The Entrepreneur DNA - The $100M+ Tech Brain Behind Ryan Serhant’s Empire | Ryan J. Coyne | EP 86

Episode Date: September 22, 2025

In this episode, I sat down with my guy Ryan Coyne — co-founder and CXO of SERHANT. — and let me just say, this one blew me away. Ryan isn’t your typical “tech dude.” He’s the perfect storm of people skills and deep tech knowledge. He broke down how he built one of the most advanced real estate brokerages in the country — not by hiding behind code, but by showing up, helping people, and building genuine connections. We talk all things AI, branding, building culture, and the future of real estate. I promise you’ll walk away thinking differently about what it really means to scale a modern business. About Ryan Coyne: Ryan Coyne is the CXO and co-founder of SERHANT., the innovative real estate, media, and technology company built alongside Ryan Serhant. With a background that spans software, cybersecurity, user experience, branding, and human-centered technology design, Ryan has played a pivotal role in building one of the most modern and media-savvy brokerages in the country. Known for developing the S.MPLE app—an AI-powered platform revolutionizing agent workflows—Ryan blends deep technical knowledge with a passion for storytelling, brand building, and empowering people through smart systems. A true believer in “tech + EQ,” Ryan is redefining what it means to be a people-first technologist in the real estate space and beyond. Website: ryanjcoyne.comInstagram: @ryanjcoyneLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ryanjcoyneX (Twitter): @ryanjcoyne Looking to hire smarter? ZipRecruiter uses powerful technology to match you with top talent fast — no more sifting through a stack of weak resumes. 4 out of 5 employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Try it FREE at ZipRecruiter.com/WORK ZipRecruiter — the smartest way to hire. About Justin: After investing in real estate for over 18 years and almost 3000 deals done, Justin has created a business that generates 7 figures in active income through wholesaling and fix and flipping as well as accumulating millions of dollars of rental properties including 5 apartment buildings, 50+ single family homes, and 1 storage facility Justins longevity in real estate is due to his ability to look around the corners, adapt to changing markets, perfecting Raising private capital, and focusing on lead generation which allows him to not just wholesale and fix & flip, but also accumulate wealth through long term holds. His success in real estate led him to start The Entrepreneur DNA podcast and The Science Of Flipping podcast and education company, and REI LIVE where he’s actively doing deals with members. He has coached and mentored thousands of aspiring and active investors over the last decade. Connect with Justin: Instagram: @thejustincolby YouTube: Justin Colby TikTok: @justincolbytsof LinkedIn: Justin Colby  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What is up, entrepreneur, D&A family. We are back with an incredible special guest today. For all my entrepreneurs out there that feel like you are in a service industry where you need to be shaking hands, kissing babies, and that's the way that you operate. That's the way you do business. My guest has built a multi-100 million dollar corporation with business partner Ryan Sourhan. The CTO, CXO himself, Ryan Coyne is here.

Thank you so much, Justin, for having me on. It's a place to join you. This is going to be fun. dynamic, you're charismatic, you're smart, you're bald-headed, good-looking. This is going to be a fun episode. So again, for everyone on here, Ryan Coyne knows all things technology, has built this brand of Surhant, the brokerage that we're all familiar with, partnered with Ryan Surhant on this, and I want to just jump into kind of who you are, how this all started. Your journey getting into this space is so unique to me that I think that's a great way to start this episode. Oh, man. I

I definitely want to give credit to the village around me that is part of the same thing. You know, being one of the faces of the company's culture is awesome. Yeah. But we, we are all umpalumpas in the factory that makes what Wonka does possible so he can lick wallpaper with people's grandpas all day, you know, uh, despite him being one of the hardest working people in the world, uh, does take a village. So yeah, I, I started in and around the industry at 12 years old. My dad ran a title company. Yep. Uh, which is not one of the most exciting things in the entire world, according to most people. But I was reading and editing title

reports at 12. Not exciting. Nothing about that is exciting. No. He was a cop and then a teacher and then an attorney, otherwise known as a human lie detector. Okay. Which was my origin story for authenticity and radical candor was, don't even try getting over on this guy. So I just became truth by default, you know. And my mom and English teacher. So I started there and I got really tech curious as young as six years old. I was just. just frustrated that I had this computer, wanted to get on this thing, the internet that everybody was talking about in like 1994 or three, whatever it was. I remember saving my allowance and riding my bike to go buy a modem. Yeah. Installed it myself, not knowing what I was

doing. Then realized I needed an AOL hours free CD to get started. Yeah. Road my bike to Barnes and Noble and got one of those, you know. So fast forward to working at my dad's title insurance company part-time, I started messing around with the tech when his IT people couldn't come fast enough. And that's where I started to learn about business tech environment. And then the mortgage company down the hall in the same office building started asking me for help. And then I started my coin consultancy at 17, I incorporated, did mostly residential and the businesses of my dad's friends who would trust me.

But it all changed when I started hanging out a lot in a store called. micro center there's only 40 or 45 locations in the u.s um but there was one that was about 20 minutes from my house and it's like a a big like best buy sized place that only sells computer shit right and i was waiting for an online order to be ready this is 2005 and they give you know 40 minutes but i had just placed the order and i was like god damn you know i got to wait so i'm wandering the aisles And I see somebody kind of looking at the shelves of Wi-Fi routers looking confused. And I kind of sidle up to the guy. And I see, I don't work here, but I know all there is to know about this stuff.

Any chance you want help. And you're 17, by the way. Yeah. I was like, do you want help picking something out from somebody who's not a salesperson? Yeah. And the guy's eyes lit up and was like, yeah, absolutely. And that interaction went so well. He wanted a business card.

He wanted me to come to his house and set the thing up. His sister has a law firm. They're looking for a new tech person. and all this kinds of stuff. And that feeling of elation was like, oh my God, I could be doing this all the time. So I started. Now, after the second or third time that I did that,

one of the salespeople on the floor came up to me and was like, you again, you're stealing sales from us. I said, what do you mean? They said, well, we only get paid if we can put a commission sticker from whatever we sell people on the boxes of the things that we help people pick out. I said, oh, my God, no, I'm so sorry.

like can I just get like a whole bunch of your commission stickers and I'll put them on the boxes of the things that I'm helping people pick out? So he was like, yeah, so he tears off the thing. And from that moment on, my routine was any waking moment that I had that I wasn't doing something else. And this is, you know, through early days of college, which I didn't finish. But I spent every moment walking in that store, having placed an online order for something, even if it was a $2 item from the parking lot so that I had a reason to be there. They couldn't kick me out. Yeah. Find a salesperson, ask them for stickers, and wander making sales and introductions,

giving cards out, getting invited back to people's houses and offices and things like that. And one of them, several years into doing this, I became number four in the entire country for online order sales. Just because I, anything. I would just, and for my clients, too. I'm picking stuff up for jobs. Somebody needed a new computer, office needed this, whatever. And eventually one of the guys who came in who had me back to his house, there was a real estate agent sitting at his living room table, finishing signing exclusive paperwork to go on the market and made that introduction.

Her name was Maria. She had just started out in the business recently before that. I'd known her for well over 20 years now. She's become one of the top people, you know, for another brokerage for a long. time but she introduced me to her business coach seven years after that who we have in common yeah yeah and a few months into meeting him because business coaches and advisors were some of my bread and butter the best introduction i would say to business coaches like him and say listen i i want to be on your speed dial so whenever you're on the phone with a client no matter what

technology thing comes up just text me and say 911 i have somebody on the line there's a question right now and I will do the swoop and poop like a bird that just I come into the phone call I drop the knowledge and then I fly away yeah I don't need anything from you or them if something comes of it and they want my information cool if not also cool make you look good I'm a resourceful person I will even if I don't know the answer I'll figure it out or find somebody and he took a liking to that as most of those people did that was amazing for introductions and he's who introduced me to Ryan Surnan over 11 years ago we headed off right away way. But in that journey to get from, I had spent time around title. I had spent time around

mortgage. I had started a real estate marketing firm in 2013 that I was one of the first 300 people to buy a Matterport camera. We did, you know, floor plans, photos, all this stuff. Because I was consulting so many agents and brokerages and teams and things like that. I was like, why am I not capturing this additional market? Because the marketing side seemed like a really tired old game. Yeah, yeah. So I was like, all right, I'll hire younger, more tech savvy people, train them on how to do the tech side. You know, one of the guys I hired was delivering barbecue food. That's how I met him.

I Uber eats like barbecue food late one night on a tech job and invited him in because he seemed like he recognized the watch I was wearing before the Apple Watch was a thing. He knew I was wearing an Android one. He ended up becoming a world class photographer and bought the company from me in 2018 when I exited it. Wow. You know, you meet people in strange ways, but I had been on every side of it except for actually getting a license and selling. Consulted media companies.

I consulted online sales. Specifically to the technology. Yeah. The thing I want everyone to understand and take away from just this part of it is people think tech is boring and difficult and challenging. And the people that know it and understand it and you're good at it are nerds

and they're totally, um, uh, that's the word where you'd, introverts. They're complete introverts. They don't want to go out. They don't want to meet people. They don't want to do exactly what you did. And I just think it's so unique to have that story. Now you're a co-founder and a co-owner of Surhant. Your partner is the Ryan Surhan. Like you have this community that you've, you know, created over there. And I know now that new title is CXO, but it's because you deserve that role. But for most people, they don't, they don't think technology and real estate per se. They know somewhere, fits in but what you were able to do is understand your best skill set was people and i would make an argument i still think that to be true and i don't know you as well as others but you went out daily to go create business like a salesperson yeah which you would think would be the ryan

sirhan type or the justin colby type but the background was in tech and the blend of those two is where i really want to dive in on this is that's the ultimate superpower if you combined that skill set with your knowledge of tech, I think that's where real estate ultimately goes. But I wanted everyone to understand. You don't need to be a tech wizard and be a introvert and never leave your home and you just got to be behind a computer and be Mark Zuckerberg type of thing. As a real estate investor and entrepreneur, I've hired a lot of people. VAs, acquisition reps, lead managers, and I'll be real. Hiring can be a headache. You can get buried in resumes, but barely anyone actually fits the role. It's like trying to find a needle. It's like trying to find a

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ZipRecruiter.com forward slash work. It's the smartest way to hire. all you need to do is be a resourceful facilitator yeah that's what a lot of agents consider themselves as being that connective tissue between all the different vendors or different kinds of resources and what their clients needs are yeah right that's all i was doing was for tech i i was not a guru i was enthusiastic curious and helpful and from having that connective side i used to be a complete introvert nerd the kind that you're alluding to um i was the youngest of five in a big loud family. I had big self-esteem issues. I had crushing insecurity. Now I've got

all this coincidence. Where did it come from? It came from being out there. Somebody talked me into improv in my teens at like sleepaway camp. And I found comfort in playing another person, like a character. Sure. But from being in the habit and not understanding and not being able to connect to other people as this nerd archetype and like slightly on the spectrum vibes and all different kinds of kinds of things. I spent so much time in that character that eventually the line between who I didn't know I was and this character I was playing to try to fit into society just blurred to the point that it went away. And then it grafted together and became, you know, in like late teens, early adulthood, I found, I found who I really was from blending those things and making myself

more accessible, but being that resourceful facilitator. Yeah. So if you're, if you're looking to solve people's problems and you're listening, right, listening to understand instead of just listening to respond. You're bringing empathy to the table for what the common challenges are and giving yourself the brain space and challenging yourself to what are the innovative things that I wish existed that could help solve these people's problems. Don't just think of them as clients. Think of them as your community, right? We go back in human history to all the different specialties that we had that we brought to the table that got society this far. I don't see it as that different.

We're all still kind of farmers of knowledge and, you know, the resource agriculture of figuring out what is the next big unlock for the industry. So to your point about like prop tech and real estate agents, they get a bad rap in the industry. When I talk to vendors, I talk to VCs who want my opinion about different stuff. They, they ask and they make these jokes. They go like, real estate agents, right? And I'm like, no, you don't understand. They don't know when their next meal is coming.

They didn't get into this business to necessarily be business people. Right. They got into it because they either want the freedom and flexibility, which can go too far. You know, lack of structure is also not great. And they don't make much money. Right. For sure. Or they got into it because they're great at people, but they're not looking for the constraints

of having to make all these different choices about platform. They want the it just works. Yet the average real estate agent has over 40 logins to do. different tools and nobody can offer them the one size fits all. So it's how are you reducing it down to why is this guy so successful with just an Excel sheet and everybody else is claiming that you need to spend all this money on tech? You have to be looking at the human side. It's like EQ plus AI in the modern era is the unlock for what's next. Yeah. Because if you separate the humanity from it and you look at the problem solving without looking at what makes

humans really tick, that's what's going to create frustration on both sides, the people providing the services and tools and the people consuming them. What are you guys doing now moving forward at Sirhant with technology? What are some, whether groundbreaking or like new introductions that over the last call it 12 months or so as AI is now the keyword, we'll get to AI. But like, what are you implementing to create culture or create organization, help agents be better at facilitating and being a dot connector, what are things that you guys are doing in the Surhant business?

I think that the biggest leap forward for us was the decision to try to be the world's first, mostly screenless brokerage, right? All right. You've seen the technology space keeps trying to make certain things happen before people are ready.

VR is a great example. Yeah. How many times over the last 15 years was like VR going to change everything? then the Metaverse was going to change everything. Then Apple's like, here's the Vision Pro. We're going to, you know, people are ready when they're ready and you need to be able to serve different parts of that acceptance life cycle.

Sure. But we realized that if an agent is sitting at a computer screen, spending tons of time doing admin work, everybody's losing money. They're losing money. We're losing money. Their clients are losing service. So we built Sir Hans Simple, which was essentially the combination of,

AI and humans working together. The industry used to call it man-machine teeming. We prefer human in the loop. Okay. And what we do is we have an app that an agent can essentially speak anything that they need done. We have automations that do the things independent of humans that can. And where the sous chefs in the kitchen need to be involved to make sure the dog didn't eat the homework and AI didn't just generate slop or falsities, you know, the humans are in the loop there. So an average agent is submitting anywhere from five.

to 12 requests a day and having a lot of their stuff done for them, ranging from common things like CMAs and listing presentations to the mundane stuff like CRM updates, keeping them out of having to do that. So I think that that's a major thing that we pioneered and had a vision on because Ryan's original ethos was excellence and speed wins all the time, speed to lead, speed dominates, all this different stuff. where the real gains are is doing the work for them

that they shouldn't have to because they could be focusing on clients or themselves and the things that are bogging them down. Right. Right. So if we look at how do we give every single agent at our brokerage, what made Ryan

have an easier runway to reach 35,000 feet in the industry, right? That was putting this assemblage of resources and an awesome team around each agent without them having to be burdened with learning every single new thing that comes out. Yeah. Without them having to have a dedicated gigantic team, each of them, because we could figure out a way to scale.

Yeah. What we do and what our standards are using AI and humans together, and that's what became the simple app that's changing the industry and people are starting to try. Can that be used by any agent or is it simply for Surhant? Well, the app is called simple. So, yes, it is simply for Sourhant agents for sure. Well, I think that would be a great reason for people to go to Sourhand. I do, too.

Yeah. Now, let's get into AI because my assumption is it's really built around probably multiple AI. I think everyone's like chat GPT worn out. I am not a tech guy, so you'll be able to speak to this. You know, my assumption, and that could be totally off, is you were able to look at AI and say there's multiple utilization for different AI components and you put together a great recipe that can create a simple where they could run a comp in a CMA as well as you know market research and anything exclusive agreements it all kinds of stuff but it doesn't stop there to your point it's humans make these contextual decisions

about what their needs are all the time take being hungry how hungry are you when's the last time you ate when's the next time you're supposed to eat are there other mouths to feed any allergies to consider what's in the fridge. How much effort is this going to take? Fuck it, I'll order Uber eats. We do this all the time. Right. So making it easy on people to just go with those workflows and account for the edge cases. Not everything is mapped to a specific recipe. We get requests that are way off the beaten path. Yeah. But we do our best to build new recipes based on ideas that they give us. And we build the company and the app together every day by heavily including our agents.

Yeah. And so let's move into how this plays into a culture, a community, the experience at a company like Sourhant. And give a background real quick. How big are we now? How big is Sourhand? I know everyone's familiar with Ryan because the million-dollar listing show and then he started his own brokerage Sourhand.

But give a background right now of kind of what has transpired since he launched Sourhand. My goodness. September 15th, 2020, in the heart of COVID, because that was the smartest decision ever. Yeah, yeah. We were, I think we were 15 people, the founding team. And now we are over 1,400 people combined between employees and agents. We're in 12 states. We're kind of, you know, we're growing. We'll be in more markets this year. We'll be in more markets next year. And every year after that, I used to have hair and Ryan's used to be brown. You know, it's a lot of. It's a lot of. stuff. But it is the following, like when I, when we first connected, he was in like the low hundreds of thousands of followers. Now the brand itself has over nine million followers across platforms. And we have Sirhan Studios, our content team that produces north of 70 pieces

of video content per day. Wow. For across all the different platforms and for our, our customers, our real estate agents. And that, that culture around growth and what his His old mantra used to be expansion always in all ways. It has kind of inspired, but the DNA of that is in the walls of disrupt for good, be relentless. And, you know, the growth that we kind of embody making sure that there's no quality drop off is the hard part. Yeah. But that growth into these different markets and what's different about each one, like the Hamptons is like its own planet. Yeah, I can imagine.

you know um new york city is its own planet you know dense urban versus rural you can't or suburban you can't make that distinction it really is like so hyper regional yeah different rules in different parts of the country the data is all there's 529 MLSs in the united states but only 350 of them matter and some of them are literally just a dude with a google sheet really right like so um the growth The growth has been meteoric. The Netflix audience is 300 million plus people. I think Ryan's account is knocking on the door of 3 million followers. Do you play into that side of social?

I mean, you're the old title, CTO, but like, were you a part of that? Or is that more just a real true media team? We're a pretty flat org chart, man. You know, we'll be sitting in a room and everybody's ideas are valid. You can walk into any space with ideas. and bring the heat, we're involved in whatever the next goal is or whatever the most impactful ROI driving or culture driving action we can possibly take is. You know, as long as we're enabling that growth, we get like right now, I'm not sure

when this is going to air, but we're working on a partnership with a major wireless carrier, right and that that was something that was because of a cold call that I got no kidding somebody on their business team was trying to sell us like phone system stuff yeah and I said excuse we're having the wrong conversation here why don't you want the world's most recognizable salesperson who has to grill and manage his empire from his phone 24 seven at the speed of your company's name you know as the poster child for it yeah who do we need to get on this phone let's advance your career, I said to them. You don't want to be making cold calls for selling business phone systems. Go tell somebody that you've got Sir Hans CTO at the time on the phone. Yeah. And I want to

talk a bigger campaign with you. Fast forward a year and a half later. We have a joint press release coming out next month. That's incredible. And a big partnership where he's the face of this new thing that they're launching. And we collaborated on that. We get in the room and it's like just because I brought in that opportunity meant that it becomes an opportunity for all of us. And we have such an amazing time working together, whether it's because Adobe or BMW or Mercedes or Land Rover, whoever comes in and wants to work with us, all ideas are on the table. And we have a blast. And so do our agents that participate.

And all of it is just iron sharpening iron to help us be better storytellers, to help our agents do the same thing when coming up with content planning for them, especially now that we've launched the entire cast of owning Manhattan into this different level of stardom than They even expected. There's a reality. I mean, that was a great show. And so do you play in that role of technology? Does the growth of Sirhant,

and I know you're going from 15 markets now and you're going to go to 50 markets? No. Would the argument be made, it's built off the strength of the growth of the socials that you guys have been able to create? I mean, it's huge. I mean, if you look at the last 12 months,

I was just looking at the Looker Studio report yesterday for our Google Analytics. Yeah. I think we had, we average around a million uniques a month on our site right now. Yeah. And when you look at the last year, like the organic traffic is over 90%. We don't do paid social for bringing in people to our site. We don't really have to.

Right. Like there are some markets where we think about it because the organic awareness isn't as much there. Yeah. You know, like I've been working with Ryan for so long that I remember back. when like one in three or four people knew who he was, where now it's like one and two. Yeah, yeah. I know.

But the brand and all the Ryan stuff is just a foil to get people to care about real estate who wouldn't normally care about real estate. It's like content to commerce flywheel and what that top of the funnel looks like. It's not just a funnel that's catching people who fall into it. It's actually like a Dyson vacuum force pulling people into the funnel wherever you are.

We're catching the youth audience on TikTok. We're catching the special. who might be in the room overhearing owning Manhattan, who would never watch a reality show, like, or seeing Ryan on CNBC Money or Fox Business or Yahoo Finance or whatever it is. So, yeah, it is something the social brings a lot, but it's that content-to-commerce flywheel and those partnerships.

I still wish we got him on that really popular First We Feast YouTube show back when it would have been easier. Yeah, no doubt. I won't name them, but there was an idea. Anyway, but yeah, It is something that the social has a big component. One of the phrases I like is the effort real estate needs makes you weep, but brand can generate leads in your sleep.

So the more that you build your brand, the more that we empower our agent's brand with ours. Yeah. And we make it ours together. Like our animal of the year is the orca. We move as one. We're like, you know, killer whales that work together in pods. That we can, we can be the wind beneath their wings.

It's not about Ryan. even though that may be a good draw, it's a foil to suck people into the top of that funnel. Yeah, absolutely. So let's move into kind of where we see all this going. I think being that technology is obviously rapidly, crazily increasing. No. What you ain't that idea? Yeah, right? Listen, I come from the real estate background and I'm always of the mindset and I don't know when I'll change. I just don't believe real estate will be a technology play where you won't have the hand to hand because the pride of homeownership, the emotions that goes with homeownership just don't see it really removing.

I know people are like, oh, it's going to remove all of our jobs. That's extreme, I think. I think people who think it's, you know, come and go. I think that's extreme. How are you seeing the real estate world and technology for the next 10 years? Where do you think it's going? What are you doing to stay ahead of it? it. I mean, we just talked about simple, right? What are you thinking from that background?

There's two answers to this. And I'm curious about how some of these things bounce off of you, too, because I know you have a perspective on this. Yeah. And the answers change based on which school of thought you subscribe to. There are some people who are of the theory. You've heard of dead internet theory? Like there's only... I have not. It's like the theory that there's very few websites that actually mean anything to anybody. anymore. Back when the internet used to be this vast ocean of islands you could visit, you know, and now there's really only a few places that you want to travel to. Sure. These aggregate sites, like Reddit became this behemoth and different kinds of things and that having a blog and having a great website that's full and content rich, what does it end up doing? Like, especially now that traditional SEO is dead. Yeah. Right now like AIEO. Yeah. It's whatever you're going to call. I've seen LLMEO. I've seen whatever. And we do have agents who

actually have gotten calls and have been found because of people doing AI search, which is a whole new thing. But one of the theories is that this is as good as it's going to get. Some people think that. Some people think that we've hit a wall with AI and that we're just going to be iterating on these large language models for a while and that these automation things, even what's simple are based on, that you're essentially at a certain point, there's a diminishing return and you just have a more complicated version of like Zapier with AI in the between the steps, right? There are some nihilist, pessimist people who think that Sam Altman is not hiding a better

model in his back pocket and there's not like this AGI full consciousness revolution sky net shit coming. Right. And then there are people who think the exact opposite and they're thinking that at some point in the next five to 10 years, which again, don't ask Elon who's been promising full self drive since 2014. So grains of salt there. But there are some people who think that we're on the cusp of, um,

of tens of millions of jobs being eliminated. You have the white collar community who's feeling the same thing right now, the same anxiety that the blue collar community did in Detroit when the first robot arms showed up on the assembly line. That's that's coming for people in other businesses right now. So which one of those things you subscribe to gives us a different answer? If you believe that this is as good as it gets, then that means that the people building businesses that are essentially, dependent on these large foundation models like Anthropic, like Open AI, like Lama and different

kinds of things, that as the models improve, so will your business accuracy and ability to deliver and scale and it'll get cheaper, economy of scale. Nuclear is coming back because it's the only answer to solving the power thing without just absolutely chopping down the whole Amazon, like all this stuff, right? And then you've got the school of thought that is, okay, what new jobs are? going to be created? Like we have a, we have a, uh, Ryan's book, Salt Lake Sirhant that came out in 2018, a bestseller, uh, three time bestselling author. Make sure to make sure to go check him out. Yeah. Um,

we actually collaborated on a new chapter for the reissue of his book. That's coming out this holiday season as part of a box set selling in the age of AI. And we actually list and make some predictions about what new job titles will be created. Our VP of engineering, Jeremy, uh, who joined us earlier this year, just all. authored something also on understanding your processes because the root of what you asked and what humans are going to be best at, and I'm of the school of thought that I don't think the machines will be able to do what we do as quickly with as much nuance is context switching. Okay.

You do that so much. Humans, probably the most special thing about humans is our ability to take 50 different pieces of information about our given scenario and our limbic system which has millions of years of evolution, your lizard brain, is with only 30% of information able to make a bold, confident

decision. That is unique. Until we can solve the hallucination problem with AI, depending on what you're using it for, hallucination can be good if you want creativity. Sure, right? You ever asked chat GPT to pretend it just took acid? No. Try that. It is a fun time. You

Your old laugh. Yeah. But human context switching of adapting to who's in front of you, reading body language, hearing tone. You ever fight with a significant other over text message and regret doing that? Of course. Because there's no tone in the middle of it. Yeah. Yeah.

Like humans did all of the things before we invented structured language. And then we decided to invent a main modality of communication that abandons all of what got us this far. Yeah. And we wonder why it kills relationships? Yeah. No, I agree with everything you're talking about on the premise of what you just said. Just something as simple as tone. Sure.

But you can replicate with AI voice, but it's still, it's still an engine, like an AI engine that's replicating that voice. What I probably where my question is stemming from is kind of what I'm hopeful to have in that book when that comes out, right? Like, how do you sell in the age of AI? Because now you are literally seeing on Instagram and all these platforms real non-humans that look like humans with all the intelligence that the AI has, essentially creating brands, selling all the same things. And it's not even the human doing it anymore. Yeah, that's one of the big concerns there too, which is large language models to this point have been trained on like as much of the entirety of human documented knowledge as possible. but now that so much content is being AI generated yeah what happens when the AI is trained on stuff that AI has generated

and you end up with the photocopy of the photocopy of the photocopy right and creativity like all the artists who feel the pressure that they're going to be pushed out well uh that just means they're going to be able to charge more anybody who still yeah the pre do the premium that's going to be placed on face to face interactions that's going to be placed on actual small batch manually handcrafted stuff to whatever degree of quality. Yeah. Because you can go into a place like Walmart and get a shirt that costs 38 cents from

whatever country and that's the quality is what it is. Right. Or you can get the designer thing, leaving Balenciaga out of this. I don't understand. I don't understand that. Yeah. But, you know, the Hermes or whatever it is, like the hand stitching of different kinds of things. I understand because I can feel it's tangible.

It's something human about being able to tactile and tangibly perceive the quality difference. Art is that same thing. You can tell one of the miracles of the human condition is that we're able to translate the thoughts and feelings that come from our limbic system through the language center of the prefrontal cortex. But there's millions of words in the English language. How do you choose which one? And are you angry? Are you pissed? Are you enraged? Are you furious? Fifty different ways to say I'm angry with you. But artists, creatives, copyrighters, all the real estate agents, anybody who's got tradecraft about all the myriad options in front of you for how to navigate a deal, when to push, when to pull back. This is artistry. It's tradecraft. That the ones who do it best, the ones who are able to take all of that information, all of those feelings and translating. it through the right language and the right strategy into the world in a way that art makes you feel something.

That's why we pay attention. It's a currency. It's why advertisers pay for our attention is because giving it to somebody means something. Right. And the fact that these artists, real estate agents, anybody who does something with manual refinement, maybe even with AI as a passenger in the car, as your co-pilot navigator, like turn here it's like oh sorry i was texting i missed that turn you know like you when you like i was counting on you to tell me where to go it can hallucinate too and you know it happens but those people who are

able to translate all of that into something that you can see and feel in touch or a deal that you had success because of and you're like well thank christ i wasn't doing a for sale by owner this person is the one who made sure the deal happened yeah when you when you have those feelings and it gets reversed back into those feelings in you from what somebody did, that's what makes manual artistry special, is being able to take that swirl and all the different options, make art with it, and then we turn that art back into feelings in our own body. That's the power of art. And real estate tradecraft is an art form, more than a science. The compliance is the science. Right. You know, any title company and, you know, compliance checklist.

different kinds of forms you have to have, but navigating those personalities and using AI to help you become more human, like, where are you on the disc chart? Do you know your disc type? D, high D. You're a high D. Okay. So you have people in your life who balance you because they're Cs and S's and different kinds of things. And you couldn't live without those people. No chance. Absolutely not. Right. Right. So you have supplemented your natural gifts and strengths with people who balance you in the ways that if you were all on your own, you couldn't, you couldn't, whatever. That's humans or social creatures.

I just view AI as another business partner to help me think. If you want something that you can try today, go tell whatever your AI of choice, whatever your problem is, and ask it to help you look at it through 10 different lenses and present a solution through each one of those 10 different lenses. The thing that I find, and it's a descriptive statement, but I think the common people, like myself, by the way, they're not technology savvy. We don't have a big push. I want to get eyeball deep in AI.

I think it's the coolest. I'm still kind of on the other side of I'm pretty archaic. I'm much more a person, person. I don't dive deep into AI. Don't mess with chat, GPT all day, right? So some people would say, that's just silly. You got to go all in, and I can respect it. The challenge I'm seeing now is like, even my team, I have to be like, dude, can you put some critical thought into the response versus just chat ChbT?

Because I'm just seeing everyone responding for any particular reason, for any question at all, becomes like, let me just go to the answer on chat ChbT. And that's where I go, God, is this world literally going to turn into a bunch of people who can't think anymore? Well, you know, in China and in Japan, they disable every single AI service during. school finals in the entire country. Yeah, it makes sense. Because they want you to know that when the actual tests come, you won't have them. Yeah. I mean, this is my point.

Like I just, and then kids, I was just with my nephews and I'm raising a bunch of young kids right now, a bunch of two. And I'm like, oh my God, are they just going to raise, like, how are they ever going to fail at it? Like, how did the school even happen anymore? No, my son is a sophomore in high school. Thank you. I take very good care of my skin. I appreciate that. And he and his friends are very anti-using it.

I was surprised. I thought, because I said to him, hey, daddy knows a thing or two about this. I'm going to show you some stuff. And he's been resisting. And so of all his friends, which I'm so fascinated by it. Now, it is Florida public schools. So I will caveat that. I'm just kidding.

But I will, I will be surprised every time somebody has a different unlock. But to speak to what you just said, I think that if we shift from using it for answers and output that does the thing for you to helping expand our thinking. That's why I recommend the lenses thing. Or tell me all the reasons that my idea is a good one. Then take the counter viewpoint and tell me all the reasons my idea sucks. Yeah. And debate with it back and forth. Practicing objection combat as a person in sales is one of the greatest things you can do. Okay. So this is the situation. These are the highlights and low lights of it, whether it's a property or a deal. Simulate a list objections, give me all the things I should say back to them, give me a psych analysis about

why you're recommending each one, give me coaching tips along the way so I can really learn why in this exercise this is valuable, and the most important one for you and for anybody else. Based on our entire conversation history, reveal my cognitive biases that I tend to approach life or my problem solving with. Have it hold up a mirror to you. to learn more. The biggest thing that I think that's holding most humans back is a lack of deep enough self-awareness to navigate situations better. So most of my presentations and content on this, or coin-tent, if you will, is

blends around how to use AI to become more human. How can you, as a high D, learn more about the why you need to compensate? Like, a person with a glucose monitor knows they need to live life differently than a person who doesn't have an insulin problem. Yeah. How can we use it to become more self-aware, more respectful, more introspective, more contemplative, you know, have this thought partner in our life for anybody who's in any kind of industry, no matter what, it can help you think things through.

So your staff or anybody else that you would be frustrated about the output because they just said make this, you're right. That's not good enough. And we need to challenge ourselves as a humanity. It needs to be like a grand social contract that we're not going to live. let ourselves literally become the movie idiocracy because that's where that's headed, if it's a logical conclusion, we'll just forget, you know. So even things like medical, everybody had a basic working medical knowledge until more

than 80% of the world lived in cities and had access to competent medical care within a few minutes. Yeah. You know, we all do how to do math on paper before the pocket calculator was even a thing that only came out from Cassio and Texas Instruments in the 1950s. you know before it was all people still use all that is progression there's no doubt

I think what you just said is pretty brilliant if I do say so myself I mean even something as simple as getting some more self-reflection on how do you think and what are your biases and how do you make sure to not just lean into those all the time are you objecting? Yeah yeah

what so for the person who actually loved your idea about like the salesman who wants to overcome the objections and create, here's a scenario, what are the best AI tools for that person? I think it's being more verbose with your input. It doesn't matter which tool.

It's garbage in, garbage out. Like what you put in your body reflect how you look and how you feel. Yeah. Which don't take advice from me on that. It's just an analogy. But what you put into your AI experiences is going to influence how well

and how impactfully you're left from that experience. Yeah. I see people kind of just give it very little. Like the intake that we have for the personalized AI that we offer and the proactive AI that we've created, it's very novel. We actually did a comparison. Quarter two of 2024 and quarter two of 2025 were extraordinarily similar real estate

markets. Like extraordinarily similar. Like our VP of financial planning and analysis, his name is John. He was like, hey, guys, I'm so excited to tell you that these two markets suck just as bad as each other. And I was like, John, why the, Fuck does that mean? He says that means we get to look at anything else besides the market conditions. Oh, yeah. To look for what went up or down. And then we can eliminate that the market was a factor.

Yeah. So we looked and we found that our most engaged agents who had brought AI into their journey daily in a meaningful way beyond the kinds of things that we're insinuating are the lazy versions saw 144% average GCI increase. Wow. between those two quarters. Wow. And when you get testimonials from them, they're just like, yeah, it's changed the way that I approach everything and the way I navigate everything. Not BS stuff like listing descriptions or email responses,

even though those have their place. So when you're looking at how it can be that partner for you, you have to challenge it to challenge you. The more that you give it in that intake, the questions we ask, some of them are questions like, what do you think your blockers are? from achieving your goals question right after that is what do other people around you tell you

are the things that are blocking you from your goals because there's truth in both yeah right or you know who are the people who inspire you the questions i get to the answers i get to that question fascinate me like who are your inspirational figures that you admire look up to or want to sound more like we've gotten answers ranging from uh like religious figures to authors, philosophers, musicians, even characters from movies. I had somebody say to me once, Anne Hathaway's character, Jules, from the movie The Intern, not Anne Hathaway, even though she's great,

but the character she played in the movie, or Robert De Niro's character from the movie, Heat, but not Robert De Niro. Yeah. Like, one of mine is Wendy Rhodes from Billions. I fucking love Wendy Rhodes. Okay, yeah, like unofficial staff psychologist for like performance mindset stuff, like, I love that.

You love it. Yeah, somebody said Haley Bieber once. I'm not here to judge. Okay. So, you know, but you learn a lot about yourself by even just asking the AI. Ask me a list of questions. Ask me 30 questions that would help you understand me best to help solve my problem. I feel stuck in this way.

Yeah. This is my challenge. I did this much production last year and this much production this year. I'm working harder than ever. Why? We don't have an answer. Some people struggle with finding their brand voice. Like we were saying in the pre-show,

You can give somebody the world's most technologically advanced megaphone. If they don't know what to shout into it, they won't. My favorite example of that was there's an active duty Suffolk County police officer. His name is Raymond. Raymond Macy, Jen. And I hope Raymond doesn't mind me telling this story. I don't think you will. But we were sitting together last year on our South Shore Long Island office.

I was making a visit. And he was saying that he was looking for his brand voice. I said, well, tell me about yourself. He says, well, I'm a cop. Not everybody likes cops these days. So I find that, you know, can be a touchy thing to, I'm also going to adjust my glasses if that's what we're doing. Yeah. I'll powder our nose together.

He says, I get a lot of business from that, but I don't want to juggle too many listings at once. I'm not looking to grow out of control. You know, I don't want to have too many things going on at once. I said, where does that come from? What happened? What was the thing in your life? He says, well, You know, I, back in 2020 during COVID, he was active duty.

He, you know, his grandfather was ill even before COVID happened. He was looking forward to spending more time with his grandfather. And, you know, the time that he was spending with his family was kind of rocky because of the competing things going on. He was serving his community. He was being called into Manhattan to work on, you know, to support the protests and different kinds of things that were going on plus COVID and all this different stuff. and because he was juggling too much at once

certain things with his family went all the way south he didn't get to spend that amount of time with his grandfather that he wanted before he passed and he was left with feeling like he did his sense of duty to his community writ large but the juggling didn't go well and now he's left kind of wondering how to talk about the value in these things

I said what if you're the real estate first responder people dig like hands handsome EMTs, you know, please give me the CPR, some people would say, you know. Depends on who shows out, I suppose. But every, every H. Gray's Anatomy episode ends with somebody wrapped in a space blanket, drinking a warm cup of teeth and even big dreamy or whatever it is, right? So I said, what about that? And what about that your people's trusted protector in life's most difficult or to navigate

transactions and decisions? Yeah. There's a reframe for everybody that's hiding in being more authentic. authentic in telling your story and your blockers because there's all something hiding beneath. If you're just so surface level, the garbage in will be garbage out. Yeah, that is, I mean, that's a great point. And as someone that needs to, you know, I need to be better at myself and I got to take this. I'll learn as much from this episode as probably the listeners and the viewers from this as well.

And so, you know, listen, to say that you are not dynamic is. insane you are one of the most dynamic individuals that meant a long long time oh my god oh please yeah yeah please keep going yeah um so listen everyone needs to go follow you everyone needs to know you you may not be on the big tv shows like ryan and you might not have all that the way that he does but i'll tell you everyone needs to know who this guy is uh your dynamic you deserve the uh change in title uh which now you are the c x o right cx chief chief chief chief experience If experience officer means making sure that we are absolutely the best place that you would agree with the statement, there is no other place on planet Earth that you could possibly achieve your goals than right here with us. Let's go.

Let's go. And we're going to leave it at that. If you think this guy's dynamic, make sure you're going to follow him. I'm sure he'll answer your questions. He's smart well beyond technology. You should just see our conversation. So thank you coming all over to Miami to do this. It's my pleasure, dude.

Thank you for having me, Jeff. Absolutely. Appreciate it. if this was meaningful to you, you thought this was pretty good or you should have someone listen to it, please share this to your friends and I'll see you on the next episode.