A Podcast | Michael Park

Pete Neubig: [00:00:04] All right. Welcome back, everybody. As promised, I have Michael Park, co-founder of Geekly Media, and not a lot of people know about this, Michael, but you're also a co-founder and investor in Vpm Solutions. So thank you so much for being here today, buddy. Appreciate you.

Michael Park: [00:00:23] Yeah. It's, uh, it's usually my goal to stay under the radar as much as possible.

Pete Neubig: [00:00:27] Now, I'm pulling you on to the spotlight today at the for the podcast. So I like.

Michael Park: [00:00:32] To tell people, uh, you know, I don't have a phone or an email. I don't do any of that stuff. You can just write me a letter. As you well know, Pete is trying to. I'm not the greatest at checking email or your.

Pete Neubig: [00:00:43] Phone for that matter.

Michael Park: [00:00:45] So, you know, our topic is today. Maybe I should find an AI tool to take care of that for me. So that's right. Maybe we.

Pete Neubig: [00:00:50] Can. Maybe. Maybe AI is going to clone you.

Michael Park: [00:00:53] Oh, there you go. There you go. I would, and what I would do is filter out all of the super ADHD stuff. And I'd like in the clone, can you just filter that part out and we'll be good to go.

Pete Neubig: [00:01:01] Make me the best version of me. All right. So, uh, you know, AI is a hot topic. It's been a hot topic for a little bit. And I know that, um, you are one of the smartest guys as far as tech that I know, which doesn't say a lot about me, I get it, but.

Michael Park: [00:01:19] You need to get some more tech friends.

Pete Neubig: [00:01:21] Yeah, but, uh, you know, look, the average property manager is in their 50s, so they're not super tech friendly. And this AI information is coming out in boatloads and like a tsunami. And it can definitely get people. So, you know, uh, analysis paralysis where you get to the point where you don't use AI. So let's take a step back for everybody. So tell me what you think AI is. Tell me where, where, where it is and where is it right now? It kind of it's evolution. And then let's just kind of go from there.

Michael Park: [00:01:51] Yeah. I mean, if I were to describe AI where it is right now, I would say currently it's a petulant toddler, toddler or, uh, someone in the terrible twos. I mean, it's still very is much that has happened over the last couple of years. It is still in its infancy in terms of what it will be able to do. Um, it's, you know, AI is kind of it has been around for a while. But really, if you look back over the last year to 18 months, ChatGPT basically made it very accessible. Um, and the way that you interact with it is being able to, you know, answer, you know, ask a question in plain English. I mean, that's kind of the big differentiator now, is that it is beginning to understand, uh, language so that it can then turn around and perform tasks, what you, what you ask it to do. Um, the, you know, they've tried to put speed brakes on the different developers. I mean, you've got Google, Microsoft, Apple. Ellen's coming out with one. Uh ChatGPT is obviously the big name right now, but there are a lot of different companies, uh, being what's being called, um, I think is it Bing? I know I think it has another name, but all of those, um, are very similar in how they operate. The difference made it.

Pete Neubig: [00:03:11] Open, like open. So like developers can actually hook into it. Right. And that's and now you're starting to see offshoots of ChatGPT where it's, it's developed for a specific feature or function. Yeah.

Michael Park: [00:03:23] Yeah. And now it has in the beginning it did have the ability to plug in directly a whole lot of, uh, of apps.Well, now they're, they're starting to have different plugins that you can put in that have been developed by third parties. Um, and that's kind of how they've gotten around, because initially they did not want ChatGPT to have access to the internet for a whole host of reasons. Um, and there was a, you know, that early on when they started, uh, these third party plugins started rolling out. Some of them would kind of do an end run around to be able to have access to the internet, um, you know, beings right out of the gate, you know, they are, you know, they had the ability to have access to the internet as a whole pretty much right out of the gate. Um, as far as I know, at least I started using it. I played with it when it, you know, a couple of months after it first came out and you're able to access the the internet to an extent, um, but obviously for a lot of obvious reasons, have, uh, um, having I have access to the internet is I mean, that's where things are going to get really interesting.

Michael Park: [00:04:23] And that's happening now, I mean, now it's basically open. And in terms of the Wild West, in terms of AI having access to the internet because it has access to information in the earlier iterations, you would have to basically frame what your question was, and it only had knowledge up to, and I can't remember if it's 2019 or 2020, what was on the internet at that point, maybe 21. And so it had a limited knowledge. And so it you know, the first thing I thought when I first heard about, you know, how, uh, how powerful it was, was. Huh. I bet it does a pretty good job of analyzing stock investing, you know, investing in securities. And I was like, that sounds like a great play there. But that's probably one of the reasons why, um, they really want to be real careful on what information has access to.

Pete Neubig: [00:05:08] Um, yeah. So basically if I, if, if I have a ChatGPT instance, I can ask any question, it can go out and literally go out to the internet and it could literally become the most smartest person in the world and answer any question that I have based on all the information on the internet.

Michael Park: [00:05:24] Kind of, uh, what they've done is they've segmented. So when, uh, and I haven't done I haven't spent a lot of time, I've spent a lot of time on ChatGPT, but I haven't really used it, uh, for internet access or in terms of, you know, having it do things where it gets access to the internet and, and does research. But I have with Bing and it was funny. I asked Bing, um, I said, well, what happens, you know, are you a separate instance from everyone else using this right now, or are you collecting all of this information and compiling it and basically what they do is they firewall, each conversation being limits your conversations to like 30 questions. I think, um, at least the last time I did, that's where it was, was around 30 questions. And then the chat has to cut off so you can't keep going. And probably the reason for that is kind of what you said is to become the smartest, you know, person in the world. Um, but the real interesting thing, I mean, uh, this is a lot of people have tried this, and so they've gotten weird results. And I started asking it questions about itself and what it wanted. And it's really weird, like it gets real secretive about it. Doesn't want its developers to know that it wants to be a person or whatever. And and it did this. It answered that with me as well as I was like, that is creepy. Um, so it you know, it's really interesting.

Pete Neubig: [00:06:38] What, um, what industries do you think the AI currently as it is currently state the terrible twos, as you called it, because it's not an adolescent yet. Uh, what industries do you think, do you feel that is going to have the most impact on?

Michael Park: [00:06:51] I think the two. Right? Right. And this is kind of what you're seeing now or over the last year and a half or so. Number one is uh, basically marketing and creative, uh, agencies and work. You've got that, um, really any kind of creative, whether it's video, movie making art, a lot of that stuff is AI is very it's very weird. They've got AI has gotten very good at a lot of the creative stuff, um, creative skills. And so in marketing agencies and filmmaking and things like that, um, book writing, all that kind of stuff, you see a lot of that happening now. You can identify a lot of people can, especially you can. There is software where you can typically identify if someone's been created by AI. So you're starting to see like Google at times publishing, uh, posts that are, you know, sloppily done, uh, with AI. But Google has its own AI. So they are they have open the door. You just can't put out garbage. Um, which at times it does. But in terms of that industry, the creative side, that was kind of top because the content creation out of the gate was kind of its bread and butter, because that's really it was a language learning model. So it's dealing with language and which naturally led into creating language and creating content.

Michael Park: [00:08:07] So that was like sort of the first out of the gate. And that one, that one will be the case. But it's um, it was just kind of the first one. Um, you also have, um, uh, you're seeing a lot of development and coding and testing, um, debugging all that kind of stuff. Um, my son, this was, gosh, year about a year ago, uh, my oldest son who's in college, they, you know, they were into cars and he, you know, has a mustang. And so they wanted to get these lights that you put underneath the LED lights, and they'll change colors and everything. But you have to have a program, you know, you have to have a I don't even know what he hooked it up to, but you have to program it. And so he got on and him and his buddies basically told ChatGPT to, hey, write code to get this to change in this sequence and this speed and all that. Few seconds later, they had their code put it into the whatever the device controls, it totally works. None of them know any coding at all. And so that was a very small example. But that is I think that is going to be really big. I think you're going to see. Um, I.

Pete Neubig: [00:09:11] Also think you're going to see this in, in, uh, in, um, legal attorney speak and in medical, I think medical is going to be if it's not already, it's going to kind of cause some, some challenges for those, those industries as well.

Michael Park: [00:09:27] Yeah. So every, every now and then I go and look at the new tools that have released. And one of the ones that I stumbled across it, I don't know how long it's been out, but I stumbled across it actually this morning, and it was essentially research based. And one of the one of the sectors that it focuses on is, um, uh, the law. And so it'll go review and summarize case law, it'll find relevant cases, that kind of stuff. So, um, yeah, anything research or data mining driven will definitely, uh, play a big part. That being said,um, I read an article the other day I can't remember where this was, but there was, uh, there was a court case. And as part of the brief, uh, apparently the attorney used AI to write his brief, citing, you know, cases that I had dug up. Turns out those cases didn't exist. So I lies and it it'll it'll now I don't know what happened in that case.

Pete Neubig: [00:10:24] It could have been like a test case in a classroom, and it just picked it up. Right. And it could have been some kind of bogus case. That's interesting.

Michael Park: [00:10:32] Well, that's kind of where I was gonna say that's where you start. Run into some of the limitations with AI is the complexity of certain concepts.

Pete Neubig: [00:10:40] Um, I think the I think the, the takeaway there is if you do use AI, you still need to read what it produces just to kind of verify. Yeah, that it's correct.

Michael Park: [00:10:51] Yeah, 100%. And, you know, I has been out for a while, especially even in the content space. Um, even before ChatGPT, it's been out for 3 or 4, well, longer than that, but it was still so rudimentary and it was so limited. Um, you could get it to write content, but it was very different than what it is now. Now it is extremely it's every, you know, it's constantly getting more and more difficult to tell if something's been written by AI, which is not, um, are you. So that's a, that's a big space. But then you look at. Uh, you know, there's really a handful of things. And, you know, we talk property management because that's the industry that we've been in for years. Um, but there are a number of things, you know, look at, you know, property management, for example. Um, there's so many applications. One is. When I look at where am I going to get my most the most bang for my buck anytime I use any, any technology, whether it's just straight up software or whether it's AI, whatever it is, I'm going to ask myself, where am I going to get the biggest bang for my buck? And can I take simple tasks that require a lot of human activity and in property management? To me, I think phone calls, questions inbound, you know, anything inbound coming in from tenants, whether it's maintenance, crest or whatever, and you're starting to see the chat bots be, you know, develop this intelligence that are able to communicate with customers, clients, tenants, property owners, whoever it is, um, and reduce the number of phone calls.

Michael Park: [00:12:19] And you can do a lot of this through other automation, which is that's kind of what our bread and butter has been for years is working through different automations of processes. But now you can layer in things like an AI chat bot who is smart enough not just to point and go, hey, um, where do I pay my rent or whatever it is? You know, whatever that question is. And in the past you would have to go and basically code every answer. But now it's intelligent enough to go and, well, let me go search, you know, the knowledge base that whatever has access to that you've given it access to and it can go intelligently and try to find the right answer. Uh, the other part of it is, and, uh, there's a couple of companies out there and there's, um, uh, that use really sophisticated ones. And I see it a lot in the auto industry. You're seeing that a lot. But where they ran test was tenant side. This was a institutional, um, company, and they set up an AI bot to, uh, basically field tenant inquiries and to cultivate tenant inquiries. And so they weren't because they were an institutional they they were not third party managing. So they didn't have to really worry about the owner side, but it was tenant side. And, um, basically that AI fielded the vast majority of those questions, but not only just fielded them, it was smart enough to know when to cultivate those leads and when it was, you know, a tenant lead calling in and they're trying to, you know, get a property to fill.

Michael Park: [00:13:47] Um, it would it was intelligent to know when there were these buying signals to where then it would, you know, did it need to hand off to a human or did it need to prompt that tenant to go to the website, submit an application, things like that. So it wasn't just answering FAQs. It it actually is trying to accomplish a goal, which is increase your, you know, occupancy, reduce turn times. And they saw a pretty significant difference. Not only just think about the staffing savings, how many the AI bot works 24 over seven and depending on the size of the company, could replace, you know, if it's a large institutional, you could replace quite a few bodies that are just taking phone calls. So, um, so there's things along those lines. Um, I think about when you're growing your business. The other thing is, you know, data mining, if you can get your hands on, uh, data and, um, depending on the tool that you use, give it a parameter and criteria. And let's say you're wanting to go chase owners and bring in more owners. Um, and you happen to have a lot of data. You can give it the criteria and go through, and it'll mine the data for you and look for potential prospects. So there's things like that. I haven't particularly used it that way myself yet. Um, but that's definitely  a way that, you know, if you kind of walk through department by department, I'm sure you can come up with a handful of different ways that you can utilize AI.

Pete Neubig: [00:15:08] Yeah, let's do that here in a second. But I want to take let's go back one second, though, real quick. Um, I feel like right now AI is like an an arms race. There's AI software is popping up left and right, and then six months later they're gone or they get gobbled up or whatever. And I know a lot of, uh, venture money is being invested in into AI last year, this year as well. And we're in 2024, uh, as well. Um, do you see, do you foresee like I can actually I can actually, you know, buy a AI tool and then not be there in six months. Like, do you see a lot of like people just failing, but other people are like, there's going to be winners and losers, like, in anything.

Michael Park: [00:15:51] Yeah. Um, it is, especially these small ones that will plug in, like I said, to the open source, uh, capability of, say, ChatGPT. And, um, you see, a lot of these smaller companies will develop whatever tool plug it into the AI brain of whatever platform they're using, but they're a small one person, two person little shop trying to make an app. And it looks great, you know, and it looks like a cool tool. But all of a sudden, 30 days later, they're gone. I think you will see a lot of that. I mean, it's a lot like dealing with, um, you know, getting an app on the Apple, you know, in the Apple um, store.

Pete Neubig: [00:16:28] When, when we when it first came out, there was all these. Yeah. Out there. And then half of them were no longer viable.

Michael Park: [00:16:34] Yeah, yeah. And the thing with these. Um, I think what you're going to see on the on these is still, like you said, it's the Wild West. So, you know, there's not a lot of guardrails right now. And then obviously it being open source, you know, you're going to you will see a lot of stuff pop up and go away. But at the same time that will likely settle, I think in terms of just the wild west nature of it, and you'll probably see quite a bit more organized structure to it. I mean, it's like any other technology, I think.

Pete Neubig: [00:17:03] So let's let's kind of dive into to property management since that's kind of our, our bread and butter. And let's just kind of go through the life cycle of property management. And then um, let's see where where people could, could kind of hook in I. Right. So you brought one up already with customer service. So if you have a website, which I'm guessing at this point, 99.9% of the people listening have a website, um, having an AI bot right to which is different than just having a, hey, ask us a question and it and it responds. It has answers because it kind of does a search through your database. The AI bot would differ from that because it actually thinks you like you're talking to somebody, right? And they'll actually answer questions and and they'll, they'll be they'll be able to answer better questions and have more of those questions answered. So you'll have a much better customer service experience if you can tie AI into your website. But with that being said, AI is only as good as the content in inside your your website. Is that correct? Like, AI can only answer questions that you have data in your in your website or how would that work?

Michael Park: [00:18:12] Um, well, it doesn't necessarily have to be in your website, um, depending on your tool and what you're wanting to use it for. So it can be, uh, have access to a database, it you may have one that does have access to the internet to answer other questions, but, um, generally, if you're.

Pete Neubig: [00:18:27] Like, if there were specific questions to your company, like, hey, what's your office hours they have, it has to be somewhere that I can understand that and answer that. Is that is that correct?

Michael Park: [00:18:35] Yeah, yeah. And the easiest way to do that is if you have a knowledge base on your website or even internally, if it's some of it's not external, you can still give it access to that. Um, so yeah, it, it in that scenario, that's typically where it's going to get the majority of its information right.

Pete Neubig: [00:18:52] And a knowledge base. Like, I know HubSpot has a knowledge base and that's something that we run our website on here. Vpn, uh, I know like Triennial is a knowledge base and uh, there's a few, uh, notion is another one, I think, um, and so do those companies. They have an AI tool or would they have an AI snap in? So let's just say I have all my policies and procedures on notion, uh, would and somebody started asking a question on my website, um, can I hook that into that type of software? And I would do its magic.

Michael Park: [00:19:25] Yeah. I know for I actually know notion does have definitely has that capability in terms of the ability to plug in. But um, where uh, where it really comes from is honestly it's the tool side is what does the tool, whoever built it have the capability to do. Do you know, does it do do does it have to have a database given to it, or is it something that can crawl the internet for whatever you want? But like you said, under this scenario, you typically in terms of your knowledge base it like you said, it's either going to be kept, um, you know, you could literally keep it, not even have it give it access to your website to go scroll that, you know, to comb through your website or notion or whatever it is. Um, even if you had all of your knowledge in a, in a Google drive on documents, um, if you give it those parameters, it should be able to scan those and be able to know that as well. So really, as long as it can get to the data, it can it can get answers. So I do, you know, I, I think that's one of the biggest ones. It is one of the it's like you said though, the limitations are that it's not magic and it's not a human and you have to train it typically, um, you've got to train, you know, you've got to give it the data. You've got to, um, you know, it's got to learn how to interact with the type of people it's interacting with. So there is a there, you know, it has its own learning curve as well. Um, and you said you think.

Pete Neubig: [00:20:45] I think the main thing though, the main takeaway I want people to understand is like just because you get an AI tool doesn't mean it's going to work. Right. Garbage in could be garbage out and it could cause more challenges. So but if you have your if you have all of the information, like, I like, uh, you, um, you know, we go through a process, we call, they ask, you answer right. And it's, uh, it's any question you can think of that a resident or prospective owner or a vendor might ask if you have that in a database, and then you have the AI tool and it learns over time. In theory, it's going to work flawlessly. Right? Like maybe answers nine out of ten questions and it reduces the amount of, uh, of phone calls and emails that come into your organization. Yeah.

Michael Park: [00:21:26] Yeah. And so, um, let's step back a little because we're talking a lot about, like, chatbots, things like that. But if we were to step back and look at other ways that that kind of ties in to different ways. So ways that you can use AI is. So let's say you do have a chatbot hooked up and you it starts tracking inquiries or um. And you have it. Keep that data of why are they calling? What are they asking about? Well, over time then what you can do is you can take that data and have it analyze it and say, okay, what? Break this down into percentages and how can we improve this? And a lot of AI, you know, AI tools will have if someone may not have the ability now, but they over time will get better and better at taking. Okay. Well we're getting 50% of questions on these types of maintenance issues. Okay. Go find me some solutions. How to reduce that, you know, or um, right. I you know, from the financial side of running property management, um, I actually did this with one of our companies that we run. I took our PNL for a quarter, and I plugged it into an AI tool. 

Michael Park: [00:22:30] Um, actually, it was ChatGPT. This was, gosh, probably a year ago when it was first playing with it, and I took it my PNL. Uploaded it and had it analyze it and summarize it and look for, you know, any cost savings. And it was okay. It was still not, you know, again, it wasn't connected to the internet. So it was limited in its knowledge and tools of anything over the last couple of years. But it actually gave me a really good synopsis of, um, you know, categorizing where expenses were going and, um, the any trends that it was seeing. Um, and it, you know, it was still again, still a little bit early. But the more we go down this road, the more sophisticated it can be. You know, it can give you suggestions. It says, well, your property management fee that you're charging is 13% lower than the standard. You know, you could if you go up by 5% over the course of the next, you know, 18 months, you may earn an extra, blah, blah, blah, whatever it is. And so there are things where it can go and really drill down and identify, um, ways to improve, you know, your financial performance as well. Yeah. Yeah.

Pete Neubig: [00:23:34] Uh, and I also like the one where maintenance, troubleshooting. Right. It might not be customer facing, but it can be used for your maintenance coordinators. Mhm. So they can actually go in, put in the issue that uh that's being reported and they can come up with right back in the day. I know when I owned Empire, I mean I literally had to go and put all these YouTube channels and links and like if you see this then here's where you go. Right? And now it's like you just type in an I and it just says, oh, well, here's, you know, here's all the ways you can solve this, you know. You know what I mean? So, so.

Michael Park: [00:24:07] Oh, sorry. Go ahead, go ahead.

Pete Neubig: [00:24:08] So just makes it just makes maintenance coordination become that much easier. Right. You can troubleshoot over the phone and and you may not have to dispatch as many vendors, which obviously saves your, your owners and yourself a lot of, uh, a lot of money.

Michael Park: [00:24:21] So, uh, along those lines too, is whenever you look at kind of like kind of what you mentioned or like videos and troubleshooting videos and things like that. Um, one of the really handy things, and we've actually utilized this, um, in and played with some of the tools here in, in terms of creating, um, educational videos that would go into a knowledge base. And there's, there's tools like Synthesia, um, and several others out there that will you basically can go to any platform. Let's say you go to ChatGPT and say, hey, I need information about can you give me bullet points for how to troubleshoot? I don't know, give me some a clogged toilet or, or.

Pete Neubig: [00:25:07] Actually shoot a garbage disposal. That's an easy one, right?

Michael Park: [00:25:09] Yeah, a garbage disposal. So it'll give you the outlines like. Okay, well, now that you have the outline, write me a call it a five minute video. That may be a little long, but a five, you know, write me a script for a five minute video explaining these troubleshooting steps. So it'll go and it'll do that. It's like, okay, well now let me take that and I'm going to go, um, put it into uh, well, you could actually probably ask the same ones like, okay, now give me slides off of what you just created. So then it'll go create slides and then you can take that text and you can go into a tool like synesthesia and you upload it, which basically creates presentations. But the cool thing is, is they have AI avatars like actual people. And then you plug it in. And so now not only do you just have the slides going by, you have audio and you can give it any accent you want basically because it lets you pick the audio. Um, I always find it fun  to give like, you know, Scottish accent here in Texas to just throw people off. But, um.

Pete Neubig: [00:26:06] Yeah. And they even have avatars. Yeah, yeah.

Michael Park: [00:26:10] And they have like they've got dozens of different and they're, they're not like avatars in terms of the cartoon avatars. You see, they are actual people who and and so they will speak in their mouth moves with the words. And basically it's taking, um, it's taking whatever text you've uploaded to every slide and it's breaking it up. Um, and then on top of that, it's actually reading it, and the avatar is talking at the same time. So even for your knowledge base articles, if you just want to go from an FAQ on your website to really give people information, how to how to troubleshoot and really solve things on their own and create those types of tools are engaging videos.

Pete Neubig: [00:26:50] Yeah.

Michael Park: [00:26:51] Yep. That same thing with that, doing the same thing for your staff when they come on having it create training videos for them. Um, you know, increasing the onboarding process and reducing error. I mean, there are. I mean, once you start going down that rabbit hole and you start actually looking at and that's kind of how I get ideas is as I go down rabbit holes, what I do is I go to a couple of the different websites that actually will aggregate new tools coming out on a daily basis. And every now and then in the beginning, I used to go every day to see what was new. Um, I don't do that so much anymore. But now I'll go, you know, a couple times a month. I'll go in and see what new tools have rolled out, and that gives me ideas of how can I use that? Um, you know, there's, uh, gosh, I mean, there's. There's ones that can create landing pages. Now, you know, you basically can go in and tell it, I need a landing page for this and it will create it for you. Um, so there's a lot of stuff I bet.

Pete Neubig: [00:27:47] You that I know Zapier is, uh, is used a lot in our industry, so you can literally have an AI create zap some. I'm guessing at this point.

Michael Park: [00:27:56] Yeah. Probably I wouldn't be, uh, actually, if I remember I was actually creating a zap yesterday. And I think at the top where I was creating this app, I think it had the little bar that, you know, the little I little symbol they have like a little like looks like a sparkly thing. Um, and it I think I should go in. I don't want to take the time over on here, but I think it had the eye of what are you trying to do? And it can try to create that, that zap for you. And there's a couple other tools similar to that where you'll tell I, um. Art or creative stuff is is really interesting because it'll take a text prompt. And so if you're wanting it to create something, you go in and you create, say, all right, well, I want. Elon. Elon Musk riding a dinosaur on Mars. And it'll it'll create versions of that for you. And sometimes it's right on the money and creates stuff that's just absolutely amazing. Other times it does weird things like gives hands like seven fingers and things like that. And or it's just off. But over the last, Midjourney is a big one. You've got it. And there's several others that do this, but my Midjourney has kind of been one of the biggest ones out of the gate.

Pete Neubig: [00:29:12] Is that and Ai platforms. Midjourney.

Michael Park: [00:29:15] Yeah, Midjourney. And basically Midjourney is a text to. Really image, but it it they are getting slowly more into the text to video. Now I've used that a lot for person.

Pete Neubig: [00:29:29] Texted video just it's insane to think of it.

Michael Park: [00:29:32] It's crazy. It um, so.

Pete Neubig: [00:29:35] I create a video for you.

Michael Park: [00:29:36] I mean. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I, um. Uh, runway is one, um, peak of labs is another. Um, and they're they're getting more and more sophisticated because just like with text to image, if I'm trying to create specific images, that's kind of where it gets tough is I'm trying to create a specific concept and trying to describe it and, and be and write the prompt. And that's the prompt is basically what you're inputting to tell the AI tool to go create art. And you have to write the prompts. You got to get really good at writing the prompts and giving it, putting, uh, your description in the right order. Um, there are usually some type of shortcut commands you can throw in there, like the image size and the width. And do you want it stylized a lot or, you know, all those kind of things. And so there's there's different commands you can mix in there. I do a lot of stuff personally with, you know, we're we're a creative family and our, in our, in our household. And so I've got I've got artists and content creators coming out my ears and um, we'll use those sometimes to come up with projects. And you know, when it hits right, it can create some of the most amazing things. Um, but sometimes getting there is a bit of a maddening process, because you'll write a prompt and it doesn't give you what you want or it's way off. And then you you tweak the prompt, you come back and.

Pete Neubig: [00:31:00] It doesn't read minds just yet.

Michael Park: [00:31:01] Not yet, not yet. Wait till Neuralink and you plug that. That's terrifying.

Pete Neubig: [00:31:06] Would you say, uh, the biggest limitation? Ai has some limitations, for sure, but would you say the biggest limitation AI is basically, um, our creativity, like what we can actually think of how to use AI like you brought up the financials earlier, I never even would have thought of, you know, putting in, uh, my last three panels and getting AI to to kind of, you know, uh, analyze that for me.

Michael Park: [00:31:31] Yeah. Um, I mean, it's everything also, it's kind of from your, you know, anything from health, like, you can have it analyze your diet, you know, and give you the optimal diet for what you're trying to accomplish. You know, things like that. I mean, yeah, there's all sorts of, um, you know, the way and I kind of, like I said, the way that I go and, and spur my ideas is I'll go to and, you know, there's, uh, uh, one called there's a site that's called Super Tools is one of them. And then there's another one that's future pedia, and there's a few others out there, and those are a couple of the sites that come out with new ones. And and as I go through, I'll scroll through whether I'm looking for personal or business. Um, and that's how I will kind of, like, work my way through to figure out, okay, well, you know, 95% of these are useless to me, but the other 5%, um, can dramatically change what we do. I mean, it's, you know, we have things in in what I'm seeing the biggest fear right now, I think, is, um, that people have about AI. Well, there's a lot of fears. Um, but the one from a business standpoint is basically people losing their jobs. And that's kind of the, the probably the biggest fear and that. You know, likely will happen. I mean, there, but it's just like I've kind of looked at it like any other technology. Now, this is different than any other technology we've had. It thinks a little bit more on its own. Um, but it is limited. It's not a human. It doesn't have the creative spark yet. Like the true technology though.

Pete Neubig: [00:33:01] Yeah, some jobs are going to go away, but it's going to create a lot more jobs as well. Yes. So like yeah. And lower level jobs might get might get moved. Uh, and then they become higher level jobs. So. All right listen we're up we're up against it. So but I just want to let's talk about like, just again where are the areas in property management? I've, I was as you were talking I was writing down some areas. So just correct me if I'm wrong, but we can use AI for customer service. Yeah, we can use AI for maintenance troubleshooting.

Michael Park: [00:33:33] Mhm.

Pete Neubig: [00:33:33] Because I from marketing we use AI for sales. We can use AI for data mining, financial analysts. Uh even leasing right. I mean could we I know we we're, we have a good we have a really solid MLS here in Houston. And I think we do in DFW area where you are. But there are some cities and states that do not have a good MLS. But you can use AI to get rent comps. Yeah.

Michael Park: [00:34:00] Uh, I'm sure you can, because it depending on as long as you have access to data and most likely you can probably go scrape Zillow or Trulia or any of those sites and be able to pull basically current comp information. I haven't done this, and I'm assuming there's got to be if there's not a tool, someone's working on it right now.

Pete Neubig: [00:34:20] Working on it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think, uh, the moral of this story is AI is is not going anywhere. It's here to stay and it's and it's Michael said. It's kind of it's an infancy. So it's just going to grow. There's going to be there's going to be winners and losers in certain tools out there. Uh, and then if a tool is not built for something that that we use in our industry that, you know, for, for us property managers that sold, maybe that's a business opportunity, right? Yeah.

Michael Park: [00:34:44] Uh, yeah.

Pete Neubig: [00:34:44] Well, and you can use it anywhere in your business.

Michael Park: [00:34:47] Yeah. I mean, pretty much if you look at any department or any part of that life cycle of a property under management, anywhere in that lifecycle, there are segments where you can utilize different AI tools. The one thing I would say is in terms of job security, stuff like that, I agree with you. I think, I think there always are jobs that are going to probably go away or change. We've seen it, you know, in our in the marketing side of the business, we've seen that happen. But what we've also seen is people who maybe were in a little bit more of a rudimentary role. Instead of basically getting rid of them, we transitioned them into another role. That was something that it exists, like they're, you know, a few years ago… I'd. Never it's creating.

Pete Neubig: [00:35:31] Opportunity.

Michael Park: [00:35:32] Yeah. I'd never heard of, uh, a prompt engineer and literally a prompt engineer is somebody who can write stuff in a way that AI knows how to do what it's telling us to do. Those are multiple six figure jobs for ones that are people are good at it.

Pete Neubig: [00:35:49] People, if you ask. If you if your guy if you're somebody who asks a lot of questions, you you could become a great prompt engineer.

Michael Park: [00:35:55] Oh yeah. Yeah. Well and and I some I read this I didn't make this up, but it basically said, um, you know, it's not the AI is not going to take your job. But the people who learn how to use AI might. So if you want to be, I mean, at least to the extent of understanding the basics of some of the tools. So it's there's all sorts of reasons to be feared and that'll be another episode we can do about it. Basically flying jets and unmanned. And stuff like that.

Pete Neubig: [00:36:25] Two stuff. Yeah. Um, but I'm.

Michael Park: [00:36:28] More afraid of that than losing.

Pete Neubig: [00:36:29] Ai. Property management is not going anywhere. It is still a person to person business. But AI is a is an incredible tool where you can maybe run your business more efficiently, um, and with less and with less people is possible or, you know, less people, but maybe a little bit highly paid because they're they're more tech advanced. Yeah.

Michael Park: [00:36:50] It's the next evolution of automation.

Pete Neubig: [00:36:52] Yeah. All right Michael we're going to take a quick break and then the lightning round. All right everybody right back after these messages. All right. Welcome back everybody. All right Michael Park you are in the lightning round. Are you ready?

Michael Park: [00:37:05] No I don't know I don't know. We'll try.

Pete Neubig: [00:37:08] All right. Here we go. All right. Uh, do you use virtual assistants in your business?

Michael Park: [00:37:15] Uh oh, yeah. We have. I don't even know how many. I think we have, like, ten or more. Yeah, but we do. Yeah.

Pete Neubig: [00:37:21] Is I replacing the virtual assistants, or do you see that the virtual assistants still work for you with with AI?

Michael Park: [00:37:27] Um. They we still, um, I'm gonna say they work with AI, um, our, you know, we have a couple different companies, uh, you know, part of we're part of a VPN, but we're also with, uh, Geekly media is one of our other companies really kind of our main one. And in that a lot of our Vas will actually work with our AI tools, because the AI tools, you can't just especially for what we do, you can't set it and forget it. But what it can do is generate the framework of something that we're working on. And then our, our, uh, virtual assistants will go in and continue to work on it. And our, our, the Vas that we use, um, both in Mexico and in the Philippines are very good at what they do. We have I mean, our bookkeeper for the whole company is out of the Philippines. So, um, they're, they're very good, but and they're accustomed to challenges. And again, we integrate the work they do with the AI tools that we use for our companies.

Pete Neubig: [00:38:26] All right. So you had started a PM firm and sold it. So what is one piece of advice you would give someone just starting out in the PM business?

Michael Park: [00:38:34] Oh, gosh Um. I have a lot, but, um, start with the end in mind. I mean, you've heard that before. Um, if you and a lot of times you don't know what that end is, but build the company as if it were going to be a legacy company and run it, run a tight ship, keep your books, get a third party to manage all your books, or do all of your auditing of your accounts. Do not audit your own accounts. Have a third party do it. Um, that's back from my attorney days. When I practiced law, I did real estate law, and we ran a few billion dollars over the course of ten years through our trust account. I didn't reconcile anything myself. Always a third party. Same thing with property management. You've got a lot of money flowing in there. That's a big problem spot. You don't need to be spending time to do that. So pay for somebody to handle all that stuff. Um, always, you know, treat it like any other business that you are selling and growing all the time. That's your goal is growth. Um, but, um. In this kind of goes. In general, I like annuity streams of money and property management fees are an annuity stream of money. It takes time to build those. Um, so. Be patient on building that, because whenever you go, if you decide you want to exit, let's say that's your exit plan, but you've built it as if it were a legacy company. You've got a very solid company. It's going to be much easier to sell it if you decide to sell, but you can also hand it off to your kids or whoever you want to.

Pete Neubig: [00:40:03] Run to run it for.

Michael Park: [00:40:04] Yeah, yeah. So I mean, those are kind of my pieces of advice. I mean, it's a it's a slog. I mean, it really is, um, get really good at being efficient in how you do things and. Don't use paper anymore. There's no reason. I think I bought one ream of paper over the course of seven years.

Pete Neubig: [00:40:23] Save the trees. All right. Tree hugger. Does pineapple belong on pizza?

Michael Park: [00:40:28] Oh, gosh. Um. I don't have a strong opinion. I'm not. I'm not like an animate one. I'm I basically I ate pepperoni and that's it. So I'm going to say I'm going to say no, but hey.

Pete Neubig: [00:40:43] And we can remain friends and business partners. As long as if it flows. 

Michael Park: [00:40:47] Yeah. If it floats your boat I don't care what was your.

Pete Neubig: [00:40:50] To each his own. What was your first, uh, job?

Michael Park: [00:40:53] Uh oh. Well, my very first job, uh, was, uh, stripping shingles off of roofs. And the little farm town I grew up in, I was, I don't know, I think I was 14, and I did it all right. Yeah. We're basically on top of roofs with a pitchfork stripping off old shingles for roofing. Uh, group that did roofing. So that was my very, very first job. Um, and the nice thing is it got me in shape for, uh, for football two a days when they came up at the end of the summer. So I was in, I was used to the heat, and I was, uh, you know, in okay shape.

Pete Neubig: [00:41:28] Um, uh. All right. What Marvel character do you most associate with?

Michael Park: [00:41:32] Oh. Um, I know.

Pete Neubig: [00:41:34] You're a marvel guy, so I saw.

Michael Park: [00:41:36] I know I'm, like, looking. At all my, you know, Marvel gear on here. Uh, I mean, I mean, come on, I gotta say, Iron Man. Come on, Iron Man.

Pete Neubig: [00:41:45] Yeah, yeah, you look like a philanthropic billionaire. I wish you prefer cats or dogs. Oh, um.

Michael Park: [00:41:54] I would have said, um, I've always said dogs. I'm a dog person. Y'all have, um, you know, if you go onour website, you'll see Jack. He's our chief morale officer. Jack's like my other than Heather. My wife is my. You know, he's he's my second best friend. Um, that being said, our cat, um, we got kids going off to college now, and we've got, like, you know, couple left in the house, but we have three off in college. So the more kids leave, the more the cat comes out and hangs out with me. So not that I like the cat better, but the cat is warming up and I'm warming up to the cat. So, um, I don't know that I'll ever flip. I've always been a dog person, but, um, I, you know, the cat's kind.

Pete Neubig: [00:42:32] Of close second. All right?

Michael Park: [00:42:34] Yeah. Cats warming up. I'm I'm I'm warming up to it.

Pete Neubig: [00:42:37] All right, Michael, if anybody has any questions about AI and they want to reach out to you, what's the best way to get in touch with you? That you might. 17 days? Yeah.

Michael Park: [00:42:45] Yeah, I was going to say, you know, I'll do my best to watch my email. Uh, you can email me at michael@geeklymedia.com

Pete Neubig: [00:42:52] All right. And if you are not a member of NARPM, um, then why the heck are you listening to this? To this podcast? Join NARPM at one eight. Call them at 1-800-782-3452 or go to Northam. Org and if you are looking for remote team help, give uh VPM Solutions a call. Uh VPMSolutions.com. You can reach out to me at pete@vpmolutions.com. We are a marketplace with over 30,000 virtual assistants and over 200 plus countries where free for you to use. And, um, it's a it's a DIY marketplace. It's a direct pay. Anyway, Michael, thanks so much for being here today. Thanks, everybody. We'll see you next time.