Matt Britton: How AI's Breakneck Speed is Transforming the Future of Work and Life

We've already seen some kind of low-hanging fruit. So there's a company called Klarna, which is a fintech company that essentially claims they were able to replace 700 customer service reps through AI.
Welcome to Mick Unplugged, the number one podcast for self-improvement, leadership, and relentless growth. No fluff, no filters, just hard-hitting truths, unstoppable strategies, and the mindset shifts that separate the best from the rest.
Ready to break limits? Let's go! Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another exciting episode of Mick Unplugged.

We are in person, in studio with the guru of AI and the greatest rapper you've never heard of.

We're talking about my man, Mr. Matt Britton.
Matt, how are you doing today?

How are you? Good to see you.

I am doing great, man. We got to go into the book.

AI obviously has been a big thing.

It's been a big thing probably longer than people actually realize, which is, I know, one of the things you kind of highlight in your book, man. So I want to go there.
What's something that people don't actually know about AI? Well, I think it's an interesting point. It's an overnight success decades in the making.
You know, there was a time when AI played, you know, a Russian chess champion and tied them in a famous match called Deep Blue. And that was decades ago.
So AI has been part of kind of scientific theory and technical development for a very long time. But it wasn't until ChatGPT when it was packaged really for consumer use in a form factor called a chatbot that it really took off at the end of 2022.
And since then, it's really just been a rocket ship. The thing about AI is moving so fast, it's hard for even the most technically forward professionals to keep their finger on the pulse of where things are at.
So you said decades in the making, right? When or what was the first true iteration of AI? Because I was talking to my friends when ChatGPT became a thing, right? I was like, it's scary because someone had this information, right? Like this thing had to like have been, to your words, decades in the making. So what was that first iteration of AI and like when exactly was it? Well, I mean, it's hard to tell.
I mean, the origins of AI go back to the 50s. But when you say they had this information on you, AI is fed through all the information on the web.
To break down AI just kind of in layman's terms, there's really four parts to it. The first and foremost is the foundational layer.
That's what the chips are. So I'm sure you've heard of a company called NVIDIA.
They make these GPU chips that made them the most valuable company in the world. What sits on top of that foundational layer is something called large language models.
ChatGPT being one of them, Anthropics Cloud being another, Google's Gemini, Meta, which is the Facebook company, has one called Llama. And the large language models essentially take human input in any language,

and they generate output that is human-like, right? And that's really what made it take off. The third layer is something that you just got into, which is like, how do they know all this information about you? That's data, right? So large language models are fed on data.
It could be proprietary data, like somebody's medical records, or it could be the data that ChatGPT fed on, which is all the open data on the internet, right? And then the fourth layer is applications. How is it basically packaged together for consumer use? Again, the most popular form being chatbots.
Chatbots took off because there was no hurdle or friction in adoption. You didn't have to learn how to use it because you text ChatGPT just like you're texting a friend.
And because of that, it became the fastest growing technology product in human history. So ultimately, to oversimplify, it's those four layers.
And there's opportunities to be had in all four of those layers, depending upon your business and where you want to focus. So with all your research and studies in AI, what's the one thing that most people don't know just yet? Like what's building or brewing in the background that's like from Matt Britton, three months from now, six months from now, 12 months from now is going to be this big thing, but you already know that it's coming.
I think it's going to replace a lot of human labor in almost every corner of the economy, much quicker than people realize. I think you start to see these companies that are forward-looking like Facebook and Google laying people off, and they make billions and billions of dollars of profit.
And the reason why is they have a fiduciary. Everyone's like, why are they laying people off? They make billions and billions of dollars.
They have a fiduciary responsibility to the person that bought their stock today at a high price to make it higher, right? They have shareholders that have 401ks or college endowments and things like that. So they're going to obviously want to optimize their profits.
And the way they do that is look for efficiencies. And what they're seeing ahead of other companies is just how many places in the way they operate where AI can disintermediate human work.
And every day we are seeing use cases more and more in terms of what used to be uniquely human now can be replaced by technology. And that's really scary.
It's scary for parents to try to figure out what their kids should be focused on. It's scary for a lot of people in the workforce.
And that's really the impetus on why I wrote the book is really to kind of paint a picture of the future, how this is going to really impact every corner of business, culture, and society. So for the listeners and viewers, especially the business owners that are listening.
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Give an example of how AI is replacing something in human touch. Because I've been saying, if you aren't using AI, and if you aren't really using your humans to connect with humans, you're missing the boat.
I think there are some things that bots are going to do and that AI is going to do. From your viewpoint, what are some examples? Yeah.
So we've already seen some kind of low-hanging fruit. So there's a company called Klarna, which is a fintech company that essentially claims they were able to replace 700 customer service reps through AI.
And at first it was through chatbots. So basically we have all had the experience when we call an airline, we call the cable company, you're pressing zero a million times.
And essentially what we just want to do is get information or cancel our subscription or upgrade or whatever it may be. That kind of conversational intelligence is now at the point where it can replace human intelligence.
And you look at customer service, many companies offshore did. They offshore did India or Costa Rica or somewhere else where they can get cheaper labor.
But now what they're finding is they don't even need to do that anymore. So more often than not now, when you're reaching out to an airline or you're reaching out to your cable company, you're going to find that you're not talking to another human.
And when I say talking to, at first it was texting. But now one of the biggest innovations we've seen here in 2025 is in the realm of voice, where you could be talking to someone that you actually think is a person, but it's actually not really a person on the other line.
So that's almost a starting point. But then if you start to think about it, if all of a sudden the customer service rep can be replaced by AI, can the secretary in the office, can the person who's taking reservations at the restaurant, can the person who's booking your appointment, you know, at the doctor's office? And it kind of goes on and on and on.
So people whose job it is to essentially move or transfer information from one place to the next or complete kind of very everyday tasks, those are going to be the first people that are going to be impacted. Another evolution we've seen this year is a concept of agents.
You've probably heard a lot about AI agents. What makes agents different is agents don't just give you information.
They can take action on your behalf. So if you think about what a travel agent in the traditional sense did, you could say, I want to travel to the Caribbean over Christmas.
Here's my budget. I have a family of four.
I want to be close to the beach, whatever it may be. And then the travel agent will go do the research for you.
And if they have your credit card, they may book it for you. All of those things can now be done by AI much more efficiently because a travel agent is limited to knowledge that they have in their head.
But AI has the knowledge of every single hotel there, every review that's ever been given, the weather, all the flights that exist and get you the best possible deal. So now travel agents, anyone who's an agent or a broker, this entire podcast could be me giving examples of how AI can do jobs that exist today better.
And that's really scary. And the question is, well, what are humans going to be left for um after this and we can get into that as well because i do think it will create a lot of opportunity for humanity but just like every other technology we've seen it has negative and positive implications when when the model t was invented i wrote about this in the book by henry ford you know 99 of all the companies that were in the horse and carriage business obviously went bankrupt.
But over the next decade, over 30% of all the new jobs that were created in America were through the automobile industry. Correct.
So the hope is that's going to happen. The difference is that the skill sets required for people to be able to adaptively reskill in the AIR are a little bit different this time.
Oh, for sure. I mean, we could have a whole conversation around prompting because, you know, I've got an AI clone, multiple AI clones.
And so they're open to users. And I go back and see sometimes like the prompts that people are putting in.
It's like, if you could just ask your question a different way to get the model to talk to you better, like it would be so different. But I won't go on that soapbox.
I promise. But I want to go to Matt, the beginning, right? I like to know people's because, that thing that's deeper than your why.
What's Matt's purpose today? If we were to say Matt, what's your because? What's your driving motivation? What would that be? What really gets me going, what I'm passionate about, is teaching people about where their world is headed and helping them make the changes they need to make today to future-proof themselves. And that's kind of been a common theme throughout my career.
When I first started out of college, it was the year 2000, the internet was coming. When I tell my kids that, they think I'm a dinosaur.
Right. Like I started in business when the internet was just starting.
It's like your parents telling you that they didn't have electricity when you're growing up.

It's kind of how I probably looked to them. But it is the truth.
And I immediately dove in and started an ad agency that helped big brands understand how to leverage the internet specifically for younger kids, college students, and teenagers. Because those are the only people who are adopting it.
In 2004, I was lucky enough to get in touch with Facebook right when they were starting because I was marketing to college students and Facebook took off on college campuses and actually ended up selling the first ads ever that existed on Facebook directly to Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin, the founders of Facebook. And I pivoted my career to really helping brands understand social media and what it meant for their brand.
And I personally registered at Visa on Twitter for Visa, the credit card company. So that was the early days and really got passionate about them.
Then 2008, 2009, the iPhone started to take off and everyone had this new way of mobile communing, mobile communication. And I was focused on helping companies build apps, how to communicate.
And now here we are in 2025 and it's that next big evolution, arguably bigger than all those combined, which is AI. So my, you know, my why is helping individuals and companies really prepare for the future and teaching them.
And what I love is giving somebody, you know, a set of facts or tips or know how, and then seeing them six months later and they say to me, I use that and that really worked. It helped me drive growth.
It helped me do this or that. I love doing that.
You know, I've been successful in my career and I've made money. I'm a gazillionaire, but so, but I can't say like I'm just driven by financial success.
I really am driven by the impact I have on other people. And I think when you hit a certain age, that becomes a little bit more important.
Yeah. Because you feel like if you've gotten what you feel you need out of life, if you give your kids a good education, you travel, at certain points, like to your point, what is your why? Yeah.
That becomes more important. Okay.
And that's why a lot of people work into their 70s and 80s. It's not for the money.
It's because they're driven by something. No, wholeheartedly.
I can definitely tell you from experience with my grandparents, right? It was like they worked because that was part of purpose. It wasn't about money.
It wasn't about anything. Right.
And like literally, especially for my grandfather, like the moment that he, that we forced him to stop working, right? It was like, Papa, you got to quit driving and all that. It's time.
Then all of a sudden, like, health started deteriorating. And there's a big correlation to that, I believe, with us as humans, right? Like, we've got to have that purpose and that drive.
It's in our DNA to be builders and to make impact. Right.
Yeah, totally, man. So I want to go a little bit deeper.
So this side of you, we talked about when you graduated college, right? Was that always how you were like that? I look at Matt and I see the inquisitive, right? Like, because I was like that growing up. Always trying to find the why behind the why, the deeper, like, don't tell me something.
This is how it works. Like, let me figure it out too.
Like, was that always Matt as a kid too? You know, i think you hear these stories about the entrepreneur who was doing the paper routes growing up and that's a classic story my experience is more often than not you don't always see it when kids are young and i think that's why sometimes parents overreact if their kids are good students etc and by the way many of the most successful entrepreneurs i know were terrible students in school. I became a nightclub promoter in college.

I saw somebody handing out flyers and I'm like, well, let me try doing that. And that was my first job.

And I ended up building a little bit of an empire in college.

I went to school at Boston University promoting nightclubs.

And I think what got me into that was the idea that I can impact somebody's behavior.

Like I gave him a flyer and on Friday night I saw them in an event.

I wasn't a big drinker, like a huge partier.

I don't a big drinker, like a huge partier. I just love

the idea of promotion and, and, and, and almost like the behavior and the psychology behind

driving someone's behavior. And that got me excited.
And that sort of evolved over time to

me seeing where the future is, but how it all comes together in the rearview mirror, I can't really point to it in a sequential way that makes sense. It's just sort of how I evolved.
I wish I had a story where it's like that moment I knew. Sometimes that's bullshit, to be honest with you.
I think a lot of some of this happenstance and I just developed over time and my skill set, I think, lends well to this. I just became passionate for it.
Okay. Yeah.
So going back to AI now.

Yeah.

One of the crazy coolest things that I've been using the last couple of months is the

deep research.

Yeah.

It's amazing.

On ChatGPT, right?

And from a self-improvement stance, just things that I can learn and apply is the craziest

thing I've ever seen.

And now it literally is the tool that I use the most is deep research, right? Like not creative writing. What was the last thing you did deep research on? You really want to know? I do.
Joe Rogan and how can I get on this podcast? Love that. Right.
So, but it literally starts talking about the connections and who you might want to contact and all the different various people that

have been on that because it knows me, hey, you might want to talk to this person that you're

connected with because they were on the show. You want to hear an insight behind that, Mick,

is that the reason it's so impactful is if you asked a friend, how do you think I should get

in Joe Rogan? That friend of yours, A, is obviously limited in knowledge. They don't have all knowledge.

But they may also be thinking, if Mick gets on Joe Rogan, he may become richer than me. He may become more funnier than me.
What does that make me feel about myself? So am I really going to help him, right? AI doesn't care about that. So it's going to be very rational about giving you the steps that you need to know.
And in that way, it can be better than humans and advice because all humans are flawed. We're emotional beings.
Even doctors, they may feel bad about telling you you're going to die in three years, right? But I actually created my own health bot where I uploaded all my x-ray, MRI, blood test information. And when I asked my health bot, what's most likely to kill me in five years, it'll tell me.
And there's no emotion involved, right? but that's ultimately what you want to hear. So when you're asking about Joe Rogan, you're going to get step-by-step information and it's going to be helpful in a way like no other piece of information you've probably interact with is.
And that's what makes it so jaw-dropping. Dude, I'm going to tell you the greatest instance of this, and it's probably going to put these companies out of business.
So you're going to hear breaking news with Mick and Matt right now. So I use deep research.
You know, I do events, right? Like we both have podcasts and I do speaking events and leadership events. I asked it for, based on what I'm trying to do, who were the sponsors that would align well with what I'm doing, and then create a contact list of me with name, email, and social handles if are available.
You know how deep research works, right? They ask you a few clarifying questions. 30 minutes later, I have a list of 200 direct contacts with their actual confirmed and verified email, their social handles, and business contact phone numbers.
So I'm going to build it out for you. What you could do with that information is you can feed it into, and maybe I'll help you do this, right? Let's go.
You can feed it into an engine, which can create a personalized, hyper-personalized email outreach, which takes the content of your podcast and who you are. It'll search those companies and those individuals of those companies.
It go through their linkedin figure out what they care about and we'll send a series of customized emails each one completely different correlating their company their business goals and your what you're offering is to them and it'll send those emails out for you and you don't have to do anything that's next step. And that's where kind of things go to the next level where you could be so much more efficient.
If you do that and other companies don't today, you get a leap. If you wait a year, everyone's going to be doing it and no one's going to respond to emails.
So a big thing about AI is you have to move incredibly fast. AI enables you to, but if you wait, it's going to be too late.
If you think about the first companies that started to sell stuff online, they had such a big advantage because as more and more people started to buy stuff online, there was a limited amount of places to buy from. Now everybody sells everything online, right? And that's not an opportunity anymore.
So we're all going to be kicking ourselves. I'm not saying five years from now, one year from now for not spending so much of our time today trying to figure out how it can move us forward.
Oh, totally agree. I mean, when I found this out and every email was confirmed, it was valid.
Incredible. These list gen companies are going out of business because they give you a list and then they sell you the verification booster or whatever where they verify the emails and nothing is ever accurate right this literally gave me everything and to your point it also gave me tips as to an approach in the email now i didn't take it as far as you did yeah i'm gonna let you build that out for me i'll show you but i did secure 250 000 for one of my events through and this was like three weeks three weeks of work yeah literally done game changing You talk about you clone your voice.
There are models right now. Like there's a company called Eleven Labs where you clone your voice.
But you can connect that with a platform like Twilio where it could call these people in your voice. Right.
And talk to them. And it's indistinguishable, which is also scary and opens up a path for nefarious bad actors to use your voice to get them to wire money to them thing they're you and uh you know so that that's all comes along with the positives and negatives of technology yeah i mean where the world is going is so crazy i was at a wendy's don't shame me i was at wendy's but i was at wendy's and it literally was a voice operating order taker receptionist going through the drive-thru like literally asked me for my order i could see on the screen that they read back everything freaking insane so one thing i talk about in the book is what does this mean for education yeah right because those of us who are parents like you think about your kids and are they going to be out of work is there going to be 0.0001 of the population controlling 99.99 of the wealth is it good to be that small sliver of people who figure out, is everyone else going to be poor? I mean, we see underdeveloped nations like this where the rich people live on a hill with security guards and pit bulls at the bottom and they don't interact with everyone.
We are at risk as a society, especially here in America, of going in that direction. And some of that can't be stopped.
But I'd rather my kids be on the hill than at the bottom struggling for food, as I'm sure we all feel that way. And the thing about AI is it is all within our control, but it starts with education.
And the thing about education that is broken is for years, what made you a good student was memorizing information and then regurgitating it, right? You're going to study. And then if you regurgitate during the test, you get A's.
That kind of skill set is becoming rendered meaningless. So you talk about those list companies.
Those list companies are just giving you information, but now information is commoditized. So what isn't commoditized? It's creativity, right? It's critical thinking.
It's the ability to be a problem solver yeah right that's important being strategic and figuring out what is the problem your problem you framed is i want to get on joe rogan i'm going to use deep research i'm going to use these tools and figure it out but someone had to get the idea in your head that you want to get on joe rogan correct that's the part that makes you uniquely human yeah and and and you're going to have the perseverance right at to put your head down and do whatever it takes to get there. And I believe you'll get there.
That's what differentiates, I think, people who are going to win in the age of AI, whether you're a student that's studying right now or somebody who's trying to reinvent themselves in their career. Oh, wholeheartedly.
Like the Joe Rogan, I could show everybody everything I did, but it literally gave me the pitches that I should be able to make. And like, here's some conversations you want to have, right?

Like, here's some very cool things most people don't know about Joe.

I was like, how the F does it know all this?

But it's information that source is somewhere.

Yep.

Right.

Cool.

So a couple of things, Matt, to get you out of here on.

So you talked about, you know, how in the future we're replacing, I don't want to say humans, I'm going to say job functionality that humans have. Sure, sure.
Because I do think that there's a great need for humans and the connection of humans, right? Of course. So when we look into the future, like, when do you see that move really starting to take place? We see big corporations.
But what about for the smaller, I'm 30 employees or less. Maybe I really only need 25 employees to do the jobs that they're doing and I can repurpose five to do something that like, when do you see that really becoming a big push for the smaller level business? It's going to take companies and entrepreneurs to come up with products and services that are easily digestible by small businesses.
Because right now, there's a sort of misperception that AI is for the whiz kids. Like senior citizens, baby boomers should be all over AI.
You don't need to know technology to use it. You just have to talk in any language.
But if you look at the data, why do younger people disproportionately use AI? It's a perception issue. And small businesses probably think, I need AI engineers.
I need to hire somebody from MIT. But you don't.
But I think over time, what will happen is you'll see entrepreneurs and businesses bring very easy-to-use plug-in solutions to small businesses, just like how Shopify did to get small businesses to adopt e-commerce. Or Squarespace gave companies the ability to easily create a website.
And before that, you had to pay an agency a lot of money. I think you're going to see those sorts of evolutions and those sorts of companies enter small business world.
And with that, they are going to embrace the efficiencies, whether it's, you know, if you're a hairstylist, you have somebody working the front desk. Today, you don't really need that.
I hate to say it if you're a hairstylist and your receptionist there, right? But if you're a hairstylist and your rent is going up and your cost of goods are going up and your cost of labor is going up and you're trying to stay in business, maybe that will be the one thing that saves you. So that's the other way of kind of looking at it for Main Street type businesses.
So to answer your question, I think we're probably two years away, but I think you're going to see pockets where it's going to happen a lot sooner as well.

Totally agree. Totally agree.

And then last one, Matt, like the floor is yours.

Amazing book.

What's one or two tips that you want to leave people with today?

So I think AI is about understanding the most important problems that you want to solve or opportunities.

In your case, it was going, it's going on Joe Rogan's show. In my case, I built a health bot because I just turned 50.
I have young children. I want to stay alive as long as possible.
So I built a health bot that I can talk to. And if I have any ailment, it has all my health history.
And it's going to be able to tell me what I need to do, what doctor appointments I need to make. That's a problem that I want to solve or an opportunity I want to seize.
It all starts with that. I think sometimes people get overwhelmed with how quickly things are moving and all these tools.
And it's almost like you're going to an all-you-can-eat buffet and you can eat everything. But it's like the paradox of choice and you end up not knowing what to do.
And you circle around. That's sort of how AI is.
You have to go back to first principles. What is the most important problem I need to need to solve frame that problem figure out the data that you need that can help you solve the problem in your case it was um you know maybe the companies that you need to call for sponsoring your events or the things that you're working here about whatever it may be so that's the data right and then what is the desired outcome that you want and then you have to do the work yeah so you have to put your head down and persevere.
And it's a step-by-step function. So if you say the goal is this in two years, what has to be true 18 months from now? What has to be true a year from now? What has to be true six months from now? And then AI, through something like deep research, can help, first of all, zoom out and say, okay, here are the steps you need to take.

And then you need to take the steps. And so if step one is getting the contact information or step one is writing a social media post, go step by step with AI helping you and you can get there.
And I think – so we should all feel empowered. I want people to read this book and feel empowered that the power is in their hands to future

proof themselves for a future that will look nothing like the world that we live in today.

But people need to accept that the future looks nothing like the world we live in today.

And they need to do something about it now.

And that's what I want them to take away from the book.

I love it.

And the book, Generation AI, Matt Britton.

So I'm going to do something really quick. Matt, I want to purchase five copies of the book.
I love it. And the book, Generation AI, Matt Britton.
So I'm going to do something really

quick. Matt, I want to purchase five copies of the book.
Great. Thank you.
And the first five people

that message me, Matt, M-A-T-T, I'll send it over. The first five.
Again, we do this a lot.

Not number six, seven, eight. People message me all the time.
Mick, I messaged you. I said the

first five. All right.
First five, you're getting a copy. Maybe I can convince Matt to sign it for you, too.
Oh, yeah. See, Matt.
Count me in. Brother, I appreciate you so much for taking your time to be with us today.
And for the listeners and viewers, remember, your because is your superpower. Go unleash it.
You're the man, bro. Thank you.
Thank you. That's awesome.
You are the man. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Mick Unplugged.
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