Cyber Business Podcast

The Age of Human Judgment, Not the Age of AI, With Benny Zhang - Ep 235

Written by Matthew Connor | Sep 9, 2026, 8:32:07 AM

Benny Zhang spent years as VP of IT at Orion Group, where he built and led the company's entire technology organization, including infrastructure, cybersecurity, service desk, and application support, before transitioning into investing full time. Benny's path started in chemical engineering, then shifted into IT when he became a one man department overseeing everything from servers and networking to board level reporting. Today he applies that same systems thinking to markets, having built his own AI connected trading tool that analyzes his portfolio and holds him accountable to a written investment strategy. He joins the show to talk about his path from engineer to IT leader to full time investor, and how he uses AI as both a technical partner and a decision making gatekeeper. 

 



Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: 

 

  • How Benny went from chemical engineer to one man IT department overseeing infrastructure and cybersecurity
  • Why Benny transitioned from VP of IT into investing full time, and what that transition actually looks like
  • How Benny built an AI connected trading analysis tool without being a professional coder
  • Why Benny argues we are in the age of human judgment, not the age of AI
  • The spring roll story that taught Benny not to blindly trust AI generated instructions
  • Why Benny thinks more than 90 percent of businesses still are not using AI effectively
  • How Benny uses ChatGPT as a gatekeeper to hold himself accountable to his own investment strategy


In this episode…

Benny opens with his path into technology, starting with a childhood Commodore 64 and a book about Steve Jobs that shaped his early fascination with tech, before family pressure pushed him toward chemical engineering instead. After several years as a plastics manufacturing engineer, an opportunity opened when his employer lost its entire IT staff at once, and Benny volunteered to take over, spending years as a one person IT department handling infrastructure, cybersecurity, networking, and data center operations alongside board presentations and audits. He argues that experience, more than any traditional help desk path, is what made him capable of eventually leading a full IT team at Orion Group, where he oversaw service desk, infrastructure and cybersecurity, procurement, and application support as VP of IT.

The conversation shifts to Benny's transition into investing full time, where he describes treating every dollar as an employee generating future returns, and explains the discipline behind choosing to hold NVIDIA stock instead of buying a Porsche 911. He is candid that he started investing later than he wishes he had, and frames his current full time focus not as chasing a net worth number but as proving his own investment strategy is sound and repeatable. He also talks through his philosophy on spending, favoring travel and experiences over status purchases, drawing on a story from Notre Dame in Paris about the value of seeing the world while still physically able to.

The back half of the episode centers on how Benny's technical background from his IT career carries directly into how he invests today. He built a tool that connects ChatGPT to his brokerage account, filters his watchlist, and runs opportunities through his own written investment strategy before presenting recommendations, a project he says took him less than a week despite not being a professional developer. He shares a story about ChatGPT giving him bad cooking advice as a lesson in why human judgment still matters, and argues that the real divide forming in the workforce is not between AI users and non-users, but between people who command AI as a tool, the way he does with both his infrastructure background and his trading system, and people who follow it blindly.

 

 

Resources mentioned in this episode

 

Matthew Connor on LinkedIn
CyberLynx Website
Benny Zhang on LinkedIn
Orion Group Website
Darktrace Website
Abnormal AI Website

 

Sponsor for this episode...

 

This episode is brought to you by CyberLynx.

CyberLynx is a Bethesda managed IT and cybersecurity company. Local techs you know, not a call center. Month-to-month. 24/7 intrusion detection.

We help growing companies with managed IT, help desk, backup and recovery, and a fractional CIO.

Talk to us at https://cyberlynx.com/contact, info@cyberlynx.com, or 301-798-9170.

 

Check out previous episodes:

 

Why Patch Management Is No Longer Frontline Defense with Brett Price - Ep 234

Generals in the Command Post: AI Security and Human Identity with Erik Miller - Ep 233

Why UNICEF USA Is One of the Hardest Security Jobs with Andrew Nuxoll - Ep 232 

 

Transcript: 

 

Cyber Business Podcast

Guest: Benny Zhang, Former VP of IT at Orion Group Holdings Host: Matthew Connor

Matthew Connor: Matthew Connor here, host of the Cyber Business Podcast. Today we're joined by Benny Zhang, former VP of IT at Orion Group Holdings. Benny, welcome to the show.

Benny Zhang: Thank you. Thank you.

Matthew Connor: And before we get too far in, a quick word from our sponsors.

Sponsor Break — CyberLynx: Hackers are using AI to conduct machine-speed attacks. Is your security keeping up? CyberLynx sells industry-leading AI-powered cybersecurity solutions that detect threats in real time, so you know about an attack before the damage is done, not after. Learn more at cyberlynx.com. That's cyberlynx.com.

Matthew Connor: And now, back to our show. Benny, for those who aren't familiar, can you tell us about Orion Group Holdings and your role there as VP of IT?

Benny Zhang: So I was actually reporting to the CFO. I was in charge of the entire IT system over there. I had about four teams reporting to me, and it's very traditional IT management, like the framework, right? So I had a service desk, which was fairly large because we had a lot of field offices, and those technicians had to go out there. Then I had an infrastructure team, so that's the traditional back end: cybersecurity, servers, networking, data center, all of that going into one. Then there was a very small team, like three people, asset management and procurement for the IT department, because we were managing a fairly sizable IT budget. Then I also had an application support team, and that's where I saw the most contribution IT can have, in the application support, supporting the enterprise applications we used at Orion. That was actually my largest team.

Matthew Connor: Very nice, that makes perfect sense. I think you actually have a pretty interesting background, and what you're currently doing now is really interesting, too. So if you could, let's go through your backstory, your origin story if you will. If you were a superhero, how did you get into tech originally, and then get to where you are today?

Benny Zhang: I think my passion for technology started with two things. One, my dad bought a Commodore 64 for me when I was young. If you know what that is, it tells you your age.

Matthew Connor: Yep, then I'm that old. That was my first one too. Well, it was a Vic 20 and then the Commodore 64. Go ahead.

Benny Zhang: Yeah, that's great, it's an age-revealing thing. So I played on that quite a bit, and that's where I actually learned how to code, in BASIC, a very old language. The second thing is, around the same time period, I read a book called Silicon Valley Fever. It had a case study on Apple and the rise of Steve Jobs. The most fascinating part was he walked into a venture capitalist's office asking for money, dressed like he was homeless, wearing sandals. You can imagine the scene. He's been my inspiration for many years. So that's the start of the inspiration. But because of my Asian background, Asian parents are very pragmatic, so if you're studying a degree that's not going to pay you well after graduation, they will move mountains and heaven to stop you. So I wouldn't say I was forced, maybe I was coerced, or talked into it, how about that, to go into chemical engineering, because I was good at chemistry, physics, and math. So I went into chemical engineering, and I was pretty decent at it. After graduation, I went to work for a manufacturing company, a plastics manufacturer, for a very long time. But after about three years with that company, I was very uninspired by chemical engineering. I was a pretty good engineer, I actually became their lead engineer, and by year three they transferred me. I was in Canada, and they transferred me down to Houston as the QC manager. So I got a promotion within three years, and I was a pretty good engineer, but I wanted to switch to doing IT. At the time I spent almost eight thousand dollars of my own money to get Microsoft certifications, and I was ready to make a move. But it just so happened that the company lost all their IT people within about three months. There was nobody running their IT, so I raised my hand and said, hey, would you let me try this, I think I can do a better job. I'm actually very grateful they took a chance on me and let me run their IT. At the start it was a one-man show, I was pulling cables, changing mice for users, and then I was also doing board presentations and dealing with auditors. That job gave me a tremendous amount of knowledge. Because I was a one-man show for a while, I had the opportunity to touch almost every aspect of IT, even down to coding, sometimes I'd do a little bit of coding myself because there was nobody else there. Eventually I was able to build up the team. But looking back, all these years later, because I had that experience with that company, I was able to sit in the role I was in. Otherwise I couldn't even manage the team. If I'd just been siloed into being a network engineer, or just a programmer, I wouldn't have been able to manage the entire IT team. So that experience really helped me become a good IT leader, not just from a technical point of view.

Matthew Connor: No, it's amazing how formative that is, being the one-man show. You really do get to touch everything. A lot of times we'll have a CIO, or somebody, a VP of IT, and they'll recommend people start at the help desk. But honestly, I think if you go one step further and start as the only IT person at a business, where it's a one-person show, I think you learn so much more than you do just on the help desk, even at bigger organizations. Obviously there's no such thing as a one-person show there, but I think everybody should cut their teeth on that small-business, one-person show and learn from there.

Benny Zhang: I'm right there with you, I think that's a really great way to do it. Yep, really enjoyed that opportunity.

Matthew Connor: Well, let me ask you, you're now, you're not just about IT anymore, you've done pretty well on the investing side of things, and that's kind of your full-time job now, right?

Benny Zhang: It is my full-time job now, but I wouldn't say full-time, because I'm not spending all my time sitting in front of a computer doing it.

Matthew Connor: Well, let's dive into that a little bit, because I think a lot of people invest, a lot of people dabble in it, a lot of people look to be able to retire on their savings and investments. Can you walk us through your strategy, where you're at, what your take is, and your approach to investing?

Benny Zhang: I actually didn't start early, that's one huge regret. The investment is a time game, meaning if you're in the market long enough, even if your annual return isn't that great, over the long term you're still going to win. So it's a time game, and that's why I'd suggest everybody start as soon as you can, especially if you have kids, start investing for them when they're very young. By the time they're in their twenties, they already have a million dollars, and who cares if they have a job, right?

Matthew Connor: That's right.

Benny Zhang: So that was my advice to my friends about that. I didn't start until pretty late in my career, because I was mostly just focused on the working part, and that's a huge mistake, a huge lesson I learned. It's kind of late for me, but the hope is somebody else can learn from that too. The goal of working, I think, is twofold. Number one, obviously, is to pay the bills, but that's not really the goal. The goal of working is to accumulate enough money so one day that money can work for you. Think about every dollar as your employee, right? They're going to generate interest, dividends, or capital gains to help you. So once you start thinking that way, it's like, okay, do I want to spend ten thousand dollars on a Rolex watch, guilty as charged here, or should I spend that ten thousand dollars buying NVIDIA stock? I actually faced that dilemma myself a couple times. I wanted to sell NVIDIA stock to buy a Porsche 911, I'm a huge Porsche fan, I had a Porsche myself for many years, I love that car, it's manual, and I'm a big car guy, especially Porsche. But in the end I decided to keep the NVIDIA stock, and the results were very clear, and I knew that at the time too when I made that decision. So you've got to think about it that way: make the money work for you as early as possible, and over the long term you'll accumulate a lot of wealth. I unfortunately started very late, but I started at the right time and with the right strategy, which allowed me to step into retirement if I wanted to. I wouldn't call it retirement, but more a transition to a different phase of life.

Matthew Connor: There's a few things I think are really fascinating that I want to dive a little deeper into, this idea of investing versus spending, that balance of putting off the reward until later. This is interesting, because if you never save and never invest, and you spend everything, you likely get to a place in life that may not end up being very good for you. And if all you do is save and invest, you also get to a point in life that's maybe not very good, where you have tons of money but what good is it, you don't spend any of it. There are people who live on very little, who have these massive savings and investments, and they feel really bad about spending, because they've spent decades, their whole lives, with the mindset of I don't spend, I save, I invest, and then they can't use that money for anything to benefit themselves. So it's an interesting spectrum, and those are the ends of it. In the middle, how do you, and you may be on one of those ends, I don't know, though the Rolex watch maybe is a giveaway that you're not completely on one end, but you were torn on the 911, and yet you invest. So how do you balance that with quality of life, enjoying, putting that money to use for things you enjoy, and yet still investing and preparing for the future, or getting to the point where money is working for you? Do you put it off so long that, once I have enough money that I can have all the things I want without touching the principal, then I will spend? Where do you fall on this? What's your philosophy?

Benny Zhang: I think the term "live below your means" is actually very, very good. Don't spend money that's outside of your capability, and definitely don't borrow money. Now, there's a bit of a caveat there. There's a good way to borrow money and there's a bad way to borrow money, so I'm not ruling out borrowing entirely, just keep that in mind. For me, I'd argue certain kinds of spending are actually very helpful. Looking back at my life, the most joyful time was the trips I took with my wife, traveling the world together. It's not a huge amount of spending, each trip was about five thousand dollars, sometimes up to about twelve thousand. We did that probably twice a year, and over the course of our marriage we accumulated quite a few trips and traveled to quite a few places. Those are very precious memories. I think that's the thing, we don't live forever, at least, maybe later on we can talk about AI and all the longevity talk, but at the moment we have to assume we don't live forever. And I'd also argue living forever is a curse, not a gift, so be careful what you wish for.

Matthew Connor: That's right. Yeah, we're getting into the philosophical part later.

Benny Zhang: I'd argue that when you travel, it can actually be pretty economical if you do it right. Let's say we bought a ticket to Italy for about four hundred dollars round trip.

Matthew Connor: Oh, it was fantastic. Then did they put you in the cargo bay of the plane, how did you get there for that?

Benny Zhang: No, there was a seat and everything, it was actually fairly good.

Matthew Connor: Wow, that's incredible.

Benny Zhang: It was an opportunity, you've got to watch for those moments. You save tons of money just on the airplane tickets, especially when you do those things when you're young. You don't have to be in top-line hotels, and you still get to enjoy things like Vatican City, or Notre Dame. There's a story, that's why I encourage people to travel when they're young. I was at Notre Dame with my wife, and we were trying to climb up to see, I don't know what they call them now, unfortunately they burned down.

Matthew Connor: Yeah, 2018, I think, maybe.

Benny Zhang: Unfortunately, so. But we were there to see them before they burned down. We were at the bottom, there was a pretty huge line at Notre Dame. I was wearing my college ring, it says Quincy University, and the guy next to me saw it and said, oh, you speak English? I said yeah, I'm from the US. Then he started talking to me, he was in his sixties, and unfortunately not in good health. For him to climb up, in Europe elevators are a very precious thing, you actually have to climb, I think about six to eight stories, to get to the top of the cathedral. For him, that's a very difficult thing, and he was doing that with his wife at that age. It kind of struck me, gave me a little epiphany: when you're young, you don't have to spend a ton of money, but you can still go see a lot of things and have the most precious memories of your life. Because you're young and still capable of walking, walking doesn't feel like a chore or a burden, and a long flight in economy isn't a huge deal either. So my advice would be, while you're young, go see the world. And not to get into politics too much, but for people in the US, you don't know how good we've got it here. Go outside the US and see other parts of the world, and you'll get a very different perspective. Life is very different on the other side of the world.

Matthew Connor: It really is, it's easy to lose focus on that, or take it for granted. It's interesting, because at the same time you like your Porsches, and you've got your Rolex, and I think people often talk about travel as one of these things, you're building memories, it's great, it's worth spending money on, and that's hard to argue with. But at the same time, those things, like a car you love and drive all the time, and every time you look at it you get a sense of joy, or a watch you wear every day, every time you look at it you get that feeling of accomplishment, that you could finally afford that watch, and then you wear it and see it all the time. So at the same time, there are these things you can spend money on that give you joy every day, and there's value there too. So it brings you back to the question of how you balance that. You didn't buy the Porsche 911, you kept your money in NVIDIA, and obviously that was a choice you made. Are you then looking to get that 911 down the road, or is it something like, that's cool, but it's probably not in the cards for me now? How do you balance that, when you could go get it and you're delaying it? Do you have a goal that drives you, is it a specific number you want to reach, or what's the goal, and how do you balance that with the day-to-day spending?

Benny Zhang: My investment goal is actually different from a lot of people. Most people are driven by, oh, I want to reach a million dollars. But to me, it's more about proving my investment strategy is sound and durable, and it's also a way for me to continue sharpening my investing. Everybody makes mistakes, I think good investors make fewer mistakes, and those mistakes are often very manageable for them, but bad investors make huge mistakes that can be catastrophic, life-destroying mistakes. So that's my investment goal, it's not to achieve any status, it's more a self-validation, if you will. Now, when you talk about balance, I always say our life, at least in the United States, is a consequence of the choices we make throughout our life. When we were very young, you'd have to decide, okay, do I go to parties or do I go to the library and study? That's a choice you make, and it can be as small as that. I'm obviously not saying anything extreme one way or another, I think we should go to parties because our minds do need breaks from time to time, but obviously we can't have breaks all the time and never actually study. I think study is quite important, and that could be another topic we discuss a bit later on, because nowadays, what do I even study, when everything can be done by AI now?

Matthew Connor: That's a great point, and I think that's a great thing to discuss, because at the same time, the world is changing in a way it's never changed before, thanks to AI. I think we're seeing a lot of huge benefits right out of the gate. I think it makes a lot of jobs that much more enjoyable, more productive, especially on the IT side of things. Look back to the days before Google, when you were trying to figure out how to code something, those were hard times, when all you had was a book on BASIC and you had to figure it all out yourself. Those were hard times. And now you can work with AI to build amazing things, solve problems that are very difficult, and do things in minutes that you'd struggle to do over weeks and months. So I think we're seeing huge benefits in the IT field from using AI, and I think this brings the whole conversation together nicely: one, is this a focus of your investing, and two, as you mentioned, where should young people, what are your thoughts on what they should study? Does AI replace humans as workers? In which case, what does the future look like, and do you even need to save and invest if AI is taking care of everything and we live in an economy that's so abundant people don't have to work because resources are readily available? That's a lot, go ahead and take it wherever you want.

Benny Zhang: That's a lot. I'll give you a real-life example from the AI news. I'm a very heavy ChatGPT user, I probably spend four to six hours a day with ChatGPT on various projects and topics I need to discuss and study. One thing I did recently was, I have a brokerage account, and I connected ChatGPT to my brokerage account, then built a program to review my portfolio and my wish list. That's what they call an API connection, application programming interface, if I remember that correctly. But keep in mind, I'm not a coder, I'm just good enough to know roughly what to do, but ChatGPT did all the coding for me. I'd tell ChatGPT, okay, this is the result I want, and just code it for me. The entire process works like this: first, the code pulls information out of my brokerage account, then does a rough mechanical filter, and whatever's left after the filtering gets fed back into the OpenAI API, and the AI does a thorough analysis, then sends the results to me. I'm doing a bit of options trading right now, and I have a very specific way of doing the investment. So the very first thing I did with AI was write out my investment philosophy, my strategy. So when the data is fed into OpenAI, it has to follow my investment strategy when looking at those opportunities, then present the final findings to me, saying, okay, you should reject these trades, or you should accept these trades, and here are the intricacies that come with these trades. It's just so useful, I did that in less than a week. In the old days, I'd have had to work with a developer for months. And you know what the best part is, ChatGPT doesn't have an attitude, you just tell it what to do and it does it for you, no matter how minute or complex the problem. A lot of the time, if you work with a developer, they'd say, okay, just send me the piece of code I need to modify. With ChatGPT, I just dump the entire thing in and say, here's the latest version, there's like fifty different pieces of code in there, read them all and fix the problem I need fixed, and it'll do it without any complaint. That's the best part, no argument, obviously. I actually trained ChatGPT to argue with me, tell me if my idea looks pretty crappy, or that's not a bad idea, I trained it to do that. But beyond that, it'll just do it for you, and it's so convenient. I cannot believe I didn't get into this sooner, because it's already made me a ton of money. And that was about three weeks ago that I did this.

Matthew Connor: Wow. So I totally agree, I think it's really impressive, the sort of analysis AI can do, it's shocking, and it's come a long way in a short period of time. What kind of results have you had in those three weeks?

Benny Zhang: Like I said, I made a lot of money just using those tools. It's still not perfect, obviously there are bugs here and there, sometimes I miss things, but it's way better than me having to go look through fifty to a hundred stocks to find those opportunities, because those opportunities are sometimes time-sensitive, something that could be sold at a certain price would disappear within a day or two. So with these AI tools, plus the program they wrote for me, I don't have to miss those things anymore. To me, it's like free money I'd otherwise be throwing away or not grabbing.

Matthew Connor: That way. It's really interesting, because on the one hand, I kind of hope we never get to the point where we have this super intelligence, where we never reach that AGI level. Because honestly, as it stands right now, it's such an incredible tool, and it's going to get better. And if it never really reaches that super-intelligence level where it's all-knowing and makes no mistakes and can work forever, that's kind of cool, imagine if we get to live in a world where we have phenomenal AI assistants that still have us in the loop. Not bad at all, I don't mind it one bit. We're already seeing it with self-driving cars, they're so much better, it's come so far. It used to be really dangerous and not good, and now it's about eight times safer than the average human driver, and we're still not there yet, there's still a lot of room for improvement on that side. So I don't know, on the one hand I kind of hope we never get to that level of super intelligence, on the other hand I do think it's going to happen. And if it does, you raised the question earlier of what does that future look like, what should kids be studying now, what's your crystal ball look like, and what's your advice?

Benny Zhang: The biggest thing with AI is it lacks proper judgment. I think Jason Wong said it pretty clearly, there's tasks, and then there's the actual purpose. Sometimes, most of the time, ChatGPT can do a task fairly decently, but the purpose still has to be judged by a human. For example, taking my investment as an example, I had to write out my investment strategy to formalize the purpose, then the task becomes easy for ChatGPT to complete, but everything still operates under the framework of my own investment strategy. So I don't think humans are ever going to be out of the loop. The scary part really is a lot of people blindly trust whatever ChatGPT says. I have friends who, when they argue with me, will just pull out something ChatGPT said and send it to me, and I say, your ChatGPT needs some training, because it's your laptop, not your advisor at that point. By default it's very agreeable, which is not helpful, but it's helpful for attracting more users, that's a marketing thing. But truth be told, it's a laptop.

Matthew Connor: That's true, the human judgment in that is absolutely critical.

Benny Zhang: So I actually wrote a short piece arguing that we're not in the age of AI, we're in the age of human judgment. And human judgment is going to become more and more precious, because the person who can come in and say, okay, I think this product is going to excel, or I don't like this design, this is an ugly design, get that out of my way, that's a judgment call. I wrote a short article about this particular thing. My attitude with ChatGPT is, I can do anything here, if you ask me to build a rocket ship, I'll have the design on your desk by tomorrow morning, that kind of overconfident way of saying things. But I was making Vietnamese spring rolls, and part of that is making a special sauce, mixing peanut sauce with another sauce. ChatGPT told me to add water to thin the sauce. But once I added water, the sauce became grainy, and the more water I added, the more it started separating, so you'd get lumps of peanut paste, then the water and oil separating. So ChatGPT suggested, all you've got to do is use hot water, not cold water. Wait a minute, this is a judgment call again, I know I've got to use cooking oil, not water, because water isn't going to mix with oil. So I ignored ChatGPT and replaced the water with oil, and it worked out just fine. But that just tells you, the AI will tell you something whether it's factual or not, and if it's not factual, it'll just hallucinate and make something up, because it has to tell you something. The judgment really has to come from each one of us. Like I was saying earlier, unfortunately a lot of people just follow whatever ChatGPT does, or not just ChatGPT, but all the AI tools, they just follow them. It's very scary, because you're going to have a separation of different people. There are the people who can actually command AI, the engineers, the AI designers, and people like probably myself and yourself, who say, hey, I'm going to use AI as a tool, I'm not going to let AI manage my life. And then there are people who just follow AI blindly, I wouldn't say slaves, but overly trusting and overly reliant on whatever ChatGPT says. Then there's another group that's completely ignorant, they don't even know AI exists, they don't even know what AI is, they think it's just a movie thing, at best. So you'll see that divergence become more and more clear in the next couple of years. Then on the business side, unfortunately, I think more than ninety percent of businesses, even people I talk to, still aren't using AI. You brought up this super-intelligence, all-knowing part, it's actually very useful in the business world. I'll give you a real-life example. The most difficult thing for us was doing forecasts, because we're in the construction business. If it rains, I can't pour concrete, I have to wait for the rain to stop. A two-day rain delay would throw off my material delivery, my manpower management, and there's a whole bunch of people and supplies I have to juggle to avoid that two days of rain. It would throw my forecast completely into disarray. So how can we leverage AI? I actually use the term "omniscient intelligence," because AI can look beyond what's just in your corporate environment. You have delivery dates, order placement dates, the construction team's manpower, all of that, you can cover, but you also have to look at things like what the weather forecast looks like, and how this year's weather forecast compares to last year. I'm not saying that's a perfect comparison, but it's a reference point. You also analyze the specific locale to see, is it going to rain, and if it does, how do you reorganize the entire supply chain and the people side to support that decision? There's no way a person can do this properly, but with AI, there are quite a few tools you can leverage to give you this omniscient intelligence, and it's extremely powerful, because it saves you tons of money and gives you a very predictive future that nobody else could give you. So it's a great thing for business.

Matthew Connor: It really is. And I think interestingly, so many people got into using ChatGPT early on, or AI early on, and since ChatGPT was kind of the first one, we'll go with them, and I think because of those early hallucinations, it gave a lot of people a false impression, and it led people down the path of, even on the business side, saying, oh, this isn't ready for prime time, this won't help us. And then at the other end of that spectrum, you had people saying this is going to be the future, we're going to fire people, we're replacing them with ChatGPT, okay. And that happened on both sides. I think the reality is we're still very, very early days here, in August of 2026, less than four years since ChatGPT came out, and we've gone so far, so fast, so much, with the latest models. It's so much better when you give them direction, and rather than it being purely human judgment, now we're seeing you can give it guidance and it can advise on judgment and even make judgment calls. But it's getting to the point now where you see it with Claude, and even Grok and Gemini and ChatGPT, yielding to the user and saying, hey look, this is what I would do, here's my judgment, here are the considerations, but it's your call, here are your options, which is night and day from where we started just a few years ago. That huge exponential growth we've seen in these models in just a few years, I can't help but think, what's it going to be like in a couple more years? It's really difficult to project out and say where we'll be in ten. I think it's exciting times nonetheless, and it's a lot of fun, and it's really cool to hear projects like yours, where you set it up and leverage it to invest. I think that's a great idea, and more people should be doing it, because as we know, the average person isn't as good as Warren Buffett, and yet with AI, I think we're going to see a lot of people greatly outperforming Warren Buffett in the long run, not just short term. I think there will be a lot of impressive gains by leveraging AI, not because it's a better investor, but because it consumes so much more knowledge about investing, and it can do it in a much more detached way, and provide much greater guidance. You're seeing that with yours, it can see hundreds of opportunities, and it would take you days, weeks, and by that time the opportunity's passed. So I think it's exciting times. I'm going to let you get the last word in on this before we go, because this has been a lot of fun.

Benny Zhang: Yeah, very, very cool topic. I'll give you another example. I've been using ChatGPT, and since I have it connected with my brokerage account, it sees every trade I make. So I have it set up to ask me at the end of the day about any new trade, why did you make this trade? It forces me to explain why this trade is still in line with my own investment strategy. That's actually a very good gatekeeper, because I told ChatGPT to be my gatekeeper, to hold me in line and not let me go outside of my strategy on impulse. So one of the things we talked about earlier is that investing is a time game, the longer you stay invested, especially with a great company, the bigger the reward you're going to get. So having ChatGPT as an advisor and as a gatekeeper has really helped me invest properly. Now I have somebody to check on me, why I made this trade, I have to explain to ChatGPT, hey, what's my reasoning, did I make a mistake or is this a proper call? That use, to me, has tremendous value, especially in terms of investment.

Matthew Connor: Totally agree. Benny, I can't thank you enough for coming on the show today. I think these are fantastic topics that everybody should be discussing on the daily. But before we go, can you tell everybody where they can find out more about you, and how they can get in touch?

Benny Zhang: Sure. I have a pretty active LinkedIn profile, so if somebody looks me up on LinkedIn, just Benny Zhang, Houston, you'll find me, probably the first picture, the first profile you'll see. I have quite a bit of content because I'm interested in leadership topics, so I have quite a few interesting posts under my profile, I'd encourage people to go read them. One topic was about why all the aliens we've invented so far are just a show of a lack of imagination, how about that.

Matthew Connor: Yeah.

Benny Zhang: It's a fun topic where I talk about why Godzilla isn't actually formidable, it would just collapse on its own, people can read that one too. There's also quite a bit about leadership, what we should do as leaders, sharing some of my experience as an IT leader for many years.

Matthew Connor: I love it. Well, thanks again for coming on, Benny.

Benny Zhang: Sure, thank you

Matthew Connor: And until next time.