How do you lead when AI is changing everything about how we work?

Mike Todasco, former Senior Director of Innovation at PayPal and Visiting Fellow at the SDSU AI Lab, talks about what it really takes to build an AI-first organization. Mike shares hard-won lessons from running innovation inside Paypal, why most teams get stuck in “pilot hell,” and how leaders can build a culture that embraces experimentation instead of fearing it.

Mark and Mike also explore the human side of tech leadership: creativity, curiosity, adaptability, and how to stay grounded as AI accelerates. From PayPal’s innovation tournaments to the future of work and the rise of solopreneurs augmented by AI, this episode gives CTOs and tech leaders a clear, practical view of what’s coming, and how to prepare.

Chapters

00:00 Who Is Mike Todasco?

02:42 What AI-First Really Means for Companies

04:32 How Leaders Can Drive AI Adoption

07:56 Inside PayPal’s Innovation Culture

15:31 Getting Executive Buy-In for Innovation

21:06 The Leadership Skills That Matter in the AI Era

32:42 The Future of Work: Humans + AI

39:43 When AI Feels Overwhelming (Mike’s Advice)

About Michael

Michael Todasco is the former Senior Director of Innovation at PayPal, where he spent over a decade leading initiatives to design, test, and scale disruptive ideas across the company. He is currently a Visiting Fellow at San Diego State University’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, where he explores the intersection of AI, creativity, and the future of work. In addition, he is pursuing his MFA in Creative Writing at Johns Hopkins University, blending his passion for storytelling with his expertise in technology. A frequent speaker and writer on AI, innovation, and creativity, Michael helps audiences rethink how to stay relevant and human in a rapidly changing world.

Books Referenced

• "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie

Where to find Michael

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/todasco/

• Website: https://todasco.lovable.app/

Today's guest, Mike Todasco, former senior director of innovation at PayPal, where he spent over a decade designing and scaling disruptive ideas across the company. These days, he's a visiting fellow at San Diego State University AI Lab, where he explores the intersection of AI creativity and the future of work.

So what's really fascinating about Mike and what I love is that he bridges a lot of different roles. He's an inventor. He holds over 100 patents. He's worked in big tech at PayPal. He is pursuing or he's already achieved a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. He writes a lot about AI tech leadership. And he works with, well, as part of his visiting fellow right now with tech leadership and entrepreneurs on basically integrating AI for innovation and growth, which I love as well. Mike, welcome.

So tell us a little bit more. Thank you. Thank you. Very you. And where you are right now.

Where am I? I'm in California right now.

Okay, cool. But what's your role at SDSU? What do you do exactly there?

Yeah. So at SDSU, it's a visiting fellow, which is a very cool and weird position where I get to do whatever I want, whatever interests me.

So what that means is I do I work with students a lot. We're doing some robotics. We're doing some very interesting things. I was down in the lab last week. San Diego is beautiful. Even though I don't live in San Diego, I get to fly down there every so often. And it's a wonderful place to be. And so I get to mentor students. I get to teach. I get to do research and writing on things that interest me. And I get to go on podcasts and talk about AI stuff to try and explain these complex things to normal folks.

Cool. So our audience is CTOs, CIOs, tech leaders in general. I think they get what AI is and what it does. I think the main challenges are, and I think you talked about A lot about that is the future work, the software stuff of AI, and I would love to get into that.

So, and starting with that, you said that companies need to redesign for AI operations and not layer some AI on top of old systems. What does that actually look and where should people start?

It's funny. I think this is a time where small companies have a huge advantage over big companies. Because they're nimbler, they can move fast, and the things that are normal. this week, I wrote a blog post, and I called it the Borg chart, B-O-R-G. And what I was trying to do was coin a phrase of , for myself, I was doing inventory of , what are all the roles and functions that I have in my N of one business that is me, and we all have these businesses. And what are the ways I'm using AI? And I counted a dozen different ways from being a designer to being an administrative assistant to being all this other stuff that I use AI to do that. That's really easy for an individual. Or a small company or a startup that is getting started, It's much harder. When you're a company of five or 50,000 people to change the ways that you've been doing stuff, change your processes and all that stuff. And this is something that I see day in and day out. It's something that startups are easy to embrace because they have no other choice.

I could either spend $20 on using chat GPT to help me, do legal stuff, or I could spend $500 an hour on a lawyer. And yes, the lawyer is going to be better. But when you're starting and you have limited resources, you're going to use the $20 a month solution to do that. And it's a way of , it's a new way of thinking. And this is going to percolate through and Bigger businesses eventually are going to get it, but it's.

Harder. And I think those bigger businesses, I was having a strategy session as late as last week with a semi-larger business, not too large. And basically they were looking at the budget for next year. There was a lot of additional spend on AI stuff. And the CFO said, let's cut it out, right? Because we can't afford to spend on AI there.

So what can CTOs or CIOs or What can we do to actually drive that change in those Semi, medium size or even bigger companies still.

Yeah, I love this question. This is something that it's not going to give you ROI overnight. And it's going to give you have to realize there's going to be a lot of experiments and there's going to be a lot of failures along the way. It's not that you're going to take a, a thousand person company and be AI first the next day. But if that is a goal that you want, if you think that this is a strategic imperative Years from now, You need to do things today that are going to put you in that direction.

So first thing above all else is you need to let your employees know it's okay to use these tools because, even for companies that don't allow it, your employees are still using these. And I'd much rather have them putting information into the enterprise version of Claude than going into DeepSeek or something that online, putting all my customer information in there and who knows what's happening to it at some point. - I think so, first thing you do is you say, And honestly, between ChatGPT from OpenAI, Anthropic, Claude, Google's Gemini, all three of those are pretty much world class.

I feel you can't go wrong with any of those. pick one and go with it and say, hey, employees, we're doing this. Then as a leader? I think one of the things you need to do is you need to be visible that you're using it yourself.

So what I always advise companies is, start whatever you use, Slack, Teams, Zoom, whatever messaging channel you have, create an AI channel in. You as a leader in that company should be the first person that posts in that channel. And this should be a way for you to share what you're learning. About it. It's , how are you using it? Not only professionally, but show something in your personal life you've done. Because with these tools, there are infinite, possibilities of what you can do with these tools. And whenever we have infinite possibilities, we tend to freeze up. It's the paradox of choice. And with the paradox of choice, it makes it really hard to get started.

So people need to see examples and things that. And when that's coming from on top, everybody else is going to see , if the big boss is doing this is something that we should be doing. And again, it's something you should encourage. If you have all hands meetings, Start it off with , hey, I'm going to pick somebody and I'm going to say, hey, show me what you're doing in AI or something that. Get them to come on stage and show a cool thing.

That's how you can start to create that organization.

Okay. I that.

So give people access to the tools and then lead by example, show them what's possible and start off that whole conversation about what we're using, the little things we're even doing with AI. 100%. The chat Okay, so let's take it back a bit to PayPal. You were leading innovation at PayPal and then running experiments. What did that look ?

It was a beautiful mess is what it looked . That's what innovation is in so many ways.

Look, I got the whole job. I did something very similar. It's funny. Before I was running the innovation group, I was leading a product team of 10 people. And one of the things that, and I inherited many of the people on the team, and I found that many of the people, I asked them a question, do you find yourself to be creative? And they, and half of them said yes, half of them said no. And it drove me crazy. The people that said, cause I'm , you're wrong. You are creative. And I , and my goal as a manager was to get them to see that.

So one of the things I did, which ties back to what I was doing before is we started every staff meeting. I told them, I want you to talk about something creative you did in the past week. I would cold call on people in that meeting. And what that did was it forced them to during the week, think about creative solutions. God, what am I going to talk about if my cold calls?

, they hated me for this, at least in the beginning. But I think it pointed out that They are creative people. And because I remember the stories 15 or 15 years later or something that to this day. One of the people in the group would Sneak through the airport to avoid traffic. Which was a crazy thing. I'm , what? You're on the highway? He goes through the airport and all this other stuff. Another person talked about how they couldn't get somebody to come to a meeting and they... I, They would literally found out what donuts they liked.

And then they bought those donuts and then they put that in the meeting invite and they did that. , And to me, it's the little innovations that lead to that more innovative culture.

So , that's what I did at a micro scale. And again, you could take what I did for innovation, apply that to AI, as we were talking about before. But doing those things at a micro scale were the things I tried to do at a macro scale then when, not everybody in the company was reporting to me. I actually had an extremely small team. But how do you create that culture of innovation at PayPal? And a lot of it was leading by example. It was Holding an event to, I would bring in speakers. I would try things. I remember I had coloring sessions in our innovation lab. And I literally remember nobody showed up. Not a single person showed up to that.

There's hundreds of people on these lists. Nobody showed up. And that was a chance for me to talk about that too on their Slack channel.

And then I would be, like hey, look I screwed up something. Let me tell you what I learned from this. And being very open and transparent, that was the innovation type of culture we tried to do. And, I got all the leftover products.

So blockchain and augmented reality and all this other stuff. So I got to do that. But the favorite part of it was more broadly, spreading innovation throughout the company. That's what I did that for six years there. And that's what always got me super excited.

And I think I understand how you did that within your group, right? How you do that in the weekly meetings and everything.

So how did that gradually spread across? Because PayPal is not a small organization. It's a big international organization. You had innovation labs in multiple countries. How did that spread from this really small team that you had to the whole company?

How did that work?

Yeah, two specific examples I'll give. one was we really didn't have innovation labs all over the company.

So one of the things we did was we followed the franchise model. So, companies McDonald's and so forth, most of those are not owned by McDonald's itself. It is owned by local people or local companies, more likely, that own a bunch of that, and they run things locally and everything. That was one model that we followed was McDonald's. I would, PayPal had offices all over the globe. And I would... Travel to these offices and try and recruit people to say, hey, part-time, do you want to start an innovation lab here? We'll give you a little bit of money and we'll get you started and we'll give you the recognition, but you define innovation however it is you want. Because in Bangalore, versus an office in Dublin versus something in Austin, Texas, they all had different functions and defined innovation in a different way. And that was something we very much encouraged. Was that these labs would be very different. They were all part-time. There are people who wanted to be there and wanted to spread innovation. And, to use an Indian phrase, Jugaad innovation, it was innovation through constraints. That was a lot of what we practiced.

we didn't give them a ton of money. I didn't have a ton of It's funny, I would go to other FinTech companies that had much bigger innovation teams. And we were a much bigger company, but , at max outside of some developments I had, would have three people, including myself working on the pure innovation side, for a 30,000 person company, you didn't need a lot. It was all about building that from the ground up.

So that was one way franchise model. Another way is we would actually hold something called an innovation tournament every year. And there's actually a great HBR article that was written up about the stuff that we did on this. And it would, it actually came from an intern. It's somebody intern was in our innovation lab. She was , hey, you should do this. And it's so funny.

, we took that idea. She left because her internship was done. We continued. She actually came back full time nine months later and was, you guys are doing this now. It was crazy. I'm , yeah. And I give it, we give you credit.

this was an idea that was sparked from you, but that was a way for, we would have executives put out problem statements. And then we built this system where then anybody in the company, whether you're an administrative assistant, you could work in the mailroom. It didn't matter. We wanted all of ideas out there on how to do this. And it was how to build up those ideas. And we have thousands and thousands of people submit ideas, vote on the ideas because then it got your other teammates to do , it was a whole very entrepreneurial type process, which led to a quote unquote, big event where we got the CEO, we got an hour of his time and a few other senior leaders. We were , okay, now after three months, you get to pitch the idea to the CEO. And , cameras, all this stuff there, that whole thing costs us $50,000. Most of it was the cameras and stuff that we needed for the big event. And, some of the, all that, but you could do that for $500 within a company.

Innovation does not need money. It needs passion, effort, and focused attention.

Yeah, and even, and I think that's my question, right? You had, you were leading innovation and you were very passionate for it. How did you convince... Maybe a CEO or boards to go along with all of that.

Yeah, I love that. So I remember the CFO talking to me once about something innovation related. And I'm , do how small my budget is?

That was always the CFO argument. It was, how are you going to get to return on investment? I'm, we're a rounding error.

We're nothing here in this. Now, when we would bring out, I remember when we had our blockchain team, that was specifically allocated money that did have goals, that did have ROI, that did have all that stuff, but innovation writ large, I knew if we kept it small that it wouldn't really matter. And they're, okay, you're doing cool stuff. keep doing cool stuff. And, of the 30,000 people we have, keep doing the press, keep doing the culture stuff and we're fine.

So that was the CFO. Now, how did we get the CEO involved? It was literally, honestly, Mark, it was working up the hierarchy for this.

that's, I remember this so well because This started from an idea of this innovation tournament started with an idea by an intern. She had that idea and then we were building it out. We're, okay, Who are we going to have develop these problem statements? I reached out to the most innovative VP level person that I knew. And I'm , can you do me a favor here?

Give me a problem statement for something. Put your name on it and record a little video. He's okay.

And then I would take that person's and then I would say, hey, his name was Guru. Guru is doing this. Can we have the other people do this too?

he's doing it. You should do it too. And it was a little bit of peer pressure.

And then eventually once we had all these people with the problem statements, it was a we handpicked. Then we were able to go to senior leadership and say, do you see the Problem statement is your people on your team, they didn't even know about this. And that's how we got the senior leaders to say, hey, do you want to be on stage? And once we get that, I said to the CEO's communication people, hey, we're going to have this, It'd be really important to have Dan, our CEO there to do it. And they're, yeah, we can arrange that. Let's work off schedules. And that was it. And so, it starts with one favor using that. It's a lot of it is... Dale Carnegie. How to win friends and influence people that is, A book I've read many times that is something I recommend everybody read if you haven't. It's the best book with the worst title. And you need to understand what is it that people want. And frankly, for our CEO in the end, he got to take some amazing photos that he literally had in his office. Because one of the guys on the communications team was , we need a confetti cannon. I'm, what are you talking about? Confetti cannon? He's , trust me, confetti cannon. I'm, it's a thousand bucks.

This was a significant part of our total budget was confetti cannon. He's, no, do it. And he was right. Because you had confetti flowing out of there when we announced the winner and the shots that you got and the camera people and everything. It was amazing. And that goes on the CEO's desk.

So next year, when we want to do something, the CEO has a picture of his family and him with the confetti cannon. It makes it an easy choice for him to say , okay, yeah, I'll do that for you guys.

So again, it's all about building up those relationships and doing those kind.

Of stuff. And I would say that's to AI, of course. How would you do that today, right? 2025 in a corporate. What approach would you take doing the exact same thing, but then for AI?

My gosh. If I was still in a big company, if I was still on PayPal or whatever, and you're trying to encourage AI, that is literally what I would do. I would have AI hackathons where I would say, maybe you have an engineering company. Cohort and a non-engineering cohort, but have both sides build stuff. Lead with a few weeks of record these sessions where you can actually show people how to vibe code or something that. Have problem statements put out by people and maybe they could be data science related, maybe they could be customer related, maybe they could be whatever, give access to these tools with these problem statements and say, okay, now form teams and go out there and be able to develop these ideas, develop these concepts and build out some innovation process. And at the end of it, at the end of this global AI hackathon, you get in front of the CEO and you have a confetti cannon and you do this And again, the whole point of that It's the concept of the X Prize.

So Peter Diamandis is somebody who created something called the X Prize, which was based on what happened with Charles Lindbergh. Crossing the Atlantic. Way back in the day, It's not actually about the winning idea. The winning idea almost doesn't even matter. It's about training your whole organization how to use these tools.

the winning idea is it's almost an afterthought, great. Yeah, we'll be able to use that for something. But the tens or hundreds or thousands of people that are learning AI, that are doing this stuff, a long part of the process that, are realizing, I'm doing this now I could do that. That's where the value is going to.

I love that. So that leads me to, I want to move on a bit to leadership, which is something that you talk about a lot, especially in the era of AI, the real leadership. You talk about creativity. I think you already mentioned that, but curiosity, adaptability.

So why are those, according to you, the most important leadership skills?

Let's take curiosity. I think , leadership is, All right, well, let me say , As we're going into this future, It is those soft skills that are really going to matter. When you think about curiosity. And in this world of AI, we may be years away or months, I don't even know, away from artificial general intelligence, which theoretically means that an AI is going to be able to do any job a human can do even better. And , well, what's that future mean for us as humans and the roles that we're going to have and so forth?

That is something where... , to be a Scrappy? Curious person who is, up on technology, willing to try new things, And doing that within your teams and organizations that you're leading by example with that, that's setting the right example for the teams that you have. I don't know what companies are going to look five years from now, 10 years from now.

The other side of AGI, assuming we do reach that at some point. I really don't know what things will look . But I do know that those are traits that are timeless and really even become more important in this future. And the more as a leader that you have those and display those, the more that you encourage others in your organization to have those, the stronger you and your team are going to ultimately.

Be. And if you're listening to this, right, I work with a lot of CTOs and tech leaders and CIOs, and they're very often tech oriented. And maybe less human-centered or creative, and you've said you believe that everyone's creative. If I'm listening to this, how should I think about developing those skills for myself?

Being more creative, curious, human-centered, where do I start?

Yeah, I think a lot of it comes down to being willing to take risks and try new things. I think following a passion is a good way to start with that. Look. Think about what your eight, 10 year old self used to do, used to think about.

I, as a young kid, I remember I would videotape Saturday Night Live because I couldn't stay up late enough for it. So with my VCR, I would videotape it and then I would watch it and study it the next day. On that Sunday. And I loved it. I loved comedy and all that stuff. And, it's funny, a couple of years ago, I, I've done all these other things. I decided I want to get into humor writing.

This is, what would my eight year old self love? my God, you're telling jokes and publishing articles and all that. And this is something that I started doing. And. It was... I've really sucked at the beginning. I would get rejected time and time again because I'm submitting to all these publications. And the great thing about human writing is all these publications are very open that you can submit. Anybody could submit stuff, but they are pretty stringent on what they actually accept. But I would learn. I would try and ask for feedback. I would iterate. I found other people who were interested in this. I would get their feedback. I would frankly even use language models. They're not quite funny, I would say, but they can understand elements of humor, which can actually be helpful in evaluating something.

So, I would use all of these tools to get better and, after getting rejected 10, 11 times, I think probably by the 12th time I actually got accepted one of them. And I'm my God, this is amazing. And , I still do it to this day. I actually got rejected the other day for something, but I, every rejection, I take that, I iterate and so forth and do that. And , That's working a totally different muscle. And , okay, you're , well, Mike, what are you going to do with that? Humor, right? I don't know. I'll inject more humor into other things, into presentations, into whatever.

You never know these skills that you're acquiring, how they're going to pay off in different ways. And I think that's something that folks should tap into.

Find whatever that passion is that you had when you're that age. It could be playing the piano. It could be, learning languages. Maybe you would make up your own language with friends or something that.

Go then learn Indonesian or something that. Learn something that is out there that isn't part of your job. And that ... Creates different synaptic points in your brain to connect different things that is ultimately making you more creative and more resilient. Because , again, a big part of creativity is knowing, hey, a bunch of the stuff I do is going to fail. And if you're not failing every day, then you're not being.

Creative. Nice. Makes sense.

So, and then another leadership skill that you talk about quite a bit, which I love, it's decoupling rewards from results. So rewarding actually the quality of the decision making instead of the outcomes or results, because as you said, well, you said, even in human writing, you may put in all the effort and still get rejected.

So what does that mean for leadership?

It's hard to do this, first of all, because , we're so results oriented. We think that if a project goes well, that it went well because of us. If a project goes wrong, we find external things out there to do that. - Look, I think I watch a lot of basketball. I love basketball. And , I think there's a lot we could learn from about leadership from the coaches. The best coaches out there will flip the script. If they win the game, their team did great, right? They did this, and this. If they lost the game, say, well, that was on me. I should have done this. And that's, I know that's not exactly what you're referring to, Mark, but that's the first thing that jumped in my head is one, when your team succeeds, give praise to your team. When the team fails, you take it upon yourself and be very visible and very open with that. And that creates that environment. Where you do have that team level camaraderie and the best coaches do that. They will always take the blame when things don't go according to plan. And so , When I think of leadership, that to me is , thing number one that a leader should do. If a manager, sorry, little sidebar here, manager test. How do that your manager is great?

So if you're working for somebody else, I love this and I have to share it, sorry. This is something I came up with years ago. Ask yourself the question, If you would go up to your manager and said, "Hey, hey boss, I have this amazing job. It's a job offer outside of the company. It's with a different company. It's going to pay me this. It's going to do this. It's going to lead to all this stuff. What should I do? The great managers out there, can give you an honest answer that's actually going to be detrimental to themselves. Y, yes, I would do anything to keep you here. But , that sounds amazing. You need to take that. And it's going to suck because I can't backfill you. It's going to make things worse for me.

They are going to put you first over your team. Over the company, in fact.

A great manager will put you over the company. They're not supposed to do that. That's, theoretically, we're supposed to put the company first as a manager and employees second, but they will actually say, Hey, do you want, you should leave the company. You should do this great thing. It's going to suck for me. It's going to suck for our company, but it's the right thing for you. Those are the kinds of managers you need to follow. And, embrace those managers. Anytime they have a job for you, anytime, anywhere, you follow that person because they are very rare. Most managers I had were never that. They're a very unique bunch if you could ever find them.

Cool. So I love that answer. But so how do you become a manager that?

How'd you become that manager? Look, I think... You need to become that man.

Look, we should all strive to become that manager. I don't know if I actually ever became that manager. We truly do that. I think part of it at least is to have, confidence in yourself. To know that you can do more. And I think people who are self-confident versus, people who are, Less so, let's say there's a vast difference in how they act. And I'm not talking about arrogance, but I'm saying have enough confidence in you and yourself that , yeah, you'll be able to figure that out. And I think it's servant leadership.

You as a manager are there to serve your employees. You're there to remove barriers so they can be successful in their jobs, be successful in their careers. And if you take that servant leadership mentality further, it might mean that your employees are going to be successful despite you. And are you okay with that?

Their success might not necessarily lead to your success. It should, but it might not. And are you okay with those things? This is...

So I taught a leadership class and a big part of that leadership class was teaching different management and leadership styles. For everyone defining who the leader that resonates most with them. And, for me, it's funny. I actually have a custom GPT set up on ChatGPT that I taught with Abraham Lincoln leadership coach. Quotes, writings about him, all this stuff about Lincoln's leadership style. And I will use that to ask questions because, look, I'm not Abraham Lincoln. But if I could emulate a little piece of who he is, that is somebody who I might aspire to be.

So. If you ask , who is it that I actually aspire to be? Ask that question. And that will start to guide you on what leadership style you might have. And, I do think servant leaders to me are the, the ultimate to achieve and that leadership hierarchy.

Nice. Makes sense.

And then striving for that. And it's a hard thing to do.

Yeah, absolutely. So, and then talk about the future of work. You've said you don't really know what companies are going to look in five or 10 years of AGI is going to happen or not going to happen. I understand that.

Still, a lot of things are changing. We're putting AI into productivity.

So what do you think in a new, right? When we get AI into what we're doing now as maybe small companies, small businesses, startups, and individuals, if you do the same in big corporates, what are the real jobs that we're going to need? The jobs that are going to be and maybe not disappear versus what are the roles that maybe over time are going to be less important.

So there's only one job that I know that will exist in the future. Now, to be clear, there are going to be many jobs, but the only job that I know is going to exist is the, is a solopreneur. Is a person who has tens, hundreds, thousands of AI bots working for them, doing things that they need to do. But ultimately, they're the human in the loop, the person who's signing the tax forms, the person who's doing whatever that is actually there with customers when they want to talk to a human being and people will still want to talk to a human being as good as AIs are. There is something about that.

So I do see that as being the one job of the future, which I know will exist. Which then pivots to... What are the traits of that person? And we've already talked about a lot of these, Mark, to be infinitely curious, willing to try new things, willing to fail, willing to run experiments. All of these things are going to be even more important When you start to look at what are the traits of a person that is going to be successful in the future? If you're, I think, I don't think I ever actually wrote about this. I was starting to write a piece on it and, It was looking at the different personality types and how people use language models. What you don't want to be is the person who first time using ChatGPT, you ask it a question, it gives you an answer, you read through the answer, this isn't very good.

And then you're done using ChatGPT or whatever language model. There's a lot of people that. They try once and they're , they're nuts. What you want to be is you want to be the person puts that thing in a chat GPT. It doesn't give you the right answer. That didn't work. Let me try this. Let me try this. To be resilient, to be scrappy, to iterate, to try all these different things.

That is how we're going to work with these models in the future. And that is, one of the few roles I see humans playing. And so if you, look at yourself and you may have done what I described in the first group. It's not to say you can't become the second group. You totally can. You have to rethink your own thinking of , it's always easy to find reasons for something to go wrong. It's always easy.

This doesn't work because of this. It's so easy to be negative. It's hard to be positive on stuff. And I think to shift your thinking more to that direction, to force yourself to say, okay, it has the answer I'm looking for in here somewhere. And it does because there's infinite outputs it can make. The answer exists somewhere inside of the model. How is it that I can get it to give me the answer I want? And looking at it through that lens and taking on that responsibility will completely change how you interact with these models and frankly, how you interact with the world. If you look at everything from , there is an answer in there. I need to do it. It's a, Was it the Da Vinci or Michelangelo quote of , in The Rock, I removed all the parts to reveal the. Statue of David or whatever it was. I'm totally butchering the quote. I'm sure somebody knows way more about art would get it right. But , that's what you're doing with these language models.

The answer is in there. You got to frankly go through all the steps, removing all the junk until you actually get the answer that.

You want. And I think that's really up to us as humans right now. And you said before that AI really isn't that great at writing humor yet, but the models go really quickly, right? If we look at the coding skills now versus the coding skills two years ago, it's night and day.

So at some point, these models are probably going to be a lot better at humor, at creativity, at curiosity. What do you think that's going to look ?

Look, I don't think it's that far from where we're at today. I think the models are already close with that. I wrote a piece last year where I fed it different clips from The Simpsons and I gave it to different models and I grouped it of a simple joke and three levels of joke, getting more complex with each of the jokes. And Some of the models had a perspective on the joke that I didn't even look at. I was , crap. It understood deeper levels of the joke than even I was able to comprehend initially. And , to me, step one of getting humor is this understanding, being able to dissect it. Once you're able to understand why something is funny, you could then start to recreate, well, I'm going to make something new and original, so to speak, that is funny.

So I'm I think models Han? And will get there. I think, By the very nature of itself, how do you tell a good joke? You tell 100 bad ones first. Models are very good at making mass quantities of ideas. They never get tired, they never get bored. And especially if there's a human in the loop guiding them on that, they're getting better. I think what you're going to start to see is the models are going to be able to be more selective with their own outputs and say , hey, out of these 100 ideas, these five are actually funny. And we're starting to get there already today. I haven't seen, and frankly, I haven't tried to have a model write a humor piece for me start to finish. Frankly, I wouldn't be as interested in doing that as versus sharing my own ideas, but I can always feed it in there and say , "Can you give me 10 ideas to punch this up?

This doesn't work here. , what are other things I could be thinking about?" And occasionally I'll be , " God, that's, I never thought of that." And so the human interaction is there. If it's human model interaction today, a few years from now, that could all be in the model itself.

Yeah, makes sense. It's going to be a different world then. I think you could even let it write a hundred pieces and then judge them all and say, how's the humor in this one? How's the humor in this one? And take the best one and let it improve based on the other.

Yeah, and you could do this with multiple AI.

So I have one AI generating that, so you have another AI evaluating that. And this is very old machine learning processes that we're talking about, adversarial, general adversarial networks where you basically have multiple AIs doing that. That is totally doable even today.

And still, I think you and I are talking about this. You're comfortable in this world. There's a lot of people that are feeling absolutely overwhelmed by the amount of things that are now possible, by the pace of change, by how fast it's all going. What would you advise to those people be.

I would advise people by saying , we've been through big transitions before. this has happened and it's not to say that it's, we will get through this. It's not to say it's not going to be a bumpy ride. It's not going to say that there won't be job displacement. It's not going to say any of that stuff. It will be. How do you personally best prepare for that though?

Look, the first thing I would say is learn these models, use them for personal things, use them. And, I always start off with the personal side, vacation planning, meal planning, whatever it might be . It's wonderful for that stuff. Start there.

And then find out how to bring that into your work. Find out how to bring it in other places. Have a little WhatsApp group where you can share ideas and things that. If you are saying in this day and age, I'm going to ignore the models and I'm not going to play with AI or anything that and hope that it doesn't happen. It's you're burying your head in the sand.

This is, it is going to happen. it is going to change things. I worry for the people who are saying , no, I'm never going to touch it.

There will be certain jobs. , look, if I'm an actor at Broadway, great.

I think people will be more attracted to, as more and more of our life is online on phone. I hope that we do more in-person stuff.

So there are some professions where , it is going to have a very minimal impact, but probably for most of the people watching this, where you, if you're working on a computer all day or more, most of your day, then you need to learn and you need to understand these tools. And I think that becomes critically important for you in the success of your job to find out ways that you could be more effective and again, do more of the human stuff.

So if you get energy, if you find value for your company in talking to customers, then you should talk to more customers. But then you should take some of the backup, maybe the note taking related to that or sharing that, whatever that is, have AI automate those things. You do the human stuff, let the AI do the AI stuff and , Hopefully in the end, it's going to let you do more human stuff, which will make you even more effective and whatever it is your job is.

And more humans.

And more human. Yes. Yes, Mark.

So, and then if we go back, you've been, you were at PayPal about 10 years ago and you've had a long road since. We've had AI in the beginning or in the past five years, If you look back at innovation 10 years ago, Are there areas where you've completely changed your mind about how to do it or how to do things in the past 10 years with the advent of AI?

Well, look, one of the things I would have killed for this, we used to run these brainstorming sessions. We would have them all the time in our various innovation labs. And, they would lead to patents. They would lead to ideas. They would lead to whatever. I wish I could have had an AI running one transcribing everything because often it was me. I was having to transcribe ideas and stuff that and pull all this stuff out. But even an AI in there to help.

To be a devil's advocate, to connect to ideas that we might not have seen otherwise as part of these sessions. , for a pure innovation, creativity standpoint, If I were doing those things today, I would have an AI running 24-7. In those sessions, literally documenting every word being spoken, putting that into something Notebook LM, where I could then query that and get feedback and again, make connections, do all these other kinds of things. One, it would save me no taking time. And two, It would be an amazing thought partner where it's being able to maybe connect a few ideas that I might not have seen. And that is so much of creativity. That is so much of innovation is saying, these people do this. We can apply that in some unique way to the things that we do. That's a lot of what innovation is.

Nice. So would have been very useful 10 years ago. I think that goes for a lot of I know.

People. My gosh, could have been so much more if I had it back then.

Same. So Mike, thank you very much. It's been absolutely incredible. If people want to know more about you or where can they find you?

Yeah, probably the best place is Tadasco.com, my last name. That's my website and I have links to socials there. People could always direct message me on LinkedIn or anything that as well.

So pretty easy to find me.

And we'll put that on the show notes for sure. Mike, it's been absolutely incredible having you. Thank you so much.

It's been a pleasure. Thanks, Mark.