Transcript of Truth About AI, Work & Human Creativity ft. Andy Oliva | Coffeez for Closers with Joe Shalaby

Going from an employee to a founder is now your responsibility. The fuck stops with you. That's scary, legitimately. You got to make sure you dot your eyes, you cross your teeth, you can't let the voice look through. Now, if I go and I implement a voice AI system for a company, I've got to make sure that that thing is going to go together. Welcome to another episode of Confidencial. Thank you very much.

All right, Andy. Give people a quick 2000-foot overview of what is Lucky Day Labs, what do you do? How are you changing the game in AI? And how can they benefit from today's show?

Absolutely. Thank you. So we're a creative AI agency. And so what that means in really simple terms is, let's say your company is trying to figure out what to do with AI. Where do I go? Who do I listen to? What's my path forward? So I help you figure that out. So I'll come in, I'll help you figure out your strategy. I'll help you filter the signal from the noise. And then on top of that, I can I can even build it out for you. So let's say you need a new piece of software for your business that's running on AI. It's much more efficient. I can build that for you. I can design it in a really nice, clean, optimal way for your needs. Let's say you want to build something like an AI voice agent that when somebody calls your business and AI picks up the phone and answers any concerns they have or routes them to the correct department, helps you schedule an appointment. It's another example. My philosophy with what I'm trying to do is not replace people with AI. I'm trying to augment them and complement them and make their jobs easier and hopefully take the work that they don't find very fun or fulfilling or meaningful.

At least that's my guiding philosophy. We're going through such a transformational period right now. It's hard to predict exactly what's going to happen. But from what I can see in my what my experience has been, I think we're going through more of a transformational shift and less like a everything's going to go away shift. I think if you're, let's say, a business and You want to replace somebody that has to babysit the phone all day and answer the phone calls. If you're a business and you replace that with an AI, the next question is, what happens to that person? Do you fire them? What do you do? So if I'm going into your company, my recommendation to you is going to be like, look, let's say you're paying 50K a year for that employee to basically just sit and monitor the phone. If you replace that with an AI, you can take that same employee And you can have them do other things. Maybe if they don't have to spend their time and bandwidth manning the phones, then they can improve your customer experience two, three, four times to what it is. And then that helps you get more clients.

So that's my philosophy in it. So I don't want to go into a company and say, hey, let's replace your entire team with voice AI. That's not what my general philosophy is. My general philosophy is, how can we take and free up bandwidth for your team that you already have? And then how can we find new creative ways that you can increase your company's productivity or improve your experience for your customers with the existing employees that you have so that we don't get rid of all those employees that have jobs, that have lives, that need to pay their own bills, things like that. I know that was a long answer.

No, no. Right now, the biggest concern with AI, and this is pretty... Everyone's pretty open about it, is everyone's concerned about AI replacing humans. Everybody talks about it. My philosophy is AI isn't replacing humans. Ai is enhancing those that adopt AI. Ai is enhancing those people that adopt AI. In my industry, specifically, more average loan originators, for instance, or real estate agents, if they're using AI, they're performing at a much higher level than those that are not. As a CEO of a company, we're very tech-heavy, and we use a lot of AI, whether it's voice agents, whether it's AI calling, AI routing, AI taking phone calls, AI helping with document preparation or requesting documents or following up with clients or milestones. The world of AI, we're just scratching the surface. This wasn't even a word a couple of years ago, right? And now this is not just a buzzword. This is the future.

Yeah. Look, it is the future. Whether we agree with it or not, it's coming. And so my philosophy has been, I need to help people prepare for what's coming, because if they're not prepared for what's coming, then that's going to be really bad. Then that is the situation where, I don't know, the CEO of their company has to make a hard decision and say, I've got 100 employees, they don't know how to use AI, and the company is going to go bankrupt if I don't bring in employees that do. I want to try and avoid that situation. I want to help those employees and those teams upskill and retrain as quickly as possible, as easily as possible, to avoid situations like that. However, we do have to be careful because there is a lot of I've seen a lot of noise in the past with just because a company puts AI on something, they say, We did this AI thing. People are burned out with hearing that. Even though I don't I think it should be a buzzword, it has become that for the layman person. There is genuine value and benefits to be gained in AI for the reason, like an example I just provided earlier.

But just be careful. Just because a company has the word AI on it doesn't mean it's Not necessarily. If you're a CEO of a company, just because somebody comes to you and they're like, Hey, this is AI, you shouldn't just immediately adopt it. If they can provide you meaningful value, like how I did earlier, then that definitely I think you should look into that seriously. Yeah.

Listen, there's a new AI application being created every second.

Exactly.

You say you come into companies and help them drain the noise. There's a lot of freaking noise around AI. What AI should I use? I don't know how many AI applications we got that we're paying for, that we're subscribed to outside of ChatGPT, corporate ChatGPT, whatever the difference that is in the general one. But we ourselves have several.

Sure. And look, I found people feel guilty. I'm not necessarily not saying you, but I've found people feel bad or they feel guilty or they feel ashamed about not being able to keep up with the pace of how fast things are going. All of these AI companies are releasing ground-breaking products. It feels like almost every week, almost every day. And even I have had trouble, like just you mentioned, having trouble keeping up with how fast things are moving. And I don't think we should be ashamed of that. I think we should try and just be honest and transparent and frank with each other about it and lean into it. When I was at Open AI's developer conference a couple of months ago for a few weeks ago for Tech Week, they had Sam Altman and Johnny Ive, they were talking on stage. You know who Johnny Ive is, right? For listeners who may not know, he was the basically chief creative officer at Apple. He basically shaped Apple's products with Steve Jobs like we know them today. So big deal in the design world. He's joined OpenAI now. He mentioned that they're building a family of AI hardware products at OpenAI.

So that's exciting. But the reason I'm telling this story is when he was talking to Sam Altman, even he mentioned that he's feeling overwhelmed with the pace of AI innovation. So if that guy is feeling overwhelmed, I tell people, Don't feel guilty, don't feel bad. We can be honest with each other. And so once we're honest, then we can just start sharing our with each other, like you and I are doing right now. I'm seeing this. Are you seeing this? What do you think of that? Have you used this? Have you tried that? We're not in this age right now where we were maybe the past 10, 15 years, where technology, iPhone's apps were mature as an industry. And so the territory was mapped, so to speak. And you could just go to someone who had been doing something for five or 10 years, and you could ask their opinion, and they could give you the answer, and that was good enough. We're not in that period Right now, we're more in a period where it's like an exploratory, we're like exploring uncharded territory. There's, of course, a few there's principles that still remain true, and that are never going to change and have always been true.

But there's a lot of things that are unknown that we're going to have to figure out together.

Let me ask you this. We talk a lot about AI replacing workforces. Which workforce do you think is going to go first with AI innovation. I mean, you just said, I come in and I use voice agents. Is it the receptionist? Is it the programmer?

It's nuanced. It's tricky. We're in shades of gray territory. I want to avoid being in black and white territory. Let me give you a couple of examples. There are scenarios where I could replace a receptionist with an AI. Now, my hope is that that receptionist will find other more productive, more fun things to do. That's my hope. At the same time, there's going to be companies and industries that don't want to do a voice AI for their business because it doesn't match their brand, doesn't match their culture. Their customers won't be comfortable with it. And then there's going to be some industries where they love it. It's a good thing for a company. If they pick up a phone and they call a company and it's like an AI, they're like, Wow, this tech company, they're really tech-forward. Do you get what I'm saying?

A lot of people are like, When I call Wells Fargo or Bet My Bank, it's an AI agent. I hate it. We don't have a voice AI agent answering phone calls. Maybe after ours, There could be some something, but you call a finance company, you don't get a human, you're pissed.

Well, there's the traditional phone tree systems that we've all used for the past, I don't know, two decades. The The voice AIs are different. It's more like you're talking with a natural conversation, almost like a human. Not quite. So if you've used ChatGPT and you've talked and had conversations with ChatGPT or Grok, if you have a Tesla, you can use Grok in your car. It's more like that now. So it's a much more rich, better quality experience, I believe, if it's done right. And that's where I think having a good customer service background is really helpful, and that's what my background is because I've been on those front lines, so to speak, of interacting with customers. And so I know the disconnect firsthand of, okay, here's the BS of what management is trying to do in their meetings. And here's what the customers are experiencing on the ground with the front line employees and how to make that an experience that the customer actually enjoy rather than, sometimes Sometimes what I see happen is, and I have to be careful here because I don't want to get myself in trouble. But sometimes what I see happen here is a management team will have an initiative, they'll hire their customer service team, they'll create all of their policies, they'll teach the customer service team, the customer service team will go out and do it.

And then the customer service team will learn all of this information. They'll get feedback from customers. But then the customer service representative, their hands are tied because they aren't making product decisions. And they're afraid of telling the management team what they really think because they're afraid that they're going to get labeled as super negative or not a team player or the manager will get mad at them, that thing. And so that, to me, is a signal that the feedback isn't going up the chain of command like it should. And so my philosophy is that in a company, the managers should be fostering a culture of transparency and frankness in a kind and candid and respectful way so that when customers customers have an issue, that's where they're getting signal. Ideally, their representatives are talking to the customers, acquiring all of the signal, feedback of what should be done and how things should be improved. Those customer reps should feel like they can carry that up the chain of command. And then the management has more information that's valid to go off of.

Let me ask you this. Let's talk about where this all began. Where did How did you get the idea of starting Lucky Day Labs? And what problem were you trying to really solve for?

Sure. That's a good question. I guess I never really... I always wanted to start a company. My family at different points before I was born, they were entrepreneurial as well. But it was just it seemed like this thing that was super far off in the distance. I I would never really do it. That was for some other people to do. That was just not something I was meant to do. But I think that in the age we're living now, it's never been easier to start a business. And I have this background in the tech space, almost 10 years now at various different companies and startups and whatever. And people started coming to me and asking me my advice or my opinion, or if I could do this or if I could do that. And it got to a point where I'm like, I got to just make this official at this point and start a company. And then the rest is history, I guess you could say. But tech, for me, has always been fun. Ever since I was a little kid, my mom showed me home videos. And I was always trying to figure things out.

I don't know what it was, but I look at technology like that as well. And I get frustrated when things don't work as they should from a customer experience. I'm sure you've had this. You call and you got to argue with maybe a receptionist or whatever because of some policy that didn't go right or you use some app and there might be bugs or whatever and it doesn't work. I don't like that. I don't think it should be that way. And it's not to say the people that are making these systems aren't trying. They are trying to provide good experiences, but there's always dynamics that might be limiting them and restricting them. Icai is a way to unshackle these teams and these companies that before they were held back by something and now- What's ICAI? Icai?

Yeah. You said ICAI. Is that another acronym?

Did I? I don't know. Maybe I did. Icai. Do you see AI? Oh, no.

I thought I heard ICAI. You see AI as something- ICAI I see AI.

Yes, not as an acronym. I see AI as something that can remove the traditional barriers that stopped these well-intentioned people from wanting to create a good experience but weren't able to for whatever pick your reason.

Got it. Yeah. Man, so many acronyms with all these things. I'm just keeping up. Like, is that a new company?

I know.

Let me ask you this, because you've worked with Apple, Sotheby, Surhant, and you the tech development space for all these organizations?

I worked in different companies as a representative that had partners with various companies. So if you want to take Apple, for an since I was at the genius bar. I was called a genius expert. And so you know what the genius bar is. I worked at a company called Luxury Presence. I don't know if you've heard of them, but they basically help real estate agents with their online presence. Now they're doing AI automation. But like, realtors from all of these brokerages you mentioned, would come to me as a part of that company. And I would design their websites for them and give them branding strategy and SEO strategy. And then I would actually design it and then launch it for them. And I would support them and help them learn like, okay, why do you need to Google My Business Profiler? Or why does your website have to look this this way versus that way? And why should your brand present itself as this? And who are your customers? And why are those your customers? All these business strategy things. And I learned a lot, and I did really well. I broke company records multiple times.

I'm very proud to say because early in my life, I was not that overachiever person. I struggled in school. So it was just a really proud moment for me. You work out, right? So when you go to the gym and you lift a weight that's more than last time or last week, it feels really good. Yeah.

Actually, on Tuesday, I broke my PR for dead lifting 300 pounds.

Congrats. Good for you. It feels good, right? Yeah. Even though it might seem silly to some people that don't work out, you can take that confidence and you can apply it to other areas of your life because it's something that you were able to improve on yourself. Just working hard at something.

I've gamified everything in my life. Every single variable in my life is a game now. There's just nothing I haven't gamified.

Sure. I hope we don't get into the Black Mirror world, but I do think that it's helpful to gamify stuff sometimes.

Because I'm always trying to get better at everything I do. I'm 44. I'm in a basketball league. I'm still trying to get better at basketball.

What do you think of competition?

I love competition. Yeah? Yeah, because that's That's part of gamification, right?

Competition with other people?

Competition with other people, competition with myself, competition... In my industry, we have all the mega companies. There's four competitors. Like I discussed with you earlier, I try to distinguish myself from my top competition by a bunch of different things that are unique to me and my personal brand. We've gamified all all of our top teams at our company, all of our top loan originaires at our company, and see where they're at with their production, and they could track what everyone's doing. I do that with pretty much everything in my life, whatever it is. I instill that mentality, sadly, in my kids. I don't know if it's sad or not, but they're always trying to get better at everything they're doing, too.

I'd love to peel this onion with you a little bit, and I want to hear what you think, because I think it'll useful to me. So I don't like competition.

Really?

Yeah. I've never liked it. I don't know why. There were people around me in my life- Were you ever an athlete? I played soccer, but even then, I wasn't really competitive. I was around people that were competitive.

But then you're okay with losing?

No. I like winning, too. Yeah, exactly. But okay, so this is good. I like that we're unpacking this. So my My thing is, the reason I didn't like competition was because I felt like it was a distraction from whatever the goal I was trying to accomplish was.

There's truth to that, too. But to get to that goal faster, you need to have someone lighting a flame on your butt.

True. I see that. So my thing is, I don't like to compete with other people. I like to compete with the version of myself from yesterday. And going back to what you mentioned earlier, where you try to do better every single day.

Yeah, get better Every single day. At the end of the day, and that is true, that you're only in competition with yourself. The only person you need to compete with is the guy in the mirror. That's the ultimate competitor.

Yesterday.

But to get there, you need to have benchmarks.

Sure.

I use my competitors. Now, there's things in my life where I don't have competitors left. Sure.

Let me give you an example. Let I want to hear what you think about this. Let's take you broke your PR record, right? Okay, that's you competing against your record yesterday. You set that bench for yourself, right? You set that standard. You were self-motivated to keep up with it, and then you did it. But if I were going to say, Okay, well, if you're competing with Arnold Schwarzenegger, you know?

You're doubled that way.

Right. You're never going to get there. Exactly. If your goal is to compete with someone else, you shouldn't. You're not Arnold Schwarzenegger. That's okay. The reason Arnold Schwarzenegger is who he is is because he's extraordinary, and there's tons of other examples.

Maybe I could compete with him at this age. He's at now.

But look, do you- Seventy-five. Right.

Well, we might be deadlift in the same way.

I don't know. He still looks pretty good for his age.

I know. But when you're 75, you can't deadlift 300. I mean, he can, but 300 is still pretty hard for him.

Right. Look, for me, competition was a negative because I incorrectly, at a young age, I tried to compare myself with unrealistic standards of competition. And then it was like, well, why even get started? Why even try? Because I'm never going to be at that level. Do you hear what I'm saying?

Sometimes competition is debilitating. I'll never get to that level. Why even start?

But that's not true. Of course, you should try. Of course, we should start. We know this now. It makes sense, obvious when we say it. But I worry there's a lot of people that were like I was, where they get discouraged and they don't even start. You know what I'm saying?

But it shouldn't be that. One of my mentors says, The hardest... And obviously, Peter Thiel has a book, Zero to One.

Zero to One is the hardest thing to do.

It's like, after one, it's easy. Zero to get to one, it's like, that's all the is getting to the start. And then from there, it's just consistency.

I agree. Have you read any of the books on habits? Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. It's the Atomic Habits. Similar thing. I know people say this, that book legitimately changed my life. Atomic Habits? No, Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg.

Do you like it more than Atomic Habits?

I haven't read Atomic Habits because I looked at the summary, I'm like, This seems like the same thing. I don't know. Maybe there's new information, but it's just a more modern version.

Power of Habits is just older.

Sure. But look, that book changed my life. I know that's cliché to say that. People say that about books, but legitimately. That book, and Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. I don't know if you've heard of it. If you pair those two together or even Atomic Habits with Thinking Fast and Slow, I think it'll help you a lot. It was this huge unlock for me in terms my personal development and what was possible and what was not possible, because there were all these things in my life that just held me back. There's this impression, some people are good at some things, other people are good at other things, and you're just born with the way you are, and there's not much you can change. And those two books help me see there is a lot you can change. There's some things you can't change. Arnold Schwarzenegger, you're never going to lift as much as he did. But there's a lot of things you can change. So I encourage anyone to go read those books if they can. Or just start with ChatGPT. Ask ChatGPT, Hey, what's this book about? And then start there, and you can go buy the book if it piques your interest.

Now, when you started Lucky Day Labs, what were some of the bigger risks that you took to get this company off the floor? And what are some of the bigger risks you foresee coming in this world of AI?

Look, I think starting a company is really risky because if you're an employee and you've worked as a company, there's this hidden thing that is taken care of for you. And that hidden thing, I'm sure you're aware, is liability. When you work for an employee at another company, they're taking all of the liability and all of the risk. So if you do something and somebody has directed you to do something, then that's not really your fault. That's the company's fault. And then the company has to pay for it or get lawyers for it or so on and so And so forth. Whereas if you're starting a company, the biggest risk is going from an employee to a founder is now your responsible. The buck stops with you. So that's scary, legitimately. You've got to make sure you dot your I's, you cross your T's, you can't let things slip through. Now, if I go and I implement a voice AI system for a company, I've got to make sure that that thing is well put together. I can't just be like, Thank you, sir. Have a good day. If you're working for someone else, that's their problem, maybe, some people think, right?

No, it's my problem. And I got to make sure that I'm not messing things up in their company, right? Because if I mess things up in their company, they've got bills to pay. They've got vendors to pay. They've got employees that have to have their own things to pay as well, right? But look, we have legal structures and things in place to help encourage entrepreneurs to be able to take that risk and get a little bit of shield, like LLCs and corporate structures and things like that, which is good. I'd like it to be easier, but the fact that we even have that, I think, is a miracle, genuinely.

Yeah, just some corporate veil.

I'm constantly amazed at working inside different companies. I'm sure you know this. You see working with other people, even just calling other companies. How many things go wrong? I think it's It's a miracle that society and civilization and culture exists the way that it does, and more things don't go wrong.

Yeah, you're right. A lot goes wrong, but we just sweep it under the rug or we just don't disclose it.

Sure. Look, we've got air conditioning, we've got relative security. We've got plumbing and food and The planes take off and the cars drive. I don't know. It's just a miracle to me every day that that's happening. That's my baseline I try to remind myself of.

Hey, we got Thanksgiving coming up, so that's That spirit of thankfulness is always in the works. Let's talk how AI... What do you think... What problem is Lucky Labs solving right now in a way that feels exciting, human, and necessary?

So two different things right now that are really on my radar and are bringing me the most amount of joy. Number one, doing things like this and having really frank, candid conversations with people like you and other people to help them sort through the noise and comfort their fears. I find a lot of enjoyment out of that. Ai has been a really unique trend trend that's been different than any other technological trend that I've seen in my lifetime. When I was growing up, there were these two camps of people I felt like, maybe this is true, maybe this was just anecdotal. But there were two camps of people. There were people that were wanting to adopt technology, and then there were the people that just wanted to keep things traditional. And most of the trend was people wanting to adopt technology. That was the hottest thing. We had the Internet, we had computers, we had iPhone. That was It was a cool thing to do when I was growing up. And for better or for worse. Ai is the first time where even from people that are in technology and technology literate and work in tech, they were like, hating AI.

And they were only seeing the negatives of what it could do. And it was a very fear and anxiety.

I mean, software engineers are the biggest ones that hate it Because they're like, it can do my job.

Right. That shocked me. At first, I thought it was just on the surface, there wasn't any depth to it. But everywhere I went, I found that sentiment. And I'm like, okay, I got to do something about this because I get where people are coming from. Everyone's afraid their jobs are going to get replaced. This was like two years ago. Everyone was afraid their jobs are going to get replaced, so on and so forth. I get the fear, right? I was afraid, too.

But isn't that... I mean, Amazon had some of the biggest layoffs. Facebook had huge layoffs. All these big companies had big layoffs. I mean, was it AI the cause of those layoffs?

That's tough to say. It's really tough to say why layoffs happen inside of these big companies. Unless you know someone that made that decision, I really don't think we're ever going to know. We can all surmise and guess, but I don't know if we'll truly ever know the real reason. But look, I think a more accurate picture, if I was going to take a shot in the dark, would be the future is unpredictable right now because of the transformational moment we're going on, not only just AI, but look, there's wars going on, too. And so these companies are looking at the future and they can't make the same sure decisions that they could have made maybe in the past decade. And so they're adjusting their risk mitigation strategies accordingly. So that's just if I was going to take a shot in the dark. But look, people were afraid their jobs were going to get replaced with AI. What I'm actually seeing is Is that the barrier to entry gets lowered because of AI. So you gave an engineer example. So now you don't have to be an engineer to make an app with Lovable or Claude or take your pick of open AI's codex, whatever it is.

Now anyone can make an app. So if you're a software engineer, you're sitting there and you're like, well, what am I going to do? So that's where that fear comes from, and I get it. But it's true Sure that it raised, it lowers the barrier to entry and makes the floor lower so more people can get in. But it also raises the ceiling of expectation at the same time. So it moves more like this. Or more like this, I guess you could say. So more is expected of that software engineer. So if you're a CEO, you want a prototype of an app in a day, not two weeks, It used to take two weeks, a week, depending on the situation. Now it takes a day, two days.

It used to take months.

Sure. So now that means if you're a CEO and you're sitting in your company, you're like, I can do 10 prototypes in a quarter. Which means I can potentially take two or three times as many products to market or features to market as I could before. Which means now I need more engineers, not less engineers. Or I can certainly keep the engineers that I have because now people's expectation from software, from a customer experience, is going to go up as well. You're using this old phone tree system. You're not using this AI that can just understand what I'm saying. I have to have these weird keywords to get to the right person. What is that? That expectation is not acceptable anymore. Because clients are interfacing with... Give me an example. Chatgpt, if You've used voice mode in ChatGPT, you can have a full conversation with it. The expectation is not, well, Siri, why can't Siri do that? Siri has been around for 10 years. Why can't I do that with Siri? Some people say Siri's terrible, right?

I don't know why we can't do that with Siri. Why doesn't Siri like that now?

Exactly.

You probably will be on version 18 and 19.

We'll see. Look, I've heard Apple is making lots of different improvements. There's a whole controversy to that. But look, that's what I mean. My expectations are raising, but it's also easier. So I frankly think that it's one of the best times to be alive if you can adopt this stuff. And what's exciting about this that's even different than the past is you can talk in plain English. Anyone can go to chat. Com and talk to ChatGPT for free just as they would talk to their parents or their siblings. Chat.

Com or chatgpt.

Com? Both.

Oh, they have both sites?

I think OpenAI spent millions dollars to get chat to. Com. It's crazy.

Yeah, that's cool. Now, I want to talk about two things. One is you are the forum leader for OpenAI. What is the forum leader job description? What do you do for OpenAI? And how did you get that job?

Sure. So I found a lot of people don't know this. So if you go to forum. Openai. Com, you'll find that they have a forum there. So they do virtual events. So there was a virtual event where they hosted a museum curator in Paris, and they talked about how they're using AI to help educate museum guests as they go through the museum and inform them on different art pieces. We had neuroscientists talking about how AI is helping them with their scientific research and helping move things along and increase the pace of research. And there's discussion discussion forums where someone can go and they can just have a discussion like the old school forum days, I guess you could say, or the classic forum days. My responsibility as a forum leader is just to encourage AI adoption in local communities. I'm in that if you go into the discussion boards, you'll see me there. There's a virtual event. You'll see me helping encourage discussion there. I had the opportunity to go to an Education Guild summit at the office in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago, and that was just to collect a bunch of educators from across the country to figure out what does the future of education look like with AI.

So all of these are what I like to call humanities-based, artistic-based, humanistic-based approaches to see, how do we figure out this AI stuff together? Just by having conversations with each other and sharing what we're doing. So that's how I see being a forum leader. So I had to go through an application process, but I consider it to be more of a honor, and it's a volunteer thing I do for fun. So it's not like I'm getting compensated for AI. It's still a tremendous privilege, at least in my mind, because if someone else tried to go and apply to be a forum leader right now, they couldn't become a forum leader.

Got it. Now, let me Let me ask you, you've hosted an AI film festival. What's an AI film festival?

Sure. I'm sure for maybe your listeners that don't know, a film festival is where filmmakers will have their film. They'll showcase it to a selected audience of people to get their feedback or share what's happening on the forefront of filmmaking. Before a film goes to theaters, it'll be presented at a film festival. Months and months before that, a bunch of filmmakers and producers and directors will go to that film festival, and they'll all mingle and watch it. And they're at the forefront of filmmaking as an art form. So I thought, okay, how could this apply to AI? Ai is completely transforming how filmmaking is done. And so there's a lot of new creators that are adopting AI filmmaking tools. We were talking about Chapman earlier. They're leaning really heavily into AI. They have a really big storied film school at Chapman. And so as a part of the forum, I started talking to a filmmaker there, and the rest is history. I wanted to showcase him and a few other filmmakers that were in the forum, and just to showcase, okay, what does the future of work look like? What does the future of creativity look like in an AI world in a way that was like non-technical, that everyone could understand in a non-complicated, no jargon words thing.

Because, again, there was this controversy where people were afraid that AI was going to destroy art. It was destroying artists' jobs and things like that. Now look, their fears are valid. I don't want to gaslight people. Their fears are valid. But my philosophy, again, has been, this is coming, so we have to prepare for it. If you're an artist, you're a filmmaker, you're creative, I want to try and help show you how to use AI in your existing creativity in a way that's still authentic to who you are as an artist and your perspective as an artist that's true to you. Because if you don't do that, I think the options are just going to be limited. Just frankly, again, whether I like this or not, I'm not even saying I necessarily want this to happen. I'm saying it is going to happen. So I saw a film festival as an opportunity to just bring people together in the community and talk about that, showcase their work. So these AI filmmakers showed short films that they had made using AI. They talked about their process and how they did it and what their perspective is on the future and how it improved their creativity.

Because the narrative at that time was that it was destroying artists. It was destroying creativities. I'm like, no, look, there's these artists, real, legit artists here that are using AI in unique creative ways that neither I nor other people nor themselves could anticipate. Isn't that cool? Isn't that cool?

I love that. That is amazing. That's cool that you were on the forefront of really shedding promise to people that are hopeless about it. And that's where I think people like you are imperative is educating society on the the true benefits of how AI is going to help society really Excel. Now, you have thoughts that Elon Musk is all over the place with what he thinks the future looks like with AI. Some of his stuff is just scary with his thoughts. But as long as I feel like people leverage AI to help them raise their standards and raise their bar of productivity, I think that we're going to be in a good place. The people that use AI just to get lazier, which is Because it's a double-edged sword, it's a reality in some instances as well. I'm using AI to help me just multiply. That's good. I hope everyone has that mindset. Those that do will dominate, and those that don't will just fall by the wayside. Let me just close up with a couple of questions here. Now, what's your leadership philosophy when it comes to building and empowering the various teams that you work with at the intersection of tech and art?

Sure. I mean, for the experience I have leading teams and when I've hired people for different things, and this is based off of my experience being led to. I think the single most important thing, especially now more than ever, my philosophy is to just lead transparently and with kind candor, and foster that culture. Because if your teammate or this person you're leading doesn't feel like they can trust you, to be honest with you, to tell you things that they're worried about or things that they're afraid of or things that they're seeing, then how are you supposed to lead? I think that's one of the most important things. I think it's tricky because I think working in corporate environments, some of us might have different experiences in different company cultures where the manager would come into a meeting and they'd say, Tell me what you think. And everybody just sits there and they're like, Well, I know he's saying I should tell him what I think or her what I think, but he doesn't really mean that, because if I tell him what I think, he's probably going to fire me. Or maybe they won't fire me, but maybe I won't get a promotion, or maybe they'll give me a really hard project So there's all these hidden incentives that are at work in a company's culture that I think as a leader, you just have to be aware of, just frankly.

Explicit incentives and implicit incentives. Explicit incentives. Explicit incentive is like, I'm going to give you 100K a year as a salary. I'm going to give you X amount of dollars an hour. That's explicit. Implicit is if I tell them what I think they might not give me a promotion. It's not anything anybody said. It's not written anywhere. It's just implicit that people could pick up on. Maybe it's not true, but if they are afraid of that, then it's true to them, right? And it's going to alter their decisions when they're working with you as the leader. And when I say candor, I've heard people think that that means being rude. And this is nuanced. We're in great territory here because different cultures, I mean, country cultures, right? They take candor differently, right? And so if you're working in a company, you've just got to be aware of how things are in in whatever culture or city or country you're working in. But if you can, I would say, try and teach your employees, at least in your company, to operate with kind candor and kind frankness and respectful frankness, not just blurting whatever comes out of your mouth.

Because there's ways of saying things. We all know this. There's ways of saying things that are more respectful, less respectful, more rude, less rude. But I can still be direct with you and tell you what I'm thinking just in a respectful way. It's not rude to you, if you're the manager or the boss or whatever. Love it.

A couple of last questions. What's a personal goal that you have for yourself and business goal that you have for Lucky Day Labs?

Good question. Look, my personal goal is to just try and leave things better than how I found them in life. I know that's cheesy, but that's the philosophy I like to lead with is whenever I get to a place, I'm like, okay, can this be better? How can I make this better? I definitely don't want to leave things worse than how I got there, right? So maybe move away from that. So for Lucky Day Labs, I hope that I can continue to do what I'm doing now and I can help help, do as you said, help educate people around what's coming and how to prepare for it and make things better. Legitimately, I think if everybody... Imagine how cool it would be if everybody just went everywhere and they tried to get to the point, and they I tried to make things better wherever they went. I think that would be great. So why not try that? Let's see if we can make things better. Some things, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. But the things that are broken, and I think there's a lot of things that are that have been broken, why not try?

So that's my hope, that Lucky Day Labs will be able to do that in some way.

I love it. We'll ask a question for you. When you're in front of the curly gates, what do you think God's going to tell you?

Interesting question. I know people have different beliefs in terms of heaven and so on and so forth. But if I was just going to play with this framing, I don't know. What is God going to tell me or what am I going to ask God?

Let's go both ways.

I don't know. I'd probably ask him like, Hey, did I do a good job? What do you think? I don't know. That's probably what I'd ask him, but I don't know what he'd ask me. I guess I'll have to wait and see.

Hey, you've been a pleasure to have on the show. If people want to connect with you, how did I find you?

You can go to luckydaylabs. Ai, and you can book a free call with me right there on the website, or you can go to my LinkedIn, Andy O. I will say, part of that mission and that hope that I just mentioned to you, Lucky Day Labs is starting an academy called Lucky Day Labs Academy. We're going to teach people how to, what it's called, vibe code with tools like Lovable. And I found that people try these AI tools to make their own software because they've dreamt of making software their whole life, but they've never been able to do it. And now they try to do it. But then they would hit these roadblocks where there was things they didn't even know they had to ask as a question. And so what I'm going to do with Lucky Day Academy is help guide people through that process. So they'll be able to make their own software. They're going to be able to make their own app using these AI tools and teaching them what the pitfalls are, like security, so that user's information doesn't get leaked in a database. So you can find that at academy.

Luckydaylabs/waitlist.

That's great. Thanks so much, Andy. It's been a pleasure to have on the show. Make sure to connect with Andy O. He is the man. God bless, guys. Thanks for turning in. For tuning in.