Rewiring Leadership in the AI Age
Ion Valis - (TechXY Turbo, Episode 6)
Ion Valis has built a career at the crossroads of politics, technology, and leadership. He started out in Washington, DC, where he spent six years as Press Secretary to two Congressmen—learning firsthand how ideas are shaped and shared on the biggest stage. From there, he jumped into the private sector, helping Vodafone in London launch a bold international media initiative just as mobile technology was transforming the world.
Back in Montreal, Ion joined a fast‑growing tech start‑up as a senior executive, then shifted gears to lead the Jeanne Sauvé Foundation, an international non‑profit dedicated to cultivating public leadership. Along the way, he wrote The Magnificent Mistake, a book about why failure can be our greatest teacher, and later delivered a TEDx talk on rethinking leadership systems.
Today, as President of Prometheus Strategic Advisors and co‑host of the Boiling the Ocean podcast, Ion explores how leaders can navigate complexity with creativity and courage.
Listen to “Rewiring Leadership in the AI Age” below, or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon, Pandora, or wherever you get your podcasts.
TechXY Turbo - Podcast Transcript - (T2 E1)
Frank Gullo: Welcome to another episode of TechXY Turbo. My name is Frank and I am your host.
Ion Valis, a strategic advisor focused on AI leadership and neuroscience, joins me on TechXY Turbo to explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping the way we think, work, and lead. As president of Prometheus Strategic Advisors and co-host of the Boiling the Ocean Podcast, Ion helps executives rewire their mental operating systems for the AI age. In this episode, he unpacks his concept of neuro-optimization, explains why thinking has become cheap in the taste economy, and shares practical strategies for leaders who want to augment—but not be replaced by—artificial intelligence.
Ion also reveals how dopamine-driven platforms hijack our creativity, why walking meetings unlock innovation, and what he discovered when we asked both him and his own custom AI model about his greatest accomplishments. Ion, it is great to have you here on Techxy Turbo. To start, can you tell our listeners about yourself, what you do, and the work you’re currently involved in?
Ion: Absolutely, Frank. First of all, I wanted to thank you for inviting me onto your program and I love your introduction. In fact, I’ve been tempted to crib from it for a future podcast appearance because you did a great job. But basically, I describe myself as a personal AI strategist and executive coach.
My goal in life is to help leaders upgrade their brains, master AI, and become what I call attention capitalists—and we can talk about that in a second. And all of that is in the hopes of helping leaders, executives, entrepreneurs, and professionals thrive in a world of infinite distractions and exponential tools. And a little bit about my background: I’ve had what I call an intentionally eclectic path that has covered about six different mini-careers in four countries over three decades.
I’m kind of sneaky old that way, and I’ve worked in politics, media, tech startups, leadership nonprofits, and management consulting. And for the last 15 years or so, I’ve worked as a strategic advisor to entrepreneurs and executives, and in my current capacity as a personal AI strategist.
Frank: Interesting. We’ll get into that background. And speaking of your work as a personal AI strategist, you assert that leaders must augment themselves with AI or risk being replaced. You highlight AI skills as career-defining now. So for executives who prioritize the enhancement of their overall impact, what would you say is the single most effective AI tool or strategy today you’d recommend they consider to improve their decision-making?
Ion: Great question. I probably have three answers to that rather than just one. First of all, I just want to highlight the fact that I truly believe that AI is a remarkable technology that probably is more akin to agriculture than any other kind of development that’s happened in the last 2,000 to 10,000 years. I think it’s that disruptive. It may not all happen this year or this decade, but over the long sweep of history, this is not just an internet-level effort or impact. This is going to redefine work, philosophy, how we see ourselves, and so on and so forth. And the reason why I mention that is because your listeners should know there’s a strange bifurcation that has occurred in society today where there are people like I think you and I—if I can speak for you, Frank—who are what I might call jokingly “AI-pilled,” who kind of believe in the technology, believe its power and its impact are going to be immense.
And then there are a lot of people who I understand are skeptical and see this as yet another version of NFTs and 3D printing and, you know, “talk to me when it becomes a real technology and shows up in the statistics” and things like that. So I just wanted to kind of underscore that if you find—we find ourselves in those two buckets—generally there’s no kind of middle ground. And so I’m appealing to develop a bit of a middle ground, which is: if you don’t believe as I do that this is a completely disruptive technology, but you want to kind of hedge your bets—what I call the 21st century Pascal’s wager, if you’re familiar with that particular philosophical callback—it actually really behooves you to learn how to use AI to protect yourself against potential replacement by AI tools. And it also positions you very, very well in the marketplace where you have marketable skills against people who aren’t as quite well-versed with AI.
So that’s kind of my long-winded preamble to why this is important. In terms of your specific question, I have three specific suggestions for executives and leaders who want to use AI effectively and quickly right now.
My number one suggestion is to start using AI as a thought partner first and foremost. So you want to not be outsourcing your thinking to it, but treating it like a super smart friend who has infinite patience and almost unimaginably encyclopedic knowledge of everything. And you can just bounce ideas off of it. And I say “it” as opposed to “he” or “her,” because I don’t want to personalize or anthropomorphize it anymore.
I think, Frank, you and I probably all had really good friends who are super smart and who we do this on a normal basis, but aren’t always available, you know, when we have a wacky idea or we just want to kind of bounce something off someone. The AI is always there, has this multimodal capability where you can talk to it, write to it, upload information to it, and so it’s incredibly versatile that way. So, number one: use AI as a thought partner.
But here’s the thing—you don’t want to outsource your thinking to AI. So what I always say is: always ask AI, but in the middle of any project or task. What do I mean by that? Well, “always ask AI” is it costs a few cents and a few seconds to pop open a browser and whack a question into ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini or whatever your tool is at the moment.
But you don’t want to do it right at the beginning. So, you know, if you’re writing a blog post, you don’t say, you know, “AI, write me a blog post on X.” What I do is that I write out an idea or I write out a sketch or an outline, or I put together all of my thoughts that I’ve collected on a particular topic. I try to flesh it out as much as possible, and then I take it to AI and say, “Help me structure this. Help me organize this. Help me stress test this.” You know, I even ask it to rank my essay on three criteria: you know, persuasiveness, completeness, and novelty. You know, is this a trenchant, pioneering kind of thought, or is this a “me too” kind of idea that, you know, everybody’s written about or talked about?
And so, in a more kind of mundane example: say you’re writing a really important email to an investor or a stakeholder or to a customer, and you think you’ve done a great job—you’ve labored over it for a couple hours maybe, even just to get it right. Before you hit send, throw it into, you know, your AI tool of choice and ask it to improve it. And if there’s anything—you know, again, ask it to rank it on a score of one to 10, perhaps on persuasiveness or if you’re trying to close a sale, you know, on whether or not it will help you close. And then invariably—and I’ve done this dozens and dozens of times—the AI will give you one nugget of an idea that will improve it 5%, 6%. You know, maybe it’ll catch a mistake you’ve made. Maybe it’ll find something that you’re not supporting with data. Maybe it’ll say you’re sounding a little too strident here, you should, you know, be a bit more open-minded and so on and so forth. And I incorporate—I use my judgment, and we can come back to it in a second—to incorporate one of those suggestions, and it instantly gets my email or my project that much better.
And if you do that over time, that compounding effect is immense and it’s something that we have access to, again, with a few seconds and a few cents. If you spend $20 a month on the Plus membership of ChatGPT, you have almost unlimited access to that. So using AI as a thought partner: always ask AI, but in the middle of any project, not at the end, not when you’re just about to press send, and then you copy and paste. Because what you always want to do is add your special sauce, your tone, your judgment, and your taste to the final product before you send it out. And the analogy I like to paint is: you are a world-class chef. You have sous chefs. They prepare the dish as to your instructions. You look at it, you help them while they’re preparing it, but before it goes to the table, before it gets plated and sent off, you review it one last time. That’s the way I think executives and leaders need to use AI.
And then the last thing I would say is—this is where it’s going to come up a lot in our conversation, I think, Frank—we have to be very intentional about what we outsource to AI because whether we like it or not, whether we accept it or not, whatever we send over to AI frequently and over time will atrophy. So those skills of synthesis or of expression, or finding the right word—if you outsource all of that all the time to AI, your vocabulary will shrink. Your ability to synthesize information quickly will evaporate. So we, you know, invariably as technology comes online, we lose certain skills. You know, Socrates lamented the fact that the written word was going to destroy memory, and to a certain extent he was right. But the trade-off was immensely positive in terms of what we were able to get out of writing versus having to memorize the Iliad and the Odyssey. So I’ll take that trade. We want to be aware of what we’re trading off.
And so my third piece of advice to executives is to be very intentional about what they’re doing when they’re outsourcing to AI, because those skills will, by necessity, atrophy over time. And so be very cognizant and very selective about what skills you’re willing to give up in order to get the trade-off of this increased efficiency and increased output.
Frank: Ion, thank you for that thoughtful answer and giving away some of your practices. So for everyone listening, we’ll have the full transcript and Ion has a website and blog where he regularly writes about some of these things. And in working with dozens of employees and what you’re saying, I’m seeing across the workforce now: a lot of people are using it like this and experimenting. Definitely an exciting time. And I would like to know what color the AI pill is. So maybe at the end we can, you can tell me the color of an AI pill.
So more on this: you developed the concept of neuro-optimization to help leaders upgrade their mental operating systems. As you define it, you also emphasize training the brain’s control tower to unlock its cognitive superpowers. So what do these concepts mean and look like in actual practice for a busy professional today?
Ion: Sure. Great question. Neuro-optimization is my catchall term to describe how we can now finally learn to use our biology like a technology. So we’re in the midst of this extraordinary revolution that started, you know—let’s take it for the mass market element of things—on AI in, you know, late 2022, early 2023 when ChatGPT came out. But we’re actually in the midst of an even more—or equally important—revolution that has really been in place for the last 20 years, and that’s extraordinary advances in neuroscience.
We have learned more about how the brain works in the past 20 years than we knew in the previous 200,000 years. It’s really extraordinary how much more we understand about how the brain works these days. Now it is still a bit of a black box, so I’m not saying it’s a problem that’s been solved. This is not, you know, like we haven’t sequenced the genetic code here in terms of the brain, but we understand so much more of how it operates and it really is astounding, the level of power that we can get from finally understanding what the most important organ in our body—the most complex piece of kit in the universe, bar none—operates.
And so when I talk about neuro-optimization, I’m talking about availing ourselves of these insights from neuroscience from the last 5, 10, 15, 20 years to, you know, perform better, be happier, thrive more, and just be more successful as people and as professionals.
And so that’s kind of the set piece to all of this in terms of why it applies now. Well, you know, I don’t think I’m going to get much pushback from you on this, Frank, but I like to describe all of us now as cognitive athletes, a term I borrowed from a well-known author named Cal Newport. And the basic idea is that we use our brains to earn our livings. Now we add value through what happens between our two ears. And while there are still people—and maybe there’ll be more people in the future—who earn their livings with their, you know, muscles or with their bodies, by and large, we’re all basically knowledge workers to some degree or another. And our most important asset is our brain. That’s what we bring to work every day. That’s our tool of choice, so to speak.
So we need to kind of prioritize that and we need to treat our brains the way Olympic athletes treat their bodies: with great care, with a view towards optimizing performance and so on and so forth, just as they think of nutrition and training and understanding the way the body works to get the best, you know, gold medal results out of their bodies. We need to do the same for our brains. So what does that mean in practice?
Well, number one, I would say on a general level, we consume far too much content in our lives, and I am the first to put up my hand and say guilty. But what does that do in practice? Well, we are flooding our brain with all sorts of information. Some of it is useful and much of it is frankly frivolous, and we are choking not only our limited bandwidth with all of this content consumption, but we are choking out our ability to create as a consequence, an unintended consequence of all this content consumption.
And that’s what I was trying to get at when I was talking about this notion of controlling your brain like a control tower. And I use this analogy, which might be familiar to a lot of people who have smartphones, which is: we need to start putting our brain in airplane mode more often. So what do I mean by that? It means just as when you put your phone on airplane mode when you get onto a plane and you get on a flight, we need to start turning off the receive button, so to speak, in our brains and just stop with information so that we can catabolize it and start kind of digesting all of these terabytes of information that we consume every day. The reason for that—that it’s so important—is because it’s only through that white space that we create both in our brains, but also I would argue for executives who are listening, in our calendars, that we can start to become creative.
So, I don’t know about you, Frank, but a lot of my clients—maybe you too as well—go back-to-back-to-back with these, you know, kind of 60-minute meetings on Zoom that run for hours in a row without even a bio break, let alone a brain break. Right? And so we need to create these white spaces in between these meetings to kind of digest what just happened, prepare for the next meeting that happens, and you know, get the most value out of what just transpired and what’s about to transpire. And so I argue, you know, to my executive clients that you should have 20-minute meetings for 30-minute time slots and 50-minute meetings for 60-minute time slots. And you use those interstitial—or 25-minute meetings for the first 30 minutes and 50 for the second. And we should use that interstitial time to kind of wipe the—almost like a palate cleanser, brainwise—to, you know, get prepared for the next meeting.
And similarly, you know, instead of always—and I am as guilty as anybody in this—putting in your AirPods and running on a podcast, or the minute you have a free second jumping onto your inbox and checking something out or checking the stock prices and so on and so forth, sit. Not in silence, but stillness and just let your mind kind of rest at best and also create from that white space because that’s what’s going to emerge eventually if you push through that small and short and, you know, kind of really frivolous pain point of boredom. You get to the other side of creativity and so on and so forth. And so neuro-optimization is understanding that the brain is like a muscle that you have to—you can stress it and then you rest it. And the more we understand about how the brain works, the more we can tweak our schedules and the way we operate in day-to-day life to give us the best possible brain that we have, which is our best possible asset in our arsenal of professional tools.
Frank: Very interesting. And I think it’s fascinating you’re talking about executives, but having just sent a high schooler to college, I think this is a widespread phenomenon and issue. You think of technologies and you link them like TikTok, Instagram, other social media, and you call them a toxic form of distraction that robs us of boredom and the white space that you were mentioning, that’s really important for inspiration. Some other writers—Nir Eyal with his book Indistractable, talks about this and how to break the habit of the phone. So scientifically, Ion, how do these distraction engines, that—it’s not just executives, it’s kids, everybody—in our feeds, the algorithm, how do these distractions that produce dopamine at regular intervals suppress our creativity?
Ion: So I’m really glad you brought up your son or daughter who’s just going off to school because this is important to us as parents. The link between creativity and distraction is a complicated one, but one that I can try to unpack. So, number one is that when our minds are bored momentarily, the brain shifts into what neuroscientists call the default mode network, and it’s literally when your brain is not being subjected to distractions or stimulation. The best example I can give of when the default mode network kicks in is if you are on a long drive, on a path, on a road, you know, or a highway that you know well, and you’re either listening to a podcast or you’re even better sitting in silence. That’s when your default mode network kicks in, and I don’t know about you, but when I go on long drives or when I take a shower, I get this flood of ideas that comes out because—
Frank: Totally. Yeah.
Ion: Exactly. And so it’s intuitive and, you know, it’s resonant with a lot of people because they’ve experienced this. Now, that’s the exception. The rule is whenever we have a spare moment, a micro-moment of boredom, we fill it with something. Either we’ll pick up the phone to call or text someone, or we open up the app and we, you know, swipe right, or we, you know, check our stock portfolio on Robinhood and so on and so forth. Or, you know, we do something even more what I say frivolous, which is, you know, go on TikTok or Instagram Reels and just, you know, get a little dopamine hit from all of this stuff. So what does this do cumulatively? Well, number one, it trains our brains not to be able to tolerate any form of boredom. I’m going to kind of call out something that I see in Los Angeles where I live every day, and it scares me, but it also is, I think, illustrative of where we are.
I call this stoplight scrolling, and I’m sure you’ve probably seen this before, but you pull up next to someone, you look over, it’s a red light, it’s not a long red light, and they’re looking down, looking at their phones. They cannot—mere seconds of, you know, boredom. And so they have to look at their phone. I also, you know, for those people who haven’t experienced this, and this is very common in places—
Frank: Do you think that’s an addiction? Are they addicted to it, do you think?
Ion: It’s a, what I would call a low-key addiction in the sense that, you know, are they going through physical withdrawal? You know, I don’t want to trivialize, you know, the kinds of addictions that some people really suffer from, but absolutely we have trained our brains to be intolerant of boredom.
And so the minute we feel it, that little pinch of boredom—and again, we’re talking about a 30-second stoplight, we’re not talking about, you know, a five-minute wait at the doctor’s office here, or longer—they look down. And so it is a form of addiction and it’s a particularly pernicious one because it doesn’t seem that bad.
But I think, you know, for anybody who’s been caught behind someone who’s doing that, you have to honk their horn. If you’ve ever pulled up on the 405, which is the, you know, the busiest highway in America, and you look over and people are like talking on their phones or texting on their phones while they’re driving at 60 miles an hour, becomes very, very problematic, let alone for their brains, but for my brain too, so to speak.
So the reality is that we have put slot machines in our pockets and these—I call them slot machines because these apps have been designed with the same technology and the same scientific rigor that slot machines in Las Vegas and in, you know, any of these bars that you find themselves in have been designed. So it’s things like intermittent rewards where you never know what you’re going to get.
You open up the dating app and you’re like, “Maybe someone’s matched with me,” or you open up your, you know, your Robinhood account and, “My stock value has gone up.” So they’re very good at manipulating the tools that the gambling industry in particular has learned is incredibly addictive and incredibly entrancing and putting them to use for, you know, more mundane, you know, sources and things like that. So we have these slot machines in our pockets that are always available entertainment, and I would argue distraction. And we turn to them at every waking moment that we are bored.
I don’t know about you, but I like to go to the coffee shop, you know, often during the week. I have forced myself when I order my drink—and I don’t do it through the mobile order, I, you know, speak to the barista—and then I wait for them to make my, you know, iced mocha frappuccino or whatever it is.
And I don’t reach for my phone, but it takes an effort of willpower not to do so. And I look around and everybody’s doing it because what—there’s like a two-minute wait and two minutes is too long for us to literally be alone with our thoughts. And not only that, we’re missing out on life basically. I’ve had business ideas, I’ve had business model ideas in Starbucks, sometimes related to Starbucks, and sometimes related to something completely different because I’m forcing myself to look up and look around rather than look down and get lost in this vortex of distraction. Right?
So scientifically here’s the way that it works. Dopamine courses whenever you are anticipating something that could be novel and exciting. So it’s not actually when you are scrolling through Instagram that you get the highest dopamine hit. You get it as you open it, as you—that little bit of excitement. It’s when you pop open the app and it starts to populate and your brain basically says, “Oh look, let’s see if there’s going to be something good.”
And so that trains us to want to do it all the time because we get this pleasure from opening the app and the novelty. Because dopamine also kicks in when you get something that’s what they call unexpected reward. So, you know, you’re scrolling through your feed and you come across something that’s great and like, “Oh, I didn’t expect that. I didn’t know what to expect, but I didn’t expect that.” And so you get this burst of dopamine that also comes from the novelty.
And what happens is that when you do that, you’re crowding out your mind-wandering kind of capacity, which is the default mode network, which I’ll remind listeners requires not stimulating your brain. But the other thing that’s really important is that there’s this inverse relationship between dopamine and serotonin, which I think we might get to later in the conversation, but I’ll maybe spin it forward a little bit and say that serotonin is the neurochemical that gives us satisfaction. We get it when we see a sunrise or a sunset, when we’re spending some time outdoors with our friends.
Maybe you get it as I do when I’m playing basketball with my boys, you know, on a Saturday. And it’s this feeling that your life is complete and it’s a wonderful feeling.
It’s something that we seek out. And dopamine is the kind of opposite neurotransmitter. It’s the—I would call it the neurotransmitter of dissatisfaction, because if you think about it historically from an evolutionary perspective, the people who were highly dopaminergic are those kind of cavemen and women who said, “You know what? I don’t think that this valley is the be-all and end-all. I want to see what’s over at the next valley. Like maybe there’s more food there. Maybe there’s better fruit there. Let’s go over there.”
So the stone age people who lived on the savanna back then who had a lot of dopamine and who decided, “You know what, I’m not satisfied with the status quo. I’m going to go over there.” Well, their genes propagated more successfully than those who said, “You know what, I’m good. We got a tree here. I got some shade. I got an apple in my hand. What else do I need?” That’s the kind of serotonin person. And so evolution has kind of tilted us in the direction of dopamine.
But here’s the thing: the 21st century gives us a complete surplus of cheap dopamine. We used to have to earn our dopamine. You know those people who had to go to another valley? Well, they had to cross, you know, rivers and had to climb mountains to get to the other valley. What do we have to do? We just got to bring our phones and we get this like massive hyper-stimulating dose of dopamine for doing nothing, for expending no calories, for expending no effort. Right. And to get no reward really other than distraction.
Frank: Right.
Ion: And the thing is, sorry you wanted to jump in?
Frank: Yeah, no, I think it’s just a fascinating topic and you know, you reminded me of there’s like a great talk by Simon Sinek, Leaders Eat Last, where he talks about dopamine, serotonin, also oxytocin. And it’s fascinating, you know, especially as it does, you know, relate to tech and managing impulses, using machines. So, and certainly talk about this. I did want to—I wanted to segue a bit into taste.
In addition to the challenges with the brain, addiction, dopamine, you also argue that AI has now started to make thinking what you call “cheap,” and it leads to what you’re calling the rise of a “taste economy” where now judgment is the ultimate currency. So in this new state, if intelligence is now cheap, especially given your previous comments about the knowledge and cognitive athletes, what are the new soft skills that are essential for employees, executives to remain relevant and valuable in this new landscape?
Ion: I love that question. And it tees up, you know, a really nice conversation that I hope we can have about this notion that intelligence has become commoditized. Basically what Google did in the 2000s when it gave us access to kind of the world’s information is that it made information basically free.
You didn’t have to ever remember a fact. You could settle any bar, you know, debate in a second by just Googling it, and information became commoditized. It became valueless in some ways. What AI is doing in the 2020s is turning intelligence, which is a more kind of purified form of information, kind of distilled and digested information, into a commoditized resource.
Now, we have not just slot machines in our pockets, but we have the world’s knowledge digested and ready to respond to any question that you have in our pockets. And so whereas until recently to succeed in life, whether it was in business or in arts, or in anything you can imagine, one presumes that you needed to be intelligent.
But actually now everybody has access to intelligence. When you have, you know, $20 a month to spend on ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude, you have an extraordinary and explosive amount of intelligence at your fingertips. Not just in terms of, you know, deep research capabilities and things like that, but the ability to put together business plans and so on and so forth.
And so intelligence is no longer the scarce asset that it used to be. In this kind of world where intelligence is, you know, kind of multifaceted, multimodal and everywhere, what becomes scarce? Well, I’ll argue it’s, you know, another thing in a second, but in the context of business, as you rightly posed in the question, it’s actually what I would call taste.
And what do I mean by taste? Well, I define taste as being kind of made up of two pillars on one hand and on the other. Now think of almost these Russian nesting dolls, you know, the ones you might have seen on TV or you know, in a YouTube video. Judgment and craft. There are two other nesting dolls. So what do I mean when I say judgment, which is one of the two pillars of taste? Well, it’s values and analysis on that side of the ledger. So judgment for me is the combination of what you think you should prioritize for, whether it’s in your business or your life, and a rigorous form of analysis that you’ve done either through, you know, kind of gut instinct or pros and cons analysis or a strategic plan or anything like that. It can go, you know, the full gamut between, you know, just what I feel we should do. And these are my values to, you know, some multimillion-dollar McKinsey analysis or, you know, what I would argue a one-hour deep research analysis through ChatGPT. So judgment is one piece of it.
The other piece is craft, and again, craft has two components as well. One is what I would call skill. So if you think of a chef or a painter, it’s their skill in using the brush or, you know, using the ingredients in the kitchen. And the second is what I call personal style or aesthetic. Anybody who’s gone to a Gordon Ramsay restaurant knows that it has a certain vibe, it has a certain kind of profile for ingredients. If you look at a Van Gogh painting, you can instantly recognize his brushstrokes. Same thing with a Picasso. They have just this specific aesthetic that’s just really evident. And so for me, taste—even though it sounds kind of superficial—is actually a really layered and textured combination of judgment and craft, which are these, you know, components of values and analysis on the one hand, and skill and personal style or aesthetic on the other.
Now, what does this mean for soft skills, the ones that you referenced we need to kind of focus on? Well, one is when intelligence is commoditized and accessible to everyone, we need to develop, intentionally develop our taste. This is the thing that we will bring, you know, to add value to in our decision-making, in our ability to, you know, kind of contribute productively to our organizations and whatnot. And so a lot of people say, “Well, I wasn’t born with taste,” or, “I don’t have any good taste. You know, what should I do?” Well, first of all, you can’t afford not to have taste anymore for the reasons I’ve just described. And secondly, there’s no excuse not to develop that taste. And what I would suggest you do: one is intentionally curate your information diet. We are—our taste gets determined by what we expose ourselves to. So if you eat McDonald’s or burgers all the time, you know your culinary tastes will go a certain direction. Right.
Frank: You’d rather have grass-fed AI?
Ion: Exactly. Well, yeah. I mean, and same thing with like, you know, if you consume crap informationally, you’re not going to be, you know, kind of developing your taste.
So one is curate your information diet very intentionally. Two, and this is really important and is really an adjacent notion of taste, is stand for something. How can we spot AI, you know, kind of verbiage or, you know, copy that’s really boring? Because it’s right down the middle. Doesn’t take a stand. There’s no conviction.
Humans value conviction. You know, the people who are great financial stock pickers, they have analysis, but everybody has analysis. What do they do that’s better than anybody else? They have enormous conviction, like, “Trust me, buy the stock. You will not regret it or go—” you know, we all have that friend who says, “Ion, you know, I’ve never led you astray, watch this movie or watch this show.” My friend Adam forced me, he said, “You will love The Diplomat on Netflix.” I’m like, “Ah. I don’t know, man.” “Trust me.” He had this enormous conviction. I watched one episode, I was hooked. Conviction matters.
In a world where we operate in a taste economy, we have to train our judgment. We have to instruct it intentionally with our information diet. We also have to decide very intentionally what we say no to. Taste is as much about what you don’t put into a product as what you do. Taste is as much about what you emphasize in your service, as much as what you de-emphasize. So these are all questions that executives have to decide and have to use their judgment, which is again, you know, kind of a portmanteau of a couple different things.
And so it’s very important to develop your taste. And the last thing I’ll say about this, Frank, is in order to operate and to succeed in a taste economy, in addition to developing your taste, you also have to make it visible. So you want it to be clear what your taste is. You want it to almost scream out there. You think about the newsletters that we like to read, or the music we listen to. It’s recognizably of someone. You know, it’s just emblematic of their taste. A Grateful Dead album. I’m dating myself, but I’m not even a fan. But you know, it just has this distinctive sound. A Taylor Swift song, you know, their taste is visible.
And similarly, when you look at an Apple product from the packaging to the design, you can close your eyes, you can feel it, you can listen to the unboxing of the package, and you know it’s an Apple product. Taste is visible in those things. So my advice to executives and leaders and the people who are listening to your podcast is develop your taste, but also make it visible. Make it very apparent to people who are consuming your product or service that you would put your fingerprints all over it. And they can decide whether they like it or not. The people who like it will love it. And the people who don’t like it, well, they’re not going to be your customers anyway.
Frank: I think that’s a very useful model. I mean, in some ways it reminds me of brand, like strong brands people tend to love or hate. I think you’ve mentioned Taylor Swift as an example of that. I also work full spectrum IT, so my work involves cybersecurity and I do wonder about, you know, the engineering aspect of it—are there hackers who may try to subvert this taste?—but maybe for another time.
I want to get to a few other questions before we wrap up. One of the things you said before regarding stone age brain, I find very interesting. So I live on the beautiful Lake Erie, one of the Great Lakes, and I love riding my bike along the lake and I notice I have great thoughts. So I was wondering when you talked about stone age brain, I think you mentioned our thinking thrives when we’re moving in nature or collaboratively, and it spurs creativity. So certainly the biking. But I was as much curious about how it happens collaboratively, particularly today where so many people are remote or in hybrid teams. So how would a project team of today use what you call the “walk and talk” concept in weekly meetings to spur innovation?
Ion: It’s a great question again, Frank. And I love the image you painted of you biking around Lake Erie. And if you just know a little bit about our evolutionary history, and I’ve become a student of evolutionary history for the last, you know, 10 years or so, and it’s just really a cheat code to understanding humanity basically.
But something that we’ve forgotten is that our brains were not really made for thinking, at least not in the kind of Descartes sense of, you know, bending over a computer or an abacus or a calculator and, you know, laboring away on a problem by ourselves. Our brains developed basically to communicate and to collaborate in hunts.
Basically we needed to communicate and to kind of coordinate chasing down, you know, big prey like mammoth. And not only do we need to communicate and collaborate, but we also needed to move because our brains were optimally designed to think and move at the same time. What do we do when we put our kids in school or when we’re trying to work on a project? Well, we work by ourselves. We, you know, work at cubicles. We put headphones on, you know, the over-the-ear kind that are kind of obnoxious “don’t talk to me” kind of vibe. We have virtual Zoom meetings mostly nowadays.
And, you know, I’m as much a purveyor of those as anybody because I work as an executive coach to people all around the world. And so we basically do the opposite of what nature designed us to do. And sometimes we have these moments, these epiphanies like you have, which is like, “Wow, I have these great ideas when I’m outside, you know, taking in nature and moving. I wonder if there’s a reason for that.” Well, the truth is there is because your brain kind of lights up when it’s in vitamin D in the sunshine and taking in nature.
By the way, one of the reasons why nature is so calming to us is because it’s not so busy. If you go to like a cityscape like Manhattan, you have so much stimulation, but you also have all these right angles, you know, the skyscrapers and the streets and things like that. But if you look at nature, there are no right angles. You know, trees grow vertically, but they don’t grow vertically perfectly. Hills roll and, you know, mountains emerge, but they don’t go straight up.
And so that environment is intrinsically calming to us because it’s not this hyper-stimulating environment. And so on and so forth. And so once—and again, these are all parts of what I call neuro-optimization—understanding how the brain actually works and incorporating that idea into how we work on a day-to-day basis.
So how does that relate to like a walk and talk meeting? Well, number one, humans are designed to think collaboratively, think in motion, and think outside, ideally in clement weather. Why did you have a meeting? If you are trying to kind of be creative and brainstorming where you take, you know, a person—it works really well on a one-to-one basis, but even a small group—and just walk around outside in the park immediately adjacent to your office complex.
There are studies that show that 15 minutes—only 15 minutes in a city park, we’re not talking about Grand Canyon, we’re not talking about Zion National Park. We’re talking about a city park and we’re not even talking about Central Park. We’re just talking about a, you know, normal park. 15 minutes in a normal park de-stresses you as much as exercise for an hour would be. It also inspires you because again, you’re in nature. You’re calmed.
Again, if you’re not screwing up by, you know, putting your headphones in, listening to a podcast or scrolling your, you know, TikTok or your Robinhood feed. And so what I recommend executives do is: learn about your brain. Learn about the human brain, the stone age brain that we operate in the 21st century. But learn about your particular brain too, which is, “Hey, I operate optimally when I, you know, work in the mornings versus in the afternoons.” You know, something about circadian rhythms, that’s really important.
And so we need to understand what neuroscience has given us, which is this combination lock to understanding the most complex piece of kit in the universe, as I said, which is our two pounds of wetware that we have in our brains. And use that to our advantage. And things like walk and talk meetings, like going outside at lunchtime for 15 minutes without media and technology and just thinking without stimulation is an extraordinary boost to your creativity and to your ability to synthesize and catabolize information. And that turns you into a better knowledge worker, which turns you into a better cognitive athlete, which allows us to fight off the influence and the threat of these thinking machines, which is—
Frank: Very nice. And I would say though, in Buffalo sometimes it is a little challenging to do that in January. Probably easier in LA but—
Ion: Well, I’ll tell you this, Frank, I used to live in Montreal and I started doing walk and talks with my friend Mike, who worked at McKinsey at the time, and we did all year round. So I hear you. Buffalo has like a level of snow that Montreal did not, but you wrap up and you head out.
Frank: Yep. Yep. Very good. So we’re almost at time, but given your focus on AI, using tools, sharing what you do, I thought it would be appropriate to end our show by having you ask a question to an AI model I’ve set up about you. So I—we can do that on the show. It’s ready to go. Do you have a question you’d like to ask about yourself? And I’d be curious if you projected what it might say and we can kind of go from there.
Ion: Uh, that’s—I wasn’t prepared for me to ask the question, but I guess I’ll say, you know, what is the best idea that Ion’s come up with in the last little while? Or something to that effect.
Frank: Okay. Thank you. Let us roll and ask this question. Absolutely. And I thank you for your patience. So for those who don’t know, what we did in preparation for this is we looked at a couple of tools, Notebook LM, but in this case we went on Google. If you go on Google now, there’s an AI search option. So I searched Ion Valis and then I asked what is his greatest idea? And in terms of what the AI model of Google thinks, it is your idea to “earn more from failure than you learn from success.”
So that came up first. Interesting. But thank you. This is really fascinating. We could talk for hours on this, but before we wrap up, you gave a lot of practical advice, information. Where can people find this information? Where can they connect with you? Do you have a website, LinkedIn? What would you like to share to close us out?
Ion: So thanks again, Frank, for this wonderful opportunity to speak to you and to your listeners. Just a couple different touchpoints that you can reach me at. So one is ionvalis.com. That’s my website. I also put out a newsletter called Ion Intelligence, so it’s iontelligence.substack.com, or just Google “Ion Intelligence,” but a “do” between the “I” and the “n.”
And you know, speaking of that newsletter, I’ve recently launched this project called the Attention Project, which is a multipart series on this idea that I have, which I was kind of hoping Google would’ve called out to me. But I respect its reference to my 2014 book, The Magnificent Mistake.
This idea that attention has become the operating system of the 21st century and how it’s become this incredibly important—in fact, I would argue the most important form of capital today. So I would encourage your listeners, if you’re at all curious about that, go on to Substack, find Ion Intelligence, and subscribe for free to my newsletter and follow along in that series because I’m going to be unpacking this over the course of the next 10 or so weeks and building up to this crescendo where, you know, I kind of explain my attention theory of everything, which sounds very ostentatious, but it’s kind of tongue-in-cheek and fun. And lots of interesting things.
And then the last thing I would say is that, like you, I am a podcaster at heart and I’m actually relaunching a new podcast with a friend and a colleague called Not Widely Distributed, coming out in January 2026. And it’s about how we used to think of news as the first draft of history, and Not Widely Distributed is meant to be kind of the first draft of the future. So we’ll be looking at trying to see around the corner, figure out what’s next, and help our listeners prepare for it by telling them what it means and, you know, what they can do to prepare for it.
So probably not at all dissimilar to what you’re doing. I don’t think it’s competitive with, you know, Turbo or anything like that. It’s probably a cousin podcast, if you will. But so it’s, you know, my website, my newsletter, and my coming soon podcast. Those are probably the best ways. And of course on LinkedIn, email me on LinkedIn if you want to connect with me. I’d love to hear from you guys and gals.
Frank: Great, thanks very much. So all of this information will be on the site and in the show notes. So that’s techxy.net. And Ion, I want to thank you again for coming on. This was great. We could have gone even farther on all these topics, but for another episode, thank you again. Have a great night.
Ion: Appreciate it. Thanks again, Frank.
