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Meet The Founders - Ryan Tubbs · Humanity Working

• 0:04
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_02: I highly suggest that we just go with it and in your opening say, look, we are committed to doing these podcasts in real life.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_01: Base blowers, construction, children.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: This is what we're doing.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, studio quality microphones and headphones don't mean anything when you got, you know, life going on.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_02: So I think you got to include that.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my God.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: It's insane.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_02: My undergrad was in chemical engineering.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um, all I really cared about was um doing something that involved heavy science and heavy math.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_02: I really didn't know where it was going to take me.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_02: But no, I did fall in love with tech early.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I started my career as a software developer.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_02: I went through the normal career progression, or quasi-normal at least for the day, uh, in terms of just becoming a more advanced programmer into architecture and database design and administration.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_02: And then ultimately I had the great fortune of being able to be a CIO for a period of time and really think about managing infrastructure across a large volume of people and leveraging the capabilities of software as opposed to uh as opposed to building it.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um but always in, let's say, the productivity space, uh, you know, so the software that I developed is productivity software, the software that I primarily focused on rolling out to all of our employees as a CIO was productivity software.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_02: Uh then I came to Microsoft and I sold and marketed productivity software.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so definitely um definitely in and around uh uh not just tech uh but software and more specifically um productivity software.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: You know, how how did your career start to focus or or make its way to a point where you would um you know help people sort of transform their their way of working or any of that kind of stuff?
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it was definitely a circuitous path, far from a normal corporate ladder climbing, if you like.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um I I think, and I know I'm jumping ahead a little bit.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_02: I I think that I think I always had an aspiration of doing something big and something meaningful.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um and I continued to hunt for it all the time.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um the evidence of that is the fact that I had a different job every year to 18 months while I was at Microsoft.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um in the end, I was there for 13 years, and I might have my math off by one, but I believe I had 10 different jobs in that period of time.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_02: And I think I was just always on a hunt.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_02: I was always on the hunt to do something that was going to be the next big thing.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and and I really wanted the experience, I really wanted the exposure to other elements.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_02: And so I was in consulting for a while, I was in uh sales for a while, I was in marketing for a while.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and the kind of the privilege that that experience affords is to know kind of the ins and outs of the organization, um, right?
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_02: So the different cultures in those different, different mini-cultures, if you like, in those different segments of the business, um, the different operational procedures in those different elements of the business.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_02: And then, of course, the underpinnings of the infrastructure that that underlies them all.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_02: And um I think that it was that experience that uh was one of the things that the collection of experiences led me to what was a very unique role, at least for the time, was a uh chief transformation officer.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_02: Um and that was a new role.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_02: It certainly was far from a standard title.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_02: And that was really about as Microsoft was going through a transformation uh in and of itself, really from box software company to a cloud software company or cloud provider, um you have to shift your mindset and your thinking in terms of how you talk to customers, how you sell to customers, how you market to customers.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_02: And so this role really came about as being kind of a harbinger of that change, um, developing change management programs, uh, for lack of a better term, that are going to kind of instill some of these new ethos that underpin the overall cloud strategy, the transformation that Microsoft was going forward forward with.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_02: And then that role became very outward-facing because other companies were witnessing what Microsoft was going through and seeing Microsoft do it rather well at the time.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_02: And so they knew that they were having to transform to be more digital, digital era ready, more exponential in nature, if you like.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_02: And so they were seeking the advice of Microsoft as to how to help them transform.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_02: And so I ended up working with a lot of individual companies, not really in a customer, you know, provider relationship, but more almost like as a mentorship, um, to help them design new business models that were designed for growth, help them uh understand perhaps why they were having such a hard time changing their culture or motivating their employees.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_02: And and that really was a major transition in my career from kind of pure tech, pure software to almost more human.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: There had to be some personal uh itch you're trying to scratch in moving to billion mines, and and maybe take us through how that how that role led you to see this opportunity.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you know, it was a it was a fascination really with the problem of almost like technology overload um or even productivity software overload.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_02: This isn't a Microsoft problem, this isn't a ABC Acme Company problem, this isn't a mid-sized company problem, this isn't a small business problem.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_02: This is a global problem that technology has just started to take over our lives, and we just didn't possess the skills.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_02: We haven't learned the skills to really manage to that, to manage that complexity, to manage that ambiguity.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and so that's what really drove the advent of billion minds.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_02: So, what can we do?
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_02: So it's a billion person problem for one, hence the billion.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and what can we do to help create that set of skills that will allow people to thrive?
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_02: We're not gonna change it, we're not gonna slow technology down, we shouldn't, but we need to learn the right skills so that we don't drive ourselves nuts while we're trying to live with it.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, there's there's you know, it's really interesting then to think, okay, so you recognize this problem, you see what's happening, you see that the tools uh available to people to solve this for you know, for their large part are office type tools, um calendars, scheduling, emails, all of these uh different types of things.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and uh I I find it interesting that then you know you just you decide to leave and form billion mines.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: So you know, uh uh uh filling in the gaps, if you will, uh or at least trying to identify and fill in the gaps of what's missing in these things and sort of the human element of these things and and bringing them all together to your point.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um, maybe a little bit more on how you saw the opportunity and what you think you can do to solve the problem, you know.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and it you know, one thing I I'm not gonna do is I'm not gonna diss in market productivity tools.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I I think that they many of them are are brilliant in their own right.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I happen to be very opinionated on the point that um I don't think they should be called productivity tools.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_02: I I think that they should be called flexibility tools.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, so a lot of these tools were built to provide for flexibility, or if you want to call them productivity tools, then say that if used properly, they might have the effect of making you more productive, right?
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but there's a lot of work that the individual has to do, and then let alone the team, let alone the organization.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um a tool is a tool.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_02: A hammer sits in your toolbox, and if you don't know how to swing it, it ain't gonna help very much, right?
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_02: And so the the one of the challenges is that a lot of the productivity tools um, again, designed to be you know very well-intentioned to help people do a particular task, help people to schedule things, help people to email better, faster.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_02: Um, they were all built in a time, or they were at least conceived in a time that is not like the way we live now.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_02: A tremendous amount has changed over the last uh 10 years, two years, but you know, 10 years, 20 years.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_02: And a lot of these concepts, email, calendar, tasks, if you like, um, they've been around.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_02: And and they weren't purpose built for the age that we live in now, which is uh you're always on, you know, work is increasingly unstructured, work is increasingly ambiguous, work is, you know, there's different modalities of work.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um and and the days, the individual days have become so very complex.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_02: And so if you were a master, let's say you were the modern day productivity master, Matt, where you had like every productivity tool you could imagine and every book, every bit of wisdom to your veil, right?
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_02: So you read a hundred books, you had infinite budget and bought every productivity tool, then you could concoct something that works for you.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_02: But then you know what you're left with?
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_02: You're left with something that takes 80% of your time just to manage.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_02: You know, um, just managing your own personal productivity uh infrastructure, if you like, um, takes so much time and effort.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_02: You have to be a genius to construct it, you have to spend a lot of money to build it, spend a lot of time to build it, just spend a lot of time reading, and then by the time you're done building it, you know, it's probably something new that you need to implement, right?
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_02: And so you could spend all of your productivity time trying to build yourself a productivity solution.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_02: And so we we believe that the ethos should be that the tools we use every day should make us more effective.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_02: That's it, right?
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_02: Pull full stop.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, there's an interesting thing you mentioned there too, is like as you start to, you know, if you're really good with technology and you're really good with the available tools, you can kind of build your own version of your own personal effectiveness, right?
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but you're then subject to all of those different tools changing as we go to, you know, you you you forget that there is a learning curve, and a lot of times people don't even touch, scratch the surface of the utility of the tools that they're using either.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_02: And so one of the things that we did in that, the core of our personal effectiveness platform is that we broke it down to uh I like to kind of call it the the DNA of effectiveness.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_02: And so you break it down small enough into like the atomic space, if you like, that um that when you build it up from there, um you have a lot more uh flexibility into what you can do at kind of the interface layer.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_02: So what I mean by that is what kind of getting things done boils down to is you're a person, you might be multiple people, you do a set of actions that achieves a set of outcomes that fulfills a certain objective, right?
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_02: One or more objectives.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_02: And I mean, I'm not gonna say, I'm not gonna sit here and say that that's like you know, the DNA of life, but it it's pretty darn low, right?
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_02: It's pretty darn low in terms of like an atomic unit of why people do stuff.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and when you break it down that low and you build up from there, it it's amazing because when when we asked people, we were building this from the ground up on those principles, like if that's those are the units of work.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_02: And so let's build it up from there.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_02: People didn't say when we interviewed a bunch of people, they didn't say, um, I want a better email app, or I want a better calendar, um, or I want a better task list.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_02: You know what they said?
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_02: They said, help me get through my day.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, just that's it, right?
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_02: Help me get through my day and end my day and be able to switch off at the end of it and go to sleep feeling like I've accomplished something.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_02: So help me get through my day, help me stay on top of the people in my life, and help me plan for the future.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so when you remove, when you remove like pre-existing notions of what technology should be or what solution should be, you arrive at something that's very interesting.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_02: And all those three things I mentioned, the pillars of our of our personal effectiveness platform, they're all built on that same construct of people that do stuff, that achieve stuff, that ladders up to longer term things.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_02: And so you can build anything, it's like Lego pieces.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_02: You can build anything with that.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: That's a really cool construct.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_01: So, how do you think your uh your own uh journey is influencing the way that you uh uh expect to work with others in this in this space because your idea is evolving as well beyond the platform, you know, and and into into you know helping people at the end of the day and bringing that together.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: So take me through some of that.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, people helping people.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_02: That's we're trying to play with, you know, what's the what's the short, concise way that we could describe this?
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I would say um this is the journey of any any startup, really, is you know, you think you have it cracked, you know, you think you have it figured out, and then in a month, you know, you're in a completely different place.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um we thought that we could solve it all with software.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_02: That was our initial thought, is that you know, by everything I said before, by breaking it down to those elements of life, if you like, uh, or work in the context of life, and building up based on what people need now, um, in and the way that lives are lived now, that that alone could be the solution.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_02: And because our objective is to help a billion people, that that's great because software can scale.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_02: Um but as we started to have more and more conversations and and start getting users um you know testing out the platform and things like that, um what we learned was something I should have known all along because of the background I told you about before.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_02: My, you know, I was a student of change management, is that, well, that doesn't run across all those elements of change, right?
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_02: That's that's one element.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_02: You could say that that's the that's the ability part of ADCAR, if you like.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_02: Um, maybe even the reinforcement part of two, if you're continuing to use it.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_02: But the point is that it's it's just a tool.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_02: And then we would be victim to the same previous generations of innovation if we didn't really think through that.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_02: And so one of our one of our um users put it to us um, I think brilliantly to say, guys are trying to solve a human problem.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_02: Humans have to be part of the solution.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and so that's when we really had the the aha moment that put us on our our current path, um, which is uh how do we fulfill the other elements of change?
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_02: How do we incite uh or how do we instill behavioral change that's lasting, that's sustainable?
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um, well, you need continuous education, you know, everything's changing constantly.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_02: There's new innovations uh happening every day.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_02: How can we continue to feed that to our user base?
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_02: So think about that as educational content learning, um, but in the in the context of your daily life, in the context of your workflow when you need it, not that you have to be on your own and go figure it out on your own.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um and then coaching, um, or let's call it accountability, if you like, having having a human that can actually interface with you and not only keep you accountable in terms of um uh reminding you, if you like, the the objectives that you've set for yourself, um, but then also coaching you through some of the complexities of the of the skills development.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it's not easy just to wake up in the morning and learn how to write the best objectives or the best outcomes.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_02: It's a skill that you develop over time.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_02: And humans can help do that.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_02: They can really personalize it, they can walk you through like a five wise activity, for example, which works really well when you have two people doing it as opposed to doing it on your own.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_02: And so there's some things that just you can't substitute a human for.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_02: Now, uh, you know, then you might ask, Matt, I'm I'm I've kind of put words in your mouth, but Ryan, how do you scale that?
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah, I've got the answer, Matt.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_02: Um, well, so then the um the the beauty of it though is um that uh uh when you think about these types of skills, which are different than hard skills and they're different than soft skills and the kind of those two ends of the extreme, these practical skills, um these 21st century skills, if you like, these daily uh skills that that anybody could really benefit from.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_02: People are much more apt to help their friends and family, colleagues.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_02: You know, they they want to help other people.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_02: And they're like, this helped me.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_02: I want to, I want to bestow that upon you, right?
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_02: I want to I want to help another.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_02: That was the big kind of revelation that we had, this big aha moment that we had is to say, well, somebody's maturity.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_02: You go from you know, a low level of effectiveness maturity to a high level of effectiveness maturity, if you like.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um, what's next?
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_02: Well, what's next is help others.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_02: And that's how you scale.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_02: That goes back to, I was joking before, but the people helping people, the the scale, the scale model, the how you scale the human aspects of this is based on people helping people.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_02: And people want to help other people to fix their, to get them off the path to burnout, to to help them live better days and to help them achieve their objectives that that is very meaningful.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_02: And so kind of the capstone of your effectiveness journey is to help others be effective.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_01: Billion Minds has taken over a dozen years of research into the habits of the most effective among us in this new world where work and life are merging.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_01: They've distilled it down into a 90-day program targeted at employees that do unstructured, ambiguous work.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_01: Employees from five different countries around the world are using Billion Minds to help them start each day with a purpose and end it with accomplishment.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_01: If you or your team wants to discover how billion minds can help employees optimize their work in the context of their broader life, go to billionminds.com slash learnmore today.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_01: That's billionminds.com slash L-E-A-R-N-M-O-R-E.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_01: Billion Minds, providing practical tools for our way too busy lives.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_01: You bring very unique perspectives having uh, you know, sort of run through the gauntlet, if you will, uh, in tech at, you know, one of the largest companies in the world, um, getting exposure to all of these things.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_01: And then, you know, uh some of the best ideas are a synergy of all of the best ideas finally kind of coming together at the right time, right?
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_01: So I I think I think that that seems to be the the pocket that that fits here, which is really really interesting to look at.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_01: And and I think um maybe it'd be interesting to hear about you know what has changed for you over the last you know year or so since since founding Billion Minds.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_01: And obviously you've had a couple of pivots, you've had a couple of uh uh big eye-opening moments and and uh and just light bulbs to just be like, this is what we're doing now, this is how we have to do it.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I you know, I think the first thing, and just uh on the very personal side, um, I think I found my thing.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_02: You know what I mean?
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_02: It's uh I was talking before about how I was changing jobs every year and stuff like that, and maybe it was all still in a similar domain, you know, tech domain or software domain.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but the job functions were very different.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_02: I think I was searching and I searched for a long time.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_02: And so um I really, I really believe in my heart of hearts that I found my thing.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_02: And if um if we find a different way to help people, then we'll find a different way to help people.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but this is something that uh gives me such satisfaction from you know, and forget about the business, forget about the career side of it.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_02: Actually, I think very little about that now.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_02: I think about what we can do to pave the way for the future generations.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_02: And I've got two small children.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I think about if they're if they had to go through what I went through over the last decade of my, the more senior part of my career, um mentally unfit, you know, stressed, you know, like unbelievably stressed, and frankly not spending enough time on my own wellness and well-being.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_02: Um, if they're doing the same thing, then what have I done?
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_02: You know, what have I done as the previous generation in a nothing?
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um, they're in the same rat race, they're in the same cycle.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_02: And so um I think this is this is going to be my thing in whatever iteration, whatever path it takes.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_02: You know, what Paul and I talk about all the time is that um, you know, we'll continue to evolve, we'll continue to pivot, we'll continue to do whatever, but the problem's the same.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_02: We've fallen in love with the problem.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_02: We fall in love with um this notion of helping people, uh, you know, and again, it's a billion person problem.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_02: And there's gonna be another billion people online uh over the next 10 years, the rising billion.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_02: And it's gonna so it's gonna become even more pronounced.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: And so for me, uh from a personal perspective, and I guess it folds into the other part of your question too, um, from a personal perspective, this is my thing, this is what I'm about, and I'm going to continue to iterate and continue to innovate, you know, against this problem until we have it licked.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_01: It's great exposure to what I think, you know, it's easy to kind of get stuck in the mindset when you're, you know, doing what you're doing, starting and founding a tech company, you know, looking at personal effectiveness with a with a with a focus.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_01: So the things you read, the the data you take in, the analysis that you do is almost like without a company like Billion Minds trying to do it, most people don't have time to look at this problem because they're just trying to get through the day, right?
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um Yeah.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_02: Well, and that's yeah, it's a great point, actually, too, because I should mention um we're not the the creators of all the wisdom around personal effectiveness.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_02: The the fact is that um in in our interviews, in the primary research that we've done, we've noticed patterns, right?
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_02: And there's patterns of behavior of the 99% of people that that are leading them to being more stressed, less healthy, less mentally fit.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_02: And and so we've kind of looked at those patterns, looked at those trends, looked at those characteristics.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_02: But where we really um invested our attention to is in that 1%.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_02: There are people that are thriving.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_02: There are people that have had this figured out and like, all right, well, let's inspect them a little bit more.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_02: So most of what we've done is is not necessarily like original thought.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_02: It's not like Ryan's tips and tricks of how to get through your day.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's based on research, it's based on observation of the people that have it figured out.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_02: And so we're in a lot of ways, we're curating this wisdom that's not in the form of consumable wisdom.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_02: It's not it's not in books.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_02: It maybe is in a medium article that's tucked away somewhere or something like that.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_02: But there's a lot of good wisdom.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_02: There's a lot of people that are thriving, and we're just trying to democratize that, right?
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_02: Is to say, can we package that up in a way that's consumable?
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and and it's not like not packaged up in a way that, like, hey, here's 30 articles for you to read and then figure out what to do with it.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_02: No, how can we how can we extract that wisdom and and memorialize it in something that you use every day so that it just works for you, right?
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_02: So you don't have to learn this technique, you are doing this technique by just being in the software by doing what you do every day.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_02: That's the secret, right?
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_02: It's this invisible tech thing.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_02: If you, if you had to read 30 books to try to better yourself in some particular way, you're not gonna do it because to your point, you're already in a state of paralysis.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_02: You don't have the time for that.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um so our objective is to curate that, figure out what the juiciest bits are, right?
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_02: What are gonna what are gonna appeal most to the mass market, to billions of people, and then bake it into their setting, their workflow of their everyday.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_02: And that's gonna level the playing field, if you like.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_02: That's gonna democratize the that wisdom.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I like the idea that it's not um life hacks, you know, it's it's it's it's chain it's fundamental changes to your well-being across all the things you have to do.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_01: And it's also not for just people in a job setting.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I know a lot of the times when you guys talk through this, uh, you talk through it with uh you know the broad spectrum of activities that every person has to deal with if they have a family, a hobby, a sport, you know, whatever the case may be, even if it's just personal, uh personal well-being, maybe uh, you know, things you want to get on the bucket list or trips you want to take or or skills you want to learn, it's all of it together.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_01: And you can't compart, you can't compartmentalize and break off chunks of it and still be as effective as you'd like to be.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um you can try.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, that's we think, yeah, we think that this notion of um I know this is just gonna sound a little iconoclastic, but the the the term work-life balance is in and of itself flawed, right?
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_02: Because that's to say you got work over here compartmentalized, and the rest of your life over here compartmentalized.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_02: And the problem is that um you then if you do that, you can't make adroit decisions in either without looking at it in complete context, right?
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_02: And so um, so already it was flawed just with that regard.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_02: But now, because our lives and our work lives and our personal lives and our side hustle lives and our family lives are so all intertwined, um it doesn't even make sense to think of it this way, right?
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_02: To think of it as this versus this.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_02: It's just it's an objective that you're trying to achieve, right?
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_02: It's as simple as that.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_02: It breaks down again to that fundamental thing.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_02: Um, actually, I had had lunch today in Tulsa with uh a gentleman um who had said it uh very well, I think.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm I'm paraphrasing, probably gonna get it wrong, but um, he was just like, I've got all this great sophistication in my work life, right?
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_02: I've got the most advanced productivity tools and calendaring, and I've got administrators and I've got all kinds of stuff.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_02: But in my personal life, which is just as complicated, if not more so, I don't any of that stuff, right?
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_02: I don't have any of the discipline of strategy and things like that that I do in my job.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_02: I don't apply any of that at home.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_02: Why is that, right?
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um, me communicating with my wife, uh we're communicating about things we're trying to achieve.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_02: How is any different than me communicating with my colleague or my boss?
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_02: And so the answer is it's not.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_02: And we've got to stop thinking of it that way.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_02: All the great innovations that have happened in business and the enterprise, there's no reason why those should be held hostage in the enterprise.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_02: They're just as applicable everywhere else in life.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it it's funny too, when uh now when you said the work-life balance thing, I was thinking about it, even just in terms of hours, right?
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_01: So I always had this idea, uh, because I'm sort of a night owl.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_01: So I'd be like, all right, if I worked 10 hours today, I need to stay up like eight to ten hours after I'm finished because I don't want to seed my entire life's day.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_01: I gotta, I gotta, it's gotta be even, right?
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_01: So uh you know, that's not healthy, obviously, to only get you know four hours of sleep every day.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_01: So it just doesn't, it doesn't work out.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_01: So you it's almost impossible, right, to uh to do it effectively trying to balance it.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_01: And and you know, I think something interesting this past week, you know, my my company has this amazing thing.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_01: They they shut down, you know, and we all took a vacation last week.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_01: And and uh the when the whole company is on vacation, it's this weird psychological difference to know you're not coming back to an onslaught, you weren't missing anything.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_01: There's no FOMO of what was happening while you were gone.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_01: And it just struck me very, very squarely like how much of a game, how much of a game changer that is to have that.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um and you know, I really applaud them.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_02: It's very forward-thinking.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it it's it's pretty amazing.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you have you have some essential core things that have to go on, but for the most part, everybody is not here, and and that is a beautiful thing to come back to is like almost an empty inbox, right?
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_01: Which is kind of unheard of after a week's vacation because you know, the the day you leave for vacation, you're like, uh, what did I forget?
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_01: And then the day before you come back from vacation, you're like, oh man, I don't know what I'm gonna walk into.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_01: And right, you know, I don't I don't even want to open the computer and see how many emails I missed.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_01: And we've all experienced that, but this time it was a pretty soft landing, and and I think that that speaks volumes to you know the necessary cultural shift that we also need to to see.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um maybe uh have you guys uh seen anything along the along the lines of you know, obviously COVID, uh the pandemic has had a dramatic impact on how people feel about work, and you're seeing a lot of this kind of thing where people you know take less money to not have to move and and go back in the office and all that kind of stuff.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_01: You know, what do you think the the impact is going to be there if you could if you could speculate?
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's interesting.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_02: You know, we um and from a business perspective, you know, we were always thinking um go straight to the individual, right?
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_02: Forget about you know B2B versus B2C.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't matter, let's go to the individuals, help individual mass market play because it's a billion-person problem.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um but the businesses are are fighting a an attrition battle right now.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_02: You know, a lot of people call it the great resignation.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_02: And um I I applaud people for you know leaving for the right reasons.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_02: If that, if they what they learned, they learned something very new about themselves and and now they wanna um they want to go off and do something different.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_02: You know, they had a big aha moment as a result of the experience in the and during the pandemic.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um but there's a lot of people that are leaving because their employers have not kind of come around to a new way, right?
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_02: They're kind of trying to snap back, and and they're like, nah, I I'm not gonna snap back.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um I would love to keep working here, but I'm not gonna snap back.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_02: I can't.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_02: I I'm I'm a new person now, right?
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_02: And um that just got my workflow and a workflow that frankly I believe is very, you know, 2030 ready, it's very digital ready, digital era ready.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so now we're starting to see a lot of employers really realize like, no, no, no, if we do, if we do push back, if we do try to fight um this forward movement and try to swing back to where we were before, um we're gonna lose all of our people.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_02: You know, um, and I don't necessarily think that that's good either.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I don't think mass exodus is is good for the economy, it's not good for the people.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_02: I I like I said, I hope that people are following their dreams and doing everything they're doing that's right for them, but but leaving because of um because of a lack of empathy for and on behalf of the companies for what their employees are going through and the way they want to work, um, that is wrong, right?
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_02: I think that we should prevent that.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm really hopeful that um we'll be able to work with um some organizations that really want to be, let's say, you know, spokespeople for the anti-great resignation that that really want to show in a big way, in a very public way, that no, no, we we're listening, right?
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_02: And we understand this is happening, we're gonna change.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_02: And it's gonna maybe take us a little while, but I think if they just express this commitment to to moving forward, I think they're you know those attrition rates will will improve.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I think that there'll be better companies for it.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's eat it's neat how I think billion minds kind of fits into this, I think, pretty unique category where you could uh have a very strong impact both on the individuals and the enterprise, which is which is not uh typical, you know.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_01: So so if if you empower the the people in the enterprise through the support of, and this goes back to your change management background, through the support of the enterprise.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_01: If people know the enterprises behind it and they're helping uh shepherd it along, that's great.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_01: But you also have this whole gig economy and individual uh folks that are having to manage it.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_01: So it's it's kind of cool.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think it's an awesome opportunity that that, you know, like you said, when you first started thinking about software, maybe wasn't in your mind uh when when when it all started, but it it it's weird how it comes back to it, right?
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_02: No, it's true.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it it's it's amazing, you know, the the the path that you take.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and it's been uh it's been a circuitous one at that.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_02: Uh but you know, it's look it's gonna sound silly when I say it out loud, so it's it's so obvious, but uh, people often forget that you know organizations are just a bunch of people.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_02: You know, so uh and so if you're an organization of 100 people and 100 people have that problem, well then yeah, it's an individual problem.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_02: You know, they need to be solved.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_02: You need to solve it at the individual level.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_02: Uh you know, these these types of skills, um, these 21st century skills, that they they should, everybody should have the right to have them, you know what I mean?
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um, to have the right to know how to do these things more effectively, to have a right to be you know as effective as they can be and make it very personal for them.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_02: And so from an organizational standpoint, um giving them the tools, the platform, like a billion minds, for example, it should be think of they should be thought of as uh as a benefit.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's a you're yeah, you know, that's you know, you know what I'm saying?
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_02: Like it's it's you want your employees to be happy, to be healthy, to be more personally effective.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_02: That you desire that, of course.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_02: Um, they desire that as well.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_02: And so rolling it out at scale or in an enterprise shouldn't be viewed as like what I said before.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_02: It's like some top-down uh uh infrastructure installation type of thing, thou shalt use this application or something like that.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_02: It should be viewed as we hear you.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you know, we we hear you.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_02: We we we see you're struggling, we get that, and we're going to try to arm you with the skills that are necessary so you can be the best you, and that's all we want from you.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_02: All we care about is you being the best you.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_02: And when you have a hundred people and a hundred people are the best versions of themselves, well, guess what?
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_02: You got a pretty kick-ass organization.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's a it's a cultural mindset shift that goes both directions.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's really cool.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so I know this is this this uh the idea here is kind of meet the founders.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_01: And we talked a lot about business, and we talked a lot about you know what billion minds is trying to do and how you got here, but uh maybe just spend the last couple minutes on you know your own personal journey.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_01: What do you like to do?
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_01: What kind of things are you balancing here?
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_01: And and uh, you know, how how are you gonna evolve knowing what you know now?
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_02: Well, yeah, it's I I say uh I'm I'm not just a co-founder of Billion Minds, I'm also a client.
• 36:29
  unknown: Yeah.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_02: You know, um yeah, I mean, look, I think um I'm on my own personal journey, just like everybody else is.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_02: I I I hope that um I can continue to load my life up and continue to you know try to work on getting an order so that I can learn.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_02: In many ways, it's what we say is you know, eating our own dog food.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and and so uh yeah, I'm immersed, I'm immersed in this.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, my family's immersed in in all of this, and and we're learning every day.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and uh, you know, I guess kind of shameless plug, I I would say um, if you've got any ideas, if you've got any wisdom, if you've got any, you know, things that have worked for you, um, you know, please reach out to us.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_02: You know, Ryan at Billion Minds, you know, send me an email.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_02: You know, we we want to try everything.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and we want to try everything with a diverse population so we can really figure out what the con the common denominators are that work for the most people.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um, learn how to personalize some of these things uh for either particular demographics or people with different psychographic characteristics.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um so you know, we're in it.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_02: You know, we're we're in it to experiment, to constantly learn and to constantly grow.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and that's kind of me in a nutshell.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_02: You know, so uh I I you know I want to learn how to race motorcycles.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_02: I just produced an album.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I I like to load my life up with a lot of stuff, and I want to keep on doing that and and and try to continue to find new and effective ways to manage all those things.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_02: That was another shameless plug, by the way.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_02: 19 beats for COVID-19 available on all streaming services.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_01: And incidentally, the uh composer of the theme song for the Way Too Busy podcast as well.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, that's right.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, it's it's weird how you start to uh settle into these things and find these these um these things that light you up.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's where uh you really have a keen sense of how important they are when you start stacking them up against each other and you start figuring out how you're gonna uh fill your day, especially when you know when your day is also not your own.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_01: You're you're beholden to your company, you're beholden to your family, you're beholden to you know, kids' activities, and and those kids' activities become part of your scheduling and and part of your consideration on a on a regular basis, too.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, you know, I I just find that uh we're at a very, very interesting junction around personal effectiveness, productivity tools, technology, and this, I guess, freedom born of the pandemic, which is yeah, we can be anywhere kind of too in ways that we never could before.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_01: So um it's yeah.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, look, I mean that not with yeah, notwithstanding what what what we're doing, uh I'm a hundred percent convinced that we're gonna look back at this decade, 2020 to 2030.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_02: Mark my words, uh, you know, we're gonna look back at this decade as um a huge turning point.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I mean, honestly, look, this is gonna sound a little embellished, but I mean, I think a huge turning point in human history, I believe it's that big.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and if technology continues to advance at the pace that it is, it has to be that.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that um the one thing that I'm truly hopeful that we can do as humanity, again, I know this sounds you know super esoteric, but um, is I hope that we keep being humans.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I mean, like if we if all we do is just become slaves to technology and you know, we're trying to uh compete with routers and out try to out route a router, uh, you know, we're not gonna win.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_02: And um, and the thing that we can do is uh is we can feel, you know, we can love, we can learn, we can, you know, we can uh use our brains to come up with new ideas and new creations, new machinations.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_02: You know, these these are things that as far as we know, machines will never be able to do.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_02: You know, you can't ever replace those characteristics of humanity.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_02: And so I think it's incumbent upon us over the next 10 years to think about what we want to be when we grow up as humans, you know, and start to plan for that now.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_02: And and that's again coming back to one of the reasons why this was so important for me uh and my co-founder and I to do now, not in 10 years from now, but now to to try to prevent you know humanity from going a path that is going to be less human, right?
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think if you if you read about AI and all of the futuristic thoughts around this, a lot of the best, brightest thinkers continue to stress the fact that we really have to look at still the ethic of the humans that program the AI and make sure those mind those mindsets are in the right spot.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_01: And and uh the creators of of these tools need to have that thought in mind.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_01: So I think it's really important to do that at a high level and and in some cases stand up at the front and and lead, lead those things.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_01: So uh I applaud I applaud you for taking the leap and for you know moving moving forward with with billion minds.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_01: I can't wait to see what happens next.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_02: I appreciate that.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_02: It's gonna be an incredible journey.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um, obviously, to try to impact a billion people is gonna take a billion people.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_02: So um, you know, obviously, Matt, your involvement and what we've been doing and just the these conversations and the you know helping us grow this community has been extremely uh beneficial for us because it's gonna take a community.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_02: So I thank you for that.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no worries.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_01: This has been fun.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_01: Ryan, uh, we'll catch up next time on the on the next uh the next podcast.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_01: But uh have a good trip and uh we'll we'll chat soon.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_01: Cool.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks, buddy.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_01: The way too busy podcast was presented and produced by me, Matt Neal, and was brought to you by Billion Minds.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_01: If you want to get in touch with us, tweet us at Rising Billion or email us at WayTooBusy at Billion Minds.com.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_01: Billion Minds creating practical tools for our way too busy lives.