We wanted efficiency. We got isolation.

Welcome back to the episode of the Startup Therapy Podcast. This is Ryan Rutan, joined as always by my friend, the founder, and CEO of startups.com. Will, Schroeder will, we're back and it has been a long minute. We normally push pause in December, but we took an extra couple of snow days in January and we're, we're finally back. It feels good. Yeah. Yeah, man, it's, it's been like almost two months. I was getting set up for this call and I was like, what's everything I need to do?

I kind of forgot about all this. And, uh, I've grown and shorn two beards since the last time we we played this game.

And how apropos, uh, that we're, we're gonna talk about today is that like we've optimized efficiency into our workflows and we've optimized things like human connection and talking to other people right out of it. You know, we got faster. But I think we also got lonelier and I'd love to make today about exploring how that happened, but then also about like how do we buy some humanity back on purpose?

At this point, when we were putting this article together, like, you know, for this podcast, I was thinking to myself, you know, we've been talking about remote work and you know, kind of like this, that AI marketplace and we are big proponents of it. A hundred percent we're also reasonable people. Yeah. And, and, and we're looking at it and we're saying, huh. And again, having been off for two months, right.

You know, again, we were off in, in December, we were off in January, and I was like, I don't even have the tools. Like, you know when, when you and I podcast, right? Yeah. I get to see you and talk to you, whatever. And obviously you talking throughout the week, but it's one of the few times in the week that you and I spend, you know, next to an hour together doing our thing. That's it. Right. I don't podcast with anybody else. I don't see the rest of our team whatsoever. Right.

That's exactly right. Right. Yeah. Other than a couple Zoom calls and this is our social time.

Yeah. And, and, and I think it's been years now since COVID, it's been like five years since, you know, the start of COVID. Yeah. And I think the novelty of being able to, to come downstairs in your pajamas and work is still great, but the part that comes with not talking to anybody else, like, like, uh, seeing a human presence that's not your family. Yeah. Or like. Days, weeks on end is starting to get gnarly and I think it is.

What's triggered it more for me is the amount of time that I'm spending with ai, which is now taking human interaction. Totally off the table. Dude, this is getting a little scary. Like this is not a good thing. How are you seeing it? A lot of times spent chatting with not a person, but kinda sort of feels like it at times. Right. Do you remember when you noticed like. In the name of productivity you had started subtracting people from your day.

Do you remember like there, was there a point at which it was like the balance kind of tipped and you're like, oh shit, like this is actually happening? Yeah, it's actually pre COVID. It's actually when we were all back in the office. Okay. When we all had all moved to Slack as our primary like chat communications tool. Yeah. Our office used to be so goddamn loud because it was a completely open office and so like to talk to chat with somebody, you had to chat with them.

You literally had to talk 'em. And then within, call it six months of moving to Slack, our communication was faster. Like you could talk to a whole bunch of people at the same time, but our office was like a library, right? You'd have no idea that all these people worked there because other than like a quick like giggle over like a meme or something like that, right? There wasn't a single word, and I was like, hmm. It doesn't feel right.

I remember a very specific moment at which I realized that we had turned the corner on something kinda weird. You remember our desks when we went to the open plan, our desk sat right beside each other. Yep. By a little column between us, but we could literally reach out and touch each other. Yep. Somebody walked up to my desk at one point and was like, Hey, do you have a couple minutes? And I had been sitting there silently for. 15 or 20 minutes, I'm sure. I don't remember.

They sat directly across. Yeah. So they were, they were staring at me and finally came over and said, Hey, do you have a couple minutes? And I said, yeah, I'm talking to Will. And they, I remember them like, they looked at you. They looked back at me and they're like, huh. Right. I was like, oh yeah, I sort of am and I'm not at the same time. And I remember that was the moment for me where I was like, okay, this is, this is a little strange. Hours on end and not utter a word.

And again, that's just where it started. And dude, it's gotten way worse.

Right? Way, way worse. And now we're not in an office together. And again, I'm spending, we'll dig into this. I'm spending four to five to six solid hours per day. Yes. Talking to GPT or you know, whatever, uh, chat interface I'm using. So I'm not even talking to humans anymore. Yeah. Now. It is wildly effective. It is wildly productive. But when I get up outta my chair at the end of the day and I go talk to my wife about how the day went, I'm like, huh.

I don't have like a single funny story to tell you, or a quip or, or anything else like that. There's one time GPT said like nothing, right? I gotta imagine if, if it's wearing on me, it's definitely got gotta be wearing on a lot of other people who never had those connections to begin with. Right? Yeah. So I think that one, one thing, maybe they don't notice it as strongly, but that doesn't make it any less dangerous, I don't think.

Right. So I, I, I was thinking about this the other day, like all of the early stage solo founders out there who are just literally on their own, right? There isn't another teammate to talk to. What does that look like? Right? So on one hand, I guess you could say, well, at least there's something. Thing to talk to now, but I think it's a big challenge. You know, and look, I have definitely talked about on the podcast, even when we left the physical office environment, right?

Specifically when I left and, and you know, it was before we were actually outta the office, but we were only in the office two days a week at that point. I left and, and went to Florida, and so I was physically outta the office. And one of the things that I noticed was, as a bit of an empathic introvert, being in an office meant overhearing lots of things and getting involved in lots of things. Yeah. And starting to carry emotional weight and stuff for a lot of other people.

And so there was this benefit to, to being outside. And I remember thinking at the time, I was like, man, I've optimized interruptions out of my and and emotional baggage outta my calendar. That's awesome. I also optimized. Connections straight outta my life, which is you don't feel that. You feel the benefit. Immediately. I felt the benefit in me. I was like, wow, this is, I have so much more energy now. I'm not drugged down by all these other side convos and all this other stuff.

And at some point you go, damn, those were actually. Pretty, pretty valuable, right? We've traded availability for true presence. I mean, we've traded messages sometimes not even to people for conversations, and we didn't really lose our teams, but we sort of quietly uninvited them, right? That's what I'm saying, man. And so I think the core of what we're gonna talk about today is like we've traded productivity for humanity. Or, or the other way around.

I guess it would trade up our, our humanity for productivity. And, and it blows my mind because I kind of didn't see all of it happening at once. And now I'm starting to see it happen. And I guess what's interesting is I'm watching, I think we all are watching the floodgates about to burst again, where AI's going and I'm like, shit. This is a problem. And again, you nailed it, Ryan. There's a lot of people that we help other founders that don't have a team of people. Right.

Or, here's an interesting one. You and I have a benefit that we've worked together for almost 15 years now. Yes. A very long time. And most of that time we were spent, you know, physically in an office, you could build those relationships. And a lot of other members of our team, the same thing. You know, we have very long histories with them. Yes, yes. And so I felt like we've had the benefit.

Of having established those, you know, interpersonal relationships and then kind of carried them into COVID and beyond. What if we had none of those? What if our whole team was all the people that we hired in the last year? Yeah, it would feel so disconnected. I can't actually imagine what remote first, like if you really never had that connectivity. Any anybody on the team that you've ever met with? Mm-hmm.

In person and or, or maybe you have, but like you haven't spent significant time with 'em. Like we, we played hockey, we worked out, we had lunch. Like we did all this stuff together as a team and I think that made remote less painful. I just correct when you start with remote and I get that maybe. That's, it just feels normal at that point. I'm gonna argue that it just isn't, it isn't normal and that your work product is not gonna be as good.

It's like, yeah, I can ship a dock in half the time now and I feel half as proud because nobody made, made it better with me, right? Like it's just, it's just me doing stuff now. Lemme challenge that a little bit. I think we're more productive. I think we get more shit done, right? I think so. Right? Oh, no, I, well, no, I'm not arguing that at all. I absolutely, yes, yes. I, we, we do things twice or more as fast than we used to. Right? Right. A hundred percent.

At the expense of this little thing called humanity, which by the way, like in the past, like decades and decades, you know, and centuries of building businesses wasn't necessarily a thing people talked about. 'cause it wasn't an issue, right? No, it was a foregone conclusion. It was, it was a necessary part of the puzzle. And so let's start to talk about how the hell we got here.

Sure. Because I think it's important to talk about how every time we make a decision in a race for a productivity, how humanity has the, the humanity factor that was never a factor before. Yeah. Has become not just a, a casualty, but maybe like. It ain't coming back. You know, and again, we'll talk about how to get it back, but like, let's talk about how we got here. Yeah, I agree with that.

I think it is a casualty and I think it could come back, but I don't think it's, I don't necessarily know that it's a natural cycle. I think that this is one of those things where it will take a very deliberate action. Right. So let's talk about, we got here, right? We, we all started racing towards productivity and efficiency. Mm-hmm. You know, slack replaced hallways, zoom replaced rooms. AI replaced the urge to even. Ask somebody something, right? Every time.

Holy hell, we high fived the shit out of each other, right when we did it right? Like I love Slack, right? I absolutely love Slack. And I'll say this, I love Slack as opposed to email. Like the only time I get an email from anybody in the company now is when they quit. Yep. Like email is the equivalent of a certified letter now, right? Yeah, it's exactly. Nothing good comes up, right? You never get a certified letter that says, we love you so much. You know, mom and dad, right? Like, yeah.

So it's like the worst possible. And so I only get an uh, an email Now, like I said, when something's horrible that said, I hated email because it was slow. It was, you know, and that was, you know. Yeah. People looked at email being faster, right. I hated email and Slack was like this perfect blend of when you just had a simple thing you needed to say to me, you could just say it, and it didn't become an email thread. Right? Yeah. And I loved it.

I loved how all of a sudden I was talking to so many other people because the, the cost of that touch, so to speak, was so low. Transactional time. Nearly zero. Exactly. But then all of a sudden, Ryan, who sits next to me, 12 to 14 hours a day, he and I have an exchange. We've talked all day, so to speak. We've communicated all day, I should say. Right. But we haven't said a single word to each other. That's what I could tell.

And you're saying the same thing that okay, maybe that's worth making that trade. Okay. Maybe, you know, maybe we're, we're getting more done so in in any of it, we missed the part where we lost our humanity because of it. We had plenty of other ways to like, you know, we're at lunches and stuff like that, so we had plenty of other ways to like recapture that touch point. We never got it back. We didn't. That's it. That's it. You know, we used to whiteboard together for hours.

Now we, we used to whiteboard for three. Right? Now I prompt for six. Right. And call that collaboration somehow. And I, I think one of the, the things where like, there's definitely, there's an increase in individual productivity, but one of the things that I'm seeing more and more, because of the amount of productivity we have, the amount of, let's say content or collaboration or thinking that we can crank out. It makes it really hard to catch everybody else up.

Yeah. One of the things that, because we're not doing this together, right? It used to be that we'd, you know, we'd whiteboard in a room together and everybody sort of had some, at least some overlap and shared context. Yeah. I'm finding it harder and harder because we've stripped the humanity out of this to make sure that everybody's on the same page and that we do have enough of that shared context that we understand it. Right when, right when you're not.

Part of the genesis, simply looking at the final outcome and like, okay, this is the distillation of a whole bunch of thought and effort on my part and, and chat GBT or Gemini or whatever. Yeah. When you're not part of that, it's you, you lose so much. To me, there's so much texture loss, and I don't just mean that in terms of like just the human component, but actually understanding and, and making it something that's useful to someone other than you has become harder, in my opinion.

Let's, let's continue this timeline.

Let's, uh, we go to remote work and we did remote work long before it was cool to do remote work, right? Yes. Like, like 15 years ago. Yeah. Yeah. Work from home Wednesdays. Yeah. Correct. Right. And it worked great because we were mostly interacting with each other, but I think you might have moved by the time we got to the point where work from home Wednesdays became work from home Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. We were already there. Okay. Okay. Got it.

Yep. We were already, yeah, we were already there. So we were only in the office two days a week. Right. And at that point, I could already feel it. I could already, I could already feel something missing also, for what it's worth back then, because remote work wasn't like a thing people were used to. Yeah. It was more tantamount to days off. Yeah. It wasn't as much, it was remote work sort of. Right. It was because office still was tantamount to work. Right? Yeah. Not office was tanto.

I'll do some work. Right. And so I also saw like on our Fridays, like our Fridays almost disappeared. We didn't increase productivity. That was just people notworthy. They just had a three day weekend. My point is, at least back then, we still had a touch point of humanity, right? We were still seeing each other, et cetera. Not soon thereafter, COVID hits in COVID. Yeah. And COVID force feeds everybody into remote work. And at first. I really liked it.

I'm gonna be honest, I loved not having to go to work. I, lemme put it this way, even after everything we're gonna say today, if you said tomorrow that in order to keep doing my job@startups.com, I would have to go back to an office, I would quit my job@startups.com. That's how much I don't ever want to go back to an office, right? This isn't me making a turn from all that we've said before in saying, you know, I really wanna go back to an office.

We're not about to send everybody an email that says, you gotta come back to an office, guys. Yeah. There's, there's any, the team that's listening. Don't, don't be scurred you, you're safe. I guarantee there is no return to work mandate coming from this company anyway. But in the first year, I think because COVID was such a, it was such an overlapping specter, right? You couldn't go anywhere. Right. So like, it felt like a sick day, except it lasted like two years forever. Yeah. Right, right.

So, so again, now we're all hopping on Zoom. Right. And Zoom becomes the thing. And at first it's new, it's novel. Like, hey, you could see everybody talk to everybody, et cetera. Yep. In the not too distant future it, it will wind up becoming the default. Like that's how you interact with people, a personal level. And then I started to see it because we were using it so much that Zoom, it was better than nothing. It was better than, you know, the slack interaction we had.

Sure. But it was hard to persist like nobody wanted to be on a Zoom for hours and hours on end. Oh yeah. Zoom fatigue was a very real thing. Correct? Right. And at some point it became a liability, right? Yeah. It was like there's something about being stuck on camera that drains you. I mean, the phone is kinda the same thing, but dude, I can be on Slack 14 hours a day. I don't even think about it.

So there was actually some super interesting research around this that said that being on a phone would actually be significantly easier for people because one of the things that we, we do when we can visually engage sort of with a person, yeah. We're built to, to look for all these additional non-verbal cues. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And body language, all these things that.

When you have these little boxes instead of actual people in a room or you can't see the entire body, our body, we are mentally, we're still looking for this stuff and we can't find it. Ah, and so that's actually a huge part of where the zoom fatigue came from. Some really fascinating research around this time, and I think this is important to the folks listening. We had launched our founder group's product that was you. Our ability to be able to get eight people in a room and.

Talk about stuff we were dealing with, right? Remember in 2019 when that was gonna be an in-person product? I mean, god damn man. Like COVID was like, rethink that one. The launch date for that product, for a national launch in every city was, I remember this specifically, March of 2021. Yes. Yep. Like the worst. Nope, the worst not happening. So we moved it to Zoom and the idea was we'll be able to have the same interactions, but we'll do it over Zoom and it never materialized it.

Everybody tried it. Everybody tried it, right? And it worked zero. It turns out that the in-person, uh, aspect of it is so much different. Like the texture of it is so much different, right? Yes. We got through COVID and all of a sudden remote work became like tried and tested. Right? And again, I'm a huge fan of remote work. So same. This isn't me making an argument against it. What I am gonna say is we once again chi that away at our humanity. A hundred percent.

We removed friction, but we also accidentally removed quite a bit of meaning and interaction at the same time. But I'll say this, but at least we were still interacting with each other. Yes. Like yes. Which brings us to the final straw.

GPT shows up and I'm using GPT universally to to mean all chatbots or AI in general, and all of a sudden we're all enamored by it, right? We all jump on it, we're solving problems with it, we're doing cool stuff with it, whatever, and all of a sudden I look up and I realize I've been on GPT for five straight hours at the expense of talking to a single human. Now, dude, I am wildly productive on this thing, right? I've never been more productive at the expense Yes. Of any level of humanity.

And I'm looking down the barrel of this gun man, and I'm like, this is not gonna get better. It's terrifying. Let me level up on that for a second, because I found myself a couple weeks ago having built out a bunch of automations and using multi-model chat. I was watching some chatbots talk to each other. For like three hours. I wasn't even participating. I set it up and I hit run. Yep. And then I literally sat and it, it's like I was watching CNN or, or no C-span.

I was just watching stuff play out. Right. I was just watching people have conversations. Yeah. Man. And then I, I stopped and I'm like, what is happening? Right. Like I'm now no longer looking out and imagining dystopia. I'm, I'm literally sitting in it. Right. And so again, I get up at the crack of dawn, right. You and I talk who are in very different time zones. Oh yeah. What are we, six, six hours apart?

Yep. So if, if I'm up at four or 5:00 AM uh, like today and I'm pinging you, what time would it be? It's, eh, 10 some. We usually pop on between 10 and 11 my time. Right. And you and I have great chats in the morning. You know, it's kinda like before everybody else wakes up, you know? It's great. Yes. And I realize that's becoming more and more the last time we talk, I mean like on a consistent basis. Yes. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a lot of dialogue at that point, right?

Like if you look at our slacks, there's probably. A hundred to 200 messages in that period. Yep. And then the rest of the day maybe has 20, bro, we're right back where we started. We're sitting next to each other without communicating a single word in this case, because all of that extra dialogue has now been consumed by GPT. Right. Yeah. I'm having endless conversations with GBT. Again, if you look back at those timestamps.

You know, when you get past the wee hours of the morning, all my time stands for in GPT and I've got so many parallel conversations going, there's no way I could do anywhere near the level of what I'm doing. And I know you're the same with a human. Yeah. And it's phenomenal. My productivity is phenomenal. Right. But I no longer talk to humans when I'm doing that. Yeah, right. And I don't have a cooler way to say it. That is wildly terrifying. That is wildly terrifying.

It's a cost we didn't model for at, at all, right. We, you know, but it's new. We understood, I guess, look, speed and productivity had had a price tag. What we didn't look at was that the invoice line reads isolation. Right. So like that's where we're at now, and I think we, we look at some of the things that. I would've even considered inefficient before and just sort of things that I was happy to have go away.

Like all those little side interactions that I felt were just weighing me down and wearing me out, and man, laughter was never an inefficiency. Not that I ever was against laughter, but like it was a glue. I didn't account for what it was. Right? Yes. There were times where it interrupted, or like, yes, sometimes we interrupted people's work with things like our NBA jam cabinet playing that thing at four 30 instead of five 30.

And it did feel, it did feel like an interruption to work, but man, it was part of the fabric. It was super important. You know something that's really funny about everything we talk about here is that none of it is new. Everything you're dealing with right now has been done a thousand times before you, which means the answer already exists. You may just not know it. But that's okay. That's kind of what we're here to do.

We talk about this stuff on the show, but we actually solve these problems all dayLong@groups.startups.com. So if any of this sounds familiar, stop guessing about what to do, let us just give you the answers to the test and be done with it.

Once I got into GPT, a lot of what I'm doing now is I'm saying to myself, well, if I can get this resolved in GPT, then I don't have to, uh, bother one of my coworkers. Yes. Right. Our CTO uh, posted something in Slack a couple hours ago and said, here's a new version of cel, how it's gonna normalize, like how it communicates to other ais. And I had a question for him about like, like, how is that different than what we've been doing in that platform before?

Yeah. And I was like, well, if I ask him, then I'm gonna be taking up time. He could otherwise, you know, be writing code. So I'm gonna take its GPT, uh, where I can also feel less stupid. It's that and do there. Right, right. It's that thought about it. Go ask two hours ago judgment. Right? Yeah. And I thought about it and I'm like, okay, maybe he didn't wanna answer that question for me. Right. Or maybe conversely, maybe he wanted talk about, maybe he didn't, that's why he posted.

Yeah, maybe he'd rather you have his answer so that he also knows you have an answer to that. Yep.

This is one of the things like we're all absorbing information and generating stuff so fast that it's hard to keep up with what anyone else is doing and what they know and what they don't. Yep. And it's creating some real. Danger in my opinion, man, like used to be, you know, you said it now, like you'll just go GPT it yourself, but like used to be that old the retort, right? Let me Google that for you. Yeah, right. Right.

Now it's like, let me, let me go chat GPT that for you, you know, because, because at this point what can't you go and find out at least a reasonable answer for an answer damn near nothing and 80% answer at least. Yep. Right. And I thought about that and I am like, shit, that's yet another thing that's gonna cause me to not have an interaction with him. Yeah. And again, I say this kind of facetiously, maybe that's the best thing he's ever heard.

He wants to hear less of me and I could accept that. But you know, we're going back to this cost we didn't model for. Dude, I'm starting to get a little anxious about this because I'm thinking of how many things. Let me reverse it that he's not asking me, right? Yeah. But I do wanna talk to my, I do want those questions brought to me, right? Yep. And I'm like, shit, think about this. If I have a dumb question, okay. It at least in invokes some dialogue.

Which can also also lead to other things, honestly, it often does. But if I'm a 25-year-old person in a, in an organization, and I'm now afraid to ask questions because I can just GPT and kind of be quiet about it, think of how much interaction the highers up aren't getting with me. Yeah. Yeah. A teaching moment. I'll give an example.

A, a person, you and I both know who I've been working with, uh, on my house, right? Uhhuh convincing him to start a business, right? And every time we get together, he's telling me like, basically he's running the whole thing through GPT, like all of his decision trees and everything else like that. Yep. Which, you know, I, I can't knock, but he'll come to me and he'll explain to me like what the outcome of that conversation was. And I'll be like, damn, dude, that's like entirely wrong.

Like, like you were completely led astray by a wildly overzealous AI that sounded convincing as hell, but none of that is true. You know what it reminds me of? Yeah. It reminds me of when college students used to come to us and say, this is what my professor said. Uh, and I'm like, that is entirely wrong. Told to you by a very well-meaning person, right? Yeah. Well intended. But they haven't left the classroom long enough to remember what it's like to build a business. Never done this.

They knew in the first place. Yeah. So that's here nor there. But again, this behavior. Of me going to a non-human for stuff Yeah. Is robbing us of interactions. Yep. But here's, here's the trick, but it makes so much more sense for me to do that.

It makes so much more sense for me to go to GPT and ask the question, and I'm starting to go, well, it also makes sense for the rest of my team to go to GPT to ask the question, which means I'm not getting involved, which means I don't have either a teaching moment or a say in the matter or anything else like that. And I'm like, oh. Shit. That's a problem.

Yeah. You know, there, there's a, there was a little of a parallel I thought of here, which is that like, and look, I'm not judging anybody's parenting style, but like we've been fairly di device restrictive. Yeah. And I remember like being out with our kids and like our kids be a little noisier. We'd have to do a little more work to get 'em to settle in and eat dinner. We're out somewhere, look across and there's a, there's a family of, of, of five.

Where the kids are being perfectly quiet 'cause each one of them is looking into a device on the table. A hundred percent. Yep. That was easier. Really efficient. Right? And it keeps the, but it does the same kind of things, right? Strips out that, that humanity strips out those interactions and, and I think it's, it's dangerous. There's something else too, and I think we've talked about this on another podcast episode Will, but there's a big difference between you and I using.

GPT to, to work through things that were already outright experts and just really experienced people in Yeah. Right. And the 22, 23, 20 4-year-old just getting an answer from it. They have nothing to qualify it against. And I, and I, I really worry that we're gonna lose something really important. And I was thinking about a really specific example. Where you get to some level of conviction. Mm-hmm.

I think that one of the things that, that these outcomes can lack as you're getting information back from a model is conviction. I remember one of the, the best lines I ever wrote, it ended up being our, our highest performing ROAS line, uh, from a LinkedIn ad ever happened over by our lunch table. Remember the lunch table? We had the massive whiteboard next to it? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. In, at the end of the room there, uh, conference table, but it wasn't in the conference room.

It was one just at the end by the entrance. I, I wrote a couple lines up on the, on the, uh, on that board, and then I was asking people to bring their laptops over and just like, Hey, I want you guys to scroll your LinkedIn feed and tell me what you're seeing. And everybody started kinda going, oh, okay. Like we came to this conclusion together.

That there was a lot of polished business graphics and a lot of really formal talk and all this stuff, and so we decided to do the, it's the napkin ad, right? Yeah. That's where that came from. Yeah.

Yeah. And that came from other people rolling their eyes at it, beating it up a little bit, pushing around, and then all of us, everybody kind of going, okay, I see where this is going. The conviction that came from that. Was something really interesting that had I gotten the same answer from a model was like, do this for these reasons, it wouldn't have felt the same. Right. And so I think that there is something else to that human piece that even if the information was exactly the same, yeah.

The way we receive it, the way we process, the way we feel about it can be entirely different. Yeah. And to your point, like I miss having those moments with people. I miss, like yes, I want my team to know things on occasion. I also want it to come from me because that binds us, that brings us together in a different way. If they come to the same conclusion without me, they came to that conclusion without me. Right.

And I think part of that, Ryan, that's less the team and just more of a bunch of mercenaries, is what teachers used to retort. When people said, why do I need to learn this? I've got a calculator. Yeah. I mean, it was like, this will give me the answer, so why do I need to know the math behind it? Yep. And you know, the teacher, and usually fatally would explain because the math behind it is how you understand what the answer is supposed to be. Yes. Right.

Just getting the answer isn't what it's, it reminds me of too, what I would imagine professors, college professors or, or any teacher would be trying to tell their students fatally, uh, right now, which is, I understand that all of you can go into GPT and write a book report. Or a term paper or whatever. I, I understand you, like you, you can just use a calculator, right?

But understand the whole point of you being here wasn't to get the output, it was to get the input right, so you understood the material. Right. I look at it with our team where this goes back to, you know, when we'll talk about this kind of bringing back the humanity. I'm gonna have to start realizing that yes, our team can GPT it, Google it, kind of thing, right? But it's my job to make it so they don't have to.

It's my job to be able to say, let me explain my thought process, or let me explain kind of how we get here so that you understand the math behind the answer. This is the first time I've ever had to do that. It's weird, but it's it's real, man. It is. So here's what, this is where we are, right? This is, we find ourselves at a crossroads.

Yeah. Uh, or maybe we're already past a little bit when need to, we need to talk about how do we, how do we reverse things a bit? So how do we bring humanity back, right? Like, what is it, how do we add human ROI back to the roadmap in like a really, really deliberate way. I think the first thing is to be honest, realizing that like we got a problem. Yeah, for sure.

It was a little bit different when we all went remote work and it was like, oh yeah, just put people in, in an offsite or like put people like, you know, uh, work at a, a coworking facility or something. Yeah. Yeah. And we could look at it like, well, problem, no people in office or Right. You know, people out of office, uh, solution, people in office. Right. Like that was the thing. Yeah. And you're seeing kind of that, um, that caveman response. At huge companies now. Right?

And these, these are people that I absolutely like, admire, like Jamie Diamond from Chase, right. Incredible, incredible mind. And his whole thing is like, Hey, we're going all going back the office 'cause we get more stuff done. Do I think that's the answer? No. Do I think that guy's a genius? Yes. I say this to say certainly people are taking in that caveman approach, right? No office, bad office. Good. Yeah, I get it. What I'm saying is that was the easy version of this. Right? Right, right.

We're now doing a version where there's no human at all, even if you're in an office. Right. Because we've already proven that you can sit right next to somebody and talk to them without letting a word pass or any actual human interaction occur. You bet. And I think now that really, because AI is, is the final step in this where you're just taking humans out of it altogether.

I think we have to start going, dude, like this isn't okay. Like as managers. Ryan, this is a whole new skillset again. Yeah. It, it goes back to I don't need to teach math anymore because everybody's got calculators and you've gotta be of the mindset that just getting the answer isn't what I'm here for. Like, I also need to teach people how we arrived there. So let's say that, that we're thinking about a new product we're gonna build.

I can brainstorm with GPT all day long and have no input from everybody. And produce a requirements document. And that's cool. Like I, that was the most time efficient way I could get that done. But what did I lose in that process? I lost the buy-in. Everybody that would've been involved. Yep. Right. I lost somebody raising their hand and say, Hey, that's a stupid idea. And the challenge, right?

The pushback, obviously, you know, most AI are incredibly han, which to me like that goes back to what I was saying before about conviction, right? That's part of where conviction comes from. It's not just people agreeing, it's people disagreeing and then realizing why you still think you're right, right? That's where conviction comes from, and it's an important part of the thought process. That absolutely doesn't occur any of my. My chat interactions with GPT or other.

Okay. So, so I'm, I'm gonna actually use that as a, as a great comparison. So you fly into town, ed flies in, or you come from Spain? Ed comes from Canada, yep. You know, like in the team in Columbus, everybody gets together. Right. And we sit in my living room and we go over the product development together. Yeah. Right. Over a course of a few days. Right. And how pumped were we coming off that? Yeah. Right.

Yep. No way on God's green earth that was ever gonna happen in a Slack chat. Ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, every two pages of product discussion generated by chat GBT enjoy. Yeah. Like, oh, I can't wait. Because, and again, that was like a really compressed period of time. You guys were only in town for so long, you know, we had a lot to cover. Unfortunately, we just motored through it.

But, you know, we really came up with an entire vision and stepped forward for the company that everybody contributed to. Everybody was bought in, and more importantly, everybody was excited about. Again. Yeah, buy-in and ownership. You can't, if you're just reading the requirements doc that was generated and handed to you, like there's no buy-in, there's no ownership, there's no, there's no sense of participation. Right. It's just. Executional work at that point, it becomes transactional.

You bet. So then guess what they're gonna do? The obvious thing to do would be, all right, let me have GPT go execute this for me. Perfect. So, but other aspects of that, this concept of not having the interactions, realizing the interactions are fundamental aspect of, of our humanity. The efficiency that we gain has a real cost that as managers, you know, as, as leaders of companies, we have to replace. For sure. Right?

And, and, and maybe some of that replacement is, I use AI where appropriate, but I also realize that at some point the use of AI is gonna cost me all the buy-in from my team. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Or from your standpoint as the CMO, you can say, I know I can put together this entire plan by myself in ai Yep. But without anybody else chiming in on it. One, I could be wrong like we've been talking about.

Yes. Right. I could, I could have missed something, um, or gotten like, really, you know, high on my own supply about this concept without considering a really basic fact. Or because you don't have buy-in on it. All the other like levers that you need in order to orchestrate this are being put in front of people who don't care about it. That's it like kind of matters. Or when you have the buy-in, you have shared like consequence.

If your campaign doesn't work and everybody bought in on it, they're like, shit. But if you're the only one that presented it and no one else had any input and you fuck it up, that's just Ryan's problem. That's just it. I mean, technically all of our problems, but like, you know what I mean? It ain't the same. Yeah. You know what's funny is like we're, we're mostly talking about fairly transactional stuff, like content producing things at campaigns. Yeah. Whatever.

You get into things like the, some of the, the softer stuff, which are the hardest, right? Like what the really hard calls in a founder, like I don't having to, having to let. Somebody go having to wind down the company, right? Should we take on investment? There's all of these other things that are like these really big tough, hard decisions that founders have to make.

And look, the hardest calls are always still gonna be ours, but man, it feels like they land a little softer when someone else hears it land. Right? Agreed. When, when it's just ours. And also like I, I get really worried that we're losing the ability to thought process. Mm-hmm. Right? We're losing the ability to kind of sit with stuff because we don't have to. We don't have to sit with anything anymore. I can immediately have something, process it. Right.

There's no more like, you know what's funny? I have done this. I used to, I used to have a notebook beside the bed. Right? And when I would wake up with one of those thoughts, that just wouldn't go away. Yeah. I'd write it down. Then I'd leave it until the next morning, try to get it outta my head. What do I do now? Throw that shit into GPT. Yep. Right? Yep. Partially, this is a way to capture it, but agree partially is a way to begin to process it, right?

Yep. Which takes away just sitting with something. And I think there's a, there's a real danger in that. Yes, there are certain things that it will just, it'll, it'll help me crank stuff out, I can help me brainstorm, help me do a lot of things. Um, but I think we get into some of these bigger, harder decisions, which are the best and worst part of being a founder. There's a much, much bigger danger. That's where my head is at. Right?

I, I keep thinking to myself, how do I replace the humanity in this? Right? Yeah. How do I re replace the process that brought the humanity, because this thing's scary, right? Yeah. Again, my efficiency is at an all time high in over 30 years of being a founder, and this is the first time I've ever seen a consequence to efficiency. In the past it was always efficiency. Good. You know, consequence zero pretty much. Yeah, exactly right. Consequence was maybe the cost of the tool, right? Correct.

That would create that efficiency and now I'm kind of like, damn, I could do all of this in a vacuum in my connection to my team become zero and, and you know, I've been talking about how it affects the team. Lemme talk about how it affects me. Like how it affects me, me personally, when you go hours and hours and hours and like if we extrapolate days and days and days without really ever having conversations, like any meaningful conversations with anybody, that stuff messes with your head.

It does, and I say this, we have a lot of luxuries because of our, the stage of this company that most founders don't have. We have the luxury of being, being around almost 15 years. A tremendous amount of personal history among the team, you know, and trust, et cetera. And so I don't have to build those things 'cause we already built them.

But if I'm a solo founder and I've got maybe, you know, two people that were working with me through Upwork or something right, you know, super far away that I've never met, I was already lonely. Right, but this is taking it to the nth degree, I think as a founder, which again is a very, and, and it's not like specific to the founder, it's specific to everybody on the team, but I'm just gonna speak from the founder's perspective. As a founder, it's already a lonely job.

Like a super lonely job to begin with, and now to take the human interaction out of it all together. That is just not healthy, that I don't see any version where that goes. Well. I don't see any version where people, people are like wildly happy about it. Unless you were the world's, it was already introvert as you said. It was already isolating and we, we kept the isolation, but we deleted the antidote, which were the other people that we would've been forced to communicate with.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, yeah, I mean, we're dialing that up significantly. Ironically, you know, at a time in, in, in the world where it's never been easier. Right. Access is not the problem. Right. We can find people that would be really worth talking to. Yep. And yet we have all these reasons why. It'd just be more efficient not to.

I'm of the opinion right now that we're going to see a massive swing the other direction almost by nature, where all of us, and I'm not specific to like startups or anything else like that, all of us are gonna start to place a massive premium on human interaction. Right. I just, I feel like this is, you know, one guy's prediction, but I feel like the world is starting to like not up like a muscle. Yep. And it's starting to hurt.

I think social media for as much as it was supposed to connect us, disconnected us in a tremendous way. Right, because it replaced that human interaction. Yes. Which we thought like if I have lots and lots of convos with all of my friends, technically we're talking. But if none of those wind up being like actual human interactions, it's not the same thing. And I think at some point I also get numb to it, which is even worse.

Like again, and, and this is you and I coming from perspective, having lived a very different version of life. I mean, yeah, I didn't have a cell phone until I was in my twenties. How did you make it? And that was just a phone that you had to push the keys, you had to remember the number, push the buttons to call someone, and then you could only hear their voice.

Right. Like I think about the, the, the poor digital natives and it's like they don't even necessarily know what they've, what they've lost. And I think that brings a greater responsibility on those of us who, who do to protect the humanity in all of this. Yeah. Yeah. Because we may be the, the only ones who actually really, truly still understand what it was worth. I agree. And here's what I think. I think Ryan, startups of the future.

You know, you know, we're all building kind of these next generation of startups. I think one of our greatest like cultural draws is going to be how we exemplify humanity. Human connection. Yeah. Right. And again, I don't just mean in person. I hope so. Because I feel like that's always been one of the tenets of the startup, right. Think of the way we described it, the large soulless corporation. Right? Yeah. Like, and that's becoming true. Like the worst thing in the world to me would be.

That description also applies to a two person startup company. We're a small soulless corporation. Yes, very small, soulless individual. Yeah. Awful. I genuinely believe that, and this applies to our own company, et cetera. I think our ability to craft a new culture. That triples down on humanity. Yeah. That recognizes that all of these productivity boosts that we've had have come at a tremendous cost and that the people that work for us, with us, et cetera, are lonely as hell. Right.

Just, yes, a hundred percent at a very fundamental level in our ability to engage and bring them back in. You know, make them feel heard, make them feel connected, make them feel important again. Right. And I just mean on an ego level, I mean just at a human level. Sure. Sure. Especially for what, what we're about to go through right with, with what AI is about to do, I think is gonna be the number one premium.

I think people are like, yeah, there's, there's lots of jobs I can get if jobs still exists. Uh, there's lot, lots of jobs I can get, but I'm looking for a company with soul. I'm looking for a company that values humanity in a way that. Kind of got pulled away. And I think for all of us as, as startups, as founders, as people, if we can start to recapture that humanity, we are gonna be a, the kind of startup that all of us actually want to go and work for. In a world where none of that exists.

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