Ep. 145- Reimagining Innovation with Costa Michailidis

This is the You Winning Life Podcast, your number one source for mastering a positive existence. Each episode we'll be interviewing exceptional people, giving you empowering insights, and guiding you to extraordinary outcomes. Learn from specialists in the worlds of integrative and natural wellness, spirituality, psychology, and entrepreneurship so you too can be winning life. Now here's your host, licensed LMFT 🎗️, marriage and family therapist, certified neuro-emotional technique practitioner, and certified entrepreneur coach Jason Wasser.

Today's guest is Costa Mikalidis, who began his life as a creative misfit, using his imagination to spur havoc, laughter, and the occasional unintended success. Some of his recent adventures have included working for NASA scientists to reimagine the search for life beyond Earth, designing innovation tournaments inside of a Fortune 500 company to seed innovation projects, speaking at the United Nations in New York as part of the first-ever TEDx event there, working with a group of cybersecurity experts, including one of the original creators of the internet— not Al Gore— to make recommendations to the Obama administration. And that's just the who's who of some of the things he's done. Some of the most impactful and beautiful work he's done has been with college students, young entrepreneurs, and nonprofit organizations. His passion, and by some coincidence, his job, is to help people be more creative so they can solve new and meaningful problems in the world. And he takes great joy and pride in the skillful priming of the human brain and the human heart for creative breakthroughs. He is the co-founder of Innovation Bound, and it's joined a team of academics, entrepreneurs, consultants, and other creativity and innovation experts just like him to help accelerate innovation efforts in science, business, and beyond. All right, y'all, welcome back. This is another exciting conversation I'm very much looking forward to. And, and as you heard in the, in the introduction, we're going to be hanging out for the next little bit with a person who is a master of innovation, of creativity, of problem solving.. And we're going to get into all of that and how we can make it practical, applicable, and usable. And you don't need to be a multimillionaire in a lab with some big think tank in order to do it. So, Costa, thanks for hanging up— hanging out, not hanging up. Don't hang up. Thanks for hanging out.

Jason, happy to be here. I will accept that intro as long as we accept the caveat that mastery is a process.

Correct.

Mastering innovation over time.

Yeah, I actually just had a conversation with my last client about that a little bit ago, of the law of compounding interest when it comes to personal development. And, you know, the idea of looking back upon periods of time, but knowing at the same time what you want to accomplish with clarity and specificity— specificity, excuse me— and also knowing that like there has to be some patience. So it has— it's like that balance of like on one side, I know I want it, I got to be there's some urgency, and the urgency has to be countered with a little bit of patience. So when it comes to mastery, I definitely agree with you on that, on that statement.

Is this James Clear by any chance, author of Atomic Habits?

One of the many ways I've heard that be expressed is James Clear. But I think my own personal realization of that a lot of people do is the negative talk they give to themselves about what you haven't done, or how you haven't done it, or that you tried something and it didn't work out in a specific way and then dogging ourselves versus, you know, what's— what, what, what is the mindfulness? What is the gratitude? What is the patience? What is the process? Are you really clear? And so I know when it comes to, you know, let's, let's first start applying that to—

there's a word, not to jump on the first tangent, go for it. The idea of, um, of negative self-talk is really interesting. And my first experience was with it was in, um, was in college, young man, 19, uh, and there was a lot of sort of self-judgment. And I think my brother pointed out to me, I don't know, but it was like, oh my God, I shouldn't have said that, that was dumb. It said you get this like feedback after every tiny human interaction, every like every little thing. There's like a little coach on my shoulder who's really hypercritical. And, um, I tried this technique. This was, uh, something I read in the book The Pilgrimage by Paulo Coelho. And interesting book. Anyway, talks about someone who goes on a pilgrimage and has a variety of different coaches along the way and so forth. And one person talked about cruelty and self-cruelty. Anytime you have a cruel moment, take your, take the nail of your next finger and drive it into the cuticle of your thumb, just tiny bit of sharp pain and just like punish the cruelty. I don't recommend this. It's a wacky, I mean, this is not the psychological way.

The self-flagellation.

I was like, all right, let me try this. Like, cause I don't like the critical coach that sits on my shoulder all day. Let me give him a slap every time. And see if we can get him to shush a little bit. And it was weird because I do this and the first thing I notice is my cuticle's a mess. And so self-mutilation is kind of a bad idea. But the next thing I noticed was that I was suddenly smiling for no reason. I was just happy. I was just taking a subway ride in New York with a smile on my face.

Wow.

And it's just like, "Wait, what am I smiling about? What just happened?" It's like nothing. You just removed this layer of yap, yap, yap cruelty that you were wearing all the time. And that was a really profound experience. And again, done it in a crude fashion, read in a book copy. These are not the right techniques, but figuring out a way to either adapt or remove the negative self-talk is absolutely a worthy endeavor. And it's an endeavor. It takes time to do, and you end up having to do it every 8 or 9 years because you find new judgments come in from new places. So it's not a once and forever, but it— that lasted years. And then I went through it again a different way. But absolutely worthy endeavor.

Well, I see it as peeling away layers of the onion, right? And you think you think you got it, and then you got that little thin, thin membrane, and they're like, oh, I didn't even realize that was there after I already cut the onion. So that you're right, I think, right, this is a process of cycling. And I can't remember the exact number when it comes to science on this, but it talks about our cells, all of our cells. Being completely regenerated every 7 to 9 years. So the only thing that stays consistent with us, even though we're looking at ourselves and like we don't really change when we look at ourselves in the mirror, but our internal makeup and chemistry and biochemistry is constantly evolving and changing. But we don't take that into consideration of like the old me and the new me versus always looking at, well, I screwed that up back then, or exactly like that, versus, well, I have a mindset where I can take a retreat for a week every 7, 8, 9 years and just realize what I want to work on and realize what I've accomplished and maybe do that even more frequently if, you know, that's— yeah.

I really like that cycle length. The 7 years, somewhere in that ballpark, is a really nice cycle length because you can save up quite a bit of money for it. So over 7 years, you can actually pull together a decent budget. And if you want to really take a month off and work on yourself, you can make it happen if you're saving up for 7 years. It's a period of— it's a cycle long enough that if you make meaningful change, it probably takes 7 years to really gather the fruits of that labor. Like, if you're going to lay down new habits, the first year is really habit formation. If you're going to do some new learning, it's going to take time to do the learning before you get to apply it. Um, so 7 years, somewhere in there, 9 years, it's really nice. And what you can accomplish in a decade will absolutely blow you away. It's insane what you can do in that amount of time. And each of us get— we get like 3 good ones. Like, it takes time to mature or whatever, and then you got like 3 good decade cycles, and then you gotta start retiring.

It's as if you literally were on that session, like, hanging out on the Zoom in the back. Like, I mean, it's— no, it's beautiful because, because, I mean, what I really want for people who are listening to this, right, this is the podcast, is what I get to talk about in sessions with my clients and, and distilling it the experts that I'm bringing on as guests. So more people can hear this information versus working one-on-one with me. So it's kind of like my, my reverse hack of like, you know, can you get some really valuable, powerful information out of this? And this idea of looking at things from a decade perspective, like, in a way, we have to practice that forced positive, forced, right? And I'm really saying it forced because we usually assume force is a negative thing. But that forced positive to see what we've actually accomplished from that lens of, of gratitude. Because, you know, when you talk about— I was watching your, your TED Talk at the UN, and it was only— what was it, 2 years after, right? Or how many years was after 9/11? It was, it was 12 years after.

It was, it was one of the anniversaries because it was on September 11th, but it had been— so that was 2013. It had been, um, up 12 years, 12 years after.

And now I'm looking back at it and being like, man, like, can we listen? Like, is that it? Like, that's a TED Talk that people could be listening to every day today with the chaos of what's going on and how quickly it is to forget about compassion and other and, and, and the rising tide raises all ships mentality. And unfortunately takes such a catastrophic moment, negatively forced pressure Yeah, absolutely.

We need, um, those things. Compassion. I think responsibility is another one. Um, uh, whatever reverses extremism— I don't know, I don't claim expertise on this, but whatever that is, we need it now. Yeah, um, in a preventative fashion, because if we keep going the way we're going, things are going to get worse before they get better, which is probably going to happen. Like, I'm just wearing my analytical hat for a second.

Correct.

So I'm preparing to— I'm expecting worse before it gets better on the global stage. That said, I really hope we don't go much further before we turn around and go, hey, it's time for compassion, responsibility, and rebuilding.

I know. I agree with you. It's the idea of how much— have we hit our critical mass of rock bottom as this country? And I also playfully call it our really awkward and uncomfortable puberty stage. Because we're still a young nation and we don't really know, right? And as Hamilton says, we're young, scrappy, and hungry, right? So, um, but it's— I do see it as an awkward puberty stage and where we don't have an idea of what our true identity is, where it's really uncomfortable and in who we are and what we are, and, and we're facing some unhappy, unhealthy truths, so to speak, right? If universal truths are on you or personal truths. But I think that when with innovation That's— you got to break a lot of— you got to break some stuff in order for it to hopefully have something new come out of it.

There's a variety of connections here. Yeah, sometimes something like when you look at a culture or a team or a group of people and they're using the same words, but they mean totally different things to different people or different subgroups. That's a pretty good indication that there's miscommunication or that we've grown in different directions or that there's work to do around coming together and compassion and understanding. On the innovation front, the semantics get really blurry. And so we were just running a lab last week.

It's—

we still have the virtual piece of it going on. So we did a 2-day in person. Now we're doing a virtual, and this is with a university, and there are a bunch of engineers, and they're being asked to develop innovative research ideas. And they've just done the thing— we're kind of in the middle now— they've just done the thing that I've seen so many times. They retreat to safety. So these really epic innovative ideas, and then we've asked them to sort of explore the obstacles. How would you approach this? We're asking them to get into the weeds now.. And they've come back and they've presented their projects and really cool stuff around like, um, how do you recycle EVs? Like all the EVs are coming on board in 10 years. They're, they're gonna need junk, the equivalent of junkyards. And if they're actually junkyards and we have a bunch of giant batteries decaying in junkyards, that's gonna be bad. So how do we get ahead of that? So really cool ideas. And then, um, on the implementation side, all of their coaches, cuz they have coaches for the week, they were all like, What happened? They're just like, they're not as ambitious. We had really great ideas and now they're all kind of like, yes, this is called the retreat to safety. Everybody kind of does it. And you need to encourage them. It won't fix itself. You need to encourage them to not retreat to safety. Keep thinking big, stay the course. You ever seen that meme infographic thing where like there, there's two people, they're like miners with little pickaxes and they're mining through and one of them's just getting started. Full of energy, and the other one's like almost to the end, exhausted. He's thrown his, you know, shovel over his shoulder and he's walking away. Meanwhile, he's like that close, like spread thin, crushed from getting to a pile of diamonds or whatever it is. And so the first attitude that I find among innovators who are successful is never give up. And we all learn this. Everybody has an opportunity to learn this in life. Anybody who's done a sport Anybody who's done anything challenging, anyone wanted to be good at throwing darts at a dartboard, it didn't matter. Just whatever the thing is that you got passionate about, that no matter how difficult it was or how challenging it was, you kind of kept going. And if everyone's willing to take the critical, you know, coach off their shoulder and take the encouraging one that forced positivity on, you'll see you have your own too. A lot of people like to deny that. I'm going, oh, not me. It's like, nope, you too. Just didn't look hard enough.

We all have that. For sure. And I think like starting to realize that each of us have our unique set of tools. If we go through that process, we go through that language, we go through that softening and the positive coaching of ourselves. For you and your own personal journey of self-awareness, when did you start realizing or start noticing— maybe that's even a better way— that innovation, this idea, right? In other words, there was things that you probably were accomplishing at different stages in your, you know, of your life, but when did it start real— why, when did you start putting it under the bucket of something called innovation?

Yeah, so a lot of this happens in reflection. Um, so I started doing some form of training or facilitation when I was 18 years old. I joined a nonprofit student organization freshman year, and we ran a lot of conferences and workshops and things like that. So, so that's always been my domain. And then I kept getting fired, like first 3 or 4 jobs out of college, kept either getting fired or quitting, which I later realized that's how everybody moves on from a job. That's not a just me thing. So I don't mean to like, that's how you end a job. You either get fired or you quit. There's no other way. So we all, any past job anybody has. So yeah, but not this extreme thing, but yeah, it was 3 years. I went through 4 jobs or something like that. And I look back on it now and I go, oh, I was trying to change things. And like, nobody wants anyone entry-level changing anything. They just want you to do the job the way the job's designed, and they want you to perform as well as you can and go away and go home, come back the next day. And I was trying to like improve the process, change stuff. I was experimenting, and that was just causing havoc. So I ended up finding the company I'm at now. And building another company, and that sort of happened at the same time. So Innovation Bound was founded in 2011 or so, 2012 I think we incorporated. 2012 I was also hired at Know Innovation, which is our sister company, K-N-O-W Innovation, and they do these scientific innovation labs, these workshops and conferences for scientists doing innovative things. So I found that, and here's a job where I am hired to help create change. And, you know, at first in an entry-level position, carrying flip charts around, ordering supplies, taking photos. And then a year later they realized, you've been watching this for a year. How about you run this next activity? So they stuck me in the front of the room and I had had those 4 years with the nonprofit during college and it went well. And they're like, what do you— well, put the camera down. Don't worry about the supplies. Come run this next activity. Let's see what you can do. And so they groomed me up a little bit and put me in a facilitator role, which became a lead project manager role over time. That's so lots of fun little coincidences. But that's sort of the backstory for me. There's an interesting point here, though, which is there's a lot of this learning in reflection. Um, so my brother's a partner at Know Innovation, and so he joined initially. I came on later. Um, he did a master's in creativity, which is apparently something you can do.

Wow.

Yeah, Buffalo State— Buffalo State College, I believe. International— it's ICSC, the International School for Studies in Creativity. Um, and so he would bring textbooks home I didn't show me the textbook. And he goes, hey, read this part. Oh, I do that. He goes, yeah, read this part here. Reading that part. Oh, I do that too. He goes, yeah, it's been like the whole book like this. I'm like, oh, okay. So sometimes you, you can find your talent, but it kind of happens in reverse. Like, um, another one was this attitude. There's an innovator attitude. Never give up is one of them. Another way to phrase that is anything is possible. There's 101 ways to phrase this, understand it, market it, but it's this ability to keep going at the attitude level. No matter what happens, I will keep going. And it's rooted in your self-identity. Like, if you have this or if you have cultivated it, it's part of you. It's anti-you. You wouldn't be yourself if you gave up. That's the level at which this thing becomes a part of you.

Wow.

And everyone has access to this. We all have that thing for which we are. Unstoppable, you know, relentless and so forth.

Yeah, relentless in that pursuit, for sure. Yeah. So how much of that is— well, I'm curious just on a psychological perspective, because the first thing that questions to me is going through my own life journey of survival, right? Of being a scholarship kid and then being on my own since I was 17, 18 years old. Of a lot of the things that I realized I committed to was purely out of survival, even though they had to be something that I believed in at that point, or were aligned with my values at that point. But there, I wonder if the duality— because you're saying there's, you know, I see that of what you described is this, like, there's an eternal optimism in that paradigm of what you're describing. And I'm looking at it from my lens of like, yeah, this is meaningful, this is powerful, this is purposeful. But it's survival on the other side of the coin. In other words, I have I have bills to pay, and I need food, and I have car payments, and I have student loans. And I— so it's interesting. I wonder, you know, what the nuance difference would be, because we both— we all have both. We all have to pay bills. We all have to do those things. Is there a discernment between, like, I don't want to call it a percentage, right? Because I know that's where I used to be coming from versus leaning more into what you're describing, that I'm assuming there are people who are more predisposed to that way of thinking that you have, and there's people that are predisposed to based on what I came from. And then the evolution is, is finding that balance or finding more of leaning into mission critical, not just out of survival, but out of purpose and, and, and collaboration and leading. Do you find that like you meet people that maybe came more for that, for that this is survival for me, and I got into this because of survival versus I got into this from, you know, your vantage point of how you started?

Yeah, a, a less, a, a more kind of neutral way of thinking about it, as far as I can tell, is, um, I'm just understanding what motivates people. Um, and so there are self-motivated people where, like, they will just do what's interesting or challenging, or probably they will, they will motivate themselves.

Yeah. So they don't need the manager, they don't need the bill paying.

Yeah, they're largely intrinsically motivated. And so let's all put on our manager hats and pretend that we're hiring a team and there's a team of people, right? So you have the kind of person you can hire as self-motivated. And what's good is they're self-motivated. You, you can check in on them once a week and they will have worked 40 to 60 hours in the prior week, but they're self-motivated, which means they kind of decide their direction on their own. You're, you're gonna have to work harder to get them to do the thing you want them to do the way you want them to do it. Other people way on the other side of the spectrum. Perfectly happy to be motivated by external incentive, and they need direction. You have to tell them how to do the job. What are the metrics of quality, and so on and so forth. And then they'll do it that— they're perfectly happy to get good direction and follow and execute on that and receive a reward for it. They're perfectly happy that way. And it's really hard if you're self-motivated, that other person, you feel like you're punishing them. By like trying to tell them how to do the job. It's like, no, no, no. If you were in their skin for a minute, you'd understand that they need the direction in order to do good work and they're very happy to do it. Imagine a writer, a producer, a director, and the actors. It's like the actors own a certain little part of the thing and they need direction in order to do well. I'm totally simplifying personalities here. I'm sure there are actors who are self-motivated. But you can think of people in different roles where they take direction really well. So that's two of them. I bet you could stratify that and come up with a little bit more, but certainly there are differences in the way people are motivated. And I think if you're going down the track to become an innovator at whatever your craft is, I think inevitably what you will find is passion for something. The other option is a team that you really love. You might fall into a team that you absolutely love doing work with. And then the environment around you supports your, your actions.

It's so interesting because I, I work with so many entrepreneurial individuals, right? And I really like giving people the challenge of instead of seeing them as an employee and shifting that definition over to an entrepreneur. And exactly like you, you said, a lot of companies or higher-ups don't want someone below them managing up, right, or guiding up, because then it means that they've been doing something wrong, the system isn't as great as they think it is. And it also is a bit, right, it's also a lot of power differential issues. And, and I find that I have so many clients that are so passionate about the work that they came in to do that when they do see a stopgap somewhere, the receptivity of managers, of leaders, of people above them goes directly into defensive mode or blaming mode, or, huh, that's a really good idea, let's see how we can strategize together to bring this and manage, you know, and work this up the chain. That it very rarely happens that way. But like you said, that's innovation, that's growth, that's people. Those are the people you probably want as part of your company, not for the sake of like, I know it better than you, but like, hey, like, you know, a system, you know, always goes to its least common denominator over time, right? That's just what momentum does. How have you, you know, what have you seen in regards to identifying that? And helping guide teams and groups and people to navigate that successfully without just saying, "Well, eff it, I'm out," or being so miserable, but they continue staying in that environment for years and just become a miserable son of a bitch themselves.

So, the advice to the individual is if there's genuine toxicity somewhere, you cut it out or you leave. And Yeah, that there's a lot of life experience before, behind why I would say that. And so I won't, I won't give you the life experience, but I'd say that if there is genuine toxicity, if there's a lot of genuine toxicity around you left and right, you know, it's, it's every relationship, it's all the jobs, then it's you and you have some work to do on yourself.

Yeah.

And I say that with love, go do the work. And then, so that's the person. If you're advising the person, when I look at organizations, there's a couple team dynamics and dysfunctions that are common. So when you're looking at Challenges to being innovative as a team or an organization, there's typically two things. One is just a pervasive risk aversion. Everybody's scared of taking risk, or many people are scared of taking risk in the organization. And if you're trying to do something new, risk is inherent. And there are appropriate ways to take on risk. Namely, you want to do it cheaply, quickly, and safely. And you want to aim to learn not accomplish anything. You take off the Achiever hat when you put on the Innovator hat. This is not about achieving, it's about learning. If you're going to do something new, if you're going to enter the unknown, you have to learn by necessity. To do something never— that's never been done before, you have to do things that have never been done before. Therefore, you have to learn. So you take off the Achiever hat. You're— whether you achieve the outcome you thought you did or you don't does not mean you're bad or good. You've got to throw all that out. You put on a learner hat and you go, okay, do we know if this new market is gonna be interested in our product? No, let's find out. How do we find out? Well, we're gonna do a pilot project. We're gonna market it the best we can. And then we're gonna read the data we get back and try and interview our customers and see what they say. And we're gonna learn. Mm-hmm. And then we're gonna do that as cheaply as we can, as quickly as we can and as safely, like we don't even want to expose our brand.

Right.

So we're doing this under a hidden brand so we don't ruin our reputation in the marketplace. Cool. Totally, totally fine approach. So that's the risk-averse and the, um, and the, the, the risk management, like do it appropriately. And then the, um, by the way, there are a whole bunch of articles and links I can send you where we go into more detail on any of this stuff, so just let me know. Um, the other one is, um, there's no risk aversion, or there isn't a pervasive risk aversion, but there's a little bit of chaos just kind of everywhere. So sometimes an organization that was built on mergers and acquisitions is like this. So AOL brought America online. They delivered on their name, epic organization, and then they went about buying later in their, in their, in their life, they went about buying a whole bunch of internet properties, including Huffington Post and a bunch of others. So they were just this conglomerate of lots of little companies trying lots of different things. And so here you just have a little bit of chaos. Um, and the solution here is just getting organized, doing a little bit of discovery. So go into the organization and ask for stories about how people are innovating. How people are using creativity to solve problems. So you can go even more basic. How are people using creativity to solve problems here like this and like this? Collect those stories and those stories will tell you what your culture is now. So if you're going to go do organizational team change, culture change, figure out what your culture is now first. And then if you want to make change, there are leading experts on like cultural organizational change, of which I am not. But you need a baseline. You need to start by understanding and storytelling, listening, story, story extracting, so to speak. Super useful tool for, for starters.

What I'm finding, and I guess maybe in this example, like the company that I'm, that I'm thinking about is like, it's just, you know, it's these, and I see this again over and over again where I challenge my clients, especially those that are building something to the difference between creating a company and having something that's a job that they've created for themself. That's a hustle. Right. And the, the difference that I see is the structures and the operating procedures and org charts and, and knowing that, yes, you may be filling out like the whole eMath type of thing, right? You might be filling out 23 out of the 25 positions yourself, but you have this built out in step-by-step framework where you know where the growth is versus it like, you know, makes you a mom-and-pop shop that will never become a franchise versus a Papa John's or a Domino's. No one's saying it's the world's best pizza, But it's the pizza you're gonna get at 11 o'clock at night when nothing else is open because you know it'll get there in 30 minutes or less. And people are still gonna— and that has a useful model, and that's a multi-million dollar a year model. So, you know, I guess what I'm, what I'm wondering, especially for those that are, that are listening, is if they want to take that initiative and they want to say, hey boss, hey team leader, hey whatever, I have ideas and Even if they may be afraid of, of taking it to the person above them because they're afraid of the ego or they're afraid of it being a stopgap or that person going defensive, how can they be strategic in even presenting it? So we're talking about like your day-to-day staff, right? Your, your design team or your sales team, and then going to the managers above that are maybe a department head or or just a team leader? How would you, you know, cause like, I know there, I see this often that these people are passionate and they're talented and they're newer, much newer educated on 2022 things that are in the world and the company's running like it's still 1986.

Yeah, this is a really good question. So I think as long as you're clear on your motives, um, you can, you can set on this course. And so you have to decide what those are. So if you're going to innovate inside of an organization, you inherently take on risk. And so if you're— if it's all survival and you can't handle losing a paycheck and priority number one is keep this job and there is no safety blanket, it's not time to be an innovator. That's okay. Do the job as best you can, keep getting paychecks coming, figure out a way to make savings, etc. Get yourself in a good position because there's some risk that comes with it. Sure. So If you're in a position where you do want to engage that, and you want to begin to level up your career, and you want to be able to add more value to the business and so on, and you have the ideas and so on, what you can do— we call this building better business cases. And so what you are setting out to do is to build a business case, and a business case can grow into an innovation. In order to deliver a business case to a senior manager or an executive or whoever you're sort of pitching it to, You need to have, um, you need to have explored and developed an idea. You need to have done some work in a pilot or a prototype, have some data. Like, you have to deliver something where you go, hey, I'd like to scale this up, it's already proven it works in a small scale. So that, that's when you get to do a pitch to your senior leaders. You don't get to do a pitch just because you have an idea, and that's because an idea is the seed you know, of a forest. You, you don't have a forest if you have an idea. There's work to do from— to get from one to the other. So the work to do is about developing some skills, and then you, you can slowly build credibility for being innovative inside your organization. So let's say, um, you have some teammates and they have trouble, and you're the one sort of helping them solve problems, you know, sort of using creativity to solve problems they couldn't solve. Great, you're building early credibility for being an innovator at your firm in small ways. Let's say your boss has a particular challenge that's just been going on for a while and you can help solve that. Say, hey, I'd like to work overtime on that. I know it's been a thing. I want to try to solve that. Is there some way I can help? And they might go no, or they might go sure, have at it, or you never know what kind of response you're going to get. Be ready for anything. But you're basically slowly building credibility as someone who can use creativity to solve problems. Using creativity to solve problems is a skill. Go learn those skills. There's a ton of books. I would, I would, I would plug my own stuff, which I'm happy to do, but there's also a ton of resources elsewhere. There's a whole International Center for Studies and Creativity in Buffalo, so there's plenty of ways to develop the skills. So it's about building credibility little by little and then ultimately building a business case. And in order to build a business case, you have to do the learning piece. You have to cheaply learn if this idea you have will work. It's a new product or whatever. Yeah.

But I see it as like while they're there and I've had this, you know, again, this, this conversation with multiple people in different spaces of while, if you, if this works great and obviously, right, it's going to be beneficial to you and the company. If it doesn't work while you're doing this, let's call it due diligence, right? Are there any additional skill sets you can learn? Are there additional trainings you can take? In other words, even if this doesn't work out for you while you're presenting this in a loving way to the company, and they're like, yeah, no, like, we really aren't interested. You just made yourself more valuable to go somewhere else, to somebody else, in the long run. If you find that this is not the place you want to stay in, and you already have, right, your due diligence and your case studies and your research and your training, and you went above and beyond. And I see this over and over and over again where it's just like that, that simplicity of that doesn't connect when it comes to I can scale up even within this tiny little box because my job description is this, but why not ask management, hey, there's this $200 training on whatever, some, um, right, some certification program from some university or Teachable or Kajabi, or it's $100 for this thing, right? The self-certified program or whatever it is. And maybe, maybe they'll, maybe they'll throw you the $100. Maybe they'll throw you the $500. Maybe they'll say, yeah, sure, go to the conference on, on if it's going to be tangible. But, but people, I think, I think there's a fear of asking for that.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. But the personal development funds are a gift. I mean, yeah, if you have those, totally use them. And then the orientation here, I think that's really interesting, just to circle back to our start, is, um, you, you want to adopt the idea that mastery is a process. And so if you have a single entrepreneurial idea and you're really excited about the idea and you think this idea is it It's like, that's a sign that you are beginning the process of developing the skills to be entrepreneurial. That idea, more likely than not, and it's okay, is not the idea. There's no such thing as the idea.

Well, just watch Shark Tank, right?

Yeah, entrepreneurs see million-dollar ideas everywhere they walk and look, and they're everywhere. There are thousands of ideas for thousands, there are probably thousands of million-dollar ideas that you could see over the course of a week or two. One exercise I did for myself sort of early as an entrepreneur was I did 150, something like that, 150 ideas for businesses, little Post-it notes. I filled an entire whiteboard with Post-it notes. I was like, if I'm really gonna go take on the entrepreneurial journey, I would really like to map out what the possibilities are. This, by the way, is one skill that we teach when we train innovation skills in plain language. It's come up with lots of ideas. Would you mind an exercise?

Please go for it.

Yeah, you're listening, you can follow along. So think of 3 superhero powers. What would be, what would be some interesting superhero powers? And think of 3 and then throw 3 fingers up. And then if you are listening at home—

All right, so I got, I got speed.

Don't say them out loud.

Oh, don't say it out loud. Okay, fine, fine, fine. All right, sorry, didn't say that. Okay, fine.

Okay, all right, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna say superhero powers and you put a finger down if I say one of yours. Um, so, um, super strength, Uh, flying, reading or controlling minds, traveling through time, uh, super empathy skills, uh, climbing on walls or walking through walls, breathing underwater, super speed. Um, oh, there's a couple more. Uh, communicating with animals, um, or controlling animals. And then I'm forgetting the list, but those are most— how many did I get?

Those are pretty— well, of mine, I think the, the distance, the speed, right, moving from one location to another, right, to be able to be in multiple locations, um, right, because, you know, I want to help as many people as possible, um, right. So yeah, and then like the, you know, the healing part, right, being able to— what's intuition, maybe, right? I would call that intuition versus like knowing what a person needs to be able to help them in this role, right? So intuition or reading, right, could be reading their mind, but Yeah.

The idea here is that when you ask someone for superhero powers, like, think of some interesting superhero powers, their mind goes to what they saw recently in a Marvel movie or what they read in a comic book when they were a kid. That's where your mind goes. Um, at first, uh, it takes a while, but if you sit there and you keep writing superhero powers and you come up with 100 of them, somewhere in there, you'll have vibrating your ears to amplify the Wi-Fi signal and growing life-extending vegetables in your beard and harnessing the power— harnessing political apathy as a renewable source of energy. You'll come up with some really interesting, wacky things. You don't get those at first. You can't get those at first. You have to go through the process of generating lots and lots of ideas to get to the interesting stuff. It's even better because we have that 1% compounding thing we had mentioned. As you generate more ideas, the concentration of good ideas gets higher and higher. Um, we recently did this experiment. We've done it a few times at the labs that we do with scientists. So we have a group of scientists, they go through a 5-day-long lab in which they are generating interdisciplinary research ideas, really innovative research ideas. For example, we've done stuff on building synthetic cells, using supercomputers to enhance cancer therapies. There's always a theme, something like that. Sure. We've done stuff on space weather, fun stuff. So you get this group of scientists, and on day 2, they're doing this generate lots of ideas activity. So there's between 100 and 200 one-sentence research ideas on the wall. And what we do is we hand out different color Post-it notes for this. And so we carve out the first quarter, the next quarter, the third quarter, and the fourth quarter. And then we look at the wall, and we ask them to rank their own ideas. So they go up, they read, and they pull them over to a wall. We call it the spicy wall. Those are the, like, really interesting ones. And so you look at that wall, it's really colorful. And then you count how many pink Post-its did we have and how many pink ones made it to spicy, how many blue and how many made it. And you get a concentration for that last quarter of like 1 in 4 of them or 1 in 2 of them making the spicy wall.

Oh, wow.

Every other idea really interesting to the group. Yeah, that's the level of, or 1 in 4 really. Whereas when they start, it's like 1 in 16. 1 in 13 are interesting enough to make the SpiceCon by their own judgment. There's no external reviewers. The, the review is baked in. It's the people themselves who want good ideas. They're their own judges. And so we just see this again and again. Every event we do, we get the same kind of results. This is published in the psychology literature. Um, it's under the, what's called the third third, for anybody who's curious about researching it. So one specific skill if you're trying to be more innovative is come up with lots of ideas. By the way, ideas can be questions. If you're an investigative journalist, you're not coming up with like product ideas, you're coming up with questions to ask. Great, 100 questions or more. So here ideas is a kind of bucket category. It could be questions, it could be notes, it could be possibilities, it could be options, it could be menu items if you're a chef who's setting up a new restaurant. Could be anything. So that's one skill. There's 5 that we teach, and we have an Innovation 101 course, still very under construction, but we have an early bird discount for anyone who wants to jump into a really messy, we're still getting the walls up, uh, kind of a situation. But again, discounted and much more one-on-one time for people looking to really learn these creativity skills.

It's so cool because I'm thinking about people I know in the science world, and like, especially in the, like, the medical research, and they're committed to one specific thing for 30 years. And I know that me, and, you know, in my— I have my overarching thing, right? I'm a therapist. But I know that there's sometimes my over— my interests in the world definitely go into that area, which is kind of the, like I said, the theme of the podcast, right? My psychology, integrative alternative medicine, entrepreneurship, and spirituality are the four— I think are the four areas that everything in my life falls under. So as I'm looking at me and musical instruments, well, okay, well, that's nice. You know, that spirituality to listen to, right? Listen, I'm listening to a Phish replay and like, that's pretty spiritual, or Dave Matthews, right? Whatever it is, right? And how music for me is spiritual as well as, you know, meditation and whatever other spirituality. So it's interesting to just, for me as my own personality predisposition, to just focus on one thing and just have my practice be, I'm only serving creative artists, right? That would be like, that'd be great. But then I feel like I'm missing out on this other side of the thing, which is entrepreneurs, right? And so it's right, we're distilling and distilling and distilling. And I can see that over the point of my career where, okay, so what is a niche versus what is a tool to get there? And I realized that I have a lot of tools that all support one thing, people that don't realize or have begun to realize that they're elite, potentially elite performing individuals. And it doesn't mean you have to be on the PGA Tour or an NBA player or or a multi-million dollar business owner. It could be that you are starting to realize that there's more out there for you than what you originally expected. And now that opens up— well, I could see the athlete, I could see the musician, I could see the business owner, I can see the teenager who's like, oh man, this is starting to suck. Like, I've been, I've been doing programming on the side, or I'm making YouTube TikTok videos on the side, and I didn't realize I had a passion for Audiovisual stuff and computer programming. I don't even need to go to school for that now, cause I'm already making $50,000 a year just on, on revenue from my TikToker. Like, I think this is like, what's so cool now about 2022, 2023 coming is a lot of this stuff is organically learned and that people don't even realize that passions and talents and wisdom is going to come more intuitively.

Yeah. So yeah, I think I got to like 27 years old before, like the whole way I was like, I don't know anything. Like I'm not an expert at anything. What's good until I got to, I got to 27 and I had been doing the same job since about 23 or so. And I was like, oh, I'm developing mastery innovation skills, which are, you know, they're like writing skills can be used in lots of domains. It's another one. Communication skills can be used in lots of domains. It's one of those horizontal skills as opposed to a vertical expertise. Like fashion, or vertical expertise like, um, design's another horizontal one, right? A vertical one like manufacturing or website design. Yeah, any scientific discipline is vertical in its nature. Just vertical, horizontal here, just for, for visual versus integrative. Yeah, I think that, um, so you're talking about the journey. So you, you probably need to have a discipline and focus more at the start than as you progress in a career. Um, I'm taking some guesses here. This is, this is me thinking out loud. The reason I say that is because if you're 20-something, just came out of college, and you're trying to compete with anyone, you're probably not allowed in. It's not even about the barrier. You're just probably not ready to compete, um, at a super high level unless it's, um, athletic, musical, you know, a talent you had been cultivating. You've already put in 10 years, you already have that reputation for— oh yeah, then you're already well along the way. And then what's really cool is like, let's say you are, um, you know, 21, Olympic track for your sport, and like, so now you're— now you're going to have a second, third, fourth— you're going to have a bunch of other careers that come after this because you're not going to be an Olympic athlete into your 60s and 70s, right? There will be an end to that part of your career, which can be scary. But what's cool is you have this razor-sharp discipline. And so the path from Olympian to public speaker, from Olympian to coach, from Olympian to entrepreneur, those paths are open. You have this really cool opportunity to get some breadth after developing hard expertise. I don't know of anyone who's incredibly successful who didn't start with some technical skill. They were either big at sales or big at something else, or they were a programmer. They had a technical skill. Everybody has one. I do some coding. I've been coding for 10 years. I have, you know, a technical— for me, it was a plan B the whole time, but I ended up kind of using it here and there on the side, building the website for our company and so on. And so it ended up being a skill I used. It also affected the way I think. Learning how to code affected how I think about consulting. I mean, then I guess consulting arguably is a second technical skill. So that's one, one sort of thread. The other thread is these days you do see some either T-shaped or pi-shaped people. So T-shaped means you have deep expertise in one thing. Um, you are a free diver. Um, I do breath-hold diving. I go down to 100 feet, come back up on one breath. That's your T. Cool. And then the horizontal part of the T, the top part is you have shallow experience in lots of other things. And you end up being really powerful with that. And then pi-shaped would be like the Greek letter pi, looks like a table, I guess. So two deep expertises and then broad knowledge on other areas. That's a really interesting approach to go for. The way to do this is you ask yourself the question, who am I? Which is a way better question than what do I want, right? What do you want? It's kind of the consumerist version of an ancient Greek question asked a long time. Throw all that out. It's who are you? Or what is my purpose here? Ask that hard question. Do not expect an answer by Friday. This is a process. But if you continue to delve into it, you start to find some things. Like for me, in reflection, like 7 years after it happened, I remember this moment in gymnastics doing a backflip over the high bar. I grew up doing competitive gymnastics, doing a backflip over the high bar and catching the bar again. I had been working on it for a year, missing, missing, too scared to let go, missing, too scared, etc. And then finally caught one one day. My teammates beat the crap out of me as a celebration. That's what we did. That was our MO. And sort of thinking back about that 7 years, I was like, oh, that's why I believe that anything is possible. That's the moment that life taught it to me the first time. And then it kept teaching me that again and again. And so at my core, what I'm really trying to do for people is teach them that anything is possible, show them the, the, the, the possibilities of their own capabilities. And when I have a room full of scientists or business leaders or whoever it is, the moment when I know I'm doing my job well is when they're surprised by their own capability. I can see it on their faces, happens all the time. That's how I know I'm doing good work. It's like, oh, I didn't know we could do this. Perfect, good, keep going.

It's, it's about a month and change ago, I was at a podcast conference with a bunch of friends that I met through the community that have become in-person real good friends. And one of the people that I kind of heard about when I first got started, I was like getting all these huge names this on the podcast. I, I met him and have subsequently become friendly with him, um, but he was talking about, uh, I went to his workshop and it was like a 30-minute thing of like how to reach out to people that you think you can't get on your podcast. Oh cool, right? And, and his process of how he started doing that when he first started his, and he's, I mean, really big names in the thought leader stuff and the big podcast community people that you never, you know, that like you have to be relatively well known because they always ask what's your downloads, right? So So I'm sitting in there and I just went because I'm cultivating this new friendship with him and I wanted to support him in this workshop. And it was after 2 and a half years or so of doing this because I remember my first podcast conference, I just released episode 2 and I knew crap from crap from crap about what I was doing. I leveraged everybody that I met through my business entrepreneur circles and people that I already knew in my alternative medicine community. And like, you know, it was pretty— these were pretty awesome people already, but it wasn't like, you know, these big, big names. And then I'm like, oh man, like, it's through the leverage of relationships, it's through the leverage of being consistent at it, because now I'm at 130 episodes or whatever it is. And, um, where I'm like, wow, I can't believe I have these two names that were just on my podcast because I had the audacity and the balls to just walk up to them at a conference and be like, Hey, so you made a joke about shitting on psychology and going to counseling, going to therapy. I'm a therapist, and I thought that was hysterical. Be on my podcast because you owe me, right? With tongue in cheek, right? And therefore so and so got on my podcast for that for 30 minutes, right? Which is great. And I'm so— you know, the value of that time for me is incredible. So I think that like when you're talking about, right, just consistently hammering away, like you said, for a year. Or I love watching those YouTube videos of someone learning how to do a backflip themselves or some type of like cool trick, whether it's the trampoline, jumping off the trampoline on the big— whatever they— I forgot what they call that, where it's the trampoline below and they do all these cool tricks and they land back on the platform. And seeing them start from right there, it's just the edited clip of them doing it 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 times, and then finally nailing it and how excited I am for that person that I have no clue who the hell that is in real life, seeing that, but knowing that like the difference is, is I'm just consuming that. I'm not also— in my own way, I'm trying those things. But I think that's where we, we start pulling into the people that we surround ourselves by, that like the thought leaders of the podcast or the YouTube videos, is we're really— it's not like, oh my God, they're motivating. It's those— I think those people have a skill set that we haven't yet harnessed in ourself that we want to pull into our toolbox. And then the real step is now what do you do with that? And I think that's the, you know, the ma— we are moving into more mastery, moving into—

And that's how we build the most beautiful human family, is that if everyone can do that, if everyone can ask the question, who am I? You know, and if it's acrobat, you know, and your journey is learning backflips and, you know, falling on your head a few times, hopefully not that hard, and making that journey. You get to do that. You go through that process. And if you love that process enough, you come out the other end an acrobat. And then we watch and see what you can do. And if we've equivalently in our life asked the question and done hard work, then we are free to appreciate you for what you're beautiful at. Whereas if we haven't, then we're resentful.

Sure.

We bring this other element into life, which is destructive. So I think to the extent that we can each as individuals ask that question, who am I? Why am I here? Pursue answers. When you find them, engage them, live by them courageously and persistently. And that's how we become a beautiful human family. I think that's it. That's the big thread that we have to follow. Sure. And encouraging one another to do that, you know.

Yeah. And I think that's, that's the point that I was going to add to that is 100% spot on is also asking like how, of course, right, protecting boundaries and energy and space-time energy that one might have. But, you know, in what way can I help someone else accomplish that? And it may not be me directly, but I mean, like, hey, I know this person, or I know this resource, or I've heard this podcast, or I heard this, right? I heard Costa's doing this really awesome course. So this might be something for you to check out. I think that's a, I think that's a missing part still that people, I mean, it's great to cheer someone on, but you see that, that meme on social media. It's like, you know, we're, we're so happy, you know, like so-and-so opened a new business, but are you, you know, and you're friends with them and you love them and, and you want them to succeed, but are you sharing that their grand opening or that they're doing a sale or that there's, you know, where are we? Marketing and networking outside of being just business owners is still a missing skill in a way. Or, uh, like, I've tried to set up— I've set up couples that have gotten married, you know, and yet, yet I'm, you know, and I'm presently single. And, um, right, so I know I'm like, wow, okay, so if this date doesn't work out, who, who, who can I look favorably upon? If they're not for me, it doesn't mean, oh God, this person sucked. It was like, well, who can set— who can I set her up with that I might know? Or keep in mind, like, okay, these are the things that this person was looking for. I have my— maybe I know someone down the road or right now. So, you know, I think that that mindset of moving it away from just us to this more global community, like you were saying, really adds so much more intentionality to the process.

Yeah, absolutely. It's a realm I think I'd like to develop a little bit more expertise in. I think that the individual track I understand quite well, and I do my best to help others with it. The communal level, community level, global level, collective level, that's something I think I'm still developing some expertise in, and I'm excited for.

That's super cool.

There's something I can mention here I think is really useful. So we've talked about tapping into your own capability in a way that can blow you away. For people out there who like the ocean, like if, if you're a competent swimmer, that's probably enough of a qualifier. Um, freediving is a really interesting, like a level 1 freediving class. It's a really transformational experience. Let me, let me explain why. So there's something called the mammalian diving reflex, and any air-breathing vertebrates that have been studied have a diving reflex. So birds, dogs, dolphins, mammals, humans have a diving reflex. And, basically, when you're submerged in water, when water hits your face, that's the trigger. There are other triggers too. Your body initiates a response to conserve oxygen. And so, it shunts blood away from your extremities into your core so that your heart and your brain have plenty of oxygen. It reduces your heart rate so you're not burning through that oxygen too quickly. There's more to it. That's the gist. And this mammalian diving reflex also induces a sense of calm and serenity. So think of this as the opposite of grit and adrenaline. I hear grit, adrenaline, aggressiveness. This is like serenity, calmness, zen, chill. Yeah, that's that domain. And so in most sports, it's the grit that like gets you across the finish line. In freediving, if your adrenaline kicks in, you burn your oxygen and you're, you're out of luck, right? Um, So Serenity is this skill in freediving, which is really cool. And within, within day 1, I'm a freediving instructor. Within day 1, I have students who hit 2-minute breath holds and 3-minute breath holds.

Whoa.

They come. This is, it's hilarious cuz you got a bunch of students in the water and you do the 1-minute breath hold as the warmup. And then you ask 'em to come outta the water. You're like, okay, come on up. That was 1 minute. Great. And inevitably someone goes, ah, that was a minute. That wasn't a minute. It felt like, went by like nothing. I was so relaxed. They're like, hey, don't get too excited, you gotta go back down for your 2-minute. Chill, chill, chill. But yes, yay, okay, now calm down. Um, and so people are just blown away at what they can do. And then in day 2, a whole bunch of them make, um, 65-foot dives on one breath. That's the maximum we do for level 1, we don't go past that. Um, but people are making those dives on one breath. And it's not 100% pass rate. It's more like 50%. So it, it is a challenge. It's not a, like a gift, uh, but it's a, it's something you have built into you. It's a superpower you have built into you, in this case, an aquatic one that you can access within 2 days. Like a 1, it's a 2-day class. So there's some classroom and then there's a pool session, then an open water session. But within that timeframe, you can actually access this. And when it opens up in your mind, the doors that open up, the, the idea that you can transform and tap into something that powerful, that quickly is really special. That's a really easy way to get it. And some other things— most of the ones we've talked about, you need to engage for years, right? Learning how to be a programmer and coding takes months. Learning creativity skills, you can start right away, but you're talking about taking a long time to develop really strong creativity skills. A musical instrument, that's just challenging. A new language, challenging. Like, these are not things you have access to in a day. Um, but there are things that are that way, and it starts to, um, it starts to create the thirst to do more. So that's one that I would recommend, is a Level 1 freediving course is incredible. I love it.

And that's perfect time because it's summertime right now, so that's what, even warmer. So this is, this is amazing, and this is definitely a good place for us to put a pause because innovation, self-mastery, growth, personal development, psychology, right? Again, these are profoundly deep places to go. And I know you and I can spend a week just scratching the surface on this, but I do want to point people in the right direction for this. So I know you have a workshop that you said you have a mastermind that is in, right, the Innovation 101 course. Um, let's talk a little bit more just about that. Who would be perfect for that and how can they get access to that, as well as other ways that someone might say, do you know what, I do, I wanna, I wanna do something with you and your team or your conference, or what would be some of the ways that people can have access besides, right, obviously going to innovationbound.com? But what would— who would be the best, you know, out there if they're listening, like, oh, you know what, I might want to tap into some of this?

Absolutely. So it's innovationbound.com/101, 1-0-1, and that's the Innovation 101 course. We teach 5 key habits of great innovators, and the one we, we sort of touched on today was coming up with lots of ideas. And they're all habits, so you, you can try them and they work kind of right away, but the more you cultivate them as habits, the more you do them, the better you get at them over time. Innovation's a horizontal skill. You can apply it kind of in any job category if you're looking to be able to solve problems in that area. It's also things like you want your kids to have healthy habits, or you are trapped at home in Brooklyn during a pandemic and you're single and you want to find love and you feel like you're getting there let's use some creativity to come up with some ideas on how you might do that in an environment that we didn't expect, you know, to arrive in. All kinds of growing a small business. Oops, I'm an influencer. You find yourself with 10,000 followers. How did this happen? And you want to think about, well, how do I monetize this? And like, there are generic strategies. You can go to the expert for any one of these. And oftentimes, expert advice doesn't work for health, wealth, and relationships, which are like king categories. These are important categories in all our lives. Typically expert advice in those areas doesn't work. And you, we can explore reasons forever. Uh, what I would chalk it up to, at least for now, is we're all different enough. We're all personal and different that you take one person is, can be super different from anyone else. You take two people in a relationship and you multiply that by two.

It's like exponential factor. There is no book.

Like there are hints and keys and tools.

Cool.

But two people as individuals, or one person as an individual, is different enough from others that the generic approaches don't always work. And that's where creativity comes in. That's where this experimental mindset and attitude are pretty tremendous. So the course teaches the five skills. It is currently under construction. That said, we are offering an early bird discount. So it's not going to be at this price. Again, it's $35, and then we'll kick that up as we get closer to releasing in the course. The other cool thing is there's relatively few people involved right now. So if you jump in now, there's a whole lot more one-on-one time with me, um, which, which can be really valuable, just getting some personal coaching. Later on, if there's 1,000 people in the course, it's going to be much tougher to get.

Sucks for everybody else. Yeah.

It's okay.

Yeah. Right. No, that's super cool. As you were, as you were saying what you were saying, right. And looking at it as a therapist and doing a lot of couples counseling, 50% of my week is definitely couples at this point. Um, And then even when I'm doing— yeah, yeah, right. I mean, listen, thank God they're coming, right? So, and it's only the type of couples that I want to work with. It's not letting everybody in the door. And that's, you know, my doorman principle of who I work with has to be I'm absolutely excited to want to work with you versus like, yeah, the threshold.

Pandemic?

I think there's been a big bump for everything from the pandemic, which, you know, now Florida, I live in Florida, we had a pandemic here. I'm in Florida. Right.

Okay. Okay. That's a fair point.

Okay. Well, there you go.

Melbourne?

Oh, okay. We will talk after the episode about that. So, um, um, shout out YD, who's in— my buddy's in Melbourne. Um, so, um, yeah, I've seen it right specifically here where people were so eagerly okay with being— doing this via Zoom that I would— an early adopter— I became an early adopter for telehealth because I was already doing it for my podcast. So, I already was just a quick switch over for me. And now, as you know, as you know, in Florida, what pandemic? And people are like, "Are you going back into an office?" And I'm like, "Why?" Yeah. Why? No one has said no to me. That, "Oh, God, I really only want to see someone in person," versus, you know, you don't have to drive to my office and wait in my waiting room. And you don't have to actually be home. You can be sitting in your car outside of Starbucks with Wi-Fi. While you're drinking that coffee or that iced tea.

Has anyone ever spoken the words, "I miss commuting"?

No, no. And what's even funnier is like, "Well, I miss the face-to-face." I'm like, when you were in my office, if you were in my office, right, I am now about a foot and a half away from the screen, and you're about a foot and a half away from the screen. So we're 3 feet away from each other. In my office, it's you are 8 to 10 feet away from me.

Okay, so better experience at this point, right?

You're actually closer being digital than you were in human IRL in my office. You are actually 10 feet away from me in my office versus 3 feet away from me on the screen.

So we've got HD video and even higher definition coming soon, correct?

And I just upgraded my second, you know, my webcam to 4K, right? So it's—

They have 4K webcams now? Oh, yeah. Okay.

I'll send you a link.

I'm gonna abandon it on after this.

So, right. So I think that as we're pivoting and it's right, innovation, going back to the theme, it's like, now I hear people like, oh, now I need to go find an office. Now I'm like, I don't know if I'm gonna go back. And if anybody wants to actually see me in person, I pull out two chairs from my pool, from my, my community pool, and we sit under the trees and relax, or I find a little space in my rec room.

There's some really cool consequences of this, and I think we have a chance to do something awesome as a bunch of industries. If everybody went home and learned how to work virtual for 2 years, and now we have the ability to do this quite well, tech and skills, because you needed both of those to happen.

Sure.

Then what's cool is rents come down, office rent comes down, so you have a budget, and commute time comes down, so people have a little bit more time. And we still want some in real life kind of experience. And that's a good thing. We should, we're humans. We need that. We need, you know, high-touch environments. But what's cool is now we can have really awesome experiences. We've created one for companies called Finding the Wild Within. So it's a corporate training program. We take people to the ocean environment. We teach them freediving skills. They do their corporate training session. And now you can afford it. It's like if you drop the office rent.

Sure.

Like, yeah, take your senior managers who just got promoted, bring them to Hawaii, they'll teach freediving, raise some money for charity. Now you have the ability to do really meaningful in-person experiences as opposed to the cubicle graveyards that we had. It was like, why was that good ever?

That's what blew me away. So REI, I'm sure you're right since you're a nature outdoor person, right? I don't know if you knew about that, this big, massive, incredibly gorgeous home, right, place that they built. And then things kicked in at the beginning and they just like, it was ready to go, ready for everybody to move in for corporate. And they just sold the entire thing. They're not like, we're going to hold onto this for, we're just going to keep this regional, you know, people are going to work from home. We're going to have little regional centers, X, Y, and Z, but they built this gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous top of the line sustainable campus. And then they get ready to go, computer systems installed, right? REI logos. And they just sold it right within months.

Right.

No, but like, but that was the mindset. I mean, like, that's a forward thinking of like, we're just going to embrace this even though we just spent hundreds of millions of dollars.

Way to not give into some cost bias.

Yeah.

That's the—

yes.

Yeah. So, so there's ways of doing it. And I think that does tie it all together of like being thinking outside the box, not being like you said, the cost biases or, or being pulled down to a lowest common denominator. Everybody else is doing this. Apple has a corporate campus or so and so. Does a corporate— we need a— you know, that's, that's where I think the innovation comes, where you're pushing against the trend and it— you have your, like you said, your case studies.

And our company's been virtual for years, since, since inception, pretty much. Um, so we've been virtual the whole time. And what's really nice is when the scientific conferences— pandemic shows up, scientific conferences are all like out, all our clients freak out. And so, um, we go, we'll just take them virtual. We've been doing virtual conferences for years now. They're not the, you know, it's like we had this much in person, this much virtual, and it just went over the course of a month.

Yeah, I know. And I know people are dying to be back in person, and there's—

super grateful to the team, by the way, who pulled that off, because it took the tech team— just, we would not exist if they didn't do that. So sure, all of the thanks and gratitude and honor to, to the tech team on our end.

And how many companies probably came out of that that wanted to create these virtual experiences. I think eXp Realty did this where they have like, it's, you can literally, it's kind of like a Sims version of the conference where you're actually walking around a virtual conference center, bumping into other members. It's their virtual, right? Their avatar person. And you can go and have breakout conversations with them, but it's as if it's, you're living your version of a Sim at this conference. And then you have the keynote speaker and you have your seat, your dedicated seat. You have to go to your, I mean, it was like, I can't, I don't know what platform it was, but whoever came up, I mean, that's like genius. And, and it came out of chaos, right?

So there's a bunch of game developers who have really cool B2B stuff to create. Um, I'm excited to see it coming.

Love it. Love it. I can't wait to hear more. So good guys. If you got any value out of this, please, please, please just go check out, right? Check out the website, innovation, I-N-N-O-V-A-T-I-O-N, bounded.com. If that course Innovation 101 screamed to you, it sounds pretty much to me like anybody really could benefit from taking this. And there's the podcast. And then if you have a business and you want to do that really awesome Hawaii trip as well as— I'm just looking at your website right now. I mean, first of all, the layout is super cool on the menu with the way the menu drops and just like becomes this beautiful thing. So clearly, you know, you did some good work there, man.

Coding skills helped. Yeah.

Yeah. Mad props on the coding skills. But, uh, yeah, guys, please. Please check out if there was any value that you, you know, please share this episode out and leave us a, leave us a review on, on any of the main platforms to let us know that you're listening and you got value. And also reach out to, reach out to us and let us know. And if you have any questions, you want any resources, you want any book suggestions, I know you suggested, you know, so when we follow up, we'll get the list, we'll put it into the show notes.

I'm on Twitter and Instagram. Perfect. @IdeasAndAction. So if you want to check out some freediving stuff on Instagram or anything like that, On Twitter, I try not to say anything because it's a giant mess, but I'm there.

Yeah, no Elon Musk type tweets, nothing. It's the new entertainment, right? So good stuff. Yeah, so beautiful. Thank you so much for, for sharing your wisdom.

Huge pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Thanks.

Thanks for listening to the You Winning Life podcast. If you are ready to minimize your personal and professional struggles and maximize your potential, we would love it if you subscribed so you don't miss an episode. You can follow us on Instagram and Facebook at You Winning Life.