Mindstorm Ep. 2: How to Identify and Solve Humanity's Largest Problems

Hello there and welcome to Mindstorm, where we'll be talking about mindful and awakened entrepreneurship. My name is Adeo Ressi. I'm CEO of the Founder Institute. I've been an entrepreneur for 25 years and I, I was fortunate enough to have two separate billion-dollar companies before the age of 30. Then in the later half of my entrepreneurial career, I've been really working to help help other entrepreneurs succeed. And at the Founder Institute, we have chapters in about 200 cities and we launch over 1,000 companies a year, really working with entrepreneurs at the beginning of their journey.

And I'm Josh Whitton, and I focus on what I call the planetary interventions. These are companies and initiatives that are stabilizing the biosphere, repairing the earth, regenerating the earth, and helping to expand human consciousness. And I've been an entrepreneur my whole adult life, and my first company actually worked and was successful, and that was improving public transit systems using technology. And after that, I got into food systems and the environment and some farming and stuff like that. And somewhere along the way through all of that, I've just been obsessed with human consciousness and enlightenment and what our true capabilities are as human beings.

You know, that came to me a little bit later. Uh, I, I probably started off much more business-minded, uh, than, than I have now. Ironically, I'm more about giving back, and, and that's what we're going to be talking about today, which is planetary interventions as the modern-day company. And for me, I'm 47 years old, and it came to me that this is important a bit later in life. And to some extent, you've been working on them as well.

And I get—

we can talk about if some of my earlier work was in fact planetary interventions or not. I was, you know, on the board of the X Prize, etc. So it's not, not zero. But you put a lot of thought in the word. What do you mean by planetary intervention?

Yeah, those are— that's very intentionally chosen words. An intervention generally implies that there's a problem. Not like an arbitrary problem or like a really minor problem. And so it's meant— the word is meant to have that gravity because where we are today in 2019, whatever your interests are, whatever your hobbies are, you still live in this floating fish tank, this Earth that's just suspended in space with a thin atmosphere. And the bummer news is that it's filling up with poison. Things are going extinct left and right. We now realize that animals aren't just for petting. They actually perform functions in the ecosystem that allow us to have societies. And people way too often hurt each other and are walking around carrying a lot of pain. So I just decided anything I do now, anything I start now is actually going to address those kind of issues.

So you want to basically do an intervention wherever you see a serious problem. Yeah. You don't want to fix optimizations, right? You're not going to make something a little bit better. You're looking at something that's really desperately broken for humanity and the planet.

Yeah.

And you want to pull an intervention.

Yes, that's my nature. Now, I will say that if other people feel more called towards optimizations, that's fine. But optimize something that really helps the situation in all its gravity, right? So instead of like, how do you find the absolute best sushi in town instead of like the next best sushi in town, like minor problem compared to will we have air that's not poisonous? And, you know, already we have to like monitor the amount of fish we eat because they're all full of mercury and stuff like that, right? There's these kind of like the the frog in the pot is being boiled and it's time to start addressing that kind of thing.

Yeah, so I feel exactly the same way. Yeah, so at the Founder Institute, we decided about a year ago today that we were going to start focusing on the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals. And for the most part, I'm not a fan of the United Nations and the work that they do. I do think it's important, but I also think it can be very bureaucratic. For one reason or another, they've come up with really a fantastic set of goals. And as someone who's been on the board of the X Prize for many years and actually pushed the organization to focus on more things than space, I think those 17 goals are probably the best list of things that we could work on right now. And so if you don't know what they are, I recommend that you look them up. But they have things like life on land, life in the water, climate and sustainable cities, gender equality, increased equality. So they're really looking at a lot of different assets, aspects of how we live and trying to improve them. And I think for anyone looking to have an impact on the world, looking at those 17 goals are a good first step.

One of the great things about the SDGs is they took a lot of this confusing and overwhelming information about what's wrong with the world that you'd have to, you know, you could read papers endlessly about that, and they made a nice graphic, right? They made like little colored squares that all like— because maybe you're wondering like, well, what are the problems we're facing today? That's a totally valid question. There's no shame in that. You can go there and sort of see the buffet of problems or ways to categorize them. Turns out they're all interconnected as well though, right? So like environmental problems ultimately become social problems. Social problems also can cause environmental problems, right? So they're all, they're all really connected, but I love how they've laid them out in this grid that you can drill down and learn more about and get involved in the one that speaks to you the most.

And what's nice is The drill-down part, literally there's 17 high-level goals. Could be no poverty, zero hunger, things like that. You click on it, as you were indicating, and there's a set of sub-goals, somewhere between 8 and 13 per item. And even underneath those, there can be some additional things, plus they have facts and figures and lots of research. So, again, if you're not sure what a planetary intervention is. You got 17 of them right there, plus all the sub-goals. So there's a buffet menu of things to think about. And that really begs the question, so let's say that I'm an aspiring entrepreneur and, you know, I might be thinking about an optimization, or I might be curious about something deeper. How do you find— I mean, it took me a long time to find my purpose, and I'm not even sure I'm fully there yet. I'm well on my way. What do we say to them? How do we help someone in that journey?

This might be a good time to talk about the different kinds of personalities that get involved in entrepreneurship, because some of the listeners— and I know myself, I didn't need the SDGs to get me interested in solving problems, right? Like, I My first company, I just noticed that when I got on the bus to go to my college classes, quite often the bus was empty, and there was like 30 of these things running around my neighborhood empty, and that couldn't be good for the planet, right? Like, I didn't even run any numbers. You just know this giant thing is burning a lot of fuel and there's nobody riding it, and it's meant to be full of people if it's gonna be environmentally friendly. And so I just, I just took on that challenge, right? So you might be the kind of person who just notices things around you all the time and that just aren't adding up and you just want to make a difference there. So that, that might be the way your mind works, or that may not be the way your mind works, in which case it may be better to look at people addressing different issues out there already who have a running start and maybe joining their team. What do you think?

Well, so the question I guess you're saying is like, do you need to have this real desire to fix a problem to start a company? And I would say when I look at entrepreneurs on a very, very high level, I see two big buckets plus then tons of personalities. The very two big buckets I see are the problem-solution entrepreneurs, but I also see a lot of vision entrepreneurs. And there's a subtle yet important difference. You could argue a vision entrepreneur is some sort of like, I see the world being different than it is now, so the problem is the world is the way it is now. But basically they're like, I believe in a bigger vision and I'm gonna make that vision happen, right? And so you could, you know, argue that, you know, an Elon Musk is a vision guy because he's like, you could You could say Tesla's a vision company. It's like, there are no electric cars, so it's not really a problem-solution. It's not like electric cars are not very good, uh, so we need to make them better. They were like really kit cars and experimental things. There was no mass market electric car market, so to speak, or mass consumer electric car market. So he's like, look, I see a future where all cars are electric. There's electric charging stations everywhere, electric service centers, a lot of That's my vision.

But he's problem-oriented as well, right?

Definitely. I'm not saying they're mutually exclusive, but he laid a vision for the world where he's going to do his own charging stations, make electric cars, blah blah blah. Conversely, there are problem and solution people who are like, look, to your point, I'm sitting here, buses are empty everywhere, this makes no sense, it's an environmental disaster. Let's make the transit system much more functional, get people on the bus. And the problem is we have this infrastructure that's not being used, and I'm going to find the solution, right? So I see those as the two big buckets of entrepreneurs. Now, I believe that the 17 SDGs present opportunities in both, right? And I'll give you an example. Hunger, zero hunger. A problem is that aid doesn't reach the destination. There's a lot of loss and theft and warlords and all sorts of craziness that happens. And so you could say, look, the problem is only X percent of aid, food aid, reaches the destination. I'm going to solve it by X, Y, and Z. Conversely, you could say, look, I have a vision for the future where food can be produced locally in every ecosystem from desert to city, and I'm going to make that into reality, and that will feed humanity.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right? So you can tell—

Because it raises the question of why do they need the aid to begin with, right? It's like, what happened to the food system that was there? What if people in many of these places were living for thousands of years before the UN was formed, right? So what I would recommend is to try to go to the root cause if possible.

Well, yeah, so, you know, the first principles, right? So what instead of, you know, a lot of times you can get stuck solving a secondary, tertiary, or beyond problem. And it's very useful to say, okay, why does this problem exist? Well, there are warlords. Why are there warlords? Because, you know, the social structures are like this. Well, why are the social structures like this? Because of this. And it's like, oh, so it's really a social structure problem, not a food distribution problem. And so how do you fix the social structure? You can fix the food. Which also then goes back to potentially a vision versus a problem and solution, because you might have a vision for a better social structure, and it's not because you want to fix the existing social structure, it's because it's just better, right? It's a new vision for things, right? And, you know, there's been a lot of innovations in the world like that. You know, Apple was also pretty innovative in that regard. It's like, why do we have CDs? Why do we have this? Why is music distributed this way? Why can't we just have it on a thing and you subscribe and get all the music. It's like, let's go back to like the— what consumers may want to do consuming music and create a better vision. It's not— they didn't fix a problem. You could get— you could buy music, you could listen to music. It wasn't like music was broken and Apple fixed it.

I'm going to get a little bit controversial, if that's okay. Which is— and this isn't meant to be critical because I don't enjoy getting— I don't enjoy being criticized when I'm like— everybody should read the Man in the Arena speech by Roosevelt. It's incredible. And he says like, it's not the critic that counts but the man in the arena, you know, and who, unlike those timid souls, will, you know, who know neither victory nor defeat, you know, at least they've tried something, right? But if we look at Apple and all the amazing things they did, the product design, Steve Jobs, all of it, all credit is due, right? He was for a time considered in mass culture like maybe the world's greatest entrepreneur. There was a time, right? It's like this guy— some people still do, some people do. But you've got Elon coming along now and and taking us to another planet, creating the world's greatest car that's actually more sustainable, right? Taking us to a subterranean commute instead of an above-ground commute. And when you compare those two, the accomplishments of Steve Jobs may seem trivial. The guy was making consumer electronics his whole life.

Trinkets.

And so, and that's not to be critical, that is to say that society is evolving over time. And the next great entrepreneur, the next great industry, it's, it's, it's maturing and it's going to— and just, it's just a spiral. It's not— and there's nothing wrong with where you've come from. There's nothing wrong with what we were doing at the time. But like, just look at that pattern. Look how here's a guy doing stuff that seems to matter even more than this guy from the past. And that's just a really important pattern to look for.

Well, and that's a great segue into the future.

Yeah.

Right, because I think here's the way I look at it, Josh. Yeah, um, the planet needs interventions, back to the topic of the podcast. So entrepreneurs need to be thinking about interventions out of need alone, right? But I'm going to give a much more practical argument, right? Because need is kind of, uh, potentially a fuzzy argument if you can't make money and survive, like doing something that's a planetary intervention. But I'm gonna—

let's do both. Yeah, yeah.

I'm gonna explain why I think it's the only way to make it.

Okay.

Demography. Look at a 15-year-old to 25-year-old person today, especially in the Western world. They are worried about the environment, they're worried about the world, and they care more than I've seen any other generation in history care about future of the planet. In 10 years from now, they're going to be 25 to 35 years old, which means they're the mass consumers of humanity. They're buying homes, cars, food, etc. Okay, I don't believe their values are going to change at this point. They are value-locked on saving the planet And so if you're starting a company today, in 10 years from now, that's when you're going to be hitting your peak, and they are going to be your consumer.

Sure.

So, you know, you don't go to where the ball is, you go to where the ball will be. And the demography today, if you're building kind of a me-too brand that doesn't stand for something, isn't trying to make the world better, fast forward 10 years from now, no one's gonna buy Yeah, yeah, I've never thought that way, but if that's what it takes for you to do something important, then that's a great way to look at it.

That's awesome.

Well, I, you know, but it's true. Yeah, I mean, so you don't have children. I do. I have a 13-year-old, and I can tell you she cares more.

Oh, it's amazing.

Yeah, and I, but, but, you know, I work with young people and old people alike, and I can see this huge shift.

Yes.

And it's dramatic.

Yes.

So I think the future, if you are thinking about starting something, so maybe we can wrap up with some ideas for someone who's in this journey now and they're thinking of doing something. So the planet needs interventions, right? Planetary interventions. So the UN Sustainable Development Goals are a great place to start. What do you do? Do you find one you kind of like, as you said earlier, and then what?

What I do is not any of those things. So what I do is my mind is besieged by hundreds of problems that my subconscious is working on constantly that I've been collecting for a decade. So I don't know what, you know, what the average person should do. But I would suggest though that if you have— maybe make a Venn diagram, right? Like, how can I make money? What am I interested in? What helps other people? What am I good at? And I would say don't settle for an idea that doesn't hit all of those. You want to be right in the middle of all of that.

Okay, money, skills, right?

Passion, right?

Passion. And what was the fourth?

Importance. Interventions.

Yeah.

And if— and there's, look, there's so many ideas that with each one of those that you eliminate, there's more ideas available, right? That's the point of the Venn diagram. So the overlapping part means there are fewer and fewer ideas right in the middle, but I assure you there are still thousands and thousands of ideas in the middle. And that's like having a sailboat with like 5 sails in the wind at your back instead of 2 sails, because in 3 years. Was there 4? Okay, we could come up with another one if we were forced to. But yeah, you're gonna be putting 5, 6, 8 years of your life into this venture. There's gonna be days where you're gonna be glad you had that extra check on your box, that you had the extra circle in the Venn diagram. Once the novelty of the funny idea you came up with some friends on a Friday night, you know, while drinking is worn off, you know, 3 years down the road, it's not so funny and novel anymore, right? You're gonna be hoping that that you're wishing you're working on something that also mattered, that you also were passionate about, that also is a natural fit for your skills and interests, right?

And that can make money. Yeah, right. So I think those— that's a beautiful way to look at this, like don't compromise, right? And that, that's easier said than done because a lot of times you might feel like you're not compromising because you're not aware enough or alert enough about or honest enough with yourself to go that extra level. So, you know, I see this a lot. No, no, I really love this idea. Well, you know, you don't have any expertise in it. Why are you really doing this? And people convince themselves. So what I see happen, which can be a problem to avoid, is You maybe come to a point in your life where you're like, okay, I need to do something right now. And there's a bit of a reactionary component to that, uh, versus a balanced and sort of centered component. So because you've been in a job or doing something you don't love for so long, that when you finally make the decision to do something you will love, you're You're like, "I'll live anything as long as it's not that." Right. Right. And that's different than saying actually from a centered and balanced place. So, one thing that I would counsel you to do is yes, do the Venn diagrams, try to be as honest as possible, but also be patient.

Yeah.

Right. Try it out for a little bit. Don't rush in. You know, don't dive in the pool. You know, wait around a little bit. Yeah, and see if it's something you're interested in before you dive in.

Totally. And maybe even have dialogue about it as well. Like, here's an idea that gets me really excited, but I wish it could also make a bigger difference in the world. And talk about it with people, you know. I knew somebody who like wanted to do like some kind of fashion company because they just love fashion, and they were so ashamed of that. So don't be ashamed that you love fashion. And it was just like, what about people who love fashion but they can't get those great clothes made from sustainable materials? They don't want to look like some kind of eco person. They want to look like their style, but they want the clothes to be made from ecological— and it was like, boom! Suddenly that was like, they were on to it, you know? It's just—

well, that brings up an interesting thing though, that you can love an industry though, or love the output of an industry but not love the industry. And that's why Some caution and wading in the water is good. Like, I started space and video games because I'm like, I love space and I love to play video games. Oh, they're like really one of the worst personal decisions I ever made. Space is filled with angry scientists, right? And I can assure you that nothing will make you more frustrated at your own existence than spending time with a group of angry scientists. Because they are very good at being angry and, you know, they'll literally insult people in front of them.

I don't know many scientists in general.

Yeah, so then the video games, it's a very— also, it's a very long and tedious process to build a game, and sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. It can be very—

so testing them is not as fun as playing them, and you test them a lot when you make them.

So, you know, that's why I think waiting around a little bit, because Things might seem so glamorous and amazing to you on the surface, but when you actually dive in a little bit, it may not meet all your Venn diagrams perfectly.

And listen, this is— instead of getting out of conceptual land of maybe this and that, I'll tell you personally what I've done is kept a big list of ideas that I had. No matter how stupid or trivial or grandiose or important or whatever, just put them all down. I called it the idea farm. And then I would go through this list and I would, I would preen these ideas and I would prune them. I would say, oh, this one's being done, I saw it the other day, I can get that out of my brain. Oh, this one, actually, I had a new idea that alters this one to make it even better. Oh, this one— and it was just kind of going around like weeding the garden and fertilizing things. And so you can also just have a list of a lot of candidates carried around with you in your back pocket and tweak them over time. It's very satisfying and it's, it's what I've done.

Yeah, my method is slightly different because I've stuck with companies for long periods of time. You know, I've been running the Founder Institute now for 10 years, and obviously ideas come up and I see things. So what happens with me is I tend to have a sense of something important, right, that needs to happen in the world. And that sort of then manifests into a business idea, if you will. And then I essentially do the Venn diagram thing. Is this a fit with me? Does it feel right, etc., etc.? Am I passionate about it? And then I— the next thing that I do is I look for what I call the magic. And the magic is you can push ideas into existence or the universe or the world can pull them into existence. And if you're pushing a lot, you don't have the magic. If the world is pulling the idea into existence, you may have the magic. And then the next piece of the magic for me is every business, everything you do in life has problems, right? People quit, customers get angry, whatever. When you have the magic, those problems kind of fix themselves, right? The team fixes them. You just don't get plagued in the weeds and thorns of entrepreneurship that much. So you find— what I like to do is say, okay, here's something, let me see what's going on. Let me start talking. Oh my God, like it's coming out without me doing very much. And all the problems that I would normally have, I'm not having. What's going on here? This is kind of magical. And then the thing just comes. So it's slightly different. Like I'm not mentally trying to overthinking, right? I'm letting the magic happen.

If the magic's there, which is part of your point, right? Do something where there's going to be some magic. And doing something that matters, doing something that's important, probably is going to be more magic, more people showing up saying, hey, this means a lot to me. I don't care if you've got this brand of coffee or not in the break room.

Like, optimizing number one versus number two sushi restaurant, right? Yeah, I think that's— and that may be the lesson here as well, that looking back to the demography of the 15 to 25-year-olds, they're also going to be your future employees. And, you know, if you're not doing something that speaks to them, you're not going to have a workforce. And, you know, there's a whole other world of issues there, and that you've got a workforce that was used to television advertising and marketing, with putting posters and other sorts of display, literal display ads. And now you're moving to a generation that is really run by influencers. It's like a different world.

And there's a fair amount of existential crisis out there and depression and things like this. And a lot of that is improved when we find meaningful work to do when we find our way of contributing in the world. So this is why I love, again, going to the root as much as we can, finding those interventions that just— they're really far upstream and they solve a lot of problems downstream.

And you bring up one thing that I think is really important, one of the— an area that the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals is sorely lacking in. And in fact, I'm with a group that's actually trying to add an 18th, but it's mental health and well-being. And they even talk, oh, we've added it. And I'm like, no, they haven't. They have some alcohol abuse-related things and drug abuse-related things, and they call that mental health. But really, there is a mental health epidemic in a lot of the developed world, and I think that shit is in a whole other area. That's a, that's a planetary intervention level. I also think, you know, going back to some of our exploration roots and really starting to look at space and exploring space, I think that's not necessarily a planetary intervention, but certainly a worthy goal that we need to be thinking about as well. You know, as a final thoughts on the matter of planetary interventions, I think that if you're feeling something right now, and you're not sure what to do, I think the world needs you to take a step and start thinking about taking an action towards a planetary intervention. And that could be starting a company yourself and bringing people on with the vision that you have, or as you said earlier, maybe joining someone else.

I don't know what your final thoughts are for people, but My final thought is that everyone, if they take 30 seconds, can think of how the world could be more beautiful. And everybody, everybody, doesn't— it can be you, your mom, your dad, your brother, sister, everybody, given 30 seconds, they can think of one thing that would make the world more beautiful. And if everybody takes one step toward that thing, we're gonna be alright.

Alright. There you have it. I don't think we could end on a better note. Thank you everyone for tuning in.

Thanks for listening to the Founder Insight podcast. For more episodes, visit fi.co/podcast. Thanks.