Is A.I. the silver BULLET to save Mental Health?

[0:00]  do you feel like you've ever been looked at a trust as a trespasser in this space I've always been looked at as a trespasser I am not an Insider um I am a uh a Divergent thinker by Nature I am a contrarian by Nature uh I do not like the status quo and it doesn't bother me sitting in a room listening to dogma and tradition to just go against that grain but on the inside yes they looked like my friends but there was something missing and I think that's what has so many people talking about this event and exploring it because you're right he had you know access to every resource but what was really missing throughout all of that he kind of talks

[0:47]  about it in his book it was just a deep disconnect from feeling wanted all right guys welcome back to another episode of the heart and hustle podcast I am incredibly excited to have my guest here today David Whit sock now on this podcast we talk about the heart and the hustle of what is necessary to not only build a business but to live a h a life of full fulfillment and so being able to bring David on to the show today is going to be an awesome experience for everybody who's listening and everybody

[1:33]  who's watching we're going to learn a little bit more about David his mission inside the behavioral health space but we're also going to talk about some things that are important in today's work environment like work culture Innovation as well as some of the soft skills that it takes to be able to build an organization in this everchanging landscape of business today so David is a former adjunct professor at the University of South Dakota former Chief Innovation officer at face ite and currently the CEO o and founder of commonly well now commonly well is a recovery intelligence firm a data analytics company and advisory firm they help behavioral health organizations figure out their data practices and outcome models and they weaponize keyword that data to help people um those organizations create better outcomes in delivering care for their

[2:21]  clients and patients David thank you so much for joining me man I really appreciate it yeah thanks Kon this going to be fun I appreciate the invitation absolutely so Dave what are you excited about right now either in your personal life or professional life what's got you kind of amped up uh well I think because so much of what I do around my professional life is based upon my personal Journey uh those two things are intertwined so I'll say what has me excited is that finally after having worked in the field of addiction care and Recovery support uh try trying to not trying to building a datadriven peer support organization finally seeing the rest of the field get to the point where people are actually

[3:10]  making decisions off of real data as opposed to just their gut and their own intuition because they happen to be a person in addiction recovery so that's what's got me excited um it's it's it's an interesting place to be to watch people kind of learn and sort of stumble through a learning process and trying to get their feet underneath them um so and of course we're in the early stages of of bringing generative AI into all of this so it feels to me because I'm old enough like the early days of the commodor 64 in the Atari and we were just figuring out o these are advanced games and these are computers and of course I was you know building websites in the mid90s and late '90s and so it

[4:00]  feels like another one of those moments of something really big and new coming to the world so I'm really excited about what's what the next five to 10 15 years are going to look like man that's an awesome topic I was recently talking to a younger entrepreneur who I met up with the other day he's 21 years old and he was talking about his business experience thus far and one of the topics of conversations that I brought up was the ability to recognize patterns and as I've gotten a little bit older 33 years old now I've started to see some of these patterns that come up right and so hearing you talk about those early Atari days and seeing another one of these iterations that we're going through kind of is a great topic of discussion for our first segment which is really going to be Innovation so as you've kind of gone through your professional and personal growth process

[4:49]  when you see things like AI popping up and people have the instantaneous reaction of this is going to be horrible for everybody or this is going to be something that's going to be amazing it reminds me of the early internet days when people thought the internet was going to be a fad and there wasn't going to be a real necessary use case for it so when you talk about generative AI from a pattern recognition perspective what other similarities can you kind of bring together with other technologies that you've seen in the past that are going to have a huge impact on the future I'll mention two um because one I had a uh a direct relationship in building and the other one I think all of us use on a day-to-day basis that that's pretty a big risk now uh so I'll start with the latter first that is

[5:36]  email so I remember in 1994 when I went to college the first time as a freshman sitting down in a computer lab and getting my email address and sort of just checking in on it maybe once every couple of days and not really fully understanding what that was going to mean for communication and of course the big thing then was well we're not going to need mail anymore right all mail is going to go away and the post office is just going to disappear and it's going to be bad for jobs and all of this stuff and I I think what we learned was no that's that's totally not true um we need both those modes of communication digital and the analog uh so that's one and just seeing how how my classmates and people my age and even older kind of

[6:24]  embrace that mode of communication I mean I'm Gen X so I have I have people people I know who still write very formal emails like it's a written letter as opposed to to you know your age or younger where an email is like in some weird code of short speak right so that so that's one the other is podcasting so uh I was very fortunate that uh in 2004 2005 I was one of the first maybe hundred in the world who were innovating around podcasting it got to a point where um it got the attention of the New York Times because we had five podcasts and we were early innovators trying I was a former radio guy so it it

[7:13]  made sense to just go and say I can't broadcast anymore with a tower in my backyard but I've got this internet thing here and I can push this out through RSS really simple um syndication and that what generative AI feels like we don't quite know what it is um anybody can kind of do it if they feel like it anybody can sort of make a business on it if they've got the entrepreneurial attitude so that's what those two things feel like because they're two that I've you know was right there at the at the early days of and we don't know what generative AI is going to be we don't know what AI is going to turn into we're using the first thing we've got in front of us but it's going to be completely

[7:59]  completely something that we don't we can't imagine yet I love the the topic of podcasting because over the last let's say three years right the pandemic really exploded from my perspective podcasting and people using this medium of communication to disseminate information into the ecosystem of the world right and when I think about it I think how important content really is in all of our Lives if you're a business leader if you're a team member if you're somebody who's just trying to spread awareness around your mission content and the ability to produce and put it out into the world is so incredibly important and you being an early radio guy do you see a a disconnect between Business Leaders today and their content strategy to be able to be visible in front of people

[8:46]  and to get in front of more eyeballs what does that kind of look like from your perspective it's not so much whether or not the strategy is really connected to content their business strategy connected to a content strategy um that's a mess that's just a given for most it's just kind of a mess what I tend to see that kind of makes me wonder about the the different technologies that are being used is who the audience is that you're trying to speak to so I see a lot of people start a podcast but they they just do it because everybody else has a business podcast right as opposed to well should my podcast exist for our specific business so the way

[9:35]  we're thinking about it on our end is we don't have a podcast we do a lot of podcasts we're on a lot of them because there's a lot of people doing really great stuff like you are um that makes sense the way we're thinking about podcast is as a technology to deliver our content to our customers so private distribution of audio uh because it's a much more intimate means and so if we've got very complex say manuals or to uh uh tutorials why not deliver it in video why not deliver it in a PDF why not deliver it in audio because you could sit in your car sit on the train walk to work and listen to the thing that you need to learn and you can get it in a very intimate way uh by the time you get

[10:23]  to the office you can open up the thing and be like okay David was just telling me how to do this I got it I listened to the first two chapters I'm going to now do it and that that's I think if people think a little bit more creatively about these things as opposed to just let's blast to the world first maybe start with your audience that you know needs to get what you have and and play with the medium a little bit and sort of how you use it as opposed to oh this is going to build our business but maybe it can be your business I think that's beautiful because one of the things I think about is I follow a very predominant I would say internet influencer um here in Las Vegas there's a company called think media and one of their primary spokespeople or personalities if you

[11:10]  will is this guy named Omar and he talks about podcasting and content today is a way to be able to build relationships and especially in this world of disconnection and isolation especially because everybody's working from home offices like we are today it's very difficult to be able to network with people and rub elbows in the way in which previous generations did but he's like you know if somebody spends 300 hours of time with you you basically have formed a personal intimate relationship with them and it's a great way to be able to kind of focus off of or Crescendo off of another person who I follow in LinkedIn a guy named Matthew Ray Scott he talks about it's so important to help people today help know like and trust you and the ability to create that no like and trust is through the dissemination of valuable information and content to help people

[11:59]  understand your mission but be able to communicate with them on an intimate fashion being able to drive to work and throw a podcast on and have that intimate time together right when you're driving to work builds that relationship and I think that's just so tactical and so efficient in being able to do that kind of stuff yeah I like that and and I think it also comes down to um do you have something to say and if you have something to say can you say it consistently can you say it in a number of different ways because not everybody's going to get the thing that you say the way you say it the first time so you know I'm a trained lawyer uh and also as a trained broadcaster a professional broadcaster you have to think through what are the different ways that I can say this thing that is going to get somebody's attention and

[12:47]  the nice thing about our digital world is I can write the same thing three or four different times now I can use generative AI to take the first thing I write and say give give me four variations of this theme please and then I can drip that you know spread them out 10 days apart and I can add that to my distribution flow so I've got something relatively fresh but not necessarily but it might hit a different audience and the per you know if we're going to drop people that we like someone I like to watch and and follow on LinkedIn is Chris Walker uh he's you know business Revenue busin to business Revenue um and you know he says the same thing it's like you can't go into this thinking that a specific piece of marketing or

[13:36]  content is going to get them to go to your website click a form fill out the information and buy your thing it doesn't work like that you have to keep information in the feed you don't know when people are going to be ready to like you want you buy your thing and you just have to keep showing up and and eventually when it resonates and if you keep delivering that value they're going to come back to you because they're going to say I can't do this on my own I actually need you and you have proved to me you know how to do this yeah one of the most beautiful things that I heard Chris talk about a long time ago that actually influenced kind of our strategy was not running ads for transaction right like you were just talking about getting somebody to come to your website and make a purchase but running ads as a way to put targeted information in front

[14:25]  of your audience to get them to consume that information natively in the feed and I thought that was a very interesting approach that I had never really heard anybody talk about before the work that they did at refin labs and so Chris has been incredibly influential on so many people and I'm so glad that you brought him up yeah you it's it's uh you know sales if you start a business and and you're running it and you're you're beginning it um you are you you are the sales department and so uh I don't know how to sell I just I don't I don't understand the mechanic I mean I understand the mechanics of it and I'm a logical thinker and I can break things apart and um but at the end of the day I I I don't get deep into the sort of the sciency stuff but what I do like to listen to is because I do have to get on the phone

[15:12]  and I do have to sell what is my product what is our business um I I like to listen to people like him because he can he can he can talk to the senior vice president of business Enterprise sales and he can talk to a small business owner CEO which is me and that's the art of a that that's the the um the shine of a really great communicator communication is very interesting to me and you and I previously talked about different types of communication now I was introduced to you via a post that you were doing a presentation on the use of text messages and how you can use Simple communication to engage Behavioral Health mental health clients where they're at and help

[16:00]  them eliminate barriers to access and more access to resources and support now when we talk about Innovation you've talked about generative AI today we've talked about a lot of interesting technology but when we think about Innovation often people don't think about text messages and one of the things that that we share in our past is we're both Chief Innovation officers right we think about how to innovate in this space and our mission here at Francis is to use text messages to be able to engage people in everyday scenarios because we know that they pay attention to that Communication channel if you will yeah so let's take a couple seconds to kind of Riff on your passion for simple technology like text messages and why they make so much sense in helping us combat the problems that we see in the mental and Behavioral Health space well let's start there mental and

[16:48]  behavioral health issues or challenges is naturally A disruption to a person's stability so people are off they're off-kilter right they're not thinking rationally um they're challenged to make certain decisions and so if you make the process of getting help or engaging in that help harder with more friction they are not going to contribute to the healing process they will turn away I've watched it a thousand times I've seen really beautiful technology welld designed with behavior economists a behavioral scientist designing how it works but it still had one to two to three more steps than

[17:36]  necessary when all I would have to do if I just want to communicate with with you or anybody else I could just send you a text message and thank you for coming in today it's private it's not disruptive it's already on a thing that's on their phone they didn't have to download anything and and there's no friction and so why not use that why not leverage those things especially if you understand the nature of the challenge that sits before you which is a behavioral health condition or a mental health or substance use problem uh and so that's what I find really important I used to do a lot of uh training for using digital Technologies in in recovery support addiction care and I would always start my talk with um name

[18:26]  for me a tech technology you think you would love to have if money wasn't an object what technology would you like to help your people and people would throw out all sorts of fancy stuff and then I would say which of those Technologies do you think or any technology that hasn't been mentioned do you think actually gets the best engagement with your audience with your people you serve and they throw at different things the answer to the question was the telephone everybody forgets about the telephone now this was 10 15 years ago the way phones are used today is just a little bit different if you're under the age of 30 you're not picking up the phone just not uh but those things are still there so I don't know um uh I I I I know why but like you I want

[19:20]  to advocate for the simple because we're dealing with the very very difficult and we can't meet difficult with difficult or else we won't get anywhere and when I think of innovation I think of you know a lot of the popularity if you will people think when Innovation comes into a space it's something brand new and something shiny right and so that's what my experience has been in healthcare since 2014 I saw all these incredibly smart people design these apps and these different tools and these portals that were so shiny and so interesting and they would get the job done but they never got the adoption that they really were designed for because once again they create that key word that you mentioned which is friction between the experience of Engagement and when we talk about how the phone is utilized right I still remember the days when we had a home

[20:08]  phone that was located in our house we had the wire and then it went Wireless then we got caller ID but then everybody started carrying this little device around and so if we want to think about how we can tether if you will to somebody throughout their life Journey it's often through this little piece of technology that often is never farther than an Arms Reach away from us and so if we want to think about innovating maybe it's coming to a solution from a different perspective rather than trying to reinvent the wheel all the time but I feel like the technology culture that we live in says that if it's not new and if it's not a brand new approach then it's not truly innovating and I just think that that's kind of a misstep from the very beginning yeah so you just um uh triggered two two books that are two of my favorite books when we're talking

[20:55]  about Innovation and sometimes um we kind of try to get really creative and we like over innovate uh because we want the new and the shiny as you said and so there's two books that stick out that that have always helped me one is um the power of moments from Chip and Dan Heath so if you understand the journey if you understand that every moment can be designed not overdesigned but designed like if I want to get you Kenan to pick up the phone when I call you what did I do to set you up to be prepared to answer the phone like you have to think about those moments right so that's part one uh that's book one uh the other book is a book called creative trespassing from Talia Katan uh she's phenomenal and this is a

[21:45]  simple idea throughout the entire book she just talks about how do you look at everyday stuff that people just take for granted and have been designed a certain way and have existed a certain way forever and you trespass on it so like her claim to fame is um she took the the symbol of the of the lady's room of the woman stick figure and you know how it sort of has like the the triangle she redrew that to make it look like the woman was wearing a cape as opposed to a dress that's creative trespassing like we see the thing that we've always been told that we're supposed to see but maybe there's something else there and

[22:33]  and how do she didn't change the thing other than to say no I'm just going to draw this I'm just gonna add a couple of lines and now it looks like she's wearing a cape she's a Superhero you're a superhero it completely changes the way people think about themselves or about the way that they can look at problems and solutions that are before them wow that is incredibly powerful because there is that different perspective right in the Simplicity of the same thing but just small iterations and small changes make a gigantic difference in how we perceive things which is very interesting to me yeah um you know one of the words that you mentioned there is trespassing so one of the questions that I have for you is you started your business in 2020 right you guys are focusing on data and helping organizations weaponize that data to create better outcomes and better

[23:21]  experiences for their clients and patients which is phenomenal but my question for you is have you ever from an Innovation perspective felt like the and I'll mention this in a loving way the Old Guard of how we've done things in the mental and Behavioral Health space has ever kind of put you in the place of trespassing to innovate in this space but maybe people are like we've been doing this the same way for the longest time and that somewhat seems like the definition of insanity to me doing the same thing over and over and over again expecting different results but never getting them so from Innovation perspective do you feel like you've ever been looked at a trust as a trespasser in this space I've always been looked at as a trespasser I am not an Insider um I am a uh a Divergent thinker by Nature I am a contrarian by

[24:13]  Nature uh I do not like the status quo and it doesn't bother me sitting in a room listening to dogma and tradition to just go against that grain I will do it to the detriment of my reputation and and business at least I've done that in the past um because what I see is what you just described at the end of that status quo are people's lives that are not getting any better and the way I I look so I look through the lens of the work that we do through three key indicators so we're mostly working in substance use and addiction treatment so there are three indicators that that we have to pay attention to at the macro level to know whether or not we're moving the needle number one one is what's the rate of people that could

[25:00]  walk into a treatment facility tomorrow or a therapist office and be diagnosed with substance use disorder that's about 46 million people in the United States today it's enormous it's up about 20 million from two years ago it's incredible uh so we're we're we're not the status quo ain't helping that number go anywhere it's actually making it worse the second number is the rate of people that find recovery or overcome their addiction um that number has been going down as well well it's about 22 million in the United States but when you um uh adjust for population change we went from about 11% of the population finding recovery to about 8% so we're not getting better at that either and the last one is overdose deaths that number went from 50,000 about eight or

[25:50]  nine years ago it's now at 10 n10,000 a year unconscionable so so that's where my moral compass is at it's like what are we trying to solve for if that's what we're trying to solve for is people not sick and people well then whatever you're doing today if it's not adjusting that in your local community because all those numbers which are global national numbers we can take all the way down to the county so I can I can look at uh Las Vegas Nevada and I could go these are those numbers here let's pick a time frame let's pick some actions if we don't change those numbers then we got to figure out something else so that's the way I think of things and I'm I'm happy to be a contrarian in that space because that's

[26:37]  all that matters we have to move those numbers and if we don't move them we've got to we've got to adjust yeah a terrifying form of inflation if you will right with these numbers that are happening in our community I remember when we first got into the space in 2014 one of the biggest issues that we were dealing with um from a tele Health innovation perspective was helping increase access to care in areas like the Midwest in Kentucky so in 2014 there were hundreds of pain management doctors who had their licenses pulled because they were overprescribing and now we're seeing the long-term effects of opiods in our communities and one of the key Revelations that I recently had because of an event that happened that many people are familiar with is addiction impacts so many different areas of our

[27:26]  community when I was growing up I always thought of addiction or people who had substance use disorders in being in the lower threshold of society right because they don't have access these people are in the streets and they're homeless and they're doing these type of things but we recently saw that Matthew Perry passed away and he was somebody who was a fundamental figure in Social and Pop Culture by being a member of the Friends episodes and he recently just passed away and he released a book as well that talks about his struggles and as I thought about that it naturally created a sense of curiosity of how can somebody who's got so many material options for treatment and for Recovery still find themselves battling this common challenge that so many people are facing and it's not just the person who's

[28:14]  homeless it's not the person who is struggling with these addictions but it's somebody who has all the resource in the world and that was very eye openening to me and I think that story continues to be told but I'd love to kind of hear your perspective on that dichotomy of access to Res sources and still battling with these challenges yeah you know growing up in the in the 90s and and transitioning from high school to college in 1994 when friends came out that show was instrumental to My Life um every Thursday night in the dorm rooms and in our Apartments was must SE and we would sit and watch Friends on Thursday night we'd watch we'd start to watch ER but we were pregaming it and then go to the bars and you know uh I I I I I I saw somebody talk about um uh

[29:05]  grief and why so many people with Matthew Perry are feeling a certain loss like just like why is that and what this person explained was yeah I you don't know this person you have no idea who they are except that you saw them on TV and he says what that's about is you had an emotional connection to somebody during a certain period of time in your life and for a lot of people that was a growing up period of time and so when I think about my connection to that it was I was the guy sitting in that that room watching that guy on TV but struggling deeply behind and I was the same thing right I had I could I could I could look like everybody else consume alcohol just like everybody else looks

[29:53]  normal on the outside but on the inside yes they looked like my friends but there was something missing it was a small F friend not a capital f friend and I think that's what has so many people talking about this event and exploring it because you're right he had you know access to every resource but what was really missing throughout all of that he kind of talks about it in his book it was just a deep disconnect from feeling wanted and it wasn't until sort of overcoming that last mountain and getting to the other side where he could actually help other people but here's what's interesting I know people that know him or knew

[30:39]  him uh who were his friend like he helped a lot of people get well even when he was struggling the most and and so it's it's just it is it's mindboggling it's it's one of those things where you have to sit and meditate on because at at the heart at the end of the day and it deep in people's hearts people are just not willing or able or capable or can't figure out how to make that connection they want to they just don't know how and we the people on the other side of the fence don't know how to do it either and now today we live in a world with with massive social disconnect CU we're all staring at screens and we're not

[31:26]  hanging out in the place is that we would typ that we're not hanging out in coffee shops with six or seven friends around us we go to coffee shops but we put our headphones on we put our computer in front of us we pay attention to nobody and except for ourselves and I and I that worries me yeah the uh the Surgeon General actually came on to television and talked about um the biggest challenge that we face in society today is not a pandemic it's not a virus breaking out but it is this social isolation that people are dealing with and I continue to worry because when I look at the people in my community when I'm in everyday scenarios about my Costco if I'm at the gym if I'm in a Subway if I'm somewhere everybody seems automatically drawn into their device right and this little device has

[32:14]  created so many horrible experiences that we've become almost addicted to you know what I mean anybody time anytime somebody feels uncomfortable in their scenario they automatically whip out their device and they're already looking at for an instantaneous release of dopamine but that also micro sense of connection that we feel good in the moment but we don't have that same sense of community and people that we can lean on and so I often think about what is the long-term effect that these little devices and our natural I would say Behavior to go whip onto our device creates especially for the younger demographic as well because we have a generation of people who are growing up addicted to these devices because it's a behavior that's been ingrained into their lifestyle for so long and unless we have contrarian thinkers like you who are going to approach these

[33:01]  problems differently I don't think that we're going to see a massive turn that's going to take us into a better place in our society and that really is concerning to me yeah a lot of this is because like like you and like I we are working in a field that needs certain Solutions um in that last mile of help and that's really necessary but when I think about these things I'm thinking way Upstream I look around my small community of you know like 10,000 people in Northern New York we're a village and you know uh we have we have a a barber shop which is two dudes in their 50s and 60s that run this barber shop now when you walk in there

[33:49]  now I'm not from here I've been here for a few years but I'm not local yet but when you sit there and you're waiting to give your haircut there's six other dudes but there is a collective conversation going on and because it's fall we're talking about hunting right hunting season opens where you going where's the Bucks hanging out at like and there is this Collective sense of connection and it's what's amazing to watch because I'm kind of a social science nerd is there'll we you'll see the mix of the older guys the the the locals versus the college students because we got two colleges in this two small schools but when the college student is sitting there on their phone when it's when it's somebody slightly older or somebody who lives in

[34:36]  that Community phone is down and they're talking about the Yankees or the Montreal Canadians or whatever is the Buffalo Bills which are kind of huge in this part so oh yeah uh uh so it's when I look at that I go okay now how do we do that how do we how do we replicate that in a way in our communities and our main streets so that we have these moments where I don't know who any of those guys are but I felt and I could care less about hunting but I was like this is cool I'd rather sit here and listen to this as opposed to anything else in this particular moment and maybe feel a little bit more connected to the place that I live and the people who live here even though I probably have a lot uh I'm not exactly like those people if you will but I felt I felt better in the moment you've used two words there

[35:24]  that stuck out to me feel more more connected to your community right and you felt better through that sense of connection and that is so interesting because often when I think about going to the barber shop and there's an ongoing conversation where everybody's just mingling and everybody's giving their two cents you feel so much more recharged when you leave that environment rather than sitting on your phone the entire time and then going back into your regular cycle and I feel like it might be like an old school mentality but there is no replacement right for that human connection and just sharing the space with each other and that's something that I become once again concerned over because I feel like we just don't have the opportunities to make those connections as what as much as we once did and I'm not sure what the impacts of that are going to be on our

[36:12]  Downstream societies yeah I don't know I think what's what's hard and I'd be really curious in your reaction to this is you mean I I had like deep ingrained social anxieties right I had difficult time talking to people and being out amongst people of course that has dramatically changed I still don't like talking to groups of people but that's more of a I'm getting old and get off my lawn kind of thing um but what what I what I'm really concerned about is I watch people who are you know 35 and younger who really don't know how to engage in a conversation like they couldn't even imagine how to start one in a group of people that's concerning because we're not even having the

[36:59]  moments where people can get socially acclaimed to their surroundings and when we're not actually actively working on building that social ability that Social Capital now when your phone rings you're never going to answer it because you're scared to death to actually talk to another human being now when you go to the grocery store and you've got to ask for something I don't like to ask for you know directions because I'm a dude and I just don't but if I if I was really engaged in wanting to find the thing I'm going to go talk to somebody if I really need to find it I'm going to go find I'm going to go talk to somebody but I look at people now they're so scared they have no idea how to do that and I would start there like if I if if I had to start over if I wasn't already running a thing if I had to start over I would teach

[37:47]  conversation I would I would teach people to go and really do that put the phone away let's go to the grocery store let's go to the restaurant let's talk about how you're going to talk to to the waiter the server and have a conversation that's such an interesting concept to me because I remember growing up and being younger and hearing older people say your generation just doesn't know how to talk to anybody anymore and when I was younger I'd push back against that be like yeah because we can send text messages and it's so much easier but now that I'm a little bit removed from the scenario and I have the perspective of the younger generation I am also alarmed and now I was lucky to be able to learn learn how to start conversations with different people because my family moved around so much when I was younger I was born in Seattle grew up in Detroit moved to South

[38:33]  Carolina to Vegas to Hawaii now back to Vegas and every single time I had to move to a new location it meant implanting myself into a new Social Circle and having to have the conversations and introduce and understand what was going on to become part of that social ingrained ability to be wanted and to be liked and to be talked about and to have conversations and I think think today because we have so much isolation in our communities and people aren't moving around as much as they once did that's not a skill set that was mandatory and so we see so many people who don't have the ability to engage with people because I do listen to friends often and my girlfriend her sister they always joke around about the fact that when they would go to restaurants that she would have to order for her younger sister she wouldn't want to talk to the waitress and she would be

[39:21]  like can you order me the mac and cheese or the chicken fingers and that was something that she had to do and they joke about that but that's an ingrained behavior that still comes up because often we don't like going out into social situations this last weekend she had mentioned that she wanted to go out for Halloween but none of her friends wanted to go out and so she also didn't want to go out because she's like I want to go out alone who am I GNA talk to and naturally I started thinking about well that's the opportunity for you to go out and mingle and socialize and meet new people and you're never going to get those chances to connect with others if you don't put yourself in that environment yeah you know if we want to take this back to Innovation and business business it almost feels Innovative now if you create your customer service built on actual conversation so we have found that there are some of our competitors that want

[40:08]  want their customers to go through a portal and to use ticket ticketing system and there's no response there and so we're talking to people that are potential customers and they're saying we're not even a customer yet but we've called you three times and you pick up the phone every time what what is going on and we're like yeah it's because the bar is so low and all we have to do is just talk to you we might not have the best product this is a Seth Goden thing we just shipped it it's not the best it could be better it could always be better but where can we be better what can we control we can control how we communicate with you and we can answer the phone we can schedule a meeting we can make sure we talk we'll get on a

[40:55]  plane we'll come see you we'll go see the way you do your thing why do we want to do that because we think that's how life works yeah of course I can get you on my website and you can go click a button and you can pay for the thing and you can get the software without ever talking to us some people are going to choose that what I think most people want when you're dealing with the business that you and I deal in is they actually want to see us in the room I've watched some of your uh videos where you've brought the phone into a meeting a conversation which I find kind of a little unnerving someone who's slightly older than you uh but it's just fascinating to watch you and your business partner in those meetings having those conversations with customers like that's where it's at and and and I think a lot

[41:45]  more people just need to be exposed to that and do it for real and that was a big part of why we started recording those meetings not only to be able to review them later but also to show the humanality of what we were doing and it's like we are actually going to show up and be here with you and have these conversations and my father always told me that relationships are the fundamental Bedrock of business and when I was younger I didn't really believe that but now that I'm older I start to think that the people who you work with and this is a great analogy somebody asked me one time are you guys a b2c business or a B2B business and I respond and say we are a P2P business we are a peopleo people business and that is something that is a differentiator because everybody else wants to go fully automated and they want to take out the humanality and the human connection of doing business and I think a secret part of us

[42:33]  really yearns for the time when you could actually call somebody up answer a question ask a question and have that dialogue because now working with different companies like Shutterfly or these different other companies where you have to submit a ticket and you never talk to anybody ever the experience in that is quick but it misses that human connection which is so interesting yeah I find that uh just today as a matter of fact um I went through a list of of leads and people that we want to do business with and kind of things that were just stragglers right things where the grass is starting to grow and I just pick up the phone and call their mobile phone I call their office phone and finally people just pick up and I just when you're on a phone like that you can say to them look I don't want to waste your time you

[43:20]  don't want to waste my time are we going to do business or not and and it gets awkward but they'll go yeah no we're not going to and I'm like great that's all I wanted to know I I'm glad I got to meet you I'm glad I got to see the way that you operate I think you're good people and by the way if I'm ever needing somebody who needs to go to treatment in Arizona I know where to send them I can trust you and when you do that you plant a seed I'm never going to win their business but you've planted a seed they're going to remember you you're going to remember them and I just think that people don't consider that enough when they're when they're starting companies or starting a new company um pick up the phone talk to you can get more done in a phone conversation in four minutes and you can spending 40 minutes trying to write the

[44:08]  perfect email absolutely true I want to I was going to talk about some more AI but I feel like this is a perfect transition into the humanality of business now I have a book next to me and one of my favorite Business Leaders today is a guy named Gary vaynerchuk he has a book called 12 and a half right and it's the soft skills and the emotional ingredients necessary for business success so I watched you recently on another podcast where you were talking about implementing a four day work week and I would rather say instead of implementing but suggesting a 4-day work week now that is a huge change from I would say the work culture that we came from in the past why were you motivated to be able to lean into a 4-day work week and did you have any hesitancy about

[44:56]  the human nature to not do as much as we can when we have a shorter work window or why did you lean into that so much science we're a well-being company and we go to places to say the data says do this and the the lean in is well if we're not practicing the latest in science around workplace culture um overall well-being Health if we're not practicing those things and I'm not the best at it to be candid um then who are we to come into your business and say that you should do this right so that's that's really the reason um what it has done though is it's created a really great conversation amongst our team now we don't operate on a 4-day work week but because we're

[45:44]  early stage company and got a lot of work to do but what we do do is let's say so Patrick he was at a conference for three days if I don't hear from him tomorrow and and if he just sends me a text in the morning and says I think I just need to take most of the day done I get it you were working a room for three days that's exhausting we're going to pick it up and be stronger next week and I know he's going to do stuff over the weekend too anyway because he's the co-founder he's going to do that work um that's why it's like let's let's figure out how we can say let's be fresh tomorrow we're actually implementing a uh a weekly pulse a set of questions and we added some some questions to it

[46:31]  um the questions actually start with uh going into the week if you look at your if if you look at your energy as a as a gas tank how close to full was it Monday morning now it's Friday morning Friday after like Friday midnoon Now where's your gas tank and we're going to experiment with that data and just see so we're going to be data driven and if we come and find that by Friday morning everybody's just trashed why would we do work on Friday if we're not if we don't have the energy to be productive and be effective let's take the break so I I I think it's just data driven what does the science say follow the science and do it and then see what

[47:17]  happens and if it doesn't work for you it doesn't work for you if it does do it I think that's so powerful because a couple different reasons one of which is you're making decisions based on data we're not just trying to implement I would say blanket policies that we don't really know if they understand or if they work and understand what the true Effectiveness on them really is but the other thing that you said there was very powerful to me was you basically are not trying to convince people you guys are a well-being company right there's a natural intuition as people of being able to understand and have an intuition of what s really looks like because there are a lot of organizations out there who say you have unlimited um like vacation days and PTO take as many as you want but as soon as you take those

[48:04]  days they kind of look at you with a little bit of a glare because they understand that you're kind of taking advantage of the policy and from my perspective that is not a human focused organization strategy because you're hurting people for taking advantage of the things that you give them rather than truly walking the walk right being able to walk the walk and con vincing People based on your philosophy and living through it I think is just an incredibly powerful business strategy but also just a human being strategy as well yeah I mean so here's what here's always the challenge organizations that have schedules and particular hours where they're doing like um like restaurants and other things they like well we can't do unlimited time off that just wouldn't work and I my challenge is well I ran a peer support organization

[48:51]  where we had to have coaches in the office during certain periods of times and they had to do certain number of sessions per week we had an unlimited office or unlimited PTO policy how did we make it work we made it work by using Logic Technology right we used mapping of who had to work when and where and we could figure out using technology of okay Keenan had to work on Mondays and Tuesdays those were your days always but maybe like Wednesdays Thursdays Fridays you could do whatever you want with those days Within reason right and everybody had to be thinking for the most part 3 to four weeks ahead so once you have everybody thinking three to four weeks ahead I know life happens and you know sometimes the the dog gets sick

[49:40]  or the kid has to go to the thing and you got that's different but for like vacations and if you're like a team that's manageable you can sit in a room as a team and go all right David what do you think you're going to do your family vacation 7 Days 10 days 40 days what are you going to do you're going to go work remotely somewhere you're going to do a vacation and a work away awesome you're going to be in Seattle for a month cool 10 days are off 20 days are on remote love it like now you can start to get people to think a bit more creatively about how they do their job where they do their job um they can lean into not missing life but showing up as much as they can in the work that they do I saw somebody

[50:29]  say the other day or it was uh it was something on maybe it was Instagram reals and uh they were just making the point that um nobody can give 100% 100% of the time it's impossible and so if we just like understand what that means and you build that into your culture people will give you everything they can as much as they can and you have to accept that this reminds me of um a culture example and where some of the best Innovation that we've experienced in society has come from Google is a great example one time I was listening to a podcast and they were talking about where Gmail came from and they were talking about the underlying cultural expectation of working on Google based

[51:17]  products four days of the week and then on your fifth day you could work on whatever you wanted and that's where tools like Gmail came from because people had enough freedom to use their creativity to think how can I innovate and how can I create something that I'm passionate about and that is a perfect example of how a culture that is based on people creates better results and creates more Innovation and creativity and at the end of the day really impact Society in so many different ways and I thought that was just absolutely amazing yeah and you know what's interesting about that example because I've studied that um and I've talked to people at Google who've experienced it in order for that to work uh you can't just have like a naturally free willing organization it can't be you have to start from a place of of discipline and rigor so Google's very

[52:06]  disciplined like they have objectives and key results and they flow throughout the entire organization and everybody knows what everybody is supposed to do and it's very rigorous and so on there is no day that no employee doesn't know where they are against the objectives that they're working on and if they are behind in those objectives that extra 10% to go do other stuff goes away because we have to get job one done first but then once that's happening and you're getting into that flow and you're keeping up on the results that you're now time starts to get freed because everybody's performing at a Peak

[52:53]  Performance and that allows that another oh I've got three hours left in my day today I don't need to work on the thing over there because we're on schedule what is this email thing we're doing what is this new Communications tool okay let's go work on that so I think that's what people miss about that story is is it does take a lot of discipline to stay within your strategic priorities with your objectives your goals and then figure out now where can we make the room and how do we Empower people to to understand that yeah that's a beautiful insight because Freedom really does not come without discipline right the freedom feels better when you've been in lock mode and you've been disciplined and you're executing on your tasks and then when you have the opportunity to spread your wings and be creative it feels so much more rewarding

[53:41]  and it does make sense that just just that wouldn't be a a willy-nilly if you will organization who's just like work on your stuff for four days and then we'll see what happens on your fifth day when you create other kind of Innovations that's really cool I like that a lot they they wouldn't be Google if they didn't have that level of restriction and the best thing comes from what pressure constraint and restriction when you add constraint and restriction to what you do I think it's why a lot of people I'm a procrastinator and I think it's why a lot of procrastinators tend to turn out really decent work like it goes against what that should be but the constraint for some of us we find really great stuff in the the shrinkage of time and so for people like me what we have to do is we have to figure out okay

[54:28]  how do I restructure my time to take advantage of that very thing and so for me I sometimes will like oh I've got 30 days to get a thing done no I'm not starting it now I could do it now forget it I'm not going to get good work done so I'm gonna wait I'm gonna schedule it for the last seven days and I just got to block everything else around that time management so that I get that constraint to work for me as a supp post against me and I think like this conversation is great because I think that's where we start to get into like how does the human mind work how do I work and if you can figure that out like for you and you can see that in other people you can start to navigate and manage people better as opposed to managing against like arbitrary whatever manage to people's

[55:17]  gifts understand how they work I when you understand how they work then you can set up the parameters to make them successful and is this one of the the changes I saw this post on Instagram last night and this guy was talking um to I would say very successful entrepreneurs and they were talking about the difference in being a hustler and being a CEO and the difference in success that you see in those two different things one is being a hustler showing up every single day and grinding grinding grinding grinding which so many people want to do but the other level of success is being a CEO and being able to understand people to get the most out of your team which is which is very interesting so you as a CEO and as a Founder I understand that your emphasis on human behavior and getting the most out of people is going

[56:04]  to be a huge driver of your success because you take it so seriously but you're also using hard metrics such as data to be able to help justify and push forward your initiatives like your four day work week I think that's so powerful yeah there's an art and a science to all of this and some companies are going to have a culture that operates a little bit differently and that's going to be based upon personality it's going to be based on whatever yeah but my experience has been um just watching the people that I've got to learn from people who I would call mentors um watching how they as Leaders look for really kind of two things can I spot the gifts in people and can I help them leverage those gifts and then two can I figure out what I need to say yes to to make the organization successful

[56:54]  versus the way more many things I need to say no to and give to somebody else to make the organization successful um the hustle culture is yes yes yes yes yes yes yes and that doesn't last there a really is a key element of burnout right we see so much happening in healthcare and just across the spectrum of work today which is so interesting and so I love when I talk to leaders like you who have an emphasis on culture so I'm going to to use the last couple minutes of our conversation today to pull four examples from the 12 and a half ingredients that Gary vaynerchuk talks about for business success and I want to hear your input on how you leverage them in your organization or personally and how they kind of push your vision forward the first is

[57:43]  gratitude how does gratitude impact your business your personal life and how do you leverage it to be more successful uh it's just a constant recognition to all the people who you work with so it doesn't actually it doesn't have to show up as Keenan I'm grateful for you today and you know it doesn't have to be like that it could be very as simple as um so as a for instance um uh Patrick who doesn't come from the addiction recovery world he has zero fear about the entrenched in our field but he got somebody who I've known forever in the addiction recovery space to finally get what we're doing I've talked to this person a thousand times and I just sent a simple note and I go you realize you moved a

[58:30]  mountain like that's gratitude that's incredibly powerful the next is selfawareness well uh so because of my own history with depression um and spending a lot of time with therapists and counselors uh I have trained myself that the moment I wake up I do a check of me do I feel off today is this a dark day or is this a good day do I hurt did I get rest um that's how my day starts you can put that into your business you can put that into your personal life um but it's const it's a constant the product we sell is about

[59:18]  self-awareness it's it's an inventory it's an assessment for invent do an inventory on yourself that is self awareness um so it's that's constant in my life sorry we froze there for a second so I'll chop this back together um so the next question that I have for you is accountability well uh again with my own personal Journey around overcoming um addiction you you have there are things that happen when you experience that um where you've hurt a lot of people and so uh you can the the the fails don't have to be

[1:00:07]  so big but even if they're small just saying to people that was my bad that's accountability that was my bad I'll take responsibility for it but uh here's what we're going to do next and I'm going to say we're going to do X Y and Z next so you know that that's what I said we're going to do if we don't do it you got to tell me like you have to feed that cycle so if you don't give people permission to hold you accountable they won't so that's the other part of it you can hold yourself accountable if that requires your own willpower sometimes you have to say to other people hey Kenan I need you I said I was going to do this come back at me in a week and if I didn't please tell me I didn't yeah accountability is something that I often speak about because I find

[1:00:56]  that especially in the world of business as an example in the world of Life today it's so easy for us to cast blame on why certain things are happening or why results didn't occur but I found the inverse of taking accountability extreme accountability for the work that we do doing what we say we're going to like you just said creates so many opportunities for power to be transferred to you and when you take accountability for your situation and everything that you have control over it really frees you up from any of the outside forces that really are you know the casting of blame and really which is the giving away of power in your personal life so I love that one and the last one that I have for you here David is ambition how does ambition play a role in your vision for your company

[1:01:44]  being a startup and going into battle every single day to continue to push forward your vision how does ambition kind of get balanced in your life ambition is an interesting uh question because you know I'm a study U I've studied history and I've studied history around um say the founding fathers and in politics um ambition was always uh something that was feared because it would create a Corruption of how people did what they did and so we are I am in a position where I I see that as kind of a double-edged sword and uh what I want to do is just be ambitious towards our goals not necessarily um trying to eat the the the world or eat the elephant so the

[1:02:34]  ambition is much more tighter than it is uh wider but yeah it's it's an interesting thing and um I don't know if I've got a full lock on it well guys that's been another episode of the heart and hustle podcast once again let's thank David whito for coming here today talking about these important topics like Innovation how we're going to be able to overcome the challenges of trespassing in a space that's so ingrained such as mental and Behavioral Health more importantly thank him for the time that he is spending in creating a new Workforce culture and being able to push his organization forward by Leading by example not only from the things that he does on a daily basis but also from the data that he is gathering throughout his process once again this has been the heart and hustle podcast thank you guys for tuning in once again and I hope you guys have an amazing day

[1:03:20]  thanks so much