77: Harkness with Jason Brooks and Keenan Hale Jr.

This episode has been automatically transcribed by AI, please excuse any typos or grammatical errors.

Chris: I’m here with Jason Brooks and Keenan Hale of Harkness AI, a conversation analyzer that drastically improves the quality of communication. Gentlemen, thank you for stopping by BarCode.

Jason: Appreciate you guys.

Keenan: Thanks, Chris

Chris: And I’m also here with my awesome cohosts once again, Rohan Light and Mike Elkins. What’s up, fellas?

Rohan: Greetings from down under.

Mike: Greetings from up under.

Chris: So, Jason, as the founder of Harkness AI, I’d like to first off understand the genesis of your story. You’re originally from the LA area, is that correct?

Jason: That’s right. Born and raised in late 80s, early 90s. To give you a sense of the neighborhood that I grew up in, plagued with sort of all the pathologies that you saw in inner cities in the late 80s, early 90s. Right. So police, fatality drugs and gangs and all that stuff. I was seven. At my 7th birthday party, I saw my first person get shot and killed. So, it was like super intense. But I won the parents lottery, right. So my parents had the foresight to send me to the web schools, which is an all boys boarding school. About 90 miles away from my house. And there I got exposed to really high octane classmates and exceptional teachers. And it was the first time, really, that the world opened up to me. And one of the ways that they did that is they taught us with the hark, that’s method. So, everybody was sitting around a table, and then the teacher made us read the classics and made us discuss and made us engage with each other and not just to the teacher.

Jason: And then once I graduated there, went to college and graduate school and then had an 18 year career teaching and education. So, I taught Mandarin and Spanish and mathematics. And then, you know, fall of 2019, went to my board and said, hey, I’m going to step down this head of school and we’re all going to have these stories. But 2020 hit, right, and totally shook up the whole world, you know, and was met trying to teach online with muta mike’s and blank video feeds, trying to figure out, oh my God, how the heck do I connect with my faculty? How the heck do I connect with my students? This is pre Pfizer and Moderna, This is at the end of the day, we’re still banging pots and pans and thanking our essential workers, So it’s a really critical moment in the pandemic.

Jason: But going all the way back to my high school days, I was like, oh my God, I think I have a solution here. So by hand, I started charting interactions between my faculty and my students. And then it really transformed our school culture because now you are aware of how people were interacting, what people were getting left on a call, what people were dropping off a call early, what people were thriving in the pandemic, what people were not.

Jason: And then I’ll never forget there’s one day where I sort of showed the graph to my class and a young woman said, like, Mr. Brooks, the baseball boys only talk to each other, and if you don’t do something about it, I will. Oh, wow. And that really strong, courageous, emotional reaction sort of said, oh, my God, there’s something here, This awareness is really transforming the way that we’re interacting with each other.

Jason: So then very shortly thereafter, I’d been doing it for a year and a half, and then very shortly thereafter, I was like, let me digitize this, So during my time in graduate school at Harvard, I was able to first exposed to data science, machine learning, and I think there’s a solution here. So using ML to really digitize that process was really the genesis of harness. And shortly thereafter reached out to our co-founder Evan Ellison, who’s an engineer at Microsoft. And then Kean joined after. And we’ve been really just driving this technology for a year now. So, it’s been fantastic. And I’ll just tell you, once you see it, once you’re aware of the things that we all sort of feel, Like, we walk out of a meeting, you’re like, that was weird, and maybe I just had bad spaghetti last night, or I don’t know, but that was weird. But once you can see, like, oh, yeah, I got called to that meeting to watch you guys talk to each other.

Jason: That’s why I hated that. Or like, oh, yeah, that’s the teacher’s pet. Right. We all have these hierarchical relationships, so to be able to visualize that and then give people that feedback so that they can make the best decisions in high stakes conversations, that’s really what we’re trying to do.

Chris: And then talk to me a little bit about how, you know Keenan and how you brought him in to this.

Jason: Yeah, I’ll let him tell most of that story, but I sort of compressed 18 years.

Chris: I know you did, man. I’m impressed.

Jason: Yeah, but I was a teacher for eight years at an all boys school in Chattanooga Tennessee called the McCallie School, where the motto is “Honor Truth Duty”. Man, we bring it both on the field in the classroom in every way. to give you a sense of how that school is designed for the development of young adolescent boys. The crown molding in the dining hall is made out of rubber because they know that boys can horse play right. They play hard. And then you’re going to crash into something every once in a while, and instead of having kids put their head open, they bounce off a rubber. But that’s a little bit of the context of where we grew up.

Keenan: It actually is interesting because the other co-founder, Evan Ellison, and I go back a little bit further through our middle school days. We’re both from Georgia and attend the same middle school and High School. The McCallie School is a great training around for education as well as athletics. So Evan went first, and I was right behind him two years later to get into McCallie, ran track together, and also I lived across the hall from Jason. Jason was my freshman football coach, so I got to experience Jason not only on the field, but also off.

Keenan: If there was a guitar in his background that you could see. I remember when he first started playing that, and he usually appointed to have that available when we’re doing our demo calls with customers and whatnot. But, yeah, it was an interesting experience. I got to learn a lot from Jason and also from Evan, and both of us being from the same area, really connected. And then during track season, obviously we competed together.

Keenan: But Jason has always been the competitor and always super intelligent and smart, so it’s been great to connect with him on Harkness since then. For a little bit of context, I went to Syracuse, played football after I left McCallie, and graduated with my degree in Communication and Rhetorical studies. So what I bring to the table is that communication aspect. And I think all of us really, it’s important to us because effective communication goes a lot further. And so there’s a lot of miscommunication that happens in every aspect of our lives.

Keenan: And for us to be able to provide a solution that is able to interject and let you know when you’re missing that other piece of communication, somebody on your team from your relationship or in any other personal relationships that you have, that’s a big driver. there are a lot of businesses that are losing money because they don’t communicate well across teams. And so whatever we can do to provide that solution and get that in the door, we’re here for it.

Rohan: I’ve got a whole bunch of questions. I’m really interested in that hardness method, but that’s not my first question. My first question is ed tech related? I got to say that properly. Ed Tech education, technology, you’ve said your company evolves from that first. Oh, my God. The civilized world is possible to end, and this is what the beginning of it looks like. All your communication breaks down. And as you did note, those early days were crazy and chaotic over the Atlantic.

Rohan: In Ed Tech, there was the famous AI mediated exam meltdown. And I think back over to your side of the Atlantic. The FTC sent all Ed Tech people a nice copper reminder. Here’s my question. A whole bunch of innovation popped up, like your business at the beginning of COVID and now things to some degree need to be restrained and another need to be let go to continue to evolve. How are you going to figure out the difference between the two as you go trying to build your business?

Jason: Yeah, that’s a great question. So, two points to that. I’ll be completely transparent for this group and then for your listeners as well. We developed this solution in the middle of the pandemic, And it was right, this tug of war, like, do we return to in person or not? And one of the things that broke my heart and break my heart as an educator is that there was this window of opportunity because I was one of the few teachers who loved teaching online. I really enjoyed it for a few different reasons. One, you had real time back check. You could real time throw an article in real time. You could throw up a Ted Talk. You could break off and break out rooms. You could come back. There’s so much innovation that you could do. It really forced me to have strong relationships. I couldn’t just have a knucklehead and be like, Keenan, go to the principal’s office. I’m cranky or I’m tired or I don’t want to deal with you. It really forced me to compete against Xbox, compete against Netflix, compete against who? Compete against entertainment. So, I had to sort of level up my game, and the only tool I had was relationships.

Jason: And you saw that as the pandemic proceeded, people just the number one driver is that you had in person in child care, You had childcare. And you can’t really necessarily meet all of that requirement with all these ed tech tools and technology. So that was a bit of a sad bit, and it forced us to evolve and look for a little bit different solution, So what we’re finding is that there’s a ton of use cases for the technology, couples therapy, team meetings, but then also adult online learning. One of the benefits is that as the kids sort of went back to school and we saw our market go back to school, like, no, come back, right?

Jason: What we saw the opposite is that a huge spike in adults wanting to upskill reskill the value proposition of going back to Stanford for $180,000. MBA wasn’t there. But to kind of go to a network of other folks who are like minded, want to learn from each other. There’s no monopoly on books, We can all get the same book, jump on a zoom call and discuss that book. So you see a proliferation in particular adult online learning platforms and tools and companies. And it’s been really cool to see how that’s also a really strong use case. And then our bet is that over the next 10, 15, 20 years as the education university bubble sort of pops, And like, I’m not going to pay you $250,000 for an MBA to go and make $150.

Jason: That’s just not there. But people are using these new tools to learn and connect with folks who are literally all over the world. I hear you’re down under the ability that we can use these tools and then use our technology to sort of enhance that experience that someone really excited about.

Chris: Do you guys envision this tool that you’ve built to extend beyond education? I know you mentioned other use cases like couple’s therapy. that’s a prime use case in my mind when I heard about this tool. Have you put that to the test yet? Or what other use cases have you used the tool for?

Jason: Yeah, right. So, we literally use the tool on ourselves every single day, both to analyze how we’re interacting as a team and also to sort of run through external things. So, for example, we ran through Elon Musk. He had a shareholders meeting with Tesla. We ran it through just to see how that interaction went. We ran through a panel interview of Wakanda Forever, you know, the Black Panther movies that’s coming out to see how that panel interacted. So again, there’s a ton of use cases and that can get kind of intoxicating. But as entrepreneurs, we really have to focus in and lock in on one industry. And we’re just seeing that use case with couples therapy in particular because we’ve all gone through this, So a year and a half ago, went through a divorce. She’s a lovely person. We’re still very good friends, but romantically just didn’t work. And if you had looked at our conversations, you would have seen patterns that probably would have given us both data that would have balanced out the drugs that were in our head. Like, you think of the first couple of months of getting together, you’re filled with Oxytocin and all the other dopamine, all the drugs that you’re like will literally blind you to some really big issues that come up. And you can’t hear the good advice from aunts and uncles and sisters and brothers, and mothers are like, hey, dude, you might want to reconsider this.

Jason: Hey, you want to slow down? And that was sort of our experience. Certainly not talking about her. And then Keenan’s using it as well.

Keenan: At the onset of my relationship to be able to see where we are, the foundation that we have, and if there are any challenges that we’re going to need to overcome and be able to look at that data and be like, oh, okay, all right, let’s work on these different aspects of our relationship here. Or let’s build on these. These are really strong. And so it’s good at every stage of your relationship just to be able to gauge and then for a therapist to be able to say, okay, I know in the meeting I took these notes down, but here’s all the data comprehensively, and this is what I’m seeing, and provide a solid analysis.

Keenan: They’re more efficient with their time and how they can help serve clients and help serve folks like you and I in those relationships.

Rohan: So I got a question or an observation. So, you guys use it in your business meetings. That’s brilliant, but you already trust each other. Statue is also brilliant. We’ve used it in a school environment, and there’s some trust in there. You’ve used it in a dispute resolution context. Well, there’s definitely no trust in there, but there’s a mediator. There is a trusted human mediator. So what are we going to do when there is not sufficient trust in the human community for this piece of technology to push what is sort of latent into that next stage?

Jason: Ron, I think that’s a fantastic point, and it makes me we’re both sons of Baptist preachers, And I grew up really steeped in the stories of the Old Testament, of the Bible, So the first story is a brother killing his brother happiness.

Rohan: And.

Jason: There you go. Just a little light reading before we all go to bed. Who said he was that right. But I can imagine that the first person who developed a knife to be able to more efficiently cut meat off of an animal to feed their family. Imagine that very quickly that same technology would be used to murder other human beings. Same thing with a chainsaw, We use this example all the time. The first person who invented a chainsaw, I guarantee you, got really excited, came home, babe, I can clear a whole field in a month now. I don’t have to swing axe no more other things. We can just cut this like that person never imagined that there’d be a whole genre of horror films of them using that same technology to saw people in half. So my point there is that technology has and forever will already reflect and amplify what is already there. So if there’s no trust there, that’s going to be amplified.

Jason: If there’s trust, it will amplify and accelerate that trust. So, I think it’s really important that we say that over and over and remind everybody, because the accelerant, the accelerating power of artificial intelligence, that to me is the biggest difference. Right. So, you think about going back to the knife or cutting instrument. You just can’t do as much damage as scale as you can do with an ML algorithm that says these million people don’t get to vote anymore.

Jason: These hundreds of thousands of people don’t get approved for bank loads. These people are deemed insufficient or unworthy of working at your organization. I think that’s where the AI ethics comes in. That’s where bringing in the soft and hard skills, that’s where bringing in the philosophy, some of the things that humankind has worked really, really hard to refine over millennia into. I’m not talking about our literal RND processes. Right. So what does it look like to have a philosopher driving alongside with a software engineer?

Rohan: You’ve actually got an important marketing message, don’t you? It is you need enough starting trust. And I say this because from where I often look at investment proposals that have a tech basis to it. And one of the things I divine is these people are seeking a piece of tech to solve a problem they are not willing to solve themselves as humans first. And I would say I think all businesses need a column. Customers we don’t want.

Rohan: And that’s a customer I don’t think you want in the sense that you actually have to do a whole bunch of pre work. You’re going to have to put a bunch of counselors and social workers in there to get the people not backstabbing each other or whatever bad behaviors in there. You actually want them going, hey, we’re a B team at the moment and we want to go A, let’s go.

Jason: That’s the future. That’s on our roadmap as well, To be able to incorporate it’s so fascinating to do it. We’re experimenting with it right now. To be able to do it in real time and going back to the therapist example to say, like, therapy is going to change. Right. Because instead of once a week, us spending an hour and 20 minutes of that hour rehashing stuff that we did last week and forgot about and fought through four times during the week before we came back here. Now, in real time in real time, the therapists can say, you all talk to each other.

Jason: I’ll sit here and sort of referee. And then the AI comes along as another layer that says, Jason, slow down your rate of speech. You’re talking too quickly and you’re not going to be understood. Jason, ask another question. Samantha, hold on, hang on. Listen, repeat back summarize what you heard. And it’s just like the technology exists other places. Think about GPS, Turn left at the fork, turn right as a thing, you have arrived. So we know that we know that GPS can help you get to the destination that you want.

Rohan: It regularly tries to kill you as well. it seems you are the craziest places.

Jason: There’s always a human in the loop to override. So, you don’t drive into the lake, The office. Exactly.

Rohan: You need a physical control on the ground.

Jason: Yeah, that’s right. And that’s where you see the best examples of AI are when humans and let’s talk about AI is just a ton of math done really quickly. So, let’s demystify AI, That’s what it is. So when you have those two partnered, and I mean truly partnered, you see really remarkable results. When humans get lazy with anything, even if it’s cooking, I can burn down my house if I get lazy with studying, I can fail a test. If I get lazy in any domain, I can ruin whatever I’m trying to do. So the real emphasis, as you just said, is coming back to the true human work.

Jason: How do we become 100% in our humanity, fully integrated, and use the best tools the right way? Wow.

Rohan: We just had a whole bunch of vision come out there. That’s impressive stuff, man. When you get going, you’re really selling it. I feel it. I’ll get offline now. Back to you, Jason, or mine.

Chris: Up until this point, we’ve talked about the individualized use cases, the one on one type scenarios. Is it possible to scale it out to a particular demographic without profiling a particular demographic?

Jason: Yeah. So, one of the things that we’re really excited with the real time is that for the first time in human history, you really have true integration. So that the C suite all the way down to the entry level. You can look and see what words, what concepts, what topics are trending in your organization and be able to act on that in real time as a person of color. I think what fires me up, and I’ve got four sisters and a ton of sisters as well, is that you hear these horror stories of women getting talked over interrupted all kind of atrocious behavior, And it extends in the online environment as well. And for the CEO to be like today in the marketing meeting over there, we saw this happen, like, we’re not going to do that. We’re going to provide the coaching for both sides of that equation to sort of move us in the right direction. You can really make real time adjustments, which is exciting, which means that fewer people will get hurt. Companies can be nimbler. You save money, you save time.

Jason: It’s just the ability. And this is the exciting and the promise of AI is to live and transform the way that we do things currently into new iterations of that.

Chris: Yeah, you could take that training model and extend it out beyond the organization too, right, so it could include partners, third party contractors, for instance, so that will help you get that full visibility.

Jason: Yeah, and just put a fine tip on that. One of the things that we’re seeing with our enterprise clients is that they are able now to be incredibly responsive to their suppliers because they know in real time, oh my God, we’re going to have a supply chain issue. Like this is going to be an issue. Let me send this email a week, two, three weeks ahead of time. And then that creates cushion in the system to be able to absorb those shocks.

Jason: That is the stuff that gets exciting, Because instead, look, like we said, technology is technology, Like it’s going to do what it’s going to do, but we can use it in a really interesting and creative way. We live in a hyper connected world. Let’s use that hyper connectivity to communicate with each other more efficiently, That’s the promise, right. I’ll say it here and now and forevermore, Like, I am a teacher, Which is who I am in terms of my identity, It’s like, how do you use what we have learned as a species to give to the next generation so they can live a better life than we have had?

Jason: And the fact of the matter is, the planet is on fire. You go to any country in the world, you’re dealing with social inequality, you’re dealing with racial injustice, you’re dealing with exploitations of all sorts. And to the extent that our company can play a small role in moving the needle towards the flourishing, the thriving of our species, that’s what gets us excited, Because no offense to any dating app, folks, but we’re not trying to make another, better Tinder, That is just a short sided, very myopic view and application of these tools. What we’re trying to do is help folks communicate better. And literally, I say this with so much reverence for what’s happening across the world, but people are dropping bombs on each other’s heads because of miscommunication. And I’m not just referring to Russia and Ukraine, I’m talking about wars that have been going on for years that nobody talks about anymore. Because of long standing miscommunication to the extent that we can use AI that can translate across multiple languages to mitigate bias, communication, all that stuff.

Jason: That’s why you wake up in the morning, That’s why you wake up at seven, go to sleep at twelve to see that dream come true.

Rohan: You’re only awake for 5 hours. My God, you achieved so much.

Chris: I definitely see this tool having limitless use cases to it. But I’m just curious, how do you implement value within the organization? Taking the output from Harkness AI and then applying it into the user base?

Jason: Yeah, that’s a great question as well. Right, so we talk a lot about the now what moment, So you told me I’m a jerk, you told me not to talk too much. You told me that I don’t ask enough questions. You told me to speed up or slow down. Now what? And that’s the piece where we have to slow down a little bit. And this is again the power of AI because humans we think probabilistically well in some domains. But also if you say there’s an 80% chance of rain, people will mess it up a lot of times and are pissed if it rains.

Jason: You told me wasn’t going to rain. That’s not what I said.

Rohan: Yeah.

Jason: That four times out of five it’s not going to rain. There is a chance that one time out of five it will rain. You like it when you win the lottery when you’re that one. You really don’t like it when you’re the one and it rained on you. So that’s part of like the education that we’ll always do, In terms of like let’s think probabilistically about these things. So if and when we give you a recommendation with 76% likelihood that you should do this move, remember there’s a 24% chance that this may not work. And that is part of, again, the human in the loop to make sure people understanding and people are busy, They just want to know left, right, yes or no, green or red? And I think part of being good stewards of this technology is going to require a higher level of thinking and processing from us, all Because we all want simple, quick, easy solutions. But the fact of the matter is that life at any stage in a new environment requires a little bit more.

Jason: So obviously we want to take that friction out, all the good business principles, we want to make it easy to use outside of value, all that stuff. But you can’t get lazy.

Keenan: Yeah, I think the biggest part of that is applying the humanistic approach and the human Rohan that you keep mentioning. It’s a big deal. You can’t just have anybody that doesn’t have morals and ethics that is over here trying to tell. You about your data and how you should be applying it. So having a solid foundation from our engineering team and the guys that are actually doing the machine learning and the models that have that moral compass and that are being able to provide a user experience and present data. In such a way that does shed light on some positive things that an organization at a company can do.

Keenan: That’s where we need to go. And that’s the ethics that we bring to AI.

Rohan: That’s good, mate. That’s a segue. I’ll pick that up later because this is Keenan’s question, because he’s, like, been no Keenan for quite a while, quite literally.

Mike: So, Jason, talk me through a little bit of so you went through your backstory in the journey of Harkness and kind of the concept on idea. Walk me through a little bit of the idea to the birth of the idea, because there’s a lot of things that happen in between there, both in terms of mental fortitude and the ability to push your vision forward with the ability to influence others. And I’m curious, as you went through that process with your tool, were you using the tool to analyze your own interactions as you were kind of positioning Harkness as a company instead of just a concept?

Jason: That’s a really good question. Yeah. So, when it’s a little boy, I want to be two things. I want to play in the NFL I wanted to be Indiana Jones. I’ll tell you which one worked out. I’m five and 100. The NFL didn’t work out. But I fell in love with this idea of Indiana Jones, A rough and tumble kind of guy tumbling through the jungles and speaking all different languages and sort of being fluent in a bunch of different cultures.

Jason: And that was really the genesis of the idea of the company, To be able to speak languages and understand the power of language, to create and open new worlds, right. And then I’ve done that for 18 years as a teacher teaching Spanish and Mandarin. Having lived in China, Keenan makes fun of me all the time because I get uncomfortable with this. But I did a full bright in China and lived there for two and a half years, and it totally changed the way that I think about the world. To have lived in another country for that long absorb a lot of the culture and traditions from that place.

Jason: But having seen firsthand, okay, man, like, language can’t change things, and then you add the AI element on top of that and being like, oh, I’m absolutely convinced that computers can help us with this linguistic problem. Computers can help us really tap into the deep core soul of what it means to be human. We all want to be understood and to understand at the end of the day, that’s really, really what we want to do.

Jason: And then saying, okay, that deeply resonates with me. Let me just talk to other people. Does that resonate with you? Absolutely. And then I started to hear more and more stories of trauma, Used start hearing people, like, there wasn’t a day where you talk about why I got cut off in this meeting, and this person told me this. You all believe what happened to me? And this you’re like, okay, cool.

Jason: That gave me the energy to get punched in the face the next day, Because that’s really what entrepreneurship is. You wake up, you get your eyes beat shut, and you go to sleep, and you do it again. And you go to sleep, you do it again. You go to sleep, do it again, and you get one lucky breakthrough, because you’re on this amazing podcast, and the whole world changes for you. You. But that’s sort of it, Really talking to folks and being like, hey, do you resonate with my vision of the world?

Jason: Because I think it’d be cool if we all talk to each other. Well, that sounds fun to me. Cool. All right. That resonates. Sweet. We’ll keep building, and then at every stage, we’ve been in touch with our customers, we’ve been in touch with our users. We’ve been hip and hip and be like, hey, do you like this feature? Why do you want it? What would it solve for you? What else would you want? And really, that piece, to the entrepreneurs who are listening, that piece is the one you have to fall in love with, because so many smart people fall in love with their solution.

Jason: And even though it’s my voice that’s dominating this conversation, there are a lot of people that I carry on my shoulders. There are a lot of people with whom that we pour every day into the application to make sure that they are represented so that what we are building represents the hundreds and thousands of conversations that we’ve had and really honors the millions of interactions and pain that people have endured. Like, we learned from their pain to be able to say, like, not anymore.

Jason: Like, we don’t have to live this way anymore. You don’t have to live with getting cut off in a meeting. You have to live with being unincluded. You have to live with being the one who’s left, you know, watching your boss talk to their pet as the guy that you’re much better than get the assignment that you can do. We don’t have to do that anymore. So, let’s step into this new era of humanity and just do it. Well, that’s a little bit about the journey. And if you can’t tell, you really fired up about that drive, because there’s a window, right?

Jason: COVID and I say this with so much respect, like, millions of people have lost their lives, and that’s just a fact. And I think the best way that we can honor those souls is to learn and apply the learnings to make whatever happens after this pandemic much better.

Mike: Sure.

Jason: Thank you for that.

Mike: So, I’m an out loud thinker, unfortunately, it pains me. I work on changing it, but I don’t internalize the thought. It more formulates sometimes, not all the time as it comes out. How do you account for not just the differences in language and structure and local dialect and all of the cultural some countries have longer pauses versus less compared to other folks, maybe, who are just super high energy naturally all the time and maybe get excited when they talk. Or people who are just naturally introverted and don’t necessarily feel as comfortable. Or that executive who is the one who just keeps quiet the entire meeting so at the end he can ask his three or four questions and then render a decision and move on.

Jason: Yeah. Again, fantastic questions. Right. And again, I’m aware that I’ll do this really quick. One of the things that happens, and I want to make very clear, we’re not asking tall people not to be tall anymore. Right. I’m a pretty extrovert person. I talk a lot. I can fill up a space if given as a teacher for a long time, I can talk with you for 50 minutes. I can do that. So, we’re not asking you to change. We’re asking you to be aware.

Jason: How does your ability to fill up a room, how does your physical height the length of your arms? How does that affect the other people who are in the room? And for so long, we’ve had zero data on and we’ve only had anecdotes and stories of how, hey, when you fill up a lot of space, it makes me feel this way. I feel excluded, out of the conversation. So now we can bring awareness around that. And now it is your decision to figure out what you’re going to do with that awareness right. And your team’s decision, and then to put sort of really fine teeth on it. Like, we’re seeing really cool stuff around profiles and teeth. We’re seeing really cool stuff.

Jason: And we’re borrowing from all sorts of different teamwork, whether it’s athletics or the military, in terms of like, okay, wow. The best team actually works kind of like a basketball team where you’ve got the big man in the middle where a ton runs through. You’ve got the point guard who touches the ball a lot. This is a fantastic facilitator, but they don’t actually take that many shots, but they make sure everybody on the team actually feels included in the game. And you’ve got the one shooter, and we all know this person who’s on the call, and they just kind of sit back and when they catch that ball and they let it ride, that sucker goes in, And you’re like, oh, my God, we need all these different roles that we have in sports and we see them in meetings. This is fantastic. So again, trying to say like, humans are so quick to jump to that this is good and this is bad. And again, going back to that lazy thinking, This is system one thinking versus system two thinking, Like he talks to him, I stats, like, oh, okay, there’s a problem there. I don’t know if that’s all the problem, let’s dig into that, And you and now analyzing, you can see like, okay, again, there are different roles and then I’ll kick it to key because again, we use it on ourselves, but go for it.

Keenan: Yeah, I think you hit on it because you know that in all of our meetings, we see the data and it’s like, okay, regardless of the meeting, he’s going to be consistent, and he is going to provide maybe four comments or questions per meeting, but they’re going to be solid. And you’re going to have somebody on the team just like they say. You got to be able to pass that ball. So, the awareness, we even going back to earlier this year when we were looking at our meeting data and analyzing like, oh gosh, Jason was like, Dang Keto, my bad.

Keenan: I didn’t even realize it. But once he saw it, he was like, okay, I know what I need to do to incorporate this team member more in armies. I know what I need to do to make sure that this person is getting past the rock. Because every time that I pass to him, it’s a slam dunk or it’s a three. And he knows that. So, it’s just that simple awareness and being mindful, okay, I’ve got a solid team member here that really brings a lot to the table.

Keenan: I need to go ahead at this point in the conversation, I know it’s going to be a slam dunk and letting them take it from there, it’s like a great alley up. It’s a solid set up, man. And so just using that playbook, we’ve been able to see a lot of teams that have incorporated, just being able to see the data and be like, oh, this person on my team is really solid here. I missed on this for a long time and now I can incorporate them into the team, and I know what their strengths are and also know what their weaknesses are. So now we can focus on all of those components and really have a more cohesive unit and more collaborative.

Keenan: So, it’s a lot it’s been a lot of fun being able to see that and to be able to grow personally as well as a team.

Rohan: I think we’re starting to come into the practical side of things, aren’t we? as soon as we are talking about how teams are organized and structured and where the leadership comes from, where the push comes from. We’re starting to get into quite practical stuff. One thing I’ve noted in my career is that not everyone knows or has had experience of working in a team, and often the fair amount of ego suppression that must come with that.

Mike: So, talk to me from your cyber aspect. When you created a product such as this and you’re starting to look at what goes on just in terms of regulatory requirements around personal Identifiable information, or SPI, I think is the sensitive personal identifiable information. You’re not necessarily tracking names, birth dates, Social Security numbers, things like that. But if you ever considered future regulatory impacts of somebody coming in and trying to say, hey, wait a second, we need to modify the way you store your data, the way your data is accessed, or the way your data is protected.

Jason: Yeah, totally transparent. Our business depends on our ability to defend people’s data, frankly, with our lives. Right. And that’s just becoming table stakes for anybody in any sort of technological field. It’s not surprising, It’s just table stakes. You wouldn’t walk into a restaurant and be like, here are your receipts all over the place. Let me look at the last four digits of like, no, we do this.

Jason: There’s certain sensitive information that’s held behind and we don’t care about what is said. And I’ll be totally honest, it’s profoundly boring for us. What’s interesting is how things are said, how that’s what’s most helpful to your group and then communities at large. So, like how we communicate. When you look at people who say, we talked earlier about this idea of people who can fill up a room, people can talk, but let’s talk about those folks who don’t always initiate, those folks who need a little bit of pull to get into the conversation.

Jason: You can look at just simple words like, I think I think is one of the hedges that we’re seeing across the data that people in power, both formal and informal, use to assert. Right. So, the boss says, hey, I think we should do this. Of course, you’re the boss. Like, we’re going to do what you think. But that softening signals that, hey, the direction I want to lead it is the direction that the group is going to go in. By the same token, we’re experimenting with measuring psychological safety by using phrases like kind of or sort of. So, if somebody says, like, I kind of sort of think we should do this, cool as a manager, definitely listen and then loop back to say, like, hey, tell me a little bit more about that idea.

Jason: What are you thinking? Right, so just signaling to managers who are more often than not, are super skilled at a technical aspect, but need some development in terms of the people management. That’s the piece that is exciting. So, again, all that data is incredibly sensitive. And again, we’re focused on the how, not necessarily the what, but we got to protect it all. Our co-founder, Evan, he is a fantastic dude. He’s worked at Microsoft Azure’s infrastructure team. So, he’s literally been working on the skill that we’ve needed for the last four years.

Jason: So, we’ve got state of the art in the platform.

Chris: So, while we’re in the lane of cyber, I do want to say that your tool could also be used to enhance security in many aspects as well. it can identify folks that are handling X data or handling X data in X way. So, a lot of that information is being gathered and can be mapped out to ways that can help identify security flaws as well.

Jason: That’s right.

Rohan: Starting to come into workplace surveillance now. You’re struggling to really big AI ethics issues, ad tech and workplace tech. And as I’m listening to you, I’m getting the sense of the importance of vision. I’m getting the sense of the importance of method as well. This comes back to that opening you had the Harkness method. It’s clearly you guys have got you’ve put a lot of thought into your human wear, your wet wear.

Rohan: How are you going to approach this? Because there are so many pitfalls at the moment. I’m keeping my AI ethics audit hat on and I’m suppressing my inner cynic. So, the first thing usually I want to hear is, to what extent has voice been given to others? And in your case, well, that’s what you do. This is really good so far. And then I go, okay, to what extent are voices being kept out? And then I go, well, this will actually show me literally, this is looking very good.

Rohan: Then I go to who controls the convening voice? And now I’m going now I can see a whole bunch of voice suppression will come in because we’ve touched on it already. The boss, That’s the suppressing voice. You guys are seeking to, in a sense, sort of get a bit of away from that and enable conversations to occur. I think I’ve got this more or less right?

Jason: Yeah, sure.

Rohan: And it comes back. You’re an educational communications company, but as you just said, you’re deeply in the security business because you’re connected to all their data and you’re in Edtech and workforce surveillance risk areas. It’s a challenging space to be in. So, then my last observation, when you show power, some people in power doesn’t really like that. We don’t have to go very far to look at Gerrymandering all of a sudden, the line was over there.

Rohan: To what extent? How are you going to handle knowing as a team that you’re coming closer and closer and closer to a very powerful no, and that your own mission is on the other side of that no? You’ve actually somehow got to find a way to get through past or over a powerful stakeholder that if you do, you’re also going to piss off.

Jason: Yeah. I think part of the answer is the one you’ve given us earlier. Right. So not every person who wants to pay is going to be the right customer, Yes. And one of the things that we think about often, and I say this with a lot of sobriety in my voice, is that the cats out of the bag. The cats out of the bag, right. We can do this. An 18 year old kid in a dorm room can do this. The question will be, does your company, organization, school, church, synagogue, temple have the requisite trust to move together into this new age? Right.

Jason: I know it sounds lofty and I can get sort of high flutter, but I want to put it in, like, practical terms. Let’s go all the way back 100 years to the first car, Like, you like whiskey, you also like fast cars. I don’t know if I’m going to get in that car with you. Right. Hey, that car doesn’t have seatbelts. That car doesn’t have a window. That car doesn’t have all the other sort of safety gears that we’ve had. Right. So, we just know, and we’re preparing. And part of our process, literally, after every customer call, is to ask them, how would you weaponize this?

Rohan: Oh, that’s my guy. That’s good risk work, mate. That’s very good risk work.

Jason: I’ve got to sleep at night. And we want to make sure that we’re asking that question so we can build it at the same time. And going all the way back to the sort of chainsaw idea of, like, imagine a world where the person, the engineer who designed the chainsaw asked that question and then from the get jumped, designed it so that the second the blade hit human skin, it wouldn’t work.

Jason: That’s what we’re trying to do, And we know we’re going to get it wrong. We know we’re not going to get everything right. We know we’re going to miss. But I want to be able to say to a straight face to all of our stakeholders, to all of our constituents that, hey, we gave all of our effort and here’s what we’ve been doing since day one. You talked earlier about sort of slapping on AI at the end of a project so you can say, look over AI, That is super sloppy and lazy, We want to do the slow work now so that when the winds of controversy work blow, when the winds of whatever crisis happens, we can say, no, we did this.

Jason: And this and this, and we talked to this person, and we did this and this, and we were ahead of this and we did this and this and this and this and this and this and this. Because again, coming back to good Wick monitor duty, coming back to the ethics that were instilled in us as sons of Baptist preachers, Like, I got to face my mom and dad at the end of this day. So even though the stakeholders and investors are scary, but my mom will still take them by in the shed and do some work.

Mike: And also, when you look at really what the technology does, you’re effectively creating a virtual observer in the room that’s replacing a physical person. And the opinion that that observer is formulating is based upon psychological data that has been out there, that’s been taught to psychologists and doctors and all kinds of folks as well as leaders on how to interact and grow. I think also it was a learning opportunity for people to look at that data in a very unbiased manner, It removes kind of multiple biases, race bias, potential gender bias.

Mike: And it’s not that those biases don’t exist because we all know everybody has different backgrounds, experiences and perceptions, So that everybody’s going to bring their own unique value there. But you’re able to apply that middleman observer in the room that has no stake in the game, and you are just looking at the results and you’re applying some math and logic behind those results to say, here’s what we see. Mr. Person, you take this data for you and then you could decide to act or not act or grow.

Mike: And for me, I would love it because I do have a tendency to overtalk. I have a tendency to interrupt a lot, sometimes not a lot. I have a tendency to interrupt during conversations because sometimes there’s Internet delays or microphone delays and it’s that back and forth of you arguing or jostling and you’re trying to have a two way conversation. But the Internet don’t necessarily allow that right now, or there’s Bluetooth and connections.

Mike: So, it kind of eliminates a lot of the static that maybe could come up in a conversation, right?

Keenan: And it also allows for somebody on your team to be like, hey, Keenan. Yeah, man, you actually do talk too much. Like, I couldn’t get my idea across, man. I looked at data. it’s objective. It’s no longer me telling you your breath stinks, man. It’s horrible. And it’s an emotional aspect to that. it’s all objective right there. You could see it. Everybody on your team can see it. If you had an idea and somebody on your team also had that idea first, but you just talked over them and now you’re getting promoted because your voice happened to be louder or what your boss thought was the first person to bring up that concept and that new idea, it’s not you’re getting credit for it when it was somebody else’s.

Keenan: So, all those things are measurable now, and there’s no emotion to that because it’s in the data, it’s objective. No people are going to get credit for the things that they said and that they’ve been able to do and the results, even if they were a voice that wasn’t always the loudest in the room or wasn’t the boss’s favorite, it’s all there. If the boss decides to make a decision on an individual after looking through the performance and through the data, that’s on them and that’s on the company and the organization.

Keenan: But you can’t say now that you didn’t bring anything to the table or that that person obviously wasn’t up snuff because they were, but they just weren’t getting the proper recognition anymore.

Jason: I think. Keenan, you reminded me of two different things. There’s been a big push over the last year to in person, Even threats from big time CEOs come back in person, and a lot of that is about surveillance, which is kind of weird. And the other piece is that a lot of work cultures, especially for people of color and women, are toxic, And we have the water cooler, And people are talking trash about everybody at the water cooler, and somehow we forget that gossip is corrosive and we celebrate these unintentional interactions with Spontaneity. We’re like, oh, no, that was just two people talking trash about whatever, Not really based on any data. And to the extent that we can say no one, when you jump off a call, you don’t have to ruminate about like, man, are they going to go talk behind my back?

Jason: No, because you can look in the data and be like, oh, yeah, okay, it was an equitable conversation, or it wasn’t, And we talk a lot about radical candor and all the clarity and all this stuff. Like, let’s just put it all on the table, Get it out there, and then we can all see the thing that everybody’s talking about at happy hour, and then the boss comes up. Oh, yeah, we were talking about the equals fly equals fly. We were talking about the fact that you suck. Right.

Jason: That’s not okay. Right. But the other thing I would say is that I always want to root what we’re doing in practical stuff that we already understand and don’t have any fear of. Imagine football, American football, with no rules. That would be state sanctioned murder.

Rohan: That’s stadia Fiorentina in Florence. In fact, the most violent game you’ll ever see is, I think, what you described, and I don’t want to play it.

Jason: Yeah, fantastic Netflix documentary on that, by the way.

Rohan: Right, yeah.

Jason: And then you get rules like, hey, you can’t break each other’s fingers off. You’ve got to stay on that side of the line. You got to stay on this side of line. Okay, but then, like, people will be people, and you need somebody to referee the rules. And now the cool part about the promise of AI is that we can use AI to referee the rules for a conversation, which then offloads the cognitive energy of the leader or whoever it is to say, like, hey, let’s just exist. Let’s do this. And then the AI will say, like, you crossed that line.

Jason: Come back over. Or you haven’t crossed the line. Come back over. And one of the things that we talk a lot about pulling people back, but one of the things that excites me is to push people before to say, like, no, you can’t just sit on the call and not talk. You’ve got to contribute. We’re seeing this in real time with project managers who are paying, like, real billable hours to people who sit on real Zoom calls and don’t say anything. And their customers are like, that person sat on the Zoom call for 3 hours and is going to charge me $350.

Jason: What exactly did I pay for?

Rohan: Yeah, I keep coming back. I keep seeing this enterprise level benefit, and it’s sometimes not a benefit obtained within a team. It’s actually a benefit obtained within the organization or a group of teams or the group of groups. Because as we’ve said before, you’re all about miscommunication, and we’re all about getting a bit more trust for that next level. Now that is balance sheet able at the enterprise level. We can value that stuff, and we generally do want to drive it down.

Rohan: We don’t want asshole managers with asshole teams because that’s where teams come from, asshole managers. But there’s this element of a necessary level of trust already in place. But I think one of the things I’m really liking is helping people understand how to ask different cultural questions, because of course, if it’s outside your cultural base, you can’t answer the ask the question because you don’t know how to ask it.

Rohan: And one of the things that we have here in New Zealand and we’re. Growing our language, we’re bringing in to our Māori, which is the Māori language. So English is the English language. And what’s happening is people don’t quite know how to ask questions because the linguistic bases are quite different, and the social structures beneath those linguistic bases are different as a result. So what we have is a whole bunch of people wanting to talk together, talk to each other. They don’t know quite how to ask questions and to listen.

Rohan: So I think there’s a nice little use case there for you helping global companies cross cultures, I’d say, yeah, I’m.

Jason: So glad that you said that. And again, it’s always I’m not boosting.

Rohan: It, I’m saving all my hard questions for later.

Jason: No, look, we’re trying to cut to the core of what it means to be human, for so many hundreds of thousands of years, hunters and gatherers sat around a fire and they equitably talk to each other. So many hundreds, millions of people sat around a table. We literally watch Game of Thrones. Oh, that’s crazy. Like, no, that’s how people live. Like, you got warlords coming together from all different parts of Europe be like, hey, we could all kill each other, or we could figure out this thing and figure out this piece. You literally sit around the nights of the round table, right?

Rohan: That didn’t end well. Just so you know, I all died in a last battle.

Jason: In the last one. In the last one. But we just know at a human level, And this is also back with everything we do is back with science too, is that people’s adoption of new ideas, even those ones that they disagree with, they’re much more likely to follow along if they feel like their idea has been hurt. And that’s really one of the many processes that we’re trying to facilitate. It’s like, hey, we might go left, but I really want to go right. But you heard me and you heard my case.

Jason: We’re going left, wind up going right. I can get on board with that because I see a larger picture. That’s what gets us excited about this stuff.

Mike: So, my question is around uniqueness of teams and you can interpret that in a moment. I started a job not that long ago. This was, I don’t know, probably within the last ten years. And it was a sales related job. And I was going to my first meeting. I knew I was at home with this company, or at least this leader. Leader sits down and I first day at the job, 09:00 1st meeting, We go in there and he pulls up his pant leg to show his sock. And on his sock he has a saying that says, this meeting is bullshit.

Mike: And that’s like my first interaction with this manager. I loved it. I thought that was hilarious and it was one of the best welcoming to a company that was a different culture versus really super large enterprise cultures. You could also look at Seal Team Six or certain military communities that are high performing that don’t in a multicultural world, they’ll throw racism. They’ll throw sexism and comments that to most people, if they were to look at the data on the surface, don’t really understand the context or the joke or the intent or the 30 year relationship that two snipers who are out in the field have with each other that gets pretty, maybe rough and tumble. Right.

Mike: I understand this is all coming down to the data and how it’s presented to the client, and then that client or manager or whatever can interact. So whoever that is, if it is a high performing or sales culture or Wolf of Wall Street kind of environment, they should know that and be okay with that. But help me understand a little bit. Like, is there even anything there around that thought track with harness in terms.

Jason: Of people at the edge cases?

Mike: Yeah. How do you manage the edge cases?

Jason: Yeah, I think if I’m understanding your question correctly, half of that is that cultures and having space for that culture. Right. So I’ll move it to a less charged environment. Mechanics talk a certain way. Right. There’s a certain culture in garages that me, given my background, I just don’t understand. So, again, we’re always going to come back to the human aspect of it. It’s profoundly arrogant of me to walk into mechanic and be like, actually, you have to pick up your pants. You have to talk this way.

Jason: You have to enunciate all your words. I literally don’t know what I’m talking about. But there are some human biological processes that I have some understanding about. Right. If we hear from everyone, we just know objectively, we’re going to get a larger subset of ideas. If you have more ideas, you’re going to have the luxury of picking from those ideas. You increase your chances of picking a better idea.

Jason: If folks are talking to each other, you’re increasing the bonds. Right. Abraham Lincoln famously says, it’s hard to hate a man whose story, you know, that’s a really solid reason for having everybody to talk to each other and getting feedback on whether or not we’re hitting that metric or not. So, yeah, you’re going to have certain cultures where cultures are sort of toxic or not or that, but we just don’t that cuts through in terms of a human level.

Rohan: Hey, Keenan, were you kind of saying, if Team X and industry X does a really good Harkness score, and then they go to a conference and say, we got a really good hardness score, and you go, oh, my God, how can I do that? And you try and import it, but you’ve got a completely different industry. Was that sort of around the question?

Mike: Not necessarily. So, if I use the Wolf of Wall Street example. Have you ever seen that movie?

Rohan: Yeah, it’s great.

Mike: Those kinds of environments exist a lot more, and there’s good and bad about those kind of environments, It does isolate and alienate certain individuals and groups and backgrounds or whatever, but also it’s a charged environment because it’s high performing. It’s go, go, go. literally talking about cocaine and all kinds of things, But in the workplace environment. Now, I would suspect that maybe a company like that firm who owned Wolf of Wall Street, if they were to leverage Harkness to understand some of the interactions of their meetings, they would have to make a logical decision to say, I’m okay with this, I’m okay with that, based upon with the data.

Keenan: A big part of that is what team members that are high performers are they missing out on by engaging in behaviors like that. To be able to look at your data and say, oh man, we’ve got a rock star guy, but he just doesn’t like it when we talk about cocaine or when we do those types of things. That is in the day that’s on that company, that organization to be like, okay, this fits us. And while we may have some solid folks here on our team that don’t agree, we’re going to continue this behavior because this is just what’s going to help drive us to be more successful and we don’t need that person. that’s an active decision that that group has to make as to who they’re alienating by engaging in certain behaviors.

Mike: And what that ties into is somebody like myself who is more naturally introverted than Extroverted. It’s been a journey over my lifetime to be able to get comfortable with coming on podcasts and public speak and do things like that. And that came through me watching many hours of Ted Talks and YouTube videos and other things to the upside of all of this, It cuts a learning curve down significantly. It cuts those many years of trial and error with different cultures and different people of failing and struggling and presents a little bit more of a data driven approach to better self-awareness, better communication, better understanding of the plus and minuses of both sides of the conversation. Because at the end of the day, a dialogue is a dialogue and it’s important.

Mike: And wars are fought over miscommunication and dialogues and riots get kicked off from miscommunication and dialogues and small things because people don’t always look at the intent, they maybe look at a word. And the intent behind the word sometimes is more powerful than the lack of vernacular at that moment or whatever the case may be. So I also think of this as a positive, to be able to really cut my learning curve down, or my child who’s a teenager, right, being able to get him to not have to spend 16,000 hours watching Ted Talks, understanding how to communicate.

Jason: Yeah, I think I’m understanding both. Rohan, your point and Mike, your point a little bit better is that part of the reason that I wanted to transition from education into technology is because of that impetus. And I had heard my whole life, I’d worked so long to educate really talented students to go off into the world and do amazing things and when they did that, when they did what I asked them to do, they ended up in these really tough situations.

Jason: They’ve been like, oh, man, there’s stuff outside of my control, namely toxic work environments that my students are crashing into and then getting disillusioned because they taste money, fortune and fame, ended up selling their souls on that path. And then I’ll just bring it back to one. The story doesn’t well for Wolf of Wall Street and then if you go back to the training that Navy Seals get, and I have so much respect for that profession, honor and truth and the duty and the responsibility, it’s been all guys to this point. But those men sign up for some of the highest ideals the human experience has to offer, right?

Jason: And when you look at the intensity of their training, and I’m talking about their mental training, not even the physical sort of buff, ripped guys on the beach, stuff like the mental fortitude to hold their water, doing incredibly difficult moral decisions, You think about the decision of do I take this life or do I not? That’s about the largest decision a human being has to have. They have been trained over and over and over to have a moral compass to make the right idea. So again, going all the way back to not every customer is going to be the right one for us.

Rohan: I’ll just come back to that because some teams have different characteristics. This Seal example, obviously these people say, yeah, I’m willing to die for it, I’m willing to die for it. And then that’s what they use as their fire to lift them to these great heights. But if you’re a part time remote engineer just fired from Twitter and you’re going, I feel so connected right now and here’s my Harkness. Oh, my God.

Rohan: For your use cases, there are these thresholds. They’re off and then they’re suddenly on and then they’re really, really good. And then as they get closer and closer and closer to that which shall not be moved, it feels like the use case gets more and more specific in some cases. That’s your Seal teams, for instance. But over at the bulk end of the market, I want to go back to those kids because I still think it’s one of your best examples of the girl saying, oh, my God, if those baseball boys don’t talk to us, I’m going to make them.

Rohan: There are a bunch of peers. To a large extent, the power structure is set for them because it’s school. They haven’t fully had to buy into this awfulness of society through work yet. So, they’re full of hope. They’re teachable well, hopefully they’re full of hope, but they’re, again, a different set of people. Do you see some of the brightness in the kids example carry through into the work example, or are you dealing with quite different types of people inside?

Rohan: What’s commensurate? What’s going to move across all our use cases? And we know it’s starting with kids, and it’s ending with sealed teams who are going off to die for the country. And in the middle, there’s a whole bunch of people that hate work. How if I’m in this team and I’m wanting to lift my team up, and what am I going to connect them with? A sealed team or my school kids? What am I trying to connect to their inner selves such that they’ll use this damn tool to be a better team?

Jason: Yeah, it comes back to human biology, And if we’ve learned anything about the workforce coming out of COVID is that people want flexibility and agency, Like, the structure of work comes from manufacturing age, where you had immigrants from Hungary, Germany, Italy, the Eastern Europe come to the US. Those groups didn’t speak English. And the US government had to sort of literally carbon copy all those folks into one sort of person. It’s the reason why we teach English, history, math, science, and then some language in every school. And it’s why we don’t teach entrepreneurship. It’s why we don’t teach creative thinking. There’s a reason.

Jason: How do you standardize all these folks? But we know that people want agency. And to the extent that we can use this tool to give folks agency again, to come back to the human element that cuts across culture, if I say, here’s my idea, and you choose not to use my idea, at least I feel just a little bit better taking your route, because I’ve been heard, I’ve been seen. I feel like part of the team. My perspective has given credence. It’s put on the table.

Jason: It’s not the whole perspective, but at least I’m like, all right, that’s my contribution. And there are more people like that than at the extremes of the poll. There are more people like that that are in schools, and there are more people like that in the Navy Seal teams. There are more people who just say, like, hey, I just want to show up nine to five, do a great job and go home to my wife and kids. I want to show up, make a meaningful contribution to my work, feel like I’m seen, make sure that my time here at this company is worth it. And I think, again, looking at the future, one of the things that’s super exciting for us is this idea is that resumes are gone, right?

Jason: Because to the point of agency, to the point your point, Mike, goes like, Yo, what culture am I getting into? You all sold me an idea. I gave up this equity in this company and all these other benefits I got here, and this is wild. This is not what you all said. This is what I signed up for, So before you make that transition to action, you can say, hey, let’s look at my Harkens data. Let’s look at your hearts data. I want to see how your teams interact, You can look at my resume. You can look at how I’ve been at XYZ Company for the last three years. So it’s not like we’re not going to lie each other with the dance of resumes. We’re not going to lie each other, lie to each other with the dance of interviews, all this stuff. I’m going to promise to be this, look, here’s what I’ve done.

Jason: Here’s how I interact. Here’s the type of boss I like. Here’s the type of team I like to be on. And those new configurations are really exciting to be a part of.

Mike: Yeah. And to the underrepresented folks with neuro divergences, right, autism, Asperger’s, whatever, who maybe don’t have the comfort level, and being able to help them visually see other people’s interaction may actually help break some of the molds or barriers or help them grow as an individual to find the right words. Because for me, when I love to read, but I’m not a speed reader, my brain doesn’t process it. But I’ll listen to a podcast on two time speed and be Gucci.

Jason: Right?

Mike: Like, there’s a few people that I got to put it on regular speed because they talk super fast, but by and large, I can retain more auditory. But then when I read a book and listen to the audiobook at the same time, it’s a different way to learn, it’s a different way to study. So you’re almost presenting that as a combination of an audiobook and the visual book that they’re reading.

Jason: In a.

Mike: Data way that they could understand.

Jason: Yeah, I heard somebody describe it in a way that kind of got me chucked up. And she said, I’ve never before seen we’re taught since we’re three years old about the five senses. And you can hear, like, oh, like, touch and smell or like, sight and touch. Right. But I’ve never seen until now hearing and speaking and hearing connected with visual, where now you can visualize the conversation. And even coming back to the diagram, there’s, like, a beautiful symmetry that nature, the natural world, gives us if we slow down enough to see it even in that diagram.

Jason: The most beautiful versions of that diagram are an equitable conversation because it’s perfectly symmetrical. Right. A dominated conversation. Just doesn’t look like people are like, oh, it’s a cool diagram, but we do these calls all the time. People are like, oh, I like that one. And the ones that they like is when everybody’s voice is represented everyone’s talking to each other because there’s a symmetry there that really speaks to the deepest parts of our soul. So, it’s really cool.

Chris: Well, I know after a conversation like this, I need a drink to help process it. Jason, I want to cut to you because I know you’re in LA.

Jason: Right

Chris: And I know LA is stacked with venues. Where’s a good venue that you prefer to go to hang out and unwind?

Jason: Man, there’s no specific venue, but I will say the beach here is super grounding, and there’s quite a few watering holes, so to speak, where I’ll enjoy a nice good old fashioned right. And then take some of that whiskey and bourbon for my time in Tennessee, in Chattanooga and Kentucky and just sort of reflect on the date. Right.

Rohan: Did someone say Tennessee?

Jason: You’re the only ten. All right.

Rohan: I’m sorry. I had to. He just opened the door for me.

Chris: All right, so, Jason, give me a name. Give me a name of a venue.

Rohan: Let’s boost someone.

Jason: Yeah, let’s see. I’m trying to think. Give me a second here. I’m going to really answer this question. If you all were to come to LA for the first time, where would I take you? We’re doing two things. We’re doing two things. I’m going to pick you up from Lax. We’re going to go to Santa Monica Promenade. We’re going to Venice Beach. We’re going to look at all of the creative we won’t call them weirdos, but all the creative, expressive folks, because you just got to do that, right.

Jason: And if the medicinal is in your thing, that’s an option here for you as well. And then we can go inland to one of my favorite bars here called Seven Grand, and they have over 500 different types of whiskey. Man. So we just sit there and do.

Rohan: A flight and just 500. Now, are you talking American whiskey or whiskey with an E?

Jason: So you got the Y, you got the Ie and the E Y, and you got bourbon. I went there a couple of weeks ago. This student put me on to some Japanese stuff. I know kokori and the first layer of Japanese stuff, man, you think about the precision manufacturing that comes out of Japanese with whiskey distilling, it’s just like, oh, my God, this tastes like it’s amazing.

Rohan: Is seven grand the average bill. is that what you might.

Jason: Depend on, what you’re drinking? What’s a couple of bucks between friends, man, you’re good.

Chris: Oh, man. All right, well, Keenan, what are you thinking? Where are you located geographically?

Keenan: Washington, DC. The Nation’s capital. Rocket Bar is one of the few places. It’s right across from Capital One Arena. It’s a dive bar, but it’s got a pretty cool pool table and lounge area. Downstairs. There’s another spot that I frequent called the Gathering Spot. There are a lot of politicos that hang out at the Gathering spots. I could talk about policy and stay up to date on all the new regulatory things that are coming out.

Keenan: So they’ve got really good food, actually.

Jason: Quite cool. Oh, yeah.

Keenan: I’m telling you, I think you’d fit right in.

Rohan: Yeah, I don’t know if that’s a good thing, fitting right into DC. But analytic. Oh, thanks, man.

Chris: All right.

Keenan: Yeah.

Chris: So, I just heard last call here. You guys got time for one more?

Rohan: Yes.

Chris: If you open a cybersecurity theme bar, what would the name be and what would your signature drink be called?

Keenan: The name of the cybersecurity theme bar would be Skynet. And the drink of choice is going to be the Judgment Day Daiquiri. Judgment day, Daiquiri.

Rohan: Daiquiri. I think the Garnishes are going to be judgment Day decree. I think the Garnishing we need some tombstoning. I don’t know.

Keenan: but when people go in for drinks, I want something strong. So, give me a double.

Rohan: Double with Judgment Day.

Chris: Yeah, that might be your last drink.

Keenan: It might be before you see the gates of glory. It’s going to be a good night. Basically, you could tell from that drink.

Chris: All right, Jason, what you got?

Jason: I’ll go with a privacy pint, man. Privacy is the first thing we lead with. Get a little pint, keep the data secure. Keep the data secure. Keep your wits about you.

Keenan: Privacy pint!

Rohan: The privacy pint. Yeah, we pour the privacy pint. Yes, the people’s pour of the privacy pint.

Jason: The People’s Pour baby! Give the people what they want, And if I lived in a Sci-Fi world, right, as you embark more like you would be able to protect more, more and and more of what you didn’t want people to know about you.

Rohan: So it’s the opposite of drunkenness where you tell everybody everything, more privacy points, you tell fewer stuff to few people.

Jason: That’s it.

Rohan: And you’re in the communications business.

Jason: That’s it.

Chris: That’s going to have to be some reverse algorithm to keep you quiet after a drink.

Jason: Yeah, exactly.

Keenan: Man, that’s an innovative drink right there!

Chris: Well, thanks so much. It was great talking to you guys. I appreciate you coming on. Before you guys go, let us know, let our listeners know where we can find you online and connect with you.

Jason: Yeah. The first place to go is harkness.ai. That’s number one. And then happy to connect with folks on LinkedIn as well. We’re super active there. Yeah, super active. We’re early enough where we’re still talking with folks and really want to stay connected with our users, listeners. And really, like I said, this is a human movement, right. We’re using these tools to make the world better, and we don’t want to just sit in our virtual Ivy Towers and sort of throw lightning bolts from on high and really want to hear use cases. And I don’t know I’m setting up myself for, but our most productive, best conversations come from people who disagree with us.

Jason: And I think I want to model, especially as the leader of this group, being able to hear opinions that don’t necessarily jive with mine and hear different perspectives so that in the service of building a long lasting, strong company, culture and just product, we’re getting everybody’s voice involved, So, yeah, hit me up on LinkedIn, go to the website, check us out, reach out. If I can’t get back to you, it’s only because I got a million other things, nothing but would love to connect with folks there.

Chris: Awesome. Jason, Keenan, Mike, Rohan, thank you all for joining me. It’s been awesome.

Jason: Appreciate it.

Keenan: Yeah, I appreciate that. Rohan, Mike, Jason and Chris. Fly eagles, fly. What do you all say, Rohan? What is your saying for the Titans? What do you all say?

Rohan: Love Ya Blue.

Keenan: Love Ya Blue.

Jason: Okay.

Rohan: Love Ya Blue.

Chris: Terrible.

Rohan: I think Tennessee fans sing because LP field is actually everyone else’s home field because we only kind of win every now and then. Apart from that, we’ll come to your stadium and defeat you completely.