Stop Solving Problems. Start CREATING Them.

Sean Weisbrot: What if the fastest way to transform your business was to create problems on purpose? In this episode, I talk with Ted Santos, president of Turnaround Investment Partners, about why CEOs should embrace chaos, challenge, assumption, and question everything they know. We explore how neuroplasticity, inquiry, and self-mastery drive innovation, leadership, and true organizational change. If you're ready to rethink problem solving and discover a new paradigm of business transformation, this conversation's for you. When you're trying to do business at a big level, why is it important to think about problems that you can create so that you can solve them as the thing that will create the paradigm shift for the business?

Ted Santos: That's a good way to, to ask it. because I say, CEOs, if they are not intentionally creating problems for their organization to solve, they should be fired or retrained immediately. So intentionally creating problems is, as you could say, counterintuitive for most people at the same time, if we, it's important because what it does, is it, it supports transformation of the entire organization. if you have the entire organization involved, it creating a problem such as sending a man to the moon and we've never done it. people learn new skills development. Skills, competencies. There are new technologies created, and that is solving a problem that didn't even exist. We didn't know we didn't have this problem. the other thing it does, it is it helps make the organization more nimble so that when problems that you didn't create happen, like pandemics or, competitive changes or the economy. Your organization becomes more nimble and able to, manage those things. So creating problems disrupts the organization, but it solves bigger problems in the long run.

Sean Weisbrot: I remember having this conversation with you during our intro call, and I found it really fascinating. It's been stuck in my head since then. Because I've never heard anyone talk about it like this before. I've always thought of, okay, we're trying to help our clients with some problem and we're trying to solve that problem, but. When you think about it for the client, it may not be as big of a thing to solve when you're thinking about for yourself, for the business, how you can create a problem rather than to just specifically solve a problem. You're thinking at a smaller level, and therefore the amount of help you can provide to the world is less, and so your company is able to grow less and the growth happens slower. What happened in your life that made you come to this realization that people are looking at it all wrong?

Ted Santos: Well, first, and this may sound counterintuitive, I don't say that people are looking at it all wrong. People are looking at everything or anything, based on what they already know and what they were given. That's all you have. So if you only speak English, it doesn't mean that you're speaking wrong because you don't speak Vietnamese or Portuguese or Russian. You just have what you have. And I would say the paradigm that we are given is all about evolution, more, better, different. So. We're doing X and we wanna do it, we wanna do more of it. So we try and do more. If that doesn't work, then we do it better. If that doesn't work, we do it differently. And that's just the paradigm we're given. That's part of our education system. It's part of our mindset. and so it, it, it gives us almost a hamster on the wheel. Of trying harder. The little red caboose we're talking, I think I can, I think I can. You just try harder, try harder, and you're just really doing an, a version of more, better or different. And we're solving problems and oftentimes they don't even get to the source. But if it, if it makes something go away because I got the right answer, that's also how we're educated. Just come up, we, you have to have the right answer. And you get the grade, you get the 4.0 GPA. But when you talk about creating problems. You don't have the answers, so you're asking questions that may actually ask other questions. So a great example is, Steve Jobs. Imagine saying, Hey, I want you to put, create a, a miniature listening device, and it needs to be really small fit into a person's pocket, and it needs to be able to play 1000 songs at that time. A miniature listening device was a Sony Walkman or, or a, a disc or a Panasonic. People were happy with it. No one knew they didn't have an iPod. It was something we didn't even know we didn't have. And so by creating that problem, he created a whole paradigm shift and how we engage music. I mean, he had iTunes already, but this became very compatible with iTunes and it changed the way people listen to music. Especially from a convenience and the amount of songs, you're not changing cassettes or radio stations or flipping a new disc in it. You can can have just 1000 songs playing and there was no blueprint. So imagine what his team had to do in terms of miniaturization, in terms of semiconductors, in terms of many things. How do you do this? And, and have it be so small and have perhaps more power, computing power than we had in 1969 when we sent a man to the moon.

Sean Weisbrot: I want to thank this video sponsor brilliant.org. Let's be honest, AI can feel like magic. We use it every day, but what's actually happening inside the machine when you ask it to write an email or generate an image, I was curious, but I didn't want to sit through a dry one hour lecture, so I checked out brilliance, how AI Works course, and honestly, I love it. It's been such a fun learning experience trying to understand. How AI works. Honestly, I had no idea that it worked the way it did. And for someone who loves technology, I'm kind of ashamed that I never bothered to go deeper into understanding how these things work. They start you off with these fun, interactive lessons on word predictions and gram models, and they talk about probabilities. And it just clicks. You see how those simple ideas can scale up into neurons and layers, how models learn to recognize patterns and classify faces, and how it all comes together instead of simply memorizing facts with brilliant, you're learning from the basics until you're an expert in a topic. So you're getting a genuine understanding for how AI works with this specific course, and that hands-on approach is proven to be six times more effective than just watching lectures. Because they make it interactive, and that's how I learn. I don't know about you. So if you wanna start building your problem solving skills and learn more about how AI works, I highly recommend this course and the other courses that brilliant.org offers. To get started for free on Brilliant, go to brilliant.org/sean weisbrot. Scan the QR code on screen, or click the link in the description Brilliance. Also given our viewers 20% off a premium annual subscription, which gives you unlimited daily access to all of their courses. Thank you again. Brilliant. Let's get back to the interview. So if you're someone that likes this idea, but maybe doesn't know how to get started with changing the way they think because maybe they haven't been exposed to to it, what's the first thing they should be thinking about or doing to kind of start opening their mind towards changing how they think about this so that they can get started? Basically,

Ted Santos: simplest way is to question everything  That's hard for people.

Sean Weisbrot: That is hard for people

Ted Santos: and technically it's not hard. But that's the prevailing conversation. So I'll give you another example along that line. and, and you may have never heard this, but have you ever heard someone say, change is hard?

Sean Weisbrot: I think everybody says that.

Ted Santos: Great. So let's have a conversation about that so we can help people understand what I'm saying. Tell me why change is hard. I mean, if that's, if that's what everyone or most people are saying, there must be some kind of empirical evidence to support why change is hard. So help me understand why it's hard.

Sean Weisbrot: I think we've been brainwashed by education systems to believe that something is impossible or something is difficult because the education system is still designed like it was when the Industrial Revolution started. Okay. People were meant to come out of school, ready to work from a certain hour to a certain hour and ask for permission to do things like get up and go to the bathroom or get a water, right? So it's, it's like they were being primed for a certain kind of role, but that's not the world we live in anymore. And the education system hasn't been adapted to that because capitalism needs people to blindly go to work and then spend their money on things that they don't need. And so I, I believe. The idea of change is hard, comes from this poorly designed educational system. I could be wrong, but that's what I perceive.

Ted Santos: Okay. That, no, that's, that's a good way to put it. So are you also saying that change has never been hard? It's just we've been educated, into, let's say a paradigm?

Sean Weisbrot: I believe that is the case because if everyone was raised with this belief that you should question everything. Then we probably wouldn't have a government. I think people go, well, why am I paying taxes? Why am I going to work? Why am I paying these bills? Why does money even make sense? Like it's just a piece of paper. It doesn't have value. So I think there's a tremendous amount of questions that we. Are raised to just ignore because we're basically all blindly agreeing socially that something exists and has meaning and or value, but is actually a, a collective delusion.

Ted Santos: Okay. Wow. So yeah, we're, we are, I'm speaking to Socrates now. So, just as a kind of a joke, they say, there were a bunch of philosophers talking about how many teeth a rhinoceros has. Socrates walks into, into the room in the middle of the conversation and says, why don't you just catch one and count the teeth? And they were like, preposterous. That's ridiculous. Why would we do that? We're postulating. so, he questioned their whole conversation about. How many, we're going to guess based on the size and we're going, and I don't know if they were using statistical analysis, but he questioned it and they had a problem. who is this arrogant guy who believes he has, a better way for us to, come to, an answer? And so, perhaps that's also a, a challenge in our society when people do question things because, we. We may look at Steve Jobs and say, what a great leader and what a great job he did. But the, the fact is it wasn't always that way for him, was it? Right. And he was demoted and he left and started a, a new company, but he, he actually introduced, something called the Newton in 1983. And people thought it was a ridiculous thing. But fast forward that Newton is what we call the iPad.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah.

Ted Santos: And when they entered, interviewed John Scully,  They asked Scully, do you think jobs had to mature as a person, as a leader? And he said, no. All the things that he was saying in the eighties are the things that he did later. It was us who were behind. So that's, yes, we have an education system, that tells us to, we're rewarded for the right answer. We, we are rewarded in school and then we go to work. We are rewarded for coming up with a solution. like. Do we really reward people to ask questions that, expose vulnerabilities that, create new possibilities? We look in corporate America. most breakthrough initiatives fail. Why do they fail? oftentimes because people have an existing paradigm and people do not like being disrupted. And as we're talking about why is change hard? People are living with that conversation as though it's a fact of life. there's a French philosopher called, named Jean Paul sart, and he says, once people believe something, they go out of their way to prove what they believe is right.

Sean Weisbrot: Which is why I believe the best way to live is to be okay with being wrong and to be okay with admitting you're wrong and be okay to taking new information and adding that to your knowledge set so that you can continue to make informed decisions. And the, and that's a very scientific way of looking at the world. Most people just don't have that mindset, unfortunately.

Ted Santos: Yeah, and, and you, in some ways, science does a decent job of that. I mean, they have. Found that the speed of light is not constant under certain circumstances. Right? And when you drop an object in a volume, there are certain circumstances where that's where those facts are, are, they're altered, so we've been, desi denied in certain circumstances, what we call the laws of physics, the laws of science. even natural science is not as consistent as we think because some person asked questions. And there are lots of things that were scientific as the earth used to be the center of the universe. And I guess it changed addresses and let the sun be the center, because that's what a lot of people believed a long time ago and even executed a guy by the name of Copernicus for saying that that's inaccurate. So we, we have a culture of having the right answer and being right about it. Willing to, ostracize and in, or take someone's life in the, in the case of Copernicus or, a reputational execution, of a person for, for not going along with what everyone else does. So when I say question everything for some people, that's what's, that's the challenge.  I forget who it was. Perhaps it was Malcolm Gladwell. they were talking about being an entrepreneur is a social risk. 'cause you come up with these ideas that no one's thought of and people will say things like, oh, if that idea is so great, someone would've thought of it already. I mean, I, I, I can't, I don't know what happened with Facebook. Perhaps someone said that if that idea was so great, someone would've thought of it already. You're wasting your time. If man were meant to fly, he would have wings. we can go on and on with all the, kind of, I call them slogans, like, if man were meant to fly, he would have wings. If, if that was such a great idea, it would've been discovered. that's kind of how our society operates. We're rewarded. Hey, I gave the right answer, and if I don't know it, someone will give me the right answer. but it seems this world, this domain of breakthroughs exists in a domain of things you didn't know. You didn't know. And our education system is not good at training and developing us to walk into the world of things you didn't know. You didn't know. And intentionally creating problems can oftentimes open the path of things you didn't know. You didn't know to. Greater discoveries.

Sean Weisbrot: Well, yeah, like I said, the education system isn't designed for that. The education system is designed to go, this is what you need to know about math. This is what you need to know about science. This is what you need to know about biology and chemistry and history and economics in in government. Now, go get a job that doesn't make you use any of that information because it's not about what you're learning. It's about seeing can you learn? What we need you to learn so that you can do a job that will give you enough money to be able to survive and keep you trapped with social media and news and being angry so that you can constantly be focused on something that's not what matters.

Ted Santos: I question if that's actually learning.

Sean Weisbrot: I don't think people learn in school. The, the only class that I had where I really enjoyed and felt like I was learning anything was my, my advanced placement psychology class. And that's why I got a great a degree in psychology because all of the other stuff like, sure, I remember all of those things, but I don't use any of those things. The only thing that I use on a daily basis is psychology. I, but I'm also learning other skills around language and tech and things like that. And I use those skills, but those skills weren't taught to me by a school. Those are skills that I developed on my own.

Ted Santos: I I, I wasn't planning to go down this path. so reading a book and then telling me what I read in the book is not learning.

Sean Weisbrot: It's regurgitation.

Ted Santos: Yeah. I'm just recalling something that I saw. so imagine this is where it starts. you get a test. You, you read a book and this is the book. See Jane Run C Spot Run. see John run up the hill. Okay, here's a test. What did Jane do? Jane ran. What did Spot do? Jane? Spot ran. What did John do? John ran, where did he run up the hill? You have a 4.0 average,

Sean Weisbrot: right? Why did Jane run? Why did spot run? What are they? Are they running to something? Are they running away from something? Are they trying to solve a problem? Are they trying to help someone? Like what are they, what are they doing? Why are they doing it right? I think that's, that's where the education system fails, is it doesn't go a level deeper.

Ted Santos: Well, well, you, you answer those questions and you now have an a and you have a 4.0 in that class. And so we become, the, the, the books become more expansive, so they go, but it's, it's basically the same thing. who discovered America? what was the Magna Carta? It's just. Slightly more complex than C Jane Run, C Spot Run. And then I tell you exactly what the book said. I give you the date that I, that I saw. And I would say that's not thinking it's, it's not thinking. It's not learning. And I, from what I've heard psychologists say, for every waking hour, we only spend five minutes thinking the other 55 minutes is spent having thoughts, it having thoughts. In the sense of we are having thoughts about things we've already seen, we've heard, we've read, someone told us, and we're having thoughts and we may be rearranging it in different orders, but we're only having thoughts about that which we already know and we may extrapolate with that to actually think something that's unthought. We're not really, given the tools to manage that. And so I'm, I'm answering your questions around, creating problems. 'cause this is what problem creating problems does. It requires people to think that which they've never thought. And what that does is opens this path of uncertainty, confusion, and possibly chaos. Those are the things we're taught to stay away from. We're taught to have very specific formulas for things. we, we even teach in business. What are the three steps to success? We teach people personally, what are the three steps to happiness or the 10 steps. The 10 rules. That's if we follow those, supposedly we hit Nirvana. We hit the business that, does a hundred billion dollars. We come become the, the great leader, and it doesn't seem to be occurring that way yet. We keep saying the same thing and people keep looking for, well, give me the steps that I need to take and I'll just do it. That's once again, just I have the answer. I can, I can tell you the three steps. The three steps are bop, bop, bop, bop. Yes. Give me my star. Hmm.

Sean Weisbrot: I attribute my skill to my parents. My mom taught me when I was really young that if you don't know the answer to something or if you don't feel satisfied with the answer that you've been given to ask another question. And so, for example, if something happens and she needs to contact a company, some customer service, something like that, she may go, okay, well this happened. why? Or, it is just, I, I witnessed her in interactions with other people, asking more questions, trying to get more information so that she could understand for herself and be satisfied with the situation. And so she taught me that you should ask questions until you're satisfied with the answer, and that, yes or no is, is generally not acceptable as an answer, and that you have to provide some sort of explanation to give people more information. And I think that put me down the path of, of questioning everything, even though she didn't directly teach me question everything, but rather ask questions if you're not satisfied. And that was enough for me to go, I should question everything.

Ted Santos: At the age of 21, I lost both parents and one day, and I'm, I'm the oldest of four. And so talk about being in a situation of filled with uncertainty and chaos. I had no experience at losing parents and I had no experience at, taking over a family that was in full swing because I was 21. My brother was 19, and my sisters were 12 and 16 and take my brother off to college. And even though I had my sisters live with, a rel, my father's sister. I needed them to help me in certain things. And so I would give them initially small tasks and maybe it would've been speaking to a, maybe back then calling 4 1 1 to get information or speaking to a customer service rep. And I would ask them to do these things knowing they didn't know how to do it. and they would fail. So when they would come back to me, I was okay with that because I anticipated they would fail. So instead of me giving them the answer and telling them how to do it, I would ask questions and and one of the things I would say, oh, well, just because someone said no to you doesn't mean it's no, you may have asked them the wrong way. What's another way to ask? And so they would go back and try it again and they would fail. And, I would ask more questions until eventually they would solve it. And so. At that time, I knew nothing about neuroplasticity, except that's exactly what was happening for them. and neuroplasticity is we all have neuro pathways in our brain. If you do an MRI, it looks like roads in your brain, and that's where all of our information, everything we know sits in there and it can connect with other thoughts that, seem unrelated. You can only understand something new through that which is already in your neural pathways. So when you help someone grow completely new neur, neuro new neural pathways, they can noun, have a new neural pathway that contains new knowledge, and it allows them to see new perspectives that they couldn't see in the past. So that's exactly what was happening with my sisters and I, I didn't know it was happening at the time and years after, I still could not have told you that's what was happening. What I did see is it helped them better solve problems and thinking about them differently, and it, what it allowed is over time they would start volunteering for things that were more complex and even, I would be surprised. You sure you want to do that? Sure. And, and it, they always knew if they failed, they could come to me. So I never penalized them for failing. technically you could say I set them up for failure, but I coached them up. So by watching that, when I became a Chief operating officer, I, I was able to transfer that to my role as a, as an executive. When my people came to me with the problem, instead of giving them the solution, even if I knew the way to do it, I would ask them questions to help them get their on their own so that eventually I was obsolete and I wouldn't be in the problem solving business. And every once in a while they would come up with a solution better than what I thought. So then I was like, wow, this, asking them questions is better than I thought because they may have a perspective. That I don't have, because they're in the trenches, with the customer. So, asking questions is, is really a, a big deal. The inquiry has a lot of power, and, sometimes leaders feel like they don't have time for that, except in the long run, you're better off because you're making your people more capable and they're less likely to come back to you with problems.

Sean Weisbrot: I think it's great what you did with them, and it's what I've planned to do with the kids that I don't have yet. I do this with my wife as well. I do this with as many people as I can, is like, Hey, I, I do fight myself over. This is like, and, and one of the reasons why I didn't go and actually become a therapist, 'cause I have a bachelor's ins psych, but I didn't get a master's, so I, I didn't go down the path to become licensed. And one of the reasons was I thought at the time, in my infinite. Lack of wisdom that it's much easier to be able to figure out what someone's problem is and then just tell them how to solve it. He like. Because in my mind, people would spend 20 years with a therapist and not have a resolutions because the therapist, I, I thought the therapist wasn't doing their job and wasn't telling them how to solve the problem. Or actually, as I'm older, I've been able to realize that either the therapist doesn't want them to solve the problem 'cause it's money, it's revenue, or the therapist doesn't know how to actually engage the person in a way that gets them to come to a resolution on their own. I don't know really good, but, but I think it's really important either way to be able to do that because it's so easy if you believe you have the answer to just tell someone the answer. But what are they learning? They're learning your way and maybe your way isn't the right way or the best way. And so right. It's, it doesn't teach people how to think for themselves. And I witnessed this in China where people like the kids were coddled. I'd never seen such coddling before in my life.

Ted Santos: Really,

Sean Weisbrot: and the parents did not give the children an opportunity to think for themselves and do for themselves. And so they create these kids that are basically brainless. They just study all the time, and then they go off to college. And when they're finished with college, they're expected to get a job and get married and have kids. And I'm like, you're 22, 23 years old. You have no work experience, you have no life experience. You've barely dated anybody, but now you're expected to be a parent to someone that you don't even know how to teach. You don't even know who you are. How are you supposed to have a relationship with another human being and then to be responsible for teaching somebody, and they have this massive societal pressure to do that. Obviously, society in China has changed significantly since then because of COVID and, and all of the other things that are happening in in the country. But. Back then it, it was one of the things that as an outsider to the culture, I was able to witness and go, this is really not great. These people are not happy. Like the, the children are not growing up happy. They're not growing up confident. They're not growing up capable of taking care of themselves or thinking of of other people and their needs. And there was just a lot of issues I saw in the culture. I think this is, something that if, if every parent were trained to do that, then the next generation would be better than the last one. And, and maybe we come to a point where we just don't need to fight for no reason over what, reality is.

Ted Santos: Conflict resolution.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah. So what's the most important thing you've learned in life so far?

Ted Santos: Chaos is not chaos. Chaos is something that's occurring. It's something that's happening. Your point of view, your perspective, your belief about what's occurring is what makes it chaotic. So he who masters self master Chaos, you master life. So I'm, I'm a huge proponent of self master. I, I would say a guy like Steve Jobs, there, there are all these stories of him going to India to find a guru, and I'm going to assert that was one of the things that he was after is his self-mastery. And that's what made him so powerful in being able to disrupt his people and navigate himself and others through that disruption without feeling like, oh my God, they're gonna be upset with me because. You hear all these different, the leadership styles, the, the, God, I can't remember, like the empathetic leader, the, this, the, all these leadership fads. And when you look at the top leaders. You look at the people who had the huge, the biggest impact on their industries, like John d Rockefeller Sr. And Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie, even JP Morgan. Howard Hughes. A lot of people don't think about him and what he did in film and aeronautics and, and even in Las Vegas, Steve Jobs. We all see that. And we're looking today at, Elon Musk. They don't fit these, Paper box fad leadership styles, if anything, they contra, contradict all of that. So I, I don't understand why, w we invest so much time trying to get people to follow the three steps or the 10 steps of this leadership style. When we have living proof of people who are really powerful and have done it very effectively over time, I.