EP074 - How to unlock better teams with more clarity on motivation with Casey Wahl at Attuned
About the episode
This episode focuses on team motivation and why it is important to unlock better performance. Casey Wahl, founder of Attuned, is building his product to improve team motivation in Japan. In addition to his venture, he provides an amazing sneak peek into Japan’s startup culture, internal team dynamics, and more.
About the guest
Born in Rochester, New York, raised in Saudi Arabia, and a resident of Japan for more than 20 years, Casey has been committed to improving the world of work for over a decade. In 2010, he founded tech recruitment specialists Wahl+Case with the lofty ambition of fixing recruitment on a global scale. Six years later, under the umbrella of parent company EQIQ, Casey launched Attuned, a SaaS platform that uses psychology and AI to make people’s intrinsic motivations visible, helping managers communicate more effectively with their teams while reducing conflict, boosting productivity and engagement, and ultimately making work more meaningful.
Connect with Casey on LinkedIn.
About the host
My name is Peter Benei, founder of Anywhere Consulting. My mission is to help and inspire a community of remote leaders who can bring more autonomy, transparency, and leverage to their businesses, ultimately empowering their colleagues to be happier, more independent, and more self-conscious.
Connect with me on LinkedIn.
Want to become a guest on the show? Contact me here.
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Welcome everyone to the leadership anywhere podcast. My guest today is joining us from the far end of the globe, Japan. I have always been fascinated by Japan, its culture and its people. And I have very fond memories when I visited the country for the first time. Casey wall from attuned is building a product that helps teams to find out more about their motivation. And he's doing it there in Japan. I'm sure he will have amazing stories to share about the local startup culture, the remote situation, and many more. Hi Casey. Welcome to the show.
Thank you. I think it's going to be fun to be here.
It will be fun, or I hope. Please introduce yourself to the guests. How did you end up here? How did you end up working remotely? And most importantly, how did you end up in Japan?
Yeah. So I'm Casey. I'm one of the founders and the CEO of Attune, Attuned. ai. So SaaS business focused on intrinsic motivation and psychological safety, headquartered here in Japan. We have some customers globally, but kind of product market fit, go to market fit here in Japan. I've been here for 23 years now. So on the inside, there's a little bit of Japanese, like when I go home and see my parents. You know in texas and i'm on the phone and i'll be bowing when i'm on the phone You're so japanese. So there's these things that I don't pick up on myself. For the remote work, I think it's like self interest probably I think you know for many ceos it's remote interest though, I'm a single father and have young kids, and like balancing fatherhood and young kids and all that flexibility and parenting. Don't really want to go back to the office full time with that, and so there's parts of it, but so we're remote first and we've been remote first for a while, but there's still things that I'm learning about it also, I'm still on the journey about how to execute it to the best possibility.
This is a great story. How did you end up in Japan, by the way? 20 so many years.
Yeah, sorry, that was the most important question and then I dropped it.
Because 20 something years ago, it was, Japan was what it was early 2000s. So immediately Yeah, I showed up in 2000. Yeah, immediately early after or during the tech bubble.
Yeah, exactly. I started my career pretty much after as the tech bubble was popping, I got into it. And yeah, like when I came, there was no English on the train signs. There was no Google, maps or anything else like that. So getting around in the hurdles because, Japanese being quite different, not a whole lot of people can read it and speak it so well when you come to it. So it was like the discipline. Difficulty level was much, much higher back then, I think, in terms of getting around.
Did you speak Japanese? Sorry to jump in. Did you speak Japanese?
I had a degree in Japanese from my university, but that did not equal speaking Japanese. So I could say enough phrases, but then It come right back at me and especially like the regional dialects and I just have no, no clue what they're saying. And I just smile and then I go in the wrong way or do the wrong way. It took a while, but yeah, exactly bow in the wrong way. But yeah, it was just an adventure. So I grew up in Saudi Arabia. So I spent one from one to 15 or 16 and a small desert and high school in the U S college in the U S. So I always wanted to do like international business and it was okay. What's the most adventurous thing that I haven't experienced. So I'd experienced the Middle East. I traveled in Europe, naively I thought, okay, Europe's kind of close to, the U S please don't take offense to your listeners, at least back then. So okay, let's go to Asia, something completely different. Japan had, the highest kind of brand cachet and the coolest stuff, Now, there are probably stupid things like when I was seven or eight, I wanted to be a ninja and stuff like that, so when I graduated, I got a job like a sponsor by the Japanese government and kind of set out to the sticks of Japan. So I spent two years and a relatively small town is like the only foreigner and I'd walk around like the supermarket aisles and I had five year olds and seven year olds like following me around and I turn around and they'd get scared because I'm a monster. So it was that kind of stage back then when I first came. A bit different now.
It's lovely. And now the, now after 20 something years you have the company there and that company is mainly working with the Japanese clientele.
Yeah exactly. So we actually created the original solution in Berlin, but we didn't find product market fit in Berlin. So we brought it back here. Like we had a branch office in Berlin. We brought it back here as the, as the headquarters. And one of the things about, Japan and Tokyo where we're based is, every big Japanese company is a 30 minute train right away. And the Japanese economy is a relationship driven economy for the most part. So it's, there's a lot of inefficiency, but you can go visit. companies. And if you have a connection in between, you can go visit very senior people. As a startup with a very innovative product, we were able to go meet people. And they trusted us and trusted the connections that came through and we could find our first customers here. Whereas, maybe the product was too early and not right and of course horrible ux and stuff when we released you know in Europe in the US originally, so we found initial customers here and the repeatability of like sales here In Japan first though. We do have customers around the world at this point.
Before turn to the point of discussing what are you doing right now? I would love to talk a little bit more about how the Japanese market is different. You mentioned. If someone gets offended. Sorry about that that European market is kinda like close to the US market as well, which I by the way agree with little nuances and differences, but it's like the same, for example and just I, because you mentioned UX as well, and just give you one example what I mean by that. The UX of a SaaS company, for example, or a product it's, I wouldn't say the same, but it's like the same in all of these markets in Europe and in US. If anyone has ever opened any kind of Japanese site or Asian, but Japanese to me, the most surprising, the UX is totally different. So obviously these kind of like cultural differences translate to U. S. differences translate to how to conduct the business differences as well. So can you tell me a little bit more about these differences? Why Japan is different? Compared to the US for example, most of the listeners of this show are from the U. S. And the EU.
Yeah, absolutely. If you look at Yahoo Japan the top page hasn't really changed in 20 years, 25 years, type of thing like that. It's still the same thing. They say like on the web, like people want, Japanese people want a lot more context. There's a lot more words. It's more garish, in your face links and stuff like this. Some of the narratives is Japan's not been strong in software traditionally, like hardware and actually making things in robotic there's a lot of talent, a lot of hardware engineers, but software engineers, not really, so actually building a SAAS product right now is really tough based on this because we want to be product first and product led, so even hiring a product manager is difficult. I don't think there's great product management talent in Japan. There's design talent, like the game designers are absolutely fantastic, world class, especially looking at like game mechanisms, but like for SAAS, there's not great product managers and it's like more project management. Okay we're going to do this rather than understand the user experience. So with us right now, like we still even experience our product team and our engineering team is international. So read that or listen to that as foreigners, where our customers and our go to market team are Japanese and domestic. So again, going back to our ideas to be a product company. So we do releases so we're releasing and continuous updating and things move around all the time. We get all kinds of pushback from our customers. Like, why didn't you tell us this release was coming? You have to give us in writing a month before you change anything. And of course, like customer success who are right on the front line with the customers and shit rolls downhill and they get it from the customers and Japanese customers, one of the things going back unique about Japan is customers. status and the gap between you as a, like a vendor or a product producer and the customer, especially enterprise, there's a huge gap. Like the customer is way above you and you have to bow and accept everything they say. And the concept of Gomen Nassai meetings, where I have to go and apologize. I'm so sorry exists and you have to go apologize. Sorry we changed something without you noticing and, it created frustration. So the User doesn't want the change and there isn't that culture that products are continually being updated.
Sorry to jump in sorry to jump in. I want to add a quick note a european note here I've only seen this type of, actually the net type the exact example when a SaaS product actually changes something and has a product release and the customers are like, why didn't you tell us that? We told you that's the product release email that you've got, baby. I only seen this in Germany and Italy so far, ever in my life. But yeah, and the Japan to the mix as well.
Yeah. And I think in many ways I don't know a lot about the, the German kind of go to market or German customers, but that's where we initially launched the attune. And some of it was similar, but take it a little bit farther with language and everything else. So within our company, we have this tension between, okay, the customer success and the go to market team, where they have to report to the customer and the company, the customer is always right. And there's a big power dynamic between us and them and the product team that just needs to release and iterate. And this kind of goes back to one of the reasons is you don't see a lot of especially saas startups from japan go global is. Because they just customize to the japanese user and the japanese market and the japanese market is still huge It's massive like you can become 100 million dollar a billion dollar company here in Japan and never have one English speaking customer ever. And you just have relationships and they stay with you. And then you kind of plateau. And then what happens with a lot of Japanese startups is they can get to 50 million AR, a hundred million AR, and okay, we're going to go international or 20 million AR, we're going to go international and it's totally impossible. Because they don't have the product management kind of ability. They don't have that, the way products are created in Silicon Valley or Europe type of thing is very different. So you see lots of Japanese companies that try to go abroad and in entrepreneurship now in Japan, it's a big thing. And there's a lot of entrepreneurs trying to make the next Sony. There's this japanese pride that we have to create the next world class company and it's going to be software. But they keep failing and failing and failing a lot of it because of this because they orient towards that customer, that Japanese customer and it's a cultural question.
It doesn't even economic question. It's not even a knowledge question. It's a highly cultural question and so tell me a little bit more about Attuned because maybe because most of your clients, of course, are from that area, but you also have you are a globally available product with a global market maybe it's because the leadership of the company is not from Japan, so that's what what's difference culturally, that makes you able to work or enter other markets as well. What do you think?
Yeah, I think we're unique and we've set up for a global from the beginning and, with, who I am and the ambitions to be a product company. Like we're not pulled like Japanese companies want a lot of consulting and they want a lot of handholding and, okay, we'll buy your software. But our software is really used for like cultural change. It's for understanding people different than yourself. It's about intrinsic motivation, psychological safety. They don't want just the software they want to feel safe. So give us the whole consulting package, which would become more and more Japanese type of thing like that. So wanting to be product first, wanting to be global that's part of our initial DNA. I think sets us up originally. If we can get to the stage where we're still, crossing the chasm to a certain degree. But if we can get to the stage for global growth, we have that in us. Whereas most Japanese startups wouldn't have that.
Can you tell me a little bit more about what Attune is doing and why it's useful? Just a little, elevator pitch, please. Of course, just to get the context.
Of course the core is deep psychology. So like the core R and D is psychology. And what we can do is show everybody's intrinsic motivation for work is the core of it. So it starts with a bit of self awareness, but the tool is made for managers because every manager has a team or an experience, a team member, or an experience where you don't understand that person relationships aren't great, or there's difficult people. And the key is about how to understand somebody different than yourself. And if you can understand their intrinsic motivators, which is basically connected to their values, you can understand and have deeper conversations, build the trust type of it, and you can work better together. It's the core that we're creating now. We've also just come up with psychological safety, which is a team measurement. So how much does every individual feel safe, not like that they're going to get fired, but how much can I speak up within the team and the trust? So these are the core of what we're delivering and what customers are buying us for is to reduce turnover. So people leave companies because of interpersonal relationships, right? They joined a company, they joined a product, they joined a mission, but they leave because their manager sucks, you 60 percent of cases. So if the manager could understand people better then less people would leave, right? So we're doing the turnover rate. So we're very effective in that way. Up until now, we've dealt with many use cases. So a lot of Japanese companies like bigger companies have traditionally been hierarchical and they want to become more agile. So they're really shifting the culture to be more interdependent decision making. There's a huge intergenerational communication problem in Japan. A lot of senior managers are 50, 60. There's not many 20 year old workers type of thing like that. And especially female and women empowerment is a big theme pushed by the government and big companies are trying their best, but you have a 56 year old dude managing like a young woman. They're not understanding each other and there's miscommunication and no matter how hard they're trying, they're not mentoring them up into management and they leave and the company misses its objective on how many women managers they have. So they put in a team to help this intergenerational communication like one on ones have become a big theme in Japan, especially with remote work coming in as well. Like traditionally real honest conversation in Japan and organizations happened at drinking. So afterward, when you get drunk, you can say anything and that's when the truth comes out. Or it happens in like the smoking room, if you want to know what's happening, you go to the smoking room and that's where you find out all the shit, all the real problems, what the real story is.
And that's just for the uninitiated ones, by the way. A quick note, those who never been to Japan, one of the most surprising fact of the country that you can eat from the floor of the pavement in the middle of the Shibuya crossing or whatever. It's that clean and organized and amazing, but everyone smokes. Oh, like almost everyone. is smoking. And you can also smoke in the restaurants in most of the cases, also in the bars and stuff. So it, to me, it was amazing to see. Also, I never seen this amount of type of smoking except in Austria, Germany, and also in the Balkans in the Europe. I'm just saying that, in the U. S. I guess no one actually smokes now, or I don't know, not many people.
Japan's changed a lot, so actually you can't smoke in restaurants anymore smoking's out smoking on the street now is you get fined and stuff like that, so there's this health trend. Okay, so that, that's a little changed. I've been there five years ago or so. So yeah, so it's still more than other places, but you can still go into the airport and it's just a massive smoker room with so much smoke. So the traditional places of real honest communication, like getting drunk or smoking, like those are disappearing and the organizations don't know where and how to have an honest conversation. So they bring Attuned and say, okay, This is my motivation. These are my values for work. These are yours, Peter, okay, we're different. You're motivated by feedback for example, you're my manager. I'm not motivated by feedback type of thing like that. So you give me a lot and I get frustrated because you always give me feedback. This is the type of thing. So everybody feels these human frustrations and stuff. And what we're showing is a layer of psychology that you can't see. And we're making not only your own motivation is visible, but the key part is the gaps between people. So it's visual gaps. And then you get to the tip, say, Hey, Peter, you're speaking to Casey. This is how he's different than you, be careful about his autonomy. Like he's off the charts about autonomy. Don't tell him what to do anything. Otherwise he's It's just going to get pissed off and leave. So that's the type of tips and interventions that we do.
Nice. And it works like a, based on a survey model or how just I've been curious because at the end of the day, I guess leaders need a, every leader needs a fucking dashboard that they can look at with charts and numbers and stuff so I guess your type of tool should work as well through or with or via surveys and questions, maybe.
Yes. So that's the main type of bringing kind of information in. So we start with a new company. We'll send an email to all the employees. They take an intrinsic motivation assessment for 10 minutes and that populates the dashboard and the dynamics between the class. And then real, the usage come in is really, It's one on one. So it's like when you're actually having a conversation is where you get the value for that. You would either log in before speaking to Casey and you'll get a tip, okay, here's me and Casey. And what we're starting to do is link the calendar and link like Slack and Microsoft Teams. So that automatically, rather than having to log in that, Hey, you're speaking to Casey for the first time in. Yeah. Three months, we haven't spoken for a while. You probably forget my motivations and this goes back to evolutionary psychology, where it's really hard for us to remember many people. And then you'll get like a notification on your phone or in Slack or Microsoft teams that, Hey, here's Casey's motivation. Take a, be careful about that or ask about this. And those tips in those kinds of framing questions change continuously.
Yeah, this is interesting. If you are open to it, let me can discuss the the inherently different cultures and how to be able to work with everyone regardless where they are from in a global organization, because you mentioned a little bit on how, for example, Japan, which is inherently different from pretty much anything that we know how they are different on how they organize their organizations. It's more top down and what I always had in my mind and Japanese listeners don't take it too seriously or wrong. But if you have a an older senior manager in a Japanese company, the question that what motivates you as a young employee doesn't even come up, you just work here. No this is the Zaibatsu you applied here. Whatever your big company, you work for Toyota, Mitsubishi, what I can name, whatever. This is the career path. This is your payment. You will work here for the next 60 years or less if you drop dead before that, that's it. And whatever. It doesn't even come up to discuss any kind of motivation or personal, any kind of personal beliefs, cultural traits, whatever you have. Now I'm happy to hear that it's changing, but still integrating these kinds of different cultures into, for example, the U S culture to the EU culture, European culture, which is highly individualistic. People, I'm not, I don't know the exact numbers right now. But my gut guess is that most people around 20, 25 and 35, they stay at a company, not more than five years. In most of the cases, they just switched the job. Why? Why not? Sometimes it's not even the manager, not even the leader. They just don't care, the next company pays a little bit better, it's more interesting, it's more challenging, it's more motivating to work there. Nothing personal, just, it's the way it is. Now in Japan, obviously, that's not the case. So my main question, and maybe that's where we should angle the conversation a little bit is that do you believe, or do you think that because you measure a lot of cultural traits from employees, do you think that there is a, like a bottom line for human motivation that transcends any kind of cultural degree. And I don't even want to mention the Middle East because you started your career in the Middle East, which is again, totally different from everything that we discussed so far in terms of personal motivation and stuff. So do you think there is a civil lining or something like a common ground which we can address?
Yeah, the common ground is nowhere, everywhere in the world, people are individuals, like no matter what. So the culture is the surface level of behavior. So you're absolutely right. So what we have big data across many different countries, whether it's Nigeria, whether it's Middle East, a lot of data here for Japan, US, everything like that. Statistically, people follow, okay, what are their top motivations? What are the lowest ones? And we actually have a state of motivation report that display some of this because we have so much data that people are unique. So even though you have your cultural concept that, okay, Japanese are kind, they're not very aggressive, they're grouping, those are visible behavioral cultural traits, but if you get into the motivation, they're just as motivated by competition as anywhere else in the world, they're just as motivated by autonomy as anywhere else in the world. So it really comes down to the individual for the motivation and what we see is there's only small statistical differences between your average Japanese person versus your average kind of American type of person about motivation, but there's so much variation between individuals within a country. So if we picked up two random Japanese people, their motivations would be all over the place. But if we get this kind of at a big level, like humans are humans across the board type of thing like this. So I think the nice thing to understand is deep down. And this is what we're looking at is it's not personality. It's not behavior. So behavior is cultural, some of the personality forms can be cultural, but motivations for individuals it's pretty much universal, meaning everybody's unique.
So that also means that for example, if you have incentives, let's say just, just one example, incentives work for everyone regardless of their cultural background background or cultural trade for example, financial incentives or giving more flexibility how they work giving more, I know you love this word autonomy giving out more autonomy on how they work, what they do. These things always work in the favor of the employee, right? Regardless if they are from Asia, Japan, Africa, Australia, whatever. It's always, and it will always work. The question is that can we name like certain traits of how to manage people or work with people that work for everyone?
Yes, that the incentives, if applied to the right motivation to work across geography. But I think you just raised a really good point is if you give me like a financial incentive, So we're going to look at incentives, for example, like finance needs is not my top motivator, I'm competitive, so it might come out like that way, but, autonomy or hey, if we do really well on this project, we're going to go out and have a dinner. Some people don't want to go for dinners like social relationships are not very sure if you motivate them that. Actually we have customers that look at their incentives and try to align them by different groups okay this cohort is motivated by autonomy so we're going to incentivize them with things that match those motivators. Or this cohort is motivated by feedback. So we're just going to give them a lot more feedback and that motivates them. So I think incentives within any organization across any geography should be customized for the motivations of different groups.
Totally get it. If autonomy is a big thing for you, transparency is a big thing for me. Data that you find or the data that you collect based on the people's motivations, is it more transparent towards the leadership or is it transparent or across the entire organization?
Fantastic question. So the tool is made for managers, so make it for managers. That's our core user that we're focusing on. So each manager has visibility within their team or multiple teams. And if you have a, a director or a VP or something like that, they'll have visibility within that. Sure. We have made a dashboard for every team member so that they can see their own motivations and see the motivations within their own team, but on the back side, the administrative side, the customer can choose whether to turn on that, but that visibility to nothing within your own team only, or can you see across the whole organization? And interestingly, most customers won't turn on all organization visibility because they're really scared that this is just going to create all kinds of dynamic. It's going to be chaos. If like I'm searching somebody like I barely talked to looking at their motivations and stuff like that. And I think it's interesting, like with our going back to some of the geography question, with more of our Eastern European customer where there's less trust towards a hierarchy, like you're not going to be manipulated by this tool. Every boss is an asshole. Yeah. So we don't want to open too much. We're going to do this slowly type of thing.
Yeah, totally. As an Eastern European, I can relate to that. No, it comes from, again, it's culture, right? And history. So obviously nations who are oppressed obviously they don't have the trust in the leadership as well. Simple as that. But what I'm trying to get there is that when you have a distributed team let's say you have a hundred people team and they are scattered across the globe from different nations, different cultures, different people. Transparency can really help because sometimes it's not just the manager who needs to see what motivates or, what drives people in general, what is important as a value for them. I'm not saying just motivation, just like a value. For example if I, maybe I have trigger points, right? Which you shouldn't touch, even, I'm super open and whatever, and flexible. If you step on that, I will be pissed. Right? Especially in religion, for example, certain cultures, and so on. Transparency can really help to prevent these issues, prevent this, I wouldn't say organic misinterpretations and organic miscommunications. But for example, you had a really great example on Japan. When you integrate a young female employee to a company and you have the manager who is like a 60 years old dude I don't know. Granddad was still a samurai or whatever, right? So totally conservative person, even with the best intentions the sweetest grandpa is he even with the best intentions, he can step on the trigger point on that female employee. That can hurt each other's feelings. It would be so much better if these interesting backgrounds and drives would be more transparent for everyone as well. Wouldn't you agree?
I agree a hundred percent. And as you stated earlier transparency is key to trust, right? So transparency is one of the building blocks of trust. And as a Attune, and this is one of our more difficult things like having successful implementations is trust, transparency vary so much from organization, no matter how you're set up from organization to organization and then trust us as well. So we work best where there's a great deal of transparency and there's already a great deal of trust. So let's say if we say, psychological safety, one to ten, or if we want to say just a normal word trust, one to ten with an organization. If an organization has a trust level of four to seven, attuned is great. Anything below four, it doesn't work very well because they don't have enough openness type of thing. If it's above that, maybe they don't need so much because they're already communicating quite well. But communication and mutual understanding Is a two way street. It has to happen that way. So going back to that, younger 20 year old woman, if she can understand her manager and manage and speak up the way that is going to get through to that manager based on their values and what's most important to them, even if he couldn't figure it out, that sweet grandpa she did. The communication and the trust builds because of that. So if they would open it up for her to be able to look at that would be great. But that's a really hard nut to crack. Not many organizations are, okay, let's let all of our employees see their managers and their bosses and the CEO's motivations. Let's let it go. Let chaos reign. Like everybody, most people say, Oh my God, that's too much chaos. What is going to happen here? No, let's shut this down. So we like it when that happens, but it's not many. There's usually so much fear, before that happens.
Sure. Let, as the last question, let's address the motivations of the of the organizations. When do they turn to you, for example? I assume and correct me if I'm wrong they already see some sort of shitty data high churn, less productivity and so on. So when there is a problem, you can obviously be a solution to that problem. They wouldn't just sign up for a motivational tour or whatever, or if they don't see any kind of issues. So what are the key traits or pain points?
Yeah, exactly. In startup terminology we're still going from that early adopter to the early majority phase. So we're not totally fully into the early majority phase, which means people still have to imagine a little bit and they have to be visionary buyers and very interesting for us. If we put it in motivational speak with our customers, 60 percent of our customers that people that buy champions of by are motivated by altruism or innovation. So they want to altruism, meaning they want to support, they want to work for the show. They tend to buy if they're motivated by like status or financial needs, they tend to not buy. So we can know through the buying process based on the motivations, whether they'll be a buyer and actually a user. And will we retain them based on that in terms of the pain points? So like turnover is there, but sometimes who owns turnover, like Who owns a lot of people leaving? Is that a CEO agenda? Is it an HR agenda? Who feels the real pain of it? So the place that I would have loved to get to is.
This is interesting, by the way, this is sorry to jump in. It's so interesting because if people want to make, I want to, I just want to translate it to plain English that if people want to, and sorry about that. If people want to do good for their company and for their people, they usually invest in tools like you and if they just see the Excel spreadsheet in terms of people they usually don't invest in that anyway, even if there is a high churn or leaving or whatever. Just, I wanted to reframe that, sorry.
No. Fantastic. I get so far in the weeds sometimes, and this is also part of like our difficulty rolling out. So if we roll out to a hundred managers, there's going to be managers in a different group. 20, 30 percent want to help their people. They believe in the servant leadership, 20, 30%, or just show me the money. I'm just going to keep motivating the fucking way I did and external incentives. I'll yell at that problem for me, type of thing. And we don't work very well. Yeah. with them. But, where I'd like to eventually get is whenever you feel like friction in a relationship Oh, I just came out of that meeting with Casey and God, I didn't know go well, like what was going on there. And a lot of times we don't know, but we feel it, we feel that pain. That was either bad or was it just total miscommunication no matter how hard I tried, he didn't seem to understand I was saying. And then we want them to think of Attuned. That's the pain that we want to connect where you're not being felt like you're being understood or no matter how hard you're trying to communicate and the best you're doing, like you don't feel like you're getting through. That's the core problem that we're trying to solve. So we're focused on business, but of course this happens in schools. It happens in relationships on your sports team, in your music bands, you fight over because you have different values and and we want to be there to help people reframe. So we're trying to get past the evolutionary cycle. It's the psychology of Dunbar's number where you can deal with more people than a relatively really small tribe. And that's the superpower we're trying to get to as a managerial tool.
That was a really great closing thought, Casey. So please tell us where people can find you if they want to make that change.
So just attuned. ai. If you put that in, you can find it there or you can find me at LinkedIn at Casey Wahl. That's Wahl with an H. W A H L.
All of these will be linked in the show notes below. So again, Casey, this was amazing. Thank you for sharing all of this. And I'm so happy that we actually able to talk about motivation and the tool that you're producing, not just about Japan but Japan fact that you are there it's a really great spice on everything.
Or weird, thanks for taking the spice.
No, it's a unique point of view. Yeah, very much. Especially, if you take stuff to the extremes that that you are in a culture that it's not really self-reflective in a sense, but you are. selling self reflective ideas there. And it, if it, it grows there anyway, it makes that it means that it can grow anywhere. And it's, I think the best message that we had during this episode is that people are universally at the end of the day, I wouldn't say same, but uniquely the same.
Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Universally unique.
Universally unique. Yeah. That's how you put it. This is amazing. Cool. Again, thank you very much. Thank you for your time.
Thank you. It was fun. I appreciate it.
