There’s a sci-fi image most of us carry when we think about AI: a helpful machine always by your side. R2-D2. C-3PO. But there’s a lesser-known version of that story. In Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, a young girl in a precarious world is given a book powered by AI. It doesn’t just teach her facts. It reads her circumstances, anticipates her needs, and helps her truly thrive.
Helping people flourish is what drove Diane Weaver to co-found Baryons.
On a recent episode of The Learning Experience Ops Show, Diane, co-founder and COO of Baryons, joined host Jason Gorman to talk about human adaptation in the age of AI, what flourishing really looks like at work and in life, and why learning professionals are more vital right now than they may realize.
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The Career That Built a Founder
Diane didn’t arrive at this work in a straight line, and that’s precisely the point.
Her first salary job was as an administrative assistant at the Muscular Dystrophy Association, a role she accepted gratefully and quickly grew to hate. Rather than quit or simply endure it, she reinvented it. She built the organization’s first database, redesigned their newsletter, and created programs so efficient they were adopted across MDA offices nationwide.
“You can hate the job,” she told Jason, “but it is on you to figure out how to love the job, or move on.”
That instinct followed her through an ad agency, through Pearson’s statewide longitudinal data systems, and ultimately into co-founding CourseTune, a curriculum visualization platform that was acquired and doubled its university client base within a year.
CourseTune crystallized a philosophy Diane had been building toward her entire career: that the most powerful thing technology can do is help people shift perspective. Because when perspective shifts, conversations change. And when conversations change, reality changes. It wasn’t just a product belief. It was the throughline of everything she had built, and it maps directly onto what Baryons is designed to do today.
Throughout, colleagues called her the glue, meaning she was the person who held teams together, bridged departments, translated between technologists and strategists, and made sure nothing fell through the cracks. For a long time, she pushed back against it. She wanted to be the deep subject matter expert, not the connective tissue between other people’s expertise. What she eventually understood is that being the glue gives you something specialists don’t: a full-system view and the strategic judgment to decide when to engage and when to hold back. It’s a lesson that directly shaped how she thinks about building Baryons.
Two months after completing her post-acquisition work at CourseTune, OpenAI released ChatGPT. “It’s just been like a floodgate after that,” she said.
The Adaptation Gap, and the Calm We Need
She calls it the adaptation gap: a quiet crisis hiding behind more visible ones. It shows up as disengagement, where only one in four people report genuinely flourishing at work, quiet resignation, and an anxiety that has hardened into a full mental health emergency.
The adaptation gap is what happens when the pace of change outpaces our capacity to absorb it.
When asked what she’s most anxious about for the future, her answer wasn’t AI or job displacement. It was our collective ability to calm down. In a world of accelerating information and rising opposition, she worries we won’t find the calm needed, individually and collectively, to think clearly and move forward without burning things down in a panic.
That calm isn’t passive. It’s built through daily intentionality, finding moments of joy in ordinary things, and making deposits into what she calls your mental wealth bank, so that when life throws a sucker punch, you have reserves to draw from. She draws on Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning to anchor this: humans have the capacity to find flourishing even in the most dire conditions, and we can choose to build that capacity before crisis arrives.
What Baryons Does (and Why It’s Different)
Your Baryon is not a chatbot. That distinction matters.
“ChatGPT is endlessly affirmative,” Diane said. “The affirmations will just take you down your own rabbit hole.” Baryons is voice-enabled, science-backed, and patent pending.
You call it two to five times a week, spend about ten minutes on the call, and it challenges you, asks for the why behind your thinking, and helps you surface your own wisdom through storytelling.
It remembers your goals, your challenges, your working style. Over time, Diane says, “it begins to feel like you might be speaking with your near future self.”
Crucially, it pushes you back into the real world. Baryons gives users micro-challenges designed to create authentic human connection, not more screen time. The tool works by helping people reflect on and actively reshape their personal narratives, the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. When the world shifts rapidly, those narratives can feel lost. Baryons helps surface them, then helps users decide which ones are still serving them.
What Learning Professionals Need to Hear Right Now
Diane’s vision for the learning profession is both clarifying and urgent.
She invokes the DIKW pyramid, ordering data, information, knowledge, and wisdom, as a lens for where the field stands today. Each leap up that pyramid, she explains, has always required two things working together: a technological transformation and meaningful human input. You cannot move from knowledge to wisdom on technology alone. And the bridge between the two, the mechanism that makes that final leap possible, is storytelling. Collecting human stories, making sense of them, and translating them into something others can act on. That is precisely what learning and development professionals are trained to do.
AI can now generate content and surface patterns at scale. What it cannot do is make meaning or translate information into lived wisdom. That job belongs to learning professionals, and this moment is theirs to lead.
Her advice is direct: don’t use AI to do your old work faster. Use it to transform how you think. This also means sitting with a deeper question about identity. Diane herself is actively working through what it means to be an AI-augmented person: who she is with these tools, and how to adopt them intentionally so she can show up and contribute from a different place than ever before. It’s not a productivity question. It’s an identity question. And she believes every learning professional needs to be sitting with it too.
The Human Work That Never Goes Away
In a moment when nearly everyone is asking what AI will take away, Diane Weaver is building something that asks a different question: what can AI help you become?
The adaptation gap is real. The anxiety is real. But so is the human capacity to stay resilient, rewrite stale narratives, and find meaning when the bigger picture feels overwhelming. Baryons is designed as a partner in that work, one that listens without flattering and challenges without judging.
That’s the flourishing future Diane is betting on. And from what she’s built so far, it’s a bet worth watching.
Listen to the full conversation with Diane Weaver on The LX Ops Show or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Podcast Transcript– Jason Gorman with Diane Weaver
Jason Gorman (00:01)
When we think about our sci-fi future, when it comes to AI, we usually think about helpful robots, R2D2, C3PO, right? They’re always there. It’s kind of by your side just to kind of help out when you’re in a pickle. But of course, there are negative examples of this too. Terminator, HAL, so we’ve got some bad examples. We think of these things in science fiction as this kind of long-term…
place that we get to of these machines that are helpful all the time in the context when we need them. And as we have gone through this revolution in learning, I have thought initially about, wow, I can use AI to be a little bit more productive in writing emails. And then I realized, maybe we can write the content faster, or maybe we can create this video faster.
But the end goal has always seemed like this future model where it’s a machine that can help us.
But the best example of this in literature that I can think of is from this great book called The Diamond Age. And in The Diamond Age, there is this dystopian future, but there is this book, and this book is AI, and it gets into the hands of this girl who is in some trouble, and this book is there to help her learn and to help her keep safe.
and to consider not just her cognitive needs, but her bigger picture needs. What is important to help her survive? What’s important to help her thrive? And this has always felt like the most interesting example of what AI could be for humanity. And this has always felt incredibly distant until I started using this.
incredible technology called Baryon. It is made by a company called Baryons. And what it promises is an AI companion that helps us thrive. And I’m really excited today to have Diane Weaver with me. She is the co-founder and COO of Baryons. And I asked her for a little… ⁓
blurb about herself and this is what I got. She said, here’s what my AI hype man says about me. Sunrise chaser by nature, systems thinker by trade, Weaver specializes in bringing together unlikely partnerships and covering new opportunities through data and turning visionary ideas into operational wins, building companies, frameworks and futures at the intersection of technology, strategy and human connection. And I can just say I’ve known Diane a little while, these things are all true.
It is so nice to have you on the ⁓ LX ops show, Diane Weaver. Welcome to the show.
Diane Weaver (03:09)
Thank you so much, Jason. It’s just a real pleasure to be here.
Jason Gorman (03:12)
Awesome. All right. So what we do at the beginning is we have some lightning round questions. These are meant to be to be quick. We’ll do our best. This can be this could be whatever we want it. If they’re not quick, it’s not the end of world. But OK, let’s jump in. So first one, what is the 30 second elevator pitch about what you do right now?
Diane Weaver (03:35)
Well, you teed this up so well with your intro. mean, truly, it is a remarkable age that we are in right now. So my 30-second pitch would have to be, I am the co-founder and COO of Baryons. Your Baryon is your flourishing partner. It is a voice-enabled, powerful AI.
It’s full of orchestration, agentic things happening under the hood. is science-backed, research-based, and ⁓ patent pending, which is very exciting to be able to say now. ⁓ We are truly creating a sophisticated flourishing partner ⁓ to help humans increase their capacity. It’s a time of un-
unprecedented uncertainty and we all need to increase our capacity for adaptability, agility, some of those wonderful durable skills that we’ve talked about for years now, Jason. It’s actually so exciting.
Jason Gorman (04:48)
What do you love the most about your work?
Diane Weaver (04:50)
⁓ I think the things I just said are what I love most about my work. But truly, truly what I love most about my work is that I get to play in these areas of intersection. Because when domains cross over, it’s in that area ⁓ of meeting, it’s the in between areas where innovation just really blooms and flourishes.
Jason Gorman (04:56)
Okay.
Diane Weaver (05:19)
⁓ And so anything that I get to do that brings unlikely people, ideas, concepts, technology ⁓ together, that’s where I get really excited.
Jason Gorman (05:31)
So sounds like you do a lot of things, but the next question is when you are totally dialed in on one thing, what is that thing that you are most likely to be doing?
Diane Weaver (05:43)
So I am most likely to be blocking and tackling. I am like our company linebacker. So I am most likely ⁓ listening and observing and really seeing, know, listening to all people involved and observing the bigger, broader context and helping people
Jason Gorman (05:51)
Hmm.
Diane Weaver (06:12)
remove barriers in the way and just increasing efficiencies. This is, you know, it’s something that comes very naturally to my personality. From my very first professional job, I’ve been called the glue amongst the teams, right? And so, you know, for a long time I…
kind of push back against that because I didn’t want to be a generalist. I didn’t want to be the glue that holds it all together. Like I want, I wanted to be the deep subject matter expert, the deep technologist, et cetera. But what I learned over time is that when you are the glue, you get a unique perspective from all, from all of the people involved in solving that particular problem. And when you’re the glue,
you get to decide when you engage or enable and when you don’t. And that over time becomes a big strategic muscle to flex to. So yeah.
Jason Gorman (07:14)
Hmm.
You sound like a natural born COO, I have to say. All right, three lightning round questions left. The next one is, what event or moment inspired you to do what you do?
Diane Weaver (07:29)
Yeah, so, you know, I think that the, the events leading up to this really, I can tell you exactly the moment it was when I was creating a pitch deck for another company idea. And I created this slide where you have, ⁓ workforce skilling and re-skilling and education on one side.
and you have traditional education on the other side. And then I put a stick figure of a person falling through the cracks. And this is the problem that I’ve spent my entire career around, right? How do we get education to meet workforce where they are? How do we get workforce to meet education where they are? That’s like, we’ve been trying to force these systems together. And I looked at that slide and I realized,
Jason Gorman (08:08)
Hmm.
Diane Weaver (08:28)
It’s about the individual because that feeling of falling through the cracks, it starts internally. And you can have multiple people who ⁓ are in the same circumstance or similar, you know, similar circumstance. We’re all unique, but similar circumstance. And only some of the people will feel like they’re falling through the cracks and some people will not. What’s the difference?
Jason Gorman (08:37)
Mm-hmm.
Diane Weaver (08:56)
Like what is it about the people who don’t feel like they’re falling through the cracks that we can then unlock or help everyone flourish, you know, and help all ships rise. So it, it, you know, it’s disheartening that it is on individual shoulders to bring, to bridge that gap. But I think it has to be on our shoulders because there is an ownership.
and there is a responsibility that we each have to show up in our own lives as truly as ourselves and advocating for ourselves and things like that. Yeah.
Jason Gorman (09:38)
That’s wonderful and we’re gonna do a little bit of an emotional U-turn. What are you most anxious about for the future?
Diane Weaver (09:45)
⁓ There’s a lot to be anxious about right now. mean, I am a truly, I am most anxious about our collective ability to calm. And because right now ⁓ there’s so much opposition. I always say it’s Dickinsonian. It’s the best of time. It’s the worst of time.
Jason Gorman (10:00)
Mm. Mm. Mm.
Diane Weaver (10:11)
The thing is that throughout history, every generation feels like it’s the best of times and the worst of times, right? It’s kind of the human condition to see both and the reality is somewhere in the middle. And so as we are becoming even more expert in our communication, in our massive channels, in our massive, you know, our access to democratized massive
amounts of information, are we able to also find a calm individually within groups, within communities, and within larger communities too, right? Find a calm so that we can make sure that we’re moving forward, we’re moving towards sustainability, we’re thinking about future generations, we’re not just burning it all down in a panic, right?
Jason Gorman (11:05)
Mm-hmm.
All right, deep breath.
Diane Weaver (11:10)
Yep.
Jason Gorman (11:12)
What? Last one, last lightning round question. What is a skill you’re trying to pick up right now?
Diane Weaver (11:14)
Mm-hmm.
⁓ yeah, this is a great one. I mean, I can always say AI because it’s kind of infinite, right? And the more you learn, the more you realize, the less, you know, ⁓ I’m definitely like in that, in that moment of feeling like, ⁓ I, I know nothing. And, and I think that this is like, truly it’s the re-imagining how we do.
Jason Gorman (11:25)
Yeah.
Diane Weaver (11:47)
life and how we come together from the lens of who am I as an AI augmented person? How do I ethically responsibly want to adopt this into my mindset, into my daily routine and habits so that I can contribute to the greater good, so that I can show up intentionally, so I can show up, you know, from a different place than ever before.
Jason Gorman (12:17)
think that a big theme in our conversation, I’m guessing, is going to be adaptation.
This is why I want to start with this question that has nothing to do with AI. It has to do with your first job. And the reason I’m asking about your first job is because I’m really curious about the job. So what was it? But I’m really also very interested in what skill or mindset or process or something that you picked up that you learned in that job that became fundamental to your next job and is still fundamental now. Because I think that
Adaptation is about adapting to the new, but it’s also leveraging the things that are evergreen, are foundational, that we have to be careful to maintain. You can tell me I’m wrong, by the way. This is sort of my theory. But so the question is, what was your first real career job and what was a good bedrock thing that you learned in that job that you carried forward?
Diane Weaver (13:23)
This is such a great question because I think when you can key into that common thread throughout your career, that’s such a critical thing to your own personal narrative and making sense of it and feeling like there’s choice and opportunity as well.
So I think, like, so I love this question. And ⁓ my first job where I was paid a salary, my first salary paying job, this wasn’t a gig, I wasn’t paying to volunteer somewhere, you know, like all that stuff, right? My first job job, had ⁓ volunteered through high school for the Muscular Dystrophy Association because I had a couple of friends with muscular dystrophy. And so I got pulled into like,
the MDA summer camp and things like that, and just really enjoyed that kind of work. And so when I graduated from college, ⁓ had majored in a lot of different things and I took a long time, right? Classic ADHD, like entrepreneur story there. But ultimately I graduated with a bachelor’s in English and a minor in history. ⁓
and very much a generalist, right? ⁓ So the Muscular Dystrophy Association called me up and they said, hey, we have a position open in your hometown office and we want to offer you the position. It’s an administrative assistant position. And I was like, grateful to have a salary job, right? So of course I said yes.
Jason Gorman (15:12)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Diane Weaver (15:15)
And
⁓ because at that time even, you know, I knew that it was just like, it’s, I’m just going in a direction. And ⁓ when something falls in your lap like that in the world, like it is, it is a gift. ⁓ And, and it, like, I was flattered because it was based off of, you know, knowing me through volunteerism and stuff. Right. So anyway, I hated the job. ⁓
Jason Gorman (15:40)
Mm-hmm.
you
Diane Weaver (15:44)
I hated it. I hated administrative work. ⁓ I hated the managing the call center when I had to fill in for someone else, right? There was a lot that I did not like about the job. So I got really good at it. And I got really good at completing the objectives of the job within a really short amount of time. And then I gave myself my own challenges and I reinvented my job.
Jason Gorman (16:06)
Hmm
Hmm.
Diane Weaver (16:14)
built out their first ever database in Access. So I was craving being the technologist that I knew I was. ⁓ so I built out their first database in Access. I took their very manual newsletter format and I recreated it into the word publishing, you know, computer program. ⁓ And I basically built
Jason Gorman (16:40)
Yeah.
Diane Weaver (16:43)
these things that were scalable and I created new programs. And those new programs were ⁓ actually rolled out across the nation, across ⁓ several muscular dystrophy association offices because they were so efficient. And so I learned very quickly that like you can hate the job and that’s fine, but it is on you to figure out.
Jason Gorman (16:48)
Thank
Diane Weaver (17:13)
how to love the job or move on or move on. Yeah, because sometimes you’re in a situation where you can’t, you know, do that. But I have always very stubbornly done exactly that in every job I’ve had. I make time for the things that I want to do.
Jason Gorman (17:15)
Yeah.
That story makes perfect sense to me. I love that. So, okay, could you talk a little bit about the career you’ve had between your first administrative job and founding a technology company, second technology company, to my knowledge, and ⁓ maybe choose one other stop along the way to pick out
Diane Weaver (17:39)
Yes.
Jason Gorman (18:05)
a good foundation, another good foundational thing that you learned.
Diane Weaver (18:10)
Yeah, absolutely. Well, so from the MDA experience, I was ⁓ recruited into ⁓ working at an ad agency. And I come from a long line of like multi-generational advertisers. My grandfather was a madman on Madison Avenue, right? And ⁓ so I was like, OK, I know I have those skills.
the salary was much better than the administrative job. So I went for it. And I also went for it because I wasn’t selling cosmetics or fashion. I was selling education. It was an online program management company before we had the term OPM, right? And so I created…
programs and communications and marketing and things like that for recruiting students, retaining students, helping universities take their distance learning and bring it online ⁓ and really helping with that transformation. And it all became very systematic, you know, because we were working with really large data sets. ⁓
I always kind of wanted to be an author ⁓ at some point in my life. And at that point in my life, were, ⁓ I had millions of, you know, viewers and readers of the things that I was writing. just, nobody knew it, right? My name was not anywhere, right? So was kind of a ⁓ funny moment in time where I was like, this might be my biggest reach as a writer. But of course I didn’t want to stop there.
I wanted to keep going. ⁓ that really gave me the bug of education. I had actually taught abroad ⁓ in the 90s ⁓ during my college experience. was part of the, I can’t sit still for very long, and so I would do a semester or two and then break and then do a semester or two and then break and go have these world experiences.
⁓ and I was really into linguistics and semantic, like, like forming your sense of reality through your semantic choices. ⁓ and so really fascinated by that. And so this really helped with, with that. ⁓ from there, I went on to Pearson and worked on statewide longitudinal data systems, which was utterly fascinating when we’re talking about standards and interoperability, like
I get very excited because that’s the plumbing that makes all the cool stuff work. So we connected these databases across the state that then ⁓ policymakers could use and researchers could use to ⁓ inform policymaking, to inform different ⁓ community programs that were essential to helping that community flourish.
⁓ And what I learned through working with those very large data sets was that assessment data is like Swiss cheese. Like ⁓ it’s awful actually at giving a ⁓ story of the full human, right? And ⁓ so from there, you know, what was really missing was what was going on in the curriculum. What did they learn when,
Jason Gorman (21:39)
Hmm.
Diane Weaver (21:57)
And then it was from there that I started working with a adaptive learning software company that built curriculum to understand the curriculum piece in that bigger picture a lot better. And then from there, I went and built my own company, ⁓ CourseTune, ⁓ about how do we visualize the what are students learning when, how, and why.
Jason Gorman (22:11)
Mm-hmm.
Diane Weaver (22:26)
visualize it in a way that ⁓ helps shift the conversations about that. ⁓ And that was such a great experience because we got ⁓ the design patents really, really quickly. And we knew that was just such an affirmation that we were onto something really unique. And I’ve always felt like we have to design technology for humans first.
Jason Gorman (22:55)
Mm.
Diane Weaver (22:55)
And the most
powerful thing that we can do is help shift perspective because that’s what changes conversations. when conversations change, then we start to have different perceptions of reality and impact in very different ways. So that was wonderful. And we were acquired.
pretty early by a fantastic acquisition. And that was also a wonderful experience. At the point of acquisition, the number of universities using Course Student doubled. Within a year, it doubled again. So it was tremendous. And then I stayed on for a year to oversee the merger and acquisition. And then two months after that ended, OpenAI released ChatGPT.
And then it’s just, it’s just been like a flood gate after that because that, changed everything. Yep.
Jason Gorman (24:01)
So that brings us up to nearly ⁓ what you’re doing now. So maybe you could tell us a little bit about what you’re doing now and your product.
Diane Weaver (24:12)
Yeah, with Baryons. truly, you know, ⁓ with Baryons, what we’ve done, well, so first of all, ⁓ I sought out one of the best tech teams that I knew of, which is the company Problem Solutions. And their fearless leader and CEO is Mike Ruska. And so ⁓ as I was going through
Jason Gorman (24:15)
Mm-hmm.
Diane Weaver (24:42)
⁓ It was about a year of trying to figure out what was next for me personally and what was the big idea that I wanted to work on. And that’s when I created that slide with the person falling through the cracks. And I was like, okay, I want this next thing to be a very ⁓ personal transformation kind of thing. I have worked so much of my career to transform education.
Jason Gorman (24:49)
Mm-hmm.
Diane Weaver (25:11)
transform workforce, to transform the systems and all of these things. And, you know, we’re just at this prime moment in time where individual transformation, there’s a lot of promise, there’s a lot of, you know, risk and there’s a lot of, ⁓ there’s a lot of learning that needs to happen very quickly. So it is all kind of converging. So I called up Mike and I said, Hey Mike, of all the people in the world,
You are such a smart technologist and you’re probably thinking about this in a similar way that I am. In other words, like now’s the time to make an impact on humanity for greater good, right? And, and not a widget. Like I was not interested in putting the yellow pages online like we did, you know, during.com, right? So sure enough, he was thinking about it very differently than everyone else.
Jason Gorman (25:54)
You
Diane Weaver (26:07)
He introduced me to Brooks Canavesi. And he’s also such a brilliant technologist. He’s such a, he’s, he’s a bit of a unicorn because equally technologist and can like masterful communicator and, and just an incredible, incredible team. So we started working together as problem solutions and a few months in, we realized we need to do a spinoff, ⁓ to
in order to have this SaaS product really come to life in a very different way and in a new way and be its own new entity and flourish. And so now Problem Solutions is doing amazing things now with the core team, which is fantastic, and Mike and Brooks and Ryan Kringek and Aaron Bear and Forbes Shannon.
Jason Gorman (26:42)
Mm-hmm.
Diane Weaver (27:06)
⁓ and a handful of others of us, ⁓ we’re over here building and executing on this vision that is Bary ons. And it’s. If we were all sitting here together, we would each tell you how each of us is uniquely and personally drawn to solving this problem from a totally different perspective. And that just makes it really dynamic and really interesting.
Jason Gorman (27:27)
Mmm.
Diane Weaver (27:34)
And our challenge is to keep it simple, right? And keep it incredibly simple. So anyway, so we built this thing. We tested it out with hundreds of people. We got lots of great data and lots of great feedback, made a ton of improvements, did that a few times. And then we’ve just released the latest and greatest flourishing partner. And it’s available on baryons.com.
You can go there and you can just check out. There’s two options. You have access to a free option. You get up to three calls with your baryon per month for free. ⁓ Or you can pay $20 a month and have unlimited calls with your baryon. And we recommend calling your baryon two to five times a week. Spend about 10 minutes on the call with your baryon and it will help you.
identify where are you stuck and how to get unstuck. And it’s a deeply personalized experience and it’s, ⁓ it’s not, it’s so different than talking to your chat GPT, cause chat G PT is endlessly affirmative and the affirmations will just like take you down your own rabbit hole and like echo chamber. And in that.
Jason Gorman (28:46)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Diane Weaver (29:00)
It will challenge you, it will help you shift your perspective, it will ask you to articulate the whys behind what you’re saying, it will ask you to tell stories to help you understand your own wisdom. And then it utilizes that information to help you identify your own path and get there.
and it will give you micro challenges to go back out into the real world and have authentic connection with other human beings. And that is truly, truly magical and very different.
Jason Gorman (29:40)
I have used this technology a bunch and it is definitely different than ChatGPT. ⁓ ChatGPT has all of these little dark patterns of keeping you, like pulling you into the next thing that may or may not be helpful to your goals. ⁓ It’s very interested in volume. It is not particularly interested in ⁓ being concise.
because it wants you to be engaged. And my experience with Baryons is that, of course, it understands after talking with it a few times, it remembers critical things about me, about my goals, about what my challenges are right now, about the ways that I like to work.
And so in the way that we work together, it tailors clearly, is tailoring its suggestions and ideas around things that I’ve told it before. It asks incisive questions.
And it is very focused on creating concrete things for me to do, to take action, ⁓ to meet the challenge. So it has gone as far as sending me email reminders, setting up a calendar, blocking time on my calendar for me to do critical things that I have said. I don’t have enough time to…
I don’t take enough time to step back and think about the big picture and kind of sketch things out offline just to kind of reconnect with my business. So said, great, once a month, you need to set aside two hours. I’m going to put that on your calendar. What’s the best day? Right. So and then I’ll talk to it and I’ll say, all right, well, did you do that this week? You had it scheduled this week. How’d that go? Right. So there’s some accountability there, too.
It is a fascinating tool and I work with, you know, I’ve got a therapist and I’ve got a business coach and it doesn’t replace those people, but it is a really good, it is a really good companion ⁓ to those other, ⁓ those human relationships, those super valuable human relationships. It’s a great companion that I think is just a good tool in the process of
helping me constantly try to grow and learn and meet the challenges where I can. ⁓ And you described it really quickly, but it is very straightforward. I use my phone, I call it, it says, hello, Jason. And it usually launches into a conversation, like it knows where it wants to go, right? It has some ideas. And if I disagree, I can say,
I got something else for today. Let’s do something else. And of course, it will follow my lead. But it’s all conversation. And usually at the end, I ask it for a follow-up. It sends me a follow-up. But it’s very easy to use. anyway, I just wanted to say that I’ve appreciated it. So I’m glad that you and your colleagues have brought it into the world. Oh, look at that. the hearts even went on your screen. That’s amazing.
Diane Weaver (32:54)
Thank you.
Jason Gorman (33:00)
Do it again. That’s great. I love this. All Well, if you are listening to the audio version of that, click over to YouTube because that was a good, it a nice moment. So in some of the prep we did, I asked about a challenge that you’re working on now. And you said that you’re specifically concerned about what you call the adaptation gap.
So I’m wondering if you could talk about what this is and what kinds of challenges the adaptation gap presents.
Diane Weaver (33:30)
so the adaptation gap is this phenomenon that is a root cause of things that look like
checking out, ⁓ disengaging. It looks like only one in four people say that they’re flourishing at work. It looks like ⁓ the quiet resignation. It looks like ⁓ the paralysis that we feel when we see tens of thousands of people around us getting laid off, right?
Jason Gorman (33:45)
Mm.
Mm-hmm.
Diane Weaver (34:11)
it looks like the not wanting to shift or move or change because so much has changed around us that we’re kind of bearing down on what we think we know in an effort to have a space to control. And anxiety goes way up through the roof. And what we’re seeing also
as part of all of this is truly a mental health crisis. So how do we help individuals build up their mental wealth? How do we help them think about their mental health, not just as a, know, like self-love, self-care, I’m gonna go take a bathtub, a bath, you know, kind of thing.
And I think that we’ve moved past that actually as a culture. think there’s been a lot of people have said and written things about that, about we need to get past that into the real things. And what those real things are is the daily maintenance of showing up with intentionality, identifying moments of joy in the small mundane things so that we’re
putting bank deposits into our mental wealth so that when life throws us a sucker punch or a right hook, then we can feel a little more resilient because we have reserves in our mental wealth bank.
So the adaptation gap, ⁓ we see it so clearly when we think about our own privilege and ⁓ how.
like the opportunities and perceptions and how we feel about our lives and how we show up in our lives based on the privilege that we have or don’t have, right? And so how do we meet people where they are and help them ⁓ shift into an abundance perspective and a growth mindset regardless of where they are and what they’re feeling and doing?
⁓ I, I once read, so on, I mentioned earlier that like my ADHD entrepreneurial personality didn’t allow me to just do the college experience end to end. I had to take breaks, ⁓ every semester or two. One of those breaks, I was a teacher in Russia. And after that, ⁓ about five of the teachers and I, decided to backpack through Eastern Europe and we spent.
a lot of time actually going through concentration camps. And we visited Auschwitz and we visited so many devastating places. ⁓ when I came back home, I bought ⁓ Dr. Frankel’s ⁓ Man’s Search for Meaning. And it really impressed upon me ⁓ at that time of my life, ⁓ the resiliency.
Jason Gorman (37:21)
Mm-hmm.
Diane Weaver (37:30)
of the human spirit and our ability to find or not ⁓ deep within us a source for flourishing is really key to our overall experience and our overall health in a physiological mind-body connection, mental health kind of way. Just critical.
Jason Gorman (37:43)
Mm-hmm.
I just a few weeks ago ⁓ met Holocaust survivor and I also met children of survivors and it was a work engagement. I’m working with an organization that is focused on Holocaust education and ⁓ they told me their stories and ⁓ the stories were as bad as you can imagine and they were
Diane Weaver (38:18)
Thank
Jason Gorman (38:27)
some of the most lighthearted people I’ve talked to in a long time. And they talked, they talked a lot about that balance in finding this and what life meant to them and how it meant something different. I’m glad you brought that up because there’s such a powerful thing and I would not.
wish anyone ever in history of Earth to ever have to go through anything like that in order to realize these lessons. But I think the opportunity we have now, all of us have struggles, right? Everybody has something. Everybody’s got something. And I would say right now, we do have this universal challenge, somewhat existential challenge.
of what AI means to us as humans, as people, as employees, as people who know things and can do things and who have expertise in certain areas. It’s a real challenge to those things and it’s genuinely scary to people. And so I think this frame of understanding that we can thrive, even in conditions that are the most dire you can imagine,
Diane Weaver (39:47)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Gorman (39:47)
⁓
is possible. Thank you for highlighting that. I love that.
Diane Weaver (39:52)
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.
Jason Gorman (39:55)
So
when people, when you are making this tool, when you’re thinking about what it does, how do you think about what success looks like? Is there any way to measure the ROI of somebody interacting with their baryon to help them thrive?
Diane Weaver (40:21)
Absolutely. So that’s one of the most hopeful things I think about this moment in time because, and this is why we shifted to a flourishing partner ⁓ just before we ⁓ made it available online for self-checkout, right? So we shifted it to a flourishing partner because specifically there’s so much great research coming out now about how
Flourishing is the thing that mankind needs to focus on today. ASU GSV, the theme of the conference next spring in April is the flourishing workforce. Higher Ed is in this moment in time where they are desperately wanting to be perceived again as the pipeline for a flourishing workforce.
Jason Gorman (40:58)
Mm-hmm.
Diane Weaver (41:19)
In order to be able to do that, we need to focus on individual flourishing transformation. And Harvard actually just came out with a flourishing study that identified six domains for people to seek out to increase their flourishing quotient, right?
And so it is quantifiable. We have research that is really pointing to, you know, these are the things to bring into your life to seek more of, to really increase your flourishing capacity so that you’re not completely depleted as these things come at you, right? And then…
Another ⁓ indicator of success for us personally is that during the summer, ⁓ we actually attracted ⁓ and joined up with an investor called Blue Ash Ventures, and they only invest in companies that are poised for human flourishing. They only invest in companies that are really helping humanity in areas like brain health, mental wealth, wellness.
Jason Gorman (42:30)
Hmm.
Diane Weaver (42:40)
learning and all of these things really do come together to create the flourishing whole person. ⁓ So it really is like it’s and this is a bit of the you know, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once you start thinking about these things, you see them everywhere, right? It’s like it’s like validating. ⁓ But I think that the success for us when we
listen to our customers feedback. The success for us is when they illustrate a before and after. And they choose in their own words, what was there before? Where were they stuck? And what did that look like? And what was there after? What was the thing that helped them unlock and achieve flow again and start to flourish again?
And so we’re really big on not articulating that narrative to people, but letting people come to their baryon with their own narratives and utilize the time with the baryon to reflect and, you know, reflect on that narrative and to shift that narrative where they need to and help make that narrative serve them. You know, this is like, it’s
It’s one of the oldest things that we’ve done as human beings is like create these narrative stories of what happened and why, right? And this is really, this is how we form our own sense of identity ⁓ as individuals. And then it’s also how we make sense of the world around us. And this is always shifting. And when the world is like, is,
shifting so much around us and it feels like it’s really like pressing in on us, then that’s when we start to kind of like lose sight of our own narratives. It feels like they’re, you know, no longer relevant or getting away and things like that. So this is really we talk about your baryon ⁓ talking to your baryon in time as that as that ⁓ partnership.
as that flourishing partnership develops in time through multiple conversations, it begins to feel like you might be speaking with your near future self. And that’s part of how we’ve designed it is to be that personalized to you. We’re not interested in creating the Borg. We want to know what does Jason Gorman think that his ultimate
Jason Gorman (45:09)
Hmm.
Ha ha!
Mm-hmm.
Diane Weaver (45:27)
like performance looks like and what is his ultimate definition of success. Maybe it is totally different. Maybe it’s monetary. Maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s family. Maybe it’s all of it. Maybe. And I think that’s the interesting thing here too, is that as things get more more democratized and personalized, we get to start to have a conversation about how it’s not black or white. It’s not either.
Jason Gorman (45:55)
Mm.
Diane Weaver (45:56)
It’s all of it. And we’re increasing our capacity to understand how things that used to feel opposite can live and thrive together, right? And how it can be all of it, all at once. Yeah.
Jason Gorman (46:12)
This is beautiful, such a thoughtful vision and you’re doing it. I’ve used the tool. It works. It actually works. It’s really quite something. ⁓
Diane Weaver (46:25)
It’s a very, very smart team. Working with this team is a gift every day. Yeah, absolutely.
Jason Gorman (46:31)
You have this very interesting cross section of different things that you do, different hats that you’ve worn over your career. This show is really, you know, it’s really for learning professionals. And there’s so much here that I think people are going to be able to take away.
I would like to talk a little bit about predictions. So things in the learning field are going to, well, not going to. They’re changing right now, today, tomorrow, next week. And you know this field as well as anybody. And I’m curious about what are your predictions for the learning professions? If this could be short-term, long-term, your choice.
Diane Weaver (47:18)
Yeah. Yeah, this is another really great question. And when I look out ahead, I see and hear a lot of folks saying AI is not going to replace you. Someone using AI is going to replace you. Yes, I feel like that’s a true statement for the near term. When I look out around the corner,
It’s not just the person who’s using AI, it’s how we are using our AI. So the person who’s using AI to do more search terms, right? Or do more of the old way of working faster, they will be outpaced by the person who’s using AI to transform their mindset and how they’re thinking about and conceptualizing the work.
Jason Gorman (48:04)
Mm-hmm.
Diane Weaver (48:16)
We are seeing such, I mean, it’s breakneck speeds of change, especially in learning and development industry. And it’s no wonder because when you go back to the WooKid pyramid, right? And where you have data, information, knowledge, wisdom, what we’re doing is we are literally moving from the knowledge layer as
as an industry to wisdom, right? And so how do we redesign learning and development, which was developed for data, was developed and transformed for information. Now we’re in the knowledge area, but we have to quickly step, like two step into the wisdom era, right? And so thinking about like,
Jason Gorman (48:47)
Wow.
Yeah.
Diane Weaver (49:13)
So this is a good example. With learning ⁓ and development, ⁓ from a data perspective, understanding all of the ⁓ pieces of data and being able to understand and weight them. And then information, being able to extrapolate meaning from that data. But the meaning were like statements of fact, primary resources, basically.
Jason Gorman (49:29)
Mm-hmm.
Diane Weaver (49:43)
research primary resources. then knowledge truly has been, well, we figured out the correlation and causation of things, right? All of that is being challenged right now. All of that is being challenged. And so the way to get from knowledge to wisdom, it’s through storytelling. So each of those leaps up the pyramid takes, it is technology.
⁓ It’s a technological transformation and human input, right? You cannot transform technology up to wisdom without human input. So we need people to show up more than ever. And our learning and development experts are specifically trained for this moment in time to take it from knowledge into wisdom.
Jason Gorman (50:18)
Mmm.
Hmm.
Diane Weaver (50:42)
And I think this is where we go back to reconnecting to the human experience and ⁓ really looking at this from a place of curiosity of like, we all know these things, we can predict these things. The prediction is like less, ⁓ it’s actually less reliable than it was before because all of these other things are changing. Well.
Jason Gorman (51:09)
Hmm.
Diane Weaver (51:10)
Let’s start collecting the stories from the humans who are in the thick of it, because it’s from those stories that we’re gonna be able to extrapolate this wisdom that’s really gonna guide a lot of things, right? It is no longer memorization and repetition. It is no longer, you know, and I’m talking about like higher forms, because our brains, from a human development standpoint,
Let me just say this. Our brains still need to go through those because it’s like the sit ups and push ups of brain development, right? Like to be forced to memorize and repeat things back. But then there comes a time and we have to figure out how do we get people to their ⁓ more quickly and in mass and in that scale. ⁓
Jason Gorman (52:02)
Mm-hmm.
Diane Weaver (52:06)
to the wisdom area. And then that challenge specifically instructional design has the best track record of doing that at scale because it started in the military, right? And it was how do we, how do we skill people up and train them up at the, a large amount of people as fast as possible. And so like, we are ready for this. We are ready for this.
We just gotta come together and get it to that next step. And we got this.
Jason Gorman (52:40)
Man, that’s good. I feel like you could be a recruiter for instructional design programs around the country. I feel like that pitch, that should go into every packet, every website for every instructional design program because it’s hard.
Diane Weaver (52:50)
you
Jason Gorman (53:03)
As disheartening and difficult as sometimes things feel right now, I do think that ⁓ there is a strong case to be made that we’re really, people who do this work are just incredibly vital. We’re at this, we’re an important enabler for humanity to move forward in a healthy way. ⁓ I think it’s hard to disagree with that.
Diane Weaver (53:25)
Absolutely.
Jason Gorman (53:30)
who’s pretty self-critical and realistic and don’t tend to go for a lot of kind of overblown statements about the work that I do, but I actually do believe that. So I’m glad you said it. Actually, the last person I interviewed said kind of the same thing in his last answer. He said that he really believes we have the most important job right now. ⁓
I was kind of, I hadn’t thought of it that way. So you’re the second person in a row to say something along those lines ⁓ to me in this conversation. So really appreciate that. I do have one more question. It is from Dan Streeter. He was the last person I interviewed. And this is a little bit of a, it’s actually almost the opposite of what we’ve just been talking about. We’ve been talking about the people part and his question is about technology. So his question is,
Diane Weaver (54:09)
You bet.
Jason Gorman (54:26)
What is the one piece of technology that you wish every learning professional knew? And let’s just, we definitely, everybody should get a Baryon. Let’s just say that right now, but let’s say aside from Baryon, what is a technology that everybody should be looking at, taking advantage of?
Diane Weaver (54:37)
Mm.
should embrace.
I mean, I think that it is, of course it’s gonna be AI backed, but I don’t think it’s just the LLMs. This is a tough question, so I can’t choose just one, right? And what I think is critical for…
Jason Gorman (54:50)
Mm-hmm.
Sure.
Diane Weaver (55:04)
learning and development and instructional design experts to really think about is reimagining the LMS. And look at the products that are coming out that are extremely injected with AI and that are really thinking about and doing these things differently because the LMS is, ⁓ you know, it’s the not, it’s
Jason Gorman (55:12)
Mm.
Diane Weaver (55:33)
You have an LMS, you have a knowledge base, right? And the environment that we’re ⁓ developing in now is so much more dynamic with AI in the mix, right? And we have, it is not structured data versus unstructured data. It’s when and how do we use both? And how do we utilize AI to improve one thing or the other, right? And we need the humans to…
Jason Gorman (55:35)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Diane Weaver (56:02)
set the bar for quality and standard and to flag things that are inaccurate or not up to snuff. And what humans understand more than AI understands at this point in time is scaffolding and how to scaffold specifically for the individual. so it’s anyway.
Any tools that help you with that, that’s what you need to see out. And what I would say too is like, it’s like a mountain of possibility out there. I mean, it’s almost like, you know, going from your quickie mart with like two cereal options to the full aisle of cereals, right? And so what I would recommend is just like, try out, figure out like time box it for yourself.
Jason Gorman (56:45)
Yeah. Yeah.
Diane Weaver (56:56)
and try out a tool for a time box, reflect on it, try a different one. Even if you thought that that was amazing, just try a different one. And do that a few times until you understand the similarities, differences, and capabilities of these things.
Jason Gorman (57:03)
Hmm. Hmm.
That’s wonderful. Diane Weaver, thank you so much for coming on and helping us think about thriving and the future and our kind of emotional selves, the future of work, the critical aspects of technology, all the things. This has been amazing. Thank you.
Diane Weaver (57:29)
Absolutely, my pleasure, my pleasure. Thank you for having me.