Meetings, collaboration, async work, remote friction, creativity, leadership, and the rituals teams keep or kill.
Ryan and Mark rant productively about meetings: remote work, async vs synchronous collaboration, open offices, unstructured thinking time, calendar theater, Level 10-style structure, and why being busy is not the same thing as doing useful work.
Short on time? Jump straight into the parts of the conversation most likely to pull you in.
“A calendar packed edge to edge is a recipe for losing the actual work.”
The For You cut for anyone who has stared at a day of hour-apart meetings and felt the soul leave their body.
Play on this site“Sometimes a five-minute huddle beats another hour-long meeting.”
A practical counterpoint: sync time is useful when it is short, specific, and actually needed.
Play on this site“If you are too busy to think about the business, you may still be operating instead of owning.”
A core For You moment on the difference between doing the work and designing the machine.
Play on this site“If all the work keeps seesawing through you, you are probably the bottleneck.”
This cut turns the “working on vs. in” idea into a simple diagnostic.
Play on this site“Weekly status meetings feel productive, but most of the time they are just ritualized reporting.”
The For You cut where Mark and Ryan call out the business ritual everyone keeps because everyone else keeps it.
Play on this site“Scrum can become the exact kind of process theater it was supposed to fix.”
A good moment for teams that adopted agile rituals without asking whether the ritual still helps.
Play on this siteEverything in this topic path.
Ryan and Mark rant productively about meetings: remote work, async vs synchronous collaboration, open offices, unstructured thinking time, calendar theater, Level 10-style structure, and why being busy is not the same thing as doing useful work.
In this episode of the Not Brothers Podcast, Mark and Ryan dig into one of the most important questions for entrepreneurs: are you working in your business, or on it? Using Oodle’s long-running offsite rhythm as the backdrop, they break down how stepping away from daily execution creates space for alignment, strategic thinking, and better decision-making.…
Mark and Ryan dig into the rituals businesses keep, kill, and quietly suffer through — from off-sites and water-cooler proximity to status meetings, remote collaboration, team events, and the culture that forms around repeated habits.
Mark and Ryan pick up the AI-in-education thread and push it further: if AI can write the paper, build the tool, summarize the research, and automate the busy work, what exactly are humans supposed to learn, practice, and protect?
Mark and Ryan debate the AI-era version of if you build it, they will come: building products is easier than ever, but distribution, trust, attention, and demand are still the hard part.
When a school's strict no-AI policy expels two seniors weeks before graduation, Mark and Ryan dig into the real question: what are we actually testing — and where's the line between AI as a calculator and AI as plagiarism?
Why innovation is difficult for small and medium businesses — and how AI is changing the game
Ryan and Mark talk through the fast-moving AI landscape: agentic models, tools, skills, business use cases, security risks, human oversight, model choice, experimentation, and what teams should understand before they shove AI into everything.
Ryan and Mark unpack the build-vs-buy software decision: when custom tools make sense, where off-the-shelf platforms win, how internal politics and maintenance costs creep in, and why the real answer depends on appetite, resources, and organizational reality.
