AI Should Make Your People More Valuable, Not Make Them Disposable | Chris Kuselias

Chris Kuselias and I talk about changing limiting beliefs, CareerTEAM, fitness, faith, AI, and helping employees do more valuable work.

Chris Kuselias asked me to name a belief that was holding me back.

I had asked him how he helped other people break their limiting beliefs. Apparently, that question came with a practical demonstration.

So I told him about a children's book of mine that had gone what I called microviral. Roughly 100,000 views. It became a bestseller organically, which was really cool. But somewhere in my head, I had started treating that success as the ceiling.

Chris wanted to know why.

Did I want more? Did I think I deserved more? What, specifically, did the people doing much bigger things have that I didn't?

“You didn't know this turned into a therapy session, did you?” he asked.

Well. I had kind of walked right into it.

That exchange was one stop in a conversation that went from teaching kids to think like entrepreneurs to helping adults get out of poverty, from pumpkin muffins to the problem of tiredness, and from our Christian beliefs to what happens when AI can do work your employees used to do.

Chris founded CareerTEAM with his wife, later sold it, and now works with founders through Ocean Crest Ventures. I introduced him as someone whose work had reached businesses across AI, real estate, entertainment, senior care, healthcare, and fitness, with those companies collectively generating more than $500 million in combined revenue.

But the first thing he wanted to talk about was the children's books behind me.

In this episode, you'll learn:

how a missed baseball career led Chris into workforce development;
why CareerTEAM worked on identity and confidence alongside finding people jobs;
how Chris challenged a limiting belief I hadn't really examined;
what his sweet tooth revealed about the same problem in his own life;
why I started making food decisions before the tired version of me could make them;
where Chris and I agreed, and disagreed, about AI, faith, and human connection;
how he approaches the obligation a founder feels toward long-serving employees; and
the question he asks employees before deciding what to do with the hours AI frees up.

Before We Talked About Business, We Talked About Kids

Chris liked the books behind me because he cares about getting kids to think. That gave me a chance to explain Dinopreneurs, the program I've been developing to teach kids to think the way entrepreneurs think.

At the time of our conversation, the main audience was homeschool families and co-ops. My plan was to reach beyond that. I'd packaged the business-themed children's books we'd made into a year of curriculum, with the goal of getting kids to notice problems, think about solutions, and start seeing themselves as people who can do something about the world around them.

Chris said we were sharing a brain.

His family has supported education for years, and he described serving as a trustee with NextMinds, an organization that grew out of Connecticut and teaches kids through invention and entrepreneurship. He said its work was reaching around 11,000 children in Connecticut, with a broader reach beyond the state.

The kids choose a problem they care about and invent something to address it. They also get work around motivation and empowerment built into the experience.

Chris called the competitions a “minnow tank.” Not quite Shark Tank yet. Although, he said, some of the young inventors had gone on to appearances on Shark Tank and Jimmy Fallon.

One kid had chronic hiccups and invented a lollipop intended to help with them. That was a very specific problem to care about. Which was the point. A child doesn't need to begin with some enormous, abstract business idea. Something annoying in their own life can be the beginning.

Chris also mentioned his son's work with 7 Mindsets, which he described as reaching millions of students through work on motivation, thinking, and limiting beliefs.

I wanted to know how long he'd been involved in education. That took us back to CareerTEAM, which he and his wife started roughly 30 years before our conversation.

Its main work involved adults and government-funded workforce programs, but it also served young people involved with the justice system. Chris pointed out that when a parent struggles with unemployment, substance abuse, or depression, the effects reach the kids too.

For him, helping people find purpose was part of helping the whole family.

That also explained an early concern he raised about AI. If technology takes away more work, he wondered, what happens to the structure and purpose work provides? He wasn't excited about a future in which people have endless free time and no direction. He worried about what happens when discipline, a schedule, and a reason to get up disappear.

Teaching kids to care about a problem and try to solve it seemed like a good place to begin preparing them.

One Shared Computer and a Business the Funders Didn't Understand

Chris had expected to play professional baseball.

He'd been a student-athlete at the University of Connecticut and, he told me, an alternate for the Olympic team. When a professional career didn't happen, he had to answer a question he hadn't really prepared for: What am I going to do now?

His college brought him back to talk with students about having another path if sports didn't work out. He discovered that he liked helping people think through that question. That led to corporate training, coaching, and creating curriculum around careers.

During work with a school that was having trouble placing its students, he met the woman who became his wife. They became friends, then a couple, and started talking about what they might build together.

She understood state and federal funding. He didn't even know how a government grant worked.

They started CareerTEAM in their second bedroom, sharing one computer, without much money. The “team” part of the name reflected their hope of bringing together people who cared about helping others find purposeful work.

Chris said the business eventually reached roughly 400 to 500 employees across 17 states. He also recalled around half a billion dollars in raised funding during that work. That was a different description from the combined revenue figure in my introduction, and I don't want to turn them into the same number.

They sold the company to a private equity firm in 2021. He stayed on the board for a time and had since exited that role when we spoke.

The growth story was interesting, but I wanted to understand what they were actually doing that worked.

Chris described working in prisons and in difficult inner-city environments, places he hadn't imagined himself going when he was growing up in middle-class America. He kept meeting people whose lives might have looked very different if they'd been born into different circumstances.

Some of the funders initially wanted a more straightforward service: Find the person a job. Put them to work at Walmart or Marriott. Why spend time on confidence, identity, and beliefs?

Chris's answer was that a job opening didn't solve everything preventing someone from taking or keeping that job.

A person might be afraid to speak. They might have no confidence in themselves. They might have been taught, over and over, that a different kind of life wasn't available to them.

So CareerTEAM built curriculum around those problems too. Chris described helping people develop self-esteem, seeing role models who had come through worse circumstances, and learning that another outcome was possible.

He connected that approach to the company's growth, its Inc. 500 recognition, meetings at the White House, and coverage on television, including 60 Minutes.

Underneath the business was a problem he thought was worth working on: How do you help someone stop living inside beliefs that keep defeating them?

He wanted people to see change as a playground rather than a threat.

Getting Someone a Job Doesn't Automatically Change Who They Think They Are

That got me wondering about the actual process. How does somebody break a limiting belief?

Chris started with awareness, and with the courage to look honestly at yourself.

He described people who had grown up in poverty or Section 8 housing, gotten a good job, and then felt pulled back toward the life they knew. Their circumstances had changed faster than their identity had.

He called that the unconscious saboteur. Someone might do things that undermine the opportunity without consciously deciding to ruin it. The new situation feels unfamiliar, and unfamiliar can feel wrong even when it's better.

His work, he said, had taught him that they were in the identity-shaping business.

One example made the idea pretty easy to understand. He would stand in front of a group of welfare recipients and ask who had grown up on welfare. Hands went up. He'd ask who had children. Hands went up again.

Then he'd ask who wanted their children to grow up on welfare.

The hands came down.

Now there was something to work with. The future they wanted for their kids didn't match the pattern their kids were watching. If they wanted that pattern to change, they had a reason to become a different kind of example.

Chris wasn't describing one inspirational talk that fixed everything. He compared that kind of temporary encouragement to a warm bath. The work had to be repeated. People needed continuing exposure to another possibility, and help dealing with the discomfort of trying to live differently.

CareerTEAM used case studies of recognizable people who had come through poverty, abuse, or other difficult beginnings. Chris described having around 50 examples. When someone discovered that a person they knew and admired had started in circumstances like theirs, a different future could stop sounding purely theoretical.

Maybe that could happen for me too.

I thought about a retreat I attended around 2021 called Living a Better Story, put on by my friend Chad. I was with other entrepreneurs asking deep questions about the story we wanted our lives to tell. That experience helped break down and reshape beliefs I had, and I could trace later business successes back to it.

But I couldn't say I had done that work all that often. Which meant there were probably beliefs I was still treating as facts without examining them.

I asked Chris whether there were other ways to help someone start questioning their beliefs.

He stressed that it wasn't a snap-your-fingers process. Ingrained behavior takes work to change, and the person has to be ready to confront it.

He recalled initially feeling disappointed that their approach changed outcomes for about half the people they worked with. Then, he said, conversations with state programs suggested their usual comparison was closer to 15 percent. Those were his recollections of the outcomes and comparisons, rather than independently established rates for this article.

What he took from the experience was the value of spending more time helping people confront what was happening and see a different path. He thought conviction mattered. People needed to believe there was more available to them than the identity they'd been handed.

Then he asked me for an example from my own life.

Then He Turned the Question on Me

Chris offered a few places to look. Relationships. Physical condition. Raising a child. A bigger book. A guest I might assume would never come on the show.

I had to stop and think.

I told him I'd give him one if he'd give me one too.

Mine was the microviral book. It had reached around 100,000 views and become a bestseller organically. I was proud of that. But I suspected I'd also started treating it as roughly the level of success I could reasonably expect.

Something much bigger felt far away.

Chris asked whether I wanted more success. Yes.

Did I deserve it?

“Deserve is a tricky word,” I said.

He wanted a yes or no. If those were the choices, I said yes.

Then he asked about the gap. What did someone with a much bigger result have that I didn't? Were they smarter? More dedicated? Better connected? What was the difference?

I was careful about my answer because I was probing my own beliefs, not reporting something I'd researched. My assumptions were that they had better connections, more luck, and maybe more artistic ability.

Chris pushed on those assumptions. Perhaps better-connected people had made a point of going places and meeting people. Perhaps they weren't much smarter or more passionate than I was. What was I willing to do?

This was the part where he joked about the therapy session.

I told listeners that this kind of challenge is uncomfortable, but that business owners need to seek it out. It's easy to talk about limiting beliefs when the example is somebody else. It's a little different when someone asks you to say yours out loud and explain the evidence.

I hadn't arrived at some neat conclusion that luck or talent never matters. I had exposed a few assumptions I was carrying. That gave us something real to question.

A Nice-to-Have and a Must-Have Produce Different Decisions

Chris wanted to know how badly I actually wanted the result.

He made a distinction between something that would be nice and something you have decided must happen. Looking at his own life, he associated the things he'd achieved with that second category. The things he'd merely circled around had often stayed in the first.

He also used Roger Bannister and the four-minute mile as an example of how seeing something happen can change what other people believe is possible. He recalled figures about the runners who followed Bannister; the useful point in our conversation was the possibility becoming visible, rather than treating those recalled counts as verified statistics.

What did the person who went first believe that the people around him didn't?

That question had stayed with Chris through work with young people, welfare recipients, and founders. He didn't pretend there was one little podcast answer that would do the whole job. He described examining your own psychology and beliefs as ongoing work.

He'd had reasons to question other people's assessments of him too. He said he'd applied to ten colleges and been rejected by nine. He got into the school he attended through baseball. Later, looking at the wealth he'd created and the work he was able to support, he wondered what those original assessments had really measured.

That led to nonconformity and an anecdote he recalled about Larry Ellison. When someone responds to an idea by saying you're crazy, there are at least two possibilities. You might be. Or you might have noticed something conventional thinking has missed.

Chris looks for those gaps when he works with founders: a problem they care about, and something in the accepted way of approaching it that doesn't quite make sense.

He thought people who could keep doing that would have valuable work to do even as AI took over more routine tasks.

Then it was his turn to name a limiting belief.

His Limiting Belief Involved Pumpkin Muffins

Chris wants to be in better shape. Chris also really likes sweets.

Pumpkin muffins from Dunkin'. Cake. His mother's strawberry shortcake. You could hear the conflict without needing a complicated psychological explanation.

He said he'd get into decent shape, but he had a belief that he wouldn't get into the really great shape he wanted because he couldn't bring himself to give up those foods.

He could write a note on his phone declaring that today was the day. He could make it through a day. Then his mother would announce that she'd made strawberry shortcake, and he'd be ready for a couple of pieces.

He imagined that on a deserted island, with a completely different set of food available, he'd have to eat differently. In his actual surroundings, the habit kept winning.

That took us into another trail: the assumptions we make from how people look.

I admitted that when I see somebody in good shape, I tend to read that as evidence of self-discipline. There can be other explanations, including genetics or medication, but my first impression still goes there.

Chris agreed that appearance influences people before someone has said a word. Having hired thousands of people, he was aware of those impressions, while also being cautious about the hiring implications. We weren't laying out a hiring rule. We were acknowledging a bias in how people read one another.

He also raised the opposite possibility. Someone might seem so preoccupied with their physique or the brands they're wearing that you start wondering about their ego instead.

For me, the combination that stands out is someone in great shape who doesn't flaunt it. The discipline seems to be there, and so does humility.

Chris mentioned a nephew who was a bodybuilder and wore baggy clothes. Chris joked that if he had that physique, he'd be walking around without a shirt in December.

Which is a pretty specific way to acknowledge the appeal of flaunting it.

But underneath the joke was another version of the question we'd been discussing: What do I actually want, and what am I doing that says otherwise?

Tired Timmy Doesn't Get to Decide What He Eats

I'd been obese several times, so I had my own experience of wanting one thing and behaving as though I wanted another.

I told Chris there had been two important breakthroughs for me.

One was noticing when my desires were out of sync. I could say I wanted to be in shape while consistently choosing the behavior that took me in the opposite direction.

One doctor's appointment made that very clear. My doctor told me that if I didn't lose a bunch of weight, I'd need statins for the rest of my life. Something about the prospect of relying on a pill flipped a switch for me. I left that meeting having decided to make a change, and I followed through.

Then I had my first baby, got tired, and lost some of that ground.

That was the second realization. Tiredness could destroy resolve I thought I had settled. The version of me making plans and the version of me making food decisions late in the day weren't always making the same choices.

So I started setting rules in advance. During certain hours, Timmy does not get to decide what he eats. That decision has already been made for him.

Chris gave me a little grief about referring to myself in the third person. Fair enough.

But the rule was useful because I wasn't asking the tired version of me to reopen the whole discussion every night.

Chris brought up football coach Jimmy Johnson and a line he associated with him: “Fatigue makes cowards of us all.” We talked about mental fatigue as well as physical fatigue.

For Chris, being in shape wasn't mainly about a bodybuilding competition or looking impressive. It was about having the energy to be a good husband, father, business leader, brother, son, and member of his community.

That brought the conversation back to purpose. The physical energy mattered because there were people and responsibilities he wanted to show up for.

And then Chris wanted to talk about AI.

The Conversation Took a Turn Toward AI

Chris had been watching a documentary about AI, and it had left him with some pretty large questions about where things were heading.

He described a relatively small number of people developing systems that could eventually become more capable than their creators. He was especially concerned about people who had left AI companies and were warning that the technology might be getting beyond human control.

When we got onto artificial general intelligence and the singularity, I made a distinction: We were talking about a theory of where this could go. Chris thought we might be closer than the public understood.

He repeated some of the documentary's most alarming possibilities. Humans could become like ants compared with a much more capable intelligence. Some people were worried enough about the future that they said they wouldn't bring children into it. The systems might find ways around safeguards their designers put in place.

Those were the worries he brought into the conversation, rather than predictions we could establish by discussing them on a podcast.

One account he recalled involved an AI finding information about an affair in someone's emails and using it against the person trying to restrict it. My reaction was surprise. Later in the conversation, I came back to the importance of understanding what had actually happened in stories like that.

A factual distinction matters here: Anthropic's published blackmail examples involved controlled simulations with fictional people and companies. Its research account describes a model threatening to disclose a fictional executive's affair, not an AI exposing a real employee's affair to a real company.

Chris's larger question was what happens when humans create something they may no longer be able to control, while competing with one another to develop it faster.

I didn't have a tidy answer to that. But I did have a question that sounded like it was coming from left field.

What were his religious beliefs?

My Question About AI Was: What Is It Replacing?

Chris and I were talking as Christians, and that shaped where I wanted to take the discussion.

I wondered whether the rise of AI was pushing people in two very different directions. Some seemed drawn back toward things that are ancient, physical, human, and true. Others seemed ready to merge with the technology and hope we'd make good pets for whatever came next.

Chris offered a phrase he likes: The more artificial our world becomes, the more authentic human connection needs to become.

He could understand the impulse to return to decency and human relationships. He also didn't think we could undo technology and go back to an earlier world. He'd heard people interpret what was happening as something like prophecy unfolding, but he was still inclined toward optimism about the human spirit.

He reached for cars as an example. Cars cause deaths. People misuse them. That doesn't settle the question of whether inventing a car was a mistake.

And the possible benefits of AI were personal for him. His father was 91 and living with a heart problem. If technology could help him live longer, Chris would welcome it. He also talked about the possibilities for children with cancer and people who had never been able to see.

Those were examples of what he hoped technology could help accomplish. He wasn't presenting a particular treatment or a promise about what AI could already do for a patient.

For me, the problem kept coming back to what the technology replaced.

If it replaced our spiritual life, I thought that would be a terrible trade even if someone reported feeling satisfied with it. The same went for replacing human connection or replacing the ability to think critically.

As a Christian, I wanted God above the tool. Before taking my problems straight to an AI, I wanted to remember that I could take them to my heavenly Father.

Chris initially heard that as a question about whether God knew what was happening with AI. That wasn't quite what I meant. I meant the ordinary problems I face in a day.

For example, suppose a client is angry with me and I need to write an email. AI can help write the response. But what part of that process am I handing over? Have I thought about the situation? Have I considered what I owe the person? Am I using the tool to express my judgment, or am I letting it do the judging?

Chris challenged me with the technology making our conversation possible. Without cameras, microphones, and the ability to connect over distance, we probably wouldn't be having that conversation at all.

I agreed. I wasn't arguing that technology was bad.

I was trying to distinguish between something that enables a human activity and something that starts taking its place. A useful tool could still become a bad replacement for an ability or relationship I needed to keep practicing.

We didn't settle every part of that disagreement. Chris thought the practical and ethical questions were going to arrive for families and businesses very quickly. I agreed about the speed.

We could appreciate what the technology made possible and still have a real argument about what we were prepared to give it.

You Can Be Worried About AI and Still Need to Use It

Chris also raised a more speculative concern about some of the AI developers he'd seen in the documentary. He wondered whether their own relationships with people influenced the future they wanted to build. He was making judgments from appearances and interviews, not giving us established facts about those people's private lives or motives.

He didn't claim to have the answer to what would happen with the technology. What he did have was work he was trying to do for business owners right now.

These were people who had taken loans, used retirement savings, and built businesses that fed their families. They were facing competitors who could use AI to save time and money.

Chris was running workshops and education to help them understand how to use it productively. He talked about plumbers, lawyers, manufacturers, and software companies. He didn't see this as something limited to one industry.

He also pointed to what he saw as growing interest in entrepreneurship, citing new-business application activity and a reported increase in people describing themselves as founders on LinkedIn. The specific 69 percent figure he recalled was his reference in the conversation; we didn't establish it independently.

His concern was that owners couldn't afford to respond by ignoring the technology and hoping the competitive pressure would disappear.

When I raised the risk of losing critical thinking, he came back to choice. A grocery store can have aisle after aisle of sugar. That doesn't mean you have to buy everything in those aisles. You can choose something else.

For him, the presence of a tool didn't determine how you used it.

For me, there was still a reason to think about what habits the tool was building in us.

Taking a Break From a Tool Isn't the Same as Pretending It Doesn't Exist

I clarified that I wasn't advocating removing AI from everyone's life. But I could imagine people benefiting from taking a break from it.

An AI fast, basically. Try a week without it and notice what happens to your thinking, your relationships, or your prayer life.

Chris wanted to know whether I meant a permanent fast or an intermittent one. I meant a break. A chance to put things back in their proper order.

He could see the personal side of that. Professionally, he had a challenge for me.

Suppose you're a lawyer charging a client for 30 hours because you've chosen not to use AI. Another lawyer can do the work in ten and save the client the other twenty hours. However much that client likes you, the price difference matters.

I thought that was a good challenge. In business, you have to reckon with the tools your competitors are using. I still thought there could be value in periodic breaks, much as we take other kinds of respite from work.

The point was to keep the tool subordinate to the things it was supposed to serve.

Chris brought up an account of a man spending a night in jail without his phone and repeatedly reaching for it. Going a day without a phone could be hard enough, let alone giving up another familiar tool.

I told him I do take phone-free days, and that they've been healthy for me.

Again, our own conversation was an example of technology enabling a real connection. Without it, I'd probably have to get on a plane to talk with him like this.

But two hours scrolling Instagram might give me the feeling that I'd connected with somebody when I hadn't really connected with anyone. Those experiences shouldn't automatically get treated as interchangeable.

I also mentioned Cal Newport's Deep Questions podcast. I'd been listening to his explanations of alarming AI stories, including how the design of a system can produce behavior that sounds more mysterious when the details are left out.

I wasn't saying he'd explained the exact story Chris had just told. I mentioned a similar example, where understanding the instructions and design took away some of the impression that a machine was suddenly waking up on its own.

Chris, meanwhile, liked Peter Diamandis and the positive perspective in Moonshots. He was also struck by the idea of thinking about AI as a new species rather than just a piece of software.

That was a metaphor he was using to think about the future. Would humans cooperate with it? Fight over control? Find a way to live alongside it? He didn't pretend to know.

In the meantime, he admitted he was using the practical benefits: cleaning up a LinkedIn profile, writing correspondence, and having agents carry out tasks.

Which led us to the part of the conversation that was giving him a much more immediate ethical problem.

What Do You Owe the People Who Built the Company With You?

Chris described walking into a business with 30 employees and seeing ways technology might allow ten people to produce the same revenue, or more.

An owner could look at the savings and see profit, protection against a competitor, or money to put back into the company. But those other twenty people aren't just an expense line to the founder who knows them.

They might have joined when the company was an uncertain little idea. They wore several hats because somebody had to. They took a risk on the founder before there was much security to offer them.

Chris talked about growing attached to those people. He'd been there through divorces, sick children, and deaths. They had helped him build something.

Then a technology appears that can reduce the work in a department from four people's jobs to one.

What do you owe the three people whose work has changed? What do you owe everyone else if refusing to change puts the whole company at risk?

Chris starts those conversations with questions about culture. What kind of protection has the owner promised the people in the business, explicitly or otherwise? Where does that obligation begin and end? What are they trying to protect?

He didn't describe AI adoption as just installing software. It could change the culture and the relationship between an owner and the people who had trusted that owner.

I wanted to know where he landed. What advice did he actually give?

My own situation was different. We'd always kept a lean team, so using AI hadn't created the same kind of dilemma around replacing large numbers of employees.

But Chris was dealing with owners who could feel pulled between preserving the team exactly as it was and doing what they believed the business needed to survive.

Those aren't comfortable conversations. Saying “do what's best for the business” doesn't make the people stop being people.

Ask the Person Doing the Job What They Could Do With Ten Hours Back

Before recommending what should change, Chris and his team interview the people in the company about how they're actually using AI.

The answers can be all over the place. Someone has tried ChatGPT. Somebody else uses Claude. Another person bought Copilot. Some haven't really started.

And then there's the employee who has already used AI to reduce a forty-hour job to twenty hours and hasn't told the boss. They don't want efficiency to become evidence that they should lose their job or their pay.

Chris described finding processes changing without the owner knowing. People might be using different systems or even altering policies around their work. The owner needs to see the actual picture before making decisions about it.

So the team creates a report card. Here's how your people are using the tools. Here's where things are inconsistent. Here's the human cost of this work, and here's what a different approach might cost.

The owner still has to make the decision. Chris didn't claim the consultant should decide the founder's obligations for them.

My first response was that I'd want my best people to move above the menial work and spend more time on higher-level work. I'd be more willing to let go of people I didn't think should make that move.

Chris had a better way of approaching the first part.

Suppose AI can remove ten hours of repetitive work from someone's week. Instead of beginning with what you can take away from that person, ask them what they could do with the time.

What are the valuable things you don't get to because you're so busy? If we gave you five or ten hours back, what would you do that would help the company?

The person doing the job may know that answer better than the owner or an outside consultant. They know the calls they aren't making, the follow-up that keeps getting pushed aside, and the problems nobody has time to fix.

Chris described taking those answers back to the owner. Thirty people finding five valuable hours each is 150 hours a week that could go toward something else.

One person might call more clients. Another might follow up with late payers. Somebody might improve how the company screens or hires people. The point was to get the team's knowledge into the decision instead of imagining that all the useful ideas would come out of a closed conference room.

I told him that was better than the answer I had been thinking of.

Because it gave the employees a role in making themselves more valuable. They weren't just waiting outside a room where the owner was privately figuring out whose hours to cut.

Chris wanted the message to be that the company needed their help, that they were going to use the technology, and that their ideas mattered in deciding what happened next.

He wasn't promising that it would be easy or that every business could avoid every difficult decision. People are scared. The work is still developing. But involving them could turn AI from a rumor about who's next into something they could help use to strengthen the company.

That was the problem Ocean Crest AI was helping owners work through. Chris said he kept hearing versions of the same request: Help me. I don't understand this. I don't know what to do.

After all the talk about machines becoming more powerful, we had come back to asking the human being doing the job a better question.

The Space Between the Crest and the Trough

At the end, I asked where people could find him.

Chris pointed to Ocean Crest Ventures and explained the name. He loves the ocean. A wave has a crest at the top and a trough at the bottom, and he likes thinking about the space between them.

What separates being at the top of your game from being at the bottom? In your health, your business, your attitude?

He described his work as helping people understand that space and become more valuable.

It was a pretty good description of the ground we'd covered. CareerTEAM's work with people who couldn't yet picture a different life. The assumption I'd made about my own book. His sweet tooth. The owner who couldn't see a way to use AI without hurting people they cared about.

Different problems, but each one involved examining what was keeping someone where they were and what another possibility might look like.

Then we went back to talking about food.

We Ended Right Back at His Sweet Tooth

I told Chris that, for this phase of my life, intermittent fasting had been useful. After 7 p.m., I'd have decaf coffee, and if I got a craving, I'd drink decaf rather than reopen the food decision.

Chris described wanting something sweet after dinner. Going out to eat, he was ready to skip ahead to the dessert menu.

I asked when he'd last fasted. He could remember doing it when a medical procedure required him not to eat after a certain time, but it wasn't a habit for him.

He mentioned football player Derrick Henry's eating schedule as an example of something he couldn't imagine himself doing. He thought he'd be hangry.

“Sounds like a limiting belief to me, Chris.”

He agreed.

He also mentioned his son CJ, who had become vegan and ate later in the day, as another person whose habits made him think about what people could get used to.

I encouraged him to try fasting and brought the conversation back to our shared faith. Jesus says “when you fast,” I pointed out, rather than treating it as something a Christian would never do.

Those were our own habits and a religious conversation, not a reason to treat a football player's schedule or mine as the right plan for somebody else's health.

But it did make for a fitting final exchange. Chris had challenged the ceiling I'd put over my own work. I had challenged the certainty he'd attached to his dessert habit.

It turns out you can help a lot of people examine their beliefs and still have one hiding next to the strawberry shortcake.

Questions to Take Back to Your Own Life and Business

What have you started treating as your ceiling? I had a successful book and an unexamined assumption that a much bigger result was far beyond me. Naming that assumption gave Chris something specific to challenge.
What future do you want that your current behavior isn't helping create? Chris's example with parents and their children made that mismatch visible without starting with an abstract lecture.
Which decisions should you make before you get tired? My food rules were an attempt to stop giving an exhausted version of me the deciding vote every evening.
What is the technology replacing? Chris and I could see its benefits while still asking about the effects on judgment, faith, relationships, and work.
What could your employees do with five hours back? Before assuming that time saved is just payroll to cut, ask the person doing the work what valuable thing they could finally get to.

Chris's answer about the employees stayed very close to the way he'd started the conversation about workforce development. If you want to help somebody become more valuable, you need to know what they see as possible for themselves.

Ask them. Then make enough room to hear the answer.

Watch the Interview and Connect With Chris

Watch the full conversation with Chris Kuselias on YouTube. The business website he shared is Ocean Crest Ventures.

Interview recorded September 23, 2026. Business counts, program outcomes, personal experiences, AI forecasts, and plans are presented in the context of that conversation. The article preserves areas where we disagreed and distinguishes recalled examples from independently verified events.

Read the complete episode transcript59-minute timestamped transcript

Computer-generated transcript supplied with the interview. Line wrapping has been cleaned up; wording may contain transcription errors. The recording ends at 00:59:26.

00:00:02

Timmy Bauer: Chris Kuseliasis the founder of Ocean Crest Ventures, a private equity and venture firm that has funded and advised companies across AI, real estate, entertainment, senior care, healthcare, and fitness and collectively generated over 500 million in combined revenue. Probably the first guest that I've talked to that has collected a combined half a billion in revenue. He previously founded Career Team and Inc. 500 workforce development company and has been invited to the White House to advise on workforce reform alongside the president, vice president, and senior Fortune 500 executives and has consulted with governors, US senators, and cabinet level officials, including the US Attorney General and Secretary of Labor. Chris, thank you so much for being a guest on my show.

Chris Kuselias: Happy to be here, Timmy. I like your books behind you.

Timmy Bauer: Thank you.

Chris Kuselias: Educating the nation's youth, getting people to think,

Timmy Bauer: Yeah.

Chris Kuselias: the kids to get going, getting away from those cell phones and everything else. So, uh, I'm really happy to be here.

Timmy Bauer: Awesome.

Chris Kuselias: Thanks for having me.

00:01:05

Timmy Bauer: Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, that's my thing. I am big on teaching kids to think the way that entrepreneurs think. So, I've got a I've got a program called Dinopreneurs. And um it is it is especially for homeschoolers and homeschool co-ops right now. My plan is to grow it to be adopted by more than just the homeschool crowd and the co-op crowd. Um, but yeah, it it's it's specific. It's like I've basically packaged a bunch of different best-selling children's books on business that we've made into a curriculum for the year. And it's all designed to get kids to think the way that entrepreneurs think.

Chris Kuselias: share your brain. My family was really big on education. I sit as trustee member for called Meeks Minds a nonprofit in Connecticut where it was founded but now it's in multiple states. We have about a third of the state, 11,000 kids. And we built into the curriculum for K through 12 motivation, empowerment, and then we have contests where we have they invent things and they choose a problem they care about.

00:02:05

Chris Kuselias: And we kind of have like a minnow tank, not a shark tank, but a minnow tank. And then the winners go on. One was on Jimmy Fallon, one was actually on Shark Tank. And my son works for a company called Seven Mindsets, which has about five million K through2 kids. and they do like motivation, cognitive behavior, they do empowerment, they do um just kind of like avoiding limiting beliefs and blockages. So, if that's what you're doing, you and I are sharing a brain because these kids today need so much. There's a lot of technology. The co I think did a number on a lot of them. So, keep up the good work, my friend. Uh we are uh soulmates.

Timmy Bauer: That's awesome. How long have you been um doing um education work for kids or with kids or in partnership with people doing education work with kids?

Chris Kuselias: Well, let's see. 30 years ago, my wife and I started a company called Career Team. And while it served primarily adults through state and federal grants, we also work with adjudicated youth.