EP045 - Building authentic connections online with Dave Cairns and Chris Moeller at Inspired People Inspired Places
About the episode
This episode focuses on authenticity and how to build authentic connections online. Dave and Chris are building great events in the metaverse where honest and engaging conversations happen within their community. They share their insights on the why and the how in the episode.
About the guests
Dave Cairns is an independent-minded person who started his career out of university as a professional poker player, where he was ranked as one of the world's top 100 online tournament players for a time. In 2012, he transitioned from poker to commercial real estate, becoming an office leasing broker in downtown Toronto, Canada. Since then, he had the good fortune of being surrounded by GREAT people and working for a GREAT company in CBRE.
He is a future work/living content creator, metaverse explorer, remote worker, and commercial real estate agent “by candlelight.”
Connect with Dave on LinkedIn.
Chris Moeller is the founder / CEO of Orion Growth - a modern workplace consultancy. Chris has 23 years of entrepreneurship - heavily invested in ensuring the success of others.
His current projects:
Brilliant Partners - Seed / Startup Consortium VC of, by, and for the commercial interiors industry.
Responsible Adaptive Reuse Development - Taking old buildings and giving them purpose.
Trustee Octant DAO - Non-hierarchical membership group focused on value and benefit over profit.
Co-host - Inspired People, Inspired Places. A metaverse show exploring the future of work, the future of education, psychological safety, health, and wellness.
Connect with Chris on LinkedIn.
About the host
My name is Peter Benei, founder of Anywhere Consulting. My mission is to help and inspire a community of remote leaders who can bring more autonomy, transparency, and leverage to their businesses, ultimately empowering their colleagues to be happier, more independent, and more self-conscious.
Connect with me on LinkedIn.
Want to become a guest on the show? Contact me here.
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Welcome everyone. Welcome in the leadership anywhere podcast. Today we will discuss a kind of like broad but very important topic. We will discuss what the future of workplace should look like in terms of operations in terms of processes, in terms of URL and IRL teams, and in terms of the actual office as a structure, as a building, as an organization. To discuss, I have two people from Orion Growth, Dave Kearns and Chris Moeller, welcome on the show.
Thanks. Great to speak. Great to be here. Yeah, thanks for having me and it's funny that you said two from orion growth because maybe that'll lead into my Identity crisis because I work for orion growth, I guess but really I work for cbre.
Then let's start, by introducing How did you end up working remotely and how did you end up working together? If that's a together is a together.
Dave, tell your story. I'll fill in the blanks.
Yeah. How do you, so you asked a specific question. How did I end up working remotely? Which is a really good place to start because I'm an office leasing agent by trade. I guess I'll try to surmise it quickly. Out of university, I became a professional online poker player. I was actually semi pro in university. Oh, nice. And back then I had no definition of work at all. I didn't know there was such a thing as remote work or in office based work. It was just like I played poker. I did it mostly online. I also played live in person, but that was less common because it just Didn't really make economic sense to go commute to a casino to sit at one table when I could play with ease from my home and at a lower buy in threshold at a higher volume threshold and play with people from around the world. So there was the, and it's so funny how relevant actually that, that description is that I just gave to the inflection point that we're experiencing with the future of work.
Wait. I don't want to go into the poker details, but could you make money on it, by the way?
Yes, I did. And that is a very common question. Fair question.
Can you make money? Can you make money as an office leasing broker?
Not very easily right now. But anyway guess that's where actually I, I had a foundation for remote work that I just didn't know I had. And then in 2011, the department of justice in the United States, God bless America indicted the two largest online poker websites, tax evasion, money laundering, wire fraud, all this stuff made it illegal to play online poker in the U S. Which changed the games fundamentally. It made the games harder to beat because there was less and more talented players from the rest of the world. The U. S. is where they, we had the biggest player pools and the most amateur players. And so yeah, the buy in or the intensity of the competition was higher and the amount of money was lower. So I decided to get out, got into commercial real estate. Became a broker had friends and family in the industry and they just encouraged me to go into it. And I took a leap of faith on that. I was used to not making a salary. I had good analytical skills, people skills, whatever. I went into that direction. And I've been an office leasing agent for almost 11 years. And then when the pandemic happened, everybody went remote.
And you went back and you went back to poker.
No no, definitely not. But my mindset went back to poker. My mindset went back and I realized, Oh my God, I've been here before. I've been in this virtual world before. I know how to build relationships online. I know how to collaborate online. Yada. And I started leaning more into content and that's how Chris and I met we both are rebellious commercial real estate people. And I think I should turn it over to Chris now. Maybe you can just share a little bit more about what's happened since then.
You know what's on my mind? Was that a return to casino? Like when that mandate happened and like remote poker went bust and all the chips were in, was that an RTC call?
That's interesting. Yeah, I wonder if more people started playing live, certainly in the U S they did. Yes.
And how much money do we have invested in Vegas and in Atlantic city and all the office buildings of casinos. So interesting. I never hadn't gone there with it, but that was fun.
Yeah. Tell it, Chris, like from there where did it go from there?
So Dave and I met online because you can actually have meaningful relationships through connections online. And Dave was just posting authentically about what he was seeing in the moment in the industry. And as Dave, as an office leasing broker and Orion growth sort of being a PMO and having be having the responsibility of project delivery. We were seeing similar things, but we were also noticing that people weren't really talking about it. I engaged with Dave through his content because of his authenticity. And we became fast friends from there, and that was in 20, really, months into the pandemic. Maybe it was very early 2020, maybe April? May? And have remained engaged, become fast friends since.
And what are you guys doing right now, together?
Inspired People, Inspired Places is the first thing that we're doing, which is a cool conversational metaverse discussion. Dave, why don't you why don't you tell Peter what that's about?
Yeah, and Chris came to me in February of 2023, and he said, hey, I've got this idea. I want to create a roundtable discussion series inside of a virtual world. And he had the hypothesis that maybe we'd be able to earn people's attention better. By the friction actually that existed to get inside of a virtual world like you have to have security clearance from your employer if you're using your work laptop, which, as it turns out, most people in this day and age only have a work laptop, right? So that's a point of friction. You have to make an avatar and then you have to virtually commute into a space and you have to like you it's a desktop just to be clear because some people when they think metaverse they think virtual reality with VR goggles. That is not that's not the method that we're using. We're using a desktop client so it's more actually like the way it's more accessible for everyone. Yeah, it's more accessible. And I think that word's very poignant because people video people game, people play video games. And so that's in essence at a base level, the way that we're interfacing with this technology. But you have to do those things to get in. There's those points of friction and for the audience that's actually coming into our conversations, they, aren't necessarily gamers. They're not comfortable always with navigating inside of a game. And so that's another point of friction that might actually force people to pay more attention versus like when you're on a webinar or something like that, and you might be surfing the internet, responding to emails, whatever, even an in person format where you might be on your phone while the speaker is speaking, et cetera, right? So these are the theories that Chris had. And he came and said to me would you like to take a shot at this with me? And I think that going back to my poker background, that was really what made me able to wrap my head around it a little bit more and Chris, when I'm done I'd love for you to explain how you got to the point of being so comfortable with these kinds of things as well. Cause you have your own version of that story. But for me, like being an online poker player. I didn't come into that with any form of bias, right? Like I didn't think it was either really great or really stupid. Like some people thought I was actually neutral to it. And when I first came in I'll be honest. Like what I thought is I want to learn how to be a better moderator. I want to learn how to. Kick off cool conversations. That was my role that Chris wanted me to play. And that worked well for me. And then the other thing I thought is you know what, this might be a really cool way to get really high profile speakers because of, let's just say the novelty of entering a virtual world to have a conversation. I thought maybe that's something too, that might give us a competitive advantage over a traditional podcast or webinar format. So these were the main, the first things that I thought were compelling about it. But since we've been doing it, there have been some extremely interesting insights into the future of work that are going to, we think, are going to be highly transformative for medium and large scale organizations. So what we really are calling ourselves, with Inspire People, Inspire Places, is we feel that we're an events business. We're a lot like a convene, which is a corporate event and meeting business based out of New York City. That provides a high value technologically oriented events and meetings in person that create the possibility also for a great hybrid event. We think we're doing that inside of a virtual world, but we're even taking it a step further because. We are also sourcing speakers and we are facilitating the events ourselves. So where convene is providing the space, the technology, and the hospitality, we're providing the space, the technology, the hospitality, and the facilitation. And it's been an incredible ride so far. I think I'll stop now and let Chris tell his story of why he was attracted to that, because I think later we can go into some of the benefits to corporations. So I'll turn it to Chris now.
Sure. And we should address by the way, why people are so afraid and so biased on using different tools when they work because that's also an important insight that you might actually made, but sorry.
No, that, no, we there's so many barriers to entry, right? So I was introduced to it through gaming. My son's 16, my daughter's 14. My son was a huge Minecraft builder. And in the creative world of Minecraft I did a lot of that with him is virtual Legos, digital Legos, really loved the programming capacity to that, but it didn't really have avatar to avatar first person perspective. The interactions weren't quite there. Then, of course, he grew up a little bit. And wanted to do first person shooter stuff. So he got into Fortnite. And that's when I realized the econometrics behind the game. The whole skins, V Bucks dollar conversion. The economics.
The whole marketplace behind it.
Yeah, the whole economics behind it really floored me because he's taking grandparent gift money and turning it into Sony gift card money and turning the Sony gift card money into V bucks and then buying skins. And honestly, I thought it was trivial. And I just didn't understand the value behind why you would want skin. Then I realized there was scarcity and that they limited skins. And I, my, where he proved me wrong completely and what completely opened my eyes to the econometrics behind the metaverse and gaming was he sold a skin to someone else. I told him that there was no mountain. So I didn't see a marketplace. He proved me wrong. And that was through the form of selling a user ID and password. And then therefore that person took over that sort of profile, which changed hands and he did that with Venmo. So anyway that couple, and you just realized, oops, there is money here. There is money there. Yeah, of course. And look, I'm an entrepreneur of 23 years. We have to pay bills, right? I'm not a capitalist. I like to, I like nice things here and there, but I don't have a boat and yacht. I don't have a plane. It's, that's not my, that's not my style. But I, you have to make money at business. And all of a sudden I realized. That there was an opportunity there because the econometrics were built into gaming. And we have to make money at work. And the way that we're, the way that we're meeting is falling short. This is a people problem, not a place problem. So why not explore a different modality? And why not look at what worlds are out there? And what use cases there can be for businesses to start exploring this? And that's when Dave and I got started.
It's interesting that you started using, or got your eyes open, actually, or started using examples and workflows and and the way people interacted from gaming platforms, either poker or online gaming. And there's a saying, if something is done by the done on the internet, it's either. First done by porn or the gaming industry these two and then everything else can come later on Yeah, and now that you are running this inspired places. So what is the backstory behind that? So Of course, people can meet in a virtual environment. You can actually help them to undo their biases barrier of entry. But what happens when they meet? So is there any networking opportunity there? These two businesses or something.
I'm ready to go on this one. I think that just, I want to reframe for a second. I think it's so critical for anybody listening to understand that Chris and I's backgrounds being so different, right? Like him learning from his son and unlearning all this shit that he thought was right and turned out to be wrong is so relevant to how he got there. And there's a level of humility there that is so important that Chris has. It's okay, my son proved me wrong. Unlike the return to office people who are just like bearing their heads in the sand, being so egotistical about all of this, unwilling to see it a different way. Then you've got myself who has come from this world already, just from a different background, like playing online poker is gaming, right? You're gaming. And it's evolved even further. Once I left the game, Twitch became a thing and talk about like monetizing like these guys were making huge money. Some of them playing poker on Twitch, just live streaming. And I used to catch all the, like when I when it was 2016, 2017, and I was working in an office. I'd literally be watching YouTube highlight reels of Twitch poker streamers at night, like wishing I was back there, like playing that bad shit.
That so that's part of it. I would my son would get caught watching YouTube at after bedtime watching Twitch if people building spaces in rope, in Minecraft or watching people figure out new tactics in Fortnite. So yeah, watching Twitch of people playing games. Yeah.
And so why that's so important is I've not come into this world with any bias and Chris Unlearned is bias, right? And we've, I've literally had people I know in my life that are close to me tell me that they think the metaverse is grotesque. That they think it is a black stain on humanity. These people have never entered a virtual world in their entire lives. And if they did... They would go in with all that negativity, and they would miss the fucking mark. Hardcore. 100%. So I just wanted to frame what we're about to say. What is Inspired People, Inspired Places? First, it's a fucking mindset, right? That's what it is. So Chris came to me and he said, Look. Why don't we have really important conversations around the future of education, the future of work, the future of our well being, the future of community and regenerative technology, the kind of stuff that gives us our time back, either to be more productive or to do something else with our lives, right? And I really got to give Chris so much credit because I did not come up with any of that. He came up with all of that. And I just said, wow that makes sense. And for me, I really needed that actually at that moment that he brought it to me because I was so sick of just talking about the office all the time. It was just literally like sucking me dry. And so I said, let's go, let's do this. And So really what it is it's an opt in completely inclusive conversation series that we run every two weeks at the exact same time, 12 30 p. m. Eastern Standard Time so that people can become adept to knowing that it's going to happen at a consistent time frame, and we try to do that to grow our audience and we bring in speakers that cover topics on all of these areas. Last week or I think it was last week, we kicked off this first episode of our second season with a topic around how Web3 and the Metaverse are going to impact the future of work. And we encouraged all these Web3 and Metaverse experts to get beyond the Bitcoin side of things, to get beyond the retail use cases for the Metaverse, and really focus their attention on how we could apply that thinking to the future of work. So that's an example of a topic.
So picking these topics and I understand the facilitated environment and why it's so important. But also picking the topics is also important. Do you think that this combination of the two? Can, and if yes, how can help moving the needle forward in terms of the future?
A thousand percent, I think it's super important that we be intentional about that. Authenticity is the theme of season two. Because presenting your authentic self. In whatever relationship you have, whether it's metaphysical, face to face, IRL, URL, whatever you want to call it authenticity is super important. And Peter, the technology side of authentication proving who you are, two party authorization or authentication, the world is going to spin up into authenticators and validators. There's so many bots now that there's AI. How do you present authentically? And so that was our theme for season two, which was, which we got to very quickly because there's something that resonated with Dave and I about authenticity and being comfortable in our own skin. And we put together 10 episodes pretty quickly. And this season we've got it. We're almost done. I'm looking at it right now. We just started last week. It'll take us through January 23rd. And we'll have that whole thing posted on the group page and inspire people, inspire places. On LinkedIn.
We are trying to talk about the real issues, and we're trying to do it in a place. That we can ensure that anybody who comes is we're literally hilariously these employers should just take a page out of our book and I don't say that egotistically, but this is an opt in community we're not telling anybody to come. We're organically trying to grow a reason for people to show up right. And we've had on average, our sessions get somewhere between 30 to 40 participants, which we think is pretty crazy having only done this now 11 times. And if you go and look at a LinkedIn live, you'll see a similar number of people tuning into a LinkedIn live from somebody that's got like 70, 000 followers. And we're getting 30 to 40 people to show up with all that friction, a lot of friction.
And we know what they say. And we call it Peter, we call it earning the commute. So that's the fun thing is like in real life, IRL earning the commute is getting up, thinking about what you're going to wear, brushing your teeth, putting shoes on, getting out the door, like all the things sitting in traffic, spending 8, 000 a year in fuel parking earning the commute, right? 12 salads. 15 salads. We're earning the commute in a different way. We're asking you to download. We're asking you to spend time. We're asking you to be committed. We're asking you to create an avatar and create a look and then participate. And we're somehow getting enough feedback positive feedback that we're earning the commute.
Do you, so obviously these conversations are actually, it's like sacred in terms of the happening only within that space and it's inclusive. And what I mean by that, what I'm trying to get is to it's not public. So people, that's why people within that small community can say whatever they want. They feel safe there. So it's hard to actually do a report or takeaways or learnings or whatever it is from those conversations. But. If you do, or if you would do what would they be? Yeah. What would they be?
We should say, I'll rip them but we do record this, we, and we get people's permission to record it. We do release the content on YouTube and we're going to be doing more to create like little sound bites and stuff that we're going to be sharing on LinkedIn. But here is what we've found so far. We have found that people's attention is getting earned. They are, the ones that are showing up are the ones that are very curious. They are very open minded. They want to try new things. And they we've ticked that box. Earning people's attention has worked. We have also found that we are really facilitating psychological safety. So what we're finding is that some people don't even feel comfortable with what we're doing right now. They don't feel comfortable to have their face on a screen, right? But more importantly than that, the cultural fabric of having that call, let's just say it's an internal call within an organization, is often not psychologically safe in and of itself. That people just don't feel safe to share how they feel. Because we have built this organically from zero, and the culture is not, it's open. It's for anybody to come to, right? It's not a company that has created this for themselves. It's us that's created it for anybody that wants to participate. That has created these situations where we had an episode on women's future of work, the future of work for women. And we had a woman that was crying in the Q& A, talking about a circumstance in which they were mansplained to, but not in the kind that we might not in a surface level joking kind of way in a truly, really toxic way. And that's not a dialogue that's very comfortable to have anywhere. Especially inside of a company office or something like that in person, you're not likely to get that woman to share how she feels, right? In another case, I'm going to shout out Rowena Hennigan, who was one of our speakers. And there's a fun I know her. Oh, you know her? Okay. Yeah, she's great. So there's a functionality within the software that you can actually climb up. And she climbed up onto the boardroom table and was giving an F you to the patriarchy, right? How cool is that? Like how cool is that, right? Yes. So we've created this psychological safety. And then another one that I, Chris, I just love for you to take this one over and talk about closing the doors because that's just been so profound closing the doors.
Yeah. So it's funny, right? We always talk about the doors open, right? My door is always open. My door is always open. What We have a little gathering space and you'll have to come join us next week, but we have a little gathering space outside of our meeting room in OpenCampus, which to Dave's point about it being open, our partner is OpenCampus, which is built on the Verbella platform. We can close the doors to prevent people from coming in, or we can close the doors and flip the script to create a better conversation. And what happened was we were allowing people just the free flow in and quote unquote sit down at the tables and people were doing that. But when we closed the doors, we forced a conversation to happen. So serendipity, right? People all of a sudden started talking. We had we were building trust. A lot of people were new to their avatar. They're walking into walls. They don't know how to sit there. Mike doesn't work. They hit emotes that they don't mean to. They dance in funny ways. And all of that just gives them a moment, gives us a moment to explain to them that's just skeuomorphism. It doesn't matter. Avatar to avatar connections. If you stay, it's very funny, Dave. One time with Tracy Hawkins, I think it was our first show. We were doing a picture at the end of the show and we were all trying to move our avatars in front of the images of our speakers. It was a shed and Tracy Hawkins and Dave very inappropriately with his avatar. Had his hand in a, in an inappropriate place and Tracy, but yet they were 2, 500 miles away, right? Just meeting avatar to avatar in the screen and our skeuomorphism what happens psychologically is we become part of that avatar, right? So we have all of those traditional human boundaries that don't really exist that we have to get over. So it's an amazing psychology behind it. When they have social anxiety to the point where when meeting in real life, they have a very bad stutter to the point where it's debilitating and it's prevented him. He's a programmer very smart guy. It's prevented him from a ton of opportunities in his career. I can imagine. And all of a sudden, he made an avatar, and now he meets almost exclusively in metaverse communities, and his psychological safety, because he's not in real life, he doesn't have any of that anxiety, his stutter goes away.
Wow.
And it's fascinating the things that can happen if we provide people with a platform and explore and stay curious. That's a completely unintended consequence, but think about the opportunities that he has now as a result of not having to feel social anxiety because of in real life meetings or mandates. Fascinating to me, so I just wanted to share that.
Sure. And it's a really inspiring story, and I had a one of the previous guests of the show Chris Kalaboukis is from Think Future, and he also does some facilitating meetings for companies, of course, like ideation. It's more structured in a way that it should have some sort of like a business end or business result or business case at the end. Helping companies to actually ideate new ideas. And he said that remote work is the great equalizer. So whether you are introvert or extrovert and in a traditional office scenario in a meeting room, usually extroverts overrun the table and introverts just step back and just listen and do not provide any kind of input to the conversation. But during remote in a scenario like we have right now people do equal up to each other. To me, the biggest learning based on everything that you just said so far is that when you have a group of people with like minded interest, and like a shared state of mindset. So everyone is, as you said, David everyone is like open minded. Everyone is like flexible thinking and so on and have something to share. And if you collect these people in a shared virtual space without any agenda or like just a bear we will discuss this topic, but how we will discuss it, it's up to you. We don't care. We just facilitate the the flow. It could lead to magical moments because you don't need to figure out everything from talking points and everything like that. It's a free flowing gamified experience for them.
Yeah, you're dead right. And I want to add one more thing to this introvert extrovert thing because it actually showed up on our last session. So one individual actually she's part of our team. Her name is Sarah Seagrest. She is an introverted person and she's the kind of person who often might feel not comfortable in some of these highly extroverted scenarios, which favor office or in person stuff really does favor those individuals. We can obviously learn playing field in real life too, but let's not, let's just call a spade. It is going to advantage those that are extroverted. And so for her, she highlights that when she's not only virtual, but inside of a virtual world, all of a sudden she becomes an extrovert. She's the kind of person who is ready to speak right up real fast. No, no hesitation. But conversely, we have another guest that's joined us. His name is Earl Hoag. Great guy from actually Atlanta, Canada. I just recently met him in person after building a relationship with him online first. He's a highly extroverted individual, someone who is recently retired from a government job, but is also trying to now get into consulting. So he's not officially retired, but he's older. And he highlighted actually that being inside of a virtual world has been the opposite for him. He's gone from feeling extroverted to introverted because he doesn't feel comfortable with it. But he's, as you said, he's flexible. He's open minded. He's trying to figure it out, right? And so that's something that I think is just so fascinating about what we're doing by building it grassroots and not having any mandate to come, is that we're getting these people with completely different personas talking to each other about these really important issues. So I just wanted to say that.
Yeah, and they're sharing that openly, Peter, they're sharing how they feel. And we've had we've had potential guests come in that have felt so uncomfortable in their avatar skin that they didn't feel like they could host. Or they didn't feel like they could be a part of it. And that's okay too. It's not for everyone. It's a new modality. It's a new place to explore. Duncan Wardell says this best we quit being creative and innovative in about third grade because it's taught out of us to color inside the lines instead of coloring outside of the line. So if our curiosity is starting to conform in fourth grade, then is it really a question of how we get to where we are this many years later, where we have to feel like we need to be in a corner office and to validate our success, we have to go to university, we have to meet in a certain way, we have to dress a certain way, we have to act a certain way, we have to kiss certain asses, right? All of that is, is IRL, but in URL, would you skew a morph that would you rebuild that if you had to, or would you try to build something more uniform, more horizontal, more co contribution based, non hierarchical, open concept, open plan, open source. And I think that's what we're starting to feel is that the next generation, the future of work is not asking for it. They're demanding it. And that's what Dave and I are trying to explore is if we were to rebuild the office of tomorrow and the future of workplace of tomorrow, would we skew a more of what we have and put it in an ivory tower with hierarchy or would we allow people to show up with their authentic selves and encourage innovation and encourage creativity? And I think that's pretty clear what, which side of the coin we're on.
Sure. Provocative question. Sorry about that in advance. Let's say you are you're an enterprise with multiple silos. Everyone is in doing their own shit, own work minding their own table. Everything is hierarchical and everything is process driven, so not really much room for open minded creativity, unless it's part of your job again in most of the cases it's done. Let's say the company hosts a session like. You just described by inspire people. Do you think that we all know that it would be beneficial to do, but do you think that those people who are working at that place, which is very rigid and structured, do you think they can adjust to Immediately open situation like a session like this. The reason why I asked this because I've worked with a lot of companies who are working remote first and of course they are obviously a little bit more open than those rigid structures that I just explained now. But still they do team building activities where they have like a meeting and they collect all the people together and yada. Yeah, and they do cooking shows and recipes and shit like that, which is yeah, that's fun I get it still cool. Why not talking to about talking about meaningful shit? Yeah. Openly. And I'm sure that if, let's say you are in a B2B SaaS company it's not the again all proud and celebration to B2B SaaS, but still it's not the most creative industry. Let's say you have those people and suddenly in the evening, Tuesday team building event, you discuss. I don't know, climate change or something like a very open, free flowing topic that is facilitated, of course, by a professional, but still, it's a free flowing, playful thing to do. I'm 100 percent sure, that 100 percent sure, that free flowing and playful conversation will lead to stronger bond between the team members of that company than cooking a pizza together digitally.
Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more on that. We are trying to figure this out and we know we can't figure it out unless we invite that enterprise in. And so while we won't expose all of our secrets or the whole cooking show that we, that Chris and I are trying to make. If we were to go to a large organization what I think is that what might be better than even an individual team trying to build team together might be to actually create it from the vantage point of a cross section of the organization, like cross functional, cross generational, cross socioeconomic background, make it fully open for participation. So only people that are showing up are the ones that want to come into a virtual world and participate. And then the other thing that I think is really critical is that you can't just bring these people into an environment like that cold. having never experienced how to use an avatar before, having never done any of that stuff that feels very foreign to most people. And that's where Chris and I think we have this incredible product. We have a product. The product is we host those conversations about climate change for, and we can do it for an organization. And so our thinking is. Why don't we invite, if we were going to ever move from not, we will never move beyond open conversations, that will always be a part of what we do. But if we were to facilitate something for an organization that they wanted to do privately, we would say those things. We would say it has to be opt in, it has to be cross generational, cross socioeconomic background, cross functional. And that's a prerequisite for us to do this with you.
And one free business idea for you, sorry, but you should start a facilitation way before the meeting starts or the session starts because if they opt in, you probably Will know who those person is who opted in so you probably can guess, you know the things that you just said, background social. Also, by the way, don't forget the look I know it's everyone is american here, but don't forget the location. So that's all that's also a big cultural diversity here. That's one second after you do that, you can actually facilitate the meeting by having a limit of I don't know 50 people I'm not sure what would be the limit, but whatever, and you will, the one who will invite people who can join that's part of the facilitation. That's how you can make it diverse I think.
Yeah I think that there's a, another thing Dave and I, again we we've been doing this now for a year and having conversations weekly intentional sort of one on ones and the broader team group that, that helps us Oktosmos as a partner with onboarding and we've tweaked that a little bit the onboarding experience this year for season two for Our guests is far better than it was season one because we were two guys in the woods rubbing sticks. I think we still are. But the onboarding experience in real life is experiential, like hospitality, right? They need to feel welcome. They need to feel comfortable. They need to feel like all their questions have been answered. So we are focusing heavily on onboarding and the experience that is to facilitate that conversation. Also, this notion of opting in this cross functional experience. Yeah. Cross functional, cross silo, cross team. One of the things that I think is really important that we're exploring a little bit is an agreement, a team agreement where there's an this is an innovation lab and people are going to be intentional about their opt in. So I think the opt in becomes a little bit like a team agreement where, you know, what you're doing what you're getting into, and it's not a terms of service. It's not a privacy issue. It's not anything happy feeling. It's really this is what I'm signing up for. And this I'm committed to this. And by doing that, I think you get the stamp of approval. Where you've got buy in and once you've got willingness, you've got safety, once you've got safety, you've got experience, once you've got experience, you've got hospitality. And if they're comfortable at that point, that's where you're talking about being able to truly point these things back to social and governance and DEI. These are big things that we can start to tackle with larger, broader context DEI and how it does directly point to what the purpose of the company's ESG and DEI models are.
Yes, and don't forget that innovation doesn't happen when you have a bounding context. So the looser the context. Or the wider the context, the more innovation can happen. Let me give you an example. And you're probably aware of this, but for the audience. So when you are doing product innovation, let's say you can just walk to people, to the product managers that, okay, then think about a new idea, how you can improve this product. Usually people will be super busy of their daily work and they know the product really well that they can't really think outside of box, although I hate that term right away, but they can't really think outside the box because they always say, yeah, I have this idea, but that product doesn't let me because this is how we work. But if you grab that person to a facilitated session and rip away all of the product details that they already know and just focus on to a certain type of product that you have some ideas without any boundaries, any limitations, they usually come up with some ideas that can be useful for the product that they actually have. So yeah, no results needed.
No, absolutely. And I think that's part of the idea of the innovation lab is that when people come in, they're going to be encouraged. They're not going to be discouraged. It's not going to be no, because we have shareholders. No, because the team can't do that. No, because we don't have the budget. If they come in and they agree to this, I think what Dave and I are trying to facilitate, Dave, correct me if I'm wrong is the opposite of no, it's yes. It's sure. Let's look at it. We're virtual. We can explore anything. It's in the team agreement that we're, this is an innovation lab. We are trying to figure out things that don't exist. So yes, why would we not encourage yes thinking? And discourage no thinking and start to get the creative juices flowing.
Just the result is that you are there already and that's it. Nothing else matters. One other thing that struck my mind and it's really prevalent from your discussion, from our discussion is that cross functionality and discussing topics without any kind of like boundaries and stuff. So transparency is like a thing that should be done within these sessions. But I, I'm someone who's from the trenches. I know that how leaders react when I tell them that you have to have transparent operations and share everything that you learn with your team. So do you think that can be addressed with a session like this, or how can you combat that in any way to make sure that the transparency levels out, sorry in a cross functional team as well.
I'm not an expert in this area, but I'll tell you what came to my head when you made that statement is how do we treat our children? My wife and I are going through some personal things right now, and we're having to have a lot of candid conversations, and sometimes those conversations are happening around our daughter. And what we've arrived at. Is that as long as we are, like, level headed, respectful to each other, and it's all coming from a healthy place, we see no reason why we would shield our five year old daughter from the conversations that we are having. Now, I say that with some level of nuance. There are clearly some topics that are not meant to be discussed in front of our child. And there may be some topics that are best had between the leadership group and not necessarily the employee population. We have to use our best judgment. But in general, I think it's just a mindset. Do we have mutual respect? For those that are at various sort of levels of a hierarchy, because hierarchy is not necessarily a bad thing, but what is bad is when it is a toxic hierarchy, which in a lot of ways, we would call more of a patriarchy when we look back at human history and identify what is toxic that we've carried with us that has found its way into the workplace, right?
Sure.
There literally even is a male female tension in that regard. There's so many tension points that are to that toxic hierarchy. So I don't think that there's a lot of simplicity to it, really treat it as though you're having an open dialogue around your children. That's my unprofessional opinion on it.
My first experience in Metaverse was for the Economist a Metaverse conference that I was supposed to attend in San Jose, California. I had a Covid scare, so I didn't get on a plane, but I attended virtually. I had no idea what I was doing. I didn't have onboarding help. I came out of the avatar closet, so to speak. And I was female. I had dark Brown skin and I had, I think like purplish red hair, and it was like, I presented to a conference, my name is Chris. I didn't put my last name in, so I presented to a conference as a female African American woman with hair, that was like a totally different color and I didn't even realize that, so this notion of pseudonymy and like how you can present in Transcribed by https: otter. ai a different world. If you have an agreement and you're going to show up, it does create that sort of horizontal organizational structure where it becomes non hierarchical.
I think what you said earlier that creating a culture that says yes a lot and the default yes that's super important because when you. Dave, that you said that what needs to be shared with you within the family circles is the very same thing within the business as well. And if you default to yes default to transparency, I think that's a good point to start from. And if you're already defaulting to transparency, later on, you can obviously exaggerate and explain why you are saying no to certain things. But the mindset is a yes. Mindset is, yes, we are sharing this. We are sharing by default because that's what we do. But yeah, maybe not sharing the, I don't know, the exact details of the fundraising deal or whatever. But in general, we are defaulting to everything here. So you don't need to you don't need to justify why you are not sharing something because the default is actually buying.
Can I also add one more thought to that too? It's our networks are neural now. If you follow Moore's Law with technology and you go from central processing to graphical processing and graphical processing to neural processing that's happening in technology, which is leading to things like neural nets, which allows NVIDIA chips to do AI, right? Which brings us to GPT and LLM models. That's just an advancement of technology that matches the human brain. Our networks are neural now. How we're all connected is neural. And it's really not hierarchical. So even just looking at LinkedIn, we're all connected. There's almost a big equalizer, even with LinkedIn now, whereas it used to be, eh, I'll look at your profile. Eh, maybe I'll accept, maybe I won't. The follow button has changed all that and connections are connections and following is following because you find content interesting. So I think it's interesting to think of the organizational structure of the future of work. And how the organizational structure might be different, maybe less hierarchical, more neural. And when you think about how important it is to view your network as a neural network rather than a hierarchical network, because you're climbing a ladder, because that director is connected to that junior executive is connected to that executive. Instead of thinking that way, thinking, thinking of it more horizontally. As a neural network and how we're all technically connected and how we might even be able to skip four or five steps by getting straight to Peter or straight to Dave through a single connection. I think that's a really important concept that is being figured out by a lot of remote companies because they're not having to follow the traditional steps of hierarchy.
Sure. And I do understand that. Now we know each other from LinkedIn, never met, by the way. But we already have some sort of like a chemical connection, shall I say? I don't know, something like that. So I know, I can guess what you will say next because we already know each other a little bit more than others. And I think one of the great examples for remote work, and this is not just my example, I saw it others using it to create like a personal manual. How you are preferring communicating with each other how you as a leader prefer to lead others, what are your preferences in certain topics of whatever and that can help understanding each other a little bit faster and even without meeting each other.
So Peter, I don't know, are you connected with Darren Murph? Darren has this concept. I was in San Francisco with him two weeks ago. He has this concept called a new job option, new job opportunity, or a new position in a company, the chief documentarian. And to your point an about me, a read me my style knowing your leadership style. I've right here next to me, Rex Miller has genius spark. I'm a servant leader. I have a genius paragraph and I have a kryptonite paragraph. I read that every morning, knowing who you are and how you lead and conveying that to the rest of your team. Having your personality type, your leadership style, and your ability to recognize change and resilience is super important to any team.
Sure.
And I think that's where Dave and I are really, ultimately, I think, when we get to the bottom of this and we tie it back to ESG, the social governance piece, and the inclusion piece, understanding the elemental makeup of the team, and all of our nuances, our abilities, our fears. All of our things emotionally and IQ EQ and being able to visualize that's where you start to see success. That's where you say, Peter is the person for this job because look at Peter's profile. Why would we give Dave that job if Peter is better, if Peter is going to gain from it, Dave's going to hate it. So I think that's where it's going. So I appreciate you bringing that up. And I think that necessity is the mother of invention. That's where we are. We're finding ourselves with teams that are potentially not best suited or don't have agreements for outcomes, don't understand what they're trying to do and with those two things, I think, through our innovation lab, that's two of the things without spilling all the recipe that Dave and I are trying to get to the bottom of.
And how do you see the incoming short term future for the workplace? let me rephrase the question if we look into the future of 2025, how should or would the workplace look like according to your views?
Did I go first? Overall, I'm optimistic about the future, but I'm not very optimistic that a lot will have like meaningfully changed at a larger scale by 2025. I think that large organizations are these cruise ships that are very difficult to turn.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, the silos are really hard to break down. And so I really think that the change is it's very much bottom up from, it's going to be from companies that were either formed just before the pandemic or in the pandemic, they're going to be the ones that are doing things very differently. And let's just pretend that Chris and I have a money making enterprise here with Inspire People, Inspire Places, which we don't have a money making enterprise at this point, but for all intents and purposes, we are a startup company. And this is something that formed because of all of the inflection point thought processes that have gone through our heads since this pandemic has changed everything for everyone, right? And so if I use that as a reference point, I think that we will have a lot more to speak about around the edges, than we do here in 2023, because where will we, by example, be in 2025? We'll be somewhere new and better. Than where we are today. With what we're doing, Chris and I. And so that's where my optimism lies. But I still feel like it'll be like that iceberg thing, right? Where you'll look at the iceberg and on the surface of it, it doesn't look very big, but on the bottom, it's fucking huge. And that's how I see where we will be in 2025. We'll be a little bit closer to realizing that the iceberg is larger below the surface than we realize it is actually.
Yeah, I think you're 100 percent right, Dave. And I think that the way that we're approaching this I'm an entrepreneur of 23 years. It used to be that you wrote your business plan with your financial model first, how are you going to make money? And that's how you secured your funding. 23 years of entrepreneurship, 11 businesses later, I'm still bootstrapped and have been from the beginning because when as soon as I was beholden to investor capital, I had shareholders. As soon as I had shareholders, I gave up control. And control is your ability to pivot. In times of need, no, never before have I had to pivot so hard like we did in 2019 2020 as a company. So what Dave and I are doing here is we're actually flipping that script and I think it's an important note to make that we have the business model is outside of the financial model. Currently, we're trying to solve problems first. And then figure out where the money comes in. And I think that we're extremely transparent by default in that category in that we know and recognize that we can solve problems and that we will have solutions for problems. We just don't have a financial model for how to monetize that yet.
If you finish with that thought Yeah, I totally understand. And I actually build my own services and business around that. I assume, and by the way, we will have guest on this show. I think next week I will have a call with him who will discuss more about community building and why the next type of businesses are, and should know how to build a community around a problem. Because I think once you have the, I wouldn't say that once you have the audience, but like the people around you, that you're solving the problems too you will figure out how to actually the money will follow.
You and I met after a conversation about DAOs and I and I think honestly we are probably a DAO in the making. And to be determined we have some theories to write out. We have some problems to solve theoretically on paper. We will be actively looking for sponsors to try to tie back some of these theories to their DEI and ESG objectives. In the very near term. We're already working through what that format looks like. And I think once we get past that point I don't think, I think the the econometrics of the business will start to fall into place.
I'm laughing because Peter, you didn't really know a lot about what it is that Chris and I are doing. And we've illuminated that through this whole conversation, but at no point have we talked about the fucking office market or like how a floor plan should be redesigned for more collisions and shit like that. This is that is something that needs to get solved, but that's a downstream sort of, I don't want to call it a symptom, but it's something that changes as a result of the change in the way that we interface with one another and the way that we build different cultures, right?
Like you are a hundred percent right.
Yeah. And you're talking to two guys, like I currently, and I'm a commercial real estate broker in identity crisis mode right now, but I make my money from like square feet and rent right now. That won't be my future. That won't be my future, right? Like at some point it won't be my future. But I think that what's so awesome and we need to create more community within the future of workspace across all aspects of it because there are all these rebels out there that make money from some avenue that's part of the present. But their brain is in the future, right? And that's where we are. And that's where we're trying to go. And it has nothing to do with space and rent and chairs and shit like that.
If someone wants to opt in as you said to one of these conversations, where can people do that?
Yeah we have a LinkedIn group. And as we formalize our sort of business as it becomes more of a business than just rubbing sticks together in the woods, we're gonna make all of that a little bit more professional, let's say. But we do have a LinkedIn group. We also have a communications form. That's probably the most important way to get in touch, actually, is to fill out that communications form, because it allows us to get in contact with you on an opt in basis in your email inbox about next sessions and things that we're doing. So those are probably the best ways. And then the other is to ensure that we eliminate some of the obvious friction, which is knowing actually how to download the Open Campus for Bell client. And navigate that. And we have some incredible community partners that would be willing to literally take time out of their day to meet up with anyone and everyone that wanted to participate. They would email back and forth to help understand how to build the avatar. They would meet you inside the world and talk you through everything, all free of charge. Those are the way, the best ways to being involved in what we're doing, unless I missed something, Chris.
No, I think that's right. You know again. I think it's important Peter for us to like not you know We're trying to we're trying to break the mold right so how do we communicate with people we'd like to communicate with them differently so It will evolve, but that's definitely if you could add those links We'll add those links maybe to the podcast when we see them in there so that People can get involved and we certainly would love to have you next Tuesday. We've got two Very cool women that are going to join and really talk about, are we really happy? Where are we as people right now? So I think it'll be an engaging conversation. I'm certain that Dave is going to drop some bombs on that one. It's going to be fun.
Looking forward to the guys. And thank you for your time. I appreciate of coming here and sharing all these details.
Yeah. Thank you, Peter.
Thank you so much.
