315. Dror Poleg - From Fixed to Flexible: How Work Environments are Adapting to Change
Resources Mentioned in this Episode:
Everything Coworking Featured Resources:
Masterclass: 3 Behind-the-Scenes Secrets to Opening a Coworking Space
Creative Coworking Partnerships: How to negotiate and structure management agreements from the landlord and operator perspective
TRANSCRIPTION
315. Dror Poleg - From Fixed to Flexible: How Work Environments are Adapting to Change
00:00:02,"Welcome to the Everything Coworking podcast, where every week I keep you updated on the latest trends and how toss in Coworking. I owned and operated Coworking spaces for eight years and then served as the executive director of the Global Workspace Association for five years. And today I work with hundreds of operators and community managers every month, allowing me to bring you thought provoking operator case studies and inspirational interviews with industry thought leaders to help you confidently stay on top of what's important and what you can apply to your own role in the Coworking industry."
00:00:46,"Welcome, we are running this episode live on both the Everything Coworking podcast and the Flex Uncensored podcast. If you are subscribed to only one of those podcasts, you should check out the other one. We'll put both links in the show notes, which you could open right on your podcast. Dror is a special speaker. He's a true thought leader in the space of how we're thinking about the future of work."
00:01:14,"So I wanted to run him on both podcasts and we talk about the Global Workspace Association, which is coming up the third week in September. And that is not very far away now. So if you haven't checked it out to decide if you want to attend or not, make sure you do that. Go to global workspace.org and click on events. We'll also link to that in the show note."
00:01:36,"So I wanted to make sure both audiences knew that that conference is coming up and that you should consider attending. Dror is gonna be one of the keynote speakers, so you'll get to hear more from him. Of course, Gio will be there and I will be there. I am moderating a panel that is still shaping up, so stay tuned, but it will be focused on numbers and profitability and other metrics in the industry of Coworking."
00:02:04,"So I'd love to see you there. So this episode ran live on a webinar format. So if you are not on our newsletter list, make sure you get on the newsletter list. You can go to Everything Coworking dot com, scroll to the bottom and you'll see a newsletter opt-in form because really the only way to know about our upcoming live episodes is to be on that."
00:02:30,"So we took lots of questions, which is really fun, some good audience engagement. So if you watch on YouTube, you can see the video that we recorded Live With Dror. We also record all of our podcasts for both the Everything Coworking podcast and Flex Uncensored for YouTube. So if you're a YouTube fan and want the visual of our conversations, you can find us on that channel."
00:02:56,"The channel is at Everything Coworking, easy to find. So we will put all those links in the show notes and I hope you enjoy our conversation with Dror. Dror, like I said, a thought leader, he's an author, he speaks a lot. He's a really interesting background, a varied background in real estate, and he has his own podcast,"
00:03:15,"his own newsletter. I'm a big fan. I listen to all of his stuff and read all of his stuff. We interest, he's also teaching a course on sort of the practical uses of ai. So he's got some, some tangential interest. He doesn't only talk about the future of work and real estate and and and what's happening in those two kind of realms right now."
00:03:37,"And he mentions this is super fascinating if you're a podcaster, his, his podcast is an AI recording of his blog posts, which he also puts in his newsletters. And I'm telling you, you would never know it. I listened to him a fair amount. So I know his intonations and you know his tone and all those things and it sounds like him live."
00:04:00,"So I love, I just love, he's a content creator. He experiments and you'll hear a little bit more about that in our interview. So without further ado, here's our conversation with Dror Poleg, Welcome. So Gio and I are podcast hosts and I have never met Dror before, but Gio has Dror is the keynote speaker for the Global Workspace Association Conference in September."
00:04:27,"And if you are not registered yet, you must get registered Gio and I will obviously be there. Gio is the co-president of the Global Workspace Association, which is the Industry Association for Flexible Workspace. And so we thought we'd do kind of a little sneak preview with Dror. Dror describes himself as an author and speaker rethinking work and Cities Cities. I would definitely call him a thought leader."
00:04:53,"He's also an educator and a significant content creator I guess that falls under author. But newsletter podcast writing his second book. So Dror, I very, I remember the first time I think that I heard of you, it was actually at a G W A board meeting and Annie Riner was in the room and she was getting her master's in something real estate related and held up your book and said,"
00:05:20,"guys, you must read this book. So I have the book and I have not read all of it yet, but sitting on my shelf, I'll have to read the new one, but I'm an avid, I read your newsletter, I listen to your podcast. So I'm thrilled to have you here. So thank you for taking the time to do this."
00:05:35,"Thank you both. Great to be here. And Annie's great as well. Oh, you know Annie? Okay, good. She is super smart. She is, yeah, she's a lot of great things. So she'll be at the conference as well. Oh good. We have an A, speaking of ai, we have an AI helping Emil Lab Market."
00:05:53,"She's sending us messages. Okay, So side note, Dror is teaching a course on AI. I think your next cohort starts shortly, so I'm totally fascinated by the range of things that you work on. But Gio, do you wanna kind of kick us off and ask Dror some introductory questions? Yeah, no, for sure. I mean, I think that you are definitely one of the,"
00:06:17,"the prime voices out there for kind of the futurist side of corporate real estate and what's going on with the office sector and just what the future of work looks like. And so I think let's, why don't we start there is kind of what's your background? How did you get into this focus? 'cause you truly are a subject matter expert and so I just love to hear your background."
00:06:40,"Oh, in the background it's a, do you want the long version or the slightly Longer version? I want the interesting version, But I guess the really short version is that my, my background is a mix of real estate development and private equity, real estate and online and the kind of digital app development and online media development. What this means in a little more detail is that I actually started 20 something years ago."
00:07:06,"I even worked as a construction worker for six months of all things just to really, you know, more like for the exercise and kind of the lifestyle change. But you know, I, I know the business even from that side. But about 18 years ago, I started working really in real estate development and investment in Asia. So focused mostly on China working for a private equity real estate developer."
00:07:32,"And we started as a very small team because they kind of, the parent company was in Europe, so they had a lot of projects and a lot of money there. And we were kinda like the five people that were in China kind of starting to look for projects and then developing projects. So I was kind of like the marketing slash biz dev guy,"
00:07:50,"but all the other people couldn't do a lot of other things that we needed. So I ended up doing kind of anything that is not like being the C F O or like the chief engineer. So basically finding plots of land negotiating with the seller, which is the government in China. So really participating in auctions. But before that, kinda learning and figuring out what is available,"
00:08:12,"deciding what interests us, helping the government understand what in what, what we would like to see. You know, there's a classic story about the foreigners that come and bribe the Chinese officials, but we were kind of like doing things that caused them to try to bribe us. We would go to smaller cities that traditional foreign investors and even large local investors wouldn't go to."
00:08:35,"So the government really wanted the kind of foreign direct investment, but we would have to tell them, Hey, you're planning to do this, but actually we think something else would be better. And then if they thought this was valuable, they would add it to their plans, but then of course offer it in an auction to everyone else. And then the big local developers would come and try to outbid us and sometimes succeed because the plan became so much better with the free advice that we gave them."
00:08:58,"But every now and then we would get to to buy the land as well. But anyway, long story short, I did that in China for 10 years, developing shopping malls, offices, apartments in five different cities in between. I took a break and did my master's in London and my master's is in economic history, which is basically economics, but focusing on kind of long-term processes and kind of answering big historical questions of kind of analyzing industries like at a very high level,"
00:09:27,"which is kind of what I do now. About eight years ago, I decided that I had enough of China and I even had enough of real estate a little bit, I have to admit. And I just wanted to go back to my online roots because that's where I started kind of developing websites and writing online and and designing apps. And I had an idea for an app,"
00:09:50,"which was sort of a location-based social network, which kind of is, it's kind of like Twitter, but only for stuff within walking distance. So you only see posts from people that are near you. And it has a few like kind of design tweaks that make it both like fun and kind of private enough, but also kind of incentivizes people to behave in a decent manner just like they would when they meet somebody on the street in the actual street."
00:10:15,"It was a beautiful app. Apple featured it on its homepage as like the best new app of I think September, 2015 for, for a few weeks. And that brought me here to the us but the app was a total failure apart from being beautiful. But it kind of, through a process of dealing with that failure and trying to figure out what to actually do with the app,"
00:10:38,"I realized that the only people that were interested in it were real estate people, you know, all those people I was trying to run away from. It's kind of like, you know, just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in and I started to think, okay, what can I do with this app in real estate? And I found some answers,"
00:10:54,"but they didn't interest me as a business, you know, kind of like tenant engagement apps or like white label something. But I realized that there's two worlds that I know quite a bit about, like real estate and tech and that are kind of starting to clash in interesting ways and that I should probably spend a little more time trying to systematically understand what this clash means."
00:11:20,"And while doing so, I also realized that my time in China in particular kind of gave me that basically I was dealing with real estate tech for a long time, even though we, we weren't calling it that, that like in China particularly when you're developing shopping malls, you know, location-based services, online shopping, mobile payments, sensors, all sorts of things that go into shopping malls,"
00:11:38,"you know, there's a lot of technology there. Sorry, I heard some sound. And even more broadly, I think the, the perspective of a retail developer was starting to become more relevant to offices and apartments. Kind of the thinking of not just of the tenant that signs the lease, but of the actual customer and the branding and how to draw people in every day."
00:11:59,"And you know, when you operate a shopping mall, you look at statistics every day for every single shop. You look at their point of sale system, you look at their traffic, like every day you tweak something, you're like, okay, people are going too much to the right here. Maybe I'll put a little plant here and send them to the left to that other tenant,"
00:12:13,"and how do I track them upstairs and tell the movie, send like the cinema to run some promotion on popcorns and let's see what happens and does that generate more sales to like the the baby clothing store on the third floor? So that type of thinking I thought would be relevant to, to other parts of the industry. But to cut this story short,"
00:12:34,"I started kind of writing more systematically about the impact of technology on real estate, a little bit about technology for real estate. So you know, PropTech, but more broadly about how technology itself changes real estate. So demand for real estate in terms of where people live, how people work, how they behave, and how all of that affects the nature of real estate."
00:12:54,"So kind of like the, its ability to generate stable returns and the way it is valued and its kind of role or position within portfolios of large investors. And yeah, and as you mentioned, I wrote a book about it, I'm writing another one, and kind of over the last few years it became my full-time job just writing, speaking, teaching,"
00:13:13,"and trying not to do anything practical. Just Content, content now, now more than ever, right, with what's happened the last few years, right? We, we need, everyone's been looking to someone to help them understand what the future looks like, right? Is like we went from, we did a full pendulum swing to everyone being home and now we're kind of settling back in somewhere between going into an HQ or a corporate office or being at home,"
00:13:42,"right? And so we've got all these corporations trying to figure out what that looks like, which now has all the investors and landlords trying to figure out what that looks like. All the lenders, which entail affects all of our industry operators, right? From the flex standpoint as they're going, okay, how do we build the space, right? Are we building it for individual entrepreneurs and solopreneurs?"
00:14:07,"Are we building it for corporations? Is it open, is it enclosed? How much team space? Do we do all these things? And I think, you know, your your new book after the Office, right? Did I get that right? Is that what it's called After office? After office is, is essentially talking about how the, the cities and all these,"
00:14:27,"how everything's gonna settle out, right? So give us a little sneak peek into what that's gonna be like. So the short answer is that there is no short answer. I think we we're kind of living a world, leaving a world where we had a pretty clear paradigm about what the office is, what it looks like, where it should be. Although realistically when we look at the pre covid world,"
00:14:49,"we start to realize that it was much more diverse than we gave it credit for. And that there were a lot of signs in there to what's happening now, but still there was kind of like a, a headline that was very clear to everyone and at least at the developer level, people kind of knew what to build, where to build, and kind of what are the rules of thumb."
00:15:06,"I think where we're headed, there is no single answer anymore. There is, there's gonna be much more variety and even that variety will constantly change. And it starts with the tenants and the customers themselves. I think if you go to most bosses today and ask them, okay, what do you actually need? How many people are going to come to the office over the next five years?"
00:15:27,"What are people gonna do at the office? Most of them have no idea. And and part of that is kind of grappling with the shift that you described with remote work and you know, the baseline basically becoming, everyone is home now. We have to convince them to come back rather than like, okay, we're all at the office, let's figure out how much kind of flexibility we can add."
00:15:49,"But as soon as we started now to finally grapple with this, AI comes along and kind of threatens to shake things up even more. So I think anyone that has like, you know, white collar or office-based employees now at least feels a certain threat or a certain kind of anxiety and a need to rethink things. There's no kind of way to just say,"
00:16:12,"okay, it's gonna eliminate 50% percent of jobs or something like that. I think it's less about this, but it's more about, okay, what are people actually going to be doing? How are they going to interact with the computer? How are they going to interact with each other? And what kind of spaces that that would require. So to try to still make it practical."
00:16:31,"I think I used to say that, you know, the Office of the Future is not a place, it's a network. So it's not a single location, but it's basically enabling your employees or people to access whatever it is that they need at any given moment. Whether, you know, they're doing focused work or impressing a clients or convening with colleagues in person or virtually or recording a podcast."
00:16:52,"But maybe my new twist on this is that the Office of the Future is an office. It's just in a different place designed a little differently, access differently probably on a different lease or kind of financial arrangement. And I think within that design we just have to make it much more modular and ready to, to adapt not just at the landlord level of like,"
00:17:15,"you know, changing tenants more frequently, but I think even for the end users themselves to be, to enable them as much as possible to move things around, to move whole walls around or phone boots or whatever it is. So if 40, 50 years ago it was a big deal, I think when Herman Miller and others kind of introduced these kind of active workplaces,"
00:17:32,"well you can move your chair around and, you know, pull your phone with you. I think taking that to the next level where instead of just cubicles and partitions, we can have whole walls and kind of whole areas that that can fill different purposes and kind of see, we might see some more standard answers emerge that enable people to plan a little better and to build a little better."
00:17:53,"But I think more than anything, we'll just constantly see change happening and I, I don't think there'll be a clear answer like the one that we had until like three or four years ago for the next few decades. Well, and the interesting part is it's such a Mac, you, you, so you're talking about a macro view, right? But once you go down to a micro view,"
00:18:12,"everything changes. Like for example, I'm sitting in Austin, Texas today, Jamie's in San Francisco, right? And so those markets are so dynamically different, right? So I mean Austin downtown is driving a thousand dollars plus a desk, right? The, the national average is about five 50, right? Yeah. I bet you San Francisco's probably below the national average just just because they're trying to get bodies in,"
00:18:39,"right? But then we've got Spain on here, we've got Finland on here, we've got the uk, right? And so all those places vary so much and how far along the pendulum swing they are, right? How adjusted are they? What's the culture? What are the dynamics from different environments, even down to the socioeconomic and government level, right?"
00:19:00,"What's, what's the climate, right? And so I think that's, that's where sometimes people ask us these, these macro questions and it's like, I need more information. I don't have all the pieces to the puzzle and that's what I know you get to do. That's what Jamie and I love to do is really getting down into the, the weeds,"
00:19:18,"if you will, as we say it, of the details and really understand the markets. Yeah. And, and you know, in real estate, at the end of the day, every project is, is the world in itself, you know, it has its own history, it has its own style, its own advantages. It really varies. I mean some buildings are,"
00:19:36,"I'm sure are doing better than ever, even right now. Well, well many others struggle. So yeah, the details matter, Your Honor, I'm curious, since you were an economic and history major for your master's, I, is there anything that we can draw from, you know, what, what's happened in the past that kind of directs us to what might might happen next as it applies to sort of work workplace?"
00:20:05,"You talk a lot about cities and where people live and work. Yeah, definitely. I mean the, the, the biggest thing that we can draw is that whatever we see around us and take for granted has not been around for very long. Which I think, you know, is very important to remember. And, and even the office market that we're leaving behind,"
00:20:25,"as I mentioned earlier, was much more diverse than, than we kind of give it credit for many more people. Were working from home at least part of the time. There are a lot of office crisis even in the last 30 years, let alone if we look at a hundred years, you know, cities have changed and are constantly changing. So if you look back a hundred years,"
00:20:45,"let's say in a place like Manhattan, obviously there were far fewer offices. There are actually many more people living here. So about more than half a million people extra were here a hundred years ago that are not here anymore. So the city and many cities kind of tilted probably a little too much towards offices. So not just in terms of building a lot of them,"
00:21:05,"but really shaping the whole environment around them. Like subordinating all other needs and uses to the office. So, you know, in terms of how you plan the streets, the type of retail that is there, the lead, the width of the road, the transportation networks, everything kind of is a, is a function of the office. And I think that's something that we're going to kind of tilt back away from towards cities that are not necessarily just more residential,"
00:21:30,"but much more mixed in terms of their uses. Much more, I think balanced or at least more normally distributed in terms of the, the intensity of activity throughout the day. So they're not gonna be designed anymore for like, okay, there's this bunch of people that show up at 9:00 AM and then they all go home at 5:00 PM So we have to accommodate that."
00:21:47,"But can I think a little more about what happens throughout the day? 'cause you know, office buildings, at the end of the day, they're not very efficient creatures when you look at them from above. Like they're empty two thirds of the time and again, they necessitate roads and other infrastructure that also is used for two or three hours a day at,"
00:22:04,"at its full capacity. And for most of the, the rest of the time it isn't. And they kind of require retail that, that again is maybe busy for an hour and a half on net a day. And there's kind of many more options on how to use all of that urban space much more effectively. So another lesson from history is that these changes always take time and they always involve some pain and they usually require a lot of help from everyone involved."
00:22:36,"So from, particularly from the governments, you know, whether it is tax in incentives, changes to zoning or land planning, streamlining development procedures, and yeah, so we'll probably need a lot of that as well. So again, looking back, but even looking at 20 years ago in lower Manhattan where like about 20 buildings were converted from offices to apartments,"
00:22:59,"they, that only happened and it happened successfully because there were tax incentives and the government kind of streamlined a lot of things that could have taken until now under normal circumstances. And yeah, and I think looking even further back in history at the, the overall role of cities, I mean cities have existed before offices became so important and not just, you know,"
00:23:22,"ancient cities again, even cities like New York and London, people worked in coffee shops, people worked from home, people worked near home. I think we're kind of, we're going to converge back to, to kind of the mean on that front as well. So I expect when everyone can live anywhere, there's probably many more people on earth that would love to live in San Francisco or in in New York and in a bunch of other,"
00:23:44,"other cities. Even if they don't work there as long as they can afford it and they can actually work from there. So, and, and there's also many other cities that suddenly have other maybe points of appeal like Austin for example, whether it is the, the weather or taxes or the culture or suddenly will have a longer tail of kind of lifestyle preferences where people will kind of show us that hey,"
00:24:08,"yeah, New York is great, but actually there's 50 other places that fit more specific lifestyles that previously were not relevant 'cause you couldn't work there, but now you can work there or from there and that suddenly more people are gonna be able to live there. So part of the mismatch, I think with, with why office utilization is so low now, it's not because people don't want to go to the office,"
00:24:32,"they don't want to go to the office that they used to go to, but if there's something nearby, I think more people would like to do that. So I think it's, part of it is like really reshuffling the supply rather than just eliminating the supply. But of course it's still painful because you can't move a building, you still have to kind of suffer in one place and maybe build something in another place."
00:24:55,"Yeah. So I think from not, not just a historical part, but from a cultural part, right, is there's so much to learn, right? As we look across the globe, I mean, I've got friends that have lived in Australia, I've got friends, as a matter of fact I'm actually speaking in Dubai for CoreNet in the next few weeks."
00:25:13,"Then you go over to Europe and, and parts of Europe and then you come to the US right? And those, when you look at cultures and how they operate, how they work, they're so dynamically different, right? And I think such a big part of where the US is kind of coming around is number one, a work-life balance. And number two is about activating our spaces,"
00:25:34,"right? So there is utilization, like you said, around the clock of spaces we're kind in retail now and f and B to, to overall developments, but also to office buildings, right? Is how do you create that dynamic shift. And so I think there's so much to learn across. I mean like I'm stoked to go to Dubai and understand better how they're working."
00:26:01,"Right? And I've, I've already started scheduling tours to go look at it because, and that's what I love here in the US is I get to travel is every market is so dynamically different that we get to learn from that, right? And so I think that's what I love about, you know, conferences like G w A and Juicy is we can all come together and learn from each other,"
00:26:23,"right? And so, you know, I think that's the really cool part. And I mean that's something that you bring to the table because you're out having so many conversations at a level that we don't get to have them, right? And so that's what I love about it. Yeah, I think, like you said, even in the US you know,"
00:26:40,"there's, there's a lot of local economies that depend on completely different industries that are in different stages of development. You know, some have like declining population, some have strong population growth, young, old. So yeah, there's a lot to learn and, and definitely internationally, I I, you know, I write about it a lot as well, but you know,"
00:27:00,"going to like extreme places, like you said Dubai or Japan or China or even just like good old Europe, there's a lot to learn and they have something to learn from us too. Yeah. It's not like that argument about America being bad or anything, but I think the, there's definitely a lot to learn and, and we also see that the kind of impact of remote work seems to be much more intense here in the US and probably a lot of that has to do with,"
00:27:26,"you know, how far we have shifted towards a kind of office centrism in our urban planning and also car centrism. But I think ultimately most European cities are doing better because they have better public transport offices are easier to access or at least you have a better reason to go into downtown because there's other things to do there, apart from just going to the office,"
00:27:52,"but also to speak in America's favor. I think the talent market here is the most competitive one in the world, and the industries here are the most innovative. So employees here just have much more leverage, both much more leverage. And also maybe they're just, they're just able to be productive like this from home or remotely or hybrid much more than people elsewhere are able to."
00:28:16,"So in that sense, they can learn from us and see where they're headed. Maybe, you know, people in other countries, assuming that they're going ahead, yeah, maybe they're going backwards and they're not gonna catch up. But if they, if they want to make their economies kind of more knowledge dependent and more creative, that probably also means much more flexibility and,"
00:28:32,"and a broader variety of work styles, which we're already experimenting with here. So I have a question that's specific to our, our audience. So our audience is, well, it's a little bit of a mixed audience and I don't know everybody, but we'll assume most of the audience, and this will be true at the G W A conference as well,"
00:28:53,"is in the business of providing places where people might go and do work. And it feels intimidating right now a little bit to me to feel so in fluxx around like, what do people want? Like if I build something today, is it relevant, you know, in two years, you know, how people work today, what they want out of a place where they might go and do work or,"
00:29:21,"or meet, you know, when you talk about like sort of the, the end of the office. So if we're creating a version of the office, like is it, you know, does it become irrelevant and from your, you know, construction background and, and development background, real estate's, it's expensive, right? So folks who opt, build workplaces invest in physical infrastructure."
00:29:47,"And you talked about sort of the, the need for flexibility, you know, that's all in investment and somewhere in there you need the ability to sort of future pace a little bit. Like what, where are we, where are we going? I don't know, do you have, like, I'm sure you don't have the answer, but any sort of thoughts about how to think about,"
00:30:07,"you know, what's next and, and if you're gonna sort of plant a flag and create Yeah. Something, you know, how, how do you, how do you think about that? So the key shift that offices are undergoing and everyone involved in them is, has to undergo as well, is that we're transitioning from kind of a monopoly business to a consumer business."
00:30:30,"And which means you have to think about every individual person and their needs and their experiences and their journey every single day. 'cause you have to convince 'em to come back and make sure that they have a nice experience. Now I think once you even start to think about it like that, so many things suddenly become apparent when you look around you and, and whatever it is that you're developing,"
00:30:49,"starting from how you get into the building, how long it takes you to kind of punch your card or swipe your key, where the bathrooms are, what the temperature, like all sorts of little things that when you start to think about the individual person, you suddenly realize, oh, actually this place is, is was kind of terrible before, you know,"
00:31:05,"we kind of designed it assuming that people have to be here for nine hours and we didn't have to think about so many things that if I suddenly think like a coffee shop or like a hotel or just like any other business, so many obvious things that happen everywhere else, suddenly I can just implement them here and it will already, you know, be like 80% of the job,"
00:31:23,"maybe even without breaking any walls or, or doing anything so dramatic. So, so I think there, there's a lot to that and even the desire to actually know your customers and connect with them is something that in real estate is, is kind of foreign. You know, most of the buildings are operated, not just that they don't know their customers,"
00:31:40,"they're trying to avoid their customers and ensure that the customer doesn't even know who you are, that you hide behind like five different LLCs and that nobody calls you if something, if something goes wrong. I always say, you know, whenever my birthday, I get like a hundred emails from every online store I ever visit, ever visited. But the landlord that I pay,"
00:31:59,"I don't know, a hundred thousand dollars a year to never sends me, never sends me an email and says happy birthday, because they don't know anything about me and they don't care about me. But they're actually in a position to know so much, you know, I spend so much time in my office, or if you're renting an apartment in the apartment first they have all my paperwork,"
00:32:16,"they know a lot about me by definition. But also they, they see all my habits and they, they can know so much about me and they can think about my needs and my journey and make sure that, that it's all happening. And, and a lot of that, again, is just on the way to the office or around it. So in terms of the,"
00:32:32,"the type of services that I consume, the type of things that I spend time on or the, the stuff that I eat, and that's before even talking about like, you know, building crazy amenities or anything like that. It's just kind of like a, a little mix that makes it more pleasant. And then I think within the office itself, as I mentioned earlier,"
00:32:51,"I think to, to provide as much flexibility as possible kind of modularity to allow customers to kind of shape the environment on their own. And but here too, I think there's a lot of bread and butter stuff that can just be done better. You know, simple private suites that are clean, nice, have light, have air that again, that assume that someone will only be here if they want to be here."
00:33:17,"That, that a lot of offices are designed in a way that says very clearly, okay, we know that you have no choice. So we're, we're just gonna, oh, there's, there's space here, so we're just gonna put you here. It doesn't, like nothing else matters. So I think once you, once you think about it a little differently,"
00:33:33,"you realize a lot of things. Yeah. So bread and butter, you know, So you walked, walked right into this, this question. So we're, we're halfway through. So anyone that watches or listens, we know that part of what I, what I love about this time with our guests is we get to dive deeper into who they are,"
00:33:53,"right? And that's what you you're mentioning is essentially we have to know who our audience is. We have to know their likes and dislikes. We have to know who they are as people, right? Because we're in a hospitality industry, right? And so the first question for you, or actually there's two part question. Sure. So, and it's not a business one."
00:34:14,"If you could have dinner with one person, one person that's alive and one person's that's dead, who would the two people be? Oh, one person that's alive and one person that's dead. Can I choose two dead people? I don't know. Living people are just not so interesting anymore. All I'll choose two dead and one alive, maybe so dead."
00:34:39,"There's a, an author called Millen Kundera who wrote the Unbearable Lightness of being. And he just passed away I think a couple of weeks ago. And I always wanted to meet him. He seemed like my kind of guy. He writes about kind of everything, you know, politics and relationships and I mean novels. So not like, but he kind of immigrated from eastern Europe to Paris and lived there,"
00:35:01,"which kind of seems like a nice lifestyle and he seems to have a, a solid appreciation of what it means to be an individual without getting into the politics of it. So he is not left, he is not right. He kind of lived under communism, his family fled the Nazis. So he is just a human being, which I think so many people these days,"
00:35:21,"especially with social media and the politics here in the US and elsewhere, everyone is kind of in a position and again, something and kinda like, it's hard to just be a human being and kind of care about certain things without suddenly bundling it with all sorts of other crazy things. So I think he was a cool guy to make it even heavier. There's a guy,"
00:35:39,"it's Hakuin, who was the prime minister of Israel, was assassinated for trying to make peace with the Palestinians about 30 years ago when I was a teenager. And I think he would, he is a guy that I can, like, he was kinda like a general and a warrior, but then he decided that, you know, actually that we should reboot and do things differently and take some risks in order to try to make peace,"
00:35:59,"even if it's dangerous. I'd love to, to have a dinner with him and chat. In terms of living people, I don't know, to be honest, I don't know if there's a kind of someone that I would like. I, I mean I like people, I like watching people and kind of walking around cities and observing. It's less about like,"
00:36:17,"you know, grabbing someone and kind of picking their brain for too long. I generally learn less from kind of conversations. I'm a great avoider of meetings and I like to read and I like to kind of walk around and see what people actually do and, and what's actually going on rather than kind of like hearing too many opinions. Yeah, That, that's a great one."
00:36:42,"And one of the questions we had come up is, you know, obviously we have a, a Flight to quality, right? But the other one is also, you know, a Flight to just the living somewhere and working from somewhere that you can have a experience, right? From that standpoint. And so we're seeing a lot of that being done in smaller cities,"
00:37:05,"smaller towns because you know, it's easier to get around, it's easier to, to build community, it's easier to, to drive a lot of those things. So one of the questions was kind of what do you see for smaller cities or towns kind of across the board in various capacities. So I think they, they have kind of an unprecedented opportunity to,"
00:37:26,"to punch above their weight and to, to attract people. And here too, I think the key is thinking like a, a consumer product. Like thinking, okay, what are my strengths? What kind of lifestyle can I enable people to have that other places cannot? And how do I double down on that and make it accessible, make it obvious,"
00:37:44,"integrate it into people's lives so that they'll really enjoy it. And it could be many things. It could be, you know, the ability to go for a swim or go for a hike every day. And it could even be on the other extreme, the ability to drive a lot and have great parking wherever you go. You know, we have cities like that in America as well."
00:38:02,"I think a lot of people are going to appreciate that and maybe they should. It's, it's heresy I know from like an urbanist to say that. But I think some cities and, and some people, you know, if that's what they want, they, we should, you know, give them that and they should all go there and drive cars and park and,"
00:38:20,"and so yeah, I think there's definitely opportunity for smaller cities. The big challenge for operators and we're seeing that with WeWorks kind of never ending saga and now they're kind of on the brink of bankruptcy again, in a way they symbolized or encapsulate the whole industry. It is possible to give people exactly what they want, but still figuring out how to make money from it is a challenge."
00:38:46,"In WeWork's case, obviously they've, they've actively sought ways to not make money and how to spend it on stuff that doesn't matter. But I think even the more responsible operators among us, I think it'll still be a challenge for a few years to kind of figure out one, what people want. But even if you figure out what they want, how do I,"
00:39:05,"how do I actually make money by by giving it to them, you know, how do I price it properly? How do I finance it in a way that actually kind of takes into account my needs as a business and doesn't kind of constrain me too much? So I think part of the evolution is there beyond, like we, we talked a lot about the kind of customer facing things and the actual design and physical shape,"
00:39:24,"but I think on the kind of financing and business side, there's a lot to tweak as well. But going back to smaller cities, so yeah, I, I think that they definitely have a big opportunity. I don't think that kind of everyone is just gonna move and you know, the demand is gonna spread the evenly across the land. I even think that some of the biggest cities will become bigger than ever."
00:39:45,"But I think some of the kind of, some big cities are not going to make the cut and probably fail to transition. And a lot of kind of in-between cities that try to be kind of everything for everyone will be at a disadvantage competing with smaller cities that have a clear kind of value proposition, but only target specific people, which is, these are kind of the rules of the internet in general."
00:40:07,"So when you look at the world of online media, this, this is what happens as well. You can have the New York Times that kind of becomes bigger than ever, but a lot of other newspapers just completely disappear. And then you have these kind of many more niches and kind of places where people can hang out and spend time and even pay a premium for,"
00:40:24,"because it's so kind of specific to their needs. So I think even this dynamic of smaller cities necessarily have lower rents can change because if they can kind of have a kind of better product market fit or clear value proposition to the, you know, 50,000 or 500,000 people that they need to attract, they they can get those people to pay a premium because they're getting exactly the lifestyle that they wanted that they cannot get maybe even in New York or in San Francisco."
00:40:52,"No, it's such an interesting time 'cause you're, you're talking about sort of like, you know, marketing and, and like product management concepts related to cities, but like if there's probably been no time in history where cities have been able to think that way, right? And say, oh, people are moving and looking, you know, for a new home and where,"
00:41:12,"where is their fit? And so how do we attract or message Yeah. Or right. Where do we fit in? It's it's, it's super, super interesting. Yeah. And here, I mean there is some history to it. You know, 500 years ago the world was made of cities more than than states. And you know, you had like in Europe in particular,"
00:41:30,"you know, Florence or Genoa or or Venice, and they were competing for talent and for capital as well. And they, they experimented with different rules, you know, in terms of taxation, in terms of how they treated different minorities in terms of their, the type of religion and kind of church offering that they had and the relationship between the city and the economy and the church."
00:41:47,"They experimented with different governance kind of mechanisms and with different kind of value propositions and, and sometimes they went to great length to attract the right kind of merchants or companies or financiers to come to them. And yeah, I think the office made cities a little lazy 'cause they, again, they assumed that just people are a captive audience. But that was a,"
00:42:08,"a short term historical blip and now people have a little more freedom. Again, We have a question in the q and a about generational diversity with different vision of life, you know, and how does that affect the future of the work and the, and the future of the office? Yeah. Which that's a complicated question. So Dror, I'll let you tackle it."
00:42:32,"Sure. I think if, assuming I understand the question, but one of the things that, that, that, you know, I mentioned in my book even before Covid, is that the workforce today is actually more diverse than it has ever been. And and part of that is of course kind of like people's kind of backgrounds and ethnic and cultural and gender,"
00:42:51,"but a lot of it is just basically age. We have like four or five generations working simultaneously in some companies, which is something that never happened before. Not even close to that because people are living longer and because younger people are kind of more engaged in the economy, particularly on the kind of the, the creative side. So they, they start earlier."
00:43:11,"So you can have some tech companies where there's some, you know, 70 year old person and they can have a 19 year old person and sometimes they could even work on the same project. And even the teams that at the team level teams are more diverse than than ever because in the past most people worked with people that are like them that had the same education,"
00:43:30,"that were from the same department kind of doing the same things in the same place. But today, you know, you mentioned project management, more and more companies work in teams where there's like a project manager, there's a designer, there's an engineer, there's another coder, there's maybe even like an anthropologist or researcher or sociologist of some sort or, and then there's a marketing and salespeople and all of them are coming from completely different directions and are working together."
00:43:55,"And this too is one of the reasons that the office has to kind of accommodate many more different work styles and many more different needs. And, and I think it comes back to the, the kind of solutions that we discussed earlier. So one, the idea of a network of instead of trying to kind of design the one place that works for everyone all the time,"
00:44:13,"kind of enabling people to access different spaces and second, to make that every single space more modular and kind of more empowering of the people themselves to kind of choose how to use it and to shape it a little bit in themselves. Yeah, e Eric mentioned in the chat, an additional dimension of diversity is the increasingly distributed composition of teams like geographically. Yeah."
00:44:38,"And I was listening to your, you know, podcast slash slash article about, you know, zoom and Zoom tell everyone to come back to the office. And I was like, oh, this will be good. What does Dror think about, you know, think about that. And you know, you talked, you first started by listing all the offices,"
00:44:55,"you know, where people where Yeah. Where Zoom employs people and it's just in this incredible diverse list of places around the world. And part of your point was like, look, they're already have, you know, a they're, they're interfacing with people from, from everywhere. And so that is, that's been happening and must happen, right? So to say like,"
00:45:17,"you have to go to an office where, anyway, I think, yeah, I think they work from home. That home work is a huge dis distraction. Even, even remote work I think is not necessarily the right term. I think work is becoming more distributed. That's like the real kind of significant shift that that's happening now. And most of that work will still be conducted in offices or in whatever we'll call them in specialized places where people go to do that thing that,"
00:45:41,"that, you know, that they get paid for. But, but yeah. But they might be in many more places and they, some of them will be corporate leases and some of them will be flex and some of them will just be giving individuals a budget to go and, and access the space on their own. But most of them will be in,"
00:45:58,"in specialized places that people like us have to design and figure out, you know, and make available for, for people in order for them to be productive and happy. So I'm asking this question as much for myself as everybody else that's listening, but I know we briefly talked about it, but what is gonna be the topic of the discussion for g w A?"
00:46:23,"Don't ruin it. Yeah. So don't say too much enough to some appetites. I think probably diving more deeply into like the post office world, which is not a world without offices, but the world with different offices and again, different locations, different formats, different lifestyles, and trying to understand what's actually driving the shift that's happening now. 'cause it's much deeper than like,"
00:46:51,"oh, people are so picky or kind of, they don't want to come to the office because they're lazy. But I think there, there's a deeper change in the kind of the nature of business and and of our economy that I think capitalism needs offices to be more flexible in a way we're no longer in kind of a linear economy where we just take raw resources,"
00:47:12,"throw them into some machine or industrial process and something clear comes out at the end. We're in economy where, you know, all sorts of people do all sorts of random things and suddenly one of them goes viral and this becomes valuable while a thousand other people did exactly the same thing and nobody cared. And it's true for content, but it's also true for,"
00:47:30,"for products of various kinds. And even it's even true for real estate, right? I mean, Adam Neumann, how many Coworking spaces existed in the world? And this guy made so much noise because he, he touched on something I was in the right place at the right time. So I think these dynamics that are very clear now in, in social media gradually will dominate more and more parts of our economy because the economy is becoming more creative,"
00:47:55,"but also because whatever it is that you build, even if it's the most boring and predictable thing, at the end of the day, if you want to reach customers, your relationship is mediated through all of those algorithms and through all of those social dynamics. So the world is just becoming much less predictable, much more kind of intense in terms of the inequality between the different outcomes of people or companies that do exactly the same thing."
00:48:18,"But then one of them becomes a thousand times bigger, not like 20% bigger. And this non-linear world that is already here requires the physical environment to adapt to it and to enable it to absorb these shocks, to not need to sign 20 releases, to be able to constantly change, you know, how things are being done and where they're being done. And also to attract people that are more and more diverse."
00:48:44,"Because again, we're like, the economy's becoming a series of betts basically of like, you know, trying a lot of different things and hiring a lot of different people with more and more strange and diverse backgrounds and kind of mixing them together and enabling them to do things in all sorts of ways. And, and yeah, we need spaces to, to accommodate that and hopefully even to enhance that and,"
00:49:05,"you know, to, to improve it and to contribute to it. Not just to like, not weigh down on people, but actually to, to bring them up and to open up possibilities for them and inspire them and even at the most physical level, just to make them feel good, you know, to have access to good food, to breathe clean air,"
00:49:22,"to have lights, to have clean bathrooms. A lot of simple things that I think many people in offices just don't enjoy yet. Yeah. One of the questions that, that you know, is just asked in the, the chat is essentially around the need and demand for corporations to become more flexible, right? And so, I mean, I still,"
00:49:44,"Joe Brady, one of the best ways he explained it was that the con we are now consumers, and you've touched on that earlier as employees, we're now consumers, right? So we get to pick and choose, or at least the talent, the, the upper echelon if you will, the top half of the totem pole of employees get to choose how they wanna work,"
00:50:01,"right? There's still people that are trying to make their way, there's still people that need to be in the office from a support perspective and some different things. But, you know, how do you see that shifting and evolving, right? Is the choices that we now have as the talent pool to decide where and how we work? Yeah, I think we're shifting,"
00:50:22,"and this, this is another thing that I think is really at the, at the, at the heart of, of the economy of capitalism itself. I think the, the fact that people suddenly think that work is less important. It, it's because this is what they have to think right now. I think really capitalism needs them, needs them to think that it needs them to consume more."
00:50:40,"It needs them to come up with other things to do that might enable them to charge people money for that are not things that you traditionally did at the office. I, I think in a way we're shifting from an an era of implicit bullshit to an era of explicit bullshit. And what I mean by that is that we had a lot of people working in offices,"
00:51:02,"really doing stuff that didn't have to be done. And I think when Covid happened, we saw that many jobs could be done remotely, but we also saw that many jobs just don't have to be done at all, or that they can be done five hours a week instead of like 40 hours a week. And I think people feel liberated because now they,"
00:51:20,"they can, they can say that out loud and it doesn't mean that they don't wanna do anything, but they wanna do something else. And maybe that's something else is some, again, whatever people want to pay for, maybe it's like, you know, running groups about some topic or writing content or crafts or like whatever. It can still something useful that people want to pay for,"
00:51:40,"but that doesn't just entail sh you know, shuffling papers or kind of doing things on Excel all day. And I think we're in a process of discovering what a lot of those kind of new jobs of the future are. And I'm saying bullshit, not, not in a, not as a pejorative, almost as a positive. You know, if, if you look at our lives today,"
00:52:01,"particularly, you know, here in like New York City metro a hundred years ago, a normal person would look at my life and would say like, where, like these people, like what do they spend money on? Like there's dog walkers and sleep trainers and like a consultant about this and they have like a, like there's so many jobs now that that would would've looked completely ridiculous to people,"
00:52:24,"including a lot of office jobs. You know, there's so many more functions today than existed a hundred or 20 years ago and it's good and we're gonna have many more of them because people are just gonna come up with things to do. But I think to, for them to come up with those things you have to give them a little more leeway. And I think part of what kind of remote work and hybrid work does is that it gives them that ability to first work differently even on the stuff that they're already supposed to do."
00:52:52,"So again, not just necessarily doing it at that time of day or like pretending to do it for four hours, but just doing it the way they would do it. And if it takes 'em 20 minutes and good for them, and I think good for, good for everyone, basically. And then with those 20 minutes, they can either produce something else of value or they can consume something which is also good."
00:53:11,"And, you know, so I think we're, we're, we're part of this big, we're undergoing this really big transition now that, that's I'm optimistic about. So what drives your passion for this, right? Because clearly you're very passionate about it. So what, what drives your passion? Like, what's your why behind doing what you get to do?"
00:53:32,"I'm terrified. That's what drives me. I'm a, I'm a neurotic Jew, so I, I come from a, a, a long line of refugees that people that were killed in so many places and that saw the, the world turned on its head on them and they're properly confiscated and they had to reinvent themselves in new places and learn languages and invent new professions."
00:53:53,"So even when things go well, I'm constantly thinking about, okay, what, what's about to change? What's, you know, what do I need to do now? What do I need to know? What do I need to learn? And I think that gives me a sense, like, people say that I'm good at kind of predicting things. I don't think that's true."
00:54:09,"I'm, I'm very good at noticing what's in, like, stuff that's actually happening that other people maybe are just ignoring or they don't care about so much. So not so much predict change, but just notice that things have shifted. So I think that's my why. Like, you know, that that kind of, that feeling that I have to know something new or notice something before anyone else because my life depends on it and I'm actually trying to moderate it."
00:54:32,"I think I can chill a little more and I don't, you know, the, the world doesn't move as fast as I think it does, but, but it is moving. And the interesting part about what you said, right, to put it in a different context is, you know, the, the victim that has experienced so many of those things,"
00:54:47,"they're, they're, they're basically waiting to respond, right? They're, they're not actively, proactively looking for, for where we're headed, right? And so they're just waiting to respond, right? As opposed to the victor is preparing for where we're going, right? I mean, Wayne Gretzky said it best as he, he, he's, he skated to where the puck was gonna be,"
00:55:09,"right? And I think that's where so many of us are right now, is we're trying to help people go, look, let's stop reacting to what happened during Covid. Let's stop reacting to what happened when interest rates went up. Let's figure out, you know, past historical current themes and momentum that we're seeing in other markets, right? Whether it be,"
00:55:30,"you know, in North America or South America or, you know, anywhere in Europe or elsewhere, is how do we shift and adjust to that? And that's exactly what you're saying, right? Is it's so important for you and, and us as leaders in the industry to help people prepare for where we're headed, not where we are now. Yep."
00:55:53,"Yep. And, and again and again, I, I don't think that we are all going to one very clear place. I think the, where we're going, there's room for so many different ways of working for so many kind of types of jobs and professions and ways of spending time and being productive. So yeah, don't even try to figure out where the puck is going more,"
00:56:16,"like try to figure out like where, you know, what you enjoy doing and how you can be useful. And it sounds a little corny, but I think it's, it's truer by the day. I mean, people maybe said it or even 70 years ago, but I think it's really true right now that there's so many ways to make a living and to,"
00:56:31,"to be useful and, and also even within a corporate setting to inspire other people to get the job done. There's many ways to do that as well. And yeah, so I think we should, we should really like, enjoy it and embrace it. I think that the worst thing that you can do is to try to kind of hold on and control and kind of force everyone to work the way it was before,"
00:56:53,"or to try to manage things in the, the way that they used to be managed. And, and I say that with empathy. I think I, I don't envy most managers these days. I mean, you know, dealing with, you know, suddenly your employees are all away, some of them maybe you've never even met. You're trying to figure out how to,"
00:57:09,"you know, get what you're supposed to get out of them and, you know, just to have a career and build your own stable life. And it's really challenging. So maybe that's another thing. We should kind of be nice to each other and understand that like the ground is shaking for everyone and it creates opportunities and we can kind of make the most of it together again."
00:57:30,"But I, I'm in a nice mood today. I guess I'm saying all these nice things. Jamie, I'm giving you a chance. I've been talking. Oh, well, I was feeling like that was a nice note to end on. I have many more questions. I could talk to Dror all day long, but I thought that was a good,"
00:57:50,"good kind of parting thought. So Dror, thank you for joining us and sharing your perspective. And I was just looking for the link to the conference because I am really looking forward to hearing you live and for anybody that's, I, I suspect that most folks that are live are familiar with juror's work, but Will will link to his newsletter and his podcast,"
00:58:14,"which I'm a pretty f faithful follower of both. And Gio I think also, we didn't get to talk about some of these things, but I think you're, you're an interesting follower too because you think a lot about sort of brand building and, you know, some of the things that you're, you're doing in your work that I think are relevant to,"
00:58:35,"to some of our business owners and, you know, sort of monetizing things you're offering and sort of segmenting. So, so I, I pull insights, you know, that are, that are not just real estate related from your work, which I love. So yeah, I agree. They're interlinked. I mean, my, my, the subject matter that I write about is really,"
00:58:57,"again, it comes back to what I said about my personal kind of drive. I'm really writing to myself about myself. I'm trying to figure out what's going on, trying to figure out how to make a living, how to stay relevant, how to, you know, adapt and, and also how to enjoy myself and kind of negotiate that balance between,"
00:59:14,"you know, the, the work and kind of employment needs and other priorities that I have in life. And, and you know, I think everyone is dealing with the same thing. So, Hundred percent. Very relatable. Yeah. And thanks for everybody who joined us today. We have a pretty international audience, which is fun. Spain, Finland,"
00:59:34,"few other Loca Canada, Mark Eaton, and certainly around the us. So, so thanks everybody. This was really enjoyable. Thank you. And see you again soon in person looking forward. Thank you. Looking forward to meeting you. Thanks Gio. Thanks. Thank you for listening to today's episode. If you like what you heard, tell a friend, hit that subscribe button and leave us a rating and review."
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