The Rise of Popularity in the Interest for Remote Jobs with Jeffrey Mrizek 2/2

Yeah, I think that's the global citizen part. And I think I've talked to people about this, right, on where— and partly the pandemic, last 2 years really accelerated a lot of things. And I think we're still unpacking exactly what it accelerated because we're Realizing we're like, oh, diversity, that's a thing. That's— oh yeah, we kind of failed there. Let's work on that. Let's work on inclusion. And we're checking, we're slowly figuring out all these things. And, you know, sustainability, you know, the Paris Accord, that whole thing happened as well. And remote work. And we're still— there's so much that we're looking at.

Yeah.

But one of the things that's come out, a couple things. First is emotional intelligence. People are really starting to click. Oh, and I think it came out of the whole diversity portion that you mentioned empathy. That's just not— it's hard to teach. We'll put it that way. It's very hard to teach. And it's not been a focus. Like, our education system is not based on empathy in any Anyway, uh, you know, maybe there's that one weird class in college where somebody talked about it, but that's about it. So realizing that, oh, we need to have emotional intelligence, we need to have, have that, it's not possible. And the more global we are, the more you need it.

It's—

our world is expanding. You're gonna— you are more likely now in a regular job to end up meeting 10 different cultures In one without you, you take one job and never leave that company and you'll interact with more cultures than anybody would have 30 years ago in their life, right? They could have, they could have lived in suburban America and never seen anyone that didn't look, talk, act exactly like them. That was totally possible. But now, like you're talking about millennials, is that what we're calling the newest generation? Like they're like—

Gen Z.

I've been, I've been watching TikTok with people in Nigeria and every other country my whole life. Like, that's not— it's a whole new look.

Yeah, I think when I was a kid in elementary school, we might have a pen pal and you might write to someone that you never knew or saw and said, hey, I'm an American student and maybe you're an African student. That was the exchange. But now it's high-fidelity video in real time where they're actually playing video games and gamifying with each other and The interactions that they're doing are different than the generations before in terms of just direct involvement with cultural differences and access globally. So yeah, I think empathy is huge. I think we don't want to make it all shiny and bright. I think there are some consequences to technology. People do feel more isolated, even though we're more connected. We do still feel isolated. And we, we have this media connection, but we may not have that personal connection.

Right.

And so we're seeing, you know, in the midst of some of the research that was happening with the displacement and students not in school, that many of our youth were having an increase in suicidal ideation. And we saw rates going anywhere from 30 up to 70% of our students are thinking about, you know, just kind of losing hope and not understanding how to process such a huge global event such as a pandemic. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's not just once in a lifetime, it's almost once in a century or 1,000 years type of thing. We're talking about similar situations, you have to go back to like the Black Plague, or you have to go back to the Spanish flu. They don't usually Not many generations experience what we just did. And so there's kind of this survivorship that we all have now, right? If we've made it through, and how do we reintegrate? How do we reconnect? Yes, we can click a camera on, but do we really understand the pains and sufferings that, that people have disparate experiences with that? Many may have lost family members, others may not have really been impacted that month. It really just depends on— where they live, their lifestyle, and, you know, how that, how that experience went. Not everyone had a common experience with the pandemic, and many are facing trauma. We're seeing a lot of unsheltered homelessness, seeing increases in mental health. And so there's a huge need and investment. Some workforce trends, since we're talking about workforce and economics a little bit here, is really in California there's been some really interesting work. They passed a bill doing what's called mental health peer counseling. And so we're really hopeful for that to be kind of a new career path where individuals who maybe have experienced mental health impacts, maybe they have a diagnosis or they've been through that journey themselves, can come back and help folks that are maybe in current crisis where family members or physicians or psychiatrists or social workers may not be able to give them that kind of direct support about, hey, I've lived this, This is difficult. Here's some things that were like more lived.

Empathy.

Yes, the empathy and understanding and the connection to that common experience is really important for health and for mental health. And that goes back to sustainability. Definitely, we all learned a lot about resilience. And so now it's, you know, how do we take the lessons that we've learned And some of the impacts of learning loss over the last 2 years, some of the setbacks. You see signs now, you know, be patient with us, we're understaffed, and—

Right.

A real need to get people to reengage. But I think as we kind of recover from this, and we are really emerging into a whole new realm of live and work and work and travel and travel and learn, and, you know, The doors open up, especially after having many of the borders closed during the pandemic. And, you know, the world's not a perfect place either right now. There's still a lot of humanitarian need. We have a war going on in Ukraine between Russia. So there's still the human nature aspect of all of this.

Yeah, we're still humans.

Yes, we're still human at the end of it. And so there's— technology is not going to solve our imperfections as humans. But the real nice thing about humans is that we're also very caring, compassionate, and we do have the ability to be empathetic. And I think right now, as we see impacts in Europe with— they're saying this is one of the largest refugee impacts in history, where we have millions of people displaced.

Wow.

And this isn't the first time. We've gone through this through multiple wars and histories of wars. And so the question really is to raise consciousness, like you're saying, conscious design. And are we thinking about others when we're designing? Are we thinking about how our— what our nation values and what our businesses value and what we as individuals value? And I really believe that it's about, you know, brotherly love and care and compassion. We can make really meaningful impact and change, but it does take some intention and some thought and really getting down to— trying to understand the world, not as we know it or experience it, but try to also understand it from others' diverse points of view and historical points of reference and the impacts that are real for them in terms of generational wealth distribution and power distribution. And so there's a great ability to be quite disruptive with technology. And we've said before, like—

Right.

in Egypt, right? They had their Green Revolution. And so I think there's still opportunities, and I think there are murmurs and clear indications of social transitions that we're in. And so for us at Global Urban Nomads, we want to be able to provide people the freedom to express themselves virtually, remotely, but in creative and caring, compassionate ways, and really try to carry that mission forward that You know, we can connect with each other even through our differences, and we can create, you know, a more caring and compassionate global community. And that could really resonate in ways that we haven't yet imagined. You know, since World War II, we have pretty much static nations for the most part. There hasn't been a lot of transition in, you know, geopolitical borders and things like that, but you almost have this weird an interesting overlay of this kind of technocratic, decentralized tribalism of different people connecting in different ways on different interests and different organizations. And it's mind-boggling to even try to put your head around the diverse points of view that how people come together, but there needs to be a public square and an opportunity to have those exchanges.

Yeah, that's a good point. We don't really Borders haven't changed, but we're— I feel like it's almost we're redefining what a border means. And now the border is which tech stack do you use?

Right.

And which— which— when do you have internet is the first— is the first border. And then the next one is which tech are you in? Are you— are you in Facebook? Are you in Instagram? Are you— are you— which social media platform do you use? Are you iPhone or Android? Like, that's— those are our borders now. And it's It seems like in, in how we operate and who we're— because it really defines who we're now spending a lot of our time on, right? Digitally, it's, well, I can, I can FaceTime you if I'm on an iPhone, but if you're not, then I can't really FaceTime you. So then you have to get a weird app. And then are you a Zoom person? Do you use a computer and not even a phone? Like, what, what is your— what does your world look like that way? And that's— It's really kind of Defining, which I find is interesting. And there's still, there's still new ones. Like you mentioned Clubhouse earlier, like there's still, it's not a completely full space. We're still seeing new— TikTok came out, that made huge changes. Clubhouse came out as a whole new thing of your voice only. Now we're— now people are thrown off. They're like, whoa, no, no video.

Yeah.

But now people with slower internet, Can use that. So that's— it's shifting those boundaries, which is interesting. It's very interesting to watch how we're very organically growing and trying out new things.

Right.

And the other thing you mentioned too is impact, like, and that's a huge part of conscious design that I'm putting out there as much as possible. The real root of conscious design is be aware of your impact. Like, that's, that is how you have conscious design. That's how you create anything consciously is look at what are the impacts? How are you going to impact? And are you okay with the impact that you're going to make? Is it better than it was, or is this a negative one? Do you need to work on that? Does it, do you need to make some changes? And that, I think people are, you know, I'm putting out the idea of conscious design as much as I can, but it's also. companies that have been doing it. There are companies that are doing it. There are people doing it. And I think it's that nobody's been really calling it to attention in a strong way, what that looks like and that it's working, right? You can have the people, planet, and be profitable. It may be last, but you can have all 3. You can do that. And that's been something I've been seeing is that there's this shift towards Not just, you know, it's not just somebody going off and saying, oh, it needs to be sustainable only, or it needs to be social impact, but we're only going to do a nonprofit because nonprofit is the only way to make social impact. And now people are starting to shift over and they go, well, why don't we just be profitable and be nice to people? How about, how about we just, how about we just do that? I think that might be a good idea. And I feel like that's happening more and more. And it's also the self-discovery part, right? What you're talking about of reeducating of, well, who am I? What do I want to do? And asking those questions will allow you to go be nice to people because you're happy where you're at instead of stuck somewhere you hate, which is never good.

Absolutely. I agree with you on the impact. You know, obviously almost every organization could go back to those UN sustainability goals and figure out Which one am I impacting? It's very clear on how they measure those, and those can be reported up to the UN. And so organizations can take a very intentional, conscious design about, hey, we're going to provide products and services, but we're also going to report out our impact as well. You're seeing emergent business designs like B Corporations, which are called benefit corporations. They are for-profit, but they make a certain commitment to a charter and a business practice around impact. And so you're creating a for-profit impact. Now, nonprofit's not the only way, of course, like you said, to make that impact. So those are some of the interesting trends that you're seeing around the sustainability efforts in organizations for sure these days. So I think that we're kind of on the cusp of, you know, recognizing— this is what I would say— any workforce, any economy, any exchange in in economic terms is basically solving a problem.

Right.

So you have to solve someone's problem. If you're a plumber, you're solving plumbing problems. If you're a lawyer, you're solving legal problems. If you're a teacher, you're solving learning problems. You know, any job that anyone would take or anything that they would do, even if it's a product, it's still solving a problem. If you're a person that makes, you know, cups that get sold at fast food restaurants, that solves the problem of how do I hold a liquid and drink it, right? And so products and services, no matter what they are, they all— common denominator is what problem am I solving? And so when you think about skills-based education and skills-based learning approaches, especially creating a 10-year plan, for instance, about where you want to be in 10 years, that might be 2 or 3 careers in 10 years. But what skills do you want to pursue? And what kind of problems do you— would you like? Some people like really complex systems problems. Some people like policy problems. Some people like financial problems. Some people like mortgages, and they solve that puzzle for folks. Some people like to impart knowledge, you know, and you're actually solving the problem of sharing insights, learning knowledge around, hey, how are we more conscious in our design? And so design is actually solving problems, right? It's, it's form-function that has to be clarified when we're actually solving the problem of solving problems, right?

That's what design is. Yes, yes. Yeah, you have to solve the problem of how to solve the problem, and then you can solve the problem. That's all. It's not a one-step process. It takes, it takes some effort.

Yeah. So those are, I think, the things that we're looking at Post-pandemic. I think it's time that we are more hopeful. I think we can look back and say, hey, we're resilient, we have survivorship. There is a unique global experience now. And this is the truth. And if you travel as a remote digital native, or even a virtual, you know, native, and you pop on the line, I can ask any person now on this planet, hey, how did your experience go during COVID-19? And they will tell you their lived experience, it will be unique to them. but it will be a shared experience that everyone on this planet has. And that is a connection point that really brings us to brotherly love, right? That like, hey, we all suffered this in different ways. But we can carry that concern and empathy with one another. And then that allows us to really have more rich conversations, whether it be around conscious design, sustainability, entrepreneurship, or just day-to-day conversations and connecting with people like friends and caring for them as they go through changes, because COVID didn't stop you know, all the other negative impacts that people experience, you know.

And no, no, it didn't, it didn't pause everything. It paused some things, but not everything. Not everything.

Yeah. So people, um, I think the human experience for myself, it's one of imperfection, right? It is one of being humble, and humility is huge. And it's ironic that we don't pause and think that those words actually root core as human, right? Humility, is human. Humbleness is— and if we live long enough, we will eventually, you know, kind of lose that Superman thought or that invincibility thought that we may have in our early developmental stages. And eventually we come to realize that, hey, most of us are going to have to learn to be resilient through suffering, learn to be resilient through loss, not fearful of it, and actually brave enough to fail, right? Because that's really what entrepreneurship is, is to test and fail, to test and fail until you can actually find a workable solution. And it's not take a test and it gives you the right answers and it's, you know, C, all the above, or, you know, I want to choose option A. That's not how, you know, the work really happens. So there's a little bit of disconnection between, you know, traditional education where we do exams and quizzes and we do knowledge acquisition, which is really linguistic development. to actual skills-based, which we use those linguistic skills. But fundamentally, there are actionable behaviors, right, what we call competencies or performatives that people need to learn. And some people are really proficient at it. Like, you know, some people can, you know, ride a motorcycle and do triple backflips on that thing. I wouldn't even start to try to practice because I don't want to take the first crash.

Nope, nope, I'm good. I'm good. I'll stay on the ground. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, it's Ian here. So glad you're enjoying this episode of Conscious Design. If you want the full scoop on Conscious Design, what it is, how we do it, how you can do it, then check out our book. We wrote it so creative entrepreneurs like you can code social and environmental responsibility right into your brand's DNA. You can download the first chapter for free. Link is in the description. Enjoy the rest of the episode. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and share. Yeah, it's an interesting— it's an interesting world we live in right now, for sure. And we're, we're still unpacking. We're unpacking it. But, you know, things like what you guys are working on is, you know, helping give that guidance of let's, let's take everything that we've learned. We've experienced it. It's all— it's been traumatic. We acknowledge it and Let's move forward in a way that makes things better long-term. And I think, I think having, having a bit of a timeout for us all gave us enough time where we're like, we should improve things. Actually, we should. Let's, let's do that. And now, now there's more and more people going, yeah, let's, let's make this better. Let's, let's improve. Let's figure out what we want to do. And maybe that's not a 9 to 5 at a factory. Maybe there's something else you want to do that you're You're way happier at it. Or maybe you do, you do want to sit in a factory and make the same shoe over and over again because you're okay with it. Like, that's your— you're like, oh, that's totally fine. I'm gonna go, I do stuff on the weekend. That's, that's fine for me. Exactly.

So you're a musician and you really just go to work so you can play in the band on the weekends, right?

Exactly.

I think what we probably learned the most is the importance of relationships and how important social engagements really are for us and our mental health and our community. and our need, our need for connection, connectedness, and our need for belongingness and inclusion. It was really, really clear that it wasn't great to be isolated like that and to have a, you know, limited social engagement.

Right.

I think that was probably the big— biggest awakening. So yeah, I think now as we come out and we reengage and we rebuild community, I'm really hopeful that it's— that we do kind of dissolve these false boundaries that we create that, you know, because we're different, we have to be apart, rather than because we're different, it's interesting, and I'd like to learn more, right? It's a totally different way of approaching it.

So— Yeah.

I think we can gain by sharing our differences and not othering each other, right? And seeing that way, hey, fundamentally, we are all of one human race, definitely different experiences, Culturally, racially, economically, and such. But at the end of the day, there is a common core and connection that we are, in fact, in my belief, one family. And so if we act accordingly and we, and we don't think in terms of fear or of, you know, we really recognize that the, the universe's nature is both generative and regenerative, even though at the same time it's Degenerative through entropy, right? All that's quite weird.

It's got to do both. It's a circle.

It's a circle, right? Yeah, circular economy is a big conversation, right? And that's about conscious design too. So what happens with the waste in your process? Can it be an input to another process? Ecologically speaking, that's really how the universe and nature works. It doesn't waste any energy. It just transfers.

There's no waste.

Yeah, so how do we—

waste is a human idea.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I agree. I have to rethink how, how we understand our concepts of waste and whether or not we see value in even the exchange of what we would discard, whatever that might be.

Well, I— yeah, as a crazy example, I saw— I don't know if you've ever seen pictures of like aircraft or ship graveyards as just, you know, acres and acres, thousands of airplanes just sitting there. And if you were to like— and it's treated as garbage, like, well, it technically costs too much to like recycle and break it down, I guess, is the theory. But at the same time, if somebody found that much steel sitting on their land one day, They'd be like, I'm gonna sell this, let's use it, why would I not use it? And in nature it'd be like, well, it's gonna get reused anyway. So like, just the fact that we have this idea of it's too expensive to recycle is kind of a weird, weird concept. Well, what's the actual cost, right? What's the cost of not using all that material? It's already— it's a nice steel, it works, it's— there's nothing wrong with it, you just gotta melt it again and reuse it. But yeah, it's just, just such a human concept of let's have a trash heap and then leave it alone and not, not figure out how to make it useful. So yeah, I think it's, it's great that people are starting to fall out of that and go, let's use, let's use that. And there's— I've talked to more and more companies who are like, oh yeah, we figured out how to use this industrial waste and now we're making a product out of it. And it's useful, right? So it's—

Right.

It's happening.

That's where your conscious design comes into place from the beginning, thinking about what happens to the tailings and the waste and where do they go in for next inputs. It's really pivoting from just pure economic supply and demand exchange of value and to really a more systemic or systems-based thinking around ecologies. And that's really at the heart of sustainable conversations. It's recognizing that everything is an integrated whole. And it's really sometimes about periods of time that we experience things because we might create more waste or we might create effects in terms of CO2 emissions that can change the climate. Well, the long term is that the planet will figure it out for us. It's not really like Partial to whether humans exist or whether cows exist.

No, it'll be fine.

It'll be just fine.

Yeah, yeah, that was— somebody else was like, yeah, the Earth will be just fine. It will figure out how to remove the problem. So the, the solution for us is to not be the problem so that it's still hospitable for us to be here.

Yeah, it's an existential problem for us but not for the planet per se. So the planet may just try to correct if we can't really learn to coexist with nature and with each other socially? I think that's really the heart of it.

Yeah.

How equitable and how much can we share? I think there's these false beliefs around scarcity in certain economic terms that there's not enough, and therefore that's where value comes, and that's where money and power of exchanges come into play. But fundamentally, very simple to see nature in its terms, which is you could put a seed in the ground, it's going to create a tree, and every season that tree is going to produce thousands and thousands of seeds.

Right.

That is not scarce, right? And how many trees produce fruit that we never pick or never utilize? And how efficient are we actually in reaping much of the generative value of our planet? And You know, taking—

I'd say we're pretty terrible at it.

Pretty terrible at this point, but hopefully there will be a greater consciousness to that and greater learning. You know, I think there's some traditional ways that could be brought forward. You know, we tend to like— I'm not just— this is my own bias. I'm a technocrat, right? I grew up with a computer and I've worked on computers and digital skills my whole life. I tend to think of myself as a techie. I'm in education. I've taught online. I've traveled teaching online. I know I've worked in digital service and government, creating big technological projects to solve problems like taxation and education effectiveness. And at the end of the day, there's just some things that I don't know about, like, you know, how to plant an effective crop that would actually feed my neighbor, right? So I don't have that essential skill of just like managing that most basic need. And I think if we really can understand even from second and third world countries, which are more maybe agrarian-based or maybe closer to not having that kind of pure techie mindset, we can get back to some more kind of global understandings about technology is just a tool, right? And nobody worships their shovel, right?

But there is— Not that I know of.

Not that I know of, right? But some of us tend to, and I do at times think that technology is this great solver of all things. But in the end, it's, you know, how do you, how do you use that shovel? Is it just sitting in the shed, or is it out there in the field? And, you know, are you trying to use the right tool in the right ways to create and maximize that harvest for folks?

Right. Yeah, I think that's a great example tool, right? If you give somebody a toothpick and tell them to dig a hole, it's not going to work out too well. They need a shovel. They need a shovel. They need something that's gonna actually work. And I, and I would totally agree. We've reached this— we all believe that tech is great and must be able to solve, right? Every— and especially living in LA, so many people are like, I'm gonna solve it with an app.

Yes.

Like, well, I don't know about that. I don't think you can solve everything with an app. I think, I think there's some, some problems we need to solve in ways that an app just Can't, can't do it for us. It does lots of cool things, but maybe not everything. So I think, yeah, that's, that's a— I see more and more startups too coming up with like agriculture, regenerative farming, things like that. We're like, hey, let's focus on, you know, making better crops and not destroying the land while we do it so that we all can have more food and do it nicely and things like that. So it's starting to, and hopefully, hopefully. as a species, we really pick it up and start looking at those things as well as, you know, don't— I'm not a don't get rid of tech person. We need— the tech is good. I like my Wi-Fi. I like being able to do the things I do, but I think we can do it in a much more sustainable and holistic way. Like you've been talking about, it's everything. We're all in this really big ecosystem and we like to silo things. And that's, you know, even in corporate structures, we used to far more silo Engineering never talked to marketing and we saw how that worked. So I think this general theme of desiloing everything and realizing that we aren't— you can't put anything in a bubble because that bubble is still, it's still here. We're all, we're all, we're all still here. So you just have a bunch of bubbles in the space. You're, you're still an ecosystem of some kind. You just are pretending that you're not. And that's, that's how we got here.

So that's where unintended consequences come in. If we're not communicating, we're siloed, we might end up doing something great for this bubble, but it's impacting the other bubble in another way. I think Cabrera, he's a theorist around systems thinking and he broken it down into some different basic things: distinction, relationships, patterns, and, and DS and systems. Yeah. So distinction, distinction, systems, relationships, and pattern. That's his DSRP model.

The distinction is what you're talking about.

When I say I'm a man and not a woman, or I say I'm for-profit or not-profit, in the end, those are just distinctions semantically that we make so that we can linguistically express ourselves. And so we are making difference to make meaning, right? And, but those meanings don't actually devolve the fact that everything is integrated. And so decisions that get made in economic terms or political terms or social terms or racial terms, you know, those are just modes of thinking and that the degree at which we're adapting what lens we're looking through. I mean, I always liked this as a kid. Do you remember those red things you'd stick to your eyes and you'd click it and the picture would change?

Yes! I showed my kids them and they're like, what in the world is this thing? This is video.

This is internet. This was the original internet web browser.

Look up an animal, you got to get the right card out and look at it. There you go. There it is.

So, you know, that viewfinder sense of thinking of the world, like, am I clicking through all the various views that are available? You know, the technocratic view, the social view, the, you know, and I think having those abilities to have flexible perspectives gives us the opportunity to have empathy because we can realize, hey, I'm not actually Seeing the whole picture or understanding it from another point of view.

Right. Yeah, I think that's a good— that's a good, good reference only millennials will get, but we'll, we'll take it. We can— we, we'll know what we're talking about. Um, amazing. Um, well, this, this has been a really great conversation. I think we've covered so much in, in this, and I think it's, it's all— it's also related. I think that's And as an example of how we're all in an ecosystem, you know, we can't really talk about one of these things without really talking about the whole picture, and we can't bubble, bubble things. And that's it. Hopefully that's the takeaway that everyone gets, is this bubble mentality needs to go away. You want to think about your career or say sustainability, like they all, they're all together. Like you cannot isolate it. And, and we shouldn't, and we can make better decisions, you know, like you just mentioned, we can make better decisions and not negatively impact other people accidentally without— if we're not aware of it. So yeah, this is— this has been amazing talking to you. I appreciate you taking time out of your day to do this. And for anybody who's wanting to connect with you guys, work with you, And how— what's the best way to find you guys and start working with you?

Absolutely. So our website is, uh, www.globalurbannomads.org, and you can of course reach out to me. I have a pretty great LinkedIn profile, so I'm of the generation that really liked LinkedIn. Yeah, but I need to get across that bubble. So if you're on Instagram, teach me how to Dougie, and like, let's figure out how we can connect kind of the LinkedIn bubble, which is all those people who can help us get into roles of responsibility, as well as kind of the Instagrams who are like really the creatives and they're trying to push those limits of what's possible for digital entrepreneurship. And let's try to break down those filter bubbles that we all live in and really embrace diversity, equity, inclusion, be mindful of our need for sustainability, and really appreciate each other for our resilience in surviving something that is really once in a few generations type of experience where, you know, We live this together. We know how important it is to have a human experience. And so we really can be compassionate, caring, and loving for one another, no matter what our backgrounds are. So I really do welcome you to connect with us. And we're really just looking to build a community of leaders around the globe who wanna make positive impact and change. That's really fundamentally our mission. So come join us and be part of the collective and—

Awesome.

help us connect and make change.

Amazing. Amazing. Well, thank you so much and have a good one.

Thanks, Ian.

I appreciate your time.