Well, GMGM. I think we're all set up. South Horn.
Thanks for joining us. Once up, once up. Great to hear your voice again. Yeah, it's been a while. Yeah, how things been post permissionless. I actually
I feel like post permission list, there's been so much that happened. Good and bad. So I would say overall going really well. It's been really busy trying to rebuild out some talent out functions. I'm trying to delegate more.
There's a lot of work I've done in the past that I have been building teams around so that I can step away and have more personal time. So I've been focused on that, Aynley. Yeah, it's brilliant. It's so hard I've gotten as a part of the founders.
journey to strike that balance of supporting the early days of a community and an adventure as well as trying to find that way to
step back and allow it to grow on its own terms. You step too far back and they're like, "Where'd you go?" And you lean in too much and it's like there's no room to express itself. It's always a dance. Great. Yeah, exactly. I always joke that the best start off at
as benevolent dictatorships and then you progressively decentralize from there. I've been in Dallas that have started centralized and started completely decentralized. Unless you have an operating model and suggested plan ahead of time,
It's kind of chaotic trying to create structure around a structuralist group. So I started relatively centralized when I first started talent out. Yeah, yeah, it's a challenge
either way, you know, and yeah, definitely the ones that are fully decentralized, like any amount of growth, you know, immediately breaks everything, and it feels awful. But yeah, the other way around, you know, for the ones that I'm
I'm in that are a little more centralized than, you know, sobel and sobel's community starts that way too. And, you know, I just, I get, I get this is like this one sometimes the thing that keeps me up at night is like, how does this actually progressively decentralize to the vision? It was a good and get there. So yeah.
All right, well, I see folks gathering Simon Adam Rowan. Thank you for joining us. And so we've got cell phone today. And yeah, we're going to try to walk through a number of different topics. I think it's, you know, a couple minutes past the hour. So maybe we'll get started and we'll do sort of the classic intro.
game. And so I handed over to you to sort of say, hey, Salthorn, tell us a little bit about yourself, but also tell us about your story of coming into the space. I think that's always really interesting to
get a sense of the origin story of folks and how they've arrived here and how that brought you to places like Banclistow and the founding moments of talentow. So feel free to give us a bit of a story and we'll use that as a means to kind of jump off into our topic today around, you know, how is talentow, you know, making research better?
through those open and inclusive natures of a doubt. So over to you, how'd you arrive here? Totally. So my sort of professional background is in organizational psychology and data science.
So I spent the better half of the last decade doing applied research in organizations, a lot of org design, a lot of governance, a lot of employee engagement research and sort of coaching and well-being. So I had had like a pretty sort of familiar
professional experience with building traditional organizations and then you know there's certainly been trends over the last five to ten years within traditional structures on how to decentralize and go faster but gals were kind of the big unlock for that. I got into crypto
As sort of a tourist and like curious person back in like 2017 like I saw Bitcoin take off and Panic sold like a lot of rookies during that time but stuck with it stayed around during sort of the bear period and then into
2021 when everything kind of picked up again. I had been a bankless member, subscriber to the newsletter, and had gotten an email that they were starting to Dow. And I just thought that was so neat. So over that weekend, I think I had binge content
on what the fuck a doubt was and like, you know, who is involved in this space and kind of what they're doing. And I was very intrigued and for me it just made sense instantly because I think a lot of the problems douse aspire to solve. I don't know if we've solved it yet. But a lot of
the problems down as aspired to solve are the same frustrations that I had in traditional workplaces because as a work scientist like you do all this really cool research and like in theory you're like oh this is how it should be in theory but in practice it's actually rarely that way and it usually doesn't work out and it's frustrating.
So I got really excited about the promise of dowels. I dived right in, joined Bancliffe's. I think they launched in May and I joined in June. And I was one of the very early contributors there and it's been crazy to see how much they've grown since then. I mean, there's hundreds of contributors
I can't keep up, but I knew around the first 50 or so and it was a really magical time to sort of jump into a new industry. I had done it part time for a few months and then back in September of 2021, I
I quit my job that I was working at. I was previously at a big consulting firm doing R&D. I never look back. I've been freelance full-time in Web 3 ever since. Getting mostly paid in crypto. I've had to navigate how to set up your own business and how to process crypto
And yeah, it's just been super exciting. Talent Dow, I started maybe like four months into my banclist journey. I think, you know, what's been really awesome about banclists is it really gave me a crash course on the philosophies of Dow's
it really helped me build my social capital in this space and just made it to where doing a soft launch for talent now has been just a really smooth process. And it's given me freedom to try and experiment on different things that the consequences
of screwing up something on a discord server with like 700 people versus experimenting at the enclis where there might be you know 20,000 people the consequences are a bit lower so I tend to experiment with governance to talent out and then when we find things that work I often
take them back to Banquist and suggest them. So that's kind of like the high level. I'm happy to go more into Talent Dow, but you know, we talent down has been around for about 10 months now and then I've been actively in Dallas for I guess about 15 or 16 months now.
Yeah, that's a I got you're creating flashbacks for me and and and a smile across my face. You know, just those early those early days, you know, at bankless in the season zero phase and also just really resonating with
sort of being drawn to dows around the challenges observed in Trad Corp work and like your background in the big consulting world doing R&D around work or work science. Let's spend some time on that. I love this term
work scientist, what does it mean to be a work scientist and what did you feel and observe that has led to an inspiration, you know, douse looking inspiring. So yeah, what's a work scientist? Totally. So work science,
specifically the field and the field like really needs a rebrand but it's called industrial organizational psychology It's been around for about a hundred years as you can imagine Industrial psychologists got kind of their big break during the Industrial Revolution so back in like World War II
The ASFAB for military wasn't actually a thing and the military came to org psychologists and said, "Hey, we need to hire 10,000 people. We don't know what job descriptions they should have. We don't know what their role should be and we don't know how to place them. We don't know how to rank them."
The organization of psychologists came along and said, "Okay, we will build you a selection system that assesses the different things that you want your employees to have and have some sort of equitable way to assign those job positions." That's what we're really known for is job selection research and personality assessment and stuff like that.
Since then, the field of worksike has expanded into a lot of different things. I think the easiest way to explain it is all of the systems in HR that should work are typically designed by I/O psychologists, but they're not necessarily the ones practiced
So, like if HR is the one that performs COMP systems, there may have been an org site group that got hired to design that COMP system before it was implemented. I think the difference between sort of this I/O psychologist or what I'll just call work scientists going for it is
We are trained in the scientific method. So when we ask a question about an organization, you know, a traditional management consultant, you know, they might do focus groups or interviews, they might look at market research and then they kind of put
together like a very kind of opinionated semi-informed perspective and it's not a wrong perspective often but it's typically not an empirically validated perspective. There's no experimentation that's been done. There's no sort of exploration
of any sort of cause and effect relationships. And I think that's what really separates us from the rest of the management consulting pack is that, you know, if you have some sort of abstract construct or concepts, you want to try to measure an organization and you want to like experiment to see if
If you're crazy idea, it actually does improve productivity or it actually does reduce burnout or something like that. We can help you with that. We can actually do that experiment. We can tell you how to design it. It's just a much more robust approach to
applied consulting. And I guess like that might be a good transition into talent thou somewhat is, you know, I think there's a lot of communities aspiring to do like governance research and, you know, understand how douse work. And I think
I think what separates us is we have a very strong work science professional background both on the core team but also within the discord server. I'm kind of a nobody on Twitter but I actually have a pretty decent following on LinkedIn and when I told people I was going to build a DAO.
You know, several hundred of my IO psychologist contacts hopped in the server from day one. So like we're pretty stacked with like gigabrains like most IO site people are very nerdy and they're kind of dorks, but we're good at what we do. And I think
Yeah, that's that's kind of work science in a nutshell That's awesome and yeah, thanks for telling it in because I think that's that's exactly what I'm curious about is you know, how does this How how can Dow's
benefit from this in the sense of like how are they similar and you know to tribe corpse and in can benefit from You know work science and supportive work science and then how are cows completely different and like how is that influencing How y'all approaching it at talent doubt?
Yeah, great question. So like this is probably like the question that we got most excited about starting talent out because For the last hundred years we have all this scientific knowledge about all these different things we think work in traditional companies and we have like all these theories about how people think and feel and and in
no performance work, and we sort of have to challenge all of those assumptions now. So for the last year, like we've been trying to do that, we've been exploring like what theories apply and we've been doing our own original basic research, and I've come to the conclusion about a few things. So one, I think a lot of the
Organizational problems that traditional companies have exist and douse. The biggest one that comes to mind is decision rights and governance strangely enough. So, you know, in a traditional organization, they struggle with
They don't know who's making decisions about what and they don't really know who needs to make those decisions or what decisions need to be made. So that's like often referred to as decision rights in org design. And what's great about that is
Dallas provides a solution to that. Dallas has a more readily available solution, but they still struggle with that same foundational problem.
Similarity is retention. So, you know, I think Gows has a lot of sort of high performing people that are comfortable working at ambiguity. They're self-directed. They might have entrepreneurial tendencies.
It's easy for those type of people to give it their all and get burnt out and Essentially not take rest when they should have and that's very common in traditional companies too. So retention and burnout definitely a fear to rate
There's a few others, but those are probably the two that are most interesting. What's more interesting to me though is the differences and the differences that I've seen so far is probably around selection.
traditional work science there's this concept of it's called the ASA model attraction selection attrition and the idea is that organizations naturally attract the type of people that fit within their culture and then they select those people
And then there's natural attrition over time because people that weren't a good fit as it turns out, they leave. So there's kind of this natural employee cycle that takes place. And Dow's, there's really no S. The S is kind of missing. It's really just attraction and
nutrition. And it's because you have these sort of permissionless work environments where, you know, to use like the big tech companies as an example, like let's just assume all the fangs are down. It's like if I want to go work at Google on a Monday and meta on a Tuesday and then Apple on a Wednesday, I can do that, right?
that's how DAO's operate. Whereas traditional organizations I would be doing interviews and assessments and take home tests and all this crap. Whereas with a DAO it's pretty much just you start doing the work and you get a realistic job preview of what that work is.
is. And there's like two really big implications for that. So the first one is employees now have more career mobility than ever at any point in history. You know, they can move laterally, they can switch different companies
they can get experience with a particular roller skill set across multiple sort of sub sector industries within crypto, like the promise of career growth and mobility because it does is huge. The second big implication is for our work scientists actually.
You know, I said at the beginning that employee selection has kind of been like our bread and butter for the majority of our existence and now we have this new work environment where we might not have traditional selection systems anymore. You know, I think people still need
to have some sort of way to make decisions about who gets a job, but it's much more democratic and almost more of a government style, a selection process like you would with the public official. So I think that's got really big implications. One of my co-founders, he's actually a special
and selection and personality research and you know it's just really fascinating what is that research even look like if we're not going to have formal selection systems anymore in DAO's. I think another big difference is around leadership style
And this one's a bit more nuanced because traditional organizations are certainly not unfamiliar with the concept of decentralized leadership. They're not unfamiliar with the idea of sort of inspiring leadership, empathetic leadership, more of kind of the people focused
rather than like a task focused hierarchical leader. But the problem is that being that type of leader in an org structure that has a lot of corporate politics and hierarchy embedded in it, it just doesn't work. There's a lot of resistance. So with Dow's,
It's much easier to be a decentralized leader because you can empower other groups and because you have all these tokenized ways of making decisions, it's just much easier to delegate and empower other people to make decisions. I call this concept
autonomous work structures. The idea is when I build a team, I try to make it an autonomous work structure. That basically means that that work can continue regardless if there's a leader or not, they're in power, they have the resources, they need, they have clear
goals, and there's a shared purpose on that team. And I think that we've tried to do that in traditional works and have just failed miserably because of just the natural sort of centralized leadership that naturally forms in traditional companies who's just unavoidable.
Wow, yeah, there's a lot to impact there. This is awesome. And so this is why I'm so excited and happy to have you here. The you know, the decision rights one fascinating the ASA model and selection being so significantly soft.
and if not removed in DOWS and the implications for the field of work science is just particularly interesting for me. And now just like this other meaty topic of leadership in DOWS and what does that mean? And autonomous teams, I don't even know which direction
go next. So apologies for like verbally explaining my own headspin because I'm just like excited about all these different topics. I feel like in the interest of trying to, I really want to kind of auger into the unique value that talent thou is incubating.
And kind of go into that opportunity/challenge that you're bringing forward of, huh, if we started our field predominantly focusing on selection and how to find, you know, in a world where there's a hierarchy,
place and we can select, and there are gatekeepers, then you want to be really good at that because if you're making bad decisions, I mean this is actually true to the leadership one too, but like in general, in a hierarchy where you're centralizing power, that power better be making great decisions otherwise the outcome is incredibly unproductive.
And so, you know, of course that would focus in on selection. But like, so what, how is this influencing talent-doub's research? Because you're leaning into this opportunity and you're saying, okay, that's, that's softening or disappearing. So what do we need to do research around to help douse, be effective?
because at the end of the day that's why corpse were focusing on selection. We're like, "Hey, that's our decision making mechanics and our power structure, so let's lean into making that effective. What do dowsen need to do to be effective?" And how's this question influencing your research? Or tell me it isn't and tell me what is.
Yeah, totally great question. And then maybe I can kind of answer this and then steer us back towards the whole concept of building more inclusive doubts through research, which I guess just to kind of tack on my previous answer that there is a big difference in DEI between Dallas and traditional companies.
and he's particularly around the initiatives that traditional orgs have done to try to be inclusive versus really the passive ways that dals are inclusive by nature, but we'll get more into that. So I think the major opportunity for dals and let me back up.
I think Dow's need to be effective a couple different ways.
One, they need to have a shared purpose. Two, there needs to be sort of complementary skill sets.
And then I also think there needs to be a certain amount of, some people might call it cultural diversity. I might call it cross-cultural intelligence.
this idea that if you're really truly aspiring to be like a digital nation state or this whole network state concept that biology kind of ran with,
If you want to be a borderless work nation, then you're going to have people from different parts of the world. So you're going to have to get competent on different cultures. And I'm not just talking about like, "Oh, I have a black friend or oh, I have a woman friend."
about like some cultures it might be rude to shake hands. In some cultures they want public praise and recognition whereas in others like if you call somebody out even if you're praising them like that they don't like that. It's disrespectful. It's uncomfortable. So like there's all these nuances between like South American culture and South
these Asia and Chinese or Indian culture. I don't think US business people as a Western dominant culture, we're not really used to navigating those nuances.
If we look at our discord stats, it's something like 40% of our server doesn't identify as being in the US. So we are a relatively global community, especially for our size. I work in some other dials that are 95%
percent US demographic. So I think like people are going to have to learn how to be cross culturally competent and that really kind of gets at the heart of building these inclusive teams. And then I would say the last one is we haven't really
sort of automated the social protocol of running a doubt. And what I mean by that is there's a lot of off-chain decisions that people are making that can be or should be on-chain automated governments decisions.
And the reason we haven't done that yet is because, you know, Dallas got started as financial protocols and it's much easier to automate, you know, money or financial decisions than it is sort of human social decisions. I really like the perspective
from Orca that Frog Monkey wrote about Trustware and Socialware. I call it a bit different. I call it the governance layer versus the coordination layer. The governance layer is all the infrastructure and the tools and the platforms you use to make decisions. Whereas the coordination layer is your opposite.
creating model and how you actually go about your work on a daily day basis. And we have those two things just very jumbled up together right now. Even just making a decision in a dial, we're hopping through discord polls and discord forums and then going to snapshot and then at the end of the day most styles don't have that
automated so it's like we got to wait on people for a multi-sig hold, sign transaction anyways and it's just like it's not as efficient as it should be so I think we're going to spend a lot of time figuring out like realistically how many human decisions can we actually automate and put on chain and how many
of those decisions are always going to be a conversation that has to happen. So those are kind of like the four big things and I think for Talindow, we really saw an opportunity to start from scratch in many ways. Certainly we're taking
sort of this body of knowledge with us and that's a big competitive advantage for us to take all that knowledge and have sort of that work science domain expertise. But it's really an opportunity for a fresh start because if you look at the context of when sort of I/O psychology started, it was at the
the peak of the Industrial Revolution, it was at the start of World War II, and it was just a very, by nature, very focused on capitalism and serving the corporate leader. Literally, industrial is in the name of our field, right? It's very, very sort of tradition
capitalistic focus. And it's also dominated with Western European and Western US culture thought leadership, right? So our field is very, very informed by the traditional way of thinking, like the traditional way of operating an economy.
Most of our research is designed at a very cynical basic level. We use research to make you happy about your shitty boss and poor pay. That's what we do. We do our best to figure out how to make you happy at work even though all these other factors are not that happy. With Dallas,
look at the context of when they're starting. We're at a period in our history where most people are burnt out, work life balance is like a huge issue, well-being, there's a mental health crisis in the US, arguably the world. COVID had just happened so like most
of us have been isolated and sort of navigating working remote. So like we have all these like sort of the zeitgeist of the times is just really different. And like we're basically getting to like reset the clock and say okay if we were going to start work science today.
what would the focus be and how would that focus look different from 80 years ago? And I think there's a couple of things that look different and this is really the opportunity. So one, which I've kind of already hinted at, is that we've moved away from this industrial view of capitalism.
to more of a human centered view of capitalism. How do we collectively win? Let's move away from a winner take all of society and how do we make it a winner? Winners take most and make it more distributed. And then there's also
Also, most of the jobs in the past have been on-site. We designed our systems and our research around the assumption that people are working co-located in an office. That's not the case anymore. The future of works remote. So the context of what we're studying.
Virtual teams as a subject used to be its own research domain like you would be a you could be like a oh I'm a work scientist I study teams I specialize in virtual teams People not really say that anymore It's pretty much assumed if you're studying teams their virtual teams. So like that's a big
difference. And then the last one I think is more of just like a philosophical or existential thing, in that people want to be more sovereign. They, you know, we COVID proved to the world that people can get their jobs done without being in an office. And people realize
that they wanted to be sovereign, they liked that flexibility, but they still longed for belongingness. And that's a huge component of, I think, the current zeitgeist of work right now, is that we want to have belongingness. And we weren't really
getting belongingness from corporations, like you just weren't. And then suddenly, enter, you know, start the scene, enter DAO's. And DAO's provide an opportunity to work remote, work fully digital. They provide an opportunity to be self-sauvering.
And they provide an opportunity for belongingness. So, you know, the setting here is most of us have been locked up in our rooms dealing with COVID, working remote for a corporate job, and it's been isolating, and we don't feel like we belong, and we don't have freedom. We're not getting paid well. And then enter Dow,
which is this new context, which kind of meets all these needs, maybe minus the pay, right? Pays a little choppy and dows right now. But it did provide this belongingness and this opportunity for independence. So with that context setting, work science looks so much different over the next 100 years.
Because rather than, okay, how do we staff these positions for the army and how do we be efficient than just this very black and white industrial perspective? Now, as work scientists, we're asking questions that are more
geared towards, okay, how do we make people feel belong? How do we increase well-being in Dallas? How do we make things more inclusive? D.I. research has only been a topic for a handful of years.
nobody was doing DEI research in the early 2000s and certainly not before them. So like just the topics have shifted to be more focused on humans rather than organizations because up until now
We've kind of been the people that we're kind of the bad guys. Most Iocy people get into the field because they want to help people and they want to make work better. But most of us just end up making work better for executives and profit holders and shareholders.
So I think Dow has just provided this opportunity to just completely start from scratch, make our priorities completely different, and make them more people focused. And that's really kind of why I think a lot of the core team that I've put together, like they were just so excited about this opportunity and just like really jumped into building with me.
Wow, yeah, this is amazing and I love the I love some of the themes here of like, you know, basically, you know, focusing on how Dows, if they if they're not focusing on selection can be great attractors.
And what they need to focus on maybe to be great attractors like this is how I'm kind of synthesizing what you're putting down, you know with the we need to attract these complimentary cross functional skills with like cross cultural we have to have cross cultural competencies so we can protect a track like a truly diverse
set of participants, we need to sort of automate these social protocols so that they don't erode and they're enforced whether that's on-chain, but they just need to be efficient and effective regardless.
It's amazing to me and I think like the idea that all of this kind of comes to this concept of like we have an opportunity to be far more people focused and it not be Virtue signaled like you because of what the dynamic that you've laid out here with the you know, hey, maybe our
our field of science has been either the bad guy or has been in tension with this idea that we're frankly here to just make you feel happier about your shitty work experience. I think there's something cool here in Dows that you're laying down which is hey we can get people focused
We can do some real research around the EI and we can start to understand it in this context that isn't trying to figure out how to just make you feel better without really changing anything. And so, and that I guess maybe am I right in assuming that a lot of this is around focusing now on that A in your A and A.
a model of like, okay, how do we attract and avoid unhealthy attrition? Am I getting this right? First of all, before I ask my next question. Yeah, no, you're thinking about it correctly. There's definitely a big focus on attracting the right people
especially when you're building your community initially and kind of getting like those first 100 super fans, I think it's really important to be highly curated and highly selective. Cool. And so as I think I kind of want to like, you know, dive deeper on this,
cross-cultural competency and as it relates to DEI, what's happening in DAO's and you said something earlier that we should circle back on which is like the, a lot of this is in the absence of selection process is trying to be a more implicit process.
So what's happening currently and like maybe if we want to where appropriate get into like, you know, the health of it all and the opportunity to improve health of this. Have I framed this topic? I just wanted to make sure that I was coming back with some of the things that I put a pin in from earlier in the chat.
Yeah, so I think like if I'm understanding correctly, you're sort of asking what is sort of my opinion on the current state of crime.
social confidence in Dallas and then how is talent dial doing that and trying to improve is that like a good rebuttal or response? Yeah, yeah, that's a great way of framing it. Let's start there and go from there.
Cool. So I admit, like I can only really speak to probably three or four dials intimately just because you know I mean a lot of servers but it's hard to be engaged in more than two or three dials but at least it talented out, banklessed out, and lobby three. You know I would say
that our cross-cultural competence is very strong at talent-out. Bankless style, I would say, is above average, but not very strong. And then I would say lobby three is below average. And those rankings are arbitrary, and it's nobody's fault if you're lower
on that, for example, lobby 3 is literally focused on lobbying US politics. Of course, it's going to be more US-centric. That was the one that's 90% of the servers from the US. The dominant perspective there is very familiar to the
the type of people I've interacted with in regular corporations. Whereas, Banclists is more global, so there's definitely a lot of cultural diversity. I think the way Banclists has approached it though is it's less cross-culture and it's more like sub-doubts, right? So there's like Banclists Brazil, Banclists Africa,
And you know, maybe Banclists can get away with that because they are operating on such a larger scale, right? Like there's hundreds of people in Africa that have the capacity to form a stuff that like we don't have hundreds of people in Africa specifically working on talent now. So like for them, it's a bit easier
to get away with siloing. But at smaller dowels, you can't get away with that, right? Like if Tallant dowel, if we decided, oh, we're going to have Banclist South America, because we have some core members from like Chile, okay, well that's like two people. Like that doesn't really make sense to be a sub dowel. So I would say
like the current state of cross-cultural competence is really context dependent on the size of your doubt and the purpose of your doubt. I think bankless being, you know, it aspires to kind of spread this bankless culture and help
people become financially independent, it makes sense that we are always going to be a very culturally diverse town. So the cross-cultural competence that leaders need at Banclistow is probably actually pretty high comparative to a place like Lobby 3. And I think a lot of the existing
financial protocols, definitely lack cultural diversity based on the very little interaction I've had with some of the bigger dowels, like the makers and the compounds of the world. When I look at a high-level list of who their heavy hitters are in terms of founders, big delegates,
big whales, it's mostly white dudes. And like that, that's, it's not your fault if you're born a white dude. Like I certainly sympathize with not being able to control what you're born as, right? But it is your fault if you don't make intentions to try to place diverse
around you. And maybe that's a good spot to kind of transition into what talent does, doing specifically, and like what I specifically do. I'm very intentional. So I'll pause there for a second and then I'll, you know, if you have any questions otherwise I'll jump right into kind of what we're doing.
doing a talent doubt to be more inclusive? Yeah, no, and I think that's great. You know, just to show that there are different approaches depending on the Dow and you know, size of the Dow and in the case of the, you know, the bankless example that you're brought forward. But yeah, I want to understand where you're hinting of going next though.
I think how we can be more intentional and some of the experiments that are happening at Talent Dow, I think is going to be really interesting for folks. So how are you approaching this in a smaller Dow, like Talent Dow, as it's starting and thinking about it from day one?
Yeah, definitely. So I think there's a couple ways. So going back to this ASA model, so attraction, I do think you naturally attract people that share your values and perspectives. So like as like a super progressive, damn near socialist
trans woman, like I have like people, there are certain people that are going to be attracted to that. So like I might have a bit easier of a time attracting a diverse audience than somebody who comes for a more traditional sort of majority demographic, right?
But that's not an excuse for those people, right? So here's what we're doing. We did a very early on, actually, one of the first studies we ever did was a qualitative study with Banclists, actually, on DEI. And we asked like a couple hundred people
How, aside from just getting paid a lot more, how can we make you feel included and what makes you feel excluded? And I read through all those comments and sort of aggregated them into topics and sort of the two biggest things was recognition and praise.
So most people, they wanted to be recognized by their peers. And then the way to be least inclusive is to not ask them their opinion in a conversation. Now what's interesting about both of those is those are very Western
culture answers. I want to be recognized by my peers and I want to get asked my opinion. If you go to certain Eastern cultures, I kind of said this earlier, like some of my friends from Asia, like if you call them out, like if I have a kudos channel and discord, which I'll get to that in a second.
And it's a channel on Talindow where I just give people shoutouts. And I know for a fact there's certain people that they don't want those public shoutouts. They don't like being put on the spot. And that's a cultural nuance from a larger topic called Collective Lism versus
individualist. So like, US is a very individualistic country. We tend to focus more on individuals and like my performance, my career, you know, my future, whereas more collectivist cultures, you know, they think more about, you know, how will this benefit the group? And
You know, my opinion matters less. It's more like the collective will and that's you could go into a whole lot of stuff on like how capitalism versus communism forms as a result of those different things But that's probably a bit too broad for what we're talking about today But what we learned from that study is that
what people want to feel inclusive is culture specific. So we had 200 people from Banclist out take this. When you look at the demographic, it was mostly white men and women with a few sprinkled in there of different
So naturally, what's happened in traditional work science is we would take those findings and results, we would publish them in a journal, and then we would apply that knowledge to different cultures and it wouldn't work. And then we would get frustrated and be like, "Oh, what the heck lies in this working?"
So doing research that's culture and organization context specific is something that we're trying to do at Talent Dough. And I think that right now we actually aren't doing any active DEI studies since the last one we did. We've been focused
more on leadership and community health and engagement. But the next DEI study we do, there will definitely be some sort of cultural element to it to see if we can get better understand what sort of moderating effect that has.
That's sort of my response to that.
I want to get more details in these sort of tactics side of things. So less like research and more just like tactically speaking, you know, what are some easy tips to be more inclusive in Dows? But I'll pause there for a second if you want to kind of react or make sure I'm tracking the correct
I love it. Don't let me block you. Keep going, Sultorn. This is great. Cool. So probably the easiest way to be inclusive that I have noticed is a lot of the times in
and dows, we sort of have this attitude of, oh well you didn't speak up or you didn't take the charge or get your hands dirty. Basically we penalize people for not being self-directed is what it comes down to.
A lot of cultures, they aren't going to speak out on a call. They feel uncomfortable. So I think the difference between me and a lot of people I see building down communities is, you know, this is a classic experience.
You have a community call, you know, 20 people join, only four people talk, and then, you know, a couple weeks later, people are like, "Oh, we can't get contributors or we can't get people involved." Like, they don't want to do stuff.
Send people a DM. Like I know that's kind of like, oh, don't take DMs from Discord or send them a DM or create a private thread or send a Twitter if you don't want to hit them up on Discord. A lot of people are actually really receptive to helping. And if you take that social pressure off and kind of create a more
safe space, some more intimate space, I've actually been able to successfully onboard contributors that way. There's people on my team right now that if I hadn't sort of established that initial rapport and been like, "Hey, I know this is new to you. Let's talk one on one and get you plugged
into a specific project and let me help you get to the point where you can be self-directed. And I feel like we lack a bit of sympathy in that space right now within Dows. And if you're not an entrepreneur and a hustler and can work on your own, Dows
are really hard for you and you don't see the value in them yet. And that needs to change because if we want to onboard a billion people in the DAO's, well guess what? There's probably not a billion entrepreneurs in the world, right? So the demographic of who we
word is going to have to change and to do that successfully we need to change. So tactically speaking I found it incredibly helpful to on-word people on an individual basis. You know one person at a time it takes forever it's slower right like we've could it we
We probably could have grown our server way faster. I don't blast it on social media. I don't put the discord link out very often. But if I did that every day for the last year, we'd probably have a few thousand. Whereas we've been more organic, but you know what? I've damn near-talked to every single person that has joined that server.
700 people. And that's special to me. So that's the one tactic is reach out to people individually and don't assume that somebody doesn't want to speak up or doesn't get involved just because they're not active in a voice call or in the text channel.
The second tactic that I think has been really helpful is to be implemented weekly onboarding sessions at Talentau. That are really just like open office hours. Every single week, Monday and Wednesdays,
from 11 to 12 Eastern time, 11 am to 12 pm Eastern time. I fit on a channel and discord for an hour and sometimes I have half a dozen people I've never met before, jump on. Sometimes it's a mix of people that just wanted to say hello.
or had a question that they knew I could answer. And sometimes it's just one person and I get to really like meet somebody and dive deep on their interests and their background. And sometimes it's just me and I'm okay with that because I just use it as like a working hour. I have met some people in those calls.
That are just so cool and have such cool stories like in particular a lot of people that I've met from Africa From South America where you know their internet isn't as good English is not their primary language like you know we give
non-English native speakers, shit, for not being able to speak good English. But they can speak like three or four languages. Like, what can your dumb butt do? I can only speak one language. I'm impressed with people that can speak any English, if it's not their primary language, but it makes them self-conscious to talk on a community call.
But you know, in open office hours, if it's just me or a couple more people, like they do speak up, and I do get to talk to them. I actually met some really solid junior smart contract developers from Africa who are very shy, but both of them are solid. Like they do good work.
and I try to get them involved when I can and where I can. So like that's been a super helpful tactic and I've seen actually several of like the D-Side owls which I know we didn't really get into the centralized science today but there's a whole sort of like there's D-Fi, there's NFTs, there's ReFi. Well now
other's desi, which is a whole thing, maybe we'll talk about it another time, but a lot of those desi doubts, like talent doubt has been around longer than most of the things in desi, and a lot of those newer doubts, like they're doing those open office onboard hours, which is
really cool to see. Like I love if people are going to start replicating what we're doing at Tallendale. Like that's exactly what we want because we're trying to build a science based approach to designing dolls. And then I guess like the third tactic I will leave you with is um
what they prefer to be called.
So this one's tricky, I will say, because some people they don't want to be asked about their orientation or their identity or any of that stuff. And you really shouldn't ask. You shouldn't be like, "Hey, are you gay? Hey, are you a dude or a girl?" You should never do that. But what I have done in the past in certain circumstances,
circumstances is I'll ask people like hey what are your preferred pronouns or is there anything I should know about you or like what would you like me to call you? And when I do that I always do it in private you do you don't ask those questions in a group call it's typically on a one-on-one or in a DM
And I've had situations where people were like, "I really appreciate that you said that nobody's ever asked me that before." Some people have even been like, "I haven't even ever thought about it before." Like, "Come to think of it, I want to be called she day, I don't like her, and I'm not going to challenge that." I'm just be like, "Okay, good to know."
So I think like just asking people how they want to be referred to what their pronouns are and just give them a voice is like really effective and then I guess I'll throw in a fourth tactic just because it kind of popped into my head. Don't be task focused all the time and out of the
the four, this is probably the one that most cows do the best. We call it like vibing, right? Set good vibes. Make it to where the reason that the bear market doesn't scare me is because talent cow isn't a company. We're a community and our community
Most of us aren't making money. That's not why we're here in the first place. If the bear market comes, we've still got the vibes. It's that sense of belongingness. Creating that sense of belongingness and psychological safety is
is really critical. And I'm proud to say our core founding team, which is about 10 people, there's three women. So there's me and two others. There's people of color.
There's geographical diversity, so like we have somebody from Italy, we have two people from Chile, we have some people from the UK, we have people on the east coast of the US, people on the west coast of the US, we've got to do it in Canada.
And that's just like I'm really proud of what we've built and how we built it and it's those four simple tactics and just like being a champion of DEI and social media that got us there. And I think that we have a much stronger team because of it.
Wow, this is amazing and I've been keeping notes as I usually do and I tweet them out as a thread afterwards and so I mean there's just so much in here and it's I'm doing my best as I go along feel free to append corrections to author and and I think
I think, yes, to your hint here, the hour flew by. So I think we do have the opportunity to have a conversation and again, dive a little deeper into how the scientific method was approached in a decentralized manner, aka unpacking DSI.
Yeah, we're coming close to the top of the hour. So I do want to open it up if there are like any questions that are out there. I think people can unmute. And if you can't, I'm just going to quickly go into the settings and try to figure it out. But, yeah, thank you. Or, "Sobalhost" might be able
to help us here. Adjust settings. There we go. Speakers who can speak, everyone, there you go. So anyone you can unmute, feel free to chime in and ask a question or a reflection as we start to wind down towards the outro.
Wow, I guess we're all absorbing the knowledge down through. It's a thing right, especially I don't know depending on time zone y'all are in. It may be pre coffee. Oh, I saw.
I saw them in here. How was everyone? Very nice chat, nice to listen.
Hi Maria. Hello there. Very nice to hear your talk and we are building inside now a scientific publication community. I'm a scientist and a lot of things
things that you said resonated with me. You know like we are just starting so it is wonderful to get to know a few hints from you. You have been around sometime longer than I said.
And we are trying to build, not trying, we are building a diverse team with the people from the US and also Europe, Mexico, here in Brazil. You know, decentralized science.
I would very much to hear your next space talks on that particular subject. And it's very nice to be here and share all this knowledge with you. Thank you very much for opening up the mic for me.
Thanks Maria, feel free to send me a DM with chat. We'd love to help you out if you'd like to collab with some sorts. So I got your back. Yeah, that will do great. I'll be there for some. You're back, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, I'll do that. Thanks. Awesome. I, I, I unfortunately have to call time, so we're just gonna have to have to come back and so.
Salthorne, it was just amazing massive knowledge, dumb, so many beautiful topics because they're laying out attention for us as contributors in those or Dao-Kirious folks to just, you know, truly make work better.
and a more human centered experience for us all and more sovereign. So thank you, South Learn. Yeah, thank you for having me and happy to come back and we'll talk more about D-Style and having multiple on-chain identities, which is something I
I didn't get to touch on today, but it's a big part of my DEI journey. I'll leave you with this. I actually came out to the Dow world before my real world, and that was how the big reason behind that was having the ability
to have multiple on-chain identities. So maybe we'll talk about that next time. Oh, what a mic drop. That's amazing. Thank you and we definitely will. GM to all and until the next chat with Salthorne, thank you.