Learning in Public with Anna Gat and Anne-Laure Le Cunff

hey everybody the deadline to get your application in for the spring vintage of Village Global accelerator is March 1st companies that have been through the accelerator have raised from some of the best Venture funds in the world like a16z Lux spark bezer Founders fund and many more learn more and apply at Village global. vc/ accelerator hey everybody it's Eric torberg co-founder partner of Village Global a network driven Venture firm and this is Venture stories a podcast covering topics relating to Tech and business with World leading [Music] experts hey everybody welcome to another episode of Village Global's Venture stories I'm here today joined by two very special guests Ann Laur lamp of NES labs and an aat of inter intellect uh welcome to the podcast thanks for having us by by by way introduction Anna we were going to do the podcast just us but you wanted to bring in Ann Laur uh who who I've been a fan of for a long time why don't you talk about why you wanted to bring us all three together today first of all we are super good friends and we never get to hang out so this was a sneaky way of just say giving ourselves an uninterrupted hour and I think it's just it's very difficult to kind of uh you know make that heaven otherwise and I also think that uh you know analor who is a scientist and an incredible expert on mindfulness curiosity and just like okay I have these humans and they have brains what to do with them and then there is myself and I think I kind of come to often similar conclusions but from a completely different angle right I come from public discourse how to what to do with Society how to create you know spaces of conversation uh on the Internet or offline where people are at their best selves and that they're most brilliant and you know how to give the most billiant people the loudest mics right and probably anal Lord's angle is like who are the most brilliant people or how how does how does any person discover their Brilliance and so to me the fact that you know we arrive as good friends to the same campfire from the two other angles of the of the pitch to me that's just you know one of the Miracles of of this past year for me and you know why not why not explore that to a to a deeper degree yeah and Laura why don't you introduce um the angle that that you bring and and what your vision is for what you're trying to do with Nest Labs yeah first I want to say thanks to Anna for bringing us all together today it's true that I would love for us to be able to hang out more often together so this is an amazing opportunity to just get a really good chat and yeah when it comes to Nest Labs I think Anna gave a really good introduction and to go a little bit deeper what I've noticed is that lots of people who are really smart really talented really creative are basically struggling to achieve their full potential because they experience burnout or imperor syndrome or fear of being judged and these are the kind of things that Nest laabs is trying to help with by creating a safe space where smart people can experiment together explore together and learn together so that's basically what the nestabs community is all about and both of you are are building very active communities in in the Co in Co era what what's that been like maybe Anna we could start with you and you could introduce more of the type of events that that you put together and then talk about what that transition has been like to to full digital and how you think about how that will evolve you know in a postco world yes when you when we say active communities I think people have no idea how active it is like this is like you know things are on fire and that's just the most amazing thing um I think uh to to explore it's really interesting because I was I mean I don't you know this is one of those oh I pivoted my startup kind of stories that I'm sure Eric you hear 10,000 of you know per day I had I had a I had a startup that I was working on and and I had a very casual community on the side um and then I started noticing that first of all the overlap between the two companies or the two initiatives was just so you know almost 100% And and I also started seeing that the the kind of the grav the gravitational force was more tilting it toward um just the community hangout things and and I went to San Francisco a couple of times and I traveled and I what I noticed I was that everywhere I went uh you know and I I broke up up the the question of you know non-political multidisciplinary spaces just 100 people materialized that I'd never met before and they were like yeah here we are um and I thought okay so let's ask these people like why are you here you know kind of the intro question um what can I do for you what is it that you want what should I build that you want and so early 2020 or late 2019 it became clear to me that this is what people want there's a specific space missing in between the public and the private where people want to learn and educate the public and I believe like I'm I'm one of these people who you know think that you know politics is the participants so if there are new types of participants there will be new types of politics and I think in a weird way interin started building a new way to engage with each other as as you know in a Civic sphere uh to me that's really interesting it it also signals that public and private no longer mean what they used to mean so I come more from from from that angle and and then that brought up the question okay so what is this space like what in what how is it constructed so it ensures um this continued the sustenance of this this cultural norm that we get together and we talk about all these really elevated things and it's never going to get ugly or or repetitive how do you ensure that the community does this um naturally and and it's kind of just this crazy experimentation that that kind of you know leaves you with some conclusions about what kind of conversations people want how public it should be what are the norms for moderation what are the Norms in the community and I always say like I'm running after my community they do what they want to do and I run after them analor is like grinning because you know what I'm talking about it's like you don't know you just allow people to express this deep wish in a healthy way and then you can go and kind of build around it when you wrote the blog post a couple years ago where Niche we just didn't we just didn't know is that where you were sort of getting at that the difference between public and and private has evolved or or was that something different unpack uh those ideas a little bit uh thank you for the question I I love that this this essay is going to haunt me until I die um in a good way in a good way um this is going to be my I can get no satisfaction and I will still be playing when I'm 65 so um it's really interesting I mean what I grew up in in late communist Eastern Europe and and I I grew up in this kind of VAV havali and travesty situation where you have private speech in the home and then you have public speech outside and those two things are completely different I think anybody who has experienced really living in really unhealthy States uh you will you will notice that this this happens so you have a truth at home that you discuss with your family or your loved ones and then you go outside and you play this role right and and some people think that this you can be doing without kind of infecting either the one or the other and what I noticed when I was growing up and why I became a linguist and a screenwriter and an obsessive of of the dialogue which is ironic because I'm kind of giving a monologue here but I will wrap up very quickly um was that I became super super fascinated by the difference between private and public language and whether we can align them so we are always I you know protected from this kind of duplicity you know when when one is one pretends to be true and I think we kind of all know what what how this looks in in the 21st century and from this exploration came all the startups and all the projects that I've ever worked on is just that it was inter intelect and I had to kind of dumb it down so much that I literally thought okay so how would this company look if it was post- apocalypsis and there's no internet and and electricity and then you're like okay the greatest startups still exist you know Google is this guy sitting in front of a cave and you're like hey where does Jim live and the guy says well it's like three caves down and you're like thanks you know and Facebook is this Grandma who tells you like Eric is out a lot these days you know and we saw him dancing um or Airbnb is trying to sell you a a very nice you know Cove on the beach that people like you really liked and I thought okay so what is inter inct with a pen and a paper and and when I went back to this super super basic level is when the true growth started happening to me because that's when I became really receptive to what people wanted because when there's nothing built yet then people will tell you yeah and I want to get later into sort of how that relates to Academia but but andlor let's transition to you how did your sort of community uh evolve I know you think a lot about learning communities I you you had to think about a lot about offline and online of course why don't you unpack what what's resonating with you well I wouldn't be able to talk about the Journey of the nest laabs Community without mentioning the pandemic because that has been a massive Catalyst for where we are today in March 2020 I did a first meet up the only face- t- face Meetup we ever had where I sent an email to my newsletter and I was like hey who wants to come and hang out in my living room in London and we had people coming most surprisingly one of the attendees flew from Seattle to attend that meet up where we were like 10 people in my living room so it was amazing to have this person flying from another country another continent to be there and we did that meet up and then obviously lockdown we all know the story and it was not possible anymore to meet face to face so we transitioned to online meetups and for the first few months I organized a couple of meetups every month which I was hosting and to me the most amazing transition that Nest Labs has been going through is when and I know it's the case for Anna as well is when members started organizing their own meetups sometimes that I can't attend because I'm doing something else or I'm sleeping and basically my attendance is not expected anymore they're just hanging out together so just this month like we had a few dozens like I think we're at 30 or 40 events for the month where members just pick a topic pick a date pick a time they post it we added to the shirt calendar and everyone can come and join and we've had topics r ing from productivity creativity mental health parenting burnout lots of different topics where people are not sharing their expertise because I think lots of platforms are doing this already instead they're just learning in public and sharing their Learning Journey and inviting other members to join them on their journey and this is really what the meetups are about it's about saying hey I'm curious about this topic I'm still pretty new I really want to learn about it together do you want to join me on this journey do you want to come and talk about it share our best tips our challenges or strategies Etc so today this is where we are and I would love to say that I'm an amazing strategist who predicted that this is what it would look like a year after I launched the community that that was my plan all along but the truth is that it is absolutely not I had absolutely no idea where this was going to go and I think the the only area where I can give myself a pet on the back is that I just created created this space where people can experiment can learn can grow can make mistakes Etc and the members have really embraced that ethos as part of the nestabs community so this is where we are today we we have lots of Live Events every week conversations in the online community the part that I'm sure about and I really don't know at this stage is once we get to a point where we can meet in person again do I keep things the way they are do I encourage people to meet in person this is something I'm still pretty unclear about and I don't know and I'll probably do the same thing I always do with the community which is just asking them what they want yeah what's the secret to decentralizing the community such that they don't rely on sort of the central uh figure like what can other communties learn from from what you've done and I um it's no secret I'm a big fan of no code so um I think automating a lot of the processes so instead of being a bottleneck where people need to go through you to make things happen there are processes in place where they can go and fill a form and it fills the calendar and you have all of these automatic processes and places to me this is the magic behind scaling a community in the way that's still human and it's at the core of Nest laabs I have you know beside a little bit of CSS and a little bit of JavaScript here and there to fix some things most of the neslab community and the whole platform really including the website the newsletter Etc is using no code tools I you know I could build an alar to zap here for everything it's doing for me it's like a full-time employee at Nest laabs at this point because it's doing so much so I I think just making sure that there you don't need a human to make things happen that things can be automated that's one thing the second thing that I started doing in the past couple of month which has been immensely help helpful is documentation it's quite interesting how we always think about documentation for products most good products have very solid documentation where they explain how do you do this how to you use the API Etc but I haven't seen many communities building really solid documentation so this is a process that we have at Nest laabs where anytime someone asks a question and we're like oh that's actually a really good question we're pretty sure someone else has the same question or is going to ask it in a few month we turn that question and the answer into a page that we add to the documentation and this is this Lo living breathing document that everyone can refer to whenever they want to host an event create a support group or interact with other people within the community you you recently hired a community architect can you talk about how you how you see that role and and whether you think other people should think about it in a similar way yeah so what's really interesting is that our community architect she's uh called Kari and she's absolutely amazing Kari if you listen to this I love you so much and thank you for everything you're doing for the community she started as anb's member I think first that's very important that whoever you hire to help you manage the community needs to be a member first and foremost someone who has experienced what life is like on the other side of the table and she reached out to me she gave me the most amazing presentation I've ever seen in my whole life um it included videos with music musicals in it and she started singing it was absolutely beautiful never seen a presentation like that ever before never been pitched to get a job like this ever before either and we did a one month where she i g I gave her like you know full freedom to experiment with whatever she wanted and I just told her let's see at the end of the month like just do whatever you think is helpful for the community and the title Community architect she actually came up with it and I thought it was absolutely perfect because her role is not management she's not a community manager I'm very proud that I created a community that doesn't need a manager that doesn't need a boss she's not a chief Community officer either I don't need an officer I don't need a manager she's an architect she's building and designing the processes that help the community run and that Empower community members to make the most of the community and to me this is what a community architect is that's really fascinating I'm curious for both of you when you think about your respective communities um how they fit into sort of just the broader Trend towards towards learning communities and and where where we see that that going maybe and there you can start it's interesting I one of the weird things that happened to me in the past year is that I just don't really have time to look at the market that much because I have just so much to do so I would be reluctant to um you know come up with a PhD um topic for uh for where online communities are going uh what I see I mean I can can talk a little bit about how Community fits into the II into inter intellect because we are not primarily a community right we're a community enabled business what we do is interdisciplinary conversations that hosts can monetize so we're basically building the the platforms for the public intellectuals of the future who may come from anywhere in the world from any academic rank or you know level of expertise uh we Empower them to to teach the public and and first of all will figure out what the public is interested in from what they know right um and we provide the tools for for that to happen in some sense the audience as well but we still you know we grow via the the audiences of our hosts but what is really really interesting I think about how the community builds itself um and kind of upholds its own methods via its own culture right I love this point that it doesn't have a manager like we don't we don't really moderate we don't really manage the community the community is adults and they know why why they are there and who they want to speak with and what they want to do um my job is to to enable that right and facilitate and make it smoother and and make sure that all the answers all the um answers are there where people can find them so um it's really interesting I I always find that the community for us is the backstage inter intellect is a very public Endeavor so it speaks with the world um and then you have the community which is which is the we actually have a a channel called hosts Green Room and that's where the hosts are and it's a you know it's a very private space where the hosts can complain or ask questions and share their worries and and and get tips from each other um we have a very strong host training program within the II and currently host are training hosts so the whole thing is becoming uh very decentralized from that angle as well and other than that I mean we are on Discord we moved there um 1 of November so quite recently um and we have every host has their own channel where they're the manager and that's where where they are basically building their own U their own audience we are just about to um to launch our own platform uh with basically host portfolios so uh the next weeks are going to be suddenly very busy and exciting and where I see this uh where I see this kind of maybe fitting into the wider trend is is just the understanding that you know most famous public thinkers used to be produced by Academia traditional media and traditional publishing and these um Forest fields are largely if not gone but weakened and fragmented which leaves a giant you know free space to be taken up by those with the ambition and and talent and and work ethic to to fill it in I and there is I think I'm sure analore you have a lot to say about this as well but what really struck me as as unexpected in the past year was that there is such a demand for this like people are so curious and so incredibly motivated and loyal and if you if there is an amazing writer to to read and an amazing new philosopher to listen to or just somebody who will share their you know P passion with you about a super Niche part of biology and and people will flock there I always tell my host like the nichest the topic the more attendees you will have like whenever we try to do something like Ai and ethics nobody booked and the host is sitting there with like two people and if you say something like a small village in Myanmar and their Cuisine instant s out like h1100 tickets 50 people book in two hours I'm serious it's just crazy and I think that says so much about the internet and so much about like what happens when internet weirdos grow up and have money to spend because this is what happened right um so that that's kind of our audience and and you know every day they surprise me with something so awesome I could never have come up with it myself I just want to come back to the idea of Community Based learning because this is something that's very close to my heart and I was just a second ago pulling up my phone because I wanted to double check the number and not say something wrong but the completion rate for online courses is 5% which is so bad people buy courses which is based on their desire to better to learn to improve Etc and then they actually don't mat to complete them and something I've noticed in the past couple of years is that cohort-based courses and community- based courses are doing a much better job at fostering learning and actually completing whatever goal you have when it comes to learning so this is what we're doing at Nest labs and I've seen other people doing it in a great way you know I mean Eric on De right so that's what you're doing looking at creators like tho Forte David Perl Ali abdal Etc all of them if you look at the way they teach have community at the core of their offering and Anna you mentioned loyalty and I think to me there is this deep curiosity that you mentioned this motivation that you mention but this loyalty that you took about you're not really loyal to a topic that you want to study right you're loyal to the people you're studying it with and I really think that this is the power of online communities such as the inter intellect or Nest Labs or if you look at T of fores community or on Deck Etc is that every day you show up you see fellow students fellow curs Minds fellow people who want to learn at the same time as you do who are going through the same challenges who have similar questions and where every day you feel like you're kind of like climbing this staircase of knowledge together so to me online learning this is really what online communities is unlocking it's this idea that we're not only learning in public we're actually learning together and this is what university was supposed to be like right and then we went to University and it was not like that or if it was like that then it ended and they kind of like speak you out and you're supposed to be you know absorbed by the the the private sector and you're like where is my intellectual fun am I just like you know push to read subex and then I I until the end of my life and never will I have interaction in my life I mean I always say that the moment when the fast fellow inter intellect put inter intellect in their Twitter bio my life changed like that was the moment I remember I was sitting in my kitchen because I always say like I'm rebuilding the Public Square from my kitchen which is true and the first time that happened from then on it's been just a completely different um game and from then on you know I work for these people you know it's like they you know because because loyalty goes both ways I'm and then you like okay so my job every day when I wake up and was bad is to serve um the interin community and the hosts and the audience and it just puts everything into perspective in the sense that it's almost like public service to me actually I went into technology because I felt that that's the best way in the 21st century to engage in public service and I always considered it such so yay that part work and and and talk about the the the future for how how you see it evolving and and sort of the Grand Vision because the reason I originally reached out for this podcast was because uh well one I'd been a fan for for a while but your your Tweet about how you see the inter intellect in hundreds of years like the Royal soci Society of Arts what do you unpack that a it uh this is something I'm kind of reluctant to put into pitch dacks because I'm like it just doesn't necessarily fit um the the short termism of of some parts of our business um I mean you know I I I I least this is how I approach my my job I'm building something into existence that I intend to exist for a very long time and I intend it to be a little bit separate from me after a while mostly because I have extreme limitations in my talent and intellectual abilities so I you know at some point you just like allow it to go beyond you and and for other people to um to add their U their Brilliance and and and ideas and creativity and and and strength so so I started doing inter intellect salons and as I was tring and then in 2019 these little hubs started popping up around the world and in places that I I'd never been to like we have a HBY in Atlanta i' never been to Atlanta you know like stuff like that and my plan for 2020 was to create this offline you know um network of of Civic and artistic and intellectual off campus engagement and then we kind of went online because of Co it it provided I think myself with this accelerated learning process um that I could actually do it like a thousand times more than I would have been able to do it offline at first but I really want to pull it back um offline and I remember Anor actually your your London meet up in March there was this photo of all the hand sanitizers on the table so there was wine and the hand sanitizers and I was like this is a new era so probably there will be a lot of hand sanitizer in the future um hopefully and like and I I mean I see this as a as a as a worldwide thing you know it's already happening inters are going to other courses and other community and they are running into other inter intellects there and I I'm hearing it more and more people are moving to New locals in the world and they they are no longer alone in the world because they are fellow inter intellects in that City I people are you know looking through books and articles and podcasts and oh I know this person from interin act I know this person from interin act and you know this is how this is how being an alumnus or Aluma um was supposed to be be and and I think in a weird way we are providing this a weird kind of an end of a type of loneliness that was present in our lives before the pandemic it's interesting because a lot of things that are disruptive tend to be disruptive sort of you know not directly but indirectly you know from the side or a bit orthogonal and and all of us in in a few ways are are are not you know competing with like Harvard you know head on but in in sort of indirect or interesting ways and so I asked as that as segue to ask you and it like in 10 years what could you envision like are you envisioning this is like a Agency for for intellectuals you know full stack service are you envisioning like you know hundreds of thousands or millions of people have have gone to inter intellect events there there are some decisions you probably have to make as as you scale about where you want what Lane you want to own maybe it's all of it how do you sort of think about your your dreams for you know what material it'll look like I I like to say that um I'm building a new type of media um that didn't exist before um and it's an idea that you can pull into existence in your living room or in a zoom room or wherever you are they are experimenting with it on clubhouse now so right now as I'm I'm here there is the first Clubhouse inter inct Meetup and you know I'm I see inter inact as something that will be a natural part of life for people the same way as going to the bookstore or going to the Thea uh when you move to a new place you will inquire about the local inter intellect and just go there um that's where you will meet people that you will have the best conversations with in the world um some people will do it very seriously use it for learning some people will do it very seriously and we're already seeing this so we have a couple of hosts who are doing this as a job and we are angling to you know allow our first host to have made you know 50k a year or so so that we can say that okay you can actually um you get get a kind of start a salary um just hosting intern tax salons and there will be people who will be doing it like oh my wife and I go to the theater on a Saturday night um we have dinner and then we go to an internx Salon about the history of quantum physics or um early DaVinci artworks and and have a great time have a glass of wine a little bit of cheese and you know just uh just enjoy ourselves uh in in the kind of infinite game and then hopefully many people in that room will be like oh I want to host one as well they will realize that oh actually it's not um hey there's this thing that um our host talk about which is the salon High so if you host an internx Salon you get this high after maybe analor is a neuroscientist you will one day find a magic formula what happens to people's neurons exactly but I'm just this is true and then the next day you tend to be tired and you will get a text message from Visa saying what I did today was play video games pretty exhausted yeah maybe spend a couple minutes talking about you mentioned earlier the non-political uh you know some people might be skeptical there's no way what you know one is always political even to be apolitical is political like unpack how how you think about the sort of post political uh concept okay and then I really I will shut up afterwards because I want to pause the mic to to unarm but thank you for the question um it's interesting so we are non-political in the sense that we are nonpartisan in any way uh we have um a similar restriction on topics that Ted X have um which means that we don't do any religious uh political or marketing activity you can talk about religion we have a lot of religious um content in that sense um you can talk about politics in general history of politics or you know political philosophy but you can't you because intern salons don't have a goal so they can't have an agenda where you're like good job let's leave um and and marketing activities um obviously so we're just trying to enjoy the the majority of topics which thankfully lay outside uh politics and allow people to explore them to very serious depths I always say to my hosts that the ma the main job of an inter inct host is to keep things complicated your job you're there with 30 people from all over the world all generations for some people it's 7:30 in the morning and they are breastfeeding to someone else it's temp p.m. at night and they are just having a beer and enjoying the end of their day right they will come together from different languages different religions different ster of society and because we're not we don't have an agenda we can enjoy the complexity of life and have conversations that I don't think you can have anywhere else on the internet where you're like life is really complicated so let's talk about love let's talk about work why do we work let's talk about why are we on Earth let's talk about you know the the beginning beginnings of democracy and you can just enjoy this benevolent chaos that I think is the honest way of of looking at life because that's how it is yeah yeah I love that um and Laur I want to transition back to you Anna was talking about um you know how she has hosts who are training hosts and and you were talking about how you I want to double click on your idea of you know Community architect versus not having Community manager do you feel like that's where you know communities uh should be going or or or will be going or or talk about um what you lose when you don't have a manager or or officer and how you make up for it I think you can put most communities on the Spectrum the you know you have you have Twitter which is completely unmoderated you you can report content that's offensive or that's uh spamming but mostly it's unmoderated right um and then you have um the other end of the spectrum communities that are I think overly polished where you have an officer and I don't think that all Community Management officers or managers are acting this way because it's just a title and means nothing about the way they actually work right but if you take the extreme idea of an officer who's policing the way people are behaving in the community and the kind of conversations they can have you can also create a community that lacks depth because you're preventing people from exploring as Anna said complex topic life is complicated and you can either Embrace this I think Twitter Embraces it very well life is really complicated if you spend five minutes on Twitter you'll be convinced of that or you have communities where they completely bury their head in the sand and ignore that fact and try to control everything thing and try to make it as smooth and as easy to me a really good Community is a community that is both embracing the fact that yes life is freaking complicated second you can have this space where we make it a little bit easier to think and that said to me that's a good Community that's a community that is not ignoring the fact that things are complex things are complicated but there are tools there are strategies there are ways of approaching a community culture that can make it easier to think together and that's what having a community architect or a community manager officer because again these are just titles and I'm not a big fan of titles in any case but someone who is helping a community grow and its members to engage together is someone who will be very comfortable with both ends of the spectrum I love this can I just add a note to this because this is so so closely resonating to to something that I always kind of inted and now I'm like yeah I will just on up to this so we have this knowledge right offline if you host a salon or a dinner party in your house you know how you will behave there will be really you know you probably picked up those skills when you were a child and you have a lot of experience in how to make people comfortable how to keep the volume okay so people can hear each other how to make sure everybody has a some food and something to drink and they have somewhere to sit and if you see that somebody is called or just like standing there alone you go there and help them and I think what we're doing in a weird way is we're trying to create trying to allow people to export this knowledge into the online space right so because we I mean one of the one of my motivations for writing the niche um essay was that these all divisions no longer work right and one of the divisions that no longer work you have the Left Right old young you know employed unemployed and all the other divisions that don't mean much for a jzy individual right and and one of these is the online offline um I think we no longer want to think about offline as as a completely separate space and then you go online and it doesn't affect your life every like what happens online will happen to you offline eventually and what happens offline will get documented immediately online like these two things are together so I always say to people like behave to an individual at an II Salon like you would in your living room sometimes you have strangers in your living room right because your friend brings his friend and the courtesy and the the care and the attention that you extend to this individual is how you will behave in a zoom or when we do um um uh offline um events again so I think I really deeply trust our community and we kind of joke around that it's like oh you're an II citizen right you have rights and responsibilities and I always say like I trust you guys you are a ads and you came here because you want to have a different experience and my job is to get out of your way you know in a positive sense and of course be there and for people to know that if there's a problem there's the bad signal and like you know you will come and help but otherwise just you know you don't have to I think you know a lot of I you know a lot of communities um May unfold a little bit like office parties where oh we put up these little things and then people have fun no that's not how fun works like um nobody nobody will have fun at like 4M next to a photocopier just because there is like a a pink Garand that's not enough it's not about the outside you know it's not about tokens that you put out it's about like you said on a law like ask people what they want and then make sure that you know uh first of all make sure that that thing can happen and also allow people space to change their minds because your community may be like we want this and then this happens and they are like no we actually hate this and then you can't say like but you guys said it and we already spent so much money on it no you're like everything is an experiment and there is no psychological call on on changing your mind or changing as a community right so to me these two things would be um crucial to mention Yeah you mentioned sort of dissolving uh you know boundaries or or divisions you've thought a bit about that uh and as it relates to um you multidisiplinary and just sort of the the Advent of the generalist in in in more broadly can can you unpack that I know this is one of your favorite topics because we actually did a salon about Specialists versus generalists and people were quoting your tweets I was like oh no I have to read more Eric tweets now because I was just like there like I have no idea but I mean we looked at them and now I know so um there's a book by Stanford um academic called Mira struber called interdisciplinary conversations and this lady spent 45 years researching you know she she tried to start interdisciplinary projects in the 70s in America and she brought together people and she had funding she got the room they got free Cy like everything was in place right the photocopier and the geand everything was there and then you know she would get into these situations like Oh The Chicago School Economist is sitting there with the Quaker theologists and it a huge fight and the the theologist runs out crying and she's like what happened why can't these people talk to like they expert to the same things you know they are both willing they are there and then you're like yeah yeah because they speak a completely different language right you can't just say you know you come from maybe a more you know disagreeable culture and then there's another person who is like let's first wait and what she started experimenting with and then a lot of other thinkers you know to get much further down the road is establishing the shared Humanity because nowadays you would approach the situation saying like Okay so here is the Quaker theologist and here's The Chicago School Economist so who has pets you know or who can make an awesome cadilla let's do this and and once everybody's like well fed and showed all their cat photos then you can get down to business because now we've kind of established that okay we are just humans in the room I mean this is what um I'm experimenting with in in I mean we have a relatively well um you know formulated idea of moderation now and I'm just working on a new piece to basically write it down and be like guys try this at home um and one of one of the key Parts is is the intros and how you kind of create a beginning um into something that will just make people chill out and make people realize like they are actually there to have fun so why not do it and and to that end I want to hear from from from both of you what is your hope for what someone aims to get out of a intellect event or or or a community meet up for for nest Labs like what is the what is the secret for making a a a really great um you know of your respective meetups uh work well like what is the one takeaway you want your host to to have or or whoever's organizing it may sound counter intive but to me a great Nest Labs meet up is when people leave with more questions than they had before they joined that's why to me they are every time I'm the one hosting a Meetup which only happens last time I checked like 5% of the time these days I don't host that many anymore but I always introduce the Meet Up by saying hey this is not a presentation this is not a workshop this is not a place where you're going to come and sit and listen and take notes and get answers this is a place where everybody is invited to share their experiences their challenges their strategies we're all going to learn from each other and if this event is a success you should have some answers to some of your questions but so many more questions that you didn't even know you had before joining many more opportunities to explore to learn to go on your own journey to research more around this topic to connect with fellow members to try and unpack this together to me this is a great Meetup when you leave and you're like whoa I learned so much but also you know the duning trigger effect right you don't know what you don't know if you leave the meet up realizing how much you don't know about this this topic and how excited you are about learning more this is a great success in my book I love this so much it reminds me I recently did the Tooth three on me test you know when they send you this tube and you in a very you know not very Instagram sharable moment you just keep spinning into it for 30 minutes and then you send it via post it's great and I remember when I got my results and I felt like you know I I did this because I wanted to have answers and then it just opens up all of these questions like how am I one person English what happened oh my God and you're just up all night because you're like this is like I just paid money to get so many more questions than what got answered here um but I love this and and I mean I really really love the whole infinite game um Theory and we often talk about this you know like interact is an infinite game you know winning is that people want to keep playing with you and we have four pillars of hosting an i Salon that I teach to the host and now host teach each other which is the imperfect host so you are not a teacher it's not not X cathedra you're there as a human you know an you've seen me host Live Events I spill my drink the projector doesn't work like something Al like make something go wrong so people chill out and and and enjoy you know um their brains uh without feeling like oh I'm I'm on the spot or or something then we have the stickiness as well so you know create environments where people understand that if they choose to they will see these people again so you it's worth listening to the other person worth remembering details about them worth opening up to them because it's not like oh then this person just goes down the drain and I will never see them again H we have the ritual space which is that intern tax salons are always the same format so like church or school people know what to expect it's always the same length same Parts happen and and it makes you know a kind of fundamental part of people relax and that's when connections and and connections between ideas can come to light because you don't have to worry about you don't have to prep for uncertainty at the basic level so that's very important for me and the fourth thing and and I'm just working on first of all renaming it but also just we are just exploring this with the hosts is we call it anchoring and it's very closely tied to the intro um question which is that we find that most negative associations or negative experiences in conversation and particularly when it involves politics or world viiew and intern act involves worldview a lot because we talk about values right and taste so it's a we talk about morality a lot in that sense is that we don't leave spaces where that people can fill in with potentially negative imagination so people come in it's their own face it's their name if somebody has to leave early they will say right away um and then they introduce themselves and you know who is there and you get a kind of a Vibe check and and we find that these four things create a level of trust that I think I mean you know when we are like oh my God how how do these things happen at intern taxons like sometimes it's incredibly cathartic and people share and and create things on the spot that you know it's it's like magic like you're just sitting there and you don't understand how is this happening and it happens every night or multiple times a day um and I think it comes because these four things are so stably there it's almost like this super strong Foundation for the for the building and then you can have the biggest party in the building right you don't have to worry that it falls apart um and I think this is if if if you know kind of to go back to your earlier question Eric I think a trend that we will see more of in the future in all sorts of fields is that people will work more on the foundations because they will understand that counterintuitively if you want decentralized if you want surprising if you want diverse you have to create foundations that are extremely fixed because then that's where it can happen right that's where you can I mean it's much easier to have a good conversation with you guys right now that I don't have to worry that somebody will pull out the chair from under me right this part of me is completely relaxed I'm I'm a bit less certain about the Wi-Fi but that's another question but you know and and and like what is the psychological equivalent of of that kind of physical stability um because if it's not there then you will be in you know you will be a little bit like SC forish and you will be listening less to the other person stuff like that yeah that's really interesting maybe gearing towards closing here you we talked about certain elements that make our our communities mag magical we talked about sort of the the rise of of learning communities let's talk about uh the the business of of these communities in terms of how how how you recommend they think about business models or or just sustainability more broadly and Laura perhaps we can start with you um yeah we have a very simple model at n Labs you can pay a price that is lower or a price that is higher and it gives you access to the exact same things so the lower price is for people who are either students or don't have a job at the moment which is unfortunately the case a lot with the pandemic lots of people have lost their jobs or people who are part of I don't know if there's a better word for it but the global South where they don't have the same purchasing power that you may have in the US or Europe so that's the lower price that we have and then we have a higher price for people who are maybe more successful entrepreneurs or employees working in Tech or based in Europe or in the US and we make it very clear on the landing page that you don't get any extra benefits from getting the higher priced subscription and it's quite interesting because so far we've been seeing 30% of people say signing up for the higher priced one even though again very clear you don't get anything more so I find it absolutely amazing that these generous people are willing to subsidize other members who may not have the means to pay for the full price of the membership and that's it very simple everything is included um it's a recurring membership and to me this is a model that's and I would love I mean excited to hear about the way you're thinking about it Anna because we have a completely different business model to me uh because we're a very small team we're only two people this is also Peace of Mind as a solo founder it's so simple to manage I have a really good bird's eye view of my recurring Revenue I just know this is the number of members I have at the moment and this is the money that is going to hit our business accounts this month and the same way Anna mentioned how it's important to have this kind of solid base that you don't worry about to me in terms of business model this is what it is I don't have to worry about this and my mind is free to experiment and to play with new offering new products Etc because I know that I have this stable base that is not going to move in very unpredictable ways so that's how the business model works at NES laabs I love it and I love your Tweet when you were like guys you want to pay more okay here is the button it's just like the perfect fit um so for us I mean obviously my um you know as being a community enabled business and we are technically an event company right and while a at a surface glance you would think that we make events in reality we make hosts and that's our you know if your startup is a factory that's what we make uh beautiful beautiful hosts and so our primary goal is to make hosts money right so for us you know we take a cut from from certain types of revenues that the hosts have and I kind of to go back to your question about agency there are elements in the making that will function a little bit like an agency although currently that's not the main focus and but we are also going to be launching a very very simple U membership because we started so people started asking about and we're also just two people right and people started asking about whether they could pay to get into the forum and for a long time I I didn't want to monetize it because I thought that if I start monetizing that then my incentive will be to grow that part of the business as opposed to the events which you know is the core of our mission um but they but what we see from donations is that some people feel more comfortable uh paying for it and so we're like okay there's going to be an experimental you know way to do that and then I will see for me I think that kind of um that kind of um certainty that analore you mentioned about just you know waking up and knowing that oh this is default alive is is the host community and knowing that all these are all the long Series in the making people are writing books about it people are doing salons about the books they are writing and you you kind of see I think like 70% of all the communication I deal with all day is just Salon ideas this morning I woke up and I got this text that somebody wants to do a salon series on Halt and Catch Fire but I was so sleepy so I looked at my phone and I was like oh height and Catch Fire like Jonathan height and catch her I was like oh my God we are so witty and then I was no no no no this is about TV series but maybe one day we will do Jonathan height and Catch Fire I think that would be hilarious uh that's a that's a great place to to to wrap I think if people enjoyed what what they heard uh I highly recommend checking out both uh intern intellect and and Nest Labs I believe it's just inter intellect.com and nls.com and uh also Anna and and Laura are great on Twitter as well Anna and Laura thanks so much for coming on the podcast this has been a great episode thanks so much for having us Eric thank you so much follow anur on Twitter she's amazing me H depends on the day no follow Anna she's really weird on Twitter but the best so weird I know Twitter is like Twitter is like I I I tend to say like everything uh that that used to end High School Dates because people thought you were really weird gets you a lot of followers it's like the world is upside down yeah that I I like that frame thank you so much [Music] jry if you're in an early stage entrepreneur we'd love to hear from you check us out at Village global VC [Music]