Artificial Intelligence, Abundance, and the Future of Work With Jason Cochran, Real Finds Podcast #28 Transcript
Gordon Lamphere: Hi, I’m Gordon Lamphere with the Real Finds Podcast, a podcast series where we interview key entrepreneurs, scientists, and activists who are shaping real estate and, as a result, our world. Today we have Jason Cochran. Jason is co-host of the Geeks, Geezers, and Googlization show, a top one percent business podcast, and a business psychologist and consultant. On the podcast, we discuss the future of work, adaptability, technology, and tips for HR departments and business managers to get more out of their employees and their business. Jason, thank you very much for hopping on the podcast today.
Jason Cochran: Absolutely. Thanks for inviting me. I’m looking forward to sharing some things and learning some things with your audience, Gordon.
Gordon Lamphere: Before we start, tell us a little about yourself.
Jason Cochran: I live in Indianapolis, Indiana, and I’m an organizational psychologist. I enjoy creating healthier connections between people and the work ecosystem. As we’ll get into today, there are a lot of changes going on with the future of work, in how we work and how people view work in their lives. Lots of exciting stuff to dig into.
Gordon Lamphere: Are you a Hoosier originally, or a Hoosier from outside the state?
Jason Cochran: I’m from Indiana, a little town called Logansport, close to another town people may have heard of from the Beach Boys: Kokomo. Yes, there really is a Kokomo, Indiana. It’s not as beautiful as the Kokomo in the Caribbean, but it’s close to my hometown. I grew up in Indiana, then moved to Nashville, Tennessee, for a while. But I’ve always been a Boilermaker fan. Boiler up to any Purdue fans listening. I’m excited for the upcoming football and basketball seasons.
Why Psychology
Gordon Lamphere: As a Midwesterner, I know plenty of Purdue fans. But why psychology? There are a lot of fields intelligent people go into.
Jason Cochran: This is an easy one for me. I noticed a lot of people in my family hated the work they did. Growing up, at family get-togethers, any time anybody talked about work, it had a negative connotation. What I heard from my parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and older siblings was, I hate my job, I hate my boss, I hate the culture, I don’t get paid enough. There were very few times I heard something positive about work. What I realized later was that this was going to be my passion, coming out of the pain they were sharing with me, which my young brain was distilling into: work is completely out of whack with contributing anything other than a paycheck. That broke my heart, because it doesn’t have to be this way. Work can and should be a healthy part of who we want to be and make healthy contributions to our lives. That’s the journey I’m on. My why is creating healthier connections between people and work.
The Bad News and the Good News About Work
Gordon Lamphere: There’s a lot of craziness in the work world right now, and it’s not just work-from-home culture. There’s tremendous alienation and distress, people unhappy with their jobs and the way we work. What are you seeing as a workplace psychologist?
Jason Cochran: Let’s start with the bad news, then the good news. If you look at any report from the top consulting firms, McKinsey, Deloitte, Korn Ferry, Gallup, they’re all saying the same thing in different nomenclature: we have a major disconnect between people and work. People feel they don’t have autonomy and flexibility in where, when, and what they work on, and who they work with, and those things are majorly stressful. We have rampant inflation in the United States and globally, so pay isn’t going as far as it used to. So the bad news is that a lot of people are feeling stressed, unhappy, dissatisfied, or disengaged with work.
Here’s the good news. Everything I’m learning, not just in my own work but from the top global thought leaders who come on my podcast about the future of work, is that things are going to get better. We’re going to go through a very rapid phase of disruption as we figure out automation, artificial intelligence, and, in the next couple of years, artificial general intelligence. But once we get into that phase, imagine this: what if you could get paid the same salary you make now for a typical 40-hour week, but you’re only working 20 hours? We’ve been programmed by the Industrial Revolution, by how we’ve operated for the last two hundred years, to think the eight-to-four or nine-to-five is the only way work can be. It’s not. We’re moving into the digital revolution of work, and that means you’re most likely going to be working alongside an AI agent, a bot, something that turns on superpowers of productivity and efficiency and saves hours. The trick is that leaders need to not say, okay, that means I can squeeze you for another 20 hours. If you want people to be productive, they need to be happy and engaged with a high level of well-being. So we’re moving into a place where we reconsider old constructs and habits that served us well for the way work used to be. Technology that comes alongside us opens up new capacity to rethink the number of hours worked and the tasks humans actually do. Even though right now we’re in disruption and there’s a lot of VUCA out there, we’re moving into a better period. It’s going to be a bumpy road, but everything I hear from the thought leaders I talk to is optimism, especially about improved mental health and well-being in how people feel about work.
Avoiding Winners and Losers
Gordon Lamphere: A lot of futurists we’ve spoken to compare what’s happening to the printing press and how it reshaped the way we take in and disseminate information. How do we get the good result you describe? A lot of people see the future of AI as a game of a few great winners and a tremendous number of losers, the 80/20 rule, with 20% getting the gains and 80% losing their jobs. How do we make it plentiful and beneficial for all of humanity rather than a scarcity game? That’s what most workers, and even some employers, are worried about.
Jason Cochran: That was even Stephen Hawking’s biggest concern with AI. In his final Reddit post before he passed away, someone asked his biggest fear. Previously, in press interviews, he’d talked about the apocalyptic scenario of superintelligence overtaking us. But his final answer was the inequity it could drive between the haves and have-nots. That’s a real concern, and it’s going to take a multi-pronged approach. First, we need government institutions to step in with ethical policies, practices, and legislation to make sure this is a fair, level playing field and things aren’t monopolized, because that throws everything out of whack in terms of the economy and the health and well-being of people around the world. Second, we have to shift mindsets. I love that you used the phrase scarcity mindset, because the opposite is an abundance mindset, seeing change as an opportunity for new value and growth.
Here’s a thought experiment on how we process change. For every human being, the things created between our birth and age fifteen we consider normal. If I asked, is electricity normal?
Gordon Lamphere: I’d say electricity seems pretty normal.
Jason Cochran: Exactly. Or is the internet normal? If you’re in your forties, of course it’s normal; it’s been around as long as we’ve been on this earth. But electricity has only been around a little over a hundred years. It’s a matter of perspective. Anything invented from age zero to fifteen is normal. Anything invented from about fifteen to thirty-five, that’s what you learn and use to your benefit in your career: the stuff many of us went to college for to become a lawyer, a doctor, an accountant. Here’s the funny part. Research tells us that anything invented after age thirty-five, we tend to think is weird. I don’t understand it, it doesn’t fit what I’m doing. I share that to say that beyond government making sure there’s a level playing field, we need to totally reconsider how we develop and train leaders in this mindset of approaching change as an opportunity for growth that can help everyone. We can’t go back to the old traditional ways of capitalism from the Industrial Revolution. We need conscious capitalism. Gen Z in particular, and millennials, care more about how business is conducted, about employee experience and culture, which is why we’re seeing the rise of ESG. Those things matter to the top talent in the world. It’s not just profitability for the board and shareholders. We have a responsibility to stakeholders, clients, employees, and their families. So we need legislation to guide this, and we need to reconsider leadership and how it views the opportunity, so we mitigate greed and approach it with abundance. If we can ask twenty fewer hours from our people while being more productive, that’s good for them, because it gives them time to fill their bucket, which makes them happier and more productive.
A Skills Shortage, Not a Labor Shortage
Gordon Lamphere: How we treat employees is critical, and the most successful businesses, from Chick-fil-A to the best commercial real estate and consulting firms, have a high regard for their talent. One of my struggles with AI and how employees might be treated is around productivity, because we live in a global economy. You’re not competing against your village anymore. Do you see businesses adopting the Chick-fil-A model of giving people a day off, or the Home Depot model of educating employees to bring in top talent? Or will government regulation be necessary rather than market forces? Because in a global world, even a commercial real estate business is competing globally.
Jason Cochran: To clarify, when I talked about government getting involved, that’s about ethical development of AI and a level playing field, so we don’t end up with the dystopia where companies buy up AI agents and fire everybody. That’s the worst case to avoid. But at the heart of the fear about AI is this: we hear all the time that there’s a labor shortage. Where’s the good talent? We don’t have a labor shortage. We have a skills shortage. Huge difference. This isn’t just me. We had Deloitte’s global leader on the future of work, Steve Hatfield, on my show a few weeks ago, and we discussed that all of us are going to have to adapt through reskilling and upskilling, and it will require a lot of unlearning, learning, and relearning. Those are adaptability skills, and this is part of the evolutionary process for us as a species. A lot of the jobs we’ve done over the last hundred years aren’t the jobs we’ll do in the next ten to twenty. There’s a startling statistic in education: of the jobs of tomorrow, by 2030, roughly half don’t exist yet. How do you prepare kids for jobs that don’t exist? You teach transferable skills, like adaptability: the ability to unlearn, learn, and relearn. But we don’t teach those habits or the brain science of moving beyond habits that no longer serve us.
Goldman Sachs had a report a couple of months ago on the future of work and skills, and it was eye-opening. We tend to think blue-collar jobs will be overtaken by AI, but that’s not necessarily the case. Some white-collar jobs, people making six figures in knowledge-based industries, in five years those jobs will either be enhanced by AI or replaced by it, and that knowledge worker will need new skills. Pharmacists, accountants, financial analysts, engineers, software developers: five of the top ten industries Goldman Sachs listed as being disrupted by AI. So if we’re in those positions, we have a choice. We can dig our heels in, bide our time, and cross our fingers that AI won’t replace us. Or we can be fascinated by it and ask, how can I bring AI into my job right now, learn to leverage it for efficiency and innovation, so I’m ahead of the curve and creating new value? That scratches your curiosity, takes away some fears, and future-proofs your career so you’re not seen as expendable to a board. Make no mistake: the people who think this is just a fad that will pass are wrong. Now is the time to understand it and learn to leverage it, so you’re already evolving and adapting, and it may give you back more time to invest in other interests.
The Four Principles of Connection
Gordon Lamphere: The future doesn’t wait on anyone’s timeline. Let’s march on to the four principles of connection, which you’re a big proponent of. We’re struggling to connect with the people around us and build efficient businesses. Can you share those four principles and how they factor into the business world?
Jason Cochran: What I discovered is that there are four types of connection essential to connecting people with the work ecosystem the right way: connecting people with themselves, with others, with their ideal role, and with the organization as a whole. Fundamentally, in my work with organizations, I kept hearing from CEOs and HR leaders that it feels like we’re disconnected. As I dug deeper, this went beyond people working from home. People don’t really know who they are and what they want. They may be in the wrong seat on the bus based on their skills and talents. Or just because they’re good at something doesn’t mean that’s what they want to do every day. There are lots of things I’m good at that don’t give me energy. It reminds me of my days working in schools. There was a teacher who was really good at helping students with behavior problems. Guess what happened? Every year, the kids with the biggest behavior problems got put in her classroom. She asked me one day, why does the principal keep doing this? Because you’re really good at your job. She said, can’t we upskill the rest of the staff so I’m not getting all the challenging kids? It’s exhausting. Same thing at work. Just because someone is adept at a skill doesn’t mean it gives them energy, and over time it can burn them out. That’s the connection-to-role piece.
Then connection to organization. Do people feel connected to the leaders? Is it a psychologically safe culture where you can speak up and leadership actually listens? Is there transparency and trust? And ultimately, is the organization doing work that makes a difference you care about? What I found across those four areas, self, others, role, and organization, was a lack of design in the employee experience: how we recruit, hire, onboard, do performance management, learning and development, and offboarding. Most of the time, there wasn’t intentional design around whether we’re hitting those four levels of connection at each stage. When we get a new hire, is there anything in onboarding that connects them with themselves, with others, with their role, with the organization? Usually not. It’s a fast track to plugging you in, throwing you to the wolves, and getting you to make money for the company. The four principles of connection solve the problem that for too long we haven’t put thoughtful design into our people practices. When we do, the outcomes are healthier well-being for people and improved bottom-line numbers, because you’re mitigating burnout and carefully designing the things we know matter for how people want to connect with work.
One Simple Tip: Notice, Affirm, Need
Gordon Lamphere: One of the biggest challenges right now is employee alienation and building culture post-pandemic. Whether it’s Marx on alienation or Aristotle saying man is by nature a social animal, we’re trying to work communally and get the power of strong communities and workplace culture. Pizza parties and drinks after work can be great, but they don’t build culture. What are some basic tips an entrepreneur, business owner, or HR person can implement?
Jason Cochran: I’ll boil it down to one: notice, affirm, need. This is how you structure appreciation and recognition, in writing or verbally. Here’s what it sounds like. Gordon, if it wasn’t for you and your incredible skill at asking the right questions at the right time with that curiosity of yours, there’s no way we would have landed that deal, because we’d have missed the right questions. I love that about you. We need that in our company. Thank you for sharing that gift with us. I don’t know what we’d do without you.
Gordon Lamphere: Well, thank you, Jason. I appreciate that.
Jason Cochran: That sounds oversimplified, but I noticed you, used your name, affirmed you specifically for your skills, and said we need you. Too often, when leaders try to show appreciation, it sounds like: Gordon, great job on that project, keep it up. Which one is better? I’m not saying it’s the panacea, but there needs to be a recalibration of how we communicate with each other, in person or remote. The way we communicate in writing and speech matters so much for mindset. So if there’s one simple recommendation, recalibrate how you convey appreciation and recognition, and get to know how people like it. Like the famous book on love languages, people have different languages for recognition. For me, acts of service isn’t big, but verbal praise is. If someone put a Coke on my desk and said, thinking of you, I’d think that’s cool, but it doesn’t animate me like specific feedback and praise on something I did. Get to know your teams and what fills their bucket when it comes to noticing, affirming, and needing each other.
One more thing on this. Coming very quickly, next year in fact, is the Apple Vision Pro, a headset much more involved than the one Meta put out, with spatial computing and mixed augmented reality. You can be sitting in your room, waving your hand like Tony Stark in the Avengers movies, flipping through apps and clicking on emails. It’s a three-dimensional approach to engaging with your work environment, even from home. Right now, you and I are on Riverside. This is 2D, like Zoom or Google Meet. That was a step above 1D, phone calls and texting. The next phase is 3D, where we can be at home but in a projected environment with other people, through holographics or avatars. Early research shows that in a 3D replicated environment, the same parts of the brain and the same neurotransmitters are activated as when we’re in person. That’s not to say that out of the gate in 2024, you’ll hop in the metaverse and it’ll be just like being in person, but it’s going to get there quickly, and our brains will perceive it in very similar ways. Recently, researchers had two people in different parts of the country playing a video game together to see whether their brainwave patterns would sync up, thousands of miles apart. They did. I’m not saying we should do away with being together in person. There are absolute benefits, the positive neurotransmitters, oxytocin, dopamine, serotonin. But we’re about to move from 2D to 3D in virtual interaction, and early signs are that it’s a positive step neurologically for activating and syncing our brains with other people, much more than 2D Zoom calls. That’s a critical part of helping people not feel alienated. We’ll have better tools in the next year or two that make it feel more like we’re in person with our teams, even from home.
Work From Home and Better Measures Than Productivity
Gordon Lamphere: Before the Final Four, what are you seeing from the work-from-home experience, from a team-building and brain-science perspective? Are you seeing productivity from the businesses you talk to?
Jason Cochran: Steve Hatfield from Deloitte said a couple of weeks ago that we’ve got to move beyond productivity. We’re evolving as an economy, as a people, and in what it means to create value. If we measure how valuable our organizations and people are only by throughput and output, the way we did in the Industrial Revolution, we’re doing it wrong. That would be like using body mass index as the only measure of your health. Science has given us better measurements. Productivity is important, but we need better leading indicators of what improves productivity and performance. How happy are our people? How’s their overall health, their mental health? Are we equipping them with what they need? How do they feel about collaboration? Those things have been fuzzy, but we’re moving into a time where we’ll have better signals and data on them, which gives better predictability of what productivity will be.
My perspective on remote work, looking at data from groups like Global Workplace Analytics that specialize in it, is that people working from home are absolutely doing a great job, which is why they don’t want to give it up. Cushman & Wakefield is also measuring this, and what they found is that any time a mandate is given on where and when to work, there’s roughly a 40% immediate drop in engagement from that employee. So all this RTO mandating means an immediate 40% drop in engagement. Think about it as a psychologist: when you force people to do something, how well do they do it? Begrudgingly. If I’m a leader, why would I put my ego at the top and say, you have to return to the office because I said so, and have a bunch of disgruntled staff? That’s not a great way to run a business. I know that’s an oversimplification, but we need to recalibrate how we communicate as leaders. That doesn’t mean catering to every wish. But it also doesn’t mean the model we’ve been under too long, telling you what to do from my ivory tower. That leads to burnout, and millennials and Gen Z in particular don’t respond well to it. They’ll leave. So remote work is here to stay, and a lot of organizations are moving to hybrid, because it’s the best of both worlds. You meet in a central location a time or two a week, but you also work from home. The research is clear on the benefits, and that’s tough to give up.
One caveat: the concern coming out of remote work is that people are working more, on average twenty percent more. A lot of executives say, return to the office, you’ll be more productive. Your people at home are actually working longer and harder, because they have back-to-back meetings, no window of driving, and no clear cutoff. They’ll take time off in the evening, then get back to emails before bed to get a head start. The data is clear: people want to work from home, and many are very successful with it, especially now that we’ve worked out the initial hangups. But leaders need to be aware that people at home tend to work longer hours, and set up some rules of engagement or time-blocking techniques so there isn’t constant collision between work and personal life and people don’t burn out working an extra eight to ten hours a week.
The Final Four
Gordon Lamphere: We could do another two or three hours on this, but let’s get to our Final Four. First: where do you see the future of real estate ten years out? If you could name one big change driver and how we’ll react to it, what would it be?
Jason Cochran: From a commercial real estate perspective, I go back to Cushman & Wakefield’s report: about $1.4 trillion in commercial property loans mature in 2024, and we’re anticipating a lot of them won’t get renewed. If we’re going to have all this office space, San Francisco is at something like forty-some percent vacant, what do we do with it? There are implications for local tax policy and more. Cushman’s leaders shared with me, Bryan Berthold in particular, that a lot of those spaces will be repurposed as mixed use, potentially converted to residential. It’ll be interesting to see what happens. A safe prediction is that we’ll never get back to pre-pandemic office utilization. There isn’t the business requirement for that much physical footprint anymore for most businesses. Will there be an uptick in space used in the next few years? I think so. But it’ll look different from traditional office, more of a welcoming, coffee-shop type environment where you rent space to work with a team or a colleague, rather than your cubicle Monday through Friday.
Another thing Cushman & Wakefield is doing that would be great for your listeners is an experience-per-square-foot model, being used at Pfizer right now, to examine how effective physical space is for employee experience: is it helping people drive value for the organization and bringing value to them? With their model, if you have multiple locations, they can give you an actual dollar return on investment for each building, so you know this one is getting a lot of return with our people, this one isn’t, so we’ll move more remote there if that’s what people want. We’re getting into more sophisticated models of physical space, in design and in what we use it for, so we aren’t wasting space or designing it in ways that hurt productivity.
One last thing. Any organization with open office space: convert it as quickly as you can. Every bit of research on peak performance, on flow, on people’s ability to perform at high levels shows that open offices completely destroy it. It was a fad. If you have an open office, know there’s a significant tax on your people’s performance and their ability to deliver value right out of the gate. Consider changing it if you can in the next few years.
Gordon Lamphere: I’ve been an anti-open-office evangelist since the mid-2010s. All the data, from Harvard Business Review to the psychological research, has gone against it. And you don’t even have to fully build out; large furniture that makes it not an open office anymore works too. I want to double back on hybrid. A number of folks are moving to hybrid models based on hoteling, which has economic benefits. But what we’ve found in Chicagoland, with employers like Zurich that implemented open office models, is a tremendous downside, with employees leaving because they feel alienated and lose their sense of personal space and belonging. Do you think hoteling is the path forward? Is the coffee-shop model a hoteling model? Or is it more of a WeWork, small-office, flex-space model?
Jason Cochran: Great question, and I’ll give you the answer I got my first day of graduate school in psychology. Two words: it depends.
Gordon Lamphere: I’m a J.D., so lawyers like to use that too.
Jason Cochran: My professor said the two most important words you’ll learn as a social scientist are “it depends.” People are jagged profiles, and so are organizations. We can talk in statistics, sixty percent this, seventy percent that, but every company is made up of individuals, and every individual is unique. When you get that unique mix together, it means different things for different companies. Even with some steadfast guardrails, my consulting model is that you’re the expert on your company. I’m helping you understand your problem and the possible solutions, and it’ll look different for you than for another real estate company I’m working with. That’s a good thing. And this is my soapbox: I don’t like company-to-company comparisons. Who cares what so-and-so is doing down the street? You’re competing against yourself. Look at intrapersonal growth in your organization. How did you do this year compared to last? What predictive indicators show it’ll be better this year? Benchmark comparisons and “we’re in the tenth percentile” mostly aren’t helpful. They don’t help you make the strategic and tactical changes you need for your people and your clients in your market. So maybe hoteling works for some organizations. For most, it won’t be helpful for how they do business, and that’s okay. All leaders and organizations should adopt an entrepreneurial mindset of “let’s find out.”
Gordon Lamphere: This is a great time for testing. I couldn’t agree more.
Jason Cochran: And iterate. Coming from a recovered perfectionist mentality as a kid, you can get inside your own head and not even start, because you’re already thinking of all the ways you’ll fail. That’s not the mentality you need to survive. Richard Foster, who’s pretty good at predicting successful companies, especially the Fortune 500, has data showing that by 2028, forty percent of the current Fortune 500 will no longer exist. That’s how quickly things are changing. We have to instill an entrepreneurial mindset: yes, we know what we’re good at, but we’ve constantly got to be innovating and understanding the shifting needs of the market and our people. Try something, then iterate. Don’t be too scared to fail, because if you sit back and keep doing things the way you’ve been doing them, there’s a high chance you’re in that forty percent. And to bring it full circle, I heard from a guest a few months ago: change never fails. When a change initiative doesn’t go well, we say the change failed. No. Change is like house money; it’s always winning. What didn’t happen is you didn’t get the outcome you wanted. Change is inevitable. It’s how well you adapt, learn, and iterate through it to improve your product, service, and value delivery for all stakeholders, not just leadership, owners, and shareholders, but clients, employees, and local communities. Change never fails. We just often fail to get the outcomes we want from it.
Gordon Lamphere: You sound like a scientist, which makes sense. One of the things we love in the Final Four is life advice from people who’ve done it. If you could go back to young Jason in high school and give one tidbit of advice, what would it be?
Jason Cochran: Don’t play scared, kid. I said I was a recovering perfectionist. I was totally content not competing in high school. I could have been valedictorian, but I thought, is it worth the effort? Probably not. I’m cool with A’s and B’s. It drove my mom and dad crazy, because they saw all this potential, and I thought, if I don’t try, I won’t fail at becoming valedictorian. I’m fine being number ten or fifteen in the class. So I’d tell younger Jason, come on, kid, go get it. You’re competitive, it’s a natural instinct, but you’re letting fear outweigh hope and optimism. Entrepreneurship is what brought that into my life. It wasn’t some wise teaching. It was failing and failing and failing in entrepreneurship until you finally see, here we go, now we’ve got something. Those are the things that shape your mindset, and that help you realize, okay, a lot of what my parents were trying to teach me, I get it now. And I’d share that with leaders too. A lot of you listening have been very successful, and your organizations have been very successful. But the future doesn’t care what you’ve done in the past. You have to come to the table, evolve, adapt, and develop an entrepreneurial mindset, because that’s the only way to thrive through the massive disruption we’re on the cusp of over the next two to five years. Don’t play scared. Adopt the entrepreneurial mindset and coach it in your people. A lot of them already have it. Tap into them and equip them to leverage those skills, coach others, and take some risks.
Gordon Lamphere: One of the ways to change your mindset and your neural pathways is reading. Is there a book you’d recommend our listeners pick up? A summer read, a beach read, or an in-depth War and Peace read.
Jason Cochran: A hundred percent. To prepare for change, on a personal level and for leaders preparing their organizations, I’d recommend Build for Tomorrow by Jason Feifer. Jason is editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur magazine, and we had him on our podcast last winter when he’d just released the book. It’s about having an action plan for embracing change, adapting fast, and future-proofing your life and business. Through Entrepreneur, he’s done fascinating interviews with people like The Rock and Barbara Corcoran, people who’ve been tremendously successful despite challenging circumstances, and he funnels that wisdom into a model for how you react to change. The final phase, phase four, is called Wouldn’t Go Back. That’s the point we all need to get to, as organizations and as people: we become so comfortable evolving, adapting, learning, and unlearning that we look back and say, I can’t imagine doing things the way I did five years ago, and I don’t want to go back, because I’ve built a better system, process, and way of thinking. So much practical wisdom in there for leveraging change and making it work for you.
Gordon Lamphere: I’ll have to pick that up. One last question, and the whole reason for the podcast: we reach out to voices bringing insight to how we work, live, and interact with real estate. Who should we bring on next? You’ve had a tremendous number of fascinating guests.
Jason Cochran: I’ll give you one. His name is Joe Sirio, and he’s an expert on overcoming fear. What makes him an expert? He used to be a high-level US intelligence agent, doing a lot of work in Russia with the KGB, so he was in a lot of high-pressure, volatile, fearful situations. He’s now developed an entire leadership curriculum on helping leaders overcome fears, including the fear of change and the fear of the unknown, with all the disruption coming with AI. I’d highly recommend him, and I’m happy to connect you.
Gordon Lamphere: He sounds like a voice we’d love to have on. One quick last question: if an entrepreneur, business owner, HR person, or anyone wants to reach out to you, what’s the best way?
Jason Cochran: LinkedIn. Jason Cochran on LinkedIn is the easiest way to reach me. I’ll spell my last name in case you need it: C-O-C-H-R-A-N. In my title line, you’ll see business psychologist listed first. Connect with me. I love LinkedIn. It’s where I’ve built a lot of meaningful friendships and relationships, and I’m on it just about every day. If you’re curious about the work I’ve been doing around the four principles of connection, go to jasondcochran.com or principlesofconnection.com to learn more.
Gordon Lamphere: Jason, thank you so much for hopping on today. We’ll have to have you on again to give us more insight into the way we live and work.
Jason Cochran: I’d love to, Gordon. Thanks for the invitation. It was a fun conversation. Wishing you and the listeners the best until next time.
Gordon Lamphere: Thanks again to Jason. We enjoyed having him on and appreciate his insights. If you enjoyed the podcast, please give us a like, a five-star rating, or a review. Your comments, interactions, and subscriptions truly matter and help us continue to provide quality guests. You can follow us on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I’m Gordon Lamphere with the Real Finds Podcast. Thank you for listening.
Van Vlissingen and Co. has been the Midwest’s oldest commercial real estate brokerage, development, and management firm since 1879, and today is independently ranked the #1 commercial real estate agency in Chicagoland, home to the #1 independently ranked agent, Gordon Lamphere, and the region’s #1 ranked commercial property management team. If you own, manage, or invest in energy-adjacent, mixed-use, or transit-oriented property across Lake County, the North Shore, the Northwest and O’Hare corridors, DuPage and the I-88 corridor, Will County, or southern Wisconsin’s Pleasant Prairie, Kenosha, and Racine markets, contact Van Vlissingen and Co. at 📞 847-634-2300 or 🌐 vvco.com. For a market-wide view of where these dynamics sit today, see our State of the Chicagoland Commercial Real Estate Market for Q3 2026.