Episode 20: Social Capital in the Age of Technology: Trust, Networks, and Influence
Ryan Lufkin (00:01.336)
Hey there and welcome to another episode of Educast 3000. I'm your co-host Ryan Lufkin.
Melissa Loble (00:07.14)
And I'm your other co-host, Melissa Loble. And Ryan and I are really excited for our conversation today. have a very special guest and are going to dig into social capital, workforce preparedness, where does education fall in all of this, and some really interesting and exciting work that an organization has been doing. So our guest today is Nitsan Kelman. She's the co-founder of and CEO of Climb Together. And she's
She's also, she's got quite an entrepreneurial background. We're gonna talk a little bit about that. And, but most importantly, she's doing some really, really incredible work through her organization around social capital and how we can leverage social capital as individuals in a way to create the paths and the futures that we really want for ourselves. So welcome, Mie-san.
Nitzan Pelman (00:59.119)
Hi, welcome to you. I'm so glad to be here.
Ryan Lufkin (01:01.55)
Thanks so much for joining us. So Melissa hit on some of high points, but tell us a little bit about yourself so our audience can get to know you better.
Melissa Loble (01:02.558)
Thank you.
Nitzan Pelman (01:11.813)
Yeah, I'm a social entrepreneur and have been working on sort of impact-related work for quite some time. I've built four organizations from scratch, some in the for-profit space, some in the non-for-profit space, some in government. I started my career a long time ago at Teach for America. It sort of helped me realize that
There's so much potential in our country and not everyone gets access to opportunity. So I've really, the kind of hook of all of the different work that I've ever done is really around helping people from more marginalized communities to really get access to high quality education, either through K-12, through college, or through workforce and upskilling.
And that also has a lot of overlap with relationships and how to build really successful relationships because ultimately knowing a lot of stuff is about half of the equation and then knowing people is the other half of the equation. And so I've spent probably a little less than a decade of the last decade or so really focused on how do we help unlock opportunities and doors for people
through learning something specific and skill, like skill, but also through building really thoughtful relationships.
Ryan Lufkin (02:44.174)
That's amazing.
Melissa Loble (02:45.268)
That's incredible. And that focus on relationships feeds nicely into a question that we always ask our guests on our podcast. And that's, do you have a learning moment, a favorite learning moment in your life, an impactful learning moment? It could be one as you as a learner. It could be one through your teaching, where you started your career, or something you've even observed. But is there like a moment in your life, and I'm sure there's many,
that you can think back to as either being a learner or being a teacher that's impacted your choices and your career.
Nitzan Pelman (03:21.517)
Yeah, there are many. And sometimes they're about learners, like coming to tell me about a conversation that I had with them. That made a huge difference. And sometimes it's about people who have made huge differences in my life. I've just found that over the course of life, we are impacted by other humans.
Ryan Lufkin (03:43.992)
Mm-hmm.
Nitzan Pelman (03:44.293)
And as much as we want technology to sort of like be all of our answers, it's scalable, it's easy, it's, you know, there's so many great solutions that come with tech. The people who have made indelible imprints on us usually are other people. So for me, it was a boyfriend in high school and college. And I...
He was really a lover of learning at such a young age. When we were in high school, he was writing speeches for the mayor of Los Angeles and was sort of being tracked to go to Harvard from, you know, probably age two or something. I had like a very different educational experience. People really didn't think much of my potential, to be honest. I was tracked in a special education class starting in first grade.
Ryan Lufkin (04:18.093)
Wow.
Ryan Lufkin (04:24.782)
You
Nitzan Pelman (04:36.821)
and my friends and I in that class referred to ourselves as the stupid kids. And it was rough. When teachers have the label of you being slower for whatever reason, you kind of end up living into that label more and more, and the teachers live into that label, and there's a tremendous amount of science around this.
Ryan Lufkin (04:42.062)
teeth.
Yeah.
Ryan Lufkin (04:59.352)
Mm-hmm.
Nitzan Pelman (04:59.877)
where there have been kids that have been swapped, the special ed kid became the valedictorian kids and vice versa and all of a sudden the performance either plummeted or went upward based on whatever the expectations of the adults were and they could have been literally the opposite of the performers in the room. And so my boyfriend had a very different label for me and it was because we didn't go to the same school.
I went to separate gendered schools most of my life. I grew up in a pretty religious community in Los Angeles. And so we went to different schools, and I didn't go to school with boys. And because of that, he just assumed that I was a normal Harvard learner. And I spent a lot of my college years at Harvard just hanging out on the weekends with Harvard students.
And so from going from having a stupid label to having a smart label as the girlfriend of a Harvard student, we spent weekends talking about Kantian ethics and Michelangelo's art and whatever Harvard kids like to talk about. And it was just like a really enlivening experience for me of realizing, my gosh, I have had, essentially, curiosity squashed out of me. And then to be in this environment where there was just
Ryan Lufkin (06:04.366)
Hahaha
Nitzan Pelman (06:19.565)
curiosity oozing in every orifice of the institution was just an incredible experience. And the label and the expectations all shifted. And very quickly I realized I actually had a whole lot more aptitude. I was insatiably curious. I was such a learner. I was such a desire for knowledge and for insight and for edification. But just no one had really positioned it in the right way.
And when somebody that didn't have a label for me gave me a different label, like the world sort of took off for me. So I've had a much more successful professional life than I did as a student, but it really helped me understand the learner who might struggle more, who might have that impression of their own capacity or their own capability. And I think sort of like having that perspective and that empathy has allowed me to have a really successful.
Ryan Lufkin (07:03.587)
Yeah.
Nitzan Pelman (07:14.341)
opportunity of running and leading organizations now for almost three decades for people that struggle.
Ryan Lufkin (07:21.612)
I love that perspective, amazing.
Melissa Loble (07:23.092)
Yeah. And thank you for sharing that very personal and vulnerable story, or it can be for people. It leads me to my first question for you. What attracted you to education? I'm thinking it's some of what you just shared. I mean, you talked about how you started at Teach for America. I know you worked in New York City in education leadership there. You've done patterns and patterns of education work throughout your career. What sort of attracted you to education?
Nitzan Pelman (07:54.277)
Yeah, I mean, there are a few things. I mean, it's a complicated, weird story. I grew up as an Orthodox Jew in Los Angeles and in a very deeply religious community, as I sort of mentioned before. And I went to Orthodox schools my whole life, elementary, middle, high school, Yeshiva in Israel, and then an Orthodox college in New York.
called Stern College for Women, which is the women's division of Yeshiva University. And there are no women rabbis in that community, but I always wanted to be like a Jewish communal leader of some kind. That was sort of the way I was being primed.
I realized in college that I was really struggling with the world I grew up with and sort of some of the values and some of the ways that the world was framed to me. And I decided to leave that community towards the end of college, which was probably the hardest decision I've ever made in my life. I didn't know anybody that wasn't Orthodox. I didn't know anybody that lived outside of that world and didn't refrain from using electricity on Sabbath and eating kosher food.
Ryan Lufkin (09:03.619)
Yeah.
Nitzan Pelman (09:16.045)
It was a pretty dramatic transition. And when I left that world, really didn't know any, like, was like, well, I thought I was going to be a Jewish communal leader and now I'm not going to be a Jewish communal leader. And now what am I going to do? And it felt really like, was like, I felt like I jumped into like, you know, like a black hole of some kind. I had a very dear friend who was sort of the shining star of the community I grew up in. Her name was Stephanie.
Ryan Lufkin (09:37.314)
Yeah.
Nitzan Pelman (09:45.989)
And in college, she found Teach for America. This was in 1998. It wasn't a particularly well-known organization then. It was still in its first decade of existence in its infancy. And it wasn't a household quantity yet. And she was going off to Washington Heights to teach in the inner city in New York. And I was really inspired by her. I had never been inside a public school, honestly. And I had never been in the income communities. But I sort of followed her.
there. And when I got there, I sort of very quickly realized, and this was, in my own transformation. So was leaving orthodoxy and also teaching myself everything that no one had taught me for the first years of my growing up life. It was sort of happening at the same time. I couldn't read and I couldn't write. And somehow somebody who saw my potential hired me as the first ever development director at Teach for America. And I, um,
Ryan Lufkin (10:25.933)
Yeah.
Nitzan Pelman (10:42.263)
I started to spend all this time in low income communities and realized, gosh, like I have so much privilege. I am a white middle-class woman who grew up with a lot of privilege, even though sort of like some of this educational expectations weren't quite there. I was sort of already swimming in opportunity. And walking into these schools, I realized, gosh, like when you have...
poverty and race and income all sort of working against you, like how much more so are you going to be held back? And if that were true for me in my sort of privileged space, like what was that going to look like for people and kids of color in particular? And that sort of very quickly crystallized for me, like this needs to be my work. There's a way for us to help unlock human potential. And that's what I've been doing for the last almost 30 years.
Ryan Lufkin (11:16.248)
Mm-hmm.
Ryan Lufkin (11:24.44)
Yeah.
Ryan Lufkin (11:35.054)
That's amazing. One of the first startups that you founded was Re-Up, which was focused on helping students that may have dropped out of college, didn't finish a traditional degree, re-engage. And I love that because I'm actually watching my daughter's sophomore at the University of Utah. And I we talked about her a lot on the show. But I've got a lot of friends whose kids maybe took a year or two of college and have dropped out and don't know the path forward and really struggle with.
looking at what the future looks like. Tell us a little bit about REUP and how you thought to start that. I mean, it's more common now. We talk a lot about the transition in education, but five years ago even, there wasn't this focus on re-engaging with students like there is now.
Nitzan Pelman (12:17.443)
Yeah, yeah, and I started REUP actually almost a decade ago, and it's still like a thriving company doing super, super well. I'm really proud of the folks there. Yeah, mean, so I mean, just like quick, like sort of career sketch background, like Left Teach for America, went to KIPP, which is sort of a famous charter school network and worked there for a while, then worked at the New York City Department of Education in New York.
Ryan Lufkin (12:46.494)
yeah.
Nitzan Pelman (12:46.917)
sort of helped a lot of first and second year teachers. I built a mentoring program for all of the city's first year teachers and then started a local of a national nonprofit called Citizen Schools that really focused in middle school and helping learning come to life and make more sense for kids in low income communities. so all of my work for the first 16 years of my career was in the K-12 ed reform space. But.
Ryan Lufkin (13:02.947)
Yeah.
Nitzan Pelman (13:12.395)
Running a nonprofit for six years in New York, I sort of like very quickly realized that like when you were really successful in that space, it meant that you had larger budgets to fundraise for the next year. Your budget always started at zero and like the reward was just that you had to sort of honestly fundraise more. And I was starting to get a little tired of that, sort of that business model.
Ryan Lufkin (13:25.538)
Mm-hmm.
You
Melissa Loble (13:29.01)
him.
Ryan Lufkin (13:32.13)
More fundraising, yes, yeah.
Melissa Loble (13:33.853)
Yeah.
Nitzan Pelman (13:40.749)
And I was really curious about like, how can I build a for-profit that had mission impact and also kind of had a different business model? And I met a venture capitalist out in Silicon Valley whose name was Paul. And he kind of, you know, we started to talk to a lot and I said to him, like, I'm really going to build things from scratch. All the things I had done were either entrepreneurial or entrepreneurial and
I was sort of like looking for the thing, but didn't always have the most brilliant idea no one had ever thought of that before. And he then gave me like 100 brilliant ideas that no one had ever thought of before. And I was like, oh, let's re-enroll students that have dropped out of college. So we kind of like conceptualized that idea together. That became REAP. And it's been a really interesting journey because the way that we partnered with colleges,
And this was sort of the old model, it's changed, but we essentially approached colleges and said, you know, there's a whole population of people that have dropped out or stopped out. Some of them truly, truly are never gonna go back, but some of them, you know, dropped out because life got in the way, somebody died, somebody got sick, like somebody ran out of money. I mean, there's lots of reasons.
And what if we could go to schools and say, if you can give us the stopout list, then we can reengage people. And only if they come back will we get compensated through a revenue share model. think, again, it's changed a bit because some of the challenges of that model over time were that people were dropping out because the cost of college has risen so dramatically that it isn't that affordable anymore. And I was starting to get nervous that people were
Ryan Lufkin (15:17.869)
Yeah.
Nitzan Pelman (15:26.437)
being asked to re-enroll in college, but maybe we're going to drop out a semester later again because we can't afford it. So those were some of the early kind of hard nodes of the company. I think it's moved a lot to now having states help with the funding and so the incentives align better for the learner. But, you know, look, the worst thing that really somebody can be is a student that has debt and no value for their debt.
Ryan Lufkin (15:53.912)
Yeah, yeah.
Nitzan Pelman (15:54.839)
And so I think that there's a lot of really important reasons why REAP should exist now that it is financially a little bit more aligned. feel super good about it.
Ryan Lufkin (16:00.364)
Yeah.
Ryan Lufkin (16:04.184)
That's amazing. Yeah, mean, somewhere between 30 and 50 % of students don't finish a 40 degree within six years. So it's not a small number of students we're talking.
Nitzan Pelman (16:12.569)
Yeah, yeah.
Melissa Loble (16:13.096)
No, no, no. it's interesting. So as we think about your journeys, after you left rehab, then if I'm correct, you started Climb Higher. And this has got a different focus of bringing new skills to workers and really helping bring education, particularly focused on technology. That was the next step, right? And how did that start to bring you to thinking about not just the skills that people have
in order to have successful careers but also social capital.
Nitzan Pelman (16:46.019)
Yeah, there was like one small piece in between Riyadh and Climbsire and that was being an entrepreneur in residence at LinkedIn. And that was a sort of year I got to spend working on the inside of the company.
Ryan Lufkin (16:55.849)
cool.
Ryan Lufkin (17:01.87)
It's like a different perspective than what you'd had previously,
Melissa Loble (17:04.067)
Yeah!
Nitzan Pelman (17:04.741)
And it was really amazing. I was on the social impact team and I went also to a product team for a while too. And basically when I got to LinkedIn, they had put a referral button on their platform. And what they learned by doing that was that the vast majority of job seekers get jobs through referrals. And that was sort of like an illuminating moment for me of realizing.
how every job I had ever gotten had come through a referral and a relationship. Even that Teach for America job, I called the executive director cold and had said, you my good friend Stephanie is a Teach for America teacher in your region, like, can I come talk to you? And that was enough to open the door for that first job and that job led to every other job I've ever gotten. And I realized at that time, like, I never even applied for a job. I've never been on a jobs board before, ironically enough, even though I worked at LinkedIn.
And that like, you know, as much as I wanted to be distinctly unique in the world, I was distinctly ununique. Everybody was getting jobs. And if that were true, you know, the world of upskilling and workforce was becoming like more and more popular as sort of like, you know, a response to the fact that the rising costs of college were becoming so prohibited.
Ryan Lufkin (18:05.58)
Yeah.
Ryan Lufkin (18:21.39)
Mm-hmm.
Nitzan Pelman (18:22.285)
And so I had become much more interested in workforce, especially because I was engaging with all these learners from REAP who were dropping out because they couldn't afford it. And I was just trying to figure out other alternatives. And in doing all of this research in the workforce space and having newfound curiosity around it, I realized that just every entity out there was almost having
the same model over and over again. And it was, let's teach people a skill that's in demand and voila, like they will then get a great new job. And I was like, okay, so how is this gonna work? Like the person doesn't have any relevant experience. They're trying to go from a Trader Joe's cashier to an HVAC technician or whatever the role was. It's like, how is...
Like, who's going to vouch for them? Who's going to look at their kind of non-experienced resume and sort of take it seriously? And it seemed like without social capital, it was going to be really hard for these folks who were trying so hard to do workforce upskilling to really make this transition. And I spent a lot of time looking, and there were just very, very few organizations that sort of taught these in-demand skills alongside of like,
Ryan Lufkin (19:17.912)
Mm-hmm.
Melissa Loble (19:19.208)
Hmm.
Ryan Lufkin (19:42.753)
Yeah.
Nitzan Pelman (19:43.201)
about networks and relationships and it just seemed as if there was this missing gap or missing hole in the space. So I started Climb Higher almost in response to that, which was the first ever non-profit with a revenue model. So sort of like thinking more about the blending of core profit and the non-for-profit, the government stuff I'd been doing for all these years to kind of think about how do we build networks and how do we design that into the model at heart.
Melissa Loble (19:58.525)
Yeah.
Ryan Lufkin (19:59.071)
Mm-hmm.
Ryan Lufkin (20:12.184)
That's amazing. And that's actually something, you know, as a tech provider, that's something we think about a lot. It's not something that we necessarily focus on. And it's a, you know, it's one of those things that how do you extend that beyond the digital classroom into that space where you can create networks for build community, things like that. So that's amazing. So tell us a little bit now about your current nonprofit.
Melissa Loble (20:27.55)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Ryan Lufkin (20:32.652)
which is Climb Together, which I kind of love. We always talk about we can't do an episode without talking about AI a little bit, but it does open up some doorways here and some economies of scale, I think in exactly the approach that you're looking at.
Nitzan Pelman (20:45.933)
Yeah, so we spent six years learning about what it takes to open up doors for learners through Climb Higher. We built a course that really elucidated every single aspect of relationship building at the most granular level. So both of you, when I say things that resonate for you, you nod at me.
Ryan Lufkin (21:11.779)
Mm-hmm.
Melissa Loble (21:12.286)
Mm-hmm.
Nitzan Pelman (21:13.163)
smile at me and you use your eyes to show me that you're following what I'm saying and appreciating it. And when people take notes in a conversation, I always feel like, wow, like they care that much about what I'm saying to like write it down. Like that makes me feel so good. And they've, ask these fabulous open-ended questions. Both of you guys are so artful at doing that to get me to talk. And I sort of would joke with our learners a lot. You know what people really love? They really love talking.
Melissa Loble (21:14.9)
Yeah.
Ryan Lufkin (21:27.0)
Yeah.
Melissa Loble (21:27.923)
Mm-hmm.
Ryan Lufkin (21:40.322)
They do, yeah, mean, it's...
Nitzan Pelman (21:43.429)
And so, you know, what does it mean? And there's a lot of research and science out there that says that when people talk more, they feel really good about the other person. So it's not even about like, I like what they're saying. It's that I like that I'm... So, I mean, and there's a fascinating, there's so much data around this that if you look at...
Ryan Lufkin (21:55.852)
Yeah, yeah, that's interesting, yeah.
Melissa Loble (21:56.788)
Interesting.
Ryan Lufkin (22:02.466)
They listened to me, yeah. I felt heard and seen, yeah.
Melissa Loble (22:04.199)
Yeah.
Nitzan Pelman (22:10.841)
You know, a lot of the big companies that have sales components like a credit card sales arm or things like that, the CRM tracking systems internally are literally tracking all of those account executives on how much time they're talking versus how much time the potential customer. The ratio is that the account executive is talking more than they can predict almost accurately that they will not crack a sale.
Ryan Lufkin (22:27.871)
yeah.
Nitzan Pelman (22:37.733)
And so the art of asking open-ended questions and active listening and sort of following into a conversation and finding the similarities and the overlaps, there's an art to doing those things. And when you do them well, that is when doors start to open. So for instance, there's a concept called homophily, which is the idea that when we have similarities, then
Melissa Loble (22:39.176)
you
Nitzan Pelman (23:04.055)
that opens up doors. And here's like, you know, small examples of it. When I was nine months pregnant, I was running Re-App and the last thing I had time for was to like figure out what stroller and what car seat and what, you know, and I just like texted my mom's friends and said like, what should I buy? And they sent me links and I bought them and I didn't think about it.
And like that's what happens when we have trust. Now that happens with hiring all the time too. Ryan, you have a role open? Let me send you somebody, right? You're already immediately going, because we have a trusting relationship and rapport, you're gonna already come to that conversation warmer with that person. Now we have some shortcuts in society that are more elite. Like, you played lacrosse at Duke, me too. That homophily is like immediate and it starts to unlock.
Ryan Lufkin (23:38.53)
Mm-hmm.
Ryan Lufkin (23:49.133)
Yeah.
Nitzan Pelman (23:53.827)
And that happens again in very elite environment. I sort of use that as an example. It's almost like a cheesy example. Like, you know, like, you played the grass.
Ryan Lufkin (24:01.71)
Honestly, we see that, you I was in a fraternity in college and I have a natural level of trust if someone comes and has that same background. Yeah.
Melissa Loble (24:04.616)
time.
Nitzan Pelman (24:08.165)
Yes, precisely and in even by you acknowledging that to me in this conversation I already am feeling warmer because you understand what I do
Ryan Lufkin (24:16.6)
But it can be a double edged sword because you know, I was the, you know, my fraternity was just all the skiers at the University of Utah. were the outdoorsy kids from all across the country. They weren't the super wealthy or the elites, you know, and I think that's one of the things that can be a little bit of a double edged sword to talk about.
Nitzan Pelman (24:31.193)
Yeah, but those guys probably had jobs at some point and they probably were good jobs, right? And so if somebody at your former sorority reaches out to you, even today on LinkedIn, you probably would take that request. And that's the power of social capital is like that they're leveraging homophily in order to unlock that job. So, okay, so we learned all of this in practice at Climb Higher, but the real truth is that even if you teach people
Melissa Loble (24:36.413)
and
Ryan Lufkin (24:43.862)
Absolutely. Yeah.
Nitzan Pelman (24:58.979)
the granularities of these things. I can talk to them blue in the face and like how you use your head and you how you nod your head and how you ask questions and blah, blah, blah. But the reality is unless you actually do it, you won't get good at it. There's an art to just feeling like you build confidence by having these conversations with people that you don't know.
Ryan Lufkin (25:05.73)
Yeah.
Melissa Loble (25:06.534)
Mm-hmm.
Ryan Lufkin (25:12.28)
Yeah.
Nitzan Pelman (25:19.021)
And so every month we would have conversations with people that they didn't know and we would recruit them from my social capital, LinkedIn, Google, Salesforce, all these companies that we had built really deep relationships with and they would get on calls and they would practice on Zoom and we would call them social capital happy hours. And basically through these practice sessions of where people would ask the very ubiquitous first question, tell me about yourself, right? Which was your first question.
Ryan Lufkin (25:46.478)
Yeah, yeah.
Melissa Loble (25:46.676)
Thanks.
Nitzan Pelman (25:47.487)
So when you kind of start to practice, you get really strong. And so we started to see referrals get somewhat unlocked from those practice conversations where we could put higher socioeconomic status people in touch with lower socioeconomic status and help them build rapport. But interestingly enough, where we saw much more rapport and much more doors opening was actually from the alumni of the organization.
Ryan Lufkin (26:04.11)
Mm-hmm.
Nitzan Pelman (26:14.981)
So we had taught them in the program, like your job is to get a job, but as soon as you get a job, your job is to then help somebody else get a job. And your company one day is going to have an opening and they're going to say, Hey, does anyone know anyone? Cause that happens all day long in corporate America. And when that happens, your job is to come back and pull somebody in from our community who's going to be looking. And we started to see those doors get unlocked. There was like really something to it, to your point about
Ryan Lufkin (26:28.493)
Yeah.
Ryan Lufkin (26:39.384)
Yeah.
Nitzan Pelman (26:42.767)
the alumni that come from your, you know, your, like that pay it forward or that willingness to help people that, so we started to see that. And we realized that there were some things that weren't unlocking and part of that had to do with what I now call the Goldilocks Ask, which is where some people,
Ryan Lufkin (26:44.803)
Mm-hmm.
Nitzan Pelman (27:06.189)
would meet somebody like a Ryan or a Melissa and they would say, and Ryan and Melissa were very nice people and so they would say to our learners, you seem lovely and I know you're going through job search, if there's anything I can do to be helpful, please let me know. And our learners would be like, great, like this is the kind of social capital that Clymer taught us about. Okay, Melissa, can you get me a job? And it was just like such a.
Ryan Lufkin (27:30.125)
Hahaha
Melissa Loble (27:31.453)
Yes!
Nitzan Pelman (27:32.099)
question and Melissa is a very senior executive as is Ryan like she's going on to her next thing in a couple of minutes like she doesn't have the time to like take on the mental load of my job search in this nebulous way and go find you a job right but our learners would ask that because for them it was really hard to job search and there's a lot of no's a lot of rejections a lot of ghosting a lot of like and so if I could just out source it
Ryan Lufkin (27:53.528)
Yeah.
Melissa Loble (28:01.15)
Mm-hmm.
Nitzan Pelman (28:02.356)
And so we watched our learners really falter because they could ask and then they weren't gonna get something back Meanwhile, we also saw our learners do the opposite. They would say I don't want to be a charity case. I don't want to bother Ryan I don't want to you know, kind of put him out and I don't want to look vulnerable by asking him for something And so I'm just gonna write a very nice thank you note and appreciate Ryan for all the things I learned
Ryan Lufkin (28:23.469)
Yeah.
Nitzan Pelman (28:30.263)
and the pearls of wisdom he shared and wishing him all the best. And that also unlocked nothing. So what we learned is that what I call the kitchen sink ask or the no ask, neither one of them unlock social capital. But what happens in the middle class all day every day is we send notes to our people we know and we don't even have to know them that well in order to do this. It says, dear Melissa, I noticed that you know these two people on LinkedIn.
and there's a job opportunity at this other company that they're connected to, and I think I could be a good fit. Here's a blurb about me. Would you be willing to make an entry? Amazing. Okay, so you guys, I mean, we're all in this, right? So then, and the key to the whole thing is that I have not created a heavy mental lift for either one of you by sending you that email. In fact, I've given you no mental lift. All you have to do is copy and paste.
Ryan Lufkin (29:08.874)
I responded to two of them this morning, I will tell you. Yeah.
Melissa Loble (29:12.436)
100%.
Ryan Lufkin (29:29.581)
Yeah.
Nitzan Pelman (29:29.605)
And when all you do is copy and paste and you know who you're copying and pasting to, you'll do it as long as you have a positive impression. And that's the power of what we call weak ties, which are people that we don't know super well, but are willing to be helpful. And what Mark Granoviter figured out in 1973, many years ago, is that weak ties will open up as many doors as strong ties. And we, I think conventional wisdom would say,
Ryan Lufkin (29:43.372)
Yeah, yeah.
Ryan Lufkin (29:54.05)
Wow.
Nitzan Pelman (29:55.255)
It's really the people that we know super well. Those are gonna be the people that open up doors, it's also strong ties and weak ties. And so if we can teach our learners how to reach out and build relationships with weak ties where you don't have to know these people super well, and we can help them to create this, what I call the Goldilocks Ask, the five minute or less ask.
Ryan Lufkin (29:59.214)
Yeah.
Ryan Lufkin (30:08.878)
Mm-hmm.
Nitzan Pelman (30:15.843)
that helps somebody say, here's that blurb, here's the introduction, like here's who I want to meet, here's why I want to meet them. Now the learner, the onus is on the learner to do all of that research, to know what they want, to sort of do that work, but if they can do it, they can unlock a lot. And basically, that's what we learned. It took us six years to learn all of this, which is not something I would recommend for anybody to have to learn this stuff.
Ryan Lufkin (30:25.507)
Yeah.
Melissa Loble (30:29.108)
and
Ryan Lufkin (30:33.698)
Wow.
Melissa Loble (30:40.358)
Yeah.
Nitzan Pelman (30:41.637)
And so this is the very long answer to why I started to climb together, which is that now that we have all this learning, what I wanna do is share it with the rest of the world and help two-year colleges, four-year colleges, other workforce organizations, high schools to build a social capital strategy that sits alongside of their up-skilling strategy or their workforce strategy or their...
How are they going to get their learners into jobs strategy? And they have this low hanging fruit that we call alumni who could be opening up doors, but are probably not because no one's ever reaching out to them. we can't unless they're like, exactly. And so if we can help them sort of like help teach learners how to engage, how to build relationships, how to social capital, then they can actually unlock a lot more opportunity. And so that's what we've been building.
Ryan Lufkin (31:07.363)
Yeah.
Ryan Lufkin (31:11.618)
Mm-hmm.
Ryan Lufkin (31:15.97)
Yeah, unless it's for money, unless it's for fundraising generally,
Melissa Loble (31:19.442)
Yeah, yeah.
Ryan Lufkin (31:32.302)
Man, I wish I had that when I was in high school. That would have been amazing. As a first generation college student, as a, know, all these things that you're just not really prepared with that experience. And it's something you build over time, like you said, but these are, we've had these data points since 1973 and you know, that's incredible.
Nitzan Pelman (31:35.781)
and
Melissa Loble (31:35.922)
Yeah.
Melissa Loble (31:49.096)
Yeah, yeah. And I wish alumni programs, for those of us participating in them, you I think about the asks that I get, and you're so right about the big heavy asks. I just don't have the space to do that. But the simple ones, the just create an introduction for me, the, can I just learn a little bit more from you about this? Like those kinds of conversations.
Ryan Lufkin (31:56.28)
Mm-hmm.
Ryan Lufkin (32:02.54)
Yeah.
Melissa Loble (32:15.668)
I'm really open to, but you don't get many of those. So would love to see that in alumni programs. I would love to get back to both of the institutions that I went to in more meaningful ways where I could help people via weak ties. Like that would be so powerful. So it leads me to my next question. You talked about how in community college, higher education, even K-12 education, this kind of curriculum is important. What are you all doing through CLIMB together to bring this into education?
Nitzan Pelman (32:45.411)
Yeah, so at this point we now have what I.
Think of as like we have a number of partnerships with institutions, two-year colleges, four-year colleges, and workforce organizations to really help them build a comprehensive social capital strategy. We come in and there's an asynchronous and asynchronous way that schools can do this. We can do a train the trainer model where we spend two days on site. We teach any faculty or any leaders all of this content. It takes about 10 hours or so.
to sort of learn the content, which we train everybody as learners and then sort of like they learn the content and we leave them all of the IP. It's a 150 page slide deck with about a 50 page curriculum that they can then lift off and teach locally in any of their institutions. So it's a capacity building strategy and we then help them identify which learners are going to learn this content, how are we going to reach out to alumni, how are we going to find them, how are we going you know,
And then how do we pair these group of people together once we've sort of like have taught the learners what it means to engage successfully, because we know that when you just mosh pit people together, that actually doesn't work. We've tested that quite a bit too, and that we know very, very powerfully does not work. It's called failing on your face. We did that many times.
Ryan Lufkin (34:02.2)
Yeah.
Ryan Lufkin (34:09.268)
You
Nitzan Pelman (34:14.757)
So basically, like we just really help the institution sort of develop the strategy for how do we engage these two sets of learners and how do we build that capacity. We've also built a whole second way to do this, which is an asynchronous learning model in which we now have a Coursera or an online course that could be put on any platform. And we've built an AI social capital bot named Goldie short for the Goldilocks Ask. And the bot basically will practice
these things that we know really unlock opportunities. So how do you answer the question, me about yourself? How do you ask open-ended questions? How do you show that you're an active listener in a conversation? How do you follow on in a conversation to ask those thoughtful questions to get people talking? And ultimately, how do you reach out to people on LinkedIn and how do you sort of send a note that's gonna get somebody's attention? And how do you make an ask that's like that sort of like very fine tuned, boundary five.
minute or less ask. so Goldie will kind of practice with you and the bot could be a standalone if you wanted it to and it can also be embedded in this course and so this is the first ever course that does this where it will sort of toggle between like okay here's the intro to open-ended questions and now you can practice with Goldie and she'll like help them and she gives you feedback, she simulates the conversations and then she sort of pushes you to the next place to keep going in the learning journey and so it's a
Ryan Lufkin (35:33.954)
That's amazing.
Nitzan Pelman (35:44.611)
very, very manicured or very orchestrated set of prompts that sort of get you from one place to another so that you can build your social capital and ultimately not just build it but like get something from it.
Ryan Lufkin (35:57.878)
Yeah, when Melissa and I first talked about having you on the show, she brought up Goldie. And then as you were talking and you brought up the Goldie Lock task, I was like, I'm going use my context clues here and then go ahead and make the assumption that that's where you got the naming for that. I mean, that's amazing too, because the other aspect is we talk a lot about AI literacy, right? And making sure students understand how the AI is there, entering the workforce and preparing for that.
Melissa Loble (36:09.566)
Yeah. Yeah.
Ryan Lufkin (36:24.468)
It almost has the side benefit of actually introducing these students into AI and how to use AI effectively, how to interact with these tools and put them to use, right?
Nitzan Pelman (36:33.601)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Melissa Loble (36:35.231)
yeah, you should go ahead. sorry.
Nitzan Pelman (36:37.951)
No, I wasn't sure if there was a question there.
Ryan Lufkin (36:41.706)
It was, was... Go ahead, we're gonna edit this little chunk out.
Melissa Loble (36:42.08)
well, and I was gonna, we'll pause and I'll, yeah. So I've had the opportunity and Ryan, you haven't had this yet, but I had the opportunity to play with Goldie and it was really powerful to leverage Goldie because not only is the spot kind of walking me through in a very, as you shared, Nitsen, it's in a very like,
Nitzan Pelman (36:47.289)
Hahaha
Melissa Loble (37:10.142)
thoughtful and logical way to work through these skills. was very much for all of the education nerds that are listening to this, it was scaffolded beautifully, absolutely beautifully. But the other cool thing that I thought was one of the first things I noticed, and Ryan, you would love this, it was so kind and encouraging. Behind building Goldie, what did you think as you were putting together? You knew you wanted to do this? How did you construct?
Nitzan Pelman (37:19.173)
you
Ryan Lufkin (37:28.824)
Yeah.
Melissa Loble (37:38.516)
because it's a really great example of both a really high quality AI, but also how to create, how to use AI from a learning perspective.
Nitzan Pelman (37:38.532)
Mmm.
Nitzan Pelman (37:42.607)
Yeah.
Nitzan Pelman (37:48.165)
Melissa, feel so seen right now. That is so thoughtful, thank you. Because it was so much intentionality put into this. So about seven or eight months ago, I was introduced to Hume, H-U-M-E. If you haven't spent any time with Hume, is the most empathetic bot on the internet. And somebody had introduced it to me and they said,
Like, Hume is gonna be your therapist, it's gonna be your coach, like, and not that long. And I was sort of like, all right, whatever, you know, like, come on. And she was like, just tell Hume, like, what are you frustrated about right now? And I was like, interesting. Okay, I'm frustrated because my seven-year-old daughter is a gymnast, and she's actually competitive gymnast, and she loves doing back flips, and she does them, like, all day long.
Ryan Lufkin (38:21.624)
Wow.
Nitzan Pelman (38:43.749)
In her summer camp, they told her that she can't do backflips, it was too dangerous. And I was like, too dangerous? She does like a thousand of them a day, like they're not dangerous. I was really frustrated. So I told Hume, the bot, about this situation. And Hume initially came in and was like so empathetic, like, my God, I'm so sorry, that feels so, I'm sure you feel frustrated for your daughter and she can't do this thing that she loves and.
I mean, it was just like eye to eye, like empathy, empathy, empathy, validation, validation. I was like, okay, got bot, I got you. Like, I appreciate that you're like really making me feel heard and seeing here, you know, and like, I appreciate it, you know. And then the bot said to me, you know, I imagine that you're gonna probably want to talk to the leadership of this camp about this situation. And it sounds like you're pretty hot about it right now. What about if I just look up?
Ryan Lufkin (39:17.932)
I got you.
Nitzan Pelman (39:38.469)
every handbook for summer camps in the US and just see how often a policy like this exists. I was like, wow. Yeah, Ryan, same response. And then of course the bot comes back like 10 seconds later and is like, okay, I've looked up all the handbooks in the United States and it turns out this is a very ubiquitous policy that kids are not allowed to do gymnastics at camp because it's just too much of a liability.
Ryan Lufkin (39:45.485)
Wow.
Ryan Lufkin (39:49.728)
Yeah, yeah.
Nitzan Pelman (40:03.971)
So like, while you might wanna be going in like pretty upset at the camp, like just know this is like a pretty serious, like a pretty ubiquitous like policy that is not unusual. And I was like, my God. So the body like pops me off a ledge.
Ryan Lufkin (40:10.263)
Yeah.
Ryan Lufkin (40:18.754)
Wow, that's amazing, I love that.
Melissa Loble (40:19.06)
Okay.
Nitzan Pelman (40:21.477)
And I was like, this is the bot that I want Goldie to be built off of. Like this deeply empathetic, affirming, cheerleading, but also knows how to push you bot. So the bot's base is built off of Hume. It uses a very extensive knowledge base of open-ended questions, of lots of very, very, very granular prompting to sort of...
Ryan Lufkin (40:25.923)
Yeah.
Ryan Lufkin (40:34.104)
Yeah.
Nitzan Pelman (40:49.833)
you through a learning journey. There's things that bots naturally do. One, they don't shut up. So if you ask a bot, like, can you give me ideas for blah, will be like, okay, here's number one, here's six,
Ryan Lufkin (40:58.722)
Yes, I'm constantly saying, no, can you shorten that to two paragraphs?
Nitzan Pelman (41:01.989)
Oh my God, it's like bots, and the vocal bots also don't wanna shut up. like, there is any silence in a conversation, the bot will just take the silence and keep going with it. It doesn't like silence and it doesn't want to speak to Yeah, right? So you have to really tailor the bot to be like one thing, like ask this person one thing or tell them one thing, and then push it back on them. And so it's constantly, so it will open up by saying to you,
Melissa Loble (41:02.333)
NNNN
Ryan Lufkin (41:15.468)
I can also empathize with that challenge.
Melissa Loble (41:17.716)
Mmm.
Ryan Lufkin (41:25.773)
Yeah.
Nitzan Pelman (41:31.941)
Hey, I'm Goldie, I'm here to practice with you for how you're gonna build relationships and open up doors for yourself. And the first question that people generally ask is some form of, tell me about yourself. How do you answer that question? And it immediately wants you to take an action. And then you're like, well, I'm a Starbucks barista. And then Goldie will be like, great, tell me what do you like about that job? Or what are you passionate about in that job? And it will pull out from you things.
And then it will come back to you and be like, great, well, what about if you added it this way into that, into the conversation? And then it will be like, great, you like that? Great, now you go. Now you practice it. And then it will be like, remember, I asked you to tell me about yourself, but we're in a conversation. What questions are you asking me? And so it will like drip the learning out little by little.
Ryan Lufkin (42:17.747)
yeah. So it's modeling that behavior that you're trying to get into them as well. That's amazing.
Nitzan Pelman (42:21.573)
Exactly. So it's simulating a conversation. It's giving you feedback in the conversation and it's taking you to the next place in the conversation, sort of like all simultaneously. And it takes a lot of architecture to sort of prompt it to be this thoughtful. And it's taken us quite some time to build it, but I feel really good about it. And for any of the listeners who want to test it out or try it out, you should just reach out and I'd be happy to give you a demo.
Ryan Lufkin (42:45.506)
Yeah, and we'll add some information to reach out to you. We'll also have a link to Hume because now I wanna go play with that as well and see that model. So we're getting, running out of time essentially, but, I wanna keep talking about this. So I feel like we're gonna have you back on the show at some point. Cause I wanna keep, I love this concept, but like what advice do you give to organizations that want to help support learners, especially those from underserved communities?
Melissa Loble (43:02.464)
yeah.
Ryan Lufkin (43:12.898)
those students that maybe are off track into the academic goals, things like that.
Nitzan Pelman (43:17.293)
Yeah, mean, I think like, look, in the era of AI, so things that I should say about this bot, one are that, like, I want to be very, very clear, bot, a bot is a bot. It's not building, you're not going to get any social capital. And so I want to be clear that like, this is supposed to help you practice to get conversation with a human as fast as humanly possible. Like, no.
Ryan Lufkin (43:23.384)
Yeah.
Ryan Lufkin (43:30.465)
Yeah, yeah.
Ryan Lufkin (43:39.522)
Well, there's all sorts of data too on how many times you have to do something before you get good at it, right? And this is something you can do really well. It's just practice over and over.
Nitzan Pelman (43:46.917)
practice and also it's okay to feel a little silly in front of the bot because it's a bot, it's not going to judge you. so there's a lot and I'm not sure how much you guys have been looking at the research on this, but the biggest use of AI in the country right now is companion bots. Sort of a devastating idea, right?
Ryan Lufkin (43:50.542)
Mm-hmm.
Melissa Loble (43:51.486)
Mm-hmm.
Ryan Lufkin (44:03.878)
Mm-hmm. There's a lot being written about that. I mean, the loneliness epidemic with AI, things like that, But also scaling it, kind of creating it and scaling it, yeah.
Nitzan Pelman (44:09.029)
Well, it's sort of like ending it but scaling it at the same
So it's sort of a wild idea, but my friend, my friend Julia Friedland Fisher, she has this incredible quote that says, bots can cure the feelings of loneliness, but scale isolation. Like we will increasingly be isolated as we lean into bots more and more and more. So I'm not a bot fan. Like I'm not a fan in like this very like sort of narrow way of like, can help you practice.
Ryan Lufkin (44:29.644)
Yeah.
Ryan Lufkin (44:34.199)
Now, are you-
Nitzan Pelman (44:40.741)
But at the end of the day, our learners used to call me before these social capital happy hours and they used to say, I'm gonna vomit, I'm so nervous, I can't talk to these people. I've never talked to a professional at LinkedIn or Google or any of these companies before. It is scary and the truth is you'll never replace.
Ryan Lufkin (44:50.222)
You
Nitzan Pelman (44:59.565)
the bot with a human and so like it will get you to the place where you can feel more comfortable but then you gotta go do it. So the advice is, mean and there's some real like simple things like LinkedIn, if you sign up, if you join a group on LinkedIn of, know let's say you're interested in cyber security or whatever, there's a group for anything on LinkedIn that you wanna professionally be involved with.
Ryan Lufkin (45:19.896)
Mm-hmm.
Nitzan Pelman (45:22.501)
And you can join most of those groups. are big groups, thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people at any one of these kinds of groups. And once you're in it, you can write to any of the people in that group, Colts, and you don't need LinkedIn premium. And so then the key is just to write a note that's going to be a standout because everybody gets these cold notes on LinkedIn that are like, dear Ryan, can I, you know, have your time for 30 minutes? Exactly. Oh, really? What exactly stood out?
Ryan Lufkin (45:33.944)
Yeah.
Ryan Lufkin (45:43.022)
Mm-hmm.
Your profile stood out to me as yes. What stood out? Yeah.
Nitzan Pelman (45:53.505)
Exactly. Was it my fraternity days? So the key is like, how do you write that? But the key is that you will get noticed if you write a thoughtful note. And people have written me brilliant notes on that platform. And so just learners getting onto LinkedIn, really engaging in the art of thoughtful notes, thoughtful ways to stand out, thoughtful notes for people to be heard and seen by you doing your own search.
Melissa Loble (45:56.328)
I'm gonna leave.
Ryan Lufkin (46:20.557)
Yeah.
Nitzan Pelman (46:21.751)
looking for their footprint on the internet as a way to kind of acknowledge them. I mean, this woman listened to a podcast I had done a little while ago and she wrote me this super clever note where she was like, I really want to spend some time with you. I know that's not the Goldilocks ask because it's asking for more than five minutes, but it was so playful and so cute and funny. And it was so clear she had done her homework and I was like, some time with you. You're awesome. And so like just like,
Ryan Lufkin (46:38.146)
Hahahaha
Ryan Lufkin (46:43.148)
Yeah.
Ryan Lufkin (46:47.054)
Yeah.
Nitzan Pelman (46:51.021)
teaching learners that like you can play and you can do a lot on your own to unlock a lot of stuff if you sort of like engage with these tools in the right
Ryan Lufkin (47:00.546)
Yeah, amazing.
Melissa Loble (47:02.184)
That's such incredible advice and I think that's a really great place to end our conversation, although I'm with Ryan and I don't want to our conversation.
Ryan Lufkin (47:08.802)
I know, this has been fascinating, really fascinating.
Nitzan Pelman (47:11.471)
Thank you.
Melissa Loble (47:11.668)
So good, so much in this and thank you for your work that you've done and that you continue to do to again really help people find, especially in communities that may not have the same kind of opportunities as privileged communities, to find their paths, to find their passions, to find their love, to find that next job even very simply. So, Nitsan, this has been incredible. We so appreciate your time. We're gonna put a bunch of links in so that our listeners, you all can be able to...
Nitzan Pelman (47:30.661)
you
Melissa Loble (47:39.988)
track this work and learn more and even engage with Climb Together as needed. But thank you so much again for your time today.
Ryan Lufkin (47:47.704)
Thanks, amazing, amazing.
Nitzan Pelman (47:49.317)
Thank you guys. You guys are such great interviewers. It was really fun to talk to you both. All right.
