KGCI: Real Estate on Air - Diverse Voices, Powerful Changes Real Estate_s New Era Cody Gilkeson Episode

Episode Date: June 21, 2025

Hello, hello. This is Marguerite Chris Phillow and welcome to another edition of Real Estate, Real World, where we get to talk to all the cool people. And today we have a very special guest. Cody Gilkison is the diversity, equity and inclusion leader for EXP, as well as the staff chairman of one EXP. Being born and raised in the deep south led him to experience a wide range of discrimination, both as a witness and a target, which drew him to search for a career where he could have an impact against these kinds of words and actions. While working in the banking sector, he had the opportunity to hear his hero, Amber Hikes, speak. And that moment was a spark he needed to fully commit to doing DEI work full-time. He credits EXP for giving the opportunity to walk in his calling and is now in his self-described dream job. Cody is passionate about community involvement, finding commonalities, and showcasing underrepresented voices. hosting EXP's official DEI podcast, EXP CultureCast, gives him constant opportunity to grow and learn

from folks from all walks of life, and he's thrilled to share that journey with all of you. Cody now lives with his husband in small town, Illinois. Welcome, welcome, Cody. Hey, it's great to be here. Yes, I'm so excited to talk to you. We were in some groups and stuff was going on. I was like, we need to have him on the podcast, so here you are.

I appreciate it. So tell me a little bit about your background. You talked a little bit in your bio of having challenges in your own life growing up, I would assume, and what that might have looked like that has brought you into this dream job. Yeah, I grew up in a really small town in Georgia called Barnesville, Georgia. If you look at a map of Georgia, it's the dead center of Georgia. It also is dead. So it's a app comparison. In Barnesville, I grew up as an adopted child. and came into my sort of queer identity young, right? There's some people who realize really early, and you can't put that cat back in the bag. And the community did not respond well to it, including my parents. And my parents were my adopted parents were talking about,

were really absent in my life a lot. I was sort of raved by a nanny in a nanny's household, which also led me to another, getting to view another side of the world because I grew up in, a pretty racist area in a black household, right? And then I would come home and my parents would try to deprogram me from all the stuff that I learned. Wow, that is great. Family of another race. It was a wild experience, yeah. And then I came out of the closet to my mom

when I was 13, and it didn't go well. She attempted to give me an ultimatum of go-to conversion therapy or don't live under my roof anymore. So I was homeless for a while, sort of couch surfing with friends who had more understanding parents until I got to college. And in college, I was able to live in my truth and be open and adapt and grow in a way that I experienced what most people would experience as a child and a teenager in my late teens and early 20s. And the discrimination that I faced even there in a more liberal city in South Georgia in Valdosta where I went to college and going to a liberal art school for I got my bachelor's degree in musical theater which you can see me using every day right but it was a great

experience to inundate myself in queer culture and really got me on a path of learning what got the queer community where it is now dug into that sort of history that we don't get taught in schools. Consider my self and expert on that subject, I go around and folks who haven't been able to learn those lessons from some of our queer icons and folks in the past, historical figure. Let me ask you this. Can you give us the time frame? So when you were in college, was how many years ago? What years were those? I was in college from 03 to 08. So it's interesting because I just turned 60 in November. And I grew up in a very small town called Chico in northern California.

And what's interesting is I had my uncle Tony when I was growing up who I saw randomly, very rarely, but I saw him a few times. And I went to live with him when I was 22 to get out of town. And I literally don't ever remember having any conversation about any gay person anywhere. And I'll never forget talking to my mom. and my mom was very embracing and open to that. And I said, mom, I go, I'm really confused about Uncle Tony. He's got tons and tons of guy friends around here,

but he doesn't really have any girlfriends. And my mom goes, oh, honey, he's gay. And I said, what does that mean? And I was 22. I didn't know. Yeah. So, of course, I loved my Uncle Tony, but we're talking, this was in 1980, probably 84.

And the tragedy, at that time, and I haven't really talked about this story publicly, but the tragedy at that time was this is around the time when AIDS had come out. And my Uncle Tony's partner was a high up political official here in the Sacramento area. And my Uncle Tony got beat up in a bathroom in the Dallas, Texas airport. And what that did is it caused, apparently he'd already tested, been positive for AIDS, but it exacerbated the AIDS at that time. So my uncle started having, was basically in this isolated room in a hospital in Dallas. And my uncle's partner couldn't publicly go there to take care of him.

And so here I am 22 years old. They fly me to Dallas to go get my uncle Tony. And that's what I learned the whole world and how significant discrimination was. Because again, I was extremely naive. and not just because of where I grew up. And the times, too, were very different. I mean, definitely you didn't talk about those things back in, you know, the 70s and 80s. And so it became this whole thing of trying to get my uncle care.

And at this time, the hospitals weren't even prepared to take on AIDS patients and they refused treatment to him. It was like this long, long nightmare. And luckily, I fell blessed that I was able to take care of him until he passed away in 1988. but that was my eye-opener to the gay community in the gay world and what was going on. And people were horrible then. I don't know if you were probably young at that point, but at that point, people were, it was, oh, they deserve it and all this kind of stuff, right, for being gay. It was that AIDS was basically God's way of clearing the gay population. But you know all of this.

But it was just, it was so shocking to me. And I feel really blessed that I never saw that as okay. Like from growing up with my mom and I never saw any of that as okay. And so it was really sad how all the stuff that happened at that time. The blessing was that opened the doors to a lot more inclusion. Obviously, a lot has changed dramatically since my uncle passed away in 88. Thank God. It has.

Yeah. And it's a rare thing. thing with the queer community where it's a community that has always existed in the background in the shadows. And the first real time most people remember queer stories being all over the news is the AIDS epidemic, which is not a great coming out story for a community. No. And AIDS is not a death sentence anymore. It's not what it used to be. But at the time, this is part of the reason why I believe so wholeheartedly in queer storytelling, because most of the people who were there to tell those stories aren't with us anymore.

Yeah. We lost a big, giant portion of our community before we even knew they were part of our community. Or we could even really come together before the internet. Similarly, I have an uncle, Alan, who was the only sort of queer person I ever knew when I was a kid. But he was very rarely around. He was like my aunt's brother. And I never really saw him. but he was diagnosed with HIV in the 90s and he's still alive today.

But it was always that everybody held their breath when he was going to be around. Yeah. It is interesting because you say how much it was in the background. And again, I think back to my childhood growing up, like my great grandmother had this. They were clearly a gay couple. They had lived together. They were friends. They were just best friends.

And they had lived together for 40 years. And it always was that sort of background thing in assimilation. So even back in the day in the 60s and the 50s and the 40s and the 30s, there were organizations of gay men that were trying. But the thought process then in the early movement, there was a society called Madachine Society. And their thought process was we're going to be as politically vanilla as we can, as palatable as we can, and try to convince the world that we're normal, that we're the same as everyone else, that we have one minor difference. And that's it. And they didn't really push for gay rights. They really took a very placid, flat attitude towards things.

And they got a lot of pushback from that, which sort of is the creation point of gay subculture, where you would see stuff coming up in the 60s. And then it culminates in Stonewall, right, with the drag queens and the transgender folks and people of color and the Christopher Street Liberation March, where there's men in their underwear marching around. This is the opposite of the Mattachine Society, but that came as a result of being discriminated against and held down as a community. And then the only vocal voice of the community was this men in three-piece suits,

not saying anything important, right? Which then was further exacerbated by the AIDS epidemic, where then people really started to see, you could have heard of Stonewall back in the day if you paid attention, but you couldn't avoid the AIDS epidemic on the news. And when that came out, it became we're more than this disease, but it's hard to share that message while we're fighting for our lives, right? Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting because so much of this has happened in my generation. So much has happened to allow more equality into it.

And it's obviously we've come a long way, but we obviously have a long ways to go. Like today, for example, I think about this. And today's the day we're recording is not when we'll air, but the day we're recording today is March 1st. And it's the first day of women's history month. And I think about how far women have come in addition to the, And it's still quite a few more glass ceilings to break through with women, though. We're not fully there yet. Yeah, we've got a way to go. But I feel so blessed to be here during this time when things are much more inclusive in a lot of ways. Again, like I said, we still obviously have a lot of work to go. And I live in Northern California. So I feel like we're a lot more open to things than maybe other parts of the country. And we're much more inclusive. I live one hour from San Francisco. And, There's a lot more progress, I feel, we've made here than maybe other parts of the world.

But I guess I just like, I love to hear like what you've been through and what you've gone through to get to where you are and how that's impacting things now. Because I would venture to say that 20 years ago, there was not even a title at most companies of senior manager of diversity, equity, and inclusion. That wasn't even a position that anyone is considering. And I do believe EXP has been on the forefront of doing a lot of these things to make sure that people's voices are heard. Yeah, and it's true. And this thing, diversity, equity, and inclusion has gone through a number of re-skins, reframings, re-wordings, kind of thing. The DEI is where we are now. It's going to change in the future.

We think we know what it's going to change, too, hopefully. But this used to be what was called CSR, corporate social responsibility. That came up in the 90s. and caught on. But again, it was something that was testing the waters and some companies. If they were doing it, they were visibly doing it and everybody knew it, right? Companies that had good corporate social responsibility that I think of in those early days are like Patagonia. And you think about the shoe brands that are around today like Tom's or the sock brand bombas that gives back, right?

But that corporate social responsibility, the game playbook used to be in order to show we're good social citizens as corporate entities, we write a lot of checks to charity. But there's more to it than that. There's something about employees' sense of culture, employee's sense of belonging that can make an attraction element for your company that is more powerful than most other things, including salary. And I think we're getting to the point now, the tipping point at the younger millennials and the Gen Z and particularly Gen Alpha is they are looking for this type of thing that I do.

And if the company doesn't do it, they're not interested. Because the thought process is if a company doesn't have these programs, particularly employee resource groups like the resource groups we have in 1EXP, the company doesn't have these, where am I going to fit in? That's the way that they feel, right? They've become integral to be a viable corporation. that employees find value in. And I definitely agree with that 100%.

Like I said, in talking a little bit about Women's History Month, there's such a lack of diversity at the leadership level. That's true. That in most companies, not only in having women at those levels, but having a variety of color and sexual orientation and whatever it is that also needs to be represented at leadership because I never forget Oprah telling a story when she was a little girl and she saw

a black woman on TV for something or somewhere and she said that was the first time she felt like she could do that because now she saw someone who looked like her representation yeah and it's still an ongoing battle for everyone but to be able to see I know that even when we're doing events now, we're much more conscientious of thinking, okay, who are we going to put on stage? And how does that stage reflect the audience? Do we have people of color there? Do we have people of different orientations? Do we have these different people on our panels? And that's becoming more prevalent, which it has not been. And I'm excited about that. I'm excited that we're having those conversations that we've not had before. And even a couple of

years ago, I remember seeing something, some event we were going to, and it was all white guys on the stage, right? And we're like, okay, where's the rest of the world, right? Oh, we didn't even, we weren't even paying attention. We didn't realize it. I go, well, that's the problem. You weren't paying attention and you didn't realize that you didn't think about it because it doesn't impact you. You only think about it if impacts you, right? Right. Yeah. And sometimes you have to take that opportunity and pass it on to someone else who is more represented. I think all the time about a couple years ago, I was invited to speak on a Juneteenth panel. No. You can find a person of color to speak on June team. I promise you can find one. I can help you if you'd like, but no, I'm not

going to be on that stage. Doesn't that seem to be an excuse a lot? Oh, we don't have anybody that's, you're like, come on. I just had this conversation in a Facebook group. This was pretty interesting. and they said it was something about lack of women in leadership or lack of women in something. And they're like, why does it even have to be whether it's a woman or a man or black or white or yellow? Why does it even have to be? Can't we just choose the person with the most experienced? Most qualified. You're telling me that out of 180,000, 86,000 agents of a particular company, you could not find any women qualified to sit on that

panel. Yeah, and you know what, I would take that a step further. I would take that a step further and say that if you don't know of any qualified women, maybe it's time to make one. I love that. Yes. If in your eyes, you don't know any women that are on this stage, put one on the stage, and then next time you'll remember her, right?

Yeah. That's it. That's the best response I've heard so far. That, I love that because that's true. You don't see outside your bubble, I think, sometimes. You don't see outside your little world and you don't see. what other opportunities and potential are there. Right.

And representation absolutely matters. Like you told the story about Tim Cook, right? I remember as a kid seeing Elton John or Ellen DeGeneres or we didn't have a lot of icons back then, but anybody like that was on screen and I was glued, right? That's why what I wanted to be as a kid was an entertainer because the only queer people I had ever seen were entertainers. And it wasn't even talked about. then. I think the whole world knew that Elton was clearly gay and many of the, many of the

celebrities, but it was not talked about it. It was a taboo subject. You can go way back into Hollywood. I'm trying to think of the actor's name. I can't think of him where he had an arranged marriage, so to speak, so that it was never questioned. But I do feel, like I said, like we've made a ton of progress, but we definitely have some way to go. So what is your official job? What is it that you do for EXP? What does that your title mean? So my title entails we put on events pretty constantly at a constant pace. I host a podcast, of course, that consolidated a lot of event creation because rather than me doing a bunch of fireside chats now, I just have everybody on my podcast. That made the world of difference. But the bulk of what I do, before the DEI department was started,

of EXP's official diversity, equity, and inclusion project was OneEXP. And OneEXP is our collection of resource groups, formerly called affinity groups, but we call them resource groups now to align with that corporate culture of employee resource groups. We just don't say employee because it's also for agents, right? They're primarily for agents. You look at the makeup for a company is 90,000 agents and 2200 staff. They're for agents, right? But so we manage those groups and make sure they're putting out good content and helping them with event production and being added to the communications plans and all that business, managing their budgets and also reviewing when people have an idea for a new group that's something that isn't covered already by 1EXP.

Then we help them build those groups from the roots up, right? We've, since I started, we've built four now new resource groups from the climate action network to the Healthy Mind Collective. And now the newest ones are EXP capable, which is for folks with disabilities and their allies and friends and families. And the EXP indigenous network for people that are indigenous to any land, right? Native Americans and First Nation Canadians and Aboriginal Australians and all kinds of those folks with those backgrounds. Now that EXB is international, right? We're in like, what, 27 countries, I think? Yeah, I think it's 27.

That sounds right, yeah. Yeah. And actually, I'm going to have Michael Valdez on the podcast in a few weeks. I'm excited about that. He was my original boss. He's the guy that lifted me up to the position. Was he? Yeah.

I love him. He's one of my favorite people on the planet. Yeah. Yeah. To be honest with you, and this is a story that I tell that sometimes they don't love it when we tell stories about something bad that happened at EXP, right? But in my story, I started at EXP as transaction coordinator kind of role, right? It's an auditor for transaction coordinators.

And I've always done DEI work as a volunteer through all of my different career paths that I've been on. I've always been a volunteer for different queer organizations within the companies I've worked at. And I wanted to join the Pride Network, the EXP Pride Network, which is our LGBTQ organization. And look, I've led a national version of one of these. I think I could be a great voice to help propel this thing forward. And EXP told me, no, you can't join. Those groups are for agents. And I said, I'm sorry, that is discrimination.

And I was loud about it and vocal about it. And I was like a bulldog and would not let it go and had meeting and meeting and meeting with the people team and the HR folks. And eventually they said, I think we need to invest in a department and Michael Valdez saw the drive that I had and heard the arguments that I made and said, you should just fix this problem. I love that. Right. That's where I wound up where I am.

I finally am being paid to do the work that I've been doing at the 40 to 50, 50 to 60 hour range of my CEO. But now it's the full-time gig. Michael's an amazing leader. And that does not surprise me. he pushed for that and backed you in that he's an extraordinary human being he's one of my favorite people on planet he's a titan of this company i wish i had a quarter of his energy and his chutzpah you know what i mean i see him running around with an assistant trying their hardest to keep behind him at

ex pcon or shareholders and i'm like i don't have the energy in my body and he always looks amazing does he not always smells good always dressed him i'll have to tell him how we were bragging on him on this head. It's one of my favorite people. And he still has a hand. He's not my manager anymore. I'm now in the people team officially with Mike with Mike Bain, who I love. And I think Michael still has a big hand. He's the corporate sort of executive sponsor of one EXP. He's one of the original framers of EXP along with Glenn and Fee Gentry. And he has high level budget approval over the corporate partnerships that we have, like the partnership that we have, like the partnership that we have with ARIA and the LGBTQ plus real estate alliance. And with

Narep and Nareb, he's our key ambassador for all of those relationships, honestly. It's good stuff. So what is coming up for you? What's next for your division, your department? Is there anything exciting that you have going on? Yeah, I mean, it's Women's History Month. So we just got done with Black History Month, which was monumental. One of the things we've got going on is our company operates out of a virtual workplace. Like we had EXP World. Now we're moving into this new version, which is called Frame. And with us moving over, we have always had these sort of heritage experiences where you

could go in and learn a little bit about whatever the month we're celebrating is. We tore down all those in EXP World and we're rebuilding them from scratch and frame with all the new assets and stuff like that. And now the beauty of it is you don't have to have a pass to get in. Anybody can type it in the website and go and go and. see these experiences. And the Black History Museum was so inspiring to create. Every time I worked on an exhibit, even the story that I did know, it's like I put them on the wall and I know that people are going to see this. It gave me this feeling I've never had before. And if I thought that was

inspiring, this Women's History Museum that just went live today is just magnificent. Me working with Morgan Johnson on my team, this thing, I'm so proud of this. We've got a lot going on for Women's History Month. We've got several. I didn't even know that was in EXP World. I just started getting in there. Now I'm so excited to go in there and see it. Yeah.

For anybody that wants to go see it, you can see either of those. To get in there, all you've got to do is eXP. Dot World. And then you can do slash Black History Library or slash Women's History Museum. Oh, my God. Either those experiences you can go and look at today. That is so cool. It's really great.

You want to see it. You can go check it out. you can reach out to either of us or you can actually just go to eXP.world. Black History Library or Women's History Museum. Okay. And you can go inside EXP World and check it out. That's amazing. I remember a few years ago I went to, my sister lives in Alexandria, Virginia.

So we went back there and went through the Smithsonian. And I was speechless almost the entire time, going through both the Black History section of the Smithsonian and the women's history section of the Smithsonian was incredibly powerful. So I'm excited to go in and see this inside EXP world. Yeah, it's great. And the Women's History Museum, we even gave a special shout out to the women of EXP

that I think is a really powerful moment of founders of our different one EXP resource groups who are women, as well as current leadership who are women. And I'm happy to say that at EXP, our one EXP resource groups, all 14 of them, it's 76% female. Wow. The leadership.

And that number's about to go up on Monday. We're bringing another one in. So you said there are 14 resource groups. Can you name them all off? Oh my gosh, off the top of my head. I can do my very best. Oh my gosh.

If I leave anybody out, they're going to be so mad. I should probably just pull up a list. And let's read it off because I'm genuinely curious. I don't even know what all those resource courses. are, but I'm inspired. Yeah, most people don't. That's the thing. In the company, we have that.

Yeah. Okay. So starting from the top, we have the EXP Asian Network. That one is great. It's run by Garrick Yan and Huey Wynn. Then you can move down and we have the new ones that I talked to a minute about for the climate action network, which puts on a ton of great information about green homes and how agents can use their superpowers to change the world for the world for the climate action.

better using green technology. The EXP Healthy Mind Collective, because I think mental health could not be more important at the moment, particularly for real estate agents experiencing burnout and depression and all of that business. Then we have the EXP Young Professionals Network. That's both for people under 40 and for new agents young in the profession as well. And I tell everybody, that group is not just where all of our groups are open for anyone. Young professionals in particular, if you are someone who is over 60 and you think that you don't have anything to learn from a millennial or a Gen Z, I would beg you to go to one of their Friday and the Friday mastermind meetings. They have mastermind meetings with people from all the kind of different backgrounds that, I mean,

these will make you an icon. Yeah. Period. Then on the other side of that, we have the EHP seniors network led by a really talented, really devoted crew. That's a group where you can go in and drop a question and you'll have 36. people answering you within the hour. They are devoted, right?

That's a great group. Then we have EXP Latino, led by some of our real alpha agents. That's a powerhouse of a group. That's a, has a real sense of community. We have EXP Middle East. We're currently looking for leadership

for EXP Middle East. That one's kind of, we've yet to identify who is going to be able to take the reins of that group. But we do have it, and they are active, and we do put on events for them. We're just on the lookout.

We also have EXP's, military network, which is gigantic. EXB military network has state squads in every state and some international squads as well. They also have a major presence for military spouses, which is huge. And military spouses are one of those untapped markets for agent attraction that people don't think about, right? No. They have these women with their husbands deployed have all the time in the world and want to do some good. And that's a key demo for agents.

attraction for real. And then we have the EXP Pride Network that we talked about, the LGBTQ Network. That one also has brand new leadership that are young and hungry and ready to do some damage. We have EXP South Asian, which differentiates from Asian because we're talking about India and the Philippines and those countries, which are culturally very different. Asia is a big place with a lot of different cultures, right? So they're split out in those two groups. And be remiss not to mention the Black EXP Network or otherwise affectionately known as Ben. marquee project as the Agent Accelerator Academy, which is the most profound path to icon that we offer. And it's open to more than just Black agents. And one of the great things about it is it's that intrinsically black experience of storytelling and oral tradition. Because if you graduate

from the Agent Accelerator Academy, next year, you're the teacher of the Agent Accelerator Academy and so on and so forth at Infinita. And so everybody learns. It's that climate. while leading kind of thing. And then the two new ones are EXP capable, which we mentioned for folks with disabilities and their parents and loved ones and friends and the EXP indigenous network for people of indigenous communities from all over the world. I love it. Yeah.

I had no idea. I've learned a whole lot today. I knew that there was a lot going on, but I wasn't really clear on all these different resources. Every day I'm finding out new and incredible information for all of this. And you may notice that one group is really. really not mentioned. And that's because we are under construction and in the process we've been building in the background for almost a year and a half now, which is going to be the powerhouse

of powerhouses. Obviously, real estate agents are 65% female. So this group is going to be big. And the reason that we didn't just go ahead and open it, we are really stocking the shelves before we open the store. This thing is going to have some serious value for our female agents when we open the doors later this month. I'm very excited about that one, all of them, of course, but I'm excited about that one. So let me know how I can help or what I can do to participate in that one. Of course. Yeah. Well, Cody, this has been an eye-opening conversation. I knew it would be. And thank you so much for taking the time to be here and help us be much more embracing and accepting of all differences, of all people in the world. At the end of the day, love is love.

Well, thank you so much again for being here. I really appreciate it. Thank you, everybody, for joining us again on Real Estate, Real World. Be sure to follow us all of our social channels and subscribe and share with your friends. It helps us get up in the ranking. And on a side note, our podcast was just recently picked up by the all-new E-XP-Rio on air. I radio. I'm the voice of the commercials if you recognize this voice. I know, I know. So I'm so excited. Our show was picked up. So we'll be on in this conversation, we'll be on. And this conversation will be on. on the radio, so I'm excited about that. You can catch my show, EXP CultureCast on KGCI Radio too. We were picked up in the first round as well. We're on Fridays in the 9 a.m.

block. I think I'm on Mondays at 8 p.m. is what I was told, but I've also been told that they're moving the schedule around. That's going to change. Not to be committed to that specific time, but I was really excited that they launched yesterday. So it's exciting. Again, thank you, everybody for joining us on Real Estate, Real World.

go out and make it an amazing day.