WB-40

On this week’s show we have a return visitor in Amanda Brock from Open UK. We talk to Amanda about open business models, a research project on the UK Open Technology market, and COP26.You can find our more about Open UK’s work at https://openuk.uk/ This week’s automated transcription: Intro Chris: Welcome back everybody. After a two week break to wake breach. I think I nearly said that two week break that we had for a bank holiday and well, well, the two weeks it’s been it’s, it’s gone past it, a flash. Matt, what do you think Matt: it has gone past in a flash with a tropical levels of rain, but it seems that spring is now here and it’s more. So that’s good. Cause it is may and it should be. So I’m relieved about that. And two weeks chugging away work starts going around to contracting with suppliers all that kind of thing. I’m trying to buy a car. What interesting world, a lot of car dealerships are they’re in this weird hybrid state where. Some of that. I mean the whole charade of the negotiation, when they go off into the back room to be able to talk to their manager, to see if they can be able to get a deal and all that Gubbins seems to have been knocked on the head by the fact that for a year they’ve had to sell without being at a user show showroom. But they’re in this really weird thing now where they, they still obviously got a margin to make. So they start with a very low price and then tried to sell even more crap that you don’t need with You know, ceramic coatings for paint and all sorts of nonsense that go into it. But of course, the main thing they’re trying to do, we’re not looking to buy a new car at the second, add one is try to set the credit. And if you’re saying actually Ashley we’ve got savings, we want to get a pet. They’re not into it. They don’t care because obviously there’s no money to be made whatsoever. If they’re not selling you some P P P deal or whatever, they call them their personal, personal lease deal. So that’s been an eye-opening experience and Yeah, I’m not sure I want to do it again for another seven years. I haven’t bought one yet either. So there we go. Chris: Yes, it’s it is it’s an interesting game. Car sales, no doubt about it. Couldn’t collect. I bought a car, a click by click and collect the other week. So I just, I just bought it and then went to fetch it. I didn’t even go look at it. I knew what I wanted and it worked out well, actually. Matt: Yeah. The other interesting thing though, is actually talking cars at like a year or two old. It seems like the established auto manufacturers have now realized the power of being able to, this is going to be interesting for the conversations later, but being able to sell software upgrades at premium on secondhand stocks. So you haven’t got a reversing camera. We can install that that’d be 650 quid. When you know, the camera itself is going to be like, what three quid? And it’ll all be modular in at the bank. It’ll take five minutes to do it. And it’s all just about enabling the software, but. In that you kind of go to the dealership to better get that down Chris: as a whole, but there’s a whole bunch of Tesla’s stuff going on there. Anyway. Anyway, we can get into some of this. We’ve got a guest this week who is somebody that we had a year ago just about, and it’s been a whole year. Amanda Centura must hear I’m under Brock is here. How are you? Amanda: I’m really well. I bought a car last summer too, and they were trying to tell me the second hand cars were going up in value for the first time ever in the pandemic. Well, they sold me an upgraded SD card. That’s what I’m supposed to still enrolled in the last year. Well, I, didn’t not Chris: how’s the last couple of weeks been for you, Amanda. Has anything been excising and happened this last week? Anything thundering down the track. Amanda: Constant. We are just so busy at open UK, and there’s so many different things going on, lots and lots of people involved and all bringing their own exciting ideas and skills into the organization. So in the last couple of weeks, we’ve announced, I think probably just over a couple of weeks ago, our chief sustainability officer, a guy called Christian Purina joined us and we’re working on cop 26. We had an entrepreneur in residence, join us and we’re working on a phone just for him. And we have been very busy creating our kids count for a second time. Chris: Fantastic. Well, we’ll hear a lot more about that. No doubt in the minutes to Matt: come. And how has the the life in the most mental it’s been for you over the last two weeks, Chris: Mr. Weston? Well, I w similarly it was, it’s been fairly Torrential in terms of rain, although on this was it yesterday, Sunday, and I woke up and. I looked outside and there’s some were shining and I went outside and it was not it’s cold. And I dashed out with a mighty roar through my breakfast in the garden for the first time. Well, actually not quite the first time that this year we had it, we had a weird sunny day, a few weeks ago, but it was yeah, it was a bit of a release because it’s been a bit gray miserable. So yes, yes, it was yesterday. It was nice. And, and really it’s been a. It’s been that kind of, you know, a bit of a continuation of the whole year, really in terms of work, but good. In many ways we know that the customer signed up, so I’ve got somebody to onboard and got, and hopefully another one that’s coming on. So that’s all good. Right? So ultimate renewal and things like that. And then meeting new people, doing slightly different things. It’s it’s good. Matt: Do you have any view to actually going to places. Cases outside of the UK? Chris: No, no, not yet. No. I think organizations all over Europe are still wary about their people going places and, or meeting people from other places. Right. I think whilst we’re working from home, they’re kind of assuming that, and then not getting near that part, part of that is not being exposed to like. Suppliers and things like that, it might turn up. So I think, I think it’s going to change, but I think it’ll change gradually and I’d be surprised if in, so, I mean, the IDC is one of those kind of international visitors where people travel around quite, quite a lot. But if you think about what we do, a lot of what we do is around events. So obviously a lot of the events are, if they’re starting to give you back in personally, it’s, in-country rather than internationally. And a lot of our sponsors in terms of events and that our customers, in terms of our vendor research, that they don’t want people to travel yet. So we could have an event, but we wouldn’t have a speaker. You know, we wouldn’t have a sponsor. So it’s all a bit it’s all very much in a band at the moment, but I would imagine that. You know, if we can have a good summer in Western Europe, you know, and, and things to down a bit then maybe to origin this and where we might start to see like the thawing of that. Matt: Presumably there’s quite a bit of lead time on organizing an actual physical in-person event anyway, more for being able to get people to commit to going to it and everything Chris: else. Yeah. I mean, we, in terms of PR you know, proper events, you know, the big things like our summit that we have in October, that’s lots online and it was always going to be online because. We start organizing that in February, January. And you would, there was no way that we could say, Oh, let’s, let’s hedge our bets and make it physical. I know organizations who have done that and they’ve had to keep moving data back and things because they desperately want to do it physically, but it just doesn’t work out. And for us, it just made sense to say, look, let’s just, let’s just assume it’s going to be virtual. And and then. The in country stuff, the kind of, you know, like the dinners and things like that. That’s a little bit easy to organize. It’s a little bit shorter notice and therefore those will definitely start up. It’s just a matter of whether somebody like me goes out to to sit there and take my variants of concern with me. Matt: And are you looking at in-person stuff yet? Amanda? So Amanda: we are. And as you know, from our pre-call, I’m sort of so excited about the idea of seeing people face to face. I can hardly contain myself to be quite honest. We’re looking at cop 26, first two weeks of November, and we’re being told that UK Gover working on the basis that is an in person event. Unless something dramatically changes and we’ll be notified of that as, and when, so we have an open source and sustainability day that we will hopefully host other organizations at. And we have a submission sitting with the cabinet office that we’re waiting for approval. That’s actually quite exciting. This week, we’ve submitted to build the data center of the future, not to actually build it, but to build a blueprint with a consortium of different businesses. But we, and for a penny in, for a pound. So we submitted for the IMAX cinema. So if we get it, we get to go and make a movie and I’ve never made a movie. So that would be kind of exciting. Matt: Absolutely. And a very big movie, if it’s going to be screened at the Amanda: data center. Yeah. We’ve actually got a friend who is a producer. Who’s going to help us with this. So it’s not. Quite as much the blind leading the blind as that might sound that’d be, yeah, that’d be really exciting. So for us cop 26, potentially it also coincides with our awards, which would mean we would have some hybrid element to it. Although we’ve planned that as additional event. Matt: It’s going to be interesting how quickly people want to go back to events as much as the ability to better organize them as well. I think there’s going to be varying levels of some people extremely keen, the other people that are going to be quite reticent to, to, well, what’s the Amanda: hugging stuff. So I I’ve been on calls all day and I just saw something go across my phone about hugging is hugging official. No, as Boris said, hug. Matt: People are to use their discretion as to whether they wish to be able to hug or not. Yeah. No, it’s, it’s up to families and friends to be able to make decisions for themselves as to whether they wish to go. Amanda: No, strangers. I Matt: take it well. No, I think that was always the case. You know, kind of legal kind of way, but who knows? So anyway, before we get into this sort of minefield let’s press on with the show. We’re going to talk about a whole series of things is been driven by open UK and in the last 12 months ago, Ford as well. So I think we should crack on with it. Main interview Main Interview Matt: One of the tools that we use in the what I grandiosely called production process of WB 40 is a piece of open source software that has been around for quite some time. Now nine, 20 years, I think, called audacity and or Udacity is a sound editor. And it’s. Being used by all sorts of people used by professionals, lots of features within it, very, very much open source. And then a few weeks ago there was an announcement that a company was acquiring it. And I think it’s a really interesting starting point for conversations about some of the things that you’re looking at at the moment, Amanda, because I know that business models for open technologies one of your areas of focus and. That from somebody who doesn’t really embed themselves into the board of open completely day to day, like the way you do that feels a bit confusing because how can open source software be acquired? What’s going on there? Can we unpack Amanda: that a little bit? Yeah. I’m not terribly familiar with the Udacity. I know the product and our voiceover lady. She uses a law. So, I don’t quite know what they’re structuring Wars, but I assume it’s a commercial sponsor or a company which some high revenue generates on the back of a dusty that’s been sold and the audacity will be the project that they lead. If it’s a community project. And, you know, I, I’m jumping to an assumption immediately that it’s a community project, but one of the things we’d be looking at recently, a law. Is how people’s understanding of open source very much comes from the way they’ve experienced it. So for some of us, we joined big corporate collaborations, like a Lennox foundation or an OpenStack open infrastructure is that no is open-end for, and that experience of being part of a big corporate creating effectively a de facto standard and saving money and hopefully building better software. Is one iteration of open source. Another is people creating a project and building a business on the back of it? Like a Hashi Corp, perhaps? Yeah, no dusty I’m guessing. And then you have something totally different where you have developers scratching and H’s Lynise to real estate and creating something like Linux and building a massive community without a business on the back of it. But with a foundation and over 15,000 people. Have contributed. So you’ve got all these different sort of nuanced slants, but all of them are about developing software, not really about developing business and what we then see separately is how people have built sometimes successful and sometimes not so successful businesses around there. It must have a software and it sounds to me like a dusty have built a successful business if they’ve sold. Matt: So w are there, are there sort of typical types of revenue generation from. Yeah, you had to codify Amanda: so well, it’s a topic inequality, but as a chap called Matt as let, who, you might have come across it four or five one, and he produced a report back in 2008, which was probably the first business model review for open source. And he set out the, you know, half dozen or so different business models. And I would say they haven’t changed very much. What we’ve got now is slightly different flavors of them. But I think for straightforward open-source based businesses what’s changed most is probably get hub or get, or get lab and gets a language. Or it’s not even a language as a tool. I think Lynise wrote in 2009, if I’m right. Which means that that whole chef, that whole change is about 12 years old. And when I’m talking about change, what I mean is that we’ve seen. Open source move. So when I started work at canonical in 2008, we were constantly marketing it, selling it, persuading people that were safety use talking to procurement teams, talking to lawyers, and that sort of got bypassed by get hub. So what happens now is folk go and take the software. Take it into the business, use it, kick the tires, know that they want it. And then they go back to the business associated with that software as inbound. Marketing’s an entirely different approach. They know they want it, they know they want services around it. And they’re coming to you asking for those rather than you pushing it. So you see the issue that the problem of marketing open-source has kind of disappeared. And it also has an advantage though, where it can scale in a way that surprise. She just can’t compete with. Now, if it’s done well, and if it’s done right. And I think you have to have that in by marketing focus and what you also see, if you look enough at the different founders talking about it, is that the businesses which have had a single product struggle much more. So we’ve seen a Lastic shift this year from an open source business to, I still have some open, but moving some of its products proprietary and it’s pretty much a single product company. Someone like Mongo, who’s been through the same, very similar, whereas companies that have multiproduct or which have evolved their support and service offering to almost support their competing products. They’re the ones that do well. So you have to have that as well to, to really seem to thrive. And then the mold is what you’d expect, you know, support is subscription, that kind of stuff. Matt: It was to get hub itself. Of course, is another organization that has gone through the acquisition path and is now owned by Amanda: to Microsoft. Yeah. It was a fairly sizeable sale acquisition. However you view it. Biggest, I was red, hot 34 billion. I mean, I think it’s still the biggest type transaction in history, Matt: so there’s definitely money to be made in this world. Yeah. Amanda: If you work on it, it definitely. Matt: So you’re in the process of doing kind of state of the open market. That’s the right term for it in the UK. And you’ve got a series of three phased. Reports are going out the first of which has just been published March, March. Okay. So a couple of months ago can you tell us a bit more about that project and what you’re trying to be Amanda: able to explore through it? Yeah, I think I was speaking to Jennifer Barth at It’s me and media who have been the company who’ve supported us in creating this report back in January. And I I’ve sort of been toying with doing something along those lines for a while. The European commission had been working on a report for a couple of years, you know, huge Fastly expansive report. And I kind of felt that with Brexit, we needed to do something and talking to Jennifer, I really understood that we definitely needed to, because I sort of taught myself into actually. We are the fifth biggest contributor to the cloud native foundation to cloud native in the world. When I say we, I mean the UK and I realized as I was sort of knocking the numbers around and talking about it, that actually we were the biggest contributor and the biggest by number of developers across Europe as well. And in a very typically British, we just went, you know, we sort of. Probably quietly acknowledged it to herself, but didn’t like to mention it to anybody else. And I think that is something that’s come out of Brexit is that we’re no longer part of the commission’s work on open source or the report. And really, we needed to flag both to business and to government, just the scale of open in the UK and that we. Of secretly being a center of excellence building over many years in this space. And maybe we need to get some acknowledgement for that. Not so much for a Pat on the back, but to make sure that we’re educating kids in the right way for the future so that we build future generations of it and leverage that success and that we help businesses in that space do well. I think, no, Chris: no. I was going to ask you a question on, on that basis, given that, you know, it’s a year since we spoke last and. And given that that is, you know, it’s a, it’s a fact, we’ve got a good culture of open source contribution and, and thinking in the UK, what what advantage does that give us then in terms of, you know, given, given the whole Brexit thing and how we manage our. Our business and our software development and the way we look at tech in this country and in the future, does that give us that advantage? Do you think in terms of our culture or in terms of the way that the tech community works in this country, Amanda: I’d like to hope so. And I think that it’s a process of evolution where we are, we’re one of the biggest countries in this space, anywhere in the globe, right. In terms of. However, you’re going to measure lines, contribution numbers of individual developers that you can identify. But if you look at the countries where compared against it’s like China, India, the us. So we’re obviously nothing like the size. So if you were to look at it in a sort of per capita basis, and we haven’t looked at that yet, it’s something I’ve been thinking about. Actually, we have a huge tradition of open in the UK, which lens does having skills and areas where the shortage is in, right. They can’t find enough developers and cloud and an awful lot of the cloud software is open source. So there’s lots of space for us to evolve this and I hope, and I think generate more business and not just business. I think my thinking has shifted a bit in the last year, and it’s not just about getting the businesses that are in the UK and the people in those it’s the business OVO. And so there are a huge number of particularly young people working across open source who are working for international companies who are working for a known UK parent companies, but also for companies that are maybe non-traditional tech companies. As we’ve seen this digital transformation shift. And of course, if you talk to anybody about recruiting, developers is hard because every business wants them now. And I think. Universally, you will get the same response that particularly the younger developers develop using open source methodologies and practices, and that’s what they want to do. Microsoft explain that as one of the reasons that they shifted to open, you just can’t hire young developers or the good ones if you don’t do it. So I think by building those skills here and leveraging what we’ve already got, we should be making the UK more and more competitive in the tech space. Matt: I hope. Hmm. Do you think that is that shift being driven by the change in things like cloud delivery of software so that where the value is, it’s no longer about Selling licenses because the software isn’t the thing that actually is, is where revenue can be made. You get revenue by getting people to subscribe to the availability of the service, to having software as a service or, or whatever else, or is it, do you think there’s something else going on in terms of some sort of cultural shift? Amanda: I think we’ve been in this position for a long time culturally, and it hasn’t been acknowledged because it hasn’t been obvious as part of the EU. Why mentioned that the UK is the biggest of the EU. So when you look at it, you’ve got the UK than Germany and then way behind France, there were the European commission’s data that they were using for the report. They had 490,000 developers as the figure they were using in Europe. And they reduced that to 260,000 after Brexit. Now they said they’re being conservative. But even if it’s 200, that’s almost half of the developers working in Europe. I’m guessing some of it is language-based. And when I look round, and this is something that pleases me, I don’t know what anybody else thinks about it. But when I looked round the folk who are working in this space and the folk who engage with Oprah UK, not only are there huge numbers of young people, but they’re from all over the world. They’re based in the UK, which is great, but they’re from all over. And I don’t know if they’re attracted here because of that particular skill set or, you know exactly why they’re here. But it means that we’ve got a really diverse community and it’s interesting and it’s a good thing. Matt: Mm. Do you think, yeah. Do you think if you think about technology management within you know, not technology organizations, do you think the mindset has caught up there yet? Amanda: What do you mean by technology management? So Matt: people who are CIO CTOs, but in organizations that aren’t tech focused, who aren’t tech centered organizations. Amanda: I say quite a lot that I think what’s happened is we’ve gone through a digital transformation. I think companies have been in shock and they’ve learned that they’ve gone. Two software designed businesses, and they’re just getting their heads around that. And what they don’t actually realize is they’re open source. And I know even now you are last people. So we have a questionnaire that would be working on this, going to be sent out next week to business and industry phase two of our report phase one established. What we had with the existing marketplace. So looking at existing reports we did literature review. We established what that meant economically to the UK and for the UK, that was up to 41.3 billion in GDP per annum, coming from opensource. I think that’s hugely conservative is about 20% of the digital economy. I suspect that if we were to do the figures, right, just based on that methodology, we’d double that and it’d be about 40%. So. Moving on from that. What do we do? Next phase two is about looking at business and industry and understanding what the adoption is like. So we’re going out with this questionnaire next week. We start our survey on Monday. We are focusing on about eight different sectors trying to gather data. And we ask, do you use opensource? But even when the answer is no with Ann, go through a list of different software and packages saying, do you use any of the following? Because we suspect people will not really understand or have recognized or thought through that they’re using it. And then interestingly, one of the economists has pushed us to look at what they’ve stopped using or reduced their use of. And it’s kind of something I wouldn’t have thought about, but it’s an interesting sort of counterbalance to it. What are your adults and what are you letting go. I was going to say, then phase three is sort of a sweeper upper having established that. Can we find a new ways of looking at how you value the outputs? So what output value in GDP is actually being generated. And if you think about something like public cloud, vast majority of it’s open source, can you imagine how much must be generated from that? Let’s be huge. Matt: Hmm, I guess the other part of this is as we get services that are consumed. And so for small organizations in my own organization, the bulk of what we are using now is software as a service. Quite a lot of it comes from Microsoft. So I’ve got no idea how much open-source is involved, how much open technology to Amanda: involve. They’re the biggest contributor in the world, but lines of quote, according to get Harper, right? So they use massive open source. So they may well be filling you with open source, open goodness that you getting without knowing it. Matt: But I mean, the point is that Ashley is as a technology manager’s views shifts to delivery of business value. If you don’t have some size enough to actually be doing the development yourselves, don’t run infrastructure yourselves. Increasingly it’s an abstract question that isn’t actually that important because you know, the revenue model for, or the cost model is based around subscriptions for services, not like Amanda: right. But it is important that as much as your subscription for service. It’s based on the software that’s there. And a lot of that is open-source and you see an old stuff going on with elastic and whatever else with the cloud companies being accused of strip mining. Chris: So given that this is, you know, given this is the case and we have this strength in the UK and we have what would probably turn out as a Biff significant contribution from open source. What is the role to government? Amanda is, is, is the government’s role to promote or to encourage or to educate, or is it, should it just stay out that way? What are you trying to, what are you trying to, yeah, Amanda: I don’t think it will stay out the way. So I think it is It has a dual role. One part of it is as a consumer and creator and its own business, its day-to-day business of technology. And I think as a population where effectively we’re paying for the code, they’re using. And that they’re creating, we should want, what’s created for us to be open and shareable and scalable and reuse and not be paying for proprietary code. That’s not needed unless it’s needed. I’m not saying every piece has to be open. And then on the other side of it, we have the, the policy piece. The UK government has been working on a data and digital strategy for some time now. The devolved nations are also working on theirs. I think Oliver Darden came out January, February with 10 principles. None of those were open source. And one of the reasons that I wanted this report to happen was to demonstrate to government just how important openness to us and the money that it’s generating for the country, but also the value that it brings in the code itself. And hopefully have them understand that through. I wouldn’t exactly say spoon-feeding, but putting it in one place for them to try and get open principles brought in and the importance of open brought into that strategy and policy. So I think the rule is an escapable. They’ve actually been really good. So DCMS came along, we did some lunches. We actually start our own, me and my social events. We actually sat round, honestly, an eat a meal together. We shipped people their lunch and then talked about the rapport and DCMS turned up at all three of our lunches. You know, they’ve really engaged well, and they’ve been really good, so grateful to them for that. Matt: The cop 26 happening towards the end of the year that you mentioned in the intro where do you see the role of open in that whole agenda around the climate? Amanda: It’s interesting because sustainability is a really broad thing and it’s not just a buy also carbon neutral carbon, negative net, zero, wherever we’re going with that, that that’s all important, but it’s more than just that. And to be sustainable. One of the things that really impacts is making it open. If you look at the sustainable development goals and digital principles that the UN work on the open source principles fit so well into that. And I think they really set hand in hand for a while. I was on a chaired, an advisory group for the UN for their innovation labs. And they were looking constantly at what they built, what they created being open source, because then you could scale it across member States, particularly in the pure member States, they could pick it up and reuse and not reuse and recycle is right at the heart of sustainability as well as diversity. And I guess just the, the open nature of it. It’s inevitable that it works with sustainability or promote sustainability. So we hope to bring various projects. Some of them which are very focused on things like net zero, but some of them may be focusing on some of the broader sustainability issues as well to cope. I don’t know if you’ve seen anything about coal, but the whole of Glasgow is planned to be this amazing conference and to the whole city. And when we, we actually, we applied to the cabinet office for the IMAX cinema, which will be great fun, but we have a space in a fringe event, in a marquee right next to the main event. And again, this fringe events across the city. So if this goes ahead, it will be one almighty event. Be a bit of a shock after no events for some, right. All those people in one place. Exactly. Matt: Yeah, no, no, absolutely. No, certainly not for strangers with the, if you think about some of the, sort of, some of the key players within the, the challenges for net zero or whatever. But how do industries like energy as an industry or aviation or agriculture? Are those industries which have got thriving open. Community within the moment, Amanda: funnily enough, that you’re picking industries that we’ve been talking to. So we doing, doing an event with some energy companies and OEF jam in June, where we’re working to open up a dataset to help them do that. On the software side, Linux foundation has an open energy project that we’re a member of. And they’ve been working with energy companies since 2018, trying to build more software that things like monitoring. And, you know, there are certain. Almost de facto standards that you can create by collaborating across the software there. So it was really interesting and agriculture came up recently as a space that needs more work done in that way, particularly in opening up the data. So the double pronged approach to it as well. Matt: I see. I mean, one that’s close to my professional heart at the moment is the construction industry, which Free flow of data between different elements of the construction, then management of buildings. Amanda: I think about that any major infrastructure project, even just knowing traffic data and moving things around and managing those flows. There’s so many different aspects to it. Matt: Yeah, and it feels, I mean, it’s just say particularly with it’s an errand, Chris, that scenario, you know, reasonably well from your days in synthesis management work is that there are things like BIM building information management, but I, I’m not seeing a huge amount of evidence that actually data flows particularly well across organizations or it, or indeed different. Elements of the supply chain within those organizations, Amanda: a couple of things there. So if you look at a lot of the database software, now there’s so much open source in that, right? This, a lot of these companies, even the ones that are not obviously open source the backend is so I think we’ll see more and more open around the database infrastructure, but then when you look at the, the data itself, go back to something like open banking. Forsberg method forced by regulation and what we’re now seeing as other regulators wondering how they do that too. You know, how do we make our sector open up? How do we facilitate this? And I think for the energy sector and many of the others, sustainability will actually be a factor that pushes that. Matt: And do you think it will take regulation for that to happen? Amanda: I don’t actually, and there’s a couple of spaces where I don’t think regulation will be needed where I could be wrong. And that’s one of them. I actually think the regulators will see what’s happened with open banking and they will go ahead and do it without the regulation. I know that in Australia, they followed what the UK had done on the open banking space and did it without regulation. I was told by people involved that they thought Australia had done a better job, but then the, when the people running it, I think it must be the regulator, went to government and asked for a law because they had 90% engagement and they wants to force the last 10%. But I think they also having some freedom and scoping and creasing it rather than being driven by regulation. Maybe better. Chris: Reduce it and I’m in oil and gas. For example, the, there are, there are pooling of geo spatial data and geo graphical data to say, okay, here we go. We are. Pooling our resources of understanding where the oil is and how you might get to it. But simply because they’ve realized that they’d just, if you know how the oil industry works, it goes from feast to famine. And when it’s in the farming stage, as you’re pretty much isn’t husband, for some time, they can’t afford to do it unless they pull the resources and they realized that that ecosystem. Play is the only way to do it. So there’s an industry that has done it on its own the term, but Amanda: one of the problems with that kind of initiative and this is where you get me being the ex lawyer is the, to open up data Lake that you have to work out what contractually you can and can’t do. And the non-disclosure clauses and requirements cause huge problems. And I have. Talk to me for a few times about whether we could create a universal clause that was accepted, like a model clause that we could apply to say that you both parties agree, whatever the contracts might have said that we agree just to share this data. And nobody’s in breach by doing that. And avoid lawyers or kill me, but avoid spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on legal reviews to make modifications to contracts. When all you want to do is open up the data and you both want to do it to allow that for that specific purpose. And I do think there could be a lot of value increasing that sort of infrastructure. Chris: Yeah, that’s true. Excellent. Yeah. I mean there’s, if there’s, if there’s Amanda: that I do 25 years, that’s enough for anybody. Matt: So alongside the work with the the series of reports and with carp, you’ve also managed to squeeze in writing and editing a book. Amanda: Do we have to talk about that? That was it. It was a huge mistake. I’m sure the book will be great. I I’m fine. I know because I’ve read 20 people’s work. I know that the book is great, but edit 24 chapters of a book was more than I realized in terms of work. And if there hadn’t been a pandemic, it wouldn’t be finished. Matt: But it is presumably more about open. Oh Amanda: yes. Yeah. The open source law policy and practice, it will be second edition of a text that one of my old professors created with an assistant notice. There were two of them and I thought I’ll take that on and I’ll make it happen because. 10 years since the last edition it’s time, there was a new one and the Oxford university press. So patted me in the back and sent me on my way, probably thinking she’ll never complete that. And then I, thanks to Michelle leaners at NL Matt. He helped me find sponsorship from the beach foundation. So it’s actually open access. So it will all be worthwhile effectively. We’ve created a tertiary education curriculum for all aspects of open beyond the actual coding. And it’s a gift, you know, take it, you use it, give it to your students, give it to communities, whatever. I’ll just pick that out to see it published Matt: one of Chris: the labors of Hercules complete. Amanda: Absolutely. Matt: So we might’ve said. Second or third stages of the the report frame it’s going to be available. When, Amanda: so phase two is going out as a survey on the 17th of May. Anybody listening to this, we’d be so grateful to you for completing the survey or passing it to people, you know, across any sort of business sectors from transport to professional services to retail. And we are then going to publish the outputs on the 7th of July. And then we’ll be publishing phase three very early in October. Matt: Fantastic. We’ll put details of the of open UK where you can find details of that on the website@wdfortypodcast.com. Chris: Yeah. So just before we finish, let’s just quickly touch on the fact that you’ve got another brilliant summer holiday thing for kids coming Amanda: up. We day, we’ve got a couple of things coming up. We just launched our awards last Friday, which are open uk.uk, but slash awards. And we have eight categories and those will be being an Einstein cult 26, along with the winners of our kids’ competition and the sort of four runner to the kids competition as the summer camp. And this year we have 10 fun episodes based on the open-source definition. No wonder you’re both looking at me like that, but genuinely they’re really fun. And it’s taken a lot of work to make them fun. We have a very amazing young woman who is in her first year at Cambridge, who has stepped into the role of creative director having taught the course last summer. So we have a 19 year old who intimidates me, who has done an amazing job. It’s just absolutely amazing job on the the digital skill side. And I’ve been collaborating with her and Pamela Ball, the teacher. So I should say her name, Lorena hall, absolutely amazing. A woman. She’s our creative director and she Pamela and I’ve been building the content and we are halfway through the course that will be easy. And the course available in July and we are. About to finalize an announcer, another glove kit giveaway. So another year of free mini gloves. Chris: Fantastic. As somebody who’s a kids made the last year’s glove. And I had a good fun time doing it. I’m sure it would be really, really cool. Good. Amanda: I didn’t know you’d done that. I probably did at the time. I forgot. And that’s, that’s great Chris: to hear. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was it was, it was really good. And and as you say, you know, it’s, it’s It’s something to do with the summer holidays and it teaches kids about, about something that will be useful to them. And I’m looking forward to seeing the educational and entertaining open-source model content because that’s a challenge. Amanda: Yeah, no, it has been a chat. When we had one Sunday morning, we were all sitting around and trying to work out how to explain forking to 11 year olds, you know? You’ll see it when you get it. Chris: Well, I’m looking forward to that. Outro Outro Matt: Fabulous. That’s more or less it for another show. Thank you, Amanda, for coming to join us again. What’s the week ahead looking like for you, Amanda: I’m obviously working on the survey, so that’s most of my week ahead, but I think I’m going to a restaurant in central London. Well to the street site table, like a restaurant, but that that’s good enough for me at the weekend. Matt: Everything is open with you. Isn’t it. That’s all your petrol station. Fabulous. And Chris, Chris wants the the next seven days got in store for you. Chris: Well, that’s an interest it’s in question because I have, I’ve got my diary is full of things that I noticed that I looked at my diary for this week as one doesn’t I’m Monday, just to see what, what, what a wait. And actually the it’s quite, it’s quite full. But it’s a lot of what I would call admini stuff. So it’s not, not nothing earth shattering. And I’m just looking forward really to getting through the week. Cause it’s last week was a Shortly. It wasn’t it. We had bank holiday. So I always feel that the first full week after a bank holiday is something of a, you know, it’s a trial of strength because I’ve had a long weekend and a short weekend. I need to get myself back so five to eight weeks. So that, that’s what I’m looking forward to. I’m just getting, looking forward to get through it. But with sanity intact, Amanda: you mean the end of the week is what you’re looking forward to this week. Chris: Yes, essentially. Matt: That’s fair enough. I’ve got a presentation I’m doing tomorrow for an event that’s being organized by prerogative, which is a consulting firm based in Wales. So I’m going to be talking about how investing in technology is a little bit like buying a new car. And so bring my current. Life into whatever it is that I have. You realize Chris: you realize that that is essentially the Swiss Toni. Matt: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It’s there now. I mean, the basic idea is it, it starts with the premise that when people say investing in technology will save us money. It’s a bit like saying buying a car will be cheaper than walking. And that’s the start point. And that actually is the takeaway for the whole thing. And I’m going to start with what it is that you need to take away from the presentation. So there would be 40 distances. You’ve got it there for free. There you go. And other than that yeah, pretty clean. As long as we had. I I found last week, really hard work, and it felt like there was five days work in four days and quite looking forward to having five day to do five days work, it’s going to be much easier. But there we go. Thank you again, Amanda. It was great to have you back. Thank you for listening. We we’ll be back next week. Next week we are going to be rejoined. By another guest who’s been away from us for quite some time. But coming back, Tracy Keogh from a grow remote in Ireland. Now that’s an organization surely whose time has come in the last 12 months. So we were talking about how a grow remote has developed over the last few years. And what I guess the post pandemic world looks like for fostering remote communities of workers, working for organizations away from big offices. That’d be interesting.

On this week’s show we are joined by poet Mr Gee who helps us explore the world of words, and the advantages of crossing disciplines. You can see his most recent performance for the ODI here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7p2kJX3nTE

On this week’s podcast we speak with IDC CIO whisperer Marc Dowd about how the role has developed, where it is now, and where it might be heading.

On this week’s show we are joined by Claire Selby who talks about her project with Kingston University students Not My Beautiful House, and combining work and experience into higher education. You can find out more – Links : https://www.spacehive.com/spaceforkingston Twitter : https://twitter.com/NMBH_KUSInstagram : https://www.instagram.com/notmybeautifulhousekingston/ Studio KT1 : https://www.studiokt1.com/KUS : https://www.kingstonstudents.net/creative-meanwhile This week’s automated transcript… Intro Matt: We are back. This week’s show is brought to you in grayscale, in memoriam. Good to Christopher. We are two weeks since the last show. Have you been enjoying yourself? Did you eat copious amounts of chocolate? Have you found anything that has changed your view of the world? Chris: Well, that’s a very good question. I don’t think I’ve eaten. Well, I did eat a fair amount. I talked a lot in one day that some chocolate came into the house and the kids didn’t want to eat it. So of course, that had a bit and then edit all. And then I felt ill for about two days afterwards. So I’m not doing that again. I think, you know, as you get older, your constitution becomes less capable of digesting and enormous amounts of pretty much anything. And I’m guessing I’m a little bit frightened about the idea of going back to the pub. I need a catch to five pints app to get myself back into some sort of. Shipe, I’m actually go, I’m looking forward to it. Now. I’m going to the test match in June. So I’ve got tickets, got a bunch of, I got tickets. We’re going to the test match, but of course it has to match means that you have to sit there drinking all day, watching, watching the cricket. So I do need to get myself into shape before then, but you know, it’d be nice to get there and all of the, all of the signs are good. So I’m looking forward to that, ah, has for the last couple of weeks, No. I mean, it’s been I had I had a week off work, which I’ve just finished, which was nice just to do other things. It was nice to get out and do a few jobs and Potter about, and it seems to me that people are getting back to some sort of normality regarding their work lives or that they’re either getting back to normality or they’ve, they’ve resigned themselves to the misery that there’s going to everlasting or whatever. But yeah, it’s it’s okay. And Oh, yes. And of course, yes, we’ve had the national the idea that readable websites are undignified or disrespectful. So this today I sent all of my emails using the wooden dings font in order to make them respectfully unreadable. Matt: Oh, wait paintings. There are winging things. Yeah. There’s a blast from fonts past. That’s wonderful. God bless you, sir. And this week joining us is is Claire Selby. Ha how have you been fairing over the last couple of weeks, Claire? Gosh, Claire: well time is a bit of a construct at the moment isn’t there. I’m trying to struggle back. Easter was a thing. I didn’t get an egg. There was no eggs left in Sainsbury’s, so I didn’t eat enough chocolate. But I have, you know, slowly return to normality by doing a few things that I hadn’t done before, while swimming this morning, a bit foraging. And I actually got out of London and stood on a beach. So I’m quite happy with those three things. Matt: Well, let’s get going. Whereabouts was the beach, Claire: Assets coast. So tolls, Bree and Molden. Matt: Oh, yeah. Yeah, no, well, I drive past it quite often as I head up to see my parents in Suffolk, which is where I went onto a beach at good Friday, possibly the coldest experience I’ve had on a beach in a very long time, because the East, East coast wind now whipped through you. You know, actually your beaches are a familiar place for you though, aren’t they? But you tend to do them in urban areas rather than the seaside. Yeah. Claire: I mean, I grew up by the sea, so I kind of feel like I have to see the horizon at some point, but I guess you’re referring to my muddler King which I haven’t done for a while because during lockdown they kind of advise against it because in case you get into difficulty on the foreshore you might need to be rescued and that might take away valuable time from someone else that’s more in need. So I haven’t really done any for quite a while. But yeah, generally anything that isn’t staring at a computer is of prime value now. So I’ve been learning to ride a bike for the first time, since I was about 14, which has been equally terrifying and also incredibly rewarding. So quite enjoying that at the moment that that might have overtaken the mud logging actually at the moment. Matt: Oh, wow. Okay. Because the other ones I know about is cheese. Claire: Yeah. Guilty is a big thing. Yeah. Worked at Christmas with Neal’s yard for the last three years. And then I did a quick stint before I started this job sort of in the cheese arches. So looking after the turning of, and the maturing of. Everything from your Stilton right through to your goats, cheeses and your barn by God. So I know quite a lot about cheese. If ever comes up in conversation, Matt: I was with some friends at the weekend and we were walking around Paddington basin and there’s a a new barge opening up in Patterson. Basin called the cheese barge, which I’m very excited about, but I shared a photo of this with some of the people on the WB 40 signal brief, and somebody immediately pops up with they’ve missed a trick there. She would have called it the bout from Marsh, which it isn’t that Chris: I’m just disappointed. You don’t remember. It was me that said that my Matt: colleague. No. That’s all right. I remember now. Cause yeah, it’s, that’s the, all the, all the good stuff you just did it for on the signal channel, rather than that, she waiting for the podcast. Chris: The podcast is a secondary channel for my, my I put, I think foraging though foraging is great. And especially, I think, I think the, the, the there’s a good combination of foraging and going to the beach pre. 12th of of April, right? Because there’s nowhere I was open. So you, if you go to the beach and you’d have to forage for your sustenance anyway, so it’s, it’s a, it’s a good combination. Claire: I’m just, I’m just sort of gathering all these skills, you know, for this Apple app, apocalyptic, future apocalypse. That’s probably coming at some point, so yeah, I can find you. Well, I mean, the, the guy that does the foraging walks was really interested to find out where mitten crabs are. So. That is valuable knowledge to him. But probably no one else Chris: can brush their brains in perform so much. What’s your week been like Matt: it’s fortnight? Yeah, traveled out to London for the first time in quite a while, went up to see mum and dad in Suffolk, which is very nice or very socially distance or very cold. And then we went for a walk with. My sister-in-law was in dogs in the country and actually bizarre there’s. I said patent in basin yesterday had the delight of meeting a friend at his, in St. John’s wood in North North of the center of London, but pretty damn central. And then just walking around central ish, London, the sort of periphery of London for a few hours. And it was nice to be surrounded by big, ugly, tall buildings and, you know, the big roads and the. The stuff that makes you realize that you’re not in the countryside in any way, shape or form. So that was quite good, fun. And everything’s sort of slowly creaking back into some sort of movement. So be fascinating to see their places at Paddington basin, which has grown enormously in the last 10 years and create big sleek skyscrapers all over the place combined with. Presumably extremely tiny, but very expensive apartments and how I hope the next few years. But we will see in those sorts of places, which you’ve got all of the cultural appeal to me, of somebody like Canary Wharf, I none whatsoever are actually quite an accessible, have terrible facilities. And yeah, whether they, they survive or not, but we got to also walk down the the canal around the back, or actually, you know, in the middle of the the zoo in regions park, just at the time when they were feeding the hygienists, which the cage of the hyenas backs onto the canal. Oh, it was fabulous to see these. I mean, there’s one of the scariest beasts in the world, the hygiene, and they just love like half a dozen. Rabbits over the fence. Let the high end has go completely crazy in the in the next door cage as they smelled the dead rabbit, but couldn’t get it to it and then let them through. And they’re bounded through to found one full time for it and ripped it apart. My kids were delighted to bear to see blood guts and rapid brain all over the. Yeah, so that was a little bit and then in between that doing some work, you know, so I’m carrying on carrying on. It’s all. Good. So let’s get on with this week’s show. We are going to be talking on the day in which we’re recording. The the UK started to do its next stage of the opening up of lockdown with non-essential stores. Starting to open and pop garden, starting to open and the heavens opening with snow. And we’re going to talk with Claire a bit more about some experiments that she’s up to with what might happen in the future of the high street. Main Interview Matt: A few years ago now you started a role working at Kingston university, just down the road from where I live which was something a bit different really in terms of helping people in a creative space in education, but rather than standing in front of them. Blathering on about stuff. You created a thing called studio K T one, which experiential learning seems to be maybe a starting point. It’s better. Describe it. Tell us a bit more about what KT1  was all about. Yeah. Claire: Mean, I’ve definitely done the blustering and standing up in front of them and trying to talk about stuff. But the idea was to set up a creative agency inside the university, specifically inside the school of art specifically inside the department that I’m within, which is cultural and creative industries, which has meant to be a mix of business and creativity. So it’s quite a new department and this was a new experiment. It was given a big pot of funding to set up for two years. So I sort of launched it with. I guess probably about 70 students who came along to the launch event when you could do those. And the idea was to get commissions from external clients and get students to work on them whilst getting paid, but without conflicting with the existing study. So we got some really interesting commissions. We got one from a Zillow who was an old client of mine. We got one from Veolia waste company. We got one from TBD. The. The data conference. So we were doing everything from building a giant polar bear made out of waste materials, putting it in the West end to doing an office chair race in the middle of a conference to building an installation about AI. And then we also had commissions from the vental center. So we were activating vacant units within there and filling them with art free to the public and just sort of experimenting and seeing what happened. So then the pandemic hit and all the clients they had ready to go, obviously sort of went into mothballs and. A lot of the internal departments started seeing the value of what I was doing. So I survived last year, literally by getting word of mouth around the university. And what better way than to design materials for. Students that are, you know, prospective students, why not get existing students to actually design that content because a lot of stuff was being done by just a small internal department. You know, see things through a student’s eyes, make it more valuable. So we don’t really well. And then there’s been sort of signs of recovery. And then we’re going to talk about the, the creative meanwhile project that I’ve been doing. So we have some conversations. I’ve already been working with the council and the business improvement district. We did quite an interesting project wrapping vacant shops with students’ artwork, probably that launched, I think, October last year and sort of continued as well. So we’ve wrapped the whole old close Klaus Olson store in the middle of Kingston is wrapped with colorful designs from one of our students, which is amazing. And then this has all led on to kind of the, one of those once in a lifetime things, really a developer approaches as and said we’re developing a new builder building. Would you like to have it rent-free for six months? So we kind of went, yeah. Okay. I think we can do that. And then we apply for the matter of London funding. Put a bit together. We get the Maryland funding and then we get it matched by the council. So Where we’re going. It’s the Crowdfunder is still rolling, but we we picked up the keys two weeks ago. We’ve got all PC world, which is 10,000 square feet, ground floor, and then first floor and some sort of rooms and offices off that some people would be quite terrified at this, but It just feels like exactly the right time. And it’s all sort of fallen into place. You know, we had lots of contingency plans, we sort of thought, okay. So if we can’t open in April or may, can we use it as a sort of space for students to use instead of their bedroom? Because obviously students in the pandemic haven’t been able to use the new, so to 2 million pound workshops, they haven’t been able to go to photography studios or use all these facilities, which there. Kind of paying or so that was sort of one of the potential ideas. Do we just use it as a sort of. Workspace, but now Boris announced obviously that non essential retail can open. So we’re sort of on track to open at the end of April may. And the idea is that it’s sort of part gallery Pope exhibition space, pot shop. So students can sell their work. Graduates can showcase what they’re doing, and it’s kind of until the end of August, it will be a kind of showcase for students. And for the community to use as well. So if we get approached by people who want to use the gigantic second floor, they can absolutely do that. So it’s, it’s a big experiment, but it’s everybody seems to refer back to it. And everyone that we’ve talked to about it is completely behind it. They want to see change in Kingston and they want to see something positive and something that’s led by students. To come out of this sort of weird time that we’ve been in for the past year and a half or so. Matt: So Kingston for people who don’t know the area is I, I’m not sure if this is totally true or not. Although I didn’t speak to somebody from Kingston council recently who seemed to nod in agreement to it that after Oxford street is the second biggest shopping area in the whole of greater London. Yeah. It’s big old. Big old shopping area, number of roads. So the old fashioned streets and things, although with a few kind of seventies and eighties mini arcade things going on,  fairly grotty, but nice open spaces. Lots of pedestrianized. Yeah. Areas. And even a year before pandemic hit. It was starting to become a bit weird as a number of the big retailers that arrived that going bust or pulling out of markets. So people like gap. We’re starting to close up Klaus Olson, which is one of the few stores they opened in the UK. And that was a big, big retail unit that they entered out. And then through the pandemic Obviously coming out of lockdown, there will be some stores that don’t open again. So the, the Arcadia group’s gone there are quite a few others that have sort of fallen by the wayside over the last 18 months or so. So there’s this really interesting challenge about this big space, which is all Oh, certainly to the, that yeah. The naked eye appears to be just mostly retail. I’m sure there are offices and things sort of dusted amongst as well. So. It feels like it’s the right time to start, to be able to do some experiments with about how, how can we start to think about reusing this space? There might not be that what you’re doing is that by any means to find Lance at the, some experiments around it seem to be absolutely the right time for this. Claire: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it’s, I coined something on a thing I did last week. Kingston has suffered from chain fatigue. So it’s basically all the chains that have failed within the last two years were all in Kingston. So they’ve just closed up. And I think a lot of landlords have. Because I’m to people. So because there’s a unit, a nice unit on the main drag they want that instead of the one around the corner. So the PC world is actually on five road, which is a really interesting street because it’s kind of one of the exits from the Bentall center. You’ve got a cafe Nero on the corner opposite, but then you’ve got a. Independent coffee shop. You’ve got a fancy dress shop, party shop. You’ve got trainers shop. You’ve got an art shop. Literally next door couldn’t have made this up. So it’s a lot of independent chains. And there’s something about the vibe on that street, which is really interesting. It’s sort of. A bit livelier than the others at the moment. I mean, obviously it’s, I was last there two weeks ago, I think. So it just seemed a bit, a bit had something about it. So, you know, obviously opening up the doors and getting the students inside was just watching their faces with something else. It was kind of one of those things of. I realized that what I’m doing is actually enabling people to, to be creative rather than saying I’m going to do all this. So I think it’s, it’s about opening a door and letting them be themselves. And I think for the last year, a lot of them haven’t been able to do that at all because they just haven’t had the space and they haven’t had like a lot, like anybody really, they haven’t had the mindset or you know, that they can keep campaigning to get You know, refunds on their 9,000 pounds. But I mean, that probably won’t happen. I think we all know that there might be some sort of agreements or something, but I don’t think anyone’s going to get their money back. But give them a space and see what they can create and, and sort of get something different out of it. So there’s there’s a group of students who were running a campaign on Instagram because. But you heard this her first or maybe not students aren’t really on Twitter, so everything is done through Instagram. It’s been really interesting to, if you kind of noticed that and this campaign really picked up steam. They got meetings with everybody, local MP, the Dean, and they sort of did affect change. And I just said to them, okay, these protest signs that you’ve made and you’ve put on Instagram, can we get them in the space? Oh, okay. And then another student who came in to measure up one of the product students sort of started pitching. I said, Oh, you final year, what you doing? What’s your final major project started telling me about 10. And I said, right. Where’d you want to put it? You know, it’s, it’s kind of that organic and it’s going to be that sort of quick because a lot of the time it isn’t quick and it isn’t organic. So I sort of want to change that and make it, make it more real for them. Chris: That’s the, that’s the key though, isn’t it? I mean, what you’re, what you’re talking about there is, is changing mindsets and providing leadership and making decisions for people because students aren’t very good at making decisions because they’re not yet at that stage where they’ve learned to make decisions for themselves often and universities, aren’t very good at making decisions because they are, they are bureaucratic and they are, you know, they are slow moving. So, if you can get to a point where you are able to be that point of decision and say, yep, we’ll just do that then, and change the mindset and make it into something that’s happening. Good grief. That the difference it can make to it, to the whole thing. That’s, that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s almost the definition of inspiring and that’s how it’s that? How it’s, how it Claire: works. And it’s, it’s been really interesting cause it’s not just me doing this. We’ve we’ve done it in partnership with the student union who probably hadn’t ever seen the creative process of a project sort of. Emerge. So we were really clever and we actually tasked some of the second year students in the department. I sit in to come up with a brand and the identity they had, it feels like years, but they had, they had probably a few months and they pitched and we had three teams that pitched and one of them came up with the concept of not my beautiful house. That’s the name and this comfort, this concept of comfort is overrated. You know, everyone’s been sat around and the jogging bottoms and their trainers and slippers, but actually we want to challenge the norm and say, no, get out of your house and get into something that isn’t a house, but it’s not a shop. And it’s a space to sort of learn something or do something different. So that’s the kind of idea. And I think that even they were a bit. Terrified as to actually, Oh, we’re actually doing this. Yeah, yeah. You’re actually doing it. And then we knew at the same time, we’d also briefed the interior students. So they’ve all come up with sort of modular designs that will go in the space. And then when we move out at the end of August and find the next space, it will all transport quite easily. And their faces again were, Oh, so we’re actually making this year, we’ve got the budget now we’ve got. 70 grand. We’ve got some money now. So that’s been really interesting to see, you know, and I guess that’s like a lot of creative projects. You know, a lot of them just, and, or just a visual or a render, but, but no, I think when you get involved with me, I tend to make it actually happen. So, so yeah, it gets real at some point, whether you were loading a van or putting up. A poster or whatever, you’re carrying your mannequin up 10 flights of stairs to do a fashion showcase. That’s, that’s kind of how it, how it goes with my kind of things, because they tend to be attached to money and they tend to be attached to a client’s expectations, whereas this time around I’m the client. So, but the difference is I’ve got, you know, we’ve got this money to play with, so. It’s, it’s been a really interesting journey. I mean, I’ve never done a Crowdfunder before and I cannot tell you how many times I was refreshing that goddamn browser. It was it was almost like a Publix dog, just waiting for it to hit something and, and, you know, running it through social media as well. You know, where Twitter, you just. I don’t know if it’s just in these times, but you just get absolutely no response at all. You know, I’m doing this really exciting thing. It’s a Crowdfunder and you know, three people like it. It’s just kind of, it’s quite a funny one, but, you know, put something on Instagram stories. Hey, off you go. So it’s been really interesting Matt: with the, the toast launching at the end of this month. Obviously, you’ve got the students as the audience of this, for the, the, who will be the people creating this space. How are they thinking about who the audience for the space will be? Claire: So we kind of were quite I guess we were quite explicit about this. So when we’d done the interventions in the Bentall center before what we found was a lot of parents with kids were coming in because they were bored and there was no play area. So more than once sort of parents would come in and sort of say, well, can we leave Johnny with you then? We’d have to say no, we have absolutely no CBD checks. You have to stay with them. Obviously we do in this college today, or we’re doing this activity today. You can obviously sit in and stay here. So we wanted the space on five road to be very different. So it’s probably. I mean, I don’t, I don’t know what will happen. We’re, we’re keeping it very, very kind of open, but it’s probably a bit more of a grownup space. So you might see some challenging artwork. She might come across a life drawing class and all those kinds of things we couldn’t really do in that environment because it’s a sort of governed by rules and a few regulations and all that kind of thing. Whereas this space apart from a loading Bay, which has its challenges, we don’t, we don’t have much. I don’t know what the word is. We w w we’re kind of free to do what we want because the landlord has trusted us and we’ve signed a license agreement. So, you know, we’re not going to be making bombs in there or serving alcohol all hours of the day. It’s kind of going to be quite a controlled environment, but also, you know, flexible in where we wanted to be a next creativity. So, so yeah, Matt: the students. So you’ve talked about how they kind of, Oh, we’re really doing this side of it. How many of them are up for us. And how many of them just kind of Claire: Hills? Not many have run to the Hills yet. I mean, we’ve been. It’s obviously difficult when you’re doing it remotely, because you know, you have calls and some people are more vocal than others, so you can kind of spot who’s been the organizer and who’s put some work in and he’s kind of just turning up to be on the call. And I think it will become a lot easier when we start doing it in person. So. Well, two weeks ago, when the students came in, you could kind of see who was a bit flabbergasted and you could see who was just straight away getting the measuring tape out and making notes and sketches and things. So no one’s run for the Hills just yet, but I guess, you know, it, it, it’s a good time. It’s good timing because For the second year running this new degree show. So the degree show will be online. So the idea of students building something physical for their final year degree show, isn’t really going to happen. So this kind of, isn’t funny your degree show, but the skills that they’re doing and the, the pieces that they are building are kind of a showcase of, of their skills anyway. So yeah. Matt: And then you going outside of the. The groups within the faculty or are there other parts of Claire: investees? Yeah, so the whole way through the planning of this, we’ve been chatting to the business school. So I hadn’t really had much to do with them before. And I’ve literally just this afternoon met this amazing woman who is doing leading HR. Post-graduate business ma, but happens to have got amazing retail experience in like cue cards, not kick high. Oasis, she run retail. She worked for LCFF. So kind of like, why haven’t I met you before, so I’m going to meet her next week. So yes, we are definitely reaching outside and obviously there’s sort of stakeholder engagement people within the university PR who we’re all aware of what’s going on, but we would like sort of business and marketing students as well to sort of join in with the content that’s created in that. So. I’m not standing there saying this is what happens this week. And this is what happens next month, where we’re basically hiring for roles that will do that and run stuff, pastors. But anything goes really? I think I don’t want to stifle anyone’s creativity and say no, because my God, you get told no, so many times in your life. I just, I hate it. It makes me even more determined to do crazy things. So I don’t want to say no to anybody really. Matt: So it’s come back to the, the the studio Katie one. What did you learn out of trying to create an agency from a group of students in a university Claire: crumbs? I learned that no one knows how to write a brief, not even me. You can try, you can try and you can try and give them a template and they will do anything they can to not fill out. This is internal, mainly internal clients. But yeah, I learned that I learned students don’t read a brief or they, they do read it, but they don’t read it completely. There’s always something missed out. And I think because I only realized this year. Okay. So my kind of background has always been my business development sales, but always kind of in the creative industry, I sort of woke up one morning. I was in a meeting or something and I thought. Oh, God, I’m not even doing business. I don’t run anymore. I’m actually an agency person, but I don’t have any traffic managers. I don’t have any you business people. I’m just doing it all myself. So I learnt that it is possible to do it all, but the gray has keep coming. I learned that I just, I still love working with students. I’d kind of given it a bit of a break. So I worked to Ravensbourne for. Nine years, 10 years. And then I had a bit of a break. I went to the open data world and I sort of swore I’d never go back to a university, but this job seemed too much of a, it was too tempting. It was kind of what a crazy idea and how can I make it work? And I’d seen like other models, you know LCC, no, LSP, you have something called South bank collective where they it’s mainly kind of film and TV casting they do and filming and photography, but there’s a lot, there’s a lot of models out there that are really interesting. I don’t remember have you had Matt Desmarais on this podcast Matt: on and off, but never properly. Claire: So he said something to me, like. I can’t believe you’ve done it and made it work. You know, something like you’ve got balls or something that’s like that, that is exactly it because you, you know, as you said, Chris universities have very slow and they have their process and they have their business development manager and they have their knowledge exchange person. And it’s a very kind of. Tight tried and tested method, but I’m afraid I like coloring out of the lines and I like doing projects that are quick daddy real. And you know, the students come forward, you know, the students are friends center, so this is probably the closest thing I’ve ever done to any self promotion, which is terrifying. But at the same time, I kind of. I think it’s really important to kind of showcase projects like this because they don’t happen everywhere. And a lot of universities don’t really want to do something like this because it’s too hard. So Matt: it feels like there’s also those distinctions aren’t there because universities have got a well-established model for how they deal with business, which is through research and that’s all very, you know, One side of the academic world. And then you’ve got teaching, which is, I think in many certainly non-teaching institutions, which is the ones that are generally seen as better by the people who are in organizations that are non-teaching as well as teaching. But this idea about being able to actually make undergraduates learn through doing, which is almost like the apprentices stuff that we’ve spoken about on this show quite a few times over the years, And I was just wondering whether there’s this, this kind of model would be applicable into other areas. Now I think about, you know, people coming out of university with computer science degrees, the thing that’s usually the biggest gap in their experience and knowledge is any sort of semblance per how you apply any of it into real world. Problems cause everything has been theoretical ups at that point. And creative industry is the same. And actually being able to shift that into what I learn through doing where it’s doing for real, it just seems that this it, I don’t know, maybe it’s this, the kind of the conservatism that there is in the, in the, in the world of education sometimes, but. Chris: Maybe it’s not sorry, mate. Maybe it’s not just do it. Right? Because as you say, computing students, they often do do it. You know, they, they are, they are coding, building things. What they’re not doing is doing it in the process and in the context of an organization. And it’s a bit, like you said, Clara, about people reading. Brief. So, or you being able to write briefs same in the software world with requirements, it’s just, it’s, it’s just a different, different way of looking at it. So it, you know, that what you’re doing is you’re bringing them a dose of reality, real world process, aren’t you? Claire: Yeah. And I think it is part of the Kingston ethos. So I’m trying to remember the plaque as you come in, I’m going to get roasted for this. I think there is, it’s like learning through doing or making through doing there is a little motto that Kingston has. But I think the most, if I can do one thing for students it’s to understand what the value or their worth is. When I, when the first year start, I normally stand up and do a little introduction about the studio. And I always say, no, you guys know what’s going on. You know, there’s people sitting in advertising agencies who don’t know how to sell on Depop or how to, how to work on clubhouse or how to do an ASIS marketplace, whatever. So I kind of try and say to them, you know, what’s going on. Most people don’t have a clue, you know, you’re the future kind of thing, but a bit more inspiring than that. And I think if I can do one thing, it would be to get them to know their worth. Like I had a couple of students who were going to build an AOL filter for a client and they sort of came to me and said, Oh, do you think this is too much? And it was something like 400 pounds. I was like, well, have you actually costed out like how many hours it would take you, if it’s going to take both of you, you know, and sort of recalibrated it all. And they, they weren’t nervous about asking for money from the client which. I find really fascinating. And I found that a little bit with a lot of the lecturers as well. The, the risk, the risk of doing a live project was almost too much tobacco kind of thing. It was there’s too many rules, but I think that’s, you know, if you don’t fail and you don’t take a rescue, you’re not really gonna get anywhere. And if the students learn that quite early on, I think that’s really valuable. And if they can say right I’m building this air filter, but I’m, it’s two grand, you know? And I remember there was only once I came across someone who this is way, way back. This is when I was at Ravensbourne. And I sort of said, well, I pay all the students, you know, that we, we take on commissioners, but we pay the students and she just went well, that’s ridiculous. They haven’t graduated yet. And just had this really like, you know, when you have those scenarios, like role plays of the worst client ever. I never did any work with her, but I wouldn’t have done because she just had such a terrible view of students and it goes, it was almost like it’s poor cough. Isn’t it? The UCL . She was like that it was kind of. She was almost affronted at the fact that I was kind of saying, no, they still have a value, even though they’re still studying. And Ravensbourne was great for that because, you know, it’s, it’s really good broadcast media and filming. So they, all those kids were, you know, in the kit store was taken out the DSLRs much more, better. Camera’s than that. And they were doing it, you know, half the kids were on the Olympic broadcast team. OBS you know, they were, one of them was shooting Tom Daley from, you know, The, the cutout thing in the swimming pool window to speak, you know, somebody had that job, Oh, I’m filming Tom Daley or something, you know, just mad. And I remember a student said to me, it was like being at Disneyland except you were getting paid for it, working on the Olympics. And you know, that’s what you want for every student. That’s what you want for your job. Right. Maybe not Disneyland, but. Something like that be Matt: equipped. No, no, no. And it’s, I mean, if I think about it’s my university time, the things where I learned the most were undoubtedly the stuff that sat around the edges of my core there’s bits of my course that are sort of vaguely useful fakely, but you know, there’s only so much Beaudry are, you can bring to the workplace. But. I did sociology. So yeah, I mean, I think credibly useful, but not very practical, but then being involved with student radio. So it was for half the reason why I was able to pull this thing vaguely together was because I learned how to wet it on tape. Being involved with the student union and just understanding a bit about how organizations worked and about the politics and about understanding a bit more about The political system through student politics and, you know, all of that stuff sort of built up. And that was where the value was. Of course that, and especially now, as we’ve seen this massive change in how maybe going forward, students will continue to be taught as we come out of pandemic and, you know, remote. Working is not going to be just about people in work. I think there’s going to be elements of this sort of stick within the realm of higher education as well. And the risk is that all that stuff that’s traditionally been on the periphery could well get lost. So actually finding ways to make it front and center as part of the learning experience, I think feels like that’s really, really important. Claire: Yeah. I think giving them a place to fail is really important. Because so much of university is about passing it’s, it’s kind of, you know, I remember some of the first students that I worked with some final year illustration animation students, they were just brilliant. And I remember them trying to knuckle down to do their dissertations. And I just said, peanut just showed them some drawings, like hide past you. Like it’s such an antiquated way of judging the final year when. These kids were doing just such amazing work with, you know, stop, motion, everything. But, but no, it all boils down to a however many thousand word essay. And I always try and make them feel better by saying, Oh, I had to hand write mine because there weren’t computers and they go, Oh, are you really that old? Yeah. Matt: So Claire, if people want to be able to actually. Come and see what’s going on in Kingston. How they go about it. Claire: Just knock on the door of the PC world. If I’m in there, I’ll open it. I mean, we’ve had, that’s one of the most joyful things about doing something like this. When we were in the Bentall center, we just had people come in and go what’s this. What’s going on and you can just say anything and it could be true, but we had we had two gentlemen come in the first day we had the keys. Both of them went, Oh, has the PC world closed? And we went, yes, like this is an empty room with nothing in it. There’s no signs of a computer, nothing. I haven’t got a uniform on. There’s no officialness to this. And like we said, all the new addresses on the outside, because there’s a laminate with the new address. Oh, right. Okay. And then you know, other people just pop head and, and put their head in and say, what’s going on are going to be a quitter creative meanwhile space, you know, watch this space. So, yeah, knock on the door and see if where that is. At some point we will be peeling off the old PC world stickers. We’re trying to do something quite exciting to the outside of the building. So just watch this space, but it’s 19 to 23, five road in Kingston. It’s literally a two-minute walk from the station. I can send you all the socials so you can follow along. But yeah, watch this space really. Outro Chris: Well, that was a very interesting look into how a university actually starts to work in the real world, which doesn’t always happen that often they might experience. But that was, you know, very, very interesting. Thanks Claire. So not then what is going on this week for you? Matt:  We’re recording on Monday evening tomorrow. We’ve got Meeting to be able to decide the outcome of the big procurement which hopefully will come to a conclusion. So that’s very exciting. And then I am also over the course of the rest of this week starting interviews for two architecture roles that I’m recruiting into my team, which is also extremely exciting. And also, and actually getting more and more into this as, as I explore more is we’re just launching up a piece of work, looking at ethics. Data and AI. And the more that I look at it, the more important it seems to me to be becoming and how you get people who traditionally will go all that. It’s a bit complicated when it comes to matters of data. To start to take notes to the fact that they really need to understand more about this. Then they may be doing at the moment. And you just saw the story about the two EasyJet that almost had some problems taking off after the first lockdown, because of a miscalculation of load weight that came about because the software that they just upgraded over lockdown one had been written in a country where it was assumed that if somebody put moves. It meant it was an adult female. And if they put MIS it was a female child and so miscalculated by 1.2 tons, the weight of the aircraft to take off. And it’s brilliant because it wasn’t a problem with the data. It wasn’t a problem with the technology. It wasn’t a problem with the software. It wasn’t a problem with the airplane. It was absolutely a problem of. People not having a clear understanding about the meaning of things, the semantics. And anyway, it’s been a great little exercise that to be able to help me to illustrate to people why we need to spend a bit more time and attention to thinking about these things. So that was good. Claire, what have you got in the the weekend? Claire: I’m going to be in Kingston a lot. So I think I’m going to be there twice this week. And then on Monday as well, Monday is quite exciting. It’s I’m doing a rekkie for something which could be a gigantic project or it might just not be, Matt: Oh, that’s soon to be cryptic. And Mr. Weston, what is the the week, this third or so weekend? The month of April, hold in store for you. Chris: Well, partly it’s me. I’m very rapidly trying to get to grips with what’s going on at work and what I need to get done this week. Part two, actually, interestingly enough, on your data question, I’ve, I’ve got a blog to post tomorrow about data, culture, that and side, that whole data ethics and AI and things like that is about how, as a business, you, you value data, how you. Understand the impact of what you’re working with and all of those kinds of things is a really, you know, that’s kind of fundamental, right? And so that’s a, that’s an interesting subject and, and there are yeah, some useful, interesting things that came up today. I was, I was, I was doing a little bit of last minute research for this blog, so, so yeah, I’m posting that to Mauro and then we’ve got a conversation about it with our. A European digital leaders community on Thursday. So that should be good. Fun. So but yeah, yeah, it should be a busy week. I’ve got us going on, ah, some more events to prepare for and things like that. So it’s yeah, another good one Matt: next week we are going to be joined. It’s going to be like going into the office for you, Chris, isn’t it? Yeah. Chris: It’s a very exciting time because you know, it’s going to be me. I’m my colleague, Mr. Dowd. Matt: Excellent. Mark, who is a, a seasoned. Old person who does CIS. Now I’m increasingly seasoned. I find that what comes after seasoned veteran. And then basically you’re, you’re you’re as old as whales. To be able to extend out the use of Wales as an international unit of measure. But anyway, now Margaret Downs will be with us next week, talking about . Chris: You’re thinking of a boy, Jordan. Matt: Oh, new light. I think that would be fantastic. I didn’t want to put a note in there. It’s my Irish shoes Mark down. Who’ll be joining us next week. Look forward to that. And we’ll put more details about the work that Claire’s doing on the website at wb40podcast.com. See you next week.

On this week’s show we are joined by music artist, designer and story-teller Timo Peach to explore the history of music technology, and ask what we might learn from it to apply to other realms of tech?You can find out more about Timo’s work at https://www.momotempo.co.uk/ This week’s automatically generated transcript… Intro Chris: Welcome to another episode of WB 40 everybody. It is fantastic to be back and we have another guest it’s going to be fantastic. Matt, what have you been up to this week? Matt: Well, it, it’s obviously we’re recording a day later than usual, so it’s Tuesday. So summer has broken. If you paying attention, you’ve got about another. 24 hours or so to be able to enjoy some of it before it ends again in time for the children to break off from school. Which is if you had more evidence of the non-existence of any sort of eternal entity in the sky, other than clouds, that’s it? The last week has been it’s she gets to the point where this down thing, where you just go, Oh, fuck. Sake. Can we just now stop and then realizing that no, it can’t stop. You got to carry on. So I’ve been getting a bit bored with well, Matt, Chris: to your previous point, what you’re describing is perhaps evidence or lack of evidence of a benevolent entity up there. It doesn’t rule out the alternative. Matt: That’s true. It could be that the, the, the entire overloading system is run by a misanthropic psychopath. Which actually, when you look at it, suddenly I could believe in religion out the back of that. Quite bizarrely. That’s the first time I think I’ve ever had that sort of regulatory thing, actually that on the WB 40 signal channel, which used to be WhatsApp, but signal for the cool kids. And I, there was a piece that I think John Harris wrote in the guardian at the week or the observer of the week. It’s all the same these days about the difficulty of being unreligious during such time. So there was nothing to, to fall back on. There’s no cushion of religious softness to be able to. Soften the blow of Matt global pandemics. And thinking that as a point of that, that maybe the WB 40 group is a religion substitute which seemed to be rounded, divided by the group who then went back to talking about it, addressable LEDs or whatever it is that paid for Chris: them. Yeah. Marina is an old things. Brought to beautiful. Ready before we get there, we don’t really have one. Matt: No returns. How’s your week been? Christopher? My Chris: week has been very much like any other week as always having, I said that. Right? So this last week I did a, a conference in Serbia, which was good, fun. All from, of course the comfort of my misery hall is my office. And I also, I went to lunch with a bunch of people. And it was, it was quite nice actually. And it was organized by their wonderful Amanda Brock of open UK. And it was a launch of their report that their recent report into the use of open source software in the UK. And I happened to be talking to her and she said, why don’t you come along? And I did. And they send me somebody to eat. So that was nice. And I had to spot a lunch with some people I’ve never met before, including somebody who works for Google, who. Wrote a bunch of software for the Google keyboard. He reckoned his software is used by about 3 billion people around the world, which is kind of cool. And and so that was good. And yeah, can’t complain. Here we go. And w we were already Tuesday, so the weeks thundering past already. Matt: Well, it’s not Tuesday, probably when people are listening to this, but you know what makes sense Tuesday? It was, I sat next to Vince surf on a bus once. Just talking of people at Google. Vint Cerf is one of the people who basically invented the networking standards around TCPI P I believe. Oh, and a lovely bed. Don’t know. Indeed joining us this week Timo how’s your last seven days been Timo: well, yes. Not, not quite as existential as YouTube by the sounds of it. I mean, this, this podcast goes deep, fast. I can see that I was just bumbling along reading things on LinkedIn. Sayings about, Matt: I can’t stand LinkedIn, the superficiality of it, or the lack of Chris: conversation, forest superficiality, and for the occasionally, you know, price, Leslie den, things that people put on there. And sometimes there’s some good stuff as well, but Gregory for some, there’s some funny things. Timo: I came back to it as a necessary, I don’t know about evil, but a necessary irritation. I’ve had actually lots of good conversations with them and I will confess. But if you think of LinkedIn as sort of performance art, it changes the enjoyment levels. Matt: I, I tapped, tend to think about most of modern life as somehow being performance art. I think this government in the United Kingdom at the moment is just basically a very long-winded piece of situationist. Timo: It’s a stunt of some sort, isn’t it? I agree. And unless you respond in kind and imagine that you yourself are creating some sort of living installation, then then it’s all downhill. And I dunno which data are you gonna turn to, but you’re gonna have to find one of them. Chris: You need some sort of philosophical, philosophical rock to tie this art to this, like Alibaba come with business. So it’s something that in his world that you you’d need, you need to tie to that and that then, then yet you’re okay. You know, if you could say an absurdist kind of theater, I think we’re, I think we’re good with her. Gosh, this does get deep. Timo: Isn’t it? Yeah. It does. And I’m also now mentally walking along a beach in Morocco somewhere you know, reading KEMU inset in situ and I’m wondering now they’re so vivid. Is this easily to mind that my year in lockdown is means that I’m wondering whether I’m actually, this is all taking place in the last few seconds of my cerebral cortex. And it’s you guys, my brain has it all to mine. So welcome. Welcome to the last moments of Timo. Going off on Chris: a tangent. Timo: That really? Yeah. Matt: Yeah. I, so actually there’s a thing because there’s been a lot talk. We haven’t talked at all about NFTs over the last few weeks instead of emergence on the internet as yet another wacky pyramid investment scheme. But I was, I was chatting to somebody on the Twitters earlier today and talking about he was talking about whether, you know, what, what do people do? Do they take these these artworks that they’ve bought with a non-transferrable token of what it is that NFTE stands for? Non fungible, token changeable. That’s Timo: something you can get at the Matt: chemist. No. Lord knows I’ve tried, but the th th the, what do they do? Do they sit in sort of a dark and drum and then open up a JPEG image of the thing to be able to say. But I was, I was thinking about that and something has been going through my head about it is that, although the whole NFT thing is obviously utterly ludicrous. Nuts and, and probably a massive pyramid scheme. Is it any different to buying a main Elbit of, of canvas that some 40 a hundred or so years ago, door with pigment and linseed oil. And I’m not sure necessarily it is any more preposterous. No, Timo: if people are buying them there it is. And we can be sniffy about the art world, but it’s a nice little world to be part of. And I think of an artist like Joanie Le Mercier, who’s really looked at this from her own work. She’s kind of gone into this kind of a lot and found a very empowering community there for herself and, and made a living out of it. And then for her, she did this wonderfully. Sort of honest piece looking at the, you know, how, how great and how empowering and looking forward and taking, taking back control for artists, the whole idea, isn’t it? Ah, how instantly terrible it is because of the carbon footprint. It’s not just a bit bad, but colossally terrible. Because of all those. Servers humming away while people mind thing. So, yeah, it’s got a way to go to iron out some kinks, but it sounds like there’s some, for some people there’s a really good positive thing there and yes, from another perspective, like most things in arts in the art world, rather it can look preposterous if you’re not in there. Matt: Yeah. I don’t know. Have you been tempted crest to buy any Chris: NFTs? I haven’t. Partly because You’re Matt: all locked up in your Timo: Bitcoin investments. You need, you need one Bitcoin theoretically worth a billion billion us dollars, but you can’t cash it in or don’t know where it is or you can’t turn the mining off. I don’t know how it works though. There are Chris: people out there who, you know, like that guy in Wales, who’s trying to find it. Todd drive that he threw away 15 years ago. That’s worth, Timo: it’s a nice urban myth. Isn’t it? I don’t know if it’s real, but I Chris: feel his pain. Th that will be right, because once upon a time, this was all just fun, fun, and games. Right. And it was 10 quit. And now it’s. Always with the millions of pounds. And it’s no, it’s not, it’s not fun of games anymore. My book, Timo: it’s my Mac, too, that I Chris: bought that. It’s a, well, that’s the whole point, isn’t it? This is in terms of in terms of magnetic media and stories and all these things that come it is, it is rather impermanent as, but as, as, as are all things, but the. So I, I saw that the first one that would be Paul or whatever it was that thing. And it was millions and millions of dollars or whatever on Ft. And my, my thought when that isn’t there, nobody’s bought that because they think, Oh my God, I must have that. They’d bought it for it’s like a flattened. Dubai is it’s a, it’s an investment by somebody with a whole bunch, as you say, cryptocurrency. That they could change to normal money, but they’d get a massive, massive tax bill and all sorts of things would happen at that point. And somebody might start to want to scrape where it’s come from and all that kind of nonsense. So it’s a way of taking a massive amount of money that they probably don’t need to turn into interfere currency and putting it in something else just to see what happens. And there’s a lot of people out there not, you know, Not the majority of crypto holders, but there are lots of people out there with a lot of paper, money or digital paper money that doesn’t, isn’t really worth anything to them because yes, they could, they could cash it in, but it’s just not worth it. So that whole, that thing that happened and the, all the hype about it, it’s all about. Okay. Can we make this worse, something more? Is it just about pumping a market when you get down to the, is it worth digitally signing something so I can tell you I own it. Well, that’s another question, isn’t it? Because we that’s, we redo that with. Oh, we tried to do with computer games. I tried to do it. We tried to do it with media. You know, home taping is copies, killing music, all that kind of thing. Trying to sign something to say, you have the right to look at this, or you, you own a bit of it or whatever. There’s loads of that going on. There’s this, this was always, this is just a, this sort of thing. Think that’s happening. Timo: It’s just, it’s nothing new. It’s just a slightly different setup. Tools and a bit of hype, it’s a bit of fun for people and people. Those are lots of money invest in the art market and somebody like people or others, you know, what spelt them up is years of grafting away in a shed. I myself, am in a shed you know, building something that seems like integrity to you, truth to you. And then if you end up in the middle of a hype machine, like having a hit record, you know, keep your head, it’s rather fun. If it can actually pay some bills in the real world, happy days, but not many people can get there purely through a cynical stunt that has no nothing in it. And I, I, I think in a way that the front end is always what the paper’s right? Yeah. This is insane because it is, but the backend. Yeah, the sketchbooks, the interesting bit about art, always. I, I, I miss Matt: though the days I’d might, I think actually, increasingly as I get older, my artistic heroes are the KLF. And when they went to burn a million quid fun, and if you’ve read the autobiography or biography, they still to this day, do not have the first idea why they did that. Just Timo: do it depressed. That’s even better. They still regret it. The fact that they a, they did it and B they real enough. To then go, what the hell were we doing? It makes me love them even more. I agree. Matt: Well, anyway this week out of a an observation from a month or so ago, stems an entire show. So I think we should probably get on with it. Main Interview Matt: A month ago. I was asking about this technical term with some music software, which I do quite a lot. It’s kind of my out of work moment for me. And I will spend hours sitting in my office with the spreadsheets turned off and the PowerPoints turned off. And instead with various bits of musical equipment sitting around me, some of which are quite new many of which these days are based in software. And some of which are quite old and some of them are mechanical, have a couple of saxophones. There’s some old keyboard thing that I’ve got, which is about 30 years old. I’ve got a digital saxophone, which is great fun. And the thing that struck me when I was doing this, I a few weeks back was how seamlessly music technology works with other bits of music technology in a way that the nearly 30 years of working in. Business technology and various organizations over the years has shown me that most technology simply doesn’t that I can take a piece of technology that was built nearly 30 years ago. The AI still works because it’s not wasting for another firmware upgrade or a connection to the internet so that you can renew a subscription and plug it into a device that is new, that plugs into my PC or into my iPad, or even into my mobile phone and will enable me to be able to allow. The fat and then software on my mobile PC or whatever. And it all works and it still works. And I cannot think of anything else in terms of digital computer based technologies that has got that sort of longevity, or actually to be fundamental, still works. You know, you couldn’t run windows 3.1 software effectively really. To do anything these days, if you try to fire up an old internet browser from twenty-five years ago and tried to search the internet, now it happens. It’s all broken. There’s none of that kind of ability to be able to still use things and to use them with other things that you get rid of use technology. So I thought it’d be interesting to be able to explore that a bit. So think a bit, a bit about the history of that, and then to be able to maybe draw some conclusions about what might the rest of the acknowledge he learned from what we can glean from. How music technology works. And so I thought, well, I could prattle on about that on my own, Chris. And it’d be very delicate. Somebody who actually is more than just a weekend Putler. And so Timo you’re a musical artist music artist, you’re a designer. You tell stories you have podcasts for global goals, music road show. You’ve got, you know, you’ve got a lot going on and, and you are Momo tempo. As well, Timo: I am all of those things. Yeah. And I suppose for me, this is the most. Gloriously intersectional thing I could be asked to do. And I’m surprised I had not thought of this topic. You’ve really got my imagination running. It’s so obvious. So close to home for me, where sort of futurism meets tech meets vintage since meets art meets the whole culture of globalization. That’s driven by, in my opinion, the cult of engineering and, and here we are to talk about how it all fits together. Matt: Good. So let’s go back a few hundreds of years because I think the starting point for this is the structure of music and within all of this conversation, I think the caveat to it all is we’re really talking about Western music here and actually a lot of the technologies that I’ve just described. They’re brilliant. If you’re doing stuff on a 12 note scale and in. Time signatures that are kind of conventional around threes or fours or twos or, or if you’re really, you know, way out there and Dave Brubeck sevens. But if you’re doing with microtonal, which is say a lot of Eastern music where the, the intervals between notes are much. Well, very different to Western air, whatever it doesn’t really apply. So well. But go back maybe a couple of millennia, right? The roots of our few millennials are the roots of music and people starting to be able to not only play music, but make notes too, or no down what is going on with music so that they could record a version of it for posterity. Timo: Yes. I mean, this is why all music is essentially a technology experience because technology it requires technology to create an experience, but it’s the experience you’re actually making. Which gets to the heart of why this might be a bit different as a tech sector, but unless you’re opening your throat doing choral work, which is how our sort of instinct for self-expression happened, musically you needing something people I think immediately reached for sticks to hit and for. Skin stretched across hollow sound, hollow chambers to make sounds. And that gets into tone immediately. I think humans wanted to make more of it. So you’ve got to, well, how do you note that down? You need a language. And my understanding is there’s examples of cuneiform that notate some sort of musical experience. Pythagoras apparently had a word or two to say he suggested unsurprisingly there’s might be a mathematical relationship between tones. The Greeks came up with some sort of Tetra chordal system where they thought might be four notes in a four key notes in a, in a. Scale. And then, you know, you’ve got a thousand years later, about sixth century, some Rome of like birth. Yes. Who was a Roman Senator wrote some influential paper about music and around then people like Pope Gregory. He did a lot. He started calendars. He also started music schools. But this was still before people were actually writing down notation and some, some person said, Isidore, a Seville said, this is daft with he. This person was deeply irritated with forgetting tunes, which I add onstage every time I perform, because I don’t read music. So they kind of came up with an idea of sort of marking the flow of a melody, the cadence, the ups, and the downs with notes. But. They didn’t represent specific notes. Some it was a bloke I’d never heard of a Guido dot. So. It was a music boffin who came up with the idea of staves lines and, and representing specific notes in a, in a 12 note scale. And that sort of got iterated through the dark ages. You had the basics of that around the 13th century through a few different people. But I think it’s a lot of this, like so many Chavon culture goes back to, you know, kind of 400 years where. Yeah, the seeds of the enlightenment, but also orchestral music started to overtake folk chambers and more and more instrumentalists were added at court and they all needed to know more specifically what they were doing rather than just strumming along and they needed more fine tuned notation and this sort of developed. More and more until by about Mozart’s time, you know, you could read his charts. We do to this day kind off and recreate it with an orchestra. Now that’s 300 years of 250 years of technology that hasn’t radically changed. That’s amazing. Yeah. And that, Matt: so somebody today can look at something from. Three or 400 years ago and have a pretty good stab at it in a way that actually probably even language would be a bit challenging. Certainly handwriting would be challenging. So we’ve got this standardized way of being able to write music down. We’ve got series of different instruments as if you know, a lot of evolution of those instruments from the Baroque period through to the classical period of Mozart into the romantic periods of Beethoven being the bridge point then. But we basically got stuff that you scrape stuff that you. Below into whilst making raspy noises, we did Epps stuff that you blow into whilst getting a bit of wood or read to be able to vibrate stuff that you blow across stuff that you hit. If I missed any of the major categories of musical instrument, Timo: no, that’s kind of it. It’s, it’s hitting, blowing and scraping on a, on an Epic scale over really finely tuned bits of timber and canker. And Matt: that carried on until probably the early 20th century or missed start to that and see a new type of musical instrument that is based around electricity and Circuits valves and Timo: stuff. Yeah. You had a low, I mean, electricity, I mean, obviously in the 19th century, lots of experimentation happened and the boundaries between sort of science innovation. And, and music were very lots. I mean, all boundaries are, we’re a little bit blurred, even as they will try to pin it down with good labels. And you had it. I mean, the word sort of electrical thing, things happening in the late 18th century because of the early development of battery power John  made his, what was it? Clever scene electric. And it was mucking about with. Sort of, electromagnets trying to resonate bells effectively. So a bit of a gimmick, but there, it was sort of electric hundred years later, you’ve got Elijah Grey’s musical Telegraph, trying to sort of make tones down the new Telegraph system. And then later on. Instruments that use the phone systems because there were no other speakers, but the ones in people’s, you know, emerging handsets. So that, it’s interesting. What we will try. And some of this stuff was about imagining ways to send data like a Telegraph, but they found themselves making tones and making accidental oscillators effectively. And then when radio valves really took off. And radio as a technology happened in the very first part of the 20th century, a lot more instrumentation started to come out of that. It was blatantly electronic and the first, the very first kind of synthesizes effectively by oscillators and stuff like that, which brings us to the famous Victor Timmerman in the twenties, which made music by magic, Matt: honestly. So the, the theremin was a device that was using. Electromagnetic waves and probably most famous for being the lead noise in quite a lot of the beach boys stuff. And the star Trek theme tune, I think was the thing Timo: might’ve been in there. They had a female vocalist doing there might’ve been a Thurman in the back there as well. Sermons were very popular in 50 scifi, but they’d been around for 25 years by then. And it uses electromagnet. Magnetic presence, doesn’t it to affect the oscillator and the pitch the time where we kind of sound. Yeah. That’s magic. Yeah. Yeah. Chris: So let me ask a question because I’m, I’m, I’m I’m, this is outside my domain, really, but I’m interested because of course the reason somebody can come along with electricity and as you say, he kind of resonating things. They never really knew that that that musical notes were They w were resonant frequencies. They understood that. And that was, that was not that wasn’t a revelation at that point. So when you get electricity and when you start to understand how electricity works and magnetism, electromagnetism, et cetera, you could start to think, okay, I’m going to make a, a an instrument or whatever, but there was a, it’s also about. What you do with that, right? Because it’s quite easy to make a tone, like a pure tone of say, we’re going to this, this is going to be 500 Hertz or whatever, but actually actually doing something that is replicating an, a musical instrument, which has a whole Watson, lots of different hardware harmonics going on. That’s another question, isn’t it. So there must’ve been a point where people thought, well, here’s some tech, we can do something with it. And there’s the intimates. We know, we know we normally play it and trying to figure out what the what’s the, what’s the relationship between this thing that I can do like a tuning fork. Right? So if the tuning forks are around, everybody knew that you could create a pure time from a tuning fork. In fact, it wasn’t there like a. Tuning for you, then they say, okay, it’s gotta be 400 and something hurts. That’s an a 440. And before that, there were more than one a, so actually you could write down your musical notation, but depending on where you started from, you would have a different, you would have a diff you you’d maybe have a different outcome. So all of that kind of stuff had to happen. But then you can say, you got to go through this. Okay. That’s that’s what we call a pure E too. That’s an a, on a piano. Well, that’s an a on a harpsichord or that’s an on, on a violin or whatever, and that that’s a bit quite an important leap, right? Timo: Yeah, it is. But I think it also illustrates the, the, kind of the, the debate that we’ve had in nascent. Tech terms over a hundred, the last a hundred years, but especially think of somebody like Alicia gray who made his musical Telegraph, he was driven by this idea of purity and trying to make pure sentiments. Your sounds. We can make the most pure AE ever and get rid of all the imperfections, what a weird thing, because yeah, of course, when you study Sonics and harmonics at all it’s all the imperfections that make it work. It’s the imperfections that make the emotion. The obvious thing, being that if you made an exact pure sort of, it wouldn’t quite be assigned way, but a really pure violin note. And you managed to duplicate that across five violins. You wouldn’t get emotion, you get this slightly weird pur perfect sound, which nature doesn’t do. But when you get five violins or scraping things, how are the expertly. In all these minute differences, what you get is a surge of emotion. It’s the imperfections that make music work. It’s the imperfections that give character to everything imperfections from our sort of level of make it really shiny and clean. There’ll be science in there, but it’s much finer grain that’s and that’s beautiful. It’s poetic for me as an artist, that’s kind of wonderful trying to clean it up. It’s that? It’s the dirty bits that make it great. Matt: It’s one of the things that I remember talking to my grandfather. It was a physicist. And it was about the time when CD was becoming the dominant form for for amazing. My grandfather was born in 1913 and talking to him about the irony of how music that was mostly. Rock and pop music, mostly featuring electric. Attells that mostly depend on the fact that there is massive amounts of distortion going on. We’re being then crystal clear, recorded on CD. And he didn’t really understand cause he never really ever listened to rock music. He’d have no idea what I was going on about. So we’ve got evolution, no technology is coming along. We’ve got new ways of being able to make noises other than just scraping, banging or. Billowing and people are willing to experiment as well. I think that’s the other thing here. Isn’t it? So the, the my, my main musical instruments, saxophone and adult Sachs, he was a prolific inventor of instruments. Yeah. Timo: An awful lot of people at time where. Matt: But, and it was also finding the medium by which people would be willing to accept that. So he worked with people like Ravel. So Balero the thing that told and Dean made famous in the eighties had two saxophones in it, a Turner and a soprano cause they were working together on this idea of being able to get that into orchestral music. So you need to be able to find people who are willing to experiment to be able to get these ideas kind of pre-step for them from the twenties through to the, I guess the forties and the fifties, you start to see more and more electronic based keyboard instruments start to emerge. But all of these things are still devices that are being played by him. Timo: Yes they are. I think you’ve got to the thing about the 20th century, the modernist period is this, this massive redirection. Of the, of ways of seeing. So I still cling to that as a, as you know, my primary definition of art. It’s about new ways of seeing that was the phrase that came out of late modernism in a way. And. They were, everybody was questioning what everything was. And it was a wonderful blur in lots of ways between science and an art and traditional experimentation and what an energized frenetic time. And then in the middle of the 20th century tape technology was a big dirtier actually in lots of ways to, to, to try and record and capture things. The early sense of sampling. And of course, famously Pierre Schafer music concrete started to say, well, what if sound can be music? If you hear it differently by splicing it up and repeating it is, is, is that musical? Isn’t it. And it, through all the purists and classical people into no causes, no noise, blah, blah, blah. And into those sorts of arenas came different levels of technology, making. Actually new sounds to the human ear. Think of that ear as where nobody had heard oscillators doing certain things or particular filters or combinations or chopped up samples on tape. Wow. And that turned into the auntie. They put those into keyboard of all instruments as well. Like the what became the Mellotron. Yeah. And earlier versions of it we’re out in the late fifties. So it says there’s a lot going on fifties and sixties. And then of course we have to mention before we get to our main point, Bob Mogue, and they mentioned that the, of what we now know is the synthesizer. He was actually selling Melodia theremin kits from his basement as a sort of late teenager. And he met at a sort of trade show. He met a guy called herb Deutsch, who was a composer musician, and they just fell in love with each other’s. Love for electronic music. And then what? Well let’s form a company and George managed to go back to his college is able to give me a bursary 200 quid to go and work with Bob Mogue and event the synthesizer between them really quickly. They come up with the first modular synth in 1964, which did get shipped with a keyboard. So still a basing these things around interfaces that we, that were recognizable tech going back three centuries. I caught it Matt: was, was it Wendy, Carlos, who did the bark, which was all about the Mo instruments, but it was just basically playing the same notes at the same notation that went back 400 years. But just with a new. Sound, Timo: it was switched on bark. I mean, it’s amazing that you know, a trans artist actually is a turning point in music because when she put out that record, it got the attention. Of people like the Beatles and the rolling stones and others legend has it, the rolling stones bought a Moke modular system and used it once in a film and then sold its Tangerine dream. There’s a whole bit of this and yeah, it just, it just caught people’s imagination. Cause it was so weird and wonky and that cover with them. Somebody dressed us back in the 17 hundreds garb with a wig in front of the mode modular. It’s still cool to this day. Yeah, but they were essentially just saying, look, we can reinvent the sound and then, but that led to people like Tommy eater. In the seventies kind of reimagining how you’d even approach that with early kind of homemade sequences. And lots of people were making ways to use pulses and sort of our paginations and fudge things from those machines. So there were some rhythms going on and some early drum machines happened in the sixties as well. But yeah, this is the turning Matt: point, I guess they’d been the peer NOLA. So in the, in the. Well, and those go back to Victorian era is essentially big clock work devices that playback music using sheets of paper, which was in fact that there is a fantastic argument to say that that was one of the core founding principles of computer technologies is those punch cards, which were used in that, which originally had been taken from mechanical looms then became the way in which she programmed dirty computers. But. We then started to see in the seventies, rarely, I guess the ability for machines to start to play instruments. Timo: I think of bands like craft work. I learned how to make music by listening to them. And they, they represent an interesting evolution because they started. In, you know, kind of 1970, the year I was born and they showed up at this big space in Berlin that had been rented out cheaply by some legend, as some sort of local businessman, he hired a big space and said, you can all come and make noise and, and. All the kind of early kraut rock has ended up in this GAF where social space had been made and they begged borrowed and stole synthesizes and they jammed and they just, and they all questioned this young generation. First young adults, post-war Germany. What even is music? What is patriotism? What is sound? What is melody? They deconstructed stuff. And they had fun and craft work. They’re able to sort of go from being quite. Yes, flute. There’s a lot of Yas float on really any craft work but with sense and other stuff and groovy kraut, Rocky beets into slow to get more sequenced. And it’s not until their album at the banned machine in 78, where they actually worked out how to synchronize all the kit and it shows it’s really tight and it’s not done with what we’re about to talk to. It was done with CV Gates and clocks, but they worked it out. So all the students they could program. And it sounds like early versions of Donald’s music today. And so that’s the point Matt: at which you’re starting to see people gaining not only machines playing. The instruments. So you program the instrument, it goes off there, but then also enabling these different instruments or machines to be able to do it in time with each other. And the only way she talks about the CV control boast is, and pulse is being sent out and, and it was every manufacturer had a different set of ways of doing it and it, it, it didn’t quite. Timo: Well, yeah. And so it brings us to the sort of nexus of, of the history in a way, if you want to see it that way and your point, which I think is fascinating. It’s the arrival of this shared protocol, middy musical instrument, digital interface. And that was first proposed in 1981. First, since it came out with it attached in 1983 and. This is why I think it’s interesting for the podcast so that we’ve done this back history here, which geeks like you and me and Matt will find interesting to me. The interesting bit really is how it obviously how these machines make art and express human, emotional truth. And what part of great revolutions in sound and society. But it’s also interesting for this podcast, from the culture of technology, because in researching this, I found what I inferred a superior human reason for why we ended up with middy. Now, middy is of course, this shared protocol that got competing devices talking to each other and somehow. They managed to negotiate, starting to ship and manufacture things that could talk to each other by rival companies, which I think is remarkable. What do you know about that, Matt? What’s your so Matt: originally it was, does it, Dave Smith has a company called American company called sequential Timo: sequential circuits. Matt: They, I used to have a sequential multi-track it was dreadful couldn’t hold its pitch at all. And it was all computer controlled, but still analog underneath it. It was, it was, it was an abomination of synthesize of that. That’s another story. So he suggested that there was a problem here. He spoke to a number of the other American manufacturers at the time. So people like Mogen Oberheim and others, and he couldn’t get the American keyboard. Manifests. It says a manufacturer is interested in this idea of coming to some sort of common standard, but he managed to talk to some of the Japanese companies. So people like Yamaha and cog and  and Roland and the Japanese companies bought the idea. And so they then started to work together. And as you say, in the early eighties started to be able to then get kit, which had five pin din standard. So like centimeter and a bit across round connectors. And it’s essentially a network standard. It’s a network protocol to be able to share musical data. That’s all it is. And it enables you to allow one cable to control another device or a sequencer to be able to send out pulses that enables one or many devices to be able to. Connect, you do things in you connect things in sequence, so you can have one thing to connect to another. You can then chain off the back of that. And it’s, it’s, it’s very simple in the way in which it operates, but through quite a simple set of code is able to encapsulate everything that was in that music notation that was set up, you know, formerly four or 500 years ago. And it’s still at the core of it all four, three, four, two, three, four, five beats in a bar. Up to 96 segments of that beat pitch based around octaves over 12 note scale, and other bits and bobs around Timo: it. Now, my understanding of the way that worked out, I was thinking, how do they negotiate getting all these different companies to sign up to it? Dave Smith. I think would have been still quite young in the business because he developed the profit five, which is an absolute all-time classic since. So you cleaning out a bad experience of sequential circuits. He basically was working with microprocessors during the day, kind of like music and he thought, hang on, we haven’t got any sense that can hold their programs. You have to retune everything by hand. My beautiful mogul liberation is exactly that there’s no patch store. He and he simply sat at work one day and said, well, surely we could use microprocessor to just ally that with the synth tech. You could then store your sounds surely ARP or mogul, just get, and they didn’t. So he did, and he made the profit five and it was a smash success came out in 1978. So he was still quite fresh. But my understanding is that actually it was Roland’s founder, it Kotaro khaki. Harshi who. Approached him because he actually approached Tom Oberheim first and Tom Oberheim, like Dave Smith was working on some sort of protocol and calculate how she thought it’s a bit too clumsy. So he went to Tom, found him receptive and then went back to the bosses of Yamaha, Kauai. Of course himself and got them all to sign up and I’m thinking, well, that’s how that the histories I’ve read, don’t ever explain quite how they got back to work. They do describe this beautiful moment at the nom show in 1983, where they got khaki Harshi himself and Dave Smith stood next to each other. Supposedly. And he had a Roland, JP six and Dave Smith had a new prophecy prophet 600 and they linked them up with a mini cable in front of everybody and went, look, they can play each other. And everybody’s supposedly went. Wow. And it was a cultural breakthrough that then took off. And you got to remember that Kakehashi oversaw Roland for well, like 40 years. And it was under his guidance that Roman made. Tra two Oh eight drum machine and the T R nine Oh nine, the TV three or three. Basic thing, all these geeky things that are to this day, cherished loved icons. You have an eight Oh eight as your main image on it, or most of your pages, don’t you a Matt, it’s a sort of iconic looking eighties drum machine. And everybody would know the sound if it was pointed out to them and all these other scents that could suddenly talked to each other. And as the guys from the org said, thank God for Medi, because it meant that we could suddenly make Epic sounds when we weren’t classically trained. And we only had two hands because everybody does. And suddenly a whole new form of art was open to people now. Before we get into sort of the impact of that. The reason I think is interesting is I think it’s khaki Hashi’s background. I simply rent his story and they didn’t make any connections in the story version I read, I did. He grew up, his parents died young. Both of TB tuberculosis, you grew up with his grandparents. He worked down at the docks in a soccer doing sort of technical work. He was there during the war. Their house got destroyed by bombs. He couldn’t get into official university because of. Supposedly health problems. He started at clock making shop, working from self. He went back to Asarco, got caught up in a great big food shortage there that devastated Osaka after the war. And he then got TB. He ended up in a sanatorium supposedly for years and only got better because he got given an experimental drug trial. Essentially given to him to try and his health got better and he thought, right, I’m going to start on electronic music shop. And I want to design the best synthesizer. And he’s motivation seemed to be a passion, the music, but he was untutored just like me as an artist. And I think there’s some psychology in that and yes, something to do Japanese working together and what they saw and for him to reach out across the Pacific to San Francisco and find young Dave and. And push to make music that was inclusive and more affordable, and that people across cultures could plug in with it. Each other. I know I’m reaching here, but I found this increasingly meaningful seeming. I know nothing about it. Kakehashi as a person, not seeing him speak than what personality was, but to me, there’s an awful lot of human context, motivating that technology. Now try to imagine Apple, Google, Amazon, blah, at owl, having any event in that DNA at the core, I think it was at the core of Roland driven by him. And just a last note on this, I would say it’s beautiful. In 1989, Yamaha went corporate bought sequential circuits from Dave Smith. And they immediately closed it down, out, goes an iconic name. And 20 odd years later, he was working for himself again and trying to get the name back. And Kakehashi as an old man, went to the boss of Yamaha in 2013 or something and said, I think you should give Dave. The name back, don’t sell it, give it to him. And his quote was something like, I think we shouldn’t have unnecessary friction between electronic music manufacturers. We should be helping each other. And this is the spirit of middy. And honestly, when I read that choked up, I thought, yeah, that’s, that’s why music tech works. It’s because there were people who had. Emotional reasons to do better and came to places, places of influence and we’re, after all helping people make these immersive emotional experiences computers for a thousand practical jobs, the musical instrument is to make music. I think the psychology in, in the tech there that has helped it find better moments along the way, and quite a few. Matt: Chris, do you see parallels with. The things like the open source movement in that story, Chris: in that particular story? I think, I think yes there is. And as much as there are definitely altruistic community-based views on what is useful, what can be, what can be shared and what, what, what’s the point of it? Really? What, why are we doing this? And, and there, there are. Yeah, there are examples in the open source community. These days of I was reading an example today actually, of, of software that was being used by American immigration and then some con contributions then pulling their work for it because they weren’t happy with it. And then somebody has to go and we rebuild it, et cetera. And these there’s definitely an ethos behind some of this stuff, which, which has parallels. Hm. Timo: I think for all the romance of these things, which I think we need to keep tapping back into to do good, frankly, you’ve got to find some romantic passion for envisaging better, but also I would say yeah, at the time when I was just falling in love with music as a teenager, middy to me did seem really plastic and farty. And like, like the eighties were finally going to kill music. Cause I was just discovering these. We’re actually quite creepy old seventies records with this old technology, but I found it hauntingly compelling. And at the same time, my mates were just starting to get hold of ways to get synced, to talk to each other. And my mogul liberation that I bought in 1987 for peanuts doesn’t have many, but it’s Beautiful thing and made, he just seemed really reductive 16 channels. And then general lady came along as an, a new lowest, whole destroying conformity. Yeah. Well, I always have a piano one Oh one and you get 128 sounds and they all line up and it just seems so kind of. Oh, get rid of all the fun knobs and buttons and big oscillators, and we’ll go digital and have five black buttons and a weedy LCD screen. And that’s your interface and Mitty will make it all work. And I wasn’t enamored with it. But as time’s gone on, it just works and it doesn’t get in the way. And it still works 40 years later. And now, yeah, it’s a, it was a revolution in emancipation for everyone. I, my generation, your generations got to make music and muck around in bedrooms. And I’m a music guys now because of middy. Chris: Yeah, I know. I do think, I think there are some technological parallels in as much as, as you say, I remember listening to media middy files of Beethoven, you know, on, on computers in the nineties and you think, Oh, okay. You know, it’s like chirping away and it’s, it’s not really not the, you know, the hit that doesn’t really convey the convey the, the majesty. Timo: Did you see Chris that Chris: got, but it wasn’t there. It wasn’t, it couldn’t, it didn’t have the depth. In the same way that years ago in the sixties, you know, computer nerds used to print out ASCII art, pictures of the Mona Lisa. Right. That was the thing that you used to have on your wall line, print them up, Mona Lisa, and the technological parallel that, that, I always think of that when we come to this kind of, does it work? Does it still work is VGA, you know, in 19 eight in the late 1980s, The IBM PC moved from CGI, which was like, w w which Smith do it, simpler and columns and, and stuff like that to VGA. And that’s the D shaped connector that you can still get, right. That monitor you’re looking at now how’s that BGO can act on it. And you could probably get a VJ monitor from 1990, plugged it into your computer. And it would probably work long as you didn’t try and push it to high resolution. And that’s the, you know, back in the eighties, Early nineties, you could have a picture of the Mona Lisa on your PC, and it would be crap. You know, it would look like it was drawn in paint, and now you could have it and you could zoom in, you can have a digitized image of the thing. Then you can see every single stroke, you could see it, you know, you can do, it’s not quite the same as having their canvas in front of you. You know what I mean? But the quality and the ability of the technology to keep up with the, the, the, the desire. To convey the art or the, or whatever it might be is now at a point where it’s, it’s, it’s completely feasible, but that’s the, the VJ standard is a really good example. In fact, the only, yeah, it’s not, it’s probably about on his death bed now. You don’t get money. No laptops. I’ve VGA, mainly because of the size of the dumb thing. Timo: It’s too thick for an hour. Okay. But, but you Chris: know, it, it, it did, did you for a long time, Timo: Yeah, well, I’m thinking of that. Yeah, those lovely ASCII pictures and they’re kind of stunts, but they also say something, they become their own kind of art and a little experiment I’m looking at at Tushi or just, Samas very experimental notation score from mid century last century. The issue can walls and it’s. He’s literally drawing faces with the crotchets and quavers, and I’ve heard somebody beautifully with an eight bit tone generator, try and play their score. And it is musical it’s nuts, but it is musical. And yet the. The, the, the score itself, it’s a graphic score and the, and it’s clearly a piece of work in itself and how, how fun for all this, but really, I think the interesting, it gets past when technology is new and it’s been around, it got boring so that people can sort of. Be less hypnotized by it and get back to their own thinking. W I mean, th th the 20th century was this incredible series of rolling frontiers and all the heroes are generation still connected to generation X, especially still connected to all these frontiers and expectations of progress. And so we think of all the great synths heroes or other pioneers, they did things first. They got to do it first, wow. To be in the right place at the right time. And everything’s a sort of. Pay limitation, but I’ve always said singing into your hand brushes. However, music artists starts it’s it’s joyous, but it’s when you get past that. They kind of trying to be clever or trying to copy others and find your own voice with your own imperfections. That’s when you get actually get interesting. And so now is it Galatarian all through the eighties, people were moaning about technology, killing music, the snotty little stickers in, you know, a lot of musicians, cars kind of windows. I remember those. And it sort of was the, you know, early iteration sounded a bit crap, but then it also, yeah, a whole new types of songwriting, whole new sounds. And now, you know, it’s down to the quality of your ideas, just like making films, just like all the other ways that digital work has has brought us all into the field for better or worse. There’s a ton of content, but it’s also never been richer for ideas. And for people getting involved. . Outro Matt: Fascinating stuff. I thank you very much for joining us this week. Absolute pleasure. That was it. It was good. And there’s, there’s definitely something there about looking at old technologies and current technologies and how they all interplay play with each other. What’s the week ahead looking like in a. Peach towers Timo: not getting enough of the things I planned to do dumb because I am now just drink of taking Easter weekend off and not staring at screens much. But Thursday night I do have episode 10 of the global girls music roadshow with my colleague. AYI young, who is the us young leader to the UN. Force of nature and sustainability championing as a music artist. He and I have been making this show now promoting his battery tour, which is amazing. It’s just been amazing fun in, BtoB just learning as we go out a live stream, a show and bring guests in with these amazing stories of how they’re having a go at change-making in lots of different ways. So that’s Thursday night and then I’m going to hang up my headphones, I think for the weekend and and go for a bike ride along the promenade in Bournemouth. Matt: Nice. Now we’ll put a link to where the various shows that you do on the WB 40 podcast website. So if you want to find out more about that, you can go to the website and you’d better find out the links. Christopher, have you got a exciting week ahead? Chris: Well, it’s exciting. And as much as Friday is a day off and which means that today’s Tuesday. So in the next two days, I have to crash through a whole bunch of things. So that I can relax on Friday rather than worry about the things that I didn’t do because even more so, because actually next week is a holiday for me. I I’d over a year ago, we’d, we’d booked to go somewhere this week. Now, of course we’re not going to be going anywhere, but I’m still taking the week off because damn it. It’s time to take a week off, you know, sometimes you just have to take some time. So I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m hoping I’ve become afraid to, like you said, early on that to the that my hopes are not high for a a sunny and a t-shirt to short sweet, but it’s it’s something that I can get on with things around the house. And I can just, just take a week off work. I think at some point we all need to take a week off Timo: work. Well, I think, I think take a week off, sit in his shorts on the floor in the kitchen and have a good weep. And, and let that be next Tuesday and then just see where that takes Chris: you. Yeah. I, I think, I mean, that’s not a bad idea. It’d be kind of, kind of boring to do the same thing that I’ve been doing for the last six months, but still wonderful. Matt: Well, Timo: the Bronx shouts and maybe move into, I mean, it’s high time you moved here, Chris: if that helps, you know, maybe, maybe, yeah. Timo: Whatever gets at your emotional truth, man. It’s all. It’s all fine. That’s Matt: good to hear. Well, I’m glad that you too will be you know, lounging around and, and, and caterwauling. They’ll be long weekend with the stuff we’ve got various things where we’re going to meet people. Good grief in places. And then I’m back to work next week. So hopefully be relatively quiet week to be able to get some strategic thinking data modeling and. Other various bits and bobs completed fast. No is nobody’s around to be able to distract me from the task at hand. So we’re going to be taking a week off next week because it is Easter Monday and we do as a. As a collective on this little show needs to take a little time to be able to recharge our batteries. I’ve managed to actually this evening to be able to put in a guest booking that takes us all the way now to June with a remarkable series of people to continue the incredibly high standard of guests that we’ve had so far this year, including a good self their team. Timo: So when we get pulled back there, I thought, Oh no, that sounds a lot. Their own Bobby, listen to this one. Matt: But when we come back, we are going to be joined by a class lb who is going to be talking about some of the work that she’s been doing at Kingston university around getting students to get experience of what it is to work in agencies, by setting up an agency that students work in which is a family. Fantastic idea. And she’s also been doing some really interesting work about regeneration of the retail parts of the center of Kingston upon Thames, which quite frankly, if you walk around it at the moment, it looks like everybody’s moved out because quite a lot of people have moved out. So anyway, that will be the first show back in the the second week of April. And then we’ll put a list of the upcoming guests on the podcast on the. Paul website. And don’t forget if you want to join us for the ongoing quite random conversations that take place on the WB 40 signal channel you can do. If you just send us a note on twitter@wbfortypodcast.com, then we can send you the magic link so you can join in the fun with that. Have a lovely Easter break and we will be back in April.

On this week’s show we are joined by Linda Chandler to talk about the rise of hyperlocal working. You can find her Digital High Street eBook series – first 2 books on Retail Experience and Mobility The Digital High Street eBook Series | TLA Education Working Group And last week’s – 4 Digital High Street sessions on Mobility, Smart Public Space, Community and Retail Experience The Digital High Street | RE:Connect March (unissu.com) This week’s automatically generated transcript: Matt: Hello and welcome to episode 187 of WB 40, the weekly podcast with me, Matt Ballantine, Chris Weston and Linda Chandler. Chris: Hello, and welcome to another episode of WB 40. And this week we are joined with, by Linda Chandler, who is going to talk to us about. Cities and how we work and all of that kind of thing. A bit of a continuation from well, many, many our podcasts recently. So before we get to Linda ma how, w what have you been up to. Matt: I have been getting vaccinated. That’s very exciting. I’m now one down, a slightly sore arm for about three days afterwards. Other than that, no side effects. I have been it’s yeah, it’s just I Monday. Okay. Today we’re recording is Monday by 11 folk. In the morning this morning I had to. Actually check my computer to work out what day of the week it was. I think this is basically turning into months a massive Sensory deprivation exercise and I’m losing. Other than that I continue to watch the mighty Watford climb up the, by the night, even climb out of the table. Now we’ve come fixed to almost the top of the table, which is very exciting. And I’m planning a few trips to. Places when we can travel again. So there’s a trip to Devin coming up with some friends and there’s a trip to the Lake district coming up at the end of June with some friends. And so, yeah, it’s been busy all week now, work, you know, Getting Olin. How about you roll? Chris: I can’t really remember what happened last week. It was so long ago, mainly because I had that extra hour. We had an IDC on unplug today, which means that they gave everybody a day off in a, in a very nice aspirin, Iceland to do something, do that. The nature of our work really means it doesn’t cost them to do that. And really just have to catch up with all the work the next week. But, you know, it’s nice. Everybody’s got the same day off and it’s a, it’s a, it’s a way to say, you know, everybody just, just take a break, which is, which is great. And but yeah, so that was been to three-day weekend and therefore I am. Not yeah, like the week before is completely it’s completely lost to me in my memory. And all I can think about is what’s what’s ahead of me rather than what’s behind, because it probably wasn’t very much different as you say to previous weeks, Matt: but yeah, that remember though that the point of this bit of the show is you talk about the week, just gone the bit at the end of the show is where we talk about the week ahead. Chris: Well, of course. Well, I’ve been talking about the weakest guy. I just can’t remember it, man. Matt: Okay. That’s all right. That’s fine. Good. Glad to hear. Chris: Yeah. Anyway, so, but we’ve got Linda with us. Hello, Linda? No, it was very nice to have you on this. Cause of course we were briefly colleagues, IDC and and so it’s, it’s very nice to see you back here. And so how’s your week been? Linda: It’s it’s been really good. Actually. It’s been some, some closing down of projects and some opening up projects as well. So it’s been, yeah, one of those transition weeks, I guess. So last week for me, we had a. Big event actually on Wednesday. So there was a reconnect global PropTech event that was happening online and I’m doing some work with tech, London advocates at the moment. We’ve been launching some eBooks around the digital high street. So we had the some channel sessions on the reconnect, which went very well. Chris: Thanks. Matt: So a tech, London advocates is an interesting thing. I think I’ve been it’s rough. Isn’t it? The guy who created it all, Russia is a city based. Advocacy for tech actually relevant in a world where everybody’s working remotely. They’re not the whole thing about, you know, having regional things is just it’s. It’s interesting. Isn’t it? That actually, well, can anybody join now? Is it, you know, breadth of these things? Linda: So I think tech, London advocates is a bit of a misnomer actually, because actually there are lots of other tech advocates group globally. So yeah, so, so it is really interesting in terms of how it has grown. So, so you’re right. There are all these enclaves of advocates that around a city. But we also have a technology advocates. We’re talking about setting up tech, whales advocates. So that there’s a lot of those around that there’s around globally, really just, just around the world. So yeah, so we all come together in a city, but actually we all collaborate online as well. Matt: Yeah. I just, I’d never made that connection before, but often the kind of the place is the thing that links people together. And actually that becomes. Well, I’m saying I’m not going to, by any stretch, say that we’re not going to think about things like London anymore in the future. Obviously the rest of the country would rather be, we did stop thinking about it. But there is that kind of idea that actually, maybe it needs to be ideas about how you gather people together without having the city as a I thing might be something that increasingly becomes important going forward. Maybe it’s not something we can explore in the later conversation. Chris: Yeah. So so I guess that we should crack on then, because it sounds like we’ve got to an interesting conversation ahead. We Matt: do, but before we get into the body of the show I had a little short conversation. When I say short conversation. I had a conversation with a friend of the show, Emma Berman earlier in the week, and I’ve managed to edit it down into a short conversation, which I love them. It’s a bit. And by gum it’s, it’s an interesting challenge to be able to get a little things. But anyway, she’s got a project that’s coming up in April, which is called love to play 2021. And it’s a an intergalactically scaled event picking up on what I was just mentioning a moment ago to encourage people to play more. So I spent a few minutes with Emma a few days ago to find out a bit more about it. , Chris: so Linda, thank you for coming to WB 40 because we’ve, we’ve had lots of conversations about what the world of work will be like after coronavirus or as, you know, as we, as we come back to, to after the pandemic. And I know, and you and I had a conversation a few weeks ago about this didn’t we, where we talked about what. Smart cities might look like what cities are going to be, because there’s lots of, there’s lots of I guess, death of the city stuff going on. There’s all of the folder roll between people like I know I saw a press release from, from Danska bank the other day, and they’re saying, you know, that’s it, we’re all working from home now. It’s never, it’s never going back. And then you sort of, you get, you see the likes of Goldman Sachs. Who are pretty unique at the moment on the other side of the fence saying this is just an aberration, Boris Johnson, I think saying this is the complete operation. We’ll all be back in the office so we can see what we can see what you’re doing. And when we talked to Anthony slumbers a few weeks ago that there was definitely a sense that yes, there’s going to be. Some of that will happen. And there will be organizations that really want to get back to the office. And there’ll be people as well that want to go back to an office environment. They don’t want to sit at home. They want to be in an office. They want to go and bribe by their somewhere wages from practice or whatever, whatever, whatever sort of his shop takes its place. And that will, that there’ll be an economy around now, but it will be different on the, you don’t have to have too much of a change for it to be some tipping points. So You’ve just been talking about, about the, about this, about what you did last week and some of the things that have been going on. What do you, what do you see Linda in your, in your world? What you, what do you think are, is the most likely thing that might occur as people start to return to offices? Do you see a big change or do you see us all rebounding back to exactly how we were. Linda: Great question. Thanks. Thanks for inviting me. I mean, it’s, it’s great to be with you both. And actually we felt we’ve crossed companies in a, in a number of ways. Haven’t we IDC with you, Chris, and with maths at Microsoft. And actually, you know, I guess we’re all veterans of the, of the tech world in many ways. And as you know, we. We’ve been working remotely for, you know, a couple of decades now, probably actually. So I think there’s a segment of the population that has always worked in this way that think remote working is part and parcel of what they do. They’ve carried their office around in their backpack packs for many years now. So there’s a segment of the population that thinks. Yep. This is, this is how we’ve worked for a long time, but I think what the pandemic has shown us is that there’s a whole, you, a bunch of people that just haven’t experienced that way of working. And to those of us in the tech industry, that’s. Been a bit of a revelation. I think actually in, in the way that people have suddenly discovered zoom and teams and they’ve discovered you know, what working from home, if you like. So it’s, it’s been a real wake up call on both sides, sides. I think both sides have now acknowledging that there are genuinely different ways. To work. And there are good things about remote working and there are good things about working in the office. I guess the whole idea of work locally is something that I’ve been involved in for probably the past decade or so. When I was at Microsoft, we did quite a lots of research. Very early on into something called the hybrid organization, which was really looking at how the future of technology, the future of demographics in the office and the future of work. The space itself starts to have an effect on how an organization moves. And, and as I said, that that was about 10 years or so ago that we started to have those conversations. And at the time when I worked at Microsoft, I wrote a paper called anywhere working cities, which was in the run-up to the London Olympics. I was working with TFL as my client at the time. And we were starting to think about how London was changing over the course of the Olympics. So of course, as we all know, London was. Almost a bit of a ghost town over the Olympics. It was, it was always too successful. The message of, of, you know, stay away release capacity on the transport system for all of those visitors into London. And, and so I was working for Microsoft at the time. We were equipping people with the, with Laptops and comms devices. So they could work away from the office and TFL at the time, we’re also looking at travel demand management. So they were trying to say, you know, how, how do we keep people out for, for six weeks over the summer? So it was a really interesting inflection point, I think, in, in London’s history. And what we try to capitalize on was the fact that it shouldn’t be for six weeks, one summer. Actually, if we do this, right, this could be quite a different way of actually using our infrastructure there isn’t bound to the nine to five and the peaks and the troughs. So anyway, working cities was a way of capturing the zeitgeists if you like at the time and saying, well, why don’t we work differently? You know, we’ve got these polar opposites. We’ve got working from home, we’ve got working in the office. But what about the spaces in between where we can be productive? What about the concept of third space? You know, many coffee shops of course, serve servers that space while we’re on the move, but there’s also co-working spaces. And again, at the time we were doing quite a lot of work about looking at the rise of co-working spaces in, in cities and how people were using those. So it’s really interesting to see that. All of that was around. And all of those conversations were around about a decade ago. We’ve been slowly building on those conversations and the different stakeholders involved and getting different people and actually different generations now into the conversation and suddenly, you know a year into the pandemic. We’ve got it. And where we really understand that there is another way of working. So I think in summary that there’s no going back, that the genius definitely out of the boss or, and I think it will start to settle in terms of this hybrid, working that everybody’s talking about. People are talking about that the two slash three day week. So a couple of days remote, a couple of days in the office. And I think now we’re planning on, you know, we’re planning for the return and how that might pan out. What are the systems in place to help us deal with that? Matt: I said, I’ve not made that link between the Actually, I think in many ways at the time, the sheer there was amongst businesses that they should be told to for six weeks, not everybody should come into the office every day. Yeah. And it was such a big statement and an enormous amount of organization and huge amounts of planning. And it was being done at the height of the holiday season anyway. So, you know, it would have been lower footfall or whatever, going into cities into London at that point. Anyway, but the thing actually thinking back on it if he’d done it in 2001, 2002, the difference between the technology then and now was stark. Slightly whilst we’ve definitely evolved more around cloud-based. Core office systems. Cause back in 2012 I think we were S we were just asked to be posse rowboat, and we were just getting into office three 65, but it was a bit tardy. Google was kind of, Oh, it was usable because I did a migration of it in 2010, but it was rough around the edges, but broadband was there and coffee shops were by fied. And, and so actually the difference in 10 years, Isn’t that great technologically. And it’s where we were there. Yeah, it seems like a different, different era. Linda: It does. And I think it’s a lot to do with adoption actually. And it’s not necessarily just having the technology and the comms. It’s actually about having the societal structures and acceptance of that. If you kind of remember back to the Olympics you know, people were, were saying about, you know, working remotely from home and there was you know, a bit of a backlash against it, or, you know, you’re going to watch daytime TV, or you’re not going to do any work. And, and so I think, yeah, the, the working from home, yeah. It kind of air quotes if you like. And, and I think what the, what we’ve seen in the past year is that we can be productive from home. We’re not swinging the lad. And so there is that societal acceptance. And so, so I think there are almost these layers that you need for something to become really widespread in society. I mean, I always term it as you need kind of a vision. You need a vision to hang on to. So again, around London, 2012, we had the Olympics and we need to free up space on the transport infrastructure. You need a variety of technologies and spaces that support remote working, but then you need societal acceptance of that. And so if you fast forward now to what we’ve just experienced, you’ve got a common goal. If you like, we need to work from home. Because of the pandemic, you’ve got much more prevalence of the communications. I think certainly the the telecoms providers have really stepped up in the past year or so. I think, you know, we’ve all been quite impressed with that. So there’s been, you know, largely widespread communications. We’ve had the technology. We’ve had PCs, it’s not been equally distributed. And that’s starting to become acknowledged. And these gaps in society are starting to be noticed. But again, I think what we’ve had in space is this societal acceptance of, of, we ha we have to be productive. We have to work like this and we can, we can actually do this. So there’s that belief that strongly coming through. And I think so. Yeah. You know, going back now to the return, to the office where we’ve all had quite a different experience, I think is going to be fascinating in terms of how that pans out. Chris: Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, I remember at that time I was working in London quite a lot, and I know I was actually going in strangely enough, as a lot of people were staying out, we’ve got a particular project on and and therefore I think there was there wasn’t a compulsion. Then there’s there is now, and also it wasn’t just London for a few weeks that, that as you say, that kind of a societal acceptance, it requires a wider exposure to the whole thing. And just, there’s a lot of people going in and out of London, but that it’s not everybody, you know, it’s not that universal experience. So I think that’s definitely the case. It didn’t have an end date for this whole thing and yeah. So therefore it wasn’t just, okay. We’ll stay at the office for a few weeks and we’ll see out. We’ll see how it goes. I think also technologically, if I think to back then we would have meetings and we, you know, we’d, we’d have people all around the country working on this project and not all of them are in the office all the time. And if we ever got together, Remotely. It was on a teleconference, which, you know, we all know how terrible the telephone conferences with the spider phone in the middle of the table. Really, really horrible. And the poly COVID kit was as traditionally expected. It was in the corner gathering dust and nobody would ever use it because it would be an awful nightmare to do any kind of video conferencing. So. I remember just a couple of years later working with a, an ad source development company. And they were we’re a source or a software company that had, that had outsourced development elsewhere. And they were basically saying to me, we couldn’t have done this, but if before decent video conferencing just a couple of years ago, you know, think back to them until you can do this kind of thing, where you can look at each other and you can discuss things and you can have a, have a more animated and, and, and meaningful conversation. That that option to offshore just, it was just far less, far less convenient. So I do think that switch in terms of half decent video conferencing. There’s a big difference between 2016 and now Linda: absolutely. But then I think you’ve also got to remember that when did we learn to switch our cameras on in the it world? You know, we never used to put the cameras on. So we, we, we did we through the voice conference thing. And yeah, you, you you’d be on a teams call but, but nobody would ever switch their cameras on. And it’s only since the pandemic that that’s now becoming a norm. And actually, I think we would, we would think it’s strange now, if somebody is not showing their camera and we, we understand the whole zoom fatigue being in front of you know, a camera all day and, and there, there are norms developing over when we, when we, we like to be on camera on when we decide to turn it off, but it is conscious decision now, whereas before I think everybody was I don’t know, hiding behind the technology, I guess. Matt: With the talk about the third place, places like coffee shops or I mean, heaven forbid we work when she has it. That’s, that’s a whole, that’s a podcast in its own. Right. But the, the relationships between those and work spaces and home. And homes. It does strike me that we, we don’t really think about that as some sort of. Holistic thing in any way. Yeah, they’re very much it’s first, second and third places that there isn’t a strategy around it. And I guess it’s interesting for me, particularly given my, my current work, looking at housing and the extent to which, as we now start to plan for homes that would be built over the next 10 years or so, the extent to which. The needs of people working from home needs to be built into the houses that we’re building and whether that’s you know, social rent housing, or whether that shared ownership of housing or private market housing. The idea of a studio flat now is a very different proposition. Now going forward than a studio flat in London was even 18 months ago. Do you, are you sensing that we are starting to think about this as more than just individual separate sections of. Of the world of property that is commercial or residential, or Linda: I’d like to think that we were in reality. I don’t think we are. And you mentioned the word strategy, and I think that sports what’s missing here As I said, we were quite familiar now with this polar working in the office, working from home. And in fact, a lot of the conversation about remote working assumes working from home. So I think we’re not thinking very clearly about alternative places to work than a near to home, but not at home. And I think it’s that strategy that really needs to be fleshed out. So I live in St. Alban’s. So commuter town to London. And I, if you walked down a high street on a pre-print pandemic yeah. You would have seen people working all across our towns. So they’re there in coffee shops. They would have been, you know, have laptops out that they’d be working. Yeah. But there was really no place for them to go. That was, was conducive to working. I wouldn’t say, you know, coffee shops are good for some things and not good for others. And about, Oh, about four or five, five years ago, a group of people got together in some Orbens and they would call it a Silicon Abby, actually. So a local entrepreneur said, you know, we’ve got kind of Google setting up base and King’s cross what, what, what the sun ovens have to attract, you know, people from Google to live here, if you like, is there a community? Yeah. All of entrepreneurs and tech designers you know, for them to latch onto. So Silicon Abbey was formed. And a few of us got together. And the first thing we said was. Where, where do we all meet one another? When we work from home, wouldn’t it be nice to bump into somebody? And and so we, we actually trialed a coworking space. This, this was actually when I, I decamped Singapore for a couple of years. So with Microsoft, and so but I was watching things from a, so I, I noticed this was happening locally and caught the tail end of it. When I came back to the UK in 2017. And so there was a, a genuine kind of grassroots popup co-working space just to see what it would be like for the community. And it, it was really interesting. You can’t all kinds of people, you know, coming to this space. And, and so I think you mentioned we work and I think we work has been I mean, it’s, it’s been obviously a phenomenon in the real estate industry and I think it’s been both, both good and bad because I think the, the good part of it is actually popularizing. The whole co-working space and actually, you know, making it more mainstream, but it’s only a particular type of coworking. I think it, it, it doesn’t actually show the breadth of coworking and the different spaces and the different communities that you can actually have around those spaces. It’s one particular brand and style. I think there’s an enormous number. Of the different types of working. And, and I think the way that work is evolving is that we it’s evolving so quickly. We don’t even have the language around coworking and on what it means. So it’s a co-work or whether we have casual coworking or subscription coworking, I think we’re just evolving now. This conversation. So in terms of you know, working locally, I always thought in some ovens that they were there, there was a lack of somewhere that I could go to that I genuinely thought was a substitute for a London office. And I’ve got coworking spaces that I would go to in London at the IAT or the RSA. But I felt that there was nothing locally where I could do that. And actually that there has been that gap filled somewhat in the past couple of years. And and in fact, I took up a subscription in a local co-working space called bubble hub, which gives me exactly that. So I work from there one day a week. And it’s great. It’s a 10 minute walk from my house. It’s a community of people and you actually get to have that human interaction, which is you know, much needed. I think. I think in terms of getting us out of our homes. So, so when I think about locality working, that was the kind of thing that I had in mind, you know, the, that we wouldn’t necessarily have to work at home because a lot of people haven’t got that space or, or the luxury of lots of rooms in their house, but we would work near to home. And so the rise of coworking on the high street, the actually, yeah, Makes you come out of your house? I behave very differently. The day I go to bubble hub, I always go to bubble hub. I always buy my lunch in town. So you’ve got that daytime economy that’s naturally occurring when people are out and about in the town center. You can also do, you know, knock some of your errands off the list as well. And you, you can see people. So I think that there’s a style of working that’s about being the hub of where things are in your community. Really. Participating and getting to know local people. When we, when we started to engage as, as part of Silicon happy, I was amazed at how many people there were that were professionally involved in cities that live in this and opens and I didn’t know them. And so I think it’s great when you start to really you know, engage with people in the local community because you, you just don’t know who lives around the corner or next door sometimes. Matt: I think it’s interesting that maybe some of the reticence that we saw back in 2011, 2012 from organizations. Not wanting people to work effectively from home back then. I wonder whether they will also be reticence to the idea of people working in shared areas so they can cope. Corporates tend to still, I think, have a bias towards the idea of secrecy. Th that they are private unless they decide to disclose something. And actually one of the biggest learnings for me of the whole, of the digital transformation of the last 25 years, it’s the old Don task or thing about how in, in the age of the internet, every, everybody is naked. You, you can’t. Managed to maintain an air of secrecy in the way that you used to, unless you’re, you know, my six or something, and you need to shift to the idea of everything is open, unless you decide to make it private, which is a big mental shift. Maybe one of the ways in which that will manifest will be, as Asians will be resistant to the idea of their staff working in the same place as other people. They find if there are a home and they’re in private, they’re fine. If they’re in the office is in private, but sitting next to somebody who might be from a competitor or from a, that might be a block organization each to this sort of thing happening. Linda: Potentially. Yeah, I think with some organizations, but then again, it’s about getting the right kind of space. So if you’ve got a coworking space that has the right kind of areas that support, you know, foam booths, when you can go to make a private call and when you’re in the open area, You know, perhaps you were just doing work, work at your desk, you know, you’ve got your headphones on. You’re not particularly engaging in what should be private conversations. So, so I think it comes down to having the right space that facilitates that. And also. Trust. I think, you know, we have to be trusted to do the right things. I’m sure we’ve all over her. Plenty of conversations of people being interviewed on trains and all kinds of things like that. So, so I think it is about trusting people. I also think actually one of the major barriers is about who pays. Actually because, you know, I guess the way I’ve justified it to myself in terms of my you know, one day a week in the, in a shared space is, is that I would have spent that money on a train ticket to London. So why not? Spend it in, you know, spend it locally and actually go to an area that I think benefits my productivity. And so that’s my personal choice. I think if people are starting to save money on the train fare, going into the office and genuine, the organizations are starting to save on real estate footprint. I think the question of who pays actually should become much more of an open discussion, you know? So, so should employees have a stipend. To you know, to, to work where they want to work at many years ago, of course we had the bring your own device fascination with companies and on whether you should have stipends or to bring your own devices to that, to the workplace. I think maybe the concept of bring your own office might start to become a reality in terms of, you know, choosing to go to the, the, the central office when you need to. Yeah. But also having that flexibility to choose where you want to spend the extra time and actually spend money in the local economy. You know, th there is effectively a stipend from your employer. So, so I think it’s more about the who pays question, which I’m, I’m only just seeing the, the organizations. Really realizing that that might be a barrier. Chris: Yeah. That’s that occurred to me while you were talking a moment ago. I was starting to think to myself. What makes these working spaces, even, even those that are, you know, as humble as you, like, what makes them go and concerns, because it does require somebody as you, as you say, to part with the harder and, and, and if the alternative is to work at home and save that money or to work in a coworking space. It’s a tough decision, right? Especially if you’re, maybe you’re paying 10 pounds a day or something like that, that’s a lot of money in a month. So you’ve got to be you’ve got to think there’s a, there’s that amount of value in it. And for an organization, maybe an enlightened viewpoint would be actually, I want my, I don’t want my people sitting at home. I do want them working with people. I want them to networking. I want them getting ideas and being, being able to have that, that office. Experience and because it’s better for them, it’s better for them. And it’s better for us because we get more productive and, and better informed people. Whereas if they just think actually that we’re going to save all this money, we’ll keep all that. Thank you very much. And. Yeah, I just go and work where I was brought best for you then maybe will, there’s not the, maybe there’s not the business to keep these things going as, you know, as genuinely, unless that, unless they are subsidized in other ways, they have to see how they, how they Matt: continue. Interesting as well though. I think possibly the most developed Program that is associated with this stuff is a couple of years ago. Now we talked to Tracy Keogh from grow remote in Ireland. And I think that the strengths that grow remote has had has been their ultimate drive is to sustain rural. Communities, it’s not to be able to be able to allow large corporates to have lower real estate costs. It’s about being able to make sure that outages across the, the furthest outreaches of Ireland are able to sustain themselves by having modern employment. And that’s the thing I think there that that’s the vision. That’s the strategy that the home will grow Linda: remote day. Yeah, absolutely. I’m doing some work in Wales at the moment around the concept of smart towns and the Welsh government. Very interesting because they they’re really starting again to get this idea of the disparate, the dispersal of working and actually what that can do to the, the local economies. So the Welsh government have actually come out saying that they they’d like 30% of. People to, to work locally on work remotely. And again, what they’re seeing is that, you know, you, you can do a global job and you can live in Wales and you can live perhaps in a remote part of Wales. And if you go to a local co-working space, You can engage with a local economy. So they, they’re doing a lot of strategic work about mapping out where those spaces are, where people want to work and actually asking them where they want to work and then making a very conscious effort. The, the, the right conditions are in place for that to be successful. So I think you’re right. So, so again, it comes down to, you know, what’s the strategy, what’s the big idea. And what’s the push behind this. I think also when, when I started to think about the work local agenda, I was thinking about it from the commuter and the working near to home aspect of it. But we’ve been challenged recently to think about that from more of a city perspective. So. What happens to these cities when people are actually only going in two or three days a week, and what happens to the vibrancy of those cities and so that, you know, the challenge the other way round. And actually, if you think about it, The city has got to really be quite responsive to the needs of, of that commuter making the visits. So, so I, I choose to go into London for a business meeting. But actually I’ve got a number of choices of how I spend my day. So, so we’re doing, do I just go in for that meeting and come back again? Do I go in, do I meet other people? Where do I go? You know, who facilitates that interaction for me? So, so I think the city is going to be quite challenged. And how do you make that the best experience and how do you make people really productive? Because they’ve chosen to spend that time commuting and to go to your city. So I think that’s the next big challenge that cities have goals in terms of enticing people to go and actually keeping them productive and making that as frictionless as possible. Matt: It’s also maybe thinking about the different elements, a short thing I wrote last week out of the back of some conversations I had with a few of the CIO is actually about how the, the constructs that we’ve had offices, they’re essentially a 19th century invention. The management styles that are still used in most organizations are 20th century inventions. And actually you’ve gone backwards in many cases, as we’ve seen increasingly kind of Taylorist approaches to management often because of information technology enabling closer control over people in what, where more autonomous white collar jobs and the technology is 21st century. With the exception of ERP systems, which is obviously fairly firmly entrenched in the 20th century, but there’s a mismatch there. There’s this massive misalignment. The office is if you look at pictures of offices from the late Victorian era, I don’t re I mean, the clouds are a bit old and there’s no computers, but other than that, they don’t look that much different to many offices today. Th the, the point about management style, which was still the overseeing within the space, which even for global organizations, You know, lots of global organizations have struggled to be able to shake off the the, the hierarchy and the control and the idea of, you know, not giving too much autonomy because you don’t want, they’ll get up to the McGregor stuff around theory X and theory wise manner. And I, it does strike me when people say about, you know, we need to go back to the office. He said, well, w w which. Bit of that, is it, is it, is it 19th century and the styles you’re missing or is it 20th century nostalgia you’re missing or, or, or what, and I dunno, I guess that, you know, that that little piece I wrote last week was partly about being able to say, actually stopped thinking about it is going back. How do we move this stuff forward? What do we need to put in play to be able to come up with better ways of working that don’t constrain ourselves with habits that we’ve had for. Couple of hundred years, I guess. Linda: Yeah, you’re right. I mean, it’s all about the organizational change really. And that’s, that’s, what’s lacking and we’re, we’re catching up with what the technology can do for us, I think. And of course, you know, there’s more to come of that. And and so, so you never quite get it in the sink because once we’ve caught up the technology about what we can do is actually moved on again. So we’re always in this, in this catch out mode, I think. Matt: Fascinating stuff. So that brings us to the end of yet another show. Linda, thank you very much for being with us this week. Fascinating conversation. What, what is the seven days ahead of this look like for you? Linda: So for me I’m doing some more work on the a high street e-book so we had the launch of two of the books last week, and now it’s my turn. So I’m curating smart public spaces. So we’re having yeah, th th the last call for contributions and getting that ready for launching in April. So I’m going to be focused on that last week and Tomorrow, I’ve got a UK property PropTech association round table that I’m chairing. So lots of talk about data-driven design in the real estate industry. Matt: Fabulous. And Chris, if you remember, as you got the week ahead, as opposed to the week behind, well, Chris: I think I definitely have some things to do this week. It’s it’s, I’ve got a conference we’re doing in the Adriatic, so I’m the I’m presenting out. So I’m just getting ready for that to I’m making sure that I know what I’m talking about, or at least can look like I know what I’m talking about. And I’ve got, yeah, I’ve got actually quite a lot going on this week. Different, different meetings here, there, and everywhere. All of course here, but all but everybody else is there and everywhere. And, and that’s pretty much it. I, I’ve not got any vaccinations to look forward to like, like the older generation. I’m still too young. Matt: Yeah, indeed. I love the idea of you having a conference in the Adriatic. So I imagined you were in this sort of small yellow submarine floating somewhere between Italy and maybe Serbia occasionally bringing Periscope up and, and then realizing it you’ve lost wifi connection yet again, that’s Chris: essentially it that’s that’s, you know, you hit the nail on the head. That’s exactly what Matt: happened. Excellent. That’s good. Well, I, I will be w we do some really interesting stuff. We’ve been doing the single purpose architecture Mike, after the last few months we’ve been doing lots of really in-depth interviews with customers to be able to understand their stories, what their experience of being one of our customers has been. It’s been very eye opening. There’s been some good stuff. There’s been some Frankly, terrible stuff. That’s coming out of it as well, but as a way, spare to start to better illustrate what we need to do next, how many changed? So we’ve got the conclusions of some of that. There’s a bit of recruitment going on. There’s more procurement. It’s just like endless. Stuff, which is in a it’s fine. So that will keep us going on next week’s show. We are going to be joined by Timo peach, who is a musician and artist and a creative director. And it’s something I’ve been wanting to explore for a while, which is as some of you may know, I like music and music creation tools, software, and one of the things that I’ve Wondered for some time is why music software works together seamlessly without seemingly any effort whatsoever in a way that most business software precisely doesn’t. And so we’re going to get Timo one. I’m going to talk a bit about what would the world be like if printers used middy? So I’m really looking forward to that and that’ll be the last show before Easter, when we will go off and stuff, our faces with chocolate. So There we go. So one more show before the Easter break, Timo peach next week, Linda. Thank you again, Ben. Actually delight and we will see next week recording. Linda: Thank you for listening to WB 40. You can find us on the internet at wb40podcast.com on Twitter @WB40podcast and on all good podcasting platforms.

On this week’s show we talk to Marcus John Henry Brown about his latest work Hanging in There. You can also find his previous work on his YouTube Channel here: https://www.youtube.com/c/MarcusJohnHenryBrown/videos This week’s automatically generated transcript… Intro Matt: Well welcome once again to WB 40 and you join us in the bubble, that is the show. And another week in this strange old time has passed us by Chris. Well, it’s Chris: been another week, isn’t it it’s been a lot going on in, in inside work and outside work too much of it probably. But it’s been, yeah, I guess I am in that stage now where. Hey, this happens every March where I am, I’m desperate for the sun to come out and sort of go outside and, and warm my bones outside, where it remains relentless and cold and miserable. So I’ve been a bit grumpy about that. But I, you know, life goes on and also I had some good news and as much my brother tells me that he’s going to be a father for the very first time, which means that that’s it means that I’ve got some more inkling to do And his his partner is is Zoe who I was on the podcast for you again a couple of years ago, if you, if you remember back that far. So it was I climate. So we are that that’s going to be extremely exciting later this year. So, you know, there’s lots of things to be positive about. Matt: Excellent. Yeah, that was the opportunity you had to be able to sit in John Humphrey’s chair. I remember it. Well, I remember correctly, very exciting. And that was and joining us once again on the show direct from Munich in Germany. Marcus, how are you? Marcus: Ah, good evening. Good afternoon. Good morning to you all wherever you are in the world. I am. Hanging in there, ladies and gentlemen, I’m hanging in there. It’s been a difficult time, lots to get upset about, but I’m delighted to be back on the podcast. Matt: It’s very good to be able to see you again and hanging in there as a thing, we will come to a little later in the show cause that’s the title of your latest piece which actually was released today. The day we recording Monday the 15th of the year. Marcus: That’s not true. That’s not, that’s not true. It was released in March the 11th. Matt: Ugh. Well, okay. You tweeted about it this morning. No, Marcus: I tweeted about it last week, but you never paid damn piece of attention to watch all this, but it doesn’t matter. We’re not, but please don’t edit this out. It just shows what a competent. And Chris: it’s all going very well. Marcus: I was two, Y’s all going very, very well, but I’m delighted to be here. And hello everybody. Chris: And we are delighted to have you Marcus. It is a it’s great. And there’s, which is your very presence. Is it, is it, I don’t know whether Matt seems to be discombobulated by the whole thing. It’s fantastic. So I put much your week. How’s it been? Matt: It’s just, you know, another one of those chugging away had a few major revelations. I caught up with the head of technology at Kingston council. We had a great walk in person cause he is just on the other side of the river from here. So we were able to catch up and also be in the same physical presence, socially distances. We walked one side of the tent. Did you Chris: have to share it across the teams with each other? Is Matt: that , that’s probably better. Ridiculous. Keeping an entire river between people is probably a little extreme. And apart from that, I’ve got my my first COVID vaccination booked in for a little later this week, which is good. And I am about to embark on a whole series of half-day training programs at work, which is going to be. Interesting as to what it’s all about, to be honest, there’s some stuff around better collaboration across organizational silos and that’s going to be a day of the week ahead. So that’s all good stuff to look for. Yeah. You know, chucking away. All good. We just wait for basically a bit more. Locked down stuff to release, hopefully in some point in the near future this week we are going to be talking to Mark as Mark has been doing lots of work around do people understand how to deliver more compelling video on line when we’re working in a virtual environment for events and such like, so we’re going to talk a bit about that on the show this week. So let’s crack on. Main Section Matt: So over the course of this interminable series of lockdowns Marcus, you’ve been busily producing some amazing bits of video content, some videos that helps be able to explore ideas about how to get better at making compelling content during a time where we’re not meeting in person. You’ve put out a new short piece today called hanging in there. And tell us a bit about that. Marcus: Yeah, well, I was trying to ask answer the the very, very difficult question that everybody seems to be asking at the beginning, beginning of every zoom or video call, which is hi. And it, it’s a question which is very, very difficult to answer right now because when the kind of not great being British you kind of eat you don’t Germans. When, when you ask a German, how are you? And they’re not very well done. I say, well, not very well, it’s quite jarring because you don’t want to hear that. Nobody wants to hear that. I know very well. And it’s one of the wonderful, wonderful things about the pandemic as it is. So it’s a gloriously democratic it’s hitting us all hard. So everybody is not doing great. It doesn’t matter if you have, you know, kids at school. It doesn’t matter if you kids grown up like mine doesn’t matter if you don’t have kids at all. If you’re single alone in a one room flat center of Munich, or if you have a Villa, although if you have a Villa is property, there might be a little bit better than, you know, the one bedroom flat things, but we’re all in this pandemic and doing, going through various levels of. Difficult nurse. So I wanted to run thing about how I was feeling, how I am, how to answer the question, Marcus, how are you? But it would in a way, which was kind of relevant to the context of where we all are. I’ve been stumbling on struggling for the last 12. Months to find a way of creating a performance or a piece or a piece of video, which wasn’t necessarily a how to do a online performance or online presentation, but to do a proper piece, which was four hour, had a beginning, a middle and an end and touch people’s hearts and made them think about where we all were. And I’d be hopeful and be emotional and really, really struggling with it. Partly because I was just in the same struggle that we all are. I think we all have to admit that things take much more time. Now we’re much more sluggish were timed, notionally exhausted by it, all it all. I think that’s a really good way of describing it all is. The it all. And then I stumbled on I think Julia Hoppesborne, who was your guest? A couple of weeks ago? Posted a or tweeted an article for Nerf financial times, which outlined Stanford university study about zoom fatigue. Fascinating study. It’s not really a study cause, and they say that in the study that it’s not really a study, it’s just a series of questions and some findings and more, but could somebody do a proper study on this? Cause it’s really interesting, but a lot of the stuff that was in there was basically a toolkit for doing better online presentations. On one side and on the other side kind of like the kick up the ass that I needed to right. Hanging in there, hanging in there is, is kind of I know it’s a it’s basically a zoom. I’m having a zoom call with myself and I’m asking myself, I am. And it’s quite raw. And it seems to have touched people and that really, really pleased me. So, yeah. So that’s, that’s hanging in those it’s a four and a half minute video about how we are one year into a pandemic. Matt: And I thought it was beautiful. I thought there was a, a level of emotion in it. And especially when you’re talking about seeing your kids and that sense of disconnection from others, it was a it’s. Yeah, really, really? Yeah. Arching I think is the right word for it. Marcus: That really, really makes me happy big, cause those are the bits that really really mean something. To me there’s a bit of a, a kind of a departure from the stuff that I’ve been doing before. So a lot of the work that I’ve been done before, stuff like the passing, which I think we talked about in the last podcast here That’s very detached. It’s very cold. And I’m kind of looking at a situation and trying to describe it in a, in a very detached narrative dystopian kind of fictional way. This one is much, much more personal. And there there are bits in there which are real and raw, and there were other bits in there which are kind of more Scripted. So the bit it’s about yeah, but that, that, that describing a feeling that I get when I talk to people. So on this call right now, while your listeners don’t know is the we are actually having a video call when I’m looking at Chris and Matt. And there’s a part in hanging in there where I talk about looking at them and re really looking at people on the call and re are they really you guys rarely hanging in there are your fing you know, are your knuckles, why is your grip still tight or are your fingers or your fingertips lippy too? So it was kind of like it’s a way of describing a particular feeling, but then there were other real, proper bits and like not seeing the kids the fact that they’re not kids anymore, they’re grown women, that realization that I live in a course of a year. And you can have, you can go from having free daughters to free grown women. In your life. The, my youngest will be turned 21 this year, and I’ve only seen her, I don’t know, maybe two or three times in the last 12 months. And I haven’t seen the middle one since Christmas of 2019. So there’s a lot of stuff in there. Cause you know, it describes you know, when you have kids and they grow up and they start have a diary. That doesn’t fit in that diary. And then when a pandemic comes along, that kind of makes the diary entries possible, the possibilities to fit into that diary, even, even slimmer. So so it makes me, it really means something that you say that map because it, there is a very, very personal. Pace and it feels like it it’s kind of sent me down a different path for you know, the performances that I will probably be doing in the future. The Le less kind of story universe as a more kind of personal. Matt: It’s interesting because the, the work that I know you for has been. You playing characters and Ashley to the move to be able to use some of the techniques that you’ve been talking about in the last year about how to be able to produce video in a way that people want to watch it and be able to consume. And I think there’s a bit of a character around that. That’s that’s marvelous. Brown the the presentation training person, as opposed to necessarily the Marcus that is in that video that you put out today. Marcus: Yeah. I mean, there were a bits of there were bits of that in there. One of the things I do when I’m, when I’m training people, eh, is to talk about giving 20% more of yourself than you’re prepared to give. It’s a  the camera is in one of the, you know, one of the, how to videos that I released last year that went down very well. That the camera sucks energy out of you is that there’s a completely different energy that you need to bring for this black dot that we’ve been staring into for the last 12 months. Audio, the microphone is also something that you, you need to use. You need to know how to work with and hanging in there as is a, is an exercise in both of those two things. So you have, for those of you who haven’t seen it my th the, the text is read by me. It’s a voice over. But what you see is me listening to myself saying the voiceover. So I’m having to give the 20% version visual version of me without saying the words. So it’s, again, it’s just another, in a way it’s an, an performative experiment for me. It’s something that I’ve been considering for a while, but could never, and could never find the entry point for it. But the, the zoom study from Stanford university was that entry point. The idea of gazing that the, the all day mirror the cognitive overload that you have with The kind of a streaming environment. So if you run kind of, if you run a live stream or if you do a podcast, it’s not just you talking, you have buttons to press. You have things to consider dear listener. We started this podcast three times, I think, because something didn’t work or you know, a file wasn’t rendered properly. So we had to start again and that’s and we’ve all had that. We’ve all been in the situation where we’ve been in a call where something’s not being recorded. You couldn’t hear the, you couldn’t hear the sound. The video was playing. But it wasn’t rendering properly. It was dropping frames and all of these things. These are things that we didn’t up until March the 11th. Last year we did that. It wasn’t part of our lives. It wasn’t part of the problem. We would go, we w we would go to a conference room and then we would and then fumble around with cables and things, but it wasn’t, it wasn’t a major cognitive problem, but now it’s part of everything as part of the entire day. Can you hear me? Am I muted? Can you see the slides? It’s kind of all of these things. Kind of pile on and, and, and lead to this cognitive overload. And then you have which is particularly interesting. For me as a performer who normally deals with a live audience, you have what Stanford describe as an audience of listeners, which are also speakers. So we’re in an environment now where we’re all living, kick each other, we’re staring each other and you’re not the audience. You’re also the participant and it’s very, very weird and super, super stressful. And so that was some of the, a lot of the thinking that went into hanging in there, but it’s also flavored. The speaker training or what I now call, I used to call it tiny talks, but I now call it speaker, read the format, which is how do you present? How do you keep an audience engaged with a presentation in a virtual or hybrid or blended environment? So it’s been a, it’s been a hell of a year. And for me, in terms of learning how to, to deal with this is take it literally took me 300 and just realize it. Now it literally took me 365 days to work out how to do performance online. Interesting. I, you know what, that’s the first time I’ve, I’ve heard that. Phenomenon called out. And I’m thinking that psychologically the way we act in meetings. So the way we would act, if we all sat down to do a meeting in a room, From my perspective, that’d be, there’d be two of the people in the room. Right. And that’s that, that’s the people I’m meeting with when you’re on a zoom call or a team’s call or whatever it might be. And just like this that we have now, we’re all there. I can see myself looking splendid and I can see YouTube looking, you know? Okay. So I, but I can see the meeting happened. It was like that it’s a body experience. You and your there’s a potential for. You to change the way you behave, partly because you can see yourself and you can’t see yourself when you’re, slobbing around in a meeting in a, in a, in a room. So whether that’s psychologically more draining or whether it gives you, I might, maybe it’s a Matt: phone call. I Marcus: don’t know. According to according to the Stanford study is it’s a massive factor towards soon fatigue, which is quickly becoming a thing. In very much the same way that imposter syndrome, Matthew became the thing shortly after you stood on the stage and said, Oh, this is the thing. The study points out some other work which has been done around where you look when you’re in a physical room, crass. So if you’re in a meeting, let’s say you’re, you’re in a, kind of like a round table pitch environment. There are 10 people in the room. Three as ice people might actually be looking at the person who’s speaking, but in the rest of it is kind of like looking out, looking around, listening, but looking around that the out the window, the glass, maybe it’s somebody else. Who’s not speaking. So the focus is always somewhere else in a zoom or a video conference scenario where all of the cameras are on and everybody can see everybody. Everybody is staring at everybody. And they’re staring, and this is the really, really, truly interesting thing about this study because we’re so close to each other because of the distance of the camera, where it’s staring into people’s eyes at a distance, which is normally very intimate, it’s like B and they explain it as being trapped in a, in a Lyft and you’re staring into everybody’s eyes. So if you’re in the left, can remember when we used to be in lifts with people. So you’re in a left, the doors would close, and then you do the thing where you’d look at the buttons or look at your feet or look at, or just turn around. And you do, you never look at the other people or it’s like that, or being on the London underground, you always look in between the spaces between people. You would never look into people’s eyes. But in this scenario in a video conference scenario, we’re always looking into people’s eyes at a distance, which is very, very intimate, and that is incredibly distressing Matt: and we’re seeing more and more people turning, I think T turning camera off now. And starting to be able to disengage, but then, then there’s that sense of, they’re not there. They’re not participating. Marcus: Yeah. You kind of, I’ve been in meetings where I’ve actually said Albert, can you turn the camera on? Because it feels like he’s not engaging with what’s going on. Yeah. So you have that, there are other lover things as well. So you have the you have, there’s a lack of cues. So in a physical space, you take more kind of signals. So you would, I don’t know, you would a register a nod, a wink, something that’s going on in the room, but you can’t. Get that in, in a, in a zoom environment, you exaggerate, according to the study, if somebody says something, you agree with you not more vigorously so that they can see in the tiny boxes that you agree with, what they’re saying. I can Darling. If you listen to this, I’m really, really sorry, but it’s true. My wife does this and according to how I do it to East speak 15% louder when you’re on a call, I think that has a lot to do with the fact that you can’t monitor it Mo normally monitor in in, in with your headphones. So I can see that Matthew and myself, maybe Chris, maybe you’re monitoring your own audio that helps. So you can hear yourself. So you can, you can, you know, when you’re whispering and you can use your voice properly. But for most people they’re just using normal headphones and they just shouting so that they can hear themselves, but also make sure that the other people can hear them. It’s very, very similar to. when, when when your grand mum used or her granddad used to telephone from the first time. So to heat, they shouted so that they could say for the other person at the other end, couldn’t hear them. So there’s all that going going on now. That’s really, really, it’s. It’s very interesting for I know you have corporate people. Corporate people are listen to this. So it’s very interesting from a corporate perspective that, and purely with people who not necessarily performing, not nurses, necessarily doing presentations you know, you ha th th this is HR needs to be aware of this. This is a thing that HR needs to be aware of because there’s a huge amount of emotional stress and pressure, which we’re putting on. Are people at home, but in terms of if you’re, you know, if you’re one of those people who have keynote speaker in your LinkedIn description, please take it out. But if you do have that in there, then these are things that you need to be aware of because they are hugely important for You know, nailing a presentation that will engage an audience, which is fundamentally knackered. Dan, we are knackered from zoom to video conferences. We are exhausted from paying attention hybrid virtual conferences where we need. Something else. And that’s why I’ve been fiddling around with my, this now become a manifesto, but it is kind of, it’s just, it’s a growing list of observations and things. I think that people should be doing to make their online presentations, you know, much more interesting. And right at the heart of that, the idea, the very central idea is I, I nicked it from Amazon. But it’s, instead of customer obsession, it’s audience obsession, and to be audience obsessed, you have to kind of like really get under and get into the nitty-gritty of zoom fatigue. Matt: And so one of the things within that is short no more than five minutes. One of the things within that is prerecord. Another thing in that is to, to pre-record rather than to do things live cutting through, or is it about. What is it? I mean, there weren’t that many good presenters before all this pandemic thing happened. Let’s be blunt. And then, but too many too long. Marcus: Well, I made a career out of everybody else being shit. Matt: He’ll be both. It conferences. No, no, Marcus: my friend now, I think, I think it’s just a way of I’ve, you know, when I, when I work with, I, I make a very, very, there’s a distinction between the people I work with, who just want to get better at it and feel more comfortable with doing it. And I really, really like working with those people, just to give some tips and tricks and just get them into a space where they feel more comfortable and where they can just. Every single time, get a little bit better at it. Web where their colleagues start to say, wow, wow. And to you, what’s going on there, you get a bit more confident now. That was great. So there’s a difference between that kind of stuff too. Keynote space people, literally people have keynote speaker in the LinkedIn description who were just doing the same old, same old, and it’s boring as hell. The pre-recorded stuff. I still stand by it. I think it’s, I think it’s, it’s a much, much better way of doing it. It’s scalable. It’s great for the organizer is great for you because you’ve got it. You’ve got it nailed down. You know what you know, that works. Everybody knows how long it is. But it should always be seen. And I think this is something that I’ve really understood now for the last 12 months that the talk you do is nothing more than a teaser for the discussion that happens afterwards. And I think that’s something that really got lost somewhere around 2016. When kind of like Ted really blew up, like properly blew up. The conferences got bigger, everybody got a bit lazier. But the, but the, the presentation that you give is a teaser for the conversation that happens afterwards. That was always very difficult in a live conference environment because of the setup and the hierarchical systems of a stage and an audience. So as a speaker, you would normally be in the green room with the access or area badge and on a stage physically higher than the audience. And so that was always kind of like some kind of physical. Distancing between speaker and audience in the, in the virtual environment, that’s completely gone because we’re staring at each other in the eye. We’re all in the elevator. So. Why waste time waffling on for 45? Honestly, I eat no idea how often I’ve said in the last three years to corporate people. And cause I’ve been doing these virtual events for the last three years way before the pandemic started because procurement CFOs discovered virtual events years ago. They love them. Because you don’t have to fly everybody in to Las Vegas to do kind of like a big kickoff, but I see, you know, senior, senior management business unit heads, they hate the idea of being only being only allowed to talk for seven minutes. Hate the idea. Now I need 45. I always get 45. See if I don’t get 45 because you see he’s a CEO, right. And he gets an hour. And I’m the CMO. That means I need at least 45 minutes and I’m a business unit head and I get 20 it’s all pants. It’s all hierarchical nonsense. So the, the, the talk in an environment in, in like a virtual environment, should I think the perfect length is about seven minutes and you’re pushing it to a Ted talk. 17 that’s around about the length of a, how I met your mother episode. They were, they were 22 minutes long. And I always say, I always say to the senior management that the moan about not being able to go, they need more time. They need 30 minutes. I said, so you can, you can do more than a, an episode of how I met your mother. Because I don’t think you can. So keep it short, focus on what it is you want to do from, you know, there are some S what’s his name? Chris Anderson from Ted that book, Ted talks. There’s a lot. I disagree with loads of stuff in there, but there’s lots of valid stuff. The big one is focused on the one idea. Seven minutes, one idea. Constantly throwing forward to the Q and a. Yeah. Yeah. And, and I’m more than happy to, to chat about this on the Q and a put questions in people’s heads, ideas in people’s heads pre-record that bit, and then be live for the Q and a and do a Q and a 30, 40 minutes. Cause that’s the interesting bit. That’s the meat. That’s where the action is. So that’s, that’s where I am right now. So Matt: do we still need to have events at same time? Because the thing I get mean, the Q and a from doesn’t have to happen synchronously, you can make that asynchronous Bye bye. Breaking the speaker, having to be speaking at the time at which they speak, you’ve given the opportunities to be able to engage with questions as they come up as they go. Is it still all a bit too fixed in still the temporal model for traditional event? Marcus: I think you can play with all of this stuff. It kind of an even in the event you can mix it up so you can have. The events were always very, became very programmed. It’s one of the it’s one of my things in the manifesto. This is the end of lazy. So we all got lazy speakers, got lazy events, got lazy, super easy to program staff, put speaker wrong. The only thing you really, really fought about is who, who come, who goes on before lunch and who comes on last after lunch. He opens and who closes? Those were the kind of like the major things that are an event organizer would, would, would think about you can program an event. Programming event has got a lot, much, a lot more to do with a live television event than anything else. And I like to compare it to breakfast television. So, if you look at programming and breakfast television, you have slots, which are always on the point. So the viewer knows what’s coming when, so at the, on the hour. That they half an hour, you would always have news. And then after on the hour news, four minutes long, then you would have weather. Then you would have sport. Then you might have weather, then you’d have point of interest and you’d have, and you can kind of, if you just watch the programming behind breakfast television, you pretty much have the blueprint for a really, really good event. So you can and they mix it up in there as well. So you can have a call Lin with you know, with a star. And then you can have mail-in questions and stuff, so it doesn’t have to always fit into the same kind of model you can mix it up. The only thing that really, really has to work is timing and pace is, has got so much to so much to do with pace. The real burden is on the host of the event. And being able to, to, to kind of glue it all together, have the energy to kind of drag an online audience along For 90 minutes, because I think 90 minutes is the perfect length for an online event. I don’t think, you know, I’ve seen things particularly here in Germany, you know, events that have gone on for three or four days. Awesome. What has got, what is that about? No, I’m not going to do that. Yeah. Well, Marcus, you, they can hop in and hop out and, you know, pick cherry pick. What’s interesting for them like an event. No, no, no. You would book a three-day event in, in Lisbon because you basically going on holiday for free days in Lisbon or Berlin or London or ballbar or wherever it was. You’re not going to do that online because you’re fitting it into your calendar. So 90 minutes is a stretch to put in somebody’s calendar that will block the 90 minutes. And then there might in the mindset. Oh, well, that’s my 90 minute block. And I’ll kind of like, I might drop in and out of that. So the moderators and the PA and the programming’s job is to figure out how to make sure they stay engaged and not drop in and out on those 90 minutes, but you’ll never, ever, ever. Ever going to hold people longer than that. Not for an event it’s just not going to happen. Matt: I guess the other challenge within a loss of the traditional events world then is also how do you then get the sponsors slots to be? And this is something that the, the tech world I think is, has been It’s been a real problem for, for many years now, is that for some reason, a lot of it events are free to attend, so somebody has to pay for it. So they’re paid for by sponsors. So basically you have to put up with an awful lot of crap, which are really bad sales pitches to then have the interesting bits in between and the opportunity to meet other people. And I’ve, I know a lot of organized stations in that. That model has been trying to translate that into an online event, which is just the worst, because you’ve basically got really crap sales pitches, interspersed with none of the valuable bits because you don’t meet anybody. Marcus: Come on guys. Let’s be honest. I mean, if you’re going to physical events that we used to go to soon as the sponsored talker stepped on stage, everybody buggered off and got a coffee and didn’t it. That was the bit where you networked. Yeah, really well. So that’s obviously not going to work in a, in a, in a tele Matic virtual space. The biggest thing that’s changed is, is that we’ve left. We’ve left the context of theater and we’ve moved into the context of television, television, and cinema we’re on a screen. So the expectations and the completely different we’re expecting television. And if it’s live, we’re expecting live television. So let’s break that down a little bit. So what’s missing from live television at the moment, applause. So we expect applause. We expect you probably don’t realize it, why it’s happening. Really, really. I would, I would. Next time you’re watching the news. Look at how long each segment is that we’re talking about 30 seconds to one and a half minutes. They’re just running frou staff at a rate. There is an amount of content that they’re putting together and putting in front of the viewer to keep them engaged. So when I’m saying seven minutes, that’s actually six minutes too long. For, for the screen context. So in a live context, and this is something that I’ve experienced with hybrid things, you kind of need the light, a tiny live audience, or at least canned clapping because your expecting it. So in that context, if you have a sponsored thing, that’s an advert and the people gonna get up and go to the toilet. And come back when that bit’s over. So you have to sponsors or have to think of innovative ways to to get into or to involve themselves in these kinds of events event. Organizers will have to come up with innovative sponsorship products that. Okay. That’s why this is the end of lazy. We have to re rethink everything and it’s not going to go away if it’s absolutely naive to think that when this is all over, it’s over. It’s not because the chief financial officers are looking at a spreadsheet and saying, guys, we’re not going to send you to Las Vegas because it had no impact on our bottom line. We didn’t lose any money because we didn’t go there. Some we’re not going to spend two, we’re not gonna spend a quarter of a million peop people, quarter of a million dollars or euros or pounds to send you. They’re still going to happen. They’re not going to do it. So I think that this is a. I mean, this is devastating for the entire industry. It’s devastating for event photographers, for technicians, for event agencies, for people that on the events for speakers perform and all of that, we have to rethink this stuff. But it’s slightly ironic that a, an, a business sector where a large chunk LA earn their money from spouting off about business disruption have had dead business disrupted by a virus, and they re were really, really not very good at working out what to do event. Outro Chris: Well, that was all fascinating. Wasn’t it? We’ve got a lot to learn and still, I think even, even a year on. So thank you for that, Marcus. Sorry, thunder on into the year, ahead to the week ahead. And Matt, what’s that got in store for you? Matt: All right. Well, as I mentioned at the beginning of the show, we’ve got quite a lot of corporate training stuff going on this week. It’s going to take quite a lot of my time. We’ve midway through a big procurement exercise. So still dealing with suppliers phoning me up and then having to tell them that they have to go through the official channels to be able to do this because we are still doing a procurement exercise. She’ll great fun. We are. Actually talking a lot about data in the week ahead. And I think I’ve managed to get my organization to realize that data is now something more important than just the stuff in systems. And I’ve got some people at board level and are thinking that it might be important, which is a big step forward because before it was possibly just a bit too complicated. So that should be interesting. How about Chris: you? Well, I’ve also got some training actually. Funnily enough, tomorrow is a bit of a training day. We’ve got some training about blogging you know, desperately need some pointers on, cause I’ve been doing it very buddy for years and we’ve got some kind of personal stuff branding, and again, you always learn stuff in this sort of thing. You know what I mean? It’s it’s something that you can always reflect on, so yeah, it should be okay. And. And yeah, and then all the stuff, you know, the usual I’ve been preparing for a conference in Serbia that that’s happening at the end of the month. So that’ll be really good fun because I actually do a video today, actually, funnily enough. And it was only, only a ten second kind of snippet explained, you know, what are you going to talk about Chris? And I recorded it first. And then just as Marcus was saying, you know, I watched it back and I thought, okay, Yes, Chris, you couldn’t be less animated if you know, you’re just being worked by, in a very old person with asthma. I was like, it’s hard to do it again. And it was inject the whole kind of spinning boat on all of that. And even then it comes out looking reasonably subdued, you know? So yes you do it. You’re right. It does. The camera sucks. The energy out of it. So, but yeah, a good learning point. Matt: And, and Marcus, what what does the week ahead have for you? Marcus: A lot of writing I’ve been commissioned to write a three films, which is very exciting for various. It’s interesting because these events becoming more films, film, like. It’s a very, very interesting phenomenon. So it is a, it’s a very exciting time for me right now. I’ve kind of moved away from as I said in hanging in there, I’ve packed kind of my art and the performance stuff in a box Mark 2022. And I’m walking the talk and doing the do. So there’s a lot of doing the Duke at the moment. So I’m writing a lot of formats, which are more to do with film. Like short felt like 20 minute films than actual kind of live events. So I’m, I’m working on those at the moment and that’s very exciting. And staying inside, wash my hands, keeping socially distance, wearing a mask, watching the snow fall outside of the window. Matt: Do you think when this, this pandemic thing is over, you might end up actually just making bigger and bigger films. Marcus: It’s an exciting idea. I have rarely started to look at myself as a right of things. This has been probably the biggest shift to the last 365 days thing for me was I stumbled. I don’t know when it was. I’m not sure if it was in the last year, but I stumbled across the pilot script for breaking bad and it changed. It’s like a real moment for me. Seeing how he wrote that script because it’s like, Oh, you can do it like that. Oh, that’s how you can do it. Yeah. So it completely freed me up of lots and lots of preconceptions about how you, how you do stuff. And I’ve been involved in a few productions, live productions with incredibly talented production companies over the last couple of months. And I’ve got a much better understanding of how, how the production of these things work and that’s really influenced my writing. So, so yeah, it feels that that might be a thing that is that’s an option and that’s exciting. I’ve been trying, I’ve tried to keep optimistic. I’ve really, really tried to keep optimistic. And I think we all have, but for someone like myself who always has been always drawn to the dark side of stuff it’s been quite a challenging time, but the words making, turning those words into moving pictures as well. Proven to be a really, really, really big thing and exciting. So, yeah, let’s, let’s see. There’s a Netflix and me yet. Matt: I look forward to it. We’ll put a link on the website to some of Marcus’s work. If you haven’t seen any of it, you really should. There’s some amazing things that have come out. Well, amazing things have come out over the last few years, but the stuff that’s come out in the last. Year or so and the relevance to what we’re doing and how we work at the moment. It’s really huge. So thank you again for joining us again, Marcus is a pleasure as always, and we will see you next week.

On this week’s show we are joined by Matt D’Ancona to talk about his forthcoming book Identity, Ignorance, Innovation. You can find out more about it here:https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/matthew-dancona-5/identity-ignorance-innovation/9781529303995/?v2=true And you can pre-order it through your favourite local independent bookshop here. The machine-generated transcript starts here: Intro Chris: Hello, and welcome to the latest episode. You join us with Matt D’Ancona of Tortoise and various other publications. And of course, me and Mattwere here after a Oh another week of excitement and and drama. In football cricket, which I’m trying not to think about. And and work, I guess, Matt, how are you Mr. Ballantine? Matt: Well, the kids are back at school, so I was thinking sort of slightly Kelsey about the fact how I felt this joy that I would no longer have my children around me at home all day, every day. And I miss them a bit today as it was quiet around the hat, but not that much let’s be true, you know? So that was good. I think my first lateral toe, the lateral tote had full flow test, which I, I got to, I haven’t yet, there was, there’s a, it’s a fascinating piece of user interface design though. So you’ve got this little plasticky devices a little bit like a a pregnancy test and there’s a long and convoluted exercise involving long swab everything’s plastic, and this a huge amount of small bits of plastic going into landfill out of this. But I suppose it’s worth it. You stick this swab up your nose and you stick it in your. Back of your throat and they had to stick it into a little plastic thing, which is like a pipette with some liquid in it that you stick in there. And then you put a couple of drops onto this. The lateral flow presuming the, the movement of the liquid from one end of the piece of blotting paper to the other. And then there are two stripes and one of them, if it comes on, it means the testers has been correctly administered. The second one is that it means you’ve got Corona virus and therefore are to be thrown away from human civilization for 14 days. But the one that’s the, the the controlled test that the test is working is Mark C. And the other one is Mark T for T plague or something, but I just, it’s one of those things where you just go, Oh, medical professionals yet again, have completely failed to understand the importance of user interface design, because how many people can see that see, come up with a line against it and go, I’ve got coronavirus. Chris: Yeah. Well, I that, that reminds me actually, there was a, there was a tear down on Twitter a few weeks ago. Well, maybe I share like a Twitter account called foun, which is where one of those that most follow academies, a good old techie. And he found out about these digital pregnancy tests. So the pregnancy tests that you would normally see in boots and whatever that you pee on, and the line comes across in a similar sort of way, things are digital ones. So he took one apart and found essentially what they’ve got is a little. A little optical sensor will tell, and the lines are still in the testimony, but all it does is tries to figure out whether there aligns, gone up. And then on the little screen says, yes, you’re pregnant or not. So essentially it’s just a little optical sensor to read the line. But you know, in many ways that that line sometimes is a bit fine to whatever, at least it gives you a yes or a no, maybe that’s what they need. Maybe that’s what that’s, that’s the, that’s the answer. Matt: So you want plastic as well as electronics and batteries to go into landfill Chris: fling together in order to make this more complicated. Yeah. Matt: Great movie. Great movie. Anyway Mr. Dan Kona, I think we can ask you one more tonight to be able to distinguish Matt. How are you? How’s your work? Matt D’Ancona: Well, it’s been you know, occupied by. Sort of political stuff as usual, like the budget and what have you. But yeah, the main discovery I made this week is that the pandemic has to end soon. I think that’s kind of my, my big, my big kind of insight, which was that the other night I went to, I was doing an event at jet Jewish book Fest. I wasn’t actually doing it on my book. I was doing it. I was interviewing someone else and we were on the stage at King’s place with no audience. And the, so the audience are watching online, completely empty building, completely empty, complete JD Ballarat sort of dystopian scene. And I found the whole thing. So madly exciting, you know, it was like studio 54 for me being with an author on a stage with absolutely no one in the room. And everyone, you know, coming in with masks, that was to me, sort of so thrilling, I realized we’re now reaching the point where if that’s incredibly thrilling, it really is probably time to wrap this up guys because I badly need to get out. It’s still a Chris: joke basically. Matt D’Ancona: Yeah. I mean, I, you know, I, I, I mean, I’m, I’ve got nothing against sitting in empty auditoriums, but That and, and indeed have a certain amount of experience in that, but but but it never thrilled me. So the share kind of address and rush of sitting in an empty auditorium made me think that probably certainly speaking entirely selfishly it was time to, you know, get the vaccine rollout sorted and things back to something, not if not normal than where I can go for a coffee or, you know, perhaps go to the movies. I realize it’s not a very profound insight and it may well occur to a few other people around the world. But certainly for me it was, it was a big one. Chris: We don’t need performs. No, no, no. Matt D’Ancona: Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. I’m certainly not offering it, but it was, it was, it I’m just as, as said, I looked back on the weakness past, that was kind of the moment, the Eureka moment. Matt: I think, yeah, I had a similar moment or two similar moments actually this week one was when I went to Sainsbury’s at the weekend and that was just enough to be that way. And then the other was, I woke up after a vivid dream where I had dreamt that I was backstage at a a big public performance by Bruno Brooks and Gary Davis in a shopping center. And that was the point. I wish I had the code. I need this locked down. So I’ve got something coming into my brain now, other than just the memories of the late eighties and early nineties. Yeah. Tariff Matt D’Ancona: sort of spike Island. Only not Matt: so, no, it was, it was, it was like in Westfield and it was, it was very drab and even worse. I think it wasn’t even in the late eighties, early nineties, it was kind of Gary Davidson, Bruno Brooks today. Yeah. Chris: Do you need to, you know, instant intervention here? But if I was, if I see what’s happening, I mean, I mean, I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t take a pen pandemic for me to find out what it’s like to stand and talk in front of a bunch of empty chairs, frankly. But that, that kind of experience that would see me off. I think Matt D’Ancona: it’s very strange. Matt: How about you, Chris? Has anything happened in. Okay. Anything around your life in the last seven days? Chris: Yeah, I was looking forward to watching some cricket, but then I wasn’t because that all went horribly wrong and and I’ve been busy at work and been it’s been quite good fun. Actually it’s been, being, being busy is always good, but when you’ve got interesting things going on, it’s even better. So that’s okay. But no, not really. I wish, I wish I could say that it had been some grand thing that happened, but, but really we, we plot on that way. It was, it was quite cold this week and quite dispiriting because I get, I always get overexcited when the first rays of sunshine start dripping through the trees. And then and now it got cold again. So that puts me into something to give a Dudgeon. And I’m hoping that next week is, you know, it gets a bit better and I can go outside a bit more. Matt: Well, thanks for the warning. They’re in a bad mood. This week show Matt, Matt has joined us. Cause he’s going to be talking about the book that he’s got coming out a little later this month. So I think we should probably get on with that. Main Section Matt: So on the 18th of March, there is a new book coming out called identity, ignorance, innovation. And it’s your book, Matt? It is, we had the pleasure of reading it over the weekend. Start off, just tell us a bit about what those three Is are all about. My you’ve linked them together. Matt D’Ancona: Well, I guess the Genesis of the book was oddly enough. It was during the Brexit period. When I, I kind of reached the point where I could hear not a single further debate about immigration and how awful it was. And it seemed to me the whole country got stuck on immigration, almost a proxy for change of any kind. You know, quite liberal was, have been on immigration for all sorts of reasons, but. Economic and cultural, but in any case, it seemed that everything, all roads led to immigration. And I thought it’d be interesting to, to some other words, we’re going to be the eye and just play around with them. And I came up with three, which were identity, ignorance and innovation which we can maybe go on and talk about. But the, the interesting thing of course, was that as I started writing the book and researching it and. And then along came the pandemic and, and, and that completely changed the context in which the book was written. But I, I suppose in ways that were pleasant, unsettling and both I found that it enhanced the, the, the themes and, and made me look at them afresh and they seem to be even more relevant. So it was sort of born in Brexit and delivered in. It was birthed in Brexit and finally came to be properly. And in the age of COVID, which was a strange, a very strange writing experience. I mean, needless to say, I’ve never had anything like it before. Matt: And the things about the three subjects individually. So the first one identity, and this is about quite a bit about identity politics, but it’s more than just that. Matt D’Ancona: Well, I mean, one of the. Principle purposes of this book, it in a way, I mean, all books, however, whatever they are or books, seven elements of autobiography in them. And that, and this was, you know, I’ve always sort of occupied a kind of center ground and liberal position. And it seemed to me that lots of people in that position, especially white people were looking at white men, I should say really. We’re, we’re looking at the identity politics movement as various expressed in. Black lives matter, me too. And so on. Extinction rebellion, you name it and being very dismissive of it. And, and looking at it as a kind of Pat series of pathological emergencies that were wouldn’t last, or if they did last, it would be very bad instead of, instead of saying, well, what’s really going on here and is there anything we can learn from it? And it, and it seemed to me that a lot of what was being said, In identity politics, it was really worth listening to, and, and reflecting upon as a quite justified reproach to the kind of traditional liberal way of thinking and the assumption that the world occupy operates on a fair and meritocratic basis and the systems of justice in the end will always operate reasonably well. And, and. They, they don’t and they haven’t. And lots of identity politics in this decade coming is about the fact that it’s taken so long for, to basic liberties and equality is to be, to be distributed. And that using the new technologies, I guess being a very part important part of it. People have found it easier and easier to express their politics prime primarily, or at least partly through group identity. And I think this is in many respects, a positive thing because it’s, it’s brought to light the, the, the big gaps, the big failings. And I know, I know a lot of liberal people disagree profoundly of this and see, I don’t see politics as a mortal threat to liberal institutions, but I think actually, If, if we do this intelligently, there’s, there’s, there’s a lot to be learned from it. And in it. Now there are also, there’s also some critique of identity politics in that section. It’s also sorts of I, I don’t distill it down to one goal, but but it, but it’s broadly positive. And I, that I already talking to some people about, you know, the book coming up and so on that has surprised people who didn’t, you know, I used to edit. The spectator magazine. And what are you doing, messing about with identity politics? You know, you’re a 53 year old, straight white veil. Why, you know why you’re doing this. And, and I think part of it is just that journalistic instinct, which is just you, you know, you should remain curious, you should remain open-minded, you should, you should be looking at the new and, and absorbing the best of the news. So that was, that was very important to me that the first part. And it’s kind of that in a way, it’s the most deliberately, the most combative section of the book I want. I want people of my generation to feel challenged by it, and I hope other generations will read it with interest too, but that there’s definitely a kind of generational dimension to that ignorance was really to do with a kind of realization I had over a number of years that. Something was changing to the way knowledge was being both acquired or not acquired. And the role that examinations were playing in in that, that the, the, the, you know, I’d seen my own children and other people’s children and read about the situation in the States and the way in which teaching to the test and the kind of manic formatting of of, of the examination. Treadmill was really kind of now becoming hostile to the acquisition of knowledge. It was all about just being able to regurgitate things in tick box form. And this was not the original objective of standardized testing. You know, standardized testing became came into Vogue for other reasons which were respectable, which was to try and raise standards. And as so often happens, social policy is born. And it has its time. And I think we are now one of the things that’s very interesting about the pandemic, where in which essentially standardized testing has been put on hold is that I hope it will be a kind of rethink about how we test people. And then it will still always be some elements of national standardized testing. I’m sure. But I hope that we’ll shift away from the kind of a slightly frenzied obsession. With these end of year examinations, which we, we, we tell our children that everything hangs, you know, it’s one Stripe or you’re out, which is a very, very unhealthy way to acquire knowledge and, and probably not in a way to acquire knowledge at all at precisely the time when we need people to be able to have as broad, a range of knowledge as possible, and to be able to think critically and creatively. To be able to understand the liberal arts and having helped us the sciences, you know, this great divide we still have in this country between the humanities and STEM subjects, science subjects, and maths, very unhealthy and really bad, the whole relevance to not just the workforce, not just the, the world of work into which kids are going to be going, but the world You know, th th th we were going to be living in a world in which we’re going to be, we are already bombarded with information and we need the skills, the digital literacy to understand it. We need the attention span to absorb information and knowledge, the space to have curiosity. This is one of my big bugbears, is that children, there’s a terrible word used in. Syllabus is called enrichment, which sort of means, you know, that after you’ve been forced fed like a goose, you know, being prepared for four Gras, you’re allowed 25 minutes to talk about, you know, a play or a book or a pop song, or, you know, Rappler X interests you before you’re sent back to the factory farm. And I, I think it’s very sad because I think, you know, when you’re young, you, there should be some Slack in the system. It to enable you to roam and explore. And, you know, I, I think that people should have a very broad and eclectic approach to culture. I think it’s great to encourage kids to, you know, watch our house movies, but also when they want to talk about gaming, not to treat them as idiots because gaming is dominant one, possibly one could argue the dominant force in global culture. Now. And I think, I think we have to be much more imaginative in our approach to knowledge. So ignorance was that, that was sort of the second big theme that I want to take on the innovation was, and it, and innovation became more important in the pandemic, I suppose, which was really how do we live in a world of change? You know, how do we make ourselves resilient in a world of change? And so I selected a number of. Kinds of change automation, grain, life expectancy, the problem misinformation and so on, and just took each of them as a sort of example of how it might be possible to become more resilient, because these are forces that you gotta be, you know, more and more important in the years to come. It could have, you know, could have easily just as easily looked at ’em. Pandemic issues, biology and so on. I mean, I only selected a few just as examples, but I just want us to take those three big themes and knit them together as a kind of offering towards a new politics. Because I think as we come out of the pandemic, there’s going to be a huge appetite for new ideas. And I’ve been writing about politics a while now. And I, to be honest, I can’t remember a moment when the sort of intellectual. Landscape was so average, you know, it’s not fizzing with any great big themes. There are great movements out there. Great sorts of campaigns and so on. But what you don’t have is a sense of, you know, where, where the heat and the energy is going. Be. Gather in, in, in politics itself. So this is my little contribution to that big debate that I hope will, will we’ll begin. You know, when we, when we’re sort of finally released drummer from our quarantine, With the, the identity section, some of the things you described there, it, it feels almost the identity. Politics is just one facet of how. Particularly, I guess social networks are starting to challenge established structures for organizations. So the way in which, for example I find now often that networks exist that exist, that span across organizations, with people, with interest in some sort of common interest communities that span across the can organize and be able to manage themselves. In a, in a way that they just couldn’t have done even maybe 10 years ago. And now often, actually much more powerful for getting things done and things to happen than those that exist within an organization. And take for example experience of working in digital services within government, whilst government digital service in the UK was a catalyst actually, there’s a whole load of. You know, Gulf camps and you know, open forums and stuff that sit across government organizations where you’ve got people who are affecting change much more effectively across their discipline or across the thing they want to talk about than they would if they were just stuck in a silo of a particular government department or a particular arm’s-length Balti. And that I, I don’t think it has limited the public sector at all. I think that, that you can see those kinds of waves happening in all sorts of places. And so there’s something here about how. Our means individually to communicate starting to really challenge the traditional hierarchies of traditional organizations, maybe. Yeah, no, totally. And I think that there’s a risk sometimes in of loose language. When we talk about social networks, we confuse that with big tech and the arguments about big tech and whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing. And it quickly degenerates into an argument about Facebook and Twitter, but actually as. Sort of social phenomena, social networks, I think have been, you know, a net good by some margin. And you know, one of the things I look at in the book is the difference between networks and institutions and how people have lost, lost trust in institutions in the last 20, 25 years, the reasons. But also technology has enabled them to, as you say, not in a defined their own. Peer groups and to be very creative and, and sometimes healthily disruptive in their fields. I always remember Eric, Raymond, the coder, I think back it as far back as 98, started talking about the cathedral versus the bizarre, you know, the idea that the w the old world was a world in which there was a cathedral that everyone worshiped in, which was the sort of the institution of authority and that. The web as it then was because this was pre social media, pre broadband was going to bring in a world where it was more like big shopping, bizarre of activity and excitement. And he was right. Yeah, absolutely. That is, that is what has happened. And, you know, if you look at politics the most powerful institution now is the WhatsApp group without question. And this is much criticized by some people, but actually. It’s it’s enabled people, both in campaigns and in parliament to liaise with each other, to interact with each other when they’re not physically near one another in a way that, you know, again, there’s a net positive. And I think that’s good. And I think, I think it can be good in, in any, in any, yeah, actually to be honest, professional, particularly you know, you can see how creative. Those networks are because they, they’re not built on a deferential model. They’re built on a kind of lateral model of mutual respect and understanding. Now, sometimes they break down of course, like all networks do, but that’s not, that’s not a new phenomenon. It it’s just the case that sometimes things don’t work out, but actually the opportunity I think is enhanced. And that’s the key is that the opportunities is greater than it was. Chris: Do you think that’s, I, I would say that in my experience over the years, talking about that cathedral versus bizarre idea, the number of organizations there are still those, that kind of talk kind of ex cathedra, if you know what I mean? So they, they it’s, this is, this is how it is, and that they’re telling you that what their opinion is, is the opinion. And there are organizations in my industry, you know, that, that do that. But they’re, they’re getting fewer and further between, because it’s, it’s not possible to be quite as prescriptive anymore, but it’s not possible to, to be the, the one source of truth, because there are so many ways you want to be challenged and so many other avenues for people to get valuable and valued information. Matt D’Ancona: I mean, the, the the upside of that’s huge because it means that. The means of production as it were, have gone out of the very few people’s hands into everyone’s hands. You know, when I, when I started as a journalist in 1991, I was at the times and as a trainee and, and, you know, literally the journalists would flock in to the plant in the morning and in the evening, huge trucks with the sun and the times written on the side, we’d come out with the newspapers on it. I mean, it was a completely Fordist model. And I mean, that was ex cathedra literally you know, the editorials that were written at the paper, they were the expressions of, I guess you know, it wasn’t even an elite view. It was an establishment view that, that, that really had enormous authority and power. You compare it to now, everyone. How can do that, you know, at, at vanishingly small costs, zero cost. And I think that’s a good thing. I think I’m, I’m radically in favor of that. The, the, the, the only problem, and it can be a huge problem is, is the other kind of authority, which is not power over people, but the authority that comes from being a trusted source. And so I think the, the new challenge, which is, has been wrapped as the last book I wrote was about post-truth. And I address misinformation in this one too is, is how do you, how do you kind of ensure that the world in which information is flat that your you’re not exposed to CDOT science, or if you are, that you know, that you are being so exposed and. You understand that Holocaust denial is rubbish and, and that kind of thing. And this is, it’s an educational challenge. It’s a challenge of kite marking. It’s a huge test for the, the, the tech companies themselves. And I kind of feel we’re only in the foothills of this. People want big bang answers and that’s understandable. And there is, there’s no doubt that legislation and regulation will play its part in it. But. It’s it w we need to sort of slightly keep, hold on nerve on this one, because it is true that at the moment, you know, things are not there is there, isn’t an answer to that clear and present danger, and it is deeply worrying that America is filled with people who still seem to believe in Q add-on. And, and conspiracy theories generally. And the hole they have over people is, is, is, is an alarming. By-product of all this, but still in all. I think that the, the new information ecosphere is better than what proceeded it. And we will find ways through human ingenuity of including of improving our, you know, our kind of information nutrition, if you like and, and understanding, you know, what Sears we put into our minds and how to, how to sort that. But. That’s that’s really what people should be thinking about that again, my, my, my sort of footnote worry is that there are very, very, very few politicians who understand this. I remember when I mentioned it in the book when Carol Cadwalader the, the great campaigning journalists on all this, and I went to testify to the culture media select committee, which was doing review under Damian Collins, who does understand all this. But not all of his fellow MPS on this turd much about anything. And I, what struck me most about our period of being cross-examined was an NPE shall remain nameless. Cause it was in, it was in private asking me what what an app was. And this was not that long ago. And I, that really weren’t. I mean, I thought that’s, that’s terrifying. Because it’s not as if that’s a, I mean, that’s not a, that’s not a high-tech question, Matt: but I think there’s two, there’s two sets of knowledge. And I don’t think it’s just politicians. I think there are lots of senior people in organizations and possibly the population at large. But in senior ranks, I think this is particularly the case. The one side of it is understanding technology, the kind of engineering and The way it works and how it works and what this stuff is. And it’s, I kind of vacillate between thinking that actually you do need to know some of this stuff to better make sensible decisions. And actually, I don’t really know roughly above and beyond very little how a car works, but it gets me from 80 cents of do I need to worry about it? I can see pros and cons either way. The other side of it though, for me. And again, this might be because of my own background, having studied both of these areas, but the much derided subject of media studies. Which was kind of in, certainly when I was going to university in the late eighties, early nineties was seen as a no pun intended Mickey mouse subject. But actually being able to have the cognitive understanding of being able to understand the media. As well as the content within it, so that you can start to be able to make those decisions about what is valuable and what is not. And if you don’t have either of those, if you understand neither the tech, nor the you know, th th th the mechanisms by which media operates, you’re going to believe anything. Matt D’Ancona: Well, that, that, that’s, that’s so true. And, and, you know, I think it’s, it’s, it’s very striking to me. W when I go and talk at schools. And so on that I mean the first thing that strikes me is that the, the old media world is just dead. In the sense that you can, you can be talking to a very bright group of kids and chats and before, and they’re obviously bright as buttons and, you know, really switched on and they, they get talking about the issues that animate them. So the kind of kickoff question is, well, who’s red. And then I’ll reel off the BBC, the guardian, you know, a few kind of basic mainstream media sources, you know online today and there, if you’re, then we’ll put the hands up, you know, they’re getting their information from social media and YouTube. Interestingly enough, I was, I’m always fascinated by the power of YouTube or the young as a, as an information provider. That’s very underrated. And what I think. You have now is, is that, that their teachers are over generation that, you know, through no fault of their own. Yeah. I’m not quick to teach them the digital literacy. They need to understand that they’re being fed by algorithm rather than by, by veracity. I mean, the stuff they get is, is, is based upon their previous likes and their what, what they enjoy. And so that. They’re their confirmation bias is actually into the system. And this is just the start of the process you’re talking about Matt. And I think it, it kind of, it’s, it’s incredibly important. And the sooner that happens the better, I mean, I I’m very much in favor of throwing money at this actually. And, and yeah, if necessary. You know, I wouldn’t fall tax on big tech or I know a small levy on every handset. Some, some, something like that that would just generate a big pot of cash that could be spent on helping teachers to learn how to do this because it’s, it’s, it’s so important. It’s kind of, but it’s basic civic empowerment, you know, if you, if you’re not able to distinguish the good from the bad, if you’re not able to. See, what’s what’s real and what isn’t and what’s opinion, and what’s factually based. And, and not able to cross examine and interrogate what you’re fed. You are going to just end up in a sort of canonized tribalized world, where you’re just huddling around a series of certainties, which may or may not be the case. And that is a problem. But again, you know, I think, I think, you know, we can fix it. I don’t, I don’t think that the problem is, is in any sense, unfixable. It just requires a bit of energy and a lot of imagination. And so, and one of the themes that that goes through the book is, is it’s a kind of in patients with populist governments, because I think populous governments are very, very good. At complaining about problems and very, very bad at fixing them. They, they insist that there are there are simple solutions to complex problems, but that wicked elites thought those simple solutions and immigrants and all manner of imagined enemies, including the mainstream media staff and in the way. And what’s really striking about. Poppiness governments is they’re not actually very good at doing stuff. That if you look at the Trump administration, it didn’t really do very much, which is probably for the best, but it didn’t really accomplish anything. And if you look at the Johnson government it’s first year with the pandemic was, was a series of catastrophes. And one of the reasons that we’re all so blown away by vaccine rollout is that it’s the first time that the thing has worked. And I, and thank goodness it is, but you know, it is, it is, we’re all sort of blinking and scratching our eyes and thinking, how did that happen? And, and, and hoping that it’s not some terrible. Cosmic mistake. And we’re in a multiverse and we’ll bounce back to the real Johnson universe where vaccine rollout is a complete disaster. No, everyone’s getting the wrong doses. And you know, it is, it is, but it is rather amazing that people are quite as amazed as they are. And that’s because the populous governments are not, you know, they’re great at campaigning that you have to give it to Boris Johnson and to. To a certain extent, Trump, you know, who, you know, he didn’t, he didn’t lose by that much amazing at campaigning winning referendums, winning elections, that kind of thing. But when it comes to governing countries, they’re completely terrible. And so that this is not, this is, as they say in white hall, a suboptimal moment, because we’ve got big problems. Some of them very nuanced and technical And we need, we need governments that are ready to take them on, you know, with energy. Not, not, I don’t mean technocratic governments. I mean, passionate governments. But populism is not passionate about populism is about getting power and, and keeping it using popular support as your glue. So different thing. Hmm. Matt: Do you think sometimes if you think about that populist ideal of. It’s all just about making a simple answer to things that order I wonder sometimes, actually is the tech industry, an example of that, where the answer will be tech. And then we don’t have to worry about any of the heartbeat. We don’t have to worry about getting people to change because we just put some tech in. If you think about the early days of the pandemic, for example, it was going to be the app that was going to save us. Now that it’s all going a bit quiet about the app because Matt D’Ancona: it has, doesn’t it, Matt: Yeah. Tech can actually fulfill that role of being the populist answer to staff and it doesn’t actually achieve it necessarily. There’s a, there’s a in the innovation agenda stuff. So there’s a real risk there, I think. Matt D’Ancona: Well, I think it’s a, it’s a, it’s an abusive of, of, of what technology is which is exactly, as you say, to imply that it’s magic. And you know, you’ve got a problem as. Socially complex is test trace and isolate. And you, you appeal to people’s love of their phones. Basically, you know, the phone is the modern amulet, you know, it’s the superhero amulet, it’s full of magic people. Can’t bear to let go of it. It’s they’re precious, you know? And so people think, well, how is this test trace and isolate? And the work that sounds complicated. And Matt Hancock says, we’ve got an app. And possibly several and they say, great, we’ll have them all. And, and then none of them work. And, and actually that was a very good example of technology that was kind of like the wizard of Oz, the curtain behind Richard, the wizard of Oz head, but except the wizard of Oz was was sort of temp afterward telesales person who was meant to be tracing people. And spoke to two people in 10 hours. I mean, it really was it in, in years to come that that, that policy will be studied as how not to do anything ever. It’s an incredible example of how to do things badly, but to your point, the app with a capital a who’s going gonna, it was the magical potion, wasn’t it? It really was. And that’s, I think part of this is to stop talking about technology as a separate thing. Because I think what, what, what we characterize as the digital revolution is now everything really. Nothing is divorced from it. And so when you hear people saying there are technological solutions to this, I share your kind of suspicion something is up here. This is a poker players tell. Because there are technological solutions to absolutely everything and the pandemic has illustrated that par excellence. Who really knew what Zoom was? Who wants to use Zoom ever again? It’s kind of been one of the great features of the last year, but speaking about tech as a separate entity, I think just deludes people into thinking that it’s kind of. Almost like a commodity that they can, they can get hold of or, or tribal magic they can tap into when it’s, it’s no such thing. I mean, it is, it is now the infrastructure of what is to be human. Chris: Well, you mentioned in your book, you mentioned that I come away where the research came from or whether it’s just a, I don’t know, it’s just a truism, I don’t know. But this idea that innovation is overestimated in the short term and underestimated in the longterm. And what we’re talking about is that first piece aren’t we we’re talking about people overstating the impact of tech in this case or an app or whatever in the short term. I I’m thinking, you know, in the past we’ve talked to, we’ve talked about reading people like Dominic Cummings is interminable blogs, and he kind of. You kind of gets us to this, this point where he can fix everything. Cause it’s all worked out when it’s, when it’s, it’s too complex. It’s way more complex than he realizes it. And he and he’s, but he comes up against the limits of his imagination because he sees this guy. He gets to see you get to blinded by the tech or every single time. And I remember reading a book by a journalist who got into the AI and singularity, the singularity and the rationalist community. And the more I read it, the more frustrated I got with the kind of credulous newness of this, of listening to those bollocks and thinking there was anything in it at all. Matt D’Ancona: It’s Chris: I guess it’s, it’s like people are just and ruptured by this stuff. Matt D’Ancona: Well, that’s a very good word for it. Because it, there is a religiosity to it. I, I don’t, I have a smidgen of sympathy because it is an exciting time to be alive in the sense that you’re watching, you know, I’m sure people in the past have always felt this when they’re going through a technological revolution, that’s really. Transformative that print I imagine was the same 16th century electricity and so on and so on. And, and this is one that is, it is it is extraordinary and, and thrilling and occasionally scary to, to, to live through. But certainly the, the idea that, that, you know, you, you, you throw tech at a problem because it’s too complicated for civil servants to understand. How was it damaging? Well, I mean, the interesting thing about Dominic Cummings was that he was, he, he managed to cultivate the image of a kind of scary, very clever bullying character who kind of prowled the corridors of white hall terrifying people and running Britain, wild, Boris Johnson sort of bumbled around actually the real model for, for. Dominic Cummings is from the thick of it. If you remember Julius Nicholson, the guy who Tucker was always mocking because he was bouncing from department department and Malcolm Tucker would say, you know, he was, what was he doing today? He was designing a department to count the moon and actually that’s exactly what Cummings is doing almost literally that while we’re in the middle of this terrifying pandemic with the thousand people plus dying a day, Cummings was busy. Doing schematics for his version of mission control in the cabinet office, that was a car that he was going to 10 big rooms in the cabinet office into, into a kind of mission control from which he would presumably run Britain as if it was one of the early Apollo missions. And, and, you know, exciting as that might be, it probably wasn’t the best use of the government of the prime minister’s chief advisor’s time in the middle of a global, a global plague. But that was the, that’s what he liked to do. You know, he liked to, it always involved a book, usually obscure and it always involved abusing civil servants and it always involved an idea of total obscurity. And, and actually. That the absence of someone who talks rubbish is always to be celebrated. And that’s really the great thing about coming to have having gone is that, you know, people who are trying to kind of hold the government together no longer have to deal with this in their ear every morning. And I’d need it late at night. Chris: Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, it’s like that, but you could see everything you wrote, you believed all this crap. And it is, it’s easy. It’s so easy to get and right. Yeah. Interrupted or, or to be sucked in by it. I know that what happens is this idea that, that innovation has a longer term effect. We had a, we had a guy on a podcast a few weeks ago, Anthony, until he’s somebody who talks about PropTech and property. And we were talking about the city and he was saying, well, actually, you know, it doesn’t really matter that. It won’t be that everybody doesn’t get back to work. You only need a certain amount. You know, Amazon, by taking 15% of retail has created tipping points throughout the retail industry, and that’s all you need. And that’s really, I think that that plays into this piece as well about the tech doesn’t have to be revolutionary revolutionary. It doesn’t have to change everything. In the way that we sometimes think there’s going to go into happen, this, this massive change will happen. It just needs to hit a series of tipping points in different areas to have a long-term effect. Matt D’Ancona: Yeah, no, absolutely. And, and I think, you know, it’s very important to to maintain human agency in our relationship with tech. I think it will very Seduced by the idea of the algorithm and, and, you know, big techs, desperation to keep hold of its intellectual property has encouraged the idea that the algorithm is you know, is is is it something very, very, very special and secrets in a black box somewhere in California that no one is allowed to look at except Mark Zuckerberg on a Thursday or whatever. And, and, and this is a ridiculous approach to, to technology you know, and algorithms. Long pre predated digital technology and know it’s just math, it’s just code. And I think that demystifying, the algorithm is going to be very important in all of this. And I do think every child should have at least a rudimentary understanding of that. I don’t think every child has to be a coder, but I do think understanding the power of the algorithm, how it, you know, how it’s how it’s going to develop, how. It’s going to teach itself as AI becomes more important. That’s much more important than the kind of Ray Kurzweil, singularity rubbish about, you know, consciousness and kind of a kindness kind of it’s almost like a Timothy Leary, 1960 psychedelia really read with, with a bit of you know, loaded on to a Mac book. I mean, that’s really all it amounts to but it is very, very. It is amazing how infectious it is and how you see that sort of slightly the, the thousand yard stare in people’s eyes as they start to talk about it, you know? And off they go and it really is. I mean, I I’m by no means a technologists at all, but I can tell, I could tell sort of, not long into Kurzweil’s book on the singularity that it was rubbish. And, and it was quite alarming how it sort of acquired this mystique because there’s nothing mystical about it at all. But it, you know, it is it’s the, we go back to the old RFC Clark thing about the, the partition between technology and magic, always being, you know, a poorest one in hell. That’s that’s always been the case. Matt: So to finish up then, if we think about that, there’s ignorance gaps amongst it’s one thing for, for, for kids to be taught in, in a critical thinking and to be able to understand what media channels are about and how algorithms work and not necessarily need to know coding and all of that. What about for people who are actually in power today, though? What, what, what would help us in terms of being able to get an understanding of senior levels in politics and in and in business. That’s missing at the moment, do you think? Matt D’Ancona: Well, I think you know, I, I, I do think that as, as longevity and not just life expectancy, not just remaining alive longer, but actually working and living and, you know, enjoying a recreational life much for much, much longer time has transformed everything anyway and means that. You know, w w we’re all going to be working longer, and we’re all gonna have to think harder about what our roles are, because, you know, people, you know, it’s quite possible that people will want, will want to carry on working in some way, till they’re, if they’re fit until into their eighties. But it’s ridiculous to suggest that they should remain in leadership roles until they’re 85 a minute. It’ll have to be some sort of renewed intergenerational social contract where. All older people perform different roles. So I think that, you know, that’s, that’s a very interesting and open question, but also the, the old model of living, was it, you, you, you did your learning which involved, you know, either sort of going off and getting a degree or acquiring some sort of technical or vocational skill, and then you did your career and then you retired and then he died. Very quickly and everything was kind of wrapped up in, you know, 70 years. And that’s just not the model anymore. Add to that, the fact that, that the old fashioned career is, is in pieces anyway, and that the, the pace of technology means that we have to continuously learn new staff. We’re going to have to BR I mean, to, to your question, Matt, about the, you know, older people, older people, you know, and, and I kind of, I I’m, I’ve been thinking about this myself, you know, what, what, you know, what, if I, if I could take six months off and go off and learn something, what would it, what would be really interesting to go off and learn? You know, what would be useful? And I, cause I thought that when I, when I left, I had a brief period academia, you know, w when I, when I left that, I thought, well, this is it, that’s it I’m done with the world of learning. It was great fun, but now I’m off to do the working bit and then I’ll do the retiring bit and then I’ll die. And, and it’s, it’s, it’s a bit more complicated than that. So persuading this generation, I’m 53 and my generation, probably the last, I think. Who will be really hard to persuade, to learn, you know, in, in, in middle age. But if it was possible, if companies and employers could find ways maybe through tax breaks and so on to, to enable people to go off and, and dreadful word up-skill or re-skill, but to do it intensively and properly, it would be transformative because someone, by the time they’re in their fifties, you know, it’s pretty good that. And understanding what they need to learn. I mean, you’re, you’re, you’re better at learning either in a funny way than you were when you are 18, you may have lots of set ideas. That’s, that’s true. But you also, you’ve learned how to husband your time and how to, how to work out what the, what the nature of the problem is. And so I think it’s thrilling to do that now. And I would, I would welcome a world of work and of a culture in which it wasn’t seen as odd. So, I mean, at the moment, the only thing you can really do, I guess, go off and do an MBA or, you know, some people go off and do a doctorate or something like that. But just to actually go off from your job for six months and acquire a skill that would enable you to come back and maybe reconfigure that job in, in an exciting way. That’s something that, that, that we’re nowhere near embracing. And I think it would be brilliant. I think it would be, it would make being middle-age much more exciting. It would, it would, it would enrich the workplace, you know, and it would, it would, it would it would mean that, that, that, that the arc of, of a working life wasn’t quite so predictable, which I think is I like, and I find very. Exciting as a prospect, but it, again, we have to, this has all to do with human agency and making it happen. There are no predictabilities in this at all. I don’t trust market forces just to make it happen. I think it requires management to think in a way that thus far they haven’t. Outro Matt: Well, that brings us to the end of another show. We will put a link to Matt’s book on the website at wb40podcast.com, where will be able to no doubt pre-order it. And it’s well worth a read. And thanks for coming on Matt to talk about it. How was the week ahead looking like for you? Matt D’Ancona:  I’ve got, A lot of movies to watch. Cause one of the things I do for. Tortoise is I write a weekly cultural newsletter, which is actually just an excuse to me to watch lots of films and stream lots of TV and stuff and read books that are interesting. So the next few days I’m going to, I’ve got a huge pile of backlog of stuff. I’ve got to get through, which I’m rather excited about. And and then I thought at the weekend, I might, you know if I can find an empty auditorium somewhere, I might. Go for the double second on my own. This time it sits. Yeah. It’s living the living, the life, living the dream. Matt: Fabulous. And Chris, have you got anything other than the usual ahead? Chris: Oh, no, not at all. It’s I’ve got a really busy week. I’m a little bit I’m not, not exactly stressed out about it, but I can see, I can almost visualize my outlook calendar and all the things that I need to get done. Which is doesn’t doesn’t put me with a great deal of Of pleasure, except that actually they’re all pretty, they’re all okay. Things that I, I just know that they’ve got to get done and I don’t like the idea that I’ve got lots of work to do is dice, not very civilized. So I need to, I need to get through that, but it’s going to be a busy week. What about you, Matt: Matt? I, well, we’re running within the team. We’re running a hack week and not like a, a coding hack week, but I’m trying to be able to apply some principles of. Service design, but you’re trying to be able to deploy across our organization as a whole within what we do as a technology team within the organization. So we had the first session today and there’s going to be running with kind of an hour and a half each day over the five days. So hopefully I can get my team to be able to experience what it is to start with the needs of yours. Customers and then design from there. And secondly, hopefully be able to find some things that we can do differently to make the services we deliver to our internal customers better. So that’s kind of a bit of a difference to the week as a result of that. Other than that, chucking through the procurement exercise at the moment and marveling at the irony that the supplier who we are having to make this whole procurement happen. And because of their late delivery of updates to their software have delayed the entire process by the late delivery of their non-disclosure agreements. So Oh honestly, software companies, but there we go anyway. Wonderful to have you on Matt. Thank you again for joining us very much. And next week we will be joined by the, I think the word is inimitable Marcus, John Henry Brown, who is going to be talking about how to present and to perform during lockdown. So until then have a great week.

On this week’s show we are joined by David D’Souza to talk about the Human Resources profession, multi-skilled business enabling teams, and how he might have rumbled the whole world of the CIO. The week’s automatically generated transcript… Intro Matt: Once again we find ourselves recording at least I think that’s what we’re doing. Hopefully it’s it has been known for some weeks for me to not manage, to press the record button. So that was embarrassing. And we are into the month of March. That is spring has sprung. Well, they’ve got pictured again tonight. Chris, how are you? Chris: I’m very well, thank you, Mike. His house got very chilling, but today I was out this morning quite early and it was cold. It was a bit of a shock because it was quite pleasant to the weekend then. And one gets a sense that everything’s going to be fine and we can all emerge blinking into the sunshine and coronavirus will be a long forgotten artifact of the past. But now it’s called again today. So so here I am wrapped up in my, in my, in my daily job, but trying to maintain some sort of decorum and and. Maybe think that that temperatures will rise and I’ll start to start to feel a bit better. But so we, we are, we’ve got a funny week and as much as it was, it was, it was a full stop at the end, the week of this lovely two days weather. But last week was really, really busy. I had so much going on so many people had to call and my diary was falling then this week as well, you know, I. This isn’t really my normal preferred style of working. I prefer lots of contemplating time in between doing things. You know, I like to work in short bursts of, you know, once every six months or something, but this is no, this is, this is, this has been a very busy, busy week. Matt: Good. I’m glad to hear it. Busy is good. I’d say. And I just imagined now you sitting in Western tasks contemplating like the border, which actually know, I don’t want to think about that image for too long. And joining us this week is Teva. D’Souza David. It’s an absolute pleasure to have you with us. How’s your last seven days been. David: I can’t remember. I’m tired. I think it does feel as though that there’s some kind of break and I’m curious as to how people would listen to this podcast in two to three years time. And it must seem like a very, you know, a snapshot of a moment in time where all we’ve got going on is a pandemic. And I’m now kind of chatting to family members and there’s nothing left to say. So how’s your week been opening lockdown. How about you? Very similar. Yeah. It it’s, it’s been yeah quite Pacey, same as Chris. Probably not enough thinking time, but it’s nice to have the weather turned is to be able to get outside. May not be too brisk at the same time. Matt: Yeah, it makes a big difference. Those those moments of being able to just get out and not have to have 17 layers on and feel that your bits are going to drop off. You know, but Chris: but you know, to what you said, the David bat about having no time and then people looking back and all we had was the pandemic. I didn’t think it, I don’t think anybody realized how much time upon them. It would take up, you know, it’s, it’s like it’s, it’s. So it’s in the way, frankly, it’s, you know, I just don’t didn’t do anything. Anybody we’d realized how much effort it would be, or it would have taken more, more preventative measures. David: More preventative measures. Yeah. It’s a really interesting one. I think, pick your tide and they don’t know why that’s an interesting kind of psychological quirk. But I also think she pointed, it fills the senses as much as it feels. The time even just trying to keep abreast of the good news, the bad news, indifferent news, all the different views on what the stats are doing. Maybe, maybe it is just, you know, the new national pastime is arguing about what exactly is happening with the pandemic when it might stop and how we got here. But yeah, it’s, it’s quite busy. I know. Maybe it’s replaced cricket Chris: just as well. I think. But but the fact is I tried just listening to people talk about the different vaccines you can happen and expressing an opinion as if they know of any clue about what’s in the vaccine. It’s all as if you know, there’s millions of people in this country will go to a vape shop and buy it, buy some things or put in a vape and smoke it without, you know, if they don’t know it’s in it, it could be. It could be anything as far as they’re concerned, but I’ll know we’re interested in what’s in a pandemic. If thought you’re going to go in a building and say, what mixer do you use in the concrete, in this building? I’m not sure I want to go in this building until I know. Did you use, did you use two parts and then one done? What sorts of men did you get Matt: to be fair? Chris? I do work with people who are exactly like that because they work in the building. David: I quite like it there’s a sense of national boards and where like, The old conversations can only have the framing of the pandemic. So, you know, what’s the weather like has been replaced by, you know, how, how are you doing in lockdown, all that kind of stuff. And to your point, you know, you’ve got people expressing a view on things that they’ve got no inclination of, but it almost feels like the old Patrick compensation in this. Oh yeah. I got the Pfizer one. Yeah, I’ve heard it. Yeah. That’s it. You know, like in the same, in the same way you might prefer to, I don’t know. Like getting a new phone or something like Chris: that. Oh, Continentals are mine. Oh really? Yeah, David: yeah, yeah, no, it was transom the last week and they said the Pfizer one’s definitely better. So if you do have the option go for that, it’s just like the old pattern, but on a situation that we’d never have envisioned actually being in it, it’s strange. It’s a bizarre way to deal with it. Matt: We do have to have these topics. They don’t mean, I also say that though, for your point, Chris, about all the time that it takes up, that I think the the CEO of Goldman Sachs and also the CEO of the Canary Wharf estate have both come out and said that, no, this is what we need to be able to free up time is to spend more time commuting again. That’s where we’re all going wrong. As you get these remarkable vested interests. Now starting to talk. But how everybody’s going to go back and that the prime minister no less, a couple of days ago, talking about how he didn’t really believe that anybody would change from working in the office. This is a man who has his office paid for, to be at home at number 10 Downing street and is unable to see any of the irony, anything that he says. But yes, that’s quite interesting David: though, isn’t it? I hadn’t realized how. Productive the commute allegedly was until some of these people came out and said, this is the critical bit. So I wonder if you can cut out the office in the middle and just have people doing extremely long commutes and then turning around and going back again, maybe grabbing something at the other side. Cause apparently that’s essential team, but essentially just having an extended day of traveling, just, Chris: just build a massive circular train line and just, just get on, get on it, you know, go Rand once or twice and get off and go home. Matt: I D I did have a friend once who in the days in the circle, I was a true circle rather than the sort of a bridge to you shape it is these days actually managed to get so drunk. She managed to go three times round before she managed to get off again. I’m not entirely sure how she knows that three times. Well, David: she made use of that for collaboration. You know, there’s random moments where she met someone and innovation really kicked it off. So, yeah, exactly. So, you know, it wasn’t wasted time in any way. It was essential to keeping the company moving like company on the country. No, absolutely. Matt: In other news this week as well the the, the procurement exercise has reached a new level of excitement where we’ve spent. So, well, we spent a good two hours taking us from 17 down to five, which is very exciting. We’ve we’ve let the, the 12 who weren’t successful to get through to the next stage. And within minutes Afro-Cuban had had people very angry saying no, but we do meet your basic requirements and you think there’s nothing quite like immediately getting shirty to be able to prove that the the potential client has made the right decision in taking him off the supplier list. I, I never fail to understand salespeople. It’s quite busy. And it’s also been school placement announcement day to day. So up and down the length of the country people including myself and I believe it was David had been finding out that maybe we’re not going to get the school that we first wanted. Which is somehow going to be quite annoying for quite a lot of people. But yeah. So how, how have you been finding the, the pressure of the school choices? David: It’s been it’s, it’s quite odd doing it actually at a time when the children can’t attend school because mentally I’ve got a clock to, it’s just another place that she can go, but obviously that won’t be the case for her entire life and it’s quite a bit cold. So didn’t get the school that she wanted to buy. Two or three towns which has got an issue but there’s, you then go into the appeals process and all that kind of stuff. And so hopefully she will end up at a school that’s, you know, slight nearest to where she lives rather than just randomly picked at some point in the country. Matt: Yeah. It’s I suppose it was quite weird. We were S I say we were separate because my wife was super organized and insisted. We did a lot of the School tours last year, rather than this year which turned out really quite useful because obviously there were no tours going around other than virtual things, but saying what schools were able to do with virtual tours was interesting in its own. Right. And I don’t want to say that one of the schools that we saw obviously did a lot of work with drones to be able to get just that right level of whizzing through the air, kind of look about what their school was going to be like to be at. David: Well now they’ve just got abnormally tall children for the video. I mean, there’s two options and I think you’ve, you’ve gone for one, probably say too readily there. Matt: Well it’s yeah. It’s the technologist in where you say I’m immediately going for solutions? Not. Yeah. Anyway, we are going to talk about the world of people and human resources this week because David joins us from, well, not from the CIPD, but a rep representing the CIPD worked for the CIPD. However you wanna. David: Let’s go for a wet for the CRPD and I’m having a conversation with UT. Matt: Excellent. That’s a good way to know how these things were. Christine will David: be far less nervous about that. Matt: Excellent. Well, let’s get on with it and see what we can find out about the contemporary world of HR. main interview Chris: So Mr. D’Souza your w worked for CIPD and some people might not know what CIPD does. I mean, we, maybe in the past, we’ve seen those little tables at events that say, Oh yeah, get your C IPD points for attending this event here. And then, and then you might to do something with them, but maybe, maybe that’s not widely understood. What on earth is a CIPD date? David: Yeah, that is all the Western parties. Chris, I just always had the sausage rolls and yeah, there, they are frequently a qualification. So yeah, with the professor, somebody for HR and people development within that, you’d have a broad umbrella of, you know, everything from paying people, to recruiting people, to training people, to making sure that organizations stay legal, but also making sure that. Organizations have the culture that they need to achieve what they want to do. So we’ve got over 155,000 members. We have a host of students at one point in time, we offer a qualifications membership, which kind of recognizes people’s professionalism. And then we also do giant conferences and to have a perspective on the world of work. So we talk about championing, better work and working lives. So genuinely attempting to drive the change in behavior and policy that ends up with the word wellbeing better because it’s important to many people. It’s a determinant of the quality of their working day and at times of their lives. So it’s an important thing to have a voice on and to make better. Chris: Well, it’s perfect thing to be talking about right now. Okay. Because everybody, you know, we, we talked to a guy called we took time to the assemblers last week. Wasn’t it, Matt? And that was a really interesting conversation because he was, he’s more involved in property with the state, but also what, you know, kind of future of work stuff and how people will work and where their work. And it’s a conversation, which is never ending at the moment. Isn’t it in the business world, because we’re all thinking about what’s remote work going to be like, you know, is everybody going to be shooed back onto trains and press gang to back into back into misery and offices? Or, or will it all be it? The completely different future where we all existed as virtual avatars and and have all this time to ourselves. And that is not, there’s not going to be either of those, but it’s it’s a great conversation to be having. So no doubt, it’s something that’s exercises, your team and members and people generally at the moment. David: Yeah. And so people have been talking about the feature work forever. And also disruption, that was always the thing, wasn’t it? You know, the world of where it’s going to be disruptive now it’s probably been disruptive and no one’s really enjoying it. Disruption was never sexy as suggested. And we’d got a banker people aren’t you can’t just working normally. On site throughout this thing, cause I haven’t had a chance to do it and there’s probably not enough time and attention spent on that. And then you’ve got another group of people who’ve come through. One of the biggest changes that we see in the world of work at pace, which is previously having been office based and now working from home in an enforced manner. And we’ve got data that’s probably unreliable in sense of what’s going to happen next. Cause you’ve got a number of forces at work from real estate and messaging that you have there to governmental influence through to actually just the power of our kind of behavioral norms as human beings. So, you know, I think some of the surveys at the moment when you’re asking people, how, how will things be in a year’s time? It’s very difficult to answer that because of a pandemic, you know, that that’s not a good way of getting a reliable, but what is clear is that things are going to be very different to your point, how different. Very hard to tell will it be Dilek utopian, probably not given the economic status. So we’ve got a layer of realism that we need to factor in, but yeah, it’s exacting our members, you know they lead organizations, support senior teams and organizations, and lots of organizations are having to either make proactive choices, alternatively, or being forced into choices about how they’re going to spend their money and how they can keep surviving. So challenging time, but an interesting Chris: one. And challenging time for HR teams, HR departments, and everybody is trying to keep the organization on the right side of legal and make sure that the people are doing are prospering or whatever. So interesting to see this week we were talking about this recently met the chap from octopus energy, who was, who said we don’t have an HR department. And, but I think Matt, when, when we looked into it, some of the people in our little community, they find they were HR people at octopus energy. What was going on there? David: So I have a look into that because I’ve seen this come up over the years. It’s quite a bold statement, isn’t it? You know, don’t like HR, we don’t have them. And invariably, what you find is they still have a need for the things they jump provides. So they still need to recruit people. They still need to train them. They still need to pay them at a very minimum. And quite often HR has got a broader impact than that. So. What appeared to come out over time? Possibly, you know, the headlines were misleading is that they don’t have an HR department because they don’t have an HR director, but they do have lots of people doing HR jobs. And I think when people say we don’t have an HR department possibly you would assume that men, you don’t have anyone doing HR. And I believe the same claim was made about it. We don’t have an it department but it turned out Archie. Very similar about a group of people who, if you collected them together in a room, you’d probably go that’s the it department and there. So I think it’s important. It’s always important to be here. What are they trying to solve for? And it appears to be, they’re trying to solve for more frontline and managerial accountability and people be more adults and not kind of pushing decisions elsewhere, which in fairness, most HR departments would be in favor of as well. One of the biggest challenges is managerial capability. But it’s one of those areas where no matter how much you might want to hope that people could be adult stuff happens, right. Either mistakes happen or there’s a degree of expertise that’s needed to understand the situation and what can and can’t be done. So it was a really interesting story. It provokes a lot of conversation but as is often the case, it wasn’t quite what it claimed to be. As soon as you scratch the surface. Matt: It does feel to me, it, it does start to tap into maybe some of the the brand positioning challenges that HR having it actually indeed it does. And finance do, and you know, most support functions within organizations do. And a lot of that stems, I guess, from there’s a transactional role. Doing stuff. So running recruitment exercises, or, you know, that, that things you’ve got a maybe transformational role, which is about being able to help an organization to do things better and differently. And that’s always a challenge. And then you’ve got a regulatory role, which is to be the people saying, don’t do that. And I guess the. I mean from my experience of working in many different organizations over the years, it seems that one of the HR biggest the HR team’s biggest challenges is dealing with incompetent managers. And one could argue, well, that’s a lack of the transformational part of HR going on. This led to lots of incompetent managers, but it’s not really, it’s just under-resourced and all the rest But when you get those kinds of stories coming out, it does feel that there’s this. Oh, what? I had to do this one too. And I didn’t like it. So therefore I’m going to make a lot of noise about the fact that I did something I didn’t understand. And didn’t like, Yeah, constant balancing, I David: guess. Well, my view is organizations should always be reviewing their structure and their ways of working to look at the context that they’re trying to work in and what they’re trying to achieve. So the kind of blanket, I always do things this way, or always do things that way never strikes me as a sensible way of approaching things. And in this particular story, I think it was. I had a chat with someone on the front desk, 10 years before and had an epiphany. And now there’s something really positive to say about my intent to, to empower people and support them. But as you say, there’s, there’s a tension in terms of what organizations provide and actually, you know, whether it’s facilities and workplace management, only being known as the people that keep the toilets clean, whether it’s it to, you know, switch off and switch it back on again, or whether it’s, you know, HR just that said to hire and fire. The best organizations find a way to actually think about those as genuine strategic assets. Far more broadly in terms of how do we shape our culture? You know, what’s the importance of the work environment for people and how can we ensure that that’s developing productivity and from a digital point of view, rather than just a pure it point of view, you know, customer and user experience and a far richer way. So yeah, there’s a challenge for HR in sense of capacity and in terms of branding. But actually when I speak to CEOs and their HR teams working brilliantly. They wouldn’t swap them out ever. You know, it’s, it’s an absolute bit, the business that, that are alone. So as with any profession, there’ll be some people lacking behind the pace. But that’s no reason to kind of, you know, make decisions about whether you have a functional goal. Then we’ve got to be a bit more enlightened than, Matt: but what’d you think of the things that would Mark out a, a really good well-regarded HR team at the moment? David: So I think at the moment there’s a few things. So one is a, a richer view around wellbeing and productivity. So actually for lots of HR teams, they’ve had a real chance to prove their worth over the last year, really difficult and tragic circumstances to do it in, but it’s gone from our you’re the, you’re the person that gets me, someone to actually you’re understanding some quite complex change management and helping see us through. But the second one, and I think the most important one for me and for them. Just results. So there are still too many actual teams that will have a series of initiatives and series of pledges, things that like to impact. And three years later, you’re in the same place. And that’s true of lots of different functions of the business, but the ones that can genuinely, you know, a board or a senior team can identify a problem. And the HR team can think really creatively out of the box about what’s the best way of, you know, genuinely solving that. They’re the ones that actually properly move on culture or performance in a different way. And that’s how you change your brand. It’s not, you know, whether you call the HR team, the people team it’s about actually the substance of that job and what people can expect from. Matt: Yeah. Are you seeing things like design thinking, coming in as part of that within the way image? The HR groups are approaching these challenges. David: They can come in primarily, I think most often kind of under the umbrella of employee experience. So broadening out the employee engagement piece and looking at slightly wider end to end the experiential piece, and then design thinking, being the way that you think about the different elements of that. It’s a bit of an odd one. There are some techniques that you can actually take from it that would add value. But actually I think the whole thing goes back to slightly more user centric approach that would have been useful in design no matter what, no matter how you brand it, that’s always been the challenge. And I know there are lots of different Lots of different ways of describing work. But 30 years ago, the challenge probably was understand the problem at a complex level, not just a superficial level, understand the evidence and try and find out the best way to solve it. Focusing on the impact that you wanted to have. I’m not entirely sure how much that’s shifted even though probably some of the philosophies or approaches are laid on top of that. So if you look at no, it’s not a design thing, just pluck it. Yeah. Business model, canvas. Useful to up signal, but you know, obviously not knocking it. But before the business model, canvas businesses still had the same challenge, but still what we attended today. So definitely say more design thinking, definitely seeing some more user centric thinking holistic joined up systemic thinking is what organizations need more of. And you see that particularly around some of the more complex areas. So if we think about wellbeing or if we think about inclusion and diversity, they’re not things that you’re going to solve with. You know, a substitutionary or, you know, we’ll put in an app and that will solve it. It doesn’t work if for complex problems in the middle of a pandemic, you know, paying for some online yoga sessions, isn’t going to be the thing that’s going to solve the problem at the heart of that actually reevaluating the way that you do work. Fundamentally, the ways of working within the organization, the balance of resource. It’s harder, but it’s more necessary. Equally inclusion and diversity. The one day training courses are going to solve that. You’ve got to go deeper and harder and our range of different spaces. And that’s where the really good HR professionals and dope, which is designing. Not for this might make a difference, but actually, if we do all these things well, we can’t help but succeed. And I think that’s where that kind of focus and drive comes into it. Chris: Isn’t isn’t that always, I mean, I’m thinking about what you say in relation to a HR teams, it teams, finance teams, whoever it might be. And generally speaking, if you try to do something as cheaply as humanly possible, then you’ll get only get a certain amount of, You only get a certain outcome. And that will mainly be a kind of, this is what this is. This is what you can do. And this is what you can’t do. And then you, you, HR, as long with, along with it has been called the business prevention department to companies, you know, for, for many years. And what you’re already talking about is HR people just like that. It counterparts people who. Actually can articulate the value of what they do to the, to the organization and therefore get more money to do it because they can show the more they do it. Yeah. The better the outcomes are generally. And overall, rather than just keep you out of jail, you know, stop, stop. You’re getting dragged under, by, you know, horrible tribunals where people, you know, might want more to suggest that you might have treated them badly on all of those things. So two things that actually, as you say, if you can do all of those things, if you can change the culture in a business or change the way people act or change the way that that people see how the, how they see their roles and they end up working in a more effective way and producing better outcomes, then you’re doing a much bigger job than. What are the rules? Let’s make sure we don’t, we don’t break them. David: Yeah. And I think it’s, for me, it’s solving business problems rather than solving the things that you see necessarily in HR publications. There’s a massive difference. But one of my favorite stories of the last few years was chatting to someone from, from a European postal service. And they’d been trying to get the organization excited about employee engagement and the organization just wasn’t having any of it. So they went to the organization and said, look, what problems are you trying to solve? And I said, well, actually it’s absence because if someone is not able to do a postal route, cause they’re off, we have to get somebody in who hasn’t done that before. And it’s quite complex to cover. And, and all of those things quite challenging. So they said, well, if we can help you with the absence problem, would that be good for you? And they went, hold on, I’ll be up so amazing. And all they did was everything they would have done under engagement. It’s, it’s a really. W we can talk about and lose focus on the problems with John. So I was at a conference couple of years back, and someone asked me, they said, how do I get my senior team to focus on wellbeing? And I said, well, what else is on their mind? And they said all that cheap as he focused on that, what happens if their people burn out. Oh, so you’re just trying to call it, you know, what you think the HR world thinks it should be. And I think sometimes we are too prescriptive, you know, we know here are the solutions that need, rather than working back from the problems that organizations have. Matt: Yeah. W also noted a couple of weeks ago, a. A technology company who they’re taking their wellbeing program. So seriously that they’d gamified it, split everybody into teams and made them compete on how much wellbeing they were each doing. And I was thinking you might have missed the point within this whole world, but yeah, it’s it’s an interesting set of challenges. One of the things that I was attracted to actually to my current job by was that rather than having HR and it and finance and the other services, health and safety communications, and so on other services that support the business, having each of their individual silos and then it reporting into different. Strands up at a board level, actually, with the exception of finance, all of our business support services report into the same exact director and that idea of having a multidisciplinary team that is delivering all of the services, the platforms that are needed for an organization to operate is something I’ve been. Talking about and writing about for ages is the first time I’ve actually had the opportunity to work in it. Now, the reality is it’s quite challenging because it people and HR people and FM people and. Comms people and health and safety people all talking completely different languages. So they don’t understand a bloody word each other saying waste of time. So you’ve got some structural issues there. And especially because we’re quite small, we don’t have them that the overhead to enable that collaboration to work necessarily particularly well. But in principle, it sounds like a really good idea. Is that, is that something you’re seeing happening? Organizations or is this an outlier? David: It’s all done a podcast, isn’t it? Cause I feel under pressure to say it’s something I’m saying just in case of missed, you know, missed it. Not, not terribly. I think you’ve seen some more functions coming together, but not actually that often with that breadth of. Tolerant and that stretch coming together. I think it’s a fantastic model. I just think it requires time and mature. And it’s probably one of those things. That’s less, it’s more normal in the market. It’s always going to be problematic for someone joining as well, because, you know, even if you do get a group of people who are comfortable working in that multidisciplinary way, Do start having a more common language and breaking down some of those barriers. You’re still gonna have people coming from specialisms to join that team. But it, it actually makes sense. I mean, you used the word kind of support functions. I tend to talk about enabling. So without those functions, the business. Simply can’t function in the way that it needs to in can’t perform it in the way that it wants to. Because I think sometimes there’s that kind of split between frontline. This is really important. And then we have some people clearing up behind us. Whereas actually I think organizations genuinely need to understand the strategic value of having brilliant similarly spaces actually in really competing for talent there rather than just competing for time. What puts you at the sharp end, but I’m really glad you, are you enjoying it? Yes, Matt: it’s. It’s been a lot of learning for me. It’s a new sector for me. It’s also the first time I’ve been in paid employment for conventional paid employment for about seven years. So getting back into working as a part of the team, as opposed to being a freelance gun for hire, David: because you were an assassin for a while. Yeah, exactly. Matt: I was, I was like Mr. And Mrs. Smith her, but I think that the, as I say, I think that the challenges that naturally, because we’re relatively small, being able to get, to get those functions to not just be working on the transactional across any of those functions is the hard bit, because also establishing a new way of working that involves bringing people from different disciplines together. You have to do work on, on that. And if you’re stretched for time and everything is reactive, it’s really hard to be, to carve that out. But I’ve I started to see this when I was working in the civil service and or do work in the civil service and that there was, there were so many cases where people were talking about, you know, the future of how we do things and user centered design. And then I was like, why do we have these separate functions that report up through totally different reasons all the way at the top of the organization? Cause that’s reinforcing a lot of the problems that you’re trying to address. And quite often, David: You know, historically has been that seat at the table conversation, which I think is one of the most tired conversations. They can kind of have in that space. But I imagine actually it very much depends on who’s leading that function and actually their bias and their background so that everyone actually feels they’re being appreciated and contributing rather than I’m an adjunct to what this function really is. Because I can see that being particularly challenging if it doesn’t have great leadership, but with great leadership. Well, I think that’s how you’ve got to look at things, you know, if we do it well, rather than one of the pitfalls, I can see that being a really strong model. And it harks back to that piece of octopus that we spoke about at the start, which is you have to be open to. Is there a better way of solving this with Matt: the models of professional membership? The other thing I find curious if you compare the HR world to a great extent, the marketing world as well, where there’s been a real drive for accredited professionalism, as opposed to winging it. Professionalism. That seems to be the thing that reign Supreme in the world of, of it. I guess the first thing I find interesting is why have HR and marketing being able to establish a culture where it’s expected that people have qualifications in the CMI or from the CIPD and the. You know, the, the fish compared to society’s floating around at the edges with nobody. Quite sure why I want to be a member. Can do, do you think there is it just the nature of the people who work in those professions that needs one to one to organize in that way and others to David: not. I think it’s quite interesting. So professional bodies kind of come in three-ish tiers, so you’ve got licensed to practice. So I couldn’t really do it without it. Then you’d go you know, used us as an example of an organization where you’d probably be expected to happen. So you’d have, you know, a dominant position. And. It would be, you know, a normal job advert. And then you’ve got some organizations that never quite Breton that critical mass. And I think, you know, one of the advantages we have, we’re 107 years old, so there’s a legacy in history and kind of status, but that’s been built up over time. But I think some of it is affinity community. Some of it is some of the it jobs can be relatively. Technically siloed. So Hal’s a naturally kind of, you can’t do it without people. You can code pretty effectively is a solitary procedure. I wouldn’t suggest that people do that the whole time, but it can be quite heads down. And I, I just think that’s a different maturing of the professions and the recognition, and it can often be quite a course or qualification or platform driven. In terms of, you know, learning and acquiring skills whereas for some of the others, it’s, you know, entry points and then working through in a more structured way. It’s, it’s a professional body. It’s a fascinating well actually if you work in them, they’re probably fascinating. I imagine they’re really boring if you look at something, so we’ve talking for too long on it. But there’s something about having a critical mass in the marketplace that actually a bit like if the comparison of makers, if you were trying to start an online group we’ve all seen them starting to flounder and that’s because you just don’t have enough people to get the conversation going. There comes a point where you reach critical mass and people can expect to go in and get value from it. And at that point, that’s where they started to kind of flourish and nourish themselves. And I think for some professions, you’ve, you’ve got that base. Where actually you can go in and everyone else has got it. So therefore that’s what I need to break into that status. Really difficult thing for an organization do. And because why D why do people think you need it because of the market share, how do you get the market share where they need, if people need it? So it’s really difficult. The barriers to entry, I guess, to that tier are really high, Matt: I guess, as well. There’s something about how. You have got to serve two constituencies. You’ve got to serve the needs of members, but you’ve also got to serve the needs of the people who employed the members. And you’re acting as an assurance service for employers, as well as the, you know, the professional body for the, the, the HR professionals themselves. David: Yeah. Completely. And we fulfill that role. But I mean, he is the amplified T if you think about it, if you think about the amount of cost and investment in that space, You would have thought actually, you know if you’re a CEO and you’re hiring for that, you want something probably more than track record, if there was, you know, external validation of that. But I’m not sure that it’s seen in quite the same way, which is a really interesting one, considering that the criticality to almost all bits of the employee experience and customer experience. Chris: No, maybe it’s maybe it’s just Dan, does you talk about maturity, but I think maturity not just of. Organizations, but, but of the market, generally, the things that you wanted out of a an it person 10 years ago, aren’t the same that you want today. Probably. And, and the, the things that changing in the people world are, you know, people pretty much stay the same regulation changes, but regulation changes slowly by accretion. It’s not, it’s not the rapid pace of change that we see in it. So it’s just, maybe it’s just not that it’s not suited to these kind of. Bodies as, as you say, 107 year old organization can fit into you know, you know, 2000 year old, probably if, if not 5,000, you hear a whole process of managing people. David: It’s quite interesting. It’s a really. That’s a really interesting point. And what it spoke to me is if you think about, if you think about tech entrepreneurs, no, no one thinks about the qualifications that sit behind that you think about. Individual excellence. And you think about, you know, understanding something that to an outsider was completely impenetrable. Now HR is quite often the opposite of that, which is that everyone thinks they can do it. Everyone thinks that I have to train people. Everyone thinks they’ve got an eye for talent. Everyone thinks they can lead people effectively, all of those things, whereas. If I were to think if, if I were to think of almost the whole year with would stereotype of someone who’s great at it, it would be that kind of, you know, it would be a hacker, wouldn’t it flying through some kind of computer generated landscape that’s supposed to simulate how hacking really works, but even, you know, likes of his, of books, you know, Google any of the tech startups, it’s different ethos. And maybe you don’t know for sure. So associated with the steadiness that months in some of the other professions. Matt: Although there’s that kind of mythology about the the founder genius entrepreneur type, but actually SBR missed most of it’s very RP systems. It’s really dull. And if you w w when I was working at Microsoft shortly before I started there, they’d done some demographics surveying of the UK it population. And they actually found that it professionals, this is about 12 years ago now, but on that. We’re significantly more change averse than the general population. So this mythology about how it sort of the cutting edge is, is a very thin sliver. I guess the other part, though, if you think about the accreditation part of this, there have been lots of other routes. So software companies particularly have made a big old monetized. Set of products out of accrediting people to be certified engineers or whatever. So Microsoft and articles and, and all the rest make a, a good solid revenue out of being able to credit people, which would be the sorts of things that maybe an HR would be done by the CIPD. And similarly, we’ve got things like quality standards. The much more suited to being able to, you know give a standard set of accreditation for information security or coding or service delivery. And, and, and, and so it’s probably been achieved in different ways. Cause David: it’s really interesting. So there’s a thing about there. Isn’t a certain level of is indecipherable from magic. It departments do things that. Your average person in the business doesn’t even begin to understand. So I mean that in a really basic level, right? If my laptop doesn’t stop by give it to someone and they give it back to me in a couple of days speaks, and I don’t know what’s happened there. I don’t have any insight into that with finance. I can sit down, I can kind of understand the P and L with most bits of a business. I can get talked through. What they’re doing and why maybe have a view on it, even down to you, the legal team, this is the guidance. Well, is it really, you know, how does it look? It is like magic. And so there’s something really odd about the fact that something so fundamental to our lives that we all use. We don’t have a clue about how it actually works, you know, th th the level of dependence and that, you know, we’ve seen that this year with zoom calls and things like that, you know, just people, but literally, like, how does this witchcraft work? Cause I’ve never had to use it before. The intimidation that comes with technology as well. So you say otherwise, you know, completely in control individuals when faced with not being able to work out how to connect their printer, just falling apart and being wholly reliant on another human being. I think maybe there’s something in that you get, you get away with being far more magical than any other department, if you work in it. Matt: Yeah. I wonder if there’s a short lifetime on that now, now, because if you think about how I imagined that things like cars were like that. When Carlos was still more user serviceable. If you go onto the bonnet of a car these days, there’s a bloody great plastic sheet that is basically telling you, get out. You’re not coming in here, take it to the garage and they’ll plug it into a machine. It will diagnose it for us. And similarly, actually, we’ve got to a point now with probably with mobile technology that actually the ability to fix it is just not the same with mobile. Because you don’t need to in the same way as you do with the PC. And that’s just because it’s legacy technology in many ways, still that it does go wrong. And most of the stuff that goes wrong, if truth be told is cause the it department have been buggering around to make things better. When they’re trying to second, guess what it is that Microsoft or Apple or whoever else do. And I don’t know that being able to be great because you’re fixing stuff that you broke in the first place is not necessarily. A longterm strategy. Yeah, no, it’s just blending, uploading that blend a little fit. Chris: I mean, if you think about it a few years ago, sorry. A few years ago when I was, when I was a wee boy. Right. And you were to have a TV in the corner of the room, if you were, you know, if you’re lucky. And every now and again, some who go wrong and then a man would come round in a Brown coat in the tool bag and tap the bow. But the dock back off it and fiddle around with it. And maybe there’d be a smell of soldier or something. And the CV would be repaired. And the TV repairman was doing the same magic that Dave was talking about earlier. Nobody else knew how the TV repairman, but he was really important. He got it fixed, right? Because it was the TV. And now that doesn’t no, we don’t need that because it’s, it’s become essentially a non serviceable anyway, but they don’t break as often as it used to. And maybe it is still going through that phase of, of. Getting to the point where nobody needs to touch it and we’re getting there, right. Nobody’s going to serve as an iPad. If you’ve used an iPad or a tablet, all the tablets are available pretty much. It’s going to work whenever you turn it on until the day it doesn’t. And, and then you’re going to get another one and maybe that’s, we’re getting to that point where those magical moments go away. Matt: Although there is the irony that we’re now discussing how technology fails, because it’s the technology. When most of the time we spend our time saying to the thing that fails about technology, isn’t the technology, it’s the way in which we get people to try to use it. And to what extent is that a people issue, which has been left in the hands of, of a part of the organization that thinks that the people are the stuff that breaks stuff. David: Was him ubiquitous to NRG, look at XL. And to what extent, that could be useful to organizations and isn’t utilized fully. You look at something like three 65. You look at teams, you look at all of these kinds of things, and we know we don’t maximize use of it, but some of those people are just scared, you know, that I’m sure that training elements, all those kind of elements, but it just feels like magic. I mean the millennium bug, could’ve been a giant hoax for all learning. No people were telling me that, theoretically, there’s something going wrong. You need to pay some consultants or consultants could have just clumped together and then got around. Oh yeah, we fixed it. That’s why it didn’t go wrong. Because we’ve never known it, whereas that it’s not true of any other bit of the organization. You can sniff stuff, you can see it. It’s obviously going wrong. It’s not working in some ways. Whereas to your point it teams don’t go. We made a change that didn’t work. They just go and fix that for you. I’m a wizard is as the kind of narrative. So, so yeah, I, I don’t know if there’s a mystique to it and a distance that I think is really interesting. Now, to what extent that plays into the whole professionalism piece. I don’t know, but actually when I have interviewed people who work in it during my career, And I’ve ended up in positions where you, but there’s no other role and it don’t come. It’s just, for me, I think it’s a slightly more universal experience, no other role where I know what I’m talking about. I’m basically sitting there going. So what I’d really like to know is, are you good with computers and for the stuff that we need computers to do? Have you done that kind of stuff before? Because there, there isn’t, that was that your con pretty much I can interview, you know, for an FD role. That’s not a problem. I can do that. Same for HR CEOs. I can tell you, you know, what a good stirrups of legal and governance that’s like it. No, we’re so out of our depth, there was ordinary mortals. I’m basically going, I’m trusting you to be good. It’s really strange, really strange. Your magical mystical is, is it’s. It’s like interviewing Pokemon, but not being able to know how their special politics come up. All you’re going to be good when you evolve. I don’t know how this works. It’s pretty much that, Chris: but isn’t that crazy? Is that isn’t that absolutely crazy. That, that, that such a fundamental thing now is down to people. Who’ve. You don’t really know who they’re taking on a Y. And I, you know, God knows I’m not the best CIO or CTO or whatever that ever Strode the earth. And I’m, I’m quite capable of making mistakes, but I look at some of the people who ended up in some of these jobs and I think, Oh my God, you know how, and it’s, you know, because they’ve managed to say the right things at the right time and they, you know, they’re, they wear the right suit and they’ve got the right names on their CV, but. But under no circumstances, are they going to make a positive contribution to the business? They’ve just joined, but it’s, as you say, it’s, it’s a bit maybe because it’s, it’s just a bit David: magic. So do you remember that TV series faking it? Sort of thing. So for anyone, I guess listening, we didn’t let’s take a member of the public and they would teach, teach that I think I had like 48 hours to try and get them to a possible professional level. So they could go into an environment and people wouldn’t recognize that they were a fake and I’ve always, I’ve always been tempted to put myself in fake a CV and go in for like a CIO job. Or like ahead of OT and just, you know, talk to, you know, that’ll be your firewall, you know, or yeah, no, it’s all about agile methodology going forward. You know, that’s how I need to get the team working and migrate everything to the cloud. I think that’s going to be a challenge. I mean, it’s sold, it’s the same line. You could get away with three or four sentences and you’ve probably seen. Relatively credible. Well, it’s, I’m not entirely sure how that would work and maybe, and it’s not actually for anyone listening. It’s not, cause I’m flipping it and don’t rate the capability in it. It’s because it’s just really hard as an outsider to discern whatever Matt: side. And so how do you assess the skills that you don’t have particularly at senior leadership level to be able to bring them in. And I think that’s it. Yeah, I think there’s, there’s a real challenge there for organizations, particularly if they need to change direction when it comes to technology. Yes, they a couple of roles I’ve had now where I’ve inherited from somebody who was a very long serving head of technology. And that means they weren’t able to be able to get the influence from outside into the organization. And if you’ve had somebody long serving for a long while in the same role, then actually. Bringing somebody to replace them. And all of your expertise internally has been based around that person. Who’s been there forever. That’s a real challenge. David: Well, I think what we need to do is review the legacy architecture, ensure that we’re digital first, culturally, as well as from a systems point of view. And then once we’ve done that over time, you’re going to have a roadmap that we can develop together that gets you to that level of user experience that you really need. That, that is kind of, I kind of figured I could turn up and I have a show. Chris Christian is looking at me in a very skeptical way. I’m Chris: just thinking we need to stop this interview before you blow the whole gap, frankly. outro Matt: Well, having blown our cover. Thanks, David. We bring the show to something of a judging Holters. Many of us, particularly those of you out there who are in senior it role. So I’ve been realized we’ve all been rumbled. Pleasure talking to you, David, have you got any idea what’s happening in the the week ahead? David: Schools were going back. I believe that that’s, that’s a thing that’s happening within a week. Some will be shining. The starts are going to continue going in the right way and probably piers Morgan, also something outrageous the nation. Core, Matt: you’ve got crystal ball. It’s amazing skills. And Chris was, it’s just, it’s just now into the regular bit of the show every week where it asks you if next week’s going to be the same as this week Chris: and you go, yep. I say I died. I can’t even remember what I say. I think I’d probably yes, I suppose. It’s it’s, it’s very busy at the moment. So I’m a bit like last weekend I went to the start of the show and I was like, Oh, it was busy last week. It’s going to be busy this week. And, but not nothing unusual is going on really in my work life, I guess. I guess one of the things that’s happening is now I’m starting to have those conversations about, I had a conversation this week or this week, then the end of last week about. Oh, right. I October we might do this thing and you might be able to come to that and I’m starting to contemplate the travel. I’m starting to contemplate the bits in the diary that say you’re going to be in a different place then. And it’s all a bit unreal at the moment because it’s kind of, Oh yeah. You know, maybe if, if, if, if, but we all know that at some point. Things are going to change. We, you know, we can cross our fingers and hoping the person I was talking to actually was from Serbia where they’ve, they’ve, they’ve vaccinated a third of their population and they, you know, they are really cracking through them. And he said, well, actually, where, you know, if all this happens a bit, we’ll get vaccinated numbers go down. We could well be we could probably be in a position where we’re, where we’re traveling around in October. So that’s only six months away. Right. And. It’s starting to go in little circles and the diarrhea and that that’s a bit, it’s a bit weird and I’m looking forward to him anyway. He’s but not necessarily without that, a level of maybe I’m like a dog, cause it’s been locked in a cage for, you know, a year, you open the door and it doesn’t necessarily want to come out. And maybe, maybe that’s the way I’m reacting to it. Matt: Yeah, I can, I can kind of relate to that. I think there is a bit of Hermitude in my psyche that has been brought out in the last 18 months that is going to make it quite hard, to be able to make decisions of flight, leaving the house. And especially, I think the I don’t know, at the moment, the idea of going into an office, I just find so alien. I, David: I get scared might be too strong, a word, but occasionally you’ll see like sporting events or post events on TV with large crowds. And my instant gut reaction is what are you all doing, man, standing so close together. And, but I’m curious as to how that’s going to translate actually to going back into. Like say a commute in a city where you don’t know people and you don’t know how well they’ve been looking after themselves or any, any of those things going on. And you imagine that the media will flare up any virus anywhere. And that will throw people into perpetual panic as well. So now I I’m I’m. I’m happy to confess that I am feeling the same way as Chris, which is quite unsettled about quite settled about all the stuff I’m supposed to Chris: look forward to. I remember, I mean, this didn’t happen to me for a long time, cause I’m now old and decrepit, but imagine being in a nightclub or somewhere where you were at the bar and across your people trying to get served and the sweatshirts trickling down your back, and you’re not entirely sure whether it’s yours or somebody else’s and you know that, that see the mud cross of people and the idea of doing that now, it seems. Just the balmy. David: Yeah. So being in someone’s own pit for a train journey. Yeah. I achieved all that, all that kind of stuff, you know, queuing up to go into a football stadium know even, I guess, you know, for people, you know, different backgrounds, you know, going to religious places of worship and that kind of, you know, funding in and funneling out together. It just seems like a lot of the things that we spent an entire year conditioning ourselves to being inherently dangerous, that the things that we’re supposed to. Well, my former snap back into looking forward to, and I find this degree of cognitive dissonance in that way, I’m both excited and scared, but scared and Chris: excited. Matt: Yeah, no, that makes sense. But let’s keep in mind schools go back on Monday. So that’d be good. Anyway. Thank you very much for joining us, David. It’s been fantastic, Chris, as ever see you. Next week we having had no people with a name begin with duh. We have two in the course of two weeks, and next week we’re going to be joined by the journalist writer Matt D’Ancona, who is going to be talking about the book he’s got coming out a little later in March. So that should be fun. It’s been fun this week and we’ll look forward to seeing you again next week.

On this week’s WB-40 we talk with Antony Slumbers about the commercial property market and the way that the pandemic might change who provides office space in the future. The Automatically Generated Transcript… Intro Chris: So, hello and welcome to another episode of WB 40. We are here today with as Matt said in the intro, Anthony Slumbers. And we’re going to be talking about property trends in how people are going to work. It’s been, it’s been a bit of a theme for us recently and about prop tech as well and what that means and how that’s going to change in the next few years. So, Matt, how has this week treated you? Matt: Well, I had some time off, which is very exciting to spend more time with my children, just what I needed at the moment. It was half term, so that was it rained basically for most of it. So the, you know, the lovely ideas that I had in my head about going out on long cycle rides and. Painful walks in bushy path from whatever amounted to now. So we just sat in and the kids just nacked about bumps, play computer games all the time. That is being a 21st century parents where I was, I can tell it’s about how long do you go before you go? No. All right. Then it’s usually about 25 minutes. Chris: If it wasn’t right. It would have been before that was TV, right? Isn’t it’s the same thing. Matt: Yeah, exactly. But other than that, I had a a very nice time of the weekend where I caught up with a mate of mine. I went for a long walk down by the Thames in a socially distanced, not stopping for RefreshMints kind of permitted way. And I’ve taken actually. Because having actually got my fat ass out of my chair for the first time in weeks, having had a little break from work, I’ve decided to start experimenting with standing up whilst doing meetings. So I’ve written myself up with my iPad on a microphone stand so that I can stand up for meetings and I have done it for one day. I feel invigorated. And much refreshed already, but by day two, we’ll be seeing whether I can manage to keep it going or not. I I’d forgotten for my days of training, standing up all day. It’s actually bloody hard work, even if you’re not actually walking anyway. So it feels like I’m doing myself some good. And yeah, you know the news today that the, the lockdown time today, well, I refuse to call it a roadmap is being widely. Publicized and, and seeing people talking about that. And some people seeing it seems to be terribly slow, Mizon happening more quickly. And other people saying it seems to be how many terribly fast and why isn’t it happening more slowly. So yeah, nine days left before the kids go back to school. How’s your week Antony: been? Chris: Well, likewise it’s been after and therefore I’ve been at home with the children, although I only had one day off. In the week. And I there was a reason for that. I went somewhere. I had to something to do. I start my car for service. So that was exciting obviously Matt: a day out Chris: as is. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. But it’s it’s but of course, with all the messing about and, and coronavirus and things like that, it was, it was a bit more of a hustle it needed to be. So yeah, I mean, that was my exciting week and Oh, it’s been, it’s been it’s been fun, right? The kids are, as you say Not really moved out the house because it was whether it’s been filthy. Although today I had two, this one came out, which I was really grateful for because was, as I have detailed in some, in some depth on a, on a signal group, my boy that did fail this morning, moved me to go into the garage this morning and find water all over the place and the whole thing in a sorry mess. So now I’ve got a few days without heat or water, so hot water. So that’s I’m very glad that it’s going to be 10, 11. 12 degrees for the next few days. If it happened two weeks ago, I’d have been an extremely grumpy man trying to keep warm in the, in, in the Sub-Zero temperatures. But but yeah, and I did an event in Austria, so that was exciting. Of course I didn’t move. But that was, it was fun on the list. Nice to meet you see some different people and yeah. And that’s been pretty much it. For me. So Anthony, what’s the week held for you? What has your week been? I think it’s Antony: all been all been pretty similar, actually love laundry, been hiding away in my house or in my office at the end of the garden, promoting the weather that we have in February. Same as same as every year. Main, main moments where it’s and it’s rainy and it’s. Gray and it’s depressing behaving like a spoiled childhood. So not, not, not, not going anywhere. Well, I did do though, was I actually bought a travel Haldol. I bought a 24 hour away. We can sort of weekend away back. I was like, Oh, this is a. His email came, came through and they had this lovely week. We, we can back out, it was 50% off and I just looked at it and thought, well, I can’t actually go anywhere, but I’m going to bloody buy it anyway. And I’m just going to leave it out. So as soon as it can go, it’s going to get filled up. I’m going to be built the off, but, but in the, in the, in the meantime, in the meantime, actually I see the last five weeks I’ve been running, I run an online. I’m online real estate course. And we had a cohort started in January, so that’s been running for five weeks. So it’s actually been rather a lot of fun. So it’s all online. But on Thursdays we have a two hour big group zoom session. And there’s people from everywhere from New Zealand to San Francisco to bring us ours. So it’s actually actually quite, quite funny now in a weird way, as long as you forget the externalities and just try and concentrate on. Something, something else. Matt: Was that something you did before the pandemic? Antony: Actually, I see it. I’ve done it with a friend of mine. He lives in lives in New York. And we started working on it before Christmas. So we started working out before Christmas 2019. And it just happens. So we were working, working on it. So Jen March and funnily enough, it was ready to go. The day we went into lockdown, which was extraordinary, extraordinary, same, just really lucky. And then we didn’t do anything for two months because remember back in March, every March and April, no one knew what the hell was going on. But we’d probably be launching in. In may. So it was actually, I don’t know, it was hot half clever, clever thinking and half really lucky to decide to do an online course given, given the timing. So it’s it’s well, it’s worked really, really well. Matt: That’s interesting. It’s going to be interesting to see how The flexibility and the ability to be able to reach people and the ability to be able to fit it in around other things more easily. It’s going to what it’s going to do to more traditional. Learning, which was, I mean, a lots of learning and development work had shifted online anyway, although lots of it was crap, but actually now with the ability to better bring diverse groups of people together from across the world, actually, there’s a huge bunch of opportunities for that for making a much better than more traditional delivery models. Antony: Well, I think, I think absolutely. I mean, what’s been so, so interesting about this is that we didn’t know who was going to go to sign up, sign up for it. But as it happens, I think we’ve had 27 different countries. And North America, South America, Africa, Asia, or Australasia it has been, it has been fascinating. But I’m a huge, I’m a huge believer that business or. Get very aggrieved with this whole, you know, you can only innovate if you’re face-to-face and then what is that? We will also call a moments or, you know, or nothing ever happens. And I just think it’s complete completely nuts and nonsense. And this has given us an opportunity to actually talk to talk to people in a way we’ve never, never done before I talked to more people the last year. Then I’ve I’ve ever met. I mean, I’ve always been a huge Twitter user for years, and I find Twitter the most amazing networking tool. There’s a most extraordinary networking tool. I mean, my partner is drawing in New York. We met on Twitter, I don’t know, five years ago or something. And we didn’t meet in real life until three years ago. And I think we’ve only met. Three or four times, but where the hell it sort of can start a cost cost together. You know, you can, you can do, you can do these things. And I think there’s a, I think there’s a mindset change, which is the upside of the pandemic that there will still this idea that. You know, the way things work was the way things worked. And they worked like that because that’s the way things worked. And that was the best way to do it. But we have so many habits have been broken because this has gone on for so long. But I think the, the, the change that is coming is actually much more significant than people think it is because, you know, I think if you know that little story about the, what’s the difference between a rubber band and they and the safety pin that, you know, if you pull a rubber band and you let it go, it just says mind straight back to, as it was before. But if you get a safety, a safety pin and you pull one of those one of the bits of metal up and you let go, it mowing, it, bounces back. But he doesn’t go back to the way where it was before. And I think, I can’t see how certainly amongst the smarter companies there is any way on earth. They are not all of them reconfirm me thinking how they work, where they work, who they work with. Howard. And all of this stuff, what tools they use and everything, because you see that there are so many upsides to being distributed, but it only, it’s only going to work for people who we can figure out how their businesses work. You know, I think there’s a huge, a huge problem coming with companies that are blindly going, Oh, well, let’s go hybrid where have some people working in the office and some people working at home and it’s just going to be a disaster. You know, if you have, if you have some people in the office all the time, and some people are home, that’s an absolute recipe for disaster. The whole process of moving. To back into the office is going to be a big jump. It’s it’s different now because everybody is out of the office. We’re actually all working fully remote. So if I want to get in touch with them, anyone, anyone, it has to be virtually, no one has an option of going in and Oh, I can schmooze up with the boss today. I can’t, I have to do it like that. So at the moment we’re working in a completely different way. So when we go back, essentially, we need to try and keep, keep that sort of thinking and then enhance that thinking rather than, rather than drop back into, or some of us be in the office and some of us won’t, but the ways of working the ways of working will change. I think, I think a lot, because simply what’s the point. I mean, I mean, so much of this obviously depends on what type of company you are, what job role you have and where you live. These are where they all offer offices. But funny enough, I was talking to a friend in Stockholm this morning and he was saying, well, he said about half an hour or something from, from the office. So, and he still doesn’t think he’s going to go and he’s not going to go about five, five days a week, but it’s still only a half an hour. So he’ll go in and out now I’m only 35 miles South of London in Guilford, and it would still take me 90 minutes to get into the city London. So it’s three hours, three hours a day. So I never did. I I’ve worked basically either had an office at home for 20 odd years, but I’m, but I’ve gone into London generally try twice a week. Because I can do everything I need to do in two days and meet everyone and do well, to be honest, I think the way I I’ve done it for ages, this is the way most people are going to do it. Similar situations of, you know, nine, 19 minute plus community. It felt like, you know, if I live 15 minutes from the Apple, Apple headquarters, I think go in the office five days a week, but I don’t. So. So, yeah, I th I th I think it’s really interesting. And in a press, you just mentioned that it’s lots of decisions are kind of, had to have to be made, and it is sort of make your mind up time now, because we now know probably about from September onwards offices are going to be okay to go back into. So you’ve got all the people with real estate are now in a position to go. Hmm. Right. What are we going to do last, last year, people were just mulling around ideas because you didn’t know when you were going to look at it back now, is it that there’s a, there’s a deadline at some stage we’re going to convince, so what should we be doing? And to be honest, I think, I think there’s also, it’s a problem for companies. Cause they don’t know. And they really starting to, the wheels are starting to spin now. Matt: Well, let’s, let’s hold that thought because that’s what we’re going to explore in more depth in the rest of the show. So let’s get on with it. Main Interview Chris: So we’re going to goodbye. It’s those things that we’ve just been mentioning around how people are going to work, we’re gonna talk about, about prop tech and what part that has to play in it, because it’s one of those rather PR terms for a whole bunch of things that some things are very, very dedicated to property. And some things are a little bit just a bundle of. Related services and Anthony, your background is, I mean, you’ve been in this market for a long time. Now this is something you talk on and you, you, you you’ve, you’ve got a long history and so may, maybe you can help us to define PropTech and what it, you know, what it encompasses. Antony: Well, I had, I probably have 15 years doing PropTech before the word wordings actually existed.  Essentially, I mean, I started, I started in 1990, 95. I actually started with nets, the Netscape browser, not 0.9, four Netscape browser. So, but I’ve always, I’ve always been the stuff I do has always been for commercial real estate, mainly the, the office market in one way or another, but the sanctuary on the top takes really been a thing for. Seven seven, eight years, something like that, but it’s really, it’s really developed as a marketing handle. So talk about any technology that was related to the built environment in the same way as FinTech is any technology that’s related to money in, in, in the widest sense. So it obviously encompasses all the different asset classes. And it encompasses everything from residential estate agent software to commercial agent software, to investment agent software to how do you run a building? How do you design a building? How do you construct a building, how you operate a building and all that sort of thing. It’s I think it’s a term that is there this past itself sell by date. I actually wrote a blog post, I think, in. December, 2017 for new year’s resolutions for 2018. And my number one was to kill the term PropTech by the end of the year. Because it’s limiting in some ways it’s learning it’s limited. It has served a really good purpose for the last, for the last number of years. So it’s folks to focus the mind on technology relating to whatever you do within, within the built environment, but the trouble is it then becomes. It then becomes limiting because people talk about, or what do you do? Oh, well I’m in real estate. No, no, I’m in prop tech, but really I was using the argument about Amazon, Amazon doesn’t have an it department as such because it is diffused through the whole. The whole business. It’s part of it. It’s part of what you do. It’s like the companies who have innovation departments, so well, you know, everyone else can sit on their ass because we’ve got an innovation department there. They do the interesting, interesting stuff as opposed to being an innovative, innovative company. So it’s sorta it’s so it served its purpose. But it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s a. It’s time, it’s time to move on and it’s actually time to move on in the sense that in in our every cloud has a silver lining way. COVID is there absolute making of the PropTech industry is absolutely the making of the PropTech industry for, for two absolutely fundamental reasons. The first is that we’ve known for ages for years, for decades. The importance of air quality and the impacts on air quality on a, on a cognitive function and B how you feel, you know, your health and wellness, but it’s never been no one’s really ever paid that much attention. It hasn’t been a, well, how healthy is your building in a, in a lease? I mean, yes, there’s been all the, like the world standard and Fitwell and, and all that, but that’s sort of. Relatively neat as an industry. No, one’s really cared that much, but now we have a situation where we’ve had a pandemic and we absolutely know the saying, staying in indoors in the space with lots of people in bad ventilation can kill you. Now that’s a pretty good lever. Start to stop pushing technologies that improve the, the environment, environmental conditions. So anything to do with the indoor air quality and the environmental conditions within the building is now a really big thing, because if you’re going to go back to your office, whenever it is, if you don’t actually ask the question, is this office safe? Then you’re, you’re, you’re making it. You’re making a mistake. Because we know that we know buildings can be, can be ready. It can be really toxic. So fr my landlord’s pond, there’s a, there’s a fucking a feature at the office, but the bug is, we now have spend money to make our buildings safer. So we have to invest in new technologies, have to upgrade HVAC systems and all this sorts of stuff. But the feature of it is that it actually improves your building. It makes it, it makes your building a better building and a better place and a better place to be. So there’s that science side of things. And the second big, big driver around pop tech is that it’s demonstrated globally that this remote working thing well, actually works. Remote working works, you know, the, the whole, the world has been functioning. Most companies have been functioning, but no one in the office and funnily enough, there’s an awful lot of companies that have been doing really, really well. So you know, now that you can function without an office, so this has been something that’s been boiling up for a long time, but the whole office market is turning from one where previously it was an industry based on selling a product. To one that is going to be based on delivering a service, but more fundamentally it’s been based an industry based on a customer who needs you, right. Product, historically companies needed an office because that’s where the computers were. That’s where the desks were. That’s where the people were. That’s where everything was nowadays. And the last year has really, really proved the point. We don’t need an office. Now, that’s not to say we don’t want one, but as an industry, the, the office industry has to change tack from working on the basis that it’s customer needs needs us. You know, it’s a bit like Brexit, isn’t it. They need more than more than we, we need way meet them to going up. I now got to prove to you, Mr. Customer, why you should. Take my office, why you should come into the office? Th that’s an interesting LinkedIn, because as Mark kind of alluded to. Earlier, one of the things that I’ve been I’ve noticed certainly from, I was worked in various property management and FM type businesses over the years. And all the technology was very much about the building. It was about money managing the assets within the building. How often does it, you know, does this air conditioning unit break down or is the lift okay, or when are we going to replace those carpets or whatever it might be. All of your systems were, were tuned to that. And one of the things that I’ve talked about is, you know, actually build executive serve communities that they down there for their own purpose. They’ve got, they’ve got a reason to exist and that’s for the people that use them either long-term or short-term or whatever. But what you’re talking about really is, is, is PropTech liking that live link. Now that leap, rather than being focused on the building, because it was, it was the thing we needed. And that was the thing we focus on. Actually, it’s the people and the, it is this fit for purpose. Is it, is it going to add value to what you do or is it going to add to the sum of the sum of your organization as a, as a building? Because if it’s not, you’re not going to use it, but that’s absolutely the whole, the whole way the real estate industry is it sets up the office market has been set up is there’s actually been two customers. The primary customer of an office building has actually been the institution funding it. Or the investor buying it, but I’m buying an asset for, for my pension fund. No one is a, has had really any interest in who’s in the building. What’s it doing? The, the interest has been, this is isn’t. How good is this bond that this lease? How long is it? How strong is the covenant and what sleep and how guaranteed is my income? End off that’s the way the industry has been set up. But that is in, that has been slowly moving. It’s still a big brick wall within the industry. There’s that essentially a, a huge, there’s a huge area of denial within the industry in terms of the institutional industry that still says. Yeah, this is all very interesting, Anthony, and people like me to talk about this, but I don’t care. I want a 10 year lease. Otherwise I’m not going to fund your building, but it’s getting to the point where there’s not any customers for a 10 year lease or there’s very few customers, but for a 10 year lease, you know, leases are getting shorter and shorter and shorter. So the, so the focus is, has been moving much more to a people thing. I mean, there’s something fundamentally daft about the way the industry works, because there’s a, there’s a phrase that started there with the world. Green building council uses that you pay three pounds for your utilities, 30 pounds for your rent and 300 pounds for your people. So what does the industry concentrate on the three and the 30? And no one cares. We’re moving to a world where it’s the 300 is, is what we need. And I, I always use a phase that within the industry, we, we sort of operate under a bit of a category era that will, because we building offices, we think people want offices and no company wants an office. And that company has the slightest interest in an office. What they want is a productive workforce. And the industry has to start setting them productive workforces, but where, but where the PropTech thing and coronavirus comes into all of this is that the pandemic is forcing us to make our buildings healthier. Otherwise people aren’t going to come in or if they do come in and we kill them, then, I mean, this is the interesting thing in America. You look at the, how far out. The big American companies are saying before they bring anyone back. And it’s not a real estate issue. It’s a legal issue because in America, you’re going to take that. Someone’s going to Sue someone as soon as I wake up all night, if I, if anything happens. So you’re going to, you’re definitely going to see in America cases, you know, you, you may meal because of, because of this. So we have to solve that problem. But the, the interesting thing is in solving that problem. It’s actually gonna go a long way to solving the, the, the bake in commerce productivity problem. Cause people talk about, well, how do you measure productivity? And they say, Oh, well, you can’t measure productivity in an office building, but you in a workplace, you can measure it if you relate it back to cognitive function. So if I put Chris and Matt in an environment that. For some, the right environmental conditions, such that their cognitive function is operating to the maximum of their abilities. I’m making the, I’m an Mo I’m enabling them to be as productive as they can be. But if I put you in an environment that’s too hot, too cold, too noisy, whatever it will impact on your cognitive function and you will be less productive. So. The interesting thing in real estate, I really real estate cannot make a bad company. Good. Put it back company in a great workplace. It’s still a bad company and we can’t affect that. But what we can affect is putting the people in the right environment, in the right In the right spaces with the right environmental conditions to enable them to be as good as they can, as good as they can be and to solve the air quality problem, we solve that problem. And also the triple, the triple bonus of this in doing these two things, we’re also pushing a long way down the sustainability issue. Because a lot of, a lot of the impacts and the, the FM and how the building works has implications for sustainability. And, you know, you’ve you chillin a building properly, it’s operating in a more sustainable manner than the building. That’s not true. So taking a absolutely glass half full look at what’s happened over the next year. But potentially for the, for the smarter operators, there’s going to be a real opportunity to brand themselves as well, come to our space because a we’re sustainable and we know. More and more people actually want to know that they’re working in a building that’s sustainable. We’re going to get put you in really good environmental conditions. And we’re going to pay attention to your health and wellbeing. And that build that build a brand. There will be a number of new, either new brands or existing listing brands, which were really co-op to list the where, where the company. But is concerned about making you happy, healthy, and productive. And those spaces, those buildings I think are going to do better than they’ve ever done. Before. I was saying to Matt earlier, I was talking to someone today who was telling me about three or four new city office buildings that have just received. Planning permission. And they’ve been funding funded and they’ve been financed today. And you’d say, would you go build an office building today? Well, you would. If the calculation is the winners, even in a declining market, I’ve going to be the best buildings, the best buildings operated in the best way, paying the most attention to who’s going to make us happy, healthy, and productive. That’s that’s the theory of where is the successful real estate company of the future? Because if you don’t do that, as I say, well, why the hell am I going to come in? Would Matt: you think if you think about the people who operate buildings today, and if you compare them, say to a hotelier, because what you’ve described there, it sounds like if I compare the world of residential landlords, and particularly in the realm I work in, which is in a social landlords as opposed to hoteliers, there’s a massive difference in the whole approach there, because actually for for residential landlords, the focus is all on the property. Because, you know, you’ve got a captive market, you know, that you you’ve got more demand than you can possibly service. So that the focus goes on to efficiency within the management of the property and then customer experience of that might not necessarily be particularly great in many cases. If you look at the world of hotels and certainly outside of the realm of Especially now, even if you look at the budget chains, they’ve got the idea that actually you can’t have a budget chain. That’s a really unpleasant experience. You need to be able to provide a good quality of experience for people to want to go there. And so it strikes me that hope tele is a much more focused on the customer experience. And of course, the way the hotel industry works is that the people who manage the buildings, aren’t the hoteliers. There’s a layer that sits within that is managing the experience. That is way more than just. Some building and some space and they offer a bunch of things that are adjacent to the management of space because you’ve got restaurants and you’ve got, you know, whatever other services it is that is deemed to be necessary if I’m running, running a hotel. I guess we work started to go down that route, but it was also. In, in good tech company, funding models, completely open inflated and losing money, hand over fist. And my personal experience of it, wasn’t the, you know, the customer experience was it wasn’t that great. Everybody was trying to rub against the magic pixie dust of startup by working next to people from Accenture or whoever it was, you’d be sat next to in your office. But from what you’ve described there, that sounds like this. This middle there of people who were actually starting to think much more holistically about what is it to provide spaces for working or, or to provide collaborative environments. That would be a logical extension asset Chris: that, yeah, it would absolutely be logical essential. There’s that? There’s an increasing overlap between, between hospitality and office in the sense of, you know, what, what, what, what is a hotel? What is, what is an office? I mean, you remember, you know, pre pandemic, you’d go into any number of. Central London hotels, and the whole ground floor is full of people working. And that was that. That was a big thing, but absolutely there’s an, there’s an operating layer. And then it’s quite interesting. If you look at Matt Marriott, Marriott used to own all their hotels and they’d run all their hotels, but I think it was in the, in the nineties, they split up and they, they, they, there’s a Marriott wheat, which looks after the. The real estate. And then there’s a operating company, interestingly, with Marriott, there’s also then a brand division. So, you know, you can that they might build you a hotel or buy it or buy you a hotel and then Marriott my, my operate it themselves. Or, or you can just license the brand. But the point, the point is that absolutely that there is this operating layer, which makes the difference between. Which activates a space. So the, if you like the, the, the, the, the real estate is just dumb. We want to say he’s dumb. It needs is this of activation and hotels are definitely the way to look at it, particularly to do with brand because you made the, they made, they made the point that there’s great budget brands, and there’s very top end brands. And there’s middle brands. So, you know, premier Inn is fantastically good at what premier does for its particular customer. And the four seasons is equally brilliant at what it does. They’re completely different animals, but they have a different customer, different value proposition, a different brand, et cetera, et cetera. And what you’re increasingly going to find. In the office market is that is going to be this opera operational level. And you mentioned, you mentioned we work, but then, you know, you think of the, you know, the office group or industrious or uncommon or any number of brands, which are aimed at particular types of people. And, and a lot of it’s going to be around. That brand is aimed at a particular type of customer and understands the wants, needs, and desires of that customer. So what type of space do you need? So see, you’re starting to see coworking spaces set up for particular industries. So there’s ones to do with, with music or fashion or finding it finance or, or women, and they, and they have different needs and on different, different configurations and the trick. The trick for the real estate industry and the difficult thing for the real estate industry is working out who is going to do that operator level. So you have a few of the biggest real estate companies. Trying to do the operator operator level themselves. So sure fans have story. Land securities have myo tissue, inspiring America zone, et cetera, et cetera. There’s a number of them, but it’s a really hard game to play, to move from being a real estate product company to a service company. I think today CVRE, a number of years ago started their own flex brand. Cool Hannah or Hannah, H a N N a. That has actually just been, that has actually just been taken by a third party brand is a, there’s a big co-worker flex operator in America called industrious. And CBRA had just invested $200 million into industrious and are merging their Harner operation into industrious as well, which is essentially saying. We are CBRA, which is a massive, massive political company. Well, we can do it. We’re going to have our own band and they’ve gone down the road and live with us or they can’t make this call make a success event. So they’re pushing it in into some something else. So, yeah, this is why the, the, the market is so interesting at the moment because. But the fundamental value proposition that is changing and that operator level is becoming super important. And also the asset itself is becoming more important, you know, used to be. I don’t, I don’t even care what your building looks like. Is it, is it BCO, BCO, specification? Yes. In that case, How much is it I’ll buy other you’ll need to look at it, but now the type of space is becoming really, really important because is it the type of space that you can create within that, within that four walls, the title, the type of spaces that people will be interested in. So physically can you create the right, you know, an exciting place to be, and then who’s going to operate it. And. The interesting thing is, as I say, I think that the best buildings define best in many different ways, but the best buildings for the best operators are probably going to generate more revenue than, than an office building has ever generated before. But that doesn’t matter. That doesn’t mean that’s a good thing for the landlord because the landlord might be the building might be generating more, a huge amount of revenue. But who you are having to pay to help you generate to help you generate that. So it’s big. It becomes a really difficult, difficult game that is going to involve the industry changing dramatically, dramatically over the next. Hey, Hey, X number of X number of years, because you’re going to find it. You’ve got to work out. You’ve got to work out a model that works. I mean, I don’t know. Yeah. I mean, we work in many ways have completely transformed the industry, but we weren’t. As big as mistake is they had too much capital money we want to say is not an industry suited for. For venture capital software. It’s funny, you put venture capital because you either crashes or you make, you make an amazing return. You know, your margins are huge in real estate, your margins, and never go, never going to be huge, but we work got push. I mean, obviously they went with it, but they also got pushed to do too much. And you can’t just keep, you’ve got to be a little bit more plotting in, in, in, in real estate and take your money from, from different places. Matt: What do you think we’ll see organizations coming in from other sectors. So again, thinking about what you’ve described there, could you see, or are they already say, you know, the big consulting firms getting into this. Management of space game, or Chris: I could see that as becoming possible because they’re going to end up doing a lot of it themselves, you know? Cause I think th th th the big consulting firms. Absolutely bullseye for pushing the remote distributed work and button post pandemic. Cause they, they did a lot of remote working anyway. I’m a big, you know, the KPMGs and the PWCs of the world. And now they will all be dispersed and they can work. They can work all over the place. So they’re going to, they’re going to become pretty good. At, at operating these places. So they’re, they’re all, they’re all they’re definitely going to be new entrance is interesting. They don’t, again, talking about the financing. How do you finance this stuff now with an institutional industry that sets out that wants 10, 10 year leases with, you know, they want Google on a 10 year lease and that, and that doesn’t happen. Isn’t even Google by their own self. You can’t mostly, he can’t have Google as a tenant because they think $15 billion of their own real estate. It’s massive. But. If you look back to when ball games was fun, was funded for broad gate. At that time was North of the city. It was beyond what was considered the city, the city of London. I mean, it’s now very much as almost the center of the city. But it was really was beyond the pale, the eighties. It was right up there. The institutions. The obvious institutions in the eighties did not, and would not from bull gate, the Japanese funded bull gate. And what I think you’re going to find here is there is, there is so much money in the world sitting, earning. Next to nothing in terms of interest rates and some of them, I was listening to a webinar with a chairman of an investment company. So you just to two acronyms, you need to pay attention to Tina. Good old Margaret affections. Tina, there is no alternative, you know, where am I going to put my money? I’ve got billions, I’m sitting on billions, where am I going to put it? And not negative interest rate policy, which is exists. I mean, I think there’s supposed to be something like $15 trillion of, or Donald’s of, of money sitting on negative interest rates. Where are you going to put it so surprising in America? You see all these new SPACs turnout, these special purpose acquisition companies, and they’re just raising hundreds of millions to go to go and do stuff. So you’re, you’re gonna find new entrance in, in to the industry who prepare to move up the risk, the risk curve. Because I mean, even if, even if I could get Google on a 10 year lease, well, what’s it going to earn me 1%, 2%, you know, nothing it’s safe and secure, but I’m not going to earn any money out of it. How do I actually earn a decent return? And, you know, pension funds and well, all investments, they, they need more than one or 2% interest. So how do that, how do they do it? So you’re going to have to become more risky. So there’s going to be more money going into, into more risky ventures, but they didn’t like hotels, hotels are riskier than offices. Typically. Traditionally you have essentially the cap rate, as I say, a hotel. So hotels might yield. Six to 8%, you know, so you pay, pay a hundred million for it. You get six to 8 million a year in rent. Whereas a prime office might be two to four. So, but office is more likely to move closer towards hotels. So they riskier. But if you operate them in the right way, you might be able to generate 10 to 30% more income out of the building. So that the game, the game is changing from. Being designed for passive places to park your money, your pension money. And you said, societaly, it’s a problem. You know, cause pension pension is obviously a really important and they’ve got to park them somewhere, somewhere sensible. You don’t want them sticking it all on Bitcoin and you know, hoping. But that’s become, that’s becoming a harder, harder. So yeah, it’s It’s an interesting, interesting, interesting, interesting market, very, very entrepreneurial, which is, I think, you know, which the real estate industry always has been, but it’s now there’s a different type of entrepreneur coming into the market for, for Matt: organizations who are the, the clients of all of this, the customers of all of this Obviously it’s a time of is going to be a time of transition. It’s not going to be any, any great certainty, but for organizations who are trying to work out what their flexible working mix of office space kind of thing, what are the sorts of factors? I don’t think you can, you know, open up your crystal ball here to be able to tell people what they should do, but what are the sorts of factors? The sorts of dimensions that people should be thinking about when it comes to their own commitments around, you have to Chris: commercially, you have to, to, to still fund Steve jobs, start with the customer. I’m thinking of all your employees are all the other customer you accompany has to understand. The, the, the needs of each of it, of each of their employees in the sense of for instance, how do they, how do they use space before the pandemic? What do they do when they were in the office? What were they doing since the pandemic? How have they been? Have they operated? Okay. Has it been all right for them? What’s worked for them. What’s not, not work, not work for them. And then what do they want when, when they, when they come back. And it sort of splits up. If you look at the best research, all this is done by a company called Leesman or they’ve done 170,000 interviews with people work at working, working at home. And the, the, the bottom, the bottom line is roughly 70 for roughly 70% of people working from home has been okay. It’s been okay to very good. And in fact, the, the, are you more productive at home or in the office? It’s, I’m more productive, but for 40% of the people it’s been really bad because they’re not set up leads to, you know, they haven’t got the space and all the, all the obvious reasons why, while it’s really, really bad, so that that’s almost like a starting point to understanding what it is your, your individual needs. And then, and then how long is that committed? You know, there, there is an absolute correlation between the number of days people want to work in the office and that, and how long they, how long they can, like they commute. And then what are you going to do in the office? Why do you need the office? Well, everything works for me at home, but I need to speak to see my team. Do I need to see my team five days a week? No, probably not, but I do need to see my team for one day a week, two days a week. One day, every fortnight, two days before, like what, whatever. And in what type of space do I need to see them? I don’t need to sit and sit them all over the desk. We need the right environment. So you actually have to, every, every company should, should start with talking to its employees about how thing, what did they do before the pandemic? What, or how have they been since the pandemic and what do they want to do to the pandemic? And that will provide a huge amount of data. And that’s your, that’s your starting point to understanding, understanding what you need, what you need to do. Outro Matt: Fascinating stuff.  And I’m sure this is a theme that we will come back to, again, as the, the myths of post pandemic, start to slowly lift into the worlds of more office spaces going to be like and how it will be used. So that’s it. It’s it’s towards the end of yet another show we have. Another seven days ahead of us before the next one, Christopher, what’s the seven days of your diary looking like for the week ahead? Chris: Well, we’re hoping that I’ll get my boiler fixed is going to occupy quite a lot of it, but and the, the nuts pretty much just in this is the same every week, pretty much doing what I was doing last week. I wish I could say something different, but I’m looking forward to a mild week for various reasons. And as you say, and, and then, and then our next podcast with another blink guests where we’ve got an embarrassment of riches this year has been Matt: great. We’ll talk about that a bit more in a moment. Anthony, have you got anything exciting on the horizon in the next weekend? I’ll try. Antony: I have, because what we’re doing at the end of this week, Is where having a first zoom session, Matt: which is open to all the alumni of our Antony: online course. So we’ve run about five, five or six cohorts now, and we’re doing a big event at the end of end of the week where everyone’s invited to them. And we’re going to have but doing a fireside chat with someone who’s a big, big fish in the market. And then we’re having people from all around the world doing updates on how’s things in Asia, how’s things in South America and this sort of thing. So I’m actually really looking forward to that. And then after that, where we’re looking to build a new course, so. So I’ve got some, some free weeks just getting stuck into my big pile of reading books here. Chris: What about Matt: you, Matt? I have got the first stage of whittling down the applications that we’ve had for property, asset management and repairs management tender that went out a couple of weeks ago. We’ve had 17 organizations. Being able to respond to that. So the rest of this week is going to be spent going through those and working out how we get down to a shortlist of potential suppliers. So that will be. Entertaining, although by probably number 15, I might be losing the will to live as I stare endlessly into yet another spreadsheet, but I’ll show it will be fine. And the the, the, the moderation sessions that we have to have, where we were not allowed to have averages the way that the whole. Set up, which is going through the the digital outcomes framework. You have to come to a consensus on the assessment panel about what the marks are, rather than just taking an average. So those actually turn into quite interesting sessions, as you try to then have to remember why it was you marked something a one or a three Which once you get to number 15 of them might become a little bit challenging. We will see. So yeah, that’d be good. And obviously watching what would continue their ascent on the the wonders of the the automatic promotion places. For the time being anyway. So there we go.  So we wish you a wonderful week between now and then, Anthony. Thank you again for for joining us this week. It’s been an absolute delight to have you on and we will speak to you again this time next week.