Adam Hadley CBE

0:06Adam Hadley: Hello and welcome to the Amber Moment, a podcast that tells stories of remarkable careers. My name's Paul Howarth. My guest today is Adam Hadley, CBE. In 2016, Adam founded QuantSpark, a company that rewires how organisations work with AI. QuantSpark's ambition is to add 1 % to the UK's GDP through AI implementations. Adam is also the founder and executive director of Tech Against Terrorism, which is a UN-supported initiative empowering the global tech sector to tackle terrorist exploitation of the internet. Under his leadership, they've developed solutions that help identify and alert platforms to verify terrorist content online.

0:46Adam Hadley: Adam, welcome to the show. How are you today? I'm very well, thanks. Good to know. What's been keeping you busy this week? Oh, goodness me. Well, AI, really, both the opportunities and the threats, those are the sorts of things that are preoccupying us at both Quorum Spark and Tech Against Terrorism. Okay, well, I'm sure we'll get into some of that detail as we go through the conversations. But what I'm really trying to do here on The Amber Moment, as I think you probably know, is to tell some fascinating stories. And from the outside, yours looks like a really interesting one. But every story starts somewhere.

1:18Adam Hadley: Every hero of every story, and you are the hero of your story for the purposes of today has his or her own origin story so I'd love it if you could start by telling us a little bit about your background your childhood your upbringing education and any early influences you might have had what a great question so well I think for I grew up in Cornwall and spent most of my time outdoors actually and enjoying everything that Cornwall has to offer but also focusing a lot on on school I was always pretty geeky but that kind of managed to balance outdoor life that you obviously have in Cornwall with studying pretty hard.

1:54And I always enjoyed computing as well and playing around with, goodness, I think it was an Amstrad. I don't know if you remember those. I do. Kind of way back. And just being a bit obsessed with computers and just trying to figure out how to use them, how to break them, and so on. So, you know, I was kind of an early adopter, I suppose, of these sorts of things and feel quite fortunate to live through such a transformational period of kind of computing right and my age sort of late 30s you know grew up with you know very old computers and floppy disks etc pre-internet and goodness me things

2:32Adam Hadley: have changed a lot since then haven't they haven't they just uh well i grew up in devon i have a few years on you but i do remember taking home a bbc computer back in the day from a certain educational establishment um so perhaps you can talk to us a bit about how that sort of early interest in computers and any other influences from your childhood might have taken you through to transition to to the career that you found yourself in yeah well I was thinking about this when preparing for the podcast and I think I'd probably say for some reason I have this slightly contrarian contrarian nature in the when I when I see something not working properly I'm always kind of motivated to figure out a way of fixing it and I think the best example of this of my personality in this regard is when I was at school, I went to school in Truro in Cornwall.

3:19And for some reason, so I used to travel to school by train every day, and the trains became really overcrowded. And so for some reason, I took it upon myself to kind of launch a campaign to try to encourage a train company to increase the number of carriages. And I managed to get the BBC Spotlight. You'd be familiar. Oh, you did. It covers Devon as well. man forget bbc spotlights do an undercover investigation into the overcrowding and trades and i think that was my first taste of kind of sometimes how easy it is to have positive impact if you've got a slightly quirky idea and you're a bit contrarian and combined with an interest in business and computing i suppose it's kind of that's what shaped a lot of my career subsequently this slight bloody mindedness i suppose you could say or kind of unrealistic sort of aspiration to do something positive yeah so i think one of my kind of core memories in that sense is is this campaign and actually i think we were quite successful because this particular train company lost its franchise one of the reasons for that was overcrowding so that was quite funny did you say is it an undercover investigation by spotlight yeah wow so how did you get them how did you persuade them to do that well i mean they're obviously concerned about the safety of children you know pretty pretty severe overcrowding and the you know the train company just didn't want to hear it right um and i think pretty much everything i've been doing since then is quite similar my counter-terrorism work and a lot of the ai implementation work actually it's kind of built on the same model which is not taking no for an answer and trying to figure out what we can achieve by taking on the establishment i suppose so perhaps you can talk to us a little bit about

5:04Adam Hadley: how that became your career and maybe at the start of your career were you aware of having anything as set in stone as a kind of a mission or an ambition what drove you at the start of your career what you're trying to achieve well I always took my own education pretty seriously and studying and so on but I suppose I've always had a fairly high risk appetite and this idea that provided we work hard i think this is quite naive because clearly you know we're all privileged in lots of ways but i always felt that provided we worked worked hard and really backed ourselves that that you know something good can come out of it so my my early career was really focused on trying to gain an eclectic range of experiences and learn as much as possible and and then see where it goes i think a lot of this is opportunism as well okay and thinking about how your career developed you've obviously been very successful in your field and you've done incredible things and i mean we'll talk about tech against terrorism hopefully as we go through but what do you think it is this is where you have to leave your modesty very firmly at the door by the way what do you think it is about you that makes you different or special what sort of skills or knowledge talents or character traits do you possess that have enabled you to be successful where perhaps others wouldn't have been well i think part of it is a mentality slightly un-british mentality as well which is if something's broken we we can and we should try to change things uh i know it's the realization that most people i don't want to be rude but quite a few people especially in larger organizations don't really do very much and it is possible if you if you're really focused and you can marshal the right skills and powers of persuasion it's possible to achieve things that you otherwise wouldn't expect i'm very you know obviously british and a patriot and you know I love the country.

6:55But what I don't like about Britain is this culture in which we're often not particularly aspirational, right? And often giving all the reasons why things can't happen. I think we've got a brilliant culture and brilliant country in so many ways, but we've kind of lost our sense of purpose as a country. And what I think I bring to this is a sense of optimism and ambition that it is possible to achieve things if you can go about it in the right way.

7:23Adam Hadley: And can you maybe give us an example or two as to how that ambition, and I think you mentioned being bloody minded, how that bloody mindedness has served you? What results has that produced in your career? Can you think of an example or two? Well, there's quite a few, probably mainly related to counterterrorism. So what I often find is that we all assume, don't we, that organisations do things. We assume, I don't know, that the police or tech companies or even corporations, supermarkets, for example, we're assuming that these organizations do things when actually they really don't. So whenever the word surely comes up in my mind or in conversation with people, I question whether that assumption is correct.

8:06We assume so much about what organizations are doing and in fact, very few do so. so so a lot of what we do at tech against terrorism it's a small small team not particularly well funded but it's really focused on on having impact and i think you know quite quite kind of a few examples of us having done things that you perhaps wouldn't expect um you know taking on al qaeda and isis and having their websites taken down i think it's surprisingly easy to have impact if you're focused um because we're all assuming that everyone else is doing things and that they're actually not so it's pretty low bar for change i find and if you're able to give us any details of

8:43Adam Hadley: those projects i understand it might be uh quite sensitive information but how did that process work for example taking down the al-qaeda website well you see so this is a good case in point so lots of people don't realize obviously because they go about their lives uh and not thinking about this which you could think that loads of terrorist organizations isis al-qaeda and so on have their own websites and they pay for them really quite wild and hundreds of them not not not quite like isis.com but effectively isis.com and it's just so many of these absurd things that where again you assume that this someone else is dealing with it yeah you you assume that these things don't exist but actually when you peel back the onion a bit you realize that there are quite a few things that just aren't being addressed so so what we do where we can with small team is trying to identify these sites and then go hell for leather to issue legal requests to the companies that are hosting these terrorist websites and trying all sorts of ways to to have have these taken down and they've got quite a few areas where no one is doing anything really so what i've i was thinking about this as well i think a lot of my career has been focused on market failure this idea that there are there are so many things in society or problems in society that no one really maybe they care about but there's no incentive to fix things and in many cases there are incentives to keep problems going because it keeps people busy um but there are loads of market failures and i realize my career today has been focused on market failures i could probably be a lot richer and wealthier if i focus on market successes you know kind of benefiting from market successes i think that'd be too boring i think we need to focus on where things aren't working correctly because there are so many things go wrong it's actually because there aren't incentives for people to fix them and and how in your opinion can ai help with those market failures it's a big question i appreciate well yeah i mean ai can mean lots of things can't it the most of the time the benefit i i think of ai is actually building software faster and cheaper because people may not realize that ai is really good at computer languages i mean it's quite good at human languages but it's really good at programming yeah so if you know what you're doing in fact you don't really need to know what you're doing these days but if you have an inkling of what you're doing you can build software essentially for free so that means that previously if you'd have to fundraise millions of pounds for loads of engineers software engineers is to build tools, you can kind of build this for 10 times less these days.

11:21So I think the biggest, or the thing that I'm most excited about with AI is it means that small organizations or even individuals can now build tools, can build software, can build solutions that previously would have costed millions of pounds they can do for a very small amount of money. So what I think the opportunity here is the asymmetry of AI, because what it means is if you're very small, all of a sudden you you can develop the capability that a large organization company NGO government department might have and that's the opportunity because these days if you if you understand the problem and you've got some data and you've got a vague link of how to build a solution you can probably go ahead and do it so i think ai should be able to empower all of us to build tools to tackle problems that we think are worth solving and what would need to happen for the

12:13Adam Hadley: dissemination of ai through to granular individual levels as you've described there what needs to happen in the world well the the i mean ai is a scary topic isn't it because it can mean so many things and there's a lot of kind of i call it annihilationism there's a lot of kind of concern about rogue AI taking over. Some of that is warranted, but most is not. I think people are quite apprehensive about AI. I was reading the results of a survey this morning about the perception of AI in the UK, and it's pretty negative, actually, which is a real shame, because what AI can do, certainly when you're building technology, it means that pretty much anyone can start building tools.

12:56And the only way to have impact, The only way to have effect, in my view, is to build technology often, right? You obviously need people with the ideas and the leadership and the powers of persuasion. But if you're going to have an effect beyond a couple of people, you've got to build technology to do so. And when we think of the most impactful things in the world at the moment, for better or worse, it's usually technology. And it's technology that can scale. so what i'm really interested in is kind of this fusion of technology and social impact and social purpose yeah which is really what we're trying to do at tech against terrorism in particular so so i you know in summary i would say the opportunity is to to kind of show people the art of the possible with ai it's not about chatbots it's actually about building tools you could build tools any one of us could build tools we need a little bit of training and goodness me a whole new world will be opened up as a result and how so how does that apply

13:53Adam Hadley: to quant spark and and how how you serve your clients at quant spark what i mean i know there's no no two projects would be the same i'm sure but what's what are the sort of the outcomes and benefits that clients of yours can expect working with you well what drives me really is solving interesting problems and and quant spark i suppose is it's focused on solving business problems and and i think business gets a bad press certainly in the uk we don't really like business here do we for some reason. Profit is this sort of tainted concept. Being entrepreneurs as well, I'd say, in some respects. But I think businesses are uniquely suited to solve problems.

14:31I mean, clearly, employing people is important and paying taxes is important. But if you get the incentives right, I think businesses can achieve great things. And what we're trying to do at Quantspark is to work with our clients to show them the art of the possible data and analytics and AI and do our bit to ensure that the economy can benefit from this amazing technology. And that's why our vision at QuantSpark is a slightly crazy one. It's to say, you know, we want to have helped contribute 1 % uplift to the GDP of the country through AI implementation. And I think this is another market failure.

15:09I was also looking at another survey this morning, looking at AI adoption in small businesses, and it's minuscule.

15:17Adam Hadley: Yes. I'm not really sure why because actually the the opportunity is so significant maybe people are just a bit fearful a bit conservative I'm not sure what it is but you know our mission at Quantspark is is to help businesses remain competitive survive and thrive in the world of AI but I do I do slightly fear that we're a bit slow in adopting this type of technology and a lot of the political narrative is is not really focused on this at all it's focused on data centers and tips and you know existential risk but actually the benefit of this technology is is derived from the boring uh the boring work required to transform businesses and processes so yeah that's genuinely what we're excited about quant spark but i do think it's going to be an uphill struggle to convince people that ai is is as good as we think it is see that that to me as as a person who's grown up in advertising and marketing sounds like a classic marketing issue if there's a if there's a gap between the percentage of small businesses that should be using it and taking it up and and those who actually are in reality but there's no real reason for that to be the case then then is that a communication issue do you think it is and it's a leadership issue also i i mean i also kind of offer perhaps slightly controversial view that the frontier ai labs anthropic and opening i've got it completely wrong in that they're obsessing about building capability and you know they're spending apparently you know multiple trillions of dollars and building ai but they're doing very little to encourage the implementation of ai in businesses so how is this going to add up i think there's this idea isn't there that businesses will organically implement this technology well i suppose they will if they feel they're under competitive pressure yeah so i'd agree with you i think this is a marketing and communication problem but i think it's also a framing problem that so many of the largely american providers of ai are just not thinking about you know the implementation and governments are not really doing so either so i'm kind of left scratching my head quite a lot of the time because we read headline after headline about taxes and so on and we occasionally hear things about growth but what we never hear much about is how technology can help us be more productive in this country and how AI can be used in practice.

17:40So I really am quite passionate about this, that we've got to do more to communicate the benefits. I think we can only have a vibrant democracy and society if we have a decent economy. And there's a real risk that we're just kind of missing this opportunity yet again in this country because we're just not thinking clearly enough about how we could be using AI. So at the moment, I'm trying to do whatever I can to encourage the government to have a decent AI growth plan because I can see the opportunities in this country, in the UK, to be huge. I mean, we're a big services economy, really literate, really numerate, very tech-focused.

18:16And I think there's a slight concern that's just not on the agenda at the moment.

18:20Adam Hadley: Would that not be the case with pretty much any technological innovation throughout history, is that you'll get early adopters and you'll get the rest that come later on? It's a well-worn, well-trodden path, isn't it? So in some way, you're looking to do something different with this piece of technology versus what's happened previously. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it's the same with any and all technological revolutions. I think there's a tendency to overestimate the immediate value of it and underestimate time taken for the technology to diffuse within the real world. and there's so many examples on there of steam and you know the telegraph and cars and computers and the internet so the the principle is almost certainly the same here i think the difference is though that the rate of change or an evolution of ai is so much greater than any technology we've ever seen before that i think there are genuinely risks of entire business models and businesses will just be wiped out so so i think qualitatively it's kind of the same as what we've seen before but quantitatively it's much faster and the disruption is going to be more significant and therefore the the natural lag time lag that we'll see in adoption could well be so great that the technology has moved on so quickly that it's kind of irrelevant because we'll have missed it by then yeah so there's a real jeopardy if we think in terms of businesses and small businesses that, yeah, there might be lots that don't survive if they don't adopt in the correct way.

19:56Well, yeah, and I'd say there is some hope, but because there's this collective, I don't know whether it's denial or ignorance or I'm not sure what it is, but because of this sort of collective idea that AI isn't really that important, you know, it's not, you've got time. And if everyone believes this fiction, then perhaps the disruption will be slowed down. It's like with accountancies. We have a really good accountancy that works to support us but most of what they do we've actually automated using ai i mean i haven't really told them this yet um uh you're getting to listen to the podcast and they'll know then i know i will i'll forward it and so there's quite a lot of dissonance i would say at the moment which i personally find quite confusing which is i know it's possible to automate so many things but i also know people are not really interested in that yet so maybe we'll be okay because of this sort of collective amnesia or denial.

20:48But, you know, so maybe that will protect us for a while longer. That's a hopeful thing to say, isn't it?

20:55Adam Hadley: Well, you did say you're an optimist as well at some point. Yeah, I'd expect that. Do you think there are economies around the world, the US, for example, are they doing any better or are there economies who are doing better in terms of this rate of adoption? I mean, I don't know. I think it's too early to tell. I mean, I would have thought countries like Singapore would be in a very good position because their policy is quite logical and rational and they think many years ahead. So I think those societies and economies that plan and are rational about policy focus will probably benefit from this most.

21:30So we've got to hope that politicians focus on what's important, haven't we really? And we've got to, all of us have a responsibility to ensure that we're voting for politicians who are sensible and thinking ahead.

21:43Adam Hadley: thinking about the story then of your career adam and and bear in mind you are the hero of your own story of course but every great story also has an anti-hero now this might be people and you don't have to name names unless you particularly want to but it might equally be i don't know systems structures prevailing ideas what are the sorts of things that you have had to overcome in order to succeed in your career would you say well i think my my career is is quite unusual and that i've i've refuse to join a large company or organization this is not in my i mean i'd last a week right i just i just wouldn't have the skills to put up with knowing that things are broken and you know it's being told to get on with it so i think i would be a disastrous employee in a corporate to be clear uh you know and i have a lot of respect for those people who can navigate those type of environments.

22:35So I would say my, what I rail against is kind of corporate bureaucracy where you have systems that perpetuate themselves for the sake of it and building inefficiency. And I think, you know, not wanting to bang on about AI, my friends are a bit

22:51Adam Hadley: No, please do. But I think the opportunity with AI is actually to hollow organisations back because most organisations are full of people just talking to one another about having meetings about meetings. I know that's that's a bit of a cliche but it also happens to be true so you know if we're able to make organizations a bit more effective by cutting down all this internal communication and politics and so on maybe we can actually get organizations to be more effective in whatever they're supposed to be doing um so so i suppose without one thing to be abstract about it i think what what kind of annoys me is when you have groups of people just sitting around doing very little and that you know And it could be a supermarket or it could be a government department or whatever it is.

23:33That's what motivates me really is identifying opportunities where things are going wrong and just trying to figure out ways of holding people to account and or just doing it better.

23:44Adam Hadley: Would you say you have a particularly strong set of personal beliefs that you apply to your career? Are there any sort of principles or behaviours or values, we might call them in marketing terms, that you sort of treasure? well so i i um a lot of so i think quite a few of my personality traits were uh were established fairly early on but in my mid-20s uh my mother died oh sorry which really you know badly affected me um we were very close and it took me a year or two to kind of to figure out what i was about and what was important um you know on the other side of that tragedy i i was like you know what what could possibly be worse than this?

24:27You know, why I need to be confident and be brave and just go for it because what could possibly be worse? And, you know, quite a few of my more entrepreneurial friends are slightly unhinged in the sense that their risk calculus is quite different from others. I think it's kind of a trend, right? So I would say that whilst a lot of the fundamentals of this probably had for whatever reason from a young age, in my mid-twenties i thought goodness me you know life can be really short and i just felt i wanted to live mine intentionally and focus on problems that i thought all were solving not trying to make money for the sake of it uh not looking for status but actually saying i want to be proud of having done x y or z and and you know that is that a value i suppose it is to some extent um and i always sort of encourage my friends to just do things that they think are whatever they think is important to them because as humans we do have agency and whilst there's this sort of cultural idea that you've got to be part of a big organization to achieve things certainly from my perspective which granted is privileged in lots of respects it is possible to achieve things if you're focused as an individual because you know as i've said quite a few organizations don't do as much as you can expect because of the the dynamics of how organizations scale and their productivity often patos quite quickly.

25:52Adam Hadley: You spoke about your other entrepreneurial friends there. I'm interested to understand, do you find you're naturally drawn to other entrepreneurs or are there kind of official groups that you're part of or is it just those people you tend to be friendly with? You know, I don't know many, I must say. There's a few and far between. I think there are quite a few more in America. I think the sort of mentality is a bit different there because you need running your own business whether or not you call yourself an entrepreneur you know requires a certain i mean it's not a normal thing to do really because of the risks associated with it but but certainly i i'm i'm yeah i am drawn to people who have ambitious ideas and and just work hard to achieve something even if even if it seems impossible yeah and you spoke about some of your kind of values there that intentionality i think you called it and kind of if you want to achieve something be really focused about doing it and just go for it and what's the worst that can happen all of those sorts of things what would be the opposite of that what what sort of values or traits do you see that are total anathema to you well perhaps not anathema but what i often see is that people for various reasons can sabotage themselves through no confidence and something i see now and then with colleagues actually is people just doubting themselves and not having that confidence.

27:14And I think most people can suffer. I mean, we all can, including me, from moments of low confidence. But I think there's a lot of this sort of self-sabotage going around. So I wouldn't say it's kind of anathema per se, but I think many of us can accidentally self-limit. and I think we should just be aware of that and really challenge some of the assumptions we have about what we're doing and going back to AI again, I think this is also quite relevant, many of us are going to need to reimagine what our career looks like in the age of AI, even me right, so much of what we used to do at QuantSpark can now be fully automated and built with AI in seconds right, so I think we've all those of us who are going to survive and thrive in this age of they are the ones who are going to adapt fast enough and a lot of that is going to be about confidence in our own abilities and thinking again about this totality

28:15Adam Hadley: of your career then you know no no person is an island if you like so which who are the people and groups who you would consider to be real allies for your career who's who's been particularly helpful or supportive well key to this of course is working with great people and infusing and evangelizing and working as a team so nothing i've achieved could be done without an amazing team and really dedicated teams both at quant spark and tech against terrorism uh so why it was kind of it's slightly embarrassing in a way receiving the um the cbe because actually the over the years hundreds of people have contributed to to the mission at tech against terrorism really is a group effort i think what i've provided is a sense of leadership and and bloody mindedness and and and uh this this sense of of confidence that we're able to achieve things but but clearly this is down to delegation and this is this is down to the blood sweat and tears of you know many hundreds of people over the years working long hours trying to solve apparently impossible problems i'm interested about the cbe actually You say you're embarrassed, but it's a hell of an achievement.

29:27Adam Hadley: What was the day like? It was pretty surreal. Windsor Castle and all that sort of stuff, the kind of patentry. Yeah, it was sort of surreal. But also, I felt proud that the work we've done at Tech Against Terrorism has been recognised. A lot of what we do at Tech Against Terrorism is we're not particularly funded. We're not a big team. we were often trying to work with and against very large American tech companies and all this sort of stuff so we're very much the underdog in everything we do so it was good to get that that recognition um it was it was quite interesting speaking to to others there because they're all quite a lot older so that was a bit surreal um but but great that we were recognized and very much appreciated that is that something you think particularly appeals to you being cast as the underdog i mean think right back to your campaign as a child against the uh the crowded trains yeah i think it probably does wasn't it maybe i have a bit of a chip on my shoulder for some reason but i think the key thing is to channel these things positively right yeah and i would like to ask my guests as well about what your happy ending is by which i don't by any means mean the end of your career i just mean when all of these things come together when it works as it ought to work what does that world look like well i suppose it depends what what problem we we're talking about i i think the what does that happy ending look like well in terms of we've got a very long way to go with a lot of work we're doing i would say but certainly the counter-terrorism work the the ending we're looking for there is recognition that the internet is important and needs to be taken seriously which is currently not so i suppose a lot of that is about behavioral change that we are we're hoping to bring about and and similarly with with the more commercial work we we do the happy ending there is is um i suppose an end state in which companies are using ai properly and have adopted these things so i'm just wondering whether there is an end state or whether whether this is a kind of uh site naive to to believe that there would be But I think ultimately this is about behavioral change and ensuring that those examples of market failure have been fixed and solved.

31:46Adam Hadley: Yeah. I'm going to ask a very self-serving question now because I am a small business and it is currently just me. But Paul Health Limited is a going concern. If you were to give a piece of advice to small businesses like me or other small businesses about the adoption of AI, what would be your single piece of advice? oh a single piece of advice the single piece of advice i would give is think really deeply about what your business is and where you're creating the value because if you can really understand that and the underlying processes then you can easily figure out how to use ai as a result but the key thing is understand understanding who are what you're doing why it's valuable why it's important why it's different from everyone else if you can understand that as a business owner the AI bit is easy.

32:32Adam Hadley: Yeah which is kind of what all good businesses should do all good companies should understand why they exist and how they add value and all those sorts of things and that's always been the case I suppose so that's good thank you. So what's next for Adam Hadley then in both the near and far future if you can think what's what's on the horizon? Goodness what a difficult question. Well I haven't I haven't completed my mission at TAT or QuantSpark yet So I'm fully focused on those missions. I am interested in finding ways of having impact at greater scale in both respects. So there's a broader problem than just terrorism where the Internet and AI is concerned.

33:15So I'm really looking for opportunities to focus more broadly on AI safety and security. I think it's going to be one of the bigger challenges we're going to face over the next 10 years, kind of across the board, because there isn't, in my view, there isn't enough focus on the safety of AI. There's quite a lot of melodramatic media hype about AI taking over the world, et cetera, but there isn't much focus on the day-to-day harms AI can uplift. So I'm currently thinking through ways of having a bit more impact there and creating a kind of coalition or working with an ecosystem of like-minded people to see what we can do before it's too late.

33:57And similarly, I think with the AI adoption work I'm doing, there's only, I mean, for all of the benefits that running your own small organization has, it's really hard having scaled impact. So I think I'd like to think that, you know, going into my next decade, I find a way of joining forces with more people because I think it can be quite intoxicating running your own organization. But the impact you can have is kind of limited as a result of being really small. right AI of course can help because you can build tools and you know you can do go to market much more effectively and all this sort of stuff but you're still several orders of gravity too small to have the societal impact that you might want to have so so I think the challenge I'm studying myself psychologically is you know once I'm content that my two organizations are doing you know continue to do a great job and sustainable how can I go out of my comfort zone which might mean thinking about joining larger organizations rather than purely running my own small ones

34:55Adam Hadley: so you need some big and powerful allies to that previous point i suppose so you think about outside of your work life then and i don't know how much sleep you get but it sounds like probably not very much but outside of of work it will take as read that family and friends and loved ones are important but outside of that what would be your other sort of passions and hobbies and interests Oh great question so I as I said before I kind of I miss the countryside you know living live in London now and I think the the countryside and the tranquility and calmness that it provides are really important especially considering how much chaos there is in the world at the moment so the main thing I really do is spend as much time in the countryside as possible hiking and sailing walking my dog and all these sorts of things and otherwise playing playing the piano and listening to music so so a lot of my pastimes are deliberately kind of calm and quiet and um hopefully thoughtful my wife will approve because she is a musician and she specializes in the piano so i'll pass that on she'll be delighted about that um and when you spend time in the countryside is that back in cornwall or is that elsewhere oh all over i mean i go to cornwall fairly often um but yeah i think there's there's so much of of the uk that's that's worth exploring it's a real pleasure to be here agreed agreed and then final final question then since we're on a podcast would you have a podcast recommendation for our listeners you know what i don't really listen to many podcasts um i should shouldn't i i listen to lots of it's not compulsory okay yeah well you can give us an audiobook then instead oh yeah no there's so many of those i think my favorite podcast is the rest of the politics actually i that's that's my weekly uh twice weekly politics fix so that's that's the main podcast i listen to yeah fantastic well thank you for that recommendation but thank you even more for your time and generosity and wisdom and lots of thought-provoking things and stories about your remarkable career adam hadley thank you very much join me next time on the amber moment when we'll be hearing another story of another remarkable career until then stay amber

37:15Major Zenit