#100, Computer Weekly’s Editor in chief, Bryan Glick: Writing the Digital Revolution

28:37But I think the thing that came across to us in the early days was just how broken the culture at the post office was. There's this enormous institution with a huge social value, within the UK. Its marketing slogan at the time this was going on was Britain's most trusted brand. And they were. I can remember surveys at the time, brand surveys, post office, most trusted brand in the UK. I think a lot of people grew up thinking it was the government. It was, yeah, it was, absolutely. It used to be. It used to be government, obviously. Yeah, it did, yeah. But it retained that level of... Do you know what I mean?

29:18You just thought it was the people. Do you see what I mean? Yeah, absolutely. But yeah. You know, we would hear, you know, inevitably, you know, every journalist will tell you, if you find things out that you can't write, people tell you things that you can't evidence, you can't double source. So we would find out things that we couldn't write, a lot of which have come to light since. But I think the thing that shocked us most was just the attitude towards the sub-postmasters from the institution. For most of us, for you and I who use our local post office branches, is the post office is the sub-postmaster.

29:52It is the person in the little rural branch who knows everybody in the community and knows all the pensioners in the days when they used to go in and get their pensions from the post office once a week and all this sort of thing. They are the post office. It became apparent that the institution, the people in the centre of the post office, thoroughly distrusted those sub-postmasters. And the culture at the time that the Horizon IT system was rolled out. Before Horizon, Postmasters kept manual accounts and fed those back up to the Post Office. The institutional culture towards those Postmasters was, they're all fiddling the books.

30:31They're all trousering a little bit of extra money here and there. We just can't prove it. So when this IT system came in that automated all the accounting processes across all of the Post Office, and then in the early 2000s, it started throwing up accounting errors and showing that large numbers of these branches were having losses. Instead of the institution thinking, that's weird, why are so many people suddenly having accounting losses? They went, see, we knew it all along. We knew we were right. They'd been fiddling the books all along, and now we can prove it. And everything started from that.

31:11Everything on this scandal started from that attitude. So it was like confirmation bias, basically. Total confirmation bias. They were arriving at an outcome that they kind of wanted to arrive at, and whatever bit of evidence would feed into that narrative was what they fed on, I suppose. And yeah, no, that makes sense. Do you feel a little bit, Brian, I don't know obviously from your knowledge of this whole matter, in terms of Fujitsu, of kind of like, you know, is that post office have taken the front of the blame for this, and rightly so, depending on, you know, based on a lot of the things we've already talked about.

31:47But Fujitsu, of course, have taken blame as well, but nowhere near as much. We've not had the CEO of Fujitsu in a public inquiry. I mean, not to the extent that the level of scrutiny that Mrs. Bannels has got. They were complicit in this. It was their system at the end of the day. We all know about the cover-up, but ultimately it was their system. Have they walked away a bit scot-free from all this? I think for a lot of the time they did. I think it's only since the TV drama came out that really the scrutiny on Fujitsu has been what it should have been and the sort of public shaming of them for their role in this.

32:23In one respect, I have a certain amount of sympathy for Fujitsu in that when Horizon was being rolled out in that period in the early 2000s, we talked earlier about what an exciting time the early 2000s were in terms of the dot-com boom and technology coming out. It was also a period of time when the public sector and major public services were being automated for the very first time. It was a big initiative from Tony Blair as prime minister. He used the phrase e-government at the time and put a lot of money into starting to automate public services. And during that period of time, there were a lot of big government IT cock-ups.

33:03I wrote about a lot of them. I broke some of them when I was a reporter. Lots of big, big government IT systems had major, major problems. It's not as if Fujitsu was the only big tech company that was developing large-scale, complex IT systems for the public sector that were having tech problems. I think the failing for me of Fujitsu was once they became aware of what the post office was doing, that it was prosecuting people based upon accounting losses that Horizon was showing up, they knew about the bugs. They've admitted they knew there were bugs. They knew that the bugs were there. They hid behind the post office.

33:39They never at any stage did they come out and either go to the post office forcefully and say, you cannot do this. This could be because of bugs in the system. Nor did they go publicly and say, you know, we've got to be honest here. You know, we think what the post office here is doing is wrong. So they became complicit in what the post office was doing. The post office is to blame 100%. This came from the post office making bad decisions and doubling down on those decisions, lying about what they were doing, and then trying to cover up the lie. And hoping it'll go away, I think, was the big one, wasn't it?

34:19Yes, absolutely. Yeah, very much so. Fujitsu is most complicit because it went along with the cover-up. Yeah, sure. This episode was brought to you by Be Digital. B-Digital support leadership teams to optimize cost and get more out of technology investments. B-Digital and the team have unrivaled expertise with technology license management and data remediation and are therefore perfectly positioned to help prepare organizations for AI technology capability. And on the last point, B-Digital have just developed a cutting edge AI readiness assessment, which provides tech leaders with a platform they need to make well-informed decisions about AI adoption strategy in 2024 and beyond.

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35:14So let's maybe pivot in towards investigative journalism there. Right, okay. So like, you know, that of Computer Weekly. I know you've done quite a lot of this type of thing over the years. Well, what's your thoughts on investigative journalism? What part does it play in holding powerful institutions like post office accountable? You know, because the tech industry is becoming ubiquitous. Everything is the tech industry now. It wasn't before. So what do you think about investigative journalism holding institutions to account on things? And is that something you see yourself doing more of in the future?

35:52I mean, to me, I'm a journalist, so I would say this, but to me, investigative journalism is one of the fundamental bedrocks of an open democratic society. You need to have journalists who are willing to ask the difficult questions to put people in power under scrutiny and to uncover the information that people in power don't want the rest of us to know about. It's hard. It takes a lot of work. It takes a long time. The big risk to it is it's… You've got to be patient, haven't you, I suppose? You've got to be patient. 15 years, we've been working on this particular story with the post office. It's also very difficult to justify commercially because of the time it takes, because of the effort that has to go into it.

36:43And sadly, all across the media, we've seen a decline in investigative journalism because as the business model of the media industry has changed, as advertising has gone elsewhere, as a lot of those traditional sources of revenue for the media industry have declined in the digital era, a lot of publications in a lot of different areas of the media have decided they can't afford to do investigative journalism anymore for that cost, which is a terrible show. chain. Now, from our perspective in technology terms, the world runs on technology now. The government runs on technology. Every major business runs on technology.

37:24Our lives run on technology. Data about us, our personal information, the way we live our lives, the websites we go to, the places we visit, the things we do, all that data is being funneled by technology back to big corporations and back to governments. There's never, to my mind, been a time when investigative journalism around technology and how technology is being used has been more important. Well said. Yeah, I agree. These days, a lot of investigative journalism is going to be about finding information that's in computers, that's about computers, that's being gathered by computers. And that's hard.

38:05It needs a decent understanding of technology and how it works. And it means knowing the people who understand these things in technology and having them in your contact book and being able to ring people up and say, look, I've just found this out. Does this check out? Does this make sense to you? I see what we do in investigative journalism from a technology basis as getting increasingly important more only it's only to get more more and more and more important if somebody asked me to retrospectively write a profit and loss for the work that we've done on on the post office scandal over 15 years i would probably come out at the end of it and show you a whopping loss but in terms of the impact that journalism has had both generally in to the post office victims and the post of itself and yes in terms of the impact of the positive impact it's had particularly this year on our brand and brand awareness around Computer Weekly has been enormous, and it's almost impossible to put a financial, commercial figure onto that.

39:14How do you decide and choose which stories to prioritize? The time of your team is precious and it's a finite resource. How do you decide which ones that you need to spend time and effort putting their energy into? So do you have a gut feeling? Do you have a decision framework? How do you arrive at that decision, Brian? That's a really good question because I would say our biggest challenge on a day-to-day basis is prioritization. It's deciding what we don't write about as much as is a harder decision than what we do write about. I often say to my boss, and he just raises an eyebrow when I say it, if he doubles the size of my team overnight, I would still keep everybody busy.

40:02there is so much that we could be writing about in the tech world these days. So the way that we go about prioritizing it, there isn't any sort of formal process or anything like that. So there is an element of experience and gut feel to it. But I always say to all of my journalists, all the reporters, if I turn to you at any time and say to you, what are the 10 biggest issues in your reporting area, your beat as we call it, what are the 10 biggest issues in your beat at the moment, you should be able to reel off the 10 biggest issues or whatever the number is, six biggest, 20 biggest, whatever it is in terms of what they're writing about.

40:41And you should be able to say to me, well, this is why it's a big issue. This is where it's going next. This is what we've written about it most recently. This is why I think this is going to be a bigger issue into the future. And so that's the sort of framework that we start from, really, is when a story comes in, if one of my reporters sees this is relevant to this big theme. So let's take, for example, security. The most read topic on Computer Weekly is security, not surprisingly. It's the single biggest issue for people working in IT is cybersecurity. If I said to Alex, who's my security editor, give me some of the big issues at the moment, probably one of the first things you would say would be ransomware.

41:27Ransomware is a massive problem. It's been the biggest, the fastest growing form of cybersecurity in recent years. It's now being generally identified as one of the biggest risk factors that even at a government level, people are talking about how do we address that? So if we're assessing a number of different stories, and one of those stories is a possible ransomware attack on somebody or a new form of ransomware or something like that, we're going to jump straight on that one because we know ransomware is a really big issue that is very relevant for our audience and is only going to continue getting to be a bigger issue.

42:08Having said that, we still have to be mindful that once upon a time we didn't think ransomware was a big issue and nobody really knew what it was. So we've also still got to be keeping an eye on what's happening around the edges, what's coming onto the radar that might become a big issue in the future. And that really comes down to a judgment call between conversations between myself and the people on my team about, yeah, you know, I think this is going to be really big for these reasons. And I think we should put some resource and some effort into writing about this because it's something we think in a while has become bigger.

42:44And there are any number of examples I could say to you over the years where we've seen something at a very early stage that nobody else is really writing about. And we've gone out and we've written about it and sort of taken a bit of a lead on it, if you like. That has then subsequently become a huge issue that everybody else is writing about as well. Yeah, yeah, for sure. No, that makes sense. Just in terms of emerging trends, obviously, you've got a unique sort of perspective on the UK tech industry. What are you most excited about? And also, what are you most concerned about in terms of emerging trends in the tech sector in the UK right now?

43:19I get asked this question a lot about, you know, what's the most exciting thing in tech at the moment? And in all honesty, I find it a slightly difficult question to answer. Maybe it's just because I've been around the sector for too long. Perhaps I'm just having been a journalist for 25 years now. Perhaps I'm just getting a little bit too cynical. The thing that's always excited me the most about technology hasn't changed in that it's the way that technology makes our lives better, the way it makes our work, the way we work, the way we live, the way we communicate with each other better. And anything that supports that is a technology that excites me.

43:56But of course, most technologies these days do that in one reason or another. One of the privileges of my job is I get to talk to lots of people who aren't necessarily in the public profile, academics and researchers and people like that, about what they think is going on in the world. And I get to sort of take bits of that and think, yeah, that makes sense and that makes sense and sort of synthesize it all together. And, you know, to me, what's happening in the tech sector at the moment at that sort of big macro contextual level is no different from what has happened for 200 years in terms of technological innovation generally.

44:34People get very excited about the idea of invention. There's actually, to me, there's very little invention going on in the tech sector at the moment. There's a huge amount of innovation. To me, an invention is something that's completely new that will enable you to do something you've never been able to do before. Innovation is about finding, using existing technologies to do things better, faster, better, faster, cheaper. Let's go back a couple hundred years, say, to the Industrial Revolution. Arguably, the technology that was the catalyst for the Industrial Revolution was the steam engine. It wasn't the case that the steam engine was invented and then the Industrial Revolution happened.

45:15The steam engine had been invented. It was invented in my hometown of Merthyr Tidville. There we go. There we go. Absolutely. My Richard Trevathic. Absolutely. That's right. Richard Trevathic. But that came, you know, the very first steam engine was like over 100 years before the Industrial Revolution. is generally considered to have started. The kickstart of the Industrial Revolution was, if I remember rightly, if I get the text right, was when James Watt built a steam engine that was small enough and easy enough to produce and cheap enough to produce that it was able to go mass market. It basically commoditized the steam engine.

45:49And once it commoditized the steam engine, there was this enormous outburst of innovation of people using the steam engine to do all sorts of things, build trains, build factories, find ways to pull coal out of the ground. And it's those innovations is what we now call the Industrial Revolution. You can look at almost any major technological innovation in the last 200 years and you've got the same story. Look at the car, for example. The internal combustion engine was the invention that eventually led to the transport revolution that the car brought about. But that was invented, was it, by Messrs.

46:26Daimler and Benz, wasn't it, in the late 19th century? But it wasn't until Henry Ford commoditized the production of cars and made them cheap enough to produce at a high volume for the mass market that suddenly that was the catalyst for all the innovation and road building and transport innovation that we've seen since. And we're going through exactly that in the technology sector. And we've been going through that for 50 plus years. The personal computer in the 80s was the time that we commoditized the ability for us as individuals to be able to use computers. Before that, it was big mainframes where you needed really specialist skills, and they were hugely expensive.

47:06The personal computer commoditized the ability to use computers for us, ended up with one on every desk, eventually in every home. huge that that was the catalyst for a huge amount of innovation with all the pc applications spreadsheets word processors email all this sort of things yeah in the 90s the internet you know the internet had been around for 30 years but but it reached a point where the where it became commoditized it was cheap enough ubiquitous enough available enough for everybody to use it that was the catalyst for an enormous amount of innovation the worldwide web was the biggest of those innovations, websites, e-commerce, all of that innovation that came from that.

47:46Then that smartphone, commoditizing again of that mobile technology, huge burst of innovation out of it, apps, social media, all these sort of things. Absolutely, yeah. Cloud, commoditization of large-scale computing power and storage, making cheap, affordable, and highly accessible. Where we are in technology and the digital revolution, if you like, at the moment, it's not that i would argue it's not that we have a huge pace of invention it's not like there's so many new technologies coming out it's just that we're we are reaching the point of commoditization in so many different areas of technology now that that's causing so much innovation in all areas of our lives personal life working life everything the technology is is changing more aspects of our lives at the same time than it ever has before.

48:42So when I look at new technologies as they're coming through, that's the frame of reference, if you like, that I'm coming from. So most people, I think if you ask most people today, what do you think is the most exciting technology around? They probably say AI. Yeah, of course. But I think AI to me is just another really good example of exactly that same process. You know, generative AI at the moment, chat GPT and all this. The core technologies at the heart of chat GBT and generative AI is neural networking, which has been around since the 60s. Some of the principles have been around since the 50s.

49:18The reason we're talking about this now is because we've got to a point, because of mobile phones, because of the ubiquity of data, because of cloud, because of all the other commoditization that's come before this point, that neural networking and the technologies around it can now be commoditized. that can now be done at such a large scale at an affordable cost that makes it reasonable for all of us to be able to use it. It gives us the ability to be able to go into whichever generative AR you like and say, give me a picture of a bunch of penguins in suits sitting in the Houses of Parliament.

49:54And to generate that in seconds and to get that wow moment is, wow, that's incredible. You know, this almost looks so real. to be able to have these conversations with chat GPT and all these sort of things, which for somebody who's never, who's come into this cold, blows your mind. It really does. Yeah, sure. Absolutely. So for me, what's exciting about technology at the moment is the fact that so many different areas of the technology sector are reaching this point of commoditization and are therefore having this enormous surge of innovation as a result of more and more of these technologies becoming affordable and easy to produce and easily accessible.

50:42And I still think we're very much in the early days of the sort of innovations that that's going to lead to. Just to add a thought on that, I think it's a really good point that the life cycle always remains the same. You get the invention, and then you get the manifestation of that invention to a point where it becomes commoditized and it becomes ubiquitous. but it takes a while. Obviously, the steam engine took ages. Even the internet was invented in, what, the 70s or 80s? It didn't really hit the business world until the late 90s, really. And then, obviously, the man on the street, even later.

51:20It wasn't really until the iPhone, was it? I don't suppose. But what is changing, I think? And absolutely, you're right. There's so many of these things going on now. There's so many of these inventions and then the manifestation of the invention. But what I think is changing is the speed of the life cycle from invention to commoditization. It seems to be just, there's so many of them going on and they're just happening quicker. It still takes time, and I absolutely agree on that one. It's not overnight these things happen. AI, I think, is an enormous step, generative AI, sorry, is an enormous step forward.

51:55I just think everyone's confused about how it's useful for them right now, apart from being able to write a quick tweet or, you know, summarize a book you haven't got time to read or whatever. It's great for that. But in terms of real, actionable, productive output, I don't think we've quite nailed how it works for us right yet, at least, or most people haven't anyway. Yeah, I agree. I mean, we're about 18 months or so now after that release of ChatGPT that really engaged the world, that really got people excited about this. Even at this stage, businesses are still only tentatively starting to use the technology.

52:31They're still checking it out. They're still making sure that it's viable for them. And there are some fantastic examples of businesses that are using chat GPT-type technology, generative AI technology. But they're mostly using it for, you know, internally. they're using it in very carefully controlled environments where they can maintain their confidence that the results they're getting out of it are viable and is providing them with information that genuinely helps their business. And that will accelerate, of course. That will accelerate. But there is that time gap between the excitement and then people working out, well, how can I actually use this?

53:13Yeah, sure. What are the actual applications of this? And then it's suddenly starting to pop up everywhere. Yeah. It'll never become lightning quick because I just don't think people are there. I mean, do you know what I mean? It's like people are the thing that slows it down now, not the invention. The invention and the manifestation and the commoditization, I think, will never be instant because people take a long time to adopt, don't they? You know what I mean? And that's a really good point because that's the one thing I think the technology sector still is not really, really not very good at.

53:49You know, we can pump out these new technologies all the time. But as human beings, we will only ever have a certain capacity to absorb the change in our lives that these technologies bring along. There is, you know, and we're getting better at it. We're getting faster at it. You know, if you were to try and plot this on a graph, you would find you'd get bursts of innovation in technology and then you'll get a slowdown. and then you'll get a burst of innovation and then you'll get a slowdown and that slowdown happens because we as a society reach a point where it's like it's too much it's too much it's happening change is happening too quickly we need to slow down yeah assimilate what we've got and then we can then yeah we can move on i feel quite close to that right now yes i agree the other question you asked me earlier as well what excites you was sort of what concerns you and that relates into this as well in a way because i think the thing that's still what worries me most about the tech about in the technology world is we still haven't learned the lessons fully of the unforeseen consequences of technology.

54:52As technology is becoming more ubiquitous, as it's becoming used in more and more areas of our lives, yes, it's bringing enormous benefits, but every technology is going to have a downside to it as well. For every great new thing you can do, there's going to be a negative side to it. When we were all starting to get excited about social media back in 2008, 2009, 2010, whatever, when Facebook was suddenly becoming ubiquitous. Who would ever have imagined that a few years after that, people would be blaming Facebook for influencing general elections in major Western democracies? You just wouldn't have been able to comprehend that this tool you were using to share photos with your auntie in Australia would become this tool for authoritarian governments to try and undermine elections in other parts of the world.

55:43You wouldn't have been able to make that leap. But we're too slowly learning that lesson, that these great technologies have unforeseen consequences, and we need to be better prepared and think more about what their unforeseen consequences are. And this is one of the things around AI that I hope is encouraging. There has been a ridiculous amount of hype. We've all heard some of the daft, AI is going to take over the world, AI is going to destroy the world. Skynet is playing out. Skynet is on the way. The world, all this sort of thing. All of that's bullshit, frankly. It's people trying to sell technology.

56:25But there's a kernel of truth in it, in that AI is a technology. We don't know what the unforeseen consequences of AI are going to be. And I think it is a good thing that we are having that conversation at this very early stage of AI. I still remain to be convinced that that conversation is going to go as far as it needs to go because there are vested interests who don't really want to have that conversation because ultimately it might restrict the way AI is going to be used. But I think those sort of conversations about the potential unforeseen consequences, the ethics, the safety of new technologies, I think are hugely important.

57:07And if there's one thing I would like to change in the tech sector more than any other at the moment, it would be to embed those conversations right at the very heart of everything we do. I think the people want to know, okay, you compile, very successful, UK tech 50, most influential women in tech. How do you go about choosing who gets on that list and where they are placed in those lists? We've been doing it for a long time now, So we've got the process down quite well now. We pulled together a judging panel of representatives from various different parts of the tech sector who bring their perspectives on what's important, what influence in the tech sector means.

57:49And we place a lot of faith in those judges' experience and contacts and knowledge. We engage with our audience, with our readers, asking them to nominate people. the ultimate purpose of the UK Tech 50 and of the most influential women is to recognize role models, to change perceptions of the tech sector. It's not just all about techies and people with beards and sandals in base rooms, writing code and never seeing daylight. That people in technology are changing our lives for the better. Absolutely. We're in a privileged position at Computer Weekly as we know a lot of these people, but we don't know all of them.

58:30So we rely a lot on our readers to nominate people that they consider to be influential for them. And then we go through a judging process where the judges assess all the people who are nominated, come out and then come out with the list. We do a reader vote on the shortlist as well. And then we come out with these finalists. And the focus of them, I often get contacted afterwards by people saying, oh, I didn't make the list. I'm a bit disappointed. Can you tell me why? And I can't really tell them why because we never ever make a conscious decision not to put somebody in the top 50. We make conscious decisions about the reasons why we put people into the top 50, but nobody who doesn't make the top 50 is there because anybody ever said, oh, I don't think they should be there.

59:21They're not good enough or they've done enough. it's about you know looking at what people have done and saying yeah these people have done something really special this year and it's hard we're going through we've just recently been through the first phase of the judging for the UK Tech 50 the most influential people in technology and there are loads of people who didn't make the final 50 that I know really well and I know what an incredible job they're doing and I would love to see them in the top 50 but it's not my top 50 It's a top 50 by judges from lots of different perspectives, all across the sector.

1:00:01It's not a personal opinion. It's a consensus-based opinion based on a structure you've developed for this type of thing, which I'm sure is probably very impartial and is based on facts, not subjective. Yeah, absolutely. We try as much to make it that as we can, yeah. Absolutely. Now, good answer. Thanks for clearing that up. So, Brian, I know you're obviously, you've got a long way to go in your career, but looking back now in your armchair with your smoking jacket and your cigar, looking back on your career, if you were to sort of talk to your 21-year-old self, maybe the guy who first left university and got into the sort of media world, maybe around that time in your life, what would you say to that guy?

1:00:41What career advice would you give to that person, knowing what you know now? I mean, I think two things come to mind. One, I would say, don't be afraid to follow your instincts. Don't be afraid to follow your gut. Don't be worried that some of your decisions will take you down a dead end in your career because with the right attitude and the right approach, you can back out of those dead ends and you can change direction. I've had the experience now of doing that. I think if I'd known that when I was 21, I'd have been better at it. I might have taken more risks without being quite so worried about what the outcome of those risks would be.

1:01:18So I think on one level, it's very much that thing, don't be afraid to follow your instinct. And I think the other thing I'd say, thinking back to how I was at 21 and how I was thinking about technology at that time, was I would say to my 21-year-old self, don't worry, one day technology is going to be cool. Trust me, technology is going to be cool. When I was at university and I was going to parties and meeting people and trying to meet girls and make friends and all that sort of thing. You know, it's like university. You eventually get around to the conversation. You'll chat with somebody. You'll get around to it.

1:01:52You eventually say, well, what are you studying? And they would say what they were doing. And I would say, yeah, I'm doing computer studies. And they'd be like, oh, oh, oh, okay. Zeros and ones. Yeah. For a lot of my early years working in the technology sector, it was similar. As I was getting older and meeting people and going to dinner parties and all this sort of thing as you do in your 20s and 30s it was that sort of thing you'd have get chatting with somebody and they say oh what do you do and i say oh well i i work in it because that's what everybody called it at the time i work in it and they're like oh oh oh okay um there's just this constant process of having to get over the people's disappointment when you said to them you work in it these days you know and for a few years now oh i should say when i got to journalism initially it was i'm a journalist and people oh really that's really interesting tell me more What do you write about?

1:02:43And say, well, I work for a tech magazine. Oh, okay. We've got the point now where, you know, I have those conversations with people now, and I say, yeah, I write about technology, and people go, oh, wow, that's really interesting. That must be so much fun. Isn't it exciting what's going on in the technology world? So much. Isn't it incredible? You know, that... I bet there's probably, to the contrary there, but they probably expect you to be an expert on absolutely everything now. Oh, absolutely, yeah, yeah. Of course, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. You obviously, you're a cyber expert, you're an AI expert, you're a ubiquitous expertise of everything, basically.

1:03:20I think probably everybody who works in tech, who meets somebody who's not in tech, at some point will get asked the question, so which is the best iPhone to buy? I've got no idea. Or how do I fix my laptop? How do I fix my printer? At least people don't print so often these days, so I don't get the how do you fix your printer. You don't get the press so often. Brilliant. So let's end on this one, Brian. So I always ask the guest to finish off, have you been inspired by a book recently? It doesn't have to be a book if you're not much of a reader. It could be a story, an anecdote. But what piece of content have you been inspired by recently that you could recommend to the listeners?

1:04:00That's really interesting. That's such an interesting question. That's such a difficult one to try and pick one. I'm going to pick a book that I came across in a reader, nothing to do with technology. as a hobby. I like writing fiction purely as a hobby, creative writing. A little while back, I did an MA, a master's degree, a part-time master's degree in creative writing as a hobby. Great fun. Loved it. Got so much out of it. As part of that, I came across a book called Into the Woods by a chap called John York. He's a screenwriter. He used to be a senior screenwriter at the BBC and at Channel 4.

1:04:40And he's basically written a book about, essentially it's how to tell stories. It's about how to structure. It's how stories work. Why is storytelling important? And how do stories work? Now, I read it initially from the perspective of if you want to write a book or a short story or something like that, what could I learn from this to structure those stories and make my storytelling better? And it's become a little bit of a, This book has become a little bit of a Bible for me on this. But I've also realized that a lot of the principles of it around storytelling apply to so much more of your life.

1:05:18It applies to my job. It applies to the way we communicate. It applies to the way that I, as a journalist, try to tell stories to people. And I think this subject of storytelling and understanding storytelling is so hugely important. Yeah, absolutely. In a world where there is so much technology, where technology is confusing, where it's changing our lives so much and will continue to change our lives for many years to come. The ability to be able to communicate with somebody else in a way that they will understand and empathise and appreciate what it means for them, which is what storytelling is all about, is hugely important.

1:06:04So if anybody who's listening to this is interested in creative writing, is interested in storytelling, I would absolutely recommend them go and read the book Into the Woods by John York. Fantastic answer. I will make sure that goes into the show notes, okay? Yeah, look, storytelling is a fundamental, primal, it's a fundamental part of the human experience, isn't it? You know, at a fundamental level, at least. And it's a skill that is, it sounds quite easy to say it, But I think people who are good storytellers, especially when you throw in complex things like the tech sector, but if you can create stories out of that that are compelling, then I think that's how you get across important facts or you get information across so much easier.

1:06:56You know, if you chuck facts at me, I'm not going to listen. If you tell me a story, I'm inevitably going to listen. Everyone loves a story. So I think that's fantastic. That's a very, very important skill, especially in your line of work. So, yeah. Yeah. The tech sector historically and largely to this day is not very good at storytelling. The tech sector loves features and functions and whizzy new things and bits and bytes. And, you know, look at this exciting new thing that my software can do, that my app can do, all that sort of thing. It's still a little bit obsessed with features and functions.

1:07:29I think the tech sector generally needs to get a lot better at storytelling, really does. Yeah, I think it's due probably to the sort of short attention span that we've all got these days due to social media and things like that. You kind of want immediate impact in your face, and a lot of people are not patient enough to read on, to listen to a story. I think that's something that we all need to work on because you're missing out. Stories are, you've got to be patient. Stories are never communicated in 120 characters. Very rarely, yeah. but the stories are, you read beyond that. But look, Brian, thank you so much.

1:08:07My pleasure. Another nugget of wisdom there amongst many others. But thank you so much for coming on the podcast, the 100th episode. So thank you for being part of this milestone for us. I have to say the most recommended book, I've asked pretty much every guest this question, the most recommended book is actually Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, which is also a tech-related book. So yeah, so that's a really popular one as well amongst the guests. So, but yeah, thank you so much for coming on the Tech Leaders Podcast, Brian. My pleasure. I've really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to do so.

1:08:50Wow, what an episode to celebrate, our 100th release. I can't believe we've been through this process 100 times. is crazy but there are loads of revelations to focus on here Brian was very candid I mean he was he was a brilliant interview where do I start I think I think the one I want to draw attention to because what really struck me most it's a bit of an intangible but Brian was obviously talking about what seemingly what appeared to be an orchestrated tactic of repeatedly telling postmasters, you are the only one, almost perpetuating the idea that their individual struggles were isolated incidents.

1:09:31It was Mr. Bates and the campaigners who obviously put in the hard yards on this. But I have to say, Computer Weekly, their journalistic integrity and their persistence really did support and help uncover this pattern that turned what could be a mere story into an institutional scandal. Obviously, Brian's description and Brian talking about how this played out from the Computer Weekly's perspective, I thought was fascinating. It was just a really interesting part. But again, there was so much to draw attention to here.

1:10:09So reflecting on our journey to 100 episodes over the last four and a half years, It feels like both a blur and also a monumental leap from recording our first episode on a phone back in 2019 right through to where we are now. Looking back, we've evolved so much. We've become an established podcast, which is reflected in the amount of inbound interest we get from PR companies and people wanting to come on as guests. Ultimately, our goal is to give real people a platform to share their story unfiltered. Whilst we invariably don't have the marketing budget and the production budget of the larger podcast productions, our goal has always been very simple, is to share authentic stories that inspire people.

1:10:57And hopefully, we've managed to do that. We have so much more fantastic content to come your way, including some of the UK's and international top CTOs, CIOs and other tech leaders, entrepreneurs, authors, journalists, and those with a great story to tell in relation to leadership and technology and this incredible sector that we're all involved in. Thank you so much for your support. I look forward to delivering more great content to you in the years to come. Thank you so much for your support. please share and try to amplify the message we're always looking for new listeners and we're open to spread our reach as wide as we possibly can i look forward to delivering more great content to you in the years to come