#91, Lianne Potter, Head of SecOps @ Asda: People-centric Cybersecurity

0:00What are people's real motivations, either to be secure or insecure? What do they actually care about? And if you think it's caring about the company's data, forget it. Nobody cares about the company's data. But do they care about maybe that'll impact their bonus? Yeah. Bring it to the personal.

0:23Leanne Potter is a cyber anthropologist, host of the Compromising Positions podcast, and head of SecOps at renowned Leeds-based supermarket giant Asda. We talk about how an English literature graduate learned to code in little under five months and went on to have a successful career in cybersecurity. We also discover why being a wedding photographer inspired Leanne to study anthropology and also the surprising synergy between anthropology and cybersecurity. We also uncover the great digital divide and also what macro human behavior is likely to be impacted by generative AI and much, much more.

1:05It's a fascinating conversation full of value, full of opinions, everything we love on the Tech Leaders Podcast. It is Leanne Potter.

1:21Leanne, thank you so much for coming on the Tech Leaders Podcast. I'm really excited to be speaking to you. Look, let's start with the question we always start with. Really keen to get your take. What does good leadership mean to you, Leanne? Good leadership means that you don't have an ego about yourself as a leader. You're there to make everyone else look good. And if you do that well, you'll end up looking good anyways. I am very much treat people like adults, especially in the work I do. I'm hiring knowledge workers. I'm hiring people with skills often I do not have. And I'm very comfortable with saying I'm hiring people because I can't fulfill that need.

1:58But I can get the best out of people. And that's what I would say my leadership is like. The aim is to get the best out of people. So I often say to people in my team, I'm here interested in your career because cybersecurity is a small industry. We are going to bump into each other again. yeah i'm not bothered if i give you opportunities that will make you look better to another organization and that might lead to you leaving one day yeah because i'm all about repaying that forward making sure that people get the most fulfilling careers they possibly can with what they want not everyone wants to keep climbing the ladder some people want to stay in the technical space for example and keep doing that but finding out what really drives people when they come to work and leveraging that.

2:43I think we often are too focused as leaders about the outcome, but not about how does it make people feel doing this job? Now, things need to get done. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying let people go do whatever they like, but there is an element of if you identify what people enjoy to do, then the return on investment there is great. And that might not necessarily be what you've originally hired them in to do. And it's about having those open dialogues, really establishing what really motivates this individual where do they see themselves in a few years time how can you shift and manipulate your deliverables for them to be able to achieve that one day i think if you unearth if you somehow find that bite point between what they're really motivated to do and their job and what their remit is then you've got this effortless crossroads of these two things you know what it's like leanne sometimes you spend an entire day you spent hours working on something and it feels it's gone like that because you love what you're doing it's you're passionate about it do you know what i mean you're loving it so much it's just you don't want it to end and i think if you can trigger that inside your team so that they're working on things which are just absolutely effortless then they will give you 110 because that's what they'll want to do that won't they i absolutely love that i think i've never really looked at it in that way in terms of leader in the context of leadership but it's something that certainly resonates with me for sure and a lot of my leadership peers turn around oh what if they leave what if they go i was like well actually the more i seem to treat people but for mine say i i do say to people when they first join me be here with me in two years time i'm going to be very disappointed if you're still doing the same thing if you're still you know doing this role nothing has changed i'm going to be incredibly disappointed whether or not that's with myself or anywhere else and maybe a lateral move or move somewhere else with me or another organization people say do you really say that i say yeah i say that every single time yeah and what i find is actually it's not supposed to be a psychology but it seems to work is that i actually get repaid in loyalty and people say actually because you're so transparent and that we can tell you really do actually care about our careers i want to stick with you because it makes more sense to stick with someone who's going to champion my career than it does to try and forge your own path because we all need help we all need that support careers careers are made on networking definitely especially nowadays and having someone in your corner that says look i'll put you in touch with this person you might really enjoy speaking to this person you might decide to leave but at the end of the day i see it as making the industry better so that in a few years time once you've maybe got an experience elsewhere I can rehire you again and you've got some more experience for me and I just keep building up on that yeah I really do believe in karma and good things happen to good people and I think if you are just building value in anyone's career they don't forget that I would be very surprised and if you've forgotten someone who's really added value to your career and really set you on the path you ultimately the person who inspired you to set up a podcast the person who inspired you to go for that promotion you remember that don't you and you'll always think you'll always always have them positive thoughts towards that individual.

5:52But there's two quotes that sprung to mind. The one of them is a bit of a overused quote, which is Steve Jobs about, you know, it doesn't make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do. You hire smart people so they can tell you what to do. And ultimately, if you stick to that, and it comes back to your ego play, so many leaders are not able to do that because their ego won't allow them to do it. But the other one is, and I wanted to ask you if you've come across this one, I don't know who the quote is from, but I think it's from a famous business book is the cfo says to the ceo what if we hire good people and then train them and then they leave and the ceo because what if we don't trade up train them and they stay do you have you heard that one before yeah that's richard branson is that a branson one is it it's a branson cut and i think he's absolutely right and i get why they do it i'm very suspicious of organization and i've worked for some because the current one isn't like that but where if you have a piece of training then the handcuffs go on you are not allowed to leave otherwise we're going to get you to repay that within six months a year sometimes even longer i've seen really long 10 years for training and yeah the companies i've worked at where that that has been the case because i in tech you never know what the world's going to look like you never know where the next opportunity is going to come from what the next big tech innovation is you want a bit of agile a bit of flexibility to be able to move and i've worked in organizations where that has been the case and they've said look we were happy to train you and we want to train you but if you leave within an x amount of time we're going to charge you and what did i do i didn't take that training not because and i stayed but not because i didn't think the training was valuable but because i wanted that flexibility so if i needed to go i didn't want to have a financial burden on there unfortunately what does that mean it means that they didn't get an extra skill or expertise out of me because you can't force them to do training and so i totally think it's it's absolutely right that you empower people to have an open mind of heart about training and development and then they will repay that loyalty i think there's been some studies recently about generation z and the study said that they don't really care about the financial compensation as much as the past generations do but what they do care about is training and development and we're going to see that a lot more and i think what i would call those good ideals about what work can be that we are seeing from that generation it will start to filter into the other generations that people like myself millennial and then gen x's and baby boomers going backwards will all start to see actually this is always learning always curious mindset actually will make me have a better work life balance it will make me more employable whether that's in my company or not and overall oh, I'm just going to be happier at what I'm doing.

8:39When it comes to things like working in tech, you need that. You need to be at the forefront of everything because what was hot and cool and trendy a few years ago no longer applies. Yeah, especially in your industry. Yeah. In cybersecurity, it's like an ever-changing platform. AI is too, and all technology-based endeavors are. 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.

9:26And 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. Go to bdigitaluk.com to find out more and get in touch.

9:49I wanted to just ask you to tell the listeners a little bit about yourself. You're the head of SecOps for ASDA at the moment, but tell us a little bit about your career from a very high level from point of education right through to the to the present day yeah so I wasn't always in tech I did English literature at university my undergraduate got into the first job I could find because it was the financial crash the year I graduated and jobs were few and far between so I was the last generation yeah I was last generation who was promised get a university degree and you'd be set for life that wasn't the case unfortunately so I ended up with my husband at the time setting up a business.

10:29We were wedding photographers and I did that business for 10 years. I loved it. I absolutely loved it. I still miss it to this day. It was incredible. It's a really nice career to have. And I was really interested in anthropology. And so I went back to university while running the business still and studied anthropology at master's level. But my specialism wasn't great exotic countries. It was digital anthropology. Now, anthropology, for those that are not aware of what it is. I know I get asked a lot, what is anthropology? Anthropology is the study of human cultures, how they're formed, how they thrive, and ultimately how they collapse.

11:04So my specialism was digital anthropology. So that's the study of how digital cultures are formed online. And so I do research, and this is aging me immensely. There was a platform called Second Life, and it was avatar-based. This is way before Meta. And I did a study on whether we replicated capitalist structures in that universe. And we did. We replicated things exactly. At the time when I was studying that aspect of digital anthropology, it was considered like, should we be studying this? Is it real? Are these social interactions real? Are they tangible? Do they have any value merit to actually be recorded?

11:43And as we all live online nowadays, they certainly do. They are just as valid. Did you find that human behavior in the context of playing computer games or whatever, on a macro level, does it pursue the similar path, a similar pattern to what macro-humour behaviour follows? Do you know what I mean? If we're looking back at history, is it a microcosm of that? Is that what you're sort of finding typically? Yes, absolutely, yes. Humans are very malleable. Humans are very good at adaption. That's why we've endured. That's why we've survived. And that's why we are able to live on any part of the world.

12:19No other animal species can so easily go to any other part of the world. It's because we're so adaptable. And yes, that includes the online space as well, the virtual space. Wow, that's fascinating. So you did the anthropology thing. Yeah, and then I managed to get a job as an anthropologist, which I'll tell you what, in the UK is very rare, but I did. That was working for a charity as a project lead. I was given£5 million and told, solve destitution in Leeds. And I was just like, how? okay let me try and figure that out so what i did was i opened the doors i wait to see what would come through and what i was finding time and time again was people that were facing severe destitution were those that were digitally excluded now that was just a coincidence that happened it wasn't that i was manufacturing that or anything like that i came in as a strict anthropologist not a digital anthropologist but what happened it was a perfect storm is all the uk online benefit systems had moved to online so people used to be able to walk into a job center and say i'm here to sign on and they would speak to a person they would fill out a form get their money now they were coming into the service and they were pointed to a bank of computers now if you've never touched a computer before which a lot of these people hadn't or had no experience or whatever reason that was so incredibly intimidating and they would just be told oh just go have lessons at the library now if you have a lot of social anxiety you know these people have lots of drug issues and also just saw the library is still quite a lofty academic place somewhere where they didn't feel like they belonged they just didn't go so then they would come into my service about to be made homeless not eaten things like that and we spent the majority of the time just doing online forms and one of the kind of upticks of that piece of work was that I was able to write in my reports, look, the destitution in Leeds has been deeply impacted because the government has made these decisions to move everything online, which it was a good decision.

14:21However, in doing so, they completely neglected the most vulnerable people in society. And that's known as the digital divide. And that still exists today. And in places that you wouldn't imagine. So when we were doing our service, the actually biggest people affected by the digital divide was the very young so 16 to 21 which you wouldn't think so initially but when you think about people who've gone through the care system they've never had computers they've never had their own phones and then they're suddenly once they get of age thrust into the real world not having any of these skills don't know how to fend for themselves and then people in between the ages of 45 to 55 were the also biggest affected group so maybe they have worked all their lives maybe doing blue collar jobs and things like that.

15:07And then obviously then they're told the only way to get on this world now is to access a computer. And they've never had to do it before. And so that's where we've seen the biggest barriers. Yeah. My father-in-law, who sadly passed away last year, but he was basically, I know it sounds crazy now and the older listeners will remember what this is, but there was, you obviously come across Teletext. So Teletext was basically, so my father-in-law was in his 80s and he just used teletext for everything got all his news from it he didn't have the internet they just didn't they just they were suspicious of the internet so there's no internet no broadband in the house at all but got everything he needed from newspapers and teletext so when i when he needed a new tv and it was on his last legs they no longer supported teletext now i sound stupid but he was i said oh no worries i'll just we'll just get the internet and he was like no i don't want it he just did not want to get the internet so he kind of lost that real-time communication vehicle for news for sport the lottery numbers which they were in that into the lot they were into the lottery and it detached them so it's funny you say digital divide i immediately thought of that it detached them from real-time information because this teletext is not supported anymore and i can imagine that's just a microcosm again of of uh i've had a lot of people experience that we saw it during lockdown so whole families have maybe if they were lucky one device between them And so you've got whole families, different age groups, all learning, trying to get their school lessons in, maybe trying to work at the same time as well.

16:35You know, adults trying to work at the same time. Absolute nightmare situation. The digital divide is nothing to do with how many people have a smartphone. It's about the skills people have and the access. You've got to think, I've got my new broadband bill because it goes up this time of year, doesn't it, with inflation? And I was just like, wow, it should be going down on up, this stuff. if we're so digitally connected, this should be going down, but it's getting so prohibitively expensive. I can't imagine if I was still doing that work on the digital divide, how some of the most vulnerable people in society can even afford to keep connected.

17:10And you need to keep connected because you've got your things like your gas and electric. How do you do a price comparison and get the very best deal if you're not online? How do you have access to health information? How do you have access to education information? All those little tiny things we take for granted. and it has a massive impact. So that was my anthropology, Dave. And I decided I wanted to get really hands-on with the tech and apply what I'd learned from the digital divide and what I'd seen on the ground into actually building tech. So I taught myself how to code. So that was my first forage tech.

17:43So up until then, I wouldn't say I was non-technical, but I never had a tech job until then. So it was in my 30s, I decided to retrain. I used all free online resources, tret it like a full-time job. So I was very dedicated. every evenings, weekends. I was going to tech meetups in Leeds. I'm very lucky that, you know, it was a little less so now since COVID. But at the time it was, yeah, you could go to an event every single night on tech in Leeds and it was fantastic. So I was networking all the time. And then within five months I was job ready and I got a job working for NHS Digital on their graduate scheme.

18:16I was the oldest graduate there by miles, but I've still enjoyed it. And it wasn't very long while I was doing my software development at NHS Digital. I actually started to notice another team that seemed, with my anthropology hat, to have a different culture to everyone else. And that was the cybersecurity team. And I was just fascinated by how the software development team was all about innovation, agility, working in two-week sprints. And it was in direct contrast with the cybersecurity team who were restrictive, slow, not keen to innovate, worked in longer cycles. I was like, wow, this is so interesting that this really important aspect of health, making sure our health data is very secure, is in contrast to what we're actually trying to deliver.

19:03And how could we actually make that work? And I begged the cybersecurity team to let me in for a year, literally on the daily. I would say persistence pays there. They eventually let me in. and I have been working in cybersecurity ever since. I'm also doing cyber anthropology, which I do as part of my consultancy, the Ampro Securist. Yeah, no, we'll come on to that in a minute. But there's a lot to unpack there, Leanne. So I want to basically, can we just go back through a little bit? There's a couple of things I wanted to ask you about, okay? First of all, can you give some advice to somebody who has no idea how to code, but is thinking about getting into it and learning how to code?

19:40What, from your experience of getting into it and learning coding, what languages did you start with what did you learn from it what advice would you give so i started off with a site called free code camp and that starts you off on what's known as html and css and then builds you up to javascript and then you can go on to things like python and that was a journey i took that way and i also supplemented that with youtube videos and other kind of free resources there's a really good book called automate the the boring things with python that was really good that can give you a step-by-step guide and things like that so that's how i started oh fantastic how long did it take you to get to a reasonable level where you were sort of able to get involved in projects and things from beginning to that point yeah so i was job ready for using stuff within five months as i say it was a very dedicated five months wow job ready that's amazing yeah i was just really lucky that i had the time to be able to and the supportive group behind me while I said, no, I'm not going to any family events.

20:41I'm not going to any parties or anything like that. So, yeah. You obviously had a burning desire then to get into the cyberspace from that because you said you were persistent with it. They weren't particularly inviting at first and there was loads of things you wanted to improve there. But what was driving you to get into cyber? There must have been some sort of gut feeling you had about it. Can you talk us through that? I think it was my natural pessimism. I've always been the one to kind of imagine the worst. And I think that's quite a good skill to have when you're working in cybersecurity.

21:13So that almost Debbie Downing-ness appealed to me a little bit. cynical yeah cynical i do find cyber people a lot of them are cynical especially the ones on the compliance side but yeah now that that makes total sense so how did you loosen them up and get them to think along your sort of along the lines that you saw it how did you influence that team that initial team to sort of be more agile and work with more of a software development mentality i was very lucky that while i was at the nhs i was put on a leadership kind of fast track. And what that enabled me to do was actually speak. So they would put you in a group of people, but it wouldn't be, for example, it wouldn't be all software developers.

21:50It wouldn't be all cybersecurity. But actually my group were all clinical staff. So that was a really great experience. It was doctors, it was pharmacists, it was nurses. And I just sat there and I just asked them, I was just asking them as an anthropologist, what do you think of security? What are your fears about it? What can we do to make your life easier? And the answers were quite shocking but not shocking so most of the clinical staff was like my job is to look after people it doesn't matter if that uses a digital tool or not yeah and so patients health and well-being came first which is totally understandable but what that was leading to was obviously technical shortcuts so if you needed to act fast maybe you don't have such a good password maybe you use the same password for all your devices you know your personal and and your work things like that maybe you do have those kind of what i would call insecure behaviors but it's instead of instead of like the stick and going you need to do this you need to do this because in the uk we're in a unique position we don't pay for health care unless we're paying for it privately so the motivations you see maybe in other countries where you do pay for health care that is financially motivated any kind of hack is financially motivated that way and so actually how do you explain yes there is no financial implication really apart from obviously downtime if we have a breach or attack in the nhs but what is the impact on patient care and that's where you hook them in you find out where their hook is why should they care and you can only do that if you ask them now typically in cyber security we do not ask our end users how the controls that we're putting in place will affect them on their day-to-day job.

23:35And we don't ask them what their motivations are for being secure or being insecure. And those questions need to be asked because otherwise we're just doing a one-size-fits-all approach. And people, you can see, we're getting breached all the time. Big companies, small companies. Microsoft had one recently. If they can't handle it, then how are we expecting other organizations to handle it? Yeah. Because we just don't communicate. What kind of threats are you concerned about at the moment, Leanne? ransomware what is there anything in particular you've seen recently which is like oh god that's a bit of a challenge the deep fake videos oh god yeah it's gonna get in scary good they are aren't they it's ridiculous yeah yeah i'm worried if i put my security awareness hat on we've had pretty good messaging with phishing emails like what's about look helpful you know like bad spellings and stuff like that yeah ai is getting really good at writing this stuff so we're gonna have to really rethink how we train people yeah to spot this stuff and i absolutely at the moment can't think of how we're going to do that and that's what worries me is not only we're going to have to pivot we're going to have to pivot in such a way that we've not had to do in quite a long time because the principles have always been very much the same have strong passwords make sure it's unique for every site have 2fa don't click on that but there's so many things against us at the moment that yeah is really causing us to reconsider it i can't see much of a future for passwords i think there has to be something more robust than that yeah there has to be some sort of retina scans or fingerprint way of access but what do i know but i just passwords surely it's just not robust enough going into a potentially a quantum computing future you know i'm going to ask you about anthropology and cyber security an unlikely match and i wouldn't normally put those two things together.

25:22Why did studying anthropology benefit the stuff you were doing with cyber? Why are they interlinked? And what have you learned? What similarities are there between both subject matters? They are interlinked because everything we do in tech is cultural, and that includes cyber. Interesting take. Because every act we do at work is a cultural act, and cyber is a part of that the analogy i suggest is we are so ritualized when we leave the house at locking our doors we don't even think about it anymore yeah however we haven't got quite there with cyber security yet we're getting there but i think it's the intangibility and it's the intangibility we need to work on of what that threat is now if i look outside maybe occasionally i might see maybe not these days but used to be able to see bobby's on the beat police officers walking around even you yep if i made a phone call to them they'd come out if something was going on in the cyberspace we feel like we're on our own it's a bit more like the wild west another way i tend to think about is the way we discuss victims in cyber security as well is a very interesting cultural phenomenon that needs exploring so if i get burgled in my house even if i've left the window open people are going to have sympathy people are going to say oh it's really it's awful that and and those burglars they'd be angry at the burglar yeah if i get breached if i get hacked or something like that oh you were stupid it was you it was it was you that went wrong and we see this on an individual scale and we see this on a corporate scale so when a big corporation gets breached it's not the cyber criminals that have vilified it's not the ones that have done the effort to actually break into your organization it's the organization themselves and we turn around and go oh they were stupid they had bad practice but we wouldn't do that in other circumstances so i'm really interested in the impact in that cultural narrative and how it's probably causing us to do more elusive behaviors when it comes to our security not have that open dialogue so you're seeing in organizations people too scared to report when something goes wrong and timing is everything when it comes to reporting cyber security incidents and if we don't get people reporting as soon as it happens we're in big trouble yeah no absolutely i i did it myself i basically put my crypto keys into a phishing site before and they just stole all my crypto straight away it's because i thought i funnily enough i thought i'd left lost my laptop and whatever i thought there was a security issue there so i in a panicked way went online and put went onto the site where they were containing the the crypto and then put it in and then it was it was efficient side and they they cleaned me out it wasn't that much fortunately but nonetheless it was still but i yeah i didn't report that i just felt like such an idiot i didn't report it i don't think the police would have done a great deal anyway because it was like they probably didn't wouldn't have known what crypto was at that time but yeah i totally get that that's i think we don't we just don't treat digital property with the same amount of respect as we do physical property.

28:32Would you agree with that? I would totally agree with that. And that's where it needs to change because that's where the shift is. I get paid in binary nowadays. I very rarely go to the cash machine and actually pull out my hat and pay in cash. So it's all kind of ephemeral stuff. My whole persona, my whole career is built on my network, which starts off going to a LinkedIn page. That's my storefront. and if something happened to my linkedin page that's all that work that's all the effort decade of work gone of building a personal brand and my website and things like that it's all it might feel ephemeral but they have real world consequences and that's where the narrative needs to change yeah for sure absolutely brilliant so tell us a little bit about anthro securist and how that come about and what you've learned since you were involved with this type of work Yeah.

29:25So unfortunately, there is no out and out job for a cyber anthropologist. But people are interested in learning how to improve their security culture in their organization. Now, when people call the amphrosecurist, they usually start off with like, I really want to change the security culture in my organization. The first thing I say is security team, it starts with you. And they're like, no, no, no, we know all about security. It's okay. We don't need to do any work on ourselves. It's everyone else. They keep clicking on stuff. Actually, if you have persistent insecure behavior, the likelihood is it is coming from you.

30:00It is always going to be a cultural reason why people are not paying attention to your initiatives. And so before you go out there and start changing culture, which takes a long time, people think it's just a quick fix, but it's not. it takes a long time yeah sure you need to do that introspection work you should actually say when am i going to be ready to actually go out there and share this message and you can only do that by understanding as we were saying earlier what are people's real motivations either to be secure or insecure what do they actually care about and if you think it's caring about the company's data forget it nobody cares about the company's data but do they care about maybe that'll impact their bonus yeah bring it to the personal make it real for them personally yeah absolutely and avoid those one-size-fits-all messages and so that's you know when they asked me to come in and do that kind of coaching work before then we can start applying the principles of anthropology so anthropology one of the main research methods that you use is something called participant observation now participant observation is literally how it sounds is you participate so it's not just sit standing off into the corner and watching, being a passive observer, it's being a part of that community, almost shedding yourself of your own identity and adopting theirs.

31:17So you can get real insight into not only what's being said, but what's not being said and having those nuances. Teaching them the principles of how you apply that kind of methodology to really get a deep understanding is usually key. And then alongside that, I've been published academically as well for my work on cyber anthropology and speak on keynotes internationally. So I've been very lucky to spread the word about cyber anthropology. How popular is this field of study in an academic sense then? Are there many universities who do degrees in this type of thing or is it just normally a part of a more general degree subject?

31:54There's plenty of degrees that do anthropology. Not so many that specialise in digital anthropology. Yeah, I was going to say, I'm not seeing that as a standalone degree subject. And when I Google cyber anthropology, it's usually just this face that comes at mine. Oh, really? Fair enough. Let me ask you this question, Leanne. How do you describe what you do to a child? If a child asks you, what do you do for a living? How do you describe it to them? In my current role, I say I protect beans and broccoli. There we go. That's all the answer you need. It's about protecting one's sense of self. and and you know we were talking just moments ago just talking about that how your digital assets make up you as an individual these days yeah more so than ever more so than ever my whole financial life is on there my personal life my social life everything that i want is literally in my phone it's all here it's all here and protecting that i don't know about you but if you feel like you've lost your phone or anything that not in your stomach when you think has that gone missing it's because your whole life is on there and there is ways we can protect the physical device that seems to be easier but then understanding how to protect once it's out there on the internet the digital space you know you that's the tough part that's the challenge and there's bad people out there i would say to the five-year-old and we need to make sure that people don't take advantage just like in the real world so how do you see ai impacting your role as the head of SecOps over the next couple of years, Leanne?

33:28So I need to make sure that everyone throughout the organization has a baseline knowledge of it. Now, that is knowledge to keep them safe and secure. I don't want people uploading things they shouldn't be to these large language models. But I also don't want to prevent people from really harnessing this incredible power. I firmly believe that at the moment, You see a lot of articles in trade magazines asking CEOs, oh, how do you think AI is going to impact your business in five years time? Oh, maybe, I don't know. I'm not sure. They don't realize that everyone in their business is utilizing AI in some way.

34:09It's a bottom up initiative, unlike anything we've ever seen before in tech. And so we need to make sure that there are guardrails in place, but not out and out ban. and the productivity gains, unfortunately, because the productivity gains, some people are frightened by how good it's actually made them at their own job. And therefore, they're not sharing that information because they think, well, actually, am I orchestrating myself out of a job here? But that isn't the case. If people were willing to be a bit more open, if organizations were willing to be a bit more open about the productivity gains people were gaining, then maybe we could actually start moving people from the boring stuff that none of us enjoy doing to the real cerebral knowledge worker type stuff that would really benefit organizations.

34:55But again, it's about that cultural nuance of understanding where are we happy, where are we accepting, and where are we going to keep those guardrails on? Yeah, for sure. What are you most excited about, Leanne? And I'm talking in a very general context. What excites you most about AI or generative AI? What excites me most about it is the democratization of productivity. I can throw my mum in front of ChatGPT and just say, just ask it something like you would a search engine and then slowly coach her in the ways how she could use it. And in a very short space of time, she would be able to interact with it because it's very conversational based.

35:33It's very democratizing. You ask it things and then you ask it to elaborate on things, to build things for you in a way that search engine doesn't quite do it. And that's really interesting to me is the democratization piece. Yeah, I agree. It's very intuitive. That's what excites me about it. So much so that I'm doing a master's in AI in September. Oh, wow. Fantastic. Isn't it amazing though, Leanne, that if you are able to prompt well, just having that skill of being good at prompting can take you from being, let's say, an average coder to surpassing a better coder than you because you are able to prompt well and they don't like using large language models to create code.

36:18Do you know what I mean? So it's going to change things, isn't it? The hierarchy, the people who embrace this technology and the ones who are talented and good at prompting, let's just say that, are going to fire ahead exponentially. So do you think there's any... So I asked you the question, what are you most excited about? What are you most fearful of from this technology over the next two or three years? If we just roll back the piece about productivity, what's interesting about that is they've done studies recently and we found that the people who benefit most are in the most entry level jobs in terms of productivity gains.

36:57But then the higher up you go up the kind of expertise level in an organization, the productivity gains drop off. And what people are actually worried about is that middle ground of people in middle management, middle sort of area knowledge work sort of sense. People in those areas are actually a lot more fearful about AI taking their jobs than people in more junior or entry level roles. because of that reason you were saying people say oh ai is going to take my job no prompt engineers are going to take your job people yeah who are good at this are going to take your job not not ai and so we have to think to me what am i worried about is how do we keep that middle part of the organization you people really doing the doing really doing the kind of cerebral thinking around the organization how do we keep those productive and interested when a lot of their job is going to be now really focused on those deliverables over what ai can do in like a split second and things like that and it's going to and then again it's a democratizing thing so people who were doing those entry-level roles will now be at the same level of those mid-level executives for example so you've got to start thinking about what new roles and responsibilities what new projects can I bring in to make sure that everyone's got work to do?

38:20And that's the scary thing. Do you know what? When you first got into the job market, I had been in the job market for a couple of years at that point. And you mentioned how there was a recession and stuff like that. I recalled that period, okay? And I got affected by it as well. And I remember around when the recession hit, it was the mid-level that got stripped out of companies to save on cost. they generally kept their juniors they kept their top of the upper echelon and then they stripped out the middle bit so i agree it does compound the threat to that level i think so maybe that's partly driving their fear though from that period of the jobs market being like that but but yeah look anthropology i think an observation of macro human behavior i'm guessing you've seen inequality as tends to happen in any human collective civilization whatever you want to call it are you fearful that that ai will create more inequality at all or do you just think it's gonna improve it or just we'll just have a bigger version of what we've already got i think it's going to be very much a case of suck and see which is probably not the answer you're looking for but it's going to be it gives in one hand takes away in the other i really yeah believe that because in some areas this is going to revolutionize people's lives for the better this is as i say it's going to enable people to do things they've never done before for example i've got a podcast i can just use ai to help me do editing i can use it to do that i don't need to go hire a producer sorry for your producer that's there or anything like that and do quite a lot of the grunt work myself and that's enabled me to be able to do that there's also the element of loneliness which is i'd love to spend some time really studying how we develop cultural bonds with AI.

40:09Because we say please and thank you, don't we, to it? And things like, oh, you should do because one day they might be in charge of us, so you better treat them nice. Skynet's going to be in charge at some point, yeah. Absolutely. So that kind of loneliness piece as well is people might be able to create things and have real meaningful interactions in a way that they couldn't do normally for whatever reason that might be. Yeah, sure. But then there is the other piece. It's like, how do we trust what we're seeing? How do we respond culturally to things that are machine created? What makes us unique as human beings is our love for creativity.