260. This Year in Work 2025 (Part 1) - Featuring Bosses, Benders and Big Toddler Energy

0:00Happy Christmas Eve Eve!

0:09welcome everyone hopefully you're wrapping up for some time off maybe you've already finished maybe you're actually wrapping presents maybe you're wrapping presents having finished work with a wine congratulations if you are i think we're all gearing up for for christmas um so with that in mind we thought we'd bring you something a little bit special yeah for the First time ever. We've pulled together our favourite parts of the podcast for the last 12 months. And over the next couple of episodes, we're inviting you to help us celebrate 2025. And also, for some of us, kicking 2025 in its hairy ass and getting it out of the way.

0:43Because it's not been great for everyone. Today, we're sharing the best moments from our This Week in Work style episodes. There's a Tuesday episode where you're bringing the news roundup, you know, in the workplace surgery and latterly truth or lie. In part two, we're going to be bringing you the best bits from our Thursday episodes, which is all our interviews, including also our most downloaded interview episode of the year. Yeah, exciting. And if it's your first time here, what a good place to start. Yeah, you're getting like 30 episodes in one. Yeah, absolutely. And just so you know, this is Truth, Eyes and Work, the award-winning podcast where behavioural science meets workplace culture, brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination of business professionals.

1:24My name is Leanne. I'm a charter occupational psychologist. Also the author of the smoothest link in the podcasting. I love that. My name is Al and I'm a business owner. And together we help organisations build amazing workplace coaches. We'll be getting into part one of our highlights after this very quick word from our sponsors. Does your experience with AI sound a little like this? You prompt for 20 minutes, the output is polished, is confident and is completely flipping useless. Well, that's what happens when AI doesn't know anything about your business. Mm-hmm. But you know what does know something about your business?

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2:19Welcome back. We are kicking off our 2025 highlights with our word of the year. You know I love a new word. So we both had a look through our words of the week over this year and picked our favourite, expecting to have to battle it out over the actual winner. But as it turns out, we chose the same one. The exact same one. Yeah, Leanne said your favourite. I was like, this is mine. I said so. So here it is. Drum roll, please. the new word of the year for 2025 is duck shuffler. Yay!

2:57Duck shuffler. LinkedIn loved this one as well. It is quite rightly our word of the year. This is from episode 202 released in June, not long after we've been kicked out of Bosnia and Herzegovina. And I only mention that because it comes up. Right. Yeah, yeah. I imagine it would. That was quite a situation we found ourselves in in the summer. Yes, it was. Anyway, enjoy. Tell us what you've seen this week. Duck shuffler. I was so close. See, now, regular listeners will know that that is just essentially a ball, open net. I just need to get my head on it and I've knocked it in. But we will, yeah, I'll not be rude.

3:33What is a duck shuffler? It's my new word. It's my word of the week. So, you know how people like the saying, get your ducks in a row? Yep. Which means you're ready to kind of like go on like a task or a situation. well a duck shuffler is someone who will come in and mess them all up oh so for example you've got you've got a team they've spent ages perfecting a certain project plan or process every details and plays everything looks great and then someone comes in and goes hang on have you thought about this and then points out the one thing that you haven't noticed that my friend is a duck shuffler so essentially the ministry for foreign affairs were the duck shufflers of our ducks because our ducks in a row we were like great we get residency any day soon and they've come in and said yeah very similar i mean we were in fact missing a duck but that's true they pointed out so they were more of a more of a duck observer than a duck shuffler yeah we probably didn't even have ducks but like geese um yeah so i think i think the thing is this is being kind of talked about in a way that is quite negative like that person that annoying person always comes in like meh a duck shuffler i i think in general people don't come to work to just be disruptive for disruption's sake i think people come to work because they're trying to do the very best that they can or it's just a part of part of who they are operating in in the way that they do i don't believe the intention is always necessarily bad yeah totally i mean i do agree i think as i'm not i'm definitely not type a um but i definitely i'm someone who likes to go oh yeah be fine let's do it and then someone comes along go well have you thought about this and that bit isn't it you haven't even thought about it's like yeah come on dude i'll work that out as i go along so it can be very frustrating i think but you're right if you're the duck shuffler of this organization that is probably a good thing because you will say to me al there's a bit you've not thought about here i don't think just go and have a little think about it where it becomes i think really annoying is someone comes in a little bit like oh well you haven't thought about that bit have you and then you go come on man i'm trying to do something innovative here trying to do something cool and you're going that's never going to work so that's maybe a goose shuffler maybe that's your your your goose man or person or woman honker honker so we've got duck shufflers we've got honkers bill bill from accounts he's the biggest honker of them all yeah he can honk right off don't he yeah i think that's a big a big add-on as well isn't it that if you are a duck shuffler you probably want to be coming with some solutions or some helpful questions to work around and find that solution.

6:04You don't just want to be pointing at yourself going, ha ha, you didn't think of that. Because that is just annoying and unproductive. Yeah, that's just Nelson from The Simpsons. So dog shufflers are generally good. That's what we decided, wasn't it, Lee? It was, whereas honkers, not so much. Did we actually, have we actually put in that clip a bit about honkers? Yeah. Do you know what? What's been so funny about putting this together is that I listen back and I'm like, one, I don't remember this conversation. And two, what are we talking about? I know. If you have listened to a significant number of our Tuesday episodes, then the award for the most patient listener in the world goes to you because they're not very tightly edited.

6:41And yeah, we can get a little bit silly anyway. Okay, so our next highlight comes from the News Roundup, Leanne's favorite time of the week, and caused quite the stir. I had entrepreneurs calling me in existential crisis. Leanne had people getting in touch, confessing that they had definitely experienced it. And one listener even created a YouTube thumbnail featuring Leanne and I as chubby face two-year-olds. If you haven't guessed it already, we're talking about Big Toddler Energy. I'm not sure I've ever had so many people get in touch with me after this and be like, my boss definitely has BTE.

7:16Yeah, I really loved it. We actually in the episode didn't call it Big Toddler Energy. That was a thumbnail, I think, title we came up with later. I came up with later. But yeah, it sums it up perfectly big. Toddler Energy from episode 196, released in May this year. Al brought the idea of big toddler energy to the news roundup. I saw a great post on Twitter by Peter Steinberg. He's Stipeet. Solid name. Yeah. And he's actually quite a cool guy. If you go and look at his profile, you'll see what he's doing. He's doing some really cool stuff. He's really into vibe coding at the moment. Now, this was an image of toddler versus CEO.

7:52and basically you might have seen this on LinkedIn but basically it's got like things that toddlers say and CEOs say that are the same thing now we don't have kids but we've got plenty of nieces and nephews thanks to to my brother and my sister for producing those so it kind of still resonates not together we should have oh god yeah no no no separately with different partners

8:17well the truth lies on work well we keep it in the family alright so So thank you for that very, very important clarification there. So this kind of still does resonate, but hopefully this isn't you if you are a CEO. So I'll try a few out on you, Liam. So the first one is a toddler and a CEO both blurt out random opinions that are treated as gold. Yep. Yep. And probably publish a book about it. Yeah, that's so true. They use special made up words. Like touching grass. Swishing grass. Oh my God. So cringy. God, if this resonates with you, then don't worry. I'm going to ask the aunt shortly why CEOs tend to have this behavior.

9:02So then they ask you to drop something, to do something, then change their mind completely five minutes later. This one made me chuckle. Throws a tantrum if she doesn't get what she wants. So many CEOs. Maybe occasionally. I mean, musk musk excuse me um anyway replies with answers that make no sense now this is a big one i think there's so many cartoons on twitter or x or twix or whatever we're calling these days and then collects and quickly discards expensive toys um the last one here i thought which i thought was really good was interrupts every conversation to share his own tangentially related thoughts that's what kids do isn't it you're talking about cheese and they'll go i like cake it's like well dude i know you i know you're 18 months two years but i'm talking about you i want to talk about geez anyway lee why do some ceos act like this can they not have they not got the the prescience to understand that this is just not really a cool way to act yeah is that it no i think if we i mean i don't i don't know it's first time that i've i've kind of heard this but what would my thoughts be on the psychology of it um most entrepreneurs extroverts they tend to say a lot of their thoughts out out loud before they introverts process first and then speak extroverts speak and sometimes process if they've got time um a lot of um entrepreneurs are neurodiverse with adhd um on the autism spectrum communicate differently neurodiverse um people um particularly with a sense of urgency and need to to get things out because they process faster they're they're lightning speed in terms of of analysis and processing depending on what what type of neurodiversity um they might have um so it's just it's it's they need to move at that pace um we're just we're just the slow ones you can't keep up um so yeah that's probably the two obvious ones and i think as well that typically these people are probably quite um low on what we'd call agreeableness which is one of the big five personality traits and that's kind of like how compliant you are basically so I'm quite compliant I quite like rules and a system I like science it's not real a shocker that I want to understand the rules of the game so I can I can play it um whereas entrepreneurial um mindsets and personalities tend to be lower on this they want to break the rules they want to make their own rules they want to do it again with that sense of urgency and excitement um so yeah there's a few different things that would feed into why i'm sure a lot of these things that are kind of ringing true yeah i suppose there's also an element of ego of um protecting your position of you know if someone if someone's not particularly confident but they're a ceo they need to make sure that everyone knows that they're the smartest person in the room which is by the way i think is the opposite you should be as a ceo i think you should be the most stupid person in the room but you're just very good at making a great room for intelligent people.

12:06So maybe there's this element of them just looking to look intelligent. And so we've always said this, and we teased this the other week, and we still haven't talked about who I was talking about, but the person who uses long words when short words will do. Yes, and they, in my opinion, are not particularly intelligent, and they're using those words to appear intelligent. Narcissism is another personalised trait that entrepreneurs, this person, incidentally, scored quite high on. you do know who I'm talking about well you told me afterwards did I tell you? I forgot I told you so yeah lots of reasons so there you go and if you haven't listened to the pod before even if you have you'll know that Leanne always brings the science and I'm loving that Leanne actually told us basically the science behind why CEOs might have big toddler energy well educated guesses really I've not actually seen any hard research on that but neither have I had any complaints from what I said on that show.

13:03No tantrums from CEOs. No, no. So yeah, either way, I think it highlights self-awareness is very important. So CEOs, if you do one thing next year, hire a coach. Yes, you might even have time to enter the prize giveaway from episode 257 and win a six-week coaching program with the incredible Rob Kalvarovsky. Just the nicest guy in the world and also brilliant speaker. You've got to listen to his TED Talk. Even if you don't enter the competition, go back and listen to the episode and go back and watch his TED Talk. So go and check it out. We'll be back with more of our 2025 highlights after this very short break.

13:37Let's crack on with our next highlight from 2025. And Al, we are sticking with our entrepreneur energy. On the 27th of May, this very year, we celebrated our 200th episode. Yes, I remember that. Yeah. Two days after my birthday. Yeah. And about, I think it was two days before we got kicked out of Bosnia as well. Happy times. So in the News Roundup, we covered a groundbreaking story from the Sunday Times reporting that happy staff make for more productive businesses. Shocking, Al. I know. I am shook. Shook us. I shook us. And Al also shared the story of a Boston company boss who went viral after an employee asked him for a$40 loan.

14:20Yeah, and Leanne had quite the heated discussion over that one. With you, not with myself. Yeah, sorry, Leanne and I, yes. Did I just say Leanne had quite the same? I think so. You're just talking to yourself. Just shouting at myself. She does do that in the bathroom. Anyway, it was Leanne's story on rule bending CEOs that's made our highlights list. And for those listeners who've expressed interest in learning more about me, this clip includes a confession from my time owning a beer delivery business in the 2000s and how I bent and perhaps broke the rules. I'm sure it was nothing illegal. Do we like rule keepers or rule breakers?

14:53That was the question of a new study by Astrid Homan. Astrid, what a lovely name. and colleagues at the University of Amsterdam published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology Applied. They suggest that the answer is neither. It isn't about breaking them. It isn't about keeping them. It's about bending the rules. And that's what we like in leaders. Leaders that bend the rules. So here's what they did. They created scenarios for people to judge. So one of these scenarios was an employee called James, who was at a car company facing a cash flow crisis. He had three options. He could stick to the rules and raise money by crowdfunding.

15:29He could break the rules and sell cars illegally or he could bend the rules by selling memberships that included a free car, a legal grey area but not outright breaking the law. They then asked participants who would you trust to lead? Who seemed most capable and most respected and the results were fairly surprising. Rule followers were seen as solid, dependable but they didn't really stand out as leaders. Rule breakers seen as bold but a bit too aggressive and more dominant than genuine trust. And the rule benders they came out on top they were seen as the most respected, resourceful and most likely to be admired by their team.

16:04So when the research team dug deeper in a second experiment they used a similar setup but placed the employee in political roles with cooperative or competitive environments. So in cooperative settings so things like building alliances or forming a government, rule abiders were still trusted, but rule benders were a very close second because people admired their ability to find workarounds without tearing up the rule books and basically still getting stuff done. In competitive settings, when it's about winning debates or outperforming rivals, rule benders were the top choice, even above rule followers.

16:43And the rule breakers were on the bottom in both of those scenarios. So the difference the research which is found, it's all about dominance versus prestige. Rule breakers were dominant. They'll bulldoze through, but it doesn't always earn respect. Rule benders have that edge of resourcefulness. They're clever enough to navigate the system and people feel good about following them. Our thoughts? Well, story time. Here's the time. Let me tell you about the time that I bent the rules. Way back about 23 years ago, I started a company. It was selling alcohol. um after hours in the uk to students so they want four cans of lager they'll get we'll come around with four cans of lager so i got a a license to sell it which in the uk you need a license a liquor license i call it in in um in america um and but the law said i still couldn't do it because i could only sell during permitted hours which is between sort of like 10 a.m and 10 p.m that's when i could sell it individually otherwise i couldn't sell it or i'd sell it wholesale well this is what I did first of all I created a wholesale an order for every single possible person that that could that could ring up um so if someone said oh this person's ordered something I can say oh there's the order that didn't really work and in fact it worked so badly that the court the police took my license off me so there I was selling alcohol with no license to do it but I could still anyone can sell alcohol and this is back in the day anyone can sell alcohol in wholesale quantity which is basically 24 cans of lager but nobody wants 24 cans of lager at one o 'clock in the morning so what i found was there's a bit in the law which says essentially if you you can combine lager and also something called perry which is pear wine which is grim but really cheap so what we did was we said you can order whatever you want but you have to also buy one bottle of this what's called lambrini it was a five liter bottle of lambrini it was horrible cost about four quid to buy you had to buy that because that fulfilled us and made us made us wholesale again but if you already had one of those in your house from a previous order you could swap it over so essentially we'd give you a refund for it so so dodgy so basically people had a membership fee of a bottle of Lamborghini exactly and as long as they had it we'd give you the money back on that on that bottle and take it away and give you the new one of course we didn't we just basically went there's your bottle i bring you there's your four quid back all right keep it for the next order and that was it so we paid and we had a lot of fun with it but ultimately there's a reason why i'm not running that business anymore is because i went bankrupt for about 103 000 pounds which was partly due to the fact that the law changed and anyone could sell alcohol after hours so like the you know big supermarkets did my my market just dried up but definitely that was my first dillying dallying dallyance that's the word first dallyance into rule bending and also rule breaking and I think that I think the people I had about 20 people worked for me at the time and they all thought it was really fun and in fact my solicitor at the time who used to come with me to the courts he used to really enjoy when we came to the courts because he'd be like oh right okay there was a copper there who was like dead against me he's the one who's shut down and he used to come along and we used to come up with different ways creative ways of getting around it and then the one time when they took my license away he came in and says do you know what Dave's really unhappy this is the end you're gonna have your license taken away but anyway he enjoyed it too so anyway wait, that was the end of my story, Lee.

20:01It doesn't really help. It doesn't really support it. I think it does. I think it does. I think rule bending is exactly that. It's entrepreneurial. It's innovative. It's pushing back against maybe too rigid systems that don't need to be that rigid. And they didn't because fundamentally that business went out of business because they changed the licensing rules because they realized they were too rigid. So you were only fighting the rigidity that was then eradicated. Look at me with the words today. Rigidity eradicated. I haven't even had coffee today. What a story, Al. honestly you would just it's it's such an interesting it was such an interesting time and if you haven't listened to al's episode of kind of who is al elliot which i think is like episode 10 or 12 or something do go back and get the full story of that um because it's brilliant you are so creative in the best of ways you my friend are a bender oh hey a rule bender yeah i'm hoping that's gonna be a rule bend it's what we've just been talking about of course i understand moving on okay our next highlight takes us back to the news round up in episode 214 back in the summer oh the summer good times and this was a good episode al told us the story of one of the most outrageous employment heists in recent tech history picture this one engineer working for 22 startups and earning more than$1 million a year without actually doing any work.

21:29So this is my favorite story I've seen for a very, very long time. Basically, it's Silicon Valley's great employment heist is what I'm going to say I came up with, but actually Claude came up with that. So a software engineer in India named Soham... Software engineer. Sorry, did I say that too briefly? I don't really hear. So this software engineer in India, whose name is Soham Parekh. I hope I'm saying that right. I doubt he's listening. Probably too busy, too busy working. He filled up what might be one of the most audacious employment scams ever in Silicon Valley. He simultaneously worked for multiple AI startups, earning around about a million dollars over three years.

22:10No, annually, sorry. Million dollars annually, while barely doing any actual work. Kind of like if you've seen that movie, Catch Me If You Can. I love that movie. Me too. I've seen it twice. I saw it about six months ago and I'd watch it again. Yeah, me too. But this is basically like code me if you can or something. I don't know. Probably Claude will come on with a better quip than that. So let me just tell you, the scale is actually quite staggering. 22 companies were involved, me interviewed for some and hired by others. Most of them were Y Combinator AI startups. Just in case you don't know why Combinator is, it's like kind of like, it's the place to be for a startup in Silicon Valley.

22:49We've had PostHog. James Hawkins was our previous guest about 10 episodes ago. He's YC alumni. So it's like a good gold standard of startups. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. The best of the best. So the likes of Coinbase came out of there. Stripe didn't come out, I don't think, but something else did. There's lots of like major companies you've heard of, which are YC. So you'd think they'd be a bit more vigilant in the hiring process? That's fair. And just in case Gary Chan's listening, because he's a bit annoyed. He's the guy who runs it. He's a bit annoyed on X at the moment. So just in case you are listening, Gary, I'm not saying that you employed these guys.

23:20I'm saying that these were all YC Combinator companies. And they were targeted by this guy, Soham. So those companies were paying him$10 ,000 a month each. It went on for two years between 2022 and 2024. four he only got caught because Y Combinator founders started started talking about him going I've got this great guy but he I haven't seen him for a while however he gets caught catching that too wide people start chatting absolutely so so just give you a little bit of background on this he's mid-20s based in India apparently he's genuinely brilliant he's describes the top 0.1 percent of software engineers so he's it is very much catch me if you can because he's a genius He aced every single interview.

24:00He had strong business acumen, and he created an incredibly convincing personal persona I've got written down here. So basically what he'd do is he would go to interview. He'd interview really well. They'd be like, oh my God, we've got to have this guy. And he'd go, I'm sorry. Well, it's 10 grand a month minimum. That's what I worked for. And they went, all right, well, he's such a good guy. Yeah, we'll have him. And then just started making creative excuses for why he wasn't delivering the work over that time. He also said that he got U.S. visa status, and he hadn't. He once said, I didn't do the work because a military drone crashed into my house in India.

24:35And then if he was confronted, he denied everything until the evidence was undeniable. This is a movie. This is a catch-me-if-you-can movie. This is absolutely brilliant. Now, so why did this happen? Well, engineers are in massive demand, like top 0.1 % of engineers. There's very, very few of them out there. AI isn't helping because everyone's now... I talked about vibe coding the other day. Everyone thinks they're an engineer because they can write two prompts in Claude and create a to-do app. That's not the way. That does not make an engineer. The top ones are 200 ,000 easy a year. And so obviously, you know, you can multiply what he earned.

25:07That has to be worked out at about a million a year. Nice. I know. So, I mean, this is... What do you think? Do you think that he was a genius? Do you think he's criminal? Do you think this is just a... What's your thoughts? Powerful. If it's criminal, I don't know. I guess it depends on the contract he signed, unless it specifically says you're not allowed to have another job. It could be if you've got a good lawyer, and if you've got a million dollars, you can probably get a good lawyer. True. Probably get you out of that one. Telling lies, though, to get a job, like you don't have US visa status, that might be a bit more of a pickle.

25:42I mean, morally, ethically speaking, it's not super cool, is it? Particularly in an environment where there's lots of people from tech out of work. so I'm not sure that's cool the fact that he's not doing the work is my beef like if he'd if he'd been holding down these 10 jobs and delivering all the outcomes I'd kind of be like well what's the problem? Hustle just because he can deliver that in a fraction of the time that allows him to do it for 10 different companies then fair do so I think it's a fact I think this is more the fact that he didn't deliver the work so therefore yes I think it's kind of forward, isn't it?

26:22Yeah. And I think it's such a shame because if you're that level of an engineer and there's AI agents, to be fair, there wasn't in 2022, but still, you can probably create systems that are going to be able to do half the work for you. So, yeah, I think the not delivering was a bit odd. To be fair, this is actually a trend. There's a subreddit on Reddit called Overemployed and it's full of people who've got stories of working multiple jobs at the same time. most of them I think deliver the work and therefore everything's okay obviously you know if you want to do that for like four or five years trowels are half a million dollars you'd be burnt out and it's going to be a tough thing but you've got half a million dollars it might take you 20 years to make that as a junior junior engineer I don't I've seen people on LinkedIn lose their shit about this as well like people are being that's why we can't trust people to work remotely because they hold multiple jobs and it's like we're just focusing on the wrong thing if somebody's doing the job to the standard that you want it's not just indicating that maybe you don't need an employee you need a freelancer or a contractor you know as a contractor i have multiple contracts yeah i have multiple ways of earning money from different people like it's no different i don't get what the beef is as long as you're getting delivered what it is then it's just logistics oh i love a good rant about remote work and management by outcomes al to be fair i thought this was such a great great story and i'm a little frustrated that an engineer of this sort of like caliber or style isn't actually doing the work, but just having the whole multiple jobs thing.

27:52I'm okay with having multiple jobs. I just think that if they're clever enough to manufacture that, they should be clever enough to do the work or at least find some AI or agents or something to do the work. We will leave a link to that episode and actually all of the episodes we mentioned today in the show notes, of course. So we have covered our news roundup highlights from 2025. And honestly, it was really hard to choose because the media just is such a gift, isn't it, Alex? It's such a gift. Keeps on giving. Yeah. And some of the business owners out there. I mean, we didn't even mention Jamie Dimon's rant.

28:20No, we didn't. We didn't mention the Coldplay Jumbathon. No, we didn't. Honestly, it's been such a gift of a year. Touching grass, was it? Touching grass, yeah. Oh, some people did not like that at all. No, no. Kenny was particularly offended by that one. Our Kenny. Yeah. Oh, right. Okay. Yeah. So it was Ken. Yeah. Anyway, so continuing with our This Week in Work episodes, us long-time listeners will know that this middle segment we like to have a little play with from time to time and for more than a year we have actually or we did bring you a hot take from a workplace expert every single week yeah and uh some hot takes were a little more lukewarm than others but we did have some awesome conversations with some genuinely genuinely cool people including a person who has quickly become one of my favorite people on the planet rebecca taylor But I kind of hope she is listening.

29:11And also I kind of hope she isn't because now it looks a little bit creepy because I've literally I was messaging you just a few minutes ago. So now. Well, so was I, if that makes you feel any better. Literally like an hour ago. We're those people, aren't we? Yeah, we're those weird people. I'm sorry, Rebecca, but we just really think you're cool. Rebecca, if you haven't heard of her, you strange person. Rebecca is a content creator. She is host of HR Confessions and co-founder of Skill Cycle. And her hot take was actually spicy. So my hot take is that all work is just a collection of gossip. Yeah.

29:44So if you think about the actual definition of the word gossip, because I don't want to assume that everyone has the same definition. It's one of those words that can it has an emotional reaction to some people. Right. But if you think about it, the actual definition of gossip is two people talking about someone who's not in the room. so if I'm going into a job interview and I interview for a job and then someone comes in to talk to the person who interviewed me about me they're literally gossiping about me to see if I'm a fit for that job and that's the whole purpose of interviewing so it's literally just talking about this person when they're not in the room and then making decisions about whether or not this person is going to work there in that specific instance performance management it's just gossip it influences so many things in our lives.

30:28We have this big movement right now in the U.S. for pay transparency. So states are passing laws where it's mandatory for you to post a salary in a job description. And it has to be transparent that this is the pay range for this role. It has to be real. It has to be a realistic range. It can't be a dollar to a million dollars. It has to be actually there. And that came out because of workplace gossip. People started to talk about their salaries. They learned that there was this huge pay gap and that salaries were not necessarily paid in a reasonable way. They were based on whatever you were making before, how well you could negotiate.

31:05And so there's been this push for leveling salaries and being transparent about what they are because people are talking about it anyway. So it's been this great movement for equity in the workplace, for transparency in the workplace. And it all started because people were gossiping about each other or about each other's salaries at work. People are inherently social creatures. And so the concept of gossip is about your community spreading word to other members of the community to either promote safety in the community or to inform the community about something. What I think a lot of people will be thinking is going, OK, cool.

31:38But in my head, gossip is bad. So when does your definition of gossip become bad? To me, gossip is bad when it leads to people othering others in a negative way. So there's including people and then there's othering people. So including is kind of just like be part of this community. Let's make this. Let's be stronger together. Let's come together around this. And othering is like, go away. You don't belong here. You're different. And it's treating difference like it's a bad thing. So if someone is a sexual predator, for example, it's OK to other them. It's OK to say, stay away from this person, keep them away, don't give them opportunities.

32:15You know, there's there's issues here that they that people need to know about. But when gossip is about something that's about sharing important information that helps the community or helps other people rise above something, then it's great. Pay transparency is an example of gossip that I'm a big fan of because it does drive a lot of equity that we've never really had before, at least not in the States. And when we look at gossip in the form of how it can help other people either help each other or help themselves, that's when it's good. Everybody talks about someone who's not there. The nature of the gossip all relies on whether or not you're inserting your opinion or if you're just sharing sort of facts and stories and letting the conversation unfold.