S2: Episode 14: Rob Austin, Professor of Innovation and Information Systems

Rob Austin returns to Career Resilience! This time round the discussion is about information sharing in a “super transparent” society. Formerly, we have lived with the assumption that for the most part,  information would stay where it is. Rob talks about how in fact information can propagate in ways that are unexpected and can cause us problems. Or ways that can drive unexpected change.  Providing examples of specific situations, Rob discusses Anonymous and the pros and cons of the information age we inhabit. Rob talks too about how he and his fellow researcher and mentor David Upton got some things wrong and the unexpected direction super-transparency can take us as individuals and as societies. Rob also provides specific tips for businesses to consider. 

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Thank you Jann Danyluk, Career Resilience.

Transcript

  | 00:06 | Welcome to season two of Career Resilience, where we talk with people about their career path and their career journey and maybe we can all learn from each other. My name is Jann Danyluk and I'm a human resources consultant in London, Ontario, Canada. I work with Ford Keast LLP, providing human resources advice and counsel to my business clients. I also support people through individual one on one coaching and helping with career development.
 | 00:32 | I hope you will enjoy our series where we talk with ordinary, extraordinary people. We get to hear about interesting journeys. We get to talk with people about failures, successes, advice and counsel to us as we develop our own careers. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk with these people, and I hope you will enjoy listening to it. And now for some logistics, please subscribe on YouTube. Or if you're a listener, please follow me wherever you get your podcast.
 | 01:01 | And if you have a chance, I hope you'll visit my website. Careerresilience.com welcome. Rob Austin. Welcome back to Career Resilience. That's great to be back. Thanks for having me.
 | 01:27 | Well, it's just so amazing to have you back because we talked in early fall, you and I got together and talked about your career resilience, and we talked about neurodiversity, which is a fascinating topic and really appreciated your insights on that. But this time we're going to be talking about living and leading in an era of super transparency, which is one great bunch of words put together. So I'm looking forward to chatting with you about that.
 | 01:57 | So why don't we start with you sort of reintroducing yourself in terms of what you do for your living? Yeah. So I am a professor at Ivy Business School. I've been here about five and a half, I guess, going on six years. And I have been throughout my career, I've been sometimes an academic and sometimes in industry. They used to be in about equal measure. But I've now been in academia longer than I was in industry.
 | 02:27 | I worked for the Ford Motor Company. I spent twelve and a half years at the Harvard Business School, about seven years at Copenhagen Business School. And for a couple of years I was the Dean of the University of New Brunswick. Of the business school. Yeah. I worked a bit for a software company. So you sort of been around the globe with your career, both physically the globe and in the kind of work that you've done.
 | 02:56 | So I wanted to just sort of get right into what is living and leading in an era of super transparency. What does that mean? Because our audience is all about career and growth and resilience. So tell us about that. What do you mean? Yeah, well, this is something that I began to work on. This is a while back now, probably twelve years or something like that.
 | 03:25 | And I was working with a colleague, a gentleman named David Upton. David Upton was a professor at Harvard Business School. And he was kind of a mentor of mine at Harvard. And then later I moved to Copenhagen and he moved to Oxford. And Unfortunately, David passed away unexpectedly and at a surprisingly early age, but a terrible thing.
 | 03:54 | But I worked with him on this topic and what we meant by it. We're looking at the ways in which sort of in an information society, it's getting harder to keep secrets. And even if you're not really actively keeping a secret, we've kind of lived with the assumption that certain information will stay where it is. Right.
 | 04:21 | And that it won't necessarily propagate in ways that cause us problems. And in fact, the metaphor that we use to describe this, we talked about when everybody's childhood probably involved some interaction with puddles of water. Right. So when I was a kid, you'd go splash around in the mud puddles. Right.
 | 04:45 | And one of the things we know about puddles from our experience as children is that water in one puddle tends to stay in that puddle unless you do something like what we used to do. We take a cup and move water from one puddle to another. Or sometimes we dig a channel that would connect to mud puddles or whatever. Right. And historically, we thought about information as being kind of like that. It stays where it is unless somebody does something active to move it.
 | 05:14 | And our point was that the world is not really like that anymore. It's more like it's become a flood. If we compare water and mud puddles to information, the volume of information has increased and it doesn't flow around in an orderly way anymore. It flows around kind of where it wants to go. Was there something, Rob that triggered the two of you to sort of be thinking about that what jumped you off into that topic?
 | 05:45 | We were watching the phenomenon of activists so like groups like Anonymous. And it's a misnomer to call Anonymous a group because it doesn't have any permanent membership or anything like that. It's more like a banner. One of the cases we were looking at, you may remember this case. It was from Nova Scotia. It was the story of Rattia Parsons. Do you remember that name? Yes, of course.
 | 06:14 | Yeah. So terrible story. Right. I mean, she was taken advantage of and photographs were taken over and the photographs were circulated. We're talking about an underage teenage girl, and she was the classic not a very nice expression for it, but in common use. She was slut chain. Right. And basically moved high schools but couldn't escape and ultimately killed herself because she was so terribly bullied.
 | 06:49 | And her case was investigated. And you probably remember there were no charges laid. Basically, they said there's not enough evidence to make a case, and Anonymous became involved. In fact, Rata Parson's mother directly addressed Anonymous and said, please, I know the information is out there. It was on all of their phones. Please help me bring justice to the people who did this.
 | 07:21 | And they did. They basically forced the RCMP to reopen the case by revealing that they did have information that probably could warrant reopening the case. That was one of the examples, I think, that we were looking at a lot that suddenly we've got disability. And it's double edged. Right. In a way, its vigilante isn't right.
 | 07:52 | And there have been instances where it's been used quite destructively. Right. Where Anonymous has incorrectly identified a perpetrator and brought all sorts of consequences down on this person, only later to discover that it was a mistake. It's a relatively, I think, new phenomenon in kind of a complicated one, a morally ambiguous one.
 | 08:21 | Yeah. Because one thing led to the other, didn't it? Without the social media that we have, she wouldn't have had that extra layer of bullying beyond the horrible incidents that happened to her. So she had that extra layer that she had to live with, which is hard for us to fathom, really, as a young girl, what that is like and what we know, what that led to for her hand, it wouldn't have been found out without having the tools that we have.
 | 08:56 | So I can see what you mean when you say it's a double edged situation. There were a number of cases around that same time, the same period of five years or so that had that similar profile. Right. I mean, there was one in Missouri, I think, and it was of interest in the news because football players in a small town in Missouri, there was a case like that in the case, the town was divided. Now half the town was on the girl’s side and half the town was on the football player side.
 | 09:30 | So we were as academics, of course, both of us had daughters. So a reason to really feel strongly about this as well. But as academics, we were interested in the fact that this is kind of a new kind of a thing, right? Yeah, it's a very new kind of a thing. And did you project or do you project, Rob, where it's going? Yeah, I think that's where we got some of it wrong, honestly.
 | 10:00 | There was an article we wrote, David, and I wrote an article that was published in the MIT Sloan Management Review, which is pretty highly regarded, I think, second only to Harvard Business Review, probably in terms of its influence as a conduit between research and management practice. I'd have to look to be sure. It was about 2014, 2015.
 | 10:23 | And I think what we got right is this idea that the Internet, social media and various other things that run on top of the Web create this capacity for magnification of an issue. And there's been some famous examples.
 | 10:48 | You probably know there's another one that's actually Nova Scotia based, David Carroll, and he was a musician who United Airlines. He was flying to somewhere in the Midwest. And United Airlines broke his guitar and they wouldn't pay him for it. You probably know this story. So he composed a beautiful, very catchy tune and made a music video that was extremely funny.
 | 11:18 | And it very quickly racked up millions of views. And United Airlines was scrambling. Right. So this is not a capability companies have had to have historically, really to respond overnight to a social media firestorm. Yeah. Just so you know, Rob, I'm from Nova Scotia. Okay. Well, good connections here then. I have great pride in that.
 | 11:46 | United Brakes guitars. That was awesome because I loved that was used and the message that it sent using that kind of humor. But I'm sure if I were United, I wouldn't have loved it. That was definitely something for United to handle. And one of the things we were pointing out in the article is that this is happening pretty often now. Right.
 | 12:10 | So the lead example that we used in the story in the article was the story of a young woman, Martha Payne, a young lady, a girl. She was nine years old in Western Scotland. And it's kind of a fun example. She became a little bit indignant because every week the school would come out with a menu for what they were going to get at lunchtimes.
 | 12:39 | And it was always very beautifully described. It sounded like a gourmet restaurant or something. Right. But then what showed up in the cafeteria, she thought didn't resemble the descriptions efficiently. And this kind of excited her sense of justice. Right. And so she started this blog called Never Seconds with the help of her dad. And her idea was every day she was going to take photos of her lunch and rated on a number of dimensions, like how nutritious she thought it was and how delicious it was and so forth.
 | 13:15 | So very enterprising for a nine year old. Right. And what happened is she started to accumulate followers. And what was interesting is her commentary was very nine year old and very charming. But there was an automatic they were using a blog platform and it was an automatic comment section. And people would weigh in in the comments, and they were not nearly as charming. Right.
 | 13:45 | That looks pathetic. That's rubbish. Why are you eating that? Right. Why are they serving that to you? They weren't accusing Martha. But what was interesting is at some point, I guess, Jamie Oliver. Jamie Oliver, the British celebrity chef who one of his things is making school lunches more nutritious. And so he jumped on board and he tweeted in favor.
 | 14:13 | And then a whole bunch of newspapers did an article on her website. And within, I don't know, three months or so can't remember exact timeline. But she was up to 2 million visitors to our website. And then one day the principal, the headmaster, called her in and told her she had to stop. And so the next entry that appeared on her blog was entitled Goodbye. And she explained that she'd been called down during math.
 | 14:42 | She'd been called out and sent to the headmaster's office. And he told her she'd have to stop taking photos of her lunch and posting them online. So she explained all this and then the next thing that happened was 2600 comments on her blog, many of them providing links to petitions to post to this Twitter hashtag and so forth. Anyway, they reinstated her website or her blog the next day.
 | 15:13 | All right. So that's the story that we use to get going on this and the assumption we ask it turns out the town Council was the one who had ordered her blog shutdown, said what was the assumption that they had made? Why did they think they could do this? And it was that puddle assumption. Right. They assumed throughout history they'd been able to do stuff without it becoming something that the world was bothered by. Right.
 | 15:40 | I think what sticks out to me in hearing that story, Rob, is the naivety of the Council versus the sophistication really of a nine year old. Yes. It made it a very good story. One of the things I like to point out when I think we pointed out in the article is Wired magazine on the very same day that she posted Goodbye.
 | 16:07 | And of course, Wired is in the Pacific time zone in the US, and she's in Western Scotland. So it was 09:00 p.m. When Wired magazine posted the story on the same day. And so they posted I think the headline was Politicians silence nine year old girl who is campaigning for better school lunches or something like that.
 | 16:38 | Silicon Valley's biggest voice is announcing this to the world. And this naivety that you described is kind of why we were writing the article for companies. Right. We're saying don't be naive this way. And by the way, you probably are. Yeah. Whatever happened to any publicity is good publicity.
 | 17:08 | This is, for example, changed the way the hotel industry has to behave. Right. So hotels before the Internet, before TripAdvisor, before review sites, they were able to largely control their own messaging. And now they live in this world where user generated content or customer generated content, depending on what you want to call it, is much more credible. Right.
 | 17:35 | There's been a shift from what you might call institutional trust, which was based on the hotel chains reputation or brand. Right. So they're Hyatt. So we believe them or they're Hilton. So we believe them. But that's kind of receded in favor of what we might call peer trust. Right. We go immediately to the TripAdvisor reviews and we read what people really think about this hotel.
 | 17:59 | And Interestingly, one of the things that the marketing research suggests is that it's still somewhat the case that if you can get people to talk about you on social media, it's mostly a good thing now, if they're saying negative things, there's a caveat that says you have to be really good at quickly responding. Right. So you have to post that right.
 | 18:27 | Under that negative review, there's an opportunity for the hotel to put something in. And if they get it in there within 24 hours or something, that's pretty good. The reason I mention all this is because they still believe that no publicity is bad publicity, and I think it kind of is true in that industry, for example. Right. So there was an interesting sense in which the hotel industry came to this conclusion at different rates.
 | 18:57 | So, like, I went to a Radisson Blue in Orhouse, Denmark. This is some years ago. And one of the things that struck me is all over all the walls were posters encouraging you to take photos, post reviews. They were trying to get at every turn. They were trying to get you to post something about them, anything about them to the Internet. And they were pointing out the WiFi network was free and so forth.
 | 19:27 | On the other hand, at that same time, there were some hotel chains like Marriott, for example, there were still charging people for WiFi access inside their hotels. Right. So what happened is everybody got cell phones, and there was a certain revenue line that hotels had historically gotten from using the rooms in the phones or the phones in the rooms. And those were no longer being used because everybody was using their cell phone. And they were trying to replace that revenue line by charging people for access to WiFi.
 | 19:57 | But it meant people weren't posting about Marriott's while they were posting about Radisson Blues. And I think Marriott has probably changed their policies by now. I know they have. What do you think of the whole and you're talking about leadership in the Transparent Society and so on. What is your take on influencers? I don't know.
 | 20:23 | There's a whole industry in people who are trying to tease out what the effect of influencers are, what the effect of people liking things on Facebook is. And it's a very complicated problem because it's never clear which way the causality goes. It's also never clear what's causing what generally. So just, for example, when it comes to how valuable is alike. Right.
 | 20:53 | So I buy an album, I buy some music, and then three days later, a friend of mine who on Facebook, then I go, like the music, right. I go write about it and like it on Facebook. And then a friend of mine three days later also buys the same music. So does that mean that my life caused that person to buy that music? Well, no. Right.
 | 21:23 | There's a possibility that is what happened, but it's also possible they would have bought it anyway. And we're just on kind of a slower path to buying it. There's also a possibility that because we're friends and like the same things that that's responsible right. People like us will buy this music. It has nothing to do with the like. Right. So it's very hard to tease the causality apart in these things.
 | 21:49 | I'm sure there are consultants out there who think they can, who are making claims that they can. And I don't know, maybe they can, but I'm not sure what is the push and the pull between this super transparency and Privacy, which is also extremely popular as a topic. Yeah, it's a really good question.
 | 22:17 | So one of the things that we were toying around with at the time we wrote the article, the idea that there might be some sort of an appliance that everyone could have, we thought it was most likely to be an app on a cell phone, a smartphone. And the idea behind this appliance would be that it records video, but it records it in a way that makes it impossible for the video to be contained. Right.
 | 22:46 | So that if you're in a place in the world where people are trying to hide the fact that they're committing atrocities, they confiscate your cell phone and they smash it. How can you make sure that the video is already escaped into the cloud? Right. And so we were imagining this everybody might carry around an appliance that you would use. And this, of course, is already happening. Right.
 | 23:14 | With people recording arrests by police and things like that. So there is in some sense, it is there already. But what we were talking about is something that was even more robust in getting information to the cloud out of the reach of the people who might try to keep the information from getting out. And there were two means to that. One was it automatically goes to the cloud as soon as possible.
 | 23:38 | And the second part was even if somebody shut down cell service and it can't get directly to the cloud, then you can use what's called a mesh network to move it from. All it has to do is find a nearby cell phone. And so part of the app is that it kind of Daisy chains from cell phone to cell phone until it finds a cell phone that could access the cloud, and then it goes up to the cloud. Right.
 | 24:05 | And so we're imagining in a world of super transparency, if a lot of people had this kind of an app. And by the way, there are apps like this now that got used, for example, during the protests in Hong Kong, they use mesh networks because China would turn off the cell phone towers. But anyway, one of the things somebody we're imagining, if everybody had an app like this, then atrocities might be harder to hide and therefore less likely to occur.
 | 24:38 | Right. So this could have a major favorable impact on the world. But then somebody said to us, it's also the biggest violation of Privacy that you could possibly come up with. Right. Somebody could surviveitiously record something that a person has every right to keep private, and there would be no recovering it. It would be out on the cloud immediately. And so I concede that's a very good point.
 | 25:09 | Right. Again, all of this is double edged. Yes. What do you think in terms of the since it's in everybody's mind, it's in your mind. It's in my mind about the Ukraine war. What do you think about that visa topic and how it's been going in an unexpected direction? Yeah.
 | 25:38 | So I think in some ways it reinforces our message in the sense that if I turn on, I will confess I have TikTok on my mobile phone. Right. When I fire up TikTok, every third video is a video taken by someone close to the action about something that's going on in Ukraine. So that is the super transparency part. I mentioned this before. There's a part we got wrong.
 | 26:08 | And I think the part we got wrong is that we didn't sufficiently appreciate the possibility of people transmitting things that look like transparency that were actually fake. Right.
 | 26:28 | And that's also going on in Ukraine is that we're hearing about websites and ticktock people who are trying to accumulate views, who are taking footage from 2011 and dressing it up as if it's something happening in Ukraine right now just to attract views.
 | 26:54 | And of course, if we take that to its full possible extension, we get to this whole phenomenon that's gotten really big since about 2016, this idea of fake news or alternative facts or whatever you want to call it. And I think that's the thing that we were naive about in writing about super transparency.
 | 27:23 | What we were envisioning was the future where companies if somewhere in your supply chain there's somebody using slave labor, you better find out about it, because otherwise you might find out about it on YouTube. Right. Or worse, on the 600 news because they found it on YouTube. Right.
 | 27:46 | But what we didn't anticipate is the degree and the sophistication to which people would use their ability to fake what looked like transparency in order to pursue a certain agendas. And I think we underestimated the degree to which people are not necessarily always interested in facts or in transparency, that they are more interested in seeing things that confirm views they already deeply hold.
 | 28:19 | Right. And so we see this kind of what they call the filter bubble. Right. We're seeing that, again, a good example in Russia and Ukraine. We see these stories about how people in Ukraine are calling family members in Russia and saying they're bombing us. Right. They're bombing my apartment, listen to the shells landing right outside my window. And the family members are saying, you must be mistaken. Right.
 | 28:48 | If you're in danger, it's the bad guys who are Ukrainian. Go seek the help of Russian troops. And they're saying, no, it's the Russians who are bombing us. And people just don't believe right. So transparency doesn't help very much if people are prone to discount it relative to their fervently held beliefs. Yeah. That's the truth, don't you think?
 | 29:16 | So that in some ways we get to the point where we think, well, you can't believe anything you see. That is worrying. Yeah. I don't know where that goes because especially I'm sure you've seen this, too, that this idea about deep fakes. Right. I mean, we're also seeing a convergence of artificial intelligence, image manipulation and so forth that allows the generation of what looks like authentic video footage that is actually faked.
 | 29:47 | Right. So we can see a political leader saying something the political leader never said. Yeah. And it does get very tricky at that point. The only thing I can think of is that it calls on all of us to do a better job, especially us as educators, to help people evaluate the veracity in what they're seeing. Right. To take a critical view on things. And I've been caught up in it myself. I remember a few years ago, I posted something on Facebook.
 | 30:19 | It was a share. Somebody posted it, I saw it, I shared it, and somebody came to me later, wrote in the comments on Facebook, said, this is a fake, you should take this down. And I checked online and it was fake. And so I apologized and took it down. But a lot of people aren't doing the latter part. How did you feel about that, Rob? Did you feel embarrassed?
 | 30:48 | Annoyed. How did you feel about that? I was pretty embarrassed. I realized it was something I won't say what the specifics of it were because it was something that they had pushed my buttons, they had made me indignant, and I had fallen for it. So I was embarrassed. Yeah. It's almost like being defrauded. Well, it is like being defrauded, isn't it? Yeah. It's all the one upsmanship.
 | 31:19 | It's like when I get calls from CRA telling me that I'm going to go to jail because I've already, I don't know, I've done something wrong. And so I love talking to them. And, you know, there's a whole thing around that. Right. Where I'll talk to them. And the most recent one, which I'm fond of is I said, well, I'm already in jail, though. Is that a problem? I love that because I was one up in that person.
 | 31:48 | Right. So I felt good about it. But I don't know, it's a very strange thing, and it's nubb, it's very depressing, those kinds of things. Yeah. The other thing I think we got wrong, these things are genuinely worrying is that I think we thought we were looking at pretty much the end of an era when a country could completely shut down and control the information flow.
 | 32:22 | Right. I think it was 20 12, 20 13. You may remember there was this event where in Turkey, Erdogan, I can't say his name quite right. But the Prime Minister there. His son was accused of bribery, I think, and there was a telephone recording that sounded like him that was clearly about a bribe.
 | 32:52 | And he was able to reach out to the traditional news outlets and control them and say, you better not put this on the news. Right. This phone call. And they complied. But he couldn't keep people from passing it around on social media, on Twitter in particular. And so he tried to shut down Twitter. He said, we're going to pull the roots out of Twitter. And he did. He shut it down.
 | 33:22 | But within 8 hours, everybody in the country knew how to route around whatever he had shut down. Right. So what we were concluding from that is, yeah, you can shut it down temporarily, but you can't shut it down forever. And I think the question is open on that. We're watching an experiment like that with Russia right now. So is Putin going to be completely able to control the information flow inside Russia? I think you've seen the news probably today that somebody on a major TV show jumped up and said stop the war with a sign.
 | 33:55 | And I think that probably lasted all of 5 seconds or something. But it's a big story, two hypothesis, right? One is know the information is eventually going to get through and is getting through. And for some segments of the population that can download a VPN and access foreign media, then, yeah, they know there's a war in Ukraine. But then we're back to that other question about what?
 | 34:23 | About the people who don't really want to know that there's a war in Ukraine. And we really didn't sufficiently deal with that factor in our article in 2014, I think. Yeah, well, it's continuous learning, isn't it, Rob? That's what makes it exciting, right? I mean, the world really is changed, by the way. This information flow has changed. And I'm writing a textbook or contributing to a textbook.
 | 34:53 | And I just was writing a section about the role of this new kind of information flow in influencing Democratic institutions. And there's some favorable effects, but there's also some destabilizing effects. And I don't think we know yet which effect is going to win out. Well, we've certainly noticed a decreasing amount of stability, haven't we?
 | 35:23 | Yeah, I think that's true. And I thought this is again, things people would like to think, including me. My I would like to think as I was thinking, that's an American thing. Right. And then in the past few months, I think we discovered with the trucker convoy that maybe it's also a Canadian thing. Right. So plenty of nastiness around that from nice Canadians.
 | 35:54 | Yeah, I do believe Canadians are nice. I'm an American originally. I do notice that Canadians are nice. It's noticeable. Well, don't you think so that all populations are have a large section of nice people. But the not so nice is the more interesting to listen to or something. The ones that get the attention, the ones that get the attention.
 | 36:21 | I just wanted to finish off by bringing this down to business and business leaders and people that are in their careers and so on. What do you have to say to people like that? Well, there's definitely some things that in that article, and since that we would advise businesses to do. And I think many of them have already traveled down this path a reasonable distance. But those who haven't probably need to think about this still, one of them is they need to be listening.
 | 36:54 | Right. And they need to be listening in other ways than traditional ways. So there is a kind of a technology now called social media listening technology. There's also something called sentiment analysis where technology scans for mentions of your company, your executives, anything to do with you. And it's a machine, it's an algorithm.
 | 37:20 | So it parses what's being said in scores words, either positive or negative in terms of their sentiment. That sentiment that they represent so rubbish would be a big negative word and terrific would be a big positive word. And then it kind of totals it up. And one of the things you can notice through an analysis like this, if you have this kind of sensory technology out there, is the cinnamon on our company just turned extremely negative by 15% in just the last 8 hours.
 | 37:54 | What's going on? Right. And so then they can dig into that. So I think at the very least, companies need to have a capability for social media listening. They also need a rapid response capability. Right. They need an ability to quickly get out there if it's happening on Twitter or wherever it's happening in fashion and respond. And they also need a capability for coming up with effective responses very quickly, which I think is an entirely different capability.
 | 38:26 | Right. In the Dave Carol story, as I recall, United Airlines kept repeating this phrase on Twitter. This story has struck a chord with us. Right. Ha. Music Pond. Right. While I give him credit for listening and responding, I don't know that that was an especially effective response. Right. They seem to think it was far cleverer than the people who were responding thought it was.
 | 38:58 | Rob, is there anything that you wanted to finish off by saying no? I think we've pretty much covered the territory. I guess I would say we all should be thinking about this issue. Right. And for the reasons that you talked about before that, I think we all have a say in whether or not the destabilizing forces are going to be a bigger deal than the sort of improvement in, wellbeing, reinforcement of democracy, et cetera, forces.
 | 39:35 | I catch myself on these things sometimes there's just that temptation to say to somebody on social media, you're ridiculous. Right. As opposed to engaging in a conversation that might actually find some common ground. I know Canadian niceness might be a real advantage here, right?
 | 39:57 | I mean, I talked earlier about some of the disappointing things that evolved around the trucker convoy, but I would also observe that when they finally did stop the Ottawa protests, it was done in what strikes me as a rather Canadian manner, very gentle, very gradual.
 | 40:27 | I mean, being an American, it was kind of like, oh, yeah, we never would have had that patience. We would have knocked people down and hurt people and so forth. Now, having said that, my 24 year old daughter, who is a social activist, will tell me there's a racial component there, right. That's not exactly the way everything gets handled in Canada. So I want to be careful there about things all figured out.
 | 40:57 | Well, you know what? We're all everybody globally is a work in progress, right. And hopefully it's a work in progress in the right direction. And I agree with you that that was handled in a Canadian way or whatever, but there's always sub themes, but certainly the kudos that I think of two are the citizens of Ottawa because that was the epitome of patience. Yeah.
 | 41:24 | And it really did strike me as kind of an expat. Right. Someone who isn't from Canada but feels very much fondness for the country. That just the patience, right? So much patience. And people were like, yeah, well, let's let them have their say. And then I think it just went on too long. The people were amazingly patient.
 | 41:52 | I really do think that Rob, thank you so much for chatting with me. Again, this is just an absolutely fascinating topic and so interested to hear about what you have to say on the topic and your thoughts about we might have gone wrong in that direction because we're constantly evolving for better and worse at the same time. Right. So thanks so much for today. That's a pleasure. It's always a pleasure talking with you and to our viewers and listeners.
 | 42:22 | Thanks for joining Rob and me today for this conversation about transparency and Privacy and all the complexities of our world. Really appreciate that some of those complexities allows me to speak to you and chat with Rob and bring in this conversation. So find me on YouTube and listen wherever you get your podcast and until we meet again. Thanks.