Transcript

Beth Comstock:

… imagine innovation and creativity are these sort of lone crazy geniuses in the dark of night. The reality is you need a little of that, but you need a lot of give and take. The aha of discovery, it is magic. In fact, some of the colleagues I worked with told me they felt I was the dog from Up in the sense that I am always chasing the shiny new thing, whether it’s a person, an idea, a place. I was never going to be the one who knew the batting average of, I don’t know what baseball player, I was not that person. I wasn’t going to be wearing the golf vest that a lot of my male colleagues did. I was wearing crazy shoes and just expressing myself differently. And in some ways I might have been able to grab and have a little more freedom of being different because of those things and some of my male counterparts.

Aleks Krotoski:

Hi, you’re listening to Standing on the Shoulders, a podcast about giants, but not the kind that you hear about in fairytales. These stories feature innovators and thinkers, visionaries, who somehow managed to see a world that others can’t and through their work, they lift others, helping them to see further. Each episode, we speak with one of these people to hear about the key moments that shaped their journey. And they tell us about the one person whose work inspired them the most. It’s hosted by me, Aleks Krotoski, and supported by Pearson

Aleks Krotoski:

Today’s guest is Beth Comstock. For nearly three decades she worked for General Electric, one of the biggest multinational conglomerates on the planet, and she headed up their marketing division. She also worked for NBC on their digital strategy, and she had a hand in developing Hulu. Her book about her eventful career is called, Imagine it Forward: Courage, Creativity, and the Power of Change. But to us, she let us in on the secret to getting big established companies to take risks and be creative in how they grow and innovate. And she talked about one person in particular whose unusual creative habit helped her to develop that framework for innovation. We begin with her beginnings.

Beth Comstock:

I grew up in a small town in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and it was just a great upbringing. And what I love about small town life is it’s very nurturing. Everybody looks after everyone else. The downside of that, however, is everybody knows your business. My mother was a school teacher and she had this amazing network. I used to joke she was like the CIA because she and her teacher friends would often know what we were getting into before we even did.

Aleks Krotoski:

The Shenandoah Valley is just one of the most beautiful places. I went to high school in the East Coast, and we would drive through in the autumn and see the leaves turning. And we would go camping up in the national park all the time. It’s such an incredibly beautiful environment.

Beth Comstock:

It is. I went to nature camp there. I mean, yeah. I just, so remember when we were free-range kids growing up, at that time would have been the 70s, our parents set us loose in the summers. You’d leave in the morning and you’d come home, every family had their own, whether it’s my dad’s whistle or their dinner bell or whatever, your parents would ring the bell for meals and then you’d go right back out. But we had so much freedom to innovate and create. I still remember the games we played, the imagination activities. We take over fields and create small cities. We’d go foraging for plants and turn them into works of art. I mean, that was really special. And unfortunately, I’m not sure kids get as much of that these days.

Aleks Krotoski:

It seems to me that community though, is something that you really pulled from that childhood experience. And I’m wondering, can you talk a little bit about the role of community in what it is that you do and how it is that you push the envelope when you are trying to create something new?

Beth Comstock:

Yeah. I do think that growing up in a small town, the community did impact me because people are looking out for you and they care about you and you have certain rituals and practices, whether it’s going to church on Sundays or who your teacher is. And I do think in many ways it shaped me and just the love and appreciation I’ve grown to have for collaboration. I think innovation is a collaborative act. We imagine innovation and creativity are these sort of lone crazy geniuses in the dark of night. The reality is you need a little of that, but you need a lot of give and take.

Beth Comstock:

And I should also add, I identify as somebody who’s an introvert. I’m also shy, I’m reserved. And so that act of collaboration for people like me, an introvert, it takes an extra bit of energy because you want to hold back. And I had to struggle with that early in my career, that sense of holding myself out and not participating in things. And once I got feedback and started to realize the value, I kind of never turned back and collaboration is so critical. So I’m glad you raised that.

Aleks Krotoski:

Beth got a lesson in collaboration at her first workplace, straight out of college.

Beth Comstock:

I was just out of college and working as a television reporter covering Virginia politics, but I needed also to pay my bills and so I was a part-time waitress at a Mexican restaurant. And I hated that job because there was no community. Everybody was sort of on their own. There was no sense. It was literally punching the clock and people barely said hello to one another and yet we’re supposed to be a team that was serving customers. And I did not thrive there.

Beth Comstock:

And I contrast that to a job I had in college, where I worked in a Rubbermaid plastics factory making trash cans and plastic beer mugs. And it was working a factory line in the summer. And it was another one of those tough jobs, but it was a different way. It was physically tough. They would put me in situations and they dare me and bet with each other of whether I’d make it through the night. But what I loved about that was there was a community and people asking each other for help and kind of having fun with it and sort of putting you through your paces to see if you were up to snuff. So I do think for those early formative jobs, you’re exactly right. I was sort of pattern-matching, looking for more of that kind of community engagement.

Aleks Krotoski:

Throughout Beth’s career, the one thing that she has always loved is teamwork. The art, the alchemy, really of bringing a bunch of totally different people together, which is hard one for a self-described introvert.

Beth Comstock:

I think that’s… When I look back at the course of my career, one of the things I’m most proud of are the teams I’ve been able to work with and the work we’ve done together. It fills my soul to think that I have been part of that kind of teamwork.

Aleks Krotoski:

One of the important things about innovation is what psychologists like myself and network analysts describe as cosmopolitaness. And when you’re talking about bringing your community, your team together, you’re actually bringing together a relatively cosmopolitan set of individuals, people who have their own interests, their own ideas, very different backgrounds, and pulling them together. Can you give me an example of cosmopolitan team that you brought together and some of the things that came out? Whether they were successes or failures.

Beth Comstock:

In the work that I had to do, it was often introducing the what’s next and what’s new into incumbent businesses. I think of my time at NBC, the last stint I had at NBC when we were digitizing, the media world was being digitized. And it was a lot of having to bring in different perspectives of people who came from outside media who had digital internet, consumer internet experience, young filmmakers to bring in to do crazy digital shots. And that was very disruptive and very different to a network broadcast world. But that is how you drive innovation. You have to bring in those different perspectives, but it doesn’t make it easy and it’s with a lot of conflict.

Aleks Krotoski:

I admire your ability to admit vulnerability, particularly when you’ve held such top roles. Is that something that you have felt comfortable displaying in the workplace or is it something that you’ve kept to yourself?

Beth Comstock:

I’ve had to learn that very painfully. I remember getting some feedback around that time of that confidence story just before that job where my peers and the people who were on my team gave me feedback like, Hey, you’re such a perfectionist, you have lots of ideas, but you have to have them perfect. You don’t ask for help. And frankly, we don’t like working with you.

Beth Comstock:

That was one of those moments where like, Oh, Oh my gosh. And I had a great colleague at work who was an advisor. And he said, “Look, you got to go in there and you have to say, I heard you, I accept it. And I need your help.” And even today, as I say those words, it kind of gives me that like pit in my stomach, that ability to say, I need help and hold me accountable. But it was such a defining moment because out of that came much more of these collaborative efforts. I would not have been successful. The teams I worked with, we would not have been successful if we wouldn’t have been able to say we need help. And every time that I’ve been part of a team or I’ve led a project myself that’s faltered, it’s those moments when you, your pride, your ego, whatever doesn’t ask for help. And it’s never as good.

Aleks Krotoski:

Can you remember any specific times, perhaps the first time when you actually plucked up the confidence to say, it’s not working, I need some help. Can you remember what was going through your mind at that moment? That pit of the stomach feeling?

Beth Comstock:

I shared some of the stories earlier about the time at NBC and the digitization of media, I lost that perspective a bit. We became a bit, I was leading the digital team and we became a bit of the cool kids. And we didn’t think we needed help from the traditional broadcast team because digital was new and we had hired all the experts. And what happens is you start to create the haves and have-nots, the cool kids and the ones who feel left behind. And frankly, I didn’t do as well in that job. At one point, I almost lost my job because I lost perspective. And so I remember those moments when you devolve into warring teams and it’s my team against your team. And I got to prove I’m right. My team’s more right than you’re right. And I don’t know what we’re looking for. Validation from I don’t know, the boss? The press? I don’t know something, but we lose sight of what we’re trying to do.

Beth Comstock:

The times I remember where that wasn’t an issue, the work was so great in coming together, whether it was launching and cleantech effort, which was about total teamwork. And we had to open ourselves up and invite critics in and say, tell us what’s wrong with this. We had to go out to people and we were deleting our cleantech revolution. We had to go out to NGOs who had criticized us and say, okay, here we are. We’re GE and we know a cleaner, greener future has to be part of it and we want to help build it. Help us get there. Let’s not fight anymore. Those are really tough conversations to have, but you realize you cannot go forward without it.

Aleks Krotoski:

That’s the social capital piece that you hear about, that you’ve written about, that you’ve spoken about. That making yourself vulnerable is the thing that then binds you together as a community. Otherwise, it’s what individuals who are operating within themselves. That was the thing at the Mexican restaurant. Wasn’t it? Nobody was working together.

Beth Comstock:

And it was the thing I experienced in media at NBC, where it was my team against your team. And we had this just back to what you talked about, the social capital and the team trust that was missing often is people would pushing some new innovation or some new idea, and people would come into the room together and go, “Yeah, yeah.” And then they’d leave and go, “I’m never going to back that.” And I think that’s a lot of why change is difficult, why innovation efforts fail in companies because it’s those tough moments where everybody has to, decisions have to made and they have to be backed. You have to create a place for conflict, but you also have to create a place where you can duke it out and then decision made and trust is there that we’re going to figure it out. And that’s where things fall apart.

Aleks Krotoski:

One of Beth’s innovation tricks is to find colorful, creative people, people that she calls sparks and invite them in to shake up the buttoned up corporate environment. She’s done this throughout her career.

Beth Comstock:

That became a bit of my move to bring in outsiders, what I call sparks. These people who are very unconventional to come into a business setting.

Aleks Krotoski:

Some of them were more unconventional than others.

Beth Comstock:

I remember early on, I brought in a cultural anthropologist who made people lie down on the ground. And he came in, he’d say, “I’m an alien from another land, another planet. I found these two letters, GE. What do they mean to you?” I mean, people felt really awkward, not to mention you like wore velvet vests and blazers and caps. And he was very different asking them different questions. People were like, what are you doing? But it sparked a different reaction. And so wherever, that’s been my journey kind of the process is that is part of it. You have to bring an outside perspective that makes people feel uncomfortable. As an insider in the company, my job was to be sort of this outsider inside this insider outside. I had to know enough of what was happening outside to translate it into language the team could understand.

Aleks Krotoski:

Beth’s favorite outsider by far was the contemporary dancer, director and choreographer Twyla Tharp. Twyla’s style is known in the dance world as vernacular classicism. That’s a fancy way of saying that it throws together an unlikely collection of influences, classical ballet, modern and ballroom dance, avant-garde, pizzazz Broadway. Also, aerobics. There’s a thread that does connect them all and that is her dreamy, artistic vision, combined that with a ferocious discipline. And it’s a recipe for attracting creative DNA. Something that everybody has, but may be stuck more in some people than others. So she wrote a book called The Creative Habit that shakes it loose with a few practical exercises. Beth found it hugely inspiring.

Beth Comstock:

I had known her writing partner through just networking. And he had told me he was working on this project and that’s how I got introduced to her book. And it really had a profound impact on me because one, I mean, I was working as a business person, a marketer, nonetheless, and here was a choreographer with something to teach me about creativity. And I was in a role, I was leading marketing and innovation. And when people didn’t know what I meant, and it was in a culture that was very, and is today, most business cultures are very, as we said earlier, very process-driven, very step one, step two, step three. At GE, we had processes for our processes. We loved process. And there wasn’t a lot of space for deviation, as I mentioned. And so here was Twyla Tharp in her book saying that basically creativity needs discipline. It needs tethering. It needs a framework.

Aleks Krotoski:

But Beth’s favorite Twyla trick uses cheap cardboard boxes to give each of her projects a home. The boxes, they make her feel organized, like she has her act together even if she doesn’t really have a roadmap. Just writing which project the boxes for starts the work and it makes it happen.

Beth Comstock:

So I just remember thinking, here’s this crazy modern dance choreographer, and she is still working within a box. Wow. There’s something there that I can learn from. And I think it just gave me and the teams I worked with gave us a bit of confidence that as we were trying to inject more creativity and really creative problem-solving to think a little outside that box, that there was a framework that we could start to talk the same language the engineering culture had. And we actually came up with a framework for the innovation process. I mean, it was about discovery. Really we called it exploration and discovery. It was about kind of coming up with a space to test and learn your hypothesis. And over many years, we fine-tuned it. But my point being is there is a process that gives people at least some boundaries. Otherwise, people feel lost. It’s like creativity without borders is chaos.

Aleks Krotoski:

Where were you at that point in yourself? Were you seeking, were you sort of at a loose end or were you very confident and you were thinking I’m going to go out and I’m going to find something new and I know where to look? How did this trip into and interrupt your life? What was happening inside you at that moment?

Beth Comstock:

This point in time, I had just been named Chief Marketing Officer. I, in fact, my boss had called me in about four months into being named this big job at the company. He called me in and he was like, “Hey, look, you’re not being very confident. I put you in this job for a reason. You’re creative. You see things differently. You’re not speaking up. You’re not showing up. You’re not challenging points of view or bringing ideas to the table with your peers. You better show up.” And so I had been put in this job and I was excited about it, but I hadn’t come with a traditional marketing background. But yet the opportunity that we saw was that marketing was a path to innovation. It was about, as I said earlier, living in the market, then you started to see patterns.

Beth Comstock:

It was less about our idea or Beth’s idea. It was about seeing things and seeing where things were unfolding in the world. And that started to build a confidence, oh, cleantech may be happening. Okay. It’s the year 2003. It’s hard to believe there was a time when it wasn’t so certain, but it wasn’t. And we see that happening in aviation and the rail business and the energy business. There’s a trend here. It gave us confidence to pursue that future. And we had to create a framework to bring other people along too. So yeah, those tools all help because you’re just, you’re lost and you need things that fit that pattern that help you just gain a little bit of confidence. And so things like Twyla Tharp’s book, like getting out and seeing things, and feeling confident about the pattern. Those things really help build confidence.

Aleks Krotoski:

What are some of the other ways that you recognize? What else did you see in this book that made you think, you know what, I really do need to bring a choreographer in here, even though it may not have seemed relevant at all?

Beth Comstock:

You know, everybody you think innovation work is you’re just sitting around, coming up with ideas. Look, ideas are rarely the issue. It’s getting to action. And so here was literally a framework for getting up in the morning and literally walking around and doing steps and taking action. So that was very powerful. And lastly, the thing I think that she’s sort of touches on, but it’s profound to me is just the need for story. And she was telling her story in a very relatable way. It was still this woman who gets up and goes to work and how she does her work, not just her craft, but her process, as the word you’ve used. And everyone can relate to that, but there’s a beauty in that story. And so underlying all of this, I think for me as a storyteller was this appreciation, the need to connect at an emotional human level and not just throw up a bunch of PowerPoint pages that say, it’s step one, two, three. Now you’re done.

Aleks Krotoski:

That connection is so deeply important. I’m wondering apart from what it was that she wrote about that connected the two of you, can you describe her to me in your own words, who is Twyla Tharp? And it can be about her physicality, it could be about her mind, whatever it is that sort of, that you felt connected with her.

Beth Comstock:

She’s very petite and determined. So I think she kind of literally owned space in a really unique way. And as somebody who, as I said earlier is reserved and feeling awkward, there’s a fascination with people who are able to kind of take space and fill it in a much bigger way than themselves, this small woman who was able to just own space. So perhaps on a personal kind of looking for courage and confidence level, I was seeking somebody who could fill that space in her own way.

Aleks Krotoski:

I remember once inviting somebody who I deeply respected to do a talk for me at the Royal Institution. And I had been watching his programs, I’d loved the way he told stories for years and years. And I remember phoning him up. I was super nervous before phoning him up. He knew I was calling. So it wasn’t as if it was a cold call. And I said, “Oh, hello. This is Aleks Krotoski, and I would love it if you would do this, let’s talk a little bit about it.” And he jumped on it and he was so charming and he was so engaging and he was so direct and he was so magnificent. You can tell where I’m going with this, that when I hung up the phone, I basically pranced around the office and it’s sort of like, high-fiving myself.

Aleks Krotoski:

And it was the most fantastic moment because he and I have made programs together since then. And we’ve worked together, but there’s still that magical moment of the first time you speak with somebody whose ideas have really resonated with you and you just want to tell the world. You want them to come in and share what it is that magic that you felt with somebody else. Can you describe that conversation that you had with Twyla and what you felt that was going to come out of that?

Beth Comstock:

I fall in love with a lot of people and ideas in those moments. The aha of discovery, it is magic. In fact, some of the colleagues I worked with told me they felt I was the dog from Up in the sense that I am always chasing the shiny new thing, whether it’s a person, an idea, a place. And so I can relate with that, that you talked about. And so I think it was exactly the way you said. It was just this, I found something and someone that we’re kindred spirits in this moment. It’s a sense of, I’m not alone. This creative journey is work I have to do on my own and work that is a team sport.

Aleks Krotoski:

You also described the fact that she was still operating within a box, despite the fact that she was thinking outside the box. And other people who have inspired you and other phrases that have inspired you to the degree that you even introduced them in your book, incapacitated learning, which is such a great expression. I’d love it if you could unpack that for me and how that may have led to your chapter on agitated inquiry.

Beth Comstock:

Yeah. I took that concept and phrase from the futurist Edie Wiener who’s another person who had quite an impact on me because in those early days of looking outside and trying to look for trends and patterns, I got to know some futurists. And these are not people who can foresee the future. They’re just good at pattern recognition. And so Edie has a great book, FutureThink, that has this concept of incapacitated learning, which is basically just people have such deep expertise often that they feel they can’t learn anything new. So they’re incapacitated. And I saw that a lot in the expertise of the people I worked with. I mean, amazing depth of expertise, and you want that, but then it starts to get this mindset that, well, I can’t learn anything new. I know everything there is to know in my area. And so a lot of things start to happen and people dismiss them or they belittle them.

Beth Comstock:

Back to my days at NBC and video, when YouTube comes onto the scene, ha ha ha, isn’t that funny? Cats playing the piano on video? Ha ha ha. Yet a little bit of fear like, Oh my gosh, if that takes off, what will we do? So I think there is that sense of when we see something new and we have deep expertise to belittle it, to make light of it and, or not even to open our minds up. But that’s part of that process. You have to realize all of us have that block where we think we’re good at what we do. We know everything in that area. And you have to shock people out of that is what I’ve found.

Aleks Krotoski:

And the shock that you found is by introducing sparks into your communities, into those spaces where everybody feels safe enough that they can sit back and either take from, or not take from the sparks that you drop into your community. Would you say that that is part of your process?

Beth Comstock:

Exactly, Aleks. Sparking that discomfort, sparking that aha like you talked about, partly you’re sparking discomfort first, but then you want people to find that moment as you described so beautifully when you had that connection. When I was talking about aha, this Twyla Tharp concept. Aha. And so to me, sparks with that.

Aleks Krotoski:

Is there anything else that you’d like to say about your own innovative practices, about the way perhaps that other people have inspired you? Is there anything that they have said or done that has put you in the position that you are in now?

Beth Comstock:

That’s a great question. I mean, I guess we didn’t talk about this idea of giving yourself permission. Agency granting of yourself is just a kind of core philosophical principle I believe in. What I learned from these people and what I had to unlock in myself was this sense of giving yourself the okay to just take a small risk, to just go explore one new idea, to just try this little thing, try it small. Don’t go pitch your idea to the board. Pitch it to the person who sits next to you first. Open yourself up to say, Hey, I’m going to take a risk here by being vulnerable by saying, I have a seed of an idea. It might not even be a good one. What do you think? Can you make it better? And so it really starts with this permission granting and mindset shift, and we have it within all of us. It just starts with saying, I give myself permission. I can just take this one step forward. And that’s where it starts.

Aleks Krotoski:

We’ve talked about vulnerability. And now I want to talk about a humbleness that allows you to have these different pieces of scraps of paper that you’ve put into your shoe box, that you’re able to pull them out and say, this is my process. My process involves not just me shouting into a room and making everybody else believe me with the confidence that I can pretend to have. It’s about being humble enough to turn to somebody else’s process like Twyla’s, or to bring somebody else in to inspire a new way of thinking. And that I think it’s a value. It’s something that you’re encompassing in this conversation that I think is incredibly humble. Is that what you see within corporations regularly? I’ve never been in a corporation. It’s not what I imagined what it’s like inside a corporation.

Beth Comstock:

No, we don’t see enough of that. Yeah, there’s a humility to it. But most of those moments, I don’t think it was a thought of, okay, I’m going to be so grandly humble. I think it was often desperation. It was, I need to get people’s attention. But I do think it is this recognition that the goal is bigger than yourself or your team. You’re trying to fight for the future of the company. You’re trying to fight for the future of a new way for the future for your customers. And one of the things we were trying to eradicate in GE and it happens in most businesses, I’ve seen this notion, we called it success theater. And there’s a lot of theater that happens in company. There’s innovation theater, where you pretend like you’re innovating and you’re not. And success theater is part of that where people are just, all they want to talk about are the good things.

Beth Comstock:

They don’t want to admit that there are tough things. They tell the boss what they think he wants to hear. They don’t confront the tough issues. And I think that there’s a humility of leadership that says, no, tell me what I don’t want to hear. Tell me that because I need to confront that. And usually you want to just say everything’s working. No, we’re growing. Everything’s great. See, we’ve got the data to back it up. And I think it takes a very humble leader and person to say, I don’t have all the answers. It’s to say to the team, I don’t know. Let’s go figure it out. That’s not the way we’re trained in business.

Aleks Krotoski:

You use the pronoun ‘he’ when you were talking about the boss and I don’t know if that was a slip or if that’s just the nature of corporations. I mean, it’s challenging because this is certainly what I was brought up with as well, is this idea that women aren’t in the boardroom or all of that. And I’m wondering if gender does play a role in this ability to recognize that one cannot provide all the answers. You’re hired for a job. Sure. But part of that job is to make sure that you can do your job. And one way of doing that job is looking outside for answers. Can you talk a little bit about the gender dynamics of that particular decision, either standing up in front of a room and sort of busking your way through and getting everybody to believe what you’re saying, even though you might not have any basis versus seeking outside help, asking for help, bringing other experts into the space?

Beth Comstock:

In my experience it is for more along gender lines, in that I’ve tended to find women are more open to outside help and collaboration. That being said, maybe it’s been an adaptive skill we’ve had to. And we’ve had to kind of work our way there together or work with others to kind of get attention. So I’ve thought a lot about that, but I know for myself in the path that I was on and the women I saw do well, being open to new ways because we were different. And so we were about difference. Just our gender, we showed up in a different way. I know for myself, I often felt there was this kind of moment when I had to recognize that my difference was actually a strength and not a reason to not be confident.

Beth Comstock:

I was a woman in a largely male-dominated set of organizations. I was a marketer in a land of financial and mechanical engineers. I was a media person and industrial and I was creative, a creative person and in teams that were largely logical. So I had all those things that made me different. And I, at some point just kind of that moment of like, I’m going to embrace that. And it gives you a certain amount of confidence, but I think a lot of women have had that path and you just start to say, I’m going to do it in the way I feel most comfortable doing it. I had to realize, like I was never going to be the one who knew the batting average of, I don’t know what baseball player, I was not that person. I wasn’t going to be wearing the golf vest that a lot of my male colleagues did. I was wearing crazy shoes and just expressing myself differently. And in some ways I might have been able to grab and have a little more freedom of being different because of those things than some of my male counterparts.

Aleks Krotoski:

And it’s worked out for you. Things are going well.

Beth Comstock:

To me, it’s about opening yourself up. If I’m feeling like if I’ve been successful in anything for me personally, it’s opening myself up, opening myself up to change, to difference to collaboration. It was a personal act and I had this amazing platform to be able to do it. And that led to a lot of great things, but it was a team that was open. And so success, I think for me, I measure it in that way. Not the billions of dollars generated here or there. I mean, that’s important for business, but on a personal level, it’s how open were you? What did you do together? What can you look back and say, we made magic happen? That happens in business, I guarantee it does. If you open yourself up, you can make that happen.

Aleks Krotoski:

Beth Comstock, thank you very much for being so open with us. I really appreciate this. To find out more about Beth Comstock, go to bethcomstock.info. For more on Twyla, read The Creative Habit, or you can go to twylatharp.org. For show notes and links to the stories that we mentioned in this episode, you can go to standingontheshoulders.net. Standing on the Shoulders is a Story Things Production. This episode was written and produced by Shruti Ravindran. Our audio engineer and sound design was by Kenya Scarlet. Additional interviews were by Alois Stevens. Social media by Kate Norton, artwork by Darren Garrett and Eddie Brackenbury. Our executive producers are Hugh Garry and Caroline Leary, supported by Pearson and hosted by me, Aleks Krotoski.

Aleks Krotoski:

It takes a lot of time and a big team of people to make this podcast more than most people would imagine. So if you like the show, then please go to Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you go to get your podcast effects and rate it. It really does help people discover us. On our next episode.

Jude Kelly:

I think once she recognized that some people have got barriers and some people have got fewer, if any, you can either think, well, great. I’m glad I’m on the side of the ones that have got fewer barriers, hooray, or you can feel a sense of injustice on behalf of everybody else. And I felt the latter.

Aleks Krotoski:

Thanks for listening.