Driving Sustainability: What We Can Do Starts with You

“If you want the best talent out there, having a commitment to sustainability works because people care very deeply about this topic… people are actually resigning from jobs or they don’t apply for jobs when companies don’t have a good approach to sustainability.”
Christian Smith

In this episode you’ll hear about

• Sustainability as a Business Strategy: How sustainability can be used as a strategy to reduce risk and improve profitability
• Aligning Purpose and Profit: Presenting sustainability initiatives in a way that justifies investments to senior stakeholders
• The Importance of External Engagement: Stress-testing sustainability approaches through engaging with external stakeholder and why seeking collaboration is essential
• Navigating a Sustainable Future: Whether sustainability is a lost cause or there is still meaningful action that can take place in the business world to create change
• Evangelising Sustainability: How to effectively and authentically promote sustainability as a priority within organisations and to senior leaders

https://youtu.be/8fn5WNZxy6I

Key links

Art of Persuasion episode (referenced)
Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows
International Accord
Zalando
NGOs

About our guest

Christian Smith has been in the sustainability field for over 15 years, holding positions at major retailers, fashion brands and in the NGO sector. He’s currently Head of Sustainability, Diversity, Inclusion Reporting and Stakeholder Engagement at Zalando where his role is to connect the organisation with the outside world as they navigate the ever changing world of sustainability.

Christian also acts as an advisor across sectors on how to embed social and environmental innovation into business models, and possesses an MSc in Environment and Sustainable Development from UCL.

About our host

Our host, Chris Hudson, is a Teacher, Experience Designer and Founder of business transformation coaching and consultancy Company Road.

Company Road was founded by Chris Hudson, who saw over-niching and specialisation within corporates as a significant barrier to change.

Every team approaches transformation in their own way, also bringing in their own partners to help. And while they’re working towards the same organisational goal, it’s this over-fragmentation that stunts rapid progress at a company-wide level.

Having worked as a marketer, transformation leader, teacher and practitioner of design thinking for over 20 years, both here in Australia and internationally, Chris brings a unique, deep and ‘blended’ skillset that will cohere and enable your teams to deliver ambitious and complex change programs.

Transcript

[00:00:07] Chris Hudson: Wow. Wow. Wow. What an episode we have for you today. This was a conversation about how we as individuals, as intrapreneurs, as business leaders, have accountability for the sustainability of our planet. Something that we can tangibly influence through the choices that we make. My guest today is Christian Smith.

Christian has been in the sustainability field for about 15 years

and has held positions at major retailers, fashion brands, and in the NGO sector. By his own admittance, he’s had quite a nomadic existence. Born in the UK, he has lived in Freetown, London, Leon, Hamburg, Miki-chō, Washington DC,

Brasilia, New York, now flitters between Amsterdam and Berlin.

Taking his time to figure out what he wanted to do, Christian has dabbled in recruitment, energy research, sales,

English language teaching, stay at home parenting until he fully immersed himself into his MSc in Environment and Sustainable Development from UCL and has never really looked back since then.

He’s currently Head of Sustainability, Diversity, Inclusion Reporting and Stakeholder Engagement at Zalando, where his role is to connect the organisation with the outside world as they navigate the ever changing world of sustainability. This is a tale of curiosity, purpose, and how to find your inner calling by listening to your thoughts and putting them into action.

I started this episode with a big question, thinking we’d back shuffle to some simple topics at a later point in the episode, but we just kept on going deeper and deeper and deeper. By the end of this conversation, I left with a renewed sense of optimism and urgency to assess my day-to-day actions and choices based on their wider or longer term impact.

You’re gonna enjoy this wake up and cold water in the face episode for sure. Have fun in there.

Christian, so lovely to have you on the show. We’ve known each other ever since we’re at uni together, and my have time’s changed since then.

And even as students we’d get together we’d contemplate the world what was working, what was downright broken most of that would’ve been forgotten the next day for reasons we won’t mention. And the point being that robust conversation has never been stranger to us.

And we’ve always valued that about our friendship, I think. And in our work lives, actually from the start of our careers, neither of us really found a natural fit straight away.

And after a bit of meandering and figuring out, we soon got used to the fact that we would need to pivot, need to change, need to try things out frequently and effortlessly if we were to succeed and find something that felt a little bit better.

I think despite that, you know, our careers took different turns. Mine from advertising and marketing and into business and product innovation, experienced design,

and yours is very much geared up around purpose from what I can, from what I can observe. So you were swimming upstream when a lot of people hadn’t really woken up to the rather large topic of sustainability and all things good, and I’m in awe of that. And actually, what, you’ve been, what you’ve been able to achieve through just sheer persistence, mainly against the institution of corporates. And probably against all odds as well. So a lot of mentors and coaches will ask, what were you put on the planet to do?

So maybe we could start with the question around that. What do you feel like your comfort zone is? That’s a nice easy one. How do you define yourself and your purpose for those that don’t know you?

[00:03:11] Christian Smith: Thanks for the intro. How do I define myself and my purpose? You mentioned our chats, so we’ve had lots and lots of chats for what, 20 something years now? And it’s always trying to figure out what the hell am I here to do? And there was never this feeling that I wanted to be a director of a bank or a lawyer or a this, there was never that kind of drive to be something that with that level of status.

But I think what happened is the fact that I was able to travel quite a lot as a child and also as an adult. We knew each other at U C L, but obviously, I grew up in West Africa. I was born in London. I grew up in West Africa, in Sierra Leone, and that probably had much more of an impact on me than I realised.

And then throughout the last 20 years or so since leaving university I’ve lived in Brazil, in Japan had a stint in the US, that combined with France and Germany where you and I were obviously lived in Hamburg led me to the belief that this world in which we live is this wonderful place in which we live is in a bit of a mess.

And so there was always something about me of what can you do? And this isn’t like a, I wanna save the world thing is how can we improve things? How can we value the things that make us what we are the things that the ecosystem in which we live that serves us so well? And what can I do?

How can I use my role, my knowledge, my education, my experiences to, to bring that to the fore? And it was a very long journey trying to figure out what that was. I dabbled in a lot of things, as you mentioned. I did recruitment, I did sales. I did work for a Japanese energy company. I’ve done all sorts of things. But when I look back, and it’s easy to have that 2020 vision, but when I look back, it feels very clear to me that it was through that meandering journey that I landed where I am. I had to make those decisions. I had to make that trip to land on something. And that’s something is sustainability.

It’s the opportunity to look at the world as it might be and try to pivot, whether it’s companies, individuals, NGOs, whatever it might be into that space and try to remain hopeful. So I guess when we look at my purpose, my purpose is to maintain the level of hope that we might come out of all the different shit storms that we’re facing right now in a better place.

And my role is to work with organisations, individuals to try to bring that to life.

[00:05:27] Chris Hudson: You answered that much better than I thought you would, but anyway. No, that’s a very good answer. In just thinking about that, obviously travel and multicultural and diversity all of the different elements of inputs that you’ve had over your lifetime And thinking back to that, obviously travel is a great is a great way to put perspective on things. You’re often seeing people in lesser situations or, less um, comfortable situations than you would be yourself. And I think that perspective obviously puts a lens on, on how you appreciate things in your current state, in your current realm where you are today, what you end up doing is obviously informed by that and it influences people a lot.

But a lot of people don’t see that, right. So how do you, share that with other people? Because it, it really comes down to perspective. But if people don’t get it, then they’re just stuck in their own ways.

[00:06:11] Christian Smith: Yeah. I think a really key component of that is for me is it’s the realisation because I spent my nascent years in Sierra Leon in Freetown and I look at what could have been, it’s just, you have, you think of the sliding doors, moments, if my father hadn’t succeeded the way that he had, then I could be living in Freetown somewhere trying to, you know, not having running water, really, really kind of fundamental shift in what my life could have been.

And so that aspect was always drilled into me as a kid. See how fortunate you are? And I didn’t have to think about it. I saw it, and in continuing, I left Sierra Leone when I was, what, seven, eight years old. But we used to go back every year, so there was always a reminder of where we came from, what my father had achieved in order to get us to where we were able to have a really comfortable life and to be able to travel and to benefit from these things.

What I try to do is just really connect people to that fact. It’s only been relatively recently that I’ve been able to be very open and honest about these topics as well. You mentioned diversity and inclusion and obviously as a black man growing up in the UK I have been subjected to my fair amount of racism.

But it was never something you could speak about growing up. It was always like, well just deal with it, even from my parents’ standpoint, it’s well, you’re a black man. I remember my father’s like, you are a black man. You will have to work twice as hard to get half as far. That’s one of the things he drilled in me at a very early age.

So it was like, oh, just put your head down and get on with it. But now being in a space where you are able to be more transparent, you are able to be more open, you are able to bring these different perspectives to the table, not as a level of as a kind of tokenistic approach, but as a way to provide perspective.

I think increasingly people are valuing that, and it’s important for me to be vocal about it. ’cause I think and I think I’ve, we spoke about this before. There’s a kind of weird juxtaposition with me as well. When I open my mouth and I speak it might not necessarily be the things that people are expecting to hear, but then when I speak it takes people to a different place.

And so I have to bring people back and say, actually, hold on. This is what my background is. This is where I’m from. These are the experiences that I’ve had. And just because I speak in a certain way doesn’t mean that I haven’t had to experience some of the pitfalls, some of the challenges that black people of color have had to face throughout history. It may be different now, it may be slightly less, we may be slightly more in tune to some of these topics. But they are still there, there are still relevant and they’re still things that we need to address. So my thing right now is being in a position where people listen to me, which I also find a bit funny but people listen to what I have to say means that I am even more confident to stand up for myself what is right and for also for other people.

So it’s something that I think that I bring to table as well. So that perspective from travel, that perspective of seeing, world, whether it’s Freetown, whether it’s, the travels we had in Brazil, in Rio and in Brasilia. Some of the situations I was in Japan as well.

’cause I think people’s perceptions of Japan is very different from the reality and bringing those things to the table and being able to say, hey you know what we do have an effect from the choice that we make here in the world in which we live. Whether you’re in Berlin or Amsterdam or London.

We do have an impact and the choice that we make can actually ameliorate people’s lives. So let’s figure out how to put that into practice.

[00:09:21] Chris Hudson: Yeah, I think interesting points in and around what drives people to make change possible, and probably around the choices that people think that they have when they listen to what you’ve just described. People might think, okay, somebody’s chosen to do that as their career. That’s all they live for and this is what, they’re here to do.

A lot of people that are in different walks of life and probably in different careers and maybe in different situations will maybe not know where to start in relation to their own choices. In relation to what can be done at a very personal level to them, but in a way that would be impactful for the broader culture or the broader society that they live in.

So do you feel like everyone has a, a role to play? I’m sure I know the answer to this a little bit, but what’s your perspective on that?

[00:10:04] Christian Smith: I think everyone can play a role should they want to. but I also don’t want to be the person that forces people to do so. And I think that’s the, I was just listening to one of your previous podcast and they were talking about persuasion. It’s my job to come to the table and help people to understand what’s in it for them.

This is, I think the biggest, one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in the last 10, 12, 13 years of doing this type of work, is that I may come from this place, this kind of idealistic perspective of what the world could be my ideas are, you know, human rights and environmental topics and whatever it might be. But for a lot of people, they come in at very different angles. So it’s not really my role to come in and say, hey you have to do this because it’s great for the environment and for whatever. It’s my role to figure out an entry point. And meet them halfway, sometimes three quarters of the way. So it’s really important for me to take my knowledge, my understanding of the world, my way of thinking from a, from a systemic perspective and bring that down to the things that people value so that they can make the decisions according to the KPIs that matter to them. So I’m not gonna force anyone to go, you have to go on this trip with me. I’m not gonna guilt trip people into it. If you yourself aren’t touched by the way that the world has changed, whether it’s, the increasing levels of inequality, whether it’s the, unpredictable weather and the effect on food and migration, for example, if that doesn’t affect you, then it’s my job to come to you with the right amount of information to say, okay, fine.

Let’s not talk about migration. Let’s not talk about agriculture. Let’s talk about KPIs, let’s talk about risks. Let’s talk about all these different topics, and let me find a way to bring you to the conversation. And that also helps me because it helps me to understand again the depth of the value system that we’re in.

And take away some of my naivety about how people should just change and really start working with people where they are.

[00:11:47] Chris Hudson: Yeah. I’d imagine starting out in your line of work that there would’ve been a degree of frustration in how some of those messages were received to begin with, but also in trying to establish how that gap could be plugged in some way because you are effectively evangelising and you’re expecting people to come on the, on the journey with you, and not everyone’s ready for that, and you have to meet them where they’re at and obviously move them along.

But it, it must be extremely tiring.

[00:12:12] Christian Smith: It has been. But I guess um, one of the things that someone said to me a, a while ago is that I do have this kind of steely determination, which I never thought of for myself. It’s like, I will play the long game, and so for me, it’s always been, Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but eventually it’ll happen.

You’ll be able to see that level of patience has been really, really important for me and my sanity. Because experience, again, is the thing that, that really is valuable for me here. When I was starting out, I knew very little about how business worked, I needed to have these experiences to learn how to navigate the landscape, how to deal with people who work in logistics versus people who work in finance versus people who work in the supply chain.

What are the competencies they have? What are the things that are important to them? And then how do you then take the things that we, in the sustainability world need to move the needle on and bridge the subject in the right way? What I think has happened over time, though and you mentioned this as well, is that yeah were very much on the fringes of things and.

And I say this is someone who came in, I don’t know, relatively late in a way. Because when I look at the documents I’ve written about the Club of Rome, Donella Meadows who wrote Thinking in Systems and things like that. This is the seventies when you look at the knowledge that oil companies had about climate change and things like that.

That’s going back to what, the fifties, something like that. It’s ridiculous. So you think that I was an early adopter. I’m going, I came in pretty late. Everyone is just even more late. So I think about that and I think about the fact that is a, an exponential increase in the amount of people who are aware of what’s going on.

And that continues to drive certain behaviors, certain actions. On top of that, the political climate has really caught up as well. When you look at the Infrastructure Act over in the US that was essentially a Climate Act. I mean it, whether or not it’s successful or not. That’s gonna be another question but that was essentially to do with climate change.

When you’re looking at the European perspective, you look at the corporate social responsibility directive, you look at the, all the regulations requiring better communication of environmental impacts, better understanding of environmental impacts. These things have caught up to the point where I don’t have to necessarily evangelize anymore, because regardless of where we are going as an organisation where you might want to go as an organisation, you are now going to be required to actually put these things into practice.

Measure your CO2 footprint, measure the impact you have on your supply chain and report on it. But when you report on it, people are gonna take note. And if you’re not improving, people will come back at you and ask you why. So, it’s been a really interesting challenge. What changed in my challenge?

So first of all, it was trying to bring people into the conversation, to, yeah, to evangelize then it was, okay, you can’t evangelize, so you have to meet people halfway. And now my conversation’s changed again, which is, we have to do this. Let me help you understand what this means and how we can then use this as a way to take our business forward.

What can we leverage in these changes that helps us to, stay ahead of the game or just not get into trouble? And I think some of those conversations have changed your access to leaders across the business changes because of the way legislation has changed. But it also makes my life in one way, A lot easier.

’cause lot easier. I don’t have to be so emotionally vested now. I can use much more of my rational mind and bring people on for the journey. But it also provides new challenges of how do you then engage with the people across the business to turn this into a meaningful exercise rather than something that is just very much a tick boxy approach to what’s going on.

[00:15:37] Chris Hudson: There’s a lot to think about there. There’s obviously the, broader change at play that people are aware of to a greater or lesser degree. The rate of change has improved and increased, obviously. So the velocity at which change is happening, and the expected response to that is obviously shrinking.

Technology is driving that. It feels like you can see other things play out in other areas that have been successful, really in driving level of change because the new bar has been set and people have been expected to meet that bar and meet that expectation. So if you think about the world of data and the rollout of GDPR, for example, that was not an easy thing for a lot of people together, heads around, but there was education that happened.

Some of the industry leaders came forward, put a lot of things forward. They were able to educate their businesses and their clients in and around what needed to happen. And all of a sudden, fast forwarding a few years that feels like it was accepted and the change was made.

Right? But until that bar is really set in a way that people, people’s ears prick and they actually feel like they need to respond to either personally or on behalf of their organisation, it feels like everyone’s just gonna carry on as usual. And that level of inertia is just still there.

So there’s a lot of talk obviously around, reversing the effects of CO2 emissions and net zero and everything else. The fact that we would need to do something just unprecedented and have a concerted effort in the next seven to nine years around what would, whatever would need to be done.

We don’t know what the answer is yet, but let’s get a AI involved and we’ll may, maybe we can fix it in some way. Get the machines to do it. Yeah I just wonder like what will be the next kind of big frontier and the big line that the people need to cross and actually pay attention to and personally act upon?

Do you believe?

[00:17:16] Christian Smith: The and this kind of comes back to my evangelising thing and the, the idealism that still runs in my head after studying way, way too much at UCL. For me, the biggest change that we could possibly make right now is addressing the financial system. Everything in this world is about money, regardless of what you might wanna say, that it is about money.

And the challenges that we’re facing right now is that we have reached this level of development as a society because we’re all chasing money. Better lives, more access, better technology improvements in all over the place. I mean the world is in many ways a better place now.

Poverty levels have dropped, people’s access to clean water, to things like sewage treatment. All these different fundamental things have increased. And that was driven by this growth mindset that we’ve had as part of underpinning the system.

What we can’t do anymore, or what we shouldn’t do anymore is sit down and say, okay, well how can we just grow, and grow? And so the big question now which people really are having issues trying to address, because this then becomes a question of semantics as well, is how do we decouple economic growth from material growth? So the challenge here is not say that we can’t grow anymore from an economic perspective, but that growth should not be dependent on the extraction of resources from the ecosystem, from the biosphere. We need to restore not extract. And if we use clothing as an example, just reading some of the stats the other day, we have enough material out there right now to actually, if we develop the right systems in terms of circularity to keep on producing clothing without ever having to get another cotton plant grown, in water stressed areas.

So the key thing for me now is how can we start to challenge politicians and the investor community in particular to reward companies for the behaviors that are needed to avert the worst cases of climate change. My mind now is that we’re way past a point of no return. Everything I read, everything I understand about it is that we’re, what we are doing is mitigating, we’re not gonna stop, we’re not gonna reverse, but we’re mitigating, we’re trying to avoid the worst possible outcomes.

And if you see already the impact of the weather systems of the changes in climate that, that are happening, we do not want it to get any worse. I mean from a personal perspective, when I talk to, my family in Sierra Leone and we talk about the rain season, it’s absolutely ridiculous.

And that’s changed over a period of time, and that is due to climate change. So what we’re trying to is ert the worst cases, and in order to do so, we need to be able to turn around and say, well, if industrialisation is responsible for a large amount of CO2 emissions, then how do we de-industrialise in a way that reduces our reliance on CO2 emitting activities and at the same time create new areas for growth and new ways of measuring how successful a company is. It doesn’t just become this zero sum game of you either make money or lose money. It’s how can you contribute to society at large in a way that provides benefits not just for you and your bottom line, but for the communities and areas and that you affect so that people can thrive rather than be a recipient of the waste of what you produce.

So I think that challenge for me is now the key thing is that how do we then turn towards politicians, towards investors and find a way to share this message because we are all tied into the system that has yes, worked for a long time, but now as I’m sure you are aware of as well, and many of your friends be aware of doesn’t serve everyone.

It serves a very small amount of people and everyone is just contributing to that kind of resource up top. It’s almost like feudalism. We’ve kind of done the full circle while we’re back into feudalism and everything that we provide, everything we produce then goes into line in the pockets of the super rich to super wealthy.

And that for me just represents the kind of pinnacle of how unjust the system has become. And that is one thing that we really need to figure out. How do we undo that? How do we make the system work for everyone? And is, do we have to dismantle the whole thing, which terrifies people, but do we then have to dismantle the whole thing or do we tweak it? Dismantling is way too radical for so many people, so I think it’s gonna be a lot of different tweaks. But if you’re gonna tweak it, then again, we need to understand what is the end result we want out of the system, and how do we design a system that gets us to that end result. And so that’s where, again, I’ll mention Donella Meadow’s Think in Systems book is really important because she helps people to really understand that the output of a system is very much triggered by the inputs.

If you can define your outputs in a, in the correct way, then you really are able to work on what the inputs are in order to drive the right behaviors, the right performances, in order to get to the right output. We know what the outputs are that we want, I think generally, and there is now a growing challenge being put out there.

Even within the EU the EU commission had a couple of sessions a couple months ago on the issue of degrowth how do you turn that into something that isn’t just a oh this is the leftist, agenda item, but actually something that is universally beneficial for the majority. And how do you get people to understand how they can participate to also contribute to an agenda that actually can be beneficial for them as individuals. So that was a bit long-winded, but.

[00:22:41] Chris Hudson: Long-winded, but an incredibly articulate wow, I’m just thinking about all of that. That’s, yeah, that’s really sparked the conversation. I think. what you’ve pointed out here is that there’s if we, we were to rewind, what’s driven, the industrialisation, the commercialization, the capitalism, all the things that have, led us to this point has been a bit of a gap, almost a chasm between what some people had and other people didn’t.

Right? So the scarcity mindset has driven people to want and crave that which other people have in abundance, and that pattern has just repeated itself and repeated itself. And like you say, it’s made a lot of people and in the minority, but a lot of people, own control and have control over most of the wealth that’s in the world today.

So scarcity has a polarizing effect. Obviously you get to see what the other side looks like and therefore you act upon it to make that change possible in some sort of way. And I’m wondering what that, that driver will now be because all of a sudden for people to wake up, not only to the purpose that they need to now shift to, but to realize what their role is in relation to that and take personal accountability really for moving away from, quite a safe organisation or a safe set of ideals really that they’ve been used to and they’ve grown up with to something that’s a little bit more focused on what should be done will be a huge step.

And I’m wondering, who are the people that can really shine the light on that? On this show we talk about intrapreneurs, we can talk about entrepreneurs, we could talk about thought leaders, we could talk about, government, world leaders, who’s gonna drive this change?

it

[00:24:15] Christian Smith: It kind of has to be everyone. That’s the issue. I think, For a while I think people were just relying on, okay, it’s gonna be Elon Musk, he’s come out with electric cars. It’s gonna be all the, about electric cars and we’ll win, or it’s gonna be nuclear energy or it’s gonna be this it’s a combination of everything.

You cannot replace a system in which say the oil industry has propelled us into this level of development. And just say, yeah, we’ll just replace oil with something else and then we’re done. It’s not, that’s not sufficient. So I think first of all, help you to understand that what we need is a diversity of solutions and for that diversity of solutions to come to life we need a diversity of people working on the diversity of solutions to help us move forward. So from business leaders who understand that their business is at risk, existentially at risk from the effects of climate change to politicians who are willing to stand up to business leaders who want to maintain the status quo, those are really important, drivers of the conversation because we still have this level of, hierarchy, that exists.

And so those type people need to talk to each other. But I think what I would like to see more is just everyday people really starting to understand a little bit more about how things affect them. When you look at the basket of goods. You know, when you look at inflation, things like that, people are like, oh, well, inflation’s-

well, again, when you look deeper into that, as you look at the inflation figures, prices are not increasing necessarily because of commodity prices. There are increases because people, certain businesses have seen an opportunity to increase prices because of the threat of commodity price increases.

That is just unjust. Whether it’s right or not, theoretically, or I would say practically it’s unjust. Morally it’s unjust. Yeah, it might be fine. It might be a part of the game, but morally it’s unjust. Where is the outrage? and I think we just have a level of apathy that people have reached at the moment because we’re unable to connect them to the things that really matter.

When I think of the work that you’ve done from a marketing and advertising perspective, I think there’s a massive opportunity there within the advertising sector to help people really understand and connect with their values better. To help people understand that they too could have a role to play, that their world could be better, it could be better if they were to open up to these different ideas.

We are very bad from an environmental perspective, whether it’s environmental or social, connecting emotionally with audiences that can really make changes. I think as an example, I can say again, looking at the car industry, there’s this idea that we just switch everything to electric cars. It’s taken, its own life.

If everyone drove an electric car, well whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait a second. That’s not the solution. The solution is we switch to electric cars and then we reduce car ownership. So you have access to vehicles. ‘ cause you don’t need to have, no one needs, depending on where you live, but when I look at Europe, for example, you shouldn’t need to have a car, have access to a car yeah. But then that also looks at fundamental topics of we can decrease the amount of land that is used for parking, which means that we can turn it into grassland, greenland whatever it is, have open space for kids to play, improve air quality. You can decrease the amount of raw minerals that are required to build, whatever millions of cars that you need to build a year.

Which then has massive implications on, the resource rich countries who, by the way, have not benefited from this whole economic development in a way that they should have done. You can reduce your reliance on certain energy sources because you’re not gonna be producing so many cars, but for that to happen we need to be better at telling the narrative of why these things are interconnected. Helping people to see that their lives could improve out of these choices that need to be made. we need to be better at that. I think on a social perspective, we have to do the same as well. We have right now the beginnings of a very steep migrant crisis.

Whatever it is that we’re experiencing now is just the tip of the iceberg. When you look at I think it was the the Tunisian, issue with the guy who set himself on fire. That was part of the revolution. But actually that was triggered according to some reports on climate change, people’s ability to grow food was diminished prices rose.

That creates a massive kind of revolution within that country to spread. People are coming across on boats and treated like shit. If you look at the UK, and I’m sure you and I here are probably agreed in that we feel pretty embarrassed at the moment to see people like Suella Braverman talking about migrants in such a fashion to treat them in such a fashion.

But actually these are people who are leaving really difficult circumstances, partly due to the effects of climate change. And we have an opportunity to be able to tell that story, provide that narrative that can then switch hearts and minds towards how do we actually work to not just reduce our, our own consumption, our own, demands on the ecosystem, but then find ways to encourage our politicians and our businesses to then work on the restoration of ecosystems so that people can stay in their homes and work. And provide for themselves. I’m a child of a migrant, so I know full fully well that people generally don’t choose to leave their homes for shits and giggles. There’s usually an economic imperative to do so. I’ve been lucky enough to be able to choose to move.

I chose to move to Brazil. I chose to move to Japan. I’ve chose to move from Netherlands. I’ve chosen to work in Berlin. These are choices that I’ve made fully aware of what’s going on. But many of these people don’t have these choices or the choice. They have a false choices. And so there’s lots of different layers of the conversation that we need to have that we’re not having. There’s lots of different people we can bring into this conversation that would like to contribute but don’t yet know how to. So the challenge is how do we then start building the right levels of coalitions? How do we make people angry enough to actually stand up and do what’s right, even if it’s out of their own self-interest?

If I want to have a better life, I want to live in a place where I have better air quality, I wanna live in a place where my kids are safe and my house doesn’t have a risk of flooding. Even if we can get people to start thinking from that perspective, then we can start, I think creating a, conversation that could then lead to some of the fundamental changes that we need to see.

[00:30:30] Chris Hudson: There is obviously a challenge with all of that. It’s harder to, to make tangible. It’s harder to do. It’s like in business, anything that feels too strategic or too lofty or a little bit nebulous or idealistic.

It feels like a lot of that is often dismissed because it doesn’t tangibly translate into something that people can really feel, understand, actively contribute to or even talk about in the now. I’m wondering where we can look to for examples of how people have brought those conversations together successfully and have delivered, the outcomes that the people are looking for and, in a way that they can see.

I think there’s usually a bit of a split between a short term focus and a very long term one. And the very long termist would come at it from the point of view of transition design. What are you thinking about now? Same in business, you might find that a five-year plan is a luxury, but actually it really grounds people in what they need to do in the next week or in the next quarter, even if in six months time it has to be completely rewritten. People need to be given a pathway or a set of clear things to aim at for that to be in a way understood and actioned tangibly.

So yeah where do you think we can look to for people? How can people lead this way? How can they converse this way? Where have you seen it working well, even if it’s just on a really minute level, how could that be applied at a broader level as well?

[00:31:50] Christian Smith: I think first of all, we have to recognise that whatever I say, whatever I put out there it’s never gonna be enough. And these are, like I said, these are the beginnings of things, of conversation that we need to have. Because I think there’s very much the people who come and say, what about the whole what about this, what about that?

And we’re not there. There are definitely ways that we can improve. But I can think of a couple of examples, both from a political and a business perspective. it’s somewhere in Brazil, whether it’s Recife or Belo Horizonte, or somewhere where they have participatory democracy, participatory decision making in which they’ve actually used that to help people understand how they can have much more voice from a political perspective. And see the results of that voice. So working to improve public transport systems, I believe the same notion is being used in Columbia, past Columbia as well, where people become much more engaged politically because they’re given the opportunities to contribute directly into decisions that affect them, fundamentally. And it gives that voice to people that so often and maybe it’s about taking decisions that from that kind of wider governmental level down to local level and saying, well, what can we do as local politicians to really drive conversations to, that can get us to the right point and interact better with the communities we serve.

From a fashion perspective, there’s a couple of things that, that come to mind. The first is, and unfortunately it’s always after the disaster that’s happened, but when you look at the Bangladesh Accord which is now the International Accord, the ability to sit down with different parties, different stakeholders from brands, from retailers, from local NGOs and other local governments, and work on ways to actually improve the building safety of the factories from which we source.

That was also a success ’cause you’re looking there at agreements that are made at, at local level with international support and funding that allows people to live and work in safer buildings that reduce the risk of buildings collapsing. And unfortunately it took a big kind of incident for that to happen.

But it triggered something. And that is something that was recently extended. So it was Bangladesh to begin with. It’s been extended, I believe, to Pakistan right now. It’s called the International Accord they wanna continue doing that moving forward. So I think that’s a really interesting example of a kind of industry focused topic as well.

There are lots of really similarly things, interesting thing going on from a climate perspective. When I look at the industry as well. How do we combine and work together, as companies to help some of the transition problems that the countries that we source from are going through so how do we help fund some of the climate change, some of the change in energy mixes that we need to deal with.

And this also links back to the legislative piece as well. ’cause when we look at having to report on our climate emissions on our CO2 emissions, for most companies, most of their CO2 emissions come from their supply chains. Deep down in supply chains, if you’re not gonna decarbonise that party’s supply chain, then you have no chance of actually, meeting the targets that we’ve all set for this 1.5 degree threshold, but actually even your own individual targets as well.

So understanding that having to report on it then means that you need to find ways to put the money to then reduce that impact. And that can be directly through product innovation. It can be directly through the different sourcing methodologies, what, whatever it might be. But it will, it should help to return an absolute long-term reduction over time.

I think those are some of the things that come to mind. But I would also say that going back to the car company example, there’s a really interesting thing which is I think it’s BMW and Mercedes who’ve actually formed together a joint venture, and I believe it’s a, they’ve created a car sharing company, so they continue to build and sell their own cars, and they will do for as long as they absolutely have to.

But they’re also hedging their betts because they’re seeing actually people can’t always have their own car. So how do we then build a ride sharing model that allows us to continue as the business moving forward? It’s not always an and or, so, it’s not always the one or the other. There might also be an and as well, and there’s also an opportunity to transition into, into these conversations. So I don’t know if that’s what you’re looking for, but those are things that come to mind in terms of politically you could engage better with your community from a local level to see that. And I think that political apathy that you get across, whether it’s through the only time that people really get riled up is when you know it’s Brexit or immigration and then everyone else, other times people just be quiet.

So, well, how can you get people involved at a local level? How can you work with businesses from an international perspective to avoid some of the things that have taken place? And then how do companies then deal with that themselves when they’re looking at the landscape? Looking at this five-year plan.

And some companies, may not have a five-year plan, but they have futurists who sit there and look over the horizon and say, what is coming down the line? And how can we prepare for some of that? And if you’re a big enough company, you usually have like innovation centers that help you to plan a little bit for that.

The oil companies did. And so there’s chances there to also see certain changes of behavior as well. And if you’re able to then maybe start to expand on some of these topics you have a chance of really starting to have some fundamental conversations on what’s coming down the light.

Uh, We’re not talking a hundred years, Chris, we’re talking five years. The climate issues that we have and the resulting social issues that we have will continue to accelerate over time. And we do not have a hundred years to discuss this. We do not even have 20. We look at 2030 is the goal that the governments have set in terms of change they wanna see, looking at people, looking at 2040, 2015, net zero commitments. But actually when we look at the impacts and how fast they come in and how devastating they are, then we don’t really have the luxury of time to deal with these topics.

Things have to happen pretty much now.

[00:37:26] Chris Hudson: Yeah. I like the idea around decisioning being informed and steered by almost the immediacy of the impact in a way, because a longer term investment, in a business sense, a longer term investment might be fruitful, but obviously it takes a long time, a lot of processes, people and systems.

It, just that feels wasteful in a way because you’re obviously, hoping for a longer term return, but the attention it feels needs to be turned to a more immediate impact. But, but in a way that’s mitigating from all of the things that you’ve described and I think there’s, there’s encouragement.

You know, we’ve painted a fairly bleak picture in this chat so far. But there’s encouragement in the fact that from the examples that you’ve given both at a government level in business from a practitioner’s point of view all the way down, if you look at every single level of society and our social infrastructure in a way. Our community at large has the levels and probably the expertise of the braids to be able to take on some of these challenges and probably stitch a few things together.

So, uh, in my neck of the woods, you know, I was just workshopping and teaching around building a culture of experimentation earlier in the week example. And that’s all about how you can quickly understand a problem, but really get into the problem fi, figure out what the right problem is to solve and then turn that into an experiment that within 2, 3, 4 hours, will lead to a certain outcome or will not lead to a certain outcome.

And if you don’t like it and then, it doesn’t give you what you need it to do, then you move on to the next thing. But it’s a really shorter way of understanding, you know, without two years of investment in r and d, whether something will be worth doing or not. And I think that the immediacy with which we can make these decisions, the decisioning power.

Not only using techniques like that, but also using data and other inputs will become really important. How do we get the right level of information to be able to decide where to focus? How do you get a balanced view on whether you should take this product to market based on not only you know, your customers and what they, you think they want or what the business perceives to need from a commercial standpoint, but also what is its social impact?

What is its long tail in a way, and what are you bringing into the world and what is your responsibility as the owner of that, the custodian of that? It’s a really make sure that you’re doing the right thing. I think a lot of that decisioning will become, hopefully a little bit more well thought out. you think?

[00:39:43] Christian Smith: I think so, yeah.

When I’ve had the opportunity to speak to various leaders, across the businesses I’ve worked in, there is a kind of legacy thing as well. I wanna leave something behind. I wanna leave something that I can be proud of. And

[00:39:54] Chris Hudson: There’s a lot of legacy in the world, right? There’s a lot of, there’s a lot of baggage that everyone’s carrying, carrying along every day, but

[00:40:01] Christian Smith: and then you have the thing of people who have kids and then they’re looking out at the things that are going on crap, do I, what kind of world do I look wanna leave for my kids? So it’s that I think from a personal perspective is helping things, but the immediacy of some of these challenges is also accelerating the way that people think about this as well.

And I will have another positive impact story for you because you said we’re getting far too negative.

[00:40:23] Chris Hudson: Go on.

[00:40:23] Christian Smith: For example, in India there’s obviously, there’s a lot of cotton growing in India for the industry. And what we see is that organic cotton has certain benefits for the ecosystem, but it doesn’t have as high yield as the traditional cost in which use a lot of pesticides, and pesticides has a lot of water issues and caused a lot of problems with water. And so certain companies have now started cutting out the middleman and started going directly to the farmers to say, okay, we are gonna get the cotton directly from you. We’re gonna pay your premium so you can then actually survive and thrive in your system, in your locality. But more than that, we’re also gonna try to figure out how can we do some I can’t remember the technical word for it, but they have, cotton plants, they grow together with other different plants.

So you have different types of crops that if one fails, then the other one can still provide sustenance and income to the local people as well. Thinking that is now changing. So it’s not just a- I’m just gonna use the traditional models of sourcing my materials. It’s, well, if I have direct control over my supply chain, I could then make the right interventions, ask the right questions, get the right data, and build closer relationships with the people that are making these, that are growing these particular things.

For me as an organisation. So what you have then is the opportunity to have a direct impact on the lives of people way down uh, up the value chain, and then demonstrate that impact directly towards your customer should you choose to do so. So I think that’s also an example there of people looking at a problem thinking, okay, how can I solve this to the benefit of me and my organisation and then doing that work.

But then there being a kind of knock on effective the local communities as well, benefiting from decisions that you make that actually are trying you as a business, trying to reduce your level of risk as much as possible.

[00:42:09] Chris Hudson: Yeah, I love that example. And I’m just thinking that would be a great idea, great initiative and one that would take, a little bit of effort obviously in, in setting all that up. But it would just return so much. And I’m also thinking that not everyone in a position of responsibility would feel comfortable carrying the weight of that initiative either.

It feels like you would, you would attract some to that, but it would be a minority of people that would feel comfortable in taking it forward. So I’m coming back to, I suppose, where people could be empowered to do something themselves at the level they’re at. A lot of the listeners to this show will be earlier in their careers, not in a senior position, looking to rise up the ranks quickly.

We’re in a position now where we can almost lead and provide guidance and direction obviously. But for a lot of people, they don’t have that they don’t feel like they have that option anyway just yet. They might be coming up with ideas, but quite quickly within the constraints of what they’re working with, they’ll be most likely to be shut down.

So, what advice would you give to people that have broader ambitions, but feel constrained by the situations that they’re in?

[00:43:12] Christian Smith: I think first of all for me is the idea that every job is potentially a climate or a social job. When you look at the work that you do, there’s usually some way or some level of improvement, whether it’s in processes or systems or sourcing that you can do ask the right questions. Do we know where this product’s coming from? And even if it’s not from a climate related or social justice related topic, it’s just good to know these things because there are inherent risks in the way that we source a lot of the different things that we that we source as companies. Regardless of what role that you’re in, just being able to ask the questions of where are my goods coming from? Do we have a risk of like slavery, of of sourcing in the place that we shouldn’t be sourcing? Do we understand the impacts that we’re having through these products and what are the ways that we can optimize our purchasing methodologies, our sourcing strategies in order to reduce our own risk from business perspective, if you are able to come in and really use this kind of risk mitigation approach. Then you have a much better chance of succeeding and putting things forward. And if you come in as a person who’s really about, yeah, you know, we’re going to save the world. People will say, just do that in your own time. Just come to me and help me work what my business.

So it’s little things of, again, using the fashion industry as example, if you’re designing, how can you design so you leave as little waste behind as possible because that will also help you save money for your organisation, increase your margins. Where can you source materials from where you have a high level of traceability so that you can demonstrate, to your investors, to, to NGOs, to governments in your reports that you have a good handle on where things are moving.

How can you. Take some of these topics and turn them into interesting advertised and marketing, campaigns for your organisation to use this, use your creative juices, get ’em flowing in order to tell honest stories about what you’re doing as an organisation in order to increase the connection with your customer base.

And I say this as someone who understands and has seen the gap between, what customers say they want versus what they will actually do, but understanding that wanna see that gap closed. We wanna see that closed. And part of the responsibility is on us as people in the organisation to find the ways to really connect.

It’s an opportunity that I think we’ve missed. But it’s an opportunity that if we take and we do it the right way, it can really help galvanise lots and lots of different parts of of a business and their customers to come on a journey with you. No one has got it perfect.

Nobody’s got it right. Even when you look at someone like Patagonia and you start looking deeper into some of the things that they don’t have it absolutely right, but they’re trying, but they’re also trying to bring their customers along with ’em. They’re trying to bring, the ecosystem with them and they share the information on what they succeed on and what they don’t succeed on.

So it’s not always going to be a walk in a park, in fact, it very rarely is. But there is always gonna be something to be gained. It’s always gonna be something to be learned and always a way to, to kind of improve moving forward.

[00:46:16] Chris Hudson: I mean, there are different dimensions to capital aren’t there that, that aren’t solely financial, in and around social capital. But obviously, you know what, what can be translated into, broader benefit and how do we, readdress our understanding of what net benefit or profit actually means.

Because in a lot of cases, these initiatives would be put forward within a, within an organisation with a corporate. For example, say if you’re an airline or, even if you’re in the auto manufacturer and you are, you’re investing a lot in EV because that’s where it’s going.

You’re following all the other players in the industry. You’re investing a lot in the materials that in fact are very expensive to, to produce. You are playing it out because there’s commercial reasons to do it. In terms of market share and so on. But, often there’s a feeling that, profit will outweigh purpose in those situations.

If it costs too much to invest in and coming back to capital and how we frame it, how do you set up those cases? How do you best present the way forward in a way that, that doesn’t lead your senior stakeholders and your leadership team just to say we can’t justify the investment in this because it really comes from the top.

You have to align to the purpose at the top for it to work, in my experience anyway.

[00:47:29] Christian Smith: No it does. The purpose question does come from the top and you have to take them along the journey with you. The conversations that I was having when I first started 13, 14, 15 years ago, however long it was, are very different from the ones that I’m having at maybe ’cause I’m also in a high level position, but connected with people who are in good position, high level positions, then, the conversation is very different, and they’re very much about how do we figure out a way to integrate sustainability into the business in a way that makes sense, so that you understand very early on what the necessary trade-offs are gonna be.

So you can put the guardrails in place to figure out when do we need to make a decision? How do we then make that happen so that we’re not, falling foul of some of the fundamental, decisions that we’ve made with what goes to our strategy. So it’s really important to bring them along.

And I think different companies will do this in different ways, for me now in this position that we are with all this new legislation coming in, that’s my anchor. That’s my anchor. That’s the way that I wanna use to, to engage these senior stakeholders to say, hey I understand where you’re coming from.

I understand the pressure with regards to, your quarterly numbers. I get it. And I know that they’re gonna have to be trade offs, but here is the wider picture. Here are the things that we need to show that we’re working on. Here are the things that have a fundamental risk for us as a business, but also present us with opportunities that if we can land one or two of them, we don’t have to address every single topic, but one or two of them, we have a chance to really make a positive impact, not just in terms of the impacts on the ecosystem and the human rights situation, but also in terms of our own brand value as well.

So I feel that for a very long time, this has been a zero sum game conversation. It’s either you win. Or lose on sustainability. And what we’re trying to do now is, and this is not just me but I think across the board of people working in this topic, it’s how do you find win-wins? How do you use this as a point of differentiation?

There are gonna be areas where you might be able to take a lead, but there’s gonna be other areas where you’re thinking, you know what? We’re gonna comply. We’re gonna follow what legislation says. And that’s okay, because you don’t have the resources to take a lead on everything. But then you’ve gotta be okay with that.

And then as an organisation, you need to be able to say, you know what? Here are the 1, 2, 3 things that we wanna stand out for. Here are the 1, 2, 3 things that we’re gonna, and that’s it. And as long as you can be kind of open and honest in a position where you say you are consistent with your approach. You can communicate that internally and externally to different stakeholders, then I think you’re good to go. That for me is one of the things that, that consistency of communication of mindset that this is something that we can actually take and, and move forward in a, in a way that adds value to the business and isn’t just gonna be a, a continuing conversation that leads us to a zero sum game conclusion.

[00:50:21] Chris Hudson: And I think just to build on that point, I think that the equipment and the resources and the possible publicity for many of these changes is much greater than it ever was. The fact that even within an employee experience, realm, or where people are very much now aware of their personal brand and what it means within the four walls, their organisation, but also more broadly how they’re representing themselves in the world.

All of this has been a bit of an education to try and get people up to speed with now how can they use their skills and really apply that you know, more broadly and how can they make people aware of what they can bring as well. So the point being that if you yourself, individually or as in any individual have the tools by which you can, can start to rally, start to campaign.

You can be activist in your own way but all of that, all of those resources are now much more easy to use than they perhaps once where you wouldn’t need one evangelist or a leader to be able to do it. Because actually the democratization of, influencer marketing, brand social tools is all there.

You can just take it and run with it and make something of it. And if you wanted to get some support, you can get some support If you need to fundraise there are ways to do that. There are ways to campaign for yourself and for a cause that you feel passionately about.

So I’m quietly encouraged by that, but I can obviously see that’s being used for a lot of other things that are less significant as well so…

[00:51:46] Christian Smith: No, it’s a good direction. But yeah I think, when I look from the, the kind of brand kind of corporate perspective, there is that realisation that if you want the best talent out there, having a commitment to sustainability works because people care very deeply about this topic. I remember reading that people are actually resigning from jobs where they feel or they don’t apply for jobs when companies don’t have a good approach to sustainability. It is at that level of importance for people coming into jobs right now. So it’s really trying to figure out, okay, so yeah, we’ve got this fundamental, existential issue that we’re trying to address, but there are also so many different opportunities that exist if we address it properly on brand value, on the people you bring into the company, the people you retain within an organisation on your ESG scoring, on whatever it might be.

And we as brands, as people on this sector need to figure out so how do we pick the right things for us? For our sector, for our industry, for our for our strategy. And then communicate that in a way that helps people to understand why we’ve done it, at what it means, but also why we haven’t done the 15,000 other things that we get requested of, on a consistent basis.

And that is also, I mean, we haven’t spoken to that. That’s also kind of partly, the job I have as someone who does stakeholder engagement is reaching out to those NGOs and to other people and having these conversations to say, you know what? I get what you mean, but we are only, externally, we may look absolutely massive, but we are only a relatively small player in the game.

So the ability to impact certain things may not be as you wish, but this is what we’re trying to do. And we welcome that back and forth. welcome the opportunity to engage with them because I think having those external perspectives are really important for us to align and stress test the things that we’re doing our approaches and to just keep us a little bit accountable as well.

But it’s also important for us to be able to navigate that space and say, hey we get it. We get that there are problems. We’re doing our best to resolve some of the problems, but maybe these are some of the ways that we can start to then address them together as a collective rather than being, antagonistic towards each other and, then actually not having any room to, to provide solutions.

So I think that’s also a really kind of crucial aspect as well of creating this whole ecosystem through which you have, businesses doing what they can, you have individuals doing what they can, you have different collectives doing what they can. And you want that to then be a kind of gradual groundswell of changes that can lead us to a place where people are okay with the way things are going.

I don’t think everyone’s gonna be absolutely delighted anytime soon, but if we’re at least okay with the progress.

[00:54:27] Chris Hudson: And I think a point around transparency and really knowing where you stand in relation to some of those initiatives is also important. You can see it, but if you’re not feeling part of it, it’s just the same as watching the news or anything else. You feel a distance immediately if you don’t really understand what it’s aiming at and

[00:54:42] Christian Smith: Indeed.

[00:54:43] Chris Hudson: There’s also that point we talked a bit about self-serving corporations and, and individuals probably within those corporations. I think there’s definitely been an inward focus within a lot of organisations. It’s how things have been set up from a competitive, within the competitive market, you obviously have to focus inwards to, to find your own differentiation.

And then, you know, you have your own teams and your formula for building, taking things out into the world. It feels like that connection to broader society needs to be there. The broader community, like the people and culture, which once was HR was just looking after people within those four walls is actually now, you know, thinking, how do I, how do I unite people around something?

And if it’s called people and culture, why not connect it to people and culture more broadly in the world and make it relevant to that and what people are actually needing to aim at now to improve things. I think that would strike a chord that would be worth pursuing, I think for of, a lot of people

[00:55:34] Christian Smith: Like I said, there are opportunities and I think we, we need to look at this as a, like I said, a problem to be solved and what are the opportunities that we can find to build brand equity, whatever else it might be in order to, to address these topics. But I also think it’s really important to remember that going back to the discussion on capital, this hasn’t existed forever and I think people forget that.

People forget that the current state where, whether you want to call it the neoliberal approach to capitalism has only been around since the seventies. It’s not a long time, about 10 years older than me. So just because it feels like it’s been here forever doesn’t mean that it has.

And if something can change so quickly, I. 50 years is a pretty short time in the grand scheme of things. If something can change so quickly for the worst, then surely it can also change relatively quickly for the better as well. And sometimes when we have these conversations I think people lose that sense of perspective, that idea of crap, you know what, it’s only been 50 years ’cause it is only 50 years.

And so there are lots of ways to maybe galvanise people to get them out of that thing of, oh god it’s been there forever. There’s nothing I can do to say no it’s cool. 50 years is not a long time and a lot can change in 5, 6, 7 years, 13 years in this industry, a lot has changed.

So, for me it’s trying to maintain that level of hope that, that naive optimism that I have that we can actually do things to mitigate the worst effects of whatever it is that we’re going through. And also see the opportunities to connect better with people, whether they’re on this side of the world or whether the people that are, in our value chain, creating the fundamental components for the products that we all want to use and wear over time.

[00:57:19] Chris Hudson: Brilliant. Well, thank you so much, Christian. Yeah, I wanna thank you for your time and obviously for putting a lot of those points and arguments forward so eloquently. And it’s just cool to chat it through. There’s so much obviously that can be done and that should be done.

But even just to capture some of that in a short one hour is just awesome. So thank you very much. One thing we do on the show is just to give people the opportunity to provide a way for some of the listeners to get in touch if they want to. Would you be happy for somebody to, to reach out if they had a question or if they wanted to talk about some of these topics in a bit more depth?

[00:57:51] Christian Smith: Yeah, sure. They can contact me via LinkedIn. I’m sure you’ll put the link up on your website at some point. But yeah that’s going to be the best way to contact me.

[00:57:58] Chris Hudson: Yeah. Great. Oh, awesome. Well, thank you so

[00:58:00] Christian Smith: I also wanna say thank you, Chris for inviting me on. I’ve actually listened to quite a few of the podcasts and was fairly intimidated by the group you put together. So hopefully I can stand um, I can stand up tall against all the different characters, but it’s been uh, it’s been really fun listening to the chats you’ve had and thank you very much for having me.

[00:58:17] Chris Hudson: No, absolute pleasure. Thank you so much. Okay, so that’s it for this episode. If you’re hearing this message, you’ve listened all the way to the end. So thank you very much. We hope you enjoyed the show. We’d love to hear your feedback. So please leave us a review and

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