Silence Isn't Safety: 88% IC Burnout, CEO Comms Collapse & Meta's Data Grab

[00:00:09] Welcome to Frequency, I'm Jenni Field. And I'm Chuck Gose. Frequency is your go-to for real talk about comms, culture and employee experience beyond the buzzwords and straight to what matters. Jenni, this week we're going to be talking about how internal comms is absorbing a crisis, the state of workplace communication, the new normal for CEO communications, and how Meta is spying on employees.

[00:00:32] And I threw in a fifth one to shake it up here, Jenni, which is going to be my original freak out from last week I'm bringing in at the end. So please stick around for that one. Jenni, I love it. I love it. I am out and about today. So I'm at the Institute of Internal Comms Festival in the UK, which is a two day event. I popped in yesterday and I've been here today because I've been talking about the credibility gap and how comms people can close it.

[00:00:56] But, um, helpfully it is a 15 minute drive from my house this year, which is, which is why I'm here, if I'm honest. It's so close. I was like, I have to come, but I thought it was worth sharing with you a couple of things from the session today. I think we're going to probably dig into this in a few episodes time, but there's a chap talking from Microsoft about the work trend in index, which has just come out. And he was talking about the number one success, success. Oh, I can't talk today. This happens when you're at a conference.

[00:01:24] The number one success factor in AI adoption around the world is organizational culture, which I thought was an interesting piece of insight. So we'll dig into that, but it's been an interesting two days. Lots of talk about change. Lots of talk about trust, credibility and AI. They're probably the four big topics, but we'll talk probably a bit more about IOIC in a few weeks because their IC index is coming out.

[00:01:47] And I want to dig into that when we get a little sneaky advanced copy. So go on then kick us off with one of your five articles. Well, before we get into that, I'm just curious as, as if you're Jenny Field, do you just get to pop in to places? Is that how, is that how you roll over there? So to be fair, they did say that to come to the whole conference, you have to pay to come on the day you're not speaking. But I said, I can only come for the first half an hour because I was speaking somewhere else yesterday at a leadership conference for a corporate client.

[00:02:17] So I snuck in for free and I'm speaking today. So I get to be here today anyway. So yeah, so I, yeah, just pop in. Channel Jenny Field and just pop in. Let's kick this off with the internal comms crisis. So I call you remember Ellen Greiley is connected to this one. So I just wanted to flag that up and share some pride there that Ellen's working on this. The Equilibrious Shifting Ground Report surveyed 24 veteran internal comms practitioners, most of them with five plus years in director level and above experience.

[00:02:47] What she found is that 88% said their personal wellbeing was affected by overlapping crises and 83% reported stress or burnout. What's notable is where they pin the blame. Workload is involved, but more importantly, it's the structural mismatch between the organizations say they went from comms, things like strategy, transparent, trust building, and what leadership actually allows.

[00:03:14] Nearly three quarters claim to be aiming for a strategic comms model, but only 18% believe they've gotten there. And 61% have no formal change comms approach at all. In a moment where, as a report puts it, every communication is effectively a change communication, that's a pretty big gap. The report offers a framework called steady with six principles, safety, trust, environment, agency, dialogue, and you.

[00:03:43] The core argument is that neutral, sanitized language isn't safe communication. It just transfers risk from the organization's legal exposure onto employees' trust. Jenny, neutrality is named as the enemy here. The idea that the sanitized, perhaps even boring language is somehow still responsible communication. Do you buy this?

[00:04:08] And if you do, how do you make the case to a legal team or CEO who convinced that saying less is actually safer? So I agree that if we're saying that that sort of neutral, boring language isn't safe, then I agree with that. Because I think that that is too risky. Because when you're doing that, you're avoiding the real stuff. So all you're doing is just asking more questions.

[00:04:38] People are just going to have more questions. It doesn't really help anybody. I love the point about how it shifts the risk from the organization's legal exposure onto employees' trust. That, for me, is the big thing. Because if you're trying to be safe, really what you're doing is not being safe. Like I've been doing a lot of reading around psychological safety this week for some client stuff. And it basically says this. Like if you're trying to do all of this, then you're not having the candor.

[00:05:06] You're not doing the stuff that actually creates a psychologically safe organization. Because you're kind of hiding away from that. So yes, I think that's the case. I think the challenge around how do you communicate that with legal teams and CEO who want to say less, it's all about the impact they want to have. That's always the conversation for me is if you say this, this is what's going to happen. And if you're okay with that impact and consequence, then that's fine. Maybe I don't keep arguing. Or maybe I do.

[00:05:33] But you've got to have that conversation about impact and consequence. Without that, I just think you're going to have a very tricky time trying to convince them. Yeah. If I was a gambling man, and I am, this is the way I look at it. Anytime there's risky communication, you're gambling somewhere. And if you're playing it safe, you're then gambling with the employees and the trust.

[00:05:56] Where if you come out strong, if you come out with the real information, the risky stuff, then you're taking on that responsibility. So again, this just shows some of that weakness and neutrality of shifting that responsibility onto employees. No different than I would say how we view engagement. We put that on the shoulders. There's something wrong with them if they're not engaged. There's not something wrong with the organization. So I think this is just another example of shifting that responsibility.

[00:06:26] The bit that stands out for me in this report from Ellen is around what organizations say they want from communications and then what actually is allowed. And I've experienced this. I always joke that when I was hired as a communications director, they liked the idea of a communications director. They did not enjoy the reality of a communications director. And I think that's so often the truth. I think people have this vision of what that's going to be. But actually, you're asking the hard question. You're challenging what that really means.

[00:06:56] You're getting them to think maybe a bit more ethically than they have before. And I think all of that is uncomfortable. And I think that that gap is where I want to see people like the IOIC who have talked this week about advocating for internal comms. Like that's the job. That's the bit we need to be doing more of to make sure that that's really happening. Because that gap is where our biggest risk is, I think. When you talked about the idea of a communicator, it reminded me of my wife, Kristen, talking about men as a concept.

[00:07:25] Sounds really good. But in practice, maybe not so much. Oh, I adore her. Enough of that. Enough of that. But if you want to check out this steady framework, we've got a link in the show notes. You can check out Ellen's work on that.

[00:07:43] We're going to move along now to Corbett and Rework surveyed 1175 full-time U.S. employees and found that the kind of contradiction that should make every communicator a little bit uncomfortable. Half of employees say the volume of communications they're getting is quote unquote about right, but also 44% feel overwhelmed.

[00:08:05] You would think those two things can't be true, but unless what's happening is that employees have gotten so good at filtering out messages that they're no longer registering the volume, which is not a win. 89% say they're only moderately confident that they're not missing important updates. The trust data is also worth going into. 73% of workers say who a message comes from is the most important factor in deciding whether to trust it. Not the channel, not the format, but the sender.

[00:08:35] And the most trusted sender is the direct manager. Not senior leadership, not a company branded email. That has real implications where we think about cascade communication and why it keeps falling short. And then moving on to AI, 81% of employees say they can tell when something was written by AI and 45% question the accuracy the moment they suspect it. With 92% want AI to reduce information overload, not generate more content and noise.

[00:09:04] Their survey's phrase for it is quote unquote, reduce, don't produce, which is a clean shorthand for governance conversation. Most organizations have not had yet. Also buried in the data. If employees found out an AI drafted message on a sensitive topic wasn't disclosed as such trust collapses immediately. Immediately. Jenny, the data says that employees trust their direct manager more than any senior leader or official channel.

[00:09:31] But other research consistently shows manager capability as one of the biggest risks in the function with most organizations providing almost no support. Why are we still not closing that gap? So I love all of this. I love the challenge that about half say that they're getting about right and then another half feel overwhelmed. It's just the joy of data. You can make it say whatever you like. I think that managers have always been important.

[00:10:00] So this report saying that trust the direct manager more than any other senior leader. Other research shows that manager capability is one of the issues. The two are the two can exist at the same time, however paradoxical that might feel. So in all of the research I've done with desks workers, frontline workers, it's always I trust my manager the most.

[00:10:22] If that manager is a poor communicator, that has a direct impact on how I feel about communication in the organization as a whole and how I feel about the organization kind of more generally. So I can trust my manager because I don't know maybe how good they could be or how different that could be. But it's important for us to make that better as a skill set manager capability because that does have a direct impact.

[00:10:47] I don't think that gap is closing because I don't think people are willing to invest the time and effort needed to upskill managers. I just don't think they're going to do it. I think everyone feels like it's fine and nothing's on fire. So we'll just carry on. And then it will go on fire and then they'll blame something else for that fire. So it will never come back to being the managers. It will always be something else that's the problem because that's hard and messy and costly and nobody wants to do that. I should have mentioned this too.

[00:11:16] So as through eicology, I got to advise them on the results of this and start to dissect it and look at some of the trends, look at some of the figures. And one of the things that I, it happens rarely, Jenny, but I do love being proven wrong from time to time. It's not often. This is why I enjoy it. Is I remember a decade ago or however long ago when people say like, oh, my manager is my most trusted person. I never believed that.

[00:11:44] And I think I said, I think they say that because that's the only person they actually hear from is their manager. So who else are they going to trust? But I think this just shows that that is such a key channel. So how we empower and equip managers with information and skills is absolutely critical. And the other part that I find a bit comical and troubling is this, that 81% of employees say they can tell when something was written by AI.

[00:12:13] They think they can tell when something was written by AI because I saw this video where this guy put paragraphs of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein into an AI tool. And it said with 100% certainty, it was written by AI, which I don't know if there's time travel involved or what, but I'm guessing that. So we don't know all the time. We really don't know.

[00:12:42] But it's funny that now there's this subjection that is happening on if we think it is, then we question the accuracy. But we don't question the accuracy if it's a person doing it when we should question the accuracy at all times. But I wonder if it's linked to a bigger trust problem. So if 81% of people saying they can tell when something's written by AI, are those same 81% of people, people that don't trust the person that that's come from?

[00:13:11] Like, is it just you're having that confirmation bias? Like, you're just going to assume that it's AI because it's that person and you don't trust them anyway. And they're lazy and you know they wouldn't have. Do you know what I mean? You can create that story, I think, quite easily. And I wonder if that's what's happening. And in fact, this reminds me of one of my thoughts yesterday when I was sat listening to the IC index sort of top level reports. And I thought it's really hard when you look at individual reports in isolation, because we talk about so many reports on frequency.

[00:13:40] Every time there was something coming through yesterday, I was like, ah, yes, but, ah, yes, but in terms of other reference points and other things that you really have to look at all of it to tell the whole story. Otherwise, you're getting such a narrow view of the reality because there's so many different parts playing a role. And I think that's important when we're looking at data like this is you can there's other things at play that will be linking to some of those numbers. There's also a lot of really interesting hybrid data in here. So I know we've talked a lot about R2 in the past. I didn't want to bring that in.

[00:14:10] But if you want to learn more about this report, we've got it linked and you can check out that hybrid data as well. For this next one, it's going to sound like I'm talking external comms at first. And I am. But don't worry, I'll bring it back. Goal and tracks the public communications activity of the top 250 Fortune 500 CEOs through their CEO Impact Index. And the 2025 numbers are interesting.

[00:14:39] Those 250 CEOs collectively lost nearly 3 trillion earned media impressions compared to 2024. 90% of that came from pulling back from traditional media. The silence didn't protect them. It just created a vacuum that filled with other narratives. And for those that are in internal comms, this is a version of a story we already know. The political dimension is hard to ignore.

[00:15:04] Donald Trump was the single biggest topic appearing alongside Fortune 250 CEOs in 2025. cited in 17.3% of earned coverage, which beat AI at 9%. 68% of CEOs had DEI, climate, immigration, and political alignment service as a meaningful factor in their public engagement. The approach that held out best per goal was what they call, quote unquote, engagement without endorsement.

[00:15:33] This is framing decisions in business terms rather than political ones. That also sounds weak AF. Their read, CEO's silence on social issues, quote, doesn't build a shield. It reallocates risk. There's that risk word again. The AI finding is the one with the most direct IC relevance. 86% of CEOs now reference AI in public communication. But the news has shifted from opportunity to workforce cuts, which we've talked about on here.

[00:16:00] Golan is blunt, leading with, quote unquote, where cutting jobs because of AI generates real sentiment liability. Organizations just anchored that in that message and rescaling our product innovation for considerably better. This is not a PR lesson. It applies to how internal comms teams are also handling AI narratives internally. Jenny, what else can internal comms learn from this Golan data? So it's interesting, isn't it?

[00:16:27] Because I think it's really telling that story about silence. And it's telling the story about the importance of how you message something, maybe thinking you're mitigating risk, but there's unintended consequences. And I think we see that so much in internal comms. Because the AI stuff we talked about, I think, either last week or the week before about that, how you're framing that has a direct impact on adoption and stuff. And I think this is kind of referencing the same. I think the silence stuff is interesting.

[00:16:57] I think the silence piece around the fact that it's just created other people to step into that space. And I think from an internal comms perspective, you've got to think about that. If you're not speaking on some of those digital channels that you might have, if I think about various – I'm not going to name any – but if you think about all of the various different ways and platforms that exist where you can communicate internally, if you stop doing that or you're not visible there as a leader, someone else is going to fill that space.

[00:17:25] And I think that's something to reflect on in terms of the impact that has here as well. So there's definitely something about risk, silence, and framing that I think this is relevant for internal comms. I think this goes back also to that neutrality thing that we talked about earlier. Whereas if you're safe, that's not a shield. You're just putting that risk somewhere else. And I think that shows the weakness of some leaders willing to put that onto others instead of themselves.

[00:17:55] We talked about that with what was happening in Minneapolis with ICE and the way – kind of the weak message of some of those leaders that came out. I think that's what people want from their CEO, COO, whoever it is that's out there speaking. I think the other part that was interesting to me was the fact that Donald Trump mentions nearly doubled AI. Which if you're saying you want to play it safe, I wouldn't mention Donald Trump in your communication.

[00:18:24] So it's really interesting to see that this is the top of the top CEOs, not from a performance level, but from a large organization standpoint. I think this just shows that pulling back from traditional media, like you said, that's creating a vacuum. That's going to be filled with something else. Yeah. And I think we always have to remember that sort of mantra or phrase, which I heard a long time ago, and I don't know where it started from. But if you're saying yes to one thing, you're saying no to something else.

[00:18:53] And if you're saying no to that, you're saying yeah. And I think sometimes we forget that. Like we're very good to say yes and yes and yes and do more and more without thinking about what you're then saying no to. But equally, if you're going to say no to stuff, then what are you doing instead? So I don't know whether the silence meant people were going off doing something else and that had a bigger impact. So it's that trade-off that I think we have to be mindful of. Imagine if that 90% pulling back from traditional media, they then spent that time internally. What a difference that would make inside organizations. Yes, they haven't done that.

[00:19:22] I'm pretty sure that they have not done that. They have not done that. Speaking of interesting leadership, Meta launched something internally called the Model Capability Initiative. And when employees found out about what it involved, some of them called it as dystopian. And internal messages that Meta was presumably also tracking.

[00:19:49] The program captures employee keystrokes and mouse clicks across hundreds of sites and apps, including Google, LinkedIn, Slack, and GitHub, with the stated goal of teaching its AI models how to use computers. To do that well, you need a quote-unquote big and unbiased data set of how people work. But now the employees are the data set. Their communications around this launch appear to have been minimal, which is also a choice.

[00:20:14] Speaking of silence, internal concerns raised by employees included potential exposure of passwords, unreleased product details, immigration status, health information, and even family data. The tracked site list reportedly included ChatGPT and Claude before both were removed. Whether you find the surveillance itself acceptable or not, the way it was communicated or wasn't communicated is a case study on what trust erosion looks like when you move faster than your employees can process.

[00:20:42] For organizations watching how this AI-employee relationship gets defined right now, this is 100% worth paying attention to. Jenny, for years we've heard stories about companies monitoring employees. The employees who called this dystopian were doing so in internal messages that Meta was also monitoring. What does this tell us about the state of psychological safety inside organizations that are simultaneously asking for trust?

[00:21:11] So, first of all, psychological safety is about being able to speak up, speak freely, have candor without fear of punishment. I don't think that's the issue here because I don't think people are going to get punished for anything. So, I don't think that's the challenge. The issue I have with this is more scientific from a research perspective. So, the reason for this is that they wanted to educate AI. So, they were like, the goal is to teach AI how to use computers.

[00:21:40] So, they needed, to use the quotes in this, a big and unbiased data set, right? Except it is not. Right? So, even if you had communicated that it was going to happen, it leaked out anyway. But if you tell somebody, we're going to start tracking you, you're going to start behaving differently. It's a natural human reaction. If you then find out that you have been being tracked, you're going to behave differently. So, nothing about this is unbiased. It's probably big. But this is not actually going to do anything.

[00:22:10] And if I found out this, I would start doing things really oddly in the hope that it does. I hope that it sabotages stuff because I'm that person. But I think that's the biggest issue for me is I don't know that the goal and the purpose of this was right even in the first place. In terms of the communication, in terms of the ethics around it, all of that is questionable. But I think if you're – is that really the goal? The big unbiased data? I'm not sure you were ever going to get that. And I'm not sure that's the right goal.

[00:22:37] And I've got bigger questions about that and scientifically how you're doing it. I mean, we've – I remember years ago hearing stories about companies allegedly tracking like employee bathroom breaks and all this kind of stuff. And they've labeled under the thing of productivity. And so, I'm not surprised by any of this. I think it's a good reminder to employees out there, like for Slack, for example. They're called Slack DMs, not PMs. They're direct messages, not private messages.

[00:23:05] At any point in time, your company can go in and see what you're typing, what you're doing, what those messages are. So, you know that. This shouldn't come as a surprise. I just think when you think about the types of relationships that people have, they might be sharing sensitive information. We've said health information, immigration status. Is it passwords? Like all of those things that you might be logging into your personal bank account, do they now have that information stored?

[00:23:33] Like there's a lot of questions that I think Meta hasn't done anything to earn anyone's trust, let alone their own employees. And so, that's where I think the safety part stands out is I don't know that your employees would feel safe, psychologically safe at a workplace like that. You've got no trust credits in the bank, have you? So, you know, it's not like someone's gone, oh, this is absolutely fine because we've spent years building trust in this relationship. And I know what you're going to do because I understand what we're doing and why we're doing it.

[00:24:02] Everyone's just gone, what the are we doing? Because it's come from a culture and a leadership style and an approach that doesn't value employees, doesn't seem to, doesn't seem to have that ethical grounding and all of those things. So, it's interesting that the use captures, the programme captures these things. What is it capturing? Like, what? Is it like, I'm thinking of like a net when you go fishing and it's like, is it a net that's got like hardly any holes? So, you get all the fish, even the tiny, tiny fish or is it one that's just got big holes?

[00:24:31] So, you just get the big fish and all the little ones can go away. What are we capturing? I think there's too many questions and I think it is just overall just a very bad idea and not particularly thought through. All right, we're going to go along to our bonus content this week, Jenny. Number five, this was going to be my freak out last week, but I wanted us to have a longer conversation about it.

[00:24:55] In a previous episode, we talked about Anthropic scanning old books to train its model. But this is something different or is it? I can't quite determine the difference between the two. Fast Company reported on a product called Asset Hub built by a company called Simple Closure, a startup that helps other startups wind down. There's an interesting concept. I'm going to be a startup to help other startups close. Anyway, the business for everything.

[00:25:22] This business, though, they help shuttered companies sell their internal data as AI training model. This means years of those Slack conversations, email threads, and meeting notes could be sold to AI companies looking for authentic organizational data to train on. About 100 deals have been processed so far. Payouts range from tens of thousands to well into six figures.

[00:25:45] One former founder sold what she described as a decade of internal records for hundreds of thousands of dollars. The employees whose messages are in those archives were not asked. The legal question of whether a company owns its employees' internal communications and can sell them is largely untested. Simple Closure says that data gets anonymized before sale. Researchers and lawyers aren't fully convinced that covers it, especially for messages that touch on things we just talked about.

[00:26:13] Health issues, personal information, sensitive business decisions. What buyers are getting is an unfiltered view of how real organizations operate. That's worth more to an AI company than most public internet data. The bigger question isn't about startups. Any organization running Slack or Teams now is sitting on a data asset its employees have never thought of as one. If the company gets acquired, merges, or shut down, who owns that archive?

[00:26:40] If it already has real monetary value, which apparently it does, when does the obligation to tell employees kick in? Jen, are you surprised by this? We work for ourselves now, but we've been employees before. How do you feel about this happening? So this whole thing makes me feel really uncomfortable. And it makes me feel uncomfortable because it's the question of, can you sell employees' internal communications?

[00:27:08] Who owns that communication? That's the big question for me. I don't think it's ever been seen as data that's helpful before in that way. And I think that's a part of AI that is a big question. I agree that the data is anonymized before sale and therefore it's fine. I'm not sure I'm here for that. But I'm also, my biggest question is why? I get it if you're trying to train AI stuff or understand stuff.

[00:27:38] But if I was a startup, getting an insight into data of another company, I'm not sure why that's helpful or what that's helping me achieve. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. I stand by Jurassic Park's ethos forever. But there's something about why. I can't figure out why this is truly helpful for organizations. And I really don't like it.

[00:28:05] And I would like someone legally to figure out who owns the employee's internal communication and that selling off it. I think that's a massive legal question. I think this shows that everyone and everything has a price. And as startups are winding down and they're selling these things off for parts, it's clear there's value there.

[00:28:27] If it's training, whether it's ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini or whatever's buying it, maybe it's some other proprietary AI tool. Whoever's buying that is getting data that they cannot get anywhere else. So that's where that value comes from. It's also just the ethics. Like when you were saying about there was an owner of a business who said that one former founder sold what she described as a decade of internal records for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

[00:28:56] Like I feel like that's not yours to sell. I just feel like there's this greed element to this, which is what probably makes me most uncomfortable. Jenny, are you saying people are motivated by money? What? Some people are. And I think that's what's making me uncomfortable is this just feels greedy. It feels like a greedy thing. And I don't know how that's helping us move society forward. Maybe I've just got grand ideas of what we should do, but it feels dirty and greedy and I don't like it.

[00:29:26] I would love to hear from people if their company has a policy on this or has even talked about this. And if not, maybe this is a fantastic conversation to talk to your chief legal officer. Yeah. To truly understand if it could be that the company owns it, but the company doesn't sell everything that it owns. And so maybe it's, but it shows that maybe in certain cases, everything is for sale.

[00:29:56] Yeah. I don't like it. But if this is happening to you, then let us know because we would like to hear more about it. And maybe, maybe you're listening to this and thinking, I don't know what you're getting so worried about, Jenny. It's absolutely fine. Calm down. Also, let me know because I, you know, might just be one of those days today. But this is why I was freaking out about it. One, because I never thought of it before. Yeah. Then two, the audacity, but then the realization of, oh yeah, like when these companies wind down, they're looking to pay off all debt. They're looking for value anywhere.

[00:30:26] They'll get it. And the fact that still the irony of a startup helping other startups close like that, that's just. Yeah. Blows my mind. But you raise a question in there around if, if we think about 10 years ago, companies closing down, what happened to all that data? Like where is that? They're probably now wondering, why didn't we sell it? Yeah. Well, maybe they're all going to go back and go, hang on a minute. I've still got that on like a floppy disk. Where is that server that somebody had? Yeah.

[00:30:56] We don't need to give anybody any ideas. That wraps up our content for this week, Jenny. Thanks for letting me throw that last one in there. Let's move on to our freak outs. What are you freaking out about this week? So my freak out this week is a little bit relevant because I've been speaking a lot this week and it's about speaker vetting. And I say this because I was chatting to one of the speakers at the conference this week who is headed up internal comms in an organization. And she said to me, you know, I just, I just put my hat in the ring and they just said, yes.

[00:31:24] Nobody knows if I'm good or not. I don't know if I'm good or not because I've not done this before. And she's like, and they just said yes. And so we had a chat about that. And it just got me thinking about sort of events in general, how speakers are vetted. And I don't think anywhere has got that right. IABC, we've talked about that before. I definitely don't think they've got that right. But I wonder how you think, how we do that to make sure it's a really great experience for people that are paying to come to events. And it's just left me with a bit of a question about how to do it, do it well.

[00:31:53] And this was someone who is a client. So we'd had a chat about speaking beforehand because she was like, could you give me some tips? So we had a chat about it. And I messaged her yesterday and said, how did it go? And she said it was really good. And she's up for doing it again. So that's really great. But I think her questions are valid around, well, I just put my hat in the ring and they said yes. Which just made me laugh. We've talked about that before where you see people that are speaking and it's who they work for is the driver.

[00:32:20] It's the logo versus people who are great speakers, but maybe where they work is not a name brand. And so they have to work harder to get there. I've seen that all the time. I fixed this with Flyover Festival, Jenny. Because I quote unquote vet the speakers because these are people that I know. Yeah. I only I don't put out public asks. I don't do anything like that. I go and handpick the people that I know that I've seen that I know will deliver that experience.

[00:32:50] Which I think works when you are networked well enough to bring diverse voices in. And you're really good at that. And I don't think everybody makes the time to do that. And that's why it ends up being a public call, because you want to make sure you do get the diverse voices. And that's the easiest way to do it. But yes, I don't know how we solve that in a mass scale perspective. But it just made me chuckle. So that was my freak out this week. What's yours?

[00:33:14] Mine is I've been thinking a lot about internships recently because our daughter is home from college and she starts her, I will say first internship. She had one last summer. But this is the one that she got on her own. She went out, saw the opening, applied, interviewed, got the internship. So she is doing that. I was reflecting back on, I did four different internships when I was in college.

[00:33:43] And just what a great experience they all were in one way or another. One of them was I went to college thinking I was going to be a newspaper reporter, did an internship at a business newspaper, hated it, and realized, okay, this is not for me. But the internship taught me that.

[00:34:04] And I'm just excited to see what she now learns in these early bedrock moments as she builds her career, knowing from my own what you and some of the people I still keep in touch with that I interned with. This is now 30 years ago. This is pre-LinkedIn. This is before you could track people down. We still have email addresses. Some are Yahoo. Some are some pretty obscure ones, but they're still out there.

[00:34:29] So I just, as other people, whether you think back on your internships or you have an opportunity to provide internships to people, just what an amazing opportunity that is. I know there's controversy around whether they're paid or unpaid. I did both. There's merits. Everybody should be compensated for work. So I think that's now largely the case. But yeah, it's just freaking out about my experiences and what's going to be rolling out for our daughter this summer.

[00:34:55] Yeah, I think it's nice to have the ability to test something in a sort of finite time frame like you did and went, oh, actually, this isn't for me. I think that's got to be worth doing. And I think even all of my jobs have been along the way of working in clothes shops, of working in bars, of doing an internship at a PR firm to figure out whether or not you want to do it. I think it's a good thing. Like you said, compensated now, but I think it's a great thing. I'm excited for that. I was thinking back on the newspaper experience. It wasn't the work.

[00:35:24] The work I enjoyed doing, it was seeing how everybody else hated their life. Like they just did not enjoy their life. And so I'm like, okay, this is not going to be good for me then either. Well, that's what we are freaking out about this week. The show notes have all the articles and links from today's conversation. If frequency is a regular part of your week, a quick review for us goes a long way. Subscribe wherever you're listening and share this with one person who's interested in what we talked about today.

[00:35:53] Thank you to Poet Ali for the music. We're back every Monday. See you next week. On this week. See you next week.