Dr. Aubrey de Grey is best known outside of the longevity community for discussing the end of aging on the TED stage, as well as on 60 Minutes, the Colbert Report, the Joe Rogan Experience, and many other popular programs. Inside the longevity community, he's best known for co-founding the Sen's Research Foundation and the Methuselah Foundation, both of which do impressive work in seeking to solve the problem of human aging. In recent weeks, Dr. de Grey has once again been in the news, but not for his efforts in longevity science. Despite this, or perhaps partly because of it, Dr. de Grey's recent talk at the Ending Age-Related Diseases Conference got quite a bit of attention. We'll tell you what he said in this episode of Lifespan News. On August 19th, 2021, Dr. Aubrey de Grey addressed the attendees of Lifespan.io's fourth annual Ending Age-Related Diseases Conference with a talk focused on the continuing work and changing priorities within longevity science. This talk was given during the independent investigation, while Dr. de Grey was on administrative leave from Sen's, but while he was still affiliated with the organization. His only comments on that came at the very beginning. So, I just thought I'd start by saying that some of you may have heard perhaps of a complication that's going on in my life right now. So, I just wanted to say that there is an independent investigation which was started at the beginning of July and is still ongoing, and that, of course, means a couple of things. It means that I am on administrative leave, which means that I am not representing Sen's Research Foundation here today officially. I am here in a personal capacity. I should mention that I just noticed I have the Sen's Research Foundation logo at the bottom of all my slides, so please pretend that that isn't there. Apart from that, I can't say anything more at all about what's going on, and of course, this would be the wrong place anyway, so I just want to say how overwhelmed I am for all the love and support that I've received from hundreds and hundreds of people, and it shouldn't be long now, so, you know, watch this space. Dr. DeGray then got on with the main content of his talk, in which he detailed five emerging challenges that he sees in longevity science. Challenge number one is short-termism and the pressure to go after low-hanging fruit. This exists in the business world as a focus on achieving profits as soon as and in the academic world through the publish or perish mentality. The problem with this, Dr. DeGray argues, is that much of this research doesn't lead anywhere, and short-termism takes focus away from harder problems that may be more useful to solve. Challenge number two is the combining therapies, while useful to generate knowledge is boring, meaning that there's no incentive for researchers to undertake the difficult work of studying the effects of combined therapies when that isn't the primary interest of high-profile publishers. Intellectual property also stands in the way of combined therapies and licensing deals typically take a long time to work out. According to Dr. DeGray, some of the reportedly 27 million dollars worth of cryptocurrency recently donated to SENs through the Paul's Chain airdrop will fund work on combining therapies. At the foundation, there is now a very nascent effort to do that. We are putting together a program to put just two therapies together, a stem cell therapy and a synelitic therapy, and there's going to be a lot more of that. I believe that one of the biggest consequences of the enormous windfall that some of you may know we received recently is that there'll be a very big expansion of work at the Sensory Research Foundation on combining therapies. It may end up in that being our main focus over the next few years, but we shall see. You can learn more about this large donation in our video linked in the description. Challenge number three is that more money means less mission. Dr. DeGray explained that he sees that many angel and seed investors are mission focused. They have the goal of seeing longevity science succeed and enabling people to live longer, healthier lives. However, when companies in this space prematurely seek to go public or be acquired, additional money, likely tied to less mission driven motivations and incentives, comes into play. This can be the downfall of mission driven companies, and Dr. DeGray warns that we could end up having things slow down and go less rapidly than they could if we allow too many companies to make this kind of mistake. Challenge number four deals with the clinical trial for metformin against aging, or TAIM. According to Dr. DeGray, this trial faced considerable challenges within the FDA and the NIH. Even once those hurdles seemed to have been cleared, which was no small feat, the trial still faced funding concerns as metformin was off-patent and industry had no financial incentive to fund a trial. Instead, donors and foundations were and are needed to fill the void. Dr. DeGray believes that the TAIM trial will be groundbreaking and could encourage big pharma to invest in longevity therapies if there can be a demonstrated path to market. However, the trial is years behind schedule, and it's yet to really get off the ground. This delay is a major challenge, and it must be overcome. Challenge number five is that policymakers and governments have short attention spans. This is especially relevant now, because COVID-19 disproportionately negatively affects elderly people. So, aging and the health concerns accompanying it have been front of mind, and COVID-19 didn't just end lives and harm health, it also heavily impacted the economy, and policymakers cared deeply about the economy. So, while this is on their mind, this could be a good opportunity to remind them of the extraordinary benefits that would come from addressing the problems of aging. Here's how Dr. DeGray put it. So, I've mentioned in the past, I may even have mentioned a year ago at this meeting, that COVID is a bit of an opportunity, in the sense that it has hit the elderly extraordinarily preferentially. As we know, most infectious diseases are worse for the elderly than for young adults, but it's particularly extreme in the case of COVID. What we have not, I believe, said nearly loudly enough, and focused policymakers nearly strongly enough on, is the fact that among all of the damage repair, rejuvenation technologies that we're interested in, rejuvenating the immune system is really going rather well. It's one of the ones that's furthest along. If policymakers were to understand that really not very much additional public money thrown at this kind of area could have a significant impact on the immune function of the elderly, and thus could have a very significant impact on the likelihood, let alone the severity, of any future pandemic, then we would be in a better position than what we are now. Overall, the crusade against aging is accelerating, but there's still much work to be done. And to avoid regressing, we need to address some of the emerging challenges we are facing. Timing is critical, and now is the time to act. Please subscribe for more updates on the business and science of longevity. I'm Ryan O'Shea, and we'll see you next time on Lifespan News.


Fraud. Wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain. I couldn't think of a more perfect word for Mr. Paul Saladino, or should we say, Shiladino. And I guess you can say this about the other cornivores as well as they are being paid to promote the cornivore diet. If you aren't aware of the continued plagiarism of my information, check out my past two videos. Copy pasta salad and Paul Saladino the carnivore copycat. This guy has copied everything, including my book cover. Here is mine. Here is his old one. Then he switched over to this. Plus, the title of his book was ripped from Dr. Jason Fung's book, The Obesity Code. Sounds awfully familiar to me. He copied the name of my podcast, Mine Being Perfected Health. One week later he comes out with fundamental health and he's even promoting a deodorant. I started Frankie's National over a year ago and these corporate chills just steal ideas and prop them up with millions of dollars. Paul, I have a better book cover idea for you. Some of you guys suggested I plant fake information in one of my videos to prove he copies me. And I did just that. On March 7th, I made a video discussing how salmon roe contains vitamin C and once you do a fair bit of research on raw animal foods, you'll understand that most of them have anti-scorbidic properties in a fresh raw state. This is ten times higher in certain organs and tissues. Almost ten times higher in liver and fish eggs. So if you were following a carnivore diet, you would likely get two to three times the amount of vitamin C. On March 14th on the Ben Greenfield podcast, Paul Saladino does not mention that salmon roe has vitamin C. One questioned about it, despite spending most of the podcast talking about salmon roe. Vitamin C would probably be the only one that I can think of that people, maybe you can think of others that people would say, oh, you can only get that from plants. And that's not true. If you look at liver, there's actually quite a good amount of vitamin C in liver and there's a good amount in brain as well. And if you look at the innuet, there's a good amount in the whale blob or skin and so again, he knows the tail. If you eat knows the tail, you'll get plenty of vitamin C. On March 26th, I called out Paul Saladino and Ben Greenfield that they were stuffing their faces with salmon roe without knowing it had vitamin C. He clearly didn't know that salmon roe contains vitamin C. Otherwise, he would have mentioned it. Ben Greenfield asked Paul what foods had vitamin C and they had both stuffed their faces with salmon roe this morning, but they didn't mention that salmon roe has vitamin C. So if Paul was actually doing his own research on why salmon roe's good for you, he would have saw that it had vitamin C because he would have seen it on a nutrient database, but Paul didn't know that because he didn't watch the video where I mentioned salmon roe has vitamin C. Oh, guess what? On April 4th, Paul suddenly knows salmon roe has vitamin C in a discussion conveniently after I called him out on it. You know, if you're eating any liver, you're probably getting enough vitamin C. And then there are other foods that also have vitamin C from the animal. I've talked about salmon roe, has a little bit of vitamin C. And on April 6th, I revealed that I lied. Or, well, I wasn't specific. Salmon roe will have vitamin C if it's not salted. Paul and Ben were consuming salmon caviar, aka salted fish roe. When you salt or preserve a food, you reduce the anti-scorbidic properties if not remove them altogether. If Paul actually did his own research on vitamin C instead of just parroting me and watching my videos, he might have known this. Paul sat in a conversation with Bart Kay that salmon roe has vitamin C. And I paged him. I put that information in a video intentionally. In a video where I corrected Paul Saladino, I said he was a crook. I said that, by the way, Paul salmon roe has vitamin C. What I didn't mention was that if you salt and cure salmon roe, you remove the anti-scorbidic properties. So salmon caviar doesn't have vitamin C. So I kind of intentionally made it so Paul was spreading incorrect information. I planted like a little, I planted something that sounded correct, but it wasn't, which goes to show that Paul didn't do his research. It claims to be the leading authority on the science and application of the carnivore diet.  Oh wait, I know.  Mark Sisson, Ben Greenfield, Merkola, Dave Asprey, Rob Wolf. So I guess all of these people support plagiarism just so they can keep lining their pockets with the money of the sheeple. You know what's strange? Many of the other carnivore shills are ex-vegans as well. Bobby's perspective, primal edge health, raw alignment, clearly getting paid to switch over to the new trend. I spent over seven years now researching and experimenting on this diet, yet I've had no such podcast or opportunities. Paul, it must be nice to live a privileged life and travel for six years while someone else does the work for you. Shit, if I knew I could have gone on vacation for six years instead of working myself half to death, why didn't someone tell me? Oh, it's because I don't have connections. Paul, were you just sent from big college college? I'm a bit confused because you were sprinkling collagen powder on your salads just over a year and a half ago, but now you prefer to sprinkle collagen powder on your steaks. You started the carnivore diet just over a year ago, and one month after you started, you were already making videos about how to do the diet right. Maybe you should tell your fanboys to stop choking down collagen and eggshells if you flip flop diets this often. Paul Saladino was recently on The Doctors with The Shill Sisters, and if you can't tell, this was a complete setup, you might need to get your IQ checked. Is it a conflict of interest if one of the sisters worked as Mr. Saladino's secretary? Hmm, this is an awful coincidence. Is it criminal that this clown of a doctor charges $800 per hour to repeat Frank Tafano's free information? Yes, Paul Saladino. I know it sucks to not know heth as much as me about the carnivore diet, to not be as smart as me in general, but you're still an intelligent guy that can help a lot of people, or, you know, I'll take that back. Maybe you're not intelligent. Maybe you're just really good at memorizing, plagiarizing information. Too bad you're in it for all the wrong reasons. I'm not going anywhere, and I will continue to expose the shills until everyone sees how ugly they are on the inside. For someone like myself to be treated like this is nothing short of evil. I spend every waking moment of my day focused on things to help other people. Every single thing I do has that end goal, and all I met with is these degenerates stealing my ideas and twisting the message. Then they ban me from all of the carnivore forums and social media pages to hide the truth.  This society is disgusting, especially you YouTube who are taking his side for a chance at a few thousand subscribers.  They are being paid to say the words coming out of their mouth. So you should not support them, you should not trust them, and anyone else who supports them is not to be trusted as well. It's not too late to apologize Paul. Do you really want the man who copied Frank Tafano written on your tombstone? I mean I guess corporate shill is already going to be etched there anyway so I guess you don't really care at this point. Thank you guys for joining me. Unfortunately this has to keep happening because these people keep stealing my information, ignoring me, and all sorts of nasty corporate tactics. So guys please share the video, you know if you haven't subscribed subscribe, like the video, if you'd like to support me further you can check out my book, The Ancestral Indigenous Diet, or if you want a new version of that I think Paul has a book coming out in a week or two. But if you want the original source of information definitely buy my book down in the description. You can go to Frankie's Serange Meet. If you want an actually good deodorant product go to Frankie's Naturals, not some nonsense packaged in plastic that he's promoting, and you can also go to frank-tafano.com for affordable dietary and nutrition consultations that you don't have to reverse mortgage your house for.   Almost forgot guys. The craziest thing about all of this, the only reason I'm making these videos, is because he didn't mention my name. How hard is it to credit someone when you're using their information? Why wouldn't you do that? Oh yeah, Frank Defano's great, seven-year carnivore does a lot of research. Is it because you don't want people to know where you got the information from? Possibly. Only thing that makes sense to me.


Hey guys it's Liana and I'm here today to talk about Assassin's Quest by Robin Hobb. I am filming this again because I didn't know that my camera wasn't recording and I was most of the way through my review when I realized that I was not happy. So hopefully it's smoother the second time. Assassin's Quest is the third book in the farce of your trilogy by Robin Hobb. Mara kind of, I don't want to blame Mara, I don't want to, I'm not pissed at her or anything, but she kind of put me off finishing this the month that you're supposed to be reading it because she was like it was getting slumpy and sluggish and I knew that I had to push through if I was gonna finish this. And so when I learned that even though I had started reading it I was like oh like I have a lot to read this month and I don't know if I can push through a book that's gonna be slumpy or sluggish. So I was like I will maybe, maybe I'm not gonna prioritize trying to finish this right now, I'll finish it in another month because we do want to read the Liveship Trader series this summer so like I wanted to get this finished now despite that so I was like all right let's get this done. And also a goal for the year was to finish the Farsieger trilogy. Yay, achieved a goal for the year, good job me. But yeah so having learned that or heard that from her then I was you know like okay well let's let's do the thing. And I at no point was bored by this book, I kept expecting to be and I wasn't. Now do I think that this book has extraneous material? Do I think that there are things that could be cut and wouldn't really affect the like cohesiveness of the plot? That there are things that don't move the plot forward that are kind of redundant? Absolutely. But at no point was I bored at no point would I say this would be better if it was cut. Can it be cut? Yes. If we were trying to condense this for an adaptation could some of this be cut out? Yes. If we were alarmed by the page length and we're simply trying to reduce the page length for like no other reason other than to reduce the page length. Yes there are things you could absolutely cut and the story would still make perfect sense. But I don't think that there would it be any benefit or value to cutting stuff like unless you're like worried that people are going to be put off by the length of this book and for that reason alone you want to cut stuff there's stuff you could cut. But I don't think that this book is like suffering from being too long. Apparently other people do think so so perhaps it should be cut because I wouldn't be unhappy and they would be happier so I don't know. But I didn't feel bored by this at all. It's kind of like uh like when you get the director's cut of a movie that has all the scenes that were cut obviously they could have been they could be cut and they were cut for theatrical release. But a lot of those scenes are great and a lot of times if it's a movie you love then you enjoy the longer version because there's all these extra scenes that you also really enjoy. The extended editions of Lord of the Rings are the editions of Lord of the Rings in my opinion. Obviously they cut a bunch of stuff for the theatrical release and like it didn't hurt the like integrity of the plot but I only watched the extended editions. More Lord of the Rings is never bad. So let's kind of feel about this is like the extended cut of Assassin's Quest. There isn't a theatrical cut there isn't only the extended cut but I'm fine with it because I enjoyed the whole thing. Now this is a journey book which I know that some people even in the best of times even when it's only like a small part of a book or it's a shorter book will find that just the fact of that to be exhausting or draining or sloggy like it doesn't matter if it's like an exciting quest the fact of it being a quest is gonna make it a slog for you and if that's the case I mean yes this at all times basically this book is a journey book. There are different journeys it's not all one journey. There are side quests and the main quest but it is nearly the entire time people on the move on a journey on a trip on the road. So if that's gonna bother you then I could see this book getting slumpy and sloggy for you absolutely that doesn't really ever bother me like the fact of that never bothers me. There are times when I think an author has indulged in a lengthy road trip for no reason and I wasn't really enjoying my time with it because I because of how it was written not the fact of it being a journey for example in wise men's fear by Patrick Rothfuss one of my ultimate favorite authors the part where they are in a kind of a journey phase in wise men's fear that is way too long that I do think could be cut and should be cut here I don't think any of this really needs to be cut could be cut but doesn't need to be again without spoilers this is a non-spoiler review which I mean I don't think is going to be a big problem for me because like I've noticed when I've you know watched myself back in editing videos that I can apparently talk about a book for like 40 minutes and never tell you what it's about I don't know if it's a good or a bad thing but I just do it on the regular without even trying but so based on the titles alone you can surmise a lot about this book the assassin's apprentice it is an assassin in training you know that from the title royal assassin okay well then the previous apprentice is now the assassin and now the the apprentice then royal assassin is now on a quest so like you know the like plot arc that that basic framework just from the titles alone these books follow fits chivalry farce here from like childhood into adulthood he's a single pov story with his not multiple perspectives it is always fits chivalry's story so if you're sick of being in fits chivalry's head you're gonna be in his head a lot just because all these books are in his head and then in particular a journey book I feel like somehow feels more like you're in someone's head I think partly because like when you are even yourself like hiking like you're in your own head more than you are just generally when you go about your life there's less I guess to distract you because you're just kind of like walking walking walking and being kind of in your own head so you're very much in fits his head in assassin's quest as he's questing and if you don't like him being in fits his head well I don't recommend the farce here trilogy to you at all if you don't like this as a character it's his story so it's not gonna be for you if you don't like fits and you're extra extra deep in fits you know okay I don't like how that sounded you're very much in fits his head in assassin's quest while he's questing so if you don't like him you don't like being in one character's head for a long time if you don't like journeys I feel like you probably very likely will be miserable reading assassin's quest no no I like this as a character I like doing deep dive since I was head I don't have any problem with journey books so like I had a great time however I did give it four stars not five and I gave for a assassin five stars I do think royal assassin is the best of the trilogy assassin's quest I I didn't dock at a star because I thought I was too long or because it was too meandering or because it was a slog or a slump or anything like that that wasn't my problem apparently that is other people's problem for me it was more that some of the the the major plot arc that's kind of thread through all three books because there's there's individual arcs for each book of course but there is a one large arc that encompasses all three and the the answers to questions that have were posed in the beginning of the trilogy the the reveals for mysteries that were present in the beginning of the trilogy you like the way that this culminates and gets wrapped up at the end of assassin's quest it was a bit disappointing to me and part of that might be just like you find out who the murderer is might just be that like the answer to a mystery is never as interesting or as cool as the mystery itself like find you want the answer so bad when you get it you're like well it's boring now like finding out how a magic trick is done you're like well I really wanted to know but now that I know well it's not so fun anymore is it it's kind of boring now so what exactly that I mean there that might be part of it just that like knowing the answer to questions like it's never as interesting as the question itself but that assigned I think also that it just also was kind of a disappointing answer to some of those questions I don't think it's bad I don't think that like it's a dumb answer to those questions it's not like all of that and then like that's it like I wasn't pissed off at all I gave it four stars but I did feel like some of the build up it made me want a little more out of the end of this so the way that things that we've been looking for for the all three books when we finally found the things when we finally got the information it was like I somehow expected a bit more and and then the way that it wrapped up just generally as a plot not the answers to questions but the way that the plot wrapped up just felt kind of a little bit rushed a little bit neat a little bit I don't know like we like we spent all of this time questing and building to this and then the end was just kind of like and wrap it up which I feel is the case in the end of a lot of series when the author has like spent a lot of time building something it's almost inevitable that the end will feel rushed because you you're unless you spend this amount of time now doing the like falling action like which is unreasonable it will feel a little bit that way I think kind of regardless it's really hard to not have a rushed ending but it was exceedingly rushed especially as compared to the length of this quest like when you're accustomed to a book really taking its time with stuff to have a rushed ending just feels even more abrupt and there were some specific things that I really didn't like irritate in me throughout the book and I actually message more about this as well I don't regard this as a spoiler at all there are so many times throughout this book when women throw themselves at fits and he doesn't want it he's not interested and then they get pissed and hate him and get really like bitchy because he like rejected their advances and like having that happen for sure like whatever like humans are humans it happens and you know things get messy but it happened like a lot to the point where like every time a new female character entered the scene I was like waiting for her to like make a move on fits and then for fits to reject it and then for her to be bitchy about it and it happened like clockwork I was like can we not does every woman who meets fits have to like throw herself at him and then also be a bitch to him if he's not into it like it's getting old so that irritated me a bit not an I wouldn't have acted a star for that alone but that didn't irritate me yeah so in general I would say it is a solid ending to a trilogy despite my slight disappointment with the ending the like the like the lore reveals the magic reveals the stuff like that it was I kind of found it difficult while I was reading the first two books to believe that it kind of could live up to like this great enigma that was being built up because it was quite an enigma it was like all the mystery things I like I really love the character of the fool the fool is one piece of it that I don't think I've really like lost its shine because the fool isn't a very enigmatic character and I think the reason that the fool remains like it wasn't kind of I don't want to say ruined for me because it's not like the end of Assassin's quest like ruined it for me it was just like it ended on a whimper a bit for me but the fool remains kind of an enigma and I think that is a good choice and it kind of makes me wish that some other things about this would have remained an enigma I don't really have an idea like I don't have in mind how it could have been executed while maintaining enigma I think I think it's possible I haven't really thought through how that would look or how that would go but I do think it would have benefited the book and the trilogy to leave some things a little bit like a lot of stuff is still kind of unexplained but in a way that feels dissatisfying not maintaining an enigma it just kind of feels like I think you just don't have an explanation for this like I just don't think you know how it works and I think for that to work better then more of it should remain unknown we had enough of it known to where it feels like a gap rather than a mystery so we just leave more of it mysterious and then this will work better would be against my tip but thing again things I like the fool absolutely love the fool everywhere he pops up in the three books is a fantastic character that is always fascinating and has some of the best lines I was laughing out loud at some of the stuff the fool said hilarious and so witty which like when you're gonna have a character that's kind of like a the jester or like a supposed to be like this kind of witty comic relief character like you were it is a big gamble that you're gonna say that this character is funny that is what the universe recognizes this character to be witty and then to write stuff that your audience is gonna have to agree is witty and I do think the fool is very witty so like well done thousand percent would die for night eyes night eyes has my whole heart so love that fits as a character is is fit he's he's he's kind of dumb you kind of want to throttle him but it's endearing and you feel for the guy he's he's been through it see you want to see good things for him but you also know he hob is not here for giving fits a good time ketchikan remains a fascinating wonderful character the world is a cool world to be in the lore is cool again some of the explanations for the lore left me a little underwhelmed but overall it's still a really lush world that does feel very alive and very well thought out and I am very excited to read the magic box I will say there is something that like it was kind of explained at the end but I'm honestly kind of confused by it still like that was a thing that I really expected to get a solid answer for and it was I feel like the book has an answer but it's like such a quick aside that I'm kind of like wait hang on go back what what is the explanation for this run that by me again I don't want to say what that is because it's kind of spoilery for the trilogy not super spoilery but like there's the thing that is going on a lot in the trilogy that I thought would get explained more and I'm still very like hang on what now what was going on with that was it perfectional that's why I gave it four stars but I think it's super solid and I think it's very hard to nail the landing of a trilogy which is why I'm very often like the second book of a trilogy best this is not aberrant for me they frequently find the second book on a trilogy to be my favorite this is no exception once again felt the third one was solid I was good at the second one didn't stick the landing some of its reveals some of its wrap up some of its conclusions this little let me know in the comments down below this was helpful to you at all I feel like my first go-through was better before I realized that my camera wasn't recording stay lovey you'll just have to take my word for that that's the case um so if you found this review dissatisfying at all I can tell you that wish you could have seen the good version but my camera wasn't recording and I'm sorry about that but there was a good version you'll just have to trust me anyway let me know all the things I post videos on Saturdays other random times as well but definitely Saturdays so like and subscribe join my patreon if you feel so inclined or don't and I'll see you when I see you bye


KZN flood victims refuse to leave Tranesnet building. Quasulunatal flood victims who have taken over the Tranesnet hostel in Durban are refusing to leave until they're provided with proper housing. At least 300 homeless victims invaded the empty building last week after living in community halls for the past four months. They accuse the government of making empty promises about housing and neglecting them. The victims say the living conditions at the community halls were inhumane and with the help of the Umzenzi movement, they found a safer place. The movement says all government representatives they have asked for help have left them in the lurch with no explanation.


Roger Federer will not be playing in the Canadian Open and the Cincinnati Masters as he continues to recover from a knee injury. After undergoing two operations on his right knee last year, Federer has competed in just five events so far this year. Most recently, the 20-time Grand Slam champion reached the Wimbledon quarterfinals before losing in straight sets. The 39-year-old is missing out on the Olympic Games due to knee injury. Hello, hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


The Sa'afah Lewis Community College recently presented the Minister for Education with a blueprint of its successes as the institution curves a space for itself locally, regionally and internationally. Hermadi Mark reports. The Minister for Education, Innovation, Gender Relations and Sustainable Development Honourable Dr. Gail Rigabet recently visited the Sa'afah Lewis Community College. She was updated on the current developments, successes and plans of the campus. The Minister visited the Derrick Walcott Library, a new instalment at the college and the Schools E-Learning Academy. Dr. Keith Nurse is the principal of the Sa'afah Lewis Community College. We also hope to share with the Minister upcoming developments to establish an innovation hub here at the college which would house four sub-labs. The first lab that we are establishing is an environmental sciences lab. We will be doing testing of everything from water quality and air quality to soil and other environmental areas. The second lab is a food sciences lab or food tech lab which will allow for both agro-processed facilities as well as again testing certification in the area of food processing as well as food development. The other upcoming projects shared with the Minister include a media technology laboratory focused on application development and robotics. Additionally, Sa'afah Lewis Community College hopes to establish a virtual reality laboratory to aid in teaching subjects that traditionally require hands-on training. Dr. Nurse also shared with the Minister plans to set up a café in the centre of the college courtyard with the goal of making the campus more hospitable. The goal there is to make the centre of the campus a more hospitable place for students and staff as well as the institutions that surround us. We are talking about Kafa, Caribbean Regional Public Health Agency which is situated on our campus but we also have neighbours like HTS, Helen Television Systems which is right across the road from us. The OECS Secretariat which is adjacent to us as well as the UU Open Campus and so the goal is to create a magnet where we invite both our neighbours as well as our staff and students and the general public to come up to the campus and experience our culinary delights. The principal explained another goal of the project is to host the farmers market on weekends. This will allow the college to sell the produce from its farm. Concessionaires ranging from crafters to food producers and agro-processors will be invited to sell local products. Honourable Dr. Rigabet applauded the college on the revamping of its associate degree programmes, the advancements made in digital education and the modular approach currently used in 60% of the college's classes and the introduction of four new bachelor degree programmes. From the Government Information Service, Humadi Makh reporting.


Hey folks, welcome to Don't Take Out Your Phone. I had a really cool chat with Leon Walker today. We heard about his journey from Manchester to London, which is a pretty hard journey to make, and the various challenges he's faced entering into the London insurance market. We talked a little bit about what we can do to increase diversity and level the playing field, so making sure that people have a quality of opportunity and there are no obstacles in the way. So yeah, it was really good. I hope you enjoy it. Hey, it's Lewis. Welcome to the podcast. Enjoy our conversations anytime, anywhere. Thank you, Leon, for joining me. Thanks for having me. Pleasure, pleasure. So Josh Breckenfeld introduced us. We should mention him. Good old Josh. Yeah, I haven't had one of my podcasts yet. Good old Josh. Good old Josh. Just to highlight that point. I think he's older than both of us. He's definitely old. Yeah. And he arranged a little gin tasting that we went to. Which is cool. And then I saw you talk at Diving Fest, which was really good. So I thought I'd get you on. Thank you very much for having me. Pleasure. Thanks for joining us. So what's your story? How did you come down from Manchester? Oh, coal mining. I'm joking. Football. Yeah, definitely football. So I started my career. I studied law first because I wanted to be in LA law. And I think for suits. But suits wasn't available yet. I still thought I was Harvey Specter. And I think for a few days I was called Donovan before Leon. Because my mum was obsessed with Don Johnson.  And I thought law was the way to go because I loved arguing. You didn't copy their accent? I didn't copy their accent. I couldn't ever get rid of my Mancunian accent. Which is why I got a D in German. And effectively I went into law but I didn't enjoy it as much as I did in theory when I was in practice. So I was a paralegal. I worked for a number of firms. The last one being a sports law firm. Which, you know, I was in the meetings where Carlos Tevez was signing for Man United from West Ham and trying to draft new rules or trying to look at the differences between years of FA football rules thinking this is not LA law. This is not suits. This is not what I thought. The sports are sexy part of the rules. That's what I thought. And honestly I thought to myself I'm going to get out of law and I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I thought I'd been trained to kind of read contracts and I had pretty good attention to detail. So I went into a recruiter's office and they sent me to an insurance broker. Was this up in Manchester? Up in Manchester, yeah. They sent me to an insurance broker and I went for a compliance role at a broker and I sat in front of the CEO very similar to as we're sat now and he's like, what? You'll hate compliance. What about broken? I had no idea about broken. And he says, you'll be good at it. And I thought, oh god, I'm on the apprentice. I need to stand my ground. I need to be very focused. So every time he said broken, I said, compliance, broken compliance. And he said, right, I'm going to stop you there. I'm going to give you a job in my broken business in real estate. So I started out real estate broken and we had massive clients like Irvin Seller who was behind the shard. And one of my biggest clients had a thousand residential properties in London. So you think about some of the scale, some of the portfolios we worked on where Cot Darjeon is, one poultry building. I'd never seen that, but we ensured it up in Manchester. So I kind of started out in the market that way. Worked in sales roles, corporate development type roles where I'd be travelling from Manchester to Scotland in a car. I think I drove to Glasgow three days after my driving test. It was the most frightening experience of my life. I mean, yeah, I had nightmares about falling asleep at the wheel for months. And after a couple of years, I realised that the insurance world was kind of where I wanted to be in terms of the foundations of what you can get were very different to law. Law I left because I was 10 years away from getting client contact. On my second day in a broker, I went out to see a client and ratified for me why I was making the move. And one of the interesting things is in my second year, my last broken firm in Manchester, I ruptured my patella tendon playing football. So for anyone that's squeamish, effectively my kneecap was in my thigh. And I was off work for a couple of months and watching Bloomberg every day and looking at the TV thinking the centre of the insurance world doesn't overlook Salford Chippy. I think there's more to it than this. Football career had finished by then. Oh, absolutely. My chances of playing for Man United ended probably when I was seven. But I dragged it out. You could have played for Man City at that time. Never. I'm from Stratford. You can't even wear blue in Stratford. And honestly, I sort of sat there thinking I have to get to London. How am I going to do it? Just because more opportunities. More opportunities. It seemed like the centre of the universe and if you were going to do insurance come to the city and do it here. And it was actually quite a stretch to go from Manchester to New York or Dubai or wherever. You have to have done your grounding in London. Yeah. So I got a role at Willis working in the heart of the city. It was a carrier management role and I was quite tactical about why I did that. And that was because it spanned the whole business. So I was talking about aviation one day and find out another and energy and obviously you don't do this in Manchester. So for me it was a steep learning curve. And a transition to living in London? Living in London was okay. One of my uncles has lived here for a long time so I came here every summer as a kid. But I think working in London was very different. Because one I thought it would be I was one of three people that I ever saw in the market in Manchester. And I came to London because I thought it would be more diverse. Or one of the reasons I thought it would be more diverse. And when I started at Willis and maybe this was just where I was at the time there was very few and actually I saw more people that worked in the kitchens and the catering and cleaning and the security that were of ethnic minorities than I saw in the office and I thought that was very strange. Did you find London just as a whole very diverse? Yeah, but London's in fiefdoms. London isn't the right one. East London resonates with me more because that's a bit like Manchester it's a bit grittier and it's got a bit of an edge. And Mancunions have that edge so I look at the Gallagher brothers that seem to have an edge. And we all want to be the Gallagher brothers or David Beckham or Ada. He was on Essex. Yeah, but he was adopted of Manchester and came in King of Manchester. And effectively when I got here I thought everyone kind of sticks to their group which was really quite weird. And the group hasn't liked where you live. Yeah, for sure. You had people that saw a lot of pinkie rings never seen those before in Manchester. I'm not a fan of a pinkie ring. And then of course in the city you have this sort of crashing together of sort of Eton and Essex. And some army. And what's fascinating here is boarding school is massive as is army. But where I'd come from, you only went to army or boarding school if you were really naughty. So it was very... Yeah, because it couldn't control you whereas here maybe the standard's much higher. There's people from different backgrounds and actually that part of that diversity is something that I loved. But I still felt quite lonely. And it took a long time to find people that look like me. But I replaced that with people that thought like me. And I think that's where my view of what diversity has shifted from what people look like to what people think like and how they act and what their values. It was a shock. It was transformational in terms of how I thought about the world. But it was...  I didn't understand structure and ego and I didn't understand that people needed to be made to feel important. Office politics I guess. Because I'd worked in roles where my line was the driver. So how much do you produce? How much do you add to the company? And nothing else mattered. So when I came here and it became very political the size of the companies grew etc. I thought I need to step my game up. That learning curve was steep.  And that does make a big difference I think. Willis must have been infinitely bigger than them. I worked for JLT in Manchester. But I worked for a part of JLT which was 30 people with 400 people around us that were employee benefits. So ex-mercer people. So effectively I'd only ever worked for small companies. Whilst I had a big name I'd only ever worked for small companies. Even from the property investor broker I worked for 56 people when I left. That's where I was one of 19,000 at the time was just mind-blowing. Crazy. Have you faced any discrimination? Yes. And I think given before I touched on my own experience given what's going on in the world given what's some of the challenges we have I think 2016 was probably one of the worst years of my life. Because every day I'd turn on news there was a black person being arrested or murdered or shot out by police or choked out like Mike Brown was choked out. This is US. This is all US. But it was published on BBC News and all these things and news at 10 and all of that news night Channel 4 it was hard because frankly it would be remiss of me to say that all of this didn't have an impact on the way people viewed us globally. And turning those seeing that every day it wasn't that it was happening it was that it was being filmed and it became news and news is more like entertainment these days. So it was just a constant barrage and I thought well of course if you say you're a recruitment person in a company or you're a CEO and you get a CV and it's a black person or a Muslim person if your image of those people is only ever derived because your circle doesn't include those people it's only derived from what you see on the news then of course you're going to it's not unconscious you just you'd rather not have that around you so it'd be remiss of me to say that hasn't affected me at some stage in my life as it relates to my own experience of discrimination to give you a bit of background where I grew up there was only two black families on the council estate I grew up on and effectively when we moved in my mum and dad went to the local pub and they were quite young so my mum had me when she was quite young and they went to the local pub and stopped drinking until they left really? this was 87 8 crazy so for me it was fascinating growing up in that environment because my parents view was we don't belong here but all of the kids of these people became my best friends so many times where I'd be in fights when I was younger trying to defend you were always on the back foot but they were not so the kids and your peers you experienced like no discrimination so it was a mixture because whilst if anyone attacked me from the outside I would always have the protection of these people who just grew up with me I often would get into fights within my own group and they would come and repeat some of the things that they'd hear from their parents so this is a case of the worst discriminatory experience I've had is I was playing a football match in a certain part of Manchester and I was quite good at football to be fair and a lot of people came to watch it and one of the spectators had torn a coke can in half and then sliced the air of one of the players on our team while he was taking a throw in so it was quite a rough name that was a racial attack but what was fascinating was one of the parents who happened to be a white guy shouted at me and called me an albino which I thought was quite funny at the time because clearly understand what an albino was so I thought if that's the worst racial experience I'm going to have in my life publicly, directly I think I'll take it I think I can move on from that crazy and then moving to London and working in insurance where it's not particularly diverse have you experienced anything or have you found your journey making your way in that in your career I think it's an interesting point here because the London market isn't very diverse and I think working or getting closer to diversity and inclusion as an agenda the market feels like it has diversity, fatigue almost like they view it as a message being rammed down their throat which is really frustrating because if you're on the other side of that you feel that progress has been very slow so you're not really seeing any change I'll tell you they have diversity and fatigue it suggests that they don't want to change do you think that's true I can only go for the evidence we've got taking insurance aside we've got more CEOs and the FTSE 100 call David than we do for my black and ethnic minority background so how can we argue with the numbers but I also think quite radically that there are two sides to this there's a fence almost and I think on the side of the fence of the establishment and the establishment tends to be middle age or middle class white men on the side of the establishment if I sit with them I feel like diversity and inclusion is presented as a zero sum game in what way almost that for it to become more diverse I have to lose something from my table so you're taking food off my table to feed everybody else and it feels like I'm constantly under attack and I don't think diversity and inclusion is meant to come across that way because it's supposed to be inclusive by definition and at the moment it feels like we attack this person and we've all ran teams and set up teams in the past you don't go in and sack the most experienced person you build around that person some of the diversity and inclusion initiatives are not done well correct and you can see how that will all happen I mean even so far as some I run a headhunting firm some clients have asked specifically this is on gender but 50% has to be female which again creates big problems right because ultimately really being inclusive who cares where people have come from what they look like I mean who cares right I don't care but maybe as my colleague Odi was saying young people I'm classing myself as young even though I'm like 37 young people are much more optimistic so I'd love to think I do believe my social circle and my peers aren't racist, homophobic whatever but the reality in the world is really a bit different completely and I echo that but I think you know you'll sit on that side of the fence you're thinking I'm under attack here and I don't want to why would I if you're going to attack me and then say actually do you want to come and be part of the solution I'm probably going to say no it's not a good way to so then if I go to the other side of the fence where I sit as a young black with a very strong which is probably coming through today I look at it and say we have significant challenges and one of those is that insurance is not something that we pick typically because in our communities and whether you're black or Asian or any of these in our communities we look for the ones that we can see so for instance I always say that my grandparents came here to get our job like any job, get on the ladder my mum's generation had to get a job that you could point to in the community so gas board, council health authority it had to be something that you could point to postman, you had to be able to see it and then they hit the glass ceiling so my generation's job is to become senior in those companies that they couldn't become senior in that's my historical responsibility to my culture I see so then the generation after me so my kids or the people that I mentor at the moment their job is to start their own businesses because then the generation after them is on equal parity they can go in and do the gas board they can go in and be a labourer they can go in and do the CEO job they can go in and be the entrepreneur and it will take five generations to do that five, yeah, wow and I'm sort of three in the line so we're not far off but we're still a long way away from where we want to be the same with my family, both my parents emigrants, one dad's from Egypt one's from South Africa my mum had a different upbringing we're up in the part of South Africa my dad was chocolate out of Egypt for being Jewish and came here and the whole thing so it's not too dissimilar but in Jewish culture a lot of the parents push the kids into being accountable and emigrants tend to want to contribute to the society they've moved into and as you see them as the generations go on they start to get more integrated and assimilated my first broken job was in a Jewish real estate investor broker and I learnt everything I know about business from that firm because that was about us and the community and helping and teaching and that's what I saw teaching I didn't see challenge I saw how can I help you do this and everything I learnt from business from those bosses the key to leadership is thinking about servicing your employees teaching, education if we all do better so having that mindset if we can get that instilled in people then I think we'll go a long way absolutely so what should we do what can we do to achieve equality of opportunity do you think I think equality is a big question right I think equality is something that kind of starts outside the office I think companies have a responsibility to set a framework where people feel that they can do their best and their best might be half as good as someone else but it's still their best and they want to be able to do that you have to understand that some people come to work for just the paycheck and then they support their lifestyle with that which is fine and then certain people if you're like me or certainly like when Josh and I speak we're kind of pinking the brain trying to take over the world and I think that you have to give room to those people as well but equality to me is something that touches politics housing, economics relationships exposure, media as I touched on before equality is there and companies kind of need to pressure media like I went to a talk with someone very senior at WPP the biggest advertising agency in the world and I pressed that person as to how do you allow these companies to position us in such a way from a black and ethnic minority background how do you allow that to be the case where the only time we ever see anyone celebrated is if they're a sports person or if they're an entertainer they're the same because sports is entertainment these days where do you go and find the leaders and the owners and the developers and why don't you celebrate them in the same way that you celebrate Steve Jobs or the same way you celebrate Richard Branson and that person didn't really have an answer other than I can only work off the brief I'm given by the client so if the client is the company and the company's role is to then start to change narratives I spoke at an event recently for the diving festival as you saw and I talked about the movie Black Panther and that was a seminal movie for anyone from a black background I think it's a 12 and I sat next to a 6 year old like it was ridiculous people needed it they needed that confidence boost maybe after 2016 I don't know and the reason why I think that's important is not necessarily well in addition to the fact that you saw someone there that was a warrior, a woman a scientist, a young girl and the king was black and he had heritage and he relied on his ancestors and all these things that you get taught of when you come from a black background to look for and reach on it was important because it made a billion dollars in a month it's crazy isn't it a billion dollars in a month and do you think that was important because of the role model aspect I think it was important because every advertising agency realised that they could tap into that dollar that Jordan has been getting for years Michael Jordan tapped into that dollar that black people will certainly in America will queue for days to get the next release and Black Panther tapped into that so now when I pick up GQ I pick up Esquire and any other fashion magazines that end up in my house because my fiance works for a fashion company all of those have diverse models in now and the fashion industry changed overnight because it went to get that dollar not because it had any moral obligation not because it wanted to change the world but because they realised that if you can put these people on a page they will buy my clothes so I was speaking at a school recently I've become a school governor for Seoul and East London and I was talking about labels like Trapstar and Puma and all these things have now become cool in black and ethnic minority communities and I asked the kids why do you think that is and they said oh well because it's cool and Supreme that was the other label and it was why do you think that's cool and they said because Jay-Z wears it or because Beyonce wears it and I said no it's because you wear it it's because they know you will save up all of your money everything you have and you'll spend it on this item that's why it's cool and that's why they push it and you need to have a look at that from a frame of how powerful this message has become how powerful these people are and people don't like the term babe like I didn't like it at first but then I realised that that just cemented all of these different parts of this question into one big group and now we can say right what do we want to do about it but it's great I mean you've got I think you need more role models so there's the sports stars there's the musicians Kanye went to meet Donald Trump Kanye has had his hood packed revoked revoked I tell you he's had it revoked but no one that's got close to the Kardashians has come off well so it's always ruled the sisters like was the quickest billionaire exactly from Instagram because her sister did a porn video crazy there's a few memes about that but I think back to kind of like non-like sports stars and musicians and stuff certainly we need more role models and more representative in these types of industries but I mean it's a challenge to get people to want to work in like let's say insurance or financial services I think not only because their families don't do it or they don't respect it like I said my grandmother cried so she thought I was knocking on everyone's door on the street I'm trying to explain to her I think at the time we were looking at some of the early plans for the cheese grater and she's like what are you going to be knocking on someone's door like it's very very strange I think yeah there's an attraction problem to the market at all levels I think we need to look at I think if the average age of an active underwriter at Lloyds of London is 53 and I have to be careful because I don't want to be aged this is not an age thing but if the average age of an active underwriter is that age if I say I'm supportive of diversity and inclusion and focus on the grad scheme then that means that by the time those people come through to challenge me to challenge for senior jobs I've already retired I'm out I'm supportive of it but as long as I don't have to work for it underwriting is an example where you have to have started young and worked your way up there are a bunch of roles where you can hire someone from a different industry 100% technology, data science all of these new kind of things that are coming through but you typically don't see people hiring them they still take people from similar firms from rivals they're scared to make a bad hire but then I push back on recruiters and you can only go off the brief right so what we do we're going to take a brief from a client we'll go through all of our various questions they open up the spec and probe as to why they want certain skills and experience and it's always the same so to start with they're open to someone from outside the market but in the end and then you deliver that diverse list different sectors and stuff wider financial services is much more diverse than insurance so you can start to increase diversity and insurance if you start recruiting from different sectors but in the end they always end up 90% of the time going for someone from the insurance sector from a rival it's a safer hire let's say you go down to mid-level or junior level and you're asking a middle manager to make a hire if they make a bad hire because they've hired someone from a Cardo or whatever other company to hire someone from one of our rivals but how is it that an organisation or an industry that is designed around risk won't take any well firstly people like people like themselves so sector whatever the commonalities are but if you're in a job for and the average 10 in a job now is 2.5 to 3 years so you're in this job you want to do well, you want to progress why take a risk on someone that's left field let's say maybe they're not empowered to do it it's been a different economic environment you've got Brexit coming up maybe people in this mindset let's just make a safe hire it's like 100% of the 5100 use the week before accounting firms they didn't take a well it's like you never get fired for hiring Mackenzie it's like a classic thing for me from my perspective there's a bit of an issue around that and we do what I can because for us it's great to have a larger pool of people to source from much easier to find good people and diverse in the end it's more often than not the insurance experience sounds like you're beating your head against a brick wall probably but you keep trying because I think ultimately it hasn't changed actually for a while I've been recruiting in insurance and wider finance services for like maybe 14-15 years and it's always the same conversation that has been from the start sometimes they take a risk on someone most of the time they don't and you end up the same people moving around these jobs there's a few things there that you said that I want to just touch on so first about taking a risk on someone that will have to happen to change the demographic of the London market and there's a perception that it's easier to train Charlie from Charles to have a school than it is to train Jamal from Brickstone right there's just a perception like I'm going to have to teach this person stuff to operate in this world and some of that's true but then most of it isn't and I think because you don't experience that person in your circle and again over them what you see on the news so that's one on that point on that point I think so if you look at the low socio-economic backgrounds comprehensive schools and stuff we can do a lot to work with kids in those scenarios because if you want to be let's say you want to be an accountant or a scientist or an investment banker your choice of GCSE starts at 14 years old and mostly people in that in that part of society do worse at GCSEs then get the GCSEs to the right levels if you don't do the right levels you can never be a scientist or so companies in this industry just generally can do a lot more work with schools at that level so whoever it is from the local comprehensive school understands that here you can be an underwriter or you can be an investment banker or you can be a scientist the guy from the private school has the benefit of people coming in and talking to them about their jobs, about coming on work experiences and so they really get a head start so this is a quality of opportunity I feel people miss out on them from 13 to 14 100% it starts there was a program on BBC about this talking about the chance of someone from a black background becoming Prime Minister being in the many millions of percent because it was because of all these socio-economic challenges and I don't want to divide the person from the public school I don't think that person should ever have to apologise for their background just because their parents have been successful their grandparents have been successful you can't apologise for that but what you can do is recognise your own privilege and privilege is very important so now people talk a lot about white privilege because it's fashionable to do it and I think that white privilege is why we talk about this sort of stuff around our table because we have the additional challenge of if we're blessed enough to do it having a mixed race child so we have to work as hard as media is to make sure that child feels like it belongs somewhere and belongs to us and feels equal part but when we talk about white privilege I say to her that that's because the way it presents is that you only have to apologise for yourself as an individual whereas when I feel like I have to apologise the way in which society is set up is if I'm apologising for everybody because you're the only reference point for many people they'll say so why do black people do this as if you can answer for every black person or why do Jewish people do that and you think how do I know if I said to her why do white people do this she's like well I can only answer for myself and that's okay but I think privilege is very important whilst I can point at privilege in other people I have to be humble enough to realise I have my own so my privileges of just being a man or being born in the west or being born in the UK or the difference between even being born in Manchester versus other parts of the north you know all of these things so you have to be people have to show a little bit more humility to then get this equality that you're looking for and I guess as it relates to Jamal or my fictional Brixton Boy or it relates to Charlie from Charles House all they need to do is align around an objective because what happens in small companies versus big companies in my experiences in a small company they're aligned around an objective and it doesn't matter where you come from everyone's going for it when you get to a big company it becomes more political and that's where you start hiring your own image and wrap people around you that you know are going to protect you so there's an element of democratising the objectives and saying it doesn't really matter I don't care where you come from male, female, age, LGBT wheelchair whatever you have because we're going to need it to get to this objective and I think that the city of London one needs to acknowledge some of its past as to how it's got what it's got and two needs to step out of the train tracks it feels like people are saying well David was successful so I'm going to follow David and then do exactly what he says and then the person following David does exactly what David does to innovate there's a tough on that because if you think of that from the other perspective if you're lucky enough to have two parents who are successful doing something in their career and you look to them as role models or other family members or people in society if you don't have that then it's quite easy to just you don't know what's possible your goals are much shorter than they should be honestly when I was growing up where I grew up that was patently obvious it was common I lived probably half a mile away from Man United's ground and probably 50 or 60 meters away from Trafford Park which had lots of factories and that's where you were supposed to work that was absolutely where you were supposed to work so my grandparents came here in the 60s and they definitely experienced racism and the stories that our grandmother would tell about just going to the butchers and having to wait until the last white person was served and she could be in there for three hours because when she's the next person to be served if someone came in then she'd have to wait until they were served and all of these things but my grandad was a tailor he set the standard for our family in what way? in every way how we looked, how we presented how we talked how we carried ourselves what our aspirations were he was quite big in the local community in terms of helping people from the Caribbean settle in the UK giving jobs, giving them a suit getting them settled and you look back at pictures of the 60s and the way that the sort of Hollywood version of it now where you're panting around your ankles then it was suits and ties every day and my grandad wore a suit and tie every day you did come in and see and tie today and look and smile and what's really interesting is that's because of my family standard that's got nothing to do with the city of London, that's got nothing to do with what anyone tells me here that's our standard and we don't let that standard drop I have several uncles that I'm very proud of and I have my mum who is probably one of my heroes because they maintain that standard and then we all grow off the back of that you could pick our family up and put us in any country and our values about hard work and graft and being presentable and articulate hopefully and focus around changing the community that is a relevance to where we are now not everyone's as lucky as us my grandad was a very strong character, any bread strong characters and I'm a strong character being a good family correct and whilst I have a lot of the traits of many people you come from a single background and all of these things whilst I have many of the traits of those people anyone I tell or I mentor a few people five people I talk about you set your standard so there is one thing in keeping with this podcast that I'll share and I got it from Game of Thrones so watching Game of Thrones one of the big differences between we talked about the Pinky Wingers and certainly people from my background is heritage and if you watch Game of Thrones I'll always say this is the son of the son of the son of who is ex and what we lack is that we don't have the people that have done it before to go off and so I started to think about what would be great is if I had been able to see or hear my grandad's experiences in his life so I could use them as a reference point absolutely so what I started to do was record voice notes and I save them into a drop box for my grandkids nice so I can talk to them about being the first one that came to work in the city and I can talk to them about office politics because we don't get taught that I talk to them about management of international relationships I talk to them about what it was like when I was preparing to propose and how it took me sort of seven years to figure out whether I wanted to get married at all at all and as soon as I decided I decided on the Saturday I wanted to do it and then I proposed the following week like I wasn't there was no messing there was just and you record all of that wow how long have you done that for? probably about 12 months love that so the aim is like a town capsule and you pass that down and it was Game of Thrones that taught me that because these people just I know it's acting but what they're acting is kind of art imitating life so they're kind of saying we know how to behave because our family behave this way so like Lannister's always pay their debts or whatever it is and what we have in the Bayam community is the ability now to combine and sand based on all we've learned and say right this is my family brand it's great you're just layering and do you think that's going to be the catalyst for real change I think the catalyst because you were talking about I want more people in ten positions now and do you think this is going to yeah I think there's a few things really I think there's an element of and I was reading recently about the end of slavery in the US and for a few years the slaves did what was called walking around and they would go into the bars and the restaurants that they weren't previously allowed into just to kind of show that they could do it so they'd go and sit in the bar and you know think of it here and I never was able to before but now I can and now I'm here and I didn't have a job to support that and I didn't have a life to support that but I was here and I just want to show you that I can do it too and I worry that within certainly our community excuse me if we're still doing that I want to be senior at PWC because I wasn't able to do that before and now I am what we should do is start our own absolutely we don't like role models I challenge we don't like role models, we have role models some of them are role models that we don't deserve like as much as I love his music Lil Wayne is not my role model but old Kanye now but old Kanye was because he was cool but we lack owners we lack leaders we lack people that can shape the destiny we lack entrepreneurial time we lack people that can hire whoever they want if I start a company after talking the way I've been talking to you for 20 minutes I can't then just allow it to become homogeneous I can't just allow it to become an all black company or an all female company I have to mix it I have to control in which to do that and I think that's what we lack in our community we don't lack role models there are you're right so what can we do to make the interview process as fairer if you think they're not fair because that's the other there's a lot of talk about it first thing do you think it's a fair process now generally I mean you can only look at the result and the result in the London market I walk around loads everyone still has their own image is that because it's not fair or they just have a lack of choice both so no it's not fair because everyone has their own image that's just a result as I said before on our side of the fence we need to get the candidates interested in insurance there's an attraction problem and we can't kick the can down the road and just focus on grads we need to try and get middle marriages getting people from other parts of FS so all of that matters but I also think that given my background I'm going to be predisposed to hire someone from a working class background that's a fact how do you know they're from a working class background though just talking to them having the conversation, learning about their experience and their challenge so I'm going to be predisposed to be looking for that so as a result you then change the environment you don't change like when a flower's broken you don't change the leaves, you change the soil you change the environment so instead of allowing me to just interview someone on my own where I'm going to obviously favor the person working class background you put me in a room with other people on my panel that aren't going to look for that aren't going to be turned on by that so that way you get a more balanced view and are you doing that at the moment so we're pushing for multiple things so I lead the cultural awareness network at Lloyd's at the moment which is what? so we've got representation chat goals we've got goals around celebrating different cultures and religions and ethnicities and we've got a committee together that's done a number of things which I'll touch on in a second one of them is around diverse recruitment panels and what we've done as a cultural awareness network as a community itself is we've done inclusive hiring training all of us and we are then offering ourselves out to the business as people that can go into an interview process and support the interviewer rather than the interviewee so I'm not really looking at you as a candidate I'm looking at the person interviewing you and making sure they're asking questions that are more inclusive than they would typically so if I'm so if they were sat in with me for instance and I'm absolutely loving the fact this person's a Man United fan and letting that skew the fact that they have their experience could be probed a little bit more or letting that skew the fact that just because they they've got the newest Jordans that are like and all these sorts of things they can give that person a nudge and sort of shape the interview to a slightly more balanced view so diversity recruitment panels is one blind CVs is another because again do you do blind CVs? so we're piloting it in operations at the moment at every level? so we're piloting blind CVs because what tends to happen in an interview process is the whole unconscious bias process starts with where have you come in from yeah classic question because when you say I'll travel down from Manchester instantly I'm going to be a mate you might even just be able to put on a great Mancunian accent and I'm sold so that's why we need the panel to go in hand with the plan to you that's conscious well I think more bias is conscious than unconscious I don't think unconscious bias is enough I think people focus on that and they think anything happens will send you an unconscious bias training as if that ticks the box whereas actually we need to just challenge your conscious biases and then allow you to talk about them we had an issue at Lloyd's where we did a Ramadanathon which effectively we had a number of us fasted for Ramadan and it sounds very altruistic for the whole month? well so it sounded very altruistic but one of the Muslim guys at work bet me that I couldn't fast for a day so I fasted for 12 days and the aim was to do a day in the first week, two days, three days four days until I got got on speed and we launched the Ramadanathon with a talk from a scholar in Lloyd's and we had a poster that said this is Ramadanathon popping to understand a little bit more about it and then we had complaints because it was a day after the Manchester bombing and certain people in the market were of the view that we shouldn't be promoting Islam in Lloyd's building because of the Manchester bombing and of course I can't go too much more into it because there's obvious confidentiality challenges but we I wanted to speak to the person individually who had made the complaint yeah definitely but it was a normal complaint I wanted to more than anything because they have the right to make the complaint no one has the right not to be offended you can take issue with being offended but you don't have a there's no God-given right not to be offended however I wanted to understand why that person felt that right? so it's the same with changing not changing the leaf or the flower you change the environment so you take that person away and you say open up and let me understand why you feel the way you understand and I don't think that happens enough and actually the diving festival would be much more successful if I was able to attract those people because most of the people that go went into it oh yeah you preach into the convert it I think there's an element of some of the silent majority want to stay silent because they're convinced that what they say is racist and what I'm saying is the head of the cultural awareness network or just a decent guy that loves to chat is some of the stuff you will say is racist just let's just own that some of the stuff that you will say to me will offend me let's just own that but let's have the conversation yeah yeah because if we don't have the conversation you go back to your dinner table and say what you want I go back to my dinner table and say what I want but we don't move forward so when we talk about the interview process there's loads of different things like the planned CVs and the structural differences do you go into helping to write the job specs initially because like wording terminology often pits people off yeah I've heard about this tech now so for example if you're in Brixton let's say and you actually quite want to be an underwriter and you look at a company website and you see everyone's white and old whatever it might be the stereotypes might be or you read the job spec and it doesn't quite attract you so I think there's a lot of work that can be done on that regard just even from writing the spec also the key skills you're looking for it's a lot of looking into that and then the actual interview questions so is it just like what do you do which might be good enough but the other thing is like so when I take feedback from candidates and clients we do board searches and heads of functions and stuff it's always the first thing anyone always says is I really feel like I've gotten well with that person I'm like what do you mean it's just a feeling I had so it's always the everyone goes on about fit cultural fit which is what does that even mean so I'm doing a course at the moment at London Business School it's like a Lloyd's leadership course and our question is around how important is culture for business what's the role of leaders in culture and how does Lloyd's future proof it's culture for success and culture is massive at the moment because it's nebulous it's so hard to grasp and does this person fit my culture is so subjective I believe that your culture could be focused around how do I get as many different viewpoints of the world into this place and at the moment it's about how do I not mess it up yeah which goes back to people that are scared to take a risk because you know that the whole thing of diversity is diversity in riches you want people with different backgrounds experiences and you have options better decision making but very hard to manage really hard to manage if you have a political discussion Brexit people from all over the country different educational backgrounds born in different countries religious backgrounds whatever you're going to have so many different worldviews and opinions it's great yeah it's hard to control but you see so my where my answer is from voted 100% for Brexit 100% for Brexit correct it's crazy and what's really interesting about that is I have no I have no insight into turnout or anything like that but they voted 100% Brexit when I go to this place there's probably three black people and when I leave there are two it's not a very diverse part of the world so it's more around the fear of change and if you look at the media and I come back to the media I think the media has a huge role to play and we should be forcing media to be more accountable for their actions all they saw was images of the jungle migration camp jungle migration camp is gone when's the last time you ever heard of ISIS on the news gone we don't need it anymore we don't need that as a vehicle to frighten people to do what we want so they'll move on to something else and now it's all about US and China and Russia so these people kind of made a view and I'm not saying this has got nothing to do with their education because everyone I've met there is super smart and very entrepreneurial but they voted 100% Brexit based on fear and I believe that we need to challenge that narrative the other thing I think I'll say Brexit is actually if you think about where most people get their news and information from, podcasts online, social media and you had the Cambridge Analytica staff, all the fat news so you don't half the time you don't know where people are learning from well I see a number of copies of the Sun up there and the Daily Mail which don't get me wrong, if Daily Mail was just showbiz and sport it would be the best newspaper in the world but it's all the other stuff that comes with it and I guess the point I was driving at with the people that I'm referring to in this particular part of the world is they did this out of fear but if your experience, your day to day experience is never ever with anybody of colour or anybody from a different background then you have no reason to believe that anything's broken so why fix it whereas in London it's different and I look at comic relief, I can't watch comic relief as much as I love Lenny Henry I can't watch it because the view of Africa hasn't changed since I was a child it's always starving children, flies on their face skinny Theresa May danced in I'll come to that, I've got the best means ever I've seen that with Skepta in the background but that is the image and it hasn't shifted but when you come to the city of London and talk about Africa all it's all about is opportunity and money is to be made there and that's almost this colonial view of Africa that's not changed so we'll pump out to the normal people that it's still going through challenge and you don't want to go there meanwhile I'm going to go there and make a load of money off it I see what you mean Africa is great population growth, it's a young motivated workforce great technological changes so the Theresa May thing I don't know which news channel it was I was watching on news and then there was Theresa May dancing and I was like I think they were in Jo Berg or something and then it panned to the reporter in front of an elephant I was thinking hold on a sec they're on their elephants in Jo Berg they're outside Jo Berg why are you reporting in front of an elephant and it was just classic that's the image they won't need to think of it and we've got to change that and I think we have a tremendous opportunity because we have people that are like minded coming together and as I said at the start of this diversity is less about what you look like and when we're doing our culture project we've spent a long time talking about what the market looks like because that's a hot topic but that's not diversity in my head diversity is diversity of ideas of experience of skill set so the opportunity that we have is to create an environment where that comes to the fore and it matters companies have a humongous opportunity to position it in such a way of not bringing your best self to work because it will make you feel good even though mental health is a huge issue it's bringing your best self to work because we need it and that's a different message that's to solve this problem we need more people from different viewpoints you know I look at empathy I did a Myers Briggs the other day my empathy level is very low naturally because I'm very task oriented whereas my fiance's empathy level is through the roof as she works in HR so we make her a good couple hopefully I'm pretty much invested into that we make a good couple because she approaches things very differently to how I do and often she'll talk to me about something at work and I'll say did you sack them and she'll be like no because of this factor and this factor and this factor and I'm thinking what's that got to do with the result it works and that has to happen in the office, it has to happen within the team it has to happen in your interview process and you have to actually look to piece together a jigsaw and that always changes under pressure and you'll know this when someone says I need to hire someone it needs to be done in the next three weeks that's different to I need to hire someone in the next six months we've been using technology because I'm starting to talk about automation so there's some really cool apps that have gamified recruitment so there's two I know Qmetrix which quite a few big phones use and then there's NAC KNACK really cool Indian firm and they do a lot of work and so essentially you well with NACK let's say you decide what attributes you're looking for so an accountant numerical skills, analytical you send the games to the candidate, they'll play the games and then out and pop their NACKs and so you'll receive the data and you'll say I think this person is closely aligned with the traits we're looking for and then you can invite them for interview so it takes away that blind CV, it's just a nice thing that you can use at some point in the interview process it shouldn't be to validate the decision you've already made so it should be either upfront or certainly after stage one like Qmetrix they do a very similar thing there's also quite an interesting facial recognition software it's called We Are Human I think and basically you send the candidate a video interview and so it films the person on the smartphone or whatever device you're using and then it has their live emotions and their live characteristics and then it would produce a report personality report based on facial expressions and there's some science behind we all have a certain number of facial expressions and so if we know we can use people to face it I'd love to try that The We Are Human stuff, the report wasn't that great but I'm sure it will get better so we don't use it but we will do and then the gamification stuff is a no brainer one of our private equity clients use it as standard for all of their highs and it's great. It also says quite a lot about the firm if you were using that stuff and I think it goes a little bit further than just, you know, let's take the names off Oh, consent I think, you know to touch on some of the themes we've said today about, you know, equality of opportunity and talking about levelling the playing field recognising people's differences and celebrating them the interview process backgrounds, media all of these things like you said if a company can draw a line in the sand and say, like I said with my family brand if a company can draw a line in the sand and say, yeah but this is how we're going to do it whether we're 330 years old or we're 2 years old this is a statement we're going to make to anyone that joins us from now I think that's a very powerful definitely powerful statement and it doesn't just attract young people it retains the people that you've got because it shows that you're willing to make a commitment to change and I think as a person from a black and ethnic minority background or just someone working in an industry that's desperate to attract people well, it's too proud to say so but it wants to all of that stuff sounds really positive and it sounds like we're at a water shed moment that there's a lot to be positive about there's a lot to be focused on there's less difference I'm not walking into a pub now and people are putting their drinks down like my parents did I'm walking to a pub where my best friend's white and I've got friends in from moving to London, I've got friends from India and I've got friends from China and Japan all of these different places, Africa and that's good and it's celebrated and it's right and I think there's a lot to be optimistic about we've just got to action it London's the most diverse city around it's great to be working here but all of these things we've talked about we just need to crack on I agree just crack on and it happens I've got to commit to it it feels like that's a good place to wind up thanks a lot, thanks for joining me thanks for having me hey folks thanks for listening don't forget to subscribe in all the usual places


What's going on guys welcome back to the channel critical overlord here So we'll be talking about nightmare in Elm Street in this video here today So nightmare in Elm Street seems to have a legacy sequel a recoil if you will on the way from Blumhouse It's apparently in development and they've been working on it some time for some time now according to the v-scooper I'm gonna start off my video firstly though by talking about the rumors about nightmare in Elm Street and The bid that was going on for quite some time and share what I knew and Frame it to how it seems to make this also more credible let alone Considering the fact that the v-scooper does have some credibility as you scroll through their Twitter profile So what I knew regarding nightmare in Elm Street and a potential revival legacy sequel if you will that would be on the way was from someone else who was involved in this bid With other come other Other companies like Paramount apparently was one Blumhouse Of course Blumhouse got seems to have gotten the rights and in their company, but they never specified who their company was So what was going on is that if this company the anonymous one that I never got told who they were if this company had gotten the rights They were planning to do a modern take on Freddy's revenge nightmare in Elm Street, too They were going to do a completely new story that would bring in a new male lead rather than a traditional final girl And they were hoping to have a female director Heather Langenkamp and Robert England would have been offered roles But Freddy himself would have been recast They would have just had Robert involved in the casting process with helping them find a new Freddy Now again, they didn't specify what studio they were with but it would have just been a modern take on Freddy's revenge and Freddy would have had a gloved arm instead of a glove on his hand kind of Seemed to be mechanical in the way from my notes that I have here, which if they were gonna explore that This does sound it did sound promising to me I don't know if it sound promising to you guys as far as I get in a modern take on Freddy's revenge But that's what this company would have done. They didn't seem to win this though The bid apparently ended in June because I've been getting told stuff as as soon as late last year around December Working its way through the summer. So they didn't get the rights to this They've gone completely silent AWOL and then the v-scooper puts out this bit of information saying that Blumhouse Has been secretly working on making a recoil of the first entry of this saga This revival is a high priority and they pointed out that they don't have a date on this yet But we shouldn't expect it to be so far away And then they also chimed in this to discuss some other expectation that could go into this The idea is that England will return or that England returns But also they heard a proposal to make Freddie CGI, but with his voice and here's the thing I Would rather you keep Robert than do that and just have Robert participate via his voice That seems like a waste even if anything don't even bother doing that I actually would rather you recast Robert, but again Jason Blum has stated he is confident He could convince Robert to return now I'm not against us getting a worthy performance out of Robert if Robert is able to pull it out up pull it out and Deliver an amazing performance as Freddie. I won't be against that hell What we could actually end up be doing is looking at a story that tells many different variations of what people perceive as Freddie Krueger and you could have probably different actors in the role as the dream demon maybe that's what's about to happen and it's gonna serve as a legacy sequel to that original movie because of how The story of Freddie has just grown people don't immediately envision him as Robert England's Krueger you could see people dream about different things with Krueger and he could take it on Similar to what they did with Candy Man in a lot of ways. That's just one possibility. I just started thinking off thinking of randomly but in terms of What I was told I think I would have preferred to see a modern take on Freddie's revenge of Blumhouse getting the rights to it I believe that is the case again going off of the V scoopers credibility and because of the fact that I was told that Blumhouse was involved in the bidding. I was kind of hoping they wouldn't win because Blumhouse Knowing what I know about the exorcist believer. I'm not excited about that knowing how they ended their halloween trilogy I'm not excited for anything that they have to offer when it comes to obtaining these legacy IPs or pertaining or pertaining to them obtaining these classic horror IPs and doing legacy sequels to them Because they just seem to go off of the rails if they start off promising. I Mean, that's the case with Halloween Halloween ends again. I liked it but in comparison to the 2018 film It's off the rails So with them taking this approach and then hearing that they allegedly want to do CGI perhaps That's already a bad taste in my mouth I would have rather this other company that allegedly wanted to do a story on a modern take of Jesse with a female director with Heather and Robert involved and then replacing and recasting for it ever rather seen How that would have turned out because I'm scared that with this revival as good as it could turn out I'm scared that Blumhouse is gonna crank out some more crap in the name of Bringing back a IP that everyone was eager to see but then when they put it out, you're gonna like, oh, we didn't want this from you What is this? But you guys let me know what you think about this down in the comments section below if you haven't already course make sure you subscribe turn on post notifications So that you never miss a video in the description. I will have links on my social media accounts I'm on Facebook Twitter and Instagram you can message me there of course Let me know is any movies news or reviews you'd like me to cover in the future and with all that in mind guys I will see you in the next video