Ep.15: Curious About Boards
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About this episode. In this episode of The Better Way?, Zach and Hui welcome investigative journalist Anna (A) Bianca Roach for a conversation about the intersection of corporate strategy, ethics, and global risk—and the evolving priorities for today’s corporate boards. Drawing from experience reporting for Agenda, a Financial Times publication, A shares insights into what keeps boards up at night: from tariffs and supply chain complexity to the murky waters of AI oversight and education.
A, Hui, and Zach also explore the nuanced realities behind corporate DEI and climate commitments, where public silence doesn’t always mean inaction—and how short-term shifts in public transparency may have long-term effects on public trust. The conversation closes with reflections on immigration policy, the environmental cost of AI, and the importance of asking “dumb” questions . . . because sometimes, that’s where the smartest answers begin. A also also reflects on their journey from multilingual childhood in Switzerland to a career in journalism shaped by curiosity and interest in cross-border collaboration.
Who? Zach Coseglia + Hui Chen, CDE Advisors; Anna (A) Bianca Roach
Full Transcript:
ZACH: Welcome back to The Better Way? Podcast brought to you by CDE Advisors. Culture. Data. Ethics. This is a curiosity podcast for those who ask, “There has to be a better way, right? There just has to be.” I'm Zach Coseglia, and I am joined as always by Hui Chen. Hi, Hui.
HUI: Hello Zach, how are you?
ZACH: Good. Happy to be here.
HUI: We are thrilled today to have a journalist friend with us, so this is yet another attempt from our part to bring different voices and different perspectives to our podcast. So, with us today is Anna Bianca Roach. They are a journalist covering corporate risk and strategy for Agenda, a specialist publication for the Financial Times. Anna has a master's degree in investigative journalism from Columbia University and was a journalist with Global Investigation Review prior to joining Financial Times. Welcome, Anna.
A ROACH: Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me on the podcast today. It's such a pleasure to join you.
ZACH: Absolutely. We're so happy you're here. Welcome to The Better Way? I'm going to ask you the question that I ask everyone on their first go at The Better Way?, and that is to invite you to introduce yourself to us and to our listeners. So who are you? Tell us more about yourself.
A ROACH: Yeah, I mean, Hui said it correctly, I'm Anna Bianca Roach. A lot of people also call me A. I'm a journalist and I'm a writer. I live in New York City. I currently work at Agenda, which, like you mentioned, is a specialist publication of the Financial Times. I write specialized content for the boards of directors. Before that, I did a lot of kind of international investigative cross-borders work. So, actually, Hui, the way that I met you was when I interviewed you when I worked at GIR, Global Investigations Review. That's a legal trade publication where I covered foreign bribery. Before that, I did a little bit of reporting on the UN.
Before that I did my investigative degree at Columbia, where I was focused a lot on cross-border investigations and I've always just been really interested in, you know, what collaboration looks like across borders, how people can share information. I'm also someone who's very curious and interested about the future and curious about what are the ways that we get there. And so that's been something that I think we'll probably talk a little bit about today, and something that's been really kind of informing my understanding of risk and what that means in a corporate environment. This is my first time in a while being on this side of the interview, so thanks for flipping the notebook on me.
ZACH: That's a really good point. Now I feel super self-conscious because here we are interviewing someone who's in the business of interviewing people. So that just creates a whole another layer of anxiety for me. So thank you for that A.
A ROACH: Don't even worry about it. My interviews don't get published on the air, so we're really doing two different types of art and I don't think any comparison is necessary.
ZACH: It's true. That's great, 100%. One of the things that we sometimes talk to folks about, especially in ethics and compliance and corporate responsibility, is how we got to this fairly specialized sometimes obscure corner of the world. For me, it was very much a series of happenstances that got me here, as opposed to a series of really thoughtful, intentional decisions, which I think is sort of interesting and kind of weird. How did you find your way to this very unique corner of the world of journalism?
A ROACH: Yeah. The way that people get to specialize content is always really interesting. So I grew up in Switzerland. I grew up very grateful to have grown up learning a bunch of different languages. I've always been someone who was really curious about breaking the communication barrier. I always enjoyed something that was formative for me that's silly, but when I was little, you know, my family, we speak French and Italian, and I spoke Italian. My cousin spoke French. But we both spoke enough that like I would speak in Italian to him, and he would speak in French to me and we would like understand each other, which is like a silly childhood story.
But that's just like triangulation and just like, oh, I'm invested in understanding you, we're trying to have this conversation across this barrier that was really interesting to me. So yeah, growing up I was always very literary focused. I was always a writer. I always knew I was going to be a writer. And as I went through academia, I got a degree in Canada at the University of Toronto. I studied conflict studies. And I loved the research and the methodology, but I was just struggling with academia and I found it to be quite slow. And I found that the amount of effort that I put into writing something often didn't pan out for the amount of attention that it got. Not even attention, but just like it might never see the see the light of day. And that was something that I really kind of struggled with and that kind of led me to journalism.
So by the time I got to journalism, I kind of had these different languages. I knew that I was interested in an investigative skill set. That led to me getting this specialized degree in investigations at Columbia where I got a chance to take some classes in cross-border investigations—and I was looking at like how do you investigate somebody like the World Bank? How do you investigate somebody like the UN? That led to me briefly covering the UN. Then I spent a couple of years at GIR. And I think that was probably some of the most like super, super, super, super specialized. And so, then I was looking for a beat that was a little bit broader and eventually I landed kind of where I am now, where I get to cover. And the name of my beat at Agenda is Audit, Risk and Strategy. So really I'm always looking at when companies make certain decisions about human capital like digital strategy, AI, climate, supply chain, like all of these big picture decisions. My job is now to ask questions about how people are making those decisions. I definitely was not gearing my career towards covering the audit industry. It just has been a really fascinating time, but here I am. It's been a really fascinating time.
ZACH: But here you are. Talk to us more about what you're doing now. Give us a little bit more about your work at Agenda.
A ROACH: I can cover a lot of different topics, but with a very specific angle and the angle is or the mission for FT, the Financial Times specialist publications, our mission is to help people to do their jobs better. And Agenda, our publication, we specifically focus on the job of being a board director. So, what's information that board directors need to know that'll help them do their job better?
HUI: Your audience for the Agenda is the boards of directors of companies. What do you do to find out what interests them?
A ROACH: The easy answer is keeping a brush to the news. But then in terms of the more interpersonal aspects, this is the first time really that I've had an audience that is very close to--I guess that was kind of true of GIR, as well—where our audience is very, very close to who our sources are. And so very often in conversations that I have, one of the questions that I'll my last question for every interview is always like, did I miss anything? Is there something else that you want to talk about? Is there something else that you think is interesting that I'm not looking at? I'll be on the phone with somebody, and I'll be like, hey, what's going on? What's worrying you right now? What's keeping you up? What should I be looking at?
HUI: So, what are some of the things that are keeping boards up at night?
A ROACH: Tariffs and cyber security as far as I can tell really seem to be the big one. And I guess I'll expand out the tariffs a little bit where that kind of goes into the broader bucket of like economic uncertainty as well as geopolitical uncertainty. I think a lot of people have talked about the shifting world order, new world order, like all that kind of conversation. And for companies, I think, right now it's a matter of really getting down to brass tax, “okay, so we manufacture this toy for children and it requires this much nickel and it requires this much aluminum and it requires this much plastic and it requires this much of these 17 fibers. And where do we get them and what factories do they get processed in and how much tariffs are each of those nodes, are all of them like subject to?”
So right now, I think it's a question of people just having to get really serious about what's in their supply chain and that's kind of been a theme as long as I've been at this job and probably for many years prior to that. It's definitely been a lot of effort for companies to try and understand what's in their supply chain, all the way to the source material . . .
HUI: Are boards getting involved at that level of you know what's in our supply chain or what's the level of board involvement on this on the tariff concerns?
A ROACH: Yeah, that will certainly vary by board and by board member. Certainly, the role of the board is not to be too . . . they're not supposed to be super, super, super in the weeds. So, a board member is probably not at the level of saying, “hey, you know, we have ye much like Tungsten and right now we're getting it from China. But what if we got it from this other country instead?” They're probably more at the level of like asking their management like, “Hey, so do we know who our third tier suppliers are? Who do we have? What part of our supply chain? What parts of our supply chain’s in India? How much do we rely on them?” So they're a little bit . . .
HUI: It's making sure that the management really has a handle on things.
A ROACH: Yeah. As far as what comes out in my conversations very often, we always make a point of having paragraph in the top of the story that says like, boards should ask their management about this, that and the other boards; should consider doing this or that. And one of the things that often people will tell me is just like boards should ask their manager. You know, how are tariffs impacting us or what part of our supply chain is in X country? So, yeah, they're certainly not supposed to be like too deeply in the weeds.
ZACH: One of the things I'm really interested in is we just did an episode about ethics, where among other things, we talked about politics and how politics is playing a role in corporate decision-making. And a great example of that we've raised and that often comes up is companies’ diversity, equity and inclusion commitments, and were we to read a lot of the media around a topic like that, we would get the impression that there has been quite a shift in the way that companies are approaching these things. Do you think that's a fair reflection or do you think that there is actually a disconnect between reporting on certain of these issues and the actual effort that companies are continuing to put in or the investment that they're continuing to make?
A ROACH: Yeah, I think that's certainly possible. Something that I think is noteworthy is that a lot of the reporting . . . companies have been taking certain words out of their disclosures and that relates to DEI, that also relates to certain types of environmental or climate related commitments. A lot of different topics or types of commitments that have been politicized, people are just pulling from their disclosures. It's a decrease in transparency. But just because people are no longer saying what they're doing doesn't necessarily mean that they're not doing it. And the difficulty with that is that obviously companies are reacting. Companies are taking these words out of their disclosures because they worry that that might put them at some kind of legal risk. And for that reason, they're not going to tell me about it, right? For the same reasons that they don't want their stuff to be in their 10Ks or whatever are the same reasons that they were not going to be telling a journalist about what they may or may not be doing for DEI—or what they may or may not be doing for climate. However, it is also true that I think a lot of these programs have been designed very thoughtfully and have been quite successful. People who built these programs thoughtfully, and in places where those programs are successful, what I'm hearing people say is that they are in fact a cornerstone of Company strategy. Your DEI strategy, if you've been thoughtful about it, if it's successful, your DEI strategy is just a cornerstone of your human capital strategy.
HUI: It is so ingrained in your company's DNA that it just naturally sort of . . . not naturally, but it does happen as part of the strategy and operation of the company.
A ROACH: Right, exactly.
HUI: Yeah, it's interesting. I was thinking about this very issue. [Italian]. So I do about 20 minutes of Duolingo a day to keep up with my Italian. And it's very interesting. So the Italian language program in there, if you look at . . . so you have these stories in the cast of characters. In your daily regime, there's a couple of stories and the cast of characters in these stories are very diverse. I don't know Duolingo ever announced a particular commitment to create diverse characters in their stories, but there they are. And I think I'm drawing from what you're saying is, some things the companies are publicly saying. And then there's something that they're doing daily. And if you have a real commitment to something, you don't necessarily need to be saying all the things very publicly, so long as you're really doing them daily.
A ROACH: Yeah. I think that's exactly right. And I think right now a lot of companies are having a lot of introspection about like, how do we . . . so there's all this DEI. There was an executive order saying illegal DEI. We're still not super legally clear, I don't think on exactly what that means and exactly what that accountability hook might mean. So, there's all this kind of like looming regulatory, will it, won't it type of threat. But ultimately, yeah, like you say, if it's an ingrained part of your practice, they're going to continue doing that. “We're so committed to it in value. We can't use these words anymore. What can we tell our employees so that when we pull this language from our website that people don't feel like they're being abandoned or people don't feel like the culture is being turned over?” So I think that's an important part of the conversation right now and that's a part of the conversation that's difficult to get to as a reporter. But that's a part of the conversation that's often not in the media because by virtue of being media, the part that we see is the disclosures.
ZACH: Look, I hope that that's the case. I'm cynical, naturally, but I do hope that that's the case because it feels like so much of what we're seeing and reading about is very reactive to a situation that exists in the United States right now that by all accounts has a term limit. But I see these things, and I often ask: what's going to happen when the pendulum inevitably swings back in the other direction. That can be managed if what we're kind of hypothesizing here is true. It's going to be much more problematic if it's not, because I think that there is a real credibility issue around what is being said publicly versus what may be said publicly four years from now. And I just am not sure how much folks are going to actually be able to come back from the public pullback that we've seen.
A ROACH: Yeah. Something that's come up in a couple of different areas of my reporting is just the importance of just being very clear on what your values are and sticking to them in whichever direction.
ZACH: Which by the way, and this is maybe a more eloquent way of saying what I was trying to say, which is, your values do matter. And so it's hard to accept the fact that you may be exercising and living your values privately, but doing something publicly that very well may, on its face, appear to be counter to your values.
A ROACH: Yeah. And I think there's a lot of case studies kind of going in both directions. Target's a great example of what happens when you kind of flip-flop. Both with their pride collection and then if I remember correctly, they also recently had a boycott related to pulling certain things that were created by black creators, if I remember correctly. Yeah, I think what happened at Target is a great example of how companies lose credibility if they don't stick to their values.
HUI: I also think it's interesting from a reporting point of view that the companies who are trying to be quietly doing the things that they believe in naturally want to fly under the radar and they would not want to be reported in the press about their efforts in those area, which leads then obviously to that under reporting that we probably might be experiencing. But you mentioned the talent pool and the DEI impact on the talent pool. There's another issue that impacts on talent pool that you have you have reported on which is immigration environment, the immigration enforcement and the overall political environment surrounding immigrants. How is that impacting the talent pool for corporations?
A ROACH: Yeah, that's a really good question. And it turns out it's really difficult to answer. I've been trying. I think that's one of those things that's a little bit too soon to tell, but it's also one of those things that by the time the data comes in, whatever's going to happen will have already happened. So it's really difficult to have foresight around this particular issue. I will say as I was preparing for this conversation, I was looking up some statistics and from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we know that in 2024 immigrants accounted for 19.2, so almost 20% of the entire US workforce.
So in that case they defined immigrant as someone who is born outside of the United States to non-American parents. And that accounted for people kind of like across from green card all the way to like folks were undocumented, like every kind of variation of like legal status. Immigrants account for 20% of the US labor force. And so I just think, like, however it goes from here, however more challenging it becomes for immigrants to come to America, however more challenging it becomes for immigrants to live in America—if people start leaving, that impact is certainly going to be felt depending on how big that number is. And another thing that I have heard recently that I find very interesting is that at universities outside of the United States we're seeing a rise in interest in their programs from US candidates. We're also seeing that a lot of science in the United States is being defunded. And we're also seeing that foreign universities are attracting more foreign students who would have previously chosen a US university. So we're seeing stuff like people are choosing to go to University of British Columbia in Canada over a Stanford, even though two years ago, except for very specific circumstances, that would have been a crazy choice, right?
I've been asking people this question. I've been trying really hard to kind of get a sense of, you know, what do we know, like what is certain? And there's not a lot of data that's available about this yet. But this is certainly something that I'm paying attention to. And also, if you're listening and you would like to talk to me about it, I would love to talk about it and perhaps my contact information can be made available.
ZACH: Absolutely. We will make sure to link when we release this episode for sure. So, we talked about some of the things that are on the board's minds. We talked about the change in the world order, supply chains, tariffs. We talked about DEI, we've talked about immigration. I got to imagine that AI is a top issue for most boards.
A ROACH: Yeah.
ZACH: Yeah. What are the areas where there seems to be the most discussion or interest or curiosity?
A ROACH: Yeah, one of the big ones for the board is just trying to figure out who's responsible for AI. And so, a lot of that is kind of the like very weedsy, like what's in your charter kind of energy—trying to understand, okay, if we build this AI solution and something goes bad, whose name is on the dotted line? So a lot of it is just determining who has oversight for it. And is that the audit committee? Is that the risk committee? Should there be a tech committee? Another conversation related to that that's happening a lot for boards related to AI is the question of education and do people have enough? A lot of companies right now are trying to figure out how many tech experts do we need on our board and how do you kind of balance the skill of being able to ask good questions about anything that you're faced with versus the specific technical skill of being able to look at an algorithm and be like, where does that data come from?
ZACH: On this point about education, what are you seeing, around board member education and familiarity with AI so that their questions are being driven from a place of knowledge as opposed to a place of hype?
A ROACH: Yeah. I mean, that's a really difficult call right now, especially for, again, companies that are not primarily tech focused. It seems to be a really big challenge to have people just like asking the right questions. And I think one of the issues with that is that there is . . . I mean, I think people are afraid to ask questions and they're afraid to see, they're afraid to look stupid. Honestly. I think in a lot of cases people are just not asking simple questions. This is one of the things that I appreciate the most about my job is that I've gotten so good at asking the dumb question because very often I find that the dumb question actually has a very interesting answer.
ZACH: 100%
A ROACH: Yeah. And I think that at the board level, when you get into the boardroom, that's a very particular type of relationship that you have with people there and you have to present a very particular type of way. And so I think people feel a lot of pressure to seem like they know a lot. And in a lot of the cases, I think that might lead to people just like not asking the basic question because they're afraid that they're supposed to already know.
HUI: I feel like in every executive decision-making process, there really should be someone whose job it is just to ask stupid questions. Because honestly, stupid questions is, one, you think it's stupid and you think you're the only one who has it. It turns out oftentimes many other people have it. I somehow I think if we have a way to remove that stigma of, I'm afraid of asking a dumb question. Dumb questions is oftentimes where we get to the smart places.
ZACH: Well, at the end of the day, what it really is, is just curiosity, which pretty much powers everything that we do. We're just about ready to go into our questionnaire. But I'm wondering, is there anything else we haven't discussed that you're curious about? This is a curiosity podcast. We value curiosity so much, and you're in the business of telling stories that are driven by your curiosity. So, hey, what are you curious about?
A ROACH: Yeah, there's a lot that I'm curious about. I think with AI is such a big part of my beat right now and there's two questions there that I kind of keep noodling over and I feel like they're connected and I'm kind of still looking for exactly how they're connected, but it's the skill part and then the energy part and the environment part. So the skill part is we know from a study from Microsoft that if you rely on AI really heavily to do certain skills, I think Microsoft called it cognitive loss. The more you rely on AI to write your emails for you, the worse you are going to get at actually writing emails. And so, I think when companies are deploying these huge AI systems that are going to automate certain parts of engineering or programming, or this is a big part of the audit industry right now—auditing.
Those people who come up in the generation who have access to these tools, are they going to have the same training? Are they still going to be able to do the basic task that they need to know how to do? Because if you don't know how to write code and you have AI write code and you read it, but you don't know how to write code, and something goes wrong—you can't fix it. And so there's that part where there's the question of like over relying on AI. How do you use AI and kind of like make the most of it, but also not chip away at your own skill set and the things that you're good at as a human, because we need that. And then there's the environment and the energy part where we know that AI is a massive and big data in general and AI kind of like exacerbated this by a lot—but we know that data centers consume a tremendous amount of water, a tremendous amount of power.
I'm really interested and curious about opportunities to develop it in such a way where, when are we using AI where truly we could not do this thing without AI? Or when are we using AI that this is going to save me like 3 days’ worth of work versus 15 minutes for sending an e-mail? So yeah, I'm curious about what does it look like developing that technology? What are those processes like? What does it look like to have a policy governing the technology so that we create a relationship with AI where we use it and we have an understanding that like, okay, I'm trying to create this cat picture. Is that worth pulling a bottle of water out of the desert?
ZACH: 100%, yeah. A topic that would be worthy of many episodes, in fact. All right, so it's time for The Better Way questionnaire. This is our version of the Inside the Actors’ Studio. James Lipton, Bernard Pivot, Proust questionnaire and Hui, why don't you ask question number one?
HUI: All right, so question number one is one of those choose from one of two possible questions. So if you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be? Or you can answer, is there a quality about yourself that you're currently working to improve? If so, what?
A ROACH: Trying to get better at time management, but I think that's kind of a boring answer, so I'm going to answer both questions and I'll say that if I could wake up tomorrow with a new ability, I wish I could speak every language. I think that would be really cool and useful.
ZACH: Totally. Fully. By the way, my answer was very similar to your first one, except it wasn't time management. It is the ability to manipulate time, which would solve your time management problem.
A ROACH: That's a better one. I like that one better.
ZACH: You have to be very careful with it though. With great power comes quite a bit of responsibility. All right, question number 2 is also a choose one of two. Who is your favorite mentor or who do you wish you could be mentored by?
A ROACH: That's right. I think my favorite mentor, I'm going to name Sheila Colonel from the Columbia School of Journalism. She runs a program there and she is just a phenomenal journalist who has done some really important writing about the Philippines. She's in a lot of really impactful accountability journalism. I look up to her a lot. I'm not sure that she would describe herself as a mentor to me. However, I think learning the trade with her, she has a very strong internationalist, cross-border perspective. And I think learning the trade from her was really influential. So I'm going to say Sheila Connell.
ZACH: Perfect.
HUI: Great. What is the best job, paid or unpaid, that you've ever had?
A ROACH: I mean, I really have been a journalist for most of my career. The jobs that I've had that were not journalism were not that fun. And I'm pretty glad I have a job that allows me to ask a lot of questions and I have a job that I was able to turn curiosity into a career. So, I'm pretty happy with that one.
HUI: Awesome.
ZACH: It's pretty good. All right, number four. What is your favorite thing to do?
A ROACH: I really like to dance.
ZACH: Do you really, like in public?
A ROACH: Yeah, it depends. I don't like to perform. I have it in situations where I'm dancing and I'm seeing videos come out and I'm just like, no, thank you. Like I’m like, please don't put that on. I'm not here to perform. I really like dancing. I do some whacking. I'm very liable to be just like dancing in in my kitchen while the pasta's cooking. I also will just take any opportunity, like if it's a bar and people are dancing, like I will be getting into it. So yeah, I love to groove.
ZACH: Amazing. I love that. It's got to be pretty hard in today's world to dance at a bar without cameras pointing at you, sadly.
A ROACH: I find people are usually pretty respectful about it. I've had some few exceptions. I have had at least one situation where somebody was filming me and I kept all kinds of gestures, all kinds of don't look at me, blocking your camera, all this kind of stuff, and they didn't listen to me. But at large, people point their phones at me and I'm just like, no, thank you. People are usually trying to not be rude. If anything, people usually mean it as a compliment. I just prefer not to, so it's not usually a very stressful interaction.
ZACH: True, yeah. I was just trying to have brunch on Saturday and the entire thing was being recorded and finally I was like, I don't want to be. I don't want to be in your reel. I don't. I'm just having a meal.
A ROACH: I just would really like to end the expectation that everything we ever do is on social media at all times. I really don't need a picture of the sandwich. It’s fine.
ZACH: Totally.
HUI: I'm with you.
ZACH: 100%. They didn't even eat the food. This was the most depressing part. The food was just a prop. It was just to take pictures of. They didn't touch the food. It was horrifying. Anyway, sorry. I know I'm . . .
A ROACH: No.
HUI: Oh no, that is bad.
A ROACH: That feels offensive to me.
HUI: That is bad.
ZACH: I'm displaying my geriatric millennialism. All right, question five.
HUI: All right, we're going to get back to the questionnaire. Next question is what is your favorite place?
A ROACH: Let's do it. I was thinking about this one. I love a mountain lake. I've never met a mountain lake I didn't like. I think there's something about the mountain lake ecosystem that I just find very, like, peaceful and calming. So I'm going to choose a lake in the mountains.
HUI: It's that Switzerland in you.
ZACH: That's right.
A ROACH: That's right. It probably is. That's what they also do.
ZACH: That's great. Totally. All right. Question six. What makes you proud?
A ROACH: I think when I'm writing a difficult story and I hear from somebody that I understood them exactly right, like if somebody explains something that's kind of complicated to me and I write it up and then I hear them say like, that's exactly what I meant. That's a moment where I'm like, cool, I did good. This worked out.
ZACH: I like that.
A ROACH: That's like a small work moment that makes me feel good.
ZACH: Nice.
HUI: What e-mail sign off do you use most frequently?
A ROACH: It's probably a toss-up between cheers and thanks. And I tend to use thanks a lot. I've been trying making an active effort to only say thanks if there's actually something I'm thanking the person for, similar to how I'm trying to not apologize for everything all the time. So yeah, I'm going to say cheers.
ZACH: I’m a “thanks” guy. The big question for me is, is it thanks comma or thanks exclamation point? And I have to really talk myself up that exclamation point because rarely am I really that thankful.
A ROACH: If the gratitude is like five points are up, you got to add that exclamation mark.
ZACH: That's right. Exactly. All right. Question 8. What trend in your field is most overrated?
A ROACH: Layoffs. There's a lot of layoffs in journalism right now. We could stand with fewer of them. I'm also going to cheat and answer the opposite of this question, which is I think something that I think is really underrated in my field is collaboration. I think there's a lot of pressure to have the big story out and it'd be your byline on it. And there's a lot of other places in the world where journalists are a lot more collaborative. And I wish that we had more of an instinct of just like the important thing is that this information is out versus like that my name be on it. So I'm always trying to encourage my colleagues to be more collaborative. So that's one thing that I want to see more of purely off more collaboration.
ZACH: Love it. It's great.
HUI: I love flipping that question that way. I appreciate that. So the last question is what word would you use to describe your day so far?
A ROACH: Pleasant, started off kind of hectic. I had a bad commute, but I always love my conversations with you and I've been looking to looking forward to this one. So, far pretty pleasant. I had really good Yoza for your lunch, so that was great.
HUI: Same here.
ZACH: Very good.
HUI: Did you take a picture of it?
A ROACH: No, I did not. I missed it. Instagram is going to have to wait. I'll have to get it again just to prove that I did it.
ZACH: Thank you for that. Well, A, thank you so much with an exclamation point. Thank you with an exclamation point so much for joining The Better Way. It's been a really fun conversation and I hope you'll come back.
A ROACH: Perfect. Absolutely. Thanks so much to both of you. And it's really interesting being on this side of the recorder, so thanks for that.
ZACH: Absolutely.
HUI: Thank you.
ZACH: And thank you all for tuning in to The Better Way? Podcast. For more information about this or anything else that’s happening with CDE Advisors, visit our website at www.CDEAdvisors.com, where you can also check out the Better Way blog. And please like and subscribe to this series on Apply or Spotify. And, finally, if you have thoughts about what we talked about today, the work we do here at CDE, or just have ideas for Better Ways we should explore, please don’t hesitate to reach out—we’d love to hear from you. Thanks again for listening.