Leigh Honeywell is founder of digital security company Tall Poppy and shares the highs and lows of building a tech company from scratch but what has piqued her interest in disaster preparedness and housing advocacy
Transcript
Hi, I'm Dhruti Shah, and this is my podcast
Leigh Honeywell:Have You Thought About. Thank you for joining us for season
Leigh Honeywell:two. I'm a writer and I love to find out about what passions
Leigh Honeywell:people are pursuing. And also what makes them tick the
Leigh Honeywell:podcasts for those who are at a reckoning and tired of being
Leigh Honeywell:told you can really just have this one focus just one thing
Leigh Honeywell:that makes you you. In each edition, I'm going to chat with
Leigh Honeywell:someone who breaks these lines and who's managed to fit things
Leigh Honeywell:together in their life or profession that you might not
Leigh Honeywell:think of as an obvious match. You're about to hear me chatting
Leigh Honeywell:with Leigh Honeywell, a digital security expert, founder and CEO
Leigh Honeywell:of Tall Poppy, and someone who has a passion for disaster
Leigh Honeywell:preparedness and activism.
Dhruti Shah:Now Leigh, you've got over a decade's experience
Dhruti Shah:in computer security. And you've worked with some pretty big
Dhruti Shah:names before setting up a very unusual company. So tell us a
Dhruti Shah:little bit more about your background and journey Tall
Dhruti Shah:Poppy.
Leigh Honeywell:I think the the thing that I love the most about
Leigh Honeywell:working on Tall Poppy is that it really combines my sort of past
Leigh Honeywell:day jobs and educational background and computer science
Leigh Honeywell:where I was working at big companies like Microsoft,
Leigh Honeywell:Salesforce, and eventually Slack doing somewhat traditional
Leigh Honeywell:cybersecurity work, although I was fortunate to get to do
Leigh Honeywell:pretty cutting edge stuff, protecting companies protecting
Leigh Honeywell:infrastructure, all of that stuff, super important and very,
Leigh Honeywell:like formative in my career.
Leigh Honeywell:And at the same time I was doing a lot of activist work has been
Leigh Honeywell:organising, and being able to combine the two in the way that
Leigh Honeywell:we work with individuals and in many cases, individuals who are
Leigh Honeywell:themselves fighting for social change and social justice. I
Leigh Honeywell:think that's something that I find really fulfilling about the
Leigh Honeywell:current work and the work that we do with Tall Poppy.
Dhruti Shah:What is Tall Poppy, for people who think maybe it's
Dhruti Shah:like something gardening related, what is this cool thing
Dhruti Shah:that you've actually created?
Leigh Honeywell:So we're a cybersecurity company focused on
Leigh Honeywell:personal cybersecurity. So, you know, many people have done this
Leigh Honeywell:sort of like you work at a big company, and you have to do the
Leigh Honeywell:security training that's like, don't click on the phishing
Leigh Honeywell:email and get the company hacked. Our focus is really
Leigh Honeywell:making sure that people don't get hacked, and people don't
Leigh Honeywell:experience cybersecurity issues as well as more broad or
Leigh Honeywell:personal security issues. We originally came at it from the
Leigh Honeywell:angle of online harassment, that that was like the big like blow
Leigh Honeywell:up issue that people were dealing with these sort of
Leigh Honeywell:online mobbing things and cyber stalking all of this. People
Leigh Honeywell:sometimes use the term cyber bullying, which I've always
Leigh Honeywell:found it like, it's just bullying, it happens to be on a
Leigh Honeywell:computer, but it's, you know, it's and I think calling it
Leigh Honeywell:bullying, in many ways, also sort of takes away from the
Leigh Honeywell:severity of some of the stuff that we've dealt with where it's
Leigh Honeywell:very much like, full on like criminal stalking. I've never
Leigh Honeywell:been one to really like that, that sort of cyber bullying
Leigh Honeywell:thing, I think diminishes a little bit of the threats that
Leigh Honeywell:people face. So really, the focus is that sort of personal
Leigh Honeywell:cybersecurity, outside of the corporate firewall, protecting
Leigh Honeywell:people's personal accounts, personal information, and
Leigh Honeywell:personal safety.
Dhruti Shah:But how did you make that move from taking
Dhruti Shah:perhaps more secure roles? And being like, No, I'm gonna go
Dhruti Shah:away and recreate this app create this thing that's
Dhruti Shah:actually quite at the vanguard. There's not a lot of things out
Dhruti Shah:there, like what you've created. So how did you take that risk as
Dhruti Shah:it were
Leigh Honeywell:The fortune and the misfortune, I think the
Leigh Honeywell:fortune is that I was in a position where I'd been working
Leigh Honeywell:in tech for a bunch of years, I had some savings, I had a
Leigh Honeywell:network, I had access to venture capital. So in many ways, I was
Leigh Honeywell:very fortunate. And then the misfortune is, sometimes there's
Leigh Honeywell:an itch that nobody else has scratched yet, and you got to be
Leigh Honeywell:the one to scratch it. And I actually came up with the idea
Leigh Honeywell:that would eventually become Tall Poppy, all the way back in
Leigh Honeywell:2014. During the the GamerGate crisis, when all of these women
Leigh Honeywell:video game journalists and critics were getting attacked
Leigh Honeywell:online by like a horde of weirdos who really had too much
Leigh Honeywell:time on their hands. This sort of idea came to me that like,
Leigh Honeywell:how do we get leverage to support people who are dealing
Leigh Honeywell:with stuff like this? And you know, when you think about who
Leigh Honeywell:can be the sort of payor for stuff like this, it could be the
Leigh Honeywell:individual - that seems that sucks. It could be like
Leigh Honeywell:governments or agencies, sort of the nonprofit world, or when
Leigh Honeywell:it's people that have a job, shouldn't the employer have a
Leigh Honeywell:duty of care, to protect people who are dealing with these
Leigh Honeywell:personal security, personal safety issues in the course of
Leigh Honeywell:their job.
Leigh Honeywell:And that was the real lightning bolt moment was like, Oh, this
Leigh Honeywell:is something that like, companies should be paying for
Leigh Honeywell:to protect their staff. So came up with the idea all the way
Leigh Honeywell:back in 2014. But I was living in the US on a visa, and you're
Leigh Honeywell:not allowed to like start companies on the visa that I was
Leigh Honeywell:on. So I was like, Ah, I guess I'm just gonna, like keep
Leigh Honeywell:thinking about this for four years until I got my green card.
Leigh Honeywell:And then I got my green card in February 2018. And I
Leigh Honeywell:incorporated in April. So that was like, I was kind of like,
Leigh Honeywell:well, nobody else has done this. Clearly, this is something that
Leigh Honeywell:I still need to do. It's I've still been thinking about it. I
Leigh Honeywell:still see it as a need in the world. And the rest is history.
Dhruti Shah:Your passion - how did you make sure that it was
Dhruti Shah:maintained? Because four years is a long time, especially in
Dhruti Shah:the tech world.
Leigh Honeywell:If you leave it at that timeframe, there was an
Leigh Honeywell:election in 2016. That was pretty stressful living in the
Leigh Honeywell:States as somebody like as an immigrant, there was a lot of
Leigh Honeywell:things going on day to day, but I kept doing the work
Leigh Honeywell:fundamentally in my evenings and weekends working one on one with
Leigh Honeywell:individuals who were dealing with these like severe personal
Leigh Honeywell:security issues.
Leigh Honeywell:Whether it was because of activism, whether it was like,
Leigh Honeywell:you know, connected to an intimate partner violence
Leigh Honeywell:scenario or intimate partner abuse, we saw a real rise in
Leigh Honeywell:that time in a type of malware called stalker wear, which is
Leigh Honeywell:spousewhere, which is like an even creepier term, this is sort
Leigh Honeywell:of apps that people would installon their significant
Leigh Honeywell:others phones, either with or without their knowledge, and
Leigh Honeywell:then use them to surveil things like location. And there's also
Leigh Honeywell:you know, mobile devices have built in functionality that
Leigh Honeywell:allows for that kind of surveillance stuff like the Find
Leigh Honeywell:My, in iOS, like, you know, you can consensually share your
Leigh Honeywell:location with people sometimes that's like a healthy and good
Leigh Honeywell:thing, if it's like a parent who's trying to keep track of
Leigh Honeywell:like a small child, but in an abusive situation that can be
Leigh Honeywell:really, really scary. So really sort of tracking that arc of the
Leigh Honeywell:field, staying current with threats that people were facing.
Leigh Honeywell:And then when I had this sort of logistical opportunity, and the
Leigh Honeywell:time was right, for me, personally, I was able to, you
Leigh Honeywell:know, actually start the company and hit the ground running
Leigh Honeywell:because I had been keeping up to date. And I also spent a lot of
Leigh Honeywell:time, it's sort of cheesy, but like learning about
Leigh Honeywell:entrepreneurship, and like talking to other people who
Leigh Honeywell:started companies and learning all that stuff, so that when I
Leigh Honeywell:was actually logistically able to, particularly with the visa
Leigh Honeywell:stuff, I was able to start the company.
Dhruti Shah:You're a founder, you're not a conventional type
Dhruti Shah:of founder. So what's that journey been like?
Leigh Honeywell:Ups and downs but generally trending upwards.
Leigh Honeywell:I think the.. it has been harder in ways that I didn't
Leigh Honeywell:anticipate. And some of the things have been easier stuff
Leigh Honeywell:that's been harder has been things like fundraising, there's
Leigh Honeywell:an oft touted statistic that 3% of venture capital is raised by
Leigh Honeywell:women, which is pretty depressing, if you think about,
Leigh Honeywell:like, some of the big brands and names in the world that were
Leigh Honeywell:founded by women. And I think every woman founder goes into
Leigh Honeywell:this being like, Oh, I know, it's 3%. But it can't be that
Leigh Honeywell:hard, right? Like, I'm really good at what I do. There's
Leigh Honeywell:always this sort of, like, I didn't follow up on that one
Leigh Honeywell:email, maybe it's not, maybe I'm not dealing with bias, maybe
Leigh Honeywell:it's actually just that, like, I suck personally right? Then I
Leigh Honeywell:come back to like, 3%. That's pretty bad. That's pretty bad.
Leigh Honeywell:So I'm very fortunate to have some fantastic investors on, you
Leigh Honeywell:know, on my cap table that have believed in the company that
Leigh Honeywell:believed in me and my team, but I think the the fundraising
Leigh Honeywell:thing has been legitimately really, really hard.
Leigh Honeywell:Hopefully, by the time this podcast comes out, we'll have
Leigh Honeywell:some exciting news to share. So stay tuned. It's been a slog, I
Leigh Honeywell:think that's the technical term, the stuff that's been easier
Leigh Honeywell:that people I feel like constantly complain about, I
Leigh Honeywell:hear other founders being like, man, it's so hard to hire, it's
Leigh Honeywell:so hard to like, get the word out. And I think we have the
Leigh Honeywell:sort of fortune of this is an issue that people care a lot
Leigh Honeywell:about, and want to work on. And so, you know, when we've been
Leigh Honeywell:recruiting when we've been hiring, we've just had like, a
Leigh Honeywell:tonne of incredible, incredible people apply. I feel like, if I
Leigh Honeywell:had the budget, I could hire twice as like, I could double
Leigh Honeywell:the team tomorrow, which would be challenging for like other
Leigh Honeywell:cultural reasons.
Leigh Honeywell:But I think the I've been very, very fortunate that hiring
Leigh Honeywell:amazing people has been relatively easy compared to what
Leigh Honeywell:I hear from other people. And, and also just like, we've done
Leigh Honeywell:basically no marketing since day one, and we're doing like,
Leigh Honeywell:pretty good. And a lot of that has been that like people like
Leigh Honeywell:you want to talk about this stuff. And I'm really, really
Leigh Honeywell:grateful for that. So we actually have our first
Leigh Honeywell:marketing intern right now. She's been making TikToks It's
Leigh Honeywell:very exciting. Figuring out the things that are hard for us that
Leigh Honeywell:are easy for others. And the other way around has been a
Leigh Honeywell:really like interesting part of the journey.
Dhruti Shah:You're awesome. Just gonna keep saying that
Dhruti Shah:every so often. But how do people discover who you are? You
Dhruti Shah:have a marketing intern now? Is it word of mouth? And also not
Dhruti Shah:just people in terms of who need what tall poppy offers what you
Dhruti Shah:offer? But the investors too? Is it a lot of cold calling? Is it
Dhruti Shah:a lot of Oh, actually, here's one person who really believes
Dhruti Shah:me? Can they recommend me to somebody else? Like how does it
Dhruti Shah:actually work? Because it feels like connections are actually
Dhruti Shah:quite important in this game, in the investor game.
Leigh Honeywell:It's been super interesting, seeing how the word
Leigh Honeywell:of mouth and networks work in this field, a couple of the ways
Leigh Honeywell:that we've gotten the word out, I used to be very active on
Leigh Honeywell:Twitter R.I.P. And so certainly like social and the social
Leigh Honeywell:presence, a lot of referrals, we've worked with a number of
Leigh Honeywell:particularly trust and safety teams. So these are the teams
Leigh Honeywell:that tech companies who they ban the like internet Nazis or
Leigh Honeywell:whatever the sort of current mode of nastiness is, those
Leigh Honeywell:teams are the folks that do content moderation. And one
Leigh Honeywell:thing that we found is that the trust and safety community is
Leigh Honeywell:very tightknit, everybody knows each other. And so when we ended
Leigh Honeywell:up working with a couple of like, major company platforms,
Leigh Honeywell:whose names start with T, the sort of diaspora of folks from
Leigh Honeywell:those companies, who now work at other companies tend to like
Leigh Honeywell:bring us in in subsequent roles. So we've seen a lot of business
Leigh Honeywell:come that way as people move around in these various roles,
Leigh Honeywell:doing sort of media talking about what we do, I think has
Leigh Honeywell:been really useful in terms of just... a thing that I learned
Leigh Honeywell:in the sort of like, as I'm learning how to do say, like,
Leigh Honeywell:I'm a security person I, computer scientist, like I'm not
Leigh Honeywell:a business person by training and learning how to do sales has
Leigh Honeywell:been a big piece of like, what I sort of didn't even know what I
Leigh Honeywell:didn't know, going into this.
Leigh Honeywell:A big thing has been this sort of like idea of educating people
Leigh Honeywell:about the thing that we do even exists, right, I think that's
Leigh Honeywell:one of the really interesting challenges of building something
Leigh Honeywell:new is that people don't even realise that there might be a
Leigh Honeywell:solution to the problem that they're having. So just
Leigh Honeywell:literally just like talking to people talking to like you about
Leigh Honeywell:what we're doing is one of the most important things that we've
Leigh Honeywell:been doing in terms of the sort of like promotion of the thing.
Leigh Honeywell:So one of the other things that we've been doing is engaging in
Leigh Honeywell:the sort of civil society efforts around fighting online,
Leigh Honeywell:there's different terms used in different places, I think the UK
Leigh Honeywell:is using online harms a fair bit as a sort of catch all term.
Leigh Honeywell:Other places use online violence, and online harassment
Leigh Honeywell:is the sort of traditional term, but all of these different
Leigh Honeywell:things, there's a group out of the International Women's Media
Leigh Honeywell:Fund called the coalition against online violence. And
Leigh Honeywell:we've been highly engaged in that for the past two years, we
Leigh Honeywell:have sort of regular calls and talk around what are the
Leigh Honeywell:different efforts in the world in like civil society, nonprofit
Leigh Honeywell:land around combating online harms, that's been a really
Leigh Honeywell:important way for us to like, give back, because, you know, we
Leigh Honeywell:are a commercial for profit company, although we're not
Leigh Honeywell:profitable yet. But being able to participate in that dialogue
Leigh Honeywell:in that discourse, and be a resource and service provider to
Leigh Honeywell:that to that community in the various communities that they
Leigh Honeywell:support has been really important to us.
Dhruti Shah:So just to make sure that we break it down for
Dhruti Shah:the audience. Like if you're an individual, can you download Tor
Dhruti Shah:puppy? Or is it something you have to get your company to sign
Dhruti Shah:up for? And then just again, very quickly, what happens once
Dhruti Shah:you log on? Like, how does it help you?
Leigh Honeywell:Yeah, so we currently only sell to
Leigh Honeywell:businesses, we really don't want to be charging individual
Leigh Honeywell:consumers for the work that we do. So our like official product
Leigh Honeywell:is something that we only sell to businesses and organisations.
Leigh Honeywell:The other things in terms of the participation in the ecosystem,
Leigh Honeywell:we work with a number of groups that provide public and free
Leigh Honeywell:resources. Back in the summer, we released a new guide to
Leigh Honeywell:staying safe online on the Feminist Frequency games
Leigh Honeywell:harassment hotline, website. So that was actually a guide that
Leigh Honeywell:was originally produced in 2014. And this was the first big
Leigh Honeywell:update of this guide in quite a few years. And we're really,
Leigh Honeywell:really proud of having been able to contribute to that we did the
Leigh Honeywell:sort of tech editing of it.
Leigh Honeywell:We're also involved in a number of other projects that that
Leigh Honeywell:provide public resources for individuals who aren't
Leigh Honeywell:necessarily like coming through a company. One of my favourite
Leigh Honeywell:resources along those lines is the Consumer Reports security
Leigh Honeywell:planner, this is a free public tool that anyone can use to
Leigh Honeywell:improve their overall personal cybersecurity and personal
Leigh Honeywell:safety practices. It's really like the best product on the
Leigh Honeywell:market for the general public. So I highly, highly recommend
Leigh Honeywell:checking that out, I believe, at securityplanner.org.
Leigh Honeywell:And then we have an extensive public resources page, where we
Leigh Honeywell:link to all of this different stuff, a whole number of
Leigh Honeywell:resources, both from the sort of tech support, like how do you
Leigh Honeywell:keep people from hacking into your stuff, but also the sort of
Leigh Honeywell:psychosocial support because I think that's one of the things
Leigh Honeywell:that I mean, you can say cybersecurity very broadly, but
Leigh Honeywell:also specifically talking about stuff like online violence. We
Leigh Honeywell:don't talk enough about how like upsetting and frankly
Leigh Honeywell:traumatising, some of this stuff can be even if it's just like
Leigh Honeywell:just a scam, or just some sort of like untargeted attack, it
Leigh Honeywell:can still be like really upsetting to people. And I think
Leigh Honeywell:making sure that folks have that sort of psychosocial support and
Leigh Honeywell:resources is really important to me.
Leigh Honeywell:So to your actual question of like, if somebody works at a
Leigh Honeywell:company that we work with, what is the process, we do two
Leigh Honeywell:things, we have a web app that can scale to like an entire
Leigh Honeywell:company, it walks people through protecting themselves
Leigh Honeywell:proactively as well as if you do become the target of online
Leigh Honeywell:harassment, what are the things that you can do to mitigate and
Leigh Honeywell:reduce the harm, we also provide Incident Response support within
Leigh Honeywell:the context of our like customer base.
Leigh Honeywell:So you know, folks can obviously self serve through the app, or
Leigh Honeywell:we will get on the phone with them and walk them through
Leigh Honeywell:threat assessment, potentially working with law enforcement, if
Leigh Honeywell:that's something they're comfortable with all the sort of
Leigh Honeywell:asterisks of law enforcement like really struggles to deal
Leigh Honeywell:with this stuff. And also, lots of people do not feel
Leigh Honeywell:comfortable interacting with law enforcement for many very valid
Leigh Honeywell:reasons. So we've got this web app that we built, we roll out
Leigh Honeywell:broadly, we also do a sort of executive service where we go
Leigh Honeywell:over one on one with folks and typically this is, you know,
Leigh Honeywell:going by the name its executives is particularly high profile
Leigh Honeywell:people within an organisation and it is a more expensive
Leigh Honeywell:service because it requires a human to like interact with the
Leigh Honeywell:person. So we don't tend to roll that out super super broadly
Leigh Honeywell:within organisations, but we do two big things there.
Leigh Honeywell:One is what we call the digital footprint assessment. In the
Leigh Honeywell:digital footprint assessment, the sort of like joking way I
Leigh Honeywell:explain it, but it's like pretty accurate is we basically like
Leigh Honeywell:cyberstalk you with your consent. So if I was really mad
Leigh Honeywell:at Dhruti, what would I find about her on the internet?
Dhruti Shah:Too much
Leigh Honeywell:We do that, walk through people's like
Leigh Honeywell:online profile, use a bunch of tools to figure out, you know,
Leigh Honeywell:what kind of data breaches has your email address been. And
Leigh Honeywell:therefore I can find out your like, Neopets account from 2014,
Leigh Honeywell:or whatever, hey, you might want to reset the password to that,
Leigh Honeywell:because I found the password and it reached up and stuff like
Leigh Honeywell:that. So that's the digital footprint assessment. And then
Leigh Honeywell:the second piece is an advanced security review. This is where a
Leigh Honeywell:deep dive one on one interview, where we go over, like how to
Leigh Honeywell:use technology. And then we make customised recommendations based
Leigh Honeywell:on how you're currently using stuff, and and what you could do
Leigh Honeywell:to secure the stuff that you already use.
Dhruti Shah:See, it's so weird, because a lot of what you say
Dhruti Shah:makes common sense. But you are at the vanguard of a lot of this
Dhruti Shah:in terms of like the company itself in terms of the way that
Dhruti Shah:you've been thinking in terms of the conversations that you're
Dhruti Shah:having. So that's the let me sort of segueway a little bit,
Dhruti Shah:you're clearly multi talented, multifaceted, how do you not
Dhruti Shah:break with so many ideas with such a big brain and so many
Dhruti Shah:different things going on, and also the fact that you're
Dhruti Shah:working in security, and it's quite, it's not necessarily the
Dhruti Shah:most positive space to be in constantly.
Leigh Honeywell:I think a big thing for me has always been in
Leigh Honeywell:terms of making this work sustainable and not too crazy
Leigh Honeywell:making is really like identifying what is the small
Leigh Honeywell:chunk of the world that I can break off and fix in a very,
Leigh Honeywell:like, small contained way. And I do have a zillion projects on
Leigh Honeywell:the go. Or at least on the planning board, I feel like
Leigh Honeywell:being able to make like little bits of progress on all of them
Leigh Honeywell:makes me feel really happy. Even if I'm not like getting
Leigh Honeywell:obviously top hobbies my day job. That's like the thing I'm
Leigh Honeywell:the most focused on.
Leigh Honeywell:But my other sort of like hats that I'm wearing right now are,
Leigh Honeywell:I'm on the board of a local nonprofit that's doing housing
Leigh Honeywell:advocacy. So we have a housing crisis in Canada, which is
Leigh Honeywell:bonkers. So much space, every time I say that out loud. I'm
Leigh Honeywell:like, this is the most ridiculous thing ever. But the
Leigh Honeywell:reality is that Canada has built the fewest houses per population
Leigh Honeywell:of any country in the G20. I have been an immigrant in the
Leigh Honeywell:States, I very deeply and I strongly believe in immigration
Leigh Honeywell:to Canada.
Leigh Honeywell:But there's something about like, if we actually want to be
Leigh Honeywell:welcoming, we have to build houses, I've been really
Leigh Honeywell:involved in this local nonprofit and literally talking about like
Leigh Honeywell:changing little tiny bits of the world. I show up at these like
Leigh Honeywell:zoom housing consultation meetings for like an 18 unit
Leigh Honeywell:apartment building that people are like up in arms about, oh,
Leigh Honeywell:you're gonna cast a shadow over my backyard or like, this is
Leigh Honeywell:going to add all this traffic on this, like really high traffic
Leigh Honeywell:street. And I was like, Hey, we are in a housing crisis in a
Leigh Honeywell:climate crisis. Can we get this building built, please. And one
Leigh Honeywell:of the really powerful things that I learned about housing a
Leigh Honeywell:few years ago, which honestly just was one of those, like,
Leigh Honeywell:total mind blowing moments is the people who are already here,
Leigh Honeywell:they are the ones that are showing up at these meetings to
Leigh Honeywell:say like, I don't want this, I don't want more neighbours. The
Leigh Honeywell:people who are not yet in those 18 units, we don't know who they
Leigh Honeywell:are, they don't know to show up at that Zoom meeting. And so it
Leigh Honeywell:is the responsibility of those of us who are already here who
Leigh Honeywell:know that this is a problem to show up and be like, No,
Leigh Honeywell:actually, we need to build this building. One of my big hobby
Leigh Honeywell:horses right now is housing.
Dhruti Shah:Can I just throw something into the mix? Because
Dhruti Shah:actually, I'd quite like to hear your thoughts on this because I
Dhruti Shah:was at a conference very recently, where you mentioned
Dhruti Shah:climate and people were talking about something similar with
Dhruti Shah:nature. And people being a voice for nature, like representing
Dhruti Shah:the rivers or representing particular elements of nature in
Dhruti Shah:those meetings, whether it's planning meetings, or like
Dhruti Shah:government meetings, but what you're doing is at a smaller
Dhruti Shah:scale for particular components, yeah, housing. But it's
Dhruti Shah:interesting that there is that movement going on where people
Dhruti Shah:are stepping up beyond who they are, specifically in order to be
Dhruti Shah:able to represent not necessarily the voiceless, but
Dhruti Shah:those who don't actually know what's going on or can't be
Dhruti Shah:there, even though they're the ones that are subject to it,
Leigh Honeywell:Or just like physically aren't there yet. A
Leigh Honeywell:couple of years ago, I read Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry
Leigh Honeywell:for the Future, which is sort of near future climate change
Leigh Honeywell:science fiction, and I highly highly recommend it kind of
Leigh Honeywell:content note for the first couple chapters describe like a
Leigh Honeywell:unsurvivable heatwave in India and it's really really like,
Leigh Honeywell:it's a it's a rough scene. So I always like caveat that so that
Leigh Honeywell:people don't dive into this book and they're like, oh my god, it
Leigh Honeywell:because I was definitely like sobbing by like the third
Leigh Honeywell:chapter, but it's worth it. Super worth it. The book is
Leigh Honeywell:amazing. Going by the title Ministry for the Future, the
Leigh Honeywell:sort of conceit of the book is that the United Nations sets up
Leigh Honeywell:a ministry to engage in like the legal defence like through
Leigh Honeywell:litigation and stuff of people who have not yet been born. And
Leigh Honeywell:this is actually a like legal strategy that is being tried in
Leigh Honeywell:the real world. And as you you mentioned, the defending the
Leigh Honeywell:lakes and the rivers. There has been I think, Greta Thunberg,
Leigh Honeywell:the climate activist. She's one of the folks that has been, like
Leigh Honeywell:advocating for this strategy of like, literally children suing
Leigh Honeywell:governments and polluters and all of these different folks
Leigh Honeywell:that are like messing things up, because there's a future harm.
Leigh Honeywell:And I think that's it. You know, I'm not I'm not a lawyer,
Leigh Honeywell:although I was raised by a pack of lawyers.
Leigh Honeywell:But I think it's a really, really interesting strategy, a
Leigh Honeywell:good segueway to the other little chunk of trying to fix
Leigh Honeywell:things that I've been thinking a lot about, which is really
Leigh Honeywell:around like emergency preparedness.
Leigh Honeywell:This is a Thursday we were supposed to record on a Tuesday.
Leigh Honeywell:And I had to reschedule because my internet had been down
Leigh Honeywell:because we'd had this huge storm and the power's out for a couple
Leigh Honeywell:days. And that's like the second one this year. And last year, we
Leigh Honeywell:had a derecho, which is something I only learned about
Leigh Honeywell:recently, but it's basically a tornado without the twisters.
Leigh Honeywell:It's like that degree of storm. But there's no funnels that
Leigh Honeywell:touch down. And so we had this direct show in May 2022 in
Leigh Honeywell:Ottawa, which took out I think, about a quarter million people's
Leigh Honeywell:power.
Leigh Honeywell:We were without power for nine days. And thankfully, like we
Leigh Honeywell:have a generator, because we've been thinking about this stuff.
Leigh Honeywell:But that is like, we were very lucky to have a generator. We
Leigh Honeywell:didn't have internet for nine days. So that was, that was
Leigh Honeywell:challenging. But just thinking about all of that sort of like,
Leigh Honeywell:you know, as we're dealing with this increased frequency of
Leigh Honeywell:weather events, I grew up in Ottawa, we did not have
Leigh Honeywell:tornadoes, and I was growing up, that was just like, it was not a
Leigh Honeywell:thing. And we've now had two this year so far, and the
Leigh Honeywell:derecho last year, this is like, very, very different. And so
Leigh Honeywell:anytime that people are like doubting climate change, I'm
Leigh Honeywell:like, are you do you not see what's happening? Like I did not
Leigh Honeywell:grow up in a place with tornadoes. So that's kind of
Leigh Honeywell:So building that sort of community resilience is
Leigh Honeywell:wild. But when I was living in San Francisco, before I moved
Leigh Honeywell:something that I've been thinking a lot about. This past
Leigh Honeywell:weekend, we had this other power outage, my neighbor's fridge was
Leigh Honeywell:plugged into my garage, because we had the generator running. So
Leigh Honeywell:home to Canada, I went through a programme called NERT, the
Leigh Honeywell:making sure that people are like talking to their neighbours and
Leigh Honeywell:identifying like, hey, who in the neighbourhood is an elderly
Leigh Honeywell:neighbourhood Emergency Response Team. And this is a programme
Leigh Honeywell:person who's not mobile? Can we make sure that they're okay in
Leigh Honeywell:the wake of this storm, or whatever. And then you've got
Leigh Honeywell:that was set up in the wake of the 1989 earthquake, where they
Leigh Honeywell:the additional challenge of like you're in a high rise or like
Leigh Honeywell:multi unit buildings? How do we make sure that, frankly, that
Leigh Honeywell:the laws require those buildings to have generators, so that
Leigh Honeywell:realised like, hey, let's actually get a whole bunch let's
Leigh Honeywell:somebody who's less mobile is able to like get out of the
Leigh Honeywell:building, if there's any sort of incident, we have this nine day
Leigh Honeywell:build surge capacity of individual members of the
Leigh Honeywell:power outage, if you're on the top story of a tall building,
Leigh Honeywell:you're stuck there, if there's a medical emergency, that can be
Leigh Honeywell:community who want to learn the basics of first aid, the basics
Leigh Honeywell:super, super scary.
Leigh Honeywell:So some of this stuff can be done in the like, super
Leigh Honeywell:individual community level, some of this stuff has to be done
Leigh Honeywell:of like, we call the earthquake, eyes, look at a building, see if
Leigh Honeywell:from like a regulatory framework, because, you know,
Leigh Honeywell:some random apartment building, they're not going to instal a
Leigh Honeywell:generator on like, the goodness of their hearts, you have to
Leigh Honeywell:it has unreinforced masonry is it going to fall down now that
Leigh Honeywell:regulate them. But my dream is that everybody should have
Leigh Honeywell:something like the neart programme in San Francisco and
Leigh Honeywell:we've had this earthquake identifying, like, where's the
Leigh Honeywell:like, there are programmes like that around the United States.
Leigh Honeywell:But as far as I've been able to tell, in Canada, there's only
Leigh Honeywell:natural gas shut offline, so because when in the '89
Leigh Honeywell:like the 72 hours of supplies kind of level of community
Leigh Honeywell:preparedness. I want to go a step higher than that and like
Leigh Honeywell:get people talking to each other, get people learning these
Leigh Honeywell:earthquake, all these houses caught on fire, because the gas
Leigh Honeywell:skills. Although, thankfully, we don't need to learn the like
Leigh Honeywell:earthquake goggles as much here doesn't take that much work to
Leigh Honeywell:lines broke, and so you got to be able to let's go turn off the
Leigh Honeywell:do this kind of emergency preparedness, but it takes
Leigh Honeywell:knowledge and like access to the information. And that's I think
Leigh Honeywell:gas, the gas outputs.
Leigh Honeywell:the big thing that I think is missing right now.
Dhruti Shah:And that was the amazing Leigh Honeywell, digital
Dhruti Shah:security expert, founder and CEO of Tall Poppy and helping you
Dhruti Shah:get prepped for all emergencies. Do you have an interdisciplinary
Dhruti Shah:life because I would love to hear from you. And perhaps we
Dhruti Shah:can chat on this podcast that goes in my newsletter, which is
Dhruti Shah:called Have you thought about and can be found via
Dhruti Shah:www.dhrutishah.com. Please join me next time for a fun
Dhruti Shah:conversation with another guest who likes to mix up lots of
Dhruti Shah:things in their life. If you like the podcast, do share rate
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Dhruti Shah:helpful, then let people know. Thank you to Rian Shah for the music.