How can we all work together to battle the climate crisis?
In this episode of Here to Help, Indeed CEO Chris Hyams takes a seat with Silvia Ito, Senior Sustainability Project Manager at Indeed to discuss Earth Day and hear why she made the move from the Small Business Program Management team to the Sustainability team.
Chris and Silvia also delve into Indeed’s progress on our sustainability commitments, which were announced in 2021 – and how each of us can take action to help address the climate crisis."
- Hello, everyone. I am Chris Hyams, CEO of Indeed, and welcome to the next episode of "Here to Help." At Indeed, our mission is to help people get jobs. This is what gets us out of bed in the morning and what keeps us going all day long. And what powers that mission is our people. "Here to Help" is a look at how experience, strength, and hope inspires people to want to help others. Today is Earth Day. Every year on April 22nd, Earth Day marks the anniversary of the birth of the modern environmental movement in 1970. The very first Earth Day inspired 20 million Americans, at that time, 10% of the total population of the US, to take to the streets, parks, and auditoriums to demonstrate against the impacts of 150 years of industrial development, which had left a growing legacy of serious human health impacts. Today, Earth Day is widely recognized by more than a billion people as a day of action to change human behavior and create global, national, and local policy change. At Indeed, we have extended Earth Day to Earth Week to promote our corporate climate change action and to encourage Indeed-ians to think about and commit to adopting sustainable practices at the office and from home. My guest today is Silvia Ito, Sustainability Project Manager here at Indeed. Silvia leads our global collaboration, communication, visibility, and delivery of many complex projects, in addition to leading Indeed's Green Team and the Sustainability Champions Council. Silvia, thank you so much for joining me today.
- Thank you for having me.
- Let's start where we always start these conversations, by asking how you're doing today.
- I'm super nervous, but I'm super exhausted as well. But I'm super excited because, so actually, this is my last week here in Tokyo. I'm moving back to Canada at the end of the week. And so there's, you know, there's a lot happening, including of course, Earth Week. My son's turning six years old near the Earth Day. Anyways, it's a lot of emotions and things happening, but yeah, I'm feeling I'm feeling good. Thank you.
- Well, thank you for joining me in the middle of all of that. Let's start by just talking a little bit about your role. You're a Sustainability Project Manager. Can you explain what that role is about and how it is that you help people get jobs?
- Of course. So as a Sustainability Project Manager, I help the sustainability team at Indeed be more efficient by helping them set up PMO frameworks, agile best practices, as well as I lead the employee engagement program, which includes the iGreen, which is our affinity group, iGreen group, as well as our champions council. And recently, I've joined to collaborate with our parent company, Recruit, to help them achieve their ambitious sustainability goal across all of their business units. And so, yeah, how that helps people get jobs is that as a big organization that have 12,000 employees and the world's number one job site, I feel like we have the duty and responsibility and we are committed actually as an organization to support our environment and our community. And so, our work environment, it's made of people, right? And people are dependent on our natural environment, our planet. And so a healthy planet, right, is totally connected to, you know, a thriving society with a thriving work workforce. So that's how we help people get jobs.
- That's fantastic. So we're going to talk about Earth Day in more detail in a minute, but I want to start with your background and your career. So as you mentioned, you're based in Tokyo today for a little while longer. And as you mentioned, you're planning this big move to Canada. You have moved countries many times. Can you talk a little bit about your early life?
- Sure. So I was born in Paraguay. My mother is Argentinian, my father is Japanese. Due to my father's job in international development, we actually moved countries perhaps 13 times, and that does not include the times that we moved cities within countries and we moved houses within cities. But yeah, and then the countries are pretty much, we moved mostly in South America, but that includes, of course, Paraguay where I was born, then Honduras, Japan, Argentina, Brazil, and Canada. So those are the countries I've moved. I've visited many more countries and cities, but those are the ones that I actually relocated to.
- So how did all of that moving around impact you as a kid? Obviously, you didn't stay in the same school, have the same friends all this time, but you were also, it sounds, you know, to someone like me, that sounds adventurous. What was that like as a kid and how did that impact you?
- Sure, yeah, well, as a child, I mean, it is not as, you know, a lot of people, you know, think it is really interesting and cool, and they said, oh, you know, I envy you that you can kind of relocate and move countries. But as a child, it is hard because every time you make friends and you connect, right, with the community and the school and whatnot, you have to be taken and it's difficult for you to understand why that happens. So I feel like it was difficult not only, you know, on that, but also the sense of I never belonged anywhere, right? The identity of, right, even though I was born in Paraguay, I was there just for a short time, and did not look like Paraguay or Japanese, even my accent is more Argentinian, but then when I go to Argentina, they don't think my accent is Argentinian. So you know, it's this thing of, you know, a lack of belonging, you know, I felt like I was not included, I was not part of any community, ethnicity, or language. So that was a bit difficult in terms of determining, you know, what is my identity, who I am. So I feel like I was always searching for that, right? The sense of wanting to belong somewhere. And I felt that at the end, when I moved to Montreal for university, you know, I was just so impressed of the multiculturalism, the diversity of students in the campus, you know, as I walk in the streets, you hear different languages, right? Chinese, Arabic, Greek, Italian, you know, all the languages. And I felt for some reason more at home, like comfortable, because everyone is different. So having that diversity around you, I felt like it made me feel more like I belonged. And so when I actually, you know, was interviewing with Indeed and I saw how diverse Indeed was, like I felt that, you know, like comfortableness, right? That I'll feel belonging here as opposed to other companies that I've been in the past tend to be less diverse.
- Yeah, that is an interesting thing. We've had a lot of conversations in the past about the fact that our Tokyo office in particular is actually a vast majority of non-Japanese natives. At least last time I looked, it was something like 70%. And so it really is, at least our engineering offices there, it's an expat culture, and so people come from so many different places. Which is one of the reasons that our Tokyo office, I think, is so innovative, is that you have all these people who are really adventurous. You have Japanese roots, but moving to Tokyo for people who don't have that requires a level of adventurousness, I think, that leads to really collaboration and creativity and having people connect through their maybe lack of being native. And I think it's a really interesting thing. I want to talk a little bit about, you went on in school to study supply chain management when you were in Canada, and then you went to work for a number of years in the aerospace industry. Can you talk a little bit about how that job ended up influencing your views on sustainability?
- Definitely. I mean, moving many countries, I felt that, right, I was used to kind of taking the planes to go, right, from one continent to another. And so, for me, it was a natural continuation of, right, kind of working in an organization that makes this, right? The planes that connects people, connects peoples around the world, families and whatnot, given that I have families in different parts of the world. So you know, and I really kind of liked their vision of, I think it was giving wings to people or something along those lines. And so, yeah, for me, it was that value, that mission, that really, you know, connected with me. And also the fact that as a manufacturing company, I mean, obviously they focus on a lot of the- They didn't use necessarily, I don't remember the actual words, but about reducing waste. In manufacturing, you want to reduce as much waste as possible, whether it's waste of physical items to manufacture the aircraft, or waste of just the processes and the time that it takes, which are all part of, right, that's what sustainability is about. It's about being efficient. It's about using what we have and just like, you know, reducing the waste in every way. So yeah, I felt that kind of they were really trying to embed that mindset of, you know, working in that way, not only in the shop floor, but in the offices as well. So I thought that was pretty awesome.
- So a little over four years ago, I think, you joined Indeed and moved back to Japan. And so I understand that that was not an easy decision. Can you talk a little bit about the choice to pick up your new family and move to Japan?
- Sure, yes. So actually, so about 15 years ago or so, I did work in Japan for very traditional-minded companies, and I did not have a good time per se. So given that experience, I told myself, I don't want to go back 'cause it was a bit traumatizing, the way they work. But my husband had a huge fascination for the Japanese culture, and so it was his dream to at least once in his lifetime to be able to live here. And so he was hoping that marrying someone with a Japanese citizenship, you know, he would be able to do that. Of course, that was not the reason why he married me. So anyway, I sent him a set of criterias and I said, fine. You know, I really don't want to go there, but if I have this criteria for a company, that will be the only reason. But I thought those criteria, given my experience, there was no such company in Tokyo. So anyways, I had a lot of friends from my high school in Japan. So I told my friends, you know, we're kind of exploring moving to Japan, but only if I find a company that has all these criterias. I mean, criterias like, you know, work-life balance, you know, a huge diversity, men to woman ratio, you know, things like that. So there was a lot of things in my list and I said, there's no way I'm going to find this, so I know we're not going to go to Japan. And then my best friend in Japan, who actually worked as a recruiter for a tech company, she told me, Silvia, I know that company, and it's Indeed, you know? At the time, I didn't know much about Indeed. I said, oh, okay, sure. I wasn't sure, you know, like if it was real, but she said, you have to go. I visited the office, I spoke up to the people. This is your company. You need to do the interview. And so she encouraged me to go through the interview process. And even though I said, you know, sure, why not? I'll practice my interview skills anyways. And so as I started my interview process with Indeed, of course, I have to do my research about the company and look into everything, I just fell in love with the company, the culture, the mission, the people, it's just, you know, to the point that it was a huge interview process. I think I got nine different interviews. It was the longest interview process I ever had in my life. But every time I interviewed and I met different people from different functions and roles, I said, I want to work for this company. Please let me in. So anyways, that's how I ended up coming to Tokyo, is by finding what I call everyone, you know, in it is like a treasure, a hidden treasure in Tokyo, that if you get to work there. Yeah, I feel like you need to take that opportunity.
- So one of the things that happened when you joined Indeed and moved to Japan, during this time, you had sort of a political awakening, I guess, and you became a bit of an activist. Can you explain what happened? What was the spark for you?
- So the spark, I mean, I've been kind of environmentally conscious, which kind of triggered in Canada. And I've been, you know, my personal life has been, you know, trying to recycle and compost and, you know, being efficient with my things and all of that. But what I guess the trigger of me really taking action was after my second child was born. So I had my second child here in Japan. In Japan, actually, hospital stays are like, almost one week long, so way longer than, I think, you know, Canada and the US. And so it gave me a lot of time to reflect. And as you have this tiny little baby, right, a new born being, and I just said, what am I doing bringing this kid to this world, you know? And I guess, you know, freaking out, tiredness, hormones, whatever it is, but it made me think about, you know, am I doing everything as a mother to make sure that he has a future, you know? A future, you know, to thrive in. 'Cause I feel like that's our responsibility to make sure that they have the education, that we have the savings to be able to, right, like give them the support, what they need for their future. And so, you know, would he have even that environment in the future? And so, you know, that kind of triggered my thought of, okay, I need to do more. You know, more than just at home, you know, 'cause I feel like I've been doing it as much as I could at home. And so once I got out of the hospital, I saw on social media, someone posted about a meeting that was happening with the Tokyo representative, environmental representatives, and I said, okay, I'll go. I don't understand Japanese that much, but I'll go. And so I took my newborn to that meeting, and initially it was just the first half an hour. I think it was just a Q and A with a panelist, which were the environmental representatives for Tokyo. After that, they all left and a bunch of individuals stayed, but I don't know political terminologies in Japanese, so I also stayed and I found it strange that I was the only kind of, you know, citizen or civilian in there. I mean, after the fact, I learned that that was a meeting just for legislators. And so I had stayed in a meeting just for legislators because I didn't understand. But the good thing is that, you know, as I was listening to them and talking and discussing about the plans to tackle, you know, climate crisis and what to do, I raised my hand, I introduced myself as a concerned mother and I said, I would like to know what I can do as a mother to help in this cause. And so they said, you know, Silvia, we don't have any representation, any legislators from your city, so it will help a lot if you could reach out to your legislators and tell them to join this coalition of legislators of Tokyo to kind of address this issue. And I said, awesome, I'll do that. So I went home and then right away found out all the emails, 34 legislators from my city, and I wrote them an email. Very simple, I'm a concerned mother, you know? And I would like to ensure that my kids have a future, and you know, please can you support this cause? And so I got maybe a few responses. Two or three said yes right away without any questions. They said, thank you, we didn't know that there was such, you know, action to take, and so we'll definitely support that. And then I had another two or three who said, well, thank you for the email, it's kind, but I don't understand what is the purpose of this, you know, action or how it is going to bring value. And so, I had to do some back and forth to explain, right, the background of the climate crisis, why is it important, you know, even for their political campaigns or whatnot. You know, this is something that I said, if there's no action, 'cause one of them said, what is the point of taking this action if I don't see the result, what would be the value? And I said, well, tell me if there's another project or initiative. If there's nothing going on, then whatever it is, we got to take action and push that, you know? And so let's support this initiative that already exists, that's in place, without reinventing the wheel, and push that. And so he said, you know what? I like your passion. I like that you pushed this, 'cause most people who write me, they give up as soon as I say no, but you kept going at it, so I'll support you. So I'm not sure if he bought the story of the climate crisis, but it looked like my passion is what convinced him to do so. And so, yeah, and I had another legislator, which I sat down with him at a coffee shop. I bought the book of Al Gore, "An Inconvenience Truth," in Japanese, even though I can't read Japanese, but just so I can show them with the pictures, you know, and the page, and I brought my baby with me. Yeah, and I just convinced him. For two hours, we spoke, you know, showing him different pages about this environment. And then he said, you know what? I can see how important this is for you, so I will support you. So again, and what's interesting, this legislator, which I met for two hours and I had so many emails back and forth to convince him about this cause, you know, who was not, you know, as convinced, he's the one who helped us in the end push a petition that we actually started with a community here in the city to request our city to become carbon neutral by 2050. So we did that, he really pushed and helped along, and then, actually this year in February, the city has publicly announced that they will be carbon neutral, net zero by 2050, so it's a win. And then going back to the story of me convincing the legislators, I got six legislators in total to support kind of the coalition of legislators to address climate crisis.
- Yeah, it's an amazing story. I mean, I was kind of blown away when we met last week and I heard this story, I think there's so many people who feel like there's absolutely nothing I can do as an individual. And it's not that everyone who has a passion is able to be as successful as you are, but it just shows that that effort is really worth it. So, I mean, it's really an amazing story. So also, that experience in that time led to a change in your role at Indeed, which started in that same period in 2019 when you were on maternity leave. You actually sent me an email and I put you in touch with my chief of staff, Lisa Ramirez. Can you tell this story and how you ended up in the role that you're in now?
- Sure, yes. So around the same time that I was writing the legislators, I wrote you an email. Actually, the email writing started before I started my maternity leave. I kind of wrote an email and then I got my manager at the time to kind of proofread. I had my former manager from Bombardier to proofread. I had a few directors, you know, from engineering and other functions to kind of say, you know, I want to make sure that, you know, I know Chris doesn't have that much time, so I want to make sure that the points are clear and that my request is clear. And so everyone, you know, kind of read and gave me pointers to fix this email, but I was only able to send it when I started my maternity leave. And so, yeah, so I sent you, and I didn't think you were going to open 'cause it's from my personal email, I don't have access to my work email while I'm on maternity leave. And so I was so surprised that within a week or so, or a few days, you write kind of, I mean, Lisa responded saying, Chris, you know, asked me to follow up on this and take a look into this. And I was just, wow, mind-blowing, first of all, that you actually read my email from my personal account, and then, you know, the fact that they took the time to investigate what we had at Indeed. And so I really appreciated that. I mean, I did highlight that we did have pretty much two of the three pillars of sustainability, which is the inclusivity aspect, the social aspect, but we're missing the environmental aspect. And so I did kind of respond in a follow up email to say, you know, thank you so much for the information, I do notice that we are missing the environmental aspect of it. And I know that in my original email, I had asked if we could embed sustainability as a core value and also to see if we could have a department with assigned full-time resources. So that was kind of my first request. And then in the follow up, I highlighted that we did have other departments, but not the environmental side. And so after I returned from a maternity leave on that same year, I know that there was an announcement, that a role was going to open for a global director of environmental sustainability. And then on Earth Month, April, Valeria Rosco, who was our head of sustainability, was hired and started, so I thought that was, yeah, awesome. I know that some people asked me, was your email the trigger? And I said, I don't think my email was the trigger for that. I'm pretty sure something was happening in the background, but yes.
- Yeah, well, clearly you are very convincing, though. So I wouldn't discount it. So actually, a year ago right now, I sat down for "Here to Help" with Valeria. Valeria Rosco, who is our global director of sustainability. And we had just at that point rolled out our, I think, very ambitious Indeed-wide and Recruit-wide set of commitments for 2030. Can you just help outline what it is, the commitments that we made? And one year into this, since having just rolled them out last year, how are we doing, what is our progress, and where are we going?
- Sure. So we had made last year actually, two high level commitments externally, and so one was to achieve carbon neutrality by 2021, and then the second one was to achieve net zero by 2030. So I feel like those two, pretty ambitious goals that we've set.
- [Chris] And I'm sorry to interrupt. Can you just, for people who don't know exactly the difference between, can you explain exactly, what does net zero mean?
- So carbon neutral neutrality is basically making sure that we measure all our carbon footprints, so greenhouse gas emissions that the company emits, and then offsetting. So by offsetting means purchasing projects that either reduce, avoid, or remove the carbon from our atmosphere. So that's carbon neutrality. And net zero is actually reducing, like literally reducing. And so when we say we want to achieve net zero by 2030 is that we want to reduce to zero all the emissions that us as an organization emit through our operations, right? Our electricity and things like that, and also our procurement, right? So all throughout the whole value chain.
- And that part actually is quite significant, 'cause that includes our hosting for our products, travel, whole host of other things.
- Exactly, yes. And so for most companies in tech, right, 'cause we're not a manufacturing company, we're in tech, the big portion of our greenhouse gas emissions comes from the procurement, the supply, the value chain. So I think, you know, the average in the tech industry is about maybe not 90% plus or minus that goes into this part. And then like, our operational emissions are a very small percentage in comparison, but we are obviously starting from reducing our operational emissions, right? 'Cause that's where we can start. And so that means switching to renewable energy. That means, right, ensuring that we also don't use, for example, gas for heating and things like fossil fuels, so removing all fossil fuel usages from our office buildings. And yeah, trying to electrify and switch to renewable energy.
- So what are we doing to help employees get involved in helping us achieve this? It's is obviously not something that can be done by a project team off to the side. We have 12,000 employees globally. What are we doing to help support our employees involvement in helping us meet these ambitious goals?
- So as part of the employee engagement program, we do have sort of kind of two programs. One is the Affinity iGreen group, which is pretty much a program, employee-led program, which we allow them to, we set up the structure so that employees can actually drive sustainability initiatives on their own. And then we have the sustainability champion council, which this is more of, so one is like, bottom up, and the other one is kind of like a top down. So we share with the council members, right, our strategy, our sustainability strategy, and allow them to have a voice, an opportunity to shape, right, our strategy so that we can be more ambitious. And so for actually the affinity group, we are working this year to formalize them and make it into an employee resource group. So that will allow them to be more empowered to be able to take further actions. Not only right now, it's kind of like, right, an affinity, you know, whenever they have time outside of work hours, but as they become an employee resource group, they'll be able to try to figure out how they can make their own roles in their department more sustainable. And so we'll be able to provide the education and the tools, right, and the mentorship for coaching to be able to do that.
- One of the things that happens in just sort of the general cycle is when things are good, it's easy for people to think about and try to focus on things like sustainability and how can they make the world better. In the last couple years, we've had a global pandemic, we have rising inflation, we have war in Europe. How has that pushed sustainability maybe down in the list of priorities, and why is it important to ensure that people stay focused on this, especially in times like this?
- Yes, definitely, I mean, right, the focus, I think, as individual naturally goes into the aspect of the compassion for the people that are going through, right, the wars and all that. But I feel that it's all connected in the end, right? We might not use the word sustainability, but even what's happen in right now in Ukraine, it's all kind of related to, right, the fossil fuels. A lot of the countries, including Japan, depends on the fossil fuels provided by Russia and all that. And if we didn't need to, right, depend on that, you know, this money is actually fueling the war. And so understanding that connection, and so I know it is not easy to kind of see that unless someone highlights it, but understanding that everything is connected. 'Cause sustainability, it's about our air, our water, our food, right, our environment. And that, when you really pay closer attention to things, everything we do, including the wars, including, right, the political things, it's all in the end, there's a sustainability component to it.
- There is a huge amount of focus and investment globally. I think I know the answer to this, but I'd love to hear your thoughts. Are we doing enough?
- So I think that we can do more. There's way more that needs to be done. I know that there's some experts that say that we need to kind of mobilize at a larger, more ambitious way. And so for this, currently our society depends on energy to function, right? Everything that we do, whether it is to drive our cars, our planes, to maintain our buildings, to keep ourselves warm, to cook, all of that requires energy. And a big portion, a huge percentage of the energy comes from fossil fuels. And so on those fossil fuels is like, the biggest, right? 60% of our carbon emissions is due to fossil fuels. And so reducing that will be something that we need to do, ideally cut, right? If you have a bathtub, and let's say the water is pouring, the source, right, the water is pouring a lot, and it's about to overflow, and this is what's happening, right? The carbon kind of limit is about to overflow. What we need to do is stop, right? Is to stop the source. Instead, what we're trying to do is continue, right? The carbon or the water to continue meeting, and then we're trying to kind of have tiny little buckets to remove it, right? But that doesn't work, and so we need to do, obviously, we need to kind of have the buckets and unplug the hole in the bath to drain all the pollution. But yeah, we need to do everything we can. Including, which is very important and people don't connect, is that not only we need to remove the sources and then protect our environment so that it can absorb all our carbon from our air, but also we need to improve our society, because it's all connected.
- So one of the important ideas in lasting change is this idea of draw down. Can you talk a little bit about what draw down means?
- Yes, so draw down is actually, I think a terminology that might be used finance as well, but draw down in this context is basically the time in the future where our carbon emissions currently is kind of headed towards. You know, if we continue operating as we are right now without taking any actions, it's just, you know, it's forecasted to keep going, you know, at a pretty high rate. But the draw down point is the point where we stop, right? So we stop producing, right? We stop the source of it and it starts going down. So at that point where it starts going down, it's called the draw down. And for us to get that point, obviously we need to cut the sources of pollution, which is the, right, all our fossil fuels mainly. If we can kind of address it, that's kind of our low hanging fruit per se. I mean, it's more complex than that, but that's number one. Number two is protect our environment, 'cause our trees, our oceans, our nature is actually helping us absorb that. And so we need to kind of protect, I know planting trees is important, but they say that trees don't absorb until they're like, 35 years old or something, depending on the type of trees. So that's kind of a long, right? So protecting the trees that we have right now, like our Amazon forest and whatnot, so I feel like that's very important at the same time, that we do other stuff and we wait for that technology that does not exist yet that we're still kind of, you know, exploring to absorb carbon from the air in the future. So yeah, so that's two. And then third, taking care of our society, right? Improving our society, educating, you know, girls and women, and yeah, giving the opportunity. So everything that we're doing here Indeed, right, for our community, for our society, it's so, so important. And all of them, you can't just say, I'm going to just focus on reducing the source, 'cause it doesn't work, it's a system and all of that. The components of society, of reducing the fossil fuels, and protecting our nature has to happen at the same time.
- So you are the parent of two young children. How are you as a parent trying to instill the ideas of sustainability in your kids?
- I do speak a lot out about sustainability to my kids. And I started, for example, my boys, at least the older one, who's five years old, he loves Avengers and superheroes. And we have something called like, the Golden Books, which are stories for children the age of, I think, two to four or something along those lines. And so what I do is because they cannot read, right? Because they cannot read anything, I kind of changed the narrative of the Avengers story and I make them into environmental superheroes. So as an example, I read the Thor story, there were dragons with fire and they showed the forest and all that, so what I said is that, you know, Thor wanted to have his Mjölnir, you know, the kind of the hammer thing, but he couldn't take it, 'cause you know, he was not worthy enough, and to be worthy, he had to protect the environment. And I said, do you see this picture? There's no trees because all these monsters cut all the trees, and you see that dragon? That dragon is trying to burn the trees. So you know, now Thor has to protect the forest. And so I kind of make up the story about, right, and then, I mean, they enjoy it and they tell me, read me more, read me more, read me again. And so that's kind of how I tell them about the importance of protecting the environment through Avenger stories. If Marvel will be hearing this, I don't know if I'll have like, issues with changing their copyrights.
- That's an amazing, that is the best answer to that question that I could possibly imagine. I assume when your kids are older, that you will show them "Princess Mononoke."
- Well actually, my son.
- They might need to be a little older.
- I know that he shouldn't be watching this, but he already watched "Princess Mononoke" and he loves it. But what we do make sure is that whenever we watch movies together, we see it through together and I kind of, we pause almost like, every five minutes to say, do you understand what happened there? You know, and we kind of explain every single scene, every single thing. And so, you know, it helps for him to be able to process the information. And what's interesting is that I guess at one point, he was kind of so concerned about the environment that, so every morning I bike my kids to daycare. I have a bike that has a seat in the front and a seat in the back, so I have my little one in the front and the older one in the back. And so on my way to daycare, my older one, out of the blue, and that day, I didn't even talk about sustainability, but he started yelling at people, stop cutting the trees! Why are you polluting? And I said, why are you yelling? And so he was so angry, and I said, Toto, his name is Toto, I said, Toto, you know, these are not the people that are cutting the trees, don't worry. Like they're not even here, you know? But anyways, you could see his passion and, you know, anger, and he wanted to let everyone know that, you know, that they shouldn't be doing things like that. So yeah.
- That's amazing. Yeah, just that's A plus parenting there. Last question that I always ask, and I think it's a relevant one here, is when you look back over the experience of the last couple years throughout the pandemic, both your experience and the world's reaction to it, is there any thing that you can point to that has left you with some optimism for the future?
- Yeah, I feel like the pandemic has shown us that we can adapt and innovate. And so it has been very impressive how, right, even in communities and in the tech industry as well, how everyone got together and so fast, we just, right, changed the way we operate and we do things, you know? From us going fully virtual, and so figuring out the technology that's needed to support that system, and you know, finding alternative innovative ways to collaborate globally. And so we discovered, you know, different things that we didn't think about before, that we said, oh, well this is difficult because you are in another country and time zone. But suddenly now, it doesn't matter where you are. We're able to connect and collaborate and innovate more. So I think that's something that I was impressed. And I feel like seeing how fast we were able to kind of adapt into this new way of doing things, this gives me hope that then we can adapt to, right, addressing the sustainability issue as well.
- Fantastic, well, Silvia, thank you so much for joining me today and sharing your experience and your passion. And thank you for everything you do for Indeed, but really, thank you for everything you do for the Earth. It is really profound, again, just to see what an impact a single person really can have. And so thank you for all of that.
- Thank you.