Career Growth Advice from Genevieve Bell, Cybernetics Leader | Career Tips for Women in Cybernetics

2B Bolder Podcast – Episode 66
Featuring Genevieve Bell

Episode Title: #66 Career Podcast Featuring Genevieve Bell, Renowned Anthropologist, Technologist, and Futurist: Women in Tech

Host: Mary Killelea
Guest: Genevieve Bell



Mary Killelea (Host): Hi there. My name is Mary Killelea. Welcome to the To Be Bolder podcast, providing career insights for the next generation of women in business and tech. To Be Bolder was created out of my love for technology and marketing, my desire to bring together like-minded women, and my hope to be a great role model and source of inspiration for my two girls and other young women like you, encouraging you guys to show up and to be bolder and to know that anything you guys dream of, it's totally possible. So sit back, relax and enjoy the conversation.

Hi there. Thank you for tuning in. I am thrilled and honored to have Genevieve Bell on the show today. She is an inspiration to all businesswomen and women in tech who want to carve out their own path. She's a true trailblazer in leveraging her talents and passions to success on her own terms. She's a distinguished professor, the director of the School of Cybernetics and 3A Institute at the Australian National University and a senior fellow at Intel Corporation. Recently nominated top 100 women in technology, Bell holds a PhD in cultural anthropology from Stanford University and is renowned anthropologist, technologist and futurist, having spent more than two decades in Silicon Valley. Genevieve, I am thrilled to have you here. Thank you so much for joining. You're like a rock star to me.

Genevieve Bell (Guest): Oh, Mary, you're most welcome. There's something really disconcerting about hearing your biography like that. I never recognize me in it. I don't quite know what that says about me, but wow, that person must be very tired and that's when I recognize that it might be me.

Mary Killelea: Okay, so your career really does fascinate me. You got your PhD from Stanford in anthropology. By definition, anthropology is the study of what makes us human. How did you leverage that background to go on to bring together social science, design, computing, engineering, research to create the future of AI technology? I mean, that is enormous.

Genevieve Bell: There's a couple of different answers to that. There's a really straightforward answer, which is a silly one in some ways. That is that when I finished my PhD at Stanford, I was on the faculty there and I met a man in a bar.

Mary Killelea: I was not expecting that.

Genevieve Bell: And dear listeners, that story did not go where you think because ultimately the man in the bar introduced me to people at Intel and as a result, I landed a job and I landed a job because his question was, what do you do? I said, well, I'm an anthropologist. He said, what's that? I said, well, I study people. He said, why? Because they're really interesting. Well, what do you do with that? I'm a professor. And he's like, couldn't you do more? And I thought, what an extraordinarily rude thing to say to me because being a professor as an anthropologist was about as good as it was ever going to get as far as I could conceive. And ultimately, he and his colleagues started to show me other things that I could do with my training and my discipline and with the things that I cared about. And Intel came calling and I said no to them because I couldn't reframe my imagination of what I was good at enough to think that I would be valuable there.

And then one day I had, the closest kind of secular girls like me get to epiphanies where I woke up in the middle of the night in California and realized that my mom had raised me to believe you were kind of morally obligated to put your life into service. You had a moral obligation to make the world a better place through your labor. And I knew I was doing that at Stanford, but I hadn't been able to see a way to do that at Intel. And I think in that moment of clarity in the middle of the night, I realized that companies like Intel were building the future. And if they were building the future, they needed people like me in them, even if there hadn't been a long history of that being true. And so I quit Stanford, I quit a tenure track job, I moved to Oregon where I had never lived and I joined Intel. So one short answer is I met a man in a bar. A longer answer about how did I keep that job and the jobs that followed is that I've always believed in the notion of a productive discomfort. I like being able to put myself in places where I get to learn. And I have been extraordinarily fortunate that the places I put myself to learn were full of people who understood the idea of an apprenticeship, were willing to have someone ask them questions that must have seemed utterly ludicrous to them, and were willing to come on a learning journey with me. So I think, you know, man in bar is one answer.

Second answer is I've always oriented to roles and opportunities that pushed me outside of my comfort zone, because I thought those were opportunities to learn and grow and not ossify. And then I think the last piece of the puzzle is that same mother who raised me to have a kind of a very clear sense of the moral obligation. She also raised my brother and I to be constantly curious. So whenever we were traveling, which we did a little bit of when I was a kid, at the end of every day, she'd ask my brother and I what surprised you today. And what she was doing when we were little kids was training us to recognize that feeling when something didn't look the way you expected it to and to be able to hone in on that and work out why and use it as an opportunity to say, so maybe something you thought about the world that you thought was true is actually just what you think. And so, here's an opportunity to test that and kind of grow. And she made sure my brother and I learned to recognize that feeling and rather than suppress it or walk away from it to lean into it. So I think how you end up with a biography that starts with Native American, no history and feminist and queer theory, and end up doing AI and cybernetics is because along the way you've been in a series of places and a series of conversations and to stay in those conversations, you, I don't know, ended up doing a lot of homework and then accumulating things.

Mary Killelea: That's beautiful. And I'm sure along the way there's those little voices in your head that tend to whisper self-doubt in that. How do you quiet the little voices in your head that try to hold you back? I know you said it was one way, the way you were raised and curiosity, but is it, is it a muscle you practice? I mean, what tips do you have?

Genevieve Bell: I mean, yes. I mean, I'm sure like many people, there's a, looking inside of me the person that says that biography that Mary just read, that can't possibly be you. Like really? And I think part of it is learning that that's a reflex, right? That at least for me, that's where I feel I'm not worthy of those things. And I worry that I don't deserve them, but I'm not good enough. And I think lots of people feel those feelings, right? For me, one of the things I have consciously taken to practicing over probably about the last, gosh, 10 years now, is I set aside time every year to catch up with myself. And I know that sounds crazy, but I set aside a little bit of time where what I try and do is, and my way of doing that is to attempt to write down in a place I can't walk away from. So, it's on the page, what I have done in the previous year in a format that makes me realize what I've accomplished. And so for me, that over the last many years has been either updating my LinkedIn page, updating my resume, because I'm in a university setting now, I had to make a curriculum VTi, horrifying and updating that. And part of that's just practice. Cause I've done, I've usually done a terribly undisciplined job over the year of writing down all the places I was. I have to spend a day going, where did I give that talk? Like, was I on the radio doing that? Did that thing finally get published? And pulling them all together gives me a sense of the scope of the year.

And then I also think there's a bit about sitting with it. There's one of the things I started to realize was that at the points in my life where my imagining of myself, which is frequently at about 14 years old, looking incredibly dorky, cause I was much taller than all my peers. I never grew again, but at 14, I was the tallest of the girls and the tallest of the boys. And I was all legs and books and words. And I was incredibly nerdy and geeky and I was really shy and I didn't fit in. And I was a terrible athlete in a country that really prizes that stuff. And I had red hair and I burnt in a country that prizes neither of those things. And I just knew I didn't fit in. I was a greatly conscious of it at 14. And in my brain, that little girl is still there a lot. And I know when I haven't worked out that I'm not her anymore, I tend to not be as good to myself and others. But one of my really wonderful dear colleagues was with me about 10 years ago and I'd given a talk in public and you come off a stage and you are flushed with adrenaline and you can be intensely delightfully self-critical. It's amazing. You can just find every flaw down to things that are completely bonkers. And I was busily in that little spin and this younger woman came up to me and wanted to tell me that something had really inspired her. And my response was to tell her the 15 things I'd just done really badly on stage and her face fell and she kind of went away. And my colleague looked at me and said, what the hell is wrong with you? That is so extraordinarily rude. And I was like, I was just being honest. And he said to me, she summoned up all of her courage to tell you something you said moved her and you shut her down and made her feel invalid by telling her why the thing she thought was moving was wrong and bad. And he said, you have to learn not to do that. And it was such a powerful intervention in that moment in time because the last thing you want to do is make someone who's summoned up their courage to say something feel that they shouldn't.

And I took that moment and thought, why am I doing that? What's that about? And how do I learn to sit a little bit more comfortably with the way other people see me? And so that was the moment when I thought, okay, I need to be better about working out that I'm not a 14 year old grotty girl with a hair everywhere and a pile of books with people saying mean things to me. I am now a fully functioning, surprisingly competent human being. And I should be able to stand with my biography. But it took work and it still takes work.

Mary Killelea: Thank you for sharing that. That you khere are so many people that look at you and all you've accomplished. And so having you share vulnerabilities like that, it gives…

Genevieve Bell: Every time I am to this day, every time I have to get up on stage or give a talk or front my students, I can feel the flutter in my throat. I still get butterflies and I still fret. I also have learned to know that that's partly just my biophysical response to that sort of stress. And it doesn't really mean anything. But I think most of us, no matter how accomplished we are, still have moments where you think, oh, how did I get here?

Mary Killelea: Let's talk about cybernetics. Okay, what is cybernetics all about? And how did you or why did you name a school after it? Help us understand this.

Genevieve Bell: Oh, absolutely. Well, as you said at the beginning, I've been on this kind of mad journey from classic culture, anthropology through computer science and engineering and Intel into big data and artificial intelligence. And now I find myself, you know, the tagline cybernetics. You have to go back in history a little bit to understand cybernetics. It's made upward. It was invented to coin a body of knowledge and work in the 1940s in America. And it was the invention of a collection of men and women across maths and physics and engineering and anthropology and philosophy and medicine. Who gathered for a series of conversations in the late 1940s and early 1950s and their guiding impulse, the thing that kind of propelled them forward was that they were profoundly troubled by what had happened during World War II with technology and the ways in which it had been put to fairly destructive ends. And they were staring into the face of rapid growth of computers as objects and the power of computing. And collectively, they wondered what that power would be put to. And they believed that they had a responsibility to articulate an agenda for how that power might unfold in a way that would be in the service of human beings and in humans control rather than at loggerheads with and possibly in opposition to human beings. They called that body of work that came out of those conversations Cybernetics. And it was a theory and a praxis, so both a way of thinking and a way of doing to make sense of what would happen to complex systems when computing came into them.

If you think back to the 1940s, there were lots of very complicated systems already in play. We already had telegraphy and electricity. We had the beginnings of airplane travel. We had complex machinery in factories. We had multiple phases of automation. But the rapid growth in computing at that point promised to scale those things up. And the way computing appeared to be unfolding in the 1940s suggested that it wouldn't just be automation. It would be thinking or reasoning or strategy. And so for that collection of people, they really wanted to say, how might we imagine that computing unfolding where it's always in dialogue with humans that are building it and where it's always aware of the context in which it is being deployed. And so Cybernetics in that sense is a theory about systems. It's a theory about complex systems with computation at their core.

As a theory, it's particularly preoccupied with notions of feedback. So how does a system run where the output of the system is its future input? It's interested in notions about circular causality. So how are pieces of the system reacting to other pieces of the system? And if you change one piece, you inevitably change everything else. Now, anyone who's been at Intel over the many years will recognize this sounds remarkably like how we build things because we are, frankly, in some ways, a systems engineering company. So, for me, I started to go, I recognize these conversations. These aren't just abstract to me. These are things I sort of I had lived. And then as a way of doing things, cybernetics also encouraged radical interdisciplinarity. It had many voices in the room. It was acutely tuned into the fact that when you have many voices in the room and they come from lots of different places, i.e. they are diverse, they tend not to immediately all agree with each other. And they have a really hard time working out if they're talking about the same things. Because economists have a very different worldview to anthropologists, to philosophers, to physicists. And so one of the things that cybernetics was particularly good at articulating was this notion of productive discomfort, that you needed to create a space where ideas could bang up against each other so that you could produce something new, not just so that you'd have a fight.

As I was thinking about how to respond to the call of the president of my university here, who said, Genevieve, I think this thing you're doing requires a new school. I was like, sure it doesn't. Like, no, no, that's not my plan. Nope, nope, nope, nope, not a good academic. Don't want us. Oh, God, here we go. I thought, well, how do we describe the thing we're doing here? Because we were really interested in complex systems. We were interested in artificial intelligence inside complex systems. We were really interested in the piece about how do you build critical thinkers and critical doers. And I looked at the word cybernetics and I thought there is a word that was the wellspring of a whole lot of stuff in the first half of the 20th century. Not only does systems engineering flow from it, so does artificial intelligence. The people who built the internet and the web are descendants of the original cyberneticians, as are all of our friends in computer graphics, as is design thinking. In fact, frankly, scratch any biography of anyone interested in the second half of the 20th century, I will show you cybernetics I can get from David Bowie through to a few other people. Look here it all is. But it was a term in the second half of the 20th century that no one did very much with. It kind of lurked in science fiction. So, if you're my vintage, you vaguely remember it sitting inside the Terminator movies. If you grew up with any kind of fetish of British science fiction, you will vaguely remember it turning up in everything that Douglas Adams, think the serious cybernetics company and Preciate Lifts and Marvin the Paranoid Android all flow from that. So it's a word that has been working out there, but it hasn't been animated for a while. And as my colleagues and I were working out how to start a new school, we thought, well, there's a term that feels like it has room for us in all of our pointy elbowed interdisciplinary mix and our endless desire to make the world a better place. And so we thought, well, if we're going to build the first new school this university has had in 40 years, the first new school of cybernetics in the southern hemisphere and probably about the same, and I reckon the only one ever run by a woman, anthropologists, we should just lean in. And so here we are as the school of cybernetics.

Mary Killelea: Amazing. Amazing. So many questions I could spawn off of that, but I want to keep us on track. Oh, my God. OK, so let's talk about AI. You worked for Intel for 17 years and then five years ago, you shifted to academia to lead and build the new branch of engineering to take AI safely, sustainably and responsibly to scale into the 21st century, which I think is so admirable because so many people are scared of AI thinking it's going to overtake the world and eliminate a lot of people, a lot of jobs. But I love the fact that you are representing the humanistic care and investment into it. How do you even begin to counter AI theory or technology, but bring in that human element to it?

Genevieve Bell: It's such a good question, Mary. I suspect you have to start you have to start by honoring the anxiety and the ambivalence. One of the ways we frequently behave is that we make people feel bad that they're seduced by stories that say technology is dangerous. We make them feel like they are naive and foolish. And the reality is in the West, at least, and I would arguably more broadly than that, we have a pretty checkered past with large technical systems over the last 150 years. And if you thought, oh, the kind of the arc of the technology adoption goes, yeah, it'll change everything. It's going to be great. And then, oh, hell, it changed everything. It did really bad stuff to the I'm just going to open the fridge. You know, that kind of arc. Right? And somewhere along the way, a whole lot of things happen that we didn't anticipate, and whether it was changes in business models, refactoring how people did their jobs, changing who got to be employed and who didn't, changing our ideas about time and space, sometimes resulting in the loss of life at scale. Technology has hardly been at a human level, an easy road. And so when people manifest ambivalence, and we tell them they're being naive or anti-technology, I think we don't do ourselves any services, because the reality is as human beings, we have lived through most of us. In fact, at any age, we have lived through at least one major technological shift that had manifestly large consequences that took a while for us to work through. So I think you have to start by honoring the ambivalence and the anxiety and not telling people they're silly.

I think you also need to understand, and again, this is particularly in the West, we have hundreds of years of not just history, but stories we tell that leave us primed to be concerned. So we are the children of the stories of Frankenstein, a book written over 200 years ago about a monster made real by technology determined to destroy its maker. And that story appealed because it built on the story of the Golem. It was a story that had many iterations before it and many iterations since it. So when technical systems come along, not only do we have a factual base that says, huh, this isn't always that straightforward. We have a set of socio-technical stories, stories that prime our imaginations to make us want to ask questions.

Now, all of that said, we also need to do a better job of educating ourselves about what other questions we should ask, which isn't are the robots going to kill us? Because usually I have to say things like, can they climb stairs? Because I'm pretty certain the largest deployment of robots on the planet is still the Roomba to the robotic vacuum cleaner, and I'm pretty certain they still can't climb stairs. So you are safe, at least from that first version of the robot apocalypse, which is a glib way of saying you need to understand what the affordances of the system are and what it's designed to do. And be mindful about how to ask those questions, right? Is our ambivalence about artificial intelligence an ambivalence about technology or is it an ambivalence about the business models that are propelling it forward? Are we really concerned about machine learning and algorithms or are we concerned about the vague sense we have that we're being enmeshed in systems of constant data gathering and constant advertising? And how we get clearer with ourselves about what it is that the anxieties are about, and how we get better at asking the questions to say, well, what is the history of AI really? What do people mean when they talk about it? I often find in my many roles in life that when people say AI, everyone in the room goes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then if you run around the room, which I occasionally do in the classroom and go, right, here's a post-it note, all of you write down what AI is on the post-it notes, they'll put them on a wall. It is extraordinary to discover the diversity of things that turn up on that wall. You get everything from robots and cyborgs to the Terminator to Facebook and Meta to machine learning, algorithms, neural networks, code, machines that think. I mean, there's a diversity of people's notions about what it is. And I suspect we're a little bit lazy in our language that way. And so we have a kind of, I often find an obligation to be clearer there too. So the too long don't read answer there is we need to recognize why we're anxious and then we need to do a better job of educating ourselves to work out what are the right questions to ask. So, we know where the points of intervention can be for us as individuals, as citizens, as consumers, as groups, as organizations, as regulators, and that actually requires a bit of homework.

Mary Killelea: What drives you personally to be an explorer?

Genevieve Bell: From the time I was a little girl, I was really concerned that the world didn't feel fair. I spent part of my childhood living in Indigenous communities here in Australia, so in Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. And I remember watching things happen to Aboriginal people that I knew hadn't happened in the suburbs that I had lived in before I moved there. I watched interactions between Indigenous people and the police. I watched people living in places that I had only ever seen on the television news in developing countries. And here they were in my own country. And I thought that was really quite unfair. As a very small child, that just didn't seem fair. And after one of those moments, my mum sat me down and my younger brother and said, look, the world as we find it now is not the world as it could or should be. But if it's going to be different, it requires you to put effort in. You can't just say it should be different. You have to actively work for that to be true. And she would, over the years that we've had that conversation, say that may mean it's about where you put your time, and maybe about where you put your money, maybe about where you put your effort, maybe where you put your intellectual energy or your passion. It may be ultimately where you have to lay your life down for those things, because that's the only way change actually happened. And she was really clear that you had a moral obligation to make the world a better place. And by better, it needed to be more fair and more just, and I would say now more sustainable. And that it had to be more fair and more just and more sustainable. And that if you could get into the room where those decisions were being made, you needed to actually actively intervene so that that could be true, because there'd be a whole lot of people who wouldn't be able to get into those rooms. And so it wasn't about making it more fair or just for you. It was about doing your best to make it more fair and more just for the widest range of people.

And so ever since I was a kid, I believe that was what was necessary. And so I am constantly propelled by a sense that the world is not as it should be. And whilst I know I am one quite small now, human being, the only way you get to a different future state than we have in the present is to actively engage in building it. I mean, and in that way, I'm oddly kind of part of a genealogy of Silicon Valley founders who believe the only way to make the future was to invent it. Or, you know, Robert Noyce and the idea of go out and do something wonderful. But for me, it's about these are not undirected actions. These are actions in the service of making the world a better place when I'm done.

Mary Killelea: That's beautiful. I love understanding the motivation behind your work. Let's talk about career resilience. I love this topic, because it's the ability to adjust to career change, whatever the circumstances may be, and navigate all the ups and downs and twists and turns. What has been your secret to career resilience?

Genevieve Bell: The internet. Because online shopping in meetings. It's a terrible, it gets a very glib answer. Look, the thing about having a career of any kind, right, whether it was in a university or government or industry, and the various moments I've had is there is going to be some moment in time where you think something is going to happen or imagine the world war unfolding a particular way and it doesn't. And you get the moral equivalent of respect on the nose with a roll of newspaper or something worse. And those moments are incredibly dispiriting. And I am more than capable in those moments of buying shoes on the internet, of watching bad TV on repeat. Several seasons of several shows, I've probably seen more times than is necessary. And of a slight affection for dark chocolate. So, part of it, now we would call it that self-care. I'm not sure I think of it that way.

And listen, I suspect the other bit about resilience is a twofold lesson, which is if you don't advocate for and ask for the things you want to change, they won't happen. And that the people around you won't know that those are the things you want. And in asking for them, it can feel like you are being incredibly exposed and vulnerable. And when you are told no, it can feel like an utter rejection of who you are and what you are. But over the arc of my life, I have come to realize the very worst thing that has ever happened when I have asked for something was I got it, because then I actually had to make it true all the things I had said before. But that also requires a kind of persistence and a kind of bloody mindedness and a kind of belief that what you are doing is the right thing. And it requires being willing to act in ways that are not always in line with the organization. And I also think it requires all the other stuff that we know is true. And they're all really banal. And that I'm going to now say to you, Ariana Huffington's notions about sleep are not inaccurate. Water is sometimes useful. Exercise is good. Church, if it works for you. A forest, if that's what works for you. There's a little bit about paying attention to all of those things. And they all sound really glib, but they turn out to be some configuration of those things works for every one of us.

And then truthfully, for me, I have been incredibly lucky to have been surrounded by really good people and making sure that I lift them up and they lift me up. But yeah, and ultimately, sometimes it is just, yeah, high heels on eBay.

Mary Killelea: With a side of chocolate.

Genevieve Bell: With a side of chocolate, preferably with mint in it, and a little bit of bad TV. At the moment, I'm on my like, I think my third reprise of Stranger Things and I don't know what that's about.

Mary Killelea: So there's so many, when we talk about the future of work, AI jobs that haven't been created and what we currently do today and what we could, I guess, develop from skill set. Looking forward, what advice do you give women as they want to go into tech, but right now some of this stuff is so unknown as far as what they would be doing? Is there like, kind of like along the science that the mindset of having a growth mindset, what kind of transferrable skills are there that will help someone grow into these jobs that aren't defined yet?

Genevieve Bell: This is one of the conversations I keep having here in Australia, where we have a new government and where there's a real interest in ensuring that our graduates from our universities are kind of future proof and job ready, which are interesting kind of notions. And one of the things you get when you talk to the key leaders in industry here in Australia, which I suspect we would hear echoed in the United States and elsewhere, is that it is no longer sufficient for people to have a portfolio of technical skills. They also need to have a portfolio of what in Australia we're gradually calling core skills, by which we mean an ability to work in a team, an ability not just to work in a team, but to care as much about the success of others as you care about yourself. So, an interesting kind of positionality. We're increasingly having a conversation here about resilience and grit and an ability to manage ambiguity. And I think that's a pandemic consequence of realizing that jobs and job roles and work are not going to be quite as obviously bounded as they have been in the past. And that maybe what we need to do is think about how do we get our students, and that's our employees, I think, more comfortable with the idea about things being ambiguous, about change, and about how you can be better at managing through that.

And then I think we've also seen a real focus on how do you be better as a communicator, storyteller, and engager, because it turns out most offices, and we know this, in most places of work, regardless of whether they're in an office or not, you are bound to be with people who aren't your same skill set. And so being able to talk across skill sets turns out to be hugely important. And that's really changing the way universities are educating people so that we can have that set of skills alongside a portfolio of technical skills. What that means for all of us as we look into the next pieces of our career is it is important to invest in the basics of a technical education. But as I keep telling my students who are being put through Python boot camps as we speak, and not loving me as a result of that, well, some of them are, I mean, some of them think it's great, Python is not necessarily the language that they will encounter 10 years from now. I mean, I'm old enough that I was taught to program in Pascal back in the day, and I was not fabulous at it, but I could make my way around. And nobody's going to ask me to do that now, thank goodness. But understanding how a programming language works, and the work that it does, and the way that it is configured has always let me have conversations with people who do that kind of work in a way that means I am useful in those conversations. And so I think there's a piece that says, you may not want to be a computer scientist, you may not want to be an engineer, you may not want to be a physicist or a chemist, but you will inevitably find yourself in conversations with people who have those backgrounds and skills. And so being able to engage in meaningful ways means you actually have to go do a little bit of work in lots of places. Now, I'm sort of assuming everyone has some baseline of skills in some area, and then it's a matter of laddering things on top of that. And I think that looks like lots of different things. I think in some places that looks like additional degrees, in some places that looks like short courses and micro-credentials, in some places that looks like enthusiastic engagement with all the free content that lives out there in the world. But I think it goes back to your original question about how do you rank emotional resilience and a growth mindset and a kind of capacity to learn and be curious. I think the way you future-proof yourself or ensure that you are ready for the world that is coming is to constantly be engaging with it and to find places where you don't immediately know how to make sense of what you're looking at and stand there for a little while until you can work it out.

Mary Killelea: I love it. What would you tell your 20-year-old self?

Genevieve Bell: One day you will learn to dress better. Yeah, my 20-year-old self is rapidly, you know, encountering my 20-year-old self because I'm back in the place she was when she was 20. So one of the really unexpected things to me is that I went to America, I kind of did the kind of the grand circuit, came back to Australia and ended up living in the town that I left at 20. So, I'm haunted by my 20-year-old self in this town because some of the people who knew her never left. And for them, I'm still her, which is deeply disconcerting because I say things like, I haven't seen you in a while. Did you move across town? I went to another country for 30 years. That's nice. Okay. So my 20-year-old self, she's still kind of lurking around here.

I think I would tell her to go harder than she even did. I mean, I sort of think about my 20-year-old self as a very brave, a very brave creature indeed. She left the country she'd only ever lived in. She went to a place she'd never really spent any time with. She didn't know anyone to a university. She didn't understand. But I was willing to take myself to another country because I knew that being somewhere bigger and somewhere where I could basically fill my lungs and expand my elbows and take up as much room as I was capable of would be a very different experience than the one I had here. And I think I wouldn't tell her it would be okay because it was a crazy first couple of years. But I think I probably would have said, go harder, go faster.

Mary Killelea: What are you most proud of when you reflect on your career?

Genevieve Bell: All the people who think and behave differently now because they've spent time with me and all the ways that they taught me to grow to my network, basically.

Mary Killelea: What does to be bolder mean to you?

Genevieve Bell: More Doc Martens.

Mary Killelea: I've never received that answer. I'll just say that.

Genevieve Bell: Listen, I'm fairly certain, Mary, the people around me are like, please don't encourage her to be bolder. We're already suffering through all of that. That's already been quite traumatic for us. More bold would be genuinely disturbing. Well, you can hear it here first, Mary. So in the kind of, you know, leading to the things that make you faintly uneasy. My boss is taking a new job. And so, for the next couple of months, I'm going to be the Dean here, the acting Dean of the College of Engineering and Computer Science. So, if there was ever a moment where I thought to myself, OK, Genevieve, if you spend a lot of time talking about productive discomfort and throwing yourself into things you don't know how to do and being more bold, I'm standing right on the precipitous and I am thinking more Doc Martens.

Mary Killelea: That's amazing. I love that you shared it here. Oh, my God. This has been such a treat. I could go on for hours, but I totally want to be respectful of your time. Is there anything that you would like to share with our audience of young women who are trying to find themselves and build satisfying, fulfilling careers? Any advice, parting ways?

Genevieve Bell: Yeah, don't imagine it's one career. Don't get so set on the end point that you forget that it'll change along the way. I mean, I'm pretty certain my 20 year old self did not imagine she would be a senior fellow at Intel. I don't think she imagined that Intel existed in that sense. I'm pretty certain she didn't imagine she would be running an academic program. I don't think she imagined she'd know how to dress in a way that was much more compelling. And I don't think she ever imagined that she'd be able to stand on a stage and tell people about the future. I think the ways I imagined myself at 20 would have profoundly limited me if I thought that was the whole arc of my horizon. So, I think there's a little bit about being willing and indeed sometimes searching for the moments where the path doesn't take you exactly where you plan. And then having that not be about a failure to live up to your dreams, but an extraordinary opportunity to be something you could never have imagined.

Mary Killelea: Thank you so very much for being here.

Genevieve Bell: It's my pleasure.

Mary Killelea: Thanks for listening to the episode today. It was really fun chatting with my guest. If you liked our show, please like it and share it with your friends. If you want to learn what we're up to, please go check out our website at 2bbolder.com. That's the number two, little bbolder.com.