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you were the vp of twitter obviously donald trump has just been booted off twitter permanently what do
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you think about that there's a 70 year long study out of yale university looking at what
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the the secret of longevity and happiness is and the secret of longevity and happiness is
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work the thing we spend the majority of our lives doing today's guest is an expert on exactly
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that how can you be an expert on work bruce daisley spent the last
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five to ten years studying what makes work joyous what makes it miserable how we
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get burnt out and what matters the most when it comes to work he's been named one of the most influential londoners in the uk has been
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named as one of the most influential britons in the united kingdom bruce daisley's book the joy of work became the best
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selling business hardback book in 2019 he has his own podcast so he's one hell of a talker as well
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and as the world has transitioned over the last 10 months to this zoom-centric remote working lifestyle i think now is a great time to ask
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ourselves the question what makes work enjoyable how can we get the most out of work how do we avoid
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burnout and how do we maximize our motivation bruce has the answers so without further ado my name is
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stephen butler and this is the director ceo i hope nobody's listening but if you are
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then please keep this to yourself
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bruce you were you wrote a i feel like that's an understatement you wrote a smash hit book about
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work called the joy of work and i've seen this book absolutely everywhere it's been an absolute phenomenon
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so you know considering the fact that the world has fundamentally shifted over the last nine ten months because of this pandemic
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and the way we work has changed so much i wanted to get your view of this remote
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working zoom um sort of working culture that has now been forced upon us just before i let
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you answer i'm gonna give a little sentence around around my take on it i hate it um and
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when when in march when we were forced out as a ceo for business to tell my employees that we're gonna be working from home
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and we have this amazing office which gives us all this community um i know that about 50 of my workforce
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liked the idea but i 100 hate it for a number of reasons what's your take
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so i think at the outset i shared some of your reservations brony brown talks about this thing which
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is collective effervescence and it's a it's a good way she's she's coined to turn for something you see
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quite a lot in social science that even the introverts amongst us actually quite like being around people
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in in some scenarios and we get far more of our energy from the tribe
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were in and the people were surrounded with then would probably admit and so when it first happened
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look the defining thing about work for me is laughing every day i if i laugh every day and i you know in
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the organizations i've been in they've been at times incredibly stressful we've had
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you know at times when i was at twitter there was just for good reason there was like big headlines
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demanding stressful scenarios but either the sort of the dark humor
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that you find in those moments or the moments of levity that you can just get if you're around people that
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you trust soldiers talk about this or firefighters talk about this you know you can find human and i used to love that so the idea of
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shifting to a world where somehow we're plugging into the matrix and we were losing
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that camaraderie that kinship that we get from being around other people i wasn't
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necessarily the the biggest advocate of it i think what's clear though
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is that we've fundamentally moved into a different world and some of those preconceptions that we might have had
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might have been partly ill-judged so so so working through those things that the number one thing we know uh 91 of
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people say they want to continue working in some capacity when you look at the numbers of that
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people say broadly say they want to work at home three or four days a week so there's
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some firms saying we're going to let people work one day a week or two days a week at home people workers want to work more than
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that so there's going to be some degree of of balance and we're going to achieve an equilibrium
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so that's the demand side of it and in fact when you look at all age groups young or old there is a slight
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difference so younger workers have said that they were they're happy at home but they they it's
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close to how happy they were in the office and we can partly understand that a lot of young workers don't have
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home offices they don't have nice desks they're sitting on their bed or they're sitting on the table that
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sits at the end of their bed so they're working in slightly different scenarios but even they report they're more
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productive and happier than than that they were in a big open plan office so that's the first thing older workers are
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significantly happier if you've got a bit of space it seems to correlate with you feeling really happy
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so broadly all of the evidence suggests actually the experience of it has been at least
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unbalanced positive so then you look at the the other side and i guess it's firms
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and it's really growing evidence that firms are recognizing that something has fundamentally changed
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bloomberg did something interesting the business people they did an analysis of all the earnings calls so all these transcripts of like
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big bosses reporting to shareholders what they think is going to happen and
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bloomberg say that already about one in eight firms are talking about making their offices smaller the ft did something
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where they said about half of british firms are already talking about their offices being smaller so
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whether it's that demand side or whether it's that supply side almost certainly we're going into something that's going
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to look and feel a bit different to what we were used to before if you had to guess um i i completely
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resonate with that i think even for our organization we realized how much money i'll be honest how much
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money we could save by not having an office because it's not just the rent it's the the cleaning the electricity it's the
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food in the cupboards you know the maintenance of a what was a 20 000 square foot office in manchester
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uh and you you stripped back those costs and you know it was that you were forced to realize that it is possible for there to be another
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way and i think at first we were we were skeptical that our business could run in
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completely remotely then we realized it could and then we moved into phase three which was like okay but what have we lost now and it
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was it was it was definitely a phase three thing because in phase two we're like oh everything's fine in phase three we're like now we've got
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a problem because we've lost the uh the sense of community that our
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company was giving to our employees and for a company like ours community was a huge part of our our
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value-add you know we are the sterile stereotypical like millennial office with like the slides and the ballpark
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and the freedom and um and a real sense of strong community where pretty much everyone lives together
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and so in phase three of this sort of this sort of mental journey what we saw and i actually resigned just
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after in about september time what we saw was a bit of an exodus of our employees because now
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they're sad at home they're looking at their to-do lists and that they're now thinking the
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remuneration or the value i'm getting from this job is this amount of money and i'm doing
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these set of tasks so now i think i can get more money down the street at that place that
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has no working culture whilst i'm still going to be sad at home and it will be a similar set of tasks
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and it was it was astonishing it was astonishing how many people um are being completely honest because i
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have no reason not to be honest we almost never lost good people the month just before and after i left
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we we lost our the largest number of employees we've ever lost by a fault factor of 10.
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yeah and it's fascinating so let's look into that because you're exactly you spot on these the big themes that
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are emerging now firstly how can you make people feel like the part of something when the old way they felt part of something
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was the energy they had when they're around people right you know there is some buzz and and it's not an
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exaggeration i've chatted to some of the world's leading experts and they say good workplaces do have a buzz
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to them they have almost like this tangible energy um and i think that's one of the challenges we've got
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now if you've got a situation where people on video calls back to back and you know it might be not with the
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big boss it might be with clients they're dealing with or it might be with customers they've got to keep happy
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but if there aren't back-to-back meetings with those people then they can just feel well look that's
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going to be exactly the same wherever i go we're not going to have the same energy and there's far more evidence that
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when people feel part of something bigger than themselves it's transformational so i've been i'm
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writing something about resilience at the moment a book about resilience and what you discover is that actually
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what you hear about resilience is that people tell you all these myths about resilience that it's this individual
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strength or it's this it's this trait that we can do develop and what you discover about resilience
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is it's normally a collective thing it's because you feel part of a resilient community you
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feel like you've got the strength of others to draw upon you feel like you can tap into something one person in some of
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the research i was reading said you can't be a resilient on your own and there's so much truth in that
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now what does that mean for the way we're working right now well if you've got someone in a bed seat or a studio flat or a flat
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chair and they're sitting on their own all day and they feel lonely it's almost certain that those reserves
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of resilience are being tapped and you know there's one thing that psychologists talk about all the time it's this notion
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of of affect it's sort of it's a fancy way of saying mood it's a psychologist a way of saying
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mood and what you discover about affect is that the the mood we're in is really
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influential on a lot of the things on our experience of life and the uh creativity and our sense of
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collaboration so scientists talk about positive affect and negative affect and positive affect best way i can sort
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of frame uh positive affect it it suggests that like the mood we're in transforms some of the decisions we make
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and the best way i can frame that is that when you're a kid growing up whether your main carer is a grandparent or a
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parent or a a guardian but you knew from the age of four or five you knew that it was a good time to ask
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for something and a bad time to ask for something you knew based on the mood that your carer was in that there was a good time
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to ask for something a bad time but affect the mood we're in affects uh decisions well the situation we're all going
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through right now is not positive affect it's a negative affect loads of people are feeling burnt out
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average person during lockdown has been working about an extra 45 minutes a day that's on the back of the average
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working day has gone up by two hours in the last 10 years so people are finding themselves in this
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lonely unaffiliated disconnected sense of exhaustive burnout so it's no
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wonder people are quitting their jobs because they just don't feel like the good version of them that they used to feel like you know the contrast as well
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so this idea of contrast where you can remember how your job used to be and if your job used to be a 10 and now
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because it's because a central part of what made it a 10 say the community or the culture in the office or you know that sense of camaraderie
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or that sense that you know you were a group of people working together towards a goal now you're kind of sat in your bedside on your own on the
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end of your bed doing a to-do list um if your company was a 10 because of that culture and it's now dropped down to a
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six something in my mind makes me think that those companies will actually hurt more
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versus the companies that were like an eight before and an hour a six um and that's part of what i think with
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with our company social chain because culture was such a big thing that people must be thinking oh my god what the hell is this
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um being sat alone and we try i think you know i can't speak to the company now because i'm no longer there but i know there was ample efforts with all
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as with all companies to do these like zoom bingo things and that lasted a month before everyone got sick to death of that but you mentioned
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the word burn out there uh a very popular phrase a topic of much mystique as well i think um i saw
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your ted talk about the topic of burnout and i saw your your thoughts there i guess my my question is what causes burnout
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in your view yeah there was a really interesting there was a a really interesting book that just came
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out last year and it was based on a a successful article that had sort of blown up on
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buzzfeed by a woman called an helen peterson and she talked about she the premise of her article really
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good article worth searching for is the the millennials of the burnout generation you remember that one i think
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maybe you showed it right there's all these matchy matches and what she said is she said and she'd encountered it as a journalist
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she's thinking i'm feeling something i wonder if i could capture it and she was thinking is there such thing as errand paralysis
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so what she means by that is that she was getting to the end of like these productive working days
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and then she would get back to her flat and she would she would open a bill or she had she had something she needed
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to do and she just didn't have the energy this high performing really successful person didn't have the
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energy to get those things done and so she was thinking in her head is this some sort of weird
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um this sort of duality that you can be really accomplished at one set of things but you can't
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others she started looking into it and she realized it's not that you're avoiding one thing
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you're just exhausted and her lesson was that any time we teach we treat our energy as infinite that's
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when burn out comes and it we so often do it we we treat the idea that we can work
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all the time and the best examples i can give you are the ones where we actually check in on ourselves so i i
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used to find myself day job working at twitter worked on twitter for eight years i used to
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uh when i was especially guilty of this i used to have back-to-back meetings on monday what's the consequence of back-to-back
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meetings your inbox is is exploding it's it's absolutely overloaded and so i used to get home on a monday
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night get myself a cup of tea deal with all my domestic responsibilities and i would sit there
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and work and do emails for about four hours and just try and catch up with what i was doing
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and i quite often i would check myself and about nine o'clock i'd be spending as much time changing
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the music as i would doing emails or one long email that's like a two-pager who sends these emails these
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criminals sending long emails but i'd find myself reading this you know that feeling where you read it
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i'll just read that again and then read it again and what you discovered there's this science for this it's called ego depletion
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and the people who look into this say that our brains are sort of far more finite far more limited than we
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might imagine our brains are far closer if you want a metaphor for it our brains are far closer to the batteries on our
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phone than the infinite broadband that we we normally deal with so your brain's sort of got a certain
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amount of charge in it and when you use it and so the way you'll you'll witness this is maybe you walk into
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a situation and someone asks you a question at the end of a long day or whatever and you're like hang on can you just
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just give me a minute just give me a minute or someone asks you something really complicated just as you're about
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to oh okay hang on can we just give and effectively our brains are sort of far more finite
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once you recognize that you start thinking okay i wonder if that should influence the way i think about
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doing my job and and of course burnout is one of the things where we don't treat our energy as finite it is
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it is uh finite but we don't treat it like that and the end result is then we just feel like we're running on empty
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we're running on vapors and so when you look into it the world health organization uh recognize burnout as a real
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phenomenon and they say that burnout is is all about when our energy feels spent when we feel
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emotionally exhausted they talk about this other thing called depersonalization where when you're really burnt out you don't
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necessarily construe other people as full and
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empathetic individuals but sometimes you're a bit sort of dismissive of other people or you're a
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bit reductive of their motives or you start seeing people around you as an annoyance so in the old days if you ever
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found that the person you sat next to their chewing or their tapping was driving you crazy that can be a little
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bit of an exam example of deep personalization so it's a real phenomenon it's uh i think to my mind it makes you
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rethink the way you work so if you knew okay the most i can do every day
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is eight productive hours of work and you can you know there are evidence to suggest you can do more than that but if you
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started treating it like that and said maybe actually if i'm honest it's not a really high intensity productive hours
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but maybe it's five or six really good hours and then you know other stuff is dealing with email or dealing with
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with phone calls it i suspect it would change the way you made decisions and you see evidence of this barack
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obama used to have someone who followed him round who uh barack obama never chose his
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lunch in eight years because this person just made all his decisions for him and you see albert einstein said something
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similar einstein used to wear that same outfit every day and uh it was because he knew when he
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got to his lab when he got to the the place he was making uh decisions he knew that if he went there and he
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hadn't cluttered his brain with all these little micro decisions he was he just felt a bit more
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imaginative inventive creative so we see evidence of it in other people's behavior but normally when it
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comes to us we don't treat our brains like that we don't treat it like something we need to protect
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our energy to protect we we tend to treat our energy as infinite but that's why burnout comes just
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does the type of work you know you talk there about eight hours or five hours or whatever it might be does the type of work you're doing and
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the amount of intrinsic motivation you have or joy you get from it impact your
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likelihood of being burnt out yeah because like because that's what i that's what i suspected in my life
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because the people that i've seen that get burnt out and this is all anecdotal and there's no scientific evidence really to
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support these these assertions but people that i've seen get burnt out the most typically typically especially during
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the lockdown working alone often often freelance um often doing a repetitive task
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usually doing things that aren't that enjoyable and i had a friend actually come here and sit on the sofa which i've talked about i think in the last few podcasts
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and he basically told me that he was feeling a bit burnt out um and uh he was struggling to get out of bed
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and go and do the go and do his work in the morning he's a he's a freelance freelancer working on his own in his house he used
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to work within teams during pre pandemic and i i was saying to him like think about the things that make your
00:19:00
work enjoyable and what other you know what are the things about work that are intrinsically and
00:19:05
motivating to you all those things have gone right now so now you're just left with waking up alone sitting in front of a
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computer and maybe because your intrinsic motivations or the intrinsic joy of your work has been stripped maybe
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you're now um encountering burnout i think that resonates with me as well to some degree like if i've ever got close to feeling
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unmotivated or quote unquote burnt out it was when i was doing things alone pre-social chain
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on my own just for money well there's a couple of things there so two things so like this i think is
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all related to resilience so there's two things there the first thing is that the evidence we have is that when we feel an absence of
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control we do we generally feel more burnt out so let's think of examples and the research on this some of the best research on
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this is about nurses so very timely for the moment we're in right now when nurses choose to work extra hours or you might
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have known friends when you were doing jobs before your career where you know i used to work in fast food and some of
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those dudes used to work 14 hour shifts and you're like wow where did they get the energy but they were electing to do
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it and the evidence we have is that when people choose to do those things it often impacts them less they they
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feel like they've got control over it so you know i these guys who used to work with burger king king at me with me and they were doing 100
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hour weeks but because they were choosing to do it because it was really important for them to afford a car to do things
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they were what you discover is that when you're electing to do it does seem to give you some degree of
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protection so control is a really important part the more control we feel over our lives so why might you
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now be feeling burnt out because imagine if your company has you on 40 hours of zoom calls a week or your
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inbox is always full or you've got a difficult person you have to deal with a client relationship who's phoning you
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all the time you might be feeling the absence of control or your your friend who's the the freelancer might be feeling like i'm
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just i'm not in control of things but there's a couple of other really important parts and they're about our identity and about
00:21:06
the the sense of community and you get really good evidence of how
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when we feel part of something bigger than us and feeling that connection being around people is a really important part of
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that it tends to enrich us it tends to to protect us and you see really good
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evidence of this you see when people go to hospital if they have like a heart operation or
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they have something serious when they come out of hospital the people who reported that they were
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part of groups before their chance of survival their chance of avoiding depression
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is massively higher than those who live in isolation and look that's the
00:21:44
experiment we're going through right now that you might have wonderful friends that are at the end of a zoom line or a
00:21:50
messenger link or a whatsapp but if you're not around them and to some extent some of the energy we get
00:21:56
from them is dissipating and i think that's the challenge that a lot of us are in right now it's just a very lonely existence we've
00:22:02
got now all of the things that we found nourishing enriching life-affirming a
00:22:08
lot of them have been taken away from us now the challenge go on i was just gonna say i was gonna say um
00:22:13
actually there's a lady that sat in your in your chair yesterday anna hemmings and she's an 11 time or
00:22:19
11 time world gold medal world champion amazing olympian etc etc and she was
00:22:26
speaking to the fact that at one point in her career when she's when she she was training in london to be a kayaker so she's like an
00:22:31
eleven-time world champion kayaker right and then at one point in her career they decided that they wanted her to go to the olympics so she had to
00:22:38
learn sprint kayaking right the coach was in florida so they took her away from her team in london and she had to basically train
00:22:45
on her own via using an email that her her coach in florida was selling her
00:22:50
and after doing that for a couple of months she got chronic fatigue syndrome wow so she was out for two years she said
00:22:56
she couldn't lift her hands and shampoo her and the thing that brought her back was the realization
00:23:02
that taking away her from her team as someone who was a bit of an extrovert and got her energy
00:23:07
from people had um set off a bunch of alarm bells in her body so the the reason that she managed to
00:23:13
recover and come back and win more world titles after two years of literally having this chronic fatigue
00:23:18
syndrome was by realizing that and putting her back with her teams and changing her training which is wow
00:23:23
what a metaphor for what we're going through right and it shows how the mind is so intrinsically connected to the body yeah
00:23:29
people don't think that loneliness or removing you from your tribe
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can disable your body yeah or your energy but although there's remarkable amounts of evidence on that so there's a
00:23:41
woman in the u.s called julianne holt lunchtime who's done like a colossal survey
00:23:46
and she appropriates she says loneliness is the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day
00:23:52
and so you know it has this big impact on us and loneliness is as bigger than obesity in terms of the
00:23:59
health impact it has on you and that's what we're going through right now and for all of these things that we've tried to sort of create these
00:24:06
artificial intel alternatives zoom quizzes and all manner and things like that they just don't
00:24:11
have the same connection of feeling surrounded with someone there's
00:24:17
some evidence as soon as you start looking into these things it's extraordinary what an impact people have on each other
00:24:23
so these one piece of evidence i went up to to oxford to meet the woman who did this research and she took groups of rowers
00:24:30
similar to to the kayaker took groups of roads first and there are oxford university roads you've seen them the colossal
00:24:36
the monsters and she she put the first group individually on rowing machines second group she said okay i want you to
00:24:43
be on a a made-up boat you know you're going to sit on your rowing machines but you've got to be in stroke with each other
00:24:49
and she wanted to see firstly what was the different experience what she noticed was that the firstly
00:24:55
they did about the same exercise it wasn't like someone worked harder than others but she measured the
00:25:01
endorphin levels you do that by uh you put these arm cuffs on people you sort of you subject them to pain and then you
00:25:07
see how much pain they can take and the endorphin levels of the people who'd rode together was twice as high
00:25:13
as the people who'd rode alone and you know you see this with choirs people who sing inquired you know you
00:25:19
can grab strangers off the street get them to sing some abba songs together and you say to them at the end
00:25:24
of it how do you feel they say i feel utterly elated now that's not because singing our songs on its own does it it's
00:25:30
because when you feel some connection with other people even strangers it seems to be
00:25:36
transformational it seems to sort of elevate our mood and all of that has been stripped from us
00:25:41
so you know if you've got i guess you can try to do some approximations of it but all of that has been stripped from
00:25:47
us and i think that's why it's it's inevitable that we are feeling
00:25:52
flat energy-less we it doesn't feel the same right now how do we fix that though and this is i think it's going back to
00:25:58
the start of the conversation why i hate it i hate the lack of connection i hate the lack of community i think are you an extrovert would you
00:26:05
say oh god i really don't know i think on one hand i'm a massive introvert yeah i i i'm people know me i don't like to
00:26:11
do i don't like small talk i like to sit alone for weeks on end i like i went off to the jungle for four weeks in september alone
00:26:17
went off to the costa rican jungle alone so i like that although i have this kind of like you know public speaking and social media brand
00:26:24
so i actually don't know although a lot of introverts like that ability to switch on the public speaking side and
00:26:30
but i think actually the more you look into the introvert extrovert thing it's sort of a compartmentalization that doesn't
00:26:36
necess the vast majority of people sit somewhere and sure exactly i'm the same as you um no but
00:26:41
these uh i i think look the point you raise is there's no easy substitute but there is some evidence i saw an
00:26:49
amazing piece of research and it looked at couples who lived distance relationships
00:26:54
so you know in the uk distance relationship means you're half an hour an hour's drive from someone in the us it means you're like a three
00:27:00
hour flight so they did a piece of research 40 000 couples living distant relationships
00:27:06
and they wanted to know so these were unmarried so they wanted to know the ones who made it through a year what what was the thing that made it through
00:27:13
a year and this was research was done three or four years ago so it's not from a different era of technology but the ones who stayed with each other
00:27:20
for the long term phoned each other every day and you know when they they were asked what you talked about
00:27:26
they said oh we just talked about trivial things so i think so many of us have got into
00:27:31
this frame of mind of thinking well i liked her a photo and i sent a
00:27:36
quick whatsapp saying what i sent a voice note horrific use of technology but they said
00:27:41
but you know we think somehow we've serviced the relationship by doing these things
00:27:47
and actually when you come down to it and maybe future generations will be different but it's it's often quite analog it's
00:27:52
that sense of feeling seen and appreciated so i suspect face time might work the same way
00:27:58
but so many of us are sort of are overwhelmed with these performative zoom calls right now where he's sitting there
00:28:04
with like a celebrity squares a blanky blank uh array of faces in front of you i know
00:28:11
and i wonder if it's that sense of being seen and being heard that probably connects and cuts through a bit more
00:28:17
yeah i think so yeah i just think work is just so much more than the work right i think
00:28:22
especially in the world in the world we live in at the moment where we're getting lonelier as a society i was looking at the stats when i was
00:28:28
writing my book about you know the the when they ask americans for example how many people they can turn to at a time of crisis it
00:28:34
used to be three people a couple of decades ago now they're like medium answer is zero yeah and um i think it was theresa may
00:28:41
that appointed a head of loneliness where loneliness are for the uk and i've seen the stats so i think work is one of the few sort of
00:28:48
i don't know institutions where it still binds us together um and we're not between four white walls tapping glass to order food and
00:28:55
alone speaking to our nan through a piece of glass so it's a shame that that that community that part of community's
00:29:01
gone but anyway moving on creativity something you've talked about at length and
00:29:06
um for me i've i've always believed that i'm least creative in the office i've always thought
00:29:11
i'm more creative in the gym and in the shower than i am when i'm when i'm sat in a boardroom with a bunch of people
00:29:17
and i know this is something you've spoken about so i wanted to get your take on where we're most creative what kills and causes creativity
00:29:23
yeah i mean look firstly i would all i ever feel in all of these situations is that i feel like i'm a
00:29:29
a vessel that's passing on other people's knowledge so i've found myself being consumed with all these things and
00:29:34
interested in their learning so look let me tell you um what i've i've discovered that
00:29:40
neuroscience is really intriguing the most compelling thing about neuroscience is when you look into it uh neuroscientists used to work on
00:29:48
experimenting on animals you know i'm not i'm not keen on that i was like i was
00:29:53
you know in a protest group about animal experimentation when i was younger um and they used to look at brain
00:29:58
injuries so that used to be the main way that neuroscience worked and it's only the last 20 years that brain scans have had any degree of
00:30:05
sophistication but what they've discovered in like the time that they've had brain scanners is some of the things that they presumed
00:30:11
about the way our brain works aren't necessarily right so let me give you one example but they used to put
00:30:16
people in these brand new brain scanners and they would watch what their their brains did they give them a puzzle they
00:30:22
give them a rubik's cube their brains would light up in these sort of different places and then they'd notice what happened
00:30:28
when people stopped playing on the puzzle and their brains would light up in sort of
00:30:33
loads of places as well and so it was it was baffling what's going on right now they'd say to these people they say oh right sorry i
00:30:40
was a million miles away i was daydreaming so okay right that's interesting your brain's lightened up when you're when you're not
00:30:47
thinking about something when you sort of switched off and so the way that neuroscientists categorize this broadly they say
00:30:53
these three systems of cognition first one is like when you're doing that rubik's cube or
00:30:58
when you're typing an email it's called the executive attention network so it's the main thing you're focusing on
00:31:04
and then you'll know while your executive attention network is watching netflix or while you're writing an email you can
00:31:10
also be aware of like the room you're in that's called the salience network and the third one the third
00:31:15
so there's three of these systems the third one is that one when you're daydreaming the one where you're a
00:31:21
million miles away the one when you're in the shower which is called the default network
00:31:26
but what we discover is that people generally report having their best creative ideas not
00:31:32
when they're frowning into their laptop screen but when they're in these default mode uh situations so you might have it in
00:31:39
the old days if you're on a train somewhere or on a plane somewhere loads of people i've got a friend who says she has all
00:31:45
her best ideas staring out the windows of planes yeah and so you know if that was you then this year has been
00:31:52
an uncreative year but um my favorite example of it is a really famous screenwriter
00:31:58
called aaron sawkin he's written the west wing he wrote there was a um there was a film he had
00:32:04
on netflix just before christmas called the chicago seven he's written all these big things very famous for zingy dialogue so he
00:32:10
wrote the social network film things like that sort of you know um really sort of really what's
00:32:16
better than a million a billion like he's written all these zingy lines and he's realized that uh he has all his best
00:32:22
ideas exactly like you in the shower he said he had he told hollywood reporter magazine he had a shower
00:32:28
installed in the corner of his office and he has eight showers a day and he was asked by them
00:32:33
he was asked by them hang on is this like some weird ocd thing he said not at all i find that
00:32:39
when i you know so i'll be sitting there thinking of something trying to come up with an idea but it's
00:32:45
only when i disengage my brain to something comes to me an idea comes to me and so
00:32:50
what you described is exactly what a lot of these people whose job is to be creative
00:32:56
have recognized and as soon as you know that you start thinking wow okay i need to think differently
00:33:03
about being creative because creativity can then be when i'm sitting at my desk i'm
00:33:08
sort of taking all this inspiration in stimulation ideas but then it's about disengaging
00:33:16
going for a walk going for a cycle ride going to to do a workout might be the moment where the idea hits
00:33:22
you and i don't think necessarily we think about that enough you know if you go back to this idea
00:33:28
that your brain is a bit like your phone battery then some of those moments that effectively can recharge your battery
00:33:35
can be the moments where creativity hits you and inspiration hits you so i think sort of rethinking the way
00:33:42
that we treat a productive week of work of you know these blocks of work
00:33:47
but then moments where you know it might be your personal is you go for a walk every lunch time
00:33:53
that can be far more creative and productive than you might imagine well how do we make our work environments more conducive with
00:33:59
creativity then is there a way or do we just resign to the fact that that's not going to be the best place for our creativity and if we're going to
00:34:06
reach our creative potential it's probably going to be away from the office i think it's about recognizing there's a
00:34:13
yin yang there's a balance of work and and imagination
00:34:19
so i i always loved the example of um charles dickens charles dickens obviously um like
00:34:25
incredibly productive i think he wrote 15 novels 200 short stories he edited a weekly
00:34:31
magazine about a mile from here you know sort of incredibly productive we didn't work afternoons
00:34:36
and so charles dickens would sit down at his desk at eight in the morning he'd write for about four or five hours and then he'd go and walk and he'd walk
00:34:43
10 10 miles every afternoon and that was like him lost in his thoughts you know
00:34:49
striding through east london probably sort of imagination popping when he sat down the next day he had
00:34:55
loads of ideas and i think some of us have eliminated that
00:35:00
sort of the brain fermenting ideas we've eliminated that a bit so
00:35:06
you know it might be that your way to do this yourself is just to make sure you just got some down time
00:35:12
or you've just got some time where you know you put music on but you turn podcasts off or you just
00:35:17
you try and get a bit more balance in how you're uh using your energy so let's conclude
00:35:23
this point about work and creativity say that i today made you the ceo of a company that had
00:35:29
100 employees um and you could design from scratch the the working environment how often people
00:35:36
worked and some of the sort of key sort of principles and foundations of that working environment what kind of
00:35:41
things would be important to you based on all you know so let's look into what happened in lockdown the first part of lockdown most
00:35:48
people reported that their engagement went up and why did their engagement went up their engagement went up because they
00:35:54
were solving problems like we'd never worked like this before everyone was you know the first moment
00:35:59
you're getting on a zoom call or a google hangout or you're getting on these things there's like you know even though you're in this
00:36:05
crazy situation there's a degree of excitement fight or flight almost right and and so what do we know about that we
00:36:11
know that people felt that they were involved in firstly a bit of team collaboration but secondly they were
00:36:16
helping solve problems and so you know the whole organizations computer sales
00:36:22
have gone through the roof whole organizations that had no laptop computers so they had to arm their teams with kit
00:36:28
and so people felt really engaged by the fact that they back to what we talked about earlier had some control they had a a bit of
00:36:36
influence so number one thing that we discover is the more that people feel that they can have an
00:36:41
impact in their job and it might be something similar simple they're they're just responsible for a
00:36:46
couple of things themselves the more that they feel that they've got some agency some control themselves
00:36:52
they feel motivated in their jobs when do we feel unmotivated in our jobs when our boss tells us what to do but we
00:37:00
don't get any input into it we don't necessarily think it's the best thing to do we're doing
00:37:05
repetitive things that don't feel very rewarding so the best thing that any of us can do think well how can i make
00:37:12
teams feel small and teams feel like they've got a shared sense of accomplishment and pride in what they're
00:37:18
doing so that's what i would be saying what you discover is 100 is a really nice size actually any time a
00:37:24
company goes over 100 what your discovery is you lose a bit of some of that
00:37:30
camaraderie you better almost there's a few organizations that do this when you go over 100 split it into two
00:37:36
teams because your that sort of cohesion you get works really well when we
00:37:42
we've got a familiarity with each other and what happens is when you go over that you start losing it
00:37:47
and you think we want we want it to feel like it used to feel it's never going to feel like that humans don't work like that so
00:37:54
far better to say you know we've got two teams that love each other but we're we're working on separate goals so
00:38:00
keeping things small is really critical and there's lots of evidence of the smaller you can keep things you
00:38:07
almost get the economies of engagement compared to the economies of scale that when people feel they're part of
00:38:13
something that they're having an input into their engagement is higher they they they work more effectively
00:38:20
so i would say that would be the defining part making people feel like they've got things that they're responsible for
00:38:26
and generally all of those things encourage active engagement what you find when you
00:38:32
look into some of the stats they're terrifying so and when you globally there's an organization gallop to this workforce
00:38:39
survey opinion poll company and they they do this workforce survey and they say that globally
00:38:44
13 of people are engaged in their jobs when they look into it what i mean by
00:38:49
that is that these there's almost as many people there's about 22 of people who
00:38:54
would actively disengage their jobs so by actively disengaged they kind of hate their organization and
00:39:01
they want to bring the downfall of their organization so anytime you meet some someone on the tuber in the street they're almost twice
00:39:07
as likely to want to destroy their company as make it succeed but then the vast
00:39:12
majority of everyone else over 50 percent of people are just disengaged they're not actively
00:39:17
disengaged they're just passively disengaged so work for most of us is something is something that sort of
00:39:25
feels arduous we don't necessarily enjoy we don't necessarily value the decisions and you'll know as
00:39:31
someone who's run a company where culture was the defining thing you'll know that when you get it right
00:39:37
it can be this superpower where you know you're on high octane fuel compared to you know
00:39:43
the energy can feel low otherwise and so just getting those things right generally is far more about
00:39:50
people feeling a personal connection with the people that are around feeling like they're contributing something these things play a really big
00:39:56
part we talked a lot about the joy of work obviously the i guess the antithesis of the joy of work is the misery of work
00:40:02
and at some point when work feels miserable um people are faced with this quite um this quite confounding question which
00:40:10
is how do i know when to quit and we talk that we know i think there's so much written about how to start and when to start and
00:40:16
starting being the thing but obviously the thing that comes before starting usually is knowing the right moment to
00:40:22
quit people don't quit sometimes and they spend many decades in a miserable job and
00:40:27
you know then their fear of quitting almost becomes stronger because they're getting more comfortable and more entrenched so i wanted i've not seen you talk about
00:40:34
anything about quitting before but i just wondered if you had a take on when the right moment to quit a job was or i know it's an incredibly personal
00:40:40
nuanced thing but people i can i was thinking then i was thinking what are some of the things people
00:40:45
really want to know right now one of them i'm sure is like i hate my job i don't have control my boss is an
00:40:51
do i quit i'm gonna tell you a secret for the past five years while building
00:40:56
social chain into a 700 person global social media powerhouse i've been using a service that i've never really
00:41:02
mentioned some of you might know that service it's called fiverr f-i-v-e-r-r
00:41:08
it's my little secret if i've ever had a project where i've needed affordable skilled freelancers to help me whether
00:41:13
it's building a social media application that made my company three million pounds or just a video i needed editing or
00:41:19
help making a logo or making a website i've used fiverr now that my secret's out the bag here's
00:41:24
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00:41:31
made anything at all go to fiverr.com ceo i'll put the link in the description
00:41:36
that's fiverr.com ceo message me the service you want from the
00:41:42
website and every single week i'll personally send you the credit to your fiverr account so that you can get that project
00:41:47
done thank you to fiverr for the sponsorship and for supporting entrepreneurs and freelancers around the world i'm looking forward to all of your
00:41:53
messages i've been working my way through these huel nutrition bars this week um as you
00:41:59
know i love the ready to drink cure flavors but you will have also got these salted caramel bars
00:42:04
and i'm a big salted caramel nut which i've been having and if you're if you're someone that does like to chew
00:42:10
not just drink your food then i really highly recommend the salted caramel flavor there's also another flavor called the raspberry white chocolate
00:42:16
flavor which i've been very addicted to over the last couple of weeks but again just like huel it's nutritionally complete
00:42:22
you get all of your your proteins you get essential fats you get it's gluten-free as well
00:42:27
and you get 26 vitamins and minerals from these bars
00:42:32
tastes amazing and i'm a big salted caramel fan give it a go if you do send me a screenshot on instagram or
00:42:38
twitter or linkedin and let me know what you think again as someone that skips meals this is an absolute lifesaver
00:42:43
i was thinking what are some of the things people really want to know right now one of them i'm sure is like i hate my job i don't have control my
00:42:50
boss is an do i quit yeah look you know big
00:42:56
questions you probably could tell us more than that um yeah i think you know the uh the
00:43:03
critical thing about that is is probably checking in with yourself and asking you know do i feel any sense
00:43:09
of reward by my from my job obviously it's not a great time for anyone right now to
00:43:14
be debating doing something that makes them economically precarious
00:43:19
that so you don't necessarily want to risk something that is going to put you in a difficult situation but i
00:43:25
think you know evaluating our jobs generally when you look into the research when you say to people have you had a good days
00:43:31
a good day at work it generally comes down to whether people feel pride in their organization
00:43:37
and whether they feel like they've made meaningful progress in something they've been working on so meaningful progress actually can be
00:43:44
difficult right now if your job feels like you're the expert in emailing and
00:43:50
video calls you sometimes feel like you've made no progress for weeks you haven't done anything for weeks and also if your
00:43:55
organization is struggling this is a really interesting phenomenon because some organizations pre-covered were in
00:44:01
uh were growing so naturally when you're an employee in those organizations you're dragged up with it you're giving
00:44:06
promotions and pay rises and there's the cash to fund that now organizations are in decline or a lot of
00:44:13
them are hanging on and so you're not getting a promotion your pay's been frozen you might have be on a pay cut
00:44:18
you might be furloughed and it feels like suddenly you've gone into decline in your career because the organization
00:44:23
you're in is in decline um and i think that also causes a lot of people to start to think
00:44:29
well you know i might my whole life up until this point has been about progress and climbing the ladder why am
00:44:36
i going down the ladder yeah i didn't do anything different or wrong you know it's a really interesting philosophical thing about that because
00:44:41
the whole idea of the career at korea is the invention of the last 40 years you know
00:44:47
uh ancestors uh grandparents our great-grandparents never had the idea of a career where i
00:44:53
was going to be accomplishing something and developing and changing you know the job you were going to be
00:44:59
doing next year was the job you were doing last year well done and the job that your kids were going to do was going to be the job that you did
00:45:06
and the the this idea and it brings with it a degree of insecurity this idea that we will be on this
00:45:13
developmental path is a construct look and it's a construct that suits the economic system we live in because it
00:45:21
makes us all we strive to be accomplishing more than we did last year and to be earning
00:45:26
more than we did last year but it's a construct for the last few years whether it's the origin of
00:45:31
happiness i'm not 100 sure if i was going to put two things alongside some of the things that you've talked about
00:45:37
that sense of feeling part of something feeling connected to other people i think is a more robust route to
00:45:42
happiness than feeling like i'm on a career trajectory even though that can the the illusion of
00:45:51
that can be incredibly powerful it's interesting because you know with there's this thing called like gold medal depression where like michael
00:45:56
phelps he set these set these tarts one thing i kind of investigated in my book is the idea that
00:46:02
we think stability we think chaos we think we live in chaos and and in search of stability but the
00:46:09
moment we find stability i.e completed goals and um you know roof over our heads and
00:46:15
everything's normal we actually descend into chaos so in fact we're meant to keep this is a
00:46:20
philosophical idea i guess but we're meant to keep our lives in forward motion in that chaos because when you look at people that have
00:46:26
achieved all their goals and they have nothing left to accomplish they so often fall into some kind of depression and lack of purpose and
00:46:32
meaning i think jordan peterson talks about it i know benjamin said a lot about it that you know much of um i was looking at the
00:46:39
stats around life expectancy in the uk and the us and over the last two years it's declined for the first time ever
00:46:45
but and they say when they say why is that they say because the opioid crisis and say why is there an opioid crisis and they say well because
00:46:51
there's a lack of meaning and so i i began to realize that in my own life i think i'm meant to keep myself
00:46:59
my goals way out in front of me almost unattainable um and keep myself striving and i've even
00:47:05
seen it in my person which i've talked about a little bit on this podcast the days where someone came along and said here's 50 million will buy a company or we're
00:47:10
going to go to the stock market you're going to be a millionaire were the most confusing days of my life because i immediately didn't know what
00:47:16
my point was anymore i wonder what there's something really fascinating so there's a there's a study of
00:47:22
olympic medalist a british study really fascinating piece of work it's called the great british medalist study and um it was commissioned by the
00:47:29
british olympic association so they wanted to know what was the what was the creation of a
00:47:35
champion and they did this fascinating thing they did they gathered 20 what they called super elite athletes so
00:47:42
these are athletes you'll know them all of them are household names they don't name them in the study but it's people like kelly holmes it's people
00:47:48
like the big iconic names and uh these were people that every time they went to
00:47:54
a championship they would win gold or they would win they would be right in contention then
00:48:00
they took a second group and they called these elite athletes super elite elite and these were people who went to championships
00:48:06
but kinda didn't meddle or if they meddled they meddled third biggest difference between them these
00:48:11
ones had all received significant childhood trauma the elite ones the super early best ones had achieved
00:48:18
significant childhood trauma let's start counting the cases so kelly holmes she was bullied at
00:48:24
school she was the only child of mixed race ethnicity in her village she said she
00:48:30
experienced continual racism tom daley his father died when he was
00:48:36
training yeah um you know you look at countless examples of these things the andy murray was you know greatest
00:48:42
british tennis player maybe greatest british sports person he was at the dumb lane shooting the only mass
00:48:48
shooting in british history so all of these people have experienced significant childhood trauma and what happens is they tend to direct
00:48:54
their energy based on what we know they direct like they're fortunate there was a coincidence that they were
00:49:01
gifted supreme talent and what you discover is childhood trauma normally correlates with addiction
00:49:06
so if you know if it correlates with anything it correlates with obsessive behavior but both of them have
00:49:12
something in common you're trying to fill that void and so these people are fortunate that they've been gifted with this
00:49:18
super elite talent that they can fill the void with striving for something and the people who ends up at addicts
00:49:24
with the same challenge don't but they're still striving to fill that void and so there is something in you know
00:49:29
it's it's almost inevitable that these people who are striving for the elite uh accomplishment hoping to fill this
00:49:36
this hole that sits inside them of course when they get there they realize it was all an illusion it's like a mirage in the desert but you know there
00:49:43
is something in what you say i mean i've got i just i mean completely like i think when i i sit here and speak to people
00:49:48
that are tremendously successful and the one thing that i've seen in common with all of them actually think i said it to joe wicks when he was sat
00:49:54
here two weeks ago was they all seemed to have some real severe childhood trauma that no one else has experienced
00:50:01
and even in my i said to joe i said you know my i've got a friend who's a billionaire he's not happy but he has had this deep
00:50:08
obsession since he was a kid because of some things that happened with his father and his father making him feel
00:50:14
that he just wasn't enough or he wasn't adequate enough which has made him obsessive about success to the point where it's
00:50:20
unhealthy um and he's got there now he's a billionaire but he's not happy at all he's he's you know he's tremendously
00:50:26
unfulfilled the same with eddie han i went and eddie holmes on this podcast a couple of weeks ago as well
00:50:31
and he he is the most relentlessly obsessed person i've met um just non-stop eat to the point where
00:50:38
he'll say to his kids like he'll he'll tell his wife and kids that they are second priority to his box to being a boxing promoter
00:50:44
you ask him where that's come from he said you know my dad my dad always made me feel like i wasn't enough it's really interesting though because
00:50:51
it depends i'm intrigued then how these people pay it forward because andre agassi
00:50:56
supreme tennis player great tennis player married to the greatest the up there equal greatest tennis players
00:51:02
for all time uh he's married steffi graf and um and he says that his dad bullied him constantly
00:51:08
like his dad was never happy he's the only place his dad who was a persian iranian cab driver could
00:51:14
afford to own a tennis court was in las vegas so they moved to las vegas and his dad bullied him into becoming a tennis
00:51:20
player and andre agassi fantastic autobiography wrote about how much he hates tennis
00:51:25
hates it with every single bit every fiber in his body and he says i will never do to my kids
00:51:32
what my dad did to me and so it's like this really interesting origin of success is the thing that propels you
00:51:39
this driving force that propels these people who just keep going relentlessly is it
00:51:45
something missing rather than something extra and i think that's the interesting conundrum
00:51:50
i don't think it's predictable and this is the thing because i think you think okay well if someone has trauma they're going to become successful or
00:51:56
they're going to become an addict or if someone has a upbringing that lacked empathy from
00:52:02
their parents then they'll become an or a serial killer but in the case of joe wicks he was he talked about how he had you know he
00:52:07
looked at the doors in his house and they all had fist holes in them his dad was an addict his mom had these problems and
00:52:14
and he is the single most empathetic person i've ever met you know when they announce the third lockdown he does a livestream crying his
00:52:20
eyes up because not because of him he's fine he's saying i can i'm feeling the pain of people losing their jobs right now
00:52:25
and you think well if your dad was you know you grew up in a home full of domestic abuse right and violence
00:52:31
how can you become the most empathetic person that i've ever encountered genuinely genuinely empathetic this guy
00:52:37
like i've never seen you know um i you know because everyone says about you know pee with joe
00:52:42
and they all like send him the memes every time there's a lock down of him like putting his shoes back on or whatever but the guy gets really down really really really
00:52:51
down because he knows that other people are hurting never seen anything like it however here's my question so we talked
00:52:56
about childhoods um making people very interesting there's one guy in particular who is
00:53:01
notoriously had a very um interesting childhood which made him a certain way
00:53:06
donald trump and his father um you know the story of donald trump and his father being you know um
00:53:13
you were the vp of e-m-e-a of twitter um obviously donald trump has
00:53:19
just been booted off twitter permanently what do you think about that but also i wanted to ask you where if you were jack
00:53:26
dorsey in that at that time would you have made the same decision
00:53:31
number one it's so incredibly hard and i think the i mean i always felt lucky i worked
00:53:38
four years at youtube before twitter and the time that i worked at youtube
00:53:44
there was a lot of um mass shootings and there's always mass shootings in the u.s
00:53:49
but there's a lot of mass shootings and the phenomenon at the time was that a lot of the mass shootings
00:53:55
it was being discovered that the people had youtube channels and so i remember sitting in a meeting with lawyers in the
00:54:02
san bruno headquarters of youtube watching them debate what the the right moral thing
00:54:09
to do was in these fascinating to watch things that were being invented challenges that no one had conceived of
00:54:16
five years before now you've got these things and so you're watching all these things going on
00:54:21
and um and so you know when twitter was invented when twitter was invented it was a way
00:54:26
15 years ago it was a way to text all of your mates at once and so there was a short code and it was
00:54:32
a way it was it took like your msn messenger status and it sent it to text messages that was
00:54:38
the idea before everyone had internet connection on their phone so that it feels like a different lifetime now
00:54:43
but just an illustration to be 15 years on from that debating whether you d platform the most
00:54:51
powerful most well-known is he the most famous person in the world maybe the most famous person in the world to
00:54:57
de-platform that person is such a journey to be on and i know the people
00:55:03
i mean i know jack i know uh the the other person who made the decision and i know that they don't make any of
00:55:10
those decisions lightly you know it's like it's really uh weighs on them but to my mind
00:55:16
it was a singular situation where firstly i saw some people on social media saying um saying that this was an illustration
00:55:23
that the employees of tech firms were woke and it's just really interesting equivalents because six people died
00:55:30
in that event and if you watch back all the footage of what led to it then it
00:55:37
it doesn't take a huge leap of logic to say i can see why that created that so six
00:55:42
people died and i think it was at the end of a long period where increasing numbers
00:55:48
of the tweets by the president and the people associated were being labeled with this isn't true
00:55:56
and you you do reach a point where a lot of critics were saying where does your responsibility kick in
00:56:02
here do you have no responsibility for what your platform is being used for i
00:56:07
think knowing the people concerned that that was the last thing they wanted to be to be in the position where
00:56:13
they were making a decision angela merkel has come out saying she's she feels uncomfortable with it
00:56:18
and i can definitely imagine that everyone in twitter felt uncomfortable with it it was one of
00:56:24
those difficult things everywhere you went for the whole trump presidency people would say um
00:56:30
what are you doing why are you not taking this down and of course you know the first thing you've got to say is irrespective of anyone's opinion and
00:56:36
that's the only way you can look at this that this is an elected leader of a country and so you know irrespective of anything
00:56:43
else for a private company to be saying that we we take an opinion which transcends
00:56:51
uh the election result is a really uncomfortable one so i know that it would have been a
00:56:56
really careful decision i think a really deliberate decision jack's been on podcasts and any places
00:57:02
uh i'm joe rogan talking about he believes that bands shouldn't be forever so who's to say that you know there
00:57:08
wouldn't be a root back on these things but i do know that the decision was probably made
00:57:16
carefully reluctantly i think i think it's the right decision i think is the right decision and i think the
00:57:22
timing of it was probably right i i would be you know it felt
00:57:28
it felt at the moment it took place it felt like the intensity of dialogue
00:57:34
and the toxicity of dialogue was reaching such a stage that you know six people already dead
00:57:41
it's just like this could get this can escalate even further and i have to say since it's happened it does feel to me
00:57:48
like a bit of the stress in the room has gone someone said something uh about i think
00:57:55
president-elect biden said um the you know a natural order of things you don't think about your leaders
00:58:00
every day you kind of know they're there you've got context that they have an awareness but you know this
00:58:06
sense of peril where you're thinking about your leader and what might happen every day just contributes to bad mental health
00:58:13
it's not a healthy place for us to live in so you know i would guess that there would always be a route back
00:58:19
for people even if they've had a permanent ban jack said that but i i do think it was
00:58:24
the right decision i i am i'm really not sure i think
00:58:30
i consider myself as someone that's on the left i guess to some degree or maybe left to center left but
00:58:35
um i it does make me feel a little bit uncomfortable because you're right it sets a bit of a presence for the future
00:58:40
in terms of how we deal with um opinions we don't like things that might
00:58:46
be considered to be inciting violence would you have done in this case i think i think i would have um
00:58:52
suspended his account um temporarily like the facebook approach
00:58:57
yes i think that was i think that was probably a better approach all things considered um i think because trump is a very
00:59:05
unique very powerful individual i would have also had someone i'm not sure if this happened but someone from
00:59:10
twitter contact his team and really have a dialogue about it and lay out that we can't allow our platform
00:59:18
to be a place where we're like denying the election results and therefore inciting you know these kinds
00:59:23
of things and basically do and i would have used this suspension period i think to have that conversation
00:59:31
uh um but yeah but i think with the removal is it sets a bit of a strange presence and i did wonder before this moment you
00:59:39
know social media is very left it's a very it's a very like a liberal place
00:59:44
i think if you were to just look at social media you would think that the labor party you're always going to win typically as well because
00:59:51
you think i think so because i think that's more a reflection of who you follow because
00:59:58
you know i definitely think there's plenty of pockets of people who are huge brexit supporters who clearly i
01:00:04
mean the numbers say that there's more of them yeah but it's just i think the brexit and the conservative
01:00:09
narrative is less akin to like the virtue signaling that you're rewarded for on social media
01:00:16
so if i say uh child a lunch boxes for all right everyone's eager but if i was to i
01:00:23
i would prob i might even lose my job or be canceled or be criticized if i said oh no we don't need to fun give as much
01:00:29
money to the nhs or something so just seems like the liberal the sort of left talking points are a little bit more
01:00:35
acceptable on social media and the right ones might make you lose your job or get you cancelled or you know what i mean i
01:00:42
think it's about tonality rather than uh perspective i mean look you know absolutely it's not going to play well
01:00:48
if you're in the market for likes to say that i think we need a tighter fiscal policy
01:00:53
and you know and less benefits for people he's going to play differently i wouldn't necessarily agree
01:00:59
that the platforms have a specific bias though i think you know
01:01:04
of course it's my echo chamber yeah generally you know i've witnessed plenty of strong
01:01:10
opinion on both sides likely as it was my job to try and
01:01:15
ensure there was a a degree of good conversation in those things and i i've probably not seen that
01:01:21
because i've only seen my own little echo chamber and i'm young i'm you know i'm surrounded by very left
01:01:27
uh people in my organization and stuff so i probably surrounded myself with that narrative a bit more but i just i've always felt that um
01:01:34
where does social media go from here i mean it's it feels like it's a really pivotal moment we've got this big case with
01:01:40
facebook at the moment in the us where they're trying to you know considering breaking up facebook and we've got trump being banned from
01:01:45
twitter we've got parlor being pulled from the app store and amazon web services um it feels like we're in a bit of a i
01:01:52
don't know maybe we've always been in this constant debate of what social media is and where the lines are but
01:01:58
what what are some of the big changes you see coming to look i think it's pretty clear that regulations
01:02:03
coming in some in some capacity uh i think to be honest i think
01:02:08
most of the big organizations would welcome it when it comes to choosing to de-platform people whether they're the
01:02:14
president or whether they're troublemakers having some rules that are agreed by an independent
01:02:20
authority would be welcome for most of those platforms i think you know it's really uncomfortable when
01:02:26
organizations are losing sleep being on the inside is really uncomfortable when you're losing sleep about
01:02:32
should we be doing this can we be doing this how do we account for doing this uh jack daughter did a series of tweets
01:02:39
a couple of nights ago trying to he's formidable i think trying to demystify how decisions are
01:02:45
made so no win almost everyone who reads it will be critical of it but you know he's trying to say look
01:02:51
this is how we reach that decision um i think there'll be degree of regulation i think that's probably a
01:02:56
good thing i suspect some of the big groups will be broken up and you know facebook and google i think
01:03:03
will probably be broken up and the question will be whether they are willing to embrace that and do it
01:03:09
and all of the shareholders and all of the users and all the people who work there benefit or if they resist it and you know the
01:03:15
lessons of microsoft bill gates and steve balmer will say we lost 10 years of our company
01:03:22
because we spent 10 years resisting uh regulation resisting control had they
01:03:28
just given up to that they'd probably microsoft's in a good place again i think biggest company in the world again
01:03:33
but you know they uh they would have been in a better place to to avoid those things so um i think regulations probably coming i
01:03:40
think it's probably a good thing do you think they're gonna break up facebook yeah you think they will yeah in the next five years
01:03:45
really so you think they'll force facebook to sell whatsapp or instagram or something yeah
01:03:51
or both yeah or both yeah really almost certainly i would guess youtube will be sold from google as well
01:03:56
really yeah blimey that's crazy better go somewhere is it better for a
01:04:03
consumer so number one if you own any of those shares every time that these breakups
01:04:08
uh the all of the value of the firms is worth more than the constituent parts so from shareholder point of view it's a
01:04:14
really good idea to pick the right moment but break yourself up and um and it's good from a consumer point
01:04:21
of view i often sit there big youtube consumer if you're a youtube consumer you said go
01:04:27
going hang on this used to be like the big daddy of video they've missed tick tock they've missed
01:04:33
twitch they've missed like all of these big opportunities that youtube was
01:04:38
right in the box seat for they've missed all of them why because big firms generally are slow and don't innovate
01:04:45
and so it's better for everyone if you've got people experimenting doing new things and you
01:04:51
know if you've got a layer of regulation over the top of that saying these degrees of norms of
01:04:56
behavior that you expect it's it's much better for everyone and it's really exciting i think
01:05:02
in the case of facebook mark mark would respond to that and say we've got 10 years or 15 years whatever it is now of
01:05:07
experience moderating terrorist content and you know really you know horrific types of content we've
01:05:14
built ai systems which are the best in the world and we're removing you know we're spotting 90 of posts before they're reported and
01:05:20
this has taken us you know decades and billions of dollars of investment to get to this point if you take instagram and put it in the hands
01:05:26
of an i don't know an adobe they don't have that experience they don't have that um data that they don't have the ai systems and
01:05:32
so it's not going to help for um missing misinformation and it's a misdirection though isn't it i mean
01:05:39
that specifically if someone is saying we have learned we've developed machine learning that can do these
01:05:45
things that sounds like a marketable product that sounds like something that shouldn't be the point of difference
01:05:51
that shouldn't be your differentiator that you've got better capacity to deal with those things but rather that should
01:05:56
be something that some entrepreneur avails to other firms and i think you know sometimes we can
01:06:02
get locked into an idea of thinking oh the narrative that we're being given is the right one here
01:06:08
but rather more than thinking actually if someone could put a layer of safety over the internet
01:06:13
that used that machine learning to spot things that were really heinous that that used that learning to make sure
01:06:19
that no one had a bad experience wow pinterest could use that linkedin could use that
01:06:25
tic toc could use that it should be something that everyone could plug into their products and then you
01:06:30
immediately start saying wow there could be gaps in the market for new products here maybe there's a version of twitter that's mega safe
01:06:37
maybe there's a version of instagram that just has a different aspect to it
01:06:42
so you know my view would be absolutely we've learned these things but the notion that somehow
01:06:49
that safety of experience should be a proprietary benefit rather than something that is afforded
01:06:54
to everyone is just i think a a a bit of deception and a bit of
01:07:00
misdirection the other talking point mark zuckerberg would rebuttal you basically because i've looked at his arguments for
01:07:06
not breaking up facebook he says well what have we got a monopoly in we're not as big as imessage in
01:07:11
messaging we're not as big as this platform for uh he and he rattles through the platforms and says what what are we
01:07:16
bigger what are we the monopoly on and um he says there's tons of competition we've got tick tock
01:07:22
our heels pinterest twitter you know uh google you know these platforms so he says you know
01:07:27
where is the monopoly here um and i have found that kind of compelling i know again it's a bit of a
01:07:33
misdirection but i i can't tell you what he's the what what facebook have the monopoly on
01:07:41
yeah well firstly monopolies don't have to be more than 70 i think you know i think by the rules
01:07:46
for monopoly in the uk it's like more than 20 30 percent of a market so you know so so to be monopolistic you
01:07:52
don't have to be dominant but you know when you've got three of the top five apps you start questioning whether there is a
01:07:59
degree of undue influence look i've got no dog in the fight um my view personally is that
01:08:05
i i suspect these firms will be broken up and the question then becomes do you serve your employees better
01:08:12
do you serve the people who use your apps better do you serve the the state of society better
01:08:20
by just going with that and saying let's do it but let's do it joyfully get on with it and i suspect
01:08:27
personally i think you know some of these organizations are going to be presented with the the challenge some of them will go
01:08:34
okay i'll break we'll break ourselves up and others will say actually we're going to uh we're going to position with this and
01:08:39
just the less than microsoft is you lose 10 years of your life by resisting talk a lot about the joy of
01:08:45
work we've talked a lot about you know your past experiences at youtube and twitter what is next for you when you're
01:08:50
thinking about what's going to give you joy from work in the future what are you thinking about um i'm writing a book
01:08:56
about resilience uh are you able to tell us the title yeah i mean it's the title is a big ongoing discussion okay i'm not at
01:09:02
that stage um which is just about all about the things we've talked about how resilience is actually a collective thing rather than
01:09:08
an individual thing um i've really enjoyed sort of doing things like that i i i'm doing a couple of things on
01:09:16
climate change so i worked with an organization last year yeah yeah so i'm working with alcohol's
01:09:22
climate reality now but um i did something with an organization last year that's trying to reduce our plastic
01:09:29
footprint and you know so so there's a few things like that and i really enjoy those things because they
01:09:35
i think they're non-linear i think you know what success looks like is really hard to judge
01:09:40
and it's all about trying to achieve things so i did something through october where i presented into
01:09:47
about 100 70 different companies i presented climate change into 70 different
01:09:52
organizations and you know connections have started from that so the al gore's climate reality is al gore did
01:09:59
that film an inconvenient truth about 15 years ago probably short in school my dad made me watch it right sat me
01:10:04
down and said to my brothers and sisters you got to watch this and he's turned he's work on that into an organization
01:10:10
and it used to be he had to pay 7 000 to go and be trained in las vegas now he's in the era of zoom he said
01:10:16
anyone could be trained on it for free really so i trained the only commitment you have to do is you have to commit to
01:10:22
spread the word so hence i did about you know all these presentations getting out and and spreading the word um and that's
01:10:29
really energizing sort of because i think a lot of us feel a certain way towards climate but
01:10:34
feel powerless about what can we do so uh i've done a bit of that hopefully i'll i'm i've got a few more
01:10:40
things coming along on that so will you ever get back into the world of social networking i i really want to
01:10:46
avoid doing that so that's why i'm working hard on podcast and writing because if i can pay
01:10:53
the bills doing that you know full-time jobs are really demanding
01:10:58
and you know my my social media consumptions remains i'm a huge user of twitter i'm a huge
01:11:04
user of tick tock and uh so my social media consumption is still there i just don't want to
01:11:09
i just don't want to work in those organizations again why just you know they're really exhausting
01:11:14
you know like you work really hard i had so much fun working at twitter and youtube before
01:11:20
but you know you do long days especially working with california up in the morning and you you're working
01:11:27
late at night so i don't want to really go and work in a big company again i'm going to conclude this podcast by
01:11:33
just asking you you know for you and from everything you know about the joy of work and what makes work joyful and fulfilling
01:11:40
if you had to just focus on one thing that was the most important factor for
01:11:46
you um in work what would that be um there's a 70 year long study out of uh
01:11:53
yale university looking at what the the secret of longevity and happiness is and the secret of it
01:11:59
studied these guys for like the whole of their lives and the secret of longevity and happiness is love and friendship and i think
01:12:06
work is far closer to that than we might imagine when we feel a connection with the people we work with
01:12:12
it makes everything worthwhile and i think hidden in all the chat about productivity and strategy
01:12:18
and and you know market fear and usps we lose the fact that when we feel most
01:12:25
motivated by work it's when we feel like we're doing it with other people and so that's it for me i used to a
01:12:32
great day at work was when i laughed 12 times and you know and it was almost it felt trivial to mention that it felt
01:12:38
like oh why do you love your job to mention that i just love these people i love being around these people i'm energized
01:12:44
by these people feels really embarrassing to admit but i think that's the secret of it when we
01:12:50
feel part of something our jobs can feel defining that can feel part of our
01:12:55
identity bruce thank you um that loops perfectly round to the start of the podcast in my expression
01:13:00
that i think remote work as hell so but also it's uh it's something that yeah i've come to learn over the last
01:13:06
nine months i'm sure a lot of other people have um thank you so much for all the work you've done on work generally because i
01:13:12
think it's a conversation not a lot of people are having or breaking through with and some of the ideas you deliver in
01:13:18
your book and just generally in your content across youtube and your social channels linkedin your articles on there
01:13:23
i think really are helping to dismantle a conventional and sometimes toxic
01:13:28
framework for how work has to be so on behalf of someone that works and has teams i want to thank you for that because it's been um it's a value that
01:13:35
the world needs but also thank you for the conversation today thank you it's an absolute pleasure thank you
01:13:53
[Music]
01:13:58
oh you
