Stay ConnectedMAKE WORK BETTER. Eat Sleep Work Repeat is the best podcast about workplace culture – it’s been listened to millions of times.
Bruce Daisley brings a curious mind to discussions about our jobs and the role they play in our lives.
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Rutger Bregman’s Humankind was my favourite book of 2020 and it comes out in paperback next month. A brilliant read (that also works wonderfully as an audiobook) it will appeal to fans of Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens or anyone who wants a provocative, thoughtful summer read.
To mark the paperback release I spoke to him about universal basic income, the way that we've worked in lockdown, and why we turn our backs to lots of evidence that humans are innately kind, decent beings.
Rutger's brilliant book Humankind is out in paperback in May 2021. For a full transcript of this interview go to the website.
Rutger mentions he's written recently about the end of neoliberalism - you can read that here.
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Eat Sleep Work Repeat is made and hosted by Bruce Daisley.
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Two discussions today about big stories in the news. Firstly I chat to senior features writer at The Economist about his brilliant special report on work. Callum wrote the special report on work in this week's Economist - you can find it here.
Then I have a discussion with CEO and podcaster Dan Murray-Serter. Dan runs his own start-up, Heights.
We talk about three articles:
These and of the articles I find relevant to how work is changing are included in the weekly Make Work Better newsletter - sign up now.
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Eat Sleep Work Repeat is made and hosted by Bruce Daisley.
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Kim Scott is the straight talking author of the phenomenal hit Radical Candour. Now she's back with a huge new book that's set to be equally as impactful.
She joined me with business partner Trier Bryant to discuss themes of diversity, workplace bias, bullying and harassment - and what any of us can do to stamp it out. Along the way we go into plenty of specific examples that will help you think about issues like this in your own workplace. We also get real talking about why standing up - even to good people - is an important thing we all need to do. There are some good stories in this episode!
Kim's new book is Just Work - available now.
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Eat Sleep Work Repeat is made and hosted by Bruce Daisley.
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What a guest today. I've tried to speak to Professor Robin Dunbar for 4 or 5 years.
Robin has a new book out called Friends which is the sort of book you can lose yourself in on a holiday (if anyone lets you have one).
I enjoyed it for surprising me and going beyond what I already knew.
So reliant are human beings on our social collaboration that it has been suggested that our bodies have evolved the feeling of loneliness, an alarm system that aggressively resists isolation. Many other animals don’t have anything close to this — some mammals and birds actively seek isolation, spending weeks and months alone aside from rituals of mating and raising their offspring - something that Robin Dunbar and others have demonstrated is a reflection of brain size.
Robin Dunbar ‘spent the better part of twenty-five years studying the behaviour of wild animals’ - mainly monkeys, goats and antelopes. He wanted to understand social evolution - why species had the social systems that they have developed. He admits that ‘humans were, at best, only a very superficial interest’.
He noticed that monkeys and apes were social in a way that other animals were not. They would spend hours grooming each other, hours upon hours entwined round each other cleaning each other’s fur. ‘I had been deeply impressed by the fact that they groomed far more than they ever needed to for purely hygienic purposes’. It seemed there was some mutual pleasure in this action. When he took the time to explore what was the causal factor for this grooming long haired monkeys spent no longer grooming than shorthaired monkeys, large monkeys spent no longer grooming than small monkeys. The complexity of the hair management task wasn’t the prompt.
Rather it was the size of the brains of the primate that determined the amount of time spent. Dunbar proposed the Social Brain Hypothesis - that a species brain size constrains the size of its social group. ‘The problem with living in stable, permanent groups is that considerable diplomatic and social skills are needed to prevent the stresses and niggles of living in close proximity with others from overwhelming us,’ - we need big brains to help us manage the politics of a bigger tribe.
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Eat Sleep Work Repeat is made and hosted by Bruce Daisley.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
A recording of a Twitter Spaces discussion with Scott Galloway. We talk remote working, why cities will never die, why working hard is Scott's top career advice. Along the way we talk about the power of touch, Goldman Sachs, missing humans and what will come next for work.
The Twitter Spaces app also blings a lot too, sorry about that. I've edited about 200 of them out.
Scott's book Post Corona is a bestseller.
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Eat Sleep Work Repeat is made and hosted by Bruce Daisley.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
I’ve talked a lot about Cal Newport’s provocations about abolishing email (and Zoom calls) [find them here and here].
And in fact, I had someone last week astonished when I suggested we should try to limit video calls to eight hours a week. They thought I’d lost my mind. How would we get things done unless we were on video calls all day?
This default to video and emails is what Cal Newport calls the Hyperactive Hive Mind.
He’s convinced that we’ll look back at the way we’re working right now and be embarrassed we optimised for what was easy rather than what was productive. Cal outlines how we should be setting about to fix work - by changing our relationship with technology.
It is a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant provocation that is unique to him and I think will give all us reason to reflect.
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Eat Sleep Work Repeat is made and hosted by Bruce Daisley.
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Pre-order Conflicted now - available from 18th Feb
You can also read Ian's post on Paul McCartney that I mentioned on the show and follow him on Twitter here.
What's the route to better decision making at work? What can any of us do to ensure we resolve our disputes in a more productive way. A brilliant discussion with Ian Leslie about his forthcoming new book, Conflicted.
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Eat Sleep Work Repeat is made and hosted by Bruce Daisley.
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The guest this episode is Dr Damian Scarf, he teaches at the University of Otago in New Zealand. I saw him do a short and impactful TED talk: Dr Damian Scarf's TEDx Talk. (Post script: sadly Dr Scarf passed away in 2025)
Very much like Dr Jill Bolte Taylor who did that wonderful lecture about having a stroke, Damian uses his psychology to diagnose what went wrong with him when he was studying. He describes how he thought the way to get things done was to cut himself off. And as he cut himself off from more people he felt worse.
He says:
‘It’s our connections with those around us, the groups we belong to, that bolster our resilience. The number of groups we belong to not only bolsters our resilience, but is also protective against developing depression, can be curative of existing depression, and helps to prevent depression relapse. Even when you're old, groups are critical. The more groups we belong to, the slower our cognitive decline’.
So could our strength come from our connections?
I chatted to Steven Bartlett on his Diary of a CEO podcast - watch it here.
On with today’s episode. At the moment I’m in the middle of writing a book on the myth of resilience. What’s the myth of resilience, the myth is that resilience is an individual strength that some of us have and some of us don’t. As I’ve been immersed in the most wonderful research along the way there’s been some people who I’ve seen their work and thought firstly I’d like to chat to them and secondly they’d be a good podcast.
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Eat Sleep Work Repeat is made and hosted by Bruce Daisley.
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What's going to happen with our workplaces.
Today the theme is how, if we're not careful the way that we're using our workplaces is going redefine our work culture.
At the start there is discussion about some of the themes in the most recent newsletter and then go on to chat to Nick LiVigne from Convene. Convene are a coworking/events business that allows you to adapt your needs to the minute-to-minute demands of your business - they have been very successful in the US and are coming to the UK in 2021.
Nick explains how they see coworking evolving - and what to look for next.
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Eat Sleep Work Repeat is made and hosted by Bruce Daisley.
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There is no better guest to kick off 2021 than Amy Gallo.
Amy Gallo is a contributing editor at Harvard Business Review writing about workplace dynamics and emotional intelligence. She is co-host of the wonderful Women at Work podcast
She's is the author of the HBR Guide to Dealing with Conflict and gave a hit TEDx talk on that subject in 2019.
On the Women at Work podcast, Harvard Business Review staffers Amy Bernstein, Amy Gallo, and Emily Caulfield untangle some of the trickiest problems that women face at work. They talk to some of the sagest advisors on gender, they tell stories about their own experiences, and give practical advice to help women succeed at work.
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Eat Sleep Work Repeat is made and hosted by Bruce Daisley.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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