Resilience Doesn't Equal Brilliance: Building Fortitude with Bruce Daisley #72

After all, all art is experience. Hello and welcome to The Company Doctor, where today we have a real treat in store for you in the form of Bruce Daisley, former boss of Twitter in Europe and of YouTube in the UK, a bestselling author, a consultant, and one of the UK's most influential voices on the intersection of life and work. In this episode, Bruce shares some of his fascinating and challenging thoughts on the topic of resilience., as well as some eye-opening and fresh insights on the topic of workplace culture. I'm very excited for this one, as you can probably tell. So without further ado, this is Resilience Doesn't Equal Brilliance: Building Fortitude with Bruce Daisley. Say the analogy of serpentine.

Hey Bruce, thanks so much for joining the Company Doctor. Great to have you.

Thank you. I've been looking forward to this.

I'm so excited about this. I've got so many questions, but I've had to kind of contain myself, so I've kind of reduced them down, but looking forward to it. So let's kick off. Normally on these podcasts, we kind of do an intro about, you know, what's your title, what jobs have you done? You've got, I had such an amazing career, but I did hear you on another podcast when someone asked you about your career and you said you didn't want to be defined by your role particularly. So here's my question for you. Tell us what makes Bruce Bruce. I think that'd be a great place to start.

I'm intrigued what answer I gave on the other podcast. Yes, look, I have worked in tech companies. Been a senior leader inside places like, uh, Twitter and YouTube. And so I've, I've got that heritage of working inside, you know, billion-dollar organizations and, and having sort of hundreds of people. But my passion, my focus really throughout my career has been on workplace culture, workplace dynamics, having fun at work. Candidly, has been my, my big focus. For me, I was very lucky that I've worked in a series of organizations where I've been able to laugh every day. I've been able to feel like I'm inspired by the people I'm working with every day. I feel like I'm surrounded with people who are doing their best ever work. So I've been fortunate in those things, and that kind of runs through everything I do. So now I spend my time as a consultant for companies on their workplace culture, or I go in and talk to companies, or I facilitate sessions for companies about their workplace culture. And that's, I think, from a perspective of someone who is fascinated with it, is sort of immersed all the time in trying to get better at these things. I think I'm a student of it rather than an expert in it. You know, I feel like I'm learning new stuff every day and that the world of work's changing. So that's how I would describe myself. I'm sort of a workplace culture enthusiast, really.

Yeah, you're very subtle about what you say because I've been listening to you and it's really inspiring stuff. In fact, I'm working my way through some of your back catalog of, you know, you have a very successful podcast, Eat Sleep Work Repeat, which is really highly recommended to people. When I was, I was reading through your new book Fortitude, which I, you know, again, I hadn't quite finished yet, but it's really got me thinking, and it is kind of leading me to my first question, really, because I used to think that resilience was where it was at. And I've got through the first quarter of the book, and, you know, resilience was on my mind because mental toughness and, you know, looking at sports professionals. You're positioning that book to give us a different perspective on resilience. So what's your beef with resilience, and what is fortitude?

So I guess in, in essence, I take issue with the whole theme of resilience, largely because it can, in its worst version, be a form of victim blaming. So I've got a friend who works in the NHS, and she told me in the middle of the pandemic, a notice went on a notice board in in the reception of the Whittington Hospital saying resilience webinar Thursday at 12. And she said never has a single piece of paper produced so much anger from so many people because it felt like a bit of gaslighting. Oh, you know the problem, guys, you guys aren't resilient enough, rather than you're working in a completely unsustainable, overwhelming, burnout-laden environment. You know, the idea that you're not resilient enough is kind of an insult, and certainly that was how it was interpreted. Look, the issue I take with it, irrespective of whether the term is politicized or whether the term has got sort of prickly edges to it, because I'm not alone in thinking that, uh, taking issue with resilience, that there are other people who, who feel that it creates unreasonable expectations. But all that aside, even if we just like the idea of bouncing back from setbacks And, you know, in itself, that's admirable and desirable. We'd probably want it for our friends, family. But the interesting thing about resilience is it's actually incredibly difficult to produce on demand. And the example I'll give you for that, the biggest customers in the world for resilience training are the US Army. They've spent $1 billion training all of their combat soldiers, all of their personnel to be more resilient. The wonderful thing is when someone spends $1 billion on something, other people say, can we measure that? Can we check how that went. And they've come along and they've tested it, and they've said, oh, it's had absolutely zero impact on the resilience of soldiers. Right, okay, so you've thrown a million— a billion with a B— a billion dollars at something and it's had no impact whatsoever.

Not great ROI, is it?

No, it's, it's almost the sort of stuff that the UK government would do. And so, you know, you've, you've found— in fact, it's not just, uh, reserved there. Schools around the world have introduced resilience programs, and that's fabulous because you can get no shortage of people who say, let's measure how it worked. And without exception, they come back and they say— it's all based on the work of the same psychologist, by the way, a guy called Martin Seligman— and, uh, they, they come back and they say this has had no impact other than what a control group would have seen. Okay, so resilience, we really struggle to synthesize it on demand. Why? Because the version of resilience that we're trying to create is a fantasy notion. It's an individual notion. It's the idea that some of us are resilient and some of us aren't. The idea really is the product of neoliberalism. Economics, the idea that the individual is everything. Resilience is always and has always been a collective strength. Resilience is what we get from feeling supported by the people around us, uplifted by the strength of the community we're in. You know, I think if we're going to think about it a different way, resilience is the strength we draw from each other. And as soon as you identify that, you start getting a massively different outcome when it comes to trying to train it. Let's go back to those combat soldiers. Combat soldiers, actually, the interesting thing about combat soldiers is while they're in service, while they're in the army, they generally report high levels of well-being and resilience. Why? Because they're surrounded with people who understand them, who share their social identity, who understand, you know, what horrors that job entails. It's the moment they're separated from that tribe, it's the moment they're pushed back into civilian community and they're no longer with people who understand what they've been through, that their resilience diminishes. And, you know, the, the result for the lack of resilience of, of former combat soldiers is horrific. Massive instances of PTSD, massive episodes of addiction, and all manner of, you know, poor addiction behaviors. So look, it gives you a really telling lesson. Don't start looking for resilience as this magical thing that some of us have got. Think about how you can create a resilient group. How can you make people feel uplifted, supported, understood by the people around them? Now look, you know, I've been simplistic there for the benefit of trying to put it all into 2 minutes, but I think that's probably my point of disagreement with the world.

Yeah, and I read the first chapter. I'm going to come back to it in a minute because it opened my eyes, because I think a lot of people feel there's a hope if you can be resilient, and therefore the person's maybe the underdog. Do you get pushback from people on that?

Yeah, but look, you know, I'll give you a couple of examples, and there's some fabulous examples that are in service of it really. So the one thing's, you know, is that once you start identifying that resilience is frequently a collective strength, you see really good examples of it. I love the example from the pandemic. There was the, the world's leading expert on mental teenage mental well-being is a woman called Jean Twenge, a fascinating person because she's probably been at the forefront in the last 10 years of us trying to understand how mobile phones are having an impact on teenagers. And that was something that I think— I used to work in social media, I used to work in sort of technology companies, and the time I was there, certainly there was no evidence whatsoever for that. And it's only been the last few years that we've been starting to, starting to draw these things anyway. But she studied teenagers during the pandemic. Now I'm going to have to sort of reset your clock and ask you to sort of think about a specific moment in time, because she was— when she was looking at this data, it was for the first 8 weeks, 12 weeks of the pandemic. Not to, to, uh, drag you back into past trauma and be re-triggering, but that was the moment of the pandemic that you were probably queuing outside Tesco's to go and buy some pasta shells, toilet paper. You were— if you came home with a 4-pack of toilet rolls, it was like you'd— you're a hero— like you caught an antelope on the savannah. It was a, it was a joyous moment. It was that moment the pandemic— she was looking at, and she was looking at teenage mental well-being. Now, she was convinced because she was looking at this data a year on She was convinced, well, you know, we all know that the pandemic was a mental health calamity. We all know that it's had a lot of downsides. But what she found was that at this early stage in the pandemic, teenage resilience went up and depression went down. She's like really confounded by it. Why on earth would that be the case? That first 8-12 weeks. And, um, and what she found specifically is when she drilled in, it wasn't all teenagers. It was teenagers who were having an evening meal with their families every night. Their resilience went up and their depression went down. Resilience is the strength we draw from each other. And, and the whole of modern life, you know, witness— we don't have evening meals with family every night because modern life just doesn't enable it. And the whole of modern life is actually set up to separate us and make us lonelier and make us feel more isolated. And the more that you recognize that, I think it's got societal implications, it's got work implications, got implications about how we should try and live our life. The final thing I'll say The best predictor if you're hospitalized, and whether you're hospitalized for mental health or heart attack or depression, any sort of example, the best predictor of your health in 2 years and 5 years is not your diet, it's not what you drink, it's not your exercise routine. The best predictor is how many groups of friends you say you're part of. Now, why would that be the case? It's like, it's such a conundrum that, you know, A doctor probably doesn't ask you, do you have a good social life? Do you have a good friendship group? Do you, do you hang around with— but it has a massive impact. I'll give you another example, final example. I'm talking too much. Final example, um, really interesting exercise done in Swedish care homes, and they wanted to differentiate the difference between the members of the care homes who were going to exercise classes and the impact that that was having. Because an exercise class has got two elements to it. It's got the exercise and the class. Okay, exercise in the class. See, like, these, the, these, the aerobic or anaerobic activity that you take part in, and the fact that you group of people that you probably chat before, you chat after, and you, you giggle all the way through it. And so in this Swedish care home, they said, let's separate those two effects. So we'll send one group every Thursday morning to go and do their, their Zumba class, get their leotard on, kick their legs up high, and another group, same time, will send them and they're just going to sit around and they're going to have a reminiscence class, just talk about old times. And what they found was the health benefit of both classes was identical, that what we might associate with this sort of rush of adrenaline and exercise and sort of burning off calories, in fact, the social benefit was what seemed to be having the magic. And I think, look, I could, I could talk for hours about these things, but I think it's so often ignored. It's got a direct implication for how we run our companies, live our lives, and the social element of these things is something that I think we don't frequently, we don't give high regard to.

I think it's really interesting, but you've conjured up a question for me because it did shatter my dreams a little bit because I thought that I could be more resilient, and I understand why. But when I read the first chapter of your book, Fortitude, you talked about the common link between successful athletes that done some amazing things, and that's why I always thought resilience was really powerful. But you said the common link between them was negative critical life experience. Can you explain that, and why does it matter, and how do you link it back to what you've just shared with us?

Yeah, so the reason why I sort of start with— have a big piece about athletes is that frequently we're given the biographies of athletes or military stars, of people who've battled through adversity, and we're told that is an example of resilience. And it's a bit of a red herring, actually. I don't think these teachable lessons— the, the one person I researched, he said there's 408 Olympic gold medals given out. They'll be given out this summer. And, uh, the idea that the people who win them are in any way normal, I think, is fanciful. You know, with a population of 8 or 9 billion, the idea that 400 gold medals are going to be given out to people who are like you and me is fanciful. And actually, there was a The thing I cite is a really fascinating piece of work done by— it was funded by UK Sport. They wanted to try and understand what created gold medal winners. And so what they did is they took a group of gold medal winners and they compared them to a group of people who'd got the same funding in the same sport at the same time. So a decent control group, but the comparison group at best had won a bronze or maybe a silver. But had never won a gold. And they compared them, and the principal difference between them was that those who'd won the gold had had a significant moment of childhood trauma. Now, what would you conclude from that? You conclude that, you know, adversity does produce some sense of wanting to thrive. But actually, what's at force there is frequently themes of identity, because, you know, let's briefly look into the biography of people who might have achieved incredible things. Mo Farah revealed his own biography a couple 3 years ago. Until now, he'd just been someone who I think had come from Mogadishu or Eritrea, and, uh, he'd come to the UK. Just a great story of an immigrant kid who'd won 2 gold medals at 2 successive games. Wow, to win gold like that is very rare. Then he revealed a couple years ago that actually he was sold into modern slavery by his family, and he was— he brought this this country. Now, the way that you can try and make sense of childhood trauma is this something called the Adva— the Adverse Childhood Experiences Index. It's sort of like, it's a little tick list. In the original version, there's about 10 questions on it. Subsequent expanded versions go up to about 20 questions, but they include things like, before the age of 16, did you routinely experience physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse? Were you subject to parental abandonment? Did you have anyone in your who went to jail? Did you have anyone in your household who had addiction issues? You get a score, so you just say yes or no to those. So no one knows what you've said yes or no to, but you get a score. My score is 4. It's quite a high score. About 60% of people can say yes to one of them. Did your parents get divorced is one of them. It's pretty straightforward. People like me who've got 4, it's about 15% of the population can say 4. Interestingly, prison populations— 70% of prison population has 6 or more on the ACE Index. And what you find is that the— these things frequently lead to sort of behavior that is, um, trying to be remedial on it. It's trying to sort of make good for what's gone wrong. And so what you find with the athletes is that in the same way that the vast majority of addiction can be explained by childhood trauma, it's normally you're filling the void for something that's happened. Similarly, these athletes got addicted to being winners and would frequently do anything to win. So I guess the point of that— I've made it quite a complicated story there— but the point of that is to say, beware comparing yourself to someone who, you know, has got deep psychological drive for what they're doing. The one thing that really blew me away, I chatted to someone who in the research that— this blew me away. Um, he said that if you're— if you've got high childhood trauma, your likelihood of taking drugs is about 9 times higher. Uh, your likelihood of taking steroids is like, you know, 20 times higher. And so anytime we find ourselves seeing an athlete and failing a drugs test, the first thing we, we say is Why would they do that? Surely they know they would have got caught. And what you find is that this is a broken soul who's found that the only way that they can reconstruct their identity— the way we experience trauma is we experience it as shame— the only way that they can reconstruct their identity is creating an idea of themselves as a winner, and they're loved by other people. And often what's going on inside them is that they hate themselves and they think they're worthless. And so there's often a psychological explanation.

It's kind of a reverse of what you expect, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, it does conjure up a question. Does that mean that if I don't have a negative critical life experience, then I can't be a high achiever or I can't be resilient?

To some extent it goes through your mind. There's a piece of work by a guy called Mark Seery who said that there's a Goldilocks effect for childhood experience where you want to have had at least some sense of having to overcome some degree of adversity. The challenge of it is that you— it's very difficult to synthesize. It's very difficult to say, I'm going to give my kids a slightly hard time, you know. I'm gonna, I'm gonna give them, you know, nothing that might get them a score on the checklist, but, you know, I'm just going to be a bit of a tough parent. It's very difficult to do that. But, you know, people have looked at that research and said, okay, some degree of hardship and misfortune doesn't appear to be a bad thing. So they've talked about a Goldilocks effect where, you know, if you, if you want the best possible, you, you don't want to just give someone a completely cushy life.

But have you got some advice, Bruce, for people that are listening then? Should we give up on resilience, or is there some advice and tips you could give us based on your experience?

The most critical thing I would say is that understanding that we achieve real resilience collectively. And so the way I think about that all the time— I work from home, you know, I go and meet companies, I work from home though. And so what it means is I have to really focus on staying in contact with my friends. And so, you know, every Friday lunchtime I go and have lunch with someone. I make sure I sort of— I, I am far more active socially than I've ever been before because I'm always— I'm the person who texts people, what you're up to, what's your plan for this, what you're doing for that. I'm, I'm constantly trying to ensure that I feel—

I'm gonna get out of the house.

That's it.

Yeah, let's stay connected. This is actually perfect because I wanted to switch tracks, but it's connected, about kind of hybrid remote working and this whole world that we're in now, which is, you know, the life that we're living. In fact, we did a recent live podcast with a panel about working from home conundrum, which is the title. Um, yeah, we'd love to get your take on it. Working from home, blessing or curse?

Strong blessing. I saw a beautiful thing, which was that anyone who is watching Bridgerton, or has ever watched Bridgerton, the showrunner of that show is a woman called Shonda Rhimes, and she's, um, she's the Charles Dickens of dramatic TV. She's, she's written some of the biggest TV shows in the world. She's created them. She's just like a force of nature. And she gave a commencement speech about a couple of years ago, and she said something in it which I think he's a showstopper. She said, anytime you see me succeeding, what you don't know is somewhere else I'm failing at something. So you see me, I'm on the set of Grey's Anatomy for Sandra Oh's last ever recording, and I'm there thanking her and these beautiful photos. It's an incredible moment. What you don't realize is I missed my daughter's soccer final. And you know, you see me at the Oscars or the Emmys you know, receiving an award. What you don't know is that I didn't turn up for my parent-teacher evening. And so she said, every time you see me succeeding at something, I'm failing at something else. And what I loved about that is that that's someone who's so remarkably accomplished, we just think it's— her life is just a series of wins. We, we don't recognize that on her score sheet she's scoring all these defeats as well. And it's an illustration of what we all, I think, felt trying to balance our jobs. We just felt like, I'm kind of being bad at work or bad at home or bad at both. You know, people are scowling at me when I get into the office at 9:25, but they don't realise that I've just done, I had to take my food round for my mum, had to do this. They don't realise what I've done. And, you know, I think for the first time we found ourselves able to say, right, I can do the job that I'm being asked to do and I can make sure that I'm not failing as a partner. So broadly, if you look at working from home, most people say, I've got no issue with being in the office, I've got no issue with my colleagues, of spending time with my colleagues, but I'm saving 70 minutes a day. And, you know, we all know the scarcity of time. Saving 70 minutes a day normally is the difference between someone feeling like they're in deficit and profit in, in their home life.

No, I mean, that's the amazing part. But when we were doing the panel, the other side came up, which is, and actually George mentioned to me, he was trying to meet up with the team, but they were all there different days and he found it quite annoying because he couldn't really either collaborate or get to meet anyone together.

Boom. So point number 1, office time has to be coordinated. The most critical thing is that it doesn't necessarily matter how much time that you have. You know, I've seen organizations who have 1 day every 2 weeks. I've seen organisations that have 2 days a week, 3 days a week. It doesn't matter how much time as much as what do you do with it. So, you know, I think the thing that frustrates a lot of people is they make their way into the office and then they sit on video calls all day. Someone said to me yesterday, I make my way into the office, I sit in a quiet corner with headphones on from 9 o'clock till 7 o'clock, I leave and go home, and it's just so I can have badged into the office and I've been there. And I think everyone knows that that's just a performance, really. There's no benefit. Now, if you say, okay, here's what we're doing— meeting-free Wednesday, we're all in the office on meeting-free Wednesday— you can't— you know, the way that a meeting-free day works— I've done quite a lot of stuff on this— the way that a meeting-free day works is that you're allowed to put stuff in your own diary, but no one's allowed to put it in for you. Normally, the biggest issue with meeting-free days is that senior leaders don't respect them. Senior leaders are trying to arrange a meeting and they don't respect them. They say, ah, the only time we could get everyone together, you okay for put this on 2 o'clock on Wednesday? And they— so senior leadership that normally leads to the abandonment of it. And so if you fancy lunch with someone or going for a walk with someone or sitting down and have a coffee with someone or having a quick huddle around the desks, all of that is possible on a meeting-free day. And the people who do them say that it gives massive uplift in, in productivity, in motivation, in engagement with work. People feel less stressed. Um, so yeah, using your office time very differently is the most critical thing. I did something just in May. I, I put a, a piece, a free piece of research out that I'd done, which is a slide deck. Anyone can download it, and it's about presence. And it's the, you know, the critical thing that quite, quite a lot of leaders do is they say 'the team doesn't feel the same, we want them back in the office more.' And actually, they're missing the other thing that's happened in the last few years. What's happened in the last few years is that the amount of time we spend in meetings has doubled since the period just before the pandemic. And so most people now who work a hybrid job spend 20 hours a week in meetings. That's the stats. And so, you know, bosses who say work doesn't feel the same are missing the fact that work has become back-to-back meetings and are blaming it on we need everyone back in the office more. And I think it's a misattribution to some extent. I think what we need to be thinking is we need to be thinking, how can we reduce this tax of meetings on people? Is there a way to get rid of meetings? Best thing that you can do is start with an audit. You know, how many meetings do you have? Did you say anything in that? Do you need it? Would it be better if you just got a summary of what the meeting was about? And effectively sort of try to think again about how we use our time and use it differently.

It's really good, I mean, this is really insightful stuff. In fact, we have a lot of leaders that complain about how do I get people back in the office, so you covered it really well. But what about in the sales environment where collaboration is really important, not just together but with customers, and even they're not in all the time? What can people do to collaborate better with the new world they're in?

If anyone is in sales and doesn't think that the world has fundamentally changed, then they're missing a key customer experience. It's a bit like wandering into John Lewis and John Lewis being exactly the same as 20 years ago and not understanding that while people might walk into department stores, the first thing they're gonna do is check the price on Amazon. They're gonna check the price elsewhere. Why? Because customer behaviour has changed. Now, if you're in sales, then what's almost certainly the case is that the way that you used to be able to get face-to-face time with a prospect has changed. They might not be in the office today to try and sell to them. So you can mandate as much office time as you like. Well, the people you're selling to might not be in the office. The next thing you've got to say to yourself is, okay, how many meetings do you attend personally where you think someone is doing emails or is doing something else while they're on the meeting? Happens all the time. So if you're selling, the idea that you're going to do a 40-minute sales call with someone You've probably got to guess that these days to get their attention for 40 minutes is difficult. They're probably going to be doing something while they're talking to you. Right. So the game's changed. It's no longer 40 minutes going through 40 slides. Now, can you do something dazzling in 5 energised, engaged minutes? Can you say to someone, look, I know your time's really precious. I'm only going to take 10, 15 minutes of your time. I'm just going to tell you 4 things you need to know. Right. And it's all about, you know, using your own energy, you're connecting with them, and then you say, I'm going to send you some stuff about this afterwards. But you have to understand that the game has changed. And if you're still doing the old thing of getting, you know, the old thing in sales might have been you turn up, you put your presentation in front of someone, you page through 40 slides, you take a page of notes. It's gone. That's gone. If you're selling in that same way, then you've, you're missing an opportunity.

And I think you've blown it.

Yeah. So, you know, I would say now the sales game is Espresso hit, really sort of energize people, try and get message across, follow up with really sort of compelling, beautiful looking follow-up, and then get people to real life events once every 6 months, 12 months. And so create something energetic in person, 6 or 12 months, and then I think it's all about that really.

Is anyone good at this that you've seen and you think, you know what, these guys have got it sorted, they've kind of adapted?

Yeah, I mean, look, you know, when it comes to sort of going in the office, I definitely— there's companies who I've looked at, and I think the companies who've listened to their teams and said, okay, you know, the certain amount of time together in the office seems to be beneficial, we're gonna make this the right amount, we're gonna coordinate that time, we're gonna do it well. Um, so I have seen organizations who are doing 2 or 3 days in the office, quite a lot of them have got a nice equilibrium to it. They've got people in there.

This—

the issue, I think, with some organizations is that they've done 4, 5, 6 return-to-office pushies. We're gonna have breakfast, but you need to be in. You go do this, but you've got to be in. And what you find is people find themselves in a sort of a game of dissonance, really. My boss told me I've got to be in the office, but I've come all the way in and I'm Zoom calls, Teams calls with people who are at home, and I don't understand it. And so, you know, more people are coming in off-peak, they're coming in at 11 in the morning to sort of swipe in through the office to say they've been in, uh, then going home. And so I think the more that you can make people feel that they've got a degree of autonomy, of agency in what they're doing, it seems to be producing the best results, really.

That's fantastic. Well, listen, um, I've got a couple of questions, then we want to get to your musical taste. Because you've had so much experience to draw on, I really need to ask this question. So looking back at your career, if you had the chance to do it again, would you have done anything differently knowing what you know now? And secondly, what would you have told your teenage self based on what you've learned?

The benefit of me, I've no doubt I've got cognitive flaws along the way, but I'm not remotely reflective. So I spend no time whatsoever thinking about the past, the future. But it's, you know, if you, if you look at me and I look like I'm thinking about something, I'm probably just staring at something. You know, this, there's clearly some flaw with me. Um, how I got my first job is I drew a cartoon CV of my life and I sent it. Initially I sent it to 50 record companies. I wanted to work in pop music in, in record companies, really. Then I sent it to like Radio 1. Then I sent it to and I was getting really lovely responses, but there were no jobs, or no jobs for people like me. And so then I just started using it as my application. I got a job at Capital Radio in the end. But what I realized very quickly is most people are bored and in doing their jobs, and you do anything that interests them and then you back it up. You— so you hit them with the emotion, but you gotta hit them with something rational as well. They're not going to hire you if your application's brilliant, but you look like a bad candidate. So you've got to hit them with both. So I often, you know, if I ever go into schools and do speakers for schools, the first thing I say is, look, you know, look, try and do something that'll stand out, turn yourself into a real person. So I wouldn't change anything there. I've been, I've been remarkably fortunate there, really.

Yeah, amazing. What a great story, by the way. I'm just visualizing your, your cartoon CV.

You know what, that stood me in good stead. I got my job at Twitter because I was doing a presentation, I was working at YouTube, so, but the thing I knew was that if you ever turn up at a conference, you might empathize with this, you turn up at a conference, you think when you turn up it's going to be amazing presentations all day. And then a couple of hours in, you're like, yeah, it's okay, but the standard's really boring, really bad. Like, and I just thought when I was at YouTube, okay, well, everyone thinks YouTube's a 10 out of 10 brand. My job is to present it in a 10 out of 10 way. And so, you know, I would like quite often when I worked at YouTube, I would never present the same thing twice and people would tweet, I can't believe it. I saw this bloke from YouTube present on Monday. He's presenting something completely different on Wednesday, all the time, something new. I wanted it to feel fresh. But the, um, I presented at a conference about YouTube and I thought, okay, I want this to be a really funny presentation. Now you're fortunate in that because you've got loads of funny stuff to show on YouTube. Um, But Jimmy Carr came to me afterwards and he said, damn, that was really funny. That was really funny. He was— that's a good compliment. He was the next speaker on. So look, you know, broadly, if you work on the basis that most people are bored, trying to entertain them is like quite a valuable thing to understand, I think.

That's fantastic. But you know, if you're someone that isn't able to entertain, is there another approach that they could follow?

Yeah, I mean, look, you know, people worry about not being funny, right? Look, I always at Twitter, uh, used to find a funny tweet and put it on the screen. And there's, there's a great sort of misattribution, cross-pollination there. You put something funny on the screen, people are laughing at it, they think you are funny. I have not done anything funny to this stage other than press page down. So, you know, I presented to a group of teachers last year, and I found there's a website called Fesshole, Fesshole, where you anonymously type a confession. And I found this, uh, confession on there, which is It was my responsibility to put the items into the school time capsule that we buried on the Queen's Golden Jubilee. And it was only a couple of months after doing it, I realised I hadn't put any of the items into the box. And so, you know, as they said, it fills me with fear 3 times a day. And anyway, so put that on the screen. I said, I'm just trying to, I'm here at this conference trying to work out who did this. Anyway, got a magnificent response. I mean, I hadn't done anything funny myself, so I'd just shown something funny from the internet. So, um, this is great. So yeah, I hear you, but I don't think necessarily have to put the burden on yourself being funny. Just try and curate funniness.

Such good advice. Listen, uh, we're just going to go to musical taste, but before we go, this has been so inspirational. Your enthusiasm and experience, it comes across. It's been great. I had a question at the end, but I'm not even going to ask you now, which which was, is there a golden thread between all your experience? But I think I might know what you say. So thanks so much for coming on and sharing with us. Um, let's get to your musical taste. We, we always add tracks from our guests, uh, things that inspire you or interest you, that adds to our playlist. What would it be for you, Bruce?

Yeah, like, pop music should never be august. It should never be, uh, it should never have any, uh, anything other than trying to fill you with a jolt of adrenaline and a thrill of excitement. Obviously the big, uh, song of the summer is Sabrina— I love pop music, I love fresh pop music, all I ever listen to is brand new fresh pop music. Obviously the song of the summer is Sabrina Carpenter's Espresso. Uh, last song that moved me that much was like Tate McRae's Greedy. What a pop anthem. If I ever listen to old stuff, it's normally like the 1975 or Taylor Swift, so I'll maybe put I Love It If We Made It by the 1975 there. But generally I just listen to brand new pop music.

Done. That's fantastic. Me too. I love it. Thanks so much, Bruce. Thanks for coming on. It's been an amazing conversation. I really appreciate it. And we'll hopefully get to see you again soon.

Thank you. Thank you so much.

Brilliant. Cheers.

Thanks for listening. And a big thanks, of course, to Bruce Daisley for joining us on this episode. If, like me, you've been totally enthralled by Bruce's takes on today's topics, The good news is you can listen to him regularly on his own podcast, Eat Sleep Work Repeat, and of course explore his books, the latest of which, Fortitude: The Myth of Resilience and the Secrets of Inner Strength, is an absolute corker. Thanks again for tuning in today, and we will see you next time.