Everything Is Content - Everything In Conversation: Are We Work-Shy?

Episode Date: January 22, 2025

Happy Wednesday, or unhappy Wednesday, it's been a weird week. Here at the EIC newsroom, we will fill you in - welcome to Everything In Conversation.This week on the extra episode, we discuss BrewDog founder James Watt's approach to work/life balance... which is to not have one. He came under fire after he shared a video of him and his fiancé, Georgia Toffolo, where he says, ‘so I just think the whole concept of work life balance was invented by people who hate the work that they do’, to which Georgia replies ‘it’s so true’. After he received a huge amount of backlash, including unacceptable threats of violence, as well as lots of more balanced takes,  Watt asked on LinkedIn,  “What does it say about our society that a post extolling the virtues of hard work gets met with this kind of furious backlash?” calling it a “bizarre controversy”. He said: “As a nation, we love to joke about the French being lazy, but the reality is that our output per hour is 13 per cent lower than theirs." James Watt is worth an estimated 262 million pounds at present, and has also previously been accused of presiding over a “toxic” culture. Beth, Ruchira and Oenone rummage around in the mess, and with help from the listeners, try to answer the question, is The UK workforce, work-shy? https://www.heraldscotland.com/opinion/24851034.roz-foyer-james-watt-spouting-nonsense-work-life-balance/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/food-and-drink/features/has-brewdogs-toxic-culture-pierced-craft-beer-balloon/#:~:text=A%20staple%20on%20supermarket%20shelves,out%2C%20afraid%20and%20miserable%E2%80%9D.https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/01/14/uk-is-among-most-work-shy-nations-claims-brewdog-founder/https://inews.co.uk/news/house-prices-young-people-nothing-to-work-for-3457041#:~:text=NEWSLETTER%20(%C2%A3)%20Work%20no%20longer,a%20home%20of%20their%20own.&text=This%20is%20Home%20Front%20with,newsletter%20from%20The%20i%20Paper%20. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I'm Beth, I'm Richera and I'm Anoni and this is Everything in Conversation, an extra dose of pop culture analysis to help you through that midweek slump. We'll round up our biggest stories from the week before diving headfirst into a topic with you. Remember if you want to take part in the conversation just follow us on Instagram at everything is content pod that's where we vote on topics and ask for your thoughts. This week we're asking, is BrewDog founder James Watt right about the UK being one of the most work-shy nations, or is he just blinded by his privilege? But first, the headlines. Timothée Chalamet says he was fined £65 for parking a line bike at the premiere of his Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown. He says it's horrible because it was actually kind of an advert for them.

Channel 4 have announced a new show where six opinionated, their word, Brits are going on an extraordinary journey to find out why asylum seekers are coming to Britain. It is incredulously called Go Back to Where You Came From. Drake files a federal lawsuit accusing UMG of defamation over promotion of Kendrick Lamar's Not Like Us. An absolute banger. David Lynch, director of Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive and Blue Velvet, also genius and master of the one-liner, has died at age 78.

In a tribute posted on Instagram, actor Karl MacLachlan wrote, His love for me and mine for him came out of the cosmic fate of two people who saw the best things about themselves in the other. I will miss him more than the limits of my language can tell and my heart can bear. R.I.P. Molly May has opened up about that infamous New Year's pick with what looks like a kiss with Tommy Fury, saying they're, quote, trying their best. The influencer said the breakdown of her relationship with the boxer has been incredibly hard, adding that accusations it was all done for publicity have been, quote, frustrating.

The owner of the Saxon City townhouse used for exterior shots of Carrie Bradshaw's apartment in the show will now build a gate to keep out, quote, the endless presence of interest in my celebrity staircase. They said that day and night she experienced visitors taking flash photos, talking loudly and posting to social media. Some have added graffiti or carved their initials into the doorframe. Icon and famous chat show host Wendy Williams has said she's not cognitively impaired after being put into a guardianship. She told The Breakfast Club, I'm in prison, you understand what I'm saying? Williams shared that she cannot leave her room in her New York care facility, cannot receive incoming phone calls and has difficulty taking visitors. Another update to the It Ends With Us legal saga. Justin Baldoni is now suing his co-star Blake Lively and her husband Ryan Reynolds.

Baldoni is seeking at least $400 million, which is £326 million, for damages including lost future income. A spokesperson for Brad Pitt has responded after a French woman was scammed of over €800,000 by someone pretending to be him. It's awful that scammers take advantage of this strong bond between fans and celebrities, they said. For over a year and a half, the impersonator used fake social media profiles, multiple WhatsApp accounts, and AI-generated images of the actor, one showing him receiving surgery. A ceasefire has come into effect in Gaza following 15 months of violence. Al Jazeera reports that 50% of Gaza's hospitals have been destroyed, while its health ministry says that 46,900 people have been killed during Israel's offensive. As the fighting stopped, hundreds of aid trucks queued to enter Gaza to deliver supplies to its 2.3 million residents, 90% of whom have been displaced by the conflict, many multiple times, the Guardian

reports. On Monday, just gone, 20th of January, Donald Trump returned to the White House as the 47th President of the United States. He said in his second inaugural address, the golden age of America begins right now. From this day forward, our country will flourish. And that's all from the headlines this week. This week, BrewDog founder James Watt came under fire after he shared a video of him and his fiancée, Georgia Toffolo, where he says, So I just think the whole concept of work-life balance was invented by people who hate the work they do. To which Georgia replies, it's so true. It's giving. It seems like nobody wants to work these days. After he received a huge amount of backlash, including some unacceptable threats of violence, as well as lots of more balance takes, Watt asked

on LinkedIn, what does it say about our society that a post extolling the virtues of hard work gets met with this kind of furious backlash, calling it a bizarre controversy. He said, as a nation, we love to joke about the French being lazy. But the reality is that our output per hour is 13% lower than theirs. And I've had countless international leaders say that the UK's work ethic just doesn't stack up against other nations, especially the US. I think it's worth noting that James Watt is worth an estimated £262 million at present. And he resides in a palatial riverside apartment, recently proposed to Georgia with a rumoured 400k engagement ring whilst on holiday in Greece.

And so maybe under these conditions, shunning a work-life balance isn't quite so tricky. And he has also previously been accused of presiding over a toxic work culture. However, Watt isn't quite so tricky and he has also previously been accused of presiding over a toxic work culture however what isn't the first to lambast our attitudes to work although not uk specific as i said earlier kim kardashian famously stuck her head above the parapet and many money men on twitter love to complain about it too especially gen z employees in my days etc and in a piece of the guardian earlier this month Olly Mould writes of Gen Z the constant message from potential employers to be competitive entrepreneurial and flexible has failed quite spectacularly to deliver the sunlit uplands of career fulfillment riches

and healthy work-life balance instead this generation is navigating a workplace of reducing benefits pay and stability through their parents experiences they've seen how austerity has eroded the social safety net and the human cost of a system that treats people like interchangeable cogs, all while dangling the carrot of an opportunity that is always just out of reach. And in a piece from December last year for the iPaper, Vicky Spratt wrote, Work, if you're lucky, is a vocation, something you enjoy. But for many people, it's a way of earning enough money to cover the essentials, and shelter increasingly for younger adults work does not pay enough to do that and if going to work won't help you pay away let alone progress your life by buying a home of your own why would you be inspired to seek it out so I turn to you both

and I ask what do we think are we work shy I just yeah I I do not think the UK is work shy I had to double check this just because for my whole life I've understood that British people put in the longest hours in the EU in terms of how many hours they work and I double checked and literally there is so much data backing this up. There's a piece in the London Standard from last year saying the ONS shows that Londoners put in the most hours in England. And then there's data literally from the last three years saying that as a whole, Britain puts in the longest working hours of the EU. So I honestly do not understand why he's saying this or where this is coming from, even from a data point of view. It is true. And actually, I was reading similar statistics. And also there was a piece in The Herald by Ros Foyer, who's the General Secretary of Scottish Trade Union Congress, that we work

on average two hours more per week than what's typical in Europe. Also, half of British employees are working outside of their contracted hours for almost or over an hour every day. Also that overwork is prevalent in ages 18 to 24 year olds, a large proportion of who work in hospitality. So I think it's a really incurious thing to say, oh, we're work shy because data shows that we don't rank work particularly highly and our hourly output is lower. It's such a small part of the picture and it's such an incurious way to phrase it, because you'd want to know, okay, but why? Especially with those other statistics that actually we're putting in hours of work. If the output is lower, if it ranks less highly in our

list of priorities, why is that? And it is what Vicky Spratt talks about in her piece, and also what James O'Brien talked about last week on LBC, there's no incentive there. Something has died in the hopes of workers in this country, and that is the fascinating thing. I think he's cherry-picked, and I came away from watching the video with him and Georgia just absolutely seething. He just comes across so ignorant,

because I think it is definitely true that there is a been a huge disillusionment generationally in terms of what work can offer us and so I think lots of people aren't going around being like oh my god I want to get this career the American dream has been completely shattered in our minds we understand that working hard does not necessarily mean a life of prosperity but that doesn't mean that people aren't doing it anyway we have to to survive so I think what's happening is he's listening to perhaps conversations of people feeling this really awful pit in their stomach and all of us have had these conversations before where it's like how much more can we do in order to reach

that point that tipping edge where suddenly you know our incomes give us this fruitfulness that we've always been seeking and I think that is the feeling for the majority of people in our generation and generations below but that doesn't mean that people aren't working really hard and it's such a CEO LinkedIn bullshit that I don't really see because I'm not on LinkedIn I think I told you guys this before but the one time I did download LinkedIn I decided to try and stalk some girl on there that I thought one of my exes was going with and then I got a notification that she'd look back at my LinkedIn so I had to delete the whole thing so I'm not on there because I don't know how it works I didn't know that people know when you stalk them so that is an unsafe place

for me to live I was really pleased when I was reading through some of the Instagram comments because he then later like reposted the video and there was a really good comment which I thought summed it up and we'll go on to listener comments as well this one was from Yazim and it read the problem is you're not recognizing that it's a privilege to do what you love we all wish we could but that's simply not the case for everyone this isn't just for blue collar jobs I personally coach so many senior executives that equally do the job to pay the bills they recognize they're lucky to be in that position, but they would rather spend time with their families. Work-life balance is such an important element for 98% of people.

And I would imagine that includes the people that work for you. To promote that you don't believe in work-life balance encourages a lack of psychological safety in which employers don't feel like they can say, hey, I need a break because it's not in the big boss's belief system. Yeah, completely.

That was the thing that really pissed me off as well this complete lack of awareness of him just saying well why why isn't everyone just doing something that they love or maybe they are but they're just basically lazy as shit it's like of course people are doing jobs they don't care about everyone's just you know doing the best they can especially in the current economic climate that we are in at present I know so many people who are previously freelance who have run to the nearest job they can I know people who were previously staff who've been laid off and been redundant who have been forced into freelance and have been desperate for a job as soon as they can it's just I don't know like are you are you literally alive in the

same time i am i don't understand it's so fucking obvious people are not doing jobs that they are passionate about we actually did get a listener message from someone which i thought was brilliant from cass who said sounds like absolute bollocks to me sounds like a way to roll back everything that's been done to look after people in the workplace and treat them like humans and not machines they want to penalize people who don't want to live and breathe their work all the time. Have them being seen as not committed enough. Next, why retire? Don't you love your work, you lazy old bastard? We need balance. Work we love is still work. Brilliant Cass, would quite like Cass on the podcast. And I think that's so true. I think if you are an employee, anytime your boss or anyone working remotely in the upper echelons

of your company says something like this, alarm bells should ring. The idea of a good work-life balance is only harmful to you if you are extracting maximum profit from your workers. It's only a problem if you are someone that wants more money from other people's labour. And I think rejecting it as a worker means protecting mental health. It means having your weekends free. It means not answering the phone after hours. It means ignoring that email till Monday. A work-life balance is like rest and recuperation and sanity. And I think it's no shock that former CEO of Brewdog, eg a company that will get into all of the the drama the allegations the scandal it's really no wonder that someone works at that level would be saying oh you should put a bit more

in oh maybe no balance for you like it just astounds me he would be so kind of blatant about his belief in what does he call it the work-life integration like what does that even mean work all the time like a bit of work in everything like uh just really made me a bit sick can I say one thing as well I feel like people who own businesses have this complete inability to understand why people who work for them don't have the same level of oh I will drive myself into the ground for this business and it's because it's not their fucking business it's not their own thing they don't have ownership it's not their asset they're they're clocking in and it's your vision you're reaping the most out of it one thing I will say is when I was a freelance writer and also even

working on this podcast I I'm like I love working on it in my spare time and I'm happy to take on a bit more of that like CEO mindset I don't know doing it in my off time but when I worked at a job and I had that mentality of oh I really want to prove myself here I'm gonna you know show up on weekends I'm gonna like do the work I can outside of hours at one point they turned around and fucked me over and like it just really was a lesson to me that you can drive yourself into the ground in a job where you work for somebody else but also at the same time there are all sorts of avenues that can lead to you not reaping any reward from it and even just feeling kind of done over

in a situation where you are passed over for promotion you aren't respected in the way that you want to be and I think ever since then it really is a lesson to me that you I don't know everyone who talks about being friends or family in a workplace that is a bloody red flag you should not be putting in extra hours and assuming that people will respect you it is a workplace and it can be a cutthroat environment, even in the nicest places. It's like that quote, you can love your work, but your work's not going to love you back. Which is just fundamentally true. We had a really good message on that vein from Ash, actually, which said, as an ex-teacher, this whole conversation makes me sick. The reason I left teaching was the ingrained martyr Olympics that gets built into the staff.

When your own colleagues treat it like a badge of honor that they spent all weekend marking sound you're more miserable than me what you win nothing following up that obviously teachers have a ridiculous amount of work and that is systemic and not their fault but it is left to an unhealthy performativity that if you're not stressed and panicking at all times you're doing something wrong and again the other thing is there's I found that message so interesting and so right but the other thing that's so interesting is we have had and seen countless studies and statistics coming out about how four-day working weeks how rest how time and space to enjoy the fruits of your labor really improve a workforce it really improves the

productivity it makes people happier nations report much better findings from from people that are able to rest and have space and time outside of their work and i also wanted to read quite a salty comment that was on the video because i just thought it was really good from cookie monster gla which said i'm sure when toff had a clothing collection with sheehan she was also happy that the child labor being used by Shein and the various illegal practices didn't have a work-life balance. This is completely tone deaf and self-righteous post. It's so ill-advised, but unsurprising coming from the guy that allegedly treats his employees terribly and is accused of inappropriate behavior. Like that comment about her Shein collection is so true.

Completely. That, yeah. I literally gasped when I heard that comment because it's so true it's so accurate it was such a good point also did you guys see that the brew dog co-founder said that he might not get married to Toff for years so that he can benefit from the tax relief of having invested in her company he is a sentient linkedin post truly is this just the complete joylessness of an existence where everything can be tax relief, dollar signs, can be, you know, investment potential. Even your marriage to a woman you claim to love is, you know, a means to make sure that you get the tax relief you need first. That is why I'm scared of people who say things like this. I'm scared of people who are

open to thinking about work all of the time, which is what I'm taking from the term work-life integration, that it could touch everything. It could be a part of everything. It could be midnight and you're thinking about work. It could be a roast dinner or think about work. And she says that they'll have his kids over there at the dinner table. They're coming up with business ideas that it's kind of all go all the time. They love that about each other. But to me, I just think, why would you want a speck of work anywhere near your free time why would you not want you know full labor-free hours and I suppose it is because at the top every bit of work kind of feeds back to you and through you and you do reap the proper rewards for it and then I was thinking about how CEOs really get away with mislabelling

themselves as these hard workers, these hustlers, these grinders. Actually, at the top, it is a bit of a laugh. You can still work yourself into the ground, but it's kind of like a fairground at that point because you are reaping the rewards. You are making bank. And then everyone below you is propping that up so that you can have fun integrate it you know go to the Maldives while the rest of your company tours over over Christmas and I just think as a society we do need to stare at CEOs and think you don't actually you aren't actually the pinnacle of hard work you are not the image of someone who is grinding you are just sort of the fat cat i was just about to say the moldy's thing because there's another thing that's like it it might be hard work but it doesn't mean that you

work hard and if you're someone that can afford to go on a private jet work for the moldy's probably have a personal trainer personal chef driver get a massage whenever you need one have vitamin drips have pretty much every single like part of your life outsourced cleaner caretaker house cleaner whatever he's probably got multiple nannies for his children it that is not the same thing of course it's so easy to work when your whole life is cushioned by that level of privilege and wealth it's just it's just absolutely insane to say that someone a single parent living on working three jobs living in a rented apartment which is like falling apart that seems it should be loving their work like you just it's astounding

to me that people manage to have that level of ignorance it's just so frustrating so we got a message from Lara who said work-life integration seems to do the opposite. It exploits the time and space of working people even more and setting clear boundaries is getting even harder. We as a society are not working too much or not enough. We are working in a way that isn't suitable to today's demands and hustle culture. In my opinion, companies have to provide support in setting up clear boundaries and regarding work environment, communication, time management and stress management. the burden can't and shouldn't last on the shoulders of individuals there's so many smart people in our inbox aren't there i agree i think i'm in a job at the moment

and this is the first time where i've been encouraged to basically have a good work-life balance and it's because so many people on the team are parents. And I've never had that experience before. I've never been in a job. Actually, my one before that was like this too. And I think, yeah, it was quite a unique experience. My experiences of being in a job from five years before that have only ever been this encouragement to really put in the work if you want to prove that you're worth your salt and doing what you love which I think often people ask me like do you do what you love and is it really rewarding because I don't because I'm freelance because I'm chasing

various creative pursuits and the answer is always not always mostly not because work is work and I think the best advice I ever got as a freelancer who has been self-employed for almost a decade now and finds it very difficult because it is very difficult is to have a good work-life balance and to not demand that you love what you do all the time. Even if you are the one driving the machine, even if you do want to be very successful, sometimes you've got to go, God is work work is shit work is not sitting in an orchard eating a fig work is not like doing a puzzle or sitting with your friends it is work is labor and i think encouraging people to abandon that even if he does say that he's just talking to

you know ceos and founders well then just do a group chat like it's just so tone deaf because the majority of the people that listen to him and he would have known that this would have gone to some degree viral he has done so much like everything that that company touches seems to be a little bit icky um like should we go through the allegations slash the various brew dog i'll say scandals but it's mostly just like depressing business practices so 2021 he apologized to former employees who accused the company and him of fostering a culture of fear in which workers were bullied and to quote treated like objects 61 former workers said that they were cost cutting on health and safety and that the culture was toxic and left staff suffering mental illness.

And then just last year, they abandoned the living wage and dropped out of the living wage scheme at Brewdog, hired new staff on minimum wage and then froze the pay for their bar staff. That's £11.44 an hour, which is, I think, £56p under the 12 pound cost of living based rate my maths there i think is correct so considering how many and that's just not all the scandals of like the offensive beers that they were doing for i think they did a pink one beer for girls which i remember at the time 2018 i was like shut the fuck up that's not including all of those and to find yourself in the news or your company in the news that often you know when you say something like this that it has the potential to travel and it just does not read the room at all although I am glad that is sparking a lot of conversations

about work ethic and profit and work-life balance I think that has been a nice side effect to go back to what you're saying just at the top of that beth about do you love your work it's it's so much easier to love your work when it's paying you properly when it's paying on time when it's paying you regularly because that is the the idea of work is it's supposed to give you enough money to live hopefully to enjoy you know maybe with a bit of extra on the side and so often now even if you love what you do in essence even if you would love it as a hobby and it's now become your job most people are just not making that income from whatever works. So that immediately just strips out the love. And this is where it's so difficult with like wage stagnation, house price increases, even if you absolutely love even if you're doing your passion as your job,

no one is getting paid. And there was this whole argument recently on Twitter about whether or not inverted commas, low skill workers, so people working in mcdonald's or in shops or whatever should be earning enough money in order to live like a standard life like have a good standard of living and loads of people arguing no and i was like what has happened that's more my issue with the society not that people are work shy that we don't think that every single job that every single role within society is important. Of course it is. Like all of those jobs need to be done and every person working them should be earning

enough money to have a good standard of living, to be safe and housed and fed and watered. And that's more the conversation we need to be having. But this is the problem. We have these two disparate mindsets where you've got these people right at the top making all of this money being like, you need to work harder and love your work. And then other people that are doing their absolute best and simply can't get by. And it's just getting further and further divided. And it's a really frustrating and upsetting place to be.

So Abby said, privileged, toxic, masculine drivel. The labor movement fought for the right to separate home and working lives during the industrial revolution i appreciate things have changed but we cannot reverse this separation as it will only harm people namely women who will likely have to juggle the double burden of their work and reproductive abilities care housework etc this man is giving me andrew tate vibes if andrew tate was a linkedin bro i will not comment on that last bit but it did i did have a reaction to it and it reminded me so I was reading a book I think I was reading this in 2021 and I either didn't finish it anyway I've left it lying around somewhere but I do remember it was yeah it was Lost in Work something about capitalism by

Amelia Horgan and I was recommended by someone I really trust and a lot of the book deals with the role of work in our personhood, the ways that work reaches beyond itself into the way that we feel about ourselves, into communities. And she writes, because communities and whole towns and families are built around certain industries, it can be really alarming and frightening for people when you say that you don't care about your work because it's so entwined. And also that the fear of

hating work, doing less work isn't just because the elites have conditioned us to have this work ethic, but also that in our capitalist society, work is one of the only ways that we can kind of self-actualise, that we can attain self-respect, achievement, self-development, celebration around ourselves. And so doing less of it and assigning our self-esteem elsewhere is really hard and when I was thinking about that in connection to this story I ended up feeling a little bit sorry for not that sorry but a little bit sorry for the people right at the top who do seem unable to separate the two parts of their lives, the personal and the professional, and say things like work-life integration, which to everyone else who earns less, and I think is

of rational mind, it sounds ridiculous. And I think it speaks to a restlessness of self. And I think it's a misallocation of self-esteem. So I do feel a bit sorry for them, because I think you've sort of missed the point. The world is a playground to you, but are you actually having that much fun? On that note, we had a message from Melissa which just read soz but we were put on this planet to enjoy nature and fanning around oh I can't relate a woman of my heart that's so funny that's what I just want to be lying around naked eating grapes on a chaise longue you can do that whilst also emailing yeah that's true popping on a zoom guys circling back while drinking a can that is not a punk ipa also i guess the one thing that we haven't spoken

about as well as just pension age and the fact that at the minute the pension age is 66 but by the time that we get to the close age of needing to retire wanting to retire it probably will just be climbing closer to 70 and may even be 70 and this idea that we have decades ahead of us potentially in the workplace decades of it like the idea that you would burn out now and just like work extra hours when you have so much steam ahead of you in not doing the things that you want to do or prioritizing your time away from work it's just like an investment that doesn't really feed you back in any positive way well I guess the idea is like some people especially people that this often men actually men that I know that are very successful that are very type a that have

done very well in you know traditional industries are like I absolutely worked so hard through my 20s and I worked really hard in my 30s and I'll just retire at 40. Whereas in our careers, we'll never have that level of stability or maybe hopefully we'll have a massive burst of income. But these people that are really good at investing, that are on very high salaries, that are very capitalist minded, that's what they're looking at. I don't know about you guys. I genuinely have never thought about my retirement. I don't imagine myself ever retiring. I imagine myself having some form of work forever, like up until I die. And also probably part of that is like,

if I ever became like properly became a writer and I became an author and that was my thing, I would love to be doing that into my 80s. That would be like a joyous thing. But I cannot, I do not have this mindset where there are some men that I know that are like, yep, I'll retire at 40, aim to have like 10 million in the bank. It's just nuts to me, but we're different brained people, I think. So I recently, in the last year and a half,

have just been haunted by this idea of retirement and pension and this idea that I won't have enough to retire because of the kind of work that we're doing and just like having taken periods of being full on full time freelance for a few years. And just, yeah, you know, hustling while I could and not really thinking about it and putting it to the back of my mind. So it is something that I'm really worried about. And like, I just don't want to think about it. I feel really scared about that future concept and having to prep for it now but also not knowing what that looks like and what the right thing is and also like we spoke about creative industries pulling me away from full-time work at various points and not knowing like what my income trajectory will be

because it is just so all over the place I'm just so scared by it all honestly I think I looked at my pension a few years ago out of sheer curiosity wish I hadn't it was about £1.77 a week so I don't have any kind of cushion any kind of safety net so I'm the same I'm I've made a sort of nice fancy around eternal work and I quite like it and I don't have a pension plan at present I'm starting to take my financial health more seriously but before now I couldn't I have been. I've been a low earner and I've been a low to mid earner. And when I've had some money, I have either gone on holiday or put it in a rainy day fund. And so I think, yeah, my plan is one of denial until the point...

Actually, my pension plan is this podcast podcast so we'll be absolutely fine and I just think it's really it's so fascinating to talk to people across industries because so many people are absolutely terrified for retirement for the future for various reasons and it just really grinds my gears when someone who could retire twice over who essentially I think he kind of has he sort of stepped back from brewdog ceoing and is you know captain of the ship or whatever wanky term he called it and then just you know dabbling in other businesses dabbling in building those about say building the price the price fund high I've watched too much traitors building his own net worth higher and higher um starting new

businesses with his fiancee I just find it I just think you should retire from public life when you say things like that I just think it's absolutely unacceptable something that I really wanted to come to which is like the confusion around what work is and there was this episode of celebrity memoir book club and they were talking about Mike the situation's book I promise this has a point and he was talking about how for years he'd been driving hard on the idea of launching Jersey Shore he'd been working so hard blah blah blah and they had him on the podcast and they brought it up to him and they were like were you actually working or were you just thinking about it before the show launched and he said you know

what I wasn't working I was just thinking about it but because that felt so stressful it felt like working and I it like blew my mind that he could admit to that because it's so true I think when people are at a certain level ideating thinking about something you know worrying about something counts as work to them because it's a focus but that's not really work in my opinion that is just like caring about something there are lots of things that I care about I care about this podcast but it wouldn't be like clocked hours compared to the same way that somebody clocks into a workplace is there away from their life and they're like literally chipping away at something that's not that's not the same thing but doing the podcast is work isn't? I'm counting this as work. Yeah, 100%.

Like being on this call is work, but me thinking about, you know, what ideas I want to bring to it, that I couldn't charge for that to a business. You can't, that's not the same thing. It's like when people say they're thought leaders, and it's like, you're not a thought leader. You're just, you're sentient.

You're conscious. You just woke up this morning. It's absolutely baffling. Did you see that he made reference to people wanting to murder him with hammers in his linkedin post yeah which was a reference to the writer joel golby i believe who hadn't said that he had made a referential joke to an age-old joke on twitter probably a few years old where someone wrote me and my friends would beat et with hammers i can tell you that much so he had done a play on that and said me and my friends would i think beat or hit ceo james watt with hammers i can tell you that much so it was he slightly misrepresented

it not that it probably wasn't quite alarming to read but i think it was it was a meme rather than threat of violence and then he also went on to say and whilst i am always up for respectful discussion there are only so many times you can be called a gay Scottish egg-headed cunt in one day and I can't comment on that again I will not say a word I mean like the internet is a horrible and abusive place I don't think that's actually a net good for anyone but if that many if how many times a day is happening I did want to say we had one only one person who liked this message. And it was from Samantha. And she said, I find it inspiring.

I work in the NHS and love my job. He verbalizes how I feel perfectly. That makes me really happy that she loves her job because I do really think having spoken to so many people, it's such a rarity for anyone I know to have that kind of positivity about the work they do the workplace the amount of hours they're putting in and feel so passionate about putting more time in I think just even having this chat listening to the people who've spoken back to us that really is anomalous and I guess that's the point of it I hope we haven't been uh

too strongly affiliated from the outset on our thoughts on this but as always our dms are open if you have anything to add to the conversation please do slide in there and we have linked everything that we've mentioned in the show note thank you so much for listening and for all of your opinions and takes on this topic we love being in conversation with you all and please follow us on instagram and tiktok at everything is content pod as always we will see you on friday bye