Season eight is half done, so Alice and Dan took a breath and talked about what's changed. Quite a lot, as it turns out.
A new name for a bigger thing
Work is Weird Now is now Work is Weird Now Media. Not because the podcast is going anywhere. Because it was always the start of something bigger. "This is so much more than a podcast," Alice says. "We love the podcast and we do it because it's fun and interesting and it helps us to learn a lot, but it's not really the core output long term" (01:17). The podcast started in the corners of two home offices. The something bigger is arriving.
We're commissioning our own research
The first piece of it is original research, with a partner we'll announce soon. The reason is simple: the data we keep looking for doesn't exist. "What is the gap between what senior managers or people at the end of their careers know and what grads need to know coming into the workforce?" (03:14). Nobody is measuring it. So we are.
Three stages in three weeks
Alice is at the University of Brighton talking to media studies students about a career that, as she puts it, "once you try and put it on a slide, it gets a little bit complicated. It's more of a tapestry" (04:06). On 17 November we're back at WORKTECH London for our third live AI session, this time a brand sprint for the office itself. Our argument: the office has all the signs of a dying brand, so how do we rebuild it into somewhere people want to go? The same week, we're running a 90-minute session for 150 senior leaders in the US on what happens "when you're done climbing but you're not yet done working" (07:11).
Post-ambition, and where it came from
That last line opens the idea we'll be exploring properly in 2027. Credit where it's due: it came from Alice's friend Laura, on holiday this summer. "You get to the point where you're CMO or whatever level you've climbed to and you think, actually I don't need to be the next thing up. I don't need to run this company. And then what happens to you at that point?" (08:54). You still want purpose. You still want work that fills your life. You just don't want all the stuff that comes with being the boss. Lauren Spearing of Career Ring joins us on that soon.
Three guests we're still thinking about
Ollie Pickup on what to tell our kids about the future of work, an episode that keeps coming up at the school gates. Ash Jones on whether LinkedIn is dead. His verdict: it "feels a little bit like work does for people right now, which is that you almost feel like you have to show up, but you don't particularly want to" (12:30). It's still good for the people you already know. It's hard to build something new there, although changes to the platform may be coming. And Giselle [surname] of Equal Reach, which matches project briefs to exceptional talent in displaced communities. We've briefed our first project through it. Ask us for a discount code on yours.
The career larder, properly defined
Dan asked Alice to say it again, slowly. "The career larder is a stock of skills, people, and proof that you build early and keep topping up so that you can cook up whatever the market turns out to want" (19:30). Less a ladder. More a tapestry. Or a larder.
What we've been learning
A keynote bootcamp that left both of us terrified and inspired. Dan's AI Builder course with Yaroslav [surname], which took a self-confessed non-techie to a rebuilt website and a working assessment tool in a summer. And a shift in the AI conversation itself: from "it'll take our jobs" to "where's the return?" to the bit that matters now. "It's now about that judgment piece," Dan says. "That's where the value is, and you get that from a human, not from a machine" (25:17).
The office, again
Dan is bored of return-to-office posts. Alice is all for human interaction and still can't get quiet work done in an open-plan office. "We need to recognise that the office isn't right for everything" (28:24). More on that at WORKTECH.
What to read, listen to and try
London Falling, a piece of long-form journalism Alice couldn't stop listening to (content note: it deals with a young man's death). Mad Mabel, Project Hail Mary and Daisy Jones and the Six on audiobook. Dan's 30 Days of Delulu, one too-ambitious thing a day, starting next week. And Alice's Christmas: The Hunger Games in Spanish, and music theory from the beginning.
Listen
Listen to the full episode. Discount codes for WORKTECH London and Equal Reach are in our DMs.
