Fired for Ignoring His Own RTO Mandate: Inside a $30M Leadership Credibility Collapse

[00:00:09] Welcome to Frequency, I'm Jenni Field. And I'm Chuck Gose. Frequency is your go-to for real talk about comms, culture and employee experience beyond the buzzwords and straight to what matters. What matters this week, Jenni, we're talking about how people are really using AI at home and work, why offsites fail, a co-founder fired for not following the rules, and now AI may not be to blame for Gen AI job challenges. And our friend Nick Bloom returns in another remote work conversation.

[00:00:38] I love it when you have five articles for us to discuss. Before we get into that, I wanted to let our listeners know that we are going to introduce a newsletter on LinkedIn called Frequency Check. So Chuck and I were chatting the other week around the fact that I do a sort of quarterly roundup for people that come to my workplace huddle, and we thought it would be a good way of being able to let you guys know what the quarterly trends are that we've been talking about. So that'll be coming out. So if you don't subscribe to us on LinkedIn, make sure you do.

[00:01:07] And that'll be just coming out every quarter as a little update. So we'll put some links in the show notes to that. And the other thing I wanted to mention is some discount codes. So we are bringing Frequency Live to London in September with the Unite 26 event with the folks at Unite. So if you want to come along to that, you can use the code FREQUENCY20 to get yourself a discount code. And Chuck, you have a little code for Flyover Festival as well.

[00:01:33] Well, we're not doing Frequency Live at Flyover Festival, Jenny, because there's no lay flat seats on the way to Sioux Falls, South Dakota. However, we are hosting Flyover Festival August 27th in Sioux Falls. We have around 10 tickets left. There's only 45 seats in the whole room. So if you're looking for a great event to really connect with the internal comms community, join us August 27th in Sioux Falls. So that's just one month prior to our trip over to London, my trip over to London. You already live there. I already live, yes.

[00:02:03] Yeah. Let's get into our content this week, Jenny. Mark Zal Sanders is back with his third annual edition of his AI usage study, and it's not about adoption anymore. It's what heavy use is doing to us. He has coined think slop for the growing worry that people are handing their thinking over to the machine alongside a parallel concern that they're leaning on it for emotional support. ChatGPT hit 900 million weekly users.

[00:02:32] Gemini passed 750 million and open AI is valued at $852 billion. The tools are everywhere as we all see. The year over year shifts though are the interesting part. This is drawn from nearly 13,000 real use cases across Reddit, LinkedIn, TikTok, and YouTube. Therapy and emotional support is the number one use case for the second year running, and it doubled from 5% to 11% of all cases.

[00:03:02] Technical troubleshooting is second with fun and nonsense being third. Two new entries cracked the top 10, autonomous agentic operations at number six, and vibe coding. And the study keeps surfacing, quote unquote, shadow usage where people are running AI without telling their managers. In the business world, Zal Sanders says activity is producing marginal rather than game changing benefits so far.

[00:03:29] Three and a half years in with vibe coding and agentic workflows and all the noise, the enterprise payoff is still incremental. When there is hard ROI, it's very specific. The study cites AI personalized email campaigns lifting conversion 20 to 30%. But those cases are rare. Jenni, I'm curious, going through all that, how have you seen your use of AI change over the past few years? And what value are you getting from it?

[00:04:00] And I will answer that. But I want to just make a shout out to the fun and nonsense coming in at number three. I think it's come up from number seven in the chart. And I just enjoyed the fun and nonsense. I was like, this is true. Also loving think slop. That's going in our list of stuff. And there was something else in the report where they were saying that we've developed this false sense of intellectual rigor. So AI is optimized to engage and keep us engaged. So it's kind of gaslighting you into thinking you're a genius. So you'll just keep using it, which did make me smile.

[00:04:29] And so in terms of usage, I think I use it less for content creation now than I did a year ago and more for thought partnering. So I definitely use it more for I've got this idea. Can you help me kind of work it through and sort of bounce that around? I haven't used it for content generation for some time. In fact, I got it to draft some stuff for me just the other day and I was like, just not sure. It doesn't it kind of doesn't feel right anymore.

[00:04:59] Whereas I did have loads of draw and I've still got loads of drafted blogs through it that I need to read. I just don't get to it because it's just a bit of noise. So for me, it's more analysis and thought partnering. And whereas I think a year ago, it was much more about content generation. That's my shift. What about you? I was thinking about it. I started out in pure fun and nonsense. I remember the very early uses I had of chat GPT. And I think that's okay.

[00:05:26] Like if that's if that's the trivia or you're being creative, you're experimenting with things like that's awesome. I went from that to administrative to a bit of the thought partner, but I've gone completely back to administrative. I have found that I get so frustrated when I'm trying to use it as a thought partner. We're just on different wavelengths. We're not what I'm trying to do. I can tell it is just not picking up what I'm putting down.

[00:05:54] Basically, what I do see with it was interesting where I get a ton of benefit from it is that technical troubleshooting. It is amazing at that. Even the example of the other day. So small business owner, you can appreciate I have to run my own QuickBooks account. And I've been the past always struggled with how to add a new credit card to it so it would sync up and you could see what charges were coming in. And I remember having to just go to my accountant to do it using Claude.

[00:06:23] It was like, here's the five steps. Just do this, then do this, then do this. And so the technical troubleshooting is just massive. I would say that's where before I would have Googled something to try to find those answers. Now it is in Claude. So that's been that shift and that replacement of searching to now doing it entirely within an AI platform. I think the other thing I use it for all the time is kind of summarizing calls.

[00:06:49] So I record a lot of my calls now so I don't have to take notes and then summarize it in Claude. I do ask people's permission before I do that, certainly if it's like a coaching client or anything. But that just makes things a lot easier. So even like new business calls and things like that, I'll be using it to just record, then just get the summary to help me with creating documents and things.

[00:07:07] So, yeah, it's definitely become a lot less about creating stuff and more about helping me get through the day to day stuff that could have taken me a long time, get to learn a bit quicker. So kind of optimize what I already do. I've recently started using Granola for recording notes from Coles. Yep. I've been starting using that. And then I linked up Claude to Granola's MCP. So right after a call, I can go in the Claude in that project and say, hey, I just had a call about this.

[00:07:37] So bring in the notes from that. And then I know it's all included in there. Yeah. I think when we did comms reboot in Toronto, I think it might have been Sharon or one of the other facilitators was using Granola to record the session in the room. I need to check actually with all the facilitators what they were using. And I think I said to you, what did you use? And you were like, my brain. It's like, okay, cool. Thanks. I was kind of looking for some technology solution for other people who don't have as good a brain as Chuck. So I need to check.

[00:08:04] But there was definitely people using more of that technology in that environment, which was really helpful for me from a reporting perspective to give people that report on output from comms reboot. And so I think I'm sure Granola was in there. And it keeps coming up on my Instagram advert as well. And it will now even more because I've talked about it. And I guess this is that reminder to people of, yes, AI can be a bit of a superpower for you. It can also shore up your weaknesses. And one of mine has always been note taking.

[00:08:30] I have historically been a horrible note taker because I get lost in the conversation. I fit the scribble thing down and I have horrible penmanship. So even though we do scribble it down, I can sometimes not even read what I wrote myself. Yeah. So the fact that now I don't have that worry and then I know that as I'm working on projects and have different calls on things, it's all being brought into a broader project. It's sort of what I think notion has been for some people, but notion was too white space for me. I could not figure out how to use it.

[00:08:57] I think Claude with the MCP connectors into things is now, that's now what makes sense to me. Yeah, totally. We'll move along to Gustavo Rossetti, author of one of my favorite books, Remote Not Distant. He has run over 300 executive offsites and his advice is clear. Most fail for the same seven reasons. And the biggest one is treating bonding as the point.

[00:09:21] Teams leave the bowling night feeling closer and go right back to the same three voices dominating every meeting, the same avoided conversations, the same friction people mistake for personality clashes. Feeling good is not the same as working better. Gustavo's interesting idea here is quote unquote, conversational debt. The compounding cost of every real conversation a team keeps dodging.

[00:09:45] A good offsite exists to pay that debt down, which means it should be uncomfortable by design. Rossetti also refuses to let leaders play by different rules. Laptops away speaks last, not first and accepts public pushback from the facilitator or he leaves. And he's clear that the offsite itself is almost beside the point. What happens in the week after decides whether anything sticks.

[00:10:12] For comms and EX people who often get roped into designing these things, either for others or their own team. The useful provocation is that follow up gets dumped on HR or the leader and then momentum dies. Rossetti wants ownership split and follow up baked into existing rhythms, not bolted on as new meetings. Rossetti wants to know that. Jenni, while conversational debt is very interesting and would be a good name for an interpretive dance group.

[00:10:38] I want to focus on offsites ending in conflict. Do you think leaders can even handle that? Yes and no. And I love the work of Gustavo. In fact, his book, Remote Not Distant is one I also love. And he read and endorsed Nobody Believes You for me as well. So we've had several conversations over the years and he has got a new book out as well. So I'm still on my list to get, but I think that they can handle it.

[00:11:03] And actually, I was talking to a leader the other day and they just come back from a team offside where they said it was a really good three days. There were lots of tears. There were lots of upset. There was lots of this, but we've sort of come out of it almost the other side. And I thought, what a great offside because you've actually dug into the really meaty stuff. And even though I always say to leaders, you have to make time quarterly to get together. It's not about the team bonding. It's about getting into the deep issues.

[00:11:30] It's about having the time and space to have the gritty conversations, but that you don't get in a 90 minute weekly call that's very operational focused. So I think leaders can handle it whether or not they are able to do the work afterwards. So Gustavo says about it's what happens in the weeks and days afterwards. I think they can handle it in the moment. Do they then do the work to make sure that the team cohesion is there afterwards to follow through?

[00:11:56] I think that's probably where it fails, because I think when you're in the moment in the room, it's easier to deal with. When you're then back to the day to day, I don't think you're helping facilitate and manage that group cohesion that might be needed after a tricky offsite. Yeah, I have not led 300 offsites the way Gustavo is, but here's my recommendation to this.

[00:12:16] I treat these like retreats off sites on sites off sites, whatever you want to call it a bit like Festivus from Seinfeld, where you begin with the feats of strength. You begin by talking about all the things the team is good at. It's a chance to compliment each other. Hey, we did this really well.

[00:12:36] We did this really well, followed then by an airing of grievances so that you can then go into talking about the things that are challenges, things you didn't work out well, and then ultimately coming into our Festivus miracle. So I don't think they think about it in this way, though. So they might be up for it, but I think sometimes they just think about these off sites as like, it's either we're here to do a bunch of training and get work done or no work. We're all going to have fun.

[00:13:03] And that's not often what employees want out of off sites. Oftentimes they're like, this is the first time they're in a room with another person that they want to just work through some stuff with or solve a problem with or talk. Like, I think it's setting the goals and understandings of what this off site is going to be and make sure that's what your employees want. Yeah, I also think there is something about the facilitation. And he's right in terms of what he expects and what he contracts as the facilitator.

[00:13:30] And I invested in my facilitation a few years ago and became accredited in it and stuff because it comes up so much in our work. And I wanted some skills and tips and tricks and ways to learn how to navigate that. And I've still got stuff to learn and there's different levels I want to do. But I think having a good facilitator can't be underestimated in those away days because it does help sort of. And I always say I will agitate, you know, because that's part of my job.

[00:13:56] And that's why you hire me as a facilitator to facilitate, but also agitate. And I think that that facilitation is so important. Whoever you get to do it, don't not have one. Do you know what I mean? That's really bad English. But don't try and think, oh, we'll just all go away as a group and it'll be like you need someone to facilitate that. It is a skill and it is helpful then because you're working as a team together with someone else doing that. Otherwise, you're not working as a team. And I think that's really important for executives.

[00:14:24] Moving along, William Kneeport co-ran Bramshill Investments, an $8 billion firm with two high school classmates. In 2022, all three signed an email ordering staff back to the office five days a week. Kneeport was living in San Ramon, California, hundreds of miles from the nearest office and didn't comply. His partners fired him for it. His defense now, the mandate was for employees, not owners.

[00:14:52] He's also suing HR provider ADP for at least $30 million and is in arbitration with his former partners. Do not be distracted by the RTO part of this. Because the real story is the 12% equity. A company provision forces shareholders fired for cost to sell their stake. And Kneeport claims the whole thing was engineered to push him out after a lowball buyout offer. The office policy may have been the clearest, cleanest available lever.

[00:15:21] He paid the price for the rules for the not for me approach. Jenni, when leaders set a policy that visibly exempts itself from it, what does that actually cost in credibility? And can any amount of good comms survive this kind of contradiction? No, no. Because it's, I was going to use the word disgusting then, which feels a little bit harsh. But this is everything that's kind of wrong with leadership, which is, oh, no, this wasn't meant for me.

[00:15:49] This is meant for all you lowly employees. I'm far too important. Like, it's just absolutely what organisations and leadership is not about in the modern workplace. You can't have that's the rule for you. That's the rule for me. It doesn't work because why should it work? And there are some things that I know people can feel quite strongly about in terms of, I know certain people in leadership teams feel quite strongly that the CEO should have their own parking space because they have to be able to come and go quite quickly.

[00:16:18] And there's different. And I can kind of take or leave that. Right. But there has you can't have it's that rule for you based on that one reason. It just it just doesn't work. And also, why? I've got a bigger question about why wasn't this discussed by the three co-founders? Like I would be just which office are you going to which office you go? Like, why was that conversation not not happen didn't happen in terms of when will we have our meetings? How will we operate? Do you know what I mean? None of that seemed to happen.

[00:16:44] And I think that says there's a much bigger problem in terms of how they were operating from a management perspective, that they weren't communicating about how they were going to do it when they were going to have their meetings or how they were going to change. But also, then, why is this only coming to light now? It feels really strange that it's gone on for this long. And I find that a bit odd as well. Yeah, I think it's just a great example of people feeling like they're above the rules or again, they're they the same rules do not apply to them.

[00:17:13] And now they could have said, hey, employees get this owners get this and then that's very clear. They didn't do that. No. And whether his high school classmates wanted him out, they certainly found a way to make it happen. It would be interesting if they're like, hey, he doesn't know that he's going to get out of this because he's not coming into the office. He's not anywhere close to one. You know, the same thing happened, same conversation happened with Starbucks with their CEO when they ordered everyone back in. But he was in California, not in Seattle. And there was this whole thing about it.

[00:17:43] It just shows some of the arrogance that some people have and also not understanding the impact that arrogance has. I think he's now feeling financially the impact that his arrogance has. Well, and there are consequences to decisions, whether you like them or not. Like this is this is one of those. But it just reminded me of a conversation we had a few weeks ago about that report that showed that something like 80, 18 percent or 22 percent of executives and HR professionals were using the RTO mandate as a quiet way to get rid of people.

[00:18:13] Do you remember that one? It was like, oh, if we do the if we do the mandate, then people will go. It's almost like this is exactly this in action. They're just maybe quietly hoping that he'll just leave but was fired. So what I'm wondering was this part of their whole plan to was this RTO or is this going to help get rid of staff who who don't want to come into office? And they end up getting rid of it feels like one of their owners. Yep. Next up, we're talking about last week. We talked about generations, Jenny, but we're going to talk about Gen Z today.

[00:18:41] The dominant narrative says A.I. is eating entry level jobs. New St. Louis Fed research says not really or at least not mostly. I'm not quite sure what that means. Looking at 18 to 24 year olds from April 2023 to late 2025. A general shortage of job openings pushed their unemployment up 2.9 percentage points. Employers shifting toward A.I. skilled workers accumulated for just one point one percent of that.

[00:19:07] The bigger villain is a hiring slowdown and young workers always get hit first when hiring stalls. Teen summer jobs are projected at 790,000 this year down from 801,000. And last year was already the weakest summer for teen employment in 77 years. Bureau of Labor Statistics attracted. Meanwhile, 66% of Gen Z says they're teaching themselves skills online to stand out versus 20% of boomers.

[00:19:36] The problem is that when everyone runs a self same self improvement playbook, it stops being that much of a differentiator. For anyone who owns early career comms onboarding or the internal narrative around A.I., this misattribution matters. If you tell young workers or struggle as an A.I. skills gap when it's actually just a demand shortage, you send them chasing the wrong fix. This blame A.I. stuff is the easy story for a bad youth job market.

[00:20:02] Why is that narrative so sticky and who benefits from it being A.I.'s fault rather than a plain hiring slowdown? I'm also curious, Jenni, what your first summer job was. So my first summer job was working for my dad. So I worked, he had a business doing interior design for offices and stuff. So I had a little office job with him answering phones and filing and stuff like that.

[00:20:29] And then I suppose my first proper job was working in a clothing store on Saturdays. And I loved it because I loved doing all the merchandise. I was going to ask, outside of nepotism, what was the first job? I mean, he was a tiny business. It was, it was, um, uh, was, yeah, working for a clothing brand called River Island, which I'm not sure you would know across the pond. Uh, and I worked in their store on Saturdays. And I love, I really loved it. Loved the customer service, loved the stuff in the, just, I loved it. It was brilliant.

[00:20:55] Um, I think the blame A.I. staff is really interesting actually, because when I was reading this, I was thinking about all the other factors that are impacting it. And it's based, which is what this is saying is actually there are other things impacting that. And if I think about the UK market, you know, retail hospitality, that's often where people have their first jobs. Mine was retail. Do you know what I mean?

[00:21:16] There's, it's often that way, but over here in the UK, they, those industries have been massively hit by changes to, um, minimum wage changes to tax changes to business rates. Like all sorts of things are compounding that. And I feel like that should be getting the blame because actually, if you focus in on that, you'll actually probably make some changes.

[00:21:35] But instead we're focusing on A.I. And I don't know whether it's because that feels like an easier thing to blame when you're making lots of cuts rather than trying to go after sort of government choices and decisions. I honestly don't know. I find it, I find it really strange, but maybe it's because companies want to invest in it and they want to make the job cuts to allow for that investment. And we've talked about that before in terms of it's more about making space for the investment in it.

[00:22:04] Um, so I, I, I, I find it strange to blame it and maybe it's just because it's easier. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think that's what it comes down to a couple of weeks ago. I talked about a conversation I was having with my son who's going into college and being interested in marketing, but it's not, marketing is not going to be there because of A.I. And I could explain like, no, it's just going to be different. It's going to evolve over time. So I think this blame A.I. is just easy. We all like a villain. We all like to blame something.

[00:22:29] It's easy to blame a thing that there's no face to. There's no, like it's, you're not blaming a company, even though the companies are saying, Hey, it's A.I.'s fault, but also we're spending money to invest. In A.I. So I think that's the, the sticky part. We all like the, to blame the villain. I think the, the good side of this is seeing about people teaching themselves skills, like trying to move up, trying to catch up to things that are changing.

[00:22:55] I mean, that, that's a, that's a redeeming quality to hear that more than two thirds are teaching themselves these skills to try to stand out. I don't care if it's, that's, you know, the article says from the same playbook, because they're, they're trying to improve. They're investing in themselves, or I think is a really great thing to look at.

[00:23:13] Yeah. I don't think that's a bad thing, but I think that there are other skills that younger generations need to build, like relationship building and things like that in terms of conversation and communication and some of those things. If you're just learning how to use A.I., that is not going to help you with how to influence your stakeholders, like whatever job you do, that's, that's going to be something you're going to need to do. How to persuade, how to, you know, build relationships quickly, how, you know, all of those kinds of human skills.

[00:23:41] I don't, I don't think it's as easily accessible to go and learn that as it is to go and learn A.I. And I think that is actually probably the bigger gap that's having an impact in terms of their skills. And I think if it could be as easy to access, here is, you know, a quick thing about how to build relationships at work. Here's that, those are some skills that I know young people are saying, I'd really like to learn how to do that because I don't know how to do that.

[00:24:04] Because I either, you know, was at school during COVID and therefore didn't build some of those foundational things or I'm neurodivergent and I struggle with doing that and I'd like some help. Like there's loads of different things behind that. But those are the skills that I worry will be left behind as everybody goes into, oh, I've got to learn A.I. in order to be able to do this. And they're not learning the biggest skills that we need to actually connect as a human race. Yeah. Thanks for asking about my first summer job, Jenny.

[00:24:31] It was, I was a, I was a bagger. Yeah. I was a bagger at Kroger grocery store in my hometown, which was awesome. I loved it. It was a great summer job. But yes, you're right. But also they were every new, what do you call them? Generations or people entering in like new employees, whether you're in your late teens or early twenties, there's so many skills you have to learn by just doing the job. Yes.

[00:24:57] Like you, you, you, you can't teach yourself some of those skills, but I think when you look at job descriptions, that's what they're trying to teach themselves. The things that companies are saying we're hiring for, even though those other things you talked about are important, you can't really teach yourselves those things. You have to be exposed to that. And it's sort of the old adage, like you need experience to get a job and you'd have a job to get experience. Like people get caught up in that cycle where at least they're trying, they're, they're, they're trying to get better, get stronger, whatever it is.

[00:25:26] And that's always a good thing. And last up a new study from researchers at the New York fed university of Virginia and Harvard drew on more than 588,000 workers and found remote work accounts for roughly a third of the rise in mental distress between 2011 and 2024. Hitting people who live alone hardest, nearly nine and 10 workers in remote capable jobs spend their entire workday alone. And co-author Emma Harrington describes days going by with no face-to-face contact at all.

[00:25:55] But this one comes with a fight attached. Our favorite person, Stanford's Nick Bloom, whose randomized trials show remote work, improving mental health, pushing back hard on this. He says that people repeatedly choose something they love. How is it bad for them? His fix is choice, not mandate. The people who live alone are clearly the ones carrying this cost and nobody serious is arguing for a return to 2019.

[00:26:22] Brian Elliott's belief is that most companies treat remote as a default, not something you design around connection. So they cut gatherings and travel and basically no one's engineering moments that matter for these employees. Just one office day a month reportedly lifts productivity 8% and cuts attrition by a third. This is a design problem that keeps getting framed as a location problem.

[00:26:49] Jenni, the loneliest people in the data are the ones living alone, not remote workers as a group. Does that mean the office isn't the fix at all or is it even the employer's job to solve an employee's loneliness or just to stop making it worse? Oh, gosh, this is complicated, isn't it? In terms of the and we've talked about this a lot on this podcast about what is the role of work in terms of the individual's overall life and wellness.

[00:27:17] And I think we both agree that there is an element of agency on the employee for their own life and that work can't come in and fix that. However, I do. I do absolutely agree that the loneliest people are the ones living alone and then working remotely. And that compounds the issue. I do think there is also the issue that people have just cut all of this connection stuff. We talked about this on my internal comms roundtable the other day of we've sort of stopped this ability to have fun because if you can't measure the return on it, then why should we do it?

[00:27:45] I don't know, because it's just a nice thing to do because we're human beings. And it would just be nice just to not be sitting doing tasks together and actually having a moment of connection without having to measure it. So I think all of that is part of the issue. I don't think it's location. I think it's probably it's about that connection.

[00:28:04] It's not the responsibility of work to address the loneliness issue, but I think it's the responsibility of the organisation to figure out where work fits in the bigger societal world we live in and how it fits for the individuals. We talked about this before, about you saying about how it was a big part of your dad's friendship circle. Because we were talking about how that's the role that work used to play. Now it's less that. But for some people, it's still that. And if you're taking away that option for them to create their community, then that's not fair.

[00:28:34] And I do think that sometimes people say everybody wants to work really. Everybody wants to work hybrid. Everybody. No, they don't. You can't possibly just blanket that. That is not right, fair, accurate, just any of those things. Everybody is different. Give people the choice. Give them the flexibility. And if you know someone does live on their own, then they should be encouraged to come in on like team days where everyone's together so that they are having some element of social connection. Yeah, I do.

[00:29:02] We'll say everybody does want choice. And it's what you choose is then what's best for you. Yes. And so I also think it's being clear, like being alone and lonely are different things. Yes, correct. And I remember thinking about that during the pandemic of the people who did live alone, how challenging that truly must have been. Where at least I had my wife, Kristen, and kids and we were safe and could go back and forth between houses.

[00:29:31] Like, at least you have that person. That's also putting a lot of burden on that other person. I wonder if did people just develop, and we all did, develop some really bad habits during that time. But I don't want to, it's not people living alone is not the problem. I think it's some of these habits that we might have developed. And I was recently talking to Kristen about this, where we hear a lot of times about the male loneliness epidemic. I'm now, and we don't relate to this, maybe not.

[00:30:00] But I'm taking a bit of a harder, maybe harder and harsher stance on it. That is also a choice. That is a choice. If you are lonely, that is a choice. I know that's going to sound really harsh, but I'm saying this to guys who are using that as an excuse. That's a choice. Because you can choose to join groups. You can choose to get out of the house. You can choose to go to the gym. You can choose to say hi to people. Like, we were talking about the difference between male friendships and female friendships.

[00:30:29] And not that there's entirely different, but there are differences between the two. A lot of male friendships are very superficial in very good ways, not in a negative way. If you like the same football team as another guy, you can develop a friendship off of that. Like, it's actually pretty simple to do. We all feel lonely at times. Like, I mentioned to you, this was maybe about a month ago. I work from home. My wife was traveling abroad.

[00:30:58] My kids were traveling. So I was like, this is weird. Like, it was oddly easy to just stay at home. But also, I didn't like that feeling. I was like, I've got to get out of this house. Yeah. That was a choice. You got stroppy. I was like, you're not in a good place. And you were like, yeah, I think that's what it is, actually. But that's a choice. And there's some of that self-reflection we need to all do. Like, what do we all own in this?

[00:31:25] And I do think it's interesting that the data point around that one office day a month, what that does. Just by that one connection, I think we can all benefit, even if it's once a month. So imagine what twice a month or three times a month or whatever that is. Like, how that truly does help the business. But it all comes back down to the choice. Yeah. And you know, you've made me remember the book, The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins, which I've talked about a lot. There's a chapter in there about adult friendships.

[00:31:54] And it's probably the one chapter I talk about the most around how weird it is making friends as a grown-up. Because you're not taught how to do that. Because your friends, when you're younger, you meet at school and you're all at the same stage of life. But then as you get older, you move away. And it's a really good chapter about the challenges of adult friendships and how you do it. And one of my very good friends, I remember her saying to me when we met, because we ended up doing the Tough Mudder Challenge thing together.

[00:32:22] And I didn't know her, she was a friend of a friend. And she would even say now, I remember when I first met you and I thought, I really want to be her friend. And now we're really good friends. But you have to, to your point, you have to invest in that and nurture that and build those relationships. I've invested in my relationships locally to home because a lot of my friends were outside of where I live. And I think you do have to do that. But I do think that work does have a role to play in the broader society that we live in, in creating space to bring people together. And I think that's probably something that we haven't talked about enough.

[00:32:52] Yeah, I'm going to bridge that into my freak out. Okay. Because when you talked about that, it's, it's challenging, or Mel Robbins said it's challenging or weird to, to make friends as adults. She said, it's, it's just, it's harder to do because we aren't taught how to do it. Because when we're growing up, we're all at the same stage of life with our friends through school and things like that. Whereas when you're grown up, it's just different. And she talks about why and stuff. I, I would say that that has not been my experience.

[00:33:22] And I'm going to use this as my freak out. Earlier this month, we went to New York. People that listen to the show, you've heard us mention Poet Ali in the music for the show. Poet has become a friend of mine. I met him a couple of years ago at Attune, which was an event that I was running. We did not know each other prior to that. We flew to New York to see his band perform. There's a photo of me with Poet, with two other friends, Edward Ford and Panaki Kaffiari, who I also met as adults.

[00:33:52] So all of my, all of my best, I would say best friends and that my best friendships are formed as adults. I have one that is carried on from when I was a kid, still my best friend from first grade. We still keep in touch. But also all of our friends are scattered truly around the world. Yes. I'll include you in that, Jenny. Truly around the world. Oh, thank you. So it does take effort. It does take work, but it's so fun.

[00:34:18] It's so fun having adult friendships, like being able to see your friends and watch them succeed and do things you never thought they were capable of. Like this photo of Edward, myself, Poet and Panaki, biggest smiles out there in the sea poet, do his thing up there. It was just really cool to see that. So that was my freak out is one, adult friendships are amazing. And two, man, to see your friends do things like we didn't know what to expect. We heard his other music.

[00:34:46] We hadn't heard Brook Angeles, which I did later learn. I had a bit of a faux pas, Jenny. He was trying to keep those two personas separate, like Poet Ali over here and Brook Angeles over here. I broke the seal on that unknowingly. And also I was like, Poet, you're not Hannah Montana here. Come on. This is good. We can keep these things together. But it was a really fun trip to New York. We happened to be in New York at the same time as the Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey wedding,

[00:35:14] which was kind of a bit bizarre because we just saw a lot more black cars and SUVs around, transporting people around. We were not invited to the wedding, unfortunately. But we did get to see Poet Ali perform in his band, Brook Angela. So that was a lot of fun. It's very cool. And I'm with you on that. Nearly like all of my friendships are adult friendships. I'm not friends with anybody from school. I've got a few acquaintances, but yeah, not tons. My freak out this week is you may notice I'm somewhere else.

[00:35:43] I'm actually downstairs in my house today because the heat wave continues in the UK. And it's too hot to be in my office at this time of day and I will melt. So I'm just a bit bored. It's meant to be calming down over the weekend and stuff now, which is good. But it's been going on for such a long time and I'm just, I'm bored. I'm bored of it, but I'm downstairs. I've actually got an ice pack under my feet while I'm sat at my dining room table here doing this because we don't have any air conditioning and I'm not allowed the fan on while we record because it's too noisy.

[00:36:13] So that's my freak out. It's just the bloody heat wave, but it is coming to an end. Fingers crossed. Fingers crossed. Well, or just get air conditioning. That is what we are freaking out about. Thank you for all joining us. The show notes have all the articles and links from today's conversation. If frequency is a regular part of your week, a quick review goes a long way. Subscribe wherever you're listening and share this with just one person who's interested in the stuff we talk about. Thank you to Poet Ali for the music. We're back every Monday. See you next week.