This is eat Sleep Work Repeat.

You can catch up with all the previous episodes at our website.

That's Eat Sleep Work Repeat.fm. sort of radio vibes there.

Today's episode was provoked by an article in the Guardian just before Christmas.

I've shared the link to it from our Twitter account.

If you search for eat, sleep, work, repeat on Twitter, you'll find that.

And I've tweeted out the link.

It was by a guy called Andre Spicer and it was entitled,

The cult of compulsory happiness is ruining our workplaces. Right then, because I guess if the premise of this podcast is that happy people are more productive,

then the whole point of that article was really a challenge to my belief. So I went on to read it and not only was it brilliant but it inspired me to read Andre's other books.

I mean if you just hear the titles of Andre's books you get a sense of the perspective he comes

from he says the stupid one of his books is the stupidity paradox the power and

pitfalls of functional stupidity at work.

And that's really about how we sometimes simplify things

and simplify to a largely incorrect answer, but one that's easy to take in.

He also wrote a book called the Wellness Syndrome which talks about how

we're being made to feel guilty for often unproven tweaks to lifestyle. He's writing his sort of irascible and

spiky and I was just fascinated to meet him. I have to say when I met him I

was worried that he was going to torpedo anything that we've discussed on

these podcasts and he was going to give evidence that really sort of disproved all of

the ideas we had. Instead it was probably my favorite interview I've done and this is by far my

favorite episode. So what you're going to hear in the next 30 minutes we talk about a

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