Back in October of 2016, when admittedly the world seemed a bit of a simpler place, I wrote an article called “An organizational consultant can’t save you now.” Probably four years before that, as I was leaving New York City, I actually really wanted to be a consultant. Less than a half-decade later, I had soured completely on the idea. In that article I wrote, I quoted a guy named Dan Rust who has a book called Workplace Poker. In that book, he equates work to “chimp rape.” Not kidding.

Ironically, that was one of the posts where I first started interacting with Anil Saxena, who has been a digital and e-mail friend of mine for about three years now. I wanted to bring him on this episode and talk about both life and work. Admittedly we probably spend 90 percent of the time talking about work, but work takes up a big chunk of the middle part of your life, so I was OK with it. We talk about psychological safety, the role of HR, the role of leaders, and at the end there’s a sequence about a crappy job interview he had and what it meant when he eventually took the role. Let’s get to it.