What Works

What Works is a workplace-culture series for people who suspect that ordinary work advice leaves too much unexplained. Tara McMullin approaches work as a system of incentives, identities, myths, and obligations rather than a simple matter of personal discipline. The show is analytical, but not detached. It keeps returning to daily scenes where abstract forces become visible. A med student clocks out after a punishing hospital shift. Restaurant workers protest outside a luxury dining residency. A solo business owner discovers that independence still requires a whole corporate structure of functions. An adult learner hits the frustrating moment when a new skill stops feeling inspiring and starts feeling disorienting. These examples become arguments about burnout, hierarchy, business ownership, education, media, and the cultural stories that tell people what they owe to work. The pacing is deliberate. Claims are built, clarified, restated, and connected back to the concrete situation that opened the episode. Solo installments often sound like compact essays, with McMullin using personal reflection, pop-culture references, and political economy to name patterns that can otherwise feel private or accidental. Interview episodes carry the same structure. In the conversation with Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, higher education becomes a way to examine public goods, debt, employment, curiosity, and the shrinking space for learning that is not immediately monetized. The show has a particular interest in mental models. It asks how independent workers imagine themselves, how people learn unfamiliar tools, how criticism is produced, and how old work gains or loses value over time. It is also willing to be pointed. Episodes challenge gendered claims about intelligence, the worship of optimization, and technology companies that turn human life into data. The critique stays controlled rather than breezy. What Works suits listeners who want business and work discussed with history, culture, and power kept in view. It is less a career-hacks program than a careful attempt to understand why work feels the way it does.