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Peter Phelan

Peter Phelan

Founder & CEO of ValuesCulture, former Chief People Officer (MediaMath), and "HR's Humorist" — an Irish-born HR culture strategist and stand-up comedian, co-founder of NYC's Funny People HR Comedy Club.

Nov 3, 2026

39:15
Like that's the night job.
39:16
That is the night job, yeah.
39:18
And it's been a journey.
39:20
You know, I got some gray hairs here.
39:23
So, you know, and HR folks, we do see the craziest things.
39:27
So some of it isn't my observations of the quirks of the world or whatever, just as...
39:33
I get material just from the HR jobs serving up a near infinite amount of wild and woolly stories.
42:10
How do you sort of start to mix these things together?
22:05
Yeah,
22:05
yeah, exactly.
22:06
And then there's reliability is the next factor.
22:09
So that's simple enough.
22:10
Humor isn't such a big factor there.
22:12
It's like, if I showed up to this webinar on time, it's like just meeting your commitments, the basics.
22:18
You've got a deadline, you meet it.
25:34
So, I mean, whether it's a recruiter or HR professional, within that first 10 minutes of meeting this people leader, is there a golden thread of commonality that stands out to you? Or is that golden thread that has been a part of each of those person's stories or portfolio that has helped you create the result for them?
5:00
But where are you generally doing these?
5:03
So there's a few different forums, fora, whatever the word is.
5:07
So I've been lucky enough to have kind of an ongoing thing at Transform, that conference in Vegas every March, which is always a lot of fun.
5:16
And I kind of was an early adopter and promoter of Transform, and they've been kind to me ever since.
5:24
So the last couple of years at the Wynn, I've been like the last performer on stage before it kind of shuts down.
5:31
And We moved the party to some musical guest at a nightclub across town.
5:36
So that's been great, you know, to get the mic for 30 minutes of HR comedy at a big conference like that.

13 MINS LATER

18:22
What would you recommend they do to work with their leadership to bring more humor into the workplace and and really build part of their culture around that.

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