Speaker 1: Hello the Internet, and welcome to Season three, O eight,
Speaker 1: Episode two of der DALY'SI Guys Day production of My
Speaker 1: Heart Radio. This is a podcast where we take a
Speaker 1: deep dive into America's shared consciousness. And it is Tuesday,
Speaker 1: October tenth, twenty twenty three. Mm hm oh, yeah, you
Speaker 1: know it is. It's a lot of cake. It's National Wednesday,
Speaker 1: National Angel Food Cake Day, which is always felt a
Speaker 1: bit light of the Cake Variety's National Cake Decorating Day,
Speaker 1: National Panbag Day, you know, for everybody grinding out there
Speaker 1: trying to get it on that burkin life like me,
Speaker 1: World Mental Health Day, National Walk to a Park Day,
Speaker 1: a character across the whole National Metric Day. It's all
Speaker 1: about a grind jack, you know what I mean. Set mindset.
Speaker 1: The grindset mindset is what powered my grandfather to look
Speaker 1: thirty years older than he did when he was.
Speaker 2: Forty three, you know what I mean. And that's what
Speaker 2: I'm trying to do. Like I'm trying to grind so
Speaker 2: hard people think I'm a time drave.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Anyway, well, you know what we're gonna get into
Speaker 1: that obvious minute. Are you a old like a mountaineer
Speaker 1: from Turn of the century West Virginia, because you look
Speaker 1: old as hell. Bro. Anyways, my name is Look at
Speaker 1: some old pictures of mountaineers back the day because they
Speaker 1: would just like go up there without oxygen and come
Speaker 1: down looking so old. It's oh, it's truly the oldest
Speaker 1: looking like humans I've ever seen. Like they they age
Speaker 1: like presidents on those mountains. That's a misnomer. They're not
Speaker 1: the oldest looking humans you've ever seen. They're the They
Speaker 1: look like the hardest working people. They look like the
Speaker 1: hardest grinders that I've ever seen, exactly grinding their bodies
Speaker 1: down to dust. That's right. Well, my name is Jack
Speaker 1: O'Brien aka in the Jungle, the Mighty Jungle. Oh, Brian
Speaker 1: sleeps too nice. That is courtesy of reads these the
Speaker 1: disporge can't be me, can't be talking about me, must
Speaker 1: be talking about one of my kids, because I don't sleep.
Speaker 1: I always keep one eye open. And I'm thrilled to
Speaker 1: be joined as always by my co host, mister Miles Great.
Speaker 1: It's Miles Gray, AKA. Why why don't we do birthday bye? Cake?
Speaker 1: Is boring? Something something something?
Speaker 2: The AKA wasn't finished, but I understand the sentiment from
Speaker 2: Scouty on discord.
Speaker 1: Why don't you Why can't we make birthday pie just
Speaker 1: a normal thing? You know what I mean? Just do
Speaker 1: for those that do. Shout out to the trailblazers out there, Miles,
Speaker 1: we're the ones in charge of these decisions. We should
Speaker 1: just do it. As people in charge of the zeitgeist.
Speaker 1: We should just make the make the dang change. Dude.
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't fucking work three hundred hours a
Speaker 1: week to not make the wolves, you know what I mean?
Speaker 1: And I don't even know there are that many hours in
Speaker 1: the week, but that's what it feels like. Baby. All right, Well,
Speaker 1: thank you for calling me baby. I do love me.
Speaker 1: You do that, and you I have requested that you
Speaker 1: do that more often. Miles in our seat, we are
Speaker 1: thrilled to be joined by a professional futurist with a
Speaker 1: pH d in the history of science. He's been a
Speaker 1: visiting scholar at Stanford and Oxford Universities and is the
Speaker 1: author of four books, including Shorter and Rest. Please welcome
Speaker 1: to this show, doctor Alex Sujung King pang.
Speaker 3: Alice, thanks for having me and happy National angel food cake.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah right? Are you a fan of angel food cake.
Speaker 3: I love angel food cake. Oh and cake decorating actually,
Speaker 3: so you know two for one?
Speaker 1: Oh wow? Okay, is that like is that a like
Speaker 1: a hobby of yours decorating cakes? Or you know you
Speaker 1: admire the artwork.
Speaker 3: I admire the artwork though my wife and my daughter
Speaker 3: are both pretty pretty amazing bakers.
Speaker 1: So oh okay, okay, okay, Well, we're so glad you
Speaker 1: joined us here today. Obviously the listeners probably have heard
Speaker 1: me really talking about my grindset, mindset. How I get
Speaker 1: to Lambeau is the thesis statement of this show.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but as quickly as possible. You know, Tim Ferriss
Speaker 2: gave me some ideas they aren't working very well.
Speaker 1: Not I don't know why. Yeah, I wasn't able to
Speaker 1: outsource enough of my work to enough, but yeah, people
Speaker 1: who work for five dollars an hour, It didn't work
Speaker 1: that way.
Speaker 2: But we are curious to pick your mind because yeah,
Speaker 2: it was the talk of shortened work weeks and if
Speaker 2: that's better, I don't know. The jury is still out
Speaker 2: in my mind. We figured it's good to enlist the
Speaker 2: help of someone who hasn't like their area of expertise
Speaker 2: is and precisely that to fight the voices that tell
Speaker 2: me to keep grinding every day and every night.
Speaker 1: We're mainly going off vibes on this end, and you've
Speaker 1: actually looked at data whatever that means. So we're gonna
Speaker 1: dig into it. But before we get to before we
Speaker 1: get into that, we do like to get to know
Speaker 1: you a little bit better and ask you what is
Speaker 1: something from your search history that is revealing about who
Speaker 1: you are or what you're up to.
Speaker 3: Well, this morning, I was on Google Translate for a
Speaker 3: while looking at four day week in other languages. So
Speaker 3: it's something that I've been interested in for several years,
Speaker 3: and it's a movement that keeps growing and I have
Speaker 3: to keep like tracking it now in like Turkish and
Speaker 3: Hungarian and stuff. It used to be relatively simple. It
Speaker 3: was like English and maybe one or two other languages,
Speaker 3: but now it's like just all over the place.
Speaker 1: How is that spreading? Is it just like kind of
Speaker 1: word of mouth that different companies are learning about it,
Speaker 1: or is it coming usually from the workers themselves, or
Speaker 1: how do you see that kind of happening?
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know a lot of it is spreading through
Speaker 3: sort of word of mouth with like within industries, So
Speaker 3: you know, you get a couple of people in like
Speaker 3: HR and recruiting who try it in their organizations, and
Speaker 3: then then their competitors will do it because those competitors
Speaker 3: are starting to lose people to sort of the company
Speaker 3: that did it first. And then you know, it gets
Speaker 3: written up in the news and some you know, and
Speaker 3: there's some ambitious politician who thinks, you know, this is
Speaker 3: how they become you know, governor or senator or something, right,
Speaker 3: champion in the four day week, and so you know,
Speaker 3: and it kind of builds from there, and it's fortunately
Speaker 3: been something that's gotten you know, plenty of press and
Speaker 3: plenty of attention, and so it's, you know, it's it's
Speaker 3: it's been really great to see it acquire that kind
Speaker 3: of momentum and take on a life of its own.
Speaker 2: Yeah, is there is there anything to like you think, like,
Speaker 2: are there certain cultures where the just like innately, some
Speaker 2: cultures are gonna be a little bit harder for them
Speaker 2: to like cross the barrier into the four hour work
Speaker 2: week just based on sort of like ideas of what
Speaker 2: productivity or what you know, someone's worth is based on
Speaker 2: work or is it or is there also a thing
Speaker 2: where too, like humanity is just kind of naturally maybe
Speaker 2: progressing towards this or it's like I mean culture or not.
Speaker 1: It's like this is this feels better, this works better.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, I think if you've got twenty four
Speaker 3: hours in a day, you're gonna you're gonna value this.
Speaker 3: So I mean, you know, I have seen this in
Speaker 3: like two of the hotspots for the four day week,
Speaker 3: or Japan and Korea, which are both countries whose languages
Speaker 3: have their own words for working yourself to death. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so you know, it's not just like Sweden and Denmark
Speaker 3: in places with really good work life balance. You actually
Speaker 3: see it most in places that have really serious issues
Speaker 3: with like stress over work, et cetera.
Speaker 1: Okay, it stood out that yet, hit yeah, we're not
Speaker 1: We're we're not on board yet.
Speaker 2: But you said, you said twenty four hours in a day,
Speaker 2: My man, you gotta find some more hours.
Speaker 1: I got thirty in a day over here. But anyway,
Speaker 1: that's another story. It does cut against the standard narrative
Speaker 1: that we see in the mainstream media. I feel like
Speaker 1: that that's one of the things that made to jump
Speaker 1: out to me, is like this wouldn't be getting coverage
Speaker 1: unless it actually worked because so much of the mainstream
Speaker 1: like narrative is focused on emphasizing the impact of these
Speaker 1: like billionaires and how they worked so hard and did
Speaker 1: it all by themselves and bootstrapped their way up, and
Speaker 1: so to have this thing that keeps getting media attention
Speaker 1: that feels like really counter to the logic that the
Speaker 1: entire that is, like the software that the entire media
Speaker 1: that we consume runs on. Like that, That's one of
Speaker 1: the things that made me be like, huh, I feel
Speaker 1: like there's must be something here, because if it wasn't true,
Speaker 1: like the media wouldn't allow it, you know, yeah, like
Speaker 1: weapons of mass destruction. We were saying that to Okay,
Speaker 1: why would they talk about that the yellow cake? That's right,
Speaker 1: it's got to be true. What is something you think
Speaker 1: is overrated?
Speaker 3: So what do I think is overrated? You know, I
Speaker 3: think over work is actually overrated. That you know, there
Speaker 3: is there is a centuries worth of research that tells
Speaker 3: us that that is a counterproductive both for people and
Speaker 3: for actually for for organizations, and that you know, humans
Speaker 3: are able to sustain brief periods of you know, bursts
Speaker 3: of work for short periods of time, right, you know,
Speaker 3: sort of running away from the tiger or harvesting crops
Speaker 3: in the fall. But the idea that you do this
Speaker 3: sort of as a way of life turns out to
Speaker 3: sort of lead to bad outcomes in all kinds of industries.
Speaker 3: And you know, we spent industrial like engineers or of
Speaker 3: sociologists started seeing this as early as like nineteen oh five,
Speaker 3: nineteen oh eight in the optics industry, right, high performing industries,
Speaker 3: and like explosive and munitions industries during World War One.
Speaker 3: And it's just taken us a really long time to
Speaker 3: take that data seriously, but I think we're finally at
Speaker 3: a point where it is it is it is getting
Speaker 3: a sympathetic hearing.
Speaker 1: So what did they find? What did those industries see?
Speaker 1: The people like kept that just accidents were happening when
Speaker 1: they were overworking people.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so you get more accidents, which in a munitions
Speaker 3: factory when you're dealing with explosives is not a good thing.
Speaker 3: But you know, more generally, you get sort of higher
Speaker 3: rates of mistakes. You see people overlooking small things that
Speaker 3: maybe signal big problems down the line. So you know,
Speaker 3: out of a few years ago, Samsung had an issue
Speaker 3: with one of its cell phones with the batteries exploding,
Speaker 3: and this was like only you know, this is like
Speaker 3: one in a million odds of it happening. But when
Speaker 3: you sell several hundred million of these things, you got
Speaker 3: a class action suit. And one of the things they
Speaker 3: found was that the engineers who are working on this
Speaker 3: were working like eighty hour weeks literally sleeping, you know,
Speaker 3: sleeping under their desks. And they had some data suggested
Speaker 3: that this was potentially a problem, but they were so
Speaker 3: rushed and basically so exhausted that nobody followed up on it.
Speaker 3: And so, you know, I think it's and you know, today,
Speaker 3: when you've got incredibly complicated technologies, amazingly sophisticated products, that
Speaker 3: kind of you know, that kind of really tiny problem
Speaker 3: actually can have gigantic consequences now and then you know,
Speaker 3: people also are more likely to get sick to just
Speaker 3: up and quit. They're also more likely to cut corners
Speaker 3: and cheat when ort of they're overworked and tired. So
Speaker 3: you know, not a good look, like if you're you know,
Speaker 3: a sort of investment bank or a law firm or something.
Speaker 3: And so you know, for all of these reasons, it
Speaker 3: turns out it's not good for people, and it's not
Speaker 3: good for companies.
Speaker 1: So what I'm hearing is they work hard or work smart,
Speaker 1: not hard, and that you're basically a hater on the grindset.
Speaker 1: You know, definition of what you just said. Is it
Speaker 1: okay if we just come out and say that you
Speaker 1: might be a hater against the you know.
Speaker 3: I will, I will. I will also add the odds
Speaker 3: of crashing your lambo go up a lot when you're
Speaker 3: sleep deprived, so you know, until until they come out
Speaker 3: with a self driving version, then you know, this may
Speaker 3: be something to consider.
Speaker 1: I mean, with all, dude, I'll just put it. I'll
Speaker 1: just throw another three hundred hours on and give me
Speaker 1: another mine off. That's the thing. That's how easy it is,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean. I think that's too it's
Speaker 1: too scarce. There aren't enough lambos out there. There are
Speaker 1: enough lambos out there. It's not enough hours in the day.
Speaker 1: We're all search of you. I mean, should we just,
Speaker 1: like with all the slander against grind said, should we
Speaker 1: just run through our schedule real quick and see if yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe yeah. I mean I can't find anything wrong with yeah,
Speaker 1: like if he spots any problems? So all right, I
Speaker 1: mean I don't know about you, Miles. I wake up
Speaker 1: at two a m. Before Mark Wahlberg, before the Rock. Okay,
Speaker 1: I fuel my workout by thinking about all my enemies
Speaker 1: still sleeping in their beds, right, and laugh to myself
Speaker 1: so loud that it wakes people that I share a
Speaker 1: house with, because they're you know, it's just funny to me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're they're sleeping. Well the dust, yeah, exactly, they're sleeping
Speaker 1: and inhaling a bunch of dust is what's happening to them.
Speaker 1: How about you? When do you? When do you wake up?
Speaker 1: I wake up, you know, and to be honest, you
Speaker 1: said you wake up at two am? Yeah? Oh man.
Speaker 1: And this this is every day. This is humiliating for
Speaker 1: me because I always we always live comparatively, as we
Speaker 1: both realized that's the healthiest way to live is to
Speaker 1: compare your situation to an arriving each other exactly, drive
Speaker 1: each other towards total dissatisfaction with our lives. And so
Speaker 1: I wake up at three forty five. Actually wow, yeah,
Speaker 1: so don't judge. I mean, but then that workout, work
Speaker 1: out till five, U shower, drink two pots of coffee. Uh.
Speaker 1: Then five point thirty I begin working reading the news, writing.
Speaker 1: Then at ten to three back to work doing the
Speaker 1: real work.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's like recording the show, taking meetings, doing development stuff.
Speaker 1: Things like that. You're working, but then the next thing
Speaker 1: on your schedule is back to work.
Speaker 2: Yep, exactly, well, the real work obviously. Then three pm,
Speaker 2: I obviously take a second to be a parent. I
Speaker 2: look at my infant son on the monitor for about
Speaker 2: fifteen twenty seconds. Then I go back to work again.
Speaker 2: Then five point thirty, have a light breakfast. Six to
Speaker 2: nine pm look through used Lambeaux listings to see what's
Speaker 2: out there. Nine pm, I eat a lunch of whatever
Speaker 2: my wife and son have left over from their quote
Speaker 2: unquote dinner.
Speaker 1: Yeah there do you also do you also go in
Speaker 1: after they leave, because I've noticed that sometimes that creates friction,
Speaker 1: Like when I go in and they're still there, It
Speaker 1: creates friction, and it like slows me down a little bit.
Speaker 1: I look through the doorway and I giggle to myself
Speaker 1: and I go so that's why y'all are unemployed?
Speaker 2: And I get back to it. Then again nine to
Speaker 2: fifteen to twelve am leisure time. I do take some
Speaker 2: time up for myself. That's where I watch American Psycho
Speaker 2: on VHS. But I'm right now, I'm trying to learn
Speaker 2: every single line word for word. That's what I do
Speaker 2: my leisure time. Then twelve am time for dinner, where
Speaker 2: I just go for a run in the park where
Speaker 2: I'm usually looking for sleeping squirrels to eat. And then
Speaker 2: at two am I go to bed do it all
Speaker 2: over again. I'm sorry, and I cut you off. So
Speaker 2: you're up at two, up at two.
Speaker 1: So by the time you wake up, Unfortunately, my man,
Speaker 1: I am already out the door on my way to
Speaker 1: the hospital because I'm generally like unable to see very
Speaker 1: well when I wake up that early because my eyes
Speaker 1: are like half closed, and so I totally will often
Speaker 1: run into things and at you know, three forty five
Speaker 1: of them, just so tired, I can't remember if I've
Speaker 1: like done that already that day, or if it was
Speaker 1: the day before or like a month ago. So I'd
Speaker 1: just like to check in with urgent Care just to
Speaker 1: be like, everything, look okay here, do I have any
Speaker 1: major holes in my body? Yeah? But other than that,
Speaker 1: it's like a lot of the same stuff, you know.
Speaker 1: Five point fifteen, I add in a little you know,
Speaker 1: give my reflection in the mirror, that get to work
Speaker 1: fat boy speech. But then I'm just grinding, straight, grinding,
Speaker 1: you know. Eight thirty I will usually come to in
Speaker 1: a parking garage or grocery store loading bay somewhere within
Speaker 1: a twelve mile radius of my office. I'm working on
Speaker 1: my speed so I can get them radius up. But
Speaker 1: then yeah, just kind of use context clues to figure
Speaker 1: out how I got there and why I'm talking to
Speaker 1: the person I'm talking to. Yeah, and then yeah, midnight,
Speaker 1: Saga night to each individual picture of Lambeau and influencer
Speaker 1: on my vision board. One thirty five am, fall asleep,
Speaker 1: standing up like a horse. Does that okay? Does that
Speaker 1: sound like what are we thinking there? Do you think
Speaker 1: that is over work? Would you call that work? That's
Speaker 1: a good work life balance, know, Alex, You know.
Speaker 3: I got to say, first of all, I really admire
Speaker 3: sort of the like combination of sort of Genghis Khan,
Speaker 3: Elon Musk and Joker that you've managed to sort of
Speaker 3: achieve here.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, you you listen to the show, right,
Speaker 1: because we always start off that's our triune God, Musk
Speaker 1: and the Joker, the experience.
Speaker 3: I might have a couple ideas, you know, around the
Speaker 3: edges about maybe expanding the amount of sleep that sort
Speaker 3: of and there's some good science behind why get it
Speaker 3: more than let's say, twenty or thirty minutes of sleep
Speaker 3: per day is a good thing, right.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: And you know, the sort of the other the other
Speaker 3: thing I might you know, recommend, is that there's there
Speaker 3: might be a little bit more room for sort of
Speaker 3: some breaks, some non Lambeau and influencer related activity. Okay, okay,
Speaker 3: So you know, I will say, looking back at my book,
Speaker 3: I studied a lot of historical figures who really were
Speaker 3: around before you know, before the founding of the Lamborghini company.
Speaker 3: So we can't say that today, you know, would Charles Darwin,
Speaker 3: you know, not be going for a Lambeau.
Speaker 1: Who knows? Because so here's the thing. I don't get
Speaker 1: the lambro Lambeau for the breaks. I get it for
Speaker 1: the gas, all gas, no breaks. Is how I live
Speaker 1: my life like a Lambeau. So that's the thing that
Speaker 1: I feel like Darwin kind of wouldn't have been able
Speaker 1: to wrap his mind around. Necessarily, Survival of the grindest
Speaker 1: is what he would have you know, I came up
Speaker 1: with that concept. But that's neither here nor there. Well,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for bearing with us and for
Speaker 1: looking at our schedules with us. What is something that
Speaker 1: you think is underrated?
Speaker 3: Let's pick up on where we were just a second ago,
Speaker 3: and I think, you know, actually sleep is underrated despite
Speaker 3: in a sort of the you know, the like internet,
Speaker 3: mattress companies and things that are sort of you know
Speaker 3: that are sponsoring lots of podcasts, maybe like yours. I
Speaker 3: don't know, but there's.
Speaker 1: Okay, it's time to talk with sponsored does in a while.
Speaker 3: You know Peter Rettia who wrote who wrote a sort
Speaker 3: of terrific book that's actually sort of behind me about
Speaker 3: called Unaging, which is all about how sort of the
Speaker 3: you know, all the all the amazing things you can
Speaker 3: do in order or of to have a great long life,
Speaker 3: talks about sleep is one of like the great secret
Speaker 3: weapons in or you know, sort of in our arsenal,
Speaker 3: and that it does, you know, it does amazing stuff
Speaker 3: for brains, for bodies. It even does really good stuff
Speaker 3: you know, for us create and helps us you know
Speaker 3: that sort of helps us have better ideas and have better,
Speaker 3: more sustainable lives. So and the problem is we underestimate,
Speaker 3: you know, we underestimate sleep at our peril, but everybody
Speaker 3: does it right. Nobody ever says I'll work when I'm dead,
Speaker 3: but you know, sort of we do say all sleep
Speaker 3: when I'm dead, which is you know which sort of
Speaker 3: which I think, you know, just illustrates the way that
Speaker 3: we value the one, you know, the one over the other.
Speaker 1: So that I mean, and I never sleep because sleep
Speaker 1: is a cousin of cousin of death. Because we're in
Speaker 1: a New York state of mind. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that you talk it. You mentioned like the word of obliquity,
Speaker 1: which I had not really heard, but like that kind
Speaker 1: of it's something. It's an idea that I've been kind
Speaker 1: of dancing around and like talking about this show and
Speaker 1: talking about like people coming to like having scientific breakthroughs
Speaker 1: in their dreams or you know, that they're just being
Speaker 1: these unconscious forces in our lives that kind of break
Speaker 1: through and like guide us in a direction that we
Speaker 1: might not be even consciously aware of. Just this idea
Speaker 1: that there's so much work happening at an unconscious level,
Speaker 1: and that's what you're it seems like a lot of
Speaker 1: the value of rest and you know, not being on
Speaker 1: task all the time. To quote my other philosophical hero,
Speaker 1: Jeff Bezos. You know, some off task time, yeah, can
Speaker 1: actually make you much better at solving problems, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: And like you, there's this anecdote that I'd never heard before,
Speaker 1: but about like how studies of the brain have found
Speaker 1: that the brain is using up as much like when
Speaker 1: I'm staring off into space, you know, sitting at my
Speaker 1: desk and just like I'm like, all right, my brain
Speaker 1: needs a rest. I'm looking off into space in the
Speaker 1: middle distance with my mouth open like that. That is
Speaker 1: that that time, my brain is using just as much
Speaker 1: oxygen as it does when I'm working on a problem, right,
Speaker 1: And it's like, but but my brain prefers or like
Speaker 1: craves that rest. You talking about that and like why
Speaker 1: why you think it craves up?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Okay, So you know, first off, absolutely correct that
Speaker 3: sort of our brains when we are apparently just spacing out,
Speaker 3: are actually not slowing down or shutting off. They're just
Speaker 3: as active as they are when we are trying to
Speaker 3: do our taxes or you know, or sort of talk
Speaker 3: our kids out of.
Speaker 1: You know, sort of we're because there's some there's some
Speaker 1: bad habits he's talking about.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's you're giving that's Lambeau money you're giving away out.
Speaker 3: But you know, it turns out, you know, even when
Speaker 3: we're when we're like thinking of nothing at all or
Speaker 3: you know, sort of day dreaming, that there's a lot
Speaker 3: going on, you know, under the hood, as it were.
Speaker 3: And what scientists have found is that there are basically
Speaker 3: parts of our brain that switch on when we are
Speaker 3: when we're mind wandering, as they sort of as they
Speaker 3: call it, and these are parts that are associated with
Speaker 3: creative thinking, with thinking about the future, or it's often
Speaker 3: sort of the more visual parts of our brains. And
Speaker 3: that default mode network, as scientists sort of call it,
Speaker 3: does two things. Number One, it switches on really really quickly,
Speaker 3: like in the time it takes us to blink your eyes,
Speaker 3: the default mode can be seen firing up. And the
Speaker 3: second thing is the default mode is really good at
Speaker 3: attacking problems that you've been working on but haven't solved yet.
Speaker 3: So when you're trying to remember you know, the name
Speaker 3: of the actor who is in the movie and that
Speaker 3: other thing, and sort of it doesn't come to mod
Speaker 3: you know, you can't remember it, and then five minutes
Speaker 3: later sort of you're doing something else, and all of
Speaker 3: a sudden, the name pops into your head. Right, it's
Speaker 3: Hugh Jackman or yeah.
Speaker 1: And that's.
Speaker 3: Okay. But that's the default mode working on something even
Speaker 3: while your attention has moved elsewhere. And one of the
Speaker 3: things I think that really creative people are good at
Speaker 3: is recognizing just how powerful the default mode can be,
Speaker 3: especially if you give it some time, some regular time
Speaker 3: sort of in your day to do its thing. And
Speaker 3: so you know, not only do you have time for
Speaker 3: rest and recovery, but you get this kind of extra
Speaker 3: time when sort of your creative subconscious is able to
Speaker 3: take on to take on problems that you haven't been
Speaker 3: able to solve just by grinding away at them and find,
Speaker 3: you know, hacks and shortcuts and so forth, and find
Speaker 3: solutions that you know that you haven't been able to
Speaker 3: find through sort of conscious effort, but are down there
Speaker 3: in your brain somewhere, and it can kind of bring
Speaker 3: into the surface for you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, now we have to take a break. But before
Speaker 1: we do, just one thing I picked up from what
Speaker 1: you were just saying is that it sounds like you're
Speaker 1: having trouble remembering Hugh Jackman's name, and a helpful little
Speaker 1: trick is think huge jacked man and then picture him
Speaker 1: from Wolverine and it like does it's like a little
Speaker 1: mind palace thing. But there's also interesting, other interesting stuff
Speaker 1: in there. Let's take a quick break and we'll come
Speaker 1: back because I want to hear you talk specifically, you know,
Speaker 1: about your background as a historian of science and kind
Speaker 1: of how that led you to where you are today.
Speaker 1: So we'll be right back and we're back. And yeah,
Speaker 1: so you started as a historian of science, and I've
Speaker 1: heard you talk about like what you learned from Darwin,
Speaker 1: and you know, Ernst Macht talked about kind of these
Speaker 1: ideas of you know, letting the subconscious take its turn. Look,
Speaker 1: can you just talk about like just looking at the
Speaker 1: historical record around these great thinkers and what they what
Speaker 1: they knew.
Speaker 3: Right, So, you know, part of the reason that I
Speaker 3: talk about these these folks un rest is number one,
Speaker 3: their lives are really really well documented.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: There were fourteen thousand letters in of the Darwin archive
Speaker 3: at Cambridge University, so we actually know an awful lot
Speaker 3: about their daily lives. We also have enough perspectives so
Speaker 3: that we can, you know, say, with a pretty high
Speaker 3: degree of confidence Charles darn Darwin was an important person
Speaker 3: who's you know, who made an enduring contribution to or
Speaker 3: to our understanding of the natural world. And you know, finally,
Speaker 3: in contrast to today's great so many of today's great achievers,
Speaker 3: they don't you know, we can see them without the
Speaker 3: filter of like pr handlers and sort of you know,
Speaker 3: people who are worried about their stock price, sort of
Speaker 3: making the argument that you know, these people actually sort
Speaker 3: of never rest there, always serving the customer, you know,
Speaker 3: creating delightful products, blah blah blah. And so we have
Speaker 3: actually a better understanding of how they worked and how
Speaker 3: they did their work than we do of many inventors
Speaker 3: and entrepreneurs today.
Speaker 1: That little fish with feet that Darwin came up with
Speaker 1: was pretty sick. Marketing. I gotta say that branding is
Speaker 1: pretty tight. He's kind of a marketing genius.
Speaker 3: He did have his moments, you know, it's it's us.
Speaker 3: It's us too bad that he was working before there
Speaker 3: was actually any you know, social media.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I've always thought him more than an influencer
Speaker 1: than anything. But yeah, okay, I think he did other
Speaker 1: important stuff, you know.
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, he definitely had a lot of influence,
Speaker 3: no question about that. And the other thing you see
Speaker 3: when you look at these lives is there's an amazing
Speaker 3: consistency in things like their daily schedules and sort of
Speaker 3: when they worked, when they took breaks, and how they
Speaker 3: kind of layered these periods of really focused work of
Speaker 3: only like ninety minutes or ninety minutes to two hours
Speaker 3: and then a break and then another deep dive what
Speaker 3: Cal Newport calls deep work, and you do that like
Speaker 3: three times a day, and that's about all they needed
Speaker 3: in order to you know, come up with ideas that
Speaker 3: sort have changed the world. And I think that's a
Speaker 3: you know, it is a it's a great challenge to
Speaker 3: the assumption that in order to do you know, world
Speaker 3: changing stuff, we have to work enormously long hours. We
Speaker 3: have to in effect sacrifice ourselves and our happiness and
Speaker 3: our health and sometimes our families. Is in you know,
Speaker 3: sort of to make you know, sort of to reach
Speaker 3: some mountain top, make a discovery, et cetera, and that
Speaker 3: it's possible to have you know, long sort of lives
Speaker 3: that are longer, that are more sustainable, but also still
Speaker 3: let us do really amazing work that or of you know,
Speaker 3: lets us express our passions and that sort of is
Speaker 3: deeply satisfying for a really long time. So that ultimately
Speaker 3: is you know what Darwin taught me along with the
Speaker 3: fish with the feet.
Speaker 1: Yeah, which is I've got I've got a ton of
Speaker 1: those in my garage, trying to get rid of if
Speaker 1: you want to buy something. Yeah, that is kind of
Speaker 1: the whole point of this episode is actually trying to
Speaker 1: help Miles move that product because he is.
Speaker 2: I shouldn't haven't made it in pure gold. I think
Speaker 2: that's right, I shouldn't have pure gold. Yeah, but what
Speaker 2: do you think?
Speaker 1: Like? So you know from my we talk about culturally right,
Speaker 1: like how some places work themselves to death. I know
Speaker 1: that from like I'm I'm a Japanese family who when
Speaker 1: I first was working in media, they thought my job
Speaker 1: was not serious because I wasn't like working day and night.
Speaker 1: Are what like sort of what was sort of the
Speaker 1: evolution of being able to be like I don't know,
Speaker 1: Darwin works like a couple hours a day to sort
Speaker 1: of this like new like the exaltation of like the
Speaker 1: non stop working person and that is why they are successful.
Speaker 1: How did we like what what jumps?
Speaker 2: Did we make I'm assuming the Industrial Age had a
Speaker 2: lot to do with that, but what what what like.
Speaker 1: Where where were we and where are we now?
Speaker 3: Essentially it did have a lot to do with it.
Speaker 3: But even you know, one hundred years ago, there was
Speaker 3: this sense that you know, super successful people of kind
Speaker 3: of earned earned the right to leisure because of their success,
Speaker 3: you know, not that getting rich met that you had
Speaker 3: to never ever stop. Like if you look at old
Speaker 3: issues of Forbes magazine from the nineteen tens, nineteen twenties, right,
Speaker 3: Forbes magazine has never been one that's been especially critical
Speaker 3: of capitalists, but you know, lots of those profiles have
Speaker 3: stuff about how these guys spend like you know, still
Speaker 3: go to Minnesota to tramp in the woods where they
Speaker 3: grew up before, you know, sort of coming back to
Speaker 3: Wall Street and you know, sort of you know and
Speaker 3: sort of cornering the silver market. I think, you know, so,
Speaker 3: you know part, but what happened to change that? I
Speaker 3: think really starts like in the seventies and eighties, when
Speaker 3: you have sort of the realignment of the American economy,
Speaker 3: you have sort of the sort of along with the
Speaker 3: growth of the computer industry, of the high tech industry
Speaker 3: and finance simultaneously, both of which teach us that the
Speaker 3: way to be successful now is not to chard at
Speaker 3: the bottom, pay your dues, and work your way up. Right,
Speaker 3: the age in which both General Electric and General Motors
Speaker 3: could be run by guys named Charlie Wilson, both of
Speaker 3: whom started in the mail rooms of their companies, was
Speaker 3: now over right. The way you became rich was to
Speaker 3: be like Steve Jobs right, or of overnight success or
Speaker 3: like you know, Charlie Sheen and Wall Street, and that
Speaker 3: becomes that becomes the model for what a successful career
Speaker 3: looks like. In a sense, sort of you get rich
Speaker 3: before the next you know, either before your technical skills
Speaker 3: become obsolete, before the next turn of Moore's law means
Speaker 3: that someone else has a sort of chance at bat
Speaker 3: or you know, or of the next or of you know,
Speaker 3: the next stage in the global economy or economic turndown,
Speaker 3: or of you know, wipes everybody out, and then you know,
Speaker 3: other structural factors like sort of the growth of or
Speaker 3: of increasing reliance on sort of temporary labor stone of wages.
Speaker 3: And culturally, I think the sensibility that you know work
Speaker 3: goes from something that is important in every American's life,
Speaker 3: to essentially the only thing right, more important than family,
Speaker 3: than community, than religion. It means that it is like
Speaker 3: the undisputed champion of everybody's existence. And so, you know,
Speaker 3: all of that stuff together means that it's been really
Speaker 3: hard to push back against all of that and to
Speaker 3: imagine an alternative. And it's taken something as dramatic as
Speaker 3: the pandemic right to sort of shift, to make a
Speaker 3: lot of us shift gears to see that actually, you know,
Speaker 3: all these things that we took for granted, that we
Speaker 3: thought were like inevitable and inescapable turned out to be
Speaker 3: things that we can change, and to begin to take
Speaker 3: seriously the possibility that we can actually, you know, or
Speaker 3: rather than have our workplaces changed virus, make these changes
Speaker 3: ourselves for ourselves for the better. But you know, that's
Speaker 3: that's a that's a brief history of how we got
Speaker 3: how we got in here, and how we're getting out.
Speaker 1: It's interesting to me that it happened in like the
Speaker 1: seventies and eighties at a time when like people started
Speaker 1: really like hoarding and getting immoral amounts of wealth for
Speaker 1: like doing things that like building things that weren't lasting
Speaker 1: or you know, doing corporate rating and stuff. Yeah, corporate rating,
Speaker 1: Like it reminds me the anecdote from the people's history
Speaker 1: of the United States, where like the War Department changes
Speaker 1: its name to the Department of Defense at the moment
Speaker 1: that they start waging non defensive wars because they're like
Speaker 1: they need this you know, linguistic defense mechanism to like
Speaker 1: throw people's attention away. And it's like the the powers
Speaker 1: that be in capitalism need this idea that like, well,
Speaker 1: you just have to work harder, you just outwork every
Speaker 1: one to justify that they're actually not doing anything that
Speaker 1: is harder or more worthwhile and certainly not millions of
Speaker 1: times more important than the people who they're out earning
Speaker 1: by a factor of a million.
Speaker 3: You know, Jack. That points to another important thing, which
Speaker 3: is that you know, we've we've come to see or
Speaker 3: of both success and challenges in the workplace as totally
Speaker 3: like sort of individual and personal. Right, sort of, my
Speaker 3: success is because I worked enormously long hours, not because
Speaker 3: I have a social network I have patrons, friends, you know,
Speaker 3: et cetera. Right, and if I have a pretty you
Speaker 3: know sort of if I have if I have a
Speaker 3: problem at work or if I want to be more
Speaker 3: successful sort of the you know, the key is all
Speaker 3: in what I myself do right, get up earlier, hustle harder,
Speaker 3: et cetera. And I think that we've you know, of
Speaker 3: even even those of us who turn out whose clocks
Speaker 3: have thirty hours in a day rank you discover that
Speaker 3: you know, at some point you run out of hours.
Speaker 3: And the ability, you know, the ability to solve problems
Speaker 3: that way hits a limit. And the fact that we
Speaker 3: all share that we all have these kinds of problems
Speaker 3: suggests that actually maybe a more powerful and enduring way
Speaker 3: to deal with them would be to solve them together, right,
Speaker 3: to act collectively. And that's one of the big things
Speaker 3: behind stuff like or of the four day week is
Speaker 3: that you know, it's something that's done in companies when
Speaker 3: where everybody does it from the CEO or of you know,
Speaker 3: CEO on down. And I think part of the success
Speaker 3: of the movement has been that it has you know,
Speaker 3: it has shown us, that shown us the power of
Speaker 3: collective action to change how we work and to make
Speaker 3: work better for us.
Speaker 1: All. Yeah, that just made me think of the fact
Speaker 1: that Zach Morris is the ultimate capitalist because you can
Speaker 1: freeze time. He can freeze time, and that saved by
Speaker 1: the bell. Yeah, of course do I don't think I
Speaker 1: have to explain that to anybody here, but I'm sure
Speaker 1: this comes up all the time in academic circles. But
Speaker 1: what like that he was and that that was a fantasy,
Speaker 1: that was like a thing that I was when I
Speaker 1: was younger. I was like, oh, man, to be able
Speaker 1: to freeze time, you have like so much extra time,
Speaker 1: I can like get so good at things or like
Speaker 1: do all the all my work and then just like
Speaker 1: come back and really, you know, living my life on
Speaker 1: Zach Morris's clock, you know how, Like I'm curious, like
Speaker 1: you know, when I got a lot more on Zach
Speaker 1: Morris here, Miles, if you Oh, no, I was about to.
Speaker 1: I was actually about to talk about the Jack Morris
Speaker 1: when he had to take two people to the same dance.
Speaker 2: Jack, let me finish the question. No, But Alex, like
Speaker 2: we I think when we talk about what we talk
Speaker 2: a lot about on the show, just sort of the
Speaker 2: just terrible habit we have, especially in America and other
Speaker 2: like western capitalist societies, just like it's all about work.
Speaker 2: Productivity is the only metric to define your life, and like,
Speaker 2: you know, we see that obviously, like at a more
Speaker 2: professional level, but I feel like it's also really difficult
Speaker 2: for people who like have like you know, hourly wage
Speaker 2: working jobs and things like that. What is the sort
Speaker 2: of same way because obviously I feel like when people
Speaker 2: go like, I'm sure if you tell business owners like, oh,
Speaker 2: four weeks, what for all my productivity to go down?
Speaker 1: How do those sort of lessons apply to various industries?
Speaker 1: Because I can easily see how, like in a professional thing,
Speaker 1: it's like, well, we've got all these like invoices we
Speaker 1: have to process as an accounting firm or whatever. Once
Speaker 1: you're done, then you have something there. But like for
Speaker 1: something that's like sort of like an always on business,
Speaker 1: like retail consumer sort of facing business, what is the
Speaker 1: same way? What is the way that that needs to
Speaker 1: be messaged to those people for them to not think, well,
Speaker 1: my line will go down if this happened. And how
Speaker 1: does this how does this sort of vision offer a
Speaker 1: new sort of form of I guess, you know, time
Speaker 1: liberation for workers that are like in like in every sector.
Speaker 3: Right, So okay, first of all, I think that the
Speaker 3: you know, it's the four day week is something that
Speaker 3: the very you know, who's very earliest adopters tended more
Speaker 3: to be in like professional and creative services. And partly
Speaker 3: because that work is kind of more malleable and more
Speaker 3: shapeable by individuals, it's also tends to be a little
Speaker 3: more project based and so right, and you know, you're
Speaker 3: not like actually moving physical things around, so sort of
Speaker 3: easier to imagine how to redesign it. But one of
Speaker 3: the really interesting things is that we've seen is it
Speaker 3: move into places like nursing and I'm actually working with
Speaker 3: a police department that's moving that is experimenting with thirty
Speaker 3: two hour work weeks for officers, you know, and talk
Speaker 3: about you know, talk about two industries where you don't
Speaker 3: want you know, sleep to prived or of overworked people
Speaker 3: coming in and making mistakes is like in an ICU,
Speaker 3: and you know, sort of during any interaction with sort
Speaker 3: of with law enforcement. And what we found there is that,
Speaker 3: you know, okay, a couple things. Number One, that that
Speaker 3: kind of work turns out to be just as creative
Speaker 3: as what we think of as you know, creative work
Speaker 3: of like people sitting around in meetings, you know, drawing
Speaker 3: on whiteboards, it's just we don't recognize it as such. Right,
Speaker 3: there's just as much ingenuity, sort of problem solving skill,
Speaker 3: et cetera required to either defuse a situation, to you know,
Speaker 3: assess what's going on in an emergency room, to calm
Speaker 3: down people. And that's and so this kind of work
Speaker 3: is just as responsive to the benefits of a shorter
Speaker 3: work week on the part of individuals. Now, the way
Speaker 3: that organizations make it work is for nurses, you know,
Speaker 3: like plate places, like nursing homes, they have huge issues
Speaker 3: around sort of turnover and sort of recruitment and retention. Right,
Speaker 3: these are of these oftener jobs that are not very
Speaker 3: well paid, they're highly stressful, and so you know, in
Speaker 3: so it's easy for people to come into those jobs
Speaker 3: work you know, for maybe a year or two, and
Speaker 3: even if they like it, to find the stresses you know,
Speaker 3: sort of are too much and for them to leave.
Speaker 3: Moving to a shorter work week means that they have
Speaker 3: more time, more time for recovery, so more time to
Speaker 3: you know, and then but also it means that the
Speaker 3: organizations themselves, like nursing homes that have moved to six
Speaker 3: hour shifts while still paying people the same amount of
Speaker 3: money that they were that they were paying for eight
Speaker 3: hour shifts. They save enough in like in temp agency fees.
Speaker 3: You know, when someone calls in sick, you've got to
Speaker 3: get someone from a temp agency and it's like five
Speaker 3: times is expensive hours to sort of you know, have
Speaker 3: a regular full time person. You save so much money
Speaker 3: on that that the programs pay for themselves and you
Speaker 3: get higher quality of care, so less administration of psychotropic drugs,
Speaker 3: fewer like bed sores, slips and falls, all the kinds
Speaker 3: of things that indicate whether whether you know, whether nursing
Speaker 3: home residents or people in the hospital are being well
Speaker 3: cared for. And so you know, in a sense basically
Speaker 3: there are there are industries in which there were hidden
Speaker 3: costs to overwork and high turnover that a four day
Speaker 3: week are subsidized by I think that's andre and we're seeing,
Speaker 3: you know, we're seeing that in the restaurant industry, in healthcare.
Speaker 3: The trial with the police force, it's an eighty person
Speaker 3: force and they've saved something like two hundred thousand dollars
Speaker 3: in overtime, which is like incredible in like the last
Speaker 3: you know, four months or so they've been that they've
Speaker 3: been doing it, and so you know, it's and so
Speaker 3: it's not just that you know, these are sort of
Speaker 3: these are jobs that you know, in which individuals benefit.
Speaker 3: But it turns out that once you dive into the numbers,
Speaker 3: there often are kind of systemic savings that justify moving
Speaker 3: from sort of sort of from you know, eight from
Speaker 3: eight hour shifts to or to shorter ones. So you know,
Speaker 3: even when you have to pay more people, you have
Speaker 3: to hire more staff, it's you know, the numbers still
Speaker 3: work out. And then with retail, the most interesting thing
Speaker 3: I'm seeing has been sort of places that will stay
Speaker 3: open now for twelve hours and have two six hour shifts.
Speaker 3: So that means that you get more walk in you know,
Speaker 3: you get more walk ins. People can you know, come
Speaker 3: into the store or the garage before work, you know,
Speaker 3: maybe get some work done or before they've got to
Speaker 3: you know, drop the kids off. And it means that
Speaker 3: you know, for you know, you get more customers and
Speaker 3: more revenue. And so even if you have to hire
Speaker 3: of one or two more people, it often can pay
Speaker 3: for itself that way, or you know, sort of on
Speaker 3: sort of more sales.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's about to think about the creative work that
Speaker 1: police do. That's crazy because every time I'm pulled over,
Speaker 1: they're like, why are you in this? Why are you
Speaker 1: in this neighborhood? Because they're coming up with like really
Speaker 1: interesting reasons why I shouldn't be there. But in their yeah,
Speaker 1: they have that it's an exhaustion issue. I'm like, you
Speaker 1: just get some rest. You could you need a nap? Sorry? Sorry, officer, sir,
Speaker 1: you you seem so sleepy. He seems so sleepy.
Speaker 2: But no, it is like, is there are there any
Speaker 2: is there potentially any like this could apply to any job?
Speaker 1: Right? Like is there like when looking at sort of
Speaker 1: the way we toil and labor, is there any job
Speaker 1: where you're like, okay, maybe that one has to kind
Speaker 1: of stay that way. It's it's sort of it seems
Speaker 1: I don't know for life perspect like I think it
Speaker 1: supplies everything, right, Can we just call to day? Everyone
Speaker 1: goes to four days?
Speaker 3: I think you know, they were sort of looking at economically,
Speaker 3: I think if you commute to work by helicopter, it's
Speaker 3: going to be hard to move to a four day week.
Speaker 3: So like if you're working on an oil rig or something, right,
Speaker 3: it's like ten days on, ten days off. Just the
Speaker 3: cost of getting to work and back is such that
Speaker 3: a four day week is probably not going to work
Speaker 3: very well. And then after that it becomes it really
Speaker 3: becomes a matter of like a professional ideology. Right, Hedge
Speaker 3: funds are not going to do it because they have
Speaker 3: constructed incredibly profitable systems for hiring twenty two year olds,
Speaker 3: working them to death and then discarding, you know, discarding
Speaker 3: the desiccated husks three years later and hiring new kids
Speaker 3: right right, so until they're you know, Viking freezers are
Speaker 3: full of woggu beef right in their like apocalypse bunkers.
Speaker 3: They're not going to have a lot of good vision board, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 3: you know, but there were, you know, and then places
Speaker 3: like law and medicine, you know, they pride themselves on
Speaker 3: being able to work these kinds of titanically long hours
Speaker 3: and they even though they recognize that they are high
Speaker 3: costs to it, and it leads to sort of instability
Speaker 3: for organizations and unnecessary burnout. Until now, it's been hard
Speaker 3: to envision constructing something different. But so, you know, and
Speaker 3: some of the you know, there were there definitely are
Speaker 3: older people in these fields who really resist the idea
Speaker 3: that you can you know, sort of you can scale
Speaker 3: back hours and make the work better without making the
Speaker 3: work worse. You know, occasionally you get people who say
Speaker 3: that I can't do this because, look, I don't have
Speaker 3: another life other than reading SEC filings or you know,
Speaker 3: X rays, So don't ask me to do this.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, let's actually, let's take one more break and
Speaker 1: then I have another thing that I heard you say
Speaker 1: that kind of made the whole thing fall into place
Speaker 1: for me. So we'll be right back, and we're back.
Speaker 1: I was just telling these guys I once came to
Speaker 1: out of one of my sleep fugs while flying one
Speaker 1: of those oil rig helicopters, and I didn't even know
Speaker 1: how to fly a helicopter. I didn't think, but I
Speaker 1: think I was just learning at an incredible rate. It's
Speaker 1: called grinded man. Yeah, that's right. But so you I
Speaker 1: heard you interviewed where the host I think it was
Speaker 1: ten percent happier. The host was like, so, but you're
Speaker 1: asking them to do the same amount of work in
Speaker 1: less time, Like, how does that not cause problems? And
Speaker 1: you responded with the thing that makes this whole thing
Speaker 1: makes sense to me, that the idea that when you're
Speaker 1: a worker and you get to keep the dividends of
Speaker 1: your efficiency as the as the worker in this case,
Speaker 1: like in the past, when you had workers doing their
Speaker 1: job more efficiently and just the overall goal the overall
Speaker 1: idea was that they had to work forty hours a week.
Speaker 1: If they did their job more efficiently, capital kept the
Speaker 1: dividends of that efficient work. They would just give you
Speaker 1: more work to do. So if I figure out how
Speaker 1: to make eight baskets in four days, and you know,
Speaker 1: it used to be take me five days in the
Speaker 1: traditional version of things, now my company asks me to
Speaker 1: make ten baskets, They're just like, well, now you make
Speaker 1: two baskets a day, buddy, you just did fuck it up. Yeah, yeah, exactly, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you just fucked you by learning to do that. So,
Speaker 1: like the incentive structure is all off, and so you know,
Speaker 1: in that case, I would probably keep it a secret
Speaker 1: or like build inefficiencies into my schedules so that I could,
Speaker 1: you know, kill time at work unless there was like
Speaker 1: some sort of structure attached to it. But even then,
Speaker 1: like like working longer and faster and more intensely, like
Speaker 1: I might not share that information with my fellow workers.
Speaker 1: I might try and you know, or only apply it
Speaker 1: when like the incentive structure was set up in the
Speaker 1: right way. But like in a four day work week,
Speaker 1: you figure out how to make eight baskets, you get
Speaker 1: to keep the dividend of that efficiency by getting a
Speaker 1: day off to you know, chill or do what you want.
Speaker 1: And also you don't have to like keep it a secret.
Speaker 1: It's just that like arbitrariness of that five day work
Speaker 1: week is is like what gets in the way, like
Speaker 1: just being like you have to fill the forty hours. Also,
Speaker 1: something that like I came across just in researching the
Speaker 1: five day or four day work week is the idea
Speaker 1: that like just the seven day week is also arbitrary,
Speaker 1: like years, days, months all correspond to physical events happening
Speaker 1: two our planet, and the week is just kind of
Speaker 1: made up. Like the the idea that like, oh no,
Speaker 1: we have to fill five sevenths of this seven day
Speaker 1: week is kind of bullshit. But but yeah, that that
Speaker 1: idea that like this allows you to like keep the
Speaker 1: dividends of your job of like your efficiency and make
Speaker 1: your life better. Like that started that That was kind
Speaker 1: of the key detail I needed to make this whole
Speaker 1: thing makes sense to me, is that does that Does
Speaker 1: that help you kind of understand what's going on and
Speaker 1: is that sort of the dynamic that you see going
Speaker 1: on when you see these programs working.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Absolutely, you know, I think that the of the
Speaker 3: the one of the big ideas that we work with
Speaker 3: companies and work with leadership to sort of to understand
Speaker 3: is that the four day week is not just you know,
Speaker 3: it's not a concession that companies are simply making to
Speaker 3: their workforces, but rather, the four day week is something
Speaker 3: that everybody is creating together, all right. By finding efficiencies,
Speaker 3: by making meetings shorter, by doing other things in order
Speaker 3: to use technology smarter or give people more focus time
Speaker 3: sort of, you are in effect creating time that the
Speaker 3: creators are able to reclaim for themselves. And that's incredibly
Speaker 3: powerful for two reasons.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: First of all, there is it's a tremendously short feedback
Speaker 3: loop between what you're doing and what you get.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: It's not like or if you're working harder, therefore or
Speaker 3: of your retirement account is experst bigger, and you will
Speaker 3: appreciate that forty years from now. It is we've done
Speaker 3: these things together, and therefore we can go home at
Speaker 3: the end of the day on Thursday and have a
Speaker 3: three day weekend sort of. So you know, that's that's
Speaker 3: a that's a very very immediate tangible reward. The second
Speaker 3: thing I think that's important is the sort of collective
Speaker 3: aspect to it, right, that everybody works together in order
Speaker 3: to make this happen. One of the class sick moves
Speaker 3: in you know, sort of labor relations or management labor
Speaker 3: relations is you know, offering the new guy on the
Speaker 3: factory line or the machine tool you know, or the
Speaker 3: machine tool shop sort of more money if they can
Speaker 3: work faster, and the struggle always is between Traditionally sort
Speaker 3: of wage incentives can be used as a way of
Speaker 3: breaking labor solidarity and sort of and sort of forcing
Speaker 3: a ratcheting up of sort of of output at the
Speaker 3: expense of workers. And you know, one of the things
Speaker 3: that skilled laborers part of their power is an ability
Speaker 3: collectively to push back against increases in you know, demands
Speaker 3: and increased productivity. And in a sense, the four day
Speaker 3: week takes the kind of vision of collective action of
Speaker 3: efficiency and flips it around so that you are working
Speaker 3: together and you have a great incentive to share, you know,
Speaker 3: to share those greater efficiencies to share ways of working smarter,
Speaker 3: but not in a way that benefits me, becomes at
Speaker 3: your expense, but helps all of us. And you know,
Speaker 3: it does mean that companies you have to sort of
Speaker 3: the one big thing they've got to they have to
Speaker 3: get there, you know, get their heads around is you
Speaker 3: don't you know, let people figure all this stuff out
Speaker 3: and then at the end of the trial say, you know,
Speaker 3: it's awesome, you figured out how to do all this
Speaker 3: work in four days. Now let's go back to five
Speaker 3: and you can just produce twenty percent more for me.
Speaker 1: Right, yeah, yeah, imagine we took that and do that
Speaker 1: five days a week.
Speaker 3: Fortunately, fortunately it has not happened, and you know, not
Speaker 3: with sort of not with not with any of the
Speaker 3: companies that sort of that four day week glow has
Speaker 3: worked with. And I think partly number one, everybody recognizes
Speaker 3: that this is the this is the you know, this
Speaker 3: is the fastest way to getting your sort of your
Speaker 3: business burned down, and any jury saying yeah, that's okay
Speaker 3: sort of the sort of yes, the purpose, Yeah, you know,
Speaker 3: the perpetrators were sort of we're acting out of a
Speaker 3: sense of justice, but also you know, the boss is
Speaker 3: get a forty week two and for all of our
Speaker 3: you know, and the sort of indignation at capitalism, it
Speaker 3: is a fact that you know, particularly entrepreneurs and people
Speaker 3: in executive roles do have really high levels of stress, burnout,
Speaker 3: drug dependency, sort of, et cetera, all of which signals
Speaker 3: that they benefit just as much from a four day
Speaker 3: week as everybody else. And so when the seat, you know,
Speaker 3: after after six months of having a four day work week,
Speaker 3: most CEOs are willing to say, you know, actually this
Speaker 3: is kind of saving my life and I'm not as
Speaker 3: much of a heart attack risk, and I remember the
Speaker 3: names of my children and that, you know, when my
Speaker 3: wife recognizes me, and maybe the dream maybe I can
Speaker 3: live with that, right?
Speaker 1: So right?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Is it sort of do these like do a lot
Speaker 1: of CEOs because obviously those are that's the neck that
Speaker 1: turns the head in most instances in an organization. Does
Speaker 1: it take them to like they can't just understand it
Speaker 1: intellectually when this is described to them, it's sort of
Speaker 1: like I have to experience it and then I can
Speaker 1: come around because it's too abstract. Or do some people
Speaker 1: when told about like the efficiencies and how much how
Speaker 1: beneficial it is not just for the business but also
Speaker 1: the workers and employees that they're able to turn around.
Speaker 1: Like what, because I feel like that's that's the one
Speaker 1: thing that's probably keeping so many companies from doing this.
Speaker 1: You're like, ah, that's a bunch of hippie crap or
Speaker 1: whatever they think it is. It's like, I'm a I'm
Speaker 1: gonna I'm gonna work to I die.
Speaker 2: And also I work hard so I can afford to
Speaker 2: do the drugs that I do.
Speaker 1: I do the good ones, that's how hard. So I
Speaker 1: can afford more coke so I can do more cokes
Speaker 1: so I could do more Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, you raise a terrific point, which is
Speaker 3: that you know, first of all, almost every company there
Speaker 3: is some senior person who is championing this. Very often,
Speaker 3: you know, in startups it's the founder or like founding
Speaker 3: team who have themselves spent like ten or fifteen years
Speaker 3: doing seventy eighty hour weeks and they're realizing, you know,
Speaker 3: they've got kids, now, they're getting a little older, and
Speaker 3: they're wondering, how much longer can I keep this up?
Speaker 3: And then I think that they so they very often
Speaker 3: are sort of or are leading the charge within their organizations.
Speaker 3: And then in terms of you know, can you just
Speaker 3: look at the numbers that you have to feel it?
Speaker 3: You got to feel it, and right, I think that
Speaker 3: you know, sort of one of the pieces of advice
Speaker 3: that we give to let's say, people who are not
Speaker 3: at the executive level about how to sell this sort
Speaker 3: of you know, sell it upwards is the numbers are good,
Speaker 3: but they're not the thing that really sort of gets
Speaker 3: people over the line. What gets people over the line
Speaker 3: is a vision of how their lives and how everybody's
Speaker 3: life could be different and could be better if the
Speaker 3: CEO is willing to take the lead on this. It's
Speaker 3: a little bit like One Last Job movies, which I
Speaker 3: absolutely love, right, Yeah, you know you've always got the
Speaker 3: rock or nick Cage or someone you got to steal
Speaker 3: fifty cars before you know, in twenty four hours, or
Speaker 3: they're going to kill your brother and one of the things,
Speaker 3: you know, and it's a huge goal. But in these movies,
Speaker 3: you never do it by yourself. Right. The first thing
Speaker 3: you do is you assemble your team, you know usual
Speaker 3: and you know of it's you know, you have your
Speaker 3: sort of driver and your hacker and your master of disguise,
Speaker 3: et cetera.
Speaker 1: Maybe a big, muscular, huge Jackman.
Speaker 3: Exactly, huge Jackman. Yeah, to return to the previous to.
Speaker 1: The yeah, I think yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: But and you know, one of the things that successful
Speaker 3: pitches do in a sense is say, we've got the team, right,
Speaker 3: We've got the chief, you know, resource officer. We've got
Speaker 3: sort of people and culture. We've got sort of this
Speaker 3: small crew that's willing to do it, but we need
Speaker 3: the leader. And what CEO doesn't secretly want to be
Speaker 3: Nicholas Cage stealing fifty cars. And you know that's a
Speaker 3: sort of that you know, that turns it from you know,
Speaker 3: kind of a you know, an abstract you know, business
Speaker 3: calculation into something for which they can really have sort
Speaker 3: of some passion and some dedication.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, And it appeals to the ego, which is
Speaker 1: always exactly you know. It's a great, great tool obviously
Speaker 1: when trying to motivate people.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this can't happen without you, but it will change
Speaker 3: everyone's life if it does.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you to be like a local god, you know,
Speaker 1: right in your mind, if you'd be so kind enough
Speaker 1: in benevolent that's right. Well, I feel like we could
Speaker 1: keep talking about this for a long time with you,
Speaker 1: and we'll have to have you back on as you
Speaker 1: kind of continue to spread the word about this. But
Speaker 1: doctor Alex Sujun King Peng, it's such a pleasure having
Speaker 1: you on the show. Where can where can people find you?
Speaker 1: Follow you all that good stuff? Read you?
Speaker 3: Right? So the forty week globals website is four Day
Speaker 3: week dot com, which is very convenient. And then my
Speaker 3: book rest is available everywhere fond you know sort of
Speaker 3: books are sold, and also the place where books are
Speaker 3: sold online. And then my book about the four day
Speaker 3: Week is called Shorter, and you know, once again that's out.
Speaker 3: And then I don't do a whole lot on social
Speaker 3: media these days because I'm sort of busy with another
Speaker 3: book project and lots of other stuff. But if you
Speaker 3: want to see like pictures of my dog on Instagram,
Speaker 3: I am ask Pang ask p a ng and that's
Speaker 3: actually my handle on pretty much everything, So you can
Speaker 3: be part of that select circle of my forty three
Speaker 3: followers or so sort of social media.
Speaker 1: There you go. I like that, Yeah, I like that.
Speaker 1: What kind of dog do you? Just so we can
Speaker 1: chum the waters.
Speaker 3: Little fifteen little fifteen pounds spaniel who's about who's about
Speaker 3: like sixteen years old now.
Speaker 1: So, oh, a lot of books. We do. We do
Speaker 1: Spaniels on this, Yeah, we do, we do. I've got
Speaker 1: a couple of them. And is there a work of
Speaker 1: media that You've been enjoying.
Speaker 3: A work of media that I've been enjoying social or
Speaker 3: otherwise social or otherwise you know, watching can I can?
Speaker 3: I say, sort of a certain sort of schadenfreud, sort
Speaker 3: of watching the dumpster fire of X, sort of that
Speaker 3: whole story, you know, just you know, living in Silicon
Speaker 3: Valley and knowing a couple of people who had been
Speaker 3: working at Twitter, sort of seeing what's been going on
Speaker 3: with that has been remarkable and kind of terrifying in
Speaker 3: terms of, you know, any other media that I've been enjoying.
Speaker 3: Ryuichi's I've been listening to a lot of Ryuichi Sakamoto,
Speaker 3: who was a composer. He was a founding member of
Speaker 3: Yellow Magic Orchestra and then went on and did lots
Speaker 3: of soundtracks and very experimental stuff. He just died a
Speaker 3: few months ago, So Mark, yeah, you know, yeah, in March.
Speaker 3: But you know, as an example of someone who was
Speaker 3: incredibly creative for an incredibly long time, he is sort
Speaker 3: of I think a real model for us, all right,
Speaker 3: the guy who could do you know, bring electronic music
Speaker 3: to Japan but also win an oscar for you know,
Speaker 3: his soundtrack work and collaborate with David bow you know,
Speaker 3: sort of co star in a movie with David Bowie.
Speaker 3: You know, this guy was a baller and so sort
Speaker 3: of and you know his work is so varied there's
Speaker 3: something in it for everyone. So that's amazing. So yeah,
Speaker 3: that sounds great. And Miles, where can people find you?
Speaker 3: Is there a workingmedia you've been enjoying?
Speaker 1: Oh? Man, find me on wherever they got the at thing?
Speaker 1: Shift heild the shift key and then hit number two
Speaker 1: and then type in Miles of Gray, m I L
Speaker 1: E s oh I just hit my knee on the desk.
Speaker 1: M I E S O F g R A Y.
Speaker 1: And then also, if you like basketball, you can hear
Speaker 1: Jack and I on our basketball podcast Miles and Jack
Speaker 1: Got Mad Boosties. And if you like ninety Day Fiance,
Speaker 1: catch me on four twenty Day Fiance and also The
Speaker 1: Good Thief. That's so many shows, so just you know,
Speaker 1: just just look for me and deal you'll find the podcast.
Speaker 1: Listening to Miles's voice, Oh, please. That's all I hear. Although,
Speaker 1: help me get to Lambeau please. I haven't seen my
Speaker 1: son in five months. Then that's by choice. That's by choice,
Speaker 1: because I'm not done grind. But Alex has given me
Speaker 1: the courage to maybe shave off an hour or two
Speaker 1: of just looking at used Lambeau ads. And to that,
Speaker 1: I am, I am. I owe you a debt of gratitude.
Speaker 1: Let's see in terms of tweets or anything like, I
Speaker 1: not I don't. I don't have anything on Twitter Instagram
Speaker 1: that I've liked. I let's see, did I see anything? No?
Speaker 1: I don't really have anything to suggest at the moment.
Speaker 1: It's mister, you know, let me know, put me onto something.
Speaker 1: I need a new show that's a murder mystery because
Speaker 1: that's the only thing her majesty my partner likes to
Speaker 1: watch with me. She won't watch comedy with me, so
Speaker 1: give me, give me good and something with European people
Speaker 1: in that always works, So hit me as I imployed.
Speaker 1: That got to be European people. She loves a good
Speaker 1: European people and all the meme and murdering. All right, Uh,
Speaker 1: you can find me on Twitter at Jack Underscore O'Brien tweet,
Speaker 1: I've been enjoying. David Hines tweeted me, So you just
Speaker 1: released the Exorcist Believer Blumhouse. Yes me, and you're calling
Speaker 1: the second one the Exorcist Deceiverhouse. Yes me. My pitch
Speaker 1: is for the third one Blumhouse. Oh no me, Extreme
Speaker 1: airbud guy voice. There's no rule that says a dog
Speaker 1: can't conduct an exorcism the exercise Golden Golden Believer. It's
Speaker 1: up to you, that's what That's what You guys are
Speaker 1: the creative ones. You're the ones who are allowed to
Speaker 1: take breaks, not us. You can find us on Twitter
Speaker 1: at daily Zeikeeist. We're at d daily Zeitgeist on Instagram.
Speaker 1: We have a Facebook fanpage and a website daily zeikeist
Speaker 1: dot com, where we post our episodes and our our footnotes.
Speaker 1: We link off to the information that we talked about
Speaker 1: in today's episode, as well as a song that we
Speaker 1: think you might enjoy. Miles, is there a song that
Speaker 1: you think people might enjoy? Yeah, I was just listening
Speaker 1: to this duo that I think they're from Atlanta. I
Speaker 1: heard them years ago, like where there was a track
Speaker 1: with claro like rapping on it. With them. They're called
Speaker 1: Coco and Claire Claire and they have a track called
Speaker 1: Outro and it's like their music just like fun dy,
Speaker 1: like bedroom hip hop and they're like monotone. Flow is
Speaker 1: just always I've always I've always been a fan. So
Speaker 1: this is Outro by Coco and Claire Claire. All right, well,
Speaker 1: we will link off to that in the footnotes. The
Speaker 1: Daily Zeitgeist does a production of iHeartRadio for more podcasts
Speaker 1: from my heart Radio is the heart Radio Wrap, Apple
Speaker 1: podcast or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. That's
Speaker 1: going to do it for us this morning, back this
Speaker 1: afternoon to tell you what is trending, and we will
Speaker 1: talk to y'all then bye bye