What Would You Say You Do Here? | DEEP DIVE

00:00:00.000 | [intro music]

00:00:04.740 | The topic of today's deep dive is a question.

00:00:08.600 | What would you say you do here?

00:00:12.440 | Now this is a quote that comes from Mike Judge's 1999 satire movie, Office Space.

00:00:21.320 | And I use this quote in a recent article that I published in the New Yorker.

00:00:26.040 | Now the column I have been writing for the New Yorker is actually called Office Space.

00:00:30.040 | So partially I want to just pat myself on the back.

00:00:32.760 | Six articles into this column, I finally found a way to work an Office Space

00:00:37.960 | reference into my Office Space column.

00:00:41.400 | But there is obviously a deeper meaning underneath that quote that I was trying

00:00:46.520 | to unpack in that column, and I want to spend some time talking about it here.

00:00:52.880 | So the point of the article was revisiting Tim Ferriss' classic

00:00:57.760 | 2007 book, The Four-Hour Workweek.

00:01:01.360 | And I told the story that I don't think has been told that often about how

00:01:04.920 | that book debuted to the world.

00:01:07.040 | It debuted to the world at South by SouthWeth Interactive in 2007.

00:01:11.840 | After a last minute cancellation, the organizer of that event, Hugh Forrest,

00:01:16.520 | found a room for Tim to come to give a talk about his book that was just about

00:01:21.760 | to come out, the conference was in March, the book came out in early April.

00:01:26.920 | And he got up on this stage in this makeshift room into a capacity crowd

00:01:31.440 | that was full of people, was the argument I make in the article, it was full of

00:01:35.680 | people who were the epitome of the 10X programmer, hardcore, move fast and break

00:01:42.440 | stuff Silicon Valley culture of that first decade of the 2000s.

00:01:45.840 | These were people that said, you get after it because you might become a

00:01:50.240 | decamillionaire when your startup gets sold, when you go to your IPO.

00:01:54.640 | This was a time and a place where work ethic really trumped all.

00:01:59.760 | You stay up late, you drink Soylent so you don't waste time with meals.

00:02:03.200 | It's a hardworking group of people.

00:02:04.920 | Tim got up in front of them and said, essentially, you work too much.

00:02:10.640 | This isn't sustainable.

00:02:12.080 | Give up on this type of career and do something more

00:02:15.480 | interesting with your time.

00:02:16.440 | That is what that speech was.

00:02:19.080 | I went back and listened to the audio of the speech.

00:02:21.000 | I remember it from 2007.

00:02:22.520 | I went back and listened to the audio of that speech.

00:02:24.320 | It was all about, this is completely unsustainable, this hard, hard

00:02:27.800 | charging, 12 hours a day, check email all the time.

00:02:30.240 | You should have many retirements.

00:02:32.000 | You should re redefine what work even means in your life.

00:02:35.520 | You should heavily automate things.

00:02:37.000 | You should take these startups and make them into lifestyle businesses.

00:02:40.040 | It was a radical talk and this audience of hard charging tech types loved it.

00:02:45.400 | The tech bloggers there in the crowd wrote about Tim, that put them on

00:02:50.440 | the radar of bigger tech luminaries.

00:02:52.920 | They started talking about Tim, that put him on the radar of major media.

00:02:57.320 | They began writing about Tim.

00:02:59.120 | The book debuted on the New York Times bestseller list where it basically stayed

00:03:03.720 | more or less for the next four and a half years, it went on to sell millions of copies.

00:03:08.240 | It was mentioned in 2011 in the NBC show, The Office.

00:03:12.440 | Darrell actually looks through the camera at one point and says, four hour work week.

00:03:16.160 | So it was a really big event, a cultural milestone that these overworked,

00:03:21.080 | stressed out workers embraced this message of maybe we should rethink work.

00:03:24.760 | The question I then asked in that column is how come we don't hear more

00:03:30.960 | about the four hour work week today?

00:03:33.280 | Right now in this period of post pandemic reconsideration of work, this period of

00:03:39.760 | what is known as the great resignation, which more and more knowledge workers

00:03:44.720 | are leaving their jobs or rethinking what role work should play in their life.

00:03:48.080 | In some sense, four hour work week should be the manual for this movement.

00:03:52.000 | If you go back and reread this book, Tim nails the reality that remote work is

00:03:58.440 | going to be the key to a much more fulfilling and autonomous

00:04:01.720 | mode of pursuing your career.

00:04:03.320 | He nails the reality that excessive email and meetings is going to be the main

00:04:07.800 | obstacle to your work and your life being much more fulfilling.

00:04:12.440 | I mean, this is a book that is getting at exactly the questions

00:04:15.160 | people are asking today, but you don't hear about it that much.

00:04:19.600 | Now, why is that?

00:04:21.680 | And I should say, of course, it sells strongly.

00:04:23.560 | I'm just saying when I've been reporting for The New Yorker on the great

00:04:26.280 | resignation and people rethinking their work over the last year or year and a

00:04:30.080 | half, this book doesn't come up as much.

00:04:32.280 | And what I said in the piece is that this is in part because over time,

00:04:38.000 | Tim and his message got transformed.

00:04:39.920 | The book was radical.

00:04:42.280 | Tim got changed in the mind of the media, in the mind of the culture, into

00:04:47.240 | something that was much less radical.

00:04:48.760 | He got changed into a productivity guru.

00:04:52.120 | And you can go back here and watch this happen.

00:04:55.160 | By the time Daryl Philbin holds up, or he doesn't hold up the book, we fact

00:04:59.720 | checked that, but by the time he says four hour work week on an episode of

00:05:03.080 | The Office, the plot line was that he was trying to get more work done so that he

00:05:08.800 | could get promoted to a more grueling management position.

00:05:11.600 | That is the opposite of what the four hour work week was about.

00:05:15.040 | But by the time we got to 2011, the writers of The Office didn't know that.

00:05:18.640 | They thought about that book and Tim as being vaguely speaking all about

00:05:23.400 | optimization and productivity and trying to get more done.

00:05:26.480 | There's a couple of reasons why this shift happened.

00:05:29.640 | I mean, some of it is completely rational because Tim did go on to do quite a bit

00:05:34.040 | of writing about optimization and productivity.

00:05:36.800 | What he explained to me when I talked to him for this article is that his

00:05:40.280 | overriding interest during this period was minimum effective doses for any type

00:05:45.880 | of goal, and when you applied that to work, it led to this radical rejection

00:05:49.640 | of the standard career path and the working 12 hour days till you retire at

00:05:53.240 | 65, but when you apply this mindset to other topics, like health and fitness,

00:05:58.720 | which he did in his second book, it comes across as more pragmatic.

00:06:01.440 | You know, how do we rethink our diet?

00:06:03.920 | What are more aggressive ways to exercise?

00:06:05.600 | So partially his writing turned more pragmatic, but I put out another hint in

00:06:12.080 | this piece that also partially, maybe as a culture, we weren't ready for the

00:06:17.200 | radical message that was embedded in that book.

00:06:19.280 | Tim was looking at this world in which we were getting increasingly busy and

00:06:24.800 | saying, "Most of this stuff is probably nonsense."

00:06:29.360 | Probably most of what you do could be reduced to a few hours a week and your

00:06:35.520 | impact on your organization might be more or less unaffected.

00:06:38.400 | He was implicitly asking of the entire culture that question that came out of

00:06:45.600 | office space, that question, "What would you say you do here?"

00:06:49.040 | A question that was actually asked in a scene where you had a pair of efficiency

00:06:52.960 | consultants interviewing a cubicle dweller at this corporate park, office

00:07:00.160 | park, and they were trying to figure out what this guy's actual job was.

00:07:03.360 | And he was struggling to actually come up with a good explanation for what he

00:07:06.480 | actually did.

00:07:07.200 | And in exasperation, one of the consultants asked that question.

00:07:10.080 | In exasperation, one of the consultants finally said, "Well, what would you say

00:07:12.960 | you actually do here?"

00:07:14.320 | Tim was asking this of a whole culture.

00:07:16.080 | I don't think we were ready for that question back then.

00:07:20.320 | As I say in the piece, this period after the first dot-com bust in 2001 up until

00:07:26.960 | the recession in 2009 was a period where busyness worked.

00:07:30.960 | Frenetic energy worked.

00:07:32.960 | We were buying mortgages and packaging them up into these collateralized debt

00:07:38.400 | obligations that no one really understood.

00:07:40.000 | And suddenly we had BlackBerrys and we were answering a volume of messages that

00:07:43.680 | no one ever really requested or said was a good idea, but we were just doing stuff

00:07:47.200 | and making money and seeing our stock portfolios rise.

00:07:50.960 | Cash was plentiful.

00:07:51.920 | It was not an environment where people wanted to step back and say, "Is what I'm

00:07:56.160 | doing actually useful?

00:07:58.000 | Why am I on my BlackBerry all day?

00:07:59.920 | Why am I in all these meetings?

00:08:01.120 | What exactly do I do here?"

00:08:02.480 | So I think there was almost a cultural immune response to Tim Ferriss in the

00:08:06.880 | four-hour workweek.

00:08:07.680 | We can't face that question.

00:08:09.760 | So let's turn Tim into a productivity guru.

00:08:13.920 | And then we can raise our noses and say, "Look at this hack stuff.

00:08:17.680 | That's beneath me."

00:08:19.680 | And we were avoiding the question.

00:08:20.960 | Today we can't avoid it.

00:08:23.280 | What happened to all these knowledge workers who maybe avoided the radical

00:08:28.320 | provocations of the four-hour workweek in 2007?

00:08:30.720 | They were unavoidably confronted with them in 2020 and 2021.

00:08:35.440 | When we were forced to go remote and work from home and suddenly we had all these

00:08:41.600 | new things we had to figure out, so the amount of Zoom meetings skyrocketed, the

00:08:45.120 | amount of email skyrocketed, the amount of Slack skyrocketed, we had people

00:08:48.320 | discover that they were spending 80 to 90 percent of their day in meetings and

00:08:52.880 | doing email.

00:08:53.600 | And yet somehow their job still worked.

00:08:57.360 | The company still did what it was supposed to do.

00:09:00.000 | The product still went out the door.

00:09:01.600 | They were working, actually working, a really small fraction of the day.

00:09:06.640 | There was someone who tweeted in response to my New Yorker piece that says, "Yeah,

00:09:09.520 | I know about the four-hour workweek.

00:09:10.880 | That's about how many hours of work I could get done having to work from home

00:09:14.480 | with my kids' school closed."

00:09:15.760 | And yet these jobs still worked.

00:09:18.320 | And now I think an entire sector of the economy is facing the same question.

00:09:24.720 | Well, what would you say you actually do here?

00:09:26.480 | And they're looking at themselves and they're looking at their jobs and they're

00:09:28.720 | saying, "Not as much as I probably imagined.

00:09:32.240 | We're communicating, we're in meetings, we're in email, we're in Slack.

00:09:37.040 | Is the hyperactive hive mind supercharged?"

00:09:40.960 | But the pandemic started to teach us most of that is probably performative.

00:09:46.960 | Most of that is probably overhead.

00:09:49.120 | Tim Ferriss reduced what it required to run his company from 18-hour days to

00:09:53.680 | four hours a week, and it seemed to run just fine.

00:09:55.840 | And I think there's more and more people out there who are finally ready for that

00:10:00.000 | provocative question that he asked.

00:10:02.160 | They're looking at their own lives and saying, "Something like that might be

00:10:04.720 | right for me too."

00:10:06.080 | So that is why I wrote about the 4-Hour Workweek 15 years later, because I

00:10:09.920 | think Tim was ahead of his time.

00:10:11.520 | It was a big deal, a warning shot that that crowd took to that message.

00:10:15.360 | We ignored the warning shot.

00:10:17.280 | Now the rest of the salvo has arrived and we can no longer ignore that.

00:10:22.880 | We are all looking around and asking, "What would you say you do here?"

00:10:25.440 | And I don't think we have any more a good answer.

00:10:28.960 | A good answer.

What Would You Say You Do Here? | DEEP DIVE | Episode 143

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