The topic of today's deep dive is a question. What would you say you do here? Now this is a quote that comes from Mike Judge's 1999 satire movie, Office Space. And I use this quote in a recent article that I published in the New Yorker. Now the column I have been writing for the New Yorker is actually called Office Space.

So partially I want to just pat myself on the back. Six articles into this column, I finally found a way to work an Office Space reference into my Office Space column. But there is obviously a deeper meaning underneath that quote that I was trying to unpack in that column, and I want to spend some time talking about it here.

So the point of the article was revisiting Tim Ferriss' classic 2007 book, The Four-Hour Workweek. And I told the story that I don't think has been told that often about how that book debuted to the world. It debuted to the world at South by SouthWeth Interactive in 2007. After a last minute cancellation, the organizer of that event, Hugh Forrest, found a room for Tim to come to give a talk about his book that was just about to come out, the conference was in March, the book came out in early April.

And he got up on this stage in this makeshift room into a capacity crowd that was full of people, was the argument I make in the article, it was full of people who were the epitome of the 10X programmer, hardcore, move fast and break stuff Silicon Valley culture of that first decade of the 2000s.

These were people that said, you get after it because you might become a decamillionaire when your startup gets sold, when you go to your IPO. This was a time and a place where work ethic really trumped all. You stay up late, you drink Soylent so you don't waste time with meals.

It's a hardworking group of people. Tim got up in front of them and said, essentially, you work too much. This isn't sustainable. Give up on this type of career and do something more interesting with your time. That is what that speech was. I went back and listened to the audio of the speech.

I remember it from 2007. I went back and listened to the audio of that speech. It was all about, this is completely unsustainable, this hard, hard charging, 12 hours a day, check email all the time. You should have many retirements. You should re redefine what work even means in your life.

You should heavily automate things. You should take these startups and make them into lifestyle businesses. It was a radical talk and this audience of hard charging tech types loved it. The tech bloggers there in the crowd wrote about Tim, that put them on the radar of bigger tech luminaries.

They started talking about Tim, that put him on the radar of major media. They began writing about Tim. The book debuted on the New York Times bestseller list where it basically stayed more or less for the next four and a half years, it went on to sell millions of copies.

It was mentioned in 2011 in the NBC show, The Office. Darrell actually looks through the camera at one point and says, four hour work week. So it was a really big event, a cultural milestone that these overworked, stressed out workers embraced this message of maybe we should rethink work.

The question I then asked in that column is how come we don't hear more about the four hour work week today? Right now in this period of post pandemic reconsideration of work, this period of what is known as the great resignation, which more and more knowledge workers are leaving their jobs or rethinking what role work should play in their life.

In some sense, four hour work week should be the manual for this movement. If you go back and reread this book, Tim nails the reality that remote work is going to be the key to a much more fulfilling and autonomous mode of pursuing your career. He nails the reality that excessive email and meetings is going to be the main obstacle to your work and your life being much more fulfilling.

I mean, this is a book that is getting at exactly the questions people are asking today, but you don't hear about it that much. Now, why is that? And I should say, of course, it sells strongly. I'm just saying when I've been reporting for The New Yorker on the great resignation and people rethinking their work over the last year or year and a half, this book doesn't come up as much.

And what I said in the piece is that this is in part because over time, Tim and his message got transformed. The book was radical. Tim got changed in the mind of the media, in the mind of the culture, into something that was much less radical. He got changed into a productivity guru.

And you can go back here and watch this happen. By the time Daryl Philbin holds up, or he doesn't hold up the book, we fact checked that, but by the time he says four hour work week on an episode of The Office, the plot line was that he was trying to get more work done so that he could get promoted to a more grueling management position.

That is the opposite of what the four hour work week was about. But by the time we got to 2011, the writers of The Office didn't know that. They thought about that book and Tim as being vaguely speaking all about optimization and productivity and trying to get more done.

There's a couple of reasons why this shift happened. I mean, some of it is completely rational because Tim did go on to do quite a bit of writing about optimization and productivity. What he explained to me when I talked to him for this article is that his overriding interest during this period was minimum effective doses for any type of goal, and when you applied that to work, it led to this radical rejection of the standard career path and the working 12 hour days till you retire at 65, but when you apply this mindset to other topics, like health and fitness, which he did in his second book, it comes across as more pragmatic.

You know, how do we rethink our diet? What are more aggressive ways to exercise? So partially his writing turned more pragmatic, but I put out another hint in this piece that also partially, maybe as a culture, we weren't ready for the radical message that was embedded in that book.

Tim was looking at this world in which we were getting increasingly busy and saying, "Most of this stuff is probably nonsense." Probably most of what you do could be reduced to a few hours a week and your impact on your organization might be more or less unaffected. He was implicitly asking of the entire culture that question that came out of office space, that question, "What would you say you do here?" A question that was actually asked in a scene where you had a pair of efficiency consultants interviewing a cubicle dweller at this corporate park, office park, and they were trying to figure out what this guy's actual job was.

And he was struggling to actually come up with a good explanation for what he actually did. And in exasperation, one of the consultants asked that question. In exasperation, one of the consultants finally said, "Well, what would you say you actually do here?" Tim was asking this of a whole culture.

I don't think we were ready for that question back then. As I say in the piece, this period after the first dot-com bust in 2001 up until the recession in 2009 was a period where busyness worked. Frenetic energy worked. We were buying mortgages and packaging them up into these collateralized debt obligations that no one really understood.

And suddenly we had BlackBerrys and we were answering a volume of messages that no one ever really requested or said was a good idea, but we were just doing stuff and making money and seeing our stock portfolios rise. Cash was plentiful. It was not an environment where people wanted to step back and say, "Is what I'm doing actually useful?

Why am I on my BlackBerry all day? Why am I in all these meetings? What exactly do I do here?" So I think there was almost a cultural immune response to Tim Ferriss in the four-hour workweek. We can't face that question. So let's turn Tim into a productivity guru.

And then we can raise our noses and say, "Look at this hack stuff. That's beneath me." And we were avoiding the question. Today we can't avoid it. What happened to all these knowledge workers who maybe avoided the radical provocations of the four-hour workweek in 2007? They were unavoidably confronted with them in 2020 and 2021.

When we were forced to go remote and work from home and suddenly we had all these new things we had to figure out, so the amount of Zoom meetings skyrocketed, the amount of email skyrocketed, the amount of Slack skyrocketed, we had people discover that they were spending 80 to 90 percent of their day in meetings and doing email.

And yet somehow their job still worked. The company still did what it was supposed to do. The product still went out the door. They were working, actually working, a really small fraction of the day. There was someone who tweeted in response to my New Yorker piece that says, "Yeah, I know about the four-hour workweek.

That's about how many hours of work I could get done having to work from home with my kids' school closed." And yet these jobs still worked. And now I think an entire sector of the economy is facing the same question. Well, what would you say you actually do here?

And they're looking at themselves and they're looking at their jobs and they're saying, "Not as much as I probably imagined. We're communicating, we're in meetings, we're in email, we're in Slack. Is the hyperactive hive mind supercharged?" But the pandemic started to teach us most of that is probably performative.

Most of that is probably overhead. Tim Ferriss reduced what it required to run his company from 18-hour days to four hours a week, and it seemed to run just fine. And I think there's more and more people out there who are finally ready for that provocative question that he asked.

They're looking at their own lives and saying, "Something like that might be right for me too." So that is why I wrote about the 4-Hour Workweek 15 years later, because I think Tim was ahead of his time. It was a big deal, a warning shot that that crowd took to that message.

We ignored the warning shot. Now the rest of the salvo has arrived and we can no longer ignore that. We are all looking around and asking, "What would you say you do here?" And I don't think we have any more a good answer. A good answer.