So, all right, those are all of the updates. One other update I guess I will add is that, as I told Jesse today, earlier today, I've returned to the Tim Ferriss podcast. So, you know, whatever it was a month or two ago, I was on the show, Tim interviewed me for the show.

This week, so actually the week before this will come out, so the week immediately preceding when this episode airs, there's another episode that Tim just published where it's me interviewing Tim. It's an episode of me interviewing Tim in particular about the rise of the four-hour work week. What went into that?

What that moment was like? What was happening right before? What was the event that sparked it? Now, this was an interview I actually did, this would have been last year. I was interviewing Tim for a New Yorker article I was writing about the four-hour work week. And that article came out last fall.

And as we're getting closer to do that interview, Tim had this idea, he said, "Well, why don't we record it? Because maybe if it's interesting," you know, he interviews everyone else who gets to interview him. He doesn't go on other people's shows, right? So he's not interviewed that often.

He's like, "Why don't we record it just in case it's interesting?" So actually this episode that was just released on Tim's feed is a recording of an interview I was doing of him for a New Yorker article I was writing. About him and his book. So that is the origin story.

Now, of course, once I knew that we were recording it, I did the interview more in podcast style. So I don't wanna give those who listened to that episode the idea that this is what magazine interviews sound like. It's more scripted and polished. Real magazine interviews are way less formal.

But that's the origin of that Ferris episode. So I thought what would be interesting, Jesse, today is to go back to that article that I wrote about him. So for those of you who've listened to the interview on Tim's feed and are curious about the article it led to, I wanna revisit that article and talk about the three big points I extracted from talking to Tim.

So the three big points are gonna be number one, the unlikely circumstances under which the four-hour workweek broke out and became a big hit. Number two, the subsequent dismissal of that book by the broader cultural conversation. And number three, why I think it's Tim's most radical work to date and that we underestimate today the radicalness of what he was actually claiming in that book.

Those were three big points from the article. I wanna go through those briefly today. For those who are watching this on the video instead of listening to it, I'm actually gonna pull up the article here on our new fancy pants Telestrator. So you can actually see the parts of the article I'm talking about as I talk about it.

For those who are just listening, don't worry, you'll still get the gist of what I mean. All right, so let's start with this first point. Here's the article, "Revisiting the Four-Hour Workweek." I wanna start with this context of why it was unlikely the way that Tim's book broke out.

So let's talk about timing. So the big event that broke out Tim's book came in March of 2007. It was South by Southwest. Tim gave a talk at South by Southwest which blew the book into the stratosphere. It was the spark that ignited the engine that blew this book into the stratosphere.

Now what I wanna argue, what I argue in this article is that this was actually a very unlikely crowd to be receptive to the message Tim had to share with them. And a lot of this has to do with the context of that time. So I just said that South by Southwest was in 2007.

Let's look at what else was happening in tech culture around this period. So in 2004, just three years earlier, Google had its $23 billion IPO. 2006, that's just the year before, Facebook opened beyond university students and quickly got its first 100 million followers. That same year, Twitter went live.

So we have that happening at the same time. Earlier the same year, we also had the iPhone launched. Steve Jobs stood on that stage in the Mascone Convention Center in San Francisco and introduced iPhone. So this was a period of huge enthusiasm for the tech industry. There was a lot going on.

There was a lot of changes going on. And the culture emerging during this period was definitely one of moving fast, breaking stuff, hustling, getting things done, not sleeping. This was a period of we are changing the world, the culture is changing, and you're gonna get there by working very hard.

I mentioned in that article how during this period, I was at MIT and there was a notion going around at MIT at that time of hardcore culture. So it was a term that you would hear around MIT a lot at the time where they would say, I'm hardcore. And that meant I'm staying up late, I'm doing triple major.

So this was the context in which Tim Ferriss took to stage at a tech conference. So everything was about working hard, staying up, moving fast, hustling, and by doing so, changing the world. He stood up on a stage and basically told people, work less. What you were doing is unsustainable.

And you can look at the actual terminology. He talked about checking email like a rat with a cocaine pellet dispenser, send, receive, send, receive. He talked about just flatly the unsustainability of what's happening. Is your business scalable, he said, is your career scalable? And most important, is your lifestyle scalable?

These are big, big claims to make to a crowd that was celebrating working very hard. He was saying what you're doing is not working. So this was incredibly counter-cultural. You could imagine that this would lead to a backlash. The audience would say, what are you talking about? We are doing what is cool.

We are doing what the culture is saying. We are building these companies that are producing billion dollar IPOs, but it's not what happened. Instead, the talk was a huge hit. So I went back and talked to Tim about this, but he went in there saying, I don't know what's gonna happen.

If it goes good, good. If it doesn't, it doesn't. Instead, the temporary room they found the slot him in because he was a last minute replacement was overfilled capacity. Almost immediately, he began to hear from participants who were saying, I've changed major things about how I work to embrace your ideas.

A bunch of the tech bloggers, influential tech bloggers who were there by South by Southwest began interviewing Tim. This is what really sparked the growth of his book. These interviews with influential tech bloggers spread the idea throughout Silicon Valley. He quickly expanded to take over that market segment with his book.

Once he had that imprinter of Silicon Valley is all about this new guru, that is what gave it the foundation to expand to the culture much wider, to much wider audiences and made that book a perennial bestseller. It was on the New York Times bestseller list more or less continually with some exceptions for seven years to follow after that.

So it was unlikely that speech would do well, but it did. So here's the, I'm gonna highlight this in the article, but here's the big observation about that. Here I stumble with my pen. Okay. In retrospect, an overflow crowd of tech sector enthusiast embracing Ferris's message was a warning shot, an early indication that the mode of work emerging in a hyper-connected, always on, hustling modern office had flaws.

So it was a big deal, I think, that that audience received his talks so well. What it told us is there's a problem. There's a problem with the way we work. If even these people at the core of Overwork Celebration are embracing Ferris, there's something beginning to spread. There is a cancer in our work culture that we have to be careful about.

So I think that was really telling. Now, the interesting thing that happened is the book of course did very well. It sold a lot of copies. It was, I found a reference where it was featured on the NBC hit show, "The Office" where the, what's his name? Daryl, the Daryl Philbin character said at some point, "Four-hour work week." So he was referencing it.

So the book became very popular, but the underlying cultural message, the way we're working is not working. It is not sustainable. This idea that we should be so locked into this frantic scrambling from the age of 22 till the age of 65 doesn't work. We could completely rethink the role work plays in a deeper, more fulfilling life.

That radical part of the message was rather quickly stripped out of the cultural reception of Ferris's book. And I get into this into the article, but I said, there's really two reasons why I think this happened. One, Ferris was quickly reassociated with hacks, optimizing productivity. And this book quickly became categorized in the minds of people who encountered it or heard about it as a book about extreme productivity hackery.

Now, I don't wanna imply that this is a unfair assessment of Ferris's work because Ferris himself, as he told me when I interviewed him, was interested in hacks. Now, he doesn't use that terminology. He talks about minimal viable inputs to get a desired output, but he was really interested in that.

And after the four-hour work week, he went on to write books like "The Four-Hour Body," which was much more specifically targeting optimization and hacks. You wanna get bigger arm muscles in a minimal amount of time, do this exercise, eat this food. So he is really interested in hacks. The intro to his podcast is all about optimizing performance.

So he quickly got recategorized as a productivity hack optimization type guy. That's different than a challenging the very nature of work type guy. Rethinking what is a sustainable life in a world of digital knowledge work. That idea got pushed aside and he was seen as the guy doing hacks.

As I point out in the article, by the time Daryl Philbin on the NBC show "The Office" held up the four-hour work week and said four-hour work week, at that point, that plot in "The Office" was actually Daryl trying to do more work so he could get a promotion to a more grueling manager job.

So by the time we got to 2011, what we would say is the peak of the influence of the four-hour work week, the way it showed up on that NBC show was actually in direct contradiction to the underlying message of the book, which is to work less, to change the role of work in your life, to make it smaller, more autonomous, something you control, something you deploy towards making your life happier.

By the time we get to 2011, it's, oh, this book must be about how I get more done. The exact opposite. The exact opposite about what the book is about. I thought that was a very telling example. The other explanation I give for why I think we lost the main message is that we weren't ready for it.

We weren't ready for it at that time. So if we think about 2007, 2008, what's going on right then, we are in that pre-Great Recession moment when everybody's making money, that you buy mortgages, you buy stocks, whatever you're doing, what seemed to any type of activity seemed to be alchemizing in the money.

Everyone had cash. This was this bubble period before the big recessionary crash. That was not a period where people were really open to a message of work less. Activity was generating money. Everyone was doing well. No one wanted to hear it then. And then we had the big crash.

Well, after you have a huge crash and everyone's scrambling just to find a job, just to make employment, they also did not wanna be rethinking works. That timing was such that our culture wasn't ready for it. So Ferris got recategorized as the hack optimization guy. His underlying subversive message about rethinking the role of work got ignored.

So that brings me to why I wrote the article for "The New Yorker," which is I had just spent months writing this column for the magazine that was all about the impacts of the pandemic on the world of work and how we think about work. And I was categorizing the various ways that people were rethinking the role of work in their lives and trying to make it something that supported a life well-lived, a deep life, not just something you do for the sake of doing it.

In that context, you would assume that Ferris's book would be a major text. It sold millions of copies. It gets at exactly that point, but it was never brought up in the discussions that I was involved in. And I think that is why. 'Cause by the time we get to 2021, 2022, Ferris's subversive message had been largely eliminated from the cultural understanding of his book.

So I wanna bring it back now and just make this point, give credit where credit is due. The underlying point that Ferris had that using new technologies, the internet, automation, et cetera, that you can find a way to make a good living with work that happens on your terms and well south of a typical 40-hour work week, that you do not have to work for 40 years and then retire.

You can actually go back and forth between adventures and retirement and then make it enough money to survive. This type of subversive counter-cultural message is radical. And he was making a radical point. It got forgotten, but I wanna bring it back. He was, of that generation, probably the first at this argument that a lot of people are making now, that maybe the role of work in our lives can be something different than it actually is.

So that article in some sense was a hat tip to Tim because I thought he was being unfairly ignored. He actually was way ahead of the game on a problem that everyone now seems like now agrees exist. I mean, did you read it, Jesse, four-hour work week? Was this something you came across at the time?

Or is this something that, do you know Tim through that book or do you know Tim through the podcast or a more recent incarnation? I'm always curious now that I've read this article how various people encounter him. - I knew about him before the podcast. I think I read some of the book.

- You had read some of it. - I read some of the book before the podcast, but then I started listening to his podcast pretty early on. - Yeah, right. So I think there's a lot of people now who know him primarily through the podcast. - Yeah. - Yeah, because I remember, I mean, so the four-hour work week was a phenomenon at the time, but again, I think that the pivot towards hacks and optimizations and four-hour body and four-hour chef really, I don't know what you would call it, but kind of corralled his audience into a big stream of people, but put up pretty thick walls on either side of that audience.

And it sort of insulated him from the more mainstream awareness. My memory of four-hour work week was Ramit Sethi. He was a friend of mine, he was a friend of Tim. So it's sort of a shared connection. I remember Ramit calling me in 2007 and saying, "I have this friend, Tim, and he wrote this book and you have to read it." I remember that.

I remember getting on audio. And for some back then, they weren't really well-synced audio books and print books, they weren't really well-synced. So I was able to get the book early just because it was available earlier on audio than it was on print. And I remember listening to that in Harvard Square where I lived at the time.

And I remember at the time, it was like a lightning bolt. And a lot of people have forgotten that reaction. It was like a lightning bolt because of this subversive idea that you could craft this incredibly alternative lifestyle in which you're on the road adventuring and through aggressive use of automation and tools, you sort of do a little bit of work, but it generates enough money that you can live in Buenos Aires where the dollar is strong and I'll be fine.

It was like an incredibly counter-cultural subversive book. I remember at the time, a lot of people had that same reaction. But again, we should be talking about it today in all of these think piece articles about we work too much and we have to rethink the office and get remote and cut down on our number of days.

Like all of these articles should be thinking about the four-hour work week, but they don't. So there you go, Tim. Your book should be considered more. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)