Cal Newport and Tim Ferriss Revisit the 4-Hour Workweek

00:00:00.000 | So, all right, those are all of the updates.

00:00:04.380 | One other update I guess I will add is that,

00:00:07.480 | as I told Jesse today, earlier today,

00:00:10.640 | I've returned to the Tim Ferriss podcast.

00:00:13.100 | So, you know, whatever it was a month or two ago,

00:00:16.720 | I was on the show, Tim interviewed me for the show.

00:00:19.620 | This week, so actually the week before this will come out,

00:00:23.300 | so the week immediately preceding when this episode airs,

00:00:27.360 | there's another episode that Tim just published

00:00:30.120 | where it's me interviewing Tim.

00:00:32.840 | It's an episode of me interviewing Tim in particular

00:00:36.440 | about the rise of the four-hour work week.

00:00:40.520 | What went into that?

00:00:42.240 | What that moment was like?

00:00:44.840 | What was happening right before?

00:00:46.320 | What was the event that sparked it?

00:00:49.260 | Now, this was an interview I actually did,

00:00:52.020 | this would have been last year.

00:00:53.880 | I was interviewing Tim for a New Yorker article

00:00:56.400 | I was writing about the four-hour work week.

00:00:59.800 | And that article came out last fall.

00:01:01.560 | And as we're getting closer to do that interview,

00:01:04.280 | Tim had this idea, he said, "Well, why don't we record it?

00:01:07.640 | Because maybe if it's interesting,"

00:01:08.840 | you know, he interviews everyone else

00:01:10.520 | who gets to interview him.

00:01:11.480 | He doesn't go on other people's shows, right?

00:01:13.120 | So he's not interviewed that often.

00:01:14.540 | He's like, "Why don't we record it

00:01:15.440 | just in case it's interesting?"

00:01:16.440 | So actually this episode that was just released

00:01:18.520 | on Tim's feed is a recording of an interview

00:01:20.960 | I was doing of him for a New Yorker article I was writing.

00:01:26.680 | About him and his book.

00:01:28.560 | So that is the origin story.

00:01:29.480 | Now, of course, once I knew that we were recording it,

00:01:32.420 | I did the interview more in podcast style.

00:01:34.440 | So I don't wanna give those who listened to that episode

00:01:37.200 | the idea that this is what magazine interviews sound like.

00:01:39.840 | It's more scripted and polished.

00:01:42.960 | Real magazine interviews are way less formal.

00:01:46.240 | But that's the origin of that Ferris episode.

00:01:49.080 | So I thought what would be interesting, Jesse, today

00:01:51.360 | is to go back to that article that I wrote about him.

00:01:55.160 | So for those of you who've listened to the interview

00:01:57.400 | on Tim's feed and are curious about the article it led to,

00:02:01.640 | I wanna revisit that article and talk about

00:02:06.120 | the three big points I extracted from talking to Tim.

00:02:11.120 | So the three big points are gonna be number one,

00:02:14.560 | the unlikely circumstances under which

00:02:18.480 | the four-hour workweek broke out and became a big hit.

00:02:21.960 | Number two, the subsequent dismissal of that book

00:02:26.360 | by the broader cultural conversation.

00:02:30.120 | And number three, why I think it's Tim's

00:02:32.360 | most radical work to date and that we underestimate today

00:02:37.360 | the radicalness of what he was actually claiming

00:02:40.840 | in that book.

00:02:41.680 | Those were three big points from the article.

00:02:42.880 | I wanna go through those briefly today.

00:02:44.920 | For those who are watching this on the video

00:02:47.540 | instead of listening to it, I'm actually gonna pull up

00:02:50.000 | the article here on our new fancy pants Telestrator.

00:02:54.200 | So you can actually see the parts of the article

00:02:56.840 | I'm talking about as I talk about it.

00:02:59.480 | For those who are just listening, don't worry,

00:03:01.240 | you'll still get the gist of what I mean.

00:03:03.080 | All right, so let's start with this first point.

00:03:04.640 | Here's the article, "Revisiting the Four-Hour Workweek."

00:03:08.080 | I wanna start with this context of why it was unlikely

00:03:12.780 | the way that Tim's book broke out.

00:03:15.760 | So let's talk about timing.

00:03:19.180 | So the big event that broke out Tim's book

00:03:21.720 | came in March of 2007.

00:03:23.680 | It was South by Southwest.

00:03:26.840 | Tim gave a talk at South by Southwest

00:03:29.880 | which blew the book into the stratosphere.

00:03:33.200 | It was the spark that ignited the engine

00:03:35.540 | that blew this book into the stratosphere.

00:03:38.040 | Now what I wanna argue, what I argue in this article

00:03:40.060 | is that this was actually a very unlikely crowd

00:03:43.600 | to be receptive to the message Tim had to share with them.

00:03:48.600 | And a lot of this has to do with the context of that time.

00:03:50.880 | So I just said that South by Southwest was in 2007.

00:03:54.720 | Let's look at what else was happening in tech culture

00:03:58.320 | around this period.

00:04:00.120 | So in 2004, just three years earlier,

00:04:02.640 | Google had its $23 billion IPO.

00:04:07.600 | 2006, that's just the year before,

00:04:10.720 | Facebook opened beyond university students

00:04:15.560 | and quickly got its first 100 million followers.

00:04:19.600 | That same year, Twitter went live.

00:04:23.020 | So we have that happening at the same time.

00:04:25.080 | Earlier the same year, we also had the iPhone launched.

00:04:30.080 | Steve Jobs stood on that stage

00:04:32.360 | in the Mascone Convention Center in San Francisco

00:04:34.360 | and introduced iPhone.

00:04:36.760 | So this was a period of huge enthusiasm

00:04:41.360 | for the tech industry.

00:04:43.160 | There was a lot going on.

00:04:44.440 | There was a lot of changes going on.

00:04:46.760 | And the culture emerging during this period

00:04:49.160 | was definitely one of moving fast, breaking stuff,

00:04:53.560 | hustling, getting things done, not sleeping.

00:04:57.640 | This was a period of we are changing the world,

00:05:00.800 | the culture is changing,

00:05:03.000 | and you're gonna get there by working very hard.

00:05:06.040 | I mentioned in that article how during this period,

00:05:09.680 | I was at MIT and there was a notion going around

00:05:14.040 | at MIT at that time of hardcore culture.

00:05:19.000 | So it was a term that you would hear around MIT a lot

00:05:21.560 | at the time where they would say, I'm hardcore.

00:05:25.480 | And that meant I'm staying up late, I'm doing triple major.

00:05:28.800 | So this was the context in which Tim Ferriss took to stage

00:05:33.100 | at a tech conference.

00:05:36.380 | So everything was about working hard, staying up,

00:05:40.240 | moving fast, hustling, and by doing so, changing the world.

00:05:44.880 | He stood up on a stage and basically told people, work less.

00:05:49.880 | What you were doing is unsustainable.

00:05:55.800 | And you can look at the actual terminology.

00:05:58.160 | He talked about checking email like a rat

00:06:03.160 | with a cocaine pellet dispenser, send, receive, send, receive.

00:06:08.600 | He talked about just flatly the unsustainability

00:06:12.200 | of what's happening.

00:06:13.280 | Is your business scalable, he said,

00:06:14.920 | is your career scalable?

00:06:15.940 | And most important, is your lifestyle scalable?

00:06:20.940 | These are big, big claims to make to a crowd

00:06:25.840 | that was celebrating working very hard.

00:06:28.440 | He was saying what you're doing is not working.

00:06:30.360 | So this was incredibly counter-cultural.

00:06:32.880 | You could imagine that this would lead to a backlash.

00:06:38.160 | The audience would say, what are you talking about?

00:06:39.760 | We are doing what is cool.

00:06:42.040 | We are doing what the culture is saying.

00:06:44.260 | We are building these companies

00:06:45.960 | that are producing billion dollar IPOs,

00:06:48.800 | but it's not what happened.

00:06:52.120 | Instead, the talk was a huge hit.

00:06:54.540 | So I went back and talked to Tim about this,

00:06:57.620 | but he went in there saying,

00:06:59.320 | I don't know what's gonna happen.

00:07:00.960 | If it goes good, good.

00:07:03.100 | If it doesn't, it doesn't.

00:07:04.120 | Instead, the temporary room they found the slot him in

00:07:07.160 | because he was a last minute replacement

00:07:08.680 | was overfilled capacity.

00:07:10.380 | Almost immediately, he began to hear from participants

00:07:15.600 | who were saying, I've changed major things

00:07:17.880 | about how I work to embrace your ideas.

00:07:21.120 | A bunch of the tech bloggers, influential tech bloggers

00:07:23.760 | who were there by South by Southwest

00:07:25.160 | began interviewing Tim.

00:07:27.040 | This is what really sparked the growth of his book.

00:07:29.260 | These interviews with influential tech bloggers

00:07:31.640 | spread the idea throughout Silicon Valley.

00:07:34.120 | He quickly expanded to take over that market segment

00:07:36.960 | with his book.

00:07:37.800 | Once he had that imprinter of Silicon Valley

00:07:40.120 | is all about this new guru,

00:07:41.800 | that is what gave it the foundation to expand

00:07:43.760 | to the culture much wider, to much wider audiences

00:07:46.400 | and made that book a perennial bestseller.

00:07:49.480 | It was on the New York Times bestseller list

00:07:51.080 | more or less continually with some exceptions

00:07:55.040 | for seven years to follow after that.

00:07:58.520 | So it was unlikely that speech would do well, but it did.

00:08:03.060 | So here's the, I'm gonna highlight this in the article,

00:08:05.360 | but here's the big observation about that.

00:08:08.500 | Here I stumble with my pen.

00:08:10.640 | Okay.

00:08:11.760 | In retrospect, an overflow crowd of tech sector enthusiast

00:08:15.160 | embracing Ferris's message was a warning shot,

00:08:18.180 | an early indication that the mode of work emerging

00:08:21.320 | in a hyper-connected, always on,

00:08:23.080 | hustling modern office had flaws.

00:08:26.620 | So it was a big deal, I think,

00:08:30.440 | that that audience received his talks so well.

00:08:32.560 | What it told us is there's a problem.

00:08:36.200 | There's a problem with the way we work.

00:08:38.060 | If even these people at the core of Overwork Celebration

00:08:41.880 | are embracing Ferris, there's something beginning to spread.

00:08:45.680 | There is a cancer in our work culture

00:08:48.120 | that we have to be careful about.

00:08:49.920 | So I think that was really telling.

00:08:52.760 | Now, the interesting thing that happened

00:08:54.560 | is the book of course did very well.

00:08:56.980 | It sold a lot of copies.

00:08:58.160 | It was, I found a reference where it was featured

00:09:00.240 | on the NBC hit show, "The Office"

00:09:02.600 | where the, what's his name?

00:09:04.640 | Daryl, the Daryl Philbin character said at some point,

00:09:07.900 | "Four-hour work week."

00:09:09.760 | So he was referencing it.

00:09:10.640 | So the book became very popular,

00:09:13.300 | but the underlying cultural message,

00:09:16.280 | the way we're working is not working.

00:09:19.780 | It is not sustainable.

00:09:21.340 | This idea that we should be so locked

00:09:24.380 | into this frantic scrambling from the age of 22

00:09:27.840 | till the age of 65 doesn't work.

00:09:29.680 | We could completely rethink the role work plays

00:09:32.960 | in a deeper, more fulfilling life.

00:09:34.500 | That radical part of the message was rather quickly

00:09:37.720 | stripped out of the cultural reception of Ferris's book.

00:09:41.920 | And I get into this into the article,

00:09:43.680 | but I said, there's really two reasons

00:09:45.200 | why I think this happened.

00:09:46.480 | One, Ferris was quickly reassociated with hacks,

00:09:51.040 | optimizing productivity.

00:09:52.520 | And this book quickly became categorized

00:09:54.600 | in the minds of people who encountered it

00:09:56.520 | or heard about it as a book

00:09:57.880 | about extreme productivity hackery.

00:10:02.120 | Now, I don't wanna imply that this is a unfair assessment

00:10:07.380 | of Ferris's work because Ferris himself,

00:10:09.140 | as he told me when I interviewed him,

00:10:11.120 | was interested in hacks.

00:10:12.520 | Now, he doesn't use that terminology.

00:10:13.960 | He talks about minimal viable inputs

00:10:16.560 | to get a desired output,

00:10:18.080 | but he was really interested in that.

00:10:19.880 | And after the four-hour work week,

00:10:21.840 | he went on to write books like "The Four-Hour Body,"

00:10:24.000 | which was much more specifically targeting

00:10:27.720 | optimization and hacks.

00:10:29.080 | You wanna get bigger arm muscles

00:10:30.520 | in a minimal amount of time,

00:10:32.320 | do this exercise, eat this food.

00:10:35.520 | So he is really interested in hacks.

00:10:37.600 | The intro to his podcast

00:10:39.400 | is all about optimizing performance.

00:10:41.280 | So he quickly got recategorized

00:10:42.920 | as a productivity hack optimization type guy.

00:10:46.600 | That's different than a challenging

00:10:51.360 | the very nature of work type guy.

00:10:53.940 | Rethinking what is a sustainable life

00:10:56.480 | in a world of digital knowledge work.

00:10:58.900 | That idea got pushed aside

00:11:02.440 | and he was seen as the guy doing hacks.

00:11:06.760 | As I point out in the article,

00:11:08.700 | by the time Daryl Philbin on the NBC show "The Office"

00:11:11.760 | held up the four-hour work week and said four-hour work week,

00:11:14.840 | at that point, that plot in "The Office"

00:11:18.940 | was actually Daryl trying to do more work

00:11:21.960 | so he could get a promotion to a more grueling manager job.

00:11:25.100 | So by the time we got to 2011,

00:11:27.360 | what we would say is the peak of the influence

00:11:29.260 | of the four-hour work week,

00:11:30.540 | the way it showed up on that NBC show

00:11:32.340 | was actually in direct contradiction

00:11:35.140 | to the underlying message of the book,

00:11:36.740 | which is to work less,

00:11:38.800 | to change the role of work in your life,

00:11:40.540 | to make it smaller, more autonomous,

00:11:42.140 | something you control,

00:11:42.960 | something you deploy towards making your life happier.

00:11:44.980 | By the time we get to 2011,

00:11:46.660 | it's, oh, this book must be about how I get more done.

00:11:50.060 | The exact opposite.

00:11:51.820 | The exact opposite about what the book is about.

00:11:53.540 | I thought that was a very telling example.

00:11:55.840 | The other explanation I give

00:11:58.380 | for why I think we lost the main message

00:12:03.380 | is that we weren't ready for it.

00:12:06.440 | We weren't ready for it at that time.

00:12:09.500 | So if we think about 2007, 2008, what's going on right then,

00:12:15.100 | we are in that pre-Great Recession moment

00:12:18.360 | when everybody's making money,

00:12:21.420 | that you buy mortgages, you buy stocks,

00:12:25.180 | whatever you're doing,

00:12:26.260 | what seemed to any type of activity

00:12:27.840 | seemed to be alchemizing in the money.

00:12:29.680 | Everyone had cash.

00:12:30.980 | This was this bubble period

00:12:33.580 | before the big recessionary crash.

00:12:36.780 | That was not a period where people were really open

00:12:38.860 | to a message of work less.

00:12:41.020 | Activity was generating money.

00:12:42.220 | Everyone was doing well.

00:12:43.420 | No one wanted to hear it then.

00:12:44.540 | And then we had the big crash.

00:12:45.700 | Well, after you have a huge crash

00:12:46.780 | and everyone's scrambling just to find a job,

00:12:49.180 | just to make employment,

00:12:50.060 | they also did not wanna be rethinking works.

00:12:52.020 | That timing was such that our culture wasn't ready for it.

00:12:54.940 | So Ferris got recategorized as the hack optimization guy.

00:12:59.940 | His underlying subversive message

00:13:03.260 | about rethinking the role of work got ignored.

00:13:06.100 | So that brings me to why I wrote the article

00:13:09.460 | for "The New Yorker,"

00:13:10.300 | which is I had just spent months

00:13:11.800 | writing this column for the magazine

00:13:13.900 | that was all about the impacts of the pandemic

00:13:16.140 | on the world of work and how we think about work.

00:13:18.340 | And I was categorizing the various ways

00:13:21.820 | that people were rethinking the role of work in their lives

00:13:24.500 | and trying to make it something

00:13:26.940 | that supported a life well-lived, a deep life,

00:13:29.500 | not just something you do for the sake of doing it.

00:13:32.220 | In that context, you would assume

00:13:33.500 | that Ferris's book would be a major text.

00:13:35.460 | It sold millions of copies.

00:13:37.100 | It gets at exactly that point,

00:13:39.380 | but it was never brought up in the discussions

00:13:41.020 | that I was involved in.

00:13:42.180 | And I think that is why.

00:13:44.820 | 'Cause by the time we get to 2021, 2022,

00:13:49.220 | Ferris's subversive message had been largely eliminated

00:13:53.420 | from the cultural understanding of his book.

00:13:54.900 | So I wanna bring it back now and just make this point,

00:13:57.180 | give credit where credit is due.

00:13:58.780 | The underlying point that Ferris had

00:14:01.980 | that using new technologies, the internet, automation,

00:14:06.100 | et cetera, that you can find a way to make a good living

00:14:10.220 | with work that happens on your terms

00:14:13.180 | and well south of a typical 40-hour work week,

00:14:16.140 | that you do not have to work for 40 years and then retire.

00:14:20.860 | You can actually go back and forth

00:14:22.300 | between adventures and retirement

00:14:23.780 | and then make it enough money to survive.

00:14:25.460 | This type of subversive counter-cultural message is radical.

00:14:28.780 | And he was making a radical point.

00:14:30.860 | It got forgotten, but I wanna bring it back.

00:14:34.260 | He was, of that generation,

00:14:36.700 | probably the first at this argument

00:14:38.700 | that a lot of people are making now,

00:14:40.380 | that maybe the role of work in our lives

00:14:41.860 | can be something different than it actually is.

00:14:45.020 | So that article in some sense was a hat tip to Tim

00:14:48.260 | because I thought he was being unfairly ignored.

00:14:51.100 | He actually was way ahead of the game on a problem

00:14:54.220 | that everyone now seems like now agrees exist.

00:14:58.580 | I mean, did you read it, Jesse, four-hour work week?

00:15:03.260 | Was this something you came across at the time?

00:15:05.500 | Or is this something that,

00:15:07.140 | do you know Tim through that book

00:15:08.900 | or do you know Tim through the podcast

00:15:12.140 | or a more recent incarnation?

00:15:14.340 | I'm always curious now that I've read this article

00:15:16.480 | how various people encounter him.

00:15:18.320 | - I knew about him before the podcast.

00:15:21.860 | I think I read some of the book.

00:15:23.460 | - You had read some of it.

00:15:24.760 | - I read some of the book before the podcast,

00:15:29.380 | but then I started listening to his podcast

00:15:31.260 | pretty early on.

00:15:32.340 | - Yeah, right.

00:15:33.400 | So I think there's a lot of people now

00:15:34.900 | who know him primarily through the podcast.

00:15:38.220 | - Yeah.

00:15:39.700 | - Yeah, because I remember,

00:15:40.820 | I mean, so the four-hour work week

00:15:41.940 | was a phenomenon at the time,

00:15:43.500 | but again, I think that the pivot

00:15:45.220 | towards hacks and optimizations

00:15:46.580 | and four-hour body and four-hour chef

00:15:48.420 | really, I don't know what you would call it,

00:15:51.500 | but kind of corralled his audience

00:15:53.260 | into a big stream of people,

00:15:55.840 | but put up pretty thick walls

00:15:57.100 | on either side of that audience.

00:15:59.060 | And it sort of insulated him

00:16:00.740 | from the more mainstream awareness.

00:16:03.900 | My memory of four-hour work week was Ramit Sethi.

00:16:08.380 | He was a friend of mine, he was a friend of Tim.

00:16:10.020 | So it's sort of a shared connection.

00:16:13.100 | I remember Ramit calling me in 2007

00:16:16.540 | and saying, "I have this friend, Tim,

00:16:18.540 | and he wrote this book and you have to read it."

00:16:22.020 | I remember that.

00:16:22.860 | I remember getting on audio.

00:16:24.060 | And for some back then,

00:16:25.180 | they weren't really well-synced audio books

00:16:27.880 | and print books, they weren't really well-synced.

00:16:29.300 | So I was able to get the book early

00:16:30.940 | just because it was available earlier on audio

00:16:33.340 | than it was on print.

00:16:35.140 | And I remember listening to that

00:16:36.640 | in Harvard Square where I lived at the time.

00:16:39.620 | And I remember at the time, it was like a lightning bolt.

00:16:44.100 | And a lot of people have forgotten that reaction.

00:16:46.300 | It was like a lightning bolt

00:16:47.180 | because of this subversive idea

00:16:48.940 | that you could craft this incredibly alternative lifestyle

00:16:52.060 | in which you're on the road adventuring

00:16:54.420 | and through aggressive use of automation and tools,

00:16:57.900 | you sort of do a little bit of work,

00:16:59.060 | but it generates enough money

00:17:00.060 | that you can live in Buenos Aires

00:17:01.700 | where the dollar is strong and I'll be fine.

00:17:03.140 | It was like an incredibly counter-cultural subversive book.

00:17:06.820 | I remember at the time,

00:17:07.660 | a lot of people had that same reaction.

00:17:09.540 | But again, we should be talking about it today

00:17:13.580 | in all of these think piece articles

00:17:16.100 | about we work too much and we have to rethink the office

00:17:19.980 | and get remote and cut down on our number of days.

00:17:22.940 | Like all of these articles should be thinking

00:17:25.820 | about the four-hour work week, but they don't.

00:17:28.180 | So there you go, Tim.

00:17:32.100 | Your book should be considered more.

00:17:34.140 | (upbeat music)

00:17:36.740 | (upbeat music)

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