Futurology: The Forces That Shape Your Future & Where's the 4-Day Workweek?

It makes sense that if you want to cut down on the amount of spam email you get, just unsubscribe from those emails. WAIT! That could make things worse. There is a better way to handle spam emails, and I begin this episode by explaining how. https://www.yahoo.com/news/warning-hitting-unsubscribe-unwanted-emails-115900557.html Predicting the future is a losing game most of the time. Still, a lot of influential people spend a lot of time and money trying to do it. People forecast where the stock market is going, they predict trends in fashion, technology and everything else. It makes you wonder if all that effort and money trying to predict the future actually helps to make it happen. So why is the future so unpredictable? What forces do shape the future? Joining me to discuss this is Glenn Adamson, former director of the Museum of Arts and Design, New York. He has held appointments as Senior Scholar at the Yale Center for British Art and he is the author of the book, A Century of Tomorrows: How Imagining the Future Shapes the Present (https://amzn.to/442HOfb). People have been floating the idea of a 4-day workweek for over 60 years. Yet it is still not the norm. Why hasn’t it caught on? Is it a good idea? Will it ever be a real thing? Here with some interesting insight into the 4-day workweek is Juliet Schor. She is an economist, and professor of sociology at Boston College. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, People and 60 Minutes. She is also the author of a book called Four Days a Week: The Life-Changing Solution for Reducing Employee Stress, Improving Well-Being, and Working Smarter (https://amzn.to/4jQSvr0). There are a lot of weight loss programs and strategies available for people. But what if there was one simple, common sense, easy to do tactic that is proven to help people lose weight effectively? There is. It so simple. And I will tell you exactly how to do it. https://www.ornish.com/zine/proven-benefits-keeping-food-journal/ PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! MINT MOBILE: Get your summer savings and shop premium wireless plans at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://MintMobile.com/something⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ! FACTOR: Factor meals arrive fresh and ready to eat, perfect for your summer lifestyle! Get 50% off at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://FactorMeals.com/something50off⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ROCKET MONEY: Cancel your unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster! Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://RocketMoney.com/SOMETHING⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ QUINCE: Stick to the staples that last, with elevated essentials from Quince! Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Quince.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns! INDEED: Get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ right now! DELL: Introducing the new Dell AI PC . It’s not just an AI computer, it’s a computer built for AI to help do your busywork for you! Get a new Dell AI PC at⁠⁠ https://Dell.com/ai-pc⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Pink Pantheress here. Coach and Spotify are teaming up to bring music and style together, and they want you to be part of it. Grab your friends and head to the Tabby Tour, hitting cities around the country with live performances from special artists, exclusive experiences, and personalized products. And discover custom playlists on Spotify, booked just for you based on who you are and how you listen. Live your story with Coach. Learn more at coach.com.

• 0:30Mike Carruthers?

  Today on Something You Should Know, why unsubscribing from spam email may cause more harm than good. Then predicting the future. Mostly, it's impossible. But in some cases, could the prediction itself make it so?

• 0:46Speaker 02

  Some things are certain, you know, the sun will come up tomorrow. Some things you can't predict at all. And then there's this kind of bandwidth in the middle where people can make claims about expertise of various kinds. And that becomes a greater and greater influence in our lives, actually, over the course of the last century.

• 1:01Mike Carruthers?

  Also, an amazingly simple and effective way to lose weight. And the four-day work week it's been talked about for decades. And the push is getting stronger.

• 1:12Speaker 03

  Number one, employees love it. Transformational. But the really surprising thing about it is that the companies love it too. That they are thriving along with the employees.

• 1:25Mike Carruthers?

  All this today on Something You Should Know.

• 1:29Mike Carruthers?

  Now here's something that might be worth a minute of your time. How would you like $1,000 to spend on shopping? Especially with the holidays coming. Well, the people behind Shopify have a shopping site called shop.com. And to celebrate the new shop.com, they're giving away $1 million in shop cash. But not to one person. A thousand people will each win $1,000 in shop cash. And shop.com is actually a really clever idea. It brings lots of different stores together in one place. So instead of bouncing around from website to website, you can search across stores, find what you're looking for,

• 2:14Mike Carruthers?

  and track your orders all in one place. Clothes, electronics, gifts, things for the house, all kinds of stuff. And whether you win or not, it's worth knowing. But with 1,000 chances to win $1,000,

• 2:29Mike Carruthers?

  I'd certainly take a look. Enter to win the $1 million Shop Cash giveaway from now until November 1st. Just go to shop.com. There are so many ways to win. That's shop.com. Shopping designed around you. No purchase necessary. Restrictions apply. Official rules available at shop.com.

• 2:54Speaker 04

  Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life today. Something you should know with Mike Carruthers.

• 3:08Mike Carruthers?

  You would think that unsubscribing from unwanted emails would be a good idea. But is it? Let's find out. Hi and welcome to this episode of Something You Should Know. When you get a spam email offering you something you have no interest in, it's tempting to go to the bottom of that email and unsubscribe. But by doing so, it turns out you might be unwittingly inviting more spam. Now, most of the time when you unsubscribe, especially if it's from a reputable company or a company you've done business with or you're familiar with, there's no problem. Unsubscribing should stop any more emails.

• 3:50Mike Carruthers?

  It's those emails that come from out of the blue, like the one from the Nigerian prince or it's for some miracle cure or miracle weight loss product or some oddball investment opportunity. When you unsubscribe from those emails, it's possible you're signaling back to the spammer that your email is alive and active and reaching a real person, which could just get you more spam headed your way. For those emails, it's probably better to block them or mark them as junk so future ones from that sender go to your spam folder that you periodically clean out. But unsubscribing is engaging the spammer, which is just what they want. And that is something you should know.

• 4:39Mike Carruthers?

  Things are different today than they used to be, and things will be different in the future than they are now, obviously. But what and who drives those changes? If you talk about the future, does that help shape the future? Are there certain people who have the power to direct what happens in the future, even in subtle ways? What will be the new hot kitchen appliance trend? Or how will fashion change? What tech breakthrough will emerge? And who and what will determine those things? Well, here to talk about those people, those futurologists, is Glenn Adamson. He's former director of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York

• 5:21Mike Carruthers?

  and has held appointments as senior scholar at the Yale Center for British Art. He's author of a book called Century of Tomorrows: How Imagining the Future Shapes the Present. Hi Glenn, welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 5:35Speaker 02

  Hey there, Mike. Great to be with you.

• 5:37Mike Carruthers?

  So I've always felt that predicting the future is pretty unpredictable. It's pretty iffy. So explain to me this concept of futurology. Is it people predict something and then therefore it becomes so?

• 5:53Speaker 02

  Well, that's what the futurologists would like you to think. When I use the term futurology, what I mean is the professional practice of telling people what is going to happen. And that is something that really grew over the course of the 20th century especially. But you might think about anyone from, you know, insurance executives to trend forecasters, military planners, urban planners and architects, fashion consultants. There's a whole range of different people who engage in futurology.

• 6:24Mike Carruthers?

  Meaning they're trying to predict what will happen in the future?

• 6:28Speaker 02

  Correct. And of course, they don't really have any more access to that than you or I do. But there's a whole industry of scientific, or you might call it quasi-scientific methods, by which these folks try to make their predictions persuasive and try to get closer and closer to an accurate prediction. So you might think, for example, about stock forecasting. That would be a really good instance where really it's just total mystery and nobody has any idea what's going to happen at the beginning of the 20th century. And techniques are refined and refined and refined, and now it's a billion-dollar industry predicting stocks. And have they gotten any better at it? Well, maybe yes, maybe no. It kind of depends who you ask.

• 7:08Mike Carruthers?

  Well, what's interesting, and your example right there of predicting stocks, well, doesn't it depend on who's doing the predicting, right? If some person who is very influential goes on television and is talking in a way that sort of predicts that a stock is going to go up, the stock often goes up. Is it because he was right in predicting that? Or was his prediction a driving force in making it happen?

• 7:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, and Mike, you really put your finger on why it's an interesting subject. So there's a phenomenon that I like to call the self-fulfilling prophecy. And a great example of this would be in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, you had an industry of trend forecasters who would take insights, often in fact, from the Paris fashion industry, and they would apply those to the colors of, let's say, refrigerators or cars, even the colors that would appear in Hollywood films. And the very fact that they were making those predictions meant that, lo and behold, those domestic appliances, those automobiles, did in fact come out in those colors, and it made them seem like wizards. But obviously, they were actually directing that process from the inside. So there's a very interesting thing with futurology

• 8:23Speaker 02

  where some things are certain, you know, the sun will come up tomorrow. Some things you can't predict at all. And then there's this kind of bandwidth in the middle where people can make claims about expertise of various kinds or influence of various kinds. And that becomes a greater and greater influence in our lives, actually, over the course of the last century.

• 8:42Mike Carruthers?

  Well, something I've wondered about, I'm sure everybody wonders about this. You watch a movie from the past, or there's a book from the past, or like the Jetsons cartoon. You know, if you watch the Jets and some of the things that that show was predicting would be in the future have come to be, and some of them have not. But you wonder, did they come to be because they kind of, somebody saw it and said, "Hey, we could maybe work on that and see if we can develop that." Or those things were just more likely to catch up in the future just because?

• 9:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, and how would you ever know, right? Because the titans of the tech industry today are the same kids that grew up on science fiction, you know, 30 years ago. And in fact, it is in comic books and films that you see the greatest influence maybe when it comes to futurology, but it's a very, very difficult thing to track because it is so widespread and popular culture. That's another thing I was very interested in. Actually, not so interested in looking back at specific texts and saying, "Well, what did they get right? What did they get wrong?" Partly because I don't think keeping a score on the past is really a responsible way of doing history. But also, if you think about it, when those texts came out, when those movies came out, nobody had any way of knowing whether they were accurate.

• 10:02Speaker 02

  So their influence, their impact in their own present day was much more about the sensibility, about the mood, about the direction that they suggested. And I do think that those kinds of prediction were and remain tremendously influential.

• 10:18Mike Carruthers?

  And what are some of those?

• 10:21Speaker 02

  Well, I love to use the example of Blade Runner, which is a movie that came out, as you may know, in the mid 1980s. And people will remember that it features Harrison Ford's character, Deckard, chasing these characters who were called replicants. And there's a suspicion that he might himself be a replicant. And it's a funny thing because that movie seems increasingly relevant now, as we're surrounded by, you know, the increasing power of AI. And maybe as some cities are increasingly starting to resemble the Los Angeles that was depicted in Blade Runner. And so it's a really interesting example, and there's so many of them, where it's perfectly of its own time, as well as, you know, a perfect representation of the future that was coming.

• 11:06Mike Carruthers?

  It would seem like, in the case of a movie, or a book, or something, that the goal isn't to predict the future, but rather to imagine the future. When they're trying to create Blade Runner, they aren't also working on, well, maybe we could predict the future here. And then when there are war games and things, are they really trying to predict the future? Or war games sort of look at options. Well, if we did this, that might happen. If we did this. What's the motive behind all of this?

• 11:40Speaker 02

  Yes, that's a good point. You know, when you get really sophisticated futurology, a figure that leaps to mind here would be Daniel Bell, who is a sociologist. Many people may be aware of his name. He created these quite sophisticated descriptions of futurology. This would have been in the 1960s, where he was trying to distinguish between merely good guesswork and more complex systems, where you would have different pathways that could be allocated, specific percentages of likelihood, and then you could try to think about how those different pathways would interact. So if you like, almost creating like a delta of possible streams of the future that might interact with one another.

• 12:24Speaker 02

  And that kind of complexity that gets built into futurology, especially in the 1960s and right down to today, is, I think, one reason why the industry has gotten as big as it is. In other words, it has a kind of quasi-scientific apparatus that makes it more and more persuasive and more and more legitimate seeming. Of course, the irony is that that floods the zone, so you get all of these competing models and competing statements and descriptions and ideas about what the future will look like. And already by the 1980s, you have critics of futurology saying, in effect, we're drowning in this stuff.

• 13:06Speaker 02

  And even if some of it is accurate, how would we know which futures are the right ones to put our bets on? So futurology starts to become almost like a victim of its own success as a commercial enterprise, as a professional enterprise at that point.

• 13:21Mike Carruthers?

  You mentioned predicting stocks before, and that stock prediction is, would you say, a billion-dollar-a-year industry.

• 13:31Mike Carruthers?

  And yet, we hear that people who try to predict stocks, for example, mutual fund managers who are managing a mutual fund, trying to beat an index, seldom beat it. That predicting stocks is a losing game, and yet, we keep doing it. So why? Why do we continue to predict something that fails most of the time?

• 13:55Speaker 02

  It's a great question, and it's one that you can really ask about almost any aspect of this. Why do we keep doing it? You know, why do we keep going to tarot card readers? Why do we keep going to films that show us what our future might look like? So from the very small scale to the huge scale of the whole market, or the dimensions of society itself, you still have this kind of instinct for people to try to beat the odds and try to know before they can know, because they want to know before anybody else does. So, you know, it's that the advantages of it seems so alluring, I suppose.

• 14:38Speaker 02

  And, you know, maybe it's just part of the human condition. It's, that's, that's something I thought about a lot when I was writing, the kind of poignant dimensions of this story and the tragedy that's written into it, this sense that what we really, really want to know is precisely what we can't, which is what's going to happen to us. Whether, again, that's at the scale of your own life, or your family's life, or your town, your city, your country, the whole world. So you start to think of the future as something more and more threatening. Perhaps around 1970, you know, into the 70s, you start to have many more narratives about potential collapse, a kind of secular version of medieval apocalyptic thinking. And that's something that we're deeply into now.

• 15:22Speaker 02

  You know, we've had about half-century of that kind of existential relationship to the future. So again, all the more reason to think about it and try to explore it.

• 15:33Mike Carruthers?

  Yeah, but here's the thing. Going to a tarot card reader, or going to the movies is fun, but, but investing your money, that's serious business. And, and the people who try to tell you what the market will do are usually wrong, and yet, they keep doing it.

• 15:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, and of course, they go to casinos, too. You know, in fact, my dad is a very enthusiastic day trader. And he does try to, I suppose, outwit the market by trying to isolate things that he thinks are overvalued or areas of overconfidence that he doesn't share and tries to do better. Does he? Probably not, but as you say, it's fun. You know, and I think that's the main reason he keeps doing it, not necessarily because he's confident of making more money at it, but because it's a fascinating thing to try to beat the house in that way.

• 16:29Mike Carruthers?

  I'm speaking with Glenn Adamson, and we are talking about predicting the future. Glenn is author of a book called A Century of Tomorrows: How Imagining the Future Shapes the Present.

• 16:42Speaker 00

  Pink Pantheress here. Coach and Spotify are teaming up to bring music and style together, and they want you to be part of it. Grab your friends and head to the Tabby Tour, hitting cities around the country with live performances from special artists, exclusive experiences, and personalized products. And discover custom playlists on Spotify, booked just for you based on who you are and how you listen. Live your story with Coach. Learn more at coach.com.

• 17:10Speaker 05

  This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Football has a play for just about everything. You can go deep, keep it on the ground, or draw up something nobody sees coming. And whether you want to run a flea flicker or the tush push, you need a plan to fit your unique situation. That's why State Farm takes the time to get to know you, so they can help personalize coverage for your life and budget. Now that's a solid game plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

• 17:38Mike Carruthers?

  So Glenn, when you look at things that shape the future, the origin of those things seems important. I mean, there are some things, I'm thinking of the internet as something that, even when it started, people were kind of shaking their head because it came from kind of a geeky beginning, a lot of internet, you know, people, but not the general public was like buying into this. And, but then, look what happened.

• 18:07Speaker 02

  For sure. And, you know, some things that seem... Very niche at first, and the internet here would be the classic example, turn out to be absolutely decisive for everybody, even though they're cooked up in quite geeky little, you know, circles, you know, among a very small group of people. And then their particular preoccupations and personalities kind of metastasize across the range of the whole culture. I tell the story in the book of a guy called Doug Engelbart, who nobody's ever heard of now, but he created what's often called the mother of all demonstrations, where he showed all of the essential features of what we now associate with the internet. And this was in the late 60s.

• 18:52Speaker 02

  He had this idea of augmented humanity. So instead of artificial intelligence, he was thinking about augmented intelligence. In other words, we don't replace ourselves with machines. We extend our brains using machines instead. And he did demonstration that, of course, now would look quite primitive, but at the time was completely mind blowing because it anticipated email and hypertext and linking one document to another, lots of things that we associate with the internet. And so somebody like Doug Engelbart and his idea of augmented intelligence turns out to be, you know, completely, completely influential. And no one would have necessarily expected that at the time because, as I say, it was a very niche phenomenon.

• 19:34Mike Carruthers?

  Well, what I'd like to know, and maybe you can't, there's no way to find out an answer to this, but the fact that this guy way back in, what was it, the 60s, predicted email, is his prediction part of the reason that we now have email? Or is it just a coincidence that he predicted that? And it was more or less in a vacuum? And what a coincidence that we now have email. And if you stop people from predicting, if you say, okay, you pass a law and say, okay, there's no more predicting the future, would it's, would the lack of prediction slow the progress?

• 20:11Speaker 02

  Exactly. And that's the great irony of the subject, but it's also the power of the subject. So, you know, again, just to say one more time that if you're living in a capitalist economy, you really can't. You can't not predict the future because you're really thinking in terms of graphs and bar charts and curves that project their way out into five years, 10 years, 15 years into the future, right? So maybe the way to think about it is that the economy itself is already an aggregated set of predictions that are in some ways in tension with one another. William Gibson, the science fiction author famously said, "The future is already here, it's just not very well distributed."

• 20:56Speaker 02

  So you might already have these energies in play but are not evident to you and me because we're not specialist enough or we don't have that kind of access. And yet, the moment that we're sitting in is already permeated with this futureological thinking and it is going to change our world, we just don't know how.

• 21:14Mike Carruthers?

  But like those charts that people use to forecast five, 10 years out, the market will do this, whatever. How accurate do they end up being if anybody's looked at that? And what effect did it have? Or was it just a sideline prediction and now we watch and see what happens?

• 21:36Speaker 02

  Right, exactly. And you have these disruptive moments, of which the COVID pandemic would be a great example, where every single prediction that every single industry had made and every single government had made about its activities turned out to be completely wrong. And not just wrong by a little, but massively wrong. And of course, we were all wrong together. So you have this huge correction that has all these political and economic consequences that we're still living through now. And who would say that there's not going to be another thing like that? Certainly, I wouldn't. So any predictions that you make have to be considered highly provisional in that sense. You know, another writer that I was very interested in when working on the book is

• 22:19Speaker 02

  this German sociologist called Ulrich Beck. And he wrote a book called Risk Society, where he argues that because of this future orientation that modern culture has, really a lot of what power involves is pushing risk away from yourself and onto somebody else. So the idea here would be that if you're creating pollution, for example... Then the pollution might go downwind to other communities and affect them, but you yourself are not put at risk. So that's a very simple example. But he talks about all these other much more complex instruments by which states and companies can isolate themselves from the risks that they themselves are generating, or risks that they're subject to for other reasons, and try to push those risks off. So that's another kind of futurology.

• 23:04Speaker 02

  And one fascinating thing about COVID is that it was itself kind of immune from that sort of risk allocation, because it did hit everyone all at once, or more or less all at once, in rapid succession, which makes it a very unique phenomenon so far. But I certainly wouldn't say it's going to be the last time that we live through something like that.

• 23:23Mike Carruthers?

  In the business of futurology that we're talking about, are there any superstars? Are there any people that other people say, oh, he or she is the futurologist's futurologist? They're so good at this.

• 23:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, the inevitable figure there is Buckminster Fuller, who was, you have to say, the 20th century's most recognizable, quotable futurologist. He's famous for having, among many other things, invented the geodesic dome, as in, you know, the one at Epcot Center, and also coining the phrase Spaceship Earth. In other words, we're all crew on a spaceship with limited resources. We're hurtling through the void. And if we don't do a good job running the vessel, then we're all gonna go down together. And his writing and his thinking and his endless speech making, you know, towards the end of his life, he did a TV show called Everything I Know, and it was 40 hours long.

• 24:23Speaker 02

  And he was really just getting started by the time he finished. But people these days are going back to his writings and thinking a lot, partly because he was an organic thinker, sort of like the counterculture on which he was a huge influence, by the way. He really does stand out as a, you know, wonderful thinker, kind of amazing character and somebody that people love to go back to.

• 24:45Mike Carruthers?

  Anybody else you would name as a member of the Futurology Hall of Fame?

• 24:51Speaker 02

  One person that people will often think about in that respect is H.G. Wells, who writes these amazing descriptions of warfare in the early 20th century that look a lot like what happens in World War II. And there are movies based on H.G. Wells' work that come out in the late 30s, so before World War II starts, that look almost like documentaries of the war. So that's pretty freaky.

• 25:14Mike Carruthers?

  Well, as you pointed out, it's impossible in our culture not to focus on the future. We're concerned about the future in general, our future in particular. How do we best prepare for our future, not knowing what the future is? Because we can never really know what the future is. I've been talking with Glenn Adamson, and the name of his book is A Century of Tomorrows: How Imagining the Future Shapes the Present. And there is a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Glenn, thanks for being here.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  My pleasure. Great to talk to you, Mike.

• 25:49Speaker 00

  Pink Pantheress here. Coach and Spotify are teaming up to bring music and style together, and they want you to be part of it. Grab your friends and head to the Tabby Tour, hitting cities around the country with live performances from special artists, exclusive experiences, and personalized products. And discover custom playlists on Spotify, booked just for you, based on who you are and how you listen. Live your story with Coach. Learn more at coach.com.

• 26:19Speaker 05

  This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Football has a play for just about everything. You can go deep, keep it on the ground, or draw up something nobody sees coming. And whether you want to run a flea flicker or the tush push, you need a plan to fit your unique situation. That's why State Farm takes the time to get to know you, so they can help personalize coverage for your life and budget. Now that's a solid game plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

• 26:50Mike Carruthers?

  For many years, I know people have talked about the idea of a four-day workweek. And while I'm sure some businesses have adopted it, or some form of a shortened workweek, the five-day week still seems to be preferred, at least by employers. So will the four-day workweek ever become the norm? And should it? It clearly seems to benefit the workers, but what about the employer? After all, the employer signs the paychecks. Here to dive into the conversation on the four-day workweek is Juliet Shore. She's an economist and professor of sociology at Boston College. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek,

• 27:33Mike Carruthers?

  60 Minutes, and other places. Her TED Talk, titled "The Case for the Four-Day Workweek," has been viewed more than 3 million times. She's the author of numerous books. Her latest is called "Four Days a Week: The Life-Changing Solution for Reducing Employee Stress, Improving Well-Being, and Working Smarter." Hi Juliet, welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 27:55Speaker 03

  Oh, hi. Great to be here.

• 27:57Mike Carruthers?

  So I've heard people advocating for a four-day workweek for a very long time, but it does seem to meet a lot of resistance. Are we, do you think, close to actually adopting the four-day workweek as the norm?

• 28:12Speaker 03

  I think we're finally at the point where it's starting to gain momentum. Certainly, pre-pandemic, absolutely agree. I mean, Nixon talked about it being around the corner back in the 1950s. Then there was sort of another bout of people predicting it was going to happen in the 70s, and then things went pretty quiet. But the pandemic really changed, I think, the common sense around the four-day week in a way that people, it went from being sort of utopian or aspirational, something that everybody thought would be great, but we'd never get it, to what I like to say now, that it feels like common sense to people.

• 28:57Speaker 03

  And that's what we really see in our research. I've been... Researching this now for, you know, we're in the the fourth year of studying companies, hundreds of companies all around the world who are doing it. We're also seeing in the surveys of senior management and so forth, a big change in terms of many of them think it's coming or working on it. Feel like they're gonna, you know, try and make it happen in their companies.

• 29:26Mike Carruthers?

  And so why should we do this? And I know there's lots of detail to this answer. But in a, in a big, broad stroke way, what's the benefit of a four day work week? Other than a three day weekend?

• 29:39Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, that turns out to be important, but we can come back to that. Why should we do it? Number one, employees love it. Transformational, life changing. But the really surprising thing about it is that the companies love it too. That they are thriving along with the employees. So I think that's why we should do it. I think before, when it seemed aspirational, we thought, well, that would be great for the workers, but it wouldn't work for the employers. And what our research shows with, as I say, hundreds of companies is it's really working for employers too.

• 30:17Mike Carruthers?

  Because what is different?

• 30:20Speaker 03

  Number one, the employee well being. So if you are an employer whose workers are stressed out, burned out, maybe leaving at a rapid pace, they're, they're disengaged. If you look at the Gallup surveys on disengagement, a majority of workers are disengaged, both in the US and around the world. If they are quiet quitting, which many are doing, or if they are struggling. And that's again, we've got something like two thirds of workers who are in the struggling or worse situation. The four day week really helps them.

• 31:04Speaker 03

  So, okay, you might say, "Well, yeah, I can see that it really helps them, but how does that help the employer?" The model that we have been studying is one in which companies in advance plan, not just for giving people a four-day, 32-hour work week, and I really want to stress that, this is not a compressed work week, giving them their full pay for a five-day week, so people are not making income sacrifices, which, you know, not many can do. But the trade-off is that they manage to do all their work in the four days. So, it's called the 180-100 model.

• 31:46Speaker 03

  Hundred percent of the pay, eighty percent of the time, but hundred percent of the work. Well, you can ask, "How is that possible?" The companies go through two months of planning, onboarding, preparation, what we call work reorganization, in which they figure out where are they wasting time, what are they doing that isn't really contributing to their mission, their bottom line, whatever it is. And that's, there's a, there are two parts to that. One is what the whole organization is doing. So, whether they're tightening up their meetings practices, which tend to be very wasteful, time-consuming, inefficient in lots of places, or they're giving people focus time where they don't get distracted and people aren't bothering them,

• 32:31Speaker 03

  and so they can really get through work and do better quality work. Or they're just giving them a break. So, they're figuring out all of that. And then the other piece of it is the individual piece, where the people have a lot of control over their own work. They figure out how to prioritize what's important. They get through their to-do lists better. They spend less time chit-chatting. Many people talk about communicating differently in the workplace so that there's sort of less social, you know, time and sort of more work.

• 33:02Mike Carruthers?

  As you speak, though, I'm thinking of more and more businesses where I don't see how it would work. Because it's a, like a restaurant, a fast-food place, where the place is open and it has to be staffed. And you have to have people there from opening to closing. And the only way you can do that is have people there working. You can't cut down, unless you cut down the hours, the business is open.

• 33:30Speaker 03

  Yes, many of the companies will keep open for the five days, or if it's seven days, you know, depending on whatever it is. So they're not, clearly not all companies can sort of close down for one day a week, although many do do that. But what happens in those, let's think about those service organizations. And I'll give you the example of a restaurant. The restaurant decided to give its chefs and managers the four-day week. So they did a couple of things. They hired a few more people, although they were able to hire them at sort of lower, at a lower level.

• 34:11Speaker 03

  They upgraded some people, so they were, they upskilled them to do some of the work that the chefs had previously done. And so they were able to cover all of the time with those adjustments, which cost a little bit of money. And they got savings in two other ways. Number one, their quality of service went up a lot. This is also something we see in the healthcare cases, where the patient outcomes are much better when you have more rested staff. And the other really big thing, whether we're talking about chefs or nurses, is resignations. So many of these companies were dealing with very high levels of resignation.

• 34:55Speaker 03

  In a burger flipping context, the turnover is enormous. You have, you know, maybe 100% turnover in fast food restaurants. Very, very costly. Some of the estimates are, you know, it can cost up to 30% or even more in some cases to replace. Now, in fast foods, it's going to be a little bit less. It's going to be less than that. But you have to onboard that person. You have to train them. You have to find them. That turned out to be very hard for some periods during what we were studying. So the company saves money in that way. So like I said, there's not one way to do it. For some organizations, it's the savings in the quitting, because the quitting has been really expensive.

• 35:40Speaker 03

  For others, it's saving time. And for most of them, it's a mix. So one of the things that probably happens at the burger flipping, and which also happened at the restaurant I was talking about, is they do figure out ways to do things more efficiently. So they can maybe get by with slightly fewer people on those four days.

• 36:03Mike Carruthers?

  What about, I mean, how does the work at home thing fit into this? Because certainly that does seem to happen a lot and has since COVID, that people spend all and now maybe part of the time working at home and part of the time going into the office.

• 36:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a great question. What we find is that work at home seems to be a positive from the point of view of making the four-day week work. I'll give you a quote from a CEO, the very first company in our surveys. And he said, "Work at home taught us that we could trust our employees about where they work, and so we thought we could also trust them about how much time they work." And I have another CEO who said something similarly, in which she said, "I never thought work from home could work, but it did. And that's what made me think, well, maybe the four-day week could also work."

• 37:03Speaker 03

  So it, I think, from the management side, it made management more open to considering a four-day week. And it just, it seems to work well from the employee side, too. But I should say that in our studies, we don't really find that it's better, you know, that the work-from-home companies, we have 25% who are 100%, remote, so fully remote. And we only have about 5% who have zero work from home. So they're just a hun- like, we have a brewery, for example, and a RV manufacturer, or the restaurant, where it's like, everybody's, you know, on site.

• 37:48Speaker 03

  It works for them, and it works for the vast majority who are hybrid, which is really the world that I think, you know, we're living in now.

• 37:56Mike Carruthers?

  So who's generally the decider of this? I mean, is it, are employees demanding it? Or businesses are saying, "Let's try it"? I mean, like, where's the demand for this coming from?

• 38:11Speaker 03

  In our ser- in our research, the vast majority, it's coming from the upper management. Often, it's the CEO, the owner, the founder, or someone else in senior management who is a believer and manages to convince others to do it.

• 38:29Mike Carruthers?

  And if we were to go talk to one of those CEOs and say, "Okay, you've got people coming in here five days a week, working, and you now want to switch to four days a week, in two or three sentences, tell me why", what would they say?

• 38:44Speaker 03

  It's because my employees are so much better off. So for many of them, it's a sort of quality, well-being for their employees. But you have a, I think they all, or almost all of them, care about that. But you have another group, which really sees that things are inefficient. And so I have one guy, for example, he's a co-owner of a marketing firm, and he's like, "It's Parkinson's Law here. We keep getting all this great new technology, but somehow, we're never saving any time, and we're working always as hard as we were before, when our technology was so archaic and basic.

• 39:29Speaker 03

  And now we save so much time, but we don't get any of it." So, I mean, you've got, you've got both of those things. And then I think you've got the other group, who are like, "We've got to staunch the bleeding", you know, that very first company that joined us, they had a rash of resignations, and they were like, "We've got to do something."

• 39:50Mike Carruthers?

  But how would they know that's the answer? If they hadn't done it before, how would they know their resignations would stop if they had a four-day week? Or how would they know their employees would be better off with a four-day week if they'd never done it before?

• 40:05Speaker 03

  Well, I think, starting at about 2018, there's been a lot of press for small-scale experiments or cases where this has happened. So, the man who started the NGO that set up the trials is a guy named Andrew Barnes. He's an entrepreneur from New Zealand, and he owns a financial services firm. He wrote a book, he's been all over the news. Japan, Microsoft Japan did it for a month and had phenomenal results. And so, the press has been full of a lot of stories of this, and I was surprised when I did my interviews with CEOs, how many of the stories were, "I read an article about

• 40:50Speaker 03

  this." And quite a few, "I read an article in the New York Times," and I thought, "Maybe it would work for us." So, it's interesting that many of them are just going to the press and seeing it there and then sort of thinking it through for their companies and deciding to give it a try. These trials are truly trials, so we have two months of that work reorganization process in which we help the companies figure out how to make it work. And then it's a six-month trial, and at the end of the six months, we give them the research. You know, they figure out what they're going to do next. So, typically, they're not committing to it forever without having tried it out.

• 41:34Mike Carruthers?

  Have there ever been a company that has come to you, or have you ever, in your research, come across a company and thought, "No, this isn't going to work for them"?

• 41:44Speaker 03

  It's really interesting you ask me that. There is one case that they came to me, and I was pretty excited, because it was a university. And we don't know of any... Universities that have done this for everyone. There are some that have done it for their staff, but not for staff and faculty. So I was pretty confident about how they could do it on the staff side. On the faculty side, you know, faculty don't go to that many meetings. We don't waste, I mean, individuals may, may waste time, but that's, you know, as a, as a, as a group, we don't have a lot of time wasting that would be easy to, to sort of cut out.

• 42:27Speaker 03

  And this university had no spare cash. So there wasn't a way that it could do something like reduce the teaching load or tell people they, you know, they could do less research or give them more money or do something that would, you know, make it easier. And I was really racking my brains about it. And I hadn't sort of figured it out because I just thought it's gonna, it's gonna take some money. I mean, that's such an interesting thing about all these other companies. Almost none of them spend any money doing this. So it's, that's part of why it's like such a win-win for them. They get big productivity improvements without spending money. They make people so much better off without spending money.

• 43:09Speaker 03

  You know, they increase the value of these jobs to their employees without raising the wage. Well, sure enough, the, things went dead on the other side of this case. They were sort of in a pickle to begin with. It, it may be hard to do in a case like that.

• 43:25Mike Carruthers?

  So I want to be clear on something because you're a researcher and, you know, my image of a researcher is someone who researches something, but doesn't take a side necessarily. But you, as I listened to you talk, you haven't said anything negative about the four-day week. You seem to be an advocate for it, which is fine. But if you Google, in fact, I did. If you Google drawbacks to the four-day work week, there's a lot. And the BBC did something, Forbes did something. And there is a lot of pushback to the idea of a four-day work week.

• 44:02Speaker 03

  The BBC story, if that was one of the early ones, I think it had some problems with it, but. Let me tell you what we're finding. Number one, we have about, we have 10% of these companies who revert to the five days at the end of one year. So we give them a whole year and then find out, you know, is it still, is it working for them? That's actually a bit of an inflated number because a number of those never really got into it to begin with. They sort of signed up and didn't really do it, dropped out really early. The kinds of reasons that we're finding are, could be a downturn, you know, where just like a really bad recession or something.

• 44:46Speaker 03

  A few of the ones that stopped were in Australia and they, they had a recession at the time that they were doing this.

• 44:52Mike Carruthers?

  What about the argument of, well, if we go to a four day work week, then someone's going to show up in a few years and say, you know, we really need a three day work week. And then it's going to be, well, you know, we really need a two day work week, that, that this is a slippery slope problem.

• 45:07Speaker 03

  Well, it could be. I mean, look at what we're facing right now with AI, which is we have a, a technology that's very general purpose technology that can do so many things that humans can do. What's going to happen? We introduce this into our workplaces and suddenly we need far fewer people. If you look at what happened with the first industrial revolution, which was also like incredibly revolutionary technology, which saved labor at, at levels that were historically unprecedented, which is, I think, what we're, you know, also looking, staring down the face of today. We had huge reductions in the work year and the work week from 1870 to 1970.

• 45:52Speaker 03

  So it went from about 3,000 hours a year down to about 2,000 hours. And that was a really important part of what kept people in work. It kept people employed. So, I mean, there are plenty of people now who are predicting the like 3.5 work week, 3.5 day work week, like Bill Gates and I think Obama and so on. So it is quite possible, depending on how much productivity growth we see out of AI over what period of time, that if we do move to four, there may be another move down there. And then I think that really the question for us is, what are people doing with that additional time? Is it valuable? Is it socially productive?

• 46:37Speaker 03

  You know, is it improving our quality of life and our communities and society and so forth? I mean, there's no point working just for work's sake. It needs to be valuable, worthwhile activity, right?

• 46:52Mike Carruthers?

  Just real quick, what do you see as the benefits? From the worker's point of view, what do they report back after working a four-day work week?

• 47:02Speaker 03

  So they feel so much more on top of their work while they're at work. And they just report so much higher productivity. And the companies also tell us that people are so much more productive. They're less drained by their work. They look forward to going to work in a way that before they had Sunday scaries and kind of a lot of anxiety about whether they could get through the work week. And I think that's really a big part of why the companies are feeling that it works. It's, you know, and for the naysayers, it's a piece of it that doesn't compute really because they don't, the standard econo, I'm an economist by training. The standard economic models think if you take away a day of work, you lose 20% of

• 47:46Speaker 03

  productivity. But that's not actually what we're seeing happen, which is that people, people are stressed enough at work that this actually improves their quality.

• 47:58Mike Carruthers?

  Well, it seems like a big part of the problem is getting a business to agree to take the plunge because it is going to be disruptive in some sense. If you've been, everybody's been working five days and now you're cutting 20% of the work time, even if you're pretty sure it's gonna be okay, it's, it's still gotta be a little scary to, to take the plunge. I've been talking with Juliet Shore. She's an economist and professor of sociology at Boston College, and she's author of a book called Four Days a Week: The Life-Changing Solution for Reducing Employee Stress, Improving Well-Being, and Working Smarter. There's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thank you, Juliet.

• 48:38Speaker 03

  Really appreciate it. Thank you so much, Mike.

• 48:46Mike Carruthers?

  The idea of keeping a food journal is not new. It's part of several weight loss programs. The theory is that if you actually write down everything you eat, it will force you to see exactly how much food you eat and help you make better choices. Now, it sounds simple enough, but it works better than you might imagine. A study funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health a while ago showed that the simple act of writing down what you eat can help you double your weight loss. Double. The better and more detailed the journal, the more weight was lost. But any method of tracking works.

• 49:28Mike Carruthers?

  Just the act of writing down what you eat on a Post-it note, or sending yourself an email that tallies up each meal, or sending yourself a text message, all of that will suffice. It's the process of reflecting on what you eat that helps you become aware of your habits and make better choices. If you are one of those people who swears you can't lose weight, chances are you haven't tried food journaling. It is extremely effective, and that is something you should know. In our never-ending quest to find new listeners, we need your help, and if you would share this podcast using the share function on the player that you're listening to this

• 50:11Mike Carruthers?

  on, on Apple, or Spotify, or Castbox, or wherever, use that to send this to someone you know, and that'll help increase our listenership. And your friends will probably appreciate hearing this podcast. I'm Mike Herrothers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

• 50:28Speaker 00

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