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

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Speaker 2 Today, on something you should know, why unsubscribing from spam email may cause more harm than good. Then, predicting the future.

Speaker 2 Mostly, it's impossible, but in some cases, could the prediction itself make it so?

Speaker 3 Some things are certain, you know, this sun will come up tomorrow. Some things you can't predict at all.

Speaker 3 And then there's this kind of bandwidth in the middle where people can make claims about expertise of various kinds.

Speaker 3 And that becomes a greater and greater influence in our lives actually over the course of the last century.

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Speaker 2 All this today on something you should know.

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Speaker 2 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.

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Speaker 2 Things are different today than they they used to be, and things will be different in the future than they are now, obviously. But what and who drives those changes?

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Well, here to talk about those people, those futurolists, is Glenn Adamson.

Speaker 2 He's former director of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York and has held appointments as senior scholar at the Yale Center for British Art.

Speaker 2 He's author of a book called Century of Tomorrows, How Imagining the Future Shapes the Present. Hey, Glenn, welcome to Something You Should Know.

Speaker 3 Hey there, Mike. Great to be with you.

Speaker 2 So I've always felt that predicting the future is

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 3 Well, that's what the futurologist would like you to think.

Speaker 3 When I use the term futurology, what I mean is the professional practice of telling people what is going to happen.

Speaker 3 And that is something that really grew over the course of the 20th century, especially.

Speaker 3 But you might think about anyone from, you know, insurance executives to trend forecasters, military planners, urban planners and architects, fashion consultants.

Speaker 3 There's a whole range of different people who

Speaker 3 engage in futurology.

Speaker 2 Meaning they're trying to predict what will happen in the future.

Speaker 3 Correct.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 So, you might think, for example, about stock forecasting.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 It kind of depends, so you ask.

Speaker 2 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Well, what's interesting, and your example right there of predicting stocks, well, it doesn't it depend on who's doing the predicting, right?

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 3 Yeah, and Mike, you've 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 But obviously they were actually directing that process from the inside.

Speaker 3 So there's a very interesting thing with futurology where some things are certain, you know, the sun will come up tomorrow, some things you can't predict at all.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And that becomes a greater and greater influence in our lives, actually, over the course of the last century.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 You know, if you watch the Jetsons, some of the things that that show was predicting would be in the future have come to be and some of them have not.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 Or those things are just more likely to catch up in the future just because.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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 in popular culture.

Speaker 3 That's another thing I was very interested in.

Speaker 3 Actually, not so interested in looking back at specific texts and saying, well, what did they get right? What did they get wrong?

Speaker 3 Partly because I don't think keeping a score on the past is really a responsible way of doing history.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And I do think that those kinds of prediction were and remain tremendously influential.

Speaker 2 And what are some of those?

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And people will remember that it features Harrison Ford's character, Deckard, chasing these characters who are called replicants. And there's a suspicion that he might himself be a replicant.

Speaker 3 And it's a funny thing because that movie seems increasingly relevant now as we're surrounded by the increasing power of AI, and maybe as some cities are increasingly starting to resemble the Los Angeles that was depicted in Blade Runner.

Speaker 3 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 a perfect representation of the future that was coming.

Speaker 2 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: 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.

Speaker 2 I mean when they're trying to create Blade Runner they aren't also working on well what maybe we could you know predict the future here.

Speaker 2 And then when there are like 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.

Speaker 2 If we did this, like what's the motive behind all of this?

Speaker 3 Yes, that's that's a good point.

Speaker 3 You know, when you get really sophisticated futurology, a figure that leaps to mind here would be Daniel Bell, who as a sociologist, many people may be aware of his name.

Speaker 3 He created these quite sophisticated descriptions of futurology. This would have been in the 1960s, where he was trying to distinguish between, you know, merely good guesswork and

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 So, if you like, almost creating like a delta of possible streams of the future that might interact with one another.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 In other words, it has a kind of quasi-scientific apparatus that makes makes it more and more persuasive and more and more

Speaker 3 legitimate, seeming.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And already by the 1980s, you have critics of futurology saying, in effect, we're drowning in this stuff. And even if some of it is accurate, how would we know which futures are the right ones to

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 2 Aaron Powell, you mentioned predicting stocks before and that stock prediction is a, would you say, a billion dollar a year industry.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 dimensions of society itself,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 So, you know, it's that the advantages of it seem so alluring, I suppose.

Speaker 3 And, you know, maybe it's just part of the human condition.

Speaker 3 That's something I thought about a lot when I was writing the kind of

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Whether, again, that's at the scale of your own life or your family's life or your town, your city, your country,

Speaker 3 the whole world. So you start to think of the future as something more and more threatening.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And that's something that we're deeply into now. You know, we've had about half century of that kind of

Speaker 3 existential relationship to the future. So again, all the more reason to think about it and try to explore it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but here's the thing. Going to a tarot card reader or going to the movies is fun,

Speaker 2 but investing your money, that's serious business.

Speaker 2 And the people who try to tell you what the market will do are usually wrong.

Speaker 2 And yet they keep doing it.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And of course they go to casinos too.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Does he? Probably not, but as you say, it's fun, you know, and I think that's the main reason that he keeps doing it, not necessarily because he's confident of making more money at it, but because

Speaker 3 it's a fascinating thing to

Speaker 3 try to beat the house in that way.

Speaker 2 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.

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Speaker 2 so Glenn, when you look at things that shape the future, The origin of those things seems important.

Speaker 2 I mean, there are some things, I'm thinking of the internet as something that, I mean, even when it started, people were kind of shaking their head because it came from kind of a geeky beginning.

Speaker 2 A lot of internet, you know, people,

Speaker 2 but not the general public was like buying into this.

Speaker 2 But then look what happened.

Speaker 3 For sure. And, you know, some things that seem

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 circles

Speaker 3 among a very small group of people.

Speaker 3 And then their particular preoccupations and personalities kind of metastasize across the range of the whole culture.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And this was in the late 60s.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 We extend our brains using machines instead.

Speaker 3 And he did a 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.

Speaker 3 And so somebody like Doug Engelbart and his idea of augmented intelligence turns out to be

Speaker 3 completely influential.

Speaker 3 And no one would have necessarily expected that at the time because, as I say, it was a very niche phenomenon.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 would the lack of prediction slow the progress?

Speaker 3 Exactly. And that's the great irony of the subject, but it's also the power of the subject.
So, you know, again,

Speaker 3 just to say 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?

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 William Gibson, the science fiction author, famously said the future is already here. It's just not very well distributed.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And yet the moment that we're sitting in is already permeated with this futurological

Speaker 3 thinking and it is going to change our world. We just don't know how.

Speaker 2 But like those charts that people use to forecast forecast five, 10 years out, the market will do this, you know, whatever. How accurate do they end up being if anybody's looked at that? And

Speaker 2 what effect

Speaker 2 did it have? Or was it just a sideline prediction? And now we watch and see what happens.

Speaker 3 Right, exactly.

Speaker 3 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 government had made about its activities turned out to be completely wrong.

Speaker 3 And not just wrong by a little, but massively wrong. And of course, we were all wrong together.
So you have this huge correction.

Speaker 3 It has all these political and economic consequences that we're still living through now. And, you know, who would say that there's not going to be another thing like that? Certainly, I wouldn't.

Speaker 3 So any predictions that you make have to be considered highly provisional in that sense.

Speaker 3 You know, another writer that I was very interested in when working on the book is this German sociologist called Ulrich Beck.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 So that's a very simple example.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 So that's another kind of futurology.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 But I certainly wouldn't say it's going to be the last time that we live through something like that.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 3 Yeah, the inevitable figure there is Buckminster Fuller, who was,

Speaker 3 you have to say, the 20th century's most recognizable, quotable futurologist.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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 going to go down together.

Speaker 3 And his writing and his thinking and his endless speechmaking,

Speaker 3 you know, towards the end of his life, he did a TV show called called Everything I Know, and it was 40 hours long.

Speaker 3 And he was really just getting started by the time he finished.

Speaker 3 But people these days are going back to his writings and thinking a lot,

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 wonderful thinker, kind of amazing character, and somebody that people love to go back to.

Speaker 2 Anybody else you would name as a member of the Futurology Hall of Fame?

Speaker 3 One person that people will often think about in that respect is H.G. Wells, who writes these amazing descriptions of warfare

Speaker 3 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'

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 2 Well, as you pointed out, it's impossible in our culture not to to focus on the future. We're concerned about the future in general, our future in particular.

Speaker 2 How do we best prepare for our future, not knowing what the future is, because we can never really know what the future is.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Glenn, thanks for being here.

Speaker 3 My pleasure. Great to talk to you, Mike.

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Speaker 2 For many years, I know people have talked about the idea of a four-day workweek.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Her work has been featured in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, 60 Minutes, and other places.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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. Oh, hi.

Speaker 2 Great to be here. 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.

Speaker 2 Are we, do you think, close to actually adopting the four-day workweek as the norm?

Speaker 4 I think we're finally at the point where it's starting to gain momentum.

Speaker 4 Certainly pre-pandemic, absolutely agree. I mean, Nixon talked about it being around the corner back in the 1950s.

Speaker 4 Then there was sort of another bout of people predicting it was going to happen in the 70s. And then things went pretty quiet.

Speaker 4 But the pandemic really changed, I think, the common sense around the four-day week in a way that

Speaker 4 people, it went from being sort of utopian or aspirational, something that everybody thought would be great, but we'd never get it, to

Speaker 4 what I like to say now that it feels like common sense to people. And that's what we really see in our research.

Speaker 4 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 doing it.

Speaker 4 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, are working on it, feel like they're going to try and make it happen in their companies.

Speaker 2 And so why should we do this? And I know there's lots of detail to this answer, but in a big broad-stroke way, what's the benefit of a four-day work week other than a three-day weekend?

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And what our research shows with, as I say, hundreds of companies is it's really working for employers too.

Speaker 2 Because what is different?

Speaker 4 Number one,

Speaker 4 the employee well-being. So if you are an employer whose workers are stressed out, burned out, maybe leaving at a rapid pace,

Speaker 4 they're disengaged. If you look at the Gallup surveys on disengagement, a majority of

Speaker 4 workers are disengaged, both in the U.S. and around the world, if they are quiet quitting, which

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 situation. The four-day week really helps them.

Speaker 4 So, okay, you might say, well, yeah, I can see that it really helps them, but how does that help the employer?

Speaker 4 The model that we we have been studying is one in which companies in advance plan not just for

Speaker 4 giving people

Speaker 4 a four-day 32-hour workweek, 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 not many can do.

Speaker 4 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, 100% of the pay, 80% of the time, but 100% of the work.

Speaker 4 Well, you can ask how is that possible? The companies go through two months of planning, onboarding, preparation, what we call work reorganization.

Speaker 4 in which they figure out where are they wasting time?

Speaker 4 What are they doing that isn't really contributing to their mission, their bottom line, whatever it is. And

Speaker 4 there are two parts to that. One is what the whole organization is doing.

Speaker 4 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 and so they can really get through work and do better quality work.

Speaker 4 or they're just giving them a break.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 They figure out how to prioritize what's important. They get through their to-do lists better.
They spend less time chit-chatting.

Speaker 4 Many people talk about communicating differently in the workplace so that there's sort of less social

Speaker 4 time and sort of more work.

Speaker 2 As you speak, though, I'm thinking of more and more businesses where I don't see how it would work because it's

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 clearly not all companies can sort of close down for one day a a week, although many do do that.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 So they did a couple of things. They

Speaker 4 hired a few more people, although they were able to hire them at sort of lower, at a lower level.

Speaker 4 They upgraded some people so they were they upskilled them to do some of the work that the chefs had previously done.

Speaker 4 And so they were able to cover all of the time with those adjustments, which cost a little bit of money.

Speaker 4 And they got savings in two other ways. Number one, their quality of service went up a lot.

Speaker 4 This is also something we see in the healthcare cases where the patient outcomes are much better when you have more rested staff.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 In a burger flipping context, the turnover is enormous. You have,

Speaker 4 you know, maybe 100% turnover in fast food restaurants. Very, very costly.
Some of the estimates are,

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 You have to train them. You have to find them.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 For some organizations, it's the savings in the quitting because the quitting has been really expensive. For others, it's saving time.

Speaker 4 And for most of them, it's a mix.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 So they can maybe get by with slightly fewer people on those four days.

Speaker 2 What about, I mean, how does the work at home thing fit into this?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it's a great question.

Speaker 4 What we find

Speaker 4 is that

Speaker 4 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,

Speaker 4 and he said, work at home taught 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.

Speaker 4 And I have another CEO who said something similarly in which she said, I never thought work from home could work.

Speaker 4 But it did. And that's what made me think, well, maybe the four-day week could also work.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 But I should say that in our studies, we don't really find that it's better,

Speaker 4 you know, that the work from home companies, we have 25% who are

Speaker 4 100% remote, so fully remote.

Speaker 4 And we only have about 5% who have zero work from home. So they're just a hundred, like we have a brewery, for example, and an RV manufacturer

Speaker 4 or the restaurant where it's like everybody's

Speaker 4 on site.

Speaker 4 It works for them and it works for the vast majority who are hybrid, which is really the world that I think

Speaker 4 we're living in now.

Speaker 2 So who's generally the decider of this? I mean, is it...

Speaker 2 Are employees demanding it or businesses are saying, let's try it? I mean, like, where's the demand for this coming from?

Speaker 4 In our research,

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 2 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 why.

Speaker 2 What would they say?

Speaker 4 It's because

Speaker 4 my employees are so much better off. So for many of them, it's a sort of quality

Speaker 4 well-being for their employees. But

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And so I have one guy, for example, he's a co-owner of a marketing firm, and he's like,

Speaker 4 it's Parkinson's law here.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And now we save so much time, but we don't get any of it.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 2 But how would they know that's the answer? If they hadn't done it before,

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 4 Well,

Speaker 4 I think starting at about 2018,

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Japan, Microsoft Japan did it for a month and had phenomenal results. And so, you know, the press has been full of a lot of stories of this.

Speaker 4 and I was surprised when I did my interviews with CEOs how many of the stories were, I read an article about this,

Speaker 4 and quite a few, I read an article in the New York Times, and I thought maybe it would work for us.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 These trials are truly trials. So

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And at the end of the six months, we give them the research.

Speaker 4 They figure out what they're going to do next.

Speaker 4 So typically they're not committing to it forever without having tried it out.

Speaker 2 Has 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?

Speaker 4 It's really interesting you asked me that. There is one case that they came to me

Speaker 4 and I was pretty excited because it was a university and we don't know of any

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 On the faculty side, you know, faculty don't go to that many meetings. We don't waste, I mean, individuals may waste time, but that's, you know,

Speaker 4 as a group, we don't have a lot of time wasting that would be easy to

Speaker 4 sort of cut out. And this university had no spare cash.

Speaker 4 So there wasn't a way that it could do something like reduce the teaching load or tell people they need, you know, they could do less research or give them more money or do something that would, you know, make it easier.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 They get big productivity improvements. without spending money.
They make people so much better off without spending money.

Speaker 4 You know, they increase the value of these jobs to their employees without raising the wage. Well, sure enough,

Speaker 4 things went dead on the other side of this case. They were sort of in a pickle to begin with.
It may be hard to do in a case like that.

Speaker 2 So I want to be clear on something, because you're a researcher, and my image of a researcher is someone who researches something, but doesn't take a side necessarily. But you,

Speaker 2 as I listened to you talk, you haven't said anything negative about the four-day week. You seem to to be an advocate for it, which is fine.

Speaker 2 But if you Google, in fact, I did, if you Google drawbacks to the four-day workweek, there's a lot. And the BBC did something.

Speaker 2 Forbes did something.

Speaker 2 There is a lot of pushback to the idea of a four-day workweek.

Speaker 4 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,

Speaker 4 we have about we have 10 of these companies who revert to the five days after at the end of the 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.

Speaker 4 They sort of signed up and didn't really do it, dropped out really early. The kinds of reasons that we're finding are

Speaker 4 could be a downturn, you know, where just like a really bad recession or something. A few of the ones that stopped were in Australia and they had a recession at the time that they were doing this.

Speaker 2 What about the argument of, well, if we go to a four-day workweek, then someone's going to show up in a few years and say, you know, we really need a three-day work week.

Speaker 2 And then it's going to be, well, you know, we really need a two-day workweek, that this is a slippery slope problem.

Speaker 4 Well, it could be. I mean, look at what we're facing right now with AI, which is we have a technology that's a very general purpose technology that can do so many things that humans can do.

Speaker 4 What's going to happen? We introduce this into our workplaces and suddenly we need far fewer people.

Speaker 4 If you look at what happened with the first industrial revolution, which was also like incredibly revolutionary technology, which saved labor at levels that were historically unprecedented, which is, I think, what we're also looking, looking, staring down the face of today.

Speaker 4 We had huge reductions in the work

Speaker 4 year and the work week from 1870 to 1970. 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.

Speaker 4 So, I mean, there are plenty of people now who are predicting the like 3.5

Speaker 4 work week, 3.5-day work week, like Bill Gates and I think Obama and so on.

Speaker 4 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,

Speaker 4 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?

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 It needs to be valuable, worthwhile activity, right?

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 because they don't, the standard economic, I'm an economist by training, the standard economic models think if you take away a day of work you lose 20% of 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 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.

Speaker 2 Even if you're pretty sure it's going to be okay, it's still got to be a little scary to take the plunge. I've been talking with Juliet Shore.

Speaker 2 She's an economist and professor of sociology at Boston College, and she's the author of a book called Four Days a Week: The Life-Changing Solution for Reducing Employee Stress, Improving Well-Being, and Working Smarter.

Speaker 2 There's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thank you, Juliet.

Speaker 4 Really appreciate it. Thank you so much, Mike.

Speaker 2 The idea of keeping a food journal is not new. It's part of several weight loss programs.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Now, it sounds simple enough, but it works better than you might imagine.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Double.

Speaker 2 The better and more detailed the journal, the more weight was lost. But any method of tracking works.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 It's the process of reflecting on what you eat that helps you become aware of your habits and make better choices.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 In our never-ending quest to find new listeners, we need your help.

Speaker 2 And if you would share this podcast using the share function on the player that you're listening to this on on Apple or Spotify or Castbox or wherever.

Speaker 2 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 Carruthers.

Speaker 2 Thanks for listening today to something you should know.

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Speaker 6 Oh, the Regency era. You might know it as the time when Bridgerton takes place, or the time when Jane Austen wrote her books.

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