Something You Should Know - Why Dating is So Hard and How to Fix It & Will We Soon Have a 4-Day Work Week?

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Starting point is 00:00:17 You can now make the first move or not. With opening moves, you simply choose a question to be automatically sent to your matches. Then sit back and let your matches start the chat. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. Today on Something You Should Know, is it really good for you or your kids to take a multivitamin every day? I'll tell you what the science says. Then, the new world of dating.

Starting point is 00:00:43 What's the best way to meet someone? Probably not on a dating app I've yet to meet a marriage minded woman who tells me oh I love the dating app so much all the guys I meet are incredibly honest and kind and it's so easy to find true love I do not hear this ever then why flipping a coin may be a really good way to make a decision. And is the four-day work week soon to become a reality? We know that the five-day week, it's not working for the average person's health and lifestyle outcomes. And so moving to the four-day week, I think is a huge step for the evolution of business and for people.

Starting point is 00:01:25 All this today on Something You Should Know. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like Something You Should Know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years.

Starting point is 00:02:01 She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named the Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back. And in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show.

Starting point is 00:02:32 There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. Hey, welcome. It's time for another episode of Something You Should Know. You know, when I was a kid, I remember taking multivitamins much of the time. And if you take a multivitamin or make your kids take a multivitamin, you may not need to.

Starting point is 00:03:13 Research suggests that they don't really help. According to scientists at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, multivitamins, this is in a pretty big study, multivitamins failed to prevent cancer, heart disease, and all causes of death in the group they studied. Kids who took multivitamins did not perform any better or have any fewer sick days than kids who didn't take multivitamins. And a lot of doctors agree, saying multivitamins can actually give you a false sense of security. There is no substitute for a healthy, well-balanced diet. Some experts even caution that you're getting too much of what you don't need with a multivitamin, that you're better off checking with your doctor to determine exactly what you do need rather than try to take one pill as kind of an overall insurance policy.

Starting point is 00:04:04 And that is something you should know. Whether you're single or in a relationship or even married, you're going to find this discussion about dating really interesting. Dating has changed. It's changed a lot, mostly because of the internet. And now lots of people can meet lots of other people they would have never otherwise met before. Which might sound like a good thing, but it actually may not be. And then there's the same old conventional dating advice I'm sure you've heard about. Play hard to get. Don't be too interested. A woman should never ask a guy out. Is that good advice?

Starting point is 00:04:47 Well, meet John Berger. He is an award-winning magazine writer and former senior writer at both Fortune and Money. He has taken a long, hard look at how the world of dating is going. And what he found is both interesting and troubling. And from it comes some very good advice. He's written about it in a book called Make Your Move, The New Science of Dating and Why Women Are in Charge.

Starting point is 00:05:12 Hi, John. Welcome. Hey, Mike. Thanks for having me on. So you write about the science of dating, but I think a lot of us like to believe that dating is not supposed to be science. It's supposed to be magic. It's supposed to... Sparks are supposed to fly or not. And that's how this all works. And that, I don't know, there's something about if you look at it too closely through a scientific lens,

Starting point is 00:05:36 it's not very pretty. So I'm a big believer in magic and romance. So we're on the same page. The goal of Make Your Move, my new book, is to basically push back against a lot of the bad dating advice that singles, particularly women, have been getting from various dating gurus over the years, telling them that the only way to get a guy is by playing hard to get and by pretending that you don't actually like a guy who you actually like. Or nowadays you have all these dating experts who are pushing singles towards online dating. And I don't you know, the science shows that online dating is actually a pretty terrible way to meet somebody. Well, that comes as a bit of a surprise because dating apps, online dating seems to be the way people are going, that that's the way to meet somebody now because the potential pool of people that you could meet is so much bigger and that therefore you should be able

Starting point is 00:06:39 to find somebody. I've yet to meet a marriage-minded woman who tells me, oh, I love the dating app so much. All the guys I meet are incredibly honest and kind, and it's so easy to find true love. I mean, I do not hear this ever. Yet, if you look at the data, most young singles, the way they're meeting is through the dating app. So my take is that today's younger marriage-minded singles are actually addicted to something they don't like. And actually, Pew Research, they came out with a survey, I believe, last year, which confirms this, that most people don't have a favorable view of online dating. A majority of young women consider online dating to be unsafe.

Starting point is 00:07:28 And one in five women on dating apps have been threatened with physical violence. Wow, that's pretty amazing. My impression is that online dating is very popular. And yet you're saying people don't like it. Doesn't sound like they're very successful with it, and a large number of women feel threatened from doing it. Yeah. No, it's confusing because it's kind of easy. It's like online shopping. And one of the many things that worry me about the spread of online dating is how similar the culture is to online shopping. And nowadays,

Starting point is 00:08:08 everything is kind of a value proposition. The same way you can buy something on Amazon, it can be returned or exchanged. I think that's the same mindset that you find with online dating. And the way this shows up in the science and the data is that the breakup rates for couples who meet on dating apps are much higher than they are for couples who meet the old-fashioned way. So there was a Stanford study which came out a few years ago, and it showed that among couples who met on dating apps, the one-year breakup rate was 16%. Compare that among couples who met on dating apps, the one year breakup rate was 16%. Compare that to people who met as co-workers, it's 6%. Or if you met in church, it's 1%. So people who meet in the real world and actually know the people they're going out in the first date with, those relationships fare much better. But it's funny because I don't know about you,

Starting point is 00:09:03 Mike, but I don't hear a lot of people telling me how great online dating is and how easy it is to meet their soul mate. The conventional wisdom has always been that with my busy lifestyle, I don't meet people, I don't go to places, and I don't like to go to bars. And so online dating is really the best way to do it. That's the conventional wisdom, which seems to fly in the face of what you're saying. I hear that a lot, but let me just share a little story. So I was giving a talk to a college group, and there was a young lady who made a similar point to the one you just made, basically asking me, well, how the heck am I supposed to meet somebody if not through the dating apps?

Starting point is 00:09:52 I posed a question. I asked them, okay, how many of you here have somebody you know and like from the real world, somebody who's single, and somebody whom you've ever wondered about dating. 40 people in the room, 40 hands went up. So my take is that most singles, not all, but most singles, particularly younger singles, already have somebody they know and like from the real world whom they're interested in dating, but basically they're afraid to ask them out. Why? Because this is the world we live in. I mean, particularly with millennials and Gen Zers, there is a next level fear of awkwardness for a lot of singles, particularly young singles. It's easier to take a chance on Tinder than ask out a coworker who they actually already have chemistry with. Because if it doesn't work, they have to see that coworker again the next day.

Starting point is 00:10:54 Right, exactly. But this has always been the case. I mean, with dating, high rewards sometimes come with high risks. And human beings evolved as social animals. The way we connect is through shared experience. And this is why the breakup rates are so much lower for people who meet in the real world than they are for people who meet online, because this is how human beings connect. Is the goal of dating, is it your sense anyway, that the goal of dating is still to find a mate for life kind of thing? Or are people dating now differently, different goals? They just want someone to hang with? I mean, has the basic goal of dating changed? Yeah, it probably has. I mean, I definitely agree that you don't need to be

Starting point is 00:11:46 married or have a life partner in order to lead a happy life. And I think there are plenty of singles out there who are really happy being single and remaining single. And actually, for those people, a dating app might make a lot of sense. But if you're looking for kind of a longer lasting relationship, the research shows that dating apps probably are not serving you well. I thought that the dating apps and the online dating websites had gotten more sophisticated, that they're better at matching people who theoretically belong together or are more likely compatible with each other? Yeah, I'm with you. But you know, it's funny that the founder of OkCupid had a blog post a few years

Starting point is 00:12:32 ago in which he admitted that they did this experiment in which they connected people who matched on their search criteria and also connected people who didn't match at all. And they found that the success rate for the relationships was no different. Now, unsurprisingly, this blog post was removed not long after because it caused a bit of a stir and it kind of questioned, well, what's the point of online dating if the algorithms don't work? But it's telling. So what's the point of online dating if the algorithms don't work, but it's telling. So what's the advice then? What's the most successful way to date in the 21st century? My argument is that, A, it's good to get off the apps, but equally as importantly, I'm always

Starting point is 00:13:20 encouraging single women to make the first move and to be assertive because one of the other trends we've seen over the past several years is that guys, particularly younger guys, are a little gun-shy. They're kind of worried about saying or doing the wrong thing. And there's a lot of research out there showing that women who are assertive, women who ask out guys, tend to fare far better. And my big message to women is that guys like women who like them. So if you ask a guy out on a date, the odds are he's going to react positively, assuming you actually know the person. I'm not talking about asking out a complete stranger on a dating app. We're talking about dating, how things have changed in the dating world,

Starting point is 00:14:12 what strategies work and what strategies don't. My guest is John Berger, and he is author of the book, Make Your Move, The New Science of Dating and Why Women Are in Charge. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet.

Starting point is 00:14:43 Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson, discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person

Starting point is 00:15:18 Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. I Wrong, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our listener poll results from But Am I Wrong? And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. So John, is it your sense that the problem, the lack of success that people have with dating, is it that they're meeting the wrong people or they're meeting people and then something goes wrong after that? Not to belabor the point, but I kind of feel like this goes back to the problem with online dating. And to me, one of the reasons why the breakup rates for these

Starting point is 00:16:31 relationships are so high is that people are much more inclined, much quicker to pull the plug on the relationships when one party does something wrong or says something wrong. Well, you're calling them relationships, but my sense is that a lot of online dating never gets to be a relationship. It's one or two dates, you find something wrong, and that's it. It's not like you're breaking up because you never were. That's a great point, but just think about it. When a first date with somebody you meet on a dating app is a blind date with a complete stranger. Back when you were dating, how commonplace

Starting point is 00:17:14 were blind dates with complete strangers? Well, it depends on what you mean by complete stranger. I mean, they may be someone you've never met before, but probably you have some mutual friend, you have someone in common. Right. There was some connection. There was some connection, maybe a friend of a friend. So there was some accountability there. So that like, maybe it's your best friend's cousin or something like that. But that degree of accountability is really important. But the kind of blind dates we're seeing now on dating apps are not something we saw a whole lot of 30, 40 years ago. And if you think about it, if you're going out with somebody you know, somebody you know from work or from church or from the dog park,

Starting point is 00:18:05 or even just a friend of a friend that you met at a party, you already know something about the person. So basically you're not starting at zero, but so many of these first dates that are created by dating apps, you're starting at zero. So it doesn't really surprise me that the breakup rates are going to be higher because you don't really, you're not starting with things in common. So my sense is that the big difference between going out on a date with a friend of a friend or someone from work versus going out on a date with someone you meet on a dating app. When you meet somebody on a dating app, your defenses are up. You're looking for where the trouble spots are. You're looking for red flags. It's a very defensive game. If you talk to particularly younger women about how they

Starting point is 00:19:01 approach first dates with people they meet on a dating app, it typically goes like this. They, you know, a day before, a couple of days before, they spend a lot of time Googling the guy to make sure that, you know, Bob, the handsome hedge fund manager, isn't actually Billy Bob the ex-con, that he really is single, not married with four kids. And then on the day of the date, there's a safety plan involved that, you know, the particularly women, they'll tell their roommate or their best friend or their sister or their mother, look, I'm going to be at Sushi Palace at seven o'clock on Saturday. If you don't hear from me, it's time to get worried. That's not much of a safety plan. That's more of a funeral plan.

Starting point is 00:19:54 No, that's a good point. But I just want you to think about how that kind of a mindset going into a first date is likely to affect the outcome of that first date. And there's a ton of research showing that the way we meet and our comfort level on a first date has a big outcome, not just on the first date, but on the relationships in general. So if you go into a first date anxious and fearful, that's very likely to impact the outcome of the relationship. Well, in my single days, I tried online dating. And my experience is that if you've done online dating for any length of time, your expectations sink so low because of your experiences and that the first date is spent mostly looking for reasons to run rather than looking for the good in this person.

Starting point is 00:21:02 You're trying to find the red flags, which, you know, and as soon as you find one, we're done. Yeah, no, I agree. I interviewed a woman who told me that she used to spend all of her online first dates trying to poke holes in the guy's stories because, you know, she had had so many men who deceived her, lied to her, took advantage of her, that she became disillusioned and kind of went into these first dates expecting the worst. And she described online dating to me as a doubters game. And she, she's now engaged to a guy she met through a mutual friend. And she told me that when she went out on her first date with this guy, she didn't even bother Googling him. And she told me she didn't have to because she knew that her

Starting point is 00:21:57 friend, her close friend, would never, ever, ever set her up with a man who was unkind or untrustworthy, even though the guy wasn't exactly what she was expecting. And actually, in an online dating setting, that would have been a problem if his reality didn't match up with his online presentation. But because she was so open to new possibilities and because she trusted the mutual friend, it didn't matter that he wasn't exactly what she was expecting. And she told me this was actually the closest thing to love at first sight she'd ever experienced. Well, and in large part because her guard was down. Exactly. Yes.

Starting point is 00:22:44 Bingo. Without necessarily mentioning the names, but I wonder if, are there any differences? Is there any research to show that some dating apps are better than others? Or are they all in pretty much in the same category? I mean, the dating app I used to like the most was Hinge, but they changed their business model. I mean, Hinge initially, when it was founded, you had to be kind of a friend or a friend of a friend with the other person on Facebook before the app would connect you for a possible date.

Starting point is 00:23:23 And to me, that made perfect sense. But Hinge actually kind of abandoned that business model. And now it's basically the same as every other dating app. But if you're asking me what my favorite dating app is today, it's actually not even a dating app. It's meetup.com, which as you probably know, is just an online venue that allows people to kind of meet up in the real world. People with shared interests allows them to meet up in the real world. Ostensibly, it has nothing to do with dating, but I'm a big fan of meeting people in the wild, so to speak. So if you're a runner, join a running group.

Starting point is 00:24:01 If you want to go clean up the beach, you know, go join some beach cleanup crew. If you, you know, if you want to play beach volleyball, you know, join a beach volleyball group. I think meeting people in the real world in this way is much more likely to kind of lead to deeper connections than, you know, going out on a first date with a complete stranger. What about dating services where there's actually people who are trying to match people up? So I have a lot of friends who are professional matchmakers and the ones I'm thinking of are brilliant. They have kind of a sixth sense for what may be holding back their clients romantically and they really know who's compatible and who isn't.

Starting point is 00:24:53 The problem is that the quality matchmakers, the top matchmakers, particularly in cities like New York or L.A. or London, you know, they charge, you know, $2,000, $3,000 a month. And, you know, I'm not going to tell the average single because most people can't afford that. Well, you often hear that dating is a numbers game, that if you want to find someone, you're probably going to have to go out on several dates with several different people in order to find somebody compatible. But it does seem that if you have someone that you have something in common with, it just makes perfect sense that that's just much more likely to work. I think the reason that couples who already know each other from work or from school or from church, the reason they get to committed relationships faster is because they have a sense of whether they're compatible before the first date. They're not waiting for date six to figure out if they're

Starting point is 00:25:59 compatible. I mean, so many of the couples I interviewed who met in the workplace, they knew before the first date that there was something real there. Well, I think those two pieces of advice you gave earlier, that is, it's okay for women to ask men out and to not try to play hard to get, because that just seems kind of, I don't know, it seems kind of old fashioned and outdated advice. The problem is that this advice runs counter to pretty much all the conventional dating wisdom that we've seen over the past 20, 30 years. I mean, books like The Rules or Ignore the Guy, Get the Guy, they kind of preach this mantra that a guy won't like you if you seem to like him. And I don't know if, you know, maybe I wasn't dating in the 1960s or 1950s. Maybe that worked back then. But in kind of a post-MeToo world, if a woman seems disinterested, the average guy is not going to assume that she's playing hard to get. He's going to assume that she's actually not interested. So a woman who's assertive and takes a chance and asks the guy out, I just think has this huge built-in advantage.

Starting point is 00:27:23 Well, clearly things have changed a lot in the world of dating. And it's really interesting to hear, even for someone like me who's not in the dating scene anymore. But for someone who is and who is looking, your advice is really important. That, in fact, online dating may not be the best way to go. And there are some other strategies that can really help move the process along. John Berger has been my guest. The name of his book is Make Your Move, The New Science of Dating and Why Women Are in Charge. And you'll find a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, John. Thanks for being on the podcast. All right. Thank you.

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Starting point is 00:29:01 or at ghoststoryguys.com. People have been talking for a long time now about shortening the 40-hour work week. The argument is that we don't need to work so much, that we need more work-life balance, that there's more to life than work. And maybe, just maybe, we would be more productive and do better work if we didn't have to put in so many hours. On the other hand, the people on the other side of the argument say things like, look, people get plenty of time off. You know, every time there's a holiday on a Monday, it seems everybody takes the Friday before off as well. And we have tons of vacation. We have a lot of holidays.

Starting point is 00:29:46 And what we really need to do is get the work done. And if people aren't there, the work doesn't get done. So let's take a look at this through the eyes of Joe Sanuk. Joe is an entrepreneur who's really looked hard at this topic. He's written a book called Thursday is the New Friday. How to work fewer hours, make more money, and Spend Time Doing What You Want. So I think we know where Joe comes down on this topic, but let's dig into the details. Hey, Joe, welcome to Something You Should Know.

Starting point is 00:30:16 Thanks so much for having me on the show, Michael. So I'm not sure how we got to the 40-hour work week, but, you know, in many ways it seems to work pretty well. So where did it come from and why should we reconsider it? What's wrong with it? Where's the flaw? So if we go back 4,000 years or so to the Babylonians, they just made up the seven-day week. And so this thing that we think is solid, the seven-day week was just totally made up. There's nothing in nature that points to it. The Egyptians had an eight-day week, the Romans had a 10-day week. So if we just start with the week as we know it was totally made up. But then if we fast forward to the late 1800s,

Starting point is 00:30:55 early 1900s, the average person was working 10 to 14 hours a day. And then what happened from there was they were all working these farmer's schedules, even if they weren't farmers. And then in 1926, Henry Ford gave us the 40-hour work week, which was a great step for human evolution and for work evolution, but it was really to sell more cars. He had the idea that on the weekends, if people had a fast mode of transportation, they would buy it because they weren't going to buy a car just to get to work faster. So then if we fast forward to the pandemic of 2021 and 2020, we see that we all were shown a different way of thinking, that the biggest key performance indicator was not to sit in a chair for 40 hours. Well, it sounds good that we're getting more

Starting point is 00:31:41 modern and more efficient and we have a different way, a more modern way of looking at life in the world. But how do we know that a shorter work week actually works? It makes sense. How do we know that? And so we see emerging research right now that's really showing this. The largest one is the Iceland study that just came out about a month ago, 2,500 people across multiple industries in a multi-year study working 32 hours a week over four days. So it wasn't even 40 hours within four days, it was 32 hours. And they saw boosts in productivity, boosts in health outcomes, and also boosts in happiness. So if we think about they had more productivity in 32 hours

Starting point is 00:32:22 than in 40 hours, we would think that 20% drop in time would actually be a 20% drop in productivity, but we're just not seeing that. And the research continues to show us that our best work happens when we actually slow down first and then dive into the work using the neuroscience to guide how we do that work. Aren't there a lot of jobs though that are not adaptable to this? I mean, if you have to get so much done in a week, you have to get so much done in a week. And if you can do it in 30 hours, well, good for you. But it takes most people 40 and that's just their job. Yeah. I think there are going to be industries that the applicability is different in the same

Starting point is 00:33:01 way that in the late 1800s, early 1900s, there were people that said, wait, we're working 10 to 14 hours a day, six to seven days a week. How are we going to change Henry Ford? I think there will be those people with the industrialist mindsets or even jobs that have to keep with that industrialist mindset that we just say, yes, this is how it is. But I would argue that through experimenting, through trying A-B tests between different teams, to try taking, say, half of a Friday off and then looking at the key performance indicators, we may see that there's actually a machine that we're creating. Whereas the new business model that's emerging is more of an evolutionary model where we're adapting and changing and growing while doing experiments to try to see if it works in different industries and then have those teams report out the best experiments that happened within those teams. So what's the explanation if you take people and cut their 40-hour work week down to 32 hours and they actually turn out more work and they're happier, why are they happier?

Starting point is 00:34:12 And how did they do that if it took them 40 hours before and now it only takes them 32? What happened under the surface. Yeah. I love the case study of Kalamazoo Valley Community College to answer this question because KBCC, it's a small community college in Southwest Michigan. And when you think about colleges and community colleges, they're behemoths. There's huge institutions oftentimes that are very unmovable. But there was this guy, Ted Forrester there, that he teaches in the HVAC. He's an HVAC instructor. So he's teaching heating and cooling in large buildings.

Starting point is 00:34:50 So he noticed that every Friday, there were very few students in the summer that were coming to campus. And he took pictures from the roof every Friday for a whole summer to show this. So he presented to the board in the fall. This was probably five or six years ago and said, here's what our parking lots look like on Fridays. Here's how much it costs us to do air conditioning in this building on Fridays. And then they said, well, what should we do about this? And he advocated for a four-day work week in the summertime. Now, what they saw happen was more than just air conditioning savings.

Starting point is 00:35:22 They saw that the offices then were able to be more flexible to be able to get open earlier, open later. Students then were able to come in more often. So they saw student outcomes go up. So you saw that people were more effective in their time because they had fewer hours. So did they focus on their worst 15 tasks of the week or their best 15? They focused on their best 15. And so week after week, each team is then doing better and better work. And then we also saw that their health outcomes have continued to go up and that their healthcare costs have gone down. And so on top of that, millions of dollars in air conditioning savings. What about the argument though, that we have so many holidays and we add holidays and

Starting point is 00:36:02 the holidays are usually on a Monday, which means that people end up taking the Friday before off just as arbitrary as the 40-hour week. But the concern is, well, when will the work get done if everybody's taking all this time off? I mean, compared to the rest of the world, we actually don't have that many holidays. The rest of the world has quite a bit more time off than in the United States. And not that that needs to be our case here in the States, but I think that's where each individual business can ask themselves, what's a step forward for us? Because for the most part, I would say that adults are busier than they need to be. They're more unhealthier than they need to be. I walked through a 30-year health study that looked at a number of different factors. And our sleep is significantly worse than what we would say is optimized for our brains.

Starting point is 00:37:10 Our stress levels, our cortisol levels, all those things that indicate higher levels of stress than we need is through the roof. And I think that when we were in the pandemic, in the midst of it, during lockdown in 2020 and 2021, a lot of us got a glimpse into the box that had been created for us by the industrialists. It may work in some industries, but that there's also a number of different areas that we can apply things differently, that we can shift. And I think we're seeing that in this next generation where they aren't just thinking about having a job that's a 40-hour-a-week job, but instead they're saying, what's the life I

Starting point is 00:37:44 want to create? What are the outcomes? What's the impact? What are all those things that maybe I can create on my own where I don't need to just have someone, say, come into the office from eight to five every day to make it happen? Yeah. Well, but there are those jobs where people are paid by the hour. And so if you cut their hours, you cut their pay. Sure. Yeah. But in looking at those types of things, do we want our lowest income earners to have their hours cut? Do we want to have living wages? Do we want to have those kind of discussions? I think that's definitely a macro level discussion for us to say, if we're going to switch to something healthier, do we want that to be on the backs of our most

Starting point is 00:38:21 vulnerable people? Does that feel like the kind of society we want to create? I mean, I would say not, but I think that's a healthy debate that we could potentially have. So you would do what differently? Well, I mean, I think that when we look at individuals that are working hourly, I would want to look at, is this just a service-based industry? Is this an area that we're going to move to a four-day work week? We could make that same argument that you're making and say, well, then why should we even give them a weekend? Why wouldn't we have them work seven days a week? They could work more. Why have any sort of employment or labor law based on that question you just asked? And so if we're

Starting point is 00:38:57 going to say that a weekend is okay, the shift into a three-day weekend is not okay in some way, I think that's where we would want to examine different industries and see if we want to have different labor laws and have that discussion beyond just the typical kind of five-day work week model. What about when companies try this model? Here's your work. It takes you as long as it takes you to get it done. And if it's done in 30 hours,. And if it's done in 30 hours,

Starting point is 00:39:26 great. If it's done in 40 hours, great. So you do it where you want, when you want, however you want. It just has to get done. Does that work? Yeah, it often does work. But the problem with a lot of the supervisors or owners is they see we've been paying people X number of dollars to do what we thought took 40 hours, and they just got it done in 25 hours. And then they jump in and they say, well, let's increase the output that we want people to do for the same amount of money. And so rather than giving those people that extra time off or creativity time, they then say, holy cow, they were only at 55% capacity before. We need to now amp this up. or in future hires, they then go back to the

Starting point is 00:40:07 old model or change it. And then they kind of shoot themselves in the foot in that situation where yes, that makes sense. But then the individuals no longer have that positive reinforcement to be able to work as hard as they can because they don't get that free time back. Yeah. Well, that does seem to be a... If yeah, what used to take you 40 hours a week, now you can get done in 25. Why was I paying you for 40 hours of your time? It was happening anyway. And that's the part that we see

Starting point is 00:40:36 is that the productivity, oftentimes people aren't at that 100% productive. But when we're seeing what does the company actually want to achieve, the shift that we're seeing, especially post-pandemic, is the biggest key performance indicator in the past was showing up for 40 hours and not leaving. That is not an effective way to motivate people or compelling enough to get people to leave their houses now to come in. So we're seeing this great resignation because of that. So then the next step in is going to be, how do we help people do work that they care about in the time that they

Starting point is 00:41:09 prefer to do, while also saying we as owners or business leaders need to have key performance indicators that help us get to where we're headed. So the way you're describing this is that there's lots of positives and not many negatives to cutting the 40-hour work week, but people have been proposing this for a long time. There's a lot of resistance. There must be a reason for the resistance. So maybe it's not as rosy a picture as you're painting. Well, I think many of your questions point to what is the tough side of this next step. There was a messy middle after Henry Ford instituted the 40-hour workweek. There were businesses that jumped in.

Starting point is 00:41:51 There were businesses that didn't. It's not like overnight, all of a sudden, the 40-hour workweek just worked for people. There were industries that it didn't work for. And right now, in this post-pandemic generation, we have a window of opportunity to say, how do we want to do this? And that's where I believe that us doing public experiments and sharing data and saying, here's what's worked is going to be what helps us really find what for the most part in society works. The biggest pushback is, well, I'm paying these people for 40 hours. Why would I ever give them

Starting point is 00:42:21 an extra hour off? What happens with labor laws? What happens with unemployment insurance? What happens with vacation days and sick days and all of those things too? Our whole system right now is based on an industrialist model. And so there's going to be a lot of things that are going to need some undoing, some reshaping. There may be political things where we have to have new laws around specific areas, that's going to be a messy process. And we know that we are going to have a very difficult time going back to how things were pre-pandemic. Things are shifting. Right now, at the time of this recording, everybody I know that owns a business is short-staffed and looking for more staff that's quality. How do you retain great staff? Well, you give them something that other people aren't giving them. And so for right now, a four-day work week that's flexible, that helps

Starting point is 00:43:09 you figure out where are you headed and where do you want to go? I mean, that's a compelling argument for most people that want to have a job that has some meaning behind it. Now, at some point that may become the norm, but right now it's a unique selling point for people that are looking to hire really top quality people. Well, you say it's a messy process, but it would seem to be less messy if you didn't have to drag people kicking and screaming to change. So there must be an argument on the other side of this. Yeah. I mean, I think that the big argument is that the research continues to show us that there's

Starting point is 00:43:42 more creativity and productivity working fewer hours a week. Whether it's the Iceland study, there's a study out of the University of Illinois that I talk about that looks at our vigilance decrement, vigilance, how well we pay attention to a task decrement, meaning that it breaks down over time and looking at micro breaks, which by even just having strategic micro breaks can totally eliminate vigilance decrement. So people can pay attention better while they're working and get more done in a shorter period of time. There's enough neuroscience that's come out over the last couple of years that really is changing the way that we view the brain. Being trained as a psychologist, to me, having that current research to say, how do we do this differently? What are we learning from

Starting point is 00:44:22 science that we can actually implement? The way we did it five or 10 years ago is completely outdated when we look at the neuroscience. And so being able to step into how do we do our most effective work when we are working, and then also allow our staff and employees to step back and to genuinely be able to not be available 24 seven, that's going to be better for the brain and also better for business. So, I mean, to me, that's the biggest argument. The science is showing us over and over that this can work. It's just a matter of that personal buy-in coming along. Yeah. Well, that's what I'm trying to understand is if we've got all these studies that show the benefits of what you're talking about, and we've got examples of businesses

Starting point is 00:45:00 that have done it and done it successfully, then why is there still resistance? What's the argument on the other side of this? If you had to put the hat on of people who don't buy into what you're talking about, what is the reason why they don't buy into it? I mean, I would say that at least what I'm hearing is they feel like it's not broke. Why should I try to fix it? That most businesses, I would say, are more reactionary than intentional. When the profits are down, that's when they make changes. They add the marketing, they add new sales, they cut staff.

Starting point is 00:45:43 Rather than saying, where are we headed over the next six months to a year? How do we proactively make that happen? And so if we start with a posture of, we tend to react to the market instead of to create it, those type of people are going to continue to react instead of to be proactive. And so I would say the argument that I often hear is, we're doing okay. Why would we change things? Why would we gamble on something new if we don't know? When we see places like Kickstarter saying, you know what, in 2022, we're going to try the four-day work week. And they're doing that publicly. And they're going to, I imagine, be reporting out publicly. When we see more and more companies saying, this is going to be something that gets unique talent to come to us, I mean, that pushes back on the other side. But the other side of kind of that industrialist mindset, it has worked in a

Starting point is 00:46:25 certain way for a while. But this to me is that natural next step of business evolution. But there aren't always going to be people that buy into it right away until they see more and more evidence mounting. Yeah. Well, are there any businesses that I might know of that have done this successfully? And you're painting a very rosy picture but i'm wondering too if there are businesses that struggle with this that it doesn't work or that there there are problems that it isn't necessarily as rosy a picture as you're painting yeah i mean microsoft japan did an enormous study that showed great outcomes and then they they cut the program uh and we we reached out to them numerous times to get kind of

Starting point is 00:47:06 the behind the scenes of why they weren't willing to publicly talk about why. And so it was reported across the globe in the papers that they were doing this four-day workweek in Microsoft Japan, that it was successful, and then the program just disappeared. And so we see that these things happen publicly, that it works well, and then, you know, they go back to the old way. Sometimes companies will publicly say why and other times they won't. I imagine, too, there's this this fear that this is a slippery slope, that if we if we go to a four day week, well, Joe's going to be back in a couple of years with his new book about the three day week.

Starting point is 00:47:41 And then there's going to be the two day week. Yeah, all my friends are like, let me guess, the sequel's Wednesday's the new Thursday's the new Friday. Right. That's a valid argument of, well, when do we stop? But I would say right now, we know that the five-day week, and I would say the amount of people that are actually working 40 hours, it's probably significantly more than that when we look at the data. It's not working for the average person's health and lifestyle outcomes. And so moving to the four-day week, I think, is a huge step for the evolution of business

Starting point is 00:48:16 and for people in the same way that 1926, the 40-hour workweek was a big step. But we will continue to see if that's where it ends. We were working 10 to 14 hours a day, six to seven days a week at the late 1800s. So yeah, the 40-hour workweek, the four-day workweek, continuing to move, that may occur. I would say that's the challenge of the next generation after we achieve the four-day workweek, to say, what kind of health outcomes do we want? What kind of lifestyle outcomes? How do we creatively address the problems of our era? What I do know is that when we're stressed out and maxed out, that's not when we go to new things. And so if we look at the challenges we're most likely to see in the next hundred years, do we want a population of people that are stressed

Starting point is 00:49:00 out and maxed out in their jobs? Or do we want people that are able to creatively address the problems of the next hundred years? We have no idea what kind of jobs will be created. I mean, my kids are going to most likely be doing something that has yet to be invented for their job. And so to say, we want the most creative, innovative people moving into the next hundred years of problems, that's not going to happen when we're maxed out and stressed out. And so if we think with that long-term perspective, how do we get there? I would argue that working the four-day work week is going to be a step in that direction. Well, it does seem like it's coming. As you point out, it wasn't all that long ago that people were working six or seven days a week. And that seems so archaic now. And I imagine at some point in the not too far distant future,

Starting point is 00:49:47 people will look back at, wow, you worked five days a week in a row? That's incredible. So I suspect people's attitudes about work are changing and that's probably what's driving this. Joe Senec has been my guest and the name of his book is

Starting point is 00:50:04 Thursday is the New Friday, How to Work Fewer Hours, Make More Money, and Spend Time Doing What You Want. And you will find a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks, Joe. Michael, thank you so much for having me on the show. The simple tossing of a coin has been used to settle disputes and make decisions for centuries. And there does seem to be something to the idea. In fact, if you're having trouble making a decision, there are good reasons to pull out a quarter out of your pocket and call heads or tails. Here's why it helps.

Starting point is 00:50:41 First of all, it forces you to narrow the options down to just two. And secondly, when you flip a coin and it lands heads or tails, you have a gut reaction. And you should be ready to acknowledge that gut reaction. Because if you don't like the result of your toss, and then you find yourself going for, let's do two out of three. That's an indication that you're probably not ready to make that decision yet. And that is something you should know. Hey, we could really use your rating and review on Apple Podcasts. We're this close, this close to 5,000 reviews or ratings, and you could help us reach that mark. If you would just go to Apple Podcasts, it takes like no time at all. Leave a rating and review, and hopefully it's a five-star one.

Starting point is 00:51:33 I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B.

Starting point is 00:52:02 Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity the pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law her religious convictions and her very own family but something more sinister than murder

Starting point is 00:52:18 is afoot and someone is watching Ruth Chinook starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. Contained herein are the heresies of Redolph Buntwine, erstwhile monk turned traveling medical investigator.

Starting point is 00:52:43 Join me as I study the secrets of the divine plagues and uncover the blasphemous truth that ours is not a loving God and we are not its favored children. The Heresies of Randolph Bantwine, wherever podcasts are available.

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