The Tim Ferriss Show - #594: Cal Newport and Tim Ferriss Revisit "The 4-Hour Workweek" (Plus: The Allure and The Void of Remote Work, Unsustainable Behaviors, Burning Out, The Cult of Productivity, and More)

Starting point is 00:00:00 This episode is brought to you by Viore Clothing, spelled V-U-O-R-I, Viore. I've been wearing Viore at least one item per day for the last few months, and you can use it for everything. It's performance apparel, but it can be used for working out. It can be used for going out to dinner, at least in my case. I feel very comfortable with it. Super comfortable, super stylish. And I just want to read something that least in my case, I feel very comfortable with it. Super comfortable, super stylish. And I just want to read something that one of my employees said. She is an athlete. She is quite technical, although she would never say that.

Starting point is 00:00:34 I asked her if she had ever used or heard of Viore, and this was her response. I do love their stuff. Been using them for about a year. I think I found them at REI. First for my partner, t-shirts that are super soft but somehow last as he's hard their stuff. Been using them for about a year. I think I found them at REI. First for my partner, t-shirts that are super soft, but somehow last as he's hard on stuff. And then I got into the super soft cotton yoga pants and jogger sweatpants. I live in them and they too have lasted. They're stylish enough. I can wear them out and about. The material is just super soft and durable. I just got their clementine running shorts for summer and love them. The brand seems

Starting point is 00:01:02 pretty popular, constantly sold out. In closing, and I'm abbreviating here, but in closing, with the exception of when I need technical outdoor gear, they're the only brand I've bought in the last year or so for yoga running loungewear that lasts and that I think look good also. I like the discreet logo. So that gives you some idea. That was not intended for the sponsor read. That was just her response via text. Viori, again spelled V-U-O-R-I, is designed for maximum comfort and versatility. You can wear it running. You can wear their stuff training, doing yoga, lounging, weekend errands, or in my case, again, going out to dinner. It really doesn't matter what you're doing. Their clothing is so comfortable and looks so good. And it's non-offensive. You

Starting point is 00:01:47 don't have a huge brand logo on your face. You'll just want to be in them all the time. And my girlfriend and I have been wearing them for the last few months. They're men's core short, K-O-R-E. The most comfortable lined athletic short is your one short for every sport. I've been using it for kettlebell swings, for runs, you name it. The Banks short, this is their go-to-land-to-sea short, is the ultimate in versatility. It's made from recycled plastic bottles. And what I'm wearing right now, which I had to pick one to recommend to folks out there, or at least to men out there, is the Ponto Performance Pant. And you'll find these at the link I'm going to give you guys. You can check out what I'm talking about. But I'm wearing them right now. They're thin performance sweatpants,

Starting point is 00:02:29 but that doesn't do them justice. So you got to check it out. P-O-N-T-O, Ponto Performance Pant. For you ladies, the women's performance jogger is the softest jogger you'll ever own. Viore isn't just an investment in your clothing, it's an investment in your happiness. And for you, my dear listeners, they're offering 20% off your first purchase. So get yourself some of the most comfortable and versatile clothing on the planet. It's super popular. A lot of my friends I've now noticed are wearing this, and so am I. VioriClothing.com forward slash Tim. That's V-U-O-R-I Clothing.com slash Tim. Not only will you receive 20% off your first purchase, but you'll also enjoy free shipping on any US orders over $75 and free returns. So check it

Starting point is 00:03:14 out. Vioreclothing.com slash Tim. That's V-U-O-R-I clothing.com slash Tim and discover the versatility of Viore clothing. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time what I would take if I could only take one supplement. I've been asked this for years. The answer is invariably AG1 by Athletic Greens. I view it as all-in-one nutritional insurance. So you can cover your bases. If you're traveling, if you're just busy, if you're not sure if your meals are where they should be, it covers your bases. I've recommended it since the 4-Hour Body, which was God, eons ago, 2010, and I did not get paid to do so. With approximately 75 vitamins, minerals,

Starting point is 00:04:00 and whole food sourced ingredients, you'll be hard-pressed to find a more nutrient dense formula on the market. It has a multivitamin, multimineral greens complex, probiotics and prebiotics for gut health, an immunity formula, digestive enzymes, and adaptogens. You get the idea. It is very, very comprehensive. And I do my best, of course, to focus on nutrient dense proper meals, but sometimes you're busy. Sometimes you're traveling. Sometimes you just want to make sure that you're getting what you need. AG1 makes it easy to get a lot of nutrition when whole foods aren't readily available. It's also NSF certified for sport, making it safe for competitive athletes as what's on the label is in the powder. It's the ultimate all-in-one nutritional supplement

Starting point is 00:04:45 bundle in one easy scoop. Right now, Athletic Greens is giving my audience a special offer on top of their all-in-one formula, which is a free vitamin D supplement and five free travel packs with your first subscription purchase. Many of us are deficient in vitamin D. I found that true for myself, which is usually produced in our bodies from sun exposure. So adding a vitamin D supplement to your daily routine is a great option for additional immune support. Support your immunity, gut health, and energy by visiting athleticgreens.com slash Tim. You'll receive up to a year's supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your subscription. Again, that's athleticgreens.com slash Tim. Optimal, minimal.

Starting point is 00:05:28 At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seemed an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton. Me, Tim, Ferris, Joe. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of

Starting point is 00:05:55 The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers to tease out the routines, habits, etc. that you can apply to your own lives. This episode is going to be a little bit different. In this episode, past podcast guest and excellent writer Cal Newport interviews me for an article he ended up writing for The New Yorker titled, Revisiting the 4-Hour Workweek, How Tim Ferriss' 2007 Manifesto Anticipated Our Current Moment of Professional Upheaval. So the call itself was for material. We were having a conversation for this print piece that ended up coming out. And I really enjoyed the conversation and thought you might as well. So who is Cal? Cal Newport. You can find him at calnewport.com, C-A-L-N-E-W-P-O-R-T.com, is an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University, who previously earned his

Starting point is 00:06:45 PhD from MIT. His scholarship focuses on the theory of distributed systems, while his general audience writing explores intersections of culture and technology. Cal is the author of seven books, including most recently Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, and A World Without Email. He is also a contributing writer for The New Yorker and the host of the Deep Questions podcast. You can find my interview with Cal, me interviewing him, that is, at tim.blog slash calnewport. And you can find the 2007 talk at South by Southwest that launched everything. So my talk at that festival, my first ever keynote on the content and the concepts in the four-hour work

Starting point is 00:07:25 week at tim.blog.com. And with all that said, please enjoy. Tim, thanks for taking some time to talk with me today. My pleasure. Excited to dig in. Yeah. So I really want to focus, as we've talked about before, on the conception and immediate reception of the four-hour work week. Just to remind you of the context, I'm interested in this idea that that book's reception in 2007 was actually a warning shot of sorts about what was happening in the world of work becoming less sustainable. And it was a warning shot that sorts about what was happening in the world of work becoming less sustainable.

Starting point is 00:08:06 And it was a warning shot that was largely forgotten. And now we are feeling it today, the after effects of this thing that you were pointing out early. So I wanted to get into a little bit of story of the book and the reception. I'm going to ask you about that and get your thoughts about why, in some sense, that warning shot faded out of people's perception for a while. So that's the route I'm going to take, if that's amenable to you. It's absolutely amenable.

Starting point is 00:08:31 I'm game. All right. So I want to set the context of the times and the culture before you started conceiving this book. So right off the bat, you graduated Princeton, do I have this right? Right around 2000. What was the actual year you graduated? Exactly 2000.

Starting point is 00:08:48 Okay. And did you go straight from Princeton to Truesand? Was that your first job? I did. I did. Okay. Yep. Had the desk in the fire exit.

Starting point is 00:08:57 Very much not up to code. They were over capacity. So it was an exciting time to land in Silicon Valley. And you were there for that first crash, the 2001 crash. Yes, absolutely. So when did you begin to notice signs of unsustainability about the work culture out there? Was it Trusan? Was it Later with your startup? What was it like out there because and just as context this 2000 to 2005 roughly this is when as far as i can tell something tipped in the culture especially in silicon valley towards this sort of hyper-community of unsustainable so i know

Starting point is 00:09:35 somewhere around there this was happening you were there what were you seeing on the ground back then i was seeing what i suppose many people were seeing and engaging in, which is a heroic sprint or what was intended to hopefully be a sprint to cash in or cash out with these incredibly fast-growing startups. This was the new, new economy. All the rules were thrown out. At least that's how it was presented in the media and i think everyone there was inclined to believe it because it was a an

Starting point is 00:10:13 appealing fiction that you could sprint for a few years and everyone could make a ton of money and cash out turns out that is harder to do than it would seem on paper. But when things crashed, at least what I saw before the tech startup implosion was people coming into the office on the day before Thanksgiving or Thanksgiving and working late into the night and so on. That in and of itself is not intrinsically unsustainable for everyone, but it's unsustainable for a lot of people, right? If you're Ruth Bader Ginsburg, yes, you can do that for the entirety of your whole life. If you're Henry Kissinger, you can also do that. But I think the vast majority of us can't sustain that for an

Starting point is 00:11:02 incredibly long period of time. So I took the behaviors that I had developed working in the startup culture, working in a very fast-growing startup, and then applied it to my own business starting around, say, 2001. My tenure at Truesand didn't last very long because Truesand didn't last very long. And I was working across multiple time zones. I was waking up early, going to bed very, very late, and probably clocking, I would say, at least 12-hour days, typically. And what I began to notice, this was very early from a tech perspective, right? If you wanted to access certain, say, files on your computer, this is pre-Dropbox. You might have to use something like GoToMyPC to log in remotely and so on. As far as mobility and remote access, it was very, very early days.

Starting point is 00:11:59 We had Flintstones tools at the time compared to today. But the breaking point for me was about 2004. And I was dating a wonderful girl who I thought was probably going to end up my wife. And she broke up with me and gave me a, not exactly a plaque, but do you know those trifold photo holders that you get at a Target or something like that? They're sort of wire brushed and so on. And so she had created a collage of sorts. It showed me a photograph of my head cut out and pasted onto this paper body in a business suit with a briefcase with stuff flying out. And it said, business hours end at 5 p.m. And so she basically said, keep this for your health, put this on your desk. And at the end

Starting point is 00:12:49 of that relationship, what I realized was that outside of the pre-startup crash euphoria and the quick flips and so on, if I telescoped out, and if I'm not really getting to your answer, tell me, but this is sort of a microcosm of the macrocosm, if that makes sense. If I telescoped out a year, five years, 10 years, and looked at the behaviors, they were not sustainable. And the problems that were small were going to get bigger. The little physical issues that I had from sitting in front of a computer for those types of stretches were just going to compound, so on and so forth. And so that is when I decided to either completely rethink and remake the business or shut it down.

Starting point is 00:13:38 And that led to a commitment to back when you could buy a one-way ticket overseas without too much trouble. I bought a one-way ticket to the UK where I stayed with a college friend, crashed on a couch, and I committed to spend four weeks there to figure things out. And ultimately, even with the rudimentary tools at the time, was able to really automate and outsource an incredible amount at the time using things like Elance and again, remote access tools like go to my PC where you would still have to go to an internet cafe, mind you. I guess it was Easy Internet or Easy Cafe, which was the internet cafe equivalent or cousin of EasyJet, if that rings any bells. And I just continued traveling because I had sort of removed the need to be physically in one location. And that led me to travel around the world for

Starting point is 00:14:34 around a year. And over that period of time was guessed, and I'll stop in a minute because I'm not sure if I'm going in the right direction, but over that time and for actually many years prior from 2000, what was the date? I want to say it was 2003 to 2013, I guess lectured at Princeton twice a year in high-tech entrepreneurship class. And I was the bootstrap example. They had a lot of venture-backed entrepreneurs who would come speak to the class and I was the bootstrapping example. And I began to codify the rules that I had borrowed or refined for myself in this huge experiment, and that much later turned into the four-hour workweek. Just by the way, as an aside, there's not a business school at Princeton, so where were they hiding this high-tech entrepreneurship class?

Starting point is 00:15:26 I'm assuming it was probably phenomenally popular. It was very popular and relatively new, all things considered. It was in the, it was in two departments. It was ELE 491. So it was in electrical engineering. And even though it was decidedly non-technical, it was within electrical engineering. And also, I believe it was called, it may have changed in name, ORF, Operations Research Finance, like financial engineering and operations engineering.

Starting point is 00:15:55 So I believe it straddled both of those departments. And so you had undergrads and graduate students in that class. And it was phenomenally popular. The professor, Ed Hsiao, Z-S-C-H-A-U, is an incredible human, incredible teacher, incredible character. He's worth looking up. I don't know how much you want me to get into right now, but he was a former competitive figure skater, had been a congressman, had taken a couple of companies public, was one of the first computer science teachers at Stanford, had then taught at Harvard Business School. Of course, chronologically, all these things are out of order. And he was tremendously inspiring and also encouraging. And so he helped connect me

Starting point is 00:16:39 ultimately with the people who led to the job at TruZone. And was he, Ed, was who taught you the Pareto principle? Do I have that right? It's a good question. I'm not sure if Ed taught me Pareto's principle. The Pareto principle could also have come from a lot of reading. I mean, I've always been a voracious reader, so it could have come from any number of books. There was someone you cited, yeah, in your 2007 speech. Maybe it was a different Ed. Was there an Ed Lau? Is there a different Ted? If I had mentioned an Ed, it probably would be Ed Schell. So I'm perfectly happy to attribute it to Ed. We'll give him the credit. Rewinding just a little bit, though. So I like this idea that you have this, you know, the new new thing culture in Silicon Valley, late 90s, early 2000s.

Starting point is 00:17:34 Everyone wants the Jim Clark Hyperion yacht. You know, this is where I'm going to end up, right? And so, you know, you go and you go to your startup. You're like, this is how I'm going to push now because that's what you do. Now, in your case, you mentioned somewhere, I think maybe I'm going to push now because that's what you do. Now, in your case, you mentioned somewhere, I think maybe in the four-hour work week,

Starting point is 00:17:48 which I just, I reread last weekend. Oh, thanks for that. You mentioned cryptically. Well, it's great. I love the book. And I still remember my first listening of it after our common friend,

Starting point is 00:17:56 Ramit Sethi, called me. It was like, my friend Tim has this book. You got to read it today. And I listened to it on Audible or whatever it was back then. Ray Porter. Good narrator. Yeah. Ray Porter. Good narrator.

Starting point is 00:18:05 Yeah. Ray Porter is great. Yeah. He does a lot of thrillers now too. Yeah. He's prolific. You mentioned the book that you had made a fatal flaw with your company that meant that you weren't going to, this wasn't something you were going to sell in three years and

Starting point is 00:18:20 buy the yacht. A little bit of a side. I'm just curious. What was the fatal flaw that made the company something that wasn't going to be quickly sold? Well, I think that if you start with the end in mind, perhaps I'd started with the wrong end. And by that, I mean my relationships and contracts and so on would not necessarily transfer over to new leadership. So a lot of the business was dependent on me. Ultimately, I created the business because I understood that I had a very large margin of

Starting point is 00:18:53 safety with the actual profit margin. And it was also an area I understood really well. But the flaw was not, I mean, there were many, there was more than one flaw is the short answer, but there's a good book actually that people can read, which gives them pretty much the gist in the title and that is built to sell. And a more extreme example of something not built to sell would be say the Tim Ferriss show, the podcast, right? It is so intrinsically intertwined with me. There's a key man in this case, dependency. There's a bunch of that built into the business and that made it more difficult. The other piece that made it difficult in a sense, which can be a very elegant solution for, you know, I hesitate to call it a lifestyle business because some of these so-called

Starting point is 00:19:43 lifestyle businesses are really just cash flow, healthy businesses that are privately held, right? I think they get maybe an unfair knock. But with many of these lifestyle businesses, certainly a lot of the businesses that exist now and a lot of the businesses that were created after people read the 4-Hour Workweek, you would have one or two owners, and then you would have lots of contractors. And if you haven't assembled a management team that would effectively transfer as an acqui-hire, even if the price were larger, to another company, there are all sorts of complexities involved. So that's a bit of a meandering answer, but there are a bunch of weaknesses because I created it first and foremost, having never sold a company, having never invested in startups, having never even really considered how one would build a company to sell. I started it first and foremost to produce cashflow. And that's the long and short answer. Right. Exactly. That in some sense, because

Starting point is 00:20:47 you've mentioned before, for example, at some point people tried to knock it off unsuccessfully. And that's because it's not just the idea or assembling the right contractors. It's the intense focus on operations that the founder runner you injects into it, that I am here 7am to midnight doing all the things keeping the things up caring you are the operational cog yeah yeah absolutely you can hire all the contractors and set up a relationship with the manufacturer but if you're not paying attention to it cal may i add actually one more thing yeah sure of course i was just going to say i think it's important to note that because we're talking about sprints and i mentioned that word at least

Starting point is 00:21:24 and sustainability and so on. I think it is all things equal critically important if you are opting into, say, the venture-backed startup game where there are some zero-sum scenarios that you work your ass off. I do actually think that's important. If you're playing that game, and it is in some ways very similar to professional sports. It tends to favor the young who are really going to put nose to grindstone and are willing to engage in that type of full contact sport. But even within that type of intense environment, things very often take two

Starting point is 00:22:03 or three times longer than you would like them to and cost two or three times more. So it makes sense to have systems and habits and principles that support those types of contingency plans, if that makes any sense. Well, yeah. And I'm glad you brought that up because this sort of brings me to my next question, which is, you have this culture emerging in Silicon Valley where there's people making a run for startups that are going big. For the first time, this capital was there. Everyone saw what happened to Netscape, and then the firing gun had been fired. But then what interests me, and this is where I don't know if you have an answer or not, is that attitude metastasized out of people who were employee number three on a startup trying to hit an IPO schedule. And it grew to just, I'm a

Starting point is 00:22:49 programmer. I'm in the marketing department at this larger company. And then it grew out of Silicon Valley and the knowledge work more generally, this let's get after it, let's sprint this hustle culture. And the other place it had shown up where it was sort of necessary was in high finance. So in the 80s, I guess, you had Michael Lewis now for him looking at Silicon Valley. Of course, you had Liar's Poker. So it also was that culture was coming out of the managing director push in high finance in the 80s and 90s. And then we get this push for your startups. But it spread. And it spread to people

Starting point is 00:23:19 who I am not in line to. I don't own 30% of a company that my effort's going towards that I'm going to make a lot of money when this thing sells. And yet everyone began working more and more like that rarefied model of the founder trying to make their startup successful. I don't know if you have an answer. I don't have an answer, but I don't know if you have a thought on it. But why is this just Silicon Valley's cultural influence? Because this is what I saw. That idea spread and people began treating work became more and more that type of sprint, even when there wasn't a clear finish line that you were sprinting towards. It's a good question and I can only take an educated stab at it, but it's still speculative. I would say, I think what happens in Silicon Valley often is twofold. There are companies and people who are lionized and put on a pedestal. And therefore, culturally, there is a lot of imitation of Silicon Valley. I do think that's a piece. I do think, though, it's possible that an even larger piece is that Silicon Valley, certainly at that time, and there are more places like Silicon Valley now, whether that's New York City, Cambridge, Shanghai, Beijing, there are more places like it.

Starting point is 00:24:40 But if we flash back to the early 2000s, Silicon Valley was also the prototyping and testing ground for new technologies. And you had bleeding edge early adopters, even if technologies are available. I think of the William Gibson quote, which is very overused, but it is apt here, which is the future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed. And that's true in Silicon Valley. So for instance, years ago, you could go into a coffee shop in Palo Alto, and they were actually attempting, I think it was Coupa Cafe, C-O-U-P-A. They were attempting to allow you to pay in Bitcoin for your coffee. I don't think they had many takers, but nonetheless, that was an option. And similarly, I think whether it's

Starting point is 00:25:32 internet cafes, remote work arrangements, virtual organizations, a lot of these were tested early on. And you also had people buying tools and iPhones and so on, although the iPhone may have come later, with a certain density in Silicon Valley. And when you have all of those tools, and you have certain cultural norms, but they're enabled by a certain pervasive technology fetish, if we look at where we are now, it's easiest way to make the point that when you can always be connected, and when you don't have a single physical office, you can work all the time. And in fact, it's incredibly challenging and you need strategies and rules, maybe even technological constraints so that you don't work all the time. It bleeds over.

Starting point is 00:26:28 And I think that's a byproduct of not just the culture and the narrative, although that's a big piece of it. It's also a byproduct of Silicon Valley at the time, at least being sort of ground zero for density of new tech use, which then proliferated out to other places. I like this because I think it's the alternate hypothesis, and it's a hobby horse hypothesis of mine, that the other way to understand people getting more busy, work seeming less sustainable, we have my original hypothesis, which is there's this culture of overwork that came out of Silicon Valley. But what you're saying here is the other, I think, competing hypothesis, which is maybe

Starting point is 00:27:04 even more right. I mean, I just read a whole book about this. It was the tools. And that when you give people always on low friction digital communication, there's weird dynamics that occur. And I note, for example, in your 2007 sort of coming out South by Southwest talk, South by Southwest interactive talks, I want to get to a sort of the core of this book's release. And I just re-listened to it. Email is mentioned. You mentioned email four times in the first six minutes of that talk.

Starting point is 00:27:35 It is your personification in some sense of unsustainable work, right? The whole opening of this talk is about how work has become unsustainable. And email is brought up multiple times as the example. So this is the competing hypothesis, which is once email spread, and again, we can blame Silicon Valley in the sense that they probably prototyped like, hey, we should all be on email talking all the time. And that's where that came from. It became an accidental byproduct.

Starting point is 00:27:55 We can all reach each other at all times. There's no governor on that behavior. And the whole social, cultural, economic, business, culture environment just spiraled out of control. And suddenly no one knew what to do. We were constantly getting emails. We didn't know what to do with it. No one was putting a cap on that. No one was asking, how should we do it? So that's another

Starting point is 00:28:11 hypothesis that maybe that one's more accurate. Because you mentioned email so much when you were talking about this book in the time, I'm taking it that that's an important, to you, that's an important piece of part of what was making work less sustainable back then. Oh, for sure. And I mean, I think that, well, a few things. Number one, I would love to hear that talk because I haven't heard it since I gave it. I wasn't even aware that they had a recording. So if you could send a link to that, I would love to listen to it.

Starting point is 00:28:37 I have to. Do you remember your PowerPoint broke? Do you remember that? I do remember that. I absolutely remember that. I do remember that. It seemed like a metaphor for something. It seemed very profound. I absolutely remember that. I do remember that. It seemed like a metaphor for something. It seemed very profound.

Starting point is 00:28:45 It was very meta. So let me just, as a backdrop, say I think Silicon Valley in its best versions shows us the bright, optimistic, enabled, better future that we can have. You get glimpses of things that might only be seen on Main Street 5, 10, 15, 20 years later. So in that sense, it is a glimpse of things to come. Conversely, it's also the canary in the coal mine for new maladies, for new neuroses, for new afflictions that are related to new technologies and developments and cultural changes also, if they're associated with technology. So the email at the time was the email addiction and assorted issues was the easiest to point to. And Twitter is just an example. I think you and I

Starting point is 00:29:46 spoke about this some time ago, but my understanding is that Twitter launched officially that same South by Southwest. And I remember there being a huge big screen TV on the ground floor of the convention center where they had South by Southwest Interactive, which at the time was really the redheaded stepchild of the entire event. It was tiny. It was so small. And now it's the connective tissue that binds everything at South by Southwest together. But at the time, it was very small. And you could see all of the tweets being published in real time in the world on one big screen TV, and you could watch it. You could watch it slowly click through and you could see it scroll. It was incredible and kind of crazy to think that you could do that at that point in 2007. But Twitter wasn't ubiquitous. Social media

Starting point is 00:30:38 weren't ubiquitous in the same way that they are today. So email at the time was a clear example of a tool that was designed for defense purposes if we go back to like arpanet and so on best i can tell that was now being being adapted to be used as an instant messaging tool by millions of people. And I recall, I don't know if I mentioned this in the talk, but at the time, Robert Scoble was a big figure in this corner of tech. And he had said something to me along the lines, I may have only mentioned this in later talks, I don't know if I mentioned that one, but that the only way to receive fewer emails is to not respond. And that he had noticed when he responded to email,

Starting point is 00:31:31 for every email he responded to, he received something like 1.75 email in response. And that is the very definition of insurmountable. You used the word metastasize earlier in the conversation. I think that's very appropriate here. And if you begin to telescope out, just looking at if we take that math as roughly true for a lot of people in some fashion, it was very clear that we had either a broken tool and or a broken approach to handling this tool. And everybody empathized, especially the people in this audience at South by Southwest. I mean, these are tech early adopters who have maybe been sort of wading through the briar patches

Starting point is 00:32:22 and quicksand of high volume email by that point, perhaps for a few years longer than the mainstream. That acute pain perhaps had not been felt by a lot of other people, which is part of the reason why I think the four-hour workweek really, and it was deliberate on my part also, but it really took off among tech savvy and tech immersed knowledge workers in a handful of cities first. And I think it's because they felt the pain most acutely. And that matches my research. They're hard to find now, but I used to have people were posting notes, their notes from your session and the email, it's too much. Tell people you're not going to answer. All of that elimination ideas was just asterisk, exclamation point, Scoble's interview with you. Let's get into the email. You definitely felt that. This is where that tipping point was happening, but no one was yet saying this was unsustainable. My whole theory on this is that when I went back and did all the research on email spread, it spreads in the early 90s because

Starting point is 00:33:29 we needed more cost-effective asynchronous communication. It was replacing fax machines and voicemail, and it's cheaper, and it did it well, and it's good for that. And then we got what you said, which was, well, let's just use this as the main medium through which all collaboration happens. Hyperactive hive-minded back-and-forth conversation, that doesn't scale. That fried our brains, and tech got there first. But the problem was tech was the wrong place for that to hit first because they're such techno-instrumentalists in that world. They're like, okay, it's all about user habits.

Starting point is 00:33:58 If I can just get a custom Vim macro suite set up just properly, this was the era of Merlin Mann and Inbox Zero that like, if email is a problem, it's because I don't have the right setup. I don't have the right configuration. I don't have the right processing system for, and so they were going at it by saying, I'll just build better tools because the tech people, tech is quite neutral.

Starting point is 00:34:19 It's all about how you use it. So like, we must just be using this tool wrong, but I think you're right. And I agree with that theory that no, no, that the whole way is that organizations were using emails. Like this is how collaboration happened. There was nothing you could do to your inbox configuration that was going to save you from having to answer a lot of emails.

Starting point is 00:34:37 You had to actually change how the work happened, which is basically what a lot of what you were preaching. And maybe that's what made it transgressive at the time or a release. But I'm glad you had that same reaction because that's so strongly how I remember your talk. Is the email thing just landed, you know, like that was a punch that just landed and the audience was like, yes. Oh, yeah. Oh, etc. experiments and case studies which allowed people to see how infrequently the worst-case scenarios manifest landed in a very, very big way.

Starting point is 00:35:32 And just to build on what you said, it's very tempting to think that you can make surface-level changes to the tools and tactics that already lay on top of what you're doing. And it turns out, I think, certainly in hindsight, if we look at the last 20 years since 2000, I would imagine that if what I've seen is any reflection of a broader experience that instead of having an inbox now, you have five crowded inboxes. You have different messaging apps. You might have iMessage. You might have multiple emails. You might have any number of other applications that sit on the desktop or on your phone. And it's clear to me that you really, at least, I mean, millions of people who have read the 4-Hour Workweek

Starting point is 00:36:31 have found it more helpful to start with first principles and questioning assumptions and identifying possible worst-case scenarios, how to mitigate them, and then running experiments a little higher up the stack, if that makes any sense, or further upstream, just to mix all my metaphors. Because at the end of the day, if you have an unsustainable approach, you can window address it with an upgrade or an application switch, but you're not typically addressing

Starting point is 00:37:03 root causes. And I think that's why even now, since you just read it last week, I mean, you can say as credibly as anyone that the resources in the 4-Hour Workweek are out of date. And many of the examples, how to market test, how to launch what people would now call an MVP, have all changed. But the book still sits in top few hundred on Amazon generally to this day, somewhere in the top thousand. And I think it's because of the principles. It's because the principles and the stories and the pain are still present and can still be used, or in the case of the pain, minimized by revisiting the fundamentals.

Starting point is 00:37:48 Right. You're saying it's not go to my PC and keep your wiki fans? That's right. That's right. Yeah. Those are no longer relevant. And this is actually a great point. If you think the latest app is going to save you, you're just going to have to repeat the drill six months later, 12 months later. There's very little durability to a tactic-based or a tool-based approach in my experience. Right. You're not one Slack plugin away from productivity nirvana. From nirvana. From nirvana, right. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. Small business owners juggle 100 balls and don't have time to interview unqualified or even underqualified job candidates. LinkedIn Jobs

Starting point is 00:38:42 makes it easier for you to find the people you should interview faster and for free. Create a free job post in minutes on LinkedIn Jobs to reach the world's largest professional network of more than 770 million people. Then add that job and the purple hashtag hiring frame to your LinkedIn profile to spread the word that you're hiring so your network can help you find the best applicants for the position. Simple tools like screening questions make it easy to focus on candidates with just the right skills and experience so you can quickly prioritize who you'd like to interview and possibly hire. It's for all of these reasons and more that small businesses rate LinkedIn Jobs number one in delivering quality hires versus leading competitors. LinkedIn Jobs helps you more quickly find the candidates you want.

Starting point is 00:39:26 Did you know that every week, nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn? Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash tim. That's linkedin.com slash tim to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. One of the things you talk about for our work week is in elimination, you talk about, I don't like productivity. And I think most time management is, in some sense, a waste of time. This is smart people spending too much time trying to be more efficient instead of trying to be smarter about what they do. And I recently did this big piece for The New Yorker on, it was called

Starting point is 00:40:02 The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done. And it was about the rise of the productivity prawn movement, which was this movement that felt like with the right high-tech tools and scripts and database-backed applications, you could basically make work, you could tame all your work and it would be easy. An interesting thing about that timeline is that that movement picked up all of its speed in the three or four years before the four-hour workweek came out. And around the time the four-hour workweek came out, one of the main organs of that, which was Merlin Mann's 43 Folders blog, which was a really important thing at the time. Oh, it was hugely influential. Yeah. Basically, not shut down,

Starting point is 00:40:39 but it redirected away from, this isn't going to work. That's kind of the point of this article that followed Merlin's story, but it was like, okay, we isn't going to work. That's kind of the point of this article that followed Merlin's story, but it was like, okay, we're not going to solve work by just having Quicksilver scripts and KGTD. Like, actually, we need to rethink work. All of that was concurrent. So when you were looking at productivity is not working, time management is not working,

Starting point is 00:40:57 is that what you were seeing, that moment of that, that brief moment of optimism where we thought with like the right Mac configurations, we can make our overwhelming work effortless without having to actually ask the question of what our work is. You might not remember. I mean, this is a while ago. No, I remember a lot of it. I think that last portion is true for me, at least in the sense that the cult of productivity, and we have to be very careful with that term. And you've written about this. I read your recent piece, actually, which I thought was very good. We have to define productivity very carefully lest we become the greyhound chasing this rabbit around a track, not knowing why we're there in the first place. And those who are mesmerized by technologists and technology are very prone to getting extremely efficient at doing things that are not important.

Starting point is 00:41:57 And sometimes they do apply to things that are important, but the thrust of the four-hour workweek, I would say in a nutshell, is what you do is more important than how you do it. And put another way, being effective is more important than being efficient. So let's think really hard about the 80-20 principle, otherwise known as Pareto's law, such that if you focus on the highest leverage things, even if you fuck up every which way from Sunday, you have such a margin of safety and such a disproportionate output for the time that you put in, it's okay. Does that make sense? So if you look at Churchill, Drucker, I mean, a lot of these figures who were massively productive by almost any definition, I mean, taking naps, you got like Ulysses S. Grant, alcoholic, you know, it's not like they were sitting in front of a typewriter

Starting point is 00:43:02 or dictating or active, frenetically active all the time. That was just not the case. So yeah, I agree with you. And I think anyone who has attempted to kind of address the malaise of overwork by adding more tools and tricks and scripts realizes pretty quickly that the water's always going to fill faster than you can bail it out with that type of approach, at least in my experience. Yeah. I think that idea was very influential for me too. I got it from you. I got that from the 4-Hour Workweek, but I thought about it recently. I wrote an essay over the

Starting point is 00:43:43 summer where I read a book about the history of a lot of great scientists, about the history of science. And I wrote this essay that was saying, Galileo didn't work that much. And yet we see him as being incredibly productive, but he was rarely busy. That's a Far Our Work Week idea. I just want to say one more thing, because it's so tangible for folks. A lot of people don't identify with scientists or maybe even writers, but this is true of a lot of the world's best investors also. I mean, Warren Buffett, don't just do something, stand there instead of don't just stand there, do something. And very laziness bordering on sloth, I think is how either he or Munger have described their investing approach. You don't have to do a lot if you get a few things right, if you really pick your targets

Starting point is 00:44:32 well. Okay, good. Now that you've brought it up, let me just, as an aside, pitch you this. This idea I've been developing on my podcast recently, slow productivity. And here's my whole concept. I don't know. Let's see if this makes sense. Productivity depends on scale. So when you say, what I want to do is maximize what I produce on the scale of weeks, you're going to be very, very busy.

Starting point is 00:44:54 Let's get things moving. Email is going back and forth. I'm jumping on calls or what have you. But if you change the scale to years, like I want to maximize what I produce over the next five years to be as impressive as possible. It's like a completely different game because now it's like, I want to produce three great produce over the next five years to be as impressive as possible it's like a completely different game because now it's like I want to produce three great things in

Starting point is 00:45:08 the next five years which means your Wednesday you might do nothing right it's like scale so this is my this is my new thing maybe scale the scale at which you're talking about producing changes the rhythm of what your everyday everyday feels like But this is all aspirational for me because I have too much going on. I love that phrasing, slow productivity or patient productivity is maybe another way to look at it and not to revert back to investing over and over again. But money is such an important, tangible, scary, alluring thing to people that it's useful as an instrument when talking about some of these principles. And I read a book recently, well, listened to a book called The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel.

Starting point is 00:45:57 And I was quite impressed by it. And one of the chapters explored the importance of playing your own game and not other people's games, but that entails knowing what games they are playing. So for instance, if you have momentum traders who are in very short positions, who really don't care if, let's just use an arbitrary example, if Google has a higher price a year from now, but they do care, they don't care about fundamentals, anything like that, free cashflow, whatever. They don't care about any of that. What they do care about is market sentiment or behavior driving up the price that they can sell tomorrow or a week later. And it's important to know the motivations and the games of other participants, because if you have a different time horizon, your way of relating

Starting point is 00:46:45 to that is totally different. For instance, can I guess, and this is not investment advice, but can I guess correctly whether a stock is going to go up or down by what percentage over the next week? No. Over a year? No. Probably not. I mean, any kind of cataclysm could hit. But there are certain trends over time where it's like, yeah not. I mean, any kind of cataclysm could hit. But there are certain trends over time where it's like, yeah, do I think there are certain technologies that inescapably are going to become more pervasive in a five to 10-year stretch? And if I invest in companies that are investing heavily in those areas, do I have a pretty high degree of confidence it's going to go up? Yep. And that's all the homework I really need to do. Does that make

Starting point is 00:47:25 sense? And similarly, with productivity, if your time horizon is like, how can I get the most important things done over the next five years? And that's reasonably well thought through. But you're reading interviews with people on the cover of magazines if that's even a thing anymore who are in a mad sprint in a zero-sum startup game to like dominate market share and do god knows what you're playing different games they're just different games was that your mindset when you moved into podcasting like now we're doing a long game because you had a lot going on and it seems like you simplified things and at first it must have been the first month you're moved into podcasting. Now we're doing a long game. You had a lot going on. It seems like you simplified things.

Starting point is 00:48:09 At first, it must have been the first month you're doing that is not an empire. Oh, yeah. I'm not sure if this is going to be relevant, but I'll tell you, the podcast came about because the four-hour chef just about killed me. It was such a complex project done in such

Starting point is 00:48:24 tight timelines. It was such a complex project done on such tight timelines. It was one of the most grueling things I've ever done physically. Very, very difficult project. what is the different channels and forms of media that are decreasing in influence but are thought to have still very high influence by the majority and thus kind of overvalued in some fashion. This could apply to paid acquisition too. And then I'm looking at the neglected darlings that are undervalued in some way, uncrowded in some way, but growing in importance. And so podcasts, I do this every book launch, and the podcasts came out pretty uniformly as having a massive impact. This is in 2012, 2011, 2012, planning this. So I did a lot of podcasts for the book release. And they had a tremendous impact. And I really enjoyed the format and decided that I wanted to test podcasting for, I think my commitment was six episodes. But here's the rationale. The rationale was, or rather the question that I would ask myself is,

Starting point is 00:49:40 is there a way that I can win doing this even if I fail? And the way that I win doing something even if I fail is if I develop skills and relationships or deepen relationships that transcend that project as a failure. Does that make sense? Scott Adams writes a lot about this really well. And in the case of the podcast, I thought to myself, well, I'm going to take a break from books no matter what, given the type of books I write, I do interviews minimum effective dose is for podcasting? Like how many episodes would I actually have to do to start to get better at speaking and interviewing? I was like, ah, six to 10, probably great.

Starting point is 00:50:33 Let's commit to that. And then I was off to the races and it's become a lot more since, but that's how it started. Interesting. Yeah. I was just, I was curious about that. So that's a, I'm glad we got that that detour but okay

Starting point is 00:50:47 so going back to work being unsustainable warning shot when you got this opportunity to speak at South by Southwest 2007 at

Starting point is 00:50:56 South by Southwest Interactive this was potentially a hostile crowd as far as I can tell right because these were Silicon Valley types I mean it was at this music festival

Starting point is 00:51:04 but this is where all the khaki pants were and all the best were. These were people who were going after it, crushing it, trying to get their startups turned around. So it kind of could have gone both ways. So because this was ground center. So were you worried about that? Or were you, you knew everyone, enough people in this world, you're like, yeah, everyone's going to be on board with this. What's the mindset going into that crowd? The mindset was, I really don't have much to lose in the sense that if it works, great. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. And I'm right back where I started. And I felt like I knew that crowd because I was a member of that crowd on some level, if that makes sense. And I also wanted to approach it,

Starting point is 00:51:49 maybe this is part of the mindset, by telling my story and describing case studies. You would know better than I because I haven't heard it since I gave it, but I don't think I was saying you have to do this and everyone should do X, Y, and Z. There were certainly prescriptions, like you could do this, this is what I've done, this is what so-and-so did. But it was really sharing a story and there was so much common pain. I knew the pain was going to land. I knew it was going to land because I had also workshopped the material on classes for years of technologists. And now these are undergrad and graduate students. But nonetheless, I was living in Silicon Valley.

Starting point is 00:52:32 So I was surrounded by friends who were co-founders and people who were using technology. So I was very highly confident that the very least, the various pains would be something people would identify with. And also, maybe a little known fact, Hugh Forrest, who I thank pretty much every time I speak at South by Southwest, gave me a shot. I did not have a proper room. The talk was given in basically an overflow room, I want to say, that also acted as a mini cafeteria. And there was a cancellation. There was some type of cancellation. And to my memory, he was like, hey, if you still want a shot, we got a spot.

Starting point is 00:53:15 Here's this little stage. And I want to say the capacity was something like 100, maybe 100 to 150 people, somewhere in that range. And no one knew who the hell I was. And it was packed. It was packed. And that had nothing to do with me. It had zero to do with me. It had to do with the pain and the potential of some toolkit that would help alleviate that pain. But it was standing remotely. And that is purely from subject matter. The structure of the talk was six minutes, seven minutes pain. Like, let's get into the pain.

Starting point is 00:53:58 And then relief in, you know, we can radically rethink what work is. And now we'll talk through different ways you might do that. One of the things I picked up re-listening to it recently, too, is the other thing that seemed to land in there was the examples you gave about it's okay to do things that might make someone else's life temporarily less convenient. For some reason, that really landed. Put an autoresponder and say, I'm not going to respond to you right away. Or fire a client. Those two things really seem seem to land do you think that gets at the pain

Starting point is 00:54:29 in a pretty clear way like or the frustration i definitely came away with that because when i heard those two things i remember those things landing when i first heard your talk and they landed whatever this is now 14 15 years later it's okay to basically tell some people, you have to be inconvenienced here. So there must have been something going on where everyone could just grab you and your time and there was a helplessness. And that frustration was palpable when those examples really, I think those examples really got to it. For sure. And it's also, the sort of interpretation is in the eye of the beholder here, but one way to look at it would be, it's okay if you inconvenience other people. The other way to look at it is, it is not just okay, but it's imperative that you prioritize your self-care.

Starting point is 00:55:15 And if you don't, you're not going to be a player in this game very long. And if you don't establish boundaries and ask for what you want, indicate what you don't want, the world will be happy to program all that for you. And chances are it's not going to turn out very well. what I would consider a positive assertiveness, or you can build resentment and accrue fatigue until you break. And it's not only those two options, but I think it's perhaps useful to think of the two in opposition. And that definitely landed for folks. And the tools are important, right? I don't want to say that the tools aren't important, but ultimately, it's asking better questions, it's testing assumptions, and it's really reorienting yourself with different philosophies and a different psychology. for anyone to wait an hour or two or three or even a day or two or three for a response in some instances, it doesn't matter what tool you use. It just doesn't. And impatience will just swell to fill the void if you allow it on behalf of everyone who is being trained to be impatient. What was the private reception, if you remember?

Starting point is 00:56:50 So now you've given the talk, standing room only, you're socializing, the parties, et cetera, that makes up South by Southwest. Do you remember what were people talking to you about, growing to you about, excited about? I would say that the vast majority, it's been a while, right? So to my memory, the vast majority of the conversations began with a confession of some type.

Starting point is 00:57:14 People came up to talk about their pain or their situation or the unrealistic expectations that are made of them and how they feel like they have digital handcuffs of one type or another. I mean, it almost always started with some type of confession and commiserating, right? Because I'd been there and done that. So I wasn't an outsider in that sense. I was a fellow patient, if that makes any sense. And people were also excited and nervous to test things. So they were looking for reassurance that these were experiments worth doing with limited downside, which is always how I painted it. I said, I would ask questions, and you've heard this again. I haven't heard the talk since I gave it, but what is the absolute worst case scenario if you put up an autoresponder? Are you going to be fired sight unseen because you created an autoresponder? Okay. Then you determine what you think the worst case scenario is. How could you mitigate the risk of that downside? Maybe you talk to your boss in advance. Maybe you test it only for half a day on Fridays when your boss leaves at 3 p.m. and you can get to see how

Starting point is 00:58:31 co-workers respond to it. And then how would you sort of reverse the damage if the worst-case scenario comes through? Well, you take the autoresponder down. What is the residual damage of that, really? And if the damage is containable if it's finite and you look at the potential upside of what it could mean to you if it works that is a gamble worth taking right it's just an asymmetric bet and so i really tried to frame it that way i was like look I'm not saying that anyone should commit to doing these things forever, right? Because a lot of the concerns and the pushback would be like, well, what if this, and what if that, and what if all these scenarios?

Starting point is 00:59:14 I can't account for all the scenarios, but I do know that in my own life and in the life of the people who served as case studies, a short test, 24 hours, 48 hours is very valuable because it provides you with more information and it either confirms or questions a lot of the fears associated, the anxieties associated with it. So a lot of the conversations are around that and people got right to it. I mean, South by Southwest lasts a while. So there were people who began to test autoresponders the next day. And so people then started coming up to me to share their kind of hallelujah. I thought all these horrible things were going to happen and none of them happened. At the same conference.

Starting point is 00:59:59 At the same conference. I mean, I think that's a very important point that the freedom to experiment is the meta value. Like in other words, like the book and your talk is a microcosm of the book first lays out, here's this pain that wasn't being articulated. And so people say, thank you, right? No one's articulating this. They're all saying, God, you know, get after it. And then the second part is you have a lot more options than you think. You can even be relatively radical and re-engineering what work means. Go out there and try things.

Starting point is 01:00:28 And then the book had specific things to try. But am I paraphrasing or summarizing the reaction, how you were thinking properly when you were saying it's not that you have to build a particular automated muse that uses VAs in this very particular way. You should be doing that type of experiment. Be willing to say, well, what if I did this? Let me try this. And you might not end up selling French sailor shirts, but you can almost- I forgot about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you could almost certainly end up with a much better work configuration. It might look much different. The person who always comes to mind, and I won't use his name because I didn't ask him permission, but he's a common friend of ours and was really big, you know, on your

Starting point is 01:01:08 book when it came out. I met up with him at some point, I think it was 2008 in Rio. And I was there presenting a paper at a computer science conference. He was there for Carnival. He's a lifestyle designer. And when I first met up with him, he was showing me, okay, I've written this code. It was like very in line specifically with the examples in the book.

Starting point is 01:01:30 It goes through the Google AdWords, automatically finds like what underperforming, you know, value AdWords. I click this button and it automatically sends a email to my VAs in the Philippines who are good English speakers who then write 25 articles on this topic

Starting point is 01:01:44 and put it on HubSpot so we can get a high price for these. He wanted, you know, very, very automated. And then I met up with him a couple of years later. And what he was doing was much more sustainable. He was a computer programmer. I found that I'm working remotely hourly, but for a European company. And I'm getting paid in euros. And I'm living mainly in South America.

Starting point is 01:02:04 And there's a great geo-arbitrage going on there. And it was this spirit of rethink your work life. His first attempt was, let me exactly follow one of the examples in the book. And then where he ended up was, actually, I'm getting mobility, I'm getting geo-arbitrage, there's bigger concepts.

Starting point is 01:02:22 And then he ended up going to an incubator and doing a startup because he had time to think about things and what he wanted to do. Anyway, so to me, that always summarized that point you're making there, that you can do radical things that are different than the thing that's very unsustainable now, but you have to go take

Starting point is 01:02:36 action, experiment, and that's okay. And even if some people get mad, that's okay. But there's a wide variety. And especially as time changes and tech changes, and let's say today, people are not incredibly nervous about asking for a remote work arrangement. But when that book came out, that was incredibly avant-garde. So the times have changed. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:02:52 But that general principle approaches, that applies. Even two years ago, a lot of people would still relate to remote work very differently than they do today. Both as employers and employees. And I want to take, if it's okay with you, just take a step back for a second, because the point you made about timescale and how you think about, say, productivity leads me to want to also just mention at the very least that the four-hour workweek started with some overarching kind of macro principles and the definition section, right? There's the definition, elimination, automation, liberation, all that. The definition section, the purpose of that was to uncover

Starting point is 01:03:48 perhaps unexamined assumptions, like these invisible scripts that are running a lot of our decisions and long-term planning, and to question them and then to offer alternatives. So for instance, taking a very close look at what i called in the book the deferred life plan right the deferred life plan which is this sort of slave save retire i will redeem my decades of work for this sort of utopian vision of leisure in my older years and that will work for me and be great has dozens of unexamined assumptions inside of it. And then offering alternatives like mini-retirements and distributing retirement throughout life since long life is not guaranteed. And there are all sorts of other issues with assuming you'll have enough for retirement with no income, etc. There are others that I'm just going to mention because they may be interesting to take a closer look at. One would also be, and this is very relevant now, that, well, two things. One is

Starting point is 01:04:56 that there's absolute and then relative income. So determining how much you make per hour is actually quite important in the sense that it's easy to say so-and-so makes $200,000 a year, so-and-so makes $75,000 a year, another person makes $500,000 a year. Therefore, the last example is the most successful and no doubt they have the greatest sort of lifestyle output for what they make. But the lifestyle or life value of each unit, each dollar is really dependent on other factors and to what degree you control them. The where, with whom, how, et cetera, determines a lot of that, which is part of the reason that geo-arbitrage or geo-arb was another thing that was,

Starting point is 01:05:45 I don't know if it was put on the map, but it was definitely kind of thrust into the zeitgeist by readers of this book. The idea that you can geo-arbitrage, which you can do in a single country or even a single state, right? It doesn't have to be scattering different income and expenses around the world. It could be you've gone through COVID, you lived in Manhattan, you decided this makes no sense to escape the city, you went to New Jersey or Long Island or Connecticut or who knows where, right? Upstate New York. You realize you prefer that quality of life and that you can get four times the value for money in certain locations, even just within a radius of a few

Starting point is 01:06:26 hours. I just think the definition section is super, super important. We don't have to dwell on it, but I just wanted to mention some of these overarching approaches to deconstructing assumptions that underlie a lot of our decision-making. Let's pull on that thread, in particular, a thread about today. This message was 15 years ago, work is unsustainable, be willing to consider radical changes to what work is and what role it plays in your life. There's the mystery of why that warning shot was somewhat ignored in the semi-immediate aftermath, which I'll get back to in a second. But we fast forward to today, especially COVID post-pandemic. As someone who's writing about these topics right now,

Starting point is 01:07:08 this is exactly what's on everyone's mind. This book and what you're talking about, everyone is going through, not everyone, but there's a very large fraction of, let's say, remote capable knowledge workers who had severe disruption in what their day-to-day life was like due to the pandemic who are going through the thinking. You mentioned before, you're seeing the book is catching, not catching a new wave, it's always sold well, but it's finding an audience now, a new audience? It's never really stopped, but I would imagine, I would have to imagine it's finding a new audience. I mean, a friend of mine, old friend, sent me a photograph from Austin. He said, oh, this makes me happy. And he said, it was a photograph of a young guy,

Starting point is 01:07:48 probably late 20s, reading The 4-Hour Workweek, the only hardcover edition, or I should say the latest hardcover edition that exists, which is the 2009 expanded and updated edition. So 11 or 12 years later, post-COVID, this is still finding an audience and it's finding new audiences. I think in part because there were early adopters for this book and there were people who really ran the tests and did the experiments in the book. And then there was also, of course, it's called The 4-Hour Workweek. There was a lot of dismissing it based on the title, even though, I mean, on some level, it's really about maximizing per hour output, right? On some level, it's about that. But for the title, because of how popular it became in the subsequent year,

Starting point is 01:08:43 it was on the New York Times bestseller list, I want to say, for, I could get you the exact duration, but like four and a half years, five years straight, something like that. And it became part of the pop cultural conversation. And I think that there are many, many, I mean, there have to be at this point, just given the exposure of the book, millions of people who have seen the book, they've heard about the book, and they concluded, this will never work. This can never work for me. And then all of a sudden, this discussion of time and mobility, which is the centerpiece of the four-hour workweek, has been pushed to the forefront of everyone's mind through this gigantic experiment called COVID-19. people who thought they wanted to work in a certain way after having experienced alternatives are saying, wait a second, I actually don't want to go back to the office. How do I figure this out? And there are also, I don't want to say risks, but challenges in working remotely,

Starting point is 01:10:01 in feeling like you have and developing community when you are fully distributed. And these problems existed certainly when the four-hour workweek was initially released. They still exist. So I feel like we are still in the honeymoon phase of remote work for millions of people. They think they found the promised land, but I don't think they have experienced some of the harder aspects. Like the filling the void chapter in for our work week talks about this right so i think for a lot of these reasons and more the book has definitely seen a new resurgence of interest yeah why in the interim it's a mystery that i'm curious about in the interim between when it first hits work is unsustainable you should'm curious about. In the interim between when it first hits, work is unsustainable.

Starting point is 01:10:45 You should try radical new things. In the interim, over time, the book and pop culture beyond people who are directly engaged with the book got associated with something different. And I mentioned this to you via email, but I think about 2011, The Office brings up the book. Daryl brings up the book, the character Dale in The Office. And by that point in 2011, when he's bringing up this book, it has nothing to do with work being unsustainable and radically rethinking work. It is all just how do I be more hyperproductive, which is almost the opposite of what the book was on their radar, but they didn't engage with the book, that's for a lot of people became associated with like being hyperproductive by using sort of radically inventive in the systems you use for the purpose of getting more done, which is not what the book was about. And so this is sort of this mystery to me is that this big warning shot was happening. We feel it today.

Starting point is 01:11:41 Huge. Yeah, work's not sustainable. We need to rechange it but in between somehow that warning shot for a lot of people got changed to um how can we use tech and innovative systems to get even more done yeah it's a damn fine question you know before our work week became and you know i didn't mind i thought it was kind of funny this yeah sort of pop culture productivity novelty that word again. Novelty. Novelty, yeah, in a way, right? So it shows up on The Office or the cast from, well, supposedly the cast, I mean, it's probably a bunch of ghostwriters, but from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia wrote a book called The Seven Secrets of Awakening, the highly effective four-hour giant today.

Starting point is 01:12:21 Right? So you can see what that is. And I would love to hear your theory for why this is, but I think it's deeply, deeply uncomfortable. And it can be deeply, deeply challenging to really question the assumptions and plans that are the underpinning for much of your existence, your waking existence. And I think it's very uncomfortable. that are the underpinning for much of your existence, your waking existence. I think it's very uncomfortable. And it's not as cleanly measurable, perhaps,

Starting point is 01:12:56 as installing a new Chrome plugin that helps you do A, B, and C. And I cleared 17% more email in the last hour. That type of trackability and that type of trackability and that type of countability is really alluring so the productivity porn like real porn is highly addictive and highly distracting and as new technical doodads and applications and approaches surfaced, even if they're old approaches that are being reinvented, right? Using note cards or index cards for various things.

Starting point is 01:13:35 It's a very graspable, appealing novelty that I think almost everyone gravitates towards. It's not surprising to me that the four-hour workweek became a representation of a collection of productivity tricks or techniques or technologies, because it did include that, in fairness. But I think that what is unfortunate but not surprising is that the four-hour work we sort of treated like a toolkit and a bunch of construction materials but used without the blueprint and the approach and the guiding design principles that are

Starting point is 01:14:19 explored in the first say two sections especially Those two things are divorced, where in my mind, the blueprints and the design principles, those are the most valuable and most important piece. And then the tools, those are all going to change over time. And I expect them to change over time. That's what I've observed. Did you observe people doing that? Just just looking at the hacks and not or was it the the perception of the people who weren't reading the book but just this is what i think it is because you of course you're around this crowd a lot more yeah i think it's more the latter the book is written in a way if you start at page one you cannot get around the sort of philosophical resets and questioning of assumptions and design principles. You can't get around that. 100% true. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:15:08 But if you are reading a blog post that is supposedly a summary of the four-hour workweek, or you are reading any number of books that followed the four-hour workweek, which were intended to capitalize on that wave of popularity, they focused almost without exception on the tools and the tricks and the latest websites and the best virtual assistant services and so on. Again, not to say those don't have value. They do have value. But without the underlying frameworks and principles, I don't think you end up solving many problems. And in fact, I think you can end up creating a lot of new problems. Well, and maybe some of that was, I mean, you're 100% right because I just reread the book.

Starting point is 01:16:01 There's no other way to interpret the book if you read it. There's no other way to interpret it than this is unsustainable. You have to craft the life that emphasizes the other currencies that are important. This is what the good life is built on. Oh, now let's talk about how you might do it. And part of this, I have two theories I'll throw at you. Part of this, I think, is don't underestimate the degree to which the way you did talk about the systems when you got there was so new and compelling that it almost opened up a new genre and tone in productivity. There was a, I don't quite know how to articulate it, but there was a precision and a brashness to, you know, it was like very declarative and precise and it's kind of hard to articulate, but the way you would talk about, and the VA should do this, and don't do it for this.

Starting point is 01:16:50 I can't do it justice, but it's very compelling in itself. So I think you might have introduced a stylistic approach to giving advice that itself could be separated from the context, right? Because that's a great – it's a very compelling – but but it's very compelling the book is very compelling beyond the content so there's yeah there's something in in that tone but then the other thing is i i think and i talked when we last talked we kind of i was bringing this up to you is that i've been covering recently i'm very interested in the the anti-productivity movement and it's very powerful right now and i'm taken by the degree to which when you read people who are in this movement, the way they characterize what is popular in productivity and time management is invented.

Starting point is 01:17:33 It's fabricated. When they talk about what productivity books are out there right now, they will say, it's like, yeah, it's all about trying to get 60 things done and find more time in your day to get things done. And so I go over to, okay, time management in Amazon. Let's look at the bestseller list, right? What are the commonly the top three books there? It's usually shifting back and forth between For Our Workweek, my 2016 book, Deep Work, and Greg McKeown's 2015 book, Essentialism. All of these books are about working less, getting away from distraction, getting away from busyness, trying to get the things that are more meaningful. I mean, you have to go down pretty far. I mean, David Allen shows up pretty early, but I think he's misinterpreted. I think

Starting point is 01:18:14 he's more about, I hate the fact we have so much to do, but let's at least try to tame it so we don't go insane, right? You can't really interpret him as pushing for overwork. I can't find on the list of bestselling time management books right now anything that is, how do we get more done? I think the last book like that that just straight up lionized that was maybe Hyper Productivity from eight years ago or something like this. And so that also seems to be an effect that's going on is that for people who are characterizing for our work week or any of these books or characterizing me or other people in this genre who aren't engaged in the books, they have just projected this whole fabricated world where productivity, we're all Frederick Winslow Taylor and we have stopwatches and we're twirling our mustaches and trying to get people

Starting point is 01:19:01 to move back and forth between, if you put your keyboard over here, you can type faster, move your mouse faster, and whatever. So I don't know what that means, but it seems to be true that there is a fabricated world of what productivity literature is, and nothing like that has been popular in 30 years. Yeah, I think the narrative, this is true for a lot of things, there's a delay in the narrative. How we think about ourselves, how we perceive the world around us, what we think is popular is informed by our realities, but there's kind of a lag. You're going to continue to have that story even beyond hyperinflation for a period of time. It might even affect your behavior for the rest of your life. Who knows? And I think that for a lot of people who are commenting on what they would consider productivity books or time management books, they have all the biases that you would expect. They have primacy, recency, they've got any number of other things at play. I think for many people who grew up in the, say, mid to late, not grew up, professionally came up in the mid to late 2000s, or actually it's not even that long. It would be like the first 2000 to 2010, maybe.

Starting point is 01:20:31 Things seem to be pretty saturated with that kind of advice, not necessarily in the form of books, but certainly online, there was a lot of productivity porn. And I was a beneficiary of that, so I can't slam it too hard on some level. But I think that type of highly prescriptive hyperproductivity instructional material has kind of lost its luster for most people, I would say. And I know we're running short on time, so I'll give my optimistic take and you can see if you share my optimism. Here's the optimist's storyline then for our work week and today is 2007. This book comes out. The way we're working is becoming unsustainable. Be willing to consider radical alternatives. It was aimed at for the tech crowd that was ahead of the trend on unsustainability.

Starting point is 01:21:45 It landed very powerfully. The people who encountered it said, yeah, this is absolutely right. It's taken 15. We get the 2021, we get the pandemic to help accelerate this. Now, knowledge work writ large is like that 300 people and that overcrowded converted cafeteria in 2007. They now recognize things are unsustainable. They're now really open to the idea of maybe radically new things are available. That your book was a warning shot. We might have ignored it for a little while. And by we, I mean the people who didn't directly encounter it, which it was a large people. But now we're hearing the echoes of that warning shot reverberating because what you were warning about, we're all there, that you were 15 years

Starting point is 01:22:18 ahead of your time. Am I optimistic there or is that plausible? I mean, that sounds plausible, for sure. I certainly, what I saw and experienced, other people saw and experienced, I just happened to be the one of many who could have written this book who sat down after looking for this book for myself to write the book I couldn't find. And I think that a lot of the challenges discussed in the four-hour work week have only compounded. And if compounding is the eighth, sort of greatest wonder of the world, then it's remarkable and terrifying what that can become.

Starting point is 01:23:09 So I do think I agree with you that it's same, same, but 10x, same, same, but 100x, same, same, but 1,000x. Instead of one inbox, we now have 14. It's clear to me, and maybe this will always be the case, but that a lot of what we consider work is just simply not working. And it's never been more important to ensure that we are not getting really good at doing things that should not be done in the first place. And optimistically also, we've never, in a sense, had more options. The technology has never been better. The flexibility with remote work arrangements have never been better. So the tools and options and unorthodox career and life choices that are available now have never been available to more people, in my opinion. So I know we're at the 90-minute mark, I promise. So I'll just conclude by saying,

Starting point is 01:24:10 when I first read that book or listened to it, I guess it was in April 2007, I had that instinct that there's something prophetic about this in the sense that this is picking up on bigger trends that are going to be very important and a lot of thinking, a lot of things are going to be based on for a long time to come. And at least it's my sentiment that 15 years later, I think that was true. I'm glad you put those ideas out there when you did. Thanks, Cal. I really appreciate that and really admire the work that you do and thinking that you

Starting point is 01:24:41 do behind the work that you put out. Really, I'm a big fan. So thank you for taking the time to have the chat also. Well, thank you, Tim. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday

Starting point is 01:25:15 to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of

Starting point is 01:25:45 goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim.blog slash Friday, type that into your browser, Tim.blog slash Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time what I would take if I could only take one supplement. I've been asked this for years. The answer is invariably AG1 by Athletic Greens. I view it as all-in-one nutritional insurance, so you can cover your bases. If you're traveling, if you're just busy, you're not sure if your meals are where they should be, it covers your bases. I've recommended it since the 4-Hour Body, which was got eons ago, 2010, and I did not get paid to do so.

Starting point is 01:26:31 With approximately 75 vitamins, minerals, and whole food source ingredients, you'll be hard pressed to find a more nutrient-dense formula on the market. It has a multivitamin, multimineral greens complex, probiotics and prebiotics for gut health and immunity formula, digestive enzymes, and adaptogens. You get the idea. It is very, very comprehensive. And I do my best, of course, to focus on nutrient-dense proper meals, but sometimes you're busy. Sometimes you're traveling. Sometimes you just want to make sure that you're getting what you need. AG1 makes it easy to get a lot of nutrition when whole foods aren't readily available. It's also NSF certified for sport, making it safe for competitive athletes as what's on the label is in the powder.

Starting point is 01:27:15 It's the ultimate all-in-one nutritional supplement bundle in one easy scoop. Right now, Athletic Greens is giving my audience a special offer on top of their all-in-one formula, which is a free vitamin D supplement and five free travel packs with your first subscription purchase. Many of us are deficient in vitamin D. I found that true for myself, which is usually produced in our bodies from sun exposure. So adding a vitamin D supplement to your daily routine is a great option for additional immune support. Support your immunity, gut health, and energy by visiting athleticgreens.com slash Tim. You'll receive up to a year's supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your subscription. Again, that's athleticgreens.com slash Tim. This episode is brought to you by Viore Clothing, spelled V-U-O-R-I, Viore. I've been wearing

Starting point is 01:28:07 Viore at least one item per day for the last few months, and you can use it for everything. It's performance apparel, but it can be used for working out. It can be used for going out to dinner, at least in my case. I feel very comfortable with it. Super comfortable, super stylish. And I just want to read something that one of my employees said. She is an athlete. She is quite technical, although she would never say that. I asked her if she had ever used or heard of Viore, and this was her response. I do love their stuff. Been using them for about a year. I think I found them at REI.I first for my partner t-shirts that are super soft But somehow last as he's hard on stuff and then I got into the super soft cotton yoga pants and jogger

Starting point is 01:28:52 Sweatpants I live in them and they too have lasted they're stylish enough I can wear them out and about the material is just super soft and durable I just got their clementine running shorts for summer and love them The brand seems pretty popular, constantly sold out. In closing, and I'm abbreviating here, but in closing, with the exception of when I need technical outdoor gear, they're the only brand I've bought in the last year or so for yoga running loungewear that lasts and that I think look good also. I like the discreet logo. So that gives you some idea.

Starting point is 01:29:22 That was not intended for the sponsor read. That was just her response via text. Viori, again spelled V-U-O-R-I, is designed for maximum comfort and versatility. You can wear it running. You can wear their stuff training, doing yoga, lounging, weekend errands, or in my case, again, going out to dinner. It really doesn't matter what you're doing. Their clothing is so comfortable and looks so good.

Starting point is 01:29:46 And it's non-offensive. You don't have a huge brand logo on your face. You'll just want to be in them all the time. And my girlfriend and I have been wearing them for the last few months. They're men's core short, K-O-R-E. The most comfortable lined athletic short is your one short for every sport. I've been using it for kettlebell swings, for runs, you name it. The Banks short, this is their go-to-land-to-sea short, is the ultimate in versatility.

Starting point is 01:30:11 It's made from recycled plastic bottles. And what I'm wearing right now, which I had to pick one to recommend to folks out there, or at least to men out there, is the Ponto Performance Pant. And you'll find these at the link I'm going to give you guys. You can check out what I'm talking about, but I'm wearing them right now. They're thin performance sweatpants, but that doesn't do them justice. So you got to check it out. P-O-N-T-O, Ponto Performance Pant. For you ladies, the women's performance jogger is the softest jogger you'll ever own. Fiori isn't just an investment in your clothing, it's an investment in your happiness.

Starting point is 01:30:44 And for you, my dear listeners, they're offering 20% off your first purchase. So get yourself some of the most comfortable and versatile clothing on the planet. It's super popular. A lot of my friends have now noticed are wearing this and so am I. Fioriclothing.com forward slash Tim. That's F-U-O-R-I clothing.com slash Tim. That's V-U-O-R-I clothing.com slash Tim. Not only will you receive 20% off your first purchase, but you'll also enjoy free shipping on any US orders over $75 and free returns. So check it out. Vioreclothing.com slash Tim. That's V-U-O-R-I clothing.com slash Tim and discover the versatility

Starting point is 01:31:23 of Viore clothing.com slash Tim and discover the versatility of Viore clothing.

The Tim Ferriss Show - #594: Cal Newport and Tim Ferriss Revisit "The 4-Hour Workweek" (Plus: The Allure and The Void of Remote Work, Unsustainable Behaviors, Burning Out, The Cult of Productivity, and More)

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.