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

Summary

Something You Should Know Episode: Futurology: The Forces That Shape Your Future & Where's the 4-Day Workweek?
Host: Mike Carruthers
Release Date: June 19, 2025

---

Introduction

In this insightful episode of Something You Should Know, host Mike Carruthers delves into two compelling topics: the intricate world of futurology and the burgeoning movement towards a four-day workweek. Through engaging conversations with experts Glenn Adamson and Juliet Schor, listeners gain a deeper understanding of how predictions shape our future and the transformative potential of altering work structures.

---

Part 1: Futurology – Understanding the Forces That Shape Your Future

Guest: Glenn Adamson – Former Director of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, Senior Scholar at the Yale Center for British Art, and author of Century of How Imagining the Future Shapes the Present.

The Nature of Futurology

Glenn Adamson begins by dissecting the concept of futurology, emphasizing that it involves professionals attempting to predict future events across various sectors, including insurance, fashion, military, and urban planning.

"Futurology is the professional practice of telling people what is going to happen. It grew significantly over the 20th century, encompassing fields from insurance executives to trend forecasters."
— Glenn Adamson [06:30]

Adamson highlights that despite the vast industry dedicated to predictions, futurologists do not possess superior insight compared to the average person. Instead, they employ quasi-scientific methods to make their forecasts appear more credible and persuasive.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecies and Influence

A key concept discussed is the self-fulfilling prophecy, where the act of predicting an outcome can inadvertently cause it to occur. Adamson cites mid-20th-century trend forecasters who influenced the colors and styles of consumer products merely by their predictions, thereby shaping market trends as a result.

"People can make claims about expertise, and that becomes a greater influence in our lives over the course of the last century."
— Glenn Adamson [09:19]

This phenomenon raises questions about the true power of predictions: Are futurologists merely observers, or do their forecasts actively shape reality?

Pop Culture’s Role in Shaping the Future

Mike Carruthers introduces the idea that science fiction and popular media, such as Blade Runner and The Jetsons, play a significant role in envisioning future possibilities. Adamson concurs, noting that while these depictions are not precise predictions, they influence the aspirations and innovations of future technologists and entrepreneurs.

"Movies like Blade Runner not only reflect their own time but also inspire future technological advancements and societal changes."
— Glenn Adamson [10:58]

Challenges in Predicting the Future

Adamson addresses the inherent unpredictability of future events, using stock market predictions as a prime example. Despite being a billion-dollar industry, stock forecasting often fails to outperform market averages, illustrating the limitations and uncertainties inherent in futurology.

"Predicting stocks is a losing game, yet we continue to do it because of the allure of gaining an advantage and the human desire to know the unknown."
— Glenn Adamson [14:33]

The COVID-19 pandemic serves as a stark reminder of the unpredictability of global events, drastically altering economic and social landscapes in unforeseen ways.

Notable Futurologists

Adamson pays homage to influential figures in futurology, such as Buckminster Fuller and H.G. Wells. Fuller’s concepts like "Spaceship Earth" encapsulate the interconnectedness and fragility of our planet, while Wells’ prescient writings on warfare eerily mirrored the onset of World War II.

"Buckminster Fuller stands out as a visionary thinker whose ideas continue to resonate and influence modern perspectives on sustainability and global responsibility."
— Glenn Adamson [25:35]

---

Part 2: The Four-Day Workweek – A Transformative Approach to Employment

Guest: Juliet Schor – Economist and Professor of Sociology at Boston College, author of Four Days: The Life-Changing Solution for Reducing Employee Stress, Improving Well-Being, and Working Smarter.

Rising Momentum for a Four-Day Workweek

Juliet Schor discusses the growing acceptance and implementation of a four-day workweek. Originally viewed as utopian, the concept has gained tangible support, especially in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, which highlighted the need for better work-life balance.

"The pandemic changed the conversation around the four-day week from aspirational to common sense."
— Juliet Schor [33:32]

Benefits for Employees and Employers

Schor outlines the multifaceted benefits of a four-day workweek. Employees experience reduced stress, improved well-being, and increased job satisfaction. Surprisingly, employers also benefit through enhanced productivity, reduced turnover rates, and improved service quality.

"Employees love it, but the really surprising thing is that the companies love it too. They are thriving along with the employees."
— Juliet Schor [34:21]

She emphasizes that the success of this model hinges on thoughtful implementation, where companies reorganize workflows to maintain or even increase productivity within the reduced timeframe.

Implementation Strategies and Challenges

Transitioning to a four-day workweek requires meticulous planning. Schor describes a model where companies engage in a two-month work reorganization process, identifying inefficiencies and restructuring tasks to fit the new schedule without sacrificing output.

"Companies go through months of planning to reorganize work, eliminate time-wasting activities, and prioritize essential tasks."
— Juliet Schor [36:00]

Schor also addresses industry-specific challenges, such as in the service sector (e.g., restaurants and healthcare), where maintaining operations requires innovative staffing solutions like hiring additional employees or upskilling existing staff.

"In industries like restaurants, companies hire more staff or upskill current employees to cover operational hours without compromising service quality."
— Juliet Schor [37:48]

Employee and Employer Perspectives

From the employee standpoint, the four-day workweek leads to higher productivity and better mental health. Employers notice that workers are more engaged and efficient, countering traditional economic models that predict a loss in productivity with reduced work hours.

"People are so much more on top of their work while they're at work, leading to higher productivity and less burnout."
— Juliet Schor [51:10]

Schor counters criticisms of the four-day workweek by sharing that only a small percentage of companies revert to the traditional schedule after trials, often due to external economic pressures rather than the efficacy of the model itself.

"About 10% of companies revert to a five-day week after trials, often influenced by economic downturns rather than the four-day week's performance."
— Juliet Schor [48:19]

Future Implications and Societal Impact

Looking ahead, Schor speculates on the potential for even shorter workweeks as AI and automation continue to evolve, further reducing the need for human labor. She stresses the importance of ensuring that the additional free time is utilized in meaningful and socially productive ways, enhancing overall quality of life.

"As productivity increases, the key question is how we use our additional free time to enrich our lives and communities."
— Juliet Schor [49:26]

---

Conclusion

This episode of Something You Should Know provides a thought-provoking exploration of how our attempts to predict the future can both shape and be shaped by societal trends. Additionally, the discussion on the four-day workweek offers a hopeful glimpse into a more balanced and productive approach to modern employment. Through the expertise of Glenn Adamson and Juliet Schor, listeners are encouraged to reflect on the dynamic interplay between foresight, innovation, and workplace transformation.

"The future is already here. It's just not very well distributed."
— Glenn Adamson [22:07]

"The four-day workweek is a win-win, enhancing employee well-being while simultaneously benefiting employers through increased productivity and reduced turnover."
— Juliet Schor [34:21]

---

For more enlightening discussions and practical advice to enhance your life, tune into Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.

Transcript

[Mike Carruthers]

Since Mint Mobile became a sponsor here, I'm kind of tuned in to when people talk about their cell service and they complain about how much their wireless bill is and it happens all the time. Perhaps maybe you've thought your plans a little expensive. Well, Mint Mobile is here to rescue you from high jaw dropping monthly bills and unexpected overages with their premium wireless for just $15 a month. Why would you pay more if you don't have to? And look, all Mint Mobile plans come with high speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can use your own phone with any Mint Mobile plan. Bring your phone number along with your contacts. So I think I've argued away any objection you might have. So now just just ditch overpriced wireless and get three months of premium wireless service from Mint Mobile for 15 bucks a month. I have Mint Mobile. It works spectacularly well and I can spend the summer thinking about how much money I'm not giving to the big wireless company I used to this year. Skip breaking a sweat and breaking the bank. Get your summer savings and shop premium wireless [e-mail] something that's mintmobile.com something upfront payments of $45 for a 3 month 5 gigabyte plan required equivalent to $15 a month new customer offer for first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details today on something you should know why unsubscribing from spam email may cause more harm than good then predicting the future? Mostly it's impossible in some cases. Could the prediction itself make it so?

[Glenn Adamson]

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

[Mike Carruthers]

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

[Juliet Schor]

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

[Mike Carruthers]

All this today on something you should know. Introducing the new Dell AI PC powered by the Intel Core Ultra processor. It's not just an AI computer, it's a computer built for AI. That means it's built to help do your busy work for you, so you can fast forward through editing images, designing presentations, generating code, debugging code, running lots of apps without lag, creating live translations and captions, summarizing meeting notes, extending battery life, enhancing security, finding that file you were looking for, managing your schedule, meeting your deadlines and responding to Jim's long emails Leaving all the time in the world to for more you time and for the things you actually want to do. No offense Jim. Get a new Dell AI PC at Dell.com AI PC how those ahead? Stay ahead. 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. You would think that unsubscribing from unwanted emails would be a good idea. But is it? Let's find out. Hi and welcome to this episode of Something youg Should Know. When you get a spam email offering you something you have no interest in, it's tempting to go to the bottom of that email and unsubscribe. But by doing so, it turns out you might be unwittingly inviting more spam. Now, most of the time, when you unsubscribe, especially if it's from a reputable company or a company you've done business with or you're familiar with, there's no problem. Unsubscribing should stop any more emails. It's those emails that come from out of the blue, like the one from the Nigerian prince, or it's for some miracle cure or miracle weight loss product or some oddball investment opportunity. When you unsubscribe from those emails, you it's possible you're signaling back to the spammer that your email is alive and active and reaching a real person, which could just get you more spam headed your way. For those emails, it's probably better to block them or mark them as junk. So future ones from that sender go to your spam folder that you periodically clean out. But unsubscribing is engaging the spammer, which is just what they want, and that is something you should know. Things are different today than they used to be, and things will be different in the future than they are now, Obviously. But what and who drives those changes? If you talk about the future, does that help shape the future? Are there certain people who have the power to direct what happens in the future, even in subtle ways? What will be the new hot kitchen appliance trend? Or how will fashion change? What tech breakthrough will emerge and who and what will determine those things? Well, here to talk about those people, those futurologists, is Glenn Adamson. He's former director of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York and has held appointments as senior scholar at the Yale center for British Art. He's author of a book called Century of How Imagining the Future Shapes the Present. Hey Glenn. Welcome to Something youg Should Know.

[Glenn Adamson]

Hey there, Mike. Great to be with you.

[Mike Carruthers]

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

[Glenn Adamson]

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

[Mike Carruthers]

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

[Glenn Adamson]

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

[Mike Carruthers]

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

[Glenn Adamson]

Yeah, and Mike, you've really put your finger on why it's an interesting subject. So there's a phenomenon that I like to call the self fulfilling prophecy. And a great example of this would BE in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, you had an industry of trend forecasters who would take insights, often in fact from the Paris fashion industry and they would apply those to the colors of let's say, refrigerators or cars, even the colors that would appear in Hollywood films. And the very fact that they were making those predictions meant that, lo and behold, those domestic appliances, those automobiles did in fact come out in those colors. And it made them seem like wizards. But obviously they were actually directing that process from the inside. So there's a very interesting thing with Futurist where some things are certain the sun will come up tomorrow. Some things you can't predict at all. And then there's this kind of bandwidth in the middle where people can make claims about expertise of various kinds or influence of various kinds. And that becomes a greater and greater influence in our lives, actually, over the course of the last century.

[Mike Carruthers]

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

[Glenn Adamson]

Yeah, and how would you ever know? Right? Because the titans of the tech industry today are the same kids that grew up on science fiction, you know, 30 years ago. And in fact, it is in comic books and films that you see the greatest influence, maybe when it comes to futurology. But it's a very, very difficult thing to track because it is so widespread in popular culture. That's another thing I was very interested in, actually not so interested in looking back at specific texts and saying, well, what did they get right? What did they get wrong? Partly because I don't think keeping score on the past is really a responsible way of doing. But also, if you think about it, when those texts came out, when those movies came out, nobody had any way of knowing whether they were accurate. So their influence, their impact in their own present day was much more about the sensibility, about the mood, about the direction that they suggested. And I do think that those kinds of prediction were and remain tremendously influential.

[Mike Carruthers]

And what are some of those?

[Glenn Adamson]

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

[Mike Carruthers]

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

[Glenn Adamson]

Yes, that's a good point. When you get really sophisticated futurology, a figure that leaps to mind here would be Daniel Bell, who, as a sociologist, many people may be aware of his name. He created these quite sophisticated descriptions of futurology. This would have been in the 1960s, where he was trying to distinguish between merely good guesswork and more complex systems where you would have different pathways that could be allocated specific percentages of likelihood, and then you could try to think about how those different pathways would interact. So if you like almost creating a delta of possible streams of the future that might interact with one another, and that kind of complexity that gets built into futurology, especially in the 1960s and right down to today, is, I think, one reason why the industry has gotten as big as it is. In other words, it has a kind of quasi scientific apparatus that makes it more and more persuasive and more and more legitimate. Seeming. Of course, the irony is that that floods the Zone. So you get all of these competing models and competing statements and descriptions and ideas about what the future will look like. And already by the 1980s, you have critics of futurology saying, in effect, we're drowning in this stuff. And even if some of it is accurate, how would we know which futures are the right ones to put our bets on? So futurology starts to become almost like a victim of its own success as a commercial enterprise, as a professional enterprise at that point.

[Mike Carruthers]

You mentioned predicting stocks before, and that stock prediction is, would you say, a billion dollar a year industry? And yet we hear that people who try to predict stocks, for example, Mutual fund managers who are managing a mutual fund trying to beat an inde decks seldom beat it. That predicting stocks is a losing game. And yet we keep doing it. So why. Why do we continue to predict something that fails most of the time?

[Glenn Adamson]

It's a great question, and it's one that you can really ask about almost any aspect of this. Why do we keep doing it? Why do we keep going to tarot card readers? Why do we keep going to films that show us what our future might look like? So from the very small scale to the huge scale of the whole market or the dimensions of society itself, you still have this kind of instinct for people to try to beat the odds and try to know before they can know, because they want to know before anybody else does. So it's that the advantages of it seems so alluring, I suppose. And, you know, maybe it's just part of the human condition. That's something I thought about a lot when I was writing. The kind of poignant dimensions of this story and the tragedy that's written into it. This sense that what we really, really want to know is precisely what we can't, which is what's going to happen to us. Whether again, that's at the scale of your own life or your family's life, or your town, your city, your country, the whole world. So you start to think of the future as something more and more threatening. Perhaps around 1970 into the 70s, you start to have many more narratives about potential collapse. A kind of secular version of medieval apocalyptic thinking. And that's something that we're deeply into now. We've had about half century of that kind of existential relationship to the future. So again, all the more reason to think about it and try to explore it.

[Mike Carruthers]

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

[Glenn Adamson]

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

[Mike Carruthers]

I'm speaking with Glenn Adamson and we are talking about predicting the future. Glenn is author of a book called A Century of How Imagining the Future Shapes the Present. I am hardly what you would call a trendy clothes shopper. I know what I like. I buy things that last and that I will wear for a long time. And so now I shop almost [e-mail] and I've come to discover that a lot of people, men and women, shop there too because they have quality, well made clothes for summer that you are going to love, like organic cotton silk polos. I've got a couple of those European linen beach shorts, comfortable pants that work for everything from backyard parties to nice summer dinners out. Here's the best part about quints. Everything with quints is half the cost of similar brands. And how they do that is they work directly with top artisans. They cut out the middlemen. So you get luxury clothes without the big markups. And Quince only works with factories that use safe, ethical and responsible manufacturing practices with premium fabrics and finishes. Quince is all about really great clothes at a very reasonable price. If you saw my closet, what you would see are the Quince clothes hanging right in the center and and my other clothes, they keep getting pushed to the sides and the same thing will happen to your closet. Oh, and you're going to love their website. Stick to the staples that last with elevated essentials from quince. Go to quince.comsysk for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's quince.comsysk to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.comsysk.

[Narrator]

You chose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart Choice. Progressive loves to help people make smart choices. That's why they offer a tool called Auto Quote Explorer that allows you to compare your Progressive car insurance quote with rates from other companies so you save time on the research and can enjoy savings when you choose the best rate for you. Give it a try after this [e-mail] Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy.

[Mike Carruthers]

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

[Glenn Adamson]

And some things that seem very niche at first, and the Internet here would be the classic example, turn out to be absolutely decisive for everybody, even though they're cooked up in quite geeky little circles among a very small group of people. And then their particular preoccupations and personalities kind of metastasize across the range of the whole culture. I tell the story in the book of a guy called Doug Engelbart, who nobody's ever heard of now, but he created what's often called the mother of all demonstrations, where he showed all of the essential features of what we now associate with the Internet. And this was in the late 60s. He had this idea of augmented humanity. So instead of artificial intelligence, he was thinking about augmented intelligence. In other words, we don't replace ourselves with machines, we extend our brains using machines instead. And he did demonstration that, of course, now would look quite primitive, but at the time was completely mind blowing because it anticipated email and hypertext and linking one document to another. Lots of things that we associate with the Internet. And so somebody like Doug Engelbart and his idea of augmented intelligence turns out to be completely influential. And no one would have necessarily expected that at the time, because, as I say, it was a very niche phenomenon.

[Mike Carruthers]

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

[Glenn Adamson]

Exactly. And that's the great irony of the subject, but it's also the power of the subject. So again, just to say one more time that if you're living in a capitalist economy, you can't not predict the future because you're really thinking in terms of graphs and bar charts and curves that project their way out into five years, 10 years, 15 years into the future. Right. So maybe the way to think about it is that the economy itself is already an aggregated set of predictions that are in some ways in tension with one another. William Gibson, the science fiction author, famously said, the future is already here. It's just not very well distributed. So you might already have these energies in play, but are not evident to you and me because we're not specialists enough or we don't have that kind of access. And yet the moment that we're sitting in is already permeated with this futurological thinking, and it is going to change our world. We just don't know how.

[Mike Carruthers]

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

[Glenn Adamson]

Exactly. And you have these disruptive moments of which the COVID pandemic would be a great example, where every single prediction that every single industry had made and every single government had made about its activities turned out to be completely wrong, and not just wrong by a little, but massively wrong. And of course, we were all wrong together. So you have this huge correction that has all these political and economics consequences that we're still living through now. And who would say that there's not going to be another thing like that? Certainly I wouldn't. So any predictions that you make have to be considered highly provisional in that sense. Another writer that I was very interested in when working on the book is this German sociologist called Ulrich Beck, and he wrote a book called Risk Society, where he argues that because of this future orientation that modern culture has, really a lot of what power involves is pushing risk away from yourself and onto somebody else. So the idea here would be that if you're creating pollution, for example, then the pollution might go downwind to other communities and affect them, but you yourself are not put at risk. So that's a very simple example. But he talks about all these other much more complex instruments by which states and companies can isolate themselves from the risks that they themselves are generating or risks that they're subject to for other reasons and try to push those risks off. So that's another kind of futurology. And one fascinating thing about COVID is that it was itself kind of immune from that sort of risk allocation, because it did hit everyone all at once, or more or less all at once in rapid succession, which makes it a very unique phenomenon so far. But I certainly wouldn't say it's going to be the last time that we live through something like that.

[Mike Carruthers]

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

[Glenn Adamson]

Yeah. The inevitable figure there is Buckminster Fuller, who was, you have to say, the 20th century's most recognizable quotable futurologist. He's famous for having, among many other things, invented the geodesic dome, as in the one at Epcot center, and also coining the phrase Spaceship Earth. In other words, we're all crew on a spaceship with limited resources. We're hurtling through the void, and if we don't do a good job running the vessel, then we're all going to go down together. And his writing and his thinking and his endless speech making. Towards the end of his life, he did a TV show called Everything I Know, and it was 40 hours long. And he was really just getting started by the time he finished. But people these days are going back to his writings and thinking a lot, partly because he was an organic thinker, sort of like the counterculture on which he was a huge influence, by the way. He really does stand out as a wonderful thinker, kind of amazing character, and somebody that people love to go back to.

[Mike Carruthers]

Anybody else you would name as a member of the Futurology hall of Fame.

[Glenn Adamson]

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

[Mike Carruthers]

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

[Glenn Adamson]

My pleasure. Great to talk to you, Mike.

[Mike Carruthers]

You know, some summer days you just don't want to cook, going out or even getting takeout. I mean, that's gotten so expensive. So our solution is Factor Factor delivers fresh chef crafted meals. They're ready in just two minutes and then you're eating a restaurant quality meal that is so good and cheaper than going out or getting takeout. With 45 weekly menu options, you can pick gourmet meals you will love here. This is right off their website on their menu. Salmon piccata with cauliflower mash and garlic broccoli or chimichurri filet mignon and shrimp or smoky Gouda chicken with red potatoes and green beans. Now, being a Factor veteran, let me explain. These are not frozen meals. These are fresh, restaurant quality meals delivered to your door. Now you don't have to, but we always put them on dinner plates because they're too good to eat out of the container. They come in two minutes in the microwave and you're having a real delicious dietitian approved gourmet meal that is so not fast food. Now here I'm going to make this very easy to try get [e-mail] something50off and use code something50OFF to get 50% off plus free shipping on your first box. That's code [e-mail] something 50 off for 50% off plus free shipping factormeals.com something50OFF and that promo code is in the show Notes I am a big fan of Shopify. They have been a longtime sponsor here and Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses and they should be behind yours too because they get it right. If you run a business, you know as I do, that there are so many details that need your attention it can be overwhelming. Finding the right tool that can handle a lot of those details and simplify the selling process, well, that's a game changer and it makes your life easy and helps you sell more, which is what Shopify does. Shopify handles 10% of all e commerce in the US from household names like Mattel and Gymshark. If Mattel and Gymshark are using Shopify as their commerce platform along with millions of other businesses, shouldn't you be too? Shopify gets you up and running with your own design studio. They've got hundreds of ready to use templates to build a beautiful online store and AI tools that write product descriptions, page headlines and even enhance your product photography. If you've ever tried to build an online store, this has got to sound pretty tempting. Turn your big business ideas into With Shopify on your side, sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com sysk go to shopify.com sysk shopify.com sysk for many years I know people have talked about the idea of a four day work week and while I'm sure some businesses have adopted it or some form of a shortened work week, the five day week still seems to be preferred at Least by employers. So will the four day work week ever become the norm? And should it? It clearly seems to benefit the workers. But what about the employer? After all, the employer signs the paychecks. Here to dive into the conversation on the four day work week is Juliet Schor. She's an economist and professor of sociology at Boston College. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall street journal, newsweek, 60 minutes and other places. Her ted talk titled the case for the four day work week has been viewed more than 3 million times. She's the author of numerous books. Her latest is called Four Days A the Life Changing Solution for Reducing Employee Stress, Improving well being and Working smarter. Hi Juliette, welcome to something you should know.

[Juliet Schor]

Oh, hi. Great to be here.

[Mike Carruthers]

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

[Juliet Schor]

I think we're finally at the point where it's starting to gain momentum. Certainly pre pandemic. Absolutely agree. I mean Nixon talked about it being around the corner back in the 1950s. Then there was sort of another bout of people predicting it was going to happen in the 70s. And then things went pretty quiet. But the pandemic really changed. I think the common sense around the four day week in a way that people, it went from being sort of utopian or aspirational, something that everybody thought would be great but we'd never get it to what I like to say now that it, it feels like common sense to people. And that's what we really see in our research. I've been researching this now for, you know, we're in the, the fourth year of studying companies, hundreds of companies all around the world who are doing it. We're also seeing in the surveys of senior management and so forth, a big change in terms of many of them think it's coming, are working on it, feel like they're going to, you know, try and make it happen in their companies.

[Mike Carruthers]

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

[Juliet Schor]

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

[Mike Carruthers]

Because what is different, number one, the employee well being.

[Juliet Schor]

So if you are an employer whose workers are stressed out, burned out, maybe leaving at a rapid pace, they're disengaged. If you look at the Gallup surveys on disengagement, a majority of workers are disengaged both in the US and around the world. If they are quiet quitting, which many are doing, or if they are struggling, and that's again, we've got something like 2/3 of workers who are in the struggling or worse situation. The four day week really helps them. So okay, you might say, well yeah, I can see that it really helps them. But how does that help the employer? The model that we have been studying is one in which companies in advance plan not just for giving people a four day, 32 hour work week. And I really want to stress that this is not a compressed work week, giving them their full pay for a five day week. So people are not making income sacrifices, which you know, not many can do. But the trade off is that they manage to do all their work in the four days. So it's called the 180, 100 model. 100% of the pay, 80% of the time, but 100% of the work. Well, you can ask how, how is that possible? The companies go through two months of planning, onboarding, preparation, what we call work reorganization, in which they figure out where are they wasting time, what are they doing that isn't really contributing to their mission, their bottom line, whatever it is. And that's, there's a, there are two parts to that. One is what the whole organization is doing. So whether they're tightening up their meetings, practices, which tend to be very wasteful, time consuming, inefficient in lots of places, or they're giving people focus time where they don't get distracted and people aren't bothering them and so they can really get through work and do better quality work, or they're just giving them a break so they're figuring out all of that. And then the other piece of it is the individual piece that people have a lot of control over their own work. They figure out how to prioritize what's important, they get through their to do lists better, they spend less time chit chatting Many people talk about communicating differently in the workplace so that there's sort of less social, you know, time and sort of more work.

[Mike Carruthers]

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

[Juliet Schor]

Yes, many of the companies will keep open for the five days or if it's seven days, you know, depending on whatever it is. So they're not. Clearly not all companies can sort of close down for one day a week, although many do do that. But what happens in those. Let's think about those service organizations and I'll give you the example of a restaurant. The restaurant decided to give its chefs and managers the four day week. So they did a couple of things. They hired a few more people, although they were able to hire them at sort of lower, at a lower level. They upgraded some people so they were, they upskilled them to do some of the work that the chefs had previously done. And so they were able to cover all of the time with those adjustments, which cost a little bit of money. And they got savings in two other ways. Number one, their quality of service went up a lot. This is also something we see in the healthcare cases where the patient outcomes are much better when you have more rested staff. And the other really big thing, whether we're talking about chefs or nurses, is resignations. So many of these companies were dealing with very high levels of resignation. In a burger flipping context, the turnover is enormous. You have, you know, maybe 100% turnover in fast food restaurants. Very, very costly. Some of the estimates are, you know, it can cost up to 30% or even more in some cases to replace. Now in fast foods it's going to be a little bit less, it's going to be less than that. But you have to onboard that person, you have to train them, you have to find them. That turned out to be very hard for some periods during what we were studying. So the company saves money in that way. So like I said, there's not one way to do it. For some organizations it's the savings in the quitting because the quitting has been really expensive. For others it's saving time. And for most of them it's a mix. So one of the things that probably happens at the burger flipping and which also happened at the restaurant I was talking about is they do figure out ways to do things more efficiently so they can maybe get by with slightly fewer people on those four days.

[Mike Carruthers]

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

[Juliet Schor]

Yeah, it's a great question. What we find is that work at home seems to be a positive from the point of view of making the four day week work. I'll give you a quote from a CEO, the very first company in our surveys, and he said work at home taught us that we could trust our employees about where they work. And so we thought we could also trust them about how much time they work. And I have another CEO who said something similarly in which she said, I never thought work from home could work, but it did. And that's what made me think, well, maybe the four day week could also work. So I think from the management side, it made management more open to considering a four day week. And it just, it seems to work well from the employee side too. But I should say that in our studies we don't really find that it, it's better, you know, that the work from home companies, we have 25% who are 100 or 100% remote, so fully remote, and we only have about 5% who have zero work from home. So they're just a hundred. Like we have a brewery for example, and a, an RV manufacturer or the restaurant where it's like everybody's on site, it works for them and it works for the vast majority who are hybrid, which is really the world that I think we're living in now.

[Mike Carruthers]

So who's generally the decider of this? I mean, are employees demanding it or businesses are saying, let's try it? I mean, where's the demand for this coming from?

[Juliet Schor]

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

[Mike Carruthers]

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

[Juliet Schor]

It's because my employees are so much better off. So for many of them, It's a sort of quality well being for their employees. But you have a, I think they all, or almost all of them care about that. But you have another group which really sees that things are inefficient. And so I have one guy, for example, he's a co owner of a marketing firm and he's like, it's Parkinson's law here. We keep getting all this great new technology, but somehow we're never saving any time and we're working always as hard as we were before when our technology was so archaic and basic. And now we save so much time, but we don't get any of it. So I mean, you've got, you've got both of those things and then I think you've got the other group who are like, we've got to staunch the bleeding. You know that, that very first company that joined us, they had a rash of resignations and they were like, we've got to do something.

[Mike Carruthers]

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

[Juliet Schor]

Well, I think Starting at about 2018, there's been a lot of press for small scale experiments or cases where this has happened. So the man who started the NGO that set up the trials is a guy named Andrew Barnes. He's a, an entrepreneur from New Zealand and he owns a financial services firm. He wrote a book, he's been all over the news. Japan, Microsoft. Japan did it for a month and had phenomenal results. And so, you know, the, the press has been full of a lot of stories of this and I was surprised when I did my interviews with CEOs. How many of the stories were. I read an article about this and quite a few. I read an article in the New York Times and I thought maybe it would work for us. So it's interesting that many of them are just going to the press and seeing it there and then sort of thinking it through for their companies and deciding to give it a try. These trials are truly trials. So we have two months of that work reorganization process in which we help the companies figure out how to make it work. And, and then it's a six month trial and at the end of the six months we give them the research. You know, they figure out what they're going to do next. So typically they're not committing to it forever. Without having tried it out.

[Mike Carruthers]

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

[Juliet Schor]

It's really interesting you asked me that. There is one case that they came to me and I was pretty excited because it was a university and we don't know of any universities that have done this for everyone. There are some that have done it for their staff, but not for staff and faculty. So I was pretty confident about how they could do it on the staff side. On the faculty side. Faculty don't go to that many meetings. We don't waste, I mean individuals may waste time, but that, that's, you know, as a group we don't have a lot of time wasting that would be easy to sort of cut out. And this university had no spare cash. So there wasn't a way that it could do something like reduce the teaching load or tell people they need, you know, they could do less research or give them more money or do something that would, you know, make it easier. And I was really racking my brains about it and I hadn't sort of figured it out because I just thought it's going to, it's going to take some money. I mean, that's such an interesting thing about all these other companies. Almost none of them spend any money doing this. So it's, that's part of why it's like such a win win for them. They get big productivity improvements without spending money. They make people so much better off without spending money. You know, they increase the value of these jobs to their employees without raising the wage. Well, sure enough, if things went dead on the other side of this case, they were sort of in a pickle to begin with. It may be hard to do in a case like that.

[Mike Carruthers]

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

[Juliet Schor]

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

[Mike Carruthers]

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

[Juliet Schor]

Well, it could be. I mean, look at what we're facing right now with AI, which is we have a technology that's very general purpose technology that can do so many things that humans can do. What's going to happen? We introduce this into our workplaces and suddenly we need far fewer people. If you look at what happened with the first industrial revolution, which was also like incredibly revolutionary technology which saved labor at levels that were historically unprecedented, which is, I think what we're, you know, also looking staring down the face of today. We had huge reductions in the work year and the work week from 1870 to 1970. So it went from about 3,000 hours a year down to about 2,000 hours. And that was a really important part of what kept people in work. It kept people employed. So I mean, there are plenty of people now who are predicting the like 3.5 work work week, 3.5 day work week, like Bill Gates and I think Obama and so on. So it is quite possible, depending on how much productivity growth we see out of AI over what period of time, that if we do move to four, there may be another move down there. And then I think that really the question for us is what are people doing with that additional time? Is it valuable? Is it socially productive? Is it improving our quality of life and our communities and society and so forth. I mean, there's no point working just for work's sake. It needs to be valuable, worthwhile activity.

[Mike Carruthers]

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

[Juliet Schor]

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

[Mike Carruthers]

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

[Juliet Schor]

Really appreciate it. Thank you so much, Mike.

[Mike Carruthers]

The idea of keeping a food journal is not new. It's part of several weight loss programs. The theory is that if you actually write down everything you eat, it will force you to see exactly how much food you eat and help you make better choices. Now, it sounds simple enough, but it works better than you might imagine. A study funded by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health a while ago showed that the simple act of writing down what you eat can help you double your weight loss. Double. The better and more detailed the journal, the more weight was lost. But any method of tracking works. Just the act of writing down what you eat on a post it note, or sending yourself an email that tallies up each meal, or sending yourself a text message, all of that will suffice. It's the process of reflecting on what you eat. That helps you become aware of your habits and make better choices. If you are one of those people who swears you can't lose weight, chances are you haven't tried food journaling. It is extremely effective and that is something you should know. In our never ending quest to find new listeners, we need your help. And if you would share this podcast using the share function on the player that you're listening to this on on Apple or Spotify or Castbox or wherever, you use that to send this to someone you know and that'll help increase our listenership and your friends will probably appreciate hearing this podcast. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to something you should know.

[Narrator]

You might think you know fairy tales and you might think that they are cute and sweet and boring, but the real Grimm fairy tales were not cute at all. They were very dark and they were often very grim. On Grim Grimmer Grimmest, we tell a grim fairy tale to a bunch of kids. Perfect for car rides or screen free entertainment. Grim Grimmer Grimmest activates kids imaginations and instigates fun conversations because fairy tales speak to all of us at a very deep, primal level and they raise interesting topics and questions that are worth chewing over together as a family. Every episode is rated Grim, Grimmer or Grimmest. So you, your kids, your whole family can choose. What is the right level of grim for you? Though, if you're listening with Grandma, she's just gonna go for Grimmest. Trust me on this one. Tune in to Grim, Grimmer Grimmest and our new season.

[Sarah Gabrielli]

Available now from the podcast that brought you to each of the last lesbian bars in the country. And back in time, through the sapphic history that shaped them, comes a brand new season of Cruising beyond the Bars. This is your host, Sarah Gabrielli, and I've spent the past year interviewing history making lesbians and queer folks about all kinds of queer spaces, from bookstores to farms to line dancing and much more.

[Juliet Schor]

For 11 years, every night women slept illegally on the common.

[Mike Carruthers]

We would move down to the West Indies to form a lesbian nation.

[Juliet Schor]

Meg Kristen coined the phrase women's music, but she would have liked it. Say it was lesbian music. And that's kind of the origins of the Combaheever Collective.

[Sarah Gabrielli]

You can listen to Cruising on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes air every other Tuesday starting February 4th.