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Does a Four Day Work Week Work? · Earn Your Leisure

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: You also champion a four week, a four day work week, right, yep,
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  Speaker 1: So talk about that.
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  Speaker 2: So what I realized is that we have a big
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  Speaker 2: problem in the typical workplace, which is that most of
• 0:22
  Speaker 2: corporate America, at least what I've seen, is that everyone
• 0:26
  Speaker 2: is perpetually exhausted. And so they're working five days a week.
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  Speaker 2: They're in a bunch of monotonous meetings of doing work.
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  Speaker 2: They're not even sure as important. They have to catch
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  Speaker 2: up on work on the weekends while they take care
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  Speaker 2: of their families, and you know, no one can ever
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  Speaker 2: catch up.
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  Speaker 1: And so.
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  Speaker 2: Four day work week is tied in with a few concepts.
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  Speaker 2: But the underpinning is that I've tried to figure out
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  Speaker 2: in my companies is how to eliminate uh what I
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  Speaker 2: call work theater. And this is a phrase that most
• 1:05
  Speaker 2: of the things I talk about I've used from others.
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  Speaker 2: This is a phrase that I coined work theater. Most
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  Speaker 2: of the work that people do doesn't matter. I'd say
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  Speaker 2: ninety percent is work theater, meaning it's work that just
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  Speaker 2: looks good but doesn't actually accomplish anything, right, And so
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  Speaker 2: people working so much, they're so exhausted and they're getting
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  Speaker 2: nothing done. For the company because they're consumed with red
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  Speaker 2: tape and bureaucracy. And so what I found is by
• 1:41
  Speaker 2: shortening the work week and say no, you don't have
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  Speaker 2: five days to get everything done. You've got four days
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  Speaker 2: to get everything done. You can't schedule meetings Friday through Sunday.
• 1:52
  Speaker 2: You need to expect people are going to be off
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  Speaker 2: these four days. You're going to be present focused. This
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  Speaker 2: I took from Twitter is not mine. It's called work
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  Speaker 2: like a lion, not like a cow.
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  Speaker 1: Right.
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  Speaker 2: I want my team to come in and work like
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  Speaker 2: lions for four days as much as they can, and
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  Speaker 2: then I want them to go relax, be with their family,
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  Speaker 2: be with their friends, enjoy life, heal so that they
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  Speaker 2: can come and work like lions. I think as human beings,
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  Speaker 2: we're supposed to go hunt and then we're supposed to
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  Speaker 2: go relax. We spend too much time in this middle ground.
• 2:32
  Speaker 2: So to me, I found much more productivity when we
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  Speaker 2: have these intense spurts of hunting and then where every
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  Speaker 2: people have their own lives.
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: So all your employees work for four days, yes and no, uh,
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  Speaker 1: we try to adhere to it with love with both.
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  Speaker 1: It's been experiments.
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  Speaker 2: So both has it out, but both his later stage
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  Speaker 2: could maybe afford to do it a little bit more love.
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  Speaker 2: We're trying to do it, but we still end up
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  Speaker 2: working a lot of fridays. So I can't say fully
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  Speaker 2: that we're doing it with love right now, but we're trying.
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: We're being mindful of it. And you champion remote work, right.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, all my companies are one hundred percent remote. I
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  Speaker 2: never want to go back to an office again, and
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  Speaker 2: that's just the personal choice that I made. And other hubs,
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  Speaker 2: So some folks there's a cluster in San Francisco, or
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  Speaker 2: a cluster in New York, or cluster in LA and
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  Speaker 2: they meet up. They may have shared workspaces. So there's
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  Speaker 2: certain clusters that like to come together into my various
• 3:44
  Speaker 2: companies and work a prism. Another one of my companies
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  Speaker 2: has a bona fide office, but they have a pretty
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  Speaker 2: kind of hardcore sales culture and it fits them, so
• 3:55
  Speaker 2: you know, I do. One of my companies does have
• 3:57
  Speaker 2: a bona fide office, but it's not something that that
• 4:01
  Speaker 2: I'm married to at all, and I typically prefer remote.
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: So you got both has eight hundred employees.
• 4:10
  Speaker 2: No, both has gone down by quite a bit and
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  Speaker 2: We've just realized that with our narrow focus on going
• 4:19
  Speaker 2: after the world's largest customers, we didn't need as many
• 4:23
  Speaker 2: people and many headcounts. So we actually completely removed our
• 4:28
  Speaker 2: focus on SMB just small, small and medium sized businesses
• 4:33
  Speaker 2: to focus on big accounts. So we brought the company.
• 4:36
  Speaker 2: Now it's below two hundred.
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  Speaker 1: How many you ad love.
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  Speaker 2: About fifteen, right, and so you have that, but you
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  Speaker 2: also have the nonprofit work.
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: Yes, and I know that's very important to you talk
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: about that.
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  Speaker 2: I believe that spiritually we're supposed to give at least
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  Speaker 2: ten percent, if not twenty percent of what you make back.
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: This is my fundamental belief.
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  Speaker 2: I believe if you don't do that, uh, you're hurting
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  Speaker 2: yourself because you're gonna have you're creating karma. And so selfishly,
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  Speaker 2: I want to stay healthy, I want to stay safe.
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  Speaker 1: I want my businesses to be successful.
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  Speaker 2: So so I try to give back as much as
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  Speaker 2: I can because I know spiritually you have to.
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  Speaker 1: Uh.
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  Speaker 2: It's not a lot of people say, oh, we're gonna
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  Speaker 2: wait until later in life.
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  Speaker 1: That's a proven thing to do. I don't believe in
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  Speaker 1: that at all.
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  Speaker 2: I think you have to always be giving back to
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  Speaker 2: the community. It has to become a muscle that becomes
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  Speaker 2: ingrained in you. So I have a few different impactulated initiatives.
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  Speaker 2: My most prominent nonprofit is called the Movement. So dance
• 5:56
  Speaker 2: has completely changed my life. It was a healthy outlet
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  Speaker 2: for me that got me through many tough times in
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  Speaker 2: a very healthy way. And so I realized that dancing
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  Speaker 2: is one of the most scalable ways to spread happiness
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  Speaker 2: and mental health because all you.
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  Speaker 1: Need is a floor and a speaker.
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  Speaker 2: So if you're gonna try to solve a mental health
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  Speaker 2: crisis at a homeless shelter, refugee camp, it's very difficult.
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  Speaker 2: You have to hire if you're gonna have to hire
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  Speaker 2: a psychiatrists, it's one on one or one hundreds of
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  Speaker 2: dollars per hour. Other methodologies are not very scalable or
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  Speaker 2: very expensive. Dance, you know, floor in a speaker, And
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  Speaker 2: so we started. We did some work with some homeless shelter,
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  Speaker 2: some disabled centers, after school programs, and then we realize
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  Speaker 2: that we can go do refugee camps where there's hundreds
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  Speaker 2: of thousands of people who are suffering. So we've picked
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  Speaker 2: one of the largest in Africa called Biddy Biddy and
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  Speaker 2: two hundred and fifty thousand refugees in Uganda. Then a
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  Speaker 2: massive suicide crisis, a massive mental health crisis. I think
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  Speaker 2: it's something like thirty or forty percent of their residents
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  Speaker 2: is they are depressed. It's like a ten percent annual suicide, right,
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  Speaker 2: don't quote me on that, but I mean it's those
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  Speaker 2: proportions and a lot of the folks that have nothing
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  Speaker 2: to live for, and so the goal is to give
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  Speaker 2: them something to live for. That is a force that
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  Speaker 2: we could afford. So we partnered with another nonprofit who
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  Speaker 2: created this stage is like performance stage, and we do
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  Speaker 2: the programming, dance programming, and we have people coming say
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  Speaker 2: this is what they now live for. This has changed
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  Speaker 2: their life. They didn't take their life because of this.
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  Speaker 2: Imman is flourishing and we did almost nothing. We created
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  Speaker 2: some curriculum, we trained some people on the ground. We're
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  Speaker 2: not fishing for them. We don't hire people to go
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  Speaker 2: out and teach me. There's thousands of incredible dancers already
• 8:03
  Speaker 2: as refugees. So we just put a little program together
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  Speaker 2: and they've taken the ball and they run with it.
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  Speaker 2: Now we go back every six months, check in, help
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  Speaker 2: give him advice, on how to manage the program. So
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  Speaker 2: now I want to scale this to Shelter's homeless refugee schools.
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  Speaker 2: This is my biggest passion for charity.