Making Sense with Sam Harris - #253 — Corporate Courage

Episode Date: June 17, 2021

Sam Harris speaks with Jason Fried about the recent controversy over the “no politics” policy at his company Basecamp. They discuss his business philosophy, the surrender of institutions to "social-justice" activism, how politics has acquired a religious fervor, some of the cultural risks of remote work, keeping activists out of one’s company, social media use as analogous to smoking cigarettes, antitrust regulations for big tech, how social media might be improved, the tax-avoidance schemes of the richest Americans, the prospect of implementing a wealth tax, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

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Today I'm speaking with Jason Fried. Jason is the co-founder and CEO of Basecamp, formerly 37signals, which is a Chicago-based software firm which produces the Basecamp product. He's also the co-author of the book Rework, among others, and he also writes Inc. Magazine's Get Real column. And I invited Jason on the podcast to discuss the recent controversy over his no-politics policy at Basecamp, which caused quite a firestorm on social media, as you'll hear. We discuss the pervasive failure of institutional nerve in the face of all of this social justice activism, how our politics has acquired a religious fervor of late, some of the cultural risks of remote work,

how to keep activists out of one's company, antitrust regulations for big tech, how social media might be improved, ProPublica's recent disclosure of the tax avoidance schemes of the richest Americans, the prospect of implementing a wealth tax, and other topics. Anyway, a very timely conversation, and a counterpoint to some recent podcasts where I focused on corporate cowardice. Here we have an example of corporate courage, which is certainly worth celebrating. And to that end, I bring you Jason Freed. I am here with Jason Freed. I'm sure there's a lot we could talk about. You have an interesting background, but we have a specific thing to talk about, which we'll get to in a second. But before we do, perhaps you can summarize what you've been up to, the to low these many years. How do you describe what it is you do?

And in particular, the company you started, Basecamp, what does that do? What is the product for those who have not experienced it? Yeah, sure. So back in 1999, I started a business called 37 Signals. We were originally a web design company. And over a number of years, we eventually morphed into doing software development. And we did that because the product that or the work we were doing was website design, and we needed a better way to manage that work. We were using email and shooting things back and

forth and things were getting lost. So we eventually made this thing for ourselves called, which well, it wasn't called Basecamp yet, but it was like a project management tool, internal communication thing. And eventually, we started using it with our clients and they liked it. And we said, you know, maybe we can turn this into a product. And we did that in like 2004. So since 2004, we've been making software. We've made a variety of different products over the years. This is software as a service stuff you'd use online. And, you know, we've always been a very unusual company in that we've done things our own way. We're fully independent. We're privately funded by ourselves and our customers, so we don't take outside money. And we've always sort of taken a different path than the rest of the industry. We've pushed back

pretty hard against a number of different things. But basically, we make two things, Basecamp, which is a project management and sort of internal collaboration tool for remote work. And also we make something called Hey, which is H-E-Y.com, which is our newest product, which is an email service. And so those are the two things we make today. Mm-hmm. And how big a company is it, both in terms of employees and revenue or valuation, terms of employees and revenue or valuation, however you'd want to consider its scale? Yeah. I mean, I can rail on or rant on against valuations because I think they're kind of ridiculous. So I'll just give you a sense of, we've historically been at our largest about 60 people. And since we're private, I don't disclose exact revenues, but we generate tens of millions

of dollars in annual revenues and annual profits. And we've been profitable every year since we started the business in 1999. Nice. And you've also had a fairly intentional consideration of culture and business philosophy. You've published several books about business, and you write for Inc., I believe, regularly. So maybe you can summarize how you've thought about business and business culture up until this moment. Yeah. We are an independent company, and I believe in independence and small businesses. And part of the reason why we haven't taken outside money is

because we don't want to be beholden to someone else. We want to do what we think is right. We want to try things. We want to experiment with things. And we've found that the only way to do that is to be independent. So I'll give you a sense of some of the things that are different about Basecamp. First of all, in our industry, which is the tech industry, people are used to overwork and just being driven really, really hard. 10, 12 hour days, all nighters, weekends, the whole thing. We just expect an eight hour day from people. Eight hour day, 40 hour week, very standard, very mainstream, very old school kind of work environment in that way, which is just give us a good day, eight hours, that's plenty of time to do great work. And because of that, we require

a certain degree of focus and attention to be put on that work, which is why we try to eliminate a number of distractions. For example, we don't really have meetings at Basecamp. If people need to get together, it might be two or three people, but we don't have scheduled meetings. We don't have daily standups. We don't have a bunch of all hands. We don't have the type of culture that a lot of companies do, which people are just drowned by meetings constantly. They're in them all day. And they're chunking your day into smaller and smaller bits. And no one has time to get work done because you've got only 15 minutes here or maybe an hour there before the next meeting.

So we kind of stay away from that kind of stuff. We do four-day weeks in the summer. So basically May through September, we only do four-day weeks, which is a 32-hour week, which is really unusual. We've worked remotely for about 20 years. We have a very different approach. And our general approach is let's focus on the stuff that matters. Let's get rid of the things that don't. Let's put in a good day's work.

And then let's have a life, which is, again, very weird in the tech world, which is not about life. It's about work all the time. And we're not about that. So there's a bunch of other things as well. But those are some of the fundamental things that we've done to make this place a different place. So you guys must have weathered COVID better than many other companies. You were already fully distributed?

We're pretty much. So we've had an office in Chicago for the past 10 or so years, but most of our employees are all over the place. So outside of Chicago. So we have people in the US and Canada and Europe, Hong Kong and Australia. And we've always been remote. Even the local people who lived in Chicago, they may have come into the office once or twice a week. So we've always essentially worked as if we were a remote company.

And I think we did weather it pretty well because we were used to it. We didn't have to scramble to figure this stuff out. But at the same time, I think it hurt us because we'd always leaned on each other a couple weeks a year. So we would fly everybody into Chicago twice a year for about a week to have these in-person meetups where we got to share a meal and hang out and have some FaceTime and just have some social interactions, which we hadn't been able to do for the past year because of COVID. And the last time we did it, I think, was fall of 2019. So it had been a while. And I think it was a problem because, by the way, everyone's going through this as well, so this isn't unique to us. But I think we realized how important it was, or it is, to see each other at least occasionally

and remind ourselves that we're all human, we're all soft-bodied organisms here, and we have feelings, we have emotions, and we're complicated. I think we lost a little bit of that through COVID, and I know a lot of people have. It's been a very difficult year for a lot of companies, obviously a lot of people. Okay. So what happened? I mean, now we have a picture of you as an employer that sounds quite domineering and depressive. And I can imagine that your workforce is looking for every opportunity to revolt. So what has brought us together for this podcast? Well, it's been about almost two months now. In mid-April, we announced a policy change that basically said, you know, we're not going

to start talking, or we're not going to continue to talk politics at work. I'd say over the past few years, probably starting in, you know, 2016, as a lot of things started in 2016 and through the 2020 election and beyond now. Politics has invaded every aspect of life, obviously, and it's become incredibly contentious. And it was sort of leaking into our day-to-day too often. Not every day, but enough. And we've been at this kind of low simmer for a while where we sort of felt like it was just part of life simmer for a while where we sort of felt like it was just part of life at work. But it started to get more and more concentrated and the boil began to heat up. And we were having discussions in the company that were company-wide. So between 50 and 60 people were participating in these conversations, or at least receiving the notifications. They weren't all participating.

Where things started just to go off the rails in a way that felt very nonproductive and unhealthy. And when I say nonproductive, I don't mean like measuring productivity. I just mean like, this is not the kind of general mind space we should be in at work. We shouldn't be debating the most complicated issues of the day. I mean, these topics are hard enough to discuss, period. Professionals have a hard time discussing this stuff. And, you know, to think that all we have to do is mix work in there, and that'll be the antidote, and work will make it better. I mean, it's just the opposite. Work makes it incredibly hard to have conversations like this. So we just decided, when I say we, I mean, David and I, we're the two owners of the business.

We decided that we were going to not have political discussions inside Basecamp any longer. Now, to be clear, let me just clarify a couple things. So when I say inside Basecamp, Basecamp is the name of the company, but also the name of our product. So when I say inside Basecamp, I mean, in Basecamp, the product where we do our work, which is where we do all of our work. We just don't want political conversations leaking into that. If you want to set up a signal account, a group WhatsApp, whatever you want to do, a Discord thing to talk about that during the day, that's fine. But we can't have this in front of everybody whenever at random times. Now, we're also quite

political as an organization in a different way in that we are very outspoken about things that involve our work. So we're very much in favor of antitrust regulations against big tech. We're very much in favor of more privacy regulations, because we think that big tech is just basically in everyone's face all the time, in everyone's business all the time. It's unhealthy. So we push against that. We've gotten into some very public battles with Apple about the App Store and their rules. So we are still going to be involved in political discussions that directly touch the edges of our work, but that's the limit of what we're comfortable doing. And so we made that declaration along with a few others, and things kind of went sideways, let's say. At the end of the period of time where this was sort of a topic,

we had about 20, a little bit over 20 people leave the company. So that's a third of your workforce. Basically, yeah. And a couple other things to share here, which is that we offered an extremely generous severance package, six-month severance for anyone who'd been here for more than a few years and three months if you've only been here for a few. And some people took us up on that outside of the policy changes. They were just ready to go anyway, and they were looking for a new opportunity, and this was a good chance for them to do that. That said, the majority of people probably left because of the policy change that we made. So it was a very difficult time, a sad time.

So it was a very difficult time, a sad time. And I know a lot of people were sad. And it was challenging, a very challenging kind of an existential moment for us as a sort of the toxicity, of course, that we all know is there. But then when you're part of it and you see it coming directed at you, it's a whole nother thing. And that was an eye opener, even though I knew it. But to feel it is different. And it was challenging. So here we are. But we made the decision.

We think it's still the right call. We think this decision is right. And we think that we're early on it. We have a history of being early. We've been working remotely for a long time before other companies had done it. 40 work weeks is still, of course, not a thing most companies would do. We pushed very hard against venture capital. And you're starting to see more of a bootstrap revolution happening right now. We've been preaching this for 20 years. There's a number of other things that we've done ahead of the pack. And I think that sometimes when you're early, it hurts even more. You got to put your neck out there and give something a try.

But to me, this is an extension of the experiment, which is Basecamp. And we feel almost a moral obligation to live up to our independence and to do things that other people wouldn't give us permission to do. That is why I'm an entrepreneur, to do things that I wouldn't have permission to do otherwise. Because if you're just going to do what someone's going to tell you to do, you might as well go get a job, is kind of how I look at it. So we take that seriously and we give things a shot and we try things out and we see what happens. And time always tells. And we'll see, we'll look back on this a year from now or two and see how it all played out. So things must have been heating up prior to your change of policy, right? Because you kind of ripped the Band-Aid off with the policy change.

But prior to that, were there signs that things were becoming dysfunctional at the company? Were there signs that things were becoming dysfunctional at the company, or was it really at a very low simmer and you just decided this is just something that needed to be corrected going forward, and then things only got chaotic after you announced the new policy? I think it had been ramping up. Now, I have an organizational view that's different than some people who only see part of the organization. I'm the CEO. I'm part of all the discussions. I see what's going on. I'm part of other discussions that aren't public inside the company. And there was a ramp up. Now, I'm only willing to talk about the things that have been made public because everything else is a private

internal conversation, of course. But the thing that ultimately sort of ripped it all off, I think, was this conversation that was had about, and this has all been made public, it leaked, so here it is. There was a list of names that had been kept by some people in the company. You would call them, well, they were considered to be funny sounding names. Now, this was a serious lapse of judgment. And when I say names, these are customer names that had come in via customer service emails. were considered to be funny sounding names. Now, this was a serious lapse of judgment. And when I say names, these are customer names that had come in via customer service emails. And this is a terrible lapse of judgment. And I feel responsible too. I knew about this list about a decade ago when it first began. And I sort of thought it was put away at some point, but apparently it continued and it was growing. It hadn't been updated for many,

many years, but it existed and it had been moved between systems, like upgraded, moved between different file services and whatnot. Anyway, at some point, an employee apologized for being part of that list. And I thought that apology was very fair and great. But in addition to that apology, there was a chart that was posted along with the apology, which is actually the ADL pyramid of hate. I don't know if you're familiar with that pyramid, where at the bottom you have, I think, microaggressions and it kind of goes up three or four levels. To the top, it's genocide. And the suggestion ultimately was that if we are going to be making fun of people's names, which again was a major mistake,

that we could end up literally genocidal, which is just such an, I don't know. It's just, I mean, it's obviously what it is. It doesn't make any sense. I think you might need to take some VC money to bring that project to scale. We would need some more people. That's true. There might be one reason to do it, right? But the thing is that was so interesting about it was that some people thought that that was just simply okay. And I could not wrap my head around how we got to a place where we were talking about genocide at work. And the subject of the genocide was that we were potentially going in that direction if we were willing to make fun of people's names, which again was wrong. And the thing that's so

interesting to me is that there's got to be a time and a place where you can say, we screwed up, and we're sorry, and it can end there. But in some cases, it can't end there unless you come to a full account of all the horrors that it could also end up leading to. And I just felt, and David and I both looked at that and said, this has to be the end of that. Because we can't literally normalize discussions about genocide that we were potentially going to commit inside our company. This is just so out of proportion. And that was ultimately what it was. But there had been a boil. And this was sort of the moment where we're like, we can't let this continue. This just doesn't make any sense. Would I be right in guessing that the person who alleged that you were on the

ramp to genocide is also a person who took the buyout when you offered it? Yes. the ramp to genocide is also a person who took the buyout when you offered it? Yes. Well, obviously, this is not just a problem for Basecamp, and that's why we're having this conversation, but it has become system-wide in media and tech and Hollywood, and it truly is ubiquitous, and that's what's so alarming to many of us, that there's a fringe phenomenon, it's so alarming to many of us that there's a fringe phenomenon, which should be a fringe phenomenon on the left, that is capturing our institutions and the K-12 education now to a remarkable degree. I tend to describe what we're witnessing under the guise of social justice

politics as a kind of moral panic. And this is not to say that racism and sexism and transphobia aren't problems anywhere. I think they clearly are, but they're not problems everywhere. And they're being treated as such by a large group of activists and cult leaders, frankly, I mean, people like Ibram X. Kendi, who are pushing a politics on the rest of the country that resembles nothing so much as mental illness. And because they enjoy this asymmetrical advantage with respect to social stigma, because being accused of racism in particular is so destructive to a person's reputation, these activists are successfully silencing and cowing most good people. And the people who do have the courage to call bullshit on all this dishonesty

and bullying can be made to seem like they're joining the ranks of bad people who are really racist and sexist and transphobic. So now we have the spectacle of some of the least racist people and institutions on earth issuing abject apologies, the kinds of apologies that would seem appropriate in an exit interview from the Ku Klux Klan, just rending themselves over their past sins. And this is something that recently happened, you may have heard about this, at Juilliard, and its drama department in particular, just tore itself apart over its alleged racism.

The drama department at Juilliard is 50% black. It's circulating crazed lists of demands to itself, talking about how black bodies are being subjected to violence under this appallingly racist regime at Juilliard. So this has become like the Salem witch trials. And I remain convinced that this fever will break at some point and that sane people will step forward and acknowledge that while there's still a lot of work to do to address specific inequalities in our society, we have made tremendous progress. I mean, there is in fact less racism and sexism and transphobia at this moment in America, in particular in our institutions, than there has ever been anywhere

on earth. And not to acknowledge that is becoming increasingly perverse, even while you are right to want to work to resolve remaining inequalities. So what you've done here, I think, is if it hasn't been celebrated sufficiently yet, it will one day be. Because the I mean, the lack of institutional courage we're seeing in the most profitable companies that have ever existed, I mean, a company like Apple, right, which is just showing every sign of capitulating the moment a Twitter thread gets started, it's really shocking and totally dysfunctional. How do you view the landscape of tech in particular? I mean, there are a few other companies who have done more or less what you've done. I mean,

I'm thinking of Coinbase and Shopify. I think in the case of Coinbase, I certainly didn't hear they paid the same kind of price you did in terms of employees leaving, and perhaps they didn't offer the same kind of generous exit package. But how do you view your tech colleagues and their commitment or lack thereof to holding the line here? Yeah. Well, there's a few things going on. First of all, there does appear to be a tinge of sort of a religious fervor about this. And, you know, I will say everybody who's ever worked here, I think is a wonderful person and they have a great heart and their intentions are good. I don't wish ill will on anybody. And I think that, you know, people are making their own personal decisions and I'm fine with the decisions people make. The problem though,

is that when the alternative is that, you know, the takes are so uncharitable that if you stick around here, I mean, there was some threats to people who work here still. And I'm very, very appreciative of the people who stayed and lived through this because some of them were being threatened terribly, that they were racist and they are white supremacists and that they are fascist or part of a fascist regime. It's like the most uncharitable possible takes on people. When it defaults to that, that's a problem. That is like their heretics, basically. And that sits with me. That does not sit well with me at all. To go straight there just does not make sense. And it's funny, like I'm Jewish. I was called a Nazi. I was called a Nazi.

I was called a white supremacist. Of course, white supremacists want me dead too. Like, to even have a suggestion that I would side with that is just to be completely blinded to the realities of what that is. Anyway, that's what happened is that Twitter, the other thing I've kind of noticed here, and by the way, I've been off Twitter for about two months. I was off it about a week prior to this all going down. And I'm glad that I was because my sanity was maintained to some degree during this

process. But I was shown screenshots of what was going on on Twitter. And the amount of shame and bullying directed at our employees and that people who work here was just horrifying. And what's interesting is that I think part of the reason why, for example, Coinbase, I think they lost something like 5% of their workforce, something like that. We lost about 30 is that we have a smaller surface area. We have 60 people and we had a page up at basecamp.com slash team, which we've since taken down, where everyone's name was there and people's Twitter handles were there if they were on Twitter. And it was very easy to throw

a mob at that small degree of surface area and literally shame the hell out of people. It's just, it's, you know, Twitter, you know, look, I've been on Twitter for years, got a few hundred thousand followers. I've been very active on Twitter. And Twitter is a double-edged sword. And I've just come to realize that it's actually a terribly toxic soup of complaints and attacks. And I don't want to soak my mind in that anymore. So I'm off of it. But I think Twitter plays a huge role in this. And it's one of the reasons why so many companies are afraid, because you get a very, very vocal group, grandstanding and throwing bombs at individuals. I mean, who's going to stand up to that? And I don't blame any of our employees who decided they just couldn't take that. And they decided they had to leave too, because they didn't want to be part of that. I can understand that. I really truly can. That pressure must be enormous. And there was moments that I wanted to quit. I don't want to do this anymore. I don't want to be subject to this. How did this happen? So I get the pressures, but I think that's part of what's

going on. If there was no Twitter, I think things would actually be quite a bit different. Now, Twitter is also wonderful. We've managed to make serious inroads against some stuff that Apple's doing, not around this, but around the App Store, by marshalling an audience on Twitter and getting people to understand our point of view and our take. And Twitter's wonderful in those ways too, but man, it's such a tricky place. And I think that's the main thing that's going on, is that because Twitter is so public, and because there's no identity verification on Twitter, you have no idea who is forming the mob, is forming the group. You just don't know. And so therefore,

there are reasonable, good people on there who do have a different point of view, fine, who want to throw some bombs, that's fine. But there could be thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of fake accounts. You have no idea what's going on on there. And they can destroy people. And that's really sad. So I understand the self-preservation, what it must take at that level to sacrifice somebody or something to say, we're just going to... I can't handle this anymore in public, so we're just going to do this thing to make that go away. I get where that comes from.

Yeah, we have a massive coordination problem here, because this problem could go away instantly if enough people just stepped forward together. But because it's difficult to orchestrate that, and because the penalty for any one person summoning too much courage can be extraordinary, you have people just wanting to avoid the problem altogether. It becomes rational not to be the one to open your big mouth because, you know, so much ire and dishonesty is going to be targeted in your direction. And this problem, strangely, doesn't go away when you become incredibly successful and wealthy. I mean, you can literally meet billionaires who have no more courage than your lowliest employee, because they're the first to think, well, you know, what's the upside for me? You know, like I, you know, I don't want to complicate my life. And in addition, I've got

thousands of people and in some cases, hundreds of companies. And I was talking to a, you know, famous venture capitalist who, you know, shares all of my opinions, apparently, on this subject, when I asked him why he wouldn't talk about this publicly, he said, and this is, admittedly, this can be a totally altruistic motive, at least in his head, he said, just too many people and companies depend on me. I've got hundreds of companies and people whose whole livelihoods are wrapped up in, you know, the next thing I do or don't do on some level. And, you know, why would I want to complicate everyone's life by opening my big mouth on this topic? Yeah, I mean, you know, part of that is when you have so many interests that are intertwined and dependent upon one another, you have to worry about what the stakeholders might say. And maybe your company is going to go IPO in a year, and you got to worry about that. And there's a lot of things to worry about the

deeper your tentacles go and the more dependent you are upon this funding source or that eventual exit or whatever it might be, which is one of the reasons why we felt like we could take this on and try it. We are, as I mentioned earlier, independent. We don't have a board. We don't have investors. If not us, who? And look, we even discussed, David and I, my business partner and I discussed like, this could take the company down. Like this literally could. And you know what? We're okay with that if that was to happen. We've been in business for 22 years. This is more of a, I guess, a stoic practice perhaps, but just kind of the negative visualization. Like the worst thing that can happen here is we can,

we could, the business could go out of business and that would suck. It really would. It'd be painful and terrible. And I put my life's work into this. I'm 47, like half of my life, basically. And the full majority of my professional life has been in this. I would hate for this to go away. I love this place. I love the people who work here.

The products we make are fantastic. We have wonderful customers. We've done a lot for the industry. We care a lot. We give a lot back. We're very altruistic when it comes to the work that we do. We've open sourced tons of software, written a bunch of books. We're out there and very vocal and willing to say things that we think need to be said. But if that all went away, we would be okay with that. I mean, I don't want it to be that, but we had to come to that. And I can understand how other people who have far more

dependencies. And by the way, the other thing is, if you've worked at Basecamp, you can work anywhere. So anyone here who has a job could get another job somewhere else if that happened. I'd feel terrible about it, but if that happened, that would happen. And I mean, we're very grateful that that didn't happen and that we have a wonderful crew here and we've already been hiring and people are excited to work here more than ever in some cases because they really want a place that's a refuge from what's going on in the world right now. They want a place where they can hone their craft and focus on the work. Of course, have social conversations with colleagues, of course, but a place where they aren't constantly having to address or decide whether or not they want to wade in

or stay out of the biggest topics of our time. They want a place where they can just kind of do the work. And so that's been wonderful to see the response. And the company is great and it didn't hurt the business. We had a few extra cancellations that one week, but other than that, everything's back to normal. So that was reassuring too, that this is actually, I think our position is actually quite mainstream. It's hard in the tech world to feel that because

when you're surrounded by it, and especially if you spend time on Twitter, it feels like the whole world is against you at this moment. But the more I talk to people and the more people I've heard from, I received hundreds of emails from folks. And I've talked to a lot of people and other CEOs and leaders and business owners and other employees at other companies and just vendors that we work with. And they're like, politics at work, that's crazy. Why would we ever talk politics at work? We don't talk politics at work. It's also a bit of an American thing. Since we have employees all over the world, we did lose a few great employees in Europe. But for the most part, a lot of people were just surprised that the reaction was what it was. And anyway, it comforts me to know that this is actually a pretty mainstream point of view,

which is that politics and religion, I mean, there's other things you just wouldn't talk about at work. People know not to talk about religion. And since politics has essentially become a religion these days, it feels like it fits in that category. In the same way that if you were in an open office and you were to, you know, everyone's working in an office and someone just grabbed a podium and started to proselytize and talk about their points of view on religion or politics and that you should come this way or else,

everyone would say like, hey, shut up. Like, what are you doing? Like, this is totally inappropriate. But given the fact that we use remote working tools like, hey, shut up. Like, what are you doing? Like, this is totally inappropriate. But given the fact that we use remote working tools like Basecamp and other companies use things like Slack and whatever else you use, it becomes actually, you lose the attachment to the physical pushback of some of these things.

It's the same way, this is a bit of a tangent, but it's the same way, it's the same reason why software often gets worse over time. It's because there way, this is a bit of a tangent, but it's the same way, it's the same reason why software often gets worse over time. It's because there's no physical edges pushing back on it. If you have like a physical object, if you're thinking about industrial design, a can of soda or something, it's going to have to be a certain shape, a certain size, made of a certain material. There's just some obvious physical limits to

what something can be. Software, however, can be anything. And that's why it often becomes anything. It becomes overwrought with more features and slows down and gets confusing over time. And I think the same thing is true right now with remote work, which is that, and by the way, I'm a huge proponent of it, but that you can throw things into this place that you normally wouldn't if you were in person. And that begins to erode the wall between what's reasonable and what isn't, given the environment and the organization that you're in. So I think that's part of it too. And I almost don't blame people for falling into that because it's sort of a natural depression. I don't mean depression in the land.

Yeah, in a tractor. It happens. I get it. But anyway, we felt like we had to basically fill that depression in so people wouldn't keep falling into it. And we didn't normalize it. And here we are. Yeah, there's something insidious about what gets done with silence in software and on

social media, too, because, you know, silence gets read as a scent for better and worse and mostly worse. And then you can get attacked for your silence. Like, I noticed you haven't commented on X. You know, that must mean you're a fascist. And then, you know, what's widely supporting this problem is that people's silence is being counted as acquiescence to this hysteria, right? I mean, so the silence of people at every level, you know, including at the top, it's just giving space to all of these, I mean, again, it does have a quasi-religious shape to it. I mean, there's been blasphemy tests and formal scapegoating of people, I mean, reputational witch burnings. And all of it is so dishonest in most cases

that it's really toxic and affecting almost everything. That was one of the other things, if I could jump in on that. This is one of the other things that started happening, is I began to hear from a number of employees who over the past number of months felt very uncomfortable because they have their own personal opinions, even in support of some of these things, but they chose just not to share them because people sometimes will say that's privilege. I think it's just your own personal opinions are your own right. You don't need to share what's on your mind with everybody. Your cause doesn't have to pull an opinion out of me at any time. And some

people just choose not to want to talk about these things. It's also not on everybody's mind equally. You know, some people don't have time to think these things through and they're not even sure where they stand. You know, people are nuanced here. People are complicated and these are really complicated issues. And, you know, you shouldn't have to wonder if staying out of it means that you're complicit. Right. And that the non-charitable or the uncharitable assumption is that if you don't say something, you don't stand up for something, then you are against it. And not only are you against it,

but the against equals you're a racist, you're a white supremacist. I mean, the reach is just, it's so vast, so quickly. And also then if you want to kind of wade into it, because you maybe do want to participate, but you say the wrong thing, you don't necessarily know how to say it, and everyone's definition is a little bit different. You can be attacked for a microaggression or whatever it might be. And then you're like, you don't know where to go. And I feel like what ended up happening at Basecamp was that the self-esteem of the organization felt like it was being battered. People were afraid to talk. They didn't know how they were being perceived. There was assumptions about what was being said and what side you were on. There were factions were being formed. And it's one thing to have a detailed debate with somebody or a political debate with someone

when you know you can at the end clap your hands and go home. The problem with mixing this with work is that you have this debate or you stay in it or you stay out of it. And staying out of it is communication as well. Again, like you said, it could be perceived as acquiescence or whatever it might be. But then you've got to work with people who think you're a monster. It's like, how do you do that? It's unfair. It's literally unfair to have that going on. And so, again, this atmosphere just does not feel conducive to a supportive place where we can actually do the work that we're here to do. And the other thing is that

we're a small business. We can't really affect global change on any of these points anyway. I mean, it's one thing perhaps to try to get a huge multinational corporation to make some moves, to make something better if you want to go in that direction. I can almost understand the desire for that. We just don't have that presence. We can't press into the world in that way. We can press into our world, which is the tech world. We can press into antitrust stuff. We can press into software development. We can press into leadership and management styles and advocate for sane work hours and advocate for really fair pay and advocate for reduced hours and advocate for remote work and advocate for a lot of autonomy and agency inside organizations and all these things. That's our realm. That's our sphere of influence.

And we can stick to that and feel we should be able to stick to that and feel wonderful about our contributions to the world without feeling like we need to just take everything on that could ever be wrong. And that's how it began to feel. And maybe not to everybody. And I can appreciate how some people go, or probably listen to this going, Jason, it wasn't like that. Well, it was where I sit in the organization, which is looking at the whole place and how we're doing and how we're feeling and the general sense. And I hear from all sorts of different employees. So as CEO, I have to make some of these difficult decisions about what is this place like to work at? And this was one of those decisions.

I really don't think anyone could challenge your lived experience as CEO, Jason. You're on firm ground there. I try to. Yeah. So have you changed anything about your hiring practices? What advice have you given yourself here going forward? And what advice would you give to other tech leaders? Yeah, well, we've put a few job ads out there so far, and we're getting wonderful

people applying. And so we haven't changed the practices. I think it's pretty clear that, you know, we want to make sure that we're focused on the work here, and that this is a place where you can come and do great work, and hopefully the best work of your career, and that we want to create an environment where that's possible. And I think that we've shown over 22 years that this is a wonderful place to be for those reasons. And it's one of the reasons why, up until just recently, I think close to half of our company had been with us for more than seven years, which is extraordinarily long in this industry. I think the average tenure at most tech companies is something like 18 months or two years. I think we had 20 some odd percent that were over 10 years here.

So obviously, I'm bragging a bit, which is not something I'm comfortable with doing so much. But I will say that we've built a wonderful company, a place where people can do great work with great people. And even the people who left are great people. I feel like everyone's a great person here. We have wonderful benefits and wonderful pay and a wonderful environment. And we don't screw people over with meetings all day. And we don't take people's time. We don't divert people's attention. So I think all of those things are one of the reasons why we typically get hundreds or thousands of applications whenever we put a job up. And that's continuing as we've seen already with the job ads we put up. So I don't think we have to

say anything else. We just have to make it clear where we stand. I mean, you could be relying on the fact that this hiccup got so much press that anyone seeking a job with you now knows what the rules are. But five years from now, if you couldn't really assume that, would you be asking any further questions or telling people just what the policy is upfront as they kind of filter against woke or any other style of activism coming into the company? Yeah, we haven't really discussed that, like what to do about that. I would just say that, first of all, politically, I don't care where you stand. I don't care, you know, where you stand religiously. I don't care about any of these things. They're none of my business. Like, that's how I look at them, right? They're completely none of my business. So you can come in with any point of view you want. But we have

a collective society here, and we're deciding to focus on the work and be essentially nonpolitical outside of the immediate things that we touch. So I don't know what that language might look like. I know Coinbase has said mission-focused. That's their language. I don't like mission purpose. That's not my language. So I don't know what we're going to say at some point. So far, we don't have to say anything. But I think, yeah, at some point, it would probably make sense to come up with something like that. But we tend not to get ahead of ourselves on these things. Right now, we're attracting wonderful people, hired some great people already. And right now, everybody understands the wonderful people, hired some great people already, and right

now everybody understands the advantage to working at Basecamp. Can you really state it that categorically? Because I'm also hiring, I have my own ventures, and I would not be eager to hire a white supremacist, say, right? I mean, if you're a neo-Nazi and you're applying to, you know, however good a software engineer you might be, if you're applying for a job at waking up and those are your political views, well, we're obviously not interested. And I would extend the same judgment to the other side of the continuum. I mean, if you're so far to the left that you think I'm a racist for saying what I just said on this podcast, you know, I'm also

not interested in working with you. You know, how to communicate that, I mean, in my case, I probably don't need to communicate that explicitly because people are aware of what I'm up to on the microphone. But I'm just wondering if you're a CEO of another company and you basically see the world that way, where you just don't want extremists and extremist activists in your company, because they are a species of religious fanatic. And, you know, the laws against discrimination on the basis of religion notwithstanding, I'm not going to hire jihadists.

There's a lot of people I'm not going to hire based on their cockamamie beliefs. So the question is how to select against those beliefs because they are so disruptive. Is there generic advice to give to people? I don't know.

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