The Peter Attia Drive - #74 – Jason Fried: Optimizing efficiency and work-life balance

Episode Date: October 7, 2019

In this episode, Jason Fried, co-founder of Basecamp, shares his beliefs around achieving business success in a modern world which tends to disproportionately focus on the massive success stories (the outliers). Jason gives his honest take on companies like WeWork, Uber, and Lyft that may give off the appearance of wild success but may instead provide an example of the dangers of perverse incentives. We get into Jason’s backstory, and how his affinity for optimizing efficiency and production in the workplace culminated with the creation of Basecamp, his very successful web-based project management software business. Perhaps most importantly, we get really deep into all aspects of work-life balance and what it really means to “work hard” (Stay tuned for an AMA-style deep dive into the topic of work-life balance with Jason in the near future). In addition, Jason provides many more valuable nuggets including thoughts on some common mistakes made by businesses today, the value of giving employees autonomy, how to take the right types of risks, why he doesn’t set any goals, and much, much more. We discuss: Jason’s background and his early entrepreneurial spirit [9:45]; Views on completing higher education and the notion of hard work [24:00]; Beliefs around success in business [35:00]; WeWork, Uber, and Lyft: Poor business practices and the dangers of perverse incentives [41:30]; Jason’s early career: his redesign approach and personal motivation [56:00]; The genesis of Basecamp [1:10:00]; Why Jason does not set goals but instead focuses on a vision [1:12:15]; Workplace motivation and hiring practice [1:20:30]; The importance of luck and not overworking [1:32:00]; A framework to work less and optimize for workplace autonomy [1:38:00]; The importance of saying ‘no’ more often (and tips for doing so) [1:55:00]; A shared passion for watches [2:03:30]; Guarding against the perils of phone addiction [2:08:45]; Jason’s views on email and chat for communication [2:15:00] and; More. Learn more: https://peterattiamd.com/ Show notes page for this episode:peterattiamd.com/jasonfried Subscribe to receive exclusive subscriber-only content: https://peterattiamd.com/subscribe/ Sign up to receive Peter's email newsletter: https://peterattiamd.com/newsletter/ Connect with Peter on Facebook | Twitter | Instagram.

Hey everyone, welcome to the Peter Atia Drive. I'm your host, Peter Atia. The drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking, along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with some of the most successful top performing individuals in the world, and this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality, more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode and other topics at peteratia-md.com.

Hey everybody, welcome to this week's episode of The Drive. I'd like to take a couple of minutes to talk about why we don't run ads on this podcast. If you're listening to this, you probably already know, but the two things I care most about, professionally, are how to live longer and how to live better. I have a complete fascination and obsession with this topic. I practice it professionally, and I've seen firsthand how access to information is basically all people need to make better decisions and improve the quality of their lives. Curating and sharing this knowledge is not easy, and even before starting the podcast, that became clear to me.

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I want to thank you for taking a moment to listen to this. If you learn from and find value in the content I produce, please consider supporting us directly by signing up from monthly subscription. I guess this week is Jason Freed. Jason is the co-founder of Basecamp, a privately held company based out of Chicago, committed to building the best web-based products and tools with the least number of unnecessary features. This is sort of a hallmark of Jason's personality. He's also the co-author of several books getting real, rework, remote, and it doesn't

have to be crazy at work. Now, some of you may recall back from when I started the podcast that one of the reasons I wanted to do this in the first place was I kind of found myself having conversations with friends that after the fact I thought, man, I wish that had been recorded so whether it's good to hear it. And this conversation with Jason is exactly one of those. It's in fact, it's an extension of a conversation that we've had several times over meals. We talk a lot about Jason's story. We get into some turns and had some side conversations that I thought were really interesting.

We talk about his background and how he grew up and how that sort of shaped what eventually led him to working on base camp. And we even had a little side tangent on a whole bunch of other companies that everybody sort of thinks of as great examples of companies like Uber and we work and things like that. One of the things about Jason that's pretty unique in this space is he's just incredibly blunt and not in an obnoxious way at all. He's not being blunt for effect. He's just very open about how he feels and he doesn't mask his feelings about some of these companies and the way they do things and how he feels about that.

We talk about base camps focus on hiring and they have a really unique culture around that and the importance of writing and things like that. At the end of the podcast, we get really deep into all aspects of work, life, balance, which in some ways is something that I really wanted to talk about with Jason. I would say about a week after we recorded this podcast, both Jason and I sat back and sort of thought that we could have even gone deeper into that very particular topic, specifically work-life balance, which is something that I just think every person struggles with on some level. So we actually hummed in hot about going back, sitting down again, and going even deeper on this topic. But after

kicking the idea around what we decided to do was something a little cooler, which was set up a special AMA that Jason would do, much in the same way I've done with Matthew Walker, where after this episode, whatever questions you have about anything we talk about, but I think work-life balance is probably the most important thing we talk about here. We're going to take a bunch of questions from our members and we'll do a specific AMA with Jason that focuses on that. So if you have any questions that we didn't get to or areas that you want to go deeper on, this is a great opportunity to use the AMA to help us put together a follow-up

discussion with Jason. So with all that said, please enjoy my conversation with Jason Freed, the first of at least two. Well, Jason, it's great to see you as always. Thanks for having me here. New York to Chicago. It's not as much of a shock as some places to New York, right? Like Chicago is... Chicago's a small New York. Very small.

Like probably, I feel like it's an eighth, well actually it's 16th of New York. But I get it. I know how to roll in New York, you know? But I feel like if I came from Kansas City, I wouldn't really know what New York was. It'd be a big shock to me. Yeah, yeah, New York, it's a beautiful place,

but I do love it here. I'll offend all the New Yorkers when I say this. I love it. be a big shock to me. Yeah, yeah, New York, it's a beautiful place, but I do love it here. I'll offend all the New Yorkers when I say this. I love it, I just couldn't live here. Yeah, that's how I feel. I feel like I missed it. I wanted to live here in my 20s and I missed that. Never happened. And now I want to kind of live here

but only for four days at a time. That'd be, I think kind of perfect actually. Because every time I'm here, I love it. But then like if I'm here for three or four days, at the end of four days, I'm tired. I'm just really tired and burned out. Yeah, I mean, as I was saying to you earlier, one of the things I like about New York,

which is really maybe even less about New York and more about just being in a short concise zone of work, is like, I always lose a little weight when I'm here. I eat really well. For the most part, sometimes I go off the rails, but like I don't have like kid food around, I can just be more, this really is not a statement of New York now that I, another is coming out my mouth, I realize

this is just a statement of people who, being on your own, who are working on their own sometimes. Yeah, I was gonna say, I can meditate when I want, I can do this when I want, I can, oh wait. It sounds like I'm saying I don't like my being with my family, which couldn't be the further thing from the truth. No, but like a little bit of separation is healthy for all things. It's good to get away from work, although you're kind of working when you're here, but just

to have a change of scenery, I think it's really healthy for people for all sorts of reasons. This is definitely something I want to talk about with you today, because someone might be listening to this and saying, what's the CEO and founder of Basecamp on a podcast where we talk about longevity? Because even though you and I both have a lot of shared interests outside, including watches, I definitely don't think anybody wants to hear us talk about watches. So we're probably not going to talk about watches much if at all. But work-life balance is actually something that I think people can immediately and sort of intuitively appreciate.

A, is something most of us don't do well. I think if I were gonna score card Peter Atia on health by far my closest to an F is on work-life balance. And frankly, it's something that seems to know no limit. Meaning, it doesn't matter how educated you are, it doesn't matter how much money you make, it doesn't matter how prestigious your job is. I think everybody on some level is struggling with this, or at least most people are. And it's such a high priority for you. It's something you've written

about and you're just kind of one of the few people for whom this idea of culture in a workplace means something. Everybody says that. Everybody says that. It almost doesn't mean much. So part of me wants to go right there, but I also think part of me thinks the listener who's not familiar with you needs to know a bit of the background. So would you humor me to, if we back up a little bit and explain how you got to be where you are? Yeah, sure. I feel like my career started when I was 14, maybe 13. That's when I was allowed to work.

I got a workers permit. My dad took me to the city hall in the town grew up in, which was, do you feel Illinois, which is about 25 miles north of Chicago. And I went to work at a grocery store, and I eventually went to work at a shoe store and did some other things. But around that time, I started getting into computers

a little bit. My neighbor had a Mac plus or Mac SE, one of the original early all-in-ones. And he showed me the flight simulator in a blue my mind. I'm like, what the hell is this thing? It's like the graphics are crisp, this is amazing. This was black and white simulator, right? Black and white simulator, this is Microsoft simulator.

I think there's something like that. I don't remember this. Early days. And it just completely blew my mind because before that, I'd only seen like an Apple II, which was a, you know, traditional computer, you know, green kind of screen, and the Mac was so crisp.

So I convinced my parents to get me one eventually. And from there, I started to learn how to make software, but only because I wanted something. I didn't care about software, I didn't really care about computers, but I wanted a tool to organize my music collection, because that a bunch of CDs and tapes. So this is, are we in the late 80s?

Where? Yeah, late 80s, because the Mac came out in 85. So this is still pre-CD. You're in your music collection. There's no asking my question is to know what kind of music collection we're talking about. Were these cassettes? Mostly cassettes. I had some CDs though I was super early at the end of the CD pink Floyd the wall my first CD mine was definitely box set good good choice

Remember buying it 80 bucks. Is that right 80 bucks for a five disc CD? I remember you know CDs were like 16 bucks each or 18 bucks each at the time. I had this collection of music and I was loaning it up to friends and I would never get it back. I forgot who I gave it to and it's gone. I spent all this time making mix tapes and you know whatever gone. And so I'm like there's got to be a way to track this and of course I could do it on paper or whatever but I had this computer thing. So I eventually, I got this thing called FileMaker Pro. I don't know if you're familiar with software, right? It's not programming.

It was like plugging stuff together. So I plugged a bunch of stuff together. I had always had an interest in interface design for some reason, design. And so I learned how to like make an interface. I built this thing, which I eventually called audio file, which was a way to keep track of the music collection that you had, and all the tracks that were on the CDs of the tapes,

and who you loaned it out to, and when, and it would send you a reminder to get it back and the whole thing. And I put it up on AOL, because this is before the internet, basically. Internet really hadn't happened yet, kind of 95, 96, is when the internet sort of happened. I put up on AOL, and in that file... You say put it up meaningOL and in that file.

We say put it up meaning like that's where you stored it or that's where you were then allowing people to access it. The latter. So AOL had this like these file library sections. I don't even know what they're calling. So I don't recall. This is a bit of a blur. This is a little bit early days and like file sharing

where you could, there's like these special interest areas and you could upload files that were called binaries basically at the time and you could upload these files to AOL and share software with others. So there's something called shareware. So it's kind of where you would put things like this. There's also bulletin boards, which is like you dial into with a modem and that kind of stuff. But AOL was the biggest one at the time. So I uploaded some stuff to AOL and in that was a text file saying, Hey, if you like this, send me 20 bucks. Like, here's my address as like my parents house. Just send this to me. And that summer I got 20 bucks in the mail from some guy in Germany. I remember getting the envelope. It was like the red and blue checked air mail envelope. And like, who do I, I don't know

it would be in Germany, you know, and like inside this envelope was this was like the red and blue checked airmail envelope. And my coup d'oeil, I don't know what it'd been in Germany. And inside this envelope was this printout of this paper I had in $20. And I realized for the first time that I could make something that I wanted that other people might want to and they're going to pay for it. So that's kind of, I think, even though today I'm doing the same thing, now I have a business name

and a 54 employees and the whole thing. It was just me back then in the late 80s, early 90s doing this. I feel like it's the same exact business. I'm in the same business, which is making something that I need that I want, recognizing that there's a lot of people in the world and there's probably some people out there like me who want it to. Package it up, make it nice, take care of it, and put a price on it and sell it. That's what I've been doing for 30 years now, basically. So in your business, sort of career was the contraband sale, because there's some really funny stories that, you know,

you've told me and you've told Tim and where you, I mean, you definitely have an entrepreneurial spirit. I think so. Let's put it that way. So where was that occurring? I'm trying to remember like the age, how, this is junior high school. So I don't know what is that 13. Yeah, something like that. Yeah. I was into knives and throwing stars and switch blades and butterfly knives and tear gas and all

this like military stuff that you kind of get into as a boy at least I did. No, I'm the same way. In fact, this is the weirdest story to start in a rut, but it's so ridiculous that someone's mentioning a butterfly knife, which I've almost forgotten what they are until you say that. At an eighth grade party, I had my butterfly knife because I was so cool. And this girl, she was the girlfriend of one of my friends, and she was just like the coolest girl in the class. She was like a cool girl, right? And her name was Dottie, short for Dorothy. And somehow, like, I let her talk me into carving her initial D into my shoulder with the

knife, which she did. And I actually still have this scar on my arm. I still have the D on my right shoulder from that eighth grade party with the butterfly knife. And I didn't see Daudi ended up leaving school and stuff and we lost track of each other, but I kind of came back into contact with her in 2016. And it was the first thing I showed her.

I was like, do you remember this? That is crazy. So someone that encouraged you to do that and you did it. That's why. like, yeah. Were you just kind of in this like misty item and impress this girl thing? Or was there, the funny thing is like I was sort of my quote unquote,

you know, air quote, girl friend at the time was like another girl anyway, who I was really into. So no, I don't even think I was trying to impress Dottie Perse, as much as maybe just everybody there. Like, look at, I'm tough enough that I can stand here while a girl Grines a knife into my arm while I bleed and I won't flinch. Wow Your next level. I mean, I think it speaks to just how It's amazing our species

Survived sometimes when you think of how stupid someone like me could be. Especially when we all get to be 13, you know, just stupid. And you're no stranger to stupidity, no offense. No stranger to it. Yeah, we're in the stupid, we're in the stupid 13 year old club. So somehow I stumbled on this catalog called the Sportsman Guide, which was like one of these mail order, army supply, camping kind of things. I think maybe my dad was on some list

and that showed up or something like that. And I just loved it. How could you not as a camel gear and tactical flashlights and all this kind of stuff? And I had a job, so I had money. My parents didn't give me any, but I had a good job. Good job selling shoes when I was in tennis rackets, but it was actually a pretty good pink job

because I had a commission and I was a good salesperson. So I could sell enough and I was making, I remember $250 in a week and I bought a bunch of this stuff. That's a ton of money, but it was a lot. It was a whole week. There was a certain tennis racket called the Yamaha Secret 10. And if you sold that racket, you got $10 commission. Now, I didn't play tennis. I'm ashamed of this now. I didn't play tennis, but I told customers I did

And I said I've never played better than with this Yamaha secret tank such a horrible lie Like I feel terrible about it But anyway, I am asked a small Very very small small fortune, but enough for me to place an order for some stuff that I wanted. But I didn't have a credit card because you can't, you don't have one in your 13. So things came COD cash on delivery. Yeah, remember that? I totally forgot about COD. Yeah, I don't know if they still do that or not, but the UPS guy would come to our house and I would give him cash. So I'd stay home from school that day. I'd fake that I was sick. I'd stay home from school.

And the UPS person would come and I would give them cash. And I'd get this box of stuff. And then I would basically make a catalog and sell to my friends. I'd like, I get the stuff and I actually physically made a catalog by cutting and pasting things and doubling the price and sold to my friends. And it wasn't even for the money, I didn't care.

It was just like fun. It's fun to get something and sell it for twice or whatever. So I did that for a while until I got in trouble. Why did you get in trouble? I got in trouble doing some other things that were not directly related but are all related to like being a hooligan. Basically, some friends, a particular friend of mine, he, I don't know who convinced to do this.. So I'm not gonna blame him or take the blame. One of us decided to fake, this is just again terrible, fake poison,

one of our friends by putting like a tick-tax in his milk at lunch, and then he drank it and we told him we poisoned him. Stupid. Stupid, right? So we didn't of course, but he passed out and math that day later on. The power of the placebo.

The placebo. There you go. There we go. And so then like they had this pompous stomach because it's like, I got in trouble for that. And then that was just tied into all this other stuff. And then like some friend got caught by his parents with knives where did you get those?

Well, I got them from Jay and it's like the whole thing came crashing down. So your empire comes crashing down. Empire crashing down. But it was interesting because my parents told me they said, hey, look, if you don't clean up, we're gonna send you to boarding school.

And I cleaned up like that moment. I wasn't bad. I was just having fun. I was pushing as far as I could until I couldn't anymore. And then I couldn't. And that was it. Did your parents not put limits on you before? Not really.

And now I'm asking this question through the lens of being a parent who's like, I think anybody listening to this who's a parent, including you, the challenge, I think there are many challenges of being a parent, but one of them is, by definition, there is enough of an age gap between you and your kid that this notion of setting limits is arbitrary enough

because you don't have a great frame of reference. As an example, an obvious example, what is the limit around electronics? Well, it wasn't an issue for me. When I was growing up, we had this one total sack of shit cathode ray tube in our house that you wouldn't wanna watch anyway. Like there were no limits around TV

because all you wanted to do was go outside and play sports. So like that whole concept of needing to limit Television or things that didn't yet exist like phones and iPads. I don't have a reference I don't I can't look back and say well this limit was placed on me and it was good or this limit was too stringent Presumably for our kids their kids will be in a situation where the limits will look different. So I really, I enjoy this topic because I feel like there are some limits that must be preserved across generations, limits around respect, limits around authority or things like that. So have you reflected back on the limits that were set on you and how you thought about those with your two children, for example? I have, and I'm terrified of it.

I'm honest because I know what I got away with, and I feel like where I lived was a lot safer to do some of these things, perhaps. But I remember my parents were very, and still are, but now they don't control me anymore, right? But they were very forgiving. They were very supportive of me. They were there all the time whenever I needed something, whenever I wanted something. You weren't only child, right? But they were very forgiving. They were very supportive of me They were there all the time whenever I needed something whenever I wanted something You weren't only child, right only child so that was probably part of it

My mom actually tried to have a few kids before me, but had I think three or four miscarriages Maybe three before that puts a little extra pressure on you as this sort of chosen one. Yeah, it was sort of me I mean, I didn't know that I didn't really care but like looking back I can see that now. And it makes me ashamed of some of the things that I did as a child. For example, I ran track in my parents' word every single track meet.

I was on Play Basketball, Freshman Year, and I sucked. I got into one game, but my parents were at every game, even though I was on the bench the whole time. You know, like so, they were always there for me. I always were supportive, always always gave me plenty of latitude and lots of room to do what I wanted to do. And I really appreciate that. And I think that that's, it was valuable, but I, I got away with a lot of things that I probably

shouldn't have. I certainly pushed them a bit too far and I pushed myself a bit too far. And there was quite a bit of tension near the end of my Hooligan time. And then I remember they just kind of told me this eventually like you've got to stop this or we're going to send you away as you're what like 15 16 I don't think I was driving yet so it's probably 15. I got in with like some of the wrong kids my parents knew it, they called it from the beginning, they go you shouldn't be hanging out with these people but I did because you know that's what you do. It's cool, right? And then the pressure is, that's the sort of what I'm aware

of now, like, I mean, my son's only five of my daughter's 11 months, so like, I've got some time here, but you can only do so much as a parent, I mean, kids are gonna sort of do what they're gonna do, I think. Anyway, they gave me a lot of room, I did a lot of things, I learned a lot, but they also taught me from early age to be very independent, like getting a job right

when I could and working and that sort of thing. So I think the independence part of it was really important. I think it really did shape me that I could figure things out on my own and get where I needed to go without a lot of support, let's say. There was support in terms of, we're there for you, but I figured a lot of things out myself. I was never really good at school either, I was okay,

but I wasn't great, I think it just kind of bored me. Thinking back to your point about kids now. I'm just aware of these things now It helped me think about what it was like to be that age again So when these things come up with my kids, I'll hopefully be able to to empathize a bit more than maybe if I was More perfect Yeah, you know, so you managed to dodge this boarding school bullet, right? Yeah, I did. And then you go to college and what do you study? Study finance, what's the University of Arizona? I picked finance because I didn't know what else to pick. I loved business.

I was kind of doing business before, right? My dad was working for himself. My grandfather started a grocery store chain way back when, I think it's something I've always wanted to do and I felt like I was good at it I like the stock market and like on the stock market I guess that's a finance degree I don't know right so I did that and truthfully I went to Arizona to chase the weather and to chase a girl at the time in high school Who's also going there and some friends I had were going there? So I didn't really care I didn't think that much about college and I remember a couple in, I just wanted to be done because I was actually doing

business. Then by that time I was starting to do website design. After that, I was offered a job in San Diego and moved to San Diego for about six months. I lived in the gas lamp way back in the 90s. Where it was even dirtier. It was just beginning to turn. They just built a Horton Plaza. If that's right, they just built that,

and things are starting to change on there. But anyway, I started doing website design, and I actually felt like school was interfering with my education. Like I felt like I was learning so much more from doing business and finding clients and delivering work and getting paid or not getting paid and understanding what it's like to work with people

in the world, that school began to feel faker and faker to me, because everything was very abstract, everything was not real. The work we were doing, the products we were doing, the projects we were doing, they were all manufactured in a way where it just didn't feel like, this is really like, I can learn the real thing,

why would I spend my time doing this? But eventually I finished. But let's pause there for a moment, because I'm really curious as to what the real assessment is of this phenomenon that everybody loves to talk about, which is how many of the great entrepreneurs that we think of didn't finish college. Everybody loves to tell the story about Zuckerberg and Jobs and Gates. I'm curious now that you've been in the workforce for a long time, but not only that, but you're so highly attuned to the notion of recruiting talent. Are there a subset of people

whose talent is such that going to university or college is truly a waste of time? They're going to go on and be really successful without it versus there's another subset of people who have the potential to be equally successful, but they need that time to be on the rails versus it doesn't matter. So could Jeff Bezos have just said, forget MIT, I'm literally going to create this thing. If the timing were right and he could have started Amazon, if he were 10 years younger, could he have skipped college and investment banking and just started Amazon? And would we be adding him to the list of the Zuckerbergs, the gates, the jobs is? It's hard to say. I think that there's some mythology around some of that. Amazon, and would we be adding him to the list of the Zuckerbergs, the gates, the jobs is.

It's hard to say. I think that there's some mythology around some of that. I mean, some people, like Steve Jobs went to school, like at a liberal arts college and sort of got into all sorts of interesting things, like taking calligraphy classes and stuff. But influenced his sort of flavor for the job. Exactly. So the fact that he didn't finish school to me doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if you finish school or not, in our field, I mean, perhaps in medicine,

it certainly matters, right? But like in our world, it doesn't matter so much because I think it's about what experiences you want, what experiences you find interesting, and being motivated by the things that you're doing. So some people are motivated by learning in school, some people are motivated by learning outside of school. I don't think that there's a specific breed

or type of person that couldn't finish school and needs to leave the world, a school, the educational world, and get out in the real world. Like, there's some moments in history where timing really matters. I mean, timing always matters, but for example, Zuckerberg, like,

Facebook only exists because he went to Harvard. It only exists because he wanted to build this thing to get to know other people at school, or whatever, like the fact that he finished school, that's something more important. I think he did, yeah, exactly, and you could even take the same experience. It's experience, right, yeah.

If he had not gone to college, like everyone likes to focus on, he didn't graduate. Like, that's cool, whatever, maybe it is, maybe it isn't. But what's interesting is that to me, although I have a big problem with Facebook, but Facebook exists today because he did go to college. I think that's actually the more interesting thing to focus on rather than like, did you

think you actually finish and get this piece of paper? Yeah, so if we want to play with all these myths, like Steve Jobs, calligraphy classes, well, that influence design, that influence typography on the Mac, and that made a huge that changed the world in a lot of ways. So school was important to jobs and school was important to Zuckerberg. I don't know Gates' history and whatnot. I thought He and Paul Allen met in high school, didn't they? They might have been old friends. Yeah. But again, like here's the other thing that I think's interesting. We all like to call out the exceptions and think there's a lesson there.

Right, and we don't really know what the graveyard looks like. Right. The contrapositive. And it's the same thing with venture capital. I'm sure we might get into this, but I can jump into it for a second, which is that people like to look at, or like hard work, let's say hard work is actually a better example. Basos and whatever, they work their ass off. So like, well, there's a lot of people

who work their ass off who get nowhere. And they work really, really, really, really hard, and they make minimum wage if they're lucky. And they work their whole life, and it's very, very difficult. So this idea of hard work getting you somewhere, I don't buy it. Wow. I wanted to go down the path of contrarian case and views. We're there. We're there. I don't think that hard work, the argument is that like no one else is working as hard as Zuckerberg. Therefore Zuckerberg worked hard

and he come on, please. There's only 24 hours in a day to begin with. I don't even know what working hard means. Like, in my opinion, if you get to sit behind a desk all day in an air conditioned room, there's no such thing as hard work. Hard work is picking strawberries in the field. Hard work is roofing in 120 degree heat. That's hard work. Intellectual work can be challenging work.

No question about it. And it can be difficult work, but as far as like the hard part of it, the word hard, like to me that's physically hard sweating, not getting paid, not being respected, that's hard. It's hard to go to work every day when that's your reality. Anyway, I have a slightly different take on that, I suppose, than most, but going in circles a little bit, but basically there's a lot of myths around these exceptions.

And we tend to focus on the exceptions, is like those are the exceptions and the exceptional people. A lot of this has to do with luck and timing and also skill and talent and observation and opportunity and all these things. But I think we put a lot of weight into things that probably have very little to do with it, in fact.

So we can find patterns like these people dropped out of school therefore I should drop out of school. And there's a lot of people who feel that way. They want to follow their idols. What I would say is, what did they get from that experience? Maybe that's something you should look for versus the dropout, the dropout, just a moment in time. You decide not to go anymore.

That doesn't really mean anything. I think that is actually a great point. And you're right about the patterns. I mean, I think we are pattern forming machines. And it probably served us incredibly well. In fact, I wrote a blog post on this a long time ago. It's rare that I would even remember a blog post I wrote, trithly. This is like one of my favorites. I don't know why. I just really, I've probably even gone back and read it once or twice. So I don't remember the details, but the gist of it was we're not

wired to think scientifically. So all of this critical thought stuff, reason, trying to distinguish between correlation and causation, these are incredibly modern phenomena. In fact, you could argue that they represent less than five basis points of our genetic existence. Meaning, like less than 120th of 1% of our genetic existence has been in exposure to the idea of thinking logically, going through formal logic and reason, the scientific method has not even been around for 400 years. And if that sounds like a lot, you know,

obviously just reflect on how long our genes have been around. But what has been around for a long time is pattern recognition. In fact, you would argue that it hasn't just been around for a long time. We have we have sharpened that tool so well because as I think the example I remember using in this blog post was like, if you were walking around in a tribe of 30 people and you see somebody over there getting the desirable mate, then you want to emulate what they're doing. You see somebody over there getting sick, well, presumably whatever he ate or drank, you shouldn't be doing. And again, will you ever be able to tease out the correlation versus the causation? Not a chance.

But if you were a good correlation identifying machine, that was a very beneficial trait to be able to carry on. And I just think that on this topic, which is, again, it's off topic, but it's such an interesting notion that we observe in ourselves. Most of us default back into that without even realizing it. Even when we think we're smart and smarty pants, in the end, we're still kind of a bunch of knuckle-dragging

pattern recognizing brainstems. For sure, and also we look for the patterns that correlate with our own stories. Then you get into all of the biases, of course, so you have the confirmations that come with these things. Right, and that's sort of where it gets to be dangerous, but you kind of have to. I mean, you can't go through the world looking at everything fresh all the time. You just wouldn't get anywhere. I mean, that's what I think fascinating about looking at kids. I assume from what I can tell, from observing kids,

like they don't have those patterns yet, especially when they're young, and they see a leaf for the first time, they see a plant for the first time, they see a caterpillar for the first time, and they're fascinated by it. You and I walk right past those things because we know what they are,

and the pattern is clear, like that's a leaf, that's a thing. So you end up missing all these interesting details, probably because you jump over things. It's like, not all leaves are the same, but we, so that's a leaf, big deal. But a kid's like, what's this leaf? What's that leaf? What's this leaf?

And you're like, come on, we gotta go. Like, get your shoes on, but they're fascinating by these little things. So I think that we have to, of course, function with patterns or through patterns. But I think oftentimes they end up reinforcing our own wishes. Like, we were excited about the person who dropped out of school therefore, like, we find the patterns, we find the things that line up, and then we can tell our own story that matches with our own internal story. But I try to look for things

that are a little bit outside of that because it's a little obvious. Some of these things are really obvious in terms of, if you don't dig a little bit deeper, you end up believing the myths. And I think there's a little bit deeper, you end up believing the myths. And I think there's a lot of that going on, especially in the entrepreneurial world right now, where people are, they look to companies like these big companies and they go, well, that's the way we want to build our company. And that's the way we want to be. What they do, they took $100 million, so we should take $100 million.

And they, their founder is whatever, and so we should be that way. And the thing is that that I think people follow the wrong pattern. So they're looking at big, huge companies. So they're starting a new business. Let's say there's three people in the business for themselves, just themselves. And they're looking to like, well, how does Apple do it? Well, Apple is at a totally different scale from where you are. You should not be following their patterns. Those are the wrong patterns to follow. They don't make any sense for you. Just like you wouldn't expect Apple to follow your patterns. Like you're just one person. But we end up following the wrong patterns and doing the wrong things because we want

to get what they have, but we don't realize that they started out where we started out too. We just kind of feel like they just jumped to be Apple. And so like let's just do what they do when we're going to get to where they're going to get. And I just don't think that's usually true. What do you think is sort of among the top mistakes, slash myths that people starting businesses make, not even making the looking at Apple model, but looking at other successful startups,

looking at like Dropbox or companies where you can say, well, look, I can still remember when they were in their infancy, but look what they're doing now. Like, what are some of the common mistakes you see people talking about? I think that most of this stuff is actually luck and timing. And there's a clearly talent and skill involved too, but sometimes things just happen at the right time. Meaning most of the successes that we look to as these beacons of brilliance

We're under appreciating how much luck is involved. I think so partially because if you just think about it this way Like what if they all started again right now? I could drop box be with drop boxes 10 years from now like it is 10 years in Probably not and you'd say well why not they could do the exact same thing Well, because it's a different time and there's different competitive pressures and there's just different timing and there's different economic things going on. If you can't replicate these successes, then there's probably a lot of luck and timing involved in these things. And it's not that people don't pay attention to that.

I just don't think they give enough value. I remember early in my career, I thought there was no such thing as luck. I thought I was hot shit and I knew it all. Where in your life cycle is this? This is in college, post college. No, post college, after starting our business. Probably, I gave a talk, well, to look this up, I gave a talk at Startup School,

which was a Y-combinator's thing. I don't remember what the year this was. Maybe it was 2007, I'm just guessing. And I remember someone asked about luck, and I remember answering, I don't believe in luck. I remember that answer distinctly, and I am so ashamed of saying that, but that was me at the time. And I remember just being like, no, no, I did this,

I did that, we did it this way, it's all intentional, and this has happened for a reason the whole thing. And now I realize that that's probably not true at all. And in fact, if I had to start the business again right now, pretty good chance I wouldn't, I wouldn't do it at all. So I think luck and timing has a lot to do with it. And there's multi-dimensional luck and timing.

There's like how, like your time, there's the market's time, there's competitors time, there's the appetite for the public's time. Like there's a whole bunch of timing things in here. I just don't think people pay enough attention to that. That's number one, or maybe number two and three. The other thing that I think people who start businesses don't realize is that it only gets harder. Business only gets harder. It doesn't get easier.

So base camp is harder today than it was 20 years ago. Absolutely. Because we have more people, we have more customers. With those come all sorts of things, customers you have expectations, there's more competitors, employees, there's just more people, people are difficult. There's just the notion of doing the same thing for a long period of time and becoming blind to new things and you're so used to the way you've done things. It's safe to say it's harder or it's just different. I'm trying to think of an example. I don't know, every example I can think of, I can immediately think of a counter example.

But let me give you something kind of more specific than perhaps to frame it. I'll hear a lot of entrepreneurs saying, like, I'm gonna work my ass off now, so I don't have to later. The assumption is that if I put in all this time now, it's gonna be easier later. So therefore I don't need to work those kind of hours

or all higher people to do that stuff. Never works out that way. And why is that the case? Well, I don't know. How much of it is the drive to work so hard now under the guise of not having to work hard later? When you get to later, you have failed to address that which it is that's driving you to work so hard in the first place.

And so, you know, work expands to fail available time. You just come up with more stuff to do. Some of which may not even be necessary. Most of it, I would say, is probably not necessary. I think that one of the reasons why it happens this way is that we're just our creatures of habit. So whatever you practice, you get better at. And sometimes you don't even realize you're practicing. But if you're working 80 hour days, you're going to get good work, or not 80 hours. 80 hour weeks. You're gonna get really, really good at working 80 hour weeks.

That's just what you're gonna do, 12 hour days. And then at some point, you're like, that's the only way to do this, right? Because that's what I've done. That's how I've gotten to where I've gotten. And it's because of the hours I put in. And therefore, if I pull back, this is all gonna fall apart.

So that's what we begin to do. And that's how we begin to work. The other thing is I think people underestimate how difficult it is to fall apart. So we just, that's what we begin to do. And that's how we begin to work. The other thing is, I think people underestimate how difficult it is to have employees. I love our employees, but like, it's difficult to have employees. Like, when you're starting by yourself, it's just you. You'd make all the calls, you bring someone else on, maybe it's great, bring the fourth or fifth person on. At some point, there's personality conflicts, things get a little bit more difficult. And then you have to manage people and you have to hire managers. And then you're a little bit out of the loop loop and before you know it, you own the business, but you're the last to know everything.

That's important about the business. You don't know what people are upset, you don't know what's going on, you're so far removed from it, and this is what happens, and I think business just gets harder. It does also just become different, so there's just the difference that's true. But I think it becomes harder, and I don't think people realize that. And so I just see people going into things, not recognizing that, and just assuming that they can be self-destructive in the short term, because in the long term it'll be worth it. Now I just haven't really seen a lot of that play out. I see a lot of people actually ultimately destructive themselves and destroying themselves.

And then maybe selling their business or getting out and then trying to come back and never being able to do it again. So the other thing I would say, I don't know what number I'm on here, if there's even numbers, but I would say like, if lightning strikes, like keep that lightning in the bottle, like, it's a lot of people who are serial entrepreneurs, I'm not one of those people.

I don't believe in that necessarily. I think if you are lucky enough to have a hit, ride it out until it's over, versus stop and try and do it again. Chances are, very slim are lucky enough to have a hit, ride it out, until it's over. Versus, stop and try and do it again. Chances are, very slim that you can really do it again, if you actually truly have a hit. So, I'm not ashamed to say,

I don't think I could do this again. Well, I'm totally comfortable with that. A lot of entrepreneurs feel like they need to prove something to someone or themselves that they can do it over and over and over. That's just not me. So, I think putting that idea out there is a good alternative because a lot of people

think that starting a business, selling it five years in, doing other ones selling it five years in is like the way to make a career. I think the way to make a career sustain business, not to get out of business. Now again, is it possible that there's just a different itch that's being scratched? I mean, I want to come back to sort of this because, you know, your motivation is, you know, it's clearly not driven by some exit. I mean, base camp's a private company, right? They're probably, how many times a year are you asked when you're going to take this company

public? Probably not that much anymore. Not that much, because we've made the answer very clear, yeah. I get an email to every week from a VC forever private equity firm or whatever wanting to invest. And the answer is always no. I just don't want that pressure on me. The other thing I think that becomes clear or has become clear for me, and by the way,

everything I'm saying is my point of view. None of these are facts. This is just what I'm seeing. People end up making things really hard on themselves. I don't think business is that difficult if you don't make it hard on yourself. But people make it, they grow too fast, they raise money from the outside, they put unnecessary expectations on themselves. They are forced into a growth track where they have to grow and they have to produce returns.

They have to then hire people because they have money in the bank from the investor because that's where you spend money on people basically in marketing. And then you get ahead of yourself. And you're over your skis and now you're screwed, you're in trouble. So now you have to keep fueling the growth and raising more money. And it's like, I've talked to a bunch of people who've done this. And they all pine for the good old days when they were a group of eight people just doing it right.

And they sort of got out of control for them. So I see that happening a lot too. And I think this is like self-destructive behavior, even though people don't necessarily see it that way. They see it as like business building, but a lot of businesses are destructive and destroyed by unreasonable expectations of growth and having too much money in the bank. Something I've talked about before is that making money is a skill, just like playing guitar is a skill, just like anything guitar is a skill, just like anything

is a skill. And if you want to get good at it, you have to practice it. In our industry, in the software industry, a lot of companies will lose money for years and years and years, and they think they actually say like, we can just pull the lever and become profitable whenever we want. That would be like saying, you can walk on stage and just play guitar really well, whenever you want. You can't. You have to practice. You have to practice making money, which means that if you keep borrowing money and keep having other people fund your operations and you don't have to get in the black, then when you're going to get good at this skill, and to me, like an entrepreneur needs to be able to make money, they need to be able to make their own fuel, they need to be able to make their own food and their

own water. That's what profit is. And profit is the only thing that keeps you in business, ultimately. And if you have to rely on other people to provide that fuel for you, I think you're at a real disadvantage and I think you're putting on dupe pressure on yourself. So let's use an example that's very top of mind because it's just somewhat recent, which is Uber, right? So, terrible business. Uber is not profitable, but the story is it could be profitable at any moment. It just has to choose profitability over growth, right? Well, it's a great example, because it's a textbook terrible business. Everyone thinks it's a great success. It's horrible. They lost what $1.8 billion last year on $11 billion in revenue or whatever it is, or maybe last quarter. I don't even know if it's quarter a year or what numbers.

They're just huge losses. Right. The fact that you can't remember that, it probably says enough. Massive losses. And then their CEO says, like just a few days ago, it's like, we're just getting started on this amazing journey. It's like, you've actually been in business for a long time. Yeah, about 10 years, right? 10 years, you've raised over a billion dollars in capital. You're a public company now.

Like, when is this journey, when is this gonna work? Because right now, I think right now, for every buck they make, or they pull in, they're losing 20 or 30 cents, or whatever it is. It's like terrible. The economics are terrible, and they don't seem like they're going to change, unless they actually change the pricing model, which might make it less attractive to riders.

On top of that, Uber is a dumpster fire in terms of ethics. They've done a lot of bad things, let's say, with tracking journalists, and the way they went after competitors, and a whole bunch of stuff, that's pushed by growth. They have to show numbers. These businesses like Uber and even like Lyft and like WeWork and like a number of these businesses that are quote successful, they're not at all. They're actually terrible businesses. The dry cleaner on the corner is a better business.

They're going to be around longer than WeWork. I don't follow this stuff at all. So it's, this is all sort of, again, I'm one of those guys that would just naively say, well, they're everywhere, so they're doing well, right? Yeah, we're just that, oh, they sent the concept of we work, makes sense, but truthfully, I've never put like my business hat on and actually scratched the back of the envelope and looked at what they're paying per square foot and how they arbitrage it and then what their middle costs are. I don't actually, I haven't done that analysis.

Well, all you have to do is look at their filing and they say there's a good chance we will never be profitable. Like they know that themselves. How is that possible? That's what almost all of these IPOs that file these days in the tech world say. There's a good chance we will never become profitable.

That's what it says in their S1s. Is we work S1 on the street? Yes, it is. No, it is. I don't even know that. These businesses are terrible. Okay, but then let's use the counter example of Amazon. Sure.

Okay, so Amazon went public long before they turned to profit, continued to lose incredible amounts of money while growing in equity value like crazy. And now, would you argue that AWS basically saved Amazon, or do you argue that at some point Amazon just turned the ship and said, look, we're going to focus more on profitability than on pure growth? Well, let me even step back further and go, I don't care, because it's one example. And this is the thing that ends up happening. So you think Amazon might be an exception is the thing that ends up happening. And I will address it. Amazon might be an exception is sort of what you're...

I think pretty much most of these companies are exceptions. Because if you think about... Most of the ones we all talk about are exceptions. I will address the Amazon point in a second though, but people always will go, well, what about Amazon? Well, you're not Amazon. And if it was so easy, everyone company would be doing this.

They're not. Amazon is a very different kind of company. They've basically said we don't want to pay anything in taxes. So we're going to roll all of our profits back into the business. AWS is a huge part of their business. Maybe for people listening to this who we're getting a little deep in the weeds, can you tell people what AWS is and how that sort of is such an important piece of Amazon?

Yeah, so AWS is Amazon Web Services, which is basically an outsourced cloud. Like you can basically use Amazon services and hardware to run your own business in their cloud. They're kind of, they built it for themselves and then they basically made it available for everybody else. So instead of having to buy a data center or a co-host physical machine somewhere, you can just buy a slice of theirs. If that hopefully makes sense. Yeah, and I remember just to put this in perspective, I remember in 2014, one of my best friends, maybe it was 2013, but it was 13 or 14, one of my best friends who was running

a hedge fund, we were having dinner one night and whenever I'm having dinner with people, I'm much more interested in their world than mine, so I tried to monopolize the conversation around them, so I don't have to answer a bunch of questions. And this was one of those nights where I was like, tell me about the most interesting long position you have right now that it is. And he's like, Amazon. And I'm thinking, it's gonna be some company I've never heard of.

And he's gonna tell me about some offshore oil company in Brazil that's got this thing in Bolivian. It's like, no, it's Amazon. And I'm like, why? And that was the very first time I ever heard of AWS. And he basically showed me the entire share price of Amazon is captured by AWS. You're getting a retail business for free in 2013

and you have a appropriately valued AWS. And of course, me naively, I was thinking, but their price to earning ratio is so, 200 or 500 or whatever. He's like, no, no, no, you're thinking about this the wrong way. So what you're saying is, that's a bit of an exception. I don't know enough about Microsoft,

but given that there is software business and we've been talking about software, I assume Microsoft is pretty profitable at the outset. They've been profitable for years, as has Apple. Two great companies, wonderful companies. I guess my point is this, their stories actually don't matter because that's not,

in my world, it doesn't matter because I'm more interested in small businesses and like real businesses that have to show profit. Like you can't be Amazon. The dry clean in the corner cannot be Amazon. The pizza shop in the corner cannot be Amazon. They're not gonna, if you said, hey, pizza shop,

let's say this, let's say pizza shop owner comes up to you and goes, I've got an idea. I'm gonna lose money in every slice of pizza I sell, but I'm gonna sell a lot of them. What do you think of my business? You go, it's fucking stupid. What are you talking about?

You're gonna be out of business, and everyone in the world would know that. So like, those are the economic laws that most people are under Amazon, and some of these other companies are exceptions. Now Apple, hugely profitable, Microsoft is profitable, those to me are better models than like, but what about Amazon?

I have a lot of respect for what Amazon's done. I also lately have a lot less respect for what Amazon's doing. I think that they might be a net negative, given a number of different things. I think the pressure they put on the system, in the fact they don't pay federal income tax, and I know they say, well, we're doing what's within the law, like, okay, fine. But I think there should be a little bit more corporate responsibility in the world. And I think companies that generate billions in revenues have an obligation to pay taxes.

But aside from that, I also think that, given their large S, I feel like they could treat workers a little better and they can do a number of things. I also think they put on due pressure on smaller businesses and they sort of dominate the market. For example, our book, 98% of the sales come through Amazon. And that's just kind of wrong. I don't think that's good. Even though it's convenient to buy, they made the user experience incredible.

So I can't fault them for running that kind of business, but it still feels like in the world, things are a little bit better when there's more options, not fewer options. And I think that Amazon has reduced the number of options people typically have these days. But that's an aside. My general point is that we all like to look at these outliers and go, but what about? And I go, well, that's not your world. You don't get to be them, unfortunately. You don't get to be them. You have to actually generate more money

than you spend, you have to pay your employees. The public is not going to endlessly give you money forever. You're just not that. So we can look at these examples, but I just don't think they're relevant to most companies. Truly. What's the natural history then of these businesses, of the we works and the ubers of the world?

I mean, you sort of, I think basically said, look, at some point, the public will either demand profitability, in which point prices have to go up, in which case profitability might not be as much as you think, because at some point you're going to drive people back to taxis or whatever the alternative was. I'm still sort of reeling in this idea that these companies are that bad from a pure business standpoint. They are. You should look at the numbers. They're terrible.

I know you don't read fiction. That's something you and I have in common. We've just basically decided there's too much other stuff I need to read fiction. I've read one work of fiction since 1999. So I'm at 20 years, one work of fiction. But this is another one of those things that I used to be very interested in. When I worked at McKinsey,

there is nothing I enjoyed more than reading the entire Wall Street Journal cover to cover every morning. I don't even read the news anymore. I've just decided I'm not reading the news. Like ever. I'm the same way. I don't read the news either.

But I've looked into these numbers because I'm curious. No, I've looked at relevant. It's terrible. Ter terrible numbers. And the thing is, is like, these companies, there's a sense that they deserve to exist no matter what. No, they can go out of business. Like Uber could go out of business. And why shouldn't they? That's a crappy business. It's a terrible business right now. Maybe they'll turn around at some point. They've had 10 years. Maybe they'll turn around some point. But there's this assumption that

these things are now part of our world. Therefore, they must be there forever. I just don't think that that's true. There will be other people who come along who maybe make a profitable model out of this. But and there's been a number of things around ride sharing lately that have come out. Traffic is worse because of ride sharing, pollution is worse because of ride sharing, because there's a lot of cars idling with nobody in them. So will autonomous vehicles change this for Uber? I think they might, although I think that's much further off than we all think.

I think it's very, very far actually. But I do think that that's probably what they're holding out for. They want to dump all their drivers because they don't want to deal with them. And they've kind of said this publicly, which is amazing to say that about people who work for you right now. Like we're basically trying to eliminate you. And they want to go through autonomous.

But I think that's also selling the dream to investors. Right, to buy a longer position and just go in and make the investment. But I think that's very, very, very far out. So there are, of course, running trials and doing all the stuff and they get new stories for it. But I think we're very, very far off from that. You can just see the best in the business at this Tesla, we don't have one now, but we had one.

And there are autopilot, like it's actually a crime to call it autopilot. I think they shouldn't have called it that. That's part of the problem. The expectations are wrong. It's not autopilot. It's like assisted driving, and it's really quite good at that.

But to leave your hands off the wheel and trust the thing, which is what autopilot would basically suggest, you're gonna kill yourself. So if they're the best in the game, which is what autopilot would basically suggest, you're going to kill yourself. So if they're the best in the game, and that's where they're currently at, maybe there's some massive technological advances around the corner that we don't see over the hill, whatever. But as it is today, we're nowhere near autonomous vehicles, like really driving on the streets with human beings and pedestrians and bicyclists and all that stuff.

I just don't think it's anywhere close. Yeah, that's sort of been my uninformed, I guess, bias would be the only way to describe it, which is I think the problem is way harder than it's being sold because it's way more asymmetric. Yes. And I think it's easier if you, for example, I have to think it would be easier if you had like dedicated roads only for autonomous vehicles, where they would all behave the same way and fall the same rules.

Well, not only that, and if each car could be autonomous overnight, in other words, if you could immediately allow every vehicle to communicate with every other vehicle, and you could eliminate all of the humans simultaneously, I think that's actually easier to imagine than a gradual transition where you infuse in autonomous vehicles. There's a point when like 7% of them are autonomous and 93% are driven by knuckleheads. Well, the 93% of us who are knuckleheads driving cars, I just don't know if AI is good enough to fully understand the depths of our stupidity. I totally agree. So it's the phasing in which seems like... That's the part of our stupidity. I totally agree.

So it's the phasing in which seems like... That's the part that I saw. Kids and decades away. I agree. If there was dedicated lanes where all the cars talked to each other, and they all followed the same rules and they all had the same language, different story. But that's not the story.

Like, we can't build more roads right now. Where are you gonna build roads in Manhattan? Of course, that gonna happen. So they're gonna have to phase in, and that, I think think is really far away. But anyway, we work, lift, Uber, look at the economics, terrible businesses. Uber and lift, I mean, the public markets are saying

these are actually quite bad. They're down quite a bit off their highs with the IPO. So like people are starting to wake up to this and they're saying, I don't think there's anything here. The funny thing is, I got love talking about this stuff so much, and I realized just probably somebody at this point in the podcast saying, what in the world does this have to do

with anything that I want to hear these guys talk about? So let's go back to post college, you're doing some software stuff, right? Website design. Website design. You ever get any interesting feedback on website design? I do. So I remember when I was first getting going with this,

I thought I was good. There was this award thing back then, I think it was called high five awards, something like that. And back then, this is before you had like, WordPress where people could basically take a template and to what you're doing is from scratch. From scratch, this is like writing basic HTML, website code, basic stuff.

This is mid to late 90s? This is about 95.96 is when I started doing this stuff because that's kind of when the web became visual before that, it was like mostly text-based. Right, so mozeic. Mozeic was a big step forward. And I remember the summer of 94 when I was using Mozeic on a sun workstation.

And it was like, I didn't know what I was looking at. Yes, total game change. That was the moment that everything changed in the world. Netscape, IPO, and August of 95, if I recall, right? I remember when that was. 94.95 was a... That's when it changed. It was a step function.

Yeah, exactly. And that's when it changed, and that's when it became commercially viable for companies to have websites or even begin to think about the web. There I was in college, bored, the junior, I think in 96. I loved design, and I knew a little bit about computers, and back then it was really easy to learn how to do this stuff because no one knew what they were doing, and so it was just dead simple.

Today it's really hard, another example. Today, could I pick up what I know today? Probably not, it's really hard. I mean, yeah, I could, but everything's got more complicated. Back then it was simple. Anyway, I figured out how to make some websites. I went around to some sites, actually financial sites, and emailed at the bottom and said,

like, webmaster, app, whatever, because that's what everyone had back then. So I'd email these people and say, hey, I like your site, but I think I could make it look better. Like, will you give me a shot? A couple of them replied, yes. And so I did some simple work.

First job I ever had was like $600 doing some guys website. I actually got named Tim, forget his last name, but it was called profit data services. It actually based out of San Diego. Tim Knight was his name. He's still around actually doing this stuff. But anyway, he gave me a shot and I did some work for him and I did some work for another guy named Keith Crookshank in San Diego and started doing more work for him and then he offered me a job when I graduated from college in 96. So I went out to San Diego and sort of worked with him, it was just me and him for about four months, five months, and I realized I'm just not built to work for other people. I just knew it at that

moment. I kind of had a suspicion before. I've had jobs before, but they were like, you know, part-time jobs and that's fine. But as far as like a full career job, I couldn't work for somebody else. I had a hard time doing something I didn't believe in or didn't agree with., I couldn't work for somebody else. I had a hard time doing something I didn't believe in or didn't agree with. I just couldn't do it. What do you mean by that? I mean, these guys weren't asking you to do anything on ethical.

No, no, nothing like that. So what did you not believe in? I realized that my motivation went to zero because it wasn't your idea. No, it wasn't that. It was more like, for example, an aesthetic decision. Or like, if I had to do something that I just didn't agree with aesthetically or structurally or in terms of like copywriting a sentence that I didn't like, it's not that I couldn't

do it. It's just my motivation went to zero. I just didn't want to do it. Oh, so it wasn't about you having a boss. It was about you having a client. If I'm your client, and I say Jason, you probably noticed the Atia medical website sucks. Can you help me redo it? Is the issue that I would say, well I really, I much prefer to have serif fonts here, but

sans serif fonts here. If you thought that was wrong, you just couldn't do it. Or is it that I'm talking to a guy between us who's telling you what I'm telling him? It's not the client side. I'm okay with working with clients. It was more of the boss situation. And it wasn't this fellow named Keith, who was a great guy, it wasn't that.

It was just purely a function of motivation. I realize that I don't wanna spend my day on something I feel like I begrudgingly have to do if I don't have the intrinsic motivation to get it done. Like I just, if I just like for example, with writing, like I love writing, if I don't have the intrinsic motivation to get it done. Like, I just, if I just, like, for example, with writing, like, I love writing, if I had to write a sentence in a certain way just to appease somebody because they were paying me, like, it was, it was my job. I would write the sentence, but I'd be miserable by the end of the day.

I'm like, why am I doing this? Like, why am I spending my day doing things I don't want to do and I don't agree with? That, like, you could do that once or twice or five times, of course, but when that became something that was clear to me that we had like aesthetic differences with my boss. We had like just fundamental, principled outlook differences around the work itself. Yeah, I could do the work, but I didn't want to do the work. And if I didn't want to do the work, why was I doing it? Why was I wasting his time? Why was I wasting was I doing it? Why was I wasting his time?

Why was I wasting other people's time? Why was I wasting my time? I realized that I have to be motivated by the work itself. That's what drives me. It's not the money, it's not success. It's like I get the pleasure, it's like a fine man. Like the pleasure is a fine man thing. It's not the thing out, right?

It's not the awards, it's that. And so for me, that's what it was. And if I have to do something, just Didn't enjoy I just motivation was gone And if you don't have that you're screwed because then there's no carrot that can pull you along I mean they can pull you along in the short term, but long term camp So we're trying to come back to this theme by the way at base camp, but let's keep going with this story So I quit living San Diego for a few more months move back home in Chicago And then start doing freelance websites on my own

Which in the mid-90s looks like what? How are you finding clients? Same way I did before, which was that I would just reach out to people who had websites. Because everyone's website at that time, how are you finding the people who don't have websites? Aren't they the people that need you even more? No, so I've never focused on that. I always focused on redesigning. Because I felt like I could show an improvement.

If there's context, I certainly there's always context from zero to nothing, but I felt like I had the ability to take something that someone had and elevate it basically in a way where they'd be like, I want that version of the thing that I have. So I always have focused on redesigns. So I would go to websites that I use,

and I'd find out how to get in touch with the owner and say, hey, sometimes I would send them like a free mock up that I would make or something and say, here's what I would do with your thing. And eventually you get a few clients and you get a few clients and sometimes you don't have any. So you make up a fake client and design something yourself and show someone something. This is what I would do to this bank if I could, which is something we eventually did at our company where we did this whole thing called the Better Project, where I was so frustrated with how FedEx's website worked, that I just redesigned it for myself.

I mean, I couldn't use it because it wasn't FedEx's website, but I made a mock-up of it. This is how you'd want it to be. It's how I'd want it to be, and we got a lot of publicity over doing like, better FedEx, better bank, better car interface, better PayPal. We didn't get hired by these companies, but it was a way for us to show what we could do if we had the chance.

And so sometimes you have to create your own clients. That's what I kind of did too, and sort of got that word out there. And then word sort of spread, and it was just me. So I've, oh, my cost was zero. My rent. I was paying $900 a month to live. I lived and worked in the same place, of course. My cost was zero, basically. Not zero, but $900. So I could cover that.

This is one of my things. I never get ahead of myself. I never spend more than I make. I never put myself in a bad position. I'm a believer in risk, but never putting yourself at risk, which is a different... So, not differentiate those for me. Risk is like taking a shot that if it doesn't work, no big deal. And we do that all the time at Basecamp. But what I will not do is bet the company on something. I mean, maybe I would figure out that I've done that looking back if something didn't work, but I would not knowingly go into something go, this has to work. We're going all in this or else, like it's over. And this is another great example of history is littered with these hero stories of betting the company on, you know, what was Apple bet on?

I mean, Apple was bet on the Mac. Yes, it was. The re-release of the Mac in 97 was the entire, I mean, that company was hemorrhaging cash when jobs came back. Disaster. And they bet big. They had now in retrospect, yeah, was that, I mean, really, was that right?

Well, yes, but even, I mean, but remember, Annie Duke, I don't know if you've ever heard the podcast I did with her. I mean, Annie, I think does this great job of differentiating outcome from process and stuff like that. But in retrospect, do we still think like if there were a thousand universes with a thousand apples all in the same position and the company was bet, through like 800 of them work out well, or did we see one of just 75 of a thousand that worked out well?

Well, I think there could have been, of course, a bunch of different outcomes. Microsoft could have bought them, someone else could have bought them, but looking around this table right now, I have an iPhone, you have an iPhone, you have an iPad, these things would not have existed in the world. Had Apple not made that initial bet with the Bondy blue iMac.

So all those things led to these things, whether or not that's clear about it. But you're just saying it's not in your person. Your type of leadership is not designed to be in that moment. Maybe the way jobs was the right guy for that role. Yes, although I will also admit that I haven't been in a position where I had to do that. That's partially intentionally and also perhaps by luck, but jobs came back. He had nothing to lose. Apple was dying.

You could almost say like, what else are you gonna do? Why come back and do the same thing? Make another newton. Yeah, make another newton, which didn't really pan out. Although some of those ideas were very press-y. No, yeah, yeah, yeah, not as totally, yeah, totally not his, not. Right, but anyway, like looking yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Not totally, yeah, totally not his, no. Right, but anyway, like looking back on it,

of course, it was the right move, but there's a bunch of, you know, history's littered with the companies that try to, but for me, I just don't see the point. Like, I'm all about the odds. What are the odds, like with any decision I make, I don't really think, probablyistically, necessarily, but I do think about it in a broad sense.

Like, what if this goes wrong? Like, David's my co-founder, my business partner. We always talk about this. Like, what if this doesn't work? What's the worst that's going to happen? And it's like, well, like we're making a new product right now. Okay. We have base camp. We're going to do another product. What if this, we spend a year building this other product? What if it doesn't work out? Then we spend a year building it, or we're not going to go out of business because of it. We still have a very healthy business with base camp. It's still growing. We're fine. The worst that can? Then we spend a year building it, or we're not going to go out of business because of it. We still have a very healthy business with base camp. It's still growing, we're fine. The worst that can happen is we spend a year. If we spent 10 years, that'd be a problem.

If we spent seven years, that'd be a problem. But we can afford to spend a year on this. I'm not going to do something I cannot afford to do. I just don't see the point in it. Like, I'm more for self-preservation. I don't need to hit the grand slam. Like, I'm more for self-preservation. I don't need to hit the grand slam. Like, I want to keep doing this. Like, I found my dream job, which is running my own business.

Why would I want to put that at risk? Now, you could say, if you don't take more risks, someone's going to beat you. And I would say, you're probably right. And at some point, we will lose. And our company will go out of business, and the company will die. And that's what happens to every single company

in the world, essentially, except like there's some Japanese companies that are around like 40 generations or whatever. Companies die and that's okay too. This stuff doesn't have to last forever but if we look back David and I have talked about this too like let's say in six years it just peeders out. Well that would suck but also like that's a 26 year run. That's not so bad. So I always tend to look at it that way, but I also want to stay in business, so I don't

want to take the risk that could put us out of business. I want to just take risks, but not put ourselves at risk. So that's kind of, I don't know if that defines it well enough, but that's how I think about these things. So before Base Camp, now going back to the mid-90s, you're one stop shop, you're one man, nine dollar apartment guy. And then how is that going? I mean, the story I'm pushing you to

is this funny submission to a contest. Yeah. So around that time, I thought it was good. I mean, I was, I was good enough for clients. They were paying me and now I was staying afloat. And this was great. There was this award site and I was sort of excited about it because a lot of, I wanted an award.

Like, I wanted to be recognized, which is like a very human fundamental thing. Now, since then, I've realized awards are nothing I'm interested in. But at the time, I was young and like excited to be on the scene, right? Get someone else's approval. So I submitted this website design to this award site. I got an email back saying like, basically you suck, you should not do this. This should not be the line of work you're in.

I think maybe some people would be destroyed by that, but I've always felt that to be motivation. Like, okay, let me show you what I can do. Or, I didn't care about this guy. Did you see a grain of truth in the feedback? Did you think that? No, I didn't believe it. I thought I was good.

I thought I was good at what I did. I am good at what I do. And I thought so, but like, what I realized was that like, everyone's opinion is purely subjective, especially when it comes to this kind of stuff. I am good at what I do. And I thought so, but like what I realized was that like, everyone's opinion is purely subjective, especially when it comes to this kind of stuff. Like this is just a guy, I don't even know this guy. Why should I let this guy piss me off, but he did.

Like now I look back at that and go, why would I ever let someone else take my mind over like that and make me upset at his opinion, who cares about his opinion? But he was sort of seen as a rainmaker kind of type at the time, so I didn't get that word. But it just motivated me, like I've always been motivated by that, like if I, someone thinks I'm like good at something or can't do something, like that fires me off,

it doesn't piss me off, I mean it pisses me off but it doesn't make me upset. So it's sort of a productive channeling of, at least a quasi productive channeling. Except you could say it's revengeful, which is not productive in that regard, but I wouldn't do it to shove it in his face. That's not why I would ever do it. I would do it because I think I am good,

and just motivated me to keep working at that. So I got better and better and better eventually. How do you hone a craft like that where you're on the, it's the Wild West still? Yeah, practice. You just keep doing it. And then you find your aesthetic, you find on the, it's the Wild West still. Yeah, practice. You just keep doing it. And then you find your aesthetic, you find your eye, you find what you're good at, what you're not good at, and you kind of double down.

So for me, what I was good at was, I actually wasn't very good at making, I'm not a trained designer, so I couldn't make sophisticated three-dimensional design e-things, right? What I was really good at was laying out copy, or writing copy, laying out text, laying out simple graphics so things were orderly and structured in a way where people who hit the site will go, I understand what this company's selling because a lot of companies have a really hard time

explaining themselves and helping people get to the thing that they're trying to sell. They just can't explain their own thing, they're too close to it. So I got really good at that because that was what was within my ability. That was it. I didn't have the desire to flex outside of that. I'm like, let me just get good at what I'm good at.

Like, why do I need to get good at everything? Like, make it good at that. So I kept doing that. Got really quite good at it. Eventually hired another person because I got a really big gig. Somehow, I won this gig for Getty Images, which is a big huge company. Yeah, they won this gig for Getty Images, which is a big, huge company. Yeah, they make the stock photos and stuff like that.

Yeah. They're launching this new service called Getty One, which was the first aggregate. They had a bunch of different stock photo libraries. And you had to search all the separate stock photo libraries to find a picture of the Empire State building or something. So Getty One was going to be a new site where they aggregated all their results into one place. It was just me at the time. I won the gig to design that site actually from scratch because they didn't have that site.

But they had an identity and they had some other stuff. But I beat out a bunch of big companies and someone really took a bet on me. It made a bet on me. So I ended up hiring my first employee then, got named Matt Linderman, who lives here in New York now, and he was with me for like 12 years after that. We worked together for a long time. And that was my first employee. From that, we grew very slowly. And how did that become Basecamp?

Is that the vehicle that became Basecamp? No, well, eventually. So that was the company was called 37 signals at the time. And we started getting busier and busier and doing more and more projects. And then we needed a better way to manage the work that we were doing. Because we were managing our projects using email at the time and phone calls and in-person meetings and paper and like stuff was slipping through the cracks and we couldn't figure out where things were. I didn't know where to find

something. Someone else put something in the wrong place like you can't work that way. You can kind of work that way for a minute and then an hour later it's a total mess. So we built Basecamp. Like when I built my audio product, we built base camp for ourselves, for our own specific needs. Didn't even realize it was going to be a product, but then we used it with our clients and they said, hey, what is this thing you're using? We have projects too. Can we use this thing to manage it more like, no, it's just this thing. And then eventually enough people ask, you're like, ah, there's a product here. We tightened it up, cleaned it up, put a price on it, put out in the market, called a base camp in February 5th, 2004, which happened to be the same day Facebook launched.

Interestingly enough, about a year and a half later it was making more money for us than a website design. So we stopped doing website design and transitioned to do software entirely. I'm skipping over a few things like when I met David, my business partner and stuff, but he was a student, Copenhagen Business School, he's from Denmark. I hired him to do some projects before that, and then we ended up building Basecamp together. So he did the back end of Basecamp, and I did the front end design, along with another person we had at the company. That's what happened, but it wasn't a plan.

I don't plan. I don't have goals. This is the next thing I want to ask you about is you very famously said you don't set goals. I'm not a goal driven person. How does that work? How doesn't it work? I mean, it works.

Well, you're talking to a guy like, so by contrast, like, everything in my life seems to be about a goal or something. And so when I was in high school, every day I would wake up and write a new my goals because sometimes they would change a little bit. So I would like to, I would have a goal, I don't know how this really started, but I had goals in what I perceived as all areas of physical fitness. So I wanted to run five minute miles, so five miles and 25 minutes was a goal and I wanted to, I had goals in strength. So I wanted to be able

to bench press squat and deadlift certain amounts. I don't exactly remember what they were, but they were very, very high, much higher than anything I could dream of doing today. I had certain anaerobic goals, certain goals with respect to flexibility and muscular endurance, like I mean, I really had this long list of goals. And I would literally write them out every day, and many days I was just rewriting what was there the day before. I mean, no change, right? But over the course of years, there was tweaking. I was realizing, oh, you know what, that's a bit of a sandbag goal. You're actually going to hit that goal within six months. Let's stretch it out a little bit. And then there

were times when, you know, for example, like I never could do the five-five-minute miles. I don't know what it was like I could do. So I really, I changed that to five-six-minute miles, I never could do the 5-5 minute miles. I don't know what it was, like I could do. So I really, I changed that to 5-6 minute miles, which I could do. Again, not just to move the goal line, but because I also realized, I was just not going to get to 5-5, so you could have that goal in there forever. But at the time, I certainly didn't know how to train for that. I'm not sure I ever could have, but the way I was training, which was in retrospect running far too long and far too slow, was going to plateau me there.

So that was kind of a goal modification. Basically, that has sort of stayed with me forever, that habit. I don't think I'm as literal. Today, I don't actually write them down on post-it notes anymore. But, you know, then in college, I wanted to be able to spend, you know, this summer, I would want to go through the entire book of integrals and know how to derive every single interval and all these sort of things. So, no, for me, it's like everything in life comes down to these goals. And I still do have a to-do list, which is kind of a mini-goal list of, I have a daily,

weekly, and then non-time constraint, personal, and non-time constraint, professional to-do list. So, yeah, this is a totally foreign concept. People should do what motivates them. What I realized was that goals don't motivate me because goals turn into one of maybe three things. Like, one is just disappointment. You don't hit it and then you're disappointed.

Like, I'm not sure I want to do something that ends in disappointment. Like why should I even set myself up for ending up in disappointment? Two, you end up just like hitting it and then setting a new one. So like, so you're on a treadmill. You're on the treadmill of like forever setting these fake numbers.

I mean, you just, you guess like five minute mile. Like, that's just a round number. It's easy to say. But like, what does it mean? Why is that better than a five, 12 mile? Yeah, why does it mean? The other one is that you end up, I think, just kind of chasing things without really thinking about it.

And my feeling is that I had some experiences where I didn't realize this until later, but for a while I did want to run like certain times. You know, you go out for a run and let's say you want to run a six minute mile, like recreationally. You go out for a run, you want to set a six minute mile, you, or your watch, you time it, and you ended up getting like a 606 or something, or 608 order run.

You didn't hit your goal, you're disappointed. Now you could say, well, I'm not, because next time I'll get it, but like at some point, like, fuck, I didn't get this number. That's like the wrong way to frame it. The better question is like, did I enjoy the run?

Did I get some fresh air? Did I move my body? Did I feel challenged to some degree? Like, if I enjoy the run? Did I get some fresh air? Did I move my body? Did I feel challenged to some degree? If I did all of those things, what does the number have to do with anything? The number is nothing. It doesn't mean a single thing, a six versus a six, oh six. It's different. If you're an athlete training for something, you need to beat someone else's time.

Okay, that's a different story, but I'm not that. So why should I focus on trying to hit a fake number? Why not try to hit things like, did I have a good time? Did I get outside and run for 45 minutes and get my heart going? Did I enjoy myself? Did I get a break?

Did I get to think about some things? Those are the things that are more interesting to me. So there's that side of it. The other side of it is, I just want to do the best work I can anyway. So because I want to run a five minute or six minute or seven minute, like I'm just going to run the best I can anyway. I don't need the number to

tell me what that is. This is maybe tying back to the whole thing. One of the reasons why I quit that job is if I'm not motivated by the work itself, it doesn't matter. I have to enjoy the work and for me the pleasure is the thing itself. Just doing the best I can on a given day and just like seeing where it comes out. But that's not necessarily incongruent with having a goal, right? So let's use your health as an example because that's something we obviously talk about, right? Which is, again, putting semantics aside, if we're going to take the word goal off the table, you have objectives, correct? I mean, I want to go in a certain direction.

Well, also, I think, wouldn't it be even more than that? I mean, don't you have a model for or in your mind's eye a sense of what the 85-year-old Jason should be able to do? What does success look like when you're 85? This is kind of this back-casting idea from Annie Duke, right? Don't think about how many miles you have to run tomorrow or how much weight you need to lift next month or next week. But think about what the wind state looks like at 85.

Not that that's the end of your life, but let's just use that as a point in time. And you have to have an objective of that to sort of at least get on the direction of getting there, don't you? I think about it in terms of at base camp, we don't have company goals, but we have a vision. We have a direction we're going.

We have things we want to do because we think they're the right thing to do and the right way to do them. For me, like, living, trying to live to be 85 and be able to go up with squat 30 pounds wherever these things are, like, to me, that's more of like the vision side of things. Like, I want to get there because it'd be nice to be alive that long and to be healthy that long Why would I want to not be that way? It's I don't I just don't see it as a goal. I don't see it as like a distinct thing that either here's maybe what what I think If you don't hit a goal most people are disappointed

Like when I made me five if I can't do that. I don't want to be disappointed when I made me five years old I Like when I'm 85, if I can't do that, I don't want to be disappointed when I'm 85 years old. I want to like, I tried or I did whatever, but like I don't want to have this point where I have to go, did I make it or did I not, am I disappointed or am I happy? Like, that's the thing, maybe it's subtle, but I think it's an important distinction. Like when I just go out for a run, I don't have to measure up against something and decide whether or not I worked hard enough, ran fast enough, whatever. I can just go, did I enjoy it? It was good for me. So you could say the goal is healthy.

There's that, but it's very broad. It's not a number. Maybe it's the number goals. I don't like. Maybe it's the milestone goals. But, like, directionally, I do have definitely, I want to go in specific directions. It might just be also, again, I think the process part of it, if you want to be able to goblets squat 30 pounds correctly when you're 85, you'll have to do a lot of work between now and then to maintain it, because you can do that today quite easily, but gravity's gonna really work against you

over the next 40 years. And if when you get there, you can goblets squat 25 pounds instead of 30, I don't think anybody would say that that's a failure. And more importantly, I guess it's that objective, which, you know, for me, we use this example because it's one of the things on my Centenary and Olympic list of, you know, 20 different events to be able to do. But what's it in service of, I guess, is the question. Maybe that's where we are probably saying the same thing in a different way. I mean, to me, it's not about a goblet squat. It's that 30 pounds represents the weight of a toddler and a goblet squat, which is to

say a squat position where you have to be in scapular protraction and be able to pick something up in front of you. That's what it's like to pick a toddler up. And I want to be able to pick up a toddler when I'm 85. I would agree with that, but to me, that's like a direction versus a... I see. So let's bring it back to the company, because this is still a very unusual concept within the company, which is really a big part of what I wanted to talk about today.

There's no shortage of stories, horror stories, really, of companies that have just gone so far ethically off the rails because of creating perverse incentives. So this great story on the podcast with Catherine Eban about the generic drug companies, Rembaix's only goal is profitability. Like literally nothing else matters. And unfortunately, that goal superimposed in a cultural environment that produces sort of different sets of ethics that are deemed almost acceptable leads to devastating consequences where, I mean, they'd sell you cyanide if it was profitable.

If they could make enough money on it, they'd spike your medication with that. So you have to motivate people. Should we even start that that's not necessarily an assumption? Like you have 54 employees. Do they need motivation? And if so, do you feel you need to provide some of it? Everybody's very different. I think we have to set a vision of the direction of what we're going that people want to be on board with that.

If the train's going in this direction, you want to be on that line or not. Like, there's that. But I think a lot of it is more day-to-day in the actual work itself. And that people have the autonomy and the control over their own work and their own work environment and their own schedule and their own time. That, to me, is the more important side of it versus dragging someone along with a carrot, which is like this bonus or that thing or whatever, or the... At some point, it's coming to you with 17 billion and you've got this much stock equity and options and you can convert it. It's like, yeah, some people are going to be motivated by that, but I don't think that's healthier and long-term motivation.

So for me, it's more about the day-to-day autonomy of the work, the time they have to themselves every day, and the environment that we can create for people. I think that's the thing that's often most overlooked is that people always talk about, we want to hire the best in the world, we want to hire, it's like, you can hire the best in the world, but the environment is crap.

You're not going to get the best work out of those people, and they're going to leave at some point. I'm more interested in creating a great environment than I am motivating people around specific business goals. It just, I don't think a lot of people care about specific business goals. That's not, they're a writer, they're a designer, they're a programmer, they care about the work

that they're doing, and how it all relates, of course, but whether or not we hit some number, I don't think most people care, or their program, or they care about the work that they're doing. And how it all relates, of course, but like, whether or not we hit some number, I don't think most people care unless your compensation's tied to it, but I think that's a whole nother problem. I don't think that's a good thing to do either. Let's talk about hiring.

Let's start with hiring. You have some hiring practices that are not always in the norm. How do you guys hire? We spend like weeks writing job ads, first of all. A lot of companies like, oh, that's HR department, just like throw something up there with a bunch of bullet points. You need five to 12, you just experience this and whatever. We actually try to write in a way that truly conveys what it's like to work in this position

and what your day to day would actually feel like. And we put a lot of time into it because we feel like if we want to get the best people we can, we're going to track the best people with that kind of job description. So we're very clear about that. We also put salaries in the job descriptions and job ranges because there's no reason not to. Why is that typically not the norm? I think big reason is because companies feel like

it's their job to negotiate the best rate they can from a person. Like they're trying to get the most out of somebody. I don't feel like that's something I'm interested in in terms of like, I don't wanna, if I could have paid this person 160, they would have taken 140 or something like that, but I got them for 130 or like, you know,

or like I got them lower than they would have, they would have gone or whatever. Like, or we're willing to pay 180, but like they accept to 165. Like a lot of companies see that as a victory. To me, like if there's any place to spend money, it's on people. I'm not interested in having leverage over anybody

or forcing anyone to be an ace negotiator to get what they deserve. So we publish our salaries because that's the actual number we're going to pay. It's not like come to us and let's negotiate. It's like this is actually what we pay. A lot of companies just won't do that because they want to try to take advantage of people

or they don't know what they're going to pay. There's a variety of reasons for it. Some people think there's some ethical issues around publishing salaries because then other people would know what people make and I can appreciate that. But we've just decided that we want to remove negotiation completely from the picture. So do you ever get down the path where you, you know, you post this thing, this is a job that's going to pay 97,500. You get a bunch of people, you put them through, you finally get your dream candidate, they're awesome, and then they say, look, I know you guys posted this at 97,5, but I'm

not working for that. Like, I'm not working for less than 115. How many times do you find yourself in that situation? We don't. That's a non-st because like it's published. That's the number and that's what we're going to pay. This is something we did a few years ago. We decided this is sort of a very unusual angle that we take here, but we pay everybody in

the company top 10% of the industry rates based on San Francisco rates. We don't have anyone who lives in San Francisco, but in our industry San Francisco has the highest salaries. So we use these benchmarking industry, San Francisco has the highest salaries. So we use these benchmarking tools to figure out what the industry pays. And we're just saying, we're gonna pay people basically the best. There's of course, always companies that are higher,

and if you're in the top 10%, there's some that are in top 5%. But we're gonna pay people the best we possibly can, and we're going to eliminate negotiation from the equation. It's unfair to them. So you're sort of like CarMax. Yes, we're like CarMax. Because here's the thing. Why should you have to not only be great at your job, but also be an ace negotiator? Most people are not good negotiators. They

don't like negotiating for cars, for houses, or for anything. So why should your livelihood depend on how good of a negotiator you are? That's not fair to somebody. They should get paid, in our opinion, the best we can possibly afford, which is basically top of the market. And so we've basically said that that's the deal. And so we have different tiers based on the different roles, but everybody with the same set of skills and experience get paid the same amount of money that number is published. So it's not necessarily clear like how much each person individually makes, but like it's

basically you could figure it out if you wanted to. And that's part of the hiring process too,, which is like, it's no bullshit. This is the number. And it's just what it's going to be. And there's no negotiation from the start. So if you feel like you want the 120 or you're an extraordinary person and you want double, like, because some people have said that, like, I'm worth more than that. That's cool.

Go find another job. There's a lot of jobs out there. If you want to work at Basecamp, we're going to pay you incredibly well. We're going to give you the best benefits we believe in the world overall. And this is the number. And let's, let's, can we eliminate the rest of it? Like, why do we need to play games around salaries? The other thing about hiring for us is that we look primarily first at their writing

ability. So no matter what the job is, you have to be a great writer. If you cannot write well, if you submit a cover letter and it's bad, you're out. I don't care like what you're, if you're the best scientist in the world, you're out. Because you have to be able to communicate with us and the rest of the company, it's primarily written. And you have to be able to express yourself that way. So that's a core thing for us as well, it's like the first filter that we have. Now you talked about this before that when you were websites slinging, your strength was more

on the copy side. So you've, and you've written how many books, four books? Yeah, four, five, maybe depending on your account. So you obviously like to write, were you always a good writer? No. It came down to motivation. I remember I was terrible writer in high school because like I had to write papers I didn't care about, about subjects I didn't care about.

Like, write about this. Like, okay, but like I'm not, I don't care. It's only when I got to college and I was able to write about things, like, okay, but I don't care. It's only when I got to college and I was able to write about things that I really cared about. I thought we were interesting that I started to develop a love for it. Like I love sentences.

I love just a well-crafted sentence that just nails it. That just few things are satisfying to me is reading a great line. Only when I began to be able to write for those reasons that I began to love writing. And I think it's just like, it's so true with a lot of kids in schools. Like, you don't get it until something applies to you and then you really get it. Or you find a teacher, a professor who knows how to put something in a perspective

that makes a lot of sense to you, then you begin to excel. So that's kind of how that. I mean, whenever Tim talks about his professor at Princeton, I can't put them blanking on his name right now. Do you know what I'm talking about? I've heard him speak about this, but... I have one of his books, actually. Whenever I hear Tim talk about it, I can't put them blank on his name right now. Do you know what I'm talking about? I've heard him speak about this, but I have one of his books actually. Whenever I hear Tim talk about it, I just get insanely jealous that I was not smart enough to have found a similar experience in college, because even though I wouldn't have had, it's John something in his name, but even though I couldn't have

had a professor that good necessarily, like, how did I not put more effort into writing? You're a good writer now though. I mean, I think I'm okay, but I wish I was a hell of a lot better. I agree with you. It's just one of these things that... You got a fun topic. I mean, now you do.

So you get to write things that you're interested in, but there's something else I think that's interesting about learning how to write in school, which is that I don't, especially in business school. I mean, I didn't go to an MBA program, but like my business classes, they don't really teach you how to write. They teach you how to put words on paper, and it's usually like length-based. It's not even about like substance in the sense. It's like write a five-page paper on whatever it's like

why five pages? Like, why is that? A class that I'd love to teach if I were taught writing, or I'd love to see, I don't care, someone can take this idea and run with it. It's not something I need to do. For every assignment, let's say there's a writing, or I'd love to see, I don't care, someone can take this idea and run with it. That's not something I need to do. For every assignment, let's say there's a writing assignment. I don't even care, you pick whatever, if I was writing teaching writing, pick whatever topic you want, I want a five page version of this,

I want a two page version of this, I want a one page version, I want a three paragraph version, a one paragraph version, a one sentence version, and a one word version. They don't teach editing. That's the really valuable part. So I love to see you write a long thing

and then keep writing a shorter, shorter, shorter and try to just still it down to assess. And of course, one word is, that's more of a fun exercise. But write these things at different lengths. That, to me, is the skill. It's not like, can I fill up five pages, of course you can. But can I fill up three paragraphs and get pretty close to what I had on five pages?

That's the real skill and that's not being taught. As I was thinking about talking today, I was like, I wonder if I can coax Jason into reading my book before it comes out. Oh, I love to. It is so long my poor editor and the publisher are like, they're humoring me, but I think deep down they're losing their mind. How many words? No, the contract said 80,000.

With the appendix, it comes in under 200. That would be a miracle. Obviously, it won't be published at 200,000 words. It'll be better if it's happened long. You know that too. It just will be. I know you have a lot to say, but. You know what it is?

The desperation is I don't ever wanna write a book again. Part of it is I have 10 books inside me. I don't wanna write them. I wanna write one and never do it again. So it's like there's this sense of I can't not talk about this and I can't not talk about that, which of course is sort of a dumb idea. But can you do like a double album style thing?

Like two books? Yeah, it's Use Your Illusion One. And Use Your Illusion Two, which is the greatest, in my opinion, at least the greatest double album ever, simultaneous. Our books were like, our contracts had 40,000 words and we handed in 20,000. And initially we had to argue with the publisher about it because it's like, well, the thick book sell better and the whole thing and it's like, I know, but we just read, can you read it, please?

Can you read, like, it's so funny these industries, like, they don't, what about the book itself? Like, what is the thickness and like, the word count, like, what about the material? And so eventually, we ended up padding it with pictures. So every essay had a picture, not this current, our latest book, but our previous book, Rework, had a picture with each essay to thicken it up. That was the compromise. Content was great, but it wasn't thick enough to sell apparently, which is so ridiculous. Anyway.

So you mentioned that in 2007, you're given some talk at Y Combinator and you're up there in all your confidence basically saying, hey, there's nothing about luck here. I made my destiny, here we are. We're 12 years later and you don't have a bone in your body that wreaks of that. So what happened in the last 12 years that changed your outlook on the role of luck and presumably a lot of the other things that you've written about that I want to talk about with respect to work-life balance? It was probably a slow shift.

I typically think most things are event-based, like something must have happened, but I don't recall something that happened. I think it's just a mellowing of age and growing older and sort of seeing things and being more honest with myself and self-reflection. I don't think I reflected much when I was younger. I thought I was just like, because you don't have as much to reflect on. I think just sort of recognizing that like at some point that I probably couldn't do this again if I tried And wondering why would that be like I thought I was really really really good and I kind of probably realized that like

Maybe I was really really really good at that time at that thing in that place and I've been able to continue to be good at that thing But starting of another business for example. I don't think I would do well at that at all. And part of this also might come from the fact that I've written about this, which is like, they ask the wrong people for advice. Maybe this was sort of the genesis of this. So people ask me all the time how to start a business. I don't know. I haven't done it for 20 years.

I'm the wrong person to talk to about how to start a business. Advice has a shelf life and it expires pretty quickly. You're much better off talking to somebody who just started a business six months ago than me. Even if they're struggling, I don't care. That's the right person to talk to. They know the ground game there. They know what's going on.

I don't know. I don't remember. And things have changed. So I think I kind of began to realize that reflecting on that, you kind of realize like, well, a lot of this has to do with when we started it, what was going on at the time. Hopefully, like, you just continue to reflect on that and you develop some more humility. I think you have to grow into that, though. At least I did certainly have to grow into that.

And I still have more to grow. When did this ethos around, wait a minute, what if you don't have to work 80 hours a week? What if you don't have to be checking email all the time? What if we don't have to have meetings all day every day? How did that begin to take hold for you? I remember this was a distinct moment. I used to write proposals to get work back when I was in like 98, 99 or whatever. And I was mostly on my own, actually 97 probably.

I would spend all night, I would stay up all night and do these proposals for a client work to get a project, 20 page proposals and whatever. And I would just do this and do this and do this and do this. And I realized like I won some jobs and I didn't win others, but I put a lot of work into that process because I felt like that's what I had to do. And then I was redoing my kitchen at my apartment. And someone sent me their proposal. And what did I do?

I turned to the last page and looked at how long is it gonna take and how much is it gonna cost. And I realized like that's all people really care about when it comes to proposals, because if they've asked you for one, they already know what you can do. They already know what you're doing. They just wanna know how much is it gonna cost

and how long is it gonna take. And that's what they're really comparing. That's it. And so I started going, okay, wait a second, maybe I should just write shorter and shorter and shorter proposals. Why do I need to put all this work into this document? So I started doing like, I was doing 10 pages and five pages and three pages, kind of like the writing side. Like the writing side. Yeah. And I eventually got down to basically one or two pages. And it was like, here's the thing and here's the cost and here's all that's gonna take. And if you wanna know more about me, call me,

or here's my link to my website, whatever. I didn't win any more jobs or lose any fewer jobs. Like, it was the same. And- Except you got to sleep more. I got to sleep more and I realized, wait a second, all this work I've been doing, I don't need to do. And that was the first moment I realized I can kind of poke this expectation of like, God, you have to, because all the proposals I'd seen need to do. And that was the first moment I realized I can kind of poke this expectation of like,

God, you have to, because all the proposals I'd seen up to that point were huge, and they're fancy, and they're glossy, and all this work, and everything's personalized. It's like, when I was on the other side of that, I just looked at the time and the price. That was the moment when I realized, like, I don't have to do all this work.

And so then that kind of extended until a whole bunch of other things, like, why do I need to work 12 hours a day? What am I doing? Like, why do I need to push this hard on these things? Like, maybe I can just do a little bit less and figure out what the essence really is. Like, what is the price and time

of all this other work that I'm doing? And then when you finally kind of get into that mode, you realize, like, most of the time you spend on things is probably wasted time. And this is a huge exaggeration, of course. But there's a lot of time you put into things that you don't need to put into things, and I've gotten really good at editing that down. So I can put a little bit of time into something because I just know what the essence of the

thing is, and just do a really good job on that and leave the rest alone. We've tried to develop that habit and that skill internally based camp with all our employees. So we really get to the essence of something we call the epicenter of whatever it is that we're doing. What are we doing? So you can think of like, if I was to open a hot dog stand on the street. It still be a hot dog stand if I didn't have catch up and mustard and onions and pickles and relish,

even the bun. I could just sell the hot dog. If it was a hot dog, it would be the hot dog stand still. If I didn't have the hot dog, it wouldn't be a hot dog stand. All those other things wouldn't matter then. So the epicenter is the hot dog itself, not the quality of it necessarily. I don't care about that, but like all these other things,

like they're nice to have, but you don't really need them to still say that you sell hot dogs on the street. So that's how we kind of think about like features and functionality, like what is the core essence of this thing that we're trying to do? There are always going to be more powerful for this. But there's so much judgment involved in that. and functionality, like what is the core essence of this thing that we're trying to do? There are always going to be more powerful for this.

But there's so much judgment involved in that. And I've tried to play this game with myself and I'm so bad at it. I would talk myself into saying, well, really, you can't just have the weiner because then it's like the weiner stand, you have to have the bun. And I can't be just handing people buns, I at least have to have the napkin. And honestly, there's going to be somebody that wants a paper plate. I ought to have that. And how could you not have ketchup and mustard?

And who's not gonna want a drink? And by the way, there's ancillary revenue in the drink. I probably have bigger margin on the drink. I should have the drink. Like, you can see how I would spiral that into something that is the antithesis of what you just described. And I mean, I don't think I'm alone in that, right? And I'm not either.

Like, I think about that too, but then I edit it down. It's about all about editing. And is this something that only works now? Let me just actually throw this thing at you too, because what you could also say is, you know what, I'm gonna be the hot dog guy that just serves hot dogs on a stick, or I'm gonna be the hot dog guy that just like,

has a hot dog with it with a fork in it or something, or like, I'm gonna be the hot dog guy that whatever. I don't know. You could to be the hot dog guy that just like has a hot dog with it with a fork in it or something, or like, I'm going to be the hot dog guy that would have, I don't know, like you could be the other hot dog guy. Like that's an angle too. It's not just like, I need to be like everybody else. And I think this is the problem, especially in the software world. As you see, well, this competitor has these five features and this one has these seven, so I need to have these 12.

I need to cover everything, because if I don't cover everything, they're going to go here, they're need to cover everything. Because if I don't cover everything, they're gonna go here, they're gonna go there. I think the more interesting thing is to see what do you really need to have and what can you live without and execute at a really high level on the things you absolutely need to have and then let other people deal

with the things people can live without. And recognizing that the market's large and there's lots of people who will not like what you do and there's some people who will love what you do and some people will hate what you do and it'll be controversial but I think there's a lot of value in that further it allows you to work less. I take pride in that. I think there's a lot of macho boasting in our industry of people who work long hours and get no sleep. I got forward just everything's nice. It's interesting. Yeah, now it's turning into every industry especially finance and a bunch of these industries.

I think it's actually been a bit of an export though from tech. Tech gets a lot of publicity for this. Which may have exported it from medicine. Well, yeah, medicine, I mean, I don't even know how, that's legal. It's like 24 hour shifts and the whole thing and whatever. But people brag about how little sleep they get

and how much they work. I don't understand that. And if you pay attention to what they're doing, if you really ask them about why they're working so long, and this is I think the deeper insight, it's not that there's more work to do. It's that there's less time to do good work because people's days are broken into smaller

and smaller and smaller chunks of time. And I think you need contiguous amounts blocks of time to do great creative work. You can't do it 15 minutes at a time, then check your phone, then get 20 minutes, and there's a conference called, and you're pulled into a meeting. And before you know what's the end of the day,

you've got nothing done, even though you've been busy all day. If that's what's going on at work, then it's crazy at work. Like, our whole point of view is that it should be callment work. Like the title of our book, it doesn't have to be crazy at work. It doesn't have to be crazy at work. We have to give people a full block of eight hours a day to themselves

and you cannot allow people to look at each other's calendars and take time from each other. If you get to that place, which is where we're at, you can get a lot of work done in eight hours. I mean, a ton of work, eight hours is a long time. Fly from here to, I just flew to Amsterdam with my family, it's in about an eight hour flight. It's a long flight.

It's long. You look at your watch, like, oh my God, it's only half done. You look at your watch again, you're like, gotta be done family, it's in about an eight hour flight. It's a long flight. It's long. You look at your watch, like, oh my God, it's only half done. You look at your watch again, you're like, gotta be done. It's only six and a half hours in. And like, eight hours is a long time. If you have eight hours,

most people don't have eight hours at work. They have like 45 minutes to themselves. And therefore, they're working late nights and working on the weekends because there's no other time to get the work done that they're expected to do. Work is, is chewed it all up. What you're saying makes sense, but the part I still struggle with is, but how do these teams

coordinate with those teams and how do these guys, you know, present their work to their manager or, you know, whatever it else that someone might be having to do? A few things. Number one, we try to work independently versus being dependent. So I think there's a lot of companies that work, they're grinding gears. Like this gear has to push this gear and there's a lot of dependencies. And so people are waiting around and there's so many things that can go wrong if one person's late, the whole thing. We try to glide past each other. We're more like glide wheels than gears with teeth.

Almost no one should ever have to depend on another team to get anything done at base camp. Every team is autonomous and sell under their own control. Sometimes they might need something from operations to make sure a new server is online or something like that. For the most part, every feature and everything is built and can be deployed independently of one another. So there's no dependencies. How is that possible in a software business? I'm glad you're asking this because this is really interesting stuff I think at the

end of the day. The size of the project matters. So we only work on things that take six weeks or less to do. So every feature we build into Basecamp, there has to be a six week maximum version of that. Many features are only two weeks or three weeks. Can you give an example because I can't find them what this could be? Let's see, like take a calendar feature in Basecamp. So for a number of years, Basecamp didn't have a calendar. A lot of people wanted calendars. So you start thinking about like, what does that mean?

What does a calendar? A calendar is like complicated. We've built calendars before and they've taken... This is before we start working these six week cycles. Years ago, we built calendars and they can take six months, eight months to do well. But what do people really want? A calendar is just a manifestation of something.

What do they really want? And they're talking to people and start digging into requests and you start to understand what they really want is, they want to see days that have something on them and they want to see what those things are on that given day. That is a lot easier to build than like a-blown calendar where you can drag things across cells and have events that span different cell blocks and have to span another line.

There's a whole bunch of complexity that gets involved with building a full-blown. If you try to build a Google calendar in six weeks, you cannot do it. But there's a version of Google calendar you can build in six weeks that solves 80% to 90% of the issues. So you have to kind of file it down to that. You really file it down to that and go, we're going to build that. And then if we want to build something else,

that's a separate project. What we don't do is we don't hold that back, that calendar feature. We don't hold it back until we have seven or eight or 10 other six week projects and then launch it all together. We launch these things as we go. And therefore therefore they're small enough that they don't depend on other things, and there's nothing held up that ends up becoming stale because other people have committed new work.

And how many people would have spent the six weeks working on that calendar? Three. Max. So, this is the other thing. On any given feature, we have three people maximum working on that feature. Typically, two programmers and one designer, sometimes just one program, one designer, and that's intentional too. The number three is really important to us. It's a small team, it's a wedge, it's odd, so there's never any ties, it can be self-managed. Once you add a fourth person, something happens

where you can now have sides and someone has to come in and mediate, and it just becomes more complicated It's all hard to get four people on the same schedule It's everything gets harder than more people you add so three people maximum to anyone on feature They have six weeks maximum to complete it and oftentimes it's less than that and then we move on But all these things slot in independently, but that trio reports not to you They must report to a manager who reports to somebody who reports to you or you know I mean kind of but not really we're very flat so

Organizationally so there's me and David so David's a CTO on the CEO We have someone who runs what we call core product, which is like all the designers and developers for like the desktop version of base camp We have an iOS team which is three people we have an Android team which is three people we have a customer Android team, which is three people. We have a customer service team. We have a technical operations team. And then we have a few other people who are working independently. These teams, for example, the product feature team with three people, we have maybe four of those teams running

at the same time. They sort of self-report. So in Basecamp, the product, there's a way, at the end of every day, Basecamp asks everybody automatically, what do you work on today? People write up what they worked on today. They also write up what they plan on working on this week. And then every six weeks, the team leads, writes kind of a summary of what's happened over

this past six weeks. So these things are self-reporting, and we're all paying attention to the work itself as it's going. So there's no moments when there's big presentations. There's no presentations. It's like work is happening, we're paying attention to the work itself. Everyone's writing up what they're working on every single day. And people

just know what's going on. You just know what's going on this way. When people go off for months at a time and do these big huge massive projects, then they have to report back. That's a whole different structure, which we don't have. I don't I don't think that's the right structure. Is that make any sense? I feel like sometimes it's hard to explain these things. Well, it does, but it begs this question, right? Which is how much of this is a product

of the type of work you do specifically, and how applicable is it to, I don't want to use my work as an example, because I want to go so deep on that that we don't even have time. We'll save that for a dinner. I'd love to figure out how to use my work as an example because I want to go so deep on that that we don't even have time. We'll save that for a dinner. I'd love to figure out how to change my life to have eight hours a day to think.

But it seems hard to imagine most jobs being amenable to that. I just don't think it is. Do you get a lot of people asking you this? That's a Jason, I read your book, I love your book. I mean, oh my God, it sounds like an Irvana. Yeah. How do I do it?

Well, yes. And we just wrote another book actually called ShapeUp, which is a web-based book. So if you go to basecamp.com slash ShapeUp, it's a very, very detailed, like this book here, it doesn't have to be crazy work, it's more the big picture. It's the framework. Framework. ShapeUp is actually how we work day-to-day to build software. But whatever you're building, it has elements to it.

And if you can scope these things down into smaller elements, I think you can work this way. There's certainly some things that are going to, like I'm not saying like you can build an airplane. Like people always go, what about an airplane? It's like, well, you're not building a fucking airplane. Everyone thinks they're building them, like, most critical thing in the world they're not.

It's like, no one is. There's just some people building airplanes where I was like, what about air traffic control systems? It's like, you're not building an air traffic control system. A lot of people I think think that their work is so mission critical. It's not. Like, you can work this way. You can slow things down a little bit. You can break things into smaller bits. And you can apply a few people and apply pressure to a problem with just a few people over short period of time and solve that.

And then layer that in and keep doing that over a year, you end up getting somewhere. If you have multiple teams, like on any given six week cycle, we're doing four or five or six or eight different features, just different teams are doing them. And they all come together on the end

because they don't mesh. They don't have to rely on each other. That's why you can do this. The big problem is when you've got six or four, whatever different teams working on their own things, that all the puzzle pieces have to come together at the end and work together. In some product worlds, that's true, but we've made the conscious choice that's not in our world. I think the key here is that it is a choice. What's the price you pay for that? Because every choice comes with a cost, and is the cost that you are less profitable over a given time horizon or less

innovative or I mean making these things up because I don't know what the answer is. Everything has a trade-off. So I look at more as a trade-off than a cost, specifically but whatever. Yeah, it's a trade-off, which is like maybe some of our stuff is not as high fidelity perhaps as like it could be. Like maybe if if there's a transition, like you click a button, and it'd be nice to have a smooth transition between these two screens, maybe instead, the screen just flash. Like, we just decided that that trade-off

is worth it to get the feature out. Or maybe we have to cut some features. Like, in our book, we cut our book from 40,000 to 20,000 words. Certainly, there were some words in there that we cut that we probably shouldn't have. But that's okay to make this book readable in three hours, because overall, the advantage is there.

So there's absolutely trade-offs, and we're very conscious of them, and we make them all day long, and we actually talk about the trade-offs. Like, this is something we have a term internally called trading concessions. I run the, basically, run the design team. David runs a technical team.

I'll bring an idea to David, and I'll say, here's how I'd like to do this, and he'll go, we can do it that way. It'll take probably maybe 12 days or something of worth of work. This is an estimate. Although we don't really talk about estimates, we talk more about appetites, which is another thing we'll talk about a second. But he'll say, this will take maybe a couple of weeks to do. It was, but there's a version of this I can do in three days. And here's the difference. The difference is it won't do this, that, and the other thing. And then I'll go, that's worth it.

Let's save those 10 days or 9 days or whatever, and let's do that simpler version and get that done because now we can do three or four more things in the same amount of time. So it's about trades. You make trades with people. And some things I'll go, you know what, no, this is, I believe, I mean, it's just a guess. What do I know? This is what I think. I think this is worth actually going all in on.

Like this feature, let's do the two-week version of this. And he'll go, you care more about it than I do, I'll do that. And the next time maybe, he'll get the win on that. Like, it's like, you pay for lunch, I'll pay for lunch. You just kind of all evens out in the end, but you have to talk about the trade-offs and then you have to discuss them and go, yeah, that's worth it.

That's worth it. I think the thing is, is that especially in software, a lot of people don't talk that way. They just think that we have to build the best possible version of whatever it is that we're making no matter what. And it's like, well, why? Like, why is it, why is it have to be the best possible version? And what is the marginal gain past a certain point? You can put, like, and we've done this in the past, where we used to work on things

for long periods of time, and truthfully, like, let's say we worked on something for three months, like as you said, Parkinson's and law work expands the field of time available. What we realized was that that project probably could have gotten done in half the time and probably been 95% is good, and probably the stuff that we squeezed out was probably worth it.

It's just, you can keep squeezing these things until you get down to the atomic level. And then you can do more of them. That's the other thing you can do more of them. The other thing I would say getting back to culture is that there's nothing more demoralizing than working on something that you don't know when it's going to end and that you don't like. No matter what you're doing, you're going to work on some things you don't like to do.

At base camp, the worst thing that could possibly happen is you have six weeks of something you don't want to work on. Certainly other bad things can happen. But like when you begin you can see the end six weeks max and we've thrown out work we've built built something six weeks like we don't like it. What's the cost? Six weeks. Versus what ends up happening is if you work on something for six weeks or 12 weeks and 24 weeks and you keep going You then have this huge momentum that makes it impossible for you to cut your losses because we put in months and months and months It's only gonna take out we're almost done another month another month another month It's never just one month. It's always another month after that before you know what you're nine months in ten months in And you're not gonna cut your losses at that point because you've invested too much

It's very hard to do that organizationally So you end up keep pushing and pushing and pushing and this thing keeps going and going and going. And by the end, it's no good and you waste a year. And that could kill morale and can destroy teams. So at the very worst, we have basically what we call circuit breaker, which is after six weeks, like if this isn't going anywhere, if we're not where we need to be, we can pull the circuit breaker and call it quits on that. And like, we lost six weeks, but that's not the end of the world.

Now, how does one apply this to themselves? You have the luxury of being the boss. This is a culture, this is your company's way you've created it. How does somebody who's listening to this, who works at a company that functions the way a normal, you know, a normal quote unquote high functioning company works? How did they get to apply this to their lives

when they don't control their calendar, shy of quitting and working at a company like Basecamp? And do you get this sense? Like, what percentage of companies do you think function, even let's just limit it to software? What companies within software do you think function within sort of the neighborhood of the way you've described that? I'd say pretty small percentage currently.

We're out to change that. But I would say most do not right now. How does someone do it? This is like kind of about like figuring out what you have control over on what you don't. If you're new at a company, you're probably unlikely you have any power to change any of these things. The best way to do something like this is to take a small step and you're probably not going to have the influence to change the way the company works. But maybe on some project that's on the side that no one really cares about, you can take that on and show people how you can do this, perhaps in a short amount of time, and they might have expected it.

It was going to take three months, and you do it in six weeks, and go, what is that? How'd you do that? And then you begin to build on some wins, but I think that's even maybe too big of a leap. I think around time, which is really important here, which is you may not have full control of your own time because you have a shared calendar system and people pull you into meetings and you're junior and you have to say yes because you can't, if you don't say yes, you're not a team player and you're out of there, you can start to do some things with other people. So, you know, there's the famous, I guess, the Gandhi quote,

be the change you wish to see in the world, basically. So if you don't like being interrupted by other people all the time, you can interrupt other people less or fewer times. Whatever you have in front of you that you can modify and you can change, begin to change that for yourself. You're not going to change the whole company, but hopefully you can influence some other people and they might be willing to make some more changes. And you can kind of bring that up the chain, But I'm not under any illusion here that like, someone's gonna read this book or read some other book we've written in,

like the company's gonna change. Where that change happens is from the top. So a CEO reads it and goes like, and I also will also tell people like, if the way you're working works, like keep doing it. But the way most people are working is not working and they know it, but they don't know what to do about it. They just like, this is what you do.

We pour in more hours. Projects go long, we're running in circles. Like, if you're at the point where you're struggling with that and going, I can't do this anymore. I don't want to do this anymore. Then it's time to change. The only time people are going to change is if there's actually a struggle. You're not going to change because you've heard of something.

You're going to change because you're struggling so bad with what you have that now you're open to a new wave of working. So that's really, I think, ultimately the only way for these sorts of ideas to take hold is when there's a true struggle and you have the chance to implement some of those things. But as far as, like, other ideas we have, which are not about working as a team, like there's a lot of individual things you can do, certainly. How do you think about it personally? I was on the phone with a friend yesterday who's, I said to him, I

said, man, I am so impressed by your ability to say no. I was pitching an idea to them that I'm interested in and you know sort of putting a group of guys together to invest in something and I reached out to him saying, look, I realize you're probably not gonna do this, not because you don't love it but because you have the strictest no policy of anyone I know. And in the end, it was, I love this so much, but like I can't. It is irresponsible for me to take on one more single idea. By the way, I should be saying the same thing.

I should absolutely be saying no, but I'm not. But I've been investigating this within myself lately, right? Why do I struggle to say no? And I have this nasty, nasty habit which creates so much tension in my life of agreeing to do things into the future. And then when D-Day comes, I take it out on everyone around me,

but I'm really just pissed at myself. You know, I'll agree to go do a talk next March in Germany. And I'm like, well, you know, there's nothing on my calendar, March 14th next year. And then February 27th comes along. And I'm like, I'm so pissed. And I do this awful thing. I take it out on other people. I'm like, how could you let me do this? And I'm like, I'm so pissed. And I do this awful thing. I take it out on other people.

I'm like, how could you let me do this? And I'm like, you baby. Nobody, you did it yourself, you idiot. But the fear that I'm examining is I have a fear of missing out. Like, well, you never know. Maybe that one talk, you meet somebody really interesting and they're doing this really cool thing in research

and you're learning this one thing that's gonna change the way you do this or you know it's like I don't know I don't know how I keep rationalizing doing things that in the end I really believe I'd be better off doing less but I don't know how to do less. I mean this is this is like now it's just turned into a therapy session. This is hard and I've realized that too which is why I've gotten better at saying no. I often regret saying yes, I've realized, to things far out in the future. One of the reasons why is because yes is really easy to say.

Yes requires no work, like later. Like, yeah, I'll say yes to that trip to Germany, because it takes no work to say yes to that trip to Germany. And then you get to like, it's like, I'd rather be somewhere else right now than have to get on a plane flying internationally and I'm going to be tired and the whole thing. Like, I've just gotten better at looking at like trying to zoom to that point in time and going, what I want to do that then, it's not about do I want to do it now. It's what I, what do I think I want to do it then? And that helps me be able to say no to things.

But to me, no is far more surgical and far more precise, which I think will, this will appeal to you. When you say yes to something, you're basically saying no to a thousand other things. Because you can't do, when you go to Germany, yeah, you might meet someone interesting, but look at all the things you can't do, like at that same time. You don't have the flexibility and the freedom to do things, because you've already booked something for our advance. And that thing is costly. It's costly in your time and your health and all these things that you have to do. When you say no, you just say no to one thing.

And now you have more options available to you. And that's how I've been thinking about no. No, is a very surgical, very precise strike. Yes, is a shotgun. And for me, I've discovered that I prefer, this is again, just for me, I prefer flexibility. And I I like to have options which is also one of the reasons why we're an independent company and I will always remain an independent company because my freedom flexibility is the most important thing to me. The ability to do what we need to do the way we want to do it is way more important and the way for me to spend my

time on the things I want to do is way more important than booking my calendar in the future and feeling regret when that moment comes. It's unfair to the venue for me to go and feel regret. So I should be honored to speak, but it's not the speaking moment. It's the everything around it that I don't want to do. Yeah, one hour talk is still 48 hours of your time. Right, so I've gotten much better at this.

I heard something, I don't know if this is true. I've heard this is sort of how Warren Buffett manages his time. I don't know if you've heard of this thing. I think I've heard the story, but please, I don't know if this is true I've heard this is sort of how Warren Buffett manages his time I don't know if you've heard of this thing. I think I've heard the story But please yeah, I don't know if it's true So like I kind of feel weird about talking about it But I've heard that basically he will not book things far in advance if you want to see Warren Buffett If you're a business associate or whatever you basically have to ask his secretary a day before And say like is Warren available tomorrow that he wants to keep his schedule open day before and say like, is Warren available tomorrow?

That he wants to keep his schedule open for anything that comes up and not be blocked for months and months and months because how do you know what you're going to want to be doing in three months on Tuesday at four o'clock? How would you ever know what that's going to be like? You might, in that moment, feel like you want to read a new article or you want to go on a trip or you want to think about something else or something else comes up the day before that you want to go on a trip or you want to think about something else or something else comes up the day before that you want to work on. We block our future with present obligations. And then we never have time to do things we want to do.

So when you realize that, and it's hard still, even if you realize it, it's hard to do it. But I've found it to be a lot easier once I realized that I was, I don't want to be regretful. And I don't know when I'm going to want to be doing that far in advance. So I'll book something a few days in advance or a few weeks in advance or a few months in advance, sometimes for people I know, but I turn down way more things than I say yes to these days and I feel better about it.

Do you have any tips for saying no? The actual act of declining something that, as you said, is flattering to have been offered and you feel like an idiot for not being more grateful. I think just being really honest about it. Like for example, I was just invited to speak overseas and I said, it's an honor to be, to be invited. I appreciate the invitation.

However, I'm just not, I don't feel comfortable flying internationally for talks anymore. It's just too tiring for me. It's hard on my family and I just, I don't want to do that anymore. So, and now it's often say like, if you want to do a virtual thing, like I'm happy to call and be a Skype or like provide some other option, but I can't book travel around a business engagement anymore. And I'll even do that in the US where like if it's a, if I have to go to San Francisco, like that's a four hour flight for me from Chicago. And that's a day minimum, probably two days. And it's like I'm just very careful about that now. So

I'll just be honest about it because otherwise if you like Sprinkle powdered sugar on it and BS people it's like and everyone responds like I totally understand I appreciate that thanks for the consideration and you just nice to people and they're nice to you back in your honest and they're honest back and everyone understands Nobody's mad ever You know, maybe they're like this. I really would have liked had you speak, but they're they understand I agree with that By the way the times I muster up the foresight to sort of say no it I agree people I don't really recall a time when it's been So poorly received if I've just been very transparent the biggest challenge is examining the motivation They the fear of not doing something that that for me is something I'm still really exploring

Well, here's how you can look at that because I understand that. Just flip it. Look at all the other things I can do instead. Of all the possible things you can do, you can now do any of those possible things. Versus your only amelody to do one thing. Look, I've met wonderful people at events that I didn't want to go to. And there's clearly the opportunities that I've missed because I haven't done some things, obviously. But I think that the power of know is that you have a lot more options. It gives you a lot of options. And you can experience something else that day. It might be something where where you kind of keep track of the things you've said notes. I've said no to seven things this year that I think would have been really interesting. So I have to do seven interesting things instead.

Like you can make your own little trade-offs with yourself. Oh, that's interesting. I like that. That thing that came up in March that I said no to the biggest reason I said no to it was actually the realization that it would basically kill any chance of going away with my family that month. And there might be a window to go, you know, if spring breaks line up, that would basically nuke a spring break opportunity, which then you'd feel like an idiot, right?

If you're like, I can't believe I agreed to do this thing, and it now means I'm not gonna do something with my family. Yeah, I look at nose as yes as to other things. That's kind of how I look at it. Do we even dare talk about watches at all? How did you get into watches? You and I both love watches. We have a circle of friends who are equally, I think, if I can just be affectionate, idiotic. Is it an

aesthetic thing for you? Obviously, you've expressed a huge interest in aesthetics. Yes, it's an aesthetic thing. My dad, I don't think he does this any more, but he used to buy these old watches on eBay. Back when I was in high school. So, like, old Elgin and Illinois, these old tank watches from the 20s. That aesthetic doesn't speak to me today. Well, some of it does, but I just remember these little cool objects that would come in the mail. We'd open them up, we'd look at them together, and they were all different. I've always sort of been interested in things that like look like there's only one way to do something, but then there's like a thousand

ways to do something. So like watch design is a great example of that. So you have a, you have 12 hours or whatever you have, you know, 24 hour dials, whatever it is. And you're like, there should be like one way to do this, you know, there's like two hands and this is, but really there's, there's thousands of different designs and stuff. I've always found that fascinating. So I, if I had my dad has probably hundreds of these little watches, like 20 bucks a pop, I don't know what they were. I kind of got into it that way.

And my first watch actually was a, that I remember getting was a Seiko Data 2000, which is a digital watch with a keyboard. And being the bad student that I was, I would cheat in school with it, because you could put notes into it with a keyboard and would sink it, and you'd have like, there's a screen with two buttons which you can scroll through, like, how would it text file? It was amazing. This was like an amazing thing. So it had a keyboard like the size of a like an iPhone today. And the back of the watch was this just metal and it would snap into this spot on this keyboard and there was

like an induction thing going on. It was like pretty interesting. Then it would go into this text mode where you can basically have like a text file and I could type stuff into it and then it would just save it, and then you take the thing off and print your wrist, and then you can just scroll through the notes. And back then, whatever it was, the early 90s or whatever it was, no one would ever suspect that you had data on your watch.

Right? Now, it'd be cheating, but I guess people can have notes today. But anyway, so I would just look through and tap through and have some notes for math and some history notes, because I was terrible with names and dates and stuff, so I just kind of put those in there.

And that didn't feel like cheating to me to be honest. Like, what does it matter if you know someone's name or date exactly? Like, what is the difference really? But anyway, I would do that. And that kind of got me into like the utility of watches. Now everyone talks about tool watches. That was like a great tool for me truly.

And so I got into that, and then I eventually got into mechanical watches because I was just blown away by the fact that something could run without a battery and can run perpetually forever, just because you're moving. That's really kind of a cool thought. And then I got into the mechanics of them, and then of course I got into the aesthetics of them.

You know, I definitely have this sickness, although I've been sort of trimming back lately, which is kind is nice, but it's probably just to build back up again. My taste of change, too. I think that's the other thing, it's neat to see things that you bought that you thought you liked six years ago and you look at them now and you're like, my taste of change. I think it's a neat thing to do because of course you can look at clothes and look at

other things, but I feel like I kind of dress the same way I always have, like a T-shirt and jeans, so that hasn't really changed much, but the things that I like, the objects that I like definitely have, and since these objects are permanent objects, you do keep them around. Unlike a phone, like flip phones, like you go way back when, you don't have those anymore, so you can't really look back on those things, but watch as you can look back and go, that's what I was into then, and this is how I've changed, I kind of like that. Now, how did you get involved with Hoodinke?

I was just a fan. And then Eric Winn, who used to work with them, he reached out to me. Eric is a great vintage watch dealer. I've bought several watches from him. Yeah, Eric's a wonderful guy, very knowledgeable. He reached out to me via email because I had some stuff on Instagram,

back when I was doing Instagram. I don't do it anymore. But when I was doing that, I had some watches and somehow he found me and he's like, hey, you seem to be into watches a lot and I want to introduce myself, I'm Eric from Houdinkie and I write this thing called Bring a Loop or whatever it was called back then,

I think it was like the precursor to talking watches. Yeah, and this is like a thing every Friday, they would show vintage watches that they found on the web. And I think he once said, can I show one of yours? I think that's how it was. And I kind of got into that and then I eventually met Ben and met the crew. I'm a big fan of what they're doing. I'm also an investor, so full disclosure, so I'm a fan and I'm an investor, but I am on the board there, so just to get that out of the way, so everybody knows

where I'm coming from there. But I like what they've done, and I think they've elevated but I like what they've done and I think they've elevated this sort of weird geeky thing into a bit of a more refined collector's experience. I think it's pretty cool and pretty hard to do in like niche circles. So a lot of like niche collectory things are often like really poorly done and bad taste, not like offensive, but just like there's no design involved. Well, I think that's what's sort of cool about Houdinkie. I don't talk much about watches on the podcast, actually, but I do think a number of people listening know how much I love watches. Houdinkie is really great. I think their writing is very good, and I find myself forwarding articles to my wife all

the time. One thing I had to do two years ago was take this stupid Haudenque alert off my phone and computer because it was just really bad every day to get like two pings with a Haudenque article And I was like, you know, talk about not being productive is just Getting watch porn thrown at you all day long. I've eliminated pretty much all notifications on my phone except like things I need during the day. I actually think phones are highly addictive. I think they're basically modern day cigarettes. And they might be at least as bad for you. I think they might be worse.

Oh, well, probably not worse. Like lung cancer is pretty damn bad, right? And cardiovascular is pretty damn bad. But you know what though, if you took the area under the curve of suffering, I actually think phones have a bigger AUC of suffering than cigarettes. And even though maybe for a while people didn't realize cigarettes are bad, like people

know that they're bad and they still do them. I don't think people realize phones are bad. So I think that's their manipulative in that way, in a way that the cigarette is very direct. It's like, I smoke. They're smoke. Well, it's the cigarette of 1950. Right. We're no one really knew it thought it was cool and whatever. Yeah, doctors recommended them. Tenture check them under. Great.

That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right.

That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's smoke. There's smoke. Well, it's the cigarette of 1950. Right, where no one really knew it thought it was cool and whatever. Yeah, doctors recommended them. I'm sorry. Great. Great way to lose weight. I thought it was good for you or something. Yes.

In fact, this was the preferred brand during smoking. I had during pregnancy rather. Was that right? Oh, I'm sure. I think there was a mother should smoke this one, very end. Wow. You know, at Hopkins in the Old Wing at the hospital, which I don't think is in use anymore,

there are still ash trays in the patient rooms And I remember still in the old O.Rs even seeing ash trays Interesting and they should keep that around this is a reminder how delusional we can all be But I think phones are kind of like that so I've kind of taken notifications off my phone I don't like if I want to know something I'll go find it versus I don't want to be pulled to anything Like I'll go look it versus I don't want to be pulled to anything. I'll go look forward if I'm curious. I think we've become slaves to phones telling us what to do and pro apps telling us what to do. This actually all comes back to the beginning of this conversation, which was that

the business models surrounding many of these things on phones are all about engagement. An engagement is an addictive behavior. And so these companies basically are designed to addict you to their services and prompt you the right amounts of time per day and reward you for engagement and whatnot. And they build these terrible addictive behaviors. I'm aware of them, but like I try to stay as far away as it from them as it possibly can. But the business models are tied to this. This is the other thing. It's all about eyeballs, number of people using it. It's all about advertising dollars. It's all about all these things. And this is where the business model, like you can't see things changing

unless the business model changes. There's lots of talk about like companies need to be more responsible and designers need to be more responsible and programmers shouldn't be building software like this. But like as long as the business model supports that and that's what keeps you in business and that's what the job is, you're gonna keep doing it. That's just human nature, unfortunately. I remember you sort of opted out of Instagram a little less than a year ago if I recall. Yeah, in 2019, beginning of, yeah. I remember you put up a black picture, right?

Yeah, it's a black square. And I still look at it sometimes. I find myself actually browsing and I feel sick that I wanna do it, but I still do it. It's like powerful. Why do I feel sick? I want to do it, but I still do it. It's like powerful. Why do I feel sick? Yes Couple of reasons first. I feel like I'm going against what I said I would do. So I have stopped posting

Completely, but I was hoping that that meant I would stop using But I'm not so why haven't you uninstalled it on your phone It's mostly because of the watch thing So like I still use it to look at watch people that I know because I feel like I learned something from that. But I don't think it's worth it because I probably still spend too much time browsing through things mindlessly looking at pictures of watches which don't really matter to me. Really?

Really don't fundamentally matter if I see that picture of that person wearing on the wrist. I'm not really learning anything. I've sort of convinced myself that I am. It's kind of like, I'm an addict convincing myself that it's okay. I mean, that's what it is. Now, there's recreational enjoyment out of it and I do learn some things and I met some people that way clearly. But I don't, again, get him back to trade-offs. The trade-offs are probably not worth it. Yet I'm still on the wrong side of that deal. I'm using it less and less and less.

What I don't like looking at is, I guess I don't like looking at vanity. That's why. Because you still use Twitter. I use Twitter. So it's not a social media thing, mature approach. It's not social media, although I am strongly

opposed to Facebook for a number of other reasons, but I'm not opposed to Twitter, because to me, Twitter is something that I can, I'm mostly broadcast, I because to me, Twitter is something that I can, I'm mostly broadcast. I don't really read that much. Except I'll engage if someone writes me back, typically. But Twitter, for me, it's just different. It feels very different.

One of the things that bugs me about Instagram is that a lot of people just show off. It's not that there's not valuable stuff on there. It's just that I don't like to see people showing off. And that happens. And I remember myself doing that. I'd buy a new watch or something. And the first thing I would do, I'd like, I want to share this with other people, not because I want them to see it. It's because I want them to know that I have it. And that is not healthy behavior. It just isn't. So I cut myself off from that at least. But then now I still see other people doing it, and it just, but then I, it's hard to turn away too. This is the addiction a little bit.

So I use it a whole lot less than I did, and I'm almost all the way off it now. I should probably just delete it. In fact, I will delete it after this conversation. Wow. Yeah. Wow. Done. Holy cow. Why not now? Like, when am I going to do it? Well, it's funny. Before we jumped on this podcast, we were having another great discussion about a whole bunch of other really cool stuff with respect the exercise and meditation and you are Very much a person who does what he says he's going to do. I'm gonna do it right now right now I mean you'll have to tell people that I'm really doing Well, yeah, they're down here and of course I look I can always reinstall it

Yeah, but I'm not going to know about you. That's gone. That's gone. And it's interesting to know that that was your home screen. Second, oh no, you're right. Yeah, that's your home screen. So you opened up some real estate on the most important screen on the screen. Here's what's going to happen. It's not going to matter. That's the thing. Like, you might go, I might lose connection with some like, oh well, like the fact that you can't do something because one thing goes away because of it, I don't want to be beholden to those kinds of things. And also, I'm just aware that that made me feel weird for a second.

That's them making me feel weird. Like, I shouldn't let them make me feel weird. That just, they shouldn't have control over me that way. That might be the most important moment of the podcast. Last question I want to ask you, which again purely stems from selfish desires, though I do, but I think there'll be enough people listening that this question will serve a broader purpose.

What is your relationship like with email? Which is, I mean, just to let my, I've probably spoken about this more than people want to hear. I really find email to be a troubling thing. I find, take everything you feel about Instagram, Qbit, raise it to the power of E, and Qbit again, that's how bad I think email is. I think email is an awful, awful thing,

which is not to say there aren't valuable things that come from email, but I think the net effect is toxic. I agree with you. One of the things that blows me away about email, anybody with your email address can get in your face. I don't mean like getting your face in a rude way, but I mean getting your attention, right? They land in your inbox. It's yours and they can put themselves there, no matter what.

And to build on that, they can add to your to-do list. It's sort of like this. It's just to-do list that everybody gets to add. And it's an introduction list that everybody can just make. But actually, I don't think email is the biggest offender. I think in organizations, I think chat is a bigger offender. Now, I don't know if you use chat tools in your organization, but chat worse. No, but I can.

Yeah, because it's even more instant, right? It's real time. And there's an expectation of immediate response. And that makes it especially bad. And also organizations begin to think one line at a time. Yeah, it discourages this writing thing that you seem to place an emphasis on. You've got like write and present

and like think something through and put it out there as a complete thought. Like if you've ever tried to be in a chat room and a company, you're sort of typing some idea out and someone else jumps in and takes, and like asks a question, like, well, wait, let out and someone else jumps in and asks the question, like, wait, let me just finish. And it's like, it's just a mess.

It's like this race to get your idea out because you're doing it one line at a time. Meanwhile, if you write something in long form, you can get your whole idea together, put it out there for people. People can read it on their own schedule and they can get back to you tomorrow. There's not this expectation of a immediate response

because the medium is encouraging immediate response. So, that's why I hate WhatsApp. There's not this expectation of like a immediate response because the medium is encouraging immediate response So I just can't stand what's up for that reason, but imagine if you had a company of 200 people and everyone's on WhatsApp And that's the primary way they communicate with each other This is what's happening inside many organizations these days and it's going in the wrong direction and people are beginning to realize it just like 15 years ago everyone thought open floor office plans were a great idea. People are realizing now they're not good ideas at all. But at the time, it was the best idea in the world. Everyone switched to it.

There's other ideas, why there are other reasons why they did it's cheaper and it's easier, it's more flexible, I get all that too, but they're very distracting. People don't have any privacy, it's hard to get in the zone and do some deep work when people are mulling around and there's noise around. Chat rooms are basically all day meetings with an unknown set of participants and many, many different topics all at once. And they're basically virtual open offices and they're running 24-7 and they're terrible.

But that's sort of the current trend, but I think it's gonna trend back towards more asynchronous long form communications. I think it's a better method. I hope so long-form communications. Because I think it's better method. I hope so. I mean, I would just close by saying I think evolutionarily, I don't think we evolved for the tempo of the electronic environment. Obviously, we didn't evolve with electronics, but it's less about the electronics, I think,

and sometimes, and more about the way it's changing our brain and the way we, the chats are obviously a horrible example. Meaning a great example of how horrible it is. But yeah, I just don't think our ancestors when they were working on a problem, whether it was finding their next meal or building something like I... I just don't think that we're great synaptically

at doing that stuff. Tied of that too is like, what's the rush? Someone might hear me say that and go, well, you guys work in six-week cycles instead of like three months is like, what's the rush? Someone might hear me say that and go, well, you guys work in six weeks cycles instead of like three months, like, what's the rush? Well, six weeks aren't rushed. But like, why is everyone feel like they need to rush a rush? I mean, you can ask people what it's like it worked today. Most people say, like, I'm super busy.

I'm like, get back to these people and then like, everyone all of a sudden is rushing all the time. What is so important that we're rushing about, and most of the stuff we're rushing about and rushing to get to and rushing to do doesn't really matter anyway. It's just this pace that I think has absorbed the business world specifically that is unhealthy

and unsustainable, and I don't think the outcomes are better. Why is it better to talk faster at work? Like, why is that better? Why is it better to talk faster at work? Like, why is that better? Why is it better to talk shorter at work? Why is it better to not be able to explain yourself clearly in one fell swoop? You know, why are these things actually better? I think they're more convenient,

and that's why they're happening, but I don't think that they're better. And I think that enlightened companies are going to begin to realize this and go, convenience is one thing, certainly, but we're actually able to do better work when we're more deliberate about it, when we slow down a little bit, and we get to communicate in complete sentences and in complete form.

And when we also don't allow human nature to get in the way, which is that specifically around projects that things should not last forever, and go on and on and on and build up the such momentum that we can't pull the plug anymore, and that morale goes down the tubes and all these sorts of things begin to happen. So I think a small percentage of companies are going to sort of see the light in our beginning to. And it's not going to change everyone because convenience and speed is something that a lot of people value as well. But I think that there's a lot of trade-offs that aren't being evaluated. Well, Jason, on a personal level, find this stuff so interesting because, like I said, I were to sort of evaluate, give myself a scorecard on how I'm doing with respect to my

eating, my sleeping, my this, my that, my other thing. I think this is definitely the area where I fall short, and it's not even close. Like, it's not even a contest. This is really tough. This will be a long commitment for me, but I'm very interested in figuring out ways to make this better because I think I come at it from a different framework, which is honestly, I've had the, I don't know if privilege is even the right word,

but I've certainly seen many people at the end of their life, not so much today because of what I do today, but back in my previous life where I really did get to see people who were at the end of life, clichés are a cliché for a reason. I to see people who were at the end of life. Cleeshays are a cliche for a reason. I really don't recall anybody at the end of life wishing they had worked a little longer, a little harder, which isn't to say that there isn't somebody out there who feels that way or there isn't somebody who feels like they left something on the table.

And who knows, maybe in his final days, Steve Jobs did wish he had worked a little harder to get that next product just to that next level. I don't know. I mean, I, so I won't, I won't blanket that statement as completely diffused, but most people, so I have to assume I will be the same way. When you're on the back end of that, you start to think about the relationships that got neglected or the amount of just joy that got sort of missed by being busy, which is for me,

busyness is a bit of an addiction. Business is the other thing we don't really talk much about, but busyness is something I try to avoid at all costs, because I feel like busyness is basically shifting between a bunch of different things at the same time. And that's why you feel busy, because you're like, I gotta run to this, I gotta run to that, I gotta,

and I'll come back to this and I'll have more time to do this later. It's like, if you can figure out ways to work and contiguous blocks of time, you can cut back a lot of the busy feeling. I think that's another really interesting area to improve on is to give yourself time to start and finish something in the same day versus within a contiguous block of time versus like, I'll get this done later between lunch and after this call and whatever, you'll do a better job and you'll have a calmer day than trying to wedge things into empty spaces.

I think that's one of the big things. I think people's days are pretty scrambled actually. That's one of the reasons they feel busy. Again, it's not that there's more work to do. I don't feel like there's more work to do. And in fact, shouldn't technology be in like, hasn't the promise been like less work? And it's all these things are automated for us.

So where's all this more work coming from? I don't think it's that. I think it's our days are chunked into smaller bits. It's hard to fit everything in that and you feel really busy and manic. I think that's a great point. Jason, thank you so much for making the time. I know you take time very seriously.

So you're here as little as you need to be. So, well, thanks Peter. it's great to be on. You can find all of this information and more at peteratiamd.com forward slash podcast. There you'll find the show notes, readings, and links related to this episode. You can also find my blog at peteratiamd.com. Maybe the simplest thing to do is to sign up for my subjectively non-lane once a week email where I'll update you on what I've been up to, the most interesting papers I've read, and all things related to longevity, science, performance, sleep, etc.

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