The Peter Attia Drive - #93 - AMA with Jason Fried: Work-life balance, avoiding burnout, defining success, company culture, and more

Episode Date: February 17, 2020

In my first interview with Jason Fried, Jason explained his overall philosophy about work-life balance and how exactly he optimizes for efficiency. For this special follow-up AMA, we've decided to release the full episode to everyone (including non-subscribers), so all can hear Jason answer questions from listeners that dive deeper into topics such as work-life balance, the role of luck versus hard work in success, specifics around Basecamp’s unique process-oriented approach to projects, 4-day work weeks, practical tips for people searching for the right company culture, tips on writing and parenting, and a whole bunch more. If Jason had taken his own advice about work-life balance at the start of his career, would he have achieved the same level of success? [2:05]; What is Jason’s definition of success, and what is he optimizing for? [10:10]; Basecamp’s policy on email and expectations for a quick response, and why Jason believes in sleeping on big decisions [14:30]; How Jason implements “true” work-life balance in his life and at Basecamp [19:15]; Does work and life have to be separated in order to have balance? [32:00]; How Jason makes time the fixed component to avoid the compulsion to keep pushing forward on a project perpetually [34:15]; Jason’s tip for physicians who may be facing burnout [45:00]; Signs of “burnout” if you do the same thing for work and pleasure, and tips to avoid and manage that feeling [49:45]; Is a 40-hour work week the correct amount? [53:45]; How to evaluate a company’s culture when looking for a job with the right work environment [59:00]; Jason’s take on salaries and alternate incentives like equity, profit sharing, etc. [1:06:45]; What traits does Jason look for when hiring new employees? [1:13:45]; Does Jason believe in process-oriented work or outcome-driven work, and Basecamp’s unique process for completing projects [1:16:15]; How does Jason handle a project that results in a failure? [1:20:00]; Advice for people in situations where they don’t have full control of their time and work demands [1:23:50]; How much of success should be attributed to skill versus luck? [1:29:30]; The importance of writing skills, and tip to improve your writing [1:43:15]; Lessons learned from parenting, and Peter’s top priority when it comes to raising kids [1:52:15]; An important skill: the ability to say “no” to things [2:01:15]; and More. Learn more: https://peterattiamd.com/ Show notes page for this episode: https://peterattiamd.com/jasonfriedama 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 Drive Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter, all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, full stop, and we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen. If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more in-depth content if you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level. At the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are, or if you want to learn

more now, head over to peteratia MD dot com forward slash subscribe. Now, without further delay, here's today's episode. I guess this week is Jason Freed. You may recognize that name as Jason was a guest on the podcast we released in October of 2019. At the end of that discussion, both Jason and I sat back and thought, you know, on some levels, boy, this was kind of outside of what I normally talk about, but at the other level, we thought there were a lot of topics that we could have gone deeper into. And once the podcast actually came out, we were surprised, I suppose pleasantly, by the

number of questions that people put forth. And so we decided to do a follow-up AMA on that initial discussion. And so we took questions from many of you, broadly, the apologies for those of you who weren't aware of this. We tried to do it through social media and other channels, but nevertheless, we called together a pretty good list of questions. And we've done our best to organize those for this discussion.

We talk a lot about work-life balance, the role of luck versus hard work and success, some tips on writing, a whole bunch of things. Frankly, I think you're gonna fall into one of two categories. Either you remember that initial discussion and you're gonna wanna deep dive into it, in which case, I think you're going to fall into one of two categories. Either you remember that initial discussion and you're going to want to deep dive into it, in which case I don't need to tell you anything more, or you felt, hey, that episode, you know, I got all I needed out of it, I don't need to go any further, in which case you stop listening now.

So with all that said, please enjoy this special follow-up, ask me anything with Jason Freak. Jason, thank you so much for making more time to follow up. You've already been gracious once, so I figured I'd take advantage of you twice. I like being taken advantage of you, Peter. Thank you. Well, after we spoke the first time, you and I both had the same reaction. I remember we talked about it right after, which was, was man Did we get off onto some tangents that for us were really interesting, but for others were maybe not so interesting and I Remember saying I don't know. Yeah, maybe maybe we went off too far and then Nick Listen to it and said oh, no, this is great like people are gonna like it and sure enough Nick was right We were wrong and people had a lot of follow-up questions. So I guess for listeners

That's really why we've decided to do this. I just think there was so much great follow-up that I thought I can't resist a second Bite at the apple and so basically all of the questions I'm gonna ask you today Jason have come from listeners and I'll probably editorialize a little bit and I might dig off into a tangent. Should the question lend itself to that, but for the most part, all of these questions are about to inundate you with come from people who have been either listening to the first podcast and are just following your pretty incredible work. So with the ground rules set and no time limits in place,

let's go to it. I might throw some back your way too because I'm sure there's some medical stuff in here somewhere that I know nothing about. Very well. So the first question is one that actually came up several times. And I'm guessing it's a question you've heard before, but it's a variation of the following. If you had taken your own advice about work-life balance at the start of your career, would you have achieved the level of success that you're at today?

Yeah, I do hear that one a lot. And let me first admit that that was 20 plus years ago. So whenever you go back that far, there's always some revisionist history. But I'd never really been a super long worker. I'm sure there were nights that I worked longer than I normally would. I'm sure there were times when I was really fired up and just couldn't get something out of my head and worked on it at night, especially when I lived by myself when I was, you know, 21. But the two things I remember are this. One of the things that got me to stop working some of those hours

was actually realizing that putting in more time wasn't helping. And I don't remember if I told the story on the other podcast we did, but I'll tell again for those who haven't heard it, and maybe no one has. I used to, when I was working on my own as a freelancer, I would get these opportunities to write proposals. I'd get an RFP and some company would want me to do website design, and I would put together a proposal,

and I thought that you had to do really long, arduous proposals, because that's what I thought proposals were. I'd seen some of my friends do proposals, some I asked some friends who were to big companies what their proposals look like, so I didn't know what proposal really looked like, what was supposed to look like, and they were big. They were like you could hear them on the desk if you drop them from a foot up, you know, like they made a plonk sound. It was like there was substance to them, so I thought that's what I had to do. And I remember working really long hours occasionally to prepare these really big proposals to try and win business.

And it was a lot of work and oftentimes you didn't win the business. And there's a lot of work for nothing, essentially. Yeah, you could say it was worth it because I was trying and you're not going to get all jobs. But at some point I just started to realize that this wasn't actually enjoyable for me. I could put in long hours and if I didn't win the gig, that was kind of a major letdown, and do I want to keep doing that over and over? So I started writing shorter and shorter proposals. Until one time, I actually got a proposal from someone else. I was redoing my kitchen or my bathroom, or maybe it was both at the time.

I'm not sure how that was staged, but I got a proposal from a contractor that I had asked to submit a proposal. And what did I do? Well, I turned to the last page, that I had asked to submit a proposal. And what did I do? Well, I turned to the last page and I looked for the price and I looked for how long it was going to take because that's what you do with proposals. First of all, you only ask people to submit proposals if you already like their work. You wouldn't ask someone to submit a proposal that you didn't like. And so I already liked this contractor and I just how much it was going to cost and how

long it was going to take. And it kind of dawned on me that that's what everyone pretty much does the proposals. So I started running shorter and shorter proposals until like by the end I was running one or two page proposals. And those didn't take very long. I just kind of came up with the price and the time and we're a little bit about the project and what to expect. And I didn't win any more projects, but I also didn't lose any more projects. So it was about the same, even though the amount of work I was doing was significantly less. And I think that was a sort of a wake-up call for me that just putting in more time doesn't mean anything other than you're putting in more time. You're not guaranteeing yourself a better outcome or anything like that.

So that was a really good reminder earlier on in my career. And then the next thing is that what I'm most known for today, where basically all my successes come from, is this product called Basecamp, which we make. And Basecamp, the product, was developed on the side with about 10 or 15 or 20% of our time, because we were actually still in the client business at the time. So we had to carve out some extra time during the day to work on Basecamp. And then my current business partner, but at that time, just a contractor, a guy named David Hanmeyer Hanson, who wrote the code for Basecamp

was a student at Copenhagen Business School, and he could only give me 10 hours a week. And I think I paid him something like 20 bucks an hour way back then to write the code. So he was writing Basecamp in 10 hours a week. I was doing the design in about 10, 15 hours a week. And in about four months, we built the first version of the product. And that first version of the product is what set this whole thing off and allows us to

be where we are today. So it turns out that not having a lot of time was actually an advantage. If we had more time, we would have made it more complicated. It would have taken longer to actually get out the door. I'm reminded of these moments in my career where I realized that less was actually the better position of the two. So those are two examples. Now, today, these days, I don't work more than 40 hours a week anyway, but I'm sure to

get back to it. I'm sure early on there was moments like that, but those are very few and far between. I was not a workaholic. I was not a pull in all night or kind of person. I just don't really believe in that. There's two follow-up questions that I have based on that. The first is, what about the person who's in the situation where they don't have complete control? So the person who's working at the start-up and the demands are sort of being put on their plate that

for even a really smart competent person are going to take more than 40 hours a week. I mean, isn't that sort of the entire ethos of our culture, whether you're in Silicon Valley or New York City or frankly almost anywhere in between? It is. And it's true that when you don't have control of your situation, sometimes you just have to do, you know, what the boss says, basically. So like in anything, you've got to figure out what you're a control of and what you aren't in control of. And if you don't have any control of your

day because people are loading up your calendar or they're pushing you or there's unrealistic expectations or the demands are out of control. Whatever it is like there's only so much control you have over that situation. But what you can do for yourself is figure out what control you have over yourself or maybe your own small team. Maybe you're lucky enough to be at the position or at the point where you have two or three or four people below you or are working with them and your team leader manager or something. You can shield them perhaps as best you can from the onslaught from above and I think you just have to figure out what can you carve out and what can you control.

And also what behavior are you perpetuating? So if, for example, you are unable to get work done during the day and you have to work long hours at night, because people are bothering you and interrupting you all day with stuff that doesn't matter, then it's maybe good idea for you to look at what you're doing to other people and go, you know, am I actually perpetuating this? Am I part of the problem? Am I just interrupting people constantly? Am I just falling for, you know, in the same traps? And can I do something about how I'm behaving? And can that influence the people around me? This is not a quick fix or anything like that. But there's that famous quote, I don't know, Gandhi or whoever has been attributed

to, which is basically you need to be the change you wish to see in the world. And at a small level, that's maybe ultimately the best you can do. So what you don't want to do is bang your head against the wall, trying to change things that you simply can't. But I do think you have probably a little bit more control of your own local environment than you think and you should just do the best you can in that scenario. You referred earlier to the sort of the reductionist history approach of this. It is pretty common to hear people at the end of a given phase, I mean, the most extreme example would be at the end of their life saying, I wish I did X different, but also achieving a certain milestone of success, business-wise, and saying, God, I didn't need to work that hard. I can think of examples in my own life where I've said that with respect to lots of different

things. But, you know, I've still never been able to get out of this loop of, and I can just help from the number of questions that people ask, that if I could go back in time, and if I'd done it different, would I be in a different place? And, of course, the answer is yes. I mean, that's the nature of a chaotic universe. Initial conditions matter greatly, and if you change those, you're going to change the outcome. But to me, it sort of comes down to, what are we optimizing for? I mean, are we optimizing for wealth or are we optimizing for impact or are we optimizing for happiness or are we optimizing and whatever that means, by the way. And that, to me, also seems like part of the challenge here is I don't think many people

myself included spend enough time asking that question first because if you don't even know what the answer to that is and you haven't really thought through all of the permutations, I don't know how you're going to answer some of these second-order questions. I'm glad you brought that up. You're right about that. People say, would you have achieved the same success, right? And we just, I mean, in America, especially we just go towards, well, success equals financial independence or, you know, being rich or like, that's just probably what we everyone who's listening to this podcast at least who lives in the US probably thought

the same thing about that word. And look, I'm not going to stay in here and say money doesn't matter to me. Of course, it does, but I've just never really been driven by it. So for me, success really is, do I want to keep doing what I'm doing? Is that, of course, I have to survive and all that basic stuff and provide enough for my lifestyle that I like, but really, do I want to keep doing what I'm doing? Because certainly, at Basecamp, we leave a lot of money on the table. There's a lot of things we could be doing. We could be charging more. We could be charging per person right now.

Basecamp, we only charge one price no matter how many people use it. We could charge per person. We could make white label versions of base camp. You know, there's all these things we could do and it's just software. We could figure out how to do anything to make more money. But I wouldn't want to do that work. That's not the kind of work that we want to do here. It's not the work I want to do.

It's not the kind of organization I want to build. I don't want to build an organization that's interested in squeezing every last penny out of every last customer. It's just not interesting to me. That's how I look at success is, of course, we have to be financially independent enough to stay in business because we don't take outside money and all that stuff.

We've got to have that baseline there. But after that, it's not about squeezing out the most you can. It's not about maximizing. I've never really been interested in maximizing. I'm looking to find the right amount, the enough amount, the feeling that like, this is about right. And this also includes like the number of employees we have here.

We have about 56 employees. We could have four, five, or six, or seven times. Our revenue could support that, but I don't want that many people because that comes with its own set of headaches. Yeah, it might equal more money in a sense because we could do more things at the same time. But what are the costs of that too?

Everything has a cost and everything has a trade-off, and many trade-offs. And for me, and this is, I'm just speaking for myself here, but for me, maybe it's because of where I'm at in my career, I'm conscious of that as well. Success is not defined by revenue, targets, or big numbers. It's defined by, do I want to go to work tomorrow

and do the same thing I did the day before? Am I enjoying this? Do I like the people I'm working with? Am I challenging myself intellectually and creatively? Those are the things that matter. Do I, impact does matter to me too. Am I impacting the industry in a positive way? Are we standing for the right things?

So those are the things to me. And those things don't have a lot to do with time spent. They have a lot to do with what you choose to do with the time that you have. So if you say, I only have 40 hours a week, well, I can spend that to do good, I can spend it to do bad, I can waste it on things that don't really get me ahead or don't really matter. I can do all sorts of, I can come up with all sorts of self-destructive arrangements that work to make those hours not count as much as they should. And there's all that stuff.

So for me, it's really about making sure that the hours that I've designated as work hours are productive in the ways that I want them to be productive and not just chasing dollars. I don't think we discussed this on the first podcast. And I can't remember because I think you and I have discussed this sort of stuff over meals instead. But what's your culture of email like? Like I'd love to be able to create a world where it's the social norm that everybody checks their email from, you know, eight to nine in the morning and four to five in the afternoon

and never again. Like there are no, there's no such thing as a browser being open outside of those hours. And if you really, really need to get a hold of somebody outside of eight to nine or four to five, you call them. And if you don't have their number, then too bad you probably don't deserve to get a hold of them. You know, something like that because you know, you've heard me rail on this, but I think the interruption to thought through the endless stream of emails, even if they're not life-threatening or requiring a lot of cognitive horse power, it's just taking you off your train of thought. So, do you guys have any rules, guidelines, practices around that? Yeah, we do. We don't use email as an organization, but we use Basecamp,

which has an email like functionality where you can write long messages and people get a notification, then you can comment. But it's the same concept, which is this is a cultural thing, like you were kind of getting at. What we try not to do is build a lot of this into software. We have some stuff that's in software that prevents people from getting emails or getting notifications, let's say outside of work hours. But culturally, we have this norm that no one should expect immediate response. And there's no expectations of immediate response.

So that if I have a question to ask you, and I just happen to have a question right now, because that's when it came to my mind, that doesn't mean that I expect you to stop what you're doing to answer my question right now. The only thing that matters about now is, it doesn't matter about now, and I'm saying is like, now just happens to be my clock. This is like the theory of relativity in a sense, you know, like, my now is not your now, you're probably busy doing something else. So why should I stop you from what you're doing?

In fact, interruption is a really arrogant act. It's saying whatever you're doing is less important than what I have to ask you or what I have to tell you. So, what we do here is people are allowed to write to each other whenever they want to during the day, but the expectation is not that you're going to get a response immediately. The expectation is that people are going to get back to you when they're ready. And that might mean three hours later, it might mean in five minutes, if they happen to be ready, it might mean tomorrow, that's okay too. And if there's actually literally an emergency, which there should almost never be, or if you

actually truly do need something right now because something super important is pending, and you have to respect what super important means, you can't make everything super important. You know, like, in a lot of businesses, ASAP has become just everything as ASAP, and that doesn't work. So, if we all respect the fundamental definitions of these things, and if there's actually truly an emergency, you're really truly going to get it hold of someone right now, you call them. The phone is the elevation or the escalation of the attention.

So if one of us calls each other, we answer the phone. But if one of us sends us each other a message, we might not get to it for a couple hours, and that's fine. And in fact, I think most things are better off waiting until at least the next morning. Especially important things with decisions that are attached to it. In fact, I think most things are better off waiting until at least the next morning. Especially important things with decisions that are attached to it. You're better off sleeping on some of these things and coming back to it with a fresh mind the next day. I just think that there's something to that.

In fact, I read somewhere recently, I don't know if this is true, but I kind of can't believe anything you read anymore, I guess. But that Bezos only makes important decisions in the first half of the day. And if any important decision comes to him afternoon, he won't make it. He'll say, I'm waiting to the next morning. Because he knows that he is cognitively there in the morning. In the best possible way, he's not going to be worn down. He's not going to be frustrated. He's not going to be beaten up by some other issue he had to deal with.

The mornings are for decisions, and afternoons are not. And I like that general point of view. And there are very few things that you hear from someone at four o'clock that you truly absolutely need to get back to them at four, ten, like most things can wait to the next morning. So, culturally here at Base Camp, that's our point of view. That doesn't mean people always live by that, just like in culture, sometimes people go outside the norm and there's moments when we do speed communication

up a bit too much. But for the most part, we're very careful about that and the expectations are set in that way. Yeah, I love that. I wrote that down mornings or for decisions. If I take nothing else from this podcast, but reframe how I do things that actually will be an interesting experiment. I've been doing the same thing, by the way, and I do find that it's just a nicer way to

approach things. And it's kind of, the default is, like, let's just sleep on this. You know, if it's second, if it just sleep on it, it doesn't matter. At three o'clock, we don't need to make any decisions. It's going to matter right now anyway. So let's just sleep on it and you'll come with a clear head the next day. It really works for me. Now, someone asks an astute question, which is, balance is inherently dynamic.

So it's going to look different for different people, but it's also going to look different for an individual across different periods of time. So the obvious they point out is flexibility as a trait that is valuable here. Are there other traits or features that are inevitable to maintain this dynamic balance as an individual goes through time and different stimuli.

I think so. As we talk about balance, you know, work-life balances, what people call it, but a lot of people don't mean it because what usually takes is always work. Work always eats into life. It's very rare that life can eat back into work. So if something's really going to be balanced on a scale or something like one side has to be able to freely move up and move the other side But both sides have to be able to move So I think the flexibility here is that

Life has to also take over from time to time because it's so easy for work to take over like Like yeah, I gotta I gotta do this thing at seven o'clock And I gotta I gotta answer the email. I got to write this thing up Well, what if you say like I have to go watch a movie? It's two o'clock in the afternoon, I wanna go see a movie. Like, that should be okay too. But that usually isn't okay.

It's seen as like, oh, that would be weird to leave work in the afternoon and go watch a matinee or something, that'd be strange. But why is it any stranger than writing up something for work after dinner? Like, that's strange too, but we're just so used to it that we consider it to be normal.

So when it comes to flexibility, I think both sides need to be flexible, and both sides need to be able to take back from the other and trade. You're basically trading concessions from here and there. I need a couple hours during the day for this, or I need a couple hours at night for that.

Both of those need to be acceptable. If only one's acceptable, then it's not really truly balanced. You can almost think about instituting a little personal practice, both of those need to be acceptable. If only one's acceptable, then it's not really truly balanced. You can almost think about instituting a little personal practice, which is for every time you do work outside of work hours, let's just say you're in an organization that defines work as eight to six.

If for every hour you have to spend after six doing something, you figure out a way during the eight to six hours of the subsequent week to go and take it back with a life specific thing, whether it's literally do nothing, watch YouTube, if that's what you fancy, go to the gym, you know, something that is part of your life. I love the idea of banking that, you know, essentially just having a ledger and keeping track of that, and then, you know then one of the things you can do is just daydream. I encourage people here to daydream at work. Just have nothing to do and just think.

Like it's okay to be bored too. Boredoms good and we've lost that ability. Just being able to sit still and just look out the window and see where your mind goes is not in a meditative state kind of thing, but just like, I've got nothing to do for an hour. I'm not gonna fill my time up with something else. I'm just going to let something else fill out my time.

That to me is a healthier approach than feeling like I need to cram stuff. Like if I have nothing to do, then I'm not being efficient or I'm slacking off or something like, yeah, no, you're not. You're just letting your brain rest and seeing what comes into it. I think that's totally fine. So I think that that's a great, a great approach. So if you're running up something at night, you got to reclaim some of those hours during the day.

That makes a lot of sense to me. Now, the thing is, of course, is that in order to do that, the work day has to be flexible. So getting back to the question, like, you can't just keep taking time away from life if you can't take time away from work. And in many organizations, sitting around doing nothing would be seen as a problem.

You're lazy, you're not a team player. So like, there's a lot of fundamental change that has to happen here, but you can also just kind of hide as best you can and do it for yourself. And like, I don't think your company's gonna miss that hour that you're just thinking for yourself. Nothing's not going to get done. There's a double negative, but nothing's not gonna get done

just because you had some time to think. In fact, I think you'll probably use that our better in most cases than you would have if you were just doing some medial tasks. Now, that doesn't apply to everybody though, right? I mean, if you work at a call center or you work in a cafeteria, it'd be impossible, right, to take even an hour off a week for idle thought and relaxation. So as the, there definitely going to be some people for whom they don't have that luxury, right? Is there any insight we can draw for that person?

Yes, this is in some ways a privileged opportunity. However, a lot of people who work, for example, to call center have a pretty strict work life balance already because they can't do that work from home or their hours are tracked in a way where they won't be paid overtime, so they don't work. They work eight eight hour days and so this whole thing about reclaiming an hour during the day to day dream because you did something at night isn't necessarily even as applicable because there's a clear separation between work and life i think often times information based jobs or jobs that are are more about like sitting behind a computer doing creative work or you know that kind of stuff. Those are the people who find it so easy just to kind of dive back into work because the tools that you need are right in front of you all the time. They're on your laptop, they're on your iPad, they're on your phone or whatever.

Compared to like let's say a call center where you sort of punch in and you punch out and you have a system that you use just for that. You're not using that system also to surf the web. It's like it's a totally different kind of thing. So I actually think in many ways structurally that's a healthier situation. It's one of the reasons why in Basecamp we built a feature into the product called Work Can Wait, which allows every employee to set their own work boundaries, work hours. So outside of those hours, let's say you work nine to five, Basecamp cannot send you a notification.

So it physically like separates the tooling from your phone. When normally you get a notification at 4 o'clock, you won't get one at 6 o'clock because you said 5 o'clock is my cutoff. So it's the same phone, but the tool won't reach out to you. And I think that's what's really important about a lot of the stuff when it comes to technology is that they're called push notifications,

but they're really pulling you back in. And these things pull you into your phone. And when you're pulled into your phone or you're pulled into your laptop or you're pulled into your iPad, it's pretty rare that you're just going to do that one task and then shut it. What's going to end up happening is you're going to open the thing and your browser is going to be open and you happen to have 17 other tabs open or there's an unread indicator on iMessage or whatever Twitter is open and before you know it, you're

sucked back into the world of staring at a screen doing stuff. So anyway, yes, you're right. If you're working retail or you're working in a call center or you're working a very sort of regimented kind of job like that or on a factory line or something like that, clearly you can't do that. But also your day ends in a much more, I think, in a clearer way than most people's days and these days. Sort of on that same thread, I think about decisions that we make that are setting us up for a bad default environment. So people who have home offices, I remember in every home I've ever lived in,

you know, since I've been at a point in life when I would need an office at home, I've always gone out of my way to make it as convenient as possible to be there. And I actually think that's a horrible mistake. It should be as miserable to be there. Like in an ideal world, my home office should be in a tree stand or something where if I, you know where if you really want to go out there in the freezing cold, get soaked in the rain as you climb the tree stand and get into your little office and sit at your computer with your little space heater and pack away at your keyboard.

Okay, go for it. But it certainly shouldn't be something you just sneak in to do on your way walking back and forth between the kids' bedrooms, which is what I basically do today. It's like, okay, go read this little guy a story, put him to bed, and you're walking back to the kitchen where you could be social, and, oh, you know what? I'm just gonna go check on some email. And I mean, I really hate that about myself.

So I might have to build a tree stand or so. I feel like this idea just came to me having this discussion with you, which is it's so easy to work. Yeah, gosh, it really is. I mean, technologies made it way easier than ever. And you're right. I mean, of course, like people's homes are what they are,

and you probably can't move the walls around and stuff, but maybe you can make a mark on the door or something every time you do that, or maybe you can do something that helps you recognize and realize how often you're doing that, and that might change your behavior, or at least make you aware of the behavior. I think we probably go around not even wondering what we're doing, we just do these things that are in voluntary.

I think that's cool. I've always, this is impossible for basically everyone in the world, but I've always admired – I don't know if you've ever been to the Glass house, the Philip Johnson glass house in New Canaan, Connecticut. But again, this doesn't apply to pretty much everyone on the planet because it's a 50 acre site, it's a beautiful place. And I think there's something like, I'm getting the number wrong, but there's 12 separate buildings on the campus, I'm not campus, but on this 50 acre site. What's really neat about it is that Philip Johnson who designed it,

he decided that it's actually all one house, but the rooms are separated by space versus hallways, and space being nature. So, for example, his office, so the glass house itself is like the social space of the house. There's a fireplace, there's a lot of it's all glass, it's just a very beautiful place to sit. But his library or his study is actually a separate building that you have to walk to. And it's 50 acres, so you have to walk quite a bit to get there. If I remember correctly, there's no electricity. So he just uses the light, there's an oculus at the top of the space. So the light comes in from the sky, and that's it. And when it's dark, it's done. There's no plumbing. So you can't kind of camp out in there. You've got to get up occasionally and

go to the bathroom or whatever. And again, like this was not applied in most people, but the idea, I think, is really strong, which is there's actually a physical separation. And there are things in this space, which make it inconvenient to stay there very long. No electricity. So, hey, when it's five and it's winter, it's dark. You're done. You stop working. That's just what you do. And maybe you get up a bit earlier and you work a bit earlier if you want to do that.

That's a really, to me, a really beautiful constraint, which is it's not even up to you. It's up to the planet. It's up to the stars. It's up to the solar system. It's up to the universe. That's what tells me, and that's kind of, you know, how it really sort of should be. And also, how it used to be, of course, right? There might be other ways to the universe. That's what tells me and that's kind of, you know, how it really sort of should be and also how it used to be of course, right? There might be other ways to simulate that even though of course your house is connected. There might be some other ways to do it

And I think as a thought experiment it might be need to think about how can I yeah, how can I make this more difficult for myself? I still come back to this thing, which is there's a great privilege that we have that we might not have if we existed along the Glasshouse paradigm. I don't know why I'm going to, I'm like, as I'm looking at my phone or something and you look at your computer, you look at these things and you think, like, would these things exist? Would Apple have existed? Would Microsoft have existed if the norm was what we're describing? Sun up to sundown is all you can work. And I don't know the answer to that question, but I suspect that it comes back to this point of what are you optimizing for.

And everybody has a choice. And maybe the people who have bent the arc of our civilization, either deliberately or not deliberately made a choice to emphasize impact. But in the end, each of us still has a decision to make. I mean, I think about this a lot, and I wrestle with this a lot. And my leaning is not towards impact personally, right? My leaning personally is much more towards, I hate saying happiness, but some variation of that or suffering minimization. You know, that's probably kind of a cop-out answer that

says, well, maybe you'll never matter and a hundred years after you're dead, no one will know your name, whereas a hundred years after Steve Jobs is dead, everyone will still know his name. But the stoic philosophers would argue, I think it was Marcus Rillius, ironically, would argue like, who cares?

You're not there to know that you're dead anyway. You're dead anyway. You're dead anyway. You're dead anyway. I mean, I'm not a Luddite, by any any measure, like I like technology. I just, I think it's important for us to recognize the trade-offs because it's been pitched as all good.

Everything coming out of Silicon Valley has been pitched as all good. It's a win-win and it's not. It's not a win-win. So I think it's on us, the public, to push back and say, hang on a second. What have we been sold and what is this doing to us? I mean, it's damaging relationships. People sit in bed with their partner and they're both looking at their phone.

I've done that. My wife's done that. Like, that's just, doesn't feel right. Now, you could say, well, they could be looking at a book. Instead, and that's true too. There's always something, perhaps, but I think what we've seen is that technology is not all good. In fact, there's

some significant impacts, negative impacts of technology, and we just need to keep that in mind. So, yeah, I mean, I'm glad these things do exist in the world, obviously. We're doing this podcast over Skype and recording on my Mac book pro, and I've got an iPad next, you know, like, these are great things, but they do come with costs and I think that's just the important thing to keep in mind. So someone asked a question that's getting at a counterpoint here, I'll just read the question directly. I always cringe at the phrase, work, life, balance, and quotes. These two things should not be different. I understand that they often are, but it seems to me that the fix is not to figure out how to maintain a balanced separation, but rather to bring the two together. What are your thoughts? This is kind of the

opposite point of view, potentially, to what you just said. It is. I kind of cringe at the phrase also, but mostly because it's misused and it kind of doesn't really represent anything. I think this is a fair and interesting point. I'm not sure what they're suggesting. So this person might be suggesting that you do a little bit of work and you do a little bit of living, you do a little bit of work and you do a little bit of living, that they're kind of the same thing. There's not like this actually demarcation during the day. And I think perhaps work like balance, there's a slash in it. You look at the words, there's work slash life. Like there is a demarcation that this happens over here and this happens over here and they should be balanced.

That's maybe what's cringe worthy perhaps because I do think that these things can play off each other and they can each take from each other and that's to me the balanced part, not that they're necessarily equal or that, you know, one starts and one ends kind of thing. That might be a little bit complicated. So for example, for me, I wake up in the morning

really early, I make breakfast for my kids, they take them to school a few days a week or I go to the gym the other day's a week, and then I do a little bit of work and then I take a little bit of a personal break and do something else around the house and then I do some more work and then do something else and maybe I'll drive to the office around noon.

So like my day and my work and my work in my life is sort of mixed up during the day. But I think the important part is that there's life mixed in there too. And it's not just like 18 hours of work, although that's probably unrealistic for mostly, but 12 to 14 hours of work is a lot of work. And a lot of people are spending that much time at work. That's not together. This point about bringing those two together, that's not peanut butter and jelly. That's like mostly peanut butter and tiny bit of jelly. And that's like that would make

a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. You know, that wouldn't make a work life balance if these things are so unbalanced. So I don't mind these things being scattered throughout the day, as long as one's not dominating the other, that's kind of my main point. The way you just explain that is not at all at odds with the thing, the question that that person is asking, yeah, that's actually a better explanation than I would have provided. On this same sort of theme sort of, do you have, and how do you deal with your own personal compulsion to keep pushing forward? This could be specific to a project or just the overall arc of your business.

I think I've changed here. I think in the past, I might have pushed harder to keep pushing forward, I should say. I wouldn't end the day or something like that. But what I've kind of realized is that a project doesn't exist until it's over. Until then, it's just work and what turns it into a project or turns it into something to be proud of, I think, is like at the end when it's all packaged up and ready to go out to the world. And I want to get to that point sooner rather than later. I guess there's a few different ways to think about this question. Pushing forward might mean

speeding it through, but I suspect this is more about like continuing to work on it. I'm inferring here, but I want to give it my time and then I want to get away from continuing to work on it. I'm inferring here, but I wanna give it my time and then I wanna get away from it to gain some perspective. So when I come back the next morning, I have a fresh look at these things. And then I also, I wanna get it out the door. So I'm typically someone who's going to cut things

out of something to release it versus to keep adding things onto something, to finally release it. I'd rather get it out early and then iterate on it than do it. So what I've found is that there's just diminishing returns at some point. You're better off just taking a break and coming back to it the next day than trying to like push through to the next day on things. So I think though in the past I may have pushed a little bit longer when I had perhaps fewer responsibilities in life. I wasn't married and of kids. I didn't have anything pushing back on me to

remind me that I probably shouldn't be doing this. But I've come to realize now, of course, I do have those pressures, but also that those pressures are an advantage, they're not a disadvantage. And in fact, many of the people that work here and that I've seen over the years who happen to have other pressures outside of work tend to be more efficient workers because they know that they don't have extra time. And so they make better use of that time. I might be kind of missing the crux of the question, but I think it's the same concept, which is, I want to do my work during the day.

I want to stop. I want to come back the next morning and I want to get this thing done, which means I'm going to cut it back and not keep pushing forward, but instead draw a line, get it out there, and then continue to revise over time. Yeah. So using the analogy of defined benefit versus defined contribution, you've defined the time and you adjust the scope consistently within that constraint, which is pretty much what nobody does, certainly not what I do. I am the exact opposite of that. I'm actually worse than that if I'm going to be brutally honest, right?

I will define a scope with some expectation of how much time it takes. I will get there and I will realize, no, that scope wasn't high enough. It needs to be higher. So now we have an exponential drag on time as the scope continues to go further and further away. So I'll just keep moving the goal post further and further away. And when it's all said and done, you look back, I mean, the audit of that type of behavior is devastating.

It is. And I have done that. So I recognize that behavior. We've become ruthless about cutting scope for us. What's fixed is time. And in our world world that's six weeks So we I talked about this in the other podcast. I won't go deep into it But like we work on projects for no longer than six weeks at a time And if something's far bigger than we break it down into six-week chunks

But that helps us or that forces us to figure out what's actually really worth doing What's really important what trade-offs we're gonna make what really matters here? Because if you just keep shoving more stuff in, you'll never end, it'll get really big, it'll get really complicated. By the time it's done, you may not like it anymore. Because the ground may have shifted, the market may have shifted, you may have shifted. I'd much rather get things done sooner, cut the scope, and then decide to do more scope later as a second project, versus continuing to pile and continuing to blow air in this balloon, that keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. I'd rather have separate balloons and blow them up enough

and let them go and then blow the next one up and let it go. I just feel like that's a much better way to do this. So yeah, we're ruthless. In fact, we have a term here at Basecamp, we call it the scope hammer. So we just wheeled the scope hammer. I could use one of those. Yeah, I could use a scope hammer. Thank you. And we always talk about that, like break it in half, like break it up, make it smaller.

Keep breaking it until these pieces are so small that we can see the whole thing, we can hold the whole thing in our head, we can maybe piece a few back together, but we wanna break it down and not build it up. And the worst thing that happens is when people are on deadlines and then the boss or the manager, whoever comes in and shoves in more work at the eleventh hour, that work's not going to get done anyway by the time you want it. So just don't do that. Let the thing finish, get people a break, a little bit of reprieve, and then make

another scope, another project, and start that next. But you've to have some separation, I think otherwise, like things just balloon and this huge snowball and then it gets dirtier and dirtier and dangerous and more dangerous. And then it becomes more massive and more massive an object, the harder it is to change its direction. That's just basic physics here and the same thing is true for projects. So it's this project gets so big and you have so many decisions piled it behind it, pushing it and there's so much momentum behind it, you're never going to stop because you don't want to give up all that work.

It's going to be very hard to change its direction because it's been pointed in the same direction for a long time. Then it becomes too big to fail. And then you end up with this thing where you pour so much time into it. By the way, it could be an amazing outcome. It's possible. That's true. But oftentimes, it's not even just the outcome.

It's the process too, because sometimes you can brute force something through. You can just push people as hard as you can and they get it done. And you have this thing at the end that looks great. But you may have destroyed the team, so they can't do it again. You may have destroyed morale.

You may have burned people out. You may have messed up personal relationships there. And so yeah, the outcome might be worthwhile, but that's a very short-term look at it because you've got to work with these people again, don't you? And if you have to do work with those people again, and they don't want to work that way again, you kind of ruined it for the long term. So I think you have to be very thoughtful about what kind of impact brute force has on the people who have to do the work, especially if they're going to be the same people doing

the work over and over and over and over. You know, it's funny you say that I need to remind myself of that more as well. I remember talking with Rick Elias on the podcast and he referenced the Simon Sinek book, The Infinite Game. That's what it made me think of when you said that, right? Which is, again, it's a failure to appreciate what you're optimizing for. If you are only optimizing for that one project, like the world was going to end in three months, and for whatever reason, you somehow deemed that it was relevant that this project

be done before the Earth gets blown up, you know, you might take a different approach to how hard you work, although that example seems sort of counterintuitive. But if you're optimizing around the game of, but you're gonna have another project after that and another project after that. And what if the game is to be able to have the freedom, flexibility, sanity, comfort, passion, fill in the blank adjective to keep doing projects,

you'd have to take a different approach, right? You just nailed it, That's exactly it. And when you're building a company, first of all, it's hard to hire people. It's expensive. It's hard to find great people, it's hard to train great people. The worst thing you can do is lose those people to burn out and team dynamics and whatnot. We've been in business for 20 years. I'd like to be in business for another 20.

And I'd like to ride with a, a lot of the same people. We've had a number of people, a half far company. So we have 65, 33 of which have been with us for five or more years. 22 have been with us more than seven years. 10 have been with us for more than 10 years. In our industry, that's incredibly rare. Most people, I think, cycle out after 18 months in our industry. I think that's the average 10 year.

And I like these people. They're fantastic. We've invested a lot of time and effort, energy into them. And they've given a lot back to us. And I would hate to get a project done, but to lose someone because of it. It just doesn't add up to me. So yeah, you want to ride with these people for a long period of time. You've got to think about what it's like and what the impact is on them as you go, not just on what you get out on the other side. Because yeah, again, you can brute force something. Think about, you know, there are probably certainly times we can always come up with examples

where it was like something that had to happen at a given time for whatever reason and you just had to do it. Okay, that's maybe fine occasionally. But I think if you do that, it's important to tell the team, this is not how it's always going to be. This was something that we had to do for this reason, and we had, believe we had no other choice. This was an existential threat or whatever it was,

and this is not how it's gonna be next time. And you, of course, people have to be able to trust you. So you have to, that has to be true. But it's probably okay to go all in on something, occasionally if you make it clear that that's an exception versus if people think every project is gonna be like this, I'm gonna get my CV ready and look for somewhere else to work because this is just, I can't do this over and over

and then you lose great people and you gotta find new great people and you burn the same people out over time. And so I do think it's really important to think about the long term. Let me just add one more thing. This is one of the issues with Silicon Valley. Why Silicon Valley is a whole, I'm generalizing here, but pushes people so hard is because

a lot of the companies that come out of Silicon Valley aren't profitable. There's no way for them to survive more than five or six years anyway. Their end game is acquisition, IPO, merger, something, or famously fizzling out, blowing up. So they're not thinking about long-term. So they just burned everyone out because there's always a new batch of people coming in, and this company's probably not going to exist anyway, and this entrepreneur's a serial entrepreneur is not going to do something else anyway. And so they don't have that point of view.

And the problem is, I think, is that that point of view, that this burned people out point of view, it doesn't matter, because we're in it for the short term, has seeped into every other business because people look at Silicon Valley and go, there's a few people who became billionaires there, I want to be one of those. So if I work like them, then I'll be rich like them. And so now you have all sorts of other businesses that don't have the same dynamics that are trying to work like Silicon Valley companies. And it's our worst export is that kind of effort, that all-out constant effort to burn people out

just because it's not gonna last anyway. Unlike what I'm trying to build another company's are trying to build, which is a long-lasting company, you can't behave that way in last for a long time. You're just gonna flame out, and I don't wanna do that. So one last question on this,

and it's a specific example. So it's someone who's a primary care physician. I mean, I understand what that person's life is like, but for you and the listener, let me kind of explain it in the way that they do, which is it's a fixed schedule. So they're in a clinic from this hour to this hour. Carrot and stick incentivized practice.

So they have to have so much time face to face. They get paid based on RV use, which are clinical codes for basically the acuity of the patients. When they're not in the clinic, they're spending their time chained to an inbox of emails and calls. So, unfortunately, Physician Burnout is a ridiculous issue. I think anybody listening to this has tried to find a really, really top notch primary care doctor, pediatrician,

whatever realizes it is harder and harder to do that because the job itself is getting so unattractive on so many levels, if you're still in the space where you're taking insurance and operating within the normal confines of it. There are obviously exceptions to this, but I've lost count of how many doctors have reached out to me with basically this concern. I don't expect you to solve primary care, but is there like one tidbit you could offer to this person? I have a primary care physician who I'm sure is in the same boat. It's part of a large hospital chain, a university hospital system. I've got to know, it's part of a large hospital chain, university

hospital system, got to see a bunch of patients. What I've noticed though is that the problem, aside from this being a problem for the physician obviously, now I'll maybe get to a solution a second as I stall to think of one, but is that the patient feels it too in a different way. So I totally see how frustrating must be to have to see, I don't know, 20 patients a day and the whole thing and being billed and judged based on these metrics that don't feel like they're really about patient care so much, but they're about quantity. But what I've noticed is that doctors look at the screen more than they look at me now.

When I'm seeing a primary care physician, they're entering data constantly into their electrical, whatever medical record thing, electronic medical record thing, epic or whatever it is, whatever they're using. And they're just like entering, they're listening to and just entering data by looking at a screen. And there's what's been lost is the humanity of the whole process.

And that to me is the bigger loss. Of course, I'm just speaking as a patient. So, if I was a physician, I might maybe agree or disagree or say there's two massive losses here. But, unfortunately, if you're within a system that requires what this person's describing, there's not much I can suggest. The only thing, the only thing I can see, like just completely stepping outside of this, is somehow people have to see fewer patients. But if that comes down to higher paid, then you can't support yourself by seeing fewer patients. I'm not really sure what the solution is.

I think the only thing I'm thinking about this again is the end of that question, which is about emails and getting back to people and getting back to patients. That's probably the one place that you have a little bit more control over because that's not how you're getting paid. It's not what's being measured. It's actually what you think people want from you. So I'm gonna just tie this back to my client days when I was doing client work way back when,

which is like, I didn't have patients, of course, I'm not in the medical world, but I had clients that also demanded my time, like a patient might, and of course it's not life or death or whatever, so didn't have patients, of course, I'm not in the medical world, but I had clients that also demanded my time, like a patient might, and of course, it's not life or death or whatever, so it's obviously different. But a lot of people think that if a client emails you 10, 30, a night, you need to get back to them 10, 31

because they're paying you. But that's you thinking that. They may not think that. They might just be emailing you 10, 30, a night because that's when they had a free moment. Like, they might be fine getting the answer back the next morning. This idea that, again, that email has come in

that you need to just immediately respond to people, you do have a little bit of control over that. And there might be better ways to do it. There might be a really nice thing you can send, like an auto responder of someone emails you. Maybe there's top 10 questions. Maybe there's top 10 resources. Maybe you can build your own resource library

of things that might answer questions for your patients if patients keep asking the same kinds of questions that they're going to get automatically when they email you. Maybe there's some other technical solutions here to help you deflect some of those questions that could be answered in other ways. But this is of course a systemic major systemic problem and I don't have the solution for Peter, you probably have way more ideas here than I do. But it fundamentally, it seems like there have to be fewer patients per doctor in order for the humanity to come back into the medical profession.

Yeah, I could expand on my thoughts on this forever, but then that would become another podcast. I actually like your idea a lot. I think a smart email responder that, because if you really do stop to think about it, in the end, a lot of the questions are questions where you've done the heavy lifting on the thought process and the problem solving and there are ways to batch them and point people in the direction of the resources. So I actually kind of like that idea. Shifting topics a little bit. I thought this was a very interesting question and I don't

know if you've ever been asked this before. I never have contemplated it, but I love it. I'll just read the question verbatim. I basically do the same type of work, programming and coding, referring to you, not me, of course, on my free time, and also for my own pleasure, other than work. How can I notice the signs of burnout if I do the same basic thing for work and pleasure? That's a really good question. And a lot of people in my field, in the field that he's describing. Their job is also their hobby on the side. The way I think

about it is this. Think about an album that you love. You love this album. You play it over and over and over and over and over. You love it. And then at some point you go, I don't know, I'm gonna start skipping some songs. I'm not into the album anymore. I'm into a few songs. And then he's start, you know, playing those songs over and over and he's start to wear those out too. You know what it feels like to feel that way about that thing, this thing that you used to love, but now you're like skipping over stuff and now you're just like, eh, it doesn't have that hook anymore. The hook is gone. I think

that's the same kind of thing to be looking out for when it comes to this, which is, if you're essentially loving this thing that you do because you do it in your off hours, but at some point, whatever it is that you're working on just doesn't seem to be as interesting as it once was. That's like that album that you've played a few too many times. And because you're doing it all the time, you're basically playing it twice a day, versus once a day. And I think just, you know, there's no like obvious sign, like all of a sudden, you know, this flips to that,

but there's a feeling. And I think thinking about it by comparing it to overplaying an album is a nice way to think about it. And the other thing is is that, burnout is often shrouded by things you may not recognize unless you really step back and think about it. And the other thing is is that burnout is often shrouded by things you may not recognize unless you really step back and think about it. One of the early signs of burnout is motivation going away. It's not like frustration with the work. It's

just like, I don't want to, I don't want to do this. And sometimes you can chalk that up to maybe a day or two of just, you know, things are slow for you or whatever, you had a bad night's sleep or whatever, but at a certain point, like, if you get into the work and you have a hard time getting into it and you see yourself, like browsing the web some more or going on Twitter, some more Facebook or Instagram, whatever is it that you do, when before you used to sit down, you couldn't wait to start doing that work. I think that's an interesting sign of burnout as well. Just procrastination is a pretty good sign of burnout. So I'd pay attention to the feeling of

the music example and also procrastination. I think that's something. And I think that if you're doing the same thing all the time, there's a really good chance that you're probably going to burnout sooner than somebody else. The other thing I would say, and I've seen this work well for people who do both things, is that let's say you're a coder in this example. And during the day, you code information systems, business software, whatever. At night, don't tinker in the same thing.

And so tinker like in algorithms for creating mazes or 3D ray tracing or something totally different. It's the same medium in that you're typing into a keyboard manipulating computer, but it's not actually the same work. I think that's one healthy way to do it. I think, for example, if you were a baker and you bake muffins all day for the baker you worked at and you came home and you bake muffins all night, you're gonna get bored of muffins.

How could you not? But if you make muffins during the day and at night you bake bread or you make cakes or I don't whatever you make cannellies and you're expanding your repertoire, like then even though it's baking, it's different. And I think that that's the healthy way to manage kind of the same thing that you do at night

and your hobby and your professional life but also to make them quite a bit different. And as I'm in the middle of a fast right now, I really appreciated the example of baking, cakes, muffins, because none of those things sound remotely appealing to me right now, not at all. Okay, let's talk a little bit about 40 hour work weeks versus other options. So this is a pretty interesting question. As productivity has grown over the decades, many economists thought that that growth was going to be reflected in a shorter work week in our society. So 40 could be compressed into 32 and you'd have the same output. That number 40 hasn't really changed in 80 plus years.

Why do you think that is the right number? And historically, I don't know if you know this, but I don't even have a sense of, I assume that was driven by daylight at some level. Like, is that how long we were in the fields at some point? Or it's sort of an interesting to note, I've never thought about that until I saw this question, which is kind of an interesting default, right? Why is it the 40 hour work week, not the 45 hour work week or the 31 hour work week or something like that? I mean, it has to be divisible by five. I'm supposing, but you know, if we decided weekends were on.

I think I heard a story and I don't know if this is true. We have to look this up. But I think this went back to Henry Ford. I think that he decided that this was about the right amount of time to work. For his workers making the model, was it Model T, whatever it was? And that's been what we've done ever since. I don't know if that's true, I've heard that. And it sounds like it might be right, because these things sort of take on a life of their own, and for a long time, Ford was the leader, and this was why they were the leader and this is what we should be doing too and people don't stop to question it For example in the summers at base camp we work 32 hour weeks. So may through October we do 4-day weeks eight hour days

So we're still doing the eight hour day, but just doing one fewer day a week and Less work gets done, but not that much less. So it does feel like 40 is about a good number. And some of the between 30 and 40 seems to be a pretty good number. I think if we had less than 32 hours, though, we would fall off a cliff pretty quickly, because what ends up happening is when you have fewer hours, you can't waste any time. And any mistakes are magnified and are really difficult to recover from.

And we've seen that even in our 32-hour weeks, if there's something that happens on a given day, and now you only have a three-day work week, like pretty much nothing happens that week really quickly. So you lose a day out of four, and it's a real problem. So the five-day work week is pretty standard, of course, but it feels like eight hours just seems to be enough time. It's not quite sunrise as sunset, of course, because that might be earlier or longer. We should look up the

history, but it feels to me like somewhere between 30 and 40 is the right number. That's not to say that 45 isn't fine too. I'm sure it's fine. The problem is when it gets into 60, 70, 80, that's when it's a problem because, if you think about your day, you've got 24 hours, you should sleep about eight. Now you got 16 left. And if you want to get into some sort of balancey kind of arrangement,

then you split it in half, you got about eight and eight. That seems about fair. If you're working 14 hour days, and you're sleeping eight hours a night, which you may not be, because you might be working longer or whatever, and trying to squeeze in a whole day also, then your life gets squeezed out of there too. So it just seems like it feels about right, but I think it goes back to Henry Ford. I'm not sure why though. If you had to pick would five days at eight hours be better or worse than four days at 10

hours, I'm going to cop out and say I think essentially both is good. And the reason why, and this is kind of what we do, almost, since we do only part of the year, four day work weeks, even though we're not working 10 hours, four day work weeks versus five days. And I think what I like about that is the seasonality of things. You know, when we grew up, when all of us grew up, we went to school, and then we got summers off. And he takes summer off, and he do something else. And then summer is amazing until the end of summer. And you're like, maybe I'm kind of ready to go back to school or do something else or maybe you're not.

But like, at least things change. And I think that that's a really healthy thing. And that's sort of what we try to model it after here, which is, you know, let's kind of give everyone a summer break again, like you used to have when you were a kid. And it's not that it's a break break. It's just a little bit of a break. And let people enjoy themselves. Everyone has a three day weekend in the summer. There's more things to do. You can maybe take another vacation that you wouldn't have taken. You can maybe take a slightly longer road trip than you would have taken. But what we found is that like, we actually started trying to do the four day work weeks all year and it wasn't as special.

It didn't feel as special pretty quickly becomes just the way it is. And so I like the shift. So I'd be, by the way, I'd be okay also with a four day, 10 hour day, if people want to do it, you know, want to do it that way. The thing is that like having the three day weekend

is the real boon there. It's the real like nice special thing. You can, it can afford the ability to do things that you normally wouldn't have been able to do it that way. The thing is, is that having the three day weekend is the real boon there. It's the real nice special thing. It can afford the ability to do things that you normally wouldn't have been able to do because two days on a weekend is just sometimes not enough to take a long trip or something like that. So I think it's healthy to mix this up,

but I don't know what the exact right amount of hours are, but I do know that like too many hours has some real costs. All right, got a couple of questions on culture. And I've always sort of bristled at the term culture because when I think about culture, I think about those sort of happy feel good signs that get mocked a lot. You know, I'm talking about like integrity, thoughtfulness. Like I could, you know, you just like, and I'm like, boy, it's when you get to get to get to. I know. A buddy of mine found a, maybe it

still exists, but there was this really funny website where you could take all the motivational value-based culture-based pictures, but put your own pictures and own captions to them. But it would build it in the same font and look like the same poster. I'm sure people listening have seen it, but it's, it's really priceless. So not with saying the fact that I don't know what any of this stuff means because like a poster on a wall doesn't mean anything to me. Presumably, how does it infiltrate what you actually do day in and day out?

Nevertheless, there are great questions you're around this notion of what advice do you have for somebody who sort of listens to this podcast, listen to the other podcast, says, Jason, you got it, man, I buy what you're saying. I tried to get a job at Basecamp, you guys didn't hire me, or I don't want to work in Chicago, or I'm not in that space, but I still believe in the ethos you describe.

Can you help me think about the right lab to pick for my PhD, the right job to pick, the right, you know, fill in the blank, the right company to work for. What are the telltale signs that I need to be aware of that I'm in a place where I'm going to thrive based on all the things we've discussed and even things we haven't discussed that you just think are important metrics of a great existence. Culture, I cringe in the same way that you cringe when you hear about corporate company industry culture stuff. First off, culture is not something that a company creates.

You cannot create culture. Culture is the byproduct of consistent behavior. It's what the company does, that's it. It's not what you want it to do, it's not what you wish it to do, it's not what you write down. It's what it does. I think the best way to find out what a company is like is simply to talk to the people who work there. They're going to tell you what it's really like. You don't listen to the company tell you what it's like. Listen to the people who work there because they know.

So one thing you can do is if the company has a product, let's say you're working it, or you wanna go work at shore microphones, I'm looking at our microphones, shore microphones, great company. What's it like to work there? I don't know, go call customer service and ask them a question about shore microphones and talk to the person. First of all, see if, like,

how much does the company value customers? Is the customer service good? Is it bad? What is it like? How quickly do the answer? How coherent are they? And then just ask that person, go, hey, this is totally weird.

I know I'm calling customer service here, but it's not a question about your mics, but I'm also thinking about working there. Like what's it like to work there? And just ask people, just like, it's sometimes we all struggle with, how do you find these things out? Well, you just ask, you just ask.

And so call the number and ask, ask around and see if you know anybody who works there or who has worked there I don't believe in looking at like there's some things called like Glassdoor and there's some other websites on the on the internet that like aggregate Employees perspectives on companies and oftentimes they're filled with disgruntled ex employees who are you know screaming about something And there's some value in there too obviously, but you don't really get the context of just talking to somebody. So I try and figure out ways to just go talk. So for your example, like a medical lab or something, there's got to be a way to talk to someone

who works there. Maybe just go show up. I don't know if you can show up at labs, but like talk to someone who works at the front desk, like just talk to somebody and ask. And say, what's it like to work here? What's it like? And just let them go and just kind of ask them questions about that.

But don't look at like a handbook or the posters on the wall or what they write about themselves on the website. Another thing you can look at, though, by the way, I like to look at this, is, you know, like those terms of service, you get some software and there's like a term service or privacy policy or these kinds of policies that are public policies for the companies Pretty much every company has one these days. Just go look at those and see how they're written

Are these you know are they written in language that human beings can understand because they're meant for human beings to read or does it require a lawyer to you know lawyers are humans of course, but you know a different life form Like just a require a lawyer to decipher this stuff. Like, what is the company thinking about? What is the company, when they write something like this, that's meant for people, are they writing to people, or are they just doing whatever one else does, which is have the lawyers write it,

and no one can understand it. Like, there's all sorts of artifacts and symbols out there that represent sort of how the company thinks. So that combined with talking to people who work there. There's a great thing. And a lot of people on LinkedIn, you could probably find someone to work somewhere and just say, do you mind if I just, if we hop on the phone for 15 minutes, I know this is awkward, but like, I'm really thinking about it.

I'd like to hear what it's like to work there. I really care about, you know, what it's like to work in a company. Most everyone's going to go, yeah, that's cool. You're not trying to sell me something. Sure, I'll hop on the phone with you. Why not? So anyway, that's what to work in a company. Most everyone is gonna go, yeah, that's cool. You're not trying to sell me something. Sure, I'll hop on the phone with you. Why not? So anyway, that's what I would recommend people do. We've thought about, here we've thought about putting together

a list of companies that we have heard are sort of like-minded companies, but I also don't really want to get in the business of endorsing other companies because who knows? So it is hard to find the list. Anyway, I'm rambling out. Just call and talk to someone. Is there anything that you would view as a warning

sign? Is there something that if you're doing your interview day, and is there a question you would ask as a way to probe and get an answer that could one way or the other tell you, you know what, this is a place that's gonna walk the walk and not just talk the talk. Are there any other ways that you could sort of fish through that? There's a few things. Number one, and I don't know,

it depends who you're interviewing with, but I always like to ask the question, what would this company say no to? That's just always a question that I think's an interesting question to answer. You can ask some, like, what happens if, you know, you can have your own things. Like, what happens if I need a couple of days

for mental health, or like, what happens if someone in my family close to me passes away? Like, stuff like that, which is like heavy stuff, but if the company is like, if the interview's like, I don't even know, I don't know. I guess you can maybe have a day off, I don't know. Like, that just means to me that they haven't thought. I guess you can maybe have a day off. I don't know. That just means to me that they haven't thought about these kinds of things.

These are real human issues. I think that a good culture is going to think about those kinds of things. I think those kind of questions. The other one I would always run away from pretty fast is when a company goes, we're just a big family here. This is something that's common across companies. Is that code speak for you're going to eat, sleep, breathe, hear, live, hear, and you won't have friends outside of here? Exactly.

Real good companies? Respect family, which means you get to see yours. But when a lot of companies say we're just a big family here or it's like family here, what they basically mean is you're going to sacrifice for us like you would for your family, which means you'll do anything that you're called upon doing because we're all a family here. That's code speak, I'd run away from that. I mean, maybe there's an exception here and there,

but mostly it's like, we're gonna do whatever it takes for each other no matter what. And that often means busting your ass, long hours, you could never like abandon the family and go home. Like you would never do that to your family, would you abandon your family? And then it's just dangerous talk. So companies are not families.

They're places to work and you have co-workers and you can do great work with co-workers, but you don't need to fake this family BS. And also, like again, real companies that care about people actually care about family. And that means time away, time off, time yourself. So that's a red flag. All right, let's shift gears a little bit and talk about incentives. We've got a few questions on this. We'll see if we need to get through all of them because you may answer some of them by getting through earlier ones. So can you talk about employee incentive

structures and how they can create a calm workplace? I know that at Basecamp you have foregone traditional option grants in favor of profit sharing and an employee pool if Basecamp were to exit. How has that worked out and maybe talked through some of the thoughts behind that? Yeah, unlike many companies in the tech world, we don't offer equity. I think equity is often unfair in that in most companies it goes to zero. That's just the reality of things. Especially private companies, private companies that never go public, you can't really get out of any equity that's granted and most companies don't go public

and many of them that do don't do so well and often companies will give you equity in lieu of salary and you can actually spend salary on sandwiches but you can't spend equity. You can't go to your local restaurant and pay with stock options. It's not real money. It's fake money. Now, that doesn't mean some of it can turn people into huge millionaires. Of course, that happens, but it's really a lottery ticket. So, I think it creates stress when you don't pay people what they're worth, and instead

you substitute some lottery tickets, some instant games essentially, I just don't think that that's a healthy thing to do because it creates pressure for the company to finally help people cash out on those things. If that doesn't happen, well people feel like they put in a lot of time and they were misled and this is often what happens. I don't think that's a calm approach. What we decided to do was just pay people at the top of the market. Now, we can do this now.

We couldn't have done this 15 years ago when we didn't have the money. So, this is all about when you can face some of these things in. But now we pay people at the top of the market, which means we pay basically the 90th percentile San Francisco rates regardless of where you live, since we have a remote company, people can work anywhere. So you live in a farm in Tennessee, you still get 90th percentile San Francisco rates, and we benchmark the industry using a couple different benchmarking companies that help us do this.

And what this does is it takes basically, certainly when you're 90 percentile, it means someone else is a little bit higher in certain situations. There's always someone who will pay you more. But for the most part, you know that you don't really have to think much about salary. That you're being very well paid, and that's not something that has to creep into your mind all the time. Like, could I be making more somewhere else? Could I be making more somewhere else?

And, hey, I want to ask for a raise pretty soon. And my God, I hate asking for raises, and I'm really terrified of doing it. And so I'm not going to do it. And now I'm stressed out because maybe I should, but I'm not going to. I'm nervous about it. My manager is a really good negotiator and I get totally intimidated when I go in there. There's no reason for you to have to be great at two things at work. Great at your job and a great negotiator.

Most people are not great negotiators. Negotiations are really difficult for most people, for most things. We've eliminated negotiation. We have published salaries essentially tied to roles. If you're in a particular role, you get paid that amount, the same as anyone else who's in that role. It eliminates all sorts of bias, and it's a really nice system. Now, we have explored profit sharing, although we've never really paid out on it, because we've only done it for three years, and it's all based on profit growth, not profit in itself. We've been profitable for 20 years,

so being profitable is not the hard part for us. What was hard for us was to see profit growth year over another year. And we haven't paid out on that because we've hired some more people lately, which means our margins went down a bit, so we haven't been able to match the total high watermark for previous profitable years.

So that hasn't paid out, but what we do have, and by the way, because of that, we've eliminated it. So we had it for three years, it didn't pay out for three years, and we just got real about it, which is saying, look, this may not pay out. And having this system in place that's constantly getting your hopes up and letting you down, like, that's not healthy for anybody. I know it's going to suck to rip this bandaid off and say we're not going to do this anymore,

but what would suck would be to keep ripping the bandaid off a little bit at a time over, you know, a course of many, many years and never coming through on that. Now, we could have come through on it, but we have some more expenses ahead of us. We want to do some other things. We want to grow in a few other ways, and we just knew this wasn't going to happen.

So we pulled it off the table, explained it to everybody. And by the way, when we announced the thing, we said we're going to do this as a three-year experiment. So we set it up upfront. We're very big into setting expectations upfront so we can get out of things if they don't end up working properly. So we did that. What we do have, though, is we do have something

that stands in for equity. Most people want equity in the case of a liquidity event of some sort, the company goes public or the company sells or something like that. So what we have instead is, instead of having to worry about equity and granting equity and dealing with options and investing in the whole thing, we have a pool.

So in our operating agreement, it says, in the event of a liquidity event of any kind, or maybe that's defined a little bit more clearly than that, but I don't have the text in front of me. We will set aside at minimum 5% of the purchase price to distribute to the employees. So you don't have to have equity at base camp to participate in the windfall if a windfall ever comes due. So that's kind of a much simpler way to approach it.

Now the downside is that if you worked here for seven years and we'd sell the company year nine and you left after seven, you wouldn't participate in that. It's for people who are still at the company. And the longer you've been here, the more of a percentage of that you get. But that's sort of how we've decided to do that. And all in, what's nice about this is that this isn't a day-to-day thing. And I think that's what stress is people out. You look at people who are being paid by stock. You know, think about people who get stock and a company goes public and there's a six month lockout or whatever.

And people are checking the stock price many times a day all day long and their hopes are going up one day and down another and they're dashed this day and they're pumped up this day. This is just a roller coaster of stress and anxiety, financial anxiety. And you can't plan your life with it. You don't know what it's going to be worth at the end. You can't plan vacations on money that isn't real and that fluctuates on a day-to-day basis. These are just all these little things that make things stressful on people. And if there's anything that's stressful in the world, it's money for day to day basis. These are just all these little things that make things stressful on people.

And if there's anything that's stressful in the world, it's money for a lot of people. So like to have things being so variable and so unknown, it just feels like a terrible burden to put on people versus being very clear about, here's what you're gonna get every year, here's how it's gonna work, we're gonna pay you exceptionally well.

If you move up this level, you're gonna get this new salary and you're gonna be paid there. If we ever happen to sell the business one day, we don't need to think about it day to day because it's not gonna happen anytime soon. But if it does, here's the provision that handles that. And now, like you can focus on your work versus focusing on being a day trader.

And if you've ever met any day traders, you know, they're not calm people. So converting your whole workforce into day traders seems like the absolute wrong direction to going. This question, I don't know if this came from somebody at Basecamp, it might have. Basecamp recently went through its biggest hiring phase. Five new, says teammates, I believe, in quite some time.

Is there a common poor habit or less than optimal habit you've found in hires either past or present? The thing that's so important to us when we hire somebody are their writing skills. We've noticed that poor writers tend to perform poorly here, so we're very careful about making sure that we hire great writers. So we look at a lot of writing samples during the hiring process, no matter what position they're in. So that's a really important, it's more of a skill than a habit, I guess, but that's super important to us. The other one is the hard thing for people to do is to break habits, not to form them. We form them all the time, breaking them's hard, and we're

careful about that when someone comes from a much larger organization. So if they're coming in from a company that has tens of thousands of people or very, very stuffy corporate structure, we have to help them give them more time to break habits because it's unfair for us to expect them to adapt very quickly. So that's really on us more than it is on them, but we have to be conscious of where people are coming from. And remembering that even though they might start here on Monday, they've been somewhere else their whole career. This Monday is just like,

it's like one against a thousand days or one against 10,000 days worth of work. So helping people work their way out of those habits is something we need to do and we need to be conscious of, and we have to be careful not to judge people on some of those behaviors. And there's been a situations where we've hired new people who we saw were working on Saturdays because they were checking in work or asking

Someone else to do something on a Saturday and you know come Monday I would just mention to them, hey, you know, you don't have to do that here like I appreciate that you're trying to you know You're trying to make an impression and you're trying to do great work and you're probably putting in more time than you need to but like just just remember Like we don't have to work on the weekends and everything can wait till Monday, it's totally fine. So you kind of have to reinforce that. So it's not that people are bad in any way. It's that the environments they've been in, you know, condition them to work a certain way

and be a certain way. And that's particularly hard thing to break unless you have help breaking that. It's kind of like intervention almost in a sense. Like, hey, you're doing this thing. Like, we got to stop doing that thing. And we're here to help you stop doing that thing. What kind of support and help do you need?

It's really on us to help and break those habits. Going back to work itself, people talk all the time about process oriented work versus result driven or outcome driven work. How does that factor into how you think about your company? I've changed over the years. I used to believe that process didn't matter so much, that it was all about outcomes. Who cares how it gets done, as long as it gets done,

or who cares what happens along the way, but look at how great this thing is or whatever. And as I sort of alluded to earlier in another question, my thinking in our companies changed a lot and we're very much focused on the process now. Of course, the outcomes have to be good too, but if the outcomes get you somewhere and you've killed a bunch of people along the way,

I don't mean literally, but like, morale's been destroyed, teams don't like working with one another, employees don't like each other, employees don't like you, employees don. Employees don't like each other. Employees don't like you. Employees don't trust you. No one trusts you. That was not worth it.

So if you're just looking at the outcome, well, you're barely looking at what matters because you have to do this again and again and again and again. A company is hundreds of decisions and thousands of projects over the course of its life. Unless you again want to keep hiring new people or you can somehow continue to keep burned out people going with artificial respirators or whatever you want to do. Like, you're going to have to do stuff that's sustainable and that's what process is all about.

Processes, although a process can also be unsustainable, but for us, we've come up with a process that we believe is sustainable. So for us, like, for example, on the product side of things, we work in these six week cycles, and then we take two weeks off between cycles, not off of work entirely, but off of structured work. So during those two weeks, after those six weeks,

those two weeks are for more like, people can freelance internally. They can tighten something up that they saw was a little bit loose. They can fix some stuff that they weren't thrilled with perhaps. They can explore a new idea or prototype something new. And so they're working, but they're not working on structured work. There's gaps between things. And that's really helped. People recharge a little bit and then get their mind off the big project and onto some smaller personal projects and then get back into the new thing again. It's like running wind sprints, you know,

you kind of, well, I don't like the term sprints in business and we're not worrying people out, but you've got to take a break between, and then you do another one, you take a break, and you do another one. This idea of doing things back to back to back to back to back might work in the short term, but you're going to burn yourself out

and you'll be exhausted. So you can't do that over and over and over and over and over. That's kind of how we've decided to look at this. So we invest a lot of time and thought into process. We've published our process for anyone who's interested. If you go to basecamp.com slash shapeup, SHAPE, you can see, like we've written up about 30,000 words on this,

about how we actually work day to day on projects. And it's for everyone to see, so anyone can see it. The idea here is that we wanna make sure that people think more about what goes into doing the work and not just about what comes out the other side. I've seen so many companies that release things, but they've caused fundamental significant damage inside their organizations, and they never recover

from that, even though they got that product out. But it's like, so what? So you got this thing out. Now, no one wants to work on it anymore. Maybe the code base is a complete disaster because you pushed it through so hard and you sped through it without really thinking about it. Now it's a total mess and no one wants to get near it.

It's called spaghetti code, is what people tend to call it or it has a code smell, sometimes what people say. Like, they don't want to get near that anymore because it's foul basically. But you did what you had to do to get it out the door, but you also want to get near that anymore because it's foul, basically. But you did what you had to do to get it out the door, but you also have to work on these things. You have to maintain these things. It's no different than a relationship or a friendship.

You know, just have a friendship with someone and just never maintain it. You've got to maintain it. And if you brute force your way into being a friend with someone, it's not going to last very long. That's how we think about process and why I think it's so important. Now, you talked about the last time we spoke that you, your motivation for creating products is products that you want. The opposite way to the way Steve Jobs is

characterized in how he built products at Apple, right, which is he knew what the market wanted and he built it for them. Maybe that's the same thing. Maybe he was just ultimately building what he wanted. He wanted a phone to do this and eventually the market was going to figure it out. So maybe it is the same thing. Can you think of an example of a failure where internally all the process is, hey, we really think this product is fantastic. This is something we would love. Let's put the steps in place to make it happen. You do so. It hits the market. It's a total flop. Have you experienced this? And if so, it hits the market, it's a total flop. Have you experienced this? And if so, what's the frequency of it? Yeah, we certainly have.

I mean, we've, so base camp is our biggest hit, but we've, we've released, depending on how you count, probably eight or nine other products. And they've had success to varying degrees. And I say success, even though some of them were not, anywhere near successful. So they weren't failures in the sense that they didn't work, but they didn't work anywhere near as well as base camp.

And so it didn't make sense for us to spend our time on them anymore. We've shut one of them down, a couple of them we spun off into separate companies, a couple of other, we just sort of continued to maintain, but don't improve anymore. So the customers who use them can use them forever, but we're not gonna improve them anymore. So they were not financial successes like on the grand

scheme of things, but they found a market, they found a niche, it was just too small for us to justify. Yeah, that's happened to us plenty of times and we've been in business for 20 years and we've only had like one major hit let's say, which is base camp. High rise was our second most popular product, which was a significantly large product and very successful as a whole, but it was 10X less successful in terms of customers and revenue and the whole thing if we're getting back into success equals money here and measuring it that way than base camp. So it was successful on the merits compared to a lot of other products, but it wasn't successful as base camp.

So we're not strangers to things that don't work out quite as well as we hope. We're working on a new product right now, and I hope that that's great, but it may not be as well. I think if you get one hit in your life, you're pretty successful or pretty lucky, I should say, to begin with. So, I've gone through the process of spending a year or more on something that doesn't pan out, but we don't look at those things as failures. That's not how we look at that stuff.

Technically, you could say it was, but I just see it as an experience and we move on from it, and we keep going. It didn't take us down. It didn't kill the business. It didn't kill anybody here. We're okay. It just didn't do as well as other things. Let's just come to terms with that. The failure would be to continue to pour effort and

energy into something that you know is never going to get where you want it to get or where you want it to be and That's the failure. It's not that it didn't do as well as you'd hoped The failure would be that you're lying to yourself about that. So as long as you come to terms with the guy, this didn't work out as well as we'd hoped. So what do we do about it? Well, we can keep it around, we can shut it down, we can merge it with another product, we can spin it off, like let's give it another life. We've sold a few products over the years. We built this thing for a while called Sortfolio, which was a directory for web designers

to help people find web designers. And it did moderately well, but it wasn't enough to have anyone work on a full time. So we sold it. We had a job board, which we had called WeWork remotely, which still exists, someone else runs it now, which we sold,

because it was doing well, but it wasn't doing well enough to justify continued investment. So I think a lot of things, ultimately, can do well enough. It's just a matter of how much is it worth to continue to foster that thing, to invest in that thing.

And I think that's the more important question is, is cutting your losses at some point to think is a really healthy thing. And it's not healthy when you don't, and that's the failure. What's the sales force like of Basecamp? You said you have 56 employees. How many of those people do sales?

Zero. We don't have many sales people. We are 100% essentially 100% word of mouth. We dabble here and there and playing with some ads, but basically rounds down to zero. So for us, it's all been word of mouth. It's worked out really well for us. Plus, we speak a lot, we write books and all that stuff,

of course, is in a sense marketing. And in a sense, our sales people, every book we put out is a sales person essentially, and we share a lot of what we do, but we don't have any dedicated sales people. Never have. So a lot of companies do have sales people, and there's a question about it,

which I think is kind of interesting question, right? Which is, what do you do when sales go down, and it's, you know, due to externalities, you know, the market is, you could argue playing a bigger role in this than the efficacy of the individual. Or at least there's some, you know, if I'm not going to delineate what the balance is between them, it's clearly not 100 zero or zero 100. So how do you get in the head of somebody whose job is so far out of their hands, which is kind of the opposite of, you know, I think having things under your control is a great source of pleasure on one hand, but it's also, you know, can be a very tormenting thing, depending on how serious you take it, conversely, having nothing in your control, you know, if you're a monk can be a great realization because then you realize

one of the things in my control, therefore I don't have to suffer as a result of it. But at the same time, I think for some people, the uncertainty of that is also quite painful. So I don't know if what I'm saying makes sense, but A, are there any people in your company whose job, description, and performance seems a little more out of their control than others. And if not, even could you just talk about this in the abstract? Yeah, I'm certainly conscious of the fact that I have it good. I own the place, I run the place. All these things I'm talking about are ideas that are in place and I get to live by the ideas that I have.

And I know that that's a very fortunate position. So I get all that. Certainly there are different jobs here with different levels of criticality that sometimes you have to be on. And one of the hardest jobs here I think is technical operations. So we have a team I think of seven or eight people depending on how you count. Actually there's a few more who work in security as well as four people in that group. So it's called 10-ish, 10-11 people, or 12, who are essentially, they have to kind of be on call if the shit hits the fan, like literally.

Like if servers go down, customers can't get to base camp. Like if it's three in the morning, it doesn't matter. Like they have to get the, to get the page or call and they have to, like a doctor. You got to get up and go to the hospital and do that emergency surgery, like that kind of thing. So, there's people here where they're under different kinds of pressure, perhaps than others. That's the job, of course, but there's definitely a different level of criticality and security as well. If there's a breach or there's credential stuffing attack or there's denial of service attack,

there's all these different things that can happen at any time now on the internet. And someone has to man that or run that project or run that situation and take the lead and deal with it. And oftentimes, David, my business partner and I are on those calls and helping out if we can. David, more than I, because David's technical and I'm not, but if I can help with communicating things to customers and explaining things where I have to jump on customer service, that kind of stuff. Like we're all hands on deck in those kind of situations.

But yeah, there's definitely a leading edge there of people, their job in a sense is out of their control. And even more so today than perhaps ever before, we used to host, and we still have some of our own physical hardware in a data center, but we've been moving more and more things to the cloud lately. So most of our stuff is hosted on Amazon, AWS, and we've had some stuff in Google as well for a while.

And that's even further out of our control in a sense, because it's not infrastructure that we're in charge of anymore. And so things can go wrong that we can't control as a company now that we could have maybe controlled before, or we could have understood better before, or we could have had some other contingency plans in place before. So it's tough being on ops and being on securities, particularly tough customer service then becomes tough too because, you know, if base camp is down, hundreds of emails will pile in. We have thousands and thousands and thousands of people using base camp at any given moment. So hundreds of emails begin to pile in like what's going on?

What's wrong? Why is this busted? Now we have to figure out how to communicate with our customers under duress at a certain level, you know like everyone's stressed out, we're stressed out there stressed out like how do you explain what's going on? You can't always give an exact time when we're going to be back because we don't know. So we've just decided to be extremely honest and clear with people. So we have a whole writing guideline internally

that we have for events like this in checklists that we resort to during times of derest so we don't let our emotions get the best of us. We don't use exclamation marks. Now, ever we have to talk about downtime or uptime or issues like that. We just don't wanna make things emotional for people. We wanna be very clear, very coherent, brief, but detailed, speaking terms that everyone can understand, no, no

lingo. Like we drill these things over and over, so we get better and better at it. So yeah, there are definitely people here, but as far as like sales, I can see in some organizations, sales starts to go down, and sales people take the brun of it. In our case, we don't have that, but I would say operations can take the brun of it if something goes bad technically. In our case, we don't have that, but I would say operations can take the brun of it if something goes bad technically. Got it. This is kind of a little bit of a popery of some questions. They don't necessarily fit into a nice theme, but I think they're interesting questions. So in our first discussion, you talked about, I think the way you described it was we sort of under appreciate the importance of luck.

We sort of overemphasize talent and skill. And you said we need to focus on the exceptions. It's likely those exceptions and the exceptional people a lot of this has to do with luck and timing. And it also has to do with skill and talents. I don't think you're being dismissive of that. All that said, the question is, are we attributing too much to luck? I really wonder whether Jason is emphasizing luck too much. And this person says, I've recently started to shift my way of thinking more towards that of Peter Teal, who said, shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances, strong men believe in cause and effect. I think that in the past, this is the person still speaking. Basically, I've tend to believe more in luck and randomness I'm trying to shift more into this cause and effect way of thinking. It's a bit of a

long question and we've certainly touched on some of the components of it, but I wonder if you have more thoughts on this notion. I do, I think luck and timing are sort of the substrate and everything grows on that and timing probably more than anything. I kind of feel like, number one, you've got whatever you're making, whatever you're doing, it's got to be useful. So that's has to be true. But if the timing's wrong, it sort of doesn't matter. If you're way out of your time or way behind your time, it sort of doesn't matter how useful it is or how good it is or how good on paper it is. Like it has to, timing has to be there. And some people can, some people are slightly better, some people can create their own timing,

like that can happen. But most of the time you look back on it and go, oh, that was the right time for that thing to happen. I think actually, we can maybe talk a bit about this. I think like the cyber truck, the thing that Tesla just released is really interesting. You've seen that, I imagine, Peter?

No, I haven't. Oh my God, well, you have to go take a look at it. Tesla's Cybertruck, it's bizarre. I love, absolutely love it though, because it's so different from any other pickup truck you've ever seen. It's so completely unusual that in many ways it drew the line,

and he just announced it a few days ago, it drew the line between and he just announced a few days ago, it drew the line between before and after. There's gonna be before the cyber truck and there's gonna be after the cyber truck. And from this point forward, every design group inside every car manufacturer is going to look at this thing that Tesla designed and it's going to influence them in one way or another.

So in that case, Tesla created a new time. Like they actually drew a line in time. And they did that because they were extremely bold and also they've built up a lot of goodwill in this area. And they've been known as a company that can do this and they have a showman at the helm and a genius at the helm in many ways. And so there are organizations that can create their own time. Apple, perhaps, was another one. But again, these are like, we're talking about Tesla and Apple here. Like, most people, most companies don't have anywhere near the luxury of even creating a moment for themselves.

They have to live in other people's moments and other industry's moments and other economy's moments. And so I just think that luck and time is the substrate. You have to work within those things and sometimes you're going to hit it and sometimes you's moments. And so I just think that luck and time is the substrate. You have to work within those things, and sometimes you're gonna hit it, and sometimes you're not. Certainly, absolutely skill matters, execution matters, vision matters, communication matters, how you treat people matters,

what kind of team you can build matters, how you can put the right people together matters, hiring matters, all the customer service, and all this stuff also matters, absolutely, completely matters. And you can even say in some cases it doesn't matter when it should. Like, a lot of great big Google, great successful company has terrible customer service. So you could say customer service doesn't matter in their respect.

But that's because other things, they're so outsized in other ways that customer service can suffer. But ultimately, if you're not one of the outliers and Maybe this person who asked might feel like they are and maybe they are But if you're not you don't get to pick your own luck in your own timing you ride on on the wave and you've got to catch it and sometimes you don't know at the time But I think it has a huge huge degree of influence over whether or not ideas and companies make it and sometimes you don't know at the time, but I think it has a huge, huge degree of influence over whether or not ideas and companies make it and some don't. So anyway, that's my general feeling, but yeah, of course a lot of other things

matter as well, and I'm not discounting skill. You've got to have the ability to do the thing you're saying you're going to do. You have to be able to explain what it is and that all that stuff, but who knows. I think one of the things that complicates this type of analysis is that success begets success and therefore luck begets success. If you accept the fact that on some level there's randomness, there's luck, it's not all down to your skill and your execution. Think about how much easier it is to raise money when you've been successful before and you've had a successful exit in a business. Now, I've read all the analyses in the world that say,

VCs also like people who have lost before because someone who's not quite the stereotypical entrepreneur, which again, that word has become sort of denuded in the past 30 years or 20 years because we think entrepreneur only means 20-year-old in Silicon Valley, but of course the term far predates Silicon Valley. But nevertheless, I've always found this to... I don't know the answer to this question, right? I find this a very interesting question. Just intellectually, I don't think it really impacts like what I do because I'm kind of just a little guy doing his own thing.

But if I were trying to do something major in life, I'd be obsessed with this question. I suspect, and I guess that's why many people are, but I think it's very difficult, and I don't mean to pick on him. He's just the first name that comes to my mind, but it's very difficult to do the Jim Collins type analysis, which are all of these very, very retroactive, retrospective association based. I mean, it's the equivalent of basically epidemiology. And I just don't know how to extract cause and effect from that. Yeah.

And there's survivorship bias, which is rampant in Silicon Valley. A lot of people who've done something in the past, who even just simply raised money. Like you said, even if they failed, the fact that they raised money, another VC will look at that and go, well, someone else thought they were worth it. So I feel like they're worth it. And so you have these people who are compounding on the opportunities that they have

versus many people don't have any opportunities. So I agree, you can look back on things and justify anything. This person was successful because of this reason or that reason or whatever. And maybe some of those analysis are correct, but If I was betting on this I don't think and there's no way to figure who's gonna win this bet But I would bet that time and luck have a lot more to do with with someone's success than anything

And of course the people who are successful are probably not going to say that Like this Peter teal quote like I don't know. That's pretty arrogant, I think. But fun, that's his take on it. I mean, we all want to think that what we did was right and that we were unique in our ability to do that thing and no one else was able to do it. We did. It's a very human, ego-tistical thing to do. And in some cases, that's true. I mean, there are people that come along where it was them, clearly them.

They are so good at what they do. They are so unique in how they do it. They were in the right place at the right time, but they almost created that place in that time. But it's interesting, like, if you look at Apple, just to play with this for a second, Steve Jobs didn't create the graphical user interface. He stole it from Xerox.

Now, the people who were working in Xerox on this, nobody knows their names. They had the idea first, but they didn't have perhaps what it took to get it out there to more people, or they didn't have the technology, the technology didn't exist at the time to actually make this more of a consumer-facing thing. Timing played a role in that too. Microchips were there at the time. All sorts of things, the acceptance of what people thought was even possible at the moment. Sometimes you have to create, that's like a combination of jobs, selling a vision

that he saw someone else come up with. And he goes, I know how to turn this into something else. And I'm going to make a moment to do so. And I'm gonna make an incredible, super bowl ahead. And I'm like, I'm a visionary and I'm going to do this. Those people absolutely exist. But they basically don't. Like they exist, but they basically don't.

They are extreme outliers. And that's kind of my point here is that we can always point to 10 great cases or 100 great case studies or whatever. But that's 100 is an outlier when it comes to the number of businesses that have started every year. The amount of ideas that die, 100 is nothing. So anyway, this is a good one. I mean, who knows, right?

Who knows? But I would just say to this person, it's like, whatever you believe, just do your best anyway. And hey, if luck and timing's on your side, all the better, if you create your luck and timing for great, and if it doesn't work because you didn't have luck in timing, who knew anyway? Just do your best. Just do the best work you can and don't worry about what the reasons for success or failure ultimately are because you probably don't really know exactly what they are. You know, there's another component to luck that I know is a very difficult discussion for many people to have myself included because it's

sort of mind-bending, but it's sort's the whole nature of free will. And I've had sort of fun and lengthy discussions with Sam Harris on this topic, which is, let's just assume I've been successful and Ra-Ra-Ra, I worked really hard and I had a brilliant insight and I had a brilliant idea and I was able to execute on it and lo and behold, here are the fruits of it. Well, you could make the case that I can't take that much credit for the work ethic, the intelligence, the spark of insight, in addition to all of the random pieces of luck, like being in the right place, the right time. But if you go even deeper than just those things, like even the capacity to do the work.

Again, look at what Bill Gates did for Microsoft. It's very hard to deny that he was a force of nature. They had a great tailwind, and they fought a great headwind. All these things. But in the end, how much credit can one take if your Bill Gates for his innate intelligence? I mean, the CPU in that guy's head is, I think it's unparalleled. Yeah, it's a product of two other human beings

making that brain. Like at some level, you can just stop taking credit for anything because I don't know. I mean, Sam uses really extreme examples which is look at a pedophile. Like, does a pedophile choose to be a pedophile? Now, he's not for a moment saying that a pedophile doesn't deserve to be, to live with the consequences of their actions.

So he's not saying, well, look, the pedophile didn't choose to be a pedophile therefore, there shouldn't be consequences for the action. No, not remotely, right? You know, he's arguing that there are always consequences for your actions both good and bad, but it's not entirely clear how much choice you had in that and I don't wanna go down that path

because that's way too deep for most people myself included. But that thinking has given me a bit more of an appreciation because I'm sort of in your camp, truthfully. I just, I'm not sure how to take credit for any insight or any amount of work or any of that stuff. I think it's in some ways for some of us, it's actually a curse to work so hard. They're actually the scars we carry more than, you know, the things we should be gloating over.

You're right, or Sam's right, or whoever thinks it. I just think if we just stop taking credit for stuff, we'd probably be better off to begin with. It's like, what credit can you take for anything? Like other people maybe put you in a position or you're in a position and you happen to stumble on something, but why would it give you the experience to do that? Like, I grew up in a safe family, I grew up in a safe place, I had the time, my parents were able to buy me a computer when I wanted to and I was 13 or whatever it was.

All these things are how I got to start and I got a foothold in this industry, which allowed me to do what I do now. That's because my parents had done their job and worked and were open to giving me a computer and my neighbor got a computer. I think I told the story that my neighbor got a computer which I saw had not seen my neighbor's computer.

I don't know if I would have gotten one. Like, who knows, right? Who knows? You keep going back. You just connect these dots going back and back and back and back forever. And then you go to your grandparents, and your great-grandparents,

and who knows where that leads. So I agree, the other thing about the pedophile example, which is super interesting, is that people basically say, pedophiles can't be rehabilitated, right? There's no rehabilitation for pedophilia. So therefore, it kind of makes the case that you can't blame the person. If the person can't change their behavior, then where did that come from?

Like, what is it then? Of course, I'm not, none of us are defending pedophilia, but like, it is an interesting, my next exercise to go, if we acknowledge as a society that these people cannot be rehabilitated and there's a sexual predators list and you can never get off it if you're honored essentially, then you're basically saying they have no free will over improvement, over self-improvement

that they were born with this and it's like you just simply can't get rid of it. So if you can't get rid of it, how'd you get it in the first place? Well, you could say you caught it, perhaps, like you might catch a chronic illness or something, but that's not what I think what people are saying. So it is kind of interesting to think about that example

in the extreme, I think Sam's particularly good at those kind of mine exercises and looking at those absolutes. So yeah, anyway, it is interesting. Yeah, I think in general, if you just stop worrying about who gets credit for things, I think there's a great quote, I don't know who said it, just one of these great quotes. Like, you can achieve, I think it was one of the presidents or something true

man. I don't know. Like, you can achieve anything in the world as long as you don't care who gets the credit. And I think that that's very true. I've seen that to be very true. I got a couple more questions, Jason. One of them is you've talked a lot about writing the importance of writing to you personally, also to how base camp runs. Although you didn't state it explicitly, at least not today, like you, I do tend to be a bit of a stickler around writing. For me, poor writing happens to be a symptom of poor thinking, so if you can't organize yourself on paper, it's generally the case that you aren't organized in your mind. That may not be true, but that's been my bias. That said, I also believe one can improve it. Do you? And if so, how do you

take steps to do so? Both for yourself, but also in terms of your employees? I agree with you, and I do believe it can be improved. I think everything can be improved. This is a little bit of attention, but in the design circles, there's been this thing like, can taste be taught? And I think the answer has to be yes. I think everything can be taught. Otherwise, what do you use some special person who happens to have something no one else has? Like, it's again, this ego coming through. If you have good taste, then you're you're annoying to your special. No, you're not. Maybe Someone else taught you. You didn't realize it. Maybe your grandfather, your grandmother, your mom, your dad, or your uncle, or aunt, or someone taught it or Or a magazine that you used to read or whatever. Like someone probably taught you this or gave you the eye and Tought you what to look out for. So yeah, I do think writing can be improved. One of my favorite books on writing is this book called Revising Pros.

And what's amazing is the cover is horrible. It's a CD-ROM on the cover. It's like, makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. It's called Revising Pros. I forget the author, my consenual link, or you can find it and verify that it's the right book. But it's a wonderful book about writing, and he really breaks down writing sentence by sentence. And actually teaches you how to write a sentence because that's the fundamental building block here. And it's a really great book. I'd recommend people take a look at that book.

The other thing is just to read great writers. And since this talk has been kind of business focused, my two favorite or actually probably three favorite are Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, and Jeff Bezos. They are wonderful business writers, but also just wonderful communicators. And I think if you read their shareholder letters, I don't care if you care about the companies or not, you don't have to. But what you'll come away with is going, I understand what they're trying to say. You couldn't have said it any better. This is great. I get it. And I'd read that again. Like that's kind of what you come away with. And if you come away with that on any piece of writing, I feel like it's great writing. The worst kind

of writing is like you laboriously get through it finally and you're like, oh gosh, I don't remember anything. I'm not going to read this again. I don't remember. And I'm not going to try to remember. It's I'll never read it again. It was too hard. I didn't, didn't make any sense. It's almost like the writer is trying to show off. And I think that's the thing. And Peter, I'll say, I love reading your writing because I don't feel it don't mean to kiss up, but you're obviously incredibly smart.

You're brilliant. Yet, you're writing a way that people who aren't in the medical field can understand the things you're writing. I find that to be really hard for people to do, which is to communicate outside of their walls when they're deeply knowledgeable about a subject and also be able to explain it to normal people. I think that that's, when it comes to business,

I think Buffett, Bezos, and Munger are three people, particularly who are really, really good at that, as well as they're talking about complicated issues, leadership issues, investment issues, investment issues, structural issues, and they explain them in a way where you don't need to have gone to business school to even pick out, you don't have to look up any words in the dictionary,

you don't have to wonder what that means, they're just clear and thoughtful and fair and the great communicators. So those are the people I've been talking about. I think like anything, if you wanna immerse yourself in that kind of, if you wanna get better, I think it's good to surround yourself with things that are better than you and more capable than you,

and people that are more capable than you. And of course, you can't always be around the people, but you can be around their artifacts, and read how they write. And I think that's a great way to get better. And by the way, practice, like something I talked about, I think in the last podcast, is this class I've always wanted to teach. And I think this would be a good personal exercise, which is to write something, call it a page,

or call it three pages, then write a one-page version, then a three-paragraph version, then a one-paragraph version, or one sentence version. Practice editing, that's a big part of writing is editing. It's not just about getting words on the page, about getting rid of words on the page, substituting three word or one word for three, don't use eight words when five will do that whole thing, and just really kind of, and also think about the rhythm and how does it sound? So another great way to get better writing

is to read your writing out loud. What does it sound like? Does it bounce? Is it flat? Is every sentence the same length? And I would say those are not good things when everything's the same length. You want some texture, I think, and some rhythm to it.

So reading out loud is really helpful, and also it helps you kind of stumble over things and go, you know, that's not how I speak or that's not what I would say. Let me reward this so I don't stumble over it. Anyway, those are some basic tips and some things I would recommend people try. I love that.

I'll throw in a couple of other writers that I like on the business side. I think Howard Marx is fantastic. I've enjoyed his books and I enjoy his monthly newsletter. So again, another example of someone who's writing about stuff that's above most of our pay grades in terms of distressed markets, but I could just, I could read him forever. And of course, David Foster Wallace, like to, you know, I came across a story that he wrote. I think it was for the New York Times, and it was, oh, I don't know, probably 12, 12, 14 years ago, it was about Roger Federer. And it was an unbelievable article. I mean,

he's written lots of short stories about tennis and, you know, string theory, all sorts of things. But it was just a treat to find something of his that I hadn't read before and it was just, you know, something and it was like kind of one of the weekend magazine New York Times, I think. And it was just this beautiful article on Federer and I was like, how did a human have the capacity to communicate this way?

It was just so beautiful to read. And none of us will ever be David Foster Wallace, but I agree a lot that you read these things. And it shows you what amazing story telling can look like. Any dealer who writes short stories is one of my favorite writers. She, one of the classic essays she wrote is on the total eclipse. I'll send it to you.

He'll blow you away. Please do. Yeah, it's so good. She's written a number of books, but this one essay is so moving and so damn good that you read that and you go, I suck. But you do it and you smile, because you're like, I'm so glad someone is so good at this.

It's a wonderfully evocative short story and it's beautiful. So anyway, I'll send that to you. It's in this book called The Abundance, Annie Dillard of The Abundance. It's wonderful. So anyway, I'll send that to you. It's in this book called The Abundance, Annie Dillard of The Abundance, it's wonderful. So anyway, I'll send you that as well. I can't wait. You know, one of the, to close the loop on writing,

I think one of the biggest challenges I had when I left medicine and went to McKinsey is at McKinsey, they did place a real premium on being able to write, you know, and it was more in memo that you had to be able to write good memos. And I feel like the 10 years previous, I had no exposure to good writing. And it's really funny to me now

when I read scientific papers, how poorly they are often written. Now part of it is they're not making any effort to sort of be clear, because they don't have to be clear. They're writing to a very, very niche, nuanced audience. They're basically writing to the editors of the journal who, by definition, have deep subject matter expertise.

But I just think that there's this culture for most scientific papers, which is, there's a formula, there's a way that we write this, that is totally unemotional, totally unannetorialized. And I think that's important, but you have the luxury of throwing out any clarity as well. And it's highly variable. I mean, there are certain people who can, you know, I've read scientific papers that

read very well, and they're captivating. They're usually more like review articles or, you know, these lengthy summaries of a person's life's work. But when you just grab the New England Journal of Medicine or even, you know, pick some other top journal and just start to flip through it, it's comical to me how poorly these things are written. Never mind once you get into the lower tier journals. And so, yeah, spending, you know, time in medicine, I realized at that point in time, that's the only thing I was reading was textbooks and journals. It was a real rude awakening to realize that, if that's the level you are gonna write at,

you are gonna be hurting a lot of people. And there's no reason for it. There's no reason for writing to be bad like that. Like there's no reason for scientific writing to be difficult to grok. The clearer it is that more exposed it can be to more people and that should benefit people. If this is a great piece of writing

in a really important discovery or a really important paper, why not make that more accessible? You don't need to write in this insider language. I mean, certainly there are scientific terms that the average layman's not going to understand, of course, but you can surround those things with clear thoughts that aren't obscuring the accessibility of what you're trying to say. So anyway, I can rant on that for a while. Yeah, I mean, too.

Any tips on parenting as it pertains to lessons you've infused from all the stuff we've talked about today? Oh, God. It's so different. I'm just figuring this out as I go. I would feel like a complete fraud to suggest, to give any parenting tips to anybody.

I'm got a five-year-old in the one-year-old and I'm learning as I go and they're very, very different. The one thing I've learned about parenting that I think is true about people is that you can't make someone do something they don't want to do. You have your five-year-old who won't put their shoes on and like, yeah, I mean, you can physically make them put their shoes on, but that doesn't work either. If they don't want to put their shoes on, they're not going to put their shoes on. And I think you can make people do things at work that they don't want to do, but it's not going to turn out well either.

They're going to leave. They're going to be disgruntled. Morales going to go down. You got to figure out a way to make people feel invested in whatever it is they're doing and make them feel good about it versus forcing people to do things they don't want to do. That's just, it's really hard, I think, to get through the day forcing people to do things they don't want to do. That's just, it's really hard, I think, to get through the day forcing people to do things they don't want to do. There's been other revelations I've had, but that don't really relate to anything else.

But it's hard. It's really hard. It's fascinating. I'm trying to figure it out too. Do you have any tips? No, I mean, I love it. I really do. I love it in a way that I've never thought I would.

I know it's sort of cliche and bullshitty to say this stuff, but I do believe it. I think it's the only thing that matters for me personally. I'm not saying that broadly. I'm not suggesting that parenting or being a parent is the highest calling or any of that stuff. I think all that type of talk is nonsense to me. I just know that for me personally, I've got these three kids. If I literally accomplish not a single thing in life other than, you know, shield them from my baggage and my nonsense and set them up to be

resilient and happy and great people, man, that's the only thing that matters. And doing that, of course, is the journey of a lifetime. And the good news is, you know, I think the area under the curve of that type of exposure is so big that you don't have to beat yourself up for any one failure. And I've had many of those, but I take some comfort in knowing that in the end, it's a very long game. And it's not like you only get one shot at goal, so you wanna just think about being very consistently good. Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that.

That's something that I've struggled with from time to time, which is of like a bad day with my son or something, and like maybe yelled in a way I shouldn't have or said something I shouldn't have or made him feel a certain way, or whatever comes up in a moment I shouldn't have or said something I shouldn't have or made him feel a certain way or whatever it comes up you know in a moment of frustration and you can beat yourself up over it and maybe you should a tiny little bit but also recognize that that was one day and one moment and like you can you know recover from that and

and you need to do better and hopefully you know all in and total everything turns out to be good so yeah it's challenging I think the biggest thing I've noticed is just like sleep deprivation or surrounding it. It's amazing that humans survive at all. I mean, your parents, you have newborns, and then you're tired, and you have short fuse, and it's so difficult sometimes. But I do agree, and I also agree that,

like, if you don't have kids, that's fine. I don't have any, like, it's not like you're not important. But to me, I agree totally that this is hopefully the best thing I can do in my life is to raise two great kids who are well-adjusted and thoughtful and creative individuals who can contribute to the world themselves and be good people. So I think it's hard. It takes a long time and you don't really know how to do it.

You just figure out as you go and hopefully you continue to get better at it and pay attention to yourself and to them. One real practical thing that I've been experimenting with lately at the advice of one of my great therapists is being much more open with mostly my daughter because the kids are a little bit with the five-year-old, but certainly with my daughter, he's 11, which is, I'm much more transparent with her now about my mistakes. So I'm really open with her about my faults. Not you again, you have to use your judgment here, right? This doesn't mean that you don't want to enmesh your kids and just have them be a sounding board for all your woes. It's not that at all It's that like when I screw up I tell her hey Olivia like you know daddy really screwed this up

And I think I was just in a bad mood and I didn't you know I did this and I did this and I That just wants you to know that that's not cool and I know that I did that and I'm gonna work on being better about that And I don't know I just think that that's for me been a little bit of a way to defuse some of the shame of making mistakes and also make these teachable moments. And frankly, it tends to cut down on the mistakes. I mean, that's sort of the beauty of it is you've now brought another person into your sphere of self improvement, but not in a way that's burdened them, right? Like in a way where it's yourself deprecating about it and they see that you're hopefully you model for them that they can take ownership over their mistakes also. That's great advice. I got there recently myself and

I've been trying it. My wife and I have both been trying to do more of that. It's a great way to, you're not going to be perfect. Things are not always going to work out. You're going to make mistakes and modeling, admitting them and coming to terms with them and getting over them is a big part of moving on from them. So yeah, I've been doing that too and I found that to be useful. But I really don't know. I don't have any other advice.

I would just say that it can be a real challenge sometimes and I don't really feel like work stuff is applicable so much. It's, they're very, very different things and we should treat them as such. All right, one last question for you Jason. Are you still off Instagram? Ha, I am. I am still off Instagram. I will admit however that I have occasionally gone to the web interface to check to see if I have any messages because I some people would write me on Instagram. And that was the only way for them to get in touch with me. because I some people would write me on Instagram

and that was the only way for them to get in touch with me. But I don't have the app on my phone, I don't post anything, I don't look at anything, but I do check occasionally for messages if people are trying to get to hold me. Mostly because I have some watches for sale that other people have, like I gave them on consignment and we used to use Instagram to go back and forth on some of that stuff. So that's how they would always message me. So I have to check for that. But other than that, no, I am off and I feel great about it.

Are you still on it? I am. I'm on Instagram. Instagram doesn't create as much consternation for me as Twitter. Twitter creates much more emotional pain for me. And if I would have do a plot of my happiness, it would be highly inversely correlated to a number of emails I get and the amount of time I look at Twitter. Is it because people responding to what you say?

Yeah, no, I like Twitter for curating information. So if you follow good people, you know, people who are interesting and put out interesting stuff, in that sense, I like Twitter. Actually, I would argue that 10% of the scientific studies that I read are things that come through my little curated Twitter following, like who I follow on Twitter. No, it's just the attacks and stuff. It's not so. Yeah, I just, I have thin skin, which is unfortunate and something I'd love to rid myself of.

So, you know, if 100 people say something nice to me or 99 people say something nice, I don't hear it, but that one person who's, you know, wants to go after me nice to me or 99 people say something nice, I don't hear it, but that one person who's, you know, wants to go after me, it's sort of the only thing I hear. So, which is just, a lot of people are like that. I'm think I'm unique in that regard, but Twitter is an odd environment in which that gets amplified. You know, Twitter used to have a product, they were experimenting with this for a while

at least, for VIPs or, I don't know what they call them, but for people with massively large accounts. Like if you can imagine someone with four million followers, like they can't say anything without being bombarded back. So they had this product where if you were one of those people, use this different Twitter client and it would hide all replies from you. So it was purely a broadcast tool and you couldn't see anything anyone said back to you. It's like a cone of silence, which I think should be an option on Twitter. There should be a way to hide all replies, because a lot of people are abused on Twitter,

especially women. They say anything and the troll is just a tack and it's a really brutal place to be. But if you could speak and say things and share things, but not have to deal with the ramifications of trolls hitting you up with things, or people trying to prove you wrong all the time, I think it'd be a much more pleasant place. I think that's one of the big problems with the platform right now, is that you kind of have to be exposed to the shrapnel from any opinion, or even an opinion, just like a link or anything you share,

someone's going to find something wrong with it if you have a sizable enough audience. So yeah, I hear that. Well, Jason, this has been great. I've enjoyed this a lot, even though it's, you know, you'd think what we spent already a couple of hours talking about these topics, what more was there to say? But luckily, a lot of people felt there was a lot more to say. And through their questions, I think we've had a pretty fun discussion. Is there anything that we haven't talked about through these questions that you feel is something that's important

enough that you want to put a bow on this? I really enjoyed it too. I think the only other thing that is important, a particular skill that's important to develop, I think, is just this, we talked a bit about this before, I think, is just this ability to get better at saying no to things, especially no to things in the future. Yes is cheap. It's easy to say yes to anything, especially if you don't have to do it right now, and that adds up over time. And then it turns out that by the time those things come due, you wish you hadn't said yes,

but it was so cheap and so easy to do so and there's no pushback whatsoever. So just I think keeping that in mind is really important in order to help reduce the stress and anxiety of the future and also to help reduce stress and anxiety at work. Like packing your schedule in the future is a great way to never have any time to do anything else. So working on getting better to say no is just an important thing to keep in mind. I'm glad you brought that up. That is the single most important takeaway from our first discussion into my actual life, which is I'm working on it. I haven't got there yet, but I'm trying to get to a point where I'm only scheduled one month out as opposed to a year out as gross as that sounds. That's what my life has looked like in the past where even though I don't know who I'm going to be on a call with, there are all these

blocks on my calendar. It's like call, call, call meeting, meeting, meeting, meeting, flight, boom, boom, boom. Like it's, you know, to see that a year out is I've realized an enormous source of anxiety. So trying to get to that Warren Buffett area that you describe, which, again, we don't know if it's true or not But it sure makes for a great story where I mean if you want to meet with Warren Buffett You got a call as a system the day before and you know He keeps an open calendar and if he wants to meet you he'll meet you and if he doesn't he won't But yeah, I agree the cheapness of yes is something that I'm forcing myself to get a lot better at saying no and

Paying this you know finite lot better at saying no and paying this, you know, finite upfront pain, but for, you know, much less back end pain. It's hard. It's hard and you never pro-addit, but you can get better for sure. And I still work on it. I've gotten to the point now where no is such a relief. I feel so good about saying no to things that I really just didn't want to do. And I think it's totally fine to go, I didn't want to do that. I don't, I shouldn't have to do it just because someone asked me to do it. I don't want to do that. And I'm talking about like things like traveling far away to go give a talk or something.

I'd love to give the talk and I'll say like, I'll give the talk remotely. But I just can't do the travel. It sounds glamorous. It'd be great to go to Paris in April. I'm sure, but come, you know come March 27th and I realize in April, I would rather be doing something else because I'm in a zone and working on something else. Now I'm going to get in a plane and go out. It just doesn't work for me.

So anyway, you just have to come to terms with that, I think, and be comfortable going. I'm truly honored by the invitation. I just, I can't book that far in advance. I'm not taking on any international travel right now, or this just isn't gonna be a good fit for me. I'm sorry if there's some other way I can contribute. I'd love to, but I can't do that. Awesome, man.

Well, thank you very much, Jason. I enjoyed this fall discussion a lot, and I suspect the people listening to it did as well. So I appreciate your insight in what you're doing for us. Thanks, Peter. It was really fun. Thanks so much. And thanks to everyone who asked questions. I appreciate that as well. So I appreciate your insight in what you're doing for us. Thanks Peter, it was really fun. Thanks so much and thanks to everyone who asked questions. I appreciate that as well. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of The Drive. If you're interested in diving deeper into any topics we

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