This Week in Startups - DHH on Basecamp's painful evolution, Bitcoin, Revitalizing internet discourse + Lumanu CEO Tony Tran | E1394

Episode Date: February 26, 2022

Jason chats with David Heinemeier Hansson (2:03) about global governments reacting to COVID, Basecamp’s Twitter cycle blowup last spring when more than 1/3 of the company left, the shift from debating in the public square (Twitter) to debating in private with friends on group chats. We also talk about why David now sees a case for Bitcoin after Canada leans toward authoritarianism.  (00:00) Jason and Molly intro today’s episode, David Heinemeier Hansson, OK Boomer with Tony Tran of Lumanu (02:03) Jason catches up with David Heinemeier Hansson (07:05) DHH on Living in Denmark during COVID (10:31) Ourcrowd - Check out the deal of the week at https://ourcrowd.com/twist (11:41) Social media: a weapon of mass disfunction (20:08) Eight Sleep - Go to https://eightsleep.com/twist to check out the Pod Pro Cover and get $150 off at checkout! (21:40) DHH on keeping politics out of the workplace and offering severance for company culture unity (31:14) Marlow - Get 15% off your individual or team memberships at https://getmarlow.com/twist (32:41) Jason and DHH on the joys of working at home (39:41) Jason and DHH discuss the downsides of social media (46:50) Why DHH changed his position on cryptocurrency and the Canadian trucker protests (01:34:15) Jason, Molly, and Rachel intro this week’s OK Boomer (01:36:02) Rachel speaks with Tony Tran, CEO of Lumanu Read David's Blog: https://world.hey.com/dhh FOLLOW David: https://twitter.com/dhh Check out Lumanu: https://www.lumanu.com/ FOLLOW Tony: https://twitter.com/TonyTranNYC FOLLOW Rachel: https://twitter.com/_rachelbraun FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

Hey, everybody, hey everybody. It's a great show today. You love this guest. He's here for his fourth appearance on the show. David Hahnmeier Hansen is on the show. You know him as D-HH. We talk about government's reaction to COVID. Base camps blow up, if you remember that last year,

when more than the third of the company left, when they said, hey, no more talking about political or social stuff at work. And we talk about the shift from debating in the public scare, Twitter, to all of our friends and creators and capital allocators, moving to email and group chats. Plus, we talk about Canada straying towards authoritarianism, causing DHS to get orange-pilled. Yes, he was very critical of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.

And now, since he saw people's accounts getting frozen, he's been orange-pilled. Orange-pilled means you are now a Bitcoin fan. And finally, I cannot wait to hear this interview. And at the end, we have another OK Boomer segment, where Rachel talks to Tony Tran, the founder and CEO of Lumanu, which is a platform that helps creators manage their money, their invoicing, their payments, and those all-important collabs.

Love to have a startup. Yeah, love to have a startup on this weekend startups. It's going to be a great show. Stick with us. This weekend startups is brought to you by Our Crowd. Our Crowd helps you invest early in pre-IPO companies alongside professional VCs. If you're interested in investing, you can join Our Crowd. for free at O-U-R-C-R-O-W-D.com slash twist.

Eight Sleep. Good Sleep is the ultimate game changer. Now you can add the Pod Pro cover to any mattress. Go to 8Sleep.com slash Twist to check out the PodPro cover and get $150 off at checkout. And Marlowe. Every founder should have a coach to help them become more effective at managing and leading their teams. Get 15% off your coaching membership at D.

getmarlo.com slash twist. Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of this week in Startups. We've got one of our most popular guests on the pod coming back for his fourth appearance. He was on episode 46 in December of 2010, if you can imagine, episode 337 in March of 2013, episode 1029 in February of 2020, and here we are back-to-back years. No big weight in between episodes this time. David Hamier Hansen, as you know, is the CTO and co-founder of Basecamp, author outspoken on Twitter from time to time.

Welcome back to the program, David. Thank you so much for having me back. This is one of my favorite podcasts. We always have a great conversation. Sometimes we agree, sometimes. We disagree. And we're always moving quickly through topics. Let's start with COVID.

You're spending some time in Europe. And tell me a little bit about the difference between how COVID is wrapping up there versus, say, in California where you used to live and where I currently live. Yeah, it's really interesting. Even talking about Europe as one group doesn't make so much sense. The individual countries have really chosen very different paths. But where I am in Denmark, the pandemic has been over, quote unquote. Yeah. Now, for at least a good month. And that was after they did a bit of a mini lockdown for Omicron. But prior to that mini lockdown around Christmas,

it had been basically open since I think May with no major restrictions and so forth. And then they just saw, hey, things changed in the data. The Danish healthcare system has the most sophisticated testing operation anywhere in the world. At one point, Denmark was testing between 5% and 8% of the population every day. And they were sequencing basically all those. tests as well, which meant that they picked up an Omicron before basically anyone else. They were able to divide it into the BA1 and BA2 and really had just an incredibly good insight into it.

And most importantly, they acted on the data. They had one hypothesis about how to deal with this when we were dealing with Delta, when we were dealing with the earlier ones. And then Omicron comes in and they go like, okay, let's take it easy. Let's make sure this doesn't get out of control. And then as soon as they saw, okay, this is just a different thing. This is a different kettle of fish. It infects equally between whether you're a vaccinator or you're not vaccinated.

The mortality rate is a tenth of what it was. We're not going to keep the country on lockdown with this version of the virus. And then they opened up. And I thought there was such an interesting difference to see because I follow American news and I follow American media. And you see sort of the reaction or perhaps in some ways, lack of reaction to new data. It's unbelievable. update the policies, not to update your approach on it when things come out. And then you see a country like Denmark being able to do it and you go like,

oh, okay, it is possible. Like it's not like every country in the world just must go down this path where it becomes ideological warfare five minutes after we get into something. Here's a country that just like goes, okay, I mean, we'll take this very seriously. We have this testing apparatus we're spending billions of crowners on. And we will absolutely open up and pull back. from these extreme incursions on civil liberties as soon as we can. And then they did it.

And I was just like sort of thinking, wow, this is wild. It is completely wild. And for people who don't know, Denmark is a 5.8 million population country. So it would be like a state maybe in the United States, medium-sized one. And very high functioning. In fact, when people talk about a high-functioning society where government kind of matches, the will of the people in some way and the distance between people's desires

and beliefs and the government's execution is shorter or tighter. They say getting to Denmark. It is a phrase of people in politics and testing is so obvious and we still don't have the United States still 20, 30 bucks a test. We're finally going to send people

for free tests when it's over. So everybody's going to get a commemorative four pack of COVID tests literally last night. I got into a Twitter spat with the New York Times report. I wouldn't say her name, but because then she'll say I'm creating my gang. My gang of followers are going to, you know, get into her replies. But she literally is like the pandemic's not over.

It's not an endemic. And I'm endemic. And I'm like, pandemic's kind of over if you're vaccinated. Like 93, 94% of the people dying are people who are unvaccinated and testing such an obvious win. It's crazy. And you just look at the United States. So politicized.

people can't change their position. And I guess the great paradox here, which I'd love to hear your thoughts on, is Denmark, correct me if I'm wrong, is not only a democratic country, it's a socialist Democrat social. It's exactly what Bernie Sanders uses as his inspiration of where America needs to go. So there are even more socialist in their thinking than California, yet the Californians can't back off. given Omocrine's absolutely different footprint. What do you have thoughts on that? Yeah, I think that that's one of the really disheartening things about this. When prior to all of this, prior to the past two years,

whenever I would talk about Denmark in the Danish example with liberals and progressive, they don't be like, yeah, yeah, Denmark, they really got to figure it out. We've got to get to Denmark. We've got to get nationalized health care. We've got to get universal education. We've got to do all these things Denmark is doing. And then as soon as I'd get into the specifics with people about like how Denmark is able to accomplish some of those things. Like, well, you know what?

College, for example, everyone doesn't get like a four-year luxury five-star vacation at a hotel, right? Like, that's just not how the university is. Like, if you want these kinds of things, you get it in a different way. And then we get into this pandemic and Denmark is doing extremely well on excess mortality, one of the best in the world. Not zero. They're trying to balance these things. And then when you try to talk about the balance and you talk about the nuance and the tradeoffs, where when the Danes opened up, they were like, do you know what? This is going to have consequences.

Some people will die from the fact that we've opened up. Reality. Reality, right? And the reality is that the consequences of keeping the lockdown going, they're also very there. Right. It's not free to keep this, not just in an economic sense, but in a social sense, in a cohesive sense. in a cohesive sense for education in particular.

There are all these trade-offs. And the Danes were like, do you know what? Let's weigh him. But what I found most interesting, actually, was not even the Danish government's response. It was the media response. It was the fact that the media and society

allowed a difference of opinion to play out in the public forum without the demonization. For example, Denmark was recommending vaccination of kids for a while. Now they're considering to retract that recommendation, but for a while that was the public sort of, this is what we're doing.

And you'd have these op-heads in the major newspapers from pediatricians basing, I don't think that's right. I don't think we should vaccinate the kids. Because like the trade-off is not worth it and their likelihood that they'll... I'm assuming those doctors were canceled and their bank accounts were frozen

and they're not practicing anymore, right? Because they had a dissenting opinion about science. And none of that happened. And it was so weird to, on a daily basis, watch these two universes play out in completely divergent ways where you go like, oh yeah, I remember like the US used to be more like this. I mean, let's not over romanticize it. It was not like everyone peace, love and harmony all the time. But what we're in now is new. It's not sort of a thing that's always been and the US was always in this way. And there are different

ways, there are different countries that are able to escape that weirdness, that counterproductiveness. I thought just like, holy shit, it gave me hope. It gave me hope that this is not the inevitable end of civilization. That we're not just all on a timeline to get to wherever the hell the U.S. is right now. There are different paths here. And hopefully the U.S. can also find its way back to something else that isn't the bananasness it's in now. Time for another R Crowd deal of the week. Right now, you can join our crowd's investment in Future Family.

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each other, you could have a friend who was Republican, you could have a friend who maybe had questions about the vaccine, and you could have a vibrant debate about it, and you could still have dinner. Like somebody wouldn't leave the dinner or say, I'm not going to the dinner party because that person's there. Right. And how much you think, the combination of social media breaking people's brains, Trump and then Putin and his crazy, you know, disinformation campaigns.

Like, this all feels like a KGB campaign against the United States to get rid of the ability for us to respect experts, excellence, debate, all the things that made the country great, at least in the United States, this ability to be a rugged individual, debate things, and then carry on. It's been broken. I have to think it has something to do with their psychops. I think the sad reality is that it was an insult. job that the U.S. cannot blame Russia. It cannot blame anyone else. It can blame itself. And we talked about some of these things in the last episodes about like the social net, safety nets, and the lack of these and do that. But I do think that the accelerant is social media. Yeah. And it pains me a lot to have spent 12 years on Twitter. I think the last time I

looked up, I'd done 80,000 tweets or something bananas like that and thinking, do you know what? I helped contribute to that. Sure. And that was one of the things I was blessed with a crisis and I saw things in a new light. And I thought, you know what? I don't want to be part of this anymore. So I totally, about a year ago, changed my approach to Twitter. I stopped arguing with strangers on Twitter.

And at first I thought the problem was arguing with strangers. And it was a misidentification. Because since I've started writing an email newsletter, I've been arguing, actually not even in quote, I've been arguing, debating with strangers who reply to my things, and they very often tell me I'm wrong. And then we have this kind of, as you say, 90s style, early 2000s debate where like, we present arguments and you say, like, that's a good point. And okay, I can see that, but I think you're wrong on this thing.

And I just go like, it's like a time machine. It's a time machine to argue with people over email when you're doing it one-on-one without an audience versus you open. It's the performance. When you open up Twitter and you just look at it, particularly now that I've cut down my usage dramatically from where it used to be, I'll open it up and just go like, Jesus. I got to shield my eyes almost. This is what is this even? And I think that is one of the, once the history of all on all this is written, the history on the 2010s and the 2020s, I think we'll look back and see social media as being one of those weapons of mass dysfunction.

It is a weapon of mass dysfunction. It's perfectly stated. I mean, if you think about where it started, we were all bloggers. There was a blogger movement. If you could put together three, four, five paragraphs that were cohesive, didn't need to be 2,000 words, it could be 600, it could be 800, but you still had to have a thesis, you had to have sentence structure, you had to present an argument, and you could be taken apart if you did it poorly, or you could be rewarded and start a great conversation. And listen, God love Jack and Evan Williams, great entrepreneurs, great product guys. they decided to, and I told them this when they showed me Twitter for this problem, I was like, you kind of got rid of the blog post, but you left the headline.

Now every idiot who can't form sentences or paragraphs or put four paragraphs together into a cohesive argument or the start of a discussion is now empowered. Maybe these people shouldn't be part of the debate if they can't put a cohesive argument together. All I can do is a link-dating headline. I thought that was part of the issue too, but. But I've changed my mind on that. I don't actually think that's the root cause because I think the main

fermenting of division on Twitter is coming from people who know how to write very well. They are being programmed by the damn... I was about to say algorithm, but that's not even true. They're being programmed by the base instincts of humanity through likes and retreats to become a certain type of person, the most angry, bitter, divisive person that could possibly be.

And I say that as someone who felt those forces enact themselves on me. I got to look back on some of my tweets, particularly the tweets that all went bam, right? The ones that hit the ding ding. And I go like, they're all angry. Yes. And sometimes anger has a place, right? Sure. But on Twitter, it's all of it.

Yes. It's like where the anger should be like the 7%. Like sometimes you should be angry about things. On Twitter, it's like 99 or 100. And you go like, holy s' This is why we're off the path. We're steering straight into the goddamn wall because we're being programmed and everyone is being programmed to be the worst version of themselves because that's what's being rewarded. If you look at both you and I, sometimes we're a provocateur, sometimes we have strong opinions.

It's actually a perfect analogy because our personalities, sometimes we get angry about something. We have something we're passionate about. But it's such a great observation that when you're on social, media and you have that moment, it's like perfectly hitting the bullseye. Everybody's like, oh, wow, they nailed it. And then everybody emulates it. And so when the rage gets going and then, you know, the kind of secret there is, if the rage is against another person or a target, now they're brought into it.

And now every, you're trending, right? And it's basically rewarding, as you're saying, you know, the behavior that should be reserved for when it's appropriate. It's appropriate to be angry about something. You can be very angry about what Putin is doing right now. You can be very angry about app stores, you know, taking 30%. There's moments for that. But you said you had a personal crisis and that made you have this realization to pull back.

I had a book deadline. That was one of the best moments of my life was when I deleted Twitter off my phone for six months and I was super productive. After this conversation, I think I'm going to do it today. It's just such an addiction. What was the crisis when you decided to do what Brian Armstrong did at his company, Coinbase said, you know, like enough with the political discourse at work? Yeah. When, when, um, it's interesting because I mean, I've been in so many Twitter feuds and Twitter blowups and huge viral threads and so on, which I, I credit with preparing me someone for what came. Yeah. But then when we followed Brian's example at, at base camp and this just blew up and we were trending on Twitter for like, uh, about a day. When you see sort of just the, the quantity having a quality all of its own, when 20,000 people come at you and call you a racist and.

a white supremacist, you just go like, do you know what? This, this is helpful, actually, in some abstract sense, because you see things more clearly and you see all the patterns because it's all just flowing in and you go like, wow, this is a mirror. Let me reflect in this. In which way was I one of those people at other instances in my life? When was I piling on? When did I take this kind of thing where I just saw a shred of something and like, you're the worst person in the world, right? And I thought, you know, that's a gift. Sure. It's not that often we're forced to have that mirror right in front of us and go like, do you know what? I could see myself being one of those people. And it's just like, that's ugly. It's ugly in just the sort of the deepest

sense of our basis humanity. It just go like letting all that out and flowing it through. I don't want to become more of that person. And that's what I felt through my own use of Twitter, right? I'd see whenever my follower account would just shoot up, it always be on the back of some angry threat. Right? Although, one exception, partly, which was his latest thing about Bitcoin, which was actually me saying, like, I got it wrong. Here's why I got it wrong. That was one of the rare exceptions that proved the rule that, like, it's 99% anger and

then 1% something else. All right. We'll get to that one in a sec. We both had a very similar turnaround because we both are. Questioning of crypto and then all of a sudden both of her eyes lit up at the same tipping point. Good sleep is the ultimate game changer. And it's nature's best medicine.

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That's Ainsleep.com slash twist for $150 off at checkout. Just to wrap up what happened at 37 signals, so you're getting stoned. And I'm watching this. And I'm saying, this is fascinating because you were the hero of, let's face it, liberal, left, woke. You know, that group loved you because you were a champion of work from home, champion of reasonable work. We've had this debate. I've said, hey, listen, you got to work your ass off to win. You said, you're wrong, JCal. Just another way to do it.

And Viva deference. I think we came to some great realizations on this. Yeah, you can have a four-day-a-week company to be successful. You can have a six-day-a-week company to be successful. But they turned on you instantly. Just because you said, listen, at our company, we don't want to have people involved in exactly what we're talking about. Their worst instincts, bringing it to work, making people feel uncomfortable,

and using company platforms to debate political and social issues at this charge time. And you were very clear. If you want to do this on your own, we super support you. I'm talking about these things on my own. You can join me in talking about them over here. Just not on the company servers. Just so if there's somebody who's pro-Trump, anti-Trump, whatever, pro-immigration, anti-immigration, it doesn't overwhelm our mission at the company.

you presented a more reasonable version, anybody would argue, than even Brian Armstrong's, which I thought was completely reasonable as well. And yet they still came for you and still destroyed you. I thought you did the most reasonable thing possible. You offered like everybody if they wanted severance, they could leave, we understand. Here's the most generous thing we could ever do.

I think you gave people six months or sevens or three months. Yep, up to six months. And I think a third of people, 25% of people took it. And I looked at it and I was like, you're functioning business. your business is so high functioning, so high profitable. I'm going to predict your company will be higher functioning after those people leave.

Was I right long term? Was it a hit short term? Win long term in terms of company culture, unity and effectiveness of just running the business? Yeah, I mean, it was some very difficult weeks. And we clearly underestimated just how difficult those weeks would be for our employees, for us, for all of it. It wasn't a pleasant time. I'll be perfectly frank about that.

But that was measured in weeks. After that, we spent a few months hiring people again. And now it's like night and day. From my experience. Now, you have 60, 70 people at a company. They're all going to have their own experience. But the experience that Jason and I had of the place we were in when we decided to do that was not a happy camper place. No. And we were looking at each other and going like, do you know what? This isn't going somewhere good. It's on a trajectory that that's not heading somewhere good. We got to change that trajectory. And that came at a significant cost, but I am glad we paid it. I would not want to trade. I would not like, hey, could you rewind the clock? And then we didn't do that. And we just, we kept numb and we continued on the path that we were on. I don't think it would have been good for the people who were very fired up about this, who took the buy out and went somewhere.

somewhere else. I mean, do you know what? Sometimes a breakup is not a bad thing. Yes. If you have irreconcilable differences of what you want in life or what you want in business, you should think sometimes like splitting up is the right thing to do and you can go off and you can be your best self somewhere else where you can fulfill all the things that you want out of it. And then base cam could be another thing that isn't that. Absolutely. And the thing that sort of blew my mind is like I look at some of the people who were most ferocious about how bad and terrible we are, and I still wish them well. I still wish that they go somewhere else, and I wish they do their life's work, and I'm sure many of them will.

Yeah. And at that release, realizing that we're both better off, both parties are better off. And we really, we spent millions holding this, literally millions of dollars, putting them in front of like, you know what, if you don't like it, if you don't like where this is going, if you want something else out of work, take the money, and you can get another job tomorrow. You're basically getting a bonus here. Because you'll be employed in 30 days if you so choose, and we're giving you six months severance. So you just got like half a year of pay to follow this path if that's what you want. It's literally, it reminds me of friends we've all had who got divorced. And you'd be at the dinner party and they're fighting with each other. And you're like, these people

should not be married. I mean, this is terrible for their kids. It's terrible for them. It's terrible for us to have to have dinner with them. Then they break up. They don't talk for two years. And then somebody has a Christmas party four or five years later. And they're both there with their new significant others. They're both happy. And everybody has to drink together and it's a happy dinner party.

Like, go find the company where they want to, you know, have this culture of debating social issues at work. And then other people just want to put in their six, seven, eight hours of focused work, do their best coding, do their best design work, best customer support or sales, whatever they do, whatever the zone of excellence is, and not have to argue at work. And what we found was that there's an huge number of people just like that. We had zero problem hiring. As soon as we opened up positions, we'd get hundreds and hundreds of applications,

far more than we could hire. And it was really just an interesting way of seeing that you have this is difficult few weeks, where Twitter is just going bananas, right? well, not just Twitter. There are press reports and all these other things. And then you come out on the other side and you think, oh man, we're destroyed. Right?

Like, I had a moment of darkness from there where you just think like Twitter's reality. There's 10,000 people telling me I'm the scum under your earth. Yeah. Do you know what? I don't know. And then you come through that. Well, a reasonable person, David, would,

if 10,000 people tell you like, hey, you're terrible, a reasonable person who's not a sociopath would say, wait a second, if 10,000 people are telling me this, Let me meditate on it for a second. Maybe there's something here that I can learn from. That's a reasonable response. But the fact is, those 10,000 people happen to be wrong in this case. They're just piling on to get retweets.

All of that. Or they're right from their perspective or whatever. What really did help in part, though, was so we got tens of thousands of tweets on this. And they were all, like, 99% of them had, you're the worst person in the world. And then we got thousands and thousands of emails, all in private, Yes. Telling us like, holy shit, we're struggling with this at our company. I work at this place.

It's terrible. I'm so happy you did this. I wish more people would do this. So clearly there's also a swell of sort of silent minority, majority. I don't know. It's a solid majority. I would think who feel differently about these issues. And what we also then found was that expressed in the business.

First of all, that the business didn't suffer from this. And then, of course, when we said that, some people like, well, that just means you only care about money and you don't care about people. Okay, I was just telling you, just as a fact, for other people who might be looking at making controversial changes at their company, this is not a purchasing level decision indicator for most people. And then the second part, of course, was that we were thinking like, well, is it now going to be impossible to hire people?

Is it everyone in this category where they really want to have this, speaking about these topics at work and so on? And they just weren't. And we hired a bunch of wonderful people. And that's sometimes the other flip side of a breakup, right? Is that you also meet new people. The world is full of wonderful people. Yes.

And you get to establish new relationships and so forth. And again, I look back upon it now and say like, wow, that was tough. But it's also, it was a crisis where if you chose to use it and we did to first introspect, like, who are we? What is this mirror? How am I actually some of this? and then move forward in a new path was really interesting. And in fact, it changed the trajectory of the company. So prior to this happening, Jason and I were on this seven-year kick of we're as big as we want to be.

We're like in 2014, we said we're just going to become base camp. This is totally irrational thing of taking three products that were growing well and saying, we're just going to turn off sign-ups for them because we're just going to focus on one thing, just that we can stay a tiny company or small company, 40 people, 50 people. when this happened, we really looked at each other and said, like, do you know what, let's try something else. It's almost like, when you have this moment of clarity, suddenly you reconsider things you would never have otherwise thought about.

And we reconsider that and we thought like, do you know what? We launched this hay email service. It was this bananas hit out the gate. We literally signed up tens of thousands of paying customers in like a month, like 10 or 20x. what our projections were for several years. We signed up that up in a month. Now we ballooned this major new business right next to the other business.

We already had the base camp business, which was already running very lean. Now we had like two major businesses. We got to do something here and let's just make the other choice. We're going to grow the business. So already now we're bigger than we've ever been. We hired a COO. We've hired a leadership team in other areas. And we have a path that's going to take us to be larger than we ever were.

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and now you've cleared that up, you know, and then you get to redeploy that energy. So if you're dealing with strife and HR or people who didn't want to be there, where people who wanted to be there but talk about, you know, social issues all day. That's taking your CPU. Just like Twitter can take your CPU over. Yeah, hold on a second. I'm getting rid of this dog. Literally right as you're talking, the dog, I have a little puppy.

He just came to the room and started biting my feet. I'm like, ow, that hurts. Oh, it's hilarious. The joys of working at home, right? It is pretty fucking great. I'm at my ski house. I've skied 33 days today. I'm on the DHS program right now.

Well, what I did was, you know, it's like you started thinking, I think, when you have a crisis like this, COVID was a crisis, let's people reevaluate and let you just think, and I think it's very important for founders. I'm interested in your take on this. If the founders don't want to come to work every day, and they start hating the organization they built, and they don't want to be there,

and it becomes insufferable to be in the worlds you created, well, why be an entrepreneur? You could have just not been an entrepreneur and go and work in some other world. You manifested the reality of 37, Signals and Larry and Sergey manifested Google. They don't go to the office anymore. They don't want to be there.

And if you don't want to be at your own company, that's a problem for everybody. And the funny thing is that we've advocated that for so many years on all these other topics, right? Be careful how much you grow. Be careful who you take money from. Be careful with all these things and you might end up with a company you don't like.

Right. And we got in a little bit into that. The weeds were seriously, when some of these issues and plenty of them, them weren't exactly preview to the public eye. That was the other thing about this whole thing. You get to see this sliver of it. And this was always one of the, or another one of those mirror moments, right?

You read a press report on something. And you go like, wow, that's what it is, right? And then you said on the other side of knowing what's other wire under the iceberg. And you go like, oh, shit. Do you know what? Maybe that's like, let's park that one for next time I react to some news report about something. but having those experiences led Jason and I for the first time in 20 years to think about like is that what we still want to do?

Yeah. And ironically enough, those conversations of do I still want to come to work was what gave us the courage to do this. Because when we did it, we knew it was going to be controversial. I had no idea it was going to be that controversial or blow up to that extent. But we knew this is a risk and there's going to be people who don't like it. and there's going to be people who yell at us and all these things, do you know what,

it's still worth it? Because if we're contemplating that we don't want to be here anymore, like, what's the point? What are we losing in that regard, right? Yeah, you sell the business. I mean, that would be like complete capitulation.

Like, I built this. I don't want to be here any day. And that's okay. That happens to some founders. It's actually, that's one of the reasons when a founder says, hey, I'm thinking about selling my business. And I say, you know what?

There's a couple of reasons. One, somebody offers you a price that is absolutely bonkers and beyond the actual reality of the value of the business because I guess some strategic reason they wanted or they're stupid. Take it. Two, you know, it's life-changing money

and, you know, it's not crazy, but you would like to have the life-changing money. You're burnt out or something. Or three, you're just not in love with the business. Something else you want to do. And that was the thing that was interesting for us because the first two never applied. First of all, that there is no number

where I go, that's life-changing for me anymore. We've been in this business of 20 years. We've been profitable for 20 years. There's not another zero on anything that's going to change anything for me. And partly perhaps that's because my aspirations are so limited that I don't dream of shooting a rocket to Mars or something. Maybe if I had a dream like that, I'd go like, oh, let's do the springboard. This is why I've always admired Gary V's notion that like, hey, I want to buy the sports team. I need a billion dollars.

This is what I want to do. If someone offers me a billion dollars for my business, I will sell my business. I'll buy my sports team. Like, that's a goal. a mission. I never had that, right? Like, our goal and our mission at Basecamp was like, let's create a great place where I want to come to work every day, where the people who work here want to come to work every day when we create good shit. And then arriving in that moment, Steve Jobs had this thing about, like, if you look yourself in the mirror too many times and you

think about, do you know what, I don't want to do this, that's a moment, right? Just stop to reflect and do you want to do something else? And the interesting thing, of course, is so we had this experience with this particular case. And then everyone else did too because of COVID. The great resignation. All these people quitting their jobs and just droves, right? Right. We had this

a third of the company leave in one go which is obviously huge. Crazy. It was crazy, right? 20 people. And then we didn't, right? Like the normal attrition rate, I think, in the industry is something like 9%. And at Netflix, it's something like 16%.

percent or something. That was before the great resignation. I don't even know what the numbers are now. They're probably quite a lot higher. A lot of people had this realization. Do you know what? I don't want to do the thing anymore. I'm going to quit.

I'm going to go somewhere else. And we have that too. And that's how we got to this. But I really hope that given the fact that there's part of this is also time. If you had asked me a month into this or a month later, like was this a good experience? or, I don't know, good experience, a meaningful experience. I'd go like, hell no. Yeah.

No, avoid at all costs. But that's the case with a lot of these most meaningful life experiences we have. You cannot actually appreciate them in the moment. You can only appreciate them from a distance. And when you look back upon them and think, do you know what, this was really a pivotal point for me. I look back on these major points in my career. And a lot of them were about me either getting fired or quitting, realizing, do you know, want, this is not it.

And then going off and doing something better. Switching to something else. And I hope that's true for all the employees who left. It definitely is true for me. I know it's true for Jason. And this is one of those things where you do the reunion, maybe five years, maybe

the US has gotten to a different place and it's in a different political environment. And you can sit down and you have that chat and like, I was really angry with you. Yeah. But now it's been five years. And you know what? I can see that I got to a better place. You got to a better place. Absolutely.

You found love, I found love, and it's all love. You'll get there. It's interesting you bring up the perception of your company and what's happening in the press. The press obviously loves stories like this. It gets the most clicks. And the press now is kind of aligned itself with, you know, the mania that you described in social media, which is, hey, the retweets and the clicks equal the profits and the traffic. So therefore, they've kind of aligned themselves with, hey, if we can find a fight, if we can find that, you know, people are, you know, at each other's throats, we need to cover that story. And not only do we need to cover it, kind of need to stir the pot even more. We need to try to exacerbate. They like to put a little kerosene on the fire. But you mentioned, hey, my experience when I read the stories is they got whatever. You didn't say a percentage, but I'm going to guess 20% right, 30% right, 10%, right? They call it the gelman.

effect. I don't know if you've ever heard that term, but there was a scientist, and in Murray's case, it was physics. And he basically was like, anytime I got quoted in a story about physics and I read it, I was like, wait a second, the journalist is not getting the story right. But you read what, then you have to say, well, wait a second, I'm reading a story about biology. And I'm saying, oh, wow, the New York Times wrote this or Vox or whoever, Verge wrote it, they must have it right. And then you can just say, well, when you read the physics story, did they have it right? No, okay, you can kind of put it there. How close was the press to getting that right?

The funny thing is it's what I realized was that it's not that things are factually incorrect. It's about the fact that it covers just a sliver of it. It's the thing about the elephant in the dark, right? You have the tail and you think like, oh, this is a tiger. And then you turn on the light and you're like, no, it's an elephant. Because you couldn't see the whole thing because you don't know the whole story. And the funny thing with that is that I've so often gone like, yeah, do you know what? That's what someone in the shit would say.

You don't have all the facts. Like, this is not a representative of... So I don't know how you resolve that. Because the other thing I'd say is like, hasn't the press always been like this? I think there's something else in the culture that has changed that these things have exploded to this. Like, part of the role of the press is to be muck-wracking, right? Like, it's to find needle a bit. And it's to find some employees who were disgruntled and they want to get their say out.

And sometimes good things come out of that and changes are made and like, we're all better off and so on. So I have a quite ambivalent relationship with that. I can appreciate the function of it and say, like, do you know what, even if it produces these inaccuracies or whatever, or not even inaccuracies, right? Because, again, it's not about the factual things. Exactly. It doesn't paint the full picture. It probably can't be any other way because that was the other thing I learned.

Or I don't know if I learned, but I just realized, again, was Jason Rye wouldn't go on the record with the things that were under the iceberg, right? You're not going to go out. You can't. I mean, they're HR related, right? There's all these things where you're just, you're not going to go out and. reveal things that aren't already on the public record, which just means that, like, the iceberg remains the iceberg,

and it must be that way, right? These are the terms of the game. This is just how it is. You've got to suck it up a bit and accept that that is what it is. And I just factored into your own calculations, and it certainly did that for me. And I reflected on experiences I've had where I'd read something and I'd formed an opinion about a person or a company,

and I went like, do you know what? I should keep this in mind. Yes. Next time you see a founder getting destroyed. Like, I remember the away CEO. I don't know if you remember that. You know what? That's exactly actually the story I think about. And it's the one I feel bad about. Right. Again, I don't know the facts. Maybe the facts were exactly as presented. That could also be a possible explanation. Unlikely but possible. Right. Unlikely but possible. Right. Maybe. Maybe it was like that and everything was justified. But I was thinking, you know what? Maybe it also isn't. And I did not exhibit like the finer qualities. I exhibit the qualities of Twitter in my public response to that. You went into dunk.

Yeah. Yeah. And I look back at that now and I go like, for what? Right? Like what was that? Again, you can you can lull yourself into these grand narratives. Well, I'm on the barricades arguing for better worker rights and better work conditions. And they very well might have had issues with working.

and worker rights and so on. But just a moment of reflection and stand back and also an appreciation for a deeper appreciation for what it feels like to be on the other end of 20,000 tweets calling you the worst things in the world. And this was, the funny thing when that was like, I've been involved in so many Twitter feuds and whatever. And I always reminded myself, you know what, I have a privilege experience here. I can talk about almost everything.

And like, the worst I get is like, sir, you are incorrect. Right. And then it flipped with this, right? Right. Because I think in part, as you said, in certain circles who held certain views, like, we were being held up as like, hey, D, base camp is really doing the right thing, right? Like, we're on this team. We're on this team. And then we did something that wasn't in line with what the team was doing now.

And then we were traitors, which is actually worse than enemies. Much worse. And this is why you get the kind of ferociousness of the response and the whole the eating of your own syndrome and all these other things and why we got some. suddenly tipped over and it wasn't like, sir, you're incorrect. It was like, you white supremacist piece of shit. And you go like, oh, do you know what? This is an experience. It's quite an experience.

Yeah. All the time. And it's not a pleasant one. And it's so interesting where, like, you know, I've observed all these things. And I was wearing my aura ring at the time. I don't know if you used one of those. Oh, yeah. It's incredible. Yeah. So it tracks your heart rate and it tracks all these other things.

I had this intellectual response to it like, hey, this is what happens. You're the main character. We were the main character in Twitter for a while. Yes. And there were all these people piling on with it and we were seen as traitors and so on. And like I had this. This is just what it is. It's going to pass.

But there's like a lizard brain response where you go like, holy shit, I'm being thrown out of the tribe and there are lions out there and they're going to eat me. And I could just see it on the ring. My nighttime heart bait. Right, which is through the roof. And you go like, wow, this is really unpleasant and fascinating that this is how it plays out. And you don't recognize is that when you're on the other side of like, hey, I just fired off one tweet. Right.

This is, you don't see the other 20,000. Yeah, you were one of 20,000 stones in the digital stoning. And yeah, you would like to think as an intellectual person, as an enlightened person, as, you know, a person who can. think about thinking and be meta and an expert on social media as we are for having been here from watch to be created. But you are not immune. Your body's physiological response when people are throwing rocks at you 24-7 and it never ends or it doesn't end for a month is your heart rate's going to go up. And yeah, you can get a heart attack. You can't sleep. All of those physiological things happen. Let's segue into this crazy observation that you and I had at the same time,

which was, we've been watching crypto, and it's so obviously filled with grifts, incompetent people, scams, you know, people being preyed upon because they're being meant to feel stupid, have fun being poor, you don't get it, okay boomer, yada, yada. And it's so transparent to guys like us who have been in the game for a long time that they're just flipping these NFTs or shit coins to other people and taking their money in absconding with it, 99% of these ICOs never manifested in an actual product, which you and I, I think, both find super insulting as people who create products. Like, how does somebody get a billion dollars for not creating a product? I'm offended. You do the work, then you get the reward,

not the other way around. But tell me what you saw, because you came out and said, hey, I was wrong about cryptocurrency. There is a real need here. What was it that you saw that made you flip your position? Yeah. So it's funny, Bitcoin, of all those $2,000, of all those $2,000, Twitter feuds over the years. Bitcoin has been a recurrent theme. I would piss off the Bitcoin community over and over again because I'd call out all the scams and this, that, and the other thing. And I was very negative on it. I got to say. Yeah. And then the bit that flipped for me was this Canadian trucker thing. And I think there's two parts of it. One thing is whether you think there's any merit to what the protesters were protesting. Sure. And then whether the response, whether you like the

protesters and what they stand for or whether you agree with them or you don't agree with them. It's for a lot of people, apparently, it's very difficult to separate those two things. For me, I don't find that difficult at all. I don't find it difficult to separate the principle of the response from do I like the person this response is being enacted upon or not. And when I saw the response first with GoFund me, I went like, this just, it's incongruent, it doesn't make any fucking sense. this is an incredible overreach that just the police would reach out.

There's not a judge involved. There's nothing. No charges are being brought against anyone. And for people who don't know, the truckers put up a go fund me. They raise like 10 million. And then the government steps in and says, you know what? Those people are Nazis and there's some Confederate flag there. We'll take the money and we'll give it to the opposite side.

Well, it was worse. In my opinion, it was even worse. It was the Ottawa police, as I understood it, made a request to go Fund me and said like, hey, these are bad people with unacceptable views. You should not be allowing them to fundraise. And GoFundMe said like, oh, yeah, sure. All right. Let's just turn it off.

Okay. And then the first approach was like, well, we'll just give them money to some other charities. And you just go like, wait, what? People donated to this because they wanted to help these protesters out. Again, you can also think that's a bad thing. Oh, these protesters shouldn't get the fuel or the. food to continue their protest, but to make the jump from that to we're going to cut off this mechanism, we're going to confiscate the money and give it to someone else. They thankfully did back

down on giving it to someone else, but then they still locked up the money for like seven to ten days in the refund process and so forth. So I thought, wow, that's already bananas. That's blowing my mind. That's starting to think like, well, what other ways can we route around this damage? But then what really sent it home for me was the Emergency Powers Act. Yes. This idea that this protest, of all the possible protests you can imagine, right? This protest, and maybe we'll get to the discussion about the dispute over peaceful and not peaceful, I've actually been convinced that using the word peaceful is a bad direction to go. Nonviolent is a better word.

Because violence has a clearer definition, even though that's also being... Did you punch somebody in the face or not? Are you setting fire to buildings? Are you battling with the police? All these other things, looting, all these other things. No one described the protest as that. Yet this was the thing that invoked these incredible powers,

essentially a version of martial law, which also has this dispute, oh, is it the military doing it? No, therefore it's not martial law. No, it's a suspension of civil liberties. And the suspension of civil liberties was primarily the suspension of due process, that the police could now just,

say to a bank, hey, we suspect this person of being involved. We suspect this person of having donated. We don't have to prove that to a judge. We don't give the person any opportunity to defend themselves. You're going to freeze their bank account. And I just went like- They froze the bank accounts of people from the GoFundMe. Hundreds of people. Hundreds of people got their bank accounts frozen.

And I just went, that is bananas. That sort of sanction. Imagine you getting your bank account frozen. Hey, rent is due. I got to buy food. Like, what do you fucking do in modern society? Most people's money is not laying around in cash. It is sitting in a bank account.

It's a number. And if the government with no due process can go in and say, like, yeah, right now your number is zero. Whatever the number was before, right now it's zero. And it'll be zero for as long as we please. You'll have no recourse to change your opinion. Yeah, or anything, right? You change your opinion. And I just go like, this is so wild.

And what's even wilder to me is the second order effect that other people don't think this is wild. That's what really blows my mind. To me, this is one of the most scary authoritarian overreaches that I can remember is seeing in a Western democracy for all the hype about Trump being an authoritarian. And he was in many ways. And I'm the furthest away from support of that. Which also, of course, you're instantly getting lumped in. Oh, you're with the truckers. That means you're Trumper.

That means, oh, shut up. No. No. I'm not a Trump. There's more than just, it's not a binary thing. You can be multi-dimensional in this thing. So anyway, all this, to some extent, in hindsight, hysteria over the fact that he was going to do all these draconian things.

And he tried some things and they weren't successful. And here you have this well-polished, liked of liberal guy in the North just going 100x, 10x over what Trump ever did in terms of, could you even put your I had to imagine what would have happened if Trump had just said, like, hey, I'm going to cancel the bank accounts of anyone who shows up to a Black Lives Matter protest. Oh, my Lord. Yes. I mean, the country would probably still be on fire, right?

I'm going to seize the bank accounts of people who donated to BLM. Like, I mean, it would be. There were so many steps so quickly. I already went. The GoFundMe thing is bananas. Then they went to like, we're calling a Confiscape, a bank account of people who are involved in it. Bananas. We're going to confiscate a freeze the bank accounts of people who donated to them.

They went. Well, and then I saw the story. They went to a cafe that was giving coffee to the truck drivers, and they wanted to shut that down. It's like really standoff video of like this guy who wants a cafe locking the door and not letting the police in. And the police are like banging. Open the doors. Open the doors. He's like, this is a private property.

Go get a warrant. But this is what happens. And this is how democracy dies and authoritarian's take over is somebody, claims that, hey, we're on the right side here. We have the right opinion. Therefore, all of these rights go away. And we saw it after 9-11. Hey, we're going to be able to read your emails. You're going to have to get frisked at the airport, all this stuff. And you really need to pause. Anytime somebody says, I need to take your rights away. It's in your best interest. You've got to really pump the brakes and say, well, let's have a really considered thought about this. And this was not

considered at all. And this was what blew my mind was that these powers that were invoked in many ways, superseded the things of the Patriot Act, which at least happened in response. I think the Patriot Act was an abomination. It's crazy. And what followed after 9-11, the immune response to that was so much worse than the original inflection. But two freaking planes flew into the towers and 3,000 people died. If there was ever a time where you could say like, okay, there's going to be something here,

right? You could go like, again, and as I would, I would dispute it. We don't need the Patriot Act. don't need these other things. But to see something worse than that imposed after this, after destructs, I'm not saying that there wasn't anything, right? If you or I lived downtown Ottawa and they were honking incessantly, we'd probably also be mad out of our skull and we'd be like, whatever takes, shut these guys down.

But this is why you don't ask the victims for the sentence of the perpetrator, right? Right. You don't ask someone who... Exactly. You have a due process. Yes. And they can go dispassionately and look at the case and look at the facts and go like, hey, this is what is reasonable. And what happened was just utterly unreasonable. And the justification was these people have unacceptable views. And that in itself, the fact that those words would be stated as a justification, literally, I looked up the Canadian Charter of Freedoms and Rights.

And it's like number two on the list, freedom of consciousness, freedom of thought, freedom of belief. and then I think it's number three is the other standard freedom of association and so forth and you just go like, well, we're just going to cancel these for these people

because we don't like what they think. Yeah. And of course, for sort of the protests and so forth, but it just felt like so disproportionate. Yes, that's a disproportionate. Is the really confounding part of it

because, you know, I think you could look at the standard, I think separating the two things. What's the reaction to the protest and then what are the actual protests? We haven't talked about what the protest was about here. We're literally just looking at, hey, if BLM happens, if January 6 happens, Operation Wall

Street, which people forget, or these auto truck drivers, how about a uniform standard here? If somebody commits violence, they're arrested, and they're tried for the violence they committed. If somebody's peacefully protesting, and it's a nuisance, okay, you know, we've got to mitigate that. Maybe there's some reasonable amount of time you can yell and scream and maybe some decibels that you can You know, if your horns higher than that decibels, you get a ticket, if you get three tickets, we tow your car. There's some reasonable approach to this. I loved what the response to Operation Wall Street, which was, okay, you guys have some concerns about how society's going. Here's a camp area in Oakland.

Here's one in Wall Street. Just keep it within this so people can get to work and emergency vehicles can get through. And that got lost here. And you have to wonder, like, what derangement was Trudeau and other people going through in Ottawa? that they felt there wasn't another path here. Like there's an obvious path, which is if you're blocking the road and there's no way for an emergency vehicle to get through,

okay, we're going to tell your cars. But if you leave half the road open for emergency vehicles and by 8 o'clock you stop with the loud noise so people can go to bed who live up there, we're good. Stay there as long as you want. Just here's where you're going to be able to protest. They didn't do that. They just went immediately to freeze in the bank accounts

of people in another province who gave a donation. So weird. And I think what actually is even more scary to me was the expressions of support that this is good. I've been writing about this a bit. And I've gotten a bunch of emails and some say like, this is bananas. But I've got a lot of emails too from Canadians going like, nope, this was totally good. I'd like to seem more weird. And I just go like, that's frightening to me.

Why were they thinking it's good? Was there some thing like? Because I got some of the Twitter where they were like. These were bad people. That's what they said to me. Like, you don't know who these people are. They're bad people. And if you live there, if you hurt the honking and all these other things,

these are bad people. They had unacceptable views. This was the other thing, right? Like, a bunch of people were like, well, we actually don't have really pandemic restrictions anymore. And then I looked up the pandemic restriction. You have all sorts of pandemic restrictions. Did you know that to fly in Canada now, you have to be vaccinated.

It's not enough to have recovered. And you can't have taken a test before. To fly domestically and internationally, you literally have to be vaccinated. that can be a thing as society decides. Totally. We decide different things and Denmark decided different things. But it's also fair to have an objection to that maybe. Like say, like, hey, I don't think that's reasonable.

I don't think we should have vaccine mandates for some of these things or for the federally regulated industries that I think is something like 6% of the Canadian workforce that are also being mandated to be vaccinated. It's reasonable for them to say, like, that's not what I want. And this was what I've, just this confounding of effects. And people would use the argument, but 90% of it's, of the truckers are vaccinated, ergo,

only this tiny minority are actually mad about this. Hey, I'm vaccinated. I'm triple vaccinated. I'm not for mandates. I don't think mandates is the right way to go. In fact, the Danish general director of the health authorities went out with this statement

when asked about that and said, I don't think mandates are a good thing. I think they create a counter reaction. Well, duh, see what we got. We're going to hold you down. Right. They don't actually work that well, that they decreased trust in the overall society and so on. Again, it doesn't mean that everyone has to do what Denmark does.

It just means that if this is one example, that this is a reasonable country, right? Like, we're not some third world. This is not Saudi Arabia. This is not North Korea. It's not China. Despotic state with no democratic accountability or any of these other things. Arriving at these conclusions that like, hey, we should do vaccine mandates, we should cancel all these other restrictions as soon as we can and so forth. And then you have a bunch of Canadian trucker saying, like, essentially, we'd like what they got.

Can we have the Danish deal? And again, it doesn't mean that you have to cave on all this, but engage in the political process. Isn't that why we have politicians, is that we can engage with them? Right. I mean, the whole concept of this democracy is that you have the freedom to dissent and have an opinion that is, you know, maybe the minority opinion. This is what the rights are about. We don't need rights to protect them. majority opinion. We don't need rights to protect op-eds praising the government. We don't need

rights to protect spontaneous. We love the government rallies. We need rights to protect objectionable speech. Objectionable protests and minority views. This is why we have constitutions, charters of rights, of freedoms, a bill of rights, all these things is to protect it because the people who set this up knew. Do you know what? A simple majority, you can turn into a mob very quickly and it can in very badly. And this was the shocking thing to me was that first of all that it was happening in Canada. The nicest place in the

world. It just did not match my mental model, right? It didn't. They went so far authoritarian and they usually other people were like, if you bump into a Canadian, they apologize to you. Like literally if you literally ran one over with a bicycle and knocked them over, they'd be like,

I'm sorry. You'd be like, which is of course just the stereotype, but what's so useful to my, again, I always try to look at these crises and we're like, no, what can we learn here? And what's the mirror? And I look at this crisis and go like, holy shit. Canada is not that different from France or Austria or Denmark. If it took this little, in my opinion, again, little is all relative.

It's relative to burning buildings and rioting and looting and all these other things. You shouldn't minimize it either, right? This was a serious protest that caused all sorts of things. But if this is what it takes to go. that far, how thin is this veneer recalled civilization? How quickly does it break down in countries and Western democracies

where I went like, I thought they were stronger than this? Are we that weak? Does it take that little for us to give up all these rights that it literally took hundreds of years for us to win from the Magna Carter forward?

Then we did not just have these despots who just set out decrees and directives and you would not have due process and you would not have any of these other things? Is this what? it takes, that is scary. And if so, holy shit, I should take another little good big home. Yeah. I mean, if you, if you, if people get scared, when people are fearful, they are more than willing to give up rights or suspend, you know, these basic premises. And the thing

that I found so crazy about this was going back to our original discussion of, hey, how are things different in Denmark versus California? You know, we still got kids in masks here. And, you know, if you were, if you were to say in California, like, hey, maybe kids don't, you know, need the vaccine, like, is it actually necessary? Let's look at the death rates. Like, you'd be canceled. Like, that would be a Twitter mob, like, you would not believe. If you said that at a school, you know, uh, meeting, you might get dragged out. Where we started was, hey, the information has changed. So when I saw this protest, I was like, okay, we're in the Omicron era. Truckers are in their cars alone for most of the trip. If they stop at a truck stop, the truck stop is a private

restaurant, they could require a vaccine card and they could turn people down. It seems like there's no issue here. So now what is the actual issue? The issue is fear. The issue is there are a group of people who are scared to go back to reality and live with the fact that, yeah, some people who choose not to get the vaccine are going to die. But I've come to the conclusion, even in America where we have two or three thousand deaths a day right now, 94, 95 percent of which are people who just choose not to get vaccinated. And I'm like, you know what? If that's their choice and everybody else can move on, we can't hold them down. That's not American to hold somebody down and put a needle in their arm. And it's not an issue for the people who are vaccinated. So sorry for the

immunocompromise, but they've already had this issue before COVID of, you know, getting caught in a cold. So the, where is the rationality to this and the proportion was crazy? And then if you look, my tweet, literally, you wrote your thing and I did my tweet, we're like exactly had the same observation is I just said Trudeau freezing bank accounts of truckers is going to do more for Bitcoin adoption than McDonald's accepting it. Like I looked at it and was like, I need to have some Bitcoin for when my account gets frozen. Maybe, you know, I'm whatever small percentage in Bitcoin right now. I do have a low seven figure Bitcoin position. I'm like, maybe I need to double it. Or maybe I need to find another cup, a basket of cryptocurrencies, maybe some stable coins.

I'm like, I literally was like, what's the most anonymous, hard to seize crypto? And I think that that is the case here. If you think, if you just take this three steps forward, what else could the government do with programmable money that they controlled? Because they do control our money. We just have lived, like you said, with this veneer that they can't seize our money.

But they actually can. So much of this is simply just like the expectations that someone wouldn't. I mean, this was what the US went through with Trump, right? That there were all these norms. Norms, yes. They weren't strictly written down and they weren't strictly nailed down.

and someone could come in and just violate those norms and suddenly you go like, holy shit, we're not holding this together with anything else than legitimacy. Legitimacy is usually a pretty strong agent to hold these things together. But I think the Canadian situation for me just gave me that wake up call of like,

the wheels can come off so quickly that I need to take another look at this. And as I said, I've been such a stanched Bitcoin I don't know, critic, skeptic for so long. I didn't have anything in,

in Bitcoin. And to be fair, I had a cursory level understanding of it. And one of the first things I did was like, got the white paper, like the Bitcoin, original Bitcoin. White paper,

like, I got to read up on this stuff. I got to read it. I should understand it better. And I got a bunch of feedback on it too. I mean, that tweet. What have you learned about it? Like now that you're on the other side of it saying, you know what,

there is a case here. Yes. And have, has it, opened your eyes to a couple of possibilities because you're also an entrepreneur product person, like one of the best product people, I think, in terms of constructing products that actually provide value. Has it gotten your creative juices? And when we see a 37 signals, you know, Jason free DHS production of like, hey, crypto. Is there a hey crypto coming? I doubt it. I mean,

there's definitely, there's people who've been in this for far longer. This is one of the drawbacks of being a skeptic and a critic. You sit on the sideline and you start from scratch. Sometimes that gives rise to new ideas, but I don't know if this is exactly my space, but what it has given me is a renewed appreciation for decentralization, that the major issue here is these choke points, that a government like the Canadian conscripted tow truck operators who originally had refused to tow these trucks and said, if you don't do it, we're going to put you in jail, we're going to find you, we're going to use the power of the state to force you to do it. They went to the insurance companies, said the same thing.

you're going to drop these policies and these truckers because this is how we're going to squeeze them. Again, no due process. This is all happening under these martial law style powers. And then they went to the banks, right? And they went to the banks and said, like, you're just going to, not just to the bank. They actually also went to the crypto exchanges. Right. Which was an interesting thing where you, like, a lot of this activity in the crypto space.

And one of the reason I've been sort of skeptical is like, how decentralized is actually some of this stuff? And again, the only use can. for crypto is not necessarily just a decentralized part, but that's the part I'm interested in. And this is the part that really flipped me, that if we had a mode of sending digital cash from one wallet to another, one recipient in Canada, and that the government could not block that because they could just shut down the exchange or shut down the wallet, that provides a release valve, in my opinion, for a functioning democracy. The government has these uniform power to

stop you from transacting, I mean, that curtails all your other powers. There was a great thread by some pseudo-anonymous guy, punk, 65, 27. Of course, this is the other thing

in crypto, every... Yeah. Which, I mean, it's funny. I actually have some appreciation for that. It reminds me of, like, old demo scene. When we first got on the internet and we had

PBS and we all, it was charming. And we all had aliases and stuff, right? It's charming unless you're running a grift and you're stealing everybody's money. unless you're donating to some truckers to buy fuel. All of a sudden, you also want to be anonymous or pseudo-anonymous or whatever, right?

Double-inch, yes. Yes, double-hs. And that's the other thing. I mean, I haven't changed many of my objections to crypto or Bitcoin. And I think there are all sorts of problems that could arise from this, just like there are all sorts of problems with cash. But I think if someone came today and like, I'm going to introduce cash, it cannot be tracked. You can hand it over.

You can hide it wherever you want. Like, this is a great technology. You might even be able to forge it. You never know. Exactly. Can I get in on this cash technology here? Like there's then reasons for why that doesn't work so well. And we're moving towards a cashless society.

We need this release valve. And the cost of that release valve is that like some crime will happen, some fraud will happen. But I've just changed my priorities. It's not that I think the fraud isn't there, the crime isn't or couldn't be there. There's just some things that to me rank higher. that I'll accept some of those things if it means that someone donating to a protest can't be left with no option at all

for how to transact. I think a lot of people are going to start learning about like Monaro and Zcash. I immediately started tweeting like what are the, which one is actually the most resilient, most private, you know,

and it turns out there are projects where people have built them around this concept of being more untraceable, you know, and harder stop. Which again, it totally has its dropbacks too, right? Like, from tax evasion to this, that, and the other thing. But cash has had that for hundreds of years. People have used cash to commit crimes and so on and so forth. And also society has kept going on.

Like, do we look back on the 60s or 70s and 80s ago, like, holy shit, this was just nightmare time. Right. Where cash was the main mode of payment and transaction. And like, it was just total carnage and mayhem. No, a lot of people actually look back on that era and like, hey, they had some things I'd like to have now, including a line of Twitter and other things. Anyway. Well, think about it.

Like, if you were going to pay a terrorist to do something terrible, you would give them like, we've seen the movies. They're like, here's a duffel bag. Here's a bag of diamonds. Like, there was some way to pay them off. Here's a bunch of gold bullion. You know, like, this is the equivalent of that. Now, you can move a lot more money, a lot faster. So there is a terrible scenario that's some terrorists like Osama bin Laden instead of raising

money, you know, with duffel bags full of cash from unknown places. It could be, you know, a lot more money coming in Z cash or something. But people get arrested for crimes, right? They do. And you can get, we have a whole legal system of charges and prosecutions and all these things to deal with that. Yeah. But the thing that flipped for me is I am now less afraid of that scenario than I have of the state scenario. That's a tipping point. Wow. And that's the tipping point. That's a tipping point. Where I went like, up until this point, my analysis of Bitcoin and the rest of the crypto space was like, I'm more afraid of that scenario.

No one is ever going to cancel someone's bank account without due process. That is something that maybe is relevant in these failing states or overtly authoritarian ones. And then you go like, oh, now this is the reality in Canada. And it got to be that way in three weeks over this protest. I need to update my software. I need to update my software, my firmware, how I think about these. things and I need to open my eyes to it in a different way. And I also need to eat some humble pie, right, after being so skeptical on these things and having people who had seen that, right? And

particularly if they came from one of these regimes and like, hey, do you know what? This is happening to us. And I go like, well, yeah, okay, I could see that. It's not relevant to the Western experience. We have democracies. We have rule of law. We have all these other things. So that's why, to me, it's just such a shocking moment. And then the second order of shocking that has such support. I really, I did not expect that. That was weird. That was so weird to tweet. Like, I was tweeted when I did that Bitcoin tweet, people were like, stop talking about Canada. You don't understand it. And I'm like, I don't understand. This is the thing I found so interesting. Like, what am I miss? I just responded. What am I missing? This was one of the number one

complaints in a bunch of the truckers got with the serve replies I got was you don't understand Canada, right? You're actually not qualified to commentate on, can Canadian situation because you don't live here. Hey, does that principle apply to a Canadian's commenting on the U.S. political scene too? I don't think so, right? This idea that we can't comment on something as shaking as this. And I consider Canada to be part of this sort of pantheon of Western democracy.

So if something is happening in one of them, it is surely relevant as a warning signal to the rest of us. And we should be alert. And we shouldn't go like, well, these are Canadian concerns and like that just is irrelevant. That to me is like looking at Italy in spring of 2020 and go like, wow, that CoronaVivish looked bad. No, that's probably not our concern. That's never going to happen here. Only for Italians.

Do you know what? This is the black swan, right? You go around thinking all swans are white. Suddenly do you see a black one and you go like, do you know what? There's no way that's the only one that's ever going to be. Yeah, it's not a phenomenon. Once you've crossed the Rubicon, you don't go back, right? Like these norms, they are surprisingly fragile.

And I think Canada is in a very interesting place. But even if nothing else happened, this was just the end of it. And now for the rest of time, the Canadians were like, okay, actually maybe that was a mistake. Maybe we don't admit it's a mistake. But we just don't do it again. We're not going to pull out these crazy weapons. Yes. You've broken the dam.

You've shown everyone else that like every authoritarian person is looking at it or not authoritarian who just feels they're on the right side of history is going to go, you know what? Trudeau did it. We can do that. He's a moderate. If Trudeau can do it, I can do it. It doesn't take much for an authoritarian like Trump. I mean, you give him an inch.

I mean, look what he's done. He gave the green light to Putin, to Xi Jinping and to, you know, North Korea. And they're like, oh, we can behave badly? Great. Thank you. Thanks for the West for giving us a thumbs up. We're going to go crazy. What's going on over?

I have a slightly different analysis on that. I don't even get into that. But I think just tying it to these other things that's been happening in the U.S., the shutdowns of things off. platforms, the power that big tech has, the conscription of big tech by government officials, as happened in Canada, that it took that little. And in some ways, we shouldn't be that surprise, right? The Snowden revelations showed us how little it took for the NSA to conscript AT&T and a bunch of these other corporations. And now they're going to be part of this, right? And you think the

power that big tech has to all our most important computing platforms and the fact that what will it take for them to imagine you get cancelled in the US and someone cancels your iTunes account. Suddenly you're locked out of your I message, you're locked out of your phone, you're locked out of everything, which by the way has happened just within their own little ecosystem.

Someone didn't pay a bill once for a computer and they were locked out of their whole thing or you get locked out of Google. We've reached the point of digitalization now. If you get locked out of your bank, you get locked out of your phone, you get cut off from a huge swath of society. You are in serious trouble.

Yeah. Right. And these kinds of remedies should meet the most stringent of due process terms to be enacted. We can't have that someone just decides, hey, I think you have unacceptable views. Ergo, boom, your bank account is gone. And anyone in like two degrees of separation from you who might have helped you along the way, boom, them too. That is just, that's terrible. And it's frightening.

And it's, to me, the shocking part is the same. is that there are not more people reaching this conclusion. And maybe there are. I think that's the other thing. I mean, as we learned with April, lots of people reach conclusions all the time that they don't broadcast on Twitter. The broadcasts usually have to fit into team narratives and so forth. And sometimes people will just silently for themselves go like,

what is this is this fucking bad shit? You hear about it now in the group chats. So if you look at what people are saying on their Twitter, I have the same group of friends. And on Twitter, they're totally silent about an issue. And then they're like, okay, this is crazy with the mask mandates. Why is my, why am I going into a restaurant and wearing a mask from the reception to the thing?

And then why are the server, why are the servers wearing masks and we're not? And we're in the same 800 square feet? This makes no sense. And my kids are going to school, but they're outside. This is why I'm really bullish on the fact that, do you know what? We might actually unseat these social networks because the real conversations are going to be happening in these private chats. I've noticed exactly the same thing.

And I noticed the same thing over email too, that these private means of communication, and that's where, quote, unquote, the truth comes out. Or people are being honest. Let's just say that, not even truth. Honest. And Twitter and Facebook and these, in many ways, are just becoming these tribal platforms where you reaffirm your pieties, right? And you say your hell marries and like, I am on Team A or Team Blue or Team Red or Team Z.

and I'm in good standing with these ideologies and I'm not a person of blasphemy and then you go behind it, right? Which is, you look at the evolution of religion and prohibition and all these other things. There are plenty of historical echoes. Selimuth trials, yeah. There's plenty of historical echoes of this were totalitarian regimes, right? Like the stories coming out of the Soviet bloc or so on where people would put on their party face and then they would whisper in the shadows what they really thought. And again, that we could get here, right?

Like, in some ways, maybe that shouldn't be shocking. Maybe if you looked at the totality of human history, like this is simply the cycles we go in. But we don't live in the totality of human history. We live in, I mean, I'm 42, right? So I got to see and remember sort of politically, I remember the 90s, I remember the 2000s, and here we are, right? Like, it's not actually that long of a time frame. And you can study history.

and so on, but it's so different when you feel it on your own body, right? Absolutely. And you go like, wow, is this the timeline we're living in? Yeah. I mean, it's amazing the stress test we went through. We had this like very, like, it was almost like this charming period where there wasn't anything too stressful to the system. And then the Trump and the pandemic in that short period of time seems to have been like,

okay, we're to test all the norms here. And then you have the social media thing, you know, as the way and the media as the interpretation of these two very stressful events. And the pandemic, a once in a hundred year pandemic creates all these weird behaviors and then fear and then is there any truth? You've got to build a chat on. We haven't even started to unpack just the number of forces working on us at once. But it is interesting where, as you can only appreciate history in the review mirror, you go like, wow, those 2000s were pretty chill, weren't they? And of course, they weren't. There was the Iraq War and there was all these other things. But the feeling of

the acceleration of it, feels novel. And part of that is Twitter. One of the things I learned I would take these long breaks over the past year. And time slows down if you don't put yourself into these streams, these rivers of shouting people. It really does. And if you just consume like one daily newspaper,

the world to some extent doesn't seem as terrible that maybe it is or that it appears. But we can't let it go. These platforms are so addictive and they're now so dominant. If you look at Twitter's role in American politics right now as the agenda setter, it's the main, it's the main deal. It's really bizarre. Or one of the main deals at least. And that is just,

that's a terrifying prospect. And what's more terrifying is like, where's the off ramp? Like, I'm having even a trouble of imagination. I can't. I actually know. I can see it.

You know, like when you look at somebody like Dave Chappelle saying, like, I don't listen to Twitter because it's not a real place. And watch me exist in the world. without caring about Twitter. And he is. And I think what happens to a certain point is you left Twitter, you started writing,

and other people are leaving and going to private chats. And I think what people are saying is, okay, there are these two crazy groups of extremes, at least in the United States, this crazy alt-right, this crazy, you know, historical left. They're actually like really weird people who are not enjoyable to be around. And then it's kind of nice to be with the people in the middle. and that old world in the 90s and 2000s where we had the dinner party and we disagreed but we drank wine and we learned something

from each other and we couldn't wait to get back together and have another dinner and open another bottle of wine or have a coffee and play chess and debate for two hours. I think everybody's like, I kind of miss that. So I think the off ramp is we choose.

We choose to put our attention somewhere. I've chosen to not engage with these people and do more podcasting. Because when I get out of a conversation with you, you know, and we have our conversations. I think we both look forward to them. We come out of them and say,

you know what, that was a really great conversation. I learned something. You and I have learned so much, I think, from each other. I know I've learned a lot from you. You had all these, like, ideas that really challenged my thinking about work.

You know what I did? My realization was, you know what? I've worked too hard in my life. I thought over the last two years when my friend Tony Shea died, you know, Tony really enjoyed life.

Are there things that I should be doing that Tony was doing? And am I going to die? Yeah, I am going to die soon? And I could die young. and one of the things I realized was I'm not skiing enough I always love skiing so I bought a ski house I skied 33 days this year

I was skiing three days a year I've skied more this year than I did in the last decade at least and it was just a simple change I said to my team I'm going to work from four to eight at night four to seven 30 and I'll work from whatever seven to 12

just don't put anything in that 12 to four window so I can get out on the slope for two hours it's changed my whole mental framework. I think I physiologically and mentally, spiritually changed where I just dream about carving and, you know, the feeling of going down the mountain. And it's totally changed my brain chemistry. It's a lot to do with like the balance you talk about, other people have talked about, and constructing my own life to one that makes me happy. It's not, you know, I mean, how much more do I need to achieve? Like, you've said this many times. And you probably needed to

Prices to get there, right? I think I did, when Tony died, it did change everything away. I look about the world. It was just, he had a joy, and he's gone. And all of that joy that he would bring into our lives is gone. And how do we bring that back? And I have a group of friends on a chat that's BLT is the name of our chat, be like Tony.

And we all just looked at it and said, you know, Tony's gone, but we can remember him. And the way we can pay tribute to Tony is to just be a little bit like him. You knew Tony, I think. In passing. And it's just a beautiful human. And I was just like,

all of us just made a decision, let's be just a little bit like Tony every day. And Tony's love people and they loved experiences. And so I just said, you know what? A little more people, a little more experiences. That's so great. Great to hang out with you again.

You're such a great guess. And you're so honest and insightful. It's just great to know you, David. Well, thank you. And likewise, I always enjoy these chats. And that's exactly it. This is one of the most frustrating times to like debate. And I love debate. I love debate. I love talking about all these things. And debate has become dangerous in a way that's really sad where I think we advance and we get these new perspectives through these debates. But when these debates now are so explosive and the consequences of having the wrong take in the moment. moment is so high. You just back off. You slipped up in this conversation. Yes.

I'm sure I said some stupid stuff. Right. You can you can pick something out of these hour and a half. We've talked. And you'd go like, well, that's the worst thing ever. He deserves to be canceled because of that. Yes. And I just go like, this is so sad.

We will end up self-censoring ourselves into a corner of ignorance and bitterness. And what if you, as you're exploring the edge of this conversation, all of a sudden you turn over a rock and you find a, you know, a diamond. You turn over a rock and you find this great, wonderful thing that moves humanity forward. Well, you know what? If we stop turning over rocks and we stop exploring because we're scared. We're scared to have a conversation. We're scared to debate what happened in Canada because somebody's going to say, oh, you know,

or scared to say, do kids under five need the vaccine? Is it essential or not? You know, like, I've got kids above five. I had kids under five. of course I would think about the shot before giving it to them and that gets me cancelled. Really? Before giving an experiment. I mean, when people were debating MRNA as an experiment, I went to my friends who knew

MRI as a hey, Freiburg, tell me about MRI. You know, should I be scared of it? He's like, it's very new. I'm like, okay, have a billion people been given MRNA before? He's like, nope. Like, nobody's been given MRNA. This is like a huge experiment. I'm like, how do we know it's?

okay, it's like, well, we'll know in the short term in a year when a billion people get it and we'll know in the long term in 20 years. It's like, okay, there's a good risk assessment. I'm going to take the shots. Right. Which was the same thing I had, right? Like, I was happy to get those shots. I was like, no one, I'm in reasonable shape,

but I'm over 40. Right? Like, my risk factor is just different than a five-year-old. And I will make a different assessment for that. And for us not to even be able to have those discussions is just such a sad in place because look how much we got wrong. And when I say we, I mean consensus, right?

Yeah. You would think that that would provoke some of that humility. We were talking about that mirror where you go like, oh, do you know what I used to say when this first sprayed out, the masks don't work. And then they totally worked and you could use anything. And then the cloth mask actually were shit and weren't helpful. And then you need the N95.

Like, this is evolving, which means that we need the dissent, even when the dissent is wrong, some of the time. Sometimes at a time it'll be right. Right. Sometimes it'll be right. And if we don't have it, if we squash these voices early on, we'll never have the insight. This is what's so frustrating about this, like to capitalize the science. The science is a process.

And that process requires argumentation and debate and dissent. And if you squash that out, you don't have the science. You have something else. And it gave me such great hope. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. And to see that in Denmark, we were able to have these debates in a much broader way.

I got some sniffs and echoes, right? This is the other thing. We're all just human. And this was the thing about the Canadian thing. There was such a great reminder that, like, you know what, we're more like each other than we think. And Denmark is not immune to these kinds of things. If this is happening in Canada, you should mentally prepare what are the mechanisms? How do we counteract this?

Where should I be spending my time in my brain? on podcast like this, writing over email, arguing with people in private groups, all this other stuff. But I'm still, you're more hopeful, I think, than I am for the turning point of this. I don't know if it's going to come organically. I hope the thing that's going to switch this is a crisis of a different kind of dimension that I'm not keen to see. Yeah. The thing that makes me hopeful is if you look at the class of people, and I'm not saying this to be

classist. I'm just saying there are different people in the world. There's a group of people who are builders. You and I are lucky enough to have spent our career with the great builders in society, people who start things and build something. That doesn't mean people who take other jobs or less, but the builder class is important for society. And the builder class is still out there, more than ever, and the capital allocation class, the people who give them the resources to do that, because some of these projects can't be bootstrapped, they need resources. Those people are as vibrant, aggressive, in pursuit of greatness, in pursuit of solving, and they're the ones in the private chats.

So when I see, you know, all of the capital allocators I work with, all of the great product people, all of the visionaries, the scientists, the engineers, the writers, the podcasters, moving to private groups and having their discussions there. And then Twitter becomes a marketing channel. Twitter becomes a place to retweet a friend. It's like this little tool over here. And I look at it as like a little tool for me to market my businesses or share my thoughts,

but then the important discussions are happening around the poker table, on the podcast, in the messages, and we're all moving the ball forward. And you look at what's happening in terms of energy and, you know, this biology and some of the innovations in tech, it's extraordinary. Even cryptocurrency has got some extraordinary technologies in it that are worthy of, you know, being impressed by. You know, the fact that people can move money around the planet and it's all tracked on this ledger and nobody's in charge and it hasn't been hacked. I mean, when I look at Bitcoin, the resiliency of it, the anti-fragile nature of it, it's like the bigger it gets, the more resilient it is? Like, isn't it supposed to be a bigger target now? It's supposed to be like Windows.

There's a bigger target. So therefore, more people use it. Therefore, there should be more viruses. And the opposite has happened. It's getting more stable. it's so weird to me that it's anti-fragile in that way. And that's also been one of those things where you look back on like, if you are in opposition to something for 10 years and it's still around and it's growing,

you were wrong. Fair change, you were wrong, right? I feel the same way. Yeah, I was like, I thought for sure it'd be hacked or replaced. Like, why hasn't it been hacked at its core? Like I'm talking like, why hasn't like a server level? There was a novel insight, right? There was a novel construction that made it answer fragile.

And I think that that's really fascinating. Well, I am actually inspired by your optimism that we can drain Twitter and these other nasty channels of sort of the real conversations, that they move somewhere else. And if we can rescue those conversations, just that they're still being had, they're not just being suppressed. That's a really comforting thought. And I've changed my Twitter years to the same thing. I just, I post links to my writing and I turn off comments on everything I post and I have done for a year. And I just don't use that as a platform of having any discussion of any kind. And then I put all that energy into discussions like this, discussions in the private chats,

discussions on email. So good. And it's actually, it's restoring my faith in this idea of talking to strangers, which was something social media destroyed my faith. And I thought the problem was like, well, strangers just can't have these conversations. You need a rapport. You need all these other things. Maybe you need the bottle of wine.

Maybe you need these other things to facilitate it. And finally, it's not true. True. So I have at simultaneous levels, greater faith in humanity that we'll figure it out, while also just being utterly depressed about the depravity that these social media channels. All right. I'll see you on our private chat that I'm starting right after this. And everybody go, stop what you're doing, pause the pod, world.h.com.com slash dh. Sign up for his email, world.com.com.com. And if you don't have a hay.com email, great product. Go check it out. super affordable, super private,

get yourself a backup, even at the very least, to the dependency on Google and Apple's ecosystems and DHS. I'll talk to you in six, 12 months, maybe we can put something on the calendar and chop it up again, and hopefully I'll get to Europe

and we can go find a cafe and crack open that bottle of wine. God, I'm so jelly of you in Denmark. Such great food. You get those Schmourbergs? You get those Schmourbergs? Oh, that's good. And the brown bread with the fish on it and that butter.

Oh. I get those every day. It's good. I'll share a meal anytime, man. This was a pleasure. Talk to you soon, brother. All right. And we'll see you all next time on this weekend start.

Bye bye. All right, everybody. It's Friday. So it's time for everybody's favorite segment of the week. Rachel Reporting's famous, now infamous, OK Boomer segment. Who do you got for us on our OK Boomer producer, Rachel? I got to speak to my first non-Gen Z of this segment. I know. I know. Old or youngster?

He was older. Not that much older, but he had a really cool app. The person I got to speak to was named Tony Tran from Lumano. He is the founder and CEO. And Lumano is a company that helps creators manage their invoicing, payments, collaborations, and more. I've been very interested in the creator economy. And I know a ton of Gen Zs that would love to use this. So I got to pick his brain and hear his thoughts on the entire process of being a founder and the landscape of creators.

And the generational difference, right? It sounds like he talks about the difference with you between Gen Z creators and millennial creators. It's not just about the side part. It's actually how they manage their money. Definitely. He goes in and it was really interesting actually hearing him speak on that in particular because I don't feel like I even consume much content that's being like advertised

to me by millennial creators. like if you asked me, like a millennial creator right now that has, that I've seen like try to like pitch a product to me, whether I'm like scrolling through my TikTok feed or watching on YouTube, I don't know if I can name one. So that was really interesting for me because I tend to consume content of people my own age. So definitely an interesting topic that he brought up. Fascinating.

All right. Here it is. Okay boomer with Rachel reporting. Okay boomer. I understood the assignment. Thank you so much, Tony Tran, for coming on a segment of Okay, Boomer. So I'm guessing you are not a Gen Z. You're actually the first guest on the show who's not a Gen Z, but I know you deal heavily with Gen Z and Gen Z culture.

So I thought it would be really cool to have you on. Can you talk to us a little bit about Lumano? I understand that you're the CEO of it. I found them on Twitter. And overall, I just thought it was a really interesting company. Yeah, for sure. So Lumano, we started in 2017, and our mission is quite simple. We want to empower creators to thrive under own terms.

I think it's an exciting time right now where there's a whole generation of solopreneurs and entrepreneurs making more money in more ways than ever, you know, working with whom they love on projects that they're passionate about. And we want to be that one-stop shop, you know, full-stack business platform for them. The idea is you can run your entire business from your phone. Think about it like QuickBooks with none of the anxiety, with built-in payments, banking, all the things creators need and nothing they don't. Awesome.

And I think it's really cool that you're helping. helping out with the creator economy. I read on the morning consultant that 86% of young people say they want to, they want to post on social media for money. So obviously there's a giant market there. And I understand that you make it easier on the operation side for doing things like invoices and payments and to create partnerships. How difficult is it to actually find brands that want to create,

that want to advertise with creators? You know, it's funny. It used to be a lot harder. but now with everything that's going on from people tuning out advertising to even like the more technical things like the new Apple changes with advertising. You know, a lot of the brands understand that at the end of the day, the message isn't the only thing that matters. It's who's delivering the message.

You know, I was a Vietnamese immigrant, moved to America in 94. I didn't really see a whole lot of people like me in media, in TV ads. But creators basically give brands opportunity to tailor their. message and actually have it come from voices and people that look like their customers. So what you find at, everything from, I mean, we work with everyone from like really big companies like Walmart, down to fashion companies, even tech companies, right? Trying to convince someone to put money into your new crypto app or to use you as an alternative to Robin Hood.

It helps when you have people that are as diverse as your customers are or should be. Do you see a difference between Gen Zee creators and millennial creators on the platform? I do. And you know what's funny, we internally at Lumano, we have this idea of a Gen Z ethos, which obviously Gen Zs have, and actually a lot of younger millennials have as well. When you think about like the old school, like sort of millennial, even older creators, they grew up on things like blog. You know, everything had to be very perfect, very filter, very tailored.

And then Instagram and Facebook was the same. What we see with Gen Z is that raw sort of unedited perception and, you know, just the way to talk about their brand, the way to talk about their interestness with the brand. And I think even brands that work with Gen Z creators really let them do what they do best, right, and not give them like a script, which tends to be the case even like a few years ago in terms of like, hey, you know, I want you to like follow the script.

It's almost like a TV commercial. Whereas now it's just like, we love working with you. We love, you know, who you are as a creator. Here's our product and just give us your honest, candid reactions to it. So is there a sole reason you think why brands are choosing to do influencer marketing over that higher quality content that like we've seen previously. I see like a Super Bowl commercial or something that's just really processed, maybe not necessarily of that like pay scale.

But is there a reason why brands would funnel a bunch of their money into like micro influencers rather than doing something a little bit higher scale? Totally. You know, I think at the end of the day, it's not just the funneling. It's just about having diverse content. There's always a time in place for super polished content. that's for like a Super Bowl commercial, right? Or a billboard ad.

But, you know, just like how people respond to different stimuli, it's just helpful to diversify the type of content you're producing so that some of it is more polished and some of it is just more rogive and more approachable and relatable to the average consumer. And I think that's one of the big reasons why brands now are investing so much money in this area. And I also want to call out, you know,

creators aren't just influencers making content to be posted on social media. We see a very common pattern of creators essentially acting as solo content producers. Like we ourselves, Luano, you know, work with creators to make content for our FAQs, right?

For showing up inside our product, for educational content. It's just so much better for a creator to explain how to use Lamanu than someone internal to our team. And a lot of brands do that as well. They use creator content in their Abad and Cart emails on their website, product reviews,

even content that never gets published. We had a creator who makes a lot of money creating content for meditation ads. You know, she doesn't have that many followers on Instagram, but she makes a very comfortable living doing that. That is so interesting here. I've definitely seen the gig economy work and freelancing work in general, and that space definitely amongst my generation increase, especially since the pandemic has hit. And if you ask somebody around my age to go back into an office,

I think they'd rather pick up freelancing content creation than they would maybe move across the country to work in a cubicle. And so for you guys, how do you actually acquire these customers? Like, do creators pay them or do brands pay them? By customers, you mean how do we get creators on board? Yeah, for sure. I'm glad you asked. That's actually one of the our secret sauce, if you will. So we have a really unique acquisition model.

We have a two-sided network. On one side, you know, we have a mission of empowering creators to thrive on their own terms. And some of the brands today who really believe in our mission know that, you know, running Facebook ads and advertising is relatively commoditized, right? But if you can actually get creators, to love you because they love working with you. Like that is something that can differentiate you from your competitors.

So we work with some of the top brands out there from, you know, Fashion Nova, we evolve, some of your best DTC companies. And as they onboard their creators, for the purpose of giving that relationship, you know, the best chance to succeed to make life easy for both sides. You know, my joke is you've got to tweak creators as an extension of your team, not just as another ad buy. So they onboard their creators to Lamanu. So that's a big source of acquisition for us.

Simultaneously, we have a great marketing team who invest very heavily in elevating and helping to create our community. So we get a lot of creators as someone told them about us. They go on our website. One thing I love doing is I go on Google and I can actually see what people search for. And you can see when they misspell our name with L-A-M-A-N-U. And I could tell, well, it's probably because you heard about us at a bar or something. And that's how you know, you didn't know how to spell it, but you sort of phonetically write it out.

So it's always cool to see the number of search results with that because then you know that people are talking about us in real life. But yeah, so that's basically the two channels. You know, we do a lot of marketing, a lot of community, a lot of organic referrals. And then the other side is from the brands we work with. And why would somebody choose to go to an online platform rather than going to like a management company?

Yeah. So, you know, for us at the end of the day, we actually work very closely with creators, with managers as well. I have a lot of manager friends and I tell them all the time creators are giving you 10, 12, 8%, not just to send invoices and hunt down payments.

Your job is to grow their business is to be a business partner. And a lot of managers, even hire assistance to take care of the more mundane admin stuff. Look, no one wakes up in the morning saying, I need to hunt down all the people that owe me money. I need to figure out which one of my expenses

is a tax write off. I need to hunt down this receipt. It doesn't matter if you're a manager or creator or an assistant. So for us, you know, we frame it as Lumano is basically your secret weapon, whether you're a creator who can't afford a manager or you're a manager who wants to free up more of your time, right, to network and actually get new business for your, for your talent. But that's sort of like what I've seen. It's never like either or. Now, if you're a creator just starting out, you know, and managers won't pick you up, the Lumano community is a great way to get a lot of the benefits without the full-fledged. We almost call it like the Little Leagues. And then as you, you know, get larger, more successful and you can work with one of the managers in our network. I was actually talking to my friend and I actually enjoy seeing like sponsored content on my

TikTok feed from smaller creators rather than larger creators because it just doesn't feel as salesy and like I mentioned before, it definitely feels more organic. So it's cool that you guys have a space for that to exist because as a consumer, that's definitely something that I value a lot more than having somebody that maybe is always like pushing products or just as you can tell that they're doing the ad partnership for a paycheck, maybe having the smaller creators, feels a little bit more natural to me. And how do you guys charge?

Like, how do you guys make money? Is this a consistent thing that you're doing? Or is it based on, like, is it based on how big the project's going to be? You know, it's funny. When we talk to creators, so we have this program called White Glove onboarding, where we personally onboard every creator that uses Lamanu, if, you know, they're willing to hop on a Zoom call. And they always ask us, like, how do you guys make money?

So we're actually free for creators to use, absolutely free. It's free to send invoices. It's free to receive money. I joke all the time. PayPal is probably one of the worst things for creators in that not only did they charge you 2.9%, but there's a lot of stuff out there about how they hold on to your money. Because, you know, a creator making thousands of dollars from a brand, it's just going to set off red flags. So we're free.

The only thing we make money on is we have a product feature called Early Pay. It's our big belief that as a creator, just like most entrepreneurs and solepreneurs, You need cash in order to grow your business. But unlike a big company with venture funding, creators are living in a way where their business and their personal life are very intertwined. You know, if a client doesn't pay you on time, that could be a rent-shed.

You know, if you had a medical emergency or an expense, right? And you just didn't get your money from YouTube that month. Like, that could be a really bad thing. So early pay costs 2.9%, which is the same as PayPal. And essentially, we pay you whatever a brand or a platform owes you up front. And then we take on the onus of collecting the money on the back end. So we essentially tell them it's cost the same as PayPal, but you get your money instantly. And you can use that money to we invest in your business or to, you know, hire, pay for a production video you really wanted to do or just pay for some, you know, some personal expenses.

On the other side, we also have a nice revenue stream coming from the brands and agencies we work with. So they pay like a monthly license subscription to use to use our software. Got you. And so early pay, just take it clear. They're like essentially small loans for creators, right? Yeah. So there are small loans, but unlike a loan, we're actually buying the, it's called an accounts receivable, but we're buying the invoice from the creator. So as a creator, let's say we, you know, you have an invoice to Bloomingdale's for $5,000 and then they went bankrupt or whatever and they couldn't pay you. You are not on the hook. This doesn't hit your credit score. It's not that we actually take on all the onus and all the risk. And the reason we can do that is because we have a really good understanding of who the creators are what they're doing. And we can basically underwrite them like a banquet.

Gotcha. And what's like the average spread between when a creator gets paid from you guys and when the invoice hits from the brand? You're talking about early pay or just in general? Just in general without using early pay. Well, it's funny. It really varies. We've seen anywhere from 10 days all the way to 60 and 90 days when you're working with like bigger agencies or bigger brands. One thing I tell creators all the time is we've actually seen if you invoice from like a professional email and not just at Gmail at Yahoo, you get paid faster.

But yeah, one of the things that we do as a company is we send reminders and do all the things that an accountant would do, but like a creator usually doesn't do because you don't have time to play the accounts payable, accounts receivable scheme. Yeah, we see it varies. And a lot of times too, we notice a lot of creators aren't just invoicing, you know, brands. they're invoicing clients of theirs like coaching, right? A lot of creators are coaches. They're enforcing other creators. Those get paid within days. And how much,

so how much faster is early pay? So early pay can be as fast as 60, 90 days faster. We've like, oh, wow. Yeah, we had a creator, you know, invoice HBO and that usually takes like 90 days. Because remember, like HBO is paying so many vendors, right? Like, there are finance teams.

Like, you're probably as a creator so far down their list of priorities. But Lumano, being a corporation, with a lot of, it's almost like collective buying power, right? Like if we pop up in New York Times, Condé, NAS accounts, finance teams, list of invoices to pay, we tend to get pay way faster and like a small creator in North Carolina working on our own. That's definitely something that I've seen come up time at time again. Like I said before, I have a lot of friends that are in that freelancing community

and that space between like when you take on a client and when you complete your work to when you actually get paid is sometimes pretty detrimental. Do you have any advice for? or Gen Zs that want to break into this content creation role. Yeah, so I got a couple. You know, one is you have to network. You know, like myself, I take this a little bit for granted back when I was first starting out as a founder, but the more people you know, the more people they know, and the chances

of an opportunity coming on your door set is really high. You know, especially in today's economy, a lot of brands tend to work with multiple creators. And if there's already synergy and chemistry and network, they might even ask a creator, hey, who else do you know that would be good for this campaign? And if you've done your work and you're in community with those other creators, that just increases the chance of you surfacing up. And being in community could mean sharing notes, joining Facebook groups, doing joint collabs, you know, doing TikToks together.

I think even platforms like TikTok and so forth really make it easy, you know, for creators to work with other creators. So that's one. Two is, you know, really treat this as a profession, you know, not just as a hobby. So there's little things you can do, whether it's making an actual website, you know, use something like Webflow. pay a little bit extra money for like a good logo or incorporate, you know, get a business bank account, like actually get an email does not at Gmail. When people take you seriously,

not only will you get more opportunities, but they actually pay you like a profession, right, and not just someone that is just doing this as a hobby. For like major, major content platforms, are you starting to see them invest into influencer marketing? I know you mentioned HBO being one of them, But are they a one-off or is that like a reoccurring thing that you've been seeing? It's definitely reoccurring. I can't share with you since all of the people that we work with on a brand side. But let's just say there's a lot of media platforms producing a lot of short form and long-form content all tapping into creators, whether it's for talent for shows or as a way to amplify existing shows.

And it's a very common thing. Which makes sense. You know, creators are essentially modern-day micro-publisher's and micro-media companies. And, you know, yes, you have like the Addison Rays and like the really big ones, but even like a small creator, you know, it's, it's healthy business for both sides. Oh, definitely. And do you see like certain spaces right now that are blowing up? I know for me, just I'm on TikTok the most. So that's like the space that I see blowing up the most.

But do you on your end see any other platforms that are just really utilized well? You're talking about platforms like TikTok or the type of content that's being produced. You can answer both because I was going to say type of platform. That's a good question as well. So in terms of platform, I mean, you're spot on TikTok is huge. Another platform that's really interesting that I'm not sure if you've heard of as Kajabi. So it's funny enough, my wife left for a job to be a creator and is using Kajabi.

You know, one of the things I talk about in terms of creators is it's not just about amplifying content to millions and millions of people. If you're making content for any type of digital community, and it could be a community of like five people, there's different ways that you can distribute that content. You know, YouTube and TikTok gets you

in front of thousands, millions, platforms like Qajabi or Patreon or substack are a really great way to give content to a smaller community. And obviously the monetization is a little bit different. But I think I've seen a lot of

Qajabi content, especially with fitness. There's a lot of new startups nowadays where, you know, if you're like a Peloton trainer, you create content to distribute to a small cohort of fitness enthusiasts. So definitely, you know,

I think, think but TikTok, I would say right now, TikTok and Instagram are still two of the biggest. YouTube shorts is becoming more of a thing for sure. We've definitely seen a lot of creators being pegged by YouTube to amplify that. And in terms of the other topic, which I think is also really interesting, is from a topical standpoint, I've noticed a huge uptick in financial education and empowerment content. And it's not just about crypto and Web 3. I think, you know, the world is really wising up to the fact that there's a huge underserved

market of people who are now making money and they're not making money through your traditional nine to five job and the way to build financial health for those type of people is very different. So just a lot of financial content, a lot of technical content around that, then your usual like fitness, fashion and apparel, entertainment. I always am kind of nervous when I see financial content. First off, big fan of financial content on the internet. Like, I'm definitely that prime example of being a young adult who, you know, this is my first job at this speaking startups. This is my first full-time job.

So learning how to do things like allocating my Roth IRA. Like, instead of going to my parents' first thing, I go to YouTube because I'm a Gen Z. And I feel like YouTube answers all my questions. But there's something to be said and something a little bit scary about getting so much information off of YouTube and trying to parse through what is right and what's wrong in the content creator world. because I think some of it is just incredibly oversaturated. But on the YouTube side for YouTube shorts, I actually saw that YouTube is putting a lot more money into their short form content in general, which makes sense because I feel like they're trying to go after TikTok.

I think they announced that just a few weeks ago over on their YouTube blog. We went over it in an episode of this weekend startups, I'm pretty sure as well. Did you see that YouTube's using Google's giant cash reserve to pick off the top creators? Do you have any comments on that? Yes, it's definitely not a novel playbook. You know, a while back, Pritch's payouts to creators, right? It was leaked. And it's a thing.

You pay creators for exclusive rights for them to produce content in your platform. And then they bring their audience. It worked really well for Tritch. It didn't work that great for Microsoft's competition to Twitch. So we'll see how this turns out. But, yeah, I will say one thing. I'm a big fan of YouTube because I think it's one of the few content platforms. that have stood the test of time.

Now, there's some, you know, unfair advantages they have sitting on Google's servers and having a low-cost way to deliver content. But, you know, they tend to do work by creators. And there's a lot of content out there that generates ongoing revenue streams, which is something that Instagram, for instance, doesn't really do a great job of, at least not right now. But yeah, anything that gives creators passive income streams and, you know, paying creators up front for exclusive rights like that, I think.

So if you're going to, like, recommend one platform for creators to start out on, Which would it be? It really does depend on what type of creator they are. Okay. You know, if you are a, you don't want to set up a whole gig to do long form editing, I would say TikTok. You know, it's a great way to breakthrough. It's a great low effort way of networking with other creators.

I would very seldom recommend YouTube unless you really know what you're doing. But, you know, there's a couple of other platforms. I actually think starting off of Patreon is not a bad idea, especially if you're building a small group of people first and then let them inform you on what you should make for bigger channels. It's actually very similar to how like startups do it, right? You start with a small set of users, build for them as your early product advisors. And then when you're ready, launched a bigger market.

It's something that I've seen a few creators due to great effect. And you can always share your Patreon on like Reddit. I was going to say, how do you find people to check out your Patreon then? But if I see it, sharing it on Reddit, sharing it on Discord. I've seen a lot. I very recently have gotten into more like the Discord community is just because I find, again, Reddit, it's just been so difficult lately to just parse their things. and obviously their search function isn't phenomenal.

So I've been joining discords a lot, and people have been sending in their patrons going over, like, even things talking about like Web 3. They're like, we made a little master class. We broke it down really simple. Like, it's super cheap. If you guys want to check it out and support me. And I'm like, that's actually a really good idea.

I'm a big fan of that as well. Thank you so much for being on. This was super helpful just to see inside the world of the creator economy. I obviously think, like, Lumano is doing phenomenal things. and I'm excited to see what you guys do in the future. Yeah, no worries. I mean, this is the future. You know, I say like creators are just the tip of the iceberg.

This whole creator ethos, if you will. Just being able to like be passionate, you know, give something back to the world in a form of creativity and content, you know, entertain, inform and inspire. I think that's something that we're going to see a lot more of. And there's probably a bunch of platforms that are, you know, on the horizon, maybe AR or something else, you know. Oh, man. So we'll see. But yeah, I think it's an exciting time for sure to both be a creator and being the ecosystem to support. creators. Awesome. Thank you so much, Tony, and excited to get again, just really excited to see where

the entire creator space goes. I have a lot of hope for it in the future, and you guys are kicking out. My pleasure, Rachel. Hey, everyone. Producer Nick here. I want to tell you about the SaaS Syndicate. If you're a founder of a SaaS company with a product and market, our investment team wants to talk to you. Head over to the syndicate.com slash SaaS, S-A-A-A-S to apply to raise from the SaaS Syndicate. And you can join Jason's syndicate of over 9,000 accredited investors at the syndicate.com. Producer Justin here, no cool startup? Check out openscouting.com, where anyone can refer a startup to our investment team here at launch, even if you don't know the founder.

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