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

00:00:00.000 Hey, everyone. Welcome to the drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atiyah. This podcast,

00:00:15.480 my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity

00:00:19.800 into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and

00:00:24.760 wellness, full stop. And we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen.

00:00:28.880 If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more

00:00:33.280 in-depth content. If you want to take your knowledge of the space to the next level at

00:00:37.320 the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are. Or if you want to learn more now,

00:00:41.720 head over to peteratiyahmd.com forward slash subscribe. Now, without further delay, here's

00:00:48.080 today's episode. My guest this week is Jason Freed. You may recognize that name as Jason was a guest on

00:00:54.780 the podcast we released in October of 2019. At the end of that discussion, both Jason and I sat back

00:00:59.800 and thought, you know, on some levels, boy, this was kind of outside of what I normally talk about.

00:01:04.340 But at the other level, we thought there were a lot of topics that we could have gone deeper into.

00:01:07.740 And once the podcast actually came out, we were surprised, I suppose, pleasantly by the number of

00:01:12.840 questions that people put forth. And so we decided to do a follow-up AMA on that initial discussion.

00:01:19.120 And so we took questions from many of you broadly. Apologies for those of you who weren't aware of this.

00:01:24.600 We tried to do it through social media and other channels. But nevertheless, we culled together a pretty

00:01:28.920 good list of questions. And we've done our best to organize those for this discussion. We talk a lot

00:01:33.920 about work-life balance, the role of luck versus hard work and success, some tips on writing, a whole bunch

00:01:40.620 of things. Frankly, I think you're going to fall into one of two categories. Either you remember that initial

00:01:44.300 discussion and you're going to want to deep dive into it, in which case I don't need to tell you

00:01:47.440 anything more. Or you felt, hey, this, that episode, you know, I got all I needed out of it. I don't need to go

00:01:51.900 any further, in which case you can stop listening now. So with all that said, please enjoy this special

00:01:56.900 follow-up, Ask Me Anything with Jason Freak.

00:02:05.760 Jason, thank you so much for making more time to follow up. You've already been gracious once. So, you know, I

00:02:12.400 figured I'd take advantage of you twice.

00:02:14.960 I like being taken advantage of you, Peter. Thank you.

00:02:17.440 Well, you know, after we spoke the first time, you and I both had the same reaction. I remember we

00:02:22.820 talked about it right after, which was, man, did we get off onto some tangents that for us were

00:02:27.640 really interesting, but for others were maybe not so interesting. And I remember saying, I don't know.

00:02:33.700 Yeah, maybe, maybe we went off too far. And then Nick listened to it and said, oh no, this is great.

00:02:40.260 Like people are going to like it. And sure enough, Nick was right. We were wrong. And people had a lot of

00:02:44.540 follow-up questions. So I guess for listeners, that's really why we've decided to do this. I just

00:02:49.140 think there was so much great follow-up that I thought I can't resist a second bite at the apple.

00:02:53.800 And so basically all of the questions I'm going to ask you today, Jason, have come from listeners.

00:02:59.740 And I'll probably editorialize a little bit and I might dig off into a tangent should the question

00:03:04.520 lend itself to that. But for the most part, all of these questions I'm about to inundate you with

00:03:08.800 come from people who have been either listening to the first podcast and or just, you know, following

00:03:13.000 your pretty incredible work. So with the ground rules set and no time limits in place, let's go

00:03:19.160 to it. Let's do it. I might throw some back your way too, because I'm sure there's some medical stuff

00:03:23.740 in here somewhere that I know nothing about. Very well. So the first question is one that actually

00:03:32.440 came up several times. And I'm guessing it's a question you've heard before, but it's a variation of

00:03:37.320 the following. If you had taken your own advice about work-life balance at the start of your

00:03:41.800 career, would you have achieved the level of success that you're at today? Yeah, I do hear that

00:03:47.320 one a lot. And let me first admit that that was 20 plus years ago. So whenever you go back that far,

00:03:55.320 there's always some revisionist history, but I'd never really been a super long worker. I'm sure there

00:04:02.060 were nights that I worked longer than I normally would. I'm sure there were times when I was really

00:04:06.420 fired up and just couldn't get something out of my head and worked on it at night, especially when

00:04:09.620 I lived by myself when I was 21. But the two things I remember are this. One of the things

00:04:16.480 that got me to stop working some of those hours was actually realizing that putting in more time

00:04:21.560 wasn't helping. And I don't remember if I told the story on the other podcast we did, but I'll tell

00:04:27.020 it again for those who haven't heard it. Maybe no one has. I used to, when I was working on my own as a

00:04:32.380 freelancer, I would get these opportunities to write proposals. I'd get an RFP and some company

00:04:38.260 would want me to do website design and I would put together a proposal. And I thought that you had

00:04:42.220 to do really long, arduous proposals because that's what I thought proposals were. I'd seen

00:04:46.800 some of my friends do proposals. I asked some friends who were to big companies what their

00:04:50.440 proposals looked like because I didn't know what a proposal really looked like or was supposed to

00:04:53.380 look like. And they were big. They were like, you could hear them on the desk if you dropped them

00:04:58.100 from a foot up. They made a plonk sound. It was like there was substance to them. So I thought

00:05:02.780 that's what I had to do. And I remember working really long hours occasionally to prepare these

00:05:07.300 really big proposals to try and win business. And it was a lot of work. And oftentimes you didn't win

00:05:11.900 the business. And there was a lot of work for nothing, essentially. Yeah, you could say it was

00:05:16.320 worth it because I was trying and you're not going to get all jobs. But at some point I just started

00:05:20.700 to realize that this wasn't actually enjoyable for me. I could put in long hours and if I didn't win

00:05:25.120 the gig, that was kind of a major letdown. And do I want to keep doing that over and over?

00:05:29.420 So I started writing shorter and shorter proposals until one time I actually got a proposal from

00:05:34.900 someone else. I was redoing my kitchen or my bathroom, or maybe it was both at the time. I'm

00:05:38.540 not sure how that was staged, but I got a proposal from a contractor that I had asked to submit a

00:05:44.260 proposal. And what did I do? Well, I turned to the last page and I looked for the price and I looked

00:05:50.140 for how long it was going to take because that's what you do with proposals. First of all,

00:05:53.920 you only ask people to submit proposals if you already liked their work. You wouldn't ask someone

00:05:57.680 to submit a proposal that you didn't like. And so I already liked this contractor and how much

00:06:02.720 was it going to cost and how long was it going to take? And it kind of dawned on me that that's

00:06:05.840 what everyone pretty much does with proposals. So I started writing shorter and shorter proposals

00:06:10.300 until like by the end I was running one or two page proposals. And those didn't take very long.

00:06:14.780 I just kind of came up with the price and the time and wrote a little bit about the project

00:06:18.580 and what to expect. And I didn't win any more projects, but I also didn't lose any more projects.

00:06:22.860 So it was about the same, even though the amount of work I was doing was significantly less. And I

00:06:27.780 think that was a sort of a wake up call for me that just putting in more time doesn't mean anything

00:06:32.820 other than you're putting in more time. You're not guaranteeing yourself a better outcome or

00:06:37.160 anything like that. So that was a really good reminder earlier on in my career. And then the

00:06:41.120 next thing is that what I'm most known for today, where basically all my successes come from is this

00:06:47.200 product called Basecamp, which we make. And Basecamp, the product was developed on the side

00:06:52.820 with about 10 or 15 or 20% of our time, because we were actually still in the client business at the

00:06:57.820 time. So we had to carve out some extra time during the day to work on Basecamp. And then my current

00:07:03.140 business partner, but at that time, just a contractor, a guy named David Hanmeyer Hansen,

00:07:07.580 who wrote the code for Basecamp, was a student at Copenhagen Business School. And he could only give me 10

00:07:13.940 hours a week. And I think I paid him something like 20 bucks an hour way back then to write the

00:07:18.780 code. So he was writing Basecamp in 10 hours a week. I was doing the design in about 10, 15 hours

00:07:25.400 a week. And in about four months, we built the first version of the product. And that first version of

00:07:29.760 the product is what set this whole thing off and allows us to be where we are today. So it turns out

00:07:34.820 that not having a lot of time was actually an advantage. If we had more time, we would have made it

00:07:39.700 more complicated. It would have taken longer to actually get out the door. I'm reminded of these

00:07:44.740 moments in my career where I realized that less was actually the better position of the two. So

00:07:49.480 those are two examples. Now, today, these days, I don't work more than 40 hours a week anyway. But

00:07:54.980 I'm sure to get back to, I'm sure early on there was moments like that. But those are very few and

00:08:00.320 far between. I was not a workaholic. I was not a pull an all-nighter kind of person. I just don't

00:08:03.980 really believe in that.

00:08:04.700 There's two follow-up questions that I have based on that. The first is,

00:08:09.680 what about the person who's in the situation where they don't have complete control? So the

00:08:13.820 person who's working at the startup and the demands are sort of being put on their plate that

00:08:19.980 for even a really smart, competent person are going to take more than 40 hours a week. I mean,

00:08:25.280 isn't that sort of the entire ethos of our culture, whether you're in Silicon Valley or New York City or

00:08:30.920 frankly, almost anywhere in between? It is. And it's true that when you don't have control

00:08:36.300 of your situation, sometimes you just have to do what the boss says, basically. So like in anything,

00:08:43.420 you've got to figure out what you're in control of and what you aren't in control of. And if you

00:08:47.100 don't have any control of your day because people are loading up your calendar or they're pushing you

00:08:52.380 or there's unrealistic expectations or the demands are out of control, whatever it's like,

00:08:56.520 there's only so much control you have over that situation. But what you can do for yourself is

00:09:01.300 figure out what control you have over yourself or maybe your own small team. Maybe you're lucky

00:09:05.800 enough to be at the position or at the point where you have two or three or four people below you or

00:09:10.540 are working with them and you're a team leader or manager or something. You can shield them perhaps

00:09:15.180 as best you can from the onslaught from above. And I think you just have to figure out what can you

00:09:19.480 carve out and what can you control? And also what behavior are you perpetuating? So if,

00:09:25.020 for example, you are unable to get work done during the day and you have to work long hours

00:09:29.880 at night because people are bothering you and interrupting you all day with stuff that doesn't

00:09:34.160 matter, then it's maybe a good idea for you to look at what you're doing to other people and go,

00:09:38.660 you know, am I actually perpetuating this? Am I part of the problem? Am I just interrupting people

00:09:42.620 constantly? Am I just falling for, you know, in the same traps? And can I do something about how I'm

00:09:47.600 behaving and can that influence the people around me? This is not a quick fix or anything like that,

00:09:52.100 but there's that famous quote, I don't know, Gandhi or whoever has been attributed to,

00:09:55.920 which is basically you need to be the change you wish to see in the world. And at a small level,

00:10:00.020 that's maybe ultimately the best you can do. So what you don't want to do is bang your head against

00:10:04.740 the wall, trying to change things that you simply can't. But I do think you have probably a little

00:10:09.540 bit more control over your own local environment than you think, and you should just do the best you

00:10:12.940 can in that scenario. You referred earlier to the sort of the reductionist history approach of this.

00:10:17.440 It is pretty common to hear people at the end of a given phase. I mean, the most extreme example

00:10:23.640 would be at the end of their life saying, I wish I did X different, but also achieving a certain

00:10:30.140 milestone of success business-wise and saying, God, I didn't need to work that hard. I can think of

00:10:36.480 examples in my own life where I've said that with respect to lots of different things, but you know,

00:10:41.600 I've still never been able to get out of this loop of, and I can just tell from the number of

00:10:45.660 questions that people ask that if I could go back in time and if I'd done it different,

00:10:51.680 would I be in a different place? And of course the answer is yes. I mean, that's the nature of

00:10:54.860 a chaotic universe. Initial conditions matter greatly. And if you change those, you're going

00:10:59.100 to change the outcome. But to me, it sort of comes down to what are we optimizing for? I mean,

00:11:03.960 are we optimizing for wealth? Are we optimizing for impact? Are we optimizing for happiness? Are we

00:11:10.600 optimizing whatever that means, by the way? And that to me also seems like part of the challenge here

00:11:15.520 is I don't think many people, myself included, spend enough time asking that question first,

00:11:21.440 because if you don't even know what the answer to that is, and you haven't really thought through

00:11:26.180 all of the permutations, I don't know how you're going to answer some of these second order questions.

00:11:32.300 I'm glad you brought that up. You're right about that. People say, would you have achieved the

00:11:36.340 same success, right? And we just, I mean, in America especially, we just go towards, well,

00:11:40.600 success equals financial independence or, you know, being rich or like, that's just probably

00:11:45.440 what we, everyone who's listening to this podcast, at least who lives in the US probably thought the

00:11:49.640 same thing about that word. And look, I'm not going to stand here and say money doesn't matter

00:11:54.800 to me. Of course it does, but I've just never really been driven by it. So for me, success really

00:12:00.860 is, do I want to keep doing what I'm doing? Like, is that, of course I have to survive and all that

00:12:06.600 basic stuff and provide enough for my lifestyle that I, that I like, but really it's, do I want to

00:12:12.200 keep doing what I'm doing? Because certainly at Basecamp, we leave a lot of money on the table.

00:12:17.360 There's a lot of things we could be doing. We could be charging more. We could be charging per

00:12:21.560 person. Right now in Basecamp, we only charge one price, no matter how many people use it.

00:12:25.200 We could charge per person. We could make white label versions of Basecamp. You know, there's all

00:12:29.580 these things we could do and it's just software. We could figure out how to do anything

00:12:32.880 to make more money, but I wouldn't want to do that work. That's not the kind of work that we

00:12:37.860 want to do here. It's not the work I want to do. It's not the kind of organization I want to build.

00:12:42.140 I don't want to build an organization that's interested in squeezing every last penny out

00:12:45.800 of every last customer. It's just not interesting to me. That's how I look at success is of course,

00:12:51.260 we have to be financially independent enough to stay in business because we don't take outside money

00:12:55.300 and all that stuff. We've got to have that baseline there. But after that, it's not about squeezing

00:12:59.320 out the most you can. It's not about maximizing. I've never really been interested in maximize.

00:13:03.560 I'm looking to find the right amount, the enough amount, the feeling that like,

00:13:08.380 this is about right. And this also includes like the number of employees we have here. We have about

00:13:12.600 56 employees. We could have four or five or six or seven times our revenue could support that,

00:13:17.940 but I don't want that many people because that comes with its own set of headaches. Yeah,

00:13:21.900 it might equal more money in a sense because we could do more things at the same time.

00:13:25.320 But what are the costs of that too? Everything has a cost and everything has a trade-off,

00:13:29.420 many trade-offs. And for me, and this is, I'm just speaking for myself here, but for me,

00:13:34.540 maybe it's because of where I'm at in my career. I'm conscious of that as well. Success is not

00:13:39.440 defined by revenue targets or big numbers. It's defined by, do I want to go to work tomorrow and

00:13:45.440 do the same thing I did the day before? Am I enjoying this? Do I like the people I'm working

00:13:48.820 with? Am I challenging myself intellectually and creatively? Like those are the things that matter.

00:13:53.100 Impact does matter to me too. Like, am I impacting the industry in a positive way? Are we standing for the

00:13:58.220 right things? So those are the things to me. And those things don't have a lot to do with time

00:14:04.200 spent. They have a lot to do with what you choose to do with the time that you have.

00:14:09.340 So if you say, I only have 40 hours a week, well, I can spend that to do good. I can spend it to do

00:14:13.720 bad. I can waste it on things that don't really get me ahead or don't really matter. You know,

00:14:17.700 I can come up with all sorts of self-destructive arrangements at work to make those hours not

00:14:23.060 count as much as they should. And there's all that stuff. So for me, it's really about making sure

00:14:27.180 that the hours that I've designated as work hours are productive in the ways that I want them to be

00:14:32.440 productive and not just chasing dollars. I don't think we discussed this on the first

00:14:36.300 podcast. And I can't remember because I think you and I have discussed this sort of stuff over

00:14:40.440 meals instead. But what's your culture of email like? Like I'd love to be able to create a world where

00:14:47.000 it's the social norm that everybody checks their email from, you know, eight to nine in the morning and

00:14:53.100 four to five in the afternoon and never again. Like there are no, there's no such thing as a

00:14:57.520 browser being open outside of those hours. And if you really, really need to get ahold of somebody

00:15:03.780 outside of eight to nine or four to five, you call them. And if you don't have their number,

00:15:09.080 then too bad. You probably don't deserve to get ahold of them. You know, something like that

00:15:13.120 because, you know, you've heard me rail on this, but I think the interruption to thought

00:15:19.200 through the endless stream of emails, even if they're not life threatening or requiring a lot

00:15:27.340 of cognitive horsepower, it's just taking you off your train of thought. So do you guys have any

00:15:31.540 rules, guidelines, practices around that? Yeah, we do. We don't use email as an organization,

00:15:37.340 but we use Basecamp, which has like an email like functionality where you can write long messages and

00:15:41.920 people get a notification, then you can comment. But it's the same concept, which is, this is a

00:15:47.100 cultural thing, like you were kind of getting at. What we try not to do is build a lot of this into

00:15:52.560 software. We have some stuff that's in software that prevents people from getting emails or getting

00:15:56.460 notifications, let's say, outside of work hours. But culturally, we have this norm that no one should

00:16:02.800 expect immediate response, that there's no expectations of immediate response. So that if I

00:16:07.120 have a question to ask you, and I just happen to have a question right now, because that's when it came

00:16:11.320 to my mind, that doesn't mean that I expect you to stop what you're doing to answer my question

00:16:18.660 right now. The only thing that matters about now is, it doesn't matter about now. What I'm saying is

00:16:22.720 like, now just happens to be my clock. This is like the theory of relativity in a sense, you know, like

00:16:27.620 my now is not your now, you're probably busy doing something else. So why should I stop you from what

00:16:33.200 you're doing? In fact, interruption is, is a really arrogant act. It's saying whatever you're doing

00:16:38.740 is less important than what I have to ask you or what I have to tell you. So what we do here is

00:16:42.800 people are allowed to write to each other whenever they want to during the day. But the expectation

00:16:47.080 is not that you're going to get a response immediately. The expectation is that people are

00:16:50.740 going to get back to you when they're ready. And that might mean three hours later, it might mean in

00:16:56.440 five minutes if they happen to be ready, it might mean tomorrow, that's okay too. And if there's

00:17:01.600 actually literally an emergency, which there should almost never be, or if you actually truly do need

00:17:06.880 something right now, because something super important is pending and you have to respect

00:17:10.700 what super important means, you can't make everything super important. You know, like in a

00:17:15.320 lot of businesses, ASAP has become just everything is ASAP. And that, that, that doesn't work. So

00:17:20.340 if we all respect the fundamental definitions of these things, and if there's actually truly an

00:17:25.320 emergency, you're really, truly need to get ahold of someone right now, you call them. The phone is

00:17:29.500 the elevation or the escalation of the attention. So if one of us calls each other, we answer the

00:17:34.780 phone. But if one of us sends us each other a message, we might not get to it for a couple

00:17:38.800 hours and that's fine. And in fact, I think most things are better off waiting until at least the

00:17:43.940 next morning, especially important things with decisions that are attached to it. You're better

00:17:48.120 off sleeping on some of these things and coming back to it with a fresh mind the next day. I just

00:17:52.040 think that there's something to that. In fact, I read somewhere recently, I don't know if this is

00:17:55.620 true, but you kind of can't believe anything you read anymore, I guess, but that Bezos only makes

00:18:02.880 important decisions in the first half of the day. And if any important decision comes to him

00:18:07.240 afternoon, he won't make it. He'll say, I'm waiting until the next morning because he knows

00:18:11.520 that he is cognitively there in the morning in the best possible way. He's not going to be worn

00:18:16.720 down. He's not going to be frustrated. He's not going to have been beaten up by some other issue he

00:18:20.420 had to deal with. The mornings are for decisions and afternoons are not. And I like that general point

00:18:27.000 of view. And there are very few things that you hear from someone at four o'clock that you truly

00:18:31.260 absolutely need to get back to them at four 10. Like most things can wait till the next morning.

00:18:34.280 So culturally here at base camp, that's our point of view. That doesn't mean people always live by

00:18:38.720 that. Just like in culture, sometimes people go outside the norm and there's moments when we do

00:18:43.880 speed communication up a bit too much, but for the most part, we're very careful about that. And

00:18:48.380 the expectations are set in that way. Yeah. I love that. I wrote that down. Mornings are for

00:18:52.780 decisions. If I take nothing else from this podcast, but reframe how I do things, that actually will be

00:18:58.180 an interesting experiment. I've been doing the same thing by the way. And I do find that

00:19:02.560 it's just a nicer way to approach things. And it's kind of, the default is like, let's just

00:19:08.240 sleep on this. You know, if it's second half day, let's just sleep on it. It doesn't matter at three

00:19:12.200 o'clock. We don't need to make any decisions going to matter right now anyway. So let's just sleep on

00:19:15.460 it and you'll come with a clear head the next day. It really works for me. Now, someone asks an astute

00:19:21.200 question, which is balance is inherently dynamic. So it's going to look different for different people,

00:19:27.380 but it's also going to look different for an individual across different periods of time.

00:19:32.480 So the obvious they point out is flexibility as a trait that is valuable here. Are there other

00:19:38.760 traits or features that are inevitable to maintain this dynamic balance as an individual goes through

00:19:46.720 time and different stimuli? I think so. As we talk about balance, you know, work-life balance is what

00:19:53.760 people call it, but a lot of people don't mean it because what usually takes is always work.

00:20:00.200 Work always eats into life. It's very rare that life can eat back into work. So if something's

00:20:04.860 really going to be balanced on a scale or something, like one side has to be able to

00:20:07.720 freely move up and move the other side, but both sides have to be able to move.

00:20:11.860 So I think the flexibility here is that life has to also take over from time to time because it's so

00:20:18.540 easy for work to take over. Like, yeah, I got to, I got to do this thing at seven o'clock and I got to,

00:20:23.100 I got to answer this email or I got to write this thing up. Well, what if you say like, I have to go

00:20:26.660 watch a movie. It's two o'clock in the afternoon. I want to go see a movie. Like that should be okay

00:20:30.240 too. But that usually isn't okay. It's seen as like, well, that would be weird to leave work in

00:20:34.960 the afternoon and go watch a matinee or something. That'd be strange. But why is it any stranger than

00:20:39.760 writing up something for work after dinner? Like that's strange too, but we're just so used to it

00:20:45.500 that we consider it to be normal. So when it comes to flexibility, I think both sides need

00:20:49.340 to be flexible and both sides need to be able to take back from the other and trade. You're

00:20:53.980 basically trading concessions from here and there. You know, I need a couple hours during the day for

00:20:58.120 this, or I need a couple hours at night for that. Both of those need to be acceptable. If only one's

00:21:02.500 acceptable, then it's not really truly balanced. You can almost think about instituting a little

00:21:06.800 personal practice, which is for every time you do work outside of work hours, let's just say

00:21:13.340 you're in an organization that defines work as eight to six. If for every hour you have to spend

00:21:19.560 after six doing something, you, you figure out a way during the eight to six hours of the subsequent

00:21:25.320 week to go and take it back with a life specific thing, whether it's literally do nothing, watch

00:21:32.080 YouTube, if that's what you fancy, go to the gym, you know, something that is part of your life.

00:21:38.080 I'd love the idea of banking that, you know, essentially just having a ledger and keeping

00:21:41.960 track of that. And then, you know, one of the things you can do is just daydream. I encourage

00:21:45.880 people here to daydream at work, you know, just have nothing to do and just think like it's okay

00:21:50.860 to be bored too. Boredom is good. And we've lost that ability. Just being able to sit still and just

00:21:56.180 look out the window and see where your mind goes is not in a meditative state kind of thing, but just

00:22:01.200 like, you know, I don't, I've got nothing to do for an hour. I'm not going to fill my time up with

00:22:05.320 something else. I'm just going to let something else fill up my time. That to me is a healthier

00:22:09.860 approach than feeling like I need to cram stuff. Like if I have nothing to do, then I'm not being

00:22:14.980 efficient or I'm slacking off or something like, eh, no, you're not. You're just letting your brain

00:22:19.600 rest and seeing what comes into it. I think that's totally fine. So I think that that's a great,

00:22:23.560 a great approach. So if you're writing up something at night, you got to reclaim some of those hours

00:22:27.060 during the day. That makes a lot of sense to me. Now, the thing is, of course, is that in order to do

00:22:31.300 that, the workday has to be flexible. So getting back to the question, like you can't just keep taking

00:22:36.460 time away from life if you can't take time away from work. And in many organizations sitting around

00:22:43.360 doing nothing would be seen as a problem. You're lazy or you're not a team player. So like there's

00:22:49.020 a lot of fundamental change that has to happen here, but you can also just kind of hide as best

00:22:52.600 you can and do it for yourself. And like, I don't think your company is going to miss that hour that

00:22:56.060 you're just thinking for yourself. Nothing's not going to get done. There's a double negative,

00:22:59.700 but nothing's not going to get done just because you had some time to think. In fact, I think you'll

00:23:03.800 probably use that hour better in most cases than you would have if you were just doing some menial

00:23:07.780 tasks. Now that doesn't apply to everybody though, right? I mean, if you work at a call center or you

00:23:12.280 work in a cafeteria, it'd be impossible, right? To take the even an hour off a week for idle thought

00:23:19.420 and relaxation. So is the, there are definitely going to be some people for whom they don't have

00:23:24.280 that luxury, right? Is there any insight we can draw for that person? Yes, this is in some ways a

00:23:29.920 privileged opportunity. However, a lot of people who work, for example, at a call center have a

00:23:34.800 pretty strict work-life balance already because they can't do that work from home or their hours

00:23:41.000 are tracked in a way where they won't be paid overtime. So they don't work. They work eight hour

00:23:44.920 days. And so this whole thing about reclaiming an hour during the day to daydream because you did

00:23:49.680 something at night isn't necessarily even as applicable because there's a clear separation between

00:23:54.680 work and life. I think oftentimes at information-based jobs or jobs that are more about

00:24:00.180 like sitting behind a computer and doing creative work or, you know, that kind of stuff. Those are

00:24:04.360 the people who find it so easy just to kind of dive back into work because the tools that you need are

00:24:10.520 right in front of you all the time. They're on your laptop, they're on your iPad, they're on your phone

00:24:13.940 or whatever compared to like, let's say a call center where you sort of punch in and you punch out and

00:24:18.500 you have a system that you use just for that. You're not using that system also to surf the web.

00:24:23.360 It's like, it's a totally different kind of thing. So I actually think in many ways

00:24:26.200 structurally that's a healthier situation. It's one of the reasons why in Basecamp we built a

00:24:32.740 feature into the product called Work Can Wait, which allows every employee to set their own work

00:24:38.220 boundaries, work hours. So outside of those hours, let's say you work nine to five, Basecamp cannot

00:24:44.160 send you a notification. So it physically like separates the tooling from your phone. When normally you

00:24:50.600 get a notification at four o'clock, you won't get one at six o'clock because you said five o'clock is

00:24:54.240 my cutoff. So it's the same phone, but the tool won't reach out to you. And I think that's what's

00:24:58.280 really important about a lot of the stuff when it comes to technology is that they're called

00:25:02.860 push notifications, but they're really pulling you back in. And these things pull you into your

00:25:09.180 phone. And when you're pulled into your phone or you're pulled into your laptop or you're pulled

00:25:12.740 into your iPad, it's pretty rare that you're just going to do that one task and then shut it.

00:25:17.600 What's going to end up happening is you're going to open the thing and your browser is going to be

00:25:21.460 open and you happen to have 17 other tabs open, or there's an unread indicator on iMessage or

00:25:26.300 whatever Twitter's open. And before you know it, you're sucked back into the world of staring at

00:25:32.300 a screen doing stuff. So anyway, yes, you're right. If you're working retail or you're working in a call

00:25:37.220 center or you're working a very sort of regimented kind of job like that, or on a factory line or

00:25:41.760 something like that, clearly you can't do that. But also your day ends in a much more,

00:25:46.240 I think, in a clearer way than most people's days end these days.

00:25:50.260 Sort of on that same thread, I think about decisions that we make that are setting us up

00:25:56.940 for a bad default environment. So people who have home offices, I remember in every home I've ever

00:26:03.460 lived in, you know, since I've been at a point in life when I would need an office at home,

00:26:07.900 I've always gone out of my way to make it as convenient as possible to be there.

00:26:11.580 And I actually think that's a horrible mistake. It should be as miserable to be there. Like

00:26:17.840 in an ideal world, my home office should be in a tree stand or something where if you really want

00:26:24.800 to go out there in the freezing cold, get soaked in the rain as you climb the tree stand and get

00:26:30.420 into your little office and sit at your computer with your little space heater and peck away at your

00:26:35.000 keyboard. Okay, go for it. But it certainly shouldn't be something you just sneak in to do

00:26:40.020 on your way walking back and forth between, you know, the kids' bedrooms, which is what I basically

00:26:43.880 do today. It's like, okay, go read this little guy a story, put him to bed, and you're walking

00:26:49.340 back to, you know, the kitchen where you could be social and, oh, you know what, I'm just going

00:26:53.320 to go check on some email. And I mean, I really hate that about myself. So I might have to like

00:26:58.220 build a tree stand or something. I feel like this idea just came to me having this discussion with

00:27:01.940 you, which is it's so easy to work.

00:27:05.040 Yeah. Gosh, it really is. I mean, technology has made it way easier than ever. And you're

00:27:12.340 right. I mean, of course, like people's homes are what they are and you probably can't move

00:27:16.000 the walls around and stuff, but maybe you can make a mark on the door or something every

00:27:20.660 time you do that. Or, you know, maybe you can do something that helps you recognize and

00:27:25.200 realize how often you're doing that. And that might change your behavior or at least make

00:27:30.160 you aware of the behavior. I think we probably go around not even wondering what we're doing.

00:27:34.180 We just do these things. They're involuntary. So I think that's cool. I've always, this is

00:27:39.540 impossible for basically everyone in the world, but I've always admired, I don't know if you've

00:27:43.240 ever been to the glass house, the Philip Johnson glass house in New Canaan, Connecticut. But again,

00:27:48.160 this doesn't apply to pretty much everyone on the planet because it's a 50 acre site. It's a

00:27:52.800 beautiful place. And I think there's something like, I'm getting the number wrong, but there's 12

00:27:57.040 separate buildings on the campus. Not campus, but on this 50 acre site. What's really neat about it is

00:28:03.160 that Philip Johnson who designed it, he decided that it's actually all one house, but the rooms

00:28:10.440 are separated by space versus hallways and space being nature. So for example, his office, so the

00:28:17.820 glass house itself is like the social space of the house. There's a fireplace, there's a lot of,

00:28:24.020 it's all glass. It's just a very beautiful place to sit. But his library or his study is actually a

00:28:29.500 separate building that you have to walk to and it's 50 acres. So you have to walk quite a bit to

00:28:35.000 get there. If I remember correctly, there's no electricity. So he just uses the light. There's

00:28:39.140 an Oculus at the top of the space. So the light comes in from the sky and that's it. And when it's

00:28:44.320 dark, it's done. There's no plumbing. So you can't kind of camp out in there. You've got to get up

00:28:49.500 occasionally and go to the bathroom or whatever. And again, like this would not apply to most people,

00:28:54.360 but the idea I think is really strong, which is there's actually a physical separation and there

00:28:59.960 are things in this space which make it inconvenient to stay there very long. No electricity. So hey,

00:29:04.960 when it's five and it's winter, it's dark, you're done. You stop working. That's just what you do.

00:29:09.240 And maybe you get up a bit earlier and you work a bit earlier if you want to do that. That's a really,

00:29:14.580 to me, a really beautiful constraint, which is it's not even up to you. It's up to the planet. It's up to

00:29:18.460 the stars. It's up to the solar system. It's up to the universe. That's what tells me,

00:29:22.100 and that's kind of how it really sort of should be and also how it used to be, of course.

00:29:26.240 There might be other ways to simulate that. Even though, of course, your house is connected,

00:29:31.180 there might be some other ways to do it. And I think as a thought experiment, it might be

00:29:34.280 neat to think about how could I make this more difficult for myself?

00:29:37.920 I still come back to this thing, which is there's a great privilege that we have that we might not

00:29:42.260 have if we existed along the glass house paradigm. I don't know why I'm going to, I'm like,

00:29:48.700 I'm looking at my phone or something and you look at your computer, you look at these things and you

00:29:53.160 think like, would these things exist? Would Apple have existed? Would Microsoft have existed if the

00:29:59.740 norm was what we're describing? Sunup to sundown is all you can work. And I don't know the answer to

00:30:05.880 that question, but I suspect that it comes back to this point of what are you optimizing for? And

00:30:12.340 everybody has a choice. And maybe the people who have bent the arc of our civilization either

00:30:19.220 deliberately or not deliberately made a choice to emphasize impact. But in the end, each of us still

00:30:25.240 has a decision to make. I mean, I think about this a lot and I wrestle with this a lot. And

00:30:29.620 my leaning is not towards impact personally, right? My leaning personally is much more towards,

00:30:36.640 I hate saying happiness, but some variation of that or suffering minimization.

00:30:40.920 You know, that's probably kind of a cop-out answer that says, well, maybe you'll never matter. And

00:30:45.480 a hundred years after you're dead, no one will know your name. Whereas a hundred years after Steve

00:30:49.620 Jobs is dead, everyone will still know his name. But as the stoic philosophers would argue, I think it

00:30:54.760 was Marcus Aurelius ironically would argue like, who cares? You're not there to know that you're dead

00:31:00.180 anyway, right? You're dead anyway. I mean, I'm not a Luddite by any measure. Like I like technology. I just,

00:31:06.220 I think it's important for us to recognize the trade-offs because it's been pitched as all good.

00:31:11.160 Everything coming out of Silicon Valley has been pitched as all good. It's a win-win and it's not,

00:31:15.760 it's not a win-win. So I think it's on us, the public to push back and say, hang on a second,

00:31:22.340 what have we been sold? And what is this doing to us? I mean, it's damaging relationships. People sit

00:31:27.220 in bed with their partner and they're both looking at their phone. I've done that. My wife's done that.

00:31:33.160 Like this just doesn't feel right. Now you could say, well, they could be looking at a book instead.

00:31:37.440 And that's true too. There's always something perhaps, but I think what we've seen is that

00:31:42.640 technology is not all good. In fact, there's some significant impacts, negative impacts of

00:31:48.420 technology. And we just need to keep that in mind. So yeah, I mean, I'm glad these things do exist in

00:31:53.620 the world. Obviously we're doing this podcast over Skype and recording on my Mac book pro and I've got

00:32:00.420 an iPad next, you know, like these are, these are great things, but they do come with costs. And I

00:32:05.520 think that's just the important thing to keep in mind. So someone asked a question that's getting

00:32:09.660 at a counterpoint here. I'll just read the question directly. I always cringe at the phrase work life

00:32:15.120 balance in quotes. These two things should not be different. I understand that they often are,

00:32:20.360 but it seems to me that the fix is not to figure out how to maintain a balanced separation, but

00:32:25.120 rather to bring the two together. What are your thoughts? This is kind of the opposite point of

00:32:29.460 view potentially to what you just said. It is. I kind of cringe at the phrase also,

00:32:35.040 but mostly because it's misused and it kind of doesn't really represent anything.

00:32:41.740 I think this is a fair and interesting point. I'm not sure what they're suggesting. So this person

00:32:47.260 might be suggesting that you do a little bit of work and you do a little bit of living,

00:32:50.360 you do a little bit of work and do a little bit of living that they're kind of the same

00:32:52.880 thing. It's not like this actual demarcation during the day. And I think perhaps work life

00:32:57.460 balance, there's a slash in it. You look at the words, there's work slash life. Like there

00:33:01.720 is a demarcation that this happens over here and this happens over here and they should be

00:33:06.480 balanced. That's maybe what's cringeworthy perhaps, because I do think that these things

00:33:11.840 can, can play off each other and they can each take from each other. And that's to me,

00:33:16.420 the balance part, not that they're necessarily equal or that, you know, one starts and one ends

00:33:21.660 kind of thing that, that might be a little bit complicated. So for example, for me, I wake up

00:33:26.260 in the morning really early. I make breakfast for my kids. I take them to school a few days a week,

00:33:31.320 or I go to the gym the other days a week. And then I do a little bit of work and then I take a little

00:33:35.040 bit of a personal break and do something else around the house. And then I do some more work and I do

00:33:38.720 something else. And maybe I'll drive to the office around noon. So like my day and my work or my work

00:33:43.800 and my life is sort of mixed up during the day. But I think the important part is that there's

00:33:49.520 life mixed in there too. And it's not just like 18 hours of work, although that's probably

00:33:53.340 unrealistic for most people, but 12 to 14 hours of work is a lot of work. And a lot of people are

00:33:57.460 spending that much time at work. That's not together. This point about bringing those two

00:34:03.360 together, that's not peanut butter and jelly. That's like mostly peanut butter and tiny bit of

00:34:07.720 jelly. And that's like, that wouldn't make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, you know, that wouldn't

00:34:10.780 make a work-life balance if these things are so imbalanced. So I don't mind these things being

00:34:15.920 scattered throughout the day, as long as one's not dominating the other. That's kind of my main point.

00:34:22.000 The way you just explained that is not at all at odds with the thing, the question that that person

00:34:26.360 is asking. Yeah, that's actually a better explanation than I would have provided. On this

00:34:30.960 same sort of theme, sort of, do you have and how do you deal with your own personal compulsion

00:34:36.540 to keep pushing forward? This could be specific to a project or just the overall arc of your

00:34:43.000 business. I think I've changed here. I think in the past, I might've pushed harder, like to keep

00:34:53.100 pushing forward, I should say. I wouldn't like end the day or something like that. But what I've kind

00:34:57.960 of realized is that a project doesn't exist until it's over. Until then, it's just work and what turns

00:35:04.820 it into a project or turns it into something to be proud of, I think, is like at the end when it's

00:35:09.320 all packaged up and ready to go out to the world. And I want to get to that point sooner rather than

00:35:13.860 later. I guess there's a few different ways to think about this question. Pushing forward might

00:35:17.380 mean speeding it through, but I suspect this is more about like continuing to work on it. I'm inferring

00:35:24.100 here, but I want to give it my time and then I want to get away from it to gain some perspective.

00:35:29.620 So when I come back the next morning, I have a fresh look at these things. And then I also,

00:35:33.960 I want to get it out the door. So I'm typically someone who's going to cut things out of something

00:35:39.000 to release it versus to keep adding things onto something to finally release it. I'd rather get

00:35:43.660 it out early and then iterate on it. So what I've found is that there's just diminishing returns at

00:35:49.680 some point. You're better off just taking a break and coming back to it the next day than trying to

00:35:53.260 like push through to the next day on things. So I think though in the past, I may have pushed a little

00:35:57.580 bit longer when I had perhaps fewer responsibilities in life. I wasn't married, I didn't have kids,

00:36:02.100 I didn't have anything pushing back on me to remind me that I probably shouldn't be doing

00:36:07.720 this. But what I've come to realize now, of course, is I do have those pressures, but also that those

00:36:11.980 pressures are an advantage. They're not a disadvantage. And in fact, many of the people

00:36:16.300 that work here and that I've seen over the years who happen to have other pressures outside of work

00:36:21.420 tend to be more efficient workers because they know that they don't have extra time. And so they

00:36:26.120 make better use of that time. I might be kind of missing the crux of the question, but I think

00:36:31.680 it's the same concept, which is I want to do my work during the day. I want to stop. I want to come

00:36:35.760 back the next morning and I want to get this thing done, which means I'm going to cut it back and not

00:36:39.360 keep pushing forward, but instead draw a line, get it out there and then continue to revise over time.

00:36:45.460 Yeah. So using the analogy of defined benefit versus defined contribution,

00:36:49.660 you've sort of defined the time and you adjust the scope consistently within that constraint,

00:36:59.120 which is pretty much what nobody does. Certainly not what I do. I am the exact opposite of that.

00:37:05.520 I'm actually worse than that if I'm going to be brutally honest, right? I will define a scope

00:37:09.940 with some expectation of how much time it takes. I will get there and I will realize, no,

00:37:14.220 that scope wasn't high enough. It needs to be higher. So now we have an exponential drag on time.

00:37:19.660 As the scope continues to go further and further away. So I'll just keep moving

00:37:23.640 the goalpost further and further away. And when it's all said and done, you look back.

00:37:29.500 I mean, the audit of that type of behavior is devastating.

00:37:33.260 It is. And I, and I have done that. So I, I recognize that behavior. We've become ruthless

00:37:38.920 about cutting scope for us. What's fixed is time. And in our world, that's six weeks. So we had

00:37:45.800 talked about this in the other podcast. I won't go deep into it, but like we work

00:37:48.780 on projects for no longer than six weeks at a time. And if something's far bigger than we break

00:37:53.560 it down into six week chunks, but that helps us or that forces us to figure out what's actually

00:37:59.880 really worth doing. What's really important, what trade-offs we're going to make, what really

00:38:03.640 matters here. Cause if you just keep shoving more stuff in, like, you know, you just, you'll never,

00:38:08.700 it'll never end. It'll get really big. It'll get really complicated. And by the time it's done,

00:38:12.240 you may not like it anymore because the ground may have shifted. The market may have shifted.

00:38:18.020 You may have shifted. I'd much rather get things done sooner, cut the scope, and then decide to do

00:38:22.660 more scope later as a second project versus like continuing to pile and continue to blow air in

00:38:26.860 this balloon that keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger, bigger. I'd rather have separate

00:38:30.180 balloons and blow them up enough and let them go and then blow the next one up and let it go. I just

00:38:35.340 feel like that's a much better way to do this. So yeah, we're ruthless. In fact, we have a term here

00:38:39.940 at Basecamp, we call it the scope hammer. So, um, we just, we wield the scope hammer.

00:38:45.900 I could use one of those.

00:38:47.420 Yeah. Yeah. I could use one of those.

00:38:48.240 I'll get you a scope hammer.

00:38:49.100 Thank you.

00:38:49.480 And, and we always talk about that, like break it in half, like break it up, make it smaller,

00:38:54.540 keep breaking it until these pieces are so small that we can see the whole thing. We can hold the

00:38:59.900 whole thing in our head. We can maybe piece a few back together, but we want to break it down and not

00:39:04.720 build it up. And the worst thing that happens is, is when people are on deadlines and then the boss or the

00:39:09.340 manager or whoever comes in and shoves in more work at the 11th hour, that work's not going to get

00:39:13.920 done anyway, by the time you want it. So just don't do that. Let the thing finish, give people a

00:39:19.620 break or a little bit of reprieve and then, and then make another scope, another project and start

00:39:24.320 that next. But you've got to have some separation. I think otherwise like things just balloon into this

00:39:28.060 huge snowball and then it gets dirtier and dirtier and dangerous and more dangerous. And then

00:39:31.580 it becomes more massive and the more massive an object, the harder it is to change its direction.

00:39:36.140 That's just basic physics here. And the same thing is true for projects. So it's this project,

00:39:40.460 it's so big and you have so many decisions piled behind it, pushing it. And there's so much momentum

00:39:45.560 behind it. You're never going to stop because you don't want to give up all that work. Um, it's

00:39:50.140 going to be very hard to change its direction because it's been pointed in the same direction

00:39:53.080 for a long time. Then it's becomes too big to fail. And then, you know, you end up with this thing

00:39:57.980 where you poured so much time into it. And by the way, it could be an amazing outcome. It's possible if

00:40:01.820 that's true. But oftentimes it's like, it's not even just the outcome. It's, it's the process too,

00:40:06.360 because sometimes you can brute force something through. You can just push people as hard as you

00:40:11.840 can and they get it done. And you have this thing at the end that looks great, but you may have

00:40:16.120 destroyed the team. So they can't do it again. You may have destroyed morale. You may have burned

00:40:20.900 people out. You may have messed up personal relationships there. And so, yeah, the outcome might

00:40:25.780 be worthwhile, but that's a very short-term look at it because you've got to work with these people

00:40:29.600 again, don't you? And if you have to do work with those people again, and they're, they don't want

00:40:33.100 to work that way again, you kind of ruined it for the longterm. So I think you have to be very

00:40:37.080 thoughtful about what kind of impact brute force has on the people who have to do the work,

00:40:42.600 especially if they're going to be the same people doing the work over and over and over and over.

00:40:46.240 You know, it's funny you say that. I need to remind myself of that more as well. I remember

00:40:50.520 talking with Rick Elias on the podcast and he referenced the Simon Sinek book, The Infinite Game.

00:40:56.000 That's what it made me think of when you said that, right? Which is, again, it's a failure to

00:41:01.160 appreciate what you're optimizing for. If you were only optimizing for that one project,

00:41:05.680 like the world was going to end in three months. And for whatever reason, the, you somehow deemed

00:41:13.120 that it was relevant that this project be done before the earth gets blown up. You know, you might

00:41:17.920 take a different approach to how hard you work. Although that example seems sort of counterintuitive,

00:41:22.400 but if you're optimizing around the game of, but you're going to have another project after that

00:41:27.840 and another project after that, and isn't, you know, what if the game is to be able to have the

00:41:32.100 freedom, flexibility, sanity, comfort, passion, fill in the blank adjective to keep doing projects,

00:41:40.600 you'd have to take a different approach, right?

00:41:43.340 You just nailed it. That's exactly it. And when you're building a company, first of all,

00:41:48.600 it's hard to hire people. It's expensive. It's hard to find great people. It's hard to train great

00:41:52.720 people. The worst thing you can do is lose those people to burnout and team dynamics and whatnot.

00:42:00.220 Like we've been in business for 20 years. I'd like to be in business for another 20.

00:42:04.260 And I'd like to ride with a lot of the same people. We've had a number of people, half of our

00:42:08.700 company. So we have 65, 33 of which have been with us for five or more years. 22 have been with us

00:42:15.400 more than seven years. 10 have been with us for more than 10 years. In our industry,

00:42:19.360 that's incredibly rare. Most people, I think, cycle out after 18 months in our industry. I think

00:42:23.500 that's the average 10 year. And I like these people. They're fantastic. We've invested a lot

00:42:28.400 of time and effort and energy into them, and they've given a lot back to us. And I would hate to

00:42:32.900 get a project done, but to lose someone because of it. It just doesn't add up to me. So yeah,

00:42:40.220 you want to ride with these people for a long period of time. You've got to think about what it's like

00:42:43.720 and what the impact is on them as you go, not just on what you get out on the other side.

00:42:49.800 Because yeah, again, you can brute force something. I think about, you know, there are probably

00:42:53.560 certainly times we can always come up with examples where it was like something that had to happen at

00:42:58.200 a given time for whatever reason, and you just had to do it. Okay. That's, that's maybe fine

00:43:03.600 occasionally. But I think if you do that, it's important to tell the team, this is not how it's

00:43:08.120 always going to be. This was something that we had to do for this reason. And we had believe we

00:43:13.540 had no other choice. This was an existential threat or whatever it was. And this is not how

00:43:18.680 it's going to be next time. And you, of course, people have to be able to trust you. So you have

00:43:22.560 to, that has to be true, but it's, it's probably okay to go all in on something occasionally. If you

00:43:28.240 make it clear that that's an exception versus if people think every project is going to be like this,

00:43:33.220 I'm going to get my CV ready and look for somewhere else to work. Cause this is just,

00:43:36.200 I can't do this over and over and over. And then you, you lose great people and you got to find new

00:43:40.520 great people and you burn the same people out over time. And so I do think it's really important

00:43:44.100 to think about the longterm. Let me just add one more thing. This is one of the issues with

00:43:47.740 Silicon Valley, why Silicon Valley as a whole, I'm generalizing here, but pushes people so hard

00:43:52.060 is because a lot of the companies that come out of Silicon Valley aren't profitable. There's no way

00:43:56.360 for them to survive more than five or six years. Anyway, their end game is acquisition, IPO,

00:44:01.200 merger, something, or famously fizzling out, you know, blowing up. So they're not thinking

00:44:07.260 about longterm. So they just burn everyone out because there's always a new batch of people

00:44:11.040 coming in and this company is probably not going to exist anyway. And this entrepreneur is a serial

00:44:14.500 entrepreneur. They're going to do something else anyway. And so they don't have that point of view.

00:44:19.360 And the problem is, I think is that that, that point of view, that this like burn people out point

00:44:23.720 of view, it doesn't matter because we're in it for the short term has seeped into every other

00:44:27.600 business because people look at Silicon Valley and go, there's a few people who became billionaires

00:44:30.840 there. I want to be one of those. So if I work like them, then I'll be rich like them.

00:44:35.160 And so now you have all sorts of other businesses that don't have the same dynamics that are trying

00:44:38.500 to work like Silicon Valley companies. And it's our worst export is that kind of effort, that all

00:44:44.760 out constant effort to burn people out just because it's not going to last anyway. Unlike what I'm trying

00:44:49.920 to build and other companies are trying to build, which is a long lasting company. You can't behave that

00:44:54.300 way and last for a long time. You're just going to, you're going to flame out. And I don't,

00:44:57.460 I don't want to do that. So one last question on this, and it's a specific example. So it's

00:45:02.240 someone who's a primary care physician. I mean, I understand what that person's life is like,

00:45:06.840 but for you and the listener, let me kind of explain it in the way that they do, which is it's

00:45:10.580 a fixed schedule. So they're in a clinic from this hour to this hour, carrot and stick incentivized

00:45:15.880 practice. So they have to have so much time face to face. They get paid based on RVUs,

00:45:22.720 which are clinical codes for basically the acuity of the patients. When they're not in the clinic,

00:45:28.660 they're spending their time chained to, you know, an inbox of emails and calls. So unfortunately,

00:45:36.320 physician burnout is a ridiculous issue. I think anybody listening to this has tried to find a

00:45:42.420 really, really top notch primary care doctor, pediatrician, whatever realizes it is harder and

00:45:48.040 harder to do that because the job itself is getting so unattractive on so many levels.

00:45:55.140 If you're still in the space where you're taking insurance and operating within the normal

00:46:00.420 confines of it, there are obviously exceptions to this, but I've lost count of how many doctors

00:46:05.780 have reached out to me with basically this concern. I don't expect you to solve primary care,

00:46:11.480 but is there like one tidbit you could offer to, to this person?

00:46:16.580 I have a primary care physician who I'm sure is, you know, in the same, same boat,

00:46:22.320 you know, as part of a large hospital chain, university hospital system, got to see a bunch

00:46:27.680 of patients. What I've noticed though, is that the problem, aside from this being a problem for the

00:46:32.460 physician, obviously, now I'll maybe get to a solution in a second as I stall to think of one,

00:46:36.920 is that the patient feels it too in a different way. So I totally see how frustrating it must be

00:46:45.720 to have to see, I don't know, 20 patients a day and the whole thing and being billed and judged based

00:46:50.380 on these metrics that don't feel like they're really about patient care so much, but they're

00:46:54.760 about quantity. But what I've noticed is that doctors look at the screen more than they look at

00:46:59.520 me now when I'm seeing a primary care physician. They're entering data constantly into their electrical,

00:47:05.940 whatever, medical record thing, electronic medical record thing, Epic or whatever it is,

00:47:10.020 whatever they're using. And they're just like entering, they're, they're listening to and just

00:47:13.600 entering data by looking at a screen. And there's, what's been lost is the, the humanity of the whole

00:47:19.760 process. And that to me is the bigger loss. Of course, I'm just speaking as a patient. So if I was a

00:47:26.700 physician, I might maybe agree or disagree or say there's two massive losses here. But unfortunately,

00:47:31.360 if you're within a system that requires what this person is describing, there's not much I can

00:47:36.260 suggest. The other, the only thing, the only thing I can see, like just completely stepping

00:47:39.880 outside of this is somehow people have to see fewer patients. But if that comes down to how you're paid

00:47:46.160 then, and you can't support yourself by seeing fewer patients, I'm not really sure what the solution

00:47:51.580 is. I think the only thing I'm thinking about this again is the end of that question, which was about

00:47:57.160 emails and getting back to people and getting back to patients. That's probably the one place that

00:48:04.300 you have a little bit more control over because that's not how you're getting paid. It's not what's

00:48:09.780 being measured. It's actually what you think people want from you. So I'm going to just tie this back to

00:48:17.440 my client days when I was doing client work way back when, which is like, I didn't have patients. Of

00:48:22.140 course, I'm not in the medical world, but I had clients that also demanded my time like a patient

00:48:25.860 might. And of course it's not life or death or whatever. So it's obviously different. But

00:48:29.080 a lot of people think that if a client emails you at 1030 at night, you need to get back to them at

00:48:33.100 1031 because they're paying you. But that's you thinking that. They may not think that. They might

00:48:38.400 just be emailing you at 1030 at night because that's when they had a free moment. Like they might

00:48:42.020 be fine getting the answer back the next morning. This idea that again, that emails come in that you

00:48:46.260 need to just immediately respond to people. You do have a little bit of control over that. And there

00:48:50.540 might be better ways to do it. There might be a really nice thing you can send like an

00:48:53.400 autoresponder. If someone emails you, maybe there's top 10 questions, maybe there's top 10

00:48:57.860 resources. Maybe you can build your own resource library of things that might answer questions for

00:49:02.080 your patients. If patients keep asking the same kinds of questions that they're going to get

00:49:05.680 automatically when they email you, maybe there's some other technical solutions here to help you

00:49:09.980 deflect some of those questions that could be answered another ways. But this is of course a

00:49:15.020 systemic, major systemic problem. And I don't have the solution for it. Peter, you probably have

00:49:18.740 way more ideas here than I do, but it fundamentally, it seems like there have to be fewer patients per

00:49:23.720 doctor in order for the humanity to come back into the medical profession.

00:49:28.300 Yeah. I could expand on my thoughts on this forever, but then that would become another

00:49:31.740 podcast. I actually like your idea a lot. I think a smart email responder that, because if you really

00:49:38.880 do stop to think about it in the end, a lot of the questions are questions where you've done the

00:49:43.980 heavy lifting on the thought process and the problem solving. And there are ways to batch them

00:49:49.840 and point people in the direction of other resources. So I actually kind of like that idea.

00:49:54.460 Shifting topics a little bit. I thought, I thought this was a very interesting question. And I don't

00:49:58.460 know if you've ever been asked this before. I never have contemplated it, but I love it.

00:50:03.060 I'll just read the question verbatim. I basically do the same type of work, programming and coding,

00:50:08.580 referring to you, not me, of course, on my free time. And also for my own pleasure,

00:50:13.760 other than work. How can I notice the signs of burnout if I do the same basic thing for work and

00:50:20.080 pleasure? That's a really good question. And a lot of people in my field, in the field that he's

00:50:24.800 describing, their job is also their hobby on the side. The way I think about it is this.

00:50:32.260 Think about an album that you love. You love this album. You play it over and over and over and over

00:50:38.960 and over. You love it. And then at some point you go, I don't know, I'm going to start skipping some

00:50:44.860 songs. I'm not into the album anymore. I'm into a few songs. And then you start, you know, playing

00:50:49.860 those songs over and over and you start to wear those out too. You know what it feels like to feel

00:50:55.120 that way about that thing, this thing that you used to love, but now you're like skipping over

00:50:59.720 stuff. And now you're just like, eh, it doesn't have that hook anymore. The hook is gone.

00:51:04.040 And I think that's the same kind of thing to be looking out for when it comes to this,

00:51:09.000 which is if you're essentially loving this thing that you do because you do it in your

00:51:12.840 off hours, but at some point, whatever it is that you're working on just doesn't seem

00:51:16.800 to be as interesting as it once was. That's like that album that you've played a few too

00:51:20.580 many times. And because you're doing it all the time, you're basically playing it twice

00:51:24.900 a day versus once a day. And I think just, you know, there's no like obvious sign, like all

00:51:30.840 of a sudden, you know, this flips to that, but there's a feeling. And I, I think thinking

00:51:36.120 about it by comparing it to, to overplaying an album is a nice way to think about it.

00:51:40.840 And the other thing is, is that burnout is often shrouded by things you may not recognize

00:51:47.160 unless you really step back and think about it. One of the early signs of burnout is motivation

00:51:53.080 going away. It's not like frustration with the work. It's just like, I don't want to,

00:51:58.360 I don't want to do this. And sometimes you can chalk that up to maybe a day or two of

00:52:02.940 just, you know, things are slow for you or whatever. You had a bad night's sleep or whatever,

00:52:06.780 but at a certain point, like if you get into the work and you have a hard time getting into

00:52:11.480 it and you see yourself like browsing the web some more or going on Twitter, some more

00:52:15.200 Facebook or Instagram, whatever it is that you do when before you sit down, you couldn't

00:52:19.720 wait to start doing that work. I think that's an interesting sign of burnout as well.

00:52:23.820 Just procrastination is a pretty good sign of burnout. So I'd pay attention to the feeling

00:52:28.980 of the music example and also procrastination. I think that's, that's something. And I think

00:52:35.260 that if you're doing the same thing all the time, there's a really good chance that you're

00:52:39.260 probably going to burn out sooner than somebody else. The other thing I would say, and I've seen

00:52:44.780 this work well for people who do both things is that let's say you're a coder in this example.

00:52:50.040 And during the day you code information systems, business software, whatever at night, don't

00:52:55.820 tinker in the same thing. And so tinker like in, you know, algorithms for creating mazes or,

00:53:01.520 you know, 3d ray tracing or something like totally different that, yeah, it's the same medium and

00:53:07.100 that you're typing into a keyboard, manipulating a computer, but it's not actually the same work.

00:53:11.940 So I think that's one healthy way to do it. Cause I think for example, if you were a baker

00:53:15.700 and you bake muffins all day for, for the bakery you worked at and you came home and you bake

00:53:18.820 muffins all night, it probably not, you're going to get bored of muffins. Like how could

00:53:23.800 you not? But if you make muffins during the day and at night you bake bread or, or you

00:53:27.420 make cakes or I don't, whatever you make cannellies and you're expanding your, you know, your repertoire,

00:53:32.720 like then it, even though it's baking, it's different. And I think that that's the healthy

00:53:37.400 way to manage kind of the same thing that you do at night and your hobby and your, in your

00:53:42.920 professional life, but also to make them quite a bit different.

00:53:45.500 And as I'm in the middle of a fast right now, I really appreciated the example of baking

00:53:50.360 and cakes and muffins because none of those things sound remotely appealing to me right

00:53:54.620 now. Not at all. Okay. Let's talk a little bit about 40 hour work weeks versus other options.

00:54:00.320 So this is a pretty interesting question. As productivity has grown over the decades,

00:54:04.940 many economists thought that that growth was going to be reflected in a shorter work week

00:54:09.920 in our society. So 40 could be compressed into 32 and you'd have the same output. That number 40

00:54:18.640 hasn't really changed in 80 plus years. Why do you think that is the right number? And historically,

00:54:25.160 I don't know if you know this, but I don't even have a sense of, I assume that was driven by daylight

00:54:29.620 at some level. Like, is that how long we were in the fields at some point? Or it's sort of an

00:54:34.580 interesting to note. I've never thought about that until I saw this question, which is kind of an

00:54:39.160 interesting default, right? Why is it the 40 hour work week, not the 45 hour work week or the 31 hour

00:54:44.840 work week or something like that? I mean, it has to be divisible by five, I'm supposing, but if we

00:54:50.400 decided weekends, we're off. I think I heard a story and I don't know if this is true. We have to look

00:54:55.620 this up. But I think this went back to Henry Ford. I think that he decided that this was about the

00:55:03.280 right amount of time to work for his workers making the model. Was it model T or whatever it was? And

00:55:09.560 that's been what we've done ever since. I don't know if that's true. I've heard that. And it sounds

00:55:15.140 like it might be right because these things sort of take on a life of their own. And for a long time,

00:55:21.220 Ford was the leader and this was why they were the leader. And this is what we should be doing

00:55:27.340 too. And people don't stop to question it. For example, in the summers at base camp, we work 32

00:55:33.120 hour weeks. So May through October, we do four day weeks, eight hour days. So we're still doing the

00:55:40.860 eight hour day, but just doing one fewer day a week and less work gets done, but not that much less.

00:55:47.400 So it does feel like 40 is about a good number and 30, somewhere between 30 and 40 seems to be a

00:55:55.060 pretty good number. I think if we had less than 32 hours though, we would fall off a cliff pretty

00:55:59.460 quickly because what ends up happening is when you have fewer hours, you can't waste any time and any

00:56:05.800 mistakes are magnified and are really difficult to recover from. And we've seen that even in our 32 hour

00:56:11.480 weeks, if there's like something that happens on a given day and now you only have a three day work

00:56:15.640 week, like pretty much nothing happens that week really quickly. So you lose a day out of four and

00:56:21.020 it's a real problem. So the five day work week is pretty standard, of course, but it feels like eight

00:56:26.600 hours just seems to be enough time. It's not quite sunrise to sunset, of course, because that might be

00:56:31.940 earlier or longer. We should look up the history, but it feels to me like somewhere between 30 and 40 is

00:56:37.200 the right number. That's not to say that 45 isn't fine too. I'm sure it's fine. The problem is when it gets

00:56:42.500 into 60, 70, 80, that's when it's a problem because if you think about your day, you've got

00:56:47.940 24 hours, you should sleep about eight. Now you've got 16 left. And if you want to get into some sort

00:56:53.920 of balance-y kind of arrangement, then you split it in half, you got about eight and eight. That seems

00:56:59.800 about fair. If you're working 14 hour days and you're sleeping eight hours a night, which you may not

00:57:06.360 be because you might be working longer or whatever and trying to squeeze in a whole day also, then your life

00:57:11.460 gets squeezed out of there too. So eight just seems like it feels about right, but I think it goes back

00:57:16.540 to Henry Ford. I'm not sure why though. If you had to pick, would five days at eight hours be better

00:57:21.560 or worse than four days at 10 hours? I'm going to cop out and say, I think essentially both is good.

00:57:27.640 And the reason why, and this is kind of what we do almost, since we do only part of the year,

00:57:33.160 four-day work weeks, even though we're not working 10 hours, four-day work weeks versus five days.

00:57:37.720 And I think what I like about that is the seasonality of things. You know, when we grew

00:57:42.160 up, when all of us grew up, we went to school and then we got summers off and you take summer off

00:57:47.280 and you do something else. And then summer's amazing until the end of summer. And you're like,

00:57:52.100 maybe I'm kind of ready to go back to school or do something else, or maybe you're not, but like

00:57:56.060 at least things change. And I think that that's a really healthy thing. And that's sort of what we

00:58:01.840 tried to model it after here, which is, you know, let's kind of give everyone a summer break again.

00:58:06.720 Like you used to have when you were a kid. And it's not that it's a break break. It's just a

00:58:11.080 little bit of a break and let people enjoy themselves. Everyone has a three-day weekend

00:58:15.260 in the summer. There's, there's more things to do. You can maybe take another vacation that you

00:58:18.860 wouldn't have taken. You can maybe take a slightly longer road trip than you would have taken.

00:58:22.560 But what we, we, we found is that like, we actually started to try to do the four-day work

00:58:26.540 weeks all year. And it, it wasn't as special. It didn't feel as special pretty quickly becomes

00:58:31.900 just the way it is. And so I like the shift. So I'd be, by the way, I'd be okay. Also with the

00:58:36.640 four-day 10 hour day, if people want to do it, you know, want to do it that way. The thing is,

00:58:41.900 is that like having the three-day weekend is the real boon there. It's the real like nice special

00:58:46.060 thing you can do. It can afford you the ability to do things that you normally wouldn't have been

00:58:49.280 able to do because two days on a weekend is just sometimes not enough to take a long trip or

00:58:53.780 something like that. So I think it's healthy to mix this up, but I don't know what the exact

00:58:57.100 right amount of hours are, but I do know that like too many hours has some real costs.

00:59:01.240 All right. Got a couple of questions on culture. And I've always sort of bristled at the term

00:59:06.160 culture because when I think about culture, I think about those sort of happy, feel good signs

00:59:13.520 that get mocked a lot. You know what I'm talking about? Like integrity, thoughtfulness. Like I could,

00:59:21.320 you know, you just like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. A buddy of mine found a, maybe it still exists,

00:59:26.780 but there was this really funny website where you could take all the motivational value-based

00:59:32.180 culture-based pictures, but put your own pictures and own captions to them, but it would build it in

00:59:37.240 the same font and look like the same poster. I'm sure people listening have seen it, but it's,

00:59:42.280 it's really priceless. So notwithstanding the fact that I don't know what any of this stuff means

00:59:46.960 because like a poster on a wall doesn't mean anything to me. Presumably it's, how does it

00:59:51.880 infiltrate what you actually do day in and day out? Nevertheless, there are great questions here

00:59:56.460 around this notion of what advice do you have for somebody who sort of listens to this podcast,

01:00:03.360 listen to the other podcast says, Jason, you got it, man. I buy what you're saying. I tried to get

01:00:08.500 a job at base camp. You guys didn't hire me or I don't want to work in Chicago or I'm not in that

01:00:13.460 space, but I still believe in the ethos you describe. Can you help me think about the right lab

01:00:22.200 to pick for my PhD, the right job to pick the right, you know, fill in the blank, the right company to

01:00:28.940 work for? What are the telltale signs that I need to be aware of that I'm in a place where I'm going

01:00:34.360 to thrive based on all the things we've discussed and even things we haven't discussed that you just

01:00:38.640 think are important metrics of a great existence? Culture, I cringe in the same way that you cringe

01:00:44.600 when you hear about corporate company industry culture stuff. First off, culture is not something

01:00:51.980 that a company creates. You cannot create culture. Culture is the byproduct of consistent behavior.

01:00:59.440 It's what the company does. That's it. It's not what you want it to do. It's not what you wish it

01:01:03.520 to do. It's not what you write down. It's what it does. I think the best way to find out what a

01:01:08.020 company is like is simply to talk to the people who work there. They're going to tell you what it's

01:01:11.600 really like. You don't listen to the company tell you what it's like. Listen to the people who work

01:01:16.660 there because they know. So one thing you can do is if the company has a product, let's say you're

01:01:22.200 working at or you want to go work at Shure Microphones. I'm looking at our microphone. Shure

01:01:26.700 Microphones, great company. What's it like to work there? I don't know. Go call customer service and

01:01:31.220 ask them a question about Shure Microphones and talk to the person. First of all, see if like how much

01:01:36.860 does the company value customers? Is the customer service good? Is it bad? What is it like? How quickly

01:01:41.520 the answer? You know, how coherent are they? And then just ask that person and go, hey, you know,

01:01:46.080 this is totally weird. I know I'm calling customer service here because I have a question about your

01:01:50.220 mics. But I'm also thinking about working there. Like what's it like to work there? And just ask

01:01:55.480 people. Just like sometimes we all struggle with how do you find these things out? Well, you just ask.

01:02:00.260 You just ask. And so call the number and ask. Ask around and see if you know anybody who works

01:02:05.700 there or who has worked there. I don't believe in looking at like there's some things called like

01:02:10.160 Glassdoor and there's some other websites on the internet that like aggregate employees'

01:02:15.280 perspectives on companies. And oftentimes they're filled with disgruntled ex-employees who are, you

01:02:20.600 know, screaming about something. And there's some value in there too, obviously, but you don't really

01:02:25.020 get the context of just talking to somebody. So I try and figure out ways to just go talk. So for

01:02:29.120 your example, like a medical lab or something, there's got to be a way to talk to someone who works

01:02:33.640 there. Maybe just go show up. I don't know if you can show up at labs, but like talk to someone

01:02:38.800 who works at the front desk, like just talk to somebody and ask and say, what's it like to work

01:02:43.400 here? What's it like? And just let them go and just kind of ask them questions about that. But

01:02:48.620 don't look at like a handbook or, you know, the posters on the wall or what they write about

01:02:53.540 themselves on the website. Another thing you can look at though, by the way, I like to look at this

01:02:57.520 is, you know, like those terms of service, you get some software and there's like a term of service

01:03:02.420 or a privacy policy or these kinds of policies that are public policies for the companies.

01:03:06.260 Pretty much every company has one these days. Just go look at those and see how they're written.

01:03:11.500 Are these, you know, are they written in language that human beings can understand because they're

01:03:14.740 meant for human beings to read or does it require a lawyer to, you know, lawyers are humans, of course,

01:03:19.700 but, you know, a different life form. Like does it require a lawyer to decipher this stuff? Like

01:03:26.160 what is the company thinking about? What is the company, when they write something like this,

01:03:30.660 that's meant for people, are they writing to people or are they just doing what everyone else does,

01:03:35.180 which is have the lawyers write it and no one can understand it. Like there's all sorts of

01:03:39.240 artifacts and symbols out there that represent sort of how the company thinks. So that combined with

01:03:46.660 talking to people who work there is a great thing. And a lot of people, you know, on LinkedIn,

01:03:50.980 you could probably find someone who works somewhere and just say, do you mind if I just, if I hop,

01:03:55.140 if we hop on the phone for 15 minutes, I know this is awkward, but like, I'm really thinking about it.

01:03:58.480 I'd like to hear what it's like to work there. I really care about, you know, what it's like to work

01:04:01.340 at a company and most everyone's going to go, yeah, that's, that's cool. You're not trying to

01:04:04.520 sell me something. Sure. I'll hop on the phone with you. Why not? So anyway, that's what I would

01:04:08.260 recommend people do. We've thought about here. We've thought about putting together a list of

01:04:12.840 companies that we have heard are sort of like-minded companies, but I also don't really want to get in

01:04:18.860 the business of endorsing other companies because who knows? So it is hard to find the list.

01:04:24.700 Anyway, I'm rambling now. Just call and talk to someone.

01:04:26.800 Is there anything that you would view as a warning sign? Is there something that if you're doing your

01:04:34.380 interview day and is there a question you, you would ask as a way to probe and get an answer that

01:04:40.940 could one way or the other tell you, you know what, this is a place that's going to walk the walk

01:04:46.520 and not just talk the talk. Are there any other ways that you could sort of fish through that?

01:04:51.120 There's a few things. Number one, and I don't know, it depends who you're interviewing with,

01:04:54.580 but I would, I always like to ask the question, what would this company say no to?

01:04:58.640 That's just always a question that I think is an interesting question to answer.

01:05:02.280 You can ask them like, what happens if, you know, you can have your own things. Like what happens if

01:05:07.300 I need a couple of days for mental health or like what happens if someone in my family close to me

01:05:14.000 passes away? Like stuff like that, which is like heavy stuff. But if the company is like,

01:05:19.940 or if the interview is like, I don't even know. I don't know. Uh, I guess you can maybe have a day

01:05:23.840 off. I don't know. Like that just means to me that they haven't thought about these kinds of

01:05:27.320 things. And these are just real human issues. And I think that a good culture is going to think about

01:05:31.480 those kinds of things. So I think those kinds of questions. Um, the other one I would always

01:05:35.440 run away from pretty fast is when a company goes, we're just a big family here because,

01:05:40.960 I mean, this is something that's common across companies.

01:05:42.900 Is that, is that code speak for you're going to eat, sleep, breathe here, live here,

01:05:46.980 and you won't have friends outside of here?

01:05:49.340 Exactly. Real good companies respect family, which means you get to see yours. But when a lot

01:05:56.540 of companies say, we're just a big family here, or it's like family here, what they basically mean

01:05:59.800 is you're going to sacrifice for us like you would for your family, which means you'll do anything

01:06:03.980 that you're called upon doing because we're all a family here. That's code speak. I'd run away from

01:06:08.940 that. I mean, maybe there's an exception here and there, but mostly it's like, we're going to do

01:06:12.680 whatever it takes for each other, no matter what. And that often means busting your ass,

01:06:17.300 long hours. You could never like abandon the family and go home. Like you would never do that

01:06:22.100 to your family. Would you abandon your family? And then it's just dangerous talk. So companies are

01:06:26.520 not families. They're places to work and you have coworkers and you can do great work with coworkers,

01:06:30.760 but you don't need to fake this family BS. And also like, again, real companies that care about

01:06:35.780 people actually care about family. And that means time away, time off, time to yourself.

01:06:41.520 So that's a red flag. All right. Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about incentives.

01:06:48.640 We've got a few questions on this. We'll see if we need to get through all of them because you may

01:06:52.020 answer some of them by getting through earlier ones. So can you talk about employee incentive

01:06:57.500 structures and how they can create a calm workplace? I know that at Basecamp, you have foregone

01:07:02.420 traditional option grants in favor of profit sharing and an employee pool if Basecamp were to exit.

01:07:08.900 How has that worked out? And maybe talk through some of the thoughts behind that.

01:07:13.860 Yeah. Unlike many companies in the tech world, we don't offer equity. I think equity is often

01:07:20.000 unfair in that in most companies, it goes to zero. That's just the reality of things,

01:07:26.520 especially private companies, private companies that never go public. You can't really get out of

01:07:30.640 any equity that's granted. And most companies don't go public. And many of them that do,

01:07:34.680 don't do so well. And often companies will give you equity in lieu of salary. And you can actually

01:07:40.300 spend salary on sandwiches, but you can't spend equity. You can't go to your local restaurant and

01:07:46.100 pay with stock options. It's not real money. It's fake money. Now, that doesn't mean some of it can't

01:07:52.400 turn people into huge millionaires. Of course that happens, but it's really a lottery ticket. And so

01:07:57.580 I think it creates stress when you don't pay people what they're worth. And instead you substitute some

01:08:05.300 lottery tickets, some instant games, essentially. I just don't think that that's a healthy thing to do

01:08:11.060 because it creates pressure for the company to finally help people cash out on those things.

01:08:17.580 And if that doesn't happen, well, people feel like they put in a lot of time and they were misled.

01:08:21.780 And this is often what happens. So I don't think that's a calm approach. What we decided to do

01:08:28.060 was just pay people at the top of the market. Now, we can do this now. We couldn't have done

01:08:33.060 this 15 years ago when we didn't have the money. So this is all about when you can phase some of

01:08:36.900 these things in. But now we pay people at the top of the market, which means we pay basically the 90th

01:08:41.660 percentile San Francisco rates, regardless of where you live. Since we have a remote company,

01:08:47.360 people can work anywhere. So you live in a farm in Tennessee, you still get 90th percentile San

01:08:51.460 Francisco rates. And we benchmark the industry using a couple of different benchmarking companies

01:08:55.780 that help us do this. And what this does is it takes basically, certainly when you're 90 percentile,

01:09:02.160 that means someone else is a little bit higher in certain situations. And there's always someone

01:09:05.980 who will pay you more. But for the most part, you know that you don't really have to think much

01:09:09.540 about salary, that you're being very well paid. And that's not something that has to creep into your

01:09:14.240 mind all the time. Like, could I be making more somewhere else? Could I be making more somewhere

01:09:17.220 else? And hey, I want to ask for a raise pretty soon. And my God, I hate asking for raises. And I'm

01:09:21.020 really terrified of doing it. And so I'm not going to do it. And now I'm stressed out because maybe I

01:09:25.520 should, but I'm not going to. And I'm nervous about it. My manager is a really good negotiator.

01:09:29.120 And I get totally intimidated when I go in there. And like, there's no reason for you to have to be

01:09:33.020 great at two things at work, great at your job and a great negotiator. Most people are not great

01:09:37.180 negotiators. Negotiation is really difficult for most people, for most things. So we've eliminated

01:09:42.080 negotiation. We have published salaries, essentially tied to roles. And if you're in a particular role,

01:09:47.460 you get paid that amount, the same as anyone else who's in that role. It eliminates all sorts of

01:09:51.880 bias. And it's a really nice system. Now, we have explored profit sharing, although we've never

01:09:58.300 really paid out on it because we've only done it for three years. And it's all based on profit growth,

01:10:04.440 not profit in itself. We've been profitable for 20 years. So being profitable is not the hard part for

01:10:10.420 us. What was hard for us was to see profit growth year over another year. And we haven't paid out on that

01:10:16.320 because we've, we've hired some more people lately, which means our, our margins went down a bit. So

01:10:20.800 we haven't been able to match the total high watermark for previous profitable years. So that

01:10:26.560 hasn't paid out, but what we do have, and by the way, because of that, we've eliminated it. So we had

01:10:31.520 it for three years. It didn't pay out for three years. And we just got real about it, which is

01:10:36.300 saying, look, this may not pay out. And having this system in place, that's constantly getting your

01:10:42.980 hopes up and letting you down. Like that's not healthy for anybody. I know it's going to suck

01:10:47.480 to rip this Band-Aid off and say, we're not going to do this anymore. But what would suck would be

01:10:50.700 to keep ripping the Band-Aid off a little bit at a time over, you know, a course of many, many years

01:10:56.760 and never coming through on that. Now we could have come through on it, but we have some more expenses

01:11:01.280 ahead of us. We want to do some other things. We want to grow in a few other ways. And we just knew

01:11:04.320 this wasn't going to happen. So we pulled it off the table, explained it to everybody. And by the way,

01:11:07.980 when we announced the thing, we said, we're going to do this as a three-year experiment.

01:11:12.020 So we set it up upfront. We're very big into setting expectations upfront so we can get out

01:11:15.780 of things if they don't end up working properly. So we did that. What we do have though, is we do

01:11:20.740 have something that stands in for equity. Most people want equity in the case of a liquidity

01:11:28.880 event of some sort. The company goes public or the company sells or something like that.

01:11:34.000 So what we have instead is, instead of having to worry about equity and granting equity and dealing

01:11:37.920 with options and vesting and the whole thing, we have a pool. So in our operating agreement,

01:11:43.280 it says in the event of a liquidity event of any kind, or maybe that's defined a little bit more

01:11:48.800 clearly than that, but I don't have the text in front of me. We will set aside at minimum 5%

01:11:54.480 of the purchase price to distribute to the employees. So you don't have to have equity at Basecamp

01:12:01.520 to participate in the windfall if a windfall ever comes due. So that's kind of a much simpler way

01:12:08.720 to approach it. Now, the downside is, is that if you've worked here for seven years and we'd sell

01:12:13.080 the company year nine and you left after seven, you wouldn't participate in that. It's for people

01:12:17.220 who are still at the company. And the longer you've been here, the more of a percentage of that

01:12:21.220 you get. But that's sort of how we've decided to do that. And all in, what's nice about this is that

01:12:26.520 this isn't a day-to-day thing. And I think that's what stresses people out. You look at people who

01:12:30.780 are being paid by stock, you know, think about people who, who get stock and a company goes public

01:12:35.640 and there's a six month lockout or whatever. And people are checking the stock price many times a

01:12:40.700 day, all day long, and their hopes are going up one day and down another, and they're dashed this day

01:12:45.500 and they're, and they're pumped up this day. This is just a rollercoaster of stress and anxiety,

01:12:51.300 financial anxiety. And you can't plan your life with it. You don't know what it's going to be worth

01:12:56.280 at the end. You can't plan vacations on money that isn't real and that fluctuates on a day-to-day

01:13:00.580 basis. These are just all these little things that make things stressful on people. And if

01:13:05.580 there's anything that's stressful in the world, it's money for a lot of people. So like to have

01:13:08.640 things being so variable and so unknown, it just feels like a terrible burden to put on people

01:13:12.520 versus being very clear about, here's what you're going to get every year. Here's how it's going to

01:13:16.040 work. We're going to pay you exceptionally well. If you move up this level, you're going to get this

01:13:19.180 new salary and you're going to be paid there. If we ever happen to sell the business one day,

01:13:22.640 we don't need to think about it day-to-day because it's not going to happen anytime soon. But if it does,

01:13:26.280 here's the provision that handles that. And now you can focus on your work versus focusing on being

01:13:32.040 a day trader. And if you've ever met any day traders, you know they're not calling people.

01:13:36.040 So converting your whole workforce into day traders seems like the absolute wrong direction to go in.

01:13:42.660 This question, I don't know if this came from somebody at Basecamp. It might have. Basecamp

01:13:46.160 recently went through its biggest hiring phase, five new, it says teammates, I believe, in quite some

01:13:52.340 time. Is there a common poor habit or less than optimal habit you've found in hires, either past

01:13:59.980 or present? The thing that's so important to us when we hire somebody are their writing skills.

01:14:08.700 We've noticed that poor writers tend to perform poorly here. So we're very careful about making

01:14:15.440 sure that we hire great writers. So we look at a lot of writing samples during the hiring process,

01:14:19.000 no matter what position they're in. So that's a really important, it's more of a skill than a

01:14:22.980 habit, I guess, but that's super important to us. The other one is the hard thing for people to do is

01:14:28.880 to break habits, not to form them. We form them all the time. Breaking them is hard. And we're careful

01:14:34.940 about that when someone comes from a much larger organization. So if they're coming in from a company

01:14:42.140 that has tens of thousands of people or very, very stuffy corporate structure, we have to help them,

01:14:47.460 give them more time to break habits. Because it's unfair for us to expect them to adapt very

01:14:54.020 quickly. So that's really on us more than it is on them. But we have to be conscious of where people

01:14:58.400 are coming from. And remembering that even though they might start here on Monday, they've been

01:15:04.020 somewhere else their whole career. This Monday is just like one against a thousand days or one

01:15:09.020 against 10,000 days worth of work. So helping people work their way out of those habits is something

01:15:14.620 we need to do and we need to be conscious of. And we have to be careful not to judge people

01:15:18.420 on some of those behaviors. And there's been situations where we've hired new people who we

01:15:24.020 saw were working on Saturdays because they were checking in work or asking someone else to do

01:15:27.440 something on a Saturday. And come Monday, I would just mention to them, hey, you don't have to do

01:15:33.200 that here. I appreciate that you're trying to make an impression and you're trying to do great work

01:15:39.280 and you're probably putting in more time than you need to. But just remember, we don't have to work

01:15:43.720 on the weekends. And everything can wait till Monday. It's totally fine. So you kind of have

01:15:47.920 to reinforce that. So it's not that people are bad in any way. It's that the environments they've been

01:15:54.020 in have conditioned them to work a certain way and be a certain way. And that's a particularly hard

01:15:59.400 thing to break unless you have help breaking that. It's kind of like an intervention almost in a

01:16:05.080 sense. Like, hey, you're doing this thing. Like, we got to stop doing that thing. And we're here to

01:16:09.500 help you stop doing that thing. What kind of support and help do you need? It's really on us to help

01:16:14.260 them break those habits. Going back to work itself, people talk all the time about process-oriented

01:16:21.060 work versus result-driven or outcome-driven work. How does that factor into how you think about your

01:16:27.780 company? I've changed over the years. I used to believe that process didn't matter so much,

01:16:32.500 that it was all about outcomes. Who cares how it gets done as long as it gets done? Or

01:16:37.600 who cares what happens along the way? But look at how great this thing is or whatever.

01:16:42.620 And as I sort of alluded to earlier in another question, I've changed my thinking and our

01:16:48.720 company has changed a lot. And we're very much focused on the process now. Of course,

01:16:52.640 the outcomes have to be good too. But if the outcomes get you somewhere and you've killed a

01:16:56.820 bunch of people along the way, I don't mean literally, but morale has been destroyed. Teams don't like

01:17:01.740 working with one another. Employees don't like each other. Employees don't like you. Employees

01:17:06.600 don't trust you. No one trusts you. That was not worth it. So if you're just looking at the outcome,

01:17:11.560 well, you're barely looking at what matters because you have to do this again and again and again and

01:17:16.940 again. A company is hundreds of decisions and thousands of projects over the course of its life.

01:17:23.420 Unless you, again, want to keep hiring new people or you can somehow continue to keep burned out

01:17:28.360 people going with artificial respirators or whatever you want to do. You're going to have

01:17:34.280 to do stuff that's sustainable. And that's what process is all about. Although a process can also

01:17:38.940 be unsustainable. But for us, we've come up with a process that we believe is sustainable.

01:17:44.040 So for us, like for example, on the product side of things, we work in these six-week cycles.

01:17:48.640 And then we take two weeks off between cycles, not off of work entirely, but off of structured work.

01:17:54.640 So during those two weeks, after those six weeks, those two weeks are for more like people

01:17:59.120 can freelance internally. They can tighten something up that they saw was a little bit

01:18:03.560 loose. They can fix some stuff that they weren't thrilled with perhaps. They can explore a new

01:18:08.000 idea or prototype something new. And so they're working, but they're not working on structured

01:18:12.840 work. There's gaps between things. And that's really helped people recharge a little bit and

01:18:18.320 then get their mind off the big project and onto some smaller personal projects and then get back

01:18:22.380 into the new thing again. It's like running wind sprints. Although I don't like the term sprints

01:18:27.240 in business and we're not worrying people out, but you've got to take a break between and then you do

01:18:32.080 another one. You take a break and you do another one. This idea of doing things back to back to back

01:18:35.380 to back to back might work in the short term, but you're going to burn yourself out and you'll be

01:18:39.200 exhausted. So you can't do that over and over and over and over and over. That's kind of how we've

01:18:43.720 decided to look at this. So we invest a lot of time and thought into process. We've published our

01:18:48.520 process for anyone who's interested. If you go to basecamp.com slash shape up S H A P E U P,

01:18:55.340 you can see like we've written up about 30,000 words on this about how we actually work day to day

01:19:01.920 on projects. And it's for everyone to see. So anyone can see it. The idea here is that we want to make

01:19:08.380 sure that people think more about what goes into doing the work and not just about what comes out the

01:19:13.760 other side. I've seen so many companies that release things, but they've caused fundamental

01:19:18.780 significant damage inside their organizations. And they never recover from that, even though they

01:19:22.180 got that product out, but it's like, so what? So you got this thing out now, everyone, no one wants

01:19:26.780 to work on it anymore. Maybe the code base is a complete disaster because you pushed it through

01:19:30.980 so hard and you sped through it without really thinking about it. Now it's a total mess and no one

01:19:34.480 wants to get near it. It's called spaghetti code is what people tend to call it, or it has a code smell.

01:19:39.940 Sometimes what people say, like they don't want to get near that anymore because it's foul,

01:19:44.180 basically. But you did what you had to do to get it out the door, but you also have to work on these

01:19:48.420 things. You have to maintain these things. It's no different than a relationship or a friendship.

01:19:52.340 You don't just have a friendship with someone and just never maintain it. You've got to maintain it.

01:19:56.240 And if you brute force your way into being a friend with someone, it's not going to last very long.

01:20:00.380 That's how we think about process and why I think it's so important.

01:20:04.000 Now you talked about the last time we spoke that you, your motivation for creating products is

01:20:09.760 products that you want. The opposite way to the way Steve Jobs is characterized in how he built

01:20:17.100 products at Apple, right? Which is he knew what the market wanted and he built it for them.

01:20:20.980 Maybe that's the same thing. Maybe he was just ultimately building what he wanted. He wanted

01:20:24.500 a phone to do this and eventually the market was going to figure it out. So maybe it is the same

01:20:27.740 thing. Can you think of an example of a failure where internally all the process is,

01:20:35.000 hey, we really think this product is fantastic. This is something we would love. Let's put the

01:20:40.420 steps in place to make it happen. You do so. It hits the market. It's a total flop. Have you

01:20:44.280 experienced this? And if so, what's the frequency of it?

01:20:47.100 Yeah, we certainly have. So Basecamp is our biggest hit, but we've released, depending on how you count,

01:20:53.420 probably eight or nine other products. And they've had success to varying degrees.

01:20:57.740 And I say success, even though some of them were not anywhere near as successful. So they weren't

01:21:03.780 failures in the sense that they didn't work, but they didn't work anywhere near as well as Basecamp.

01:21:10.200 And so it didn't make sense for us to spend our time on them anymore. We've shut one of them down.

01:21:15.040 A couple of them we spun off into separate companies. A couple other, we just sort of

01:21:20.080 continue to maintain, but don't improve anymore. So the customers who use them can use them forever,

01:21:24.620 but we're not going to improve them anymore. So they were not financial successes, like on the

01:21:29.200 grand scheme of things, but they found a market. They found a niche. It was just too small for us

01:21:33.600 to justify. Yeah, that's happened to us plenty of times. And we've been in business for 20 years and

01:21:38.320 we've only had like one major hit, let's say, which is Basecamp. Highrise was our second most popular

01:21:43.680 product, which was a significantly large product and very successful as a whole, but it was 10X less

01:21:51.660 successful in terms of customers and revenue and the whole thing. If we're getting back into success

01:21:56.840 equals money here, I'm measuring it that way than Basecamp. So it was successful on the merits

01:22:01.580 compared to a lot of other products, but it wasn't as successful as Basecamp. So

01:22:04.640 we're not strangers to things that don't work out quite as well as we hope. We're working on a new

01:22:09.860 product right now, and I hope that that's great, but it may not be as well. I think if you get one hit

01:22:14.320 in your life, you're pretty successful or pretty lucky, I should say, to begin with. So I've gone through

01:22:19.100 the process of spending a year or more on something that doesn't pan out, but we don't look at those

01:22:24.800 things as failures. They just not, that's not how we look at that stuff. Technically you could say it

01:22:30.040 was, but I don't, I just see it as an experience and we move on from it and we keep going. Like it

01:22:35.260 didn't take us down. It didn't kill the business. It didn't kill anybody here. We're okay. It just

01:22:41.180 didn't do as well as other things. So let's just come to terms with that. The failure would be

01:22:46.620 to continue to pour effort and energy into something that you know is never going to get

01:22:53.220 where you want it to get or where you want it to be. And that's the failure. It's not that it didn't

01:22:59.500 do as well as you'd hoped. The failure would be that you're lying to yourself about that.

01:23:04.960 So as long as you come to terms with them, this didn't work out as well as we'd hoped.

01:23:08.180 So what are we going to do about it? Well, we can keep it around and we can shut it down. We can,

01:23:11.660 we can merge it with another product. We can spin it off. Like let's give it another life.

01:23:15.740 We've sold a few products over the years. We built this thing for a while called Sortfolio,

01:23:19.960 which was a directory for web designers to help people find web designers. And it did moderately

01:23:24.160 well, but it wasn't enough to have anyone work on a full time. So we sold it. We had a job board,

01:23:29.340 which we had called WeWork Remotely, which still exists. Someone else runs it now, which we sold

01:23:34.120 because it was doing well, but it wasn't doing well enough to justify continued investment. So

01:23:39.220 I think a lot of things ultimately can do well enough. It's just a matter of how much is it worth

01:23:44.340 to continue to foster that thing, to invest in that thing. And I think that's the more important

01:23:49.720 question is, is cutting your losses at some point, I think is a really healthy thing. And it's not

01:23:53.840 healthy when you don't. And that's the failure. What's the sales force like of Basecamp? You know,

01:23:58.660 you said you have 56 employees. How many of those people do sales?

01:24:01.800 Zero. We don't have any salespeople. We are a hundred percent, essentially a hundred percent word

01:24:07.000 of mouth. We dabble here and there and playing with some ads, but basically rounds down to zero.

01:24:11.980 So for us, it's all been a word of mouth. It's worked out really well for us. Plus,

01:24:16.760 you know, we, we speak a lot where we write books and all that stuff of course is in a sense,

01:24:21.220 marketing. And as a sense, our sales people, every book we put out as a sales person,

01:24:25.960 essentially. And we share a lot of what we do, but we don't have any dedicated salespeople.

01:24:30.300 Never have.

01:24:31.140 So a lot of companies do have salespeople and there's a question about it, which I think is

01:24:35.160 kind of an interesting question, right? Which is, what do you do when sales go down and it's,

01:24:39.620 you know, due to externalities, you know, the market is, you could argue playing a bigger role

01:24:44.880 in this than the efficacy of the individual, or at least there's some, you know, if I'm not going

01:24:49.660 to delineate what the balance is between them, it's clearly not 100, zero or zero, 100.

01:24:54.640 So how do you get in the head of somebody whose job is so far out of their hands, which is kind of

01:25:03.800 the opposite of, you know, it, I think having things under your control is a great source of

01:25:10.860 pleasure on one hand, but it's also, you know, it can be a very tormenting thing depending on

01:25:17.520 how seriously you take it. Conversely, having nothing in your control, you know, if you're

01:25:22.800 a monk can be a great realization because then you realize, well, nothing's in my control, therefore

01:25:28.320 I don't have to suffer as a result of it.

01:25:30.600 But at the same time, I think for some people, the uncertainty of that is also quite painful. So

01:25:34.560 I don't know if what I'm saying makes sense, but A, are there any people in your company whose

01:25:38.680 job description and performance seems a little more out of their control than others? And if not,

01:25:45.060 even, could you just talk about this in the abstract?

01:25:47.720 Yeah, I'm certainly conscious of the fact that I have it good. You know, I own the place,

01:25:53.360 I run the place. All these things I'm talking about are ideas that are in place and I get to live

01:25:59.700 by the ideas that I have. And I know that that's a very fortunate position. So I get all that.

01:26:06.240 Certainly there are different jobs here with different levels of criticality that sometimes

01:26:13.100 you have to be on. And one of the hardest jobs here, I think, is technical operations. So we have

01:26:17.300 a team, I think, of seven or eight people, depending on how you count. Actually, there's a few more who

01:26:23.300 work in security as well. There's four people in that group. So let's call it 10-ish, 10, 11 people,

01:26:28.840 or 12, who are essentially, they have to kind of be on call if the shit hits the fan, like literally.

01:26:36.200 Like if servers go down, customers can't get to base camp. Like if it's three in the morning,

01:26:41.280 it doesn't matter. Like they have to get the, they get the pager call and they have to,

01:26:45.520 like a doctor, you know, you got to get up and got to go to the hospital and do that

01:26:49.300 emergency surgery, like that kind of thing. So it's, there's people here where they're under

01:26:55.120 different kinds of pressure, perhaps than others. That's the job, of course, but there's definitely

01:27:00.720 a different level of criticality and security as well. If there's a breach or there's credential

01:27:04.840 stuffing attack, or there's denial of service attack, there's all these different things that

01:27:08.180 can happen at any time now on the internet. And someone has to man that or run that project or run

01:27:14.020 that situation and take the lead and deal with it. And oftentimes David, my business partner and I

01:27:19.460 are on those calls and helping out if we can, David more than I, because David's technical and I'm not.

01:27:26.000 But if I can help with communicating things to customers and explaining things, or I have to

01:27:29.480 jump on customer service, you know, that kind of stuff, like we're all, all hands on deck in those

01:27:33.720 kinds of situations. But yeah, there's definitely a leading edge there of people, their job in a sense

01:27:38.200 is out of their control. And even more so today than perhaps ever before. We used to host,

01:27:44.020 and we still have some of our own physical hardware in a data center, but we've been moving

01:27:47.280 more and more things to the cloud lately. So most of our stuff is hosted on Amazon, AWS.

01:27:52.820 We'd had some stuff in Google as well for a while. And that's even further out of our control in a

01:27:57.900 sense, because it's not infrastructure that we're in charge of anymore. And so things can go wrong that

01:28:02.020 we can't control as a company now that we could have maybe controlled before, or we could have

01:28:05.940 understood better before, or we could have had some other contingency plans in place before.

01:28:10.500 So it's tough being on ops and being on security is particularly tough. Customer service then

01:28:15.800 becomes tough too, because, you know, if Basecamp is down, hundreds of emails will pile in. We have

01:28:20.940 thousands and thousands and thousands of people using Basecamp at any given moment. So hundreds

01:28:24.860 of emails begin to pile in, like what's going on, what's wrong, why is this busted? Now we have to

01:28:28.560 figure out how to communicate with our customers under duress at a certain level. You know, like

01:28:33.100 everyone's stressed out, we're stressed out, they're stressed out. Like, how do you explain what's going

01:28:36.920 on? You can't always give an exact time when we're going to be back because we don't know.

01:28:40.740 So we've just decided to be extremely honest and clear with people. So we have a whole writing

01:28:46.360 guideline internally that we have for events like this and checklists that we resort to during times

01:28:52.040 of duress. So we don't let our emotions get the best of us. We don't use exclamation marks.

01:28:57.420 Whenever we have to talk about downtime or uptime or issues like that, we just don't want to make

01:29:01.280 things emotional for people. We want to be very clear, very coherent, brief, but detailed. Speak

01:29:06.860 in terms that everyone can understand. No lingo. Like we drill these things over and over. So we get

01:29:11.940 better and better at it. So yeah, there are definitely people here. But as far as like sales,

01:29:15.380 I can see in some organizations, sales starts to go down and the salespeople take the brunt of it.

01:29:19.840 In our case, we don't have that, but I would say operations can take the brunt of it if something

01:29:23.500 goes bad technically. Got it.

01:29:26.180 Um, this is kind of a little bit of a potpourri of some questions. They don't necessarily fit into

01:29:32.420 a nice theme, but I think they're interesting questions. So in our first discussion, you talked

01:29:38.120 about, I think the way you described it was we sort of underappreciate the importance of luck.

01:29:43.260 We sort of overemphasize talent and skill. And you said, we need to focus on the exceptions. It's

01:29:50.420 likely those exceptions and the exceptional people. A lot of this has to do with luck and timing,

01:29:55.420 and it also has to do with skill and talent. So I don't think you're being dismissive of that.

01:29:58.640 All that said, the question is, are we attributing too much to luck? I really wonder whether Jason

01:30:05.160 is emphasizing luck too much. And this person says, I've recently started to shift my way of

01:30:11.040 thinking more towards that of Peter Thiel, who said, shallow men believe in luck, believe in

01:30:15.860 circumstances, strong men believe in cause and effect. I think that in the past, this is the person

01:30:21.460 still speaking. Basically, I tend to believe more in luck and randomness. I'm trying to shift more

01:30:26.840 into this cause and effect way of thinking. It's a bit of a long question, and we've certainly touched

01:30:31.340 on some of the components of it, but I wonder if you have more thoughts on this notion.

01:30:35.820 I do. I think luck and timing are sort of the substrate and everything grows on that. And timing

01:30:42.480 probably more than anything. I kind of feel like number one, you've got whatever you're making,

01:30:46.600 whatever you're doing, it's got to be useful. So that has to be true. But if the timing's wrong,

01:30:52.320 it sort of doesn't matter. If you're way ahead of your time or way behind your time, it sort of

01:30:56.100 doesn't matter how useful it is or how good it is or how good on paper it is. Like it has to,

01:31:01.420 timing has to be there. And some people can't, some people are slightly better. Some people can

01:31:06.320 create their own timing. Like that can happen. But most of the time you look back on it and go,

01:31:12.060 oh, that was the right time for that thing to happen. I think actually we can maybe talk a bit

01:31:17.360 about this. I think like the Cybertruck, the thing that Tesla just released is really interesting.

01:31:23.260 You've seen that, I imagine, Peter? No, I haven't. Oh my God. Well,

01:31:26.700 you have to go take a look at it. Tesla Cybertruck. It's bizarre. I love, absolutely love it though,

01:31:33.120 because it's so different from any other pickup truck you've ever seen. It's so completely unusual

01:31:39.660 that in many ways it drew the line. And he just announced this a few days ago. It drew the line

01:31:46.440 between before and after. There's going to be before the Cybertruck and there's going to be

01:31:49.960 after the Cybertruck. And from this point forward, every design group inside every car manufacturer

01:31:56.320 is going to look at this thing that Tesla designed and it's going to influence them in one way or

01:32:00.860 another. So in that case, Tesla created a new time. Like they actually drew a line in time

01:32:07.860 and they did that because they were extremely bold. And also they've built up a lot of goodwill

01:32:13.100 in this, in this area. And they've been known as a company that can do this. And they, and they have

01:32:17.960 a showman at the helm and a, and a genius at the helm in many ways. And so you could, there are

01:32:23.140 organizations that can create their own time. Apple perhaps was another one, but again, these are

01:32:29.640 like, we're talking about Tesla and Apple here. Like most, most people, most companies don't have

01:32:33.680 anywhere near the luxury of even creating a moment for themselves. They have to live in other

01:32:37.280 people's moments and, and other industries moments and other economies moments. And so I just think

01:32:42.580 that luck and time is the substrate. You have to work within those things. And sometimes you're

01:32:46.720 going to hit it and sometimes you're not. Certainly, absolutely skill matters. Execution matters.

01:32:52.640 Vision matters. Communication matters. How you treat people matters. What kind of team you can

01:32:56.740 build matters. How you can put the right people together matters. Hiring matters. All the customer

01:33:02.420 service, all of this stuff also matters. Absolutely, completely matters. And you can even say in

01:33:09.300 some cases, it doesn't matter when it should. Like a lot of great big Google, great successful

01:33:14.500 company has terrible customer service. So you could say customer service doesn't matter in their

01:33:17.940 respect, but that's because other things, they're so outsized in other ways that customer service can

01:33:22.820 suffer, you know? But ultimately, if you're not one of the outliers, and maybe this person who asked

01:33:29.800 might feel like they are, and maybe they are, but if you're not, you don't get to pick your own luck

01:33:35.360 and your own timing. You ride on, on the wave and you've got to catch it. And sometimes you don't know

01:33:41.600 at the time, but I think it has a huge, huge degree of influence over whether or not ideas and companies

01:33:48.080 make it and some don't. So anyway, that's my general feeling. But yeah, of course, a lot of other

01:33:52.380 things matter as well. And I'm not discounting skill. You got to have the ability to do the thing

01:33:56.980 you're saying you're going to do. You have to be able to explain what it is and all that stuff,

01:34:01.380 but who knows? I think one of the things that complicates this type of analysis is that success

01:34:07.180 begets success and therefore luck begets success. If you accept the fact that on some level there's

01:34:14.480 randomness, there's luck, it's not all down to your skill and your execution. Think about how much

01:34:21.540 easier it is to raise money when you've been successful before and you've had a, had a

01:34:26.800 successful exit in a business. Now, you know, I've read all the analyses in the world that say, you

01:34:31.580 know, VCs also like people who have lost before because, you know, they're, you know, someone who's

01:34:37.900 not quite the stereotypical entrepreneur, which again, that word has become sort of denuded in the past

01:34:44.560 30 years or 20 years because we think entrepreneur only means a 20 year old in Silicon Valley. But

01:34:51.000 of course the term far predates Silicon Valley, but nevertheless, I've always found this, I don't

01:34:57.180 know the answer to this question, right? I find this a very interesting question, just intellectually.

01:35:01.380 I don't think it really impacts like what I do because I'm kind of just a little guy doing his

01:35:04.880 own thing. But if I were, you know, trying to do something major in life, I'd be obsessed with this

01:35:10.480 question, I suspect. And I guess that's why many people are, but I, I think it's very difficult and I

01:35:16.060 don't mean to pick on him. He's just the first name that comes to my mind, but it's very difficult to do

01:35:19.880 the Jim Collins type analysis, which are all of these very, very retroactive, retrospective

01:35:26.500 association based. I mean, it's the equivalent of basically epidemiology and I just don't know

01:35:31.380 how to extract cause and effect from that. Yeah. And there's survivorship bias and which

01:35:36.880 is rampant in Silicon Valley. A lot of people who've done something in the past who even just

01:35:41.520 simply raised money, like you said, even if they failed, the fact that they raised money,

01:35:45.640 another VC will look at that and go, well, someone else thought they were worth it. So

01:35:49.540 I feel like they're worth it. And so you have these people who are compounding

01:35:52.460 on the opportunities that they have versus many people don't have any opportunities. So

01:35:56.580 I agree. You can look back on things and justify anything. This person was successful because of

01:36:01.780 this reason or that reason or whatever. And maybe some of those analysis are correct. But

01:36:06.400 if I was betting on this, I don't, again, there's no way to figure out who's going to win this bet,

01:36:10.860 but I would bet that timing and luck have a lot more to do with, with someone's success than,

01:36:16.280 than anything. And of course the people who are successful are probably not going to say that.

01:36:20.520 Like this Peter Thiel quote, like, I don't know, that's pretty arrogant, I think, but fine. That's

01:36:25.560 his take on it. I mean, we all want to think that what we did was right and that we were unique in

01:36:31.420 our ability to do that thing and no one else was able to do what we did. It's a very human egotistical

01:36:36.680 thing to do. And in some cases that's true. I mean, there are people that come along where it

01:36:41.820 was them, clearly them. They are so good at what they do. They're so unique in how they do it.

01:36:48.340 They were in the right place at the right time, but they almost created that place in that time.

01:36:53.040 But it's interesting. Like if you look at Apple, just to play with this for a second,

01:36:57.300 Steve Jobs didn't create the graphical user interface. He stole it from Xerox. Now the people

01:37:02.380 who were working at Xerox on this, nobody knows their names. They had the idea first,

01:37:07.960 but they didn't have perhaps what it took to get it out there to more people, or they didn't have

01:37:14.320 the technology. The technology didn't exist at the time to actually make this a more of a consumer

01:37:18.100 facing thing. Timing played a role in that too. Microchips, where they were at at the time,

01:37:23.980 all sorts of things, the acceptance of what people thought was even possible at the moment.

01:37:27.960 Sometimes you have to create, that's like a combination of Jobs selling a vision that he

01:37:32.820 saw someone else come up with. And he goes, I know how to turn this into something else.

01:37:38.120 And I'm going to make a moment to do so. And I'm going to make an incredible Super Bowl ad.

01:37:42.800 And I'm like, I'm a visionary and I'm going to do this. Those people absolutely exist,

01:37:48.240 but they basically don't. Like they exist, but they basically don't. They are extreme outliers.

01:37:54.100 And that's kind of my point here is that we can always point to 10 great cases or a hundred great

01:37:59.460 case studies or whatever. But that's a hundred is an outlier when it comes to the number of

01:38:03.780 businesses that have started every year. The amount of ideas that die, a hundred is nothing. So

01:38:09.380 anyway, this is a good one. I mean, who knows, right? Who knows? But I would just say to this

01:38:14.220 person who is like, whatever you believe, just do your best anyway. And Hey, if luck and timing's on

01:38:20.340 your side, all the better. If you create your own luck and timing, great. And if it doesn't work

01:38:24.740 because you didn't have luck and timing, who knew anyway, just do your best, like just do the best

01:38:28.880 work you can. And don't worry about like what the reasons for success or failure ultimately are,

01:38:33.080 because you probably don't really know exactly what they are.

01:38:35.580 You know, there's another component to luck that I know is a very difficult discussion for many people

01:38:41.360 to have myself included, because it's sort of mind bending, but it's the sort of the whole

01:38:45.900 nature of free will. And I, you know, I've had sort of fun and lengthy discussions with Sam Harris on

01:38:52.840 this topic, which is let's just assume I've been successful and rah, rah, rah. I worked really hard

01:38:59.660 and I had a brilliant insight and I had a brilliant idea and I was able to execute on it. And lo and

01:39:05.080 behold, here are the fruits of it. Well, you could make the case that I can't take that much credit for

01:39:11.160 the work ethic, the intelligence, the spark of insight, in addition to all of the random pieces

01:39:16.780 of luck, like being in the right place, the right time. But if you go even deeper than just those

01:39:21.640 things, like even the capacity to do the work, you know, again, look at what Bill Gates did for

01:39:27.660 Microsoft. It's very hard to deny that he was a force of nature and they had a great tailwind and

01:39:34.540 they fought a great headwind and, you know, all these things. But in the end, how much credit

01:39:39.220 can one take, if you're Bill Gates, for his innate intelligence? I mean, his, the CPU in that guy's

01:39:45.480 head is, I think it's unparalleled. Yeah. It's a product of two other human beings

01:39:51.740 making that brain. Like at some level, you can just stop taking credit for anything because

01:39:57.540 I don't know. I mean, Sam uses really extreme examples, which is look at a pedophile.

01:40:02.600 Like, does a pedophile choose to be a pedophile? Now he's not for a moment saying that a pedophile

01:40:09.760 doesn't deserve to be, uh, to live with the consequences of their actions. So he's not

01:40:14.920 saying, well, look, the pedophile didn't choose to be a pedophile. Therefore, you know, there

01:40:19.060 shouldn't be consequences for the action. No, not remotely. Right. You, you know, he's, he's arguing

01:40:23.600 that there are always consequences for your actions, both good and bad, but it's not entirely

01:40:29.160 clear how much choice you had in that. And I don't want to go down that path because that's

01:40:33.280 way too deep for most people, myself included. But that thinking has given me a bit more

01:40:38.780 of an appreciation because I'm sort of in your camp. Truth. I just, I just, I'm not sure how to

01:40:45.280 take credit for any insight or any amount of work or any of that stuff. I think it's in some ways for

01:40:51.480 some of us, it's actually a curse to work so hard. They're actually the scars we carry more than,

01:40:55.960 you know, the things we should be gloating over. You're right. Or Sam's right. Or whoever

01:41:00.640 thinks, I just think if we just stopped taking credit for stuff, we'd probably be better off

01:41:04.420 to begin with. It's like, what credit can you take for anything? Like other people maybe put

01:41:09.140 you in a position or you're in a position and you happen to stumble on something, but why?

01:41:13.200 What gave you the experience to do that? Like I, I grew up in a safe family. I grew up in a safe

01:41:17.600 place. I had the time. My parents were able to buy me a computer when I wanted to, when I was 13

01:41:21.880 or whatever it was, all these things are how I got to start. And I got a foothold in this

01:41:28.200 industry, which allowed me to do what I do now. That's because my parents had done their job and

01:41:35.020 worked and were open to giving me or getting me a computer. And my, my neighbor got a computer.

01:41:40.800 I think I told the story that like my neighbor got a computer, which I saw, had I not seen my

01:41:44.500 neighbor's computer, I don't know if I would've gotten one. Like who knows, right? Who knows all you

01:41:48.780 keep going back. You just connect these dots going back and back and back and back forever.

01:41:52.960 And then you go to your grandparents and your great grandparents and who knows where that,

01:41:55.520 where that leads. So I agree. And the other thing about the pedophile example, which is

01:41:59.020 super interesting is that people basically say pedophiles can't be rehabilitated, right?

01:42:05.280 There's no rehabilitation for, for pedophilia. So therefore it kind of makes the case that

01:42:11.500 you can't blame the person. If the person can't change their behavior, then where did that

01:42:17.320 come from? Like, what is it then? Of course, I'm not, none of us are here defending pedophilia,

01:42:22.000 but like, it is an interesting mind exercise to go, if we acknowledge as a society that these

01:42:26.440 people cannot be rehabilitated and there's a sexual predators list and you can never get off

01:42:30.380 it if you're honored essentially, then you're basically saying they have no free will over

01:42:34.580 improvement, over self-improvement, that they were born with this. And it's like, you just simply

01:42:39.900 can't get rid of it. So if you can't get rid of it, how'd you get it in the first place?

01:42:43.380 Well, you, you could say you caught it perhaps, like, like you might catch a chronic illness or

01:42:48.940 something, but that's not what I think what people are saying. So it is kind of interesting to think

01:42:52.780 about that example in the extreme. I think Sam's like particularly good at those kinds of mind

01:42:56.840 exercises and looking at those absolutes. So yeah, anyway, it is interesting. Yeah. I think in general,

01:43:01.800 if you just stop worrying about who gets credit for things, I think there's a great quote. I don't

01:43:05.720 know who said it. It's one of these great quotes. Like you can achieve, I think it was one of the

01:43:08.740 presidents or something, Truman. I don't know. Like you can achieve anything in the world,

01:43:11.820 as long as you don't care who gets the credit. And I think that that's very true. I've seen that

01:43:16.040 to be very true. I got a couple more questions, Jason. One of them is you've talked a lot about

01:43:20.960 writing, the importance of writing to you personally, also to how Basecamp runs. Although

01:43:27.580 you didn't state it explicitly, at least not today, like you, I do tend to be a bit of a stickler around

01:43:33.460 writing. For me, poor writing happens to be a symptom of poor thinking. So if you can't organize

01:43:40.320 yourself on paper, it's generally the case that you aren't organized in your mind. That may not be

01:43:46.400 true, but that's been my bias. That said, I also believe one can improve it. Do you? And if so,

01:43:53.180 how do you take steps to do so? Both for yourself, but also in terms of your employees?

01:43:59.300 I agree with you. And I do believe it can be improved. I think everything can be improved.

01:44:03.700 This is a little bit of a tangent, but in the design circles, there's been this thing like,

01:44:07.900 can taste be taught? And I think the answer has to be yes. I think everything can be taught.

01:44:14.160 Otherwise, what are you, some special person who happens to have something no one else has? Like

01:44:18.160 it's again, this ego coming through. If you have good taste, then you're anointed, you're special.

01:44:23.680 No, you're not. Maybe someone else taught you and you didn't realize it. Maybe your grandfather,

01:44:27.880 your grandmother, or your mom, or your dad, or your uncle, or your aunt, or someone taught it, or

01:44:31.560 a magazine that you used to read, or whatever. Like someone probably taught you this,

01:44:35.700 or gave you the eye and taught you what to look out for. So yeah, I do think writing can be

01:44:40.460 improved. One of my favorite books on writing is this book called Revising Prose. And what's amazing

01:44:46.140 is the cover is horrible. It's a CD-ROM on the cover. It's like, makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

01:44:53.400 It's called Revising Prose. I forget the author. I can send you a link or you can find it and verify

01:44:59.360 that that's the right book. But it's a wonderful book about writing. And he really breaks down writing

01:45:03.660 sentence by sentence and actually teaches you how to write a sentence. Because that's the

01:45:07.860 fundamental building block here. And it's a really great book. I'd recommend people take a look at

01:45:12.200 that book. The other thing is, is just to read great writers. And since this talk has been kind

01:45:18.280 of business focused, my two favorite, or actually probably three favorite are Warren Buffett, Charlie

01:45:22.640 Munger and Jeff Bezos. They are wonderful business writers, but also just wonderful communicators.

01:45:30.200 And I think if you read their shareholder letters, I don't care if you care about the companies or not,

01:45:36.260 you don't have to. But what you'll come away with is going, I understand what they're trying to say.

01:45:41.480 You couldn't have said it any better. This is great. I get it. And I'd read that again. Like,

01:45:47.400 that's kind of what you come away with. And if you come away with that on any piece of writing,

01:45:51.080 I feel like it's great writing. The worst kind of writing is like you laboriously get through it

01:45:55.620 finally. And you're like, oh gosh, I don't remember anything. I'm not going to read this

01:45:59.540 again. I don't remember. And I'm not going to try to remember because I'll never read it again. It

01:46:02.360 was too hard. I didn't, didn't make any sense. It's almost like the writer is trying to show off.

01:46:07.160 And I think that's the thing. And Peter, I'll say you're like, I love reading your writing because

01:46:11.260 I don't feel it. Don't mean to kiss up, but you're obviously incredibly smart. You're brilliant.

01:46:16.260 Yet you're right in a way that people who aren't in the medical field can understand the things you're

01:46:21.840 writing. I find that to be really hard for people to do, which is to communicate outside of their

01:46:26.240 walls when they're deeply knowledgeable about a subject and also be able to explain it to normal

01:46:31.540 people. I think that that's, when it comes to business, I think Buffett, Bezos, and Munger are

01:46:36.180 three people particularly who are really, really good at that as well. They're talking about complicated

01:46:41.300 issues, leadership issues, investment issues, structural issues. And they explain them in a

01:46:47.320 way where you don't need to have to have gone to business school to even pick out. You don't have

01:46:51.420 to look up any words in the dictionary. You don't have to wonder what that means. They're just clear

01:46:55.920 and thoughtful and fair and the great communicators. So those are the people I read. So I think like

01:47:01.120 anything, if you want to immerse yourself in that kind of, if you want to get better, I think it's

01:47:05.220 good to surround yourself with things that are better than you and more capable than you and people

01:47:09.280 that are more capable than you. And of course, you can't always be around the people, but you can be

01:47:12.580 around their artifacts and read how they write. And I think that's a great way to get better.

01:47:17.920 And by the way, practice. Like something I talked about, I think in the last podcast is this class

01:47:22.040 I've always wanted to teach. And I think this would be a good personal exercise, which is to write

01:47:25.540 something, call it a page or call it three pages, then write a one page version, then a three paragraph

01:47:30.500 version, then a one paragraph version, a one sentence version. Like practice editing. That's a big part of

01:47:35.220 writing is editing. It's not just about getting words on the page. It's about getting rid of words on the

01:47:38.860 page. Substituting, you know, three words or one word for three. Don't use eight words when five

01:47:44.520 will do that whole thing. And just really kind of, and also think about the rhythm and how does it

01:47:48.760 sound? So another great way to get better at writing is to read your writing out loud. You know, what

01:47:53.760 does it sound like? Does it bounce? Is it flat? Is every sentence the same length? Like, and I would say

01:47:59.420 those are not good things when everything's at the same length. Like you want some texture, I think,

01:48:03.480 and some rhythm to it. So reading out loud is really helpful. And also it helps you kind of stumble over

01:48:07.700 things and go, you know, that's not like, that's not how I speak or that's not what I would say.

01:48:12.340 Let me reward this so I don't stumble over it. Anyway, those are some basic tips and some things

01:48:17.320 I would recommend people try. I love that. You know, I'll throw in a couple other writers that I

01:48:21.760 like on the business side. I think Howard Marks is fantastic. I've enjoyed his books and I enjoy his

01:48:28.860 monthly newsletter. So again, another example of someone who's writing about stuff that's above most of our

01:48:35.440 pay grades in terms of distressed markets, but I could just, I could read him forever. And of

01:48:41.100 course, David Foster Wallace liked to, you know, I came across a story that he wrote, I think it was

01:48:46.480 for the New York Times and it was, oh, I don't know, probably 12, 12, 14 years ago. It was about Roger

01:48:54.340 Federer and it was an unbelievable article. I mean, he's written lots of short stories about tennis and,

01:49:02.380 you know, string theory, all sorts of things. But it was just a treat to find something of his that I

01:49:07.500 hadn't read before. And it was just, you know, something in, it was like kind of one of the

01:49:11.500 weekend magazine, New York Times, I think. And it was just this beautiful article on Federer. And I was

01:49:16.260 like, how did a human have the capacity to communicate this way? It was just so beautiful

01:49:20.900 to read. And none of us will ever be David Foster Wallace, but I agree a lot that, you know, you read

01:49:26.060 these things and it, it, it shows you what amazing story, storytelling can look like.

01:49:32.060 Annie Dillard, who writes short stories is one of my favorite writers. She, one of the classic

01:49:39.180 essays she wrote is on the, on the total eclipse. I'll send it to you. It'll blow you away.

01:49:43.780 Please do.

01:49:44.660 Yeah. It's so good. She's written a number of books, but this one essay is so moving and so

01:49:50.600 damn good that you read that and you go, I suck. Like, but you do it and you smile because you're

01:49:56.600 like, I'm so glad someone is so good at this. It's a wonderfully evocative short story and it's

01:50:01.880 beautiful. So anyway, I'll send that to you. It's in this book called The Abundance, Annie

01:50:05.960 Dillard of The Abundance. It's wonderful. So anyway, I'll send you that as well.

01:50:08.980 I can't wait. You know, one of the, to close the loop on writing, I think one of the biggest

01:50:13.080 challenges I had when I left medicine and went to McKinsey is at McKinsey, they did place a real

01:50:19.580 premium on being able to write, you know, and it was more in memo, but you had to be able to write

01:50:23.940 good memos. And I feel like the 10 years previous, I had no exposure to good writing. And it's really

01:50:32.260 funny to me now when I read scientific papers, how poorly they are often written. Now, part of it is

01:50:38.000 they're not making any effort to sort of be clear because they don't have to be clear. They're writing

01:50:42.020 to a very, very niche nuanced audience. They're basically writing to the editors of the journal

01:50:46.480 who under, you know, by definition have deep subject matter expertise.

01:50:50.820 But I just think that there's like this culture for most scientific papers, which is like,

01:50:56.160 there's a formula, there's a way that we write this that is totally unemotional,

01:50:59.640 totally uneditorialized. And I think that's important, but you sort of have the luxury of

01:51:04.480 throwing out any clarity as well. And it's highly variable. I mean, there are certain people who can,

01:51:10.220 you know, I've read scientific papers that read very well and they're captivating.

01:51:14.600 They're usually more like review articles or, you know, these lengthy summaries of a person's

01:51:20.440 life's work. But when you just grab the New England Journal of Medicine or even, you know,

01:51:25.480 pick some other top journal and just start to flip through it, it's comical to me how poorly

01:51:30.680 these things are written. Nevermind once you get into the lower tier journals. And so,

01:51:35.000 yeah, spending, you know, time in medicine, I realized at that point in time, that's the only

01:51:39.360 thing I was reading was textbooks and journals. It was a real rude awakening to realize that

01:51:44.600 if that's the level you were going to write at, you were going to be hurting a lot of people.

01:51:48.560 Yeah. And there's no reason for it. There's no reason for writing to be bad like that. Like,

01:51:52.200 there's no reason for scientific writing to be difficult to grok. The clearer it is,

01:51:57.740 the more exposed it can be to more people. And that should benefit people. If this is a great

01:52:01.960 piece of writing and a really important discovery or a really important paper, like why not make that

01:52:06.800 more accessible? You don't need to write in this insider language. I mean, certainly there are

01:52:10.440 scientific terms that the average layman is not going to understand, of course, but you can surround

01:52:15.960 those things with clear thoughts that aren't obscuring the accessibility of what you're trying

01:52:21.500 to say. So anyway, I can rant on that for a while.

01:52:23.720 Yeah, me too. Any tips on parenting as it pertains to lessons you've infused from all the stuff we've

01:52:31.340 talked about today?

01:52:32.080 Oh God. Oh, it's so different. I'm just figuring this out as I go. I would feel like a complete

01:52:40.060 fraud to suggest, to give any parenting tips to anybody. I've got a five-year-old and a one-year-old

01:52:46.680 and I'm learning as I go and they're very, very different. The one thing I've learned about

01:52:51.520 parenting that I think is true about people is that you can't make someone do something they don't

01:52:56.480 want to do. You have your five-year-old who won't put their shoes on and like, yeah, I mean,

01:53:00.920 you can physically make them put their shoes on, but that doesn't work either. If they don't want

01:53:04.760 to put their shoes on, they're not going to put their shoes on. And I think you can make people do

01:53:09.280 things at work that they don't want to do, but it's not going to turn out well either. They're

01:53:13.700 going to leave. They're going to be disgruntled. Morale is going to go down. You got to figure out

01:53:17.860 a way to make people feel invested in whatever it is they're doing and make them feel good about it

01:53:21.740 versus forcing people to do things they don't want to do. That's just, it's really hard, I think,

01:53:25.780 to get through the day forcing people to do things they don't want to do. There's been other

01:53:29.560 revelations I've had, but that don't really relate to anything else. But it's hard. It's

01:53:34.800 really hard. It's fascinating. I'm trying to figure it out too. Do you have any tips?

01:53:39.620 No, no. I mean, I love it. I really do. I love it in a way that I've never, I never thought I would.

01:53:45.700 I know it's sort of cliche and bullshitty to say this stuff, but I do believe it. I think it's the

01:53:50.660 only thing that matters for me personally. I'm not saying that broadly. I'm not, you know,

01:53:55.540 suggesting that parenting or, you know, being a parent is the highest calling or any of that

01:54:00.300 stuff. I mean, that's, I think all that, all that type of talk is nonsense to me. I just know that

01:54:04.440 for me personally, I've got these three kids. If I literally accomplish not a single thing in life

01:54:11.500 other than, you know, shield them from my baggage and my nonsense and set them up to be resilient and

01:54:21.180 happy and great people, man, that's the only thing that matters. And doing that of course

01:54:26.440 is the journey of a lifetime. And the good news is, you know, I think the area under the curve of

01:54:32.720 that type of exposure is so big that you, you don't have to beat yourself up for any one failure.

01:54:38.520 And I've had many of those, but, but I take some comfort in knowing that in the end it's a very long

01:54:43.980 game and it's not like you only get one shot at goal. So you, you want to just think about being

01:54:49.520 very consistently good. Yeah. I'm glad you mentioned that. That's something that I've

01:54:53.920 struggled with from time to time, which is I have like a bad day with my son or something.

01:54:57.520 And like, I maybe yelled in a way I shouldn't have, or said something I shouldn't have, or,

01:55:03.540 or made him feel a certain way or whatever comes up, you know, in a moment of frustration

01:55:07.920 and you can beat yourself up over it. And maybe you should a tiny little bit,

01:55:11.600 but also recognize that that was one day and one moment. And like, you can recover from that and,

01:55:16.820 and you need to do better. And hopefully, you know, all in, in total, everything turns out to

01:55:22.320 be good. So yeah, it's challenging. I think the biggest thing I've noticed is just like sleep

01:55:26.360 deprivation or surrounding it is it's amazing that humans survive at all. I mean, your parents,

01:55:31.940 you have newborns and then you're, you're tired and you have a short fuse and it's so difficult

01:55:38.000 sometimes, but I do agree. And I also agree that like, if you don't have kids, that's fine. I don't

01:55:42.620 have any, like, I'm not, it's not like you're not important, but to me, I agree totally that,

01:55:48.160 that this is hopefully, hopefully the best, the best thing I can do in my life is to, is to raise

01:55:54.000 two, two great kids who are well-adjusted and thoughtful and creative individuals who can

01:55:58.680 contribute to the world themselves and be good people. So I think it's hard. It takes a long time

01:56:03.660 and you don't really know how to do it. You just figure out as you go and hopefully you continue to

01:56:07.940 get better at it and pay attention to yourself and to them. One real practical thing that I've

01:56:12.720 been experimenting with lately at the advice of one of my great therapists is, um, being much more

01:56:19.320 open with mostly my daughter. Cause the kids are a little bit with the five-year-old, but certainly

01:56:24.840 with the, with my daughter, who's 11, which is I'm much more transparent with her now about my mistakes.

01:56:30.540 So I'm really open with her about my faults. Now you, again, you have to use your judgment here,

01:56:35.520 right? This doesn't mean that you're, you don't want to enmesh your kids and, and, you know, just

01:56:39.840 have them be a sounding board for all your woes. It's not that at all. It's that like, when I screw

01:56:45.480 up, I tell her, Hey Olivia, like, you know, daddy really screwed this up. And I think I was just in

01:56:51.700 a bad mood and I didn't, you know, I did this and I did this and I, I, that, that just wants you to

01:56:56.180 know that that's not cool. And I know that I did that and I'm going to work on being better about that.

01:57:01.080 And I don't know. I just think that that's for me been a little bit of a way to diffuse some of

01:57:08.120 the shame of making mistakes and also make these teachable moments. And frankly, it tends to cut

01:57:13.660 down on the mistakes. I mean, that's sort of the beauty of it is you've now brought another person

01:57:18.700 into your sphere of self-improvement, but not in a way that's burdened them, right? Like in a way

01:57:23.400 where it's, you're self-deprecating about it and they see that you're, hopefully you, you model for

01:57:28.940 them that they can take ownership over their mistakes also. That's great advice. I got that

01:57:33.040 recently myself and I've been trying it. My wife and I have both been trying to do more of that.

01:57:37.520 It's a great way to, you're not going to be perfect. Things are not always going to work out.

01:57:41.320 You're going to make mistakes and modeling that admitting them and coming to terms with them and

01:57:45.760 getting over them is a big part of moving on from them. So yeah, I've been doing that too. And I

01:57:50.500 found that to be useful, but I really don't know. I don't have any other advice. I would just say that

01:57:56.020 it can be a real challenge sometimes. And I don't really feel like work stuff is applicable so much.

01:58:02.140 It's, they're very, very different things and, and we should treat them as such.

01:58:06.360 All right. One last question for you, Jason. Are you still off Instagram?

01:58:11.360 I am. I am still off Instagram. I will admit, however, that I have occasionally gone to the web

01:58:18.400 interface to check, to see if I have any messages. Cause I, some people would write me on Instagram and that

01:58:25.380 was the only way for them to get in touch with me, but I don't have the app on my phone. I don't post

01:58:29.500 anything. I don't look at anything, but I do check occasionally for messages. If people are trying

01:58:33.800 to get ahold of me, mostly because I have some watches for sale that other people have, like I

01:58:40.020 gave them on consignment and we used to use Instagram to go back and forth on some of that

01:58:43.840 stuff. So that's how they would always message me. So I have to check for that. But other than that,

01:58:47.020 no, I am, I'm off and I, and I feel great about it. Are you still on it?

01:58:50.500 I am. I'm on Instagram. Instagram doesn't create as much consternation for me as Twitter. Twitter

01:58:55.620 creates much more emotional pain for me. And if I were to do a plot of my happiness, it would be

01:59:01.420 highly inversely correlated to number of emails I get and amount of time I look at Twitter.

01:59:07.060 Is it because people responding to what you say?

01:59:10.820 Yeah, no, I like Twitter for curating information. So if you follow good people,

01:59:16.460 you know, people who are interesting and put out interesting stuff, I, in that sense, I like

01:59:21.040 Twitter. I actually, I would argue that 10% of the scientific studies that I read are things that

01:59:27.820 come through my little curated Twitter following, like who I follow on Twitter. No, it's the, just

01:59:33.480 the attacks and stuff. It's like, yeah, I just, I have thin skin, which is unfortunate and something

01:59:38.120 I'd love to rid myself of. So, you know, if, if a hundred people say something nice to me or 99 people

01:59:43.600 say something nice, I don't hear it. But for that one person who's, you know, wants to go after me,

01:59:48.340 it's sort of the only thing I hear. So, which is just, you know, a lot of people are like that.

01:59:51.240 I don't think I'm unique in that regard, but Twitter is a, an odd environment in which that

01:59:55.260 gets amplified. You know, Twitter used to have a product. They were experimenting with this for a

01:59:59.700 while at least for VIPs or I don't know what they call them, but for people with massively large

02:00:06.420 accounts, like if you can imagine someone with 4 million followers, like they can't say anything

02:00:11.240 without being bombarded back. So they had this product where if you were one of those people,

02:00:16.400 you use this different Twitter client and it would hide all replies from you. So it was purely a

02:00:21.240 broadcast tool and you couldn't see anything anyone said back to you. It's like a cone of silence,

02:00:27.980 which I think should be an option on Twitter. There should be a way to hide all replies because a lot

02:00:36.100 of people are abused on Twitter, especially women. They say anything and the trolls just attack and

02:00:42.240 it's a really brutal place to be. But if you could speak and say things and share things,

02:00:47.980 but not have to deal with the ramifications of trolls hitting you up with things or people trying

02:00:52.280 to prove you wrong all the time, I think it'd be a much more pleasant place. I think that's one of

02:00:55.860 the big problems with the platform right now is that you kind of have to be exposed to the

02:01:00.360 shrapnel from any opinion or even not even an opinion, just like a link or anything you share,

02:01:05.020 someone's going to find something wrong with it if you have a sizable enough audience. So yeah,

02:01:08.780 I hear that. Well, Jason, this has been great. I've enjoyed this a lot, even though it's,

02:01:12.800 you'd think, well, we spent already a couple of hours talking about these topics. What more was

02:01:17.100 there to say? But luckily, a lot of people felt there was a lot more to say and through their

02:01:21.200 questions, I think we've had a pretty fun discussion. Is there anything that we haven't

02:01:26.040 talked about through these questions that you feel is something that's important enough that you want to

02:01:32.120 put a bow on this? I really enjoyed it too. I think the only other thing that is important,

02:01:39.480 a particular skill that's important to develop, I think is just this, we talked a bit about this

02:01:44.060 before, I think is just this ability to get better at saying no to things, especially no to things in

02:01:48.760 the future. Yes is cheap. It's easy to say yes to anything, especially if you don't have to do it

02:01:55.340 right now. And that adds up over time. And then it turns out that by the time those things come due,

02:02:01.940 you wish you hadn't said yes, but it was so cheap and so easy to do so. And there's no pushback

02:02:06.040 whatsoever. So just, I think keeping that in mind is really important in order to help reduce the

02:02:12.520 stress and anxiety of the future and also to help reduce stress and anxiety at work. Like packing

02:02:17.920 your schedule in the future is a great way to never have any time to do anything else. So

02:02:22.160 working on getting better at saying no is just an important thing to keep in mind.

02:02:26.740 I'm glad you brought that up. That is the single most important takeaway from our first discussion

02:02:31.040 into my actual life, which is I'm working on it. I haven't got there yet, but I'm trying to get to

02:02:36.940 a point where I'm only scheduled one month out as opposed to a year out. As gross as that sounds,

02:02:42.700 that's what my life has looked like in the past, where even though I don't know who I'm going to

02:02:46.540 be on a call with, there are all these blocks on my calendars, like call, call, call, meeting,

02:02:50.780 meeting, meeting, meeting, flight, boom, boom, boom. Like it's, you know, to see that a year out

02:02:55.720 is I've realized an enormous source of anxiety. So trying to get to that Warren Buffett area that you

02:03:03.200 described, which again, we don't know if it's true or not, but it sure makes for a great story where

02:03:06.780 if you want to meet with Warren Buffett, you got to call his assistant the day before.

02:03:10.660 And, you know, he keeps an open calendar and if he wants to meet you, he'll meet you. And if he

02:03:13.800 doesn't, he won't. But yeah, I agree. The cheapness of yes is something that I'm forcing myself to get

02:03:19.860 a lot better at saying no and paying this, you know, finite upfront pain, but for, you know,

02:03:28.260 much less backend pain. It's hard. It's hard and you're never pro at it, but you can get better for

02:03:35.100 sure. And I still work on it. I, I've gotten to the point now where, where no is such a relief.

02:03:39.960 I feel so good about saying no to things that I really just didn't want to do. And I think it's

02:03:45.540 totally fine to go. I didn't want to do that. I don't, shouldn't have to do it just because

02:03:50.120 someone asked me to do it. I don't want to do that. And I'm talking about like things like

02:03:53.560 traveling far away to go give a talk or something. I'd love to give the talk and I'll say like,

02:03:57.540 I'll give the talk remotely, but I just can't do the travel. It sounds glamorous. It'd be great to go to

02:04:01.780 Paris in April, I'm sure. But come March 27th. And I realized in April, I would rather be doing

02:04:07.720 something else because I'm in a zone and working on something else. Now I got to get in a plane and

02:04:12.380 go out. It just, like, it just doesn't work for me. So anyway, you just have to come to terms with

02:04:16.760 that, I think, and be comfortable going. I'm truly honored by the invitation. I just, I can't book that

02:04:23.220 far in advance or I'm not taking on any, any international travel right now, or this just isn't

02:04:27.580 going to be a good fit for me. I'm sorry if there's some other way I can contribute, I'd love to,

02:04:30.660 but I can't do that. Awesome, man. Well, thank you very much, Jason. I enjoyed this follow-up

02:04:36.500 discussion a lot and I suspect the people listening to it did as well. So I appreciate your insight and

02:04:42.100 what you're doing for us. Thanks, Peter. It was really fun. Thanks so much. And thanks to everyone

02:04:45.640 who asked questions. I appreciate that as well. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of

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02:07:21.820 So Regent S III hon.

02:07:28.120 How'll she walk in the business without him?

02:07:29.020 I'll see you next time in our show notes.

02:07:31.200 Please read and read and do something.

02:07:33.900 Yeah, that's true.

02:07:36.580 I'll see you next time in our show.

The Peter Attia Drive - February 17, 2020

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

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