Hey, everyone, welcome to the Peter Attea drive. I'm your host, Peter, into you. Theo Drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health longevity, critical thinking, along with a few other obsessions along the way. I have spent the last several years working with some of the most successful top performing individuals in the world, and this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality, more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode and other topics at Peter tia MD dot com. Everybody welcome to this week's episode of the drive. I'd like to take a couple of minutes to talk about why we don't run ads on this podcast.

If you're listening this, you probably already know. But the two things I care most about professionally are how to live longer and how to live better have a complete fascination, an obsession with this topic. I practice it professionally, and I've seen firsthand how access to information is basically all people need to make better decisions and improve the quality of their lives, curating and sharing this knowledge is not easy. And even before starting the podcast, that became clear to me. The sheer volume of material published in this base is overwhelming. I'm fortunate to have a great team that helps me continue learning and sharing this information with you. To take one example, our show notes are in a league of their own. In fact, we now have a full time person that is dedicated to producing those. And the feedback has mirrored this.

So all of this raises and natural question, how will we continue to fund the work necessary to support this? As you probably know, the tried and true way to do this is to sell ads. But after a lot of contemplation, that model just doesn't feel right to me for a few reasons now, the first and most important of these is trust. I'm not sure how you could trust me if I'm telling you about something when you know and being paid by the company that makes it to tell you about it. Another reason selling ads doesn't feel right to me is because I I just know myself. I have a really hard time advocating for something that I'm not absolutely nuts for So if I don't feel that way about something, I don't know how I can talk about it enthusiastically. So instead of selling ads, I've chosen to do what a handful of others have proved Ken work overtime, and that is to create a subscriber model for my audience. This keeps my relationship with you both simple and honest. If you value what I'm doing,

you could become a member. In exchange, you'll get the benefits above and beyond what's available for free. It's that simple. It's my goal to ensure that no matter what level you choose to support us, that you will get back more than you give. So, for example, members will receive full access to the exclusive show notes, including other things that we plan to build upon. These are useful beyond just the podcast, especially given the technical nature of many of our shows. Members also get exclusive access to listen to and participate in the regular Ask me anything episodes. That means asking questions directly into the AM a portal and also getting to hear these podcasts when they come out. Lastly, and this is something I'm really excited about.

I want my supporters to get the best deals possible on the products that I love. And as I said, we're not taking ad dollars from anyone. But instead, what I'd like to do is work with companies who make the products that I already love and would already talk about for free and have them past savings on to you again. The podcast will remain free to all. But my hope is that many of you will find enough value in one the podcast itself and to the additional content exclusive for members. Want to thank you for taking a moment to listen to this. If you learn from and find value in the content I produce, please consider supporting us directly by signing up for a monthly subscription. I guess this week is Jason Free. Jason is the cofounder of Base Camp, a privately held company based out of Chicago committed to building the best Web based products and tools with the least number of unnecessary features. This is sort of ah ah, hallmark of Jason's personality. He's also the co author of several books getting riel rework remote,

and it doesn't have to be crazy at work now. Some of you may recall back from when I started the podcast that one of the reasons I wanted to do this in the first place was I kind of found myself having conversations with friends that after the fact, I thought, Man, I wish that had been recorded so others could hear it and and his conversation with Jason is exactly one of those. It's in fact, it's an extension of a conversation that we've had several times over meals. We talk a lot about Jason's story. We get into some turns and had some side conversations that I thought were really interesting. We talk about his background and you know how he grew up in, how that sort of shaped what eventually led him to working on base camp. And we even had a little side tangent on a whole bunch of other companies that, you know, everybody sort of thinks of his great examples of companies like uber and we work and things like that. And one of things about Jason that's pretty unique in this space is he's just incredibly blunt and not in an obnoxious way at all. He's not being blunt for effect.

He's just very open about how he feels, and he doesn't sort of mask his feelings about some of these companies and the way they do things and how he feels about that. We talk about base camps, focus on hiring, and they have a really unique culture around that and importance of writing and things like that. At the end of the podcast, we get really deep into all aspects of work life balance, which in some ways is something that I really wanted to talk about with Jason, I would say about a week after we recorded this podcast, both Jason I sat back and sort of thought that we could have even gone deeper into that very particular topic. Specifically work life balance, which is something that I just think every person struggles with on some level. So we actually hummed and hot about going back, sitting down again and going even deeper on this topic. But if you're kicking the idea around, what we decided to do was something a little cooler,

which was set up a special a m A. That Jason would do much in the same way I've done with Matthew Walker where after this episode, whatever questions you have about anything we talk about, But I think work life balance is probably the most important thing we talk about here. We're gonna take a bunch of questions from our members, and we'll do a specific AM A with Jason that focuses on that. So if you have any questions that we didn't get to or areas that you want to go deeper on is a great opportunity to use the AM A to help us put together a follow up discussion with Jason. So with all that said, please enjoy my conversation with Jason Freed, the first of a leased to Jason. It's great to see you as always. Thanks for having here. Yeah, New York to Chicago. It's not as much of a shock as some places to New York right like Chicago is.

She was a small New York, very small, like probably. I feel like it's an eighth well, actually 1/16 of New York. But I get it. I know howto like role in New York, you know. But if I feel like if I came from Kansas City, I wouldn't really know what New York was to be a big shock to me.

Yeah, and it's a beautiful place, but I do love it. I'll offend all the New Yorkers. When I say this, I love it. I just couldn't

live here. Yeah, that's how I feel. I feel like I missed it. I want to live here in my twenties and I missed. That never happened. And now I want to kind of live here, but only for four days at a time. That be, I think, kind of perfect. Actually. Every time I'm here, I love it. But then, like if I'm here for three or four days at the end of four days, I'm tired. I'm just really tired and burned

out. Yeah. I mean, as I was saying you earlier, one of things I like about New York, which is really maybe even less about New York and more about just being in a short, concise zone of work is like I always lose a little weight when I'm here. I eat really well. For the most part, sometimes I go off the rails, but like I don't have, like kid food around, it could just be Maur. This really is not a statement of New York. Now that another is coming out my mouth, I realize this is just a statement of people who, being on your own,

who are working on their own. Sometimes, yeah, I can meditate when I want. I can do this when I want. I can wait. I wish I was like I'm saying, I don't like my being with my family, which couldn't be further from

the truth. No, but like a little bit of separations, healthy for all things. It's good. Like to get away from work, although you're kind of working when you're here. But just to have a change of scenery, Thanks really healthy for for people, for for all sorts of reasons.

This is definitely I want to talk about with you today because, you know, someone might be listening to this and saying, What's the CEO and founder of base camp on a podcast where we talk about longevity? Because even though you and I both have a lot of shared interests outside, including watches, I definitely don't think anybody wants to hear us talk about watches. So we're probably not gonna talk about watches much, if at all, but work. Life balance is actually something that I think people can immediately and sort of intuitively appreciate a something most of us don't do. Well, I think if I were gonna score card Peter Attea on health, by far my closest to an F is on work life balance. And frankly, it's something that seems to know no limit, meaning it doesn't matter how educated you are.

It doesn't matter how much money you make. It doesn't matter how prestigious your job is. I think everybody on some level is struggling with this, or at least most people are, and it's such a high priority for you. It's something you've you've written about, and you're just kind of one of the few people for whom this idea of culture in a workplace means something. Everybody says that everybody says that it almost doesn't mean much, so part of you wants to go right there. But I also think part of me thinks the listener who's not familiar with you needs to know a bit of the background. So would you humor me to ah, if we back up a little bit and explain how you got to be where you are.

Yeah, sure. I feel like my career started when I was 14 maybe 13. That's when I was allowed to work. I got a worker's permit. My dad took me to the city Hall in the city. I telling Grew up in which was Deerfield, Illinois, which is about 25 miles north of Chicago. And I want to work at a grocery store. And I eventually went to work in a shoe store and did some other things. But around that time I started getting into computers a little bit. My neighbor had a Mac plus Cermak S C one of the original, like early, all in ones, And he showed me the flight simulator and it blew my mind. I'm like, What the hell is this thing? It's like the graphics or Chris. This is amazing.

This is black and white simulator,

right? Black and white. Some of this Microsoft simulator is there something like that. Remember the early days and it just completely blew my mind, cause before that, I'd only seen like an apple to which was ah, you know, traditional computer, you know, green kind of screen. And the Mac was so crisp, so I convinced my parents to get me one eventually, and from there I started learned how to make software, but only because I wanted something I didn't care about Software. I didn't really care about computers, but I wanted a tool to organize my music collection. Is that a bunch of CDs and tapes?

So this is Are we in the late

eighties? Where? Let's see, yeah, late eighties, because the Mac came

out in 85. So this is still pre CD. You're in your music. The reason I'm asking the question is to know what kind of music collection we're talking about. Where these cassettes

mostly cassettes. I had some CDs, though.

Super early adopter of the CD

Pink Floyd The Wall,

My first CD, Mine was Chaplain Box set. Good, good, Reasonable.

Remember buying it mostly? Is

that right? 80 bucks for a five disc CD.

Remember? You see these like 16 bucks each or 18 bucks each of the time. I had this collection of music and I was loaning out to friends and I would never get back. You know, I forgot who I gave it to. It's going. I spent all this time making mixtapes and, you know, whatever gone. And so I'm like, there's gotta be a way to track this And of course, I could do it on paper or whatever, but I had this computer thing, so I eventually I got this thing called FileMaker Pro. I don't know if you're familiar software, right? It's not programming.

It was like plugging stuff together. So I plugged a bunch of stuff together, had always had an interest in interface design for some reason design. And so I learned how to, like, make a interface. I built this thing, which I eventually called audio file, which was a way to keep track of the music collection that you had, all the tracks that were on the CDs of the tapes and who you loaned it out to and when. And it would send you a reminder to get it back on the whole thing. And I put up on a well because this is before the Internet. Basically, Internet really hadn't happened yet. Kind of 95 96 is when the Internet should have happened and put upon a well, and in that fine

I'll put it up, meaning like that's where you stored it or that's where you were then allowing people to access it

the ladder. So a. Well, had this like these file library sections, I don't even know

what they were called. I don't recall this is a bit of a blur to this is

a little bit early days and, like file sharing where you could. There's like these special interest areas, and you could upload files that were called binaries basically the time. And you could upload these files too a well and share software with others. So it's something called shareware. This is kind of where you would put things like this. There's also bulletin boards, which is like you dial into with a modem and that kind of stuff. But a Wells the big was the biggest one time, so I uploaded some stuff to a well, and in that was a text file saying, Hey, if you like this, send me 20 bucks like, here's my address is like my parents house. Just six.

Send this to me, and that summer I got 20 bucks in the mail from some guy in Germany. Remember getting the envelope? It was like the red and blue checked airmail and beluga Michoud. Y I don't know anybody in Germany, you know, like inside this envelope was This was this print out of this paper I had in $20 I realized for the first time that I could make something that I wanted that other people might want to and they're going to pay for. So that's kind of, I think, even though today I'm doing the same thing now, I have a business name at 54 employees and whole thing. It was just me back then in, you know, the late eighties early nineties doing this, and I feel like it's the same exact business. I'm in the same business,

which is making something that I need that I want, recognizing that there's a lot of people in the world and there's probably some people out there like me who wanted to and package it up, make it nice, take care of it and put a price on it and sell it. And that's what I've been doing for 30 years now. Basically

so in your business sort of career was the contraband sale because there's some really funny stories that you know you told me and you've told Tim and where you I mean, you definitely have an entrepreneurial spirit. Thank you. Put it that way. So where was that occurring?

Remember, Like a jealous his junior high school. So I don't know. What is that? 13? Yeah, something like that. Yeah. I was in din IVs and throwing stars and switchblades and butterfly knives and tear gas in the office. Like military stuff that you kind of get into is a boy. At

least I did. No, I'm the same way. In fact, this is the weirdest story. Sorry to interrupt, but it's so ridiculous that someone's mentioning a butterfly knife, which I've almost forgotten what they are. Until you say that at an eighth grade party, I had my butterfly knife because I was so cool. And this girl, she was the girlfriend of one of my friends, and she was just like, the coolest girl in the class. Like she was like a cool girl, right? And her name was Dotty,

short for Dorothy. And somehow, like, I let her talk me into carving her initial d into my shoulder with the knife, which she did, and I actually still have this scar on my arm. I still have the D on my right shoulder from that eighth grade party with the butterfly knife. And I didn't see Dottie ended up leaving school and stuff, and we lost track each other. But I kind of came back into contact with her in 2016 and the first thing I showed her, I was like, Do you remember this?

That is crazy. Just want to encourage you to do that. And you did it. That's why I like. Yeah, well, you just kind of witness, like, Misty. I'm gonna impress this girl thing. Or was there if anything is

like, I was sort of my quote unquote air quote girlfriend at the time was like another girl anyway, who I was really into. So, no, I don't even think I was trying to impress Dottie per se as much as maybe just everybody. They're like, Lookit. I'm tough enough that I can stand here while a girl grinds a knife into my arm while I bleed and I won't flinch.

Wow, Your next level. I mean, I

think it's speaks to just how it's amazing. Our species survive sometimes when you think of how stupid someone like me could be

especially, we all get to be 13 you know, just stupid.

And you're no stranger to stupidity. No offense, no stranger to it. We're in the stupid. We're in the stupid 13 year old club. So

somehow I stumbled on this catalog called The Sportsman's Guide, which was like one of these mail order Army supply camping kind of things. I think maybe my dad was on some listing like that showed up or something, right? That and I just love you. How could you not as a camo gear and like tactical flashlights and like all this kind of stuff. And I had a job. So I had money because my parents don't give me any. But I had a good job and good job selling shoes when I was a tennis rackets, and but it was actually pretty good paint job except commission. And I was a good salesperson, so I could sell enough. And I was making, like, remember 250 bucks in a week, and I bought a bunch of this stuff. That's a ton of money.

There's a lot holy. There was a certain tennis racket called the Yamaha Secret 10. And if you sold that racket, you got $10 commission now, I didn't play tennis. I'm ashamed of this now. I didn't play tennis by told customers I did. And I said, I've never played better than with this Yamaha secret tank. Such a horrible lie like I feel terrible about it. But anyway, I amassed a small, very, very small, small fortune, but enough for me to place an order for some stuff that I wanted. But I don't have a credit card because you can't. You don't have one. You're 13. So things came C o d

cash. Cash on delivery. Yeah, remember that I totally forgot about

C o D. Yeah. I don't know if they still do that or not, but the UPS guy would come to our house and I would give him cash, so I'd stay home from school that day. I'd fake that I was sick and sail from school, and the U. P s person would come and I would I would give him, give him cash, and I get this box of stuff, and then I would basically make a catalogue insult to my friends like I get this stuff and I actually physically made a catalogue by cutting and pasting things and doubling the price. And so I told my friends and it wasn't even for the money. I don't care. I was just, like, fun. It's fun to get something and sell it for twice or whatever. So I did that for a while until I got

in trouble. Why did you get in trouble?

I get in trouble doing some other things that we're not directly related, but are all related to like being a hooligan. Basically some friends, a particular friend of mine, He I don't know who convinced to to do this. So I'm not gonna blame him or take the blame. One of us decided to fake assistant just again. Terrible fake poison. One of our friends by putting like a tick tack in his milk at lunch. And then he drank it. We told them we poisoned him. Stupid. Stupid, right? So we didn't, of course. But he passed out in math that day later, on

the power of the placebo

or the placebo. Go. There we go. And so then, like they had to pump his stomach because it's like I got in trouble for that. And then that was just tied into all this other stuff. And then, like some friend got caught by his parents with knives. Where'd you get those? White Got it from J. It's like the whole thing came

crashing down. So your empire comes crashing

down, Empire crashing down. But it is interesting, cause my parents told me I said, Hey, look, if you don't clean up, we're gonna send you to boarding school And I cleaned up like that moment. I wasn't bad. I was just having fun. I was pushing this far as I could until I couldn't anymore. And then I couldn't

and that was it. What, did your parents not put limits on you before? Not really. And now I'm asking this question through the lens of being a parent who's like, I think, anybody listening to this, whose apparent including you. The challenge. I think there are many chances of being a parent, but one of them is by definition, there is enough of an age gap between you and your kid that this notion of setting limits is arbitrary enough because you don't have a great frame of reference as an example. An obvious example. What is the limit around? Electronics? Well, it wasn't an issue for me when I was growing up.

We had this one total sack of shit cathode ray tube in our house that you wouldn't want to watch anyway. Like there were no limits around TV cause all you wanted to do was go outside and play sports. So, like that whole concept of needing to limit television or things that didn't yet exist, like phones and ipads. I don't have a reference. I don't I can't look back and say, Well, this limit was placed on me and it was good or this limit was too stringent. Presumably for our kids, their kids will be in a situation where the limits will look different. So I really I enjoy this topic because I feel like there are some limits that must be preserved across generations. Limits around respect, limits around authority or things like that. So have you reflected back on the limits that were set on you? And how you thought about those with your two Children,

for example? I have and I'm terrified of it honest? Because I know what I got away with. And I feel like where I lived was a lot safer to do some of these things. Perhaps, But I remember my parents were very and still are, but now they don't control me anymore. Right? But they were very forgiving. They were very supportive of me. They were there all the time. Whenever I needed something, whenever I wanted something

where you were an only child,

right? Only child. So that was probably part of it. My mom actually tried to have a few kids before me, but had I think three or four miscarriages, maybe three before

that puts a little extra pressure on you as this sort of chosen

one. Yeah, it was sort of me. I mean, I didn't know that I didn't really care, but like, looking back, I can see that now. It makes me ashamed of some of the things that I did. A za child, for example. I ran track in. My parents were every single track meet. I was on play basketball freshman year and I sucked. I got into a one game, but my parents were every game. Even those on the bench the whole time.

You know, like so they were always there for me, Always very supportive, always, always gave me plenty of latitude and lots of room to do what I wanted to do. And I really appreciate that. And I think that that was valuable. But I I got away with a lot of things I probably shouldn't have. I certainly pushed them a bit too far, and I pushed myself a bit too far, and there was quite a bit of tension near the end of my hooligan time. And then I remember they just kind of told me this eventually you gotta stop this or we're going to send you

a ways And you're what, like 15 16? I don't

think I was driving it. So it's probably 15 I got in with, like some of the wrong kids. My parents knew it. They called it from the beginning that you shouldn't be hanging out with these people. But I did because you know, that's what you do. It's cool, right? And then the pressures that that's his sort of unaware of now, like my son's. Only five of my daughters, 11 months so like I've got some time here, but you can only do so much as a parent. I mean, kids, we're gonna sort of do what they're gonna do,

I think. Anyway, they gave me a lot of room. I did a lot of things. I learned a lot, but they also taught me from an early age to be very independent, like getting a job right when I could and working in that sort thing. So I think the independence part of it was really important. I think it really did shape me that I could figure things out on my own and get where I needed to go without a lot of support. Let's say there was support in terms of we're there for you. But I figured a lot of things out myself. I was never really good at school either. I was okay, but I wasn't great. I think it just kind of bored me thinking back to your point about kids. Now,

I'm just aware of these things now. It helps me think about what it was like to be that age again. So when these things come up with my kids, I'll hopefully be able to empathize, but more than maybe if I was more perfect,

you know? So you managed to dodge this boarding school bullet, right? Yeah, I did. And then you go to college. And what do you study?

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

a couple years, and I just wanted to be done because I was actually doing business. I was. Then, by that time, I was starting to website design after that is offered a job in San Diego, and I moved to San Diego for about six months. I lived in the gas lamp way back in the nineties

when it was even dirtier.

It was just beginning to turn. They just built Ah, Horton Plaza. That's right, they just built That started to change on their. But anyway, I started a website design, and I actually felt like schools interfering with my education like I felt like I was learning so much more from doing business and finding clients and delivering work and getting paid or not getting paid and understanding what it's like to work with people in the world. That school began to feel faker and faker to me because everything was very abstract. Everything was not riel. The work we're doing, the products were doing, the projects were doing. They were all manufactured in a way where it just didn't feel like this is like I can learn the real thing. Why would I spend my time doing this? But eventually finished?

But let's pause there for a moment because I'm really curious as to what the real assessment is of this phenomenon that everybody loves to talk about, which is how many of the great entrepreneurs that we think of didn't finish college. I'd already loves to tell the story about, you know, Zuckerberg and Jobs and Gates. I'm curious now that you've been the workforce for a long time. But not only that, but you're you're so highly attuned to the notion of recruiting talent. Are there a subset of people whose talent is such that going to university or college is truly a waste of time? They're gonna go on and be really successful without it versus there's another subset of people who I have the potential to be equally successful. But they need that time to be on the rails versus it doesn't matter. So could Jeff Bezos have just said Forget M I t. I'm literally going to create this thing. If the timing were right and he could have started Amazon if he were 10 years younger, could he have skipped college and investment banking and just started Amazon? And would we be adding him to the list of the Zuckerberg's the gates? The

jobs is it's hard to say. I think, that there's a mythology around some of that. I mean, some people like Steve Jobs went to school like it a liberal arts college and sort of got into all sorts of interesting things, like taking calligraphy classes

and stuff, but influenced his sort of flavor

for exactly. So the fact that he didn't finish school to me doesn't matter. Doesn't matter if you finish school or not in our field, I mean, perhaps in medicine. It certainly matters, right, really. But like in our world, it doesn't matter so much because I think it's about what experiences do you want, what experiences you find interesting and being motivated by the things that you're doing. So some people are motivated by learning in school. Some people are motivated by learning outside of school. I don't think that there's a specific breed or type of person that couldn't finish school and needs to leave the world a school of the educational world and get out in the real world like there's the moments in history where timing really matters. Any timing always matters. But for example, Zucker Burg, like Facebook, only exists because he went to Harvard. It only exists because he wanted to build this thing to get to know the people at school or the fact that he finished school that

didn't hurt, did Yeah, exactly. And you could even

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

like, did you finish your actually finish and get this piece

of paper? So if we want to play with all these myths, like Steve Jobs, calligraphy classes, will that influence designed that influence typography on the Mac? And that made a huge that change the world a lot of ways. So school was important. T jobs and school was important to Zuckerberg. I don't know. Gates is history.

He and Paul Allen met in high school, didn't

they? Might have been old friends. Yeah, but again, like here's the other thing that I think is interesting. We all like to call out the exceptions and think there's a lesson

there right now. We don't really know what the graveyard looks like, right? The contra positive.

And it's the same thing with venture capital. And sure, we might get into this, but I can jump into it for a second, which is that people like to look at or like, hard work. Let's say hard work is actually a better example, Bezos and whatever they worked their ass off, so like Well, there's a lot of people who worked their ass off to get nowhere. And they work really, really, really, really hard. And they make minimum wage if they're lucky. And they worked their whole life, and it's very, very difficult to this idea of hard work getting you somewhere.

I don't buy it. Wow. I wanted to go down the path of contrary and foregoing their views. Were

there were there. I don't think that hard work. The argument is that, like no one else is working as hard a Zuckerberg. Therefore, Zuckerberg worked hard and he come on, please. There's only 24 hours in the day to begin with. I don't even know working hard means like, in my opinion, if you get to sit behind a desk all day in an air conditioned room. There's no such thing is hard work. Hard work is picking strawberries in the field. Hard work is roofing 123 heat. That's hard work, intellectual work and be challenging work, no question about it,

and it can be difficult work. But as far as like the hard part of it, the word hard, like to me that's physically hard sweating on not getting paid, not being respected. That's hard. It's hard to go to work every day when that's your reality and you have a slightly different take on that, I suppose, in most, but going in circles little bit. But basically there's a lot of myths around these exceptions, and we tend to focus on. The exceptions is like those are the exceptions and the exceptional people. Ah, lot of this has to do with luck and timing and and also skill and talent and observation and opportunity and all these things. But I think we put a lot of weight into things that probably have very little to do with it,

in fact, so we can find patterns like these people dropped out of school. Therefore, I should drop out of school and there's a lot of people who feel that way they would have followed their idols. What I would say is, What? What did they get from that experience? Maybe that's something you should look for versus the drop out. Drop out. Just a moment in time. You decide not to go anymore. That doesn't really

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

reason trying to distinguish between correlation and causation. These are incredibly modern phenomenon. In fact, you could argue that they represent less than five basis points of our genetic existence. Meaning, like less than 1/20 of 1% of our genetic existence has been in exposure to the idea of thinking logically going through formal logic and reason. The scientific method has not even been around for 400 years. And if that sounds like a lot, you know, obviously just reflect on how long our genes have been around. But what has been around for a long time is pattern recognition. In fact, you would argue that it hasn't just been around for a long time. We have We have sharpened that tool so well, because, as I think,

the example I remember using in this block post was like if you were walking around in a tribe of 30 people and you see somebody over there getting the desirable mate, then you want to emulate what they're doing. You see somebody over there getting sick? Well, presumably whatever he ate or drank, you shouldn't be doing. And again, will you ever be able to tease out the correlation versus the causation? Not a chance. But if you were a good correlation identifying machine, that was a very beneficial trait to be able to carry on and I just think that on this topic, which is again, it's off topic. But it sze such an interesting notion that we observe in ourselves. Most of us default back into that without even realizing it. Even when we think we're smart and smarty pants. In the end, we're still kind of a bunch of knuckle dragging, pattern recognizing brain stems

for sure, and also we look for the patterns that correlate with our own

stories. Then you get into all of the biases. Of course, yeah, you have the confirmations that

come with these things right, and that's that's sort of where it gets to be dangerous. But you kind of have to. I mean, you can't go through the world looking at everything fresh all the time. You wouldn't get anywhere. And that's what's so I think, fasting about looking at kids, I assume from what I can tell from observing kids like they don't have those patterns. Yeah, especially when they're young, they see a leaf for the first time. They see a plant for the first time. They see a catapult for the first time. They're fascinated by it. You and I walked right past those things because we know what they are and the pattern is clear like that. Silly if that's a thing.

So you end up missing all these interesting details, probably because you jump over things like not all lead to the same. But we said it's a leaf big deal. But kids like, what's this leaving? What's that leave when Cicely, you're like, Come on, we gotta go like shoes on. But they're fascinated by these little things, So I think that we have to, of course, function with patterns or through patterns. But I think, oftentimes end up reinforcing our own wishes like we were excited about the person who dropped out of school. Therefore,

like we find the patterns, we find the things that line up, and then we can tell her own story that matches with our own internal story. But I try to look for things that are a little bit outside of that because it's a little obvious. Some of the things are really obvious in terms of if you don't dig a little bit deeper, you end up believing the myths, and I think there's a lot of that going on, especially entrepreneurial world right now where people are. They look to companies like these big companies, and I go well, that's the way we want to build our company, and that's the way we want to be, what they do, what they took $100 million. We should take under $1,000,000 they founder is whatever. And so we should be that way.

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

But we don't realize that they started out where we started out to. We just kind of feel like they just jumped to be apple. And so, like, let's just do what they do when we're gonna get to where they're gonna get it. I just don't think that's usually true.

What do you think is sort of among the top mistakes slash myths that people starting businesses make? Not not even making the looking at Apple model, but looking at other successful startups looking at, like Dropbox or people Cos where you can say, Well, look, there was I can still remember when they were in their infancy, but look what they're doing now. What are what are some of the common mistakes you see people talking about?

I think that most of this stuff is actually luck and timing, and there's clearly talent and skill involved, too. But sometimes things just happen at the right time,

meaning most of the successes that we looked to as thes beacons of brilliance were under appreciated. How much

luck is involved. I think so. Partially because if you just think about it this way, like what if they all started again right now, I could drop box, be what Dropbox is 10 years from now, like it is 10 years in, probably not and you'd say, Well, why not? They could do the exact same thing will cause it's a different time and there's different competitive pressures and there's just different timing and there's different economic things going on. If you can't replicate these successes, then there's probably a lot of luck and timing involved in these things. And it's not that people don't pay attention to that. I just don't think they give you enough value. I remember early in my career I thought, There's no such thing as luck. I thought I was hot Shit,

I knew it all. Where in your life cycle is this? This is in college Post

college, Post college. After starting our business, probably. I gave a talk. We have to look this up. I give a talk it startup school, which was Ah y Combinator sze thing. I don't remember what year this was. Maybe it was 2007. I'm just guessing. I remember someone asked about luck and remember answering. I don't believe in luck. Remember that answer distinctly and I and so ashamed of saying that. But that was me at the time, and I remember just be like, No,

no, I did this, I did that. We did it this way. It's all intentional. This happened for a reason, the whole thing. And now I realize that that's probably not true at all. In fact, if I had to start the business again right now, pretty good chance I wouldn't I wouldn't do it all. So I think locking timing has a lot to do with it. And there's a multi dimensional luck and timing. There's like how, like your time, there's the markets time.

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

So base camp is harder today than it was 20 years

ago. Absolutely, because we have more people. We have more customers with those come all sorts of things customers. You have expectations. There's more competitors, employees. There's just more people. People are difficult. There's just the notion of doing the same thing for a long period of time and becoming blind to new things. And you're so used to the way you've done things. And it's safe

to say it's harder or it's just different. Like I'm trying to think of an example like, I don't know every example I can think of. I can immediately think of a counter example,

but I give you something kind of more specific than, perhaps to frame it. I'll hear a lot of entrepreneurs saying like I'm gonna work my ass off now so I don't have to later. The assumption is is that if I put in all this time now, it's gonna be easier later. So therefore, I don't need to work. Those kind of hours are all hire people to do that stuff never works out that way. You worry where Why is that the case? Well, I

don't know how much of it is the drive to work so hard now under the guise of not having to work hard Later, when you get to later, you have failed to address that which it is that's driving you to work so hard in the first place. And so you know work expands to fill available time. You just come up with more stuff to do, some of which may not even be necessary.

Most of it I would say it's probably not necessary. I think that one of the reasons why it happens this way is that where you just are creatures of habit. So whatever you practice, you get better at and sometimes don't even realize you're practicing. But if you're working 80 hour days, you're gonna get really good at work or not. There was any are weeks you're gonna get really, really good at working 80 hour weeks. Just we're gonna do a 12 hour days and then at some point you like. That's the only way to do this, right, because that's what I've done. That's how I've gotten to where I've gotten. It's because of the hours I put in and therefore, like if I pulled back like this is all gonna fall apart, so we just That's what we begin to do, and that's how we begin to work.

The other thing is, I think people underestimate how difficult it is to have employees. I love our employees, but, like it's difficult, have employees like when you're starting by yourself. It's just you. You'd make all the calls you bring someone else on. Maybe it's great. Bring the fourth or fifth person on at some point. There's personality conflicts. Things get a little bit more difficult and then you have to manage people and you have to hire managers and then your little bit out of the loop. And before you know it, you own the business. But you're the last to know everything that's important about the business. You don't know what people are upset.

You don't know what's going on. You're so far removed from it and this is what happens. And I think business just gets harder. It does also just become different, so there's just the difference that that's true. But I think it becomes harder and I don't think people realize that. And so I just see people going into things, not recognizing that and just assuming that they can be self destructive in the short term, because in the long term it it'll be worth it, and I just haven't really seen a lot of that play out. I see a lot of people actually ultimately destructive himself on destroying themselves and then maybe selling their business or getting out and then trying to come back and never be able to do it again. So the other thing I would say I don't know what number I'm on here if there's even numbers, But I would say like if lightning strikes like keep that lightning in the bottle Like a lot of people who are serial entrepreneurs, I'm not one of those people. I don't believe in that necessarily. I think if you are lucky enough to have a hit,

ride it out until it's over versus stop and try and do it again. Chances are very slim that you can really do it again if you actually to actually have a hit. So I'm not ashamed to say I don't think I could do this again. I'm totally comfortable with that. A lot of entrepreneurs feel like they need to prove something to someone of themselves that they could do it over and over and over. That's just not me. So I think putting that idea out there is a good alternative because a lot of people think that by starting a business selling five years in doing other one song in five years in. It's like the way to make a career. I think the way to make a career sustained business, not to get out

of business now again, is it possible that there's just a different itch that's being scratched? I mean, I want to come back to sort of this because, you know, your motivation is it's clearly not driven by some exit. I mean base camps, a private company. How many times? Ah year. You asked. When you gonna take this company public? Probably not that much anymore, because we've made the answer very clear.

Yeah, I get ah, email to every week from a VC firm, a private equity firm or ever wanting to invest. And the answer is always No, I just don't want I don't want that pressure on me like the other thing. I think that becomes clear. It has become clear for me, and about everything I'm saying is my point of view that none of these air facts like this is just What I'm saying is that people end up making things really hard on themselves. I don't think business is that difficult. If you don't make it hard on yourself, but people make it. They grow too fast. They raise money from the outside. They put unnecessary expectations on themselves. They are forced into a growth track where they have to grow and they have to produce returns. They have to then hire people,

cause their money in the bank from the investor, because that's where you spend money on people basically in marketing. And then you get ahead of yourself and your over your skis, and now you're screwed. You're in trouble. So now you have to keep fueling the growth and raising more money. And I've talked to a bunch of people who've done this, and they all pined for the good old days when they were a group of eight people just doing it right. Then they sort of got out of control for them. So I see that happening a lot, too. And I think this is like self destructive behavior, even though people don't know sissy it that way. They see it is like business building. But a lot of businesses air destructed and destroyed by on reasonable expectations of growth and having too much money in the bank, something I'll talk I've talked about before is that making money is a skill just like playing guitars,

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

That's what profit is and profits the only thing that keeps you in business ultimately, and if you have to rely on other people, they provide that fuel for you. I think you're at a real disadvantage, and I think you're putting undue pressure on yourself.

So let's use an example that's very top of mind, because it's just It's somewhat recent, which is uber right. Terrible business. Uber's not profitable, but the story is it could be profitable at any moment. It just has to choose profitability. Overgrowth,

right? Well, it's a great example because it's a textbook, terrible business. Everyone thinks it's a great success. It's horror. They lost what 1.8 billion last year on 11 billion in revenue or whatever it is, Or maybe last quarter. Don't even know if it's quarter year. What numbers? There's a huge

losses, right? The fact that you can't remember that probably

says in a massive losses, and their CEO says it's just a few days ago, we were just getting started on this amazing journey. It's like you've actually been in business for a long

time, about

10 years or 10 years. You've raised over $1,000,000,000 in capital. You're a public company. Not like when is this journey? When is this gonna work? Because right now, I think right now, for every buck they make or they pull in. They're losing 20 or 30 cents or wherever it is. It's like, terrible, like the economics are terrible and they don't seem like they're going to change unless they actually change the pricing model. Which what? Which might make it less attractive to riders. On top of that, uber is a Dumpster fire In terms of ethics. They've done a lot of bad things,

let's say with tracking journalists and the way they went after competitors and a whole bunch of stuff that's pushed by growth, they have to show numbers. These businesses, like uber and even like lift. And like we work in, like a number of these businesses that are quote successful, they're not at all. They're actually terrible. Business is the dry cleaner on the corner is a better business. They're gonna be around longer than we work.

I don't follow this stuff at all. So it's this is all sort of again. I'm one of those guys that would just naively say, Well,

they're everywhere. So there, doing well, right?

Yeah, we're just that other sent. The concept of we work makes sense, but truthfully, I've never put like my business hat on and actually scratch the back of the envelope and looked at what they're paying per square foot and how they arbitrage is it. And then what their middle costs are like. I don't actually I haven't done that analysis.

But I have to do is look at their filing and they say there's a good chance we will never be profitable like they know that themselves. How is that possible? That's what like almost all of these, I pose that file these days in the tech world, say, like there's a good chance we will never become profitable. That's what it says in the dress ones

is we works as one on

the street. Yes, it is. Now it is okay. Thes businesses air terrible like part of it.

But then let's use the counter example of Amazon. Sure. Okay, So Amazon went public long before they turn to profit. Continued to lose incredible amounts of money while growing in equity value like crazy. And the now that would do argue that aws basically saved Amazon? Or do you argue that at some point, Amazon just turn the ship and said, Look, we're gonna focus more on profitability than on pure growth.

Well, let me even step back further and go. I don't care because it's one example. And this is the thing that ends up happening

is that Amazon might be an exception is sort of

what you're. I think pretty much most of these companies are exceptions, because if you think about, like, most of the ones we all talk about are exceptions. I will address the Amazon Point a second, though, but people always will go. Well, what about Amazon? Well, you're not Amazon. And if it was so easy, everyone company would be doing this. They're not like Amazon is a very different kind of company. They've basically said we don't want to pay anything in taxes, so we're gonna roll every offer profits back into the business. A W s is a huge part of their business.

Maybe for people listening to this who were getting a little deep in the weeds. Can you tell people what AWS is and how that sort of is such an important

piece of Amazon? Yes. Oh, AWS is Amazon Web service is which is basically an outsourced cloud like you can basically use Amazon Service's and hardware to run your own business in their cloud. They're kind of they built it for themselves, and they basically made it available for everybody else. So instead of having to by a data center or or co host physical machines somewhere, you can just buy a slice of theirs. If that hopefully

you and I remember just put this in perspective. I remember in 14 2001 of my best friends, maybe it's 2013 was 13 or 14 1 of my best friends who was running a hedge fund. We're having dinner one night, and whenever I'm having dinner with people, I'm much more interested in. There were held in mind, so I tried to monopolize the conversation around them, so I don't have to answer a bunch of questions. And this was one of those nights where I was like, Tell me about the most interesting long position you have right now that it did. And he's like Amazon, and I'm thinking it's gonna be some company I've never heard of. And he's gonna tell me about some offshore oil company in Brazil that's got this thing and bold, and it's like no it's Amazon, and I'm like, Why?

And that was the very first time I ever heard of a W s. And he basically showed me the entire share price of Amazon is captured by a W S. You're getting a retail business for free in 2013 and you're you have a appropriately valued AWS and, of course, me. Naively, I was thinking, but their price to earnings ratio is so liberal 100 or 100 degrees like that and your thing about this the wrong way. So what you're saying is like that's a bit of an exception. I don't know enough about Microsoft, but given that their software business, we've been talking about software. I assume Microsoft is pretty profitable at the outset.

They've been profitable for years, as as has Apple. Two great companies were wonderful, cos I guess my point is this. Their stories actually don't matter because that's not in my world. That doesn't matter, because I'm more interested in small businesses and like real businesses that have to show profit like you can't be Amazon. The dry cleaning the corner cannot be Amazon. The pizza shop in the corner cannot be Amazon. They're not gonna If you said Hey, pizza shop, I would say this. It's a pizza shop owner comes up to you and goes, I've got an idea. I'm gonna lose money in every slice of pizza I sell, but I'm gonna sell a lot of them. What do you think of my business?

He goes and stupid. What you talking about? You're gonna be out of business and everyone in the world would know that. So, like those of the economic laws that most people are under Amazon and some of these other companies are exceptions. No Apple, hugely profitable. Microsoft is profitable. Those to me are better models then like, But what about Amazon? I have a lot of respect toward Amazons Done. I also lately have a lot less respect for Amazon's doing. I think that they might be a net negative, given a number of different things. I think that the pressure we put on the system, the fact they don't pay federal income tax and I know they say,

Well, we were doing with what's within the law like Okay, fine. But I think there should be a little more corporate sponsor ability in the world and I think like companies that generate billions in revenues have an obligation to pay taxes. But aside from that, I also think that, given their largess, I feel like they could. They could treat workers with better, and they could do a number of things that they also think They put undue pressure on smaller businesses and they sort of dominate the market. For example, like our book, 98% of sales come through Amazon, and that's just kind of wrong. I don't think that's good, even though it's convenient to buy.

They made that the user experience incredible, so I can't fault them for running that kind of business. But it still feels like in the world things are a little bit better when there's more options, not fewer options. And I think that Amazon is reduced the number of options people typically have these days. But that's a that's an aside. My general point is that we all like to look at these out liars and go. But what about and I got what? That's not your world. You don't get to be them. Unfortunately, you don't get to be them. You have to actually generate more money than you spend have to pay your employees. The public is not gonna endlessly give you money forever. You're just not that so we can look at these examples, but I just don't think they're relevant to most companies. Truly.

What's the natural history then of these businesses of the wee works and the ubers of the world like you? I mean, you sort of, I think, basically said, Look, at some point, the public will either demand profitability, in which point prices have to go up, in which case, profitability might not be as much as you think, because at some point you're gonna drive people back to taxis or whatever the alternative. Waas. I'm so sort of reeling in this idea that these companies are that bad from a pure business standpoint.

They are, you should look at, the numbers are terrible thing, and this is like

a family. I know you don't read fiction, and that's something you and I have in common. We've just basically decided there's too much other stuff I need to read fiction. I've read one work of fiction since 1999 so I'm at 20 years, one work of fiction. But this is another one of those things that I used to be very interested in when I worked at McKinsey like there is nothing I enjoyed more than reading the entire Wall Street Journal cover to cover every morning. I don't even read the news anymore. I've just decided I'm not reading the news

like ever on the same way. I don't read the news either, but I've looked into these numbers because I'm curious what is relevant. That's terrible, terrible numbers. And the thing is is like thes cos there's a sense that they deserve to exist no matter what. No, they can go out of business like Uber could go out of business. And why shouldn't they? That's a crappy business. It's a terrible business right now. Maybe it'll turn around at some point. They had 10 years. Maybe I'll turn on some point. But there's this assumption that these things are now part of our world. Therefore, they must be there forever.

I just don't think that that's true. There will be other people who come along who maybe make a profitable model out of this, but and there's been a number of things their own ride sharing lately that have come out. Traffic is worse because of ridesharing. Pollution is worse because of ride sharing. There's a lot of cars idling with nobody, and

then we'll really autonomous vehicles change this for uber.

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

right to buy, to buy

a longer, longer position and just go in but and make the investment. But I think that's very, very, very far out. So there, of course, running trials and doing all this stuff and they get new stories for it. But I think we're very far from that. You can just see like the best in the business at this Tesla. We don't have one now, but we had one and they're autopilot like it's actually a crime to call autopilot. I think they should have called it that. That's part of the problem. The expectations are wrong. It's not autopilot. It's like assisted driving,

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

Yeah, that's sort of been my uninformed. I guess bias would be the only way to describe it, which is, I think the problem is way harder than it's being sold because it's way more asymmetric.

Yes, and I think it's easier if you, for example, I have to think it's it would be easier if you had, like dedicated roads only for autonomous vehicles where they would all behave the same way and

followed the same rule. Not only that, and if each car could be autonomous overnight. In other words, if you could immediately allow every vehicle to communicate with every other vehicle and you could eliminate all of the human simultaneously, I think that's actually easier to imagine than a gradual transition where you infuse in autonomous vehicles, you know. And there's a point when, like, 7% of them are autonomous and 93% or driven by knuckleheads. Well, the 93% of us who are knuckleheads driving cars I don't know if a I is good enough to fully understand the depths of our stupidity

totally agree. So it's the phasing in, which

seems like that's

the part that I have kids in decades away. I agree. If there was dedicated lanes where all the cars talk to each other and they all follow the same rules, and they all had the same language, different story. But that's not the story. Like we can't build more roads right now. We're gonna build roads in Manhattan. Of course, that gonna happen. So they're gonna have to phase in and that I think, is really far away. But no way we work. Lift uber, look at the economics, terrible businesses, uber and lift.

I mean, the public markets are saying these were actually quite bad. They're down quite a bit off. They're off their highs with the I p o. So, like, people are starting to wake up to this and this thing, I don't think there's anything here.

The funny thing is like I love talking about this stuff so much, and I realize it's probably somebody the this point of the podcast saying, What in the world does this have to do with anything that I want to hear these guys talk about? So let's let's go back to post college. You're doing some software stuff, right? Website design website design. You ever get any interesting feedback on website design?

E Remember when I was first getting going with this? I thought I was good. There's this award thing back then. I think it's called High Five Awards That,

and back then, this is before you had, like WordPress, where people could basically take a template and two a

year doing this from scratch from scratches is like writing basic HTML website code. Basic stuff.

This is mid to late

nineties This. So this is about 95 96 when I started doing this stuff because that's kind of when the Web became visual. Before that, it was like mostly text based, right?

So Most Mosaic was a big step forward. And I remember the summer of 94 when I was using Mosaic on a Sun Workstation, and it was like I didn't know what

I was looking. Yes, that little game change. That was the moment that everything changed

in the world. Netscape I p. O. In August of any five. If I recall, remember when that was okay, 94 95 was, that's what changed was a step function.

Yeah, exactly. And that's when a change. And that's when it became commercially viable for companies to have websites or even begin to think about the Web. There I was in college board the junior, I think, in 90 Graduate 96. I love design and I knew a little bit about computers, and back then I was really easy to learn how to do this stuff because no one knew what they were doing, and so, like it was just dead simple. Today, it's really hard. Another example today. Could I pick up what I know today? Probably know it's really hard. I mean,

yeah, I could, but like everything's got more complicated back then was simple. Anyway, I figured how to make some websites. I went around to see some sights, actually, financial sites and email that the bottom, it said, like Web master at whatever, because that's what everyone had back then. So email these people say, Hey, I like your site but I think I could make it look better. Like, Will you give me a shot?

A couple of them replied, Yes. And so I did some simple work. First job I ever had was like 600 bucks doing some guy's website, actually Tim for his last name, but it was called Profit Data Service is you actually based out of San Diego. Tim Knight was his name. He's still around actually doing this stuff, but hey gave me a shot and I did some work for him, and I did some work for another guy named Keith Crook Shank in San Diego and they're doing more work for him. And then he offered me a job when I graduate from college in 96. So without San Diego and sort of worked with him was just me and him for about four months, five months, and I realized I'm just not built to work for other people. I just knew it. At that moment,

I kind of had assistance, like a suspicion before. I've had jobs before, but they were like, you know, part time jobs, and that's fine. But as far as like a full career job, I couldn't work for somebody else. I had a hard time doing something I didn't believe in or didn't agree with. It just couldn't do it.

What do you mean by that? Like was there? I mean, these guys weren't asking you to do anything unethical. No, no, no, nothing. So what did you not believe

in? I realized that my motivation went to zero

because it wasn't your

idea. No, wasn't that it was more like, for example, an aesthetic decision. Or like if I had to do something that I just didn't agree with, aesthetically or, like structurally or in terms of like copyrighting a sentence that I didn't like. I just It's not that I couldn't do it. It just my motivation went to zero. I just didn't want to do. Oh, so

it wasn't about you having a boss. It was about you having a client. If I'm your client and I say Jason, you know, you probably noticed the T A medical website sucks. Can you help me redo It is the issue that I would say, Well, I really I much prefer tohave serif fonts here. But sand Sarah funds here. And if you thought that was wrong, you just couldn't do it. Or is it that I'm talking to a guy between us who's telling you what I'm telling

him? It's not the clients. I'm okay with working with clients. It was more the boss situation. It wasn't this fellow named Keith who was a great guy. It wasn't that it was just purely a function motivation. I realized that I don't want to spend my day on something I feel like I begrudgingly have to do if I don't have the intrinsic motivation to get it done like I just if I just like, for example, with writing like I love writing. If I had to write a sentence in a certain way just to appease somebody because they were paying me like it was my job, I would write the sentence. But I'd be miserable by the end of the day like I don't Why am I doing this? Like, why am I spending my day doing things I don't want to do? And I don't agree with that, like you could do that once or twice or five times, Of course.

But like when that became something that was clear to me that we had, like a we had, like aesthetic differences with my boss. We had, like, just a fundamental principle outlook, differences around the work itself. Yeah, I could do the work, but I didn't want to do the work. And if I don't want to do the work while I was doing it, why was that wasting his time? I was always in other people's 10 miles at wasting my time. I realized that I have to be motivated by the work itself. That's what drives me. It's not the money,

it's not success. It's like I get the plug. It's like Fineman like the pleasure isn't going to find anything out, right? It's not the awards, it's that. And so for me, that's what it was. And if I have to do something I just didn't enjoy, I just motivation was gone. And if you don't have that, you're you're screwed because then there's no carrot that can pull you along. I mean, they can pull you along in the short term, but long term can.

So which I want to come back to this theme by the base camp. But let's keep going this story.

So I quit live in San Diego for a few more months, moved back home to Chicago and then start doing freelance

Web site design of my own, which in the mid nineties looks like what? How are you finding clients?

Same way did before, which was that I would just reach out to people who had websites because everyone's website at that time,

how are you finding the people who don't have websites aren't the only people that need you even

more? No. So I've never focused on that. I always focus on redesigning because I felt like I could show an improvement in this context, it certainly there's always contacts from zero to nothing. But I felt like I had the ability to take something that someone had and elevated, basically in a way where they'd be like, I want that version of the thing that I have. So I always have focused on redesigns. So I would go to Web sites that I use, and I find out how to get in touch with the owner and say, Hey, sometimes I would send them like a free mock up that I would make or something and say, Here's what I would do with your thing and eventually get a few clients and you get a few clients and sometimes you don't have any. So you make up a fake client, designed something yourself and show someone something. This is what I would do to this bank if I could,

which is something we eventually did in our company, where we did this whole thing, called the Better Project, where I was so frustrated with how FedEx his website worked, that I just redesigned it for myself. I couldn't use it. It wasn't FedEx website, but I made a mock

up of it this is how you'd

want it to be, is how I'd want it to be. And we got a lot of publicity over doing, like, better FedEx Better bank, better car interface. Better pay, pal. We didn't get hired by these companies, but we It was a way for us to show what we could do if we had the chance. And so sometimes you have to create your own clients. That's what I kind of did, too, and sort of got that word out there and then words sort of spread. It was just me. So my costs were zero at my rent was paid 100 bucks a month to live. I lived and worked in the same place.

Of course, my costs were a zero, basically not zero, but 900 bucks. I could cover that. This is one of my things. I never get ahead of myself. I never spend more than I make. I never put myself in about a position. I'm a believer and risk, but never putting yourself at risk. Which is it? Different. Differentiate those for me. Risk is like taking a shot that if it doesn't work, no big deal and we do that all the time at base camp.

But what I will not do is bet the company on something. I mean, maybe I would figure out that I have done that. Looking back, if something didn't work, but I would not knowingly go into something. Go. This has to work. We're going all in on this or else like it's over.

And this is another great example of history is littered with these hero stories of betting the company on, you know, what was Apple bet on? I mean, Apple was bet on the Mac. Yes, it will release the Mac in 97. Was the entire the men? That company was hemorrhaging cash? Yes. When jobs came back,

Disaster. And they bet big

get they had Now. In retrospect, it was that I mean, is there Well, yes, but even even mean? But remember, Annie Duke, I don't if you ever heard the podcast, I did with her mean any, I think, does this great job of differentiating outcome from process and stuff like that. But in retrospect, do we still think like, if there were 1000 universes with 1000 apples all in the same position and the company was bet. Do you like 800 of them work out well or did we see one of just 75 of 1000 that worked

out? Well, well, I think there could have been a course, a bunch of different outcomes. Microsoft could've bought them. Someone else could have bought them. But looking around this table right now, I have an iPhone. You have an iPhone, you have an iPad. These things would not have existed in the world had Apple not made that initial bet with the Bondi Blue I Mac. So all those things led to these things. Whether or not that you're

saying it's not in your person that, like that's your type of leadership is not designed to be in that moment. Maybe the way jobs was the right guy for that

role, Yes. Although I will also admit that I haven't been in a position where I had to do that, and that's sort of partially, intentionally. And also perhaps by luck, but jobs came back. He had nothing to lose. Apple was dying. You could almost say like, what else were you gonna D'oh, Why come back and do the

same thing. Make another Newton. You make

another Newton, which didn't really pan out. Although some of those ideas were no oppressing me

suddenly totally

not his. Yeah, right. But anyway, like looking back on it, of course, was the right move. But there's a bunch of letters, you know, history's littered with companies that try that. But for me, I just don't see the point like I'm about the odds. What are the odds, like with any decision I make? I don't really think Probabilistic Lee necessarily. But I do think about it in a broad sense. Like what if this goes wrong?

Like David's? My co founder, my business partner. We always talk about this. Like what if this doesn't work? What's the worst that's gonna happen? It's like, Well, like we're making a new product right now. Okay, we have base camp. We're going to another product. What if this we spend a year building this other project? What if it doesn't work out? Then we spent two. You're building it.

We're not gonna go out of business because of it. We still have a very healthy business. With base camp still growing, we're fine. The worst that can happen is we spend a year. If we spent 10 years, that be a problem. If we spent seven years, that be a problem. But we can afford to spend a year on this. I'm not gonna do something I cannot afford to do. I just don't see the point in it like I'm more for self preservation. I don't need to, like, hit the Grand Slam like I want to keep doing this Like I found my dream job, which is running my own business.

Why would I want to put that at risk? Now you could say, If you don't take more risks, someone's gonna beat you And I would say You're probably right. At some point we will lose and our company will go out of business and the company will die. And that's what happens to every single company in the world. Essentially, except like, there's some Japanese companies that burning like 40 generations or never cos die, and that's okay, too. This stuff doesn't have to last forever. But if we look back, David and I have talked about this to like, let's say, in six years it just peters out well that would suck.

But also like that's a 26 year run that's not so bad. So I always tend to look at it that way. But I also want to stay in business, so I don't want to take the risk that could put us out of business. I want to just take risks but not put ourselves at risk. So that's kind of, you know, if that defines it well enough, but that's how I think about these

things. So before base camp now going back to the mid nineties, your one stop shop, your one man, $9 apartment guy and then how's that going? I mean, the the story I'm pushing you to is this funny submission to a contact?

So, yes, around that time I thought it was good. I mean, it was I was good enough for clients they were paying me and I was staying afloat, and this is great. There was this award site, and I was sort of excited about it because a lot of I wanted an award like I wanted to be recognized, which is like a very human, fundamental thing Now, since then, I've realized awards air, nothing I'm interested in. But at the time, I was young and like, excited to be on the scene. Right?

Get someone else's approval. So I submitted this website designed to this award site. I got an email back saying, like, basically you suck. You should not do this, but this should not be the line of work you're in. I think maybe some people would be destroyed by that. But I've always felt that to be motivation, like Okay, let me show you what I can do. Our bit like I didn't care.

Did you see a grain of truth in the feedback? Did you

think? No, I didn't believe it. I thought I was good. I thought I was good at what I did. I am good at what I do. And I thought so. But like what I realized was that, like everyone's opinion, is purely subjective. Especially to come to this kind of stuff like this is just a guy. I don't even know this guy. Why should I let this guy piss me off? But he did, like now I look back at that. No. Why would I ever let someone else take my mind over like that and make me upset.

At his opinion, who cares about his opinion? But he was sort of seen as a rainmaker kind of type of the time, so I didn't get that word. But it just motivated me like I've always been motivated by that. Like, if I someone thinks I'm not good at something or can't do something like that fires me up, it doesn't piss me off. I mean, pisses me off, but it doesn't make me upset.

So it's sort of a productive channeling of at least a quasi productive channeling.

Except you could say it's revengeful, which is not productive in that regard. But like I wouldn't do it to shove it in his face. That's that's not why I would ever do it. I would do it because, like, I think I am good and just motivated me to keep working at that. So I got better and better and better.

Thank you. Hone a craft like that where you're on the it's the Wild West still

practice. You just keep doing it and then you find your find your aesthetic. You find your your eye, you find what you're good at. What you're not good at, and you kind of double down. So for me, what I was good at was I actually wasn't very good at making. I'm not a trained designer, so I couldn't make sophisticated three dimensional designing things right. What I was really good at was laying out copy, writing, copy, laying out, taxed, laying out for simple graphics. So things were orderly and structured in a way where people who hit the site will go.

I understand with his company's selling, because a lot of companies have a really hard time explain themselves and helping people get to the thing that they're trying to sell. They just can't explain their own thing. They're too close to it. So I got really good at that because that was what was within my ability. That was that I didn't have the desire to flex outside of that. Look, let me just get good at what I'm good at. Like, why do I need to get good at everything like make it good of that? So I kept doing that, got really quite good at it, eventually hired another person cause I got a really big gig. Somehow I won this gig for Getty Images, which is a big, huge

company. Make the stock photos and stuff like

that. Yeah, they're launching this new service called Getty One, which was a first aggregate. They had a bunch of different stock photo libraries, and you had to search all the separate stock photo libraries to find a picture of the Empire State Building or something. So Getty one was gonna be a new site where they aggregated all their results into one place. It was just me at the time. I won the gig to design that side, actually from scratch because they didn't have that site. But they had an identity and they had some other stuff. But I beat out a bunch of big companies and someone really took a bat on me, made a bet on me. And so I end up hiring my first employee, then Gunny Matt Linderman, who lives here in New York now. And he was with me for like, 12 years after that. We were together for a long time, and that was my first employee from that we grew very slowly.

And how did that become? Base camp? Is that the vehicle that became based candles?

Well, eventually. So that was. The company was called 37 Signals at the time, and we started getting busier and busier and doing more and more projects. And then we need a better way to manage. The work that we're doing is we're managing our projects, using email at the time and phone calls in person meetings and paper and like stuff was slipping through the cracks and we couldn't figure out where things were. I didn't know where to find something. Someone's put something there. One place like you can't work that way. You kind of work that way for a minute and then an hour later, it's a total mess. So we built a base camp like when I built my audio product. We built base camp for ourselves for our own specific needs. Didn't even realize it was gonna be a product. But then we used it with our clients in this and hey,

what is this thing you're using? We have projects to Can we use this thing to manager or like, No, it's just this thing. And then eventually, enough people asking like, uh, there's a product here we tighten it up, clean it up, put a price on it put out in the market, called a base camp in February 5th 2000 for which happened to be the same day Facebook launched. Interestingly enough, about a year and 1/2 later was making more money for us than website design. So we stopped doing Web site design and transition to do software entirely. I'm skipping over a few things, like when I met David,

my business partner and stuff, but he was a student. Copenhagen Business School is from Denmark. I hired him to do some projects before that, and we ended up building base camp together. So he did the back end of base camp, and I did the front and design along with another person we had at the company. That's what happened. But it wasn't a plan. I don't plan. I

don't have goals. Yeah, there's the next thing I want to ask you about is you're very famously said. You don't set goals. I'm not a goal driven person. How does that work?

How doesn't it work? It works

when you're talking to a guy like So by contrast, like everything in my life seems to be about a goal or something. And so when I was in high school every day, I would wake up and write a new my goals because sometimes they would change a little bit. So I would like to I would have a goal. I don't know how this really started, but I had goals in what I perceived as all areas of physical fitness. So I wanted to run 55 minute miles of five miles in 25 minutes was a goal, and I wanted Thio had goals in strength. So I want to be able to bench, press squat and dead lift certain amounts. I don't exactly remember what they were, but they were very, very high, much higher than anything I could dream of doing today. You know, I had certain anaerobic goals,

certain goals, with the respect of flexibility and muscular endurance, like I mean, I really had this long list of goals and I would literally write them out every day. In many days. I was just rewriting what was there the day before. I mean, no change, right? But over the course of years, there was tweaking, You know, I was realizing, Oh, you know what? You that's That's a bit of a sandbag goal.

You're You're actually gonna hit that goal within six months? Let's stretch it out a little bit. And then there were times when you know, for example, like I never could do the 55 minute miles. I don't know what it was like I could do, so I really I changed that to 56 minute miles, which I could do again, not just to move the goal line, but because I also realized like I was just not going to get to 55 so you could have that goal in there forever. But at the time, I certainly did. Not a train for that. I'm not sure I ever could have. But the way I was training, which was in retrospect,

running far too long and far too slow was gonna plateau me there, so that was kind of a gold modification. Basically, that has sort of stayed with me forever. That habit I don't think I'm is literal today. I don't actually write them down on post it notes anymore, but you know, then in college, I wanted to be able to spend. You know, this summer I would want to go through the entire book of integral ls and know how to derive every single interval and all these sort of things. So So no, for me, it's like everything in life comes down to these these goals And I still do have a to do list, which is kind of a mini goal list of I have a daily, weekly and then non time constraint,

personal and non time constraint, professional to do list. So, yeah, this is a totally foreign concept.

People should do what motivates them. What I realized was that goals don't motivate me because gold tryinto one of maybe three things like one is just disappointment. You don't hit it and then you're disappointed. Like I'm not sure I want to do something that ends in disappointment. Like, why should I even set myself up for ending up in disappointment to you end up just like hitting it and then

setting a new one. So, like so you're on a treadmill

were on the treadmill of, like, forever setting these fake numbers. I mean, you just you guess like five minute mile, like that's just a round number. It's easy to say, but what

is it is better than a 5 12 miles.

What is it? What does it mean? The other one is that you end up, I think, just kind of chasing things without really thinking about it. My feeling is that I had some experiences where I didn't realize this until later. But for a while I didn't want to run like certain times. You know, you go out for a run and lets you want to run a six minute mile like recreational e you off for a run? You want to set a six minute mile, you where you're watching time it and you ended up getting like a 606 or something or 608 order. You didn't hit your goal. You're disappointed now you could say, Well, I'm not. Next time, I'll get it,

But like it's some point, like I didn't get this number. That's like the wrong way to frame it. The better questions like, did I enjoy the run? Did I get some fresh air that I move my body? Did I feel challenged to some degree? Like if I did, all of those things. What does the number have to do with anything? The number is nothing. It doesn't mean a single thing. A six versus 606 It's different. If you're like an athlete, like training for something, you need to beat someone else's time.

Okay, that's a different story. But I'm not that so. Why should I focus on trying to hit a fake number? Why not try to hit things like, Did I have a good time? It did. I get outside run for 45 minutes and get my heart going. Did I enjoy myself that I get a break that I get to think about some things like those are things that are more interesting to me. So there's that side of it. The other side of it is I just want to do the best work I can anyway, so because I want to run a five minute or six minute or seven minute like I'm just gonna run the best I can. Anyway, I don't need the number to tell me what that is. This is maybe tying back to the whole thing. One of the reasons why I quit that job,

is it? If I'm not motivated by the work itself. It doesn't matter. I have to enjoy the work. And for me, the pleasure is the thing itself. Just doing the best I can and given day. And just like seeing where it comes out like

that's not necessarily incongruent with having a goal, right? So let's use your health as an example, because that's something we obviously talk about, right? Which is again putting semantics aside. If we're gonna take the word goal off the table, you have objectives, correct.

I mean, I want to go in a certain direction. We'll also, I think,

wouldn't it be even more than that? I mean, don't you have a model for our in your mind's eye as sense of what the 85 year old Jason should be able to do? What is success look like when you're 85? This is kind of this back casting idea from Annie Duke, right? Don't think about how many miles you have to run tomorrow or how much weight you need to lift next month or next week, but think about what the wind state looks like. It 85. Not that that's the end of your life. But let's just use that as a point in time, and you have to have an objective of that to sort of at least get on the direction

of getting there, don't you? I think about it. In terms of base camp, we don't have company goals, but we have a vision like we have a direction. We're going. We have things we want to do because we think they're the right thing to do in the right way to do them. So for me, like living, trying to live, to be 85 build it gobbled squat £30. Wherever that these things are like to me, that's more of like the vision side of things like I want to get there because it be nice to be alive that long and to be healthy that long, Why would I want to not be that way? It's I don't I just don't see it as a goal. I don't see it is like a distinct thing that I either.

Here's what maybe what I think if you don't hit a goal, most people are disappointed, like when I'm 85. If I can't do that, I don't want to be disappointed when I'm 85 years old. I want to like I tried or I did whatever. But, like, I don't wanna have this point where I have to go. Did I make it or did I not? Am I disappointed or am I happy? Like that's the thing. Maybe it's subtle, but I think it's a important distinction, like when I would just go out for a run. I don't have to measure up against something and decide whether or not I worked hard enough,

brand fast enough, whatever. I could just go. Did I enjoy it? It was good for me that I'd like So you could say like the goal is like, healthy out. There's there's that, But it's very broad. It's not a number. Maybe it's the number goals I don't like. Maybe it's like the milestone goals I don't like, but like directionally, I do have definitely I want to go in specific directions. It might

just be also again. I think the process part of it, if you wanna be able to goblets, got £30 correctly. When you're 85 you'll have to do a lot of work between now and then to maintain it, because you can do that today quite easily. But gravity's gonna really work against you over the next 40 years. And if when you get there, you can goblet squad £25 instead of 30 I don't think anybody would say that. That's a failure. And more importantly, I guess it's that objective which you know, for me. We use this example because it's one of the things on my centenarian Olympic list of 20 different events to be able to do. But what's it in service of, I guess, is the question.

Maybe that's where we are, probably saying the same thing in a different way. I mean, to me, it's not about a Goblet squad. It's that £30 represents the weight of a toddler and a goblet squad, which is to say, a squat position where you have to be in scapular pro traction and be able to pick something up in front of you. That's what it's like to pick a toddler up, and I won't be able to pick up a toddler when I'm 85.

I would agree with that, but to me that's like a direction versus I see. So let's bring

it back to the company, because this is still a very unusual concept within the company, which is really a big part of what I want to talk about today. There's no shortage of stories, horror stories, really, of companies that have just gone so far ethically off the rails because of creating perverse incentives. So you know this great story with on the podcast with Katherine even about the generic drug companies, Ranbaxy's only goal is profitability. Like literally, nothing else matters. And unfortunately, that goal superimposed in a cultural environment that produces sort of different sets of ethics. That air deemed almost acceptable leads to devastating consequences. Where, I mean, they'd sell you cyanide if it was profitable.

If they if they could make enough money on it, they'd spike your medication with that. So you have to motivate people. Should we even start that? That's not necessarily an assumption. Like you have 54 employees. Do they need motivation? And if so, do you feel you need to provide

some of it? Everybody's very different. I think we have to set a vision of direction of where we're going. That's people want to be on board with that if the train's going this direction, you want to be on that line or not like there's that. But I think a lot of it is more day to day in the actual work itself and that people have the autonomy and the control over their own work and their own work environment and their own schedule and their own time. That, to me, is the more important side of it versus dragging someone along with a carrot, which is like, this bonus or that thing or whatever, or that it's some point this company worth 17 billion and you've got this much stock equity and options and you can convert. That's like, Yeah, some people really motivated by that. But I don't think that's that's healthier long term innovation. So for me,

it's more about the day to day autonomy of the work, the time they have to themselves every day and the environment that we can create for people. I think that's the thing That's often most overlooked is that people always talk about. We want to hire the best in the world we want to hire, you know, it's like you can hire the best in the world, but the environment is crap like you're not gonna get the best work out of those people and they're gonna leave some point. I'm more interested in creating a great environment that I am motivating people around specific business goals. It just I don't think people care about specific business goals. That's not the They're a writer, their designer there programmer. They care about the work that they're doing and how it all relates, of course, but like whether or not we hit some number, I don't think most people care unless you're compensations tied to it. But I think that's a whole nother problem. I don't think that's a good thing to do,

either. Let's talk about hiring. Let's start with hiring. You have some hiring practices that are not always in the norm. How do you guys higher?

We spend like weeks writing job ads. First of all, a lot of companies like Oh, that's HR department, just like throw something up there with a bunch of bullet points. You need 5 to 12 years experience this and whatever we actually try to write in a way that truly conveys what it's like to work in this position and what your day to day would actually feel like. And we put a lot of time into it because we feel like if we wantto get the best people we can, we're gonna track the best people with with with that kind of job. Descriptions were very clear about that. We also put salaries in the job descriptions and job ranges because there's no reason not to.

Why is that typically not the norm?

I think a big reason is because companies feel like it's their job to negotiate the best rate they can from a person like they're trying to get the most out of somebody. I don't feel like that's something I'm interested in in terms of like I don't want to. If I could have paid this person 1 60 they would have taken 1 40 or something like that. But I got him for 1 30 or like you know, are like I got him lower than they would have. They would have gone or whatever like or we're willing to pay 1 80 but like they accepted 1 65 like a lot of companies, see that as a victory to me, like if there's any place to spend money, it's on people. I'm not interested in having leverage over anybody or forcing anyone to be an ace negotiator, to get what they deserve. So we publish our salaries because that's the actual number we're going to pay. It's not like come to us and let's negotiate. It's like this is actually what we pay. A lot of companies just won't do that because they want to try to take advantage of people or they don't know what they're gonna pay A. There's a variety of reasons for it. Some people think there's some ethical issues around, like publishing salaries, because and other people would know what people make, and I can appreciate that. But we've just decided that we want to remove negotiation completely from the from the picture.

So do you ever get down the path where you you know, you post this thing? This is a job that's gonna pay 97,500. You get a bunch of people, you put them through. You finally get your dream candidate. They're awesome. And then and then and then they say, Look, I know you guys posted this at 97 5 but I'm not working for that. Like, if I'm not working for less than 1 15 how many times you find yourself in that situation?

We don't That's a nonstarter because like it's published, that's the number. And that's what we're gonna pay. This is something we did a few years ago. We decided this is sort of a very unusual angle that we take here, but we pay everybody in the company top 10% of the industry rates based on San Francisco rates. We don't have anyone who lives in San Francisco, but in our industry, San Francisco is the highest salaries. So we use these Ah, these benchmarking tools to figure out what the industry pays. And we're just saying we're gonna pay people basically the best. There's, of course, always companies that are higher and fear in the top 10%. There's something on top 5% but we're gonna pay people the best we possibly can. We're going to eliminate negotiation from the from the equation. It's unfair to him.

So you're sort of like CarMax.

Yes, we're like CarMax because here's the thing. Why should you have to not only be great at your job, but also be an ace negotiator. Most people are not good negotiators. They don't like negotiating for cars or houses or for anything. So why should your livelihood depend on how good of a negotiator you are? That's not fair to somebody. They should get paid, in our opinion, the best we can possibly afford, which is basically top of the market. And so we've basically said that that's the deal. And so we have different two years of based on the different roles. But everybody with the same set of skills and experience get paid the same amount of money in that moment that numbers published. So it's not necessary clear, like how much each person individually makes.

But like it's basically you could figure it out if you wanted to. And that's part of the hiring process to which is like, It's no bullshit. This is the number. This is what it's gonna be. There is no negotiation from the start, So if you feel like you want the 1 20 or you're like an extraordinary person and you want double like some people said that like I'm worth more than that school. Go find other job. There's a lot of jobs out there. If you want to look at base camp, we're gonna pay you. And currently, well, we're gonna give you the best benefits we believe in the world overall. And this is the number, and that's let's eliminate the rest of it.

Like, Why do we need to play games around salaries? The other thing about hiring for us is that we look primarily first at their writing ability. So no matter what the job is, you have to be a great writer if you cannot, right? Well, if you if you submit a cover letter and it's bad you're out, I don't care like what you're. If you're the best scientists in the world, you're out because you have to really communicate with us. And the rest of the company is primarily written, and you have to be to express yourself that way. So that's a core thing for us as well, Like the first filter that we have

now. You talked about this before that when you were website slinging, your strength was more on the copy side. So you and you've written How many books?

Four books yet for five, maybe depending how you count.

So you obviously like to write Where you always

a good writer? No, it came down to motivation. Remember? I was terrible writer in high school because like I had to write papers. I don't care about about subjects I didn't care about. They write about this, okay? But like I'm not, I don't care. It's only when I got to college and I was able to write about things that I really cared about. I thought we were interesting that I started to develop a love for it. Like I love sentences. I love just a well crafted sentence that just nails it. That just a few things were satisfying to me. Is reading a great line on Lee when I began to be able to write for those reasons that I begin to love writing and I think it's just like it's so true with a lot of kids in schools like you don't get it until something applies to you and you really get it or you find a teacher. A professor who knows howto put something in a perspective that makes a lot of sense to you. Then you begin to excel. So that's kind

of how I mean, whenever Tim talks about his professor at Princeton campus, I'm blanking on his name right now. Do you know what I'm talking about,

Robert and speak

about this, but I have one of his books. Actually, whenever I hear him talk about it, I just get insanely jealous that I was not smart enough to have found a similar experience in college because even though I wouldn't have had, it's John something of his name. But even though I couldn't have had a professor that good necessarily like, how did I not put more effort

into writing your good writer Now, though,

I mean, I think I'm okay, but I wish I was a hell of a lot better. I agree with you. It's just one of these things that

you gotta find topic. I mean, now you do. So you get to write things that you're interested in. But there's something else. I think that's interesting about learning how to write in school, which is that I don't especially in business school. I mean, I didn't go to an MBA program, but like my business classes. They don't really teach you how to write. They teach you howto put words on paper, and it's usually like length based. It's not even about like substance. In a sense, it's like write a five page paper on whatever's like y five pages like Why is that a class that I'd love to teach if I ever taught writing? Well,

I'd love to see I don't care. Someone can take this idea and run with it. That's not something I need to do for every assignment. Let's say there's a writing assignment. I don't care. You pick whatever. If I was writing teaching, right, pick whatever topic you want. I want a five page version of this. I want a two page version of this. I want a one page version. I want a three paragraph version of one paragraph version, one sentence version in a one word version. They don't teach editing. That's the really valuable part.

So I'd love to see you right along thing and keep running a shorter, shorter, shorter and try to distill it down to a sentence. Of course, one words that's more of a fun exercise, but right these things at different lengths. That, to me, is the skill. It's not like, Can I fill it five pages? Of course you can. But can I fill up three paragraphs and get pretty close to what I've had on five pages? That's the real skill, and that's not being taught.

As I was thinking about talking today, I was like, I wonder if I can coax Jason into, uh, reading my book before it comes out It love Thio. It is so long. My poor editor and the publisher are like they're humoring me. But I think deep down they're losing their mind. How many words? The contract said 80,000 with the appendix. It comes in under 200. That would be a miracle. Obviously it won't be published at 200,000 words.

It'll be better if it's happens long. You know that, too. It just will be. I know you have a lot to say,

but you know what it is. The desperation is I don't ever want to write a book again. Part of it is I have 10 books inside me. I don't want to write them. I want to write one and never do it again. So it's like there's this sense of I can't not talk about this and I can't not talk about that. Which, of course, is sort of a dumb

idea. But can you do like a double album style thing with two books

that's use your illusion one and use your illusion to which is the greatest, in my opinion, at least the greatest double album ever. Simultaneous

books were like our contracts at 40,000 words, and we handed in 20,000. And initially we had to argue with the publisher about it because he's like thick books sell butter on the whole thing. It's like I know, but we just read Can you read it? Please? Can you really like it so far in these industries like they don't? What about the book itself? Like, what is the thickness And like the word count? Like what about the material? And so eventually we ended up adding it with pictures, so every essay had a picture. Not this current, our latest book, but our previous book, Rework,

had a picture with each essay to thicken it up. That was the compromise content was great, but it wasn't thick enough to sell, apparently, which is so ridiculous. But anyway,

so you mentioned that in 2007 you're given some talk it y Combinator, and you're up there in all your confidence basically saying, Hey, there's nothing about luck here. Like I I made my destiny. Here we are. Well, we're 12 years later and you don't you don't have a bone in your body that reeks of that. So what happened in the last 12 years that changed your outlook on the role of luck and presumably a lot of the other things that you've written about that I want to talk about with respect to work, life

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

really good at that time at that thing in that place. And I've been able to continue to be good at that thing. But starting another business, for example, I don't think I would do well that all and part of this also might come from the fact that I've written about this, which is like they asked the wrong people for advice. Maybe this was sort of the genesis of this. So people ask me all the time how to start a business. I don't know. I haven't done it for 20 years. I'm the wrong person to talk to you about how to start a business expert advice, has a shelf life and expires pretty quickly. You're much better off talking to somebody who just started business six months ago than me. Even if they're struggling. I don't care like that's the right person to talk to you. They know the ground game there.

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

When did this ethos around? Wait a minute. What if you don't have to work 80 hours a week? What if you don't have to be checking email all the time? What if we don't have to have meetings all day, every day? Like, how did that begin to take hold for you?

I remember this was a distinct moment. I used to write proposals to get work back when I was in, like, 98 99. Whatever. It was mostly on my own. Actually, 97 probably. I would spend all night. I would stay up all night and do these proposals for client work to get a project, 20 page proposals and whatever and I'll just do this and do this and do this and do this and And I realized like I want some jobs and didn't win others. But I put a lot of work into that process because I felt like that's what I had to do. And then I was redoing my kitchen at my apartment and someone sent me their proposal and what did I do? I turn to the last page and looked at How long is it gonna take it home, Which is gonna cost? And I realized, like,

that's all people really care about when it comes from proposals because they are. If they asked you for one, they already know what you can do. They already know what you're doing. They just want to know how much it's gonna cost. How long is it gonna take? And that's what they're really comparing. That's it. And so I started going. Okay, wait a second. Maybe I should just write shorter and shorter and shorter proposals. Why do we need to put all this work into this document? So I start doing like I was doing 10 page and five page and three page kind of like the writing, like the writing us and eventually got down to basically one or two pages, and it's like,

Here's the thing and here's the cost and how long it's gonna take. And if you want to know more about me, like call me or like, here's our Here's my link to my Web site, Whatever. I didn't win any more jobs or lose any fewer jobs like it was the same.

And except you

get to sleep more. I got to sleep more and I realized, like, Wait a second, all this work I've been doing, I don't need to do And that was in the first moment. I realize I can kind of poke this expectation of like, God you have to, because all the proposals I'd seen up to that point, where huge and they're fancy and their glossy and all this work and everything's personalized, it's like when I was on the other side of that, I just looked at the time in the price. That was the moment when I realized I didn't have to do all this work, and so then that kind of extended until a whole bunch of other things, like Why do we need to work 12 hours a day? What am I doing like? Why don't need to push this hard on these things like maybe I can just do a little bit less and figure out what the essence really is.

Like, What is the price and time of all this other work that I'm doing? And then when you finally kind of get into that mode, you realize like most of the time you spend on things, it's probably wasted time thistle. Huge exaggeration, of course, but there's a lot of time you put into things that you don't need to put into things. And I've gotten really good editing that down so I can put a little bit of time into something because I just know what the essence of the thing is and just do a really good job on that and leave the rest alone. We've tried to develop that habit and that skill internally base camp with all our employees. So we really get to the essence of something. We call it the epicenter of whatever it is that we're doing. What are we doing? So you could think of like if I was to open a hot dog stand on the street. It's still be a hot dog stand. If I didn't have catch up and mustard and onions and pickles and relish even the bun,

I could just sell the hot dog. If it was a hot dog, it would be the hot dog stand still. If I didn't have the hot dog, it wouldn't be hot dog stand. All those other things wouldn't matter then. So the epicenter is the hot dog itself, not the quality of unnecessary. I don't care about that, but like all these other things, like they're nice toe have. But you don't really need them to still say that you sell hot dogs on the street. So that's how we kind of think about, like features and functionality like, What is the core essence of this thing that we're trying to do? There are always going to be

more powerful. There's so much judgment involved in that. And like I've tried to play this game with myself and I'm so bad at it, I would talk myself into saying Well, you know, really, you can't just have the wiener, because then it's like the wiener stand. You have to have the bun and I can't be just handing people buns. I at least have to have the napkin. And honestly, there's gonna be somebody that wants a paper plate. I oughta have that. And how could you not have ketchup and

mustard and who's not gonna want a drink? And by the way, there's ancillary revenue

in the drink. I probably bigger margin on the drink. I should have that. Like you can see how I would spiral that into something that is the antithesis of what you just described. And I don't think I'm alone in

that, you know, I'm not either. Look, I think about that, too. But then I had it down. So all by editing,

And is this something that only works? Now,

let me just actually throw this thing at you, too. Because what you could also say is, you know what? I'm gonna be the hot dog guy that just serves hot dogs on a stick, or I'm gonna be the hot dog guy that just, like, has a hot dog with it with a fork in it or something. Or like I'm going to be the hot dog guy that whatever, I don't know, like you could be the other hot dog guy like that's That's an angle, too. It's not just like I need to be like everybody else, and I think this is the problem, especially the software world. As you see. Well,

this competitor has these five features, and this one is these seven. So I need to have these 12. I need to cover everything, because if I don't cover everything, they're gonna go here. They're gonna go there. I think the more interesting things to see what you really need to have. And what can you live without and execute at a really high level on the things you absolutely need tohave and then let other people deal with the things people can live without and recognize that the markets large and there's lots of people who will not like what you do, and there's some people who will love what you do. And some people hate what you do, and it'll be controversial. But I think there's a lot of value in that. Further, it allows you to work less. I take pride in that.

I think there's a lot of macho boasting in our industry. People who work long hours and get no sleeps a guy, every industry. Yeah, now it's turning into every industry, especially finance and a bunch of these industries. I think it's actually been a bit of an export, though from tech tech. It's a lot of publicity for this, which

may have exported from medicine.

Well, yeah, medicine, I mean that I don't even know how that's legal work, like 24 hour shifts and the whole thing and whatever, but people brag about how little sleep they get and how much they work. I don't understand that. And if you pay attention to what they're doing, if you really ask them about why they're working so long, this is, I think, that the deeper insight it's not that there's more work to do is that there's less time to do good work because people's days are broken into smaller and smaller and smaller chunks of time, and I think you need contiguous amounts blocks of time to do great creative work. You can't do it 15 minutes at a time, then check your phone that you get 20 months and there's a conference call, then you're pulled into a meeting, and before you know it's the end of the day,

you've got nothing. Don't even though you've been busy all day. If that's what's going on at work, then it's crazy at work, like our whole point of view is that it should be calm at work like the title of our book. It doesn't have to be crazy at work. It doesn't have to be crazy at work. We have to give people a full block of eight hours a day to themselves, and you cannot allow people to look at each other's calendars and take time from each other. If you get to that place, which is where we're at, you can get a lot of work done in eight hours. A ton of work, eight hours is a long time. Fly from here to I just flew to Amsterdam with my family is in about eight hour flight. It's a long flight.

It's long you like, Look at your watch. That coming out is only half done. You look at your watch again, you got to be done. It's only six and 1/2 hours in like eight hours is a long time. If you have eight hours, most people don't have eight hours of work. They have, like, 45 minutes to themselves, and therefore they're working late nights and working on the weekend because there's no other time to get the work done. That they're expected to do. Work is shoot it all up.

What you're saying makes sense, but the part I still struggle with is. But how did these teams coordinate with those teams? And how did these guys, you know, present their work to their manager? Or, you know, whatever else that someone might be having to do

a few things? Number one, We try to work independently versus being dependent. So I think there's a lot of companies that work. They're they're grinding gears like this, Gear asked, pushes this gear and this lot of dependencies, and so people are waiting around, and there's so many things that could go wrong. If one person's late, the whole thing, we try to glide past each other. We're more like glide wheels than gears with teeth. Almost no one should ever have to depend on another team to get anything done at base camp. Every team is autonomous and sell under their own control. Sometimes they might need something from operations to make sure a new servers online or something of that. For the most part, every feature and everything is built and can be deployed independently of one another. So there's no dependencies.

How is that possible in the software business?

I'm glad you're asking Schools is really interesting stuff. I think at the end of the day, the size of the project matters, so we only work on things that take six weeks or less to do. So. Every feature we build into base camp, there has to be a six week maximum version of that many features are only

two weeks or three weeks. Can you give an example? Cause I can't fathom what this could be.

Let's see, like take a calendar feature in base camp. So for a number of years, base camp didn't have a calendar. A lot of people wanted calendars, so you start thinking like, what does that mean? What is a calendar? Or calendars like complicated? We've built counters before they've taken. This is before we start working in six weeks cycles. Years ago we built counters and they could take six months, eight months to do well. But what do people really want? A counter is just a manifestation of something. What do they really want? And it's there talking to people.

You start digging into requests and start to understand what they really want is they want to see days that have something on them, and they want to see what those things are on that given day. That is a lot easier to build than like a full blown calendar, where you can drag things across cells and have events that spans different cellblocks and have to have to span like another line. There's a whole bunch of complexity that gets involved with building a full blown like If you try to build a Google calendar in six weeks, you cannot do it. But there's a version of Google calendar you can build in six weeks. That solves 80 to 90% of the issues, so you have to kind of file it down to that. You really file it down to that and go, we're gonna build that, and then if we want to build something else that's a separate project, what we don't do is, we don't hold that back that calendar feature. We don't hold it back until we have seven or eight or 10 other six week projects and launch it altogether. We launched these things as we go, and therefore they're small enough that they don't depend on other things. And there's nothing held up that ends up becoming stale because other people have committed new

work. So and how many people would have spent the six weeks working on the count of three

max? So this is the other thing on any given feature. We have three people maximum working on that feature, typically to programmers and one designer. Sometimes just one program, one designer and that's intentional to the number three is really important to us. It's a small team. It's a wedge. It's odd, so there's never any ties. It can be self managed. Once you add 1/4 person like something happens where, like you can now have sides and someone has to kind of come in and mediate, and it just becomes more complicated. It's all hard to get four people on the same schedule. It's everything gets harder, the more people you add.

So three people maximum to anyone on feature. They have six weeks maximum to complete it, and oftentimes it's It's less than that. And then we move on. But all these things slot into independently,

but that trio reports not to you. They must report to a manager who reports to somebody who reports to

you are you know, I mean kind of, but not really were very flat, so organizationally. So there's me and David. So David's a CTO on the CEO. We have someone who runs what we call core product, which is like all the designers and developers for, like the desktop version of base camp. We have an IOS team, which is three people have an android team, which is three people. We have a customer service team. We have a technical operations team and with a few other people who were our work independently. These teams like, for example, of product feature team with three people.

We have, like maybe four of those teams running at the same time, they sort of self report. So in base camp, the product there's away with every At the end of every day, base camp asks everybody automatically. Would you work on today. People write up what they worked on today. They also write up what they what they plan on working on this week and then every six weeks. The team lead rights kind of ah, summary of what's happened over the past six weeks. So these these things air self reporting, and we're all paying attention to the work itself as it's going. So there's no moments when there's a big presentations. There's no presentations. It's like work is happening.

We're paying attention to the work itself. Everyone's writing up what they're working on every single day, and people just know what's going on. You just know what's going on this way. When people go off for months at a time and do these big, huge, massive projects, then they have to report back. That's a whole different structure, which we don't have. I don't I don't think that's the right structure. Does that make any sense? I feel like sometimes it's hard to explain

these. Well, it does, but it begs this question right, which is how much of this is a product of the type of work you do specifically, and how applicable is it too I don't want to use my work as an example because I want to go so deep on that we don't even have time. We'll save that for a dinner. I'd love to figure out howto change my life to have eight hours a day to think, but it seems hard to imagine most jobs being amenable to that. Have you Just don't think it is? I get a lot of people asking you this that Jason, I read your book. I love your book. I mean Oh, my God. It sounds like Giovanna. Yeah.

How do I do it? Yeah, well, yes. And we just want another book actually called shape Up, which is a Web based book. So if you go to base camp dot com slash shape up, it's a very, very detailed, like this book here. It doesn't be crazy. Work is more the big picture. It's the framework during work. Shape up is actually how we work day to day to build software. But whatever your building, it has elements to it. And if you can scope these things down into smaller elements,

I think you can work this way. There's certainly some things that are going to like. I'm not saying like you can build an airplane like people. Let's go. What about on airplanes? Like what? You're not building airplane? Everyone thinks they're building them like most critical thing in the world are not likely. No one is. There's just some people building airplanes or I was like, What about air traffic control systems? It's like you're not building in traffic control system. A lot of people think think that their work is so mission critical. It's not like you can work this way. You can slow things down a little bit. You can break things into smaller bits and you can apply a few people and apply pressure to a problem with just a few people over a short period of time and solve that and then and then later that And keep doing that over a year you end up getting somewhere.

If you have multiple teams like on any given six weeks cycle, we're doing 45 or six or eight different features. Just different teams are doing them, and they all come together in the end cause they don't They don't mesh. They don't have to rely on each other. That's why you can do this. The big problem is when you've got six or four, whatever different teams working on their own things, that all the puzzle pieces have to come together at the end and work together in some product worlds. That's true, but we've made the conscious choice that's not in our world. I think the key here is that it is a choice. What's

the price you pay for that? Because every choice comes with a cost and is the cost that you are less profitable over given time horizon or less innovative, or, I mean making these things up. But I don't know what the answer

is. Everything has a trade off. So I look at Maura's a trade off in a cost specifically, but whatever. Yeah, good point. Yeah, it's a trade off, which is like maybe some of our stuff is not as high fidelity, perhaps as like it could be like maybe if there's a transition like you click a button and it be nice to have a smooth transition between these two screens, maybe and said the screen just flash like we just decided that that trade off is worth it to get the feature out. Or maybe we have to cut some features like in our book. We cut our book from 60,000 words. Certainly there was some words in there that we cut that we probably shouldn't have. But that's okay to make this book readable in three hours because overall that the advantages there. So there's absolutely trade offs, and we're very conscious of them.

We make them all day long and we actually talk about the trade offs like, This is something We have it. We have a term internally called trading concessions. I run that, basically run the design team. David runs a technical team. I'll bring an idea to David. I'll say, Here's how I'd like to do this and he'll go. We can do it that way. It'll take probably maybe 12 days or something of worth of work. This is an estimate, although we don't really talk about estimates. We talk more about appetites, which is another thing. We'll talk about a second,

but he'll say this will take a little, maybe a couple weeks to Dio he was, But there's a version of this I can do in three days. And here's the difference. The difference is it won't do this. That and the other thing, and then I go. That's worth it. Let's save those 10 days or nine days or whatever. And let's do that simpler version and get that done, because now we can do three or four more things in the same one of time. So it's about trades. You make trades with people and some things I'll go. You know what? No, this is,

I believe. I mean, it's just a gas. What do I know? It's so what I think. I think this is worth actually going all in on, like this feature. Lets do the two week version of this and no go. You care more about it than I do. I'll do that. And the next time maybe he'll get the win on that like it's like you pay for lunch. I'll pay for lunch. You just kind of all evens out in the end. But you have to talk about the trade offs and then you have to discuss them and go, and that's worth it. That's worth it.

I think the thing is, is that special software? A lot of people don't talk that way. They just think that we have to build the best possible version of whatever it is that we're making no matter what it's like. Well, why? Like why does it? Why does it have to be the best possible version? And what is the marginal gain past? A certain point you can put again? We've done this in the past. We used to work on things for long periods of time and truthfully, like let's go to work on something for three months. Like as you said, Parkinson's law work expansive, fill the time available.

What we realized was that that project probably could have gotten done in half the time and probably been 95% is good. And probably the stuff that we squeezed out was probably worth it. It's just you can keep squeezing these things until you get down to the atomic level and then you can do more of them. That's the other thing. You can do more of them. The other thing I would say getting back to culture is that there's nothing more demoralizing than working on something that you don't know when it's gonna end and that you don't like no matter what you're doing, you're gonna work on some things you don't like to do at base camp. The worst thing that could possibly happen is you have six weeks of something you don't want to work on. Certainly other bad things going on. But like when you begin, you can see the end. Six weeks, Max and we've thrown out work we've built, built something six weeks, like we don't like it. What's the cost?

Six weeks versus what ends up happening is if you work on something for six weeks are 12 weeks and 24 weeks and you keep going, You then have this huge momentum that makes it impossible for you to cut your losses because we put in months in months and months. It's only gonna take We're almost done. Another month, another month, another month. It's never just one month. It's always another month after that. Before you know what? You're nine months in, 10 months in and you're not gonna cut your losses. At that point, you've invested too much. It's very hard to do that organizationally. So you end up, keep pushing and pushing and pushing and this thing keeps going and going and going,

and by the end it's no good and you've wasted a year, and that could kill morale and can destroy teams. So at the very worst, we have basically what we call Circuit breaker, which is after six weeks. Like if this isn't going anywhere, if we're not where we need to be, we can pull the circuit breaker and call it quits on that and like we lost six weeks. But that's not the end of the world.

Now, how does one apply this to themselves? You have the luxury of being the boss. This is the culture is your company's where you've created it. How does somebody who's listening to this, who works at a company that functions the way a normal you know, a normal quote unquote high functioning company works. How did they get to apply this? Their lives when they don't control their calendar shy of quitting and we're gonna company like base camp. And did you get the sense like, what percentage of companies do you think function even? Let's just limited to software. What companies within software do you think function within sort of the neighborhood of the way you've

described that I'd say pretty small percentage currently. We're out to change that. But I would say most do not right now. How does someone do it? This is like kind of about like figuring out what you have control over what you don't. If you're new at a company, it's probably unlikely you have any power to change many things. The best way to do something like this is to take a small step and you're probably gonna have the influence to change the way the company works. But maybe on some project that's on the side that no one really cares about. You can take that on and show people how you can do this, perhaps in a short amount of time. And they might have expected it was gonna take three months and you do it in six weeks. I go, What is that like? How'd you do that? And then you begin to build on some wins. But I think that's even maybe too big of a leap.

I think around time, which is really important here, which is you may not have full control of your own time because you have a shared calendar system and people pull you into meetings in your junior and you have to say yes because you can't. If you don't say yes, you're not a team player and you're out of there. You can start to do some things with other people. So you know there's that the famous I guess it's the Gandhi quote. Be the change you wish to see in the world basically. So if you don't like being interrupted by other people all the time, you can interrupt other people less or fewer times whatever you have in front of you that you can modify and you can change, begin to change that for yourself. You're not gonna change the whole company, but hopefully you can influence some other people and they might be willing to make some more changes. And you can kind of bring that up the chain. But I'm not under any illusion here that, like someone's gonna read this book or read some other book we've written in,

like the company's gonna change. Where that change happens is from the top. So a CEO reads it and goes like and I also will also also tell people like if the way you're working works that keep doing it. But the way most people are working is not working and they know it, but they don't know what to do about it. They just like this is what you do. We pour in more hours, projects go long. We're running in circles. Like, if you're at the point where you're struggling with that and going, I can't do this anymore. I don't want to do this anymore. Then it's time to change. The only time people are gonna change is if there's actually a struggle. You're not gonna change because you've heard of something you're gonna change because you're struggling so bad with what you have that now you're open to a new wave of working.

So that's really I think, ultimately the only way for these sorts of ideas to take hold when there's a true struggle and you have the chance to implement some of those things. But as far as like other ideas we have, which are not about working as a team, like there's a lot of individual things you can do, certainly How

do you think about it? Personally, I was on the phone with a friend yesterday. Who's I said to him, I said, Man, I am so impressed by your ability to say no. I was pitching an idea to him that I'm interested in and, you know, sort of putting a group of guys together to invest in something. And I respect him saying, Look, I realize you're probably not gonna do this, not because you don't love it, but because you have the strictest no policy of anyone I know. And in the end, it was I love this so much,

but like I can't it is irresponsible for me to take on one more single idea. By the way, I should be saying the same thing. I should absolutely be saying No, but I'm not. But I've been investigating this within myself lately, right? Why do I struggle to say no? And I have this nasty, nasty habit which creates so much tension in my life of agreeing to do things into the future. And then when D Day comes, I take it out on everyone around me. But I'm really just pissed at myself like ago. Agree to go do a talk next March in Germany. And I'm like, Well,

you know, there's nothing on my calendar March 14th next year, and and then February 27th comes along and I'm like, I'm so pissed and I and I do this awful thing, I take it out on other people

I'm like, How could you

let me do this? And I was like, Baby, you did it yourself, you idiot. But the fear that I'm examining is I have a fear of missing out, like,

Well, you never know. Maybe that one talk, you meet somebody really interesting and they're doing this really cool thing in research and you learn this one thing that's gonna change the way you do this or, you

know, it's like, I don't know. I don't know how I keep rationalizing doing things that in the end, I I really believe I'd be better off doing less. But I don't know how to do less. I mean, this is This is like, now is this turn into a therapy

session? This is hard. And I've realized that too, which is why I've gotten better at saying no. I'm often regret saying yes, I've realized two things far out in the future. One of the reasons wise because yes, is really easy to say yes requires no work like later. Like you'll say yes to that trip to Germany because it takes no work to say yes to that trip to Germany. And then you get to like it's like I'd rather be somewhere else. Right now. They have to get on a plane, fly internationally, and I'm gonna be tired of the whole thing. Like I've just gotten better looking at, like trying to zoom to that point in time and going What I want to do that. Then it's not about what I want to do it now.

It's what I do. I think I want to do it then and that helps me be able to say no to things. But to me no is a far more surgical and far more precise, which I think will This will appeal to you when you say yes to something. You're basically saying no to 1000 other things because you can't do when you go to Germany. Yeah, you might meet someone interesting, but look at all the things you can't do. Like at that same time, you don't have the flexibility of the freedom to do things because you've already booked something far in advance and that thing is costly. It's costly in your time and your health and all these things that have to do when you say no, you just say no to one thing and now you have more options available to you. And that's how I've been thinking about No, no is a very surgical, very precise strike. Yes is a shotgun.

And for me, I've discovered that I prefer this is again just for me. I prefer flexibility, and I like to have options, which is also one of the reasons why we're an independent company and I will always remain an independent company because my Friedman flexibility is the most important thing to me. The ability to do what we need to do with the way we want to do it is way more important, and the way for me to spend my time on things I want to do is way more important than booking my calendar in the future and feeling regret. When that moment comes. It's unfair that the venue for me to go and feel regrets like I should be honored to speak. But I like it's not the speaking moment. It's the everything around it

that I don't want to dio. Yeah, one hour talk is still 48 hours of your time,

right? So I've gotten much, much better because I heard something. I don't know if this is true. I've heard this is sort of how Warren Buffett manages his time and know if you've heard of this thing,

I think I've heard this story.

But please, I don't know if it's true. So, like, I kind of feel weird about talking about it. But I've heard that basically, he will not book things far in advance. If you want to see Warren Buffett, if you're a business associate, whatever. You basically have to ask his secretary a day before and say like Iswaran available tomorrow, that he wants to keep his schedule open for anything that comes up and not be blocked for months and months and months. Because how do you know what you're gonna want to be doing in three months? On Tuesday at four o'clock? How would you ever know what that's gonna be like? Like you might in that moment feel like you want to read a new article or you want to go on a trip or you want to think about something else or something else comes up the day before they wanna work on. We block our future with present obligations,

and then we never have time to do things we want to. D'oh. So when you realize that you know it's hard still, even if you realize that it's hard to do it. But I have found it to be a lot easier. Once I realized that I was, I don't want to be regretful, and I don't know when I'm going to want to be doing that far in advance. So ah, book something a few days in advance or a few weeks in advance or a few months in advance, sometimes for people I know. But like I turned down way more things tonight, then I say yes to these days, and I feel better about it.

Do you have any tips for saying no? The actual act of declining something that, as you said, is flattering to have been offered and you feel like an idiot for not being more grateful?

I think just being really honest about it. Like, for example, I just invited to speak overseas, and I said, It's an honor to be to be invited. I appreciate the invitation. However, I'm just not. I don't feel comfortable flying internationally for talks anymore. It's just too tiring for me. It's hard on my family, and I just I don't want to do that anymore. So and also often say, like if you want to do a virtual thing like I'm happy to call in via Skype or like provide some other option. But I can't book travel around a business engagement anymore, and I don't even do that in the U.

S. Were like, If it's a have to go to San Francisco like that's a four hour flight for me from Chicago and that's a day minimum, probably two days, and it's like I'm just very careful about that now. So I'll just be honest about it, because otherwise, if you like, Sprinkle powdered sugar on it and B s people like everyone responds like I totally understand. I appreciate that. Thanks for the consideration and you just nice to people in the nice to you back in your honest and they're honest back. And everyone understands nobody's mad ever. You know, maybe they're like this. I really would have liked had you speak. But they're understand.

I agree with that. By the way, the times I muster up the foresight to sort of say, no, it I agree, people. I don't really recall a time when it's been so poorly received if I've just been very transparent. The biggest challenge is examining the motivation, the fear of not doing something that for me is something I'm still really exploring.

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

So, like, I have to do seven interesting things instead, like, you could make your own little tradeoffs

with yourself. Ah, that's interesting. I like that. That thing that came up in March that I said no to the biggest reason I said no to it was actually the realization that it would basically kill any chance of going away with my family that month. And there might be a window to go. You know, if spring breaks line up, that would basically Nukus spring break opportunity, which then you'd feel like an idiot, right? If you're like, I can't believe I agreed to do this thing. And it now means I'm not gonna do something with my family.

Yeah, I look at noses is yeses to other things. That's kind of how I look

at it. Do we even dare talk about watches at all? How did you get into watches? You and I both love watches. We have a circle of friends who are equally. I think if I could just be affectionate, idiotic. Um, is it an aesthetic thing for you? Obviously you've expressed a huge interest

in aesthetics. Yes, this instead of thing. My dad. I don't think he does this anymore. But he used to buy the old watches on eBay back when I was in high school. So like old Elgin and Illinois, these old tank watches from the twenties. That aesthetic doesn't speak to me today. Well, some of it does. But I just remember these little cool objects that would come in the mail. We open him up. We look at them together, and they were all different. I've always sort of been interested in things that, like,

look like there's only one way to do something, But then there's like 1000 ways to do some things like watch. Design is a great example of that. So you have a you have 12 hours. Serve whatever you have, you know it's a 24 hour Dallas, whatever it is and like, there should be like one way to do this. You know, there's like, two hands, and this is but really there's There's thousands of different designs and stuff. I've always found that fascinating. So I followed. My dad has probably hundreds of these little watches, 20 bucks a pop.

I don't know what they were. I kind of got into it that way. And my first watch, actually was that I remember getting was a Saeko Data 2000 which is a digital watch with a keyboard and being the bad student that I was. I would cheat in school with it because you could put notes into it with a keyboard and would sink it. And you'd have like that. There's a screen with two buttons, which you can scroll through. Like how would an extra mile is amazing. This is like an amazing thing. So it had a keyboard like the size of a knife own today, and the back of the watch was this just metal, and it would snap into this spot on this keyboard, and there's like an induction thing going on. It was like pretty interesting. Then it would go into this text mode where you basically have,

like a text file, and I could type stuff into it, and then it would just save it, and then you take the thing off upon your wrist, and then you can just kind of scroll through the notes. And, you know, back then and when it was the early nineties, or like whatever it was, no one would ever suspect that you had, like, data on your walk right now, like if you'd be cheating. But I guess people can have notes today anyway. So I just kind of looked through and tap through and have some notes for math and history notes because I was terrible with, like,

names and dates and stuff. So I just put those in there and that didn't feel like cheating to me, to be honest, like, what does it matter if you know someone's name or date exactly like was the difference really? But anyway, I would do that, and that kind of got me into, like, the utility of watches. Now, if one talks about tool watches, that was like a great tool for me truly. And so I got into that, and then I eventually got no mechanical watches because I was just like, blown away by the fact that,

like something could run without a battery and can run perpetually forever Just because you're moving, that's really kind of a cool thought. And then I got into the mechanics of them. And then, of course, I got into the aesthetics of them. You know, it definitely have this sickness, although I've been sort of trimming back lately, which is kind of nice butts, probably just to kind of build back up again. My taste of changed, too. So I think like that. See, the thing is kind of neat to see things that you bought that you thought you liked six years ago,

and you look at him now and I like my taste of change. And I think it's kind of a neat thing to do because there's of course, you can look at clothes and look at other things, but I think I kind of dressed the same way. I always have like a T shirt and jeans, so that hasn't really changed much. But the things that I like the objects that I like definitely have, and since these objects are permanent objects, you do keep them around. Unlike a phone like flip phones like you go, you know, way back when in or have those anymore so you can't really look back on those things but washes. You can look back and go. That's what I was into then. And that's kind of this is how I've changed. I kind of like that.

How did you get involved with her? Dinky.

I was just a fan, and then Eric Wynn, who usedto work with them. He reached out.

Terry is a great vintage watch dealer. I've bought several watches

from him. Eric's a wonderful guy, very knowledgeable. He reached out to me the email because I had some stuff on Instagram back when I was doing Instagram. I don't do it anymore. But when I was doing that, I had some watches and somehow he found me. And he's like, Hey, you seem to be into watches a lot and I wanna introduce myself. I'm Eric from From who? Dinky and I write this thing called Bring a Loop or whatever it was called back then, I think was

like the precursor to talking

watches. Yeah, and this is like a thing. Every Friday they would show vintage watches that they found on the Web, and I think he wants said like, Can I show one of yours. I think that's Hannah Hawass and I kind of got into that and then eventually met Ben and met the crew. I'm a big fan of what they're doing. I'm also an investor, so full disclosure. So, like, I'm a fan and I'm an investor, but I am on the board there. So, like just to get out of the West, everybody knows where I'm coming from there.

But I like what they've done. And I think they've elevated this sort of weird, geeky thing into a bit of, ah, more refined collectors experience. Your thing's pretty cool and pretty hard to do in like niche circles. It's a lot of like niche collect ary Things are often like really poorly done. Bad taste, not like offensive, but just like there's no design

involved. Well, I think that's what sort of cool about hiding key. And I don't talk much about watches on the podcast, actually, but I do think a number of people listening know how much I love watches and how dinky is really great. I mean, I think they're writing is very good, and I find myself forwarding articles to my wife all the time. You know, one thing I had to do two years ago was take this stupid hood inky alert off my phone and computer because it was just really bad every day to get like, two pings with a hoe dinky article. And I was like, You know, talk about not being productive is just getting watch porn thrown at you all day long. I've

eliminated pretty much all notifications on my phone except, like things I need during the day actually think phones air highly addictive. I think they're basically cigarette. Modern day cigarettes

and they might be at least is bad for you.

I think they might be worse. Well, private networks, like lung cancer, is pretty damn bad, right in Cardiff, acid is pretty damn bad.

But you know what? If you took the area under the curve of suffering, I actually think phones per to have a bigger a UC of suffering than cigarettes.

And even though maybe for a while people didn't realise cigarettes were bad, like, people know that they're bad and they still do them. I don't think people realize phones are bad, so I think that's their manipulative in that way. In a way. That cigarette is very direct. It's like I smoke. They're small.

It's the cigarettes. The cigarette of 1950

right where no one really knew Thought was cool.

Whatever you doctors recommended them a great way to lose weight. All was good for you or something. Yes. In fact, this was the preferred brand during smoking during pregnancy. Rather,

is that right?

So I think there was a mother should smoke this one. Variant. Wow. You know, at Hopkins, in the old wing of the hospital, which I don't think isn't use anymore, there are still ashtrays in the patient rooms and I remember is still in the old O. R is even seeing

ashtrays. That's interesting. They should keep that around. This is a reminder how delusional we can all be, but I think phones are kind of like that. So I've kind of taken notifications off my phone. I don't think if I want to know something, I'll go find it versus I don't want to be pulled to anything like, I'll go look for it. If I'm curious. I think we've become slaves to phones, telling us what to do, and Pratap's telling us what to do, and this actually calls. All comes back to the count to begin this conversation, which was that the business models surrounding many of these things on phones are all about engagement, and engagement is an addictive behavior.

And so these companies basically are designed to addict you to their service is and prompted the right amount of time per day and reward you for engagement and whatnot. And they build these terrible, addictive behaviors. I'm aware of them, but like I tried to stay as far away from them as it possibly can. But the business models are tied to this. This is the other thing. It's all about eyeballs. Number of people using it. It's all about advertising dollars. It's all about all these things. And this is where the business model like you can't see things changing unless the business model changes. There's lots of talk about, like company, the people responsible designers into people more responsible in programmers shouldn't be building software like this, but like as long as the business model supports that, and that's what keeps you in business, and that's what the job is, you're gonna keep doing it. That's just human nature Unfortunately,

no, I remember you. You sort of opted out of Instagram little less

than a year ago. If I record this in 2018

beginning. Yeah, I remember. You put up a

black picture simplex square, and I still look at it. Sometimes I find myself actually browsing, and I feel sick that want to do it, but I still do it powerful. Why do I feel sick? Yes, a couple of reasons. First I feel like I'm going against what I said I would do So I have stopped posting completely, but I was hoping that that meant I would stop using.

But I'm not. So why haven't you done installed it on your phone?

It's mostly peers of the watch thing. So, like, I still use it toe look, att, Watch people that I know because I feel like I learned something from that. But I don't think it's worth it because I probably still spend too much time browsing through things, mindlessly looking at pictures of watches which, like don't really matter to me. Really, like, really don't fundamentally matter if I see that picture of that person wearing on the wrist like I'm not really learning anything. I've sort of convinced myself that I am. It's kind of like I'm an addict, convincing myself that it's okay. I mean, that's what it is.

Now there's recreational enjoyment out of it. And I do learn something that I met some people that way clearly. But I don't again getting back to trade off. The trade offs are probably not worth it yet. I'm still on the wrong side of that deal. I'm using it less and less and less. What I don't like looking at is, I guess I don't like looking at Vanity that because you still use Twitter,

I use Twitter. It's not a social media

thing, just social media, although, like I am strongly opposed to Facebook for a number of other reasons. But I'm not opposed to Twitter because to me, Twitter is something that I can I'm mostly broadcast. I don't really read that much, except I'll engage if someone writes me back typically but Twitter. For me, it's just different. It feels very different. One of the things that bugs me about Instagram is it. A lot of people just show off. It's not that there's not valuable stuff on there. It's just that I don't like to see people showing off, and that happens. And I remember myself doing that.

I'd buy a new watch or something in the first thing. I would do it like I want to share this with other people, not because I want them to see it. It's because I want them to know that I have it, and that is not healthy behavior. It just isn't so. I cut myself off from that, at least. But then now I still see other people doing it, and it just But then I It's hard to turn away, too. It's This is the addiction little bit. So I use it a whole lot less than I did, and I'm almost all the way off it now. I should probably delete it. In fact,

I will delete it after this conversation. Wow! Yeah! Wow! Done. Holy cow. Why not now?

Like, when am I gonna do Well, it's funny. Before we jumped on this podcast, we were having another great discussion about a whole bunch of other really cool stuff with respect, exercise and meditation. And you are very much a person who does what he says he's going

to do gonna do it right

now. We're gonna do it right now.

Right now. I mean, you'll have to tell people that I'm really

doing well. Yeah,

they're down here. And of course, I look, I can always reinstall

it. I don't know about you going That's gone. And it's interesting to note that was your home screen

2nd 0 no,

you're right. Yes, I was your home screen. So you opened up some real estate on the most important

screening. Here's what's gonna happen. It's not gonna matter. That's the thing like you might go, I might lose connection with, like, Oh, well, like the fact that you can't do something because one thing goes away because of it. Like, I don't wanna be beholden to those kinds of things. And also, I'm just aware that, like that made me feel weird for a second. That's a them making me feel weird, like I shouldn't let them make me feel weird. Just they shouldn't have control of me that

way. That might be the most important moment of the podcast. Last last question. I want to ask you which again, purely stems from selfish desires though I do. But I think they'll be enough people listening that this question will serve a broader purpose. What is your relationship like with the mail? Which is, I mean, just to let my I've probably spoken about this more than people want to hear. I really find email to be a troubling thing. I find you take everything you feel about Instagram Cubit, raze it to the power of E and cubit again. That's how bad I think email is. I think email is an awful awful thing. Which is not to say there aren't valuable things that come from email, but I think the net effect is toxic.

I agree with you one of the things that blows me away about email. Anybody with your email address can get in your face. I don't mean, like, in your face in a rude way, but I mean the getting your attention right. They land in your inbox, it's yours, and they can put themselves there no matter what,

and to build on that they can add to your to do list. It's sort of light. It is. It's just to do list that everybody gets to add to and it's an introduction list that everybody can just

make. But actually, I don't think emails. The biggest offender, I think in organizations. I think chat is a bigger offender now. I don't know if you use chat tools in your organization,

but no, but acting worse. Yeah, because it's even more instant

in real time. And there's an expectation of immediate response, and that makes it especially bad. Also, organizations organizations begin to think one line at a time.

It discourages this writing thing that you seem to place an emphasis

on like right and present, and I think something through and put it out there as a complete thought. Like if you've ever tried to be in a chat room and a company, you're sort of typing some idea out and someone else jumps in and takes the like, ask a question like Well, let me just finish and it's like just a mess. It's like this, this race to get your idea out because you're doing it one line of time. Meanwhile, if you write something in long forming your whole idea to gather, put it out there for people, people can read it on their own schedule and then get back to you tomorrow. There's not this expectation of, like, immediate response because the medium is encouraging immediate response. So

that's why I hate what's up. I just can't stand. What's up for that reads.

But imagine if you had a company of 200 people and everyone's on WhatsApp, and that's the primary way they communicate with each other. This is what's happening inside many organizations these days, and it's going in the wrong direction and people beginning to realize it. Just like 15 years ago, everyone thought opened floor office plans were great idea. People are realizing now they're not good ideas at all. But at the time, it was the best idea in the world, so everyone switched to it. His other ideas? What other reasons why the digs? It's cheaper and it's easier. It's more flexible. I get all that, too, but they're very distracting.

People don't have any privacy. It's hard to get in the zone and do some deep work when people are mulling around and there's noise around. Chat rooms are basically all day meetings with unknown set of participants and many, many different topics all at once and They're basically virtual open offices and they're running 24 7 and they're terrible. But that's sort of the current trend. But I think it's gonna trend back towards more asynchronous longform communications that I think it's better. But our method,

I hope so. I mean, I would just close by saying, I think evolutionarily I don't think we evolved for the tempo of the electronic environment. Obviously, we didn't evolve with electronics, but it's less about the electronics. I think, in some times and Maura about the way it's changing our brain and the way we the chats are obviously a horrible example, meaning a great example of how horrible it is. But, yeah, I just I don't think our ancestors, when they were working on a problem, whether it was finding their next meal or building something like, I just don't I think that we're great synaptic Leah. Doing that stuff

tied to that, too, is like, What's the rush? Some might hear me say that goal. You guys work in six weeks cycles instead of like three months, like what's the rush? Well, 66 weeks aren't rushed, but like why is everyone feel like they need to rush around. I mean, you can ask people what it's like. It work today, and most people say, like I'm super busy. I'm like, get back to these people like everyone all of a sudden is rushing all the time.

What is so important that we're rushing about? And most the stuff we're rushing about and rushing to get to and rushing to do doesn't really matter anyway. It's just there's this pace that I think has absorbed the business world specifically that is unhealthy and unsustainable, and I don't think the outcomes air better. Why is it better to talk faster at work like, Why is that better? Why is it better to talk shorter at work? Why is it better to not be? Will explain yourself clearly in one fell swoop? Why, you know, why are these things actually better? I think they're more convenient and that's why they're happening. But I don't think that they're better, and I think that enlightened companies are going to begin to realize this and go. Convenience is one thing,

certainly, but were actually able to do better work when we're more deliberate about it. When we slow down a little bit. We get to communicate in complete sentences and incomplete form and when we also don't allow human nature to get in the way, which is that specifically round projects, that things should not last forever and go on and on and on and build up to such momentum that we can't pull the plug anymore and that morale goes down the tubes and all these sorts of things begin to happen. So I think you know, a small percent of companies, they're gonna sort of see the light and are beginning to, and it's not gonna change everyone because convenience and speed is something that a lot of people value as well. But I think that there's a lot of trade offs that aren't being evaluated.

Well, Jason, I, on a personal level, find this stuff so interesting because, like I said, if I were toe sort of evaluate, give myself a scorecard on how I'm doing with respect to my eating my sleeping by this my that. My other thing. I think this is definitely the area where I fall short and it's not even close, like it's not. It's not gonna contest. This is really tough. This will be a long commitment for me. But I'm very interested in figuring out ways to make this better, because I think I come at it from a different framework, which is Ah,

honestly, I've had the don't have privileges, even the right word. But I've certainly seen many people at the end of their life, not so much today because of what I do today. But back in my previous life, where I really did get to see people who were at the end of life cliches are a cliche for a reason. I really don't recall anybody at the end of life wishing they had worked a little longer a little harder. Which isn't to say that there isn't somebody out there who feels that way or there isn't somebody who feels like they left something on the table. And who knows, maybe in his final days, Steve Jobs did wish he had worked a little harder to get that next product just to that next level, I don't know. I mean, I so I won't. I won't blanket that statement as completely defused,

but most people, so I have to assume I will be the same way When you're on the back end of that, you start to think about the relationships that got neglected or the amount of just joy that got sort of missed by being busy, which is for me. Business is a bit of an addiction.

Business is the other thing we don't really talk much about. But business is something I try to avoid at all costs, because I feel like business is basically shifting between a bunch of different things at the same time. And that's why you feel busy just like I gotta run to this. I gotta run to that again. I'll come back to this and I have more time to do this later. It's like if you can figure out ways to work in contiguous blocks of time, you can cut back a lot of the busy feeling. I think that's another really interesting area to To improve on it is to give yourself time to start and finish something in the same day versus with in a continuous block of time versus like I'll get this done later between lunch and after this call and whatever you'll do a better job and you'll have a calmer day than tryingto wedge things into empty spaces. I think that's one of the big things. I think people's days air pretty scrambled. Actually, that's one of one of the reasons they feel busy again something. There's more work to do. I don't feel like there's more work to do, and in fact, shouldn't technology being like,

hasn't the promise been like less work? And it's It's all these things are automated for us. So where's all this more work coming from? I don't think it's that I think it's our days or chunk into smaller bits. It's hard to fit everything in that, and you feel really busy

and manic. I think that's a That's a great point, Jason, thank you so much for making the time. I know you take time very seriously. So you here is little is you need to be so well. Thanks, Peter. It's great to be on. You can find all of this information and Maura Peter tia MD dot com forward slash podcast There, you'll find the show notes, readings and links related to this episode. You can also find my blogged at peter tia MD dot com. Maybe the simplest thing to do is to sign up for my subjectively non lame once a week email where I'll update you on what I've been up to. Most interesting papers I've read and all things related to longevity. Science, performance,

sleep, etcetera on social. You confined me on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, all with the I d Peter A T f M d. But usually Twitter is the best way to reach me. To share your questions and comments now for the obligatory disclaimer for this podcast is for general informational purposes only does not constitute the practice of medicine, nursing or other professional health care. Service is including the giving of medical advice and note. No doctor patient relationship is for the use of this information, and the materials linked to the podcast is that users own risk. The content of this podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice. Diagnoses or treat users should not disregard or delay in obtaining medical advice for any medical condition they have and should seek the assistance of their health care professionals for any such conditions. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly,