#195: David Heinemeier Hansson: The Power of Being Outspoken

David "DHH" Heinemeier Hansson (@dhh https://twitter.com/dhh) is the creator of Ruby on Rails http://rubyonrails.org/, founder and CTO at Basecamp https://basecamp.com/ (formerly 37signals http://fourhourworkweek.com/2010/03/08/why-grow-and-other-wisdom-from-37signals/), and the best-selling co-author of Rework http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0307463745/offsitoftimfe-20 and Remote: Office Not Required http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0804137501/offsitoftimfe-20. Oh, and he went from not having a driver's license at 25 to winning, at 34, the 24 Hours of Le Mans race, one of the most prestigious automobile races in the world. It is often called the "Grand Prix of endurance and efficiency." David is one of the most outspoken technologists out there. He is not one to hide his opinions or mince words. In this episode, we cover a lot, including... The power of being outspoken Running a profitable business without venture capital Stoic philosophy Flow space Parallels across disciplines DHH's rules for creating excellence And much, much more... Please enjoy my conversation with DHH! Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Four Sigmatic http://foursigmatic.com/tim. I reached out to these Finnish entrepreneurs after a very talented acrobat introduced me to one of their products, which blew my mind (in the best way possible). It is mushroom coffee featuring chaga http://foursigmatic.com/tim. It tastes like coffee, but there are only 40 milligrams of caffeine, so it has less than half of what you would find in a regular cup of coffee. I do not get any jitters, acid reflux, or any type of stomach burn. It put me on fire for an entire day, and I only had half of the packet. People are always asking me what I use for cognitive enhancement right now, this is the answer. You can try it right now by going to foursigmatic.com/tim http://foursigmatic.com/tim and using the code Tim to get 20 percent off your first order. If you are in the experimental mindset, I do not think you'll be disappointed. This podcast is also brought to you by Wealthfront https://wealthfront.com/tim. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive (in a good way) set-it-and-forget-it investing service led by technologists from places like Apple. It has exploded in popularity in the last two years and now has more than $2.5B under management. Why? Because you can get services previously limited to the ultra-wealthy and only pay pennies on the dollar for them, and it's all through smarter software instead of retail locations and bloated sales teams. Check out wealthfront.com/tim http://wealthfront.com/tim, take their risk assessment quiz, which only takes 2-5 minutes, and they'll show you for free the exact portfolio they'd put you in. If you want to just take their advice and do it yourself, you can. Well worth a few minutes to explore: wealthfront.com/tim http://wealthfront.com/tim.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Tim Ferriss?

  Now would be an inappropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 00

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by 4Sigmatic. I reached out to these Finnish entrepreneurs after a very talented acrobat introduced me to one of their products, which blew my mind in the best way possible. It is mushroom coffee. What on earth is this? Well, it includes chaga mushroom, very powerful antioxidant, considered a superfood. I was introduced to chaga by Laird Hamilton, the king of big wave surfing of all things, and it includes another mushroom that is considered a nootropic, a smart drug, and this is lion's mane. In the entire packet, you just add it to hot water, tastes like coffee. There is only 40 milligrams of caffeine, so less than half what you would find in a cup of coffee. So

• 1:06Tim Ferriss?

  I do not get any jitters, I do not get any acid reflux or any type of stomach burn, and it put me on fire for an entire day, and I only had half of the packet. So this stuff is really amazing. People are always asking me what I use for cognitive enhancement. Right now, this is the answer. So, it is legal, it will not give you visuals, that's something else, and you can try it right now by going to 4sigmatic.com/tim. That is 4-sigmatic, S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C, 4sigmatic.com/tim, and use the code TIM to get 20% off your first order. If you are in the experimental mindset, I do not think you'll be disappointed. 4sigmatic.com/tim.

• 1:55Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront, and this is a very unique sponsor. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive, in a good way, set it and forget it investing service led by technologists from places like Apple and world famous investors. It has exploded in popularity in the last two years and they now have more than $2.5 billion under management. In fact, some of my very good friends, investors in Silicon Valley have millions of their own money in Wealthfront. So the question is, why? Why is it so popular? Why is it unique? Because you can get services previously reserved for the ultra wealthy but only pay pennies on the dollar for them. And this is because they use smarter software instead of retail locations, bloated sales teams, etc. And I'll come back to that in a second. I suggest you check out wealthfront.com/tim.

• 2:40Tim Ferriss?

  Take the risk assessment quiz, which only takes two to five minutes, and they'll show you for free exactly the portfolio they'd put you in. And if you just want to take their advice, run with it, do it yourself, you can do that. Or, as I would, you can set it and forget it. And here's why. The value of Wealthfront is in the automation of habits and strategies that investors should be using on a regular basis but normally aren't. Great investing is a marathon, not a sprint, and little things that you may or may not be familiar with, like automatic tax loss harvesting, rebalancing your portfolio across more than 10 asset classes, and dividend reinvestment add up to very large amounts of money over longer periods of time. Wealthfront, as I mentioned, since it's using software instead of retail locations, etc.,

• 3:21Tim Ferriss?

  can offer all of this at low costs that were previously completely impossible. Right off the bat, you never pay commissions or account fees. For everything, they charge 0.25% per year on assets above the first $15,000, which is managed for free if you use my link, wealthfront.com/tim. That is less than $5 a month to invest a $30,000 account, for instance. Now, normally, when I have a sponsor on this show, it's because I use them and recommend them. In this case, it's a little different. I don't use Wealthfront yet because I'm not allowed to. Here's the deal. They wanted to sponsor this podcast, but because of SEC regulations, companies that invest your money are not allowed to use client testimonials. So I couldn't be a user and have them on the

• 4:03Tim Ferriss?

  Podcast, but I've been so impressed by Wealthfront that I've invested a significant amount of my own money, at least for me, in the team and the company itself. So I am an investor and hope to soon use it as a client. Now, back to the recommendation. As a Tim Ferriss Show listener, you'll get $15,000 managed for free if you decide to open an account. But just start with seeing the portfolio that they would suggest for you. Take two minutes, fill out their questionnaire at wealthfront.com/tim. It's fast, it's free. There's no downside that I can think of.

• 4:35Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls. Meow. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to attempt to deconstruct world-class performers from all walks of life, whether that be sports, military, entertainment, business, finance, or otherwise. And this episode, we have the fearsome Dane himself, known as DHH, David Hanna Meyer Hansen, lots of vowels and a double S in there, just like my last name. This is a multifaceted character and we delve into a lot of stories and details that I don't think he's discussed at length anywhere else. He is the creator of Ruby on Rails and we'll certainly dig

• 5:19Tim Ferriss?

  into what that means for those of you who are not in technology. He is a founder and the CTO at Basecamp, formerly known as 37Signals. He is also a bestselling author and known for being very, very outspoken. We also, I suppose, meander into a discussion of the power of being outspoken. And he's also a world-class race car driver. He is a Le Mans class-winning racing driver, despite the fact that he didn't even get his driving license, his driver's license, until he was 24 or 25. You can find him a number of places on Twitter at DHH Medium, where he writes longer form content at DHH as well.

• 6:03Tim Ferriss?

  And on Instagram, he does spend a lot of his time taking photographs, at DHH79, that might be lesser known, but certainly check that out. And we really bounce across quite a few different subject areas. We talk about tech. We talk about running a profitable business without venture capital. For more than a decade, we talk about his 13 years of open source with Ruby on Rails. And we talk about Stoic philosophy. We talk about flow states. We talk about racing. And I will warn you in the very beginning, for the first, I don't know, 15, 20 minutes, we have a lot of racing talk. It is relevant to what comes later because we're looking for, again, parallels across disciplines and first principles.

• 6:48Tim Ferriss?

  So I'm not going to dig into a bunch of stuff that you've heard 100 times about DHH before, if you're familiar with him on Wikipedia or in his books, for instance. We wanted, or I should say, I wanted, that's the royal we, to dig into his rules. What are the rules he follows? The philosophies that he uses as his personal operating systems for creating excellence on this planet? What does beautiful code mean to him? How does that translate to other areas? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So with that further ado, as I always say, please enjoy my conversation with DHH.

• 7:29Tim Ferriss?

  David, welcome to the show. Thanks, man. It has been a long time since we've chatted. And we were, we were of course, talking before we started recording. And I couldn't pin down how we first came in contact. And I think where we arrived was somehow through Seth Godin, when you guys were first considering publishing rework, we connected to talk about all sorts of things, ranging from split testing titles to the entire publishing process. And that must have been, what, six years ago?

• 8:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think 2010 was when we started shopping our manuscript around. Or maybe that was even when we published the book. It's so weird. It feels like it was just yesterday and then six years later, here we are. But I mean, it started in part in the same way that I started on learning a lot of things. I tried to identify whoever in that domain I want to learn from. And then figure out a way if I can either learn from them directly or indirectly. And of course, if you can have a direct link, that's the best. And I had read For Our Work Week sometime in advance of that. And so I had Jason, my business partner and co-author of ReWork. And we were both just depressed with that. And we're like, hey, this is, this is kind of the path we want to take.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  Let's see if there's a way we can learn from what you've done. And oh, here's a connection. Oh, Jason knew Seth and Seth knows. And there we go.

• 8:56Tim Ferriss?

  So we're going to get into certainly programming and everything else. But since you talked about seeking out experts, I don't actually know the, I don't know the answer to pretty much any question I'm going to ask because then it'd be boring for me. But you, I'm just looking at some Cliff Notes that I have here to go off of. But you, I didn't know this part. So you did not have a driver's license at 25. Is that right? Around that?

• 9:21Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 9:21Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. And then let's flash forward. What happened at 34?

• 9:29Speaker 02

  I got to stand on the podium after 24 hours of racing in a town in France called Le Mans in the greatest endurance motor race in the world, fulfilling my dream of not only just completing that race, but, but winning our class there. And all that in nine years from not having a driver's license to getting a driver's license, learning how to drive a normal car.

• 9:57Speaker 02

  And then getting into racing and climbing the ladders of racing until you're at the top.

• 10:04Tim Ferriss?

  So if, if we were to try to find the parallel example to you reaching out to me, and I'm sure other people about publishing, two questions. One is, how did you decide? Was there a moment or a dinner or a conversation where you decided, yes, this is what I want to do? And then second, how did you start trying to figure out how to go about it?

• 10:28Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  One thing I, since the mid 90s, I had on Danish television just tuned into this race, the 24 Hours of Le Mans, caught it a number of years and always just fascinated by the speed, the teamwork, the endurance, just the whole process of driving around in circles for 24 hours straight and making the machine last, making the humans last, and just found it that absolutely fascinating. And then in the late 90s and early 2000s, a fellow Dane, we're talking about Denmark here, there's a population of 6 million people, 6 million Danes total. So when another Dane does something remarkable on the world stage, other Danes take note. Maybe that's true of all countries, but I think it's especially true of small

• 11:14Speaker 02

  ones because we just don't expect it, right? You don't expect that out of such a small country, you're going to have someone who reaches the peak. And we had Tom Christensen, who now goes by the name Mr. Le Maire because he's won the race nine times, started winning races and started winning the 24 Hours of Le Mans just over and over and over again. So that of course piqued my interest too. I was already sort of interested in the race. Then a Dane started winning it all the time. This is still before I even have a driver's licence, but this just plants the seed, right? I'd already been playing lots of racing games. I loved racing games all the way from the Commodore 64 to Sega and Nintendos and

• 11:58Speaker 02

  Amiga and all sorts of video games. Pearly racing games was one of my favourite genres. So played a lot of video games. Then all of a sudden at 25, I'm, I want to go on a vacation and I go, actually if I go to Brazil or the United States and I don't have a driver's licence, that's really annoying. Like you want to arrive there and you want to rent a car. The funny thing is, I wouldn't even think about driving around Copenhagen because that seemed like such a foreign concept. I'd already made it 25 years in Copenhagen on rollerblades and the occasional bike in between them getting stolen. And that seemed to be well sufficient. Copenhagen is not that big of a town. It's very well equipped for people who want to bike or rollerblade or whatever. So it wasn't even to use it in my own country. It was like, I want to go on vacation and I want to be able to rent a car. So.

• 12:44Speaker 02

  I learned how to uh drive a car in Copenhagen, um which was in itself a funny process because most people, even in Copenhagen, I think if they learn how to drive a car, they learn how to drive a car at eighteen or whatever, right? So it's that kind of like new and exciting or what have you. And here I am, twenty-five, I'm trying to learn how to drive a car. And I, at that point, I already knew programming. I had uh already worked on a number of domains that I had taken sort of a methodical approach to. And I took a pretty methodical approach to learning how to drive the car too. To the point where the guy I was doing the exam with um was remarking on the fact I was self-commentating.

• 13:23Speaker 02

  I didn't even realize that at the time. You're like, the guy who's grading me, whether I pass or I don't pass it, right next to me in the car, right? I'm driving around and I'm like, oh, I should have turned in a little sooner there. Oh, I should have turned on the blingers there. And it was funny, he told me, oh, you pass, of course, but what was really remarkable was that you were narrating the whole process. And I was like, oh, yeah, actually, I don't know, maybe that wasn't so smart. I guess it worked out. Well, I was basically pointing out all my own flaws because that's how I learned. So that's how I learned how to drive a car. Then um skip forward just a little bit, I'm.

• 13:56Tim Ferriss?

  Well, actually, you know what, David, I'm sorry, I'm gonna interrupt just for a second. So two things. The first is, do you do that self-commentary for a lot of things?

• 14:06Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 14:07Tim Ferriss?

  You do?

• 14:08Speaker 02

  There's like a running narrator just running in my head when I'm trying to learn something, constantly pointing out, oh, you could have done that a little better, or let's try this next thing on the, on the new run around. And I mean, in racing in particular, you get that enjoyment a lot because the lap isn't that long. It's usually two minutes. So every two minutes, you get to reset.

• 14:27Tim Ferriss?

  Right, you have a take two.

• 14:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. You have a take two and take three and take four. And by having that running commentary, I'm kind of taking notes on, this is what I have to tweak next time around. Uh and I, I do the same thing in programming too. I mean, I'll look at a piece of code and I go like, okay, let's get this working. And then I go back, okay, take two, let's make this right. Okay, take three, let's make this beautiful. Okay, take three or take four, let's simplify this. Okay, take five, like just having that commentary all the time about, where can I improve, where can I get better? That's. I don't know where it comes from, but that's just how I've always gone about learning things.

• 15:05Tim Ferriss?

  Did either of your parents do that? Or I need, I don't know if you have siblings, but...

• 15:10Speaker 02

  A lot of these things on learning techniques, I've talked with other people around them, like, these things have been codified and I'm gonna go like, "Oh, that's interesting." I just, I didn't know that that either had a name or that was how people were doing it, that somehow, I think I just stumbled over the fact that, "Oh, if I do this, I learn faster." "Oh, let me just do more of that."

• 15:28Tim Ferriss?

  Right. Of course, that makes, that makes perfect sense. So I, I interrupted you though. Oh, the, the other second part, I apologize, was what did you do differently compared to other people when learning to drive for that initial driver's license test? Is there anything that you, that you recall doing differently or focusing on in particular?

• 15:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, it's funny. One of the things that I, and I had these things with programming too, where I'm actually a slow learner at the beginning, because when I don't understand how something works, I have a very hard time putting it into action. I can't just, "Oh, let me just clone whatever it is you're doing, I don't understand it," and then do it well. And I remember in Copenhagen, all the cars we were being taught to drive on were all stick cars, manual cars. So you had to operate the clutch yourself. And I could not get my head around the fact that clutch engagement, lifting the pedal from the floor, was such a fuzzy process. Like, he couldn't tell me, "How much do I have to lift my leg to get the right clutch engagement?" He's just like, "Oh, just go on the feel of it."

• 16:29Speaker 02

  And I'm like, "No, no, I wanna know, like, is it 30 degrees? Is it 70 degrees? Like, how far does the clutch have to come up the floor?" And I must have stalled that car 100 times. Because I just kept going like, "I'm not just gonna do it if I don't understand how it works. I'm gonna figure out like how this clutch thing works, because then, I mean, I'll know how it works and that will help me move forward." But it just, other people would walk in, right? And they'd just go like, "Oh, you just go on the feel." And they'd put in the clutch and they'd let it out and you just give it a bunch of gas and somehow it'd work and they'd get off the line. And I would just still sit there stalled, trying to do take three, take four, take five on getting the thing going. So there was that aspect of it. And then the other aspect I was so impressed about, and it's funny I still remember this, this is 11 years ago.

• 17:14Speaker 02

  I was so impressed with the writing quality of the, of the text. So we would have both the practical part where you go out and drive the car and then you'd have like the theoretical part where you learn about the rules and so forth. And just remember being... Remarkably impressed by the narrator of this incredibly dry material, right? Like, oh, if you see this sign, then like it means this and that and the other thing. And the narrator was just entrancing because every single word had just been picked to perfection in a very bureaucratic, stilted way. But still, I was just, oh, this is just so fascinating. So it actually helped me learn the material that much quicker because I was just paying

• 17:54Speaker 02

  so much damn attention to how the guy was telling us how these signs were and how far from the curb you had to stop. And it's just like, wow, everything can be interesting if you find a way to look at it the right way and if you have a way of telling it in the right tone. Even if it's the driest material in the world. And he wasn't trying to make it peppy. It wasn't like the narrator was being funny or whatever, just being ultra-precise with every single word weighed and picked to perfection.

• 18:24Tim Ferriss?

  Well, it sounds like that probably, and we'll dig into this a little bit later, but your past two or past three example of making your code beautiful. I think that it seems to perhaps relate to why you're entranced by the precision of the language and the elegance of the language in that presentation for driving.

• 18:45Speaker 02

  Exactly. Same thing, right? Ever since I've tried to strive to write code the way that whoever wrote that instruction manual for how far away from the curb you should park could write, which I actually think correlates pretty well to programming. We do a lot of things in programming that aren't inherently interesting. If you read some of the programming greats, they talk about, oh, we were building a salary compensation system for Chrysler or something, the C3 system, which is kind of legend now in agile world. And you go like, that's gotta be the most boring domain in the world. Like, you're programming a system to come up with all sorts of deductions and exceptions and so on. How is that interesting? And, oh, little do you know, once you dig into it and you unravel...

• 19:29Speaker 02

  The mechanics that go into it is just fascinating. And I think that some of those experiences have taught me that anything that looks boring on the surface, you just haven't scratched far enough. Keep scratching and everything becomes interesting.

• 19:41Tim Ferriss?

  No, I could not agree more. And I, two, two things came to mind. The first was, and I'm going to be wading into dangerous territory for me because I'm getting outside of my competency real quick. But it seems like the, the instructional videos that you were watching are almost an algorithm for human beings, right? So you're still, it was imparting instructions and steps and so on to human operators who are going to be interacting then inside this machine. The, the second is my personal litmus test for good writers is, at least in the world of nonfiction, those people who can make topics you assume to be boring, absolutely riveting, right?

• 20:25Tim Ferriss?

  Because anyone can take the most exciting topic in the world, and even if they just throw together the equivalent of spaghetti code, right? It's just like sloppy prose. As long as the story's really strong and they're given kind of a Willy Wonka golden ticket in terms of subject matter, you, you don't have to work very hard on the words and the precision. But then you take someone like John McPhee, for instance, anyone who hasn't read his stuff should, M C P H E E. He's written entire books on oranges. He's written entire books on hand carved canoes. He wrote one on Plymouth Rock. He wrote another one about an entire, and he wrote an entire book on a single tennis match between Arthur Ashe, and I'm blanking on the, the second folk, the, the second

• 21:09Tim Ferriss?

  competitor named Levels of the Game. But his ability, he can take any subject you could assign him and make it, much like Michael Lewis, right? I mean, he wrote a thriller about credit default swaps and just make it riveting. So, so coming back, I know I'm prone to making us digress, but so you pass your driver's test. At what point do you decide to race?

• 21:35Speaker 02

  It's funny, I didn't even decide. I had a friend who had actually met online again. I mean, the whole reason I came to the US was because I met a guy online. Jason Freed through a blog and an email. And we got working together and a couple of years later I moved to the US to work with him full-time. And here's another guy I met online on a forum, a discussion board for cars, who said, "Hey, I know of this racetrack that's just 45 minutes out of Chicago. Do you want to come?" And I thought, "Cool, it sounds interesting. Let's go down there." And we come down to the track and he had set up with another friend that I could try a race car.

• 22:16Speaker 02

  Up until that point, I don't know, maybe I don't remember, maybe I had driven once with like a a street car on a course or something, but this was a real race car. This was a single-seater, you sit in the middle of the car, the wheels are exposed. They kind of looked like miniature Formula One cars. And I get a chance to ride in this thing. And I just remember, first of all, these sessions were about 30 minutes long. You get out on the track, you drive around for 30 minutes, or maybe it was even just 20 minutes. And it felt like it took 30 seconds. Because I would just see the flag right away and be like, "Wait, what? I have to come in? I just started." So time was already being distorted, which is when you know you have a good time. It's when you can't keep track of time, right?

• 23:00Speaker 02

  And not only that, I was just absolutely fascinated from the get-go about this whole closed system. That we have this track, a lap around the track was about a minute 30, and you would get instant feedback on how well you were doing every single time you came around. There was a clock telling you, "Oh, this time you did in 1 minute 31.4." Then you go around one more time and it's 1 minute 30.8 and you go like, "Man, I just shaved off 6 tenths. This is the most exciting thing in the world." And I mean, that's even taking it besides the fact that it's exciting, it's a loud car and it's shaking and there's the element of danger, you could go off course, you could hit something. But just the closed-loop system of improvement was absolutely intoxicating.

• 23:45Speaker 02

  It was kind of like... You just had like a bottle of flow. You could just go open your fridge and like, oh, I'd like some flow, please. Can you get me into the flow state where you lose track of time and where you just have such a great experience learning and getting better? Like, that's how I felt the first very, very many times I got into a race car was I could just switch on flow, which was something I had discovered in programming a fair amount, but I I find at least in programming was a little more elusive. It was like the best programming sessions I'd have flow. But then I'd also have a fair number of other programming sessions where I wouldn't have flow. When I stepped into the race car, I just felt like, oh, I could just, you turn the ignition and flow comes. And that was just magic.

• 24:28Tim Ferriss?

  Why do you think it was more? Why do you think it was more elusive in programming? And can you identify any common factors for the sessions that had flow or that didn't have flow?

• 24:42Speaker 02

  I think part of it with racing was just the intensity level was at a hundred percent right away. You had, as soon as you stepped into the car, you had maximum danger. Actually, you had more danger in the beginning than you will have later on, because it's much more dangerous to drive a car on the track when you don't know what you're doing than it is later on versus with programming. I didn't get flow until I was, I mean, I shouldn't say that. I didn't get great, consistent flow in the quantities that I'd like to enjoy it. Before I was actually a fairly well-developed programmer, because that was when I had enough of an eye for the whole scope of programming to really dive into, oh, let's make this beautiful. Let's make this as simple as possible.

• 25:25Speaker 02

  When in the beginning, I was just focused on, oh, let's get this to work. Can can the PHP page render? Oh, no, I get an error. Let me try something else. That was fun. Um, there was glimpses of flow, but the real moments of flow, uh, I wouldn't get until I was much better. Where with with stepping into the race car, you're kind of forced into a situation really early on where developing your eye for this domain just was, I mean,

• 25:56Speaker 02

  It putting a little bit of on a pin, but it was life and death, right? You you're going a hundred and sixty mile an hour. If you don't get this next turn right, at the very least, it's going to be expensive. Uh, and then it only gets worse from there, right? Either it's going to hurt or it's going to be really, really bad. Or there's going to be an ambulance involved or something else like that. And I think there's just a survival instinct that sharpens the mind in that sense. Um, that, I mean, when I'm trying to get make a PHP page work, if I make an error, it's not like I have to write off a car or go to the hospital, at least. Not the kind of stuff where I was writing. Maybe you get that if you try to write a pacemaker on your first go or something. But I was just writing information systems and webpages.

• 26:41Speaker 02

  But as as things progressed, they became more the same. When I got sort of well versed enough into programming that I had developed an eye for and developed opinions about what was good code and what was bad code? What was smelly code and what was clean code? It became a lot more fun to try to go from, oh, this is just something that just works to which to me then became uninteresting, right? Like any programmer worth their salt, generally speaking, can get something to work, right? Like can get the program to roughly perform the task it's supposed to do. At least in information systems where the domain itself isn't that novel perhaps. Uh, or it's well established enough that getting things to work, okay, that's the baseline.

• 27:23Speaker 02

  But beyond that is getting to make it clear, picking the right names, making the code beautiful, making it succinct, uh, simple, all these other pleasures you derive from code as prose, code as writing, not code as putting mechanical things together. Um, and with with racing, um, you you had the.

• 27:46Speaker 02

  Sort of interest right from the get go because you had this criticality, really high criticality. But then as you developed, it became more of the same. Like, once you start understanding grip and slip angle and all the mechanics of setting up a car in terms of caster and rake and right height and you start appreciating the differences between two millimeters up front and two millimeters on the rear or tire pressures. It becomes really interesting in a, in a deeper level than just like, oh, I'm just holding on for my dear life, I'm trying to survive. Both things provide flow, but they're different kinds of flow. And perhaps the later part is the more satisfying part because it's, as you say, when you can

• 28:28Speaker 02

  write a whole book about a single tennis match, you've really understood the problem. You've really understood the details that matter. And with programming and with race car driving, once you get into those nitty gritty details of, as I mentioned, all the particulars of the mechanics of a car and, and slip angle and wear of tires and so on, there's just so many factors. And again, it becomes system thinking, system optimizing and just a riveting thing of trade offs and optimizations and so forth that, um, just is, is, is the path to flow, is the path to flow details. Developing an eye, that's for me, the most reliable way I've found to cultivate flow.

• 29:10Tim Ferriss?

  And, and like you said, if you, if you haven't found something that grabs your interest about a given topic, just keep scratching, right? You haven't, you haven't dug deep enough. For instance, I wanted to do, get involved with archery for a very long time in a, in a serious capacity and I only started doing it about a month, uh, let's see, three months ago. And part of what triggered it was an Olympic archery coach who suggested I get, I get a book called Shooting with Back Tension. I think I'm getting the title right. It's an entire book about how to use mid back tension to fire more accurately and make the process more replicable.

• 29:54Tim Ferriss?

  And for whatever reason, I just found this so fascinating.

• 29:59Tim Ferriss?

  That is what enabled me to finally take it seriously because that was the hook. That was the lure that I needed to buy it. Let's rewind the clock a little bit because we've alluded to it, but there are people who won't have the history necessary to put some of this in context. The story of not wanting to be inconvenienced in say Brazil or US with by not being able to drive, that was, sounds like at least one of the primary catalysts for getting a driver's license, that sort of potential frustration. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but the programming came out of starting a gaming news website.

• 30:44Tim Ferriss?

  You mentioned the racing games earlier. Is that, how did that come to be? How did you start coding?

• 30:51Speaker 02

  It was actually exactly the same thing. As I said, like I learned how to drive a car because I didn't want to be in Brazil or in the US stranded or reliant on buses or whatever that would make it hard for me to sort of enjoy that vacation. With programming, I came to the same conclusion, actually. I had almost consciously avoided becoming a programmer for a long time because I grew up with a lot of programmers as friends and I was involved with computers, not as a programmer, but around the edges of it. I ran a, what was called a WARE site, a BBS, a bulletin board system before the internet, where we trade pirated software and so on.

• 31:31Speaker 02

  I was, I was well involved in the scene of computers, but I wasn't a programmer. And I had kind of decided at some point, I don't know, 13, 14, when I had these programmer friends and I saw what they were doing and I thought like, that's not for me. Like programming, it kind of looks like math and math is interesting, but it's not really what I want to spend my time on. Programming is not for me. So it took several years after that until I started working with the internet. I started working on these gaming websites and I would pester my friends, my programmer friends. Hey, can you help me make this happen? Can we make a content management system before things were called that? And they would help me and I would kind of just get frustrated because I felt a little helpless. I felt I couldn't be self-sufficient.

• 32:16Speaker 02

  I couldn't just make the things happen that I wanted to make happen. In much the same ways that I wouldn't want to arrive in the US or in Brazil or whatever I had imagined of these destinations were that required a car and feel helpless. Like I was dependent on someone else. And I think that's a thread that goes through a lot of things and why I choose to do certain things. I have a definitely a streak for wanting to be self-sufficient. And that self-sufficiency then led me to think like, ah, okay, fine. I'll learn ASP or whatever the Microsoft thing was that we were using at the time. And then after that, okay, fine. I learned this PHP thing just such that I can make the other thing that I really want happen. I wanted to make.

• 32:57Tim Ferriss?

  So it wasn't a decision to become a programmer. It's like, all right, you know what? I will just figure this out so I can do triage so I don't have to wait for A, B and C person to get this done a week from now.

• 33:07Speaker 02

  Exactly. That was it. It was, it was a tool thing. It wasn't like, oh, this is my new pursuit. I'm going to be a programmer. Absolutely not. It was, I wanted some programs. I wanted some websites actually. And I found out, oh, you kind of need to do some programs to do that. I taught myself HTML and CSS and JavaScript to, to do some of those other things. And I just resisted learning programming for a long time, simply because I thought, oh, it's math. It's hard. I had these notions about what programming was because I had observed the programming friends I had make demos and 3D graphics and games and all sorts of things that actually.

• 33:45Speaker 02

  It's programming, but it's a very different domain than working on information systems. So I picked up this tool tray in much the same way as someone goes like, oh, I have to put this piece of furniture together. Uh, which screwdriver do I have to use? Okay, that one. And then let me just read the instructions. Let me just try to put it together. It's not because they're trying to become a carpenter, right? Just trying to, hey, I just want this desk put together. I'm not trying to make a career as a carpenter. I just want a desk put together and Ikea has some instructions and I need a screwdriver. That was how I felt about it. And I felt that way about it for several years. And it was just funny because it was kind of one of those things that snuck up on me where with race car driving, for example, like there was a lot of intent. I did the first thing and I immediately got hooked. With programming, no such thing.

• 34:29Speaker 02

  I did the first thing and I actually didn't enjoy it at all. I didn't enjoy programming very much. I thought it was just kind of an inconvenience, but I just kept doing it. And as you say, you just slowly start unpacking the onion and the further you get into it, the more rings you get into it, the more interesting it becomes. So fast forward a couple of years in 2001 or whatever. I'm, um, I'm done with this gaming website I had been building for a Danish incubator. There was a lot of Danish, um, uh, dot com inspirations going on at the time. And one of the things was incubators who would throw money at kids like me to build things with no idea of profits or a business model or anything else, just because eyeballs.

• 35:14Speaker 02

  Um, anyway, I kind of saw the writing on the wall, um, painted pretty clearly when dot com bubble bursted in the US. And I thought, yeah, let me just go back to university for a while. I had stopped after high school, went straight into building these gaming websites of various kinds. Done that for what, three years or so? And then the whole bubble thing went pop and I went. I'm not a hundred percent sure what else I'm gonna do. I'm not gonna keep just spinning around the scraps here. Let me just try to learn something. And I got into a program for business administration and computer science. But at that point, like the snowball was already rolling. I had already gotten enough now of a taste of programming, again, not because I wanted to, but because I had to,

• 35:59Speaker 02

  that it was, it was kind of getting more interesting. And I was getting more fascinated by just building information systems of various kinds. And these gaming systems, that was all they were, right? They were content management systems, they were message boards, they were all these kinds of information systems. And it had just really piqued my interest. And I hid away in university for three years, getting this degree. And at the same time, I, then I really got into it, right? Not so much because of the schooling, because schooling was all about some nonsense Java stuff. Where I guess it was good to get exposed to that, that did provide influences for later work. But it wasn't the schoolwork that was interesting. It wasn't because we were getting assignments that I thought was also fascinating.

• 36:43Speaker 02

  It was all the stuff I was doing on the side. And one of the things I was doing on the side to catch the tails of the story here was I started working with Jason Fried, who I would end up becoming a business partner with. And that stuff then went from, oh, okay, I guess this is kind of interesting to like, oh, this is actually pretty interesting to all the way until 2003, when I finally find, find the love of my programming language life in Ruby and go, oh, actually, this is what I want to do with my life.

• 37:13Tim Ferriss?

  How did you experience those jumps? In other words, what made it interesting? Because there are certain moments in time where I can pinpoint for different skills or topics. Like it went from not interesting to interesting, right? It's kind of like not boiling, boiling. There was a really clear shift. For you, what was that for programming? And then, and then why? I mean, I'm sure you might be sick of explaining this, but this, so the first is why programming generally? Like, when was it like, oh shit, this is really interesting? And the second is, why Ruby?

• 37:51Speaker 02

  Sure, so the first thing certainly came first, which was why is this interesting? And the first big aha moment I had was when I reached self-sufficiency. When I got to a level where I could make a whole thing, a whole feature, a whole part of the site, without having to consult someone else, without having to stumble through it, where I could actually just put this desk together and it was a pretty good desk. It served this purpose, I could put things on it, it wouldn't fall down and I'd go like, huh, that's actually pretty cool. Like you can take something, you can take an idea and you can start writing things in a text editor? And all of a sudden you have an information system? Wait, that's actually pretty cool.

• 38:35Speaker 02

  So that was the jump point from the standpoint of I like the outcome. That wasn't the jump of the I like the activity itself. I just, I really like the outcome, I really like the self-sufficiency and I like the idea of taking nothing and turning it into something. And then I had perhaps another jump when I started working with other people. Um, I started working with Jason, uh, Jason Fried, um, as I said, was not only a business partner at Basecamp, but he was also the first guy who paid me the program. All these other endeavors I had a program were more like side chefs. They were not the main thing I was supposed to do.

• 39:18Speaker 02

  I was doing this program for the gaming websites, not because someone had hired me as a programmer, but because they had paid me some money to run it, or I was just interested in running it. And then I just through that gotten self-sufficient enough that I kind of knew my way around PHP at the time. And then Jason, um, I, I ended up connecting with him and he ended up hiring me, paying me the grand sum of fifteen dollars an hour, which, um, I was gonna say back when the dollar was worth something. Um, now the dollar is actually worth a, a lot more again, um, but... I mean, again, my comparison frame was okay. I could either get fifteen bucks an hour working for some strange American I had only met online from Copenhagen, Denmark,

• 40:02Speaker 02

  or I could go do another student job of, I don't know, filing papers in the library or something. So, hey, that seemed pretty good to me, right? Like, I get to do some programming stuff, which I'm getting more interested in, and someone is paying me fifteen bucks an hour. Which, by the way, funny anecdote on that, it wasn't even fifteen bucks an hour, because like, back then, you couldn't really easily send money.

• 40:21Tim Ferriss?

  So you got like a twenty percent transactional cost.

• 40:26Speaker 02

  Exactly. He would send goods. He would send Apple goods. So he would send like, the very first iPod was part of my payment. I got an iBook, a bunch of kind of stuff like that. Anyway, just wanted to think back about it. And then I worked with Jason for a couple of years on a variety of client projects. Thirty Seven Sickles, which was the name of the company before we changed it to Basecamp, was doing client work, mainly design work, and I would team up with them and work on programming stuff. But the big jump where I went from just liking the output to loving the activity itself really came with Ruby. And Ruby I discovered, I think maybe late 2002, I had a small look at it.

• 41:10Speaker 02

  And then, again, in the mid of 2003, I really dove into it because we started working on Basecamp, our first sort of major product together, Jason and I. We had worked on some other stuff earlier, a site to keep track of your, was it, yeah, your books, called Single File, that I had made in PHP, and that was good fun. It was good learning experience. Never really took off. It didn't go anywhere. So we scrapped that a few years later. But then this Basecamp thing came up. We wanted to keep better track of our customers, all the clients we were working on. We were doing everything over email. We just kept dropping the ball. All the same stories of when you try to manage projects and people over email. You go in the beginning, oh, this is wonderful. You can just send an email. And then at the

• 41:55Speaker 02

  end of it, you go like, ah, shit, where's that email? Like, I can't find it. Oh, did you tell Peter about this? Oh, no, I thought you. And like, he doesn't have the right version of the file. All the usual stuff you get when you try to do. That you still get today. When people try to coordinate projects over email, right? So we thought, hey, we're building websites for clients. Can't we build a piece of web software that would make this stuff easier? And so we did. So as I, we started on a project, I went, hey, this is not a client project. No one is saying you have to use PHP, you have to use ASP, you have to use Java. No one is mandating technology we have to use about this. And I had read about Ruby from some other programmers that I respected.

• 42:38Speaker 02

  Dave Thomas, Martin Fowler, and others had been sort of writing in industry magazines about this wonderful language that they also couldn't use at work, but they used it to explain various concepts. And I thought, hey, here's a chance. I can use a brand new programming language. Let's just give it a try. And I set myself this challenge, basically. If, within a week, I felt like I could get things up on the screen that talked to a database and so forth, it'd be enough to continue. And if within a month, I felt like, okay, I can build all the things that I realistically would need to build something like Basecamp, we're gonna do it. And of course, it took like three days for me to be like, oh, I can make things come up on the screen, I can make everything happen. And then it took another, what, four days to go like,

• 43:21Speaker 02

  yeah, I don't think I need to programming it in any other programming language ever again, if I can help it. This is wonderful. This is like, I liken it to sort of you take LSD or something.

• 43:35Speaker 02

  I have this, this gif of the guy that just goes like, where his mind is blown and he sees the galaxy and so forth. That was a little, without overdramatizing it even more than that, that what I felt like, right? That this is what I've been waiting for. This was the glove. And it just fit my brain so perfectly. I just went. Wow, this is something else and it's so deep. I can keep pulling on the thread. I, this was easy enough to get started that I didn't get frustrated, but deep enough that I couldn't even see the bottom. I just keep going and going and going. I read more and more of the standard library for Ruby. I read basically every library that had been released at the time. I just went,

• 44:21Speaker 02

  this is truly something else. And then I started building. I just started building, building, building, building. And the purpose in, in the beginning was just to build Basecamp. And what I found was, I was trying to put this desk together and okay, I could see sort of like this is a beautiful tree, like this is the sword I want to use for it, but like, there's no hammer, there's no saw, there's like, I have to build a bunch of these tools first, but I go like, oh, no problem. This is wonderful. I'm having such a great time. I don't mind that I have to build all my tools for myself first. So I started building all these tools, which then became the web framework Ruby on Rails.

• 44:59Speaker 02

  And that was, that was basically my first projects in Ruby. And I'd been a professional quote unquote programmer, someone paid fifteen bucks an hour for two years at the time. But it was just that aha moment where you just go like, this is next step. And it really, seriously, it didn't take that long, maybe a couple of months into it where I just went, this is some of the most fun I've ever had in my life. This is some of the most rewarding, interesting challenges I've ever had to tangle and deal with. And there's just more every day. I simply just could not wait to get back to the keyboard and develop my eye, dig deeper, get better. It was just, I, I really felt like I'd found something like you're not supposed to.

• 45:44Speaker 02

  As in, like, this is almost too good here. This is like, I, I knew programmers, I knew they could have fun, but I didn't know it could be this good. Especially because I'd been doing some version of programming for years in advance and I, I'd never felt like that.

• 46:01Tim Ferriss?

  Now, you, you mentioned there are, but there are a bunch of things I want to dig into because I love this story. So the first is, And for anyone who's wondering, does Tim program? I am not a programmer, but I did have, as an aside, a very fun experience with Chad Fowler. He's not related to the Martin that you mentioned, is he?

• 46:23Speaker 02

  Nope, nope, but I know Chad quite well as well. And he's a, he was one of the early Ruby guys and really great guy.

• 46:31Tim Ferriss?

  And he sat me down to walk me through, this was probably, this is after we first met at RailsConf. He sat me down to walk me through the basics of Ruby, comparing it to a language that he speaks, which is Hindi. And because I have some human natural language experience, he was able to walk me through it. Doing that and it's, and it made sense. I mean, the way he presented it. My question to you is, you had talked about three days to be able to get it to talk, get something to talk to a database, right? And then four days, five days to know that you can build things. Is that a typical timeline?

• 47:14Tim Ferriss?

  Or is that a sort of a Beautiful Mind timeline for going from one language to another? Because if I think about, say, going from maybe Spanish to Portuguese, maybe, because it's, they're very, very similar, right? But if you're going from Spanish to Japanese, you kind of start from scratch. And it would take a lot longer to get conversant in a new natural language. But how do programming languages work? And are you an anomaly in having picked up Ruby so quickly?

• 47:45Speaker 02

  I don't think I'm that much of an anomaly because like natural languages, there are kind of families of languages. And so Latin languages or whatever, you can jump from one to another.

• 47:54Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 47:54Speaker 02

  With, with much greater ease than if you jump to a completely different family of languages, like Japanese, for example, right? So all from the get go, most of the concepts in programming tend to be, there's this core set of concept that once you understand conditionals and variables and so on and so forth, you kind of have a good baseline, right? Perhaps that is kind of like learning Latin and then trying to learn other languages from there. And then Ruby really was interesting in the way that it wasn't. It didn't come up with a single new idea, as far as I really know. What it did was, it was like the master mixtape. It was the greatest hits of all the programming languages that went before it, mixed together by the most amazing DJ you've ever heard.

• 48:39Speaker 02

  And you go like, oh yeah, I recognize all the individual numbers here, but I've never heard them composed together like this. I've never heard like, oh, if you speed up the beat like this, so they just flow together, it's just, it's a new experience. So I kept recognizing all these angles of it. Oh, this is kind of similar to that, but whoa, what a way they've chosen to express it. So the onboarding was quite easy. And I think that's one of the areas of real success that Ruby has had, is that for a lot of programmers who've had some experience with programming, it instantly feels familiar.

• 49:14Tim Ferriss?

  Right, the switching cost is really low.

• 49:16Speaker 02

  Yes, it's quite low to at least get started. I mean, to become an expert at anything still takes a long time. And I certainly have thoughts on unrealistic expectations that people have, especially these days about how long it takes to become an expert. But to get started and to get a hold of something and get a taste, get a preview of what this could be, it was like getting, sit down and then watch the world's greatest trailer. Like you're like, oh, in two minutes, I really want to see the rest of this movie. Like it's still gonna take two and a half hours to watch the rest of the movie, but like just those two minutes was enough to get me fanatically excited about what was going on. And I think in terms of learning that new language,

• 49:59Speaker 02

  when you see something that's both that has some recognition and it also challenges you in some ways. I didn't certainly know all the concepts that were mixed into Ruby, but I knew enough that it wasn't totally foreign. It wasn't a brand new concept. I didn't have to throw out everything that I knew to adopt it. I think that's where perhaps some other programming languages that were more radical, like Lisp or even Smalltalk, and the way those languages work, they're far more radical, right? Which in some ways is more pure. Ruby is not a very pure language. It's, as I said, it's a DJ language. It's a remix. It's a mix up of just all the greatest hits.

• 50:41Speaker 02

  Ruby didn't come up with very much original content in that sense. Um, but that's really how the world, at least that I operate in, works. That when you try to apply sort of that perfectly singular idea, it usually doesn't fit. Cause it doesn't, doesn't bend, doesn't stretch. Ruby really bends. Ruby really stretches such that it covers all sorts of different scenarios with just an elegance and a grace on the long timeline. You can take any one individual language and you say, oh, Lisp or Smalltalk, and you can apply it to one problem that fits it really well.

• 51:23Speaker 02

  And you go like, okay, for that one problem, this probably is the best language in the world. It's just, problem is a little, little narrow. And then if you try to apply that same best in the world idea to another problem, it becomes sometimes the worst ideal idea in the world, or it becomes just kind of awkward. Um, where with Ruby, it was just really, really good. Never perhaps the best in the world on any individual task, but so flexible, so well remixed that it was just exceptionally good at a lot of different things. And I find that trait to be something that runs as a line through a lot of things I get interested in. Um, with Basecamp, for example, the product that I built with, uh, with Ruby,

• 52:07Speaker 02

  we were never the best at any individual thing. Basecamp is, is a DJ remix of the best tools. Like, oh, we got chat, we got message boards, we got all these different things, then that fit together and then it offers a solution. Right? Not just like, I'm just gonna be the best in the world, this one thing. Thought the same thing with Ruby on Rails. Ruby on Rails as a framework isn't the best in the world at any one thing, but it's a DJ remix master tape for like, oh, let's have a great evening and it's really gonna fit well and it's, it's gonna work out great. And to tie it to the racing we've been talking about, uh, I am, if I look at the strengths I have as a race car driver, they were never like qualifying. I could never put together the one perfect lap. In part because I kept having that damn dialogue running in my head

• 52:52Speaker 02

  of how I can improve things, which sometimes mean I step over the line and I actually regress. But where I was really good was long form endurance racing where I had to race in traffic, where I constantly had to deal with something new and have to alter my line or vary things. That was when I got much closer to the peak of the racing community, rather than just being singularly good in that one thing. And I've tried to apply that in my life in general, as in, I don't just have one thing that I'm really passionate or interested about. I'm not like, oh, it's all about work and I have to work on Basecamp, 120 hours a week and it's all that. Nope. I like working on Basecamp. I like working on Ruby on Rails. I like driving a race car. I like spending time with the family. I've

• 53:35Speaker 02

  gotten into photography. There's a lot of things you can do. Well, not a lot of things. There's some of things you can do and then you can do those things really well. I think the 80/20 thing where I'd much rather have, you can get 100% for 100% of the effort, right? Okay, fine. If you want to be the very, very, very best in the world, you have to spend 100% of you to get there. I just find that uninteresting. I'd rather have five things where I'm like in the top 80th percentile.

• 54:03Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I want to underscore that because I think it's a really important point and it's something that a number of folks have spoken about with me and it's a pattern, I think, worth highlighting for those people listening. And that is, if you want to, and Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, wrote about this on his blog, I think it's just career advice, said, "Your options for achieving greatness, so to speak, are sort of number one and number two. Number one is trying to become the Michael Jordan of one specific domain." And that's extremely difficult and your probabilities just don't look very good. And I'm paraphrasing, of course, but option number two is to combine unusual skills

• 54:48Tim Ferriss?

  where you're in the top, like you said, the top, say, 20% or 15%. Then you become extremely valuable, right? And that can apply to racing. That can apply to not only people but tools, like you mentioned, Basecamp. Ruby and Marc Andreessen has also talked about this, who's, who's of course created more than a handful of impressive things and has reinvented himself as an investor. But the CEOs in this particular case, in his example, being combinations of, say, top 15, top 20% in a number of fields that might be viewed as disparate, right? So perhaps they have a physics degree undergrad than an MBA, or a physics degree and then

• 55:32Tim Ferriss?

  a law degree, or whatever the combination might be, econ and computer science. A quick thing, and there's a, what you said about Ruby made me think of gaming, actually, and I'm gonna bastardize this, I'm sure, but the easy to learn, hard to master, and I believe that's also Bushnell's law from Atari, which was a good game, is easy to learn, hard to master. And Ruby itself, I had a question on, what is, and I could look this up on Wikipedia, but since I have you here, what or who is Ruby? And then why did you use the words on Rails?

• 56:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, so first, I'd say that absolutely agree with that. Like, that is the ideal, both for SpaceCam and for Ruby and for Rails, all the things I'm working on. This notion that things should be welcoming. Like, there are so many good ideas in the world that are good ideas, but require an immense amount of effort to penetrate. Lots of German philosophers come to mind, where like, there's some truly profound ideas about philosophy buried under an almost impenetrable description of them in non-human language form, right? Like, it really has to be decoded by people to extract that wisdom.

• 56:57Speaker 02

  I find that to be just unnecessary, like the best things, the things that I get really interested in, like they're approachable. You can get in into say programming Ruby or even driving a race car or any of these other things that I've gotten into photography. Um, they're, they're quite approachable and they've never been more approachable. But they're still really hard to, to get good at, right? And that's the fun part that you're encouraged enough in the beginning to keep pulling on the thread. And then it just goes deeper and deeper and deeper. And I'd say that some of those domains that I, I left behind that for me didn't do it for, didn't pull all the tricks were like, uh, I had worked in PHP, for example, PHP is exceptionally approachable.

• 57:39Speaker 02

  And even more so at the time, probably the most approachable of all the programming environments. If you want to work on an information system, just absolutely spectacular. It really aced that, right? Best in the world on that aspect of it. But then I found just for me at the time, this is not a reflection because I know just the firestorm that's going to start otherwise. Uh, reflection of how things are, let's just say that that's caved into how things used to be. The threat wasn't that deep.

• 58:05Speaker 02

  You, you didn't, you couldn't pull for that long until you kind of felt like, okay, I, I reached the, the end of the bucket here. That was where it really inspired me with, with Ruby and, and to keep going with that was you could just keep pulling. And it would just, it would keep getting better, right? Like it already started out with this amazing trailer and like the movie just never stopped.

• 58:27Speaker 02

  Now I totally forgot the original question.

• 58:29Tim Ferriss?

  Well, that's because my question was like a seventeen parter. I asked you the, uh, the, at the very tail end, I asked about the origins of Ruby, like who or what was it named after? And then how you used on rails, why you used on rails?

• 58:43Speaker 02

  Sure. Yeah. So it's funny because it really ties there. There's so many of these trends that are overlapping and interlinked, even when they're applied at different scales and the different domains. The name Ruby itself is a kind of a remix and so is Rails actually, but let's take Ruby first. I know that Matt, the Japanese creator of Ruby was inspired by Pearl.

• 59:04Speaker 02

  Um, the language that went before it, uh, served us an inspiration, but even the name itself.

• 59:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 59:11Speaker 02

  It's an inspiration.

• 59:12Tim Ferriss?

  P E R L, right?

• 59:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 59:14Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 59:14Speaker 02

  Um, and he went like, oh, it's a short name. That's cool. It's kind of a precious. Uh, I guess you'd say stone, even though I guess a pearl is not a stone, but it's a precious stone of some sort. Um, is there another word like that that's also short that's kind of in the same family was kind of paying homage and uh, respect to the things that went before Ruby and where Ruby drew its inspiration. So Ruby was born, I think in ninety five, maybe, uh, I seem to remember, maybe he even started working on it already in ninety three. But the first release at least, I believe, was, uh, ninety five. So it's been around for twenty one years.

• 59:53Speaker 02

  And Matt's is still working on the language, which is just something else I truly admire, respect and aspire to, which is going the distance. Not just kicking off a ball and then running out of the room, but sticking with it over the long, long haul. Right? Like I've been working with, uh, Basecamp now for twelve years with Ruby for fourteen. I mean, you're looking at endeavors that like most of my adult experience have been with these tools. I've been even, even race car driving now. I mean, it's like, on the one hand, yeah, I got started quickly and got going, but I've been going at it now for ten years. It's still a, a key hobby and pursuit. I really like just digging deep. It keeps scratching, as we said, right?

• 1:00:35Speaker 02

  Like I just keep stretching, keep finding new things that are more interesting. Anyway, the same thing with, um, with rails. So, uh, obviously we had Ruby, right? And I've been like, okay, let's, let's play off that. Let's pay some homage to that with an R. Like I, I want to have something that starts with an R too. And one of the inspirations at the time of Ruby was actually a Java web framework called Struts, which in some ways was more of a negative inspiration perhaps than a positive inspiration. It was like, oh. This is really interesting, like the concept of frameworks in general, but I really don't like how this is done. I really want to do facing the opposite of what this is doing in a whole different lots of areas. But I find that's often just as valuable inspiration as the things you want to clone.

• 1:01:17Speaker 02

  It is just as valuable to look at something and say, oh, that's what I don't want to do. That's what I don't want to be. I've learned perhaps more about running a, say, a company from working at companies that did things that I thought were absolutely boneheaded, stupid, or whatever. Then I learned from trying to emulate good companies. So in some domains, I think it's even more important to look at things that don't work and try to extract lessons from that rather than to look at things that do work. In any case, Struts had kind of this construction feel to it, right? And I mean, like, oh, that's kind of cool. And then I went, are like, oh, Rails, like, that's kind of similar. Like, it has some fun plays on, like, oh, you, you kind of put your development on Rails, that it kind of just goes, it's fast and so forth.

• 1:02:00Speaker 02

  And then I went to whatever site I was using to reserve domain names back then. I went rails.com, taken. Oh, damn, I can't get rails.com. Rails.org, nope, taken. Rails.net, nope, taken. Rails dot, all sorts of other things, taken, taken, taken, taken, taken, taken, taken, right? Like, all those singular words were already taken long since. And then I went like, oh, okay, well, I guess I need a domain name. Ruby on Rails then. Oh, free. Rubyonrails.com. And that's, and there you go. So that's how it ended up with the name, not out of any other. I mean, I ended up actually liking it even better, uh, because it paid even more homage to Ruby.

• 1:02:43Speaker 02

  It was even more differential to it in the sense that Rails for me really is about introducing the rest of the world to Ruby. That that was, that was the main mission. The Rails part was a vehicle to get people to discover what a wonderful programming language that Ruby is. So love that I could fit that as part of the name and that kind of became a, became a thing.

• 1:03:06Tim Ferriss?

  You mentioned learning from bad examples. This can be applied to a lot of domains, of course. And I know people, in fact, who teach writing in high schools or even colleges by having their students read examples of really bad writing, because it's easier to identify what they don't like as opposed to figure out why the good writing works.

• 1:03:28Tim Ferriss?

  Let's look at business. So you come to the US, you're working with Jason, and at the time, 37signals, now Basecamp. What do you guys do differently?

• 1:03:38Speaker 02

  That's a broad question that I'll try to answer in a meta way, where by saying that one of the early inspirations for wanting to do this, wanting to work at my own company with Jason, where we would call the shots, was that we would get a chance to reevaluate everything from first principle. That I felt that there was so much of the mechanics of the businesses I had worked in before that was just mindlessly copied from, "Oh, that's just the way things are. That's just how we're doing things. Like, that's how other companies do things. Like, that's how you're supposed to do things." And I just saw enough of those misapplications or wrongful copies where I just went like, "I don't think so."

• 1:04:23Speaker 02

  Like, maybe this was a good idea somewhere at some time in some context, but it's lost all connection to goodness. And now it's just a really terrible idea. So when we're going to run our own company, we're going to evaluate everything from, as much as we can, from first principle. Everything from like how we hire, how we grow, how we do marketing, how we work on products, how we decide what we're going to work on. It's not that we can't be inspired by others, but let's just try to keep peeling back until we get to the first principle. Is this, in first principle, a good idea? Do you have any principles here at all? Right? Like, a lot of people just clone techniques. They don't clone principles. So they don't examine principles,

• 1:05:06Speaker 02

  and they aren't clear about what they want those principles to be, except if they're these overly broad, "Oh, we want to do good work for the world," or whatever, meaningless things that anyone would agree to. The only kinds of...

• 1:05:21Speaker 02

  Principles and direction that I care about are things where reasonable people could disagree. Generally speaking, I think that those are the interesting.

• 1:05:29Tim Ferriss?

  Where reasonable people can disagree. Could you elaborate on that?

• 1:05:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think where where there's where you're saying something that is meaningful because someone else would take the opposite side of it. Like if there's not an opposite side of this, I'm not saying something interesting. If I'm saying like, people matters most. Okay, who's going to disagree with that? Like it basically anything that's on a corporate Fortune 500 motivational.

• 1:05:51Tim Ferriss?

  Poster.

• 1:05:52Speaker 02

  Poster. Like you'd go like, no one would say the opposite, right? Like you read these mission statements and you go like, you're not saying anything because you're not constraining your view. You're not constraining the world. And if you're not constraining the world, like, what are you doing? Why are you trying to draw this up?

• 1:06:08Tim Ferriss?

  Well, not not, yeah. I was just gonna say, not not only that, but in a way, I mean, you're acting as a scientist, right? And I think that good engineers and good programmers tend to have that lens through which they view things in so much as like, if it's not a falsifiable hypothesis, it's like, it's just like, what are you doing? You're just.

• 1:06:28Speaker 02

  Exactly. I think that has been one of the driving principles, at least for me. And sometimes we do argue about this internally, but the scientific method for me is just, uh, just such a gold standard. It doesn't apply for everything in all cases always, but for me, it implies for most things, most of the time. And if I cannot find ways where either what we're doing, um, or what we believe has a falsifiable version of it, where it's a like, oh, well, what you believe actually didn't work, right? If we can't arrive at that conclusion, it's not an interesting thing to believe. Um, because then either anyone would believe it, or it's not actually driving your actions.

• 1:07:09Speaker 02

  Because if if this principle can lead you to both sides of of the coin, then it's not helping you make decisions. And that's really what I want. I want a framework to help me make decisions and especially the tougher the call, the more interesting it is. Cause that's where we make progress. Uh, and that's always been what I've been interested in, in sort of refining Basecamp, the company, as being a product in itself that we could tweak and tune and optimize and make better for. For Jason and I owning the company, for all the employees that we have and for all the customers that we have. And it's again, it's this system thinking that we're trying

• 1:07:48Speaker 02

  to improve the system and optimize it in such a way that we do more good for more people more of the time. And if you're not measuring that, if you're not being scientific about it, you might stumble into it. Lots of people stumble into quote unquote, a great company because they have just one idea, they have some luck, or they have something else that just works. And then kind of the rest of it doesn't matter. That's not so interesting to me. I mean, sure, we've had our fair share of luck, of course we have. But I also think that the thing that keeps me going after all these years was not just like, oh, we got lucky once. It's the interesting part of we keep scratching. How can company

• 1:08:29Speaker 02

  be better this year than it was the, well, if you take it all the way to the origin of 37 signals 17 years ago. And what's interesting in that too, is that it's not just a straight line either, right? There are regressions. So it's been fascinating for me to go from the four people who built the first version of Basecamp to the 50 people who today run the company, which it's funny because I mean, most people would look at that like, oh, you're 50 people running Basecamp? Like, that's a laughably small company. And to me, it's like this huge organization. Because my origins was, and perhaps to some extent, my preferences are a smaller thing put together really well.

• 1:09:11Tim Ferriss?

  And do you, I'm definitely gonna, gonna come back to the beauty and elegance, or just beauty and elegance as concepts. But I want to ask you first, since you brought it up, and this was going to be one of my questions anyway. Do you guys have a cap on the number of employees that you want to have at the company? In other words, Basecamp not to exceed X number of people? Or is there any thinking along those lines? And if so...

• 1:09:37Speaker 02

  I think it's more a principle of let's try to stay as small as we possibly can while still not feeling... negligent about the things that we cannot do. Like, it's all good and well to say, oh, you're fifty people now. Like, what if we were thirty people and we just, like, didn't answer customers' emails? You can be a smaller company if you just don't wanna respond to, to feedback and you might still sell your product and so forth, but that seems negligent. So, I wanna be as small as is not negligent to be. And of course, like that, I mean, to some extent, perhaps that's a, not a scientific statement, because how is that falsifiable?

• 1:10:16Speaker 02

  But there's just a sense that, um, we can be much smaller than what the standard operating procedure is. For a company of our number of customers, for the amount of work and output that we produce, for all the open source that we're involved with, we are definitely far, far smaller than the norm.

• 1:10:38Speaker 02

  I see lots of companies, uh, many times our size, where I go, where's that effort going? Like, I'm not seeing it, it's not visible. Maybe it's behind the scenes and it's always easy to compare yourself in flattering ways to stories where you don't know the full backstory. But I think there's still something to be said from the idea of just trying to, to optimize your company to be your best product. And if you do that, then, uh, rejigging it and I, I look at, for example, when I, I write, uh, code, right? Like, one of the chief principles of writing good code, as it is about writing good prose, is to remove needless words, remove needless paragraphs, remove needless complication.

• 1:11:22Speaker 02

  And for example, with, with companies, there's, let's just say, policies, for example. Lots of companies have all sorts of elaborate policies on, on spending, on how you can justify, um, uh, expense reports and so on and so forth, where we should, like, is there a way we can get away without that? And one of the enduring policies we've had is when you get hired at Basecamp, you get a credit card and the policy is spend it wisely. The end.

• 1:11:51Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:11:51Speaker 02

  Um, and then, okay, forward your, uh, receipts, uh, if they're on email, to this email address that we have that no one looks at, but just in case we get audited or something. And then- That's not a perfect solution, doesn't track every expense to the ninth degree. And if we do get audited, there might be some discrepancies where things don't line up a hundred percent. And you deal with it then.

• 1:12:15Speaker 02

  Compared to what you sort of just save in overhead and complexity of, and it's not just about this thing. That's just one small thing, but imagine making that choice on a hundred things. All of a sudden, the amount of complexity you get rid of just compounds. And the whole thing ends up being so much easier, right? Because if you look at companies and you look at company growth, if you're

• 1:12:39Speaker 02

  four people and you hire four more people, maybe you get close to a hundred percent improvement in productivity, but probably not, probably more like fifty percent or whatever, right? If you're already fifty people and you hire another twenty people, are you getting like another fifty percent again? Absolutely not. You're getting what, five percent, seven percent? Like, the complexity curve is not linear. When you make your company more complex, either through people or processes or policies,

• 1:13:15Speaker 02

  the marginal benefit to sort of the overall thing you're trying to accomplish just drops really quickly.

• 1:13:23Speaker 02

  So that's one of the things that I've just on a personal level has been interested in. Like, how can we maintain maximum efficiency? And to some extent, and in some situations, that's gone too far. Like, I've been pursuing maximum efficiency, sometimes beyond the point of what's reasonable. You can say like, when in the beginning, we had zero money at all and we had to be just four people and so forth. We had to be maximum efficient because didn't have anyone else's money to spend. We had to spend our own revenue, so we could only grow accordingly to that. But now we're at a different place, so now perhaps you can afford a little bit of slack. And I appreciate that idea. Again, I appreciate generally ideas that sort of stretch and bend.

• 1:14:05Speaker 02

  And a maximum of efficiency at all times does not stretch and bend that much. But having that at least as some sort of platonic ideal, something you always have at the back of your mind or something you try to drive decision from, still leaves you To a very different place than where we would have been if we had gone the standard route of, oh, here's a new software company with a product that's taking off. Let's get a lot of venture capital money invested. Let's hire a bunch of people and staff up to a hundred as quickly as we can. Let's just start blowing it out right away. That's the standard model and lots of people have followed that and some have succeeded and lots and lots and lots of others have gone up in spectacular flame. And I just looked at the situation and went, what am I trying to do here?

• 1:14:51Speaker 02

  What am I trying to do with Basecamp? Why Basecamp? Well, first of all, I'd like to set up a company that I would want to work at in twenty years. Like, I actually, uh, to be honest, I don't like learning tons of new people all the time. Like, I'm an introvert. I like working with people for the long term because I get to get to know them and you get comfortable with them. You fall into a groove where things are just so much easier and you need to say so much less to get the same amount of work done. And there's just a reliance and a trust in that competency. And if I want to do that, then I can't install all sorts of time bombs in my business.

• 1:15:32Speaker 02

  I can't install like, okay, if I take X amount of money from these people, then they want it back in seven years and they want a ten X. So we have to shrink for the fences to get that, otherwise we're gonna blow up. Well, so that's one thing, right? Like, I want a stable, long-term work environment because that's just where I find that I can get access to these flow states as much as possible. And that's what's a lot of fun and so forth. Then secondly, um, I want to do this because I want some modicum of success. Like, I don't need to be a billionaire. I don't need to be even a hundreds millionaire. I just need to be, uh, comfortable in knowing that, like, okay, we, we got to some baseline, right? Like, I like to compare the fact that the difference between having zero dollars and a million dollars is extremely large

• 1:16:17Speaker 02

  in terms of sort of basic comforts of, of living. The difference between having a million dollars and two million dollars. Banishing you small on the same scale, right? And the further up the chain you go, the less marginal benefit there is. At least within my hopes, dreams and inspirations. Yes, if your biggest dream in the world is to own the New York Jets as Gary Vee wants to do, or you want to send people to Mars like Elon Musk, or any of those kind of wild dreams, okay, fine, you need billions of dollars and you should pursue strategies that are compatible with that. I perhaps have more, it sounds funny, but modest, it's only in comparison to those outliers, modest ideas of it. So I want to optimize my chances for that.

• 1:17:02Speaker 02

  So part of that was like, I want to optimize my chances when I'm running a business of, how can I just become like a millionaire? Like just a basic run of mill millionaire, which is still like, look at the world's stage, like incredibly rare thing, right? And extremely blessed position to be in, but still infinite, well, not infinitely, far, far, far more likely than to become the next billionaire, right? Like the number of millionaires in the world versus the number of billionaires in the world. Like, that's actually been one of the things that's been driving a lot of how I approach, where do I want to be? Like, if you take, where do you want to be in programming? What do you want to be in racing? What do you want to do in business? I'm like, I've, it's such an oxymoron, but I feel like I modestly just want to be in the top 5%, right?

• 1:17:46Speaker 02

  Like, I don't need to be, again, as we talked about, I don't need to put in 100% to be Michael Jordan. I don't need, because it's even worse than that, right? Again, that's the reason I don't want to do it. I don't want to put in 100% to have a really, really poor chance of becoming Michael Jordan. So, Michael Jordan. Lots and lots and lots of other people who, if you just take baseball or basketball metaphor, that are good baseball players, right? And can make a good living and get to play in the NBA and like, that's pretty amazing, right? I just want to make it to the NBA. I don't have to be Michael Jordan.

• 1:18:18Tim Ferriss?

  No, definitely. And I want to just emphasize something that, uh, I think, I think you said, I mean, this is how I think about it, or have been trying to think about it more and more in the last, say, five years, is that...

• 1:18:35Tim Ferriss?

  You have to, or you should strive to have compatible goals, right? In the sense that a lot of the folks I meet, and I live in San Francisco, I live right in the belly of the beast. And you run into folks who, maybe they have hundreds of millions of dollars and they're completely miserable. And when you really dig into it, if you have the chance to do it over wine or whatnot, very often you find that they have incompatible goals. In other words, like what they need to feel fulfilled and calm or in flow is not compatible with the other ambitious, say, business or financial goals that they have. So it's doomed to fail, right? I mean, if you succeed and you accomplish all of your goals, if they're incompatible, you're basically just sowing the seeds of your own destruction.

• 1:19:18Tim Ferriss?

  And so I wanted to ask you, do you consider yourself a happy person?

• 1:19:25Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:19:26Tim Ferriss?

  You do?

• 1:19:26Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And part of it is because I work at that. Like, that is one of the explicit goals of a higher tribe or a decision is this is going to make me a happier person. Jeff Bezos has sort of the reverse of it, which is his regret minimization framework, which sounds like just something Jeff Bezos would come up with, where he's like, I'm just going to try to drive my life in such a way that I have the least regrets. I don't know if that's the path that I'm taking, but happiness is also sort of a fuzzy term, right? One of the things I know that you've been interested in too, and has really spoken to me is stoicism. And this notion of tranquility, to be in this state of contentment and tranquility.

• 1:20:10Speaker 02

  It's, happiness has some sort of like connotations as though I'm running around all the time laughing my ass off. Like, oh, it's this wonderful life. Right? Like, that's not, I don't aspire to that, that's not how most days are, but I do have a sense of deep Tranquility and contentment with the situation that I'm in. And part of that is actually going all the way back to the beginning. My key takeaway from the four hour work week was the concept of lifestyle design. That there's so many people who just follow, were on rails in the negative sense of the word of like, how things are supposed to go.

• 1:20:53Speaker 02

  Okay, first I get my this education, I perhaps don't even really care that much for the subject, but it'll lead to a good job, then I'll get the good job, then I'll get married, then I'll like, da da da da, and then at sixty five, I'll retire. And then I can really live life. What? Are you crazy? Um, first of all, good chance you won't make it to sixty five and then everything was wasted between uh, getting born and not getting there. Um, second of all, why would you waste or wait until the worst decades of your life in terms of physical mobility and and capabilities otherwise to start enjoying life? And that's the problem I really have with a lot of the startup ethos and work spirit

• 1:21:37Speaker 02

  in general in the US and in Silicon Valley in particular, this notion like, let's compress working life. If you could just like work like a madman or madwoman for a hundred and twenty hours a week for like seven years straight, then Nirvana will be waiting on the other side and you can take all your millions in winnings and you can sit down on a deserted island somewhere and drink a mojito. And you're like, you know what? I know people who've gone exactly through that and after two weeks on the beach, they went like, wait, what? Wasn't this supposed to be winning? This is miserable. I hate it. I don't want to be here. Like, that was not actually my destination.

• 1:22:18Speaker 02

  The thing I gave up all sorts of valuable things to arrive at is a miserable place to be. And I don't wanna, it's easy to trivialize these things, especially you see when you're actually already are a millionaire, to trivialize um, sort of the struggles and and the aspirations of of someone where money can make a big difference. But when you're talking about people who've already made it and want to make it more, right? It's. Incredible how often the people end up sucked into this notion that like, oh, if I just make it to the next step, then I'm gonna be happy, then happiness awaits me, when just a false treadmill. It's not only is it a hedonic treadmill and that it keeps moving further and further away from you, but it's also just false. It really does not pay out that way.

• 1:23:02Speaker 02

  The, as we've talked about a bunch on this show already, flow, the striving, the getting better. Like, that's where living is. That's where happiness is. And it can happen whether you're at the beginning or at your end of that journey. Like, I think back of when someone asked me, are you happy? I think back of when I sat in Copenhagen in two thousand and one in my, what, three hundred and fifty square me, or uh, square feet apartment, tiny, tiny little apartment in Copenhagen. I was going to school at the time, I was learning uh, PHP. I had all sorts of things I was worried about, like rent and so on, not on an existential level, but still in a, in a normal sense of it, right?

• 1:23:45Speaker 02

  Also, it's also think, I'm still happy. I was within margins of where things are today. And if you look at those two situations, otherwise from a level of possessions or quote unquote success, like, they're pretty different places to be, and yet they don't feel that different. And part of that is to have that focus on the inner journey, on the inner strive of this.

• 1:24:13Speaker 02

  Another quote I, I love just pulling out whenever context fits or not is uh, Coco Chanel. The best things in life are free and the next best things are very expensive. And I like that because it sort of, it recognizes that the next best things are still pretty great. It's just that there's so many of the very best things that you can focus on, that whatever is on the next best thing and which does happen to be very expensive, it's just so far down the ladder that uh, once you adopt the philosophy of life that allows you to view it from that angle. It really puts things into perspective. It gets it so much easier to get to tranquility.

• 1:24:48Tim Ferriss?

  And I think that tranquility is, in a lot of respects, a better goal than happiness, which has been, the word is so overused to have become almost meaningless. I wanted to use it just because it's a, it's a more straightforward term and more familiar term. But it's, it seems to me also that if we're talking about, say, flow states, if we're talking about tranquility, it relates to developing an internal locus of control or an internal, metric is probably too quantitative a term, view of progress. You're competing against yourself as opposed

• 1:25:27Tim Ferriss?

  to, in some positional economic sense, competing against the Joneses, right? Which you're never going to win because there's always going to be another Jones who's willing to sacrifice more than you are. If, if you're kind of chasing, as you said, this pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the, all of which relates to Stoicism. But I wanted to also reiterate one thing that you mentioned, which is this seven to 10 year sprint that you see so often in Silicon Valley. And the misconception that you can then automatically just park up and sit on a beach and,

• 1:26:04Tim Ferriss?

  you know, praise, praise God, here's Nirvana. The, the disconnect, I think, for a lot of folks, or the question that they'd be well-served to ask is, am I develop, am I developing attributes now that I can use in multiple states, in multiple endeavors, right? Because what people fail to realize is that if you are going to stand a snowball's chance in hell of actually creating the next unicorn, or whatever it might be, and cashing out in seven to 10 years, the work habits and so on that you're going to have to develop are completely incompatible with sitting on that beach and being happy.

• 1:26:40Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 1:26:41Tim Ferriss?

  diametrically opposed. And you can just automatically switching those gears is not as easy as one might think. In fact, it's exceptionally difficult. You have to completely reprogram yourself. So coming back to the Stoicism. And you mentioned Jeff Bezos. I've been reading some of your articles and there's one line that jumped out at me is really profound and applicable in a lot of contexts. And I think this is from the, the day I became a millionaire post. And it is expectations, not outcomes govern the happiness of your perceived reality. And I was hoping you could talk a little bit about that, but also talk about, because I genuinely don't know the

• 1:27:23Tim Ferriss?

  answer to this, why, how did you navigate the decision to take money from Jeff Bezos in 2006?

• 1:27:31Speaker 02

  Yep. Let me start with the, with the first thing. I keep having to relearn this lesson very often. And I feel like this, one of these lessons I've practiced the most. But as most of the most profound, important lessons in life, you can't just read the text and then internalize it. It takes practice time and time again. And this notion that it's the expectations, not the outcomes themselves, that's what matters, is really about looking inwards and seeing like, whether something is good or bad, in a lot of cases, not all cases, but in many of the challenges we face, whether something is good or bad, that's just you deciding that. And it, it doesn't happen by random. It happens because it flows through your habits and it happens because it's through your expectations. If

• 1:28:16Speaker 02

  I take one example, just, I got, we've talked a bunch about racing. In my 2013 season, we had a stellar season. We finished second in the championship and we finished second at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Like absolutely amazing, right? It was probably one of the worst years I've had in racing. It was absolutely miserable on all sorts of levels. And one of the key reason why it was miserable was exactly because of this expectation. We came in from the get-go with a lineup, a backing, a car that said, this is supposed to be the front runner. These guys are supposed to win. And then when we didn't win, finishing second, didn't feel like finishing second, it felt like being a complete loser.

• 1:28:59Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:28:59Speaker 02

  And what was funny was just, just the year before, two thousand and twelve, right? I started, this was my first year at the twenty four hours of Le Mans. And I was thrilled just to finish the race. It was wonderful, right? And one of the magic experiences of all the time I've been in racing was to finish the race in two thousand and twelve. I don't know what we finished, seventh, eighth, I don't even care. That wasn't the expectation, that was the goal, right? And then already the year after, somehow I got suckered into expectations that said, you're supposed to win. And when we didn't win, it felt like a ton of bricks on us. And I've had this over and over again. Whenever I feel like I've personally done a good job at the racetrack, it's all about my internal competition. It's not about where we end up finishing up.

• 1:29:43Speaker 02

  Some of the best races I've ever had, we finished last. Some of the worst races I've ever had, we finished first. They're all about whether I felt like I progressed and I did everything in the best way I could possibly do. Whether I disappointed myself. And disappointment is intrinsically linked to expectation. Um, so being extremely careful about how you set your expectations, I think, is probably the number one key to true corality for me. And there's a lot of historic writing that addresses this point directly. And, and one of the things that I, I love around expectations is, and Stoicism is this notion of negative visualization.

• 1:30:27Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, my favorite, yeah. Arguably the most valuable thing that I've taken from Stoicism, yeah.

• 1:30:32Speaker 02

  You, you imagine all these terrible things that can happen, right? To, to set the context and set your expectations in completely different light. That I, every day, probably, at least every week, I imagine what would happen if I went broke? If I had a major accident where I would lose some of my limbs? If also terrible things would happen to either my family or to my professional life or to the world at large? And then I process that and A, try to come to terms with, with those things. Uh, and B, use it as a driver to be sort of thankful for the things I have without becoming attached to them.

• 1:31:14Speaker 02

  And playing those mental games, I think that's the number one thing. Like happiness, not happiness, in state of tranquility, not in state of tranquility. They're all about the mental games that you play to a large degree. I'm not, I mean, obviously, there are some places in the world where it's a lot harder to be happy and in a state of tranquility than in other places. But if we're talking about Western developed worlds where you're not living on the edge of poverty, then I'd say the mental game is, uh, is almost all of it. Um, and then in terms of sort of the mechanics, so in, in two thousand and six, I had already been exposed long enough to the internet industry and to the venture capital world

• 1:31:57Speaker 02

  to realize that's not what we wanted to do, that that was an incompatible goal to take a bunch of money from venture capitals with all the strings that that implies and getting the other things that we wanted, like running a company for twenty years, like calling the shots ourselves, like not having to go and sell our company or go IPO or being forced into some unsustainable or devious tactics for growth or any of all these other pressures that come from taking other people's money and trying to fuel them in as rocket fuel for your company. So what ended up happening was, uh, Jason and I looked at our sort of risk and we said like, okay, right now, thirty seven signals base camp, like there's something. We have some traction, as people like to call it, right?

• 1:32:42Speaker 02

  There's traction, that's valuable. There are people who want to give us millions of dollars to put into the company in hopes that we can turn this company into being worth a hundred million or billion or whatever else that they're trying to get out of it, right? So we could do that and then we could take some money off the table or we could try to just swing for those fences to, to try to get that. Um, or we could try to see if we can find someone where instead of investing in the company, as in taking money and putting them into the company to use that money for growth, which is what VCs do, um, we could perhaps find someone to. Make a hedge, hedge bet with us. Where we could sell a small, non-control, no strings attached

• 1:33:26Speaker 02

  portion of the ownership that Jason and I each have. And then just pocket that money. Not put any of it into the company. Not accept any of the strings that would normally go with a venture capital contract. Not accept any of the timeline, not start any of the time bombs or any of the other stuff that goes on. Just say like, hey, Jeff, if you want to be along for the ride, uh, we'll sell you a small slice of each of our share. And typically take that money and use it as our hedge. Just that if this Basecamp thing goes poof, um, and turns into the next Friendster or whatever, then at least we've taken something off the table. Uh, such that we don't have a hundred percent of the risk in just one basket. I'm a big believer in diversification and all sorts of

• 1:34:12Speaker 02

  manners and endeavors as we've talked about. I've tried to diversify my interests such that should the terrible thing happen as I frequently negatively visualize that Basecamp collapses like I'm, it was my whole identity wrapped up in that. I can go off, do other things and, and be fine, right? So we took a, a little bit off the table and that's where that post I became a millionaire came from. Um, and it's funny because even I felt like I was pretty well prepared for all of that stuff and I was still deceived by what happened afterwards. In the sense that

• 1:34:48Speaker 02

  I think it's almost impossible in our sort of civilization today to not be infected by the constant propaganda for like what happens when you get quote unquote rich. That like milk is flowing and honey in the streets and like certain things are wonderful and it's a fine threat to needle to thread, especially once you made it to the other side to say like, oh yeah, it doesn't matter that much. And tons of people will actually say, yeah, okay, I didn't eat today. Um, so tell me again what it is about doesn't matter, right? So that to me doesn't mean you can't talk about the topic of it. It is interesting and, and I talk about it anyway. Uh, and the conclusion I basically came to was that

• 1:35:32Speaker 02

  even knowing all the things that I thought I knew, like my expectations were still too high. I still thought that it was going to have a bigger dent on my life than it ended up doing, right? And it only reaffirmed my belief that

• 1:35:46Speaker 02

  Where happiness comes from, where tranquility comes from are not those places. That the very best things in life indeed are free. And I got to taste some of the second best things and that was a lot of fun too. But at the end of the day, they were more transient. And the things I've kept on doing, I still program Ruby almost every day. A day is better, generally speaking, when I get to program Ruby. Because that's just what I truly enjoy doing. And if you look at lots of people who've made it very well, they still continue to do what it. Like we talked about Jeff Bezos, how long has he been running Amazon now? Like 20 plus years, right? Plus years, yeah. He doesn't need to. He could retire to a beach somewhere and sit there and do that. He doesn't want to do that, right?

• 1:36:31Speaker 02

  Like none of the people like, uh, um, everyone from Steve Jobs to like all those sort of standard list of heroes you can go through. Like most people just stick to the things that provide them flow and interesting new challenges. And the striving that defines life and the purpose of it. And if you realize that, you can prioritize that first. And you can prioritize other things below that. And I think that's a really helpful way to guide your decisions. For us, it helped guide the decision that we didn't want to do that venture capital time bomb because it was completely incompatible with these other goals that we had and aspirations for life. And now I've got to play that out a bit, right? Like Basecamp would either have IPO'd or be sold or whatever.

• 1:37:15Speaker 02

  Now, if we had taken that money back in 2006, we're well past the deadline of, um, of when the money would be up. And I'm sitting here on the other side and saying like, you know what? It's pretty good. The other side's pretty good. It's not as spectacular. It's not as glamorous. Perhaps there's not as much crystal champagne or private jets or whatever. But you know what? It's pretty good. And I get to do more of the things, more of the time than I would otherwise. Like, I talk to lots of entrepreneurs all the time who either ended up with what they thought was success, right? Like, they sold their company, then they did the beach thing for three weeks. And then they ended up even worse off than that, right? They realized that the beach thing was not where tranquility was hidden.

• 1:37:59Speaker 02

  They came back and now they're like, oh, what am I supposed to do now? Oh, I guess start another company. And oftentimes, the second time around is not as good. It's not either as good of an idea, or it's hard to do it again. You've lost something really valuable that's hard to get back. And I see a lot of people at that other side, like, worse off than they were when they were just that tiny startup, two people struggling to make things work, but striving in flow, in tranquility.

• 1:38:30Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's extremely common. And I think what I've at least tried to apply for myself is practice. Like, if you want to be good and you hope to enjoy all these things by using your time for fun when you have money, you have to practice that before you have money. And it sounds ridiculous, but I think that money is like alcohol in the sense that it just makes you more of who you already are. So it's not like somebody who becomes a huge asshole when they're drunk has no amount of asshole in them when they're sober. They just keep it under wraps. And money applies the same type of pressure to the vessel, right? And so it's going to amplify your strengths, your weaknesses, your neuroses.

• 1:39:13Tim Ferriss?

  And so you have to practice the skills or the use of time, for instance, that you want to have when you have this influx of pressure. And I was going to mention, because you were discussing negative visualization, I highly recommend, and this is in public domain, anybody can read it, there is a letter by Seneca the Younger. Well, he has a compilation of letters called The Moral Letters to Lucilius, L-U-C-I-L-I-U-S. And there's a very specific letter, letter 18, probably takes 10 minutes to read, but it's called On Festivals and Fasting. And it talks about not just... Negative visualization, but fear rehearsal effectively where you set aside a few days each

• 1:39:57Tim Ferriss?

  month to say, I'm making these up, but sleep on the floor in a sleeping bag in your kitchen for a few nights, or eat nothing but rice and beans, or instant oatmeal for a few days, wear the same pair of jeans, whatever it might be, simulating the condition that you fear. In other words, if you lost everything, or if you had to take a pay cut because you needed six months to figure out your next gig because you hate your current gig, whatever it might be, by removing that fear, it emboldens you to do something that, do many different things, including, you know, one thing that you and Jason are very well known for, which is being outspoken, right? I mean, you can't do that if you're constantly in fear of having the rug pulled

• 1:40:38Tim Ferriss?

  out from under you. The, on Bezos, just one last point on that, is he, what does he get out of investing in Basecamp? Is it that he hopes at some point you guys will have a change of heart and look for, or at least entertain, a liquidity event or an acquisition?

• 1:40:58Speaker 02

  So take Basecamp, or Bezos first, he got his money back and then some, and he still owns a part of the company. We paid him back. Like, one of the wonderful things of, of having a private company that's profitable is that you get profits. Like, money actually comes out of the equation, which I know is a, almost a foreign dirty word in Silicon Valley, like, wait, what? There's money coming out of the company? You're supposed to be in the red. Like, what's going on here? But that's what happened. Like, we've run a profitable company for 17 years. Like, things compound. And like, what's not a big payday in year one? Like, if you do that 10 years in a row, like, that's, that's money. That's real money. And, and he's been

• 1:41:40Speaker 02

  paid back. He's more than made whole, and he continues to earn his share of the profits every year. And I, I mean, these are rounding errors. Like, the freaking dollar moves one cent, and he has lost more money in, like, two hours than he would ever gain or lose on, on our investment. So I don't think he actually does it that much for the money. I think the money is just a extension of simply him having fun with this, having fun with the investments and so on. So it's not perhaps as... Pure economical as as someone like a VC who's investing other people's money or fund in something and has to show certain things. I think Besos has made a ton of investments

• 1:42:24Speaker 02

  in in people simply because he enjoyed doing that and enjoyed seeing it and he enjoyed our sort of irreverent take on a lot of things and and kind of wanted to support that. And again, the it was pocket change to him to to do it, right?

• 1:42:40Tim Ferriss?

  Have you met him in person?

• 1:42:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, we've spent quite a especially in the early years, a fair amount of time with him. Usually we would meet up with him about once a year and spend a good amount of time with him and I always learned a bunch. And the funny thing is, of course, that one of the reasons I learned a bunch was that he wasn't just a version of Jason and I. He was in many ways the direct opposite, right? Like the way he run Amazon as a public company is like a hundred and eighty degrees to opposite of how we do things, which is, I think, why part of the attraction, right? Like that he wasn't just looking for little minions that were trying to do the same thing as him. He was looking for people who could challenge his thinking and we've certainly had our thinking challenged by him as well. So I

• 1:43:22Speaker 02

  think that that's it's it's great to have those kind of associations in your life where it's not just like, oh, someone does exactly the same thing that I do, but better, but someone does something totally different than me and I can learn something really important from from that perspective. But I'd say too, as you mentioned with with habits, that that has been one of the things I've been incredibly conscious about, that I've seen people just be trapped by their habits. Most people are, right? Like that's how we want run our lives. So we've been extremely conscious about getting the right habits, not just for ourselves, which for both Jason and I have meant like, hey, let's just work forty hours a week, right? Like not try to do the eighty thing or the hundred and twenty

• 1:44:04Speaker 02

  thing just because we're bootstrapping or whatever else it is. We want to set habits that we can comfortably want to have on the other side as well and do that for our company as well and do that even for the product. One of the things we worked on for the new version of Basecamp was this notion that work can wait, that I think in this age of mobile phones and apps and so on. Engagement has become this magic excuse for interrupting people all the time.

• 1:44:31Tim Ferriss?

  Hundred percent agreed. Well, it's also it's a vanity metric that

• 1:44:36Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:44:36Tim Ferriss?

  That that venture backed startups can use to Jedi mind trick their investors into convincing them that something is happening. That's me that's meaningful when nothing meaningful is happening. Yeah.

• 1:44:47Speaker 02

  Right. And I think that that's one of the things that we've been freed from, right? Like, we don't have to maintain any vanity metrics. Basecamp can actually be a better product, both for us and for our customers. If it doesn't have as much engagement, if people can get the things that they need out of it when they need out of it, and then Basecamp can kind of go away. So for example, Basecamp three, we have this feature called work can wait. You click it on and Basecamp won't send you any notifications, won't send you any emails, won't bother you in any way. Once you're off the clock, by default, it's set to nine to five. But then after that, and on weekends, if you have someone in your company, which in a company of fifty, you usually do that like sends an email on Saturday or whatever.

• 1:45:28Speaker 02

  You're not interrupting everyone. You're not broadcasting and blasting everyone all the time. And I that's been one of the things that's been near and dear to me. And I think in the US, people kind of laugh that off as silly, like, wait, what? Like, um. Can't you just like figure out how to manage your own life and so on? No, I think these habits matter. I think if you look at the French, which also the reason to laugh at the French, but this is not one of them, in my opinion, there was a proposal in their parliament last year, I believe it was, where they said like employees should have the right to disconnect, that they should have the right not to receive emails that their boss expects them to answer on Saturdays. Now, that's a truth with some modification. There are always disasters and whatever that can happen. Most of the time they don't.

• 1:46:13Speaker 02

  Most of the time, your boss just sends you an email on something stupid on Saturday that is kind of implied that you have to deal with, even though it's not that important. There's just such an ASAP culture all over the world, but in the US in particular, where everyone thinks that it's their right to have access to everyone else immediately, all the time. And I think that's just incredibly corrosive. And I think in some ways, it's just getting worse, right? Like, mobile phones is one thing. The rise of chat applications in the workplace is another. There's a lot of new pressures.

• 1:46:47Speaker 02

  Bombarding us with interruptions all the time. And if there's one thing I've found is tranquility and flow is not compatible with interruptions.

• 1:46:57Tim Ferriss?

  No.

• 1:46:57Speaker 02

  If your day is chopped up and into tiny work moments of forty minutes here and an hour and twenty there, you will get nothing interesting done. You can get routine work done. You can't get interesting creative work done. The only time I make progress of any material kind on anything that has ended up mattering, really on the creative side of the company, has been when I've had large stretches of uninterrupted time. That means no chat. It means no phone buzzing. It means none of these interruptions. I just need two, three, four hours to really sink your teeth in, scratch deep enough on the problem where you can really truly understand it and then make progress on it. And we've just made it almost impossibly hard these days.

• 1:47:41Speaker 02

  And in many ways, we're making it harder and harder. Like the number of unread counters, the most apps shipped with, the default settings for blasting everyone all the time, the new expectation that you have to hang out in the chat room and respond to every meme within two minutes. It's terrible. It's just absurd in many ways, which, by the way, is another great book on philosophy in the current age that I'm, I'm reading right now. Michael Foley, The Age of Absurdity, that draws on a lot of these things we've talked about, Stoicism included, and on this current and accelerating culture of just constant interruption and quote unquote multitasking, which it really isn't. It's task switching. I think it's just terrible and we gotta do something to push back.

• 1:48:25Tim Ferriss?

  No, I agree. And I think it has to start at a personal level, right? Making decisions like you have in creating these blocks of time. Do you schedule those on a weekly, monthly, quarterly basis? How do you create that time or how do you schedule it?

• 1:48:40Speaker 02

  I try to have it every day. I I get that question from people all the time where they like, oh, how do you get so much done? And I look at them sometimes in bewilderment and I go like, I don't actually feel like I'm getting that much done. I just happen to configure my life and my business in such a way that most of the time I have long uninterrupted stretches of time. And when you every day can get like a three hour block or whatever, you just get a lot of stuff done and it doesn't feel like it. What feels Well, it doesn't feel rushed. It it looks impossible when if your day is this kind of standard corporate day where your your day is just chopped up into these tiny moments. You're exhausted at the end of the day and you're like you feel like you didn't get a good day's work and you can look at someone else and like,

• 1:49:24Speaker 02

  how did they get all that done? How did they create and maintain Ruby on Rails? How did they keep Basecamp running with the millions of people that they have using it with that few people on board? How did they do all these things? And we go like, I at least go oftentimes.

• 1:49:41Speaker 02

  I don't know what we're looking at. We can't be looking at the same thing. It doesn't feel stressful to me. I work forty hours or less sometimes in the summer when we do Friday's office, we used to call it. Now we just call it the four day work week. During the summer, we work like thirty two hours a week and we still get a bunch of stuff done. So it's absolutely possible. It's how you configure and squeeze out the quality of time, not the amount of time. It's not about being eight hours in an office. It's about increasing the quality of the hours that you spend.

• 1:50:12Speaker 02

  And most people just produce really crappy quality, really shitty hours. They have eight of them, but they're completely soiled and spoiled. Versus if you just have four of them that are in pristine, great condition, you'll run laps around the person who sits with four or eight shitty hours.

• 1:50:34Tim Ferriss?

  This is, this is part of the reason why I almost never agree to let journalists follow me for any piece because it would be so boring. And the reason I bring it up is that people might have this image of me like it's kind of like extreme snowboarding meets Girls Gone Wild meets, I don't know, rock climbing like 24/7. And the reality is, I feel like I spend most of my time staring off into space, but I, I do block out, I try to block out the first three to four hours of each day for completely non-reactive activities. Right? And that's it. And, and I was thinking about this yesterday, in fact, because I had a day yesterday where I was like, I got to the end of the day and I was like, I don't really think I got anything done today.

• 1:51:17Tim Ferriss?

  It doesn't particularly bother me, but I was just observing it. And I thought to myself, well, I, the good news is if I have those blocks of time and this may sound odd, but it's like, if I have those uninterrupted blocks of time and this is important, I'm focusing on the one or two force multipliers, right? The one or two things that are really going to make everything else easier or relevant. I only really need two days a week where I get my shit done properly and it creates the illusion of having done a ton of other things because I'm hitting the right dominos in the right orders.

• 1:51:51Speaker 02

  I, I have that feeling all the time. I have days all the time where I feel like, really, there wasn't that much in this day, but I look at it on a timeline of like two weeks and I often go like, oh, wow. I'm very happy with that. And look on a timeline of, for example, what we got done at the company in a year. Like we just, we released the Basecamp 3 and all new version of the software last year, a year ago, right? And Jason just wrote up a summary of all the things we've worked on this year. And I go like, wait a minute, that's actually incredible. Like, how did we get all that stuff done when each individual week or each individual day, generally speaking, they're not like frantic, crazy, death march rushes, right? But it's just a compound nature of

• 1:52:33Speaker 02

  Good habits, compound nature of tranquility, compound nature of sustained, sustainable progress. It's the same thing as we talked about with the business, right? We have never had a hockey stick business. Basecamp has never been a hockey stick business. It's just been a linear growth business. And if you keep drawing that line out long enough, that's still good. Linear growth is still pretty damn good if you can just keep drawing long enough.

• 1:52:59Tim Ferriss?

  Well, it comes down to your expectations line, right?

• 1:53:01Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:53:01Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, it's, and because you say expectations, not outcomes, govern the happiness, but it also governs a lot more than that. I mean, if, if you, the timeline with, through which as a lens, you look at your progress is really important, right? Because if, if you are making, like a lot of venture-backed startups, I mean, look, I'm, I'm a player and I have been historically a player in that game. So I'm not going to totally slam every aspect of it, but there are quite a few.

• 1:53:30Speaker 02

  That's why I'm here.

• 1:53:30Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that's why you're here. And there, there are, but there are some like mass delusional activities that go on in that world. And one of them is being so focused on the short term that you basically just commit suicide over the long term. And you can do that even if you're a one man show or a one woman show, right? If you're not looking at the two weeks, you're looking at each day. And as a result, you commit to being busy instead of actually taking the time to prioritize, which requires that slack, that empty space of having three to four hours in many cases. I wanted to ask you about another piece of yours and the inspiration for it, because the, I don't think the backstory is in there. And it's called, It's Always Your Fault, which

• 1:54:15Tim Ferriss?

  is, I think ties into stoicism pretty well in, in a lot of respects. And it brought to mind a question that I was asked once by a gentleman named Jerry Colonna, who's a coach of sorts at this point. I mean, he does a lot more than that, but he was previously a very successful investor, among other things. And one of the questions he likes to ask is, how are you complicit in creating the conditions you say you don't want? Right? So this, this taking of accountability, what inspired, maybe you can give a sort of a synopsis of the piece, It's Always Your Fault, but also I want to know the inspiration. Like, why did that, why did you write that? Was, what prompted that?

• 1:54:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a, it's a good question. I think one of the

• 1:55:03Speaker 02

  Things I've always tried to do, and we talked about this in multiple domains, is to look at situations as systems, as feedback loops. And it's always your fault is recognizing that you're part of all systems. All, well, it's kind of like a truism, right? Like, you're part of all the systems you're part of. So at Basecamp, for example, I am in some way part of everything that goes on. Whether I'm involved in a project or not involved in the project, I set up some of the outlines, I set up some of the frameworks, I helped create some of the culture that led to what happened. Um, it's one of the things I keep trying to hammer into race teams as well. Uh, race teams, a lot of times, they, they love these things of like, oh yeah, just happened.

• 1:55:46Speaker 02

  I mean, you, I mean, it's just a bad luck, right? That's what people say, bad luck. And sometimes you have bad luck, and bad luck generally means like there's a very low percent chance of something going wrong, and it went wrong anyway. That's at least, I think, a fair definition of bad luck. A lot of people use bad luck as there was a great chance of this going wrong, and it went wrong, and that sucks. You know what? That's not bad luck. That is bad

• 1:56:11Tim Ferriss?

  Bad planning.

• 1:56:12Speaker 02

  That bad planning, bad design, bad, all sorts of things, that's your fault. And if you just write it off as bad luck, you're in the short term escaping some pain of accepting your complicity, as you said, in the outcomes, but you're also not learning anything. And if you're not learning anything, how are you gonna make anything better? How are you gonna prevent the quote unquote "bad luck" from happening next time? That is just one of the things I cannot take, I cannot stand for. Like, I am all about, we make mistakes and that happens, but when I make the same mistake twice, that is one of the most painful experiences that I go through. And that has happened, uh, enough

• 1:56:57Speaker 02

  in both company and, and personal life, where I just like, wait a minute, this situation seems familiar. How did I get myself into this? Do you know what? This is my fault. This is my fault for putting myself into this situation. It's my fault for reinforcing the dynamics of this situation. It's my fault for enabling this situation, even when it's not technically my fault. Like, let's say something breaks on the car because someone didn't set up in, in the right way. That's not, I mean, I didn't do it, right? Like, I didn't swing that wrench, but it's my fault for, let's say, Getting on a team that doesn't have the budget that they need to have to do this, to not emphasizing the value and insisting on the stability of a team,

• 1:57:41Speaker 02

  or of the people who are on the team, not doing enough work on debriefs and post-modems of trying to figure out what's the root cause of our problems. It's always my fault. There's always some complicity in any situation where I feel like, "Oh, that bad luck affected me." My fault. And it's just so much more actionable. That's one of the things that I like. I like things that are actionable, where I can actually do something, change something, act in a different way, where now I'm better. We're better. We've learned something. We moved forward, right? And we will make new mistakes, and as long as they are novel, that's fine. Just let's not make the same mistakes over and over again. I cannot stand repeating myself.

• 1:58:26Speaker 02

  I remember in the days before version control, before Git and CVS and subversions and so on, I would sometimes overwrite my files, right? I would have spent four hours on a piece of code, and then I would make a mistake and I would delete the file. I knew of nothing worse than having to redo that work. It was so physically painful to me that I can remember several features of both Basecamp and earlier systems I worked on, where I had a working feature, and I somehow killed it, and I just never made it again. I simply could not stand to redo the work again. So that is carried over, and it's just even amplified with mistakes, because mistakes are just extra painful, right?

• 1:59:10Speaker 02

  And these mistakes, especially as a company the size of Basecamp, like, I'm not just responsible for my own mistake, I'm responsible for everyone else's mistake. And I need to learn every single time that happens, and change the system, change the dynamic, change the flow of the feedback loop, change the inputs, change the configuration of how things are installed in such a way that it's not like, "Oh, let's prevent this from ever happening again," because I think that often leads you down a path of an overreaction. But still, just considering the whole system, considering you're part of it, not writing things up to bad luck. I mean, you hear that a lot in racing. I don't hear that a lot at Basecamp, and I think perhaps in part just because every single time someone have brought that up,

• 1:59:54Speaker 02

  A weakness, kind of perhaps, lost my cool a little bit on that, which in itself is a failure that you should learn from and correct from and so forth. It's certainly not bad luck, but yeah, I just, I can't take it. And we gotta accept that responsibility and we gotta do it all. The closer you are to the system, for example, I tweet a fair amount about politics and I tweet mostly about US politics. Why do I tweet about US politics and not about the politics of, I don't know, Iran or Georgia or Russia or something else? Well, partly because I've paid millions in taxes, so I kind of have a vested interest in like this particular country. I happen to live here. I happen to have a direct line of influence to some extent at least.

• 2:00:39Speaker 02

  Even though I'm not granted the right to vote, I still feel like this is the closest area where I have complicity. I have complicity in these actions and I have some chance of kind of affecting that. It's so much easier to just call shit out when there's no personal complicity, right?

• 2:00:58Tim Ferriss?

  For sure.

• 2:00:59Speaker 02

  Like it's the speck in your neighbor's eye and all that stuff. So, yeah.

• 2:01:04Tim Ferriss?

  Do you think your impatience, well, I shouldn't say impatience, your distaste for repeating work is part of what made you a good programmer?

• 2:01:17Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I think it's almost pathological, actually, that I have such an aversion to doing the same thing twice that, I mean, not that it's that unique, I think that lots of programmers have it, that I'll sometimes go overboard in just trying to prevent that from happening again. And that's where I need some restraint of saying like, okay, I've only seen this problem once. I might fear that I'll see it again, but until I actually see it again, let's not overreact here and build some huge honking framework to do it again. But I usually match, one of the things I like the most, actually, in terms of working on open source and on Ruby on Rails, has been pattern matching in the work that I already do. So it's not so much that the thing is exactly the same, but there's a pattern, there's an outline that's similar.

• 2:02:02Speaker 02

  And when I spot those similar outlines, And I come up with an extraction that kind of makes that work go away next time that something has a similar shape and outline. That is really where I hit the jackpot in terms of personal satisfaction with the work. I love just spotting these things where I think to myself, hey, if I had to write Basecamp again from scratch tomorrow, I'd be so much better off because I'd solve all these problems, I'd put all these tools into the toolkit of Basecamp. And this is one of the things with negative visualization where I have this, I don't know, nightmare fantasy, however you want to put it, where like we lose it all, right? I have to do it all over again from scratch. We have to write Basecamp again. It's just me and Jason and whatever. And like, we don't have the 50 people anymore.

• 2:02:47Speaker 02

  We don't have all the money and like, whatever, like, where am I? Can I do it? I can imagine this whole thing. And I've packed this backpack, I gave a talk at the Rails Club, I think last year, about the survival kit that Rails is for me. I think of like, if everything goes wrong and I have to start over from scratch, will I at least have the tools to survive? And that's my mission for Rails and it's always been. If I had to reboot fully, I don't have a staff, I don't have other programmers, I don't have anything, I just have myself. Self-sufficiency, as we talked about at the beginning, has been just such an important driver to the pathological level. And I mean, good things have come out of it and sometimes not so good things come out of it too. I think it's, it's, there are good things to think about, like, how can you rely on and depend on other people?

• 2:03:32Speaker 02

  But hey, I carry that cross and deal with that and just try to maximize the benefits and minimize the drawbacks of it. But one of the benefits have been just this focus on creating truly productive tools that allow tiny teams to do amazing things. Because I want to enable other people who want to do it like we did it, tiny team, no external money, to have a chance to compete. Yeah. Because it didn't used to be that way, right? If you wanted to start a web startup in 95 or whatever and you had to spend 200 grand on Oracle license just to get a database going, like, that was a terrible time to get things going. Now it's never been easier and I just love that.

• 2:04:16Speaker 02

  I mean, it's funny, we're lowering the barriers of entry, which in some sense makes it perhaps harder because there's more people competing, but to me it's just, there's something fairer about that. And I can imagine myself in that situation. I can imagine myself rebooting, doing all the negative visualization and thinking, it's gonna be okay.

• 2:04:35Tim Ferriss?

  No, I mean, I've used Basecamp for the last three book launches and I'm going to be doing so again shortly in about a month and a half. And I'm asked all the time, how many people do you have on your team? And I'm like, ah, one, maybe two really full-time employees, and then the rest are all contracted and everyone's distributed. So it's, it has, I think it's never been easier from the standpoint of having a low barrier to entry. And I find that encouraging because A, if you're not competing, you're not getting better. You should have some type of competition in your life, some type of pressure to improve.

• 2:05:13Tim Ferriss?

  And second, it gives you the opportunity to compete in a game that you can rig, in a sense, because like we were talking about earlier, if you are in the top 20th, like the top decile or even quartile in two or three areas, you can find a way to differentiate yourself. Whereas previously, if the cost entry was mediated primarily by finances, like if you don't have the money, you're fucked, you know? So if you don't have 500 grand to start, to buy or rent the infrastructure you need for that tech startup, like you do not pass go. That's it. You don't have a chance to use those other abilities. But I could go,

• 2:05:55Tim Ferriss?

  go on and on. I wanted to, you mentioned the age of absurdity. Do you have any other favorite philosophers or writers?

• 2:06:04Speaker 02

  Um, oh, a lot. And I'll let's draw on some of the influence we talked about. In terms of Stoicism, I think what really just got me turned on to that originally was sort of an introductory text that summarizes a lot of the work, which is The Guide to a Good Life.

• 2:06:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, Irvine, right?

• 2:06:21Speaker 02

  Yep, which is not source material. And perhaps if I knew, known how approachable the source material was, either Seneca or Elias, then you can, you can also go straight to that. But I just found it a very easy, easy, again, one of those things, as we talked about, what we like, like easy to learn, hard to master. I found The Guide to Good Life, the introductory text, was just an easy way to learn about it and recognize why this resonates. And then I kept pulling on the thread and I kept reading from there.

• 2:06:55Speaker 02

  Let's see, what else? Um, one of the things we haven't talked so much about is, is I became a parent uh four years ago or so, so now I have two boys and

• 2:07:06Speaker 02

  I've tried to treat that as a system too, to some extent of like, how can I become better at simply being a parent and being there for, for the two kids than we have? And um, the work of Alfie Cohen, uh, he has a bunch of really good books. Uh, the one that got me started was Punished by Rewards, which is actually a book all about motivation and how rewards basically don't work in most cases for developing kids or encouraging creative work, or it kind of tackles both everything from students to works to kids. Um, there's also a great book called The Myth of the Spoiled Child, um, which is even more specific about um nurturing and supporting kids and so forth.

• 2:07:51Speaker 02

  Uh, that's been very inspirational. That has then led to, I, I just read Daniel Pink's book Drive, which takes some of those same ideas about motivation and rewards and extrapolate them in a kind of a little bit of, I mean, I like the book, but kind of an obnoxious language of business-y, like everything is business 2.0, this, that and the other thing, uh, which is a little grating, but the core concepts and points are really strong and very influential for how we try to, to run the business, uh, which I'm kind of going just free association here. The um, other book that's called the Turn the Ship Around, which is a wonderful book about a guy, uh, naval, what do you call it, not commander, but admiral or something,

• 2:08:36Speaker 02

  that was running one of the worst performing US nuclear submarines and turned it around to be the best performing US submarine by Infusing his staff with basically saying like they're not waiting for a command. They're saying what they intend to do. It ties into many of the same topics, but it's very actionable and very approachable. I really like that. And we try to use that as aspiration for how we drive projects, motivation and cultivate this idea of manager one at Basecamp, where people are sort of individually both responsible and capable for doing the work and aren't waiting around to get permission.

• 2:09:18Speaker 02

  That's been, that's been great. Another, uh, sort of just to fly all over the map.

• 2:09:26Speaker 02

  Once I got interested in, in reading more about philosophy, I also got more interested in reading about sort of, uh, political science and the development of countries and authorities and so forth. There's a fantastic, uh, two-part books called, uh, Origins of Political Order by Fukuyama, I think is his name. And the, uh, something about political decay, which traces back to nation-states all the way back to, uh, 4,000 years B.C. and goes through all the case studies of, uh, the rise of China and, and so forth. And it's just a really interesting way of putting current events into a larger perspective.

• 2:10:09Speaker 02

  I think sometimes it's easy to freak out about things like the current election or whatever and like, oh, we're in a completely unique timeframe and like all these challenges and so forth are, are you new and unique? And, and no, they're not, right?

• 2:10:22Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 2:10:22Speaker 02

  History, uh, if not repeats and rhymes. And if you know the pattern, then it's both easier to cope because you go like, this is not a unique punishment on me that we live through these times. People grappled with the same issues 2,000 years ago, 4,000 years ago, since pretty much the dawn of civilization. But it also gives you some idea of seeing the arc of time and seeing trends and seeing which way things point. And I think that's been, uh, very helpful. So I really like that.

• 2:10:56Tim Ferriss?

  And as a parent, just to return to that, because quite a few people asked about this. Are there particular ways that you quantify or assess whether you are being a good father or parent? And/or are there mistakes you think that are very common among parents, aside from the over rewarding? Maybe they

• 2:11:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So I think I try to be quite direct. Like, my oldest son is now almost four years old. And since he was at least two, he could actually tell me what he liked and he didn't like. And I know that that sounds like an overly permissive thing. Oh, you just have this kid commanding your parents around. But I think that's a stereotype, a cutout board that people use to excuse just forcing their will on little people who can't really do anything about it. And that's one of the main things that I've sort of tried to just constantly put me, myself in the shoes of my four-year-old boy. Right? If I was in his shoes right now with his pressures and so on, what would I think would

• 2:12:06Speaker 02

  be a reasonable course of action? And of course, it's not a perfect transplantation, but I found that a lot of people, I don't know, they have a lot of, I mean, all functional parents love their kids, right? But that doesn't mean they always have empathy with their kids. And it certainly doesn't mean that they always act on that empathy for their kids. I think there's a lot of, it's not helicopter parenting thing, it's overprotecting in things that are convenient for the parent. That, oh, it'd actually be great for me right now if you did these things, and then I'll couch it in

• 2:12:43Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 2:12:44Speaker 02

  Language and justification as, oh, I'm doing what's best for you.

• 2:12:46Tim Ferriss?

  And I'll rationalize

• 2:12:47Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 2:12:48Tim Ferriss?

  The convenience for myself.

• 2:12:49Speaker 02

  Yes. And like, oh, it's best for me right now if you do what I say. Yeah, of course, that's best for you. That doesn't mean that's best for the kid. The other thing, a trend that I've been sort of Just alarmed about is this notion of basically criminalizing independence and especially in the US, um, this war on kids basically being by themselves or doing anything that even looks remotely dangerous that we've been at such a, someone could get hurt, which by the way is a topic of another good book, um, on this topic of, of parenting and, and letting kids, um, kind of free roam a little more. Um, I think that we all have these romanticized

• 2:13:34Speaker 02

  versions of, oh, when I grew up, everything was wonderful and blah, blah, blah, which I don't ascribe to that. And I don't ascribe to like, oh, everything is terrible now just because like I'm older and whatever, right? But I think there is a sense, at least coming from Denmark, that, um, letting kids run risks and letting kids hurt themselves and letting kids learn the things they need to learn through personal experience, I think is so much more effective than trying to be a ta- parent that tells your kids what's right for them. So just take one simple example. Sometimes like your kid doesn't want to eat the things that they're supposed to eat, right? Like they just want to eat candy all day. Well, you can tell them, if you eat all that candy, you're going to get a stomach

• 2:14:19Speaker 02

  ache, right? Or, well, you can say that and then you can yank the candy away from the kid and the kid just goes like, you're an asshole, right? You just used force to deprive me of this thing I wanted. Or you can just fucking let your kid eat the bag of candy and get a stomach ache and learn on their own accord that, okay, the next bag of candy, maybe they'll eat that too. Maybe they'll eat the bag of candy after that too. You know what? After the third time, I found, well, sample size two, indirect exposure and sample size somewhat larger and indirect exposure, but at least in my experience and observation of these things, like kids aren't that stupid and they take experiences that they have

• 2:15:00Speaker 02

  and they internalize lessons from them and they do it a whole lot better if you don't try to do the pre-processing for them. If you don't try to basically chew their food for them and say like, oh, this is going to happen if you do that and then prevent them from doing that. Like, that's not a very persuasive technique. Um, so I've tried it perhaps to sometimes an extreme degree to say like, hey, By the way, this is my assessment of the situation. I think this is what's gonna happen. Like, one thing that a lot of people have been freaking out about, screen time, right? You can't have your kid get an iPad and just sit on it for as long as they want, because like, then they're just gonna be addicted to that and they're gonna sit on that eight hours a day.

• 2:15:39Speaker 02

  I don't, first of all, I found that to be categorically untrue with my sample size. Um, but I've also find it to be an unpersuasive argument in the grand scheme of things. I liken it to the article or the experiment of cocaine. I remember that famous experience where they would have cocaine in a bottle for a rat. And sort of the rat would just go over and eat cocaine until the rat died. And everyone went like, see, that's what happens. Like, if anyone tastes cocaine, they'll just eat cocaine until they die. Scientific proof. Then I think in 2005, someone replicated a version of that experience, experiment where they had an outlet of cocaine. And then the rat or the mouse had a bunch of other activities too. There were other mice around, they could go in the wheel, they could drink water, they could do all sorts of other things, right?

• 2:16:24Speaker 02

  Guess what? That mouse didn't just eat cocaine until it died, right? Like, oftentimes, if you think like, oh, my kid would just sit on the couch eight hours a day and just do the iPad, perhaps your alternatives suck.

• 2:16:38Tim Ferriss?

  You're not providing ample, uh, rich environment.

• 2:16:41Speaker 02

  Want to engage, perhaps you don't wanna reach to your kids, perhaps you don't wanna take them anywhere. Perhaps you then just wanna enforce this idyllic version of what you think, oh, they should just play with wooden blocks all day and like, that's really good for them. You know what? Fuck you. I mean, it's just, I find it so lacking in basic understanding and compassion of like, what would you wanna do in that situation? And what then, perhaps more interesting is that I've tried to then say like, there's not really a limit on iPad use. If Colt wants to be on the iPad for eight hours in a day, he'll binge for eight hours. And that has happened, right? Like, that has happened one or two times. Like, gets really into a game or a show or something else and really binges on it.

• 2:17:26Speaker 02

  What happens the next day, he doesn't want anything to do with that iPad. Because you know what? Kids are pretty good at self-regulating, again, sample size too. Um, in my experience that if you have other interesting things and choices and opportunities that they can choose to partake in, they will. And this... Mania of like, oh, iPads are the new devil. It's just, I just find it hilarious. There's a good Twitter account, I forget what it's called, something about like terrorists from the past or something, where we go, they pull out old newspaper clippings and go like, in 1895, people were like, "Books are really terrible. If people just sit all day and read books, then they'll get trapped in their own minds." And then it was like, "Comic books

• 2:18:07Speaker 02

  are terrible," or "Dungeons and Dragons is terrible." And, eh, okay, like, at least there's a pattern of history here, where people decrying new technologies, new forms of entertainments that kids choose to partake in is terrible. It hasn't panned out that well. So perhaps there's a history there to be informed by, and perhaps you don't need to freak the fuck out over the fact that your kid just binges a bit on an iPad. Like, how can you say anything? Like, didn't you just Netflix binge the last time you had a babysitter and thought that was a good time? So...

• 2:18:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, there's hysteria and everybody goes out of style. The question of habits. See, you mentioned a few things, empathy being one of them. I'll give you yet another two-part question, because I seem to be, for whatever reason, too much caffeine maybe on the two-part thread today. But first is, there are a fair number of people who describe you as angry. And so, part one is, do you think of yourself, do you think you're an angry person? Second is, what are the habits that have helped you to develop empathy?

• 2:19:15Tim Ferriss?

  With your children specifically, maybe?

• 2:19:17Speaker 02

  Yep. I think angry is, um, it's a funny word to me, because like, even when I'm going off, like, I generally don't feel angry in the, sometimes I do. Let's be fair here. Sometimes I do feel that, but a lot of the times, I think it comes off like that, where that's not the inner mental state, the inner dialogue that's going in my head, right? Like, I'm just, just processing these things, for example, and going through like, "Hey, this isn't right," or, "I think this is, well, that's a version of the same thing, this is wrong," or whatever. And I'm trying to process this, and I'm trying to set up and decompose the system. And as I'm decomposing the system of, what is it that led to this? I'm getting

• 2:20:01Speaker 02

  pretty fired up, but... Angry to me has this sort of residue effect where someone's just walking around with a grimage on their face and or they're shouting or whatever, which oftentimes when I write perhaps the most indignant tweets, like none of the sorts is going on. So I think it's one of those things where I forget what the novel was, but there's this concept of what you see in a person on the outside is often not the reflection of what's going on in their inner life. Sure. And it's a valuable lesson to compare your own outward profile sometimes and how

• 2:20:43Speaker 02

  you other people see you to how you see yourself. And like, perhaps sometimes if there's a great disconnect, you should change somewhat on one end or the other. But perhaps more so it should teach you some empathy for other people and the fact that they probably live the same experience, right? That there's a difference between the inner and the outer of the life. But another part of it too is sometimes things are just a release for me too. Like, I don't have like things I walk around with a lot of anxiety about. I try to discharge sort of negative energy or whatever. And sometimes perhaps I should just shout into a pillow. But unfortunately, this invention of things like Twitter and so on is has become

• 2:21:26Speaker 02

  a pillow for a lot of people, including me at times. When did you when did you when did you sign up for Twitter? Yeah. I actually, it's funny because I totally didn't get Twitter when it got started. I got on the first beta because they were using Ruby and Rails and I knew some of the people who worked on the very first version and invited me to it. And back then it was like an SMS thing mainly. Sure, I remember. I don't understand this, like what my friends are supposed to say where they're going and so on. So anyway, I didn't get it for like the first two years and I didn't really get into it until, what is it, oh nine or whenever it was that a little while after it got launched. But then I totally got addicted to it, of course, right? Because first, it is this pillow and.

• 2:22:10Speaker 02

  What's funny is sometimes it's that's therapeutic, right? The pillow just for yourself, even if no one was listening.

• 2:22:17Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, sure, yeah.

• 2:22:18Speaker 02

  Well, now I have like, I don't know.

• 2:22:21Tim Ferriss?

  Millions of pillows.

• 2:22:22Speaker 02

  I have quite a few people who find that interesting and I can understand that because I listen to other people's pillows too. And some of my favorite accounts are other people's pillows where they're just screaming into it. And sometimes like it's just anger and for the best accounts, of course, it's more than just anger. It's insightful commentary on things that should be better, right? Like, let's not make the same mistakes again, or let's analyze the system and so on and so forth. So I absolutely adore Twitter in terms of personal therapy and the way it allows me to watch the therapy of others.

• 2:22:58Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I was just thinking, maybe I should change my Twitter bio to, you know, screaming into the pillow since 2009. And if you don't follow Patton Oswalt, he is a comedian and brilliant Twitter account. I mean, very insightful commentary, but hilarious at the same time. Lots of screaming into the pillow stuff, very, very high caliber.

• 2:23:21Speaker 02

  I wish I could add that spice to the mix that I was also really funny because sometimes it is just loud voices into the pillow.

• 2:23:29Tim Ferriss?

  And

• 2:23:30Speaker 02

  That's not always a blessing to listen to. And I know, for example, Jason Freed, my business partner, for quite a long time, he disconnected from Twitter. And I could totally understand that. I can totally understand that certain people have a disposition where listening to people shout into pillows all day long is not a great way for them to spend their time. I don't know why, but it doesn't affect me in that negative way. Like, I can watch a lot of pretty negative shit going on, but if I feel like there's kernels of truth and there's insight in that, it doesn't, it doesn't transport. Like, I don't sit in steam and get really angry, angry and ruin my night over it. That's at least pretty rare, I'd say.

• 2:24:08Tim Ferriss?

  What, just to jump to the habits? Because it's, I think a lot of parents have the best of intentions. They read books, they have Maybe they even have some great first principles, but it doesn't make, it doesn't cross the chasm from an abstract sentence in their head to regular practice. How do you do that?

• 2:24:30Speaker 02

  So I think perhaps one of the best practices we have is just about winding down for, for the evening and then always ending up like, I often put Colt to sleep now and Jamie, my wife will put Dash, our younger boy, to sleep. And I just get to spend like, I don't know, an hour and a half, two hours from like dinner through reading books, through taking a bath or whatever at night. And it's really a lovely ritual to have just those tasks. Okay, we'll fight a little over, not even fight, I'll try all sorts of rational arguments for why he should brush his teeth and they'll all fail. And then I'll come up with some funny story of like,

• 2:25:12Speaker 02

  why we need to brush teeth on the whale or something. And then all of a sudden like brushing teeth is the greatest thing ever. That was just a replay from last night. Like we'll read the same books again or whatever. And just having that consistency in that pattern of it is just really nice. And I think on top of that, the privilege of working from home affords me things like, I take him to school most mornings and yeah, that means I start a little later. And so what? And I work a little later too. And it also means I'm here when he comes home from school and so forth. It's just, I feel like I'm very mindful of thinking of things like,

• 2:25:54Speaker 02

  life is long enough. Not life is too short, because I think that's when you're living it wrong. Life is long enough. And if I pay attention, if I do my negative visualization, and if I truly make the hours count with Colt, with Dash, with the family, then I'll be happy when it's over. Because I do negative visualization on that all the time. Like I have a fantastic time right now where I have an almost four year old who really enjoys spending time with me, at least most of the time when he doesn't call me a stupid idiot or doesn't want to see me again.

• 2:26:29Speaker 02

  Hopefully, thankfully, it doesn't last that long at the time, but of course lasts, it happens all the time too. But I also look and think like in 10 years, that, that just won't be true. There's just, there's no version of reality, well, healthy version of reality, where, where that happens in the same way when he's 14. Like then he's, that's over, right? So I will make sure that the next ten years or whatever, where we go through this period where that isn't true and we have this kind of relationship that we have now, um, which is sort of very high intensity and many hours and so on, that's gonna count. And I'll be happy on the other side. And then I can enjoy the other part of it, right? Then when he becomes a, um, a teenager

• 2:27:11Speaker 02

  and yells at me perhaps even more and in even more pointed ways, um, I can appreciate that too, right? Someone finding their independence and so forth. And that could be a chapter and I can appreciate that too. Because I look back on, I've just turned thirty seven, um, and I look back at my thirties or better part of that is done and my twenties are certainly long gone. And I look back at those periods and think like, I got the most out of that. Well, not the most, because it's not an optimization. I got good out of that. I do not, there are no regrets here. I don't regret just spending my twenties just locked in a room, working on some piece of software all the time, because that's not how it happened, right? Like, I set up in such a way that I can live through my twenties,

• 2:27:55Speaker 02

  my thirties, hopefully then my forties and my fifties and whatever. And then I can come and arrive and be eighty-five or ninety and say, I lived a good life. And it's okay that that's at the end. And that's it. That's what we're here for.

• 2:28:10Tim Ferriss?

  When, uh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna jump into, if you have the time, I'd love to go through some, some rapid fire questions. They don't, they don't have to be rapid fire answers at all. But when you think of the word successful or hear the word successful, who's the first person who comes to mind and why? Or who comes to mind?

• 2:28:30Speaker 02

  Um, there's a bunch of questions or names that comes to mind. One that's kind of tri- is my, is my mom. Um, and the reason I say that is... She is such an upbeat, happy outlooker. Like, she is the perfect unknowing Stoic. She's actually a Catholic. But I think she's exceptionally good at many Stoic principles of tranquility and so on, and dealing with sort of adversity of life in a way where, like, she's incredibly happy with very first-order principles, like the best things in life, and doesn't care at all about the second-best things in life. And that's definitely an inspiration. But I met many other people along the way

• 2:29:15Speaker 02

  who aren't successful in any meaningful, objective term from the outside of someone looking at either the job they have or the money that they make, or the house they live in, or the clothes they wear, or any other things of that kind. And they just have an inner life, a mental life, that where I just go like, whoa, I'm jealous. Like, I feel like I'm doing pretty good on that scale, and I've certainly met people, friends, where I'd still go like, you're really rocking it, aren't you? When you mean, when you say internal life, what do you mean by that? I mean that they have that sense of tranquility, right?

• 2:29:55Speaker 02

  They've arrived at a point of like, wow, you have an amazing amount of tranquility and calm in your life, given the fact that in some cases, like, you face some real adversities, right? It's just impressive to me. And, I mean, that doesn't, it's not to say that that doesn't happen on the other end too, that someone who does have outward success can also have that. I've just found that there's basically no correlation that I've found. Yeah, no, I agree. People have the best, most tranquil inner lives and contentness. Like, there's no correlation to where they are in that outward status. Some of them are. Some of them have made all sorts of money and whatever, and some of them have made none of the sort,

• 2:30:39Speaker 02

  and some of them have made a little of it, and everything in between, and I've been able to find no correlation there. So I'm still sort of searching for what that is. But at least for me, getting conscious about that fact and being diligent about having a philosophy of life, having a framework and working on these things. I mean, that has made a difference to me. So maybe that's also, I mean, I should probably inquiry more about this because I find it endlessly fascinating, especially since you can't find that statistically correlation like, oh, it's this one thing that they do. No, it's all inside the head.

• 2:31:15Tim Ferriss?

  Is there anyone who, to counterbalance the critiques that you've had of, say, Silicon Valley and the venture-backed startup game, is there anyone in the business world you would really like to spend, you really respect and would like to spend more time with, or just spend time with? You're like, you know what? That person is either fascinating or doing it right, seems to be doing it right. I want to spend more time or learn from that person.

• 2:31:45Speaker 02

  Good question. One of the early business idols that I have that I'd still love to meet, I heard he just mentioned Basecamp in something unrelated, which made me all sort of fanboy flutter, was Ricardo Semler.

• 2:32:00Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah, from SEMCO in Brazil.

• 2:32:03Speaker 02

  He wrote a fantastic book called Maverick that was a great inspiration to me and I know to Jason as well.

• 2:32:12Tim Ferriss?

  To me as well.

• 2:32:13Speaker 02

  Giving the confidence of like, Jesus, if this guy with 8,000 employees running

• 2:32:20Speaker 02

  industrial company producing pumps for oil tanks can be this radical and this incisive about how to design a company, like surely we as a software company with no fixed assets in the 21st century can be just a little more radical than what we think is possible, right? So I think that that, Ricardo Semler is definitely high on that list. Who else? In terms of a larger-than-life persona, I've always had sort of a soft spot for Richard Branson. I know that like, it's hard to know like what's actually caricature and myth

• 2:33:02Speaker 02

  and whatever once you get at that level, but absolutely fascinating character. Warren Buffett, I know we're kind of sort of just going through a highlight reel that's kind of just easy, like, oh, yeah, I wish I'd also sat down with Steve Jobs when he was live. Okay.

• 2:33:17Tim Ferriss?

  Well, you started with Ricardo Semler. I bet a lot of people don't know who he is.

• 2:33:21Speaker 02

  So, but yeah, I think those are.

• 2:33:26Speaker 02

  Those are some of the characters that that I'd love to meet. But the thing is, what I've found in in a number of cases were, and I'm sure this goes for me too, on the episode and like when you meet your heroes, then sometimes it's better just to have the idealized version.

• 2:33:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I agree.

• 2:33:44Speaker 02

  That you took away when you read their book, or saw their talks, or listened to their podcast, or did anything else like that. I've at least found that it's been a rare moment where I've met someone and where then exceeded that and went above that.

• 2:34:01Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I would say that A, that's true, and B, I used to think that was because they were flawed in some way that, because I would meet the heroes with clay feet, as they say, right? And then I realized, I thought maybe it was because they're flawed in some way that wasn't portrayed, or wasn't reflected in how they portray themselves. And then I realized, you know what? It actually relates to your point about expectations and why you were unhappy coming in second place, which is silly in retrospect, but you came into it, or most people come into it, let's say, having read a book or listened to a podcast, which is really the highlight reel of that person. So then you meet

• 2:34:44Tim Ferriss?

  them and you're like, wait a second, I thought all 90 minutes was going to be like the fucking 60 second trailer. What is this bullshit? And then you're like, oh, wait, it's a human being too. And

• 2:34:53Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 2:34:55Tim Ferriss?

  And it's, you know, I think about this sometimes when it's like, I'll have, I had this guy come up to me, this happens surprisingly often, which is part of the reason why I stopped investing in startups. But where I'll be like in a bathroom at an airport and some like 22 year old startup founder will come up and start like breathing on my neck, pitching a startup right behind my head. And I, and I clearly not the best time. It could be the most amazing pitch mankind has ever heard, not the best time. And on top of that, I'm probably running to a flight. So I'm like, you know what? I'd love to talk, but number one, you're breathing on my neck, making me uncomfortable. Number two, I have to run to my flight and I kind of run off and they're like, wow, Tim Ferriss is such a dick. I had no idea. And like forever, that experience will have

• 2:35:35Tim Ferriss?

  contaminated whatever view they might have had of me. So yes, I mean, I think there's always a risk in meeting your heroes.

• 2:35:43Speaker 02

  And I think it's exactly that point that someone who reads rework or whatever, we get a fair amount of email, often very flattering, right? And it's really great. It's great that someone read sort of the highlight reel of 10 years of thinking, right? And then sometimes I get the follow-up question of like, oh, can you then tell me like, what's the one thing you'd like for like a startup founder to do or something? Like, dude, you just read my highlight reel. You think like I'm on the spot gonna come up with something brilliant? Like, that's just not how material works, right? Like, it's like walking up to a comedian like, hey, say something funny.

• 2:36:22Speaker 02

  It's just like, you can't just walk up to someone and like, oh, be brilliant, please. Can you be brilliant for me for like 30 seconds on command right here? Like, most people just, most brilliant people aren't brilliant most of the time, right? It takes a long time to to develop the material and develop the thinking and so forth. And when they put it out, like, that's it. Like, that's the best stuff. The best stuff isn't hidden somewhere else. I guarantee you, if I had a ton of other super brilliant things sitting in the back of my head, I'd publish them, right? Like, they aren't just sitting there waiting, oh, they're just waiting for this guy to write me and say like, hey, do you have something brilliant to say about this one specific thing?

• 2:37:04Speaker 02

  And so I get how people sometimes write me and I'll write back and like, I'm sure they're disappointed, right? Because it wasn't brilliant. All they saw was this condensed little version of it. And I think about it in the same ways that like startup or comedians, they go on the club circuit and they work for years to come up with enough to fill an HBO special, right?

• 2:37:28Speaker 02

  All the stuff in between just wasn't funny, dude. Like, they develop, I don't know, 30 minutes of material and they probably spent 300 or 3,000 hours of shitty material to get there. No one has killer shots all the time.

• 2:37:43Tim Ferriss?

  That's a part of the reason I love to go to, I enjoy standup comedy, but I love to go to small venues where well-known comedians are working on their material because you see half of it bomb and they have a little notebook and they take notes on it and I love watching that. If people listening have never seen that process, there is documentary called Comedian that tracks Jerry Seinfeld and another up-and-comer as they are working the circuit and as Jerry's working on new material and you see Seinfeld bomb, I mean crickets and it's reassuring and I also think realistic to check that out and it informs a lot of other areas. Speaking of documentaries, do you have any favorite documentaries or movies?

• 2:38:30Speaker 02

  Ah, let's see. I like The Big Short. I had read the book already. That was a good one. Let's see, what else? I just saw, what was it called? A montage of heck about Nirvana guy, which was interesting too. The funny thing is with kids, I don't know what it is, there's like a cutoff at about an hour where like, we can devour TV shows, no problem, because they fit within the hour and like, that's good. But like a movie that's two hours often feels like, oh, that's impossible. Like, we'd have to get like, have to get a babysitter, like, it's gotta be on a Saturday, like, it's gotta be this special thing because it's not that often that you get like the two-hour stretch to fit into your life versus

• 2:39:14Speaker 02

  the TV show like of one hour like fits perfectly for me. Which is why when it comes to nonfiction stuff, I love catching sort of, again, the highlight reels, like Bill Maher and his New Rules segments, I find to be some of the most, he's wrong on a lot of things as most people are and I mean, he's very right on a lot of things, which then when you disagree with him, makes it feel like he's that much more wrong on the things that he's, you disagree with him, which happens with a lot of people, I'm sure lots of people, I get this all the time on tweets, I get these backhanded compliments, like, I usually think that D H is an idiot, but like, hey, this one thing was really great.

• 2:39:53Speaker 02

  Like without realizing that, you know what, like, there's a lot of people kind of have that emotion about just different topics, right? So maybe like no one is just that brilliant all the time. And if they say something you find really spot on and insightful when they talk about another topic where you aren't in agreement, like it's gonna sting just as hard the other way.

• 2:40:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know if that was, that was a good answer. I find more that, more than documentaries. What I sometimes get a little, I get a little impatient with documentaries because I kind of find like, the point they're trying to make could be made in like 10 minutes.

• 2:40:31Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 2:40:31Speaker 02

  And we're stretching it to an hour and forty five with pictures. And unless those pictures are amazing, um, there's a lot of other things I'd rather do. I'd rather watch Game of Thrones and then spend the other forty five minutes reading a book where I feel like the compression of ideas and condensation of content is greater. That was one of the inspirations uh for when we wrote rework, that every idea should be expressed preferably in one page, and if it had to, two, and like, I think there's only a handful that's three pages. Because I hate reading business books and watching documentaries where you're like, okay, I got the point.

• 2:41:09Tim Ferriss?

  Right. This is a fifteen minute TED Talk that was bloated into four hundred pages.

• 2:41:13Speaker 02

  Exactly, right. And I have that problem too. Sometimes I'm sure some of my own content where I uh go up on stage and like, hey, I have twenty minutes of content, but my slot is forty five. Shit. Uh, all right, let's just jam it pack of memes and funny pictures and, and try to make some jokes. Uh, I think there's a lot of really important things to know and learn that just, they are as long as they are. And, and that's it. Like, we got some negative feedback on rework sometime like, oh, I really love all these ideas. And like, the person would rattle off like, I don't know how many ideas, right? And they'd say, but the book is really too short. And like, wait a minute. Um, most business books, I, I list like one, two or three things that really stick.

• 2:41:55Speaker 02

  Uh, and they're like four hundred pages and you just rattled off twelve things and, and we got it to you in like two and a half hours? Like, how is that not a win?

• 2:42:03Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I mean, what I think the key there is to respond with, well, you realize the important point is not just ingesting the information, you have to actually do something with that. But what books have you gifted most to other people if you've gifted books?

• 2:42:22Speaker 02

  Hmm, I haven't gifted a lot of books. I made a lot of recommendations for books, but part of it perhaps is that I don't really buy physical books anymore. I'm all Kindle all the time. I love Kindle. And then on top of that, I'm all Audible.

• 2:42:41Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 2:42:42Speaker 02

  So I've been traveling a fair bit since I started racing internationally. And that sometimes includes driving for long periods of time, not on the track, but to and from destinations. And I find Audible is just a wonderful way to read books without reading them, like getting the information of the books while you do. So that's how I'm that Fukuyama book, The Origins of Political Order, 24 hours.

• 2:43:08Tim Ferriss?

  Wow.

• 2:43:09Speaker 02

  Audio book, right?

• 2:43:10Tim Ferriss?

  So if you want to get somebody hooked on audiobooks, which audiobooks might you suggest to them?

• 2:43:15Speaker 02

  The one I'm listening to right now, The Age of Absurdity is really good, not just because I think it's a it's a great book and funny. It's also because the narrator just is perfect. I can just imagine sort of this crutchy old guy sitting in his rocking chair, just rattling off sort of curmudgeon ideas, which is exactly what this book is. But that's also just really funny. And I like that a lot. And then for if you do have sort of the stamina of sort of a major tone, that Origins of Political Order book I thought was was pretty great. Some other books, like, for example, the Drive book, I got that on Audible as well. Didn't love that as much. It's funny how much the

• 2:44:02Speaker 02

  Narrator can really taint or lift up material. And obviously, that's, that's a personal preference, but that's why before I get anything on Audible, I always, even if I know I want the book, I'll listen to the preview and go like, eh, I don't know, maybe, maybe not that guy.

• 2:44:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you need to hear the narrator first.

• 2:44:21Speaker 02

  But outside of even Audible, there's also podcasts, obviously, and my absolute favorite podcast is, well, I have two, but Dan Carlin.

• 2:44:32Tim Ferriss?

  I was gonna ask you if you'd heard Wrath of the Kans on Hardcore History.

• 2:44:35Speaker 02

  Yes, that's what got me hooked on Hardcore History. So Wrath of the Kans, I thought was just absolutely amazing. His work on the Second World War, on Rome, I pretty much devoured most of it and it's all just stellar. But then, of course, that's what got me hooked. And then, then he reeled me in with his Common Sense, which is his political podcast, which I just find absolutely wonderful. It's, we talk about therapeutic experience of Twitter. This is a very therapeutic experience of digesting things like the current election because I find his observations and his viewpoint, not only does it match enough with me that I can go,

• 2:45:17Speaker 02

  yeah, yeah, yeah, but it's also novel enough that I go like, oh, I haven't actually thought about that angle. And that's really the most rewarding kind. Maybe that's not always the most challenging kind, but it's the most rewarding when you both generally agree with the vantage point and you also are continually bombarded with novel takes on, on the, on the subject.

• 2:45:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, Dan's amazing. He's, he's been on the podcast as well. Yeah, I've had him on the show. He.

• 2:45:46Speaker 02

  I gotta go and listen to that.

• 2:45:48Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, he's great. Yeah. I mean, he talked a lot about, as he called it, copywriting your faults. And he talked, for instance, about how he would always get criticized for jumping into the red. He would whisper and then he would talk really loudly and he got chastised forever. Everybody wanted at the time, this very classic kind of deep voiced.

• 2:46:07Speaker 02

  And now it's

• 2:46:08Tim Ferriss?

  radio personality and then it flipped like five or 10 years later. They're like, wow, it's so great that you have this unique personality on air. And he's like, yeah, okay, that liability is now become an asset and great, great story. Really sweetheart of a guy, too. I'm gonna ask a couple of questions that sometimes hit, sometimes don't. They don't always have a ready answer, but what purchase of a hundred dollars or less has most positively impacted your life in recent memory? And it doesn't have to be exactly a hundred or less, but just a, a non-expensive purchase.

• 2:46:42Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:46:43Tim Ferriss?

  That is really positive.

• 2:46:44Speaker 02

  I have the question ready right here.

• 2:46:45Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 2:46:46Speaker 02

  I bought a skateboard about two months ago, which has a funny story in itself. Like I watched Casey Neistat, is that how you say it?

• 2:46:57Tim Ferriss?

  Sure. Yeah, Casey Neistat.

• 2:46:58Speaker 02

  His thing on, on the, those new electrical skateboards.

• 2:47:05Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, the boosted boards?

• 2:47:06Speaker 02

  Boosted boards. That's what it was. And I thought like, oh my God, this is awesome. I need to get a boosted board. And I went on to their site and first I was like, why, what, I can't buy it? There's like a version two out or something. And like, it took forever to find out that just they had a lot of demand and they weren't shipping right now. Anyway, okay, I sign up for them. And then they're like, oh yeah, we'll ship it to you in three months. And I went like, shit, I was excited about skateboard now. So I went online and found a manual version, so to speak. I used to skateboard back in, when I was, when I was a kid, but literally had not skateboarded in 20 years, right?

• 2:47:43Speaker 02

  But I happen to live right now out here in California where I'm just the perfect distance away from lunch that a skateboard is just what I need. Like if I walk, it's like just over 15 minutes and I don't always want to spend like half an hour on

• 2:47:59Tim Ferriss?

  On the road, yeah.

• 2:48:00Speaker 02

  Taking care and back. And it kind of also is too short to kind of take a car. That feels ridiculous, but a skateboard is just perfect. Like I can get there in like five minutes on skateboard. And it's just fun. And the skateboard was like a hundred and twenty bucks or something. And not only is it a lot of fun, it's one of those things where you're like, okay, I haven't skateboarded in twenty years. First of all, like the basics are the same, but the skateboard is still a good bit better. I don't know what happened in in wheel technology and whatever, but the free rolling nature of a good skateboard today is just amazing. Um, they really just don't require that much effort, but still just enough effort that you actually feel good about it because you're like, hey, this is actually kind of exercise and

• 2:48:41Speaker 02

  I'm stretching it to which actually the boosted board wouldn't. So I don't even know if the boosted board when it arrives now I I take it. Maybe I wouldn't even do that, right? I just landed here because and also even better, a skateboard is a hundred bucks and boosted board is, I don't know, a thousand bucks.

• 2:48:54Tim Ferriss?

  It's up there, yeah. I have a boosted board.

• 2:48:55Speaker 02

  It's not exactly the same thing. If you want to commute on a skateboard, um, like you're not going to go ten miles on a on a manual version, at least most people wouldn't. And a boosted board, you realistically could do that. So I'm still kind of curious about it, but I've just loved that skateboard. And it's funny because I'm a pretty big car nut and like I've had the good fortune to enjoy all sorts of cars and have all sorts of opportunities to do that still. But for the last, since I got that skateboard, I've not really touched them. I mean, I work from home and so I don't get a lot of opportunities to otherwise drive. Like I get to take my son to school sometimes in the morning and that's about it. Otherwise I don't need to be anywhere, right?

• 2:49:38Speaker 02

  So lunch was usually the one time where, okay, I'll just go somewhere for lunch, just in part for the fun of it. And now I don't have that, but because I just I skateboard, I just skateboard to lunch every time and it's awesome.

• 2:49:50Tim Ferriss?

  What kind, do you know offhand what kind of skateboard it is?

• 2:49:52Speaker 02

  It's like a short, it's kind of like an oxymoron. It's a short longboard.

• 2:49:57Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, got it.

• 2:49:58Speaker 02

  Made like a longboard in terms of it's not for making tricks and so on. The wheels are relatively large. It is for making.

• 2:50:06Speaker 02

  Actually, not commuting, but it is for transportation more than tricks and so on. But it's not so long that it kind of feels like a huge thing.

• 2:50:12Tim Ferriss?

  Like a surfboard, yeah.

• 2:50:13Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly. I just, I can, I can pick it up. It doesn't weigh very much and it's just perfect for skating over to a, to a restaurant, sitting down, eating a sandwich in the gorgeous Southern California sun and skateboarding back.

• 2:50:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, the boosted board, I, so I, I think that first of all, you've accidentally done some very good prep work if you do decide to use the boosted because you do not want to be, uh, I know a lot of kind of thirty something, forty something year old guys who have not touched a skateboard and they go straight to a boosted board, which is...

• 2:50:46Speaker 02

  And like they fall out and break their arm, right?

• 2:50:48Tim Ferriss?

  You have to be, it's, it's a high powered vehicle. I, I, I have one about fifty feet from where I'm sitting and it's, it's a fantastic device. But what I've realized is I don't have enough self-preservation instinct, nor...

• 2:51:02Speaker 02

  To know, an hour.

• 2:51:04Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. To realize just what I'm doing. Uh, and I also just have a history of, of flash, flashing back to when I was sixteen and trying to do things I did then and ending up hurting myself. So what, the coolest, most surreal use of the boosted board for me is finding a very gradual hill and carving uphill because the danger is really low and it's just the oddest feeling imaginable. It's kind of like surfing up a wave, uh, without having come down at first. It's, it's a very surreal, fun experience. So that's, that's where I would start and definitely do not set it at the fastest setting when you, when you first get it, when you first get it.

• 2:51:48Speaker 02

  I gotta get a helmet too. I, I don't really have a helmet for this small board. I'm not driving where there's really any cars and so forth. But I, I remember I tweeted about a boosted board and some guy was like... Dude, be careful with that. I just cracked my skull.

• 2:52:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you got a helmet as a must have.

• 2:52:02Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:52:04Tim Ferriss?

  What is the, this, now this is, doesn't have to be monetary, but what is the best or most worthwhile investment that you've ever made? Or one that comes to mind, and I'll give you an example. I mean, it could be money, time, energy, any other resource. For instance, I had this woman on my podcast, Amelia Boone, who's the world's most successful obstacle course racer, and she's also a full-time attorney. But she ponied up for her first toughest mother competition. It was like 450 bucks, and that was a big deal at the time. I mean, that was quite an outflux of cash. But that created an entirely new career for herself. So it could be just about any investment of any type of resource. Does, does anything come to mind? Or really?

• 2:52:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. About, so I've been into photography for, I don't know, 10 plus years. But I had an affliction point about three and a half years ago where I bought a Leica digital camera, which is, like, I was into photography, but I wasn't like, oh yeah, let me spend $7,000 on a camera and another $3,000 on a lens. You're like, $10,000 for a camera is fucking ridiculous, right? And

• 2:53:22Speaker 02

  after I bought that camera, I have captured more memories in the last three years of better quality of just feeling like I absolutely aced this shot than anything. Like, I look back, if I took one thing away from, from the last three years that I would feel in 20 years, it would be the Leica. If I hadn't had that and never hadn't dove into that world, which then in turn led me to just care more about photography, more about capturing precious moments, especially with kids, I'd be really sad in 20 years. And I'm like, I'm just, it's one of those things where it, ton of money for, for a camera, especially since you can get good cameras even on your, your phone today.

• 2:54:07Speaker 02

  But the, the difference it's meant to me to capture all those priceless moments on a

• 2:54:15Speaker 02

  Just not just a good camera, but a freaking amazing camera has been priceless. Well, the price was $20,000, but like the value has been.

• 2:54:25Tim Ferriss?

  What did, what is the model, what were the?

• 2:54:28Speaker 02

  The M240.

• 2:54:29Tim Ferriss?

  M240, that's the camera and what is, what is your preferred lens?

• 2:54:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, it's a 50 millimeter Summer Lux 1.4. The good thing about Leica is like, I bought those things new and you don't have to do that. Uh, obviously you can buy them used and save a good chunk and then they kind of retain their value. That unlike a disposable Canon, something that's worth $0 in three years, uh, Canon or Leica lenses actually retain their values pretty well. Part of it, like it's just, the lens has been the same for, I don't know, Leica has been around for a hundred years or something. Well, actually literally a hundred years. I think they just celebrated their hundred year uh birthday. And the lenses for a very long time have been around and can be used on all cameras. So it's a very sort of, I feel like investment kind of thing.

• 2:55:18Speaker 02

  And I've just been incredibly pleased with it. So for anyone who kind of, I thought it was just totally weird. Like the weird thing about the Leica is it doesn't autofocus. You have to focus the lens yourself and it does it through this weird system called a rangefinder, where you look through the viewfinder and you see two images on top of each other. They're ghosted. It sounds absolutely bizarre when you try to explain it and it's hard to explain. And then you have to line these two ghost images up on top of each other. That's when you know the picture's in focus. And I had such a disbelief in that, like I started reading this guy, Steve Huff. I think it's stevehuffphoto.com who's a big Leica guy and got me hooked on this stuff.

• 2:55:57Speaker 02

  I started reading about it and I still couldn't wrap my head about it. I, but I saw his pictures and I saw the package, like it's like a camera. One of the advantages is that it's tiny. Like I had a big honking camera or Canon camera for a while and I ended up never using it because it just, I don't want to carry around a kilo on my back. Versus the Leica is a lot smaller and I just, I couldn't get my head around it. So I went to lensrentals.com and I rented the camera. I think you can do that for like a hundred and 50 bucks or something. And I spent a weekend with it and it was, I won't say it's the same as the Ruby experience because it isn't, but it smells a little like it. It was one of those things where it just like, oh, this is totally awesome. And just that weekend from that.

• 2:56:42Speaker 02

  Lens rental rental, I have some of my favorite pictures of gold. Right away, right? And you just go like, yeah, this is totally worth it.

• 2:56:52Tim Ferriss?

  Are there any resources that have helped you to improve your photography or habits or exercises, anything?

• 2:57:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think um, there's a couple of good books. Um, I think it's called Understanding Exposure.

• 2:57:07Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:08Speaker 02

  That's what it's called. That was probably one of the first primers I read on just like, oh, what are these three angles of ISO and shutter speed and aperture? Getting a basic understanding of that. But then part of it really again came with with the tool, which I mean, I've been interested in photography before at the like, and I I thought I took pretty good pictures, but I just became much more interested in finding out how to do great photos with the like, because I got a couple of hits where I went like, oh, shit, this looks as great as any photographer I could have hired took this photo. Let me really understand that. Um, it's funny, one of the great resources lately has been Instagram.

• 2:57:49Speaker 02

  Instagram has really transitioned for me from when I first started using it and then stopped using it, where it was just everyone posted pictures of like their shitty iPhone pictures of whatever that looked like in two thousand and nine or whenever it premiered. I never thought that was that interesting. And now it's transitioned to it's more of a distribution channel. That fantastic photographers using high end gear use Instagram to distribute their photos, which means it just makes it so easy to follow really good photographers and get super inspired by how they do composition or color or or anything else. And that has led me to just be more interested in developing that eye um, and developing the

• 2:58:29Speaker 02

  sensibilities for what is a good picture, how does composition work, what is white balance, like all these things I sort of kind of knew, but didn't really practice. And then post like I kind of went like, all right, I'm not just going to know what these things are. I'm going to internalize what these things are. And I'm going to figure it out and I'm going to take great photos.

• 2:58:48Tim Ferriss?

  I want to second the recommendation for Understanding Exposure. That's Brian Peterson with a B R Y. That's a great book and it's short. It's 176, beautifully illustrated, lots of great pictures. And it's the, it gives you the toolkit of basic vocabulary and concepts so that you can then be a self-sufficient learner.

• 2:59:11Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:59:12Tim Ferriss?

  So on the subject of beauty, we could talk about photography, but I want to actually throw out a question from our mutual friend Toby, the CEO of Shopify. He said, "D H H is a software crafts person." And the question he wanted me to ask is, "What is beautiful code to you and what makes it so?"

• 2:59:32Speaker 02

  Great question because it is one of those things where you can just keep on pulling on the thread, right? I think there's a bunch of technical things in the same way that you can look at a good picture or a great lap on a racetrack where you can just go like, "Oh, there's the rule of thirds here." And like that places the subject just in this part of the photo and like the white balance is set just so and so on and so forth. With programming, we have these things called pattern languages where you can use to describe sort of aspects of the code and can talk about the different techniques that you use. For me, if I had to name just one, I'd say "composed method," which is this notion of

• 3:00:17Speaker 02

  breaking down a piece of software such that everything within an individual unit, as we call them, "methods" in object-oriented program, is on the same level of abstraction and that it keeps decomposing at the same level of abstraction. So when you're making a whole system, you start at a very high level, telling the machine to do something, right? And then to actually have that done, you have to break that down and break that down and break that down and break that down. And I find that the most effective technique that I have for for doing that is really composing the methods is that we stay at the same level of abstraction. We stay in the same sort of visual style of what the code is. Some code is very mechanical of like, oh, we're adding one to an array or whatever.

• 3:01:00Speaker 02

  Uh, something very machine like and something is very high level as in describing the outcome we're we're searching for like, uh, withdraw from account or something like that, right? Like to redraw at a certain amount from an account, you need to do some mechanical steps. You need to deduct from this one, add to another one, maybe add to an event log, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All these steps. But if you can describe the system in such a way that when you dive in, it's easy to understand, right? Like you don't have to understand everything down to the nut and bulk to understand the system at a high level. That's a very direct uh signal of quality to me that I open up any piece of code in Basecamp and it kind of reads like a great table of contents.

• 3:01:44Speaker 02

  That you dive through, okay, this is what this is the argument they're trying to make. Uh, this is how it breaks down into individual steps. I can dive into any of the particular essays if I want, but I also don't have to, right? Like I can still understand what's happening and what the programmer is trying to do from that concept. So that's one aspect that would on sort of a conceptual level. And there's a bunch of these wonderful patterns that help describe how to conceptually make good code. There's a bunch of principles about um uh low uh coupling and high cohesion. This is some of the sort of the classics. And then there's just sort of sometimes also the visual style, which to me matters greatly as well.

• 3:02:24Speaker 02

  Um, which Ruby just does a really good job at in in the sense that it removes a lot of what we like to call line noise. Like characters you have to add because um that's easier for the system to interpret. So for example, when I started with PHP, I don't know if this is true anymore. Every line had to end with a semicolon. That's how the interpreter knew that like, okay, there's a new instruction coming, right?

• 3:02:50Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm.

• 3:02:50Speaker 02

  There's no semicolons at the end of line in Ruby. And just that simple change cleans things up a bunch. So. What I like to do in Ruby code is to reduce every method or class to the least amount of mechanical noise. That what's left is a pure description of the conceptual work that needs to happen. Maybe that sounds a little floaty, but it's just that there aren't, like, the bolts aren't exposed, right? Like, it's like, um, you're sort of like, we don't use 10 screws and we don't make

• 3:03:32Speaker 02

  them show if five screws can do and we can hide them under sort of a cover, right? And then, not only that, it's not just about making the veneer look good, it's kind of like that quality of the unseen. As you keep unwrapping and unpacking the code and diving deeper into it, scratching the surface ever deeper, it's just turtles all the way down. It keeps doing that all the way through to the final instruction, at least the final instruction that the programmer can see. Once the Ruby interpreter takes over and produces something that becomes machine code, perhaps that's completely impenetrable, but at least the code that the programmer

• 3:04:13Speaker 02

  has to understand, like, it's just like a wonderful rabbit hole that you don't mind falling down through.

• 3:04:20Tim Ferriss?

  And does, does, uh, do elegant, is there any correlation between elegant code and clean prose? If you take someone who's a really, not just a functional coder, like you said, who can get the job done by using gum and Band-Aids, not that, but someone who's an elegant coder in your view, when they, when they then write prose, let's just, let's just for the time being assume they're in English.

• 3:04:47Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:04:48Tim Ferriss?

  Is it also clean? Is it logical and flow well?

• 3:04:51Speaker 02

  That's what I find. I find that there's a high correlation between people who are able, at least in high-level programming languages like Ruby, to produce elegant, beautiful code, and people who are clear thinkers. And if you're a clear thinker, at this level of abstraction, you tend also to be a clear writer. It's not always true, and it's not true for all domains, there are certain, I think, areas of programming that are less about sort of... Juggling conceptual terms and finding just the right word for a class or a method that are more mechanical in nature. And that doesn't take anything away from the skill that it takes to do that. That's not the kind of programming that I'm interested in. That was the kind of programming that I thought I would never be interested in.

• 3:05:34Speaker 02

  The kind of programming that I fell in love with was this high conceptual level. Where it really is a lot more like writing prose and like phrasing and presenting your argument in a logical, methodical manner that's easy and clear to digest for a reader. Because I think at this level of abstraction, and probably at all levels of abstraction, but here more than than other places. We're not writing for the machine. We're writing for your fellow programmer or for yourself in X amount of time from now, right? Again, that's true for all those kinds of programming, but it's even more true the larger the system becomes and the more complex it is. And modern information systems today are quite large, quite complex on all sorts of levels, right?

• 3:06:15Speaker 02

  And we are in a fight to push back against that complexity. The natural state of complexity from a programmer taking a problem that they're trying to solve. And then the first draft is very high. The first draft of anything is shit. That goes for prose, it goes for, I'm sure, well, I don't know, I'm assuming music. It goes for all sorts of creative endeavors is that the first draft, not often that good, right? Like, just like the first try of the joke.

• 3:06:47Speaker 02

  You have to refine it and that's where, that's what I really love. I really love actually just getting something working. Like, that's not the interesting part of me. Being the editor, refining it and improving it until it's as good as it can be. That mode of iteration is just awesome. And that's, that's where I extract all my flow on that. I think it's in that mode that I produce all the code that I'm proud of. It's very, it never happens that I write a piece of code and then I'm instantly proud of that. That's just, it's not how it works. You have to go through the drafts and you have to go through the revisions to get to a place that truly shines.

• 3:07:30Tim Ferriss?

  Now, I, I.

• 3:07:33Tim Ferriss?

  Don't code, but I wonder if it works in the reverse as well. Meaning people who have really, everybody thinks, I shouldn't say everybody. A lot of people think they're good at writing. Very few people are really, really elegant and able to remove the extraneous thoughts and the equivalence of ums and ahs.

• 3:07:54Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:07:56Tim Ferriss?

  The, if you had to pick, or let me rephrase the question.

• 3:08:02Tim Ferriss?

  If you had to pull people who were good at other disciplines to train them to code because you wanted them to learn really quickly or to be able to learn really quickly, who would you pull from? Right? So for instance, if I wanted to make good, I'm just making this up, but like good MMA fighters, but I couldn't pull from wrestling or anything else, who would I choose? I'd probably grab some gymnasts, right?

• 3:08:24Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:08:25Tim Ferriss?

  But because they have these, these attributes that I know will translate quite well. What is that for coding? Like if you could pull from any other discipline or

• 3:08:37Tim Ferriss?

  for say, learning Ruby or Ruby on Rails quickly and you wanted to put together your team who had the highest likelihood of success in a short timeframe, who, who would they be?

• 3:08:47Speaker 02

  I think good journalists.

• 3:08:51Speaker 02

  That's a subclass of good writers, which are focused on sort of uncovering the mystery and the story and explaining it in the simplest terms possible is a something that just at least intellectually appeals to me. I haven't actually seen that

• 3:09:08Speaker 02

  transposed that often. I don't remember actually talking to that many journalists who turned programmers. There's been some, but not that many. But that's sort of like the idealized form, I think, where someone has the clear thinking to really investigate a problem deeply and then also have the writing chops to present that to an audience. What I've seen more have been people coming from other sciences. We've talked about the scientific method. I think that's absolutely. Huge leg up when people who have internalized the scientific method aren't as likely to be the people who are just like, well, there's a bug, like, that's just a computer. That's just how it works. I don't know what's going on.

• 3:09:51Speaker 02

  There's always an explanation. Nothing is magic. Nothing is voodoo. It's just because you don't have the pieces yet. So if you have the discipline of following the scientific method, then you have a leg up in that department, that's for sure. And then at least some share of people who work in in those domains are also really good and clear writers. I think perhaps that's an even better combination of of someone who has the internalized the scientific method uh to a T and and also happened to write things that are digestible for normal humans. Sometimes that's a little hard for people who work in academics. Um, which I, which is what I like about the journalist ac- angle is that like usually that's

• 3:10:33Speaker 02

  more practical, more pragmatic in the sense you're not trying to impress some professor. You're trying to keep the attention of a of a reader who presumably should get something out of this story that they're left with, right? Um, so that's just off the cuff. I've met programmers, though, from all domains that have turned out to be excellent and programmers from all sorts of backgrounds that have turned out to not be so excellent. So I don't know if there's a direct correlation here other to say that perhaps programming of of all this sort of, I don't know even if you can characterize as scientific fields, but programming is very open to people from different walks of life.

• 3:11:15Speaker 02

  I've met people, it's such a wide span of backgrounds that end up doing well in programming that uh I really like that um idea of like uh this is what programmers look like and then you see like all sorts of different people, shapes, sizes, colors, backgrounds, genders, whatever, and uh the machine doesn't care.

• 3:11:38Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 3:11:39Speaker 02

  Right? The machine doesn't care how tall you are or whatever. There's no discrimination in in that sense. I mean. Algorithms and so on encapsulate sometimes human biases and so forth. But in at least in the purest sense of the programmer and the programming language. I think there's just such a discrimination free zone between that direct interface. Then move outside of that. Try to go to Hacker News or sometimes GitHub pull requests and you'll see the all too human side of people interacting, which is full of all the biases and bile and whatever else you'd expect out of humans and programmers are no better, perhaps even worse in some regards in that aspect. So.

• 3:12:24Tim Ferriss?

  So just, just a few more questions. I know we could, we could keep going, but I want to let you get back to your family. The, so just two or three more. If you could have a one gigantic billboard anywhere with anything on it, what would you put on it?

• 3:12:41Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 3:12:42Tim Ferriss?

  That is a non-commercial.

• 3:12:45Speaker 02

  Yep, yep. So in part one message to a lot of people.

• 3:12:54Speaker 02

  Trying to see if, see that, that's kind of like the on the spot kind of people. Like I wish I could just come up with like, just do it. And I was original in, in saying that.

• 3:13:06Speaker 02

  Unfortunately, I don't think I am.

• 3:13:09Tim Ferriss?

  Well, we can take a different direction to get to a similar destination. And that is you mentioned the Coco Chanel quote earlier.

• 3:13:15Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:13:15Tim Ferriss?

  Are there any other quotes or maxims that you think of often or refer to often in your life?

• 3:13:23Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah. Let's try to see if we can find one that's, that's positive because it's funny. Mentioned it like a thing that pops into my eye, mind is that Sinclair quote of like a man can't understand what his salary depends on him not understanding, but that's not exactly a.

• 3:13:42Tim Ferriss?

  Motivational poster for the office.

• 3:13:46Speaker 02

  That go for all, right?

• 3:13:50Speaker 02

  I think I need more time, man.

• 3:13:52Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 3:13:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:13:53Tim Ferriss?

  No, that's fair.

• 3:13:54Speaker 02

  I need to do a full creative on that because you're like, yeah, get this one shot at a poster. Damn well better be good, right? I don't want to just put up a poop emoji or something like that and have a laugh for a second. You're gonna treat this with some sanctity.

• 3:14:07Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, we, but this is, this is, uh, this is a lifelong project. So no, no rush for right now. What advice would you give your, say, 20, 25 year old self? If anything, and if, if, if you do have an answer, what place where you are and what you're doing?

• 3:14:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, uh, the answer I usually have to that is, is kind of like a meta answer or a cop out, but depending on which angle you see it from. And I'd say the answer is that there is no answer. That I find that this seal and, and perhaps I've had that in the past as well, is that you look for this trick. You look for this, like, if I just knew this one thing, everything would be great. If I just somehow had this one event happen or whatever, that people, a lot of people embody too much into this, just this one thing, right? When the answer is, it's all of the things.

• 3:15:08Tim Ferriss?

  Right, and they're, they're interdependent, yeah.

• 3:15:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. It's not only the interdependent, but there's no one thing that's just really gonna turn everything around. Like, it just doesn't, life isn't that simple, unfortunately or fortunately.

• 3:15:23Speaker 02

  Because it also just makes that much more interesting, right? Like, the thread is really deep and you have to keep pulling. Maybe that's the quote we'll use.

• 3:15:29Tim Ferriss?

  Gotta keep.

• 3:15:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, you keep pulling.

• 3:15:32Tim Ferriss?

  Keep pulling the thread. What, what, uh, not, not to interrupt, but maybe a better question is, what habit or habits do you wish you'd developed earlier in your life?

• 3:15:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I hate to be a cop out on that too. One of the things I look back on as I look back on time is I'm trying to, what was it? Jason Bisparn had a good saying about this, about, I think it was Native Americans who, I'm butchering this, but when they were preparing, I think it was like a carpet or something, right? Like an intricate carpet that was sewn, like they left the errors in. Because sort of as a reflection of that, that time has passed and the errors of those ways or how we got to where we are.

• 3:16:24Speaker 02

  So I don't think I would have gotten to where I am. Well, this is kind of a truism in itself too. I wouldn't have got to where I am if I had taken a different path. And I don't know if I want to be somewhere else. Well, actually, I do know. I don't want to be somewhere else. I want to be where I am. Right? So if I want to be where I am, I have to take the path I took to get there. I mean, that's kind of like a Yoda quote.

• 3:16:49Speaker 02

  Complete bullshit, but I think that's actually true. That's why I try not to look back on like anything with regret. Like that's my regret minimization framework is basically to not treat anything as regrets, including regrets.

• 3:17:04Tim Ferriss?

  So on that then, do you have a favorite failure of yours? In other words, is there a failure or an apparent failure that set you up for later success?

• 3:17:14Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, that's good.

• 3:17:19Speaker 02

  Let's see. Well, I tried to, when I was just starting with the university again, I tried to get a job at a at a number of software organizations in Denmark as a student helper, right? And I was so fucking blatantly over ambitious that I blew every interview because I was like, oh yeah, so like we're talking about this entry level programming position like um what possibilities are there for me to basically inflict the overall strategy of the organization? And people go like, what? What the fuck are you talking?

• 3:17:56Tim Ferriss?

  What are you talking about, kid?

• 3:17:57Speaker 02

  You you just, you know, what are you, what are you talking about? You're just here to uh like program this web part or something, right? Like you're not setting any direction for any I T or whatever, right? And of course, I mean, it was a very reasonable reply and I was being completely unreasonable in my request. Um, I'm glad that happened, right? I I'm glad I didn't end up um sort of just taking a job somewhere that I was unemployable for a while at least. Um, until I met up with Jason and I tell we uh started working together as more like peers than a

• 3:18:35Speaker 02

  sort of me being an employee. I I don't think I I would make that, actually, I don't think, I know I would make that well, good of an employee. I I worked at a fair number of places before I ended up working with they with Jason at Basecamp and I I I don't know if I was always seen upon that positively because I kind of would stir shit way too often and uh be perhaps way too critical about things that I didn't have any power or authority to change anyway. Um, which ended up just in a situation that perhaps didn't make things better. Um, so I I'm kind of glad that like it didn't work out, right? Like I, it's funny, I remember uh just yesterday I saw this uh Jack Ma quote, uh the, I think he's CEO of Alibaba in China.

• 3:19:20Speaker 02

  And he said, like, when uh K F C first came to China, they needed to hire thirty five people or something and like thirty six people applied. I was number thirty six. Like, he didn't get the job at K F C. Instead, running the biggest internet company in China, right?

• 3:19:37Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:37Speaker 02

  So sometimes the The failures we have, I'm a big believer of this. The, many of the failures we have are flip side of the strengths we have. And the other side way around too. Some of our best strengths are also some of our greatest failures. And it all, it's all about the context that you happen to put those in. Sometimes you put in a context where all your strengths turn out as just failures and weaknesses. And sometimes you're put in a context where the opposite is true and you really thrive, right? So that's what I, uh, number of times when we've had to say goodbye to someone at, at base camp. I'm always like, this isn't because, like, you can't find somewhere else to be fantastic.

• 3:20:21Speaker 02

  This is because right now in this role, at this time, at this company, like the strengths that you have, they're not showing up as strengths. Um, and I mean, I truly believe that. I don't, that's not just like, oh, let's say something nice to the person who's going out the door. It's, uh, because I've seen it time and again, I've seen it in myself. I've seen myself fail in all sorts of situations for the same reasons that I would later succeed. Um, under whatever definition of success you want to use, at least my own personal definition of success, right? When it came to that. And I traced that all the way back. I remember when I was in high school, I would take great pride in the Fs I got. I got an F in a number of subjects, including math in like senior year.

• 3:21:05Speaker 02

  And I would say like, yeah, I deserve an F. I put in no effort here. I intend to put in no effort. I have shown a F. Um, and then at the same time, I would say, well, that A plus or whatever I just got in this topic. Yeah, I'm really proud of that because I put in the effort. I, and I wanted to do it and I was good at it. And sometimes I'd go like, C, awesome. I put in 2% of the effort and I got C. That's, that's more than fair. You're being generous, sir. Um, so I think that, uh, you really have to look at that. And, and I look at that in public personas too, right? Like you have a lot of people who end up changing either a community or an industry or a country or the world.

• 3:21:48Speaker 02

  And a lot of people will go like, well, that person is crazy or like they're, they're really a bad person in these, all these sorts of ways, right? And you go like, yeah, like most sane people, well adjusted, wouldn't put themselves in this situation.

• 3:22:03Speaker 02

  Most sane, well-adjusted people don't get up on the stage in the way that people who end up changing things do, right? Because they're sane and well-adjusted and like their swings aren't this big, both their positives and the negatives, right? It's kind of like if you, if you look at the curve, like if you want to stay around the medium, like you just, you don't swing that much. But if you want to reach the peak, you also got to take the, the bottom.

• 3:22:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you gotta take the valley.

• 3:22:26Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:22:27Tim Ferriss?

  And then it's all about choosing to be response able. And that's where, I mean, there are so many tools that at least I've found, and it sounds like you've found helpful, like Stoicism and trying to put those into practice so that you can try to get the benefits of that pendulum without

• 3:22:45Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:22:46Tim Ferriss?

  suffering through necessarily.

• 3:22:49Speaker 02

  Which I think at least just being aware, right?

• 3:22:50Tim Ferriss?

  At least being aware.

• 3:22:52Speaker 02

  Like, I know that like, okay, I have strengths in certain areas that they're kind of like genes, they can express themselves in terrible negatives, right? Like sometimes I truly do wish I could just keep my damn mouth shut, right? Like, life would be a lot easier for both me and a whole lot of other people if I could just shut the fuck up. But also, I mean, at least the positive contributions I've made sometimes have come because I can't shut the fuck up, right? So I just, you gotta accept it in, in full honesty that like, okay, the good things come with the bad things.

• 3:23:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 3:23:26Speaker 02

  Like, if you, if you want that, then, and, and that's not justification, it's not that you shouldn't try to work on it. Like, I, I try to work on it and, and then still sometimes you regress to, to your habits and, and your sort of proclivities, but yeah.

• 3:23:42Tim Ferriss?

  It's the self-awareness and, and being able to, like you said, develop that self-awareness at the very least.

• 3:23:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, and put yourself in situations where you express the better side of it more often, right? Like, I don't, for example, like, oh, I have self-awareness that I'm a jerk all the time justifies you being a jerk all the time, right?

• 3:24:00Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 3:24:01Speaker 02

  If you know that there are certain situations that sort of express that part of you, try to not put yourself in those situations as much as possible.

• 3:24:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I mean, it's, I was, I was being interviewed recently and this part didn't make it to print, but I was asked a bunch of short questions and one was, you know, if you had to attribute Your success and to an attribute, what would it be? And I said, impatience. And then they like three, four questions later, they said, what do you think you most need to work on? And I said, impatience.

• 3:24:34Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:24:35Tim Ferriss?

  And what I've, what I've realized about myself is that I'm better at designing systems than I am at hands-on managing people. I just don't have a soft touch. I'm too, ah, I'm too indelicate. And that means I just need to have good systems and then say, hire one person who doesn't require the kid gloves and have them manage people. Fantastic. Then it works out. But if I put myself in circumstances that require a lot of tact and diplomacy, well, it's going to be a shit show.

• 3:25:06Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 3:25:08Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, man. Well, I, this has been really fun to catch up. Where can people learn more about you, learn more about Basecamp? Are there any things or places that you'd like them to check out?

• 3:25:22Speaker 02

  Sure. So as we just talked about, I have that pillow I scream in with some regularity on Twitter. It's at D H H. I'm also at D H H on medium.com where I kind of scream for longer periods of time into the pillow.

• 3:25:39Tim Ferriss?

  Long form screaming.

• 3:25:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, long form screaming. I'm an Instagram at D H H seventy-nine. That's a little more uplifting. I have posted some of my photography and a bunch of other people's photography, a lot about cars and racing and other things I find beautiful and pretty. And then of course, my life's work, Basecamp, it's basecamp.com. Anyone who's trying to sort of get their company organized and put things on the right track and are tired of being stuck in emails and unread counters and chatroom treadmills, should really give that a try. Ruby on Rails, if you're into programming or want to learn how to be a programmer, now has never been a better time. It's never been easier to get started.

• 3:26:27Speaker 02

  Just as hard as ever to become an expert, but it's never been easier to get started. And finally, we have a great podcast at Basecamp called The Distance, thedistance.com. You can find it on iTunes as well, where we profile companies who've been around, stuck around for 30 years or more, as we like to, Jason calls them stay-ups. The easiest thing in business is to start, the hardest thing is to stay. So that's what we aspire to ourselves. Basecamp, through the lineage of 37 sales, has been around for 17 years now. As we've talked about, I've worked on Basecamp itself for like 13 years now, and same with Ruby and Rails. I really believe in staying the distance and going the distance.

• 3:27:11Speaker 02

  Perhaps that's also why I love endurance racing so much. But yeah, I think that's a good summary of the places to find me and my screams in the pillow.

• 3:27:24Tim Ferriss?

  Well, David, thank you so much for the time. There's so many more things I'd love to ask, but this has been a great catch-up. And hopefully, I mean, you've done so much racing, and I know we were exchanging some messages, probably, I guess it was yesterday, and you mentioned that you haven't done yet any rally racing. I think you would love it, so we should definitely make some time for maybe doing a Tim O'Neill in New England or something like that at some point in the future. I think you'd immediately kick my ass, which is, I'm totally okay with, but it's so much fun. I think you'd just have a blast because of, for all the reasons you already enjoy the racing, I think you would love it.

• 3:28:07Tim Ferriss?

  But I want to let you get back to your evening, and thanks for being so generous with your time.

• 3:28:14Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me, man. This was a blast.

• 3:28:16Tim Ferriss?

  And for everybody listening, the show notes, as usual, will include links to everything that David mentioned at the end, and certainly the books and so on resources that he mentioned throughout, we'll dig up as much as possible. So you can find that at fourhourworkweek.com, all spelled out, forward slash podcast. And until next time, and as always, thank you for listening. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found

• 3:29:01Tim Ferriss?

  or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric, as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out. And just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront, and this is a very unique sponsor.

• 3:29:46Tim Ferriss?

  Wealthfront is a massively disruptive, in a good way, set it and forget it investing service led by technologists from places like Apple and world famous investors. It has exploded in popularity in the last two years and they now have more than $2.5 billion under management. In fact, some of my very good friends, investors in Silicon Valley have millions of their own money in Wealthfront. So the question is, why? Why is it so popular? Why is it unique? Because you can get services previously reserved for the ultra wealthy but only pay pennies on the dollar for them. And this is because they use smarter software instead of retail locations, bloated sales teams, etc. And I'll come back to that in a second. I suggest you check out wealthfront.com/tim. Take the risk assessment quiz, which only takes two to five minutes, and they'll show

• 3:30:30Tim Ferriss?

  you for free exactly the portfolio they'd put you in. And if you just want to take their advice, run with it, do it yourself, you can do that. Or, as I would, you can set it and forget it. And here's why. The value of Wealthfront is in the automation of habits and strategies that investors should be using on a regular basis but normally aren't. Great investing is a marathon. Not a sprint and little things that you may or may not be familiar with like automatic tax loss harvesting, rebalancing your portfolio across more than 10 asset classes, and dividend reinvestment add up to very large amounts of money over longer periods of time. Wealthfront, as I mentioned, since it's using software instead of retail locations, etc., can offer all of this at low costs that were previously completely impossible. Right off the bat, you never pay commissions or account fees.

• 3:31:15Tim Ferriss?

  For everything, they charge 0.25% per year on assets above the first 15,000, which is managed for free if you use my link, wealthfront.com/tim. That is less than $5 a month to invest a $30,000 account, for instance. Now, normally, when I have a sponsor on this show, it's because I use them and recommend them. In this case, it's a little different. I don't use Wealthfront yet because I'm not allowed to. Here's the deal. They wanted to sponsor this podcast, but because of SEC regulations, companies that invest your money are not allowed to use client testimonials, so I couldn't be a user and have them on the podcast. But I've been so impressed by Wealthfront that I've invested a significant amount of my own money, at least for me, in the team and the company itself.

• 3:31:58Tim Ferriss?

  So I am an investor and hope to soon use it as a client. Now, back to the recommendation. As a Tim Ferriss Show listener, you'll get $15,000 managed for free if you decide to open an account. But just start with seeing the portfolio that they would suggest for you. Take two minutes, fill out their questionnaire at wealthfront.com/tim. It's fast, it's free, there's no downside that I can think of. This episode is brought to you by Four Sigmatic. I reached out to these Finnish entrepreneurs after a very talented acrobat introduced me to one of their products, which blew my mind in the best way possible. It is mushroom coffee. What on earth is this? Well, it includes chaga mushroom, very powerful antioxidant, considered a superfood.

• 3:32:41Tim Ferriss?

  I was introduced to chaga by Laird Hamilton, the king of big wave surfing of all things. And it includes another mushroom that is considered a nootropic, a smart drug, and this is lion's mane. In the entire packet, you just add it to hot water, tastes like coffee. There is only 40mg of caffeine, so Less than half what you would find in a cup of coffee. So I do not get any jitters. I do not get any acid reflux or any type of stomach burn. And it put me on fire for an entire day. And I only had half of the packet. So this stuff is really amazing. People are always asking me what I use for cognitive enhancement right now. This is the answer. So it is legal. It will not give you visuals. That's something else.

• 3:33:26Tim Ferriss?

  And you can try it right now by going to foursigmatic.com/tim. That is four sigmatic, S I G M A T I C. foursigmatic.com/tim and use the code TIM to get 20% off your first order. If you are in the experimental mindset, I do not think you'll be disappointed. foursigmatic.com/tim.