DHH: How to Build a Profitable Company Without Losing Control

From 50,000 words to 25,000

I have a mild skepticism about my own ability to just talk at length about most topics that I care about, because I remember Getting Real from 2006. The brevity. We were so brief. Most of the chapters in Getting Real are half a page. Some of them are three paragraphs. And I actually have a deep appreciation for our former ability to be that succinct. It wasn't like we were trying to... It was just: here's the distillation of this idea down to these three paragraphs, and that's it.

Now, what's funny about that is when we wrote the later books, we didn't have that straight-from-the-gut brevity. In fact, when we wrote Rework, the initial manuscript that we submitted was, I think, 50,000 words. That was what the publisher got to see, and they were very excited. "Great, this fits. This is just the size of the book." And then Jason and I went through it and cut it in half, and it was down to 25,000 words, and the publisher freaked out. They're like, "We can't publish a business book that looks like this. That looks like a pamphlet." So we had to pad it with spacing and margins and illustrations to get there. But it was really that process, cutting it from 50,000 words to 25,000 words, and taking some essays from two pages down to four paragraphs, that really made it all happen. So I want to retain that ability to distill, and sometimes just being able mechanically to talk for 20 minutes about a topic is not always the best thing.

Obviously, we talked about this at dinner last night. I woke up and my abs were sore because I was laughing so much. But I told you this yesterday: I've been reading your writing for 15 years. And I think brevity is the right thing to optimize for there, getting across your point as succinctly as possible.

Yes. That's true.

But the art of conversation...

It is a different medium.

The best conversations that you've ever had in your life are not, "Oh, yeah, I talked to this guy for five minutes. It's great." It's, "I talked to this guy for five hours."

That's fun, yes.

And so this is why I wanted you on the show immediately, and we've been working, trying to figure this out for a few months together. Dude, I remember watching your Startup School talk at Y Combinator. You probably did it in 2008. And there are lines from that, because you were unfiltered, and I think it's an hour long of just, this is what's in my mind right now, and here's how I think about things, that I still think of 15 years later.

Yes. Yes.

Basecamp in 380 hours

Let me ask you a question. The brevity. You've built so many different products. I lost count of how many of them have made millions, multi-millions in profits, tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions in profits. Do you apply this ruthless edit, like Rick Rubin's idea of the ruthless edit? I started out with ten. I'm going to cut down. I think I need five. No, I'm going to cut all the way down to three. And then be so judicious about what I add back. How do you think about that when you're building products?

It's even more on our minds now than it used to be, and it was always on our mind. Our initial spiel, our tagline, was "Less Software." When we launched Basecamp back in 2004, it was often contrasted with Microsoft Project and other kinds of enterprise-y, heavy tools. And our pitch was always, "It's really good, but one of the reasons why it's really good is it's just less. There are fewer features, there's less to learn, there's less to teach, there's just less, and we focus on making the few things it does do, do very well."

Now, in this new age, where using agents and AI has made it so much easier to implement things, it becomes that much harder to stick to those principles. Because we used to be granted these constraints simply by the fact that it took a long time to build things. Especially in the early days of Basecamp. We built the entire first version on me having ten hours per week, not per day, per week, to build it. That is an enormous constraint on how you can do anything, because you can waste ten hours really quickly just chasing things around or focusing on the non-essentials. We wanted to get that product out, and we got it out in 380 hours. And the reason I remember this is that at the time, I was a contractor for 37signals. Jason had hired me at $15 an hour when I was in Copenhagen, Denmark, and he was in Chicago. And by the way, I got paid in Apple gear. That was the other laugh: "Don't even send me the money. I will just come to Chicago, and you'll give me an iPod, and a MacBook, and whatever." Anyway, that's how it got started, and therefore I know exactly how much time we put into the first version.

And the first version was awesome because of that, because it had such constraints. Now, if you have 380 hours together with your ten agents, you can build a monstrosity, something that does a million things for a million people, and that bloat just comes naturally, in a way it didn't before. And therefore, our task as software builders becomes so much more about distilling it, so much more about killing our darlings, killing features that we think are good but are just too much. I saw this especially with the new version of Basecamp, Basecamp 5. This is the first version we've been building with AI acceleration, and suddenly we had designers who were able to take features all the way to completion, and were at the cusp of shipping them, when we'd go reviewing and go, "I'm not sure this actually fits. This is expanding the balloon here. If we keep expanding that balloon, it's going to pop, in a way where we lose the central selling point of Basecamp, which is that it's just so easy to use."

And it's funny, because sometimes you can have that as a high-minded intellectual guidepost. "Oh, we want something to be simple to use." Everyone says that, by the way. Anyone who builds software, or builds anything, is like, "Oh, yeah, our software is very easy to use." When it comes from your mouth, it's not credible. But if it comes from the customer, it's very credible. And when we do customer surveys, the number one reason why people continue to pick Basecamp is that it's simply simpler to use than the competition, and therefore it's a joy to get others onto the platform with them, because it doesn't require training sessions and whatever. That's gotten so much harder to do, even for us. And I actually really like this notion of embracing constraints, because I don't trust myself. I don't trust us. I don't trust Jason. I don't trust my own sensibilities: if I could do everything I want at very little cost, I don't trust that I wouldn't.

Unlimited resources build a blob

Wait, wait. Say more about not trusting yourself.

That the constraints (I don't have enough time, I don't have enough money, I don't have a big enough crew) are what force that selection process. If you have unlimited time, unlimited money, and unlimited people, you're going to build a blob. This is actually the reason why, when we got started, I was never worried about Microsoft. When we got started, everyone was like, "But Microsoft's just going to make Basecamp a feature of Project or Teams or whatever."

For context, in the early 2000s, when you started Basecamp, everybody's like, "Why are you going to write this software program? Microsoft's just going to do it," because they were just the dominant player. It sounds crazy today.

It does. But our response was always: Microsoft's going to produce the kind of software that takes 50,000 people to make, because that's the size of their organization, so they can only produce that kind of software. I'm not worried about that. I'm worried, and still am, about a team of two, about a team of four, because they will produce software that's competitive with ours, because it comes out of the same constraints. Our threat doesn't come from the behemoth.

Now, is that true today, when a much smaller team can act as a much larger company? I'm not quite sure. But I do know that I don't trust that if I was running Microsoft in 2004, I wouldn't also have made the sprawling mess that is Office. The joke today is that I think they have four versions of Outlook. They have Outlook New, they have Outlook New (Old), they have Outlook New (2026). How do you end up with such a mess? By having unlimited resources. It's a little bit like the resource curse. If you just have wealth springing out of the ground, well, you kind of don't need to bother with anything else, do you? You don't need to develop your economy. You don't need to develop your society. You can just sit back, relax, and let the money flow. It's not a blessing, it's a curse. So I don't trust ourselves to be able to channel that by default. This is why I'm quite skeptical about all this new AI acceleration we're having. Even for us, I think it's quite likely that we could use it wrong, to build too much software, to get too far away from less software, learnable software that still has to fit in the mind of a human.

Okay. I think that's a great point. I do think the complexity comes from the resources and the lack of constraints that come with success. I study a lot of the music industry, because they're just crazy characters, and I love crazy characters. And I heard something Rick Rubin said about the first time he ever met Jimmy Iovine. Now, I've had both of them on the show, and I've become friends with Jimmy. Jimmy is a decade older than Rick, so he did basically everything a decade before Rick did. And Rick tells the story of the first time he met Jimmy Iovine. Rick was probably 19 or something, and he goes and plays music for Jimmy. And he said Jimmy's response was so surprising. He goes, "Man, I wish I could still make something that simple." And Rick's like, "I'm sure you can. You have."

There you go.

So even if you didn't make more money, the problem is you're iterating more and you're spending more time on it. I just listened to a podcast I did four years ago on the partnership between Ben Franklin and George Washington, because it was the Fourth of July. And I'm listening to it and I'm like, "Fuck. One, this is good. Two, it's good because it's simple. It's because of what I left out of it." I think I'd fuck it up today.

Terminator beats Avatar

Yes. And I think I had that analysis quite early, because I saw it in things like movies. The first Star Wars movie is just incredible. When you think about the technology they had in the mid-seventies to produce a space odyssey as timeless as that, that still looks incredible. You put it on a big screen today, and no one's going to go, "Oh, the effects look stupid." No, they're going to go, "The effects look incredible." And then you look at what George Lucas did when he had 100 times the budget. He had all the computers in the world and all the staff in the world, to produce whatever Jar Jar Binks was in the 2000s, and it was awful. And that's exactly where that distrust of my own ability to handle increased capacity comes from, because you can look at so many of the greats and go, "What they produced when they had nothing was truly spectacular."

Another one I love is James Cameron. The first Terminator movie is one of my favorite movies of all time. It was made on an absolute shoestring budget, and it still beats Avatar by a thousand times. Now, there are also people who like Avatar, and I'm sure James Cameron does. That's great. I don't. I like Terminator, and I like it because it's low budget in a way that doesn't feel low budget. It's constrained, therefore you have to tell a tight story with a real focus on just that action flow, and it's incredible. It's exactly the same thing I was saying earlier, where I read chapters we wrote for Getting Real back in 2006 and I think, "Damn it, I wish they came out that brief by default today." I have to work a lot harder now to be that succinct. I still want to. And as we talked about, there are also formats where it's great to be able to pontificate at length. But in writing, having that brevity, and in software, having that ability to distill and say, "No, no, no," is an incredibly rare gift, and it can be spoiled so quickly by an influx of money.

This was one of the reasons why I was always so skeptical about venture capital when it came to software. Because I saw, time and again, people raise an enormous amount of money, hire hundreds of people, and produce crap software. And I thought, "We're able to produce Basecamp..." And by the way, by 2007, I think, we had four major products. We were launching one a year while we were also running Basecamp, while we were seven people at the company. So my brain couldn't even comprehend: what do you do with 100 people? How do you even apply them towards software to make it good? And the answer was, in many cases, well, you don't. You apply them towards software and crap comes out. Because there is not that funnel. There's not this narrow part that forces you to go, "Well, I can't have it all. So now I have to figure out: out of the 100 things customers are asking for, I can do three." Damn, they better count.

The printer

Tie this to what you were saying last night, that there is some benefit to almost not changing any software. You compared it to the fact that you buy the same printer over and over again. Talk about your relationship with your printer.

Oh, my gosh. The Brother HL-L2340DW. I think that's the model number of my beloved printer. And the reason why it's so beloved is that it was the first printer I ever bought that I just plugged in, and it worked. There was no fucking firmware, there was no nothing, there was just the functionality. I just need black-and-white prints, often because, for whatever reason, something needs a wet signature, so I can't do DocuSign or whatever. So I print something out, I sign it, I scan it. That's the job. I am not interested in anything else this printer could conceivably do. I just want that to happen, and I want it to happen consistently, exactly the same way, ten years from now. This is a solved problem for me, and I love the printer. And I'm not a mega fan of Brother. It's not because it is some amazing piece of technology that is built in just this beautiful way. No, it just does a function.

And I think about that and my relationship to the printer every single time we move things around in Basecamp. Because I know we have a huge contingent of Basecamp customers who treat Basecamp like the printer. Once upon a time, they had a problem. Things were falling through the cracks. They weren't organizing well. They'd started the project on email, and it turned into a mess. And they looked around, maybe they got a recommendation from a friend, they signed up for Basecamp, and they went, "Yep, that's it. That's the job." And now they just use it. And they don't want things to move around all the time. They don't want all the new features that we're so excited about, because it solves the one job that they have, and that's enough. Now, when you're making products, you've got to weigh that against the fact that you've also got to sell to new people. And if you're trying to sell a product that looks like it's 15 years old to new people, that's a little difficult. But we've done it in multiple ways over the years.

How have you solved the problem?

We've tried all the options, but the one option I still really like is that we rewrote the whole thing three times. So there was the first version, which came out in 2004.

Which people are still paying you for, every month.

Yes. That's exactly the point. So we rewrote it three times, but we kept the old versions. Normally, what always happens in SaaS, and in software, is a new version comes out and everyone just has to get it. They're forced to upgrade to it. And you actually feel like, "I've lost control here. I bought a thing that did the job, and now you're making me learn things." The new version, Basecamp 5, is certainly better. It's a vastly superior product. But I'm just not in the market for a better product. I'm in the market for the product I already bought. I don't want something different. I want the shitty thing I already have, because I know all the ways it is broken, if it is, and I've made peace with that.

So for Basecamp, we kept those old versions. The version we launched in 2004, we stopped selling in 2010. Sixteen years ago. We still have customers on it. As an individual business, it's still making millions of dollars.

In profit.

In profit, because there's basically no expense to it. There's no additional development. There's a little bit of maintenance. You just have to make sure it's secure, and bring it forward, and so forth. But it's basically pure profit, because those people who've been using a product that's been discontinued for 16 years don't bother us very much. They're not like, "Oh, this thing, how do I use that?" No, they know how it works. That's why they stick with it.

And the magical thing for me is that in that cohort, 2004 to 2010, there's a ton of people who love Basecamp. I get this all the time. "Oh, we use Basecamp. I love it." And I'll go, "Oh, did you try the new features?" They're like, "Oh, no, we use the old version." I'm like, "How old?" "Oh, yeah, the original. We signed up in like 2008." I'm like, "Wait, what? You haven't seen any of our good ideas in the last 16 years, and you're still over the moon about what we sell?" I think that's incredible.

Now, it has trade-offs. There are software products that just get stuck with their initial cohort, and then they just age with that cohort. I think that's fine, but it also cuts you off from new customers. So I want to have both things, and we do to some extent. We have three major versions of Basecamp. That initial version; then we did a Basecamp 2 that lived from 2012 to 2015, I think, only three years; and then we have the current chassis, as we like to call it, that we've evolved twice, but it's still the one where we bring people forward.

What's that word you just said? Shassy?

Chassis. That's what we call it. You know how car makers...

Oh, chassis. Okay.

I guess that's how you might pronounce it.

I thought you were saying sassy.

Sassy. It's a sassy chassis.

Basecamp Sassy.

It's the original code base, and therefore we're bringing customers along with it, and it totally has those trade-offs. We just launched Basecamp 5. I think it's an incredible version of Basecamp, the best one we've ever made, and a substantial amount of the feedback was, "Why did you fuck with my printer? Yesterday, the button was here on the right. I just want to push that, and now you moved it somewhere else." And I go, "I totally get it. I totally get it."

The beauty of a finished product

And I actually wish we had more of a capacity in software to accept finished products. This is one of my great envies of people who make physical products. By the time you ship, I don't know, a knife, it's done. There are no firmware upgrades. There are no patches. You may sharpen it over time. You may fix it if it breaks. But otherwise, that is a finished scope. Same thing with movies, same thing with music. You ship that album, it's done. I think there's something really beautiful about that, and people intuitively just understand that that's how it is with physical products or cultural products. With software, they don't get it. With software, especially SaaS software, if you don't upgrade in three months, people are like, "Is this dead? Is this out of business?" No! Fuck, it's just good as it is. Can we leave it for a second? Can you appreciate just what you have? That would be great.

And we have a fair amount of that software, because we've been in business for over 25 years, and we've created a bunch of things. I've always thought, "You know what? Not everything that we've ever made is something we're going to want to continue to evolve forever." Fine. But we should keep it around. This is one of the promises we've made to the customers we have: we're going to keep it until the end of the internet. That's our moniker for this. Either that or as long as we're in business, whichever comes first. So take someone who bought Highrise, for example. We made a CRM tool, a customer relations tool, that made millions of dollars, our second-biggest hit after Basecamp. We ran it for many years, and then at some point we were just done with it. Neither Jason nor I ended up using it, because we don't actually interact with that many people that we need to keep track of. It had this core user base we're super happy with, and we're still running it for them. It's still a multimillion-dollar business, and I'm super happy, but it's frozen. It's done. It's finished software.

It's funny that you made a CRM, because I think you've said before that you don't like people.

That is one of the reasons why we haven't made version two of it. I mean, I actually like people in the abstract. It's funny, I've heard someone say, "I don't like people in groups, I like them individually." I'm sort of the opposite. I like people in the abstract. Individually, I have more of a problem with it. So I don't interact with that many people on a daily basis.

I'd quit before working in an office

How much of your time do you spend alone?

Oh, the vast majority. The vast majority. And in fact, it's funny, because at 37signals we work remotely. We have about 60 people. And twice a year, we all meet up and spend a week together, and it's really great. You get to see people, and I cherish that, because you need that human connection. You need to sit right in front of someone to re-establish trust batteries and charge things up, and realize it's not just all avatars and text. It's actually real people. But at the end of that week, I'm always like, "As much as I love these people, as much as I love this company, I would fucking quit and live as a hermit in the forest rather than work with them 365 days a year in an office." I'm just not built that way. I am not built to be in an office and work with someone all the time. And in fact, when I look back upon my career, it only took off when I could close my door and not see anyone for long stretches of uninterrupted time. When I got started working in technology, I worked in open offices. And do you know what? My productivity and my creativity were a bit of a flat line. I just got exhausted with having folks around.

Hold on. Just go back to this. Let's say, hypothetically, you're up 16 hours a day. How many of those 16 hours are you alone?

Oh, man, at least half of it, and the other half is spent with family. The amount of hours per week that I spend with strangers in longer interactions is small.

Is that increasing with age, or were you always like this?

I was always like this. I was always an introvert. I always appreciated my own company, and I always appreciated the lack of interruption, the lack of noise, and the lack of stimuli, really.

I feel the same way. People watch my podcast and they're like, "You're not an introvert." I'm like, "No, no." Things have changed now, because this new show's been fucking crazy. But before, I ran a solo history podcast with no employees. I spent half my waking hours alone in a room with books. You see, books are everywhere. And there's a great line by Kanye that sounds like something that you just said. He goes, "So much personality, what do you want from me? I can be by myself and enjoy the company." I just enjoy this better than most of my interactions.

Yes. Yes.

Especially if you don't control the environment. Like an open office.

Yes. I have a really deep-seated hatred of the open office. I worked in quite a few, and I ended up with a burning desire to see it all just go up in smoke, and a commitment, in fact, to make sure I was successful enough that I never had to return.

But remote work is everywhere now. People don't understand. You guys published a book called Remote in 2013, if I'm correct?

Yes, that's right. Well before anyone did it. Now, what's funny is I've seen the full cycle. During COVID, everyone goes, "Actually, remote work's amazing, and we get just as much done." And then as soon as that was over, it was, "Oh, I guess we still have that ten-year lease. We better get people back into the office." Now, that's a bit of a cynical view. I totally get that there are individuals who thrive when they're around others. And actually, I think the common form of leaders and entrepreneurs is people who do like to be around others a lot, who do like to be interrupted. That's the mode they exist in. That's not my mode.

Four uninterrupted hours

Paul Graham has this builder versus manager mode, or schedule. And the schedule is all about: if you're a builder and you get interrupted just a handful of times in a single day, that day is a waste, because you will never get into the flow. You will never get into this long stretch of uninterrupted time, and therefore you will not be in, not just the mood, but the moment, to solve the deep problems you've got to deal with. And that, to me, was really the breakthrough for my career, certainly in programming: I can't use a 45-minute chunk of time. An hour and a half, even, I don't know; that's not going to turn into something. If I have four hours, okay, now we're talking. I can actually attack a problem and feel like I can get all the way into it.

And part of that is I hate repeating myself. In the early days of 37signals, we did these workshops called Building a Basecamp. Eight hours; we'd just go through everything that we'd learned building software products, and share. I could stomach three, and by the third time, when I was saying exactly the same thing according to a script, I was like, "I'm going to blow my brains out." That does not have any stimuli for me. I can't do it. So I needed to not repeat myself. I needed to get into the novelty of it, and the ability to have these long stretches of uninterrupted time to do that. That's where I find it. That open space.

The funny thing, too, is that it's not just people I can't have around to work. I can't even have a mess. This is why I posted some pictures of my office here in Malibu on Instagram.

It still goes viral every few months.

It does. It actually just got picked up by some content mill that keeps putting it out, because it creates so much engagement. But one of the key points of feedback I would get on it is, "That's not a real office, because there's not a mess. It doesn't look like the desk is used." And I'm like, "Dude, you don't understand. If I have shit all over my desk, I'm not creating work, because my mind will just go to the shit." It's a bit like that Marie Kondo thing, where you go through simplifying your home and throwing out all the stuff, and it actually creates free mental space. It does for me. And therefore, I need this pure cocoon.

It's actually a form of procrastination: I need to run out of obvious things to procrastinate on before I'll start the real work. This is also one of the reasons why I got so into building software tools, Ruby on Rails, everything else. Many of these tools are functions of procrastination. I have a thing I need to do. For whatever reason, I can't get started on it, but I can do all this other stuff around it. "Oh, we need this wrench. I should just build the wrench. Yeah, yeah, let's wait with the table for a bit. I really need the table, but first I'm going to design a wrench from scratch so that I can put that damn table together." And that can be a very productive form of procrastination. But it's also just a reality of how I'm able to produce work, and I came to terms with that, made peace with that, very early on in my career, realizing I cannot work for eight hours a day sitting next to other humans.

Tobi saw it first

So this reminds me of what I want to get to. You're close friends with Tobi Lütke. We've had amazing people on the show so far, and I've enjoyed every single conversation. But the conversation with Tobi is the one that I don't think more than a week goes by without me thinking of. When people ask, "What should I start with?" I'm like, "Just go there." I was on the phone with a founder who was asking for advice. I was like, "Man, I need more context on what's going on. But basically, based on what you just said, go watch this Tobi Lütke episode, then call me and we can talk." He texts me: "Within three minutes, Tobi's already dropping gems."

And the reason Tobi's interesting to me (and I want to get to your relationship with him, and then his influence on your adoption of AI) is, one, he's your favorite founder's favorite founder. There are a lot of other founders that I admire. My friend Karim, who's a founder of Ramp, my biggest partner, is very similar to you, very similar to a lot of great entrepreneurs: divinely discontent. He makes something, everybody says, "This is great," and he's like, "Ah, it could be better." He's just never satisfied. Therefore, he doesn't like a lot of other founders, doesn't like a lot of other products, but he speaks very highly of Tobi and likes the way he thinks. And what you realize about Tobi is that everybody says, "Oh, I'm an independent thinker," but Tobi actually thinks through every single thing for himself. So he has all these ideas and beliefs that are not correlated with one another. When I ask him a question, I have no idea...

That's the hallmark of a great debating partner. You don't know what they're going to say.

Exactly. And that's why the conversation was incredible. And if I didn't have to catch a flight, we would've kept going. We were talking before and after, and it was like, "Man, I have to have this conversation again." What I also admire about you, and I've been following you for a long time, is that you'll have an idea, an opinion, and you're very fucking vocal about it. But then if you get new information, you'll immediately be just as vocal about changing your mind. And you mentioned that Tobi really influenced your thinking about using AI. Can you go into that?

Yes. So I was as excited as anyone, I think, in the abstract, by the advent of AI. We get to see ChatGPT, and all of that early enthusiasm, three-plus years ago, for the general distribution of AI. Incredible. We can make computers do that? Wow, I love it. But I had a far greater skepticism of how soon and how much it was actually going to have a material impact on how I write code, for example. And that was informed by what was present at the time. At the early stages of this AI revolution, we were getting autocomplete. You were sitting in Visual Studio Code or whatever, trying to write something, and the AI would be like this pestilent coworker: "Let me drive. Let me write it for you." I'm like, "Can I just think for a second?" Everything we just talked about, that isolation: I want to be able to sit and I want to be able to think and not get constantly interrupted. It was that on steroids. It was the open office on steroids. It was everyone walking by like, "Hey, can I write on your keyboard?" "No, you can't. Get your grubby fingers off. I want to type this shit myself." So I didn't like that at all, and I therefore locked in on thinking, "This is what AI's going to be."

And Tobi clearly saw much further ahead. His eyes were much further up. It's funny: now I'm racing with Tobi, and one of the things we talk about all the time is, where are your eyes? The difference between a great racer and a mediocre racer is very often where they look. If you're looking at the turn-in where you're supposed to turn, not at the apex, you're not going to hit it. It's the old adage: you go where you look. This is why you don't look at the tree; you'll steer right into it. And training your eyes to look ahead, further ahead than you think, is actually quite difficult in racing, and I think it's quite difficult in business and life in general. And he had an eye that was just looking further ahead than I was, and he was going, "Yeah, but it's not going to be like this forever." He intuitively had this understanding of the evolution, and I'm still not entirely sure: what did he see? Why didn't I see it? I'm actually a little frustrated on my own behalf that I did not have the same conviction Tobi did, as early as he did: "Yeah, yeah, you don't like it right now, but just imagine two more years of this."

And he wrote a memo to the company internally, I think in '23 or early '24, way before agents were doing the work on their own, going, "I've seen it. This is the big switch. This is what we've been waiting for. This is why I'm here as a CEO: to identify those kinds of discontinuities in the trend line. And we need to be a very different company to be able to position ourselves for that and take advantage of it." And now I get a front-row seat to the fruits of that. Being on the board of Shopify, I see just how far ahead they are on this. Half the time, when I'm getting the presentation at the Shopify board on the internal systems that Tobi has, it's like: this is better than anything commercial. How do you have these incredible tools? They have a tool, for example, called Scout, that analyzes the customer feedback they get, such that their product managers are very well informed about what people are asking for. It's sucking it in from all these channels, and they can ask it anything: "What do people think about this feature or that feature?" And then they get an answer. And I go, "Damn it, I want to buy this. Can you please commercialize this?" They're like, "No, we just kind of built it for ourselves." Or River, the current system they have for employing agents to do work and open PRs and everything. Everyone is working towards that. Shopify is already there.

And the reason they're already there is that Tobi saw it so much earlier than the rest of us. Now, there were other people who saw it, but most of them already worked in AI. Tobi was running this enormous company at the time, and it's actually quite difficult, I think (at least it looked difficult to me), to be as focused as he is on that main business (Shopify has a million things going on) and also have your gaze that high up, looking that far forward towards the next apex, what's coming, and then acting on it. And it was his incessant "Oh, look at this, look at this, look at this" that got me from "Yeah, I like AI, but it's sort of abstract" to "Okay, fine, I'll install Pi. I'll install this. I'll install that. I'll give it a try." And then realizing, "Oh, actually, yes, this is going to change everything."

And that nudge, having someone just constantly nerd-snipe you: "Hey, I know a little bit more," or not even a little bit, a lot more, about this specific thing. And I'm like, "That can't stand. I cannot be the person in this relationship who's not up to date on this shit." So Tobi nerd-sniped me into leveling up and diving deeper and setting things up and giving it the extra try. And so much of the ability to move your opinion comes not from abstract ideas, but from touching things: from actually setting up OpenClaw or whatever, and getting some experience with it, and then having this instinctual feeling of where things are going to go, which you're not going to get from just reading about someone else doing it. You can read a write-up of anyone else using something, but it's kind of like trying to learn how to drive a race car by reading a book about it. You could pick up some pointers, but until you get behind the wheel, it's not going to internalize. It's not going to be something you can actually perform.

So I credit Tobi heavily with that, with just being a guiding star. And what's so incredible, too, is that he's not running a startup. Well, he would probably say that he is, in some abstract sense, with day-one kind of thinking. But it's a company of 7,000 people. Most companies that get to that stage, even technology companies, with that level of history (Shopify's been around for 20 years), that large, 15% of world GDP on e-commerce, are occupied with the problems they have at hand. So for him to be further ahead than me, when I felt like I should have been, running a much smaller company, was a great way to almost shame me into getting up to speed. So thanks, Tobi.

Apple pissed him off enough to switch

Have you had a chance to nerd-snipe him back since then?

Yes, on Linux. I switched to Linux about two and a half years ago, and first I had this soft on-ramp, as most people who switch to Linux do. I used Ubuntu. That's the most popular Linux distribution. It's fine. Actually, it's great in many ways, because Linux has all these different distributions. There's Ubuntu and Fedora and Red Hat and whatever, but it's all the Linux kernel. The magic of Linux is the Linux kernel and then the ecosystem of all these tools that are around it, and whether you package them in this one way or package them in this other way is not the make-or-break of it.

So just getting into Linux, for me, was a huge thing. I'd been on the Mac for well over 20 years. I was completely a Mac head: a Mac is a computer. I don't want to use another computer. Windows certainly is not for me. And Linux is for people who wear pocket protectors: just the kind of nerd that I can relate to, I can respect, but it was not a me thing. Then finally, Apple pissed me off enough that I thought, I cannot in good conscience continue to spend money on their products if I have such deep disagreements with how they run the company. So fine, I'm going to try something else. And as I said, I gave Windows two weeks, and I realized, "Man, shit, I can't do it. I'm going to come crawling back to the Mac if there's not something else." But thankfully, there was Linux. So I discovered Linux, and spent five minutes realizing, "Okay, maybe I can do this." After two weeks, I'm like, "Okay, fine. I can. I'm committing to it. I'm going to burn the boats. Off with the Mac computers." And then, of course, I got completely sucked in. Oh my God, I can do everything on this thing.

The 19-year-old who beat Apple

But didn't you say you discovered a subreddit or something like that, and that was really the turning point?

Yes. Yes. One of the reasons I've loved Apple as a company, and their stewardship of the industry, was their design, their taste. They make beautiful products, mostly. They certainly still make beautiful hardware, and for a very long time they were also the leading bar for software quality. Just sweating the details and making sure everything was aesthetically pleasing, which to me is an incredible part of why I like computers in the first place. I like all the little subtleties. I like just the right font, just the right border curvature. I like things to look nice and behave nicely. And Apple, for the longest time, was the undisputed leader in that, especially when you compared it to Windows, which was the epitome of having no taste, of having no sensibilities about how things should look, and having no cohesive vision for what a computer should be. It was all these disjointed parts.

And then I find Linux, and I look, and man, this is like a Temu version of Windows. It looks like a cheap copy of something Redmond would have made, and that was already crap. Why would I want that? Well, on Reddit, there's this amazing subreddit called r/unixporn, and it's basically a showcase for these nerds who spend, in many cases, hundreds of hours personalizing their Linux distribution and setup, to the point that it doesn't look like anything else you've ever seen. To the point where it looks like it was made for a movie, a hacker movie where you see all the Matrix characters scrolling down the screen, and it just looks cool. Now, sometimes it just looks cool, and it doesn't actually work that great. But when I discovered that, I went, "If these nerds are individually able to make Linux look this cool, and I just take it back 20%, not as over the top as what they're trying to do, and bake it all into Linux, we can make something that's competitive with the Mac."

Hold on. You said something interesting when I interviewed you: that they were like kids. You told me this story about some 22-year-old Polish kid who smoked Apple.

Yes. So this is one of the other things I love about this ecosystem. Everyone goes by a handle. It's like the early days, when I got into computers. The reason I actually got into computers was video games, and I didn't have enough money to buy the video games, so I got into pirated video games, which meant I got into the warez scene. It's with a Z at the end. Everyone had a handle, because it was kind of illegal. You were trading copyrighted goods. My handle, by the way, was "Webster." I don't know why. It was "Webster." And everyone else in that scene had a handle, and I hadn't really thought about handles in a long time. The demo scene at the time had the same thing. But then I discovered this r/unixporn and this subculture of people who work on this, and they all had handles.

And this one Polish kid, who goes by the handle of Vaxry, had built the tool that three-quarters of everyone on this r/unixporn subreddit was using to build their rice. That's what it's called, the rice. They rice out the Linux distribution. It's called Hyprland. I call him a kid. He's 22 now, but when he made the first version, I think he was 18, 19. One kid out of Poland comes up with this window manager, which in its essence is not a new concept. There have been these tiling window managers on Linux for a long time, where basically you don't move windows around with your mouse; they tile. You open a new window, and they reposition, and all the windows are already available. But they all look, again, like they were made by the people who did the Temu version of Windows. Just not aesthetically pleasing. Maybe highly functional, maybe fast, and maybe productive for certain people, but I need the aesthetics to live. I need it to be beautiful.

And Apple never did this the way you'd like it.

And Apple never did this. Apple has been stuck, as has Windows largely (although they're sort of trying to ape some of these things), in the original Xerox pattern. Here are windows: you have a mouse, you drag a window around, and a lot of the interaction with the operating system is the mouse. And the mouse is an incredible tool for learnability. Anyone who has just a rough conception of how to move this thing around can use almost any app, because everything is sort of explained. But if you're interested in productivity, it's a terrible tool. This is why all the cracked programmers are all about their keyboards, right? They're all about hotkeys and shortcut keys, which require a lot of investment to learn, but if you learn them, you can fly. It's just like putting on a goddamn wingsuit, and you go 200 miles an hour, and there are cliffs all around, and it's not explained how everything works. You have to learn; you have to internalize it. And I was like, "I've been using a computer for, I don't know, 40 years. I've always used a keyboard, yes, but I've not been driving my computer through the keyboard. I've always had that little mouse." And here is an operating system, Linux plus Hyprland, where I can drive it all through the keyboard. It can be super fast and easy to use, because everything's just a keyboard command. It can look amazing. And the core engine that makes that work, that tiling window manager, Hyprland, is made by this cracked kid from Poland who goes by a handle and has an anime avatar. I love it.

It's just such a throwback to what computers used to be, when they were more about fun and this artsy expression. The funny thing about the original warez scene, the pirated software scene, was that it overlapped with the demo scene, and the demo scene was all about: how do we use these computers, wildly underpowered by today's standards, to make incredible computer graphics? So they put out these demos, and these two scenes would meet. The demo scene would produce the intros to the cracked games, such that you'd see this really cool video before the game loaded up that basically said, "This game was cracked by EvilHead24." And I'd be like, "Wow, it looks so cool." This is a resurgence of that: computers can be fun in that way, and they can be a bit whimsical, and they can be made by pseudonymous individuals. And the combined sum of it can be better than one of the top five most valuable companies in the world, a trillion-dollar organization that has 40 years of history caring about this, and unlimited resources, unlimited people. And still the cracked kid from Poland can beat them. Absolutely amazing.

If nobody else will build it, I will

So once all those pieces started falling together, I was not just sold; I flipped. As you said, I used to have a perception of Linux as a server tool. I used it on all the servers we've ever run: Linux. But running it on the desktop? That sounds like something for people who like to update the firmware on their printer. Not fucking me, man. I don't want to update the firmware on my printer. I just want things to work. And I realized, you know what? That's not all Linux could be. Linux just has all the Lego pieces. Someone could put those pieces together for you, and you could get the Millennium Falcon, or the Taj Mahal, or something incredible that looks great and is ready to play with. And I went, "Well, okay, if no one else is going to do that, I will. I'll take half of r/unixporn, I'll take Vaxry's cracked Hyprland, I'll slap it on top of Arch Linux, and we're going to make Omarchy." And that's what I've spent a shocking number of hours over the last year building.

Thousands.

Thousands. Yes, that's probably fair at this point. It became an obsession, and it became an obsession in the same way we were talking about. It's not because I had a grand roadmap: "Oh, I need to do this and this." I just picked up the thing and went, "Here are 75 things that are wrong. This thing is slightly misaligned. This is not right. The colors are not correct. It's not all integrated. The themes aren't coherent," and so on. And then I fixed five of them and put it back down. "Oh, that's better. It's more pleasurable to use." Picked it up again, fixed another five things. Picked it up, picked it up, picked it up, until I finally had something that felt like, "This is good." And not only is it good, it's goddamn better than whatever else is available commercially, certainly better than what Apple has.

And again, "better" is this: it's better for me. But what I've always realized is that every single product I've built started there. I have to make something that's better for me, and if I can get beyond that point, where I would rather use this than that, I know I'm not alone. I know I'm not that special. I know there are going to be tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, potentially even millions of other programmers, or just computer users who like computers, who are going to be like me. Who are going to appreciate the same aesthetics. Who are going to appreciate having an operating system they actually own, that they can make bespoke and their own, especially now with agents, but who just don't want to put in 2,000 hours upfront to get access to that kingdom. So if I give it all to them in a prepackaged omakase, ready-to-use, chef's choice edition, then they get invited to it.

And I did exactly the same thing with Ruby back in the day. There are great parallels between these things. When I first picked up Ruby back in the early 2000s, it was an obscure programming language out of Japan that only a handful of people in the West were using. And it didn't have a killer app. It looked really good, and people were using it for small things here and there. And then I went, "This is incredible. This guy has the right vision for what a programming language should be. If I take it and apply it to the thing I want to build, web applications, Basecamp, and then build the tooling around it, I can get other people to realize the magic of what's here."

And it's exactly the same thing with Omarchy. Linux is incredible. It is one of the seven wonders of the software world. It is the largest open-source code base in the world. It's like 40 million lines of code. Literally millions of man-hours have been poured into that collective process, in a way where it was not always obvious it was going to work. We talked about Microsoft a bit. The famous quote from Steve Ballmer back in the early 2000s was that Linux was a cancer, that it was going to eat everything, that it was going to be very disruptive and very negative for the software industry. And it turned out exactly the opposite. Today, Linux runs on billions of devices. Basically anything embedded is Linux. Anything on the server is Linux. The one final thing it hasn't cracked is the desktop. And I just go, "Why? Why shouldn't it?" We can just make it so good that at least technically minded people will realize that this is just a better option, and they'll pick it. Of course they'll pick it, because if I show them something that's better, of course they'll realize. That's a pretty naive instinct to have, but that's my driving principle. If I make something better, people are going to realize it's better, and they're going to use it.

No customers

Okay. But this is actually really important. Basically, I have these conversations selfishly. There's shit in this person's head that is valuable to me. You might give me 50 ideas, I might grab two and use them in my life, and my life is better as a result of that. So I'm intensely interested in that. Last night I kept asking you a question, and I wasn't getting the right answer. I was just trying to figure out what actually drives you, right?

You mentioned earlier something I thought was absolutely ridiculous: that people forever would describe you and Jason, and the business you built, as a lifestyle business. I don't know, the guy started out making $15 an hour, and now he has a 15 million dollar car. What kind of lifestyle is that to you? Versus: you live in a one-bedroom apartment and have to kiss a VC's ass so that you can make payroll next month. Which lifestyle do you want? I don't know what you're talking about. I thought that critique was pretty weak if you actually analyze what's going on.

But what I realized is it's not money. Obviously, you grew up without money. I grew up without money. Once you get money, you realize, yeah, it's valuable, but the return on it diminishes really, really rapidly. So you're definitely not driven by money. I was like, "Okay, well, this guy's just introverted and loves making things." You're definitely driven by making things. But then you have this other element, and tell me if I'm wrong: you have this fierce desire, or almost need, for control and independence and freedom, right? And so we started talking about Omarchy (am I saying it correctly?) last night, and then you realized, to the point where you're like, "Yeah, if anything happened with Basecamp, I wouldn't start another business, because I wouldn't want customers."

So me and my partner Rob (he was over here this morning) were laughing about what you said last night. I want to get to that, where you're just like, "Yeah, you have fuck-you money and you have financial independence, but then there's another thing that you transcend. You don't even have any customers." And your whole thing is just the love of making something for yourself and then putting it out to the world, making something great. And the reason I bring this up is: explain why you named it Omarchy.

Chef's choice, not a construction-kit burger

So "Omarchy" is three words put together. It's omakase, which is chef's choice in Japanese, and it's usually applied to restaurants. You go to a sushi restaurant, and they just start serving you great food, because they know better. They've been making this goddamn sushi for a very long time, and the chef who gets to be the one who picks has probably been making it for decades. What do you know? You don't know shit. You don't know what's good. You don't know what order it should come in. You should just sit down and hand over your sovereignty for this meal to this person who's more competent than you, and then open your trap and eat it. And it'll be delicious.

This is actually the best way to experience all sorts of things. There are people in this world who have spent more time than you getting really good at figuring out what quality is, and they hand you that quality so you can just enjoy it. What I've found is that a lot of people have a very difficult time articulating what they want, but they can appreciate quality instantly. They just know: "Oh, this is good. Yummy. This is some great sushi." They don't know what to ask for, how to season it, or whatever.

Funny anecdote: one of the things that always tripped me up when I originally came to the US, which will crack Jason up, is the notion of the construction-kit burger. My mind was blown when I came to the US from Denmark and I would order a burger and just be handed the parts. "Here's the bun, here's some lettuce, here's some pickles, here's the meat." And I'm like, "What is this? A construction kit? Am I supposed to put it together myself? You can't even assemble my food for me?" There's something deeply American about this: "No, I know best." No, you don't know shit. You are ignorant as fuck. Let a chef prepare the food for you. Goddammit, why would you want to get your hands dirty like this? So I had that reaction right from the get-go. I love delegating my limited sovereignty when I don't know something, or when I don't know more than the other person about a given thing. I want the best people in the world to prepare the services and products and food that I then get to enjoy. Because it's like leveling up; cheating, almost. And I thought, "You know what? I really like that principle, and I will also apply it in reverse, of my own accord. If I know something about programming, about using Ruby, or about using Linux, I can pour all of that competency into a package that you just have to sit and enjoy." So that's what omakase is.

Then the other part is Arch. We talked about that. That's the Linux distribution run by a gang of volunteers for the past 20-plus years. It doesn't have an organization. It doesn't have a lot of fundraising. It doesn't have a commercial structure around it. It's just a bunch of nerds who share the burden of distributing Linux. Amazing. And then the last bit is Hyprland. So that's Om-arch-y. And it turns into this constellation where I take... There are a trillion tools in Linux land. There are a million ways you can configure your system. You can have all these themes and apply them. I will pick them for you. I will not give you a construction-kit burger. I will give you an omakase sushi meal, and you may do substitutions. You may realize, "Ah, I don't like that." Fine, fine, fine. But you're going to start from a base that works.

A new computer in two minutes

You're going to install this system, by the way, in four minutes. This was one of the things I got obsessed with really early on. I would get a new Mac computer (I actually just got a new one for some testing I needed to do) and I would set it up. I think the last one took 42 minutes to set up, because it needed a software update and it needed some things. I'm like, "This is unreasonable. These computers are about a trillion times faster than what put us on the fucking Moon, and you're telling me it takes 42 minutes for a new computer to be ready to use? This is preposterous." So I just got obsessed with this: how quickly can we install a system that's fully ready to go and use? And we got it down to about two minutes. You insert that USB key with Omarchy on it. You fill out: this is my username and my password. And then two minutes later, you're ready to rock. All of it is there.

And I just thought, so many of these things we just take for granted. "Oh yeah, getting a new computer, it's just hours of work setting it up and getting it ready for real work." No, it's not. Someone could just do that for you, and collectively we could save trillions of man-hours every year. This is part of why I actually love sharing these things, because I get this indignation about world productivity. When we're subjecting humans everywhere, millions of them, maybe even billions of them, to shitty tools and shitty setup processes, we're robbing the world of progress. You could have taken those trillion hours that people have spent, 42 minutes at a time, setting up a new computer, and applied them towards productive outcomes, and, I don't know, we'd have flying cars by now. And I just feel like, do you know what? If I can assist in that process somewhat, and take some of that drudgery out of the world's gears, I've done my little part. I've added a little bit of oil so that everything glides a little more seamlessly. And especially if we do it in a way that's aesthetically pleasing, I've actually contributed to delight and lightness in the world. We should all be surrounded by beautiful things, including beautiful computers that just work out of the box and are ready to use.

So that became the dual mission. A, I wanted the very best computer for me. Suddenly I had found all these building blocks where, for everything I was ever annoyed about with how the computer worked, I realized I could change it. All the code was there. Everything could be rewritten and reconfigured so I could get exactly what I wanted, and that just became an obsession. I have this affliction where, when I see something that's not quite right and I have the power to fix it, nothing else matters until it's perfect. I will polish that thing until every single quarter millimeter is perfectly round, and I just cannot do anything else. And in fact, it's not always great, I will say. As a person who has other obligations in life than writing Linux, there were moments on that journey where I essentially just went on a hermit trip and went, "I will learn everything there is about this, just so that I can make the perfect computer." And it becomes a bit of an obsession, and thankfully it doesn't last, because at some point the ball literally is a perfect sphere, and it's beautiful, and it has just the right texture and light and color. And then I go, "Okay, now I've made this beautiful thing, and I enjoy it more than anything else. This is the best computer I've ever used in my life. So if it's so good for me, it should be good for other people. I should share it."

The best ideas sound stupid at first

And so I did, with Omarchy. And what's funny is I actually made a version before Omarchy, called Omakub, where I took that Ubuntu thing we talked about, the thing everyone who starts on Linux uses, and I tweaked it a little bit and made it look a little bit more like Windows or a Mac. It felt familiar. And the misconception that I had, and I think a lot of people in the Linux world have had, is: if we just make it as close to Windows or Mac as possible, then they'll come. But no, they won't. Why would you want, again, the Temu version of Mac or of Windows? I don't need a cheaper version. Then you have to appeal to these high-minded ideas: "Well, it's free software as in speech, not as in beer." Yeah, okay, there's 0.001% of the population that gives a fuck about that. Most people just want the best thing, and your job is to give them that if you want to win them over.

So I just went, "No, let's make something that's radically different. This computer will not work like anything you've used before." In fact, you won't even be able to operate it right out of the box, because it's all keyboard-driven. You'll have your little mouse, and you're like, "There's nothing on the screen. Where are the icons to click on?" And I'll go, "No. Here, let me show you a cheat sheet. You have to learn these 15 key bindings before you can do anything on this computer. Here's your syllabus. Sit down and study, boy." And by the time you have learned the first lesson, you are ready to use this computer. And we've already forked the timeline. Every other computer in the world is very focused on, "Oh, let's make it as approachable and as learnable as possible." And I go, "No, fuck that. That option is covered. It's great, but let's build something else."

And then it took off. And I've found that's very often true about products. You enter some domain and you think, "Oh, who's the best? Can I just copy them and then do a slight tweak?" That's not going to work. That's not going to unseat anything. All the best ideas that actually turn out to have an impact on something sound stupid at first. They're not intuitive, because that's where all the value has been locked up. It's been locked up in this misconception about what people actually want, because most people don't know what they want. You actually have to give it to them in a form that's beautiful and approachable and quirky and a little bit weird, and maybe a little bit off-putting at first.

I find that in all sorts of different domains. One of my favorite car designs is the McLaren 720S. When it first premiered, it had these sunken-in headlights, and when I first saw it, I thought, "This is the ugliest car I've ever seen at this level." Now it's one of my favorite car designs of all. So I think you have to be able to work in that space, where you have a high tolerance for people telling you what you're building is stupid, what you're building is ugly, what you're building is never going to work in the real world. When I get that feedback, I know I'm onto something. Now, you can't just get that feedback. There also have to be a few people who like what you're doing. But Kathy Sierra, who is one of my all-time greatest writers on what animates users and good products and so forth...

Out-teach your competition

I'm going to interrupt you, because this is the power of ideas. This is why I'm addicted to podcasting. I didn't know who the hell Kathy Sierra was until I learned about her through your and Jason's writing. Then I go consume her, and she's like, "The best way to market is to out-teach your competition."

Oh, she's amazing. Yes. Bam!

That's all I do. That's literally what I do.

Bam!

That fucking idea helped build the first podcast, which then in turn helped build this podcast. It was super valuable to me.

Yes. It built all of 37signals.

If you could put a price on that idea in my life, literally, it's worth tens of millions of dollars to me.

Yes. Yes. And it's all down to Kathy Sierra and her writings on the internet in the mid-2000s. So, outspend versus out-teach. Just to linger on that, because I think it applies to all of this. As you said, it applies to podcasting, it applies to Basecamp.

Every fucking thing.

It applies to everything. Because when we launched Basecamp, we didn't have any money. We had a tiny team, and Microsoft had all the money and all the whatever. They could swallow us up. What we had to fight back with was not more banner ads. We're not going to outspend them on a marketing campaign. That was never going to happen. But we could out-teach them. We could have better insights, and we could share them, and people could resonate with that and then reciprocate by buying our products. At least some percentage of them, even if it's a small percentage. That has been our operating strategy for literally two decades, and it's exactly the same thing.

I have to interrupt you again. It's also better for the world, because you guys are putting so much work out. You're capturing a tiny percent of the value that you've created. You put out so much more value. Now, even a tiny percent of a huge number gives you a 15 million dollar car.

Yes. Yes.

The world is big. The internet is very big. But I told Jason this (I've now become friends with him and just love spending time with him; we just had lunch together, and I went to go look at the construction project he's doing right now). I was like, "Dude, I was by myself. I didn't have any employees for ten years. You make project management software. My project's in my fucking head. All I could do is buy your books," which I did. But as soon as you did HEY, I was like, "Oh, now I can give you money."

The algorithms broke reciprocity

You're hitting on something that's really important about why what Kathy says is valuable. This is something Charlie Munger would talk about, who's my hero. If I could only learn from one person, it'd be Charlie Munger. And he says there's a deep desire in human nature that is ever present and never changing, and it's the desire to reciprocate. I feel you have done something for me, by writing those books, by going on those podcasts, by talking at Startup School. And as soon as you give me an opening to reciprocate, I will do so. I'm really tight with the Spotify team, right? Daniel, Gustav, all the top people there, Alex, everybody else, Roman. And I fucking fly to Europe; I've been there four times in 14 months just to talk about podcasting, because I'm obsessed with this. And the crazy thing that comes up in these conversations, a weird thing that we see in podcasting, is private feeds. This content's free; if you want to buy another podcast, it's X amount of dollars per month. And most people never even listen to the paid content. They're just looking for an excuse, because your podcast gave them so much value.

Right. Yes.

That will always work. It worked 100 years ago, it works today, and it will work 100 years from now.

Right. I choose to believe that. I don't actually know if it's true, but it is how we've built a business up until this point. I will say that I'm starting to see some cracks in that reciprocal exchange.

Tell me about that.

It's not because the human part of the link is broken; it's because the algorithms have changed things. For Jason and me, for the longest time, what we did was exactly that. We're just going to out-teach. We're going to put so many observations, lessons, experiences, software, open source, whatever, into the world, and we're just going to hope that a small percentage of that trickles back. And it used to work, especially on Twitter, where you'd build up a following, and if someone followed you, they'd see all the stuff you were sharing. This is Gary Vee's "Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook." You do all the jabbing: "Here's free stuff, here's free insights, here's free observations, here's free software." And then occasionally you'd go, "And now we have a new version of Basecamp. Check it out."

What's broken now on the social platforms is that my followers don't see anything I post unless it goes medium-viral, because everyone is now in the algorithmic feeds. So I follow someone, and it's just this little drop in the signal, and it kind of breaks that reciprocal exchange, at least on those social platforms. This is one of the reasons why I love podcasting. There you have subscribers who actually get things straight into their feed. It's not algorithmic. And I love newsletters. I have a newsletter as well. I have a bunch of my long-form writing go into it, because then I'm assured it at least shows up in their inbox. But both of those outlets are minority outlets compared to the behemoth that is social media, and I've seen some of it break down a little bit.

I don't know what that means. I'm going to continue regardless of whether it works as well in the future as it did in the past. I'm still going to bet on the fact that someone who does get exposed to the ideas we have, or the free software we give away, is going to feel some connection to what we have. And then, if there is an opportunity, maybe not even for themselves, but one they spot in others... As you said, "Hey, I'm one person, I don't need Basecamp." But you hear of someone who's complaining about setting up projects in complicated ClickUp, or email not working, and you go, "You should check out Basecamp."

We're starting to use it for the podcast, because we're vastly increasing the number of episodes we're doing and the number of people I have to stuff the top of my funnel with, interesting people I want to talk to.

Oh, you are? Amazing.

And me and Rob, who we had dinner with last night, we go back and forth over text message, and then the other day I was like, "Bro, what happened? I think we're losing the thread here." He's like, "We should use Basecamp."

You're the classic example.

This is the point, though. You guys have provided so much value to our lives. We're not like, "Oh, maybe we use Basecamp," or, "Let me go look around." I don't even give a shit. These are my guys. I'm just going to use their thing.

No investors is freedom; no customers is transcendence

I want to go back to a fundamental understanding of you, though, because I love this transcendence. You deeply desire independence and freedom and control. That's why you're anti-investors, and you don't have a board of directors.

Yes.

It's just you and Jason making all the decisions, right? But then you introduced this other level of transcendence last night. No investors is one level of freedom. How about no customers? That's even higher. So your point is, I'm going to put 2,000, 4,000 hours of my time into this. I'm going to craft it. I'm going to make sure everything is perfect, and then I'm going to give it to you. But then you said something last night: well, what if they have feedback for you? What was your response to that?

I love feedback if it's well grounded in solid observations that can give me new insights. But a lot of the feedback you get on the internet does not fall into that category. It's just: you looked at this for five minutes. I spent 4,000 hours, and you have some knee-jerk reaction, and you want to tell me how to do it? You want to tell me what I should do and what I shouldn't do? Well, you can go fuck yourself. And I actually get that indignation just welling up. I've been working on it. But there's this sense that this is not a reciprocal exchange. I gave you something of tremendous value. Now, you can choose to ignore it, or say it's not right for you. That's completely fair. That's a good exchange: okay, thanks for the gift, but no thanks. But if you take my gift of 4,000 hours and you go, "Well, I'll give you five minutes, and then I'll just dump shit on you"? What? You didn't pay me anything. That's a privilege you have to pay for. If you want to give me ill-considered feedback on anything I make, you've got to pay me. And you can do that with Basecamp, and you can tell me...

And then you're a customer.

And then you're a customer, and then I know we have a different relationship. I will actually say thank you, even though I might have a knee-jerk reaction too, on my part, that this is not the most well-considered piece of advice. I will take it in, because we've had an exchange, and there's a reciprocal nature there. But I actually appreciate transcending above that. I don't have that obligation with you. I am sharing something with you, and I don't owe you anything. Technically, you don't owe me anything either, if you don't accept the gift. But if you take the gift, you actually do owe me something. You do owe me a modicum of respect: to look at this for more than five minutes before you just dump your shitty ideas onto me. Or even worse, and it's not so much about the ideas, it's when people try to tell me what to do. It goes straight back to...

No, this is what I hit on last night. That is it.

That's the nerve, right? The nerve is: I have worked very hard, not just in my life but in business, to have damn near total independence, so no one can tell me what to do. No one can tell me no. No one can tell me what to work on. And Jason and I have structured our entire business around that concept of pure independence. We don't have any investors who get to tell us what to do. We don't have a board to tell us what to do. We do have customers, and they get some claim, some of the time, to tell us, at least in aggregate, what to do, because if no one wants to buy the things that we're putting out there, the business is not going to continue. So they get some good influence there. I find that tolerable. That's a tolerable exchange. I put a product into the world. You pay me some money. I will listen to you. Fair.

But I appreciate the transcendence to the next level. I don't even have a commercial relationship with you anymore. We can still have a great relationship. One of the reasons I enjoy open source software so much is because I get to collaborate with like-minded people on making things better. So if I give you the gift of 4,000 hours on Omarchy, and you then tweak a few things and send a pull request back on GitHub and say, "Here's something," I go, "Awesome. Now we're in business. Now we have a little club. Let's make this amazing together." And that feels so pure.

And not because I'm against capitalism at all. I'm a huge fan of capitalism. But I've also realized that at some point, when I retire, it will actually be a retirement from capitalism. It'll be a retirement from customers and the economic exchange. And 37signals is quite likely my last business. I made the money I needed to make to live the life I...

Three times over.

Yes. The life I would enjoy living for the rest of my time. So at some point, either the business ends because circumstances end, or Jason or I just get tired of it, and then I will transcend to the next stage of not having any customers at all. And then continue to make things and continue to share things, but without any claim that other people have on my time or my attention or where I want to go with it.

Your moral obligation to buy a Ferrari

Okay, so this leads to another thing I want to talk to you about, which is that capitalism actually works. And what I like about you is... People in the tech industry act like they don't like money, right?

They pretend. They act like they don't like money. They all do.

Yeah, exactly. And my point is that how you make money actually matters. The best definition of business I ever heard actually came from Richard Branson. He says, "A business is just an idea to make somebody else's life better." And there are infinite ways to make somebody else's life better, so there are always going to be infinite opportunities in the future. If you make a product that other people love, and it makes somebody else's life better, so that they decide to give you their hard-earned money in exchange for it, that is the system working. What I like about you is, again, you guys had this counter-narrative: "We prize independence, we want to do things for decades. We want to build the products for ourselves first, and then just find the other like-minded people." But you're not shy about, "Yeah, here's my Pagani, and here's this floating desk in Malibu that now goes viral all the time." And we talked about this a little bit last night, and you said it straight away. You go, "Yeah, that's an example that capitalism works." It's not just, "Look at the shit that I have." That's not what you're doing.

Right. I actually think there's some obligation on people who've been able to make things work to show that it did work, that it is a carrot you put out to others. I think it's completely legitimate to be motivated in part by wanting to have nice things, to have a dream car that you aspire to. I certainly had that as a kid. I thought, "Oh, look at all these cool cars." I didn't have any concept that I'd ever have an opportunity to reach that and afford it, but it was part of the drive. I think that's a good thing, part of capitalism. We want to better our lot, and some of that is material, and there's no shame in that whatsoever.

And not only that. I think there's a second order of capitalism. You have an obligation. If you sell a product or service and you make a lot of money on it, put that money back into the system. Send some of that money to the craftsmen of Italy to create you a beautiful Ferrari. There's someone who has to stitch that seat so that it's just right. There are engineers putting together that car so that it exists in the world. We would not have Ferraris to pine for if no one bought them. And who can buy them? The people who've been successful in other parts of their business. So therefore, it is your moral obligation to buy a Ferrari if you do really well, or a Lamborghini or a Pagani or whatever floats your boat. But you should be sending this forward. This is how we get to have nice things. Not everything can just be boiled down to needs. Man needs more than just bread to live. We need beautiful Ferraris, even if we don't own them.

This is one of the things I love so much about cars: they're actually a shared, collective enjoyment. The number of times I've driven a nice car next to kids especially, because kids have not yet internalized this filter that they're supposed to be cynical about wealth and nice things. They go, "Whoa!" And then you rev the damn thing, and they go, "Yeah!" There's just an instinctual human attraction to beautiful things that make noise. And it's just joy. And why would you be ashamed of that? Why would you be reserved about that? Unless you feel guilty about how you made your money. There are some people in the world who probably should be a little guilty about how they made their money, and maybe they don't buy the Ferraris. But anyone else, who's made legitimately good services or products and had success with them, should be able to celebrate that.

Now, is there a line where you turn into a bore of a braggart, where it's all about "I bought this, I bought that"? Yes, there is. But you can settle that line. It doesn't have to be either/or. You can both be passionate about the things you're creating, and validate that you made your money in a reasonable way, because you made something good that other people want to pay for. And then here are the fruits of that labor. And this is capitalism, and it's beautiful. It is absolutely beautiful. It's worth celebrating. It's worth exalting. It's worth making an example of.

And in my personal case, a lot of this also could just be post-rationalization, because I like nice things and I don't want to feel guilty about it. But let's put that aside for a second and focus on the fact that we built 37signals in kind of a weird way for a software company. Most of our peers raised a bunch of money from VCs, and they did all sorts of other things. We built a software company out of Chicago at a time when there was absolutely nothing fucking going on in tech in Chicago. And we built it on 40 hours a week. We built it on having a life next to work. We built it on going for the long term. We built it on taking profits out of the business rather than just chasing higher valuations. And therefore, that is a counter-narrative about how you can also build a business, and I want to validate that it's a reasonable thing to pick, even if you also want a nice Ferrari. These things are not in opposition.

You mentioned the lifestyle business thing. I always loved that, because people are like, "Oh yeah, you're just running a lifestyle business." Yeah, I have a business and a lifestyle. What the fuck do you have? You just have a business? Why would you not want a lifestyle? And my lifestyle happens to include a fucking yellow Lamborghini. So it's not like I'm giving anything up in terms of the material fruits of capitalism. These are actually compatible notions.

Costs are the only thing you control

And therefore, if someone is asking, "Which way should I go? I'm starting a new business. Should I raise a bunch of money?" Fine, that's one path. And if you need to invest a bunch of capital in, I don't know, factories or GPUs or whatever, you should probably raise a bunch of money. I don't have anything fundamentally against that. I have something against the notion that this is the only way to go. And I do have a little bit against it when it comes to software. I always felt it was just a waste. Why are you raising all this money just to have a bunch of programmers sit around? Just build it yourself. You don't need as many as you think.

That was our model: tiny team, building great software, having good success, not taking any money, and producing profits. I know this is a bit of a foreign term in much of Silicon Valley: that's the money you get to keep when you've taken your revenues minus your expenses. And when you get to keep that profit, you actually become interested in increasing it, and that increases your efficiency. I think this is part of my aesthetic appreciation of capitalism, and this is why I care about costs so much. Because that appreciation is what makes the entire system more efficient. If I'm hiring three times as many people as I actually need, I'm robbing the world of those people, who could have gone and done other productive things rather than spin their wheels at my little business, when I could have gotten away with a third. And also, the more money I spend on expenses, the less I get to keep for yellow Lamborghinis. So the math is really quite simple.

And you have to think of the Italian craftsmen when you're going through your expenses. This is something that history's greatest entrepreneurs repeat over and over again. In fact, we were talking about it last night. I'm going to pull up the group chat that we're in with Jason, because I dropped it in there while we were talking. You kept hammering on the fact that you just get off on clipping expenses, on finding them. And I think it's the same kind of refinement you were talking about with your product design.

Oh, I love it. Yes.

And I showed you this quote, and you're like, "Oh, shit, I hadn't heard this. This is great."

This is awesome.

So I'm going to read this. It says, "Carnegie would repeat his mantra time and again: profits and prices are cyclical, subject to any number of transient forces in the marketplace. Costs, however, could be strictly controlled, and any savings achieved in the costs of goods were permanent." He said that 150, almost 200 years ago.

It's remarkable how that goes directly to my kind of thinking, because I know how hard it actually is to increase revenue. If you already have a going business and you want it to grow massively, it's very difficult. It's very difficult to convince customers to part with their money. I try very hard to do so. We as a business try very hard to do it. Everyone tries to do that. And it's outside of your control to a large degree. What I can control is my inputs. I can put out the best damn software product I know how to make. I can talk about it. I can out-share the competition, or out-teach the competition, and therefore create this reciprocal relationship with potential customers. But ultimately, I don't get to choose whether they put in their credit card or not; they do. I do get to choose how much money we spend on servers. I do get to choose whether we squander that revenue on needless cloud services rather than just owning our own hardware. These are things within my control, and I love things that are within my control, because I have direct input on them, and I can immediately see the result of taking an action.

It's funny, because at this point, I really shouldn't have to worry about, I don't know, a $2,000-a-month recurring expense on something. But oh my God, the satisfaction I get from striking that line, replacing it either with something that's free or just slightly lower cost. It's a key part of the mechanics of the business that I just really like, because I also have this aesthetic appreciation of an efficient business, like an efficient engine, or an efficient computer that's not wasting cycles on things that don't propel it forward. Cutting expenses is exactly that. It's taking out these inefficiencies.

And very often, what I find is that when you take out expenses that shouldn't be there, it's not just about the extra money you get to keep. The whole thing gels better. When you have a smaller team with better people and higher competence, it's just more fun to work with a tight crew. I don't know many entrepreneurs who don't look back on the early days with longing eyes. Just this lost love: remember when we were just ten around a table? Now, you get other benefits. I'm sure Tobi, who commands an army of 7,000, can do very different things now and impact the world in very different ways. But in terms of that tight loop of working on something with a small team, it's incredible. And a lot of that comes from: how do we make that small team, that small company, as efficient as possible? Because then we can reach further, and we have more resources to do things, and so forth.

So I just love expense reports. I didn't know this about myself, by the way. It's one of these amazing things you discover as you just do it. As I told you last night, if you'd told my 18-year-old self, "You're going to love going through expense reports. You're going to love finding little lines that you can put a marker around, and then go hunt them until they disappear," I would've said, "That sounds like an accountant. That's not me." But it turns out it is, and I love it.

Bezos paid for the promise

All right, so you mentioned the yellow Lambo a couple of times. You bought the yellow Lambo after Bezos bought a chunk in the very early days, when you basically, by your own admission, didn't have much of a business. So he gave you a bunch of money, millions of dollars, and you're like, "Hey, I've got a couple million. I've got to give at least 200 grand to these Italian craftsmen." So you buy the yellow Lambo. But more interesting than the yellow Lambo to me is what you said: that what Jeff Bezos did for you and Jason gave you the confidence to go for it. Can you explain that?

So in the early days of 37signals, we had launched Basecamp, it was taking off quite well, and we got a lot of interest and outreach from VCs. We counted 40-some at the time. This was 2005-ish. I still had a very vivid memory of the dot-com boom and bust. I had seen what happened to some of these VC-funded companies and the internal mechanics of that, and I didn't like any of it. And I also had all these ideas about efficient businesses and what it takes to run them. So we didn't actually want VCs. But going back to this point about trusting yourself, I didn't fully trust myself not to get tempted by a 20 million dollar check, a 50 million dollar check, whatever the number was, at a time when my bank account said, I don't know, $8,000.

Funny thing: my bank account did say slightly more than that at one point. When I came to the US, I think I had 50 grand that we had worked up as we started Basecamp. And the first thing I did as soon as I landed was that Jason took me to an Audi dealership, and I bought an Audi S4, my first car, cash. It was basically all the money I had in my bank account. So I just blew it all on the car, and I thought, "We're going to make it back."

But there was this notion that we had something that was taking off, and that this is all fleeting. I had great humility about that. I'd seen many other businesses: "Oh, it's popping off," and then it's leveling off, and then it crashes. You can sell promise. That is one thing the VCs will buy any day of the week: a promise. There's a trajectory. There's traction. This is going places. It may be small now, but if we keep plotting the lines, it's going to go to the moon. I'm going to get in early, and I can make some money off that. We didn't want those people on board.

Jeff showed up around the same time, and we thought it was the same pitch. But it turned out it wasn't. He was not interested in the regular VC deals. That wasn't why he was doing it. I'm not actually 100% sure why he was doing it. I think he just enjoyed getting involved with companies and people he has an interest in. Anyway, he reaches out, and we basically flippantly tell him no, and then his team politely reaches out again: "No, actually, Jeff would really like to meet." And you're like, "Okay, fine."

This is one of my beefs at times with some quarters of the VC community: you're just a money person. Which is actually weird, why I consider that to be derogatory, but I do. If the only thing you do is money, I'm skeptical of you. If you've built things and you've made money, let's talk. But if it's just about the money and the allocation, I don't know. I'd rather talk to some builders, and Jeff is certainly a builder. He absolutely built something in a very, very different way than we had built our things. He went, "Let's just raise all the money in the world, and I don't care if we don't make anything for 20 years." It was the polar opposite, in a lot of ways, of how we built our business, but that was also just interesting. Don't surround yourself with a bunch of people who think just like you, who will say all the same things that you think and think all the same thoughts that you think. Jeff had very different thoughts, and that was very appealing.

So anyway, long story short, we ended up giving him a ridiculous term sheet. It was just flippantly, almost offensively overvalued. There was not a lot here. There was a promise, and we took that promise and drew the line to the moon and said, "We want to be paid as though we were up here." This is such a stupid number for the time; he's not going to take it. And then he took it. And it turned out to be an amazing investment for him. I actually wish I had some of the gumption Jeff has, to see that far into it. We've given him his money back many, many, many times over, and he still owns the stake, and every quarter or so we send him another check: "Here's your dividends." And we keep on doing that.

The confidence to say no to everyone

But that gave us the confidence to say no to everything else. It gave us the reassurance that if this wasn't going to pan out, we at least didn't have to go look for a job the next Monday, and that was an incredible gift. And Jeff followed up that gift, not just with the money, but with advice. In the early years, we'd meet with Jeff once a year and have dinner, and Jason and I would share our trials and tribulations, and we'd ask Jeff, "Here's the situation." And Jeff would go, "What do you think?" And we'd go, "Well, I think we should do that." "That's a good idea. You should do that." And it sounds so simple. It almost sounds like it doesn't have any value, and it actually had all the value in the world. He could have replied, "You should do this thing," and given us a detailed plan. But just that confidence. Here's fucking Jeff Bezos, king of the goddamn world in that sphere, telling us he believes in us? He thinks our thoughts are valuable and good? And the funny thing is, I don't think Jason or I generally have a deficit in self-confidence. But there's self-confidence, and then there's Jeff telling you, "No, you're right." Oh my God, rocket boost. Let's strap in. Let's go.

And in some ways, I think he turbocharged that brashness, that indignation: "Hey, here's a different way of building things, and we're not shy about sharing that we built it in a very different way." A lot of that came from Jeff, and we owe him tremendous gratitude. And actually, when I look back on the things I regret, I regret not being a little bit more grateful for that. In the long run, it was a really pivotal moment, and not just for the business. It could have gone a very different way. We might not have gotten Jeff's offer, and six months later, some VC would have given us a massive check that sounded super impressive, and it would have destroyed the business. We would have sold our independence, and we would have been fucking miserable pricks. And that didn't happen, and it's thanks to Jeff.

The day a third of the company left

That's beautiful. I've got one more thing I want to talk to you about, which I thought was very interesting, because again, I think this speaks to how you're pretty fluid. You have strong opinions, sometimes weakly held. And even though you have been known as basically a VC critic, what you shared with me last night was that in the most difficult time in your business, Marc Andreessen was the single most helpful person to you. Can you talk about what the difficult time was, and what Marc did for you?

So in 2021, we had a huge blowup at the company. This was the peak woke insanity era. This was everyone posting proclamations about political ideas on corporate pages that had nothing to do with each other, and it was an era when there was an activist group inside almost every tech company in the world, pushing these companies to do all these things, almost extorting them to do all these things. And we kind of got boiled like a frog a little bit at 37signals, Jason and I. We had probably seen good intentions in places where there weren't any, and allowed things to kind of roll. It happened quite quickly. It wasn't something that had been building for 20 years. From '18, I'd say, you started to see the first inklings: there's an activist core minority who suddenly have all these ideas about what the company should and shouldn't do, and what's kosher and not, and what's offensive and not, and pushing on things. And we're like, "Ah, we can manage." And then by '21, it became clear that if we didn't do something, this could eat the entire company, the soul of the company, the feel of the company, and we could end up with a business we didn't want to be in.

This was our business, and I had moments during that time where I said, "Eh, do you know what? Maybe it's time to retire." Which is fucking preposterous. I still like what I do. I liked the vast majority of the people I worked with. I liked the business. I liked the technology. Why would I want to retire from that? Oh, it's because there's this miserable contingent that's poisoning everything. So we just went, "Okay, let's put a hardcore stop to it." And the stop was Jason and I deciding we're just going to end it tomorrow. No more discussing politics inside our work channels. We're not going to settle, I don't know, the Palestine question inside the same space where we're discussing features in Basecamp. That is not an appropriate venue for these things, and in fact, it's incredibly divisive to introduce that kind of political energy into a professional environment.

And we did that, and we made some other changes. But it was really the thing about politics that ticked people off, because there was this core contingent inside the company that was very ideologically wedded to the idea that our business was a vehicle for their political aspirations on all these topics. And then there was the larger context of the internet, and especially Twitter at the time, which was very engaged in all of these topics. So it just blew up. We put out a memo saying, "It's over." And we also knew it was going to be contentious, so after it proved to be contentious, we doubled down on it and said, "Do you know what? If you can't see yourself at a company where we're not going to discuss fucking Palestine during work hours with your random coworkers, we will pay you up to six months' salary to go somewhere else." And at the time, the job market in tech was booming. Everyone was getting offers left, right, and center, so this was an incredibly attractive offer: "Here's six months' salary, and you can get a new job on Monday." It was almost like a mega bonus for getting the fuck out of there.

And it was the best money we've ever spent on anything related to culture, maybe anything at all. Of all the things I've bought, that peace of mind we bought with those payouts was just priceless. Because what it did was, it didn't just surgically cut out that bit of cancer. It cut out a thick ring around it. And what we ended up with was a culture that was completely cured of all that insanity in one swoop.

Marc Andreessen came to help

Now, the patient had a bit of a rough going for a while, and it was during that rough going that Andreessen came in. Because we're a small company, 60 people at the time, and 20 took the offer. 20 left. That's almost a third of the company that decided to leave in that moment, and we got to a point where we were thinking, "Not that many more have to leave before I start to get worried about whether we can keep the lights on." And it was actually Tobi who put me in contact with Marc Andreessen, because Marc had been exposed to this phenomenon at all of his portfolio companies. And just getting that initial exposure: "Hey, there are other people struggling with this, by the way. Even though you're getting skewered right now on Twitter and hounded by the mob, this is happening all over. You're not unique in this way." And that's some reassurance. "And by the way, here's a bunch of contacts. Do you need someone to come in to help with programming or operations or whatever? I know this person, and this person, and this person."

And I was just floored by the generosity, because Marc and I haven't always seen eye to eye on these things, especially in terms of venture capital. He's been one of the main faces of venture capital for decades, and I've been kind of critical at times. And there was just a realization that all those grievances we might once upon a time have thought were so big were actually minuscule. We were fighting the White Walkers on the other side of the wall, and all our internal squabbles were going to be for nothing if those fuckers got inside the wall and destroyed everything, all of it. And that felt like a real threat at the time. That could've happened. They could very well have just ripped the whole thing apart. And Marc clearly saw that this was a collective, almost existential threat to the entire industry. If these activists were able to take over these institutions in the same way they had taken over academia, we would be fucked, and not just for a little while, but potentially for decades. That couldn't stand.

So clearly, when Jason and I stood up and said, "We're not doing it," there were a bunch of people who said, "Great that they're going first, so they take a bit of the heat, but also, let's help them." And Marc was incredibly helpful. Not just in terms of those contacts and introductions and so on, which we ended up not needing. It was very powerful. When you have literally 40,000 people on Twitter calling you all the worst things in the world, even the strongest individual might go for a second, "Holy shit. The mob is coming for me, and there's no one else there." And there were other people there. Tobi was there. Marc was there. And it was incredibly helpful, giving us the fortitude to go, "No, do you know what? We're going to stick with it. We're not going to grovel. We're not going to apologize. We're not going to revert."

And then what Marc also did was give me a syllabus for understanding the history of wokeness, going all the way back to the '60s and beyond: that this didn't just come as lightning from a blue sky. It had an institutional grounding that was set in motion particularly in the '60s. The long march through the institutions, Herbert Marcuse, and a lot of the Frankfurt School, and all these groups that had designs on how to reshape society and create the revolution they so dearly wanted, but with a timeline and a roadmap that was demarcated in decades. It wasn't just, "Well, we're going to put something together, and then in two years something's going to..." No, they were sitting in the fucking '60s, fantasizing about how to overthrow everything in the 2000s. Actually incredible, in a Dr. Evil sense. But when you're on the receiving end of it, it seems a little less incredible, and it was just difficult not knowing. Where's this coming from? Why is this happening all of a sudden? Well, it wasn't happening all of a sudden. There was this long history to it, and when you understood that history, it made a lot more sense, and it gave more of a purpose to the rejection of it. We weren't just making a rejection for our little corner of the world. We were chipping in to the great civilizational battle over where this country was going to go, over whether the White Walkers beyond the wall were going to win. And we were like, "No, they're not going to fucking win. Get up onto that fucking wall. Take your goddamn spear. Fire it with maximum velocity."

David, this is awesome. Anytime you're in town, text me, and we'll run this back as much as you want. Thanks, man.

Awesome.