David Heinemeier Hansson Returns To Discuss Going Against The Grain, Mental Health And More

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David Heinemeier Hansson, better known as DHH, returns to the Elevate Podcast. He is the co-founder of Basecamp, used by over 20 million people globally. David is also the founder of Hey and the creator of the transformational Ruby on Rails, an open-source web framework used to create Basecamp, Github, Shopify, Airbnb, and more. He is also a frequent writer at Hey World, the New York Times bestselling author of four books, including Rework, and even an award-winning racecar driver. DHH joined host Robert Glazer on the Elevate Podcast to discuss politics in the workplace, mental health, going against the grain, and much more.

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David Heinemeier Hansson Returns To Discuss Mental Health, Going Against The Grain And More

Our quote is from Theodore Levitt, “Creativity is thinking up new things, innovation is doing new things.” I’m excited to welcome back David Heinemeier Hansson, better known as DHH, to the show. He’s the Cofounder of Basecamp, which has been used by over 20 million people globally and the Founder of Hey, and the creator of the transformational Ruby on Rails, an open-source web framework that was used to create Basecamp, GitHub, Shopify, Airbnb, and more. He’s also a frequent writer at Hey World, The New York Times, best-selling author of four books, including Rework, and even an award-winning race car driver. David, welcome back to the show.

Thanks for having me again.

I got to start with what we talked about before, and it was great. What I appreciate about you and Jason is that you have changed your mind a lot and are willing to change it. What is going on with Basecamp’s 37signals? Every time I write an article, someone tells me I have it wrong. Changing the company name.

It’s funny. 37signals has been around since 1999. Until 2012 or 2014, we were 37signals. After the company transitioned from being a consulting company that was doing design work to becoming a software company, which is what we’re known for now, as you mentioned, Basecamp with project management and Hey with email, we had a phase where we were very prolific and we launched a bunch of different software tools.

Not only Basecamp but also basically Slack, ten years before Slack in the form of something called Campfire. We launched a high-rise CRM tool that’s still used to this day by people, even though we haven’t sold it for a while. we realized in the early 2010s that doing all of that stuff with a team of less than 40 people was a little crazy even by our standards and it wasn’t sustainable. Our choices were here are 4 or 5 products. They’re all doing well in various regards, but one is doing substantially better than the others.

Basecamp was on a rocket journey of its own, and we could either grow the company a ton at that moment to do all these products justice at the same time, or we could do the very weird and very odd thing to say that we like it at 40 people. Let’s get rid of some successful products. Let’s start selling those successful products and just focus on Basecamp. That’s what we did. We changed our name to Basecamp.

After having done that for about 6 or 7 years, you know, you get that trigger itchy finger that suddenly you have some of that creativity and you have some of that inspiration and you want to see it go somewhere. We had too much of it for Basecamp to absorb all of it. That’s when we started working on Hey, the email service with the crazy-nonsense mission of taking on Gmail, one of the most successful software products in human history, offered for free.

We said, “Do you know what? I think we can do it better and we can charge for it.” We did that and it was a crazy launch. We signed up 30,000 people in three weeks in part because Apple tried to kill us and that gave us quite the spotlight. Finally, we realized, “Do you know what? We’re doing multiple products.” Since then, we’ve launched a variety of other products. We’ve launched something called Once. Where you get a web product, you only pay for one time.

I think there are a lot of people who are tired of subscription overload. We realized that there’s an opening in the market. We are doing something here, and we’re working on two new products at the same time. All of a sudden, we couldn’t be called Basecamp anymore. We thought, “We’re going to go back to 37signals. This was the origin of the company. We’re not working and selling multiple products. This feels just right.”

You retain the right to change your mind, but we’re back to 37signals.

Yes. I think there is a broader point here, which is when new information or circumstances change, you should change with it. Otherwise, what else are you going to do? You’re going to stay stuck on bad information or with a map that no longer reflects the territory. That seems a silly way to go. I like the saying, “Strong opinions, loosely held.”

Yes, that’s one of my favorite sayings. I map with the territory change. That’s good as well. Although most people can’t picture a physical map anymore. You were on episode 257. It was one of our most popular ever. I encourage people to read that, get more into your background, and talk a little bit more about 2023. We’ve been writing about some similar stuff, which was why I was excited to have you back. One of those topics that you wrote about, which I thought was super interesting, was the endangered state of normality. Can you help define what you mean by that?

The Concept Of Normality And Its Evolution

Yes, I am a kid of the ‘80s and the ‘90s. As I was growing up in the ‘80s and the ‘90s, normality to me felt it was a very broad concept. Most people were “normal.” Some people didn’t fit into that range. We were able to, both as a society, to varying degrees of success and more personally feeling, “Okay, that’s part of it. That’s part of what defines normality for most of us.” Then, that definition is drawn by the fact there are a few folks who are outside of that.

Sometimes, they’re outside of that in very positive ways. However it is, culturally, musically, or otherwise, there’s someone who’s out there and they’re a huge success because of that. Other times, they’re outside of normality in not good ways, They are not a net positive society or whatever. The old way of dealing with that was saying, “Do you know what? That’s not normal.” That was a saying that if it didn’t apply to some superstar meant that wasn’t good.

That norms, where normality comes from, norms are healthy. It helps contain society in a productive path. They can also be stifling and oppressive, but I think we’ve realized, I’ve certainly realized, that in the last 10 or 15 years, all these norms that you find are slightly stifling, whatever, they’re there for a reason. They’re holding the whole thing together in a way that if you just start picking apart all the norms, make all of them optional, and everything becomes, “You just do your thing.”

Norms help keep society on a productive path. But they can also be stifling and oppressive.

The most important principle becomes consent and consent alone. As long as you’re a willing participant, you should just do whatever you want. I think we eventually end up in a place we don’t want to be. This is the weird thing about norms, tradition, and even whole belief systems like religion and otherwise, that it’s very difficult to diagnose which are the bearing pillars and how much you can remove from the shared culture before things start caving in.

I got a vivid illustration of that when I moved back to Denmark during the pandemic. I’m already from Denmark. I lived there for the first 25 years of my life before I immigrated to the US and I’ve stayed in the US for almost 20 years. I just had this spell of three years after having been out for a very long time, coming back into Danish society and realizing, “Holy smokes, this society is packed with social norms, packed with what’s acceptable and what’s unacceptable.” Society is enforcing those norms.

If you are not normal in the negative sense of that, you don’t get to just ruin it for everyone else. On the one hand, I remember when I first left Denmark back in 2005, I would tell people about this thing called Janteloven. It is the law of Jante, which is essentially a set of prescriptions that go something like, “Don’t think you’re something special. Don’t stand out.” It’s the Brits who call it tall poppy syndrome. That set of norms sounds very negative, certainly to American ears when you hear it for the first time. You’ll say, “That’s just stifling.” “You’re just trying to make everyone conform.” There’s truth to that, but there’s certainly also a benefit.

I realized that things opened up somewhat as we moved with our family back to Copenhagen in 2002 and a little time into this pandemic. There’s a whole discussion there about how you handle pandemics and forth, but let’s put that aside for a second and just focus on the fact that my nine-year-old son could take the Metro by himself at 9:00 at night.

Not only was that normal, but that was what his friends in Copenhagen were doing, too. I didn’t feel I had something particularly to worry about because a norm-enforcing culture, such as the Danish, rewards you in a bunch of ways that are not necessarily that apparent until you’re in it and you realize that I would never in a million years let my nine-year-old son go down in the subway in New York City and just say, “Yes, you take a trip.”

There was a guy who did that and he was on every news station in America and that guy wrote the free-range parenting book.

I’ve been struggling with this and maybe we’ll get into that topic about free-range childhoods and I think it’s one of the parts of American society. I’m most disappointed about or critical about or just annoyed about the fact that the freedom of children has shrunk to such a degree that it almost is a lot of them are under full-time surveillance in a prison where they can’t do much of anything themselves and they’re constantly being chaperoned.

I think that’s not good and I think this is one of the things that Jonathan Haidt covers in a lot of his writings about what we’ve done to childhood. I think, unfortunately, he’s then gone into focusing a little bit too much on those screens. Also, an important point and an important topic. I’m not saying that it’s not important, but I  think the greater importance lies with what’s been happening with childhood.

The greater importance lies in what’s been happening with childhood and seeing that contrast of a norm-heavy society.

Seeing the contrast of a norm-heavy society that won’t let a homeless person or homeless people just pitch tents all over a public park, because then that means that I can’t go there with my kids to enjoy the park, it’s very different. It’s a very different response to what happens in society. What I find fascinating in this contrast is that especially in the American left.

Denmark, generally speaking, is held up as this pivotal of, “We should all get to Denmark.” Wouldn’t it be nice if we had public transportation and could walk everywhere? You want all those nice things. You don’t want to do what it takes to get those nice things. Those nice things are only possible because of norm enforcement, and we will not tolerate something outside of normality when it’s a net negative to society.

That presents some interesting pros and cons. The problem with a lot of norms is they don’t serve the people that fall out of them and they’re ostracized or otherwise. On the flip side, and this is what I’m fascinated about, all of the postmodernists and socialists are not that different from animals, except we figured out a way to come up with some basic rules our societies can live and function. I think the, “I get to do whatever I want,” I understand the personal liberty piece of it, but trying to organize a society around that without anything you agree on, it’s a theoretical concept. It won’t and it hasn’t worked. If we just take 8 billion people and make them all free agents doing whatever they want to do. I can explain what it would look like.

You can look at San Francisco. You can look at a lot of cities in the US. If you were able to just be an alien observing Earth and having no personal stake in the outcome of human life, you’d say, “These are interesting experiments.” What if you just allow people to live on the street and shoot up fentanyl or whatever as they please?

What we will do is just supply them with clean needles and hot meals. Otherwise, feel it is in no way within our bounds to have an opinion about whether people should live zombies. That is a fascinating human experiment. We have had American cities run that experiment for a long time. It’s not that they only tried for six months, and you could say, “If you tried it a little longer, maybe you’d get different outcomes.”

I think the outcomes are now pretty clear. Those outcomes are clear that I changed my mind on a bunch of things that were more of the standard liberal orthodoxy that was easier to believe before the experiments were run in real-time in my lifetime. When you say, “If we just remove all these social norms.”

The problem is there’s a narrative that if you’re doing something under the name of helping people, then there’s no accountability for whether it works or not.

Harm Reduction

I think if you had presented me the theory of Harm Reduction, I would probably have gone before seeing how that then transpired. I’d say, “That sounds like a very nice idea.” “That sounds like a very compassionate idea.” That sounds like something that might work. Maybe, if you are an addict and someone sort of helps you not die from being an act. That’s certainly something we should all be in support of.

Maybe you’ll just come to your senses eventually and you’ll find your way out of it. That doesn’t seem to be what’s happening on a mass scale in America. To me, I had to update my mental model. I remember thinking in the mid-2000s that we should just legalize all of it. Who should tell me whether I can snort cocaine?

Right, that’s the individualist mentality.

That’s very much the individualist freedom. I was full in on that. Two things happened and they’re connected. The first thing that happened was the whole opiate crisis that was driven through pharmacology, Oxycontin, and so on. Here’s essentially a regime that says, “You can get opioids literally from your doctor if you ask nicely or if your toe hurts or something else like that.” We’ve legalized it to some extent. What then happened? Not good things.

The outcomes we’ve arrived at, are 120,000 Americans dying every year from overdoses. Just an almost unfathomable human catastrophe that is unrolling from that experiment that was based on the premise of consent as long as someone wants to take fentanyl. Who are we to tell them whether that’s right or wrong? It’s just an abject failure.

Up there with some of those other abject failures of, let’s say, the 20th century and certain ideologies that might very well have been founded on some noble intentions and whatnot but then turn out to be just these hell-on-earth scenarios where you can say that you can also propose a critique of say, capitalism or American society and say that there are problems with this and you would be correct.

The problem is when then your theories of what the alternative should be turn out to be just catastrophically worse. You should have the humility to go back and revisit your priorities. Update your mental models. That’s what I’ve been trying to do. Of course, what’s fascinating about this is the ability to continue to believe an ideology that’s been proven wrong in the wild almost requires a PhD. You almost have to be exceptionally smart to be stupid.

When your theories of what the alternative should be like turn out to be just worse, you should have the humility to go back and revisit your errors and update your mental models.

If not, academic, because I was going to say before, I think business people inherently around parenting and a bunch of other things say that they’re just used with, “When something doesn’t work, you stop doing it and you change the inputs.” Policy and government seem to just not have that discussion.

We’ll have to come back for episode three on parenting because I could go into that for hours, but I would argue we’re in a twenty-year experiment with a new type of parenting that produces catastrophic outcomes, yet no one says, “Maybe we should change that.” They’re doubling down on it.

That’s what was pivotal to me about reading Bad Therapy, the book by Abigail Shrier.

We talked about this before the show. We’re both big fans of this book and I said to you, “I’ve told all of my friends to read this book.” It will make a lot of people uncomfortable, but it reminds me a little bit of Jonathan Haidt’s Coddling Of The American Mind when it came out. It was a little canary in the coal mine. People would say, “You have no proof of this.” You just feel that this book is going to age well and that people are fighting in that. Abigail was canceled many years ago. People have come around to that. She talked about in that book that you just get the sense this is ahead of its time a little bit.

What’s fascinating about that book and why I think you’re very likely to be right is that we are running simultaneous experiments in different parts of the world. This is why I brought up the example of Denmark. Denmark and Danish society have a very different approach to parenting that is way more akin to an eighties America in terms of latch kids keys or latchkey kids.

That whole idea is that it’s good for children to be unsupervised for long periods and figure the world out on their own and on and forth. That’s still largely speaking, a reality in Denmark and you’re having different outcomes. You can see it in all the KPIs for children who have different outcomes. There is some overlap. There are some shared pathologies here.

It’s hard to figure out exactly what, but the degree is very different. When I read bad therapy, I just thought that I wish I could hand this out exactly as you were saying to every parent at every school and every institution that I’ve ever been in and involved in America. Just because it is so uncomfortably pinpointing all these over-cuddling instincts that a lot of American parents have.

Now, some of that is from the example of, “Would I let my nine-year-old go on the subway in New York?” I would not. Would I let him do it in Denmark? Yes, I would. There are material differences in the circumstances, security, and so forth. Even I struggle with that because you look at crime statistics from the 80s and 90s. You’ll ask, “How did anyone ever open the door and go outside?”

They just look catastrophically bad and worse because they were. I think she said that you’d have to leave your kid out on the curb for 740,000 years before someone would kidnap them or something like that. The kidnapping thing was always nonsense, but if you just look at overall stats of whatever, violent crime or whatnot, things used to be much worse.

I’m also struggling with that. I also have that instinct. Maybe that instinct, as I was just saying, “I wouldn’t let my nine-year-old on the subway in New York,” is also disproportionate. The risk perhaps isn’t as high. Even so, I think this diagnosis, especially when it comes to the surveillance part of it, is also how Americans live by and large.

How kids get from A to B. If everything involves a drive-by Mommy and Daddy, there’s a serious curtailment of individual freedom. Yes, but anyway, the whole diagnosis of the fact that not only is the way we treat children, the amount of freedom we give them, problematic but the way we’re then trying to counter the effects of that setup, are just draconian. The way we are shrinking the maladies, we start that.

If everything involves a drive-by mommy and daddy, there’s a serious curtailment of individual freedom.

The results are horrible. She says somewhere in there, “If you gave people a cancer drug and their cancer got worse, you would stop doing that.” We are intervening in mental health situations and doing all of this stuff, and mental health just keeps getting worse. You have to look at that. What was interesting in your article, and maybe bringing this full circle, is the solution that you offered around this normalization, which is expanding the definition. It was an empathetic thing rather than treating everyone who was outside as someone with a problem that needed to be solved. How do you see that taking shape in practice?

I will speak of the areas of the country I’ve had some exposure to. In California, the amount of children that I’ve been exposed to personally who have a diagnosis of some sort and who have an intervention regime that either involves pills or therapy is wild and foreign to how I grew up. This is whatever. Maybe we’re starting to start like old people.

“Back in the ‘80s, we would just walk uphill in both directions.” Just this idea that a bunch of children, and then I hear about why they’re on these regiments. Some of the things, they can’t sit still in class or they’re acting out in certain ways. That doesn’t sound like that’s not normal to me. I acted out and I got thrown out of the class.

I haven’t met an entrepreneur who couldn’t sit still in class, but instead of saying, “Sit down and shut up,” someone should have said, “Why don’t you stand up?” David Rendall might know. He wrote this book called The Freak Factory. He said, “My entire life, I was told to sit down, shut up and be quiet. I make my living standing up and talking all day on stages.” If someone had said to me that you can make money doing that, he would have said, “I’m going to do that.”

I do think that there is more latitude in decades past to accept that. First of all, a lot of them are just boys.

You wouldn’t have that problem on a farm.

It gets even more specific in the comparisons here. I was in a Danish public school. I think it was fourth grade. I got into a fight in the classroom with my friend and we were just punching each other in the face until blood was going down the nose. I think of what would happen in any of the American schools that I’ve been involved with if that incident had occurred and it would have been a whole swarm thing. We need the full interface, we need the parents, we need all the things. I think of what happened in Copenhagen back in the ‘80s.

You solved it yourselves.

It was that. We did. We did solve it. Punching each other in the face. There are limits to everything. This is not a, “There should be more violence in schools.” Don’t be silly. The idea is that children should learn to navigate their interpersonal conflicts. To some extent, sometimes, especially when it comes to boys, that involves a physical contest. Establishing a hierarchy somewhat that I don’t think those sensibilities allow that to happen. They just don’t exist.

Right, or you also had to figure out, “I said that and he lost it on me.” There are some limits before someone might attack me.

All of a sudden, it might be a moderate force to think that I could get punched in the face if I’m a real asshole. Maybe that’s good. I don’t even think maybe. It is good. It is good to some extent. you can take it to absurdum in five different directions. Try not to do that, but just this sense that, boys, in particular, do hash out their differences in physical ways. If you take that away, I’m giving the extreme example of two kids punching each other in the face. There’s also just the example of playing tag. I’ve had kids in various institutions where they didn’t allow tags unless there was a teacher present to them.

I was reading The Anxious Mind book, and he talked about the rules that were all listed for playing tag in school. It almost sounded like a Dilbert comic.

That’s where going down the wrong path and by trying to cotton and overprotect, make sure that no one is ever hurt, either because someone says something mean or because they fall in a game of tag and scrape their knee. We’re making these children exceptionally vulnerable and fragile by not exposing them early. That’s the thesis that Abigail and Hyde present that I fully subscribe to, that you need some exposure therapy.

What we’ve done instead is not only have we taken all that away, but we’re running a grand experiment of reverse CBT. Reverse Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, where instead of increasing exposure to things that might seem dangerous or difficult, we’re doing the opposite. We’re teaching children to avoid all things and to be more sensitive.

That’s what microaggressions are. For example, here’s something you might not even have noticed before, but do you know what? If you analyze that word and that tone in just the right way, you can find a way to not only be offended or hurt by it. we can extrapolate further that that hurt is not just you feeling a little bad. No, it’s a violence.

Now, we are in a way where we’re training children and then young adults and then adults to be hypersensitive in all the little ways that the world doesn’t always accommodate us. As you say, “Is that good?” “Is that bad?” You could have a theoretical discussion about that until you see the results and the results are in. The children are not better off, as Abigail would say, after doing all this therapy and all these interventions, shouldn’t you expect that things were getting better?

No, they’re not. They’re getting worse. If they are getting worse, the first thing you have to do is stop digging. You’re in a hole, you’re digging, and you thought, “This is not working.” Stop digging. Start finding somewhere else. At the very least, have the humility to just do the intellectual comparison, “Are we better off now than we were, say, in 1985 or 1995?”

If not, why?

If not, why? To what extent are the differences between those two errors related to the ways we’re treating these things? I don’t think it’s that philosophical. I don’t think it’s that remote or abstract why kids, especially boys, and I’m saying this because I have experience with having three boys, and that’s my main experience. They hate it. My boys hate this idea that when they are in this situation, they’re under constant supervision to play a game of tag.

I think back to my childhood and say, “I would have hated that too.” That’s not just an anecdote. There’s a definition of stress, I think. Abigail brings this up in her book, where if you want to introduce stress into a psychological experiment, all you have to do is introduce supervision. Just someone looking at you is in and of itself an injection of stress. No wonder the kids are more stressed and fragile in all this way because they’re constantly being supervised in school, out of school, or everywhere. It’s not working.

Yes, I’m doing research for my next book, which takes a look at this divergence between what we understand as good leadership and what people are practicing as parenting because I think it’s interesting for those of us in the business world. I’m not giving away the opening chapter, but David, if I told you that you have an employee on your team and they track all their employees. They constantly interrupt them. They finish their work.

They do everything for them. They don’t let them make any mistakes. People would be on the glass door complaining about this employee. They would be in a remedial program. You’re a micromanager and no one wants to work for you. If you just describe the average behavior of a parent, that’s what it is. it’s super interesting to me that we understand that it is a horrible leadership behavior in the workplace. The same people, to a lot of extent, practice it at home.

Cultural Approach To Parenting

It is an enigma to some extent. I’ve been trying to figure out both by reading Abigail, Hyde, and others. I don’t think we fully nailed the full diagnosis of it. How is it that culture has moved in this way where we all have these impulses all the time in the same way? I’m trying to be conscious about it and deal with it in different ways.

Yet still, as a parent, I’m far more interventionist. I’m far more involved than my parents were in the eighties. I look at all the things that I turned out to be good at and the skills I honed as a young adult. Most of them are related to having to figure things out without having a parent there to guide it all away. Being able to make a bunch of awful mistakes along the way and realize that it wasn’t a good idea.

Taking all of that and then figuring out how to transform that into lessons about leadership. About humans in general. What works and what doesn’t work? If you look at American kids, this is one of those other contrasts. It’s not to wreck on America. I love a lot of things about America. Not this part, but a lot of other things. When I compare the Danish 15-year-olds with the American 15-year-olds who I generally meet, it feels like there’s a 5-year difference. It feels like I’m meeting a 10-year-old versus a 15-year-old.

Probably is.

There’s just such a huge gap in the way some people sum it up as maturity. That’s a vague word, but there’s some sense of you meet a person and that feels like a 15-year-old. In America and I’m sure this is segmented in different parts of the country. There’s just a sense that the kids are kids, small children longer.

Jordan Peterson has this long line of argument around the devouring parent. You want all the good and best things for your child so you try to hug them and embrace them. What you end up with is choking their ability to grow, blossom, and become functioning adults. What you have to do is the great tragedy of letting go and the great tragedy of accepting that when you do let go, some bad things will happen.

Those bad things need to happen. They are integral to producing the human you would want to have as your 25-year-old offspring. You’re harming literally by being this overprotective and devouring parent. The only way to undo that is to let go and accept that adversity is a requirement for growth. You literally cannot grow a fully formed, moral, kind, and capable adult without exposing the child of that adult to some degree of adversity, difficulty, hardship, personal choices, making bad choices, and standing back. Being there, I’m not saying to be completely absentee.

Let them know that you support and love them. They’re just not there to fix every problem that happened.

That is very interesting that you’re drawing this parallel to the workforce and the degree to which I’ve worked with a lot of employees over the 20-plus years of managing other people. It’s exactly as you say, that I need to be there to a little location, not to back on the track unless I let them commit some mistakes and chase down some blind alleys.

They’re not going to figure it out. We’ve summed this up, “Teach a man how to fish. Don’t just give him a fish.” We’re not just about, “I want a specific outcome in one instance.” No, I’m trying to train in part on another individual the capacity such that they can make good choices when I’m not here. That’s where it goes to the childhood part.

You do all this overprotective work and you may very well be able to protect them from hardship and harm in those first five years. There are 80 years left. They have to be alone by themselves and make those personal choices for 80 years even if he pains you. Which parent isn’t pained by seeing some hardship in their child?

For 5 or 7 years to realize that there are going to be some hard times. I’m looking at the bigger picture. I’m doing the marshmallow test on my parenting. I’m not going to smother it all and eat the marshmallow right now. By the way, that one didn’t replicate, I believe, as most other things in psychology at the moment. Virtually everything.

I think this is where psychology and parenting could learn a little bit from business, but businesses could certainly also learn to go back and realize that sometimes we draw on all these studies for our business lessons. Most of them are not replicated. It’s a fascinating topic on its own, but let’s just assume that it was true. I defer gratification, I think, as a concept is true. There are 80 years left. When you’re done with them, it does get easier.

If you have the abilities, the problems don’t get easier. Being made fun of for dropping a ball on the playground is generally a low-stakes thing. I know it feels like the end of the world.

They have to feel some degree of shame. They have to feel some degree of hurt and whatever. There are proportions to everything. This is not a thing that everyone should just be bullied all the time because it’s good for them. No, don’t be silly but we need some of it.

Some thick skin. I want to take a total pivot here because one of the other topics I want to talk to you about is that you and Jason have continually made decisions that go against the grain or the tide or what everyone is clamoring for. Often, there is a lot of criticism, but I don’t think you do it to be intentionally confrontational.

I think you guys are just strongly principled, maybe impervious to whatever the screaming or the crowd is. We talked about this last time. I wrote an article about how leaders are just struggling to manage their core businesses and all the extra duties of ESG and DEI. I know you talked about how you think that’s ending.

I want to go back to a couple of years ago when you and Jason said that this is in the middle of all of the fervor of companies should have opinions on everything. You said, “We’re not doing this.” “We’re not doing politics at work.” “It’s not what we’re going to do.” “If you don’t it, we’ll help you leave.” You were told that you’re on the wrong side of history.

You guys were told a lot, “You will regret this.” All this stuff. Turns out, you were right. I just saw a Gallup poll this week. It’s down to 38% of Americans want companies to take social stances. If you dive into that data, it’s less because of the things they’re saying about climate change, but I don’t think it’s a social stance.

I think they want their company to not harm the world, which, to me, is not a societal stance or a political stance. All of these things, whether it’s raising venture money, changing your name, going against this tide of saying, “No one will ever work for your company again if you don’t become a social advocacy company.” What does it take to stay calm in these storms?

I’ll point to several factors. As always, I don’t even know which of the factors are exactly the ones that determine things, but what helped us specifically around the original storm on, “Should DEI be a core component of the company?” “Should we run on an equity agenda versus an equality agenda?”

The difference of trying to ensure that we have default or the same opportunities for everyone or the same outcomes. These very different things are very easily conflated at the absolute core of the rot that DEI brought to a lot of companies. Focusing on making sure that outcomes are the same for everyone, whether the talents or efforts or inputs are the same or not, versus ensuring that everyone has a chance.

I’m a very fervent believer in that and that’s how I got sucked into the good intentions at first because the line had been made intentionally blurry. It appealed to people who thought that this was just all about ensuring that everyone gets a fair chance and a fair shot. It’s up to them to prove whether they have earned it or not. It turned out that it wasn’t what it was about.

I saw that early on when meritocracy started getting turned into a negative word. That this was bad, that first of all, no real meritocracies exist. Yes, perhaps in some theoretical sense, is there 100% meritocracy or zero, but that’s not the world we live in. There’s a spectrum of it. Trying to strive for meritocracy.

That is, the most qualified and capable candidates rise to the top and get hired or promoted, which is foundational to everything from a functioning economy to a functioning company. Giving that up or throwing that out at the altar of the DEI was just a catastrophic mistake. It took me a while to realize all of this because my instincts as this started to wind up was that it spoke to general liberal, humanistic sensibilities.

What about companies having opinions, too? Can you bring that into that?

That too and I think that’s one where I have changed my mind tremendously by seeing the total sum of it and then using it as a mirror to reflect on my behavior. I’ve been very opinionated for a very long time and for a lot of that time, I’ve been very opinionated about how other people did other things, how they ran their companies or operated their things.

We’re not afraid of expressing that opinion, but having gone through, especially the last five years and being able to see the kind of community within the tech community or the broader economy, what happens when everyone piles in on that train? Then I say, “I don’t want to be as much a part of this as I was before.”

I’ve tried to change my approach to, for example, criticism online of how to lose my trigger finger before I slander someone else for something I think they did wrong or otherwise. Either way, we end up in this situation where we are in the eye of the storm, and the easy path was certainly just to roll over and say things.

Just to be clear to you, you said that we’re no longer allowing political commentary on our internal channels. We’re not doing politics at work.

Yes, we were not going to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in our workspace. This wasn’t even about having shut down all discussions. If there are willing participants who want to start a WhatsApp group, and during work, have some back-and-forth discussions. Do you know what? Okay, whatever. This was specifically about any of those political currents infiltrating, permutating, and corrupting the main areas of collaboration that we were using.

Specifically, for us for Basecamp, where we’re doing all our messages back and forth, in that broad form, it’s inappropriate. We should have a norm that is not new. It’s a revival of a known norm at work. You don’t talk about politics, you don’t talk about religion, because talking about both of those things is inevitably going to lead to friction unless you have some weird bork where everyone has the same. Political programming.

This,, by the way, is not very aligned as I’ve always said, because people say, “I want my company to agree with me on the opinions and values.” I thought that if everyone agrees, that doesn’t sound very diverse to me.

A Diverse And Inclusive Workplace

That’s one of those internal contradictions that, to me, was always hilarious. We’re all about diversity, except if it’s about different opinions. Wait, what does that word even mean then? There’s all discussion there. First of all, this isn’t working. This wasn’t coming from a theoretical, abstract discussion of, “I wonder what would happen if we did this more.”

No. It was coming from a very concrete set of circumstances. This was happening. It is hurting the culture. It’s hurting the company. It’s turning this company into a company I don’t want to work at, let alone own. That seems bizarre. Jason and I own this company. We’ve worked in this company for 20 years. Are we going to let it turn into a company we don’t like? Let alone want to be at? This is, by the way, just to tie it to the parenting thing.

One of Jordan Peterson’s most searing commentaries is to ensure that your children grow up to be adults you would want to be around. I think of that in the same way with the company. I have to ensure that, as the co-owner of this company, this company grows or continues to be the place where I want to work. I should be the most passionate about wanting to work there. If I don’t want to work there, how could I ask anyone else to come in and do the job here?

We felt that we had to make a change. We cannot live in this shadow realm of just biting our tongue because it’s having such a detrimental effect. Now, when we went on, we said, “No more politics at work. The company at large is not going to take public stances anymore.” I think we did one, maybe two awful public statements on current things, political stuff that was posted probably around BLM or something that. I just felt like I wanted to throw up.

This is antithetical to how I want this company to operate and what I want it to stand for. It’s even abstract and removed from the specifics of whatever the current thing was. It’s just that it is disgusting. What do you do with that disgust? A lot of folks have forces on them that ensure that they will just swallow. They’ll just grit their teeth and they will say the incarnations like, “There is more work to be done.”

There was a wonderful article. I think 2020 or something that summarizes statements around it, I think BLM or something like that. George Floyd, I believe, 141 CEOs from major companies saying the same line. Verbatim, “There is more work to be done,” in the context of all this stuff. That’s, by the way, kind of freaky.

You can’t get 140 CEOs to agree on virtually anything of any kind. All of a sudden, they’re speaking as one Borg about this. This is not voluntary. This is performative in a survivalist way. I’m not even performing just because I like the aspiration. I’m performing because I think my company will be destroyed, and I will be destroyed unless I say the right thing.

What’s interesting there is that you could argue destroyed from, or you’re worried about outside forces or inside forces?

That was the real surprise for me, I would say, was the degree to which I’ve grown or developed a relatively thick skin for strangers having opinions about my work. I think that is a good thing to develop. Generally speaking, if you want to do something creative, innovative, or different, you are never going to get a bunch of haters who dislike it, and they will say online.

I thought, “Whatever.” The new dynamic in that situation, especially once Twitter became this incredible force, was that it would ricochet back and forth. Outside criticism wouldn’t just hit me. No, it would hit deep inside and splinter inside the company. It would hit a bunch of folks who were not in any way exposed or had developed that thick skin.

Those who didn’t have 20 years of being in the public eye and being a respondent or responding to these public comments would be a lot more fragile. A lot of them would shatter. I saw that dynamic go on. First of all, this is a new phenomenon. I’ve never seen this before. The way Twitter and the mob mentality were able to reach that deep into the innards of a company and then just rip it apart.

It was a Salem witch hunt type fervor.

Yes, there was a lot of that.

By the way, if you’re labeled a witch, there’s no defense that you’re not a witch.

We trended for that specific thing. We trended, I think, for 36 hours on Twitter. At the time, it counted something like 20,000 to 30,000 tweets. A lot of them were the witch label of the day, which was, “You’re a Nazi. You’re a white supremacist.” All based on, “We don’t want to discuss politics.” We weren’t even taking a hard stance on one way or the other.

How many people left?

About twenty. About a third of the company. Twenty doesn’t sound that much, but a third does, It was a big change for the company. One that, at the time, I didn’t know how that was going to play out. What happens when a third leaves? Also, are we ever going to be able to hire someone again? This is the way in the city.

I was just going to say, but then tell me about what happened with your job applications. Didn’t they spike? There were a lot of people who wanted this.

That was the whole concept of what we called Revealed Preferences and falsification cascades. I forget specific terms. This idea is that when you see something like that and you also feel it, there’s a mob on Twitter, and it feels like it’s the world. When 20,000 individuals show up in your mentions and they all call you a Nazi or a white supremacist. It doesn’t feel like 20,000. It feels like 8 billion. It feels like it’s everyone.

The inkling is to cave. The easy thing to do there, what most people would do is, “We got it wrong and we’re sorry, we’ll cave.” As you said, throwing up in their mouth saying it because they don’t believe it.

Now, the irony, perhaps, was revealed a little later when a lot of people did it. It didn’t help. Once you’ve been declared a witch, capitulating is not going to save you from the stake. You will still get burned. In some ways, you’re now just going to be burned double in both directions. Still, I can see why someone would arrive at me. I just have to wave the white flag even if it means my destruction because of the pressure. I say, as someone who had twenty years of training in internet commentary, if you take on something that lasts for more than an hour, it was the hardest period of my professional life. In retrospect, I am eternally grateful for the experience. It’s one of those very strange things that has this whole.

Anti-fragility.

Exactly. It’s one of those things that there’s a great saying, “I asked for things to be easier, but what I needed to be was stronger.” You don’t want things easier. You want to be stronger. You want to be able to carry more, heavier, and longer. That’s the way to grow as an individual, as a leader, and as a business owner. That experience forced me to do that.

As we started talking about it, I enjoyed receiving new information and updating my map. I enjoy realizing that I was wrong about certain things because that’s a gift. If I’m wrong about reality, it’s a gift to be shown that. It’s a gift to update your mental models because now you’re more accurately able to understand the world around you. At that moment, I did not understand the world that was living in. It took a substantial degree of literal study to understand the lineage of some of these ideas.

Why do people believe I’m a Nazi? Even though I don’t agree with them, it’s important to understand that.

Complex Societal Issue

Yes, it is because natural things, especially the whole DEI cult, have been effective at exploiting the good qualities of Western society. The good qualities of a culture born out of Christianity. We want to sympathize with the oppressed and we want to turn the other cheek. We want to do all these things. Unfortunately, all of those noble qualities can open up these exploit vectors where people not in good faith use those avenues to destroy you.

I wanted to understand that. I wanted to understand the lineage of these ideas. Going on that intellectual journey was just eye-opening. I’m ever thankful. I wonder if I would have gone on that exploration. I wonder if I would have read Thomas Sowell. I wonder if I would have discovered the Frankfurt School and Herbert McCuse and the plan of the long march through the institutions. All of these things, all these concepts that you can trace back literally in the most direct sense 60 years back.

The whole game plan was written in the late ‘60s on how do we do this? By the way, not only just understanding it, but also in some weird perverse way, like respecting it. Having that far of a time horizon for overturning norms in society. That’s impressive in the way you could look at some evil mastermind in a Marvel movie and say that Magneto is one sly fellow. Just going through all of that and then coming out on the other side.

First, not know what was going to happen. Are we going to get destroyed? Is the business over? This was one of the things we legitimately thought at the time, “We’ve lost a third of our employee base.” What happens if you lose another third? There you go, just turn off the lights. Is that it? How does this end? Not knowing that going through that uncertainty was in itself also just a blessing. It was a challenge.

What do you do? It’s a fearful setting. You start thinking about, “How would I solve that?”

Yes. First of all, there’s a problem. You have to solve it. You don’t know how it’s going to go. You don’t know even the extent of the problem. You don’t understand all the forces. That’s just an intellectual, almost riddle that you have to figure out, and that’s interesting. There’s a wonderful book called The Comfort Crisis, which relates to some of these things we’ve been talking about with childhood and how we’ve all grown very comfortable.

That is what the advanced civilizations offer. You’re never cold and you’re never hungry. None of those things, but The Comfort Crisis is a wonderful book that tries to interrogate what that does to a person. Is that ultimately just good in all the ways? The conclusion is, no, it’s not good to be comfortable 100% of the time.

100% of the time, it’s not good to be comfortable.

You end up flappy and fragile. That book has a wonderful term for trying to actively combat that by exposing yourself to a difficult situation called the misogi. It is essentially a quest. We’re going to try something that is deliberately difficult, uncomfortable, and unsure of success. Usually, it’s a physical challenge.

In the book, he talks about going to Alaska for a month to hunt elk or something. Living in very harsh conditions for a month and how that was very difficult. I saw this expression as a corporate misogi. You have to be careful before things get cheesy when you blend those two worlds, but I’m going to do it anyway.

The misogi of this is difficult. It’s psychologically difficult. As a secondary, it’s physiologically difficult. This was one of the things that I was wearing, the aura ring at the time when this was happening. The stats I was getting from my sleep was as if I had the flu. I could see heart rates and all those things. It was having the flu, which was just fascinating in itself.

This is interesting because I missed the story. It just seems you guys didn’t care because we were going to do what we were going to do, but that’s not it.

Navigating A Workplace

We care. Not only did we care and not only were we heavily invested in it. I think that’s why I’m now a little removed from it, that there was much meaning in that exactly because it was difficult. Exactly because it was not as obvious as saying, “I don’t care.” All right, a third leaves, who gives a damn? Some of these people I’d worked with for ten years had deep personal relationships that just got severed right in the middle.

I was almost about to use one of those modern words that bad therapy has helped me not use as much. I was about to say it was traumatic. It was not traumatic. It was not the beaches of Normandy. None of that thing. This is where level setting comes in. We live in this overly comfortable world. When something like this happens, it feels like it’s a trauma, even though that’s a preposterous notion or label to put on this.

Either way, it was difficult. That’s why I’m very proud in retrospect of the fact that we were able to stick with it. We were able to not fold, to not just capitulate, and not just try to see if we could get mercy from people who were not going to show us anything, and we were able to say, “Do you know what? This might destroy the company.”

That was one of the things when Jason and I first set off to this. We had no idea it was going to blow up, but we knew it was going to be controversial. We did go into it almost with a pack of, we dislike the trajectory of the company as it’s going right now so much that if the price of trying to arrest that development is that we destroy the company, I will accept that reality.

That ability, not just intellectually, but also economically to accept that reality was key. Most people, as I said, have these precious CEOs say these things they don’t mean, and then they throw up in their mouths afterward because they have a board. They’re unemployed. They have investors because they have all these other stakeholders who will force them to do the things they don’t want to do. We didn’t have any of those.

Not only had Jason and I been running a profitable software company for twenty years, and long since reached escape velocity on the base necessities of life, but we didn’t have a board. We didn’t have anyone else to force us to do things that we didn’t want to do. We had no one to tell us that we couldn’t do the things we saw to be necessary. I am certain that if we had taken our plan and how we were going to do it to a professional board full of people representing investors and whatnot, they would have told us, “Are you absolutely out of your mind?” “Not.” “Just post the thing.” “Say the thing.”

I’ll take that a step further. After the reaction, they probably would have fired you or told you to take it back. What happened after? What was the day after the storm? I know you’ve gotten private phone calls and people who told you you’d be on the wrong side of history apologizing, but what happened to the company?

A great deal of uncertainty about what was going to happen. We had about two highly uncertain weeks. Is the survival of the company even in jeopardy? We thought it was for a moment. Then quite quickly, you go from all the alarms flashing, everything is red, the sirens are going, those things turn off.

The mob moves on to the next witch, too.

Yes. That’s important. There were two weeks when the news coverage was on us, the Twitter intensity was on us, and so forth. Obviously, there was a long tail of just the aftershocks of things like that, but it went away quite quickly. That is one of those other things, which is if you go back to Stoic philosophy and so on.

I don’t know if it was Seneca or Aurelius who said, “If you can bear it, bear it. Why are you complaining? Either you can bear it and you will bear it or you can’t and you will perish.” We weren’t perishing, so bear it. If you could withstand it as we did for those two weeks, it would feel like the end of the world. You come out on the other side, “It wasn’t.”

Now, even further removed, your mind does all these tricks and it compresses all the things it doesn’t like and just emphasizes the things it does like. It doesn’t look trivial, but it certainly wasn’t trivial. It looks a lot less catastrophic to some extent than it was and it certainly ended up being that way. The first thing we thought was, “If this mob is representative of the 8 billion people in the world, literally every customer is going to leave us tomorrow.”

That was the first thing where you just said, “Is the business over or is everyone going to cancel?” We saw an initial small spike from our consumer product on the email side. We saw a small sign or not even a small, larger sign-up spike, as in people signing up for our stuff on the Basecamp side. In the end, it was a bit of a wash.

You traded the people who wanted to make software product decisions based on politics for people who decided that they did not want to make software decisions based on politics.

Yes. It turns out that there were lots of people who had no interest whatsoever in working in a place that was heavily invested in being an activist organization. Not even that. Just weighing into these things, including at our own company, tons of employees would reach out afterwards and say, “I know this is difficult, but what we had before clearly was not also working.”

I was very uncomfortable being in a situation where if you expressed any divergence of opinion to the mainstream orthodoxy of the left, that was going to be difficult. You were going to be ostracized quite quickly. There was that whole factor of it. It was the fact that the business itself, if you’d just seen those things, you could barely have told that something happened. These different realities coexist at the same time. If you’re just on Twitter all the time, you think the world is ending. If you close that app, it’s almost like nothing’s happening.

Yes, you do it to yourself.

Yes, you do it to yourself to some extent. This is where the stoics just say, “It’s not what happens. It’s your reaction to it.” We’re hurt much more in our imagination than we are in reality. As it turns out, not only was the business fine, but not only were the majority of people who worked at the business, if not happy with the eventual outcome, but none of them were happy going through what we went through.

Looking for it, I saw a whole world of folks who were very interested in working at a place like that. We ended up hiring amazing people who were more than capable of taking over from the folks who saw that advocacy as their main thing. Now, the other thing too is, even though a third of the company left, it wasn’t like that whole third were fully paid-up members of the activist brigade.

There was a small section, which was an interesting lesson for me. There were maybe 3, 4, or 5 at the most, the hardcore group who were able, through the power of this part mind virus and part these pressure tactics to essentially get a much larger group behind it, even if that group wasn’t fully bought up.

Did that second group come back?

No, those bridges had collapsed.

They were probably also a little embarrassed. You find a lot of people who want to go back when they’ve made a bad decision but don’t want to admit it.

Yes, I certainly got that afterwards in the years that followed. Quite a lot of commentary, not from former employees, but folks who, at the time, had picked up a pitchfork and were part of the mob and thought they were on the right side of history. Who then, after a few years, realized they were embarrassed about that. I have great sympathy for because I’ve been embarrassed about positions that I’ve taken.

I’ve been embarrassed about ways that I’ve joined parts of mobs at certain times. I’ve tried to reflect on that, learn from it, and change my operating system so that when those instincts inevitably bubble up, which they do in all people. There’s a righteous rage about something being wrong in the world, especially if you see a few more other people on that same rage strip.

It’s a very powerful emotion. It’s a very seductive emotion. You need a layer on top that says, “I’m feeling that.” I don’t have to act on that. I don’t have to go to Twitter immediately to tweet on that. I can let it dissipate. I can sit for a moment, just feel those emotions, watch that cloud over me, and then disappear. That’s a powerful ability to have. Accept that these emotions are inevitable, that this is just part of the human condition and experience, but not act on them. To allow your intellect to struggle with it, wrestle with it.

The 24-hour rule has always been good. The sleep-on-it rule.

That was one of the things I took away from this. That sleeping on it in and of itself, it’s funny. It’s one of those traditions where, probably 2,000 years ago, you’ll find some quote saying, “You should just sleep on it.” It works. All that emotion that’s high in the moment, eight hours of rest, and suddenly, it seems inconsequential. It’s certainly not that important.

Even more than just sleeping on it, especially in this case, was suspend judgment. Jason, my business partner, has a wonderful thing about how we operationalize this in product development. He calls it, “Give it five minutes.” In product development, usually, all you need is five minutes. You have this initial reaction to a new design, a new color of a button, and just say, “I don’t like it.”

You give it five minutes, and you’ll say, “It’s fine.” For some of these bigger topics, you have to give it a little more than five minutes. I found that giving almost anything like two weeks, or at least a couple of days, will radically change how emotionally invested I am in it and enable me to see more clearly where I want to be in this.

Yes, as I said, it’s turned out well. Not only are you seeing the people who regret their pitch, but they are also dealing with the consequences of this in their organization. Having gone in on something where they were virtually signaling, that they didn’t believe in it, getting distracted from their product, and getting all types of people who don’t agree with each other and are fighting over it. It’s not just that they feel bad, I think, but they realize they chose a path that has a lot of problems for them.

Yes. I have great sympathy for that because I’ve been on similar intellectual journeys where I thought I was quite convinced about things being one way and then I learned they were another. That is difficult for most people. It’s also difficult, but I’ve learned to take almost a perverse liking to it. This updating of the mental models and updating of the maps through the realization that what you want is accuracy towards the terrain, that’s what’s enjoyable. It’s not holding the map. It’s being able to get to where I want to go. That requires that the map matches the terrain. Now, what’s interesting too here is that all this has happened quickly. If you think of this incident at our company that happened in 2001, it was only a few years ago. You could have convinced me that it was at least a decade in the past.

Not only was it only a few years ago, but for a year after, we were still in the thick of that in the tech industry. It’s only recently that the clouds have started to part and the sun has come in, which is also just a reflection of how adaptable we are as humans. I don’t think about this in the same way all as I used to.

It was a very present thing all the time in almost all the interactions and observations about tech. Now, it’s quite removed. Yet you get these reminders that that’s not an evenly distributed sensibility. To me, the launch of Google’s Gemini AI was one of those great reminders. When you go ask it, “Show me a picture of George Washington,” you get something laughable back.

“Show me Nazi soldiers.” You will ask who would ship this product. How does this make it into the market? It makes it into the market by an organization that has been completely captured. What’s been fascinating to witness is the degree to which these companies are trying to correct, how they’re trying to put up the appearance that no corrections are happening. At our company, the correction was very visible and was very public. We’re just changing course.

We also said it. You said, “We did this and we lost the employees. You weren’t hiding that there was a consequence of it.

Versus if you look at some of the large tech companies now, it’s leaking out the back door. We’ve cut 80% of DEI openings, we’ve cut these DEI offices, or we’ve cut all this machinery and bureaucracy that’s producing these outcomes.

There’s no announcement about it.

Yet, they’re not through. Google is still going through it. There are a lot of organizations that are in various stages of this intellectual cancer, and maybe they’re making some headwinds of progress, but there’s a lot of infection left to go. It’ll be interesting to see where it goes, but what’s also fascinating is how the overtone window almost feels like it’s been binary. Twitter was one way, and then, literally in three months, it was transformed into a very different way.

This is where we come into these other factors, to which degree that was just culture that moved, to which degree is that outside influences Elon Musk buying Twitter and taking this intellectual cuddle away from the hardcore activists and suddenly they don’t have the enforcement mechanism anymore. Then the whole house of cards just collapses when you can’t police narratives, force cancellations, and all the other injunctions that they were able to put through.

I don’t quite know, but I’ve been just truly fascinated as it feels like we’re speed-running through history. Yet, I think that “This must be something novel. This must be something new. Is it Stalin who says, “Sometimes nothing will happen in decades, and other times decades will happen in a few minutes?” That is the rhythm of history.

Doesn’t that make you think that this romanticized notion is the moment you’re going to be on the wrong side of history in these capitulation moments? Some wine turns to vinegar, and some wine gets good. Nassim Taleb said, “I don’t judge a book that hasn’t been written for ten years. How can you possibly know if it will hold the test?”

We’re making decisions in a moment because that’s the Twitterverse, and not over time. All the articles would have said, “Basecamp are morons,” if you wrote that article in a 24-hour window. Now they say, “The guys at 37signals were brilliant.” I don’t know. It just seems we have to give things a little more time before we put the final stamp on. Did it work or did it not work?

That’s very difficult to do. It’s very difficult to accept that at the moment, you don’t know, you cannot predict the future. One of the things I’ve been humbled by, not just that experience, but a lot of things that happened during COVID and a lot of official proclamations about this is the way things are. This is the way vaccines work, this is the way we must act, this, that, and the other thing.

Turned out that there were many incidents of that in such a short period that turned out to be just laughably incorrect. That was presumably the best knowledge of the establishment of experts, just being catastrophically almost hilariously wrong that leads you to believe that experts aren’t as expert-y as you’d like to believe.

This is where Thomas Sowell’s book Knowledge and Decisions, in particular, was instrumental in helping me understand that. Why is it that even people who have studied certain things for decades and have PhDs and long degrees in something can be wildly wrong and wildly incapable of seeing things that someone far less learned can just witness right in front of their eyes?

I’ve come from some perhaps naive or default thoughts of, “The more you know, the better you are at predicting things and the more accurate you’ll be.” That has had a difficult time on a lot of topics over the last five years. Then you end up realizing, “Do you know what? It’s not just about academics being laughably wrong. There’s some interesting stuff in that. It’s about all of us.”

I think you can understand if people are wrong and if you have to make decisions under rushed judgment. What’s crazy to me, it is September 2024. If we have a global pandemic tomorrow, we have no agreement on what we have learned. What would we do differently? Where would we get it right, and where would we get it wrong? I’m okay if someone says, “At the moment, in March 2020, we said this and we didn’t know, but if we had to do it again, but there would have been no commission.” It’s staggering.

The Importance Of Adaptability

It is. What’s also interesting is that it is not evenly distributed either. I was in Denmark during the pandemic. One of the things I was most impressed with was exactly the Danish government’s and society’s policy to update its priors. For example, once the vaccines came out for kids, Denmark did a big program saying that all six years and up should get a vaccine.

They ran that program for about six months. There wasn’t a big uptake. This is one of the things where the wisdom of the crowd’s prediction markets theory is surprisingly interesting here. There was some natural inclination where a lot of parents were skeptical. Maybe they couldn’t exactly articulate why, but they picked up on something.

All these studies came in showing that this is not proportionate. The potential harm here, the likelihood of bad outcomes from a healthy fourteen-year-old getting COVID just does not stand up under scrutiny to the unknowns of these fast-track vaccines. Then they changed course. Now, the official Danish policy on vaccines and boosters is that unless you’re over 60 or you are immunocompromised, You’re not getting anything. It is not even optional.

We’re not going to offer you, for example, a booster or a vaccine. That’s not that controversial now, although I suppose for some people it will be, but at the time when the US was pushing that all kids should get the vaccine, Denmark had updated its priors and was able to adjust its approach because perhaps to some extent it hadn’t gotten politicized.

Things in the US, with that specific instance and many others, got coded politically very quickly. Are you skeptical about vaccines? That coats your right wing. You take as many boosters as you’re given that coats you as being in good standing on the left, which is a tragic way of trying to understand the world and learning.

As you say that, you end up saying that we don’t know. We have no consensus on what we should do differently. Then I also think, was it ever otherwise? I know that there are certain metrics where you can see greater disagreement, and being the size that there’s ever been, Congress is more divided than ever and so forth.

Looking back on the Vietnam War, for example, this is one area I need to focus on when trying to contextualize this. Late ’60s to early mid-‘70s, most people had some idea of what that history was. Go back and look at some of the actual things that were going on, just cities across the country, just burning, the absolute students getting shot at Penn State. There was just the amount of violence, disagreement, and feeling the country’s coming apart. It’s not completely foreign to the American experience.

Even without Twitter.

That’s exactly it. As every person and generation society has, we have a new bias. We have a new focus. This must be the first time it’s ever been this bad. It must be the first time we’ve ever been this divided. There’s the ’60s, there’s the Vietnam War. There’s the Civil War. Let’s just accept here that America has had some incidents where it has been happening, but we are regression-averse as humans.

This is one of the things, for example, the crime thing. We talked about how violent crime in the ‘80s and ‘90s was substantially far above anything it even peaked at in recent memory. For example, I lived in Wicker Park in Chicago, and I lived there for six or seven years. When I moved in, there was still a little area that was a little sketchy and then things got nice.

Gentrified that to the left is a bad word to me. It’s a great word. It means that there is not as much crime, things settle down, things get upgraded, and we will do whatever. That’s a zone discussion. I started just seeing strollers and kids and whatever everywhere, a hallmark of A) Gentrification. B) Things are just getting safer.

That curve broke. I think there’s 19 or 20, and all of a sudden, there’d be a month when I would hear from my friends still living in the neighborhood. In March, there were 21 carjackings. Wicker Park is eight city blocks. Twenty-one carjackings in a month. That was crazy in comparison to the world that existed very briefly before that.

There were no carjackings that month. You didn’t have to worry about taking your stroller out on the street and getting shot. If you compare that to the ‘80s, the ‘80s was probably still worse. I don’t know exactly about carjacking in that environment, but overall, it was still worse. What felt stark was the change. All of a sudden, it was here, and all of a sudden, we dipped. Humans are bad. They have such loss aversion.

We’ve seen this before. Even the dip might’ve been the aberration.

Murder statistics in the USA peaked at 21 and then recovered very substantially. There are still problems all over in all sorts of other crime and reporting whatnot, but murders are a good bellwether to some degree because there’s not a lot of fudging in the data. There’s no, “Is it getting reported or not?” No, if someone’s dead, they’re going to show up at the morgue and someone’s going to count them and you can add those numbers up.

All of that is just to say that we don’t know and should have more humility about the fact that we don’t know and should have less certainty. That is for someone like me, who is, as Thomas Sowell would put it, a solutionist. I try to look for solutions. There’s a problem. Let’s solve it. Versus Thomas Sowell says, as many other conservative thinkers say, that there are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.

We should have more humility about the fact that we don’t know.

That’s an interesting point. One solution creates a new problem. It’s just a cycle.

Yes, it’s very often unforeseeable. You can have the best intentions on certain solutions or interventions and not have the imagination to realize that it’s going to lead to that.

You could just get unluckier. Some strategies are genius on a Friday and you look a moron on a Monday and there’s no difference. You were a minute late or a minute early and we forget that sometimes. The history is written by the winners.

It also is written not only by the winners, but the better accuracy is happening ten years later. I remember Jack Welch in the business realm here, and I remember the biographies.

Yes, the airplane case, but I was in college. You had to learn about Jack Welch on to set. That has aged poorly.

Yes, it has. I don’t even know if it’s featured Jack Welch. It might have. Some of the companies that get featured in that very shortly thereafter turned out to not do well. It’s very difficult to predict these things. Another example, I think it’s a Blade Runner. They were going to use these timeless companies for the big banners in the movies. Half of them were literally out of business five years later. It’s very difficult to predict the future. You see it in financial markets.

What is it over 10 years and the S&P 500 ETF will be 94% of all professional money managers? We do not know. I find that the humility that ought to be imbued in people is more prevalent in folks who have less education. That is such a fascinating dichotomy to some extent, that the most learned, the most credentialed academics are the ones least capable of accepting the limitations of their intellect.

Thomas Sowell is just an absolute goldmine in the analysis of exactly why that is and how that manifests itself. The Quest For Cosmic Justice is one of the other books that he’s written that’s incredible on this topic. Helped me just articulate these sorts of dilemmas, where these trade-offs are different and there just aren’t good solutions. There are just different versions of that one.

He’s got one of my new favorite top-five quotes. I’m going to butcher it here, “Have we reached the ultimate state of ridiculousness that people are responsible for what happened before they were born but not for what they do in their own life?” Wow, that’s pretty accurate.

Not only that accurate, I think what’s interesting to me, and I still haven’t fully unpacked this box, is to the degree we’re recreating aspects of religion. That religion had shame and redemption in a full-featured package, as well as original sin. Once we lose some of those concepts in organized religion, we try to reinvent new versions of them. We quite often do it relatively poorly.

There’s a reason why some of these religions have stuck around for 2,000 years, plus that as a whole, the package had been debugged enough and was appealing enough that it could impart some moral truths onto people who didn’t want to hear them. Most people don’t want to hear about the limitations of their own instincts. They want to do what they want to do and they’d prefer to get rationalizations for why it’s okay to do a bad thing.

To find these packages that religion, at least the best of them have, constrain our natural and worst instincts for the greater good. It’s unique. Trying to recreate that over twenty years, it’s going to be difficult. I think there’s a reason why most of those endurance religions are Millennials because most of the strains that come afterwards or most of the experiments that come after don’t make it.

Some of these new strains we’ve been trying to concoct lately are not making it. They’re bad, the reinvention of original sin as some racial hierarchy because someone with your skin color 200 years ago perhaps had some connection to something bad. No, that’s a bad idea. Let’s go back to Jesus. I say that as not a religious person.

I was going to say you wouldn’t strike me as that.

No, I’m not.

You appreciate religion serves this purpose and whether people are finding it in politics, they’re finding it in all kinds of other ways that are probably even less healthy than the problems that they had with religion.

I don’t even think so. I think definitely. The reinventions or the reanimations of some of those core themes that religion had provided folks with are distinctly worse. This is one of the things I feel I’ve had to update my map. I remember watching Bill Maher’s Religolous. I think it came out in 2009, where he just makes fun of religion and all the ways they’re silly and stupid.

It’s not that he’s wrong; in some minor sense, there are a lot of contradictions, and there is a lot of weird stuff. If you look at the major religions that are 2000 years old, they have a bunch of abstract good ideas that are just enduring across time. They have some very specific prohibitions and ideas that are grounded in what life was 2,500 years ago.

What do we do to prevent disease here? Maybe we shouldn’t eat pigs or something. You take that  forward 2,500 years, and you’ll say, “In some rational sense that doesn’t make sense.” Some of these other ideas do make sense and fill a void. I had to reluctantly at first, but now, more enthusiastically, I accept that that worked for some definition of work.

You’re a software guy. I think you got to appreciate that humans need an operating system, again, we need to say that you will find another operating system and it just might be more destructive than the last one.

That is the joke. A lot of what I do is to build software tools for other people to build their applications. One thing we often talk about here is the not invented here syndrome when you go back and say, “That tool that’s been out there and used by hundreds of people for ten years for thousands of people is bad because of this. I’m going to make my own.” That’s another thing. Sometimes, you’re correct and you’ll come up with a better idea. Most of the time, you’ll just realize that you didn’t understand the problem.

That stood the test of time, that tool.

It stood the test of time. If you look at these religions, if you look at it in a very abstract sense, in an overly learned sense, or in an intellectual sense, you can say, “I don’t understand why this fence is here.” “Why is this prohibition here?” What if we just ripped out the fence is that Chesterton’s Fence law?

It is something like, “Don’t remove a fence until you know why it’s there?” Sometimes, it looks like a fence and makes no sense. Why is it there? You remove it and you realize all the demons that were working on the other side. You say, “We shouldn’t have removed the fence.” We forgot why we put it there, but the white walkers are still on the other side of the wall.

Don’t remove the fence until you know why it’s there.

You can cover a variety of topics. Where can people follow your writing and your work if they want to learn more?

DHH.Dk is my own personal website. You will find links to my Hey World newsletter, the books I’ve written, and everything else that I have done over my career and I’m focused on right now.

David, thanks for joining us again. Round two went fast. We’re going to have you back for round three and dig into this parenting thing because I didn’t want to get too far down that rope. I could have gone another hour and I’m deep in my research on it, but why do leadership experts behave this as parents? We’re going to get into that.

Please, I would love that discussion.

To our readers, thanks for tuning into the Elevate Podcast. We’ll include links to David and his work on the detailed episode page at RobertGlazer.com. Thank you again for your support. Until next time, keep elevating.

Important Links

• David Heinemeier Hansson
• Hey
• Ruby on Rails
• Rework
• Bad Therapy
• Coddling Of The American Mind
• The Freak Factory
• The Anxious Mind
• The Comfort Crisis
• Knowledge and Decisions
• The Quest For Cosmic Justice
• David Heinemeier Hansson’s Radical Approach To Entrepreneurship