for the love of play | Jason Fried

**Alan Watts** (0:07)
We make an extremely rigid division between work and play. You're supposed to work in order to earn enough money to give you sufficient leisure time for something entirely different called having fun or play. And this is the most ridiculous division of things, because everything that we do, however tough it is, however strenuous, can be turned into the same kind of play as I will show you when I was completely fascinated with spinning that orange around my head.
So the point is, therefore, that you can do everything you have to do in this spirit. Don't make a distinction between work and play. Regard everything that you are doing as play, and don't imagine for one minute that you've got to be serious about.

**Kevin Rose** (1:14)
That was a clip from Floss for Alan Watts. I can think of no better person to riff with me on this passage than today's guest, Jason Fried. Jason, he just really weaves that intersection of work and play so well, that I wanted to present him this clip during the podcast to get his take on it. So we'll get into that a little bit later.
Jason, to me, stands out as one of the Internet's most thoughtful and certainly unconventional entrepreneurs. He co-founded 37signals in Chicago in 1999, and this is a software company in the very early web that was behind just some groundbreaking productivity tools. A couple of them Basecamp, still hugely successful, and then later an email client called Hay. And it's no stretch to say that these tools not only did they shape the web and companies that would come after them, but they've just fundamentally transformed how millions of us approach work and communication. He's done this both with the tools that he's created and the books that he's written as well. And so now 26 years into 37signals, one thing is certainly very clear at this point, and that is that Jason consistently has challenged traditional norms. He's just advocated passionately for simplicity, for intentionality, and then also for independence. He's run this company without venture funding. As a profitable company for 26 years now. And he's taken these principles that he's learned along the way, and really articulated them quite well in a few influential books. One called Rework, another called Remote. A lot of the things that we take for granted today were mentioned for the very first time in these books. They definitely stand the test of time. In today's conversation, we delve into Jason's deep-seated belief that you should trust intuition over data, his conviction that play and exploration are essential to sustain success, and how his formative experiences have shaped his leadership and novel thinking. And we talk about some of these pivotal moments, one of them in particular, where he received a single $20 bill from Germany, and what it taught him about this profound joy of creating something that is genuinely valued by others. This is really a moment for me to celebrate a dear friend and someone that I deeply admire. It's a career that's deeply defined by authenticity, curiosity, and the courage really to go and to forge his own path here. This is Jason Fried.
You said that your interest in design started with these annual reports that your father would receive, and you found them, this is a quote from you, beautifully made with glossy pages and great photography. Take me back to that boy, that young boy that encountered these documents. What was that like for you?

**Jason Fried** (4:44)
Wow, I remember that just being like the first piece of anything that I saw that felt like it was from another planet or something. You know, it's just, it's like, what are these things, these books that come in the mail, you know, and are these magazines or whatever, what are they? I'd seen a magazine, of course, before, but this idea of like text that actually looked good and charts that looked good and photographs that look good, it just kind of, I don't know why, you never really know why things take you somewhere, but they took me somewhere. And it's probably because like I really admired my dad a lot, you know, he was a, he's sort of an investor, stockbroker, basically. And so this was like his world. And I think that was part of it too, that like, oh, this is a glimpse into his world. I don't know what these things mean, but he probably does. And they just look cool. And I just realized that I don't know why, I felt like there was a kind of a harmony in them somehow, like the charts and everything lined up nicely. And it just felt nice compared to everything I'd seen. I mean, if you probably remember too, like way back in the day with like stuff you get from school, like handouts and stuff, it was like over Xeroxed. And like, yes, everything was just bad. And then I got these things. I was like, what is this? This is so nice. Who does this stuff?