Jason Fried: Optimizing efficiency and work-life balance

**Peter Attia** (0:04)
Hey, everyone, welcome to The Peter Attia Drive. I'm your host, Peter Attia.
The Drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking, along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with some of the most successful top-performing individuals in the world. And this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality, more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode and other topics at peterattiamd.com.
Hey everybody, welcome to this week's episode of The Drive. I'd like to take a couple of minutes to talk about why we don't run ads on this podcast. If you're listening to this, you probably already know, but the two things I care most about professionally are how to live longer and how to live better.
I have a complete fascination and obsession with this topic. I practice it professionally, and I've seen firsthand how access to information is basically all people need to make better decisions and improve the quality of their lives.
Curating and sharing this knowledge is not easy, and even before starting the podcast, that became clear to me. The sheer volume of material published in this space is overwhelming. I'm fortunate to have a great team that helps me continue learning and sharing this information with you. To take one example, our show notes are in a league of their own. In fact, we now have a full-time person that is dedicated to producing those, and the feedback has mirrored this. So all of this raises a natural question. How will we continue to fund the work necessary to support this?
As you probably know, the tried and true way to do this is to sell ads, but after a lot of contemplation, that model just doesn't feel right to me for a few reasons. Now the first and most important of these is trust. I'm not sure how you could trust me if I'm telling you about something when you know I'm being paid by the company that makes it to tell you about it.
Another reason selling ads doesn't feel right to me is because I just know myself. I have a really hard time advocating for something that I'm not absolutely nuts for. So if I don't feel that way about something, I don't know how I can talk about it enthusiastically. So instead of selling ads, I've chosen to do what a handful of others have proved can work over time. And that is to create a subscriber model for my audience.
This keeps my relationship with you, both simple and honest. If you value what I'm doing, you can become a member. In exchange, you'll get the benefits above and beyond what's available for free. It's that simple. It's my goal to ensure that no matter what level you choose to support us at, you will get back more than you give.
So for example, members will receive full access to the exclusive show notes, including other things that we plan to build upon. These are useful beyond just the podcast, especially given the technical nature of many of our shows. Members also get exclusive access to listen to and participate in the regular Ask Me Anything episodes. That means asking questions directly into the AMA portal and also getting to hear these podcasts when they come out. Lastly, and this is something I'm really excited about, I want my supporters to get the best deals possible on the products that I love. And as I said, we're not taking ad dollars from anyone, but instead what I'd like to do is work with companies who make the products that I already love and would already talk about for free and have them pass savings on to you. Again, the podcast will remain free to all, but my hope is that many of you will find enough value in, one, the podcast itself, and two, the additional content exclusive for members. I want to thank you for taking a moment to listen to this. If you learn from and find value in the content I produce, please consider supporting us directly by signing up for a monthly subscription. My guest this week is Jason Fried. Jason is the co-founder of Basecamp, a privately held company based out of Chicago, committed to building the best web-based products and tools with the least number of unnecessary features. This is sort of a hallmark of Jason's personality. He's also the co-author of several books, Getting Real, Rework, Remote, and It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work. Now, some of you may recall, back from when I started the podcast, that one of the reasons I wanted to do this in the first place was I kind of found myself having conversations with friends that after the fact, I thought, man, I wish that had been recorded so others could hear it. And this conversation with Jason is exactly one of those. It's, in fact, it's an extension of a conversation that we've had several times over meals. We talk a lot about Jason's story. We get into some turns and had some side conversations that I thought were really interesting. We talk about his background and how he grew up and how that sort of shaped what eventually led him to working on Basecamp. And we even had a little side tangent on a whole bunch of other companies that everybody sort of thinks of as great examples of companies like Uber and WeWork and things like that. And one of the things about Jason that's pretty unique in this space is he's just incredibly blunt and not in an obnoxious way at all. He's not being blunt for effect. He's just very open about how he feels. And he doesn't sort of mask his feelings about some of these companies and the way they do things and how he feels about that. We talk about Basecamp's focus on hiring and they have a really unique culture around that and the importance of writing and things like that. At the end of the podcast, we get really deep into all aspects of work-life balance, which in some ways is something that I really wanted to talk about with Jason. I would say about a week after we recorded this podcast, both Jason and I sat back and sort of thought that we could have even gone deeper into that very particular topic, specifically work-life balance, which is something that I just think every person struggles with on some level.