 From New America and Slate, I'm Bridget Schulte, and this is Better Life Lab. First, the good news. This guy is an actual CEO. As long as you're doing great work, I don't mind if you're fat and happy. You know, why is that a bad thing? If you work for Jason Freed at Basecamp, you get a four-day summer work week. You get to work remotely. Not only do you get paid vacation, the company pays you an extra $5,000 so you can fly off to enjoy the best holiday you can imagine. And your corporate bosses are two guys who recently co-wrote a book called, It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work. Now the bad news. Jason Freed is not hiring. He likes Basecamp just the size it is, about 54 people. And that's the secret, he says, to running a profitable, but calm company. It's the total opposite of the place he worked when he was starting out at the height of the dot-com boom. In the late 90s, I worked for a company called... Nobody will hear of it, because it's gone, because it burned out. But at the time, it was the biggest thing in the world. It was in the valley, and they were unstoppable. They raised a bunch of money. They brought me in as a consultant and paid me way too much. I was like the 70th employee. I worked there for a few months and by the time I left, there was hundreds and hundreds of employees. We were all stacked together on card tables with folding chairs, packed in sardines, and the money was flowing. Everyone was excited. Of course, they made no money. They were just burning tons of it. It was actually a flat-out obscene. They were paying me like $10,000 a week, which was just ridiculous. They were putting them up in a hotel, which was ridiculous. Everything was ridiculous. Never a discussion about profit, never a discussion about reasonable work hours, never any of these discussions. It was just go as hard as you possibly can for as long as you possibly can. And hey, if you burn out, there's another kid who wants this job, so we'll just hire them. Where did you get the idea that you wanted to have a calm company, not get too big, not get sucked into this? Because we live in a culture where it's all about being number one. You talk about dominating or conquering market. I don't know where it came from initially, other than I don't want to spend all my time working. I want to work and then do other things. And you can't do that if you're working 80-hour weeks or 90-hour weeks. You can't do that if your weekends are packed with other things. But also, I've always felt like you should build the kind of company that you want to work at. As far as feeling like you need to be number one, I don't really care about that. There's not a lot of control I have over being number one at anything truly. I mean, there's always someone else who could be number one. And then if you're number two, are you supposed to be upset? I don't understand why you'd ever be upset about being number two at something. As long as you're good at it and happy with it and satisfied by it, that should be what you're measuring yourself against, not against what someone else is doing. I remember, I've always been into track. I ran track in high school and college. And after college was over, I started running like 5Ks and 3.5 miles sort of thing. And I remember trying to run a 6-minute mile. That sounds good. And I ended up like running a 6-minute, 7-second mile, right? I should be upset by that because I didn't achieve my goal. I didn't beat some number that I made up. And I felt like that for a while. But then I finally realized like, what's wrong with running a 6-7 mile? Like, there was a great run. I feel great. That should be fine. That was the best I could do that given day. And I just realized that goals and numbers and these milestones that you put out there are really artificial and unnecessary most of the times. I played competitive sports when I was growing up and I was good at it. But those events are like, that's what the game is. The game is actually winning. I just don't think business is that same game. I think people combine business and sports all the time for unnecessary reasons. I don't think you have to win at anything in business. I think you just have to provide a good product to customers who are willing to pay for it. Keep your costs in check so you make more money than you spend. And then you can do that forever, basically. As long as you're profitable, you can keep going. So what I'm really curious about is how you actually do it. You know, how do you have this company? Here's what Basecamp is. Basecamp is basically a project management tool for small businesses. So if you were an architect, for example, and you were designing a new building and you needed a place to keep all your blueprints and all your discussions and all the approvals and all the decisions and all the communications all in one place, so you can get to it and your client can get to it, you would use Basecamp to manage that whole process. So we have 54 people now, which is the biggest we want to get, by the way. We actually have a hiring freeze in place, even though last year was our best year ever as a business. So we don't want to hire any more people. We want to stay this size. But when we were smaller, we had four or five people, we had different things that we were doing and different rules and different ideas about this. But when we built Basecamp, the first version back in 2004, David, my co-founder, he only had 10 hours a week to spend on it because he was a student still in business school. So we built this product on 10 hours a week of his time over a number of months, I think it was four or five months. And we found out that, hey, you know what, that was actually a benefit because we realized that we had to figure out exactly what we needed to do because we didn't have much time to spend. So we couldn't do everything we wanted. We couldn't dream up everything and do it all. We had 10 hours. What was important? We had to prioritize ruthlessly. We had to cut a bunch of stuff. And we found out that that turned into a better product. And so that was a great example early on of seeing that, you know, less work and less time is actually a benefit. Smaller teams benefit. Fewer opportunities is actually a benefit. Saying no to more things is a benefit. These things are good for companies. These are good for teams. These are good for people. But a lot of companies are very static. They have like a way of working when they're founded, and that's how they always work. I just don't feel like that's a great way to work. I feel like you need to be paying attention to your company in different sizes at different times with different pressures and constantly tweak the way you work. And we're constantly trying to find calmer and calmer ways to be. And some companies are constantly trying to find, you know, crazier and crazier ways to be. That's so interesting that, you know, you're trying to get calmer as the world is getting crazier. In the opening pages of your book, just read this one paragraph you say, you know, describing sort of the modern work world and how crazy it is. The promises keep coming. More time management hacks. More ways to communicate. And new demands keep piling up. To pay attention to more conversations in more places. To respond within minutes faster and faster. For what? If it's constantly crazy at work, we have two words for you. Fuck that. And two more. Enough already. So I guess what I would ask is like, so somebody reads your book, whether they're a CEO or they're working for a company or they've got a member of their family who's working like crazy. What do they do? Yeah, I think it depends on where you sit. If you're a CEO, you certainly have the power to begin to change things at a mass scale inside your company. But let's say you're a team lead of four or five people. You have a small team. And you're used to just interrupting each other all the time. Back and forth, real-time chat, real-time instant messaging, emailing, whatever you do, tapping people on the shoulders, pulling people into meetings. That's just your way of work. And you want to try some of these ideas. My first suggestion would be one day a month, have basically what we call No Talk Thursday. Just nobody in your team can talk to each other through any technology, not verbally, not written, nothing. Just shut up and do your work. And what's going to happen is that you're going to find that people are going to go, I want another one of those days. I like that day. That day was great. I got a lot of work done that day. That was amazing. And so I think that's all you have to do. That's what we'll build on its own naturally. Now, if you're a CEO, you might be able to do bigger things and have more impact. So it really depends on, you got to figure out, you know, this is a very sort of stoic idea here, which is like, what's in your control and what's out of your control? Things that are out of your control, you can't do much about. So don't worry too much about them. They're just going to drive you crazy, basically. But things that are in your control, what are they and what can you do to try? And I would say whatever's in your control start as small as you can. Starting as small as you can is easy. It doesn't take a lot of permission granting to be able to try some of these things. You can try it sort of subversively. You can go rogue and try some of these things. And you'll find out that I think some of them are going to work and then you have more latitude to try more and more and more and see where you end up balancing out. You know, you talk about like the whole idea about winning, that that's such a big part of business and what drives work and a lot of that overwork. Well, you know, that starts early. You know, my daughter's in high school and she just got her ranking. The college just want to know what rank she is. And I just think that's so horrible. But we do that. You know, we start early with our kids doing that as if there's some sort of like, I don't know, celestial line that we're all in. I mean, I'm just thinking about all these very Americana sort of slogans, be all that you could be, be the best that you could be. How can you not be sort of brainwashed or shaped by that kind of achievement culture? First of all, it's all ego-based, which is the big problem, right? And especially in business, it's a lot of people flashing their egos and showing off their egos. And in our industry, which is the tech industry or software industry, most companies in this industry are actually the ones that are working the worst, I think, in terms of our principles. They're working long, long hours and they're bragging about it. They're getting very little sleep and they're bragging about it. They're stuck in meetings all day. They're paying attention to a dozen real-time conversations all at once, all day long. So the kind of work we do across the industry, software, most people would say, you can't do it the way we do it. But we've decided to do it the way we do it, which is 40-hour weeks, 8-hour days. Nothing has to happen at night. Nothing has to happen on the weekends. We don't work on the weekends. We don't pull all-nighters. We don't do any of that. And that's by choice. We just don't feel like that's necessary. And in fact, we don't feel like that ends up in actually producing great work. Also, I don't want the pressure, frankly, of having to maintain a lead. That's a hard thing to do, especially forever. And then you wrap up your whole self-worth in leading and having to maintain that lead. And then when you fall back into second, because everyone does at some point, for the most part, then you're supposed to be upset that you weren't who you were before. I just don't see how that's a good outcome for anything. It's ego. It's the expectation of eternal growth. It's always trying to be number one. It's a handful of these things. And this is why people keep pushing. And they keep pushing and pushing and pushing. And then they always think, like, I'm doing this so later on, I'll have time not to do this. I'll work crazy hours in my 20s and 30s. So in my 40s and 50s, I don't have to. I don't see a lot of examples of that, though. What I see is people forming terrible habits that they continue. Because the things you do over and over and over just become the things you keep doing. You can't not be that way. That's just the human condition, right? Of course, you know, it's hard to be 20 and hear that from someone in their 40s. I get that. I totally get that. But habits are really important because you form them whether you like it or not. And it's very hard to break them. And again, I've seen so many people who are extremely wealthy, more money than they'll ever know to do with. And they still work insane hours. They're still burning themselves out. They're still exhausted. They're taking on more and more burdens. And they're more and more unhappy every day and miserable. It's sad. I think it's really sad and tragic. So let me play devil's advocate just a little bit. I hear what you're saying, but there are others who would argue that restlessness, that pushing, that always striving for the next thing is a very American characteristic. So what do we lose if we give that up? Well, what do we lose? What do we gain? Take Germany is a good example. Great country right now. They've got a lot of companies that make amazing products. You've got Porsche. You've got BMW. You've got Audi. You've got Mercedes. You've got a variety of others. Those are just car companies because I'm into cars. But there's great, great companies there. And they have 40 hour work weeks. And they take that very seriously. And some people go, well, America's bigger and better and stronger because of this. And that might be true. But again, at what cost? What does it take to maintain that level forever? There's a lot of shrapnel, basically. People are tired. People are unhappy. People have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. Everyone has to have a side hustle these days. All these things are going on to maintain our position as what? For what? What reason? Like what why? I think asking the question why a few times in a row is really valuable here. There should be, and there always will be, certain people who are extremely driven and are huge inventors that push society and humankind forward. And some of those people are going to work a lot of hours. But there's one or two of those a generation. Most people are not that person. There is one Elon Musk right now. There is one Jeff Bezos right now. There's one Steve Jobs. These people are rare. And there's questions about whether or not it's actually a pleasant place to be one of those people as well. Elon Musk had a very public breakdown and was weeping and didn't see his kids and was feeling burned out. And then when I think Ariana Huffington sent him a tweet telling him to go home and get to rest and he sent a tweet like somebody's got to do the work and it was 2.30 in the morning, it was still at the factory. Yeah, I saw that. And by the way, I admire him for what he's built. There's no question about it and perhaps he couldn't have built what he built my way. I'm pretty sure he could not have. So I get that. My point again is just playing the odds and the probability. Basically, zero people attain that level. So you can bust your ass to try and be that and burn yourself out. Most people are not going to be that. So why not just try and find a place where you can satisfy yourself, take good care of your employees, build a profitable business that you can control. You don't have to answer to anybody other than you and your customers and contribute something great to the world that way. I think that that is more valuable and more tangible and more realistic than just about any other business model there is. Yeah, but you're talking about people's dreams. You could have dreams. It's funny. It's like you're saying this and I'm hearing this but at the same time I'm feeling like, well, maybe I could be Elon Musk. You don't know. I don't know. What's to say you wouldn't be great. And how do you decide, well, I guess I won't ever be Elon Musk. I'll just go over here and be mediocre. See, that's the dichotomy. I think there's lots and lots and lots and lots of levels of greatness. I believe in dreams. Why not dream big? Sure. But does that mean you have to work endless hours? I don't believe so. I built a wonderful business. I should say not just I. Our whole team, our whole company has built a wonderful business. My business partner built something called Rubion Rails which changed the technology world. A lot of the apps and products that a lot of people use every single day are based on this thing called Rubion Rails, which was a side project of his in a few hours extra a week. You don't need to put in excessive amounts of hours to fulfill a dream. Realistically, you have to think about sustainability in terms of your own personal life. You're going to burn yourself out. You're going to drive yourself crazy. You're going to break a lot of things in your personal life if you do nothing other than work. It's just unhealthy. It doesn't lead to great work. It doesn't lead to creative work. Most people don't have their best idea after they've worked 13 hours straight. They have their best idea. And the morning in the shower, they took a nap and went to sleep. Right? Your mind has to take a break to work on things. I don't think you need to work yourself to death in order to achieve some sort of dream. You know, you talked about one of the things that has always driven you or helped you kind of figure out how to shape your life and your work is that you had things that you like to do outside of work. I see that your co-author drives race cars. So what is it that you like to do? Yeah, he does. He's very good at it. Yeah, I do a lot of things. I mean, I have a young family. He does too, by the way. So a lot of my time over the last four years has been dedicated to family life. I really big into architecture. I like to study architecture. I like to garden. I'm really big into that. I've been restoring a bunch of land up in Wisconsin and a farm up there. So I love that process of really slowly returning the land back to the way it was a hundred years ago. I collect vintage watches, so I'm deep into that weird esoteric world. Not quite race car driving, right? Not quite. I like cars, but I don't get behind a race car. So I'm into a lot of stuff, but the thing is that I just simply can't do a great job if all I'm doing is working. I need perspective. I need time away. I need my brain to be focused on other things. I need to sleep well. I need to have all those things if I want to do work well, which is so funny because you talked about earlier how some people just love to work. I love to work too, but I don't need to work all the time. And in fact, if I work all the time, I'm probably not going to love my work. That's what ends up happening to people who love their work, quote, love their work so much that they can't stop doing it. They burn out. I don't want to burn out. I want to have a hopefully a long career. I'm 44, so hopefully I get another 20 years in me. And if I was to burn out in two, three years on this stuff, like what would I do? I don't know. Jason Freed. He's the co-founder of Basecamp. We'll hear more from Jason in a few minutes, but first I want to get some perspective on this from Juliet Shor. Back in 1991, she wrote a prescient bestseller called The Overworked American, the Unexpected Decline of Leisure. And her latest book is on small-scale, high-satisfaction economy called True Wealth. So you just heard Jason. He's talking about this American notion that to be great, you've got to put in these, you know, incredibly long hours, or that that's the only way to achieve a dream. That's what I want to ask you, is it? Is that the only way to reach for your dreams? I don't think so. I mean, this idea of the kind of heroic entrepreneur who's doing something really valuable for society, that dream for many people, these long-working hours, which lead to a lack of balance in their lives, many of them are working for companies who are producing things that are not the stuff of dreams. The dream might be to make a lot of money so you can do something else or, you know, make a lot of money so you can retire. And I think this idea that everyone is someone like Elon Musk who does have a particular dream, whatever we may think of it, you know, he hopes to transform the world. Not so many of us are like that. I mean, building the next killer app or a program that's going to figure out how to sell stuff to people better. I mean, is that really the stuff of dreams? Not for most people. I mean, obviously there are people out there trying to build companies that they believe in and they want them to succeed. I mean, that gets us into the whole question of, do companies need to grow and do economies need to grow to be violent? And there's a lot of confusion out there on that question, I would say, and mostly people are thinking the wrong way about it. Well, I want to, I absolutely want to get into that in a little bit. I want to hear more about your take on growth. But first I want to listen together to the rest of the conversation that I had with Jason Freed. He has some interesting things to say about the nature of American capitalism and the era of Silicon Valley and venture capital. I was really struck by how you'd said earlier, you had the best year ever last year but you're not going to grow anymore and that having limited or no growth is a huge part of your strategy. And yet you look at every indicator that we have, GDP and what's this quarter's growth and the whole Wall Street, earnings expectations, it's all about growth. The capitalist system is all about growth. So in a way, are you really revolutionary? You know, maybe back in the Cold War you might have been called subversive even. You're sort of poking a stick in the eye of capitalism here. Well, we're definitely capitalists. We're a very profitable company that makes a lot of money and we pay extremely great salaries and we take really good care of our employees and we want to make money here. I mean, that's something we want to do. We want to make money in our industry who are held up as huge success stories are actually terrible businesses. I mean, they don't make any money. They lose money hand over fist for years and years and years. I think Uber is still losing billions of dollars and they're held up as a great company. No, they're not. We make money. We're profitable. We're actually what Wall Street would want out of a company but I have no interest in ever IPOing or ever being a public company. I'm glad we don't have those kind of pressures. I would never want to work quarter to quarter for growth's sake is not important to us. By the way, I'll tell you, as a small business, we have over 100,000 companies that pay us for base camp every month and we generate tens of millions of dollars in annual profits. We have a very serious business here with only 54 people and we've been doing it for 20 years an hour away. Some people who might hear this stuff will go, yeah, that's cute, you know, whatever but tens of millions in profits annually, especially for any business, especially one that's as small as ours technically, I think it's something that shows or that demonstrates that these ideas are not just theoretical, that these ideas can actually be quite helpful to build a business like ours. So is your model something that Wall Street and venture capital and Silicon Valley, you know, should they be paying more attention and is it scalable for other companies and other industries? Our model is incompatible with the traditional venture capital model because their model is about investing in a bunch of companies being wrong about almost all of them but being right about one or two of them that are huge successes. What is it that the unicorn company, right? The one in a, it's like 99% of all VC funded startups actually fail miserably. Yeah, and what's so sad about that is that there's probably a lot of companies in that cohort that technically failed, that wouldn't have been failures but they were failures according to the VC model but they might have been great $5 million businesses or $10 million businesses, they might have been able to support a dozen or two dozen or 100 great employees for many, many years but instead they're thrown away as failures because they didn't fit into a model which doesn't fit hardly anybody. It's just a broken system so I'm not a fan of traditional venture capital or anything like that. So as far as them adopting our model it's not going to happen and I would never expect it to but what I'm more interested in sharing is our story because I think a lot of companies that think there's only one way in our industry specifically which is going the VC route can discover that there's other ways. It's basically impossible to be one of those companies that makes it huge, becomes a multi-billion-dollar company but it's much easier to be someone like us or someone who's half as successful technically as us or even a third or an eighth and still be a great business and so I think a lot of entrepreneurs who want to get in business, I think if they're focused on just trying to be the biggest and the best they're just hurting themselves. In the summertime you guys work four days a week you have sabbaticals, you have no fakations and you actually pay for people to take vacation and you work remotely, you have office hours so people aren't interrupted all the time you really focus on concentrated work and there are a lot of people out there when they would read a list like that they would say, oh, you're spoiling your workers I remember writing a story about Patagonia and they really wanted people to have full lives outside of work they felt that that would make their work better and the headline came out, you know, company profits is at Pampers workers you know that that was something sort of almost soft headed so what kind of responses or reaction do you get from people and how do you respond? Well, by the way, Patagonia is a company that we really admire so I love that they do those things How do people respond? They ask for a job here and that says it all, right? They're like, are you hiring? And so I'm proud to use your word PAMPER I'm glad that we can PAMPER people here and we do that intentionally in that we don't get ahead of ourselves if we hired 400 people which we could afford to do then we probably couldn't do a lot of the things for the 54 that we want to do so we make these conscious decisions every business is a collection of conscious decisions and we've decided that this is the right size for us and by the way, I think right size is a really important notion a lot of companies never think about their right size their only right size is bigger I think we've hit our right size we're going to stick here as long as we feel like it's the right size we're going to continue to pick up more customers continue to grow the business but as far as the people we have enough and we can take great care of them and we didn't do all of these things upfront we couldn't afford to do a lot of these things the fact that we pay for people's vacations and send them to amazing cities around the world we couldn't have done that 15 years ago but now we can so we do so I'm not suggesting that everybody someone launches a business tomorrow and tries to do all these things because a lot of them aren't tenable early on but you can decide how you want to spend your money I've heard people say like, yeah, you're pampering or people are going to get lazy and fat and happy and the whole thing, I'm like, that's fine as long as you're doing great work, I don't mind if you're fat and happy you know, why is that a bad thing? why is it that we all have to be miserable and exhausted to great work? it doesn't make any sense wouldn't you rather have people who are smiling and feeling good about their work and feeling good about themselves in their day and the vacations coming up, wouldn't they probably do better work? I think so why do you think you're such an outlier then why do you think we think that the best workers have to be miserable and burned out? I don't know, because I don't think that way but you know, at the end of the day if I had to be like thoroughly, completely objective about it I think it's because most companies have investors that want to be paid back and they think it's wasteful to throw 5,000 bucks at an employee every year to send them on a vacation they go, why don't you throw that money back in the business and grow and hire another person or whatever like for example, for 55 people it costs us over a quarter million bucks to send people on vacations every year they'd say, why don't you take that money and invest it into hiring 5 more people or 3 more people or whatever more people and grow your business, that's what they would do so I would say, because we don't need to or want to and they would say, but why not? don't you want to get bigger and I would say, why? why do you want to get bigger and they don't have a good answer for it frankly because they're end goals to sell the business for a big huge number or they're end goals to be popular among their peers and go, I run a 500 person company and Ego plays a huge role here I think that's one of the reasons why people are so obsessed with growth is they want to seem like they're successful to the outside world and to do that they have to be big and powerful that sounds miserable, like we're a bunch of egomaniacs dancing all the way right into our graves of the unlived lives, you know? sounds pretty awful doesn't it seem like that's the way it is? I mean, unfortunately a lot of people who are so, quote, successful are actually really really miserable and what they long for I've talked to a lot of entrepreneurs who've done very well for themselves what they long for are the early days when they had a small business when they were a small team when they can move quickly when they can do the things they wanted to do without having to answer to a bunch of outside financial masters essentially they want to go back in time and so we're just saying like if those are the good old days why can't they be the good always days that was Jason Freed he and his business partner David Heinemeyer Hansen run the software company Basecamp so, Juliet, we had been talking about growth why are we stuck on growth and is that the wrong thing to be concerned about? well, you know, Jason talked about it when you have outsiders owning these companies they are interested in maximizing the return that they get and that's something that has really intensified since the 1980s in this country what's often referred to as financialization so that companies really increasingly were controlled by Wall Street if you control your own company then you can set the terms so Jason is maybe maximizing profits and satisfaction and I think this is really important and this has also been a switch in thinking I think from this idea that the way to make profits is through growing and really we have also conflated ideas about what needs to be done at the company level with the whole economy level and we often think that individual companies must grow and the economy as a whole must grow and those are actually two very different things as well how so, how are they different? well, for the economy as a whole there is really no imperative for a capitalist economy in the aggregate to grow and it's one of the great misconceptions about economic theory that economists think economies must grow economies when they have productivity growth have a choice to take that productivity growth in more goods or more leisure time so that's the basic standard general equilibrium model of mainstream economics so there's nothing that says that the economy should grow to the max so how did we get where we do seem to be on this path of taking the economy to the max we do seem to be on the path of stuff to the max and I think you even called it the work spend vicious cycle that we're in so the answer to sort of how we got there has to do with what happened after the second world war there was a lot of fear that the economy would fall back into depression and so there was a lot of growth promotion going on by the government, by economists you could say we then overdid it because that growth imperative got really deeply ingrained and then beginning in the 1970s you start to see the growth of inequality and inequality itself furthers this whole cycle you tend to get longer working hours and more unequal societies as people struggle to keep up and to deal with the fact that people are losing out you have the answer then being let's grow so you can increase your incomes the rising tight lifts all boats even if the boats are getting farther and farther apart you hear that from politicians all the time don't worry about the deficit we'll grow our way out of it well because so many worker benefits and taxes are paid by employers beginning most importantly with health insurance it means that employers want people who work long hours so they don't have to pay as many benefits and that was a kind of accidental thing that happened during the wage and price controls of the second world war firms began to try and find other ways to compensate workers more so that's where fringe benefits came in and so that put a kind of structural bias into our whole system for long hours of work huh so how do we get out of it where do we go kind of going back to the idea of the American dream if you will what kind of society have we been creating that we may not be aware of and how should we recalibrate that to have sort of a new American dream I think the biggest impact of these growth centric economies is that they are leading the planet down a path of ecocide we are in great red lights flashing danger zone high growth economies tend to be highly ecologically damaging economies with high carbon emissions and we can wish that away all we want and say technology and new energy sources will allow us to grow indefinitely without harming the planet economists have been saying that for decades and we're just not seeing any evidence of it so the sort of terrifying but increasingly unavoidable conclusion is that this kind of an economy is destroying the very basis of our lives and if that doesn't get our attention I mean you know what will Juliet sure she's an economist and professor of sociology at Boston College and the author of true wealth she also wrote a real classic a Bible for me and the rest of us here at the better life lab called the overworked American earlier we heard from Jason freed his books with his base camp co-founder David Johnson include rework and it doesn't have to be crazy at work for more resources on working smarter and healthier visit us at newamerica.org click on the link for better life lab better life lab is produced by new America in partnership with slate thanks so much for joining me in our podcast about the art and science of living a full and healthy life our project is a collaboration with ideas 42 supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation the producer of better life lab is David Shulman Hailey Swinson provides research assistance if you enjoy our show take a moment to review us on Apple podcasts it really helps us get the word out from new America's better life lab I'm Bridget Schulte