SEASON 2 - EPISODE 0098 - FEB 28, 2024

Press Releases Are Spam

Kimberly sits down with Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson to discuss a chapter from REWORK titled “Press Releases Are Spam,” explaining why traditional press releases don’t work well for their product launches. The conversation touches on the shift from formal press releases to direct-to-consumer approaches in today’s media scene. They touch upon the importance of hearing from authentic voices with skin in the game rather than relying on formulaic press releases. The founders also share insights on their personal involvement in marketing and the ups and downs of being engaged in the social media attention game.

Watch the full video episode on YouTube

Key Takeaways

00:40 - Press releases haven’t worked for 37signals.
06:59 - Awkward CEO making direct-to-consumer work sets a significant trend.
09:05 - Press releases signal desperation; personal connections more effective.
14:17 - Authenticity trumps marketing.
20:24 - Don’t delegate your voice; maintain direct communication.
25:52 - Balancing the trade-offs of social media.
27:15 - Discussing navigating the intensity of attention culture.

REWORK is a production of 37signals. You can find show notes and transcripts on our website. Full video episodes are available on YouTube and X.

If you have a question for Jason or David about a better way to work and run your business, leave us a voicemail at 708-628-7850 or email, and we might answer it on a future episode.

Links & Resources

Transcript

Kimberly (00:00): Welcome to REWORK, a podcast by 37signals about the better way to work and run your business. I’m Kimberly Rhodes and I’m joined by the co-founders of 37signals and the co-authors of REWORK, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. One of the essays in REWORK is called “Press Releases are Spam,” and I thought this was a good chapter for us to talk about today because as you guys know, 37signals has just recently launched a few products including a whole new umbrella of business under the ONCE umbrella with no press release. Most people would think you start a new product you, of course, have a press release, but you guys think differently. So tell me a little bit about that. Have you guys ever done press releases?

Jason (00:40): Yeah, we’ve dabbled with press releases I think in the early days, and I think we actually, we did launch or did announce something with the press release in the past couple years. I can’t remember what it was.

Kimberly (00:49): Oh, when Basecamp 4 came out.

David (00:52): Yes.

Jason (00:52): Right. And what’s interesting is you get, it shows up in a hundred different media outlets of some sort and it has no impact on traffic at all. So you get a lot of coverage, which if you want to print them out and put 'em on your wall, there’s value in that if that’s what you’re after. But it doesn’t, at least for us, it hasn’t, didn’t drive anything, right? And so that was sort of an intuition that we had, which is why we hadn’t done it in a while, then we did it and you kind of see the same thing happen and I think the thing is is that some people just want coverage and it’ll get you coverage, but coverage, if it doesn’t translate into traffic or sales or product interest, then I don’t really know if it’s worth it. And then you kind of feel silly because they’re very formulaic.

(01:40): They have this fake quote from someone who I guarantee you did not say it. I guarantee you they did not say the thing. There’s what two quotes. There’s always two quotes in a press release. It’s this whole thing. It’s all bullshit and you feel like an idiot. I mean at least I do. I shouldn’t say you. I feel like an idiot putting them out because they’re just so bullshit, formulaic, unnecessary, and then the press runs with one of your quotes and then they fill in the gaps and they’re usually wrong and it’s just like, what was the point of this. That said, I get it. If you’re brand new and you want to start to build up some coverage and have links to media organizations that have written about you, there is a purpose for them in that way, but I think it wears its welcome up very, very quickly and I think they’re generally unnecessary.

David (02:32): I think it’s funny that we wrote that essay in REWORK 2010. The essay was probably written several years earlier and that was at a time where media coverage mattered in a completely different way than it does now. I think if you look at the current state of not just media in general, but marketing, it’s become ever clearer that these old channels just, they’re not doing the trick. At least in say 2005 or something, I could buy the story that maybe you were kind of fishing for gold, maybe you got lucky. Maybe there was some journalists somewhere just sitting watching the stream of press releases going through and not having anything else to publish that day and they would pick out your press release and you’d be like, wow, I struck gold and write up a great story and you just get this flood of traffic you would get discovered, you would be in the limelight here.

(03:26): That’s dead. It’s probably been dead for quite a while, but it’s deader than it’s ever been. The kind of campaigns and the kind of media language that works these days is the sort of authentic directly from the source sort of thing. Just a few days ago, Mark Zuckerberg did this impromptu review of the Apple Vision Pro and one of the takeaways from that was first of all, this is new, this is curious, here’s a CEO, not just of some small little company of whatever, the magnificent seven, the FAANG companies really diving into it and it actually changed some people’s opinion. Has a press release ever, ever changed anyone’s opinion about anything? No, it has not because, as Jason says, it is fake. It is bullshit, it has a certain rhythm to it. It’s almost like a limerick. It’s got to go… dah ta da ta da, quote. Dah ta da ta da, quote.

(04:23): And when you have something packaged like that, people just turn off. They just turn off, which is why of course press releases were written to the presses, this is why they had this sort of thing. And then you were hoping that they would regurgitate them in a interesting way, but to some extent, the Zuckerberg review of the Apple Vision Pro was kind of like, this is what the internet is supposed to be, that this intermediation of media itself, we go directly to the source. This is of course what Jason and I have been doing since basically the beginning. The vast majority of our marketing, the vast majority of our promotion has all been direct to customer. It’s all been on Twitter, on our blog, on our newsletters or on any of these things where we don’t reach the consumer through someone else. And I think it is basically like, well,bwe’ve just kept doing that all the way from press releases are Bullshit all the way to today, and the rest of the industry has come on board. And I think what we see, which is interesting is we’ve gotten quite a bit of writeups, usually not for press releases, but we’ll do something else that’s interesting

(05:26): and The Verge will write it up or TechCrunch will write it up or some other outlet will write it up and watching those statistics over just the last five years have been incredibly instructive. Even when you get a major piece, like you’re mentioned with two quotes, they link to you half the time press outlets they don’t even fucking link, right? They don’t make it a blue thing you can click and then do something with, but let’s say again, you hit the jackpot and they do that and it drives less traffic than a throwaway tweet you wrote in two seconds. The media landscape really just is so different and if you can go direct to consumer and you can be authentic in a way where people actually find you, I was just about to say credible, but you don’t even need to be credible. You just need to be fucking interesting.

(06:12): You just need to say something that isn’t da da da quote. No one wants to fucking listen to that. Right? So that’s what I thought was so interesting with the Zuckerberg review. It’s like of course he’s biased. Of course he’s going to say that the Meta Quest is the best thing ever, that it’s seven times cheaper and all the things, but it’s still fucking interesting and when even the king of human androids can appear interesting in that form, I think so can you, so can more people, right? This doesn’t come natural to Mark, at least from the sort of perception of it, right? There was this other funny video. He was at a, what’s it called? UFC Fight starting to get ready.

Kimberly (06:50): Wait, was that real? I saw that and I just assumed that was like an AI generated image.

David (06:56): No, no. I think that, yeah. Well, I think this is the other thing we’re going to come to whether everything’s just going to be bullshit from that, but I think it’s such a great example because it is actually endearing even though for years, for decades, whenever he shows up in court, everyone’s like, oh, he’s an Android. He’s saying, let me say human things without the lizardness showing and it still works. So if the most awkward major CEO can make this tactic of direct to consumer work, that’s the trend. That’s the way the wind is blowing.

Jason (07:28): Another thing to add is I think if you do want coverage, you want coverage from a place that wouldn’t read a press release. For example, I’d much rather be in Daring Fireball than in the New York Times. John Gruber is not looking at press releases to decide what to write. He writes things that he thinks are interesting and his audience looks to him for what he thinks is interesting and he’s not on a press circuit getting 1500 press releases sent to him and he’s funneling through them all and going, that one’s good and that one’s good. He’s paying attention to things and he’s writing about those things. So those outlets have a lot of power because they’re driven by an individual typically who has their finger on the pulse in a different way than their finger on the wire, which is what primarily bigger news outlets have their finger on the wire, they don’t really know what’s going on.

(08:24): This is what’s coming through to them. So yeah, I think for me, if I’m reading Daring Fireball, I know that John thought about what he was going to write. He discovered it himself, he dug into it, and I just have more faith in what he’s saying than I would a media outlet that is basically just trying to get up their six articles or eight or 12 articles a day, and the best way to do that is to have a wire service feed them information, which they can sort of manipulate slightly and then put up as an article.

Kimberly (08:50): I think that also goes to the point of targeting where you want to be as opposed to these press releases being spam, which are typically blanketed to everyone hoping someone picks it up. But Jason, you’re saying you’d rather target.

Jason (09:05): It’s the same thing we say about hiring, and in fact when you send a press release out like that, you’re saying, I’ll take any job versus if you want to go work at a company, you should target that company and make your pitch to that company. And so when you blast press release, you’re not targeting anything When you go maybe cultivate a relationship with somebody who’s running a site or whatever, you give 'em a tour, a personal tour, whatever it is you’re saying, I want to basically I want to be hired by you, and in that case hiring means I’d like you to write about me. That’s what hiring is in that case. So I think about it that way.

David (09:40): I think what’s interesting here is the parallel to another chapter we had and I think Getting Real called Feature Food. Instead of putting out a press release and hoping to get coverage because you wrote up the limerick of bullshit, put out something interesting, put out something with a hook. What can you tap into that will make your release inherently interesting? What are you doing that’s like up in the time or slightly different or slightly interesting? We’ve gotten a ton of write-ups on ONCE. Why? Because it’s novel. Because there’s something to talk about, because there’s something that’s in opposition to an existing idea, that’s always a good avenue to pick. You shouldn’t do it frivolously. You should do it because you actually mean it. But that’s a way of driving your development by interestingness. Amazon had this idea of, they actually use the press release ironically enough, but write the press release first before you start work backwards.

(10:46): How can we even design a product that’s interesting? How can we describe it in an interesting way and then work backwards forward? I think Jason and I often will look at things and go like, do you know what? We want to do this because we want to do it, but we also want to do it because it’s interesting. So for example, we just started selling Campfire on Coinbase or through Coinbase using crypto. Neither Jason or I are the biggest crypto bugs in the world. I think it’s interesting. I changed my mind on it a couple of years back. I wrote a big piece that travel very far about changing my mind on Bitcoin. So I’m sort of philosophically aligned with the fact that there is something interesting here underneath the mountains and mountains of bullshit and scam and all the other stuff. But there’s something interesting here, but it’s also something to go, you know what?

(11:37): There’s going to be a community who really cares about this, right? And that community, if you pay attention to them, they might pay attention to you. There’s reciprocity going on here in that regard. I remember when we celebrated 20 years of Basecamp, I went back and read the original announcement and Jason mentioned some of these feature food items. We had RSS feeds. This was kind of sort of pretty novel in 2004 to have rzs feeds for commercial collaboration software tool. You had RSS feeds to catch up on Yahoo News or whatever. Not a lot of people had used them in this way, and we had, I forget what the other one was, Jason, we had another sort of hook, maybe it was an API, an API at that time was also kind of novel. So you had that in, both things were good. I actually used the RSS S feed at the time we built things with the API, but we also did it with an eye to this is the alternative to a press release.

(12:34): You are not going to just build it and they’re going to come. You can’t just build something like, yeah, this is a nice thing. And then they’re No, no, no, you got to be interesting. So look at that as the alternative to press releases because when we say press releases is spam, what I often hear back is like, well, what else am I going to do if no one knows about me? How can I reach my customers? Yeah, absolutely. That’s a real problem you have to solve. But try solving it by being interesting, building interesting things, looking for interesting angles rather than like, hey, what’s the bullshit limerick I can sign up for and try to get something for free? This is what I find, Jason, your example of comparing this to job applicants is very apt. I get a fair amount of resume spamming individuals who just sent me, here’s my resume, I’d love to work for you, and that’s it. And I can tell it’s spam as in I can tell I was one of a hundred or a thousand or 10,000 recipients of this and in, HEY, it’s always, no, I’m not going to invest my time and my attention into you if you invested nothing into me. So thinking in terms of that reciprocity, you invest into what people care about, what they’re interested in, what’s up in the time, and then they will invest time back into you.

Kimberly (13:46): I’m curious about as founders, how much you feel an obligation to be promoting your own products versus it being a company message. I mean, I feel like you too in particular are very present on Twitter and doing YouTube videos from the founders. A lot of companies you don’t see that. I mean you mentioned the Mark Zuckerberg. I think that’s a unique situation. We don’t see that all the time, but I feel like we see it from you guys all the time. I am assuming that’s intentional.

Jason (14:16): Well, we’ve always done it that way. We like talking about the stuff, we’re excited about the stuff that we’re doing, so we kinda can’t help it. But I remember a few years ago we pulled back and decided not to do that actively and let’s see if we can let marketing, the idea of marketing replace our voices essentially. And it didn’t. And it’s not about the marketing so much, it’s just about, it’s hard to find the authenticity in a message from a company when you’re not sure who what’s coming from compared to the Zuckerberg example is a great example. If that was their marketing communications person doing that, you’d be like, yeah, I dunno. Or if it wasn’t attached to it was just like a random voice or an AI something, it’s like, no, no, no, I don’t know who this is. There is something about direct, speaking directly.

(15:12): There’s something about a human saying something that you know and trust or don’t like, whatever it is, but it’s a person saying something. Brands don’t really speak unless you’re a huge, massive brand like Nike or whatever. Companies like that do have a brand image that is cultivated. You almost think of the person of an athlete, but that is extraordinarily rare, extraordinarily expensive, and there’s no way a company like us can do that. So our weapon essentially is just us. We’re going to talk about the things we do, we’re going to talk about it in a certain way that resonates. We’re reachable, we’re accessible, we can respond. Brands can’t respond. Someone has to do the typing. Who is it? Who are you talking to when you’re talking to a brand? I don’t know? When you at mention me or David on Twitter, you’re going to get us. No one writes our tweets, no one writes our emails. Our email addresses are public. You write us, you get us. It’s always been our way. I think it’s the best way. I recommend everyone else do it that way as well. And I think it’s an advantage that it’s very hard to beat essentially when the people who are doing the work are the ones who are speaking about the work itself. So anyway, that’s my take and our take, and that’s how we’ve always done it.

David (16:34): Yeah, I’d say it’s a full on superpower. Because this is not accessible to companies as soon as they get to, not even that large, not even that large, you start having layers, filters of communication. You start having dedicated marketing people and again, there’s a lot of work so the work needs to… it’s not about the marketing. It’s about the superpower you have when the person with the most skin in the game is speaking directly to you. Mark Zuckerberg, whether the Vision Pro is successful or the Quest is successful, that’s personal to him in a way it’s just not personal to someone who’s going to have a three year marketing stint at Meta. It just isn’t. And people can smell it. They know it, right? So when Jason and I speak about our own products or our opinions on products in general, they can go and alright, these two idiots at least have freaking skin in the game.

(17:33): They’ve been on here for 20 plus years pushing this stuff. I may not like what they have to say. I may not agree with what they have to say, but there’s a fundamental, I don’t know if respect is the right word. I mean both Jason and I get a lot of disrespect back in our feeds and elsewhere, but I do still think there is something to that. There is a respect for people who have skin in the game and you kind of trust that if you have an interaction with Jason or I and you convince us of a point whether they’re like, oh, it should have this feature, it should do this thing. There’s a bug here. I had a bad interaction. Shit’s going to happen, right? Shit’s going to happen. If Jason and I go like, oh yeah, yeah, that person is really right, we’re going to set things in motion that’s going to change things.

(18:16): And it happens all the time. I’ve had a bunch of email interactions with people, perhaps they report a bug to me somehow, they’re writing something, generally they’re like, oh, this was there and then I’ll write back to them the next day or the next week, hey, by the way, that thing was fixed. And they go, what do you mean? That shortness of the feedback loop, that directness of you can interact with the people who not just have the most skin in the game, which founders, owners will always have when it comes to a business but also have to power to affect change, I think is really intoxicating. I think it’s why actually X as a platform is so intoxicating for a lot of people that you have like, Hey, I’m Joe Schmo here with three followers and I can interact with this Mecca account and I might get a response and we might get an interaction and something might come out of that.

(19:05): It’s a super novel internet only kind of experience that just wouldn’t exist otherwise. And I think it really is very attractive. This is why, I mean, there’s a whole thesis here on the rise of influencer culture and as much as I think pretty much everyone these days hate that word influencer, there’s something in that that’s not gross, that’s actually authentic when you’re not renting it out. I think that’s what most people react to, right? I’m an influencer, I will rent out my influence so you can buy a piece of it. You can’t buy a piece of Jason or I’s influence. That influence is natively being used to push the things we legitimately care about, have skin in the game with our own products and so forth. So I do think that that is the future of marketing. nd I think if you look at the marketing discourse at large, most companies below the megalodons of the industry are coming to that realization that this is what works.

Kimberly (20:02): I also think it’s interesting, and this isn’t even just marketing but layers. The two of you don’t have an assistant, you don’t have an executive admin, which most people would think as long as you’ve had your company and it’s successful as you are, surely there’s a gatekeeper or there’s someone who’s going through your emails. But no, it’s you. It’s directly you.

Jason (20:24): I think, look, if you run the shop, you have to delegate a lot of things, but you cannot delegate your voice. And a lot of companies do, they delegate. A lot of owners delegate their voice. And the voice is an email, it’s a phone call, it’s whatever it is. If someone tries to reach out to you and you’ve delegated that to someone else or someone else is speaking on your behalf, you’ve gone too far. You’ve gone way too far. That’s the one thing you should never ever give up and never let go of. And so I think, look, when we originally hired Andrea years ago, who runs people ops now sort of as a general assistant to help us run the business on the day-to-day and sort of manage the office and whatnot, but it was never to speak for us. No one here speaks for us but us. And every time there’s ever been anything that seemed like someone was speaking for us,

(21:18): I got just the worst pit in my stomach feeling. It’s just like, this is bullshit. I don’t like it and I hate it actually, I hate it. It’s like there are very few things at work that I hate, almost nothing but that I hate and despise and it will not happen again if it ever has, it’ll not again. So anyway, don’t delegate your voice. Don’t delegate your accessibility to someone else. Deal with the shit, including customer service, all the things like if you’re going to get in there, respond and someone writes, you respond. That’s how we do it.

David (21:54): It’s so funny because we have at times had other people than Jason or I write for example, tweets on 37signals X account or other accounts that isn’t even, it’s not someone who’s prying to pretend it’s us, but it’s still close enough that I get that pit Jason is talking about. And it’s so interesting how subtle it is. I did not appreciate how much my personal connection to my specific voice, my tone, how deep that was until I saw it just like half a degree off and I just winced. I just like, oh man, I can’t even look at it. Delete it, delete it now. And sometimes, I mean it’s almost weird to say it sounds pathological, but it could be the comma is in the wrong place and I just, I can’t deal with this. I can’t even look at it because what it does feel like is, what we’ve built up the brand equity over 20 plus years is that, is that voice is that not just authenticity, but credibility and trust that when Jason and I say something again, we may be wrong, but it’s us and we believe it.

(23:08): We don’t say shit we don’t believe. We change our minds sometimes, when we might believe a different thing, actually 10 years later. But it is authentic at that level as you come from and when someone else, when you’ve delegated your voice or even adjacently delegated your voice by having someone else write the tweets for 37signals account, it just feels like an attack on that. It feels like little whatever insects eating at the foundation of what’s holding all of it together. If Jason and I lost our credibility, our trust, our general to just scaminess or whatever, it’s over. That’s the flip side. That is absolutely the flip side of this. And this is why in part, after some of the weird years of the Covid nonsense and whatever else, Jason and I were both like, you know what? Could we try something more traditional? Could we try to not have it all be the pillars on this voice that we share?

(24:13): Even though it’s distinct, they kind of come together. And we tried that and no, it didn’t perform, so it didn’t do the numbers, it didn’t do the metrics, and it also just didn’t kind of feel right. And I think this is one of the blessings and curses of being this kind of business. You can’t outsource your voice, which means you have this authentic voice, which means you can build up this direct trust, but it also means you can’t outsource the voice. I haven’t been on Twitter for like 10 days or something like that, which it sounds so fucking like an AA thing. I’m expecting my medallion now here, and I kind of feel like, do you know what, that is a problem to some extent, like if I just took two years off Twitter, and that’s one of the main pillars, that’s probably eventually going to filter into something where it does matter.

(24:56): So it’s a double-edged sword. There’s no, there’s a trade off here. You can get a lot from it, especially when you’re a small company, especially when you dare be direct, authentic, passionate, all the things that we just are, you can also deal with the other thing, but then it does hinge on you and then the pillar can fall apart if you’re not there. So yeah, I sometimes wish I could have it both ways. I sometimes wish I could just Jason and I could just show up when we whatever wanted to, so to speak. And then like, all right, I’ll take off six months. I don’t think that kind of works in that model, but…

Kimberly (25:33): We’ve gone a little off the subject, but I do have one question about this since we’ve kind of gone down this path of it being the two of you. Do you ever feel like you can’t ever step away, you can’t take time off, you can’t stop tweeting because it is you, there’s no one else that’s making that voice?

Jason (25:53): Yeah, I mean, I think again, depends what you’re trading off. So we certainly can step away. It does mean less traffic. It does mean less exposure, and so it’s something you have to measure in your mind in a sense, but your sanity is worth it. And also refreshing yourself is worth it because you might come back stronger. You can really, I mean, I’ve been feeling kind of burned out on social shit. I’m kind of really sick, frankly, of posting on LinkedIn for example. I just don’t like going there, and so I’ve kind of taken some time off or I’ve recycled some stuff, whatever, and I’m kind of rounding the corner where I have some new ideas and some things I want to write there that I wouldn’t have if I just kept plotting through it, right? But yeah, you do to some degree feel chained to it and these platforms are kind of built way and built for that in a sense. And it does feel icky, but out of all the things that could feel icky, that’s not the worst thing. So we’re fortunate that we even can think about what would happen if we didn’t do this. I mean, a lot of people don’t have any audience, don’t have anyone paying any attention. So boohoo for us. But yeah, I don’t, frankly like the feeling that we must do this in a sense to stay relevant or to stay in people’s minds. I don’t like that about it, but it is what it is.

David (27:15): Yeah, I think it is the nature of the attention economy and it’s amazing and annoying at the same time. It’s amazing the sense that it’s even possible. If you had asked me, I don’t know when we started writing on Signal vs. Noise, I wrote maybe a couple of pieces a month. Now when I’m in full engagement mode with all of this stuff, I’m writing fucking just tons of stuff every day. If you count up all the platforms, how many tweets am I individually interacting with? There’s definitely been days over the last two months where I’ve probably written, if you count all the replies, like a hundred tweets maybe in a single day, maybe more, I don’t even know. But that’s just a volume of interaction with other people that is, to me, an introvert inherently draining. This is one of the reasons why I’ve actually just taken that step away now.

(28:09): I think it’s been like nine days. Again, my medallion here is showing for nine days I haven’t been on X. I’m going to take a little longer to, for exactly the point that Jason makes here. I found that you’ve got to have an off season. Sometimes there’s got to be some degree of off season. If you’re just fucking playing the playoffs nonstop 12 months out of the year, you’re going to get hurt psychologically, mentally in your head. You need that sort of downtime, that fallowness to ensure the future yield. If you’re constantly just mining all the intention mechanisms that you have, they do actually become icky. And I think this is one of the main forms of alienation in this modern attention based economy. There are times where I feel like, am I me or am I playing a character? And I think as soon as you start seeing that reflection in the mirror shimmer a little bit, you got to take a time out.

(29:16): You got to take a time out and realize, first of all, it actually doesn’t work if it is a character or I don’t know, maybe it does work. I can’t play a character for too long. So as soon as those lines start sort of blending and overlapping, I got to go like, all right, need a little bit of downtime. I need to get back to, I can’t not say this because I just want get it out in the world, not I’m here because like, hey, it’s fucking Tuesday, and I got a quota to meet in terms of attention hoarding, whatever. I mean, the irony here is that this is one of the things when you do this kind of work and your marketing works this way, you get accused of all the time, literally every single thing that I’ve posted in the past several years, whether it’s been our cloud exit, whether it’s been ONCE, whether it’s been anything we’ve done, the accusation instantly from a certain proportion of the internet is you’re just doing this for attention.

(30:09): And you’re like, I couldn’t work like that. If all I did was just instrumental. I’m just doing it for the attention. Whatever we do next, which is only focused, what’s the most attention grabbing thing you can do? That’s kind of the definition of a troll. I am not denying that there are aspects of sometimes how I advocate for things that appear trollish, but that can’t be the role you step into. If you do that, you’re going to stare into an abyss that’s going to stare back into you, and it’s not going to be, you’re going to fucking burn out. And this is, you look at YouTube culture, you look at all these other attention farming culture and you just see there’s a lot of bad outcomes here where people who are supposedly these huge successes, they have a huge top follow accounts, they have many views, whatever, feel like they’re slaves to the system, to the lights, to the engagement, to the next video, to the next tweet, and Jason, and I think, well, lemme just speak for myself.

(31:09): I’ve reached a point. I don’t need to do shit. I could sit on a rock and stare into the ocean for the next 20 years and my life, I could still pay rent. I don’t need this actually say every single morning. I need to remind myself I don’t need any of this, I don’t need it. So I got to do things I want to do. Mostly. I can’t do all the things that you want to do only the whole time if you also want to work with other people and whatnot, but it’s going to be primarily it and I’m not going to fucking play a monkey, a role, a puppet for myself for a year on that shit. I don’t know. Maybe you step into that role for a week or two when you got something and you really want to push. But then, alright, breathe.

Kimberly (31:55): Okay, well with that, we’re going to wrap it up. REWORK is a production of 37signals. You can find show notes and transcripts on our website at 37signals.com/podcast. Full video episodes are on YouTube and Twitter. And if you have a question for Jason or David about a better way to work and run your business, leave us a voicemail at 708-628-7850. You can also email us at rework@37signals.com.