The Tim Ferriss Show - Ep 61: The Benevolent Dictator of the Internet, Matt Mullenweg

Episode Date: February 9, 2015

Matt Mullenweg has been named one of PC World’s Top 50 People on the Web, Inc.com’s 30 under 30, and Business Week’s 25 Most Influential People on the Web. In this episode, I attempt to get him drunk on tequila and make him curse. Matt is most associated with a tool that powers more than 22% of the entire web: WordPress. Even if you aren't into tech, there are tons of "holy shit!" tips and resources in this episode. Matt is a phenom of hyper-productivity and does A LOT with very little. But how? This conversation shares his best tools and tricks. From polyphasic sleep to Dvorak and looping music for flow, there's something for everyone. Last but not least, Matt is also the CEO of Automattic, which is valued at $1-billion+ and has a fully distributed team of 300+ employees around the world.But he started off as a BBQ-chomping Texas boy. So, how did it all happen? Just listen and find out. It's one hell of a story. All links and show notes can be found at: fourhourworkweek.com/podcast***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Visit tim.blog/sponsor and fill out the form.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Quick sound test. This is transition from tea to tequila. How do you feel about that decision? I'm pretty excited. And off we go. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would seem an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite?

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episode of the Tim Ferriss Show, where I interview some of the world's top performers, whether that be in investing, sports, entrepreneurship, or otherwise, film, art, you name it, to extract the tools and resources and habits and routines that you can use. And in this episode, I have the pleasure in beautiful San Francisco to interview an icon of tech, but you do not have to be involved with tech or even understand tech to get a lot out of this conversation. Matt Mullenweg is one of my close friends. He's been named one of PC World's top 50 people on the web, Inc.com's 30 under 30, and Businessweek's 25 most influential people on

the web. Why, you might ask, has he received all these accolades? Well, he's a young guy, but he is best known as a founding developer of WordPress, the open source software that powers more than 22% of the entire web. It's huge. He's also the CEO of Automatic, which is valued at more than $1 billion, and has a fully distributed team of hundreds of employees around the world. However, Matt started off as a barbecue-chomping Texas boy. So how did this all come together? It certainly was not the grand vision from day one at all. And Matt is an incredible human being. He's a gifted musician. He is able to eat more than

100 chicken McNuggets in one sitting, and we'll talk about why and how he did that. And we really dig into the specifics of how he hires, what he looks for in people. We get really, really nitty gritty into his favorite books, his routines, music, habits, work style. He's one of the most productive people I've ever met in my life. I think you're really going to enjoy this episode. Be prepared to take notes, but if you want all the links and resources and everything else, of course, you can find them as always in the show notes. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com forward slash podcast, or just go to 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and click

on podcast and that'll take you to the show notes. So without further ado, please enjoy Matt Mullenweg. Matt, sir, welcome to the show. Howdy, howdy. Howdy, howdy. So let's explain the howdy, howdy, because there's some context missing. Of course, we know each other. Where is the howdy from? I was born and raised in Houston, Texas.

Fine state. It was a fine state. The greatest country in the world. And you've taught me a great many things related to barbecue, related to photography. So thank you for that. You got me very interested in photography. And we've traveled a lot together. But for those people who don't know who you are, when someone asks you, Matt, what do you do? How do you answer that these days? I'm probably best known for once eating 104 chicken McNuggets in one sitting.

Are you serious? Yeah. Wow. I did not know. How old are you? Does that look like last week? Now you won't forget it. And then on the side, I do work on an open source publishing platform called WordPress, which powers such amazing sites such as the 4-Hour Everything for Tim. That's true. And others like? New York Times, Wall Street Journal. About 23% of all websites now are in WordPress. That's amazing. And how did WordPress start for people who don't know the origin story?

Sure. Well, it's an open source project. And it actually started as a fork or a derivative of an already existing open source project and it actually started as a fork or a derivative of an already existing open source project. So there was this thing out there called B2, which I was using and blogging with myself and the creator disappeared so the development stopped. And myself and this guy in England named Mike Little picked it up and kept working on it. How old were you at the time?

19. 19. And were you self-taught from the standpoint of programming? Yeah, I tried to take some classes in school and they were just all terrible. So with programming, especially open source programming, like the web was the best place to learn it. And what made the classes terrible? I'm just, I'm always curious. Why did they fail?

Why did they not appeal to you? Well, I didn't go to a great school to start with. I was at University of Houston. I had an amazing high school experience. high school for the performing and visual arts one of the best experiences of my life but then i stayed in houston ufh was all right but uh the computer classes in particular i think like 20 or 30 years ago microsoft basically changed their curriculums or influenced the curriculums of many of these colleges so even though this was 2002 2003 the web the web had already happened, you know?

Right. It was a thing. Yeah. But they're still teaching you like Microsoft Visual Basic and like you're building like buttons on Windows apps. Sounds really white knuckle stuff. Exciting. And so you began working on this fork.

And could you explain what open source means? Sure. For people who aren't familiar with it? Open source is, for me, the most important idea I've been exposed to in my lifetime, actually. So think of open source like a bill of rights for software. And I think this is incredibly important now that more and more of our lives are influenced or governed by software. It basically says that here's four freedoms that are inalienable rights you have when you use open source software. And the license that WordPress has under the GPL says you have the freedom to use the software for any purpose.

So that means you can make a Matt has funny hair blog if you want, or you can, Oh, you found it. Or whatever you like. You can see how the software works. You can modify the software. And then you can distribute those modifications to your friends. And this sounds pretty basic and trivial, but a lot of what we use, it would be the equivalent of if you open the hood of your car and there was just a black box and you could be fined or go to jail for trying to modify things. For tampering with it.

Yeah. Or trying to understand it. And let's, so you're working on this fork. At what point does it become WordPress? From the beginning, actually. With a capital W and a capital P for everyone wondering. I don't see Matt get angry much, but if you want to really hit one of his pet peeves, it's the lowercase p. The lowercase p. Actually, it's not possible to write WordPress with an

uppercase W and a lowercase p on WordPress. As it should be. As it should be. It'll auto-correct it. I also feel badly for every transcendental meditation teacher. And I brought up, I was like, does it bother you when your TM always turns into a trademark symbol? And they're like, oh my God, how did you know? Yeah, well, they need their own platform, evidently. So when did it become WordPress? When was it christened WordPress? The name actually was one of the first things we came up with.

A friend in Houston named Christine had the idea for the name. And she checked that the.org was available. And I registered it that day. And that really brought it together. Because B2 slash Cafe Log, if you have a slash in your name, something wrong in the beginning. But WordPress, I just liked it from the moment I heard it. I was like, oh, this feels like something that has a little bit of gravitas, but still is pretty accessible.

And the focuses in the early days, which kind of distinguished us from what we were forged from, were focused on web standards, cleaning up the code, making sure that what we were outputting was really tight, and then installation. So it created something called the famous five-minute installation. So the standards would be like, and I'm using maybe a sloppy metaphor, but making sure that the grammar and everything is standard

so that it can have the widest adoption and tinkering possible? It was more at the time, the web platforms, you would build a website for Netscape and you would build a website for Internet Explorer and you'd use different code for both or sites would work with one and not the other. So web standards would create a common platform between them. Got it. And the installation ended up being the biggest thing. We called it the famous five minute install, even though it was neither famous. It's famous to the two of you guys yeah but it became a self-fulfilling prophecy right because people said oh it's it's famous and it's only five minutes and competitive

software at the time would take 30 minutes an hour to set up and also that's how some of our contemporaries like movletype made their money in the beginning is you could pay them to install it for you so their economic incentive was not to make the installation easier. So we just came in with that from the beginning, and it was really appealing to folks. So you were, right, simplifying to get the... Well, it's very interesting because you were open source at the time. You did not have a profit motive.

Nope. And therefore, you were not incentivized to complicate the profit. There were no golden handcuffs. Right. Nothing to lose. Which is true for a lot of industries. Professional training, for instance, is very much like that. Very few trainers are incentivized to make themselves unnecessary, right?

To make themselves obsolete. So they'll have a rotating schedule and different types of mesocycles and so on that keep you tethered to an ongoing program of training. What's a mesocycle? Well, you can have different types of cycling. For instance, if you're leading up to a powerlifting competition or a wedding, a trainer could do the same. Very similar. You always want to look like a powerlifter, especially if you're a lady for your wedding you can you can cycle the type of training so you might have let's just say arbitrarily 70 percent of your one rep max and you work between 70 and 75 percent of your one rep max

for a four to eight week period or something like that and then you go into a new cycle which is i'm making this up again but like 90% of your one rep max, or between 85 and 90. And so that would be, that has a place, but I feel like, just to bring it back to WordPress, is that I feel like the number one priority of any good physical training trainer or nutritionist should be to enable their client with the know-how and tools that make them themselves obsolete

so this complicate to profit is a real problem in a lot of industries what actually so my favorite classes in college were the political science and philosophy ones and because you think about systems instead of necessarily just and incentives versus uh what works or what gets you to the next thing so uh again kind of like what you said a personal trainer is not going to be incented to put themselves out of a job um can you create a system, something you've done with through your work, where people can self-enable? And from the early days of WordPress, we would always think, okay, well, if we do X today, what does that result in tomorrow, a year from now, 10 years from now? And it was kind of silly to think about 10 years from now, but it's now 12 years old. So now did that long-term vision develop? What were the components that helped you to develop that long-term view? Because

you're a young guy. I mean, you still are, despite the fact that you now have a three in front, how old are you now? 31 as of last week. I was so tired of the under 30 awards that you were getting every year. I was like, God, can this guy just turn 30 already? I feel badly about myself every year. It's award season, huh? Here we go. Mullenweg again. But what helped you to develop that long-term view besides maybe these political poli-sci classes? I think the political science really, really helps because- Any particular aspect or figure? I really loved Thucydides. It's actually a classic.

He wrote, I think it was the Peloponnesian, a book about the Peloponnesian War. And he was one of the first, what we see now as historians. So he would go back and writing about this series of events, would kind of look at the why and what was the environment which created these things rather than saying xyz happened saying this is what the world was like and that caused xyz to happen but the metaphor i think of the most because it's simple is just like uh the dog chasing the car right like what does the dog do if he catches the car right doesn't have a plan for it yeah so i find it just as often

on the entrepreneurial side people don't plan for success either like if we create a marketplace for plugins right what is the natural conclusion of that if it's really really successful um well it's really really successful there's not that many free plugins right it looks more like an app store on ios or android where everything's paid because that's what the incentives will be for the developers over the long term and so let me ask you this is a somewhat oblique question or unrelated seemingly but do you are there any hedge fund managers that you really get along with you don't have to name them by name, but you could, certainly. Our investors. Okay.

Who are some of your investors? And we'll talk about what they've invested in. Tiger Global. So there's an amazing guy, Lee Fixell, over there. He works on the private side, not the public equity side, but it's a hedge fund at the end of the day. Insight, True Ventures. We've actually been blessed from the very beginning with really great investors. I know a handful of hedge fund managers very closely

who are extremely good. A lot of them are macro. They would describe themselves as sort of macro guys, which I'll hope to go into another time. But the point being, they are very good at looking at sort of primary effects, secondary effects, tertiary effects, and trying to predict the various butterflies effect that can then inform a trade that other people aren't thinking of

or a position that other people aren't thinking of. I think you're very good at that. What, if you had to call yourself world-class at something besides eating Chicken McNuggets, what would you say that is? Hmm. It might be related to that because... The McNuggets? No, no, no.

The thinking of systems. Ah. And sort of environments and ecosystems and how things sort of cascade because running an open-source project, the joking term is BDFL, so Benevolent Dictator for Life. That's technically my role within WordPress.

But it's the most perilous dictatorship ever, because obviously you don't have an army, you don't have the ability to tax, but you don't really have a carrot or a stick. You're not paying people to do things, and you're not punishing them if they don't do things. So you really are in a position where the things you do have control over, like let's say the website or how the code works or the license,

you have to think of the implications of that. And then it's really just the power of a bully pulpit. In what sense? Like the State of the Union speech is happening from Obama. Once a year, I give a State of the Word speech and try to... That's at WordCamp. At WordCamp, yeah. I try to think, what are the things that have been influencing me and the things that won't

happen naturally in the WordPress ecosystem that might need another push or might need to expose the community to something that they're not thinking about. So a lot of times at WordCamp San Francisco, I'll bring in speakers like yourself or other folks who aren't in the day-to-day WordPress hubbub. Right. Despite my best efforts to muck things up. I was very happy, very, very pleased that our friend Nason was so kind at the barbecue world championships that sponsors a do you still sponsor a team there i didn't last year it's the first year i haven't been in a couple years all right and uh nason who's a tremendous developer helped to build a plugin called probation which allows me to whitelist someone who leaves in a good comment that has aspects

of, of questionable behavior, whether it's too much cursing, maybe attacking someone else, putting in too many links, um, which is a hugely helpful feature. So thank you, Nathan. Um, and the, that customize that, that, that ability to customize has always appealed to me about WordPress. What are other, we can look at it through a different lens, what are some of the mistakes that would-be competitors to WordPress have made that prevented their wider spread adoption? Most of our, most contemporary competitors,

so the Wix.com, Squarespace, et cetera, they focus more on it being a service rather than it being something that's super extensible. So for example, that feature you just described will never be in core WordPress. It will never be what? In core WordPress. It's a relatively small audience.

It's an edge case, but useful for the edge case. Yeah. And you know what? To be honest, other people who maybe have the same prominence as your blog, it would be useful for. So there is an audience out there. But it's not the tens of millions that use WordPress. So if you're building a service like WordPress.com or like Squarespace, one of these others, because you essentially have one code base that everyone runs.

You have to sort of design for the majority or what you think the majority is going to want or be. Where with WordPress, with its sort of infinite sensibility of themes and plugins, there can be a million niches. And in fact, with the way plugins are distributed, for people that run WordPress themselves, almost no two are alike. Right.

You know, when you think of the theme plus the plugins, that each blog, each one's its own unique, beautiful snowflake. Right. So you're not trying to decide what the average shoe size is in the world and give everyone a nine. So our competitors will say, ah, it's this checklist of features, and we're going to do

these 10 things wordpress does and maybe we'll do this one better and this one better and honestly like a smart team of a couple developers could probably do that in a year but to replicate the you know 35 000 plus plugins and themes is sort of it's a huge moat. I mean, it'll take lifetimes. And at what point did you decide to create Automatic, WordPress.com? Sure. So I should say what Automatic is. Automatic is the company where I work. I became CEO last year. And basically it's...

They had to wait until you had a three in front of your name. They had to wait until I was 30. So it was basically taking the idea that there's some services for WordPress that aren't appropriate for the open source side, this distributed nonprofit thing. And also that I wanted to create a company that I wanted to work at. And so that became Automatic. What was the question?

How did you decide to create Automatic? You know what it was? It was spam. Okay okay tell me more so you know things on the web get spam oh yes i'm very well aware whether it's your email a contact form you know spammers i think i have a hundred thousand more than a hundred thousand spam comments in my wow spam right now so what's been protecting you is a plugin called a kismet correct so kismet is an anti-spam system. And what had happened was I kept writing anti-spam plugins that were just plugins.

So there was just code that would run on your blog. And they would work for like an ever-decreasing amount of time. So like the first one stopped spam for like a year. And the second one stopped it for like six months. And then it got to the point where I'd release a new version. And like the next day the spammers would work around i was like these i always had like an idea of like a i apologize to anyone russian named ivan but like like this guy in russia like just downloading my plug i'm like oh i can work around this so easily yeah and um

and so i thought huh like this is asymmetric warfare yeah um we're never going to beat the spammers because they're like the bully on the playground unless we team up. Right. And so Akismet is sort of a system where... A pack of wolves that tear the bullies apart. Yeah, it's a pack of... Wow, I like that. Or maybe it's like circling the wagons, you know?

It kind of protects you from... It's more visually less violent. And it's able to adapt as quickly as the spammers were because it's a centralized service. I built some centralized services before that were expensive to run and cost me a lot out of my own pocket. So I wanted to make it a business so it could be self-sustainable.

I didn't want this something sort of running on my charity or if I went away, this would stop. So that's why... I assume you also need money for food and rent. I don't need that much. We'll talk more about that later. Got it. Not to interrupt.

So Akismet, spam. That was the first product of automatic. And it made perfect sense because it was something that WordPress, the software couldn't do. It was something that was a service. It was something that I wanted to have a sustainable business model. And so that was actually the first thing. I left CNET. So I moved out to San Francisco,

got a job at CNET. It was awesome. I was there for about a year. And basically the weekend after I left, I just hacked the whole time and released the first version of Akismet. What year was that roughly? I believe it was 2005. 2005. And was that the period in which you were experimenting with polyphasic sleep or was it before or after that question um no i did the polyphasic sleep before then okay so that was uh that was when i was still in houston and for those people who don't know polyphasic sleep is this very controversial concept of taking what would normally require, say, eight hours sleeping, monophasic, meaning one block, and breaking it up into multiple fragments.

I wrote about this in The 4-Hour Body, and man, do people get excited about that, either positively or negatively. So what was, you were experimenting with, was it Uberman? Uh-huh. So it's about, what is it, between two and two and a half hours? Something like that? In a 24-hour cycle. In a 24-hour cycle. So it's the four hours on and then 20 to 30 minutes of sleep.

What happens if you miss one of those naps? You're wrecked. But this was probably one of the most productive periods of my life. So I wrote WordPress in that time and also something called BB Press. And I remember your answer, but I'm curious if you remember what you told me. Why did you stop polyphasic sleep? What happened? What did I tell you?

You got a girlfriend. Turns out girlfriends don't like that sleep cycle. No one would have predicted it. The getting of the girlfriend? Yeah, the getting of the girlfriend. And maybe that's who I marry someday. Someone someone who also be on polyphasic sleep but the um sounds like a really tense household she has to type dvorak and do polyphasic oh yes you know what all right you brought it up why are you obsessed with dvorak oh yeah so dvorak is an alternative keyboard layout.

So instead of letters going A-S-D-F, it's A-O-E-U, for example. And all the letters except for A and M actually are in different places. So it would be a competitor to QWERTY. Yes. Right. And it's more efficient. So I think I was 14 or 15 and I thought, well, I'm going to probably be typing the rest of my life. And so if there's a more efficient way to do it, I should learn that.

And it took about a month. It's kind of like learning a new instrument, actually. And I just kind of went cold turkey and learned a type of work, and I've been doing it, yeah, over 15 years now. Gosh, I'm old. And do you still offer rewards to employees who pick up Dvorak? It's more like public shaming and or highlighting. We do little hints.

It's a dictator with a little more teeth. In our Christmas pack, we send out a Dvorak keyboard cover for your laptop or a little DVzine, which is a... DVzine.org is actually a great website that tells you all the benefits of Dvorak even better than I have. So there's things like in a I'm making up the numbers but in a year of typing on QWERTY your fingers move like 18 miles and in Dvorak they move like two miles wow like it's almost an order of magnitude more so I never thought of it this way but there's the speed benefit which uh I'm very impatient I was very impatient with the Dvorak I did play with it for

a while and then I had to switch laptops with people and I wasn't tech savvy enough to figure out. I was in Europe, I think, and I was just like having trouble with the settings and I got very frustrated. But would you say there's an argument for Dvorak being easier on your tendons and carpal tunnel and all that?

I'd say that's the most, the biggest benefit. So I, you know, again, I type for a living and I've tunnel and all that. I'd say that's the most, um, the biggest benefit. So I, you know, again, I type for a living and I've never had any problem. What type of keyboard do you use? Uh, I just use the keyboard on my laptop mostly now. You do? Oh yeah. Now you used to have this funky ergonomic keyboard that kept your hands, uh, your palms more vertical. Is that right? Yeah. You emailed me about that the other day. What was it called? Oh, I have no idea. That's why I'm asking. I looked it up and I told you what it was, but yeah, it was where the keys were actually sort of slanted in. Right. And, um, so it's almost

like you're holding joysticks. I mean, in that hand position with your, with your fingers extended and it is, you know what, that keyboard is very comfortable and I like it, but honestly the, just the, I'm not really limited when I'm on my computer by the speed I can type. Unless I was transcribing something, like when you're talking. I'm limited by the speed I can think. Earning some extra dollars by transcribing on TaskRabbit. Every now and then. I'm really limited by the speed I can think.

Right. Which is much slower than 120 words per minute or whatever I can type. So really the comfort is what does it for me. It's also kind of a cool security mechanism when someone sits down at your laptop and like just can't do anything. But it is, Dvorak is built into every single modern day computer, Windows and Mac.

So you can just, there's a setting if you go to international keyboards and you can do it. And I'd highly recommend, you have a pretty hardcore set of listeners. So pretty hardcore habit of writing too. Yeah, I would i would check out the work there's also a slightly more efficient one called colmac that if i was starting today i might do colmac how do you spell colmac c-o-l-e-m-a-k um now the difference between cordy and devorah is like let's call that 50 and between like devorah and colmac is like two or three percent so i haven't switched

again just because it's more marginal yeah but um if you're coming from qwerty yeah pick one of them huge cool all right we will link to all that in the show notes uh automatic is it coincidence that automatic is spelled with an m-a-t-t in the middle now as a typical egotistical founder, I try to work my name into everything. You should do that. I should? I could.

Tim is short. I could stick it in the middle of a lot of stuff. Automatic itself is, it's a unique company in a lot of ways. How is Automatic different from the average tech startup out there? A lot of ways, how is Automatic different from the average tech startup out there? A lot of ways. So the first and foremost is that everything we put out, we're open source to the core.

So most technology companies, the IP of their software is one of the chief values of it. And we open source and release to the public the vast majority of the IP we create. So that's the first and foremost. And it's really the key to the public the vast majority of the IP we create. So that's the first and foremost. And it's really the key to the philosophy of automatic. The second, which is I think the future of work and the future of all companies, is that we're totally distributed. So we're now over 300 people in 37 countries and well over 200 cities. So most people work from home or in co-working spaces, wherever they are. We have a headquarters here in San Francisco,

but it's only got about 20-ish people in it. There's no one there. Every time I've been to the headquarters, I'm like, where is everybody? Oh, wait, there are T-shirts I can get. Fantastic, I'll get a new T-shirt. We just needed a place to get mail and subpoenas. Do you get a lot of subpoenas?

Oh, yeah. It's like everyone who publishes on it's like if bill gates got takedown notices for people using microsoft word like we just get people contacting us for everything every type of uh disagreeable content that's published on wordpress results in some type of letter yep that sounds like fun well the more clueless the attorney the more likely they're all to contact us right right and And focusing on the distributed aspect, how did you make that decision and how early on? I mean, what was the process like?

Tell me the story of how you made that decision. It's literally from day one. And it was influenced by the fact that, you know, WordPress was an open source project before I created the company Automatic. So the first four or five people at Automatic were all in different cities. You know, we had Vermont,xas i was in san francisco actually the very first guy was in blarney ireland cork county which is like the texas is that where the blarney stone is it is

where the blarney stone is the blarney stone so you uh you climb to the top of this castle thing and you kind of hang off the side and you're kind of upside down and you kiss this stone jesus it's an old guy to kind of hold you and it's probably not sanitary but yeah um i was very shy before i kissed it about 10 years ago and now you're all now i'm talking to you i know okay well hold on i want to talk about nervousness and boldness and shyness for a second. We are going to come back to the distributed nature of automatic. This is not, in fact, the first time that I've interviewed you. Do you remember the very first, maybe you can tell people about the very first phone call that I made to you. Was that an interview?

No. Well, I was calling you to ask if I could interview you. Yes. So, Tim, this was pre-4-Hour Workweek, right? Yeah, I think it was 2006. So, it was calling you to ask if I could interview you. Yes. So Tim, this was pre-4-Hour Workweek, right? Yeah, I think it was 2006. So it was old school. Yeah, or early, early 2007.

Those are my Tim bona fides. Oh yeah, back in the day. And I got the, my phone never rings and I almost never answer, but for some reason I answer this. And this weird guy who talked very fast did like a monologue for like 10 minutes. I don't know if it was actually 10 minutes. It felt like 10 minutes.

It was really bad. But this was Timbo, Tim Ferriss and he was telling me about something. I don't know. I think it was like verbal shock and awe. I was trying to establish my credentials and a mutual friend, MJ Kim, had made the intro and I was worried you would hang up because I was aware vaguely that you weren't really

a phone guy. So you're trying to get in all the words before I hung up. That's right. Which is not the best policy in the world, but we did end up getting to know each other. And I wanted that story to be told because it's easy for listeners or readers to assume that my pitches have always been great and that I was born that way. No, I've had thousands of horrible pitches. Some of them, just by the luck of the day, you happen to contact contact someone work, but it's despite your technique, not because of it. So distributed from day one,

what are the tools that you currently use to make that work? So open source projects mostly work like this. And basically what they do is they say you use things like, well, back in the day, I'm going to say some old technologies, and then we'll get some new technologies. IRC, which is sort of an old text chat or IM system. You collaborate using distributed source control. So we use Subversion, which is a modern-day equivalent of something like GitHub. So you basically have ways that you communicate, email, mailing lists, forums, all the things that people do even when they're in the same office.

They IM each other. You just make that the primary way you communicate. And so that's what we did from the very beginning. I mean, when Automag started, we literally, it was bootstrap beginning, had no money. And I thought, well, why would, I was in San Francisco, but why would I move all these people to the most expensive place in America when we also have no money. And most investors, in fact, a lot of them said, oh, yeah, when you raise money, you can finally move everyone there. But, you know, Donica in Ireland became ready to start a family.

And, you know, people are different places for different reasons. And it's true the Bay Area has some amazing talent. But you also have, well, two things. You have some incredibly talented people all over the world who, for whatever reason, don't want to live here, even though it's a pretty cool place. You also have some of the largest, most successful companies in the world, market caps of over a trillion dollars combined, competing for the same 20,000 or 30,000 engineers. In one place. In one place in one place right absolutely so when you add up cisco oracle apple google you know just go down not to mention all

the startups linkedin facebook twitter plus all startups um they're uh they're all fishing in this like pond which is a little bit overfished yeah um again not to say there's not great people it's just that uh perhaps back in the day when you had to go to like one of these universities like stanford or mit to learn the things to create a scalable web scale startup or service um it was important to be clustered there but now you can learn all this stuff on hacker news and you can read reddit and you can you know learn everything you need to do to build the next wordpress from anywhere in the world any place you have an internet connection

so right there's some super smart people all over and so we just started to say well just like it's silly to discriminate on the basis of let's just say gender yeah i've said we're not going to hire men or women it's dumb because you just cut out half of the possible hiring pool so by definition people who hire will be not as good as if you looked at 100 we said well we're going to look at the 99.9 of the world that doesn't live in the san francisco bay area so not only are you getting better talent because you have a larger pool to filter from what can you do with the cost savings of not having to build out a huge infrastructure for a campus? I don't know if there's actually a cost savings, because once you start flying people around and things like that, like it does add up and we give people

an allowance, for example, a $250 per month co-working allowance. They can use it at Starbucks or cafes. They can use it at a co-working space we so we we invest in people's uh space because we want them to be productive but i think what it really comes down to is just allowing people freedom autonomy and something that was actually inspired when i finally read your book is some lifestyle arbitrage yeah i mean you can make a san francisco salary and live in argentina or alabama or wherever you want to. It goes a lot, it goes, it goes very, very far.

And that's kind of cool. And, um, or like myself, like I travel most of the time. Where is the, uh, you're in 37 countries.

You said, what are the most heavily weighted countries or represented countries? Oh, in order. It's probably, it's English speaking countries in order. So it's,'s uh united states is about two-thirds so again more than majority uh we love us some canadians i love canadia yeah um uk australia uh those are kind of the top four or five yeah ireland so because we're still although we're totally distributed we're still speak english

right so places where uh so that's like the top five and then of the other 32 countries um many of them we just have one person in them right we only have one person in india we have i think three or four people in argentina one person in Brazil. So it just kind of ends up being whoever the coolest, most, I was going to say bad butt. I don't like the curse. For you who don't know Matt, he never curses. He has a lot of trouble. It'd be like forcing Mr. Rogers to say fuck on the air.

It would just be the most excruciatingly painful thing to watch. So yes, they're bad bad butt bad butt engineers tim now i can't send this to my mom we can bleep the f it's it's all right you know i actually don't have a problem with cursing i just don't do it myself how long has that been has that always been the case you know i don't mean you're from texas and again i don't know that i'm implying i don't have a problem with it. Not that I'm implying that all Texans curse a lot, but I'm from Long Island. It's like you can't avoid it.

That's half of what we say. There's actually a myth in the company that you can't curse around me or I'll get mad, but it's just not true at all. I have no personal problem with it. I feel like I would have picked up on that. So how long have you not been cursing? I feel like I must have read a book when I was younger,

like a James Bond type book or something. Because I recall the sentence, I just don't remember the context. And if someone's like, you know, the English language has more words in it than any other language in the world. And so you can find your way to express yourself and some of these other hundreds of thousands of words. Now, obviously words like F word are so versatile. You can use them in a million different ways, but the, um, there's a lot of other really good ones. So I try to to express myself that's something that's always struck me and i feel like such a coarse unrefined sort of knuckle dragger with the amount that i curse which is i i enjoy being around you and uh something we've talked about on the podcast

before with other folks is surrounding yourself with people you want to be the average of and so i like one of the reasons i enjoy being around you is that you you force me to become very aware of how much i curse and which oftentimes i think is is reflective of lazy thinking just in the way that if you overuse the word interesting like oh interesting that is a garbage word it means nothing like come up with a better word or uh my my particular crutch was pretty oh that's pretty good that's pretty expensive that's pretty awesome and i got so annoyed with it the way that i tried to fix it which worked very well actually for a period of time was requiring that every time i say pretty i add fucking after it no matter who i was like, oh, that's pretty fucking expensive. Oh, that's pretty fucking pretty.

Or whatever, which solved it. But what are the current tools that you use? So you had IRC and so on, but what's the state of the art within Automatic for managing, keeping that machine running with the distributed teams? So we actually ended up creating a tool called P2. So you can get it at p2theme.com.

And that is basically a replacement for email. So Automatic basically sends no emails. All the email I get is from people outside the company. And think of P2 almost like a social cast or a Yammer or kind of like an internal Twitter or Facebook, but really work-oriented, where people can post short things, long things, blog posts, embed YouTubes, rich media, mock-ups,

images, audio, anything. And it's a threaded, asynchronous discussion. But because it's not email, I honestly don't know why people use email so much in companies because imagine that you're a company, you're a team of 10 people and you join that team. How do you catch up with the past two years of conversations do you get people to forward you like all the emails they've been doing if someone leaves like does everything

in their inbox what does everything in their inbox disappears and all that sort of locked in knowledge is gone so everything in automatic is public by default all of our stats all of our everything everything everything like salaries equity uh so we're not buffer where we publish you know salaries and equity but the um so just for context for people who are not in in this world of tech buffer app is actually an app i use every day very useful for scheduling but buffer app allows you to schedule uh different types of facebook posts twitter posts etc among, many other things. But they're extremely transparent with their information.

So they publish a formula, essentially. Yeah, how they determine their salaries. It's like a base salary, like 50K for support, plus a multiplier for experience, plus you can get equity or more salary or things like that. So in theory, the formula is public. I think some of that stuff goes a little bit too far and it creates as many problems as it solves.

How do you draw the line? Or how do you decide where to draw the line? It's really a judgment call. And also thinking about what is the logical conclusion of this. So, how does that system work when we're 10,000 employees or 100,000 employees? And does it just sort of kick the can down the road? So the thing I think about the buffer system isn't, it's not bad that there are salaries of public.

In fact, government jobs, salaries of public, and many companies have sort of stated titles and levels that have certain ranges but then it just kind of it kind of kicks the can down the road that why is this guy got an experience multiplier of 1.3 and mine is 1.1 you still have the what is kicking the can down the road man uh it's if it purports to solve the idea of compensation inequity. There's still subjective measures that have a big impact on what the formula, the output of the formula that doesn't really help. So is it, what I think of is,

is this going to make the company either solve a problem that we can't solve otherwise or is it going to make it better overall? And so all of our communication being public does. And it's all searchable, it's all indexed, it's all tagged. I could look you up in our system and see every meeting anyone's ever had with you. I feel like, wow, this guy really doesn't know how to use computers.

Yeah, but going back now, you know, almost 10 years. We turned 10 this year. So that's pretty powerful to have that sort of record of everything. And it's all searchable and indexed. So that, I think, makes sense. And we're very trusting internally. Like if we're working on an acquisition, for example, in my status updates that I do weekly,

I'll put that I worked on this acquisition. In theory, that could leak. It could whatever. But I find that when you trust people, they tend to do the right thing. Versus if we try to really lock everything down, I feel like that wouldn't engender a two-way loyalty. So P2.

Slack, I really love. Can you... Now, Slack has come up a lot recently for me, including for very small teams. Can you explain Slack? Sure. As I pour water all over this table. That's all right. That's all right.

It's wood. I would assume the tree was exposed to water. Hopefully it'll be okay. So at some point, so Slack is kind of for us, it's a replacement for IRC. So imagine it's a real-time chat platform that actually has a lot of the benefits of P2.

You can embed media in it and things. But it just makes sense for IM. imagine it's a real-time chat platform that actually has a lot of the benefits of P2. You can embed media in it and things. But it just makes sense for IM. So we used Skype before. But again, it didn't really scale for us. So if you're the 101st person to join Automatic, and we use Skype for all of our messaging each other, you have to add 100 people to your contact list and be accepted by each one of them.

Rooms have limits for how many people they can have. And just all these arbitrary things that's not suited and Slack. You can DM anyone in the company. Everything's, they also have a really great search. There's public channels. Anyone can join this private groups. And it's just,

it's done by some of the folks behind Flickr, Stuart Butterfield, Cal Henderson. And it's just really well done. Like it's pleasant to use. Love the name. So it's a, yeah, it's a positive use. Love the name. So it's a, yeah. It's a positive association just in the name.

It's an enterprise tool, although you can use it for, I have, I'm on like four or five teams now, including some that are just groups of friends. But it's really pleasant to use. Like it's consumer grade. And I mean, consumer grade is a compliment. You mean the UI? Like the user experience is consumer friendly and user friendly? It could compete with a Facebook or a Twitter for its usability versus where most enterprise software just, you know, is looked by, is designed by someone who's very unhappy. And why not use P2 for the IRC like chat?

Oh, it's not chat. Okay. So P2 for the IRC like chat? Oh, it's not chat. Okay. So P2 is threaded. It is real time, but you wouldn't use it like a chat client. Got it. Where Slack is chronological, so there's no threading. And yeah, it's instantaneous. It comes to your phone.

It's more like an IAM application. Got it. And would you use P2 for project management type stuff as well? We do. Yeah. Okay. We have bug trackers. Different for project management type stuff as well? We do. Yeah. Okay. We have bug trackers. Different teams use different things. Some use fabricator, some use GitHub, some use track. Uh, we allow teams a lot of autonomy in choosing their tools there. But, um, all the communication really happens on P2. So I think P2 replacement for email, uh, Slack or replacement for Skype, Skype, I am am and that's really between those two you can take over the world i love it and uh for those people who are not aware of uh who are not part of the tech world

no no that was that was a coaster that was a very metallic scandinavian coaster that was stuck to the bottom of the glass that's that's the downside of these coasters. We're sitting at my place, chilling. We were going to do tequila sipping. I don't want to incriminate Matt, but I have to get on the road a little bit later. So I don't want to be swimming in Casa de Aragones, which is my favorite sipping tequila. It's my favorite too. It's so good. It is good. And just to digress, because this is worth digressing on, I was introduced to Casa de Aragones the first time because I ended up doing some military training

with some active guys and some deployed guys when they were back for a brief period. And they would do a full day of shooting exercises and then they would dismantle their guns and clean their guns while slowly sipping casa dragones like the most manly session ever and no ammo around very safe and i had never liked tequila i'd always disliked tequila and it'd give me a horrible hangover and de Agones is not intended to be mixed with anything. And it's just amazing. I think tequila is the most underrated alcohol, actually.

And it's very expensive. So for people who, it's something, it's for special occasions, for sure. People have a bad impression of tequila because they drink a bunch of stuff and then at the end of the night, they do a tequila shot. So they've mixed like 20 different alcohols. Or they drink things like margaritas that are full of sugar. Or like instant hangovers for me. But just like a, yeah, I love Casa Trigonis.

I was introduced to it by a friend in New York named Shanti. And she was like, you have to check this out. I was like, come on, why am I going to pay this much? I was like, wow, this tequila is delicious. Yeah, it's amazing. It's really amazing. And if you drink, I believe this, if you stick to just tequila, and it's a good tequila, like Don Julio 1942 is also pretty good.

If you stick to good tequila all night long, obviously with limits, you're not hungover in the morning. No, I agree. So if you're looking for a hangover cure, guys, you could test responsibly sipping tequila. Personal tools. I'd love to talk about some tools that you have, say, on your laptop. So one of them that you introduced me to that I love is Momentum. Could you explain Momentum?

So Momentum is an extension for Chrome that when you launch a new tab, it shows you a beautiful picture. It says, you know, Hi Matt or Hi Tim. You put in your name. I guess you could put in my name but be creepy and it asks you a question what is your focus for today it has a light to do thing i don't

use but really for me it shows the time and just this beautiful picture and often like a nice little quote at the bottom yeah weather in the corner just it's kind of a clean fun thing that when you launch a tab because by default on chrome I feel like before it was like your most recently or most frequently visited sites, which is distraction central for me. Yeah. So I'd be launching a new tab and be like, oh, let me click this tech meme. Like, oh, and then 20 minutes later, you're like, what am I doing? Not only that, but if you open a new tab, I find it useful. Personally, it's, I mean, the photos are just amazing. They're so gorgeous. It bugs me that the

quotes have no attribution. That's a new feature. If you hover over the quote, it will tell you who it's from. Huh. I feel like that should just be displayed. They removed it a little while ago. I don't know why, but now if you hover over the quote, it'll tell you who it's from. But the photos are absolutely stunning, which catches your attention.

And the reason that's important is when you, each day, it'll prompt you to type an answer for what is your focus for today. And then it will display that every time you open a new tab. And for me, if I open a tab to do something unimportant, trivial, or just that is a pure distraction, I'll be like, oh, oh yeah, I should really get back to that. The road to heck is paved with lots of new tabs. Tone down language. This is a family program uh so what other what other uh tweaks or tools do you have on your laptop that you find helpful uh definitely uh i'm on constantly simple notes so that's actually a company i liked it so much we acquired it it's a company automatic bought a years ago. And it's a very simple notes app

that synchronizes instantly, basically across web, iOS, Android, desktop. There's a great desktop client for Mac,

so I pretty much live in that. New additions, I've started using Wunderlist. Wunderlist. I've heard a lot of good things about Wunderlist.

It's like W-U-N-D. Yeah, Chad Fowler works there now. Oh, cool. Yeah, good guy. Really liked it. So yeah chad fowler works there now oh cool yeah good guy really liked it so i just started doing that this year actually um what is it on my computer spotify you know standard stuff what what are some of your other most used apps on your your smartphone hmm well obviously wordpress yeah of course okay i'll get the plugs out of the way in the beginning

so let's say wordpress simple note got it um for messaging i've actually become really in the telegram telegram so telegram.org it is a free fast and uh encrypted optional really good encryption by the way uh messaging app that isn't Facebook, isn't WhatsApp, isn't anything else, and it's super good. And they have a desktop client as well. I like WhatsApp, but I'm on my computer the majority of the day, so I need to be able to message from there. And iMessage only works with iPhone, other iOS devices,

so it's pretty nice. So Telegram you can use on your phone and on your laptop. Yeah, which I love. My iMessage is broken. I won't pull you in for tech support, but I could use Telegram you can use on your phone and on your laptop. Yeah, which I love. My iMessage is broken. I won't pull you in for tech support, but I could use Telegram. Slack. So in terms of making myself a better person, the row is the 7-Minute Workout app,

Calm.com, which I'm an investor in, and Kindle, and they're reading. Kindle is a meditation app no i'm not no that is not the meditation app i need to do some more dual dual end back training oh god that was that was terrible calm is a meditation mat yes how often do you meditate not enough i feel like that's dodge is that once a month or what's not enough? So where I am in this new year is I'm trying to do it for five minutes per day. That's perfect. That's just where I'm starting out.

I'm actually inspired a lot by you talking and telling me about how meditation has become a big part of your life. I'd like to work up to where it's maybe a twice a day or media session. But I've struggled a little bit even with that five minutes so putting calm on my home screen and just kind of just saying you know you can do anything for five minutes yeah there's really no excuses for not doing five minutes a day um kind of neat it's kind of like for fitness one of the things i did a while back was i would just try to do like oh it started with one so just before i got in the shower do one push-up and no matter how late you're running no matter what's going on in the in the shower, I'd do one push-up. And no matter how late you're running, no matter what's going on in the world, you can't argue against doing one push-up.

Like, come on, there's no excuse. So I often find I just need to like get over that initial hump with something that's almost embarrassingly small as a goal. And then that can become a habit. I think this illustrates a really important principle, which is rigging the game so you can win. People don't like to fail. And if you set the pass fail mark too high for an activity, for instance, a lot of people make New Year's resolutions, they decide they're going

to go to the gym four times a week. That's too much for someone who doesn't go to the gym at all. And if that's the pass fail mark and you go three times a week, you're going to feel like a failure. Whereas if you psychologically set the hurdle at one time per week, for instance, and you only have to spend 15 minutes in the gym, then you can earn bonus credits by doing what would have previously been viewed as a failure. Someone should write a book on that. Right. God, I can't do another 600-pager. The four-hour body has another point that I think is very important, which is the layering of behaviors or sequencing of behaviors. So if someone has 100 pounds to lose

or 50 pounds to lose, I think exercise is the wrong place to start for a whole host of reasons. Did you say diet? Exercise is the wrong place to start. Diet is the right place to start for a whole host of reasons. Did you say diet? Exercise is the wrong place to start. Diet is the right place to start because exercise is an additive behavior. It's something they don't currently do that they have to make time for, whereas, especially if they're overweight, they're definitely eating.

So they have set aside time to eat and they're just substituting in different default meals, which is very, very, very easy. Met my first slow carb follower who's lost 200 pounds recently. Wow. Yeah. That's a lot. That's a lot of pounds. That's a lot of pounds.

Actually, it was a question I wanted to ask you if it's okay to turn this around. Yeah, sure. I've been reading a little bit more about fasting and intermittent fasting. So there was like a couple of tweets worth of advice you would give. For fasting? Yeah. Definitely. Alright. I think if you have incredible discipline, I think the intermittent

fasting, for instance, I think his name is Martin Birkin, Lean Gains. I think he does quite a bit here. He may or may not be a fan of my stuff. He's not a fan of a lot of people, but that's fine. I'm okay with it

because even if he doesn't like me, I think he's a good resource for intermittent fasting. A lot of people who sustain intermittent fasting, and I'm not saying Martin, I'm saying a lot of other people who are figureheads in that community consume massive amounts of two things. On the male side, caffeine.

They consume a lot of stimulants. And some of them consume anabolics like Dianabol, which is an oral anabolic androgenic steroid that inhibits appetite significantly. So you want to, I would encourage you to test intermittent fasting, see how you feel. But I personally prefer, and I'll be writing quite a bit about this,

to do a, I did a seven-day distilled water fast. And I think the longevity benefits known and unknown and health benefits known and unknown of doing that are very significant. What happens if you don't distill the water? Well, you know, that is a great question. They don't, the doctors who supervised me did not want me to be consuming

any supplemental minerals or electrolytes, which was interesting because I thought it would be the opposite. And in some cases when people get very weak, they'll supplement with say bullion broth or something like that. But they don't want you to be ingesting any type of

supplemental minerals vitamins etc and uh that was a tremendous experience i actually want to do that at least once a quarter and possibly do a 14 day i just read where like after the third day of like a water fast you start producing more is it white blood cells your body starts oh yeah i mean that that wouldn't surprise me at all i'd have to to look at my labs. Of course, I did your analysis every day and lab work. Did you weigh your poo? I did not weigh my poo because I gotta tell you, there's not much poo when you're not eating for seven days.

But you have to be careful with the amount of water you drink because if you're not consuming any sources of salt, you can develop, you can over-consume water just like anything else. And there have been examples of people who've died as a result of, say, radio show competitions where they have competitions to see who can drink the most water. It's a terrible idea.

I think it's called hyponatremia, I think it is, which is an extreme lack of sodium and other things that then interferes with your ability to conduct electricity in muscles like the heart but the intermittent fasting for the it works for a lot of people very well but the vast majority of people i have seen who use it end up using crutches of some type like stimulants so you trade one problem for another. And in fact, you can also end up losing fat not because of the intermittent fasting, but because you're consuming six cups of coffee a day.

I still don't drink coffee. What's that? I still don't drink coffee. Why not? You know, I figure I have enough vices in my life. Are you an investor in a coffee company? Blue Bottle Coffee. So I don't drink coffee, but figure I have enough vices in my life. Are you an investor in a coffee company? Blue Bottle Coffee. So I don't drink coffee, but when I do, Blue Bottle is the...

Okay, you don't have to answer this, but I'm curious. What are some of your other suitable for Mr. Rogers vices? What are some of your other vices? Wine, women, and song, right? It all goes back to the classics. your other vices? Wine, women, and song, right? It all goes back to the classics. Those are vices? I feel like probably the thing I struggle with the most is because my work and what I do is connected. I'm talking to people online.

I'm on my computer. And especially since taking over as CEO the past year, what I've really had to do is unschedule more of my life, create more space, read a lot more than I used to, because I find that when I don't have that space, when I'm just in the, I'm not going to call it flow, when I'm in sort of like the hedonistic treadmill of pings and chats and tweets and not even,

not even necessarily being distracted by like Facebook or Twitter, but like even just work stuff. Right. You don't take that step back that allows you to have the creative inspiration or the ideas for the next big thing or the, your mind works through the problem in a different way. Right. The deloading phase,

those blocks of time. What have you found helpful for creating that space? Oh, another interesting thing about automatic is we have almost no meetings. Let's talk about it. So I only have three standing meetings at automatic standing, meaning physically standing. Oh no. Standing like it's always standing on the calendar. I see. Outstanding. So every other week. What makes those meetings worth doing?

So they're meetings with groups of people who are responsible for three areas at Automatic. One for all of WordPress.com and everything related there. One for Jetpack and all the plugins we make. And then one we just call business they're called a dot com dot org dot biz so the commission the organization and the biz group um and business is basically all the people who work on making money at automatic right got it so all the vip guys and vips on that team ads so the the commercial side because to be honest the vast majority of automaticians don't think about revenue at all yeah there's just a few of us that shoulder the

burden for everyone else it's probably a good thing i mean what what do the other people primarily focus on um i don't know comicsquila. What they're having for lunch. No, I mean, you think about the user. You think about the experience. You think about what is the thing. The hardest thing is spending the most time on the most important things. Just in life in general. And especially when building products.

It's so easy. There's a term in open source called bike shedding. And it's this idea. Do you know it? I do, but I want you to explain it. This is a great concept. I'm going to butcher the story, but, you know,

someone brings a proposal for a nuclear plant to a city council. And it's, you know, this 200-page thing. And they kind of flip through it. But it's, like, too much for people to comprehend. And they're not nuclear physicists or activists anyway, so they just kind of rubber through it. But it's like too much for people to comprehend. And they're not nuclear physicists or activists anyway, so they just kind of rubber stamp it. And then the next person up wants to build a bike shed off the main road.

And everyone has an opinion, like what color the bike shed should be. Should it accommodate tandem bicycles? Should it like – What color should it be? Yeah. And so there's an amazing website called bikeshed.org. And a cool feature of it is that you can type in as a subdomain a color. So if you type green.bikeshed.org, it'll give you a green background and then the text of this original mailing list post,

which is like a BSD thing from like probably 13 or 14 years ago now, that tells the story and talks about how usually proportionally the more trivial something is, the more likely it is that lots of people have opinions and feel like they can have an impact on it. That's so true. And I want to talk about also your auditioning process. But first we're going to hear a few words from the fine sponsors who make this show free for all of you. So please don't skip ahead. Things we have coming up with Matt, we're just getting started. We're going to talk about his auditioning process, what he has in his carry-on bag. This man travels the world all the time. We're going to talk about investing,

Warren Buffett, music, his rituals around productivity as it relates to music, and on and on and on. So please don't go away. And here you go, our fine sponsors. We've taken a potty break, which gave us a chance to upgrade our beverage since I've canceled my driving plans this evening from tea to tequila. So bear with me one moment. Actually, Matt, perhaps you could elucidate and enlighten us about some of your favorite music at the moment while I very geisha-like pour us some lovely tequila. I will be monitoring your technique. Yeah, I'm so late to the game, but I just discovered, I was about to say Tila Tequila, but I did not just discover it. I just discovered Sam Smith, the opposite of Tila Tequila, who just his voice is super haunting.

Been enjoying Milky Chance lately. They have a cool song called... From Tila Tequila? No. They have a cool song called Stolen Dance. What type of music is that? What would you call that? That's interesting.

So they have kind of a reggae feel, but it's like a guy with a guitar and sings combined with a guy who kind of plays the laptop, like more of like a beat, almost like a DJ. Very cool. And I saw them live in San Francisco. Great show. And I'm that same.

I listen to a lot of hip hop and a lot of jazz. And you play instruments also. Yeah. Primarily saxophone. When did you learn to play the saxophone? Well, I started in second or third grade. Really? Yeah. So I started pretty young. My dad played sax, so I always wanted to do it. And I got kicked out of piano class. For doing what? I don't know. They said I had no musical talent, so I wanted to prove them wrong. God, what is wrong with some teachers? Unbelievable. Cheers, by the way.

Cheers. Cheers. And so the saxophone was your transition from piano. And is there anything, are there any skills that you developed through the, through the sacks that have translated to coding or anything else you do? Oh, almost everything.

So from how to breathe and be on stage in front of people. For speaking gigs and whatnot. Or just anything. You're in front of a group of people. How to interact. So in jazz, it's all about listening and responding. You're kind of co-composing on the fly when you're improvising or in a quartet or something. How to learn new things.

So sometimes for different, if I played in like a musical theater band or something like that, like I need to double on piccolo or flute or clarinet or another instrument. So I'd have to learn that very quickly. And just, I would say most importantly, the concept of deliberate practice, which I know you're a big fan of.

Yeah, absolutely. I remember I had a teacher once who told me like, if you only practice the things where you sound good, you're never going to get better. You reach kind of a local maximum. And that was a trap I actually had fallen into. A local maximum? I need to learn what this is.

Is that just a constrained maximum? Yeah, you reach the best that you're going to get within this sort of limited sphere. You're not moving on to the next sphere and you know especially back when i was young i think i was more self-conscious and so when i practice and it'd be at school or at home i'd want to sound good for whoever might walk by or hear me or anything and that's not how you get better you just kind of get really good at the 10 things that you're practicing but the people who practice the best sound terrible like they're

squawking and squeaking and doing long tones and overtones they sound like they're it's funny one of the most best things you can do to sound better on saxophone is what's called long tones which is playing a single note for a really long time and then going to the next note and playing that for a really long time why does that make you better um is it an endurance thing it helps your embouchure and your tone your what embouchure what is that so the embouchure is basically the position and firmness of your mouth around the mouthpiece and basically that it's it's basically the seal around the mouth trying not to make any jokes or think of like a brass instrument when you know they have the sort of circular mouthpiece and they do like that sort of thing inside of it um they use an armature to change the pitch so you're

that's the position of the mouth it's also the position of your throat the way the air is flowing the position of your tongue inside your mouth that determines where the air goes it's different for different instruments but ultimately that and the breath support is what determines your tone. And you listen to a lot of music. You're an avid consumer of music. Do you still listen when you work to one track or a handful of tracks on repeat? I do.

So tell, explain this, explain what, uh, the last thing that you, that you listened to in this way and why you do that. Um, literally today, this Sam Smith song, uh, I'm not the only one, uh, which is, I actually just blogged about it. Check it. Oh, I can plug my blog, ma.tt. Which is a great domain name. Thank you. Where's tt, Trinidad and Tobago? Trinidad and Tobago.

I actually just renewed it for another three years. Why only three years? I'm curious. Oh, it's a really weird, you know, it was unregistered when I got it. So just luck of the draw? Yeah, I literally, well, it wasn't luck of the draw. Just no one went through the junk you had to go through

to register domain in Trinidad and Tobago. Oh, because it's a pain in the ass in Trinidad and Tobago. I had to like wire money to Trinidad. And I was in my, I was in like the Bank of America on 3rd and Brandon or something, 4th and Brandon.

And they're like, sir, are you sure about this? I'm like, yeah, yeah, it's fine. I read it on the internet. It's fine. The internet said it's okay. Someone contacted me. I'm going to send them a couple grand.

And yeah, they were very concerned about the money I was wearing to this Trinidadian bank. But yeah, I find that's... So on your blog, you put a video of... Just a YouTube, a music video for this song. But that's just because YouTube is the easiest way to share music now. The nice thing about a song on repeat is that

I can really enjoy it, but something about it allows my brain to background it as well. I have a couple albums that I can do, the entire album on repeat. But what I can't do is something new or novel. So like Pandora or Spotify Radio distracts me because I'm like, oh, what's this?

And then I'll start next thing I know I'm like on the artist page and on their Wikipedia and like really digging into it. So I really want something I've heard sometimes literally a thousand times before. What are some of the other songs that you've heard a thousand times? I really like John Mayer's Who Says? Who says I can't get stoned? Which is kind of funny because I don't. What is another one? Some Kanye songs like Gorgeous, Power.

There's just different, whatever it is at the moment. Oh, Kendrick Lamar is amazing. So Kendrick Lamar has a song, Rigor Mortis. It's actually kind of upbeat. So it's a pretty intense song. And his lyrics are fast and furious. He's, in my opinion, the greatest lyricist of this generation what was the name again i don't even recognize the name i'm kendrick lamar kendrick lamar oh man yeah he um i remember when someone

told me like a year ago who taylor swift was i'm really out of the the slipstream of pop culture um yeah kendrick lamar is definitely my top five favorite rappers right now. And his music actually has a lot of jazz influence on many things he does. And the song Rigor Mortis samples a jazz track. And a lot of these tracks are shorter. So the Sam Smith is like, I think, three and a half minutes. Who Says is like 2.56 or so. Rigor Mortis is under three minutes

and just put them on loop. So I borrowed that habit. I remember you told me about this and I thought it was genius because I had used different albums for different books. And for those people who haven't heard this, because it does help some people a lot to write.

If your writing period is best at night and you feel very isolated which i did late at night i generally did my best synthesis not research not interviewing but synthesis from about 10 p.m to 5 a.m and i'd be alone and it was just very um hermit-like and i felt very isolated to be in the quiet and darkness by myself. So I would put in earphones, listen to music on repeat. Very often something without vocals and a pendulum, for instance. And I would then watch the same movie over and over and over again. But it would just be my peripheral vision because the images of human beings would make me feel less isolated.

And it was very comforting. So I had The Bourne Identity, the first, images of human beings would make me feel less isolated and it was very comforting so i had uh the born identity the first and sean of the dead for the four-hour work week did you do one of the bond movies too i did casino royale i've seen hundreds probably thousands of times because i would just leave it on repeat so i might play five six times a night if i'm really in a session and then for the four-hour chef the funny addition was the first thing that i clicked on amazon prime that was available on amazon prime which was babe so i ended up watching with the pig with the pig and farmer hoggett and it's actually a brilliant movie yeah it's a

brilliant movie there's a lot hidden in that movie there are a lot of subtle details just like kung fu panda is a genius now that i have not seen yeah oh it's it's fantastic i love when they make these movies for kids but they put cool stuff in there for adults like aladdin and many other movies yeah yeah yeah really fantastic so all right so that's the that's the music trick the repeat i have a colleague who does the movie thing and like i do yeah and i put the movie on mute though oh really yeah and i listen to the music for him he does big lebowski and a few others but um the only the only variation i've introduced in the past few years is uh i like this electronic edm type group called the jane does they're also friends and they do some mixes and

they have some i guess it's called trap music um this is where i'm getting out of my element a little bit but um i find that if i'm doing things like email where I need to be a little bit higher energy and go through a lot of things, that's really good for me. I love it. Auditions. Tell me about auditions. What are auditions? How do they work in automatic? Why auditions?

So one thing that's really important when you're in a distributed company is, I mean, there's no one looking over your shoulder. There's no manager walking by. There's no one even who knows whether you started work or if you started work at all or what time you did.

So you really need to hire people who are self-motivated and can manage themselves to some extent. A ton of automaticians who are formerly freelancers or CTOs at other companies or things like that motivated, and can manage themselves to some extent. A ton of automaticians were formerly freelancers, or CTOs at other companies or things like that, because they really need a lot of ability to self-direct and have self-management, which is a tough skill. Like, it's still something that I work on every day of my life. So what we found, we've tried every hiring,

especially when we started, you know, I was much younger younger and I thought, oh, well, we should do it like the other companies do it. So we tried how many manhole covers are there in Manhattan. The McKinsey and Google brain teasers. The brain teasers. Although Google stopped doing them. I think Microsoft was most famous for them. So we did brain teasers. We did coding tests.

We did a thing where you ask a hard technical problem and have them write the code on the whiteboard. We did it where 20 people would interview the person, not literally 20, but interview after interview, and then you sort of get a consensus. And Nomet had a great correlation with how productive and great that person was in the company later. And I also started to see no correlation, I think, because I dropped out of college, I was very entranced by people with masters or PhDs. Turns out it has no correlation with how effective they were in our organization. So what we started to do is we found, I looked back to the first couple people and I said, well, I worked with these guys before. We worked together on the open source project. And so how can we

sort of set up a hiring system where you actually do the work that you're going to do in the job. And that's all you're judging them by. You don't care about anything else. And so we try to make the interview process as much like the actual work as possible. So we don't do voice or video. It's all text chat

because that's how we primarily communicate. Also prevents you from any subconscious bias getting romanced by whatever voice or presentation the person might have yeah or maybe they have a funny accent or something like that that doesn't matter in our company unless maybe they're a salesperson and their ability to convince you of something or have a charisma is important for their job there's really no benefit to these in-person or even voice or video interactions. So we have a pretty good system for this now. We get a ton of applications. I'm actually over 1,000 applications behind now.

Okay. How do you filter 1,000 applications? So I book in the process now. So where we've evolved to is I review all the incoming applications. I do a first pass on them and I pass them on to a team if they seem promising or interesting. What do you look for? Well, I can't tell you everything. Okay. What do you look for or disqualify against? I look for passion, attention to detail,

drive beyond the things that they need to do. And I'm totally down with quirky. What questions do you ask to get an indication of those things? So at this point, all I'm doing is looking at emails. So literally there's no chat, no anything. So it's purely based on the care and effort that they put into this email.

And we've tried forms and things they fill out before, and we've gone back to just a free-form email because I want to see what kind of attachment they use. I want to see how their email client is. I want to see if you can tell they've copied and pasted things because different text is different font sizes. So all of those are indicators, and not any one of them. Paste is plain text, folks. Any one of those would indicators and not any one of them. Haste is plain text, folks.

Any one of those would not be a yay or a nay. But the combination, you get a pretty good sense. And then I pass it on to a team. The team has, for example, for engineering, they have a system where everyone, again, looks at it. They kind of rate it. They choose a certain number of people, make it to the next stage, which is like a very simple code test.

It takes like about half an hour. Sometimes it's called a fizzbuzz test in programming. What does that mean? It's just a basic, super basic thing that anyone… Fizzbuzz. Does that stand for something? Yeah, so you move some variables around that are fizz and buzz and you arrange them in different ways or you repeat them or you sort an array or something like that but got it a basic thing that anyone can figure out and that's filters out a surprising number of people even who make it through these first

few screens simple coding test and then how do they screw that up i don't know okay all right moving on fair enough no i mean I had this application for this managing editor position and I was astonished at how people would go through 75% of the application. This is a form. They'd get to a question that asked, let's say, you know, how you would get the rock to be on the podcast. What would your process look like? And they would say, now on second thought, I'm not interested in this job. And then they would go to the bottom and still hit submit. Wow. I was very puzzled by that. Yeah, there's a lot of odd behavior in job applications.

By the way, I don't know if you know, but I'm hiring a new executive assistant, personal assistant, and I referenced your managing editor hiring post. I think I block quoted the section where you say why it's terrible to work with you. Yeah, I think it's important. I've tried to not disguise that, but I haven't been super explicit about it in the past. And I just need someone who finds that Shackleton expedition type description appealing as opposed to off-putting, you know, someone who wants a perfectionist, someone who wants to, someone who wants a person like me to edit the hell out of their work.

And so I found it very important. So you have them go through a simple coding test. I like that, by the way. I went to Antarctica last month in the South Pole, and so I've been reading the Shackleton, I think it's the Endurance book. Such a fascinating story. So fascinating. For those people who don't know, the classified ad read something like, seeking men for dangerous

journey, return uncertain, glory upon success. Something low pay. Low pay. Yeah. Harsh conditions. Yeah. I had a friend who joked she should make that her OKCupid listing. Right.

The Tinder description. Probably get a lot of responses. So the code test test and then what happens we do a trial project so basically we don't actually we're not trying to get code out of people or anything like that we just do something that looks like the actual work and we're not just looking at the code they produce but how they communicate how they commit um that's a paid project? Yeah, so we put everyone on just a flat rate $25 per hour contract.

And most people who apply have jobs already, so it's often a nights or weekends thing. As long as the expectations are set, that doesn't matter. If you could only work one hour a week, that's okay. Just let us know. Some people actually take vacation to do it, so they'll take time off from their job and kind of go at it full time. If you're applying for a happiness engineer position, you'll answer tickets or do live chats.

So we try to replicate the real position as much as possible. And then if they make it through all of this, they get sent back to me for a final chat. And that I'll do on Slack now. I used to do it on Skype. And I just go back and forth with them, usually like three or four hours actually. Wow. Because you're typing, so it takes a little longer. And for that, I try to determine a cultural fit, really get to know the person because I have a, afterwards I, like let's say we're hiring an engineer, before I send the offer letter I decide

what team they go on so kind of like the that's the thing where you put on a hat in Harry Potter and it decides which oh I don't know I know you're talking about decides which school you're going to yeah so by which yeah right by talking to them I'm partly determining like which team will they fit best with because the other 300 people in the company have done this with and so I know what their strengths and weaknesses are with what their personalities are, what time zones they're in. So really putting a lot of variables into deciding where someone goes. Are there any simple questions that give you a particular amount of depth into someone's

personality? Yeah, I'm constantly iterating the question list and I'm happy to show it to you after the podcast. But every interview is different i'm just almost every single one i try out something new yeah or vary it or what is your spirit animal um what is your spirit animal i mean obviously an alpaca yeah but um you know it doesn't matter and you know some questions i retire and it's totally different and it's not like a preset script or anything like sometimes things go one direction and I just go with it.

But at the end of it, if I decide to make an offer, we talk about compensation. And then I send out the letter. What percentage of people fall out in that last chat with you? Falling out in the last chat is pretty rare, especially now that the systems before it are so good. So the hiring teams have gotten quite, quite good at automatic. It's tough because hiring is not something that you get good at until you've done it five or 10 times and you've seen people work out and not work out. So it's really just something that you need experience. So I tell people like when they

go in this new role, I'm like, you know, in the beginning you're going to make some mistakes and that's okay. We'll plan for that. But then you'll learn from that and you'll triangulate. Do you have an opinion of top grading? Do you know anything about top grading? I find references completely useless. So, yeah, including when you go outside, what they give you as references and you try to contact people.

I haven't found any. It takes a ton of time. I haven't found any sort of correlation ton of time and I haven't found any correlation with the ultimate quality of the person so I heard about top graining and tried it for a few months wasn't worth it I have an article we can put it in the show notes

Harvard Business Review where I wrote 5 or 10 pages on this that's a great piece I would love to include that I actually have that printed out because I'm an old man and highlighted, uh, cool,

which is a weird thing I do. Sometimes I'll print something out, take notes, highlight, and then rescan it back into Evernote to be OCR. Cool. Yeah. Which,

uh, which I like a lot because I think better tactically. Is that a real word? I think so. Uh, yeah. Um, what is the book that you have given as a gift most often

besides the year without pants which you can feel free to mention oh yeah there is a book about automatic and wordpress.com called the year without pants written by a great author scott birkin um tells a story about how it worked uh i give a lot of different books as gifts because everyone's different so there's one by and I apologize now because I can't pronounce anything because I just read I don't actually talk that much

well you were pronouncing crayons as crowns earlier which I thought was amazing I was like crowns? what are crowns? and you're like you know the thing the kids draw with it's like oh crayons maybe it's a southern thing

I don't know but for example I've given a few times a book called How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton. Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit is one I've given. That's cool. What is that about?

I don't know if I can summarize that one, actually. It's really one that you enjoy. Field Guide to Getting Lost. Yeah. Is Rebecca Solnit? Why do I know that name? She's local, actually. She is.

That's why I know that. She writes for New Yorker, a little bit of everything. The Effective Executive. That's a great one. That's Peter Drucker, right? Anything by Peter Drucker. So good. Is gold.

So good. So I recommend that a lot in the company. Words That Work by Frank Luntz. I read that on your recommendation. Oh, did you like it? I did. Yeah. How would you describe that?

That's a former orl or current current yeah he's like the the linguistic head of the republican party right so inheritance tax to death tax or controlling the labels of a conversation understanding what language works well for certain purposes really fascinating so and depending on how if someone likes that book, then I might point them to George Lakoff. He has a great seminal work from the 70s called Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. Or just other books about framing and language.

So there's a book for every purpose, and I find myself finding new ones. So for example, last year I just started reading fiction again. I hadn't read fiction for about 15 years. I did the same thing. Really? Any favorites so far?

Yeah, I didn't read fiction for probably 15 to 20 years. There's one called The Hard-Boiled Wonderland at the end of the universe. Murakami? Yeah, I really liked it. That's a quirky one, yeah.

And he has a lot of jazz references and things I like. The Mages. I have not read that. It was a really good one. And I'm working through a few different ones now, like Shantaram and The Untethered Soul.

I've just been trying to carve out more time for reading. The Kindle is the device that, even if I don't use it for a month or two, I'll still keep in my pack. And just because it's aspirational. But when I can get in a good flow, I'll read a little bit every day, sometimes first thing in the morning.

And that's just my whole life is better. Well, you're the one who convinced me to get a Kindle. I don't know if you remember. We've gone on a number of trips together, Thelma and Luis style, and attended WordCamps in Greece and Turkey. And well, Vietnam was a trip for Room to Read, which is a great organization.

But I remember in greece had this backpack full of 14 books and i was just like popping my you know my my discs and my spine lugging this damn thing around and you had your tiny little kindle touch and you're like how's that working out for you it's like it's terrible although what you would do when we were waiting is you would actually lift it like a weight that That's true. That's true. I use my backpack. I have a hemp backpack that's reinforced that I can use for exercises and swings and stuff. I remember Kevin Rose once when we were in, we went to China on a trip for tea tasting and I would wake up in the morning and I would do exercises. It was so hot there. I would do exercises with this backpack in my, you know,

tidy whiteies or like ex-visual underwear. Kevin took a video of me doing upright rows in my underwear, which I had to confiscate and delete, thankfully. Although I don't think it would do anything bad to my reputation because I don't have one to protect at this point. I think if you looked at a side by side, you have the backpack full of book muscles and I have the Kindle muscles. That's true. Although to your credit, uh, you, you did get into, uh, physical fitness and kettlebells and so on. How's that? Uh, has that, has that continued or is that,

has that paused for the moment? It has continued pretty well, actually. You look leaner than the usual. I shouldn't say the usual. That's not fair. Than Puffy Matt. And there's a Puffy Tim, too. But I haven't seen you puffy in quite a while. So the thing that I started doing just most recently, this most recent summer, was running.

And just kind of randomly. Like, I was in Italy. It was really pretty. I thought, no, let me try going for a run. And it killed me. Like I barely made it like half a mile before I had a walk. And then it just kind of started building. I think my next run was like a month later.

Like it wasn't like I was instantly attached. But there's a guy in the company. He calls himself the crazy running guy. And he – I think I've met him. Who's this? Joe Boydstein. And he actually – or Boadstin. Sorry. Sorry, Joe. himself a crazy running guy and he i think i've met him who's this joy joe boidstein and he

actually or boats boat boidston sorry sorry joe um he started doing this thing where he'd land at the airport and then run to the word camp from the airport so 20 30 for our grand meetup in utah he ran from salt lake city to park city it was i think 50 or 60 miles that's insane and so uh at our grand meetup this year which was in park city he ran little running workshops every morning and so i went out with him and he was like hey don't focus on speed try to do 180 strides per minute so smaller steps even if you're on slower focus on your heart rate like all these sort of different things and it completely transformed me where before i my legs would always be really sore like my whole body would hurt after I ran,

even though I loved it. Like I was just in too much pain. I just slowed down and then started being able to go much further. There's a really interesting guy named Dr. Romanoff. I don't know if you've ever come across this name. He, he founded a method of running called the pose method and talks a lot about

the forward lean and using gravity to assist your money as, your money. You could use gravity. If I could figure that out, that'd be amazing. Gravity to assist your running as opposed to heel striking and pushing. And there's some really fascinating videos of him running on ice, for instance,

by using that forward lean. Very, very cool stuff. So you might enjoy i started with the vibrams yeah um i switched to just some super thin trail running shoes but i still run more on the front or middle of my foot yeah you have to be careful with the minimalist shoes you can really if you get too aggressive in the beginning particularly since the it's not just the impact on the soft tissues of the foot and the connective tissues. Most people who have walked with an elevated heel, even an inch,

for a long period of time have chronically shortened Achilles tendon. So suddenly when you stand flat foot and you're leaning forward on top of that to run, you can cause Achilles tendonitis or tendinosis. Which is really painful. Really bad. Yeah, I've done that before. And it's true. Like for a while, my right Achilles was kind of sore. But I had a friend,

we were training up for a half marathon together and he ended up really injuring his feet, which is tough because he's a fireman. So he's my best friend in Houston, Rene. So he ended up, you got to be careful with this. So I know you're not a huge fan of running. I know it's high impact.

It's not that I'm not a fan. It's that I choose my exercise based on my objectives. And thus far, I have not found running to stack up favorably compared to other things. I can see that. Yeah. And I think that running is much easier to justify as a moving meditation. And certainly it's fantastic for travel, but that's why I have my bag that I can use as a weight. Also, I would like to get better at running due to the Lyme disease and everything

that I've dealt with. I have partial tears in both ACLs, both elbows and both hips. So I'm going to have to work up to any type of impact. So I'll start with some of the calisthenics I'm doing now and then graduate to low impact jumping rope to really condition the lower legs in particular. And then I'm doing long walks also as a way of conditioning the feet. So I'll do two to three hour walks very routinely and make phone calls, batch my phone calls.

I love when I'm in a new city and I can do a run. It's a great way to see the city. Oh, definitely. Because you're at just the right speed. I did one in Washington, D.C. a week or two ago. And it was just so cool. I felt like I was on an episode of House of Cards. It's like I'm going past the Washington Monument and like the Lincoln Memorial and like running

around the mall. It was so cool. That's what Bruce Lee used to do. He'd just travel with his running shoes. And when he first landed, he would go for an orientation run. Nice. So one of the first things I do in lieu of the jog or running is bike tours. So I'll do sort of cruiser bike tours in any new city that I want to get acquainted with. I would love to ask a couple of questions that came in through Twitter

specifically. I am at T Ferris, two R's, two S's. You are? At Photomat, P-H-O-T-O-M-A-T-T. Also a pun.

Remember you used to get your photos developed. I never noticed that. Wow. You just realized that. you just realized that i just noticed that you are i forgot you're the pun master and in japanese they call those which is dad jokes dad gags and you do puns all the time you have as long as i've known you okay i should have known all rightomat, that makes perfect sense. So we've covered some of these. Joe Pawlikowski asked about how you acquired developers. We already talked about that.

This is from Andy Vaughn. Would you still bootstrap versus taking angel money, seed money, a software tool like WordPress if you were starting over in 2015? Why or why not? That's an interesting question. I'm not sure if he thinks we're totally bootstrapped or that we've raised money.

I'll say what we did and what I would do again. We bootstrapped for the first few months and then I raised about a million dollars. This was automatic. This was automatic. Yeah, WordPress is a whole separate entity. So for automatic then I raised about a million dollars. This was automatic? This was automatic. Yeah, WordPress is a whole separate entity. So for automatic, we raised about a million dollars in 2006. And that was, in hindsight, we didn't need it.

But I'm glad we did it because I felt responsible for these other lives. You know, the other people who were sort of betting on joining this company that was run by like a 20-year- And so I want to have some certainty, I want to have some money in the bank that said, even if things went to zero, we all have a job for at least a year. So that's why we raised that first money. 2008, we had an acquisition offer for north of $200 million, even though we were just I think, 18 people people at the time and so use that to turn into a round and did about 12 million of primary capital there and then we didn't raise money again until last year 2014 so i was pretty anti-raising money as you can imagine for those six years that we

didn't do it how much did you is it public how much you raised last year it raised 160 million that's a that's a big number it was is the valuation public uh it was over a billion dollars yeah it's also a big number even bigger number uh if you were if you were starting over again developing wordpress would you make a for-profit entity like wordpress.com or automatic sooner um so it wasn't a matter of non-profit and for-profit it was just a matter of not even thinking about it loose amalgamation of nonprofit and for-profit. It was just a matter of not even thinking about it, loose amalgamation of random people working together, and then a for-profit that came later.

Nonprofits I'm not as much of a fan of as I used to be. WordPress does have a WordPress foundation. Just the rules around them are mostly designed to prevent people from cheating on their taxes, which we don't care about, and they restrict what you can do. Meaning you pay your taxes. Yeah. Meaning we pay, yeah.

I'll pay taxes till the cows come home. Right. So those rules to prevent abuse end up constricting the good an organization can do in a lot of ways. So I don't think I would start another nonprofit. In terms of raising money, one of the things that became very clear to me once I became CEO is the opportunity cost of being as lean and sort of managing

the company to break even as we were we couldn't do big acquisitions, we couldn't invest in infrastructure, we couldn't do a lot of things that make a lot of sense now like for example since we raised money we're building out 11 data centers worldwide so for worldwide users of WordPress it's going to start getting a lot faster

because we'll be closer to you physically. Acquisitions that we wouldn't have considered before, we're doing now. So... Got it. I would, you know, if you can set expectations correctly with investors and raise money on terms

that allow you to stay true to your principles and remain in control of the things you want to be in control of the things you want to be in control of i think it can be you know i would highly recommend it but those shared expectations are really important so i think that would be an expectation that's important to you um an expectation that we're not going to ipo this year next year the year after that like it's not a priority of ours got Got it. Just agreeing on the timeline. An example for us would be that we don't monetize Jetpack.

So, you know. Could you explain for people what Jetpack is? Oh, sure. So Jetpack is a plugin for WordPress. So it gives you all the best of the cloud services of WordPress.com, things that, like, resize and optimize your images for whatever client is visiting, whether on mobile or desktop, things that auto-post your blog for whatever client is visiting, whether on mobile or desktop. Things that auto-post your blog post

to Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Path, everywhere. Stats. This is all the things built into Jetpack. That, for us, is really about getting more users of WordPress. It's not about charging for some of those features. Now, Jetpack has huge amounts of usage. It reaches a very influential audience. An investor

looking at the company might say, ah, if you charge a little bit of money for this Jetpack thing, you'd make hundreds of millions of dollars. But we need to be on the same page that that's not something that we're planning on. Nice to know you have the option all the same. It's always good to have an option, but for me, the thing that's been best is just being

super transparent and super upfront. I think it's true of relationships of anything. If you can set your expectations with your investors, that's what they appreciate. You invest in a lot of things. I invest in a lot of things. I do. I'm an advisor to Automatic also, which I'm honored to be. It's been really fantastically fun so far. There's an asymmetry to what you do

because you will hear maybe hundreds of pitches for every company that you have invested in. So I find the smartest guys in the world, when you get to the very top echelon, they have perfect BS detectors. It's much better to say, I don't know, than to try to make up an answer to something you don't actually know.

Which is kind of refreshing, actually, that just honesty and transparency is actually, even when you're raising at north of a billion dollars, is the best policy. Yeah. Such a fascinating landscape. This is a question from Chris Saka. Ask Matt if he will take you shopping for a badass suit. I guess I should say a bad butt suit. It's funny because I actually say badass. I just didn't because you did this whole setup. I was trying to set expectations. If you, I mean, you have some pretty good suits.

I've seen you. I do. I have some suits. I like suits because it removes all the decision making. I don't like matching. I don't like picking out outfits that will match, which is why I like suits because it removes all the decision making. I don't like matching. I don't like picking out outfits that will match, which is why I like suits. It's either t-shirt and jeans or suit.

I do very little in between. If you are going to go for a suit, Tom Ford is the way to go. They're pretty amazing. Any particular suit? No, go into the store. They'll set you up.

You know, your body type's different than mine. They'll, they'll find something that makes you look great, but they, they, their cut is much younger, much slimmer,

much more shaped in a way. I love Catone or Loro Piana or like different folks, but they tend to be made for older men, to be honest. So I love their materials, but I end up tailoring them and recutting them how did you get into clothing and fashion because it wasn't always this way um i have no idea it might have been the influence of uh my good friend om omalik

you know he he appreciates the finer things in life and i think that for who created gigom for people who don't know yeah gigom he's a journalist now vc at true ventures um and one of my best friends one of the first users of wordpress too i think that of course in anything like if we're talking about tequilas if we're talking about classware if we're talking about microphones like there is there's a spectrum and you can go deep on any topic and i find it fascinating you know when you meet someone that's one thing i always keep in mind. Like, everyone is interesting. If you're ever bored in a conversation,

the problem's with you, not with the other person. Because- 100% agreed. That's what any good journalist will tell you also. Yeah. It's just all about figuring out what someone's really into or what they're passionate about.

And when you find those passions, it's just, I find it fascinating to like go deep on chicken raising or whatever it is. So on purchases what is the last hundred dollar or less purchase that you made that had a very positive impact on your life ah the first thing that comes to mind is quite embarrassing the gimp suit i'm just kidding i i used to make so much fun of like

marin moms who wear lululemon all day but since i started running and working out more just how lululemon is freaking awesome they make really great stuff now it's kind of expensive like right it's definitely one of those but it's like shopping at whole foods where you walk out in the check and like whoa how did that happen i bought like two t-shirts and some sweatpants but um super high quality. I love how the tags tear out so there's no tags. A lot of the shirts are reversible. And I found, especially as I travel constantly,

some of these sort of long sleeve material shirts will be super soft, super warm. I can run in them. I can sleep in them. I can do whatever. Now, speaking of packing, i will link to this in the show notes but you recently put up a post about what you have in your carry-on bag that is a genius carry-on bag i shouldn't say that maybe since i haven't seen the article yet but

based on previous experience you're very methodical what's the one thing people can do one or two things with carry-on luggage that'll make the biggest difference in your opinion? It's supposed to be about my backpack. So it's about the things that, I mean, I brought my backpack here. I carry my backpack almost constantly, especially being... What type of backpack is that?

That is very Indiana Jones. Oh, thank you. It's from a company called Hard Graft. I'll link to it in the post. It's leather. It's a little pricey but it's really good i'll keep that for the next decade um so because i can work from anywhere sometimes i have to work from everywhere that's the downside yes and you never know when an emergency is going

to pop up or anything so i tend to have within sort of a 10 to 15 minute radius um the tools i need to be productive any place in the world including if I'm in Antarctica that might be a satellite phone if I'm in you know a different country maybe that's a local mi-fi card or and so I'm just constantly bringing things in and out I was hesitant to to do a post about it you asked me to do a post about this years ago I did and I kept putting it off because it kept changing so every time I'd start I'd like take a picture of my bag and then it would change by the time i wanted to email do you still use i think it's called well this is i have one right here this is since i am packing uh well this is gridded technology by cocoon do you still use these oh wow you've got the big boy

yeah i use a big grid it but this is a company called cocoon for you people who can't see with clairvoyance what we're looking at it is a it's basically a sheet mine is about five inches by 10 inches uh mine's eight by ten i think yeah yours is eight by ten and it's uh perpendicular straps of elastic that you can stick cables into, iPhones into, batteries into, chapstick into, as opposed to just having a big mess of stuff in 15 pockets? I find my stuff always falls out. Like I just pulled it out and it was like half empty. So things are constantly falling out of it. I don't know if it's the way I walk or whatever, but I always put it back in. So key for me i used to lose things all the time in fact at one point i would lose my keys so much um i still have an old car so it

has a different door key and ignition key so i made literally 15 copies of my door key and i wrote photomat on it and then i gave it to all my friends and even like some random people i meet like instead of a business card i just give them a key to my car with the idea of being, yeah, you have random as you, when I lost my keys, someone would have the ability or when I locked my keys in the car, we need to teach you how to,

how to, how to Jimmy your door. We need to get you, we need to get you some, uh, some locksmith keys. I'm not sure if that's legal. So,

uh, within the boundaries of legality in your state or jurisdiction. But yeah, so I find that now I have places where everything goes. So my mouse, for example, always goes in the right front pocket of my backpack. And if any time something's not there, like I keep a bowl by my front door. Keys always go in there. You keep a what? A bowl. A bowl, a bowl by my front door. Keys always go in there. You keep a what? A bowl.

A bowl, right. By the front door. Anytime something's not in that place and I see it, it's a bug. So I try to put it in that place as soon as possible because otherwise I know I'll forget. And then I'm coming over, I have a meeting, I spend 10 minutes looking for my wallet because I just stuck it someplace. It's in the fridge or something. I'm always losing something. Actually, I lost one of our initial investment checks it's a check for four hundred thousand

dollars that's not good to lose it was a investor phil black who's actually still on the board today and he wrote a paper check like the kind that you would use at the grocery store or like for normal things as a foreigner it's most money i've ever seen in my life i was like i was 20 years old i was, what is this? I expect it to be a check, like a publisher's clearing house, you know, like the size of a table. That you could surf like a floating carpet from Aladdin down to the bank.

So we raised, luckily the other investors wired their money because I misplaced this check. And I was thinking, oh my goodness, like what do I do with this situation? Because obviously he could stop the check. But then he's just entrusted me with $400,000 and I've lost it.

What's the most irresponsible thing you can do? So do I tell him? Do I not tell him? Is he going to notice at some point? And months pass, literally months pass. He doesn't say anything, I don't say anything. Because you didn't want to ask him. I didn't ask him.

And I'm going back to Houston for Thanksgiving and I open the book I'm reading and I'd use book I'm reading, and I'd use it as a bookmark. And it kind of fell out of the book on the plane. I was like, oh my goodness. That's quite a find. That's better than $20 in the pants you just washed.

So the first thing I did when I landed, I went to the Bank of America. Also, I expected it to be like when you hit jackpot on a slot machine. You deposit a 400 grand check, bells should go off. They should give you a glass of champagne or something. But total non-event at this local branch of Bank of America. I was just like, here we go. I'm like, okay.

Goodbye. It's the most impact-traumatic thing ever. Step aside, sir. You have people behind you. I told him a year later, and he was like, man yeah he just hadn't looked so speaking of big numbers how the hell did you end up eating 140 or whatever chicken mcnuggets why did that happen 104 104 i don't remember how long ago it was probably about 10 years ago at this point 11 years ago but the super bowl was in houston texas and um you know i lived like a mile from the reliant stadium where they were doing the super bowl and so i was watching and as for the super bowl all the mcdonald's did a special where you

could get 20 mcnuggets for like four dollars and i was super broke at the time and so i was like man i'm just gonna stock up on these like the way you might get like cans or you know things of ramen or like cans of campbell's which i would do when they went on sale i'll always buy a bunch of them so i just like got a bunch of mcnuggets and then i just i love mcnuggets and i had to kind of like sweet talk the person so they gave me lots of extra of that sweden sour sauce oh my god and the mcdonald's sweden sour sauce is not like sweden sour sauce anywhere else in the world like all sweden sour sauce is red and for some reason theirs is brown i don't know why you might it's been genetically engineered to be as addictive as possible i don't know it's so good so i just started popping them and next thing i knew was 104

so it wasn't even a bet or anything you just rampaged through 104 while watching the superbowl that's incredible it was this it was the superbowl that's incredible it was it was the superbowl where janet jackson had the wardrobe malfunction yeah the the breast explosion sorry i missed that how was it was it gratifying i was watching it with my family and there was like this moment of silence afterwards where like what just happened i was completely mortified and i think i had a laptop on the internet and wi-fi at the time so i was like i'm gonna like what just happened like i'm gonna go on the internet and see and it turns out like what happened happened like there was a wardrobe malfunction and um a good friend of mine was in the audience about 15 feet away from her

and you know there's all the theories that it was planned. Yeah. And she said she was so pissed off, like looked so angry. She has, it was not absolutely, absolutely not planned. Huh? I could have,

yeah, I would have bet that it was planned. This reminds me your shocking moment with your, your mortified moment with your parents of when I went to the movies with my entire family. Uh, and I was sitting next to my brother and my parents were sitting on the other side of my brother. We went to see the girl with the dragon tattoo,

which I had read. My brother hadn't read it. And those of you who've read the book or seen the movie will know there's one particularly just mortifying scene. And a minute or two beforehand, I was like, Oh yeah, excuse me.

I have to go to go to the bathroom and i came back and my brother's like you fucker you you knew exactly what was gonna happen didn't you so and i was like yep yeah i did sorry about that my identical story was titanic which is much much tamer but i for some reason went to see titanic with my mom i was like oh i think it's about to happen that's the car scene the car scene or the where he's drawing or something i was like i'm just gonna leave for a few minutes and i hope it's over by the time i get back uh to switch gears a little bit when you think of the word successful who's the first person who comes to mind and why it's funny because he's getting totally panned in the

press right now but i think of jeff bezos why jeff bezos why is he getting panned i uh this is how i get informed uh the fire phone was a complete flop they wrote down hundreds of millions of dollars of inventory obviously didn't sell well um and articles have come out since then saying how like he micromanaged a whole process and things like that um i'm actually gonna do a blog post this. One of my favorite business books is called The Halo Effect. And it talks about the case study they use is Cisco in sort of the 98 to 2002 time period.

And so when they were on the rise and one of the most valuable companies in the world, highest stock, everyone's saying John Chambers is genius. They acquire companies. They don't have to invent everything. They can acquire dozens of companies and integrate them, and the competitors just can't compete. And then once they started crashing,

again, nothing changed about the business, but the stock goes down. Sometimes the same writers were saying, oh, it's a mishmash of infighting. They have all this technology that doesn't integrate, and they can't invent things, so they have to acquire it. So literally the same strategy is viewed in a totally different realm. And there's this halo effect.

And there's a case study going on right now with Amazon. So a few years ago, everyone said how Amazon makes these big bets. They're willing to lose money for years and years on something like the Kindle and just ruthlessly iterate over and over Amazon web services. They go into places where no one says they should go. The Fire Phone flopped, and now everyone's saying, oh, these idiots.

You know, the attention to detail becomes micromanaging, you know, everything. But ultimately what I admire in the long term is Jeff Bezos has convictions around things, and he's going to be wrong sometimes. I don't expect him to be perfect, but I do expect him, in my idolized mind, to continue making those big bets.

And he's probably not taking enough risk if he doesn't super mess it up every couple of years. Oh, I totally agree. And just the story of Bezos, I haven't read The Everything Store. I would like to. I don't know if you have. Excellent book, yeah.

But sounds like a good time to buy Amazon. This is not investment advice. Consult your regulatory attorney and professional wealth advisor but it's when those types of sort of capricious judgments are made based on a one-off event especially in uh well sometimes it's macro related sometimes it's just a single launch related god it's so funny how quickly people are to turn, although I will tell you,

most of the time I don't believe the words as they're written on the page. I think they're just journalists with a tough job, which sometimes I think borders on unethical, which is having to churn out a lot of content continually on an unreasonable schedule and to come up with insights that are, with rare exception,

very, very difficult to produce on demand as aha moments once a day or five times a day or 12 times a day. So they end up regurgitating or rewording things they've written before. And the people with the most knowledge about a given topic don't necessarily have any incentive

to write about it. Absolutely not. So do you buy and sell individual stocks i don't right now my personality my intestinal fortitude is not well suited to public stocks uh i don't like having the option on a daily basis to buy and sell yeah i like doing a ton of due diligence, investing in, for instance, a startup, and then betting on a seven to nine year growth curve. Or longer. Or longer.

Your automatics coming up on 10. Yeah, and I'm not overly, that doesn't concern me. It actually consoles me because it forces me to do more homework on the front end. I agree. I use Wealthfront, also an investor. We're both an investor in Wealthfront. Sometimes I get individual stocks,

like MakerBot sold to a company called Stratasys, so I ended up with a bunch of Stratasys stock. And it was really annoying to have this minute-to-minute number that moves. That's the one thing I wouldn't look forward to with being a public company, is raising money is hard as well, because you're basically saying,

someone's saying, your life's work. This is what it's worth. They're quantifying it. I can't imagine what it's like with the minute-to-minute vagaries of the market, public markets. I'm so continually impressed by people like Nassim Taleb or many of the hedge fund guys out there

who develop a hypothesis about a particular way to approach a short sale or a short position. So they're looking at the subprime mortgage crisis and they're trying to bet on that happening or the sovereign debt issues in Europe, for instance, and their ability to just bleed for extended periods of time with these sophisticated option positions and function as normal human beings and be okay with losing money while losing money every day and having people tell you you're an idiot yeah uh where you i just i can't fathom actually handling that well personally so oddly enough the binary nature of startups suits my psychology well because it it's applying a constraint and removing decisions that I might otherwise botch emotionally.

So I can be very highly rational on the front end and make a specific type of investment that precludes me from making stupid emotional decisions. And emotionally, you want to buy high and sell low. Oh, definitely. If it's dropping, you're like, oh, I got to get out of this. If it's rising, you're like, oh, it's great. I'm going to buy some more.

Are there any particular books on investing or books that you've read that have helped you think about investing? Well, you said the, the man, uh, Nassim Nassim. Oh,

Nassim Talib, yeah. Um, you're the one who introduced me to the black swan. Really? Oh, yeah. That was in Greece.

I don't recommend that to everyone. I love the black swan. I love it. Uh, fooled by randomness, anti-fragility, his latest one. I love his book of. I love it. Fooled by Randomness, Anti-Fragility, his latest one. I love his book of aphorisms. His writing has been super influential on me, both in and of itself and also in the works that he's pointed me towards.

Because he makes a ton of, sometimes annoyingly so, references to other things. But he introduced me to Umberto Eco and other really fantastic authors. So he's great. And then reading Warren Buffett's letters. I was going to mention. I know you're a big Warren Buffett fan. I wish I were a big Warren Buffett friend. I am a big Warren Buffett fan.

And I know that name is bandied about a lot by, of course, millions of investors. But the annual letters, getting it straight from the horse's mouth as opposed to the second or third hand interpretations is just phenomenal. You know, something I can say, you asked about what we look for for candidates hiring, um, clarity of writing. I think clarity of writing indicates clarity of thinking. Writing is honestly one of the hardest things I do every day. I'm very impressed. You've written a couple of books now. I've tried to write a book. I can't, I haven't been able to do it. It's a very masochistic process. I would not want to inflict on, on anyone unduly. But I love reading about writers in the process of writing like Bird by Bird and Lamont or on writing well, uh, William Zinsler, um, the Ernest Hemingway

on writing, which I think I got from this podcast actually. Yeah. That's a, that's a fun one. Because when you can write well, you can think well. And so when I find, obviously in Warren Buffett's letters, the thinking is so clear. And so that's something I look for in these sort of random emails we get or cover letters or resumes. Is it well written? If someone's a great writer, they tend to be a great programmer or efficient or something else.

So again, it's not everything, but it's a strong indicator. So just a few more questions. The first is from, wow, Valur Thor. That is a fantastic name, sir. What role will WordPress, spelled correctly, play in online content outside of the browser, example given mobile apps, APIs, et cetera, in the near future.

It's inside baseball, but a very good question. So there's been basically two waves in WordPress's history. We started as just blogging. Literally, it's just a blog. And you'd have the rest of your website doing something else, then you'd plug the blog in, your WordPress.

We expanded to be a CMS. That was the second wave of WordPress. And then it started powering your entire site. And that's been really the past five or six years where we've become almost like the dial tone of the web. Like if you're starting a website, you start with WordPress and then you plug other things into WordPress, whether that's e-commerce, management, CRM, whatever it is.

It's a plug-in for WordPress. This third wave that we're going through right now is WordPress as an application platform. So people are using the primitives and the things afforded by WordPress's infrastructure, the things that we wrote to write a blog and CMS to write other things. The primitives are the elements of the infrastructure that were used to create those things in the first place? Yeah. So think of a primitive as a basic building block. Got it. So like a social primitive as a basic building block. Got it. So like a social primitive, one that Kevin Rosen invented, was like this embeddable button

that lets you vote on things. Right. The dig it button, which is now the like button, the tweet button, et cetera. That's a primitive in some ways. So we have primitives around user authentication, around content types, around caching, around URLs, around lots of things that if you're building something from scratch, you've got to do all this stuff. So if you can start with WordPress, it saves you months.

Not for everything, not for everyone. But if you know WordPress, you start at 60 miles per hour. I'm going to ask you a silly question because I like asking silly questions. As a non-programmer, how does, and I know it differs significantly, but how does that differ from, say, Ruby on Rails, what Ruby on Rails did? Very similar. People are using WordPress as a framework.

It's a framework which does a lot, has a lot more things built out than a Ruby might. So think of it as the thing that WordPress does, built, if what you want to build looks like that. So not a game, not a chat application,

not something like that. If it looks like content, we've already managed more content than anyone else in the world at this point. So using our data structures, using our APIs, it's probably the best way to go about it. What are some of the big companies or publications that use your platform? It's pretty much all of them at this point.

Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, International Papers, New Media, so GigaOM, TechCrunch, Recode, all the tech blogs basically. Yours, I mean, it's really, the tech meme.

I'm very flattered that you put me in that group. All those guys. I try, I these things if you look at tech meme like we'll typically power 50 to 70 percent of all the sites that are on tech meme in a given day um tech meme for those people who don't know would you say it's fair to say it's a roundup of tech news from around the web it's one of my vices we talked about vices earlier so t-e-c-h-m-e-m-e dot com it's um it's algorithmic and human

it's the best tech newspaper in the world like it and it just links you to places so almost like a drudge report but so much better um you go to the primary sources so which sometimes might be not even news like a tech crunch or a verge but the actual person like you you or me. Oh, interesting. They'll link to the originals as well, which is really nice. What, if you had to point a 20-year-old entrepreneur who's looking to start a company, let's just say it's tech for the time being, what two or three books or resources

would you give to them or suggest to them? I'm gonna repeat with the effective executive or anything from Peter Drucker. He actually has one, I think it's called The Art of Entrepreneurship. It's got entrepreneurship in the title. Super good. Again, these are old now, like from the 70s or 80s.

They're so timeless though. But they're so good. He's just one of the clearest thinkers about all of these things, about management, about entrepreneurship. When I was getting started, I actually really's just one of the clearest thinkers about all of these things, about management, about entrepreneurship. When I was getting started, I actually really loved The Art of the Start

by Guy Kawasaki. I haven't read it since then. Yeah, no, it stands up pretty well. Yeah, but it really inspired me. I think you should read The 4-Hour Workweek. I'm going to plug you.

Thank you, sir. And a recent one, like a brand new one. I'll say two brand new ones. I'm sorry, you asked for three. No, no, no, you can keep going, you can keep going. The Hard Things About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz.

Ben Horowitz. Pretty good. Entertaining more than anything. I read that book, I was like, I would never work for this guy, but entertaining and some good lessons. And then Peter Thiel's Zero to One. Zero to One.

I thought it was excellent. Zero to One is great, and people should definitely, if they find that interesting and they are going into tech i think try to read the original class notes as well yeah by blake masters i believe exactly they're really just tremendous all of these guys i mean don't take them as gospel like disagree with them uh interpret it in your own way um there's some people who i admire quite a bit like say mark andreessen

uh when we first pitched them the whole meeting was about how distributed companies were a terrible idea and he was like well what do you know that every other tech company that's been big in history doesn't the facebook's the google's the microsoft's to everything and so why should you do something different um and it turns out it was a good meeting i thought it was terrible i thought to Microsoft to everything. And so why should you do something different? And it turns out it was a good meeting. I thought it was a terrible meeting. I thought it was the worst meeting of my entire career. Turns out that's his style.

He challenges you and sees how you respond. But sometimes going against the orthodoxy, doing the things that other people can't do. I think of it like business judo. What can we do that, Google makes tens or hundreds of billions of dollars more than us. What can we do that we can't do? Well well they're set up best to work in the office culture and we're set up best to work in a non-office culture so we can get the smartest people in

the world who sometimes leave google because they want to live in salt lake city or adelaide australia or someplace else for whatever reason it doesn't matter but um they're just as good as anyone inside the mountain view offices but they just don't happen to be in mountain view it's like the it makes me think of the book the starfish and the spider in a way uh particularly with the open source component right open source isn't going to the open source wordpress isn't going to die uh even if even if automatic were to cease operations. Even to this day, we compete with people 10 times our size and 10 or 100 times our capitalization.

In 2014, one of our competitors, Squarespace, spent north of $45 million on advertising. They did Super Bowl advertising, didn't they? Yeah, they're going to do more this year. That's expensive. But they had to. That's the only way they can get customers. Because we have this community,

because we have these hundreds of thousands of developers all over the world, because we have the sort of intrinsic goodness of the software, we don't have to spend advertising. In 2014, we spent about a million dollars on advertising. And that was mostly events. You do love events. I love your events, too.

They're very well done. Thank events. I love your events too. They're very well done. Thank you. Okay, two more questions. If you were sent to Desert Island and you could bring one album, I've asked a lot of book questions. I'm trying to come up with something else. One album and two other items that were non-survival related what would they be

albums really tough there are some really perfect albums out there like i think radio has okay computer it's like just a perfect album and it works as an album the individual songs don't work as well or like a frank oceans mixtape ultra nostalgia like there's some of these that are just so good kendrick lamar's good kid mad city you gotta check out kendrick lamar i know you're not as into the hippity hop no that's not true if it's break beats or danceable and i like the lyrics i'm all for it like eric b and rakim and that ilk how old are you? 67 I'm just giving you

a hard time but there's some new guys that are super cool too no there are some good guys what I don't like is the homogeneity of a lot

of the beat structure that has been sort of commoditized for top 40 that stuff makes me insane but if it's if it has some

unique flavor to it all for it yeah you like Kendrick Lamar. So probably one of those albums. And if I have to pick one, I'll pick a jazz one. Sonny Rollins' Saxophone Colossus. I could listen to that album the rest of my life and learn something new every day.

In terms of other non-essential items that aren't books, I'm not going to say a Kindle or an encyclopedia or something, a 50mm 1.4 prime lens. Okay. Is the lens I would take to a deserted island. And I burn easily, so probably an umbrella or something. You and I bond over that. I thought I was the only human who didn't tan,

but alas, hark, Matt Mullenweg. Last question. If you could give your 20-year-old self a piece of advice, one piece of advice, what would it be? Slow down. Slow down. Why? We talked about it with running earlier.

Like, slow down to go further. I think a lot of the mistakes of my youth were mistakes of ambition, not mistakes of sloth. And I think building foundations, building things that last for the long term. Obviously, some of that's happened, but some of it I think I rushed through. Education, I definitely kind of squandered you know even when i was in high school like they put great books in front of us like the great gatsby or thucydides or something and thucydides i dug into but like others like fitzgerald i just can't did the bare minimum to pass the class or pass the test when now i would kill for the luxury to just like really

sit down with all those books and dive into it and discuss it. And so just slowing down, whether that's meditating, whether that's taking time for yourself away from screens, whether that's really focusing in on who you're talking to or who you're with. But as I've aged, I know it sounds ridiculous. Don't want to hear it, but yes.

It's interesting because I feel like lot of success at a young age. I feel like you're living in dog years, though. I mean, the amount of experience you can press into each year is unbelievable. I had a lot of success at a young age. Was it intimidating? Because you sometimes think, am I ever going to top this? Or did I peak at 20 or 21 when I was doing polyphasic sleep and writing these new things and everything

since then is downhill. You wonder about impact on the world. But ultimately, it's funny that now what I care more about is a lot narrower. It's like the people who you love and the people that love you. And you don't always choose either of those. Sometimes you can't help who you fall in love with. Life would be so much easier if you could. That's true.

And you don't always choose who falls in love with you. But there's a responsibility in both. And really focusing on those people, I find has contributed more to my happiness than almost anything else. I think that's a great place to end. Matt, where can people learn more about you, find you on the internet?

MA.TT for my main blog on WordPress. On Twitter, I'm at Photomat, P-H-O-T-O-M-A-T-T. I'm on pretty much every network. Follow me on Spotify. I share some cool stuff on there. Awesome. All right, sir. Thank you so much. And we shall polish this off

with another small glass of sipping tequila. Thanks, everybody, for listening. and thanks for coming over, Matt. Cheers. Thanks so much for listening, everybody. To find links to Matt's Spotify, to the music, to the books, to everything that we talked about in this episode, just go to 4hourworkweek.com forward slash podcast. That's 4hourworkweek, all spelled out,

F-O-U-R-H-O-U-R, workweek.com forward slash podcast. And if you like this episode, there are others that you can find there that I think you would enjoy, including, for instance, Ed Catmull, who's president of Pixar. We had a fascinating conversation about the power of storytelling

and how they built that company. You could also find an episode called How to Think Like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, which is an interview with Peter Diamandis, chairman of the X Prize. This one was massively, massively popular. You can find all of that and much, much more at 4hourworkweek.com forward slash podcast. And as always, I try to put bonus content videos from these guests on facebook at facebook.com forward slash tim ferris t-i-m-f-e-r-r-i-s-s until next time thanks so much for listening