Ep 61: The Benevolent Dictator of the Internet, Matt Mullenweg

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 http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  Quick sound test. This is transition from tea to tequila. How do you feel about that decision?

• 0:06Matt Mullenweg?

  I'm pretty excited.

• 0:09Tim Ferriss?

  And off we go.

• 0:11Matt Mullenweg?

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 0:16Speaker 02

  Can I answer your personal question?

• 0:18Matt Mullenweg?

  Now would seem an appropriate time.

• 0:22Speaker 02

  I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:34Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another 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. dot com's 30 Under 30, and Business Week's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

• 1:19Tim Ferriss?

  Why, you might ask, has he received all of 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 Automattic, 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, is 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.

• 2:03Tim Ferriss?

  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 fourhourworkweek.com/podcast, or just go to fourhourworkweek.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.

• 2:45Tim Ferriss?

  Matt, sir, welcome to the show.

• 2:47Matt Mullenweg?

  Howdy, howdy.

• 2:48Tim Ferriss?

  Howdy, howdy. So, let's explain the howdy, howdy, because there's some context missing. Of course, we know each other. Where's the howdy from?

• 2:57Matt Mullenweg?

  I was born and raised in Houston, Texas.

• 3:00Tim Ferriss?

  Fine state. It was a fine state.

• 3:02Matt Mullenweg?

  The greatest country in the world.

• 3:04Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 3:22Matt Mullenweg?

  I'm probably best known for once eating 104 Chicken Min Nuggets in one sitting.

• 3:26Tim Ferriss?

  Are you serious?

• 3:27Matt Mullenweg?

  Yeah.

• 3:27Tim Ferriss?

  Wow. I did not know. How old were you? Was that like last week?

• 3:31Matt Mullenweg?

  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 four-hour everything for Tim.

• 3:43Tim Ferriss?

  That's true. And others like?

• 3:46Matt Mullenweg?

  New York Times, Wall Street Journal. About 23% of all websites now are on WordPress.

• 3:52Tim Ferriss?

  That's amazing. And how did WordPress start, for people who don't know the origin story?

• 3:58Matt Mullenweg?

  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. 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.

• 4:18Tim Ferriss?

  How old were you at the time?

• 4:20Matt Mullenweg?

  19.

• 4:20Tim Ferriss?

  19. And were you self-taught from the standpoint of programming?

• 4:25Matt Mullenweg?

  Yeah, I tried to take some classes in school, and they were just all terrible. So, with programming, especially...

• 4:32Matt Mullenweg?

  Open source programming, like the web was the best place to learn it.

• 4:35Tim Ferriss?

  And what made the classes terrible? I'm just, I'm always curious. Why, why did they fail? Why did they not appeal to you?

• 4:41Matt Mullenweg?

  Well, I didn't go to a great school to start with. I was at University of Houston. I had amazing high school experience, high school for the performing of visual arts. One of the best experiences of my life, but then I stayed in Houston. U of H was alright, but 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 had already happened, you know?

• 5:08Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 5:08Matt Mullenweg?

  It was a thing.

• 5:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 5:10Matt Mullenweg?

  But they're still teaching you like Microsoft Visual Basic and like you're building like buttons on Windows apps.

• 5:17Tim Ferriss?

  Sounds, sounds really, uh, white knuckle stuff. Exciting. And so you, so you began working on this fork and could you explain what open source means?

• 5:29Matt Mullenweg?

  Sure.

• 5:29Tim Ferriss?

  For people who aren't familiar with it?

• 5:31Matt Mullenweg?

  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 is 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

• 6:06Tim Ferriss?

  How you found it?

• 6:07Matt Mullenweg?

  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 opened 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.

• 6:30Tim Ferriss?

  For tampering with it.

• 6:31Matt Mullenweg?

  Yeah.

• 6:31Tim Ferriss?

  Or trying to understand it. And let's, uh, so you, you're working on this fork. At what point does it become WordPress?

• 6:42Matt Mullenweg?

  From the beginning, actually.

• 6:43Tim Ferriss?

  With a capital W and a capital P, for everyone wondering. That if you want to, 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.

• 6:53Matt Mullenweg?

  The lowercase p. Actually, it's not possible to write WordPress with an uppercase W and a lowercase p on WordPress.

• 7:00Tim Ferriss?

  As it should be, as it should be.

• 7:01Matt Mullenweg?

  It'll auto correct it.

• 7:03Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 7:18Tim Ferriss?

  So when did it become WordPress? When was it, when was it christened WordPress?

• 7:23Matt Mullenweg?

  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 the dot org was available and I registered it that day. And that really brought it together because B2 slash CafeLog. 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.

• 8:08Matt Mullenweg?

  So it created something called the famous five minute installation.

• 8:12Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 8:24Matt Mullenweg?

  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.

• 8:35Tim Ferriss?

  I see.

• 8:36Matt Mullenweg?

  So web standards would create a common platform between them.

• 8:38Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 8:39Matt Mullenweg?

  And the installation ended up being the biggest thing. We called it the famous five minute install, even though it was neither famous.

• 8:45Tim Ferriss?

  It's famous to the two of you guys.

• 8:46Matt Mullenweg?

  Yeah. But it became a self fulfilling prophecy.

• 8:49Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 8:49Matt Mullenweg?

  Because people said, oh, it's famous and it's only. Five minutes and competitive software at the time would take thirty minutes, an hour to set up. And also, that's how some of our contemporaries like Movable Type 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.

• 9:12Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 9:20Matt Mullenweg?

  Nope.

• 9:20Tim Ferriss?

  And therefore you were not incentivized to complicate the profit.

• 9:24Matt Mullenweg?

  There were no golden handcuffs.

• 9:26Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 9:26Matt Mullenweg?

  Nothing to lose.

• 9:27Tim Ferriss?

  Which is true for a lot of industries. Professional training, for instance, is very much like that. There are 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 mezzocycles and so on that keep you tethered to an ongoing program of training.

• 9:48Matt Mullenweg?

  What's a mezzocycle?

• 9:49Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 9:59Matt Mullenweg?

  It's basically the same thing.

• 10:00Tim Ferriss?

  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 seventy percent of your one rep max. And you work between seventy and seventy-five 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 ninety percent of your one rep max, or between eighty-five and ninety. And so that would be, that has a place, but I feel like, just to bring it back to WordPress.

• 10:37Tim Ferriss?

  Is that I feel like the, the, the number one priority of any good physical training, trainer or nutritionist should be to enable their client with.

• 10:51Tim Ferriss?

  The know-how and tools that make them themselves obsolete. So this complicate the profit is a real problem in a lot of industries.

• 10:59Matt Mullenweg?

  Well, 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 what works or what gets you to the next thing. So again, kind of like what you said, a personal trainer is not going to be incented to put themselves out of a job. 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.

• 11:44Tim Ferriss?

  Now, did that long-term vision

• 11:48Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 11:57Matt Mullenweg?

  Thirty-one as of last week.

• 11:59Tim Ferriss?

  I'm so tired of the under thirty awards that you're 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, molar leg again. But what helped you to develop that that long-term view? Besides maybe these these political, you know, poly-sci classes?

• 12:21Matt Mullenweg?

  I think the political science really, really helps because.

• 12:24Tim Ferriss?

  Any particular aspect or figure?

• 12:27Matt Mullenweg?

  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. We'll 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 the dog chasing the car. Like, what does the dog do if he catches the car?

• 13:07Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 13:07Matt Mullenweg?

  Doesn't have a plan for it.

• 13:08Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 13:08Matt Mullenweg?

  So I find it just as often on entrepreneurial side, people don't plan for success either. Like, if we create a marketplace for plugins.

• 13:16Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 13:16Matt Mullenweg?

  What is the natural conclusion of that if it's really, really successful? Well, it's really, really successful, there's not that many free plugins.

• 13:24Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 13:24Matt Mullenweg?

  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.

• 13:32Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 13:46Matt Mullenweg?

  Our investors.

• 13:47Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. Who are some of your investors? And we'll talk about what they've invested in.

• 13:51Matt Mullenweg?

  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. Insights, True Ventures, we have some, we're actually been blessed from the very beginning with really great investors.

• 14:06Tim Ferriss?

  I, I know of 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.

• 14:16Tim Ferriss?

  Which I 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, 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, what would you, what would you say that is?

• 14:48Matt Mullenweg?

  Hmm.

• 14:50Matt Mullenweg?

  It might be related to that, because.

• 14:52Tim Ferriss?

  The McNuggets?

• 14:53Matt Mullenweg?

  No, the thinking of systems. And sort of environments and ecosystems and how things sort of cascade, because the, you know, running an open source project.

• 15:05Matt Mullenweg?

  The joking term is BDFL, so benevolent dictator for life. It's technically my role within WordPress. But it's the most powerless dictatorship ever. Because, uh, 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. Um, 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 you, the things you do have control over, like let's say the website or how the code works or the license. Um, you have to think of the implications of that. And then it's really just the power of a bully pulpit.

• 15:41Tim Ferriss?

  In what sense?

• 15:43Matt Mullenweg?

  It's, uh, like the State of the Union speech is happening, uh, from Obama. Uh, once a year I give a State of the Word speech and try to-

• 15:50Tim Ferriss?

  That's at WordCamp?

• 15:51Matt Mullenweg?

  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 to communities 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, you know, hubba bubba.

• 16:14Tim Ferriss?

  Right, despite my best efforts to muck things up. I was very happy, very, very pleased that, uh, our friend Nathan was so kind at the Barbecue World Championships. That sponsors a, do you still sponsor a team there?

• 16:31Matt Mullenweg?

  I didn't last year. It was the first year I haven't been in a couple of years.

• 16:33Tim Ferriss?

  All right. And, uh, Nathan, 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 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. Uh, and the, that customize, that, that, that ability to customize has always appealed to me about WordPress. What are other, uh, 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, wider spread adoption?

• 17:19Matt Mullenweg?

  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.

• 17:39Tim Ferriss?

  It will never be what?

• 17:40Matt Mullenweg?

  In core WordPress.

• 17:41Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 17:41Matt Mullenweg?

  It's, you know, the, it's a relatively small audience.

• 17:45Tim Ferriss?

  It's an edge case, but useful for the edge case.

• 17:47Matt Mullenweg?

  Yeah. And you know what, to be honest, like 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 codebase 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.

• 18:28Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 18:29Matt Mullenweg?

  You know, when you think of the theme plus the plugins, that each blog, each one's its own unique, beautiful snowflake.

• 18:35Tim Ferriss?

  Right. So you're not trying to decide what the average shoe sizes in the world and give everyone a nine.

• 18:41Matt Mullenweg?

  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 35,000 plus plugins and themes, it's sort of, it's a huge moat. I mean, it would take lifetimes.

• 19:02Tim Ferriss?

  And at what point did you decide to create Automattic WordPress.com?

• 19:09Matt Mullenweg?

  Sure. So I should say what Automattic is.

• 19:12Tim Ferriss?

  You should.

• 19:13Matt Mullenweg?

  Automattic's the company where I work. I became CEO last year. And basically it's...

• 19:18Tim Ferriss?

  They had to wait until you had a 3 in front of your name.

• 19:20Matt Mullenweg?

  They had to wait until I was 30, yeah.

• 19:23Matt Mullenweg?

  So it's 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 so, and also that I wanted to create a company that I wanted to work at. Yeah. And so that became Automattic. What was the question? Uh, how did you decide to create Automattic? Uh, you know what it was? It was spam. Okay, tell me more. So,

• 19:49Matt Mullenweg?

  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 will basically exploit. 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 Akismet. Correct. So Akismet 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 Russia named Ivan, but like,

• 20:33Matt Mullenweg?

  like this guy in Russia, like just downloading my plugin, like, oh, ha, ha, ha, 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.

• 20:55Matt Mullenweg?

  Or maybe it's like circling the wagons, you know, it kind of protects you from- It's more, right, 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. Right. And costing 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.

• 21:28Tim Ferriss?

  We'll talk more about that later. Got it. Not to interrupt. So Akismet, spam.

• 21:34Matt Mullenweg?

  That was the first part of Automattic. 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 kind of the, 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 like the whole time and released the first version of Akismet.

• 22:01Tim Ferriss?

  What year was that roughly?

• 22:03Matt Mullenweg?

  I believe it was 2005.

• 22:05Tim Ferriss?

  2005. And was that the period in which you were experimenting with polyphasic sleep? Or was it before or after that?

• 22:12Matt Mullenweg?

  That's a good question. Um, no, I did the polyphasic sleep before then.

• 22:16Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 22:17Matt Mullenweg?

  So that was, uh, that was when I was still in Houston.

• 22:20Tim Ferriss?

  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 Four Hour Body and man, do people get excited about that, either positively or negatively. So what was, you were experimenting with, was it Uberman? So it's about, what is it, between two and two and a half hours? Something like that?

• 22:48Matt Mullenweg?

  A 24 hour cycle.

• 22:49Tim Ferriss?

  In a 24 hour cycle. So you're-

• 22:50Matt Mullenweg?

  So it's a four hours on and then 20 to 30 minutes of sleep.

• 22:53Tim Ferriss?

  What happens if you miss one of those naps?

• 22:55Matt Mullenweg?

  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 BBPress.

• 23:04Tim Ferriss?

  And I remember, uh, I remember your answer, but I'm, I'm curious if, uh, if you remember what you told me. Why did you stop polyphasic sleep? What happened?

• 23:11Matt Mullenweg?

  What did I tell you?

• 23:14Tim Ferriss?

  You got a girlfriend.

• 23:17Tim Ferriss?

  Turns out girlfriends don't like that sleep cycle.

• 23:19Matt Mullenweg?

  No one would have predicted it.

• 23:21Tim Ferriss?

  The getting of a girlfriend?

• 23:22Matt Mullenweg?

  Yeah, the getting of the girlfriend. And maybe that's, that, maybe that's who I marry someday, you know, someone who also be on polyphasic sleep.

• 23:32Tim Ferriss?

  Sounds like a really tense household.

• 23:35Matt Mullenweg?

  She has to type Dvorak and do polyphasic things.

• 23:37Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yes. You know what? All right. You brought it up. Why are you obsessed with Dvorak?

• 23:42Matt Mullenweg?

  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.

• 23:52Tim Ferriss?

  So it's, it would be a competitor to QWERTY?

• 23:55Matt Mullenweg?

  Yes. 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,

• 24:08Matt Mullenweg?

  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.

• 24:20Tim Ferriss?

  And do you still offer rewards to employees who pick up Dvorak?

• 24:24Matt Mullenweg?

  It's more like public shaming and/or highlighting. We do little hints.

• 24:30Tim Ferriss?

  It's a dictator with a little more teeth.

• 24:33Matt Mullenweg?

  Well, we'll, you know, in our Christmas pack, we sent out like a Dvorak keyboard cover for your laptop or little a 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.

• 24:54Tim Ferriss?

  Wow.

• 24:54Matt Mullenweg?

  Like, it's almost an order of magnitude more efficient.

• 24:56Tim Ferriss?

  So I never thought of it this way, but there's the speed benefit, which

• 25:02Tim Ferriss?

  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, to figure it 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?

• 25:22Matt Mullenweg?

  I'd say that's the most, biggest benefit. So I, you know, again, I type for a living and I've never had any problem.

• 25:30Tim Ferriss?

  What type of keyboard do you use?

• 25:31Matt Mullenweg?

  I just use the keyboard on my laptop mostly now.

• 25:34Tim Ferriss?

  You do?

• 25:35Matt Mullenweg?

  Oh, yeah.

• 25:35Tim Ferriss?

  Now, you used to have this funky ergonomic keyboard that kept your hands, your palms more vertical. Is that right?

• 25:41Matt Mullenweg?

  Yeah, you emailed me about that the other day. What was it called?

• 25:44Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I have no idea. That's why I'm asking.

• 25:46Matt Mullenweg?

  I looked it up and I told you what it was. But yeah, it was where the keys were actually sort of slanted in.

• 25:50Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 25:51Matt Mullenweg?

  And

• 25:52Tim Ferriss?

  So it's almost like you're holding joysticks. I mean, in that hand position with your, with your fingers extended.

• 25:56Matt Mullenweg?

  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.

• 26:06Tim Ferriss?

  Me neither.

• 26:07Matt Mullenweg?

  Unless I was transcribing something like when you're talking, I'm limited by the speed I can think.

• 26:11Tim Ferriss?

  Earning some extra dollars by transcribing on TaskRabbit?

• 26:13Matt Mullenweg?

  Every now and then.

• 26:14Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 26:15Matt Mullenweg?

  You know, I'm really limited by the speed I can think.

• 26:17Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 26:18Matt Mullenweg?

  Which is much slower than 120 words per minute or whatever I can type. And 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

• 26:29Tim Ferriss?

  They can't do anything quickly.

• 26:30Matt Mullenweg?

  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 into international keyboards and you can do it. And I'd highly recommend, you know, you have a pretty hardcore set of listeners, so.

• 26:44Tim Ferriss?

  Pretty hardcore habit of writing, too.

• 26:46Matt Mullenweg?

  Yeah, I would check out Dvorak. There's also a slightly more efficient one called Colmak. That if I was starting today, I might do Colmak.

• 26:53Tim Ferriss?

  How do you spell Colmak?

• 26:54Matt Mullenweg?

  C O L E M A K. Now, the difference between Cordy and Dvorak is like, let's call that 50%. And between like Dvorak and Colmak is like 2 or 3%. So I haven't switched again just because it's more marginal.

• 27:07Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 27:07Matt Mullenweg?

  But if you're coming from Cordy, yeah, pick one of them.

• 27:10Tim Ferriss?

  Huge. Cool. All right. We will link to all that in the show notes. Automatic.

• 27:18Tim Ferriss?

  Is it coincidence that Automatic is spelled with an M A T T in the middle?

• 27:23Matt Mullenweg?

  Now, as a typical egotistical founder, I try to work my name into everything.

• 27:28Tim Ferriss?

  And.

• 27:29Matt Mullenweg?

  You should do that.

• 27:30Tim Ferriss?

  I should? I could. I could. Tim is short. I could stick it in the middle of a lot of stuff.

• 27:36Tim Ferriss?

  Automatic itself is, it's a unique company in a lot of ways. How, how is Automatic different from the average tech startup out there?

• 27:49Matt Mullenweg?

  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 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 coworking spaces, wherever they are. We have a headquarters here in San Francisco, but it's only got about 20-ish people in it.

• 28:29Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 28:38Matt Mullenweg?

  We just needed a place to get mail and subpoenas.

• 28:41Tim Ferriss?

  Do you get a lot of subpoenas?

• 28:42Matt Mullenweg?

  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.

• 28:52Tim Ferriss?

  Every type of disagreeable content that's published on WordPress results in some type of letter.

• 28:57Matt Mullenweg?

  Yep.

• 28:58Tim Ferriss?

  It sounds like fun.

• 28:59Matt Mullenweg?

  Well, the more clueless the attorney, the more likely they're all to contact us.

• 29:02Tim Ferriss?

  Right, right. 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.

• 29:13Matt Mullenweg?

  It's literally from day one. And it was influenced by the fact that WordPress was an open source project before I created the company Automattic. So the first four or five people at Automattic were all in different cities.

• 29:25Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 29:25Matt Mullenweg?

  You know, we had Vermont, Texas. I was in San Francisco. Actually, the very first guy was in Blarney, Ireland, Cork County, which is like the Texas of Ireland.

• 29:34Tim Ferriss?

  Is that where the Blarney Stone is?

• 29:35Matt Mullenweg?

  It is where the Blarney Stone is.

• 29:36Tim Ferriss?

  What the hell is the Blarney Stone?

• 29:38Matt Mullenweg?

  So 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.

• 29:45Tim Ferriss?

  Jesus, that sounds dangerous.

• 29:46Matt Mullenweg?

  And this old guy that kind of holds you.

• 29:49Matt Mullenweg?

  And it's probably not sanitary, but yeah, I was very shy before I kissed it about 10 years ago.

• 29:54Tim Ferriss?

  And now you're all boldness.

• 29:55Matt Mullenweg?

  Now I'm talking to you.

• 29:56Tim Ferriss?

  I know. Okay, well, hold on.

• 30:01Tim Ferriss?

  I want to talk about nervousness and boldness and shyness for a second. We are going to come back to the distributed nature of Automattic. 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.

• 30:19Matt Mullenweg?

  Was that an interview?

• 30:20Tim Ferriss?

  No, I was, well, I was, I was calling you to ask if I could interview you.

• 30:24Matt Mullenweg?

  Yes, um, so Tim, this was pre four hour work week, right?

• 30:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I was, I think it was 2006.

• 30:29Matt Mullenweg?

  So it was old school.

• 30:30Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, or early, early 2007.

• 30:31Matt Mullenweg?

  Those were my Tim bona fides.

• 30:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, oh yeah, back in the day.

• 30:34Matt Mullenweg?

  Um, and I got the, I, my phone never rings and I almost never answer, but for some reason I answer this. And, um, 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.

• 30:48Tim Ferriss?

  It was bad. It was really bad.

• 30:50Matt Mullenweg?

  But this was, uh, Timbo, Tim Ferriss, and he was, um, telling me about something. I don't know. I think it was like verbal shock and awe.

• 30:59Tim Ferriss?

  It was, I was trying to establish my credentials and, uh, and, uh, a mutual friend, MJ Kim, had, had made the intro and I was worried you would hang up. Because I was aware, I was aware vaguely that you did not, you weren't really a phone guy.

• 31:15Matt Mullenweg?

  So you're trying to get in all the words before I hung up?

• 31:17Tim Ferriss?

  That's right. Which, uh, which is not the best policy in the world, but we did end up.

• 31:23Matt Mullenweg?

  It worked.

• 31:23Tim Ferriss?

  Getting to know each other. And I wanted that story to be told because it's easy for listeners or readers to assume that, you know, my pitches have always been great and that I was born that way. No, I've had thousands of horrible pitches. Uh, some of them, just by the luck of the day, you happen to contact someone work, but it's despite your, despite your technique, not because of it. So distributed from day one, uh, what are the tools that you currently use to make that work?

• 31:56Matt Mullenweg?

  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. Um, you collaborate using distributed source control. So we use Subversion, which is the modern day equivalent would be something like GitHub. So you basically have ways that you communicate, email, mailing lists, um, forums, all the things that, you know, people do even when they're in the same office, they IM each other. You just make that the primary way you communicate. And, uh, so that's what we did from the very beginning. I mean, when I had Macs 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

• 32:41Matt Mullenweg?

  all these people to the most expensive place in America? When we also have no money.

• 32:46Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 32:46Matt Mullenweg?

  And, um, Most investors, in fact, a lot of them said, oh yeah, when you raise money, you can finally move everyone there. But, you know, Donika in Ireland was, became ready to start a family.

• 32:57Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 32:57Matt Mullenweg?

  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, 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.

• 33:12Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 33:13Matt Mullenweg?

  Um, you also have, you know, 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.

• 33:23Tim Ferriss?

  In one place.

• 33:24Matt Mullenweg?

  In one place.

• 33:25Tim Ferriss?

  Right, absolutely.

• 33:26Matt Mullenweg?

  So when you add up Cisco, Oracle, Apple, Google, you know, just go down the list.

• 33:31Tim Ferriss?

  Not to mention all the startups.

• 33:32Matt Mullenweg?

  LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, plus all startups. Um, they're, uh, they're all fishing in this like pond, which is a little bit overfished.

• 33:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 33:41Matt Mullenweg?

  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.

• 34:09Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 34:10Matt Mullenweg?

  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.

• 34:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 34:18Matt Mullenweg?

  Right. If you said, we're not going to hire men or women. It's dumb because you've just cut out half of the possible hiring pool. So by definition, people you 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.

• 34:36Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 34:47Matt Mullenweg?

  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. So we, we invest in people's 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.

• 35:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 35:19Matt Mullenweg?

  I mean, you can make a San Francisco salary and live in Argentina or Alabama or wherever you want to.

• 35:24Tim Ferriss?

  Goes a lot, goes, goes very, very far.

• 35:26Matt Mullenweg?

  And that's kind of cool.

• 35:28Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 35:28Matt Mullenweg?

  And, um, or like myself, like I travel most of the time.

• 35:31Tim Ferriss?

  Where is the, uh, you're in 37 countries, you said?

• 35:38Tim Ferriss?

  What are the most heavily weighted countries or represented countries?

• 35:44Matt Mullenweg?

  Oh, in order, it's probably, it's English speaking countries in order. So it's, uh, United States is about two thirds. So again, more than a majority. We love us some Canadians. I love Canadia.

• 35:55Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 35:56Matt Mullenweg?

  Um, UK, Australia, uh, those are kind of the top four or five.

• 36:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 36:00Matt Mullenweg?

  Ireland. So because we're still, although we're totally distributed, we're still speak English.

• 36:06Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 36:07Matt Mullenweg?

  And 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.

• 36:16Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 36:17Matt Mullenweg?

  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, uh, I was going to say bad butt. I don't like the curse.

• 36:33Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 36:48Matt Mullenweg?

  Tim, now I can't send this to my mom.

• 36:50Tim Ferriss?

  We can bleep the F.

• 36:51Matt Mullenweg?

  It's, it's all right, you know, I actually don't have a problem with cursing. I just don't do it myself.

• 36:55Tim Ferriss?

  How long has that been? Has that always been the case?

• 36:58Matt Mullenweg?

  You know, I don't know.

• 36:59Tim Ferriss?

  You're from Texas.

• 37:02Matt Mullenweg?

  And again, I don't have a problem with it.

• 37:04Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 37:08Matt Mullenweg?

  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.

• 37:15Tim Ferriss?

  I feel like I would have picked up on that. So how long have you not been cursing?

• 37:19Matt Mullenweg?

  I feel like I must have read a book when I was younger, like a James Bond type book or something. And I, 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 in 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, there's a lot of other really good ones. So I try to be, express myself in other ways.

• 37:49Tim Ferriss?

  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 enjoy being around you. And 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, which oftentimes I think 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 my, my particular crutch was pretty. Oh, that's pretty good. That's pretty expensive. That was pretty awesome.

• 38:31Tim Ferriss?

  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 with. Somebody like, oh, that's pretty fucking expensive. Oh, that's pretty fucking pretty or whatever, which, which solved it. But the, what are the current tools that you use?

• 38:54Tim Ferriss?

  So you had IRC and so on, but what do you, what's the state of the art within Automattic for managing, keeping that machine running with the distributed teams?

• 39:03Matt Mullenweg?

  So we actually ended up creating a tool called P2. So you can get it at P2Theme.com.

• 39:10Matt Mullenweg?

  And that is basically a replacement for email. So Automattic basically sends no emails. I get, all the email I get is from people outside the company. And think of P2, almost like a Socialcast or 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 YouTube's, rich media, mockups, 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 joined 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

• 39:53Matt Mullenweg?

  everything in their inbox, well, it does. Everything in their inbox disappears and all that sort of locked in knowledge is gone. So everything in Automattic is public by default. All of our stats, all of our, everything.

• 40:03Tim Ferriss?

  Everything?

• 40:04Matt Mullenweg?

  Everything, like-

• 40:05Tim Ferriss?

  Salaries, equity?

• 40:06Matt Mullenweg?

  Uh, so we're not Buffer, where we publish, you know, salaries and equity, but the-

• 40:11Tim Ferriss?

  So just for context for people who are not 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 different types of Facebook posts, Twitter posts, etc., among many, many other things. But they're, they're extremely transparent in, with their information.

• 40:32Matt Mullenweg?

  So they publish a formula, essentially?

• 40:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, how they determine their-

• 40:35Matt Mullenweg?

  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, it creates as many problems as it solves.

• 40:51Tim Ferriss?

  How do you draw the line? Or how do you decide where to draw the line?

• 40:59Matt Mullenweg?

  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 at public. In fact, government jobs, salaries at 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-

• 41:35Tim Ferriss?

  What does kicking the can down the road mean?

• 41:36Matt Mullenweg?

  It's, if it purports to solve the idea of compensation inequity.

• 41:44Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 41:45Matt Mullenweg?

  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, 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.

• 42:17Tim Ferriss?

  You're like, wow, this guy really doesn't know how to use computers.

• 42:19Matt Mullenweg?

  Yeah. Well, but going back now, you know, almost 10 years, we turn 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 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 like really lock everything down, I feel like that wouldn't engender a two-way loyalty. So P2, Slack, I really love.

• 42:56Tim Ferriss?

  Can you, now Slack has come up a lot recently for me, including for very small teams. Can you explain Slack?

• 43:04Matt Mullenweg?

  Sure, as I pour water all over this table.

• 43:06Tim Ferriss?

  That's alright, that's alright. It's wood. Supposed, you know, I would assume the tree was exposed to water. Hopefully it'll be okay.

• 43:14Matt Mullenweg?

  So at some point, so Slack is, is kind of for us, it's a replacement for IRC. So imagine a, 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, for IM. So we used Skype before, but again, it didn't really scale for us. So if you're the hundred and fourth, hundred and first person to join automatic, and we use Skype for all of our messaging each other, you have to add a hundred 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. In Slack, you can DM anyone in the company. Everything's, they also have a really great search. There's public channels, anyone can join, there's private groups.

• 43:57Matt Mullenweg?

  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.

• 44:04Tim Ferriss?

  Love the name.

• 44:05Matt Mullenweg?

  So it's a, yeah.

• 44:06Tim Ferriss?

  It's a positive association just in the name.

• 44:08Matt Mullenweg?

  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, it's really pleasant to use, like it's consumer-grade. And I mean, consumer-grade is a compliment.

• 44:20Tim Ferriss?

  You mean the UI, like the, the user experience is consumer-friendly, end-user-friendly?

• 44:24Matt Mullenweg?

  It, it could compete with a Facebook or Twitter for its usability. Versus where most enterprise software just, you know, is looked by, is designed by someone who is very unhappy.

• 44:36Tim Ferriss?

  And why not use P2 for the IRC-like chat?

• 44:43Matt Mullenweg?

  Oh, um, it's not chat.

• 44:46Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 44:46Matt Mullenweg?

  So P2 is threaded, it is real-time, but you wouldn't use it like a chat client.

• 44:50Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 44:51Matt Mullenweg?

  Where Slack is chronological, so there's no threading. And yeah, it's instantaneous, it comes to your phone, it's, it's more like an IM application.

• 45:00Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. And would you use P2 for project management-type stuff as well?

• 45:05Matt Mullenweg?

  We do, yeah.

• 45:06Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 45:06Matt Mullenweg?

  We have bug trackers, different teams use different things. Some use Fabricator, some use GitHub, some use Track. We allow teams a lot of autonomy in choosing their tools there. But all the communication really happens on P2. So I think P2 a replacement for email, Slack a replacement for...

• 45:21Tim Ferriss?

  Skype IM.

• 45:22Matt Mullenweg?

  Skype IM. And that's really, between those two, you can take over the world.

• 45:27Tim Ferriss?

  I love it. And for those people who are not aware of, who are not part of the tech world.

• 45:36Tim Ferriss?

  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 the downside of these coasters. We're sitting at my place, chilling. We were gonna do tequila sipping.

• 45:51Tim Ferriss?

  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 have, I don't want to be swimming in Casa Dragones, which is my, my favorite sipping tequila, but.

• 46:02Matt Mullenweg?

  It's my favorite too. It's so good.

• 46:04Tim Ferriss?

  It is good. And just to, to digress, because this is worth digressing on, I was introduced to Casa Dragones the first time because I ended up doing some military training with some, some active guys and some deployed guys when they were back for a brief period. And they would, 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 Casa Dragones is not intended to be mixed with anything. And it's just amazing.

• 46:48Matt Mullenweg?

  I think tequila is the most underrated alcohol, actually.

• 46:51Tim Ferriss?

  And it's very expensive. So for people who, it's something, it's for special occasions, for sure.

• 46:57Matt Mullenweg?

  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. Like that are like instant hangovers for me. But just like a, yeah, I love Casa Dragones. 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 gonna pay this much? I was like, wow, this tequila is delicious.

• 47:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's amazing.

• 47:20Matt Mullenweg?

  And if you, 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 don't, you're not hungover in the morning.

• 47:32Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 47:50Matt Mullenweg?

  Yeah.

• 47:50Tim Ferriss?

  Could you explain Momentum?

• 47:52Matt Mullenweg?

  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.

• 48:06Tim Ferriss?

  Be creepy.

• 48:07Matt Mullenweg?

  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.

• 48:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 48:17Matt Mullenweg?

  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 distractions central for me.

• 48:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 48:30Matt Mullenweg?

  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?

• 48:36Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 48:45Matt Mullenweg?

  That's a new feature. If you hover over the quote, it will tell you who it's from.

• 48:48Tim Ferriss?

  Huh, I feel like that should just be displayed.

• 48:52Matt Mullenweg?

  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.

• 48:56Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 49:21Matt Mullenweg?

  The road to heck is paved with lots of new tabs.

• 49:24Tim Ferriss?

  Tone down language. This is a family program, Matt. So what other, what other tweaks or tools do you have on your laptop? Do you find helpful?

• 49:34Matt Mullenweg?

  Definitely among constantly simple notes. So that's actually a company. I liked it so much, we acquired it. It's a company, Automatic bought a few 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. Um, new additions, I've started using Wunderlist.

• 49:59Tim Ferriss?

  Wunderlist, I've heard a lot of good things about.

• 50:00Matt Mullenweg?

  Wunderlist, it's like.

• 50:01Tim Ferriss?

  Wunderlist, yeah, Chad Fowler works there now.

• 50:04Matt Mullenweg?

  Oh, cool.

• 50:05Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, good guy.

• 50:06Matt Mullenweg?

  Really liked it. So I just started doing that this year, actually. Um, what is this on my computer? Spotify, you know, standard stuff.

• 50:15Tim Ferriss?

  What are, what are some of your other most used apps on your, your smartphone?

• 50:21Matt Mullenweg?

  Hmm. Well, obviously WordPress.

• 50:23Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, of course.

• 50:23Matt Mullenweg?

  Okay, I'll get the plugs out of the way in the beginning. So let's say WordPress, Simple Notes.

• 50:28Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 50:31Matt Mullenweg?

  For messaging, I've actually become really into Telegram.

• 50:34Tim Ferriss?

  Telegram?

• 50:35Matt Mullenweg?

  So telegram.org, it is a free, fast and encrypted, optional, really good encryption, by the way, 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 like 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.

• 51:00Tim Ferriss?

  So Telegram, you can use on your phone and on your laptop?

• 51:03Matt Mullenweg?

  Yeah, which I love.

• 51:04Tim Ferriss?

  My iMessage is broken. I won't, I won't pull you in for tech support, but I could use Telegram.

• 51:11Matt Mullenweg?

  Slack, something. So in terms of like making myself a better person, the row is the seven minute workout app. Calm.com, which I'm an investor in and Kindle, you know, reading.

• 51:24Tim Ferriss?

  Kindle is a meditation app. 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 app.

• 51:35Matt Mullenweg?

  Yes.

• 51:37Tim Ferriss?

  How often do you meditate?

• 51:38Matt Mullenweg?

  Not enough.

• 51:40Tim Ferriss?

  I feel like that's a dodge. Is that once a month or what's not enough?

• 51:45Matt Mullenweg?

  So where I am in this new year is I'm trying to do it for five minutes per day.

• 51:50Tim Ferriss?

  That's perfect.

• 51:50Matt Mullenweg?

  That's just where I'm starting out. 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, you know, maybe a twice a day or meaty 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. There's really no excuses for not doing five minutes a day. 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 world, you can't argue against doing one push up.

• 52:29Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 52:29Matt Mullenweg?

  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.

• 52:42Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 53:00Matt Mullenweg?

  Yeah.

• 53:00Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 53:21Matt Mullenweg?

  Yeah. Someone should write a book on that.

• 53:24Tim Ferriss?

  Right. God, I can't do another 600 pager. The Four Hour Body has another point that I think is very important, which is

• 53:33Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 53:44Matt Mullenweg?

  Did you say diet?

• 53:45Tim Ferriss?

  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. They have to make time for, whereas especially if they're overweight, they're definitely eating.

• 53:59Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 54:13Matt Mullenweg?

  Wow.

• 54:13Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that's a lot.

• 54:14Matt Mullenweg?

  That's a lot of pounds.

• 54:15Tim Ferriss?

  That's a lot of pounds. Actually, I have a question I wanted to ask you if it's okay to turn this around. Yeah, sure.

• 54:19Matt Mullenweg?

  I've been reading a little bit more about fasting and intermittent fasting. So

• 54:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 54:23Matt Mullenweg?

  there was like a couple of tweets worth of advice you would give.

• 54:26Tim Ferriss?

  For fasting?

• 54:26Matt Mullenweg?

  Yeah.

• 54:28Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely. All right. I think if you have incredible discipline,

• 54:33Tim Ferriss?

  I think the intermittent fasting, for instance, I think his name is Martin Birkin, Lean Gains. I think he does quite a bit here.

• 54:45Tim Ferriss?

  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

• 55:03Tim Ferriss?

  consume massive amounts of two things. On the male side, caffeine, they consume a lot of stimulants. And some of them consume anabolic 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.

• 55:25Tim Ferriss?

  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, I think the longevity benefits known and unknown, and health benefits known and unknown of doing that are, are very significant.

• 55:44Matt Mullenweg?

  What happens if you don't distill the water?

• 55:46Tim Ferriss?

  Well, you know, that is a great question. They don't, the doctors who supervise 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, et cetera. And that was a tremendous experience. I actually want to do that at least once a quarter and possibly do a 14 day.

• 56:15Matt Mullenweg?

  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?

• 56:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I mean, that, that wouldn't surprise me at all. I'd have to look at my labs. Of course I did tons, I did your analysis every day and and lab.

• 56:28Matt Mullenweg?

  Did you weigh your poo?

• 56:30Tim Ferriss?

  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, you have to be careful with the amount of water you drink because if you're not consuming any sources of salt, you can, you can develop, you can overconsume water, just like anything else. And there, 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

• 56:57Matt Mullenweg?

  Most things on radio are terrible.

• 56:58Tim Ferriss?

  Hypo neutremia, I think it is, which is a, an extreme. Lack of sodium and other things that 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 you can also end up losing fat, not because of the intermittent fasting, but because you're consuming six cups of coffee a day.

• 57:35Tim Ferriss?

  So.

• 57:36Matt Mullenweg?

  I still don't drink coffee.

• 57:37Tim Ferriss?

  What's up?

• 57:38Matt Mullenweg?

  I still don't drink coffee.

• 57:39Tim Ferriss?

  Why not?

• 57:40Matt Mullenweg?

  You know, I figure I have enough vices in my life.

• 57:42Tim Ferriss?

  Aren't you an investor in a coffee company?

• 57:45Matt Mullenweg?

  Blue bottle coffee, so I don't drink coffee, but when I do, blue bottle is the.

• 57:51Tim Ferriss?

  No.

• 57:53Tim Ferriss?

  You don't have to answer this, but I'm curious. What are some of your other?

• 57:58Tim Ferriss?

  Suitable for Mr. Rogers vices?

• 58:01Tim Ferriss?

  What are some of your other vices?

• 58:02Matt Mullenweg?

  Wine, women and song, right? It all goes back to the classics.

• 58:05Tim Ferriss?

  Those are vices?

• 58:09Matt Mullenweg?

  Now, I feel like. Probably the thing I struggle with the most is. Because my work and what I do is connected. You know, I'm talking to people online, I'm on my computer. And especially since taking over CEO the past year. What I've really had to do is unschedule more in my life.

• 58:28Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 58:28Matt Mullenweg?

  Create more space.

• 58:30Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 58:31Matt Mullenweg?

  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 float, when I'm in sort of like the. 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.

• 58:50Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 58:51Matt Mullenweg?

  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.

• 59:01Tim Ferriss?

  Right, the deloading phase, those blocks of time. What have you found helpful for? Creating that space?

• 59:10Matt Mullenweg?

  Oh, another interesting thing about Automattic is we have almost no meetings.

• 59:14Tim Ferriss?

  Let's talk about it.

• 59:15Matt Mullenweg?

  So I only have three standing meetings at Automattic.

• 59:19Tim Ferriss?

  Standing, meaning physically standing?

• 59:21Matt Mullenweg?

  Oh, no, standing like it's always standing on the calendar.

• 59:24Tim Ferriss?

  I see.

• 59:25Matt Mullenweg?

  So every other week.

• 59:27Tim Ferriss?

  What makes those meetings worth doing?

• 59:30Matt Mullenweg?

  Um, so they're meetings with groups of people who are responsible for three areas at Automattic. Um, 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 Automattic.

• 59:57Tim Ferriss?

  Right, got it. It's all the VIP guys.

• 1:00:00Matt Mullenweg?

  Yeah, VIPs on that team, ads, so the, the, the commercial side. Because to be honest, the vast majority of automaticians don't think about revenue at all.

• 1:00:10Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:11Matt Mullenweg?

  There's just a few of us that shoulder the burden for everyone else.

• 1:00:14Tim Ferriss?

  It's probably a good thing. I mean, what, what do the other people primarily focus on?

• 1:00:20Matt Mullenweg?

  Um, I don't know, comics.

• 1:00:24Tim Ferriss?

  Tequila.

• 1:00:24Matt Mullenweg?

  What they're having for lunch. No, I mean, you think about the user. You think about the, the experience. You think about what is the thing?

• 1:00:35Matt Mullenweg?

  The hardest thing is spending the most time on the most important things, just in life in general.

• 1:00:41Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely.

• 1:00:41Matt Mullenweg?

  And especially when building products, like it's so easy. There's a term in open source called bike shedding. And it's this idea, do you know it?

• 1:00:47Tim Ferriss?

  I do, but I want you to explain it. This is a great concept.

• 1:00:50Matt Mullenweg?

  I'm going to butcher the story, but you know, someone brings a proposal for a nuclear plant in a, to a city council. And it's, you know, this 200 page thing and they kind of flip through it. And, um, but it's like too much for people to comprehend and they're not nuclear physicists or activists anyway. So they're 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?

• 1:01:20Tim Ferriss?

  What color should it be?

• 1:01:21Matt Mullenweg?

  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.

• 1:01:53Tim Ferriss?

  That's so true. And I want to talk about also your auditioning process.

• 1:02:05Tim Ferriss?

  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. The Tim Ferriss Show is brought to you by ONNIT. I have used ONNIT products for years. If you look in my kitchen, in my garage, you will find AlphaBrain, chewable melatonin for resetting my clock when I'm traveling, kettlebells, battle ropes, maces, steel clubs.

• 1:02:50Tim Ferriss?

  It sounds like a torture chamber, and it kind of is. It's a torture chamber for self-improvement. And you can see all of my favorite gear at onnit.com/tim. That's O-N-N-I-T dot com forward slash tim. And you can also get a discount on any supplements, food products. I like Hemp Force, I like AlphaBrain. Check it all out, onnit.com/tim. The Tim Ferriss Show is also brought to you by 99designs. 99designs is your one-stop shop for anything graphic design-related. You need a logo, you need a website, you need a business card, or anything else, you get an original design from designers around the world who submit drafts for you to review. You are happy or you get your money back.

• 1:03:32Tim Ferriss?

  And I have used 99designs for book cover ideas for The 4-Hour Body, which went to number one New York Times, for banner ads. And you can check out some of my actual competitions at 99designs.com/tim. You can also get a free $99 upgrade if you want to give it a shot. And now, back to our show. 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, while I, very Geisha-like, pour us some lovely tequila.

• 1:04:15Matt Mullenweg?

  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, because you're, but I did not just discover, 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, uh...

• 1:04:38Tim Ferriss?

  Is that from Tila Tequila?

• 1:04:39Matt Mullenweg?

  No. They have a cool song called, uh, "Stolen Dance."

• 1:04:43Tim Ferriss?

  What type of music is that? What would you call that?

• 1:04:45Matt Mullenweg?

  That's interesting. So, they have kind of a reggae feel? But it's like a guy with a guitar who's, and sings, combined with a guy who kind of plays the laptop, like, more of like a beat, almost like a DJ.

• 1:04:55Tim Ferriss?

  Very cool.

• 1:04:56Matt Mullenweg?

  And I saw them live in San Francisco, great show. And I'm not the same. I listen to a lot of hip-hop and a lot of jazz.

• 1:05:03Tim Ferriss?

  And you play instruments also?

• 1:05:06Matt Mullenweg?

  Yeah, primarily saxophone.

• 1:05:07Tim Ferriss?

  When did you learn to play the saxophone?

• 1:05:09Matt Mullenweg?

  Well, I started in second or third grade.

• 1:05:11Tim Ferriss?

  Really?

• 1:05:11Matt Mullenweg?

  Yeah, so I started pretty young. My dad played sax, so I always wanted to do it. And I had gotten kicked out of piano class.

• 1:05:18Tim Ferriss?

  For doing what?

• 1:05:19Matt Mullenweg?

  I don't know. They said I had no musical talent, so I wanted to prove them wrong.

• 1:05:22Tim Ferriss?

  God, what is wrong with some teachers? Unbelievable. Cheers, by the way.

• 1:05:28Matt Mullenweg?

  Cheers.

• 1:05:30Tim Ferriss?

  And so the saxophone was your transition from piano. And is there anything, are there any skills that you developed through the sax that have translated to coding? Or anything else you do?

• 1:05:52Matt Mullenweg?

  Oh, almost everything. So from how to breathe and be on stage in front of people.

• 1:06:02Tim Ferriss?

  For speaking gigs and whatnot.

• 1:06:04Matt Mullenweg?

  Or just anything, you know, you're in front of a group of people. How to interact, so in jazz, it's all about listening and responding. You know, 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.

• 1:06:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:06:40Matt Mullenweg?

  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.

• 1:06:51Tim Ferriss?

  Local maximum. I need to learn what this is. Is that just a constrained, a constrained maximum?

• 1:06:58Matt Mullenweg?

  Yeah, you reach the best that you're going to get within this sort of

• 1:07:01Tim Ferriss?

  Limited sphere.

• 1:07:02Matt Mullenweg?

  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 practiced, and it 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, you get really good at the 10 things that you're practicing. But the people who practice the best sound terrible. 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 just playing a single note for a really long time. And then going to the next note and playing that for a really long time.

• 1:07:44Tim Ferriss?

  Why does that make you better? Is it an endurance thing?

• 1:07:47Matt Mullenweg?

  It helps your embouchure and your tone.

• 1:07:49Tim Ferriss?

  Your what?

• 1:07:49Matt Mullenweg?

  Embouchure.

• 1:07:50Tim Ferriss?

  What is that?

• 1:07:51Matt Mullenweg?

  So the embouchure is basically the position and firmness of your mouth around the mouthpiece. And basically, it's basically the seal around the mouthpiece.

• 1:08:01Tim Ferriss?

  Try not to make any jokes.

• 1:08:03Matt Mullenweg?

  Or think of like a brass instrument. When they have the sort of circular mouthpiece and they do like that sort of thing inside of it. They use an embouchure to change the pitch. So.

• 1:08:14Tim Ferriss?

  That's the position of the mouth.

• 1:08:16Matt Mullenweg?

  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.

• 1:08:28Tim Ferriss?

  And.

• 1:08:33Tim Ferriss?

  You.

• 1:08:36Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 1:08:46Matt Mullenweg?

  I do.

• 1:08:47Tim Ferriss?

  So tell, to explain this, explain what the last thing that you, that you listen to in this way and why you do that.

• 1:08:55Matt Mullenweg?

  Um, literally today, this Sam Smith song, 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.

• 1:09:04Tim Ferriss?

  Which is a great domain name.

• 1:09:06Matt Mullenweg?

  Thank you.

• 1:09:07Tim Ferriss?

  Where's TT Trinidad and Tobago?

• 1:09:08Matt Mullenweg?

  Trinidad and Tobago. I actually just renewed it for another three years. The.

• 1:09:13Tim Ferriss?

  Why only three years? I'm curious.

• 1:09:15Matt Mullenweg?

  Oh, it's a really weird, you know, it was unregistered when I got it.

• 1:09:19Tim Ferriss?

  So just luck of the draw?

• 1:09:20Matt Mullenweg?

  Yeah, I literally, well, it wasn't luck of the draw. Just no one went through the, the junk you had to go through to register.

• 1:09:26Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, because it's a pain in the ass in Trinidad and Tobago.

• 1:09:28Matt Mullenweg?

  Wire money to Trinidad and I was in my, I was in like the Bank of America on Third and Brandon or something, Fourth and Brandon. And they're like, sir, are you sure about this? I'm like, yeah, yeah, it's fine. I read on the internet.

• 1:09:38Tim Ferriss?

  It's fine. The internet said it's, it's okay.

• 1:09:42Matt Mullenweg?

  Someone contacted me. I'm going to send him a couple of grand and yeah, they were very concerned about the money I was wearing to this Trinidadian bank. But, um, yeah, the, I find that's.

• 1:09:53Tim Ferriss?

  So on your blog, you put. A video of?

• 1:09:57Matt Mullenweg?

  Just a YouTube, of the music video for the song. But the, um, that's just because YouTube's the easiest way to share music now.

• 1:10:03Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 1:10:03Matt Mullenweg?

  The, 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. Um, 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 a 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 the Wikipedia and like really digging into it. So I really want something I've heard sometimes literally a thousand times before.

• 1:10:33Tim Ferriss?

  What are some of the other songs that you've heard a thousand times?

• 1:10:35Matt Mullenweg?

  Um, I really like, uh, John Mayer's Who Says? Who Says, I Can't Kids Don't? Which is kind of funny because I don't, uh, what is another one? Um, some Kanye songs like Gorgeous, um, Power. Yeah, there's just different, whatever it is at the moment. Um, 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.

• 1:11:05Tim Ferriss?

  What was the name again? I don't even recognize the name. I'm embarrassed to say.

• 1:11:07Matt Mullenweg?

  Kendrick Lamar?

• 1:11:08Tim Ferriss?

  Kendrick Lamar.

• 1:11:08Matt Mullenweg?

  Oh, man. Yeah, he, um.

• 1:11:10Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 1:11:16Matt Mullenweg?

  Um, yeah, Kendrick Lamar is definitely my top five favorite rappers right now. And he, um, yeah, his music actually has a lot of jazz influence on many things he does. And the song Rigor Mortis samples a jazz track. And, um, it's, a lot of these tracks are shorter. So the, um, the Sam Smith is like, I think, three and a half minutes. Uh, Who Says is like two fifty-six or so. Um, Rigor Mortis is under three minutes and just put them on the loop.

• 1:11:45Tim Ferriss?

  So I borrowed that habit. I remember you told me about this and I, I, I thought it was genius. Because, uh, I, I, 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 10:00 PM to 5:00 AM.

• 1:12:11Matt Mullenweg?

  Huh.

• 1:12:12Tim Ferriss?

  And I'd be alone and it was just very, um.

• 1:12:17Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 1:12:27Matt Mullenweg?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:12:28Tim Ferriss?

  And pendulum, for instance. And I would then watch the same movie over and over and over again. But it would just be in 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, and Shaun of the Dead for the four hour work week.

• 1:12:49Matt Mullenweg?

  Did you do one of the Bond movies too?

• 1:12:50Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 1:13:09Matt Mullenweg?

  With the pig?

• 1:13:09Tim Ferriss?

  With the pig.

• 1:13:10Matt Mullenweg?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:13:10Tim Ferriss?

  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 movie.

• 1:13:21Matt Mullenweg?

  Now, that I have not seen.

• 1:13:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, oh, it's fantastic.

• 1:13:23Matt Mullenweg?

  I love when they made these movies for kids, but they put cool stuff in there for adults too.

• 1:13:26Tim Ferriss?

  Like Aladdin and many other movies.

• 1:13:28Matt Mullenweg?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:28Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, really fantastic. So, all right, so that's the, that's the music trick, the repeat.

• 1:13:33Matt Mullenweg?

  I have a colleague who does the movie thing and.

• 1:13:35Tim Ferriss?

  Like I do.

• 1:13:36Matt Mullenweg?

  Yeah, and I think.

• 1:13:37Tim Ferriss?

  I put the movie on mute, though.

• 1:13:39Matt Mullenweg?

  Oh, really?

• 1:13:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and I listen to the music.

• 1:13:41Matt Mullenweg?

  For him, he does Big Lebowski and a few others. But the only, the only variation I've introduced in the past few years is 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.

• 1:13:57Tim Ferriss?

  Trap?

• 1:13:58Matt Mullenweg?

  This is where I'm getting out of my element a little bit. But 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.

• 1:14:09Tim Ferriss?

  I love it. Auditions. Tell me about auditions. What are, what are auditions? How do they work in automatic? Why auditions?

• 1:14:21Matt Mullenweg?

  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 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 and I thought, "Oh, well, we should do it

• 1:15:05Matt Mullenweg?

  like the other companies do it." So we tried, you know, 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 like, 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 you know, like, interview after interview, and then you sort of get a consensus. And none of it 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

• 1:15:50Matt Mullenweg?

  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 that, 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 tried 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.

• 1:16:27Matt Mullenweg?

  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 a thousand applications behind now. Okay, how do you filter a thousand 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.

• 1:17:12Matt Mullenweg?

  What do you look for? 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. You know, and I'm totally, I'm totally down with quirky, you know? 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.

• 1:17:57Matt Mullenweg?

  Right. So all of those are indicators and not any one of them. Case 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. Takes like about half an hour. Sometimes it's called a fizz buzz test in programming. What does that mean? It's just a basic, super basic thing that anyone. Fizz buzz. Does that stand for something? Yeah, so you move some variables around that are fizz and buzz and you arrange them in different ways

• 1:18:40Matt Mullenweg?

  or you repeat them or you sort an array or something like that. Got it. A basic thing that anyone can figure out. And that 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.

• 1:18:56Tim Ferriss?

  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 woo-foo 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.

• 1:19:24Matt Mullenweg?

  Wow.

• 1:19:25Tim Ferriss?

  I was very puzzled by that. Yeah, there's a lot of odd behavior in job applications.

• 1:19:30Matt Mullenweg?

  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.

• 1:19:37Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, cool.

• 1:19:37Matt Mullenweg?

  I think I block quoted the section where you say why it's terrible to work with you.

• 1:19:42Tim Ferriss?

  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 perfection, someone who wants to, someone who wants a person like me to edit the hell out of their work.

• 1:20:04Matt Mullenweg?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:04Tim Ferriss?

  And so I found it very important. But so you have them go through a simple coding test.

• 1:20:09Matt Mullenweg?

  I like that, by the way. I went to Antarctica last month, the South Pole. And so I've been reading the Shackleton, I think it's the endurance book.

• 1:20:16Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:16Matt Mullenweg?

  Such a fascinating story.

• 1:20:17Tim Ferriss?

  So fascinating. Yeah, 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.

• 1:20:31Matt Mullenweg?

  Low pay. Harsh conditions.

• 1:20:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:33Matt Mullenweg?

  I had a friend who joked she should make that her OkCupid listing.

• 1:20:40Tim Ferriss?

  Right, the Tinder description. Probably get a lot of responses. So the code test, and then what happens?

• 1:20:46Matt Mullenweg?

  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.

• 1:21:02Tim Ferriss?

  And that's a paid project?

• 1:21:03Matt Mullenweg?

  Yeah, so we put everyone on just a flat rate, $25 per hour contract.

• 1:21:09Matt Mullenweg?

  And for most people who apply have jobs already, so it's often a nights or weekends thing.

• 1:21:13Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:21:13Matt Mullenweg?

  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 you know, 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'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.

• 1:21:44Tim Ferriss?

  Wow.

• 1:21:45Matt Mullenweg?

  But because you're typing, so it takes a little longer. And for that, I try to determine a cultural fit.

• 1:21:55Matt Mullenweg?

  Really get to know the person because I have a, afterwards I, like, let's say we're hiring 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.

• 1:22:09Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I don't know. I know what you're talking about. Decides which school you're going to?

• 1:22:12Matt Mullenweg?

  Yeah, so by.

• 1:22:13Tim Ferriss?

  Which, yeah, right.

• 1:22:14Matt Mullenweg?

  By talking to them, I'm partly determining like which team will they fit best with? Because the other 300 people in the company I've done this with. And so I know what their strengths and weaknesses are, what their personalities are, what time zones they're in. So really putting a lot of variables into deciding where someone goes.

• 1:22:28Tim Ferriss?

  Are there any simple questions that give you a particular amount of depth into someone's personality?

• 1:22:35Matt Mullenweg?

  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.

• 1:22:46Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:46Matt Mullenweg?

  Or vary it or.

• 1:22:48Tim Ferriss?

  What is your spirit animal?

• 1:22:49Matt Mullenweg?

  What is your spirit animal? I mean, obviously an alpaca.

• 1:22:52Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:54Matt Mullenweg?

  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 decide to make an offer, we talk about compensation. And then I send out the letter.

• 1:23:11Tim Ferriss?

  What percentage of people fall out in that last chat with you?

• 1:23:16Matt Mullenweg?

  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.

• 1:23:31Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:23:31Matt Mullenweg?

  So it's really just something that you need experience. So I, 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.

• 1:23:44Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have an opinion of top grading? Do you know anything about top grading?

• 1:23:49Matt Mullenweg?

  I find references completely useless. So yeah, including when you go outside, what they give you as references and you try to contact people. It just, I haven't found any, it takes a ton of time and I haven't found any sort of correlation with the ultimate quality of the person. So I heard about top grading and tried it for a few months. Wasn't worth it.

• 1:24:09Tim Ferriss?

  Didn't work very well.

• 1:24:10Matt Mullenweg?

  I have an article I can, we can put it in the show notes.

• 1:24:13Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I'd love to.

• 1:24:14Matt Mullenweg?

  Harvard Business Review where I wrote kind of five or 10 pages on this.

• 1:24:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that's a great piece. Yeah, I would love to include that. I actually have that printed out because I'm an old man and highlighted.

• 1:24:24Matt Mullenweg?

  Oh, cool.

• 1:24:24Tim Ferriss?

  Which is a weird thing I do. Sometimes I'll print something out, take notes, highlight, and then re-scan it back into Evernote to be OCR'd.

• 1:24:31Matt Mullenweg?

  Cool.

• 1:24:31Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, which, which I like a lot because I think better tactically. Is that a real word? I think so.

• 1:24:37Matt Mullenweg?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:41Tim Ferriss?

  What is the book that you have given as a gift most often?

• 1:24:47Tim Ferriss?

  Besides The Year Without Pants, which you can feel free to mention.

• 1:24:50Matt Mullenweg?

  Oh, yeah. There is a book about Automattic and WordPress.com called The Year Without Pants, written by a great author, Scott Burkin. Tells a story about how it work. 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.

• 1:25:08Tim Ferriss?

  Well, you were pronouncing crayons as crowns earlier, which I thought was amazing. I was like, crowns? What are crowns?

• 1:25:14Matt Mullenweg?

  Yeah, you draw with the crowns.

• 1:25:15Tim Ferriss?

  The kids draw with. I was like, oh, crayons.

• 1:25:17Matt Mullenweg?

  Maybe it's a southern thing. I don't know. But um, like for example, I've given a few times a book called How Proust Can Change Your Life by Elaine de Batton. Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit is one I've given.

• 1:25:30Tim Ferriss?

  That's cool. What is that about?

• 1:25:33Matt Mullenweg?

  I don't know if I can summarize that one, actually.

• 1:25:34Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 1:25:35Matt Mullenweg?

  It's really one that you enjoy.

• 1:25:36Tim Ferriss?

  Getting lost.

• 1:25:36Matt Mullenweg?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:37Tim Ferriss?

  Is Rebecca Solnit? Why do I know that name?

• 1:25:39Matt Mullenweg?

  She's local, actually.

• 1:25:40Tim Ferriss?

  She is. That's why I know that name.

• 1:25:41Matt Mullenweg?

  She's written, she writes for New Yorker, a little bit of everything.

• 1:25:45Matt Mullenweg?

  The Effective Executive.

• 1:25:47Tim Ferriss?

  That's a great one. That's Peter Drucker, right?

• 1:25:49Matt Mullenweg?

  Anything by Peter Drucker.

• 1:25:50Tim Ferriss?

  So good.

• 1:25:51Matt Mullenweg?

  Is gold.

• 1:25:51Tim Ferriss?

  So good.

• 1:25:52Matt Mullenweg?

  And so I recommend that a lot in the company. Words That Work by Frank Luntz.

• 1:25:56Tim Ferriss?

  I read that on your recommendation.

• 1:25:58Matt Mullenweg?

  Oh, did you like it?

• 1:25:59Tim Ferriss?

  I did. Yeah, that's, how would you describe that? That's a former.

• 1:26:05Tim Ferriss?

  Or current.

• 1:26:07Matt Mullenweg?

  Current, yeah, he's like the linguistic head of the Republican Party.

• 1:26:10Tim Ferriss?

  Right, so inheritance tax to death tax, or controlling the labels of a conversation and understanding what language works well for certain purposes.

• 1:26:19Matt Mullenweg?

  Yeah, so and depending on how if someone likes that book, likes that book, then I might point them to George Lakoff, like he has a great seminar work from the seventies called Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, or just other books about framing and language. So there's, you know, 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 fifteen years.

• 1:26:43Tim Ferriss?

  I did the same thing.

• 1:26:44Matt Mullenweg?

  Really?

• 1:26:45Tim Ferriss?

  Any favorites so far? Yeah, I didn't read fiction for probably fifteen to twenty years.

• 1:26:49Matt Mullenweg?

  There's one called The Hard Boiled Wonderland at the end of the universe.

• 1:26:51Tim Ferriss?

  Murakami?

• 1:26:52Matt Mullenweg?

  Yeah, I really liked it.

• 1:26:53Tim Ferriss?

  That's a quirky one, yeah.

• 1:26:54Matt Mullenweg?

  And he has a lot of jazz references and things I like, The Mages.

• 1:26:59Tim Ferriss?

  I have not read them.

• 1:27:00Matt Mullenweg?

  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 I want, 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, uh, just my whole life is better.

• 1:27:27Tim Ferriss?

  Well, you're the one who convinced me to get a Kindle. I don't know if you remember, we've gone, we've gone on a number of trips together, Thelma and Luis Stile, and attended word camps in Greece and Turkey and, uh, well, Vietnam was a trip for Room to Read, which is a great organization. But I remember in Greece, I had this backpack full of fourteen books and I was just like popping my, you know, my discs in 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.

• 1:27:59Matt Mullenweg?

  Although what you would do when we were waiting is you would actually lift it like a weight.

• 1:28:03Tim Ferriss?

  That's true, that's true. I use my backpack, uh, 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, uh, 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, tighty-whities or like ex-fascial 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.

• 1:28:41Matt Mullenweg?

  I think if you looked at a side by side, you have the backpack full of book muscles and I have the Kindle muscles.

• 1:28:48Tim Ferriss?

  That's true, although to your credit, you did get into physical fitness and kettlebells and so on. How's that, has that continued or is that, has that paused for the moment?

• 1:29:02Matt Mullenweg?

  It has continued pretty well.

• 1:29:03Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 1:29:12Matt Mullenweg?

  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 and 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 to walk and then it just kind of started building up. I think my next run was like a month later. Like it wasn't like I was instantly attached, but this, there's a guy in the company. He calls himself the crazy running guy and he

• 1:29:40Tim Ferriss?

  I think I've met him. Who's this?

• 1:29:41Matt Mullenweg?

  Joe Boydstein and he actually, or Boedst, Boedst, sorry, sorry Joe. He started doing this thing where he'd land at the airport and then run to the work 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.

• 1:30:01Tim Ferriss?

  That's insane.

• 1:30:02Matt Mullenweg?

  And so 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.

• 1:30:30Tim Ferriss?

  There's a really interesting guy named Dr. Romanoff. I don't know if you've ever come across this name. 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, uh, 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.

• 1:31:03Matt Mullenweg?

  I started with the Vibram's.

• 1:31:04Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:05Matt Mullenweg?

  I switched to just some super thin trail running shoes, but I still run more on the front or middle of my foot.

• 1:31:11Tim Ferriss?

  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 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 flatfoot and you're leaning forward on top of that to run, you can cause Achilles tendon, tendonitis or tendonosis.

• 1:31:39Matt Mullenweg?

  Which is really painful.

• 1:31:40Tim Ferriss?

  Really bad. Yeah, I've done that before.

• 1:31:42Matt Mullenweg?

  And it's true. Like, for a while, my right Achilles was kinda 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, Renee. So the, um, he ended up, you gotta be careful with this. So I know you're not a huge fan of running. I know it's high impact.

• 1:32:01Tim Ferriss?

  It's not, it's, uh, it's not that I'm, 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.

• 1:32:18Matt Mullenweg?

  I could see that.

• 1:32:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. And I think that running is much easier to justify as a moving meditation.

• 1:32:26Matt Mullenweg?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:32:27Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, and certainly, it's fantastic for travel. But that's why I have my bag that I can use as a weight also. Uh, 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 gonna have to work up to any type of impact. So I'll start with, I'll start with, uh, Some of the calisthenics I'm doing now and then graduate to low-impact jumping rope.

• 1:32:54Matt Mullenweg?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:32:54Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 1:33:08Matt Mullenweg?

  My, I love when I'm in a new city and I can do a run. It's a great way to see the city.

• 1:33:12Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, definitely.

• 1:33:13Matt Mullenweg?

  Because you're at just the right speed. I did one in Washington DC a week or two ago and it was so cool. I felt like I was on an episode of House of Cards. Like I'm going past the Washington monuments and like the Lincoln Memorial and like running around the mall. It was so cool.

• 1:33:25Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 1:33:30Matt Mullenweg?

  Nice.

• 1:33:31Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 1:33:43Tim Ferriss?

  I would love to ask a couple of questions that came in through Twitter specifically. I am at T Ferris, two Rs, two S's. You are?

• 1:33:53Matt Mullenweg?

  At Photomat, P-H-O-T-O-M-A-T-T, also a pun.

• 1:33:58Matt Mullenweg?

  Remember you used to get your photos developed?

• 1:34:01Tim Ferriss?

  I never noticed that.

• 1:34:03Matt Mullenweg?

  Wow, you just realized that.

• 1:34:04Tim Ferriss?

  I just noticed that you are, I forgot you're the pun master. And in Japanese, they call those oyaji gyaku, 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 right, Photomat, that makes perfect sense. So we've covered some of these. Joe Paulakowski 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?

• 1:34:47Matt Mullenweg?

  That's an interesting question. I'm not sure if he thinks we're totally bootstrapped or that we've raised money. So, 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.

• 1:35:00Tim Ferriss?

  This was automatic?

• 1:35:01Matt Mullenweg?

  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-old. 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 at the time. And so we used that to turn into a round and did about

• 1:35:45Matt Mullenweg?

  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.

• 1:35:54Tim Ferriss?

  How much did you, is it public how much you raised last year?

• 1:35:56Matt Mullenweg?

  We raised 160 million.

• 1:35:58Tim Ferriss?

  That's a, that's a big number. Is the valuation public?

• 1:36:01Matt Mullenweg?

  It was over a billion dollars, yeah.

• 1:36:03Tim Ferriss?

  It's also a big number, even bigger number. If you were, if you were starting over again developing WordPress, would you make a for-profit entity like WordPress.com or Automattic sooner?

• 1:36:15Matt Mullenweg?

  Hmm. So it wasn't a matter 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.

• 1:36:41Tim Ferriss?

  Meaning you pay taxes.

• 1:36:42Matt Mullenweg?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:43Tim Ferriss?

  Meaning we pay, yeah.

• 1:36:44Matt Mullenweg?

  I'll pay taxes till the cows come home. Right. So those rules to prevent abuse end up constricting the good 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 break 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're areas 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.

• 1:37:30Matt Mullenweg?

  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. I think it can be, you know, I would highly recommend it. But those shared expectations are really important. So I think that. What would be an expectation that's important to you? 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 it. Just time, 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?

• 1:38:11Matt Mullenweg?

  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 post to Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Path, everywhere. Stats, you know, 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. And now Jetpack has huge amounts of usage. It reaches a very influential audience. An investor looking at the company might say, ah, if you just charged like a little bit of money for this Jetpack thing, you'd make hundreds of millions of dollars, but.

• 1:38:52Matt Mullenweg?

  We need to be on the same page. That's not something that we're planning on. And so

• 1:38:55Tim Ferriss?

  Nice to know you have the option all the same.

• 1:38:58Matt Mullenweg?

  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 like if you can set your expectations with your investors, that's what they appreciate. And you invest in a lot of things. I invest in a lot of things.

• 1:39:15Tim Ferriss?

  I advise you to automatic also.

• 1:39:16Matt Mullenweg?

  Yeah, I haven't.

• 1:39:17Tim Ferriss?

  Which I'm honored to be. It's been really fantastically fun so far.

• 1:39:22Matt Mullenweg?

  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.

• 1:39:37Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:37Matt Mullenweg?

  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. So, 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.

• 1:39:51Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 1:40:03Matt Mullenweg?

  It's funny because I actually say badass. I just didn't because you did this whole setup, so.

• 1:40:09Tim Ferriss?

  I was trying to set expectations.

• 1:40:13Matt Mullenweg?

  If you, I mean, you have some pretty good suits. I've seen.

• 1:40:16Tim Ferriss?

  I do. I do. I have some suits.

• 1:40:17Matt Mullenweg?

  But, um.

• 1:40:18Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 1:40:34Matt Mullenweg?

  If you are going to go for a suit, Tom Ford.

• 1:40:36Tim Ferriss?

  Tom Ford?

• 1:40:37Matt Mullenweg?

  Is the way to go. They're pretty amazing.

• 1:40:39Tim Ferriss?

  Any particular suit?

• 1:40:40Matt Mullenweg?

  No, go into the store. They'll set you up. Your body type's different than mine. They'll find something that makes you look great. But they, their cut is much younger, much slimmer, much, um, more shaped in a way. I love Coton 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.

• 1:41:03Tim Ferriss?

  How did you get into clothing and fashion? Because it wasn't always this way.

• 1:41:08Matt Mullenweg?

  Um, I have no idea. It might have been the influence of my good friend Om, Om Malik. You know, he, he appreciates the finer things in life. And I think that for

• 1:41:19Tim Ferriss?

  Who created Giga Om for people who don't know?

• 1:41:21Matt Mullenweg?

  Yeah, Giga Om. He's a journalist, now VC at True Ventures, 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 glassware, 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

• 1:41:49Tim Ferriss?

  A hundred percent agreed. That's what any good journalist will tell you also.

• 1:41:53Matt Mullenweg?

  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.

• 1:42:03Tim Ferriss?

  So on purchases, what is the last hundred dollar or less purchase that you made that had a very positive impact on your life?

• 1:42:15Matt Mullenweg?

  Ah, the first thing that comes to mind is quite embarrassing.

• 1:42:19Tim Ferriss?

  The gimp suit?

• 1:42:20Matt Mullenweg?

  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, it turns out Lululemon is freaking awesome.

• 1:42:33Matt Mullenweg?

  They make really great stuff. Now, it's kind of expensive, like, it's definitely one of those, it's like shopping at Whole Foods where you walk out and 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 shop, super soft, super warm. I can run in them. I can sleep in them. I can do whatever.

• 1:43:00Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 1:43:23Matt Mullenweg?

  This post is about my backpack. So it's about the things that, I mean, I brought my backpack here. I carry my backpack almost constantly.

• 1:43:31Matt Mullenweg?

  Especially being...

• 1:43:32Tim Ferriss?

  What type of backpack is that?

• 1:43:33Matt Mullenweg?

  Uh, it's...

• 1:43:34Tim Ferriss?

  That is very Indiana Jones.

• 1:43:36Matt Mullenweg?

  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.

• 1:43:47Matt Mullenweg?

  So, because I can work from anywhere, sometimes I have to work from everywhere. That's the downside.

• 1:43:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yes.

• 1:43:53Matt Mullenweg?

  And you never know when an emergency is gonna pop up or anything, so... I tend to have within sort of a 10 to 15 minute radius the tools I need to be productive anyplace 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 do a post about it. You asked me to do a post about this years ago.

• 1:44:18Tim Ferriss?

  I did.

• 1:44:19Matt Mullenweg?

  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 you.

• 1:44:25Tim Ferriss?

  Do you still use, I think it's called...

• 1:44:29Tim Ferriss?

  Well, this is, I have one right here. This is, since I am packing. Well, this is Gridit, technology by Cocoon. Do you still use these? Oh, wow, you've got the big boy.

• 1:44:39Matt Mullenweg?

  Yeah, I use a big Gridit, but...

• 1:44:41Tim Ferriss?

  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 5 inches by 10 inches.

• 1:44:53Matt Mullenweg?

  Mine's 8 by 10, I think.

• 1:44:55Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yours is 8 by 10, and it's 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.

• 1:45:10Matt Mullenweg?

  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 the 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've, 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 photo mat on it. And then I gave it to all my friends and even like some random people I meet, like instead of a business car, I just give them a key to my car.

• 1:45:44Matt Mullenweg?

  With the idea being.

• 1:45:45Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you have random.

• 1:45:46Matt Mullenweg?

  When I lost my keys, someone would have the ability or when I lost my keys in the car.

• 1:45:51Tim Ferriss?

  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. Within the boundaries of legality in your state or jurisdiction.

• 1:46:06Matt Mullenweg?

  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 anytime something's not there, like I keep a bowl by my front door, the keys always go in there.

• 1:46:22Tim Ferriss?

  You keep a what?

• 1:46:23Matt Mullenweg?

  A bowl.

• 1:46:23Tim Ferriss?

  A bowl, right.

• 1:46:24Matt Mullenweg?

  By the front door. Um, 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, you know, 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, you know?

• 1:46:41Matt Mullenweg?

  I'm always losing something. Actually, I lost one of our initial investment checks. It's a check for $400,000.

• 1:46:46Tim Ferriss?

  That's not good to lose.

• 1:46:49Matt Mullenweg?

  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. It's a 400, it's most money I've ever seen in my life. I was like, I was 20 years old. I was like, what is this? I expected to be a check, like a publisher's clearinghouse, you know, like the size of a table.

• 1:47:07Tim Ferriss?

  That you could surf like a right, like a floating carpet from Aladdin down to the bank.

• 1:47:11Matt Mullenweg?

  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? Like. Because obviously like he could stop the check, but then he's just entrusted me with 400,000 and I've lost it. Like what's the most irresponsible thing you can do? So like, 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.

• 1:47:36Tim Ferriss?

  Because you didn't want to ask him.

• 1:47:37Matt Mullenweg?

  I didn't ask him and I'm going back to Houston for Thanksgiving and I opened the book I'm reading and I'd use it as a bookmark.

• 1:47:47Matt Mullenweg?

  And it kind of fell out of the book on the plane. I was like, oh my goodness. That's quite a fine. That's better than $20 in the pants you just washed. And so 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 like a slot machine, like you deposit a 400 grand check, like bells should go off. Like they should like give you a glass of champagne or something, but total non Not just Non-event at this local branch of Bank of America. I was just like, here you go. Like, okay. Goodbye. It's the most apathetic thing ever, but Step aside, sir. You have people behind you. I did. I told him like a year later and he was like, oh man, yeah. He just hadn't looked.

• 1:48:26Matt Mullenweg?

  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 $4. And I was super broke at the time. And so I was like, man, I'm just gonna stock up on these.

• 1:49:04Matt Mullenweg?

  Like the way you might get like cans or, 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 I was just like, I love McNuggets. And I had the kind of like sweet talk to person. So they gave me lots of extra that sweetened sour sauce. And the McDonald's sweetened sour sauce is not like sweetened sour sauce anywhere else in the world. Like all sweetened 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 it was 104. So it wasn't even a bet or anything. You just rampaged through 104. While watching the Super Bowl. That's incredible. It was the Super Bowl where Janet Jackson had their wardrobe malfunction.

• 1:49:47Matt Mullenweg?

  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 we're like, what just happened? I was completely mortified. And I think I had a laptop and the internet and wifi 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 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. And she said she was so pissed off, like, looked so angry. She has, it was not absolutely not planned.

• 1:50:29Tim Ferriss?

  Huh. I could, 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. 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 have 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, I have 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? And I was like, yep, yeah, I did. Sorry about that.

• 1:51:12Matt Mullenweg?

  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.

• 1:51:19Tim Ferriss?

  This is the car scene?

• 1:51:21Matt Mullenweg?

  The car scene or the where he's drawing her 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.

• 1:51:27Tim Ferriss?

  To switch gears a little bit, when you think of the word successful, who is the first person who comes to mind and why?

• 1:51:34Matt Mullenweg?

  Hmm. It's funny because he's getting totally panned in the press right now, but I think of Jeff Bezos.

• 1:51:40Tim Ferriss?

  Why Jeff Bezos?

• 1:51:44Tim Ferriss?

  Why is he getting pinned? This is how I get informed.

• 1:51:47Matt Mullenweg?

  The Fire Phone was a complete flop. They wrote down hundreds of millions of dollars of inventory. Obviously didn't sell well. And articles have come out since then saying how like he micromanaged a whole process and things like that. I'm actually going to do a blog post about this. One of my favorite business books is called The Halo Effect. And it talks about, the case study they use is Cisco and 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. I'm saying John Chambers is genius. They acquire companies, they don't have to invent everything. They can, you know, acquire dozens of companies and integrate them and competitors just can't compete. And then once they started crashing, again, nothing changed about the business, but the stock goes down.

• 1:52:30Matt Mullenweg?

  The same, sometimes the same writers were saying, oh, it's a mishmash of infighting. They have all this like technology that doesn't integrate and they, 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.

• 1:53:01Matt Mullenweg?

  The Fire Phone flopped and now everyone's saying, oh, these idiots. You know, this, the attention to detail becomes micromanaging, you know, the 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 of a risk if he doesn't super mess it up every couple of years.

• 1:53:28Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 1:53:34Matt Mullenweg?

  Excellent book, yeah.

• 1:53:35Tim Ferriss?

  But it 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.

• 1:53:54Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 1:54:37Matt Mullenweg?

  And the people with the most knowledge about a given topic don't necessarily have any incentive to write about it.

• 1:54:42Tim Ferriss?

  Absolutely not.

• 1:54:43Matt Mullenweg?

  So do you buy and sell individual stocks?

• 1:54:46Tim Ferriss?

  I don't right now. My personality, my intestinal fortitude is not well suited to public stocks. I don't like having the option on a daily basis to buy and sell.

• 1:54:59Matt Mullenweg?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:00Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 1:55:11Matt Mullenweg?

  Or longer.

• 1:55:11Tim Ferriss?

  Or longer.

• 1:55:12Matt Mullenweg?

  An automax coming up on 10.

• 1:55:14Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. And I'm not, I'm not overly, that doesn't, that doesn't concern me. It actually consoles me because it forces me to do more homework on the front end.

• 1:55:25Matt Mullenweg?

  I agree. I use Wealthfront, also an investor in.

• 1:55:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, we're both an investor.

• 1:55:30Matt Mullenweg?

  Sometimes I get individual stocks, like if 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 like this minute to minute number that moves. Like, that's the one thing I wouldn't look forward to with being a public company is, well, raising money is hard as well, because basically saying, someone saying, your life's work. This is what it's worth.

• 1:55:53Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:55:54Matt Mullenweg?

  They're quantifying it. I can't imagine what it's like with the minute to minute vagaries of the market, public markets.

• 1:56:01Tim Ferriss?

  I'm so continually impressed by.

• 1:56:05Tim Ferriss?

  People like Nassim Taleb or many of the hedge fund guys out there who are develop a hypothesis about a particular way to approach a short, 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 that.

• 1:56:40Matt Mullenweg?

  While losing money every day.

• 1:56:40Tim Ferriss?

  While losing money every day and having people tell you you're an idiot.

• 1:56:43Matt Mullenweg?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:46Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 1:57:12Matt Mullenweg?

  And emotionally, you want to buy high and sell low.

• 1:57:14Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, definitely.

• 1:57:16Matt Mullenweg?

  If it's dropping, you're like, oh, I gotta get out of this. If it's rising, you're like, oh, it's great. I'm gonna buy some more.

• 1:57:20Tim Ferriss?

  Are there any particular books on investing or books that you've read that have helped you think about investing?

• 1:57:27Matt Mullenweg?

  Well, you said the man, Nassim Nassim Taleb.

• 1:57:32Tim Ferriss?

  You're the one who introduced me to the black swan, actually.

• 1:57:35Matt Mullenweg?

  Oh, yeah. I don't recommend that to everyone.

• 1:57:37Tim Ferriss?

  I love the black swan.

• 1:57:39Matt Mullenweg?

  I love it. Fooled by randomness, anti fragility, his latest one. I love his book of aphorisms. Like his writing's been super influential on me, both in, 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.

• 1:57:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:57Matt Mullenweg?

  But like he introduced me to Imber to Echo and other really fantastic authors. So he's great. And then, you know, reading Warren Buffett's letters.

• 1:58:05Tim Ferriss?

  I was, I was going to mention.

• 1:58:06Matt Mullenweg?

  I know you're a big Warren Buffett friend, fan.

• 1:58:08Tim Ferriss?

  I wish I were a big Warren Buffett friend. I am a big Warren Buffett fan and I know that name is, 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.

• 1:58:26Matt Mullenweg?

  You know, something I can say, you asked about what we look for for candidates hiring, 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.

• 1:58:44Tim Ferriss?

  It's a very masochistic process. I would not want to inflict on, on anyone unduly.

• 1:58:49Matt Mullenweg?

  But I love reading about writers and the process of writing, like Bird by Bird, Anne Lamont, or On Writing Well, William Zinsler. The Ernest Hemingway on writing, which I think I got from this podcast, actually.

• 1:59:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that's a, that's a fun one.

• 1:59:03Matt Mullenweg?

  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.

• 1:59:24Tim Ferriss?

  So just a few more questions. The first is from, wow, Valour 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?

• 1:59:45Matt Mullenweg?

  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. There is just a blog. And you'd have the rest of your website doing something else, and then you'd plug the blog in, your WordPress. We'd span it to be a CMS. That was the second wave of WordPress. And then it started powering your entire site. So, and that's been really the past five or six years, where we 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 plugin 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.

• 2:00:29Matt Mullenweg?

  The things that we wrote to write a blog and CMS, to write other things.

• 2:00:33Tim Ferriss?

  The primitives are the elements of the infrastructure that were used to create those things in the first place?

• 2:00:39Matt Mullenweg?

  Yeah, so think of a 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 gotta do all this stuff. Right. So if you can start with WordPress, it saves you months. Not for everything, not for everyone, but if you know WordPress, you know, you start.

• 2:01:13Matt Mullenweg?

  I'm gonna ask you a silly question because I like asking silly questions. As a, as a non, 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. It's people are using WordPress as a framework. It's a framework which does a lot, has a lot more things built out than like a Ruby might.

• 2:01:37Matt Mullenweg?

  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.

• 2:02:18Matt Mullenweg?

  Yours, I mean, it's really of the tech meme. Very flattered that you put me in that group. All those guys. But I try, I try. If you look at TechMeme, like we'll typically power 50 to 70% of all the sites that are on TechMeme on a given day. TechMeme, 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, 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. You go to the primary sources. So which sometimes might be not even news, like a TechCrunch or a Verge, but the actual person, like you or me. Oh, interesting.

• 2:03:01Matt Mullenweg?

  They'll link to the originals as well, which is really nice.

• 2:03:04Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 2:03:24Matt Mullenweg?

  I'm going to 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.

• 2:03:36Tim Ferriss?

  They're so timeless though.

• 2:03:37Matt Mullenweg?

  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 loved The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki. I haven't read it since then.

• 2:03:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, no, it stands up pretty well.

• 2:03:52Matt Mullenweg?

  Yeah, but it really inspired me. I think you should read The Four Hour Work Week. Just, I'm going to plug you.

• 2:03:57Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you, sir.

• 2:03:58Matt Mullenweg?

  And a recent one, like a brand new one. I'll say two brand new ones. I'm sorry, you asked for three things.

• 2:04:03Tim Ferriss?

  No, no, you can keep going, you can keep going.

• 2:04:05Matt Mullenweg?

  The Hard Things About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. Pretty good, entertaining more than anything. Like, 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.

• 2:04:17Tim Ferriss?

  Zero to One.

• 2:04:18Matt Mullenweg?

  That was excellent.

• 2:04:19Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 2:04:28Matt Mullenweg?

  Yeah, by Blake Masters, I believe.

• 2:04:30Tim Ferriss?

  Exactly, they're really just tremendous.

• 2:04:32Matt Mullenweg?

  All of these guys, I mean, don't take them as gospel. Like, disagree with them. Interpret it in your own way. There's some people who I admire quite a bit, like, say, Mark Andreessen. 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 Facebooks, the Googles, the Microsofts, the everything. And so, why should you do something different? And...

• 2:05:04Matt Mullenweg?

  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 styles. He challenges you and sees how you respond. But you know, 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, you know, Google makes tens or hundreds of billions of dollars more than us. What can we do that we can't do? Well, they're set up best to work in an 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 they're just as good as anyone inside the Mountain View offices. But they just don't happen to be in Mountain View.

• 2:05:46Tim Ferriss?

  It's like, it makes me think of the book, The Starfish and the Spider, in a way. Particularly with the open source component, right? Open source isn't going to, the open source WordPress isn't going to die, even if, even if Automattic were to cease operations.

• 2:06:04Matt Mullenweg?

  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.

• 2:06:16Tim Ferriss?

  They did Super Bowl advertising, didn't they?

• 2:06:18Matt Mullenweg?

  Yeah, they're gonna do more this year.

• 2:06:19Tim Ferriss?

  That's expensive.

• 2:06:21Matt Mullenweg?

  But they had to.

• 2:06:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 2:06:22Matt Mullenweg?

  You know, that's the only way they can get customers. Where, 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, I think, 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.

• 2:06:40Tim Ferriss?

  You do love events. I love your events, too. They're very well done.

• 2:06:43Matt Mullenweg?

  Thank you.

• 2:06:46Tim Ferriss?

  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, one album and two other items that were non-survival related, what would they be?

• 2:07:09Matt Mullenweg?

  The album's really tough. There are some really perfect albums out there. Like, I think Radiohead's OK Computer. It's like, just a perfect album. And it works as an album. The individual songs don't work as well. Or like Frank Ocean's 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.

• 2:07:33Tim Ferriss?

  No, that's not true. If it's breakbeats or danceable and I like the lyrics, I'm all for it.

• 2:07:37Matt Mullenweg?

  Cool.

• 2:07:37Tim Ferriss?

  Eric B. and Rakim and That Iil.

• 2:07:40Matt Mullenweg?

  How old are you?

• 2:07:42Tim Ferriss?

  Sixty-seven.

• 2:07:43Matt Mullenweg?

  I'm just giving you a hard time. But there's some new guys that are super cool, too.

• 2:07:46Tim Ferriss?

  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 forty. That stuff makes me insane. But if it's, if it has some unique flavor to it, all for it.

• 2:08:02Matt Mullenweg?

  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.

• 2:08:16Matt Mullenweg?

  In terms of other non-essential items that aren't books, I'm not gonna say a Kindle or an encyclopedia or something. A fifty-millimeter, one-point-four prime lens.

• 2:08:25Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 2:08:25Matt Mullenweg?

  Is the lens I would take to a deserted island.

• 2:08:29Matt Mullenweg?

  And I burn easily, so probably an umbrella or something.

• 2:08:34Tim Ferriss?

  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 twenty-year-old self a piece of advice, one piece of advice, what would it be?

• 2:08:51Matt Mullenweg?

  Slow down.

• 2:08:52Tim Ferriss?

  Slow down. Why?

• 2:08:56Matt Mullenweg?

  We talked about it with running earlier. Like, slow down to go further.

• 2:09:02Matt Mullenweg?

  I think a lot of the mistakes of my youth were mistakes of ambition, not mistakes of...

• 2:09:06Tim Ferriss?

  Sloth.

• 2:09:07Matt Mullenweg?

  Sloth. And...

• 2:09:12Matt Mullenweg?

  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. 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.

• 2:09:43Matt Mullenweg?

  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.

• 2:10:02Matt Mullenweg?

  It's interesting because.

• 2:10:04Tim Ferriss?

  I feel like you're living in dog years, though. I mean, the amount of experience that you can press into each year is unbelievable.

• 2:10:10Matt Mullenweg?

  I have a lot of, I had a lot of success at a young age, which is 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's 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.

• 2:10:38Matt Mullenweg?

  And you don't always choose either of those.

• 2:10:40Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 2:10:41Matt Mullenweg?

  Sometimes you can't help who you fall in love with. Life would be so much easier if you could.

• 2:10:45Tim Ferriss?

  That's true.

• 2:10:46Matt Mullenweg?

  And you don't always choose who falls in love with you. And but there's a responsibility in both and really focusing on those people. I find it's contributed more to my happiness than almost anything else.

• 2:10:56Tim Ferriss?

  I think that's a great place to end. Matt, where can people learn more about you, find you on the internet?

• 2:11:03Matt Mullenweg?

  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.

• 2:11:15Tim Ferriss?

  Awesome. All right, Sarah, 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.

• 2:11:25Matt Mullenweg?

  Cheers.

• 2:11:29Tim Ferriss?

  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 fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. That's fourhourworkweek, all spelled out, F-O-U-R-H-O-U-R, workweek.com/podcast. And if you liked 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.

• 2:12:13Tim Ferriss?

  You can find all of that and much, much more at fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. And as always, I try to put bonus content, videos from these guests, on Facebook at facebook.com/timferriss. T-I-M-F-E-R-R-I-S-S. Until next time, thanks so much for listening. The Tim Ferriss Show is brought to you by Onnit. I have used Onnit products for years. If you look in my kitchen, in my garage, you will find AlphaBrain, chewable melatonin for resetting my clock when I'm traveling, kettlebells, battle ropes, maces, steel clubs. It sounds like a torture chamber, and it kind of is. It's a torture chamber for self-improvement.

• 2:12:55Tim Ferriss?

  And you can see all of my favorite gear at onnit.com/tim. That's O-N-N-I-T dot com forward slash tim. And you can also get a discount on any supplements, food products. I like Hemp Force, I like AlphaBrain. Check it all out, onnit.com/tim. The Tim Ferriss Show is also brought to you by 99designs. 99designs is your one-stop shop for anything graphic design-related. You need a logo, you need a website, you need a business card, or anything else, you get an original design from designers around the world who submit drafts for you to review. You are happy, or you get your money back. And I have used 99designs for book cover ideas, for The Four Hour Body, which went to number

• 2:13:37Tim Ferriss?

  one New York Times, for banner ads, and you can check out some of my actual competitions at 99designs.com/tim. You can also get a free $99 upgrade if you want to give it a shot. That's 99designs.com/tim.