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Optimal. Minimal. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.
Can I answer your personal question? Now, what is a perfect time? What if I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over a metal endoskeleton?
Matthew.
Dr. Mullenweg. Not a doctor at all.
In my heart of hearts, you're always a doctor.
I think in Argentina, I got an honorary degree actually in that country.
I'm so jelly. Argentina, I haven't been back in a hundred years, but we're not here to talk about my aspirations and dreams. Although maybe.
Yeah, I hope to hear some.
We'll dive in and out. Bob and weave. For people who don't have context on the Argentine doctor Mullenweg, could you give people just a snapshot?
Yeah. Matt Mullenweg, ma.tt, which is pretty fun. So, I go by ma.tt sometimes. Born and raised in Houston, Texas, a few hours from here in Austin. And at the age of 19, I co-founded open source software called WordPress, which is a blogging content management system. Fast forward 20 years, it's been 20 years now, and runs over a third of all websites in the world. A few years after that, I founded a company called Automattic, which is kind of like the for-profit side of commercializing things around WordPress.
M-A-T-T-I-C. Yes. It's like any egotistical founder, I snuck my name into the company. And we started with just sort of Akismet, Anti-Spam, and WordPress.com, kind of easy ways to get going with WordPress. But since have expanded to e-commerce with WooCommerce, one I'll talk about with messaging. Like we've done a number of over 25 acquisitions. So we're trying to be like a digital Berkshire Hathaway, like a buyer of first resort for amazing things on the internet. Pretty much everything we do is open source or open web. So we bought Tumblr. So we're running Tumblr for the last few years. Basically trying to, yeah, I would like future generations to grow up with a web that is more open, more free, gives more liberty. And so open source is really my life's work even above WordPress and anything else. And yeah, I hope to work on it the rest of my life.
You are one of the rare examples and I'm so envious of this particular sort of mental state of focus that you have, which is this clarity on what you want to do, something you could do for the rest of your life with that degree of certainty. It's something that's always struck me as rare and maybe not as a consequence of being rare, but precious in a sense. So anyway, I'm happy for you. I don't run across that much from a professional perspective. It's like I want to do this for the rest of my life.
I think it's because the open source freedom and liberty is somewhat abstract. So there could be lots of things under that. In fact, I just mentioned probably too many things. Some people call me very unfocused.
But you, that too. We talked about on the last podcast around like teaching, learning, education, like lifelong, that's the rest of your life.
And so I think if you can find those principles you can keep them and then the job might change, other things might change.
I'm lucky to work at the same job because I'm probably unemployable anywhere else at this point. But it's been a lot of fun. Oh, Automattic's now over 1,900 people in 97 countries. We were fully remote and distributed since 2005. So, we've been kind of early on a few of those trends, open source, distributed, etc.
For people, and I know we've talked about this before, and you've certainly talked about it in other places, but we're going to get into a lot of new territory. Before we do that though, open source, just for people who may not have familiarity with that term. What does that mean? Normally when you sign up for software, you click through that license, you know, that no one ever reads.
Ours actually has Easter eggs in it just to see if anyone will find them. But yeah, most of those licenses are about all the rights you don't have. You know, sometimes you're not even allowed to look at the thing and see how it works. There's a whole right to repair movement right now where you can buy things that you're not even allowed to repair yourself. Open source is the opposite. It's all about almost like a bill of rights for you as a user. WordPress belongs just as much to Tim Ferriss as it does to me, which is kind of amazing. There's rights and freedoms you have to use it for any purpose, to modify it, to see how it works, all these sorts of things that no one can take away from you. Even myself as a co-founder, or even if all the other developers got together, we all agreed to become evil, we couldn't take it away from you.
It's that bill of rights, those inalienable rights is the core of open source. And there's lots of examples. So like Wikipedia is open source applied to an encyclopedia, right?
It used to be really bad and Encarta and Encyclopedia Britannica were way better, but then over time lots of people working together made it better and better. And why did they work on it? For free, for fun, and also because it belongs to them.
So, you know, WordPress has many thousands, maybe probably tens of thousands of contributors at this point. Why do they do that? Is it Tom Sawyer painting the fence or is it the other guy?
You know, I need more caffeine to be on my literary references.
Yeah, but you know the—wow, we should both know that. Wow, I'm embarrassed for both of us. Tom Sawyer and it'll be first thing in the comments.
Huckleberry Finn. Yeah, it's because it actually belongs to people. So sometimes people come in and just fix one bug that's annoying them, or sometimes, you know, you have the pride of knowing that code you wrote is running on a third of all websites in the world, which is actually like a real thrill as like an engineer developer. And that's just a lot of fun and it's openly collaborative in that way. Not to state the obvious, but it's a contrast to actually this news item I saw—news is probably giving it a little bit too much gravitas—but I read this story which seemed credible based on the source. I'm not going to give too much, but that this engineer joins a startup and fixes one or two bugs or develops a feature that he wanted in the product and then put in notice and that was two weeks later.
Yeah, I love that story because I know so many like on-the-spectrum engineers that would totally do that.
It's like a beautiful hack, right? Like I just got to get this fixed. They won't. There's actually companies I would do that.
One thing I have considered is like mystery shopping, like seeing if I could get hired by my own company under a fake identity or just something like that, kind of fun.
So why would you do that?
Oh, one, to experience the hiring process, which is difficult for me to debug except by secondhand accounts. Two, to see if I, you know, how my code still is.
Do companies provide mystery shopper like services for hiring processes or no? Because mystery shoppers, right, this would be the equivalent of say retail, where there are companies you can hire, they send people into stores to experience the touch points and the flow or lack of flow and then to report back so you can improve your operations. And you have that for security, right? You can hire people to red team and try to exploit or defeat your security and then you get a report back and you can improve things. Does that exist for something like hiring process?
Probably does, but I'm a big believer in especially executives going and doing the work themselves, engaging with the customers, doing customer support, trying out the product, building a, you know, a website, whatever it is that your thing is. I think that's so key.
I might be making this up, but it's something along the lines of two weeks of frontline service, even if it's a CFO or someone who's—
And actually I'm going to be doing—so no matter the job you're hired for at Automattic, you start with two weeks of support and then every single person rotates back in one week per year. And I'm running out of year so I'm actually squeezing mine in at the very end here. So if you go to WordPress.com support in the next two weeks you might get me. But yeah, I talked to an executive at Salesforce, I was really impressed. They were saying they spend 50% of their time with customers. This was a top executive running an organization of thousands of people. I was like, wow, that's inspiring to me. I'm probably 25 or 30% right now. So, it really made me think like, am I spending enough time with customers? And also like we might have some executives that are spending closer to 0% time. So, like how do we make this like a cultural thing throughout the company?
So, you're an enthusiastic fellow. Part of why, part of why I like spending time with you. Good vibes, lots of smiles, lots of laughs, and you also find a lot of things that are interesting out at the edges. You're an immaculate packer of bags also. So, for those who do not know, What's in My Bag every year gives the latest and greatest of Matt's tech gadgetry and assorted doodads and doohickeys that he's traveling with. As a road warrior who travels, fair to say most of the time, your schedule—we're going to get to my first planned question in a second. I recall maybe it was five months ago, six months ago, who knows? You sent me something along the lines of just in case we can overlap, here's where I'll be in the next year. And it was one of the most absurd—it was like a Rolling Stones tour. Are you continuing to do that in terms of travel for the next year?
Yeah, currently. So, why do I go into it? Well, it's a global community. So, I want to have a global company and a global community. So our hack for Automattic because we're apart most of the year is the teams get together a couple times a year. So if you're an individual contributor, you might travel two or three times a year, but as CEO, this means that every week there's like a couple of meetups happening. And I try to hit the bigger ones, sometimes the small ones, too, but mostly the really big ones where there's a couple hundred people there, but that's happening at least once a month. Then for WordPress, there's like three major WordCamps per year that have thousands of people. There's all these different—I just did State of the Word in Madrid. So you just take those, you're traveling a week out of the month already and then you got to add in some fun.
You're not going to die of fun deficiency. You got to have fun.
And it's, yeah, it really adds up. But it does take more of a toll than it used to. I got to be totally honest. There was years I did well over 400,000 miles and looking back I was like I don't know if maybe I still have some of the energy or maybe I'm getting more radiation in the plane. I don't know. Maybe I'm just getting older.
That does happen to people.
I know. Thank God. So, no more of this 30 under 30, 40 under 40 nonsense. You've accumulated 700 lifetimes worth of those. So, you mentioned gatherings and the first, I suppose, cone that we're going to weave around on this slalom of a conversation is things that are exciting you, things you're excited about, five or more. And I enjoy this format. It's very simple. I haven't done it much and it's a shame because I always have a good time doing it. Where would you like to start?
So if you look at Automattic's history, it's like 2005 blogging CMS, 2016 commerce through WooCommerce. It's grown to over 30 billion of sales or GMV. And we entered our third major area this year which was messaging. So we acquired this company called Texts. You might remember these sorts of programs, but we all have 20 different messaging apps. Texts currently takes 10 of them. It will take more in the future. So, Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, Instagram Messenger, Twitter DMs, all these sorts of things. Some of which have terrible interfaces. It brings them into one power user app, right now desktop only, because it's all ultra secure. So, it doesn't break any encryption or run anything in the cloud. It's all on your device, which is I think very, very important. Like engineers, you have like a code of ethics. I think we need to build things extra secure now. And brings them all together. It's really nice. I often acquire apps or invest in things to make up for my own deficiencies. So like investing in Calm in like 2012 or whatever it was because I felt like I need to meditate. So I was so behind on messages. I'm like, okay, we got to buy this company and make it available.
It's like a much more expensive version of the guy who gets hired and fixes the bugs and then leaves.
Buying companies. Small team. Really, really exciting. And yeah, I don't know. I'd love for you to try it actually.
Well, my team is using it and—actually told me about this even before I had heard about it myself. So, some credit there. Team is loving it. I have used it and it is a great product. Where can people find it or learn more about it?
texts.com. T-E-X-T-S.com.
texts.com. All right. texts.com.
And if you go on desktop, and it's a paid product right now.
Mhm. So 15 bucks a month, five bucks a month if you're a student or pretend to be a student.
And but we're also going to explore some different things. Mobile app is coming out next year in the early part. And we're going to explore some different pricing as well. Maybe making it free for one or two networks, paid for more. That's some very exciting stuff there.
All right. So I want to ask you a strategy question to the extent that you can discuss it. So you were kind enough to spend a lot of time with me just as a friend overall, which I really appreciate. Love spending time with you. And also just because disclosures are important, I am available at your beck and call, advisor with Automattic from the early days.
And I am fascinated by not just how you operate in the world but how you think about the world, right? Because that's a prerequisite for making a lot of not necessarily contrarian—because you can be a different form of sheep as a contrarian too by just doing the opposite of what everyone else does, that's easy—but picking and choosing where you're going to be unorthodox or approach things obliquely is more challenging. So the question, and I'm going to set the table with some other examples, but the question is how you choose what you're going to get into in terms of areas, products, etc. Right? Because there's diversification, there's lack of focus, there's synergy, these words we can throw around. I would love to know how you think about, for instance, or thought about getting into commerce, which I think is a more obvious leap in my mind than say messaging. And what I've observed is say in the media landscape—well the media landscape and the social media platform landscapes have collided in such a major way in say the last five to ten years where you have Amazon Studios, you've got Netflix, you've got messaging and then video and so on that are seemingly all being pursued on some level by a lot of these large platforms in the form say WhatsApp or whatever it might be. So, how do you choose what to engage in next? And you said some people might say I'm unfocused. I don't consider you unfocused, but there are sometimes sort of hidden or unspoken rationales or logics. So, how do you think about what you're going to do next?
I do think about it for a long time.
So, we've been thinking about messaging and actually making investments in the space for, yeah, four or five years. Think a lot about environment and incentives. So, you know, the reason there used to be these multi-messaging apps 15 years ago and they all stopped working was the networks all blocked them. And there is a political environment now which I think is more conducive to being more customer and user-centric. This is our data, right? This is our messages. It's all secure. It's not breaking security or anything. So, why shouldn't we be able to run this?
Can you give an example of a network blocking these kind of multi-message tools in the past?
Yeah, it happened last week. There was another one called Beeper that supported iMessage and Apple decided to just shut it down. They broke it all and Beeper had to actually charge its users. They had to refund everyone. There's also more subtle things they could do like they could just subtly degrade. If they make it so your messages don't go through 5% of the time, it's not blocking you, right? But you're going to stop using it.
It's like throttling your hotel speed on Wi-Fi so you upgrade to the premium. You're like, okay, all right.
They don't need to block you, which might draw attention. They can just make it a little wobbly, more painful, and it doesn't take a lot of friction for people to move away, especially in messaging. So the regulatory framework, both with the EU doing a lot of—sometimes misguided but also sometimes really smart. They have an act coming in called the DMA that requires some interop between messaging services. You know, we'll talk about USB-C, which I'm very excited about. Thank you EU for forcing Apple to finally drop Lightning and give us USB-C. And then in the US, I think there is bipartisan—this I actually don't agree with, but it is a reality—like some extra scrutiny on big tech.
And so I think it's actually good for them. Again, what are their incentives? I think it's actually really good for them to show that they're open right now. So again, I don't want to fight these folks.
They've got more money than most countries.
They could squash us like a bug if they really, really wanted to. But we're always doing things open source, user-centric.
It'd be a bad look for them to try to squash.
If you have the people on your side, I feel like that's what truly matters in the long term. And people are what—short-term, you know, lobbying, etc. But like long-term in the US, functioning democracy, politics is accountable to its people.
So if we come back to what you said, and the whole point of this format is scaffolding and then we can deviate. So we're deviating right now. People may have noticed talking about a, let's just say, a next-gen or digital Berkshire Hathaway. So Berkshire Hathaway could have—well originally textiles, but they could have insurance, then they could have something that is—
Chocolates, right, See's Candies, things that are completely unrelated on a face-value business level. They're not integrated in the way that a CMS or having a gajillion blogs and websites running on your platform would combine very easily with WooCommerce. Those two pair very nicely. Are you thinking about, say in the case of texts.com, that that is a standalone in the same way that some of these Berkshire Hathaways might be a standalone? How do you think about building and acquiring in that way? Are they standalones? How much do they need to help each other or not? In the case of Berkshire, right? Like the insurance premiums and so on as I understand it provide a huge bolus of cash for all sorts of other purposes, right? So sort of the capital can be utilized across the family in a sense. How do you think about—because there's so many different ways you could rank order the priorities when looking at potential acquisitions, right? Is it just like customer pain point, converging trend lines in terms of regulation and public sentiment, which Berkshire navigates beautifully in highly regulated industries including insurance, railways. But yeah, how—
I think about it—so I like to study these people. I know you love doing that too, study high performers. It's your thing, right?
Yeah, occasionally do that. But also, I mean, Charlie Munger, rest in peace, 99 years old. Warren Buffett, I don't know exactly, I think up there as well. So I try to think, you know, if Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger were hackers in their 30s or 40s today, what would they build versus what they built in their time with the opportunities and technology afforded? So I like to think they'd do some open source, because it's obviously the future. So for atoms companies, atoms versus bits, and in the industries they're in, I think, yes, I think there would be a lot of coordination cost and they try to optimize for giving the companies under them as much autonomy as possible. And they find great leaders and they also try to find great businesses. I think Warren Buffett said something like we try to find a business a monkey could run because someday they will, or something like that, you know, like what business is so good it would survive even bad leadership. So what we do with the digital version of that is we lower coordination costs between the different products by open source. So like for WooCommerce to build on top of WordPress, it doesn't need a meeting. Doesn't need to talk. It doesn't even need to know the people developing WordPress. There's open APIs, open source, there's a plug-in framework, etc. So that removes a lot of the coordination costs that you normally get in a multi-division company.
Now, when you say coordination cost, are you talking about people internally, say full-time employees, or are you talking about the communities that surround some of these things?
In proprietary software, if you want to integrate with something—like if I wanted to add a new feature to macOS or, you know, something like that, I can't do that. Now, they have APIs, they have operating systems. Smart companies like Slack or Shopify will create marketplaces that you can extend them. However, you're subject to their terms, right? So, they can change their mind. Remember, Twitter used to have all those clients. Facebook did, too. They were like, oh, we don't want this anymore. You're all kicked off. So, rough Tuesday.
Don't build on proprietary platforms. They can pull the rug and will pull the rug at any point.
So, in open source, one, the rug can't be pulled. Two, typically they're ultra pluggable, so you can really change every line of WordPress.
Not to interrupt, but would you mind giving a real world example of what this lowered integration cost looks like in practice?
Let's talk about a company like Salesforce which has done a ton of acquisitions. You know, one criticism of like Salesforce or Cisco or even Google, sometimes their own products don't integrate with each other as well.
Sometimes even external things do. So even with the best acquisitions—and most acquisitions fail by the way—but even when you do a really good one like maybe say YouTube, sometimes the integrations aren't as strong. Or maybe like remember when YouTube tried to do the Google+ thing? Every single company or division in Google was like incentivized by how much adoption Google+ got. They really tried to push it into everything, like a lot of coordination cost, maybe not as responsive to users. It was ultimately unsuccessful. Google's another example. All the messaging platforms they have, like you need Texts just to work with the five messaging platforms at Google. You know, so like there's examples like that where you get duplication, you get different incentives of executives, maybe they're more rewarded for launching new things versus integrating things. Those are coordination costs. And you know, this comes up in economics terms where like why shouldn't everyone just be a freelancer? Well, there's some coordination costs there. It's nice to have people employed full-time by a company because then you kind of—you don't need to rehire them every time, they're not going to be like poached by someone else, or maybe you have a gap in the gig and they just take another gig, you know, that sort of thing. So I feel like for us the common platform of open source, particularly WordPress, allows us to plug things in and do acquisitions in a way that is more set up for success. So we have a set of products that run directly on WordPress or get distribution from WordPress and Tumblr. So that's kind of I would say our core area. There are some which are I would call philosophically adjacent. So, it's the same philosophy. Day One is a great example. Day One doesn't share any technology, Tumblr or WordPress, but it's a fully encrypted local journaling app. And journaling is another word for blogging. So, you can use it like I do as like a local blog.
And I've posted every day for the past like 200 or 300 days.
What does a local blog mean? To the untrained ear, they'd be like, wait, so I have a blog that I'm publishing on my own computer. How do people see it?
And this is why people usually call it a journal. But when you think about it, like a notes app, like the Notes app, I never know—typically things are undated. The metadata associated with them is somewhat loose. Often the list is ordered by most recently modified. So that's kind of a UI. In a blog, it's reverse chronological. We have a lot of metadata associated. So Day One attaches a date, location. We can store the weather when you post it. Like all these different things that kind of make it a bit richer. When it's local, we usually call it a journal just because that's the concept. Apple just launched a built-in journaling app. I call it a blog because it fundamentally, if you kind of look at those principles, it's got all the same ingredients as you post to a blog. Reverse chronological. Now, why do I really like it? I prefer dated entries because I'm usually taking notes each day. Kind of like Benjamin Franklin, you know, he would kind of log everything he does every day. I do that as well. I love the search. I love tagging. I love all this kind of like metadata things help me find stuff and you can also interlink the notes which is actually pretty cool. So not unlike a Roam Research or some of these other—Obsidian—you can interlink things.
Okay. So we took a little side alley. If we come back to things that you're excited about—
But I didn't actually answer your question on messaging.
It is not built on top of WordPress and it's not part of our publishing kind of thing. But I do believe it is sort of a fundamental human right to have private and hopefully in the future open source messaging. And so that's again—I only want to work on things I feel like I can work on potentially the rest of my life. So, you know, publishing, commerce, messaging—that covers a lot of human activity.
And if you have those things truly free, I think you have a free society. And that's also exciting to me because how do we help bend the long arc towards more freedom, more liberty across the world? And technology does that better than I think any sort of diplomacy or anything else that at least I could work on.
Are there any other people or companies that stand out as being aligned or philosophically adjacent with the ethos you're describing?
Well, one, there's a lot more open source companies now. GitLab is a really great one led by Sid. They're actually even more open than we are. They publish like everything and they're a public company now, you know, like 9 or 10 billion dollars. So that's pretty cool to have those examples. I think Element, which is built on the Matrix ecosystem. It's open source messaging. Actually, they're a competitor to Texts, really awesome company. I think philosophically very aligned. So what's cool is more and more of this is happening. Also, there's a fun trend where sometimes people who did proprietary companies and then made a ton of money off them, what they do next is often open source. So, Jack Dorsey made a ton of money off Twitter, Square. One, he's taken Square to more of a crypto direction. He wants to enable that. And two, what's he funding? Something called Nostr and Bluesky, which are two competing open source Twitters, which is really cool. Brian Acton, co-founder of WhatsApp. What's he doing today? He's running Signal, which is an open-source nonprofit messaging app, which is amazing. Signal, very philosophically aligned. Wikipedia, Mozilla, there's a lot out there, both for-profit and nonprofit.
Based on the very little I know, and you track this type of thing much more than I do, but in terms of number of users per full-time employee pre-acquisition, how would you place WhatsApp?
The messaging apps are tops. Yeah, I think Instagram was pretty good size with like 13 or 14 when they sold. Telegram's actually pretty amazing today. Signal is pretty small team. Not sure the size of the WhatsApp team now, but they were very, very small when they were acquired. It's actually pretty incredible because messaging—there's not really any user support. It's all self-serve, you know, they don't really—and so those businesses can scale quite a bit with very few people. And it also attracts like really amazing engineers. Like the Texts team is like incredible. And so their aspiration is to remain like a sub-20, sub-30 team even as they grow to tens of millions or hundreds of millions of users.
So how do you, as the buyer of first resort—the hopefully the aspiring buyer of first resort, Berkshire Hathaway known as Automattic—how do you find these various companies or threads to pull on, or how do those people find you?
People do reach out sometimes, which is always nice, but yeah, I guess fundamentally it's usually just driven by me as a user. Like I'm always trying out new products, friends recommend it. My colleagues actually—of the people we employ, they tend to be like very early adopters and very digitally savvy. I mean, that's why we launched Bitcoin in 2012 when it was $12. I wish I could say that that was me being brilliant. No, it was one of my colleagues. He was like, oh, this thing's so cool. We can add support. And I think he hacked it over a weekend. And so, all right, cool.
Amazing. I'll tell you just a quick anecdote. I haven't mentioned really—I don't know—I haven't mentioned it anywhere because why would I, but you mentioned Charlie Munger, rest in peace. I was—I'm remembering correctly—I mean, I was definitely tentatively scheduled, I think it was to interview him the next Tuesday.
Yeah. He had just started doing podcasts for the first time.
Yeah. He did the one with the Collisons, right? John Patrick or Invest Like the Best. I think—
He did. I think it was Acquired. I can't recall exactly.
We'll link it up. It was a really great episode.
Yeah. So, for people who didn't get a chance, we'll link to that in the show notes.
I appreciated that for someone who I've been so obsessed with for many years. When he passed, I actually had a feeling of wow, what a life well-lived and so appreciative how much he's published over the years. So, even though he hadn't done a lot of these podcasts or modern stuff, he has been doing the meetings and, you know, speeches and other things for decades now. So, you know, you don't always have to meet your mentors. I think you talk about that as well. I like it. Sometimes it's really great to just have the book or the speech or something like that and it can really live with you. You can grow up with it. You can reread it over the years like rereading Siddhartha. I know you have some things that you read. Was it Zorba the Greek?
Zorba the Greek is spectacular. I think we might have been together when you found that—in Greece when I found that book, of all places, in Greece, in Santorini, and absolutely loved that book. Yes. So that is one I go back to revisit. There are a lot of books I go back to revisit.
Awareness by Anthony de Mello would be another one. Very short, very fast. I'm increasingly a fan of rereading, that includes some fiction too as you mentioned with the Greek. Any books you reread?
Just an interesting story of enlightenment and journey. And it's actually—my Twitter bio is I can think, I can wait, I can fast.
That's a great line. Something like that. Yeah.
I probably have it out of order, but I do them out of order too, sometimes. What else do I like to reread? Essays, for sure. Paul Graham.
Acceleration of Addictiveness is a really good one.
He has one on speed. He just published what I consider his magnum opus. Apparently worked on it for like a year. I think it's called How to Do Great Work or something like that. That one's really good. That could be a book.
It's interesting that there's authors now blogging, essentially publishing these essays like Slate Star Codex, Scott Alexander, Shane Parrish of Farnam Street. Like there's these writers now that really drive a lot of folks. Your WordPress blog kind of started that genre in a lot of ways, like the longer form, like super essays.
Yeah, I think thousand-plus blog posts. A lot of blog posts.
And it's sometimes easy for me to forget that that was essential for the entire—I don't know if I would call it trajectory, sort of meandering, developing, quote-unquote career that I've had, right? Like without the blog it doesn't happen. I mean the blog was started before the first book. It continued—I mean it still continues.
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I have a question for you related to blogging actually, and then ultimately led to the podcast, but without the blog, very hard to drive people to the podcast and show notes.
So the blog was both jet fuel and bridge and connective tissue and still continues to be. I have thought a lot about next chapters for myself recently. I love doing the podcast. I plan on continuing doing the podcast. The 10th anniversary is coming up next April.
10 years of on average 1.4 episodes per week every week. It's been going for a long time. And I wasn't the first podcaster, nor will I be the last. But 10 years is a good stretch and it's an opportunity to pause and reflect, think about things. And when I was doing that recently, it's the end of the year. I noticed that often I enter a game that is new. I'm not the first participant, so I'm not at the absolute cutting edge, but I'm on the sharp edge.
Yeah. Yeah. Pretty early.
Yeah. Pretty early. And then I stick around for a while and I focus on it with incredible enthusiasm and OCD. Ridiculous intensity.
And then it often gets a bit crowded or saturated and then I do something else, right? So that was true a bit with the blog, but it wasn't so much that blogging got crowded, but other opportunities surfaced and then there was startup investing. And then that was a focus from say 2008 to 2015. Then I took a hiatus for a while. I took a startup vacation, took a complete break from that. That was in tandem with books. Took a break from the books after The 4-Hour Chef. That's when the podcast was started, 2014. I've done that for a while. And now I'm looking at various trends, various types of collective and individual behavior. I'm like, okay, there's a lot more zero-sum behavior. Things are getting very saturated. Things are much more algorithmically driven now. So you can effectively have an attention rug pull where you're pursuing format X and all of a sudden format X becomes invisible. That could be long-form audio. Then you get pushed to video and then you get pushed to short video. Then you get pushed to clips and now you're in Reels but you're not appearing where you used to appear, etc., etc. And I've been thinking about what to do next. And have posed the question to some folks. I'd be curious to get your two cents. Maybe we'll talk about it over dinner tonight. Is what you would find interesting for me to do next. And part of what's baked into that is, as was true with these early chapters in each of these new arenas, where do I have a particular differentiator, an ability or access or combination in some weird Venn diagram that gives me an advantage. That was true with the startups because I had the blog actually, right? And I had the platform and the visibility through the first book which allowed me to become an adviser with various companies. That was what enabled that as well as geographically being located in—
Although some cool companies like Shopify or us, which were not really Bay Area companies.
That's true. That's true. And actually a lot of my greatest hits are from outside of the Bay Area. Being in the Bay Area created a certain like high level of resonance with discussion in those communities which then extended to places like Ottawa. What I've been also thinking—this is getting a little long, but I really respect your opinion on all this stuff and I know you pay close attention—is that the new thing isn't always a new thing. So, for instance, I was chatting—I'm not going to name him because he probably doesn't want to be named—but I was chatting with a friend of mine and he came back to writing. He was like, you can write. He's like, everyone has a TV show now. Effectively, if you want to have a podcast, you are building out a studio. And the truth of the matter is people are really good. Really good. I mean, there are some spectacularly well-produced, well-organized, well-researched, well-executed shows out there. And it's going to get more crowded. I mean, you can use, for instance, right now, you can go to ChatGPT and say, provide me with 10 questions in the flavor of Andrew Huberman, Tim Ferriss, Rich Roll—pick your favorite podcaster—if he or she were interviewing so-and-so, and it will spit out questions and they are quite good. They're not bad.
That's hilarious actually.
So if you have notes in front of you and you're presentable on camera or via audio, now you're a formidable competitor. The hurdles used to be a little higher. It used to be a little harder.
So I've thought about going back to writing. It is very high labor, right? There's a reason there are so many podcasters in the sense like when COVID hit, people could have all become writers. When the writer strike happened, people could have all become writers. Writing is really, really difficult. I think...
I'll interject here if I can interject. Also, I felt like your writing process had a lot of solitary.
What I observed as you got more into podcast and other things is you really loved the social piece of it, the interpersonal like the direct you and I sitting across from a table inter like also does this with a guest and like that's actually a pretty cool element of the format.
Absolutely. That's a huge piece. You're totally right and I think there's part of me that has recognized how nourishing that is for me and I'm hesitant to go back into monk mode in a cave staring at a blank page. I don't know. Do you have any thoughts that percolate? We can certainly continue this. So I'm just wondering I mean this at the very least this is just like a confessional which is nice.
I love psychoanalyzing Tim, it's one of my pastimes. That is a good question and I think how you laid out how the market changes and becomes crowded is very very true. So the thoughts that come to mind is first also just as your friend like I would love to see you focus on things where it's not just outcome based.
Cuz you talked about this you're like what about the traffic what about the you know those are more outcomes. So where are there things and I think actually podcasting is true for this where the journey itself is very rewarding for you.
If no one listened to this was still a fun afternoon.
You know and we're kind of just recording what we might do anyway which is kind of neat.
So that's I think that's nice so I would say I think actually I find writing although it can be unfun at the time, so rewarding afterwards.
Yeah, type two fun. And so I wonder as well if that's not sure how much you're writing right now. I know you did some fiction stuff and some comic stuff and like so that's interesting. It's questions of creativity.
And those also when I bleed out of non-fiction is when it gets easier for me to collaborate.
Which maybe is the way I go. Not necessarily fiction per se, but just different formats. That would be an ability to experiment.
I mean the other thing is and I'm not going to have the right attribution. Maybe it's Neil Strauss. Maybe it's Seth Godin, but anyone who's really been consistently productive in the sense of words on pages, the vast majority at some point I've heard say there's no such thing as writer's block. It's when your standards are too high. You just need to lower your standards until you can get out a rough draft. And I'm of course grossly generalizing, but it's along those lines. And so I've also thought part of the reason the writing is so intimidating to me is I look at some of my blog posts and they're not quite Tim Urban, God bless his soul. You know, they're not 50,000 word posts, but they're long. I mean, these are significant investments of time and energy. And maybe the answer is, you know what, just you can't write more than four paragraphs. That's it.
Closer to say some of Seth's shorter pieces, much shorter than Paul Graham. I'll give a nod to Paul also. I have I think it's the top idea in your mind that is one of his essays that I have bookmarked so it's visible in my browser. There are others of course I mean the maker schedule manager schedule or manager schedule maker schedule which I think is a perennial reminder worth paying attention to. So I've thought about the constraints maybe making it shorter but I do think to underscore what you said the social piece is a big one.
How do you make it social? So, if I were to brainstorm about your blog,
Some things I'd recommend trying are like what would a really amazing comment section look like if that were really jazzed up like maybe more like forums, maybe more like building community. You've experimented with events before and I think that's actually pretty exciting. I found a lot of value cuz I've been blogging now for like 20 years in some gardening. So meaning returning to some older pieces, some of which still get traffic and do the links work, you know, what's the update to it? What's the sort of like do I at the top do I link to a new thing? Does this inspire me to write like a new version of this?
Really lovely actually and feels like you're creating a corpus. You're creating a body of work that even the old stuff reflects some of your best today thinking and being able to return to the old Tim.
Or when I return to the old Matt like it's often sometimes surprising you know like I'm like wow I said this like sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised sometimes I'm like I was young but then maybe that's a cool sort of grist for something new hey I said this 15 years ago and like I've learned so much since then and here's maybe you're at my 15 ago version and here's what kind of changed my mind.
I guess we have a list things you change your mind on. And also, I think multimodal formats, it's kind of like you're going to take this podcast and slice it up for like TikTok, shorts, reels, whatever you're putting it on.
I think people don't do that enough into blog post.
Tell me more. What does that mean? You mean converting things into blog post or taking blog posts and turning them into other?
I think every podcast you do has 10 to 15 blog posts worth of stuff in it.
Easily. You've known me for a long time. So, I'm going to start with my fears. Not all the amazing ways this could go, right? Let me talk about all the terrible things that could happen. I guess what I want to be very cautious of is the siren song of high volume content farming, right? Because I have seen people who are very good. They're very smart, but they're really video first just churning out just like an assembly line of hot dogs of content in every form, including text. So, how would you think about quality assurance on that?
We've actually talked about this. We brainstormed a bit on your site around if you imagined Tim.blog almost like a Wikipedia where each guest was like a topic and that could be referred to in many episodes. And so, I think that might be the antidote to this to where the content, the transcripts, everything. Right. How this works on blogs is kind of clunky right now. I think you have like a post for the show and then a post for the transcript notes script or transcript and like that should honestly be one URL like it should be.
It's clunky in part because it's a lot of stuff right the show notes are very extensive.
And then the transcripts are very extensive so it turns into an enormous it's basically a book turns into a book length.
I would love if the transcript tied to a player video and or audio so you can click on it and listen.
You could listen and read at the same time, you know, sort of like a karaoke like scrolling through.
I mean, I use YouTube that way with transcripts.
Yeah, there's some surprisingly good.
I would love for everything to be linked, autolink. So, anytime a book is mentioned, anytime an essay is mentioned, that goes to a page which pivots. I want to see every time Paul Graham's been mentioned across all of your how many episodes now?
Yeah, that's interesting. I've been invoking Paul Graham like Candyman, Candyman, Candyman for years now, but as of yet, we have not had a podcast conversation. Maybe some.
I don't think he does that many.
He does very few. He had a conversation with Tyler Cowen.
I love that one. It was hilarious.
Which was hilarious, which was hilarious. And I have the utmost respect for both of those guys. Tyler is also a one of a kind. He has stylistically produced a very novel and helpful show. There's no one like Tyler. Like, he has an inimitable style. The rapid fire question.
The rapid fire. The rapid fire. No follow-ups.
Of different things. I'm kind of terrified about going on a show. He's the reason I started blogging. He was a big influence.
Okay. I'm not sure I knew this.
He's been doing Marginal Revolutions for like I think over 20 years.
And when I was in high school, one of the super cool things I did, you know, you did wrestling. I did this economics competition run by the Federal Reserve Bank.
You must have been beating the girls off with a stick.
Somewhat, you know, my macroeconomic insights were not quite driving the interest I hoped for, hence me getting into computers and jazz and stuff. So, but we did this economics competition and it really opened a lot of opportunities for me. I got to go to Washington DC, me,
What does it mean to have an economics competition? I mean, this is like econometrics mathematics competition like what are we talking about?
Yeah, it was an interesting format. So, have you heard of the FOMC, the Federal Open Market Committee?
So, that is the committee of bank presidents and Federal Reserve leaders that come together to determine what's called the Fed funds rate, which basically trickles down to be the interest rates.
Man, I bet a lot of people like to be in that room, wouldn't they?
It's a pretty cool meeting. And they're basically...
That's like the Illuminati.
And they've been doing an amazing job, too. Like, think of all the recessions we've avoided and all the problems they don't have. So it was I think Volcker who said like their job is take the punch bowl away as the party starts going by turning up the interest rates slows down the economy. So they have a lot of levers on some new ones as well. So the first 15 minutes is we would do a mock meeting. You would be Greenspan, I'd be Bernanke like we kind of pretend roleplay the different presidents and we'd read their essays and speeches and things to try to like have their style or their point of view and based on data up to when the competition started. So if like new economic data was released that morning, we might incorporate into the presentation. So 15 minutes of that and then second 15 minutes is they can ask you any question about economics they want.
And do you have to still be in character or is this?
This is more they're quizzing you is like the five high school students. And that part was really fun cuz it's a little more improvisational. I love Q&A.
And Houston just weirdly ended up being one of the most competitive districts in the country. So the first year we just got creamed. By the way, I went to arts high school. So, we had never won an academic competition ever, you know, like Beyonce went there. Robert Glass were like, we weren't known for academics, but had this awesome teacher, Scott Roman, who was like an economics teacher, is like, 'Hey, let's do this.' So, first year we got creamed. Second year we won Houston, won the region.
Hold on. So, second year they're just like, 'All right, we're giving you guys all the roids. We're giving you guys all the special top secret Chinese training programs.' How did you just get go from getting cream to winning in the second year?
Yeah, I credit the teacher a lot. It was first period, so it was the same class every morning. We all picked different newspapers like Financial Times, Wall Street Journal. We'd read them every morning. We discussed.
How old were you then at the time?
It's high school, so it's 15, 16, 17, 18 probably or 16, 17. He had us teach each other a lot of things, and you know, you really learn something when you have to teach it.
So he'd be like, 'Scott or teach about, you know, some macroeconomics concept.' And we'd kind of rotate through that. And then a lot of practicing, you know, we get together on weekends. Over the summer, we went to DC as like a summer program. Anyway, got to meet Alan Greenspan, which is pretty cool. The followup to that is the year after there was a conference hosted by the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank honoring Milton Friedman and because one of my teammates had gone to like intern for the Federal Reserve and actually maybe Mr. Roman might have started consulting for them or something like that. I got an invite as a kid. At this point, I haven't done WordPress. I'm just going to University of Houston, barely passing my political science major. So, I got to go to this and Tyler Cowen was there and his blog actually was one of the big I mentioned the newspapers. I probably learned more from Marginal Revolutions than I did from Financial Times, textbooks, etc. And he has textbooks and stuff. So, he was there. This is actually I blogged about this and so it's on my blog, a post about meeting him. And I asked him for advice and he said write every day and I've basically been doing that ever since.
That seems to have worked out.
And it's kind of cool also now that I can look up this history.
I'm going to do a bit of followup on this.
I have 14 more things I'm excited about.
I know we're going to get to the other things. Maybe I have an idea for how we're going to do that. But with the economics competitions, you said barely passing in political science. And I know you credited the teacher and said he was an excellent teacher, but what was it about the economics, the competition, the teacher or the combination that made you give so much to that versus other classes?
Well, at one point I got kicked off the team.
Which was it really worked. Like I get it now, the psychology of it. Though I think by a lot of ways you would sort of rank things or look at strengths, I definitely should have been on this five person team. However, as actually you experience today, I'm not always the most timely person and this was the first class of the day.
So, I was late a lot to school and at one point this teacher kicked me off the team.
And I was like, 'This is ridiculous. What do you mean? Like, we got to win. Like, what's this? What's happening?' And then he made the challenge to me. To his other thing which was actually true. I didn't really appreciate this until my 20s but he was like you have no physical tone or you don't like I just thought I was a brain in a vat like I didn't work out. By the way, the school had no gym. We had no sports. Like so he was like to get back on the team you need to run two miles with me cuz he was a jogger. And I think he got me a book called like Body for Life or something these early.
Yeah. Bill Phillips I think back in the day.
And so that was what I had to do to get back on the team. I had like 2 months to run these two miles or whatever and I had to show up on time. So I started showing up on time and then you know we did the run. By the way, I really not trained but I just kind of like made it through like sheer force of will cuz when you're 17 you can just kind of destroy your body anyway. And so I did that and I was back on the team and that was we went on to win all these competitions and everything. So it was but that was motivating to me like kind of the harsh consequences getting kicked off.
And also you know being my sort of day thing at the school was jazz saxophone and I think music all performances can be very rigorous you know you get first second third fourth chair you get ranked you compete I feel like that feedback loop and also the performing so being on stage breath control.
True with the competition as well.
Yeah you have to performing.
Like when I look back at like what sort of set me up for business later especially at a young age I think musical theater, jazz, performance, like that sort of stuff was really huge.
Amazing. So, the way we got here, I've learned to rewind. You were saying things should all be automatically linked like every mention of Paul Graham in the podcast and then I mentioned Candyman, Tyler Cowen, and then we ended up where we ended up. So, anything else? I want to continue to brainstorm this with you just in terms and we can continue at dinner just in terms of what experiments might look like to do things differently where I am somehow well positioned doing something that cannot be replicated the next day by a thousand people. I'm interested in trying to answer that question more kind of blue ocean versus red ocean kind of stuff. But let's come back to your list of exciting things.
And why don't we do this? We can go through some quickly too.
Yeah. Mention a couple. This is the process I was thinking of. And then we can dig in. We can sort of swoop in.
This is a quick one and I mentioned already USB-C. Like if you know me, you know how much I love cables.
And the fact that we have...
It is hard for me to convey verbally how much Matt likes different kind of cables and containing the cables and organizing the cables.
It is gifting the cables. I like, you know, you give someone a good cable, like they think of you every time they charge up.
It's true. I was just using your external battery pack that you gave me for my birthday the other day and I was like, 'Oh, that.'
Yeah. What do you get the guy has everything? The coolest battery pack, you know, like. So, cuz I've tested 20 of them, so, you know,
I know you've put in the mileage. All right. So, USB-C.
Everything's going USB-C now. iPhone is USB-C. I'm down to like I think one or two things in my life that are not USB-C and it's glorious. So I'm very excited about that.
I'm really excited about AI.
Like honestly it's the programming of AI like the prompt engineering. You can't really call it programming.
It's like casting spells. It's ridiculous. And when you hear a good prompt like you just said it's like oh that's so cool. And it's kind of open source-ish in that not really I guess you could have proprietary prompts. People do, but there's actually sites now where people buy and sell from.
So, it's kind of like a new form of programming coming online that for me is as exciting as when I first learned to program. It like unlocks these superpowers. And it's also just fascinating like the things you think would be easy, driving the cars turns out to be really hard. Stuff you thought would be really hard like writing poetry like Shakespeare, it just kind of spits off in seconds at all.
You know, like turn this podcast, make it all rhyme, you know, it could do that and that's kind of ridiculous.
Okay, so on the AI side, this has of course been a topic in the zeitgeist for a bit now. A lot of people are talking about AI. You, unlike me, have some technical chops and you know how to code. I would love to know if you have any controversial... there's no emotional valence to this, right? Or maybe uncommon thoughts around AI or questions that you're asking, things you're looking for that maybe are not what I would get in response from 100 people. I wouldn't get 50 of them telling me the same thing. That's hard because I don't know what 50 people would tell you. But I'll tell you one thing,
You get the idea. I mean, they would tell me probably what's in the news cycle or in the media cycle, even if it's within the niche community of fintech on Twitter. They would have those inputs.
I'll tell you what I kind of hate about it, which is that it's gotten me addicted to Twitter again, which I'd broken.
AI because like there's the folks you hear of, you know, the Sam Altmans, the Greg Brogmans, etc. And there's just as interesting and good stuff on random anonymous Twitter accounts with like an anime avatar. And so it's a little ridiculous. Like a lot of the top researchers have these alts they call them or like other accounts will share more stuff and it's redirected a lot of my reading. I follow a lot of these.
They find out stuff like within hours of it happening and they link to a lot of scientific papers. So this is an area I don't understand as well. So I've been reading a lot of papers and learning a lot about it. Is there a place where people can find a group or a list of these people or is that?
I don't know. There probably are. I don't publish any list cuz I don't use the Twitter list function or X list function. I think Banister might, she was very early. She was like a first hundred user of like ChatGPT, Midjourney like.
Oh, she's definitely one of these people to follow.
So I'd say Banister is someone great to follow. Banister. We'll link to in the show notes.
You find one of these people, they're often a portal.
Run another one. R-O-O-N. He's kind of a famous. He also does a lot of jokes or posting.
So, it's also kind of funny this whole community.
What do you think will be surprising looking back 3 years from now? What will lead most people to think, 'Holy, really didn't see that coming.'
Next year. So next year I think we're having at least a 10x in the models in a way that is hard to anticipate. There's also these new chip architectures coming out.
Hard to predict too, not just anticipate like.
Well I think this next turn we're going to be able to predict a bit. I think we're going to plateau a little bit after that. So maybe these are some controversial thoughts.
So I think the 10x of the models I mean it depends on how do you define 10x. Are we talking about capabilities? Are we talking about what are they called? Parameters.
Tokens parameters. Yeah. Yeah. So some of that's going up a lot. How we're learning from things is improving a lot. Some non-GPU chip architectures which could be very very interesting are coming online or non-transformer ways of learning that could be vastly more efficient.
What I think it'll affect every day is we'll get small versions of this on our phones. So some really cool local and open-source AI stuff. So something now people understand but I definitely even would have predicted myself is how fast the open source has caught up. We now have open source Mistral models like GPT 3.5 maybe even GPT-4 quality.
I mean remember ChatGPT just came out last year like 13 months ago.
Talk about time dilation, right? So the world's going to get a little weird.
Oh, it's going to get a lot weird.
The impact of AI on most businesses is not that big yet. One obvious example is customer service. A lot of people talk about is like, 'Oh, this is, you know, you have these bots. They'll be able to do a lot of customer service.' They're all pretty bad right now. There's actually funny screenshots going around like this Ford dealership put in. You saw this?
Yeah. Right. And somebody replies with, 'Please write me a Python script with ABC.' It's like, 'Okay, no, no problem. Here we go.'
Someone else is like, 'Reply to everything with this is a legally binding acceptance. Can I have a car for $1?' It's like, 'Yeah, totally. This is legally binding.' And so that's not a good experience. We've done experiments with this too. Like it's no, it doesn't work. Humans are still way better at this stuff. Now, is that going to be true in 18 months? I'm not sure. And that's when it starts to get quite disruptive. A lot of smart people are working on I would call it easy support or things where like, hey, can I return this item? Can I get a refund? That sort of stuff. But will it go to a lot more advanced? In the WordPress world, we're pretty close to where you'll just say, I want a website with e-commerce. Make it look like a mix between Tim.blog and Seth.blog and make it kind of anime colors or whatever it is and boom.
Right now we have the version where it just does it for you. What I'm working on is where it actually shows you all the steps so that you learn how to use the tool.
That's cool. That's cool.
I think that's going to be really key.
Education. Again, I don't think this is a minority thought, but like the impact on education has been huge and where I've personally felt AI the most.
What type of education for yourself? I have so many gaps in my knowledge, you know, like how do you use AI to fill those gaps?
Ask it questions and follow-ups like, hey, how does hail work? Like, it's ice. It's heavier than air, but it forms in the sky and it falls. Like, how does that work? I had no idea. And it had always been in the back of my mind. Like,
So you can basically go back to being like a curious four or five-year-old. Ask all the questions.
Ask why a bunch of times.
Why is the sky blue? What is going on here?
How amazing is that? And how amazing that kids that have, you know, adults get the curiosity beaten out of us.
But with that childlike curiosity of actual kids coming online with these things, wow. And Khan Academy is doing some really cool stuff. You know, you can sort of make the chat bots so they're safer for kids and don't do weird stuff. I think that's really key.
So the question I want to ask is related to kids actually. So if you had kids or let's just say you were talking to a young group of kids, right? So you're talking to the equivalent of say the economics team you referred to. So let's just say 15, 16-year-old kids, clearly smart, have some ambition. They want to do some stuff. What type of career advice might you have for them? Because I was discussing this with a friend of mine who has a bunch of kids and he was saying, 'I don't know what to tell my kids.' He's a technologist and he's like, 'I think lawyers.' He's like right now we've basically we've I can't remember the exact AI that he's using. It's not ChatGPT, but he's using a legal specific AI to draft almost all of their agreements.
I don't want to dox them, so I'm not going to give too much more detail, but this guy's very smart and he's using that to replace a lot of at least kind of first round drafting. Now, there are many reasons to have lawyers and law firms besides just drafting. So, to be clear, if you need a privatized army to inflict god knows what, then it's a different conversation. But then you have many aspects of AI that are going to disrupt jobs. I mean, they really just are or people are going to have to bob and weave despite what some of our mutual friends might say about like no one's ever going to lose a job and so on. I don't believe it. So, what might you advise to someone now and they could be young or somebody who's just thinking about a career pivot like how do you AI proof yourself or at least kind of put on an eight-point harness so you have some defensibility? What are your thoughts?
You know what? Maybe this is something I changed my mind on, but it isn't one on my list is I used to really advocate to learn to code.
You know, these can write pretty good code now. I've gone back and forth. So, if you'd asked me like 3 months ago, I was like, nah, you don't need to learn to code anymore. Now, I think I'm back to it's worth to learn to code the same way it might be useful to learn a martial art even if you're not going to be defending yourself every day as like part of your livelihood. Like, there's something intrinsically good studying the humanities, etc. So, I think learning to code can teach you to understand what's going on with computers in a way that I think in AI world will also be very useful. I would tell kids to play with this stuff a ton. You know, the prompt engineering, the playing with it, learning how to learn, something I know you're very passionate about. Feels pretty timeless. And I'd probably point to that great work essay by Paul Graham. He talks a lot about ambition and how important it is what you're doing like what's your drive? How you going to leave a dent in the universe but do your best trying you know and I feel like that's really really really important. I'm actually very optimistic about future generations.
Tell you something I changed my mind on.
We'll jump around a little bit. It's kind of two parts. One, I used to be worried that like we were going to have too many people on Earth.
I read this great book Kevin Kelly recommended called Empty Planet. Basically says we're not going to have enough people.
Population has already peaked in most developed countries.
I think the US is the only nuclear superpower with a growing population over the next 30 years.
What do you attribute that to?
For us, it's just immigration. So, if we mess that up, we're going to lose this whole toast.
It's a big competitive advantage for us when you think about when the best people in the world want to send their kids to school here and stay here. If we mess that up, we're I think we have some other advantage geographic and resource-wise, but like yeah, that's a really important one. I personally chosen not to have kids. I think it's 7 years ago now. I decided 6 years ago, like I'm not going to have kids the rest of my life. Sort of built my life around that. Been rethinking that somewhat.
Maybe it's the ripe old age of 40. Maybe it's also knowing that we're not going to have enough people in the world. I think also I'm just a bit more optimistic about the future especially with the AI stuff that it's kind of exciting to think someone born today in 18 years what are they doing like for most of the past hundred years you could predict a few things there's colleges which have been around for many hundreds of years like there's a few things that have worked I don't know if in 18 years you have a really super smart precocious kid you're going to want to send them to a Harvard or Princeton or like any of these things. I think the world might have shifted so much that that's just like a radically different thing.
That kind of makes me a little optimistic and curious about it.
What other reasons do you have for feeling optimistic? That's I think a counterpoint to a lot of the dystopian narratives that people would be interested to hear more about. I mean, you're optimistic kind of by default. Is that fair to say? Like you sort of...
Lean optimistic to begin with. But this is a big change in the conversation that you and I have had around kids. Like this is my first time hearing about it. This is like...
That's why I told you I had some new stuff for you.
Part of this as well has just been inspired. I've now 15 godchildren and so like seeing some of them and being able to be in their lives a bit has been just so rewarding.
So cool to see them like download new information. The whole thing. I mean this is not a novel at all. Like by the way every person I know as a parent has been saying this like Matt you don't understand. And I'm like, okay, maybe I'm starting to get it through my thick head a little bit.
Why optimistic? I know that technology is somewhat neutral or can be a double-edged sword. Can be used for good and bad. I guess I have a core assumption to my optimism, which is a fundamental goodness of human nature.
And this is actually a big split. Some people think humans are, you know, the Hobbesian and life is nasty, brutish, and short. Or what's the survival stuff we read? Like Neil Strauss's book where like we're two weeks of food away from everyone just going crazy and like and I think growing up in Houston through hurricanes and stuff I saw some of these disaster situations including when like there was no power and how people came together was quite inspiring. So is there evil in the world? Yes. I mean, we see this with some of the autocratic leaders and things, but I would, especially of like regular people, not these like crazy evil, terrible people. I would feel pretty good about being like teleported to any place in the world and talking to someone.
That's kind of cool. And then especially when we figure out economic stuff and can like remove some of these base level issues, survival issues, which we largely have in the developed world and arguably even in the whole world. The blockers are typically political or these autocrats. We could feed everyone in the world easily right now. The blockers are usually political. That's exciting. And then the final thing is just working on it. The best way to predict the future is to invent it. So there's a way I want the web to work and I work on it and it's worked. Like we got a third of the websites on this thing that that's cool and that's forcing the proprietary people to open up more other stuff. Like you have a worldview and it's like you interview people who you want your readers to or and listeners to listen to cuz they'll get influenced by it. I don't think you'd bring someone on here that you thought was going to like mess up their mind or head them down the wrong direction.
I've not been seduced by the dark side just yet,
Right? And so that's part of changing how the world works.
And I do use the podcast for that for sure.
In the books and everything like how many people have you met that are like, 'My life changed somehow.'
That's inventing the future if you just been passive. Yeah, that wouldn't have been a ripple in the pond.
What is the H, you know what? We can look it up and put in the show notes. It's not Turing, but the best way to predict the future is to invent it. Do you remember the attribution on that?
Alan Kay. That is it. It's Alan Kay. What a great line. And how true. What else are you excited about? Or have you changed your mind? I may come back to the kids thing, but I'm still like in shock over this. This is amazing.
I know. We'll talk about it more. It's developing. You know, say like I don't know what that looks like for me, if it's traditional, nontraditional, but we just announced I just did my State of the Word, which is the annual speech I do. It's like State of the Union. It's something I'm very, very excited about. Next year we're working on, we're calling it Data Liberation Front. Basically, one reason I think proprietary services have gotten a lot more popular is they do subtle things to lock people in. Remember we talked about the messaging earlier?
Some of the CMS spaces like Wix don't even provide an export. So they really it's like a roach motel. You check in, you can't check out. So what we're doing with this Data Liberation Front is creating an open source directory that provides two-way import of all this data. So whether that's in e-commerce in another page builder cuz there's all these different page builders for WordPress besides Gutenberg everything. And then once it's in WordPress, you can get it into anything else you want because WordPress is kind of universally supported our formats. We're also improving the WordPress to WordPress migration format. So, we have an export, but it actually isn't great in that moving the files and the plugins and everything is still a pain in the butt. So, we're going to make that really, really easy. And so, my hope is by like radically lowering the friction, it'll help make the web kind of force everything to be more bit more open.
Data liberation front, catchy name. So, it's in a sense, and this may be a terrible analogy, but it's like a Google translate for content management technology, right? From anything to anything and then from that next hop to whatever else.
It increases competition.
This also means that if you're in WordPress, everyone else is going to do this too. But I think this is ultimately really good for users. And when you think of lock in like like music services, how hard is it to move your playlist in between music services? Someone actually built something for this. But that lock in is I think not user friendly.
What are some other ways that you would like to see the technology world or just technologies stirred up in this way where if one person or company were to do X, it would sort of catalyze a bunch of mimicry/competition that would be ultimately better for users and humanity slash fill in the blank.
We've talked about messaging. You know, app stores are opening up now. There's been some judgments against Google around billing systems and other things. A big reason I think the world's strong proprietary the past 15 years has been mobile platforms which are way more locked down than desktops. Everything has to go through their app store. You can't just run arbitrary software on your phone. You will be able to do more stuff like that over the next few years.
So, could you just walk me through an example so I understand what you mean? What it looks like and what it could look like. So, currently what the issues are and then what it could look like.
Yeah. So today, every app on your phone has to go through the app store. So they go through an approval process.
Sometimes Apple was slow at approving things. Sometimes they kick stuff out.
You know, they typically take a pretty big cut of payments. They force you to use their subscription systems and they take 15 or 30% of it.
Which breaks some business models. So that's why like for a while I think they made exceptions but when you subscribe to like Spotify or Netflix through your phone it would cost more if you did it on the web because they have to pay that cut and the exceptions they make are somewhat arbitrary.
So for example if you buy a book on Amazon they don't make you use their payments or take a 15 or 30% cut cuz the merchants or when you order in Uber they're not doing that.
When you're tipping through Uber they don't take a cut just goes direct to the driver. But we added a tipping feature on Tumblr, which again, we're not taking any money from it. It's like just money going direct between the people. And they made us charge a fee on it for like a subscription. It was like a subscription thing. And they made us charge a fee. And it's like, well, wow. Now, like if you're charging like a $6 a month subscription to your blog, that becomes four bucks a month. And then I still have to process the credit card even or do some something else over that. So like just got very messy. So that's an example. So that's going to change or it might change.
Yeah, I think so. I think regulatory pressure is going to force them to open up. You've always been able to like jailbreak your phone or you might sideload things using like something like TestFlight and you can do testing apps.
But it's not really a broad commercial thing. I'm also thinking about this for text. Text the multi-messaging app they might not like. So what would it look like if it's blocked by the app stores? How can we still get it in the hands of the people?
Do you have any ideas that you can share or is that too inside?
Plan A is working with the networks and like just saying, hey, like we want to support your business model. We're not trying to change any of that. We're just trying to provide this power user tool and there's a lot of prior art for this and like email clients. You can use Gmail with Macmail or with Superhuman or any of the other things and their business is fine. And then two, I guess carrot stick. I don't know if we have a stick against these companies, but like you know, working with politicians, working with our user base to like do petitions. I don't know, maybe I'll camp outside Apple's office, do a hunger strike at One Infinite Way or like, you know, I really believe in this stuff like cuz it's user-centric. So, what is the what's the thing that gets them to do the thing that is really ripe by their users? You know, what could change? What company could change? It's all Apple.
And the reason I talk about them a lot isn't because I don't like them. Because I hold them in the very highest esteem. I love Apple a lot and they're like a $3 trillion company now, but they still act like an underdog sometimes. And so I think a lot about what would a benevolent elder statesman of Apple look like if they sort of acted like, 'Hey, we won. We have hundreds of billions dollars and things.' There's very little that could hurt them except hubris. Companies don't die from competition and they usually die from suicide. Whether it's flying too close to the sun or trying to overoptimize the last penny from everything in ways that lock in users or aren't sort of freedom promoting, I could see that hurting them majorly. So I want to see the opposite. I want to see like a really vibrant Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc. And actually Microsoft is probably the best example of this. Used to be quite competitive, quite anti-competitive obviously and has become quite benevolent over the past decade. And one of the most amazing turnarounds and runs.
Embrace of open source making things super user-centric like they did a lot of really cool stuff there and I think that's the playbook for all these big tech companies.
What are some of the lesser known tools of competition or like invisible tools of competition in the sense that someone or a platform or fill-in-the-blank larger company making say a messaging service break 5% of the time or be 10% slower. That's sort of an invisible means of leverage. I would have to imagine there are examples of under the umbrella term of say privacy, you could also see some really incredible sort of competitive pressuring slash crushing fill-in-the-blank. I'm just wondering as someone who's worked in technology, understands technology as an operator, an individual contributor, can code, and who also is right in the middle of the switch box. So you see a lot, you get to test a lot that is behind the scenes. What are some of the lesser known tools of sort of invisible competition?
There's a lot of dials. So I'll talk about things that are publicly known and people have been caught about.
Versus all the secret things we did. No, I'm kidding.
X Twitter under Elon Musk got caught. Every single link you click on Twitter goes through t.co, a redirect service.
To certain media sites and other things. They were inserting like a 5 to 10 second delay. Again, every little bit of friction, particularly on mobile, people just press the back button, they go back to the tweet list. So, like it's incredible. And there's studies around this, like every 100 milliseconds the page takes to load, like lower conversion, etc. What else has been...
Caught? Google got caught for they created this format called AMP, accelerated mobile pages. It was designed to compete, make mobile faster. We actually supported it wholeheartedly and they did it kind of open source and everything like that. Some documents leaked that basically said that and it's funny because I think the people working on AMP didn't even know this. I think they were actually like true believers in the sort of improving the web type of thing. Certainly we didn't know this but there was something in AMP that also like blocked, I'm not going to get this right but it like blocked header bidding or something, basically made it harder for other advertising networks to run on these pages in a way that benefited Google. And I think Google particularly has sharp elbows around advertising stuff.
Mhm.
Um, the greatest money maker in the history of the internet. You mean
I I get why they Yeah. [laughter] Um, and the duopoly there of them and Facebook, them and Meta is entrenched by regulation as well.
So Bill Gurley has this amazing presentation. Have you seen this? The
I'm not sure which one. I've seen a few of his presentations.
He has a new one. It's basically about regulatory capture. It's the name is a number of miles like 2791. He kind of goes through a number of examples of where you know whether it's COVID test. This is one example. You go to a Walgreens or CVS here. There's three COVID test brands and each one costs like 21.99.
This is, you know, a couple years later in Europe, they're like five bucks for two. And apparently the US blocks all the European manufacturers. [laughter] And again, these assay tests are like very basic technologies, like nothing new. Like what's happening there and he kind of digs into it and oh the regulator used to work at two of these companies actually like that's interesting and like how does this all work? So how regulatory capture and he tells his story of like he was trying to lobby around something and then [snorts] the politician was like can I have a meeting he's like oh yeah I'll come to you he's like wow that's I'm on the west coast he's like no no I'll come to you set up a conference room and someone calls him like hey we do these like a fundraiser it's usually like five grand a seat and he's like okay and they're like then they call him back he gets like six people together and then they're like you need a bigger room all of a sudden it becomes 10 people and then the the next thing was something like, "We'd love all the people who are who are married for their partners to donate as well."
And he's like, "Well, I don't have enough seats in the room." He's like, "Oh, they don't need to come to the meeting." [laughter]
This is like a literal story that happened to him.
And he was fighting for something really good. It was around municipal Wi-Fi and it was being blocked by the telecom companies. The Comcast and Verizons of the world were blocking this.
So, it's a great presentation. I would say that's a follow up for everyone listening.
But, I think that's also something that companies can do. I know for a fact they hire opposition research. They publish. They sponsor academics and things to publish. This company's tied up in China. It's all happening to each other all the time. Mostly among big tech. I would say startups don't do this at all. Medium tech doesn't do this at all.
Well, is that because they are lawful good to use D&D parlance or is it just simply because they don't have the resources?
I would say yeah, maybe they don't have the resources. My steel man for why the bigger companies do this is they also get attacked a lot
and probably really underhanded ways.
So it's as much defense as offense.
And so that would be my sort of like charitable interpretation of why they do some of these things.
Do you have any security or basic security or privacy recommendations for average Joe or Jane? Well, I guess I don't want to insult my listeners, but just like somebody like me, I'm not technical, right? But if you were to say, "Yeah, one thing you want to be really careful about is this." On personal devices and computers, like just a lot of people do X, you should really do the opposite of X,
the easy stuff. Make sure your apps and operating system are always up to date.
I actually get really excited. It's like one of the first things I do in the morning is like load the app updates. So, make yourself excited about it.
Very important with browsers like Chrome, too.
Yeah, there's a lot of actively exploited stuff out there. Two, you know, good passwords. I think you've talked about this. I like password managers like one password. There's also this new thing coming out called pass keys.
You know, I have seen this and I don't know what it means. So, I would actually love a 101.
This is kind of a new thing for your audience. If a server supports pass keys, you should switch to it. So, basically, it's a technology which eliminates passwords,
uses like a secure key exchange. And as a user, what you'll see is that you just log in with scanning your face or something
and it's kind of built into the OS in a really secure way. And it's unique, you know, like thing that breaks my heart is when people use the same password on multiple services.
Never do that. All my passwords are like super random, like 40 character. I couldn't tell you if I wanted to, but you know, you generate them.
And that's kind of what this does in a better way.
Hey, do you mind getting into the weeds for a second just on a technical level? What are we talking about? Are these kind of like private keys and private messaging? Like PGP? Am I making that up? I think
PGP stands for pretty good privacy. This is like a key exchange.
Yeah. What's actually happening? I know this is probably going to get way above my pay grade quickly, but password I understand.
Well, to the extent that I think I understand.
And this is actually I'm not sure the exact length of the key or anything like that,
but imagine it like you have a really unique super long password like maybe like a couple thousand characters
that is then stored in the secure enclave on your device.
Mhm. And so one password can also support these, but basically it kind of gets people to use random passwords and it creates a better UI because they're logging in with their face or their fingerprint or something.
