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Well, hello boys and girls, lemurs and squirrels. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers from all different disciplines to tease out the lessons, habits, new tools, etc. that you can use. My guest today is one of my favorite guests and a good friend, Matt Mullenweg. Matt is a co-founder of the open-source publishing platform WordPress, which now powers more than one-third of all sites on the web. He is the founder and CEO of Automattic, Matt. See what he did there? Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Tumblr, WPVIP, Day One, and Pocketcasts. Additionally, Matt runs Audrey Capital. Can you guess who that's named after? I'll give you three guesses. An investment and research company. He has been recognized for his leadership by Forbes, Bloomberg Business Week, Inc., TechCrunch, Fortune, Fast Company, Wired, it keeps going, Vanity Fair, and the University Philosophical Society. Matt is originally from Houston, Texas, where he attended the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts and studied jazz saxophone. In his spare time, Matt is an avid photographer. I encourage you to check out ma.tt. He currently splits his time between Houston and Jackson Hole. For my first interview with Matt way back in 2015, where he had very long hair, go to tim.blog/matt. There was some tequila involved. As mentioned, you can find him online at ma.tt. You can find him on Twitter, photomat. That tells you just how many photos he's taken. And on Instagram, photomat. Without further ado, please enjoy this wide-ranging conversation with Matt Mullenweg.
This is a new acoustic environment for me. So, Matt Mullenweg, we'll get to you in just a minute, but we're sitting here in a shell tent, which has surprisingly good acoustics. Kind of like sitting inside a spherical curtain, I guess, right? To deaden the noise or deaden the echoes. And we are on top of ice.
Miles of ice. We have two layers in this shell tent. And inside we have a little foldout table on which we have Bluetooth speaker. We have some caffeine. You have some water. We have how would you say this?
Glen Mering. Glen Morangie. Somebody's going to correct us here. Help us out. G L E N M O R A N G I E Highland single malt scotch whiskey legends the cadb. I'll let somebody sort that out. And then we have an Algaene bottle full of water. And then we have an Algaene bottle that is colored. It is orange. And the reason that is orange is it's currently full of 28 ounces of my urine.
Oh wow. Strong open, Tim.
Yeah. And does that need to be on the table? You know, this is a reminder that I need to dispose of it. So, if you come to Antarctica, which is where we are right now, everything that is brought in needs to be carried out. And that includes all human waste. Because if you pee in the snow here, it'll be here for hundreds of years or thousands of years. And in such case, you need to if you have to pee when you're outside or you're in your tent and you're freezing your ass off and don't want to walk to one of the bathrooms, you need to pee into a bottle. So that's why I have a differently colored bottle so I don't mistakenly assume as you might because there are no bubbles here that this is my water, which I guess it is in some sense.
Slightly used. So, last time we did a podcast, guess we were doing some back of the napkin, was what, five so years ago?
And a lot has happened in the last 5 years. But before we get to that, cheers, sir.
So fun to spend time with you as always. And thanks for coming to Antarctica.
Well, thank you for the invite. I'm so excited to finally come here for a million reasons. Principle of which is just getting to spend more time together. Honestly, this is our fifth continent. So, we got two more and Australia and then we'll we'll have the hat-trick. We'll have we'll have the hat-trick of all seven. And yeah, we're day nine now in Antarctica.
We've been off the internet for a while, which I'm a little shaky.
Yeah, it's like 98% of my brain. So, some withdrawal symptoms.
Wait, you have to you have to now we're going to get to the bio. Don't worry, folks.
So, one of your coping mechanisms like the methadone for the internet addict was downloading what what did you download a lot of before you came here?
Downloaded a good chunk of the Wikipedia.
The Wikipedia like the Facebook. I like the Wikipedia. Yes. And well, I remember last I downloaded a Scrabble dictionary, too. I remember last time I was in Antarctica in 2014, it was really just looking stuff up that I missed the most. And I've used it a number of times here and also like I might have the fullest copy of the Wikipedia of our group. So that's like it came in handy.
I wanted to look up a few factoids about Suriname and boom, there it was.
There it was. But then I found out that Ernesto Hoost, who's one of my favorite kickboxers of all time, was born in Suriname. Uh later won K1 a million times. People who know what that is will know and is long story to explain. But there were no accompanying photographs of course I should say just given the bandwidth limitations. So here we are day nine. You I guess were ruminating on what day it might be. And I had no idea because it is daylight all the time.
And it is so bright. I had experienced 24-hour twilight once above the Arctic Circle in Alaska. But this is totally different. I mean, this is like laying on your back in Santa Barbara with the sun beating down on you at, you know, 10:00 a.m. on a perfectly bluebird day. It's so bright all the time. So, everything kind of blends together and you're not really sure when you should be tired or shouldn't be tired. You think it's 100 p.m. and we came back from an excursion today and it was already 6:45, something like that.
It's really strange. It's super strange to not have a circadian rhythm modulated by light change to synchronize to. Super weird.
It's been Yeah, it feels very timeless when we've been here and day of the week. Everything has been kind of lost. We also had a very special morning.
We did. So, before we get to the morning, Matt Mullenweg, for people who don't know, who are you? Ah friend to Tim but probably better known for co-founding open source software called WordPress which is blogging CMS content management system has over 50,000 plugins and themes and I'm the CEO of a company was a lot smaller last time we talked called Automattic there's a Matt in there that's kind of a little pun and we make WordPress.com easy place to get WordPress WooCommerce which is e-commerce built on top of WordPress Tumblr Jetpack all sorts. Uh, Day One, awesome journaling app, Simple Notes, Pocketcasts for podcasting. So, check out Pocketcasts.
So, we basically we try to make the open web make the web more open.
And what percentage of the web uses one of those products or WordPress itself at this point?
Um, the W3Techs WordPress is now up to 42%. It's probably like 10 last time we talked.
Yeah, it's it's coming up. And what would you guess 5 years ago roughly size of the company then and now?
Then we were a couple hundred and now we're a couple thousand. We're coming up on 2,000 people which has been really amazing.
Distributed before it was cool.
Yeah, that's worth that's worth noting.
That was kind of a a funny thing as well is I I even started a podcast called Distributed and I was like okay my goal for the 2020s basically the next 10 years was to get more remote work happening. Blew up. It happened. Sorry about the virus, guys. Uh it um yeah, so it just woke up one day and you know of people who could the numbers were incredible how many people switch to distributed work. Um but yeah, we've been distributed since the beginning. We're about 2,000 people, 92 countries. Majority of the company first language is not English and we communicate primarily asynchronously through blogging.
Now when you say blogging, you're referring to internal tools that resemble blogging.
Yeah, we have this tool called P2, the letter P as in penguin and the number two. And it's basically an internal blog. We have no email in the company. The only email I get is HR stuff. And everything else instead of sending email, we'll just kind of blog to each other. And so everything has a permalink. Everything is archived. Everything is searchable. And you can have rich embeds like Figma embeds, YouTube embeds.
Usually I'm guessing not a good day.
No, I I work a lot with HR. So, um so that'll happen privately, but everything else instead of sending email, we'll just kind of blog to each other. And so everything has a permalink. Everything is archived. Everything is searchable. And you can have rich embeds like Figma embeds, YouTube embeds.
What was that first embed?
I don't know what that is.
Uh Figma is actually an awesome tool you should check out. Imagine a way to coordinate design online and in real time. So you and I could be working on the same wireframes or interaction design. And um actually it's the latest episode of the distributed podcast and I didn't actually interview the founder Dylan Field, mutual friend of ours who's a designer.
We owe Connie credit for another prop we have on the table we may or may not use which are the HOLSTEE reflection cards. And there are a lot of decks of questions that I've seen out and about and I've tried quite a few. My girlfriend loves these various decks. And there's the good, the bad, and the ugly. And I'd say mostly fairly mediocre. And this is a deck that is is quite good. So we might get to some questions here. So Connie, you were saying interviewed the founder of Figma on the distributed.
Yeah. Latest episode. It's a cool tool. I think you you might enjoy checking it out. Actually,
I will. Figma, I'm on it. And let's see what else. This is such a lazy question, but it kind of boggled my mind to think that it's been five years since we last did one of these.
Because you said what the first episode we did was number 60-some.
61 in the Bay Area at my kitchen table or dining room table. All the same in Glen Park.
Back when you had you had your golden locks. I think that was when you still had your golden locks.
Pretty long hair. Yeah. I tried to change it up every every year or two.
Every once in a while. And at the time the nectar of choice was tequila. And so that that featured very heavily in more ways than one. The Hovven. Yeah, that was um go that was a good evening. That was a good evening. So this morning if we switch from evening to morning so we had a very interesting morning and it started well it didn't really ever end I guess. I mean it was continuous. Most people didn't sleep but what what happened this morning? So, part of the reason we're in Antarctica, besides the penguins, which I know you talked a lot about with Sue. Check out that episode with Sue Flood, is the total solar eclipse that happened here in Antarctica. And it's only one in the continent until 2039. I think that's total solar eclipse. So, you and I at the wee hours of the morning, very, very wee got to see what was my first visible total solar eclipse. And it was incredible. The landscape in Antarctica is so dramatic.
Yeah, it's a it's a place that really makes you feel it's a very patient landscape and it makes you feel like your size in the cosmos.
Interesting that you would use the word patient. Why do you use that adjective? I was anticipating you might say vast or majestic. Vast even more so than majestic. But why why patient? There's something to me about Antarctica that feels really timeless and also just unconcerned with human welfare and time scales. Yeah. You know, things here happen over huge time scales. And it's so cool to see like mountains buried by glaciers essentially. Like they they look like they're like have a blanket over them. And that was over how many tens or hundreds of thousands of years. It's pretty incredible.
It is. And we were we were chatting with a a gentleman yesterday. I don't know if he would want to be named so I I won't name him but he had mentioned how deep an impact I guess his first full totality as it's known first total solar eclipse had affected him and how he had always on some intellectual level understood our relative insignificance from a cosmic perspective but the first time that he viscerally felt that which actually was deeply therapeutic for him was seeing a totality with his daughter in his arms and somebody behind him caught this amazing photograph of his daughter, tiny little daughter pointing up at the totality as it's happening. I mean, you couldn't have scripted a better photograph. And then this morning, it still feels like it was 2 days ago. I mean, everything blurs and blends together, which is We've lived lifetimes.
We've lived lifetimes. It was around what 4:44 I want to say. Mhm. And leading up to it, in the days leading up to it, I was looking forward to it, but I wasn't jumping up and down with excitement. I just assumed, okay, it gets progressively darker, then it's dark, and then it gets progressively lighter. Like, I'm not that blown away by this phenomenon. Yeah. Yeah. Cool story, bro. And had to be there. Had to be there. And it turns out you really do have to be there. And when it actually started creeping up and you're watching this happen and you're observing the progression through these eclipse glasses because otherwise you'll blow your eyes out, of course, especially if something's magnified through equipment. And when it actually fully overlapped and you're able to take off your glasses and look at it directly, it was stunning.
Stunning. and the effects on the horizon and on the visibility of stars, the things happening around it, the shadow bands as people refer to them as, right?
Traveling across the ground.
Did you see the wavy ones from the ground? That was so surreal.
Yeah. And just everything about it almost hearken back for me to prehistoric humanoid times. Like it touched something very old, if that makes any sense. felt like it touched something in species or racial memory going back thousands of years where you can imagine the impact that this would have on any sentient being who's observing it and really paying attention and watching it. Difficult to put into words. That was the most common sentence probably some variation of that that I heard afterwards. People were giddy. People were euphoric. And the expression was you just can't put it into words or I can't put it into words. And I encourage people to look up the history of eclipses. There's been some cool historical moments where predicting eclipse or not predicting eclipse or I think two kings died after seeing them and then that was part of the creation of Europe. Uh yeah, King John, King John the Pas, you were saying. And then Europe was split up into what became France, what became Italy, and what became Germany to his three sons. So yeah, eclipses seem to figure pretty strongly into the shaping of history and the shaping of national borders.
What's more reliable than the sun?
And for that to be blotted out for a moment is uh Yeah. All inspiring. Let's do it again.
Yeah. I don't say this lightly. I mean, once it once it happened though, I immediately turned to a few friends that that we're with and I and I said, "I get it. I see why people chase this because we have people here in this camp because you have these shell tents arranged in rows of sorts and then they have snow piled around them to brace against the wind." And it does get really, really cold here. Surprise, surprise. It's Antarctica. It's also very very dry and people get a lot of sun damage even more so than this is the driest desert in the world.
It is dry. It is dry. It's part of the reason you can dry the surface of say your steak by putting it in a freezer on an elevated rack for a short period of time. It's the driest place in your house is a good freezer.
So, and you just expand that a gazillion times or in a really good freezer over eons and here you are in Antarctica. It's also interesting that where we are on Union Glacier, there's no birds, no animals, no insects, literally nothing living except us.
Yeah, it's I was going to say disturbingly, but it's not disturbingly. It is oddly quiet when you go to certain parts of the camp if you're not within sort of shouting distance or within hearing distance of the mess hall or something like that.
And especially after we spent seven days with the penguins. Yeah.
Which have kind of a constant din. Yeah.
And it was really cute. They would walk into camp and just walk past your tent. The tents have no noise isolation or right up to the tent.
Right up to the tent. And so you're you're better at the noises.
That's what you That was That was pretty good.
Thank you. You although that is actually the pairing call that you hear more at the colony, but they're just going.
Tim's been practicing this.
I have been practicing. Much to the chagrin of my travel traveling companions, I've been doing that like a 100 times a day.
If you can cut in some of that field audio you took would be pretty cool.
Oh, we will. Oh, there will be magic in the editing room.
I have no idea if you'll be able to hear me or not, but those are the sounds of thousands of Emperor penguins, adults in their business formal, black and white attire, the largest of the penguin species. So, I would guess, I'm no biologist, but probably let's just call it 2 and 1/2 to maybe 3 and 1/2 ft tall. Probably 25 to 45 maybe 25 to 50 lb. And then they're chicks who have gray downy feathers or certainly appear to. The adults have I think roughly 15 feathers per square centimeter. And you're hearing many different calls. And I don't know the meaning. I assume there certainly are meanings of the different calls, but there's the which they make when they point their beaks basically straight down flat against their chests. So I imagine that's straightening their trachea somehow, but it's the opposite of what you would see with say a coyote or a wolf howling. And here I am. Holy Antarctica.
So Matt, where should we where should we go next? What do you think? You want to you want should we pull out the deck? See what happens? Should we go somewhere else? Are there other things in the last five years? Maybe we'll roll into that. I mean 5 years. It seems like so recently that we recorded our other episodes and it's not that recent. I mean it's not it's like if you live 80 let's just say we live 80 85 years. It's like five years is a meaningful percentage of that.
It's true. Yeah. Makes me think of that essay um the great one from Tim Urban, the tail end.
Yeah. Which you introduced me to and I have shared with so many people put an edited or I don't think it was highly edited but like a slightly shortened version in I think it was Tools of Titans because it had such an impact on me.
Now it's all thanks to Mr. Mullenweg.
Yeah, that was one of the big things since our last episode was my father passing.
Yeah, you were a great friend through all that. So, thank you. But that taught me a lot about grief and the ephemerality of life and everything. So that was a big one. Yeah. Pretty much everything in my life has changed a lot in the past 5 years. We hadn't even acquired WooCommerce when we last spoke. And this year it's going to do what's the number that we say I think 21 billion of transactions. You know, we're hoping to do for e-commerce what we did for websites. And I think there's a chance and the web wants an open source thing out there for commerce. So, I think what's been exciting for me is everything is always changing. I'm not good at staying still.
Everything is always changing. Not in a macro world sense, although I guess that's true. You're saying for you personally.
Yeah. You asked me the other day, do I have like a weekly routine where like Mondays are staff meetings, Tuesdays are design.
If you have an infrastructure for your week because people like Jack Dorsey have talked about this. I don't know if he he he does it any longer, but I I I did ask you and your answer was every day is different. And that's part of what keeps it super exciting for me because I feel like I'm always learning. Know nothing about podcasting software or journaling software or e-commerce software, anything, but I love making tools that people use. It's very, very satisfying.
If you don't mind, let's just come back for a second to your dad's passing. And I know that was a understandably extremely tough period. And I don't even know if it's something you've ever fully metabolized. If that's something you even view in the past tense is like something you went through or if it's something that you continue to live with. But my question is if there are any resources, tools, books, or just simply advice that you would give to someone who is experiencing grief or has lost someone or maybe is on the cusp of losing someone.
Yeah. The book that I found most helpful during that was co-authored by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross who came up with the Kubler-Ross scale. I think that's the five stages. Denial, anger, acceptance of the five stages of grief. The book was called I think grief and grieving.
Yeah. On grief and grieving.
On grief and grieving. That one was really powerful.
Might be just grief and grieving. I shouldn't be so definitive, but yeah, one of the two.
Yeah. So, that one was very, very helpful for me. But one of the things I learned was how personal the process is and how different it is. Like for example, for me, my sister grieved completely differently. And I've seen other friends go through this since then. And so if I were to say one thing I really learned, it's just that everyone has their own way of processing. And it'll happen at different times. And it's very easy to get annoyed or mad or angry or disappointed at how someone else is grieving if it's different from yours.
How did the book help you? What did it explain or help you to accept or clarify or otherwise?
I had heard of those five stages, but I thought they happen serially like you went in order.
Well, that's what I would assume.
And it turns out you you can have them out of order and multiple ones at the same time and in the same day in the same hour. And so that was really helpful. Pre-grieving was something I learned a lot from the book. this idea that if you have a sense that someone's going to pass, there's actually a whole grieving process that happens before then. And my father was in the hospital for about 5 weeks. So that was one of the most intense periods of my life. And that pre-grieving I hadn't really understood. Those are some big ones.
And it's been helpful as well. I think especially in American culture, we don't talk about death.
We don't think about it. We like to pretend it doesn't happen, but it's the one thing that for certain is going to happen to every single one of us. And we're all going to lose someone we love and we'll all pass someday. And very much like the Stoics, I think that the more you think about it, the better you are able to handle it yourself and help others when they're going through it. I have an app for my phone. I think it's what is it? Bhutanese. It's called Micro or Wro.
Wroak. Yeah, I've used Wro. and five times a day it just sends you a notification. It's like just a reminder we're all going to die.
Gives you a quote and then it gives you a quote that you can open the app. That one's been Yeah, I've kept that going.
Yeah. I also um I think we might have talked about this before, but on my Chrome new tab, I sort of calculated the average number of days I'm probably going to live. So, every time I open a new tab has a countdown. Now, is that some that's something you did manually or is that something other people can do reasonably easily? Yeah, use a tab thing called Momentum, which allows you to customize your new tab screen and it can do countdowns. And so I think the date was something like 2060 2000 uh January 11th I put my birthday and then it just counts down. And so that's also really interesting. And I find also a good interrupt to remind me when I'm starting a new tab, which is usually beginning of distraction or something. So totally that um that it just says memento mori and the countdown. M do you find that you begin to tune that out? So I've used Momentum. I like it a lot. But do you end up at some point becoming immune to the reminder? Have you experienced that or not so much? Is there anything you do to prevent that?
Yeah, I've definitely developed like a selective blindness to it. I was actually just thinking today like if I just used every app on my home screen regularly, my life would probably be much better. You know, I've got column and fitbot and all these sorts of things that I put on the like smart mats, thoughtful mats.
Put that on the homestead. Yeah. But I'll still scroll the four screens over to get to Twitter or Instagram or something.
Oh, yeah. It's hard to win that one outgunned as we are. I actually deleted all apps from my phone. Excuse me. That would not make any sense. That would make my phone very hard to use. deleted all social apps from my phone about a year and a half ago and haven't installed haven't reinstalled any of them and it's been liberating in some ways and also frustrating in others to see how addictive these tools are and how I will find workarounds by using I mean the browser yeah the browser right and and it it provides a hurdle right so it's like the candy isn't within reach like I have to like open a door and walk through to another room, metaphorically speaking, to get the candy. But still, I end up, as you've seen, on this trip with the chocolate-covered almonds.
It's amazing how much chocolate-covered almonds Tim has consumed.
So horrifying. So horrifying.
Well, it's a good reminder we're all human. Even like for our body Tim Ferriss.
Definitely even for especially for our body Tim Ferriss. Uh oh. Once he goes off the rails, it's it's very very off the rails. Oh man. So, anything else that you'd like to add within the context of the last last 5 years?
You know, one more thing on the on the parents is one thing I wish is that had more recordings of my dad. just remembering his voice or even some video though people are more self-conscious about video. So, I think it's great if there's people you love do something like this. Have a conversation with them, record it. I think it's something you'll both probably appreciate.
Well, you've been part of the a big part of the impetus for me to set time aside and schedule time to do this with my parents. We had it scheduled and then there were some calendar and travel issues of course with co and everything else going on, but that is something that I'm, you know, planning on doing in the next few months and I'm looking forward to it. I think there at different points I've had various reservations, but as I think more and more about kids, I think it becomes it dawns on me more and more clearly how valuable or how treasured that could be at some point to have that.
Yeah. And just what our parents or loved ones might remember about our life is so different from sometimes what we remember.
And could be really enlightening sometimes.
Yeah. Cuz memory is so fallible, right?
Yeah. Super fallible. So it's interesting to see the different perspectives on it and triangulate maybe how we turned out the way we did or things that might have been very influential on us.
So question for you then. Any recommendations for my conversations with my parents? Are there any particular types of questions that you would ask or angles of inquiry or anything at all? No fly zones. Anything that comes to mind.
You know this is where being offline is going to get us. What's the the project? It's like on NPR where they interview people. There's an app for it. It's StoryCorps.
Story. And then C O R P S.
And I think they even have an app with questions and part of what they do is try to get an oral history of Americans, people around the country, around the world.
I don't know anything about this, but people can record their own. And they have a really great set of questions that kind of walk people through their life history. So story those would be the experts and check it out. Maybe some things that could be a good framework.
I will and for what it's worth since we're talking about recording we can just mention briefly what I have right here in front of us which is the sophisticated grand podcasting studio of Tim Ferriss Enterprises which is very very very simple. It turns out there have only been a few minor changes since our recording 5 years ago and the first recording being number 61 of the podcast and now we have whatever it is close to 600 episodes. So we've got the Zoom H6 recorder in front of me and then we have two XLR cables, one going to a handheld mic for Matt, another going to a handheld mic in my hand. One of the upgrades that I made is when I do in-person recording, I have two different colored. The default is going to be black cabling. I get colored cables. So, for video, this would be horrible on the eyes, but practically for recording, it's great because it makes it very easy for me to see which levels I need to adjust.
That's why the cables are different colors. So, we have yellow and orange. And then I have rechargeable batteries which are Panasonic rechargeable. BQC55 is going to probably take you to the to the proper make and model. And then we have an iPhone with a Shure MV88 microphone that that attaches to the iPhone through a lightning port and captures really good audio. So, we have that running as backup. And then the handheld mics are also Shure. And I usually use SM58 mics. These are slightly better for voice. And if I could just see yours for a second. This is the KSM8. And they're very nice. Work really, really well. And that's it. And this all fits into, as Matt can tell you, a well there's a small bag, but it all fits into a BA hat. I have a Russian sauna hat that is perfect padding and insulation for the recorder itself. Then everything else fits easily easily easily into a backpack. You could probably fit most of it into a big jacket and you can record anywhere. You've now recorded two in Antarctica which is amazing.
It is kind of amazing. And so we've had 200 plus degrees Fahrenheit with Rick Rubin, the incredible music producer, although he does a lot more in his sauna cuz that was a condition for doing the interview. It was so hot and hilariously so cuz we ended up having to take breaks and do ice baths and the mics got so hot. That was the one thing we didn't budget for. I was so worried about the recorder being damaged or going non-functional that I didn't pay attention to the simple fact that when you have the mic at body height in the sauna, it's going to get ripping hot.
Wow. So, the equivalent was fine on the floor, but the mics got so hot we had to wrap them in towels and do it that way. So, we've done like plus 200° and with windchill probably at I think they were saying it was -35 this morning. Yeah, -35 maybe even a little bit colder. 35 maybe a little bit colder at Gold Bay with Sue because we were outside. We have we have a bit of shelter here, but there we had an open-sided tent with wind ripping through and and a table made of ice instead of this nice foldout table.
Why didn't you close the door at the tent?
It was a lounge that had been created by the staff and one was like up over the top. Uh, and I suppose we could have closed it, but we were all wrapped up and reasonably cozy.
I took a picture of you. I'll have to share.
That's right. That's right. Yes, you have a good photo.
Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront. Did you know if you missed 10 of the best performing days after the 2008 crisis, you would have missed out on 50% 50-% of your returns? Don't miss out on the best days in the market. Stay invested in a long-term automated investment portfolio. Wealthfront pioneered the automated investing movement, sometimes referred to as robo advising, and they currently oversee 20 billion of assets for their clients. Wealthfront can help you diversify your portfolio, minimize fees, and lower your taxes. takes about 3 minutes to sign up and then Wealthfront will build you a globally diversified portfolio of ETFs based on your risk appetite and manage it for you at an incredibly low cost. Wealthfront software constantly monitors your portfolio day in and day out so you don't have to. They look for opportunities to rebalance and tax loss harvest to lower the amount of taxes you pay on your investment gains. Their newest service is called Autopilot and it can monitor any checking account for excess cash to move into savings or an investment account. They've really thought of a ton. and they've checked a lot of boxes. Smart investing should not feel like a roller coaster ride. Let the professionals do the work for you. Go to wealthfront.com/tim and open a Wealthfront investment account today and you'll get your first $5,000 managed for free for life. That's wealthfront.com/tim. Wealthfront will automate your investments for the long term and you can get started today at wealthfront.com/tim.
Would you mind opening the non-PE bottle so I can have some of the water? I'm I'm pleased that they have the color coding. And I'm going to open this deck. And come a long way from Kasa Jonas.
Yeah, cheers. Let me let me do that with the booze. How much would you give me to drink a swig of that urine right now?
What would what would you trade?
I I like you too much, Dad. I wouldn't do that. You know, I have actually I have I don't know how this came about, but I ended up This is only for you, my fine listeners. No such thing as TMI. I
Remember at some point, I don't know what it was.
Can't spell without TMI.
That was good. That was good. So, let me take a break from the pee bottle. I'm going to come back to drinking my own urine story. Matt is the master of what is known in Japanese as oyaji-gag.
Oaji-gag. Okay. So, oaji or yaji is like pops. It's like saying dad but in a really informal way. And then gag is gag.
And as it turns out cross-culturally dads love puns and word play. So like if a shitty pun comes up, and it often did in my host family when I was 15 in Japan, then the host brother would be like, 'Yaji!' And Matt is the master. So yeah, you can't spell Tim without TMI. That is actually very, very good. That's very, very good.
I did take in that same apartment in San Francisco. I remember at one point just deciding, you know what, I think I should sample my own urine. For what reason? I can't recall. And I did. And you've seen how much water I consume. So it was actually totally fine. It was totally fine. It wasn't oversaturated with B vitamins or anything. That will affect the taste, I suspect. Not that I've had many samplings, but I will say I don't make a regular practice of drinking my urine, nor do I recommend it. This is not medical advice. It's actually pretty stupid as a story to begin with.
You did it so others don't have to.
I did it so others don't have to. Yeah. It wasn't the most delicious thing I've ever had. All right. So, let me offer you. You want me to choose a card or you want to choose a card? All right. Go for it.
All right. So, let's see. And you can always refuse.
Hey, would you say your recordings in Antarctica have been intense?
Is that another pun? Oh, intense. Oh my god, that was so bad. That was good. That was good. That was good. You can't bet a thousand. Intense.
You know, true fact, as my friend Kelly Starrett likes to say. True fact. True fact. Tim Ferriss. Here's one. What is one fear you would like to conquer?
H, you're going to answer the same one.
I can or you could choose another one.
Yeah, I think it'd be fun if we both answer it. Yeah, let's do it.
Because maybe we'll inspire a different way of thinking about it in each other.
You know, I have a hang-up around body issues and exercise and stuff. And it kind of got bigger in like the past six months and as I'm 37 now, not the old man young wag. And yeah, I think that's a fear I'd like to conquer because it's totally irrational.
What is the fear exactly?
I don't know how to articulate it, but there's something where I don't know how to articulate it because it's a fear. It's not rational. It's not something I can put into words.
Well, I mean there are a lot of fears that are rational, right? So just because it's a fear doesn't automatically make it irrational.
I think this is probably an irrational one. Yeah. All right. Um, yeah. Something around... it's like an insecurity. I'm not going to let you go.
So is it an insecurity around appearance?
I think it's something. Yeah. Something about... I'm sorry. I don't know how to go deeper. We can... this is where I should do some heavy lifting or help do some heavy lifting. What would be an example of a time when it shows up for you?
The resistance I feel around sort of exercise that's been growing, I would say, where it shows up like a fear in that I can think of so many excuses why, including like I'm going to injure myself again or I'm going to hurt my knee or my wrists are bad right now so I shouldn't be doing this or things like that, but which really just add up to be a bunch of excuses.
What do you think that is protecting you from? Like if you did not have... because it seems like you're a smart guy. So there's probably some part of you, not to like go too far into like IFS Dick Schwartz type stuff, but like your subconscious is trying to protect you from something potentially. What is it protecting you from?
I don't know. I mean it could be injury, right? It could be performing below your expectations perhaps. It's like if you exercise that you're not going to meet some standard you've set for yourself in your mind. I have no idea.
So it sounds like it's a hesitancy that you can't fully explain. Therefore, it's kind of falling into the category of fear for you.
Yeah. Okay. How about for you? What's a fear you would like to overcome?
Man, how much time do we have? I don't... I think that's a bit of an overstatement, but I mean, if we're drinking our single malt and really going for it, I would say the fear that I am just hardwired and also just software coded through DNA to be depressed and unhappy and that that is a baseline I cannot escape. Like there is the gravitational pull to out-of-the-box settings is so strong that no matter what I do, no matter how many morning routines I tweak, no matter how much I exercise, no matter how much I program meticulously different areas of my life, the regression to the mean is always going to be to a place of depression or... this is a strong word, but like self-loathing. Something that is not quite self-loathing at a 10 out of 10 intensity, but like a discontent and disappointment with myself.
That actually locked in something about mine, which is like a fear of being bigger.
Yeah. My family's bigger.
Bigger meaning like obese. Yeah. Like I have some pre-built settings. The proclivity towards that.
Yeah. Do you believe that? That's your... do I believe you overcome that or...?
Depends on the day, depends on whether I've had a good stretch or a bad stretch or an average stretch. I mean even if it is deluding myself, I want to believe that it is something I can overcome. I don't see how the alternative plays out is terrifying to me. If I truly, truly believe that 100% of the time, the consequences of that are like staggeringly scary. So, I don't want to believe that, but if I were a scientist just looking at the data set, I'd be like, 'Yeah, like if we're rating days like -2, -1, 0, +1, +2,' somewhat like Jim Collins does. If people want more on that, you can just listen to the first conversation I had with him. But I would say I probably average out negative one just on an emotional tone. The gestalt of the day being sort of positive energy negative.
Not in that way to do that around it. I should do it also because I do think, and my girlfriend has certainly pointed this out and I recognize it as true, that I have a negative selection bias. I think a lot of humans have negative selection bias because you get rewarded by overreacting to threats.
What's a stat you feel? A dollar you lose seven times more than a dollar you gain or keep.
They've done studies around this.
Yeah. Like how hard would you work to make $100 versus how hard would you work to avoid having like $100 stolen or taken from you, right? Yeah. So that is one of my macro fears. Tied to that would be a fear... I don't know if people can hear that because there are no birds. There's no insects. The footsteps on the snow are like deafeningly loud. The foot traffic is so loud which makes it even harder to sleep around here. Where was I going? Where was I?
A macro fear. It's related.
Yeah, that is related is that I will never have enough energy. So, and I think some of that ties back to undiagnosed Lyme when I was a kid, which has been verified because I then later had confirmed Lyme and I grew up on Long Island where it's very, very, very common. And when I was properly diagnosed after very severe symptoms the second time, which was I don't know 2012 or 13 or 14, when they did the ELISA, I think it's the ELISA blot test and other testing, they gave me my results and the first thing they said was, 'Well, you realize like you've had Lyme disease before, right?' Because I was showing I guess the long-term antibodies like the serologic testing. I might not be getting the details right, but suffice to say I had already had Lyme, but it had gone undiagnosed, which meant it was untreated for a long, long time. So, I don't know how much to attribute to that versus a family history of depression versus other things, but I always struggled with energy levels. It was like the currency in which I am poorest.
And it doesn't matter how much time you have, attention or otherwise. Like if you don't have just the battery to execute, you are so out.
You think people who listen to your podcast would guess that about you?
I don't think so because they're getting 1% of my time. Not 1%, but it's like I don't spend all of my time recording conversations, right? So they get to hear me when I'm having fun usually, right? Like I enjoy the podcast. Like it is very deeply nourishing to me. And when it starts to feel anything other than that, I change something, right? Like I decrease the frequency. And like I could do it three times, four times, five times a week, but it would start to feel like a burden or a chore. And I don't want that to be the case. So I don't think most people would guess that.
You know, you did share with me. I don't know if you're willing to share here or want to share here that you got a lot of comfort from a revelation.
Oh, is this the existential piece?
Yeah. I'm willing to share. This is a weird one. So, this kind of ties into another fear which is... I don't know if it's a fear. I mean, it's a belief the consequences of which are really unpleasant. Although I've started to look at it in a slightly different way and I'll back into it by saying like I think meaninglessness can be terrifying but in a way it can also be liberating because it frees you to kind of do whatever you choose to pursue. And over the last year, we've been talking about this on this trip. We agree on a lot of things. The one not trivial, pretty non-trivial thing that I think we have differing opinions on is just like inherent human nature, right? I have a... I don't want to call it dystopian, but I tend to think we are closer to chimps than not, right? Like 1% of our... Hobbesian, you know?
Nasty, brutish, short, right? Hobbesian is the right way to put it.
And I'm a little more Pinker, you know, better angels over nature.
Yeah. Exactly. So in as such I have been involved in a bunch of things over the last handful of years including psychedelic therapeutics especially on the nonprofit research side. I haven't done any for-profit investments myself and you've been a huge supporter of that world as well. So thanks for that.
It's a big deal. And then also with different conservation work in the Amazon in North America and so on and have just run into what I view as this kind of... I know one could argue against it but like almost for me like an irrefutable truth just based on overwhelming evidence that I've faced over and over again that like humans cannot resist pissing in the pool. Like they can't help themselves. Like they're so competitive and driven by incentives which of course all animals are and it has been... for me I have... I'll make it active right like I have depressed myself and upset myself so I'll make it transitive here right so that I have some agency to repeatedly run into what I view as like unavoidable self-destructive tendencies which on smaller scales aren't necessarily self-destructive, but at larger scales with billions and billions of people become just untenable. I was just like, what's the point? I found it very difficult to get up and muster any kind of enthusiasm or motivation to like knock out these emails about various just like items that might be very interesting, but I'm like, okay, I'm going to like invest in some like whatever the app that does something that really isn't making a dent. And like what's the point of all this? Because like ultimately we're all like just careening towards this incineration that I don't see is particularly avoidable.
And then I was reading this book which does punch the 4-Hour Work Week in the balls a little bit which I found kind of funny honestly. So it does make a reference to the 4-Hour Work Week and not in a terribly kind way which is fine because what do you expect if you title a book the 4-Hour Work Week but the book also has a four in the title but it's called 4,000 Weeks. That refers to the average lifespan of humans. And there's actually a lot of great exploration in this book looking at the frailty and the fallacies of time management and productivity and the kind of to-do list obsession and optimization of different types. And one of the chapters I think is called something like 'Cosmic Insignificance Therapy,' which I think this morning was a great example of where you actually find it liberating to realize how much it doesn't matter. So you end up finding it kind of inspiring and freeing instead of debilitating and crushing which is I find hard to do because I tilt towards the darkness. And so the realization was like, well, okay, look, even if people are just hellbent on self-destruction and we head that way, at the end of the day, our sun is going to red giant, white dwarf, Kaploui and then the earth is gone anyway. All life on Earth is gone at that point or certainly as far as I know, all life on Earth. So even if like we kill our own species and all sorts of other species off on this planet, the life per se of Earth is finite regardless. And I was like, 'Oh, actually that brings some peace to me.'
Yeah, it's... Yeah. I mean, God, this sounds so depressing, but like this is kind of a lot of the that I think about in part because I know this is supposed to be me asking you questions. We're going to get to another question, but it's like I don't know if you've experienced this because like you didn't grow up rich. I didn't grow up rich. And at least for me in my group of friends and their families growing up like lower middle class, it was like if only we had money, our problems would be solved. Like here are these problems. If we just had money, it doesn't grow on trees. And like oh that rich person, wouldn't that be nice? Everything is smooth as gravy over there, I am sure. And then you pursue your pursue your pursue. And you can kind of push your issues to the side in pursuit of becoming quote unquote successful because the assumption underlying it is when I have X or Y or Z, whatever that amount is, then I'll be happy.
Then I'll be happy. And then you like run through one of those finish lines and you're like, well, wait a second. Like this is a false bill of lighting. That didn't work at all. And which you know, by the way, when some people ask like what would you change or emphasize if you wrote the 4-Hour Work Week again? It's the filling the void chapter, which is a chapter that people kind of skip over because it's not this like hyper practical tactical nuts and bolts chapter, but it's really important. So yeah, that's my very, very, very long rambling answer to the existential realization which is like, oh yeah, this planet's got a finite lifespan anyway as far as like organic life goes.
And that's something I always find interesting is sometimes relief from what seems like existential problems come from the most unusual places. And so I was surprised that this came for you that that was a comforting thought. But I do believe in the cosmic insignificance. You know, it's very humbling to think like our time span, even all of human recorded history is just a speck of dust of the universe's time span.
And one thing I really appreciate about you, Tim, is that you engage with work and thinkers that some people might assume are the opposite of you or advocate for different things, but it's all part of your growth and your journey and like firming up things. So, I like that you went and read this book and how cool that it provided this relief for you, you know.
Yeah. Thanks, man. It's a solid book. And the way that I parsed it online was I put it on I guess Twitter and I said for people who have read this such and such book, you know, 4,000 Weeks. How much would you recommend it to a friend from 1 to 10, no seven allowed, which is something I learned from a person named Kyle Maynard because it forces people to like pick a barely passing or pretty strong recommendation at eight. And the vast majority of recommendations or the vast majority of answers and there could be a selection bias obviously, right? People read the book in the first place.
Came back at like 9, 8, 9, 10 the vast majority which was certainly enough to convince me to get it on Kindle and read a few chapters and ended up liking it a lot. I mean in just because I can't resist just a little jab. The author does use a lot of like $10 words where a 10-cent word would work. So, I think I'm pretty well educated, but I still had to look some words up.
It's okay. He apparently punched the 4-Hour Work Week. You can punch back a little bit.
He did punch the 4-Hour Work Week in the nuts, but that's okay because you know, get in line.
So, how many years has it been since the 4-Hour Work Week?
It's published in April of 2007. So, 14 years.
It's going to college. It's starting high school. It's going to college in a few years.
Let's try another card. All right. So, you want me to read this one first?
God, some more. No, no, that's a fierce one here. I'll let you choose. And let me just grab a few cards off the top. And again, for people interested, I don't even know if these are made anymore because I recall them being sold out or discontinued at some point. HOLSTEE reflection cards. I got these on Amazon. Dealer's choice.
Dealer's choice. And what's the light and dark side mean? Is one a tougher question?
Yes. The darker half of the card is intended to be a more difficult question. It's not always the case, but that's what it's intended to be.
If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about your life, the world, or anything else, what would you want to know?
I think you should answer that first because I just finished a TED talk. What would I want to know? I'd want to know what is before life and afterlife.
Yeah. You had the same answer.
Yeah. It's one of those things I think is very difficult to truly know in this.
Very difficult. Yeah. It's something humanity's grappled with in a million different ways for probably as long as we've been conscious. And yeah, curious about that.
I need more Matt. You got to do more than just whisper to me about generalities.
Wait, more about what's interesting about the afterlife or the pre-life?
Yeah, either or both end. I would say this is obviously a big one, but like what do you... if you had to speculate, what do you think happens? I mean, if you want to go with pre-birth, we could do that. That's definitely an unusual way to approach it. But...
Well, it's one I think why I thought of that is because I've done meditations before where they say like feel what it was like before you were born. That's what it'll be like after you're done. So like meditations on death. And so yeah, in theory there's something before if there's something after, right?
I'm going to plug two books here.
Anil Seth, Consciousness.
Yep. This is theories of consciousness. After our conversations on this trip, that is absolutely on my to-read list.
Great book and I think it kind of gets this question of pre-life and afterlife as well because where does the consciousness come from? When does it start? Where does it go? How is it suspended when we're under... what is under anesthesia?
It's such an interesting... what turns it on and off. What does it even really mean? And this book is a fantastic kind of and brief, so very densely packed or very valuable I would say not longer than it needs to be book. And then David Eagleman who...
Is this... so good. Have we talked about that?
Was it... I... maybe you recommended it to me.
It might have been. I think I did one of your books I recommend thing.
Ah, a book from books I've loved, yeah. And 40 Tales of Afterlives. And each one starts basically at the moment of death and then it's kind of something that happens afterwards and they're hilarious and it's a great bedtime read.
So I like to read short chapters like two to five pages.
Yeah. And it's nice to break it up nightly and some of them I've even read aloud to friends when you're at Burning Man. I did as a gift. I would read one of these short stories to people. Some of my favorites are 'The Scent of Species.' It was really great and the opening one, 'Sum,' is actually pretty fun.
Can you give a teaser? So I think it'd be helpful to give people an example since each of these short chapters is a hypothetical manifestation of the afterlife. So what might one be?
So the opener, 'Sum,' and I'll tell a little without giving away the amazing ending. You relive life but serially. So all the things that you did at different points broken up in your life, you do all at the same time. So you shower for like 80 hours, you sleep for 30 years, you cut your nails for like, you know, you're trying to remember a word for like 2 days, you're standing in line for, you know, 14 days. And so it kind of goes through this almost laundry list of it. And yeah, beautiful ending.
This is a great book. It is an exceptional book. After plugging these two books, what do you think? What happens or it doesn't happen?
Unplug computer, lights out. That's it.
I'm looking forward to finding out someday. Not too soon. But you said you had the same answer. So...
Crystal ball. Yeah. Well, I just think it would help... I do think and maybe I mean I'd be open to a counterargument, but I do think it would just help you decide how to spend your time better in this particular iteration if it's the one and only.
Thank you. Getting a little boost from a flask. Classy. We're classy. And I mean it would answer so many questions, right? I think the interesting thing was would humans truly be different?
What do you mean? What do you mean by that?
Would they... how would they act differently if we had a definitive answer? One, a lot of people think they do have a definitive answer. It's kind of the basis of many religions and things.
