Matt Mullenweg with Sam Harris on Distributed Work’s Five Levels of Autonomy

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay. Well, today I'm speaking with Matt Mullenweg. Matt is one of the founding developers of the WordPress platform, which, if you don't know, powers many of the websites you go to. In fact, I believe that 36% of the web is now run on WordPress. That includes my website. I believe it also includes sites like the New York Times. WordPress is everywhere, and it's an open source platform. But Matt, in 2005, started the company Automattic, which is now what drives WordPress.com and WooCommerce and many other companies. They recently acquired Tumblr. And I wanted to speak to Matt because he has unique insight into running distributed teams. As you'll hear, Automatic is entirely distributed. They have over 1,100 employees working in, I believe, 75 countries. So Matt has been thinking for a long time about the advantages and challenges of working from home. So as many companies and their workers are struggling to figure out how to reinvent themselves in this new environment, where we're all needing to shelter in place, I wanted to bring Matt on to talk about this. And now without further delay, I bring you Matt Mullenweg. Well, I am here with Matt Mullenweg. Matt, thanks for joining me.

It's a pleasure.

Let's get into your background. We're having this conversation in the crucible of the current moment with the coronavirus pandemic raging on a hundred shores here now. But let's introduce you properly. Give us your sort of business perch and then we can jump in.

Yeah, I started contributing to WordPress and the WordPress open source project when I was 19, so I didn't have a ton of work experience beforehand besides like freelancing and things. I actually thought I was going to be a musician. But then a few years later, started Automattic to commercialize basically SaaS services or software as a service around WordPress. So we made WordPress.com, Jetpack, WooCommerce, a lot of the sort of more commercial things. But so there's actually kind of like a nonprofit volunteer project called WordPress and then my company called Automattic.

So you and I have hung out a few times and I've known in the abstract that I've always wanted to speak with you on the podcast. We have several mutual friends and one just put it into my head that I should talk to you in the current moment because you really have a unique experience with remote work. Describe just how fully you've embraced remote work and how long you've been doing this.

Sure. So when Automatic started in 2005, we were coming out of an open source project. And typically open source projects are volunteers working from all over the world. Just collaborating online. What was a little different is we decided to keep that model as we scaled the company. So we are now, you know, if you fast forward to 2020, we're now about 1,200 people all over the world, all working together remotely, collaborating completely online. We like to not use the word remote even because we, we say distributed because remote implies that there's a central and remote. So we say we're fully distributed and no end in sight, meaning that, you know, through especially the early days, people said, oh, this works when you're 10 people or 15 people, but it won't work when you're 50. Or when you're 150 or reach Dunbar's number or whatever it is. And we've shown we could scale it to, you know, being commercially successful as well as kind of hopefully doing good things for society. And also try to blaze a path where now there's a ton of other fully distributed companies. You know, many are unicorns, are valued at multiple billions of dollars and doing some really amazing stuff throughout the industry. So there's like GitLab and Vision. There's, there's a lot besides just Automattic out there. Yeah.

So many companies now are confronting this imperative to figure out how to be a distributed team. Obviously, this is totally unworkable in certain businesses, and we're witnessing the closure of restaurants and the decimation of the service industry. And yet some companies like yours and happily like mine, just by sheer accident, are in a position of being, I guess, as antifragile as— to employ the term of jargon of one of my nemeses— or as antifragile as you can be in the current environment. What do you say to all of these companies that actually can make this change, or at least put a significant percentage of their workforce into home quarantine, essentially? As you know, from an epidemiological perspective, that's what is being asked of us. What advice do you have for how to make that transition?

Wow, there's a lot packed in there. Well, first, I will say that I consider it a moral imperative. So just like we would ask anyone who can work from home, you really should, or it's worse for society. I think any company which can enable their people to be fully effective in a distributed fashion can and should, and in fact should do it far beyond after this crisis is currently past. I think there's some interesting parallels. You never want to compare disasters or crises, but After 9/11, we were in a situation where people were staying at home naturally, and they were disengaging from the broader economic activity. And we had to ask society to say, hey, go back out. Go to the movies. Go to parks. Go to restaurants, et cetera. Right now, we're asking people to do the opposite. So we're saying, please do not engage in these particularly physically co-located activities. But we do still need to restart the economic engine. Anyone who can contribute to the economic engine at this point, I think, should be doing everything they can to be part of it. You asked what to do for companies transitioning to this. First, I would say that this is not a normal work-from-home situation. Usually when you work from home, your kids might have daycare or be in school, so a lot of people are struggling with unusual family situations when they're trying to work. There's obviously a ton going out and there's gonna be, I think, a lot of challenges, tragedy, and hardship at the same time. But I think that you can kind of zoom out and say, well, how can I use this as an opportunity to essentially build a framework for how myself, my colleagues, my industry, my organization can be, as you put it, antifragile, which is not just resilient in the face of turbulence like this, but actually get stronger. I think there's 5 levels here, but I've been talking a while already, so do you want to go through the 5 levels?

No, no, no. Keep rolling. I want to hear it.

Sure. So are you familiar with Daniel Pink's work, Drive?

Yeah, but I don't know that our listeners are, so.

To me, this is probably one of the most influential books on me when creating Automattic and sort of designing the workplace that I wanted to work in and I wanted to model for the world. And he talks about if you want people to be happy, motivated, content, satisfied, and fulfilled in their work, Like it's not really about compensation or giving them bonuses, and actually some of those things can have the opposite effect, but it's really about 3 things: mastery, autonomy, and purpose. Mastery being like, are you able to get better at your job? Do you have the sort of ability to accomplish it, or are you being held, you know, is the pointy-haired boss holding you back from, from doing what you are trying to do? The other side that normal organizations can do really well at is purpose. And that's, you know, working for something bigger than the paycheck, for something bigger than yourself. Do you feel connection in your work to something larger that can be intrinsically motivating far beyond any extrinsic factors might be? Where I think distributed organizations can do better than any sort of in-person office-based organization is in autonomy. Autonomy is, do you have the freedom and agency to basically control your environment to get your work done as effectively as possible? Is how I'm defining it. Now, if you imagine what you do in an office, so many elements of your environment are out of your control, from the trivial to the serious. Like, if you were going to physically co-locate with someone for a third of your life, like a partner or a roommate, you would take that very seriously, right? You would kind of consider that like a major life decision and and make that choice very carefully. But in work, we're sort of just thrust into this physical co-location with a random set of humans who we did not choose to be put there. They're there hopefully because they're competent at their jobs and useful to the employer, but even that can be a question sometimes. And then the environment itself for the sort of compatibility of the whole is very constrained. So you don't have control over the temperature, you're typically using the restroom in a shared setting. Pets might be allowed at some point, but maybe you don't like that other people's pets are there, or maybe there's all sorts of fraught things there. Your desk is— probably not everyone has a corner office with a window. There's just so much there. The food, the talking of your colleagues, the temperatures. And it's interesting. I think you've kind of not been in an office situation for a while, right?

No, no. In truth, I've never been. I mean, it's something I have no direct experience of. But the other aspect of it that seems to be true is that for better and worse, often worse, there's a lot of time, there's a lot of work time that's not actually a matter of getting work done. And I know this from even distributed meetings, you know, many meetings are in the end wasted time. So there's probably efficiency to be found, assuming one can actually figure out a way to work from home or work remotely that doesn't open itself up to its own distractions. You can probably get a lot more done in less time if you know what you're doing.

And so that's where we get into the levels of autonomy. So you know how there's like different levels of self-driving cars?

Hmm.

So I think of the different levels of autonomous organizations. So how far are they, they index on giving people the autonomy to be happy and satisfied with work. So level 1, I'm going to define as, you know, the company hasn't done anything deliberate, but almost anywhere today, if you're a knowledge worker, you can, if there's an emergency or something, you cannot go into the office for a day and still kind of keep things moving, you know, hop on a phone call. Your equipment's probably like your cell phone. You have broadband. You can get by, but more likely you're gonna kind of put things off until you're back in the office, or you won't be as effective if you're not in the office.

Right.

Level 1, that's where most organizations are at, like 98% of the world that can be like this. Level 2 is I think where a lot of people are heading right now, which is where you try to recreate what you did in the office, but just do it online. So with so many organizations forced into sort of an immediate work from home situation, they're scrambling. I liken this a little bit to in 1922 when radio dramas were first starting and radio as a dramatic medium was, was just beginning. The first things they did weren't like create things just for radio is they, they would literally just have actors perform plays, right?

Right.

But, but on the radio. And so there was no, like, you know, taking advantage of the, the medium or cinema in the beginning was, was kind of similar. You know, the terminology at this phase, at this level is often rooted in old frames. So moving pictures, or you've probably heard the term telecommute or telework.

Yeah. Yeah. I've even used that myself to my embarrassment.

What a strange term. Like on a telephone? Like what is the— at this level, you probably, you know, the company's probably woken up to like, you need to be able to access things when you're not in the office. There's certain tools. Maybe you're starting to adopt things like Zoom or Slack for chat and video. But still you're recreating the old modes in that everything is assumed to be synchronous. And you might even say like, hey, everyone needs to be online at these hours, like 9 to 5. You're just kind of recreating honestly what's a factory model of office work, which doesn't make any sense for knowledge work in the first place at home. And, uh, this is also the phase where sometimes companies will want to install software on their employee's computer to like screenshot their screen or make sure certain things are open or that they're logged in. It's It's kind of the Big Brother phase. And this is, you know, I would argue sometimes even less productive than in the office because you're actually removing some of the freedom and agency and you're kind of on, on some worse tools. So a lot of companies are going to be going through Level 2 now. And I would just advise them to, you know, that kind of old saying, if you're going through heck, keep going. Like, if you're going through Level 2, like, tough it out and start to talk about how you can move to what I'll call Levels 3 through 5. So level 3 is where you start to really take advantage of the medium. So some examples of this, like let's say you're having a video call, but instead of like, you know, having people typing at their computer or something like that, you could have a shared Google document all open for everyone on their screen and designate someone to take notes. And then everyone else will see the notes being written as they're being taken. Now this sounds like it might be distracting, but it's actually an incredibly clarifying practice in a meeting. Because you're kind of in real time checking whether, whether the, uh, the artifact of that meeting, the notes being taken from that meeting reflect the shared understanding of what was agreed to. And, you know, communication is hard in general, but in work situations, so often I see so much conflict and drama come from where people thought they were on the same page, but they were using words, the same words to mean different things, and they didn't have a shared understanding of the expectations or outcome. So when you're— the note-taking is actually, I think, one of the the most powerful positions in a meeting. And, uh, and so when it's kind of a shared responsibility there, you get a lot better outcome and expectations from the meeting. You can start to share screens really quickly. So like, hey, just let me pull up this chart really quick, or let me show you something and let me show you a website. Using things like Zoom, you can actually like share the screen of your phone if you wanted to demo something on an app. Like you really start to get to where it's pretty powerful.

Mm-hmm.

This is also where typically people start to invest in better equipment. And this could be as simple as like buying a lamp for your desk so you don't look like you're, you know, the walking horror movie.

So you don't look like you already have COVID-19.

Yeah. It's also really fantastic if I think the best investment at this is actually in audio. So I'm a little heterodox in that I do not believe in muting during meetings.

Mm-hmm.

If you don't have to, because when you're muted, like if let's say we're having this conversation and we would have to unmute to talk to each other. Every time, it would really introduce that delay and make it quite stilted. So you lose some of that spontaneity of great conversation. But we ask people to mute because they usually have really terrible mics and a lot of room noise and stuff.

Right, right.

The good news is there's like $30, $50 USB headsets. I like one from Sennheiser called the SE30 or SE130 that plug into your computer and they have a little— you look like you're in a call center, but just the physics of it is that when the microphone's very close to your mouth, doesn't have to work as hard, and it can kind of be tuned to, uh, get just your voice and not all the background noise. And literally, like, dogs can be barking, kids can be yelling, you don't hear it. I also believe this is the area where software is going to have incredible innovation. So there's a, a cool machine learning tool called Krisp.ai. I think it's like $30 or $40 a year. You can run it on your computer and it actually uses machine learning to remove background noise, even from noisy environments.

Hmm.

And it can do it both for incoming audio and outgoing audio, which is actually So if you're talking to someone noisy, it can kind of remove everything except for the voice on their side as well.

Can it be run on a phone as well, or just a computer?

So they have an iOS app, but you have to use the app to make the call. So it's not yet because of the sort of systems level access. But I would also say at level 3, you're probably using a laptop more to work. And if you put these tools through the laptop, you actually get a lot more power than if you're just using your phone or an iPad or something. Level 4 is also where you, or level 3 is also where you invest in written communication. So the written word, I think, is by far the most powerful for sharing things in a distributed organization. And writing quality, clarity, and skill becomes more and more valuable, I think, in all organizations, but the more distributed you are, for sure.

Hmm. This is going to be a windfall for all the humanities degrees.

Absolutely. We screen for it very heavily in our hiring process. Like, I actually don't care where you went to college or anything like that, but we do a lot to screen for writing ability. Both in the how you apply, how we interact. We'll hire many, many people without ever actually talking to them in real time or on voice. We do it entirely through Slack and tickets and other things to interact, because that's how we work.

Yeah. Yeah. That's going to be the final product in many cases. Yeah. That's interesting.

Level— can I talk about level 4?

Yeah, please.

Level 4 is when things go asynchronous. So everything thus far, you're kind of assuming that people are synchronous, which requires people to be on the computer at the same time. And so you're actually, you're not giving people like the agency to design their days or design their productivity to choose how, you know, the same output, you're judging them on what they need to produce, but not on how they produce it. So I think a lot about the 2016 Japanese relay race team. Do you know that story?

No, no.

So the Japanese runners, like their 100-meter dash was a full like 2 seconds slower than like the Usain Bolts of the world. Like they were not the, the fastest runners by far, but they were actually able to get a silver medal in the 2016 Olympics, beating out faster teams like Jamaica and others because they focused purely on the baton handoff in the relay race. And they were able to shave seconds off the baton handoff.

Wow. That's great.

So I think about that all the time. So like, for example, if you can get to where you have people all over the world Uh, Level 4 is also where you can start to hire, tap into the global talent pool. Uh, if you can start to hire all over the world and have those people be able to be just as effective working their daytime or most productive hours and passing off that baton between the people working daytime hours in the US to Europe to Asia Pacific, you essentially get a 24-hour cycle.

Mm-hmm.

And what might take a normal organization 3 days to have 3 kind of cycles of going through something, you could do in 24 hours. Now this is the idealized version. It's never quite that easy, but you can get a lot closer by focusing on that baton pass. Level 4 is, I think, that's also where you can start to shift to things. When you shift to asynchronous, your decisions can take a little longer, but they can be a lot better. So you were complaining a little bit about meetings. I, I could talk for 2 more hours about meetings, but like most meetings are terrible and you know, or there's the funny tweet. We're finding out just how many meetings could have been an email instead, like Emails for status updates, things like that aren't great. And often they're used as a forcing function just to get people to pay attention to the same thing at the same time. So we just say, hey, you know, we're gonna get everyone in a room and force you to think about this topic. Now, the downside of that, and like, you know, as someone who like appreciates contemplation and deep thought, is that all you're getting in that hour is people's reactions. So they're presented with information. And this is most meetings. They're presented with information and they react immediately. And typically, we also get all the dynamics, which are tough in in-person situations where the highest paid person's opinion in the room tends to carry more weight. More gregarious or outgoing people speak a lot more. Often men speak more than women. So you lose a lot of really valuable perspectives and inputs into the decision-making or sort of Yeah, the decision-making process. When you can move asynchronous, it actually creates a ton of space for the introverts, for the thoughtful people, for folks who, for whom English might not be their first language, to really sit with an idea, play with different hypotheses, and then, you know, contribute something that's very thoughtful back. You know, they've had the chance to take a walk with it or think about it in the shower, whatever it is that, that sort of contributes to their best critical thinking, and contribute those ideas. So this means, you know, it might take a day or two to come to a decision that you might have been able to hash out in an hour-long meeting. But if you can design your business around this, the decision you come to and the insight that was gone into that should be much, much, much better than if you just got people reacting to things in real time.

Right, right. We at level 4 now? Are we, uh, are we at level 5?

Level 4. There's a level 5.

Yes.

You ready for level 5?

Yeah. Yeah. This is direct brain-machine interface.

Yeah, I like to have level 5. I do call it nirvana. So it's always good to have an unattainable level, right? But level 5 is when you're doing better work than any in-person organization could ever do. And I like to think of level 5 work, it's fun. So every organization can have taste of it. So, you know, the fun side of level 5, I would say, is there's things you're able to incorporate in your day-to-day. That would be either socially awkward or impossible in an office. So remember all that stuff we talked about, about being in an office? Like, not everyone has a corner office, your colleagues are loud, they eat smelly food, like all those sorts of things.

Hmm.

This is when you really start to actually be able to design your environment and your day around health, wellness, mental wellbeing, et cetera. So something I like to do that would be not impossible, but definitely socially awkward in an office is in between meetings, I like to do like 20 squats and then some pushups, right?

Right.

To kind of keep my blood flowing, keep myself active. You could do that in office, but I would feel weird. Personally, I do a lot. I have a, a desk that can go up and down, and when I start to flag energy in the afternoon, I often put fun music on and do like a little dancing while I'm like doing my emails and reading. Obviously not if I'm on video again, it would be awkward. Treadmill desks are also great for this. I have colleagues who've lost 20 or 30 pounds just because they start putting in tens of thousands of steps during the day when they're not on video or call, just being on a treadmill desk doing a very slow, like, you know, 1.5, 2-mile-per-hour walk while they're doing what would normally be a stationary activity.

Right.

My personal favorite here is actually right now I have a candle on my desk. I find that the flame is like very centering.

Mm-hmm.

It reminds me to breathe. It also smells really nice, at least to me.

Right, right.

But you imagine an office with 200 people in an open office, all with candles, like you'd set the fire alarm off. You can't do that. So you can really, you can design things. And at an organizational level, when everyone's able to operate at that higher level, I do believe they also then can bring their best selves to their work, their most creative thinking, their most productive times of day, and they can start to incorporate things that again, might make their lives significantly better, but be hard in office. Even if your office said you can leave between 2:00 and 3:00 PM, like we allow people to do that to pick up their kids. You might feel awkward if everyone else in your office wasn't doing that. But when you're distributed, you can go drop your kids off, pick your kids up every day. Very, very common pattern with families, which makes a huge difference in the kids' lives and theirs. But it's completely— your colleagues have no idea if you're— because you're still producing the same kind of output.

Right. Yeah. I mean, that's a crucial threshold there where you no longer index on time spent in the office or at the desk. And you simply focus on the output that you care about. So it doesn't matter when you get it done or how you get it done, it just matters that it get done. That's a very different orientation than you have by default in a normal office, which is— I mean, I guess, obviously, normal offices demand results as well, so you have people working after hours and cramming to get things done often, but in reality, there's a lot of merely existing during the work hours, and that counts as a full day's work. Whereas if you could do something heroically productive in 3 hours, that should be good enough. It's just a different value. I mean, it actually kind of links up with the default sense that we all have that even in a world of infinite abundance, everyone should have to work to justify their existence. And this is what Andrew Yang's campaign ran up against in trying to explain UBI to the rest of America. It was just, "You're telling me you're going to give people money and they don't have to work? This is just the ultimate subversion of our ethics and our politics." But in a world where we really could just pull wealth out of the ether, then that should be a world where people could just creatively use their time to any purpose that interests them, and you really shouldn't have to find something to do that other people will pay you for. Now obviously we're nowhere close to that world. We were closer to that world a couple of weeks ago, and we are quickly being shoved further away, which I want to talk about. But I get the sense that many employers are uncomfortable with the idea that they don't really know what their employees are doing moment by moment, hour by hour, unless they're in a box with them in an office building. What can you say to that concern?

That's level 1 or level 2. We inherited this from the factory model, where if you weren't in the factory, you really weren't doing your work. But for some reason, we've carried this over into knowledge work, which actually lends itself to being far more productive when you're distributed than when you're crammed in cubicles or in open office spaces next to 200 of your not favorite people or not, not closest friends. You know, I think that it— I've worked in offices before. I had, you know, jobs subcontracting for oil companies. I worked at CNET when I first moved out to San Francisco. I honestly think it's easier to slack off in an office than it is when you're working from home. And I should define easier there. It's easier to get by with it. So obviously when you're at home, no one knows what you're doing, right? But the results of that input start to become very, very apparent. And if you start to go a couple days without delivering the thing that you said you were going to deliver, or your output compared to a colleague starts to really diverge, people are going to notice. Whereas if you're in an office and you show up early in the morning, you're well dressed, you ask smart-sounding questions in meetings, you're not drunk, like people don't see Facebook on your screen, you can actually get by for like 3, 4 months before people really notice. That, hey, what, what has, what has Joe done recently? You know, like, what are they really producing? And I think there's a lot more focus. I mean, another moral reason why I think that distributed work can be so much better for the world and society is that by focusing purely on those outputs, you actually remove a lot of the kind of built-in lizard brain biases that we all have kind of inherent. You know, like I said, I was joking earlier, someone's not drunk and they, they dress well and things. We assume they're doing good work. We also have a ton of other stuff that there's been a lot of research around. Like when someone jaywalks, if they're wearing a suit, people are more likely to follow them than if they're dressed like a bum. Like we're kind of hardwired in a lot of ways to have these kind of built-in social cues and unconscious biases and things like that. And when you're able to remove all that, I think you get something much closer to what Ray Dalio talks about, something like an idea meritocracy, which I think all organizations should strive for. Where we're just looking at the work itself in the purest, most objective form and judging that, not trying to bring in all these other things, either conscious or unconscious, that might influence us about how someone is doing in their role.

Yeah. So what are the other barriers here that keep organizations from moving up these levels? One that comes to mind is a concern about security. So if you're all working in an office together, and accessing databases and office computers. Now we're switching to remote access to every tool you need to use. And I can imagine that certain companies will either balk at that or worry about it or, or not know how to implement it in a way that actually doesn't compromise the security of their clients or customers or just open them to some kind of risk they haven't had to think about. Is there a generic discussion to be had about this problem?

Yeah. The good news is organizations are already moving to endpoint security or bring your own device or untrusted devices already. And even the most sophisticated ones like Google moved to this years ago. So it used to be there was this kind of regulatory capture where there'd be IT departments that had to justify very complex processes or systems in the name of security. And there was this kind of model that assumed that if you were inside the wall, you were trusted. If you were outside the wall, you were untrusted. Now, of course, this makes it— and as the sort of huge rash of hacks and data disclosures has shown, that when you put all your faith in the wall, that becomes a single point of failure.

You just have to call the receptionist and say you're a prince from Nigeria and you need her password. Yeah, you're in.

The human element, it's only strong as the weakest link, and you lose what in security we call defense in depth, where you try to have defense layers at every single step. So of course, like, if you can have a wall, have a wall. But, but beyond that, assume that there might be untrusted or malicious actors inside the wall. Actually, a security model that a lot of tech companies are having to move through in Silicon Valley is assuming that trusted people, employees with valid credentials, might actually not have motivations which are aligned with the company. They might be employed by state actors from China or Iran or Israel or other things. And so you really have to look at what are the behaviors that we want to protect against, not just saying, you know, the access control model of security. And, um, I, I actually am really excited, you know, if there's any silver linings or anything you look to to be hopeful, that we're being kind of jolted out of many old models. Um, I saw the story other day that Skype and FaceTime were not allowed for telemedicine. Again, there's the tele word, right? Because they aren't HIPAA compliant, which is a set of regulations designed to protect patient privacy. But again, regulatory capture. The other reason they weren't allowed was because all the companies selling like super expensive telemedicine stuff that didn't work as well as FaceTime were sort of putting these obscure rules in that said, uh, if it's not this, it's not HIPAA compliant. And those regulations have at least been temporarily removed. And I think, hope, get permanently removed. That when certain solutions like FaceTime has security, which is kind of best in class in the world, we can say that this is sufficient for handling private data, like discussing how you're feeling with your doctor.

Right.

So security is, I think, something that, again, as you start to move through the levels, you naturally move to a point where you enable more distributed. At level 1 or level 2, especially at level 1, people might not physically— they might not actually be able to do that work because there's some internal system that they just don't have access to. But again, most knowledge companies, most certainly technology companies, there's no reason for this.

So what are the tools that you think of as now just being standard at the moment to do this well?

So on tech tools, online stuff, I would say that Zoom, Slack, and something that we use, something to replace email, is really key. So email's nice cuz it's asynchronous, but unfortunately it's private. You know, part of levels 3 and 4 are you start to move to be a lot more transparent internally. So information isn't locked up in private things like inboxes. So what P2 is, is essentially an asynchronous blogging system that's internally public, but private to the world that we can use to, instead of email, to have all discussions.

Hmm.

So, you know, Automattic's probably a level 4 organization with glimpses of level 5 sometimes. I, from my colleagues, get under 5 emails per month.

Wow.

And some months it might just be 1 or 2. Basically all I get with email is like private HR stuff. You know, things that need to be one-to-one private communication. Everything else happens on these internal blogs, including if someone wants to ask me a question, they can do that publicly in Slack or, or P2. And then when I answer that question, the rest of the organization has the ability to see that. We've also developed essentially like an internal Google Alerts. So with 1,200 people producing lots of posts and comments, there's literally thousands per day. It's more than any, any person could reasonably read every day to follow it all. But with this internal Google Alerts, you could just get alerted when, you know, someone mentions a topic that you're interested in, or of course mentions your username. So it allows just a lot more effective sort of, uh, tapping into the information you need to without kind of the huge CC chains or like sort of opt-out methods that email tried to take to information sharing.

And so how flat is your organization? I mean, what are you doing about the tyranny of notifications if anyone can just use your username and you've got now over 1,000 people working for you? How often are you pinged with stuff that is just diverting your attention?

That's a great question because I think two things get conflated there. One is the actual organization itself. So we have a totally normal organic around, or, or chart, right? Like our, we have a very natural hierarchy of teams and divisions and everything like that. That's totally normal inside Automattic. Now communications though is totally flat and accessible, which is happening in larger companies as well. Like if you work at Verizon, you can figure out the CEO's email and email him.

Hmm.

But just by making things by default public, we have kind of these open channels. Uh, the, the beauty of it is you get, you know, folks who might not be in a meeting if you're having a meeting about a topic participating. So for example, maybe a frontline support person is saying, wow, I heard this from a customer. I'm seeing this pattern. Or folks from a different area of the company who might be working on something, a similar problem can drop in and say things. Now it's a double-edged sword. So what's beautiful about that can also be the downside. So on these kind of asynchronous threads, around decisions or design or things like that. You can also just get where people without as much credibility, but lots of opinions or lots of time to argue, drop in.

Right.

So that, that, that can be just kinda like the internet.

Sounds like Twitter.

Yeah. Yeah. Or Reddit.

Mm-hmm.

So that can happen. You just have to sort of deal with that as it happens. Maybe talk to the person or, or just say, we're looking for this type of feedback, but not for this type of feedback. And then I think it's also really important to have Just like there's good meetings or bad meetings, there's good or bad threads. So start the thread with what you want the outcome to be, when you need it by, and then when it's all done, summarize it. So maybe there's 100 comments on a particular thread, and then we like to encourage a best practice where someone summarizes sort of the best arguments on every side and then says what the decision is and sort of why you're doing that. Like, we thought of this, but we decided to go this other direction.

Are there challenges as a manager that are unique to this distributed environment, or is it basically the same thing but with different tools?

I think managers are actually the biggest barrier to companies moving up the levels towards nirvana. So I say individual contributors or sort of engineers, support people, et cetera, like that actually fall into distributed work really, really easily, especially because so many people have experience with side gigs or being freelancers or something, right? Where it just feels very natural to do the work. Just you have a bit more autonomy over your day. You need to work a little harder to make sure you have good processes and schedule and everything, but you can do the work. But managers, particularly if they have a lot of experience, famously they talk about managing by walking around, where people might sort of get a pulse of the organization by walking around the office or the cube farm or whatever and just kind of dropping in on people, things like that. You lose that kind of ambience, intimacy or information gathering that comes just by being around people. So with all of this, I think that, you know, it's not actually inherently necessarily good or bad. It's just different to work this way. And you have to list out the things that you're missing and sort of from first principles, go back and say, oh, well, I don't have as good pulse on my team. And then brainstorm ways you can get that. So for example, many managers will still continue weekly one-to-ones for 30 minutes, or you might start meetings with kind of a warm-up question where you ask someone what their favorite cartoon when they were growing up is, things to kind of break the ice or get to know people. You also, I think, as a manager, have to keep a closer eye because where you might notice in an office when someone is coming in looking really dejected or sad or low energy, you need to keep an eye out for that. And sometimes even just their written communication or how they, how responsive they're being to make sure that there might be something going on in their life that you could be a better, more supportive manager if you were aware of, but they might feel awkward bringing it up and you're not gonna notice just from how they're, they're, you know, sitting at their desk slumped over. So you start to need to be a bit more attuned for that. I would say also if you go fully distributed like level 4, when you're actually global, so meaning that you're able to tap into the world's talent pool. You have people, you know, Automatic now has people in 70 countries. The time zones can get a little tricky, so we try not to spread individual teams, so teams are typically 5 to 15 people, across more than 8 time zones. And some companies even go as far as to say, like, people need to be within, like, 2 or 3 time zones from each other so you don't get too big of an hourly spread. But most certainly if you had someone in Asia, someone in the Americas, and someone in Europe, there's no good time for that, at least the once a week when you kind of need to sync up.

The last time we spoke about this, it was a few years ago, I think you did have a physical office. I think it had like 11 people in it and you had close to 1,000 people distributed. What's the state of things now?

So we went to closing that office. It kind of dwindled because traffic in the Bay Area got so bad. So even though we have a similar percentage of people, I think over 100 people in the Bay Area, the office people just stopped wanting to go into because they could, even though it was a really beautiful office, we had, I think, 3,000 square feet per person there. Well, we didn't want that. It just kind of ended up that way.

That's enough for a candle and a treadmill desk.

Yeah, they just, they could have more control and autonomy over their life at home, and the commute could be a real killer, especially when traffic started to get bad. So we shut that down. Then we also bought a company called Tumblr, which, you know, historically has always had a really, really strong New York office. And New York also being one of those places where many people's home setup is not as conducive to, to great work. So, you know, when you move to level 3s, 4, and 5, you start to find that people often will start to make changes in their life to just have a better quality of life. So often that might be moving to someplace where the same dollars get you just a lot more space. Because then you can have a dedicated room for your home office setup or more outdoors or whatever it is that you value. But of course in Manhattan, that could be very tricky. So maintaining an office there was— when we did the acquisition, they said it was super, super important. So we actually committed to maintain one for 5 years for them. We temporarily moved into a WeWork and we're building out a space. Now something interesting has happened. So before they had about 130 people going to the office, As we sort of started to share some of our best practices around distributed work previously, the folks who were, and I'll use the word remote here, the folks who were remote from the New York office of Tumblr had a much worse experience. So they weren't able to be as productive as the people who were in the office. As they started to incorporate more of the best practices of distributed work that you and I have talked about, they had less need to go into the office to be productive. And it's down to where there's only 40 or 50 people, of course, prior to this current crisis, only 40 or 50 people that were regularly going into the office in a given week. So even those living in Manhattan started to shift away from, you know, going in certainly every day like they used to. And I will say one more thing where it's useful to have a physical space for the office is fundraising. So I raised over $450 million last year. I found it hard to do that from coffee shops.

Meet me at a Starbucks.

No, and literally in 2018 or 20— yeah, 2018, I tried doing that. So where I'd meet people at like at lawyers' offices or our investors' offices or other things and, you know, try to do this large round. And to be honest, was much less successful.

Interesting.

So we've actually built out a small space that we actually plan to be empty 99% of the time in San Francisco, just for investors. And we'll also use it for board meetings. So our board meetings have been distributed for many years now, but we like to get everyone together once a year. That's actually worth saying the magic of distributed work, which is something that in normal situations every company should incorporate, but right now is obviously off the table, which is meetups. So when you join Automattic, we say, we kind of flip the script where most companies say like, hey, 48 weeks of the year, we want you in the office. And then 3 or 4 weeks you can travel or be on vacation, whatever. We reverse it. So we say 48 weeks of the year, do whatever you want, be wherever you want. We just are going to judge you on the output, not your input. But 3 or 4 weeks a year, you should expect to travel and sort of take that into account whether you need like home care or someone to water your pets or take your dogs or whatever. Like take that into account for your compensation decision as well, that 3 or 4 weeks a year, you're gonna need to be away from home. And, uh, these meetups have been really, really crucial to us. So paradoxically, like the, the in-person time is just as important as the distributed time for building that trust. And I think, you know, going back to our earlier discussion about like there's, there's our lizard brains, it's just things that are happen when you're in person, where you can sit across a table and break bread, when you can see the full bandwidth of your 5 senses being engaged by their presence, that is just more powerful than any technology will be able to create, no matter how rich the medium is or we move to VR or whatever. And the trust you build in that in-person time can actually carry you through years of not seeing that person again. And I'm sure we could all think of friendships we have where, or maybe like a family member who we don't see regularly, but like, because we had that really intense bonding time at some point in our history, we just have a deeper level of trust and communication with that person. So that is, you know, in any organization, trust, communication, et cetera, is really, really important. And that in-person time is key for it.

Yeah. So are these global meetups where everyone comes to a big conference or do you have, you know, regional meetups that are smaller?

So they're organizational. So they're around what you work on less than where you are. So historically, once a year we've brought the entire company together. Now, as we've gone over 1,000 people, that's to me become a bit less useful.

Mm-hmm.

Because it feels more like a conference than it does like really getting to know your colleagues. Although even at that, we'll have, uh, little hacks. So for example, we have a software program where you can sort of, it's a two-way system that lets you say whether you've met someone or not. So I could say, oh, I've met Sam. And then that also gets marked for you that you've met me. All of our meals at the meetup, we actually have a, some software that assigns the seating for all the dinners and lunches. So you're seated with people that you've never met before. And so that gives you the opportunity to create as many of those cross-organizational bonds as possible. But we do it once for the whole company, and then more often, 2 or 3 times a year, you'll meet with your team, which is typically pretty small, usually under 10 people. And then maybe once with your division, which could be anywhere from like 50 to 300 people. So those smaller ones, when it comes to org structure, I obsess about this and I believe all organizational structures are trade-offs. You just have to be conscious about which trade-offs you're making. And we have tried to make where Automatic is fractal. So whichever level you zoom in or out of, it self-resembles the whole.

You're like Al Qaeda.

Uh, okay.

But, uh, more socially positive.

Yeah, we try to say like if there's a 20-person team, that should look and work a lot like when Automatic did when the whole company was 20 people. So we try to make the team super cross-functional, remove the external barriers to them for shipping or iterating. And that, um, that is just really, really effective for, for allowing the, I would say we've actually been able to get faster in our speed of iteration as we've grown, where typically as companies grow, they tend to get slower. I obsess, I know he's one of your intellectual nemesis, but I really obsess about much of the writing of Nassim Taleb because, and Jeffrey West is another one. He, are you familiar with his work? Yeah. This idea that companies are typically not resilient and tend to head towards extinction, but cities can last, survive nuclear bombs and still keep going.

Yeah. It's fascinating.

I think that every person running a company should read and study that work. Because what are the elements of the cities? What are the elements of control that they give up? What are the sort of like little bit of anarchy and randomness they allow that allows them to persist and thrive and be so creative and actually increase in productivity as the density goes up? I think companies can recreate the same things.

So I'd like to segue to our, our now global concern about what's happening with coronavirus.

Can I say one thing before we switch?

Yeah, sure.

As I forgot it, but it is so important.

Yeah.

So especially in this day and age where sometimes we can be more sensitive, you know, I'd like to say that there's a good woke and a bad woke. Like we can be overly sensitive to what people say, right? When you shift to distributed, a lot of your communication's gonna be written. And usually when you're reading something, there's two ways to read anything. A way which, you know, can kind of get you kind of worked up or mad or, or feel like the person's attacking you. And a way which doesn't. So we, we have an acronym we use a lot internally called API, which normally in tech stands for Application Programming Interface, but we use it to say assume positive intent.

That's great.

99% of the time in a work environment, the person who's sending you a message is not trying to make you feel bad. They're not trying to like attack you or anything like that. But we can often feel that way. And again, our lizard brains can kind of flare up and be, we get into a defensive mode, which can be really, uh, can devolve quickly, especially when you're typing back and forth to each other. So we like to say, like, just assume the best intent in what you receive. We like to say, be conservative in what you put out. So meaning like, try to put some extra fluffy language or extra emojis or a GIF or whatever it is that when you write a message, try to make it as kind and humane as possible and sort of take into mind that the person receiving it might read it the wrong way. So this is kind of a variation of Postel's Law to be like liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you put out. And then, uh, finally, we like to tell people to jump mediums. So if you find you're typing back and forth a lot and it's getting like a little combative, see if you can hop to an audio call real quick. And audio's safe because even though people might not be like dressed or ready for a video call, anyone can hop on audio really quickly. And just sometimes getting on the phone can really de-escalate things really in a, in a really beautiful way. It's also used being distributed to de-escalate yourself. So if you're feeling really worked up, like, can you take a walk? Or do some push-ups, or just take a few mindful moments away from the computer in a way that allows you to bring a mindset back to that communication, which has a lot more equanimity or is more kinder to the other person.

Yeah. Emojis are interesting because I was one of the holdouts. I went for a very long time without using an emoji. I mean, emojis were everywhere and I was still— it was some dogmatism based on my identity as a writer, or I don't know what it was, but I just aesthetically, intellectually, I was allergic to emojis. And then I just immediately stumbled into their utility once I started spending a fair amount of my time on Slack, and once texting became more a part of my life. I was kind of slow to adopt texting as a main form of communication. So, but it's just in terms of efficiency and also giving some framing to the text, which is often too terse to— it just takes too much time to close the door to any variant reading that worries you. So emojis can be useful there.

I hope that our work tools also get better at asynchronous audio communication. So in WhatsApp or Telegram, it's very easy to send short audio messages. In Slack, it's currently really impractical. So I think that'll improve communication a lot. I think that'll level up Level 4 quite a bit. Did you also used to use a lot of punctuation, like periods at the end of sentences?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's amazing.

I was a total— for the longest time, email for me had to rise to the standard of what you would have written as a letter. It made no sense, but for the longest time it didn't occur to me that it did. I still try to write as coherently as I ever try to write, but I'm much less concerned about typos, or I'm dropping the subject from many sentences, I notice now. It's the personal pronoun, it just often doesn't show up in the sentence because I'm just saying things like, you know, "Working hard on this now." That's a sentence, right? I never would have done that before. I feel like I've been cognitively rewired by the pace of electronic communication.

I think it's actually an interesting difference between level 3 and 4, actually, because it's interesting if you visualize, like, the sentence, "This isn't what I was looking for." If you imagine that with a capital T and a period at the end, it feels way heavier than if that were kind of all lowercase without a period punctuation at the end. But I've also found, so I've actually started to expand my brevity a bit more because especially coming from like IRC and old internet stuff, like, it was very rapid-fire, short messages, a lot more like texting. But when you move to more asynchronous, you want the message to be as specific and contain all the context as possible for someone reading it, maybe out of context or just in the stream of other things, to have everything they need to, to respond. And so when you have kind of these dangling references to pronouns or concepts that might occur in previous messages, you have more chance for misinterpretation. So I find myself actually spelling things out a little bit more. And someone's saying, "Hey, are we approving the salary for these 3 hires?" And where previously I'd be like, "Yes," or "That sounds good," now I'm trying to say, "Yes, comma, approving the salary for these 3 hires," because also there might be other messages in the stream since then. There might be other things that sort of create some ambiguity for what you're responding to, or that person might be stuck on sending you messages until you respond to that specific thing. So It just allows kind of like a level of threading asynchronicity to have more of that context in every message.

Okay, so how are you thinking about society at the moment? I mean, we're recording this after— I haven't looked yet again today, but I mean, the stock market was plunging for another day. It has in the last week fallen more than at any point in history. And I'm sure it's going to go up again, but I'm sure it'll go down again. And how far down is is anybody's guess at this point. I'm not— you know, just to bring people up to speed with the epidemiological picture— I'm not seeing an off-ramp in the near term here where life gets back to normal. So I think we have many months of this, barring some remarkable breakthrough in antiviral treatment which so lowers the risk attendant to getting the coronavirus that people can behave normally, you know, with it replicating all around them. So, you know, in the best case, we have, I think, months of disruption. We have to retool in some significant way here. And obviously, even if we could get out of this situation in a few short weeks, something like this is going to happen again, and there's no guarantee that it won't be far worse the next time. On some level, we got lucky with the— I mean, it seems perverse to say it, but we're very lucky that this virus isn't 10 times as lethal as it is, because that is absolutely on the menu biologically, to say nothing of what someone could consciously weaponize and spread. So the big picture question here is, you know, how are we going to avoid falling into a Great Depression here? Do you have any thoughts about that?

Yeah, this is definitely the more somber part. I should— I've tried to be a lot more positive and jovial in my advocacy of distributed work because I think it will be crucial, like I said, to unlock sort of economic engines where we can in this really trying time. But like you, if I look forward, I actually become quite quiet and somber because I think there's, in addition to being easily a year of disruption, we're going to have a lot of loss of human life and tragedy there, which will weigh psychically and mentally very heavily on every single one of us. And I already have friends who are very, very sick from this. No one who's passed yet, but just if you think statistically, by the end of the year, we're all going to know a few people who have been on the bad end of this disease. We were supposed to have a big conference last month on the .org side, On February 12th, I had to personally make the call to cancel it because the team still didn't have a consensus on whether to go forward. So it was over a month ago. I got a huge amount of criticism. Now, 36 days later, we're now seeing people start to wake up and have a lot more of the social behaviors, which to me feel like they have a chance at lowering the R-naught, et cetera. But I worry that we'll relapse, that we'll have premature victories or lapse of kind of these social distancing or physical distancing, as Adam Ghazaleh likes to call it, measures. And so that's why it's so key that we really work at kind of getting what we can of operating in our lives even under this situation. So I'm really, really curious if we are able to recreate in America the kind of systems that they had for home delivery. Of goods and food and things in China, where the kitchen would kind of like— everyone's temperature would be taken and the delivery person's temperature would be taken. You kind of had these things to keep society going even in face of an incredibly contagious and dangerous disease.

Just before we started recording, there was some reports on a resurgence in some of these countries that have had the most success in flattening the curve, so South Korea and Singapore and even, I believe, in China, in areas that have been fully locked down. I mean, just— so it's going to be interesting to see what happens when restrictions on social proximity become relaxed, either legally or just by people no longer complying with strong recommendations, and just how we can find a pattern of life that diminishes the risk sufficiently so that this just doesn't run at a slow boil for a very, very long time. I mean, the counterfactual here is so hard to absorb. If we could all just perfectly quarantine for something like 3 weeks, we could have this evaporate, right? We could force this into extinction, barring the people who are already sick who need to be cared for in hospitals. We could fully contain this thing, except for the possibility that the virus has some truly rare characteristic where people remain infectious for, for much longer. You'd expect this to self-extinguish if we could just take our best advice immediately, but we show absolutely no signs of being able to do that. So it's going to go on for a very long time, and it's almost like we're living on another planet here where the atmosphere has become inhabitable, and we have to, you know, each have to figure out how to maintain the integrity of our respective biodomes or spaceships, and it's absolutely bizarre. So what do you think about when you look at the economy shutting down? I mean, there are things that you can see, maybe an organization like yours can, you know, keep flying at cruising altitude, I would imagine, without much of anything changing apart from individuals getting ill, but then there are other sectors of the economy where it's very hard to imagine how they can function at all or how they can restart even when the picture with respect to the disease has totally changed. I mean, there's just, you know, there are perfectly viable restaurants, I mean, the most popular restaurants in cities like San Francisco and New York and Los Angeles, who may just go out of business simply because they can't handle this hiatus in their activity. Can you think of any creative ways, or is there anyone in your world who you know who has thought of creative ways to bridge this gap in economic activity? It just seems to me that there's so many truly successful businesses that may not survive this.

Yeah, I think, I think it's a an opportunity, one that no one asked for, but to really reexamine if you're a business, what is it that you are selling? You know, to the old axiom, like you don't sell a drill, you sell a hole in the wall.

Hmm.

So are there ways to provide the value that you provide to your customers that aren't just doing it today this way because you did it before? And I think we're going to have to reexamine every aspect of our society, which is overly reliant on physical co-location, because that makes us in an ever hyper-connected society where people travel more than ever, et cetera, makes us particularly vulnerable. And like you said, this, this one being a dress rehearsal for something that could be a lot more deadly. I would bet if you have to decide that we're going to have more situations like this in the future, not fewer. That there will be more things like this that impact our ability to sort of be physically co-located with random members of society more often. And so if we're able, I think it's a moral imperative for every single business to try to reexamine their supply chain and their delivery mechanisms to customers in this. For those restaurants you mentioned, just pick a specific example. I love the stories. We'll see how it goes, but I've high-end restaurants like Aviary who might have said their product was purely the experience of being there. And it's true, the theater of some of these restaurants is part of it in the ambiance, but sort of rapidly shifting to be to-go and delivery orders and that they can kind of shift their business model. We started— have you heard about cloud kitchens before?

No, I don't think so. I think I have heard the phrase, but it means nothing to me.

And it started to shift with Uber Eats and DoorDash and these different things. You know, when you think of the business model of like a grocery store versus an Amazon Fresh or a Walmart versus Amazon, like these kind of like big box football field size spaces where people come and pick up their stuff is a little bizarre, right? Because it's like inventory plus logistics plus making people do a bunch themselves. And then you also get things, you know, there's an industry term called leakage. Do you know that one or shrinkage?

No.

Yeah.

What is it?

Shrinkage is not just a George Costanza thing. It's also when, when, when inventory walks out the door without people paying for it. So shoplifting or, or stealing either from customers or from employees.

Wait a minute.

That's a huge issue.

Shrinkage is a euphemism or leakage is a euphemism for theft?

Yeah.

Interesting.

And it's a very common industry term where typically they, they'll have single-digit percentage of inventory in certain businesses that just walk out the door. So when you can move to delivery, you bypass all this, much like the shift to a cashless society actually can decrease corruption quite a bit because now transactions can be tracked and there's no cash register that money can walk out from and things like that. So I think a lot of these things, the digitization and the atomization of society, can actually have lots of ancillary benefits, um, in areas we might not even expect, the sort of second and third order effects from when you move to being, say, mostly delivery, both positive and negative. There was a spate of delivery theft as people started to rely on Amazon more and more. Now, the technology has started to adapt to that though. So one, they've been able to use data to look at where that was concentrated. So I'm aware of a company that was running a large national e-commerce chain, and they were finding that essentially, I think it was 60 or 70% of all the loss happening in the country was in one zip code in Massachusetts.

Oh, really?

That sort of big data allows you to zoom in. And it turns out that in their supply chain, there was someone essentially telling someone when this high-value item was going to be delivered so that the package thefts— the one-time IH package theft, they stole some water and some socks. So they didn't get— it was actually a high-risk, low-reward activity for that person. But if you know it's going to be a computer or a cell phone or something like that, it sure changes the economics and the risk-reward. So that information is very, very valuable, but they're able to identify that. I think this also shifts like now where you have these smart locks that allow people to leave packages inside the door or inside the fence or something like that in a more secure fashion. Even things like the Ring doorbell where you know immediately when someone rings the doorbell, you kind of see what's happening right there. Or it can create more like— Do you know the term club versus lojack solutions in security?

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So they can create more LoJack solutions where if everyone on the street has a ring, you'll probably catch someone on video at some point when they're doing something bad versus just like making it less attractive for you, you to be stolen versus others because it decreases the societal benefit and changes the risk-reward curve for immoral or society harmful behavior. So I think about these things a lot because I think that the systems we put in place will have many order effects. And we are unfortunately in real time trying to define new methods of privacy, of travel, of communication, of insularness for countries, of how companies are working, that the repercussions of which we're going to feel for a generation.

Yeah, no, it really does seem like it's crossed that threshold where we will feel the impact of this for a very long time. I think analogies to 9/11 are misleading. I read that the impact on the restaurant business of 9/11 was something like a 3% decrease in revenue over the course of the next month. It really was minor. It's like it was the only thing anyone was thinking about, but people were still going to restaurants. And I mean, this is just perfectly designed to zero out whole sectors of the economy. And rebooting under any significant uncertainty is very hard to picture. But even once we have a vaccine, still it's going to take a while to climb out of this. And as you say, we have to find different ways of collaborating that allow for, you know, a similar pattern of economic activity and growth and For certain parts of the economy or certain businesses, it's hard to see what the hole in the wall is that really can be delivered absent the selling the drill in the usual way. I mean, I do have a hard time picturing it for restaurants. Even just food delivery, like, you know, I would love to be able to support my favorite restaurants if I were comfortable having their food delivered, but it's hard to see how I'm going to get comfortable with that. If I'm picturing a world where, you know, a significant percentage of the people preparing that food have to be shedding virus, right? And that's a world that's coming in, you know, a handful of weeks. Under what conditions am I going to be eager to have my favorite meals delivered to my house? I can picture, you know, treating the packaging as contaminated and ordering things that I can put directly into a pan and essentially reheat. But still—

Oh, let's imagine.

Yeah.

Like, they could design food for that.

Right.

You know, give you something that needs 2 more minutes or a minute in the microwave before you eat it, or whatever that final step in preparation can be that. Yeah. You could have kitchens where everyone is certified essentially to either, hopefully once we have testing, there could be actually some regular testing. I have a friend who's a firefighter in Houston. They're starting to do testing after every shift when they think they've been exposed to COVID or to coronavirus. So you can start to build in things to create sort of safe pockets or sort of trusted supply chains. You know, cloud kitchens, I'm sorry, I forgot to define it earlier. It's a restaurant with no storefront, no retail space, no place for customers to sit, but they still have a brand and a menu and everything else. They just exist purely in kind of the industrial kitchen space, which of course, you know, we have a lot of history around food safety and how to prepare our food in a hygienic way. And And we're pretty good at that actually in America. So there's no reason you need all that, the rest of the stuff that's actually expensive and adds a ton of overhead to both employ people and sort of maintain that ambiance space. And so, you know, we're so many, let's say 98% of restaurants today or 99% of restaurants have that retail space. Maybe in the future, only 20% of restaurants have that retail space because they, you go there purely for the ambiance or purely for the theater. Of being there versus the sort of utility of that delicious meal that you want that it turns out can be delivered in an effective way and in a way that comes a lot of safety. I think that delivery networks are going to— if we're going to function as a society over the next year, we're going to really figure out a way to treat the delivery workers as essential functions the same way that we might say for healthcare, other emergency services.

Right.

Because it'll be really important for the fabric of society and the sanity of society for people to not feel like, one, they have to go into grocery stores to get things, and also just to manage the delivery and supply chain. So for example, my understanding is a lot of the grocery stores being picked clean was not a permanent thing. It's not that we can't produce enough toilet paper for everyone in the world. It's just that they normally sell a normal, a fixed amount. For some reason, everyone decided to buy it at once, so they ran out then. But there's more toilet paper on the way, right? We don't have to worry about this. We're not going to have a global shortage. It's not like a virus that attacks trees. So these sorts of things, I think we can assuage a lot of the panic behavior if we're able to maintain some of these basic services.

Yeah. So it does seem that testing is the crucial piece here. If you could, and this would happen more or less with respect to every set of hands that could touch the thing you're ordering. So it's both the delivery services and in this case, you know, this micro case of the restaurants. The ability to test and to be confident in the sensitivity and the specificity of the test and the kind of the real-time value of it, and also the prospect of, you know, finding people who are immune to the virus because they've already had it, they had a mild case or they were just they had just become carriers essentially, but now they just have antibodies for it. So we need an antibody test.

Although if that's— if this is a rapidly mutating sort of annual thing, that won't be as effective.

Yeah, that's— we have to understand the virus we're dealing with better here and what it means to screen someone and be confident they're not shedding virus at the time. That really is, as far as a landmark on the horizon in our climb out of this hole, That's an important one.

Yeah. And when you think about it, we have, we have a version of this which is easily accessible and a version which I'm actually kind of optimistic with. So the easily accessible is taking temperature, right? So that hopefully can catch as early as possible. But then of course the, the novel aspect of this is the latent period. But let's assume that we can, you know, cuz other countries have ramped up the testing far more than we have in the US with the sort of warlike intensity of society focused on getting that testing more widely available. Could we get to a point where every American had a number of tests on hand and could, you know, test themselves with some regularity, and particularly if they're in, like, a role where they're interacting with lots of other humans, they can't self-quarantine as much? Yeah, I think that could, like you say, bring it to the point where we could get a lot closer to eradication than we would through an extreme social measure like saying everyone, including emergency workers, stay home.

There are definitely people who can't stay home, and that's its own challenge, but This just kind of comes back to the point you made very early on in this discussion that for those of us who can stay home now, that shouldn't be viewed merely as a— as the thing that will keep us personally safe, and therefore it's prudent to do it. It really is an ethical obligation. I mean, this is the thing you can do that can contribute to the health of society and the rebooting of our economy. I mean, if you can work from home, it's a moral imperative now. And to view yourself as someone, especially someone who's young, who stands a good chance of getting a mild case of this if you get it, you are the first line of defense in front of every person in the community who's more vulnerable than you are. I mean, every old person in your life, you know, your parents or your grandparents, or any older person or more, you know, vulnerable person, you know, an immunocompromised person, say, even a child in that case, who you might meet. And so it's hard to get a visceral feel for this, that you're actually doing something important by doing much less of all the things you want to do by staying home.

Well, but to go back to work, I mean, how much of the spread already was because of the social stigma against working from from home, or the fact that people couldn't be productive when they were at home, so they went into work a little bit sick, or maybe when they were still in that early phase, so they were shedding but didn't display a lot of symptoms yet. I mean, I actually would take it to the point where, much like David Hymer Hansen, I would say that bosses today who are still forcing their employees to go into work when they don't have to literally will have blood on their hands in their society. We'll look at that almost like a war crime. So, you know, there's, there's what you do today, immediate reaction, and then there's what you're doing to build for the future. Any person listening to this that has influence over the future of their organization can and should make it so that they can remove all the stigma, all the sort of otherness or second-class citizenness of being at home, because we really need, especially kind of a post-COVID world, to make it okay for someone even at the slightest hint to be able to say, "I'm not going to come into work today," assuming we even maintain offices to the same degree that we've had in the past.

Yeah, I've been thinking in the last, I don't know, 2 days or so. It's amazing how long a day is now, how much change one can witness over the course of mere days. But I've been thinking that there has to be a way for us to not forget any of the lessons we're learning here. I mean, we just, we have to make some of the most basic lessons indelible. There are many things we're discovering, essentially, you see some horrific misstep reported in the media, like the president's spontaneously preventing all travel from Europe. I mean, I say spontaneously, I mean, without warning, and therefore there's a panic, and you have airports where people are packed shoulder to shoulder trying to get through immigration, right? It's like, you see photos of this.

That was shocking.

And you say, okay, We can never do that again. But I fear that in this blizzard of bad news, the lessons will get lost. I almost feel like we need a Google Doc for all of civilization right now, where we're just continually updating just a list of things we can never forget again, right? Like, now is not the time to hammer China about their wet markets, but we can never forget that Maintaining wet markets is completely unacceptable. The first thing on my list is don't play with bats. We need to get the human-bat relations down to zero or down to how you work in biocontainment at the CDC, right? So, and then the list just proceeds from there, and it has political implications, it has economic ones, and it just covers really all aspects of, human behavior. It just seems like there's some kind of online project that should— you know, you're in the website business. There should be a website for the lessons learned here that people can contribute to.

Well, I think society does evolve. And, you know, if you think of all of humanity as an organism, our— the internet on our communication methods allows us to sort of increase the clock speed of humanity or increase the rate at which we're able to evolve our social more rays around these things. But I, I, while I'm in violent agreement with everything you just said in specifics, I do think that we have to be careful not to fight the last war.

Yeah.

So by definition, you know, let's call out another good concept from Nassim Taleb and say black swan events, right? It will not be from bats next time. So we can eliminate all the wet markets. We can eliminate, maybe we eliminate bats. I don't know. Like we can get around these things. And the next kind of novel— there's still evolution happening in these organisms. And the next novel virus, you know, I worry a lot actually about prions and protein viruses and like, you know, like things that would be infinitely harder to contain and that we have no known treatment for even in the foreseeable future, that we don't even have something like an antiviral. So it's going to come from someplace else when we fix the things that happened last time. And so you really just have to think about I like— well, two things that I like. I like to think about, is there a way we can do things the opposite of what we've done in the past? And what would be the pluses and minuses of that? And then I find that almost every problem, especially in business, can get a lot better if you think really long-term. So if you zoomed out and said, okay, if we did X, if we fast forward 10 or 20 years, what would our company, organization, society look like if we continue to do X and everyone else also did X? And that actually can remove a lot of these, the short-termism, which I think plagues humanity's biggest problems today, including climate change, which we haven't talked to, but our response so far to the coronavirus does not make me as optimistic about climate change because it's so much more slow-moving. I do hope that, I don't know, are you fundamentally, are you default optimistic or default pessimistic?

I think I'm default worried, which is not quite the same thing as being pessimistic, but I by default pay a lot of attention to the way things can go wrong or are going wrong and the imperative to respond to those problems. No one's ever accused me of being optimistic or Pollyannish, but it's not that I don't— I mean, I really do think we have an extraordinary ability to solve problems, and really the sky is the limit on that front. I think we could engineer something like a true utopia. It's not that it'd be no problems, but the problems would become increasingly refined, and then in some limit case, we're just trying to make things more and more beautiful and disagreeing about standards of beauty, you know, across all domains. The human experience could become a kind of paradise, really. And, you know, we've all experienced moments where It is, and yet it has to be shored up against the insults delivered by nature and randomness and bad actors. And that's impressively hard to do. And it— but to come back to your comment about climate change, which is something I said almost verbatim in my previous podcast, I mean, this— the one thing that has made me pessimistic in seeing this drama unfold is how hard it is for so many of us to orient to a threat that is becoming less and less ambiguous by the hour. We're hearing anguished reports from Italy about its healthcare system crashing, and doctors who have worked in ICUs for decades, who have never seen anything like this, having to triage patients based on, you know, how many kids they have or the likelihood they're going to survive. I mean, they're essentially practicing battlefield medicine in the best hospitals in their country and putting 2 people on a single ventilator, right? And thereby causing them to share any conceivable infectious agent between them, right? Because it's just— they're out of ventilators. This is medicine in extremis, and we're hearing these anguished reports. There's no barrier to us getting this information. We're getting it in real time. And yet we've got people crowding Disney World on its last night of operation. And Fox News blaring out misinformation to, you know, half of our population, and they're lapping it up, and without any consequence to the business of Fox News. I mean, people have cut together the kind of before and after statements of anchors on Fox News where, you know, they're denying this as a Democrat hoax, and then, you know, a day later they're telling people to socially distance. And obviously Trump is patient zero for this kind of disregard for honest communication. The fact that we're here with respect to a threat to our well-being, even just economic well-being, forget about the health implications, the fact that we're so slow to orient to it, honestly, it makes the case of climate change seem totally hopeless. I now think that the only solution for the problem of climate change is a surreptitious one where we just invent technologies and businesses that become so compelling and they become so benign with respect to climate that, you know, people adopt them because that's the kind of car they want, that's the kind of—

It's just better. Yeah.

Yeah, it's just better. And we've never had to persuade anyone of anything. That actually seems truly hopeless to me at the moment.

Well, the good news— well, sorry, I feel silly saying good news.

You be the optimist.

Well, I'll catch this by— I think it's going to be really bad, but that adversity does create clarity. So in these things, it's true that there's been no immediate business. I actually have no idea what's going to happen with media, but I think that it goes to show that, you know, in good times when the tide is rising, You can kind of get by with weak or bad leaders or weak or bad information, but when things get tough, that's what really has to draw people together. And there is a much more, a much higher bar that every person has when it becomes more of a life and death situation, which this is a life and death situation. I, you know, resonate a lot with a philosophy that All suffering comes from separation or the myth of separation. And so my biggest— I actually, even more than distributed work, I advocate for open source because I believe that we need more transparency of information. We need humanity working together to solve common problems. And open source is a way to do that in software. You know, an optimism I'm having right now is how much better this is than it even could be at this point by researchers all over the world sharing data in a very open way. We're starting to break up the kind of journal publication and other things. We're saying, like, hey, we had this myth— like, journal publication's a really good example. Like, we had this myth that this peer review process creates correct outcomes, almost like the firewall we talked about earlier, where, like, if it's on the other side of the wall, it's secure. And we, of course, know that many things are not reproducible, and that process actually isn't always perfect. And also, there can be true and useful things that haven't made it through that process or that won't make it through that process. But if you can share things with context, as the researcher in Washington did who talked about the, um, you probably saw the sequencing of the virus that said it's probably been in the wild in Washington for 4 to 6 weeks. That's for, at least in the technology world, when a lot of us woke up to, you know, if you notice tech companies started like saying work from home and shutting things down a bit sooner, canceling events, pulling out of events before a lot of the rest of the industry. That tweet is— I would point directly to that as the reason that it happened. And so if you can have the adversity bring us closer together, I hope that, you know, they say, like, much like democracy, once you've had a taste of freedom, it's hard to return to your previous state. That once we see the benefits of kind of the sharing of information, that the kind of better angels of our nature can shine through. And if you believe, as I do, that humans are fundamentally good at their core on average. Adversity can cause us to behave in a more generous or altruistic way, and it's best. But we're going to swing. In Houston, we have hurricanes, and I'm in Houston right now. After Katrina, there was a lot of— because in New Orleans they didn't fully evacuate for Katrina. A lot of people died. It was a huge tragedy, one of the worst domestic tragedies we've had, and the government response was really bad. There was a hurricane coming to Houston after that, and they overreacted. So they told everyone to evacuate, and that evacuation of the third or fourth largest city in America clogged all the roads, and cars would run out of gas, and then they would die, and then the roads would get clogged up more. Dozens and dozens and dozens of people died in the evacuation as a result of the evacuation. And then to top it all off, the hurricane became a tropical storm. It ended up not being even something very severe. And so you had this kind of overreaction to a mistake in the past, which now has created something which, you know, could be similar to how The New York Times talked about the N95 mask, where like we were telling people to do the right thing, but maybe for the wrong reason.

Right.

That you have an overreaction where I worry that as we start to open things up, as the virus recedes a little, we'll then get too open, it'll come back, and then we'll overreact the other way with getting too closed in ways that'll send needless shocks to the economy.

Yeah, no, that's totally valid. We've had to thread the needle here in our thinking and our messaging about this, because it's true that it's possible that the panic associated with this pandemic and any, you know, subsequent overreaction personal or collective, can be worse than the consequences of the virus ultimately. And that's true even if, you know, a million people in the US or 2 million wind up dying from this virus. It's still conceivable that crashing the global economy will have worse effects than that, right? So while that is a kind of talking point that people have been using to dismiss the danger here, The extreme version is to call this a hoax that has been designed by the Democrats to unseat the president, which one could hear— perhaps one can still hear it in certain circles, even though the president himself is not speaking these ways. It is a legitimate concern that we not crash our economy unnecessarily and we not crash it for a moment longer than is necessary, because a lack of economic activity translates into lives lost in very concrete ways and to other social ills. But crashing our healthcare system because it can no longer function under the load is the immediate problem that we're avoiding.

I think you have to be solutions-oriented in how you talk about these things. So if you— I'm not as optimistic if you told everyone like, "Hey, we're not going to have enough masks, please don't buy them," that people would not buy them. Right? Like something might kick in where they say, "Well, okay." If you were to modify that and say, Hey, for the next 2 weeks, we really need health workers to have these as much as possible. If you have extras, please donate them. And in the meantime, we're ramping up all these factories, all these things to make hand sanitizer and masks and all the things that, that will help slow the spread of this. So in a few weeks, there'll be enough for everyone, or whatever the actual reality of that situation is. I think that I'm a lot more optimistic about that, but you have to have, you have to think in systems and processes. You can't just, you know, hope is not a strategy.

Yeah. And how do you think about the failures of the free market here? Because I've long been worried that, you know, while the free market should do everything that it can best do, there's a kind of free market fundamentalism here and a libertarianism which imagines quite falsely that it can do everything in the best way. That we need not take regulatory or other steps to produce things or correct for externalities that the market simply can't see. And so we're now learning about all these things that we have outsourced to China rather often, but, you know, to elsewhere for sound market reasons, but we've lost the ability to produce these things ourselves in anything like a nimble way. And this goes to, you know, our most basic life-saving drugs. It goes to things like ventilators and respirators. What do you think about an indelible lesson we might learn here with respect to the things we want to be able to make immediately or have on hand always in a crisis like this?

I think that you have to assume that regardless of any precautions you take, there will be times when everything goes wrong in a way you cannot imagine. And I'm not a free market fundamentalist, but I am optimistic that, you know, at some point over the next month, we'll be able to produce lots of masks. I'm hopeful that, you know, at some point this year, we'll be able to mass produce enough tests. So we'll have an abundance of that. And then hopefully, we also start to keep a strategic reserve. And that's where I think governments can really be most valuable, is when they can plan for the strategic reserve, the insurance, the things to tide over temporary shocks to the system, much like we do for oil. We should look at that for many, many other staples of well-functioning society. I was actually really surprised to hear, I don't know if you knew this, but China actually has a strategic pork reserve.

Not really. No, I hadn't heard that.

I guess they've just, some bureaucrat somewhere said that for the harmony of society, you know, particularly in a country so large, which is relatively authoritarian, it really relies on the citizens being happy that access to pork is actually a key thing to keep society running in a harmonious way. And so they've, they've built up the reserves there. Now that's, that's a funny example, but we can probably have all been woken up to things in our own lives that just having a week or two in the pantry might not be a bad idea. And I think where it's going to be most hard is for companies. Because we have this kind of culture of short-termism, stock buybacks, et cetera. And we really need companies to build a lot more of a rainy day fund. And that is, by the way, running a company, multibillion enterprise, it's hard to make that case because there's often like invest as much as possible or return to shareholders. And in fact, that's your fiduciary responsibility that you take on as an executive or director of these companies. So we need a way to incorporate the long term there. But when we were in the longest, almost uninterrupted bull market, kind of from '90s till now, with maybe 2001 and 2008 being blips, there's generations, including myself, that never really experienced a true downturn.

Right.

And that's why I think you made the analogy more to World War II than 9/11. And I think that's a very, very apt one. We are many generations removed from the amount of hardship society has had to go through and what we'll need to go through. Both in collective action and personal hardship today.

Yeah, that's interesting. Maybe if you can say a little bit more about the business case here. You know, there are startups that have a certain amount of runway. There's all this pressure to grow as quickly as possible. And I got to think a lot of businesses are going to wish they hadn't gotten so far out over their skis in an effort to grow. Even businesses that are designed more or less like yours, where they're optimized for distributed work, it's just there's something about the current environment where it's nice to know you can make payroll for years if you're sitting on profits, whereas taking profit is all too rare in Silicon Valley, right? I mean, Amazon is the ultimate case of this. They weren't profitable for something like 20 years and then Jeff flipped a switch and, you know, now it's become perhaps among the most profitable companies on Earth. But the virtue of being able to not get hooked up to profits for years and years as you grow, that is now the model of achieving escape velocity in Silicon Valley. And I got to think this moment has some lessons to impart for business people, certainly in that space.

Well, there's often advice for people, you know, take away 5 or 10% of your income and put it away. And I think businesses need to adopt something similar. I think all of us as both consumers and also as job seekers should look to the businesses which today are having to do big layoffs versus those which are saying, hey, even if our stores are closed, we're going to keep paying people. Apple, Lululemon, you know, there's dozens of examples. Those are the organizations that have adequately planned for downturns like this, or downturns in general, or unexpected events in general. And they deserve our patronage, both as customers and as places where we choose to devote, you know, a third of our life, our working hours, some of our most valuable time. Half of our waking hours goes to our job often. And so I believe that we each should try to donate our talents or put our talents, not donate, you pay for it obviously, but put your talents to where you feel most aligned with the way in which the company is run. There's a backdrop here as well, which is the, the oil things that are going on. Have you talked about that much?

No. No.

Well, you have the fight between Russia. I'm in Houston, so I think about energy a lot. You have the fight between Russia and Saudi Arabia crashing oil prices. You know, you're hearing that companies here are gonna start to pretty immediately pull back on 20%, 30% of their workforce because much of the oil extraction we're doing in the US is just not profitable at the prices per barrel of oil and things that are dropping too. So they're having to do really, really big pullbacks and very quickly and suddenly. Those are the type of things that do create supply shocks throughout the system because now they're going to all their vendors and asking for an immediate 10% drop in all of their cost, even to SaaS services, like internet services. They're going and say, "Hey, can you drop 10% off our bill?" And some of that's opportunistic, but some of it's very real, and that they need to bring their cost structures down almost immediately to survive.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, the knock-on effects of all of this are extraordinary. We have to remind ourselves this is only beginning. I mean, this is a very early moment to be having this conversation, and this will change week by week.

Are you hopeful for a political change after this? Do you think it'll shock people into it?

Cautiously hopeful. I'm worried about many things. I'm worried about Biden's candidacy. I'm worried about ways in which social cohesion can fray. It seems guaranteed to fray under economic pressure, and that that will just energize a kind of, you know, more toxic populism that will just ignore how we got here. I mean, the fact that even now, this early, Trump thinks he can successfully rewrite the record and say that he's been on this pandemic all along and has responded effectively to it, and this is now just best described as the Chinese flu. And, you know, modulo the fact that I really do think we have to hold China accountable for some obscenely dangerous cultural practices. This is a global problem that, you know, requires global cooperation, and simply putting this in quasi-xenophobic terms as a problem of China and of Chinese origin, that's falling into the demagogue's playbook here, and I could imagine, you know, certainly— as we lose the plot, or we begin to encounter the outrage of people who never found the plot politically, yeah, I think that this could become— rather than the utterly clarifying moment it should be, which is it matters when you hire dishonest, incompetent people who are slow to react to obvious problems and show a total unwillingness to prepare for them— I do worry that it could tip over into something fairly scary. Again, it's early days. It's hard to see where it'll go.

I have one last question for you since we're wrapping up.

Sure.

I have a lot of colleagues for whom the mental anguish of this, especially uncertainty, has been really tough and are starting to explore meditation, mindfulness. What would you suggest to people for whom this is a really stressful and anxious time to just be a human and how they could use those tools?

Yeah, well, that really is a softball question on this podcast.

Well, but I think it's important.

Yeah, you know, as you probably know, I'm putting everything, you know, all the advice I have to give on that front into my app, Waking Up. And, you know, occasionally some of that discussion hits the podcast, but it's really Waking Up is the place where people can find everything I'm thinking on that topic. And actually, I'm just about to release a lesson, which I'll probably put on the podcast too, responding to that question where it's just how to think about meditation in the context of an emergency. And this is a very strange emergency. I mean, it's sort of natural to think that you don't have time to meditate in the midst of most emergencies because you're too busy responding to them. But in the case of this one, I mean, I would argue that that's even a misunderstanding of how to marshal your resources in the case of any emergency. But leaving that aside, In this emergency, really what we're finding is that most of us have in some sense more time on our hands, and in a very real sense more time on our hands, and we're forced into comparative solitude. You know, we're being shoved onto retreat by Mother Nature right now, many of us, most of us even. So it's the perfect time to get your mind around this concept of mental training and clearly witnessing the mechanics of your psychological suffering. So if you, you'll notice that most of your anxiety in response to this pandemic and the changes in your life that it's enforcing, most of it's not useful. Most of it's just toxic, and, you know, it too is contagious. I mean, I just notice how I am around my family. And when I have an unwitnessed background level of anxiety pushing forward all of my communication, I'm just, you know, I'm not good company in those moments. I'm spreading my stress to the people who most need to be reassured by, you know, who I am in each moment. Not to mention, I'm also suffering in those moments. So For me, meditation is not even so much a formal practice. I mean, the formal practice is how you learn the skill, but crucially, it's a learned skill to be able to notice the difference between being lost in thought and recognizing thoughts themselves as they arise in the mind as just objects of consciousness. And that really is a quantum difference. I mean, it's a binary difference. I mean, either you can do that or you can't. And being able to do that allows you to unhook from the emotional consequences of any given pattern of thought. So if you're thinking terrifying thoughts about where all this could be headed, you know, professionally, politically, with respect to your, you know, your own health or the health of the people you love, A lot of us are meditating on risk a lot of the time right now, which is to say we're— our attention is embedded in this very real threat to virtually everything we care about. And we're on Twitter and we're reading the newspaper and we're watching the news and we're having conversations with other worried people. And so there's a kind of social contagion here, which, you know, in part is necessary because we need to be motivated to a common purpose. But hour by hour in your life, honestly, 95% of the anxiety any of us will feel today isn't helpful. And an ability to notice thoughts arise, you know, notice the voice in your mind or the imagery that is capturing your attention, that's sneaking up behind you in each moment, and seeming to become you, right? The thought, "Oh my God, what's going to happen to the Dow?" Right? If you're watching the implications of the stock market, or worrying about your mom, or whatever it is. I mean, it's not to say you shouldn't care about your mom, but every moment of thinking about your mom without knowing you're thinking about your mom, simply just being identified with that stream of thought, is a moment where you're producing anxiety to no good purpose, and it's becoming the mood music to everything you subsequently do. So an ability to unhook from that and truly reset is a kind of superpower. And it does— I mean, some people can acquire it fairly quickly, but it really does only come with training. I mean, it is a skill. So it's like you're not going to accidentally learn to play the piano. You're not even going to accidentally learn how to do a push-up correctly, right? I mean, like, you do have to be taught these things. So yeah, I mean, that's everything useful I have to say on the topic. I do put into my app, and, you know, once again remind everyone— I keep doing this, and people occasionally prove to me that it's still possible not to notice this— but for anyone for whom the price of a subscription to this podcast or my app is a problem, and you are the best judge of that. You need only send us an email and you get everything for free. And many, many people send that email, right? And there's no means testing, there's no further questions about it. It's just you send us an email that you need a free membership on the Waking Up app or a subscription to samharris.org for this podcast. I mean, despite the fact that I'm putting many of these podcasts, as I will with this episode, outside the paywall, because, you know, I consider them PSAs.

Thank you for that, by the way. It's been super helpful.

Yeah, we're talking about stuff that everyone should hear. But anyone who has to think about increments of money that make it a hard decision about whether or not to subscribe to my app or podcast, you know, if $10 a month or $6 a month, or if these are increments that you have to sweat, you're precisely the person for whom this policy was created, because I absolutely do not want to become a source of economic stress for anyone at any time, frankly, but, you know, much less do I want it at times like these. So I know many people who are subscribers or who have free accounts continually hear other people complain about the fact that I have any of my stuff behind a paywall, and that opens the door to a larger debate about just how to monetize digital content and, you know, what ads have done to our economy and democracy. And I've taken very strong positions on all that, but I just encourage people who hear people complain about this, remind them that they can always have this stuff for free if they just send an email. And that's the best I can do given my business model. Cool.

Thank you.

So, yeah. Well, so, and you, Matt, you too can send that email and there'll be no means testing over there in Houston.

Yeah. Thank you. I do find that that mindfulness of that meditation is even more important when things are tough. And when I've gone through personal hardships or friends dying, or wow, it can really make a life-changing difference. So count this as my personal endorsement that everyone should explore it, whether it's Sam's app or something else.

There's also just a fundamental insight here. It's a conceptual insight that everyone should have and everyone can experience viscerally, which is all you have is your mind. I mean, obviously, I'm not saying the mind is divorceable from the body, but I mean, all you have, the only tools you have in each moment in relationship, in responding to stress, I mean, all you've got is the cognitive and emotional tools you've built for yourself, you know, over the course of a life. And many of us have built these tools or failed to build them inadvertently. We're not aware of having made our minds by virtue of what we've paid attention to moment to moment. I mean, we have been practicing something, however haphazardly, every moment of our lives. I mean, we've been ramifying our desires and our fears and our concerns. We've acquired skills and abandoned them. And, you know, it's worth realizing that you can be deliberate about this and really change your mind fundamentally fairly quickly. There are many levels to this in terms of just learning new concepts and frames with which to view experience, but mindfulness really is— I do consider it a necessary piece here. And yeah, again, it's a practice. So yeah, you sort of become what you do with your attention. So I do recommend it.

Since there might be a lot of engineers or business people listening because of the topic, I will plug one book that I found helped a lot of particularly engineers connect with this, where more traditional meditation books didn't work. It's actually from a guy who was at Google. It's called Search Inside Yourself, and it uses a lot of metaphors of like background processes, interrupts, technical metaphors essentially to be an introduction to meditation. So it can be a helpful frame for people to explore. If they haven't resonated with like many of the other traditional meditation intros.

Great. Well, listen, Matt, thank you for your time. It's been great to get you on the podcast.

Likewise, really enjoyed it. And, uh, take care, stay safe.