Tim Ferriss and Matt Mullenweg Get Personal in Antarctica

Recorded inside a shell tent on Union Glacier in Antarctica after the duo witnessed a total solar eclipse, this wide-ranging and intimate conversation reunites Tim Ferriss with Matt Mullenweg five years after their first interview. They reflect on the cosmic insignificance and awe of the eclipse and the timeless Antarctic landscape, then move into deeply personal territory: Matt's grief over losing his father, the lessons of pre-grieving, and his explicit decision not to have children so he can devote himself to his mission of democratizing publishing and open source. Tim opens up about his fear of being hardwired toward depression and chronic low energy tied to undiagnosed Lyme disease, and the existential relief he found in the book Four Thousand Weeks. The pair use a deck of reflection question cards to probe fears, beliefs about the afterlife, intentions versus actions, bucket lists, and gratitude, disagreeing thoughtfully on human nature and ethics. Lighter threads include Tim's portable podcasting setup, dog cloning, scuba diving as a metaphor for psychedelics, and the limits of scientific knowing.

• Matt shares that the biggest change in the past five years was his father's passing, which taught him about grief and the ephemerality of life.
  00:26:58
• Tim confesses his deepest fear: that he is hardwired by DNA and conditioning toward depression, self-loathing, and a baseline he cannot escape no matter how much he optimizes.
  00:45:54
• Tim links his lifelong struggle with low energy to undiagnosed and untreated Lyme disease from childhood on Long Island, later confirmed by serologic testing around 2012-2014.
  00:49:14
• Tim describes how the book Four Thousand Weeks and its 'cosmic insignificance therapy' brought him peace by reframing humanity's self-destruction against the finite lifespan of Earth and the sun.
  00:54:39
• Matt reveals he decided explicitly not to have children, choosing instead to make WordPress and open source the legacy he leaves on the world.
  01:17:24
• Matt puts the odds that he changes his mind and has a child within five years at 8 percent, which Tim jokes will be the episode's headline.
  01:18:55
• Matt discloses he was party to the cloning of a dog via the company Viagen and has met the resulting clone, finding it a genetic twin with a completely different personality.
  01:39:36
• Asked what he'd change if he had one year to live, Matt says he would write more to pass on his mission of democratizing publishing, while Tim would spend more time with loved ones and have a child with his girlfriend.
  01:08:51

• WordPress now powers 42 percent of the web per W3Techs, up from roughly 10 percent five years earlier; Automattic has grown from a couple hundred to nearly 2,000 people across 92 countries.
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• Automattic operates with essentially no internal email, communicating asynchronously through an internal blogging tool called P2, where everything is permalinked, archived, and searchable.
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• In Antarctica all human waste must be carried out, so Matt keeps a colored Nalgene bottle of urine on the tent table because urine left in the snow can persist for hundreds or thousands of years.
  00:07:31
• WooCommerce is projected to process about 21 billion dollars of transactions, as Automattic aims to do for e-commerce what it did for websites.
  00:13:41
• The total solar eclipse they witnessed was the only one visible from the Antarctic continent until 2039.
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• Eclipses have shaped history: King John the Pious, and an eclipse tied to the splitting of an empire into what became France, Italy, and Germany among three sons.
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• Emperor penguins, the largest penguin species, stand roughly 2.5 to 3.5 feet tall and have about 15 feathers per square centimeter.
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• Tim records in-person episodes with a Zoom H6, Shure SM58 and KSM8 handheld mics, colored XLR cables for easy level identification, and a Shure MV88 on an iPhone as backup.
  00:36:30
• Tim recorded an episode with Rick Rubin in a 200+ degree Fahrenheit sauna, where the mics got so hot they had to be wrapped in towels; the Antarctic recording was at roughly negative 35 with windchill near negative 90.
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• Tim references a book (Another Way of Knowing) about Malaysian tribes where villagers would reliably wait at a trailhead to meet an arriving anthropologist who had given no prior notice.
  01:31:50