Category Archives: Books

What I’m reading, book recommendations, and thoughts on the written word.

The Atlantic November issue is lovely, focused on the American Revolution. I particularly enjoyed:

The Myth of Mad King George, which gave a different more nuanced view of King George I didn’t have before or from the Hamilton musical.
Why Did Benjamin Franklin’s Son Remain Loyal to the British? I was obsessed with with Ben Franklin’s Autobiography as a kid, he was an incredible self-made man who came from impossibly hard beginnings and had a profound impact on history. I think I originally read through Project Gutenberg on my first Handspring Visor. The article shows an entire huge part of his life that is missing from his Autobiography.
What We Learned Filming The American Revolution is from Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt, who’ve come together with the challenging task of making a documentary from a time there were no photographs or videos. Ken Burns is one of my favorite documentarians, and the behind the scenes is very interesting.

So pick up a copy as you pass through an airport or by a newstand. I consider it a very worthwhile subscription. It might be better to read in print or through Apple News+ as their website a bit broken for me right now.

Tim & Pablos

Two of my favorite humans, Tim Ferriss and Pablos Holman, had a great interview together.

Pablos has a great new book out, and Audrey Capital is a happy LP in his Deep Future fund. Of my many hacker friends, Pablos is probably the most public.

Greenwashing

October 4, 2025Books, Food, Karma, Open Source, WordPressMatt

Tonight there was a lovely event at TinkerTendo by Raman Frey and Karin Johnson of Good People Dinners, this one honoring David Gelles’ new book, Dirtbag Billionaire: How Yvon Chouinard Built Patagonia, Made a Fortune, and Gave It All Away. I’m a huge fan of Yvon Chouinard and really enjoyed his book Let My People Go Surfing which I read back in 2018. It was the first time hosting such a large 60-person dinner in the TinkerTendo warehouse, and thanks to this Copper battery-operated induction stovetop and an amazing local chef, Hanif Sadr, the food turned out amazing.

I’ve only started the new book, but I’m interested to see what’s happened in the 20 years between Yvon’s book and David’s, especially the story of how Yvon gave away all his equity and control in the company to ensure a focus on his lifelong goal of environmentalism and conservation. Patagonia is one of the better corporate entities fighting for good, but it reminded me of how companies can put on a jacket of doing good while actually being evil underneath.

Like I talked about the economic concept of Externalties a few weeks ago, I think it’s imperative that the WordPress community understands the history of Greenwashing, which the United Nations defines as follows:

Claiming that the company will achieve future environment milestones while not putting sufficient plans in place to do so.
Being intentionally vague about operations or using vague claims that cannot be specifically proven (like saying they are “environmentally friendly” or “green”).
Saying that a product does not contain harmful materials or use harmful practices that they would not use anyway.
Highlighting one thing the company does well regarding the environment while not doing anything else.
Promoting products that meet regulatory minimums as if peer products do not.

In WordPress and open source our environmental crisis comes from companies that frack the open source software and brands, which shows up as lack of investment in the code which falls fallow especially in the security sense, or by attaching themselves to a brand or trademark and tricking people into thinking they’re associated with the Good Open thing, when they’re really a parasitic cancer on it.

This is happening right now in WordPress, so when you see a company hire a good person or sponsor an event that seems on its own a good thing, and probably represents hundreds of thousands of dollars of investment, weigh that against the tens of millions they’re spending with their other hand to destroy the source of everything they’ve benefited from, and if they were to win, endanger every open source project. It’s an open source form of greenwashing, perhaps call it openwashing.

Telex Remixes

September 24, 2025AI, Automattic, Books, Design, Tech, WordPressMatt

Telex has launched a new design and a gallery of some interesting examples. It’s really cool to see what people are starting to do with Telex, it really gets back at the fun of hacking and coding at the beginning, when a computer does something for you that makes you gasp.

My colleague Eduardo Villuendas has been making some cool music with it.

This really gets to my vision for Gutenberg to be a builder that anyone can use to create an incredible website, like legos anyone can assemble anything they imagine on the web. This is why I said Gutenberg is bigger than WordPress.

Jeff Paul made a game of Pong.
JuanMa Garrido made a mermaid diagram. (Which I have never heard of before.)
Marko Ivanović did a beautiful dot art thing.

Hat tip to the Gutenberg Times. As I said in 2022, you need to learn AI deeply, there is so much fun stuff happening. Berkan Cesur even likes it on Reddit.

Nick Diego writes how Telex Turns Everyone into a WordPress Block developer.

When my father passed unexpectedly, I was despondent. One thing I remember was the Amazon lovebomb I got from my high school girlfriend Sunaina Sondhi, five books to help me deal with the pain. Even a decade after we dated, books were her love language; in fact, she had given me my very first book about meditation when we were teenagers. I don’t recall what all the books were, but the two that really made a difference for me were Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s and David Kessler’s posthumous book On Grief and Grieving, and the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. Each allowed me to process and understand the emotions I was going through.

Breaking Ribs

September 6, 2025Books, Food, Video, WordPressMatt

Chris Young, who is otherwise famous for being a co-author of the 2,438-page cookbook Modernist Cuisine or centrifuging steaks and drinking them, is one of the friends who, over the years, has told me I have to watch Breaking Bad, the TV show. When I was in Marrakech for a few weeks earlier this year, and it was a million degrees outside, I cracked and started watching, and I see why people say it’s one of the best shows ever. I’m only up to S2E4, and I see why everyone loves it, including that it is sometimes unintentionally hilarious, but I had to stop because it was getting a bit too dark and bumming me out before I went to bed.

However, I’m glad I made it through that season and a half of Breaking Bad, because it has given me the ability to appreciate this homage Chris has done, attempting to use science and chemistry to cook ribs in an apartment oven just as well as you could with a smoker. If you live at the intersection of Breaking Bad, BBQ, science, chemistry, and cooking, this is the video for you. And now, this makes me want to order some Pit Room in Houston. (WordPress-powered!)

And if you haven’t yet, you should buy one of Chris’ Combustion Predictive Thermometers (here on Amazon).

Alpha School Insider

June 26, 2025AI, Books, Education, ReviewMatt

Scott Alexander, of Slate Star Codex / Astral Codex Ten fame, ran an Everything-Except-Book Review Contest 2025 in February. The prompt: “Submit an ACX-length post reviewing something, anything, except a book.” The submissions were collected anonymously in a giant 450-page Google Doc. I don’t think the winners have been chosen yet, but there is one essay that has been making the rounds and getting shared more, and that’s Alpha School and “2-hour Learning” powered by AI, a parent’s perspective on Alpha School, a set of “AI-powered” schools in Texas and Florida.

It’s worth reading the entire essay, but I wanted to excerpt a few points I found interesting:

After twelve months I’m persuaded that Alpha is doing something remarkable—but that almost everyone, including Alpha’s own copywriting team, is describing it wrong:

It isn’t genuine two‑hour learning: most kids start school at 8:30am, start working on the “two-hour platform” sometime between 9am-930am and are occupied with academics until noon-1230pm. They also blend in “surges” from time to time to squeeze in more hours on the platform.

It isn’t AI in the way we have been thinking about it since the “Attention is all you need” paper. There is no “generative AI” powered by OpenAI, Gemini or Claude in the platform the kids use – it is closer to “turbocharged spreadsheet checklist with a spaced‑repetition algorithm”

It definitely isn’t teacher‑free: Teachers have been rebranded “guides”, and while their workload is different than a traditional school, they are very important – and both the quantity and quality are much higher than traditional schools.

The bundle matters: it’s not just the learning platform on its own. A big part of the product’s success is how the school has set up student incentives and the culture they have built to make everything work together

…Yet the core claim survives: Since they started in October my children have been marching through and mastering material roughly three times faster than their age‑matched peers (and their own speed prior to the program).

One of the surprises doesn’t come until Part 4 of the essay:

Incentives

People REALLY don’t like the idea of incentivizing kids to learn.

Roland Fryer, who has done extensive work on what works in incentivizing students, quotes a 2010 Gallup poll that found that only 23% of American parents support the “idea of school districts paying small amount of money to students to, for example, read books, attend school or to get good grades” (76% opposed the idea with only 1% undecided).

There are not many things that 76% of Americans agree on. Only 69% of Americans believe another Civil War would be a bad thing. Only 78% agree that American independence from Britain was the right choice. People REALLY don’t like paying kids to read books.

I hope that gives you enough of a hook to read the entire essay, it was quite good and provocative to many assumptions I’ve had about education.

Ed Catmull on Change

February 9, 2025Books, Design, WordPressMatt

I’ve been really enjoying the book Creativity Inc by Ed Catmull of Pixar, it was recommended to me by my colleague Dave Martin a while back and I finally got around to it. There’s an interesting story in it where George Lucas had asked him to develop a film editing system that was digital.

While George wanted this new video-editing system in place, the film editors at Lucasfilm did not. They were perfectly happy with the system they had already mastered, which involved actually cutting film into snippets with razor blades and then pasting them back together. They couldn’t have been less interested in making changes that would slow them down in the short term. They took comfort in their familiar ways, and change meant being uncomfortable. […] If left up to the editors, no new tool would ever be designed and no improvements would be possible.

This made me think a lot about the early days of Gutenberg and the huge resistance it had in the community, including causing the fork of ClassicPress. Now that we’re much further along there’s a pretty widespread acceptance of Gutenberg, and it’s responsible for the vast majority of all WP posts and pages made, however if we had taken a vote for whether it should happen or not, it probably wouldn’t have ever gotten off the ground.

What’s funny is if you go back even further, using a visual WYSIWYG editor in the first place was very controversial, and many people didn’t want the classic editor brought into WordPress.

Bezos at Dealbook

It looks like the Dealbook Summit had a number of great interviews this year, major props to Andrew Ross Sorkin, but this one with Jeff Bezos was particularly good.

Welcoming Harper

November 21, 2024Automattic, Books, Open SourceMatt

As announced by Automattic and covered by TechCrunch, I want to take a moment to welcome Elijah Potter and Harper to join Automattic. Harper is a super-fast (way faster than LanguageTool and Grammarly), local English grammar checker. The technology is nascent, but I’m very excited to embed this throughout all of Automattic’s products, and then expanding it to other languages, all in an open source way that can be embedded everywhere. I’m a huge fan of Grammarly and use it every day, but I think we’re doing too much in the cloud right now and there is so much compute and potential at the edge, and I’m excited to drive that forward with projects like Harper, Gutenberg, and Playground.

People Wanted

August 28, 2024Automattic, Books, WordPressMatt

There’s an apocryphal story about Ernest Shackleton putting an ad in the newspaper that read:

Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.

If you’ve read the book Endurance by Alfred Lansing, you know how that went. Pretty legendary. One of my most treasured possessions is actually a copy of Ernest Shackleton’s Heart of the Antarctic book signed by every member of the shore party and Shackleton.

You may have heard the news that we’re going to migrate Tumblr onto WordPress. Automattic has put up a similar page calling for talented engineers of any gender who want to join the voyage.

We no longer need companies, institutions, or government to organize us. We now have the tools to organize ourselves. We can find each other and coalesce around political causes or bad companies or talent or business or ideas. We can share and sort our knowledge and behavior. We can communicate and come together in an instant. We also have new ethics and attitudes that spring from this new organization and change society in ways we cannot yet see, with openness, generosity, collaboration, efficiency. We are using the internet’s connective tissue to leap over borders—whether they surround countries or companies or demographics. We are reorganizing society. This is Google’s—and Facebook’s and craigslist’s—new world order.

— Jeff Jarvis in the book What Would Google Do? Published 2009.

Interesting to revisit as they float trial balloons on breaking Google up (terrible idea) or other antitrust enforcement.

Happy Birthday, Charleen

July 21, 2024Books, PersonalMatt

I’ve had many blessings in my life, but the very first was the family I was born into. Today, I’d like to tell you about my only sibling, favorite sister, and best beloved, Charleen Mullenweg.

With a gap of nine and a half years between us, we could have easily been distant from each other, but it was almost like I had a third parent, one who was just the coolest person I could imagine in the universe. My sister paved the way for me, giving my parents lots of experience and training, so they were pretty chill by the time I came along. As a very young kid, I didn’t always understand what was going on. For example, one time, I remember getting jealous of all the gifts she was getting… gifts given after a really intense surgery for severe scoliosis (twisted spine) that required her to wear a brace for many years. She was always gracious and understanding towards the little kid following her around everywhere and trying to be like her.

However, Charleen never wavered in being my biggest supporter, despite how annoying I must have been as an eager kid a decade her junior. All of my early aesthetic and musical tastes were derivative of her early discovery of cool bands like The Police, U2, Counting Crows, and Concrete Blonde. Despite being labeled with her initials, I’d “borrow” all her CDs and tapes. We’d make each other mixes and share books.

I’ve never doubted that no matter what I did, Charleen would always back me up, as she said “I’m behind you 1000%.” I missed her dearly when she moved to Austin in the 90s, far before everyone else figured out how cool Austin was, but that just meant countless road trips to visit and crash on her couch. The distance didn’t keep her from being there for every holiday and major event, including when I started to have jazz performances or host technology events in town. Whatever my interest was, she was there and supportive. As WordCamps started to become a thing, she was there. I always knew however much I messed up or people were mad at me (there were lots!) I could look out and see my sister’s face, there to comfort me.

Her influence on me didn’t stop with music and art. Charleen’s early research into genealogy, which included deep dives into libraries and making rubbings of gravestones, couldn’t be more perfect for my first foray into relational databases. We learned together how to set up the structures in MySQL and phpMyAdmin to represent all of the genealogical information in tables, which complemented the PHP I was learning to create Mullenweg.com, still up today. Before I built any other content management systems the first content I was managing was Charleen’s and my Uncle Colin’s research.

If you’re a sibling and want to be as awesome as Charleen, start with this: Unflappable, unwavering support, and honesty. My entrepreneurial path was not straight up and to the right: It included many twists and turns, close calls, borrowing money, huge mistakes, but I always knew Charleen was a phone call away. Her sharp intellect was able to slice through whatever I was struggling with, able to back and support me however I needed in that situation. You can jump further when you feel like you have a safety net, and my family has always been that for me. There have been times when it felt like the entire internet was calling for my head, nobody liked me, I couldn’t do anything right, but Charleen was always there.

They say there’s family you choose and family that you’re born with. Well, if there’s any sliver of truth to the idea from a movie like Pixar’s Soul that you have some choice in the matter of where you end up being born, I’m delighted that I chose to be born as a little brother to Charleen. Because we saw so many other examples of familial relationships torn asunder, we never wanted that to happen to us, so we’ve always maintained that ability to just let things go that don’t really matter as much as your lifelong bond.

Charleen, thank you for a lifetime of love and support, from my first breaths to our latest adventures. You inspire me to be a better human. I can’t imagine being as successful at anything I’ve done in life without you there behind me. I’ll do my best to follow your example of always being behind you 1000%. You’re the best sister I ever could have wished for. At this half-century mark, let us count our blessings and plan many more shenanigans.

Thoughts on Tech Employment

February 7, 2024AI, Audrey, Automattic, Books, Facebook, IdeasMatt

The Washington Post writes The U.S. economy is booming. So why are tech companies laying off workers? This article has some good data, but I think misses the point with sub-heads like “Shine has come off the tech industry.” Really? How is that reflected in their stock prices?

I think a few things are happening.

First, tech companies are typically best at adopting new technology, which leads to productivity gains.

AI may be an obvious example of this, though for all its hype it hasn’t had a huge impact on most companies yet. I agree with Sam Altman when he says there may someday be a billion-dollar company run by one person who is able to highly leverage future AI agents to automate most traditional roles at a company. That said, I think there are advantages to teams including allowing people to go on vacation or take time off, and provide business continuity and succession, so literally one-person is probably an exaggeration. We don’t need AI to see very small teams being valued highly: Instagram had only 13 employees when it sold for a billion dollars to Facebook, in 2012!

Some of this productivity gains just come from adoption of existing tools like Google Workspace or Office 365, issue trackers and version control with tools like Gitlab, Github, or Jira. At Automattic we don’t use email to work or communicate internally, it’s all Slack and P2. We also leverage our distributed nature to effectively have teams around the world coordinating several shifts of product work per day, and 24/7 coverage for things like systems and customer support without the need for “graveyard shifts.”

The way tech companies operate, the pace and culture, would be unrecognizable to people at many more traditional companies.

At tech companies some roles are highly leveraged, like systems, engineering, and design, and everything else in the company really exists to support these. These leveraged roles can create enormous amounts of value, and that’s why it’s not unusual to hear of machine learning engineers working on ads at Google with salaries in the seven figures. (There’s been a weird accounting thing where companies put a lot of their compensation into equity, but I think that’s going away as investors are learning to better account for dilution and employees appreciate the fungibility of cash.)

Creators are also highly leveraged, which is why Joe Rogan can sign a new $250M deal with Spotify (which smartly puts him back on Youtube) after laying off 1,500 people in December. Some people like Hagen Terschüren try to tie this together and say you should avoid Spotify for it, but there’s nothing wrong with a business becoming more efficient to serve its customers, it’s the whole point of capitalism. Capitalism is, as Nicholas Stern says (via Marc), the best way to take care of people we don’t know. There’s no honor in keeping people employed inefficiently, it’s better for them to find someplace in the market where their talents will be better leveraged for society and themselves.

There was a bubble in hiring because tech had so much money it tried to throw people at problems. But the unlock in technology can come from a single person, a single insight. It’s the mythical man-month. Tech-first companies are going to become leaner and more leveraged. Fewer people are going to create more value for society, in ways that will follow power laws and I think we should investigate things like Universal Basic Income to provide for all living beings. Technological progress creates abundance, where we have more than what we need.

At Automattic last year we did not do layoffs, but allowed performance management and natural attrition (voluntary regrettable was 2.9%, non-regrettable 6.8% for us in 2023) to allow our size to shrink down more naturally, on average two people left for every person we hired last year, from a peak of about 2,064 to 1,936 today.

Rowing to Alcatraz

February 2, 2024Books, Gallery, Health, Review, TravelMatt

My friend Neal Mueller, who holds a Guinness World Record for longest non-stop row in Arctic open water—1,000 miles over 41 days in 2012—gave me the incredible gift this morning of introducing me to the Dolphin Club in San Francisco, which has a rich lineage of these hand-built rowboats and love of the craft of rowing. It was awe-inspiring. He then rowed me to Alcatraz! We saw a rainbow (third from last photo in gallery)!

We captured some Spatial Video that will be fun to look at on the Vision Pro later (mine just arrived, but I haven’t opened it yet).

I think what I learned this morning is there is something deeply profound about the act of rowing, of being in harmony and synchronicity with others on your boat, how good it feels when you’re in sync, and how obvious it is when you aren’t. I’ve done rowing machines before many times but never been on the open water, and I saw also the impact of the variability of the ocean, currents, and waves had on the rowing. I think there is also something related here to when autistic people (and myself!) rock back and forth when something feels like it’s in alignment.

Luckily I was with literally one of the world’s best rowers, so I always felt safe and was able to enjoy the feeling of being on the water, and really felt the heritage and respect of these beautiful craft we were on, Cronin-1938. I introduced Neal to the concept of the Ship of Theseus, one Matias and I love to talk about in the context of Gutenberg. One of the most beautiful days I’ve seen in San Francisco. Here are a few photos from this morning.

My sabbatical is off to a great start. ☺️

Books 2020–2023

December 31, 2023Books, PersonalMatt

I’m a few years behind in posting my book lists, and past few years a good amount of my book reading time shifted to other mediums. I have been rediscovering the joy of books so here’s what I read the past few years as a motivation to myself to pick it up more in 2024.

2020

2021

2022

This year I ended up mostly reading AI and machine learning academic papers, attempting to “learn AI deeply” as I asked people at the State of the Word that year. Started a bunch of other books but these were the only two I finished.

2023

All book years: 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020–2023.

29 Books in 2019

January 1, 2020Books, Education, PersonalMatt

As a follow-on to my lists in 2017 and 2018, here are the books I completed this year. I’ve linked all to the Kindle edition except the Great Mental Models, which is so gorgeous in hardcover you should get that one, and the The World is Sound isn’t available as an ebook. Bold are ones I particularly enjoyed or found myself discussing with others a lot.

What’s interesting is that if you were to purchase every single one of those books, it would be about $349. You could get them all for nothing from your local library, even on a Kindle. The money I spend on books is by far and away the best investment I make every year — books expand my mind and enrich my life in a way that nothing else does.

39 Books in 2018

January 28, 2019Books, PersonalMatt

Here’s what I read in 2018, in chronological order of when I finished it, as promised in my birthday post. I’ve highlighted a few in bold but in general I was pretty satisfied with almost all of my book choices this year. I’ve put a lot more time into the “deciding what to read” phase of things, and have also had some great help from friends there, and have been trying to balance and alternate titles that have stood the test of time and newer au courant books.

Books in 2017

December 31, 2017BooksMatt

Here’s what I ended up reading this year, in roughly chronological finishing order. (I usually have 3-4 books going on at once.)

Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss.
The Art of Stillness by Pico Ayer.
Out of Your Mind by Alan Watts (audiobook, really a series of lectures).
Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Mushashi (audiobook).
Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien.
The Best American Short Stories 2016 edited by Junot Diaz.
Feynman by Jim Ottaviani.
My Gita by Devdutt Pattanaik.
From Plato to Post-modernism: Understanding the Essence of Literature and the Role of the Author by Louis Markos (another lecture series).
The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy.
The Story of a Brief Marriage by Anuk Arudpragasam.
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr.
Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life by Héctor García and Francesc Miralles.
When Hitler Took Cocaine and Lenin Lost His Brain: History’s Unknown Chapters by Giles Milton.
Widow Basquiat: A Love Story by Jennifer Clement.
32 Yolks: From My Mother’s Table to Working the Line by Eric Ripert.
Identify: Basic Principles of Identity Design in the Iconic Trademarks by Chermayeff & Geismar.
Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity by David Lynch (audiobook).
The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World by Brad Stone.
The Leavers by Lisa Ko.
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. (Update: On Obama’s 2019 book list.)
Girls on Fire by Robin Wasserman.
The Executive’s Compass by James O’Toole.
Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom.
Dance of the Possible by Scott Berkun.
The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang (short story).
Tribe of Mentors by Tim Ferriss.
After On: A Novel of Silicon Valley by Rob Reid.
Principles by Ray Dalio.
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (audiobook).
The Undiscovered Self: With Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams by C.G. Jung.

A fairly random selection, and hopefully I can get a few more in next year.

All book years: 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020–2023.

Tim Ferriss’s new book Tribe of Mentors is out. I have finished it already, and can say it’s really excellent and I even liked it more than Tools of Titans even though I’m not in this one. 🙂 As I said in a message to Tim:

Curious how Tribe of Mentors is different from Tools of Titans? Here's a text to me from Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt, CEO Automattic)… pic.twitter.com/D9kvA2rFFC

— Tim Ferriss (@tferriss) October 16, 2017

I learned a lot from it, took a ton of notes to follow up on, and wrote down about twenty more books I have to read.