Episode 161 – A Chat With Matt Mullenweg

In this episode of Hallway Chats we talk with Matt Mullenweg about travel, photography, Tumblr, and a little WordPress.

Show Notes

This episode of Hallway Chats kicks off a new era with a new co-host Nyasha Green! And this week we talk with Matt Mullenweg.

Matt Mullenweg is co-founder of the open-source publishing platform WordPress, which now powers over 40% of all sites on the web. He is the founder and CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Tumblr, WPVIP, Day One, and Pocket Casts. Additionally, Matt runs Audrey Capital, an investment and research company. He has been recognized for his leadership by Forbes, Bloomberg Businessweek, Inc. Magazine, TechCrunch, Fortune, Fast Company, Wired, University Philosophical Society, and Vanity Fair.

Matt is originally from Houston, Texas, where he attended the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts and studied jazz saxophone. In his spare time, Matt is an avid photographer. He currently splits his time between Houston and San Francisco.

Matt’s Site: https://ma.tt

Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/photomatt

Twitter | @photomatt

Mike Flanagan’s post about No Sleep.

Episode Transcript

Topher: Hey, everyone. My name is Topher. 

Nyasha: Hey, my name is Nyasha. 

Topher: And this is Hallway Chats. For those of you paying attention, you’ll notice that my co-host is not Cate this week. Cate is stepping aside as co-host, and Ny will be joining me as our regular co-host in the future. Ny is the Editorial Director of MasterWP, and a WordPress developer. 

Before we get started, I want to say something about our sponsor Nexcess. They have a ton of cool features that I really appreciate. And they’re all over the marketing material. But there are some things they do especially well that I want to call out. Things like really good caching, a super great admin panel that lets me do things myself without needing to wait for support, and being able to SSH between staging servers. It’s those finely polished edges that I love so much. And right now, they’ll buy out your contract with another host, up to $200. So if you’re looking for a great host, check them out.

Our guest this week is Matt Mullenweg. Welcome, sir. 

Matt: Good to see y’all. 

Topher: Good to see you too. When I set this up, I got the time zone wrong because I didn’t realize you’d be on the West Coast. Are you just hanging out or you got a place over there now?

Matt: I’m actually right now in the mountains. I’m in Montana. 

Topher: Oh, that’s awesome. 

Matt: Yeah. I really love mountains. Because there’s something about the idea of something being so rock solid, building, foundations, the air, you know. I really like mountains.

Topher: Something you really can’t affect yourself very much. It’s just there. All right. So on the off chance that no one knows who you are, who are you?

Matt: My name is Matt Mullenweg. I was born and raised in Houston, Texas, and co-founder of WordPress with a guy named Mike Little. And later I started a company called Automattic, which has now grown to be, gosh, I think about 2,000 people that are around. 

Topher: That is amazing to me.

Nyasha: It’s awesome. 

Matt: And we make wordpress.com, Jetpack, Tumblr, WooCommerce, Pocket Cast for people looking into podcasts. We’re trying to make basically great open web stuff, stuff so good that you choose it because you like it, but then when you choose it, you make the web more free and open. 

Topher: Yeah, that’s cool.

Nyasha: That is awesome. Can I also say I am a big fan of Tumblr, by the way. I’ve been trying to get everyone to go back to Tumblr. I love Tumblr.

Matt: I’m looking at it at the moment right now. 

Nyasha: I love what you people have done. 

Matt: So I wear different hats in different years. You know, my role changes a lot. Like when Gutenberg started I was really deep into that. But right now one of the things I’m doing is I’m directly running Tumblr as a CEO. And that’s been really exciting to see this beautiful community and so much creativity thrive. It’s been fun to sort of like, as Twitter has its turbulence, to see just droves of users, hundreds of thousands per day come over to Tumblr.

Topher: Wow. 

Matt: And what we’re doing is trying to create a place for them where they can share and find stuff that enriches their life.

Topher: Do you have issues of scaling? Like, did you suddenly, “Oh, look, we have an extra half million users today. Let’s fire up another server.”

Matt: We definitely have had some of those. But fortunately, Automattic has been doing a lot of infrastructure for a long time. So we are, I would say, a deep technology infrastructure company. So we’re able to absorb quite a bit of additional… you know, because we host everything from like small blogs, all the way up to like whitehouse.gov hands-on-

Topher: Right. 

Matt: …so we can handle the very small to the very large. And that sort of security mindedness, network infrastructure, data center, points of presence, everything is definitely coming into play right now when we have this huge surge of interest. 

Topher: One of the questions I have here for you is, what does your day to day work look like? What does the CEO of something like Tumblr do? Do you get up in the morning, you sit down at your desk and you code Tumblr?

Matt: Well, so right now I’m running… This changes. So right now I am running wordpress.com and Tumblr directly. In the future, I’ll hand those off to other leaders. Right now I’m kind of hands-on with them. So that means I’m looking at products. We collaborate a lot through P2S, much like make. WordPress, where we, you know, write and read as a primary form of communication.

And I gotta tell you my favorite thing I do, I’ve done a couple of these already today, is customer calls or talking to people.

Topher: Oh, nice.

Nyasha: Awesome. 

Matt: There’s nothing better… I would say this for anyone listening. Like if your business is stalled, whatever, just, you know, spend some time with your customer to know them and see them in their space. 

Someone was screen-sharing with me today like how they manage… They were managing like 1,600 sites and they were showing me how they manage all that and use like Jetpack and other things to it. And that was really cool. And it gave me a ton of ideas for how we can make that easier and better. 

Auto updates and staged updates and backups and security and brute force protection and logins. There’s so many things we can do to make that easier. But there’s nothing like really going deep into the weeds with a customer.

Topher: You said call. Does Tumblr do phone support or you-

Matt: No. We do do… So I hack I have now that Automattic is now over 2,000 people is with all the leads of the business units to join like one customer call pretty periodically. So like Maiorana who’s the CEO of WooCommerce and myself will get together with a customer of WooCommerce and you know, those screenshare show us the admin, show us their orders, talk about what is working well, talk about what isn’t working well. 

You kind of have to go high and low. You have to move between like that really, really big picture because you have to sort of zoom out and make sure you’re heading in the right direction, that we’re making the internet more free and open place that we’re like meeting user’s needs that were aligning with our organization. 

But you gotta get down to details too. And the details being like, “Wow, that button doesn’t make any sense,” or “I was so stuck there.” Or you know, the wording of things really, really matters. And so it’s a fun dichotomy. But I really enjoy it that sort of pendulum swing between the very, very small details and the really, really wide philosophical aperture. 

Topher: Cool. 

Nyasha: Nice. So Matt, say I get back into Tumblr 2012 when I was on Tumblr, and I’m writing fanfiction, again, Game of Thrones, Doctor Who fanfiction, you’re telling me like one day I can potentially like hop on the phone with you and talk to you about that?

Matt: You might. Actually, something we do at Automattic is that every person who starts Automattic does two weeks of customer support, then every team rotates to do one week per year of customer support. Again, that’s a different version of the same idea which is, like, if something’s not working, again, go back to the people-

Nyasha: That’s awesome. 

Matt: …and try to understand their struggles and their stories. There’s nothing more rewarding, especially as a builder, someone who codes or designs or writes things, to see how someone interacts with your work and then iterate based on that. It’s really satisfying.

Nyasha: I love it.

Topher: Ny, you had a question about AI art. Just throw that out there.

Nyasha: I did. I did. I really wanted to get your opinion on this, Matt. So AI art is popping up everywhere. I think the latest viral craze is Lensa pitchers. How do you feel about the AI art hype that’s going on right now?

Matt: I think it’s pretty incredible. We’re almost living in like a sci-fi novel right now. Like we’re seeing the early versions of super intelligence is booting up, and we’re able to chat with them, with like ChatGPT or play with them with the Dall-E or MidJourney. So think of this as like interacting with the new life form.

Nyasha: Oh, wow. 

Matt: It’ll send you stuff back, you can interact, you can play, they’re learning. I think it’s really beautiful because we’re able to, you know… I’m just really excited for what it enables people to do. Because what I think of AI art is that it’s not the end state but it’s a great starter, right? 

So often you need that kindling, that thing to start the fire, if you’re a writer, or musician or something like that. And that generative process of brainstorming and coming up with ideas or trying different things, how cool is that a computer can try 30 things all at once and show them all to you? And then you can kind of browse through and be like, “Oh, that…” They could say that hits different. And you can then iterate based on that. 

What’s beautiful about this is that, I mean, basically, the entire history of humanity is us using tools to augment our natural abilities. Whether that’s like… Topher you’re glasses right now, right? That’s a tool that was created to augment our vision. There’s so much we’ve done over time. And I think of these tools as things that will augment our creativity, our ability and our production. 

Topher: That’s cool.

Nyasha: I like the vision. 

Topher: Every time I get to talk to you, one of the last things I want to talk about is technology because that’s kind of our world. I see what you write, what you say on Twitter, and anywhere, in the news, whatever. But what I see about your travels is one picture every few months on “not on WordPress”. And I’m like, “What? Is he there right now? Is this an old picture? So I have tons of questions about travel and pictures and stuff. 

Matt: Sure. 

Topher: Just the other day you posted one from Iceland. Were you there then or was that an old picture? 

Matt: Yeah. I post a lot more to my Tumblr. I try to put some of the best stuff on the matt.blog. I’ve been posting a lot more to my Tumblr, just also to try out things. I was in Iceland recently and saw the Northern Lights. I don’t usually post exactly when I’m there. Like I’ll kind of time shifts a little bit.

Topher: Oh, sure. 

Nyasha: But generally I really enjoy. The Northern Lights for me was a bucket list item. Like literally-

Topher: Aren’t they amazing? 

Nyasha: All my life I’ve been wanting to have a great experience. And just last week I really, really lucked out. I planned this trip to Iceland and the lights were out in full force. 

Topher: That’s awesome.

Matt: People from Iceland were like, “This is the strongest we’ve seen in six or seven years.”

Topher: Oh, wow.

Nyasha: Wow.

Matt: Like the moment we arrived, they were really out there. So the Northern Lights is basically the solar winds interacting with electromagnetic fields with Earth’s. It’s hard to describe. The pictures don’t look real. They look like Photoshop or CGI or something. But once you see it in person, you’re like, “Wow, it really much like a solar eclipse.” Like solar eclipses, Northern Lights, the Southern Lights as well in the southern hemisphere, and things like that, gosh. 

Whenever I find that I’m like getting a little burnt out or toasty or anything like that, it’s usually because I haven’t been in nature. And my mom always reminds me of this. She tells me three things. Like, “Are you hydrating, are you sleeping, and are you getting out in nature?” That’s her three-list thing whenever she sees me being a little off-kilter. And I like it because it’s just three things.

And usually, if I go down that list, I can find one that I’m not doing if I’m feeling off. And nature’s one of these magical things. Like WordPress, we say it’s both free and priceless at the same time. And there’s beauty at every scale. So it’s fractal. Like there’s incredible beauty in like a grain of sand or an acorn, if you like really studied and look at it. 

Sunsets, clouds, all of these things we take for granted actually have incredible amounts of beauty because they’re sort of made by natural systems, right? So like evolution create things that are naturally pleasing to our eye. And they’re very accessible.

Like obviously there’s people listening to this all over the world, and like I traveled to Iceland to see the Northern Lights. Whatever it is for you, figure out what is your thing to reconnect you to nature. Look at it right now, touch grass. It’s kind of cold outside where I am now so I won’t touch grass. But something like that is a really good reset to your system. And I find, especially if I’m like responding to people or feel like I’m kind of shocked or something.

Topher: I’m gonna time shift a sneak peek. Tomorrow’s HeroPress Essay, which people hearing this now, that will be a couple of weeks ago is by Anders Norén. And when he was burning out, he started hiking. So this next summer, he’s going to hike the entire length of the Swedish mountain range in nine weeks. 

Matt: Wow. 

Topher: And he just can’t get enough.

Nyasha: That’s incredible.

Topher: So you travel a lot. Do you travel mostly because work demands it or because you can and your work allows it? Are you traveling for fun? Like, why are you in Montana? Just because it’s pretty? If I may pry? 

Matt: I find my environment affects me quite a bit. I’m very sensitive to what’s around me. And so I travel to put myself in different modes to gravely charge myself in different ways. It’s like the energy I get from being in New York City, for example, with the art, jazz, the culture, is like, now, can I handle that every day? I don’t know. I mean, a lot of people do. 

But as a traveler, you remain the same. But as the background changes, you kind of see yourself in different lights and interact with different cultures, learn different things, hear different languages, try different food. All of this is, I think, enriching your knowledge, helping you understand that just incredible diversity of experiences around the world, giving you appreciation. And then you can start to synthesize which means like take the best parts of other things and combine them. 

And I find that innovation always happens at the intersection of disparate things. So when you’re able to take… If you think about it, actually all the way back to WordPress, WordPress was a blogging system. And I was going to start a different software, I was going to call it Content Press or something, to manage pages. So they’d be like the blogs and then they’d be like the page software.

And for a variety of reasons, myself and a lot of the developers were like, “Let’s just put this all in one thing.” Which hadn’t happened as much before. Like we’ll type out some pages. But like WordPress is really leaned into, like, let’s have the chronological stuff and the kind of permanent stuff all in one system. And what will that look like? And that worked out really well. 

It’s like peanut, butter and chocolate. Whoever thought to put that together the first time, that was a good idea. Sometimes it doesn’t work. I tried to do like avocado, peanut, butter or something, there’s something… And failure is definitely part of the creative process. 

That’s also why like, you know, I’m not big on like pylons. Like guess what? Automattic is gonna launch things that totally flop. I’m gonna say things that are totally dumb. We’re gonna make huge mistakes. But that’s part of the creative process is that you have to put things out there, try and you can iterate. But if you’re not failing, you definitely aren’t trying enough.

Topher: Right. 

Nyasha: Good advice. 

Topher: I know you have a reputation as a photographer. You are a photomatt, but I have only ever known you as a software person, company owner, or something like that. How much of your life is photography these days? Like are you the guy who always has one on your hip whenever you go to any country so you can snap anything that pops up or do you like go on specific trips just to photograph or do you just not do it much anymore?

Nyasha: I used to carry a digital SLR camera with me everywhere. It was essentially on my hands. I think there’s over 30,000 photos in my ma.tt media library. [inaudible 00:20:16] and post some things. That was really fun. And that whole process of capturing… By the way, there’s a lot of early WordCamps and WordPress. I was just doing… I just shoot wherever I was. 

And I like that because it helped me appreciate scenes, like look at things differently. And it also help me remember because my memory is not very good. Like I forget things very easily. So a photo, of course, can immediately evoke like an emotion or like the people that were there or something like that. 

Now, in the past 10 years, though, everything’s changed. Like my workflow changed. I started to be like less autobiographical, like sharing things in real time as I was doing them. Phones have gotten so good, like the iPhone.

Topher: Oh, yeah. 

Nyasha: I’ve taken photos on there. Actually, the Northern Lights photo I posted on matt.blog, that’s an iPhone photo.

Nyasha: Oh, nice.

Matt: I was not even like an SLR or anything. And that trip to Iceland was interesting because I brought the camera and the drone and all the stuff. I do enjoy playing with that. And there’s like a gadget part of me that just loves the tech side, too. But while I was there, I ended up not pulling it out. So the photo I posted was an iPhone photo.

I think there were two things. I had some friends that are really great photographers who were there. So I felt like a little bit of the role of photographer was held by someone else. So I was able to release that. But also I just kind of wanted to experience it. Because I think for a long time, you know, a photomatt, part of what I use the camera for was like I was like a security blanket because I love people intensely, like it’s my favorite thing, and I’m also like car-shy and awkward, uncomfortable with groups and things. And so the camera was like kind of a thing that would allow me to be part of a group, but also like have a little bit of distance.

I have friends who do this with dogs. Like I have a friend that carries a tiny dog everywhere. The dog is like, you know, draw some of the attention, is like something that helps them connect with others. With the cameras, that too. And then I would send the pictures afterwards. Like there’s a whole kind of playing around with it.

So I’m also just trying out to be more present. So that’s maybe not being behind the lens or in front of the lens as much, but really just appreciating the phenomenal moments as they pass. 

Nyasha: Awesome.

Topher: I’ve never had a serious camera. So I’ve come to love camera phones. And I feel like they let you have a bit of a middle ground between being in the moment and not. Because I can pull my phone out and snap a picture and put it back in my pocket in four seconds and kind of still be there, you know? 

Matt: It’s Apple’s greatest gift to humanity, the camera on these devices. And at the same time, some of the stuff too. But like Apple, they really push it. It’s so incredible. Stuff that I used to have to spend thousands of dollars or like have a tripod or process things for long amounts of times, they just now do. Like when you snap a photo, it’s actually taken multiple photos and bracketed them. 

Topher: Right.

Matt: So Automattic writes about computational photography. This is really, really, really, really powerful. And I think that it’s getting better and better. I love that as well. Because then you can just kind of, like you said, snap up moment and not be taken away from it. Because a lot of, you know, streaming… think of like a professional photographer of like a studio and lights and everything. Like how much chasing that great from the moment and the photo.

But you’ll be able to… I think we’re already there and it’s gonna get better. You can get that quality of photos from your iPhone now. Like a portrait mode, studio lights, you know, they can take out the background. You could do such incredible stuff. And then we can just enjoy life more. And we have this like infinite cloud storage and sharing. It’s pretty great.

Nyasha: Awesome. Matt, I have a question for you. Again, like a brain picker. So I am from a very small town in South Carolina. And while I’m not there, I’m still close. I am trying to bring WordPress to South Carolina to make it… Well, it’s there, of course, it’s everywhere. But I want to make it bigger. 

Our capital is not the biggest tech-friendly place. But just listening to what you said, I really relate to you saying like you’re always trying, so am I. I love your ambition and I am not afraid to fail. My first steps are, you know, we’re going to have a Columbia, South Carolina WordPress meetup group.

Matt: Oooh!

Nyasha: Yeah, I’m very excited. But outside of that, what advice would you give to me, someone who’s trying to just take a bigger thing in a smaller place?

Matt: Is that I like leading by example. I still do this to this day, you know. Like I come across a small business or something and their website is a little janky, I’ll reach out to them and be like, “Hey, here’s my email. Let me help you fix this. Let me connect you with someone who could fix this.” Just that leading by example, that little spark, it works. 

And really, it’s the whole history of WordPress. Our competitors, like Wix and Squarespace, have spent billions of dollars telling people about themselves. WordPress is really all… I mean, it’s not marketing, but it’s really like all word of mouth. Like, even you saying, like, “Hey, you want to do this thing, I got this tool, and here’s how you can use it and here’s how it can make you awesome. And the more you learn it, the more superpowers you have.”

That’s kind of the magic of education and learning and something like WordPress, which is free and open, and accessible. Literally, you can download the code, you can run it anywhere, you can run it on any host, you can run it yourself, you can run it in a web browser now. I’m going to talk about that. Like, there’s so much you could do that puts a lot of power in your hands. And I love that. 

Nyasha: Great. Well, I will be that spark there. I hope we do great things.

Matt: When you do it, also tell that person, “Hey, help someone else.” It makes it viral.

Nyasha: Oh, yeah. 

Matt: So that’s like the GPL. The GPL is called a viral license. The beauty of it is that when you teach them how to do it, also say like, “Hey, if you enjoyed this, if you see someone else that needs some help, don’t think that… wherever you are, you can always help someone else.” That’s how we got started with open-source contributions. 

The predecessor to WordPress was called v2 open-source software. And I just went to the forums to ask for help because I couldn’t figure something out. And someone answered my question. And I went back and you knows… just kind of go back and say, I went back to ask for help but I saw someone else had asked a question that I already knew the answer to. 

And again, I’m like a neophyte. I’m like brand new. And so then I just answered their question, not because I was an expert, but because someone answered my question like three weeks before. And so I was able to help. And that was really like the first step on the path that is now WordPress, was that someone that helped me and passed it along. And then that gets you more and more involved in contributing and being involved in helping out.

Nyasha: Awesome. Awesome. Thank you. 

Topher: We’re getting near the end of our time, but I have one more question. Do you have a few minutes? 

Matt: Yeah.

Topher: All right. So I put this question in as a potential for State of the Word, but it might not get picked, and I don’t want to lose the opportunity to ask it. So a strong mantra of WordPress and its general community is “own your content”. I’m curious where Tumblr fits in that philosophy because it appears to be a hosted solution. You can’t download a Tumblr client like you can download WordPress and set it up yourself. 

I know it’s important to you, to Automattic and so I can’t imagine you haven’t thought about it. So I’m curious to know where you’re going with it. How does Tumblr fit in and own your content world. 

Matt: It’s a good example of like ideals of pragmatism. Switch Tumblr to be WordPress powered. So every Tumblr is a WordPress. Tumblr is so darn big. That is most high year engineering project. You know, Rome wasn’t built in a day. So that transition is gonna take probably a few more years even from today. We’ve been working on for a few years already.

Topher: But that is a plan to make it so you could have a Tumblr on your own server?

Matt: I mean, one thing you can do is look at the… I always say vote with your wallet, you know? What are your principles? Whatever kind of world you want to see out there, support the commercial enterprises that share the same values. That’s the best thing to do. In the capitalist society, if there’s, you know, two different web hosts and one of them contributes a lot back to WordPress and one doesn’t, spend your dollars on one that contributes.

Topher: Yeah, exactly. 

Matt: That will then go back into the system, and that that’ll be the world you want to live in. So one thing we’ve tried to do with Automattic is have now 17-year history of like open web ideals and everything like that. 

Tumblr is a SaaS service right now. It’s not open source yet. But we’ve said it’s going to be and we’ve tried to make the data super open. So the API’s, you can put your Tumblr into WordPress very easily, you can export all your Tumblr content. So we’ve got some pretty good solutions for problematic and practical data portability that it belongs to. I think you need to think about like the values of… 

Because we all work with some host or we all work with some organization. So like, do they share your content moderation values? Again, at Automattic and at Tumblr, we try to foster healthy communities, have freedom of speech. So we host a lot of stuff we don’t agree with but we also try to be mindful of fostering healthy dialogue, not hateful speech or harmful things. So that’s all fine balance, right?

Topher: Yeah. 

Matt: That it’s way more complicated than it seems at first because there’s a lot of pieces. I make sure I demonstrate that. And then longer term, we want to support these new protocols like activity pub on top of… We’re gonna support RSS so things are easy to get in and out. 

We’re gonna try and unify the API’s. Because when you look at like the APIs for Tumblr, the APIs for wordpress.com, which is basically the same thing as WordPress API, they’re doing the same stuff but they’re just slightly different XML-RPC calls and things like that. So we’re going to merge those and just make it so… 

My hope is that basically Tumblr and wordpress.com, which are the two things I’m running right now, they’ll be essentially like two different restaurants that share the same kitchen. You have different vibe, different dishes, different experience, different kind of front end experience, but on the back end, you know, same great ingredients, same attention to detail, same infrastructure, same sort of stuff on the back end that makes you to be excellent. Food is actually a good analogy.

Topher: Yeah, it is.

Matt: What’s better? Italian food or Japanese food? You can’t answer that, right? They’re different. You sometimes want one, you sometimes want the other. And there are some fundamentals that are same between both. Like you want the food to be clean and healthy and raise well, all that sort of stuff. But the actual preparation, that spices and the presentation, everything, all that’d be different. So think of like WordPress and Tumblr are different front ends, the same core, good thing on the back end.

Nyasha: Gotcha. 

Topher: Well, I’m glad. That’s exactly what I was hoping to hear. I understand it’s a ton of work. You inherited a beast. 

Nyasha: Oh, yeah. 

Topher: So you can’t just… Well, you can’t treat it like Twitter. All right. We are-

Matt: I don’t sort of speak about this on tough times but gosh, we need it. I want Twitter to exist, I love Twitter. 

Topher: I know. I love it too.

Nyasha: I love it too. 

Matt: But in the meantime, maybe let’s have some fun on Tumblr. Get some more WordPress stuff going on there. I’ve been sharing some WordPress GBG stuff, which has been kind of fun. It’s fun to have just a slightly different space because software has affordances and encourages certain things more than others. Tumblr is pretty fun.

So I guess since this is a WordPress-heavy audience, I’d encourage you, sign up at on Tumblr. Think of this space you could be more creative and free without barely the constraints of having to think of your theme or your content, or you know, code, plugins, whatever. Just post. It doesn’t have to be a big post. You could just like reblog something or like share something or remix or add account. 

Topher: I don’t think I’ve seen any repost on… What was that? 

Nyasha: Reblog my fanfiction. 

Topher: That’s right. I don’t think I’ve seen any blog posts on Tumblr ever. It always seems to be a-

Matt: Topher, I’ll sent you a post. There was this movie director that wrote this amazing, amazing story about a movie he shot, like a famous movie, which is also part of his journey to becoming sober. 

Topher: Wow. Nice. 

Nyasha: Oh, wow. 

Nyasha: I was like, “Wow, this is such an incredible…” I mean, he’s a movie director so he like… Maybe we can put in the show notes.

Topher: Oh, yeah, absolutely. 

Nyasha: That’d be great. 

Matt: A good example of like a super long Tumblr. And also, if you haven’t heard of it, check out… Another example of what’s fun on Tumblr is like… Have you heard of Goncharov?

Topher: No. 

Matt: The Martin Scorsese film? 

Topher: Oh, yes, I have. 

Nyasha: Oh, yeah.

Topher: My daughters are all over it.

Matt: Here is… Actually, I got it out. Here’s the link to that great post by Mike Flanagan. 

Topher: All right. Let me get that out of chat before I lose it. 

Matt: Doctor Sleep. I guess it was like Stanley Kubrick had worked on, he was refilming or something. 

Topher: Yeah. Excellent. 

Nyasha: This is awesome. 

Matt: Topher, it was great talking to you. Thank you so much. 

Topher: Yeah, we’ve come to the end. I want to respect your time. I could talk to you forever. I have a good time every time we talk. 

Nyasha: Same thing. You’re helping my creative process. I appreciate that. Seriously we do.

Matt: Talk to you later.

Topher: Yeah. Well, bye. 

Matt: Bye. Take care.