The Tim Ferriss Show - #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours

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Starting point is 00:05:03 The Tim Ferriss Show. Matthew, Matty, Dr. Mullenweg. Not a doctor. At all. In my heart of hearts, you're always a doctor. I think in Argentina, I got an honorary degree, actually. In that country. I'm so jelly. Argentina, I got an honorary degree, actually. Really? In that country. I'm so jelly.

Starting point is 00:05:28 Argentina, I haven't been back in 100 years. But we're not here to talk about my aspirations and dreams, although maybe. Yeah, I hope to hear some. We'll dive in and out, bob and weave. For people who don't have context on the Argentine Dr. Mullenweg, could you give people just a snapshot? Yeah, Matt Mullenweg, domain ma.tt, which is pretty fun, so I go by ma.tt sometimes.

Starting point is 00:05:51 Born and raised in Houston, Texas, a few hours from here in Austin. And at the age of 19, I co-founded an open-source software called WordPress, which is a blogging content management system. Fast forward 20 years, it's been 20 years now, and runs over a third of all websites in the world. A few years after that, I founded a company called Automatic,

Starting point is 00:06:12 which is kind of like the for-profit side of commercializing things around WordPress. Automatic, M-A-T-I-C-H. Yes, it's like any egotistical founder. I snuck my name into the company. And we started with just sort of Akismet, Anti-Spam, and WordPress.com, It's like any egotistical founder. I snuck my name into the company. And we started with just sort of a kismet anti-spam and WordPress.com, kind of easy ways to get going with WordPress. But since I've expanded to e-commerce with WooCommerce, one I'll talk about with messaging, we've done a number over 25 acquisitions. So we're trying to be like a digital Berkshire Hathaway, like a buyer of first resort for amazing things on the internet.

Starting point is 00:06:49 Pretty much everything we do is open source or open web. So we bought Tumblr. So we're running Tumblr for the last few years. Basically trying to, yeah, I would like future generations to grow up with a web that is more open, more free, gives more liberty. And so open source is really my life's work, even above WordPress and anything else. And yeah, I hope to work on it the rest of my life. You are one of the rare examples, and I'm so envious of this particular sort of mental state of focus that you have, which is this clarity on what you want to do. Something you could do for the rest of your life with that degree of certainty. It's something that's always struck me as rare and maybe not as a consequence of being rare but precious in a sense so anyway i'm happy for you i don't run across that much from a professional perspective it's like i want to do this for the rest of my life i think it's because the open source freedom and liberty somewhat abstract so there could be lots

Starting point is 00:07:42 of things under that but i just mentioned probably too many things some people will call me very unfocused but you have that too we talked about on the last podcast around like teaching learning education like lifelong that's the rest of your life yeah and so i think if you can find those principles you can keep them and then the job might change other things might change i'm lucky to work at the same job because i'm probably unemployable anywhere else at this point but it's's been a lot of fun. Oh, Automag's now over 1,900 people in 97 countries. We were fully remote and distributed since 2005. So we've been kind of early on a few of those trends, open source, distributed, et cetera. For people, and I know we've talked about this before, and you've certainly talked about

Starting point is 00:08:19 it in other places, but we're going to get into a lot of new territory. Before we do that, though, open source, just for people who may not have familiarity with that term. What does that mean? Normally, when you sign up for software, you click through that license that no one ever reads. Ours actually has Easter eggs in it, just to see if anyone will find them. But yeah, most of those licenses are about all the rights you don't have. Sometimes you're not even allowed to look at the thing and see how it works. There's a whole right to repair movement right now, where you can buy things that you're not even allowed to look at the thing and see how it works. There's a whole right to repair movement right now where you can buy things that you're not even allowed to repair yourself.

Starting point is 00:08:49 Open source is the opposite. It's all about almost like a bill of rights for you as the user. WordPress belongs just as much to Tim Ferriss as it does to me, which is kind of amazing. There's rights and freedoms you have to use it for any purpose, to modify it, to see how it works, all these sorts of things that no one can take away from you. Even myself as a co-founder, or even if all the other developers got together, we all agreed to become evil.

Starting point is 00:09:13 We couldn't take it away from you. It's that bill of rights, those inalienable rights is the core of open source. And there's lots of examples. So like Wikipedia is open source applied to an encyclopedia, right? It used to be really bad. Carter Encyclopedia Britannica were way better.

Starting point is 00:09:28 But then over time, lots of people working together made it better and better. And why did they work on it? For free, for fun, and also because it belongs to them. So WordPress has many thousands, probably tens of thousands of contributors at this point. Why do they do that? Is it Tom Sawyer painting the fence or is it the other guy? Yeah, I need more caffeine to be on my literary references.

Starting point is 00:09:53 Yeah, but you know, wow, we should both know that. Wow, I'm embarrassed for both of us. Tom Sawyer and... It'll be the first thing in the comments. Huckleberry Finn. Huckleberry Finn, yeah. It's because it actually belongs to people. So sometimes people come in and just fix one bug that's annoying them. Or sometimes, you have the pride of knowing that code you wrote is running on a third of all websites in the world, which is actually a real thrill as an engineer, developer. And that's just a lot of fun. And it's openly collaborative in that way, not to state the obvious, but it's a contrast to actually this news item I saw in news is probably giving it a little bit too much gravitas.

Starting point is 00:10:29 But I read this story, which seemed credible based on the source. I'm not going to give too much, but this engineer joins a startup and fixes one or two bugs or develops a feature that he wanted in the product and then put in notice. And that was it. Two weeks later, yeah. I love that story. Because I know so many on-the-spectrum engineers that would totally do that. It's like a beautiful hack, right? For like, I just got to get this fixed.

Starting point is 00:10:58 They won't. There's actually companies that would do that. One thing I have considered is secret shopping. Like seeing if i could get hired by my own company under a fake identity or just something like that would be kind of fun so why would you do that oh one to experience the hiring process which is difficult for me to debug except by second-hand accounts two to see if i you know how my code still is. Do companies provide mystery shopper-like services for hiring processes? Or no?

Starting point is 00:11:28 Because mystery shoppers, this would be the equivalent of, say, retail, where there are companies you can hire. They send people into stores to experience the touch points and the flow or lack of flow, and then to report back so you can improve your operations. And you have that for security, right?

Starting point is 00:11:43 You can hire people to red team and try to exploit or defeat your security and then you get a report back and you can improve things. Does that exist for something like a hiring process? Probably does, but I'm a big believer in especially executives going and doing the work themselves. Engaging with the customers, doing customer support, trying out the products, building a website, whatever it is that your thing is.

Starting point is 00:12:09 I think that's so key. I might be making this up, but it's something along the lines of two weeks of frontline service, even if it's a CFO or someone who's... And actually, I'm going to be doing... So no matter the job, you're hired for it automatic. You start with two weeks of support, and then every single person rotates back in one week per year. And I'm running out of year, so I'm actually squeezing mine in at the very end here.

Starting point is 00:12:31 So if you go to wordpress.com support in the next two weeks, you might get me. But yeah, I talked to an executive at Salesforce. I was really impressed. They were saying they spend 50% of their time with customers. This was a top executive running an organization of thousands of people. I was like, wow. That's inspiring to me. I'm probably 25% or 30% right now. So it really made me

Starting point is 00:12:50 think, am I spending enough time with customers? And also, we might have some executives that are spending closer to 0% time. So how do we make this a cultural thing throughout the company? So you're an enthusiastic fellow. Part of why I like spending time with you.

Starting point is 00:13:07 Good vibes, lots of smiles, lots of laughs. And you also find a lot of things that are interesting out at the edges. You're an immaculate packer of bags also. So for those who do not know, what's in my bag every year gives the latest and greatest of Matt's tech gadgetry and asserted doodads and doohickeys that he's traveling with as a road warrior who travels, fair to say, most of the time. Your schedule, we're going to get to my first planned question in a second. I recall, maybe it was five months ago, six months ago, who knows? You sent me something along the lines of, just in case we can overlap, here's where I'll be in the next year. And it was one of the most absurd, it was like a Rolling Stones tour. Are you continuing to do that in terms of travel for the next year? Yeah, currently. So why do I go into it? Well,

Starting point is 00:14:00 it's a global community. So I want to have a global company and a global community. So our hack for automatic because we're apart most of the year is the teams get together a couple times a year so if you're an individual contributor you might travel two or three times a year but as ceo this means that every week there's like a couple of meetups happening and i try to hit the bigger ones sometimes the small ones too but mostly the really big ones where there's a couple hundred people there but that's happening at least once a month then for wordpress there's like three major work camps per year that have thousands of people there's all these different

Starting point is 00:14:33 just the state of the word in madrid so you just take those you're traveling a week out of the month already and then you gotta add in some fun you're not gonna to die of a fun deficiency you gotta have fun and it's uh yeah it really adds up but it does take more of a toll than it used to i gotta be totally honest there was years i did well over 400 000 miles and looking back i was like i don't know if maybe i still have some of the energy or maybe i'm getting more radiation in the plane i don't know maybe i'm just getting older that happen to people. 40 in a few weeks. I know. Thank God. No more of this 30 under 30, 40 under 40 nonsense. You've accumulated 700 lifetimes worth of those. So you mentioned gatherings. And the first, I suppose, cone that we're going to weave around on this slalom of a conversation is things that are

Starting point is 00:15:24 exciting you, things you're excited about, five or more. And I enjoy this format. It's very simple. I haven't done it much, and it's a shame because I always have a good time doing it. Where would you like to start? I mentioned messaging. So if you look at Automatics history,

Starting point is 00:15:41 it's like 2005, blogging, CMS, 2016, commerce, Google Commerce. It's grown to over 30 billion in sales, or GMV. And we entered our third major area this year, which was messaging. So we acquired this company called Text. You might remember these sorts of programs, but we all have 20 different messaging apps. Text currently takes 10 of them. It will take more in the future. So Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, Instagram Messenger, Twitter DMs, all these sorts of things,

Starting point is 00:16:09 some of which have terrible interfaces. It brings them into one power user app. Right now, desktop only, because it's all ultra secure. So it doesn't break any encryption or run anything in the cloud. It's all on your device, which is, I think, very, very important. Like engineers, you have like a code of ethics. I think we need to build things extra secure now. And it brings them all together. It's really nice. I often acquire apps or invest in things to make up for my own deficiencies. So like investing in Calm in like 2012 or whatever it was, because I felt like I needed to meditate. So I'm so behind on messages. I'm like, okay, we got to buy this company and make it available. It's like a much more expensive version of the guy who gets hired and fixes the bugs

Starting point is 00:16:47 and then leaves buying companies. Small team, really, really exciting. And yeah, I don't know. I'd love for you to try it actually. Well, my team is using it. Oh, that's right. Actually told me about this even before I heard about it myself. So some credit there. Team is loving it. I have used it and it is a great product. Where can people find it or learn heard about it myself. So some credit there. Team's loving it. I have used it. And it is a great product. Where can people find it or learn more about it?

Starting point is 00:17:10 Text.com. T-E-X-T-S dot com. Text.com. All right. Text.com. If you go on desktop, and it's a paid product right now. So $15 a month, $5 a month if you're a student. Or pretend to be a student.

Starting point is 00:17:28 But we're also going to explore some different things. Mobile app is coming out next year, in the early part. And we're going to explore some different pricing as well. Maybe making it free for one or two networks, paid for more. There's some very exciting stuff there. All right. So I want to ask you a strategy question, to the extent that you can discuss it. So you were kind enough to spend a lot of time with me just as a friend overall, which I really appreciate. Love spending time with you. And also just because disclosures are important, I am available at your beck and call advisor with Automatic. From the early days. and i am fascinated by not just how you operate in the world but how you think about the world

Starting point is 00:18:07 right because that's a prerequisite for making a lot of not necessarily contrarian because you can be a different form of sheep as a contrarian to by just doing the opposite of what everyone else does that's easy but picking and choosing where you're going to be unorthodox or approach things obliquely is more challenging so the question i'm going to set the table with some other examples but the question is how you choose what you're going to get into in terms of areas products etc right because there's diversification there's lack of focus there's synergy these words we can throw around i would love to know how you think about, for instance, or thought about getting into commerce, which I think is a more obvious leap in my mind than say messaging. And what I've observed is say in the media landscape, well, the media landscape and the

Starting point is 00:18:55 social media platform landscapes have collided in such a major way in say the last five to 10 years where you have Amazon studios, you've got Netflix, you've got messaging and then video and so on that are seemingly all being pursued on some level by a lot of these large platforms in the form of say WhatsApp or whatever it might be. So how do you choose what to engage in next? And you said some people might say I'm unfocused. I don't consider you unfocused, but there are sometimes sort of hidden or unspoken rationales or logics behind. So how do you think about what you're going to do next? I do think about it for a long time.

Starting point is 00:19:33 So we've been thinking about messaging and actually making investments in the space for four or five years. I think a lot about environment and incentives. So, you know, the reason there used to be these multi-messaging apps 15 years ago and they all stopped working was the networks all blocked them. And there is a political environment now, which I think is more conducive to being more customer and user centric. This is our data, right? This is our messages. It's all secure. It's not breaking security or anything. So why shouldn't we be able to run this? Can you give an example of a network blocking these kind of multi-message tools in the past? Yeah, it happened last week. There was another one called Beeper that supported iMessage. And Apple decided to just shut it down. They broke it all. And people actually charged its users. They had to refund everyone. There's also more subtle things they could do. Like they could just subtly degrade.

Starting point is 00:20:26 If they make it so your messages don't go through 5% of the time, it's not blocking you. Sure, right. But you're going to stop using it. It's like throttling your hotel speed on Wi-Fi. So you upgrade to the premium. You're like, okay, all right. They don't need to block you, which might draw attention. They can just make it a little wobbly.

Starting point is 00:20:42 More painful. And it doesn't take a lot of friction for people to move away, especially in messaging. So the regulatory framework, both with the EU doing a lot of, sometimes misguided, but also sometimes really smart. They have an act coming in called the DMA

Starting point is 00:20:55 that requires some interop between messaging services. You know, we'll talk about USB-C, which I'm very excited about. Thank you, EU, for forcing Apple to finally drop lightning and give us USB-C. And then in the US, I think there is bipartisan. This I actually don't agree with, but it is a reality, like some extra scrutiny on big tech.

Starting point is 00:21:15 And so I think it's actually good for them. Again, what are their incentives? I think it's actually really good for them to show that they're open right now. So again, i don't want to fight these folks they've got more money than most countries they could squash us like a bug if they really really wanted to but we're always doing things open source user-centric it'd be a bad look for them to try to squash if you have the people on your side i feel like that's what truly matters in long term and people are what are what, short term, you know, lobbying, etc. But like, long term, in the US, functioning democracy,

Starting point is 00:21:50 politics is accountable to its people. So if we come back to what you said, and the whole point of this format is scaffolding, and then we can deviate. So we're deviating right now, people may have noticed. Talking about, let's just say, next gen or digital Berkshire Hathaway. So Berkshire Hathaway could have, well, originally textiles, but they could have insurance. Then they could have something that is… Chocolates. Chocolates, Red Seas, candies. Things that are completely unrelated on a face value business level.

Starting point is 00:22:21 They're not integrated. And the way that a CMS or having a gajillion blogs and websites running on your platform would combine very easily with WooCommerce. Those two pair very nicely. Are you thinking about, say in the case of text.com, that that is a standalone in the same way that some of these Berkshire Hathaways might be a standalone? How do you think about building and acquiring in that way? Are they standalones? How much do they need to help each other or not? In the case of Berkshire, the insurance premiums and so on, as I understand, provide a huge bolus of cash for all sorts of other purposes. So the capital can be utilized across the family, in a sense sense how do you think about because

Starting point is 00:23:06 there's so many different ways you could rank order the priorities when looking at potential acquisitions as it's like customer pain point converging trend lines in terms of regulation and public sentiment which berkshire navigates beautifully in highly regulated industries including insurance rail railways. But yeah, how I think about it, so I like to study these people. I know you love doing that too, study high performers. That's your thing, right? I do that sometimes, yeah.

Starting point is 00:23:33 Occasionally do that. But also, I mean, Charlie Munger, rest in peace, 99 years old. Warren Buffett, I don't know exactly, I think up there as well. So I try to think, you know, if Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger were hackers in the 30s or 40s today what would they build versus what they built in their time with the opportunities and technology afforded so i like to think they do some open source because it's obviously the future so for adams companies ad Adams versus Bits, and in the industries they're in, I think there would be a lot of coordination cost. And they try to optimize for giving the companies under them as much autonomy as possible. And they find great leaders, and they also try to find great businesses.

Starting point is 00:24:18 I think Warren Buffett said something like, we try to find a business a monkey could run because someday they will. Something like that. What business is so business a monkey could run because someday they will. Something like that. What business is so good it would survive even bad leadership? So what we do with a digital version of that is we lower coordination costs between the different products by open source. So for WooCommerce to build on top of WordPress, it doesn't need a meeting. It doesn't need to talk. It doesn't even need to know there are people developing WordPress. There's open APIs, open source, there's a plugin framework, etc. So that removes a lot of the

Starting point is 00:24:49 coordination costs that you normally get in a multi-division company. Now when you say coordination costs, are you talking about people internally, say full-time employees, or are you talking about the communities that surround some of these things? In proprietary software, if you want to integrate with something, like if I wanted to add a new feature to macOS

Starting point is 00:25:11 or something like that, I can't do that. Now they have APIs, they have operating systems, smart companies like Slack or Shopify will create marketplaces that you can extend them. However, you're subject to their terms so they can change their mind. Remember, Twitter used to have all those clients. Facebook did too. They were like, oh, we don't want this anymore. You're all kicked off.

Starting point is 00:25:31 So don't build on proprietary platforms. They can pull the rug and will pull the rug at any point. So in open source, one, the rug can't be pulled. Two, typically they're ultra-pluggable, so you can really change every line of WordPress. Not to interrupt, but would you mind giving a real-world example of what this lowered integration cost looks like in practice? Let's talk about a company like Salesforce, which has done a ton of acquisitions. One criticism of Salesforce or Cisco or even Google, sometimes their own products don't integrate with each other as well. Sometimes even external things do. So even with the best acquisitions, and most acquisitions fail, by the way, even when you do a really good one, like maybe say YouTube, sometimes the integrations aren't as strong.

Starting point is 00:26:14 Or maybe like remember when YouTube tried to do the Google Plus thing? They do. Right? Every single company was, or division in Google was like incentivized by how much adoption Google Plus got. They really tried to push it into everything. Like a lot of coordination costs, maybe not as responsive to users. That was ultimately an unsuccessful push.

Starting point is 00:26:32 Google's another example, all the messaging platforms they have. You need text just to work with the five messaging platforms at Google. So like there's examples like that, where you get duplication, you get different incentives of executives. Maybe they're more rewarded for launching new things versus integrating things. Those are coordination costs. And, you know, this comes up in economics terms where like, why shouldn't everyone just be a freelancer?

Starting point is 00:26:54 Well, there's some coordination costs there. It's nice to have people employed full time by a company because then you kind of don't need to rehire them every time. They're not going to be like poached by someone else or maybe have a gap in the gig and they just take another gig, you know, that sort of thing. So I feel like for us, the common platform of open source, particularly WordPress, allows us to plug things in and do acquisitions in a way that is more set up for success. So we have a set of products that run directly on WordPress or a distribution from WordPress and Tumblr. So that's kind of, I would say, our core area. There are some which are, I would call, philosophically adjacent.

Starting point is 00:27:31 So it's the same philosophy. Day One is a great example. Day One doesn't share any technology, Tumblr or WordPress, but it's a fully encrypted local journaling app. And journaling is another word for blogging. So you can use it like I do as like a local blog. And I've posted every day for the past like 200 or 300 days. What does a local blog mean? To the untrained ears, they'd be like, wait,

Starting point is 00:27:53 so I have a blog that I'm publishing on my own computer? How do people see it? Well, this is why people usually call it a journal. But when you think about it, like a notes app, like the notes app, I don notes app. Typically things are undated. The metadata associated with them is somewhat loose. Often the list is ordered by most recently modified. So that's kind of a UI. In a blog, it's reverse chronological. We have a lot of metadata associated. So day one attaches a date, location. We can store the weather when you posted, like all these different things that kind of make it a bit richer. When it's local, we usually call it a journal, just because that's the concept. Apple just launched a built-in journaling app. I call it a blog because it fundamentally,

Starting point is 00:28:34 if you kind of look at those principles, it's got all the same ingredients as you post a blog, reverse chronological. Now, why do I really like it? I prefer dated entries because I'm usually taking notes each day kind of like benjamin franklin you know he would kind of log everything he does every day i do that as well i love the search i love tagging i love all those kind of like metadata things help me find stuff and you can also interlink the notes which is actually pretty cool so not unlike a research or some of these other obsidian you can interlink things okay so we took a little side alley if we come back to things that you're

Starting point is 00:29:05 excited about. But I didn't actually answer your question on messaging. Yes. So why messaging? It is not built on top of WordPress and it's not part of our publishing kind of thing. But I do believe it is sort of fundamental human right to have private and hopefully in the future open source messaging. And so that's, again, I only want to work on things i feel like i can work on potentially the rest of my life so you know publishing commerce and messaging that covers a lot of human activity it does and if you have those things truly free i think you have a free society and that's also exciting to me because how do we help bend the long arc towards more freedom, more liberty across the world? And technology does that better than, I think,

Starting point is 00:29:51 any sort of diplomacy or anything else that at least I could work on. Are there any other people or companies that stand out as being aligned or philosophically adjacent with the ethos you're describing? Well, one, there's a lot more open source companies now. GitLab is a really great one, led by Sid. They're actually even more open than we are. They publish like everything. And they're a public company now,

Starting point is 00:30:15 you know, like nine or $10 billion. So that's pretty cool to have those examples. I think Elements, which is built on the Matrix ecosystem, so open source messaging. Actually, the competitor to TextBeeper, really awesome company. I think philosophically very aligned. So what's cool is more and more of this is happening.

Starting point is 00:30:33 Also, there's a fun trend where sometimes people who did proprietary companies and then made a ton of money off them, what they do next is often open source. So Jack Dorsey made a ton of money off Twitter, Square. One, he's taken Square to more of a crypto direction. He wants to enable that. And two, what's he funding? Something called Noster and Blue Sky, which are two competing open source Twitters, which is really cool. Brian Acton, co-founder of WhatsApp. What's he doing today? He's running

Starting point is 00:31:01 Signal, which is an open source nonprofit messaging app, which is amazing. Signal, very philosophically aligned. Wikipedia, Mozilla, there's a lot out there, both for-profit and nonprofit. Based on the very little I know, and you track this type of thing much more than I do, but in terms of number of users per full-time employee pre-acquisition, how would you place WhatsApp? The messaging apps are tops. I think Instagram was pretty good size

Starting point is 00:31:30 with like 13 or 14 when they sold. Telegram's actually pretty amazing today. Signal is a pretty small team. I'm not sure the size of the WhatsApp team now, but they were very, very small when they were acquired. It's actually pretty incredible because messaging does not really have any user support. It's all self-serve. you know, they don't really. And so that those businesses can scale quite a bit

Starting point is 00:31:50 with very few people. And it also attracts like really amazing engineer, like the text team is like incredible. And so their aspiration is to remain like a sub 20, sub 30 team, even as they grow to tens of millions or hundreds of millions of users. So how do you, as the buyer first resort, the hopefully, the aspiring buyer first resort, Berkshire Hathaway, known as Automatic, how do you find these various companies or threads to pull on? Or how do those people find you? People do reach out sometimes, which is always nice. But yeah, I guess fundamentally, it's usually just driven by me as a user. Like I'm always trying out new products.

Starting point is 00:32:33 Friends recommend it. My colleagues actually, of the people we employ, they tend to be like very early adopters and very digitally savvy. I mean, that's why we launched Bitcoin in 2012 when it was $12. I wish I could say that that was me being brilliant. No, it was one of my colleagues. He was like, oh, this thing's so cool. We can add support.

Starting point is 00:32:49 And I think he hacked it over a weekend. And so, all right, cool. Amazing. I'll tell you just a quick anecdote. I haven't mentioned really, I don't know. I haven't mentioned it anywhere because why would I? But you mentioned Charlie Munger, rest in peace. I was, I'm remembering correctly,

Starting point is 00:33:05 I mean, I was definitely tentatively scheduled. I think it was to interview him the next Tuesday. Oh my goodness. Yeah. Yeah, he had just started doing podcasts for the first time. Yeah. He did the one with the Collisons, right? John, Patrick, or Invest Like the Best, I think. He did, I think it was Acquired. I can't recall exactly. We'll link it up. It was a really great episode.

Starting point is 00:33:25 Yeah. So for people who didn't get a chance, we'll link to that in the show notes. I appreciated that for someone who I've been so obsessed with for many years, when he passed, I actually had a feeling of, wow, what a life well lived and so appreciative how much he's published over the years. So even though he hadn't done a lot of these podcasts or modern stuff, he has been doing the meetings and speeches and other things for decades now. So you don't always have to meet your mentors. I think you talk about that as well. Sometimes it's really great to just have the book or the speech or something like that, and it can really live with you. You can grow up with it.

Starting point is 00:34:05 You can reread it over the years, like rereading Siddhartha. I know you have some things that you read. Oh, is it Zorba the Greek? Zorba the Greek is spectacular. I think we might have been together in Greece when I found that book, of all places in Greece and Santorini, and absolutely loved that book. Yes, so that is one I go back to revisit. Yes. So that is one I go back to revisit. There are a lot of books

Starting point is 00:34:27 I go back to revisit. Awareness by Anthony DeMello would be another one. Very short, very fast. I'm increasingly a fan of rereading. That includes some fiction too, as you mentioned, over the Greek.

Starting point is 00:34:39 Any books you reread? Sid Hartham. Why? Just an interesting story of enlightenment and journey. And it's actually my Twitter bio, as I can think, I can wait, I can fast. That's a great line. Something like that. I probably have it out of order, but I do them out of order too sometimes, so it works. What else do I like to reread? Essays for sure. Paul Graham. Which essays? Acceleration of

Starting point is 00:35:04 Addictiveness is a really good one. I haven't read that one. He has one on speed. He just published what I consider his magnum opus. Apparently he worked on it for like a year. I think it's called How to Do Great Work or something like that. That one's really good. That could be a book.

Starting point is 00:35:17 It's interesting that there's authors now blogging, essentially, publishing these essays like Slate Star Codex, Scott Alexander, Shane Parrish, Knowledge Project. There's these writers now that really drive a lot of folks. Your WordPress blog kind of started that genre in a lot of ways, like the longer form, like super essays. Yeah, I think a thousand plus blog posts, a lot of blog posts and it's sometimes easy for me to forget that that was essential for the entire i don't know if i would call it trajectory sort of meandering developing quote-unquote career that i've had right like without the blog it doesn't happen i mean the blog was started before the first book it It continued. I mean, it still continues.

Starting point is 00:36:10 Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors, and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement, and the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase.

Starting point is 00:36:52 So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com slash Tim. That's drinkag1, the number one, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash tim last time drink ag1.com slash tim check it out i have a question for you related to blogging actually and then ultimately led to the podcast but without the blog very hard to drive people to the podcast and show notes yeah so the the blog was both jet fuel and bridge and connective tissue and still continues to be i have thought a lot about next chapters for myself recently i love doing the podcast i plan on continuing doing the podcast the 10th anniversary is coming up next april wow 10 years of on average 1.4 episodes per week, every week. It's been going for a long time. Wow.

Starting point is 00:37:47 And I wasn't the first podcaster, nor will I be the last. But 10 years is a good stretch, and it's an opportunity to pause and reflect and think about things. And when I was doing that recently, it's the end of the year, I noticed that often I enter a game that is new. I'm not the first participant, so I'm not at the absolute cutting edge, but I'm on the sharp edge. Yeah, yeah. Pretty early.

Starting point is 00:38:12 Yeah, pretty early. And then I stick around for a while and I focus on it with incredible enthusiasm and OCD- Ridiculous intensity. Yeah, intensity. And then it often gets a bit crowded or saturated and then I do something else.

Starting point is 00:38:32 So that was true a bit with the blog, but it wasn't so much that blogging got crowded, but other opportunities surfaced. And then there was the startup investing. And then that was a focus from, say, 2008 to 2015. Then I took a hiatus for a while. I took a startup vacation, took a complete break from that. That was in tandem with books.

Starting point is 00:38:56 Took a break from the books after The 4-Hour Chef. That's when the podcast was started, 2014. I've done that for a while. And now I'm looking at various trends, various types of collective and individual behavior. I'm like, okay, there's a lot more zero-sum behavior. Things are getting very saturated. Things are much more algorithmically driven now. So you can effectively have an attention rug pull where you're pursuing format X and all of a sudden format X becomes invisible. That could be long form audio.

Starting point is 00:39:25 Then you get pushed to video and then you get pushed to short video. Then you get pushed to clips and now you're in reels, but you're not appearing where you used to appear, et cetera, et cetera. And I've been thinking about what to do next and have posed the question to some folks. I'd be curious to get your two cents. Maybe we'll talk about it over dinner tonight. Is what you would find interesting for me to do next. And part of what's baked into that is, as was true with these early chapters in each of these new arenas, where do I have a particular differentiator? An ability or access or combination in some weird Venn diagram that gives me an advantage. That was true with the startups because I had the blog actually, right? I had the platform and the visibility through the

Starting point is 00:40:10 first book, which allowed me to become an advisor with various companies. That was what enabled that as well as geographically being located in Bay Area. Although some cool companies like Shopify or us, which were not really Bay Area companies. That's true. That's true. And actually a lot of my greatest hits are from outside of the Bay Area being in the Bay Area created a certain like high level of resonance with discussion in those communities which then extended to places like Ottawa what I've been also thinking this is getting a little long but I really respect your opinion on all this stuff. And I know you pay close attention, is that the new thing isn't always a new thing. So for instance, I was chatting, I'm not going to name him because he probably

Starting point is 00:40:53 doesn't want to be named, but I was chatting with a friend of mine and he came back to writing. He was like, you can write. He's like, everyone has a TV show now. Effectively, if you want to have a podcast, you are building out a studio. And the truth of the matter is, people are really good. Really good. I mean, there are some spectacularly well-produced, well-organized, well-researched, well-executed shows out there. And it's going to get more crowded. I mean, you can use, for instance, right now, you can go to ChatGPT and say, provide me with 10 questions in the flavor of Andrew Huberman, Tim Ferriss, Rich Roll, pick your favorite podcaster, if he or she were interviewing so-and-so. And it will spit out questions, and they are quite good. They're not bad. That's hilarious, actually. Right. So if

Starting point is 00:41:37 you have notes in front of you, and you're presentable on camera or via audio, now you're a formidable competitor. The hurdles used to be a little higher, it used to be a little harder. So I've thought about going back to writing. It is very high labor, right? There's a reason there's so many podcasters in the sense like when COVID hit, people could have all become writers. When the writer's strike happened, people could have all become writers. Writing is really, really difficult, I think. I'll interject here if I can. Interject. Also, I felt like your writing process had a lot of solitary.

Starting point is 00:42:09 Yes. What I observed as you got more into podcasting and other things is you really loved the... The social piece. Social piece of it. The interpersonal, like the direct, you and I sitting across from a table. More of a team doing it.

Starting point is 00:42:22 Like also there's this for the guests. And like that's actually a pretty cool element of the format. Absolutely. That's a huge piece. You're totally right. And I think there's part of me that has recognized how nourishing that is for me. And I'm hesitant to go back into monk mode in a cave staring at a blank page. I don't know.

Starting point is 00:42:42 Do you have any thoughts that percolate? We can certainly continue this. I'm just wondering. At the very least, this is just like a confessional, which is nice. I love psychoanalyzing Tim. It's one of my pastimes. That is a good question. And I think how you laid out how the market changes and becomes crowded is very, very true. So the thoughts that come to mind is first also just as your friend like i would love to see you focus on things where it's not just outcome based because you talked about this you're like what about the traffic what about the you know those are more outcomes so where are there things and i think actually podcasting is true for this where the

Starting point is 00:43:21 journey itself is very rewarding for you totally if. If no one listened to this, this was still a fun afternoon. Absolutely. You know? And we're kind of just recording what we might do anyway, which is kind of neat. Best job ever. So that's, I think that's nice. So I would say, I think actually, I find writing, although it can be unfun at the time, so rewarding afterwards. Type two fun. Yeah afterwards type two fun yeah type two

Starting point is 00:43:45 fun and so i wonder as well if that's not sure how much you're writing right now i know you did some fiction stuff and some comic stuff and like that's interesting expressions of creativity and those also when when i bleed out of non-fiction is when it gets easier for me to collaborate which maybe is the way i go not necessarily fiction per se but just different formats different formats. That would be an ability to experiment. I mean, the other thing is, and I'm not going to have the right attribution, maybe it's Neil Strauss, maybe it's Seth Godin, but anyone who's really been consistently productive in the sense of words on pages, the vast majority at some point I've heard say, there's no such thing as writer's block. It's when your standards are too high. You just need to lower your standards until you can get

Starting point is 00:44:29 out of rough draft. And I'm, of course, grossly generalizing, but it's along those lines. And so I've also thought part of the reason that writing is so intimidating to me is I look at some of my blog posts and they're not quite Tim Urban, God bless his soul. They're not 50,000 word posts, and they're not quite Tim Urban, God bless his soul. They're not 50,000 word posts, but they're long. I mean, these are significant investments of time and energy. And maybe the answer is, you know what? You can't write more than four paragraphs. That's it. Some constraints. Closer to, say, some of Seth's shorter pieces, much shorter than Paul Graham. I'll give a nod to Paul. Also, I have, I think it's the top idea in your mind that is one of his essays that I have bookmarked

Starting point is 00:45:08 so it's visible in my browser there are others of course I mean the maker's schedule manager's schedule or manager's schedule maker's schedule which I think is a perennial reminder worth paying attention to so I've thought about the constraints maybe making it shorter but I do

Starting point is 00:45:24 think to underscore what you said the social piece is a big one. How do you make it social? So if I were to brainstorm about your blog, some things I'd recommend trying are like, what would a really amazing comment section look like? If that were really jazzed up, maybe more like forums, maybe more like building community. You've experimented with events before, and I think that's actually pretty exciting. I found a lot of value, because I've been blogging now for like 20 years, in some gardening. So, meaning

Starting point is 00:45:51 returning to some older pieces, some of which still get traffic. And, do the links work? You know? What's the update to it? What's the sort of like, at the top, do I link to a new thing? Does this inspire me to write a new version of of this that's interesting really lovely actually it feels like you're creating a corpus you're creating a body of work that even the old stuff reflects some of your best today

Starting point is 00:46:15 thinking and being able to return to the old tim yeah or when i return to the old matt like it's often sometimes surprising you know like i'm like, I said this? Sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised. Sometimes I'm like, oh, I was young. But then maybe that's a cool sort of grist for something new. Hey, I said this 15 years ago. I'm like, wow, I've learned so much since then. And here's maybe you're at my 15-ago version. And here's what kind of changed my mind.

Starting point is 00:46:39 I guess we have a list of things you change your mind on. And also, I think multimodal formats. It's kind of like you're going to take this podcast and slice it up for TikTok, shorts, reels, whatever you're putting it on. I think people don't do that enough into blog posts. Tell me more. What does that mean? You mean converting things into blog posts or taking blog posts and turning them into

Starting point is 00:46:58 other... No, I think every podcast you do has 10 to 15 blog posts worth of stuff in it. Oh, I agree. Easily. Easily. You've known me for a long time, so I'm going to start with my fears. Not all the amazing ways this could go right. Let me talk about all the terrible things that can happen. I guess what I want to be very cautious of is the siren song of high volume content farming, right? Because I have seen people who are very good, they're very smart, but they're really video first, just churning out just like an assembly line of hot dogs of

Starting point is 00:47:32 content in every form, including text. So how would you think about quality assurance on that? We've actually talked about this. We brainstormed a bit on your site around if you imagined tim.blog almost like a wikipedia where each guest was like a topic and that could be referred to in many episodes and so i think that might be the antidote to this to where the content the transcripts everything right how this works on blogs is kind of clunky right now i think you have like a post for the show and then a post for the transcript. That should honestly be one URL. It's clunky in part because it's a lot of stuff. The show notes are very extensive. They're long. And then the transcripts are

Starting point is 00:48:15 very extensive. So it turns into an enormous, it's basically a book. It turns into a book length. I would love if the transcript tied to a player player video and or audio so you can click on it and listen you could listen and read at the same time you know sort of like a karaoke like scrolling through i mean i use youtube that way with transcripts yeah there's some surprisingly good yeah surprisingly good i would love for everything to be linked auto linked so anytime a book is mentioned anytime a is mentioned, that goes to a page which pivots.

Starting point is 00:48:49 I want to see every time Paul Graham's been mentioned across all of your, how many episodes now? Close to 700. Yeah, that's interesting. I've been invoking Paul Graham like Candyman, Candyman, Candyman for years now. But as of yet, we have not had a podcast conversation. Maybe someday. I don't think he does that many.

Starting point is 00:49:03 He does very few. He had a conversation with Tyler Cowen. I love that one. It was hilarious. Which was hilarious. Which was hilarious. And I have the utmost respect for both of those guys. Tyler is also a one of a kind. He has stylistically produced a very novel and helpful show. There's no one like Tyler. He has an inimitable style the rapid fire the rapid fire no follow-ups of different things I'm kind of terrified about going on a show he's he's the reason I started blogging he was a big influence okay I'm not sure I knew this because he's been doing marginal revolutions for like I think over 20 years. And when I was in high school, one of the super cool things I did,

Starting point is 00:49:46 you know, you did wrestling. I did this economics competition run by the Federal Reserve Bank. Sexy. I know. Let me tell you. You must have been beating the girls off with a stick. Somewhat.

Starting point is 00:50:00 My macroeconomic insights were not quite driving the interest I hoped for since the beginning of the computers and jazz and stuff. But we did this economics competition, and it really opened a lot of opportunities for me. I got to go to Washington, D.C., meet Alan Greenspan. What does it mean to have an economics competition? I mean, is this like econometrics, mathematics competition? What are we talking about? It was an interesting format. So have you heard of the FOMC, the Federal Open Market Committee?

Starting point is 00:50:23 No. So that is the committee of bank presidents and Federal Reserve leaders that come together to determine what's called the Fed funds rate, which basically trickles down to be the interest rates. Man, I bet a lot of people would like to be in that room, wouldn't they? It's a pretty cool meeting. It must be. And they're basically... That's like the Illuminati.

Starting point is 00:50:41 And they've been doing an amazing job too. I think of all the recessions we've avoided and all the problems they don't have so it was i think volker who said like their job is to take the punch bowl away as the party starts going by turning up the interest rates slows down the economy so they have a lot of levers and some new ones as well so the first 15 minutes is we would do a mock meeting you would be greenspan i'd be bimber naki like we kind of pretend role play the different presidents, and we'd read their essays and speeches and things to try to have their style or their point of view. And based on data up to when the competition started, so if new economic data was released that morning, we might incorporate it into the presentation. So 15 minutes of that.

Starting point is 00:51:19 And then the second 15 minutes is they can ask you any question about economics they want. And do you have to still be in character is this this is more that the quiz you is like the five high school students and that part was really fun because a little more improvisational i love q a and houston just weirdly ended up being one of the most competitive districts in the country so the first year we just got creamed by the way i went to arts high school so we'd never won an academic competition ever you know like beyonce went there robert glass were like that we weren't known for academics but had creamed. By the way, I went to arts high school, so we'd never won an academic competition ever. You know, like Beyonce went there, Robert Glass, we're like, we weren't known for academics, but had this awesome teacher, Scott Roman, who was like an economics teacher. He was like,

Starting point is 00:51:58 hey, let's do this. So first year we got creamed. Second year, we won Houston, won the region. Hold on. So second year, they're just like, all right, we're giving you guys all the roids. We're giving you guys all the special top secret Chinese training programs. How did you just go from getting cream to winning in the second year? Yeah, I credit the teacher a lot. It was first period, so it was the same class every morning. We all picked different newspapers like Financial Times, Wall Street Journal. We'd read them every morning. We discussed things. How old were you then at the time? It was high school, so it's, you know, 17, 18, probably 16 18 probably or 16 17 he had us teach each other a lot of things you know you really learn something when you have to teach it so he'd be like scott or iram teach about you know some macroeconomics concept and we kind of rotate

Starting point is 00:52:36 through that and a lot of practicing you know we get together on weekends over the summer we went to dc it's like a summer program but anyway got to meet alan greenspan which is pretty cool the follow-up to that is the year after there was a conference hosted by the dallas federal reserve bank honoring milton friedman and because one of my teammates had gone to like intern for the federal reserve and actually maybe mr roman might have started consulting for them or something like that i I got an invite as a kid. At this point, I haven't done WordPress. I'm just going to University of Houston, barely passing my political science major.

Starting point is 00:53:12 So I got to go to this and Tyler Cohen was there. And his blog actually was one of the big, I mentioned the newspapers. I probably learned more from Marginal Revolutions than I did from Financial Times, textbooks, etc. And he has textbooks and stuff. So he was there. This is actually, I blogged about this. And so it's on my blog, a post about meeting him. And I asked him for his advice and he said, write every day. And I've basically been doing that ever since. That seems to have worked out.

Starting point is 00:53:42 And it's kind of cool also now that I can look up this history. I'm going to do a bit of follow-up on this. I have 14 more things I'm excited about. I know, I know. We're going to get to the other things. Maybe I have an idea for how we're going to do that. But with the economics competitions, you said barely passing in political science. And I know you credited the teacher and said he was an excellent teacher, but what was it about the economics, the competition, the teacher, or the combination that made you give so much to that versus other classes?

Starting point is 00:54:16 Well, at one point I got kicked off the team. Got kicked off. It really worked. Like, I get it now, the psychology of it. So, I think by a lot of ways you would sort of rank things or look at strengths, I definitely should have been on this five-person team. However, as actually you experienced today, I'm not always the most timely person. This was the first class of the day. So, I was late a lot to school. And at one point, this teacher kicked me off the team. And I was like, this is ridiculous. What do you mean like

Starting point is 00:54:45 we gotta win like what's this what's happening and then he made the challenge to me so his other thing which was actually true i didn't really appreciate this into my 20s but he was like you have no physical tone or you don't like i just thought it was a brain in a vat like i didn't work out by the way the school had no gym we had no sports like so he was like to get back on the team you need to run two miles with me. Because he was a jogger. And I think he got me a book called Body for Life or something. One of these early.

Starting point is 00:55:12 Bill Phillips, I think, back in the day. And so that was what I had to do to get back on the team. I had like two months to run these two miles or whatever. And I had to show up on time. So I started showing up on time. And then we did the run. By the way, I'm really not trained. But I just kind of like made it through like sheer force of will.

Starting point is 00:55:30 Because when you're 17, you can just kind of destroy your body anyway. And so I did that. And I was back on the team. We went on to one of these competitions and everything. But that was motivating to me. Like kind of the harsh consequences of being kicked off. And also, you know know being my sort of day thing at the school was jazz saxophone and i think music all performances can be very rigorous

Starting point is 00:55:52 you know you get first second third fourth chair you get ranked you compete i feel like that feedback loop and also the performing so being on stage breath control true with the competition as well yeah the economics yeah you have to perform like when i look back at like what sort of set me up for business later especially at a young age i think it was musical theater jazz performing like that sort of stuff was really huge amazing so the way we got here i've learned to rewind you were saying things should all be automatically linked like every mention of paul Paul Graham in the podcast. And then I mentioned Candyman, Tyler Cowen,

Starting point is 00:56:28 and then we ended up where we ended up. So anything else? I want to continue to brainstorm this with you, just in terms, and we can continue at dinner, just in terms of what experiments might look like. To do things differently, where I am somehow well-positioned, doing something that cannot be replicated the

Starting point is 00:56:46 next day by a thousand people? I'm interested in trying to answer that question. More kind of blue ocean versus red ocean kind of stuff. But let's come back to your list of exciting things. Sure. And why don't we do this? We can go through some quickly too. Yeah. Mention a couple. This is the process I was thinking of. And then we can dig in. We can sort of swoop in. This is a quick one.

Starting point is 00:57:07 And I mentioned already, USB-C. Like, if you know me, you know how much I love cables. You love cables. And the fact we have some. It is hard for me to convey verbally how much Matt likes different kind of cables. And containing the cables and organizing the cables. It is a thing. And gifting the cables. I like, you know, you give someone a good cable.

Starting point is 00:57:27 Like they think of you every time they charge up. It's true. I was just using your external battery pack that you gave me for my birthday the other day. And I was like, oh, Matt. Yeah. What do you get the guy who has everything? The coolest battery pack, you know?

Starting point is 00:57:42 Like, so, because I've tested 20 of them. Yeah. So, you know, it's one of those 20 of them yeah you know i know you've put in the mileage so usbc everything's going usbc now iphone is usbc i'm down to like i think one or two things in my life that are not usbc and it's glorious so i'm very excited about that i'm really sad about ai all right like honestly it's the programming of ai like the prompt engineering you can't really call it programming spell casting it's like casting spells it's ridiculous and when you hear a good prompt like you just said it's like oh that's so cool and it's kind of open source-ish

Starting point is 00:58:16 and that i really i guess you could have prepared your prompts people do but there's actually sites now where people buy and sell prompts which is so cool yeah that's wild so it's kind of like a new form of programming coming online that for me is as exciting as when i first learned to program it like unlocks these superpowers and it's also just fascinating like the things you think would be easy driving the cars turns out to be really hard stuff you thought would be really hard like writing poetry like shakespeare it just kind of spits off in seconds. Not hard at all. You know, like, turn this podcast, make it all rhyme.

Starting point is 00:58:49 It could do that. And that's kind of ridiculous, but cool. Okay, so on the AI side, this has, of course, been a topic in the zeitgeist for a bit now. A lot of people are talking about AI. You, unlike me, have some technical chops. And you know how to code. I would love to know if you have any controversial,

Starting point is 00:59:11 there's no emotional valence to this, right? Or maybe uncommon thoughts around AI. Or questions that you're asking, things you're looking for that maybe are not what I would get in response from a hundred people. I wouldn't get 50 of them telling me the same thing. That's hard because I don't know what 50 people would tell you, but I'll tell you one thing. You get the idea. I mean, they would tell me probably what's in the news cycle or in the media cycle, even if it's within the niche community

Starting point is 00:59:39 of FinTech on Twitter, they would have those inputs. I'll tell you what I kind of hate about it, which is that it's gotten me addicted to Twitter again, which I'd broken. AI. AI, because there's the folks you hear of, the Sam Altmans, the Greg Brockmans, et cetera, and there's just as interesting and good stuff on random anonymous Twitter accounts with an anime avatar.

Starting point is 01:00:02 And so it's a little ridiculous. A lot of the top researchers have these alts, they call them, or other accounts where they share more stuff. And it's redirected a lot of my reading. I follow a lot of these. You find out stuff within hours of it happening, and they link to a lot of scientific papers. So this is an area I don't understand as well. So I've been reading a lot of papers and learning a lot about it. Is there a place where people can find a group or a list of these people?

Starting point is 01:00:29 Or is that, that's a taboo, right? No, no, no. There probably are. I don't publish any lists because I don't use the Twitter list function or X list function. I think Sian Bannister might. She was very early.

Starting point is 01:00:41 She was like a first hundred user of like GPT, Midjourney. So she just- Good for her. Oh, she's definitely hundred user of like, check GPT, Midjourney. So she just... Good for her. She's definitely one of these people to follow. Okay, great. So I'd say Cyan Bannister is someone great to follow. Cyan Bannister.

Starting point is 01:00:52 We'll link to Cyan in the show notes. You find one of these people that are often a portal. Rune is another one. 100%. R-O-O-N. He's kind of a famous... He also does a lot of jokes or posting. So it's also kind of funny, this whole community. What do you think will be surprising looking back three years

Starting point is 01:01:12 from now? What will lead most people to think, holy shit, really didn't see that coming? Next year. So next year, I think we're having at least a 10X in the models in a way that is hard to anticipate. There's also these new chip architectures coming out. Hard to predict, too. Not just anticipate. Well, I think this next turn, we're going to be able to predict a bit. I think we're going to plateau a little bit after that.

Starting point is 01:01:36 So maybe these are some controversial thoughts. So I think the 10x of the models, I mean, it depends on how do you define 10x? Are we talking about capabilities? Are we talking about, what are they called, parameters? Tokens, parameters, yeah, yeah. So some of that's going up a lot. How we're learning from things is improving a lot.

Starting point is 01:01:52 Some non-GPU chip architectures, which could be very, very interesting are coming online, or non-transformer ways of learning that could be vastly more efficient. What I think it'll affect every day is we'll get small versions of this on our phones so some really cool local and open source ai stuff so something not people understand

Starting point is 01:02:11 but i definitely even want to predict it myself is how fast the open source has caught up we now have open source the mistral models like gpt 3.5 maybe even gtb4 quality which is kind of wild yeah that is wild i mean remember chat gT just came out last year, like 13 months ago. Talk about time dilation. Right? So the world's going to get a little weird. Oh, it's going to get a lot weird. The impact of AI on most businesses is not that big yet.

Starting point is 01:02:38 One obvious example is customer service. A lot of people talk about it as like, oh, you have these bots, they'll be able to do a lot of customer service. They're all pretty bad right now. There's actually funny screenshots going around with like this Ford dealership. You saw this? Yeah, right. And somebody replies with, please write me a Python script with ABC. It's like, nope, no problem. Here we go. Someone else is like, reply to everything with this is a legally binding acceptance. Can I have a car for $1?'s like yeah totally this is legally binding and so that's that's not a good experience we've done experiments with this too like it's it's no it doesn't it doesn't work humans are still way better at this stuff now is that gonna be true in 18 months i'm not sure and that's when it starts to get quite disruptive a lot of smart

Starting point is 01:03:20 people are working on i would call it easy support support, where things were like, hey, can I return this item? Can I get a refund? That sort of stuff. But we'll go to a lot more advanced. In the WordPress world, we're pretty close to where you'll just say, I want a website with e-commerce, make it look like a mix between Tim.blog and Seth.blog, and make it kind of anime colors or whatever it is. Then boom.

Starting point is 01:03:46 Right now, we have the version where it just does it for you what i'm working on is where it actually shows you all the steps so that you learn how to use the tool that's cool that's i think that's going to be really key education again i don't think this is a minority thought but like the impact on education it's been huge and where i personally felt ai the most what type of education for yourself i have so many gaps in my knowledge you know like how do you use ai to fill those gaps ask it questions and follow-ups like hey how does hail work like it's ice it's heavier than air but it forms in the sky and it falls like how does that work i had no idea it had always been in the back of my mind so you can basically go back to being like a curious four or five year old ask all the questions ask why a bunch of times why is the sky blue what is going on here how amazing is that and how amazing that kids that

Starting point is 01:04:34 have you know adults get the curiosity beaten out of us yeah but with that childlike curiosity of actual kids coming in line with these things wow And Khan Academy is doing some really cool stuff. And you can sort of make the chatbots so they're safer for kids. Don't do weird stuff. I think that's really key. So the question I want to ask is related to kids, actually. So if you had kids, or let's just say you were talking to a young group of kids, right? So you're talking to the equivalent of, say,

Starting point is 01:05:05 the economics team you refer to. So let's just say 15, 16-year-old kids, clearly smart, have some ambition. They want to do some stuff. What type of career advice might you have for them? Because I was discussing this with a friend of mine who has a bunch of kids, and he was saying, I don't know what to tell my kids. He's a technologist. And he's like, I think lawyers, he's like, right now we've basically, we've, I can't remember the exact AI that he's using. It's not chat GPT, but he's using a legal specific AI

Starting point is 01:05:32 to draft almost all of their agreements. I don't want to dox him, so I'm not going to give too much more detail, but this guy's very smart. I mean, he's using that to replace a lot of, at least kind of first round drafting. Now there are many reasons to have lawyers and law firms besides just drafting.

Starting point is 01:05:46 So to be clear, you need a privatized army to inflict God knows what, then it's a different conversation. But then you have many aspects of AI that are going to disrupt jobs. They really just are, or people are going to have to bob and weave. Despite what some of our mutual friends might say about no one's ever going to lose a job and so on. I don't believe it. So what might you advise to someone now, and they could be young,

Starting point is 01:06:10 or somebody who's just thinking about a career pivot, how do you AI-proof yourself or at least kind of put on an eight-point harness so you have some defensibility? What are your thoughts? Maybe this is something I changed my mind on, but it is the one on my list, is I used to really advocate to learn to code. You know, these can write pretty good code now.

Starting point is 01:06:30 I've gone back and forth. So if you'd asked me like three months ago, I was like, no, you don't learn to code anymore. Now I think I'm back to it's worth to learn to code. The same way it might be useful to learn a martial art, even if you're not going to be defending yourself every day as like part of your livelihood. Like there's something intrinsically good, studying the humanities, et cetera. So I think learning code can teach you to understand what's going on with computers in a way that I think in an AI world will also be very useful. I would tell kids to play with this stuff a ton. You know, the prompt engineering, the playing with it, learning how to learn is

Starting point is 01:07:04 something I know you're very passionate about. It feels pretty timeless. And I'd probably point to that great work essay by Paul Graham. He talks a lot about ambition and how important it is. What you're doing, what's your drive? How are you going to leave a dent in the universe? What are you best trying? And I feel like that's really, really, really important.

Starting point is 01:07:23 I'm actually very optimistic about future generations. I'll tell you something i changed my mind on yeah let's do it we'll jump around a little bit it's got two parts one i i used to be worried that like we're gonna have too many people on earth or this great book kevin kelly recommended called empty planet basically says we're not gonna have enough peopleulation has already peaked in most developed countries. I think the U.S. is the only nuclear superpower with a growing population over the next 30 years. What do you attribute that to? For us, it's just immigration. So if we mess that up, we're going to lose this whole toast.

Starting point is 01:08:02 It's a big competitive advantage for us when you think about when the best people in the world want to send their kids to school here and stay here. If we mess that up, I think we have some other advantage geographic and resource-wise, but like, yeah, that's a really important one. I had personally chosen not to have kids. I think it was seven years ago now, I decided, or six years ago, like, I'm not going to have kids the rest of my life. Sort of built my life around that. Been rethinking that somewhat. Maybe it's the ripe old age of 40.

Starting point is 01:08:23 Maybe it's also knowing that we're not going to have enough people in the world. I think also I'm just a bit more optimistic about the future, especially with the AI stuff, that it's kind of exciting to think someone born today in 18 years, what are they doing? Like for most of the past hundred years, you could predict a few things. There's colleges which have been around for many hundreds of years. Like there's a few things that have worked. I don't know if in 18 years you have a really super smart, precocious kid, you're going to want to send them to a Harvard or Princeton or like any of these things.

Starting point is 01:08:58 I think the world might have shifted so much that that's just like a radically different thing. That kind of makes me a little optimistic and curious about it what are the reasons do you have for feeling optimistic that's i think a counterpoint to a lot of the dystopian narratives that people would be interested to hear more about i mean you're optimistic kind of by default is that fair to say like you sort of i lean that way lean optimistic to begin with but this is a big change in the conversation that you and i've had around kits like this is my first time hearing about it this is that's why i told you i had some new stuff for you you certainly do for this as well it's just been inspired i've

Starting point is 01:09:34 now 15 godchildren and so like seeing some of them and being able to be in their lives a bit has been just so rewarding so cool to see them like download new information. That whole thing. I mean, this is not novel at all. Like, by the way, every person I know as a parent has been saying this like, Matt, you don't understand. I'm like, okay, maybe I'm starting to get it through my thick head a little bit. Why optimistic?

Starting point is 01:09:57 I know that technology is somewhat neutral. It can be a double-edged sword. It can be used for good and bad. I guess I have a core assumption to my optimism, which is a fundamental goodness of human nature. And this is actually a big split. Some people think humans are, you know, the Hobbesian, life is nasty, brutish, and short. Or what's the survival stuff we read, like Neil Strauss's book? We're like, we're two weeks of food away from everyone just going crazy and like and i think

Starting point is 01:10:25 growing up in houston through hurricanes and stuff i saw some of these disaster situations including when like there was no power and how people came together was quite inspiring so is there evil in the world yes i mean we see this with some of the autocratic leaders and things but i would especially of like regular people not these like crazy evil terrible people i would feel pretty good about being like teleported to any place in the world and talking to someone that's kind of cool and then especially when we figure out economic stuff and can like remove some of these base level issues survival issues which we largely have in the developed world and arguably even in the developed world. And arguably,

Starting point is 01:11:05 even in the whole world, the blockers are typically political or these autocrats. We could feed everyone in the world easily right now. The blockers are usually political. That's exciting. And then the final thing is just working on it. The best way to predict the future is to invent it. So there's a way I want the web to work. And I work on it. And it's worked. We got a third of the websites on this thing that that's cool yeah and that's forcing the proprietary people to open up more other stuff like you have a worldview and it's like you interview people who you want your readers to and listeners to listen to because they'll get influenced by it i don't think you bring someone

Starting point is 01:11:39 here that you thought was going to like mess up their mind or head them down the wrong direction i've not been seduced by the dark side just yet. Right. And so that's part of changing how the world works. Yeah, totally. And I do use the podcast for that, for sure. And the books and everything. Like how many people have you met that are like, my life changed somehow.

Starting point is 01:11:56 Yeah. That's inventing the future. If you'd just been passive, that wouldn't have been a ripple in the pond. What is the, oh, you know what? We can look it up and put it in the show notes. It's not Turing, but the best way to predict the future is to invent it. Do you remember the attribution on that? I want to say Alan Kay.

Starting point is 01:12:13 Alan Kay. That is it. It's Alan Kay. What a great line, and how true. What else are you excited about, or have you changed your mind? I may come back to the kids thing. I'm still in shock over this. This is amazing.

Starting point is 01:12:23 I know. We'll talk about it more. It's developing. I don't know what that looks like for me, if it's traditional, non-traditional. But we just announced, I just did my State of the Word, which is the annual speech I do. It's like State of the Union. It's something I'm very, very excited about. Next year, we're working on, we're calling it Data Liberation Front.

Starting point is 01:12:39 Basically, one reason I think proprietary services have gotten a lot more popular is they do subtle things to lock people in. Remember we talked about the messaging earlier? Some of the CMS spaces like Wix don't even provide an export. So they really, it's like a roach motel. You check in, you can't check out. So what we're doing with this data liberation front is creating an open source directory that provides two-way import of all this data. So whether that's in e-commerce, in another page builder, because there's all these different page builders for WordPress besides Gutenberg, everything.

Starting point is 01:13:13 And then once it's in WordPress, you can get it into anything else you want, because WordPress is kind of universally supported, our formats. We're also improving the WordPress to WordPress migration format. So we have an export, but it actually isn't great in that moving the files and the plugins and everything is still a pain in the butt. So we're going to make that really, really easy. And so my hope is by radically lowering the friction, it'll help make the web kind of force everything

Starting point is 01:13:36 to be a bit more open. Data liberation front, catchy name. So it's in a sense, and this may be a terrible analogy, but it's like a Google Translate for content management and technology, right? From anything to anything, and then from that next hop to whatever else. It increases competition. This also means that if you're in WordPress, everyone else is going to do this too. But I think this is ultimately really good for users. And when you think of lock-in music services, how hard is it to move your playlist in between the music services?

Starting point is 01:14:07 Someone actually built something for this. But that lock-in is, I think, not user-friendly. What are some other ways that you would like to see the technology world, or just technologies, stirred up in this way? Where if one person or company were to do X, it would sort of catalyze a bunch of mimicry slash competition that would be ultimately better for users and humanity slash fill in the blank. We've talked about messaging. You know, app stores are opening up now. There's been some judgments against Google around billing systems and other things.

Starting point is 01:14:45 A big reason I think the world's run proprietary the past 15 years has been mobile platforms, which are way more locked down than desktops. Everything has to go through their app store. You can't just run arbitrary software on your phone. You will be able to do more stuff like that over the next few years. So could you just walk me through an example so I understand what you mean? What it looks like and what it could look like. So currently what the issues are and then what it could look like.

Starting point is 01:15:08 Yeah, so today every app on your phone has to go through the App Store. So they go through an approval process. Sometimes Apple is slow at approving things. Sometimes they kick stuff out. Tumblr got kicked out. They typically take a pretty big cut of payments. They force you to use their subscription systems and they they take 15% or 30% of it, which breaks some business models.

Starting point is 01:15:29 So that's why, like, for a while, I think they made exceptions, but when you subscribe to, like, Spotify or Netflix through your phone, it would cost more if you did it on the web, because they have to pay that cut. And the exceptions they make are somewhat arbitrary. So, for example, if you buy a book on Amazon,

Starting point is 01:15:44 they don't make you use their payments or take a 15% or 30% cut. Because the margins, or when you order an Uber, they're not doing that. When you're tipping through Uber, they don't take a cut. It just goes direct to the driver. But we added a tipping feature on Tumblr, which again, we're not taking any money from it. It's just money going direct between the people. And they made us charge a fee on it. Or like a subscription. It was like a subscription thing. And they made us charge a fee on it like a subscription it was like a subscription thing and they made us charge a fee and it's like oh wow now like if you're charging

Starting point is 01:16:11 like a six dollar a month subscription to your blog that becomes four bucks a month and then i still have to process the credit card even or do something else over that so like just got very messy so that's an example so that's going to change or it might change yeah i think so i think regulatory pressure is going to force them to open up you've always been able to like jailbreak your phone or you might sideload things using like something like test flight and you can do testing apps yeah totally but um it's not really a broad commercial thing i'm also thinking about this for text text the multi messaging app they might not like so what would it look like if it's blocked by the app stores how can we still get it in the hands of the people do you have any ideas that you can share or is

Starting point is 01:16:55 that too inside plan a is working with the networks and like just saying hey like we want to support your business model we're not trying to change any of that we're just trying to provide this power user tool. And there's a lot of prior art for this in like email clients. You can use Gmail with Mac mail or with superhuman or any of the other things. And their business is fine. And then two, I guess carrot stick. I don't know if we have a stick against these companies, but like, you know, working with

Starting point is 01:17:19 politicians, working with our user base to like do petitions. I don't know. Maybe I'll camp outside Apple's office, do a hunger strike at One Infinity Way. I really believe in this stuff because it's user-centric. So what's the thing that gets them to do the thing that is really right for their users? What could change, what company could change?

Starting point is 01:17:40 It's always Apple. And the reason I talk about them a lot isn't because I don't like them, it's because I hold them in the very highest esteem. I love Apple a lot. And they're like a $3 trillion company now, but they still act like an underdog sometimes. And so I think a lot about what would a benevolent elder statesman of Apple look like if they sort of acted like, hey, we won. We have hundreds of billions of dollars in the bank. There's very little that could hurt them except hubris. Companies don't die from competition.

Starting point is 01:18:12 They usually die from suicide, whether it's flying too close to the sun or trying to over-optimize the last penny from everything in ways that lock in users or aren't sort of freedom promoting. I could see that hurting them majorly. So I want to see the opposite. I want to see like a really vibrant Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc. And actually, Microsoft is probably the best example of this. It used to be quite competitive, quite anti-competitive, obviously, and has become quite benevolent over the past decade.

Starting point is 01:18:40 And one of the most amazing turnarounds and runs. Yeah, really remarkable. really remarkable embrace of open source making things super user-centric like they did a lot of really cool stuff there and i think that's the playbook for all these big tech companies what are some of the lesser known tools of competition or like invisible tools of competition in the sense that someone or a platform or fill-in-the-blank larger company making, say, a messaging service break 5% of the time or be 10% slower. That's sort of invisible means of leverage. I would have to imagine there are examples of under the umbrella term of, say, privacy, you could also see some really incredible sort of competitive pressuring slash crushing

Starting point is 01:19:31 slash fill in the blank. I'm just wondering, as someone who's worked in technology, understands technology, as an operator and individual contributor in code, and who also is right in the middle of the switch box, so you see a lot, you get to test a lot that is behind the scenes. What are some of the lesser known tools

Starting point is 01:19:50 of sort of invisible competition? There's a lot of dials. So I'll talk about things that are publicly known and people have been caught about versus all the secret things we did. No, I'm kidding. X, Twitter under Elon Musk got caught. Every single link you click on Twitter goes through T.co, a redirect service.

Starting point is 01:20:08 Yep. To certain media sites and other things, they were inserting like a five to ten second delay. Again, every little bit of friction, particularly on mobile, people just press the back button. They go back to the tweet list. So, like, it's incredible. And there's studies around this. Like, every hundred milliseconds, the page takes a load. Like, lower conversion, et cetera.

Starting point is 01:20:28 What else has been caught? Google got caught caught for they created this format called amp accelerated mobile pages it was designed to compete make mobile faster we actually supported it wholeheartedly and they did it kind of open source and everything like that some documents leaked that basically said that and it's funny because i think the people working on amp didn't even know this. I think they were actually like true believers in sort of improving the web type of thing. Certainly we didn't know this, but there was something in AMP that also blocked,

Starting point is 01:20:52 I'm not going to get this right, but blocked header bidding or something, basically made it harder for other advertising networks to run on these pages in a way that benefited Google. And I think Google particularly has sharp elbows around advertising stuff. The greatest moneymaker in the history of the internet, you mean?

Starting point is 01:21:08 I get why they, yeah. And the duopoly there of them and Facebook, them and Meta, is entrenched by regulation as well. So Bill Gurley has this amazing presentation. Have you seen this? I'm not sure which one. I've seen a few of his presentations. He has a new one.

Starting point is 01:21:24 It's basically about regulatory capture. The name name is a number of miles like 2791 he kind of goes through a number of examples of where you know whether it's covet test this is one example you go to a walgreens or cvs here there's three covet test brands and each one costs like 2199 this is you know a couple years later in, they're like five bucks for two. And apparently the US blocks all the European manufacturers. And again, these assay tests are like very basic technologies, like nothing new, like what's happening there? And he kind of digs into it and, oh, the regulator used to work at two of these companies, actually. Like, that's interesting. Like, how does this all work? So, how regulatory capture, and he tells his story

Starting point is 01:22:04 of like, he was trying to lobby around something and then the politician was like can i have a meeting he's like oh yeah i'll come to you he's like wow that's i'm on the west coast he's like no no i'll come to you set up a conference room and someone calls him like hey we do these like a fundraiser it's usually like five grand a seat and he's like okay and they're like oh and they call him back he gets like six people together and then they're like you need a bigger room all of a sudden it becomes 10 people and then the the next thing was something like we'd love all the people who are married for their partners to donate as well and he's like well i don't have enough seats in the room he's like oh they don't

Starting point is 01:22:39 need to come to the meeting this is like a literal story that happened to him and he was fighting for something really good it was around municipal wi-. And it was being blocked by the telecom companies. The Comcast and Verizon's of the world were blocking this. So it's a great presentation. I would say that's a follow-up for everyone listening. We'll link to that. But I think that's also something that companies can do. I know for a fact they hire opposition research. They publish, they sponsor academics and things to publish. This company's tied up in China. It's all happening to each other all the time, mostly among big tech. I would say startups don't do this at all. Medium tech doesn't do this at all. Well, is that because they are lawful good to use D&D parlance, or is it just simply

Starting point is 01:23:21 because they don't have the resources? I would say, yeah, because they don't have the resources i would say yeah maybe they don't have the resources my steel man for why the bigger companies do this is they also get attacked a lot sure probably really underhanded ways so it's as much defense as offense and so that would be my sort of like charitable interpretation of why they do some of these things do you have any security or basic security or privacy recommendations for average Joe or Jane? I guess I don't want to insult my listeners, but just like somebody like me, I'm not technical, right? But if you were to say, yeah, one thing you want to be really careful about is this. On personal devices and computers, like just a lot of people do X, you should really

Starting point is 01:24:00 do the opposite of X. The easy stuff. Make sure your apps and operating system are always up to date. Yeah. I actually get really excited. It's like one of the first things I do in the morning is like load the app updates. So make yourself excited about it. Yeah, very important

Starting point is 01:24:12 with browsers like Chrome too. Yeah, there's a lot of actively exploited stuff out there. Two, you know, good passwords. I think you've talked about this. I like password managers like 1Password. There's also this new thing

Starting point is 01:24:23 coming out called PassKeys. You know, I have seen this and I don't know what it means. So I would actually love a one-on-one. This is kind of a new thing for your audience. If a server supports PassKeys, you should switch to it. So basically, it's a technology which eliminates passwords. You use like a secure key exchange. And as a user, what you'll see is that you just log in with scanning your face or something.

Starting point is 01:24:44 And it's kind of built into the OS in a really secure way, and it's unique. The thing that breaks my heart is when people use the same password on multiple services. Never do that. All my passwords are super random, like 40 character. I couldn't tell you if I wanted to. But you generate them, and that's kind of what this does in a better way. Do you mind getting into the weeds for a second? Just on a technical level, what are we talking about?

Starting point is 01:25:06 Are these kind of like private keys and private messaging? Like PGP, am I making that up? PGP stands for pretty good privacy. This is like a key exchange. Yeah, what's actually happening? I know this is probably going to get way above my pay grade quickly, but password I understand. Well, to the extent that I think I understand.

Starting point is 01:25:22 And this is actually, I'm not sure the exact length of the key or anything like that. But imagine it like you have a really unique super long password, maybe like a couple thousand characters, that is then stored in the secure enclave on your device. And so, one password can also support these. But basically, it kind of gets people to use random passwords, and it creates a better UI. Because they're logging in with their face or their fingerprint or something. So that's probably the best way to describe it. What the protocol is doing is the browsers now support this as a standard, and so they do like a challenge response effectively.

Starting point is 01:25:59 So you've used like SSH before probably. Yeah. You can do that with a key. So you can type in a password, or you can have a public key stored on the server which is not sensitive someone could have access to your public key and not get to anything and then your private key which is secret and there's a calculation done between those which says oh this is really tim or the person with the key okay past case to revisit what else are you excited about, Dr. Mullenweg? We're Camp Asia. This is actually a joint thing. Yes, let's talk about this. So this is something I am very excited about, and I need to finesse

Starting point is 01:26:32 some details to make sure it's going to work. But what are we talking about? We've had some pretty epic travel adventures. It's been a while. It has been a while. We've hung out more in home bases and things, but they're kind of traveling. We've been all over. We've been to Vietnam in like home bases and things, but they're kind of traveling. We've been all over. We've been to Vietnam. Yeah. Been to Turkey.

Starting point is 01:26:49 Yeah, Greece. Been to Greece. Been all over. And actually, the only time I've set foot in Taiwan, which is where Work Camp Asia is this year, was we were connecting to Vietnam. Actually, an amazing story there. A cool Tim story as well. There was something wrong with our tickets, and they weren't letting us board. And this was kind of early, like not everyone spoke English or something. And you like started breaking out some Mandarin and somehow got us on the plane. I still don't

Starting point is 01:27:13 know what you said. I remember that. God, I haven't thought about that in forever. I still have the photograph that you took in a park late night in Vietnam of this little kid with a cute hat with break dancers in the background. I still have that on my bookshelf. It brings back some great memories. Yes, I've never been to Taiwan. So, Work Camp Asia, March 7th through 9th. You graciously agreed to come. And part of the pitch, which also I want to do, is take a few days off afterwards and explore the country. So, we'll probably get you in on the last day or something, because I'll do a few days with

Starting point is 01:27:45 all the wordpress stuff and then uh it's just a sport of food i've heard so many good things about taiwan yeah it's also one of those places that kind of like hong kong 15 years ago like maybe you could visit a geographic geopolitical hot spot yeah it is a uh there are a lot of open questions around taiwan especially over the next few years so i think it's like a kind of a perfect time to be there hey let's say we gotta figure out what you're doing at work in Asia. If you want to do like a Q and a, I can interview you or give a talk on something you've learned. It's a cool audience.

Starting point is 01:28:12 It is a cool audience. Got to get some night markets. So I don't know if you knew this, but I, so I've spent time all over East Asia, have loved my time in Japan, in various parts of China. I've spent time in Taiwan, most recently in Korea,

Starting point is 01:28:26 which completely blew my mind. Loved, loved, loved Seoul, which is where I spent the time. But I spent, with respect to Taiwan specifically, two summers in Taiwan. No way. Yeah, I spent two summers. This is way before tech made anything easy because this would have been 98, 99 maybe,

Starting point is 01:28:49 in that range, somewhere around there. Maybe 97, actually. And a hilarious story. I remember going on these really rough bulletin boards where English was- Like physical or like online? Online bulletin boards. And the English was not always super straightforward

Starting point is 01:29:07 or easy to understand. I was doing my best. And I ended up having someone, because I was trying to find a cheap place to stay in Taipei and couldn't quite figure it out. Didn't have any money really. So I ended up connecting with someone who said they could organize a homestay.

Starting point is 01:29:25 And then I arrived in Taipei. It's pouring rain. I don't know a soul. I eventually take a taxi from the airport, torrential downpour, to this supposed homestay. And it's like a dilapidated church. And they're like, here's your bed. And it's just a wooden surface. Like it's-

Starting point is 01:29:43 Wow. It's like a tabletop. This is where your back got messed up. Yeah. I was like, oh boy, I'm really going to have to figure out a plan B. And I had this woman at one point, I was clearly lost, approached me on the street and offered to help me, which I've just, due to a host of reasons, I was wary of. I was like, I'm not sure if I want. It just seems uncommon here for this to be a viable offer without strings attached. Turned out to be a good Samaritan.

Starting point is 01:30:14 She owned two restaurants in Taipei. She was like, you know what? I come by anytime, introduced me to all of her friends. So I ended up just getting adopted by this woman and her basically like ratatouille restaurant family. It's amazing. People are fundamentally good. You know, I am leaning, I do lean. I wish I had less of this on the Hobbesian side.

Starting point is 01:30:35 So you're a good influence on me. We'll balance each other out. Yeah, in this case, absolutely delivered on that premise and just had the best time. And Taiwan has these fantastic night markets. It is, at the time, it was perfect for me because I was such a night owl. And like very late night culturally, you'll go out to dinners. You see this in places like Argentina too, some places in Europe where you're like, this is bizarre. It is 11 o'clock at night and there's an entire family out with even little kids having dinner. I love that. This doesn't make any sense.

Starting point is 01:31:05 And absolutely loved it. Had a wonderful time. And that was a long time ago now. I mean, I'm trying to run in the basic math here. It's like 20, 30 years ago. I mean, that's a long time ago. And for that reason and many more, also that we haven't taken a trip together internationally. A little while.

Starting point is 01:31:23 Like a real trip. We've collided in various places in Italy briefly, like boom. Oh yeah, that was fun. Yeah, a little like course collision. Although actually, you know, I take it back. Antarctica. That was a real trip. Oh yeah, that's a real trip.

Starting point is 01:31:35 That was our last podcast. Yeah. That was a pretty deliberate trip. That was a long one too. That was a long one. Two weeks? Yeah, it was about two weeks. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:31:41 That was a real one. I mean, exploration, yes, but with lots of constraints, right? Don't wander off. Don't wander off. Don't wander off. two weeks yeah it's about two weeks yeah that was that was really and like not i mean exploration yes but with lots of constraints right like don't wander off random wander don't wander off and fall into a one kilometer like crevasse and die don't do that all right so word camp asia what were the dates on that again roughly is march 7th to 9th all right and um yeah tim's gonna be speaking so that's that's exciting i keep saying I need to finesse in the details. But Matt is committing on my behalf. I would like to make it happen.

Starting point is 01:32:09 I really, this is a priority. So that is in there. What else are you excited about? It kind of ties into that. All right. It's something I haven't told you. Oh, wow. Which is I am taking a sabbatical in 2024.

Starting point is 01:32:22 Sabbatical? Yeah. So Automatic has this benefit where every five years you get two to three months fully paid time off okay and a hack on it to encourage people to take it is if you don't take it until year seven you don't get another one until year 12 the clock starts when you come back from the previous one i extol the benefits of this literally like hundreds and hundreds of people take them, maybe over a thousand at this point. I talk about why it's so amazing. I'm the

Starting point is 01:32:51 biggest hypocrite in 18 years. I have not taken one myself. Luckily, almost every other executive has. So like the example gets set, but I finally was like, you know, I just need to pull the trigger. And so February, March, April, including during this WordCamp, I'm going to be officially on sabbatical. I'm honestly terrified. I'm sure you are. I don't know how to unplug for that. I mean, you saw me in Antarctica. I got weird after like eight days of no internet. A lot of people get weird in Antarctica, in fairness. But yeah. So I'm going to try to do some detox, maybe some silent retreats, working on hobbies,

Starting point is 01:33:31 chess, sailing, ping pong pong just fun unplugged stuff but honestly i'm kind of scared too so i've got one or two dates that are in there uh friend surgery this work camp but i'm just gonna show up like a attendee i'll speak or something but like i'm not gonna like help plan it or do anything like that so even we we're going to have a board meeting in there, and it's going to be a good practice. We talked about this with the team. What are we going to do about this? It's like, well, I'll go to the board meeting, but I'll go to it like a board member,

Starting point is 01:33:53 not like someone who planned out the agenda and everything like that. So I'll get the material while the other board members get it versus the multi-week period planning process and everything. So I would imagine you're generally a fairly important quarterback slash primary actor in board meetings. So who is going to be presenting this information instead of Matt? Leaders in the company. Leaders in the company.

Starting point is 01:34:15 Yeah. Our chief financial officer, our general counsel are always really big in the board meetings. So here's a question for you. I'm very excited about this, and I'm very skeptical. Ha! Because you've already mentioned a number of things that are in there. Businessy things that you've allowed to slide in

Starting point is 01:34:32 with some semblance of, I'm just an observer. Two things. Two things. Yeah. And it's partially, I guess I could could skip the board meeting i'm kind of curious though for this experience so it's driven right now by curiosity so the benefit you know a lot of people think obviously the benefits to the person you get the three months paid time off so that's pretty cool we now have people who've done multiple because they've been an automatic 10 or 15 years and like some of the testimonials are amazing like someone was like yeah i get to take a summer with my kids i think they're doing their second or third one they're like this of the testimonials are amazing. Like someone was like, yeah, I get to take a summer with my kids. I think they're doing their second or third one. They're like, this is the last one. Because after this, they're going to be in college.

Starting point is 01:35:08 I'll never get this amount of time with them probably again for a long time. But there's also a benefit to the organization. It's funny. One thing people ask is they say, well, do people just take these and never come back? That's basically never happened. Maybe we've had people resign like maybe once or twice out of the like thousand. But like, it's very rare. Two, if someone's out

Starting point is 01:35:27 for like two weeks or three weeks, you just wait for them to come back. You don't actually look at the systems to which they are in the critical path for. 100% agreed. When it's two or three months, the organization needs to figure out how to work without that person.

Starting point is 01:35:41 And so it's a great opportunity to identify those bottlenecks. Actually, some financial service firms require this for auditing reasons. Because if someone's in a critical path of some financial thing, it's actually a good practice to have someone else do that for a while. That's not really our primary concern. But you can figure out your bus count pretty quickly. It's like, oh, wait a second. It also gives great leadership opportunities. So this was inspired by the former CEO of Automatic, Tony Schneider, who just did this because he's cool.

Starting point is 01:36:08 And he did like a three-month road trip with his family. At the time he was CEO, I was president. Gave me an opportunity to practice being the CEO. And we saw what worked well and what didn't. Also led like, oh, we need to do this executive hire because Tony's really good at something and I'm not. So we need to hire someone to fill that in. These are part of the reasons I think it's awesome for organizations.

Starting point is 01:36:26 First thought, if you had a thousand people do sabbaticals, or however many people, but a lot of people do it, last I checked, you guys are involved in the content business. Have you thought of or has anyone assembled anywhere sabbatical best practices? Because this is also on some level synonymous with what I described in the four-hour workweek as the mini-retirement, a primary value of which is you establish systems and stress test systems and processes that outlive the sabbatical. They persist. Is this something you guys have gathered? Is there some type of discussion form

Starting point is 01:37:03 where you have anything like this? It's so funny because as of today, no, but probably by the time this gets published at automatic.com slash sabbatical, we started working on a page. So a lot of people blog their experience. This is a page that other people, meaning the public would have access to? Yeah, it'll be just slash sabbatical. So a lot of people blog about their experience. And there's really all types. Some people like have walked the El Camino for a couple months or done like the Pacific Coast crest thing. Some people just stay at home and chill out. You know, something like it's really,

Starting point is 01:37:34 it's all over the map. I don't think there's a right way to do it, except hopefully not just do what you were doing before. And we do kind of like really strongly encourage people on the blog. Actually actually someone just who's on sabbatical pinged me on slack and i was like don't make me turn off your access you need someone to do that for you you need to hire a police officer at the end of the sabbatical i put a child lock on my phone or something and like i'll give you the code get a cookie jar with a timer on it yeah the end of the sabical, the sabbatical was a huge success. Why has it been a huge success?

Starting point is 01:38:08 Because there's doing it to say, look, I'm walking the walk and I did my sabbatical. But that's not very interesting, right? In and of itself. It's like, okay, fine. Although it is good to be consistent. It's good to be consistent, but you could also kind of creep off to your laptop and in theory be on sabbatical but in practice be a lurker on all sorts of different business calls and meetings that would be pretty

Starting point is 01:38:30 terrible it would be so what would success look like and actually something i'm debating is because you know i do love coding and computer stuff and so like playing around with like led programming or something is maybe a sabbatical project but i'm also like i'm on the computer all day so just for like a health reason i think i should really get get off. So what's success? Well, it's kind of what we talked about for the organization should come back a lot stronger. And people should get a lot more robust. What's success for you? I'm most interested in Matt Mullenweg. I think for me is that I'm recharged. You know, the funny thing is people come back really wanting to work. And a typical thing I hear is like, it kind of takes a month to unplug for your brain

Starting point is 01:39:06 to like reset. Month two, you just enjoy things. Month three, people start to get antsy to return, which is, I don't know if that'll happen to me, but that's a pretty common arc. So I hope I come back with like a renewed energy. To be honest, this last kind of two years has been really, really hard. You know, we had lots of business ups and downs there's been all sorts of crazy stuff the ai stuff and i am a little toasty to be honest like

Starting point is 01:39:31 not burnt out but like definitely at times like a little more stressed than normal where it's really getting to me and you always talk about how i'm so calm and like thank you but also like you know i'm human too so it gets to me the duck on the pond so kicking like hell underneath so i think that's the thing i'm looking forward to what am i scared of there's a weird thing we're also being scared like of like people not needing you or irrelevance which i think is like a really core fear for me it's not maybe not practical and automatic but like it there's something there. Is the needing you and relevance, is this the same in your mind or are those different things?

Starting point is 01:40:09 They're probably different versions. Like relevance is maybe in a global context or in the company context. And needing you is maybe even, maybe like interpersonal. And so, like when I've done like some meditations or some other work, that can be like a core fear of mine. Then maybe how have I designed organizations to need me in a way that's not healthy? That's one of the questions I ask myself. Or if you get a lot of benefit, and I do sometimes, you came in and saved the thing. That feels really nice, especially in like a CEO job or a job which is very amorphous. People are

Starting point is 01:40:42 like, what do you actually do? Oh, I save the thing, you know? But then are you hiring people that need saving a lot? What's the sort of shadow side of that? Jerry Colonna, who I think you've had on, right? Oh, yeah. Absolutely. We had a great episode. He has some very good questions.

Starting point is 01:40:57 He has some very good questions. My favorite is, how am I complicit in creating the conditions I say I don't want? Such a good question. It's one of the best ones. Yeah. So I think success for me is also, yeah, just come back really energized, excited, hopefully with a lot of inspiration and ideas because I get a lot of inspiration from art

Starting point is 01:41:13 or stuff outside of WordPress. Recharged, I mean, there are different ways one can use that word. Are we talking about, I would imagine we're talking about recharge physically, intellectually, physically intellectually etc multiple levels definitely want to dial on health stuff what would that potentially look like getting that outside forcing him to do a two-mile jog i think that he actually has to train for sunlight nature

Starting point is 01:41:36 nothing novel this is all like the basic stuff you talk about the basics of the basics for a reason yeah and it's so effective i'll probably experiment with some stuff you know they just started to be this blueprint delivery service in san francisco i don't know what that is brian johnson yeah it's a blueprint system and you know there's like the weird food that's like a gel or something like there's now a delivery service for that so like you get your soylent green in a bottle and i'm actually pretty excited about it it looks like why not try it out i'm not really going to cook this stuff. So yeah, just do some experiments there. So I asked you what success might look like.

Starting point is 01:42:08 Yeah. Made some headway there. I can ask a million follow-ups, but I'm going to ask a different question. It's looking at the sabbatical from perhaps the opposite side, which is, let's say after the sabbatical, you or maybe just the people closest to you are like, yeah, sabbatical didn't really work out. Kind of failed. Kind of fell on its face.

Starting point is 01:42:28 What do you think are the most likely temptations or slipping points or issues that could compromise the sabbatical? Well, somehow my health got worse over it. Yeah, sure. Right? So a lot of the things we've talked about and where I find a lot of joy and happiness is typically in being generative, making things, not consuming things. But I think it's very easy to fall into a consumption. Into consumption.

Starting point is 01:42:52 Like a hedonistic treadmill type thing. And it's nice sometimes. I mean, we're about to do the holidays. I'll definitely consume some stuff. Or it's nice to take a nice meal on vacation. But if that becomes your all the time, we've seen that happen to friends who've been successful. And that typically does not look great. The Brief History of the World guy, the amazing historian, has a great quote about that.

Starting point is 01:43:12 Oh, you're thinking about Will Durant? Yeah, Durant. I'm going to read it, actually. Okay. While you're looking that up, I'll just say I'm interested in what temptations, because I could name mine, like what temptations you think you need to be preemptively guarding against because the siren song is likely to pull you. How might you be complicit in creating the conditions? Yeah, social media. I need to be careful about that, particularly my Twitter X addiction, news consumption. My most dangerous is where something is sometimes productive or has

Starting point is 01:43:45 some positive, but is probably net negative on a whole, or if I spend too many hours on it. Phone time in general, I'd love to get down. Screen time in general. Do you think you could just take your entire sabbatical off of social media, just delete them all from your phone, not use them at all? Be interesting. I mean, they'd still be there when you came back. You know enough people, if you really, really... I want to get on the phone while I'm walking outside in the sun and talk to someone like Cyan or Rune

Starting point is 01:44:13 and just be like, hey, would you mind just giving me like the... Can you read Twitter to me? The most exciting things going on right now in your field. And I'll trade because I'm excited to share blah, blah, blah. Like, you could do that. That's a good idea. I'm sure you could do that i like these ideas keep them coming um will durant this is from fallen leaves which is that posthumous book health lies in action and so it graces youth to be busy is the secret of grace and half the secret of content let us

Starting point is 01:44:40 ask the gods not for possessions but for things things to do. Happiness is in making things rather than in consuming them. That is amazing. Isn't that beautiful? That is. Can you send that to me, please? Yeah. Will Dren... I mean, just...

Starting point is 01:44:53 Was it Will and Ariel? Yeah. So prolific. And also so incredibly good at crafting prose. Oh, man. Yeah. Did you read the Fallen Leaves book? No, I haven't.

Starting point is 01:45:07 It's neat. It's on life, right? So it's kind of his, and I guess it was discovered after he passed, like the manuscript. Wow. And so, like many years, like 30 years after he passed or something.

Starting point is 01:45:19 Incredible. I'm calling it the sematical. My dad's gag came out. Matt is a specialist in dad jokes. This began, I mean, it may have become in the delivery room for all I know. Okay, we may come back. I'm sure at dinner we'll talk about the sabbatical more. But in terms of things that you've changed your mind on or excited about or absurd things you do,

Starting point is 01:45:42 any and all of the above, you want to do a lightning round yeah i've got some changed and i've got some absurd okay changed changed my mind on nuclear actually okay from what to what i think even like when i was a baby my mom took me to like a nuclear protest or something and so like as someone caring about the environment i sort of assumed nuclear was not it was kind of anti-nuclear, Chernobyl, etc. And now I'm pretty fully convinced that is necessary. We should be building as many of these plants as possible. And it's going to be an amazing part of the bridge to a more carbon-free future.

Starting point is 01:46:22 And you see that in small-scale reactors with less likelihood of technical problems and issues. Yeah, all of the above. Let's take the things that work. They're expensive're expensive like we need to get better at building stuff like china's really kicking our butt here you stop turning ones off that we're running so like that sort of stuff like stop shooting ourselves in the foot you saw what happened with germany you know when they turn a bunch of stuff off but they're now turning it back on so this is going the right way and there's a lot of investment in the tech here and so you know let the Bill Gates startup and the other ones and the Sam Altman startup, like, let them ship. And nuclear in this case refers to fission.

Starting point is 01:46:53 We're talking about fission. Yes. And there could be breakthroughs around other things. But people are scared of this. But also, like, the U.S. military has nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft carriers that are going around underwater like we've been done this very reliably for like many decades now so i feel like that was a wrong turn in history some theories it might have been influenced actually by like countries or companies with a lot of legacy fossil fuel yeah but you know sometimes we do the wrong thing then

Starting point is 01:47:22 we figure it out so nuclear is one of them psychedelics tell me you know, sometimes we do the wrong thing and we figure it out. So nuclear is one of them. Psychedelics. Tell me. You know, thanks to you, we were very early supporters of a lot of research around this. Yeah, you supported a lot of amazing things. And I felt like, especially during that period where everything was outlawed really sillily, been very pro-legalization in a lot of ways. And like for weed, for example. I think there's some interesting stuff coming out around like marijuana,

Starting point is 01:47:47 which I had kind of not heard any bad stuff about. We're like, oh, this can actually create some risk for psychosis. There's, I used to make fun of these things, right? Like the old documentaries are like, you smoke one blunt, you go crazy. Oh, reefer madness. Reefer madness, like all this stuff. It was so dumb, but we funded a lot of research. Yeah. And I like that people are researching these things so we can understand the good and the

Starting point is 01:48:06 bad of these molecules and how to use them safely. Because we see the impact is so incredible. And there's also, I have now seen, I think you have as well, where it can go wrong. Super rare, but there's other stuff, maybe confounding factors. Yeah, for sure. So that's a change your mind on? Yeah, I think I used to be like very super pro just open legalization of everything. Like if you're 18 or above or 21 or above, you can just get it at any store, whatever you want, whenever you want.

Starting point is 01:48:32 And now questioning that. Curious your thoughts there. I mean, you've always been pretty cautious when you talk about it publicly. Yeah, I'm cautious. I'm cautious when I talk more people out of psychedelics than I talk into, by a very wide margin. I'd say eight or nine and requests, it is clear to me they're almost you're going to do a lot of due diligence you're going to do probably strengthening and a number of prehab exercises diligently for a period of time to prepare your body for the surgery you undergo the surgery which is very tightly supervised then you do rehab and these are all critical components of the therapeutic outcome.

Starting point is 01:49:46 And I think Gould-Dolan, as an example, has been on the podcast. And the potential for reopening critical windows is a compelling new theory slash hypothesis around some of the amazing outcomes that you see with these conditions like complex PTSD and so on, where somebody has the diagnosis of PTSD for 17 years. They've failed every intervention, and then at the end of a trial, you have something like, I'm pulling this number out of the air, but it's not that far off, like 67% full remission. Where the best other alternative is like 15% or something. Yeah, not even close. They're just universes apart. But the importance of the weeks following

Starting point is 01:50:23 an experience is one example. So if somebody comes to me and it's clear to me that they're like, what's the silver bullet? Give it to me on an index card. I'm not going to read any books. I don't have time for A, B, C, D, or E, but I do have 15 minutes. Should I do 5-A, B, O, D, M, T? I'm like, absolutely not.

Starting point is 01:50:36 No, you shouldn't. Well, and so many of these things are XYZ-assisted therapy. And so the assisted therapy part is really critical. I would say, furthermore, there has been historically, and by historically, I mean recent history in the last, say, 10 years, where the conversation and conversations around psychedelics have changed quite dramatically. There's a lot more research. There are many for-profit companies now at this point, which is fantastic on a bunch of levels and also adds a degree of complexity from an intellectual property and let's just call it open source perspective that on some levels can be concerning. I see both sides of this because I'm actually,

Starting point is 01:51:15 I want some new molecules. Yeah. I'm fine with new molecules. Can they engineer something that maybe doesn't have some of the downsides. Sure. I'm all for novel innovation, but people should not be rewarded with patents that can be used to potentially restrict manufacture of related compounds if they are not producing something that is truly novel with some utility. That's my perspective.

Starting point is 01:51:39 If we're talking about, well, we could certainly get into this, but there is a role for new molecules. Of course there is. And if you could take, for instance, something like LSD and modify it slightly such that it is more of what people might call a psychoplastogen, so it's not producing a psychedelic effect, but it can be used in an outpatient setting for something like cluster headaches. Maybe shorter.

Starting point is 01:52:00 Yeah, fantastic. I do have, we could talk about this for hours, but I do think the, we were talking about Munger and Buffett earlier, right? Never ask a barber if you need a haircut. I think it's very important to consider the incentives involved when you are looking at the suggested protocols from a for-profit company. I invest in for-profit companies all the time. I'm clearly pro-market-driven solutions on a million different levels. And if someone is incentivized to shoehorn a therapy within currently existing frameworks, and for that reason and many others, including, let's just say, rate of turnover or volume of patients they're pushing for an experience that is 10 to 15 minutes in length in earth time i have a lot of questions to ask before i would endorse something like that but suffice to say the conversation has been heavily biased towards positive stories and i think maybe overly so because people who went through the winter are like hey let's not easy does it and i think i kind so yeah because people who went through the winter are like hey

Starting point is 01:53:05 let's not easy does it and i think i kind of fell for that a little bit yeah there's a huge survivorship bias i think that's going to change but especially with smaller numbers and when for good reason people feel like they are part of let's just say in the last 10 years just name a time so 2015 a lot is starting to happen in the very early stages, like the Hopkins Center and so on. People feel like they are part of a movement and they want this movement to succeed. And there are certain milestones that are incredibly important and potential inflection points for opening up these therapies to eventually millions of people. And they don't want to do anything to jeopardize that. So if there is a story, for instance, of someone on the underground who in a psilocybin-assisted

Starting point is 01:53:50 session, even though they have no outstanding pre-existing issues outside of, say, hypertension, has a heart attack and dies in session, that is not going to make it to the radio waves, generally speaking. And there are examples of this, even though something like psilocybin is not going to make it to the radio waves, generally speaking. There are examples of this, even though something like psilocybin is not… There's no known LD50 in terms of lethal dose 50 that would kill, say, 50% of a random sampling of a thousand people. So physiologically, it's very well tolerated, but these experiences can be very intense, and they're not well-suited to all people

Starting point is 01:54:26 nor all conditions. Let's just take schizophrenia as an example. That's just enough people do anything. People die at Disney World every day. Yeah, no, exactly. So it's also a case where if up to this point you've, by and large, outside of an indigenous context, because really in the United States, by and large, we're not contending with that, with the exception of perhaps peyote use in the Native American church and so on. But if we're looking at more Western-informed, facilitated sessions using these various classical psychedelics, you're looking at the sample size to date, tens of thousands of people, probably, who have done… That's generous. Generous, who have done guided sessions, typically at high cost, often white glove service, let's just call it.

Starting point is 01:55:12 That is not going to be the experience of the average person if they're going through Kaiser Permanente or someone else to get MDMA psychotherapy five years from now. And when you go from 10,000 to 20 to 100,000, shit's going to happen. That's just the fact of the matter. You certainly see this with any drug that makes it through phase three and then ends

Starting point is 01:55:30 up shipping millions of pills. You discover a lot in the process of doing that. And there are interactions and contraindications that would be very hard to predict until things are in the wild, so to speak. So I am on the same page with you in the sense that I really feel with these tools, you mentioned nuclear. I mean, our friend who, rest in peace, Roland Griffiths, used to say that you're working with nuclear power. You're working with psychological nuclear power when you're using psychedelic compounds. You need to be incredibly thoughtful. It's a good analogy.

Starting point is 01:56:01 Yeah. Right. That can be radioactive. It can be healing, chemotherapy, and it can also be very harmful. Absolutely. And it can be generative or it can be destructive. And plasticity in and of itself, this word gets used often in a lay discussion as a net positive, but plasticity isn't automatically a positive thing. It depends a lot on what transpires in that window of plasticity. That was my big fear. I'm like, hey, I like my mind. I like my life. I don't want to like stir anything up or like... I'm sure I want to throw that Play-Doh in the microwave. Right? So that's a lot of my particularly successful friends, their nervousness around it.

Starting point is 01:56:42 Yeah. And I've also seen huge positive impacts on many, many people. Yeah. And I think with many of these things, and another reason I tend to dissuade folks often is if it's just curiosity, well, it's kind of like, I'm just curious, should I go into the reactor and play with some rods? I'm like, well, if you were to then ask, is this risky? I'd say, compared to what? Okay, compared to not satisfying that curiosity, yeah, it's risky. If you were to say, because, for instance, in the context of psychedelics, let's just say Ibogaine specifically, which is very interesting. Wow, you took it there. No, I did, because it has

Starting point is 01:57:16 known cardiac risk. People can die using Ibogaine, unlike some of these more better-known classical psychedelics where there's very low documented physiological risk, Ibogaine is risky. Let's just say if you're a psychedelic tourist and you're like, I just want to try a bunch of stuff. Is it risky? Yes, compared to not doing it. If, on the other hand, though, you're talking to someone who is a heroin addict who's living

Starting point is 01:57:42 on the streets, who's at risk of suicide or overdose or fill in the blank, it's a question of comparison. In which case, I think it's an incredibly promising avenue worth exploring. And there are ways to mitigate some of that risk. Dr. Nolan Williams is doing. It could be a shot out of there. A lot. It kind of brings me to my next changed mind thing, which is perhaps the antidote to some of this, which is breathwork.

Starting point is 01:58:10 All right. my next changed mind thing which is perhaps the antidote to some of this which is breathwork all right i think i thought breathwork was just kind of whatever and there's a million versions of it right and there's apps for like other ship there's the wim hof stuff there's all these sorts of different things i also like we had a friend from like eslen who's like oh yeah all the hippies who like did a ton of stuff in the 70s don't actually take stuff anymore. They just do breath work now. And so some of these things came in from different areas. I've just started to explore it a lot more. It's incredibly powerful. We've been playing with a shift wave chair, right?

Starting point is 01:58:36 Which kind of coordinates the pulses on the chair with breath work. The breath work is, I would say, a lot of the benefit of that. And so it's also a tool you can have with you at all times. You can travel to any country in the world with it. Like it's like- With your lungs. It's literally the most basic element of living is breath. And so there's something cool if that's perhaps to unlock

Starting point is 01:58:56 to a more calm interstate or like access to different things. So what has been your personal experience with breathwork? I feel like there's breathwork that can make breathwork? I feel like there's breathwork that can make me sleepy. I feel like there's breathwork that helps me focus. I feel like there's breathwork. It's a Tony Robbins thing.

Starting point is 01:59:11 You do it like this. There's stuff to give you energy. So particularly, I'm very interested in, let me get these words right, endogenous solutions versus exogenous. Exogenous, yeah.

Starting point is 01:59:24 So instead of like having another green tea or something if i'm tired in the afternoon what's a movement of breath i could do something internally yeah so exogenous easy way to remember that is like exoskeleton people have heard that so outside the body using something outside the body endogenous endoskeleton well yeah endoskeleton is probably what we have i I guess. Although you don't really, we just call it skeleton. Breathwork, so I would second that and say that breathwork is something I would view as also a prerequisite, even if your intention is to say ultimately use psychedelics. I will very often chat with friends who are interested in exploring many of these different tools and say,

Starting point is 02:00:05 okay, first thing you do is you're going to do 30 days of the introductory course on the Waking Up app from Sam Harris. You're going to combine that with reading Awareness by Anthony DeMello. And after the second week or after four weeks, you're going to do a holotropic breathwork course. There are a lot of facilitators and it's a term that is relatively turning towards wholeness, is what that means, by the way, which is relatively easy to find in most metropolitan areas, and it was developed by Stanislav Grof and others. And you should do at least a weekend course

Starting point is 02:00:41 with holotropic breathwork. Ideally do two or three separate sessions so that you have a chance to have a breadth of different experience, including maybe some challenging or strange or disorienting experiences. And then we can talk about potentially phase two or three, if you even need to go there. And a few things happen. It's a good course just for anyone to follow. Exactly. What happens in many cases is people are like this

Starting point is 02:01:05 is fantastic i'm going to continue meditating and the breath work has shown me that i don't need to go to an extreme altered state and i actually feel so much better thank you so much and that's not the end of the journey but it's a set of tools that they then take forth without in any way escalating things it's always with you. It also is just a proof of concept, I think, for me, that if you are going to throw the Play-Doh in the microwave with nuclear power, in this case, aka psychedelics, if you're not willing to do four weeks of things that will benefit you anyway, you shouldn't throw your Play-Doh in the microwave. Because there's a chance that something goes sideways, or that you get destabilized. And it requires some really

Starting point is 02:01:50 concerted effort with support staff, some type of safety net, to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. And if you have not demonstrated the willingness and capability to do that on the front end, I have zero confidence that you will be able to do that on the tail end. What would you recommend for someone going through a deep depression? Because one of the things about depression is it can be hard to take a shower, to do that 30 days of the thing.

Starting point is 02:02:16 So do you have like breakouts or things you'd recommend to interrupt that cycle? Depression is a multifaceted beast. And for people who don't have the context, for my entire adult life, certainly, although the frequency and severity has changed substantially in the last 10 years, had experienced extended and extensive depressive episodes. Almost killed myself in college. I've written about that at some length. So if you just search Tim Ferriss suicide, that post will pop up. It's one of the more important posts I've ever written. It'd be certainly top three or so of the blog posts

Starting point is 02:02:56 I've written. Very proud of that post. I mean, if you look at the comments, you'll see why. Thousands of comments at this point. But how I relate to suicidal ideation, I think, can be found in that post. But number one, I'm not a doctor. I don't play one on the internet. But I do have a lot of personal experience with depression, and I've been approached by a lot of people with depression, including close friends. And I would say that, as you mentioned, it can be seemingly impossible to summon the will to do anything when you're severely depressed there are people who get almost into a catatonia i actually so this year i experienced it for the first time no kidding a very close loved one was going through chemotherapy

Starting point is 02:03:38 and it was interesting it hit me quite hard which is felt dumb as well because i'm not going through it myself but what really like woke me up is like usually you hear me talk about wordpress not about i'm so excited about it there was a day i just looked at my computer i was like wow i don't care about this that never happened before yeah that was the wake up i was like oh man everything seems kind of grayscale i feel this apathy and it really gave me a lot of empathy for things you've described before that I hadn't experienced personally. What helped you? I don't know if my example is good. Because I do want to know your answer.

Starting point is 02:04:13 For me, some of the external conditions changing. So the chemo getting better and better and ending was part of it. So that's not a great answer. Because sometimes your external conditions still suck. Or bad things happen. And you can lose loved ones. I got really strict about exercise. I cut out all alcohol. It's like, okay, I just need to like detox, clean up, be like kind of monk mode.

Starting point is 02:04:36 And I think that's all I know how to do. Sleep, you know, try to like, I probably uninstalled Twitter at that point. Like it was just really like, it's kind of things that are on my list anyway. I probably uninstalled Twitter at that point. It's kind of things that are on my list anyway. But day to day, I would say I try to hit a lot of these things and I'm casual about some. So I'll make a couple of recommendations. I'm very cautious about making broad prescriptions because there's so many different varieties.

Starting point is 02:05:00 Everything ranging from I'm having a couple of tough weeks and I'm not sure why, but I can still function really well. I'm high functioning all the way to I want to hang myself tomorrow. And those are entirely different species. Closer to that first one for me. Yeah. So I'd say a few things, a couple of resources I want to recommend. First of all, if you're suicidal, certainly please call a hotline. And I've been through this. You're not alone. A lot of people face this. And even though it feels like it's permanent, it's personal, there's nothing you can do to change it. There are tools and I'm living proof of that. So I mean, I am incredibly

Starting point is 02:05:37 happy and fulfilled right now. And I've found tools that help to stabilize and facilitate that, not 100% of the time, because I'm still part of the human experience. So I would just say you're not alone. And if it's an acute experience, please call Suicide Hotline and I'll put that in the show notes. But if you search my name, Tim Ferriss, Suicide, that post has helped a lot of people. There's also a post I wrote called something along the lines of productivity hacks for the manic depressive neurotic and something rather like me, which has been helpful for a lot of folks. And that also, I think, just allows people to remove some of the self-judgment from the experience because there's the experience

Starting point is 02:06:24 that is difficult and then there's the harsh self-judgment that sometimes accompanies it. That was tough for me. Right? Where you might be in a really challenging state, you're suffering, and then you have this voice that says, who the fuck are you kidding? Are you joking right now? Your life is great. There's so many people who have so many more challenges than you. You don't even have the right to feel this way. Suck it up, buttercup. Get it together and variations of that.

Starting point is 02:06:51 And it makes it a lot worse. So that post I just mentioned, which I'll link to in the show notes, has helped some people with that. Lastly, I would say if it's really acute, there are a few tools that I'm hesitant to recommend because there are, especially in the first, some risks associated. I did a podcast with Dr. John Crystal, who's the chair of psychiatry at Yale, which was effectively an everything you would ever want to know about ketamine episode. And I think for acute suicidal ideation and risk of self-harm, intravenous or IM ketamine is very interesting as a pattern interrupt and that episode is available

Starting point is 02:07:28 for folks there are risks associated with ketamine there is an addiction potential it is something to keep an eye on but again risky compared to what if someone's at risk of cute self-harm then it's generally well tolerated meaning it doesn't suppress respiration it is generally well-tolerated, meaning it doesn't suppress respiration. It is very well-researched, and that is one tool. Another that is a newer tool that I've been exploring myself also, which we might talk about at dinner because we haven't talked about it, is something called accelerated TMS. This is transcranial magnetic stimulation. So various types of brain stimulation for addressing treatment-resistant depression and anxiety.

Starting point is 02:08:09 There are some newer protocols, like the SAINT protocol, which was developed at Stanford, that are incredibly interesting. It's way faster, too, because the old treatments would take like 30 days, an hour a day, or something like that. The new ones are way faster. Way faster. So you're taking treatments that would otherwise take a month or two and compressing it into five days wow and fascinating fascinating cutting edge stuff that i'm paying a lot of attention to because some of the results are equal to or even greater than with durability so if as fast acting and as durable or to a greater extent fast acting and durable than some

Starting point is 02:08:47 of the psychedelic assist therapies. And I'm reading about it as well because we have friends that won't ever take a psychedelic or some of these things. Actually, there's whole religions, Mormons, LDS, etc. So some of this stuff I think is like a really cool accessibility, kind of like the same way breathwork can be. Absolutely. And for people who might be older, a little frail or with different conditions, higher blood pressure, etc., a lot of these folks should not touch psychedelics. They just should not. The risk profile doesn't make sense. And that would also be true for certain types of disorders. I mean, later research may overturn this, but for the time being, say schizophrenia, borderline personality

Starting point is 02:09:23 disorder, a lot of folks who maybe lean more towards the, this is not a medical term, but like chaotic or like entropic disorders versus hyper rigidity disorders like OCD. issues on some level because they are often thought loops, things that repeat. There is a stuckness, whereas something like schizophrenia, which I have seen up close and personal, has a different feeling to it. It's an opposite end of the spectrum in some respects. So I'm very interested in those conditions. I'll check out those posts. Yeah. For someone who's having a hard couple of weeks, and you mentioned Tony Robbins earlier, I will mention something that I learned from him. I don't know if he's the original source

Starting point is 02:10:08 of this, but I used to put this at the top of my journals. I would write it out at the top of my journals so that I would see it every morning. And it was basically, let's call it a flowchart. That's an overstatement. And it said, STATE in all caps with an

Starting point is 02:10:24 arrow that went to STORY and then that went to STRATEGY. So STATE, STATE, in all caps, with an arrow that went to STORY, and then that went to STRATEGY. So, STATE, STORY, STRATEGY. And what that meant to say is, what happens to many people who are depressed or anxious or whatever, is they sit down and they try to figure out how to fix the thing. They go straight to strategy. What should I do? The challenge there is that if you're looking at the world through gray glasses, the story that you're going to come up with is going to be most likely a disabling story. And then you're going to come up with strategies that are, by and large, pretty ineffective. If, on the other hand, you start with state. So if you're in a low energy state, you hop in a cold shower for five minutes, or you do 50 jumping jacks, or you do 20 pushups, anything to change your state from a low energy state to a higher energy state. And that's governed by all sorts of things. Well, let's keep it simple. So low to higher energy state. Then you sit down and you're able to, because of changes in neurotransmitters or any number of things, you have a more enabling story. So you've turned the gray, maybe a tint or two brighter.

Starting point is 02:11:40 Then the strategies you come up with are going to be more effective. So just reminding myself constantly, before you jump to the strategy, like the what to do, the how to fix, have you addressed the state? Because this thing in between, the story really matters. Because if your narrative is, oh, I'm always pessimistic. I've never been able to fix this. You're starting at a deficit. You have a severe handicap in coming up with approaches that are going to help you. So that might be helpful to people as well. Like state, story, strategy, that is the order. I gotta give credit to my mom too. She gave me a list of three things that I found really helpful. She was like, did you sleep? Are you drinking water? So sleep, water, and then you've been in nature. I's a good checklist. I like that because it's three.

Starting point is 02:12:26 And so sometimes I just do like a check. I'm like, ah, man, this morning is so tough. I felt like I wasn't great in that meeting. And I'll just say I can run that. Sometimes the body scan, I also ask myself, like, am I hangry? Yeah. The basics. Because our body kind of emotions come from our system. And sometimes it's saying I'm hungry, I'm hungry.

Starting point is 02:12:44 And it's coming through as like something else. Our brain interprets it. Yeah, totally. And to invoke our mutual friend, Kevin Kelly, in his book of excellent advice, which came out not too long ago. Great book, very pithy. And one of them is,

Starting point is 02:12:58 if you don't know what you need, chances are it's sleep. And if you don't know what to do, chances are you need more sleep and if you're in a depressed state and this is something i have to remind myself of i would be inclined even subconsciously to consume stimulants because that does change your state but if you consume stimulants and then that disrupts your sleep architecture and then maybe you drink a little booze to take the edge off because you're trying to get to sleep this is a vicious cycle and i had richard branson on the podcast years ago

Starting point is 02:13:31 and his advice was stop drinking like as far as depression goes he was just like in nine out of ten cases alcohol is somehow in that picture in his lived experience in his social circles so those are a few things that come to mind there are other things certainly i mean i could go on in that picture, in his lived experience, in his social circles. So those are a few things that come to mind. There are other things, certainly, and I could go on and on. I think the work by Byron Katie and doing turnarounds, interrogating your beliefs is very valuable. So if you have a belief that I'm making this up, but my sister is selfish and always does what she wants. There are many work pages and exercises that are available for free on Byron Katie's website. So if you just search Byron Katie, B-Y-R-O-N-K-A-T-I-E, the work, you'll find the website. All sorts of PDFs you can take down. But let's just say,

Starting point is 02:14:18 my sister's selfish. She only does what she wants. You would then create alternative sentences and find supporting evidence for each one. So my sister isn't selfish. She never does what she wants. And you have to come up with some examples. You might also replace it with, I'm selfish. I always do what I want. And then you come up with some examples. And I and others have found these exercises to be incredibly powerful. There are a million and one different varieties of this. For me, the turnarounds are,

Starting point is 02:14:50 you have to come up with confirming evidence for statements that were not your starting statement. I find defangs your beliefs, which are thoughts we take to be true. I like that a lot. Take about the Charlie Munger. He says you should be able to argue the opposite just as well as you can argue your case.

Starting point is 02:15:09 Yeah. When you get thrown on stage, you got to be Bernanke. Useful exercise. Really useful exercise. Got a couple more. Let's do it. I saw the most incredible, horrifying stat, which made me change my mind on TikTok.

Starting point is 02:15:23 So I'm just going to read this because it was ridiculous 20 of 18 to 29 year olds did you hear this no one said do you agree with the statement the holocaust was a myth agreed with it they had the chart of the different errors and like 65 plus it was like zero percent yeah or like 0.1 or something and then then it goes up to this 18 to 29, 20 percent. That's horrifying. Like, oh my goodness, whatever has led to that sort of misinformation, and there's some indicators that it could be sort of TikTok related, makes me really question, is this an adversarial thing? Is this another country goosing the algorithm a little bit in a way that, yeah, is very scary misinformation. That's terrifying. I mean, you imagine what a geopolitical advantage it would be to be able to just very ever so slightly nudge sentiment about X or person Y in a certain direction. Our social networks are not allowed in China. There's no Facebook.

Starting point is 02:16:22 There's no Twitter X. There's no Instagram. I think there's a reason for that. I think if you'd asked me earlier this year or something, I would have been like, whatever. We're a free society. We should have everything. That's dumb. Trump tried to get rid of it. I was like, oh, you know. Now I'm like, huh. And it was that stat that kind of blew my mind. Got some absurd things. Blogging, I think, is absurd and it's beautiful. Absurd meaning it's like a horse and buggy in the modern world of clips and video and AI? What do you mean? It feels that way sometimes, right? Everyone's on to something else. I guess newsletters are

Starting point is 02:16:56 kind of like blogging, but you know what? There's something so beautiful about doing it. I've been doing a lot more this year, and it's one of the most rewarding things of my year. What do you find rewarding about it? The comments, the interaction, the follow-up. Well, the act of writing forces you to clarify your thinking. It activates something different in your brain. I mean, you know this. I'm preaching to a writer, a real writer.

Starting point is 02:17:16 That's incredible. The act of publishing is incredibly vulnerable, scary. And then all the stuff that happens afterwards, you learn so much from. Yeah, we need to chat about how to not resurrect because they're still good commenters, but how one could create the best comment section on the internet. Because what I've noticed, and I'm sure you've noticed this, is that with blog posts, a lot of that conversation has sort of left the room to social media. So the volume of comments and so on is less, but there are exceptions, right? If I go to say the Derek Sivers blog and I look at his comment section, amazing comment section, right? If I look at Tyler Cowen's comments.

Starting point is 02:17:59 Pretty good. Although mixed, there's a lot of- Mixed, but he's, I mean, I remember- He moderates it. And he moderates it. He moderates it. So I think that's the secret secret you have to participate yourself he posed a question like the most underrated geniuses of all time and he nominated beethoven or i'm screwing it up but it was some classical music composer and there was an amazing discussion in the comments which

Starting point is 02:18:20 of course may have been as i think you're implying tightly curated i don't know i think he's pretty open and but you set an example so by the behavior that you do in the comments and that you know what you allow that sets the standard and people follow that also seo kind of screws it up because you get people just trying to get links or you really have to be careful about that so blogging i changed my mind oh this is my last change of mind It's a little happier than the last one. Vienna sausages. Vienna sausages? You know the sausages in the can?

Starting point is 02:18:50 I have no idea what you're talking about. Oh, wow. So there's this thing called Vienna sausages. I have no idea if they're from Vienna, but it's like, they're kind of like, how many? Six or seven sausages in like a little can like this. Okay. Pops open.

Starting point is 02:19:01 I used to have it as a kid. It makes me think they're not from Vienna. I usually am not allowed to shop for myself because I'm basically like a this okay pops open i used to have it as a kid uh it makes me think they're not from vienna i usually am not allowed to shop for myself because i'm basically like a gummy bear with a credit card my parents credit card and like so i bought a bunch of vienna sausages because i was like oh this is going to be healthy you know and so i brought it home as an adult you're saying oh this was like last month okay all right got it because i was like i'll put it in my desk i like to keep like healthy snacks by my desk and where i work and i just assumed it's sausage must be like you know the

Starting point is 02:19:29 punchline that's coming it's terrible for you yeah you read the ingredients the sodium the everything it's like and it's like the meat is mystery meat like it's yeah so i really thought i changed my mind on that and i was i was saying oh yeah i had a healthy lunch from being a sausage and someone was like a very close loved one was like, that's not healthy. I was like, yeah, it is. And we Googled it and I was so wrong. Okay. So Vienna sausage.

Starting point is 02:19:53 Sorry, guys. You're on the suspended list. Oh, this is a fun food one as well. Let's do it. You know, there's so much good fancy pizza in San Francisco, like flour and water, etc. One that I really like is called Delfina. Another thing, perhaps with my Texas upbringing that I'm obsessed with is the sauce known as ranch. Ranch?

Starting point is 02:20:11 Yeah, ranch sauce. Ranch sauce. Like ranch dressing? Ranch dressing. Yeah, yeah. Sauce, ranch dressing. See, this is why you're the chef. Ranch sauce.

Starting point is 02:20:22 Got it. Okay, ranch. I asked for a ranch in Delfina, and they just scoffed. I have not been scoffed like that in a while. And then I tried this overseas where there was something, and I asked for some ranch, and it did not go well. I will now contrast at a restaurant called Canessa in San Francisco, a new one. Condessa or Canessa? La Conessa.

Starting point is 02:20:43 Conessa, okay. And they have a lot of ex ex-saison people it's a casual restaurant but it's really good service they served an amazing pizza i had the crust i like to dip the crust in the ranch and i was like do you have any ranch i was ready to be disappointed or scoffed at and he said hold on and they actually ran to like another restaurant next door to get me some oh that was amazing but then i realized because like how do you take more agency in your life i keep asking for ranch and being shut down like how how am i creating the conditions i say i don't want yeah and so i was like oh you just get those packets so i went on

Starting point is 02:21:13 amazon and i got like 200 ranch packets for like 16 or something so these have now arrived it's my place in san francisco and i'm gonna it's gonna be my next what's in my bag is some pocket ranch pocket ranch you just keep one or two in every inside pocket on your fancy jackets i've seen i'm so curious what i'm gonna put ranch on in the future having it available at all times the absurd i still insist on looking at every tab in email and i'm tens of thousands not hundreds of thousands behind at this point i think i have 500 tabs open right now wait what this is an absurd thing yeah yeah yeah you have 500 tabs open in your browsers yeah yeah okay and the email thing is like i'll even reply to emails from seven or eight years ago i have like that folder and stuff like and i go through it almost like masochistically and the sad thing is like on a third of them, it just bounces.

Starting point is 02:22:06 People don't have the email address anymore. Why on earth are you replying to emails from seven or eight years ago? Is this just like your Opus Dei penance? That's probably some of that. Just cat-of-nine-tails on the back? I also like... I'm not worthy. I'm not worthy.

Starting point is 02:22:17 I really appreciated people who have replied to me when I was nobody or anything like that. And so I kind of want to pay that forward a little bit. I also just am really impressed. I feel like there may be a point where you sufficiently repay that debt that you don't need to continue to crawl on your knees on broken glass with your tab of 10-year-old email. I didn't say this is a good idea.

Starting point is 02:22:36 You asked for absurd things. Oh, I know, this is absurd. All right, so I'm still doing that. Maybe I'll work on that on my sabbatical. There you go. I'll just answer emails the whole time. Oh, God. No, I'm kidding, I'm kidding. I think you might have some of this as well i have a very

Starting point is 02:22:47 ultra critical eye and i've been constantly remodeling things instead of just enjoying them they're pretty decent and fine already and this is one of those things that there's a superpower as well like i can open a web app or a design and like immediately spot things down to the pixel but the downside is sometimes i go in like an apartment that's beautiful and i'm like oh next to that speaker there's like a little divot in your ceiling i have the same thing and now you're gonna see every time no i'm kidding yes i just cursed your apartment but so that is like a curse as well and i'd like to be able to turn it off to just enjoy things as they are the wabi-s. How do you think you'll make any progress with that? No idea. Maybe someone can leave a comment. I've become a bit better at this. There are cases where I succumb to this finite for detail, but I think that, and this comes back to the depression

Starting point is 02:23:39 question a little bit, I would push back on the idea that some of the interventions I mentioned, like 30 days of meditation, are out of reach for people who are having a hard couple of weeks. I would push back on the idea that some of the interventions I mentioned, like 30 days of meditation, are out of reach for people who are having a hard couple of weeks. I would say that the returns on something, and this is very simple, right? Number one, the social return on, say, going to a weekend transcendental meditation training, interacting with someone is net positive to begin with. So I'm assuming you can get out of bed. If you're crippled psychologically and can't get out of bed, then it's a different conversation. But if you can get up and you're just like, I really just don't know what to do to get out

Starting point is 02:24:12 of this funk, meditating twice a day for a week, I would say in the vast majority of cases, 20 minutes a session twice a day will make a difference it creates a bit of space in the system and a little bit more space it's like taking your thought speed down to like 0.5x so that there's a little bit more space for you to become aware of the stories and the voice and so on but honestly just slowing down which for for me, meditating twice a day does, more than half the time I wonder if the benefits that I get from it are just not doing anything for 20 minutes. I could just lay down on the floor for 20 minutes. But proving to myself that I do not need to rush, I have enough time, I have the luxury of being able to take two 20-minute

Starting point is 02:25:04 breaks, and then seeing over the course of the week that, oh, I have the luxury of being able to take two 20-minute breaks and then seeing over the course of the week that, oh, I actually get better results with less stress when I do this. Sometimes I think it's just sitting up straight with good posture for 20 minutes. I don't know what the causal factors are, but I do think there's a benefit there. And I'm bringing it up because I do think that a regular meditation practice has helped me to accept some of the wabi-sabi stuff and where there's a point of diminishing returns where there's like improvement up to like 90 right if you want to improve it from 90 right to close to 100 right first of all you're almost never going to get to 100 because things change and things deteriorate but let's

Starting point is 02:25:44 just i'm making up a number here but like let's just say it takes you 50 hours to get to 90% right. It'll take another 50 hours to do the last 10%. That's very different from my experience of meditation. All right, tell me. And this is actually, I guess, something I've changed my mind on. We're going to have to talk at dinner. You become more monkish? Well, no, I think meditation can actually be dangerous at certain levels.

Starting point is 02:26:04 So that's something we have to explore. For me, and maybe it's how I'm meditating as well, my system gets very sensitive and very observant. And I kind of also probably try to use meditation a little bit as like a mental exercise to improve my cognition, my focus, other things. And that focus as well, like sometimes we're just as sensitive to the system. You know, talking about downsides of meditation, like there's, I know someone who loved blueberries and they got so sensitive to their system, they like can't eat blueberries anymore.

Starting point is 02:26:35 From meditation? That's what they claim. Wow. And there's the pursuit of the Jhanas, which is really big in San Francisco now. I gotta catch you up on a bunch of weird San Francisco stuff. All right, so we'll get caught up on the weird San Francisco stuff. I gotta catch you up on a bunch of weird San Francisco stuff. All right, so we'll get caught up on the weird San Francisco stuff.

Starting point is 02:26:46 I did just do an episode which didn't get as much attention as I would like it to get, but I did an extended episode with Dr. Willoughby Britton. I'll put it in the show notes on the hidden risks of meditation, actually. Oh, cool.

Starting point is 02:27:00 I'll check that out. And how they're addressed and how they overlap with a lot of the risks of psychedelics. I believe that, is not to say like don't do it yeah boogeyman in the closet like you're gonna do tm for 20 minutes and have your brain implode like the dose of that is i think extremely low risk so i'm thinking more like many hundreds of hours yeah then you get in trickier territory i mean historically it's not like everybody in the world was on meditation apps.

Starting point is 02:27:27 Meditation was reserved for a pretty select group of folks who had a lot of supervision. So 20 minutes, so twice a day, I find helpful. For example, a mutual friend of ours was at my house recently. And for whatever reason,

Starting point is 02:27:43 I'm in an older house and there are like 87 light switches there's so many light switches it's so unnecessary and there's one panel with the switches that is like 10 turned and he doesn't have the fixation on details that i do but he said to me he's like i am astonished that you have not fixed that because that must drive you insane. And he's known me for a very long time. And I was like, yeah, this is my daily practice is to look at that

Starting point is 02:28:11 and be like, you know what? It's fine. It's fucking fine. There are many other bigger fish to fry and that in a way kind of becomes my practice. It's in the kitchen. I see it every day. And it's gotten to a point where it doesn't bother me. And if or when we have kids, I think kids also break up. Oh, they're going to break everything.

Starting point is 02:28:29 Any obsession you have with keeping your house perfect, I think goes out the window. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's going to be game over. I am almost done. All right. What you got? This last one is really weird. And then I have a funny one. All right. So the weirdest thing I've been exposed to recently, Scott Alexander actually wrote about it. But have you heard about this bacteria you put in your mouth and it eliminates cavities? No. Okay. So, we have bacteria in our

Starting point is 02:28:51 mouth. It's a whole microbiome. I guess there's a mutation on one of the bacteria that they have essentially GMO'd a replacement. So, the bacteria, I guess, normally produces lactate acid. The lactate acid is what breaks down your teeth and creates cavities. In the 80s, I guess, normally produces lactate acid. The lactate acid is what breaks down your teeth, creates cavities. In the 80s, I guess, the scientists discovered this in one of a student's mouth. It had two mutations, and they genetically modified it to add a few more. Basically, one instead of lactate acid, it'll produce alcohol. Really trace them out. So this is like not even one drop.

Starting point is 02:29:22 It's not like a whiskey distillery in your mouth. Yeah, you're not getting drunk from having these bacteria. Forget the second one. The third one was basically something where it won't share this mutation with other bacteria. So it takes out the thing that usually allows bacteria to trade stuff. And there's a fourth one. We're going to have to look it up now because I forgot two of the four things. But you get a one-time treatment of this. So you basically scrub your teeth a lot you put in this new thing oh it takes over from the old version of this bacteria and that becomes the dominant bacteria in your mouth if you you know kiss the friend or something

Starting point is 02:29:56 doesn't spread because they would need to have their mouth kind of the existing stuff removed first yeah before the new thing could take their. Their parking spots are full. I guess the story is this guy tried to get an FDA approved scientist, and he created a company around it. And the FDA was like, you need to test this on 100 people under 30 who have dentures who live more than five miles from a school or something like that. What? So they created this really messed up thing. So it was basically impossible.

Starting point is 02:30:23 Some hackers heard about this story first they try to clone it then they partner with the guy to get like the formulation and they're doing it like down in central america someplace there's this like libertarian what's the name of that city that they're created oh it's the crypto libertarian one it's like a crypto libertarian thing in el salvador or something i'm blanking on the name so it it's called Lantern Bioworks. I have no association not to invest or anything. I'm thinking about trying this. It's a little absurd. Lantern Bioworks. You go down

Starting point is 02:30:52 you get the treatment, a one-time thing. I guess when they're bootstrapping the company it'll be expensive, like $10 or $20. Why the hell are they in Central America? The goal is to make this a couple hundred dollars. Oh, because this libertarian city has anything a consenting adult wants to

Starting point is 02:31:05 do for like a bio treatment you can do as long as you're informed of the risk so they're gonna like hopefully commercialize it so they can make it a couple hundred bucks and then finally they'll try to bring it back to the u.s i guess there's different regulations around probiotics and like um have you tried z biotic i have yeah i tried it this past i guess maybe six months ago yeah i did not find it this is to prevent hangovers this is what we're talking about yeah it helps metabolize the alcohol in your stomach yeah i did not see a huge difference personally maybe i wasn't consuming enough but yes i know what the product is yeah so same idea so that's a gmo biotic and i know people who swear by it but for me i brought some just in case this was going to be one of those podcasts oh good good well look i'm always up for a second ride at the rodeo there's a different

Starting point is 02:31:48 regulation around these probiotics so if they can kind of get it reclassified as probiotic i think they can maybe bring it to the us but how cool that may be in the future we won't have cavities anymore because this will just be like something we give to kids as soon as they start to develop teeth and then how cool would that be yeah wild that's my weird thing and then my funny thing this is also my what's in my bag post it's a little device usbc of course you never know when you're gonna need a party so it plugs in so this is like a a disco ball that plugs into the bottom of your iphone yeah usbc that's amazing you can get

Starting point is 02:32:25 adapters for lighting and different stuff but uh yeah especially with the holidays coming up new year is like fun just a little pocket party yeah this is so fun that is super fun amazing that's awesome this is like three dollars or something so what would someone search to find that it's on my post the what's my bag post post and I think this was like USB disco light on Amazon literally you could cover the whole thing in your hand

Starting point is 02:32:48 it's very small but it does look pretty much exactly like a disco light with USB-C that one's out for you oh thank you Merry Christmas

Starting point is 02:32:55 Merry Christmas Merry Christmas so great to hang man likewise this has been a lot of fun always always a great time we're going to head out

Starting point is 02:33:03 grab a bite to eat so we'll continue the conversation anything else you'd like to add before we wind to a close no photomat

Starting point is 02:33:11 p-h-o-t-o m-a-t-t all the socials but really check out my blog m-a-t-t m-a-t-t and we will add

Starting point is 02:33:19 everything we talked about to the show notes so folks can peruse all of these things there's going to be a lot at tim.blog slash podcast and search mullenweg i should probably come up with a more elegant way of directing people to specific episodes but they search you you've been on a bunch so just look for the most recent episode assuming that you're not listening to this a few years hence and as always

Starting point is 02:33:41 till next time be just a little bit kinder than is necessary. Not just to other people, but to yourself. Remember that, Jack Kornfield. If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete. And as always, thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off. And that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free

Starting point is 02:34:10 newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. I'll see you next time. esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash Friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep is a premium mattress brand that provides tailored mattresses based on your sleep preferences. Their lineup includes 14 unique

Starting point is 02:35:14 mattresses, including a collection of luxury models, a mattress for big and tall sleepers, that's not me, and even a mattress made specifically for kids. They have models with memory foam layers to provide optimal pressure relief if you sleep on your side, as I often do and did last night on one of their beds. Models with more responsive foam to cradle your body for essential support in stomach and back sleeping positions,

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Starting point is 02:37:20 and it will not last long. So take a look. With Helix, better sleep starts now. This episode is brought to you by Momentous. Momentous offers high quality supplements and products across a broad spectrum of categories, including sports performance, sleep, cognitive health, hormone support, and more. I've been testing their products for months now, and I have a few that I use constantly. One of the things I love about Momentous is that they offer many single ingredient and third-party tested formulations. I'll come back to the latter part of that a little bit later. Personally, I've been using Momentous Mag3N8, L-theanine, and apigenin, all of which have helped me to improve the onset quality and duration of

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours

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