#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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4:50 At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I answer your personal question? No, I'm just seeing it, but if I did the eye. My cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal and the skeleton. Sure.

5:13 Matthew. Maddie. Yeah. Doctor Mullin Wegg. Not a doctor. At all.

5:20 In my heart of hearts, you're always a doctor. I think in Argentina I got an honorary degree actually. Really? Oh in that In that country. I'm I'm so jelly. Argentina, I haven't been back in a hundred years. But we're not here to talk about My aspirations and dreams. Although maybe. Yeah, I hope to hear so. We'll we'll we'll dive in and out, Bob and Weave.

5:37 For people who don't have Context. On The Argentine doctor Mulbeck. Could you give people just a snapshot?

5:45 Yeah, Matt Millenwick. Domain M A.t. I go to M A dot T T sometimes. Born and raised in Houston, Texas. Few hours from here, in Austin. And at uh the age of nineteen, I co founded uh open source software called WordPress.

6:00 Which is a Blogging content management system. Fast forward twenty years. It's been twenty years now. And runs over a third of all websites in the world. A few years after that, I founded a company called Automatic.

6:12 Which is kinda like the for profit side of Commercializing things around WordPress. Yes, it's it's uh like any egotistical sound where I snuck my name into the company. And we started with just sort of Kismet anti spam and WordPress.com. Kinda easy.

6:29 Ways to get going with WordPress, but since I've expanded. E commerce with who commerce. one I'll talk about with with messaging. Like we've uh done a number over like twenty five acquisitions. So we're trying to be like a digital Berkshire Hatway. like a buyer of first resort for amazing things on the internet.

6:44 Pretty much everything we do is open source or open web. So we bought Tumblr. So we're running Tumblr. The last few years. Uh basically trying to yeah.

6:52 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

7:11 a 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. Uh

7:25 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. I want to do this for the rest of my life. I think it's because the open source freedom and liberty

7:40 Somewhat abstract. So there can be lots of things under that. In fact, I just mentioned probably too many things. Some people will call me very unfocused. But You have that too. We talked about it 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 been a lot of fun. Oh automatics now. Over nineteen hundred people in ninety seven countries. We were fully remote and distributed.

8:10 Since two thousand five. So we've been kinda 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 it in other places, but We're gonna 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, you know, that no one ever reads. Ours actually has Easter eggs in it, just to see if anyone will find'em.

8:37 But Yeah, most of those licenses are about all the rights you don't have. Mm-hmm. You know, 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 repair yourself.

8:48 Hm. Open source is the opposite. It's all about almost like a bill of rights. For you as a user. WordPress belongs just as much to Tim Ferris 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.

9:05 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 agree to become evil. 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.

9:20 Is open source applied to an encyclopedia. Right. It used to be really bad. Carter Encyclopedia Britannica were way better. But then over time, lots of people working together. made it better and better. And why did they work on it?

9:34 For free, for fun. And also because it belongs to them. Mm-hmm. So you know, WordPress has many thousands, maybe 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. Yeah, but you know the the wow, we should both know that. Wow, I'm embarrassed for both of us.

9:57 Tom Sawyer and it'll be the first thing in the comments. Huckleberry fan. Huckleberry Fan, 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 know, you have the pride. Of knowing that code you wrote.

10:12 Is running on. A third of all websites in the world, which is actually like a real thrill as a like an engineer developer. 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. But I read this story which seemed credible based on the source, I'm not gonna give too much, but

10:36 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. I love that story. Because I know so many like on the spectrum engineers that would totally do that. It's like a beautiful hat, right? For like oh I just gotta get this fixed. They won't. There's actually companies I would do that. One thing I have considered I is like secret shopping. Like seeing if I could get hired.

11:06 By my own company under a fake identity. Or Yeah, just something like that. Why would you do that? Oh, one to experience the hiring process, which is difficult for me to debug except by secondhand accounts. Two to see if I you know how my code still is.

11:23 Companies provide mystery shopper like services for hiring processes? Or no? Because mystery shoppers, right, this would be the equivalent to 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? 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

11:56 Big believer. And especially executives. Going in and doing the work themselves. Engaging with the customers, doing customer support, trying out the products. building or you know, a website, whatever it is that your thing is.

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 Yeah. Service. Even if it's a CFO or someone who's And actually I'm gonna be doing No matter the job, you're hired for it automatically. You start with two weeks of sport. And then every single person rotates back in one week per year.

12:26 And I'm running out of year. So I'm actually squeezing my knit at the very end here. So if you go to WordPress.com support in the next two weeks, you might get me. But uh yeah, I talked to executive at Salesforce. I was really impressed. They were saying they spend fifty percent 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 twenty five or thirty percent right now.

12:49 So it really made me think like am I spending enough time Customers and also like We might have some executives that are spending closer to zero percent time. So like how do we make this like a a cultural thing throughout the company? So you're an enthusiastic fella. Part of while part of while I spend the time with you.

13:05 Good vibes, lots of smiles, lots of laughs, and uh 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 assurted do dads and doohickeys that that he's traveling with as a road warrior who travels fair to say most of the time. Your schedule We're gonna get to my first planned question in a second.

13:34 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

13:51 Are you continuing to do that in terms of travel for the next year? Yeah, currently. So Why do I go into it? Well

14:00 It's a global community. Mm-hmm. So wanna 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 of times a year.

14:11 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. Mm-hmm. And I try to hit the the bigger ones. Sometimes the small ones too, but mostly the 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.

14:31 that have thousands of people. There's all these different just the state of the word in Madrid. So you just take those. You're you're traveling a week out of the month already. And then you gotta add in some fun. You're not gonna die of a fun deficiency. You're not that fun. U and it's uh Yeah, it really adds up.

14:47 But it does take more of a toll than it used to, I gotta be totally honest. There were years I did well over four hundred thousand 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 blame. I don't know. Maybe I'm just getting older.

15:03 That does happen to people. Forty in a few weeks. I know, thank God. No more of this thirty under thirty, forty under forty nonsense. You've accumulated seven hundred lifetimes worth of those. So you mentioned gatherings and the first I suppose. on this slalom of a conversation is

15:23 Things that are 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.

15:38 Mm-hmm. So If you look at automatic's history, it's like two thousand five. Logging, same as. Two thousand sixteen.

15:45 Commerce. Lou Commerce. Grown to over thirty billion of sales. Or Gm V. And we entered our third major area this year.

15:53 Which was messaging. Mm-hmm. So we acquired this company called Text. You might remember these sorts of programs, but we all have twenty 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. Some of which have terrible interfaces. It brings them in the one power user app. Right now desktop only.

16:15 Mm. 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. Think we need to build things.

16:26 Extra secure now. And 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 twenty twelve or whatever it was, because I I felt like I need to meditate. So I was so behind on messages. I'm like, okay, we gotta 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 and then leaves. Fine companies. Small team, really, really exciting and

16:52 Yeah, I don't know. I'd love for you to try it actually. Well, my team is using it. Well that's right. Actually Told me about this even before

17:01 I 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? Text.com T E S T Yes. Dot com

17:13 Text. Text.com. All right. Text.com. If you go on desktop. And it's a paid product right now. Mm-hmm. So fifteen bucks a month, five bucks a month if you're a student. Or pretend to be a student.

17:25 And uh but we're also gonna explore Some different things. Mobile app is coming out next year. In the early part. And we're going to support some different pricing as well. Maybe making it free for One or two networks paid for more.

17:38 That's some very exciting stuff there. Alright, so I wanna 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 uh also just because disclosures are important, I am an available at your back and call advisor with with auto. From the early days. From the early days. Yeah. And

18:02 I am fascinated by Not just how you operate in the world, but how you think about the world, 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 too by just doing the opposite of what everyone else does.

18:19 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 gonna Set the table with some other examples, but

18:30 The question is how you choose what you're gonna get into in terms of areas, products, et cetera. 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 landscam and the social media platform landscapes have collided in such a major way in say the last five to ten years, where you have Amazon Studios, you've got Netflix.

19:04 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 forum 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

19:26 Or unspoken rationales or logics. So how do you think about what you're going to do next? I did think about it for a long time. Mm-hmm. So we've been thinking about messaging And actually making investments in the space. Sure. Yeah, four or five years. Mm-hmm.

19:41 Think a lot about Environment and incentives. So You know, the reason there used to be these multi messaging apps fifteen years ago and they all stopped working was the network's all blocked them. Mm.

19:52 And There is a political environment now. Which I think is more conducive. To be more customer and user centric. This is our data, right? This is our messages.

20:02 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 uh another one called Beeper. That supported iMessage and Apple decided to just shut it down. Uh they broke it all. And people would actually charge its users, they had to refund everyone.

20:23 There's also more subtle things they could do, like they could just s subtly degrade. If they make it so your messages don't go through five percent of the time. It's not blocking you. Sure, right. But you're gonna stop using it. It's like throttling your hotel speed on Wi Fi. So you upgrade to the premium, you're like okay. They don't need to block you, which might draw attention. They can just make it a little wobbly. More painful. And it doesn't take a lot of friction for people to move away.

20:46 Especially in messaging. So the regulatory framework both with the EU Doing a lot of Sometimes misguided, but also sometimes really smart. They have a an act coming in called the DMA that requires some interop between messaging services.

20:59 Yeah, we'll talk about USB C, which I'm very excited about. That thank you, EU, for forcing Apple to finally Drop lightning and give us USB C. Uh And then in the US I think there is no.

21:10 Bipartisan, this I actually don't agree with, but it is a reality, like some extra scrutiny on big tech. Mm-hmm. And so I think it's actually good for them. Again, what are their incentives? I think it's actually really good for them.

21:21 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.

21:30 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 the long term. And people are what short term, you know, lobbying, et cetera, but like Long term.

21:47 In the US. functioning democracy. 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.

22:00 Talking about a let's just say uh Next gen or digital. Berkshire Hathaway. Mm-hmm so Berkshire Hathaway could have Well, originally textiles, but they could have insurance. then they could have something that is

22:11 Chocolates. Chocolates, right, Cs. Mm-hmm. Candies. Things that are completely Unrelated On a

22:19 Face value. business level. They're not integrated. And the way that A CMS or having a gajillion blog and websites running on your platform would combine very easily with Well commerce.

22:32 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. Mm-hmm. How do you think about building

22:45 and acquiring in that way. Are they standalones? How much do they need to Help. Each other. Or not. In the case of Berkshire, right, like the insurance premiums and so on, as I understand it provide a huge bolus of cash for

22:58 all sorts of other purposes, right? So that's sort of the capital can be utilized across the family. In a sense. How do you think about because there's so many different ways you could Rank order. the priorities when looking at potential acquisitions. Customer pain point. Converging trend lines in terms of regulation and public sentiment.

23:19 Which Berkstar navigates beautifully. in highly regulated industries, including insurance, 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. It's your thing kinda right. Um but also I mean Charlie Munker, rest in peace.

23:37 Ninety nine years old. Warren Buffett. I don't know exactly in I think up there as well. So I try to think, you know, if Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger We're hackers. In the thirties or forties today, what were they build?

23:49 Versus what they built. in their time with the opportunities and technology afforded. So I like to think they do some open source'cause that's obviously the future. So

24:00 Sure. Adams companies. Adams versus Bits. And in their industries they're in. Yes.

24:08 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. I think Warren Buffett said something like

24:21 We try to find a business a monkey could run because someday they will. Something like that. You know, like what business is so good it would survive even bad leadership. So What we do with the digital version of that is we lower coordination costs between the different products. By open source. So

24:36 Like for WooCommerce to build on top of WordPress. It doesn't need a meeting. Mm. Doesn't need to talk. No. People developing WordPress. There's open APIs, open source, as a plug in framework, et cetera.

24:48 So that removes a lot of the coordination costs that you normally get in a multi division company. Now when you say coordination cost, 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

25:08 A new feature to Mac OS or you know, 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.

25:24 Right, so they can change their mind. Remember Twitter used to have all those clients, Facebook did too. There I go. We don't want this anymore. You're all kicked off. Oh. Rough Tuesday. Don't build on proprietary platforms. They can pull the rug and will pull the rug at any point.

25:37 So in open source, when the rug can't be pulled. Two. Typically they're ultra pluggable. So you can really change Every line of WordPress.

25:45 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. Mm-hmm. You know, one criticism of like Salesforce or Cisco Or even Google. Sometimes their own products don't integrate with each other as well.

26:03 Yeah. 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. Maybe say you two. Sometimes the integrations aren't as strong. Or

26:15 Maybe like remember when YouTube tried to do the Google Plus thing? I do. Right. Every single company was or division in Google was like incentivized by how much adoption Google Plus got. They really try to push it into everything, like a lot of coordination cost. Maybe not as responsive to users, that was ultimately unsuccessful push. Google's another example, all the messaging platforms they have.

26:34 You need text just to work with the five messaging platforms at Google. Yeah, so like there's examples like that, where that 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, I think it's a little bit more. This comes up in economics terms, where like

26:51 Why shouldn't everyone just be a freelancer? Yeah. Well, there's some coordination costs there. It's nice to have people employed full time by a company. Because then you kind of You don't need to rehire them every time. They're not gonna be like

27:03 poached by someone else, or maybe you have a gap in the gig and they just take another gig, you know, it's that sort of thing. So I feel like For us, the common platform of open source, particularly WordPress. allows us to plug things and do acquisitions in a way that

27:16 Is more set up for success. So we have A set of products that run directly on WordPress or the distribution from WordPress and Tumblr. So that's kind of I would say our core area.

27:28 There are some what you I recall. Philosophically adjacent. 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.

27:40 And journaling is another word for blogging. So you can use it like I do as like a local blog. Mm-hmm. I post it every day for the past like two hundred or three hundred days. What does a local blog mean? To the untrained ear, they'd be like, Wait, so I have a blog that I'm publishing on my own computer, how do people see it?

27:57 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't know. Typically things are undated. The metadata associated with them. Is

28:09 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.

28:22 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'cause that's the concept. Apple just launched a built in journaling app. I call it A blog because it fundamentally if you kinda look at those principles

28:36 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. 'Cause I'm usually taking notes each day. Kinda like Benjamin Franklin, you know, he would kinda log everything he does every day. I do that as well.

28:49 I love the search, I love tagging, I love all those kind of like metadata things. Help me uh find stuff. And you can also interlink the notes, which is actually pretty cool. So not unlike a roam 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 excited about I didn't actually answer your question on messaging. Yes. Like, so why messaging? Mm-hmm. It is not built on top of WordPress. And It's not part of our publishing.

29:15 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.

29:24 And so that's again I w only want to work on things. I feel like I can work on Potentially the rest of my life. Mm-hmm. Sound

29:32 Yeah, 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

29:46 More freedom, more liberty. across the world and technology does that better. Then I think Any sort of Diplomacy or anything else.

29:54 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.

30:08 Git Lab 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. Yeah, like nine or ten billion dollars. So that's pretty cool. Have those examples. Big Elements, which is uh Built on the matrix ecosystem. So open source messaging.

30:24 Actually the competitor detects Beeper. Really awesome company. I think philosophically very aligned. So what's cool is More and more of this is happening. Also, there's a fun trend where sometimes People who did proprietary companies?

30:37 And then made a ton of money off them? What they do next is often open source. So Jack Dorsey. Made him ton of money off Twitter, Square. He's taken square

30:47 To a more of a crypto direction. He wants to enable that. And two, what's he funding? Something called Nostor and Blue Sky, which are two competing open source Twitters. Which is really cool. Brian Acton. Co founder of WhatsApp.

31:00 What's he doing today? He's running Signal. Which is the open source nonprofit messaging app, which is amazing. Signal very philosophically aligned. Wikipedia, Mozilla. There's a lot out there, both for profit and non profit.

31:14 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

31:27 Tops. Yeah. I think Instagram was pretty good size with like thirteen or fourteen when they sold. Telegram's actually pretty amazing. Today signals. pretty small team. 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

31:42 There's not really any user support. It's all self serve, you know, they don't really know. And so that those businesses can scale quite a bit with very few people. And it also attracts like really amazing engineer. Like the Text team is like Incredible. And so Their aspiration.

31:58 is to remain like a sub twenty, sub thirty team, even as they grow. Tens of millions or hundreds of millions of users. So how do you as the Buyer first resort. The hopefully. The the aspiring

32:11 Fire a first resort. Berkshire Hathaway. Known as automatic. How do you find these various companies or threads to pull on or how do those

32:23 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.

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 two thousand twelve, when it was twelve dollars. I wish I could say that that was me being brilliant. No, it's one of my colleagues who's like, Oh, this thing's so cool, we can add support. I think he hacked it over a weekend and so

32:51 All right, cool. Amazing. I'll tell you just a quick anecdote. I haven't mentioned really uh I haven't mentioned it anywhere because why would I, but you mentioned uh Charlie Munger, rest in peace. I was I'm remembering correctly. 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.

33:14 He did the one with the collisons, right? John Patra or Vest 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. Yeah. So for people who Didn't get a chance, we'll link to that in the show notes.

33:29 I appreciated that. For someone who I've been so obsessed with for many years. When he passed. I actually had a feeling.

33:38 Oh. 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 and you know, speeches and other things for

33:52 Decades now. So Yeah, you don't always have to meet your mentors. I think you talk about that as well. Like it sometimes is really great. So just have the book or the speech or something like that. And it can

34:03 Can really live with you. You can grow up with it. You can reread it over the years. Like rereading Seth Harthar. I know you have some things that you read. Oh is it uh Zorba, the Greek? Zorba the Greek is spectacular. I think we might have been together when you found that book. Of all places in Greece and Santarini. And absolutely love that book. Yes. So that is one I go back to revisit. There are a lot of books I go back to revisit. Awareness by Anthony DeMello would be another one. Very short, very fast. I'm increasingly a fan of rereading.

34:36 That includes some fiction too, as you mentioned, over the Greek. Any books you reread? Said Hartha. Why? Just a an interesting story of enlightenment and journey and it's actually my Twitter bio, as I can

34:49 Think I can wait, I can fast. That's a great line. Something like that. I probably have it out of order, but But I do them out of order too, sometimes it works. What else do I like to reread? Essays for sure. Paul Graham. Which S

35:03 Acceleration of addictives. 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 worked on it for like a year. I think it's called

35:14 how to do great work or something like that. That one's really good. That could be a book. It's interesting that there's authors now Logging, essentially. Publishing these essays like Slate Star Codex, Scott Alexander.

35:26 Shane Paris, a Knowledge Project like There's these writers now that Yeah, really. Drive a lot of folks. Your WordPress blog kinda started that genre in a lot of ways, like the longer form, like super essays.

35:39 Yeah, thousand plus blog posts. A lot of blog posts. And it's sometimes easy for me to forget. That that was essential to for the entire I don't know if I would call it trajectory, sort of meandering, developing quote unquote career that I've had. Without the blog it doesn't happen.

35:58 I mean the blog. It was started before the first book. It continued I mean still continues. I Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show.

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37:08 I 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.

37:29 I have thought a lot about Next chapters for myself recently. I love doing the podcast. I plan on continuing doing the podcast. The tenth anniversary is coming up next April. Wow. Ten years of on average one point four episodes per week every week. It's been going for a long time. Wow. And I wasn't the first podcaster, nor will I be the last.

37:51 But ten years is a good stretch and it's an opportunity to pause and reflect, 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

38:04 New I'm not the first participant, so I'm not at the absolute cutting edge, but I'm on the sharp edge. Yeah. Pretty early. Yeah, pretty early. And then I stick around for a while and I

38:18 Focus on it. With Incredible enthusiasm. And O C D the Ridiculous.

38:27 And then it often gets a bit crowded or saturated and then I do something else. 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 two thousand

38:46 eight to twenty fifteen, then I took a hiatus for a while. Yeah. Took a start vacation, took a complete break from that. That was in tandem with books. Took a break from the books after the four hour chef. That's when the podcast was started, two thousand fourteen. I've done that for a while.

39:04 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.

39:22 And all of a sudden Format X becomes invisible. That could be long form audio, 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 I've posed the question to some folks. I'd be curious to get your two cents. Maybe we'll talk about it over dinner tonight.

39:43 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

39:56 Differentiator. An ability or access or combination and 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 first book, which allowed me to become

40:12 an advisor with various companies. That was what enabled that. As well as geographically being located. Bay area. Well, 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

40:33 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

40:48 The new thing isn't always a new thing. So for instance, I was chatting, I'm not gonna name him because he probably 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 T V 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 Chat GPT.

41:20 And say Provide me with ten questions in the flavor of Andrew Huberman, Tim Ferris, 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 you have notes in front of you and you're presentable on camera or via audio.

41:42 Now you're a formidable competitor. the hurdles used to be a little higher, used to be a little harder. So I've thought about going back to writing. It is very high labor, right? It's there's a reason there's so many podcasters in the sense like when Covet hit People could have all become writers. When the writer strike happened, people could have all become writers. Writing is really, really difficult, I think.

42:02 I'll interject here if I can. Interject. Also, I felt like your writing process Had a lot of solitary. Yes. What I observed as you got more into podcasting other things is you really loved the

42:15 The social piece. Social piece of it. The interpersonal, like the direct you and I sitting across from a table in a format. Doing it, like also does 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 uh I think there's part of me that has recognized how nourishing that is for me and I'm hesitant to go back into Monkman Nakave. Staring at a blank page. I don't know. Do you have any any thoughts that percolate? We can certainly continue this. I'm just wondering. I mean this this home at the very least this is just like a confessional, which is which is nice. I love psychoanalyzing Tim. It's it's one of my pastimes.

42:54 That is a good question. And I think How you Laid out how the market changes. And becomes crowded is very, very true. So

43:02 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.

43:12 Mm-hmm.'Cause they just talked about this. You're like What about the traffic? What about the you know, those are more outcomes. Mm-hmm. So where are there things and I think Actually podcasting is true for this, where the journey itself is very rewarding for you. Totally. If no one listened to this

43:25 This was still a fun afternoon. Absolutely. You know? And We're kinda just recording what we might do anyway. Which is kinda neat. So that's I think that's nice.

43:37 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, type two fun. So I wonder as well If that's

43:49 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. Especially as a creativity. And those also when when I bleed out of nonfiction 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. That would be an ability to experiment. I mean the other thing is And I I'm not gonna have the right attribution. Maybe it's Neil Strauss, maybe it's Seth Gooden, but anyone who's really been consistently Productive in the sense of the

44:18 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 out of rough draft. And Um of course.

44:33 grossly generalizing, but it's along those lines. And so I've also thought Part of the reason the 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. You know, they're not fifty thousand word posts, but they're long. I mean these are Significant. investments of time and energy. And maybe the answer is, you know what, just you can't write more than Four paragraphs.

44:53 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.

45:08 So it's visible. In my browser. There are others, of course. I mean the makers schedule, manager schedule. Or manager schedule is maker schedule, which I think is a perennial. reminder worth paying attention to.

45:21 So I've thought about the constraints, maybe making it shorter, but I do 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 vlog, some things I'd recommend trying. Or I like

45:35 What would a really amazing comment section look like? If that were really jazzed up, like maybe more like forums, maybe more like building community. You've experienced with events before. And I think that's actually pretty Exciting. I found a lot of value'cause I've been blogging now for like twenty years.

45:49 And some gardening. So meaning returning to some older pieces. Some of which still get traffic. And Did the links work? Yeah. Wha what's the update to it? What's the sort of like Do I at the top do I link to a new thing? Does this inspire me to write like a new version of this?

46:06 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 thinking.

46:16 And being able to return to the old Tim. Yeah. Or when I return to the old mat, like it's often sometimes surprising. Yeah. Like I'm like, wow, 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 fifteen years ago, like I've learned so much since then. And here's

46:35 Maybe you're at my fifteen ago version and here's what kinda changed my mind. Yeah. I guess we have a list of things you change your mind on. And also I think multi modal formats. It's kinda like you're gonna take this podcast and slice it up for like TikTok, shorts, reels, whatever you're putting it on? I think people don't do that enough into blog posts.

46:52 Tell me more. What does that mean? You mean converting things into blog posts or or taking blog posts and turning them into other generations? I think every podcast you do has ten to fifteen blog posts worth of stuff in it. Oh, I agree. Easily.

47:05 Easily. You've known me for a long time, so I'm gonna start with my fears. Not all the amazing ways this could go, right? Let me talk about all the terrible things that could 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

47:29 an assembly line of hot dogs of 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. Mm around.

47:44 If you imagined Tim.blog almost like a Wikipedia. Where each guest was like a topic. Mm. And that could be referred to in many episodes. And so I think that might be the antidote to this. To where the content that transcripts everything, right? How this works on blogs is kinda clunky right now. I think you have like a post for the show and then a post for the Transcripts Node script or a transcript, and like that should honestly be one URL. Like it should be It's clunky in part because it's a lot of stuff, right? The show notes are very extensive. They're long.

48:14 And then the transcripts are very extensive. So it turns into an enormous it's basically a book. Turns into a a book length. I would love if the transcript Tie to a 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.

48:34 Yeah, I use YouTube that way with transcripts. Yeah, they're surprisingly good. Surprisingly good. I would love for everything to be linked, auto linked. So any time a book is mentioned, anytime a essay is mentioned. That goes to a page which pivots.

48:49 I wanna see every time Paul Graham's been mentioned across all of your how many episodes now? Close to seven hundred. 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 some of I don't think he does that many. He does very few. He had a conversation with Tyler Cowan. I love that one. It was hilarious. Which was hilarious. Which was hilarious. And uh I have the utmost respect for both of those guys. Tyler is also a one of a kind. He has a stylistically

49:17 produced A very novel and helpful show. There's no one like Tyler. Like he is an inimitable style. The rapid fire. No follow ups. I'm kinda terrified about going on a show.

49:33 The reason I started blogging. He's a big influence. Okay. I'm not sure I knew this. For like I think over twenty years. Yeah. And when I was in high school

49:44 One of the Super cool things I did. You know, you did wrestling. I I did this um 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. Uh somewhat. You know, the uh my macroeconomic insights were not quite Driving interest I hoped for since me getting the computers and jazz and stuff. So um but we did this economics competition and it really opened a lot of opportunities for me. I got to go to Washington, DC, meet on Greece. What does it mean to have an economics competition?

50:16 I mean, we're this like econometrics mathematics competition. Like what are we talking about? It was an interesting format. So have you heard of the F om C, the Federal Open Market Committee? 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. What's basically Trickles down to be the interest rates.

50:35 Man, I bet a lot of people would like to be in that room, wouldn't they? It's a pretty cool meeting. That's like the Illuminati. And they've been doing an amazing job too. Like think of all the recessions we've avoided and all the problems that don't have. So It was I think Fulker who said like their job is to take the punch bowl away as the party starts going and by turning up the interest rates, slows down the economy. So they have a lot of levers and some new ones as well.

50:57 So the first fifteen minutes is we would do a mock meeting. You would be Greenspan, I'd be Bembernaki. Like we kinda Pretend roleplay? The different presidents? And we'd read their essays and speeches and things to try to like have their style or their point of view and based on data up to when the competition started. So if like new economic data was released that morning, we might incorporate into the presentation. So fifteen minutes of that.

51:19 And then the second fifteen minutes is they can ask you any question about economics they want. And do you have to still be in character, or is this this is more the the quiz you is like The five high school students. And that part was really fun. 'Cause it's a little more improvisational. I love Q and A.

51:33 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 had never won an academic competition ever. You know, like Beyonce went there, Robert Glass were like we weren't known for academics. But had this awesome teacher, Scott Roman. Who was like an economics teacher is like, Hey, let's do this. So first year we got creamed.

51:55 Second year. We won Houston, we won the region. And then 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 get go from getting cream to winning in the second year? Yeah, I credit the teacher a lot. It was first period, so it's the same class every morning. We all picked different newspapers like Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, we'd read them every morning. How old were you then at the time? It's high school. So it's fifteen, sixteen. Sixteen, seventeen. He had us teach each other a lot of things. And no, you really learn something when you have to teach it.

52:29 So he'd be like Scott or Eram teach about You know, some macroeconomics concept. And we kinda rotate through that. And then a lot of practicing. Yeah, we get together on weekends. Over the summer we went to D C

52:42 It's like a summer program. But to me. I don't Green Span, which is pretty cool. The follow up to that is the year after There was a conference hosted by the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank.

52:53 Honoring Milton Friedman. And Because one of my teammates I'd gone to like intern for the Federal Reserve. And actually maybe Mr Roman might have started

53:02 Consulting for them or something like that. 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. So I got to go to this and Talicone was there.

53:15 And his blog actually was one of the big I mentioned the newspapers. I probably learn more from marginal revolutions. Than I did from Financial Times, textbooks, et cetera. And he has textbooks and stuff, so he was there.

53:26 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 vice. And he said, Right every day. Yeah.

53:35 Basically been doing that ever since. Seems to have worked out. And um It's kinda cool also now that I can look up this history. I'm gonna do a a bit of follow up on this. I have to obtain more things I'm excited about. I know, yeah, I know. We're gonna get to we're gonna get to the other things. Maybe I have an idea for how we're gonna do that. But with The

53:56 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.

54:14 Well, at one point I got kicked off the team. Got kicked off. Which was um It really worked. Like I get it now, the psychology of it, so I think by a lot of ways you would sort of

54:27 rank things or look at strengths, I definitely should have been on this five person team. However. as actually experienced today, I'm not always the most timely person. This was the first class of the day. Yeah. 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

54:45 Like what's this what's happening? And then he made the challenge to me. So his other thing, which is actually true, I didn't really appreciate this until my twenties But He was like you have no Physical tone or you don't

54:57 Like I just thought I was a brain in a vat. Like I didn't work out. And 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. And I think he got me a book called Like Body for life or something. 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 and I had to show up on time.

55:21 So I started showing up on time. And then Yeah, we did the run. By the way I really not trained, but I just kinda like made it through like sheer force of will.'Cause when you're seventeen, you can just kinda Destroy your body anyway. And so I did that and I was back on the team and that was we went on to

55:37 Winning these competitions and everything. So it was but that was motivating to me. Like kind of the harsh getting consequences. Getting kicked off. Yeah. And also, you know, being My sort of day thing at the school was jazz saxphones. And I think music.

55:50 Well performances can be very rigorous. You know, you get first, second, third, fourth chair. Yeah, ranked. You compete. I feel like that feedback loop and also The performing. So being on stage, breath control. True of the competition as well. Yeah. The economics.

56:05 Yeah, you have to perform. Like when I look back at like what's sort of set me up for business later, especially at a young age. I think it was Musical theater. Jazz, perform like that sort of stuff was was really huge. Amazing.

56:18 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 Graham in the podcast. And then I mentioned Candyman, Tyler Cowan, and then we ended up where we ended up. So Anything else? I wanna 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

56:40 Differently. Where I am somehow well positioned. doing something that cannot be replicated the next day by a thousand people. I'm interested in it 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?

56:57 We can go through some quickly too. 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, and I mentioned already, USB C Like if you know me, you know how much I love cables. You love cables.

57:12 And the it's hard. 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 giving the cables. I like you know, you give someone a good cable, like they 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 Yeah. But you get the guy that has everything.

57:40 The coolest battery. 'Cause I've tested of them. I know you've put in the mileage. So USB C. Everything's going USB C now. Iphone is USB C. I'm down to like I think one or two things in my life that are not USB C and it's Glorious. So I'm very excited about that.

57:58 I'm really sad about AI. My ass The programming of AI Like the prompt engineering. You can't really call it programming.

58:07 Spell casting. It's like casting spells. It's ridiculous. And when you hear a good prompt, like you just said, I was like Oh, that's so cool. And it's kinda open source ish in that

58:17 Not really, I guess you could have prepared day 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 kinda like a new form of programming. Coming online. That for me is as exciting as when I first learned the program. It like unlocks these superpowers and

58:33 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 kinda

58:44 Spits off in seconds at all. You know, like turn this podcast, make it all rhyme. You know, it could do that. And that's kinda Ridiculous. Kind of cool. Okay, so on the AI side, this has of course been A

58:58 Topic in the zeitgeist for a bit now. A lot of people are talking about AI. You unlike me have some technical jobs and you know how to code. I would love to know if you have any Controversial.

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.

59:25 From A hundred people, I wouldn't get fifty of them telling me the same thing. That's hard'cause I don't know what fifty people would tell you, but I'll tell you one. You get the idea. They would tell me probably what's in the news cycle and the media cycle, even if it's within the niche community of FinTech on Twitter. They would have those inputs.

59:43 I'll tell you what I kinda hate about it, which is that it's gotten me addicted to Twitter again. Which I had broken. AI. A I because Like there's the folks you hear of, you know, the Sam Altman's or Greg Brockmans, et cetera. And there's just as interesting and good stuff on random anonymous

59:58 Twitter accounts with like an anime avatar. And so it's a little ridiculous. Like a lot of the top researchers have these alts, they call'em. Or like other accounts. Well, they're share more stuff. And is redirected a lot of my reading. I follow a lot of these. Do you have a find out stuff like 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

1:00:26 A group or a list of these people, or is that That's a taboo, right? No, they probably are Um, I don't publish any list'cause I don't use the Twitter list function or X list function. I think Cyan Bannister might. She was very early. She was like a first hundred user of like

1:00:43 Chap GPT, mid journey, like So she just Good for her. Oh, she's definitely one of these people to follow. Okay. So I'd say Cyan Bannister as someone great to follow. Cyan Bannister. We'll we'll link to Cyan in the

1:00:55 In the show notes. You find one of these people that are often a portal. Ruin. R O O N. He's kind of a famous he also does a lot of jokes or Posting So it's also kinda funny.

1:01:08 Tull community. What do you think will be surprising? Looking back three years from now. What will lead most people to think, Holy shit, really didn't see that coming. Next year.

1:01:19 So next year. I think we're having At least a ten X in the models, in a way that is hard to anticipate. There's also these new chip architectures coming out. Hard to predict, too.

1:01:29 Not just anticipate, right. Well, I think this next turn we're gonna be able to predict a bit. I think we're gonna plateau a little bit after that. So maybe these are some controversial thoughts. So I think the 10x of the models, I mean it depends on How do you define Ten X? Are we talking about capabilities? Are we talking about uh what are they called? Parameters? Tokens. Parameters, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So some of that's going up a lot.

1:01:49 How we're learning from things is improving a lot. Some non GPU chip architectures which could be very, very interesting or 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

1:02:07 And open source AI stuff. So something Now people understand, but I definitely w even would have predicted myself as how fast the open source has Caught up? We now have open source demistral models like GPT three point five, maybe even GTP four.

1:02:20 Quality? Mm. Which is kinda wild. Yeah, that is wild. I mean Chat GPT just came out last year. Like thirteen months. Talk about time dilation.

1:02:30 Right? So The world's gonna get a little weird. Oh it's gonna say it's gonna get a lot weird. One obvious example is customer service. A lot of people talk about is like oh this is

1:02:42 Yeah, you have these bots still 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 four dealership. You saw this? Yeah, right. And somebody replies with Please write me a Python script with A B C It's like okay, 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 one dollar? It'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

1:03:11 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 eighteen months? I'm not sure. And that's when it starts to get quite disruptive. A lot of smart people are working on I would call it easy support, or things where like Hey, can I return this item?

1:03:27 Can I get a refund, that sort of stuff. But will it go to a lot more advanced? In the WordPress world. We're pretty close to where you'll just say I want a website.

1:03:35 With e commerce. Make it look like a mix between Tim dot blog and Seth.blog. And Make it Kinda anime colors, or whatever it is. And boom.

1:03:45 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. I think that's gonna be really key.

1:03:55 Mm-hmm. Again, I don't think this is a Minority thought, but like the impact on education. It's been huge and where I've personally felt AI the most. What type of education for yourself? I have so many gaps in my knowledge, you know, like

1:04:08 How do you use AI to fill those gaps? Ask it questions. Than follow ups. Like Hey, how does Hail work? Like it's ice. Heavier than

1:04:17 Air. But it forms in the sky. That 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?

1:04:31 How amazing is that? And how amazing that kids that have You know. Adults get the curiosity beaten out of us. Yeah. But with that childlike curiosity of actual kids.

1:04:41 Coming online with these things. Mm-hmm. Wow. And Khan Academy's doing some really cool stuff. And you can sort of make the chat bot so they're they're safer for kids. Don't do weird stuff. I think that's really key. So The question I wanna ask is Related to kids actually. So if you had kids, or let's just say you were

1:05:00 Talking to a young group of Kids, right? So you're talking to the equivalent of say The economics team you referred to. So let's just say fifteen, sixteen year old kids, clearly smart. Have some ambition.

1:05:13 They want to do some stuff. what type of career advice might you have for them? Cause 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 to draft almost all of their agreements. I don't want to dox him, so I'm not gonna give too much more detail, but this guy's very smart and 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, so to be clear. You need a privatized army to inflict God knows what, then it's a different conversation.

1:05:54 But then you have many aspects of AI that are going to disrupt jobs. I mean, they really just are. Or people are gonna have to bob and weave. Despite what some of our mutual friends might say about like no one's ever gonna lose a job and so on. I don't believe it. So what might you advise to someone now, and they could be young, or somebody's just thinking about a career pivot, like 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? Either one, maybe this is something I change my mind on, but

1:06:23 Mm Is the one on my list is I used to really advocate to learn to code. Mm-hmm. Yeah, these can write pretty good code now. I've gone back and forth, so if you'd asked me like three months ago I was like nah, we don't learn the code anymore.

1:06:35 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 gonna 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.

1:06:54 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 time? Yeah, the the prompt engineering, the playing with it. Learning how to learn? It's something I know you're very passionate about.

1:07:06 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 what you're doing, like

1:07:16 What's your drive? How you gonna leave a dent in the universe? But are your best trying, you know? And I feel like that's really, really, really important. I'm actually very optimistic about future generations.

1:07:26 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 were gonna have too many people on Earth. Mm-hmm.

1:07:36 Write this great book Kevin Kelly recommended called Empty Planet. Basically says we're not gonna have enough people. Population has already peaked in most developed countries. I think the US is the only nuclear superpower with a growing population over the next Thirty years. What do you attribute that to?

1:07:51 For us it's just immigration. So if we mess that up, we're gonna lose this whole toast. It's a big combative advantage for us when you think about one of the best people in the world. Wanna send their kids to school here and stay here. If we mess that up, we're

1:08:04 I think We have some other advantage geographic and resource wise, but like Yeah, that's a really important one. I personally chosen not to have kids. I think it's seven years ago now I decided Six years ago.

1:08:15 Like I'm not gonna have kids the rest of my life. S. Built my life around that. Been rethinking that somewhat. Maybe it's the Ripe old age of forty. Wow. Also knowing that we're not gonna have enough people in the world.

1:08:26 I think also I'm just a bit more Optimistic about the future. Especially with the AI stuff. That's It's kind of exciting to think.

1:08:35 Someone born today. In eighteen. What are they doing? Yeah. 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.

1:08:49 I don't know if in eighteen years you have a really super smart precocious kid. You're gonna want to send them to a Harvard or Princeton or like Yeah. Any of these things. I think the world might have shifted so much. Mm. That that's just like a radically different thing.

1:09:03 That kinda makes me a little optimistic and curious about it. What other reasons do you have for feeling optimistic? That's I think counterpoint to a lot of the dystopian Narratives that People would be interested to hear more about.

1:09:16 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 that you and I have had around kids. Like this is my first time hearing about it. This is like that's why I told you I had some new for you. Yeah, you sure they do. For this as well has just been inspired. I've no Fifteen Godchildren?

1:09:36 And so like seeing some of them and being able to Be in their lives a bit. Mm. Has been just so rewarding. Mm. So cool to see them like Download new information. The whole thing I mean this is not novel at all. Like by the way.

1:09:48 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? I know that technology is Somewhere could be a double edged sword.

1:10:00 Can be used for good and bad. I guess I have A core assumption is my optimism. Which is a fundamental goodness of human nature. Mm-hmm. And this is actually a big split. Some people think humans are

1:10:11 Yeah. The Hobsy in Life is Nasty, Brutish and Short. Or what's the the survival stuff we read? Like Neil Strauss's book. We're two weeks of food away from everyone just going crazy and like

1:10:24 And I think growing up in Houston through hurricanes and stuff. I saw some of these disaster situations. Including when like there was no power or And how people came together was quite inspiring. So

1:10:35 Is there evil in the world? Yes. I mean, we see this with some of the autocratic leaders and things. But I would

1:10:43 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.

1:10:54 Mm. That's kinda 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.

1:11:05 And arguably 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 a future is to invent it? So there's a way I want the web to work.

1:11:21 And I work on it. And It's worked. Like we got we got a third of the websites on this thing. That's cool. Yeah. And that's forcing the proprietary people to open up more. Other stuff like You have a a world view and it's that like you interview people who you want your readers to or and listeners to listen to'cause they'll get influenced by it. I don't think you'd bring someone on here that you thought was gonna like

1:11:40 mess up their mind or head'em 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 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. Yeah. That's admitting the future. If you've just been passive. Yeah. That wouldn't have been a ripple in the pond.

1:12:02 What is the oh, you know what, we can look it up and put it in the show notes. It's not touring. But the best way to predict the future is to invent it. Do you remember the attribution on that? I wanna say Alan K. Alan K. That is it. It's Alan K. What a great line, and how true.

1:12:17 What else are you excited about or have you changed your mind? We may come back to the kids thing. I'm still like in shock over this. This is amazing. I know. We'll talk about it more. Yeah. It's developing. You know, say like I don't know what that looks like for me, if it's traditional or 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. Basically. One reason I think proprietary services have gotten a lot more Popular is they do subtle things to lock people in.

1:12:47 Remember we talked about the messaging earlier? Yep. Some of the w 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 create an open source directory. That provides two way Import of all this data.

1:13:06 So whether that's in E commerce in another page builder,'cause all these different page builders for WordPress besides Gutenberg. Everything. And then once it's in WordPress, you can get it into anything else that you want because WordPress is kinda universally supported R of 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 gonna make that really, really easy. And so my hope is by like radically lowering the friction.

1:13:33 It'll help make the web. Kind of force everything to be more bit more open. So it's in a sense. Maybe this may be a terrible analogy, but it's like a Google Translate.

1:13:46 For Technology management and technology, right? From anything to anything. And then From that next top.

1:13:53 Two. Whatever else. It increases competition. Mm-hmm. This also means that if you're in WordPress, everyone else is gonna do this too. But I think this is ultimately really good for users. And when you think of lock in like Like music services. How hard is it to move your playlist in between the music services?

1:14:07 Someone actually built something for this. 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

1:14:25 It would sort of catalyze A bunch of mimicry slash competition that would be ultimately better for Users and Humanity slash

1:14:37 Fill 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. A big reason I think the world's strong proprietary of the past. Fifteen years has been mob platforms. to way more lockdown than desktops.

1:14:53 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. Like s currently what the issues are and then what it could look like. Yeah, so today every app on your phone has to go through

1:15:11 The app store. Right. So they kicked it. Sometimes Apple is slow at approving things. Sometimes they kick stuff out. Tumblr got kicked out. Yeah. They typically take a pretty big cut of payments. They force you to use their subscription systems and they take fifteen or thirty percent of it. Which breaks some business models.

1:15:29 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,'cause they have to pay that cut. And the exceptions they make are somewhat arbitrary.

1:15:42 So for example. If you buy a book on Amazon, they don't make you use their payments or take a fifteen or thirty percent cut.'Cause the The margins or when you order an Uber, they're not doing that. Mm. When you're tipping through Uber, they don't take a cut. And just goes direct to the driver. But we added a tipping feature on Tumblr.

1:15:57 Once again. We're not taking any money from it. It's like just money going direct between the people. And they made us Charge a fee on it. For 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 like a six dollar a month subscription to your blog

1:16:14 That becomes four bucks a month. And then I still have to process the credit card even or do some what something else over that. So like just got very messy. So that's gonna change. Or it might change. Yeah, I think so. I think regulatory pressure is gonna force them to open up. You've always been able to like jail break your phone or

1:16:33 You might sideload things using like Something like test flight? 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.

1:16:45 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's in the hands of the people. Do you have any ideas that you can share, or is that

1:16:56 Two inside. Plan A is working with the networks and like just saying, Hey, like we wanna support your business model. We're not trying to change any of that. We just Trying to provide this power user tool. And it's a lot of

1:17:06 Prior art for this and 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 politicians, working with our user base to like

1:17:22 Do petitions. I don't know, maybe I'll camp outside Apple's office, do a hunger strike at one infinity way, or like, you know. I I really believe in this stuff, like,'cause it's user centric. So what is the What's the thing that gets them to do? the thing that is really riper their users. You know, what could change, what company could change us all is Apple. And the reason I talk about them a lot isn't'cause I don't like them, it's because I hold them in the very highest esteem.

1:17:47 I love. Apple a lot. And they're like a three trillion dollar company now. They still act like an underdog sometimes. And so

1:17:55 I think a lot about what would a benevolence Elder Statesman of Apple. If they sort of acted like, Hey, we won. We have hundreds of millions of dollars and they there's very little that

1:18:07 It hurt them. Except hubris. Companies don't die from competition, they usually die from suicide. Whether it's flying too close to the sun or trying to over optimize the last penny. From

1:18:19 Everything. In ways that lock and users aren't sort of freedom promoting. I could see that. hurting them. Majorly.

1:18:26 So I wanna see the opposite. I wanna see like a really vibrant Google, Apple, Microsoft, et cetera. And actually Microsoft is probably the best example of this. Used to be quite Competitive, quite anti competitive, obviously. Mm-hmm. And has become quite benevolent over the past decade.

1:18:40 And one of the most amazing turnarounds. And runs. Yeah. 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.

1:18:54 What are some of the Lesser known Tools of competition. More like invisible tools of competition in the sense that Someone or platform

1:19:06 or fill in the blank larger company making say a messaging service break five percent of the time or be ten percent slower. That's sort of an invisible means of leverage. I would have to imagine there are examples of Under the umbrella term of say privacy.

1:19:24 You could also see some really incredible sort of competitive pressuring slash. Crushing slash fill in the blank. As someone who's worked in technology, understands technology, as an operator and individual contributor, can code, and who also is right in the middle of the switchbox. So you

1:19:43 See a lot. You get to test a lot. That is behind the scenes. What are some of the lesser known Tools of sort of invisible competition. Yeah. So I'll talk about things that are publicly known and people have been caught about. Yeah. Versus all the secret things we didn't know. Okay.

1:20:01 Twitter under Elon Musk got caught. Every single link you click on Twitter. goes through T dot co, a redirect service. 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

1:20:16 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 to load, like Lower conversion, et cetera. What else has been caught? Google got caught for They created this format called AMP. accelerated mobile pages.

1:20:31 It was to design 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'cause I think the people who working on AMP didn't even know this. I think they were actually like

1:20:46 True believers in the sort of improving the web type of thing. Certainly we didn't know this, but there was something in AMP that also like blocked I'm not gonna get this right, but it like blocked header bidding or something basically made it harder for other advertising networks. to run on these pages. The way that benefit Google. And I think Google particularly has sharp elbows around advertising stuff. Um the greatest moneymaker in the history of the internet, you mean?

1:21:08 I get why they uh 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? The I'm not sure which one. I've seen a few of his presentations. He has a new one. It's basically about regulatory capture.

1:21:25 It's the name is a number of miles, like twenty seven ninety one. He kinda goes through a number of examples of where Yeah, whether it's Covet tests. This is one example. Walgreens or CVS here. There's three covet test brands.

1:21:39 And each one costs like twenty one ninety nine. This is, you know, a couple of years later. In Europe. 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?

1:21:55 And he kinda digs into it and oh the regulator Used to work at two of these companies actually. Like that's interesting. Like how's this all work? So How regulatory capture and he tells his story 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 come to you. Set up a conference room.

1:22:15 Then someone calls I'm like, Hey we do these like a fundraiser. It's usually like five grand a seat. And he's like okay. Then they call him back, he gets like six people together. And then they're like, You need a bigger room.

1:22:29 All of a sudden it becomes ten people. And then the the next thing was something like We'd love all the people who are 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 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 wifi.

1:22:47 And it was being blocked by the telecom companies. Yeah, the Comcast and Verizons of the world were blocking this. So It's a great presentation. I 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

1:23:06 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

1:23:18 lawful good to use D D parlance, or is it just simply 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. Probably really underhanded ways. So it's as much

1:23:34 Defense as offense. Mm-hmm. 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, well, 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 like a lot of people do X, you should really do the opposite of X.

1:24:01 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. Very important 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 one password.

1:24:22 There's also this new thing coming out called pass keys. You know, I have seen this and I don't know what it means, so I would actually love a A one on one. This is kind of a new thing for your audience. If a server supports bash keys, 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.

1:24:44 Mm. And it's kinda built into the OS in a really secure way and it's unique. You know, like thing that breaks my heart is when people use the same password on multiple services. Never do that. Oh, my passwords are like super random, like forty character. I couldn't tell you if I wanted to. But you know you generate'em.

1:25:00 And that's kinda 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? Are these kind of like private keys and private messaging like PGP am I making that up? I think it's P GP stands for pretty good privacy. This is like a key exchange. Yeah, what's actually happening? I know this is probably gonna get way above my pay grade quickly, but Password, I understand. Mm-hmm. Well, to the extent that I think I understand. And this is actually I'm not sure the exact length of the key or or anything like that. But imagine it like you have A really unique super long password.

1:25:31 Couple thousand characters. Mm-hmm. that is then stored in the secure enclone 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

1:25:46 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.

1:25:57 Hm effectively. So if you've you've used like SSH before, probably. Yeah, you can do that with a key. They can type in a password? Or you can have

1:26:05 Uh public key stored on the server. Which He's not sensitive, so we could have access to a public key and not get to anything. And then your private key, which is secret. And there's that calculation done between those which says oh, this is really Jim or the The person with the key. Got it. Okay.

1:26:19 Pas case to revisit. What else are you excited about? Dr. Mullenwick. Work Camp Asia. This is actually a joint thing. Yes. Let's talk about this. So this is something I am

1:26:30 Very excited about and I need to finesse some details to make sure it's gonna work, but What are we talking about? We've had some pretty epic travel adventures. We've had some It's been a while. It has been a while. We've hung out more in like home bases and things, but they're kind of traveling. We've been all over. We've been to Vietnam. Yeah. To Turkey. Yeah, grease.

1:26:50 Breeze. Been all over. And actually the only time I've said 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.

1:27:03 And they weren't letting us board. I remember. And this was kinda early, like not everyone spoke English or something. And you like start breaking out some mandarin. I remember that somehow got us on the plane. I don't I still don't know what you said. I remember that. 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 breakdancers in the background. I still have that on my bookshelf. It brings back some great memories.

1:27:30 Yes, I've never been to Taiwan. Uh so work in Beijer March seventh through ninth. You graciously agreed to come and part of like the pitch, which also I want to do is like take a few days off afterwards and explore the country. Yeah. So Yeah, we'll probably get you in on the last day or something,'cause I'll do a few days with all the WordPress stuff and then uh It's just to spoil the food. I've heard so many good things about Taiwan. Yeah. It's also one of those places that

1:27:51 Kind of like Hong Kong fifteen years ago, like Maybe you could visit. Yeah. Geopolitical hotspots. 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.

1:28:04 Yeah, but say we gotta figure out what you're doing at Work Camp 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. It is a cool audience. Gotta get to some night markets. So I don't know if you knew this, but I So I've spent time. all over East Asia. Have lived my time in Japan, in various parts of China. I've spent time in Taiwan, most recently in Korea, which completely blew my mind. Loved, loved, loved Seoul, which is 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

1:28:39 This is way before tech made anything easy. Cause this would have been Ninety Eight, ninety nine, maybe? In that range, somewhere around there, maybe ninety seven actually. And

1:28:54 A hilarious story. I remember going on these really rough bulletin boards where English with Like physical or like online? Online. Both words. And the English was not always Super straightforward or easy to understand. I was doing my best. And

1:29:11 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 home stay.

1:29:26 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 home stay. 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 wow. It's like a tabletop. This is where your back got messed up. I was like, Oh boy, I'm really gonna have to figure out a plan B. And I had this woman at one point, I was clearly lost, approach me on the street. And offer to help me.

1:29:59 Which I've just due to a host of reasons I was wary of, I was like, uh, I'm not sure if I want my it just seems uncommon here for this to be a viable offer without strings attached, turned out to be a good Samaritan She owned two restaurants in Taipei. She was like, you know what?

1:30:18 I come by any time, introduce me to all of her friends, so I ended up just getting adopted by this woman and her Basically like Ratitou restaurant family. It's amazing. And people are fundamentally good. You know, I am leaning, I do lean. I wish I had less of this on the Hobbsian side, so You're a good influence on me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In this case Absolutely delivered on on that premise.

1:30:43 And just had the Best time and Taiwan has these fantastic night markets. It is uh at the time it's perfect for me because I was such a night owl and like a very late night cultural. You'll 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 eleven 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. And Absolutely loved it. Had a wonderful time and that was a long time ago now. I mean I'm trying to del you know run in the basic math here and it's like

1:31:14 twenty Thirty years ago. I mean that's a long time ago. And uh For that reason and many more, also that we haven't taken a trip together internationally. Low. Like a real trip.

1:31:25 We've collided in various places in Italy, briefly, like boom, like a little fine. Yeah, a little like course collision. Although actually you know what I take it back, Antarctica. That was a real trip. Oh yeah, that's a real trip. 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? About two weeks. Yeah. Not I mean exploration, yes, but with lots of constraints, right? Like don't wander off random wander. Yeah, don't wander off and fall into a one kilometer like crevasse and die. Don't do that. All right. So WordCamp Asia. What were the dates on that again? Roughly March seventh to ninth? All right.

1:32:01 Yeah, Tim's gonna be speaking. So that's that's exciting. I love how I keep saying I need to finesse in the details. But Matt is committing on my behalf. I am I would like to make it happen. I really this is a priority. So that is in there. What else do you expect about? It kinda ties into that. All right. Something I haven't told you. Which is I am taking a sabbatical in twenty twenty four. Sabbatical.

1:32:23 Yeah, so automatic has its 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.

1:32:34 Is if you don't take it until you're seven. You don't get another one until year twelve. 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.

1:32:51 I'm the biggest hypocrite in eighteen years. I've 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 gonna be officially on sabbatical. Um Honestly, terrifying?

1:33:09 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 in the internet. A lot of people get weird in Antarctica. In fairness. Yeah. So I'm gonna try to do some detox, maybe some silent retreats. Yeah, working on hobbies. Chess, sailing. Bing Ba just.

1:33:28 Unplug stuff. But honestly I'm kinda scared too. So I've got one or two dates that are in there, uh friend surgery This WordCamp. But I'm just gonna show up like a attendee. I'll speak or something, but like

1:33:40 I'm not gonna like help plan it or do anything like that. So Even we're gonna have a board meeting in there. And it's gonna be a good practice. talked about this with the team, like what we gonna do about this. It's like well I'll go to the board meeting, but I'll go to it like a board Not like someone who

1:33:54 Plan out the agenda and everything like that. So I'll get the material Well the other board members get it. versus, you know, the multi week period you know planning process and everything. So I would imagine you're generally a fairly important quarterback slash Primary actor in board meetings.

1:34:10 So who is going to be presenting this information? Leaders in the company. Leaders in the company. 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 sceptical. Because

1:34:26 You've already mentioned a number of Things that are in that businessy things that you've allowed to slide in with some semblance of I'm just an observer. Two things. Two things. Yeah. And it's partially.

1:34:41 I guess I could I could skip the board meeting. I'm kinda curious though for this experience. So It's driven right now by curiosity. So the benefit

1:34:50 Yeah, a lot of people think obviously the benefits To the person. You get the three months. Pay time off. So that's pretty cool. We now have people who've Done multiple.

1:34:57 'Cause they've been an automatic ten or fifteen 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 is the last one. 'Cause after this they're gonna be in college. I'll never get this amount of time with them. Probably again for a long time.

1:35:12 But there's also a benefit to the organization. It's funny, one people think 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 Sure, right.

1:35:26 Two If someone's out for like two weeks or three weeks, you just wait for them to come back. You don't actually look at the systems. At to which they are in the critical path for. When it's two or three months.

1:35:38 The organization needs to figure out how to work without that person. And so It's a great opportunity to identify those bottlenecks. Actually some financial service firms require this. For auditing reasons. 'Cause if someone's in a critical path of some financial thing.

1:35:52 It's actually a good practice for 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.

1:36:03 So this was inspired by the former CEO of Automatic, Tony Schneider. We just did this'cause he's cool and he did like a three month road trip with his family. At the time he was CO I was president. Gave me an opportunity. To practice being a CEO.

1:36:16 Then 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. First thought. If you had a thousand people do spectacles Or however.

1:36:30 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 work week is the mini retirement.

1:36:50 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 forum where you have anything like this? As of

1:37:07 Today no But probably by the time it gets this gets published at automat.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 not exist. Yeah. It'll be just slash sabbatical. So a lot of people blog about their experience.

1:37:23 And there's really all types. Some people like have walked the El Camino for a couple of months, or done like the Pacific Coast crest thing. Some people just stay at home. And chill out. Yeah, something like it's really it's all over the map. I don't think there's a right way to do it.

1:37:37 Except hopefully not just do what you were doing before. And we do kind of like really strongly encourage people unplug. Actually someone just who's on sabbatical pink me on Slack. 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.

1:37:55 At the end of the sabbatical. I'll put a child lock on my phone or something and like I'll give you the covet. The end of the sabbatical. The spadical was a huge success. Why has it been a huge success? 'Cause there's doing it.

1:38:10 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 Yeah. In theory be on sabbatical, but in practice be a lurker on all sorts of different business calls and meetings. Oh that would that would be pretty terrible. Uh it would be. So what would success look like? And I actually something I'm debating is'cause you know, I do love coding and computer stuff. And so like playing around with like L E D 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 off.

1:38:47 So what's success? Oh. It's kinda what we talked about for the organization should come back a lot stronger. And people should get A lot more robust.

1:38:54 What success for you? I'm most interested in Matt Mollenwick. I think for me is Adam recharged. Yeah, the funny thing is people come back really wanting to work. And a typical thing I hear is like kinda takes a month to unplug for your brain to like reset. Mont two, you just enjoy things. Mont three, people start to get antsy to return. Which is

1:39:13 I don't know if that'll happen to me, but that's a pretty common Ark. So I hope I come back with like a renewed energy. Yeah, it's this last Yeah, 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.

1:39:28 And I am a little toasty. To be honest. Like Not burnt out, but like Definitely at times Like a little more stressed than normal.

1:39:37 Where it's really getting to me. And you always talk about how I'm so calm like Thank you. But also like And I'm human too, so it gets me. The duck on the pond.

1:39:46 So I think that's the thing I'm looking forward to. What am I scared of? It'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.

1:40:02 It's not maybe not practical at automatic, but like it there's something there. Is the needing you and relevance those the same in your mind or those different things? They're probably different. versions like relevance is maybe in a global context or in the company context. And needing you as maybe even maybe like interpersonal.

1:40:18 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. Yeah. In a way that's not healthy. That's one of the questions I ask myself. Or

1:40:33 If you get a lot of benefit. And I do sometimes. You came in and saved the thing. Yeah, that feels really nice. Especially in like a CEO job or

1:40:41 Job which is very morphous, people are like, What do you actually do? Mm-hmm. 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.

1:40:53 Absolutely. He has some very good questions. He has some very good questions. My favorite is how am I complicit? Creating the conditions I say I don't want. Such a good question. It's one of the best ones. Yeah. Mm-hmm. So I think success for me is also, yeah, just come back really energized, excited.

1:41:10 Hopefully with a lot of inspiration and ideas.'Cause I get a lot of inspiration from my art or stuff outside of WordPress. Recharge I mean they're different. Ways one can use that word. Are we talking about I would imagine we're talking about recharge.

1:41:22 Physically, intellectually. Etc. Multiple levels. Definitely want to dial on hell stuff. What With that. Potentially look like it's a little bit more. Getting that outside. Forcing him to do a two mile jogging. Sunlight, nature.

1:41:36 Nothing novel. This is all like the basic stuff you talk about about the street. Yeah, and 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. And yeah, there's like the the weird food that's like a gel or something. Like There's now a delivery service for that. So like get your soil and green in a bottle and I'm actually pretty excited about it. It looks like we got dry. Yeah, I'll just do some experiments there.

1:42:05 So I asked you What success might look like. Yeah. Made some headway there. I can ask a million follow ups, but I'm gonna ask a different question. It's looking at The sabbatical from

1:42:16 Perhaps the opposite side, which is let's say after the sabbatical You or maybe just the people closest to you are like Yeah. Sbattical didn't really work out. Kinda failed. What do you think are the most likely

1:42:31 Temptations or slipping points or issues. It could. Compromise the sabbatical. Well somehow my health got worse over it. Yeah, so

1:42:42 Like a lot of 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. Like a hiddenistic treadmill type thing. And it's nice sometimes. I mean, About to the holidays.

1:42:59 Nice meal on vacation, or but if that becomes your all the time. Mm-hmm. We've seen that happen to friends who've been successful and Typically does not look great. Yeah. The brief history of the world guy, the amazing historian.

1:43:11 Has a great quote about that. Oh, you're thinking about Will Durant? Yeah, Durants. I'm gonna read it actually. Okay. While you're looking that up, I'll just say I'm interested in what temptations'cause I could name mine, like what temptations you think you need to be

1:43:26 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 think I need to be careful about that.

1:43:38 Mm, particularly my Twitter X addiction. News consumption? My most dangerous is where something Is sometimes productive or has some positive

1:43:47 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 can just take your entire sabbatical off of social media, just delete them all from your phone, not use them at all?

1:44:01 Be interesting. I mean they'd still be there when you came back. You know enough people if you really, really I wanna get on the phone while I'm walking outside in the sun. And talk to

1:44:10 Someone like Cyan or rune. And just be like, Hey, would you mind just giving me like the Can you tweet it to me? things going on right now in your field.

1:44:21 And I'll trade because I'm excited to share blah blah blah. Like you can do that. That's a good idea. I'm sure you can do that. I like these ideas. Keep them coming. Um Wilderant. This is from Fallen Leaves. Which is that post humus book. Health lies in action.

1:44:34 And so it graces youth. To be busy is the secret of grace. And half the secret of contents. Let us ask the gods not for possessions. But for things to do.

1:44:44 Happiness is in making things rather than in consuming them. Mm-hmm. That is amazing. Isn't that beautiful? That is. Can you send that to me, please? Yeah. Will durant I mean just was it Will and Ariel? So prolific.

1:44:57 And also So incredibly good at crafting Pros. I mean. Mm.

1:45:05 Did you read the Fallen Leaves book? No. Yeah. It's neat, it's on life. Right.

1:45:12 And I guess it was discovered after he passed, like the manuscript. Wow. And so like many years, like thirty years after he passed or something. Incredible. I'm calling it the semantical Well Yaga de TikTok. Matt is a specialist in uh dad jokes. This began I mean it may have become in the delivery room for all I know.

1:45:32 Okay, let's we may come back. I'm sure with 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. 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. Change my mind on nuclear. Actually.

1:45:52 Okay, from what to what? 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 That was kinda anti nuclear.

1:46:03 Chernobyl, et cetera. And now I'm Pretty fully convinced that is necessary. We should be building as many of these plants as possible and it's gonna be an amazing part of the bridge to more carbon free future. And you see that in small scale reactors with less likelihood of

1:46:21 Technical problems and issues. Yeah. All of the above. Let's take the things that work. They're expensive. Like we need to get better at building stuff. Like China's really kicking her butt here. You stop turning ones off that were running. So like that sort of stuff, like stop shooting ourselves in the foot.

1:46:35 Is that what happened with Germany? You know, when they turn a bunch of stuff off, but then now turning it back on. So This is going the right way. And there's a lot of investment in the tech here.

1:46:44 And so, you know. Let the Bill Gates startup and the other ones and the Sam Altman startup like Let'em shift. And nuclear in this case. refers to fission. We're talking about fission.

1:46:54 Yes, and there could be breakthroughs around other things. But People are scared of this, but also like the US 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.

1:47:10 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. Yeah. But you know. Sometimes we do the wrong thing and we figure it out. So nuclear is one of them.

1:47:24 Psedelics. Tell me. Yeah, 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 sillyly.

1:47:37 I'm very pro legalization. In a lot of ways. And like for weed, for example. I think there's some interesting stuff coming out. round like marijuana, which I had kinda not heard any bad stuff about. Where like, Oh, this can actually create some risk for psychosis. There's I used to make fun of these things, right? Like the the old documentaries were like you should one blind shoot go crazy, like re for madness. Refer 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

1:48:06 The good and the bad of these molecules and how to use them safely. 'Cause 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.

1:48:19 Yeah, for sure. So that's it changed your mind on, or that's Yeah. I think I used to be like very much super pro just open legalization of everything. Like So eighteen or above. Or twenty one or above, you can just get it in any store, whatever you want, whenever you want. And Now questioning that.

1:48:33 Here's 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 about it privately, too. I mean I would say that. Net net if you were to talk to Say my Ex girlfriends, I talk more people out of psychedelics than I talk into. By a very wide margin, I'd say.

1:48:51 Like eight or nine out of ten. would be a case of dissuasion and not persuasion. And th there are a few reasons for that. One is If someone's looking for a quick fix And by the nature of their questions.

1:49:07 and requests, it is clear to me they're not going to do they're almost certainly not going to do any preparation or integration afterwards. which you could compare I mean I often compare it to say serious knee surgery or shoulder replacement surgery. Whereby You're gonna do a lot of due diligence. You're going to do probably strengthening and a number of prehab

1:49:31 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. And I think Gould Dolan is an example, who's been on the podcast and

1:49:49 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 sixty seven percent full remission. Or the best other alternative is like fifteen percent or something. Not even close. They're just universes apart. But the importance of the

1:50:22 weeks following 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 gonna read any books. I'm not I don't have time for A B C D E, but I do have fifteen minutes. Should I do five M D M T. I'm like absolutely not. No, you shouldn't. Well and so many of these things are XYZ assisted therapy. And so the assisted therapy part is is really pretty. I would say furthermore There has been historically

1:50:49 And by historically I mean recent history, in the last, say, ten 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,'cause I'm actually I want some new molecules. Yeah.

1:51:17 I mean like I'm fine. Can they engineer something that maybe doesn't have some of the downside. Sure. I am all for novel innovation, but people should not be rewarded with patents that can be used to potentially restrict manufacturer of related compounds if they are not Producing something. that is truly novel with some utility. That's my perspective. 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

1:51:47 Something like LSD. and modify it slightly such that it is more of what people might call a psychopastogen. So it's not producing a psychedelic effect, but it can be used in an outpatient setting for something like cluster headaches. Maybe shorter. Yeah. Fantastic. I do have we could talk about this for hours, but I do think the We're talking about Munger and Buffett earlier, right? Never ask a barber if you need a haircut. I think it's very important to consider

1:52:12 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

1:52:29 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

1:52:45 An experience that is ten to fifteen minutes in length in earth time. I have a lot of questions to ask before I would endorse something Like that. Suffice to say. the conversation has been heavily biased towards positive stories.

1:53:00 And I think maybe Overly so. Yeah, because people who went through the winter are like, Hey, let's not Easy does it. And I I think I kinda fell for that a little bit. Yeah. There's a huge survivorship bias. I think that's gonna 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 ten years, just name a time. So two thousand fifteen.

1:53:23 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. Two

1:53:40 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 soul cybin assisted session, even though they have No outstanding pre existing issues outside of say hypertension has a heart attack and dies in session.

1:53:59 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 There's no known L D fifty in terms of lethal dose fifty that would kill, say, fifty percent of a a random sampling of thousand people.

1:54:18 So physiologically it's very well tolerated. But These experiences can be very intense, and they're not Well suited to all people. nor all conditions. Let's just take schizophrenia as an example. It's just enough people do anything. People die at Disney World every day. Yeah. No, exactly. So it's also a case where

1:54:36 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 payous 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

1:54:57 The sample size to date. Tens of thousands of people? Probably who have done generous. Who have done Guided sessions. Typically at high cost. Off in white glove service, let's just call it.

1:55:10 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's psychotherapy five years from now. And when you go from ten thousand to twenty to a hundred thousand Shit's gonna 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 up shipping millions of pills. Like 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

1:55:41 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.

1:55:58 You need to be incredibly thought. It's a good analogy. 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 plasticity. That was my big fear. I'm like, hey.

1:56:27 I like my mind. I like my life. I don't want to like stir anything up or like uh sure I want to throw that plateau in the microwave. Right? So that's a lot of um of my particularly successful friends, their nervousness around it. Yeah. And I've also seen huge positive impacts on many, many people. So 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 kinda like I'm just curious, should I go into the reactor and play with some rods? I'm like well

1:56:58 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 I began use specifically, which is very interesting. Wow, you took it there. No, I did, because it has known cardiac risk. People can die using I began unlike Some of these more

1:57:23 better known classical psychedelics where there's very low document physiological risk. I began 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 on the streets, who's at risk of suicide or overdose or fill in the blank. It's a question of

1:57:48 Comparison. In which case I think it's an incredibly promising avenue worth exploring and there are ways to mitigate some of that risk Doctor Nolan Williams is doing. It could be a shot out of there. It kinda brings me to my next changed mind thing, which is perhaps the antidote to some of this. Which is breath work.

1:58:05 All right. I think I Thought breathwork was just kinda Whatever. Yeah. Dumb. And then there's a million versions of it, right? Yeah. There's apps for like other ships. There's the Wim Hof stuff. There's all these sorts of different things.

1:58:20 I also like we had a friend from like Esland who was like Oh yeah. All the hippies who like did a ton of stuff in the seventies don't actually take stuff anymore. They just do breath work now. And so so these things came in from different areas. I've just started exploring a lot more. It's incredibly powerful.

1:58:34 We've been playing with a shift wave chair, right? Which kinda 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 could 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.

1:58:52 Mm-hmm. And so There's something cool if that's perhaps a unlock. Mm. A more calm in our state or like access to different things. So what has been your personal experience? With breath work.

1:59:04 I feel like there's breath work that can make me sleepy, I feel like there's breath work that helps me focus. I feel like there's breath work. It's a Tony Robbins thing, you do like this, great like there there's stuff to like give you energy. So Particularly I I'm very interested in Let me get these rotated.

1:59:19 Indog Solutions versus X. Exogenous. Exogenous, yeah. Have another green tea or something if I'm tired in the afternoon.

1:59:28 What's the 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. Well, yeah, endoskeleton is probably what we have, I guess. Although you don't really we just call it a skeleton. Breathwork so I Would second that. And say that

1:59:51 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, okay, first thing you do is you're gonna do thirty days of the introductory course on the Waking Up app.

2:00:11 From Sam Harris. So good. You're gonna combine that with reading Awareness by Anthony DeMelo. And After the second week or after the after four weeks you're going to do a holotropic breath work course. There are a lot of facilitators and it's a term that is

2:00:27 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

2:00:40 You should do at least a weekend course with Hul Triple 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

2:01:05 This is fantastic. I'm gonna continue meditating and The breathwork 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

2:01:22 in any way escalating things. It's always with you. Yeah. 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.

2:01:34 AKA psychedelics. If you're not willing to do four weeks Of things that will benefit you anyway? You shouldn't throw your plate on the microwave. Because there's a chance something goes sideways.

2:01:45 Or that you get destabilized and it requires Some really concerted effort with support staff, some type of safety net. Two 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

2:02:07 for someone going through a deep depression'cause one of the things about depression It can be hard. To take a shower, to do that, you know thirty days of the thing. So Do you have like

2:02:18 Breakouts or things you recommend to interrupt that cycle? multifaceted beast. And for people who don't have the context, I uh for My entire adult life certainly Although the frequency and severity has changed substantially in the last ten 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

2:02:46 Search. Tim Ferris 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 I've written. Very Proud of that post.

2:03:01 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. Yeah. But

2:03:12 Number one, I'm not a doctor. I don't play one on the internet, but I do have a lot of personal experience 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.

2:03:26 When you're severely depressed. There are People who get almost into uh catatonia. I actually so this year I experienced it for the first time. No kidding. Yeah, very close loved ones going through chemotherapy.

2:03:39 And it was interesting. It hit me quite hard. Which is felt dumb as well'cause I'm not going through it myself. But what really like woke me up is I usually

2:03:50 You hear me talk about WordPress not a I'm so excited about it. Mm. There was a day I just looked at my computer, I was like, Oh, I don't care about this. Mm-hmm. That never happened before. Yeah. And that was the wake up, I was like, Oh man. Everything seems kinda 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.

2:04:11 'Cause I I do want to know your answer. For me some of the External conditions changing? So the chemo getting better and better and ending. That's part of it.

2:04:19 So that's not a great answer, because Sometimes your external conditions still suck. Yeah. Or bad things happen. You can lose loved ones. I got really strict about Exercise.

2:04:29 I cut out all alcohol. Like, okay, I just need to like Detox, cleanup. Be like kind of monk mode. And

2:04:36 I think that's all I know how to do. Sleep. You know, try to like I probably uninstalled Twitter at that point. Yeah, it was just really like it's kinda things that are on my list anyway. But you know, day to day I would say

2:04:50 I try to hit a lot of these things and I'm casual about some. Yeah. So I'll make a couple of recommendations. I I I'm very cautious about making broad prescriptions because there's so many different varieties, right? There is 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.

2:05:09 And there's a Those are entirely different species. Closer to that first one from the experience, 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

2:05:27 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 happy and fulfilled right now and I've found tools that help to

2:05:43 Stabilize and Facilitate that. Not a hundred percent of the time, because I'm still part of the human experience. Yeah. So I would just say you're not alone and if it's an acute

2:05:54 experience please call suicide hotline and I'll put that in the show notes. But if you search my name, Tim Ferris, 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 it has been helpful for a lot of folks. And that also

2:06:17 I think just allows people to remove some of the self judgment from the experience because there's the experience 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

2:06:37 Who the fuck are you kidding? Are you joking right now? Like 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 and it makes it a lot worse. So that that post I just mentioned, which I'll link to in the show notes, has helped some people with that. You know, 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

2:07:08 of psychiatry at Yale, which was effectively an everything You uh would ever want to know about ketamine episode. And I think for Acute suicidal ideation and risk of self harm. intravenous or I M ketamine is very interesting as a pattern interrupt.

2:07:25 And that episode is available for folks. There are risks associated with ketamine. There is a d addiction potential. It is something to keep an eye on. But Again, risky compared to what? If someone's at risk of acute self harm, then it's generally well tolerated. Meaning it doesn't suppress respiration. It is

2:07:45 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 it dinner'cause we haven't talked about it. is something called accelerated TMS. And this is transcranial magnetic stimulation. So the various types of brain stimulation for Addressing.

2:08:08 treatment resistant depression and anxiety. There are some newer protocols like the S protocol, which was developed at Stanford. that are incredibly interesting and way faster too,'cause the old treatments sort of take like thirty days, an hour a day, or something like that. The new ones are way faster. Way faster. So you're taking Treatments it would otherwise take. A month or two and compressing it into five days. Well.

2:08:28 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.

2:08:45 fast acting and durable than some of the psychedelic assist therapies. And I bought it as well,'cause we have friends. that won't ever take a psychedelic or some of these things. So there's actually there's whole religions. There's Mormons, LDS, et cetera. So some of the stuff I think is like a really cool accessibility, kinda like the same way breath work can be. Absolutely. And for people who might be older, a little frail, or with different conditions, higher blood pressure, et cetera. A lot of these folks should not touch psychedelics. They just should not. The risk profile doesn't make sense.

2:09:14 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 disorder, a lot of folks who maybe lean more towards the this is not a medical term, but like Chaotic. Or like entropic.

2:09:32 disorders versus hyper rigidity disorders like O C D. I would consider chronic anxiety and depression to be r also rigidity. Issues on some level because they are often thought loops, things that repeat. There is a stuckness, whereas something like schizophrenia, which I've have seen up close and personal,

2:09:51 Has a different feeling to it. 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 like having a hard couple of weeks, and he mentioned Tony Robbins earlier, I will mention something that I learned from him. I don't know if he's the original source of this, but

2:10:09 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 a f let's call it a flow chart. That's an overstatement. And it said State. in all caps with an arrow that went to story. And then that went to strategy. So state.

2:10:29 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.

2:10:42 They go straight to strategy. What should I do? The challenge there is that if you're looking at the world through Grey glasses. the story that you're gonna come up with is going to be

2:10:54 Most likely a disabling story. And then you're going to come up with strategies that Uh By and large, pretty ineffective. If on the other hand you start with state, so if you're in a low energy state, you

2:11:08 hop in a cold shower for five minutes. Or you do fifty jumping jacks or you do twenty pushups, anything to change your state from a low energy state to a higher energy state. And that's govern 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

2:11:27 Because of changes in neurotransmitters or Any number of things. you have a more enabling story. So you've turned the gray, maybe a a tint or two. Brighter.

2:11:40 then the strategies you come up with are gonna 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

2:11:56 Oh, I'm always pessimistic. I've never been able to fix this. You're starting at a deficit. You have a severe handicap and coming up with approaches that are gonna help you. So that might be helpful to people as well. Like state, story, strategy. That is the order.

2:12:12 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? Mm. Are you drinking water? So sleep water and then

2:12:21 We've been in nature. Mm. It's good checklist. I like that'cause it's three. Yeah. And so sometimes I just do like a check and be like, Ah man, this morning's so tough. I felt like I Wasn't great in that meeting.

2:12:31 And I was just like can run that. Yeah. Sometimes the body scan I also ask myself like am I hangry? Yeah. You know? The basics. System. 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

2:12:53 Excellent advice, which came out not too long ago. Great book. Very pithy, and one of them is if if you don't know what you need, chances are it's sleep. And or 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. Mm-hmm.

2:13:17 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 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.

2:13:40 In that picture. Mm-hmm. 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 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.

2:14:03 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 D 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 my sister's selfish. She only does what she wants.

2:14:20 You would then Create alternative senses. 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.

2:14:35 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 you have to come up with confirming evidence for statements

2:14:54 That were not your starting statement. I find D Fangs. Your beliefs which are Thoughts we take to be true. Like that a lot. Take it back to Charlie Munker. He says you should be able to

2:15:05 Argue the opposite. Yeah. Just as well as you can argue your case. Yeah. You get thrown on stage, you gotta be Bernanke, like

2:15:13 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. So

2:15:24 I'm just gonna read this because it was ridiculous. Twenty percent Of eighteen to twenty nine year olds. Did you hear this? No. Do you agree with the statement the Holocaust was a myth?

2:15:33 Agreed with it. They have the chart of the difference. Sixty five plus it was like zero percent. Yeah. Or like point one or something. And then like It goes up to this eighteen to twenty nine, twenty percent.

2:15:45 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 that Is this an adversarial thing? Like is this another country like Goosing the algorithm a little bit.

2:16:00 In a way that Yeah, is Very scary misinformation. Yeah, it's terrifying. I mean imagine.

2:16:08 What a geopolitical advantage it would be to be able to Just very uh ever so slightly nudge sentiment about X. Or person Y. In a certain direction.

2:16:19 Our social networks are not allowed in China. There's no Facebook, there's no Twitter X, there's no like 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 free society, we should have everything like

2:16:32 That's dumb. Trump tried to Get rid of it. I was like, Oh, you know. Now I'm like huh.

2:16:38 And it was that stat that kinda like Blew my mind. Got some absurd things. Logging. I think it's absurd.

2:16:44 And it's beautiful. Absurd meaning it's like a horse and buggy in the modern world of clips and video and And AI? It feels that way sometimes. Right? Like everyone's like on to something else. I guess newsletters are kinda like blogging, but like You know what? There's something so beautiful about doing it. I've been doing a lot more this year. It's one of the most rewarding things of my year.

2:17:03 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. That's incredible. Back to publishing is incredibly vulnerable. Scary.

2:17:20 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 like the best

2:17:33 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.

2:17:45 So the volume of comments and so on is less. But there are exceptions, right? If I go to say the the Derek Sivers blog and I look at his comment section. Amazing comment section. If I look at Tyler Cowans.

2:17:58 Comments. Pretty good. Although mixed, there's a lot of He moderates it. And he better himself. He moderates himself. So I think that's that's the secret. You have to participate yourself. He posed a question was like the most underrated geniuses of all time and he nominated Beethoven or I'm I'm screwing it up, but it was some classical music composer and there was an amazing Discuss in the comments. Mm-hmm. Which of course. May have been, as I think you're implying.

2:18:23 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 Yeah, what you allow.

2:18:32 That sets the standard and people follow that. Also SEO kinda screws it up'cause 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.

2:18:47 Vienna sausages? You know the sausages in the can? I have no idea what you're talking about. Oh wow. So there's this thing called Vienna sausages. Okay Um, I have no idea if they're from Vienna, but it's like they're kind of like um how many, six or seven sausages in like a little can like this? Okay. I used to have it as a kid. Uh makes me think they're not from Vienna. I I usually am not allowed to shop for myself because I I'm basically like a gummy bears 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 gonna be healthy. You know? And so I brought it home. As an adult, you're saying. Oh, this was uh like last month. Okay, all right, got it.'Cause I was like, I'll put it in my desk drawer. I like to keep like healthy snacks by my desk and where I work.

2:19:26 And I just assumed it's sausage. Must be like You know the punchline that's coming. It's terrible for you. You me 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'd change my mind on that. And so I was I was saying, Oh yeah, I had a healthy lunch, some vanish sausage. And someone was like A very close loved one was like, uh that's not healthy. I was like, Yeah, it is and like We Googled it and I was so wrong. Okay. So if you had a sausage sorry guys, you're on the suspended list.

2:19:57 This is a fun food one as well. Let's do it. Yeah, there's so much good Fancy pizza in San Francisco like flour and water, et cetera. One that I really like is called Delphina. Another thing perhaps with my Texas upbringing that I'm obsessed with is the sauce known as ranch.

2:20:11 Ranch. Yeah, ranch sauce. Ranch sauce. Like ranch dressing? Ranch dressing. Yeah. Sauce. See? This is why you're the chef. Yeah. Got it. Okay, ranch. I asked for a ranch in Delphina. Uh and they just scoffed. I have not been scoffed like that in a while. And then I tried this overseas where there was something, I asked for some ranch and it

2:20:35 It did not go well. I will now contrast at a restaurant called Knessa in San Francisco, a new one. Condessa or conessa? La conessa. Conessa, okay. And they have a lot of like ex Saison people. It's a casual restaurant, but it's really good service. They served amazing pizza. Uh the crust. I like to dip the crust in the the ranch.

2:20:53 And I was like Davenny Ranch. I was ready to be disappointed or scoffed at. 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'cause 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. And so I was like oh You just get those packets so I went on Amazon.

2:21:14 And I got like two hundred ranch packets. For like sixteen dollars or something. So these have now arrived. And I'm gonna it's gonna be my next what's in my bag. It's some pocket ranch. Pocket ranch. Yeah, you can 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. Pocket reach. I still insist on looking at every tab and email. And I'm tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands behind at this point.

2:21:44 I think I have five hundred tabs open right now. Wait what? This is an absurd thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You have five hundred tabs open in your browsers. Yeah. Yeah, okay. And the email thing is like

2:21:54 I'll even reply to emails from seven or eight years ago. I have like that folder. Stuff like And I go through it almost like masochistically. And the sad thing is like

2:22:04 On a third of them, it just bounces. People don't have to be able to do it. Why on earth are you replying to emails from seven or eight years ago? Is this just like your opus day penance? Like Just cat and nine tails on the back. I also like I'm not worthy. I've really appreciated people who have applied to me. One eye. Was nobody or anything like that.

2:22:23 And so I kinda wanna pay that for it a little bit. I also just am really impressed. I feel like there may be a point where you've sufficiently repaid that debt that you don't need to continue to crawl on your knees on broken glass with your Tab of the thing. This is absurd. So I'm still doing that. Yeah, maybe I'll work on that on my sabbatical. There you go. I'll just answer emails the whole time. Oh God. I'm kidding. I think you might have some of this as well. I have a very ultra critical eye.

2:22:49 And I've been constantly remodeling things instead of just enjoying They're 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. 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.

2:23:10 And now you're gonna see every time. So that is like a a curse as well, and I'd like to be able to turn it off. To just enjoy things as they are. The wobbi Sabby. Mm-hmm. How do you think you'll make any progress with that? No idea. Maybe someone can leave a car.

2:23:27 I become a bit better at this. There are cases where I succumb to This fine eye for detail. But I think that and this comes back to the depression question a little bit. I would push back on the idea that some of the interventions I mentioned, like

2:23:45 thirty 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 and this is very simple, right? Number one, the social return on say going to a weekend transcendental meditation training. Interacting with someone. Isn't it positive to begin with? So I'm assuming you can get out of bed. If you're crippled.

2:24:07 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 of this funk. Meditating twice a day for a week. I would say in the vast majority of cases, twenty minutes a session twice a day will make a difference. It creates a bit of space in the system.

2:24:27 And a little bit more space. It's like Taking your thought down to like point five X. So that there's a little bit more space. for you to be become aware of the stories and the voice and so on. But honestly just slowing down

2:24:44 Which 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 twenty minutes. I could just like lay down on the floor for twenty minutes. But proving to myself that I do not need to rush.

2:24:59 I have enough time. I have the luxury of being able to take two twenty 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 twenty minutes. Mm-hmm.

2:25:14 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 too. Except some of the Wabi Sobby stuff and where There's

2:25:29 Mm. Point of diminishing returns. where there's like improvement up to like Ninety percent right. If you want to improve it from ninety percent right to close to a hundred percent right, first of all you're almost never gonna get to a hundred percent because things change and things deteriorate.

2:25:44 But Let's just I'm making up a number here, but like let's just say it takes you fifty hours to get to ninety percent right. It'll take another fifty hours to do the last ten percent. 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 talk at dinner. But no, I think meditation can actually Be dangerous at certain levels.

2:26:04 Mm-hmm. So that's that's something we have to explore. For me And maybe it's our meditating as well. My system gets very sensitive. And very observant.

2:26:12 And I kind of also probably try to use meditation a little bit as like a mental exercise to improve like my cognition, my focus, other things. And That focus as well, like And sometimes.

2:26:24 Or just as sensitive to to the system. We know talking about Downsides of meditation like their And as someone who Loved blueberries.

2:26:32 They got so sensitive to their system they like can't eat blueberries anymore. From meditation? That's what they claim. Wow. And there's the pursuit of the Johnas, which is really big in San Francisco now. Like I gotta catch you up on a bunch of weird San Francisco stuff. Alright, so we'll get caught up in the weird San Francisco stuff. 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 Doctor Will be Britain. I'll put it in the show notes on the

2:26:57 hidden risks of meditation, actually. Oh cool. And and how they're addressed and how they overlap with a lot of the risks of psychedelics. I believe that, yeah. Which is not to say like Don't do it. Yeah, boogeyman in the closet like you're gonna do TM for twenty minutes and have your brain implode. Like I'm not saying of that is I think extremely low risk. So I'm thinking more like

2:27:19 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. Meditation was reserved for pretty select Group of folks. Who had a lot of supervision. So

2:27:33 Twenty minutes though, twice a day, I find helpful. For example Mutual friend of ours. Was at my house recently. And For whatever reason I'm in an older house.

2:27:45 And there are like eighty seven light switches. There's so many light switches. It's so unnecessary. And there's one panel with the switches that is like Ten percent turned. And he doesn't have

2:27:59 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. He's known me for a very long time. I was like, Yeah, this is like my daily practice is to look at that. That's cool. And be like, you know what? It's fine.

2:28:14 It's fucking fine. There are many other bigger fish to fry. And that in a way kinda 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 uh break everything. Any obsession you have with keeping your house perfect, I think goes out the window. Oh, yeah, yeah, it's gonna 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.

2:28:38 Alright. 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 mouth. It's a whole microbiome.

2:28:52 I guess as a mutation. On one of the bacteria. That they have Essentially GMO'd. A replacement.

2:29:00 So it's a The bacteria, I guess, normally produces lactic acid. The lactic acid is what breaks down your teeth. Creates cavities. In the eighties, I guess the scientists like discovered this

2:29:10 In one of a student's mouth, like it had two mutations. And they genetically modified it to add a few more. Basically One instead of lactic acid, it'll produce alcohol. Really trace'em out. So this is like

2:29:21 Not even one drop. It's not like a whiskey distiller in your mouth. That 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 gonna have to look it up now because I forgot two other four things. But

2:29:41 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.

2:29:50 Bacteria. And that becomes the dominant bacteria in your mouth. If you, you know, kissed a friend or something, doesn't spread. 'Cause they would need to have their mouth kind of existing stuff removed first. Yeah. Before the new. I guess the story is this guy tried to get a F Da approved.

2:30:07 Scientist. And he created a company around it. And the FDA was like You need

2:30:13 People like under thirty who have dentures. who live more than five miles from a school or something like that. So they created this really messed up Thing. So it's basically impossible. Some hackers. Heard about this story.

2:30:25 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. Libertarian. What's the name of that city that they they're created? Oh it's the crypto libertarian one. I'm blanking on the name.

2:30:42 So it's called Lantern BioWorks. Okay. I have no association, not investor anything. I'm thinking about trying this. It's a little absurd. Okay Lantern BioWorks. You go down, you get the treatment a one time thing. I guess when they're bootstrapping the company it'll be expensive like ten or twenty grand to make this a couple hundred dollars. Well because this libertarian city has like

2:31:03 Anything a consenting adult wants to do for like a bio treatment, you can do. As long as you're informed of the risk. So they're gonna like hopefully commercialise it so they can make it a couple of hundred bucks. And then finally they'll try to bring it back to the US I guess there's different regulations around probiotics.

2:31:18 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.

2:31:31 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 it 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 road. There's a different regulation around these probiotics. So if they can kinda get it reclassified as a probiotic I think they can maybe bring it into the US. But how cool

2:31:56 That may be in the future. We won't have cavities anymore.'Cause this'll 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.

2:32:06 That's my weird thing and then my funny thing. This is also my what's in my backpost. It's a little device, USB C of course. You never know when you're gonna need a party. So it plugs in. So this is like

2:32:19 A a disco ball that plugs into the bottom of the phone. Yeah, USB C. That's amazing. You can get adapters for lighting and different stuff. But uh yeah, especially with the holidays coming up, New Year's like just a little pocket party. Yeah. This is so 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, though what's in my back post? And I think this was like USB disco light. Okay. And literally you could cover the whole thing in your hand. It's very small, but it does look it. Pretty much exactly like a disc collier with USB C that you can. Oh.

2:32:54 Thank you. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. So great to hang, man. Likewise, this has been a lot of fun. Always, always a great time. We're gonna head out and 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, um Photomat, P H O T O M A T T. All the socials.

2:33:14 But really check out my blog. MA. T T. M. A. T T. Yeah. And we will add everything we talked about to the show notes so folks can peruse all of these things. There's gonna be a lot. at Tim.blog slash podcast. And search Mullenwig. 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.

2:33:37 Few years. Hence. And as always Till next time, be just a little bit kinder than is necessary, not just to other people, but to yourself. Remember that? Jack Cornfield.

2:33:49 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 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 kinda like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading.

2:34:29 albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast. guests and these strange 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 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.

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