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So go to helixsleep.com slash Tim to learn more. That's Helix Sleep HLIX Helix Sleep.com slash Tim. This is their best offer to date and it will not last long. So take a look with Helix better sleep starts now. Matthew, Maddie, Dr. Mullenweg, not a doctor, at all. In my heart of hearts, you're always a doctor. I think in Argentina, I got an honorary degree actually.
Really? In that country. I'm so jelly. Argentina, I've been back in 100 years, but we're not here to talk about my aspirations and dreams all of them maybe. Yeah, I hope to hear some. We'll dive in and out, Bob and Wave, for people who don't have context on the Argentine doctor, could you give people just a snapshot? Yeah, Matt Mullenweg, domain ma.tt, which is pretty fun. I guess I might have a domain ma.tt sometimes. Born and raised in Houston, Texas, a few hours from here in Austin.
At the age of 19, I co-founded open source software called WordPress, which is a blogging content management system. Fast forward 20 years, it's been 20 years now, and runs over a third of all websites in the world. A few years after that, I founded a company called Automatic, which is kind of like the for-profit side of commercializing things around WordPress. Automatic. It's e-t2. Yes, it's like any ecotistical founder, I snuck my name into the company.
And we started with just sort of a Kismet anti-spam and WordPress.com, kind of easy ways to get on with WordPress. But since it's expanded to e-commerce with WooCommerce, one I'll talk about with messaging, like we've done a number over 25 acquisitions. So we're trying to be like a digital Berkshire Hathaway, like a buyer, a first resort for amazing things on internet. Pretty much everything we do is open source or open web. So we bought Tumblr, so we run in Tumblr for the last few years.
Basically trying it, yeah. I would like future generations to grow up with a web that is more open, more free, gives more liberty. And so open source is really my life's work, even above WordPress, anything else. And yeah, I hope to work on it the rest of my life. You are one of the rare examples, and I'm so envious of this particular sort of mental state of focus that you have, which is this clarity on what you want to do.
Something you could do for the rest of your life, with that degree of certainty. It's something that's always struck me as rare and maybe not as a consequence of being rare, but precious in a sense. So I'm happy for you. I don't run across that much from a professional perspective. It's like, I want to do this for the rest of my life. I think it's because the open source freedom and liberty somewhat abstract. So there could be lots 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 on the last podcast around teaching, learning, education, lifelong. That's the rest of your life. 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 automax now over 1900 people in 97 countries. We were fully remote and distributed since 2005. So we've been kind of early on a few of those trends, open source distributed, etc. For people, and I know we've talked about this before and you've certainly talked about it in other places. But we're going to get into a lot of new territory. Before we do that, though, open source. Just for people who may not have familiarity with that term. What does that mean?
Normally, when you sign up for software, you click through that license, you know, that no one ever reads. RZ actually has Easter eggs in it just to see if anyone will find them. But yeah, most of those licenses are about all the rights you don't have. Sometimes you're not even allowed to look at the thing and see how it works. There's a whole right to repair movement right now where you can buy things that you're not even allowed to repair yourself.
Open source is the opposite. It's all about almost like a bill of rights for you as the user. WordPress belongs just as much to Tim Veris as it does to me, which is kind of amazing. There's rights and freedoms you have to use it for any purpose to modify it to see how it works, all these sorts of things that no one can take away from you.
Even myself as a co-founder or even if all the other developers got together, we all agreed to become evil. We couldn't take it away from you. It's that bill of rights as inalienable rights is the core of open source. And there's lots of examples. So like Wikipedia is open source applied to an encyclopedia right. It used to be really bad.
Carter encyclopedia Britannica will way better. But then over time lots of people working together made it better and better. And why did they work on it for free for fun and also because it belongs to them. So WordPress has many thousands, maybe probably tens of thousands of contributors at this point. Why do they do that? Is it Tom's story or painting the fence or is it the other guy? Yeah, I need more caffeine to be on my literary references.
Yeah, but you know that we should both know that well. I'm embarrassed for both of us. Tom's story and it'll be the first thing in the comments. How could we be a friend? How could we be a friend? 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 is running on a third of all websites in the world, which is actually like a real thrill as a like an engineer developer. And that's just a lot of fun. And it's openly collaborative in that way and 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 going to give too much, but this engineer joins a startup and fixes one or two bugs or develops a feature that he wanted in the product and then put in notice. And that was it. I love that story because I know so many like on the spectrum engineers that would totally do that. It's like a beautiful half right. I just got to get this fix they won't there's actually companies I would do that.
One thing I have considered is like secret shopping, like seeing if I could get hired by my own company under a fake identity or just something like that. So why would you do that? Oh, one to experience the hiring process, which is difficult for me to debug except by secondhand accounts to to see if I, you know, how my code still is. Do companies provide mystery shopper like services for hiring processes or no, because mystery shoppers, right, this would be the equivalent of say retail.
Where there are companies you can hire, they send people into stores to experience the touch points and the flow or lack of flow and then to report back so you can improve your operations and you have that for security, right, you can hire a 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 hiring process probably does, but I'm a big believer in especially executives going and doing the work themselves. Gaging with the customers, doing customer support, trying out the products, building or, you know, a website, whatever it is that your thing is, I think that's so key. I might be making this up, but it's something along the lines of two weeks of front line service, even if it's a CFO or someone who's.
And actually I'm going to be doing so no matter the job you're hired for it automatic you start with two weeks of support and then every single person rotates back in one week per year. And I'm running out of year so I'm actually squeezing my name at the very end here. So if you go to WordPress, the comp support in the next two weeks, you might get me. But yeah, I talked to executive at Salesforce. I was really impressed. They were saying they spend 50% of their time with customers.
This was a top executive running an organization of thousands of people. I was like, wow, that's inspiring to me. I'm probably 25 or 30% right now. So it really made me think like am I spending enough time customers and also like we might have some executives that were spending closer to zero percent time. So like how do we make this like a cultural thing throughout the company? So you're an enthusiastic fellow. Part of why I like spending time with you.
Good vibes, lots of smiles, lots of laughs. And you also find a lot of things that are interesting out at the edges. You're in a macular packer of bags also. So for those who do not know what's in my bag every year gives the latest and greatest. You have Matt's tech gadgetry and asserted due dads and do hikis that he's traveling with as a road warrior who travels fear to say most of the time. You're schedule. We're going to get to my first planned question in a second.
I recall maybe it was five months ago six months ago who knows you sent me something along the lines of just in case we can overlap. Here's where I'll be in the next year and it was one of the most absurd. It was like a rolling stones to our board. Are you continuing to do that in terms of travel for the next year. Yeah, currently. So why do I go into it? Well, it's a global community. So one of a global company in a global community.
So our hack for automatic because we're apart most of the year is the teams get together a couple times a year. So if you're an individual contributor, you might travel two, three times a year. But as CEO, this means that every week there's like a couple of meetups happening. And I try to hit the bigger ones, sometimes a small ones too, but mostly that the really big ones where there's a couple hundred people there. But that's happening least once a month.
Then for WordPress, there's like three major work camps per year that have thousands of people. There's all these different, I just a state of the word in Madrid. So you just take those. You're traveling a week out of the month already. And then you got to add in some fun. You're not going to have fun deficiency. And it's, yeah, it really adds up. But it does take more of a toll than it used to. I gotta be totally honest.
There was years. I did well over 400,000 miles and looking back, I was like, I don't know. Maybe I still have some of the energy or maybe I'm getting more radiation to play. I don't know. Maybe I'm just getting older. That does happen to people 40 in a few weeks. I know. Thank God. So no more of this 30 under 30, 40 under 40 nonsense. You've accumulated 700 lifetimes worth of those.
So you mentioned gatherings and the first, I suppose, cone that we're going to weave around on this slalom of a conversation is things that are exciting you. Things you're excited about five or more. And I enjoy this format. It's very simple. I haven't done it much. And it's a shame because I always have a good time doing it. Where would you like to start? I mentioned messaging. So if you look at automatic history, it's like 2005 logging CMS 2016 commerce.
Blue commerce. It's grown to over 30 billion sales or a GMV. And we entered our third major area this year, which was messaging. So we acquired this company called text. You might remember these sorts of programs, but we all have 20 different messaging apps. Text currently takes 10 of them. It will take more in the future.
So signal WhatsApp, telegram, Facebook, Master Instagram, Master Twitter DMs, all these sorts of things. Some of which have terrible interfaces and brings them into one power user app. Right now desktop only because it's all ultra secure. So it doesn't break any encryption or run anything in the cloud. It's all on your device, which is I think very, very important.
Engineers, you have like a code of ethics. I think we need to build things 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 calm and like 2012 or whatever was because I felt like I need to meditate. So I'm so behind on messages. I'm like, okay, we got by 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 leaves buying companies. Small team really, really exciting. And yeah, I know I'd love for you to try it actually. Well, my team is using it. And that's right. Actually told me about this even before I had heard about it myself. So some credit there. Teams loving it. I have used it and it is a great product. We're going to people find it or learn more about it. Text.com T X T S dot com text.
Yes, dot com. All right. Text stock. If you go on desktop and it's paid product right now. So 15 bucks a month, five bucks a month if you're a student or a pretend to be a student. And but we're also going to explore some different things mobile app is coming out next year in the early part. And we're going to explore some different pricing as well.
And you making it free for one or two networks paid for more. That's a very exciting stuff there. All right. So I want to ask you a strategy question to the extent that you can discuss it. So you were kind enough to spend a lot of time with me just as a friend overall, which I really appreciate loves my time with you. And also just because disclosures are important. I am available at your back in call advisor with on that really days.
And 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 to him by just doing the opposite of what everyone else does.
That's easy, but picking and choosing where you're going to be an orthodox or approach things obliquely is more challenging. So the question I'm going to set the table with some other examples, but the question is how you choose what you're going to get into in terms of areas products, etc.
Because there's diversification, there's lack of focus, there's synergy, these words we can throw around. I would love to know how you think about, for instance, or thought about getting into commerce, which I think is a more obvious leap in my mind than say messaging.
And what I've observed is say in the media landscape, well, the media landscape and the social media platform landscapes have collided in such a major way in say the last five to 10 years where you have Amazon studios, you've got Netflix, you've got messaging and then video and so on that are seemingly all being pursued on some level by a lot of these large platforms in the forms at what's happened, whatever might be.
So how do you choose what to engage in next and you said some people might say I'm on focus, I don't consider you're on focus, but there are sometimes sort of hidden or unspoken rationales or logics. So how do you think about what you're going to do next? I do think about it for a long time. So we've been thinking about messaging and actually making investments in the space for four or five years.
I think a lot about environment and incentives. So you know, the reason there used to be these multi messaging apps 15 years ago and they all stopped working was the networks all block them. And there is a political environment now, which I think is more conducive to being more customer and user centric. This is our data, right? This is our messages. It's all secure. It's not breaking security or anything. So why shouldn't we be able to run this?
Can you give an example of a network blocking these kind of multi message tools in the past? Yeah, it happened last week. There is another one called beeper that supported I message and Apple decided to just shut it down broke it all. And people are actually charged. It's users. They had to refund everyone. There's also more subtle things they could do. Like they could just subtly degrade.
If they make it so your messages don't go through 5% of the time, it's not blocking you, right? But you're going to stop using it. It's like throttling your hotel speed on Wi-Fi. So you upgrade to the premium. You're like, OK, all right. They don't need to block you, which might draw attention. They can just make a little more painful. And it doesn't take a lot of friction for people to move away, especially messaging.
So the regulatory framework, both with the EU doing a lot of sometimes misguided, but also sometimes really smart. They have an app coming in called the DNA that requires some interrupt between messaging services. We'll talk about USB-C, which I'm very excited about that. Thank you, EU for forcing Apple, finally, drop lightning and give us USB-C. And then in the US, I think there is bipartisan. This I actually don't agree with, but it is a reality like some extra scrutiny on big tech.
And so I think it's actually good for them. Again, what are their incentives? I think it's actually really good for them to show that they're open right now. So again, I don't want to fight these folks. They've got more money than most countries. They could squash us like a bug if they really, really wanted to. But we're always doing things open source, user-centric.
It'd be a bad look for them to try to squash. If you have the people on your side, I feel like that's what truly matters in long term. And people are what's short term, you know, lobbying, etc. But like long term 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.
Talking about it, let's just say next-genre digital Berkshire Hathaway. So Berkshire Hathaway could have, well, originally textiles, but they could have insurance. Then they could have something that is chocolates, chocolates, right, C's, candies. Things that are completely unrelated on a face value business level. They're not integrated. In the way that a CMS or having a Gajillion blogs and websites running on your platform would combine very easily with WooCommerce. Those two pair very nicely.
Are you thinking about, say in the case of text.com, that that is a standalone in the same way that some of these Berkshire Hathways might be a standalone? How do you think about building and acquiring in that way? Are they standalone? How much do they need to help each other or not? In the case of Berkshire, like the insurance premiums and so on, as I understand it provide a huge bolus of cash for all sorts of other purposes, right?
So 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? Is it just like customer pain point, converging trend lines in terms of regulation and public sentiment? Which Berkshire navigates beautifully and highly regulated industries including insurance, railways.
So I like to study these people. I know you love doing that to study high performers. I do that sometimes. But also, I mean, Charlie Munger, Reston Peace, 99 years old. Warren Buffett, I don't know exactly, I think up there as well. So I try to think Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger were hackers in the 30s or 40s today. What would they build? Versus what they built in their time with the opportunities and technology afforded. So I like to think they do some open source.
Because it's obviously the future. So for Adams companies, Adams versus Bits, and in their industries they're in. ATOMS. Yes. I think there would be a lot of coordination costs. 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, we try to find a business a monkey could run because someday they will.
Something like that. What business is so good, it would survive even bad leadership. So what we do with a digital version of that is we lower coordination costs between the different products by open source. So like for WooCommerce to build on top of WordPress, it doesn't need a meeting.
It doesn't need to talk. It doesn't even need to know that people developing WordPress. This open API is open source, there's a plug-in framework, etc. 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, are you talking about the communities that surround some of these things?
In proprietary software, if you want to integrate with something, like if I wanted to add a new feature to MacOS or something like that, I can't do that. Now they have APIs, they have operating systems, smart companies like Slack or Shopify will create marketplaces that you can extend them. However, your subject to their terms. So they can change their mind. Remember Twitter used to have all this clients Facebook did too. They were like, oh, we don't want this anymore.
You're all kicked off. So, don't build on proprietary platforms. They can pull the rug and will pull the rug at any point. So an open source, one, the rug can't be pulled, two, typically they're ultra-plugable. So you can really change every line of WordPress. Not to interrupt, but would you mind giving a real-world example of what this lowered integration cost looks like in practice? Let's talk about a company like Salesforce, which has done a ton of acquisitions.
One, criticism of the Salesforce or Cisco or even Google. Sometimes their own products don't integrate with each other as well. Sometimes even external things do. So even with the best acquisitions and most acquisitions fail by the way. Even when you do a really good one, maybe say YouTube. Sometimes the integrations aren't as strong. Or maybe like remember when YouTube tried to do the Google Plus thing.
Right. Every single company was or division in Google was like incentivized by how much adoption Google Plus got. They really tried to push it into everything. Like a lot of coordination costs. Maybe not as responsive to users. That was ultimately an unsuccessful push. Google's another example. All the messaging platforms they have. You need text just to work with the five messaging platforms at Google.
There's examples like that where you get duplication. You get different incentives of its executives. Maybe they're more rewarded for launching new things versus integrating things. Those are coordination costs. And you know, this comes up in economics terms with like, 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 don't need to rehire them every time. They're not going to be like poached by someone else. Or maybe have a gap in the gig and they just take another gig. You know, that sort of thing. So I feel like for us, the common platform of open source, particularly WordPress, allows us to plug things in and do acquisitions in a way that is more set up for success. So we have a set of products that run directly on WordPress or the distribution from WordPress and Tumblr.
So that's kind of, I would say our core area. There are some what are called 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. And journaling is another word for blogging. So you can use it like I do as like a local blog. And I've posted every day for the past like 200 or 300 days.
What does a local blog mean to the untrained ears? They'd be like, wait, so I have a blog that I'm publishing on my own computer. How do people see it? And this is why people usually call it a journal. But when you think about it, like a notes app, like the notes app. Typically things are undated. The metadata associated with them is somewhat loose. Often the list is ordered by most recently modified.
So that's kind of a UI. In a blog, it's reverse chronological. We have a lot of metadata associated. So day one attaches a date, location, we can store the weather. When you posted like all these different things that kind of make it a bit richer.
When it's local, we usually call it a journal. Just because that's the concept Apple just launched a built in journaling app. I call it a blog because it fundamentally if you kind of look at those principles, it's got all the same ingredients as you post a blog reverse chronological. Now, why do I really like it? I prefer dated entries because I'm usually taking notes each day. Kind of like Benjamin Franklin, you know, he would kind of log everything he does every day. I do that as well.
I love the search, I love tagging, I love all those kind of like metadata things help me find stuff. And you can also interlink the notes, which is actually pretty cool. So not unlike our Rome 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? It is not built on top of WordPress and it's not part of our publishing kind of thing, but I do believe it is sort of fundamental human right to have private and hopefully in the future open source messaging. And so that's again, I only want to work on things. I feel like I can work on potentially the rest of my life. So, you know, publishing commerce and messaging that covers a lot of human activity. It does.
And if you have those things truly free, I think you have a free society. And that's also a sighting to me because how do we help bend the long arc towards or freedom or liberty across the world? And technology does that better than I think any sort of diplomacy or anything else that at least I could work on. Are there any other people or companies that stand out as being aligned or philosophically adjacent with the ethos you're describing?
Well, one does a lot more open source companies now get lab is a really great one. That by said, they're actually even more open than we are. They publish like everything and they're a public company now, you know, like $9 or $10 billion. So that's pretty cool. Have those examples. I think elements, which is built on the matrix ecosystem, open source messaging. Actually, the competitor detects beaver really awesome company.
I think philosophically very aligned. So what's cool is more and more this is happening. Also, there's a fun trend where sometimes people who did proprietary companies and then made a ton of money off them. What they do next is often open source. So Jack Dorsey made a ton of money off Twitter square when he's taken square to a more of a crypto direction.
He wants to enable that. And two, what's he funding something called Noster and Blue Sky, which are two competing open source Twitter, which is really cool. Brian actin co founder of WhatsApp. What's he doing today? He's running signal, which is an open source nonprofit messaging app, which is amazing signal very philosophically aligned. Wikipedia Mozilla. There's a lot out there, both for profit and nonprofit based on the very little I know.
And you track this type of thing much more than I do, but in terms of number of users per full time employee pre acquisition, how would you place what's up? The messaging apps are tops. Yeah, I think Instagram was pretty good size with like 13 or 14 when they sold telegrams actually pretty amazing today signals.
Very small team not sure the size of the WhatsApp team now, but they were very small and they were carry. It's actually pretty incredible because messaging does not really any user support. It's also serve you know, that only 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 is to remain like a sub 20 sub 30 team even as they grow the tens of millions or hundreds of millions of users. So how do you as the buyer first resort? The hopefully the aspiring buyer first resort. Berkshire Hathaway known as automatic. How do you find these various companies or threads to pull on or how do those people find you? People do reach out sometimes, which is always nice. But yeah, I guess fundamentally it's usually just driven by me as a user.
I got my always trying out new products friends recommended my colleagues actually of the people we employ they tend to be like very early adopters and very digitally savvy. I mean, that's why we launched Bitcoin in 2012 when it was $12. I wish I could say that that was maybe brilliant. That was one of my colleagues is like, oh, this thing's so cool. We cannot support. I think he hacked it over a weekend. And so.
All right, cool amazing. I'll tell you just a quick anecdote. I haven't mentioned really. I don't know. I haven't mentioned anywhere because why would I but you mentioned Charlie Munger, Rest in Peace. I was I'm remembering correctly. I mean, it was definitely tentatively scheduled. I think it was to interview him the next Tuesday.
Oh my goodness. Yeah. He had just started doing podcast for the first time. Yeah. He did the one with the callisons, right? John Patrick or invest like the best, I think. He did. I think it was acquired. I can't recall exactly. We'll link it up. It was a really great episode. Yeah. So for people who didn't get a chance. We'll link to that in the show notes.
I appreciated that for someone who. I've been so obsessed with for many years when he passed. I actually had a feeling of wow, what a life well lived and so appreciative. How much he's published over the years. So even though he hadn't done a lot of these podcasts or modern stuff, he has been doing the meetings and speeches and other things for decades now. So you don't always have to meet your mentors. I think you talk about that as well. It's sometimes is really great.
So just have the book or the speech or something like that and it can really live with you. You can grow up with it. You can reread it over the years. I agree reading said heart are I know you have some things that you read. Is it Zorba the Greek. Zorba the Greek is spectacular. I think we might have been together when you found that.
When I found that book of all places in Greece and Santorini 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. I'm a very honest by Anthony Damello would be another one very short very fast. I'm an increasingly a fan of rereading that includes some fiction to as you mentioned.
So the Greek any books you reread sit Arthur why just an interesting story of enlightenment and journey and it's actually my Twitter bio is I can think I can wait I can fast. It's a great line something like that. I probably have it out of order but but I do the matter order to someone works. I like to reread essays for sure. Paul Graham which essays acceleration of addictiveness is a really good one.
I've read that one is one on speed. He just published what I consider as magnum opus barely worked on it for like a year. I think it's called how to do great work or something like that. That one's really good. That could be a book.
It's interesting that there is authors now blogging essentially publishing these essays like slight star codex. Scott Alexander chain parish knowledge project like is these writers now that yeah really drive a lot of folks your WordPress blog kind of started that genre in a lot of ways like the longer form like super essays.
Yeah, 1000 plus blog posts lot of blog posts and it's sometimes easy for me to forget that that was essential for the entire I don't know about college trajectory sort of me and doing developing quote unquote career that I've had. Like without the blog it doesn't happen. I mean the blog was started before the first book continued. I mean still continues.
Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show this episode is brought to you by AG one the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement and the true answer is invariably AG one. It simply covers a ton of basis. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road.
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So learn more check it out go to drink AG one dot com slash Tim that's drink AG one the number one drink AG one dot com slash Tim last time drink AG one dot com slash Tim check it out. I have a question for you related to blocking 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 blog was both Jeff fuel and bridge and connective tissue and still continues to be I have thought a lot about next chapters for myself recently. I love doing the podcast I plan on continuing doing the podcast the 10th anniversary is coming up next April wow 10 years of on average 1.4 episodes per week every week.
So going for a long time wow and I wasn't the first podcast or nor will I be the last but 10 years is a good stretch and it's an opportunity to pause and reflect think about things and when I was doing that recently in stand of the year. I noticed that often I enter a game that is new I'm not the first participant so I'm not at the absolute cutting edge but I'm on the sharp edge yeah fairly yeah pretty early and then I stick around for a while and I focus on it with incredible enthusiasm and.
OCD ridiculous intensity intensity 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 startup investing and then that was a focus from say 2008 to 2015 then I took a hiatus for a while and took a start vacation took a complete break from that.
That was in tandem with books took a break from the books after the 4 hour chef that's when the podcast was started 2014 have done that for a while and now I'm looking at various trends various types of collective and individual behavior I'm like okay there's a lot more zero some behavior things are getting very saturated things are much more algorithmically driven now.
So you can effectively have an attention rugby where you're pursuing format X 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 push to clips and now you're in reels but you're not appearing where you used to appear etc etc and I've been thinking about what to do next and.
I have posed the question to some folks I'm curious to get your two cents maybe we'll talk about over dinner tonight is what you would find interesting for me to do next and part of what's baked into that is as was true with these early chapters in each of these new arenas where do I have a particular differentiator and ability or access or combination and some weird
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 an advisor with various companies that was what enabled that as well as geographically being located in Bay Area Bay Area.
So some cool companies like Shopify or us which were not really Bay Area Company that's true that's true and actually a lot of my greatest hits are from outside of the Bay Area being in the Bay Area created a certain like high level of resonance with discussion in those communities which then extended places like Ottawa what I've been also thinking this is getting a little long but I really respect your opinion all this stuff and I know you pay close attention is that the new thing isn't always a new thing.
So for instance I was chatting I'm not going to name him because he probably 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 TV show now effectively if you want to 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.
And say provide me with 10 questions in the flavor of Andrew human Tim Ferris ritual 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've notes in front of you and you're presentable on camera or via audio now you're a formidable competitor the hurdles used to be a little higher 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 COVID hit people could have all become writers when the right to strike happen people could have all become writers writing is really really difficult I think I'll interject here again interject also I felt like you're writing process had a lot of solitary yes what I observed as you got more into podcasting other things is you really loved the social piece social piece of the world.
The inter personal like the direct you and I sitting across from a table and doing it like also this for the guests and like 100% actually a pretty cool yeah element of the format absolutely that's a huge piece you're totally right. And I think just part of me that has recognized how nourishing that is for me and I'm hesitant to go back into monk mode and the cave staring at a blank page.
I don't know do you have any any thoughts the perc white we can certainly continue this I'm just wondering this is the very least it's just like a confessional which is nice I love psycho analyzing Tim it's one of my past times that is a good question and I think how you laid out how the market changes and becomes crowded is very very true so the thoughts that come to mind is first also just as your friend like I would love to see you focus on things where it's not just out there.
It's not just outcome based because you talked about this like what about the traffic what about the you know there's a lot of comes so where are there things actually podcasting is true for this with a journey itself is very rewarding for you totally no one listen to this is still fun after you know.
And we're kind of just recording what we might do anyway which is kind of the best job ever. So that's I think that's nice so I would say I think actually I find writing although it can be unfun at the time so rewarding afterwards type to fund yeah type to fund so I wonder as well if that's not sure how much you're writing right now I know you did some fiction stuff and some comics stuff and like that's interesting.
Yeah, it's 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 say but just different formats that would be an ability to experiment I mean the other thing is and I I'm not going to have the right attribution maybe it's Neil Strauss maybe it's Seth God but anyone who's really been consistently productive in the sense of words on pages.
The vast majority at some point I've heard say there's no such thing as writers 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 I'm of course grossly generalizing but long those lines and so I've also thought part of the reason writing so intimidating to me is I look at some of my blog posts and they're not quite Tim urban God blesses all you know 50,000 were 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 that's some constraints closer to say some of sets 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 so it's visible in my browser there are others of course I mean the maker's schedule manager schedule or manager schedule maker schedule which I think is a perennial reminder.
Reminder worth paying attention to so I thought about the constraints maybe making it shorter but I do think to underscore you said the social piece is a big one.
How do you make it social so if I were to brainstorm about your blog yeah some things I'd recommend trying are like what would a really amazing comment section look like that were really jazzed out like maybe more like forms maybe more like building community you the spirit with events before and I think that's actually pretty exciting I found a lot of value because I've been blogging out for like.
20 years in some gardening so meaning returning to some older pieces so much still get traffic and do the links work you know what's the update to it what's the sort of like I thought top do I link to a new thing is this inspire me to write like a new version of this that's interesting really lovely actually and 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 and being able to return to the
old Tim yeah or when I return to the old Matt like often sometimes surprising like I'm like wow I said this sometimes I'm pleasantly surprise sometimes I'm like I was young but then maybe that's a cool sort of grist for something new hey I said this 15 years ago like I learned so much since then and here's maybe you're at my 15 ago
version and here's what kind of change my mind yeah I guess we have a list of things to change a mind on and also I think multi-modal formats it's kind of like you're going to take this podcast and slice it up for like tick tock shorts reels whatever putting it on I think people don't do that nothing to blog post tell me more what does that mean you mean converting things into
blog post or taking blog posts and training them into other I think every podcast you do has 10 to 15 blog posts worth of stuff in it I agree easily easily if you've known me for a long time so I'm going to start with my fears not all the amazing ways to go right let me talk about all the terrible things are going to happen I guess what I want to be very cautious of is the siren song of high volume content farming
I have seen people were very good they're very smart but they're really video first just turning out just like 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 around if you imagine Tim dot blog almost like a Wikipedia where each guest was like a topic that could be referred to a many
episodes and so I think that might be the antidote to this so where the content the transcripts everything right how this works on blog is kind of clunky right now I think you have like a post for the show and a post for the transcripts or transcripts
and I that's it honestly be one year all like it should be it's clunky in part because it's a lot of stuff right the show notes are very extensive along and then the transcripts are very extensive so turns into an enormous basically a book turns into a book length I would love if the transcript tied to a player video and or audio so you can click on it and listen you can listen and read at the same time you know sort of like a karaoke like scrolling through I use YouTube that way with
transcripts yeah there's some pricing each other yeah yeah I would love for everything to be linked auto linked so anytime a book is mentioned anytime a essay is mentioned that goes to a page with pivots I want to see every time Paul grams were mentioned across all of your how many episodes now close to 700 yeah that's interesting I've been invoking Paul Graham like candy man candy man candy man for years now but as of yet we have not out of podcast
conversation maybe 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 I have the utmost respect for both of those guys Tyler is also a one of a kind he has a stylistically produced a very novel and helpful show there's no one like Tyler like he is an inimitable style the rapid fire the rapid fire the rapid fire no follow ups
of different things I'm kind of terrified about going on a show he's he's the reason I started blogging he was a big influence okay I'm not sure I knew this is been doing marginal revolutions for like I think over 20 years yeah and when I was in high school one of the super cool things I did you know you did wrestling I did this economics competition run by the Federal Reserve Bank sexy I know let me tell you
you must have been beaten the girls off at the stick somewhat you know the my macro economic insights for not quite driving interest I hope for since beginning the computers and jazz and stuff but we did this economics competition and it really opened a lot of opportunities for me I got
to go to Washington DC what does it mean to have an economics competition I mean we're just like econometrics mathematics competition like what do we do it is interesting format so I've heard of the FMC 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 which basically trickles down to be the interest rates that a lot of people like to be in that room when they it's a pretty cool meeting and basically it's like the illuminati and they've been
doing an amazing job too I think of all the recessions we've avoided and all the problems that don't have so it was I think folk are who said like their job is take the punch bowl away as the party starts going I'm I turn up the interest rates so they come so they have a lot
of levers on some new ones as well so the first 15 minutes is we would do a mock meeting you would be green span I'd be Bimber Nackie like we kind of pretend role play 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 like new economic data was released that morning we might incorporate into the presentation so 15 minutes of that and then second 15 minutes is they can ask you any question about economics
and you have to still be in character is this is more the cuisine you is like the five high school students and that was really fun because a little more improvisational I love Q&A and Houston just weirdly ended up being one of the most competitive districts in the country
so the first year we just got creamed by the way I went to arts high school so we never want 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
economic teacher is like hey let's do this so first year we got creamed second year we won Houston won the region hold on and then so second year they're just like all right we're giving you guys all the roads we're giving you guys all the special top secret Chinese
training programs how did you just get go from getting creamed to winning in the second year yeah I credit the teacher a lot it was first period so it was the same class every morning we all picked different newspapers like financial times Wall Street Journal we read
them every morning we just how old we use them at the time high school so it's 15 16 16 18 probably yeah 16 17 he had us teach each other a lot of things and no you really learn something when you have to teach it so he'd be like Scott
or Iram teach about you know some macroeconomic concept and we kind of rotate through that and then a lot of practicing you know we get together and weekends over the summer we went to DC is like a summer program anyway got to meet Alan Greenspan which is pretty cool
the follow up to that is the year after there was a conference hosted by the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank honoring Milton Friedman and because one of my teammates had gone to like intern for the Federal Reserve and actually maybe Mr. Roman might have started
consulting for them or something like that 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 calico was there 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 time textbooks et cetera and he has textbooks and stuff so he was there this is actually I blog 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 and I've basically been doing that ever since seems to have worked out and it's kind of cool also now that I can look up this history I'm going to do a bit of follow up on this I have 14 more things I'm excited about I know I know we're going to get to the more about we're going to get to the other things maybe I have an idea for how we're going to do that but with the
economics competitions you said barely passing in political science and I know you credited the teacher and said he was an excellent teacher but what was it about the economics the competition the teacher or the combination that made you give so much to that versus other classes well at one point I got kicked off the team got kicked off which was it really worked like I get it now the psychology of it so I think by a lot of ways you would sort of rank things or look at
strengths I definitely should have been on this five person team however as actually you experience 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 we got a win 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 into my twenties but it was like you have no physical tone or you don't like I just thought I was a brain in a back like I didn't work out by the way the school had no gym we had no sports like so he was like to get back on the team you need to run two miles with me because he was a
jogger and I think it got me a book called like body for life or something oh these early go 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 so I started showing up on time and then you know we did the run by the way I really not trained but I just kind of like made it through like sheer force of world because when you're 17 you can
just kind of destroy your body anyway and so I did that and I was back on the team that was we went on to one of these competitions and everything so it was but that was motivating to me like kind of the heart of getting consequences getting kicked off yeah and also you know being
might sort of day thing at the school is jazz acts phone and I think music all performance can be very rigorous you know you get first second third for chair you're ranked you compete I feel like that feedback and also the performing so being on stage breath control
true of the competition as well yeah the economics yeah you have to perform like when I look back at like what sort of set me up for business later especially at a young age I think it was musical theater jazz performing like that sort of stuff was
it was really huge amazing so the way we got here I've learned every one you were saying things should all be automatically linked like every mention of hologram in the podcast and then I mentioned candy man candy man Tyler cow and then we ended up where we ended up so anything else
I want to continue to brainstorm this with you just in terms and we can continue at dinner just in terms of what experiments might look like to do things differently where I am somehow well positioned doing something that cannot be replicated the next day by a thousand people I'm interested in trying to answer that question more kind of blue ocean versus red ocean kind of stuff but let's come back to your list of exciting things sure and why don't we do this we go through some quickly too
yeah mention a couple this is the process I was thinking of and then we can dig in we can sort of swoop in this is a quick one and I mentioned already usb see like if you know me you know how much I love cables you love cables and it is hard for me to convey verbally how much that likes different kind of cables and containing the cables and organizing the cables it is a thing the cables I like you know if you want a good cable like they think of you every
time they charge up it's true I was just using your external battery pack that you gave me for a birthday the other day and I was like oh yeah what do you get the guy has everything the coolest battery pack I like so because I've tested 20 of them so you know I know you put in the mileage
so USB see everything's going to usb see now iPhone is usb see I'm down to like think one or two things in my life that are not usb see and it's glorious so I'm very excited about that I'm really excited about AI all right my honest it's the programming of AI like the prompt engineering
can't really call a programming spellcasting it's like casting spells it's ridiculous and when you hear a good prompt like you just said I said I said that's so cool and it's kind of open source and that I really I guess you could
have prepared your prompts people do but there's actually sites now people buy and sell prompts which is so cool that's wild so it's kind of like a new former programming coming online that for me is as exciting as when I first learned a program it like unlocks these superpowers and it's also just
fascinating like the things you think would be easy driving the cars turns out to be really hard stuff you thought would be really hard like writing poetry like Shakespeare it just kind of just fits off in our hearts at all you know like turn this podcast make it all rhyme you know it could do that
and that's kind of ridiculous kind of cool okay so on the AI side this is of course been a topic in the zeitgeist for a bit now a lot of people are talking about AI you unlike me have some technical jobs and you know how to code I would love to know if you have any controversial 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 you're not what I would get in response from a hundred people I wouldn't get 50 of them telling me the same thing that's hard because I don't know if 50 people
tell you but I'll tell you why they did the idea I mean 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 I'll tell you what I kind of hate about it which is that it's gotten me
addicted to Twitter again which I broken AI AI because like there's the folks you hear of you know the same old ones a great brawgans etc and there's just as interesting and good stuff on random anonymous Twitter accounts with like an anime avatar it's a little ridiculous like a lot of the top
researchers have these ults they call them 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 the area I don't understand as well so I've been reading a lot of papers and learning a lot about it is a place where people can find a group or a list of these people or that that's a taboo right now they probably are I don't publish any list
because I don't use the Twitter list function or x list function I think Saiyan banister might she was very early she was like a first 100 user of like Gbt mid-journey like so she just good for her oh she's definitely one of these people to follow okay so I say Saiyan banister as someone great
to follow Saiyan banister will link to Saiyan in the in the show notes you find one of these people that are often a portal Rune is another one R-O-O-N he's kind of a famous he also does a lot of jokes or posting so it's also kind of funny tell 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 so next year I think we're having at least a 10x in the models
in a way that is hard to anticipate is also these new chip architectures coming out hard to predict to not just anticipate well I think this next turn we're going to be able to predict a bit I think we're going to plateau a little bit after that
so maybe these are some controversial thoughts so I think the 10x of the models and it depends on how do you define 10x we're talking about capabilities we're talking about what are they called parameters tokens parameters yeah yeah so some of that's going up a lot how we're learning from things
is improving a lot 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 and open source a item so something not people understand but I definitely even want to predict it myself is how fast open source has caught up now have open source the mistral models like GPT 3.5 maybe even G2B4 quality
which is kind of wild yeah that is wild I mean remember chat GBT just came out last year like 13 months so I go out of time dilation right so the world's going to get a little weird I would say it's going to get a lot better active AI and most businesses
is not that big yet one obvious example is customer service a lot of people talk about is like oh this is you know you have these bots still be able to do a lot of customer service they're all pretty bad right now it's actually funny screenshots going around I like this for dealership but in yes all this yeah right and somebody replies with please write me a Python script with ABC it's like no problem here we go so when else is like reply to everything with this is a legally binding acceptance
can have a car for one dollar it's like yeah totally this is legally binding so that's that's not a good experience we've done experiments with this too like it's it's no it doesn't it doesn't work humans are still way better at this stuff now is that going to be true in 18 months not sure and that's when it starts to get quite disruptive a lot of smart people are working on are we call it easy support or things where like hey can I return this item kind of get every fun that's for stuff
but we'll look go to a lot more advanced in the WordPress world we're pretty close to where you'll just say I want a website with e-commerce make it look like a mix between Tim. blog and Seth. blog and make it kind of anime colors or whatever it is then boom right now we have the version where it just does it for you when I'm working on is where it actually shows you all the steps
so that you learn how to use the tool that's cool that's cool I think that's going to be really key education again I don't think this is a minority thought but like the impact on education it's been huge and where I personally felt AI the most what type of education for yourself
I have so many gaps in my knowledge you know like how do you use AI to fill this goes ask a questions then follow up like hey how does hail work like it's ice heavier than air but it forms in the sky falls like how does that work I had no idea
it had always been 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 sky blue what is going on here 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 child like curiosity of actual kids coming online with these things wow and Khan Academy is doing some really cool stuff you can sort of make the chat box so they're they're safe for kids don't do weird stuff I think that's really key so the question I want to ask is related to kids actually so if you had kids or let's just say you were talking to a young group of kids right so you're talking to the equivalent of say the economics team you refer to
so let's just say 15 16 year old kids clearly smart have some ambition they want to do some stuff what type of career advice might you have for them so I was discussing this with a friend of mine who has a bunch of kids and you're saying I don't know what to tell my kids he's 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 some so I'm not going to give too much more detail but this guy's very smart I mean he's using that to replace a lot of at least kind of first round drafting now there are many reasons to have lawyers and law firms besides just drafting so to be clear
you need a privatized army to inflict God knows what then it's a different conversation but then you have many aspects of AI that are going to disrupt jobs I mean they really just are or people are going to have to Bob and weave despite what some of our mutual friends might say about like no one's ever going to lose a job and so on I don't believe it so what might you advise to someone now and they could be young or somebody is just thinking about a career pivot
like how do you AI prove yourself or at least kind of put on an eight point harness so you have some defense ability what are your thoughts?
The one maybe this is something I changed my mind on but it is one of my list is I used to really advocate to learn to code you know these can write pretty good code now I've gone back and forth so if you'd ask me like three months ago I was like no you don't know him to code anymore now I think I'm back to it's worth to learn to code the same way it might be useful to learn a martial art even if you're not going to be defending yourself every day as like part of your livelihood
like there's something intrinsically good studying the humanities etc. so I think learning code can teach you to understand what's going on with computers in a way that I think in an AI world will also be very useful I would tell kids to play with this stuff a ton you know the prompt engineering the playing with it learning how to learn is something I know you're very passionate about feels pretty timeless and I probably point to that great work
essay by Paul Graham he talks a lot about ambition and how important it is what you're doing like what's your drive how you're going to leave a dent in the universe but are you best trying you know and I feel like that's really really really really important I'm actually very optimistic about future generations 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 used to be worried that like we're going to have to meet people on earth
or this great book Kevin Kelly recommended called empty planet basically says we're not going to have enough people population has already peaked in most developed countries I think the US has the only nuclear superpower with a growing population over the next 30 years
would you attribute that to for us it's just immigration so if we mess that up we're going to lose this whole toast it's a big competitive advantage for us when you think about one the best people in the world want to send their kids to school here and stay here
if we mess that up we're I think we have some other advantage geographic and resource wise but like yeah that's a really important I personally chosen not to have kids because seven years ago and I decided over six years ago I'm not going to have kids
the rest of my life sort of built my life around that been rethinking that somewhat maybe it's the right people age of 40 was also knowing that we're not going to have enough people in the world I think also I'm just a bit more optimistic about the future
especially with the AI stuff that it's kind of exciting to think so on born today in 18 years what are they doing like for most of the past hundred years you could predict a few things as colleges which have been around for many hundreds of years a few things that have worked I don't know if in 18 years you have a really super smart proxious kid you're going to want to send them to a Harvard or Princeton or like any of these things I think the world might have shifted so much
that that's just like a radically different thing that kind of makes me a little optimistic and curious about it what are the reasons do you have for feeling optimistic that's I think counterpoint to a lot of the dystopian narratives that people be interested to hear more about
your optimistic kind of by default is that fair to say like you sort of I lean that way lean optimistic to begin with but this is a big change in the conversation that you and I've had round kits like this is my first time hearing about it this is why I told you I had some new stuff for you to do for this as well has just been inspired I've now 15 got you written and so like seen some of them and being able to be in their lives a bit has been just so rewarding
so cool to see them like download new information that hold the I mean this is not not for at all like by the way every person I know as a parent has been saying this like that 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 somewhat new chore can be a double-edged sword to be used for good and bad I guess I have a core assumption to my optimism
which is a fundamental goodness of human nature and this is actually a big split some people think humans are you know the Hobbes and life is nasty British and short or what's the survival stuff we read like Neil Strauss's book
or like we're emergency we're two weeks of food away from everyone just going crazy and like and I think growing up in Houston through her canes and stuff I saw some of these disaster situations including when like there was no power and how people came together was quite inspiring
so is there evil in the world yes I mean we see this with some of the autocratic leaders and things but I would especially of like regular people not these like crazy evil terrible people I would feel pretty good about being like teleported to any place in the world and talking to someone
that's kind of cool and then especially when we figure out economic stuff and can like remove some of these base level issues survival issues which we largely have in the developed world and arguably even in the 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 and I work on it and it's worked like we get a third of the
websites on this thing that that's cool yeah that's forcing the proprietary people to open up more now this stuff like you have a world view and it's like you interview people who you want your readers to
or listeners to listen to because they'll get influenced by it I don't think you bring someone here that you thought was going to like mess up their mind or had a lot of direction I've not been seduced by the dark side just yet right and so that's part of changing how the world works yeah totally
and I do use the podcast for that for sure in the books and everything like how many people have you met like my life changed somehow yeah that's a fitting the future is he's just been passive yeah that wouldn't have been a ripple in the bonds what is the you know we can look it up
we can look it up put 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 want to say Alan Kay Alan Kay that is it it's Alan Kay what a great line and how true what else are you excited about or have you changed your mind I'm gonna come back to the kids thing my I'm still like in shock over 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 non-traditional but we just announced I just did my state of the word annual speech I do is like state of the union it's something 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 the lock people in remember we talked about the messaging earlier yeah
some of the what CMS spaces like wicks don't even provide an export so they really it's like a roach Motel you check in you can't check out so what we're doing with this data liberation front is creating open source directory that provides two way import of all this data so whether that's in e-commerce in another page builder because all these different page builders were WordPress besides Gutenberg
everything and then once it's in WordPress you can get it into anything else you want because WordPress is kind of universally supported are 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 way but so we're going to make that really really easy and so my hope is by like radically lowering the friction
it'll help make the web kind of force everything to be a bit more open the deliberation from catching him so it's in a sense maybe this may be a terrible analogy but it's like a Google translate for technology management technology right from anything to anything
and then from that next top to whatever else it increases competition this also means that if you're in WordPress everyone else is going to do this too but I think this is ultimately really good for users and when you think a lock-in like music services
how hard is it to move your playlist in between the music services so we're actually built something for this but that lock-in is I think not user friendly what are some other ways that you would like to see the technology world or just technologies stirred up in this way where if one person or company were to do X it would sort of catalyze a bunch of mimicry slash competition that would be ultimately better for users and humanity slash film the bike
we've talked about messaging you know app stores are opening up now it's been some judgments against Google around billing systems and other things a big reason I think the world's front preparatory the past 15 years has been mobile platforms which are way more locked down than desktops
everything has to go through their app store you can't just run arbitrary software on your phone you will be able to do more stuff like that over the next few years so you can just walk me through an example so I understand what you mean what it looks like and what it could look like
so currently what the issues are and then what it could look like yeah so today every app on your phone has to go through the app store they can't do an approval process yeah sometimes Apple is slow at approving things sometimes they kick stuff out some look at kicked out you know they typically take a pretty big cut of payments they force you to use their subscription systems and they take 15 or 30% of it which breaks some business models so that's why like for a while I think they made it
exceptions but when you subscribe to like Spotify or Netflix through your phone it would cost more if you did it on the web because they have to pay that cut and the exceptions they make are somewhat arbitrary so for example if you buy a book on Amazon they don't make you use their payments or take a 15 or 30% cut because the margins or when you order an Uber they're not doing that when you're tipping through Uber they don't take a cut just goes direct to the driver
but we added a tipping feature on Tumblr 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
wow now like if you're charging like a six dollar a month subscription to your blog that becomes four bucks a month and then I still have the process to credit card or do something else over that so like just got very messy so that's an example so that's going to change or it might change
yeah I think so I think that's a pressure it's going to force them to open up you've always been able to like jailbreak your phone or you might side load things using like something like test flight and you can do testing apps yeah totally but it's not really a broad commercial thing
I'm also thinking about this for text text the multi messaging app they might not like so what would it look like if it's blocked by the app stores how can we still get it in the hands of the people do you have any ideas that you can share or is that too inside
plan A is working with the networks and like just say hey like we want to support your business model we're not trying to changing it at we're just trying to find this power user tool and there's a lot of prayer art for this and like email clients you can use Gmail with Mac mail
or with superhuman or any other things and their business is fine and then two I guess carrot stick I don't know if they have a stick against these companies but like you know working with politicians working with our user base to like do petitions I don't know maybe I'll camp outside Apple's office
do a hunger strike at one infinity way or like you know I really believe in this stuff like because it's user centric so what is the what's the thing that gets them to do the thing that is really right for other users you know what could change what company could change is always Apple and the reason I talk about them a lot isn't because I don't like them it's because I hold them in the very highest esteem I love Apple a lot and they're like at three trillion dollar company now
so they still act like a underdog sometimes and so I think a lot about what would have been evidence elder statesmen of Apple look like if they sort of acted like hey we won we have hundreds of boys ours and they this very little
that it hurt them except tubers come you know 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 everything in ways that lock and users are not sort of freedom promoting I could see that hurting them majorly so I
want to see the opposite I want to see like a really vibrant Google Apple Microsoft et cetera and actually Microsoft is probably the best example this used to be quite competitive quite anti-competitive obviously and has become quite
benevolent over the past decade 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 what are some of
the lesser known tools of competition or like invisible tools of competition in the sense that someone or platform or fill in the blank larger company making say a messaging service break 5% of the time or be 10% slower that's sort of invisible means of leverage I would have to imagine there are
examples of under the umbrella term of say privacy you could also see some really incredible sort of competitive pressuring slash crushing slash film the blank I'm just wondering as someone who's worked in technology understands technology as an operator and individual contributor code and who also is right in the middle of the switch box you 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 is a lot of dials yeah so I'll talk about things that are publicly known and people been caught about yeah versus all the secret things we didn't yeah X Twitter under Elon Musk got caught every single link you click on Twitter goes through t.co a redirect service yep to certain media sites and other things they were inserting like a 5 to 10 second delay again every little bit of friction particularly on mobile people just press the back button they go back
to the tweet list so like it's incredible and the studies around this like every hundred milliseconds the page takes a low like lower conversion et cetera what happened caught Google got caught for they created this format called amp accelerated mobile pages was designed to compete make mobile faster we actually supported it wholeheartedly and they did it kind of open source and everything like that some documents leaked that basically said that and it's funny because I think the people
working on am didn't even know this I think they were actually like two believers in the sort of improving the web type of thing certainly we didn't know this but there was something an amp that also like locked I'm not going to get this right head or bidding or something basically made it harder for other advertising networks to run on these pages the way that benefited Google and I think who particularly has sharp elbows around advertising stuff the greatest moneymaker
in the history of the internet you mean I get why they yeah and the duopoly there of them in Facebook them a meta is entrenched by regulation as well so Bill Gurley has this amazing presentation have you seen this the not sure which one I've seen a few as presentations he is a new one is basically about regulatory capture it's the name is a number of miles like 2791 he kind of goes to a number of examples of where you know whether it's covid test this is one example you go
to a Walgreens or CVS here is three covid test brands and each one costs like 2199 this is you know a couple years later and you're up they're like five bucks for two and apparently the US blocks of the European manufacturers and again these assay test are like very basic technology is like nothing new like what's happening there and he kind of digs into it and all the regulator used to work it to these companies actually like that's interesting like how does this all
work so how regulatory capture and it tells his story of like he was trying to lobby around something and then the politician was like I have a meeting is like oh yeah I'll come to you he's like wow that's I want the west coast is I know I'll come to you set up a conference room and someone calls him like hey do these like a fundraiser is usually like five grand seat and he's like okay and then I call him back he gets like sick people together and then they're
like you need a bigger room I was that I've become 10 people and then the next thing was something like we'd love all the people who are married for the partners to donate as well and he's like why don't have enough seats in the room is like oh they don't need to come to the meeting this is like a
literal story that happened to and he was fighting for something really good it was around municipal Wi-Fi and it was being blocked by the telecom companies and the Comcast and Verizon's of the world are blocking this so it's a great presentation I would say that's a follow-up for everyone
listening we'll link to that but I think that's also something that companies can do I know for a fact they hire opposition research a published a sponsor academics and things to publish this company's tied up in China it's all
happening to each other all the time mostly among big tech I would say start up stone to this at all medium tech doesn't do this at all was that because they are lawful good to use d and d parlance or is it just simply because they don't have the resources I would say yeah maybe they don't
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 defense as offense and so that would be my sort of like charitable interpretation of why they do some of these things do you need security
basic security or privacy recommendations for average Joe or Jan I guess I don't want insult my listeners but just like somebody like me I'm not technical right but if you were to say yeah one thing you want to be really careful about is this on personal devices and computers like just a lot of people do X you should really do the opposite of X the easy stuff make sure your apps and operating system are always up to date yeah I actually get really excited
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 to yeah there's a lot of actively its point is stuff out there to you know good
passwords you talked about this I like password managers like one password 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 one-on-one this is kind of a new thing for your audience if a service supports
pass keys you should switch to it so basically it's a technology which eliminates passwords 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 and it's kind of built into the OS and 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 all my passwords are like super random like 40 character I couldn't tell you
if I wanted to but you know you generate them and that's kind of what this does in a better way so with you do mind getting into the weeds for a second just on a technical level where do we talking about these kind of like private keys and private messaging like
PGP am I making that up I think PGP stands for pretty good privacy this is like a key exchange yeah what's actually happening I know this is probably getting away above my pay grade quickly but password I understand well to the extent that I think I understand this is actually I'm not sure the exact length of the key or anything like that but imagine it like you have a really unique super long password maybe like a couple thousand characters that is then stored in the secure
enclave on your device and so one password can also support these but basically it kind of gets people to use random passwords and it creates a better UI because they're logging in with their face or their fingerprint or something
so that's probably the best way to describe it what the protocol is doing is the browser is now support this as a standard so they do like a challenge response effectively so if you've used like SSH before probably yeah you can do that with a key so you can type in a password or you can have
a public key stored on the server which is not sensitive so we could have access to your public key and not get to anything and then your private key which is secret and there's a calculation done between those which says oh this is really Tim or the person with the key
okay pass case to revisit what else you excited about Dr. Malin Mike workamp Asia this is actually a joint thing yes let's talk about this so this is something I am very excited about and I need to finesse some details to make sure it's going to work but what are we talking about?
we've had some pretty epic travel adventures because it's been a while it has been a while we've hung out more in like home bases and things but we've been all over we've been a Vietnam to Turkey Greece then all over and actually the only time I've set foot in Taiwan which is where we're working in Asia this year was we were connecting to Vietnam actually an amazing story there a cool Tim story as well there's something wrong with our tickets and they weren't letting us board and this was
kind of early like not everyone spoke English or something and you like start breaking out some Mandarin I remember that got us on the plane I don't I still don't know what you said I remember that got I haven't thought about that forever I still have the photograph that you took in a park late night in Vietnam of this little kid with a cute hat with break dancers in the background I still have that on my bookshelf a night brings back some great memories yes I've never been to Taiwan so
working in Asia March 7th to 9th 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 it will probably get you in on the last day or something because I'll do a few days with all the WordPress stuff and then I just explore the food I've heard so many good things about Taiwan yeah it's also one of those places that kind of like Hong Kong 15 years ago like maybe good to visit
the geographic geopolitical hot spot yeah it is a there are a lot of open questions around Taiwan especially with the next few years so I think it's like a kind of a perfect time to be there let's say we got to figure out what you're doing and working at BayJay if you want to like a Q&A I can interview you or give a talk on yeah something you've learned it's a cool audience it is a cool audience got to get some night markets so I don't know if you knew this but I so I've spent time
all of restasia have loved my time in Japan in various parts of China spent time in Taiwan most recently in Korea which completely blew my mind loved loved loved soul which is is where I spent time but I spent with the time on specifically two summers in Taiwan no way yeah I spent two
summers this is way before tech made anything easy because this would have been ninety eight ninety nine maybe in that range somewhere around there maybe ninety seven actually and a hilarious story I remember going on these really rough bulletin boards where English like physical or like online online bulletin boards and the English was not always super straightforward or easy to understand I was doing my best and I ended up having someone because I was trying to
find a cheap place to stay in Taipei and couldn't quite figure it out didn't have any money really so I ended up connecting with someone who said they could organize a homestay and then I arrived in Taipei it's pouring rain I don't know a lot of people I eventually take a taxi from the airport torrential down port to this supposed homestay and it's like a dilapidated church and they're like here's your bed and it's just a wooden surface like it's wow I was like
you're back on that's yeah 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 to the street and offered to help me which I've just due to a host of reasons I was wary of I was like I'm not sure if I want like it just seems
uncommon here for this to be viable offer without strings attached turned out to be a good Samaritan she owned two restaurants in Taipei she was like you know what I come by anytime introduced me to all of her friends so I ended up just getting adopted by this woman and her basically like rat it to a 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 Hobbes inside so you're a good
influence on me in this case absolutely delivered on on that premise and just had the best time and Taiwan has these fantastic night markets it is at the time perfect for me so such a night out like a very late night culture you got you'll got dinners you see this in places like Argentina
to some places in Europe where like this is bizarre it is 11 o'clock at night and there's an entire family out with even little kids having dinner I love that this doesn't make any sense and I actually loved it had a wonderful
time and that was a long time ago now I mean I'm trying to tell you run in the basic math here it's like 20 30 years ago I mean a long time ago and for that reason and many more also that we haven't taken a trip together internationally a little while like a real trip we've collided in various
places in Italy briefly like boom like yeah little like course collision although actually know I take it back Antarctica that was a real trip 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 two weeks yeah about to week yeah that was really like not I mean exploration yes but with lots of constraints like don't wander around and wander off and fall into a one kilometer like Kravass and die
don't do that all right so we're at camp Asia what were the dates on that again roughly March 7th to 9th all right yeah Tim's gonna be speaking so that's exciting I need to finesse in the detail but Matt is committing a month to have I am I would like to make it happen I really this is a priority so that is in there what else you can do it kind of ties into that all right something I haven't told you oh wow I am taking a sabbatical in 2024 sabbatical 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 is if you don't take it until year seven you don't get another one until year 12 the clock starts when you come back from the previous one I extoll 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 on the biggest hypocrite in 18
years I have not taken one myself luckily almost every other executive has so like the example gets set but I finally was like you know I just need to pull the trigger and so February March April including during this work camp I'm going to be officially on sabbatical I'm honestly terrified I don't know 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 and a lot of people get weird in Antarctica in fairness
yeah so I'm going to try to do some detox maybe some silent retreats you know working on hobbies like chess sailing ping pong just fun unplug stuff but honestly I'm kind of scared too so I've got one or two dates that are in there a friend's surgery this work camp but I'm just going to show up like a attendee I'll speak or something but like I'm not going to like help planet or do anything like that so even we're going to have a board meeting in there
and it's going to be a good practice talk about this with team like what we're going to do about this it's like well I'll go to the board meeting but I'll go to like a board member not like someone who planned out the agenda and
everything like that so I'll get the material one of 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 so who is going to be
presenting this information instead of met leaders in the company leaders in the company actually financial officer general counsel are always really big in the so here's a question for you I'm very excited about this and I'm very skeptical because 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 especially I guess I could skip the board meeting I'm kind of
curious though for this experience so it's driven right now by curiosity so the benefit you know a lot of people think obviously the benefits to the person you get the three months pay time off so that's pretty cool we now at people who've done multiple because they've been in automatic 10 or 15 years and like some of the testimonials are amazing like someone was like yeah I get to take a summer with my kids I think they're doing their second or third one
they're like this is the last one because after this they're going to be in college I'll never get this amount of time with them probably again for a long time but there's also benefits to the organization it's funny one people think people ask because they say well do people just take these and never come back that's basically never happened maybe if I had people resign like maybe once or twice out of the like thousand but like it's very rare 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 that to watch their in the critical path for 100% agreed when it's two or three months the organization needs to figure out how to work without
that person and so it's a great opportunity to identify those bottlenecks actually some financial service firms require this for auditing reasons because if someone's in a critical path of some financial thing it's actually a good practice for someone else do that for a while that's not really our
primary concern but you can figure out your bus count pretty quickly it's like oh wait a second it also gives great leadership opportunities so this was inspired by former CEO of automatic Tony Schneider which is did this because he's cool and he did like a three month road trip with his family at the time he was CEO I was president gave me an opportunity to practice being the CEO and we saw it 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 that a thousand people do spedicals or however many people
but a lot of people do it last I checked you guys are involved in the content business have you thought of or has anyone assembled anywhere sabbatical best practices because this is also on some level synonymous with what I described in the four hour work week is the mini retirement a primary value
of which is you establish systems and stress test system and processes that outlive this medical they persist is this something you guys have gathered is there some type of discussion form where you have anything like this so funny because as of today no but probably by the time this gets this gets
published at automatic dot com slash a bad we started working on a page so a lot of people blog their experience this is a page that other people meaning the public but they did it will be just slash a badical so a lot of people blog about their experience and there's really all types some people like have walked the El Camino for a couple months or done like the Pacific Coast Cresting some people just stay at home and chill out you know some people
like it's really it's all over the map and I don't think there's a right way to do it except hopefully not just do what you were doing before and we do kind of like really strongly encourage people on the blog actually someone just who's on sabbatical peeing me on slack and I was like don't make me turn off your access but you need someone to do that for you you need a higher police officer at the end of the sabbatical but a child lock on my phone or something
and like I'll give you the co-event to get a cookie jar with a timer on it yeah the end of the sabbatical the sabbatical is a huge success why has it been a huge success because there's doing it to say look I'm walking the walk and I did my sabbatical but that's not very interesting 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 beyond sabbatical but in practice be a lurker on all sorts of different business calls and meetings that would be pretty terrible it would be so what would success look like and I actually something I'm debating is because you know I do love coding computer stuff and so like playing around with like LED
programming or something is maybe a sabbatical project but I'm also like I want the computer all day so just for like a health reason I think I should really get off so what's success oh it's kind of what we talked about for the organization should and people should get a lot more robust what's success for you I'm most interested in map all the way think from me is that I'm recharged you know the funny thing is people come back really wanting to work and a typical thing I
hear is like can't take some month to unplug for your brain to like reset month to just enjoy things month three people start to get antsy to return which is I don't know if that'll happen to me but that's a pretty common
work so I hope I come back with like a renewed energy the last last kind of two years it's been really really hard you know we had lots of business ups and downs there's been all sorts of crazy stuff AI stuff and I am a little toasty to be honest like not burnt out but like definitely at times
like a little more stressed and normal where it's really into me and you always talk about how I'm so calm like thank you but also like you know human too so it is the duck on the pond so like hell underneath so I think that's the thing I'm looking forward to what am I scared of is a weird thing we're also being scared like of like people not needing you or relevance which I think is like a really core fear for me it's not maybe not practical at all I'm
like it there's something there is the needing you and relevance those the same in your mind or those different things probably different versions like maybe in a global context or in the company context and needing you maybe even maybe like an interpersonal and so like when I've done like some
meditations or some other work that can be like a core fear of mine then maybe how have I designed organizations to meet me in a way that's not healthy this is one of the questions I ask myself or if you get a lot of benefit and I do sometimes you came in and saved the thing I feel is really nice especially like a CEO or a job which is very morphous people are like what do you actually do 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 Kelowna who I think you've had on right oh yeah absolutely yes we had a great episode yes some very good questions yes 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 so I think success for me is also yeah just come back really energized excited hopefully with a lot of inspiration and ideas because I get a lot of inspiration from my
art or stuff outside of WordPress recharge I mean there different ways one can use that word are we talking about I would imagine we're talking about recharge physically intellectually etc multiple ways if someone a down on health stuff what would that potentially look like getting that outside forcing them to do a two mile jog I think so I actually has to train for sunlight nature nothing novel this is all like the basic stuff you talk about the basics of the basics for
a reason yeah and it's so effective I'll probably experiment with some stuff you know they just started to be this blueprint delivery service in San Francisco I don't know if that is brand Johnson yeah yeah there's like the weird food that's like a gel or something like there's no delivery service for that so like you get your silent green in a bottle and I'm actually pretty excited about it looks like right out right I'm not really going to cook this stuff so yeah just do
some experiments there so I asked you what success might look like yeah made some headway there I can ask a million follow ups but I'm going to ask a different question it's looking at the sabbatical from perhaps the opposite side which is let's say after the sabbatical you or maybe just the people
closest to you are like yeah sabbatical didn't really work out kind of failed kind of fell on its face what do you think are the most likely temptations or slipping points or issues that could compromise in the sabbatical well somehow my health got worse over it yeah right so 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 hedonistic treadmill type
thing and it's nice sometimes I mean about to the holidays I got them to consume some stuff or it's nice take a nice meal or vacation but if that becomes you're 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 as a great quote about that oh you're thinking about will you're out yeah derance I'm going to read it actually okay while you're looking that up I'll just say I'm interested in what temptations because I could name mine like what temptations you
think you need to be preemptively guarding against because the siren song is likely to pull you how might you be complicit in creating the conditions yeah social media I can need to be careful about that particularly my Twitter ex addiction news consumption my most
dangerous is where something is sometimes productive or has some positive but is probably net negative on a whole or if I spend too many hours on it phone time in general 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 using it all be interesting I mean they'd still be there when you came back you know enough people if you really really I want to get on the phone while I'm walking outside in the sun and talk to someone like cyan or run and just be like hey would
you mind just giving me like the most the most exciting things going on right now in your field and I'll trade because I'm excited to share blah blah blah like you can do that it's good idea I'm sure you can I like these ideas keep them coming we'll do rant this is from fallen leaves which is that
post-tumus book health lies in action and so it graces youth to be busy is the secret of grace and half the secret of content let us ask the gods not for possessions but for things to do happiness is in making things rather than
and consuming them that is amazing is that beautiful that is key sound to me please yeah well to rent I mean just it will an aerial yeah so prolific and also so incredibly good at crafting pros I mean yeah did you read the fallen leaves book no it's neat it's on life right so it's kind of his
and I guess it was discovered after he passed like the manuscripts wow and so like many years like 30 years after he passed or something so I'm calling it this a matical well you're the guy that you can that is a specialist in dad jokes this began I mean may have become in the delivery room for all I know okay let's we make come back I'm sure we're dinner will talk about this sabbatical or but in terms of things that you've changed your mind on are excited about or
absurd things you do any and all 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 okay from what to what I think even like when I was a baby my mom took me to like a nuclear protest or something and
so like as someone caring about the environment I sort of assumed nuclear I was kind of anti nuclear Chernobyl etc. And now I'm pretty fully convinced that is necessary we should be building as many of these plants as possible and it's going to be an amazing part of the bridge to more carbon free future and you see that in small scale reactors with less likelihood of technical problems and issues yeah all of the above let's take the things that worked they're expensive like
we need to get better building stuff like China is really kicking our butt here you stop turning ones off that we're running like that's our stuff like stop shooting ourselves in the foot so it happened with Germany you know when they turn a bunch of stuff off but then I'll turn it back on so this is going the right way and there's a lot of investment in the tech here and so you know let the Bill Gates start up and the other ones in the same Altman start of like
let them ship and nuclear in this case refers to vision we're talking about vision yes and there could be breakthroughs around other things but people here this but also like the US military has nuclear power submarines and aircraft carriers that are going around underwater like we've been done this
very reliably for like many decades now so I feel like that was a wrong turn in history some theories it might have been influenced actually by like countries or companies with a lot of like a fossil fuel but you know sometimes we do the wrong thing that we figured out so nuclear is one of them it's like Adelix tell me you know thanks to you 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 silly and very pro legalization in a lot of ways and like for weed for example I think there's some interesting stuff coming out around like marijuana which I kind of not heard any bad stuff about where I like oh this can actually create some risk for psychosis there's I used to make fun of these things right like the old documentaries are like you smoke one blunt you go crazy like refer
refer madness like all this stuff is so dumb but we fund a lot of research yeah and I like that people are researching these things so we can understand the good and the bad of these molecules how to use them safely because we see the M back is so incredible and there's also I have now seen I think you have as well where it can go wrong super rare but there's other stuff maybe confounding factors yeah for sure so that's a change your mind on or the
yeah I think I used to be like very super pro just open legalization of everything like so 18 or above or 21 or above you can just get it in any store whatever you want whenever you want and now questioning that 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 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 like eight or nine out of ten would be a case of dissuasion and not persuasion and there are a few reasons for that one is if someone is looking for a quick fix and by the nature of their questions 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 to say serious
knee surgery or shoulder replacement surgery whereby you're going to do a lot of due diligence you're going to do probably strengthening and a number of pre-hab 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 Olan as an example has been on the podcast and the potential for reopening critical windows is a compelling new theory slash
hypothesis around some of the amazing outcomes that you see with these conditions like complex PTSD and so on where somebody has the diagnosis of PTSD for 17 years they've failed every intervention and then at the end of a trial you have something like I'm pulling this number out of the air but it's not that far off like 67% full remission or the best other alternatives like 15 years or something like that they're just universes apart but the importance
of the 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 be an index card I'm not going to read any books I'm not I don't have time for ABC to read but I do have 15 minutes should I do five in a day and I'm like absolutely not you know you shouldn't well and so many of these things are expires the assisted therapy and so the assisted therapy part is really I would say
furthermore there has been historically and by historic lambing recent history in the last say 10 years where the conversation and conversations around psychedelics have changed quite dramatically there's a lot more research there are many for profit companies now at this point which is
fantastic on a bunch levels and also adds a degree of complexity from an intellectual property and let's just call it open source perspective that on some levels can be concerning I see both sides of this because I'm actually I want some new molecules yeah I like I'm fine with the engineers
something that maybe doesn't have some of the downside sure I'm all for novel innovation but people should not be rewarded with patents they can be used to potentially restrict manufacturer of related compounds if they're not producing something that is truly novel with some utility that's my
perspective if we're talking about what we could certainly get into this but there is a role for new molecules of course there is and if you could take for instance something like LSD and modify it slightly such that it is more of what people might call a psychoplastogens 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 monger and Buffett earlier right never ask a barber if you need a haircut I think
it's very important to consider the incentives involved when you are looking at the suggested protocols from a for profit company I invest in for profit companies all the time I'm clearly pro market driven solutions on a million different levels and if someone is incentivized to shoehorn
a therapy within currently existing frameworks and for that reason and many others including let's just say rate of turnover or volume of patients they're pushing for an experience that is 10 to 15 minutes in length in earth time I have a lot of questions to ask before I would endorse
something like that but suffice to say the conversation has been heavily biased towards positive stories and I think maybe overly so yeah there's a little went through the winter or like hey let's not easy does it and I think I kind of feel for that a little bit yeah there's a huge
survivorship bias I think that's going to change but especially with smaller numbers and when for good reason people feel like they are part of let's just say in the last 10 years name a time so 2015 lot of starting to happen in
the very early stages like the Hopkins Center and so on people feel like they are part of a movement and they want this movement to succeed and there are certain milestones that are incredibly important and potential inflection points for opening up these therapies to eventually millions of
people and they don't want to do anything to jeopardize that so if there is a story for instance of someone on the underground who in a soul-side been assisted session even though they have no outstanding pre-existing issues outside of say hypertension has a heart attack and dies in session that
is not going to make it to the radio waves generally speaking and there are examples of this even though something like so Simon is not there's no known LD50 in terms of lethal those 50 that would kill say 50 percent of a random sampling of thousand people so physiologically it's very
well tolerated but these experiences can be very intense and they're not well suited to all people nor all conditions let's just take schizophrenia as an example that's just enough people do anything people died doesn't the world every day yeah no exactly so it's also a case where if
up to this point you've by and large outside of an indigenous context because really in the United States by and large were not contending with that with the exception of perhaps payout use in the Native American church and so on but if we're looking at more western informed facilitated
sessions using these various classical psychedelics you're looking at the sample size to date tens of thousands of people probably who have done generous guy generous who have done guided sessions typically at high cost often white glove service let's just call it that is not going to be the
experience of the average person if they're going through Kaiser permanent there someone else to get empty basis psychotherapy five years from now and when you go from 10,000 to 20 to a hundred thousand she's going to happen that's just the fact of the matter you certainly see this
with any drug that makes it through phase three and then ends 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 I'm on the same page with you in the sense that I really feel with these tools you mentioned nuclear how many are friend who rest in peace rolling Griffiths used to say that
you're working with nuclear power you're working with psychological nuclear power when you're using psychedel compounds you need to be incredibly thoughtful good analogy yeah right there can be radioactive it can be healing chemotherapy and it can also be very harmful absolutely and they can
be generative or can be destructive and plasticity in and of itself this word gets used often in a lay discussion as a net positive but plasticity is an automatically a positive thing it depends a lot on what transpires in that window plasticity my big fear I'm like hey I like my
mind I like my life I don't want to like stir anything up I'm like sure I want to throw that play dough in the microwave right so that's a lot of my particularly successful friends their nervousness around it yeah and I've also seen huge positive impacts on many many people so yeah and I think
with many of these things and another reason I tend to dissuade folks often is if it's just curiosity well it's kind of like I'm just curious should I go into the reactor and play with some rods I'm like well if you were to then ask is this risky I'd say compared to what okay compared to not
satisfying that curiosity yeah it's risky if you were to say because for instance in the context of psychedelics let's just say I began you specifically which is very interesting wow you took it there and I did because it has known
cardiac risk yeah people can die using I began unlike some of these more better known classical psychedelics where there's very low documented physiological risk I began is risky let's just say if you're a psychic doctor is 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 film the blank it's a question of comparison in which case I think it's an incredibly promising avenue worth exploring and their ways to
mitigate some of that risk Dr. Nolan Williams is doing it could be a shot out of there a lot it kind of brings me to my next changed mind thing which is perhaps the antidote to some of this which is breathwork all right I think I thought breathwork was just kind of whatever
yeah and then there's a million versions of it right and there's apps for like other ship does the Wim Hof stuff there's all these sorts of different things I also like we had a friend from like S.L. and who's 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 breathwork now and so so these things came in from different areas I've just started explored a lot more it's incredibly powerful we've been playing with a shift wave chair right we just kind of
coordinates the pulses on the chair with breathwork the breathwork is I would say a lot of the benefit of that and so it's also a tool you can have with you at all times you can travel to any country in the world like it's like
with your lungs it's literally the most basic element of living is breath and so there's something cool if that's perhaps a unlock to a more calm interstate or like access to different things would has been your personal experience with breathwork I feel like this breathwork that can make me
sleepy I feel like this breathwork that helps me focus I feel like this breathwork it's a ton of weapons thing you do like this very like there's stuff to like give you energy so particularly I'm very interested in let me get
these words right in dodgeness solutions versus X exogenous yeah so instead of like have another green tea or something if I'm tired and afternoon what's the movement of breath I could do something internally yeah so exogenous could easily remember that is like exoskeleton people have heard that so
outside the body using something outside the body and dodgeness endoskeleton well yeah endoskeleton is probably what we have I guess although you don't really we just call us skeleton yeah breathwork so I would second that and say that breathwork is something I
would view as also a prerequisite even if your intention is to say ultimately you say good legs I will very often chat with friends who are interested in exploring many of these different tools on site okay first thing you do is you're going to do 30 days of the introductory course on the
waking up app from sam harris so good you're going to combine that with reading awareness by Anthony de Mello and after the second week or after the after four weeks you're going to do a holotropic breathwork course there are a lot of facilitators and it's a term that is relatively turning
towards wholeness is what that means by the way which is relatively easy to find in most metropolitan areas and it was developed by Stanislaus Graf and others and you should do at least a weekend course with whole trip of breathwork ideally due to a three separate sessions so
that you have a chance to have a breath of different experience including maybe some challenging or strange or disorienting experiences and then we can talk about potentially phase two or three if you even need to go there and a few things happen it's a good course just for anyone to follow
exactly what happens in many cases is people are like this is fantastic I'm going to 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 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 dough in the microwave with no clear power in this case a ga psychedelics if you're not willing to do
four weeks of things that will benefit you anyway you shouldn't throw your play dough in the microwave because there's a chance something goes sideways or that you get destabilized and it requires some really concerted effort with support staff some type of safety net to put
Humpty Dumpty back together again and if you have not demonstrated the willingness and capability to do that on the front end I have zero confidence that you will be able to do that on the tail end what would you recommend for someone going through a deep depression because one of the things about
depression is it can be hard to take a shower to do that you know 30 days of the thing so do you have like breakouts or things you recommend to interrupt that cycle depression is a multi-faceted beast and for people who don't have the context I 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 search Tim Ferrissou
side that post will pop up it's one of the more important posts I've ever written would be certainly top three or so of the blog post I've written very proud of that post I mean if you look at the comments you'll see why thousands of comments at this point but
how I relate to suicidal ideation I think can be found in that post but number one I'm not a doctor I don't play one on the internet but I do have a lot of personal experience depression and I've been approached by a lot of people with depression including close friends
and I would say that as you mentioned it can be seemingly impossible to summon the will to do anything when you're severely depressed there are people who get almost into a catatonia I actually so this year I experienced it for the first time no good a very close loved
one's going through chemotherapy and it was interesting it hit me quite hard which is felt dumb as well because I'm not going through it myself but what really like woke me up is usually you hear me talk about word personality I'm so excited about it there was a day I just looked
at my computer I was like I don't care about this that never happened before yeah that was the wake of I was like oh man everything seems kind of graced scale I feel as apathy and it really gave me a lot of empathy for things you've described before that had an experienced
personally what helped you I don't know if my example is good because I do want to know your answer for me some of the external conditions changing so the chemo getting better and better and ending was part of it so that's not a great answer because sometimes
your external conditions still suck or bad things happen and you can lose loved ones I got really strict about exercise I cut out all alcohol it's like okay I just need to like detox clean up be like kind of monk mode and I think that's all I know how to do sleep
you know try to like I probably uninstall Twitter at that point yeah I go just really like it's kind of things that are on my list anyway but you know day to day I would say 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'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 and those are those are entirely different species closer to that first one from the experience yeah so I'd say a few things the couple of resources I want to recommend first of all if your
suicidal certainly please call a hotline and I've been through this you're not alone a lot of people face this and even though it feels like it's permanent it's personal there's nothing you can do to change it there are tools and I'm living proof of that so I mean I am incredibly happy and fulfilled
right now and I've found tools that help to stabilize and facilitate that not 100% of the time because I'm still part of the human experience so I would just say you're not alone and if it's an acute experience please call a suicide hotline and I'll put that in the show notes but if you search my name Tim Ferriss suicide that post has helped a lot of people there's also a post I wrote called something long lines of productivity hacks for the manic depressive neurotic and something rather like me
which has been helpful for a lot of folks and that also I think just allows people to remove some of the self-judgment from the experience because of the experience that's difficult and then there's the harsh self-judgment that sometimes accompanies it that was tough for me right where
you might be in a really challenging state you're suffering and then you have this voice that says who the fuck are you kidding are you joking right now 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 Jell-Link to 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 of psychiatry Yale which was effectively and everything you would ever want to know about ketamine episode and I think for acute suicidal ideation and risk of self-harm intravenous or I am ketamine is
very interesting as a pattern interrupt and that episode is available for folks there are risks associated with ketamine there is 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 very well researched and that is one tool another that is a newer tool that I've been exploring myself also which we might talk about at dinner because we haven't talked about it is something called accelerated TMS and this is
trans cranial magnetic stimulation so various types of brain stimulation for addressing tremor resistant depression anxiety there are some newer protocols like the St. Protocol which was developed at Stanford that are incredibly interesting and-
way faster too because the old treatments take like 30 days an hour or something and the new ones are way faster way faster so you're taking it so otherwise take a month or two and compressing it into five days and fascinating, fascinating cutting edge stuff that I'm paying a lot of attention to because some of the results are equal to or even greater than with durability so if as fast acting and as durable or to a greater extent fast acting and durable then some of the psychedelic
is just therapies and I'm really about it as well because we have friends that won't ever take a psychedelic or some of these things or it does- actually there's whole religions, there's Mormons of this LDS etc. so some of this stuff I think is like a really cool accessibility, can I like the same way of breath work can be?
Absolutely and for people who might be older, a little frail or with different conditions, higher blood pressure etc. a lot of these folks should not touch psychedelics, they just should not. The risk profile doesn't make sense and that would also be true for certain types of disorders.
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 chaotic or like entropic disorders versus hyper-rigidity disorders like OCD out consider chronic anxiety and depression to be also a rigidity
issues on some level because they are often thought loops things that repeat, there is a stuckness whereas something like schizophrenia which I have seen up close and personal has a different feeling to it, an opposite end of the spectrum in some respects. So I'm very interested in those conditions. I'll check out those posts. For someone who's like having a hard couple of weeks and he mentioned 20 Robins earlier, I will mention something that I learned from him.
I don't know if he's the original source of this, but I used to put this at the top of my journals. I would write it out at the top of my journals so that I would see it every morning. It was basically a, let's call it a flow chart. That's an overstabend. It said, state in all caps with an arrow that went to story and then that went to strategy. So state story strategy.
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. So what I do, the challenge there is that if you're looking at the world through gray glasses, the story that you're going to come up with is going to be a most likely disabling story. And then you're going to come up with strategies that are by and large, pretty ineffective. If on the other hand you start with state.
So if you're in a low energy state, you hop in a cold shower for five minutes or you do 50 jumping jacks or you do 20 push-ups, anything to change your state from a low energy state to a higher energy state. And that's governed by all sorts of things. Well, let's keep it simple. So low to higher energy state. Then you sit down and you're able to because of changes in neurotransmitters or any number of things. You have a more enabling story.
So you've turned the gray, maybe a tint or two brighter. Then the strategies who come up with are going to be more effective. So just reminding myself constantly before you jump to the strategy, like the what to do, the how to fix, have you addressed the state because this thing in between the story really matters. Because if your narrative is, oh, I'm always pessimistic. I've never been able to fix this. You're starting at a deficit.
You have a severe handicap in coming up with approaches that are going to help you. So that might be helpful to people as well. Like state story strategy, that is the order. I got 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-hmm. Or drink your water. So sleep water. And then you've been in nature. Mm-hmm. That's a good checklist. I like it because it's three. And so sometimes I just do like a check. I'm be like, oh, man.
This morning's so tough. I felt like I wasn't grading that meeting. 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. Because our body kind of emotions come from our system. Sometimes it's saying I'm hungry. I'm hungry. And it's coming through as like something else or brain interprets it. Yeah, totally. And to invoke our mutual friend Kevin Kelly in his book of excellent advice which came out not too long ago.
Greybuck. Very pithy. And one of them is if you don't know what you need, sleep. And if you don't know what to do, chances are you need more sleep. And if you're in a depressed state, and this is something I have to remind myself of, I would be inclined even subconsciously to consume stimulants. Because that does change your state.
But if you consume stimulants and then that disrupts your sleep architecture and then maybe you drink a little booze to take the edge off because you're trying to get to sleep, this is a vicious cycle. And I had Richard Branson on the podcast years ago. And his advice was stopped again. As far as depression goes, he was just like in nine out of 10 cases, alcohol is somehow in that picture. In his lived experience and his social circles. So those are a few things that come to mind.
There are other things certainly, and I could go on and on. I think the work by Byron Katie and doing turn-arounds interrogating your beliefs is very valuable. I believe that I'm making this up. But my sister is selfish and always does what she wants. There are many work pages and exercises that are available for free on Byron Katie's website. So if you just search Byron Katie, BYRO and KatieKTIE, 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. You would then create alternative sentences and find supporting evidence for each one. So my sister isn't selfish. She never does what she wants. And you have to come up with some examples. You might also replace it with, I'm selfish. I always do what I want. And then you come up with some examples. And I and others have found these exercises to be incredibly powerful. There are a million and one different varieties of this.
For me, the turn-arounds are you have to come up with confirming evidence for statements that were not your starting statement. I find defangs your beliefs, which are thoughts we take to be true. Take back the Charlie Munger. He says you should be able to argue the opposite. Just as well as you can argue your case. Yeah. You're throwing on stage. You've got to be Bernanke, like. Useful exercise. Really useful exercise. Got a couple more. Let's do it. Which made me change my mind on TikTok.
So I'm just going to read this because it was ridiculous. 20% of 18 to 29 year olds. Did you hear this? No. And said, do you agree with the statement the Holocaust was a myth? Agreed with it. They had the chart of the difference errors. And like 65 plus it was like 0%. Yeah. Or like point one or something. And then like it goes up to this 18 to 29%. That's horrifying. And then you can see this information. And there's some indicators that it could be sort of TikTok related.
Makes me really question like, is this an adversarial thing? Like is this another country like goosing the algorithm a little bit in a way that yeah, is very scary misinformation. Just terrifying. I mean, you imagine what a geopolitical advantage would be to be able to just vary ever so slightly nudge sentiment about X or person Y in a certain direction. Our social networks are not loud in China. There's no Facebook. There's no Twitter X. There's no like, there's no Instagram.
I think there's a reason for that. I think if you'd asked me earlier this year or something, it would have been like, whatever, a referee society we should have everything like that's dumb. Trump tried to get rid of it. I was like, oh, you know, now I'm like, huh. And it was that stat that kind of like blew my mind. Got some absurd things blogging. I think it's absurd and it's beautiful. Observed meaning it's like a horse and buggy. In the modern world of clips and video and AI,
what do you mean? It feels that way sometimes. Yeah. Like everyone's like on to something else. I guess newsletters are kind of like blogging, but like, you know what? There's something so beautiful about doing it. I've been doing it a lot more this year. And it's one of the most rewarding things in my year. What do you find rewarding about it? The comments, the interaction, the follow-up. Well, the act of writing forces you to clarify your thinking.
It activates something different in your brain. I mean, you know that some, um, freaks into a writer, a writer. That's incredible. That the publishing is incredibly vulnerable, scary. And then all the stuff that happens afterwards, you learn so much from. Yeah, we need to chat about how to not resurrect because there's still good commenters, but how one could create like the best comment section on the internet.
Because what I've noticed, and I'm sure you've noticed this, is that with blog posts, a lot of that conversation has sort of left the room to social media. So the volume of comments and so on is less. But there are exceptions, right? If I go to say the Derek Sivers blog, and I look at his comment section, amazing comment section, right? If I look at Tyler Cowan's comments. Pretty good. Although mixed. There's a lot of... Mixed, but he's, I mean, I remember... He moderates it.
And he for display himself. He moderates it. So that's the secret. He post a question as like the most underrated geniuses of all time, and he nominated Beethoven, or I'm screwing it up. But it was some classical music composer, and there was an amazing discussion in the comments, which of course may have been, as I think you're implying, tightly curated. I don't know. I think he's pretty open, but you set an example.
So by the behavior that you do in the comments, and that, you know, what you allow, that sets the standard, and people follow that. Also, SEO kind of screws it up because you get people just trying to get links, or you really have to be careful about that. So blogging. I changed my mind. Oh, this is my last change of mind. It's a little happier than the last one. Vienna Saustges. Vienna Saustges? You know the Saustges in the can? I've no idea where you're talking about that.
Oh, wow. So there's this thing called Vienna Saustges. I have no idea if they're from Vienna, but it's like, I kind of like, how many? Six or seven Saustges and like a little can like this? Okay. I'm so open. I used to have it as a kid. Uh-huh. It makes me think they're not from Vienna. I usually am not allowed to shop for myself because I'm basically like a... Gummi bear is in with a credit card, my parents credit card.
And like so I bought a bunch of Vienna Saustges 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 like last month. Oh, okay. All right, got it. Because I was like, I'll put it in my desk. I like to keep like healthy snacks by my desk and where I work. And I just assumed it's sausage must be like, you know the punchline that's coming. It's terrible for you. Yeah. I think ingredients to sodium, 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 I was saying, oh yeah, I had healthy lunch from Vienna Saustge. And someone was like, I'm very close to love to one. And I was like, that's not healthy. I was like, yeah, it is. And like, we googled it and I was so wrong. Okay. So Vienna Saustge. Sorry guys, you're on the suspended list. Oh, this is that fun food one as well. Let's do it.
You know, there's so much good fancy pizza in San Francisco. Like, flour and water, 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. Ranch. Yeah, ranch sauce. Ranch sauce. Like, ranch dressing? Ranch dressing. Yeah, yeah. Sauce, ranch dressing. See? This is why you're the chef. Yeah. Ranch sauce. Got an organic ranch. I asked for a ranch in Delphina. And they just scoffed.
I've 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 did not go well. I will now contrast a restaurant called Kinesa. And say, where's this go? A new one. Kinesa or Kinesa? La Kinesa. Kinesa. Okay. And they have a lot of like Xsays on people. It's a casual restaurant, but it was really good service. They served an amazing pizza. I had the crust. I like to dip the crust in the ranch.
And as I do have any ranch, I was ready to be disappointed or scoffed at. And they said, hold on. And they actually ran to another restaurant next door to get me something. That was amazing. But then I realized, because how do you take more agency in your life? I keep asking for ranch to be shut down. Like, how am I creating the conditions? I say it I want. And so I was like, oh, you just get those packets. So I went on Amazon and I got like 200 ranch packets for like a $16 or something.
So these have now arrived. It's one of the places in San Francisco. And I'm going to be my next What's in my bag. It's some pocket ranch. Pocket ranch. You just keep one or two on every inside pocket on your fancy jackets. I've seen you. I'm so curious what I'm going to put ranch on in the future. Having it available at all times. The poster. I still insist on looking at every tab and email. And I'm tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands behind at this point.
I think I have 500 tabs open right now. Wait, what? This is an absurd thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's 500 tabs open in your browsers. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I'll even reply to emails from seven or eight years ago. I have like that folder and stuff like. And I go through it almost like massacistically. And this sad thing is like on a third of them, it just bounces. People don't have a lot of energy. Why are you replying to emails from seven or eight years ago? Is this just like your opus day penance?
Like, there's probably some of that. Just cat and nine tails on the back. I also like I'm not worthy. I'm not worthy. I appreciate it people who have replied to me. All right. When I was nobody or anything like that. And so I kind of want to pay that forward a little bit. I also just am really impressed. I feel like there may be a point where you sufficiently reap at that death that you don't need to continue to crawl on your knees on broken glass with your tab of ten-year-old.
I didn't say this is a good idea. You have to have served things. Oh, I know. This is absurd. All right. So I'm still doing that. Maybe I'll work on that on my sabbatical. There you go. I'll just answer emails. Don't hold down. Oh, God. No, kidding, kidding. I think you might have some of this as well. I have a very ultra critical eye. And I've been constantly remodeling things. Instead of just enjoying them, they're pretty decent and fine already.
And this is one of those things that there's a superpower as well. Like I can open a web app or a design and like immediately spot things down to the pixel. But the downside is sometimes I go in like on apartment that's beautiful. And I'm like, oh, next to that speaker, there's like a little divot in your ceiling. Yeah, that's the same thing. But now you're going to see every time I'm kidding. Yes, I just cursed your apartment. But. So that is like a curse as well.
And I'd like to be able to turn it off. To just enjoy things as they are. The wabi-sabi. How do you think you'll make any progress with that? No idea. Maybe someone can leave a comment. 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 30 days of meditation are out of reach for people who are having a hard couple of weeks. I would say that the returns on something and this is very simple. And number once the social return on say going to a weekend, transcendental meditation training, interacting with someone is net positive to begin with. So I'm assuming you can get out of bed.
If you're crippled psychologically and can't get out of bed, then it's a different conversation. But if you can get up and 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. 20 minutes a session twice a day will make a difference. It creates a bit of space in the system and a little bit more space. It's like taking your thoughts speed down to like 0.5x.
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, 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 20 minutes. I could just lay down the floor for 20 minutes. But proving to myself that I do not need to rush. I have enough time.
I have the luxury of being able to take two 20 minute breaks and then seeing over the course of the week that I actually get better results. With less stress when I do this, sometimes I think it's just sitting up straight with good posture for 20 minutes.
I don't know what the causal factors are, but I do think there's a benefit there and I'm bringing it up because I do think that a regular meditation practice has helped me to accept some of the Wabis-Habis stuff and where there's a point of diminishing returns where there's like improvement up to like 90% right? If you want to improve it from 90% right to close to 100% right? First of all, you're almost never going to get to 100% because things change and things deteriorate.
But let's just, I'm making up a number here. But like, let's just say it takes you 50 hours to get 90% right. It'll take another 50 hours to do the last 10%. That's very different from my experience of meditation. All right, tell me. And this is actually, I guess something I've changed my mind on, I'm going to have to talk at dinner. Is it more munkish? No, I think meditation can actually be dangerous at certain levels. So that's something we have to explore.
For me, it may be time I'm meditating as well. My system gets very sensitive and very observant. And I kind of also probably try to use meditation a little bit as like a mental exercise to improve my cognition, my focus, other things. And that focus as well, like sometimes, or just a sensitivity to the system. You know, talking about downsides of meditation like there's, I know someone who loved blueberries, and they got so sensitive to their system, they like can't eat blueberries anymore.
From meditation? That's what they claim. Wow. And there's the pursuit of the janas, which is really big in San Francisco now. Like, I got to catch you up on a bunch of weird San Francisco stuff. All right, so we'll get cut up on 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 Dr. Willowby Britton. I'll put it in the show notes on the hidden risks of meditation. Actually. Oh, cool.
I'll check that out. And how they're addressed, and how they overlap with a lot of the risks of psychedelics. I believe that, yeah. Which is not to say like, don't do it. Yeah, boogie man in the closet. Like, you're going to do TM for 20 minutes, and have your brain implode like I'm not saying. The doings of that is I think extremely low risk. So I'm thinking more like, many hundreds of hours. Yeah, then you get in trickier territory.
I mean, historically, it's not like everybody in the world was on meditation apps. Meditation was reserved for pretty select group of folks. Who had a lot of supervision. So 20 minutes so twice a day. I find helpful. For example, a mutual friend of ours was at my house recently. And for whatever reason, I'm in an older house. And there are like 87 light switches. There's so many light switches is so unnecessary. And there's one panel with the switches that is like 10% turned.
And he doesn't have the biggest doesn't have the fixation on details that I do. But he said to me, he's like, I am astonished that you have not fixed that because that must drive you insane. He's known me for a very long time. I'm like, yeah, this is like my daily practices to look at that. That's cool. And be like, you know what? It's fine. It's fucking fine. There are many other bigger fish to fry. And that in a way kind of becomes my practice. It's in the kitchen. I see it every day.
And it's gotten to a point where it does mother. And if or when we have kids, I think kids also break up. I think I'm gonna break up with it. Any obsession you have with keeping your house perfect? I think it goes out the window. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's gonna be game over. I am almost done. All right. This last one is really weird and then I have a funny one. All right. So the weirdest thing I've been exposed to recently, it's got 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. I guess there's a mutation on one of the bacteria that they have essentially GMOed a replacement. So it's a... The bacteria, I guess, normally produces lactate acid. The lactate acid is what breaks down your teeth, creates cavities. In the 80s, I guess the scientist discovered this in one of his students' mouth. It had two mutations.
And they genetically modified it to add a few more. Basically, one instead of lactate acid, it'll produce alcohol. Really trace amounts. So this is not even one drop. It's not like a whiskey distillery in your mouth. That you're not getting drunk from having this 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 the fourth one.
We're going to have to look it up now because I forgot two of the four things. But you get a one-time treatment of this. So you basically scrub your teeth a lot. You put in this new thing. Oh, it takes over from the old version of this bacteria. And that becomes the dominant bacteria in your mouth. If you kiss the friend or something, doesn't spread. Because they would need to have their mouth kind of existing stuff removed first before the new thing could take the whole.
They're the parking spots are full. I guess the story of this guy tried to get an FDA-approved scientist and he created a company around it. And the FDA was like, you need to test this on 100 people like under 30 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 was basically impossible. Some hackers heard about this story or they tried to clone it, then they partnered with the guy to get the formulation.
And they're doing it down in Central America someplace. There's this libertarian. What's the name of that city that they created? Oh, the crypto libertarian one. It's like a crypto libertarian thing and I'll salvage or something. I'm blanking on the name. So it's called lantern bioworks. I have no association, not an investor or anything. I think about trying this. It's a little absurd. But lantern bioworks. You go down, you get the treatment of one time thing.
I guess when they're bootstrapping the company it'll be expensive like $10 or $20 per day and Central America. And make this a couple hundred dollars. Oh, because this libertarian city has like 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 going to like hopefully commercialize it so they can make it a couple hundred bucks. And then finally they try to bring it back to the US.
I guess there's different regulations around probiotics. Like have you tried Zbiotic? 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 where I'm going to. Yeah, it helps metabolize the alcohol and stomach. Yeah. I did not see a huge difference. Personally, maybe I wasn't consuming enough. But yes, I know what the product is. Yeah. So same idea. So that's a GMO. Yeah. And I know people who swear by it.
But for me, it brought some just in case this was going to be one of those podcasts. Oh, good. Well, I'm always up for the second ride of the rodeo. There's a different regulation around these probiotics. So if they can kind of get it reclassified as probiotic, I think they can maybe bring it to the US. But how cool that maybe in the future, we won't have cavities anymore. Because this will just be like something we give to kids as soon as they start to develop teeth.
And then how cool would that be? Yeah, wild. That's my weird thing. And then my funny thing. This is also my What's in my back post. It's a little device. USB-C, of course. You never know when you're going to need a party. So it plugs in. So this is like a disco ball that plugs into the bottom of the air. USB-C. 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 years. It's fun. Just a little pocket party.
Yeah. And this is so fun. That is super fun. Amazing. That's awesome. This is like $3 or something. So what would someone search to find that? It's on my post, the 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 pretty much exactly like a disco light with USB-C. That one's that for you. Oh, thank you. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. So great to hang, then.
Likewise. This has been a lot of fun. Always, always a great time. We're going to head out, grab bite to eat. So we'll continue the conversation. Anything else you'd like to add before we wind it close? No. No, a photo map, PHOTO, MATT, all the socials. But really check out my vlog. M-A-T-T. M-A-DOT-T-T. And we will add everything we talked about to the show notes. So folks can pruse all of these things. There's going to be a lot. That Timed Up Log slash podcast. And search mall and wagosh.
Probably come up with a more elegant way of directing people to specific episodes. But they search you. You've been on a bunch. So just look for the most recent episode, assuming that you're not listening to this. A few years, hence. And as always, till next time, be just a little bit kinder than it's necessary. Not just other people, but to yourself. Remember that, Jack Cornfield. If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete. And as always, thanks for tuning in.
Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off. And that is 5 bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between 1.5 and 2 million people subscribed to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called 5 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.
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