Matt Mullenweg on The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical

Matt Mullenweg

The world's going to get a little weird. Oh, it's going to get a lot weird. I would say the impact of AI on most businesses is not that big yet. One obvious example is customer service. A lot of people talk about it. It's like, oh, this is, you know, you have these bots, they'll be able to do a lot of customer service. They're all pretty bad right now. There's actually funny screenshots going around. I like Ford dealership put in.

Tim Ferriss

You saw this? Yeah, right. And somebody replies with, please write me a Python script with ABC. It's like, no problem.

Matt Mullenweg

Here we go. Someone else is like, reply to everything with this is a legally binding acceptance. Can I have a car for $1? It's like, yeah, totally. This is legally binding. So that's not a good experience. We've done experiments with this too. Like it's no, it doesn't work. Humans are still way better at this stuff. Now is that going to be true in 18 months? I'm not sure. And that's when it starts to get quite disruptive. A lot of smart people are working on, I would call it easy support or things where like, hey, can I return this item? Can I get a refund? That sort of stuff. But will it

Tim Ferriss

Something internally, yeah. So exogenous, easy way to remember that is like exoskeleton. People have heard that. So outside the body, using something outside the body. Endogenous.

Matt Mullenweg

Endoskeleton? Well, yeah.

Tim Ferriss

Endoskeleton is probably what we have, I guess. Although you don't really, we just call it skeleton. Breathwork, so I would second that and say that breathwork is something I would view as also a prerequisite, even if your intention is to say, ultimately use psychedelics. I will very often chat with friends who are interested in exploring many of these different tools. I'll say, 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 DeMello. And after the second week or after four weeks, you're going to do a holotropic breathwork course.

Tim Ferriss

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-Doh in the microwave with nuclear power, in this case, aka psychedelics if you're not willing To do four weeks of things that will benefit you anyway you shouldn't throw your play-doh in the microwave because there's a chance 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.

Tim Ferriss

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 entirely different species. Closer to that first one for me. Yeah, I've experienced, yeah. So I'd say a few things. A couple of resources I want to recommend. First of all, if you're suicidal, certainly please call a hotline. And I've been through this. You're not alone. A lot of people face this. And even though it feels like it's permanent, it's personal, there's nothing you can do to change it. There are tools. And I'm living proof of that. So, I mean, I am incredibly 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 along the lines of productivity hacks for the manic depressive neurotic and something rather like me, which has been helpful for a lot of Folks. And that also, I think, just allows people to remove some of the self-judgment from the experience because there's the experience that is difficult and

Tim Ferriss

And for people who might be older, a little frail, or with different conditions, higher blood pressure, et cetera, a lot of these folks should not touch psychedelics. They just should not. The risk profile doesn't make sense. And that would also be true for certain types of disorders. I mean, later research may overturn this, but for the time being, say, schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, a lot of folks who maybe lean more towards the, this is not a Medical term, but like chaotic or like entropic disorders versus hyper-rigidity disorders like OCD. I would consider chronic anxiety and depression to be also rigidity issues on some level because they are often thought loops, things that repeat. There is a stuckness, whereas something like schizophrenia, which I have seen up close and personal, has a different feeling to it. It's an opposite end of the spectrum in some respects. So I'm very interested in those conditions.

Matt Mullenweg

I'll check out this post. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss

For someone who's having a hard couple of weeks, and you mentioned Tony Robbins earlier, I will mention something that I learned from him. I don't know if he's the original source of this, but I used to put this at the top of my journals. I would write it out at the top of my journal so that I would see it every morning. And it was basically, let's call it a flowchart. That's an overstatement. And it said, state in all caps with an arrow that went to story, and then that went to strategy. So state, story, strategy.

Matt Mullenweg

A couple more. Let's do it. I saw the most incredible, horrifying stat, 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 different eras and like 65 plus, it was like 0%. Yeah. Or like 0.1 or something. And then like it goes up to this 18 to 29, 20%. That's horrifying. Like, oh my goodness. Whatever has led to that sort of misinformation and there's some indicators that it could be sort of TikTok related makes me really question like, is this an adversarial thing? Is this another country, like, goosing the algorithm a little bit in a way that, yeah, is very scary misinformation? That's terrifying.

Tim Ferriss

I mean, you imagine what a geopolitical advantage it would be to be able to just very ever so slightly nudge sentiment about X or person Y in a certain direction.

Matt Mullenweg

Our social networks are not allowed in China. There's no Facebook. There's no Twitter X. There's no Instagram. I think there's a reason for that. I think if you'd asked me earlier this year or something, I would have been like, whatever, we're a free society. We should have everything. That's dumb. Trump tried to get rid of it. I was like, now I'm like, huh. And it was that stat that kind of blew my mind. Got some absurd things. Blogging, I think is absurd and it's beautiful.

Tim Ferriss

But if you can get up and you're just like, I really just don't know what to do to get out of this funk. Meditating twice a day for a week, I would say in the vast majority of cases, 20 minutes a session twice a day will make a difference. It creates a bit of space in the system and a little bit more space. It's like taking your thought speed down to like 0.5x so that there's a little bit more space for you to become aware of the stories and the voice and so on. But honestly, just slowing down, which for 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 like lay down on the floor for 20 minutes. But proving to myself that I do not need to rush, I have enough time, I have the luxury of being able to take two 20-minute breaks and then seeing over the course of the week that, oh, I actually Get better results with less stress when I do this. Sometimes I think it's just sitting up straight with good posture for 20 minutes. I don't know what the causal factors are, but I do think there's a benefit there. And I'm bringing it up because I do think that a regular meditation practice has helped me to accept some of the wabi-sabi stuff. And where there's a point of diminishing returns, where there's improvement up to 90% right, if