I've only been passively following the Wordpress drama. Almost a year ago, Mullenweg blogged about taking a 3 month sabbatical that I found interesting, and I assumed this would have been a period of recharging... but things have seemed to gone off the rails since. Was there any correlational between the sabbatical and current drama, or was that just coincidence?
It went off the rails during his sabbatical. He was ranting about WP "freeloaders" and doxxing random Tumblr users when he was supposed to be on vacation.
I'm clearly missing some key context here, judging by the other two comments seeming to know what you're talking about, but I'm none the wiser about what's the deal with him and… Ayahuasca? which I'd never heard of before this thread.
There is some chatter about trend among techies drinking Ayahuasca and suddenly becoming a different person. I was curious if it could be related to the events that unfolded unexpectedly.
First it makes people purge (vomit profusely) because the MAO enzymes normally break down the psychoactives in the stomach, and it reacts violently when the enzymes are inhibited with MAOIs. It's likely a reaction to something else in the plant because the psychoactives absorb into the stomach before they throw up.
The technical name for what happens next is "full disassociation" which can best be described as the brain disconnecting from the sensor organs and then hallucinating whatever it wants in their place. The actual experience people have varies all over the place. Lots of trip reports of people seeing god, or aliens, or seeing their life flash before their eyes.
It's popular among the Silicon Valley crowd in general from my experience, but specifically the ritualistic experience in the Amazon. Freebasing DMT isn't as popular.
Perhaps he tried some Ayahuasca and now "doesn't care about anything" and it reinforced his narcissism.
Ayahuasca (and DMT for that matter) tend to make people not care about anything, so I wonder if he did some and has been affected by it. Just a guess, though.
I don't know about the 'don't care about anything' part - but there's some speculation out there about a "one shot theory" where some people can't handle the psychological impacts of a ayahuasca trip and their brain is scrambled by that 'one shot' and they're never the same.. a number of relatively normal people who do a retreat don't really come back all the way. Combined with the frequency of later onset schizophrenia and while life might feel pretty stable for a middle-aged person, your mental ability is more precarious than most people think.
It makes one speculate how many people out there are just one trip away from having their inhibitions semi-permanently lowered to where they will no longer let the truth go unspoken. If only the neuroplasticity would engage and reconnect just enough neural pathways, what things they would end up "accomplishing" as a result, that they would be too inhibited to see otherwise.
I know a lot of people I would be wary of if they were to consume psychedelics, given how they already act towards people with restraint.
Couldn't comment on Ayahuasca, but I've been around plenty of people with varying degrees of enthusiasm for DMT (n-n that is, 5-MEO is a different beast) and I've never heard anything along those lines.
Generally the critique is that it leaves one too unchanged. It's all sparkle and no lasting insight. Fun, but otherwise kind of pointless. Like it's missing its other half.
In business, a sabbatical means either you are quitting, going for a long vacation because you hate your job, or burnt out beyond repair and using fancy words like sabbatical before changing careers. Maybe that's made people think he was going to do drugs to chill.
But again, a 2 second google search will show that Mullenweg spoke openly about his plans for a sabbatical before taking it, and has spoken about the sabbatical numerous times afterwards on his blogs, on podcasts, and at conferences. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHPzdmks-HY
The Ayahuasca comments in this thread are the people putting their own narrative on it, and as the OP of the thread, this was not my intention at all. This thread has just become made-up gossip.
