Derek Sivers, Philosopher-Entrepreneur — The Greatest Year of His Life

so I very deliberately did what we might call the George castanza principle which is do the opposite do the opposite of all of my impulses every time I felt yes everything in me said yes I would say no out loud and everything in me says No I say yes out loud as a way of deliberately shaking [ __ ] up and so I was dating this woman for a few months and uh we had no great connection she said oh well I can't travel to California with you unless we get married and every everything in

me says oh hell no don't do that that's stupid I don't want to marry this person so I said yes let's do [Music] that for people who don't know who Derek cers is what is the brief overview of Derek oh I have to do it all right I was a musician for many years and then I started selling my music online in 1997 when there was no PayPal and there was you know Amazon was just a bookstore so I started a little thing called CD baby just to sell my music but then it grew and

became the largest seller of independent music online and I did that for 10 years till I got sick of it and sold it and then I was a Ted speaker for a few few years and then kind of threw myself into that completely and then Seth Goen asked me to write a book so I wrote a book and then people really liked it so now I've written five and now I'm a I don't know Dad in New Zealand thinking philosophically and living my life how about that I thought you did a great job thank you

for that when I can't find a virtual assistant to do work for me I'll ask my podcast guest to do my job I'll also add number one people if you enjoy this conversation which I'm sure you will not to apply any pressure to Derek but I always have so much fun go back and listen to the other conversations also because you'll notice a few things number one Derek has one of the most eclectic CVS imaginable he's worked in traveling circuses he has played music at Pig fairs he has been an entrepreneur he has certainly been

a philosopher coder and many other things but also I would say overarching ly crafted a life that is uniquely Derek's and frequently tests assumptions and to I suppose bucket one of what we're going to discuss today changes his mind and finds himself zigging when he might have otherwise zagged or where other people are zagging and that is part of why I enjoy spending time with Derek aside from The Dashing good looks and wit and charm of course so let's begin as we were brainstorming what we might chat about because we were hoping to catch up

I suggested a few things we batted a number of things around and we landed on things you've changed your mind about things you're fascinated by people you're studying not necessarily in that order so let's start with things you've changed your mind about or on where shall We Begin I've got five things for you I'm starting small and getting big coffee I've never liked coffee every time I tried coffee I went I don't know understand how you people like this and even when I'd be with somebody that knew I didn't like coffee and we were out

somewhere and they would go oh my God this is the best coffee I've ever had in my life here I know you don't like coffee but if you're ever going to try coffee this is the one try a sip and I'd say okay I'd like try to get myself into this mindset I'm going to like this I just never liked it so then I was in United Arab Emirates and I was the guest of this emirati man that we will get to later and he said it is emirati custom you must have the the coffee

and I went oh sorry I don't drink coffee I just he said you must have the coffee I said no really I've never liked coffee in my life he goes my friend you must have the it is emirati custom you must have the coffee I went all right I took a sip I was like oh my God I like this is really good he goes that is emirati coffee I went no you really there's something different about this he goes yes it's it's emirati coffee and I said is that the one where they make it

in the sand he said no no no that's Turkish he said this is Emira coffee so knowing that we were talking today and I was going to mention coffee I texted him I said hey what was that coffee cuz he said there are only three places in Dubai that know how to make real Emira coffee so he sold me one batil b a t- l if you're in Dubai and you want to try real Emira coffee apparently according to this emirati try batile and dupai for real emirati coffee I've changed my mind on coffee I

now like at least emirati coffee there's one okay just for definition purposes all right I you know I'll hold my follow-ups there are going to be a couple of follow-ups including how do you define emod is that basically a Brahman in the UAE no no no sorry sorry that's what we call people from United Arab Emirates so UAE if you are of the lineage if you were a citizen of United Arab Emirates you're referred to as emirati all right and then what is the special technique special ingredient that makes Emira coffee so miraculous for you

hey listeners if you find out what's different about Emira coffee please let me know I don't know I just I've been there I went back six months later same thing I tried Emira coffee and I like it kid severe social pressure yeah maybe that's the that might be the magic ingredi severe social pressure a it makes anything taste better you must have it and it will it will be disastrous if you don't like it I don't know what it is but a surprised okay python so I'm just going to include this because 20 something years

23 years ago I learned the Ruby programming language and I became fluent in Ruby and Ruby and python are as similar as port Portuguese in Spanish but let's say Ruby is Portuguese where Spanish became more and more and more popular so when I first learned Ruby it's like Ruby and python were kind of side by side uh Ruby was a little more popular at the time but then over the years python just took off and I refused to look at it I was like no I chose Ruby I speak Ruby I don't want to Learn

Python it's too similar if I'm going to learn another language it's going to be lisp or hascal or something really different I'm not going to Learn Python no and so for years and years I've been refusing and then just irrationally prejudiced against python when I was choosing a new language for a new project I considered everything but Python and then I realized I had left python out because of my severe prejudice against it for no good reason so I finally looked at the Python programming language and I went oh my God it's beautiful it's great

oh my God it's wonderful so now I love Python and that just felt amazing in my heart to be like wow this thing that that I was prejudiced against for 20 years is actually wonderful how cool so coffee python number two mhm number three shall I go on let's go on okay I brought a prop I want to make this a good show here we go for the first time ever appearing are my little pet rats okay if you see on YouTube look at that all right Rats on video they're sizable yeah chunky monkeys um

they are so cute and they're so wonderful and they're so affectionate you can't maybe tell cuz I'm holding them up like they owe me money right now you know but so here's the deal years ago I used to kill rats I hated rats so badly I lived in a basement apartment in Boston that had rats in and around the apartment that would sometimes be blocking my entrance to my apartment as I would come home and I was tired so I killed many rats with great Vengeance I hated rats and then just a few months ago

my boy said hey Dad can we get a pet rat I was like and I just thought it was you know he was kidding and he said A week later he said you know that really kind of made me sad that you just shot down my idea of the pet rat I said wait you were serious he said yeah I went oh well why would you want a nasty awful rat as a pet he said no they're not nasty and awful look and he showed me some videos that rats are really sweet and they're really

wonderful they're smart they're trainable you can train them to do little tricks and like pick things out and like go to a wallet and open it up and take money and bring it to you and you know very useful in Guild interesting the little art F Dodgers so it's like the difference between a wild rat and a pet rat it's like the difference between a wild dog and a poodle the pet rats are really sweet so no matter what you think of wild rats don't discount or don't hate on pet rats they're actually really wonderful

and cuddly and they're even clean they use a litter box they don't like to like they can control their bladder you know so they like a cat they prefer to go in a litter box and so they're really clean and wonderful so I love my oh and wait the lifespan their lifespan is 2 to three years which as a parent is really wonderful because when a kid says I want a pet you don't always want like a 15-year commitment you know the kid's going to be away at college and you still got the pet that

your kid wanted when they were eight you know the lifespan is two to three years which is you know so rats are good pets and so I love my little rats we've just got these two boys but even more than loving the rats I love that I am now cuddling what I used to kill like that I now love what I used to hate it's so sweet like I cuddle them but it's like God I used to hate you this is such a good feeling in my heart that I now love what I used to

hate and you'll see this is the theme of my five things today all right ready for the next what are the names of the two rats cricket and Clover Cully Clover and crazy Cricket climber do they eat crickets what do they eat actually well they do love clover but no they just kind of eat rat food from the store they eat anything it's like when you're making food and you've got little leftovers you've got little bits and crusts or little things you just give it to the rats and they usually love it it's great I

keep them in the kitchen that's perfect that's what yeah some folks in South America do with guinea pigs although the difference is they fatten up the guinea pigs on the table scraps and eat pigs probably not going to eat cricket and clover I imagine I won't be eating cricket and clover but but I do like that kind of hang out near the kitchen and give them the scraps okay number four China number four China in 2010 I went to Guin China and then I went to Taipei Taiwan and at the time China was rough I

was like I was walking over Rubble the air was just choking me with its smoke and the of oil and everything felt very third world very rough and I just thought okay that's what China is China you know developing economy it's just rough and then you go to Taipei Taiwan and it just feels like the most refined first world beautiful version it's like it's like Japan but with Chinese culture and I thought ah someday I want to live in Taiwan because that's the really nice part of China so here we are 2024 14 years later

I go to bring my kid on a school holiday to China for his first time and I thought well we'll start out rough by going to Mainland China and then we'll move on to like the best of the best with the refined culture of Taiwan and taipe and it turned out to be the opposite that China was wonderful we went to Shanghai and it was like first world amazing refined silent because all the vehicles are electric now so that was the very first thing I noticed as soon as like I took the train from the

airport we got off in downtown Shanghai I'm surrounded by 100 vehicles and I hear nothing it's just that's so nice and I was like oh my God what real like 20 motorbikes went in front of my face like right there like you know 3 meters away and I heard none of them it was just the silent movement I was like this is so nice and the people were just just so polite cultured and it was none of this like hacking and spitting that I associated with it before like the shouting and the spitting you know

that's good to hear I remember the spitting from my visits a lot of spitting yeah and even just transactionally you have to get alipay or WeChat on your phone first before you go like attach it to your credit card but then once you're there all transactions are just beep everything is so easy and they're beautiful like rental bikes everywhere laid out in perfect color-coded cues and you can just walk up up to one and go beep and step on the bike and then just go where you want to go and you drop it off you

go beep and everything is just so civilized and wonderful I was so it completely changed my mind about China and then I don't want to sound like I'm trashing Taiwan but it was just interesting that by comparison then I went to Taipei and I thought whoa if China's this nice imagine how nice taipe is going to be and I got there and it was kind of like stinky and trashy and they don't take cards or they don't have the apps and so you have to pay cash everywhere and I'm like money and paper and coins

and I was like Wow interesting and so I met with a Taiwanese woman for lunch that I D mailed with before and she's an investor that goes to man land China often and I mentioned something about this cautiously I was like yeah I don't want to trash your home I didn't say it like that but I just cautiously said hi I noticed something and she said I'm glad you noticed she said I noticed this too she said I go to Mainland China cities every 6 to 12 months and she said I feel like Taiwan may

be plateaued like 12 years ago like we kind of hit first world status and then stayed there almost like Japan you know it's like Japan used to feel futuristic now it feels kind of stuck in the 90s you know fax machines and stuff and which is kind of cute in a way like again not to knock it it's just it it feels like it it got to a certain point and then it said okay we're happy here then a plateaued yeah and she said every time I go to China she said there's visible noticeable improvements

like every 6 months she said it blows my mind that they just keep improving and keep pushing so I read a book called China's world view by David daqu Lee that changed my perception of the China's government too it's really impressive he's a guy that's in but not in the China's government and so he kind of is trying to explain the mindset of China's government to Outsiders and it's a a beautiful book I highly recommend if somebody wants to understand China better China's World viw China's worldview just as a sidebar note your mention of Japan

I love Japan and I've spent time in in also in mainland China and in taipe it's time for me to get back to both of those I've spent much more time in Japan but when people are going to Japan for the first time they're like I can't wait to experience this futuris view 30 years ahead I typically say look especially if they're going to stay there for a longer period of time I say you're going to love it and it is 30 to 40% Blade Runner and 60 to 70% DMV just like feeling filling out

paperwork and triplicates and fax machines it's going to drive you nuts if if you actually try to live there on some levels right there's so many beautiful things about it but yes it does have the feeling of having Frozen in time in a sense as opposed to continued to inflect the way that it was perhaps some time ago need to get back to the east so to speak it's been a long time all right I think you have one more because of this uh Newfound love I'm actually going to Shenzhen and changdu in a few

weeks oh wow I just want to keep experence in different Chinese cities you going to do any factory tours or see manufacturing there I'm just meeting with people mhm that's kind of how I travel these days I I tend to go to a place and instead of just looking instead of seeing the sites I want to meet the people so I'm meeting with people that I've emailed with over the years and just I chose those two cities because I know a lot of people there great that can't wait to hear the report so I think

I'm no mathematician but maybe you have one more smartass okay number five Dubai this is my big one because when I lived in Singapore Dubai would often come up people would compare the two and they would tell me things about Dubai about the shopping malls and the millionaire pandering in the Instagram hashtagie you look at me kind of crap and Dubai was in my top 10 places I never want to go in my life [ __ ] that place it sounds awful sounds like everything I hate in one one place you couldn't pay me to

go there but then I have to notice that feeling in myself and this is going to be we'll get to like the theme when we're done with this number five but I had a flight from New Zealand to Europe that it changed planes in Dubai and I looked at that and I went G Dubai and I was like wait a second what is this Prejudice in me against Dubai it's like saying I hate artichokes but I've never tried artichokes right like I hate Dubai but I've never been to Dubai maybe I should go to Dubai

so instead of making it a three-hour layover I it like a 3 or 4 day layover I went wow okay I'm going to Dubai for a few days so I read a book called City of Gold which was about the founding of Dubai and and the creation of Dubai and dude it was so good it is such a great book anybody listening to this if you want a great read read the book City of Gold about the history of Dubai it is inspiring the the wisdom and the foresight and the boldness it took to make

that Place happen it was really just like a vision that saw its way through to the end against all ODS right so super inspiring then somebody said oh you need to read Arabian Sands by this man named feser and that gets into like the Arab bedu cultur is written in the 1940s or 50s kind of like a Lawrence of Arabia kind of guy like from England but went through the desert and kind of became one with the bedu people and got to know the culture and wrote about about it so that was really inspiring and

then the United Arab Emirates itself as I learned more about so Dubai you know is a city in a region inside the United Arab Emirates it's one of the seven states the Emirates in that country and then so Sheik Zed the guy that was really like the father of the nation was a really great dude kind of like when I moved to Singapore and I learned more about Lee kwanu and started to really admire the decisions he made it became a bit of a role model like learning about him makes me want to be a

better person you know I just noticed that it actually subtly influences my actions and so when I'm in Singapore I feel like a little bit infused with the the role model like I feel the presence of the role model of leanu and when I'm in UAE I feel a little bit inspired by shik Zed because he was just such a great generous dude so and also I think it's interesting that Arab culture gets a really bad rap in the media like Hollywood portrayal is usually some white actor with brown makeup being stupid saying you know

oh I like this building I'll buy 10 of them you know I I think I want a penguin colony in the desert you know make it happen and they're kind of portrayed as fools that are too rich and so getting to know the culture felt like this is really interesting I I really had the wrong idea about this culture okay so as I read these books city of golden Arabian Sands I have a thing on my website where I always show what I'm reading and I take notes from the books and I put the notes

on my website and a friend of mine that lives in Muscat Oman saw my reading list and he said what is your interest in this region I've noticed your reading books about the Middle East and I told him I just really interested in Arab culture and he said you must meet the man from tamashi I said what and he goes go to tash.com T m- A he.com and he said you will see a Sho store his name is Muhammad kazim he designs sandals but underneath the surface he's an educator of Arab culture so the sandals

are just like the the storefront but underneath it it's like the pirate shop in San Francisco for oh I haven't heard this oh there is a place in San Francisco it's on Valencia Street and it is used for now educating kids writing workshops things like that but because they couldn't get it zoned in San Francisco they couldn't get permission for what they actually wanted to do they had to create a storefront and then do the teaching in the back and so they created a a pirate attire store and all the classrooms are in the back

so love it that was a a bit of a digression especially because I can't even recall the proper name of the sort of writing outlet that is is associated with this but tamashi shoe store sandal store on the front end but it's actually Ed education and disguise at first I thought there was no connection then I realized that his sandal designs are actually kind of reflecting Arab traditions and culture through the design of the sandals but it's like his true passion are these cultural trips he does so if you go to tushi.com and you go

in the menu you can click cultural trips and then you'll see so my friend introduced me to this guy so I met with him on my trip to Dubai we meet by the creek and he tells me that his Grand father built the first building in Dubai that was his grandfather that's how young that city is and he's just like yeah right basically right over there there was a very first building in Dubai my grandfather is the one that built it so I said can you explain to me something about Arab culture and and he

said well wait first you got to understand that the culture of the people of the desert is very different than the people of the sea like the the Arabian coast and which is very different than the people of the The Hills And I said Okay well where's your family from and he said well from the but he said but you know two uncles got in a fight and so kind of half the family moved off to Iraq for a while and there was kind of like a split in the family but then they kind of

reunited in Abu Dhabi and he said but then Islam came along and I said wait hold on Islam that was like the year 600 I said have you been telling me your family history from 2,000 years ago and he goes well 1800 years ago yeah I said wait how the [ __ ] do you know your family history back 1800 years he said well we keep Good Records whoa imagine what that does to how you see your life if you see yourself in this long lineage of 1,800 years of recorded family history like how that

affects your dating and you know whatever choices on where to live so Muhammad cousin this guy is a badass I love this guy he's such a wealth of information and he communicates it so well it really helps by the way that so he's got a complete American accent he went to College in Boston for six years like got into Finance came back worked in finance in Abu Dhabi and then just said no my real passion is teaching the Arab cultural Traditions that I think have gotten lost in our Modern Skyscrapers so that's why he made

it his passion project you know he could have made way more money in finance but he has his tamashi decom sandal store and he teaches Arab culture and I admire the hell out of this guy that's a really cool Easter egg all right so we'll link to that in the show notes and I also pulled up this word that was on the tip of my tongue mweene m.net people can check it out of course there's some hilarious writing the one that I most recently shared with someone after it was shared with me is M cormack

McCarthy writes to the editor of the Santa Fe New Mexican by John Keenan it's only going to be funny for people who have read some of cormi McCarthy like on the road or Blood Meridian but there's a lot of really good stuff so that is the outlet also wanted to mention because you mentioned Iraq Iraqi music traditional music is some of the most incredibly intricate music I've ever heard using a damer or Hammer damer there different instruments involved absolutely spectacular a lot of that has been destroyed unfortunately culturally and various teachers and so on due

to all of the goings on in Iraq over the last while but what is the overarching lesson that you take from the five things you have changed your mind on are there kind of meta lessons that you take from this yeah you can see the theme which is like I love my rats but even more it's like I love that I used to hate them and now I don't and I could have gone on twice as long about Dubai by the way the place is amazing it is it is this cultural Melting Pot that just

warms my heart that conversate just sitting on the second floor of the Dubai Mall and watching the whole world go by just the Nigerians and the I don't know the Saudis and the Russians and the Chinese and the British and just all walking in through in the same place and H it's so amazing I just I kind of want to live there as happy as it makes me I get this extra happiness of going wow I used to hate this place without even knowing it and I take a sip of this coffee and it's like

wow for my whole life I'm 55 I hated coffee and the Python Programming but the secret has been held back from you so now you have to go to Dubai to have the coffee that you like right the theme is that if you feel completely averse to something get to know it better that whatever you feel yourself leaning away from try leaning into if you hate Opera then go learn more about Opera and if you hate Sports well then go learn more about sports it's usually just learning about something gives you an appreciation for this

thing that you used to just dismiss at the end of the year last year I just thought God this has been I think maybe the greatest year of my life I think this is the happiest I have ever been in my whole life and I think the reason why was because I had five major things in one year that I used to hate that now I love like God this is the greatest joy you said major things so the Rats makes it into major things I like this I like it I mean you know they're

my pets now I'm not minimizing rats I mean maybe I need some rats even the coffee even the python I'm doing something in Python going wow I can't believe I I hated this for 20 years well I suppose they're major in the sense that to the degree you had a fixed position beforehand these were kind of strong fixed positions of dislike right yeah so that turn around is very interesting let me ask you this since in the case of the rats that was catalyzed by your son bringing up pet rats Dubai you had a layover

that then prompted you to extend how long you stayed there python I'm not sure exactly how that about face came to be but having experienced the past year you say to yourself this is one of the greatest or maybe the greatest year of my life high levels of happiness I think it's because I had these changes of Mind are you farming for opportunities to change your mind proactively and if so how are you doing that I don't have a systematic thing I can share not that I'm not sharing it I just don't have it um

it just made me notice like now I just need to notice in myself when I'm irrationally averse to something it can't even be a thought process sometimes okay this is actually in my useful not true book The came out this idea that was actually a little bit sparked by you where somebody dismisses everything a person says it dismisses everything a public figure says because they don't like something about that public figure right like oh I don't like the way he acts on social media so [ __ ] him I'm not going to listen to a

word he says yeah and that was inspired I think I told you last time that the the first time I encountered that was years and years ago when I saw somebody holding for 4 Hour Work week and I said oh wow great book and he goes yeah the guy's full of himself here you want it and it's like he didn't want to read the book because he saw one thing in there that made him think you were full of yourself yeah so that's it [ __ ] this whole thing [ __ ] this 400 page

book there's nothing in it for me because there's something I don't like about this guy when I think about that to me that's trying to think of people as either true or not true instead of useful or not useful mhm that's Jud Jud in the Box not judging the contents inside and so I think there are many things in my life where I have judged the box I'm like python no you know China rough Dubai [ __ ] that place rats coffee there sorry I just had to spit all five times and all of those

I was judging the box but if you learn a little bit more about it then you get into the contents and you go oh actually the contents are wonderful I was dismissing the package yeah he probably read the first edition where I had that whole chapter on my [ __ ] size that ended up being a little over the top so I took it out for rints and then you put it in the 4-Hour Body it was a bit much yeah then I I ended up putting that as an appendix in the 4our body fair

play on his part I would actually build on that to say that I look to my close relationships and I pause and question and how I'm thinking about friendships if in every case there isn't something substantial I disagree with each of those friends on does that make sense yes I love that I really want friends where the differences of opinion bring us closer and make our friendships more valuable not the other way around yes if you and your friends agree on pretty much everything I view that as symptomatic of a problem okay I'm so glad

you brought this up sometimes I wonder about your motivation for continuing these podcasts and how you keep up the enthusiasm for doing this for so long and then I thought God wait you must be immersing yourself in so many diverse worldviews that it made me think about the comparison to investing I was in situation recently you've probably had this many times and I think it's maybe part of why you left California where you catch yourself in a group of people and everybody agrees with everybody else it's like this group think even if they're all really

smart but damn it they all basically agree that sucks and I thought about the benefits of diversification when it comes to investing right so anybody who learns like investing 101 learns about the having a a low correlation between your asset allocations so your US Stocks International stocks real estate Commodities bonds gold cash something's risky some's riskless and the whole idea is they're supposed to have a low correlation so if one goes down they won't all go down and I thought about that in terms of the thought portfolio in our head any given person so you

say it with the friends you have around but I assume aren't you then by knowing your friends so well when you're in a certain situation and you're thinking about what to do you don't just have Tim's thoughts you also have this friend's thoughts and that's friend's thoughts and it's like how would this friend of mine approach this do you do that actively oh yeah I definitely do and I'll give a real world example and I don't know if we want to get into the thick of it but I was I was reading some of your

writing before we hopped on the phone and I was taking an ice bath also right before we got on the phone which I know I am fonder of than you are but I was sitting in the tub freezing my balls off and there were certain statements and positions in the writing that got me all riled up and I was sitting there getting riled up and thinking about my counter positions and then then I thought to myself well that's interesting to observe these feelings coming up these very strong feelings then I thought to myself this is

really good this is good because the feelings are coming up in a strong way and you're not someone to shy away from a conversation about those things and what a gift to be able to have civil disagreement with friends like what a [ __ ] treasure that is yeah because we don't have a lot of models for civil disagreement I would say at least not in most Media or online it's just not what sells and I very much want friends who are going to call me on my [ __ ] or at least take counter

positions and help me think through things yeah right and I think that in your new book for instance does a very good job of discussing perspectives and perspective taking and how you can read many things differently from different viewpoints and you want friends who can help you do that so that you don't get trapped in your own thought loops and furthermore just on a very practical sense you want to be able to speak truthfully to your friends and you want them to be able to do the same and if you do that and you talk

about a really wide breadth of things if you never have conflict one or both of you is probably being dishonest yeah and if you're going to have some friction in the system which you probably will if you're really being honest then you're going to need to be good at conflict resolution or repair or talking about hard things so that's a very long stream of Consciousness that I just let out but if I look for friends who I can and will disagree with on things then it becomes my dojo for Life overall yeah with people I

really care for and love and good God what an amazing gift and advantage that is so yes I do that deliberately and I invite people on the podcast who I suspect or know I will disagree with on a few different levels and that gives me a chance to interrogate their thinking but also interrogate my own thinking love it I've noticed Within Myself that when I'm around people that I know agree with me my inherent curiosity level drops a bit and when I'm around people that I know don't think like me my curiosity Peaks so when

I meet somebody that is like a scientist that is also Hindu I'm like oh oh my God I have so many questions for you I was like can you explain to me how this okay like I'm filled with curiosity to meet somebody that grew up Hindu and still actively has the Hindu beliefs I I want to understand this better I've read two books about Hinduism I don't get it still I have so many questions for you but if I'm around somebody that's like me I'm like how you doing what's up yeah me too cool all

right so I think it's a deliberate overweighting if we're going to kind of use a back to like quantitative and investment metaphors I have a whole lifetime of thinking my way now I want to overweight learning other ways of thinking and to me it's just pure curiosity there's no debate there's no like let's work this out and get to the right answer it's just no please tell me this other way of looking at things tell me this other way of looking at your family history 1800 years tell me this other way of looking at I

don't know spirituality life after death Etc please like I want to I'm so curious because it reminds me that my way of looking at it is not the only way I love dislodging my first impression I think our first thought is an obstacle and we have to get past it to realize there are other ways to look at the situation once you realize that you can get past your first way of looking at something then you can do that like uh what do they call it systems to thinking right thinking fast and slow you can

go oh right okay hold on that was my first reaction what are some other ways I could look at this that's what my whole useful not true book is about yeah I remember also this is I think this was on the podcast in one of our earlier conversations but I asked you who the first person was you thought of when I gave the word successful and your answer was along the lines of well I think answer number one isn't that interesting because I might say Richard Branson wow good memory or Elon Musk but if Richard

Branson wanted a life of peace and tranquility and a slower Pace if that were his goal then he's utterly failing so maybe that isn't success but perhaps overarchingly I've used that twice now as an adverb that's pretty funny I never use that word but the question should be who's the third person you think of when you hear the word successful I am so impressed that you remember that it's a long time ago yeah and that is an example of what you're talking about getting past the first thought I think think the operative word there is

thought right because just to draw distinction for me I think paying attention to feeling the first feeling can be can save you from a lot of pain in the short and the long term in other words along the lines of the gift of fear Gavin debecker Etc if your system says no pay very close attention to that but if you have a inbuilt story I hate Dubai because AB andc which is very different from I don't feel safe in this airport and I don't know why those are two very different things very yeah questioning that

first story can pay a lot of incredible dividends dude I love this subject so much to me that's it's kind of like the key of life like so often the difference between success and failure is the mindset that leads you to take different actions but if you just look at a situation and you say that's it that's what the situation is I'm not talking about physical things I mean declaring something to be a a dead end declaring something to suck these are all things of the mind and nothing of the mind is necessarily true everything

that's just in the mind is just one perspective like physical things are true sure you know there are some physical realities the number of votes cast in an election is a physical reality that an alien or a computer could observe and agree but all these things of the mind we're social creatures and we treat them like they are ities like hey that person wronged me and that's just a fact it's like that's not just a fact that's one way of looking at it and you might be a lot happier and a lot more successful if

you realize that that's just one way of looking at it it's not true it's just a perspective it's just a thought and there's another way of seeing that and that other way of seeing it might lead to actions that would be much more effective for you yeah for sure and I think your new book pairs well with with Byron K's the work very much which focuses on a lot of what we're discussing and I was going to say in addition to what we've already covered that the content is different from the mindset and what I

mean by that is you have crafted a very path of Derek life for yourself and you've made some very unorthodox decisions some of which I think are frankly sometimes cuckoo bananas but thank you you're welcome even if I wouldn't replicate the decision hearing you explain why you did it and how you navigated that the lenses through which you viewed this scenario has allowed me to learn things that I can apply to totally different circumstances right and that's really valuable you might not make the same house as someone else but learning how to use the carpentry

tools that they use to build that house could actually really really really Aid you in a lot of desperate scenarios so that's how I've also thought about it I so often try to get people to devalue the example but value the theme the process like you just said that too many people focus on the example that you give them but it's like try to forget the example and look for the process so thanks for saying that I do that with everything there's a person that we could talk about here if you want later but he's

a computer programmer but he getss up and gives a talk about computer programming that I see the theme in what he's talking about I'm like ooh okay well forget the code for a second that's a brilliant theme and it's fun to be able to do that so let's pause this might be a good segue is that part of the next bucket of people you're studying or things you're fascinated by where would you like to go next because this might be a a good segue yeah it's funny you actually jumped to the last thing I was

going to mention you brought up this this Diversified portfolio of perspectives so that was one of the things I wanted to talk about today and you didn't even know that oh amazing look at that I did not that was great yeah let's talk okay you asked me in advance people I'm studying so let's do them in reverse order since we already brought up rich hickey so r i c h h i c k y wait a second before we switch to that have youever met Brian Eno the record producer I have not met Brian Eno

but I have his oblique strategy yes wow card set I was just reading about how he ended up coining the term ambient music in the hospital because he couldn't get up and change the volume and ended up he ended up listening to very very low volume musics a friend had put on for him so I'm fascinated by briano but I've never met him briano is one of these guys that his thought process is fascinating I don't love his music I like his music I don't love it but I love his thought process by the way

if you go to the website music thoughts.com That's My Love Letter to Brian Eno and John Cage and some of these music thinkers I made that website in 1999 and it's a collection of inspiring quotes from briano John Cage and a bunch of other musicians music thoughts.com Yep music thoughts. it's totally non-commercial I'm not gonna make it Penny off of anybody looking at it so I'm not trying to pitch it but I'm just saying it's a collection of Brian Eno's philosophies on music and thoughts on music that I would read these these quotes to inspire

me as I was making music and kind of knock my thinking kind of like the oblique strategies cards to shift my thinking into something different and so even just reading his interviews one thing he said is his job as a record producer is to have strong opinions in the studio mhm so that if he's in there producing a record by you too and the guys are fighting about whether to have a guitar solo or not whether it should be a loud guitar solo or a quiet guitar solo he said well my job then would be

to say well how about we have no guitar at all in this song and the band members go what are you crazy no this song needs guitar no we Brian we absolutely need guitar and he goes all right happy I could help by you disagreeing with me I just helped you solidify your position I so that's my job here so on the other hand if you would have said oh yeah okay no guitar that's a good idea great glad I could help I'm not saying my opinions are right I'm just trying to help you respond

I love that you're providing a foil yeah that's music thoughts.com quick question on was it John Cage you mentioned yeah I was first exposed to John Cage in a documentary a friend of mine named Steve J was involved with namjun Pike moon is the oldest TV which is about namjun Pike this amazing Pioneer in experimental art performance art many different media and he was inspired by John Cage now I know very little about John Cage but I did get to see a segment of a performance that he did which caused like 90% of the audience

to leave just like the most agonizingly uncomfortable I would say no noise to listen to that is my sole exposure to John Cage but I've heard him invoked as this Figure Head of great influence and I'm basing my impression of him only on that what I would just say is awful performance that I saw part of in this documentary how would you sell John Cage or why is he interesting I'm no expert but let's just say he questioned things that hadn't been questioned before mhm a lot of Modern Art the kind where people look at

it and go what that's it it's it's a it's a seesaw over the border between us and Mexico you call that art I could do that and it's like yeah but you didn't yeah somebody looked at that border between us and Mexico and said I think we could put a seesaw over that and in a way that's a beautiful statement it's not about the brush Strokes on canvas it's about the statement so I think John Cage was doing that with music he was questioning the core of what is this anyway and so that's why I

think his most famous piece is called 4 minutes and 33 seconds which is just 4 minutes and 33 seconds of Silence the point was Hey listen to the room around you for four minutes and 33 seconds there are sounds going on here already I mean I think that was his point maybe he stayed mute on it I don't know okay so is it fair to say that he's interesting to you for the same reason that Brian you know in the producer capacity is interesting as a provocator yes of sorts like an instigator of new thinking

yeah I want to emulate his thought process even if I don't love his end results well that's I you said it first that's why I love that you beat me to this is your friends that you may you may not want to live my life here with my whatever three glasses and two rats but you like some of my thought process people keep emailing me about that hey I heard your podcast with Tim Farris so three glasses huh so let me explain that for people who don't don't have the content you should get a third

R just so you have the same number of rats that you have glasses but when I visited you New Zealand I was like hey do you mind if I have a glass of water no no knock yourself out where the glasses other they're in the cabinet and I went and I saw three glasses all of different like dramatically different sizes and I was like what happens if you have more than three people over you're like I'll just buy some more glasses I was like well actually that kind of makes a certain elegant sense so those

are those are the three glasses on that note do you want to hear I am building my dream home right now can imagine where this is going mhm just 20 minutes north of Wellington I bought a piece of land where I'm building my dream home it is a 4x8 M rectangle with nothing inside no toilet no kitchen no nothing because I thought every house I've lived in came with its default [ __ ] and I adapted myself to its default [ __ ] like well that's just where the bathroom is that's just the size of

the living room that's just what it is and I've always had to adapt myself so I've never experienced the process of making the place adapt to me through practice not in theory so I thought if I just start with a 4x8 meter well insulated rectangle then over time we'll see what I need so I'm going to start with just a little wait did you say 4x8 hold on 4 by8 8 m is the whole house oh sorry sorry it's actually two 4x4 M rectangle that's the two-bedroom place where I'll sleep with my kid and then

next to it is a 4x8 where I spend all of my waking hours so it's the sleeping house and the waking house and my kid actually gets his own 4x8 met Cube to experiment with and the whole idea is to see what you need so I'm starting with no bathroom no kitchen I'm just going to put a little induction hob outside and an ouse and then I'll see if that's okay with me or if I find through experience that I really want a bathroom inside okay well now I know from experience not just because it's

the default setting so I'm I'm trying to start from scratch and this is my Dreamhouse because of the process that it will allow me to have okay so this is a very mundane question but I'm curious generally if you're going to have like a kitchen or a bathroom or something you would have the piping or the the power and so on put in a certain place so as it stands that is not the case so you might have to do a fair amount of demo or deconstructing your house to add any of these things internally

I got this tip from steuart Brand wrote a brilliant book that everyone should read anyone who's smart that is called how buildings learn how buildings learn by stent steart brand you should try to get the paperbook because it's just laid out in such a way that you kind of need the paperbook he goes through this analytical thing about buildings and he said this is a reason why you should never hide your wires and pipes just keep the infrastructure on the outside so that it's easier to change he has a beautiful line in there it's almost

the opening point he says all buildings are predictions and all predictions are wrong so therefore the less predict you can make your building the better that's why I'm just getting this rectangle all pipes and wires will just be exposed nothing buried so that I can quickly change them I can always see where they are I'm very much following steuart Brand's philosophy steuart brand is is a smart fascinating man just a quick pitch for Stuart brand so I met Stuart through Kevin Kelly Now Kevin Kelly founding editor of Wired Magazine fascinating genius bizarre guy has an

beard but he's a technology futurist built his own house by hand spends more time in China than probably anyone I know he's just an Eclectic combination of all sorts of things and the title of my podcast with him way back in the day was the real world most interesting man in the world or something like that and in the midst of the conversation with Kevin or maybe speaking offline he said if you really want the person I consider to be the most most interesting man in the world it's Stuart brand so I had Stuart on

the podcast a number of years ago and boy oh boy you want to talk about a polymath he's something else yeah all right so you've preserved the optionality with the possibility of putting things on the outside rather than on the inside in terms of support infrastructure and how do you see yourself using a space with nothing inside to even begin to determine what you need I don't know see that would be a prediction I'm trying not to I'm trying to not predict I'm just I'm just going to show up it'll be ready in a few

months and then I'll start living there and we'll see what happens that's all I know okay it's going to be totally empty are you going to have some desks a chair I mean are you going to have anything at all or you just going to sit on the floor and be like what do I require at this moment I'm bringing a mattress to start and then over time I'll notice if I wish I had a desk here then I'll get a desk there you know so I'll add things as I feel that I really really

need them again I highly recommend the inhow buildings learn he kind of goes into this about like the best spaces are just rectangles and the best places are ones that are easy to alter so that if if you suddenly decide he talks about this MIT building where people were just allowed to bash a hole in the wall because it wasn't some beautifully architecturally designed Masterpiece it was something thrown together quickly in World War II and people love that building because if they do need to bash a hole in the wall to run some wire through

they can just do it cuz it's a trashy old building and it's and because of that it's such a creative space the places that are award-winning are often the ones that are the most hated by their residents they might win the award for the architect true but because they're award-winning they're inflexible they're they're sacred I mean talk to people who live in a Frank lloid W home now and it's like uh you know living in a masterpiece Museum can't change a single screw or anything cuz it's the way he wanted it so practical recommendation I

would say if you're going to be sitting on the floor a lot if you're not accustomed to doing that just so you don't end up with all sorts of Orthopedic issues I would start doing Turkish getups and getting accustomed to sitting on the floor and getting up a lot I'll probably get a good chair almost right away just so your body is ready I want to make sure that I really need it all right fascinating so yet another example I'll let you be the first monkey shot into space on this particular type of home design

I can't wait to learn so many things you experiment with some things I don't want to experiment with and I'll experiment with things that you don't want to experiment with I'll renounce my US citizenship and let you know how it goes I'll build my dream home of a 4x8 rectangle let you know how it goes yeah you got to divvy it up I mean the redundancy and experimentation is kind of I don't say pointless but it's more fun to have people doing different things yeah other people you are studying all right or things you're fascinated

by we can hop around depends on where you want to go I already started Rich hickey oh that's right you mentioned him I wrote him down because that was left dangling and I was like who is this Rich hickey so rich hickey he's a programmer he's the inventor of a programming language called closure c l o j u r e he's actually one of my number one picks for somebody that I would like to get on your show like if we did a co-hosting kind of thing an hour to get somebody on he's actually I

already emailed him he didn't reply but maybe hey if anybody knows Rich hickey and if he's interested nudge nudge nudge he did a brilliant talk if you search YouTube for either simple versus easy or I think the name of the video on YouTube is called Simplicity matters here's his point and I actually jotted down these notes so I could try to bang out his point quickly and then we'll talk about it and keep in mind everything I'm about to say he's just talking about programming he's speaking to a rumor programmers he said we we mistake

simple and easy we think that simple means easy and easy means simple but he said there are two different things the word complex if you look at the definition it's actually it comes from the word complect which is to braid things together so if something is complected it means it's intertwined with other things and so the adjective complex means that something is bound to other things whereas simple comes from Simplex which means it is not bound to other things it stands alone easy the root of that means that something is near at hand it's something

you already know how to do it's within your realm so easy and hard are subjective but simple and complex are very objective things that we can look at something is simple stands alone it's complex if it'sit bound to other things and he said here's where it gets tricky is that it be very easy to make something very complex so he says you could just type gem install hairball and with typing three words on a computer you can install a massive framework whether it's Ruby on Rails or WordPress and if you start using that well wow

you are now complected with a huge complicated system that you're intertwined with and so now everything I say after this this is my take on his analysis but it's really easy in life to say okay yeah let's get married or to have unprotected sex and get pregnant and have a baby that's easy adopt a dog hiring people you can have a problem and think H all right well I've got some money and I'm overwhelmed just I'm going to get a consultant to like hire 10 people okay great now I've got 10 employees pH that was

easy to take some work off my plate but your life is now objectively complex you are complex with these other people and their needs and their time schedules and their desires handing off parts of your business to say this is hard I'm just going to hand off my billing or my something or my this or my scheduling to these apps or these subscription services that was easy to just hand it off but now your business is very complected with these other services so hence my rant on our last conversation over scotch at my house about

tech Independence his point is it can be really hard to make something simple it can be much harder to do something that is objectively simple that stands alone that isn't dependent on other things it can be harder to make that but it's ultimately usually a better choice because it's more maintainable it's easier to change it's easier to stop and start it's simpler even if it's harder to make so the point is in his thinking is to beware of complexity which can be objectively measured and aim for doing the simpler thing even if it's harder in

my take I think you can make simple things easier just by learning more uh say about the fundamentals of something instead of just adopting somebody else's high level solution you can spend a little time learning about the core underneath it about the fundamentals then you can forget Norms you could forget what others do what others think and you can just get to the real essence of what you need I'm not just talking programming now I'm just meaning like in life what would be an example of that my 4x8 house it's like really I just need

a shelter where it's temperature controlled so it's really well insulated I do need a mattress to sleep on and I do need a place I can work but to me those are the oh and I do need a little food to me these are the core things of a shelter but even say with friendships do I need to live in the same place with my friends well not necessarily my dear friends my best friends are often far far away I don't need to move to a place that has all of my friends if I can

reach them on the phone talk about just the thought process I very often find myself asking like well what's the real outcome I'm after what's the real point of this and once I figure that out well then what's the most direct route to that outcome never mind what other people do what the Norms are what do I think is the most direct route to that outcome and then try to keep it simple along the way and be very wary of dependencies and entangling myself with other things so that's my take could you give another example

or two of how you implement that in your life or how you might cuz I know that more examples the next two might be less relatable because it's writing and programming less relatable than the 4x8 m box cuz I know everybody wants to live in a cube with nothing inside so here's a good question to strip away some things ask yourself would I still do this if nobody knew there might be a lot of things in our actions that we do because the we like the way it would look to others because it would be

impressive to others that's the first thing to just strip away when you're beginning this thought process is like if I were to never tell anybody and nobody were to ever know would I still do this thing okay well then that might just be the decoration two examples programming wise I'm constantly asking this when I'm building something it's is just I need to get this calendar entry into this database with this time do I need a whole bunch of JavaScript do I need a bunch of Cs and things flying around do I need fading Graphics no

I just need this thing there what's the most direct way to get that calendar entry into that database okay so that's like a programming example MH writing wise my last two books how to live and useful not true I'm spending most of my time reducing like my my rough draft I always spew out everything I have to say on the subject and then I spend a thousand hours crunching like every single word going is that word necessary wait a second is that whole sentence necessary wait can the point still be communicated without that sentence if

it can okay let me try to get rid of that sentence and see if the point still comes across actually does the point come across without this entire chapter oh my God it still does then I therefore I don't need this chapter one of the most useful things that happened recently is a few months ago an organization in Australia austa paid me to come give a talk and I said what you want me to talk about they said anything I said how about my next book called useful not true they said sure so it was

a room of very successful very effective people and I had one hour on stage to communicate the whole idea of my next book and at the time the book was still in process and that was so helpful because I noticed that there were a few things on stage even though I had it in my notes I skipped over it and I thought okay well actually we don't need to do that okay let's get to the next point and so later when I was back home I thought wow I just skipped over that whole point on

stage so why do I think it's worth killing trees to print that point apparently it's not cool this is now the shortest book I've ever written I'm very proud of that fact I compressed this 400 Pages down to I think it's 102 Pages or something and so those are two examples where I'm constantly asking like what's the most direct way to just get rid of what I really want get the outcome skipping the the usual Fanfare how do you think about first order Simplicity versus complexity versus second order third order and planning and the reason

I'm asking that is you strike me as someone who is who prizes Freedom Independence Simplicity all very highly but I imagine there could be cases where looking at the first decision and the first order effects you might think well it's much simpler for me to do X to renounce my US citizenship to build a box to do everything myself instead of taking on these cloud services for accounting and so on but there are levels of second third order complex cities that ultimately make it kind of net net more complex than doing the slightly more complex

thing up front does that make sense almost I guess I'm wondering how practically people might think about simplifying but not oversimplifying and then shooting yourself in the foot in the long term give you an example I know people who have moved to Puerto Rico to trim taxes substantially right right right they' viewed that as the most direct route to reducing taxes therefore they can do X Y and Z over time with more income or preserved capital gain whatever might be however in the process of doing that they've created all of this lifestyle complexity and applied

a lot of constraints to what they can or cannot do and the tax tailes wagging the dog and instead of money serving life now life is serving money and they've kind of put themselves in a Topsy tury upside down situation when if you were to look at it from first principles two years later you're like wow that was really bungled and that's not true for everybody in Puerto Rico I'm not trying to make it sound like that but I have seen those types of examples where like the thing that seemed simple and straightforward at the

outset ended up producing a lot of Ripple effects that produced not just complexity but complexity that was hard to undo great example how do you think about that kind of risk mitigation o by the way my two little examples of that a few years ago Tony Robbins had a money Master the game book I was like oh wow Tony hasn't put out a book in like 20 years I wonder how this is going to be and in it he's giving these prescriptions for extremely complex like Insurance things that you could set I was like o

wow that's objectively complex another example is in Neil St 's book called emergency I'll never forget this point he said that he's off at one of these Nomad sovereign individual I'm beholden to No Country kind of events and he meets this guy that is bragging to him about his setup he's like I got my income coming here but then all expenses go here but then I've got a trust and this but I'm the non-managing member of the trust which is held by this that and in the end he's going to save 30% taxes and Neil

said wouldn't it just be a lot easier or make a lot more sense to just work 30% harder or like to just make 30% more money he said that's a ton of work just to save 30% he said it's not that much harder to just go make 30% more and dude when I read that I love that thought process yeah I know that your podcast and the Titans and all that is often about how do we use the wisdom of others to avoid making these mistakes ourselves but some of these things may be you just

have to I don't know I think for some of these things I'm willing to throw myself in and feel the pain to see if I've done it wrong I know improv jazzing here so let's let's keep going this thought just occurred to me because when I here you talk about code and programming I mean there's a poetry to it and there's an economy to it that seems I'm not a programmer but I do WR there seems to be something intrinsically rewarding to you about that presentation of Elegance and I'm wondering in the case of following

steuart Brands principles and building this box or doing certain things that seem to me optimized for Freedom Independence even if it ends up face planting is is there something that you find beautiful and redeeming just about taking the simple approach even if the outcome is suboptimal it's related it's finding out in fact instead of just in theory we can sit at home and wonder what it might be like to do such and such but a certain point you just got to throw yourself in and go try it and if you try moving to Puerto Rico

and you hate it well now you know it was worth a try maybe and now you know in fact that doesn't work for you that's maybe the how buildings learn idea is don't predict that you will want to sink in that spot put yourself into that spot first and try live without a sink for a while and eventually you'll get a good feeling for where the sink needs to be in fact not in theory yeah and so I think I do this with my life is I'm willing to mess up happily because I will know

that then I found out in fact that that that doesn't work for me and maybe this is coming from the core of the fact that like I'm a I'm a really happy person and so I feel that like my my base level is up here I can take some big knocks you can take a hit and I think a lot of the crazy [ __ ] I've done I did marry somebody that I hardly knew after a few months because [ __ ] it let's see what happens in fact you and I have never talked

about that directly but do you know the mindset I was in at the time I had just sold my company I had a ton of money and I felt like I need to change my trajectory because my first impulse after selling my company was literally the next day I set up my next company yeah and I thought I'm going to move to Silicon Valley I'm going to do this thing I'm going to stay on the same trajectory and I did that for a few months but then I caught myself going wait I don't like I

want a full life I don't want to stay on the same trajectory I want to shake [ __ ] up so I very deliberately did what we might call the George castanza principal which is do the opposite do the opposite of all of my impulses every time I felt yes everything in me said yes I would say no out loud and everything in me says No I say yes out loud as a way of deliberately shaking [ __ ] up and so I was dating this woman for a few months and uh we had no

great connection she said oh well I can't travel to California with you unless we get married and everything in me says oh hell no don't do that that's stupid I don't want to marry this person so I said yes let's do that and so we got married and I kept doing that in every way I deliberately [ __ ] up my life M and made a bunch of crazy [ __ ] decisions and some of them worked out great and some of them didn't and I'm so happy that I did that like I in some

ways I could say that that's my biggest regret or biggest mistake but in other ways it was wonderful it deliberately sent me on a different trajectory and I'm glad I did it that it definitely will so for people who don't have any of the connective tissue here to figure out uh how to orient themselves to this people are going to want to know right Cliffhanger so how did that turn out the everything in me says No so I said yes let's get married let's do that the marriage is awful no that was that was terrible

I mean and we knew it like literally like days later like oops we made a big mistake yeah that was instantly a big mistake and that's fine because we knew in fact then that it was a big mistake not just in theory I could have walked away from that going oh God remember that woman that wanted me to marry her and I said no God I wonder what would have happened well now I get to find out like I did it now hold on a second though I'm going to push on this a little bit

we could use the this logic to be a reverse George castanza for every decision we think is bad we could turn around and say yes to right but as a life strategy I don't I don't see you continuing that right so you don't know for a fact that the awful idea would have been awful but I mean there has to be a point at which you think about self-preservation and time as a finite currency so you're like well when would you apply that versus when would you not apply it right cuz you could apply it

everywh were indefinitely well certain things are oneway doors and some are two-way doors right like for instance getting a pet rat okay lower cost more reversible let's just say than maybe giving up your US citizenship right that is a little harder to control Z yeah I cannot undo that yeah moving forward for you having learned everything that you've learned when do you play the George castanza strategy versus not right because there are lots of things we can't know for a fact unless we make the right or the wrong or the good or the bad decision

but you can't make all decisions yeah so what do you do long ago when I said the hell yeah or no thing it's going to be in your gravestone yeah fine hell yeah or here I am here heays some people emailed me after that was on your show and they said hey man I'm I you know I like this hell yeah or no thing I'm using it for everything you know I just got out of college I'm getting a bunch of offers and I'm like I'm not feeling hell yeah about any of them you know

I'm dating and just like you know I'm not hell yeah about any of you and I go wait wait wait wait hold on everything does not become a nail because you're holding this Hammer you don't this is a tool for a specific situation when you're overwhelmed with options like you have to have the wisdom to know when to use this tool you don't use it on everything always yeah so same thing with this going against your instincts of of course you don't use it on everything always but that was a specific time in my life

when I wanted to deliberately change my trajectory I wanted to go against my normal way of doing things MH and deliberately introduce some Randomness and variety into my life it's not your default right but let's look at you know I mentioned Dubai earlier everything in me said [ __ ] that place and then I caught myself feeling that and I thought okay wait hold on this is a good time to use this tool my impulse is saying no I'm going to try saying yes I'm going to go get to know this thing because that sounds

to me like that would be a learning Growing Experience to try it so that's a good example of integrating this into your life but then say like if maybe you do hit a situation where it's like nothing is working out you've been an idiot your whole life you just got fired you were just dumped by your romantic partner you're it's skid R maybe it's a really good time time to go against all your natural impulses since it's pretty clear that your defaults were set wrong yeah they're not working very well yeah I like integrating it

maybe it's the the question is like is this going to be a learning Growing Experience for me I like leaning into discomfort whatever scares you go do it all right I have quite a few follow-up questions we can take them in many different directions so we've covered Rich hickey cler knock knock we'll see if if anyone lets him know he appeared on the show I also want to ask you a question we can cut from the conversation if we need to but that's a great lead in I love that since the Dubai has come up

repeatedly this may be too risky for anybody's ears but here we go do taxes fit into this at all is this like people who move to Nashville or Austin and they're like oh the barbecue and the music and they they will dance and dance and dance until you Corner them with a broomstick and then they're like yeah okay fine yeah the taxes also it's a thing is Du buy one of those or no not at all I mean I had to ask myself that that's like one of those things okay when you ask yourself would

I still be doing this thing if nobody knew about it I got an email from a guy once it was just like hey man I want to travel the whole world I'm going to visit every country in the world do you have any suggestions for me I said yeah don't bring a camera and don't tell anyone that you're doing this is it still appealing to you now probably not okay so anytime like say Dubai for example I was like whoa this place is fascinating oh my God I think I want to live here and I

was like would I still live here if the taxes were like 50% I was like yeah that like that has that's moot to me I mean look I'm living in New Zealand where yeah my income tax right now is 45% I pay a ton of taxes but it's worth it to me I love it here I don't care so that thing mentioned in Neil strauss's book emergency that sentence Hit me hard when I first sold CD baby that was 2008 there were some things I was thinking at the time I was like oh wow I

just got Mega Millions how can I pay less taxes and it was literally like the month before or month after I sold CD Baby that I read that book emergency and I saw that sentence and I went whoa good timing that is a great Point don't jump through hoops to save taxes jump through a hoop to go make more money that's the growth choice anyway that's the thought process that leads you to make growing decisions not shrinking decisions so you're about to sell or have just sold CD Baby you form a new company the next

day you're planning on moving to Silicon Valley and you see yourself moving on that track and you decide to throw a cast hands a curveball in and mix things up why like what was the fear or the hazard you're trying to avoid by following that path was it doing something thoughtlessly and repeating what you've done before that it wasn't intentional what was it I want to live a full life at the end of my life I want to look back and go wow I I did a bunch of different things I tried a bunch of

different ways of living I followed this philosophy for a while I followed that one I tried this I tried that I lived here I lived there that to me is my definition of a full life my previous book called How To Live was 27 conflicting philosophies and one weird answer and the whole idea was that it's 27 chapters each one disagrees with the rest but each one has a strong opinion of saying here's how to live you know live for the future uh then the next one's like here's how to live live only for the

present and the next one's like here's how to live you know leave a legacy and these are all valid ways of living and my definition of a full life is I want to experience the different approaches to life I want to have the the Diversified portfolio of thought and of experiences so that was it I just felt like by if I was to create a new company the next day and move to Silicon Valley I'd just be doing more the same [ __ ] I've already done yeah makes perfect sense who else do you have

on your list of people you're studying all right Tyler Cowen just a few days ago in an article on bloomberg.com called who was bitcoin's Satoshi so we still don't know who is Satoshi the inventor of Bitcoin and you know there's this law of headlines that if if it ends in a question mark the answer is usually no you know so when I first saw the headline I thought that the answer was going to be it doesn't matter doesn't matter who Satoshi is forget it and oh my God Tyler Cowan took it somewhere else like even

if you would have asked me by the way hey Derek I'm going to give you an hour alone in a room to think about one question does it matter who is Satoshi the inventor of Bitcoin even after an hour I think my answer would have been of course not and I would have just sat there for an hour just going no no no Tyler Cowan took it the way and I I jotted down his points but it's a masterpiece in this kind of if then knock on thinking MH he said okay if we find out

that Satoshi is dead that the inventor of Bitcoin is dead then that's a good thing because it means Bitcoin will be more safe because it won't be open to Future alteration the person can't tarnish the reputation of it you know say like Elon Musk and Twitter kind of like you know by continuing to be their can tarnish the reputation of something sorry I shouldn't have gone there Satoshi can't come back and change the rules for the worst and then he even said this is why all religions have dead Founders is because the founder can't stay

in and tarnish the reputation of of the religion so I went okay good point if satoshi's dead that is good for Bitcoin it can stay as is and won't get tarnished won't get changed and he said so there's a chance that Satoshi is an older guy from this previous movement around eold that was generally seen as like a failed project that a bunch of people were into this idea of eold and it didn't work out if Satoshi is somebody from that group then that means that even projects that look like they've failed can create great

things so we should maybe think more highly or it would be less dismissive of projects that seem to be failing because who knows what they will lead to he said there's a chance that Satoshi is is this person and I forget their name but he said that would have been 21 years old and in grad school at the time of inventing Bitcoin he said if that's true that means we should raise our our perception of what Young busy people can do that they can do more than we realize this guy while in grad school also

invented Bitcoin and they said if Satoshi is still alive that means oh by the way we should say for your I assume people know but maybe not that whoever is Satoshi has hundreds or okay let's say at least tens of billions of dollars in Bitcoin that all he'd have to do whoever Satoshi is would have to just take it it's it's already there in the account in the public record that we can see so Satoshi is one of the richest people on Earth whoever Satoshi is so he said if Satoshi is still living that means

that some people don't want to be billionaires or just have incredible self-restraint like maybe upon realizing what he created he destroyed the the key destroyed the password so that he could not take those billions of dollars you know to protect himself from that I said now if there's a chance that the that Satoshi is a pseudonym for a group of people if that's true it means a group of people can keep secrets way better than we expected which means that conspiracy theories are more likely to be true about anything in general about UFOs about JFK

or whatever if this group of people is Satoshi and they could have hundreds of billions of dollar or tens of billions of dollars but they are choosing not to and they are all keeping the secret that's amazing and we should regard secrecy more higher than we can so that's the end of the bullet points but I read this one little Bloomberg article and my jaw dropped I went oh my God this is the kind of thinking I aspire to that is some amazing lateral creative I don't know what kind of thinking do you call that

but that's what I want to do more of I love it yeah Tyler is incredible highly recommend people check him out that's a that's a really good Tyler example Cowen C and definitely recommend people check him out also past podcast guest yeah that was a great one previously to this one of my favorite points of his is he said that restaurants are better in places of high income inequality why because these are places that have both Rich customers and low paid staff so somebody can afford to run a great restaurant because there are enough people

that will pay because there are rich people around but there are enough low income people that we can have a good amount of staff and he said that's why the best restaurants are in places of high income inequality whoa that's again a brilliant connection that's interesting I would also add to that that the a lot of folks who want to dedicate themselves to a craft or an art are depending on the industry but frequently not going to be wellp paid for that and so they're let's just call it volitionally poorly paid in some cases and

I I'm thinking of in this particular case San Francisco and East Bay where a lot of restaurants in San Francisco a lot of restaurants in different places but as the price of Living went up in San Francisco a lot of the best restaurant tours meaning I should say chefs a lot of the best chefs a lot of the best line Cooks a lot of the best massage therapists a lot of these people could no longer afford to be there had to move to the East Bay and I would say that led to a decline in

the quality of all of the goods I just mentioned in services so that would also make sense right if uh if you want access to the artists they're not going to be in the most expensive areas typically unless it's like a Jeff Coons or someone I haven't been to Pittsburgh lately but I heard that that happened with some of the a lot of the best chefs from New York City went to Pittsburgh and that now Pittsburgh is m it's hotter than you'd expect I could totally see it all right Tyler anybody else on the list

of people you're learning from or people you're studying those are my two because they're specific things I love it all right so I think we have one more category we'll see how many we get to here's something I'm fascinated with it would I heard a sharp inhale where should we go inchw inchw word.com I N CW r d.com this is actually a bit of a call out I don't usually do this but I would like to hear from translators that if you're a translator contact me because I've got a lot of paying work because I'm

really interested in the subject of translations that are always improving well not always at a certain point you could call it a release but you know as a writer mhm the first time you write a sentence is not always the best sure you improve it the second or third time and at any given sentence we see in your books that might be the fourth time you've improved that sentence maybe over the course of months MH there's always room for improvement but when somebody makes a translation of one of your books M the incentives are a

little off now because the translator's incentive as long as they're not translating you know the Bible or something their incentive is mostly just get it done good enough get paid the Publisher's incentive the publisher who publishes a translation their incentive is hire a translator that will make a good enough translation for a low enough price that we can get this out of the market now and make a profit selling it but my incentive as the writer that sweated over these words for years and really crafted it almost like song lyrics like I have a different

incentive is if I'm going to have a translation of this book out in the world I want it to be great like really really great which means my incentive is to work closely with the translator to make sure that what they're doing is the best it can be and that it's communicating what I intended how do you do that in a language you don't speak I don't know but that's my question so this is the I don't have the answer but I'm fascinated with the problem so so far the best idea is what I'm putting

at inchw word.com which is this idea of incremental Improvement so oh so this is your website yeah I made it it's my little passion thing yes okay all right so it's this idea where once I call something done whether it's an article or a book I put every sentence into its own entry in the database and then I pass it to a computer that does the first round of a bad translation so now we have a starting point so now if you're the first translator to come through and translate the automatic translation into your language

let's say that's a low bar that's low hanging fruit so let's say that will pay 50 cents per sentence but now if you've done one round of improvements over the computer transation and now somebody else comes through and says hm I can improve that further that sentence not the whole thing that sentence I can improve in that one now that'll pay like a dollar per sentence if it's an improved and now say two different people have improved it twice and now a third person looks at that and says I know how to improve that better

okay well now you can make say $2 per sentence to improve it better the the stakes are getting higher for improving it and there are incentives now to make it as good as can be how do you know if it's been improved so then we have readers reviewers readers whatever you want to call them that are are paid a little something to just read through and judge and at any given sentence where an improvement has been made both sentences are shown in random order and they have to vote for which one they feel is the

better sentence in that case okay and when the majority votes that that sentence is better then it's Chosen and that's when the translator gets paid so translator can't get money just for coming in and spewing crap they only get paid when the readers believe that that was a better translation anyway I'm not saying this is the final answer but I think it's a fascinating problem it is a fascinating problem that I'm willing to spend money on because I'm incentivized to have the best translation of my works out there that's it if they are a good

translator how do you incentivize them to go first knowing that someone might come along and make substantially more money by doing the fourth or fifth iteration or is is that not a problem I don't know see you just asked a great question mhm thank [Applause] you you're welcome that question is kind of the answer that's a that's a really good thing to ask I don't know yeah I know nothing about this I'm not fluent in any other language but you've probably seen this effect whenever you start to learn another language doesn't it make you look

at your English more closely oh 100% that's part of the fun it makes you look at the whole world differently depending on yeah how Divergent the language is from your native language in this case English for us oh yeah so so so interesting was just trying to help somebody with their approach to Japanese yesterday and my first thought was if you have like three or four weeks maybe you go to South Korea first and try to pick up Korean because the reading is so much easier so perhaps you could learn the basics of Korean which

isn't identical to Japanese but the grammar is very very very very similar and then you go back to Japan with your newfound knowledge of the grammar without the handicap that slows you down of having to learn three writing systems right kagana and then Kani interesting I don't know if that's a good approach but it was the first time it had had occurred to me and I was like huh I wonder if that actually would be helpful or kind of like Python and rub would it just be confusing as [ __ ] cuz now you're like

learn Portuguese and Spanish at the same time and you just get scrambled it's possible that it would be the latter do you remember Benny Lewis fluent in three months Benny Lewis sure yeah the Irish polyglot I think was the nickname yeah Benny recommends espiranto for that same thing that you just said oh interesting he said because objectively espiranto is the easiest language to learn that's why it was invented in 1888 by and off to be easy to learn therefore if you've never spoken a second language before go learn some espiranto first get used to having

a conversation that's not in your native tongue and then go learn your target language interesting wonder if that's too much of a lift well have you done it I did it I became fluent in espiranto about six years ago on Benny's advice and I regret it [Laughter] it's like less useful than klling onet net at least in communicating with others right actually I think Esperanto is hippie Klingon it is uh I went to the annual espiranto conference in Soul Korea and it was a bunch of like 60-year-olds in tie Dy singing about world peace kind

of like you know Woodstock 1969 Revisited and yeah and they're all singing like oh the world would have perfect harmony if we all just followed the ways of zamenhof and had the One World Language and and even though I had spent 6 months learning this language I got to the event and I went I don't like you people I'm sorry and I stopped on that day I was like I don't want to speak this language anymore okay but then so talk about like you know the Ruby python I never learned any Spanish my whole life

even I grew up in America I just thought no Spanish is too similar to English if I'm going to learn another language I wanted to be Chinese or Arabic or something very different so I never learned any Spanish but just two months ago I went to South America for my first time and so I spent like a month learning pimsler basic Spanish and Tim was like oh my God this is a great language this is amazing this is fascinating it is and also it is so easy that I went damn it Benny shouldn't have learned

Esperanto for six months I should have learned Spanish it's just as easy and it would have been more useful so anyway I like that you brought up the Korean thing I think it is proven to be a good technique to do the easier language first to help you disconnect or like you say to help you understand the grammar and then do the difficult one but it does help I guess if it's Korean or a language that people actually use not asir yeah Spanish is a great language for people who are curious about Korean and just

how brilliantly the writing system is designed is a point of national pride and it is not something that was out of the box it was something that was developed long after Korea had first adopted Chinese writing much like the Japanese there is a cartoon online and it is something like how to learn to read Korean in 15 minutes or how to read Korean in 15 minutes and it's a comic book you can find it and literally it might not be 15 minutes but within 2 or 3 hours you can learn Korean well enough that you

can read anything in Korean you will not understand a damn thing that you are reading right but you can mouth it you will be able to sound out phonetically roughly roughly what it what it is which is great fun well enough that you know if you're as I was a few weeks ago in an Uber and you see the the Uber app is is set to Korean you could say you know thank you or have a nice day or how are you in Korean and blow that and they'll be like how did you know and

you be like well it's Korean on the app oh my God a if you want some cheap Applause that'll make somebody's day that's that's an easy way to go you know what funny it fits right in you remember your whole like hey here's how to learn how to spin a pen with your fingers like here's some things you can learn in 15 minutes like the old like Tim Ferris 1.0 South Southwest yeah exactly the pen tricks speak Korean in 15 minutes also courtesy of Japan for sure this is what all the kids used to do

in class and now I have something that will endlessly distract and annoy everyone who sees it if I'm on an airplane or something thanks Japan oh all right Derek anything else in that Top Hat I'll just say this quickly I love this little phrase I realized when I was like digging into my incentives why I do things I travel to inhabit philosophies you can hear about life in Brazil or life in Japan but it's a different thing to to be there in it that I think there's some philosophies whether it's stoicism or Hedonism that we

can just do from a chair by just sitting and changing our thought process but you know Brazilian ISM japanism arianism I don't know Parisian ISM like these are kind of like philosophies the way that people live in places are kind of living philosophies that I want to experience what it's like because I want to think that way so I would really like to go there live as close as I can to being like a local learn the language live that life according to that way to inhabit embody this way of living mhm in order to

feel the actual physical results the actions of living that philosophy and I thought this is actually the reason I travel it's not to look at things or take pictures or post them to impress people it's I I travel to inhabit philosophies I love that what are you finding of the philosophy what is the philosophy of the UAE or Dubai recognizing that the cultures are very different depending if they're by the hills or the water or the desert but how would you try to express that philosophy easy generosity that's the thing when I said that shik

Zed who founded it bedwin culture underneath it and then say emirati culture or Arabian Arab culture generosity is by far the number one if you read this book Arabian Sands by feter he has all these stories of when he'd be out in the desert on the camels with his little crew of six guys and they only have like this much food left like nothing and their tummies are grumbling and they're starving it's funny that I just said tummies that was cute um and uh I was noted that for myself story dad and also my little

rats here I love kissing their little tummies anyway okay so if somebody would approach them you know like oh hello my friend whatever he said as soon as somebody approaches that's it we're not going to eat today because this is the way you give whatever you've got so anybody a stranger approaches you say hello friend come sit with us here no have some soup don't worry we're not hungry we've eaten enough this is for you now come sit with us when I went to Dubai that first time somebody I had met once from Riad Saudi

Arabia we we met briefly in Oxford he was the only person I knew that lived in the region so I emailed him saying hey man I'm going to Dubai for my first time are you going to be around and he said my friend he said cancel your hotel reservation he said you're going to stay at my home in the Burge Khalifa the tallest building in the world I have an apartment Thea stay at my home you're my guest I said wow that would be great I said uh it'll be so good to see you again

and he said no no I won't be there he said I live in Riad but my uncle will get you from the airport and just give you the keys my home is your home stay as long as you want so I did I stayed in the bur Khalifa in a few days this generosity runs so deep it's hospitality it's generosity and if and you understand why you're in the harsh environment of the desert everybody's living a harsh life when you meet somebody that's traveling and pass it's like oh come in come in here have some

don't even need to tell us your name or who you are or your tribe or nothing just come in my guest please have whatever you want my food take a bed stay as long as you want and that's so deep in the culture that yes I would like to inhabit that philosophy now that I've been on the receiving end of that Hospitality part of me kind of wants to have a home near the Dubai airport and make that my like my main home base and for whenever I'm not there and I'm traveling to just open

it up for any of my friends in the world like please you're coming through please stay at my home like I want to return that generosity is it going to be a 6x8 foot Cube touche come my home everything I have is yours wait Derek there's nothing here it's quick text where's the bathroom oh no there's no bathroom no my friend question whether you truly need it or not you will find out let me know where he think the sink should be I'll be a bad Emira I'll be fired how is understanding that that Dubai

is an international City for a lot of different reasons you could get by on English almost certainly how is your Arabic coming have you started tackling that I haven't spent more time in Dubai yet I'm planning on going back very soon and getting to know more people and spending more time there and considering it as a place I really might want to live because I've just noticed throughout my my life like I grew up in a suburb of Chicago then I moved to downtown Boston then I moved to New York City in the middle of

it and it was like oh yes this multiculturalism like this feels more like representative of the real world to me right then like when I went back to my hometown in Hinsdale Illinois it's like H everybody's white this is weird you know it's like I like places that are Multicultural cuz it feels like I'm more in the real world right so I thought New York like I've also lived in London I moved to Singapore I lived in Singapore for for years I thought I had been in the most Multicultural places in the world no I

looked up statistically New York London Singapore they're all about 35 or so 30 to 35% foreign born population Dubai is like 90 plus percent foreign born population everybody is from everywhere and so when I got there it was like you know anthropology jackpot I was like this is amazing everybody's from everywhere you get into any Taxi dri you know anybody you can just ask anybody you see where are you from and you're going to get a different answer all the time I'm from Cameroon what are you doing here I love languages I said okay what

does that mean he said well I love languages and I thought where can I get paid to learn languages I said I'll move to Dubai I'll drive a taxi and I can get paid to learn languages I said did it work he said my friend I can speak eight languages now I've been here 18 months I can converse with people in eight languages that everybody that gets into my taxi I just talk with people people all day long he said I speak Urdu Hindi Arabic uh whatever I think he grew up with French he said

I'm speaking to you in English he said I couldn't speak English 18 months ago now look at me and he said I'm getting paid to learn languages this is amazing that's wild and I turned to somebody else I like where are you from she's like I'm from Nairobi and she had the most beautiful accent and we got into a long conversation about Nairobi and I just thought this is what I want like just by being in Dubai the whole world comes through there and you meet so many people from all over the place oh God

this is what a beautiful place it's like the uh living in the Cantina in Star Wars dude you said it first that's that's what I usually say it's like Dubai is the bar in Star Wars It's The Cantina everybody comes from all over the world to this spot to kind of do their Shady dealings but oh my God if you're an amateur Anthropologist like me it's Heaven well I'm excited that you're excited man it's fun to it's fun to see and hope to hope to break some bread in person and the not too in future

yeah what fun always fun to hang man always great fun is there anything that you would like to say anything you'd like to point people to mention anything at all before we hop off and land the plane let's bring out the little buddies again for the uh these guys have been sleeping by my feet the whole time we've been talking adorable they are you're really good little pets if you don't wash your hands after you cook then you just let them lick your fingers oh he's licking me right now it's really sweet the way they

look they never ever ever bite they're very gentle H well unlike my hamsters I had when I was a kid they were B yes yeah same I had Geral they were nasty anyway I don't know well you know my usual call out I really enjoy the people that I've met through your podcast so hey anybody listen to this all the way through i' truly enjoy my email inbox I spend about 90 minutes a day just answering emails and I really like it so send me an email say hello introduce yourself especially if you're a trans

later or if you live in Dubai or you found anything here fascinating all right do you want them to do the detective work of finding the email address is that the hurdle oh sorry go to my website just go to si. RS there's a big contact me here link easy detective work okay SI I v. RS yeah my name right pretty pretty low hurdle yeah if they can't clear that then they have other problems all right man well thanks for taking the time as always really appreciate it sorry I missed you in England yeah next

time we'll both get our knees repaired and then we'll meet up for another Walkin talk I might ask you some tips on miniscus stuff oh boy yeah we'll talk about the knee repair for everybody listening go to tim. blogmodsgtasa one and until next time oh I should say that useful not true is only through my website it's not [ __ ] Amazon it's not on Amazon I put it on my website only so don't go to Amazon and look for it and email me and ask why it's not there it's because I don't like them

so go to c.com and that's where my books are all right go to c.com or si. RS I guess let go to the same place and you can find all things about Derek and until next time be a bit Kinder than is necessary not just to others but also to yourself and thanks for tuning in