Interviews → Scott Dinsmore, Live Your Legend

Scott:

Your story is pretty amazing. To add to the whole four-hour work week idea, the rumor was that you had your business so well systematized and automated that you are running it in under what like 4 hours every few months or something. Is that actually true?

Derek:

Yeah by that time, it was when I read The 4-Hour Workweek, I was living in London. My business was back in Portland Oregon with 85 employees and thousands of orders per day but I was just living at a friend’s place in London for a year just programming.

I would check in and I think my actual time spent on CD Baby, on the management of it was probably like say like an hour a week tops you know and for the most part, I was just doing all the programming of new stuff and it was fun. When I read The 4-Hour Workweek just sitting and nodding my head like yeah, that’s my life.

Scott:

That is unbelievable, so you were living the 4-Hour Workweek long before the book got published?

Derek:

Yeah.

Scott:

Wow, that is incredible. I mean just your story of how you built that and what happened before that. I maybe want to start from before then because I know you have this obsession with doing the things that scare you and a lot of the people in our course and who are looking to connect and meet these sort of people get kind of shy or they are introvert, they are scared to reach out and say hello and I know that’s something that holds a lot of people up.

So I would like to have their theme of our conversation be this idea of doing things that scare you and let’s kind of just take it wherever it goes but maybe we could start with the beginning with the circus. I don’t know.

Derek:

Sure. Actually let’s start directly with that kind of model of whatever scares you, go do it. Actually let’s talk about two slogans. One is “whatever scares you, go do it.” The other one is, Kurt Vonnegut quote from one of his books that said, “You are whatever you pretend to be”

Those two slogans are kind of kept in my mental thought since I was a teenager for … recall and I think “whatever scares you go do it” I don’t know who came up with that … something but ever since I was a teenager, I just decided like this is a good way to live that whenever you notice that something is scaring you that is the sign that this is something you should do, because the worst thing you could ever have in life is boredom, right.

That you want to do whatever excites you in life. It’s a sign of enthusiasm and I believe that fear is actually a form of excitement. I mean think about the way that fear feels right. You kind of – it gives you this adrenaline like ah you quiver, you shake but that’s energy right.

The worst thing is to be living some lethargic life like “yeah, I’ve been working at this job for 9 years, uh uh same old shit.”

So I decided that whenever I felt even the slightest hint of fear that like terrified feeling that I would honor it, go for it and use that as a compass to guide my actions. So on the smallest level, it would be like you know, you see some gorgeous girl across the room that is just way out of your league and you are like, “well, I am scared to even talk to her” and it’s like “well, okay I am scared, here I go.”

You know it’s just like you can make these decisions that fast, as soon as you notice that you are scared of something, that means it’s time to go do it. And that really works to your favor because the point is, every time you do something that scares you, you realize it wasn’t that scary and now you are no longer scared of it. So you can sort of like go through life getting rid of all of your fears.

Scott:

Right.

Derek:

I think it’s a wonderful roadmap for life, you know. So on a bigger level, it means like I am scared to move to New York city I don’t know anybody or I am scared to contact Rolling Stone magazine to see if they will write about my music. I'm scared to move to Singapore, whatever it may be. I'm scared to get married, everybody's got these things that I just think that when you are scared to do something, it’s a great sign you should do it.

Scott:

Wow! So I can only imagine the experiences that motto wins itself to. I wonder – on the other side though does that mean you're living your life in fear the whole time or how do you?

Derek:

No, it’s actually it just gives you more and more confidence every time because you just start building up this history of doing things that scare you and then realizing they weren’t that scary.

So it’s like your self-image, your self-definition keeps expanding and growing stronger and stronger. It’s like I can handle that, I can handle this, Scuba diving? sure moving to a foreign country and not knowing anybody, sure.

Because you started to have this … that you can pull on … knowing that every time you went and did something that scared you, it turned out great.

Scott:

Right and you started on such a small scale where if it’s just going up and saying hi to somebody and then at that parleys into moving to Singapore. Over time you build up this confidence right?

Derek:

Right exactly. I'm a very confident person now because I’ve been doing this my whole life and it’s funny you know. About 5 years ago, I was single for the first time in my whole life, I was one of those guys in long back to back relationships ever since as a teenager then all of a sudden age of 36, I was single for the first time in my life, I was like whoa! I'm going to go dating, wow! And I’ve never really done that.

It was funny when I was out there dating and meeting so many people and going for it entirely and going for the sheer … just to get used to it. I would go out with five different people per week and sometimes two people per night and everybody would just say, “god, you're so confident what's up with that?”

It was actually really a low point in my life, I had been married, I got divorced, everything I’d ever earned in my life she got in the divorce. Not only that, but my apartment in Portland was under construction so I was sleeping on a couch at the office.

My employees and I were fighting and it was this low point in my life but I am just such a confident mofo that I just have this swagger and I just remember people would say like, “god, you're so confident” and I'm like, “you know sometimes my confidence is all I’ve got”.

I am like, nothing else is working for you, you just still got this swagger that you know you can handle anything because you … you kept throwing yourself into scary situations and it’s going on just fine.

Scott:

Right. Got it, people can feel that too, going up and talking with say a woman in a bar, they can feel it if you're walking up confident or if you're walking up with your tail between your legs.

Derek:

Yeah and of course, we could talk about the difference between confident and cocky, you don’t want to be an ass. It’s just it’s almost like not believing that others are below you,I think that’s the distinction.

You can be confident and think that you're awesome. It doesn’t mean that you think that other people are not or that you are above anybody. It’s just you think everybody is awesome including you.

That’s the next thing I wanted to talk about shyness is this thing that I think, I used to be so damn intimidated by the beautiful people, just those people you see occasionally that are just stunning, just so out of your league they just feel other worldly and whatnot.

What’s amazing is getting to know them and finding out that they're just a mess like everyone else. It’s almost like within three minutes of talking, sometimes the physical beauty disappears behind the awkward, insecure or nasty or whatever person that they really are and it’s really--

You do that enough and it becomes very unintimidating because you see somebody who is absolutely gorgeous and for the first second, you think “oh my god out of my league, wait, hold on, she's probably just as messed up as everyone else” because everybody else does too.

The same thing goes for famous and successful people. This is another level, as CD Baby got really successful and me being the founder and owner of it, all of a sudden, I was a player in the music business and people that I thought were out of my league status wise all of a sudden wanted to be friends with me.

I got to know people that were my heroes and found out that a lot of them were also just messed up people that had some circumstances in life that made them famous, but they're just the same messed up person like anybody else.

Living in L.A. for 6 years, I got to be friends with some movie stars that were people that I would go see any movie they were in because I just loved everything they did and now 5 years later, they're friends of mine and you get to know them, and my god, they're just messed up people too, sometimes even more messed up than the average person because of their background and circumstances. So after a while, you just – nobody is intimidating anymore if you just have enough of these experiences.

Scott:

Well it sounds like you adopt this belief that people are people and that it doesn’t matter what title, what they look like, we're all the same and if you know that and believe it you can probably relate pretty quickly to whoever you talk to.

Derek:

Yeah and another thing that really helps I found, I learned this a little too early, think of this thing I'm about to say is that, I was an aspiring musician back in the mid-90s. I went off to a music business conference in Vegas and there were all these intimidating people up on the panels.

It’s like these music conferences where they get all the top executives from the record labels of all the people that you so want to impress. You're just like, “God, if I could just get my music to that person and they just liked it my whole career would be set”.

It is just so intimidating, It's this huge us versus them feeling. It’s like there's the un-watched masses of musicians who were there with their CDs in hand just hoping to get the attention of their record label executives and then it’s like then the executives know that everybody there wants their attention.

I would be there with the musicians in the panel listening to every word the executives would say and writing down their names and trying to remember this and making sure to do my follow up contact afterwards and then, it was like break time and then we said, “okay we're all going out to take lunch for an hour and a half out by the pool side, go grab some shrimp and be back here in an hour and a half.”

So I went out to the pool, stuck my feet in the water wall eating my lunch and just happened to be sitting next to some red head dude that asked me something about like he was talking to a friend to his left and then he turned to my right and said, “okay you help settle this dispute, how did you discover your first favorite artist? was it because of a live show?”

So we just started talking and for 45 minutes, we were just sitting there talking about music and girls and this and fans and whatnot, and then it was time for him to go and he said, “oh dude, I've got to take off you're cool, here's my card, let’s keep in touch” and it was the vice president of Polygram Records or something like that.

This guy,if I would have known that he was one of them, one of those guys I was trying to reach, and had him up on this pedestal, if I have known it was somebody like that, I would have been completely intimidated and nervous.

Because I didn’t know that he was one of those guys, I was totally cool and casual and not trying to pitch him or anything like that and the funny thing is, I just remembered there's more to it.

That would have been all there is to the story the moral of the story is, it’s all just made up in your head, this thing about putting people on pedestals because they're just same old people.

I just realized there is one last P.S. … to the story is that, he and I are still friends to this day and in fact when CD Baby was getting going a few years after that feet in the pool day, he started sending me some of his biggest clients because we were just friends.

Jack Johnson for example was exclusive on CD Baby for many years because of this guy. Jack came into his office with this branded CD and he said “you know what my buddy Derek at CD Baby, you should go with him exclusively he'll take care of you”.

All of this because of dipping your feet in the pool and talking to a stranger in a casual way and not in intimidated, pitching nervous kind of way.

Scott:

Right. It’s tough to pretend like you don’t know someone’s well-known when you're talking to them but ideally you talk to them as if they were any other person that you randomly meet.

Derek:

Yeah. And now let’s get on to that last slogan I wanted to remember to talk about the Kurt Vonnegut quote, “you are whatever you pretend to be.”

Scott:

Yes.

Derek:

That’s the only one that hit me strong mainly because of this introvert/extrovert thing, that I wasn’t anything being alone, just solitude is my favorite game. I just love being alone. Being around people exhausts me pretty fast. I can turn on the energy for a short period and I can think it for a short period.

That’s what I love about this nugget quote, “You are whatever you pretend to be.” As far as the outside world's concerned, if you are acting like an extrovert even for 45 minutes, and as far as they're concerned, you are.

You know that if you are pretending to be something long enough then as far as anyone else is concerned, that’s what you are. So as I started going to music conferences to promote my music, I just learned … sum up the strength, I’d leave my comfortable little hotel room and go into the conference room with all these people and I would be like, “okay here I go” and I would just turn it on.

You can just learn these techniques, you can read books like How to Win Friends and Influence People or any of these books about how to talk to people, how to get people to like you.

There's all these books about techniques, they may have slimy sounds and titles but for the most part I found that these books are about how to be … . A lot of them are about we are reminding that it’s all about asking questions and being interested in other people and not just talking about yourself.

I think a lot of people get nervous about social situations where they think they can be so uncomfortable, because they think it’s all about talking about themselves, that the magic revelation is realizing that it’s not.

It’s all about being interested in other people and talking with them about them. So if you just keep a dozen questions in your pocket that you can pull out at any given time or just pay close attention when people are talking, listen for these little conversational fishhooks I call them.

When somebody is talking about like “but you know, growing up, I was never into that kind of whatever” and he said, “oh where did you grow up?” and then they talk about something, something and I say, “well, you know we moved around a lot because I basically grew up in Chicago” and he said, “well, why did you move around a lot?” And you just start to learn to listen mostly to what people are saying and asked for more details about the things that they mentioned and … and you are having long conversations with somebody and they now think that you are a fascinating conversationalist and don't need to talk about yourself at all unless they ask questions.

This technique is kind of remembering to turn it back on them pretty soon like so if somebody says, “Why do you live in Singapore? you could say, “no you know, I moved there for work why do you ask, are you interested in Singapore?” you can turn it back on somebody pretty fast.

These techniques really help somebody who is a natural introvert get by and realize this you are whatever you pretended to be, that pretty soon, everybody thinks you are a great conversationalist and assumes that you are just a real people person and whatnot when in fact if you can just keep that up for an hour or two, then you can retreat back to your hotel room and go ….

Scott:

You do that enough though. You will become a people person, right? I mean, you can’t avoid it if you get more comfortable asking questions and having conversations?

Derek:

Scott, I am just recently admitting myself is that even though especially over the last few years, the last four years is when I started to become more public before that I was mostly just keeping my head down working on CD Baby.

I might do the occasional music conference but it’s really just in the last four years is when I started blogging, I started speaking at conferences, I wrote my book, I moved to Singapore which involved hundreds of people wanting to meet up with me one on one and I said yes to all of them and just the last four years have been extremely social for me.

funny thing is, I'm married now and my wife knows me quite well of course and what’s funny is that every time I go do some social thing, some mentoring thing or even schedule three back to back meetings in one day or whatever, every time I come home and she's like, “oh hey how was your day, how was the conference” or the meeting. And I would be like, “ It's alright.“

What I have is days where I intentionally schedule nothing at all, no phone or nothing and I just sit and program for ten hours or write for ten hours or just do my very solitude creativity thing. I just come home full of energy and she is like, “how was your day?” “ it was awesome, I got this … done and I learned this and I've taken up this … and I got it working, it was so nice I had such a great day” and so she started saying, “why do you keep agreeing to do all of these conferences and meetups and meetings and everybody who wants to meet with you, you're saying yes to, why do you keep doing this?” I'm like, “I don't know, because I feel I'm supposed to”.

I think this is something I really wanted to mention here, do not think that everybody needs to be an expert it's not like everybody who is an introvert has some kind of problem that they need to get over.

Some amazing things in the world have come from those people that can sit alone in a room for hundreds of hours and make amazing things happen, to create, they can sit down and program an entire web app from start to finish. Think of the novelists where would the world be without any of these novels and novels can't be created at parties networking at meetings or from hanging out with friends.

So many of the great creations of the world can only be made by having the focus to sit down and make something and not feel the pull or not resist to give up to people asking you to hang out so much, it's saying no to all of that stuff and sitting down and doing the work.

I think the … is just as valuable or more valuable than all of those people that are out there schmoozing and networking, shaking hands and getting business cards balling up all that stuff means nothing, what means everything is the tenacity to sit down of course and create something. I don't want people listening to this to think that they need to go fix that and change it, you can totally embrace it and run with it.

Scott:

There's a lot of value in that too, even if you are around other people and you're an introvert, it turns out introverts listen probably better than anyone on the planet, they're there and more present it seems. I totally agree with you on not seeing this as a problem it's something to be embraced.

Derek:

We have our strengths … we all have our different strengths for example when I sold CD Baby everybody expects the normal thing for somebody in that position to do would be to move to Silicon Valley and be an angel investor now be all involved in the startup scene web 2.0, social media boom, be in the middle of all this angel startup …

I did a little bit of that when I moved to Singapore because there's a huge second Silicon Valley feel to this place, everybody's in a startup, everybody's doing something and everybody's trying to invent some new app that's going to be huge.

They really roped me in to meet with a lot of these startups and mentor them and I did it for a year and a half before finally being honest, looking back it felt very dishonest in a way that I was doing this for a year and half because my big admission to myself I said, “I don't actually care about other peoples businesses” … locked in my own ideas and that's what excites me.

I was not that into other peoples business I liked to mind my own business as they say. It's a really hard thing to admit when dozens of startups are asking for my feedback and my thoughts and with everything I had to shrug going, “I don't know, it's your business”.

The point I'm getting at is that there are lots of people especially in Silicon Valley right now that are really, really into the whole startup tech scene, they're into this angel investing and incubators and hacker spaces that whole thing, they're really into it, and don't feel that you need to follow the crowd with this stuff because especially if it's a “follow the crowd” type situation, if lots of people are into something and you're just not that into it, then lucky you because there are people that are.

By me just finally admitting that I'm just not into others businesses, it really frees me up and fells so wonderfully honest and invigorating to finally stop doing things that I don't love doing.

Scott:

Sounds so simple but I know how difficult that is to do, to do things differently and to just to know who you are, your core and act on that.

Derek:

Right, let's say for startup entrepreneurs, almost everybody is told that they need a co-founder and they need to have an office or how it's cool to be in an open work-space or be in a half space.

Again let's talk about this introvert thing, that maybe you just love to work alone which they will probably tell you is a bad thing but again look at every novelist, painter or sculptor that ever lived, they work alone and you can be an entrepreneur and work alone, you don't have to be a part of some scene and sit with everybody.

You don't even need to live in a city, you can be an amazing entrepreneur living in Guam, up on the hill with nobody else around. You don't need to do things the way that everybody else is doing them, you don't need to be social just because everybody else is.

Scott:

Right that's such a good point. I don't want to take too much of your time this is really good stuff, I want to dive into two other quick things, one is just I noticed when reading something, I don't remember if it was on Tim's site or what but you talked about how your mission was to make people smile and when you were running CD Baby and just in general, I wonder if you could maybe speak about it a little because it sounds a lot like you talked about the how to win friends and influence people and that kind of thing. So what's the story with that mission?

Derek:

That to me more is more of a business philosophy, I think a lot of people look at a business plan or business idea and they say, “how can we make this make a lot of money?” or “how can I really profit from this?” or “how can we grow our user base” and I think asking those kind of questions distracts from what you're really doing, meaning stop thinking of users as a group or stop thinking of a crowd.

Remember there is no such thing as a crowd, there's individuals, there are people and every one of them is a person that is interacting with your business because it makes them happy in some way, it makes them happy because they save some time or makes them happy because you're selling them some cool thing that makes their bedroom look awesome.

Let's not forget that the reason people open their wallets and pull out their credit card and actually paying you it's because you're doing something that makes them happy.

At CD Baby I just made sure that everybody knew that was really mission number one is make sure that everybody that interacts with us comes away happy, so even if we need to lose a little money, that's fine.

The most important thing is that they walk away happy because then they'll just remember the good interaction with us, they'll they'll tell their friends we're a great company, whereas I see so many companies doing this opposite thing of nickle and dimeing and squeezing every last little dollar out of you to try and maximize their profit.

But everybody who walks away from dealing with that company it just feels icky, it just feels like ugh, they gouged me they got every-- they didn't leave any money on the table, they really got every dollar they could out of me, this icky feeling that you can't wait to not do business with them anymore.

Given that shortcut model like make sure that you're making everyone happy or making people happy it just keeps the focus on the person and remembering that's what it really comes down to more than any of the numbers, the numbers are optimization details but the real core is that making sure that you're making people happy. You can ….

Scott:

I love that, it sounds like the people who do this consistently like the way you're talking about are really in it to help people, I think the ones who are more talking as to how can we squeeze every dollar they just see it as a transaction, I think if we get back to the point of helping people then that's what these businesses are about then it becomes pretty clear.

Derek:

Yeah definitely.

Scott:

Cool, the last story I would love to hear from you is where you wrap things up is just this idea of your experience in the circus and why you did that and how that came about, it sounds so funny to read your bio and to hear like, “yeah sure it's CD Baby, sold it for 22 million dollars, he was a circus clown” or whatever it was, tell me how that came about, was that to help you with shyness or meeting people, what was the deal?

Derek:

I was going to the Berklee School of Music in Boston and the bass player in my band got a call from an agent one day asking if he would like to go up to Vermont and play guitar at a pig show and would get paid fifty dollars to do it and he was like, “hell no, that sounds lame” and asked if I wanted to do it I was like, “hell yeah, fifty bucks my first paying gig ever, absolutely”.

It was a thirty-eight dollar round trip bus ticket to get there and do the gig, I didn't care, it was like the first paying gig ever. I was eighteen. So I took this bus up to Vermont and I went to a place I had never been and I grabbed my guitar and walked around some pig show playing songs and afterwards the agent called me up and said. “hey heard you did a great job up there, so look I've got this circus the previous musician just quit and I'm looking for somebody else so why don't you catch a bus out to Worcester Massachusetts we're doing … this weekend, come play for me there and I'll check you out in person and oh I'll pay you fifty bucks”.

I was like, “Yes” he sweetened that deal and he liked my playing he said, “okay great so look we've got four gigs a week, they pay about seventy-five bucks per gig, do you want to do it?” I was like. “hell, yeah” that's a hundred and fifty oh my god three hundred dollars a week made playing music, hell yeah.

That was it I became the ringleader-- oh sorry what he didn't tell me is that I wasn't just the musician, I went to my first gig or two and after I did the show they said, “hey look, the previous musician used to go out at the beginning of the show and introduce the acts” and I said, “okay cool” they said “just do it like this kind of go out and welcome to the show” so great.

Then the next time they said, “hey the previous musician used to also close the show, at the end of every show he'd go out there and he'd get everybody involved in this big singalong thing doing the theme song, could you do that?” I said, “sure”.

Then they said, “you know the previous musician used to go out in between each and every act and introduce the next act” I was like. “oh my god, I'm actually the ringleader, MC, musician of the show” if you were to go see the circus you would have thought it was my show right?

I'm eighteen years old it was an amazing performing experience but it wasn't to overcome shyness or anything like that it was more like I want to be a professional musician in my life and this is the thing that will move me towards that goal it will get me better at performing and it did.

I stayed with the circus for ten years, I eventually started getting three hundred dollars per show and doing five shows a week. It was the reason I was able to quit my job, last I had a job meaning a boss was in 1992 I quit my last job and I've just been a full time musician or entrepreneur ever since, and it's mostly because of the circus.

I stayed in the circus for ten years from eighteen to twenty-eight toured all over constantly basically lived out of hotel rooms for most of ten years, did a thousand shows and got really, really good at it.

Scott:

Wow that is insane, what a way to start too. It seems like you just got into the habit of saying yes to everything that was remotely towards this dream you had which is so powerful.

Derek:

I have this theory, this comes back to you are whatever you pretended to be that when somebody asks you if you can do something and as you're saying if it's related to your goal at all, if you just say yes and figure out how.

A couple of years later somebody said, “Hey I need a jazz piano player for an art opening, it pays two hundred dollars, do you know anybody?” and I said, “I play jazz piano, I can do it” like. “are you good?” and like, “yeah I'm good, I play jazz piano sure I'd love to do it, two hundred bucks right?” and then I think I even talked them up to three hundred or something and I didn't know how to play piano, I went and said yes to him and went home and practiced, I got some books and-

Scott:

That's insane.

Derek:

-then you are whatever you pretend to be, I did the gig, they were happy, I made three hundred bucks and got more gigs out of it and so I updated my business card then to say jazz piano among other things on my business card.

People asked me if I could write music for a commercial and I was like yeah absolutely I do it all the time. So I got paid ten thousand bucks to do some commercial thing for Nike in Europe, and I'd never done music for a commercial before, I had no idea what I was doing, you just say yes to everything and you are whatever you pretend to be.

Scott:

Oh my god I love the motto, it reminds me of when I think I read an article of yours a while back, I think the title was “it's either hell yeah or no.”

Derek:

“Hell yeah or no” that's the motto, to be clear, I think the way I started that article saying if you're too busy … so I did get some push-back on that fair enough from people that were at the beginning of their career saying, “well no there's some things that I need to do in my career that I'm not excited about doing but I need to do.”

Fair enough if you are at the beginning of your career and you're trying to make opportunities happen then just say yes to everything. If you've reached a certain level of success where everybody's vying for your time, everybody's trying to get a piece of you, everybody wants you here and there that's one this hell yeah or no thing applies more than ever, is that we've got a lot going on.

Because when you're up and coming in your career you say yes to everything because you want every opportunity possible, you get into the habit of saying yes to everything, but once you've reached a certain level of success that same strategy will bring you down, you get what I'm saying?

Scott:

Certainly, yeah. Again that comes back to your introvert realization of you not always need to do everything.

Derek:

Exactly … after you hit some success, you have to change your strategy and not say yes to everything because it will kill you, or it will just kill you career wise, that you have to then be much more selective and say yes only to the thing that really feels like “hell yeah like oh my god that would be awesome I would love to do that, that would be amazing” you say yes to those things and you say no to everything else, doing that allows you to spend more time and be more focused on the things you've said hell yeah to and also it leaves room in your life so that when another hell yeah opportunity comes up, you've got time to say yes to it.

If you said yes to a bunch of other stuff that you felt even 80% out you wouldn't have time to really throw yourself into the occasional 100% opportunity.

Scott:

Right, you don't even give yourself a chance to do the things that really matter.

Derek:

Yeah, yeah.

Scott:

Wow Derek this stuff is gold and I love just these simple concepts of saying yes to these things and acting the role until you live it and just doing things that scare you. If you do that on the smallest scale it's no surprise that I look at the resume that you have and you've accomplished what you have and it's incredible but I think you had it coming.

Derek:

Thank you, … I'm forty three now so as time goes on, I have this theory that a lot of people are trying to do everything all at once, they say, “there's so many things I want to do, I don't know what to do because I want to do this, I want to be a programmer but I also want to be this, I also want to travel the world, and I want to--”

I have this theory that life is long you can use the future, the future exists so use it pace yourself out, do one thing for five years and then a different thing for three years and then a different thing for seven years and then actually in the course of your life you will do everything that you wanted to do, when you try to do all of them at once you get nothing done, just there spazzing out ….

Scott:

Right take one at a time, it's counter-intuitive I guess bit.

Derek:

Yeah …

Scott:

Wow to close things out can you just tell us where you've been in the last couple of months, you just listed before we got on the call a number of places just so people know.

Derek:

Scott called me first right before we connected and hit record and he said have a go and I said in the last eight weeks or so I've been … conferences in a row and with … we went to … New Zealand, Mongolia, Japan, Tibet, Iceland, Ireland, UK, back to Singapore then to Taiwan, India, Thailand, New Zealand again and back to Singapore and the whole trip just ended twelve hours ago. I got back late last night, crashed hard, woke up this morning did the call with Scott so I'm back from a few months on the road.

Scott:

Wow just a typical couple of months for you right?

Derek:

Yeah, we decided to binge, it was let's say a family decision we said binge all the traveling all at once, kid's at an age where it's we can carry him around in a stroller and he's cool with that, but now we're going to cut back on the travel for a while. It's been a whirlwind but it's been fun.

Scott:

It's even more of an honor to have you on the call knowing that you just went through that and you still made time for this so thank you the people with us appreciate it more than you realize.

Derek:

One last thing I make myself pretty wide open to email, usually the kind of person that would sit and listen to this interview is my kind of person so anybody that made it this far send me an email to derek@sivers.org and send me an email and say hi if you don't have any big profound thing to say that's fine just say hi and it would be good to keep in touch learning about what people are doing, where they're at.

Scott:

That is unbelievably generous thank you for that and hopefully people will take you up on it, your current project so that people know about it, it's Muckwork right? you're helping musicians do the dirty work so they can continue to create.

Derek:

That's what I'm programming right now it isn't launched yet I want to say I've been way too distracted saying yes to all this other stuff and speaking at conferences and all that stuff so honestly I haven hardly worked on Muckwork in the past year but yes that's my next thing.

Scott:

Wow awesome, we'll put links to all this stuff below the video and it's a total honor, Derek thank you so much it's an inspiration.

Derek:

Cool, thanks Scott.

Scott:

Thank you.