The Minimalists live in NZ
host: Joshua, Ryan
minimalism
listen: (download)
watch: (download)
Transcript:
Joshua
Derek Sivers, this is your first appearance in public in three years, I believe?
Derek Sivers
Yeah. I’ve been saying no to everything for three years. I live in Wellington and these guys told me they were coming through Auckland. A few months ago they said, “Can you come?” I said, “No,” and I said, “But ask again in a couple months.” Then just two weeks ago they said, “Can you come?” I said, “Yeah, all right. Sure.”
Joshua
He actually said no twice. But now we are here and we’re grateful for that. We’re going to talk about saying no and some of the good reasons for saying no tonight. That’s a first. Also, you haven’t done an interview in two years. Now, Ryan and I actually don’t do interviews. We occasionally bring on friends or new friends and we have conversations with them about the topics of minimalism and everything else.
Joshua
We don’t do interviews per se, but we like to have conversations about minimalism. Although, here’s the thing; minimalism is just a Trojan horse to get us in the door and let us talk about whatever the hell we want to talk about. We’re also going to answer some of your questions tonight as well. I figured we’d have a bit of a conversation with Derek and then we’ve got a mic back there. Eventually, we’ll be able to line out and we’ll get to as many questions as we can.
Joshua
Here’s another first for us, though. I’ve never spoken at a racetrack before. You, Ryan?
Ryan
Not in this setting, no.
Joshua
It’s funny, when Derek got here he took an Uber from the airport and he sent me a text. I believe the text said, “I’m here... I think”
Derek Sivers
The taxi said, “Is this where you want to go?” I said, “I doubt it, but I guess so.”
Joshua
Some people have this weird misconception that to be a minimalist you have to have great hair. That’s only partially true. It’s actually, you have to have a great haircut. I think for Sivers, he has the most appropriate haircut and I am just infinitely jealous of the haircut because I can’t pull it off. I look like something from one of the Terminator Versus Alien movies when I shave my head.
Joshua
Anyway, Derek and I were emailing back and forth- this is a lesson in persistence. After the first few times he told me no, and I believe in consent, and so I was working toward yes here. When I think of Derek Siver’s writing, or even if I just think of Derek Sivers as a human being, I think of four words. I wrote these down and I sent these to him: simple, creative, considerate and calm.
Joshua
I know for me that when you approach your writing, it’s elegant and it’s like the bones are its beauty. You have a book out there called “Anything You Want” and I have the physical copy and virtually the whole thing is highlighted just because it felt like you wrote that book one tweet at a time. I think the truth is you probably had to distill it down to one tweet at a time.
Derek Sivers
Should I talk about that?
Joshua
If you’d like.
Derek Sivers
Was that a question?
Joshua
No. It’s a conversation.
Derek Sivers
I’ve been writing for many years but I didn’t consider myself a writer. I just felt like as I go through life if there’s something that I learned, it’s easier to give your friend advice than to take that advice yourself. Usually, when I’m writing something it sounds like I’m being bossy and telling you what to do but it’s really like I’m telling it to my future self because I keep forgetting these things.
Derek Sivers
But I realized that I do have a writing process which was seven steps. Let’s see if I can remember them all. First, I write down everything I have to say on a subject. Then second, I argue against it and I try to prove all those points wrong because I usually just assume I’m full of shit. Three, I do that until I’m sick of it and then I have nothing more to say on the subject. Then number four, I leave it for a long time and just go away and then come back to it and I go, “Oh yeah, I forgot about that. That was a cool idea.”|
Derek Sivers
But then I argue it some more and then I look at this big giant, messy pile of thoughts. It’s just so cluttery and I hate it, and so I try to reduce it down to its very essence. I say, “Let me just make an outline to summarize all this giant wall of text.” And when I’m done, I just post the outline instead.
Joshua
But it takes the giant hoard of material in order to get to just the outline itself. It takes almost building up this mass. For me it’s, you need the huge chunk of granite from which you can then carve out the piece of art.
Ryan
That’s awesome.
Derek Sivers
The giant phallus, yeah. Those of you listening, I’m staring at 500 faces here and it’s kind of freaking me out. I’m wondering what you guys are doing here. I’ve actually wished that when the music was playing, if the song wasn’t so good I might have interrupted to ask you guys why you’re here. Does anybody have some concrete reason why you came here that you could shout out?
Audience
Josh and Ryan.
Derek Sivers
Well, duh. Is there something that you were coming here to learn or is this just like a big dating group that you wanted to meet other minimalists or something? Can somebody shout something out, like something you were here to learn?
Derek Sivers
Were you looking for tips on moral support or more concrete advice?
Ryan
Derek has thrown us into the question round already. Thanks Derek.
Derek Sivers
I was just so eager. I was just too curious. I couldn’t fake it. I couldn’t just look at all these faces and pretend I wasn’t too curious. Sorry. How do we summarize that question for the listening audience?
Joshua
We actually have two questions that are connected perfectly. We have one that says, hey, I want to be able to get rid of a bunch of crap. The other question is, once I’ve gotten rid of a bunch of crap, what the hell do I fill my life with? Is that right?
Audience
I say yes to everything.
Ryan
Oh, I see. I am such a dumb American. Oh, my goodness. She’s here to learn how to say no more often, is what it sounds like.
Derek Sivers
Good summarize? Okay.
Joshua
Ladies and gentlemen, Derek Sivers.
Derek Sivers
What am I supposed to say to that?
Joshua
You’re fine, dude. We were up in the green room before this and you and I were exchanging some emails back and forth talking about the concept of of complexity versus simplicity.
Derek Sivers
I’ve thought about the subject a lot. I’ve been emailing with these guys for years. I’ve been kind of living this life for years too and I think about it a lot. I realized that to me, of course it goes beyond just the stuff. First, you throw out some stuff and then you say, “Now what?” I realized that to me, the bigger point it comes down to is this idea of complex versus simple.
Derek Sivers
I learned this from a programmer recently that the word complex, we think of complicated and complex, it actually comes from the word complect, which means to braid two things together. When you complect two things, you braid them together. And so when something is complicated it means it’s intertwined or tangled with other things. Then simple comes from the word simplex, which means one, something that’s not connected to anything else. It’s just a single thing.
Derek Sivers
I started looking at life through this lens a bit, realizing that that was the real issue that interested me more than throwing out stuff, is how to make my life less complicated, like less bound to other things. And so we were geeking out in the weeks up until now, like trading ideas about what we were going to talk about, about the ways that we’re so bound to things, sometimes mindlessly.
Derek Sivers
Like a lot of my friends are creative artists and they do things like keep all of their stuff in Adobe Creative Cloud or in Google Documents, but now you’ve bound yourself to Google Docs and everything you create is in Google Docs. Now, it’s like if Google accidentally shut down your account tomorrow you’re screwed because you were completely dependent on Google to do what you’re doing.
Derek Sivers
I’ve been online since 1994. I’m kind of an old timer, I’m 48. In the first dotcom boom there were a lot of companies that started up. One example, I was in the music business, so MP3.com. In 1999 and 2000, every single musician in the world was on MP3.com. It was indispensable. You had to have your music there. That was the entire music business, was going on at MP3.com and everybody uploaded all of their music and they kept all of their fan lists there, like all of their mailing lists. Everybody they knew was interfaced through MP3.com, and then two years later it shut down and everything was deleted and they were just screwed. All their music they’d ever uploaded, their thousands of fans, just gone.
Derek Sivers
Then I saw them do it again a couple of years later with MySpace, and then MySpace was the shit. Everybody was on MySpace and you put all of your fans there and all of your interactions with all of your fans were all through MySpace. And then it didn’t actually disappear, but it’s moot, so it might as well be gone. Then now it’s 2018 and I see everybody doing that with Facebook and Instagram and all these things that they just assume they’re going to be there forever.
Derek Sivers
But I think about this comparison like right now, in 2018, we’re at the longest bull run ever since the 1920s and the stock market. You can imagine somebody that’s only been investing for 15 years, they don’t even know what it is to ever see the stock market go down for a single quarter. A lot of people today don’t even know what it is to have these companies that you think are dependable just disappear.
Derek Sivers
I often ask my friends when I see them using @Gmail accounts and uploading all their kids pictures to Facebook, I say, “What would happen if your account got deleted tomorrow? How screwed would you be?” “What do you mean? That can’t happen. I need that.” It happened to a friend of mine in Singapore. He’s a tech savvy guy too. He’s a VC tech investor in Singapore. And because he’s so tech savvy and thinking of himself as so forward-thinking, when he had a son 10 years ago he started just uploading all of the photos of his newborn son to Google Photos. What’s that called, Picasa or Google Photos? Maybe it’s the same thing.
Derek Sivers
He did this for nine years. That was the master copy of all of his photos of his kid, went straight to Google Photos. Then he started this new company and decided to merge his personal @Gmail account with Google Apps and with his domain. When he merged the two, suddenly his Google photos were gone. He was emailing customer support like, “Excuse me, where are my photos?” They said, “Well, you merged your two accounts and so it resets your photos.” He said, “Could you get them back please?” They said, “No, they’re gone. You deleted them when you merged accounts.” He said, “But those are all of my photos of my kid.” And his wife is like, “What have you done? What have you done to this child that it’s gone? It’s gone.” And I’m like, “You fucker, it’s a company. You don’t depend on a company.”
Derek Sivers
Anyway. I think about a lot of this subject of you don’t complect your life together with things, so stop depending on your social media accounts. If you’re depending on Gmail for your email, they might shut down your account some day for no reason because somebody was trying to run a scam through it and then your Gmail account is gone. I’m preaching this thing that to me, is about simplifying your life by reducing your dependencies like that.
Ryan
When we were talking about that upstairs and you were talking about this intertwining, instantly I thought about marriage. I was thinking about the analogy of how when you pick out a partner...
Derek Sivers
Better be careful.
Ryan
Yeah. Hopefully, all of us who are going to get married, hopefully we have picked out that partner very deliberately. What it’s so easy to do nowadays is to get married to Facebook, to get married to Twitter, to get married to Instagram, to get married to Gmail. And we do it without really thinking about why we’re marrying ourselves to these different tools that we have available.
Derek Sivers
To me, it’s also that super long term view. A lot of my friends are musicians and they’re in their 20s and 30s and I think, “You’re going to be making music longer than Facebook is in business.” Facebook will probably go out of business in the next 50 years while you’re still making music, so don’t depend on that as your source of where you do everything.”
Ryan
It’s funny too, because a service like Google... your friend is uploading those photos. That is a free service. So when they’re all deleted, really they’re just looking at him like, “What did you expect?”
Derek Sivers
“We tried, dude. We were doing you a favor. We decided not to.”
Ryan
“We screwed up. Our bad.”
Joshua
Derek, don’t you think that binding concept applies to possessions as well? Quite often we’ll continue to hold on to things in perpetuity just because we acquired them at some point.
Derek Sivers
That’s the path that you guys found that you talked about, that a lot of people have to find this out the hard way. There’s a good word for it. Sometimes a single sentence can change your mind. You can hear people talk, and talk, and talk and then a certain sentence will hit you. For me, it’s when I heard somebody say something like, “You don’t have to be the steward of your possessions.” It was one of those kind of words like like a museum curator or something like that. It was this idea of somebody who keeps the dust off the item forever, like you don’t want to be the steward of your items. I was like, “Oh yeah.” You think of every little thing you buy as like, oh wait, this is going to sit here forever until I get rid of it.
Derek Sivers
Did you guys see the video called The Story of Stuff? That one made a huge impact on me too. If you guys haven’t seen The Story of Stuff, like when you said you need extra tips or help on not buying stuff or getting rid of stuff. The Story of Stuff might change your life because this woman made an animated video showing you all of the waste that’s created in every single thing. When you think, “I’ll just get some shoes. They’re 12 bucks at the warehouse. 12 bucks. Why not?” But then you find out how much waste goes into creating that stupid pair of shoes and suddenly you look at it with new eyes. That video made a huge difference for me.
Joshua
We were talking about surrounding ourselves with the objects that are closest to us. Actually, in our documentary we interviewed a gal named Juliet Shaw. The thing that she said is the problem isn’t that we’re too materialist, it’s that we’re not materialist enough. In fact, there are some things that really augment our experience of life, that improve our life and choosing those things wisely is important. But instead what we’ve done is just try to amass more of whatever.
Derek Sivers
That’s right. We talked about the idea of introducing friction. Now imagine this, I moved to New Zealand six years ago. In America you get addicted to Amazon. It’s just so damn easy. Anything in the world and it just shows up at your door the next day and it’s basically wholesale price. Then I moved to New Zealand and there’s no Amazon here. What I’ve found is that my initial impulse would happen. I was like, “I need some new headphones. I’ll get some new headphones.” I’m like, “Oh fuck, they cost how much here?” And I’m just like, “I don’t need headphones.”
Derek Sivers
I stopped being a consumer because there was just enough friction now that I’m just like, “Oh, never mind.” So I just don’t buy stuff as much now because there’s no Amazon. Then we talked about if there’s something in your life that is maybe too easy, like Facebook or Instagram on your phone is just a little too easy to suck you in, introducing this friction.
Derek Sivers
What I started doing years ago is I used a random string generator on my computer to generate this 32 character long password and I changed my Facebook password to that. But it’s only on my computer so it’s saved in a GPG encrypted thing on my computer is my Facebook password. I didn’t have the app on my phone anyway but I did the same thing with my email. Now, on my phone I can’t check my Facebook or email. I don’t even know what my password is. I can only do it back at my computer.
Derek Sivers
Even in those times of low willpower, for the same reason I deleted my ex girlfriend’s phone number from my phone. You don’t want to be in that position at 1:00 in the morning going, “Wait, wait. Hold on. I’m not so strong right now.” You introduce some friction in between you and the things you don’t want in your life.
Joshua
I think sometimes that friction also gives you traction in ways because if everything is absolute convenience all the time and it’s Amazon at my door whenever I want it- in LA it’s same day delivery now and then you can get the food delivered to you. There’s no reason to ever leave. So I’m just at home laying on the couch, having someone feed carbohydrates to me all day. At some point there’s no meaning, purpose, joy in that. We often mistake these little moments of pleasure; the ephemeral, fleeting pleasures as though that’s real purpose or joy in our lives but obviously it’s not. We realize that whenever we pan out.
Joshua
But when we remove some of those overindulgent conveniences intentionally, not depriving ourselves but intentionally saying, “I’m not going to do that.” Adding the friction creates some traction in our lives so that when we are in those interstitial zones at a doctor’s office, or you’re waiting in line to order food, or you’re at the grocery store, the checkout line, you’re not just passively lost in the glowing screen like a zombie.
Derek Sivers
I’m going to say something else I shouldn’t say. Are most of you here from New Zealand? Okay. I’ve been here for so long that the American accent sounds strange to me a bit. So when these guys came on stage before the podcast started and they were talking, I was sitting in the back going, “Do we sound like that?” I was thinking of, you know Hunt For The Wilderpeople, where Taika is the preacher and he’s just like, “And behind that first door. Remember what’s behind the second door,” It’s this earnestness of the preacher.
Derek Sivers
I was thinking how similar it sounds to religion when people are saying, “And then I was at my low and my buddy came to me and he said, ’Minimalism. It will show you the way.’” You could almost put any word in there. ’Scientology, my friend.’ “Why am I so happy?” “Scientology.” “Why am I so happy?” “Sex, my friend. You’ve got to try it. It’s the best.”
Joshua
I’m really glad that I stumbled across minimalism and not scientology in that moment of searching because I was really susceptible to, okay, I’m looking for some new ideas because this current idea isn’t working. Thankfully, I found one that doesn’t have a dogma to it though.
Derek Sivers
Nice transition. I wanted to talk about dogma. Look at that. Expert MC on the mic.
Ryan
We’re not supposed to say when there is a transition. It’s supposed to be natural.
Derek Sivers
Oh, oops.
Joshua
Segue music.
Derek Sivers
I didn’t bring my dictionary with me. But I think the difference between dogmatic and pragmatic is when you’re being dogmatic, you want to take something and act like it’s the answer to everything, like I have found minimalism. It is the answer to everything. Then pragmatic is you’re using it as a tool where it’s needed in your life. I have a now, six year old kid, and these guys asked me about parenting and how minimalism applies to parenting. I thought about it for a second and I thought here’s how it applies, is I learned that it doesn’t apply.
Derek Sivers
At first I was dogmatic about it. When my kid was two years old I was just like, “uh-uh, no toys. We’re going outside and playing with pinecones.” I live right down Breaker Bay by the airport in Wellington and there’s all these rocks out there and I would just take him out to the rocks. I’m like, “No, you don’t need toys. We’ve got rocks. Come on.”
Derek Sivers
By the way, do you remember Flight of the Conchords? New Zealand Rocks. The joke in Flight of the Conchords is all the tourism posters never have a person in them. New Zealand is always advertising this place with no people like, New Zealand rocks. I’d always just take my kid out to play with limpets, and sticks, and pine cones. Then one day I took him to a restaurant in Wairarapa that had a huge, giant box of toys. I finished eating in 20 minutes and he sat there for 3 hours with these toys just like, [inaudible]. He was like playing with his character and he was so into it, he was riveted. And I just sat there for 3 hours watching just like, “I suck, man. I shouldn’t have pushed my fucking shit on him.” I was like, “Okay, I’m being dogmatic about this. My kid doesn’t need minimalism. He’s two.”
Derek Sivers
That was an important distinction for me, is realizing this is a tool. Best thing ever. By the way, what they don’t have in America is Trade Me. I went to Trade Me and for 25 bucks I found somebody in Wellington who was moving to Australia and took all of their kid’s toys in a huge crate and I bought it for 25 bucks. And still four or five years later now, my kid plays with that same box of toys for 25 bucks all the time. There’s like 300 toys in there, like little action figures, and dinosaurs, and boats, and cars, and aliens. He brings him into the bath and it’s the best damn 25 bucks.
Derek Sivers
But I realized that we got to use this as a pragmatic tool, not a dogmatic thing to apply to everything.
Ryan
I think this is a great example of how Josh and I, we do not recommend deprivation. Deprivation is not fun. Just like Josh said, any of you all could rent a dumpster and throw everything away when you get home and you’re just going to probably have a big chance of being miserable in an empty place. I know for me when I did that, that Stoeckle experiment of packing all my stuff up and going through it, first off, as a single dude living by himself, that’s a very, very easy thing to do. But for a family of six, like Leo Barboza probably wouldn’t do that. That doesn’t really make a lot of sense for a big family. But for me, having taken everything out and really getting down to the essence, it helped me realize what I needed to bring back in.
Ryan
I think the experiment that you did with your child, yeah, you were depriving them. But as a good parent you were like, “I am not being a good parent right now and I want to be a good parent and I’m not going to deprive my kid anymore.” Dude, I’m sorry but you’re still minimalist. Your kid’s still a minimalist with that box of toys, man. That was a very deliberate thing. You brought it and it sounds like those toys add a lot of value to his life. Would two boxes make him happier?
Derek Sivers
No. We talked about this. So does that mean that 10 boxes would be better? You’re right. I guess we all just find the balance.
Joshua
There’s 10 times more joy. I think that’s the problem with toys. The stat from the UK is the average child in the UK has 300 toys but plays with 12 daily. However, the argument would be if they’re playing with 300 toys regularly, then what’s the real problem here? The problem for us is we have our own toys as adults. It just turns into something else. We live in Los Angeles now. I’ve never seen more Ferraris in my life. I’m in the backseat of Ryan’s Toyota Corolla driving past each one and realizing that we do the same thing.
Joshua
We try to amass more not because it’s necessarily better but one of the things we were talking about earlier is you want to have the things that will aid the experience of life most: a good bed, a good pair of shoes, the things you keep closest to you.
Derek Sivers
We haven’t talked about the different definitions. For a little while I got sucked into these circles of digital nomads like Colin. By the way, Colin Wright lived in Christchurch for six months right before the earthquake. That was one of his spots. I got sucked into these circles of digital nomads and at one point they asked me to speak at a digital nomad conference in Berlin. This was 500 people, all who called themselves digital nomads. It was a little creepy.
Derek Sivers
What was funny though is realizing how different their definitions were. I heard a lot of people talk about this idea of traveling for a while, like they would go to live somewhere cheap in Bali or Thailand and then they’d go back home, whether that was Chicago, or London, or whatever. Then they’d go out and they’d live somewhere cheap again and then come home. I realized we had a different definition because to me nomad means you keep going, like there’s no more home anymore. You keep going constantly and that was my personal definition.
Derek Sivers
Then I realized my definition is different than most people’s. And so minimalism came up when my friend came to visit New Zealand and he stayed at my apartment. I pulled out my laptop, which is this huge, giant, bulky nine-year-old Lenovo laptop and he’s like, “Dude, what are you doing with that old laptop?” I was like, “It works.” His version of minimalism is every year he finds the smaller, better, faster computers so he can be minimalist, which to him means light and portable. Everything fits into a tiny backpack.
Derek Sivers
And so he’ll buy lots and lots of stuff to find the tiniest stuff. It’s just I was surprised it was a different definition. Whereas my definition was if you have something that works, you don’t need to keep buying stuff, so I have this giant, old, ancient laptop still. It’s funny to realize that we have different definitions of the same word, which if you don’t mind me taking one more fun tangent on that...
Ryan
Yes. We insist.
Derek Sivers
It reminded me of this idea of you have a cocktail party, you have two doctors and two lawyers, and so you introduce the two doctors thinking, “You guys are both doctors, you should talk,” and you introduce the two lawyers thinking that they have something in common. But then you find out that one of the doctors got into it because his mother died of this disease and he’s decided that he never wants anybody to ever die of this disease again. The second doctor got into it for the Prestige. One lawyer got into it because his dad was wrongly imprisoned for years and he’s decided to right those wrongs and the other lawyer got into it for the prestige.
Derek Sivers
So the ’what’ doesn’t matter as much as the ’why’. Actually, that lawyer and that doctor have more in common. I think about here we are with 500 people that came to this talk by the minimalists, but there are a lot of different ’why’s’ in this room. This is just the ’what’, but the ’why’ makes a huge difference.
Joshua
I think getting to that ’why’ is one of the most important things. During the talk earlier the question that I started with, that started this whole journey, was how might your life be better with less? That was a question from Joshua Becker. I realized for me it was one thing at first, and that often leads to other ’whys’ as well. For me it was I need to regain control of my finance. I had six figures worth of debt. I made really good money but I spent even better money and that equation just doesn’t work.
Joshua
So I had massive amounts of debt, half a million dollars if you count my mortgage. That was my initial ’why’. But then it was like you start uncovering as, as I simplified, it was like, oh, I weighed £80 more than I weigh now. And so it was regaining control of my health. It was regaining control of my time. I was working 70 or 80 hours a week and a supposedly successful career. Sure, shit didn’t feel successful because I didn’t even have control of my own time. Everyone else got to dictate how I live my life. It was a special kind of sort of enslavement in a way. And so in a way, I was a slave to a lifestyle, a template that someone else had had sold me. And so I’ve got a bunch of stuff to show for it, sort of the trophies of success. But it wasn’t. It was no longer my idea of of success.
Ryan
Yeah, it’s it’s crazy. When I, when I first found minimalism, Josh the first thing he sent me was a video that Colin Wright did on Facebook. And when I, when I mention him in my story about him being a 24 year old entrepreneur who traveled with everything on his back, I mean, he literally was like known for having 52 things. And I remember seeing this and my first thought was is I don’t want to be a minimalist because I like having a kitchen table. I like having game nights, I like having a couch or maybe two couches so I could have teams of we play Cranium and other stuff. And I then saw people like Joshua Becker, like Courtney Carver, like Leo to, and it was really inspiring to see to see people using this thing called minimalism to say no. And for me, I had to say, I had to say no more in my life. And what it was, it was it was these people setting the example and by default, giving me permission to relive my. Rework my life to really try and rework what I was I was focusing on. Honestly, man, it just look like common sense, but unfortunately, common sense. It ain’t too common, especially where I come from.
Joshua
I think, you know what.
Derek Sivers
I’ve always wondered at the beginning of the documentary, Where are you skateboarding?
Ryan
Where is that? Missoula, Montana.
Derek Sivers
Yeah.
Ryan
Thanks. There is a lot of common sense in Missoula. That’s why I move there.
Joshua
So right on that point, I think both of us in our twenties, we we got to the top of that ladder because we kept saying yes to everything. You’re smelling a transition here.
Ryan
Are you sure it’s not me sweating?
Joshua
Ryan, You smell like transition. So? So I think we said yes to to a whole lot of things and individually a lot of things that we said yes. To throw out to. One is they all sound like grand opportunities on their own. But when you stack them all together, then you start accidentally saying no to what’s important just by excluding them. And I think to take back control of my life, I had to start. I had to learn, I had to practice saying no. And I can tell you, Derek, one of the things that you wrote about that is one of the things that that fully articulated what I was trying to do and saying and saying no more frequently so I could say yes to what was important. Can you talk about that?
Derek Sivers
Yo, Derek, drop the verse.
Derek Sivers
Okay, go.
Derek Sivers
So, yeah, it was funny. In 2009, I wrote, I was trying to make a decision whether I should go to this conference or not. And I was just like, Yeah, I probably should, maybe. And, and then I thought, You know what? I’m sick of always trying to decide between yes and no. I thought, from now on, I’m going to make it. So if I’m feeling anything less than Oh.
Derek Sivers
Hell yeah.
Derek Sivers
Then I’ll just say no. So I’m going to say no to everything. Less than hell. Yeah. So am I feeling like hell yeah.
Derek Sivers
About going to that conference? No. Am I feeling like hell? Yeah.
Derek Sivers
About doing this job somebody asked me to do? Well, it’s like, okay. And I just started saying no to all of it because the big idea was that. That if you say no to almost everything, then you have like free time and you have like space in your life. And then the big strategy is then when that rare occasional thing comes along, like some kind of gig, I mean, I’m freelance, you know, So when the occasional gig comes along that you’re just like, Oh, hell yeah, now that I’m psyched about, well, then suddenly you’ve got all this free time and you can throw yourself into that thing completely. So to me, this just seemed to be a better life strategy. So I wrote it up in just a tiny, itty bitty little article like four paragraphs in 2009, and it’s become like my my hit single.
Derek Sivers
So like.
Derek Sivers
People quote it and then friends in Silicon Valley tell me that, like, people say, hell yeah or no in meetings all the time. And they’re just like, I think it was on Shark Tank or something like that. But yeah, that’s the big idea is just this idea of instead of instead of trying to decide between yes or no. Yeah. If you’re feeling anything less than hell, yeah. And say no. And it just leaves this great space in your life.
Ryan
So let me how do you get over? Because, I mean, I know how I get over it, but I’m just curious how you get over it. Like you say. So someone asks you, Hey, Derek, can you do X? And you’re like, No, sorry, I can’t. How do you get over them being, like, offended?
Derek Sivers
Or That’s a great question. I used to lie until I got to New Zealand and just, you know, I was living in Singapore before this and different cultures have different ways of doing things. And you know, the Asian culture is not always about being blunt and direct. It’s often about being indirect and saving face and being polite. So when I was living in Singapore, I would turn things down with polite lies like, Oh, just busy that day. You can’t do it that day. Well, how about the next day?
Derek Sivers
I’m busy that day to maybe the next week. Yeah, maybe, maybe.
Derek Sivers
Let’s, let’s, you know. And then I got and I moved to New Zealand. I’m just like, oh, I don’t want to do that anymore. This isn’t the kind of place for that. And so I shouldn’t admit this, but when I first moved to New Zealand, I moved to Nelson deliberately because I didn’t know anybody there. And I thought, like, nobody will ask me to do anything if I live in Nelson. So but then my ex, she grew up in New York City and she couldn’t handle the small town Nelson life. So she insisted we move to Wellington. So I kind of grumbled my way into Wellington, but I knew like 150 people in Wellington. And so when people in Wellington would ask me to do something, I was like, It was tempting to do that old habit of lying. And instead I just would say like, No, I’m really just working on some stuff and I’m really just enjoying getting lost in my work. And I’m sorry, I don’t really want to interrupt my flow to meet up. And it’s hard to say sometimes because sometimes it’s like friends that live like three blocks away. And I’m like, Sorry, man. They’re like, I haven’t seen you in nine months. I’m like, I know.
Derek Sivers
Sorry. I just I’m.
Derek Sivers
Just into my thing and I’m digging and here’s what happens. Unless they’re lying back to me, every single one is just said, You know what? That’s really cool, man. I know how that goes. Stick with the flow. Go for it. You know, and people get it. Because I think a lot of people wish that they said no more often. And so when you say no to them, you become like a role model in how to say no. So that’s why you got to tell the truth.
Ryan
When Derek said no to this interview, the first the first time, we’re also persistent. Actually, Josh is more persistent. But what I’ll say is when he said no, he said, you know, yeah, I’m really trying to be a good father. Is that what I said? I’m trying to be a good father.
Joshua
He said, I’m busy this summer being a dad.
Derek Sivers
That’s true. Yeah. Yeah.
Ryan
And and now Josh and I would have been like, We can’t believe that Derek Sivers told us no.
Derek Sivers
What would that have.
Ryan
Said about us, really? More than anything. And but, you know, hearing the way that he said no, like who here would knock anyone, not just Derek Sivers, but any of your friends? Who here would knock them for giving an excuse like that? I would love to give me some of my time, but I really need to give my kids time.
Derek Sivers
Summer holidays too.
Derek Sivers
Yeah.
Joshua
Yeah. I really thought it was a commendable. Response because I have a four year old and it’s one of the things I struggle with, and especially because I’m an introvert like you. Like I’m an extreme introvert. I know it’s weird because I’m in front of 500 people right now, but I do spend 90% of my time alone, and I’ve set my life up that way. So I could do it. Back in my corporate days, I spent virtually 100% of my time around other people, and it ruined my life. And I’ve set my life up in a way that I have people around me who also understand that when I say no, it’s so I can say yes to me. And also I can be a better version of myself when I’m there. I’m sure that when you do spend the time with the person three blocks away you’ve been dodging for nine months. That time that you do spend together is higher quality time because you’re you’re getting out of it the other time what you need. So you can be the best version of yourself when you show up.
Derek Sivers
You know, one of the questions when we were trading ideas before now about what we might talk about on stage, one of the ideas you mentioned was about being less stressed or being calm or less stressed, and you asked why or how. And I thought about it for a bit and I realized that it’s it’s about being sincere. I think that you’re most stressed when you’re being insincere, when you’re doing stuff that you don’t really want to do, or maybe even saying saying yes to stuff that you wish you didn’t say yes to, or just living the life that doesn’t really feel like it’s really for you. It kind of gives you this internal friction. And when you suddenly just kind of commit to just saying fuck it and just being honest with people, it’s just like, yeah, life is easier and calmer.
Joshua
Well, so so when I think of Derek, I think of aggressively calm. I mean, even his voice, you hear his voice and you’re like, Oh, like this is I just like, feel all of a sudden, like ten decibels calmer. And, and, and so I assume that there maybe it’s just because you are now sincere. Your your short term actions are congruent with the person that you want to be. Yeah I What did a stressed out Derek Silvers look like though.
Derek Sivers
Oh no it’s just more internal conflict. It’s just the outside might have seemed the same, but I think I was like I said, I was just, like, lying more often. And it just, it comes to realizing your priorities, too. So it’s like I was very split. I was very split between lots of different responsibilities and things I had said yes to. And then, yeah, my kid was born in Singapore and I moved here to New Zealand with this idea of actually know what the inspiration was. Uh, I was a musician, and I remember reading as a teenager that John Lennon regretted the fact that when during the height of Beatlemania, his first son, Julian, was born and he had, like, no time to spend with Julian at all. So he just completely missed Julian’s life. And the song Hey Jude is about Julian and, you know, and then he was 35 when when he was with Yoko and Sean Lennon was born. And he just said, like, okay, right. It just told his agent and manager like, no, for the next five years, no to everything. And so for the first five years of his kid’s life, he just disappeared from the world for five years. And even John Lennon did it. I was like, Yeah, if he can do it, I can do it. So yeah, that’s, you know, I moved to New Zealand, moved to Nelson at first and just said no to the whole world. I was like, I’m just going to hang out with my kid for five years and no to everything else.
Joshua
So. And you’ve let him experience the world in a way that I still struggle with. So. So maybe you can help me and then by proxy, help some other people in here. Any parents in here tonight, too? Apparently.
Derek Sivers
That’s why two.
Derek Sivers
Hands went up. That was great.
Joshua
A bunch of fucking minimalists. Yeah, I think Leo. Leo Volta has six kids. That’s what I knew. I could be a minimalist if a guy with six kids. Yeah, he’s inspired. He’s super mental. He doesn’t even believe in condoms.
Derek Sivers
Oh, you know, you were talking about, like, the three most dangerous words. What was that part of your talk?
Joshua
Oh, yeah. Just in case.
Derek Sivers
I was thinking, there’s. There is a lot of dangerous three word combinations. When he said that, I was, like, sitting in the back, and I was just thinking it was just like, your religion sucks. Is. Is it in things like that?
Derek Sivers
I was like.
Derek Sivers
There are a lot of fun, dangerous three word combinations. The imagine.
Joshua
Well, back to parenting. There are so you’ve written exactly one time if you go to ciphers dot org slash pa pa you’ve written one time about about parenting and there were some some concepts in there that you talked about embracing a longer attention span because with me I take ELA to the beach and 20 minutes in I’m like, All right, you ready to go yet? I was sand all over my damn shoes and and I’m just for you.
Derek Sivers
You’re like, And then we’ll go play in the park for 17.
Joshua
Hours.
Derek Sivers
Straight.
Joshua
And I just need some help, man.
Derek Sivers
It’s that I don’t know. That’s that’s. I don’t know. I try to think of, like, funny, entertaining answers, but. Sorry, this is just really boring. But it’s just that to me, when I think about what what I value in life, like, what do I, what do I value and what traits do I want my kid to have? To me, a long attention span is one of the best things that anybody can have. And especially I see it as being counter trend, you know, road less traveled and all that. Like whatever the opposite of everybody else is doing is what’s more valuable. And so just early on I was just like, this is a top priority for me. I want my kid to have a long attention span. And so ever since he was a little baby, we were just like, go out to the park. And it’s almost like one of those movies. Have you ever seen those? It’s just like a cheap filmmaker trick where one person sits still and then they fast motion everybody else. And so you see like a blur of people going in while one person sits still. That’s like me and my kid on the playground. We would just like go to some random little playground in Nelson and just sit there for like 5 hours just poking around. And everybody else would come and go for 20 minutes at a time. And we just sit there for like 5 hours. And I just I mean, I’m thankful that my life was such that I could do that because to me.
Derek Sivers
The the.
Derek Sivers
Biggest friction I see in parents who say that parenting is hard is when they’re trying to fit their kids into an adult schedule. It’s all this kind of like, come on, we got to go now. I told you, get ready.
Derek Sivers
Come on, got to go. 20 minutes. We need to leave. And that’s to me, the biggest friction is.
Derek Sivers
Trying, but it’s like if you let I always just let my kid lead the way and he’s he’s the boss. And I just love getting into his pace and his world and. Sorry it sounds corny, but it’s a little bit like meditation for me when because I just shut eye shut me off, right? My stuff’s done, my computer is off. I don’t bring my phone with me when I hang out with him. I miss out on some photos, but it helps with the the focus, you know? So my phone is gone and it’s just me and him. And I just love being at his pace and it’s like my self disappears and I just enter his mind and whatever he says goes. If he says suddenly, just like.
Derek Sivers
Look over there, Dad, you need to hide.
Derek Sivers
The aliens are coming. I’m like, Oh my God, they’re coming. And so, you know, whatever reality he creates is for both of us. And and I just enter his world and I find it’s like meditation in a way that I don’t really meditate. But friends of mine that do. They say that if if they don’t, they feel out of sorts. And I feel the same way. Like if he and I haven’t hung out at his pace like this, I feel out of sorts because I haven’t entered his world in a long time, you know.
Joshua
You also you also talked about, uh, broad inputs and exposing him to, you know, whether it’s not not just going to the park or the beach, but the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. And, and I found that fascinating too, because when you talk about entering his world, you’re also it’s as much for you as it is for him, Right?
Derek Sivers
In a way. Yeah, definitely. So the stuff I’m talking about right now, it’s as you can tell, it’s like I’m, I’m saying I’m doing it for him and I am. But I’ve noticed in the meantime that it makes me super blissed out to, to just enter his world. But then, yeah, whenever he’s at home playing with Lego, I’m putting on like freaky music, I’m putting on Bartok string quartets and Indian classical music, and I’m trying to, like expand his his range of what he considers to be normal music. You know? I mean, I went to Berklee School of Music. I’m a musician, so I kind of I’ve always been into a bunch of weird music, so it’s really fun to just put that on in the background. As he’s making Lego’s, he’s listening to the Bulgarian women’s choir screaming, you know, and it’s just normal to him. And so actually he calls it Lego music and Indian classical music. He calls it Lego music. So yeah. And then purposely taking him to new places, I have to you know, it expands my horizons, too. And yeah, it’s wonderful.
Joshua
Yeah, well, that’s the thing I’ve noticed in being a parent is, um, I, it’s one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done, although apparently I’m doing it wrong. And but it also is like the most sort of growth inducing, like, positive growth. And I’m learning a bunch and hopefully we can get to some questions here because I want to be really respectful of your time, but we can try to squeeze in some questions.
Derek Sivers
So if the microphone back.
Joshua
There is there’s some there’s a microphone somewhere back here, I’ve been told unless someone.
Derek Sivers
But you can shout too, and we can repeat you.
Joshua
Okay, it’s right here. Go ahead and line up at at that mic and they will or will start answering the questions. Hopefully we get a question or two about about business or creating as well, because I’d love to talk to Derek about that. We could sit here all night and talk, but we’re here for you.
Ryan
Go ahead, man. What’s your name? Where are you from?
Derek Sivers
Hey, Kiera. Welcome to New Zealand, Derek. Welcome to Auckland. My name’s Ryan.
Ryan
Awesome name, man.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, thanks. Yeah, I had a question. It’s actually pretty topical. My wife and I just had a baby. He’s, like, eight weeks old, and it’s. Thank you. Congrats.
Ryan
Congrats, man.
Derek Sivers
That’s awesome. It’s pretty hard, Derek. So I don’t know what you’re talking about, but anyway, how do you say know when people just want to give you a load of shit like I’m talking like they give you bags and bags of clothes like Air Jordans for babies, and my son can’t even walk. Yeah, but, yeah. How do you say no without, like, looking like a jerk? Yeah, that’s my question.
Derek Sivers
Trade me honestly, like, I think because some some people, it makes them feel nice to give you the stuff and sometimes you’re actually kind of doing them a favor. Sometimes you’re helping them get rid of their junk, which, you know, it’s like in the bigger picture, it’s like you take on the burden of yourself for a minute. But I mean, I don’t know, trade me. It’s just so useful, man. It’s. I found this great strategy. You could put anything on there for a dollar and the price always goes up. I actually I had a grand piano because I moved from a house in Nelson to a little apartment in Wellington. And so I tried selling my grand piano on trade, me and I listed it at like 15,000 and like, nobody bid. And I was like 14,000, nobody bid. And this went on for two months. And finally, just to see what would happen, I put it on sale for a dollar and then people followed it and bid it all the way back up to to 15,000 or whatever. But so I found this like great thing on trade me that if you just list everything there for a dollar, somebody always wants that stuff. There are some people who need it and then you can give it away. So I know it’s awkward when people dump their stuff on you, but.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, yeah.
Derek Sivers
You can you can keep re dumping.
Derek Sivers
So, so so.
Joshua
I agree because the thing doesn’t add value to your life doesn’t mean it won’t add value to someone else’s life. So being willing to let go is actually more responsible than just shoving it in a storage locker for six years and then paying on that storage locker. Yeah, month after month after month after month. But so for those of you listening at home, Trade Me is the New Zealand equivalent of eBay and Amazon sort of together. But the other thing that I’ll say is over time and this won’t happen, this won’t happen overnight, but over time it has more to do with setting expectations. So instead of saying, no, no, no, no, I don’t want this stuff. What do you want? What are you going to say yes to? Right. Maybe it’s gifting experience, maybe it’s gifting consumables. You know, someone drops off a case of diapers. That’s something you’re actually going to need. And if they want to feel really good about giving it to you, they can gift wrap and put a giant bow on it. You’re going to be much more excited to get that than you are the pair of eight month old Air Jordan. Yeah, that’s unbelievable. The American dream really has permeated your borders.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, for sure.
Joshua
Thanks for questioning.
Derek Sivers
Thanks, man. Thanks a lot.
Ryan
Yeah. I will add one thing is that. I totally agree with your approach. I would encourage you to at least try and set the expectations with your friends and family who are doing that because I don’t know. I don’t know if this has happened to you, but I’ve done that before. Where someone shows up to my house was like, Hey, what was that thing I gave you? Right. Have you had that happen? I’m curious.
Derek Sivers
One time a conference, I spoke at a conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and they gave me, like, an awful framed drawing of me. And it was.
Derek Sivers
Like, Oh, thanks. Do I really look like that? So it was horrible. And so what I did.
Derek Sivers
Like, it was so I, I went and I found a garbage can, like behind the front desk and I put it in there and a week later there’s like, Derek, we found your.
Derek Sivers
Photo. It was.
Derek Sivers
It was in the garbage. We’re mailing it back to you. I was like, Fuck.
Derek Sivers
Fuck. And they mailed it to me and said, Go. Right. So.
Derek Sivers
So we should. Yeah. Back to talk about being sincere, being honest, instead of being insincere. There’s always friction whenever you lie and just be honest.
Derek Sivers
Yeah.
Ryan
And if you do set that expectation, then, like, you could feel very good about going and getting rid of that stuff. Because at that point, I mean, like my grandmother, like I have set the expectation with her, but she last time I was at her place, she tried to give me a paperweight. Like, you’re a writer, you need a paperweight. And like, I don’t know how to explain the cloud to my 84 year old grandmother, who every time I go there, I have to reprogram my phone number into her phone. I don’t know how she keeps deleting it, so I just simply look at that paperwork. I’m like, She knows. She knows I’m a minimalist. That’s that’s okay. You know what? Think this is beautiful paperweight. Thank you so much. This is gorgeous, man. I you know, if I don’t end up finding a use for this, would you mind if I found someone else who maybe could use this?
Derek Sivers
And she’s like, Oh, do you think you could do that?
Ryan
That would be great. Yeah. Find someone else who would love it. So and that’s because I have set the expectation upfront with her of how I want to bring things into my life. So she respects it when I am sincere with her.
Joshua
And now I have a paperweight.
Derek Sivers
Oh, what a setup. Holly, What’s your name? Yeah. Evening. I’m Matthew Pitts. I’m from Middlesbrough in the UK. No one or two.
Joshua
Well, thank you for being here.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, Cheers. Hey, look, it’s pretty topical as well. Ryan kind of killed my question. It was something I in the back of my mind, but I’ll rephrase it. I’m a new dad, and what I’m finding particularly difficult is staying present when I know I’ve got other things going on, being creative. So I was just wondering what tips and guidance that you potentially use to try and declutter to make sure that you maximize that time with the little.
Joshua
I can give you a practical tip, but I’m interested to hear hear what? What Derek has to say cause he is a creative person there. Derek is actually re writing a book about marketing for creatives. He’s a musician. And so it’s particularly about marketing for it’s marketing via the lens of, of a musician. But I think it’s for anyone who is creative and it’s, it’s, you can find it chapter by chapter on, on his website. But so as a creative person, I, I get up before Leo wakes up and that’s when I write, I get up before my partner. I get up before Ella and I spend time creating. I make the time. And it’s fascinating. We often pretend we don’t have the time, but it’s the only resource we all have the same we today, we all had 24 hours, right? Except when we flew here, I we lost a few hours. So you actually had more time than me today, I guess is my answer. Derek, how do you balance the, the, the creative side, the creating, but also the the parenting? Is it a daily thing? A monthly thing?
Derek Sivers
Okay, I sound really Zen like I’ve got it all figured out. Right? But but actually, so many times when I’m like, leaving to go to 45 to go get him from school at 3:00, I’m sitting there going, Fuck, fuck, fuck. I was so in the middle.
Derek Sivers
Of something, I so do not want this right now. Fuck. Like I’m working as fast as I can.
Derek Sivers
It’s like I’ve got to get him now. I got to leave. And then I think it just comes down to like meditation 101 where they talk about it’s like, Yeah, you have those thoughts in your head and you just, you let them flow out and they just they just go back out and you just let them, let them go. And then creatively, you just have to trust the process that next time you’re, you’re back at your work, that those things will have been staying in your unconscious, you know? So it’s it’s not all Zen and easy. I’m cursing it a lot. But then it’s like once I’m actually in person with him and he’s just like, Look what I made you. I’m just like, Oh, it just melts away. And I’m like, All right, I give up. I’m. I’m here, I’m present, you know?
Ryan
You know, Josh, like, every once in a while, he’ll be like, Man, Ryan, Like, you do a really good job of living in the moment. And I don’t even I didn’t even realize that I lived in the moment a lot of the time. And it wasn’t until like a few weeks ago that I forget what I was doing, but I remember I started whatever I was doing. Let’s say I’m just sitting at my computer and I’m doing email and then like, there’s a window right there and someone passes by and I’m like, What’s going on out there? Oh my God. I go back to my email, back to my email, back to my email, back to my email. And then like, I’ll write a sentence and I’m like, Man, that’s a good sentence, man. That really is good. And that’ll spark another thought. And I start to get excited. And that’s the worst is when I get excited while I’m doing something else. And excitement can be elation, but I think it can also be distraction or stress. But as soon as I started to get excitement, I will catch myself and I will say, Ryan, that’s it is a good thought. You can get excited about that after you write this email, and I have to continuously avoid excitement in order to stay in the moment. There’s only one thing I can get excited about while I’m there, and it’s what’s in front of me. That’s what I will allow myself to get excited about. And if I can’t get excited about that, I’m not going to get I’m not going to allow myself to get excited about or distracted by anything else until this one task is done and what will eventually happen. One or two things happen. I get this task done. Who I can go get excited about something else, or I will actually start to get excited about what I’m focused on.
Joshua
I think we were having this conversation this morning. We were with our friend DK wherever he is. Hey. Dk And we were talking about the distractions are actually what keep us from, from the focus. And, and often I think the excitement or worry can be, can be the same thing. They can both be equally distracting if we really want to, to be, whether you call it focus or meditative or being in the moment, I think we have to lose ourselves in whatever the activity is. Right. And so if that is just the creative work of your writing or if you’re making music or whatever it may be, it’s losing yourself in that that that’s often when we feel most alive. It’s it’s a different type of excitement. It’s like we need, we need a different word to to really describe it. You can call it flow state, maybe your focus and you can you can obviously get that with whatever you’re doing, whether it’s writing or sex or you’re spending time with your child. There will be difficult times to do that to to really pour yourself into the activity. But that’s that’s where the real payoff comes in.
Joshua
By the way, I think we’re. We’ll skip the lightning round just so that we can dive deep into at least two more questions. So we’re not trying to give you extra pithy answers today, if that’s okay with you all.
Audience
Okay. I’m Jane. Welcome to New Zealand. I watched your documentary. It was really cool and I read your book. Thank you. My question is, once you start on going down that track, how do you stay on it? Because I’ve already tried it and I’ve fallen off the bandwagon and it’s just making sure not to get that crap back in your life that you don’t need. So for me, that is my my question is like once you start down the minimalist track, how do you ensure that things like, like fast fashion and all that sort of stuff doesn’t sort of creep back in? Especially as a woman, that’s something that does happen. You know, you see clothes and you want to buy them. How do you sort of, yeah, work around that kind of stuff.
Joshua
So what are you struggling with? Is it mainly clothes or is it other stuff?
Audience
Just having lots of clothes and books.
Joshua
Clothes and books. So. So the average book, no one makes it past the first chapter. So, so. So ten, 10% of books that are purchased, the reader makes it past the first chapter. Books become a status symbol to many of us. They also make us feel like we’ve achieved some sort of goal instead of actually experiencing the We’ve got books out there in the lobby, but you won’t do any good sitting on your shelf, right? If you read it, we encourage you to pass it on to someone else who can get value from it. Right. And so I think it’s true. The possessions that we have should augment our experience or they should create an experience. Right. And so if you’re buying the book, it’s aspirational in a way. But if all you’re doing is aspiring, then then you know, you’ll end up with aspiration everywhere. That’s a pithy answer. We could put that on the lightning round, but I don’t know that you’ll you’ll actually end up getting any value from it. I think the same is true with with clothes. I think quite often actually one of the reasons that you agreed to to do this sit down with us is I sent this advert, this advertisement essay to you that I had finished up last month, and you and I have a really similar view on advertisements in, in the States we see 5000 advertisements a day and I’m going to go on a bit of a tangent, but I’ll circle back, I promise. We see 5000 advertisements a day, whether that’s TV, print, radio, billboards, and those advertisements are backed by statisticians and demographers and psychologists and really well paid writers to aggregate your eyeballs onto their product, make it compelling enough so they can divorce you from the money in your checking account.
Joshua
And so they want it to be as compelling as possible so that they’ve removed the friction, enough friction so that you will we’ll purchase their item. There is a drug company in the United States who was trying to come up with, and this is a good cause to help people who have hypertension. And so they they did this pill trial and they realized that this pill wasn’t working at all. But the men who were taking they were getting the strange, strange side effect. All of them were leaving their with boners. And so they didn’t just say, well, that’s a weird side effect. Let’s get rid of this. They said, Hey, we have a solution to a problem. And so they hired an ad agency and the drug Viagra was created. And that’s what we’re doing with our advertisements every single day. It’s the reason that we refuse to put advertisements on our podcasts because advertisements, you’re damn right they suck. And so one of the things that really stood out to me in Derek’s book, Anything You Want, was the reason you don’t put what’s the reason You don’t put ads on your websites or you didn’t. You refused ads on CD baby for many years. You had a great analogy for this.
Derek Sivers
I said it would be like putting a Coke machine in a monastery. It’s like to me, my my website was like my baby. Like, this was my business. This was my my thing. It was precious to me. It was kind of art. And the idea of like putting an ad on it just felt sacrilegious or something like that.
Audience
My job revolves around advertising, so I kind of need them to earn money.
Derek Sivers
No wonder.
Joshua
Well, so so you know, what goes into weekly?
Audience
I’m not actually in advertising, but my IT company supports it.
Derek Sivers
Gotcha.
Joshua
And here’s the thing. I think that that they’ve gotten really good at making us take money that we don’t have to buy things that we don’t need. To impress people we don’t even know. And so when you think about it that way, when you’re about to buy that new book or the new piece of clothes or whatever it is, maybe ask yourself. Why am I buying this? And who is it really for?
Derek Sivers
For what it’s worth, I found one little hack with books. Whenever there’s a book, I’m just like, Oh, I need that now. I go into Amazon and I put it in a future wish list and, and I think, yeah, as soon as I’m ready to the day, I’m actually ready to read that, like I’m ready to sit down and read that, then I’ll get it. And right now my wish list on Amazon is like over 400 books and I haven’t bought any of them. And I’m just like, Wow, that’s like how many years of thinking? I need that now. And wow, I’m so glad I didn’t. So a little tiny hacks like that can make all the difference.
Ryan
Yeah, you’re absolutely right. I mean, for me, when I saw a bunch of minimalists, what they did is they created these rules for themselves. And minimalism was again, it was like this common sense thing where I felt good about bringing these rules into my life, I think for so long, Like, I just wanted to just act on every impulse. Like that’s what I thought ultimate happiness was. Well, if I had enough resources to act on every impulse I have, well, then that must be happiness. And that is certainly not the case. I did not get nearly as you know, you can look at. Actually, I’m not going to sit here and down any any public figures, but there are some public figures out there who we know. They go way in a bond way and above and beyond reacting on every single impulse they have. We see it on reality TV, we see it on Twitter, we see.
Derek Sivers
In the White House.
Ryan
You can talk about it because you live here now. So it’s like I’m banned. No, no, I’m I wasn’t even really going there. But but my point is, is that you do need rules in your life to keep you from from falling off the tracks. And those rules, they’re probably going to look different than Josh and his rules are probably going to look different than Derek’s rules. But you do have to create some rules for yourself to to keep you to keep you from buying more books to buy to buying clothes. The other thing, too, is, is find other things that make you excited and that make you happy. I mean, I just found out recently that I’m like this typical, typical freaking American. I’m like this close to type two diabetes. I thought I had an awesome diet. I thought I, Mariah and I, we hit the gym five days a week when we’re when we’re back home and and I’m this close because my diet isn’t good enough. Now, I do have a genetic thing. My dad has it, my grandpa had it. So my body just doesn’t doesn’t digest sugars as well as it should. But I’ve had to give up. I haven’t had ice cream. Oh, my God, guys.
Derek Sivers
Oh, dude, Real fruit ice cream. You don’t know what you’re missing.
Ryan
I haven’t. I haven’t had ice cream in, like, oh, since last year. And, like, I’m not. I’m not. I’m not willing to. You know what? I have to make choices now. A bowl of ice cream or what? I rather try. Like a local brew. I can’t have both. So I have to make choices. I have to make rules for myself. But here’s what’s awesome is that I swear to you, you could give me a 100%. It’s got to be the right brand. 100% dark chocolate bar. Dark chocolate bar. Sorry. It’s like my American right to make the hard art. But you can give me 100% dark chocolate bar. It will give me the same satisfaction of ice cream. Now, because what has happened is that I have cut out the bad crap that used to be my favorites. Well, now all these new things come in and they are my favorites. So if you if you are forcing yourself to stop buying books, to stop buying clothes, you’ve got to start asking yourself questions like, Well, what else excites me? What else can I do that is going to help me fill my time instead of me sitting now? Now I don’t buy books and clothes anymore. Now I’m just sitting on my couch wishing that I could buy clothes and books. That’s a horrible plan. So create some rules for yourself and really stick to those. But the beautiful thing is, is you get to make your own rules.
Audience
And while you’re here, if you pass through duty free, if you like dark chocolate, buy Whittaker’s because it’s New Zealand’s.
Derek Sivers
Favourite so much. All right, I will.
Audience
I would have brought some for you.
Ryan
I know. I know. Mariah is writing that down right now.
Audience
Whittaker’s dark chocolate.
Ryan
She’s my partner in crime when it comes to chocolate.
Joshua
Thank you so much for your question. I know we’ll have time for one more, but just in a moment. First, we’ll move on to something we call the added value segment of the show. This is where we talk about something or some experience that has added value to our lives recently. And since we’re here in Cleveland for less than a day, we might as well go ahead and talk about the experiences we’ve had here. Ryan Has anything added value to your life while you were here in Oakland?
Ryan
First off. You guys got some awesome filter coffee here. Now I know. All right, I heard someone say, All right, so not everyone hates filter coffee. That’s good to know. There is this place. I forget what street it’s on, but it’s called Remedy Coffee. All right, Someone knows about it.
Joshua
We have one of their employees here.
Ryan
Yes, that’s right. No, it is. So what they do is an aeropress, which is? It’s the person who invented the Aeropress. They wanted to create something that would give you an espresso type flavors. But it’s not an espresso. What I’m trying to talk you guys into doing is going to remedy and get an aeropress They’ve got an Ethiopian chuchu right now it’s so good and it’s really close to an espresso. So this is like a really good like, you know, baby step. This is a gateway coffee to like better filter coffees.
Joshua
Today’s podcast is brought to you by.
Ryan
Yeah, the difference is is they’re not paying me and I really freaking mean it It’s an amazing shop.
Joshua
Yeah. The great thing about this, about this segment of the podcast is since we don’t take we refuse to take anything free, like, even like the pants that I wear, I’ve had the company offer like, Hey, can we send you a free pair since you thought, No, you can’t. You can’t send me anything.
Ryan
For free, Well, then we would feel obligated to talk about it.
Joshua
Right? And in fact, I had a company send me a jacket that I really like for free. And so I went to the, like, figured out the retail price, and I donated that money to give well, dot org. And then I sent them a receipt to their name and to prove like, you can’t buy us with your dollars. And so whenever we get to talk about something, it becomes a experience that we actually that we find value in. Yeah.
Ryan
And we’re not embarrassed to talk about this stuff because it is coming from our hearts and it is coming from actual recommendations.
Joshua
Well, I have two things that have added value in my life. One is, well, two things from New Zealand or two things in New Zealand. One is we had breakfast at this great place called Imperial Lane that was like this little cafe there that was I mean, it’s the best breakfast I’ve had in weeks, I guess. I mean, Oh, my God. It was it was just a great place. And so check it out if it’s just right downtown Auckland. And the second is, since we have Derek here, I’ve got to recommend his book. So. So he’s got a book called Anything You Want, and he didn’t pay me to say this.
Ryan
This podcast is also brought to you by me.
Joshua
So the thing about this one, what is it, 88 pages? Yeah, yeah. And so I’ve read it on the physical book, I’ve read the Kindle version. I actually read it on the plane ride over here because it takes about an hour to read. But it’s like life lessons from many years of running a business. And if I were to retitle the book or if I would have written it myself, I would have just called it business minimalism, because really, that’s what it is. It’s about getting down to being intentional with respect to creating and doing business, because quite often we we hear that word business and we just were instantly allergic to it because we think suit and tie corporate guy go up to the ivory tower. No, it’s about solving people’s problems via creating meaningful creations and every line. Seriously, if you were to see my Kindle version of it, like every single line is like there’s fewer lines that aren’t highlighted than are. So I don’t know how helpful that was to me, just highlighting the whole book, but it’s also available on on audiobook and series. You can listen to it in an hour and a half on on audiobook, or if you speed it up a little bit about an hour.
Ryan
You know, like this whole time, man, Like because people will ask me a lot, How do I cultivate a passion? Man? How do I how do I pursue a passion? And it’s really it’s been really hard for me on this stage to not ask you that question because you do such a beautiful job of explaining that in your book. And it would probably take you an hour and a half to really go through the whole story. And lucky for you, you could buy it for like ten bucks and it’s totally worth it. The one thing there are two things I’ll say actually that really stood out to me in the book. The first one was you talk about saying no. And so whoever you write there, I know who you are. Yeah, it is. It’s an it is an amazing it’s an amazing book for that. It will help you say no. The other thing, too, there’s a line from there, man that like, totally has just well, it’s why we have Jess. It’s why we have Sean like I think about and Josh thinks about what’s the role that we want to have as the minimalists. Like, what do we want to be caught up in social media all the time? Do we want to have to do this and be our own tour manager? And there are certain things that we have to bring in help on so we can be the absolute best at what we really, really want to do. What we feel is going to be most valuable to our audience. And in that book, it helped me to, I guess, to really chase that and not feel not feel bad about bringing in help. I mean, we’re growing, but we’re growing in the right way. You know.
Derek Sivers
Thanks. That’s really cool to hear.
Joshua
So put that on your wish list forever. All right. Move on real quick to right here, right now. So when we talk about what’s going on in the lives of the minimalists, so you probably saw a camera here. We’re filming some new stuff for some future projects. One project that this is not for is we are we’re filming a new documentary, The Talk that you saw earlier tonight. We’re trying to build a documentary around that talk. The talk is, you know, 30, 40 minutes. But but we’re trying to build a full length documentary documentary around aspects of that talk. So we rented out this beautiful warehouse space in Los Angeles, brought in 300 friends and filmed this talk. And then we’re going to just go do some back story because actually next next week we’re headed back or no, in two weeks we’re headed back to Dayton, Ohio, which is where we’re from. It’s the overdose capital of America. But I don’t think there’s a drug crisis there so much as there is a a crisis of meaning. People don’t feel like they have a purpose in what they’re doing. And so they’ve they’ve turned to the opioids to to get the job done. And obviously, they don’t they don’t get the job done for long. They just mask a a problem. And so we’re trying to help solve that problem to a certain extent and try to help people re identify with what their purpose is or what brings them joy in their lives. So that’s the next thing that’s going on with us. That’s we tend to work on one project a year. That’s going to be the big project as soon as this this tour is over. This is city 49 out of 50, and then we are done touring for a very long time. What’s 50 Melbourne?
Derek Sivers
Oh.
Joshua
We’re ending there because there’s a direct flight back to Los Angeles. Otherwise we we would have ended here in Auckland and it just made sense with the way we were routing things. So we’re working on that also, as you know. Advertisement suck. So the only way that we support the podcast, we just built a new studio space in Los Angeles and it’s looking really great. We hope to add a video component so we can do more meaningful and produce more meaningful video creations in time, and that’s backed by you all. So the only way that this podcast makes any money is if you choose and you can afford to contribute to the podcast. If you decide you want to do that, or if you’re listening to this at home and you want to do that, just go to the minimalists dot com click donate at the top. You become a regular supporter, but you also get something like a little bonus. Each week we do the Minimalists Private podcast and it’s like a blow bonus up. So we call it a post script episode. And so tonight I’d love to record one of those in front of you and answer a question with Derek Silvers here. Y’all open for that? Beautiful. Let’s do it. All right, back to our regular Schedule podcast. So before we wrap this up, I know we’re like, we’re supposed to finish at nine, and it’s we’ve steamrolled past ten, so I’m both sorry. And you’re welcome, depending on.
Ryan
Depending on where you’re at right.
Derek Sivers
Now. Yeah.
Joshua
If you’re one of those people dragged here, then I’m sorry, but here’s what I’ll say. First off, Derek, I just want to really acknowledge you, man. I know. I know. You don’t do this thing often, and we’re grateful you decided to spend some time with us. It means a lot.
Ryan
Thank you so much, man.