Cool Tools
host: Kevin Kelly
Anki, Vim, Calibre, Vibram Furoshiki shoes, Kensington trackball, Berkey, StudioBricks, OED, Great Courses, uBlock Origin, general-purpose computers
listen: (download)
watch: (download)
Transcript:
Kevin
Welcome to another issue of the Cool Tools Show and Tell and my guest, Derek Sivers. Derek, would you use yourself to our listeners?
Derek Sivers
My name is Derek Sivers. For many years I was a professional musician and entrepreneur. Now I am an amateur programmer and author of four books of pop philosophy.
Kevin
Pop philosophy. Oh, I love that. That’s a great way to describe that. I may have to steal that pop philosophy.
Derek Sivers
I’ve stolen enough of your stuff. You could steal some of mine take it.
Kevin
It’s really great. It’s great to have you here. It’s always a delight to talk to you. You’re in New Zealand, right?
Derek Sivers
Yeah. So I live in New Zealand full time now. Not just traveling. I’ve been here since 2012, when my son was born.
Derek Sivers
We moved here, and I’m a citizen and love it. By the way, before we get too into it. I have to also publicly say I’m just such a huge fan of your work, that your books like What Technology Wants and the Inevitable, and even Our Private Conversations and even your public interviews. I just devour all of it. You’ve permanently changed the way I think about so many things. I’m so honored to do this.
Kevin
Great.
Kevin
It’s a pleasure. I’m a fan of your work as well. Your pop philosophy has really been great and I’m looking forward to more of it right now. I know that you have a bunch of cool stuff for us that’s refreshing and a little different. Tell us about one of your favorite cool tools these days.
Derek Sivers
I got to say, out of massive respect for your Cool Tools mission, I actually spent about 10 hours preparing for this conversation today. I really got thoughtful about what tools have made the biggest difference in my life. Some of them have already been covered. No problem kk.org/cool tools, but some of them haven’t. I’m going to give a quick kind of like an honorable mention in reverse order to some things that have been mentioned already, but I think are worth one more little shout out and then we’re going to kind of go in descending order up to the number one biggest.
Kevin
Oh, okay. We’ll do it. Top ten style. Alright, great.
Derek Sivers
I’m going to count down. So first, Anki the space repetition software. The reason I wanted to mention it is because my kid, who is now ten has been using it since he was three or four years old. Every single day since then. We use it to identify buildings and landmarks. Whether it’s the Eiffel Tower or Grand Canyon, paintings by Da Vinci, Jean-Michel Basquiat. Whenever he likes something we put it in the Anki so he can constantly remember it and remember who it is. So that later in his life all the pieces will fit together later. He can identify music by Debussy or Miles Davis. Sometimes I’m kind of giving him some cultural, what do you call that? Cultural context. Cultural landmarks and context for things later. Remembering how to spell difficult words, whenever he’s writing something and he spells it wrong, then I will record myself saying the word into Anki as the front of the flashcard. Then he writes it on a piece of paper as the answer to check his spelling. Lastly, his favorite thing we call it the where’s, it’s geography. If you go to the Wikipedia page for any country over on the right, they’ll have the country in a green map, but with no writing on it, they’ll just shade in that country in green, in its area or in the world, and you can copy that ping file, put that as the front of the card, and then identifying the country is the answer. My kid is just so proud. He goes, “can we please do the where’s?”, and he’s so proud. He kind of gets up and dances and he’s just like “Azerbaijan”.
Kevin
Right? Right.
Derek Sivers
Myanmar. Senegal. Then later we learn something about the country and he fits it together. Now he recognizes where Senegal is in the picture of things. Anki that’s one runner up one.
Kevin
Before we go on. Are you using a phone based version of it, the web based or what is the actual form that you’re using for Anki.
Derek Sivers
Kind of whatever. If we have a computer around, we’ll use the computer. He’s got an iPad now, they have it on the iPad as well. It syncs across any files.
Kevin
Does it dip into notes? You’re sharing the same files on whatever device.
Derek Sivers
Exactly. Anki the software now has built in a sync feature for free. If you have it installed in multiple places, you just sync your account for free.
Kevin
Operationally, does he or you have multiple stacks you’re using or do you put everything back?
Derek Sivers
I think we’ve got five or six stacks. There’s a nature which includes everything like medical and trees and animals. The where’s, geography, math. Spelling is in English. For a little while he was learning Portuguese, but then we stopped when we left Portugal. I have about five or six decks for him. Culture is a deck.
Kevin
As a reminder to those who are not familiar with the Anki space repetition. The idea of how it works is that you are reminded with a flashcard and you try to remember what’s on it. If you remember, it’s a longer time before you’re shown it again. If you forget, you showed it more frequently, so it actually is spaced out to just remind you before you might forget it. By extension, what you’re wanting to do is to have long intervals between being reminded of things. That’s sort of the goal but you’ll be reminded more often if you were forgetting more often. Anki is a great aid for any kind of memorization. Students use it, medical students, besides spelling all kinds of sophisticated uses. So that’s an app on the phone tablet.
Derek Sivers
It’s cross platform on Linux, Android, everything.
Kevin
There are other versions around. Anki seems to be the default best one.
Derek Sivers
Yeah.
Kevin
That’s great. So tell us another one.
Derek Sivers
All right. I feel like I should just give a quick shout out to the VI text editor otherwise known as Vim lately. Neo vim, there are versions of it. I love this so much because it’s been open source for decades. Passionate programmers that are really just improving it for their own use have kept contributing to this thing for intrinsic motivation reasons, not because they think it’ll sell better, because it’s just completely open and free. People want to improve it for their own use. It’s really people who are absolute fanatics about making the best possible text editor have contributed for decades to make VI and I just love it. It’s just a text editor.
Kevin
Describe what it is for those who don’t know and what you use it for.
Derek Sivers
Sure, it’s a plain text editor that you can use in any terminal basically. I think they have graphic versions of it. It is made for experts. So it has a learning curve you have to memorize, like to delete around the word Iran, You hit d a w delete around word and to quit you have to hit the colon and then your command, which is WQ or colon Q exclamation point. It takes a little while to get these under your fingertips and get them into your memory. Once they’re in there, you find that it’s just so much quicker, elegant and beautiful to type in these. You can just do things in a few keystrokes that most people would kind of drag their mouse and highlight and squint around but you do it without even looking down at your fingertips because, you delete three lines, you go d3j, you learn that these are motions. I’ve been using it for 25 years now for everything, all my books, my programming, my emails, all day, everything. When I’m writing or editing words, it’s all in vim and it’s just so wonderful. I’m so thankful for it.
Kevin
This is something you say you use in terminal mode. It’s kind of slightly programming, if you would use I’m not sure what computer you’re using, but you would go into the terminal mode to do your email as well.
Derek Sivers
Yeah. I even do emails in a terminal program called MUT, those of you who are around in the nineties, there used to be an email program called Pine. You just log in as the terminal, like in a shell terminal. It’s just plain text and it’s so efficient. It’s so effective.
Kevin
You’re getting down toward the metal when you’re starting working. That’s my perspective as someone who’s way at the high gooey drag and drop in a level working down there in the terminal. It feels like you’re kind of down in the engine room and you have access to all this power, but it’d be easy to kind of burn your fingertips, I think.
Derek Sivers
Down in the engine room but you can burn your fingertips. I’d say with a text editor, you’re not going to really burn anything because it’s usually just your own words. It’s not like you’re kind of messing with the CPU of your computer or something, it is just still editing words. It’s doing it at a raw level. What I also like is that I learned it in the first place because I was administering some remote servers that were halfway across the world somewhere. I could kind of ssh into the server now I’m connected to a server in New Jersey somewhere and type some commands and edit files in them. The same editor that I was using to edit files on a remote computer is the same one that I started using on my own laptop for writing books. I still just use it for everything. I didn’t mean that to be a big shout out. I’m going to kind of do a mention some of these runners up quickly.
Kevin
Before we leave it, I assume, open source. It can be downloaded anywhere.
Derek Sivers
It’s been around for decades. VI was the first version of it. Then somebody started improving it. They called it VI improved and they renamed it Vim. Then recently somebody forked it off to improve it further and called it Neo Vim. Each one does seem to improve upon the previous.
Kevin
That’s a great tool, right?
Derek Sivers
Okay, everybody knows about the Kindle. What I want to give a tiny shout out for is the software program called Calibre. Which I think might already be on the Cool Tools website. I think somebody mentioned it before, there’s a plugin out there called DEDRM, which you can use to strip out the digital rights management stuff from Kindle books so that you can then open them on any device and convert them to any format like EPUB or HTML or PDF. I found that really useful, I buy the books from Amazon and Kindle, download them into Calibre and I convert them into epub for future Derek decades from now that might not have a Kindle but still wants to read the book that I bought back in 2002.
Kevin
Does it go the other way? Can you take something and turn it into a Kindle readable ebook?
Derek Sivers
That’s exactly what I use it for. For selling my own books on my website. I write them in epub and so the master version is in epub and then I open Calibre. I use it to convert it to Amazon’s mobi file for Kindle, and then I sell that on my site so that people can have the Kindle version. Calibre does it both directions. Yeah.
Kevin
You can kind of sell a Kindle book without being on Amazon, basically that allows you. By the way, there is a couple of well known conversion programs, one ran by Kindle sales that allows you to take a PDF and turn it on the Kindle. Which I do a lot because I want to read a PDF on my Kindle and so you can just convert it. That’s pretty easy. I had not heard about being able to take another book, an e-book, and turn it into a Kindle ebook or vice versa. That’s called Calibre. Is that a open source app?
Derek Sivers
Also open source. The interface will look like something from 1993, but it’s brilliant and everybody just says it’s the best and it seems to be so Calibre.
Kevin
Right, that presumably works on any platform.
Derek Sivers
Yeah.
Kevin
Is it a browser based?
Derek Sivers
Nope. It’s just like a desktop that you install on your desktop app. I have it installed on Linux as well, so I know if it works on Linux, it works on anything.
Kevin
Right, right, right.
Derek Sivers
So Kevin, as I was putting all this thought into preparing things that I thought were the tools that made the biggest difference in my life, I realized that you like to do the Amazon affiliate link. There were some things that I was mentioning here that weren’t clickable. I also got three quick mentions that I want to talk about, things that are actually clickable that somebody could get that are also some of my favorites. Including these little fold up shoes, the Vibram shoes.
Kevin
Vibram toe shoes?
Derek Sivers
No, no, no. They’re not the ones with the monkey fingers, although they are made by Vibram. They’re called Furoshiki. They’re Vibram furoshiki and these things are so small and flexible. It was actually a ballet dancer that turned me on to these because I was traveling in Europe and I said, “wait, how do you exercise and look classy with your heels?”. She said, “oh, no, no, I never wear my exercise shoes on the airplane, I am much too civilized for that”. She would wear her good shoes to the airplane and good shoes in public. For exercising, she just kept these rolled up small in her carry on bag and she would just kind of unfold them, put these on, go to the gym, go running, do her ballet, and then look classy again.
Kevin
So, what do you use them for yourself?
Derek Sivers
I would keep them in my bag and use them just for going to the gym or if I felt like going running. If I was traveling and just do the single carry on only. I wanted to have something to go to the gym in. I would wear my nice shoes to the airport look good in public plus these out just to go to the gym or go running.
Kevin
Okay. They have enough of a sole, you’re not running barefoot. It doesn’t feel like you’re running barefoot.
Derek Sivers
It’s almost barefoot. It is the super thin Vibram thing they’re known for. It’s fine.
Kevin
Yeah. Okay.
Derek Sivers
Next thing, I’ve been using this for 25 years. You’ve probably seen one, the Kensington expert Mouse Trackball. I love this thing. I just noticed that when I use it, which is every day for 25 years, my fingers just kind of glide across the balls. I’m like moving around and it’s got four buttons so you can just get these combinations. If you want to do something with these two or those two, you can combine them to do things. For this thing around the bowl is your scroll wheel for paging down, scrolling up and down. It’s the most ergonomic, beautiful, wonderful thing.
Kevin
Why don’t more people use it.
Derek Sivers
I don’t know. I don’t know if it looked weird or it just didn’t catch on or everybody’s on a laptop instead of desktop now. I don’t know.
Kevin
I see. Are they still being made?
Derek Sivers
Yeah, I checked before I recommended it to make sure that we could still get it.
Kevin
I’m still using an optical mouse. I’m not sure why the idea of having a stationary ball that you move instead of moving the mouse seems like that’s a good idea.
Derek Sivers
You’re making me remember all the way back to 1996. I started using this in 1996 because I was in a music recording studio and I only had this much space next to my keyboard where I had to put a mouse, I couldn’t do the mouse pad. There wasn’t enough room, so I had to get a stationary thing. That’s when I fell in love with it and just have ever since. Just love it. Last kind of clickable thing not the glass itself, but my glass of water, Berkey water purifier. I couldn’t bring it down because it’s in the kitchen and it’s big. It’s like a four gallon thing. You just fill it with tap water and it’s got these two black charcoal water filters that slowly filter the water. You put the top half drips down to the bottom half. I found this water filter when I first moved to England, and they have that hard water. If you try to make tea from the hard water, it has these kind of chunks that float at the top. I found somebody that really nerded out on water filtration. He tried everything with a reverse osmosis, distillation, brita filters these filters that filters, tried everything under sink things. What he found is that the Berkey water purifier did the best job. Even if you put food coloring in the top, it won’t come out the bottom. It really filters everything out. I just swear by it ever since then, as soon as I moved to New Zealand, I just made sure that one was waiting for me on arrival.
Kevin
You stock the filters. Are they kind of a standard filter or are they just raw charcoal that you put in bulk or what are they?
Derek Sivers
They fit right in. You kind of screw the cylinder into its place.
Kevin
Right.
Derek Sivers
With a kind of cork thing. It seals it well and it lasts about five years, I think, if you use it every day. I haven’t had to change them yet, but I have my backup cylinders just for when these do run out.
Kevin
Wow. That’s a fantastic recommendation. There it is. Proof test.
Derek Sivers
All right. Needed to drink anyway. One last physical thing that is not on Amazon but is worth recommending is the thing I am inside right now. If you go to studiobricks.com you will find this wonderful recording booth, it’s just a soundproof booth. You can use it for recording audiologists, use it for testing, hearing things. You can use it for conference calls, recording audio books, you can use it for practicing music. Say if you’re a saxophonist living in a little apartment. I got this thing a year ago because I was recording my audiobooks a lot. If the neighbor was mowing the lawn, well I can’t record today, neighbors mowing the lawn has, a big lawn it takes some hours. Somebody is doing construction nearby. I’d have to wait until nighttime to record my audio book. I got this thing and it’s the size of a phone booth. It’s substantial, but it’s just so wonderful. It is absolutely dead silent. It’s heavy as hell. They’ll deliver it like kind of flat packed, but it’s still heavy. It’s got this super thick glass soundproof door, as you can see on the website. I just love it. I use this thing all the time for recording every podcast, recording my audiobooks, recording episodes of my own podcast or guest on others or Zoom calls like this or whatever.
Kevin
So they’re just this lining a little area with soundproof panels. How does that compare in terms of either price or performance?
Derek Sivers
Living in England, I literally went into my little clothes closet, I left an area unused and I went into the closet and I lined it with this kind of stuff. That helped deaden the reflection. But still, when the neighbor mows his lawn you could still hear it. This doesn’t just deaden the echo. It absolutely shuts out all outside noise. It’s worth it if that thing really matters to you. It took me a long time to find something like this. Yeah studiobricks.com. A company in Spain makes them there and then ships the parts. So I got mine.
Kevin
Is it a standing height booth or it’s six feet?
Derek Sivers
The roof is right here above my head.
Derek Sivers
What would that be. Seven feet probably altogether. Yeah. 2.4 meters.
Kevin
Okay.
Kevin
It has a door, a glass door that’s insulated as well?
Derek Sivers
Yeah, you’ll see on the website you can get them in different sizes if you really care to have more room you can. They just have just enough room to stand up with a little bit of room to set up the camera in this case, or a microphone stand built in. I love it. It’s luxurious.
Kevin
Does wifi pass through it?
Derek Sivers
It does. There’s just a little place where you can put your cords. For example, to get the power cord out of here, they have a thing where the cord goes in and over and out. So my Ethernet cable right now is snaked through there.
Kevin
That’s wonderful. What a fantastic suggestion. You’re the first to suggest that.
Derek Sivers
Good. I’m a fan of what you’re doing, and I’ve been paying attention to not just your cool tools book, but the podcast for a while. I was trying to think of things that your listeners would like but not have.
Kevin
Yeah, it’s a great.
Derek Sivers
I’m still doing the runner up. I’m going to go through these quickly is the the Oxford English Dictionary via your local library website. It’s one of my most used things. I live in Wellington, New Zealand. The Wellington, New Zealand Local Library has it where if you’re a member of the library, you have your card with your member number on it. You log in to your local library’s website and there they have a link where you can use the Oxford English Dictionary, which then is like routes to England. You can tell suddenly it’s going slowly. As I’m writing, if I’m not 100% sure about a word like I think this is the right word. The version you get online through your local library’s website is absolutely unabridged. You pull it up, you see the full historical usage of this word, the deep, thorough, verbose definition, the etymology, everything. I use it to make sure that I’m using the right word, which usually isn’t. Sometimes we’ve been using a word a certain way because we misunderstood it when we were a kid and never really looked it up.
Kevin
Right, right, right.
Derek Sivers
So I use that a lot when writing. Whenever I kind of reinstall a browser, it’s like my first bookmark.
Kevin
Is going to the source really the only way that you can get access to the Oxford Dictionary? The full abridged.
Derek Sivers
As far as I can tell. I think you could pay hundreds of dollars to Oxford directly or to the dictionary directly and use it. A lot of local libraries have it for free. Strangely enough, until two years ago I was living in Oxford, England. The Oxford England Local Public Library did not have free access to the Oxford English Dictionary. I don’t know why. A lot of others do. So just check with your local library.
Kevin
Just parenthetically, I don’t want to interrupt you, but you reminded me of a great tool that I think we’ve mentioned called Kanopy. If you have a library card, it’s the library’s access to documentaries and PBS and the Great Courses is what I use it for.
Derek Sivers
Oh.
Kevin
It has all the great courses for free. If you access it through Kanopy, it’s a streaming service like Netflix. You use your local library card to get access and you get like ten views a month or ten checkouts per month and you can get the great courses. Keep that in mind.
Derek Sivers
So Kevin, the very next thing on my list was the greatcourses.com. Music, linguistics, history, engineering, math, art and philosophy. These are the courses I’ve done just in the past year, the greatcourses.com have the best damn courses. They’re so wonderful. I just find them to be a higher quality. When lockdown first started a couple of years ago, when I started taking these two hour walks every day out in an empty field. At first I was listening to podcasts and then I went and pulled up John McWhorter’s course on linguistics through the Great Courses. It was so wonderful and so inspiring. I just thought, “man, I’ve been listening to hours of nonsense and podcasts”. No offense to any of us podcasters, but the Great Courses is so edited, so curated and so well produced.
Kevin
During COVID we watched two on the Great Death Plague and it was completely amazing. It blew away everything I thought I knew about the plague and the Black Death was wrong. I didn’t think you could have 24 sessions on it. You still learn new things. Yes, it was. The versions these days are usually recorded in video first, you can get an audio version, but I do recommend watching a video because they have illustrations, slides, graphs and things like that. I can’t recommend them too much, but they have been pricey in the past. They’re a little bit less pricey now, but if you get your library card and you go through Kanopy, you can get them for free.
Derek Sivers
Maybe which is why they priced them at $300 is because there are enough people that get them for free that if just a few people pay the $300, it’s worth it. Okay, so let’s see, two more quick shout outs and then we’ll get to the the real ones. The real like top four I wanted to get to top four. Hacker News, news.ycombinator.com. I’ve been reading this every day for 15 years. Sometimes it’s my only source of news and input from the world. It is my one and only if I’m only going to have one. That’s the one. How do I describe it? First we’ve got to say the definition of a hacker that this is using is not somebody who breaks into other people’s computer systems, but hacker like a maker, somebody who can make things do what they want often, which is not their original intention of what it was for. So it’s makers, it’s creative people, generally tech nerds, a lot of tech entrepreneurs and techies, but they just post things that are of general interest to other smart technological people. As I was preparing for today’s call, literally as of this minute right now on the front page of Hacker News is a story called The Life of a Backpacker in Asia in the 1970s by Kevin Kelly. What a coincidence. I guess your story is on the front page right now. I didn’t put it there, but it was just a fun coincidence as I was going to try to screenshot the site for you.
Kevin
I wonder what they’re referring to. I think it was Ralph Potts. All right.
Derek Sivers
Yes. Ralph Potts. When you posted your thing on your 70th birthday recently. That was all over the front page and it’s got really smart comments. So if you’ve started to give up on the idea of comments ever being intelligent. If you’ve just looked at too many YouTube comments or Reddit or Wait, news.ycombinator.com always has a really good, intelligent conversation in the comments, I think they employ a full time moderator to make sure that it stays that way. I highly recommend it. Last runner up thing is, you’re going to think it’s a little strange. I highly recommend a power off switch, which is not a thing you can buy. It’s something surprisingly that’s built into most devices you can buy, but it’s very little used. People tend to put their things to sleep or do not disturb. One of my favorite endorphin rushes I ever get is when I actually hold down that power button for 3 seconds until it says power off. Yep, power off and the screen goes from light black to dark black.
Derek Sivers
I feel this sense of like, okay, disconnected. Now I can focus. I do the same thing to my broadband modem. My desktop computer doesn’t have wifi, just has ethernet. Whenever it’s on, I feel like I can feel that it’s on or I know that it’s on. I know it’s a placebo. I actually go into the closet to my broadband modem and power it off and then I get this wonderful feeling of disconnection. I’ve just found it to be the most inspiring feeling is to disconnect. I think that we’re always so connected. When you suddenly have no pings, no notification signs, not even the ability to quickly jump online and look up that one little thing you’re wondering about to just know that’s like, I’m just going to have to do that later because I can’t get online right now is just one of my favorite feelings. To know that you’re unreachable right now.
Kevin
I had for a long time a device at my garage where my modem comes in that would power down the entire system every day on a schedule. Now, that was for a different reason, which was because we found that that was the easiest cure for all kinds of networking problems, was actually powered down. But it could be used for the same kind of a thing where it’s literally off each day or each night and you can’t get to it no matter what unless you went down and turned it on. It was sort of more for hygienic reasons until until we went to my fiber optic and that had sort of also cured those problems. You can have a little devices that will automatically just shut everything down.
Derek Sivers
When you said on a timer, suddenly made me think of the Muslim, the call to prayer, you know, the countries where it’s like every 4 hours, three times a day. Imagine if it was kind of like when you heard that it meant that you had 10 seconds, 10 seconds to lose your Internet.
Kevin
Right? Right.
Derek Sivers
Comes in 10 seconds. I’m going to disconnect you. Then you’ll need to go downstairs and decide if you really want to get back on.
Kevin
I’m sure that, you know, Orthodox Jews probably have something like that for the Sabbath where they literally turn it off and they can’t turn it on until it’s over. That would be one way to have a Sabbath is, you actually have a timed power down thing every week and it just goes off for a day. Technological Sabbaths are very healthy. Everybody I know who does it sings the praises, particularly families who follow that ritual. That’s another very healthy thing to consider.
Derek Sivers
In my favorite usage for it is about 2 hours before bed. I go into the closet and I turn off the broadband modem. I disconnect a couple hours before bed and I don’t turn it back on until I’ve written for a couple of hours in the morning. I’m kind of a morning person, so I wake up with a head full of thoughts and I write for a couple hours first and only after I’m feeling like I’ve got some out. I get up and I turn on the modem again.
Derek Sivers
I really enjoy that. When I turn it off, I just get this feeling of inspiring endorphins, knowing that nobody can reach me now it’s time to create.
Kevin
That’s great.
Kevin
That’s fabulous. That’s a great, it’s a great number two. So we’re on to number one.
Derek Sivers
Let’s see. So those were all of my runners up. For my actual top picks, you asked for four, but all four of these are non-physical things. That’s why I felt like I should give you physical things I could recommend. My top four, our number four, uBlock Origin.
Kevin
Don’t know that.
Derek Sivers
Especially when in combination with the Firefox browser, uBlock Origin is an add on for Firefox and I think other browsers, it blocks all ads, not just the little rectangles from Google. I honestly didn’t know that YouTube had ads until just about a year ago because I’ve been using uBlock Origin for so long it just silently blocks all ads. Suddenly I was on a friend’s computer and some ad came up on YouTube. I was jarred. I said, “what? what is that?”. He goes, “it’s a YouTube ad”. He looked at me like I was kidding. He was like waiting for me to laugh. That’s when I realized the power of uBlock Origin, I had never seen a YouTube ad, never seen an ad anywhere online. I can’t imagine using the web without it. I’m sure you’ve had ad blocker recommendations before, so that’s mine. When I think about what makes the biggest difference in my day to day life, uBlock Origin is at number four.
Kevin
By the way, I will sing the praises of YouTube premium, because it doesn’t have ads. Sometimes the ad blocking you’re forced to undo it or go to a different browser myself to get to a site to read something that the only way you can access it is by turning the ad blocker off.
Derek Sivers
With uBlock Origin. I haven’t found that yet. All these years.
Kevin
For what it’s worth, that would be interesting if it works.
Derek Sivers
Number three. Social skills. I think of social skills as tools. They didn’t come naturally to me. It wasn’t till I was 19 and I read a book that was on my grandma’s shelf called How to Win Friends and Influence People that I thought was the most ridiculous title. But it’s a great book. It’s a masterpiece. Since then I’ve read a few others with equally awful titles like How to Make Anyone Like You in 90 Seconds or Less, awful title brilliant book. A lot of us are kind of floundering through life, doing things like socially that feel right, but we all admit that we’re awkward or we don’t know how to take a compliment or you don’t know what to say to somebody. These books, actually, in a very compassionate way, teach empathy. They teach you to look at the situation from another person’s point of view. I read on the advice of a friend. Rules of the Game by Neil Strauss, which is a book about the Pick-Up Artist scene. He wrote the game that was like his best selling story about the Pick-Up Artist scene in Hollywood.
Derek Sivers
Then afterwards, he wrote The Rules of the Game, which is actually like, use these techniques to pick up women. So a lot of it is really ill spirited. I dislike the goal, but the techniques given a lot of it, is just how to be considerate. One of my favorite ones, he talks about how to listen for what he calls fishhooks. I actually think of them as kind of like the meat hooks that you imagine in those meatpacking plants with the hooks on the ceiling is when somebody is talking and says something like, “you know, well, back where I grew up we didn’t do that kind of thing”. You say, “oh, well, where did you grow up?”. You learn to listen for questions in what people are saying to help you get to know them better. That’s the real goal. It helps you connect to other people better. As things that didn’t come naturally to me, that I had to learn, practice and then internalize. Now people think I’m an extrovert.
Kevin
You mentioned the Dale Carnegie book about how to influence people. What are some of the other books that you might or other tools that you might recommend for people to learn better how to acquire these social skills?
Derek Sivers
So far, every book I’ve ever read around the subject has been good. Quickly off the top of my head, there was one called Power Schmoozing years ago that’s out of print now, but that was great. There was one that was, I think it’s called How to Make People Like You in 90 seconds or Less. How to Win Friends and Influence People, of course, was like the original masterpiece from the 1930s. You should start with that because it feels like every book since then is kind of derivative of that one.
Kevin
That book still holds up after all these years
Derek Sivers
Yeah, it’s kind of got a funny style. You kind of have to imagine that he’s speaking it like this. It’s yeah, that kind of times. I think it’s how to be considerate, right? To me if I could retitle it would be How to be considerate. I think that’s just the essence of everything from marketing to communicating to public speaking to writing. It’s all being considerate to understand how you come across in the eyes of others and how to be considerate of their needs instead of your own.
Kevin
I would recommend that as a great place to start picking up social skills. So thank you.
Derek Sivers
This is what I meant when I said I spent so many hours preparing for this conversation is, I wanted to be honest. I didn’t want to just hold up some thing because I thought you wanted me to. I wanted to be honest about what has made the biggest difference in my life. When I really thought about it, social skills were in my top four because I use those just in day to day interactions and they are a tool that you use to be considerate. So number two, we don’t need to dwell on that long is a little bit of programming. I highly recommend to anyone because this tool has changed my life so much. It can be learning a little bit of JavaScript or Python or Ruby or Lua or any number of these languages that are just general purpose languages to make a computer do what you want it to do. The ability to pull information from somewhere, filter it, transform it, output it, send it, present it. I just find it so useful for day to day things online. Bonus points if you keep your own database. If you learn a little SQL or even file maker or Microsoft access, something where you keep your own database of things. Your quantified self project, whether it’s music, libraries, contacts, all the people you know, keeping your own database of contacts or calendars or whatever. The ability to do this has just given me so much. It makes me feel less beholden. I’ve been selling my own books directly on my own site for years without Amazon and sold almost half a million dollars of them so far, which I gave all to charity to save people’s lives and from malaria and stuff. It would have been so much less if I would have only sold through Amazon. The ability to do that was just I’m not an expert, I’m just an amateur. I just learned a little bit of programming which can go so far.
Kevin
How would someone like me who knows no programming whatsoever learn a little programming? What would you suggest? The best way to learn a little programming.
Derek Sivers
I learned before this existed, but everybody raves and swears about this since is freecodecamp.org. I used to recommend books to people because I’m kind of a book learner nerd. A lot of people got back to me saying, “hey, the book you recommended was good, but free code camp, oh my God, that changed my life”. I still get these emails from people that that were working a dumb job they hated three years ago. They read one of my articles saying you should really learn to program, right? Then they emailed me like two years later saying, “you know what, your article is the thing that pushed me over the edge. I took your advice. I did free code camp six months ago. I quit my old job that I hated. I instantly got a great job programming. I’m making three times as much money. I’m so much happier”. It’s so sweet to get these emails, but not just for money or career reasons, but just day to day empowerment. You feel that you’re using technology more than it using you. It can be a fine line where we can feel that we are the object and they are the verb.
Kevin
The idea was free code camp as far as you understand it, is you can sign up for a free course that’s online course of some sort and they’ll give you exercises. Presumably I don’t think there would be actual live teachers, but there’ll be some kind of curriculum that you would follow through.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, sorry I haven’t done it. I kind of learned slowly and hard through books, but whatever methodology works for you, anything will work. If somebody hadn’t started anywhere, I think you could do some basic HTML, learn the basics of HTML in a few days, then CSS, and I think probably today start with JavaScript. If you don’t know where to start, you might eventually add Python to that. I think these days JavaScript can do everything you’ll need to do, and knowing JavaScript is the best kind of all around multi tool for making things happen.
Kevin
That’s great.
Derek Sivers
So number one, you’ll see related.
Kevin
I think we need a drum roll of some sort.
Derek Sivers
I’m not looking at the time. I don’t know if I’ve taken way too long to get to this.
Kevin
You’re just right on time.
Derek Sivers
Number one. I got to tell you, this is after many hours of thought, thinking about my life, like 12 days or so since you’ve asked me to come here. I’ve just been thinking about what made the biggest difference in my life. It is a regular general purpose, unlimited computer, which I think is underrated these days. Despite all those adjectives, I basically just mean a computer, a desktop PC, a laptop of any brand, as long as it’s something that is unlimited. Meaning, you wrote about how technology wants to specialize. I actually jotted it down because I like the way you put this. Where you said ’the specificity is where consumers might appreciate it the most. But for us creators, we need the generality”. If things start general and get specific or their technology is born from general use and grows more specific, I think those of us probably listening to Cool Tools, we are creators of things. I think the general purpose unlimited computer has become really underrated.
Derek Sivers
When I started selling my own books on my website, I’d get frustrated emails from people saying, “I have the MP3 audio file here in Safari. I’m trying to get it to open in my thing, but I can’t”. Well, Apple sandboxed the apps, so I don’t know. You kind of can’t or an app would have to make special permissions. I think people have gotten used to phones limiting them in some way, you can only do what they tell you you can do with it. It’s really sandboxed and locked down. Whereas like a general purpose, unlimited computer. I keep saying unlimited because it’s like not limited by security lockdowns or by a businesses sandbox model for the apps. Instead, it’s like whatever a computer can do, you can do it. That’s made the biggest difference in my life, just all day, every day making a computer do what I want, even if it’s not what a company wants me to do.
Kevin
Let’s say you have a young student. Maybe they’re 16 or 17 years old and they want they want to adopt your philosophy of the most powerful tool they could possibly get. Is this unlimited desktop computer and they have a limited amount of money what would you suggest that they buy? Do you say get something that can run Unix just and don’t get locked into Android or iOS.
Derek Sivers
I’m contrasting it with the idea of using your phone for everything. Phones came out and they were amazing. So there was this feeling of, well let’s see what we can do with it. After a while, then people had two devices. They had their old computer that might be sitting at home next to a pile of clothes. Then they had their phone that was with them always. They tried to start using their phone for everything. I think it’s not the best tool for that. I think the general purpose computer back at home is still the best tool. You asked which one. I just got my first Raspberry Pi this year and I’m surprised how much it can do. If somebody is really constrained by funds, a $25 Raspberry Pi can do everything. It’s a little slow, but it can do everything. My best bang for the buck, I think, is if you go to eBay and find somebody selling an old Lenovo, IBM. They don’t sell IBM anymore. Lenovo ThinkPad find a ThinkPad from just ten years ago.
Derek Sivers
Eight years ago. There’s a T series like the T four hundreds, t four forties. They’re amazing workhorses that everybody still swears by. They last forever. They’re still perfectly good. You can get them for a couple hundred bucks and they’re great. Computers haven’t degraded that much in the past ten years. There used to be that Moore’s Law where you’d really feel like a six year old computer was useless. But that’s not true anymore. If you’re wondering where to start for an operating system, just install Ubuntu, which is a Linux that’s very beginner friendly but yet powerful enough to do everything. The biggest thing is more the more the mentality. So instead of trying to make your phone do everything and saying well, there’s this thing I want to do, let me see if somebody’s written an app to let my phone do it. To me, that’s a little bit like, as if we all treated our cars in a way, imagine if our dashboards had multiple choice buttons on them when you could, you could go to the mall, you could go to work, you could go home, you go to Jeff’s house, you can go through this, you go to this destination.
Derek Sivers
But then if you said, I kind of want to go to that old craggy forest back behind the rock quarry, it’s like, well, I can’t do it. Maybe somebody will write me an app to let me do that, and then they’d have to send it to Ford. Who would authorize it and beam it to your thing? “Hey, look at that for only $25, and now I can go to the old ugly forest”. With a general purpose, unlimited computer, laptop or desktop doesn’t matter. By the way, a quick recommendation for desktop. silentpc.com. If you care about noise like I do. Silentpc.com they’re in Seattle or somewhere in Washington, they make absolutely silent PCs with no fans, no moving parts, which I just swear by. My desktop just off screen there is a beautiful thing from silentpc.com, just a box this big with no moving parts totally silent. I love it. The best laptop these days if you can afford a brand new one, look at framework. The website is frame.work.
Kevin
What’s good about those frameworks?
Derek Sivers
Interchangeable. They finally made the the hackers maker’s dream happen. The parts of a framework laptop are like Lego blocks. You can pull out a wifi card, stick in another one, pull out this, you can replace the keyboard, you can pull out the CPU, put in a faster one someday. It’s a Lego blocks of a laptop and I don’t have one yet, but the next laptop I would get would probably be that. Asking for what to recommend. I think it’s more of a mindset than is letting your phone be a phone and not trying to use it for everything and getting more comfortable again with the old fashioned general purpose computer and enjoying its kind of unlimited ability to do work.
Kevin
I mean, in a certain sense the phone is sort of a consumer thing, whereas your desktop is more of a creator tool.
Derek Sivers
I think of it that way.
Kevin
I guess the ultimate would be if you could create apps for your phone that you wanted using your desktop.
Derek Sivers
There is kind of a way with some Android phones are kind of hackable. You can do a root kit and you can get root. I think Android at its core is kind of Linux. But you’re really fighting an uphill battle, whereas you just get a laptop or a desktop so you can just do what you want. That’s my number one top pick. Sorry it took a long time.
Kevin
I mean, you’re right. You’re absolutely right. It is the most powerful consumer technology or creative technology we have, which is the PC, the personal computer. It’s a good reminder that moving to mobile is very constraining. It has a cost, it has a convenience, but there’s a cost that we give up for that in terms of generating things. Thank you for that reminder. It’s really perfect. I love your your top ten, great choices. So we have and we have a few minutes left Derek. Is there something that you are currently working on, a current project that you want to share and tell people about?
Derek Sivers
I brought my little stack of books. These are my four books so far. I had only been writing blog posts for years and never intended to write a book. But then in 2011, Seth Godin started a new publishing company and literally called me. My phone rang one day and he said, “it’s Seth, I’m starting a publishing company. I want you to be my first author”. I said, “okay”. People really liked my first book, which was Anything You Want. My little story of how I built, grew and sold CD Baby and more like the philosophy of generosity in entrepreneurship. That’s what that one’s about. Then I gathered all of my advice for musicians and to this book called Your Music and People Creative and Considerate Fame, which is because I ran this music company called CD Baby for ten years, where about 150,000 musicians used me to sell their music. I got to see what works and why and what doesn’t. I wrote Your Music and People about how to get your music into people and through people. Then people really liked one of my philosophies called Hell Yeah or No about what’s worth doing. That if you’re feeling anything less than hell yeah, about something, you should say no to it because most of us say yes to too many things. Whereas if you say no to most things, I found that it leaves the space in your life, right? So that when you find the occasional rare thing that really excites you, you can throw yourself into it completely because you’ve left room in your life to do so.
Kevin
That’s very wise.
Derek Sivers
Then my newest one, which I just threw myself into for four years, and I’m so proud of How to Live 27 conflicting answers and one weird conclusion. I know a lot of new parents have felt this, where you have a kid and you think “what if I don’t live long enough to teach my kid all the things I learned? I want to write a book sharing everything”. For four years, like full time, I wrote How to Live and my rough draft of it was 1300 pages. I thought, “well, that’s no good”. I spent two more years editing it down to 115 pages. I’m just so damn proud of it. It’s like the culmination of everything I’ve ever done. If I did nothing else in my life but this one book, I’d feel that was like a life well lived.
Derek Sivers
No, I’m so proud of it.
Kevin
Wow.
Kevin
Has your son looked at it?
Derek Sivers
He doesn’t really read much yet. He likes comic books so far. He knows my books are there. He hasn’t gotten into them yet, but they’re there.
Kevin
But it’s kind of for him in many ways. Right.
Derek Sivers
That was the original inspiration, but it ended up becoming a philosophy of conflicting philosophies. We both read a lot of nonfiction books.
Kevin
Right.
Derek Sivers
It’s funny when you read a nonfiction book that says, this is the answer, this is the way you should do things, and you read it and you think that’s a really good point. Then another book says, no, no, no, no, this is the answer. Forget that guy. This is the way to do things. You think, “well, that’s also a really good point”. How do you reconcile this in your head? So have you read the book called Sum by David Eagleman?
Kevin
Yes.
Derek Sivers
This format. So everybody listening. If you haven’t read Sum by David Eagleman yet, you must. I think it’s my single favorite book of all time.
Kevin
There are alternative scenarios for the afterlife. Basic premise is you die and then he has, I don’t know, maybe 60 different possible scenarios because they’re not all plausible, but they’re all interesting.
Derek Sivers
What I love about the book Sum is how those different scenarios are juxtaposed and each one acts like it is the answer. So it’ll be like chapter three, when do you die? somebody greets you to tell you that in your last life you chose to be a human. In this life you can choose to be any other. That’s a brilliant little two or three page short story. Then the very next chapter will say, “when you die, you’re in a big empty mansion, and you walk around for days trying to figure out what’s going on. Then you find out that God’s not here. He’s the creator, not the manager. He created us billions of years ago, knocked over the first domino and is off doing other things. He doesn’t even know we exist”.
Kevin
So all of them can’t possibly be true.
Derek Sivers
Right. What I love though, is the confidence, the format. When you’re reading a book every single chapter disagrees with every other chapter, the way that we’re used to books disagreeing with each other. How badass to have one book where the chapters disagree with each other. After reading and loving some, one day I was like just driving down the road and I went, “oh I want to write a book called How to Live in that format”. Where all these different ways that you could live your life. Each chapter says, no, no, no, this is how you should do it. This is how to live. You should live for the moment. All there is, is the now. The future is your imagination. The past is just the memory. All we really have is this moment. Therefore, the way to live is to live in the moment. And make a really convincing argument. Then the very next chapter will say. Here’s how to live, think of the future. Delay gratification.
Kevin
Don’t live for the moment.
Derek Sivers
Forget the moment. No, no, forget that, that’s just pleasure. Don’t be a hedonist, Think of the future and make the most convincing argument you can. Then how do you wrap this up? The whole book has a really weird conclusion that I have to just leave. It would make no sense until you credit. So that’s my book.
Kevin
So get the book. Get the book. It’s a lovely, fantastic way that you rolled out those scenarios about how to live. I’ve enjoyed all those books. I’ve read all of them.
Derek Sivers
Oh, thank you.
Kevin
Thank you for them putting them into the world.
Derek Sivers
Well, I was so happy to send them to you because you’ve sent me your book, The Silver Cord. Right now your newest book, Vanishing Asia. Oh, my God. Talk about my kid learning geography. Now, these blobs on the map we’re going through and he’s looking at the captions below the photos and putting it all together. Thank you for sending me those.
Kevin
Thank you again, Derek, for these fantastic, very refreshing recommendations from the physical to the intangible. Really, really great. It’s always wonderful to talk to you and chat with you. I love your enthusiasm. It’s so rare to have that kind of enthusiasm for all things in life. You seem to be having a great time in New Zealand, so thank you again for joining us.
Derek Sivers
Well, thanks for changing my life, Kevin.
Kevin
Okay. I’d love to see you again sometime.
Derek Sivers
Someday.
Kevin
All righty.