This Sustainable Life
host: Joshua Spodek
sustainability leadership, personal exploration vs leadership, environmental impact of technology, open source philosophy, deep vs shallow happy
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Transcript:
Josh
Welcome to the Sustainable Life. This is Josh Spodek and I’m here with Derek Sivers at last. Derek, great to see you. I think you’re the person that we’ve emailed the longest between connecting and actually now recording.
Derek Sivers
It’s been at least six years. We’ve been emailing and I was always honored with your invitation, but I’ll admit I didn’t know why you wanted me on your show. Because I admire what you’re doing but I look at it like a world I know nothing about and I think, “Why does he want to talk with me?” So here we are. We’ll find out.
Josh
Yes. And from my side, I think you had the politest, not now, but soon of anyone that I’ve brought on.
Derek Sivers
Well, it was sincere.
Josh
Yes, very sincere. And so before I address what you just said, I’m going to say a few words about you from your page. All right. So it says me in ten seconds, in your words, I’ve been a musician, producer, circus performer, entrepreneur, TEDx speaker, book publisher, monomaniac, introvert, slow thinker and love finding a different point of view. California native. I now live in New Zealand and now I think most people know of you from your TED talks because they’ve had a lot of views. I think that’s where I heard of you and that was 15 years ago. And so the page there says Derek Sivers is best known as the founder of CD Baby, a professional musician since 1987. He started CD Baby by accident in 1998 when he was selling his own CD and his own website, and his friends asked if he could sell theirs too. It was the largest seller of independent music on the web, with over $100 million in sales, over 150,000 musician clients. And I believe I’ve seen you talk online where you said, and then I sold it and I gave it all away and it gave huge applause. Do I remember that right?
Derek Sivers
Yeah, probably. Yeah.
Josh
And now why would I bring you on? Because I work on sustainability leadership, which is different than sustainability. Sustainability is how one person might behave. But sustainability leadership is to change culture. I believe that our culture is unsustainable with regard to how we treat the environment or how we treat each other when mediated through the environment. And most of what I see people doing is what I would call management. It’s working on deliverables, giving people instruction, facts and numbers, and I think giving people facts and numbers and instruction on their behavior with regard to the environment is like giving them facts and numbers and instruction to someone who smokes a lot and wants to quit smoking. And they weren’t smoking because they didn’t know that it caused lung cancer. So just giving people facts and numbers rarely changes behavior so leadership works with stories and role models and images and beliefs and emotions, often things that are less tangible. But if you want to change, culture, management alone won’t do it. Leadership alone also won’t do it. I think we need both. Sometimes I’ll say I don’t see a single person leading in the area of the environment.
Josh
I see a lot of people managing. And when I ask people, “Do you know who’s remotely trying to live sustainably?” You know, Greta usually comes back and then they’ll say they know someone who’s living off in the woods but not doing any leadership. They’re living sustainably. But nothing that’s a role model. I mean, most people fly into conferences on sustainability, which to me, flying to a conference on sustainability is like hitting a piano with a sledge hammer to learn how to play music. You’ll get some sound out of it, but it’s not exactly what most people are thinking of when they want to learn to play music, right? So the question is, the people who get sustainability they tend to be scientists. Who understand the environment, understand the natural processes of not just the globe heating, but extinctions and deforestation and a whole bunch of other things. And then there are people who know how to lead the overlap is very slim. So do I try to teach scientists how to lead? Do I teach leaders science? One of the things I’m doing on this podcast is to bring leaders from whatever area into sustainability. And I think of you as someone who changes people’s thoughts, changes people’s behavior.
Josh
And generally when people share what they do and how they live, I think most leaders and tell me if this characterizes you-- have taken risks, they’ve failed. They’ve shared those failures with others and realized that keeping those things to themselves doesn’t advance them and it doesn’t bring them shame either. Well, I mean, they might feel shame at some point, but then they get past it and lots of other things that bring people on board and invite people to join them. And I’m not particularly strong in this, so I’m learning from this, too. But one thing I often with many guests lead them through the Spodic method, which is where I talk to them about their values with regard to the environment and invite them to act on them in some way that matters for them. So I don’t tell them what to do. Leaders tend to share what the experience was like. They share the equivalent of the like warts and all. It’s a big journey for me to learn from people who’ve done things like this before. How does that sound to you?
Derek Sivers
Let’s talk about the difference between a leader and an explorer. Do you want to do that now or should we come back to that later?
Josh
If that comes to you now, then let’s go there. Okay.
Derek Sivers
So I think of myself as a bad leader because I think of myself as an explorer. So I’m personally exploring. If we think of the physical metaphor of an explorer landing in an uncharted land and just going into the jungle to see what’s there. Going to the rocky coast to see what’s there, following the coast along to see if there are little lagoons and bays and caves to explore. But that person would be a bad leader because they’re hard to follow. Because they may head up the coast for a while and go, “Oh, it’s looking boring. I’m going to go back here. I’m going to go into the jungle for a bit. In fact, it’s just hot today. I’m going to explore the forest instead of the sunny beach today.” It’s very driven by personal curiosity and hunch and whim and mood which direction the explorer goes. But a good leader should be easy to follow. A good leader should have a clear vision described saying, we’re going here. This is the destination. Let me describe the vision to you of what this is going to look like when we arrive. And here’s how we’re going to get there. We’re going to head northeast in a straight line. And that’s our path until we get to this rock, then we’re going to turn due east from that rock. Follow me. I think of that as a great leader. That’s easy to follow. That describes the vision of where we’re going, describes how we’re going to get there and says, “Let’s go.” And even if you’re in the back of the the pack, you’re not standing right next to the leader, you’re a hundred people behind. You can still follow because you know where we’re going. So that’s how I think of myself as a bad leader. I’m an explorer.
Josh
Have you distinguished between leaders and explorers before?
Derek Sivers
Not publicly, just in my head, in my diary a little bit, that’s all.
Josh
Because I have not. And you’ve gotten me thinking. I distinguish between leadership and management. And I just did. I often talk about how in sustainability does the most voices come from scientists, educators, journalists? Politicians, activists? But I haven’t. And I distinguish between each of those. I mean, journalists are great at telling stories, getting clicks. Politicians are great at raising funds generally. There are politicians who have led. But these days they tend, at least in the United States, I don’t see them as leaders so much as getting votes isn’t the same. And so none of them are really great at changing behavior, changing beliefs. But I haven’t distinguished between an explorer. And what makes it very interesting to me is that I’ve often described myself as on the frontier, exploring what’s next. And so I think I may be a better explorer than leader as well, because there aren’t a whole lot of people who are saying, “I want to live like Josh does.” In fact, the most common thing is, “Oh, I see why you can do that. But I can’t do that because--” And then they’ll give some reason they can’t. So regular listeners know I’m off the grid. Like last May, as the next in a series of many little experiments, each step small compared to the one before. But if you only know the big steps, then it doesn’t--. Or if you don’t know the middle steps, they seem big. So I had one day unplugged my apartment for 24 hours to see if I could do it. What would happen. And that was after I’d unplugged my fridge for a while. Because if you don’t need the fridge 24 hours. That’s like a big 24/7 thing.
Josh
And then that was, I don’t know, last spring and then last May I said, “I wonder if I could make it a month.” Having no idea how I would make it more than a couple of days. So now I’m in the middle of my ninth month. I had no idea that I could make it this long. And now that I’ve passed the winter solstice, it’s getting easier because I got some solar panels. Although that’s not the main thing. The main thing is decreasing the power use. Not many people are saying, “Oh, I want to go off the grid Manhattan.” But a lot of people are like, “Oh, I didn’t think that was possible.” I may be doing more exploring than leading as well. And when I talk to people, I point out some of the weaknesses that I’m learning about myself is that I talk a lot about engaging community, but I haven’t really engaged community that effectively. Partly maybe that’s because my PhD in physics is not like that’s a big community. Straight white male in Manhattan is not like, “Hey, let’s get the straight white men together.” We don’t have that parade in the city. And I’m not particularly religious, so there’s not a lot of communities that are like built in for me to tap into, although maybe I’m missing something. And I often say, I’d love to have someone who is really good at-- like I want to keep exploring the frontier. And I would love to partner with someone who would love to take what I do and make it palatable. And what you said about the leader part. Maybe I’m sustainability frontiersman explorer.
Derek Sivers
Sounds like it. I wonder then, if it’s the explorer’s role to discover places that are worth going. Sorry, I’m going to stick with the visual metaphor. Still, imagine the explorer is off and finds a nice harbor, explores the coast that nobody’s been to this coast before, finds a really nice harbor and says, “You know what? This is a place I think a lot of people would enjoy. It’s good, Good access to the sea. The weather is nice here.” And then calls on another leader to say, “I think you should lead the migration to this harbor.” And then that person has a single focused mission. That person is not exploring. That person goes back to the homeland and says, “Everybody, this is where we should go, to this harbor. Here’s how we’re going to get there. Here’s how life is going to look when you arrive there. Here’s why it’s better than where you’re living now. Here’s why you should come. Here’s how to get there. Follow me.” I think that’s a leader. And then maybe the explorer’s job is to keep moving on and looking for new places to go.
Josh
Man, this is great. I’m enjoying-- I mean, we’ll see where this goes. But to be a sustainability explorer. Exploring the sustainability frontier. Then the leaders don’t have to be taking these giant risks of exploring the territory. They’re doing something much more palatable, much easier for them. And then you didn’t say this, but I would think once this cove has been found and it’s safe and people can start residing there and enjoying it, the explorer is like, where’s the next cove or the next whatever, you know, on to the next thing. Now, I should be careful because it sounds colonial and I don’t want to be colonial.
Derek Sivers
No, actually, you know what I’m saying this from the harbor of Wellington, New Zealand, which only 150 years ago was hardly settled. And it was two different jobs. There were people that came out here 200 years ago and found this harbor. So if you look at Wellington, New Zealand, on a map, it’s the very bottom of the south, sorry, very bottom of the north island of New Zealand in a wonderful protected harbor in one of the windiest parts of the world. But it creates this kind of sheltered, though still windy Harbor. It was a good strategic place to set up a city. So, yeah, only a couple hundred years ago it was two different jobs that somebody explored this and found it, and then somebody else kind of led the expeditions here. So I’m talking to you physically from right there, right here, right now. So maybe this is why that visual metaphor is on my mind. We don’t need to pull past politics into it, but just use it as a visual metaphor.
Josh
It works for me because it’s changing my thoughts of my-- or getting me to question and consider my identity. There’s a part of me and I got to think this through more. I mean, obviously the listeners can tell this as I’m speaking, I’m developing these thoughts. But I kind of like the idea of exploring the frontier and finding out what’s possible. And to me, the frontier is really-- I mean, I’m constantly saying how people say, “How do you do X?” Like, how do you light your apartment at night? How do you heat your apartment? And my answer is always, I can. People have lived on this island for 10,000 years without burning fossil fuels, without polluting, and human beings have lived for 300,000 years. And generally they were-- without I’m not referring to any noble, savage cliche or anything here, but they generally did fine. They thrived. I mean, there were wars and problems like that and so forth. But, I mean, we’ve got our anxieties and depressions ourselves as well. And I like the frontier for me-- is actually restoring lost values. I mean, we’re not so great on “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” these days.
Derek Sivers
I think this issue came up for me because there’s that phrase thought leader. And I had to think about that for a minute. Am I a thought leader? And I thought, well, hell no, I don’t try to get other people to think what I think. Very often I’m not out there to persuade and say, “Everybody, you should all be thinking this way.” That’s not why I’m doing what I’m doing. I’m really just doing what I’m doing for my own personal exploration. And then, like you said in the intro. As I discover something for myself that makes me go, “Ooh, that’s that’s really helpful. That’s a really good epiphany that just gave me some clarity to my life or some direction to my actions.” Then I’ll share that because I feel it’s kind of like my community service or public duty to share what I’ve learned. But it’s just sharing my personal epiphany and saying, “Here’s what worked for me.” But for example, when people ask me to consult for their business, like, “Hey, my business isn’t doing very well, can you tell me what I should do to improve it?” I say, “I have no idea.” I can only tell my own tales. I’m just doing my own personal exploration and sharing what I’ve learned.
Josh
One measure of a leader is do they have followers? And hey, let me see. So you referred to me after someone responded to one of your blog posts referring to my book, and I’m scrolling. Oh, my God. Can I scroll the bottom 356? So you’re getting hundreds and hundreds of responses and you’re laughing because you knew that it’s a lot, right? So you may not intend for people to follow you and but you seem to have a lot of people paying attention to you.
Derek Sivers
Touché. Good point.
Josh
And I know that I say hell yeah, or no myself, which is a fantastic title. And so you may not intend for it to happen, but it may be happening anyway. That may be something we can learn from. Also, we sustainability people. I don’t know if there are no sustainability people, but you know, we who want to live more sustainably or want to believe that there are environmental problems and want to do something about it. How do you explain so many people following you?
Derek Sivers
I don’t know. This is almost too embarrassing to talk about, but hey, here I go. Up until just a couple of months ago, I thought that my public duty was to write and share things that were immediately useful to people. You know, here’s how to be happier, here’s how to make more money, here’s how to be more successful, here’s how to do such and such. And I thought that the only reason people would read what I write or listen to what I say is if it was directly useful for them in some utilitarian kind of way like that. Right. And just a few months ago, somebody that knows me well and knows knows me privately and publicly, has been in the audience at more than 2 or 3 of my talks and has read all of my books and is in there in my comments section on my website, reading other people’s comments, but also knows me privately. Gave me an insight that really surprised me, he said-- when we were talking about this and I said, “Yeah, I haven’t been writing much lately because I don’t feel like I have any advice for the world.” He said, “Derek, people don’t want your advice.” He said, “People just like you being you. Like, you’ve just got a way of looking at the world that people like. So I think you should just be you more and don’t worry about turning it into advice.” That blew my mind. I’m still digesting that and still internalizing it. I think he’s right. What really surprises me and it’s almost I feel a little too egotistical to believe that--. I mean, sorry, it feels egotistical to believe that, but I think he might be right.
Josh
Oh, yeah, he’s right. The advice is is nice, but everyone is going to incorporate in their own way. People hide their vulnerabilities or protect their vulnerabilities. And you communicate in many ways without protecting your vulnerabilities or less than the average person. So that’s what people connect with is, “Oh man, I’d be so embarrassed to share that. But Derek shared it so I don’t have to feel so crazy about it. It happens.” Like I’m also feeling that I don’t have the audience you do, but people want to like-- what’s an example there was recent. I don’t know. Lately I’ve been sharing more weird things that I do and people constantly come back with, “Yeah, I do that too. I didn’t know other people did it.” And at first it was embarrassing or I thought it would be embarrassed, but I ended up getting support back. I’m by no means experienced at this. I’m a novice, but I’m starting to like it. I’m trying to think of something recent. All right, here’s one that I’ve been sharing lately. I make up weird names for vegetables and fruit when I’m cutting them. So when I’m cutting an apple, I’m thinking in my head apple de grappled de and zucchini is zucchinini. Cabbage is cabbage. There’s no rhyme or reason like other things I’ve patterned this for. What are some other silly ones? Eggplant is gigaplant. I don’t know why it sounds kind of unpleasant, but gigaplant is fun. I think it started with an ex-girlfriend, but I never told anyone. And then people were like, “That’s interesting.” They didn’t say, “You’re weird, get yourself to an institution.” There was another one recently that I shared. I can’t think of what it was. And then everyone’s like, “Oh, I do that too.” And then we get into really interesting conversations. It’s not exactly the same thing as what you’re talking about because, naming fruit is not exactly--. Well, no.
Derek Sivers
Well, no, it’s a fun, colorful example of sharing something that seems so weird that you feel this might be just me, but... And when you start with that and somebody else from around the world sees that, they go, “Oh my God, you too. Yeah, I thought it was just me, too. Wow. Somebody said it.” Those things hit home and reach into people’s hearts and souls better than saying something like, “I think we should all eat less and exercise more.” Something that people hear 20 times a day from many sources. That doesn’t hit the heart for somebody to hear. It’s the things that almost the weirder and more obscure your thoughts or habits are. If you share that with the world, somebody out there is going to be so thankful to hear that. On my website. So sive.rs is my personal home website and after years and years of not having one, I added an about me page. It felt weird because of this advice utilitarian type thing where I was always trying to write for an audience. I was never writing for me. I write for me in my journal. I write for a couple of hours a day in my own private journals. So when I’m taking to write something in public, I’m doing it because it’s for them, not for me.
Derek Sivers
Right. So after ten plus years, I added an about me page on my website and I just let it be about me. And it says right at the top like, okay, this feels really weird to say these things because this is about me, not you. But here we go. I say, okay. Well, I was born in 1969. Here in such and such. Then I say, “And here are some core things about me that are kind of weird. Like, number one, I’m not close with my family. In fact, I do not believe that blood is thicker than water. I believe that all of us have blood. None of us have water in our veins. And I feel equally connected to everybody in the world, not just my closest DNA matches.” And and I expand on that a bit. Every now and then, every few months, I get an email from somebody that goes like, “Oh my God, thank you. So nice to hear somebody else say this. Like, I feel no ties with my family. I feel no bonds with my parents or siblings. And everybody says that’s despicable of me. It was so nice to hear you saying that in public on your website.” So yeah, that’s not exactly cute vegetable names, but perhaps equally rare. And therefore appreciated.
Josh
Did you use the word vanity or ego or something? Like because there is this.
Derek Sivers
I said ego early, not vanity.
Josh
Yeah. Okay. To me, there’s a balance or something that I do feel. I want people to know what I’m doing so that they can feel comfortable doing it themselves. In terms of polluting, like reducing pollution. Yeah. And because we don’t have role models. The general belief that I come across mainly is if we’re not pressing forward, we’re moving backward and we could fall into the Stone Age and mothers are going to die in childbirth and 30 is going to be old age and people are afraid of that. And I want to show them in part that’s not the case, that in what we call Stone Age cultures are actually generally politically sophisticated. And they look at us and they say, “Well, yeah, we see your technology, we see the internal combustion engine and all that stuff. But it’s not worth it to lose the connection and the community that we have, the freedom and equality to get that.” So I’m trying to get that out there now. Partly I want people to know me. So there’s a mission that’s driving it. But it also gets very close to vanity of like, I want people to know me. And have you struggled with that balance?
Derek Sivers
No. Why do you want people to know you? Is it just connecting with the world like an internal desire to connect with humanity.
Josh
Well, right now there are very few role models of trying to live sustainably and not going off in the woods. I mean, there’s definitely people who live off in the woods.
Derek Sivers
Okay. Wait, sorry to interrupt. You mean you want people to know you to know what you’re doing? To see what you’re doing so that it may help you that wasn’t like a purely emotional like, “I want to be loved and connected.”
Josh
Right. There are things inside me that are very near each other. Some that I think everyone would agree that’s great. And some that I think a lot of people would say, “Check that.” So if we did not live in times that to me look like we have a risk of a population collapse on a scale beyond anything we’ve had before, that’s definitely possible or I believe that’s possible. And to get out of that, I think one thing is to have sustainability people in the sustainability frontier, explorers and leaders now have to decide which I’m thinking about as a result of this call playing around with that, but without role models, without people saying, “Well, here is a brighter future that you will like more than you think you will, and you’ve been told otherwise.” But the reason you were told otherwise is not for your sake, but for the system, for the stability of some system. So I want people to get that because I live in these times and no one else is doing it. I’d much prefer someone else doing it who is more effective than me. But no one is people. There are people doing some great stuff that’s different than what I’m doing and that’s valuable. So more research and the management part. The storytelling part.
Josh
So as long as no one else is doing it, I’m going to try to do it. And there’s a part of me that likes the idea of being famous. Yeah, but if there weren’t the situation and I wanted to be famous, I wouldn’t do it this way. So I’m not trying to front a rock band or something like that. I’m doing something mission driven. And part of the mission involves as long as there’s no one else doing it, putting my actions out there so that people can see what’s happening and if they believe something is impossible, to live off the grid for nine months and counting in Manhattan. Then they won’t even try. But maybe, just maybe, a few people in a few different cities around the world will say, “You can do that. I didn’t know that. I want to try.” Yeah, and hopefully they’ll do it better than I do and they’ll lead better than I do. So I want me to get out there or I want to serve the mission of getting what I’m doing out there. And there’s a part of me that likes the idea of being famous. But I’m not doing it to be famous. But it won’t feel bad if it happens.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, right. So two things come to mind. Open source programming and Amanda Palmer. Do you know? Have you heard of the musician Amanda Palmer?
Josh
I don’t think so.
Derek Sivers
Okay. She had a band called the Dresden Dolls. It’s how she first got famous and then she did some solo albums and a TED Talk and a book about asking. So Amanda is quite wonderfully extreme in how she connects with her audience. She’s very two way. So unlike, say, Prince, who would get up on stage and do his music and keep his life completely aloof and untouchable, nobody can reach Prince or hang out with Prince. Amanda Palmer does the opposite, where she constantly tweets with her followers and fans. She would hold impromptu meet ups in the park. When she was on tour, she’d just like announce on Twitter like, “Hey, everybody, come to Central Park, 5:00 by the lake. The South lake. I’ll be there. Let’s hang out.” And suddenly, like 500 people would show up to hang out with Amanda Palmer in the park and she was here in New Zealand when COVID hit and shut down travel. So her and her husband and kid stayed in New Zealand for two and a half years. So I went up to where she was staying and hung out with her for three days and stayed at her house up there and got to know her. And at first I was aghast at how much of a need she has for connection with people.
Derek Sivers
She just explained, she actually like kind of practically took me by the shoulders when I first arrived. She goes, “I’m so glad you’re here.” She said, “I need connection. I need people so badly. I need so many people in my life. I need that constant connection of human energy or constant energy of human connection.” And yeah, I was taken aback at first because I’m not to that extreme. So I think maybe in the past I felt too much connection. I felt there were too many people that wanted something from me, and so I would sequester myself away. Not quite to the level of Prince, but more that way than Amanda’s way. But I’ve done that for a number of years and just recently I’ve started to feel an Amanda Palmer style need for more connection with people. So now I’m opening myself up to connect with the world more in a way that does feel a bit like wanting to be famous. It’s similar. It rhymes with it. It’s a synonym of wanting to be famous, but it is a little different. Because it’s just wanting the human connection and welcoming more two way connections instead of, “Hey, everybody, look at me, but don’t talk to me.” Yeah, that is kind of funny.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, look at me. But don’t talk to me. That’s the message I’ll keep calling the Prince way of doing things. So that’s one thing to think about. And then I’ll change to the next subject right away, which is open source programming. So I’m also a computer programmer. And in the world of open source programming, where people put all of their code out in the open onto sites like GitHub and Sauce Hut and GitLab, where you can just freely share your all the source code, including all of your documentation, all of your thoughts. You just share it with the world. In this idea of like, “Hey, maybe this is useful to somebody else.” Like I just found a really cool way to use the Ruby programming language to generate a sequence of JPEGs and then the ffmpeg tool to turn them into a movie. So now it’s really easy for me to take my article and turn it into a movie. Here’s my script in case anybody else wants it. Sometimes they don’t even announce it. They just keep it on like an open GitHub profile. Like, “Hey, you know, if anybody finds it, they find it”. Why put forth the energy to keep it secret. Why not share it? It’s actually just as easy to share it as it is to keep it secret.
Derek Sivers
So they share it in case it’s of use to anybody else. So taking those two completely different ideas, I see what you’re doing. As like a mix between them, like first, “Hey, I’m doing these private experiments on living off grid and living way more sustainably.” And even I’m sure it was that graph that’s on your site of like here is my pre 2016 Joshua and here’s the average person and then here’s me right now. I’ll bet that was for yourself first. But then noticing that number, you say, “Hey, I’m going to share this because maybe this is of use to somebody else.” And that to me feels more like the open source programming thing. But then it’s also, in your case, probably mixed with something that does want human connection. You’re not just sitting by yourself in Montana doing this. You’re using the media. You’ve done hundreds of these podcasts to share what you’ve done with the world and connect with the world. So yeah, I think those are two different things. You don’t have to think that I want to share what I’m doing, therefore I want to be famous. I think you could see those as two different things that in your case have just a nice blend together.
Josh
Yeah, just hearing someone talk about it. What we were saying before is comforting. I have to share my free software. I use the term free software and so I use my apple to up through graduating college. So that would be 1993. And then I went to grad school in physics and there was Unix, half was IBM, half a Sun, and I used to write software to analyze data. And if I use the compiler for Sun and ran it on the sun, it was much faster. If I ran it on the IBM’s and use their compiler, it was faster, but they wouldn’t. I’d have to put little tweaks in it to go on one or the other. And so this is 1994, maybe 1995, no, 1993 or 4. So my advisor said, “Just use GCC.” And I was like, “With GCC?” Oh no, I knew what GCC was. So that was the GNU compiler which was free software, open source. Well, not yet open, no free software. I said, “But if I run a GCC, if I use GCC, then it doesn’t run fast on either.” And these words are stuck with me.
Josh
My advisor says “Yes, but it compiles.” I was like, that’s really a big deal. The time it takes to run the program is nothing compared to the time it takes to write all the software. And then I got into learning about Richard Stallman and all this stuff. So by 1996, I installed Linux on my computer and I’ve never gone back. Recently I’ve been thinking about around the same time I think of between Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Richard Stallman, who’s going to have the longer term effect on the world. And I think it’s going to be Richard Stallman. Yeah, and I think of sites like imagine Google had been started like Wikipedia. I’m sure there would be donations enough to keep it going. Just the search part of it. I mean, all the other stuff. Maybe there would be other projects, other open free software projects. And it could have been imagine a world like there’d be no one testifying to Congress about how democracy is being undermined. Like the founders of Wikipedia, don’t have to do that. So anyway, I don’t get to talk about free software much. So that was my indulgence in that.
Derek Sivers
I love it. I use Openbsd as my operating system for over 15 years now. So, yeah, that’s my world too. I sit in a Unix terminal all day. That’s where I do all my writing, all of my books and all of everything is just done in Vim in a terminal.
Josh
Emacs man myself.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, of course. You know, I’m just starting to get curious about Emacs because I’m just starting to learn Lisp and everybody says if you’re going to program in Lisp, you need to use Emacs. So I’m like, “Well, huh? The other camp, I’ve heard of this other camp.” So I’m starting to look into it. I admire people that really use Emacs to its fullest. It looks like an amazing environment to keep everything in the shell.
Josh
I certainly like it. And although as I program less and less and less, which is to say, not at all in the past 20 years, but every now and then I’ll do something interesting. Like some a little bit in Perl just to do some more intense search. I’m like, oh, I remember this stuff.
Derek Sivers
I still do all my own programming. Do you know that any time I need any new feature, like for years I haven’t done any scheduling of anything. I’ve just been a full time dad for the last ten years and I just wasn’t letting anybody schedule a single minute of my time. Right. But just recently I decided to start doing these podcast interviews again. And so I thought, “All right, I need to do a scheduler.” And I looked for like a minute at Calendly and I went, “Ugh, this just looks bloated and awful. And what is this monthly fee? Screw that.” And I was like, “All right, I’m just going to write my own.” And so I was like, okay, PostgreSQL database, create table availabilities, create table interviews, create table this. Okay, schedule a availability ID to the interview ID. Okay, now I need to make a table of interviewees, people that I’m giving permission so that not anybody can go schedule an hour of my time. Only the people that I’ve agreed in advance so Joshua can have an hour of my time. Okay. You’re an interviewee table now and then I was able to send you a link saying, “All right, Joshua, please use this link to schedule my time.” And it reached into my availabilities table.
Derek Sivers
You picked one that worked for you. I was like, “All right.” That took about two days to program and it feels so much better than if I had used Calendly, because to me, programming is being philosophical, because to be philosophical is to get down to the root of things and ask what and why and break them apart and analyze it and not take things for granted. That to me is what programming is. It’s like you could just use somebody else’s thing and just take it for granted. But to make your own requires you to break it apart, break it down, look at what it really is. Ask yourself what you really want because you don’t want to just start using features just because they exist in somebody else’s software. You have to ask yourself, Do I really want that? Is that really something I actually need? So if you ask yourself what you really need and then break it down and then build it back up from scratch, well then you’ve made a bespoke clothing that fits you perfectly, bespoke software that fits what you need perfectly, and you get the philosophical searching process while making it, of asking yourself along the way what you really want and how that’s made. So I absolutely adore programming.
Josh
Is it fair to say that it increases your self-awareness and you’re living by your values?
Derek Sivers
Yeah, absolutely.
Derek Sivers
And I try it because I try to take the same approach that I do with life, which is--. One of the things you mentioned at the very beginning, I sold my company for $22 million and I had about six months in between the accepted offer and when the money was changing hands. So during that six months, I had some time to think really deeply about what I really want. Like, what am I going to do with $22 million? I am absolutely not going to buy a Ferrari or a mansion. That’s the last thing I want in the world. You couldn’t pay me to live in a mansion. You couldn’t pay me to drive a Ferrari. It’s embarrassing. I wouldn’t want to be seen in one of those. So what the hell am I going to do with $22 million? And I knew that I was just going to give it away anyway. So luckily, my attorney that was helping with the sale had a background in tax law and he told me about this thing in the US tax law called a charitable remainder unitrust, which is usually only old people do it when they want to give away their nest egg, knowing their days are limited but still have a trickle paid out to them to pay their living expenses while they’re still alive. And in my case, that was just what I wanted.
Derek Sivers
I wanted to take that 22 million and just give it all away irreversibly in my 30 seconds when the deal happened. But yet, for the rest of my life, I wanted a trickle to just pay my cost of living so I wouldn’t have to go get a job at Burger King because those are the only two options. So he told me about this structure and set it up and I was like, “Yes, see, that’s what I want.” So even though it was an unusual choice, that’s what I set up then I transferred my company into a charitable trust before it was sold so that the entire $22 million never touched my hands. It went straight into the charitable trust. And then for the rest of my life, I just get this kind of trickle annually that pays my cost of living and plenty more. I still more than I need, and I give away most of that as well. But that’s the way I wanted to set it up. And it was an unusual choice. But I got to it kind of philosophically, after much reflection of what do I personally want, no matter what anybody else does, I don’t care what anybody else does. What do I want?
Josh
I recommend the listeners go back and rewind it a bit to what you were describing of what programming is for you. Oh, I have to comment. So Calendly, I also won’t use Calendly because you have to sync it with a google calendar and I’ve not found a way to sync it with my Thunderbird calendar. And so I also have a pride of like people are like, “Why don’t just use it, man. It’s easier.” I’m like, “There’s something that’s not getting across here.” I don’t try to explain it anymore. I mean, it’s kind of like maybe meat eaters who don’t understand why I don’t want to eat meat. It’s like, “No, I’m not. There’s no feeling whatsoever of missing out.”
Derek Sivers
Yeah, but, Josh, it’s easier. Come on, man. Just have a burger. It’s easier.
Josh
Oh, man. When I did my 72 hour water only fast. The liberation I got from that of just being like, I can skip a meal if there’s nothing around. I just skipped ten meals in a row and I feel fine. I thought up until that point, if I skipped one meal, I thought there was a big problem. Anyway, so what you were talking about, you’re doing things thinking about what you want to do and why it works for you and the way that it works for you and increasing your self awareness and acting on your values. That’s what I’m doing with sustainability. Yeah, I’m just figuring out what works, what doesn’t work. Does all these things that I don’t have, a TV, my fridge is unplugged. And across the board every time I do it, I think. “Well, now I’ve picked up the pattern.” But before I picked up the pattern, I used to think, “How am I going to do this? Is this going to work? This is a dumb idea.” Like to go for a week without buying any packaged food. People train their whole lives to become chefs in this town. Why would I not avail myself of that delicious stuff? And then I start doing it. And yeah, there’s six months of really bland food. When I was trying to figure out what to do, just steaming vegetables. And then it started coming together.
Josh
And the more that I do it, the more I start learning about what it means. I don’t want to get too vague, but what it means to be human, what it means to have a relationship with someone. What nature? How much is missing? How much of nature we lack and how much. Lately I’ve been looking at our society. You know the scene in Goodfellas. Did you see the movie Goodfellas? You know, when the helicopters around and he’s like, running around trying to get everything done and he feels like he’s being very productive and he feels like just everything’s working just perfectly. People I talked to who-- and here’s a symbol of to me modern life in New York City, probably all around in cities all around the world is someone riding a city bike with a disposable coffee cup in their hand. And if you ask them, they’ll tell you, “I don’t have time to sit down and drink up a cup of coffee.” I cannot imagine there’s pleasure in drinking coffee while you’re riding a bicycle. Like, just don’t get the coffee. And here’s what happens, if people do commit to saying, “I’m not going to drink the coffee while walking, I’m not going to get the disposal. I’m only going to sit down and drink it if that’s with my spouse at the beginning of the day or if it’s at work or if I just sit at the cafe.” When they commit and do that by the values of that they were living, they should get less done. It should be that taking that time to sit and not hurry means you’re not going to get less done. And across the board they get more done. Generally rejecting things that weren’t so important, that were actually distracting them from the more important things. And that’s my life is.
Josh
Here’s a recent instance of it is when I grew up in the cereal aisle of the supermarket, there was like boxes and boxes and boxes of cereal, and they were advertised in Saturday morning cartoons. And as far as I could tell, that was like how the world worked. There’s just boxes of cereal and they’re puffed rice and they’re puffed wheat and stuff like that. So now I have to be careful about what power I use. And over the years I switched to oats and the variety came not from the different puffness to the thing. The different processing of the grain and more of what fruits and nuts are added to it. But then now to cook. And I didn’t always cook the oats anyway. So the cop has the bulk food section has lots of grains there. And it turns out if I simply just soak the grains overnight, they become edible. I had no idea. It was a wonder to me how they made bread back whenever 10,000 years ago because so many steps. But of course there’s some I’ve never researched it. But how they could step by step to figure out adding yeast or whatever. But I still kind of wondered, how did people start to eat grains because they seemed inedible without cooking. Nnow it’s just soak them in water. Not hard. And so over there on you can’t see it. But over there I got barley. Pharaoh. Camel. Bulgur wheat. Steel cut oats.
Josh
Rye, just these grains. And I just buy them the $2 a pound. They’re like ridiculously cheap. And easy to make. They have more variety now than I had when I was getting the puff stuff. And polluting less. I did a blog post on this it’s better in every way, in every single measure I can think of in terms of convenience and cost and impact on the environment and health and flavor and texture. And yet I had no idea about it.
Derek Sivers
Did you ever meet Gary Null? Have you talked with him? Do you know who he is?
Josh
It doesn’t ring a bell. The name doesn’t ring a bell.
Derek Sivers
Oh, wow. Sorry. I just assumed you would know him. Okay. New York City based Gary Null. I lived in New York from 1990 through 99 and he was all over the radio. Then he had Gary Noll’s kind of radio show, I think it was called Natural Living with Gary Noll. It was like an hour every day on the radio of him talking about this stuff you’re talking about. Mostly focused on diet things. And he published a few different cookbooks and kind of a natural living books and yeah, quite a kindred spirit to you. I’m really surprised you hadn’t met him. He must be quite old now, but hope he’s still around anyway. Yeah, you should look him up sometime. Gary Null. He was quite a pioneer. And so in the 90s, living in New York, I used to tune in to his show almost every day for the same reason that people are tuning in to your podcast now for just inspiration and a bit of a role model to me on how to live and eat better more naturally. Healthier.
Josh
Let’s go back to the beginning of this conversation. When you were saying you didn’t know why I wanted you on and I was saying I want to bring people who I mean, the term I was using at the time was leaders in other areas. And if we relax the strict use of the term leader, but someone who’s an explorer or someone who--. I mean, what you’re doing with free software. Do you prefer open source or free? Is it a difference to you?
Derek Sivers
Well I was thinking of open source as the metaphor for what you are doing. So when I think of Joshua living his life in New York and sharing your experiments, I don’t think of that as free life. I think of that as open source life. Like you’re saying, “All right, let me take the time to show you inside what I’m doing and all of the steps and the experiments I’ve done. And here, let me share my methodologies with you.” So open source seems to be more descriptive to bridge the metaphor between software and life. Sorry. Yes. Back to software, you were saying?
Josh
That’s the sort of thing that I want to bring to people who are in sustainability. Is your attitude toward software, toward writing and also your attitude toward Calendly. I presume that people have used Calendly, but if not, probably they could figure out what it was. It’s some--
Derek Sivers
But if not, don’t. Yeah.
Josh
Yeah, like getting through business school without using Excel was a bit of a challenge, but not that big of a challenge. And it was fun to use, I guess, at the time now as LibreOffice. But at the time it was open office. I forgot what it was called then. Yeah.
Derek Sivers
Yeah open office.
Josh
Yeah. And I had to explain to people why I wouldn’t use that. Talking about it with you, I think people are like, “Oh it’s not just Josh.”
Derek Sivers
Yeah. You know, I think of this as what battles are you willing to fight and actually somewhat happy to fight like you with Linux and refusing to use the Google calendar and refusing to use the Microsoft Excel. It’s a battle that you’re actually kind of happy to fight. You’re willing to fight it. Yeah, I think of that with my tech minimalism. I have a thing that I’m very against digital pollution. So if you go to my website, so go to sive.rs. And if you do view source and look at my HTML code, I write every line of HTML by hand. I don’t use WordPress or any of these generators that might be easy for the person to use them, but they spew a ton of digital pollution down the wire. They’ll generate hundreds of thousands of lines of HTML code where 15 lines would have done just fine. And then everybody wonders why their phone seems so slow. It’s because people are lazy when using things like WordPress that spew out way too much code that is not necessary. So yeah, I write every line of my website by hand. And you know what? That’s a battle I’m willing to fight. I know it’s an uphill battle. I know it’s unpopular. I’m not going to convince everybody to be like me, but every now and then I convince maybe one person every month or so, and that’s fine. I’m happy to fight that fight. I’m not going to give up on that.
Josh
It’s a direction I want to go in. WordPress is so annoying for those reasons. I mean, it’s free software and when I say free, it’s capital F, you know, free as in speech, not as in beer. I know what you mean. And do you know the website Low Tech magazine?
Derek Sivers
Yes. I admire that guy, too. Yeah.
Josh
He’s been on the podcast and that’s why I unplugged the fridge. There was an article in there it was about Vietnam, but it’s about how places don’t use refrigeration so much. I just walked over and unplugged the fridge and figured out what I would do with the stuff after it was unplugged because I’d learned from experience. Analyzing and planning tends to delay. Man. I love that sight. I think I might like that site more than my own. Do you know not just bikes?
Derek Sivers
No, I don’t know that one.
Josh
Okay. There’s three sites that I really love. There’s not just bikes. Is this guy who is from Canada and he moved to a lot of places and ended up in Amsterdam. And he’s like, “Why do I like Dutch cities so much”? And he’s done a series of videos on It’s not just Bikes. There’s lots of stuff of how the Dutch people--. They protested putting more and more cars in the cities. Amsterdam is not just cycling friendly because it’s that way. That was deliberate and lots of trial and error. And a cultural thing that they’re keeping and it’s still going. Then there’s do the math, which is this UCSD professor of astrophysics Caltech trained. He something like ten years ago was like, “What would work? Could we put a satellite in space to beam energy down to earth? Would that work?” And he does the math. He’s like, “Would fusion work?” Does the math. And he does all the math on all these things.
Derek Sivers
Did you read the book: Where’s my flying car?
Josh
I haven’t.
Derek Sivers
Oh, also right up your alley. You should find that, is a masterpiece. It’s audacious. Yeah. Where’s my flying car? It was released initially, independently self-published, and was just now republished by Stripe Press in the past year. It is right up your alley, So good. But it’s because it’s the combination of that. He does the math on saying why don’t we have flying cars? And along the way he does the math of using nuclear power versus fossil fuels and things like that and does the math and comes to some amazing conclusions. Yeah, I think you would like it and therefore I think your listeners would like it.
Josh
I’m glad to have brought your ethos, your philosophy. I think there’s a lot more people out there who have that in many areas. But with respect to the environment, I think there’s a lot of people who get that. One way to put it is, to get anything you want whenever you want it, however, no matter who pays the price. That’s not necessarily a better life. I certainly as a kid growing up, there were kids, classmates that were spoiled and everyone knew their life would be better if they got no sometimes. I mean, we didn’t think that way as kids and maybe I was spoiled. I don’t remember. But I don’t think they knew. I think if you asked them, “Would you prefer to be told no sometimes?” I think they would say, “No. I prefer to be told yes sometimes.” There’s a lot of that going around in America. Maybe New Zealand, too. I don’t know. I haven’t been there. But certainly there’s a lot of countries and and I think people have a sense of maybe a few limitations, even if self imposed might actually improve my life.
Derek Sivers
That’s what I think about when people ask me about the Openbsd operating system that I use. Openbsd does even less than Linux does. And I like that. I like that I cannot watch Netflix on my Openbsd computer. I cannot do Zoom, and I’m totally okay with that. That sets a limitation for me that I’m cool with. Basically, if it’s not a completely free open source program, it won’t run on Openbsd. Nobody, no closed source company makes binaries for the Openbsd operating system. So by using Openbsd it automatically just ensures that everything I’m using is free software. But also I enjoy the limitations. I enjoy not being able to use Spotify or something like that on the same computer that I’m meant to be writing my books on. So my Openbsd computer is my main computer for almost everything I do except the occasional multimedia interview like this where I’ll use something else. But yeah, my main computer for almost everything is Openbsd, which I enjoy it because of its restrictions.
Josh
If I known I would worked out a different way of doing this, we wouldn’t have to use the software that we’re using.
Derek Sivers
No, no, it’s fine. I’ve got a good setup here. I gave in a while ago and so I’ve got an old Panasonic DSLR camera which is piped in with an HDMI cable into a thing, into a tablet with a good microphone and I’ve got my little sound booth set up now. I’m used to this. I do this a couple of times a week, so it’s fine. I have a separate little setup for that. That’s not my usual day to day computing.
Josh
And your lighting’s a lot better than mine. I look like the Batman guy. The Two-Face, like on one side is a total shadow because there’s no lights in here and it’s bright outside. Right. And there was something else I was going to comment on. Once I said Batman, I forgot about the other stuff. Yeah. Here’s what it was. I had this really old cell phone and I don’t like to buy cell phones, so it was like eight, ten years old. And they upgraded the system and they forced me to upgrade my phone. Or they said they’d give me a free phone. And I didn’t like the free phone. I was like, “No, give me back the old one.” And they’re like, “You can’t use it. We’re upgrading the system.” And I was like, “Well, I’ll figure something out.” And they’re like, “Well, actually, we’ve already started switching you and we can’t undo it.” And I was like, “I didn’t say to do that.” I was so pissed. So the old phone was bricked and the new phone was like this giant phone I couldn’t stand. And I got really pissed. And there was a few months when I was trying to search around and figure out what I could do. Then I ended up finding this service that’s like-- how do I put it? It’s like second tier, it’s much cheaper. But if the bandwidth is really crowded, I might get not great service. But I live in Manhattan, so it’s like there’s plenty of service here and it ended up dropping my cost by half. So now I’m happy that they did that. But here’s the downside. Here’s what I’m getting at, is that I needed a different phone and some friend of mine who buys new phones unconscionably was like, “Take my old phone.” And I was like, “Oh, also I want it to be small.” So it’s old one by-- I can’t even say the name of the company, but it’s a piece of fruit.
Josh
And it is fucking torture using this thing like I cannot stand this, I was really happy to have the Apple 2. That was a different company, Right? Right. you could open it up and take things out and put things back in. Right? It was.
Derek Sivers
Right? It was yours. And the iPhone is not yours.
Josh
Yeah. It’s like every app I can possibly take off, I remove. I think there are no pictures on the phone right now. It’s got like 120GB and I’m using, like, one. Because I don’t want to, the less I use this thing. I’m looking at it. It’s horrible. I mean, it’s my hotspot, so it’s my only internet. I’d be much happier using a different phone.
Derek Sivers
Oh, right. Yeah, they do make a good hotspot.
Josh
The big thing here was that no money flowed from me to this company. And as far as I can tell. I didn’t have to get a new phone. So, you know, very minimally causing more cobalt to be mined and all that other stuff.
Derek Sivers
Right? Yeah.
Josh
But the design is so infuriating, not infuriating. It’s just totally against my way of living. It’s very we want to make it easy for you to do what we want you to do.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, exactly. Which is what most people want. And so I understand it as a business decision. But yeah, that’s why my computer feels like mine and I do everything on my compute. Which, by the way, my computer is like a ten year old desktop.
Derek Sivers
It’s a silent PC. I think if you go to silent pc.com, it was really important to me to have a fanless silent PC. So like yeah 10, 12 years ago now I had a silent PC built and I’m still using it just fine. So that feels like mine because I can hack it any which way I want to do exactly what I want. And then you give me a phone with these apps and I can’t, it won’t even let me put a file. This blew my mind because I sell my ebooks and audiobooks directly.
Derek Sivers
Somebody said, “Hey, I bought your e-book on my phone, but I’m not able to open it in the e-book reader on my phone.” I said, “Of course you can just go--- oh my God, oh my God, you can’t.” If you like the Safari browser, you can download the epub file and then the list of sharing is like you can share it with an SMS or an email, but you can’t share it to your book. And if you click it, it won’t because it’s sandboxed. So it’s like, oh my God, there’s actually not a way you have to have an iCloud account and share it to your iCloud account to put it up into Apple’s cloud and then back down to your phone through a different program just to read it, even though it’s on the same device. I was like, “Whoa, that’s kind of evil.”
Derek Sivers
But on the other hand, I understand it’s a business decision that most of the users of that phone do not even care about the concept of a file. That’s why streaming music kind of hit so big where it’s like the the era of the MP3 collections did not last very long because most people don’t even want to have to think in those terms. They just play the music. Whereas to me, MP3 collections was a wonderful solution that I can pay for the album, download it as MP3, and now I own it on any device forever for the rest of my life. That works for me, but not for most. And so same thing with what you and I are describing and how we want to use our phones. The way you and I want to do it is not what most people want. And so, yeah, if we could hack up a device to do exactly what we want, it might feel more like ours, but instead I just feel complete alienation from my phone. My phone is not mine. It’s just a necessary thing I use to communicate with friends around the world. But that’s it.
Josh
Was it before or after we hit record, did I tell you about the, what is politics videocast podcast?
Derek Sivers
After, I’m curious to go look into that. Yeah. What is politics? Yeah.
Josh
Okay. Oh, did you read the book The Dawn of Everything, by any chance? So it talks about a lot of things. One of the big questions it asks is how come we, as a culture, as a species, have gotten stuck in--? We’re unable to change our political systems very much. And it doesn’t really answer the question. It’s like 700 page book. I recommend it to anyone. But what is politics, I found out about it because he criticizes the book and the few things that he missed. And one of the things he talks about is how hierarchies form according to The Dawn of Everything you might know David Graeber, because he’s one of the authors, and he wrote Debt and he wrote Bullshit Jobs. Debt the first 5000 years he since passed. And he came up with the phrase “We are the 99%” with the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Josh
And they said if you look throughout history, going back something like 40,000 years, you see a lot of experimentation according to them, of sometimes people would live this way, sometimes people would live that way. So sometimes there were hierarchies, sometimes there weren’t hierarchies, sometimes there was a lot of freedom. Sometimes there was more structure. And they were saying that there were some places where they lived one way, six months of the year and a different way, another six months of the year, like one part of the year they’d live in some sort of hierarchy and other times it would be much more free, egalitarian, immediate return hunter gatherer. And according to them, because the same people lived one way, one time and another way another time. That must mean that people are freely choosing between one way or the other because they’re in the same place. In the What Is Politics podcast, he says no one chooses to be in a dominance hierarchy except the person at the top. Maybe a few henchmen. So no one is like, “Hey, we’re living in a free altarian society. Let’s for six months out of the year, I’m going to work really hard and provide you with food and you just eat it.” Like no one chooses that. So he says the way it happens is hierarchies form in human cultures when there’s a necessary resource that can be controlled and there’s no alternative.
Josh
So in most of human history of our ancestors, for something like 300,000 years in Africa, there was fruits and vegetables that you could dig up or pick and animals were running around. And if I told you what to do and you didn’t want to do it, you just walk away because I can’t stop you. If you get to a place where I mean, certainly agriculture will create this situation, but there’s lots of situations where there’d be a supply of food that had to be stored over some period of time and the stores of food could be taken. So someone has to protect that food. So now I have a resource that can be controlled and can be attacked and you get dominance hierarchies. So now what? This has changed. So now whenever I see something where people feel compelled to do something, where you’re stuck in a hierarchy, I think to myself, what’s the resource that can be controlled? So the cell phones are really big on this. They want to control your access, their walled gardens or in business terms, you’d say you want to create a barriers to entry, not barriers to entry, but switching costs and things like that. So in sustainability, I look around and what’s the resource that’s being controlled right now? I mean, fossil fuels uranium will increase. That fusion will increase that.
Josh
And I think we kind of sense we don’t like that there’s a lot of freedom that we don’t have. And I think we sense that someone’s controlling us. Someone’s preventing us a certain amount of freedom. Long time ago, if you lost your job, you could forage. I’m mixing up different schemes there. But like for most of human history, if someone told you what to do, you could walk away and go somewhere else and find a different band to join with. Now, we don’t have that. In fact, if you don’t have a job for most people, if you don’t have a job for a very short period of time, your life could end. I mean, you got nothing. That’s not a whole lot of freedom. What fossil fuels bring. Very little. Well, up until the Green Revolution, fossil fuels didn’t bring things that were necessary for life. People feel like we need to fly. Or we need refrigerators.
Josh
I thought that. And then I challenged myself to go for a year without flying. And I found myself getting better, not worse. So not only do I not need it, I prefer not it. Same with the refrigerator. I mean, my food is more fresh, more delicious, cheaper, more convenient. And everyone out there is like, oh, but some people don’t have access. Well, this increases the access. The more I shop at McDonald’s, the more I’m funding extraction of value and time from places that probably have the least. So I don’t accept things the way they are when I don’t like those things.
Josh
And if we wean ourselves off of this non-necessary resource that we feel is necessary. Well, the Green Revolution made it necessary and a few other things that now people live on food that requires fertilizer, artificial fertilizer and artificial pesticides. I’m not going on too long, but we’re touching on this control of a resource and people feeling that they have an alternative and you’re living free of that. If I’m not extrapolating too much.
Derek Sivers
In some ways, not in every way. Like my phone example is a place where I just shrug and give up. Saying, “Well, there is no phone that does what I want.” So, “Oh, well, I’m going to use this phone that everybody uses because that’s what my kid uses. And I can talk with my kid and my kid can send me pictures.” Because I use the same brand that he uses. So I just shrug and give up in that aspect. Like, “Oh, well, that’s worth it to me.” So my kid can send me pictures and my phone is not a big part of my life because it’s not something that feels like mine. But yeah, I guess we all draw the line in different places, don’t we? We all have to decide where it’s worth it to us. I think of myself as a bad vegan like belief wise. Practice wise. Sometimes I eat meat because that’s just where I draw the line. It’s like most of the way is good enough for me in that aspect. Yeah, in different aspects of our life. We decide where we’re going to fight the fight.
Josh
I’m hearing something. That also I said earlier that I have some weaknesses like community I’m not connecting with so well. And that’s something I think you have a strength in that I have a weakness in. You’re talking about these things and it sounds fun. I talk about these things. I don’t think I sound fun when I talk about, I’m carrying the battery and solar panels up 11 flights of stairs. To me internally, I’m feeling like that isn’t necessarily fun, but it’s rewarding and meaningful. There’s a video online. It’s one of my favorite videos online. It’s LeBron James practicing for one hour. It’s just him and a personal trainer. And on the face of it, it’s a really boring video. But if you see him play, it’s just him practicing the basics. But practicing the basics is how we get great. He doesn’t practice. The spin moves. Right. So I feel like I’m like that. So it’s a really boring video, unless you really love exploring your potential and reaching your potential by practicing the basics. But you sound more fun, I think. I think most people that’s not accessible. I think they’re like, I don’t want to do that. I just want to do what’s fun already, like what’s right. I just want to go shopping.
Derek Sivers
But maybe it is a fun challenge to me. Like, yeah, we haven’t talked about my little fridge, but I worked a long time to find a completely silent and vertical door. So the door on top when you open it, the cold air doesn’t go down onto the floor. The cold air stays in. So it took a long time and it was kind of expensive. But I found a fridge that was sold by a marine sailboat accessories company. It’s like the kind of little fridge that I forget the name of the technology right now, but there are no moving parts. It is completely silent because I also never liked the view of a fridge. So yeah, I found a completely silent fridge. It’s just a tiny little thing. You can just run it off of gas or it uses very little electricity and it’s tiny. It’s the size of an old fashioned TV or something like that. Like a how big is that? Like foot and a half across and and two feet deep and yeah.
Derek Sivers
It’s just enough food fo me. And it has this top little rail that provides the cold and it’s just enough room to put a little tiny ice tray on. So if I want to have ice cubes, I can put a little ice tray there. And then, yeah, every night when I go to bed, I just turn it off anyway and I get up in the morning and I turn it on and that little thing cost more than a usual fridge and it took a lot of work to find it, but it makes me happy.
Derek Sivers
Yeah. When I’m living in a little apartment that is in a very quiet neighborhood in New Zealand next to the forest, and I love the fact that I don’t hear from a fridge all day. When I go over to that little tiny fridge and open it up and it just makes me happy. It makes me smile.
Derek Sivers
And same as using the Openbsd operating system, which is so beautifully minimalistic and not having any of the usual bloat on it, that most people’s operating systems, even a lot of Linux distributions to me like Ubuntu is like too bloated. I want my damn minimalist. You know only what I need. Like making my website. I want my lines of code to be only what I put there myself. No line that’s not necessary and it makes me happy. It’s a battle I am happy to fight because when I’m done I go, “Oh yeah, look at that.” God, it makes me happy to have my bespoke customized operating system.
Josh
In the language of does it give you energy or take energy. Does it give you time or take time?
Derek Sivers
Oh, gives. Absolutely. I mean even if it takes time. It’s a hobby I enjoy. I mean, you probably were like this in the 90s with first learning Linux. I spent how many hundreds of hours? Well, okay, at least tens of hours installing Linux, learning how to fix things in Linux, building my own computer, installing, just learning things from the core. It was maybe hundreds of hours total over 20 years, but they were fun, interesting hours. Other people spent those learning about Game of Thrones characters. I spent them learning about rtxdi and IT files or whatever, and and I enjoyed it. And in the end, I had this deeper satisfaction of the way that a carpenter spends hundreds of hours learning to be a good carpenter, and then they make a table or a chair or a bed. That’s just the way they want it. And they look at that and like, “Yeah, I made that chair. I love that chair. It’s just what I wanted. And I made it.” What a deeper happiness. If we think of happy as an overloaded word that has too many meanings.
Derek Sivers
There’s shallow happy and deep happy. So shallow happy is eating ice cream. Deep happy is being prouder of yourself for not eating the ice cream. Right? So shallow happy might just be going and buying a chair and deeper happy would be that like, “I made that chair. Yes, it was work, but I did that.” To me, that’s a deeper happiness.
Josh
Man, I’m really glad you--
Derek Sivers
And that’s what you’re doing. And we could just wrap up the conversation there, symphony. And that’s the point of what Joshua is sharing with all of you listeners and his life. Yes, it’s a struggle. Yes, It’s a little extra effort to not just hop on the plane and get the McDonald’s but yeah, it’s a deeper happiness to live this way.
Josh
Yeah. And so when people say, “But I want to spend more time with my family, like you spend better time with your family.” Well, you won’t live so far apart from them in the first place. Yeah, when you were talking about blood is thicker than water. In your case, not figuratively speaking. At first I felt like, people all wanted to spend more time with their family. And maybe I’ve read this somewhere or maybe I came up with it on my own. I don’t remember. But people don’t want to be that close with their family. They want to be far enough away that their parents can’t just drop in on them unannounced, but close enough that they can go there and spend a day or two in the holidays. If airplanes are around, that means they’ll be flying distance away. If airplanes aren’t around, that means they’ll be driving or train or bike distance away. Same relationship, but without the airplane. It’s much less hassle to do. I mean, they can increase the hassle if they want to make it difficult to get dropped in on. But it doesn’t change the dynamic between the family. Now, if you live flying distance away and then you suddenly learn that flying pollutes and people are suffering all around the world dying by the millions already, then you’re kind of stuck because you’re flying distance way. If you want to spend time with them, you have to fund this machine that pumps pollution into the air and displaces people from their land and so forth.
Josh
Okay, so now I’m going to want to talk about Jim Oaks. Earlier the podcast guest who writes about Lincoln and abolition, I think it was reading one of his books. I came across a Lincoln quote, Abraham Lincoln, quote, that is the heart of our sustainability challenge right now. I’ll share it with you. “Nothing damages you more than to do something that you believe is wrong.”
Derek Sivers
Mm. I like that.
Josh
And he didn’t say then to do something wrong or that I believe is wrong or to own slaves. When you know that what you’re doing is wrong. Your own internal conflict. There’s no way to escape it if you keep doing something you believe is wrong. We’ll try to deny and suppress and lie and cheat to get around it, to not face it. But once we get locked into that, so now we live flying distance away because we grew up in a world through no fault of our own. I was born into the world where flying was viewed as good. But then if I create life where I have to keep flying and the headlines keep saying, “Well, the consequences of that are...” Now I have to suppress and deny to avoid facing what Abraham Lincoln says damages more than anything else. I tend to agree the kind of openness you’re talking about that you speak about in your life is one of the antidotes to that.
Derek Sivers
Day to day making yourself happy because you’re living the way you want to.
Josh
Well, that’s a result. But what I was getting at was that sharing your flaws, openly saying, here’s some things that I’m doing that aren’t perfect, here’s some things that are troubling me. Most people, including myself, don’t do that very well. But when we do it, then we expose our flaws, the things that we believe are wrong. And then only then can we do something about them as compared to if we don’t acknowledge these things or suppress and deny them or say what I do doesn’t matter. Then we come up with these things like what I do doesn’t matter. Or only governments and corporations can make a difference.
Josh
I’m curious is it making sense? Does it make sense why I suspect you might be a great guest for this podcast?
Derek Sivers
Yeah and thanks. It was a really fun conversation. I’m glad you kept asking. And I’m sorry it took so long. But yeah, I had never thought of the comparisons between how I live and what you’re doing, so that was a wonderful concept to bridge.
Josh
Yeah. Deep happy. I don’t know if you’ve used that phrase before. Deep happy versus shallow happy.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, I think about i alot. It’s one of those things-- my kid is ten years old now, and I’ve taught it to him since he was only 3 or 4. Like the difference between deep, happy and shallow happy. To me that’s a huge distinction that I’m happy. I pursue deep happiness. I tend to avoid shallow happy.
Derek Sivers
People think that I look like a workaholic, but it’s because I’m pursuing deep happiness, not shallow happy. I don’t spend many days on the beach eating ice cream. I do spend many days writing and programming and including being with my kid. And those are to me, like the deep happys
Josh
That could be a good place to end. Do you want to end there or do you want anything else to close with?
Derek Sivers
That’s great. Thanks for having me. Anybody listening to this? Go to my website and say hello. I answer every email and I love to meet strangers from around the world. Especially anybody that’s a fan of Josh’s show is somebody that I would like to meet.
Josh
Derek Sivers, thank you very much.
Derek Sivers
Thanks, Josh.