Tim Ferriss
host: Tim Ferriss
minimalism, satisficing, fame and success, mentorship, learning, decision making, beliefs
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Transcript:
Tim Ferriss
Should we kick this party off? What do you think?
Derek Sivers
Ready!
Tim Ferriss
Alright. So I thought we would start. First of all, cheers.
Derek Sivers
Cheers! Thanks to Matt.
Tim Ferriss
Yes. Matt Mullenweg, thank you for the scotch blend, which we shall enjoy here. So I'll take a sip first. We have scotch, we have Go Go Gadget Black Tea. What is this called again?
Derek Sivers
Go Go Goa. Like Goa India, you know, the region.
Tim Ferriss
I do have a backup of Diet Coke in case. This is Podcaster Speedball. So I expect this is gonna be a fantastic episode. And for those who are not watching, or those who may not have video in front of them, we have two different sized scotch glasses. And if you were to walk into Derek's kitchen, you would find a wide assortment of glasses, namely one other glass which is yet larger. It's like a Russian nesting doll of three separate glasses. And those are the only glasses you have in the house.
Derek Sivers
Yeah. And I didn't buy any of them.
Tim Ferriss
So please explain more, because you walk the talk of certain types of minimalism. There are those out there who may not believe some of it, or may be skeptical, I'm telling you guys, he's got three glasses in his kitchen.
Derek Sivers
And this is my only pair of pants. So these three glasses, I don't even think about it because I just think about having what's enough. There's only me and my kid here. And so you come over and you say, "Okay, let's have some scotch." And you're like, "Do you have any shot glasses?" I was like, "No, that's all I got." I just have these glasses and honestly, I don't even know where they came from.
Tim Ferriss
But they work.
Derek Sivers
They work. And this is enough. And these little bamboo cups I got for my kid so he wouldn't break them.
Tim Ferriss
So I have a feeling we will come back to this in a sense because as a foreshadowing for people who are listening, if you have not read the Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz, he talks about maximizers and satisficers. So I think we'll probably come back to this in a bunch of different ways. But suffice to say, you're the embodiment of minimalism. You also have two very nice suits that act as your sort of outside-in-the-world attire. Which makes sense to me.
Derek Sivers
And only two. It's again it's this idea of enough. At home I wear junk, basically home pajamas. I think of them as pajamas. The big baggy t-shirt that somebody handed you at a conference and you would never wear that outside the house. But Michael Browne in London: When I lived in London And right before COVID hit, I thought, you know, I'm living here by Savile Row in London, I'm about to leave England forever, so I'm going to get a custom made suit. So I looked at Sartorial Talks - an interesting YouTube channel about somebody diving deep into like the craft of fine clothing, and he recommended this guy, Michael Browne in London. So I went to Michael Browne and he said, "What would you like?" I said, "You're the expert, just dress me." So he told me what to wear and I do.
Tim Ferriss
And because I have a little bit more context here, he would ask, "So what type of shoes are you gonna wear?" And you're like, "What shoes should I wear?" "Well, how are you thinking about X?" And you'd be like, "Wow should I be thinking about X?" And this is something I've thought more and more about, which is it's not so much quantity versus quality because there's a whole spectrum, right? You can have things that are very good and you have half a dozen of them, I'm making this up of course. You can have one thing that is the best, subjectively or objectively, and that's it, you have one. Or you could have a ton of things and you're like, "Hey, I don't care about this thing. So this is a disposable item or service" or fill in the blank in my mind. So I think we'll probably talk more about this.
Tim Ferriss
But what comes to mind for me also, when I think about, say, your suits, they're great suits, you're happy with them, you look good in them. And I think about, in contrast, my accumulation of ill-fitting suits, in part because my body weight has fluctuated so much in my life, right? I've gone from 145 to 220, in both cases being pretty lean. So I have like kind of fat boy Tim jacket, and then I've got like really, really skinny, emaciated Tim jacket and then I've got things in between, but I don't need most of those and yet I still have them. Right?
Tim Ferriss
Not from the perspective of fit, but Kevin Kelly in his new book, which is, I think it's simply called Excellent Life Advice, something like that. And one of the bits of advice was along the lines of, "You know how you have that bad pen? Throw out the bad pen."
Derek Sivers
It's so liberating.
Tim Ferriss
You don't have the bad pen.
Derek Sivers
It's about self-respect, isn't it? Even something as simple as a pen, when I've done that, I went, "I'm better than this!" (laughing) "This pen is not going to rule over me any longer!"
Tim Ferriss
You're only as good as the worst pen in your house.
Tim Ferriss
So let's start with a story. And I have not heard this story because you began telling me and I said I don't wanna hear it - let's save it. Scuba diving.
Derek Sivers
Scuba diving, and what it taught me about empathy and identity.
Tim Ferriss
Amazing. I'll listen to the TED Talk.
Derek Sivers
So, I was in Iceland, and I never had any intention to go scuba diving, but I was at that place in Þingvellir Park, if you've ever been there, where the two continental plates meet, the American continental plate meets the Eurasian continental plate, and there's this deep fissure in the ground, but it's crystal clear water, so you can see all the way down. I'm like, "Oooh, I wanna go in there!" It just looks like Evian spring water, you know, poured over rocks with nothing clouding the water.
Derek Sivers
I was in Iceland for a month, so I went to take scuba diving lessons. And the instructor was great. He's at https://dive.is And at the time, it was just him in his basement, and it was me and one other guy learning scuba diving. So we did the practice in the swimming pool, and we did all the theoretical stuff. You learned scuba?
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
Derek Sivers
The swimming pool was great, and I love the fact that it's calm, that you don't need to panic about holding your breath, it's just slow and meditative.
Derek Sivers
But then the first time we went into the cold ocean, and to be clear, I had to wear one of those giant dry suits. You're like a spaceman with four layers of rubber and stuff over the rubber. It's very claustrophobic. And then I get into the water and it gets down to about 20 meters. And I'm just like, "Oh God, I hate this. I hate it. I need to go. I just want to go back home. I want to be on the internet. I want to be emailing my friend. I want to talk to my fried. I just want to get out of here." So I tapped on his tank and I went up to the top.
Tim Ferriss
You pointed to go up.
Derek Sivers
Yeah. And I tore off my mask. And I said, "I'm just going to go. You guys go ahead. I'm going to wait on the side there. You go ahead."
Derek Sivers
And he was so sweet. He was so cool. He looked at me and just stopped for a second and he said, "Hold on a second." He said, "It's a really nice day today." He said, "Look around. Look at those mountains." And he goes, "See? It's a nice day today." He said, "Yeah. Look at what a beautiful area we're in right now. See?" And then he said, "You know, if you were to leave now," he said, "I know you're flying back in seven days. If you were to leave now, you wouldn't be able to complete the training and you wouldn't get your certification. I know you don't want that." He said, "Just relax for a second."
Derek Sivers
And so I just relaxed for a second. You know, you inflate your BCDs, you're just buoyant and you float. And I thought, all right, yeah, what was I scared of? So I went, okay, I'm ready. And so we go back down and I completed it and it was great. It was no problem and I love being underwater. It's wonderful.
Derek Sivers
Okay, so that was a completion of my training. The next day was my first official dive. So we're there with a dozen other people that have flown to Iceland from around the world, including this couple from Germany that were bragging about how many dives they've done. "We've done over 100 dives!" And it was, and so they were acting like know-it-alls, but then they're like, "Oh, dry suit! We've never done dry suit before!" And so they're getting into dry suit, and yeah, it's tough.
Tim Ferriss
It's different.
Derek Sivers
And so I get underwater, but this time I'm elated. I'm underwater just where I wanted to be in that crystal clear fissure there in Þingvellir. I was like, wow. And at 20 meters down....
Tim Ferriss
For the yanks, 60 feet or so. That's pretty deep. I mean, that's a deep dive.
Derek Sivers
The bottom of where you're supposed to go as a beginner. And at the bottom, I see the German girl by herself and her partner's not there! I do the dive manners we were taught, where I gave her the okay ("OK?") symbol. And she gave that "NOT OK!" symbol. And I was like, wait, did I remember wrong? And I was like, "OK?". And again, she goes, "NOT OK!". And I see her eyes are looking crazy. And I went, oh shit, I've been trained for this. Oh my God, I can do this. Okay. I held on to her BCD, held on to mine, inflated hers a bit, asked if she needed my mouthpiece. And she said no, and I helped her get up to the surface. And she gets up to the surface and she rips her mask off just like I did. She said, "I don't like this. I don't like... No, this is not good. I don't... I hate this. I feel bad. I want to go."
Derek Sivers
And I just imitated the dive instructor exactly. I said, "Well, hold on a second." I said, "Look around." I said, "It's a really nice day." I said, "Isn't this great?" I said, "You see those mountains over there?" I said, "Just relax a second." I said, "I'm here with you. It's okay." And so she calmed down and I saw her do the same thing I did and calm down. And then her boyfriend showed up.
Tim Ferriss
Where the hell was the boyfriend?
Derek Sivers
I don't know. But he took her away.
Tim Ferriss
"You're on your own, babe. I'm outta here."
Derek Sivers
I've accidentally missed one step in the storytelling of this that I should have included. The night in-between those two days, I went to the hotel that night thinking, "What the fuck? I think I just had a panic attack!" Like, I'm not one of those people. Like, I have no respect for people who have panic attacks because usually panic attacks - to me - I think of like people who are just like "Oh no my cake is late I'm gonna die!" and they freak out over shallow little things and it seems to me like they have no perspective on life! So then I have no respect for that kind of silly panic, right? But I had just panicked! And it was involuntary. That night I had this moment like "Wow what does that mean? That I am a panic attack person now? Have I changed categories from a not panic attack person to a panic attack person?" I just kind of fell asleep with no answers to that. So then yeah, then the next day had this thing happen with a German couple.
Derek Sivers
I feel like that experience taught me two kinds of empathy. We categorize people - like I just said the type of person who has a panic attack - and we think of a category of person that's say like depressed, fat, homeless, divorced, bankrupt. And you think, "I would never be those things. I'm not that kind of person." But I thought, wow, a lot of these things are involuntary. It's not like somebody chooses to be depressed. And I realized I had been unfairly categorizing people the same way I had unfairly categorized panic attack people 'cause now I am one, right? I had that.
Derek Sivers
Addiction, right? Like somebody who said they would never be an addict, then they find themselves addicted to something that seemed harmless at first, and they have to admit, "Oh my God, I'm an addict." But then I realized that, yeah, someday these categories might be me. Or anybody else, if you're categorizing people, this might be you.
Derek Sivers
But then the thing that happened on the second day, where there's another category that we don't think we could be, which is like hero, rescuer, leader, athlete....
Tim Ferriss
Things with a positive connotation.
Derek Sivers
... millionaire. Some people in the past few years have become millionaires, which is something that they held in a different category and thought, "I'd never be that." And suddenly they have to admit, "I'm a multi-millionaire now." It's a category. So I realized that even those categories can be involuntary. that you can suddenly be a rescuer, even if you never intended to be one, just through the power of imitation. You can deliberately step into these roles by imitating others.
Tim Ferriss
So how do you now think about labels that you apply to yourself? And I ask that in part because as you're speaking, I think of how it can not only be unfair to say "I'm this and not that, or that person is this and not that." But if you're applying it to yourself and you have very narrow categories, so you have very finely tuned labels, I think it makes you fragile. Because you are susceptible to the the whim of chance in a way that I think is not particularly resilient. If suddenly your circumstances change and you find yourself in a different category, it can be really upsetting. And how do you think about what you call or don't call yourself?
Tim Ferriss
We were talking a little bit about this at lunch before we recorded, right? There are people who are like, "I have read stoicism and now I am a stoic." And there's this identity that's assumed and these labels that are applied. And as as I love stoicism, even though I invoked that name, I do think you have to be careful with labels. So, how do you think about that for yourself?
Tim Ferriss
Well-timed for a sip of scotch.
Derek Sivers
"Well, young man, sit down." (imitating an old man after sipping his scotch, to deliver a lecture)
Derek Sivers
By the way, audience, the hardest thing about hitting record on this is that Tim and I have these like crazy all over the place conversations in the forest and whatnot, That it's hard to remember that we need to close tangents today.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, that's true.
Derek Sivers
Usually we open a tangent and close it two days later.
Tim Ferriss
Yep, that's very true.
Derek Sivers
We have to close tangents today.
Derek Sivers
So, do you want me to go on my anti -ism tangent?
Tim Ferriss
Well, let's see. Is there some unfinished business that we need to tidy up first?
Derek Sivers
Well there's a tiny idea around the identity, which is to just admit that whatever you are is now, and whatever your preference is now. So like when my kid says, "I hate tomatoes," I say, "... today." And he goes, "Oh, right, I hate tomatoes today." Because it's leaving open the possibility that you might change your mind tomorrow.
Derek Sivers
And he did!
Derek Sivers
I hate olives. I hate, hate, hate olives so badly.
Tim Ferriss
You? Derek?
Derek Sivers
Yeah. And he picked this up from me, right? So he's like, "I hate olives too," but he was just imitating me. And then we went to Subway one day. I was so proud of him. He walked up to the counter and he said, "I would like olives." And they said, "Do you want anything else?" He said, "Ham, just ham and olives." And they loaded this sandwich full of olives. And I looked at it, horrified. He ate it and loved it! And he goes, "I like olives now." It's like, yes, I love that switching between identities.
Derek Sivers
And so I used to call myself an entrepreneur. And other people would call me an entrepreneur. And then I did my first book that was about that. So I got categorized as an entrepreneur.
Tim Ferriss
Great book, by the way.
Derek Sivers
Thank you for the forward!
Tim Ferriss
Anything You Want, right? I recommend people check it out. I've read it multiple times, it's a great book.
Derek Sivers
I love that you did the forward. Thank you for that.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, you're welcome.
Derek Sivers
For years I kept calling myself an entrepreneur until one day I realized, wait a second, this has expired! Somebody who was an athlete in high school can't keep calling himself an athlete forever.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, I've learned that one.
Derek Sivers
You have to keep earning that title or it expires, right? Same thing with being a good friend. Same thing with any labels that we call ourselves. You can't just keep using that forever. You have to keep it up or it expires. So if you realize that your previous identity is expiring, you have the choice then of either admitting, "I was an entrepreneur, I was a musician". Or if you don't want it to expire, well then you need to do something about it! And like actively be a good friend, not just keep calling yourself a good friend, or go actively be an entrepreneur if you wanna keep calling yourself that.
Tim Ferriss
So maybe skipping ahead because I do like mixing tangents. But that's the nature of conversation, especially when you have Go Go Gadget Tea and scotch involved. We were talking about this the other night at dinner. Revising. We use language, we're creatures of language. Part of the reason that we become such a dominant pest on the planet is our ability to use concepts and abstraction, right? And you'd mentioned at one point, thinking of yourself after entrepreneur as a writer, how did you make that switch?
Derek Sivers
Looking to your heroes. I call it my people compass. That like if you're not sure which way to go, you can ask yourself, "Well, who do I admire? Who do I like?" So for me, this was like, as I was not sure what direction I wanted to go, since I am an entrepreneur and I'm a programmer and I'm an author. I actually thought about it in that order. Maybe programmer first, entrepreneur, and then writing seemed to be something I was doing as just like a waste product.
Tim Ferriss
(laughing) A metabolite of your other focus?
Derek Sivers
As I'm doing my thing, if I learn some lessons, there, pffft, I just put them into writing. But then I noticed that all of my heroes were authors. These were the people I looked up to the most. And that helped me realize my values. It helped reveal my values.
Derek Sivers
So ultimately, we want to be our ideal selves, right? And I think that your heroes are your idealized self, right? That's kind of why we idolize certain people, is we want to be like them. So that kind of reveals what your values are. So in that moment, I realized that's right. In my heart, I'm actually more of an author. And programming is fun, I love programming, I love what it empowers, and I think we're gonna talk about that later. And I'm not an entrepreneur anymore. So in that moment, I was like, that's it. I'm really an author now, aren't I? Wow, that feels weird to me. I never thought of myself as an author.
Derek Sivers
I think this is, the reason I call it a people compass is it's related to when you're not sure what business to start. Like a lot of people are, you know, they're looking at the many different options right now. The way I think about it is asking yourself, what kind of people do I like being around? Because these are the people you're going to be serving. You have to like them. So you want to love your customers and love serving them. Because ultimately, even if it's the money, what you really, really want is the emotional fulfillment, right?
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, totally.
Derek Sivers
So you might get lucky by strategically choosing an industry or a market that's on its way up and you might get really lucky and become a billionaire doing something, but what if your customers are jerks? Like, would you be happy getting rich running an all night vaping store? (laughing) You think of the kind of customers that would come into your all night vaping store. Are these the people you wanna serve? And would you be happy even if you made a million dollars doing that? I think you'd feel pretty mixed about it.
Tim Ferriss
I'm a little embarrassed to tell you about my new startup though. (laughing)
Derek Sivers
It's asking yourself what kind of people do you wanna be around?
Tim Ferriss
Decentralized blockchain, baby seal clubbing expeditions? Not sure I wanna hang out with the people who might go on that tour.
Derek Sivers
Run by AI.
Tim Ferriss
(laughing) We may need a refill of this scotch the rate we're going.
Derek Sivers
So, yeah, I think that if you set up your business to serve the people that you love being around, even if it makes less money, you're going to be much happier. So that's where I'm at right now. Like right now, I'm not an entrepreneur, but I'm starting to get that itch. I'm starting to feel like doing something, and if I do, it'll just be to be around the people that I already love.
Tim Ferriss
So let's poke at that a little bit. Being around the people you love, there are many ways to do that. Why do you think you are maybe leaning towards the entrepreneur vehicle for doing that versus doing other things? Is it what you know? Is there more to it?
Derek Sivers
Because it's asking yourself, what would you do even if it didn't pay? I'll just pick one example. And don't hold me to this world if I don't end up doing this idea. Do you know that seven years ago, I happened to mention that that week we talked, I was enjoying learning the history of hip hop. And for six years, people keep telling me, like, "So! History of hip-hop!" I was like, "It was that week. Come on."
Tim Ferriss
"And now I like olives, so stop lecturing me about my past self!"
Derek Sivers
So right now, an idea I'm having is 100-year hosting, legacy personal websites. Setting up a trust so that your personal website will last on for 100 years or 50 years after you die. And this is the kind of thing I care about so deeply that I would do it even if it didn't pay. I would do it as volunteer work. And I really like people that have personal websites. They're my kind of people that enjoy technology for its own sake that took a little... what do you call that? "Oomph! Go power." What do you call that?
Tim Ferriss
Oomph! Go Power?
Derek Sivers
No, no, no, where somebody takes initiative. Somebody took the initiative!
Tim Ferriss
Is that English? Go ahead. I don't speak Esperanto yet.
Derek Sivers
Somebody took a little initiative and set up their own website. I like these people. I like people that have personal websites that aren't doing it for money. They're my kind of people. And so I would be proud to serve them. So that's all I meant by that.
Tim Ferriss
Okay, so many directions we can go here. I think you alluded to it, so why not hop to it? Programming, the empowerment that can provide. Let's talk about escaping the cloud. Or broadly speaking, tech independence. And to set the stage for folks, we were walking down the street here in Wellington, beautiful Wellington, New Zealand. Well, yeah, the central area is a little bit like Haight-Ashbury in some respects, but for those people who get the reference, but all in all, beautiful city. Lots of hiking trails, shockingly similar to Northern California. I mean, I felt like I was flying into SFO. You have Monterey Pine here, you have eucalyptus, which we both borrowed from Australia. You have nasturtiums. A lot of the vegetation here is similar. It's really nostalgic and kind of eerie in a way to be here because I feel like I'm back in Northern California. It's like being in a time machine. In any case, we were walking around, not on the nature side of things, but downtown. And I said, "You know, I'd love to ask you about cyber security. And I said, "Let's say..." and I'm not gonna use anyone's name, but somebody who's very technical and hyper paranoid. I was like, "Let's say they are a 10. Let's say your mom is a 1." Not to make assumptions about your mom, but I will. "Where do you fall on the cybersecurity spectrum?" And that opened up a, I think, fun discussion. We chatted, you also then wrote in your diary about it the next morning.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, 'cause I'm slow like that. You'll ask me something like that, and in the moment, I'll give some half-assed answer. And then later that night, I got a better answer.
Tim Ferriss
I mean, I'll push back a little bit. Slow is relative. I mean, I think that you were very coherent and you thought about it before you launched off into some type of monologue, which you didn't. It was a conversation, but you then refined it the next morning.
Tim Ferriss
So let's talk about this because you gave a couple of... I wouldn't say recommendations. You described a few things you do personally that I found very interesting. One of which was, you don't use the cloud. Which I think will get a lot of people's attention. Because in part, I think there are many people who feel, myself included, that there's something uncomfortable about it. But I assume, since I'm non-technical, there really just is not an alternative. but there is part of me that's very privacy sensitive and is fundamentally uncomfortable with having all this stuff, all this miscellanea, all these impulsive, ridiculous group chats and whatever backed up somewhere else for a lot of reasons.
Derek Sivers
Your phone book, your calendar, all these things.
Tim Ferriss
All of that, all of that. There's something deeply uncomfortable about it and yet I use the off-the-shelf tools because everyone else does and I just assume there are no alternatives that are feasible for a muggle like myself.
Derek Sivers
Poor Tim.
Tim Ferriss
Poor Tim.
Derek Sivers
Poor incapable Tim.
Tim Ferriss
Dr. Sivers, please hold court.
Derek Sivers
So, audience, I prepared. I took notes because although I love Tim's podcast, I love it most when people come and give us an intense data dump. You should know this, know that. So all right, guys, I prepared a couple hours. And here you go. So I'm going to unapologetically read from my notes to give you the best bang per buck of your time listening.
Derek Sivers
So tech independence is all about the fact that I think the main sales pitch of the cloud is, "Now, don't worry your little head about that. Let us take care of it. We'll keep all of your data. See, isn't that easier now? There, we've got your data." And it actually reminded me of something I think you said in 4-Hour Body about yoga studios, that no, it's not the best thing for your health, but it's a better profitable pitch for them to sell you a yoga studio instead of the deadlift free weights.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, there's a lot of that in fitness overall, for sure. There's an incentive.
Derek Sivers
This is the tech equivalent of that. I wish that history had gone such a way that we all had our own little private server at home, but instead, the cloud made a better sales pitch, saying, "No, no, no, give us all your stuff. We'll take care of it forever." So my idea is if you spend a few hours to learn how to do it yourself, you'll have tech independence. What that means is self-reliance. It gives you better security, better privacy, better freedom, better flexibility, and total control. And I think it's a great use of your time to spend a few hours learning to do this, kind of like somebody learning to drive manual transmission, right? You don't need to do it, but this is a good life skill to have, especially imagine if we were in a world had more stick-shift cars, just 50 years ago.
Tim Ferriss
Or now in a lot of countries you still can't drive automatic.
Derek Sivers
So have you heard, I don't know if you've heard the same stories I have about how many people have lost their Google accounts. There was a guy I know who's a very savvy tech entrepreneur in Singapore who, because he was so tech savvy, he put all of his kid's photos in the cloud since the day his kid was born. He put everything onto Google Photos for 10 years - his kid was 10 years old. The day that he started a new company and said, "I'm gonna do the Google Apps for Business." And it asked him a quick question, "Would you like to merge this with your existing Gmail account?" He click, "Yes." He merged it, and the next day his wife was like, "Honey, where are all the photos of our kid?" He went, "They're in Google Photos." She said, "No, they're not." And he looked up, he's like, "Oh my God, what do you mean they're gone?" And he emailed customer service and they said, "Well, no, you chose to merge your accounts and we warned you that they're gone." He said, "Well, could you please recover them?" They said, "No, they're gone." This poor guy has no photos of his kid from age zero to 10 because he trusted the clown. I mean, sorry, cloud. He can't trust those clowns.
Derek Sivers
Sorry. That was some tech snark.
Tim Ferriss
Escape the clowns and the cloud.
Derek Sivers
Escape the clown.
Tim Ferriss
Oh, you did that on purpose?
Derek Sivers
I did.
Tim Ferriss
Oh, that was good.
Derek Sivers
So, yeah, any time when somebody talks about the cloud, you know, change it to an N. Clown. Cloud. Keep all my contacts in the clown.
Derek Sivers
So everything I'm gonna describe here takes just a few hours to set up. This isn't a major major thing It's not that hard. Listeners of yours are used to being suggested to learn how to do something.
Tim Ferriss
And let me also preface this for a quick second. I do not experience you - maybe I'm missing something, maybe you have spider holes dug in the backyard - I do not experience you to be a hyper-paranoid person at all. So I just want to mention that because folks might think, "Oh my god, this guy's got like 20 years worth of oatmeal and gold bars and guns in the basement." I want to sort of set the proper reference point, which is I don't experience you to be a paranoid person.
Derek Sivers
Not at all. So first, let me just say, the first thing you need is to get your own server, which is as simple as $5. If you go to a company I recommend called vultr.com
Tim Ferriss
They could use some branding help.
Derek Sivers
So they have something called Cloud Compute for $5 a month. We're basically that's setting up a private slice that's just yours, but on a shared computer
Tim Ferriss
This is like a virtual private server.
Derek Sivers
Virtual private server. Exactly. I was trying to not get technical.
Tim Ferriss
A server, for people who don't know, I know this is gonna be old news for a lot of folks, but what is a server? Sounds super complicated.
Derek Sivers
It's not. It's just a computer that's always online. That's it.
Tim Ferriss
Okay, publicly accessible always online.
Derek Sivers
Doesn't even necessarily need to be public. We'll get to that. Because I think for setting up your server, there are three options either (1) the $5 a month vultr.com cloud compute, (2) search the web for a cheap dedicated server. So now a dedicated server is an actual piece of hardware. That is only yours not shared with anybody else. So if you want more privacy, just spend a little extra money and get a dedicated server, which means yeah this physical hardware. You're the only person that has access. They have physical access to it. But you have the only root password and it's gonna be an encrypted hard drive. We'll get to that. (3) The third option is go to any used marketplace and find an old used Lenovo ThinkPad, ideally from the T400 series - you can get these for under $200 now and they're great and they run any old operating system, and you would just set this up in your closet and keep the master version of your server in your closet. And then the other things would be mirrors of that. But we'll get to that in a second.
Derek Sivers
OK. So here comes my quick how-to. And I'm going to tell you a few things here that aren't complete instructions, but they're enough for you to search the web. So I'll tell you what to do, and you can search the web for exactly how.
Derek Sivers
But the first thing you're going to need to do is to use the terminal, so the command line. In the Mac, it's built in. You go into your Utilities folder. It's called Terminal. On Windows, it's called PowerShell. And anybody using Linux, you know what it is.
Derek Sivers
The operating system I'm going to recommend, the one I use, is called OpenBSD. And we touched on this on the street the other night. The reason I use OpenBSD--
Tim Ferriss
Bondage, Sadomasochism, Dom...
Derek Sivers
Berkeley Software Distribution.
Tim Ferriss
Oh, there we go.
Derek Sivers
Actually, quick aside - I was born in Berkeley, California. And kind of like more people named Dennis go into dentistry because there's an affiliation of names. Freakonomics pointed that out. I always wonder if my affinity with the BSD operating systems is because I was born in Berkeley. My B stands for Berkeley. Anyway, but the reason I got turned on to OpenBSD is because I used to have a Linux server as a public server, and it was hacked. And the guy at the data center said, "Oh, yeah, that's been happening a lot lately. You might want to switch to BSD. It's a lot more secure." So OpenBSD is designed from the ground up by super security freaks. And part of why it's so secure is it's so simple. It's a very, very simple operating system that doesn't do everything under the sun. It does this stuff that I'm describing, and it does it really well. And it's secure as hell.
Tim Ferriss
And it's got, as I understand it, few lines of code. Which means, let's just say you're a writer, the more you write, the higher the frequency of typos.
Derek Sivers
Yes, well put!
Tim Ferriss
And you don't want bugs in your code. The less that can be exploited....
Derek Sivers
The less code, the better.
Derek Sivers
So install OpenBSD and follow the instructions. Encrypt one of the disk partitions in there as you're installing it. Then you're going to use ssh, which stands for secure shell, to log into it. Then on your home computer, use that terminal to generate a private ssh key. You do ssh -keygen -t ed25519. And then that's going to generate two keys, a private key and a public key. You upload the public key to your server, and then after you do that, edit your ssh configuration file to disable password logins. So now the only way to log into your server is with your private/public key that you just generated. Very similar to the crypto public/private. Then you go into your pf.conf settings, you edit your firewall to only allow port 22, which is the port that SSH uses to connect. Once you've done that, voila! Now your server is super secure. The only way somebody.... actually nobody can get in except you from your computer with a generated private key through SSH is the only way to connect to that server.
Tim Ferriss
Can you explain the generated private key?
Derek Sivers
Yeah, it's really just a single command you type on the terminal. If you type ssh -keygen -t ed25519, it will ask you for an optional password, and it just creates the private key and the public key, the same name but one has the ".pub" suffix at the end. And then you just use whatever tool you want to upload the ".pub" to your remote server, You put it into the correct place, an authorized keys file, and voila. Now, it will, instead of asking you for your password, it just uses the private key and the public key matching to let you in.
Tim Ferriss
Got it. So it's like Marco, Polo, OK, we're in, as opposed to entering a password every time.
Derek Sivers
Right. And that's why, then, you want to change the SSH server configuration files to disable passwords. So even if a billion script kiddies were trying to hack your server to guess your password, passwords are just disabled.
Tim Ferriss
OK, keep track where you are. Do you think this will become, and I'm non-technical folks, you've probably guessed, but this type of Marco Polo, not gonna remember the proper way, the private keys and so on, private and public keys or whatever the term is, will become more and more prevalent as say, quantum computing and so on allows the current level of encryption to be decrypted more and more effectively? I'm just wondering about, Well, this is going to take us off on a major tangent.
Derek Sivers
I think it's what our phones are already doing behind the scenes, with WhatsApp encrypted chats or FaceTime, or even just our phones themselves, when you type in that code when you first turn on your phone. I think our phones are already behind the scenes using public/private key. So that's the way it should be. It's just-- it is the best solution so far, I think.
Tim Ferriss
Side note, if you have a 4-digit password on your phone, you can change that to 8-digit. Simple, simple upgrade in settings.
Derek Sivers
Okay, so next thing you need is a domain name. My recommended place to get a domain name is a wonderfully nerdy non-commercial site called bookmyname.com.
Tim Ferriss
You don't get 10% affiliate custody?
Derek Sivers
Absolutely not. Wait 'til you see the site. It's like a wonderful old school nerdy... There's no affiliate program there. As a backup, I use netim.com. Both of these are French companies. And there's a third one in Portland, Oregon that I like called porkbun.com.
Tim Ferriss
Porkbun.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, all three of these are really good reputable places to get a domain name. I recommend them. No affiliate fees at all. I just like them. I use them.
Derek Sivers
Okay, so now you've got a server and the best thing to start with -- like you said I'm not a guy that's got stockpiles of oatmeal and gold -- but once you've got your own server, it puts everything else into perspective So that's really where I'm coming from when I say like I don't do things in the cloud. It's because when companies come out and say "We can take care of this for you." It's like you've already got in your your bread and peanut butter and jam in the kitchen and somebody says, "We can make a sandwich for you in your own home." You think, "I don't need your help."
Tim Ferriss
For those who heard... The scotch really just hit me. Good lord. That was not very much but you'll have extra personality for this episode folks. So for those people who listen to what you just said and they're like "I think I just heard a lot of Klingon. I'm not sure but I can't parse what any of that means." It sounds overwhelming, right? What would you say to them?
Derek Sivers
I care about this so much that I'm gonna set up a really dead simple thing that's basically just "Do this. Copy/paste this. This is gonna work. Look at that." So email me.
Tim Ferriss
God damn it - email you? Write a blog post Derek Sivers! You've only written five million blog posts since 1987!
Derek Sivers
But until until I write up. You know what? I registered the domain name cloudfr.ee - with the "ee" from Estonia.
Tim Ferriss
CloudFree.com wasn't available?
Derek Sivers
I don't know. I just thought it was clever. Okay? "cloudfr.ee" No, but someday I'm gonna write this up into something very simple. You don't need to understand this yet. Just do this eventually you understand it cuz that's how I learn
Tim Ferriss
My photos! Derek Sivers has all my photos!
Derek Sivers
That's what I really wanted. I want your photos!
Derek Sivers
So cuz that's how we all learn at first, right? It's often like "Just do this. You'll understand it later. For now, just do it." I think that's a fine way to learn if you trust the source, right? It's not as hard as it sounds.
Tim Ferriss
Gotta do it. Gotta try it out. It's like someone describing how to hit a baseball. You'd be like what the fuck that was like 15 pages of describing, and that sounds too hard. It's like actually no, you just got to try it a few times.
Derek Sivers
By the way, you know what's cute? My kid didn't know what baseball is. They played baseball last week at school and he said, "Dad what's this thing with the squares set up?" And he hit a home run on his first try.
Tim Ferriss
Oh, wow. It's all downhill from there. Tell him to stop.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, exactly. "Everybody's cheering for me, but I didn't know what I was supposed to do. They told me to run."
Derek Sivers
Okay. So now let's talk about some applications. Okay, so you have a server set up. Here's what you're gonna do with it. First do your contacts and calendar. I don't like the fact that my phone automatically gives Google or Apple all of my contacts. So you can set up Radicale. The website is Radicale.org. It's absolutely free, open source. my mind, to install Radicale on your server, you just basically type one command and it says "okay it's running" you say "okay" and then you go into your phone and instead of telling Apple to manage your calendar and contacts you just set it to your domain name, and suddenly it says "OK it's synchronized." Now every new contact you add and every calendar entry is synchronized with your server not Apple's.
Tim Ferriss
Actually I have gone through this process before and I can tell people it's quite simple because things have probably changed, but quite a few years ago, if you wanted your, say, iCal on Mac and Google Cal to sync, huge pain in the ass. So you would have to use a third party, and at least I ended up using CalDAV a long time ago. That's since changed. But yeah, so this is not very hard. Dead easy.
Derek Sivers
That's why I started with this. Yeah, it's like the simplest thing to set up.
Tim Ferriss
And the most sensitive in a way, or some of the most sensitive.
Derek Sivers
To me it feels so important to know that my contacts aren't being sent to other people. And then you see it backed-up yourself. So that situation, because there are some people that get locked out of their Gmail account or whatever, and then they're just screwed because all their contacts are in there. But you have them yourself.
Derek Sivers
So next thing is file storage, where photos, books, ebooks, movies, documents, everything else, they're just files. So the first thing you want to do is to export them out of the apps that are like the walled garden apps like Kindle and Apple's Photos app and save it as regular files. EPUB, JPEG, MP3, MP4, just open standards. So you export it out, you save it there, and now you've just got regular files. You don't need iCloud, you don't need Dropbox, you don't need Google Drive, you've got your own server. So every computer has this dead simple little program built into it called rsync. Well, Macs have it built in, Windows I think you might need to install it, or maybe it's there with the new PowerShell. And all it does is synchronize the difference. So if you have 10,000 files and you've changed three of them today, and your remote server has 10,000 files but not the new three, you type rsync, and it'll just send the newest three that you've changed. That's it. So rsync is built in, but you have to manually type rsync and the command and your server name and it'll go. So that's what I do. But if you're a fan of Dropbox, there's a free replacement for Dropbox called Syncthing. So it's totally free, open source.
Tim Ferriss
I want to give you more scotch just to see what it does to your spelling. There's going to be a lot of spelling.
Derek Sivers
Syncthing is completely free and open source, and it does that more like automatic style instead of manual synchronization.
Tim Ferriss
Let me pause. In your particular case, do you like automatic sync?
Derek Sivers
I don't. I like having the delay between my servers. Because if I accidentally delete a file, even if it's a week later, I can get to it. I'll talk about this right now. I have my servers cloned. So that's actually the next step I would recommend. Anyway, once you've got this and it's working for extra security Go back and repeat that first step and set up another server with a different company in a different country and do it again. Do the SSH port thing. Then you can use rsync or Syncthing not just to clone between your computer and your server, but that server in the other location.
Tim Ferriss
I have a great idea. Okay, you ready? All right. So this next chapter of Derek Sivers. Entrepreneur. Interacting with customers you like who own personal websites. You could create a service that helps people liberate themselves from the cloud, for those who own personal websites.
Derek Sivers
I like it.
Tim Ferriss
Anyway, just an idea. Because you seem to be philosophically aligned with this.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, and I'm passionate about it. It upsets me when people are bound to the cloud or just going to put everything in the company's hand. They're dependent on the service. It's about being dependent. It's about the self-reliance. People who were dependent on others. Like imagine if everybody in their own home were like dependent on somebody else to make them food. They didn't know how to make their own food. Yeah, you'd feel bad for them. Like "Come on. It's not that hard. Here's a knife. Here's some bread some peanut butter. See you could do it." You know, like that's how I feel with these things
Tim Ferriss
You only need three glasses. It's easy.
Tim Ferriss
I would also say that it's not just about being dependent. It's about being informed. So do you have complete understanding or near-complete understanding of how you are storing sensitive information? When's the last time anyone listening to this or even I'll speak for myself Yours truly read the complete terms and service when something pops up and it's 27 pages and you're like, "Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Click. Accept." There's a lot of stuff buried in there. Yeah, there's a reason there are armies of lawyers that work on terms of service and that they're updated constantly.
Derek Sivers
Which is nice to tune into sources/people who care about that stuff deeply, and they can act as a nice natural filter to let you know if somebody's being good or being bad. You know, that's how I felt, you know when I recommended bookmyname.com for domains. It was like some super nerd that recommended that. They're like, "Oh these guys are old-school Unix. You want to go with these guys. They're not salesmen trying to raise venture capital for their domain selling. These are just old-school nerds doing it for the right reason." That's what I like to hear. These are my people.
Derek Sivers
So, um, okay, so I have three servers now set up in New Zealand, US, and Germany, and I like the delay between them. So I have one that I update every night, sometimes multiple times a day.
Tim Ferriss
Manually?
Derek Sivers
Yeah, I just type rsync right before I shut down my computer, backs up today's work to my remote server. And then about once a week I back it up to the second server. Then about once a month I back it up to the third server. And I really like that delay because there have been times that I've deleted something in like a whole week later.
Tim Ferriss
Let me ask you something, let me ask a dumb question maybe. Why delete anything? Storage is so cheap.
Derek Sivers
Oh I know. No I mean more like deleted lines of code like I thought I was done with.
Tim Ferriss
Right there was a revision that you want to undo.
Derek Sivers
Yeah and sometimes I'm using Git, but sometimes I'm not. And sometimes it's gone. It's rare, but every now and then.
Derek Sivers
OK, so website is a no-brainer. The OpenBSD operating system comes with its own web server. So I highly recommend -- no offense to Matt -- don't install WordPress.
Tim Ferriss
Ooh.
Derek Sivers
We love you, Matt. I adore you, Matt. But I think everybody should learn how to do it themselves. It's not that hard to do an h1, h2, p, ul, li, a href, img source. You can learn it in an hour. And voila, now you can make your own HTML website.
Derek Sivers
And anybody-- because I get this question about once a week by email, people saying, "What do you recommend? I want to make my own site."
Tim Ferriss
Well, hold on. Listen, not to push back, but just to stress test a little bit, WordPress is open source. Why not use it?
Derek Sivers
You could. See, WordPress is like, I think last time I counted, 38 billion lines of code. And it does way more than what you need. So it's kind of like if you said, "I need some scissors", and somebody handed you the contents of an entire hardware store. And you're like, "No, I really just need to cut this." So I think most people, what they want from a website is, "I have some thoughts, I want to put them in writing for the world to read." or "I have a couple photos." That's what most people want. But then I love WordPress and I used it for years, but it does everything. And I think it intimidates people to the point of paralysis. So that's why I say, well, no, no, no, no, hold on. My top recommendation is don't let people tell you that this is complicated. 'Cause if you look at WordPress or similar services, and by the way, I'm just saying WordPress, I mean, it could be Ghost, it could be any of these things. You get the impression that making a website is hard, but it's not. It's just a plain text file that you change it from .txt to .html, and you add in a couple bracket tags. And that's it. And then you upload it, and it works, and the world can see it. So I just constantly remind people how simple this can be. And I say that even if you just do it this way for the first month, please, make your own static HTML web page, even.
Tim Ferriss
I think it's a good exercise, even if you end up later using something else.
Derek Sivers
Exactly. That's what I was getting to. Start by doing it that way. And then if you need something that another service offers, you'll recognize that you need it because you'll know.
Tim Ferriss
I agree with that. I mean, I edited the first 30 to 40 episodes in my podcast, which is a lot of work and I'm not a master at it. And there are far better people who work on it now for these later episodes. But I felt good doing it in the beginning. And I was like, all right, if I'm going to delegate anything to the extent that it's feasible, I'd love to learn how to do each thing. Otherwise, how am I going to assess anything?
Derek Sivers
Yeah, exactly. Okay, I'll name one last one and then we're done with this subject. The last thing I'm gonna recommend is email. So at very least, get off Gmail and use your own domain name. It's so important to switch your email to your own domain name.
Tim Ferriss
You can do that with G Suite though.
Derek Sivers
I know, but we're talking about the liberation, the independence, it's knowing that you aren't dependent on these guys. So I think it's it's crucial to extract yourself from the "We'll take care of it for you" thing.
Derek Sivers
So the three things I'm gonna recommend in the three different options in order. The simplest, cutest little one I've found is mailbox.org in Germany. For one dollar a month, they do nothing but post your email and I think maybe your calendars But you know, we've already talked about that. Yeah, but mailbox org you point your domain name at them. They do your mail. They're cute They're great. Privacy-focused. If you want the luxury full premium suite - like the best email client on earth - you go to fastmail.com Fastmail.com is amazing. It's five dollars a month. But again, it's they're taking care of it for you So, you know the third option is coming. You can host your email yourself on your own server. It's dead easy to receive a mail. It's a little harder to send email. You'd have to set up a few config files But it's not that hard. I do it myself. It's a bit advanced but it's possible and I assume that that would come maybe as you know Step eight after you've done other things.
Tim Ferriss
That's like if you're starting on the bunny slopes, which were the first stages. This is like, Okay, now you're getting on some moguls. Yeah, don't try this day one. Okay, you see? Get familiar with the gear first.
Tim Ferriss
So so I would be curious to know how you would reply to people listening that are like "Mailbox.org in Germany? Fastmail? I've never heard of these things!" Which is not to say they're not robust and amazing and cute, as you put it, but they'll say, "I have more confidence in Google being around in five years than I do in these companies which I know nothing about." Ultimately, you can have a certain degree of liberation, but if your infrastructure fails, or these people put up a closed for business sign, and suddenly the hardware upon which things are being stored is game over, I guess I'm wondering how you would address people with those types of concerns.
Derek Sivers
Everything I've recommended here was recommended with that in mind. You should expect that you will outlive most businesses. I think that, to me, is the biggest misconception that people have about Facebook or Apple or Google. It's likely you might outlive Google and Facebook. Those of us who were around in the first dot-com boom--
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, if history repeats, it's certainly well within the realm of possibility.
Derek Sivers
It was unthinkable in 1999 that MySpace wouldn't be around.
Tim Ferriss
So how is mailbox.org better in that sense?
Derek Sivers
Because everything is done with your own domain name. So if mailbox.org ever just disappeared one day, you'd go, "Pfft!" You'd just log into your domain name router and just route it to another service. Because everything's being sent to tim@tim.com or whatever. So you have your own domain name. You can just route it to a different mail server. Same thing with the servers I'm talking about. If one of these services in Germany or New Jersey suddenly went under, no big deal. You've got your clone, your remote clone. Your remote server is a clone of your home thing. So all of this is expecting everybody to fail.
Derek Sivers
So the conclusion is, I think this is a great use of your time. It's liberating, it's empowering. And then when somebody tries to sell you a service, you'll know that you can do it yourself if you want to, and you might still choose to have them do it.
Tim Ferriss
Question for you. So if somebody's listening and they say, "There's no fucking way I'm gonna do all that. However, I'd be interested in dipping my toe in the water and maybe doing the first thing, just to learn some new technology, gain some confidence. I'm not gonna do the whole kit and caboodle 'cause it just sounds overwhelming, but I wanna do sort of a science project with some experimentation." What might you recommend to them?
Derek Sivers
I'd say the first baby step is to get your own domain name, definitely. And then move your email off of Gmail and just go to some third-party provider of email.
Tim Ferriss
Okay, so you'd start with email.
Derek Sivers
I think so. It's the simplest. It's the only one in there that's not truly setting up your own server. Obviously that's the next step. Just do that first thing and have a couple hours of something that feels uncomfortable and new to you, but voila, you have a server that's running anywhere in the world. Once you have a server, everything else is easier. So yeah, the baby steps are to just get your own domain name and switch your email to that and try to just move everything off of Gmail or just let your old Gmail be your junk account.
Tim Ferriss
Okay, question for you personally. If you had to choose between having your email off of the cloud or calendar and contacts, we can only choose one. So calendar and contacts come together, email's another. Which would you choose?
Derek Sivers
I don't know why there's a sense of happiness and having my calendars and contacts be on my own server.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, I lean that way too, and I don't know if I could verbalize why that's the case.
Derek Sivers
Mail sending has become unfortunately difficult because a lot of things get marked as spam unless you do a bunch of more complicated things.
Tim Ferriss
That's right, I didn't think about that. I could see that being a huge problem.
Derek Sivers
So the way I actually have my mail server set up right now...
Tim Ferriss
Pretend to be Gmail?
Derek Sivers
Well, God, no, can you imagine? What could go wrong?
Derek Sivers
So all incoming email comes directly into my server. But for sending, I actually use a service called Mailgun that just handles the sending. So they take care of all the deliverability.
Tim Ferriss
So it's an ESP, like an email service provider.
Derek Sivers
Oh, it is. Yeah. I guess they are. But for outgoing only.
Tim Ferriss
I think SendGrid does handle some of this as well.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, they're one of the same. So you're really just using their SMTP servers just send the outgoing mail, but receiving it privately. So that's my balance.
Tim Ferriss
SendGrid, those guys have done such a good job, at least last I checked, and I met them when they were just starting. I met them at Techstars a million years ago, and this is an example of where being non-technical hurt me, 'cause I just didn't know what I was looking at. The guys were super great, clearly very smart, but I was like, I don't understand this.
Derek Sivers
Wait, can we tell people the Shopify story?
Tim Ferriss
My most expensive mistake ever?
Derek Sivers
No, no, no, my little thing with Tobi.
Tim Ferriss
Selling Shopify early was my most expensive mistake ever as their first advisor and they had like 10 employees. I just want to say that also, God do I love the Shopify guys. I just thought they're so great. Tobi, Harley, the whole gang, just great humans. It's really, it makes me so happy when the good guys and gals do well, right? It just makes me so happy.
Tim Ferriss
So, cute story. Which I had never heard, which was shocking.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, because I sometimes people ask if I can introduce them to you. But I respect your time.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, I appreciate that.
Derek Sivers
Um, so by the way, I love your email address.
Tim Ferriss
Oh, yeah. Yeah, which basically says fuck off
Derek Sivers
It's essentially "fuckoff@timferriss.com"
Tim Ferriss
It's not yeah, it's not that aggressive, but it makes it clear like think twice before sure.
Derek Sivers
"Don't you dare give this to anyone at timferriss.com". That is his personal by the way. Yeah a little wordy, but you know, it's worth it
Derek Sivers
So Tobi: So I love the Ruby programming language. And so before there was Ruby on Rails I learned Ruby in a cabin in Sweden when I was offline for two weeks. So I brought a programming book with me I was like, well, I'm gonna be offline for two weeks. I might as well learn something new. So there was this really unknown little programming language called Ruby. I was like "That sounds fun!" So I grabbed this Ruby book, installed Ruby on my laptop, and went off to this cabin in Sweden in the winter for two weeks. I was offline and I learned Ruby for two weeks. I came back going "That was so much fun. I wish I could use this to make websites!" And there was news that there was this guy named David in Denmark who was doing something with websites and Ruby. So I emailed him saying "Hey somebody said you're making a web framework in Ruby." And he emailed back saying "Not ready yet." That's all he said.
Tim Ferriss
And for those who don't know, that's DHH - David Hennemeier Hanson.
Derek Sivers
Then Rails came out about eight months later, and at first look I was just like "Huh this is a little confusing. I don't really get it." And so I posted to the Ruby mailing list, "Can anybody tell me how this works? I'd be happy to pay somebody for an hour of time to show me how this works." So some guy named Tobi said, "I'll show you Rails for $100. I'll spend an hour with you." So I paid Toby $100 to show me Rails for an hour. And he showed me over the phone. We never met face to face. It was all just over the phone. I was living in LA. And Tobi was great. He showed me how Rails works and got me really into it. I was like, "All right, I'm in." And so my old company, CD Baby, we started converting everything over to Rails. I was like, "This is great."
Derek Sivers
So a couple years later, I get this email from Tobi saying, "Hey, not sure you remember me, the guy that taught you Rails?" He said, "Could you introduce me to Tim Ferriss? Because I've got this little e-commerce thing I'm doing." I was like, "E-commerce thing? No. Sorry, dude. I don't do that." No. I don't know. And so I didn't introduce you guys. And I was double thrilled. So I was thrilled later to find out that Toby's little e-commerce thing was Shopify or became Shopify. And then I was thrilled to find out like another year or two later that you were involved!
Tim Ferriss
We met at RailsConf of all places.
Derek Sivers
Wow.
Tim Ferriss
I was a speaker at RailsConf, which I felt I was supremely underqualified.
Derek Sivers
They love doing that, yeah.
Tim Ferriss
I met him in the green room at RailsConf.
Derek Sivers
Oh, sweet.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
Derek Sivers
That's how you met, I was gonna ask you.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, that's how we met.
Derek Sivers
So, yeah, Tobi and I have emailed since then like joking about, "Yeah, sorry I didn't introduce you guys."
Tim Ferriss
It all worked out. Tobi's a spectacular human. Big, big fan.
Derek Sivers
It's kind of funny that somebody listening to this thinks that we might be talking about tech and programming the whole time. But no, that's it. We're done. We're not going to talk about Unix command line terminal stuff anymore.
Tim Ferriss
Well, we'll zig and zag. So let's zig a little bit. You know, there's so many options here for where to go next. I think one I'd actually like to talk about is the unoptimized life. If you'd be open to going there next, what do you think?
Derek Sivers
Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
All right, let's do it.
Derek Sivers
London. 2019.
Tim Ferriss
Ooh, this is gonna be good. Tuck in, kids.
Derek Sivers
On the train from Oxford to London. And it was one of those days that looked like it might rain, it might not. So my boy (age 7) and I made a plan on the train. I said if it's raining, we're gonna go to the museum. And if it's not raining, we're going to the zoo. And he said OK.
Derek Sivers
So we got to Marylebone Station in central London. We walked out and he said, "You know, dad, "I don't wanna go to the zoo or the museum." I said, "What do you wanna do?" He said, "Let's just walk around." I said, "You sure?" "Yeah." "Okay."
Derek Sivers
We just walked around. So at every intersection, he said, "Let's go this way." I said, "Okay." And so he just led the way through London that day. We walked around for eight hours. So at one point he was jumping around park benches and met these kids from Croatia where they got into a little tickling match. At another time in like a little alleyway he saw this huge cardboard box that was like almost as big as he is. And he got into this cardboard box and wore it like a turtle shell. So he walked around London in a cardboard box for like an hour. And everybody would do double takes looking at him and he felt so cool in the cardboard box.
Derek Sivers
And then at some point we found ourselves right in front of the West End musical Wicked. And the show was about to begin in 10 minutes. And I said, "Do you have any tickets? What are the best tickets you have?" They had 8th row center tickets. They had two left. So we're like, "Yeah, let's do it. Let's go see Wicked." So he left his cardboard box there. We went in and saw Wicked. And at one point he whispered to me, he said, "Dad, I like the girl next to me." And I said, "Okay." And later I look over and he's holding her hand. He held her hand. They held hands.
Derek Sivers
When the show was over, we went home. And I tuck him into bed that night. And I said, "Did you have a good day?" And he said, "I had a great day." And I said, "All right, so what was your favorite thing today?" And he thinks for a bit. And then he said, "The cardboard box."
Derek Sivers
And I was just like... wow... I marveled at that. I was just thinking later, like, if I would have planned and said, "No, we're going to the museum! Come on. It's an important museum for you to know!" Tjem he wouldn't have had this unoptimized experience and stumbled into the cardboard box!
Derek Sivers
And so of course, you know, I think about life and I think about like that day as a metaphor for how we tend to make plans because plans seem to be the tool we use to make the most of our time. But that doesn't always make sense, does it? Because like, as you go through life, you keep getting new information moment to moment. that helps you make the best decision for that moment, not what you thought would be the best decision earlier when you made the plan, which was a prediction!
Derek Sivers
So I think about, for example, this stupid house I'm in right now. (laughing) So this is my stupid house, everybody. I don't like this house. But here I am.
Tim Ferriss
I would never guess based on your assortment of matching plateware.
Derek Sivers
Ha! How much energy I've clearly put into this house and making it perfect with all of its decor!
Tim Ferriss
There's nothing on the wall. No furniture. Except for some mice. Legitimately.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, I have three pet mice. We were gonna bring them out and be distracting.
Derek Sivers
So I thought about getting rid of this house and getting a house that was more suited for me. And I actually put an offer on a place and it was a really nice place. It was at the end of Clyde Quay Wharf, which is out there like in the water and oh man, it was nice. The night before my offer was accepted - the night before I was gonna put down the deposit and it was gonna be mine - I fell asleep that night thinking, "I'm gonna be so happy tomorrow!" Then I thought, "Wait, I'm already happy. Am I gonna be MORE happy tomorrow? No! I'm already happy! Well, then why am I doing this? Why am I spending a bunch of money if I'm already happy?" So I yanked it. So I didn't buy it. And here I am in this stupid house because it has no obstacles. Like it's warm, it's quiet. It's not suited to me perfectly, but that's okay. It doesn't get in my way.
Derek Sivers
And then from there, I think how many other things in our life are we okay to just not optimize, right? Depends where you draw the line, right? your romantic relationship, your job, your family. But nobody has the perfect family of their wishes. Our location, where you live, our diet. Like you have to kind of decide what's worth optimizing. That we don't need to optimize everything. It's okay to have some things be good enough.
Derek Sivers
And so I'm so glad you brought up "The Paradox of Choice" by Barry Schwartz. I really fucking internalized that book.
Tim Ferriss
It's a great book.
Derek Sivers
The ending of that where he says, "Okay, I've been describing the problem, so what's a recommendation?" And he says, "Satisficing." There's maximizing and there's satisficing.
Tim Ferriss
I had no idea you were gonna bring this up. This is great.
Derek Sivers
Maximizers have been found to feel worse about the decisions they make. They look into every possible option. They try to make the best possible choice, but studies show that they feel worse about the choice they make. Whereas satisficers may not make the absolute best possible choice, but they feel much better about the choices they make. So yeah, I think a lot of who I am is because of satisficing. And if I seem like I make weird decisions in life, for example, like not even continuing to pursue making money, it's because I'm satisficing. Like I really took that lesson to heart and have shaped my life around it.
Tim Ferriss
So just for definition terms: Because people might think optimizing is trying to eke out every last iota of improvement, right? But I think what we're really talking about is--
Derek Sivers
Sorry to interrupt. You know, like if you were to hear Paul McCartney go, "Hey Jude....", you'd be like, whoa! Just to hear him sing those two iconic notes. So to hear you go, "Optimizing...."?
Tim Ferriss
[LAUGHTER]
Derek Sivers
That's like, whoa! That's classic. Sorry.
Tim Ferriss
And if that is my legacy, so be it.
Derek Sivers
Optimizing.
Tim Ferriss
Optimizing.
Tim Ferriss
I think what we're talking about is where to focus your finite energy on improving versus leaving things as they are, right? In a sense, right? Because I think optimizing, when I think of optimizing, optimizing is leading to optimal. What does that even mean? Maybe it's open ended, So it just continues forever. But it's a helpful, it's a helpful word.
Tim Ferriss
I'm just curious how you currently think about where to focus your energy on improving internally, externally, versus leaving things be. And this is a conversation that's near and dear to me. One of my most effective friends basically has said, I'm paraphrasing, but he's like, yeah, I optimize for like one or two things and everything else is good enough. Like I just have to get it to good enough.
Derek Sivers
Nice.
Tim Ferriss
That's it. And he's incredibly effective in life. And he's also a very happy guy in general. Hard to know how much of that is out of the box versus due to the decisions and the way he views the world, but seems to contribute.
Tim Ferriss
So how do you think about then where you might maximize versus where you satisfies? Or is it because I know it's not good enough across the board. I find that hard to believe
Derek Sivers
Hmm what do I maximize? I'm not sure...
Tim Ferriss
Maybe maximizes too polarizing a word?
Derek Sivers
No, you know what I think it is? If it's really fun!
Derek Sivers
If you think it's just actually really fun to, like, get into bread making, and get like the best bread making stuff. Just having fun with it. Then great! You can maximize it. You know people who get really into high-fidelity audio They nerd out and they know it's stupid (usually) and they're just like, "I don't care. I want this thing with the gold-plated cable connector!"
Derek Sivers
If you have fun optimizing, then it's worth it - if maximizing that - if the process is fun to you. That should be the barometer.
Derek Sivers
But saying "enough, good enough" is a superpower.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, I really really agree with that.
Derek Sivers
You know what is such a good lesson to learn? Nobody cares what you're not good at.
Tim Ferriss
Okay, say more
Derek Sivers
Publicly, you're gonna be just known for a few things that you're good at. All those things that you're not good at? Nobody cares that you're not good at them. So, just let it go. You know?
Tim Ferriss
Now, for the broader public, I think that's really useful. But you may have, say, a significant other who cares about some of the things that you're not particularly good at.
Derek Sivers
(long pause) .... Yeah. (both laugh)
Tim Ferriss
There is that. I mean, not that I'm recently single and thinking about this all the time or anything.
Derek Sivers
We have spent many hours talking about sex while walking in the forests of New Zealand. Sex and relationships and...
Tim Ferriss
Well, even before this podcast, Derek's setting up all these cameras and all this stuff. And then he's like, I just need to take a quick shower. And I was like, wait a second, what? Are we about to have sex? Derek, what's happening?
Derek Sivers
I haven't had a shower since yesterday. I was feeling greasy. It was distracting.
Derek Sivers
But no, it's funny, I wasn't sure if you were going to say, "So, as you were saying yesterday in the forest about sex."
Tim Ferriss
Oh, no, no, no, no. We'll leave that aside for Scotch outside of recording.
Tim Ferriss
The unoptimized life. What effect has that had on you paying more attention to that? Being good enough alone. Because this is something I would like to do more of. And I've tried to focus, with some success, on making fast, especially reversible or trivial decisions. Right? If it can be undone easily, fine. And this is also with money, right? Attention and money. It's like if it's just, if it's, I'm going to default to speed with a lot of things. if it's not that important or if it's pretty easy to reverse. And I think that's been helpful.
Derek Sivers
Off the top of my head, I think how important it is to be done with something so that you can move on. I don't want...
Tim Ferriss
Open loops.
Derek Sivers
Yeah! Unresolved decisions, sitting unresolved, sitting undecided for a long time. I feel the weight of those. Unfinished projects, because I'm trying to make it perfect, I feel the weight of those. And so I think I've learned the importance of just getting things done and finishing. And to do that, you usually have to say good enough at some point.
Derek Sivers
I love the fact that we say somebody releases an album, you release a book. Because there's a wonderful double meaning in that word, right?
Tim Ferriss
I've never even thought about that. Released. Yeah, I like that.
Derek Sivers
So I think about that with anything I post on my site, any of my books, it's like, all right, it's released. It's good enough.
Tim Ferriss
All right, I'm gonna combine this, maybe another Siversism. It's not really a Siversism, but in terms of how Professor Sivers operates in the world, useful, not true. We've been talking a bit about this. I wanted to save a lot of it for this conversation at the mics. Where should we start with this?
Derek Sivers
All right, so again, I'm addressing the audience for a second. So, you know, I figure I'm coming on the podcast. This isn't just one of our random conversations. This is for the audience. There's a reason we're hitting record. It's for them. We can talk freely without hitting record. So I had to think: What's the most useful thing I I could share with your audience that I've learned in the last seven years since we last spoke? The thing that's made a biggest difference in my life - a superpower - a big huge change - to me, it's been, in short: skepticism.
Derek Sivers
So if you wonder why I'm so happy why I'm thriving why I seem to be doing well to me. It's a lot of my happiness comes from this worldview that is radical doubt. It's skepticism. And so I'm gonna give this the shorthand of calling it "useful not true". The visual for it is that moment at the end of the Matrix movie when Neo realizes like those aren't bullets. This is just code. Remember all the bullets come his way and he's like, "Oh wait, right, none of these rules apply to me." That's deep skepticism. It's empowering. It's liberating. So what I'm gonna do for a few minutes including a little stories is to play Morpheus to help emancipate the listeners.
Derek Sivers
So yes, I call this "useful not true".
Tim Ferriss
Preach! Preach!
Derek Sivers
I'm gonna tell you the four bits first and we'll use that to make sure that we come back to this.
Derek Sivers
#1: Almost nothing is objectively true.
Derek Sivers
#2: Beliefs are placebos. So you got to believe whatever works for you now.
Derek Sivers
#3: Rules and norms are arbitrary games that can be changed. (I'm preaching to the converted with that one.)
Derek Sivers
#4: Refuse ideology. You need to accept ideas individually.
Derek Sivers
There's the structure. So #1: almost nothing is objectively true. So here's what's true. My hand is on the table, but what's not true is "It's good to do everything in moderation." Here's what's not true: "Family is everything." Here's what's not true: "My mother abandoned me." Here's what's not true: "AI is the future." So all of these things, people say them as if they're true, or even when people make an excuse like, "You know, I would be more successful if it weren't for my family, or my location or whatever." People say these things as if they're an indisputably true fact. But to me, the only thing that's true are the things that both a cat and an alien, or let's say a cat and an octopus would agree on.
Tim Ferriss
You come up with so many children's books ideas in this conversation. The cat, the alien, and the octopus.
Derek Sivers
Because it makes you realize that everything else is just mental interpretation, right? Like, there we go. This is on the table. This is true.
Tim Ferriss
Yep.
Derek Sivers
But everything else, including, watch this one. (Raises a middle finger to Tim.) Am I flipping you off right now? Like, am I angry at you right now? No, just 'cause I'm....
Tim Ferriss
He just gave me the middle finger.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, sorry. I'm holding up my middle finger with the back of my palm towards Tim. Even if people say things like, "I hate you," does it mean that they hate you? No, it just, they said three words. That's all that actually happened. Their mouth said these words. Everything else is an interpretation or a projection, right?
Derek Sivers
So, we have to consider why people are saying these things. If you start to think why they said something, it helps to dispel it. You can say, "Oh, you know what, they're probably just believing whatever supports the emotions that they want to feel right now", right? So if somebody has a belief that family is everything, maybe it's because that was something they told their kids because they want their kids to take care of them when they're older. So they want their kids to believe that family is everything. But they have a self-serving reason to believe that.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, possibly subconscious, right?
Derek Sivers
Right, right! Oh, so I'm so glad you said this. Have you heard about the split brain stories that people....
Tim Ferriss
Yes. "Why did you get up to have a glass of water?" That type of stuff?
Derek Sivers
Can I tell it?
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, please.
Derek Sivers
This is so important to understand
Tim Ferriss
These are crazy. These are so bananas.
Derek Sivers
During brain surgery, the patient needs to stay awake. And so there was a woman... (It was on the EconTalk podcast.) That during brain surgery, they were poking around in there and suddenly the woman started laughing. The patient started laughing and they asked her, "Why are you laughing?" And she said, "Oh, well, it's just, it's really funny the way that that curtain is hanging." And she really thought that the reason she was laughing is because that's the way the curtain was hanging. But it was actually because they were poking a metal rudder there.
Tim Ferriss
Stimulating part of the brain, yeah.
Derek Sivers
And so the split brain patients, there's some people whose left and right hemispheres of their brain are not connected. So they've done tests on these people to say into their right ear, "Please get up and open the window." And they'll get up and open the window. And then they'll ask their left ear, or maybe it's their eye, "Why did you open the window?" And they'll say, "Oh, it was just a it was a little cold in here I hope you don't mind." and they really sincerely to the core thought that's the reason they opened the window!
Derek Sivers
There are a couple more examples of this - a message shown to one eye. And they did something then they asked the other eye, "Why did you do that?" And every time the people make up a reason! They don't know they're making it up. They give a reason why they did that and they feel completely confident that that is the reason why they did it
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
Derek Sivers
So to me, this is the most beautiful example of what we actually don't know. So talk about deep skepticism? Radical doubt? You shouldn't even believe anything you tell yourself even in your private diary! When you're saying, "I'm not happy in this location" or "I can't do this because of that" or "I'm mad at so-and-so." You need to ask yourself like okay, that might not be true. Just because I'm saying it - it might not be true.
Derek Sivers
#2: Beliefs are placebos. Two people in the same boat, one can say this sucks, and another one can say this is great. But neither one is true. No beliefs are true.
Derek Sivers
In fact, you know the little story of Richard Branson, before there was Virgin Airlines, you've heard the tale that he was at an airport and a flight to somewhere was canceled.
Tim Ferriss
Right, it was delayed.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, and everybody was grumbling, "Ah, this sucks!" So he went to the 20 people that were angry and said, "Hey. If I charter a plane, will you guys split the cost?" Everybody else was angry. He looked at the same situation and said it's great. And that was kind of the launch of Virgin Airlines. No not launch...
Tim Ferriss
Genesis
Derek Sivers
Genesis! Nice word!
Derek Sivers
No beliefs are true. When we say, "I believe...", it's an indicator that what we're about to say next is not true.
Tim Ferriss
Not evidence-based.
Derek Sivers
Because we don't say "I believe in potatoes."
Tim Ferriss
Speak for yourself.
Derek Sivers
We don't have to because there's a potato. Whenever we say, "I believe such and such," it indicates that whatever we say next is not true.
Tim Ferriss
It's kind of like when "science" is at the end of a field to name generally, it's not science. Not always, but very often that's not the case. I can think of a few exceptions: neuroscience, computer science, but very often when science gets appended to something, it's like, "Oh, thou doth protest too much."
Derek Sivers
Since no beliefs are true, I think this is liberating to realize. You can just choose whatever belief works for you now - that helps you be who you want to be. This is about personal empowerment. This is hacking yourself. If a certain belief will help you be who you want to be, right now, you don't need to keep believing it tomorrow. You could believe it for three minutes or three days or the rest of your life. You're going to find what you look for. So if you choose to believe something, you'll find evidence to support your belief of anything.
Derek Sivers
#3: Rules and norms are arbitrary games. So this is the one where I can't help but think of, you know, your introduction to the world in four hour work week, giving so many wonderful examples of how you don't have to accept the world's norms.
Tim Ferriss
Yep, for sure.
Derek Sivers
But it's funny how many times the rules of the world are stated as if they're absolutely true. Like all applicants must submit their application the usual channels and wait to hear from us. Or to be an expert in your field, you should have an advanced degree from a university. But someone made up these rules, and most people follow those rules, but they're not true. They're just not absolutely true. So I think that realizing they're not true gives you an incredible advantage because you realize you can make up the rules. So this is that matrix moment where the bullets are flying out. But he goes, "Wait a minute. This is just code." Somebody made this up, but I don't need to run this program. But if you do that people are going to be upset at you. So somebody's going to get mad at you and you have to know that even when they say, "You're a bad person for doing this!" You have to know that that's not true either.
Tim Ferriss
This begs a number of questions living in a broader society about morally acceptable or reprehensible behavior.
Derek Sivers
When I talk about being who you want to be, we can't always address people who want to be psychopaths, or who want to be damaging. Because then anytime you taught anybody how to do anything: how to fly a plane. "Hey, don't fly it into the World Trade Center." How to drive a car. "Hey, don't drive it into a crowd of people." Okay, you have to just understand that we're talking about a tool. Not your psychosis that might lead you to hurt a person.
Tim Ferriss
All right. We'll table that for a minute.
Derek Sivers
So I have a funny little story that felt almost too risque to tell.
Tim Ferriss
I'd love to do it. That's why I don't record these in front of a crowd.
Derek Sivers
Oslo Norway. My band was on tour. We were there for three nights. For the first two nights there was this girl in the audience, making eyes at me on stage. So the second night I went to go talk to her and we hit it off. We hung out all night long and it was wonderful. And then the but we didn't have sex. That's funny. I was like, "Can I say this on the air?"
Tim Ferriss
"We did not consummate our attraction!"
Derek Sivers
But we kind of regretted it. So then it was the third day - the day that I was leaving, and there's this big Central Park in the middle of Central Oslo. You know housekeeping came at 10 a.m. Like "Time to check out! Time to go!" She was asking them in Norwegian like please one more hour and they said "No get out!" So we go out to this park and she's like, "Oh god. I wish I could be with you." I wish! She's like "I just so want to be with you" and I was like "Damn. Me too. I wish we could...." And then I looked around and this park is surrounded by hotels: Sheraton, Hilton, Marriott. It was 11 o'clock and my ferry was leaving at 4 o'clock. Oh and there's one detail: She was just in the process of breaking up with her fiancé. This matters because I said "Hey, what do you think about getting a hotel for a few hours." She was like, "Oh! We could! Yeah, it feels kind of naughty doesn't it? Yeah, but let's do it. But I can't be seen with you, just on the chance that a friend of mine walks by I can't be seen going into a hotel with some strange man." I said, okay. So here's what we'll do. I'll go into the hotel. I'll get a room and then I'll text you the room number and you come up a few minutes later. She said, okay good.
Derek Sivers
So I went into the hotel and whatever hotel it was, I'll just say Sheraton, and they said, "Welcome to the Sheraton Hotel." I said "Hey, I'm here for one night. I'd like a room." Great. No problem. "Okay, tomorrow breakfast will be served over here and such and such and here's your room." And OK, he gives me my key. So I go up to the room and I text her the room number, and she comes up five minutes later, and we have fun for a few hours and it's great. But now it's 2:30 and it's time for me to go get my ferry. So this time we reverse it. I go down alone first and I go to the guy at the front desk and I said "Hey, I've decided to catch the four o'clock ferry." He's like, "Oh, is everything? Okay. Was there any problem?" I said no, no problem at all. Everything's great. Just decided to catch an earlier ferry. So, paying in full here it is. He's so he's charging my card. It's already done. But then he sees her walk by and he goes "Wait a minute. I don't like this one bit!" He remembers that he saw her come in five minutes after me, and now she's leaving five minutes after me and he goes "This is not some two-bit establishment! This is a very reputable hotel! I do not like this! I don't like this one bit!" He was getting really angry. And I was so happy because not for the obvious, but it was so liberating realizing that I've done nothing wrong. Nobody was hurt. This is fully consensual. They were paid for their room. And even though he's angry he can't get me in trouble. I haven't broken the law.
Derek Sivers
I think that we so often as kids, we spend so much of our life the first half of our life deferring to authority and thinking that authority has power over us. At a certain point you realize that you're free. You're liberated from that as long as you don't break the law. Even if people tell you you're a bad person that it's not true. They're just saying that because of their rules or whatever. So this to me was a major turn pointing my life - realizing that I was liberated from authority and from judgment
Tim Ferriss
So a couple things: The first is I read a piece recently. The author's name is Ava. I don't know her full name. Bookbear on Substack. The title of the piece is "not disappointing myself" and it's a discussion of disappointing others - how disappointing others but not disappointing yourself is important. I mean, that's the nice kind of upshot of it Very well written. Introduced to me by a friend named Mike. Thank you, Mike. So I'd recommend people take a look at that because I think it relates.
Tim Ferriss
https://www.avabear.xyz/p/not-disappointing-myself
Tim Ferriss
Since you made mention of the fiance though, I want to stand in for some of the audience who will say "Well, wait a second. You said you didn't do anything wrong, but we live in a society. We do follow rules. Otherwise, we are with the animals. So what is good? What is bad is based on societal norms?" I'm sure there are people listening like "Well, wait a second. You had fun for a couple hours with someone who is still engaged." How would you respond to people who find that morally repugnant?
Derek Sivers
They had broken up but we're still living together because she just hadn't moved out yet.
Tim Ferriss
Okay. All right.
Derek Sivers
I would I wouldn't sleep with somebody's wife or fiance. But no, I know what you mean. But in those moments you have to ask yourself, "Do I agree with this rule?" Because especially if you travel the world: What's polite in Japan can be rude in New Zealand and vice versa. These different ideas of what is the right and wrong thing to do are completely arbitrary and they change with geography. So you get to pick and choose, and you can choose to fit into the local norms or sometimes you choose not to because you disagree with them. That goes the same with individuals and people. You are liberated from others' norms. You can choose your own.
Tim Ferriss
So there's a lot of this that I agree with. I also wonder how we avoid - maybe we don't - but sinking into a moral relativism where everything is okay on some level because nothing is objectively good or bad therefore mutilation of 12 year old girls or whatever is totally fine in that culture because the culture is different there I'm not going to object to anything like that. Yeah, because I am not the arbiter of universal truth. Therefore like everything is okay in different cultures different places, different households because everything is relative. How do you how do you think about that?
Derek Sivers
I defer to Sam Harris Did he ever talk about the moral landscape on your show?
Tim Ferriss
I don't think we've discussed it explicitly. So why don't you? If you wouldn't mind elaborating.
Derek Sivers
Probably the best elaboration is to tell people to go search for Sam Harris moral landscape The best TED talk I've ever seen. Sam Harris "the moral landscape" so beautifully summarizes this idea of judging something morally objectively based on The individual well-being and
Tim Ferriss
Utilitarianism? Like greatest good for the rest number of people type stuff?
Derek Sivers
He says it better than yeah, I don't want to speak for him, but yeah. Go find that talk.
Tim Ferriss
I'm curious because this is this is a there's a there's I think a tension sometimes in my mind between living a self-authored unorthodox life that does not conform to convention for the sake of conforming to convention while also trying to have some type of consistent moral compass. And that is why sometimes I'm actually very envious of people who are deeply religious. It's like, here are the rules, right? I mean you want to talk about paradox of choice, like how much decision fatigue does that remove? I'm actually very envious of that sometimes. So how do you think about, I'm not saying you should think about it, I'm just curious, like when you, when, let's just say outside of breaking the law, you can do anything, right? There is a, it's just like having 1500 different types of toothpaste at the supermarket and having to choose one in a sense, right? There is a possible decision fatigue there. Do you use, for yourself, you can define it yourself, but like good or bad or some type of moral framework for helping to narrow the choices that you make available to yourself? How do you think about that? In secular societies, I think about, I wonder about this a lot.
Derek Sivers
Yeah. I recently read a book I can recommend for anybody called "What Everyone Should Know About Islam." And it finally like I finally understand about the different Sharia laws and it's really congruent. I think more than anything if I had to pick one word to give it's it's amazing how congruent it is, and what peace that can bring in a society where even the the government laws are aligned with the religious laws which are aligned - like everybody here agrees in this code. It's not a gray area. But you asked me the other day about this, I said that I'm very influenced by the greater good. Doing things that even if it doesn't serve me personally or privately if it seems like it's the right thing to do I'll do what seems to be the right thing.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. This came up very organically in our conversation.
Derek Sivers
I don't remember how, do you?
Tim Ferriss
Let's see. Yes, I do remember because I think I was talking about how I do not identify as a philanthropist even though I do a lot of non-profit work because I actually have a pretty Hobbesian view of human nature in general and think we've probably, we're certainly on a planetary level, cause more problems than we've solved. And therefore I don't phil_, like philosophy, right? Like hydrophilic, like philic is to love, phil is the etymology of that. And then the philanthropy is like the Anthropocene or anthropology, it's human. So like to love humans, basically, is philanthropy. and I don't feel like I align with that. I'm actually like misanthrope a lot of the time.
Tim Ferriss
So I said, no, I don't think about that. And therefore I make decisions about A, B or C in the following way, when it relates to some of the nonprofit work and scientific research that gets funded through the Saisei Foundation, my foundation. And that I think is what prompted you to say, "I'm not sure if I think of myself as an altruist, but I seem to make decisions for the greater good", which I've observed in you.
Tim Ferriss
I think that is the, rewinding the tape, I think that is sort of the stream of conversation that led to that coming up. But you were making, I was asking about how you consider constraining your choices with maybe a lens of morality. And so you were gonna say....
Derek Sivers
For me personally, I guess we have this gut feeling of what feels right and feels wrong. Or sometimes you actually let your head rule that decision. To say, you know what, I know that personally I might want such and such, but I know that ultimately it's not that important. Or maybe the fact that I'm happy anyway affects a lot of my decisions. That it's like, I don't need to have some million dollar thing to make me happy. I'm already happy. I've hit the maximum. There is no such thing as happier. I'm already there. So therefore this million dollars should just go to people who can use it because that's for the greater good. Like that's how my brain honestly works. But you know, this idea of -isms, ideologies, and subscribing, yeah, you tapped into that thing: what did you call it, the decision fatigue. It really helps decision fatigue to say I'm all in on this. But people do it to a fault where they read a self-help book and go, "Oh, yeah, this is it. This is the answer. This is I'm following this now." Stoicism, you know, everybody's suddenly declaring themselves to be a Stoic...
Tim Ferriss
Religion or CrossFit or veganism, crypto for that matter. You want to know about religion?
Derek Sivers
Yeah, it's a tribalism in that case.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, not for everyone, just to be clear. But yeah.
Derek Sivers
So something related to you happened to me on a plane years ago that I think is a good example of this. That long, long ago, I think it was 2008 or 2009, I was on a plane from Amsterdam to the US and I saw a guy reading 4-Hour Workweek. I said, "Hey, great book!" And he goes, "Pfft, it's trash, man." And I said, "Really?" And he goes, "Yeah, this guy's full of himself. This book is trash."
Tim Ferriss
I think about that all the time because... Was he a German guy?
Derek Sivers
I don't know.
Tim Ferriss
I think, yeah, I've heard a bit of this before, yeah. Not to slight the fine Germans. I should say, outside of the US, Germany and Korea are my besties.
Derek Sivers
But he found one thing he didn't like about you and therefore declared all 400 pages of this book to be trash. And I think that's the problem with -isms, is that if you're trying to buy into a system, so it's all or nothing. And so, if the leader of a movement says something you don't like on social media, well, now the bubble's popped. It's a fly in my dish, it's a hair in the meal, it's a poo in the pool. (laughing) The whole thing is ruined. Drain the pool.
Tim Ferriss
It's page four to seven in your Dr. Seuss book.
Derek Sivers
Oh yeah, we're back to that.
Tim Ferriss
The cat, the alien, and the octopus.
Derek Sivers
But it's like the mindset that wants everything to be a religion. That's deeply built into people.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, the reductionism simplifies reality.
Derek Sivers
Yeah. Simplifies reality. I like that.
Tim Ferriss
You do assume cognitive burden to take the harder path.
Derek Sivers
So, on that note, back to my whole "useful not true" - my radical doubt, super skepticism. We should be skeptical of every -ism. We should avoid isms, avoid ideology and take ideas piecemeal. Which means ideally you should be open to somebody you don't like, taking good ideas from people you don't like. And the people you do like admitting that some of the things they say, you're not going to adopt that. And when somebody does that, to me that shows a stronger thinker, a clearer thinker, somebody who's looking at ideas individually instead of just saying, "I'm all in on this." "I am a such and such-ist." "I subscribed to this ism." That to me seems to be a jumping to a conclusion. It's a punt. It's like just deferring to the -ism.
Tim Ferriss
This is very present for me in the US and we don't need to go into politics, but with respect to politics, 'cause I am asked frequently, right? Like, "Are you a Democrat or a Republican? Oh, wait, I think you're a libertarian." I refuse to play that game. If you wanna talk to me about a specific issue, let's talk about it. And if you can not just make the case for your argument, but like ideally, I mean, this is asking a lot, like steel man account argument "just to prove to me you're not in this to have a shouting match." Like, okay, then let's have a conversation. But as soon as you apply, and I think I'm borrowing from Paul Graham on this of Y Combinator fam, but the more labels you apply to yourself, the stupider you get. I think that's true. It's just like the more you calcify your thinking and or just absolve yourself of thinking. Right, which is a luxury.
Derek Sivers
It's deferring.
Tim Ferriss
It's deferring, which is a luxury if you want to, I think, have a really, if you wanna be an outlier in terms of the impact you have, the happiness you can achieve, that is a luxury you can't afford, is absolving yourself of thinking. Or maybe it's a bell curve, who knows? Maybe like the people who completely don't think and the people who think the most of the happiest, who the hell knows? I think a lot of it's probably out of the box.
Tim Ferriss
There are I'm sure people listening who are gonna be like, "Wait a second, all right, this guy can't be any happier? What kind of alien is this guy?" How much of that do you think is out of the box? Just your code versus a cultivated?
Derek Sivers
Do you know Sonja Lyubomisrky?
Tim Ferriss
No.
Derek Sivers
Okay, you know who she is?
Tim Ferriss
Nope.
Derek Sivers
She wrote one of those books on happiness. ("The How of Happiness") After I read "Stumbling on Happiness," I went, ooh, that was good.
Tim Ferriss
That was a good book.
Derek Sivers
And I went to go find other books on the subject. So she wrote a couple books on happiness. She's been studying happiness for decades.
Tim Ferriss
Sonja Lyubomisrky
Derek Sivers
So she said in one of her books that her studies have shown that most people's happiness is 50% DNA and out of their control. the other 50% is in their control. So the best we can do is just control that 50% you know?
Tim Ferriss
Sounds like you're a stoic. Closet stoic.
Derek Sivers
Oh I am. Yeah, minus the - minus the -ism. You talked about stoicism a bit and I was like "pfft, ancient crap." And then finally in 2010, I read "A Guide to the Good Life".
Tim Ferriss
William Irving, I think.
Derek Sivers
And I read it, whoa, oh my God, I thought this was just me! Like this is everything he's talking about. This is the way I've been thinking since I was a teenager. I don't know why I picked it up. Maybe, I suspect - I found out years later that the Dale Carnegie book called "How to Stop Worrying and Start Living."
Tim Ferriss
You know, I, just as a side note, so I've read that book multiple times. I just went into my Kindle recently to look at my Kindle library, mostly to see whether it was 70 or 80% of the downloaded books that I hadn't read. And I came across that book and I thought, you know what, this would be a good time to revisit this. They're very overlapping.
Derek Sivers
I just read a couple years ago in Wikipedia or something that that book was basically spouting stoic values.
Tim Ferriss
Makes perfect sense. It's a great book, by the way, folks, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living.
Derek Sivers
- by Dale Carnegie, and it was on my grandmother's bookshelf and I read it when I was like 16.
Tim Ferriss
Oh, look at that!
Derek Sivers
And so here I was thinking that I would have, up until two years ago, I would have said, or I did say, all the things stoicism says. I've believed these things since I was a teenager. I thought I made these things up. I thought this was just me being weird. This was my weird approach to life. But then just two years ago, I saw that Wikipedia entry about--
Tim Ferriss
You got incepted by Dale Carnegie!
Derek Sivers
I've been thinking that way since I was a teenager. And it wasn't till the age of like 40 that I read an actual book on stoicism. "Whoa, this is how I think!" But that being said, yeah, I think the, it's healthier to watch out for whenever you find yourself wanting to jump all in to an ism, even if it's just a book that you just read. And if you find yourself blindly kind of saying, I, you know, all of this, this is me, this is how I'm going to live now.
Tim Ferriss
Unless you have the, let's call it self-awareness or meta-awareness to say, okay, I'll try all this stuff on for size. Like this is not, this is like me putting on a suit. To see what happens, but not like this is the truth In all caps, this is who I am, identity.
Derek Sivers
That's totally different. See, that's pluralism versus monism. Monism is to say.... monism is mystical. The number one is somewhat like magical and mystical. One love, one world, one answer, one way. It's very appealing, this idea of one. And it's very upsetting to think that, No, no, no, there are many answers and they conflict and you can believe conflicting things at the same time.
Derek Sivers
So, sorry, I accidentally skipped answering your question about, was it either am I this happy or why am I this happy or why do I think I'm this happy?
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, so this researcher who wrote the book after stumbling on happiness said 50/50 and then I dragged us into stoics.
Derek Sivers
So that's it, so no, I think I got the lucky roll of the dice, the DNA dice.
Derek Sivers
But also, there's another thing I've been doing. since I was a teenager, that I found out has another name too. So for my whole life, I very often open my diary and just put everything into there. I write what happened today, but also like the things that I'm thinking. And whenever I come upon a belief that to me feels like a disempowering belief, something that I've said-- Your own beliefs. Yeah, my own, something I've said that sounds disempowering to me, like I hate it here, I can't do what I want here, I need to go somewhere else to do what I want. I'll just keep it general like that. Then I'll stop and ask myself, like, wait a minute, is that true? Like that sounds like, so that sounds like a disempowering belief. Let me push back on that. I think that belief might be holding me back. So I'm constantly doubting everything I write, doubting everything I think, doubting everything I say, and questioning it.
Tim Ferriss
And you do this in writing?
Derek Sivers
Yeah, I do this (typing fingers), my fingers just fly in my, you know. So later, I found out that this is similar to cognitive behavioral therapy. So I've been doing this for decades and now I just found out what it's called. So I just recently read a book on cognitive behavioral therapy and went, "Oh, this sounds like what I've been doing."
Tim Ferriss
Also in the all roads lead to Rome type of metaphor, CBT, as I understand it, is largely based on many stoic writings.
Derek Sivers
Ah, oh right, right, that makes sense, yeah. So I recommend, and it's kind of the conclusion of the big arc I was on, the whole useful not true, super skepticism thing, is you asked me last week, how do you change your beliefs? Like if you say, this is the belief I'm holding, this is the belief I'd like to be holding. You said, how would you recommend somebody do that, or how do you do it?
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, how do you translate that into durable behavioral change, right? 'Cause it's one thing to intellectually recognize this is a disempowering belief. It would be much better for me to hold this other belief. It's one thing to achieve that and quite a different thing to implement that latter belief in a way that changes your behavior.
Derek Sivers
So I think you stack up evidence. So first, just writing in my diary about, "I think I need to believe this. I think I need to believe that the place I'm in right now is a good place to be, not a bad place to be. I think that would be a more empowering belief for me, that I can use where I am to do what I want, not need to escape where I am", for example. So then I need to just stack up evidence of this. So it's like once you've decided on the belief that would be better for you to hold, you can always find evidence to support any belief, right? So you could just kind of stack up evidence. And then I find that, you know, we're social beings. So talking with friends about it and asking their thoughts on this or telling them like, I'm starting to think this. And then friends, if they care about you and they support you, will often give you other evidence to support the belief you want to have, saying, "You know, that's a good point", you know? My friend Tracy said such and such of this and she had this, so yeah, I think you're right on with this new idea of yours. So friends support it and then you start to internalize it more and maybe it takes a few days steps put it into action or a big giant leap to put this into action? Like you know some crazy things I've done in my life to cut off some options in my life as a giant leap? I can, we can talk about that if you want. But small actions or big actions, you can take the action before necessarily internalizing it.
Tim Ferriss
Totally. You're gonna fake it before you make it.
Derek Sivers
Fake it before you make it, yes!
Tim Ferriss
Do it before you believe it. Act as if.
Derek Sivers
I should sign up for college and you're just like You're right I should oh my god I just did like even before you've convinced yourself you can like sign up that little form and take that first step to Yeah, take that. So I think I've done a lot of things like that in my life where to support a new belief I will take an action first and then we all have the desire to be congruent with the actions we've taken Look, I'm this kind of person now. This is my belief now
Tim Ferriss
So for folks listening who may want who would find it helpful to have a structured way to cross-examine their own beliefs and maybe take an opposing stance and then gather evidence There's something called "The Work" by Byron Katie which is very much this and I found personally very useful super super useful.
Tim Ferriss
You weren't sure whether to open the door or not giant leaps. So with the understanding that what you do is not necessarily what you recommend for all people What are is there an example of a giant leap?
Derek Sivers
Yeah, I renounced my US citizenship in 2011.
Tim Ferriss
That's a big one.
Derek Sivers
I deliberately burned the ships. Yeah, so I have to explain this metaphor because I found that most people haven't heard this tale. But we have all heard of burning the bridges. So you burn the bridge when you destroy a friendship a connection with somebody the bridge between you and another person. But to burn the ships is a reference to some I think like a Spanish conquistador that had headed off with three ships to South America somewhere and when he landed there were thousands of Aztecs waiting to kill them and they only had a few hundred soldiers. Of course, I'm messing at the details here, but he turned to one of his men and said, "We must not retreat. Burn the ships! The men need to know that we cannot go back. We must go forward!" So, I wanted to challenge myself to go forward and not go back and after 40 years in America, I felt like "All right. I spent the first 40 years of my life here. I want to spend the next 40 out." But what I found is whenever things got tough, I kept wanting to retreat back to my comfortable California. So I thought, I need to burn the ships. So I did.
Tim Ferriss
Okay, I'm laughing because there's so many rabbit holes we could go down here. I'm going to use my creative license as a host of this podcast to avoid most of them. But are you glad you did that?
Derek Sivers
For years it was one of my biggest mistakes in life.
Tim Ferriss
Made it hard to visit family and friends in the US?
Derek Sivers
Yeah, I highly recommend, when everybody asks me about it, some people have found out about this....
Tim Ferriss
Now a handful more will know.
Derek Sivers
Don't tell anybody.
Tim Ferriss
(laughing)
Derek Sivers
So when people would ask me about it, my advice was always do not do it. In fact it still is, somebody just asked me last week, I was like, "Do not do it." Kevin Kelly had this wonderful saying: the best option is the option that gives you the most options. I love that. And under that wise advice, I think that no, you should not renounce your US citizenship because it's cutting off options. A lot of people seem to want to do it for tax reasons. And even that has, you need to look through that thoroughly. I did not do it for tax reasons. In fact, my taxes went up after I renounced because most of my income is still US sourced, US sourced, so now that all gets taxed at flat 30% rate instead of before it was like part of a bigger picture. So yeah, my taxes went up and it reduced the options. So there was something scary that happened just a few months after I renounced my citizenship. My ex, her dad was on his deathbed and we needed to quickly get on a plane that night. but I didn't have a visa. And so I went to the US embassy to get a visa quickly and they rejected me. And I was devastated 'cause they just hand you a slip saying, "No, you've been denied for a visa. "Next." And the slip says, "You may not reapply. "This decision is final." And hey, useful not true. I challenged that rule. I was like, "All right, I think somebody just made that up. I'm gonna go back and reapply anyway." So I went back with a mountain of evidence and luckily they granted me a visa.
Tim Ferriss
Mountain of evidence for what?
Derek Sivers
I was living in Singapore at the time and it was actually my good friend from Bangladesh that said, "Derek, this is your first time being refused?" She's like, "I've been refused like five times. Look, here's how to do it. You can't just go to the embassy and say give me a visa please. You have to show a mountain of evidence that your life is in Singapore, that you have, tell them about your cat, that you have a job, that you have this place, that you're on the board at this company, that you're speaking at National University of Singapore. Show them your two-year rental agreement."
Tim Ferriss
You're not a flight risk.
Derek Sivers
Right, not a flight risk. So I went back with a mountain of evidence and a letter from the doctor from my ex's dad saying, you know, please, he only has a few days to live. Please allow them to come back. And so I was granted the visa, but it was scary as hell. And so I think that people are often overconfident thinking like, hey, I'll just renounce my citizenship and it'll lower my taxes. I can go back anytime I want, but--
Tim Ferriss
Not true.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, I always say like, no, no, no. Once you renounce, you might never be allowed in that country ever again. That is not your country anymore. So I do not recommend it.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, I would say in general not to paint with too broad a brush, but the US frowns upon people who renounce citizenship.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, I'm always aware that I might in a lot of ways be allowed back in ever again.
Tim Ferriss
Okay, what is another example of a giant leap? Anything come to mind? And that's a huge one for sure. Moving, was it worth it for you? So you said I wouldn't recommend this to most people and I know we we live looking forward and not behind we can't change the past as far as we know...
Derek Sivers
Now, 13 years later since doing it, it did come in a little handy in kovat times where I will skip some family drama details, but there was a big big pressure on me to move to America and I was able to just kind of say "No. Can't do it Don't want to don't have to, can't." and so finally after 12 years it came in handy for that but no to me that was it. It was a huge thing, you know. It's a little bit like somebody getting a sex change or something, right? Like it's a not to be taken lightly. Yeah, if you decide that you've made the wrong decision and it'll take you 12 years if infinity to reverse that.
Tim Ferriss
Any other giant leaps?
Derek Sivers
Actually, selling my company came in like an instant moment of clarity. Life is weird when you can hold multiple philosophies in your head at the same time. Like this is, sorry, this is the whole thing I was talking about with "useful not true": No beliefs are true, so you can hold them all in your head and just kind of look at them like, "Well, here's one belief that says you should stick it out when the to-going gets tough, you need to stay in there and such and such." There's another belief that says the rewards to effort ratio is off, that I'm spending so much effort and getting so little reward that you should stop. Philosophy says.... You can just hold these in your head and look at them as paths you could go down, as philosophies you could follow, and then ultimately you just pick one or you craft one from a hodgepodge, a piecemeal from the other bits.
Derek Sivers
And so in that moment I was feeling really frustrated with my company. I'd been doing it for 10 years. I was feeling done, like somebody who's been painting a mural for many years or writing a novel for many years. And just you put the last brushstroke on you write the last word and you go, "There. I think I'm done." That's how I was feeling. But somebody could have argued like okay go take a vacation and come back and get back to work! But I played off some different ways of thinking about it and in that moment while driving down Pico Boulevard in LA while on the phone with a friend. I was like, "That's it dude. I think I'm done. I'm just gonna sell the company." And I decided in that moment and it wasn't fully congruent yet. It was just one of many options But like that night I went and called three companies that had been asking to buy mine and I told them yes.
Tim Ferriss
Was there a feeling or a meal or something your friend said that triggered that?
Derek Sivers
He just asked me a bunch of questions. He challenged the things I was saying. He basically did the cognitive behavioral therapy with me. He was pushing back on everything I was saying, challenging it. So for example, I said I'm sick of having all this responsibility. I don't want to have to do this and have to do that. He said you don't have to do anything. I said, yeah, I have to pay my taxes. He said no you don't. Yes, I do. I have to pay taxes. He said no, Derek, you need to understand this. You don't have to do anything. What's the dude, "Power of Now" that sat on a park bench. Who wrote "Power of Now"? Eckhart Tolle. I unfortunately tried to listen to it on a long drive and don't do that. It's hazardous. He's got a very soothing voice. But he starts out the story saying that at one point he just went to go lay on a park bench and basically just sat there for a couple years doing nothing. It's a reminder that you don't have to do anything that everything is a choice that even paying your taxes. You don't have to. There will be consequences if you don't but let's always be clear that you're choosing to do it. You're choosing to pay your taxes because you'd rather not have the consequences. You're choosing to pay your employees. You're choosing to go into work. And none of these things are things you have to do. And I think he pushed back on that a few times and ultimately my value system is such that, um, I most value personal growth. And it felt to me like I've been doing this thing for 10 years. The bigger learning, growing opportunity for me right now is to do something else. It wasn't a matter of up or down. It was just different.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah so let's segue from personal growth to mentors because many people have had mentors, many people seek mentors, many people pine after mentors and if they could only get a hold of person X and have a cup of tea or coffee, pick the brain, have a meal.
Derek Sivers
Pick the brain! So appealing. Who would not want to have their brain picked?
Tim Ferriss
So how would you suggest people ask mentors for help?
Derek Sivers
Here's what I do. I have three mentors. So anytime I have a little dilemma in my life, I write a really good description of my dilemma before I reach out to them because I don't want to waste their time, right? My mentors are VIPs. I don't want to waste a minute of their time. So first I write a really good description of the problem and then I summarize it. I summarize the context, the problem, I summarize my options and I summarize my thoughts. Because I got to make this succinct. I don't want to send somebody a 20 page long email. So I have to make this as succinct as possible.
Tim Ferriss
So what does that in practice look like? A half page, page?
Derek Sivers
Yeah, half page. Like bullet points for everything instead of paragraphs, right? As succinct as I can. Then before I sent it to them. I try to predict what this person would say to each of those three. Yeah, or right right what anybody would say to this? But yeah, what my what this mentor would say with that. What he would say. I know the way this guy thinks. I've read all his books. I know the way we've talked a lot. I know what he would say. So then I internalize that, and I address those points that I'm predicting they would say. I'm gonna address those in advance, to not waste their time
Tim Ferriss
So when you say address them, what do you mean by that?
Derek Sivers
Kind of like how you asked I said something five minutes ago and you asked me a question like Can you give me an example of that or how do you know this? So it's like okay. I knew you were gonna ask that and so here's my follow-up, right? So I'll address those in advance again, so as not to waste their time and then again one last time I tried to predict
Tim Ferriss
You have an answer ready for whatever they might come back with.
Derek Sivers
But I include it in the initial summary of the situation. And then, after I've done that whole process, I don't need to bother them anymore, because the answer is now clear. Because I've just done the work of summarizing everything and imagining what they would say. So the punchline is, the truth is: I haven't talked to my mentors in years, and one of them doesn't even know I exist. These are my mentors. And so this is how I think. It's kind of like how Napoleon Hill talked about the mastermind. Imagine Abraham Lincoln is there. What would Abraham Lincoln say to you? So I think that you're right. I also get a lot of emails from people saying like, I need a mentor. Will you mentor me? How do I find a mentor? And this is my answer. Like, it's all in your head. It's about the summarization of your situation, thinking of it from another person's point of view. You can predict what this person would say. If you're a fan of their books and their podcasts and their talks, you know what they would probably say, so do it yourself.
Tim Ferriss
Who is, if you're willing to share, the person who doesn't know you exist?
Derek Sivers
Tyler Cowen. I just emailed him two weeks ago to say thank you.
Tim Ferriss
Thanks for your years of service.
Derek Sivers
For continued inspiration, and he sent me back a tiny little thanks. Seth Godin is one. He knows I exist. We don't talk often. But I very often think like what would Seth Godin say?
Tim Ferriss
He walks the walk. He's another example of someone who walks the walk. Very much so. Yeah. Not as common as you would hope. Who's the third?
Derek Sivers
It's actually changing I don't know right now.
Tim Ferriss
Keith Richards.
Derek Sivers
Bjork.
Tim Ferriss
Chuck E. Cheese.
Derek Sivers
That would be great. You know that's thoroughly useful if you have a fictional mentor. A fictional person can be your mentor. Yeah. You know like what would, well fuck you know, what would Jesus do? Yeah. People still do that like okay I'm not sure what to do what would Jesus do? That's a perfectly good mentor.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah and I think a lot of people would agree with you and for those people who might wonder I actually do something very similar. Okay. Can you tell? Yeah absolutely so I have, I have, I to be more like in some capacity, right? Because I do think you become the people you spend the most time with. So to bring up a name that we've already brought up, I think actually a lot about Matt Mullenweg 'cause he's very calm in almost all circumstances. Not all, I know a handful of things that bother him, but he's very, very calm and measured and good at perspectival knowledge, taking alternative positions, taking the counter position on his own thoughts, his own opinions, his own goals. And so I often think when I get dysregulated or upset about something, I'm getting wound up, I'm like, what would Matt do in this? What would Matt say to me? If Matt were in my shoes, what would Matt do? And I've also done that in writing exercises where I actually just sit down with my older self - Oh wow. - who has figured it out. So if I'm talking to a version of myself who's 10 years older, 20 years older, who has figured this out, what might that older, wiser version of me say? And I just write out the dialogue. And by then I'm like, huh, okay. - Yeah. - Doesn't always, doesn't always give you some magic solution, but it is astonishing how often that will give you some type of clarity or maybe relief that helps you to cling less strongly to whatever the challenge or problem or question was that you had in mind. It's really remarkable. So I do something very similar, I guess is what I'm saying.
Derek Sivers
I get emails about once a week where somebody asks me a big question by email, and then at the end they say, "Actually, you don't even really have to answer this. Just honestly asking you the question helped me get some clarity, thank you."
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, totally.
Derek Sivers
Like just the act of opening their email client and starting with it and going, okay, I wanna ask Derek Sivers this thing.
Tim Ferriss
And even if I intend to reach out to a mentor about something, I still go through the exercise of not, of trying to crystallize my thinking so I don't waste their time. Even if it's a really close friend, like I don't want to be lazy, right? And I don't want to ask them something that could be resolved with five minutes of Googling, right, or five minutes of introspection. It's like whenever I go to anyone, I want to be able to say, basically, here's the situation, here are some of my assumptions, here's what I've already tried. I've tried A, B, C, D, and E and I'm not quite figuring it out. And then followed by a super specific question. But the asking the mentors around your imaginary table and doing that homework, I think is is it's something that I do and I recommend to everyone. And there is some self-promotion here. Like I would like to have fewer than several thousand email they could come in with like How can I launch my book please tell me.
Derek Sivers
And I'll admit I actually got oddly shy two minutes ago when you asked me who the third one was because actually it's it's been you!
Tim Ferriss
No!
Derek Sivers
Yeah, and I didn't want to bother you with things. So I'm just like I was tempted, you know, I've got your phone number. I could have just texted you and and I'm like, "No. Hold on." And I'll just do it for some... Never mind
Tim Ferriss
Well, thank you for you know, I think about you. I think about you, Matt.... it's funny you mentioned Seth because Seth would be on a shortlist for me as well of people who really think, and more than think it's question the musts the shoulds. Yeah, the have-tos like wait a fucking second. That's nonsense Yeah, I feel like you're very good at that. So I I'm just part of the reason I've read your first books myself
Tim Ferriss
Should we um, I feel like we should do two things. Okay, I feel like we should get a slight refill on the scotch and then maybe talk about games the games we play all right getting good at games things of this type so a little little bathroom and then scotch break what do you think? Great.
Derek Sivers
Be right back audience.
Tim Ferriss
All right ready to go we're back cool and for people wondering we just came back from our bathroom slash break slash scotch refill. This is, I would say, very similar to a lot of our conversations. Yeah. Like it's not that different from a lot of our conversations, but I do appreciate how much thought you give to deliverables for the audience. Makes a big fucking difference, honestly.
Derek Sivers
The greater good thing I think about making it interesting conversation for you, but then there's like how many people that listen so it's like I try to.
Tim Ferriss
You're good at holding both.
Derek Sivers
Looking at you, but I'm thinking of them. No offense.
Tim Ferriss
Wow we could we get unpacked. Dark mirror here we come. Cheers man.
Tim Ferriss
We're all playing games, and I think it's a matter of knowing which games you're playing. Outside of some basics you got shelter you got food. And you cover some of the lower rungs of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Beyond that, we're all playing different games. So knowing which games you're playing then choosing the game you want to play: these are these are important topics Why don't I just hand the mic over and let you talk about how you think about this kind of thing? Playing games Okay, maybe not the proper tee-up, but I'm gonna go.
Derek Sivers
Something that might seem strange about me: Sometimes people say that I seem weird because of the choices I make in life.
Tim Ferriss
You are pretty weird, in fairness.
Derek Sivers
But I try to explain that it's just because: For 10 years or 15 years. I was playing a certain game. I was trying to be successful. I wanted to be famous. I wanted to be a successful musician. I wanted to be rich in that way. And I did it. And in my mind, my by my own standards, I won the game. When you win the game - say you're playing Settlers of Catan or Monopoly or poker/whatever with friends - when you win the game, what do you usually do is you you stop playing! You say, "Okay, let's go do something else. I won the game."
Derek Sivers
So that even with say addictive video games... Have you ever played Stardew Valley?
Tim Ferriss
No. I probably shouldn't.
Derek Sivers
Don't. It's adorably addictive. My ex grew up on a farm and Stardew Valley is one of those little farming games or you tend to your crops and then you get animals and you get money for selling your crops.
Tim Ferriss
The story behind this game is also very interesting made by one guy with a passion for many years. And I believe there's a very there's there's a lot of additional context to that that we don't have to unpack now but people people can look into it. It's a fascinating backstory. But yeah, don't play it because it's visual heroin.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, I mean, it's so good. If you want to play a great game that is also non greedy? I found it because it was recommended on a list of no-bullshit games that don't ask you for more money once you're in. You just pay your nine dollars or something like that up front and then you've got the game forever. So that's cool. Let's say actually if you are looking for a new game, it is a great game. Stardew Valley is wonderful. But it's so wonderful that my ex and I got really into it. She played it for something like 400 hours or something like that. The little clock shows you how long you've played. And at a certain point she had done everything. She'd made every dish, planted every crop, caught every fish, done every favor for every villager, whatever. She was done, but yet there was this yearning to keep playing because she was so good at it. And I think that the temptation to keep playing even though the rewards are done isn't that the definition of addiction? And so it's continuing a behavior even though it's not rewarding you anymore. So to me that's what making money is. It's a game that I've decided to stop playing because I got enough. But this could apply to anything. Somebody who wanted to be a successful musician.
Derek Sivers
Oh there's a great example: Gotye. "You didn't have to cut me out. Now you're just somebody that I used to know", That guy, one hit wonder, Gotye from Australia, that was his stage name. He did a beautiful thing. He retired that stage name. He's like "There, did it, I had a massive number one hit, I don't want to keep singing that song for the rest of my life. There is no more Gotye." So now he's just back to his legal name and he's the drummer singer in a band called The Basics and he retired Gotye. He stepped away. Jacinda Ardern, the most recent Prime Minister of New Zealand, after six years felt that she had had enough and she quit instead of going through the process of running for re-election. She quit kind of midterm and just said that's enough, I'm feeling full, I'm feeling spent. Serena Williams quit instead of going longer than she should have. She quit after 27 years and like that was enough. She hit her point that was enough. Cameron Diaz. I suddenly after watching "There's Something About Mary" with my kid, I said "I wonder whatever happened to her?" And I looked up and saw that she was the fifth highest grossing actress in America, the highest paid Hollywood actress over 40, and then she'd had enough. And so she just quit to do other things.
Tim Ferriss
I should interview her. I love those stories. I mean, she would probably not say yes. Those are fascinating to me. People are just like, "Yep, goodbye!"
Derek Sivers
Because I think there's something really admirable about the personal challenge of making yourself do something else. Most of us stay in the game for too long. So I really admired that Jacinda Ardern did that when politicians are known for trying to hold on to power as long as they can, right? Until they're forcibly removed and kicking and screaming. And I really admire that she did that.
Derek Sivers
I was super super influenced by Felix Dennis's book called "How to Get Rich".
Tim Ferriss
Which I just have to say it's definitely not suitable for family listening but the audiobook is exceptional. I think it's Roy McMillan who's the narrator. And I know that because I looked it up because I was so impressed by the narrator. But just listen, anyway I just want to second that.
Derek Sivers
How's it not suitable?
Tim Ferriss
Well I mean look you have a very particular, different orientation on these things, but most parents probably don't want to listen to an audiobook that's like, "Yeah and then I spent all the money on coke and whores."
Derek Sivers
That's what I thought you were thinking. That is one specific thing, but that's so wonderful that he admitted that.
Tim Ferriss
Well it's very, it's funny for that reason right? Because he's so candid in a way that you would not normally find in most books like this. And unapologetic on other things. The whole thing is is refreshingly unusual. I enjoyed it. I love that book. Okay, so I interrupted that.
Derek Sivers
No, it's great. And I read that at a key time. It was right about the time that we met. Like 2008, I was just selling CD Baby and I was suddenly, you know, coming into more money than I could ever spend in a lifetime. And just about that time I read Felix Dennis's book How to Get Rich. And in it, he had this quote that I got ready for our conversation here. He said, "If I had my time again, knowing what I know today, I would dedicate myself to making just enough to live comfortably as quickly as I could by the time I was 35. I would then cash out and retire to write poetry and plant trees." So I read that at a key fork in the road moment for me where I just sold CD Baby, had a ton of money, I was like what to do now? And I read this book from this filthy rich old man being entirely honest and I thought I should just learn from his experience. And so I took his lesson to heart and I said alright. Felix Dennis said if he could do it all again he would just retire and write poetry and plant trees and I haven't planted any trees yet. But it's kind of what I'm doing. So if what I'm doing seems weird, it's because I took his advice to heart and I've kind of quit the game. So I think the, here's how we can summarize it, is to say that most people, I think, go by the inner compass that says, "I'm really good at this game, so I should keep playing." But I think we should all entertain the idea that we could say, "I'm really good at this game, "so I should stop playing."
Tim Ferriss
I'm excited to dig into this because there's so many facets that I want to hear your thoughts on. So first I want to pick up on something that I did not know, although I guess looking at your history makes some strange sense, but wanting to be famous you mentioned. You strike me as someone, and I mean this in a very neutral way. And this is also why I asked you the other day at lunch, I was like, "What makes you emotional?" You strike me as a very thoughtful, but in some ways, unemotional person.
Derek Sivers
Wow.
Tim Ferriss
Not in a bad way.
Derek Sivers
Okay.
Tim Ferriss
But like you're not, you don't have volatile emotions.
Derek Sivers
No.
Tim Ferriss
You don't have strong displays of emotion. And that could be a misread. I admire that about you, by the way, just the general, at least from the outside, maybe it's like the duck on the pond, right? Calm on the on the top and like kicking like hell underneath. I don't know. But you have a thoughtful, almost serene contentedness almost all the time that I interact with you. That is my perception.
Derek Sivers
That's true.
Tim Ferriss
And that's remarkable. Right? And you seem to have a very very very low need for external validation. That's my perception.
Derek Sivers
Yes, it's true.
Tim Ferriss
So that makes it odd or for me to hear you say "I want to be famous." I'm like, what do you get out of fame? If that's your constitution.
Derek Sivers
Formerly.
Derek Sivers
Wait, you know what? Something interesting came up. Okay. Check this out. You and I have thought for hundreds or thousands of hours about the concept of success, what it means to be successful. I'm 53 now. I have spent, whatever, almost 40 years, or let's say like 35 years thinking about being successful. Just a few weeks ago, in a podcast interview, somebody asked me, "What's your definition of success?" And I said, "To me, it's just "achieving what you set out to do. "That's your personal success for that thing. "I think it's very individual." And he said, "Nothing to do with "what other people think of you?" And I went, "Other people think?" I was like, "No, what?" And he goes, "Yeah, I think for a lot of people, "they would define their success through the eyes of others." I was like, "Why? "Why would anybody?" And he said, "Wait, you seriously have never considered that?" I was like, "Wow."
Tim Ferriss
He's barking up the wrong tree. He's got the wrong guy.
Derek Sivers
In 35 years, I had never, ever, ever, for a single millisecond, considered success as something that would be seen through someone else's eyes. To me, success has always been hyper-personal.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, so how does fame fit into that?
Derek Sivers
I think a little bit like the things you talked about being competitive, like your personal tendency to be competitive. As a teenager I was like "I want to get famous" - not like as famous as Prince. Prince was like a musical role model for me he was my musical hero. I didn't want to be that famous but like - I don't know - Brian Eno. That's a good you know fame role model where it's not like he'd get hounded walking down the street.
Tim Ferriss
And that was driven by a competitive drive?
Derek Sivers
It was more just like let's see if I can do it. You know just with that spirit of like "I think I can do that. I want to try doing that." And it was also feeling that what I was doing musically was valid and you know worth hearing. So a way for people to hear it is to get famous.
Tim Ferriss
Someone was asking me recently because I was describing how excited I was to see you. We haven't hung out in so long.
Derek Sivers
12 years.
Tim Ferriss
It's been so fun. It's crazy because we also interact virtually. So it doesn't seem... I think also it's helpful that we're both bald. Like we don't seem to age as much. It's like we've already crossed the Rubicon on that one.
Derek Sivers
Hit middle age at 21 and just been there since.
Tim Ferriss
A little bit more salt and pepper on the beard, but that's about it.
Tim Ferriss
So I was describing to someone that I was excited to see you and they asked what made you interesting. Or I don't think they said unusual, it's like, oh, "So what's he like? What's so interesting about him?" And I said, well, part of what's interesting is I don't think I've met anyone who has the combination of seemingly no need for external validation, yet being a good performer. Right, like you are a ringleader in a circus, musician, you're really good at imitation, voices, et cetera. You enjoy, you seem to enjoy performing. almost everyone, and I do mean almost everyone, and I'm only saying almost because it seems too absolutist to say everyone, but it might be everyone, who I know who is a really good performer. It could be comedy, it could be acting, it could be fill in the blank. Had that drive to become excellent, doing that because they loved or needed (or both) external validation. It's very I think it's a very uncommon combination. Which is why I was asking you about it.
Derek Sivers
Maybe it is because I just had that life shift where it's like I did it to a certain point. I didn't get as famous as I thought I could, but I was successful enough like I bought my house in Woodstock with the money I made touring, you know? By my own definition I was a pretty successful musician. And then just at the time that that was getting boring, I accidentally started CD Baby and I just threw all my attention into serving musicians. So I think that flipped something in my head where it's like, I no longer need the attention from me. I don't need any more attention. I don't need any more validation. And now I don't even need any more money. I don't really don't need anything from anybody. But yeah, you're right. I still am socially skilled. I know how to get on stage and talk.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. You're good at it. Really good at it! Those are your combination of elements that I don't usually see together. It's very, very rare.
Derek Sivers
Am I blushing?
Tim Ferriss
You're blushing. Could be the scotch.
Tim Ferriss
All right. So the next question that comes to mind for me is whether you've always been a satisficer to harken back to the "Paradox of Choice" terminology from Barry Schwartz, or if you've ever been a maximizer. And the reason I ask is because framing games in the way you have, which is once you're good at a game and you win, it's only natural you'd stop playing that game, is to me the genre de séquence, the spirit, the essence of a satisficer. There are people, however, who let's just say they want to be a grandmaster in chess, It's like, "This is my game. I win, that is a win on the road of additional wins and mastery to strive to become the best in the world." Or there's another option, which is someone who has played a game for so long, let's just say it's finances. They finally "win" in quotation marks. They no longer need to work to meet their needs, but they have played one game for so long they don't know what other game to play. And that paradox of choice and anxiety leads them to continue playing the same game. I know so many examples of people who have won. They've won the Oscar, they've made a gajillion dollars, done whatever. They don't have the same love perhaps they once did for that game, but they continue to play it because subconsciously or consciously they do not know what else to do. So I know this is a hodgepodge of a question, but it leads back to, I guess, the first, which is, have you always been a satisficer?
Derek Sivers
Let's do it in reverse. So the third category of people that don't know what else they can do, That's the category that by my values, I want to like physically pick them up and put them into a different scenario. I think it's just objectively "you need to change now. You need to shake it up in order to live a full life. You need to see the world from different perspectives. You've been doing the same thing for too long." That to me, talk about like beliefs and you know, that's a belief of mine, which means it's not true. But I believe that you should change.
Tim Ferriss
Just because it's not true doesn't mean it isn't valuable.
Derek Sivers
Right! It's useful. It's useful to believe that you should.
Tim Ferriss
Or I should put a different just because it can't be proven as true, it doesn't mean it isn't valuable. I know we're gonna get into some semantic rat hole here.
Derek Sivers
Those people I think absolutely should somebody needs to shake them out of their - kick them out of the nest - shake them out of their habits. Go do something else. The only celebrity death that upset me was Kurt Cobain. All the others seemed to be like, okay, they've made their contribution to culture and I appreciate them, but like, I wasn't eagerly awaiting George Harrison's next album, you know? But Kurt Cobain, like, fuck. That it felt like he had so much more to give, but he was miserable. And something like that, maybe not to that extreme, Let's just use that as the the farthest end spectrum on this kind of person that says they're miserable doing this thing But they feel like it's all they can do. Those people I just want to like, you know physically restrain them and pick them up and put them into another environment that to show them you can do something else. It's a bigger world
Tim Ferriss
Or like "You're good enough. Go to an ashram for two years. You can always come back. You'll be fine."
Derek Sivers
But just imagine the joy of simple manual labor. At the end of the movie "The Last Emperor": This guy's been through this big giant arc and at the very end of the movie he's just picking weeds in a garden. Because he used to be the Emperor but the Chinese Revolution assigned him to just be a gardener now. And he kind of found his peace with it. We all have different versions of that - that we could do. You know like for the most part for the last 12 years I've just been a full-time dad here in New Zealand. You know, I know there are other impressive things I could have done but this meant the most to me.
Tim Ferriss
Impressive is such bullshit. It's just external, right? I mean what really drove that home for me is, you know, I'm a enthusiastic student of history and I read, for instance, "Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World". Really good, especially the first half or so. He's really exceptional. But I realized because they mentioned Alexander the Great in that book, and I realized Alexander is kind of like Madonna. He's got one name. I don't know that dude's last name. Do you? And like I've polled audiences, not a single person has ever raised their hand. Okay this is ostensibly the greatest - certainly one of the greatest but let's just say the greatest - conqueror the world has ever known given the constraints and technology at the time. Can't even name his full name. So just like that "impressive" - I don't know. I've just become less and less kind of concerned with that
Derek Sivers
Do you ever notice what he has in common with Winnie the Pooh?
Tim Ferriss
(laughing) Hasn't been front of mind, no.
Derek Sivers
His middle name.
Tim Ferriss
(laughing) Oh, that was good.
Tim Ferriss
All right, so. You wanna hear a terrible joke now that we're drinking scotch?
Derek Sivers
Yeah, but you know, how fun to tell a terrible joke when we're being serious. Thank you, anyway, for letting me derail that.
Tim Ferriss
Bad joke, ready? What's the one thing you don't want to hear when you're giving Willie Nelson a blowjob?
Derek Sivers
What?
Tim Ferriss
"I'm not Willie Nelson."
Tim Ferriss
Anyway, I'll let everybody sit with that one.
Derek Sivers
Should we take another break?
Tim Ferriss
I think we're doing just fine. I think we've hit escape velocity on the scotch.
Derek Sivers
Okay, wait, there were some sub questions in that last one.
Tim Ferriss
I can rewind. Which, by the way, is totally developed skill. That's not something (that comes naturally). It's from doing a lot of podcasts.
Derek Sivers
Dude, I just noticed from our walking down the street or walking through a forest and talking, you would pick up on a few words that I said in passing. Two days later you were like, "Let me ask you some more questions about that." I was like, "What? How the fuck did you remember that?"
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, totally trained. Yeah, which is wild. So I was asking you about maximizer versus being satisficer. Have you ever been a maximizer?
Derek Sivers
Yeah, so just like I think you can't preach minimalism to somebody who hasn't felt the pain of having too much stuff. They need to feel the pain of having to look after too many things and having a cluttered house. Then they go, "I need some minimalism." You can't just preach it to them. So I think it's the same thing with maximizing and satisficing. Satisficing is a lifestyle for me now. Or something that's deeply internalized, let's say. Because I've felt the pain from trying to maximize decisions and spending hundreds of hours trying to find the best this or best that, or make the best decision. I write in my journal so much - so many pages on something - and in the end of it's like it's I've felt the pain from doing this now. I need to learn how to say good enough. And now that I put that into action it was because of reading "Paradox of Choice". I said, okay I need to do this. He's right. Dude's smarter than me. I'm gonna do this. So yeah, I just internalized it. And I did it when I catch myself in a moment. See, I think like shortly after that I moved to Portland, Oregon shortly after reading "The Paradox of Choice", moved to Portland, Oregon. It's a pretty car-focused city. The CD baby office was out in the far reaches and I needed to get a car. I had just recently read Paradox of Choice and I said "I'm gonna give myself two hours to choose a car." Maximum. And so yeah in two hours, I did quick research for 30 minutes went out to some car lots, looked at a few options, picked this one. Good enough. I loved that car. Yeah, was it the best possible choice now? Who knows?
Tim Ferriss
Well for you was! Minimizing regret. Two hours.
Derek Sivers
Kind of like the - I don't know who the hyper-effective person is, you mentioned earlier, but like choosing that there are just a couple things that you care enough about. Like I am glad that Josh Waitzkin is not a satisficer. I am glad that he went all the way down the rabbit hole.
Tim Ferriss
I'll tell you - I don't think he would mind - that Josh actually said that to me, where he's like "I basically focus on one or two things, and then the rest? Good enough."
Derek Sivers
Right! Because he's so intense about those couple things!
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, I mean you have to, right? Yeah, he's he's another one who walks the walk in a big way, right? Yeah. Have you met Josh?
Derek Sivers
No.
Tim Ferriss
You guys you guys would hit it off.
Derek Sivers
He's one of those invisible mentors. I loved his book the "Art of Learning". I've listened to his interviews and I really admire him. And so I have many times wondered - like when I've hit some kind of dilemma or situation - like what Josh would do.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, I mean, no social media. Doesn't read email. There are so many conventions that he bocks. It's really inspiring.
Derek Sivers
Yeah. That's an example of how nobody cares what you're bad at! I'm sure there's a bunch of stuff that Josh Waitzkin is not good at, but it doesn't matter. Good enough.
Derek Sivers
But have I always been like this? No, I think I had to feel the pain.
Tim Ferriss
So what what did you used to maximize, at any point?
Derek Sivers
10 years ago I over-thought where to live. I was feeling very free after I sold my company. It's like what do you do if you can do anything, but you don't have to do anything? And where do you go when you don't have to be anywhere and you can be anywhere? It's too much freedom. It was a complete blank slate with no restrictions at all. I wasn't even in a relationship. I was just completely unbound. So I spent far too long in my diary thinking of every possible place on earth I might live and why I could. I spent hours reading about places that I still haven't even visited but I learned all about them. I even know what it takes to move there and the naturalization law of becoming a citizen there, and the steps to becoming a resident there, and the pros and cons of living there and I've read books about it, but still haven't been there, because I did that for many countries. So that's a that's something that was like 10 years ago. I was still maximizing that. And now here we are in New Zealand where the longest I've ever lived somewhere in my life. It's right here. I used to always move around every two years and I've been right here in Wellington parked up 11 years now It's good enough.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, I mean there's a lot to be said for it. So I want to say for people listening also that you might think, "Good Lord, like this is pretty head in the clouds, 1%er stuff," in the sense like, "That doesn't apply to me. That's crazy." But I would just point out that, God, I got this from a documentary. It was... it wasn't Helvetica, which is a great documentary about typefaces and fonts and so on. Really cool doc. There's another one about industrial design. And there's an expression in that that stuck with me to this day. I think it was from a company or one of the founders of Frog Design, but I could be getting that wrong. And it was the extremes inform the mean, but not vice versa. Something along those lines. When they're designing say garden shears, they're not designing for the average person, they're designing for the edge cases. So it's like the the old paraplegic woman who needs to use it from her wheelchair. And then the - I'm making this up - the 350 pound bodybuilder who can't brush his teeth because his arms are too big. Okay, if you design for those those edge cases at opposite ends of the spectrum, you cover everyone. But if you design for average person, your error rate is going to be really high. And so I've thought about that in so many different domains. So in this case, I'm saying you're providing from a socioeconomic perspective, an edge case, right? Like broadly speaking. But there are principles in that exaggerated state that are easy to see, that are harder to see in some of the cases that are closer to let's just call it the middle of the bell curve. And so I would just say that we're exploring these things and the experience of this over-optimizing and paradox of choice and burnt cycles on something like location, I think everyone listening can find somewhere, right? They can find some place where they're over-optimizing in that way.
Derek Sivers
Thanks for framing it like that. Sometimes I feel guilty speaking candidly about something that's actually going on with me if I know that it doesn't apply to everybody. I often, whatever I do publicly, I try to make it for them. It's not so much my personal expression as it is me giving back. Like the world's given me a lot, this is what I do to give back. But it's a nice reminder, the way you just framed it, it's kind of like Felix Dennis writing his How to Get Rich book. Like dude was worth 600 million or something when he wrote that he didn't have to write that book and he wrote about his extreme case. But for me as a small fry reading it, it was really useful to read what somebody in an extreme situation did and how he made his choices. Or what he regrets and what he would do diferently.
Derek Sivers
You know what? I've been meaning to ask you this forever! Wait, sorry, I can hold on to that question. Maybe it's too late.
Tim Ferriss
Fire away! I told the Willie Nelson joke. We're off menu now.
Derek Sivers
So when people ask the question, "What would you tell your younger self?" What's the real question there? Because I've, I unfortunately have taken that question literally too often. And you asked me seven years ago, then I said, "Uh, women like sex?"
Tim Ferriss
I forgot about that.
Derek Sivers
Because for me, at that moment, that's what I wanted to tell my younger self, right? I felt like culture sold us this story that women don't like sex, that it's something men want and women reluctantly give. And so for like most of my life, I was trying to be considerate. And so I was not entirely sexless, but mostly. And it wasn't until like my late 40s that it was like, oh my God, women like sex. Nobody told me this. Oh my God, this changes everything. II had more sex in the last three years than the rest of my life combined. Because there's this newfound insight. And so what would I tell my former self? Fuck yeah, that's what I would tell my former self, but that's just me. I don't think that's the question.
Tim Ferriss
The question is what advice would you give me, right? When someone says "What advice would you give your younger self?" What they're really asking is what advice would you give someone who is not where you are, but who wants to be where you are. That's, I think that is the translation.
Derek Sivers
What advice would you give someone who wants to be where you are, but is not where you are? Like how do I get where you are?
Tim Ferriss
I think that's what people are generally asking, right? 'Cause they don't give a shit what you, really, what your younger self would do. They care about what they would do, rightly so. But the answers are actually very different, if I'm being honest, right? The answer is that I would give to some person whose specifics I don't understand are very different from the advice I would give to my younger self.
Tim Ferriss
Because in my case, having a history of some very extreme depression and near-suicide in college and so on, my advice would be related to self-preservation and recommending perhaps certain tools like meditation, consistent, which I had on some level, but I didn't, I think I could have tripled down on consistent exercise, perhaps supervised psychedelic therapies, etc, which don't apply to everybody. They just don't. I mean, I think some of those things might apply to some people, but if someone's really asking, like, how do I achieve X? How do I have the life that you have? Number one, I would say you don't actually know what life I have. You get the highlight reel, and you get what I share in podcasts, but you don't have the full picture, so be careful what you ask for. Number two, I don't understand the assumptions embedded in them wanting X. Because if their assumption is, let's just say, and you and I have seen this in ourselves, in our experience, in the experience of many others, once I have X amount of money, all my problems just disappear. Right? Like the vapor of mist hit by the rising sun, like all my problems just vanish, and that is an incorrect assumption, right? But if somebody's just asking that at a Q&A at South by Southwest or something, you don't have the time, you don't have the space to unpack all of that. So any answer you give is going to be hopefully helpful, but it could be really misdirecting in a way.
Derek Sivers
It's funny the nature that these questions come to us. It's usually one question asked, one answer expected. But if you think of the physical metaphor: Just imagine that you are somewhere on Earth right now. Say you're sitting somewhere in Argentina and a phone call comes in and says, "How do I get there? How do I get to where you are?" You say, "Well, depends where you are! Are you in Brazil? Are you in France? You know, are you in Finland? Where are you?" But that would take a back-and-forth that we don't have. If somebody asks you one question, "How do I get where you are?" The only honest answer is, "Well, it depends." Yeah. It's not a sound bite.
Tim Ferriss
So is the question, you clapped your hands, is the question you wanted to ask what question I think people are asking when they ask?
Derek Sivers
Yeah. Yeah, you answered it. Thank you. Because I've always wondered, how do I think of that question? I keep getting that question all the time on podcasts. I'm like, "Damn it, this question again." What I would tell my younger self. I think it came up again just two weeks ago.
Tim Ferriss
It comes up a good amount.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, I need a good answer for that without the snarky saying, "I don't understand the question."
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, it's not a bad question. It's just so context-specific that it's not just sometimes unhelpful, but I think dangerous to give too broad a response. To use your geographic metaphor, you just send somebody off in completely the wrong direction. Go east! Go east! Take two of these, call me in the morning. Oh shit I'm in Antarctica! Sorry about that, yeah, I thought you were in France
Derek Sivers
Can you go east from Antarctica? How do they do directions?
Tim Ferriss
Yeah I mean unless you're at the South Pole you can give you could give those. Yeah I suppose it gets a little tricky but the good news is there's pretty much nobody there so you're not gonna be giving too many directions to people they're gonna be at some type of base of some type. I've only I've only been once to Antarctica. I actually recorded a podcast in Antarctica in an outdoor tent with someone, a field biologist and photographer, which was super fun. You know what? All roads lead to Matt Mullenweg. I owe him thanks yet again for getting me down there.
Derek Sivers
It was one of my favorite episodes of yours, that conversation with Matt in Antarctica.
Tim Ferriss
Actually I recorded two. I did one with Matt and I did one with, I wanna say her name was Sue Flood, but I could be blanking on the name. This amazing photographer, wow, two podcasts in Antarctica. Yeah, that was fun. - Yeah, yeah, that was also, if I know Matt at all, I know that there's probably some scotch involved with that as well.
Derek Sivers
I like how my son spent time with you in Wellington and wanted to ask you questions about Antarctica, and instead he had a more pressing question, which is what is it like to be 16?
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, what do 16 year olds do? How do 16 year olds walk and behave? Do you wanna explain the context?
Derek Sivers
We took him to see John Wick 4.
Tim Ferriss
So we went to see John Wick 4. Turns out that in addition to biosecurity in New Zealand, the people at the movie theaters are really strict.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, weirdly. That was off-point for New Zealand. New Zealand is a wonderfully casual culture. Formalities are very uncommon here, but that was a weird moment of strictness where they wouldn't let my 11 year old come in to see John Wick, but we were determined to get in.
Tim Ferriss
Even though he'd seen and memorized all the John Wick movies.
Derek Sivers
He's seen all the previous ones. He's seen much worse. He's read the Saga comic books. Highly recommended, by the way: Saga. Best graphic novel. Anyway, so he's seen it all but yeah. So I went in to try to get the tickets while my son and Tim were out on the street.
Tim Ferriss
And he said, "Can you teach me how 16-year- olds behave?" We were fortunate. We had some sort of zoo animals in the form of three other 16 year olds nearby and so he was trying to mimic it and I was like, okay, you're very smart. You're very verbally intelligent. He's a very clever kid. But the body language and the energy is not at all matching a 16 year old. So you gotta work on this a little bit. He had pulled the sleeves of his sweatshirt his hoodie up and I was like, I'm not sure that's helping. It might be hurting. You look very conspicuous. And then he pulled down the sleeves to make his arms look longer. But the proportions were all wrong, so you look kind of like ET. And I'm like, "I think you're drawing more attention than you want to draw." But the whole thing was very cute.
Derek Sivers
He means so much to me that it's um, I'm proud of myself that I didn't cry when I told the story about the cardboard box in London. I almost did.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, and your answer when I asked you what makes you emotional was anything related to parenting?
Derek Sivers
Yeah. Go see the video for the song "Papaoutai" by the Belgian musician Stromae. It was a hit single in France and Belgium and there's a great music video for it of this guy who's basically being a bad dad. When he and I watched that video together, I was crying.
Tim Ferriss
Hmm yeah you're kind of tearing up right now.
Derek Sivers
Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
Wow. Yeah it's serious. Which is new in my experience of Derek Sivers. Seeing this. Why do you think that is?
Derek Sivers
It's so important. The stakes are... Wow. Yeah, new experience. I gotta collect myself for a second. The stakes are so high that if you do this right, it passes on. Wow, wait....
Tim Ferriss
We're not in any rush, zero rush.
Derek Sivers
It's funny also collecting my thoughts on how to say this. I don't have to explain it much. Nobody's asked directly. If you do this right, it passes on for many generations. A kid that's raised really well can pass on that generosity of spirit. And then somebody that's raised like ignored and might pass on that scarcity of spirit, you know?
Derek Sivers
Oh shit. I'm not doing this (crying) for the media. This is not trying to be a captured moment. Holy shit. Yeah, there we go
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, thank you for answering that. This is new also. I'll say for folks, what a gift that you have something that you respond this way to.
Derek Sivers
It's the only thing I do! My ex, after we broke up, said "Wow, I've known you for so many years and I've never seen you get mad. I've never seen you cry. I've never even really seen you get upset." I mean, I just don't, really. I'm a happy dude and this is the only thing. But it's a obviously not an upset cry. It's like "Holy shit. This is such a big deal."
Tim Ferriss
Derek we've covered a lot. I don't I don't feel like we need to cover anything more. Is there anything you'd like to to say? Any requests to the audience? Anything at all before we wrap up?
Derek Sivers
Yeah, I know it's it's you're gonna say this is crazy. But still to this day my currency - the thing that matters to me more than money - (obviously many things do) I still really like meeting people. Like I just recently went to India. I went to Chennai and Bangalore for 10 days and I sat down and talked with 50 people in 10 days. I had 1-2-hour long conversations with 50 people. And a lot of these 50 people are people that I've been emailing with for years. They just contacted me out of the blue because they read my article or they read my book or they heard a podcast. They emailed to introduce themselves. And here it is ten years later. Now I'm in Bangalore, and we finally meet. And it was so damn rewarding. And similar thing, I went to Helsinki Finland for the first time and what do I do? Open email and ask, "Who do I know in Helsinki?" and there were a number of people that had emailed over the years to introduce themselves and soon I'm sitting naked in a sauna with some dude that emailed me because you know, he read my book. It's um, this matters to me more than money. It's the reason I do a podcast like this. I'm clearly not selling anything. I don't have a big ask. But I really like it when people email to introduce themselves. Especially if it's not, you know coming with a loaded question like, "What would you tell your younger self? What should I be doing with my life?" But when people just introduce themselves, it means the world to me. It's really cool to feel connected with people from around the world, to know that I have friends in India or have friends in Nigeria or friends in Finland. That's my favorite thing: hearing from strangers. So honestly, like my website, which I made myself as a static HTML website, speaking of our earlier tangent, if you go to sive.rs just send an email and introduce yourself. That's my surprising conclusion.
Tim Ferriss
Do other domains point to that?
Derek Sivers
It used to be Sivers.org
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. You still have that, I assume.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, I'm going to keep that forever. But that's my minimalism thing. At one point I looked at that and I'm like, "dot org?"
Tim Ferriss
Where is .RS?
Derek Sivers
Serbia. Republic of Serbia. One of my favorite tech sites is, tech sites is lobste.rs
Tim Ferriss
What the hell is lobste.rs about?
Derek Sivers
Oh, it's just it's just a random domain name they got, but really it's programmers and sysadmins talking tech and it's fun. It's like Hacker News minus the business. Oh, I hope I didn't send a bunch of traffic there. Anyway, yeah I looked at the ".org" and, I used to have sivers.org, and I looked at that I was like "I'm not really an organization am I? Those four aren't really necessary are they? I think I could reduce those." And so yeah: sive.rs
Tim Ferriss
Thank you Derek. So nice. So good to hang out and have some scotch.
Derek Sivers
And make me cry holy shit! That was my first time in like three or four years.
Tim Ferriss
I've never seen you cry.
Derek Sivers
Yeah Exclusive to the Tim Ferriss Podcast folks! Yeah, just trying to help out my friend, you know, get him some more views.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, get him some more views, I'm all about the views. It was so good to hang, man.
Derek Sivers
You too, thanks.