Tim Ferriss
host: Tim Ferriss
minimalism, satisficing, fame and success, mentorship, learning, decision making, beliefs
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Transcript:
TIM-or-DEREK
Three. Should we kick this party off? What do you think? Ready? All right, so I thought we would start. First of all. Cheers. Cheers.
TIM-or-DEREK
Thanks to Matt.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yes, Matt. Mullenweg. Thank you for the Scotch blend, which we shall enjoy here. So I'll take a sip first.
TIM-or-DEREK
Ooh.
TIM-or-DEREK
We have scotch. We have. Go, go, gadget. Blackberry. What is this called again?
TIM-or-DEREK
Oh, um. Go go go go go go. Yeah. Go go go. It's so good. Yeah. Go go go go go. India. You know the region? Yes.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah. So this is otherwise known. I do have a backup of Diet Coke in case this is Podcaster's speedball. So I expect this is going to 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. There are only.
TIM-or-DEREK
Three glasses, which.
TIM-or-DEREK
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.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah, and I didn't buy any of them. They were just. So please.
TIM-or-DEREK
Please explain more.
TIM-or-DEREK
Oh, God.
TIM-or-DEREK
Because you walk the talk of certain types of minimalism, there are those out there who may not believe some of it. I'm just saying. Or maybe skeptical, have a healthy skepticism. And I'm telling you guys, he's got three glasses in his.
TIM-or-DEREK
Kitchen and this is my only pair of pants. And yeah, so these three glasses, um, I don't even think about it because I just think about having what's enough. Yeah, right. So there's only me and my kid here, and so you come over and you say, okay, let's make some scotch, and you're like, do you have any? I was like, uh, no, that's all I got. I just have these glasses. And honestly, I don't even know where they came from. Um, but.
TIM-or-DEREK
They work, they.
TIM-or-DEREK
Work, and this is enough. And these little bamboo cups I got for my kids so that he wouldn't break them.
TIM-or-DEREK
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, the embodiment of minimalism, you also have two very nice suits that act as your sort of outside in the world attire. Yeah. Which makes sense to me.
TIM-or-DEREK
And only two. It's again, it's this idea of, you know, it's like I wear junk, basically home pajamas. I think of them as pajamas that the big baggy t shirt that somebody handed you at a conference, and you would never wear that outside the house. But yeah, Michael Brown with an E in London when I lived in London right before Covid hit, I thought, you know, I'm living here by Savile Row in London. I'm about to leave England forever. I'm going to get a custom made suit. So I looked at, um. Oh, what was his name? Sartorial talks. It's an interesting YouTube channel about somebody diving deep into, like, the the craft of fine clothing. Tailoring. Yeah, tailoring. And so he recommended this guy Michael Brown in London. So yeah, I went to Michael Brown and he said, what would you like? I said, you're the expert, you know, just dress me. So he told me what to wear and I do.
TIM-or-DEREK
And because I have a little bit more context here than he would ask, so what type of shoes are you going to wear? And you're like, what should I wear? Yeah, well, how are you thinking about X? And you'd be like, how should I be thinking about X? Yeah. 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 these are sort of this is a disposable item or service or fill in the blank in my mind. So I think I think we'll, we'll probably talk more about this. 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 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 or not. On perhaps a fit not 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, yeah, you know how you have that bad pen? He's like, throw out the bad pen.
TIM-or-DEREK
It's so liberating.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah. Don't have the bad pen.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah, it's about self-respect, isn't it? Yeah. Even something as simple as a pen. When I've done that, I went. I'm better than this. I'm not going to make this. This pen is not going to rule over me any longer.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're only as good as the worst pen in your house. Oh, God. So let's let's start with with a story. And I have not heard this story because you began telling me, and I said, no, I don't want to hear it. Yeah. I said, let's save it. Scuba diving. That'll be my scuba diving. Scuba diving. That'll be my cue.
TIM-or-DEREK
And what it taught me about empathy and identity.
TIM-or-DEREK
Amazing. I'll listen to the Ted talk.
TIM-or-DEREK
Oh, God. I'm so, so, um. I was in Iceland, and I never had any intention to go scuba diving, but I was at that place in Thingvellir 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 was like, ooh, I want to go in there. It just looks like avian spring water, you know, poured over rocks with no, uh, nothing clouding the water. So I was in Iceland for a month, so I went to take scuba diving lessons, and the instructor was great. So it's Davis, 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 learn to scuba. Yeah. Okay. And so the swimming pool was great, and I loved the fact that it's calm that you don't need to panic about holding your breath. It's just slow and meditative. 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 like you're like a spaceman with four layers of rubber and, you know, stuff over the rubber. So it's very claustrophobic. And then I get into the water and it gets down to about 20m, and I'm just like, oh God, do I hate this? I hate. I want to like, I need to go, I need to I just want to go back at home. I want to be on the internet. I want to be emailing my friend. I want to talk to my friend. I just want to, you know, I just I got to get out of here. So I wrapped on his tank and I went up to the top.
TIM-or-DEREK
You pointed, you pointed to go up.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah. And I was just like, I tore off my mask and I was just like I said, I don't want to. I said, I'm just gonna go. You guys go ahead. I'm gonna wait on the side. There. You go ahead. I'll just wait. 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. Look at what a 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 I 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. It's all right. And so I just relaxed for a second. You know, you inflate your BCD so you're just buoyant and you float. And I went, 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. Okay. So the next day. So that was the 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 um, 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 the dry suit and yeah, it's it's it's tough.
TIM-or-DEREK
It's different. It's different.
TIM-or-DEREK
And so I get underwater. But this time I'm elated. I'm underwater just where I wanted to be in that crystal clear fisher there in Thingvellir. I was like, wow. And at 20m down.
TIM-or-DEREK
I just for the Yangtze. 60ft or so.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah. I just pretty.
TIM-or-DEREK
Deep. I mean, that's that's a deep dive.
TIM-or-DEREK
The bottom of where you're supposed to go as a beginner. Um, and at the bottom, I see the German girl by herself, and her partner is not there. And I do the dive. Manners were taught where I gave her the okay symbol, and she gave the not okay symbol. And I was like, oh, wait, am I remembering? And I was like, okay. And again she goes, not okay. 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. Held on to her BCD, held on to mine, inflated hers a bit, asked if she needed my mouthpiece and she said no and 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's like, I don't like this. I don't like, no, this is not good. I don't, I hate this, I feel bad now. I want to go. And I said, um, 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, do you see those mountains over there? I said, just relax a second. I said, I'm here with you. It's okay. Um, and so she calmed down and I saw her go do the same thing I did and calm down. And then her boyfriend showed up.
TIM-or-DEREK
So where the hell was the boyfriend?
TIM-or-DEREK
I don't know, but he took her away, so I was like.
TIM-or-DEREK
So you're on your own, babe? I'm out of here.
TIM-or-DEREK
I've accidentally missed one step in the storytelling of this that I should have included is the night in between those two days. I went home 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. Like, 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. It's like that night I had this moment of just like, wow, what does that mean? That am I 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, you know, answers to that. So then yeah, then the next day had this thing happen with a German couple. And I feel like that experience taught me two kinds of empathy that we categorize people.
TIM-or-DEREK
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, uh, homeless, divorced, bankrupt. And you think I would never be those things? I'm not that kind of person. But I thought, wow, like, a lot of these things are involuntary. It's not like somebody chooses to be depressed. That's. And and I realized I had been unfairly categorizing people the same way I had unfairly categorized panic attack people because now I am one, right? I've had that, um, addiction. Right. Like somebody who said they would never be an addict, and then they find themselves addicted to something that seemed harmless at first. And they have to admit, oh my God, I'm an addict. And so, um, but then I realized that, uh. Yeah. Someday, these these categories might be me or anybody else. If you're, you know, categorizing people, this might be you. 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. Mhm. Um, uh, whatever. Uh, leader athlete.
TIM-or-DEREK
Things with a positive connotation.
TIM-or-DEREK
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 there you have to admit, you know, I'm a multi-millionaire now. Yeah. It's a category. So I realized that we can even those categories can be involuntary. Mhm. That you can suddenly be a rescuer even if you never intended to be one. Just through the power of imitation. So yeah, you can deliberately step into these roles by imitating others.
TIM-or-DEREK
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.
TIM-or-DEREK
Mhm.
TIM-or-DEREK
Because you are susceptible to the, the whim of chance in a way that I think is, is not particularly resilient. Right. If suddenly your circumstances change and you find yourself in a different category. Yeah. It can be really upsetting. And how do you think about what you call or don't call yourself. Mhm. 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 much as I love stoicism, even though I invoke that name, I do think that you have to be careful with labels. So how do you think about that for yourself? Mhm. Well, time for a sip of scotch.
TIM-or-DEREK
Well, well young man, sit down. You sit down. Um, the, um. Uh, 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. Um, that it's hard to, uh, to remember that we need to close tangents today. Yeah. That's true. Usually we open a tangent and close it two days later. Yeah. We have to close tangents today. Okay. So do you want me to go on my anti-Islam tangent? Well, are we there yet? Let's see.
TIM-or-DEREK
Is there some unfinished business that we need to tidy up first?
TIM-or-DEREK
Well, the there's one. 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. And he did. I hate olives, I hate, hate, hate olives so badly. You, me. 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 like horrified. Yeah, he ate it and loved it. And he goes, I like olives now. I was like, yes, I love that. Switching between identities. 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, by the way. Thank you. Thank you for the forum.
TIM-or-DEREK
Anything you want. Right.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah. Yeah.
TIM-or-DEREK
I recommend I recommend people check it out. I've read it multiple times. It's a great.
TIM-or-DEREK
Book. I love that you did the foreword. Yeah. Thank you for that. You're welcome. But, um, what was my point? Uh, that for years I kept calling myself an entrepreneur until one day I realized, like, wait a second, this is expired. Like somebody who was an athlete in high school can't keep calling himself an athlete forever.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah, I've learned that one.
TIM-or-DEREK
You have to keep earning that title or it expires. Right. Same thing with being a good friend. Yeah. Um, 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, like 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 go actively be a good friend. Not just keep calling yourself a good friend or go actively be an entrepreneur if you want to keep calling yourself that.
TIM-or-DEREK
So maybe skipping ahead, because I do like mixing tangents, great. But that's the nature of conversation, especially when you have go go gadget tea and scotch involved. So. We were talking about this the other night at dinner, revising. Say we use language. We're creatures of language. I mean, part of the reason that we become such a dominant pest on the planet is our ability to use concepts and abstraction. Right. And, uh, you you had mentioned at one point thinking of yourself After entrepreneur. As a writer, how did you make that switch?
TIM-or-DEREK
Looking to your heroes? Um, 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. Like, I, 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, um, a waste product, a metabolite of your other focus. It's like it was like it was like. And as I'm doing my thing, if I learn some lessons there, I just put them into writing. Yeah. 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. Like it helped reveal my values. So ultimately, like we want to be our ideal selves, right? And I think that your heroes are your idealized self, right. That's kind of that's 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 went, oh my God, 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 going to talk about that later.
TIM-or-DEREK
Um, and, 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, but, um, so 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? Yeah, totally. 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, right? Like, would you be happy getting rich running an all night vaping store? You know, you think of the kind of customers that would come into your all night vaping store. Are these the people you want to serve? And would you be happy even if you made $1 million doing that? I think you'd you'd feel pretty mixed about it. You'd be a little.
TIM-or-DEREK
Embarrassed to tell you about my new startup then.
TIM-or-DEREK
Just kidding. Right. Vaping. Anyway, so, um, so it's asking yourself, like, what kind of people do you want to be around?
TIM-or-DEREK
Decentralized blockchain. Baby seal. Clubbing expeditions. Yeah.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah.
TIM-or-DEREK
I'm not sure I want to hang out with the people who might go on.
TIM-or-DEREK
That tour run by AI. You run? We may need a refill on the scotch. At the rate we're going, I don't know how that's gonna work. Pause. Um. So, um. Yeah, I think that if you set up your business to serve the people that you love being around. Yeah, even if it makes less money, you're going to be much happier. Yeah. 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-or-DEREK
Okay. So let's poke at that a little bit. Being around the people you love, there are many ways to do that. Mhm. 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?
TIM-or-DEREK
Hmm? Because it's. It's asking yourself, what would you do? Even if it didn't pay? Yeah, right. So. Right. I'll just pick one example. And don't hold me to this world if I don't end up doing this idea. Um, do you know, that's like, 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. I was like, it was just. It was that week. Come on. So. All right. Right now. And now I like olives. So stop lecturing me about my past self. So right now, an idea I'm having is, um, 100 year hosting legacy personal websites. So that setting up a trust so that your personal website will last on for 100 years or 50 years after you die. Yeah, sure. 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 that enjoy technology for its own sake. That took, um, a little, um, what do you call that? Um, oomph power. Um, uh, what do you call that? Power? No, no, no. Where somebody takes initiative. Somebody took the initiative. Is that English? Go ahead.
TIM-or-DEREK
I don't speak Esperanto yet.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah, um, somebody took a little and set up their own website. I like these people. I like people that have personal websites that aren't doing it for money. Yeah, they're my kind of people. And so I would be proud to serve them. So that's all I meant by that.
TIM-or-DEREK
Okay. So 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.
TIM-or-DEREK
All right.
TIM-or-DEREK
Or broadly speaking, tech independence. Yeah. And to set the stage for folks we were walking down the street here in Wellington, beautiful Wellington, New.
TIM-or-DEREK
Zealand, lovely central Wellington, New.
TIM-or-DEREK
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, where we're walking around, not in the on the nature side of things, but downtown. And I said, you know, I'd love to ask you about cybersecurity. And I said, let's say, and I'm not going to use anyone's name, but somebody who's very technical and hyper paranoid. I was like, let's say there are ten. Let's say your mom is a one 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. Yeah, because.
TIM-or-DEREK
I'm slow like that. You'll ask me something like that. And in the moment, as we're walking down Courtenay Place, I'll give some half assed answer. And then later that night I'm like, ooh, I got a better answer.
TIM-or-DEREK
I'll push back a little bit. Yeah, 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 of monologue, which you didn't. It was a conversation, but you then refined it the next morning. Yeah. So let's let's talk about this because you, 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. Yeah. 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, right? 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.
TIM-or-DEREK
Mhm.
TIM-or-DEREK
Uh, for a lot of.
TIM-or-DEREK
Reasons, your phone book, your calendar, all of that, all of that.
TIM-or-DEREK
It's 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.
TIM-or-DEREK
So Score. Tim. Poor Tim. So poor. Incapable. Tim. All right. So? So, doctor. Doctor Sivers, please hold court. So, audience I prepared. Um, I took notes because although I love Tim's podcast, I love it most when people come and give us, like, an intense data dump like, no, this, no, 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 for buck of your time listening. So tech independence is all about, um, 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. Yeah. And it actually reminded me of something I think you said in For Our Body about yoga studios that no, it's not the best thing for your health, but it's it's a better profitable pitch for them to sell you a yoga studio instead of the deadlift, you know, free weights. Yeah, there's.
TIM-or-DEREK
A lot of that in fitness overall, for.
TIM-or-DEREK
Sure.
TIM-or-DEREK
So there's an incentive.
TIM-or-DEREK
This is the tech equivalent of that, 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 might have 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 just 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 that had more, you know, 50 years ago. So or.
TIM-or-DEREK
Now in a lot of countries you still.
TIM-or-DEREK
Can't drive automatic. 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 or their, um, 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 kids photos in the cloud. Since the day his kid was born. He put everything onto Google Photos for ten years. His kid was ten years old the day that he started a new company and said, I'm going to 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 said yes, he merged it, and the next day his wife was like, honey, um, where are all the photos of our kid? He went, they're in Google Photos. She said, no, they're not. And he looked at her and 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 there. And 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 0 to 10 because he trusted the clown. I mean, sorry, cloud, you can't trust those clowns. So, um, sorry. That was so snarky.
TIM-or-DEREK
The clowns and the clowns.
TIM-or-DEREK
Escape the clown. Text. Snark. Okay, so, um, so what do.
TIM-or-DEREK
You do that on purpose?
TIM-or-DEREK
I did. Oh, that was good. Sorry. Um. So. Yeah, anytime when somebody talks about the cloud, you know, change it to an n clown. The clown. Keep keep all my contacts in the clown. Um, so everything I'm going to 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-or-DEREK
And let me also preface this for a quick second. This is not a tangent. By saying I do not experience you. Maybe I'm missing something. Maybe you have spider holes dug in the backyard and do not experience you to be a hyper paranoid person.
TIM-or-DEREK
At.
TIM-or-DEREK
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.
TIM-or-DEREK
Like.
TIM-or-DEREK
You know, gold bars and guns in the basement. And he's this guy. Maybe. Right. If I just would, I want to sort of set the proper reference point, which is I don't experience you to be a paranoid person.
TIM-or-DEREK
Not at all. So to set the okay, I'll talk about this in one second. So first, let me just say the first thing you need is to get your own server, which is as simple as $5 a month. If you go to there's a company I recommend called Vulture.com, but it's spelled V ulta.com. I could use.
TIM-or-DEREK
Some branding help.
TIM-or-DEREK
But yeah, so they have something called Cloud compute for $5 a month, where basically that's setting up a private slice that's just yours, but on a shared computer.
TIM-or-DEREK
So it's like a virtual private server.
TIM-or-DEREK
Virtual private server. Exactly. I was trying to not get technical. Yeah.
TIM-or-DEREK
So and a server for people who don't know, I know this is going to be old news for a lot of folks. What is a server sounds super complicated.
TIM-or-DEREK
It's not. It's just a computer that's always online. Got it. That's it. Okay. Publicly accessible, always online. 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 the $5 a month Vulture.com cloud compute number two, search the web for cloud compute for 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 you have 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 going to be an encrypted hard drive. We'll get to that. The third option is go to any used marketplace and find an old used Lenovo ThinkPad. It's ideally from the TI 400 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. Okay. So here comes my. You have done some work. So here's 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. 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. So 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-or-DEREK
Is bondage sadomasochism.
TIM-or-DEREK
So no no no sorry I Berkeley software distribution actually quick. But 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, and the B stands for Berkeley, who knows anyway. But the reason I got turned on to OpenBSD is because I used to have Linux server as a public server, and it was hacked one day and the guy at the data center said, oh yeah, that's been happening a lot lately. He said, 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 that I'm describing and it does it really well. And it's secure as hell.
TIM-or-DEREK
And it's got, as I understand it, few lines of code. Yes. Right. Which means let's just say you're a writer. The more you write, the higher the frequency of typos. Yes.
TIM-or-DEREK
Well put. And you.
TIM-or-DEREK
Don't want bugs in your code.
TIM-or-DEREK
That can be exploited. The less code, the better. So install OpenBSD and follow the instructions to 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 ssh keygen. The type you want is ed 25519. 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 in to your server is with your private public key that you just generated. Right. Very similar to the crypto public private thing. Then you go into your account 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! Like now your server is super secure. The only way somebody actually nobody can get in except you from your computer with the generated private key through SSH is the only way to connect to that server to.
TIM-or-DEREK
Explain the generated private key.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah, it's really just a single command you type on the terminal if you type ssh ssh keygen space.
Speaker3
T.
TIM-or-DEREK
Space.
TIM-or-DEREK
25519. It will ask you for an optional password, and it just creates the private key and the public key. Same name, but one has the pub 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 and 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.
Speaker3
Ed.
TIM-or-DEREK
Got it. So it's like Marco Polo okay.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah.
TIM-or-DEREK
We're in as opposed to entering a password every time.
TIM-or-DEREK
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. Okay. This is keep track of where you are. Yeah.
TIM-or-DEREK
Do you think this will become. And I'm non-technical folks you've probably guessed. But this type of Marco Polo, I can't even remember the proper way. The private keys and so on. Private 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 I'm just wondering about. Well, this is going to take us off on a major.
TIM-or-DEREK
I think it's already 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 it I think our phones are already behind the scenes using public private key, I think. Yeah. So that's the way it should be, is to just it is the best solution so far, I think.
TIM-or-DEREK
Side note if you have a four digit password on your phone, you can change that to eight digit. Simple simple upgrade. Yeah. And settings.
TIM-or-DEREK
Okay. So next thing you need a domain name. My recommended place to get a domain name is a wonderfully nerdy, non-commercial site called book my name.com. The my name you.
TIM-or-DEREK
Don't get 10% affiliate.
TIM-or-DEREK
Absolutely not. Wait till you see the site. It's like wonderful old school nerdy GeoCities. There's no affiliate program there. As a backup, I use nytimes.com. Both of these are French companies, and there's a third one in Portland, Oregon that I like called Pork Buncombe Pork Bun. Yeah, all three of those 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. Okay. So now okay, so now you've got a server. And the best thing to start with, like you said, I'm not a, uh, a guy that's got stockpiles of oatmeal and gold, but once you've got I don't know why you picked oatmeal, but once you've got 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. Yeah, it's like you've already got 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-or-DEREK
So 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?
TIM-or-DEREK
Um, I care about this so much that I'm going to set up a really dead simple thing that's basically just do this, copy paste this. This is going to work. Look at that. So email me. Manifest. God damn it. Email. You write a blog post, Derek Sivers. No, I will, I will, but yeah. Blog post. What's that? Um, yeah.
TIM-or-DEREK
You've only written 5.
TIM-or-DEREK
Million blog posts since like.
TIM-or-DEREK
1987.
TIM-or-DEREK
But until until I write up kind of I actually, you know what? I registered the domain name cloud free with the dot e for for Estonia. So cloud for ee. Um, so I like cloud free.
TIM-or-DEREK
Com wasn't available.
TIM-or-DEREK
I don't know, I just thought it was clever. Okay. Cloud for ee. Um, so, um. Uh, no, but someday I'm going to write this up into a, uh, a very simple. You don't need to understand this yet. Just do this. Eventually you'll understand it, because that's how I learn. Where are my photos?
TIM-or-DEREK
Oh, Derek Sivers says all my photos.
TIM-or-DEREK
Right, right. Ha, ha. That's what I really wanted. I want your photos. Um, so. Because that's how we all learned at first, right? It's often like, just do this. You'll understand it later. Yeah. But for now, just do it. And I think that's a fine way to learn if you trust the source. Right? Trust me. Um. So, um, it's not as hard as it sounds. Okay. Okay. Got it. So gotta try it out.
TIM-or-DEREK
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've just got to try it a few times.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah. Okay. So, um, 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? And set up an A anyway. And he hit a home run on his first try. Oh, wow.
TIM-or-DEREK
It's all downhill from there.
TIM-or-DEREK
Tell him to stop. Yeah, exactly. Everybody was cheering for me, but I didn't know what I was supposed to do. They told me to run. Okay. So. Okay, so now let's talk about some applications. Okay. So you have a server set up. Here's what you're going to do with it. First do your contacts and calendar. So I don't like the fact that my phone automatically gives Google all of the contacts and all of my calendars or Apple or whatever, so you can set up it's called radical r a d I c a l e. Um. The website is radical.org. It's absolutely free. Open source.
TIM-or-DEREK
D I c a.
TIM-or-DEREK
L e. Yes okay. Dot org it's absolutely free. Open source. It sets up what's known as a carddav or and a caldav server on your server. So this will just this will be the new server that you sync your contacts and calendars to. So it's dead simple. Blew my mind. You install a radical 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 you bought and suddenly it says, okay, synchronized. And now every new contact you add and every calendar entry is synchronized with your server, not Apple's.
TIM-or-DEREK
And 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, Cal on Mac and Google Cal to.
TIM-or-DEREK
Sync.
TIM-or-DEREK
Huge pain.
TIM-or-DEREK
In the ass, right? You had to use a third. So you would.
TIM-or-DEREK
Have to use a third party. And at least I ended up using Cal Dev a long time ago. That's since changed. But yeah, so this is not this is not very, very hard.
TIM-or-DEREK
Easy. That's why I started with this. Yeah. It's like the simplest thing to set up and.
TIM-or-DEREK
And the most sensitive in a way. Or some of the most sensitive. Yeah, right.
TIM-or-DEREK
To me, it feels so important to, um, to know that my contacts aren't being sent to other people, and, um, 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. Okay. 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 Ah, sink. Well, Max, 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 s y n c t h I n g dot net. So it's totally free open source. I want to.
TIM-or-DEREK
Give you more scotch. Just see what it does to your spelling.
TIM-or-DEREK
Cause there's gonna be a lot of spelling. Continue. So, um, it's completely free and open source, and it does that more like automatic style instead of manual, um, synchronization.
TIM-or-DEREK
Well, let me pause. So in your particular case, do you think Automatic sync. Do you like automatic sync?
TIM-or-DEREK
I don't, I like having the delay between my servers because.
TIM-or-DEREK
If you fuck up.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yes, right. If I accidentally delete a file, even if it's a week later, we'll get to. Actually, you know what? 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 and the other server. I have a great idea. Okay. You ready? Yeah.
TIM-or-DEREK
All right. So this next chapter of Doctor Server's 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.
TIM-or-DEREK
And just like.
TIM-or-DEREK
Anyway.
TIM-or-DEREK
You know, it's just an idea because you.
TIM-or-DEREK
Seem to be philosophically aligned with.
TIM-or-DEREK
This. Yeah, and I'm passionate about it. It upsets me when people are bound to the cloud, are just going to use everything in the companies had them, or they're dependent on this. It's about being dependent. It's about the self-reliance. People who are dependent on others. Like, imagine if everybody in their own home was, like, dependent on somebody else to make them food. Like they didn't know how to make their own food. 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-or-DEREK
You only need three glasses.
TIM-or-DEREK
It's easy. All the things I didn't think we'd talk about. I would also.
TIM-or-DEREK
I would also say that it's not just about being dependent, it's about being informed. So having do you have complete understanding or near complete understanding of how you are storing sensitive information. Right. When's the last time anyone listening to this, or even I'll speak for myself? Yours truly. Read the complete terms of 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.
TIM-or-DEREK
Which is nice to tune in to sources. People who care about that stuff deeply, and they can act as a nice natural filter to let you know if somebody is being good or being bad. That's how I found, you know, when I recommended book my Name.com for domains, it was like some super nerd that recommended that they were like, oh, these guys are old school Unix. You want to go with these guys? Like, you know, they're not these new salesmen trying to, you know, 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. 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 like every night, sometimes multiple times a day manually. Yeah, I just type rsync right before I shut down my computer, packs up my whatever 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 and like a whole week later went, oh crap.
TIM-or-DEREK
Let me ask. Let me ask a dumb question. Maybe. Why delete anything? Storage is so cheap.
TIM-or-DEREK
I know. Um, no. I mean more like deleted lines of code. Like, I thought I was done with that.
TIM-or-DEREK
There was a revision that you want to undo.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah. Yeah. And sometimes even using git. But sometimes I'm not. And sometimes it's gone. It's rare, but every now and then. Yeah, yeah. Um, okay. So website is a no brainer. The OpenBSD operating system comes with its own web server, so I highly recommend. No offense to, um that But don't install WordPress. Oh, no. This isn't. We love you, Matt. I adore you, Matt, but I think everybody should learn how to do it themselves. Yeah, it's not that hard to do an h1 tag h2 p tag ul. Ul I. Rf image source. You can learn it in an hour. And voila! Now you can make your own HTML website. 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. Well hold on.
TIM-or-DEREK
So not to not to push back, but just to stress test it a little bit. Wordpress is open source. Why not use it?
TIM-or-DEREK
You could. But see, WordPress is like I think last time I counted 38 billion lines of code. Yeah. Um, and it does way more than what you need. So it's kind of like if you said, um, whatever, I want to. I need some scissors. And somebody handed you the contents of an entire hardware store. Yeah, yeah. 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. Yeah. 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, because 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 dot 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 like make your own static HTML web page even.
TIM-or-DEREK
I think it's a good exercise, even if you end up later.
TIM-or-DEREK
Using something else. Exactly right. That's what I was getting to. Yeah. So 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 I agree with that.
TIM-or-DEREK
I mean, I edited the first 30 to 40 episodes of my podcast.
TIM-or-DEREK
Mhm.
TIM-or-DEREK
Which was a lot of work and I'm not a master at it. And there are far better, better people who work on it now for these later episodes. But I felt good doing it in the beginning. Yeah. 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. Yep. Otherwise, how am I going to assess anything?
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Um, okay, I'll name one last one, and then we're done with this subject. The last thing I'm going to 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-or-DEREK
You can do that with G suite though.
TIM-or-DEREK
I know, but we're talking about the 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 will take care of it for you thing. Um, so the three things I'm going to recommend in the three different options in order, the simplest, uh, cutest little one I've found is mailbox. Org is in Germany. Okay. And for $1 a month, they do nothing but host 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. They're all privacy focused. If you want the luxury full premium suite of like, the best email client on earth, you go to fast gmail.com. Fast gmail.com is amazing. It's $5 a month. Um, 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 AML. 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-or-DEREK
Right, 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. Yeah, get used to it. Get familiar with the gear first. So. So I would be curious to know how you would reply to people who are listening. And they're like mailbox org and Germany fast mail. I've never heard of these things. Oh wait, wait, hold.
TIM-or-DEREK
On, hold on.
TIM-or-DEREK
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 you're the hardware upon which things are being.
TIM-or-DEREK
Stored.
TIM-or-DEREK
Is game over. I guess I'm wondering how you would address people with those types of concerns.
TIM-or-DEREK
Everything I've recommended here was recommended. With that in mind, you should expect that you will outlive most businesses. Yeah, I think that to me is the biggest, um, misconception that people have about Facebook or Apple or Google that it's likely you might outlive Google and Facebook. You know, those of us who were around in the first dotcom boom, history repeats. Yeah.
TIM-or-DEREK
It's not it's certainly well within the realm of possibility.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah, it was unthinkable in whatever, 1999 that Myspace wouldn't be around. Well, maybe. What was it, 2003? So how is how is.
TIM-or-DEREK
How is mailbox org better?
TIM-or-DEREK
Because everything is done with your own domain name. So if mailbox org ever sends actually if they just disappeared one day, you'd go poof. You just log in to your domain name router and just route it to another service because everything's being sent to Tim at Tim. Com or whatever. Yeah yeah, yeah. 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, right? So all of this is expecting everybody to fail. Yeah. Yeah. 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-or-DEREK
Question for you. So if somebody's listening and they say, there's no fucking way I'm going to 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 going to do the whole kit and caboodle because it just sounds overwhelming, but like, I want to I want to do sort of a science project.
TIM-or-DEREK
With.
TIM-or-DEREK
Some experimentation. What might you recommend to them?
TIM-or-DEREK
I'd say the first baby step is to get your own domain name. Definitely. Um, and then move your email off of Gmail and just go to some third party provider of email. Okay. So you'd.
TIM-or-DEREK
I think. So it's the simplest it's not said. It's the only one in there that's not truly setting up your own server. Mhm. Um although I yeah I mean that would you know obviously that's the next step. It's just, just do that first thing and just have like 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. And once you have a server everything else is easier. So but yeah, the baby steps is 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-or-DEREK
Start with email.
TIM-or-DEREK
Okay, question for you personally, if you had to choose between having your email off of the cloud or calendar and contacts, but you can only choose one, so calendar and contacts come together. Email is another. Which would you choose?
TIM-or-DEREK
I don't know why there's a sense of happiness in having my calendars and contacts be on my own server.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah, I lean that way too, and I don't know if I could verbalize why that's the case.
TIM-or-DEREK
It's 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-or-DEREK
That's right. I didn't even think about that. I could see that being a huge problem.
TIM-or-DEREK
So the way I actually have my mail server set up right now, and I don't mean this unlike the other, tends to be Gmail. Well, God, can you imagine? So what could go wrong? Um, so I, um, I 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, you know.
TIM-or-DEREK
So it's not an ESP, but it's helping. Or maybe it is an ESP like an email service provider.
TIM-or-DEREK
Oh it is.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah.
TIM-or-DEREK
I guess for outgoing only. Yeah, I.
TIM-or-DEREK
Think I wonder I think SendGrid does handle some of this as.
TIM-or-DEREK
Well. Yeah. They're one of the same. Um, so you're really just using their SMTP servers just to send the outgoing mail, but receiving it privately. So that's my.
TIM-or-DEREK
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 because 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.
TIM-or-DEREK
Wait, can we can we tell people the the Shopify?
TIM-or-DEREK
Oh, man. I mean, my most expensive mistake ever.
TIM-or-DEREK
No no, no. My little thing with Tobi.
TIM-or-DEREK
Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Cute.
TIM-or-DEREK
I'll leave.
TIM-or-DEREK
I'll let that one float by.
TIM-or-DEREK
Sorry, I didn't mean to. No. That's okay. Stir up a. Yeah.
TIM-or-DEREK
Selling Shopify earlier was my my most expensive mistake ever as their first advisor when they had like ten employees.
TIM-or-DEREK
So so audience there was this cute moment. So cute moment.
TIM-or-DEREK
I just want to say that also God do I love the Shopify guys.
TIM-or-DEREK
I just there's.
TIM-or-DEREK
So great Tobi Harley, the whole gang. Just great humans. It's really it makes me so happy when the the good guys and gals do well, right? It just makes me so happy.
TIM-or-DEREK
So yeah.
TIM-or-DEREK
Cute story. Sorry. The which I had never heard, which was shocking.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah. Because I sometimes people ask, uh, if I can introduce them to you and I'm like, no, you know, I respect your time, I appreciate that. So, uh, by the way, I love your. Nevermind your email address. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
TIM-or-DEREK
Which basically says fuck off.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah, basically. Yeah. It's essentially fuck off at Tim Ferriss com. It's not.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah. It's not that aggressive. But it makes it clear like think twice before sharing.
TIM-or-DEREK
Don't you dare give this to anyone. Yeah. Yeah. At Tim ferriss.com. That is his personal email.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah a little wordy, but, you know.
TIM-or-DEREK
It's worth it. Um, give him a hurdle. So, um. Oh, Toby. So I love the Ruby programming language. And so before there was Ruby on Rails, I learned Ruby in a cabin in Sweden that I was offline for two weeks. So I brought a programming book with me. I was like, well, I'm going to 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, uh, doing something with websites and Ruby. So I emailed him saying, hey, somebody said, you're making like a web framework in Ruby. And he emailed back saying, not ready yet. That's all he said.
TIM-or-DEREK
And for those who don't know, that's DHH. David Heinemeier Hansson. Yeah.
TIM-or-DEREK
And so 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 like the Ruby mailing list. Like, can anybody tell me how this works? And I'd be happy to pay somebody for an hour of their time to show me how this works. So some guy named Toby said, uh, 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 Toby 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, CDBaby, we started converting everything over to rails. I was like, this is great. So a couple years later, I get this email from Toby 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 and I was like, e-commerce thing. I'm like, no. I was like, sorry, dude, I don't do that. No, I don't know. And so I didn't introduce you guys and I was double. So I was thrilled later to find out that Toby's little e-commerce thing is Shopify or became Shopify, became Shopify or became, you know, became the Shopify. And then I was thrilled to find out, like another year or two later that you were we.
TIM-or-DEREK
Met at Railsconf, of all places.
TIM-or-DEREK
Wow.
TIM-or-DEREK
I was a speaker at Railsconf, which I felt I was supremely underqualified.
TIM-or-DEREK
I loved doing that. Yeah.
TIM-or-DEREK
But I met him in the green room at railsconf.
TIM-or-DEREK
Sweet. Yeah. That's how you met. I was going to ask you. That's how we met. Yeah. Wow. So, yeah. Toby and I have emailed since then about, like, joking about. Yeah. Sorry I didn't introduce you guys to Toby's. It all worked out.
TIM-or-DEREK
Toby's a spectacular human.
TIM-or-DEREK
So big fan. 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. Yeah, well.
TIM-or-DEREK
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 be open to going there next. What do you think?
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah. All right.
TIM-or-DEREK
Let's do it.
TIM-or-DEREK
London. London 2019. Ooh, this is gonna be good. Tuck in on the train from Oxford to London. And it was one of those days that looked like it might rain. It might not. So we made a plan on the train. I said, okay, if it's raining, we're going to go to the museum, and if it's not raining, we're going to the zoo. And he said, okay. So we got to Marylebone station in central London. We walked out and he said, you know, dad, I don't want to go to the zoo or the museum. I said, what do you want to do? He said, let's just walk around. I said, are you sure? Yeah. Okay. 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 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. 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 ten minutes. And I said, do you have any tickets? What are the best tickets you have? They had eighth row center tickets. They had two left. So we're like, yeah, let's do it.
TIM-or-DEREK
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. And so the show was over. We go 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. And I was just like, 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 it's an important museum for you to know. Then he wouldn't have had this unoptimized experience and stumbled into the cardboard box. 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 the best decision for that moment, not what you thought would be the best decision earlier when you made a plan, which was a prediction. So, um, I think about like, for example, this, uh, stupid house I'm in right now. So this is this is my stupid house, everybody. I don't like this house. Um, and, uh, but here I am.
TIM-or-DEREK
I would never guess, based on your assortment of matching plate. Where.
TIM-or-DEREK
Find out how much energy I've clearly put into this house, and making it perfect with all of its decor.
TIM-or-DEREK
There's nothing on.
TIM-or-DEREK
The walls.
TIM-or-DEREK
And no furniture.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah. So, um, except.
TIM-or-DEREK
For some mice.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah, we were going to legitimately. Yeah. I have three pet mice. We were going to bring them out, but, um, it would be distracting. Um, so, um, 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. And so it was like the night before my offer was accepted, and it was the night before I was going to put down the deposit and it was going to be mine. I fell asleep that night thinking like, at first thought I was thinking, I'm going to be so happy tomorrow. And then I thought, wait, I'm already happy. I'm like, what? Am I going to be more happy tomorrow? No, I'm already happy. I was like, 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. Like, it doesn't get in my way. And then from there, I think, how many other things in our life are we okay to just not optimize, right? It depends where you draw the line, right. Your romantic relationship, your job, your family. Um, but nobody has the perfect family of their wishes. Um, 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. And so I'm so glad you brought up The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz. I really fucking internalized that book. That's a great book. The ending of that where he says, like, okay, I've been describing the problem, so what's the recommendation? And he says, satisficing. There's maximizing and there's satisficing.
TIM-or-DEREK
I had no idea you were gonna bring this up. This is great.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah, yeah. Um, that 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, um, 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-or-DEREK
So Just for definition terms, right? Because people might think optimizing is trying to eke out every last iota of improvement. Right. But I think what we're really talking.
TIM-or-DEREK
About is sorry to interrupt. You know, like if you were to hear Paul McCartney go, Hey, Jude, you're like, whoa. Just to hear him sing two notes. Yeah. To hear you go optimizing. That's like, whoa. That's classic. It's classic. Sorry.
TIM-or-DEREK
You know, if that is my legacy, so.
TIM-or-DEREK
So be it. Optimizing.
TIM-or-DEREK
Optimizing. Uh, 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.
TIM-or-DEREK
Sense.
TIM-or-DEREK
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. I'm just curious how you currently think about where to focus your energy on improving internally or externally versus leaving things be. And this is a conversation that's near and dear to me. And one of my most effective friends basically has said, I'm paraphrasing, but he's like, yeah, I optimize for like 1 or 2 things and everything else is good enough. Like, I just, I just have to get it to good enough. Nice. 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 it seems to contribute. So how do you think about then where you might maximize versus where you satisfice, or is it because I know it's not good enough across the board? I find that hard to believe.
TIM-or-DEREK
Um hum. What do I maximize? I'm not sure. Um.
TIM-or-DEREK
Or maybe maximizes too polarizing a word.
TIM-or-DEREK
No. You know what I think it is? Yeah. If it's really fun. Okay. If you think it's just actually really fun to, like, maybe some people set up their. Let's just say they get into bread making and they're just like, I want to set up, like, the best bread maker, and they're just having fun with it. Then great, they can maximize. You know, people who get really into high fidelity audio. Yeah. And they nerd out and they know it's stupid. Usually. Yeah. And, um, but they're just like, I don't care. I want this thing with the gold plated, you know, cable connector, whatever. Um, and, uh, I think if you have fun optimizing, um, then it's worth it. If maximizing, that is, if the process is fun to you. Um, I think that should be the barometer, but I think that saying enough good enough is a superpower. Yeah, I really do.
TIM-or-DEREK
I really agree with that.
TIM-or-DEREK
You know what? It's such a good lesson to learn is that nobody cares what you're not good at.
TIM-or-DEREK
Okay. Say more.
TIM-or-DEREK
Like publicly. You're going to be just known for a few things that you're good at. Yeah. All those things that you're not good at. Nobody cares that you're not good at them. So just let it go. Like. Yeah. You know.
TIM-or-DEREK
Now for the broader public, I think that's really useful. But you may have, say, a significant other who cares.
TIM-or-DEREK
About some of.
TIM-or-DEREK
The things that you're not particularly good at.
Speaker4
Yeah.
TIM-or-DEREK
There is that.
TIM-or-DEREK
I mean. Not yeah. Not that.
TIM-or-DEREK
I'm recently single and thinking about and.
TIM-or-DEREK
Thinking about this all the time or anything. We have spent many hours talking about sex while walking in the forests of New Zealand. Sex and relationships. And.
TIM-or-DEREK
Well, even before this podcast. Derek is 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?
TIM-or-DEREK
Are we about to have sex here? Derek. What's happening? I hadn't had a shower since yesterday. I was feeling greasy. It was distracting. Um, but no, it's funny, I wasn't sure. Um, I wasn't sure if you were going to say, uh. So, as you were saying yesterday in the forest about sex.
TIM-or-DEREK
Oh, no no no, no. We'll leave that aside for Scotch outside of recording. Uh, the unoptimized life. What effect has that has that had on you paying more attention to that? Um, leaving 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. Right. And this is also with money. Right. Attention and money. It's like if it's just if it's. I'm gonna 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.
TIM-or-DEREK
Off the top of my head. I think how important it is to be done with something so that you can move on. Like I don't want open loops. Yeah. Unresolved decisions. Sitting unresolved. Sitting undecided for a long time. Yeah. 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, um, I've learned the importance of just getting things done and finishing. And to do that, you usually have to say good enough. You know, at some point. I love the fact that we say we somebody releases an album, you release a book because there's a wonderful double meaning in that word, right? Like. All right.
TIM-or-DEREK
I've never even thought about that.
TIM-or-DEREK
Released.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah, I like that.
TIM-or-DEREK
Um, 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. Mm.
TIM-or-DEREK
All right. I'm going to combine this. Maybe another syllogism. It's not really a syllogism, but in terms of how Professor Sivers operates in the world. Useful?
TIM-or-DEREK
Not true.
TIM-or-DEREK
We've been talking a bit about this. I wanted to save a lot of it for this conversation with the mics. Where should we start with this?
TIM-or-DEREK
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. Yeah. 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 could share with your audience that I've learned, like in the last seven years since we last spoke? The thing that's made the biggest difference in my life. A superpower. A big, huge change. So to me, it's been, in short, skepticism. 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 going to give this the shorthand of calling it useful. Not true, but 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. Do you remember? All the bullets come his way? He's like, oh, wait, right. Like, none of these rules apply to me. That's deep skepticism. Um. It's empowering. It's liberating. And so what I'm going to do for a few minutes, including a little stories, is to play Morpheus to help emancipate the listeners. So, yes, I call this useful.
TIM-or-DEREK
Not true, but preach, preach. Yeah. There we go. Number one. So okay, I'm going to tell you the four bits first. And we'll use that to kind of make sure that we come back to this. So number one almost nothing is objectively true. Number two beliefs are placebos. So you've got to believe whatever works for you. Now number three, rules and norms are arbitrary games that can be changed. And I'm preaching to the converted with that one. And number four refuse ideology. You need to accept ideas individually. Okay. There's the structure. So number one. So almost nothing is objectively true. So here's what's true. My hand is on the table. But what's not true is um, 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. I 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. If I come up.
TIM-or-DEREK
With so many children's books ideas.
TIM-or-DEREK
In this conversation the cat and the alien, the alien and the octopus, 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. Yeah, but everything else, including this one. Am I flipping you off right now? Like, am I angry at you right now? No. Just because he's she's giving.
TIM-or-DEREK
Me the middle finger.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah, 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. You can't. Everything else is an interpretation or a projection. Right. 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 they're probably just believing whatever supports the emotions that they want to feel right now. Right. So if somebody has a belief, um, 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. Yeah.
TIM-or-DEREK
Possibly subconscious.
TIM-or-DEREK
Right? Right, right. Oh, so I'm so glad you said this. Have you heard about the Split Brain stories that people. Yes. Okay.
TIM-or-DEREK
Why did you get up? To have a glass of water? That type of.
TIM-or-DEREK
Stuff. Can I tell it, please? Yeah. So this is so important to understand that these are crazy. These are.
TIM-or-DEREK
They're so bananas, actually.
TIM-or-DEREK
We'll start with the other one. Since, you know that one. There was.
TIM-or-DEREK
No, no, no, but the audience doesn't. Come on.
TIM-or-DEREK
No no, no, but we'll do both. But during brain surgery, the patient needs to stay awake. And so there was a woman, um, in some.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah. Or I guess they could. Yeah. Okay.
TIM-or-DEREK
So there is I don't know the details of this. It was on the TikTok. No. Sorry. Um, Econtalk podcast, um, that, uh, 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, like, 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.
TIM-or-DEREK
Stimulating.
TIM-or-DEREK
Part of the metal rudder there. And so the split brain patients, or some people whose left and right hemispheres of their brain are not connected. So they've done tests on these people to, um, say into their right ear, uh, 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. Um, 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. And, um, there are a couple more examples of this, you know, 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. So to me, this is the most beautiful example. Like 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 can't, 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. So number two, beliefs are placebos. So 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. In fact, you know the little story of Richard Branson before there was Virgin Airlines. You've heard the tale that, like he was at an airport in a flight to somewhere, it was cancelled, right?
TIM-or-DEREK
It was delayed.
TIM-or-DEREK
And. Yeah. And everybody was grumbling, oh, this sucks. And so he kind of went to the 20 people that were angry and said, hey, if I charter a plane, will you guys split the cost? And they said yeah. So everybody else was angry. He looked at the same situation and said, this is great. And he you know, that was kind of the launch of Virgin Airlines. No. Not launch. You know what I mean? A predecessor the Genesis story. Genesis. Nice word. Um, so 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-or-DEREK
Or not evidence based.
TIM-or-DEREK
Right. Not true. Sorry. I'm just. I'm just. Yeah. Having fun. Have fun. Um. Because. Yeah. Not evidence based. Yeah. Um, because we don't say I believe in potatoes. Because. Speak for yourself. We don't have to. Because there's a potato. Yeah. Um, we don't need to say it because there it is. It exists. So I think that whenever we say I believe such and such, it indicates that whatever we say next is not true.
TIM-or-DEREK
It's kind of like when science is at the end of a field's name. Generally, it's not science. Not always, but very often that's not the case. I can think of a few examples. Neuro exceptions. Neuroscience, computer science. But very often when science gets appended to something.
TIM-or-DEREK
It's like, ooh, thou doth protest too much.
TIM-or-DEREK
Ooh.
TIM-or-DEREK
I like that. Yeah. Um, so since no beliefs are true. I think this is liberating to realize that you can just choose whatever belief works for you. Now, that helps you be who you want to be. This is like this is about personal empowerment. It's a little bit 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 you know, the rest of your life. Um, 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, right? So the number three is that 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 workweek, giving so many wonderful examples of how you don't have to accept the world's norms. Yeah. You know for sure. So 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 through 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 and he goes, wait a minute, this is just code. Yeah, somebody made this up, but I don't need to run this program. And, um, 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, like you're a bad person for doing this, you have to know that that's not true either. And I have a cute story about that.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah, this this, I think, begs a number of questions. Living in a broader society about morally acceptable or reprehensible right behavior.
TIM-or-DEREK
Right. But that's when I talk about, like, being who you want to be. We can't really address people who want to be psychopaths or who want to be damaging, because then any time you taught anybody how to do anything, how to fly a plane, hey, don't fly it into the World Trade Centers, okay? 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, you know, your psychosis that might lead you to be a bad person, right?
TIM-or-DEREK
Table that for a minute.
TIM-or-DEREK
Okay. So, um, so I have a funny little story that felt almost too risqué to tell. I love.
TIM-or-DEREK
I love.
TIM-or-DEREK
To do it. So that's why we.
TIM-or-DEREK
Don't record these in front of a crowd.
TIM-or-DEREK
So I can always edit. Oslo, Norway. My band was on tour and we were there for three nights, and for the first two nights there was this girl in the audience that was kind of making eyes at me on stage. And so the second night I went to go talk to her and we hit it off and we hung out all night long, and it was wonderful. And then the. But we didn't have sex. Mhm. That's funny. I was like, can I say this on the air. We did not.
TIM-or-DEREK
Consummate.
TIM-or-DEREK
Our attraction. All right. I'm just gonna say it. Yeah. So but we kind of regretted it. So then it was the third day and it was the day that I was leaving. And there's this big kind of Central Park in the middle of central Oslo, and we're in the park. And, you know, housekeeping came at 10 a.m., like, time to check out. Time to go. And she was asking them in Norwegian like, please, one more hour. And they said, no, get out. She's like, oh. 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, God, I just so want to be with you. And I was like, damn me too. I was like, I wish we could. And then I looked around and this park is surrounded by, like, you know, Sheraton, Hilton Marriott. And it was 11:00 and my ferry was leaving at 4:00. Oh, and there's one detail. Um, she was just in the process of breaking up with her fiance.
TIM-or-DEREK
Oh, yeah. Small detail.
TIM-or-DEREK
So this matters because, um, I said, hey, what do you think about getting a hotel for a few hours? And she was like, well, we could. I was like, yeah, it feels kind of naughty, doesn't it? I'm like, yeah, but let's do it. Yeah. Okay. You don't mind? She's like, but I can't be seen with you. She said, 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. So I went into the hotel and whatever hotel it was, I'll just say Sheraton. And he was like, welcome to the Sheraton Hotel, you know. And I said, hey, I'm here for one night. I'd like a room and. Great. No problem. Okay. Tomorrow breakfast will be served over here and such and such. And here's your room. And and. Okay, 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. So then we have fun for a few hours and it's great. But now it's 230 and it's time for me to go get my fairy. 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 4:00 fairy. He's like, oh, is everything okay? Was there any problem? I said, no, no problem at all.
TIM-or-DEREK
Everything's great. Just decided to catch an earlier fairy. So, you know, paying in full. Here it is. So he's charging my card. It's already done. He's doing the thing. But then he sees her walk by and he goes, wait a minute. I don't like this one bit. So he remembers that he saw her come in five minutes after me. Now she's leaving five minutes after me, and he goes, this is not some stupid establishment. This is this is a very reputable hotel. I do not like this. No, you must not do. I don't like this one bit. He was getting really angry. Yeah. And I was so happy. Because. Not for the obvious. Yeah, but, like, it was so liberating realizing that, like, I've done nothing wrong. Nobody was hurt. This is fully, like, consensual. He's, you know, they were paid for their room. And even though he's angry, he can't get me in trouble. Like I haven't broken the law. And I think that we so often as kids, we spend so much of our life the first half of our life, um, kind of deferring to authority and thinking that authority has power over us. And at a certain point, you realize that you're you're free. You're liberated from that as long as you don't break the law. Mhm. Um, 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 turning point in my life, realizing that I was liberated from authority and from judgment.
TIM-or-DEREK
So a couple of things. So the first is I read a piece recently, I think the author's name is Ava Ava. I don't know her full name book bear on Substack. And the headline, the title of the piece is something like on 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 kind of upshot of it. Very well written. Introduced to me by a friend named Mike. Thank you. Mike. Uh, so I'd recommend people take a look at that because I think it relates. 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 who are like, well, wait a second, like you had fun for a couple hours with someone who was still engaged. How would you respond to people who find that morally repugnant?
TIM-or-DEREK
Um, they had broken up, but were still living together because she just hadn't moved out yet. Ah, okay.
TIM-or-DEREK
All right.
TIM-or-DEREK
Okay, I would I wouldn't sleep with somebody's wife. Okay. Or fiance. Okay. Got it. But no, I know what you mean. That it's. But in those moments, you have to ask yourself, do I agree with this rule? Because just especially if you travel the world, um, what's polite in Japan can be rude in New Zealand and vice versa. Um, these different ideas of what is the right and wrong thing to do are completely arbitrary, and they change with geography. And so you get to kind of pick or choose, and you can choose to fit into the local norms, or sometimes you choose not to because you disagree with them. And that same goes the same with individuals and people that you were liberated from others norms. You can choose your own.
TIM-or-DEREK
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 genital mutilation of like 12 year old girls or whatever it is, is totally fine in that culture because the culture is different. Therefore, 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?
TIM-or-DEREK
I defer to Sam Harris.
TIM-or-DEREK
Okay.
TIM-or-DEREK
Did he ever talk about the moral landscape on your show?
TIM-or-DEREK
I don't think we've discussed it explicitly. So why don't why don't you, if you wouldn't mind elaborating?
TIM-or-DEREK
Probably the best elaboration is to tell people to go search for Sam Harris moral landscape. The best Ted talk I've ever seen. Okay. Ever. That if I were. Yeah, that is the one. Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape so beautifully summarizes this idea of, um, judging something morally, objectively. Um, Based on the individual well-being and sort of.
TIM-or-DEREK
Utilitarianism like greatest good for the greatest number of people type stuff.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah, he says it better than. Yeah.
TIM-or-DEREK
I don't want to speak. I don't want.
TIM-or-DEREK
To speak for. But yeah, go find that talk. That's kind of. I'm curious.
TIM-or-DEREK
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. Uh, consistent moral compass. And that is why sometimes I'm actually very envious of people who are deeply religious. It's like you're the rules, right? I mean, you want to talk about paradox of choice, like how much decision fatigue does that remove, right. 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? Um, in a secular, uh, in secular societies, I think about I wonder about this a lot. Yeah.
TIM-or-DEREK
I recently read, um, a book I can recommend for anybody called, um, What Everyone Should Know About Islam. Okay. And it was really good. And it finally, like, I finally understood about the different Sharia law. Sharia laws. Um, and, uh, it's really congruent. I think more than anything, if I had to pick one word to give, it's amazing how congruent it is. Um, 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, there's not a not a gray area. Um, but you asked me the other day about, um, 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-or-DEREK
Yeah, yeah. And this is just just for people who this came up very organically in our conversation, I.
TIM-or-DEREK
Don't remember how do you.
TIM-or-DEREK
Uh, let's see it. 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 nonprofit work, because I actually have a pretty Hobbesian view of human nature in general, and think we've probably was certainly on a planetary level, cause more problems than we've solved. And therefore I don't feel like philosophy. Right. Like hydrophilic, like philic is to love. Phil is I mean, the etymology of that. And then the philanthropy is like the Anthropocene or anthropology. It's humans. So like to love humans basically is philanthropy. And I don't I don't feel like I align with that. I'm actually a misanthrope, like misanthrope a lot of the time. Uh, 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 Psi Psi 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. I think that is the rewinding the tape. I think that is sort of the the stream of conversation that led to that coming up. But you were making a I was asking about how you consider constraining your choices with maybe a lens of morality. And so you were going to say, well.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah, for me personally, I guess I just we have this gut feeling of what feels right and feels wrong, or sometimes you actually let your head rule that decision. Yeah. To say, um, you know what? I know that personally. I might want such and such, but I know that ultimately that's 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. Like 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. Um, but you know, this idea of isms, um, ideologies and subscribing. Yeah. You tapped it that, uh, or tapped into that that thing that we. What did you call it? The decision fatigue. It really helps decision fatigue to say I'm all in on this, but I think that people do it to a fault where they read a self-help book and go, oh, yeah, this is it. This is the answer. Um, this is I'm following this now. Stoicism. You know, everybody's sending, declaring themselves to be a stoic. I read this religion.
TIM-or-DEREK
Or CrossFit or veganism, whatever.
TIM-or-DEREK
Right, right. Um, the biggest fault, I think, to, um, crypto.
TIM-or-DEREK
For that matter. Right.
TIM-or-DEREK
Religion? Yeah. It's a tribalism in in that case, not.
TIM-or-DEREK
For not for everyone, just to be.
TIM-or-DEREK
Clear, but. Yeah. 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 9. I was on a plane from Amsterdam to the US, and I saw a guy reading Four Hour Workweek and I said, hey, great book. And he goes, it's trash, man. And I said, really? And he goes, this guy is full of himself. This book is trash. And and I think about that all the time because this is like.
TIM-or-DEREK
That was a German guy.
TIM-or-DEREK
I think I think yeah, I've heard a bit about this.
TIM-or-DEREK
Or I don't know.
TIM-or-DEREK
Before. Yeah. So it's like because he found one thing to.
TIM-or-DEREK
Slight the fine Germans, I should say, outside.
TIM-or-DEREK
Of the U.S., Germany and.
TIM-or-DEREK
And Korea are my besties.
TIM-or-DEREK
Um, but he found one thing he didn't like about you and therefore declared all 400 pages of this book to be trash. Right. And I think that's the problem with isms, is that if you're trying to buy into a system, yeah, it's all or nothing. And so once if the leader of a movement says something you don't like on, on social media, well, now the bubbles popped. You know, it's a fly in my dish. It's a hair in the meal. It's a poo in the pool. The whole thing is ruined. Drain the pool.
TIM-or-DEREK
That's page 4 to 7in your doctor.
TIM-or-DEREK
Seuss, right? Oh, yeah. We're back to that. Um.
TIM-or-DEREK
The alien and the octopus.
TIM-or-DEREK
But it's it's like the mindset that wants everything to be a religion. Yeah. You know, and I think that's deeply built into people.
TIM-or-DEREK
This. Yeah. The reductionism. I mean, it simplifies reality.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah. Simplifies reality. Yeah, I like that.
TIM-or-DEREK
I mean, you do assume cognitive burden to take the harder path.
TIM-or-DEREK
So on that note, like back to my whole, like useful. Not true. My radical. What did I call it? Radical doubt. Super skepticism. Yes. Like this is I think we should be skeptical of every ism. I think we should avoid isms, avoid ideology, and take ideas piecemeal, which means ideally, you should find somebody you. You should be open to somebody you don't like taking their 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.
TIM-or-DEREK
Mhm.
TIM-or-DEREK
And when somebody does that to me that shows a I'm 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 as I am a such and such ist. I subscribed to this ism that to me seems to be a a jumping to a conclusion. It's a punt. It's like just deferring to the ism. Yeah.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah. This this is very present for me in the US. And we don't need to go into politics. But with respect to politics, because I am asked frequently like, are you a Democrat or a Republican? Oh, wait, I think you're a libertarian. I'm like, I refuse to play that game. Yeah. If you want to talk to me about a specific issue.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yes, let's.
TIM-or-DEREK
Talk about it. And if you can, if you can not just make the case for your argument, but like ideally, I mean, this is asking a lot, but like Steelman, a counter 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 there's a as soon as you apply. And I think I'm borrowing from Paul Graham on this of Y Combinator fame. 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. It's deferring.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah, it's.
TIM-or-DEREK
Deferring, which is a luxury if you want to I think have a really if you want to 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, uh, or maybe, maybe it's a bell curve. Who knows, maybe, like the people who completely don't think and the people who think the most are the happiest. Who the hell knows? I think a lot of it's probably out of the box. How much of your. Because there are, I'm sure, people listening who are gonna be like, wait a second. 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.
TIM-or-DEREK
From your.
TIM-or-DEREK
Code versus a cultivated.
TIM-or-DEREK
Dino. Sonja Lembersky. No. Okay. You know who she is? Nope. Oh, um, she wrote one of those books on happiness. Okay. After I read Stumbling on Happiness, I went, ooh, that was good. That was a good book. And I went to go find other books on the subject. So she wrote a couple of books on happiness. She's been studying happiness for decades.
TIM-or-DEREK
Sonia. Lembersky. Lembersky.
TIM-or-DEREK
I think lembersky. Um.
TIM-or-DEREK
I'll find it. Put it in the show. Notes. Show notes.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yay! Um, so, um, uh, she said in one of her books that that her studies have shown that most people's happiness is 50% DNA and out of their control, and the other 50% is in their control. So the best we can do is just control that 50%, you know? Um, and so, yeah, I think it sounds.
TIM-or-DEREK
Like you're a stoic.
TIM-or-DEREK
Closet stoic. Oh, I am. Okay. Yeah. Minus the minus the ism. Yeah. Right. But did I ever tell you about that? That, like. Sorry. We're total whatever. Forest style tangent. But like when I finally you even talked about stoicism a bit and I was like, ancient crap. And. And then finally in 2010, I read A guide to the Good Life, the Art of stoicism.
TIM-or-DEREK
Irvin, I think.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah. And, um, I read it was like, whoa, oh my God, I thought this was just me. Like, this is the 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, um, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. You know.
TIM-or-DEREK
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, like 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.
TIM-or-DEREK
I just read a couple years ago in Wikipedia or something. That that book was basically spouting stoic values makes perfect sense.
TIM-or-DEREK
It's a great book, by the way, folks. How to Stop Worrying and Start Living.
TIM-or-DEREK
By Dale Carnegie. And it was on my grandmother's bookshelf, and I read it when I was like 16. Oh, look at that. 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 that 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 you got.
TIM-or-DEREK
Incepted by Dale.
TIM-or-DEREK
Carnegie. Oh, wow. Inception. Yeah. Like wow. So. But the point is. Yeah, I've been thinking that way since I was a teenager, and it wasn't until the age of 40 that I read an actual book on stoicism and. Whoa, this is like, this is how I think. But that being said, um, 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, you know, all of this, this is me, this is how I'm going to live now.
TIM-or-DEREK
Unless you have the made a, 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, right?
TIM-or-DEREK
To see what happens. But not like this is the truth in all caps. This is who I am. Identity.
TIM-or-DEREK
Right.
TIM-or-DEREK
That's totally different. See, that's pluralism versus monism. Like, the monomyth is to say monism is this. It's, um, it's mystical. The number one is somewhat like magical and mystical, you know, 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 there are many answers and they conflict and you can believe conflicting things at the same time. So sorry I accidentally skipped your skipped answering your question about, um, was it either am I this happy or why am I this happy? Or why do I think I'm this happy? Yeah.
TIM-or-DEREK
So this researcher who wrote the book after stumbling on happiness said 50 over 50, and then I dragged us into stoicism.
TIM-or-DEREK
So that's that. So no, I, I think I got the lucky roll of the dice, the DNA dice. 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, um, 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, um, 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. Yeah. Um, 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, um, doubting everything I write, doubting everything I think, doubting everything I say and questioning it. And you do this in writing? Yeah, I do this. My fingers just fly in my, you know? Um, so later I found out that this is similar to cognitive behavioral therapy. Um, 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 I went, oh, this sounds like what I've been doing. So, um.
TIM-or-DEREK
Also in the all roads lead to Rome type of metaphor. Cbt, as I understand it, largely based on many stoic writings.
TIM-or-DEREK
Are all right. Right. That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. So I recommend, um, and it's kind of the conclusion of the, um, the big arc. I was on the whole, like, 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, right? You said like, how would you recommend somebody do that? Or how do you do it?
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah. How do you translate that into durable behavioral change. Right. Because 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 in quite a different thing, to implement that latter belief in a way that changes your behavior.
TIM-or-DEREK
So I think the, um, You stack up evidence. So first, you know, just writing in my diary about I think I should 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. Um, 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. Well, you can always find evidence to support any belief, right? So you can 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, such and such a this. And she had this happen. 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 and you take some baby steps to 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. I do cut off some options in my life, um, as a giant leap. I can we can talk about that if you want. Um, but, um, small actions or big actions, you can take the action before necessarily internalizing it totally.
TIM-or-DEREK
Um, kind of fake it before you make it.
TIM-or-DEREK
Fake it before you make it. Yes. Even if you.
TIM-or-DEREK
Decide, like, do it before you believe it. Right. Like, act as if.
TIM-or-DEREK
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 take the action. 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. So it's like, oh, look, I'm this kind of person now. This is my belief now.
TIM-or-DEREK
So for 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. Oh, yeah. Which is very much this. And I found personally very useful. Super, super useful. You teased, you didn't really tease. 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. Are you going there? What are what are what are is there an example of a giant leap that might make for a story? Is there? Um.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah. I, um, I renounced my U.S. citizenship in 2011.
TIM-or-DEREK
That's a big one.
TIM-or-DEREK
As, uh, as a way of doing something to. 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 or 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, um, South America somewhere. And when he landed, there were thousands of Aztecs waiting to kill them, and they only had a few hundred men. Of course, I'm messing up 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, um, 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-or-DEREK
Okay, I'm laughing because there's so many rabbit holes. We could go down here. I'm gonna I'm going to use my my creative license as the host of this podcast to avoid most of them, but, uh, are you glad you did that?
TIM-or-DEREK
For years, it was my. One of my biggest mistakes in life.
TIM-or-DEREK
Made it hard to visit like family and friends in the US.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah, I highly recommend when everybody asks me about it. Some people have found out about this.
TIM-or-DEREK
Um, no, no, a handful, a handful more will know.
TIM-or-DEREK
Don't tell anybody. Um, so, um, 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 and Kelly had this wonderful saying. The best option is the option that gives you the most options. Yep. I love that, and under that wise advice, um, I think that no, you should not renounce your US citizenship because it's cutting off options. Um, a lot of people seem to want to do it for tax reasons, and even that has, um, you need to look through that thoroughly. I did not do it for tax reasons. And in fact, my taxes went up after I renounced because most of my income is still US sourced US source. So now that all gets taxed at a flat 30% rate instead of before, it was part of a bigger picture. So yeah, my taxes went up and um, it reduced the options. So there was something scary that happened just a few months after I renounced my citizenship. My ex, uh, her dad was like on his deathbed, and we needed to quickly get on a plane that night, but I didn't have the visa. And so I went to the US embassy to get a visa quickly. And they rejected me. And I was devastated because they just hand you a slip saying, no, you've been denied for visa. Um, next, you know, and the slip says you may not reapply. This decision is final. And, um. Hey, useful. Not true. I challenged that that rule. I was like, I think somebody just made that up. I'm going to go back and reapply anyway. So I went back with a mountain of evidence and luckily they granted me a visa.
TIM-or-DEREK
Mountain of evidence for what?
TIM-or-DEREK
Um, 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, that you're on the board of this company, that you're speaking at, you know, National University of Singapore. Show them your two year rental agreement.
TIM-or-DEREK
You're not a flight risk, right?
TIM-or-DEREK
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.
TIM-or-DEREK
But not true.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah. I always say like, no, no, no. Once, once you renounce, you might never be allowed in that country ever again. That is not your country anymore. Um, so I do not recommend it.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah, I would say in general not to paint too broad a brush, but the US frowns upon people who renounce citizenship.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah, I'm always aware that I'm, in a lot of ways be allowed back in ever again. Yeah. So.
TIM-or-DEREK
Okay. What is another example of a giant leap? Anything come to mind? I mean, that's a huge one for sure.
TIM-or-DEREK
Moving.
TIM-or-DEREK
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.
TIM-or-DEREK
Now, 13 years later, 12 years later, since doing it, it did come in a little handy in Covid 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, nope, 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, um, no, to me that was a it was a huge thing. You know, it's a little bit like somebody getting a sex change or something, right? Like it's, uh, not to be taken lightly. If you decide that you've made the wrong decision, it'll take you 12 years if infinity to reverse that. Yeah.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah, totally.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah.
TIM-or-DEREK
Any other. Any other giant leaps?
TIM-or-DEREK
Giant leaps. Um. Let me think. Or big leaps. Moving. God. Actually, selling my company came in like an instant moment of clarity of, like, God, life is weird when it's like, you can 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 is these 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 going gets tough. You need to stay in there in such and such and make that. There's another belief that says the the rewards to effort ratio is off, that I'm spending so much effort and getting so little reward that you should stop. Another philosophy says you can just hold these in your head and look at them as it's paths. You could go down as, uh, philosophies you could follow, and then ultimately you just pick one, or you craft one from a hodgepodge, a piecemeal from the from the other bits. And so in that moment, I was feeling really frustrated with my company. I'd been doing it for ten years. I was feeling done like a bit like 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, huh, 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, um, 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 going to 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-or-DEREK
Was there a feeling or a meal or something your friend said that triggered that?
TIM-or-DEREK
Um, he just asked me a bunch of questions like, um, he challenged. 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, um, I'm sick of having all this responsibility. I don't want to have to do this and have to do that. And he said, you don't have to do anything. I said, yeah, I have to pay my taxes. He said, no, you don't. I said, yes, I do. You have to pay your taxes. He said, no, Derek, you need to understand this. You don't have to do anything. What they do to um, power of now that went sat on a park bench. Do you remember who wrote Power of Now Eckhart tolle. Eckhart tolle.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah. I never read the book, but I've heard good things about it.
TIM-or-DEREK
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. Um, but, um, 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 of years doing nothing. And 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.
TIM-or-DEREK
Consequences.
TIM-or-DEREK
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. 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 ten 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. Yeah.
TIM-or-DEREK
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 Ahold of person X and have a cup of tea or coffee, pick the brain, pick the brain, pick the brain. It's so appealing. Have a meal.
TIM-or-DEREK
Who would not want to have their brain picked?
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah. So how how would you suggest people ask mentors for help?
TIM-or-DEREK
Here's what I do. Um, I have three mentors. So anytime I think anytime I hit 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. 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. So what is.
TIM-or-DEREK
What is that in practice look like? I have a half page page.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah. Half page. Like it's like bullet points for everything instead of paragraphs, right? Yeah. As succinct as I can. And then before I send it to them, I try to predict what this person would say.
TIM-or-DEREK
So each of those three.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah. Or. Right. Right. Would anybody would say to this but yeah. What my, what this mentor would say. What that mentor 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 going to address those in advance. Again, to not waste their time.
TIM-or-DEREK
So when you say address them, what do you mean by that?
TIM-or-DEREK
Like, um, kind of like how you I said something five minutes ago when 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 going to ask that. So here's my.
TIM-or-DEREK
Follow up.
TIM-or-DEREK
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 okay well now that I've addressed.
TIM-or-DEREK
You have an answer ready for whatever they might come back with.
TIM-or-DEREK
But I include it in the initial summary of my 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. Uh, 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, um, what was, uh, what's his name? Napoleon Hill talked about the mastermind or whatever. Like, he was like, you know, imagine Abraham Lincoln is there. What would Abraham Lincoln say to you? So I think that you're right. I'd 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-or-DEREK
Who is? If you're willing to share the person who doesn't know you exist?
TIM-or-DEREK
It was Tyler Cowen. I just emailed him two weeks ago to say thank you.
TIM-or-DEREK
Thanks for your years of service.
TIM-or-DEREK
For his continued inspiration. And he sent me back a tiny little things. Um, Seth Godin is one. He knows I exist. We don't talk that often. Um, but I very often think, like, what would Seth Godin say? He walks.
TIM-or-DEREK
The walk. He's another example of someone who walks the walk.
TIM-or-DEREK
Very much so, yeah. Um, not as.
TIM-or-DEREK
Common as you would hope. No. Yeah.
TIM-or-DEREK
No. That's it.
TIM-or-DEREK
Who's the third?
TIM-or-DEREK
It's actually changing. I don't know right now.
TIM-or-DEREK
Keith Richards.
TIM-or-DEREK
Bjork. What would Chuck E cheese? That would be great. You know, that's thoroughly useful. If you have a fictional a fictional person can be your mentor. Yeah. You know, like, what would well, fuck, you know, what would Jesus do, right? Yeah. Like people still do that, like, okay, I'm not sure what to do. What would Jesus do? That's a perfectly good mentor.
TIM-or-DEREK
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.
TIM-or-DEREK
Can you tell?
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah, absolutely. So I, I have, I have I try to spend time with people I, I admire and aspire 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, because he's very calm in almost all circumstances, not all. I know, I know what the handful of things that bother him. But he's very, very calm and measured and good at perspectival knowledge. Taking, taking alternative positions, taking the counter position on 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, 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, if, if I'm talking to a version of myself who's ten 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 the end 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 it's really remarkable. So I do something very similar, I guess, is what I'm saying.
TIM-or-DEREK
Sometimes even just asking. 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-or-DEREK
Yeah, totally.
TIM-or-DEREK
Like just the act of opening their email client and starting with it and going, okay, I want to ask Derek Sivers this thing. Yeah. You know, it's like, just.
TIM-or-DEREK
And even 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 if I don't want to be lazy. Yeah, right. And I don't want to ask them something that could be resolved with five minutes of googling. Yeah, right. Or five minutes of introspection. It's like whenever I go to anyone, I want to be able to say, basically, here's a situation. Here are some of my assumptions. Here's what I've already tried. Mhm. And I've tried a, B, C, D and e and I'm not quite figuring it out. Uh and then followed by a super specific question, but the asking the mentors around your imaginary table and doing that homework I think is it's something that I do and I recommend to everyone. And there is some selfish motive here. Like, I would like to have fewer than several thousand emails a week that come in with like, how can I launch my book? Please tell me which is, you know.
TIM-or-DEREK
Um, and I'll admit, I actually got a oddly shy two minutes ago when you asked me who the third one was, because actually, it's been you in the past. Oh, 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 first. Never mind. I didn't ask you. Yeah.
TIM-or-DEREK
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 short list for me as well, of people who really think and more than think it's a question.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah.
TIM-or-DEREK
Right. The musts, the shoulds.
TIM-or-DEREK
The have to's like. Wait a second. That's nonsense. You know, I feel like you're very good at that. So I, I'm just part of the reason I've read my first book so many times. Uh, so, uh. No, I'm all shy.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah.
TIM-or-DEREK
Should we, um.
TIM-or-DEREK
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.
TIM-or-DEREK
Be right back. Audience. Why don't you. Audience. Why don't you just sit here and.
Speaker5
Look at the empty table for a while? Perfect.
TIM-or-DEREK
Okay. All right. Ready to go? We're back.
TIM-or-DEREK
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.
TIM-or-DEREK
Honestly, the greater good thing I think about making it an interesting conversation for you. But then there's like how many people that listen? So it's like I try to yeah, you're.
TIM-or-DEREK
Good at holding both looking at.
TIM-or-DEREK
You, but I'm thinking of them. No offense.
TIM-or-DEREK
Wow. We could we could unpack that for a while.
TIM-or-DEREK
All right. You and your euphemisms. All right, dark mirror. Here we come. Uh. Cheers, man. Cheers. So nice. Thank you for suggesting. Oh, thanks again. Matt. I don't know why we think Matt's there.
TIM-or-DEREK
That's got the. Matt's got the fuzzy hat on. Otherwise known as the boom mic. Oh. That is nice. All right, so we're all playing games, right? And I think it's a matter of knowing which games you're playing outside of some basics. You got shelter, you got food. You know, 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. Uh, 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 with it.
TIM-or-DEREK
No, that's what it works. So it's it's something that might seem strange about me that sometimes people say that I seem weird because of the choices I make in life. You are pretty weird. In fairness, it's a compliment, but I try to explain that it's just because for ten 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, to my by my own standards, I won the game. And when you win the game, say you're playing Settlers of Catan or Monopoly or poker, whatever with friends. Um, 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. So even with, say, addictive video games. So have you ever played Stardew Valley? No. Oh, don't.
TIM-or-DEREK
I probably shouldn't.
TIM-or-DEREK
It's adorably Uh, addictive? Yeah. Uh, so my ex grew up on a farm, and Stardew Valley is one of those little farming games where you tend to your crops, and then you get animals and you get money for selling your crops. I think.
TIM-or-DEREK
The story behind this game is also very interesting.
TIM-or-DEREK
Made by one guy with a passion for many years, and I.
TIM-or-DEREK
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 it's a fascinating, fascinating backstory. But yeah, don't play it because it's digital heroin.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah. I mean, it's so good. I mean, okay, let's say if you want to play a great game. Yeah, that is also Non-greedy. I found it because it was recommended on a list of like, no bullshit games that don't ask you for more money. Once you're in, you just pay your $9 or something like that up front and then you've got the game forever. So let's see. 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, uh, and I got really into it. Um, 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. Yeah. And, um, I think that the temptation to keep playing, even though the rewards are done, isn't that the definition of addiction? Um, and so, yeah, continuing a behavior even though it's not rewarding you anymore. Um, so to me, that's what making money is. Um, it's it's a game that I've decided to stop playing because I got enough. Um, but this could apply to anything. Somebody who, um, wanted to be a successful, um, musician. Oh, there's a great Gautier. Gautier? I think that's how you pronounce it.
TIM-or-DEREK
You didn't have to cut me out, you know. Now you're just somebody that I used to know. That guy. One hit wonder Gautier from Australia. Um, that was his stage name. And he did a beautiful thing. As he has 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 Gautier. So now he's just back to his legal name, and he's the drummer and singer in a band called The Basics. And he retired. Gautier. He stepped away. Um, 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 mid term and just said, that's enough. I'm feeling full. I'm feeling spent. Um, Serena Williams, I think, you know, quit instead of going longer than she should have. She quit after 27 years, and that was enough. She hit her point. That was enough. Cameron Diaz I suddenly, after watching, um. There's something about Mary with my kid. Um, I said, I wonder what ever 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. Um. And I should interview her. Yeah. Apparently she's.
TIM-or-DEREK
Those stories. I mean, she would probably not say yes, but. But, I mean, those stories are fascinating to me. Yeah.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah.
TIM-or-DEREK
Because people are just like, yep. Goodbye.
TIM-or-DEREK
Because I think there's something really admirable about the personal challenge of making yourself do something else that 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. Yeah, and I really admire that she did that. Um, I was super, super influenced by Felix Dennis's book called How to Get Rich.
TIM-or-DEREK
Which I just have to say, it's definitely, uh. 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 listening anyway, I just want to say, is it not suitable?
TIM-or-DEREK
Is it? Does it? Well, I.
TIM-or-DEREK
Mean, look, you have a very particular team. You have 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.
TIM-or-DEREK
Okay. That's what I thought you were referring to. Yeah, that is one specific thing, but that's so wonderful that he admitted that that, I mean, okay, well.
TIM-or-DEREK
It's very it's it's funny for that reason, right? Because he's so candid. Yeah. In a way that you would not normally find. Yeah. In most books like this. So yeah. So and unapologetic on other things. The whole thing is, is, uh, refreshingly unusual. I enjoyed it.
TIM-or-DEREK
I love that book.
TIM-or-DEREK
Okay, so I interrupted that.
TIM-or-DEREK
No, it was 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. Yeah. And so I took his lesson to heart, and I said, all right, Felix, Dennis said, if he could do it all again, he would just retire and write poetry and plant trees and 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 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 so I should stop playing.
TIM-or-DEREK
Mhm. I'm excited to dig into this because there are 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. Well, not in a bad way, but like, you're not you don't have volatile emotions. No, you don't have strong displays of emotion. And that could be a misread. I admire that about you, by the way. Just the 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. That's true. And that's remarkable. Right. So, uh, and you seem to have a very, very, very low need for external validation. That's my perception. Yes. It's true. So that makes that makes it odd. Or for me to hear you say, I want to be famous because I'm like, what do you get out of fame if that's your constitution, like it's formally.
TIM-or-DEREK
Okay, so wait, you know what? Something interesting came up. Okay, we won't let that go. But 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, you know, 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, what 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.
TIM-or-DEREK
Wow, he's barking up the wrong tree. Yeah, he's got the wrong guy.
TIM-or-DEREK
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. Yeah.
TIM-or-DEREK
So how does fame fit into that?
TIM-or-DEREK
Um, I think a little bit like the things that you talked about being competitive, like your personal tendency.
TIM-or-DEREK
To be competitive.
TIM-or-DEREK
I think, um, 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, incredible musician. Yeah. Um, 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-or-DEREK
And that was driven by a competitive drive.
TIM-or-DEREK
Think I used it was.
TIM-or-DEREK
Um, I.
TIM-or-DEREK
More just like, let's see if I can do it. Okay. You know, just with that spirit of, like, I think I can do that. I want to try doing that. Um, and it was also feeling that what I was doing musically was valid and worth hearing. And so a way for people to hear it is to.
TIM-or-DEREK
Get someone was asking me recently because I was describing how excited I was to see you. We haven't hung out in so long. It's been so fun to 12 years.
TIM-or-DEREK
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, crossed, crossed the Rubicon on that one hit middle aged 21 and just been there since. So a little bit more. More salt and pepper on the beard. But that's about it. So I was describing to someone that I was excited to see you, and they asked, uh, what made you interesting? Or I don't think they said unusual. It's like, oh, what's what's he like? What's 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 outside of you, who has the combination of seemingly no need for external validation yet being a good performer.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah.
TIM-or-DEREK
Mhm.
TIM-or-DEREK
Right. Like you were, you were a ringleader in a circus. Right. Musician you're really good at imitation voices etc.. You enjoy. You seem to enjoy performing. Mhm. 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, they loved or needed or both. External validation. It's a very I think it's a very uncommon combination, which is why I was asking you about it. Mhm. Uh, so.
TIM-or-DEREK
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, like 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 the musicians. So I think that flipped something in my head where it's like, I no longer need the attention for me, I no longer I don't need any more attention. I don't need any more validation. Now I don't even need any more money. I really don't need anything from anybody. But yeah, you're right. I still am, um, socially skilled. I know how to get on stage and talk.
TIM-or-DEREK
And get good at it. Really good at it. Thank you. Those those those. You're a combination of elements that I don't usually see together. It's very it's very rare. Am I blushing? You're blushing. It could be the scotch. Yeah. Uh. All right, so the next question that comes to mind for me is whether you have always been a satisficer to hearken 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 once you're good at a game and you win, it's only natural you'd stop playing. That game is to me, the the These journals secure the spirit, the essence of a satisficer. There are people, however, who let's just say they want to be a grandmaster in chess. 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 gazillion 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 the first, which is have you always been a satisficer?
TIM-or-DEREK
Oh well, okay. The subquestions we are reversing back to the.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah, this is this is a whole.
TIM-or-DEREK
Okay. So the.
TIM-or-DEREK
Series for the.
TIM-or-DEREK
Third. And in fact, if you don't mind, I'm going to I think I might end up answering in whatever order they. So the, 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. Yeah, 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.
TIM-or-DEREK
Just because it's not true doesn't mean it isn't valuable, right?
TIM-or-DEREK
It's useful. It's useful to believe that you should.
TIM-or-DEREK
Or I should put it a different way. Just because it can't be proven as true doesn't mean it isn't valuable. I know we're going to get into some semantic rathole here, so continue.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah, well, we let that go. Um, so, um, those people, I think absolutely should. Somebody needs to shake them out of their, um, kick them out of the nest, shake them out of their habits. Um, go to something else. I feel the only celebrity death that upset me was Kurt Cobain. All the others seemed to be like, okay, they've 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, but let's just use that as 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-or-DEREK
Or like you're good enough, go to an ashram for two years. You can always come back. You'll be fine, you know?
TIM-or-DEREK
Right? Yeah. Um, but just imagine the joy of, um, God. Sometimes even a simple manual labor. What is at the end of the movie, The Last Emperor? This guy has been through this big giant arc, and at the very end of the movie, he's just, you know, picking weeds in a garden because he used to be the emperor. But the Chinese Revolution whenever assigned him to just be a gardener now. And he kind of found his peace with it. And, um, we all have different versions of 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-or-DEREK
Impressive is such bullshit. I know. Exactly. See? That's external, right? I mean, what what really drove that home for me is, you know, I'm a enthusiastic student of history, and I read, for instance, uh, I guess it's Genghis Khan, but who really knows? I don't speak whatever Mongolian or whatever the language would have been. Uh, Genghis Khan and the making of the Modern world.
TIM-or-DEREK
Great book. Yeah.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah. Really good. Especially the first half or so is really exceptional. But I realized because they mentioned Alexander and the grey in that book, and I realized Alexander is kind of like Madonna. It's got one name. I don't know that dude's last name. Do you? And, like, I've pulled audiences. Not a single person has ever raised their hand. I'm like, okay, this is ostensibly the greatest if, uh, or 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. Do you ever notice.
TIM-or-DEREK
What he has in common with Winnie the Pooh?
TIM-or-DEREK
No. Hasn't. Hasn't been front of mind? No.
TIM-or-DEREK
His middle name.
TIM-or-DEREK
The. Gotcha. Oh, that was good.
TIM-or-DEREK
Um. All right, so.
TIM-or-DEREK
You want to. You want to hear a terrible joke now that we're drinking scotch?
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah, but you know how fun to tell a terrible joke when we're being serious?
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah, yeah. Thank you for letting me dis rail derail that. All right, you ready? Yeah. I'm ready. Okay, so here we go. What's the one thing you don't want to hear when you're giving Willie Nelson a blowjob? What? I'm not Willie Nelson. Anyway, I'll let everybody sit with that one. Okay. Should we take another break? Yeah. Yeah. No, I think we're doing just fine. I think we've hit escape velocity on the scotch. Okay.
TIM-or-DEREK
Wait. There were some subquestions in that last one.
TIM-or-DEREK
I can rewind, which, by the way, is totally developed skill. That's not something this is after doing a lot of podcasts.
TIM-or-DEREK
Dude, I just noticed from our walking down the street or walking through a forest and talking, you have, 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, how the fuck did you remember that?
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah. Totally trained. Yeah, yeah. Which is wild. Um, so. So I was asking you. Maximizer versus being satisficer. Have I always. Have you ever been a maximizer? Yeah.
TIM-or-DEREK
So just like I think you can't preach minimalism to somebody who hasn't felt the pain of having too much stuff. Yeah, they need to feel the pain of having to look after too many things and having a cluttered house, and they go, oh, I need some minimalism. You can't just preach it to them. So I think it's the same thing with maximizing and satisficing, that I think 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, you know, make the best decision. I mean, God, I write in my journal so much, you know, so many pages on something. And in the end, I'm just 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 going to do this. So yeah, I just internalized it and I did it. And 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 city baby office was out in the far reaches and I needed to get a car. And I had just recently read Paradox of Choice, and I said, I'm going to 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, went this one good enough? I loved that car. You know, was it the best possible choice? No. Who knows? But I mean.
TIM-or-DEREK
Well, there you go. For you, it was. Yeah, right. Minimizing regret. Yeah. Two hours and.
TIM-or-DEREK
Kind of like the. I don't know who the hyper, um, 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-or-DEREK
I'll tell you, I don't think he would mind that. So I believe that it is Josh who actually said that to me, where he was like, I basically focus on like 1 or 2 things. Yeah. And then the rest. Right. Because he's so.
TIM-or-DEREK
Intense about those couple of.
TIM-or-DEREK
Things. Yeah. I mean, you have to. Right. It's a yeah, he's he's another one who walks the walk in a big way. Right. Yeah. So have you met Josh? No. He's a role model for you guys. Would hit it off.
TIM-or-DEREK
He's one of those invisible mentors. Not like, you know, officially. But I loved his book, the Art of learning. And 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 would Josh Waitzkin do in this situation?
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah. I mean, no social doesn't read email.
TIM-or-DEREK
Mhm.
TIM-or-DEREK
I mean, there are so many conventions that he books. It's really inspiring.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah. And so it's I mean that's kind of one of those, you know, nobody cares what you're bad at things. It's like I'm sure there's a bunch of stuff that Josh Waitzkin is not good at. Uh, and he just, you know, doesn't matter.
TIM-or-DEREK
For the rest of us. Good enough.
TIM-or-DEREK
Um, but have I always been like this? No, I think I had to feel the pain.
TIM-or-DEREK
Um. So what what did you use to maximize.
TIM-or-DEREK
Um.
TIM-or-DEREK
At any point?
TIM-or-DEREK
Well, I think ten years ago, I overthought the where to live thing a lot. I was feeling very, um, very free after I sold my company. It was 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 like too much freedom. It's too much. It's a complete blank slate with no restrictions at all. I wasn't even in a relationship. Um, I was just completely unbound. And so I spent far too long in my diary thinking of every possible place on earth I might live and why I could. Or 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 you know, 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 ten 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 is right here. I used to always move around every two years and I've been right here in Wellington.
TIM-or-DEREK
11 years now.
TIM-or-DEREK
Parked up.
TIM-or-DEREK
That's wild.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah, it's good enough.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah. I mean, there's a lot to be said for it. Yeah, I okay, so. I want to say for people listening also that you might think, good lord. Like this is pretty head in the clouds. One percenter stuff in the sense like that doesn't apply to me. That's crazy. But I would just hold on. I would say I would just point out that. God, I got this from a documentary. It was, uh, it wasn't Helvetica, which is a great documentary about type font 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. It's like when they're 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. But like the £350 bodybuilder who, like, 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. Wow. But if you design for the average person, your error rate is going to be really high. Right. 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, right. And so I would just say that we're exploring these things and the experience of this overoptimizing 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 overoptimizing in that way. Uh.
TIM-or-DEREK
And thanks for framing it like that. I 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. Yeah. Um, it's not so much my personal expression as it is me giving back. Yeah. Like, the world's given me a lot. This is what I do to give back. But it's a nice reminder of what you just the way you just framed it. It's kind of like Felix Dennis writing his, uh, how to Get Rich book. It's 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. Yep. But for me, as a small fry, reading it, it was really useful to read what somebody.
TIM-or-DEREK
Had a fun book to. Yeah.
TIM-or-DEREK
To read what somebody in an extreme situation did and how he made his choices or what he would. What he regrets and what he would do with it. You know what I've been meaning to ask you forever. I'm sorry.
TIM-or-DEREK
Wait. Yeah, I can.
TIM-or-DEREK
Hold on to that question. Maybe it's.
TIM-or-DEREK
Too late. I don't give a shit. Fire away! When people. I told Willie Nelson's joke. This is. Oops. We're off menu now.
TIM-or-DEREK
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 and I said, uh, women like sex.
TIM-or-DEREK
Right. I forgot about that because to me.
TIM-or-DEREK
At that moment, that's what I wanted to tell my younger self. Right. I felt like culture didn't. 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 like, not entirely sexless, but mostly. And it wasn't until, like my late 40s that it was like, oh my God, women like sex.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah. Nobody told me this. Oh my God, this changes everything.
TIM-or-DEREK
I, like had more sex in the last three years than in the rest of my life combined. Um, because this 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. Yeah, I don't think that's the question.
TIM-or-DEREK
The question is, what advice would you give me? Right. You know, I'm saying when someone says, what advice would you give your younger self. Right. But 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.
TIM-or-DEREK
What advice would you give someone who wants to be where you are? Yeah, but it's not where you are. Like how to get how do I get where you are?
TIM-or-DEREK
I think that's what people are generally asking, right? Because they don't give a shit what you really want, right? Younger self would do, right? 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. Right? Right. Like the the. Because in my case, having a history of some very extreme depression and near suicide in college and so on, like my advice would be related to self-preservation. Mhm. And recommending perhaps certain tools like meditation, like consistent which I, 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, right. Because if their assumption is let's just say and you and I have seen this in ourselves and our experience and the experience of many others. Like once I have X amount of money, all my problems just disappear, right? Right. Like 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 is just asking that at a Q&A at South by Southwest or something, you don't have the time. You don't have the right 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.
TIM-or-DEREK
It's funny the the nature that these questions come to us and is usually, um, one question asked, one answer expected. But if you think of the physical metaphor, just imagine that you are somewhere on Earth right now. Um, you say you're sitting in a, somewhere in Argentina and a phone call comes in and says, uh, 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 like? 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 it depends. That's not a sound bite.
TIM-or-DEREK
So is the question. You clap your hands. Is the question you wanted to ask? What question? I think people are asking when they ask. Yeah, you answered it. Thank you.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah, because I've always wondered. It's like, how do I 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, it's like what I would tell my younger self. I think it came up again just two weeks ago. I was like.
TIM-or-DEREK
It comes up a good amount.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah, I need a good answer for that.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah. It's uh.
TIM-or-DEREK
Without the snarky saying, I don't understand the question.
TIM-or-DEREK
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. Yeah. You know, uh, to, to use your sort of geographic metaphor. Right. You could just send somebody off in completely the wrong direction. Go east, go east. It doesn't matter where you are. Go east. Two of these call me in the morning. Oh, shit. I'm in Antarctica. Sorry about that. Yeah. I thought you were in France. Yeah. That's, uh.
TIM-or-DEREK
Can you go east from Antarctica? How do they do directions in Antarctica?
TIM-or-DEREK
So. Yeah, I mean, unless you're at the South Pole, you can give you could give those. I suppose it gets a little tricky, but the good news is there's pretty much nobody there. So you're not going to be giving too many directions to people. They're going to be a they're going to be at some type of base of some type. I've only been once to Antarctica. I actually recorded a podcast in, in Antarctica in an outdoor tent with someone, a field biologist and photographer, which was super fun. Uh, you know what I mean? All roads lead to Matt Mullenweg. I owe him thanks yet again for for getting me down there.
TIM-or-DEREK
It was one of my favorite episodes of yours. That that conversation with Matt and Antarctica.
TIM-or-DEREK
Oh, yeah. You know, I actually, I recorded two, I did one with Matt, and I did one with. I want to 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, that's why I was asking. Yeah. Yeah, that was also if I know Matt at all, I know that there's probably some scotch involved with that as well.
TIM-or-DEREK
I like how, um, my son, uh, 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-or-DEREK
Yeah. What does 16 year olds do? How do 16 year olds walk and behave? Do you want to explain the context?
TIM-or-DEREK
We, uh, we took him to see John Wick four.
TIM-or-DEREK
So we went to John Wick four. Turns out that in addition to to biosecurity in New Zealand, the people at the movie theaters are really strict. Yeah.
TIM-or-DEREK
Weirdly, like that was that was un that was off point for New Zealand. New Zealand is a wonderfully casual culture. Yeah. 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 him.
TIM-or-DEREK
Even though he's seen and memorized all the John Wick movies. Uh huh.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah. You've seen all the previous ones. He's seen much worse. He's read the saga comic books. Oh, yeah. Um, highly recommended, by the way. Saga best graphic novel. Anyway, so he's seen it all, but, yeah, the, um. So I went in to try to get the tickets while, uh, my son and Tim were out on the street and he said, can you teach me how to.
TIM-or-DEREK
Act like I'm 16, 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. And I was like, but the body language and the energy is not at all matching a 16 year old. So we got to 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 but the proportions were all wrong. So he looked kind of like E.T. and I'm like, I think you're drawing more attention than you want to draw. But the whole thing was very cute.
TIM-or-DEREK
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-or-DEREK
Yeah, and your answer when I asked you what makes you emotional? Was anything related to parenting? Yeah.
TIM-or-DEREK
If you guys have ever seen or go see the song Papaoutai by the Belgian musician Stromae, it's basically this. 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. And when he and I watched that video together, I always cry.
TIM-or-DEREK
Mhm. Yeah. You're kind of tearing up right now. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. It's serious. Which is, which is new in my experience of Derek Sivers. Like seeing this. Why do you think that is.
TIM-or-DEREK
It's so important. The stakes Ah. Um. Well, yeah. Shit. Um. Well, yeah. New experience. Um. I got to collect myself for a second. It's. The stakes are so high that it's like, if you do this right, it passes on. Wow. Holy shit.
TIM-or-DEREK
We're not in any rush. Zero rush.
TIM-or-DEREK
Huh. It's funny, also collecting my thoughts on how to say this, I don't have to, um, explain it much. Nobody's asked directly. Um, it's like if you do this right, it passes on for many generations. Like a kid that's raised really well can, like, pass that, um, generosity of spirit, you know? Um. Oof! And then somebody that's raised, like, ignored it might pass on that, um, like, scarcity of spirit, you know?
TIM-or-DEREK
Um.
TIM-or-DEREK
Like I said, I'm not doing this for the media. This is not like trying to be a, uh, a captured moment. Holy shit. Um, yeah. There we go.
TIM-or-DEREK
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. Yeah.
TIM-or-DEREK
It's kind of the only thing I do. You know, it's funny, um, uh, my ex, after we broke up, said, like, wow, I've known you for so many years. Like, I've never seen you get mad. I've never seen you cry. Like I've never even really seen you get upset. I'm like, yeah, I just don't really like I'm a happy dude. And, um, yeah, like, this is the only thing, but it's like, it's not a, it's not a obviously like, not an upset cry. It's like, Holy shit, this is such a big deal.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah, Derek, we've covered a lot. I'm just saying, I don't I don't feel like we need to cover anything more. Nope. Is there anything you'd like to to say? Any request to the audience? Anything at all before we wrap up?
TIM-or-DEREK
Um, yeah. You know, it's you're going to say this is crazy, but still, to this day, like, my currency, the thing that matters to me more than money, not the thing. Obviously, many things do. Um, I still really like meeting people. Like, I just recently went to India. I went to Chennai in Bangalore for ten days, and I sat down and talked with 50 people in ten days. I had 1 to 2 hour long conversations with 50 people. And a lot of these 50 people, um, are people that I'd been emailing with for years. Like they just contacted me out of the blue because they read my article, or they read my book, or they heard a podcast and 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. It's like I went to Helsinki, Finland for the first time and what do I do? I email, say like who do I know in Helsinki? And there were a number of people that had emailed over the years to introduce themselves.
TIM-or-DEREK
And soon I'm like sitting naked in a sauna with some dude that emailed me because, you know, he read my book. It's on. This matters to me more than money. So it's like the reason I do a podcast like this, it's like I'm clearly not selling anything. I'm not, you know, 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? Or, you know, what should I be doing with my life? But, um, when people 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 in India, or have friends in Nigeria or friends in, uh, whatever, Finland. Um, that's my favorite thing, is hearing from strangers. So honestly, like my website, which I made myself as a static HTML website. Speaking of our earlier tangent, um, if you go to Sive.rs, um, yeah, just send an email and introduce yourself. That's my, uh, surprising.
TIM-or-DEREK
To other domains. Point to that.
TIM-or-DEREK
It used to be fas.org.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah. Um, you still have that, I assume?
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah, I'm keeping that forever, but that's my minimalism thing. At one point I looked at that. I'm like, dawg, where is this, uh, Serbia replica of the Republic of Serbia?
TIM-or-DEREK
Okay.
TIM-or-DEREK
Um, but one of my favorite tech site is tech sites is lobsters. L o b s t e r s okay. I was like, hey, lobsters. Wait.
TIM-or-DEREK
What the hell is lobsters about?
TIM-or-DEREK
Oh, it's just it's just a random domain name they got, but it's like it's it's 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 their way. Anyway, um, but, um. Yeah, I looked@the.org and I used to have servers.org, and I looked at that. I was like, I'm not really an organization, am I? Those four characters aren't really necessary, are they? I was like, I think I could reduce those. And so yeah, Sive.rs is my website.
TIM-or-DEREK
With a dot between the E and the R.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah. Um.
TIM-or-DEREK
Perfect.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah.
TIM-or-DEREK
Thank you. Derek. So nice. It's so good to hang out and have some scotch and and.
TIM-or-DEREK
Make me cry. Holy shit. Yeah, that was my first time in, like, 3 or 4 years.
TIM-or-DEREK
I've never seen you cry. Yeah. Wow.
TIM-or-DEREK
Exclusive to the Tim Ferriss podcast, folks.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah. I'm just trying to.
TIM-or-DEREK
Help out my friend, you know, get him some more views.
TIM-or-DEREK
Yeah, just more views.
TIM-or-DEREK
More about the views. It's so good to hang, man. You too.
TIM-or-DEREK
Thanks.