Clearer Thinking
host: Spencer Greenberg
subjectivity of truth, beliefs vs perspectives, objective vs conditional truth, personal accountability, perspective-taking in conflicts
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Transcript:
Spencer
Derek, welcome.
Derek Sivers
Thanks, Spencer. I’m excited to talk to you.
Spencer
Yeah. Me too. And I want to jump right into something that I suspect we’re going to disagree on a lot. Which is this question. Is it true that almost nothing is objectively true?
Derek Sivers
Ah, so I’ve got this on my mind a lot lately. It’s the subject of the book that I’m writing right now. So I think we can all just choose where to draw that line between what you consider true and what you consider not true. But for me, I find it useful to draw the line as far to one side as possible, so that basically only if it’s completely, absolutely, necessarily, objectively, empirically true, always true, and not from any particular perspective. But like even an alien observing us through a telescope from outer space would say that is true. Then I consider it true. Otherwise, I consider it not true. Which doesn’t mean it’s false. It just means, it doesn’t fit that criteria. It’s not necessarily always objectively, empirically true. So the reason I think it’s important to draw that line as far as you can to one side is because once you just say something is true, it closes it’s like no further questions. As soon as you say something is not necessarily true, it opens it to further questioning. You can reconsider it. You can consider a different perspective. So I just find it useful to consider almost everything to be not necessarily true.
Spencer
Can we divide things into false statements, true statements, and then conditionally true, which is stuff in the middle where it will sometimes be true, but it depends on the context?
Derek Sivers
Oh, was that a question?
Spencer
Well, I’m wondering, does that capture this idea of not necessarily true, that middle ground of like, well, it’s true conditionally. It’s true in certain circumstances. It’s true with the right assumptions.
Derek Sivers
Right. You know what’s funny when I’m talking about this with friends? I say, “Look, we live in a social world where people say things like, ’This city’s dangerous’ Or, ’You need to call your mother.’ And these things are all not necessarily true.” Right. So I say we live in this social order, unless you’re a scientist. And then, of course, you’re sitting there dealing with more absolutes, like, “Okay, this is how many times this thing happened.” Or, “Let’s look at something that’s in the news. Maybe not this year, but two years ago, it was like this is how many votes this candidate got in the election.” That’s just something that has a right and a wrong answer. That’s what I mean. Like an alien from outer space could observe this and say, “Yes, that’s how many votes that person got.” This is not a subjective thing that’s up for debate. But even science right, any good scientist will say that you’re aiming to be less and less wrong. That even Newton’s laws weren’t thoroughly true to the end, but then they were useful enough to a certain point. But then we just keep making models that get closer and closer to being true, or to be less and less wrong. Am I getting that right?
Spencer
Yeah, that makes sense to me. But I’m wondering, what do you see as the problem with people believing in objective truth? Do you see people falling to certain pitfalls?
Derek Sivers
Oh, no. I mean, if somebody wants to. We all have objective truths, but I’m suggesting people push the line further to question more things in our social world. Things like the examples I said already. Whether it’s like, “I’m no good at that.” Or, “You need to fight to defend your country.” Or, “You can’t get famous from Des Moines, Iowa.” You know, things like this that people say as facts but are really just one perspective. But to them it feels like a cold, hard fact. This is just true, “You need to respect your elders.” That’s just a fact. There’s no questioning that. But I like to turn all of these into questions. Or, like, don’t be so sure about that. Let’s question that. Let’s look at that and reconsider that. There might be a point of view where you should not respect your elders. There might be a point of view where you should not obey the law. And we need to stay open minded to consider those from another perspective. That’s what I’m on about.
Spencer
This makes me think about how we’re our story based machines. We humans. And the way I’m interpreting what you’re saying is that we have these stories and we treat these stories as though they’re facts, but they’re actually just stories.
Derek Sivers
Yeah. And I started thinking about why people do that. And then I realized, when people communicate socially, they don’t communicate facts, they’re communicating perspectives. See, because facts are as boring as dirt. If you were to only speak in the facts. You would just be exchanging data information. Computers do that to each other. Humans exchange perspectives because the reason we communicate is more often to be for social bonding. And so nobody bonds over facts. You bond over shared perspectives, or people are wanting validation for their feelings. Maybe they feel a certain way. Like let’s say, “My ex was evil, my ex was an asshole.” And they want somebody to go, “Yeah, he really was. You’re so right. You were right and he was wrong.” You know, they want validation for their feelings. This is why we connect, why we communicate also, what do you call it? Social signaling. People sharing their point of view on something to help identify their tribe and bond with their tribe. That’s why people are communicating. It’s never the fact. It’s all about sharing your perspective on it. But these perspectives are shared as if they are truth and usually go unquestioned. And that’s why I find this subject fascinating lately, is to question these things and realize that’s not truth, that’s just one perspective.
Spencer
If we imagine tribal people at 20,000 years ago sitting around a campfire and exchanging stories, some of those stories might be about how to survive, right? Like, “Oh, I went down to the river today and I saw these berries, and I thought they were this kind of berry. And I ate some. And then I got sick.” And that seems like a very fact based story. Although it’s sort of rooted in the facts of reality. And then there might be other stories where, “Oh, you know, I saw so-and-so and they were interacting with this person, and I think they were flirting. And what does this mean in terms of the other partner and so on.” And that story is more about kind of the social reality, right. It’s a story about social reality. And then you might imagine there’s a kind of a third kind of story that’s really about identity, which is like, “Oh, you know, I saw one of the other the people from the other tribe, and they’re so bad. And I’m such a good tribe member over here.” And so I guess what I’m getting at is it seems like there are different, even though we’re kind of story based machines, there are different kinds of stories that are sort of trying to impart different sorts of information.
Derek Sivers
Yes. Totally agree. And I love the way that you broke it down like that. By the way, I’m happy for you to tell me I’m full of shit and wrong on this. Sometimes we write a book because we’ve got something we want to tell the world. But this book, for me, is a subject I just wanted to dive deeper into and learn more about. So I actually started writing this book, well, I started “writing” this book a year ago. Which really meant for the past year I’ve been reading a ton about this subject of subjectivity. Also, I really knew nothing about religion. So I’ve been spending the last year learning about the religions of the world and their beliefs. Trying to understand why people believe what they believe, looking at the world a bit like an anthropologist. By the way, the thing you just said about around the campfire and different kinds of stories, I’ve been thinking about a fictitious translation machine. So that when somebody says something like, “Oh, don’t do that, it’s a disaster, you’re going to fail. I highly recommend you don’t do that.” What they’re really saying is, “I tried that once, and I was disappointed.” Like, that’s the factual story. If they’re speaking just in facts it’s, “I tried that once and I was disappointed.” But instead the version of the story that people usually tell is predicting the future. They say, “Oh, that won’t work for you. You will fail if you do that. Doing that is the worst.” Do you know what I mean? They turn what could be a factual story, they spin it into a certainty about the future.
Spencer
They were the projecting it into a generalization, right. Going from facts to generalization. It’s the generalization that they’ve constructed that they’re sharing.
Derek Sivers
Right. Again, because it’s more the human social bonding instead of just communicating the facts. I often also think about the job of a police clerk at a police station late at night when somebody comes in and says, “Hey, what this guy did to me, you know? So he walks up and he’s just all like, ’Yo, I’m in.’ And I’m looking at him and I’m like, man, this guy looks like trouble.” And you can imagine the police clerk sitting there going, “So a man walked into the store. That’s what you’re saying?” You know, it’s like once we take away all this interpretation, the actual observable fact is the man walked into the store where you were. Okay. Next fact, please. And can you imagine doing this on a social, human level with all the things people say about this is bad. And let me tell you what’s going to happen. And this country’s going to hell. And you know, all these things that sound like certainty about the future. Or now it gets interesting when you start thinking about the past, too. We tell stories about the past, but we don’t just list events. We list events with our interpretation of what those events meant or how we saw those events. But there’s always more to the story. You know, but people filter their stories about the past. So it’s like the past isn’t true meaning necessarily objectively, absolutely true. The future isn’t true. Perspectives aren’t true. I just find this very useful to remind ourselves how little of what people say is true, and how little of what we think is true.
Spencer
It seems like part of what’s going on is compression, right? Like, if you could list a bunch of facts about what happened about, let’s say, some event in history, World War two, you could just list a ton of facts, thousands of facts, millions of facts. But that actually wouldn’t help someone understand it that well. You need to do some compression to say, “Well, what does it all mean?” Like how do the facts fit together into something that is a causal story of like A happened and then B happened. And then this led to C, which was the thing we actually care about. And in doing so, you have to pick the facts to focus on of the millions of facts that you could choose from and the particular relationships to highlight and those not to highlight. And that seems in part necessary. It seems that there is no way to just give someone everything. There is always going to be a selection process.
Derek Sivers
And so that’s a beautiful way of putting it. Love that. Thank you.
Spencer
Thanks. Another thing this makes me think about is the way that the same exact story can have different connotations. So you gave this example of a person going into the police clerk and kind of describing someone walking into the into the bar. But, you know, take the word slut, right? What dies the word slut actually mean? It’s something like, I think that this person is interested in having sex with a bunch of people, and it’s bad, and I judge them for it, right? Whereas someone else could describe it in a very neutral terms, being like, “Oh, this person has had 20 partners or 50 partners.” Or whatever to them is, you know, a lot of partners or someone could describe it in a positive way. They could say, “This person is really sex positive or this person is really amazing at sex.” It’s like a lot of times we take a fact and then we just add some emotion on top of it. And our words sometimes represent that emotion.
Derek Sivers
I love that, you’re right. It can be built into a term itself, even if it sounds like we’re not using adjectives. Some words have the judgment built into it. That’s a great point.
Spencer
This is part of why I think one has to be really careful in communicating with loaded words, right? Because you just are going to get all of these bundles of associations. And even if you say, “Well, I’m going to use the word slut here, but I don’t mean it in a bad way.” It’s like, no, you’ve already failed, you know.
Derek Sivers
Right. Just a few months ago, funny timing. I went to Israel for a week, just late September, just a week or two before the Gaza stuff happened in October. And before going there, I read a book that was the history of Israel. And then read a different book that was the history of Palestine and the history of Israel book was wonderful. It was fascinating, but so deeply flawed because it was an almost perfect book. Except she so often used loaded adjectives to talk about the brave, courageous founders and the cowardly, timid terrorists that attacked them. And I just thought, “Oh. You could have been so much more believable if you just edited out a few of those adjectives.” And then what’s funny though, is the history of Palestine book was-- see, I don’t want to use the word autistic, which might have some kind of judgment to it. But it was like the stereotype of the guy that will just list out 1000 facts with no social awareness that everybody has left the room. So the Palestine book was kind of talking about Israel in these terms about like delegitimizing it, saying it’s not even a real place. In fact, here’s a a list of 450 people that changed their names from their birth name to sound more Jewish when they founded Israel in 1948. And here are their names. And like the next 35 pages, were lists of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of names, what it used to be, what they changed it to, and what their role was in the founding of Israel.
Spencer
It reminds me of the Bible a little bit, and then so-and-so, and the so-so.
Derek Sivers
Yeah. And I thought, “Oh man, see this book is flawed too.” I love what you said earlier about how we need to compress to tell a story otherwise it’s just a thousand facts. So the history of Palestine book listed thousands of facts where I wanted a story, and the history of Israel book gave me more of a biased story than I wanted.
Spencer
And neither were what you were hoping for? You wanted the unbiased story.
Derek Sivers
Well, the Israel book was almost perfect. Sorry, I forget the title right now. Oh, actually, no. Even in the title, it’s called “Israel the World’s Most Misunderstood Country”. That’s the title of the book. So I guess, there was a hint right there in the title that there was going to be some editorializing here, but it was an almost perfect book. I would have just edited out maybe 30 or 40 adjectives in the book, and it would have been perfect.
Spencer
Unfortunately, I think it’s one of those topics where it’s almost impossible to get someone who’s really a third party, who’s neutral, who’s just analyzing it from that perspective. And I think maybe in practice, one of the best things you can do is dig into each perspective, try to deeply embody it temporarily and until you can speak like an ordinary Palestinian citizen. You can speak like a member of Hamas. You can speak like a conservative, you know, Jewish person living in Israel. You can speak like a liberal Jewish person living in Israel and so on. And like, once you have all those perspectives, it doesn’t mean they’re all equally valid. It doesn’t mean they’re all equally correct, but like to actually get the closest you can to being unbiased. You should be able to represent every view and then step back and say, “Okay, now that I can represent every view, what is actually the triangulation of what’s really going on here?” Almost impossible to do.
Derek Sivers
Yeah. I mean, you might not even need to do the triangulation. I’ve been thinking about--. Wait by the way, I just want to pause for a second to say when I was just there in Tel Aviv in September, it was my second visit to Tel Aviv. My previous one was 19 years ago, and I loved it so much that originally I had intended on, I think, five days in Tel Aviv. And then I was going to go into the West Bank for two days, but actually I enjoyed it so much. I was like, “You know what? I’m coming back next year and I’m going to spend a whole week in the West Bank. I’ve spent almost a week in Tel Aviv. Next year I’m going to spend two days in Jerusalem, then like 5 to 7 days in Palestine.” And then now with the Gaza stuff, it looks like that might not be so possible, but what you just described is kind of what I was hoping to do. Like, “Okay, I’ve sat and met with 34 Israelis here in Tel Aviv. Now I want to go to West Bank and sit down and meet with at least 34 Palestinians that grew up here. That can tell me their perspective.” Like, I want to, like you say, embody. I want to understand both. I want to, like, really deeply have friends in both and understand the Palestine point of view on this whole thing and have a personal connection on both sides. That’s what I was hoping to do by coming back for longer next year. But we got to remember that whenever you expect to do something in the future, you might not be able to. So kind of in hindsight, wish I had done it then. It’s one of my minor regrets anyway. But changing the subject slightly.
Spencer
I just wanted to ask you about that real quick, if you don’t mind.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, sure. Let’s do it.
Spencer
I wonder, though, if taking that approach would actually piss off both sides. What do you think about that?
Derek Sivers
Oh that’s fine. I mean, yeah, it’s such a heated subject that, yes, some people are bound to get angry. Okay, I’ll tell you a real concrete thing that happened on my way into Tel Aviv. I spent a day in Dubai first, and specifically spent the day with an Emirati man from United Arab Emirates, whose name is Mohammed Kazim. Old school Arab guy family goes back to Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia peninsula over a thousand years. But he’s a very open minded guy that’s really into understanding traditional Arab culture. And so he recently had just gone to Palestine and was like, because I was asking him about it, like, who should I meet? Who did you know? And so he said, “Oh, yeah. I was just there a couple of weeks ago. But now, see, Israel and United Arab Emirates just recently made an agreement so that basically, United Arab Emirates is one of the few countries in the region that acknowledges Israel’s existence or legitimacy.” So Mohammed was in Palestine eating at a restaurant, and when the restaurant owner found out that he was from United Arab Emirates, he said, like, “I’m sorry, my friend, you must leave. Get out. I don’t want you in my restaurant. Because you are friends, your country is legitimizing Israel. So if you’re friends with them, you can’t be friends with me. Get out of my restaurant.” So, yeah, there’s. And even though Mohammed Kazim is just the nicest damn guy. He put down his plate and he said, “I am sorry you’re upset.” He said, “I consider you my brother and I understand you’re upset. I will leave your restaurant in full respect.” And it was amazing him telling me that this had happened. And his perspective on it, because to him he has Israeli friends and he has Palestinian friends. And some people are going to be upset. So that’s okay. You know, it’s good to understand why people are upset and not avoid it.
Spencer
Imagine if someone murdered your family, a family member of yours, and then later you found out someone was friends with them. The murderer. I mean, it would be very natural. It’d be, “How could you associate with that person?” Right. And I think we can all understand that on an individual level, but I think that something like the Israel and Palestinian conflict, it triggers that. But at a group level, right. It’s like, “Yeah, that group murdered the people I love, or the loved ones of the people I love and how could you associate with them?” And I think at the individual level, right. If someone’s hanging out with a murderer or murdered one of your family members, I fully support it. At the group level, it becomes trickier because then suddenly now everyone in the group is to blame, which is unfortunately, I think, a vast oversimplification that can cause tremendous harm.
Derek Sivers
Right. Yeah. It’s also values, you know, if you think like you did down to the personal individual level. There are some people that believe, you should not even associate with that person that wronged someone I know. Where somebody else would say like, “Oh, my belief is, there’s more sides to every story. If you want to be friends with him, go ahead. I can’t be friends with him. But that’s just me. Do what you want. I won’t hold it against you if you’re friends with him.” Years ago when I was in the music business. I was running a company called CD Baby. That was pretty successful, and I was the founder. And so everybody in the music business treated me really nicely. I would walk into a room and the VIP would say, “Derek Sivers, hey man, how are you doing?” Be really nice to me. And a publicist I once met said something about this guy. Let’s just say this VIP. And she said, “Oh, he’s such a jerk. He’s such an asshole. He’s so rude to me.” I said, Wait, what are we talking about the same guy?”
Derek Sivers
She goes, “Yeah, he’s nice to you because you’re Derek Sivers.” She said, “I’m not you. So he treats me like shit.” I said, “No way. Hold on. I want to see this in action.” Because we were right there at the party with this guy. So instead I walked up with my publicist friend and was just like, “Hey, Tracy, have you met Thomas?” Making up the names here. And he’s like, “Oh, Tracy, nice to meet you.” And later when when we walked away, she goes, “Yeah, he was rude as fuck to me just like ten minutes earlier. But now I walk up with you and he’s nice.” It’s funny that everybody just on a very micro personal level, has their different value systems of like, we should be nice to everybody versus I’m only going to be nice to people that can help me, or I’m only going to be nice to somebody that has never wronged anybody I know or you know, like internal value systems of what we believe is right and wrong and what you should do. And that usually comes from observing our parents or peers around us.
Spencer
Did you find that having people kiss up to you in that industry started to distort your sense of reality?
Derek Sivers
No, I saw it--. What do you call it? Took it with a grain of salt. I just saw it all as a game anyway. Often I didn’t know that it was happening at first. I really thought that the guy I was just talking about in that story, I really just thought he was just a really nice guy. But nope, he was only nice to me. But on the other hand, then who’s to say almost everybody in our life that we could think of as nice is probably mean to somebody else, but we think of them as a nice person. We just don’t know the whole story. So then you just kind of zoom out into that big level of just like, “Well, then who’s to say anything? I don’t know if somebody’s nice to me, then they’re nice. If they’re nice to anybody, then they’re nice. Where do you where do you draw the line? How do you define it. Oh well.” Which is actually Spencer, the point I was pivoting to, which is when everything becomes so ambiguous like this, there’s a tendency to say, “Well, then how do we lock it all down and decide?” Like you just said, the triangulate, like, “You spend a week in Israel, you spend a week in Palestine. You embody a bunch of different points of view. Then afterwards you can triangulate and try to figure out what really happened.” You know, there’s almost this tendency to want to lock it down and decide. But then that’s what I just recently started challenging. Like maybe we don’t. Maybe we just use all of this understanding of different points of view to turn it into a big giant shrug and just say, “Well, see? Just goes to show there’s there’s no one right answer.”
Spencer
The problem is that sometimes you have to make a decision, right? And then what do you do?
Derek Sivers
Ah, right. Well then. Yeah, if you actually have to act on something. Then maybe a information has to guide your actions.
Spencer
But a shrug is a shrug is a pretty appealing thing to do when you don’t have to act. You’re just like, “Wow, that’s complicated. I don’t want to be involved. I don’t want to make a decision.” But sometimes you have to make a decision. You know, like imagine you’re Biden. You have to decide what do you do? Are you going to give more money to Israel, or are you going to give money to Palestinians? Are you going to put pressure on Israel, you know?
Derek Sivers
Right. But most of us are not Biden, surprisingly. And but yet so many people feel a need to take a side. Whereas I think it would be healthier whether in these silly kind of social media, changing your social media icon to be blue and yellow, to show that you stand with Ukraine or to change it to something, something to show that you’re against this and for this. And everybody wants to pick a side. Again, back to the first thing we started talking about the reason people communicate for social bonding, for validation. I think it would be healthier if more people just shrugged and said, “You know, that’s it’s a complex subject. There are many different points of view on that. Who am I to to pick a side?” And luckily, we’re not Biden. We don’t need to act.
Spencer
I mean, I totally agree that people seem to feel pressure to pick a side for social reasons a lot of times. And there can be something quite unhealthy about that. If you’re just picking a side, trying to signal something, or to try to avoid criticism from the people around you who are going to judge you. Obviously, it makes sense to want to blend in and not get criticized and to want people to like you. That’s all very reasonable. It just sad that, if you’re professing to have a viewpoint that you don’t really have, then it seems like there’s something problematic about that.
Derek Sivers
Yeah. Does butter go bad?
Spencer
I think so. Why do you ask?
Derek Sivers
Because you know here recording. I just had a little sip of apple juice that I poured before we hit record.
Spencer
And you put butter in your apple juice?
Derek Sivers
No, no, no, it tastes a little off. And there are only two things in my fridge right now apple juice and butter. And so now I’m starting to wonder. And I just thought, how long does butter last in the fridge. Like, it has its own little compartment there, but if you own one of those big blocks of butter and you don’t use butter very often, how long would that last? Sorry, that was not an intentional changing of the subject. It was just a curiosity. And you’re a curious guy too, so thought it might just be fun to say something random.
Spencer
On the point of triangulation. I actually think it’s very healthy. Well, let’s go back to the butter topic, if you like.
Derek Sivers
No, we don’t to.
Spencer
At the moment on topic of triangulation. I find it very healthy to try to have an opinion, but be very flexible in that opinion, knowing that you don’t know that much and being ready to adjust it quickly as you get new evidence. So in other words, if you don’t have an opinion at all on something, there’s a certain sort of mental laziness to that where you’re like, not even trying. You’re not even trying to sort of take all the facts and put them together. If you have an opinion but you stick to it really strongly, then you’re kind of being unjustified because like, well, you don’t really know very much, right? Why are you sticking to your guns on something you don’t really know much about? And so to me, often that like what I feel is the healthiest middle ground for myself anyway, is to form an opinion, but know that I don’t know that much and be very quick to sort of update it as I get new information.
Derek Sivers
I like that. I guess it comes from not needing to tie your identity so strongly to a point. If your identity is more like, “I’m Spencer, I’m curious. I’m smart. I like evidence.” Then that can be your identity. Instead of I stand for Palestine or I’m against whatever, Russia. And picking a side in just the topic du jour. The problem is, I guess if people feel that their identity is tied to picking a side, and now that they’ve spoken, they’re not going to hear any evidence against what they’ve tied their identity to because that threatens their identity. Whereas, yeah, if you keep your identity as tied to only a “I’m curious, I’m analytical, I’m open minded.” That’s a healthier. Yeah. I like your description of that.
Spencer
The danger of tying your identity too much to any of these particular answers to questions is that sometimes you’re going to be horribly wrong, and then you’re doubling down on the on something really bad.
Derek Sivers
Yeah. One of my best friends is Jewish in New York City. And she said she was crying last time we talked just a few days ago, she said, “I’ve actually lost some dear friends in the past month. Lost them socially because they’re minorities in America, they feel aligned with, like the Black Lives Matter movement. And so when this thing in Gaza and Israel happens, they feel emotionally attached to side with the oppressed minority. And so then they kind of take the Gaza Palestine side and therefore need to proclaim themselves to be anti-Israel.” And so she said, Suddenly so friends I’ve had for like 20 years are suddenly mad at me and saying they can’t be friends with me anymore because they’re mad at Israel. And I’m not anti-Israel, so they can’t be friends with me anymore. This sucks, man. Like I’m losing friends. Like some of my best friends aren’t talking to me anymore. Because of what’s happening in Gaza and Israel, even though, you know, I’ve been to Israel for a few days in my life, like, I’m not Israeli, I’m Jewish.” But, you know, this doesn’t feel fair, that people are just picking an emotional side and and alienating friends because of it.
Spencer
Yeah, I find that heartbreaking. I find it especially heartbreaking when people are good on both sides of an issue. And they’re hurting each other. You know, it’s like both sides are trying to do something good and right. And, you know, and the outcome is people are crushed emotionally, but maybe also literally.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, yeah.
Spencer
Yeah. You know, I think this issue in particular has been so difficult to navigate because there’s the perspective of Israelis, ordinary citizens who feel like they’ve been under attack for much of their lives. You know, they feel their relatives were attacked in the Holocaust, and they’ve grown up feeling like others were going to attack them. They have felt literally attacked in their own city with bombings and things like this. So you’ve got that perspective. Then you have the perspective of ordinary Palestinians who’ve felt like they’ve been second class citizens. They’ve felt like they’ve been oppressed, you know, for as long as they can remember. A lot of them were literally children when Hamas was elected. So you kind of got that perspective. And both of those sides, like, I can just empathize deeply with. And it’s like a terrible position to be in both of those situations. Then you have Hamas, who from my point of view, Hamas is a group with very fundamentalist ideology. It’s an ideology that is completely, completely antithetical to my values. And so I feel pretty good saying like, yeah, I really don’t believe in what Hamas believes in fundamentally, but that’s very, very different than saying that I’m opposed to sort of what the ordinary Palestinian thinks or wants, which I think is very different than Hamas.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, for what it’s worth, the flawed history of Israel book. I just remember the author’s name, Noa Tishby. It’s actually a very, very, very good book. If you can just roll your eyes at the editorializing a bit and just see through that, it’s otherwise pretty wonderful. And she straight up in the opening of the book says, “I just want to make one thing clear. I am a Zionist, I am pro-Israel, I’m also pro-Palestine. I’m just anti Hamas.” She said, “I want to free Gaza from Hamas. I want to free the Palestinians from Hamas. I love my Palestinian friends. I want Palestine to exist. I want them to have equal footing.” And that was an interesting take on this. But hey, I want to actually just go back to something you said. 10-15 mins ago.
Spencer
Butter, right? No, I’m just kidding.
Derek Sivers
Let’s get back to the butter issue. Sorry for that non-sequitur. You were right, I think to say it’s intellectually lazy to just shrug and go, “Oh, I don’t know. Who am I to know. I think I am often intellectually lazy by that definition. See, lazy is like one of those words like slut. You know, it’s--.
Spencer
Totally it’s casting a negative judgment on the behavior. Yeah.
Derek Sivers
Oh, by the way, so is smug. Now see, that’s a related aside. The word smug, I think, means being proud that your actions are aligned with your values, that you’ve made yourself proud. It’s feeling good about yourself.
Spencer
We put the negative judgment around it, right. The extra condition.
Derek Sivers
So I think smug--. Actually, I should talk about this. And I’m still in writing the book right now. Words like slut, lazy, smug can actually be neutral words. If you just ignore the judgment. Anyway. So lazy. I’ve got a an 11 year old boy that is a huge part of my life. I spend at least 30, sometimes 40 or 50 hours a week. Just one on one, just me and him. No distractions. All other things off. Just me and him, doing things together for at least 30 hours a week. And I work on my writing let’s say at least 40 hours a week. And I read a lot. So between those two things, I don’t have a lot of time for other things. Like I don’t play tennis. I’m not learning to speak Italian. You know, the list of what I’m not doing is infinite, because I really just focus all my time on just a few core things. So when something comes up, let’s skip Israel for a bit, but let’s even just say whether it’s Ukraine or, I don’t know, American politics or something, and somebody expects me to have an opinion, I just go like, “I don’t know nothing about it.” Like they’re like, “What, are you lazy? What are you intellectually lazy? Why do you have no opinion?” It’s like, because I don’t have infinite time and I’m not going to be an intellectual slut.
Spencer
That’s much better.
Derek Sivers
There you go. But it’s funny that lazy can be smart. I’m a computer programmer. And in programming, often the term lazy is used in a positive sense to say, “He’s a very lazy programmer, so he finds the easy way to do things.” Which can be a positive, right. So I guess it could be the same intellectually to say he doesn’t think about things he doesn’t have to think about, which sometimes we celebrate in little quirky ways. Like, you know, Einstein just had ten of the same suit. He didn’t want to put any brainpower towards deciding what to wear that day. Who knows if that’s true or not? But people say, “Look at that. You know, there’s somebody who’s so focused on his work that he’s decided that certain things are not worth thinking about. Let me think about that positively.” But that’s how I think about most of the current events in the news.
Spencer
And that’s a completely fair point. And I actually think it’s very wise to avoid thinking about things that are not in line with what you’re trying to do in your life, right. It’s just that if you spent ten hours learning about something and you still have no opinion, I would say, “Well, maybe you should have an opinion, but maybe you should know you’ve only spent ten hours, not 100 hours or 1000 hours. And so be ready to update quickly.”
Derek Sivers
Yeah I like that. Guess most of the things that people are all up in arms about in the news, I’ve hardly spent ten minutes on. I think the Israel thing was just funny because I was just there, you know, just talking with people for a whole week. I didn’t do the usual tourist thing. I didn’t go around and sample the sights. Instead, I just met with people. I wasn’t there visiting Israel. I was there visiting Israelis. I just sat down with 34 people, one on one, like six people a day, all day long for 6 or 7 days.
Spencer
And what was their intro to you? Did you did someone just say, “Oh, meet my friend?”
Derek Sivers
No. It’s actually just people who know me from my books who’ve emailed me over the years. That’s actually why I chose to go there. There were so many people in Tel Aviv that had emailed me over the years, I actually would have rather gone to Jerusalem for sightseeing sake. I think Jerusalem is way more interesting. I find Tel Aviv kind of boring, but Tel Aviv is where all the people were and I was there to see the people. So yeah, I just got a hotel in Jaffa, in a central location in near the best hummus in town, Abu Hassan, where I went every morning for breakfast and then just sat and talked with people all day long, every day for a week, and then went off to a conference in Cyprus. That’s the reason I was in the region. But yeah. Anyway, so I feel more connected to this issue in the news in a way that usually everything else that just shows up in the news that everybody gets all up in arms about. I usually have no opinion, but this one I feel a little more connected to.
Spencer
Now that makes perfect sense. You know, another thing I want to ask you about is this idea of believing whatever works for you, which is kind of thematically connected to this. Almost nothing is objectively true, but it is a bit of a different nuance. So do you think people should just believe whatever works for them?
Derek Sivers
Okay, here’s the distinction again. I think I might have put some words out into the world prematurely as I was forming my thoughts on this. But it goes like this. In fact, you’re the first person I’m going to ever tell this to. Have you seen the little videos of AI characters learning to walk?
Spencer
Yes.
Derek Sivers
Okay, great. So I love that the researcher isn’t teaching the character how to walk. They just create a little stick figure with arms and legs and just make it exist. And they say, “Okay, your goal is to get over there, go try a million things until it works.” And what’s funny is when you watch these little creatures trying to walk. You could just sit there and usually see what the problem is. One of them is face down and keeps kind of trying to walk into the ground. Another one is spinning in circles. Another one keeps leaping up so high that it doesn’t get anywhere. And for each one of these, you think, “Okay, the one that keeps going down in the ground, if I could just put a little helium balloon on his head, just lift him up. Then he’d start to see. The one that keeps spinning in circles. If you were to give it some guide rails, like the guard rails, that would help. And then it would eventually learn how to go straight. And think of this metaphor with people in the world that are just trying to function. If we use walking to the finish line for an AI character as a metaphor for people just trying to function and do what they want to do and go where they want to go in life. From the outside you can often see. That somebody’s got some kind of mistake in their methodology that’s impeding their progress from where they want to go.
Derek Sivers
And for those people, you want to give them a little helium balloon on their head or some guardrails so they don’t keep spinning in circles. And to me, those things mentally are beliefs that if you have a tendency to just stay home let’s say, and not meet any people. But something you want to do in life requires meeting more people. Well, then you’re going to have to do something in your belief system that’s going to make you go out and meet more people. You have to adjust your beliefs somewhat intentionally. Like I need to believe that it’s bad to stay inside, or it’s bad to meet more people, or need to believe that it’s good to meet at least three people a week. Or I need to believe that it’s good to talk to strangers and learn about them. You need to adopt these beliefs. So whether that’s true or not, whether it’s good to meet three strangers a week, or whether it’s bad to stay inside and meet nobody. Of course, that’s not necessarily objectively absolutely true or not. You’re choosing to adopt a belief because it works for you. For now, it’s the belief that you need to correct your behavior or guide your behavior in the direction you want to go.
Spencer
I think I see what you’re saying. For a given situation you’re in and a given set of traits you have and habits and so on, there could be beliefs that are not true, but that help move you in the direction of something that’s better for you or help you get your goals more reliably. I guess what I would say there is that for every belief that might be inaccurate, that can move you towards your goals, there probably is another one that’s more accurate to the way the world really is. They can also get you there and have like a pretty strong bias towards trying to find the accurate, the truer beliefs that get you towards your goal, because I think there are a lot of advantages to those over just sort of any belief that moves you in the direction of your goal.
Derek Sivers
Okay. Good one.
Spencer
Maybe the number one thing is that beliefs that are truer and I say truer here. Not true. Because, you know, for the issues we were talking about before, it’s not like most beliefs of this kind are going to be 100% true all the time, no matter what. It’s more that a truer belief tends to be more likely to be true and more contexts more aligned with reality. The way, you know, Newtonian mechanics is quite aligned with reality. It’s much more aligned with reality than, let’s say, you know, theories of phlogiston. Right? But it’s not all the way to 100% truth. We know continuum mechanics is not true, right. But the advantage that truer beliefs have over less true beliefs is that they actually are also moving you in the direction of reality, and therefore they’re less likely to get you into sort of some weird belief set where you’re, like, working against reality. So let me give you an example to make this more concrete. I have a friend who is using daily affirmations. And her affirmation she’s using when I talk to her was, “Whatever happens to you is exactly what needs to happen to you.” And I felt like this was not a very good affirmation. The reason is she felt it was helpful, right. She felt it was doing something good for her. But my problem with it is, well, but what if it’s not? What needs to happen to you? What if it’s actually totally the opposite of what needs to happen to you? So what I was suggesting to her, can you find other affirmations that also do the good things that you’re getting from that one, but that are aligned with the way the world actually works? It’s not like there’s a law of the universe that says the things that happen to you are the ones that should be happening to you to help you learn the lesson you need to learn.
Derek Sivers
Right. That’s a wonderful example. You’ve gone bowling, right?
Spencer
Absolutely.
Derek Sivers
Okay. So I think most of us can relate to the thing that happens if you’re not a professional bowler is you go bowling rarely. You grab the ball and you aim for the middle pin, and it bends off to the left and you think, “Damn it, I must have done something wrong.” So next time you get the ball, you aim for the middle pin again. It bends to the left again. You’re like, “Oh, okay, I need to compensate for this thing where the ball keeps bending to the left.” So now, even though this feels wrong, like intuitively, I want to aim for the middle, I’m going to make myself aim for the right pin now. And hope that it bends into the center. And then it does. You aim for the right pin, and weirdly enough, the ball then bends into the center. So you were going against your intuition and you were doing this thing. You know that the correct thing to do isn’t to aim to the right. Eventually you’d like to get to the point where the muscles of your forearm, and your fingers and your grip are aligned so that you know it’s the center. But for now, I’m going to aim to the right, and that’s working. So I think that’s kind of what you’re saying.
Spencer
Well, there’s a difference between then convincing yourself that in fact, the right is the center versus knowing, oh wait, no, this is just a useful fiction that yes, it’s not reflective of reality.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, that’s a good way of putting it. If I were to continue with the metaphor of the AI characters learning to walk, imagine if you suddenly gave the characters the ability to help each other and suddenly the one that was helped by having a little balloon tied to its head went around going to every little AI character, going, “Everybody balloons! We all need balloons. Everybody put a helium balloon on your head.” Like, no, no, no, no, no, that was the answer for you. Like, that’s what helped you because you were face down in the ground. You needed a helium balloon. Everybody doesn’t need helium balloons.
Spencer
But that’s exactly what everyone’s doing. That’s exactly what people do. Everyone finds one thing that helps them, and then they go around shouting this everyone needs a helium balloon.
Derek Sivers
Yeah. Hence the metaphor that, yeah this is what was this is what you needed. It doesn’t mean it’s true. It’s not the answer for everybody. So that’s really a big part of what my next book is about. That first, pointing out how many things in our social world are set as fact, but in fact are just a perspective not true. And then the horror of realizing that you’re doing this too so many things that you think of as just absolutely true, that even your brain is telling you are true, are not actually true. It was just something that you needed to believe in the moment. But it’s not true.
Spencer
What do you think of what I’m saying about the advantage of believing truer things, rather than less true things for their helpfulness? It seems to me that the less true things are more brittle, right? Like they may be helping you now, but because they’re not as aligned with reality, they’re going to do less well on average when you get into different situations.
Derek Sivers
I think you’re right. I think it’s a great insight. For practical use, I wonder if that’s part of the progress. Maybe like in the bowling example. For now you need to aim to the right just to not make this next game a disaster. But hey, for the long term, let’s look on just adjusting your grip or whatever. There’s going to take many more hours of training so that you know how to accurately aim towards the middle pin or whatever, start to put a spin on it or whatever you’re going to do. But for now, I guess it’s the for now versus the long term. I guess it depends how involved you want to get. What would be some other real world examples. I don’t know, maybe this is just my personal preference is, I’m happy to temporarily adopt beliefs that I know are not correct, but they send me in the correct direction. But I’m aware that I’m doing them. So things like, when I started to learn that most humans have a tendency to believe that they are above average in common everyday things like interview any number of drivers, and you’ll find that about 97% of people asked believe that they are above average drivers. I think they interviewed a bunch of doctors, and 96% of doctors said that they felt that they were better than average doctors and so on and so on and so on. On the other hand, I think when it came to really difficult things like chess and I think actually even math was in here, that most people believe that they are below average in math. But the things that people believe they’re above average in are everywhere.
Spencer
Yeah actually we ran a study on that. We gave people a hundred different skills. And for each of them we said out of 100 people how many of those hundred do you think you’d be better than at the skill.
Derek Sivers
Oh, and?
Spencer
Well yeah. So we found just what you’re saying. Like people think that they’re better drivers than average and so on. But the really funny thing is, if we switch it from how good you are at driving to how good you are at race car driving, it flipped to people thinking that they were worse than 50 out of a hundred, rather than better than 50 out of a hundred. And again, it goes to the point of like difficult things and things you’ve never done before. People are more likely to underestimate themselves relative to others, whereas easy things and things you do a lot, people are more likely to overestimate themselves.
Derek Sivers
Spencer, I love that you did that. You know when I first got your email about having this conversation today, I went to your website and I was learning about what you had done, and I so admire that you’re taking this approach to things. And instead of just sitting there pontificating. You’re going out and collecting a bunch of real world data from people. I love this, I didn’t know that you had done it on this subject. See to me then when I hear something like this, I think, “Oh, well, I need to correct that cognitive bias that it’s not just them, it’s also me.” If most people do this, if 97% think that they’re better than average, well then shit, I must be one of those 97%. Therefore, to compensate for this bias, I’m going to start to try to assume that I’m below average, just in general. When in doubt, assume that I’m below average. And it might not always be true. But I think it’s better for me to try to believe that I’m below average to help compensate for this bias.
Spencer
I have such a different approach. It’s really interesting. So my approach is make predictions about things and then actually track them and see how well my predictions go, because my goal is not to sort of compensate for the bias by pushing in the other direction, but rather creating an iterative feedback loop where my estimates become more and more accurate. Does that make sense?
Derek Sivers
Yeah. You would do well as an AI character learning to walk. That’s the correct way to do it.
Spencer
Thank you. Question mark. Yeah. So I’ve been like I’ve been tracking my predictions about things for years. And you know, when I have an important event in my work or my life, I’ll try to log a prediction about it.
Derek Sivers
I think that’s the ideal way to do it.
Spencer
Well, but do you think that kind of imagining yourself as being worse than average does that have negative consequences?
Derek Sivers
I don’t know. I find it works for me. Which, by the way, there comes full circle to when you brought up the subject. Choosing a belief that works for you. This is kind of what I meant. Well, this is very much what I meant. Is this belief for example, I’m going to assume that I’m below average in everything. This works for me for now, because it makes me stop and catch myself when I’m feeling confident. And think, “Maybe I shouldn’t be so sure. Maybe I shouldn’t be so confident. In fact, I should probably be more careful when I’m driving because I think I’m probably a worse than average driver. Therefore, I need to be more careful.” So it’s just--.
Spencer
I think I’m also worse than average rappers, for whatever that’s worth.
Derek Sivers
So I think that this works for me. Let’s pick another example that I did blog about a few years ago, and actually was part of the inspiration for choosing to turn this into a book. Okay is at my last company I had 85 employees, and I was the sole owner, and a lot was on my shoulders and it didn’t go well. And I sold the company really out of personal failure like I felt that I’d had. Even though financially it was successful, personally, I just felt like it was a disaster. And so I sold the company for a ton of money and people said, “Wow, congratulations.” But to me it was a failure. But I found that I was resentful and blaming the employees for how badly things had gone, even though I’m not a resentful person usually. But in this case, I was just like, “Ah, those bastards, those assholes, they did this and they did that, and they were this. They were deliberately manipulated.” And they made me, you know, blah, blah, blah. And it was like for a year or two. I was in this thought loop of blaming them for everything. Or blaming them for the failure of the company. And then one day I had this thought of like, wait a minute, what if it was all my fault? And it was like, that actually made me, like, sit up in my chair like, oh, wait a second. If everything was my fault, that’s empowering. Now, like, that’s something I can do something about. Whereas choosing well believing that everything was their fault, that just feels victimy, that feels helpless.
Derek Sivers
Choosing to believe that everything was my fault and choosing to see anything from that given perspective. Again, there’s always more to the story. You can always choose any perspective on any story. If I look back through the whole past of the company and assume that everything that happened was my fault, I created the situation that led them to act that way. I created the environment where that action was just the inevitable outcome. For them to do. That was all my fault. That to me, is an empowering mindset that then worked for me. That led me to try to be a better person, that gave me more tranquility and peace with the past. That led me to stop being angry at them. And so like you, I blogged about it. I wrote a blog post saying, “I’m going to assume now that everything is my fault.” But some people in the comments said, “How dare you? That’s awful, that’s terrible. I’m ridden with guilt all the time, and for you to suggest that I should think something is that everything is my fault. That’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard you say. That’s the most terrible advice you’ve ever given.’ Oh, well, then it doesn’t work for you. I wasn’t saying everyone needs a helium balloon on their head. I’m saying I needed a helium balloon on my head. And if you find yourself laying face down on the ground, maybe you need a helium balloon on your head, too. This worked for me. If this doesn’t work for you, then don’t. I’m not saying it’s for everybody, but yeah, that’s where choosing a belief because it works for me.
Spencer
Well where my mind goes when you say that is that, of course it was partially your fault. And of course it was partially their fault. And of course it was partially luck as well. That was nobody’s fault. And so it’s interesting to me because I think I would resist a framing like it was all your fault or it was all their fault. Because it just seems so unlikely that either of those are true. And that doesn’t mean that you’re not right. That you know what works for you best is believing it’s all your fault. But I do wonder what about just trying to see it as accurately as possible and actually figure out which parts were your fault and which parts weren’t your fault.
Derek Sivers
Well, two thoughts on that for one. I think again, that’s the place to get to. I think believing that everything was my fault in this case was the turnaround. I needed to stop thinking everything was their fault. But then where I get to eventually is, yeah, it’s probably a mix of that. But another thing, even fault is a-- now I don’t know if we’re picking on the example too much, but fault is so nuanced. I don’t know if you know, like the little ripples in the water. Where did that ripple come from? You know, where did where did that action come from? And even then, choosing to judge someone’s action as right or wrong. What are we judging this by, just financial outcome or not or I don’t know. So I think that I don’t know if I ever could come to some final judgment about exactly what was my fault and what was not. I think it’s all just a spin. It’s all just a perspective.
Spencer
Yeah. I guess what I think about in terms of the ultimately arriving at is not so much okay, it’s 10% this person’s fault and 20% that person’s fault, but more here’s my best understanding causally, of the events that have transpired and ways that the ideal version of myself would have behaved differently.
Derek Sivers
Right. So then it is fair to judge things by whether it’s useful to you or not. That is this something I can do something about? Is this information I can use to improve my actions in the future? I think about this filter a lot. Is that believing that something is somebody else’s fault might make you feel emotionally better in the moment, to think you aren’t to blame. But that doesn’t improve your actions. On the other hand, if you look at everything as your fault, you might look harder for ways that you can improve your actions. Even if it wasn’t your fault. I’m sorry. I think we’re going too deep down the fault rabbit hole of almost kind of what’s the lost perspective on the the subject. But do you know what I mean? Where judging analysis through the filter of what can I use in the future.
Spencer
Yeah. And I think part of the reason we’re so fixated on fault is because we want to know how to judge people and ourselves, right? We want to have a sense, am I a good person? Is that person a good person? You know, it’s like we want to create this overall assessments. And then it’s like it seems like we have to get into the fault. But, you know, maybe there’s a more enlightened view that just goes beyond that and says, well, this person is that sort of person. I am this sort of person. Rather than kind of creating a holistic judgment, I kind of think about it using an analogy of robots, to do another another robot analogy. Imagine that there was a robot that’s programmed to punch people in the face, and it’s like going around the city punching people in the face. And other people are getting really pissed off at this robot. And they’re like, “I went up to the robot and he punched me in the face.” Like my attitude in that situation, the ideal version of myself would say, “You know what? This is a robot designed to punch people in the face.” Like maybe it needs to be locked up or reprogrammed or something like this, but like, there’s something pathological about walking up and getting punched in the face and then getting really angry because, like, once you realize it’s a robot designed to punch people in the face. And so, I don’t know, this is kind of how I try to go into these situations being like, what sort of person is everyone in the situation? What sort of person am I?
Derek Sivers
Well, wait. This is such a wonderful, vivid, colorful example. I haven’t yet seen how does this tie back into what we were just talking about?
Spencer
Well, because it removes the question of judgment. It’s like, well, you’re not going to be like, “Well, is the robot a good robot or a bad robot, like, you know, is the robot morally to blame or not?” Right. It just gets to the details of like, well, it’s a robot that’s programmed to punch people in the face. Like, how do we want to act on that information? Do we want to hang out with the robot? Do we want to lock the robot up? Do we want to reprogram the robot?
Derek Sivers
I love that.
Spencer
This is kind of how I try to see myself like, well, what sort of person am I? Rather than cast a holistic judgment about myself, like, am I good or am I bad? I want to be like, what sort of person am I? And then same with others. Rather being like, are they good or are they bad? Want to be like, well, what what are their tendencies? What are the sort of behaviors they engage in?
Derek Sivers
Right. Oh yeah. That’s a tough one for me to wrap my head around because I’m going to say I, I don’t know if it’s I or we, have a tendency to think of ourselves as changeable, but think of other people as not changeable. Again, I don’t know if that’s just me, but I think something I’ve read a few different times in these books on behavioral economics is how we often assume that other people are more motivated by money, whereas we’re motivated by intrinsic desires. And so too often bosses think, “Well, I’ll just give my employees a little more money to do the job.” And people that talk about motivation will say, “No, no, no, that’s a bias, that’s mistaken thinking, thinking that other people are more driven by money, whereas you’re driven by more all higher motives.” Everybody does that. In fact, everybody is driven by more higher motives. And money is really often a lower, lower down the rank of needs. So I think of myself as a very changeable person. I’m hesitant to think I’m a robot programmed for one function is to think that I contain multitudes. Whereas, I do catch myself accidentally thinking that other people are just that way. They’re just a robot designed for one function and they’re not going to change. Whereas maybe that’s a fault in my thinking. Thoughts?
Spencer
Well, I certainly wouldn’t say people are just programmed for one function, or simply didn’t mean to imply that people are simple or anything like that. It’s more just that people have tendencies, and you can try to understand those tendencies without making a holistic judgment on like, “Oh, that person’s good or that person’s bad.” Just try to really understand what sort of person are they. What are the sort of behaviors you would predict them to engage in, in different situations. And then you can take that view on yourself. But on the changeability piece, I mean, I do think people are constantly trying to change each other. That is a really common thing people try to do, often unsuccessfully. When it comes to myself, I think of my behavior as within my control, at least for the next few seconds, with it quickly diminishing after that. Like if I’m like, “Well, I want to get myself to do something next Tuesday.” I have to think about, “Well, what are the sort of things that get Spencer to do a thing.” And then I have to say, “Okay, well, Spencer will check his calendar in the morning.” And so if I put something on the calendar, well, that might be a thing that that is motivating to Spencer.
Derek Sivers
Yes. Yeah. Again, that’s what works for you for now. That’s not what everybody should do.
Spencer
Oh absolutely. Absolutely. It’s what works for me.
Derek Sivers
Yeah. Maybe it’s the Hollywood story arc. It doesn’t even have to be Hollywood. I’m sure many novels do this too. A writer told me that the you can tell who is the true hero of the story, because the hero is the one that changes the most during the story. And I thought that was an interesting way of looking at. He was a Hollywood screenwriter that said this. That if we think of ourselves as the protagonist in our story, does that mean that we are the one that goes through the changing arc that we used to be this way, and now we’re this way, or we’ve learned this important new insight, or we used to have this behavior that was working against us, and we’ve learned the hard way, and now we’re not going to make that mistake again. The point is sometimes the difference between seeming like this kind of person versus that kind of person can just be a change in a little habit like that I used to be a lazy person, but now I put it on my calendar, go to the gym at 10 a.m. and now suddenly I’m going to the gym every day at 10 a.m. whereas really, that was the only thing that changed is I just needed to put that entry in my calendar. But to the outside world, it’s like, wow, you’ve made a huge change. You used to be so lazy, now you’re like a total gym nerd. But that from our own internal point of view, we’re still the same person. But just this one thing changed in our actions. I wonder about the robot that punches people in the face. That a single little change in the programming to get it to punch a punching bag or something like that turns it can change it how it’s seen in the world from a bad robot to good robot and without--. Go ahead.
Spencer
I think that’s a great way to look at it. It makes me think about people with really extreme personalities, like someone who’s narcissistic, extremely narcissistic, or someone who’s sociopathic and thinking, well, maybe there is a small tweak that gets them to actually have--. Maybe right now this person’s causing harm, but there’s a small tweak in which they actually are doing good in the world, right. Like, yes, there’s a fine line between the sociopath who’s manipulating people and taking their money, versus the sociopathic lawyer who is working within the legal system to do the best job possible, defending the murderer where they’re actually providing a public service because they’re supposed to do the best job possible defending the murderer. Right.
Derek Sivers
Yeah. I saw more than twice in my years at CD Baby somebody who came at us full of venom and attack and contacted customer service. Just like, “I’m going to destroy you people into the ground. You’re the worst. You know, just wait till you feel my wrath.” And luckily, I had my first employee ever was a really sweet guy named John. And John was so nice that he would get on the phone with these people. And John’s nature was just, “Hey, man. Yeah. Oh, I totally feel you man.” He’d sit on the phone with these people for a whole hour while doing other things in the background and let these people just vent their venom. And at the end of an hour, and I swear, this happened, like, more than 2 or 3 times the person would turn around, they’d say, “You know what? You guys are great. I’m so sorry. You in fact, I’m going to go tell everybody that you’re the best.” And sure enough, again, I can think of at least two times this happened, but I think it happened more. That person then became our biggest champion and went out into the world loudly like, “CD Baby’s the best. Hey every musician, if you’re not on CD Baby, you have to be on CD Baby. These guys are the best thing in the whole world.” And they just had this tendency to-- they’re like a fountain. They just need to spout and spouts. And they can spout against you or they can spout for you. But it’s just a slight tweak in their behavior that our biggest evangelists usually started out as our biggest critics, and that was just their personality. Slight tweak.
Spencer
Yeah, just redirecting that energy. Right? Before we wrap up, I was thinking, how would you feel about doing a quick rapid fire round where I ask you incredibly difficult questions and you have to give really short answers.
Derek Sivers
Sounds fun. Let’s try it.
Spencer
All right, first question. Why do you think low confidence works for you? Because I think the vast majority of like, self-help books kind of emphasizing that you should believe in yourself, but you’re saying believing you think you’re less good than other people seems to work for you.
Derek Sivers
I’m coming from a place of high confidence. Whether it’s my nature or just something I learned early on, something quite often in life, I’ve smiled and thought, wow, confidence is really all I have right now, that I have a nature to be confident. So I think maybe to try to steer myself back to the middle, I deliberately adopt lack of confidence.
Spencer
You mentioned that your previous business was a financial success, yet you viewed it as a failure. Why do you think you feel it was a failure despite the financial success?
Derek Sivers
I define success as achieving what you set out to do, achieving what you wanted. And I mean that on a micro or macro scale. You know if I want to go mow my lawn and I want the blades of grass to be short, it was a success. If I do that, I set out to help musicians and to create a place that was casual and cool and fun to work at that ignored the formalities of most businesses. And I achieved that mostly. But then after the company grew past 50 employees, it took on a weird life of its own, where it’s like the gravity switched, the focus of the employees switched from outward to inward. And that’s the thing that felt like a huge personal failure to me, even though the company was making a lot of money. It turned into a nasty place internally in the culture, so that felt like a huge failure to me. It used to be a fun place to work and it turned into a nasty place to work. So yeah. And I also thought I was going to continue doing it for the many decades, maybe the rest of my life. But when things got so bad, I thought, well, I could fire everybody and start again. I could go in there and try to fix everything or fuck it I could just walk away. And so I chose to just walk away and that felt like I had given up. So yeah, it felt like a failure personally.
Spencer
Is there a story you have that you would want to believe, even if it was completely false?
Derek Sivers
Yeah. There’s my short answer. Yes. All the time. Many. Constantly. I mean, let’s just pick one stupid little one off the top of my head because somebody emailed me about it minutes before we hit record. They asked why I’m social in India and I’m not social in New Zealand, and I said, “I just find people in India to be more interesting than I do people in New Zealand.” And I know that’s not objectively true. That’s my little story, that people in India are interesting and people in New Zealand aren’t. I know that’s false, but it is my current story. I didn’t deliberately choose that one, but if I wanted to counteract it, I would work hard to deliberately find supporting reasons to believe that people in New Zealand are fascinating.
Spencer
But why don’t you want to stop believing that story.
Derek Sivers
Which one? Wait. Stop believing which one?
Spencer
The New Zealand story. Why don’t you want to stop believing that people in India are more--
Derek Sivers
I haven’t felt the need to yet. Right now there’s a nice split in my life where New Zealand is my place, where I’m antisocial and I just work and I spend a lot of time with my boy. And when I’m not with my boy, I’m just working. The fact that I don’t find people particularly interesting here works for me, because it helps me get more work done and focus on my boy full time. In fact, it’s part of the reason I moved here in the first place. My boy was born in Singapore. I was living in Singapore, he was born in Singapore, and Singapore is a place where I find so many people so interesting and so many people wanted my time, but I wanted to be a good dad. So I thought, why don’t I move to a place on earth with great nature, great place to raise a kid, but where I’m not interested in the people and therefore I’ll give all my social attention to my kid. And that’s why I chose to move to New Zealand for this reason.
Spencer
My apologies to everyone living in New Zealand offended.
Derek Sivers
I’m wincing. I mean, I’m standing in New Zealand as I say this, I’m like looking over my shoulder. I hope nobody heard me say that.
Spencer
Well now they’re definitely not gonna want to talk to you. So you’re good.
Derek Sivers
Exactly. Yeah. Mission accomplished.
Spencer
Why do you think it’s important to say hell yeah or say no?
Derek Sivers
That again is a specific tool for a specific situation. My little article I wrote on it starts with the first sentence saying, “If you are overwhelmed with opportunities consider this trick. Basically raise the bar to say no to almost all of them.” But it’s only for that situation where if you’re overwhelmed with opportunities, unfortunately, it’s a catchy catch phrase. And so I’ve heard from people around the world saying like, “Oh my God, I just got out of college and I’m using hell yeah or no for everything from now on.” And I think, “No, no, no, that’s the wrong time to use it. You know, it’s a tool for a tool for a specific situation. At your point in your career, you should be saying yes to everything. It’s only later when lots of people are offering you lots of money and lots of situations, and you can’t say yes.” That’s when you got to whip out Hell yeah or No and use it in that situation. Not all situations.
Spencer
Okay, just two more questions for you. Do you think it’s a good idea to strive to optimize everything we do?
Derek Sivers
No, I used to. I used to try to optimize everything. But then I’ve found the joy of leaving some things in your life deliberately unoptimized. Leaving them more random, allowing for surprises and serendipity. And maybe just releasing the pressure on some things to not be optimized. Everybody has to choose for themselves. For some people, they would want to optimize the moneymaking side of their life and not optimize the personal relationships in their life. And for somebody else, it might be the opposite. They want to optimize personal relationships. And, you know, never mind the money that’s not in their current value system. So no, I think you need to make a self-aware decision of what aspects of your life should be optimized, instead of assuming that everything needs to be optimized, because that’s what the famous podcasters do.
Spencer
Final question, what would you say to people who are told that they’re weird?
Derek Sivers
Oooh. Say thank you. I taught that to my kid when he was like three years old. I said, “Anytime somebody says, you’re weird, say thank you.” That’s the best compliment. It means you’re not like everyone else. You’re not just normal. You’re special. You have made your own decisions, come to your own conclusions instead of just echoing what everyone else is doing. So I think weird is a high compliment. In fact, I think it’s one of the best compliments you can receive.
Spencer
Derek, thank you so much for coming on. This was really fun.
Derek Sivers
Thanks, Spencer. It was a such a wonderful conversation. I loved that our brains work kind of differently and I admire the way you think. And so it was fun to hear your perspective pushing back on, especially because I’ve been really lost in my thoughts of this book called Useful Not True for a year now. But hey, anybody, if you’re listening to this all the way to the end, please go to my website and send me an email and say hello. Because if you’re the kind of person that listens to Spencer’s show, you’re the kind of person I want to meet.
Spencer
What’s your website address?
Derek Sivers
Sive.rs it’s just my name with a dot in it. And there’s a contact link. I answer every single email. I actually really love hearing from people that listen to a podcast like this. In fact, it’s the reason I choose which podcasts to appear on, are the ones where I would like to meet the kind of people that listen to this show. So that’s why I’m here.
Spencer
Thanks so much, Derek.
Derek Sivers
Thanks, Spencer.