Mark Manson
host: Mark Manson
In-person in Auckland.
listen: (download)
watch: (download)
Transcript:
Mark
I am here with the one and only Derek Sivers. In the flesh, a very special treat.
Derek Sivers
We’ve Never recorded anything live.
Mark
No, I mean, you live on the other side of the world. So I only get to see you...
Derek Sivers
Actually, you live on the other side of the world. Excuse me.
Mark
We’ll get into that. I mean, we only see each other in person maybe every five years or so. So this is a very special treat. Good to have you back on the pod. Founder of CD Baby, author of many books. Latest book is “Useful Not True”.
Mark
The new book is “Useful Not True”. I’m excited to get into it with you. So I actually want to start, every time I see you. It was actually like giving me anxiety because we had brunch before we came into the studio, and we had such good conversations over brunch and I had this perpetual anxiety of like, no, save it. Put the words back in your mouth, you’re like, you’re gonna waste it all before we start recording. But every time we hang out, we have, like, such good conversations. I’m curious, where do you find ideas and inspiration?
Derek Sivers
Oh. Lateral thinking probably. I like reading about something else. And inside reading about something else, I’ll think of something that reminds me of something else. God, that was a really bad explanation. But, I was sitting in your hotel lobby and I was looking at this Chinese dictionary and seeing how the characters were formed, and to me, there’s like, “Oh, there’s something really interesting in there about how some characters have meaning and some just don’t.” You shouldn’t try to put meaning into these characters. And I like taking little things like that and applying it to life in some other way. Same way is when you’re writing music you don’t want to imitate the Beatles too much, right? Or whatever genre you’re in, if you’re doing heavy metal, you don’t want to be a clone of Iron Maiden or whatever. You want to take some of their influence and mix it in something that would nobody would ever expect. Whether it’s like some, you know, Syrian wedding dance. Who knows what, some Dixie ragtime thing. But now your heavy metal band is going to do this and people go, “Whoa, what a unique sound.” But you actually know exactly what those two influences were. You know that you totally nicked this Dixieland jazz thing and mixed it with Steve Harris Iron Maiden basslines.
Mark
Sure. It’s funny because my brain works in similar ways. We’re both musicians, which I find interesting in that both of us kind of work this way because in creative fields you hear about this all the time. Everything’s a remix. You pull, you know, there’s the Picasso quote of, you know, “Bad artists borrow, great artists steal.” You know, you steal something from over here, you steal something from over here. And then the actual creativity is merging them together into something that sounds completely new or looks completely new. And it’s funny because I feel like in our space, call it the thought leadership or...
Derek Sivers
Public wanking.
Mark
Public wanking. It’s probably more accurate term, you know, authors, nonfiction thinkers, whatever, internet personalities,
Mark
Navel gazers. You see a lot of stealing and less remixing. And like I see a lot of nonfiction. I get sent a lot of books and a lot of nonfiction books from my space. And so many of them just feel like clones.
Derek Sivers
Navel gazers.
Derek Sivers
Of the other contemporary ones.
Mark
Yeah. Which is akin to what you were saying. It’s like starting a metal band and trying to sound exactly like Iron Maiden, and that’s never going to work. That doesn’t make sense unless you want to be a cover band. Like that doesn’t make sense. What works is taking, you know, Iron Maiden song structure and applying it to Blues and then throwing in jazz harmony and then, you know, voila. You have a unique composition.
Derek Sivers
All right. So audience, just before we walked into the studio, what we were talking about was Bob Dylan, Miles Davis. This idea of once you’re successful at something, it means you should stop. Like, Miles Davis was the man for for bebop trumpet playing alongside Charlie Parker. So it’s like, “All right, I did that. Now I need to do something new. Even though my fans are going to be upset, I need to change genres and push myself to do what I don’t know how to do.” It’s the artistic imperative, you must do this. You can’t just rest on your laurels. Well, you can, you can be ACDC and just do the same damn thing for 40 years. And some people really appreciate that. But if you are creatively ambitious, that’s not what you want. So Bob Dylan did that a bit. His fans were furious when he went electric, and David Bowie made himself, like, take on a new persona every few years. And these were my early influences because I wanted to be a successful musician. So to me, like these formative years of age 13 through 20, I was poring over these interviews with musicians, like just hanging on their every word and just watching how they live their life going, “This is the way.” So of course, when I do something and it’s successful, it just feels completely normal to me to say, like, “All right, now it’s time to stop doing that.” Not, “I need to double down. Get the money.” I think no, I need to leave that and get the challenge.
Mark
Do you feel like you’re reinventing yourself as a writer? Because this is your fifth book, right?
Derek Sivers
Yeah. I don’t know. Only my last two books How to Live and Useful Not True. Really felt like I was really writing a book. Those first three were just a collection of blog posts. Then you know “How to Live” was definitely like a flash of inspiration that it took four years to go from flash to finished thing. And I was like, following this single vision that whole time. And this new one was definitely an exploration. But wait, before we get onto that. So Led Zeppelin.
Mark
Let’s get back to the serious stuff.
Derek Sivers
So Led Zeppelin, one of the band members, said something in an interview that I read as a teenager that I think of all the damn time and I think has completely shaped my life and what I’m doing and where I live, and all of it because of a line I read in an interview when I was 14 and it was Robert Plant or Jimmy Page said, “The reason that we stood out from the pack is we weren’t part of the London scene. We lived in the countryside in Wales. We had no idea what they were doing in London. We were just off, like listening to Arabic music and trying new things to mix Arabic scales with the Blues often the Welsh countryside. And that’s why we made something unique and that’s why we stood out.” And to me, that’s so core to how I see the world that I don’t look at podcasts. For example, when you see the guy, they always have the fucking bookshelf. What’s with the fucking... Why does everybody... They say, “Well, I’m going to do a podcast. So let me get the bookshelf.” And I mean, look, we’re actually using different microphones today. But you know, usually everybody says the exact same microphone.
Mark
Shure mic,
Derek Sivers
The same Shure mic, the same bookshelf behind them with everything neatly stacked up. You know, and if it’s their own book, then they push it facing forward. And there are these norms that I think, “No, that is just the worst thing you could do.” That’s like being in the middle of the London scene and doing the exact same thing as everybody else. I think it’s like our challenge, almost our imperative to force yourself to do something different. You look at what everybody else is doing. Okay, well, not that, but then you have to be a little more look inside instead of just deliberately doing the opposite. You think, “Well, in my perfect world, how would it be? How do I think it should be?” It becomes a reflection of yourself.
Mark
It’s funny you bring this up because you were the first guest on this podcast,
Derek Sivers
Right and now.
Mark
You’re also going to be the last guest on this podcast.
Derek Sivers
Yay!
Mark
Don’t freak out, listeners. There’s still going to be a podcast. It’s just going to be very different. I want to hang on this for a minute. One, because this, like, directly affects my listeners, but also because I think this is a good example of what you’re talking about. I’ve really enjoyed having the podcast this past year. But I feel like I’m in the London scene. And I’m doing the same thing all the guys in London are doing, and I feel like I need to get to the Welsh countryside and start fucking with Arabic scales. Because when I look at all the big podcasts in this space, first of all, most of them have been doing it for like ten years now and they’ve just built this machine. But so much of it is based off of booking guests and then like researching into the minutia and getting like the perfect questions so you can have the perfect Instagram reel of that guest that you can post, and it goes viral and all this shit and like, and look, I’m friends with a lot of guys in this space that like, are amazing at it.
Mark
And I look at them and I’m like, A, it’s gonna be really hard to compete with them. And then B, I don’t want to do that. Like I don’t want to do the same thing everybody else is doing. I hate booking guests. No offense, I like most of the guests that have come on the show and I’ve enjoyed talking to most of them, but like, I don’t like researching for guests. It took me 20 episodes to figure that out. I’m like, I don’t actually like this format. And so we’re actually going to relaunch the show into something completely different in a couple of months. There will be a formal announcement, everybody. Don’t worry. Stay tuned. But it’s funny that you brought that up, because that’s exactly what I’ve been going through creatively with the show. I thought it was very poetic to bring you on as both the last guest and you were the first guest as well, so.
Derek Sivers
Thank you. And this is maybe rudely blunt of me to say, but I was a little worried when you said I’m going to do a podcast. I was like, “Oh, fuck, Mark.” But you’re like to me, your writing is so original. Your books were so like nothing else. There was nothing, until everybody started cloning you, “I’m gonna put fuck in the title.” Everything you did was so unique. And when you said you were going to do a podcast, I went, “Oh, no, no, no, like, don’t do another fucking podcast.” But, I mean, luckily you did already start to take it somewhere new right away.
Mark
We tried. Yeah.
Derek Sivers
So it’s a huge relief.
Mark
Like any creative process, right? Like, you have to learn the rules before you can break them, right? Like, we tried to break some rules early, and we just fell on our faces. And so we kind of fell into this rhythm of, okay, let’s just book the same guests. You know, at this point, I’m friends with half the people in this world. So most of the time all it took was a text message, right. And even then I was like, “Oh, I hate booking guests.” But I think we had to go through the reps and just see like that it didn’t feel right. And it wasn’t like you said, I have this almost like compulsive need to be contrarian and original or different. Like I’d rather be different and suffer the consequences of failure than to just replicate what everybody else is doing that’s working.
Derek Sivers
Even if it rewards you.
Mark
Exactly. And especially at this point in my career.
Derek Sivers
So wait, let’s pause right there, because I think it’s considerate for the audience to challenge yourself to be different. It’s not ego driven. Correct me if I’m wrong for you. But for me, it’s not ego driven. It’s like they already have this shit. Yeah. You know, “ABC, ABC, ABC, ABC.” I’m not going to jump in and go, “ABC, ABC, ABC.” For their sake, I want to say the thing that other people aren’t saying. I want to do it in a different way that nobody had considered. In every way, even my whole like, whether it’s technology wise, the way I do my site, the way I do my whatever, I try to just think, “Well, what’s the underrepresented angle in the big chorus?” Like, I know I’m not the lead singer in their life. I know I am one little voice in the choir, so it’s like, “Well, what note is not being sung that I can contribute?”
Mark
I like that. It’s also just a critique that I have of podcasting in this space too, it’s getting mundane. It’s getting repetitive. It’s the same, all the shows are doing the same thing with the same guests, same topics. You know, anytime a new book comes out, you know, I’m sure you either have done or you’re going to do a bunch of the same shows. Which I get, it’s part of promoting a book. Yeah, I don’t find it interesting. And what I find interesting is trying to reinvent the format or the medium or just do something disruptive. Even if I make less money or I lose some audience or whatever. It’s like, let’s do something interesting and fun and original and see what happens. Let’s break some shit.
Derek Sivers
That, to me goes back to the musical example. I finally just listened to the legendary David Bowie albums produced by Brian Eno called “Low and...” Crap, I forget the other, but after he was already famous for Ziggy Stardust and such. Then he went and made three really artsy albums with Brian Eno. It was just such a wonderful, bold, creative step that it’s hard to imagine. Well, okay it’s hard to imagine Taylor Swift doing but it’s actually easy to imagine some other popular musicians these days doing it. But even like Peter Gabriel back in the 80s and 90s, suddenly he did the soundtrack to the movie, “The Last Temptation of Christ”, and then went out and put out a bunch of, like, traditional world music albums released through his label, and it was just something that most of his fans would not have followed him to do that. But I thought it was so bold of him to do that, almost like a creative reset. It’s like, “All right, I’m popular. I’m popular. Now let me do something that none of you will like. Except maybe like 1% of you will get what I’m doing, and that’s what I want. Let’s let’s reduce my audience again.”
Mark
It’s funny because I definitely feel that tension, like I have been very aware for a long time now that I can just keep hitting the fuck note on the piano for the next 20 years and just keep collecting the paychecks. And there is a legitimate temptation to do that. Like it’s easy. It’s comfortable. People know what to expect.
Derek Sivers
Oh my God. You could just have like LLM just generate Mark Manson book titles with asterisks in the fuck.
Mark
Seriously I mean, we could be on fuck book number eight by now. It was funny because I remember having a conversation with my publisher pretty early on, and they actually brought that up. They’re like, “We think this could be a franchise. We think you could do 8 or 10 books like this with the same cover and the same style and the same tone, and, you know, you just repeat the same advice.” And I remember my exact response was, I will not be chicken soup for the soul for Fuckfaces.
Derek Sivers
Nice.
Mark
But I look at, you know, you mentioned ACDC like I get why. Like if you love it and you’re happy hitting that note again and again and it pays the bills and the audience is happy with you hitting that note again and again, you know, why not do it? But I definitely think I’m born more of like the Miles Davis or like the Radiohead “Ilk” of just like if I don’t try to reinvent myself, I’m going to go crazy at some point, but I want to get back to you in this cross-pollination of ideas and modalities.
Mark
I read your new book on the flights down here, and I found consistently my favorite parts of the book were where you brought in very, I guess, orthogonal references, like there’s a section on religion. You talk about nation states at some point. By the way, everybody, the book is about beliefs and how beliefs can still be useful even if they are not necessarily true. And so there’s a lot of very individual examples, right? You know, a lot of us have beliefs that are useful, not true. And a lot of us have beliefs that are not useful and not true. But then to me the most exciting stuff was like, you know, is a religion a useful, not true belief? Is a nation state a useful nature? Is culture useful not true? Or like social norms? Like all that stuff like that gets me super excited. That’s like when you take an Iron Maiden and you play it with a banjo. Is that the stuff that you find the most fun or?
Derek Sivers
Yeah, when you surprise yourself, isn’t that nice? Sometimes you sit down to write and you know what you’re going to say, but sometimes you sit down with more of a question and you privately explore this subject, and you’re typing and you’re writing and suddenly you go, “Whoa! And you surprise yourself.” It’s the best feeling when you’re writing. Because, you know, you and I have read a lot of books. I’ve never heard this idea before, I’m like, “Oh, wow, I’ve never heard this idea before. This is badass.” I want to put this out there, because if I’ve never heard it, then most people probably haven’t heard it. Or what happens sometimes is I can put an idea out and somebody says, “You know what you should look into? Like what you’re saying right now kind of sounds like this.” Which I guess like you think you’re doing something unique musically. And they say, “You should check out Tom Waits.” And you go, “Oh, okay. Wow.” So that is still the thrill for me is to surprise myself. So writing “Useful Not True” I surprised myself a lot because I was talking about something I didn’t already know about.
Derek Sivers
I went in with this question for two years and I just was devouring everything, reading all these books about philosophy and religion. And I read the Bible cover to cover we talked about in our first episode and reading the Quran, reading about Islam, reading about Hinduism, reading about just theology in general. Which is just something I had never looked into because growing up in America, it felt like a, don’t go there subject because if you go there at all, you’re just going to have this kind of just Christianity. Just join our church. Just come to Bible study with me. Like any mention of religion, felt like it was just going to go there. And that’s that. It could never stay one level zoomed out about why we even have religion and how it’s beneficial and what does it do for us and how does it improve our actions and all that. It’s just here’s what my parents taught me, and that’s that.
Mark
So this two year investigation into this concept of useful but not true beliefs, you know, in the book, you talk about how 99.9% of our views are perspectives, not facts. And how you can put down and pick up perspectives at will in order to enhance yourself or help yourself. I’m curious, after this two year investigation, what were the biggest perspectival shifts that you’ve experienced? Like how is Derek different post book versus pre book? Like what did you change your mind on or your perspective on. And what was the significance of that?
Derek Sivers
I think the big one was realizing that ultimately all that really matters are the actions we take. That beliefs that you could choose to adopt, do something for your emotional state. If you choose to adopt a belief that everything sucks. It gives you this emotional state. If you take the belief that I’m surrounded by opportunities. It gives you this emotional state. And then depending on your state is going to completely affect your actions, whether you just decide to just fuck it and eat some ice cream on the couch, or if you decide to throw out the ice cream you bought last night. Stop drinking alcohol, get your shit together and go take this action. Because it’s just a slight tweak of thinking. A slightly different belief completely changes your direction with your actions, and none of the beliefs are necessarily true. By the way audience like the first page of the book says, look, I need to define this word true. Because for the whole book, I don’t want to always say, “Necessarily, absolutely, objectively, empirically, observably true.” So whenever I say true, what I really mean is absolutely, necessarily, objectively observably true. But the reason to define it like that is because whatever you’ve defined as true. That’s closed. You’re done. No more questioning that. You know, this water is on the table. We’re done. And I think that was so interesting to realize that opening that up again to say that might not necessarily be true. You asked the actions it changed for me or what it changed in how I see the world. It was, for one, realizing that everything I just need to judge it by its actions it creates. And then I need to keep challenging myself whenever I still catch myself saying things like, “Well, that was stupid or or this is bad or that’s amazing.” And I’m like, not necessarily like, even though I’ve been focused on this subject for two years, I still catch myself having viewpoints that feel absolutely true. I have to catch myself.
Mark
I wonder how much of that is is is a product of like semantics and language, right? Because it’s one of the things that you point out repeatedly in the book is that there are all sorts of normative things that we will say, like, “She is very polite or the weather is bad today.” And through saying it, there’s an implicit assumption that is factually true, right? And we are unaware of all of the normative and subjective assumptions that have to happen underneath that statement. But then sometimes I wonder is like, we just don’t have the language to equip that, right? Like, you just said, there is a version of this book where the word empirically or objectively is inserted before the word true 500 times.
Derek Sivers
Or there might be some language on Earth that has different words, like apparently the French have 20 different words for friend. Whereas in English we just have this word friend that gets, you know, suitcased in the meaning of the thing.
Mark
So like, maybe we should just have a different word for truth, like there’s a word for objective, empirical, verifiable truth. And then there’s a word for like truthish.
Derek Sivers
Works for me.
Mark
It works for me. Yeah. David Foster Wallace used to call it capital T true. And he also said that almost nothing is verifiably capital T true.
Derek Sivers
Right. Which okay, by the way, you know so I don’t get into political zeitgeist. I don’t follow news and try to get into the conversation du jour. So when I told some people I was writing this book, a lot of people said, “Oh, are you going to finally, talk about those people that just go lie in the media and deny this?” And I’m like, no, it’s not denialism, because denialism is where you take observable facts. That are verifiable and necessary and absolute facts. And you say, “No, that didn’t happen. That’s not true. No, the we didn’t lose the election. No vaccines don’t work.” It’s like, no, you can look at data, a microscope and you can see the little vaccines doing their job. This isn’t about denying what’s true, but it is about drawing that line between there’s some things in life that are absolutely true. And everything else of the mind is just we can choose another perspective.
Mark
Well, and I think you talked about this when we talked last year of you know, the first objection that people bring up is like, “Well, then I’ll just I’m just going to believe that I’m Superman and that, you know, I’m a billionaire and everybody loves me.” And, you know, all this stuff. And you pointed out, you said, yes, you can believe those things, but they’re not useful, because you’re deluding yourself. You’re like removing yourself from a shared reality. So there’s a quote this ties in really well with a quote from the book that I marked down that I want to read really quick, because I thought this was pretty insightful when it comes to why so many perspectives feel true, even though they are not necessarily like capital T true. So you said, “People communicate for social and emotional reasons. Socially, they want to bond. Judgments, gossip, ethics and opinions are all great for signaling and connecting emotionally. They want validation. They want others to acknowledge and agree that their viewpoint is justified. When you can see someone’s point of view, it tells them that you’re standing on their side. That’s why people rarely share objective, unbiased facts. Actual facts are boring as dirt. Nobody bonds over facts. They have more incentive to share their thoughts, which are never necessarily true.”
Mark
Which I love that because you’re right, like 99.9% of everything we talk about is useful, not true beliefs. And we’re gauging and verifying whether, “Do you have the same useful, not true belief as I do? Oh great. Now it became more useful because we both have it now and we can share it together. Right.” And so I think there’s like an interesting game theory situation where if you have a not true belief that nobody else has, you know, like I don’t know, I’m the Queen of England, it’s immediately rendered unusable because it’s not shared. Nobody else sees me as the Queen of England. So it’s now a belief that’s hurting me. So there’s an incentive to... I think this this explains like social contagion and peer pressure. Right, because it’s like there’s an incentive to share the useful, not true things that other people around you believe. Because then you get to benefit from not just from the social validation, but like you get to benefit from their company, their resources, their friendship, their loyalty, everything.
Derek Sivers
I’m on your side.
Mark
Yeah.
Derek Sivers
And it was fun imagining that very literally, too. When you say that, you can see something from a person’s point of view. It tells them you’re standing on their side. It’s nice to think of that like, very literally. Like, yeah, we are standing shoulder to shoulder. I’m seeing that the same way you are seeing that. It’s kind of a nice metaphor we have in English like that. Yeah, I see it your way. I’m standing on your side.
Mark
And well, you have you have that quip as well, about the guy who calls out to the woman on the other side of the river.
Derek Sivers
That was a joke. I didn’t make that up. I heard that joke somewhere. Yeah, traveler is walking through a strange land, and he comes to a river and he calls to the woman on the other side, “Excuse me. How do I get to the other side of the river?” And she looks back and she goes, “you are on the other side of the river.” And I just love that. It’s like I’m in New Zealand right now. Sometimes I comment on people’s accent and they go, “We don’t have an accent. You do>
Mark
Yeah.
Derek Sivers
It’s wonderful to remember. Well, you have an accent.
Mark
Even at the top of the show, I was like, well, you live on the other side of the world and you’re like, “No, you live on the other side of the world.”
Derek Sivers
Exactly. Yeah. My favorite Ted talk I did was just this tiny little three minute talk, where I talked about how you can see so many things from the other point of view. So one of them is addresses in Japan. We grew up in a country where the streets have names and blocks are just the unnamed bits of land in between named streets. In most of Japan, it’s the opposite. The blocks have numbers or names, and the streets are thought of as just unnamed spaces in between. So if you ask somebody, “What’s the name of the street.” They’ll go, “What.” And same thing if a Japanese person came to America and they said, “What’s the name of this block?” And you’re like, “Well, this is Oak Street, this is Elm Street.” “No, no, no. What’s that block? Like what? I don’t understand.” But then you realize that so many things can be seen from an opposite point of view, including where we are in New Zealand right now. There is a map, I think it was in the Sydney airport. No, maybe it was in the Auckland Airport where it was the upside down world map, where New Zealand and Australia and Argentina are at the top. And down below you have Canada and Russia. And it is equally valid. We live in a sphere. It’s a beautiful reminder.
Mark
It’s interesting noting all of these socially organizing, useful, not true beliefs. I mean, it does seem like the basis of culture, right? Like even things as simple as, like, when you meet somebody, you shake their hand and you say, “Nice to meet you.” You say, please, thank you. All those things. These are simply useful, not true beliefs that we’ve adopted to signal certain things to each other because it helps organize us as a community and as a society. And I guess just being aware of that is powerful because then you have to be aware of it in order to understand why you would ever opt out I guess.
Mark
Because you see when people are not aware of the game, they either conform blindly. Right. And that’s not good or they rebel blindly like they’re upset. They don’t understand why they break a bunch of rules. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. It’s just chaos. But when you’re aware of the game, then you can be selective in choosing, okay, this is a social norm that I actually don’t think is as useful as other people do. And I think I’m going to go the other way on this one, and I’m going to bear the cost of that. And yeah, I guess I’ve just never thought of it this way. It’s really interesting. I also find it very interesting that you spent two years writing a book about beliefs, and your big conclusion is that actions matter way more.
Derek Sivers
No, sorry. More succinctly put, the whole point of beliefs is to affect your actions. If your beliefs are not improving your actions, then there’s no point for the belief. Like the person that says that they are a religious believer, but then they act like an asshole and harm everybody around them. It’s like, well, then what is the point of your beliefs if they’re not improving your actions? The point of these beautiful beliefs handed down by religions over thousands of years is that they improve our actions for the better. Follow these Ten Commandments and you will be a good person. You will be a good neighbor. You will be a good spouse, a good parent. You will be net positive for the world. If you violate these, you will be net harm for the world. But there are some people that say that they are a believer, but then they are still net harm for the world. So the beliefs are moot except in that they affect your actions.
Mark
And you talk about at one point, actually like the basis of religion in a lot of ways is like they weren’t belief systems historically.
Derek Sivers
That came from a book called “The Religious Case Against Belief” by James P Carse .
Mark
Is that the infinite game finite game guy?
Derek Sivers
Oh man, if I might have messed up my author credits right there. Sorry if anybody just went and looked that up, maybe I got the authors mixed up. But anyway, James P Carse right. He might be the finite infinite...
Mark
What’s the name of the religion book? I can look it up.
Derek Sivers
A Religious Case Against Belief. That was the author that pointed out.
Mark
It is the same guy.
Mark
Same guy.
Derek Sivers
Really?
Derek Sivers
I’m usually pretty good with that. I was really doubting myself. So he’s the one. He was the theology chair at New York University. And pointed out that religion is the doing, which usually goes hand in hand with the beliefs, but doesn’t have to be. So he pointed out first the obvious that there are beliefs that are not religions. You know, feminism and communism or whatever are not religions. But he said, on the other hand, we have Zen Buddhism, which is a religion that has basically no beliefs. So he said, “First, let’s be clear that these are two separate things. The religions are the actions, the rituals, the things you do and then their beliefs, which in my mind are just kind of moot.” And he said somewhat of the same thing, that the point of the beliefs is to affect the actions. And coming from a theological, theology, how do you say that?
Mark
Theological.
Derek Sivers
I was trying to get the noun version theologian.
Mark
We’re writers here.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, exactly. Have you ever heard anybody say the word nascent out loud?
Mark
No.
Derek Sivers
Me neither. And it’s so awkward when I see that word in print. I’m like, don’t do that. Don’t use words that you don’t say, you know. Anyway, so sorry, writer nerd thing for a minute. Anyway, coming from a theologian, I thought that was a powerful point to make is that the beliefs are basically moot because they’re just in your head, and if they don’t affect your actions. Then they’re completely pointless. And it helps remind you. Okay, now let’s stop talking about religion for a second. But even on, like, a day to day personal level, what beliefs do you have about yourself that get you out of bed in the morning? What beliefs you have when you walk into a room of strangers? What beliefs you have when going on a first date? What beliefs you have when sitting down to do a project that you’re not excited about, but you’re supposed to be doing. You choose your beliefs at any one of these and none of them are necessarily true. You just have to look at how is this going to affect my actions for the better? And it can be a beautiful little brainstorming exercise or daydreaming exercise. When you catch yourself holding a belief that is steering your actions in an ineffective, disempowering way. You could just stop for a second and go sit on the toilet, or lay down on the couch and say, “All right. How else could I think about this?” And you just play an old brainstorming exercise.
Mark
It’s funny, though, because for a lot of beliefs for a lot of people, like, I do think there are some benign beliefs that I don’t have much of an emotional response. So like, for instance, I don’t know, thinking about some sort of like numerical business decision of like, am I going to spend my time doing X, or am I going to spend my time doing Y? What are the costs? What are the benefits? Open up a spreadsheet. Figure it out, right. It’s a very unemotional task of like what do I believe is the most useful thing to pursue over the next year or so right? But then there are some things that get very emotional, and I think those are the things that are, like, very much tied to our identity. So, I imagine for a lot of people, and I actually experienced this when I was young too. Like questioning my own religion was emotionally very uncomfortable the first time I did it, and I think the first time I questioned whether I was the piece of shit in my relationship that was also extremely uncomfortable. The first time I questioned my own political views was very uncomfortable. So I think I’m curious what you would say to like kind of the instinctual emotional resistance that happens around certain subjects, like how do you fight through that?
Derek Sivers
Don’t get over it, get under it.
Mark
Okay.
Derek Sivers
I like leaning into whatever I notice that I’m prejudiced against. If I notice that I’ve got a irrational aversion to something, it makes me want to lean into it to try to figure out why. And maybe if I lean into it, to find out why, I’ll be justified and find out, oh yeah, that’s that is not for me. And here’s why. But maybe I’ll find that it was just some leftover bullshit. You know, I’m not a fan of authenticity. Meaning, I think authenticity is overrated or bullshit. Authenticity is what we call our instinctive reaction to something, which is usually just coming from some fucking shit, from a movie you saw when you were 11 or something your parents told you in passing, which you maybe even misunderstood. And now that is still sitting in you, that you think, “Oh, well, this bad, this good.” But then, because it was our first thought, we call it authenticity. When it’s not, it just means that’s the shit that you haven’t spent an extra two minutes to think through. I don’t glorify authenticity at all. One of my other favorite ideas in “Useful Not True”, is that your first thought is an obstacle. The whole point is to get past it.
Mark
Interesting.
Derek Sivers
Don’t glorify the instinct. Acknowledge it. Say, “Okay. Well, my first thought was this. Now what else? How else could I think about this?” And maybe you’ll come back five minutes later and say, “Actually, yeah, I’m sticking with the first. I’ve thought about 3 or 4 other ways I could think of this. And the first one, now that I’ve spent a minute and thought it through, this one still works for me.” But don’t glorify your impulse and call it authenticity.
Mark
That’s really interesting. I haven’t heard that critique before, but I like it. Because one of the themes that’s been coming up on the podcast the past year that I’ve been thinking a lot about is, for lack of a better term, I’ve heard it. It’s starting to be called therapy culture. And basically there’s a great piece written by a Substack named Freddie DeBoer. And I really like the way he delineated it. And he basically said that there are a lot of concepts that are extremely useful in a one on one confidential therapeutic context, something like an authentic reaction to something. Right. Like if you’re talking to your therapist about some childhood trauma, then an authentic emotional reaction is valuable and it’s something that you should try to work towards. And so that you can then do the the process of thinking through it and analyzing it, deconstructing it, whatever. He said that the problem is that a lot of the concepts and practices that are very valuable in a in a private, one on one therapy situation are now being glorified culturally and people are being socially validated for them.
Mark
So these sorts of kind of trigger response emotional reactions are now being like, “Oh, she’s so authentic.” Like good for her, you know, or like, “Oh, you’re being so vulnerable right now.” When really you’re just acting like a child and you know, you’re throwing a temper tantrum and crying and freaking out about something. And people are like, “Oh, so vulnerable, so strong.” And I thought, you know, it’s something that I have felt a little bit uncomfortable... Like, there has been this growing, emerging culture of kind of glorifying authenticity, vulnerability, trauma, a lot of these things. And it’s concerned me for a while now. And I’ve had a number of guests on who have kind of criticized aspects of it or around it or pieces of it, but I thought this piece, like, really nailed it, that a lot of these things, when the context shifts, the value is completely different. And you actually...
Derek Sivers
Right. You’re taking this value out of context.
Mark
And it actually backfires right. Because what you’re starting to see now is, so again, in a private one on one situation, like let’s say you’re having a fight with your your spouse, vulnerability is really important. You need to be able to like, share your emotions and explain what you’re afraid of or what you’re upset about. Like that’s an important thing. But then now that’s being socially rewarded in the town square. And so what you encourage is just a bunch of people to fucking dump their feelings constantly and be upset all the time. And that’s actually not healthy because now you’re like socially validating people feeling upset. And so it encourages people to feel upset more often, and they get upset over slighter and slighter things and they’re being vulnerable. So we’re supposed to applaud them. And so you can see how that turns into a downward spiral of mental health. So anyway, I thought that was super insightful, and I like your critique of authenticity because it is important to know what you feel and think. I think maybe a better definition of authenticity is having an accurate understanding of your own thoughts and feelings. Right? Because a lot of us mask our own thoughts and feelings. That gives the social experience of inauthenticity. It’s like, “Oh, he’s he’s very fake.” Like when we meet somebody who feels “fake”, it’s because they feel one thing, but they say something else. They think one thing, they say the opposite, right? So I think, like the proper form of authenticity is simply just being aligned in thoughts, feelings, actions. The bad version of authenticity is just like, “Well, those are my feelings and fuck you if you don’t like them.”
Derek Sivers
Which it is so easy to see the remedy, which is to just think of it, flipped around from the other person’s point of view. I flew here from Wellington today. If the pilot was in a bad mood today, would I want him to authentically crash the plane because he’s just not feeling it today, man.
Mark
Can you imagine if he came on the intercom and he’s like, “I didn’t sleep well and my wife just left me.” Yeah. You know, you’re like, get me off the plane.
Derek Sivers
I just want to be real with y’all. You know.
Mark
I want my pilot to lie to me.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, I mean, same with the surgeon. You know, you’re having important surgery, and the doctor’s just like, “You know what? I’m sick of this bullshit.” Mid-surgery, “You know, I don’t want to finish today. You know, somebody else sew him up.”
Mark
I’m just being vulnerable.
Derek Sivers
I’m just being real here. Being authentic. So one of my favorite examples is a great customer service. You do not want authenticity from the the nice, what do you call that? Concierge at a hotel or whatever. You might have come in and puked on their floor or whatever and be drenched from the rain. You come in and inside, they might be thinking, “Fuck my life.” But out front they say, “Oh, sir, please let me help you in some way. You know, here’s a towel.” It’s muting your id, the perverse imp inside of you. But you made a great point that it’s important to know your feelings, especially in therapy and in personal relationships and all that. But to go spewing them out like a nudist is not the right strategy to get what you want in life. You have to think about it from the other person’s point of view. Would you want to walk around your city if other people were being nudists? Yeah. “Well, hey, look at my shit, you know. Look at it.” You don’t want that. And so why would you go do that to others?
Mark
Great metaphor, wonderful metaphor, I think.
Derek Sivers
Speaking of my shit. I’ll be right back.
Mark
That is Derek authentic as always.
Derek Sivers
So, audience. For the last 15 minutes, I have been practicing the subtle art of not taking a piss. All right. I couldn’t hold it any longer.
Mark
What were we talking about? Authenticity. Let me segue into something else. Okay, I got something. So we talked earlier about kind of seeing that there’s this game being played that there’s all these useful, not true beliefs that we’re buying into and other people are buying into. And in a lot of ways they’re competing beliefs. And a lot of them we kind of inherit. A lot of them we kind of inherit from our parents and our communities, our schools, our country, our culture. I have personally experienced this, and I’ve talked to a number of people who have experienced this as well. It’s like once you kind of have this realization that nothing is necessarily capital T true, it’s easy to slip into a nihilism. It’s like, well, if nothing is true, then nothing is important and then nothing’s worth doing. I’m curious, have you slipped into that hole at all? And if not, why not? And what would be your advice to somebody who does find themselves slipping into that hole?
Derek Sivers
Ooh. I might not have much to add here because I’m just a naturally happy person.
Mark
You’re so cheery. It’s upsetting.
Derek Sivers
Sorry. You know, it’s funny. You laugh more than me, though. I’ve noticed this both on the podcast, but even audience hey, like, even offline. Mark laughs this much just in like, just random pitter patter conversation. You laugh more than me.
Mark
And you are always this cheery. No matter what is happening. I have to laugh the darkness away.
Derek Sivers
Oh. Okay
Mark
It’s the only way I could survive.
Derek Sivers
What’s Pagliacci? The clown that goes to therapy. Anyway, so I find it so joyous and liberating to say that nothing has any meaning, because that means that it is all free for you to reinvent and adopt whatever perspective you want on things. And anytime somebody passes their morality shit on you and says, that’s bad, what you’re doing is wrong and that’s bad, and this is what you should do. Go, “No, that’s not true.” There are no concrete, absolute moral values. And I think this is proven by the fact that there is always an exception. Anything you could think of, there’s either an exception for certain situations, or there’s another culture on the other side of the Earth operating under a different philosophy that is also thriving and doing just fine without adopting your approach to life. And I’ve found that fascinating recently getting to know cultures in the Middle East. And I’ve been to China once this year, and I’m going back again in nine days. And I think it’s really interesting getting to know other thriving cultures that disagree with the one I grew up in, because then to me, that’s just disproving all of these truisms.
Mark
It’s almost like life itself becomes a creative exercise.
Derek Sivers
Yes.
Mark
Like it’s a form of artistry. Just living and choosing what you believe is like an artistic expression.
Derek Sivers
I mean, let’s go back to the music thing. If somebody said, “Okay, yeah, you can do whatever you want with the chords or whatever, but it has to be in 4/4 time. I mean, you just have to be in 4/4 time. Be like, “Really?” They’re like, “Okay, well maybe 3/4. It’s either 3/4 or 4/4.” You’re like, “I don’t know. Let’s try this. Let’s challenge that notion.”
Mark
My immediate reaction would be to write something in like 9/8 or something off the wall.
Derek Sivers
Yeah and you can take that approach to so many aspects of life where somebody says, “No, it is important, you must be loyal to your blah, blah, blah. You must live your fullest achievement.” Okay, we were talking about business. There was an angle. I didn’t interrupt you before, but when you were talking about making money, I was going to say that behavioral economics and psychology address the topic of feelings that in psychology and in behavioral economics, feelings matter. Where they can say, for example, in the book “The Paradox of Choice” by Barry Schwartz. He pointed out, after many, many studies, that people who are made more aware of all of the options they could have chosen may objectively make a better choice, but they will feel worse about it. Whereas if somebody is given only 30 seconds to make a choice and only shown three options and they’re told that their choice is irreversible and the choice is irreversible. They might not make a technically as good decision as somebody who deeply dove into all 97 options, but they will feel better about their choice. And what I really like about psychology and behavioral economics is acknowledging that feelings matter.
Derek Sivers
So then we get into business and entrepreneurship, and people would say things to me like, “Yeah, but you could have made a lot more money with CD Baby if you would have done such and such.” And I’d say, but I didn’t want to, but it would have made more. Like objectively, it’s just the better choice. You made a stupid choice by choosing to do such and such that you did. And I say, “But this choice made me happier and I was optimizing for my own personal happiness. I was not optimizing for the dollars.” And I think we don’t bring that into the equation even with tech. There is some things that I do tech wise with my server, with my laptop, with the technology that surrounds me that somebody could say, “That’s stupid. Why would you.” I’ll give you a real example. All of my video editing I do on the command line with something called ffmpeg, which you have to use like dozens of little flags and optimizations.
Mark
Oh my God only you Derek, only you.
Derek Sivers
And the funny thing is I own Final Cut Pro. I could just click, click, click and make it happen, but I’m like, but I want to figure it out using ffmpeg. And somebody could objectively say, “You idiot, it’s going to take you an hour to do it this way. It would take a minute to do it this way.” I’m like, “But this makes me happier.” And that matters.
Mark
So one thing that Will Smith used to say all the time is he used to say, “Everything is feelings. All that matters is feelings.” And it was funny because when I first started working with him, that kind of irked me. Because it just kind of goes against a lot of my assumptions and beliefs. And finally, after I spent enough time with him to kind of be comfortable challenging him on things, I challenged him on it. I was like, “You know, I don’t think that’s true.” And he was like, “Of course it’s true.” And I brought up business. I was like, “Well, what about business?” You know, there’s started giving him different business examples. And he was like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. But why are you in business?” And I was like, “Well to make money.” He’s like, “Yeah, why do you want to make money?” He’s like, “Because it makes you feel good. It’s all about feelings.” I was like, all right, I think you got me.
Derek Sivers
Yeah. And I’d say the same thing with tech or just the various decisions we make in life about what kind of home you want to have. You know, you could have a bigger house.
Mark
You’re always optimizing for something. And A, I think it’s very important to be clear about what you’re optimizing for. Because I think a lot of times we optimize for things and we don’t realize it. We just assume the biggest house is going to make us the happiest. We don’t think about whether that’s true or not. We think making more money is going to make us happier. We don’t think if that’s true or not. And so I do think it is useful to get clear about what is your metric. Like, what’s the yardstick you’re measuring progress by?
Derek Sivers
You know what? Even if you don’t get clear on that. Follow that compass inside of you that’s drawing you a certain way, even if you haven’t taken the time yet to spell out exactly why. You know, when people look over my shoulder when I’m using my computer, it’s all just this black terminal screen that I’m typing into. And they’re like, “What are you doing?” Like, I don’t know, I just like this better. And maybe you could lay me down on a shrink’s couch or whatever and try to figure out why I want it this way. Or maybe I could get clear about exactly what my measure is for why I’m choosing this technology. But I just feel myself drawn this way, even though everybody else says, “No, no, no, this is the way.” Like clouds, for example. Everybody uses cloud technology. And I’m like, I just don’t want to. And I haven’t taken the time to describe why, but I do honor my preference. So maybe it’s a little bit about self-confidence and honoring your preference, even if other people are going the other way.
Mark
Well, I think, you know, a quip that I’ve said before is that money is kind of like oxygen. When you don’t have any, it solves everything. And then when you have a lot, it solves nothing. And I think so many people spend a lot of their lives optimizing for money. And when you’re optimizing for money, like by definition, you have to discount your own feelings. You have to suffer. You have to like, do things you don’t necessarily want to do because you’re broke. You got to pay rent, like all that stuff. But the whole point of making money is to not have to optimize for money anymore. Like that is the reward of making money is that you don’t have to optimize for money. Like, I canceled a big book contract this year and gave a bunch of money back. And it was funny. I was talking to my agent and she was like, “Are you sure you want to do this.” Like she kept checking in. She’s like, “You’re triple sure you want to do this?” And I told her I was like, the whole point of all the work I’ve done the last 20 years is to be able to hand a big cheque back to somebody, because I don’t want to do something I don’t want to do, right. Like, that’s the whole point of getting here. If I’m not able to do that then all of this was for nothing.
Derek Sivers
I love that. Nicholas Nassim Taleb said somewhere in one of his books that the money you refuse tastes sweeter than the money you accept.
Mark
Yes.
Derek Sivers
And I thought that was a nice way to put it, too.
Mark
That’s very true.
Derek Sivers
I had a lot of soul searching to do when I sold my company because. Sorry, edit this out if we talked about it before. I don’t remember if we talked about this on the air, but I sold my company for $22 million, and I had eight months in between when we had the handshake deal and the actual wire transfer. And in that eight months, I did a lot of soul searching about, what the fuck am I going to do with $22 million. And no matter how much I daydreamed about it. Sorry, daydreamed about the different possibilities. Not just daydreaming about swimming in a pile of gold, but daydreamed about, like, what would I do? And I would write in my journal, and I would just lay there and think. And I just kept coming back to the conclusion, like, I would feel better without it. I don’t want it. I already had like $4 million from the net profits. And I was like, “That’s enough. I just don’t want it.” And I don’t regret it one bit. So luckily in that eight months it wasn’t too late. I set things up so the entire $22 million went into a charitable trust. It never touched my hands and I was really happy about that decision. I felt like I made that decision when I was feeling very lucid, very grounded and wise. I was like, this is the right thing. This is what I really want. And there might have been little impulsive moments in the years later. I was like, “Oh man, if I had that money. I could buy a townhouse in London right now.” And I’m like, “Well, then it’s a good thing I didn’t.” Because I would have been stupid about it. And it’s like my wiser, lucid past self wisely made it so that it never touched my hands and yeah same as you. I had somebody going, “Are you sure? Yeah. Like this is irreversible. “Yeah. And it felt good.
Mark
And you still feel good about that?
Derek Sivers
Hell yeah. Yeah. So glad.
Mark
What was the thought process behind that? That’s not a normal...
Derek Sivers
I’m going to anonymously throw a friend under the bus. I had a friend who had just sold his company for $30 million a couple years before me, and I saw him doing really stupid things with his money because he just had $30 million sitting in a checking account. And so he was just like, “Yeah, you know, we were walking through London and we saw this building. We were just like, it’s nice, let’s buy it. It’s only $10 million.” And that was the to me, like the, the last straw. I was like, “I never want to say it was only $10 million.’ If I utter that sentence I’ve lost touch with reality. I never want to say that. And so then when I was in the position a year later setting up the deal to sell my company, I was like, “I’m going to make sure that that can’t happen to me. I do not want to have $20 million in my checking account.” I want to take it out of my hands so that I can’t ever be stupid like that.
Mark
The conference that you and I met at, I think in 2013, you gave a talk and the thing that I still think about today from that talk is the phrase, “Luxury is a trap.” And you told a story. I don’t know if it was you or someone you knew, who flew business class and stayed in five star hotels or whatever. And.
Derek Sivers
It’s the same guy.
Mark
Oh. Same guy.
Derek Sivers
Yep.
Derek Sivers
Okay. Same anonymous friend. That was just...
Derek Sivers
Wonderful anti-role model.
Mark
We’re just John. Anti-role model. I like that, that’s a good term. But yeah, so same guy. Got accustomed to flying business class and staying in five star hotels or whatever.
Derek Sivers
Not just business class. Actually, he looked down on business class. He would only fly virgin upper class. Where you get your own cabin. And he, like, just couldn’t sit in business class with other people next to me. I was like, “Oh, God. See?”
Mark
But you made a great point in that like, the human mind quickly adjusts, like your standards will rise to match your reality very quickly. And then you said that phrase. You said luxury is a trap. And I think you mentioned like, “I intentionally will buy economy tickets. I’ll stay in dingy hostels. I’ll make myself walk somewhere when I don’t want to.” Just to like keep yourself grounded in reality. And I was not wealthy yet when I heard that talk. But since becoming wealthy like that has stuck with my wife and I quite a bit. We actually mentioned that to each other, like something will happen and we’ll just look at each other and be like, luxury is a trap.
Derek Sivers
Yeah. Nice.
Mark
Yeah.
Derek Sivers
You know what? Let’s pivot on that point. As we were walking in here before we hit record, I talked about Abraham Maslow’s quote that I heard when I was a teenager. And that one you just said the luxury is a trap was not a quote, but it was an idea from the book “Stumbling on Happiness” by Daniel Gilbert.
Mark
I love that book.
Derek Sivers
Good. And I think something that I’ve done in life that people say I’m weird about or, you know, the things that I’ve done that make people say I’m weird are, I will read...
Mark
There’s only one thing?
Derek Sivers
I’ll read a little idea like that in a book and I’ll say, “Oh, hell yeah. I’m going to live by this. Now that is a great way to think.” So. In Stumbling on Happiness, he just used the example of the sunglasses. He said, “Here’s how adaptation works. You have a pair of sunglasses. You’ve had them for a long time. You walk into a shop and you see another pair of sunglasses and you say, ‘Ooh, I’d be happier if I had that pair of sunglasses.’” He said, “So you buy them. And in that moment where you still have the memory of the old ones and you put the new ones on, you’re still comparing them in your head. And in that moment you are experiencing joy for a few minutes.” And he said, “But pretty soon you discard the old ones and the new ones that made you happy for a couple of minutes now are just your sunglasses. They’re not your new ones anymore, they’re just yours.” He said, “All the hedonic comparison has stopped. The joy is in the moment of comparison. As soon as the comparison is gone, the joy is gone.” And I read that one idea. I remember where I was in 2007, where I read that and I went, “Whoa!” I was like, “Yes, I need to live my life by this.”
Derek Sivers
So when that moment comes up and it happens all the damn time, don’t just think that I’m some monk. All the damn time, I come across a moment where I see, like, a car and I’m like, “Oh, that would be nice.” Or even like a new electric bicycle or something like that, because I live in really hilly Wellington where it’s like, “Oh, it sucks cycling uphill.” And I go, “Ooh, that’d be nice.” And I feel that feeling and I catch myself and I go, “It would be nice for a few minutes.” I am not going to spend $16,000 on something that would be nice for a few minutes. And I just stop and I go, okay, I’ll let the moment pass. It was a wonderful daydream for a few minutes and I just don’t buy the thing. So another core idea that I live my life by was something I heard when I was 15, in high school taking a psychology class, and they quoted Abraham Maslow with his pyramid of self-actualization. And on that same page, it was just kind of like a biography of famous psychologists.
Derek Sivers
He said, “Life is a constant choice between safety and risk. Make the growth choice a hundred times a day.” And I remember as like a 15 year old seeing this going, “Whoa, yes, yes, this is how I want to live my life.” So since I was 15 and I’m 55 now, I have been following that at every little decision every day. Including like where to live, what I do, what I stop doing, deciding to edit my videos on the command line instead of just clicking the easy way. This is the growth choice for me to learn these ffmpeg commands and do it on a terminal on my own hardware, without doing things in the cloud. I’m like, that’s the growth choice. It’s the harder one, but this will give me more skills. I will level up my personal capabilities to edit things, even when I’m on any $5 computer or without an internet connection. Sorry, I’m picking dumb, shallow examples, but you know, we all have examples like this, and I lead my life following some of these great little principles. Uh,
Mark
Would you say that in “Useful Not True” the usefulness is determined by the growth.
Derek Sivers
Useful is only determined for you personally. It’s so personal. You can’t tell somebody else, “This is useful for me. So it’s useful for you.” No,it’s all what you want. You know who astounds me and frustrates me is Jordan Peterson. Yeah, because in some ways, or some times he says things that make me go, “Whoa, that’s brilliant.” And then he’ll conclude the point with saying, “And that’s just the way it is. Because, you know, Moses did this and that and therefore this, that. And God says this and that’s that.” And he opens up things I never thought to open up, but then he closes them too early.
Mark
That’s an interesting way to describe him, because I have a similar kind of love hate with his books and his material. Like I found them so enriching over the years, and I’ve met him a couple times and he’s been lovely in person and have had good conversations with him. But yeah, there’s a frustration there. Like, there’s something a little bit paradoxical about him where he expands your world because he’s so well-read and he has such a deep understanding of psychology and philosophy and literature and religion. And he’ll draw all these connections that you’ve never considered before, and you’re just like, “Whoa, like Dostoyevsky and the Bible and and Jung and and lobsters and like, communism.” Yeah. And you’re just like, “Whoa, this is incredible.” And then yeah it ends in this, like, very pithy absolute. That if you don’t agree with or you don’t follow this like you’re evil and you’re part...
Derek Sivers
You need to get your shit straight.
Mark
You’re part of the problem bucko. And then he loses me, and I’m like, I was with you. Like the young and the lobsters and the Dostoyevsky. I was fucking right there with you, dude. And some of the moral absolutism that comes with it frustrates me at times.
Derek Sivers
But yet I’ll bet you can also understand it because you grew up religious.
Derek Sivers
You understand the benefits of let’s all agree on the values here. It’s like, let’s all align. Iceland is a very peaceful place because it’s very homogenous. So if we all can just align and agree on this canon, this value system, then the world is a great, harmonious place.
Mark
Yeah, for sure.
Mark
I am definitely contrarian, especially living in LA. I am definitely contrarian in that I unabashedly see him as a net positive, simply because I think there are a lot of people who grew up in environments that I grew up in. Like they grew up in very religious, conservative environments, and they never had an intellectual to look up to, like somebody really smart. Like that was actually my first thought when I stumbled across Jordan. Like readers started emailing me about him. I think probably around like 2015, 2016, and the first time I started watching his videos, probably around then, and that was the first thing that struck me, is I said, “This is the first time I’ve encountered a very religious, very conservative person who is incredibly intellectually brilliant.” And as a millennial who grew up in the 2000, you know, with George W Bush and all the evangelical shit, like, I’d never encountered that before. It was like all the intellectuals were on the left, and all the intellectuals were atheists. And so I can totally see why, if you’re a young person growing up in that part of the world with that culture and that background and that religion, he is like a fucking lifeline for you. So I appreciate that about him. But yeah, he sometimes loses me with some of the religious absolutes and the moral absolutes. For sure.
Derek Sivers
But yet I don’t always disagree. I can see where he’s coming from, even when he’s like, absolute. And that’s I mean, one of the ones that bothered me the most is when he said so and so and so and all these important things and all these interesting things he was saying and something, “But if a woman doesn’t want to have children, I mean, she just lost the whole point of humanity. I mean, why do you even exist except to have children? That’s what women are for. Women are here to have children. That’s that. If you disagree with that, you’ve lost touch with your entire biological makeup.” And I’m like not necessarily true. Might be useful for you to believe that.
Mark
Might be useful for you, bucko. I love that he says that, bucko.
Derek Sivers
Oh, wait. He actually does?
Mark
He does.
Derek Sivers
I thought you made that up. I thought it was a great ad lib.
Mark
No no, no. It’s always when he’s on one of these, like, angry kind of moralistic tirades. And he’ll always finish it with like, “Well, that’s good for you, bucko.” And I love it. It reminds me of, like, my uncles in Texas. No, I think he ultimately I do think he’s a good role model for a lot of people. And I think the intellectualism that he’s introducing, he’s introducing a very curious and intellectual approach to, I think a lot of people who never had an intellectual outlet before. Especially like a lot of young men from religious backgrounds. And so I applaud that. I see that as a good thing.
Derek Sivers
Hey, before we close off the subject, I didn’t interject earlier about nihilism. There is a beautiful book called, I believe it’s called “Nothing and Everything” by a pseudonym. Author goes by Val N Tine. I don’t know, the author wanted to stay anonymous. It’s near the top of my book list. If you go to my website sive.rs/book. I sort the books with my highest recommendations at the top, so “Nothing and Everything” is a joyous book about nihilism. It’s about the joy of nihilism, about a world where everything is permitted. Nothing has inherent meaning. You are free to assign meaning where you want it to be and not where you don’t. It is such a beautiful book. It was one of those ones that I had to stop underlining because it was just every sentence. Yes, yes, yes. So I highly recommend it.
Mark
Well, it’s funny because the nihilism thing, I’ve definitely struggled with that on and off over the years. And actually part of my second book, “Everything Is Fucked”, was like inspired by my struggle with that. And the conclusion I landed on is that, you know, if there’s no reason to do anything, there’s also no reason to not do anything. There’s no reason to not love who you want to love or make whatever you want to make, or pursue the goals that you want to pursue. Like it is a liberation if you choose to look at it that way. And I think ultimately this is what like the existentialists were getting at, is that ultimately meaning is constructed, it’s not found, it’s not inherent. Meaning is constructed through action and through action that feels useful. That is ultimately like what imbues our life with a sense of meaning and derive satisfaction so that’s where I landed. And it was funny because when I was touring for that book, a number of readers came up to me and they said that they were like, “You know, there’s a name for this.” And I said, “No.” And they said, “It’s called optimistic nihilism.” It’s like a very obscure kind of... I think there’s a community on Reddit or something, but it’s a very obscure kind of small sub niche of a sub niche. But yeah, it’s a thing, optimistic nihilism, if nothing means anything, then you you’re free to be whoever you want and create the life that you want.
Derek Sivers
Count me in as member number four to that group. Hey, so how much time do we have? What time is it?
Mark
Okay, we got time.
Derek Sivers
Relationship stuff. I have listened to a lot of your episodes. Not all of them, but I know that you talk about relationship things way more than I do. You think about them more than I do. And I am being way vulnerable right now to decide to talk about this on...
Mark
Everybody applaud Derek’s vulnerability.
Derek Sivers
To talk about this on the podcast before we even talked about it privately. As soon as I started to mention this privately, you were just like, save it, save.
Mark
It, save it.
Derek Sivers
Because a lot of people feel the same way you do, which is, I don’t want a relationship. And that took a while to admit because it’s just this thing that we all must do. I felt like from the age of 14 until two years ago. Felt like a lot of my life’s energy. Maybe most of my life’s energy, most of my daily energy was spent either finding or minding a relationship all those years. If I wasn’t in one, I was looking for one. If I was in one, I was spending so much of my life energy like managing it. Trying to compromise and trying to make somebody else happy, and spent so many years of my life doing that. And I’ve got an unfair advantage in that I have a son already. He’s 12 years old and he and I have the best damn relationship. It’s amazing. And this biological reason to have a relationship, it’s like, if nothing else, I mean, if you want to have kids, well, then you’re going to have to. I’ve already got that. And I can’t think of any reason why I not you, not anybody else should have a relationship.
Derek Sivers
And I’ll add the one other unfair advantage is that I’ve got a little fame so I can go to a place like London or any major city and show up and email the 400 people I know in that place or cherry pick 10 interesting people of the 400 I know in this place and say let’s meet. Not with romantic intentions, but I can’t imagine that I would be that lonely in the future, because that would be the other thing. Before I had any fame at all, I did very deliberately get into a bad relationship because I thought if I don’t, I’ll be lonely. That was like after I sold my company and I knew that I was leaving America forever. I was like, “I need to get a girlfriend now, because if I don’t, I’m going to be out there as a digital nomad and I’m going to be lonely.” So I just went and, like, grabbed the first willing girl like you. You’re hot. You seem into it. Let’s let’s do this. And it was a bad mistake because it was coming from the bad place. I was only getting into that relationship because I was worried that I would be lonely.
Mark
Which is why a lot of people get into relationships.
Derek Sivers
Right. And even somebody just two days ago, I was talking about this with one other person. It’s kind of a new thing to me that I’m processing, like literally this week, even if you would have just called me privately this week and said, “What’s on your mind?” It’s this thing. I’m confused by my not wanting a relationship in the same way that like, if I was not eating food and like two weeks had passed and I had no desire to eat any food, I’d think I’m supposed to be eating food, right? Should I make myself eat food? I’m like, I’m supposed to be wanting a life partner, right? Should I be making myself get a life partner even though I don’t want one? I’m not sure how to think about this. What do you think, Mark?
Mark
Well, it’s interesting, I think, uh on an episode with Drew, maybe 3 or 4 months ago. He dug up a stat that found that for the first time since they’ve started measuring it, a majority of single people are not looking for a relationship. They’re not dating. They’re not actively dating. So they’re not necessarily saying, “I won’t date anybody.” But they’re not looking. They’re not trying. They’re not meeting people. They’re just like being single. And anecdotally, I have noticed quite a few... It’s usually middle aged women, but I’ve noticed a lot of single parents, kind of land in the same boat.
Derek Sivers
And it’s because you have a really fulfilling relationship with your kid.
Mark
And like you said, that biological imperative is already taken care of. And you probably get to this place where, like, you feel happy and stable and you’re confident in yourself. And dating is hard, it’s awkward. It’s weird. There’s a lot of awkward conversations, and, I don’t know, like, I think the older you get, the less patience you have for just dealing with people or social situations that you don’t really want to be around. So I have run into it quite a bit, and I actually think that the data showing that most single people are not actively dating, my guess is that it’s just because the population is aging. And older people just date less often, I think most 20 year old single people are probably actively dating. I would guess 90% plus are trying to get a date or have been on a date in the last year. I imagine once you get up into the 40s, 50s, 60s, that drops off quite a bit. My take on this is...
Derek Sivers
I’ll add one more thing. I should have mentioned earlier, I was in a relationship for two years. I broke up with her two years ago. She was a wonderful woman in every other way. But I could just tell that, like, our ultimate life goals were just...
Mark
Way far apart.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, it was like this. Sorry, if you’re watching the camera. It’s like we had this kind of intersection of, like, two lines heading in opposite directions. That did intersect for a little while. And it was good. But I could just tell. Like stick it out. We’re just going to get farther and farther apart. So I did the difficult and painful thing of breaking up the relationship. And it’s been the happiest two years of my life. Oh my God. I mean, there was a little sadness for like a month and then, you know, sorry, Jane, but the last two years. Oh my God, I’ve been like, so happy. Maybe that’s how I started this story. Like this life energy that I used to put into finding or minding is all free to be put into more things. Now I’m doing my work instead of like, taking care of a miserable person, you know? And I’m like making things instead of being out trying to find somebody. It’s been the best two years of my life. Obviously something’s working here. I feel great. But again, like if any of you have ever fasted for like ten days, the one thing I found in... I did it once, I fasted for ten days and I told somebody I did that and he goes, “Oh, he said, I fasted for two weeks. Are you still at the point like you wonder why you ever used to eat?” I went, Yes!” Because that’s what it feels like after you get past the 2 or 3 day hump. Like the first 2 or 3 days are hard. After the third day, you wonder why you ever used to eat. And so you have to kind of, like, make yourself eat when you don’t want to. So I’ve wondered, am I there relationship wise.
Mark
It would be interesting once your kid grows up and goes off on his own. I’ll be interested to see if this shifts at all. I also just understand, like where you’re, like, middle age makes sense to me. Like, I understand why young people are obsessed with dating. Because you’ve got your whole life in front of you, and you want to find your person. And it’s like a huge part of forging your identity and figuring out your status. And like all these things go and you’re also just really fucking horny. So, like, there’s all this stuff going on when you’re young, that makes sense. And I also understand why older people, like elderly people, would want to date mostly just for companionship. Life is simple and it can be very lonely if you don’t have somebody, so that makes sense to me, too. Middle aged people, especially middle aged people who are single parents. It totally makes sense to me that they just check out because you’re still in the prime of your life. You’ve got all sorts of projects going on, you’ve got all these trips you want to take. You want to write another book, you want to go over here, you want to move to this country like all this stuff’s going on and you’re still caretaking the child, which requires a lot of your emotional energy. And and you’re also probably if that’s going well, you’re probably getting a lot of your emotional needs met from your relationship with your child.
Mark
You’re feeling very fulfilled and a lot of intimacy and companionship. And you know you’re having a good time with somebody you love. And so I can see how that itch just isn’t there. And your needs are being met through other means. So, yeah, none of this totally surprises me. My take on this and this is true of both children and partners. I think both are overrated in terms of happiness. And a lot of people get really upset when I say this about romantic partners, but, like, you can be a perfectly happy person being single and it’s in fact if you have a bad romantic relationship, it can make you much less happy than being single. A romantic relationship is one method and probably a very useful method to get getting a lot of your needs met emotionally. But it’s not the only method. And I think similarly with children, children are a very immediate way to fulfill a sense of purpose and meaning and, you know, have a long term goal and vision and also get a lot of your emotional needs met. But again, they’re not the only way. So it’s like a lack of a child or a lack of a romantic partner. It doesn’t mean you can’t still satiate those emotional needs and desires. It just means you have to find them somewhere else. And that can be more difficult or complicated depending on...
Derek Sivers
Or it could be a good thing. It’s like someone who always wanted kids and couldn’t get kids, and because of that, they’re out volunteering at the children’s hospital, and they have all this energy to give to many kids. Because they don’t have one kid. I think that’s almost how I’m feeling about my life for the last two years. It’s like because I’m not putting my energy into making one person happy, I get to put my energy out.
Mark
my wife and I are at a point now where it’s clear we’re not going to have kids. And I have felt the exact same thing in the last year or two, like, I really had this. It really sunk in for me, maybe like a year and a half ago where I realized I’m going to have such a surplus of time and energy and freedom that for the next 18 years that most of my peers are not going to have. So let’s fucking use this well. Like, let’s really take advantage of it. Like give back, build something amazing. Do something amazing. So that’s actually been very motivating for me. It’s like, reignited a lot of my ambition just having that realization. But in staying faithful to your book, Useful Not True. Here we are jamming about how great it can be to not have a relationship, not have kids.
Derek Sivers
Bucko.
Mark
Bucko. Let’s flip. Let’s take the Jordan Peterson perspective. Because I do think there is a legitimate argument here, which is that the more free and autonomous we become in modern society, the easier it is to opt out of starting a family. And the more people that opt out of starting families, whether it’s through marriage, kids, whatever. The fertility rate drops, you get a more fragmented, atomized community. You know, there’s a lot of second and third order effects that are negative of this liberation that you and I are beaming about at the moment. And so I hold both of those things as true simultaneously.
Derek Sivers
Can you imagine if there was some statistical reason why a certain percentage of us should be in jail and somebody would tell, “You know, Mark, you really should sit in jail for a number of years because it’s for the greater good.” And you’d be like, “I get your argument, but I just don’t want to be sitting in jail.” You know, it’s like somebody saying like, “Well, Mark, you know, the biological da da da.” You’re like, “I get your argument, but I just don’t want kids.” And I was thinking about how some people say that they knew from an early age that they were gay. And I think, you know, my whole life, looking back, I’ve never wanted a life partner. All of my visions for my ideal life were always just like me in the world. It was never me partnered with one person. I always just kind of wanted to be me out in the world. And some people feel very differently. Most of my friends I know their life vision for their ultimate life. Their ideal life is to be partnered with one person, “And I imagine, me and my spouse, and we have this. That’s my dream life. That’s what I want.” Great. Then they should keep pursuing that. But I think I’m admitting that my dream life never included that. It’s weird feeling reluctant to honor that. I still somehow feel it’s wrong. But maybe in the same way that if you’re in Silicon Valley and you’re in Y Combinator and everybody says, “well, you need a co-founder, but you can’t be a solo founder, you know, statistically, we found out that that does not work. We’ll fund you if you have a co-founder.” But I just don’t want a co-founder. You need a co-founder. Why am I such a bad person for not wanting a co-founder? I feel a bit like that.
Mark
Really? What do you think that comes from? It’s funny, I think this is the first time since I’ve known you for 12 years. I think it’s the first time I’ve seen you express anxiety around social judgment or second guess yourself based on social norms.
Derek Sivers
Because it seems so, like, right there next to biology. You know, that’s why I said it’s like, okay, I’ve already got a kid. But it feels like the next closest thing to, like, “Well, that’s just true is like, you got to have a life partner. That’s just what you do.” It’s like, we hear it in every bit of fiction, every bit of Hollywood and novels or whatever. It’s just like, that’s what you do. It’s almost like the little picture of the sperm and the egg. Well, that’s what they’re here for. They’re just looking the soulmate and all of that, I think, “But yeah, I don’t feel it.”
Mark
It’s interesting. I think statistically, if you look at it, women check out. Like what you’re feeling. You see actually see much more among women. Like they just kind of check out of dating. They’re like, “I’m good. Don’t need anybody.” Men tend to kind of compulsively remarry or like, always feel the need. But it’s funny because there’s way less judgment towards men. Like, nobody looks at a single 60 year old man and is like, “Well, what’s wrong with him?” You know, whereas like, a single woman will definitely get that comment.
Derek Sivers
See, I don’t think of it from the outside at all. That’s why when you say this is the first time I’ve heard you, you know.
Mark
So it’s not socially driven at all?
Derek Sivers
No it’s not.
Mark
Okay. My understanding of Derek Sivers restored remains intact.
Derek Sivers
No, it’s only coming from, it’s like everything I’ve ever read about happiness, health. You know, they say it’s like the greatest killer of the elderly is loneliness or whatever. I’m coming from that place. I’m thinking, like, shouldn’t I be concerned? That’s why I made the comparison with food. Like, shouldn’t I be concerned about my lack of desire for this thing?
Mark
But there’s plenty of ways to get companionship and solve loneliness without having a romantic partner. Again, every time I post this, I get backlash. But it’s true. I mean, if you look at the research, if you look at the data, it’s like people with romantic partners are statistically not any happier than people without them. It’s just true. It’s a fact. Whereas if you look at people with no friends versus people with a lot of friends, people with a lot of friends are much happier than people with no friends.
Derek Sivers
Speaking of Drew. Drew, you are the reason I am here. Because I live in Wellington, which is only a one hour flight away. But when Coldplay heard that Mark Manson was going to be in town.
Mark
They fuck my shit up completely
Derek Sivers
They came in and booked all of their stuff this week when Mark was here, because they just wanted to be in the same city as him. So there were no flights at all yesterday, and the only flight I could get was like a 6 a.m. flight that I had to get up at 3:30 this morning, and it was a $1,000 flight for a silly little one hour just to come see Mark. And when he said, like, “Hey, I’m going to be in Auckland and this is my only free day.” I thought, “Oh, cool.” And then I looked at the flight. I went, ah. And and then I was listening to Drew’s, mentioning on just a few episodes ago where he talked about, like, flying for a friend’s anniversary dinner. And he was giving his arguments why I went, “Yeah. All right. Mark.” Because I was like, I’m going to spend the thousand bucks and wake up at 4 a.m. to come up to see you today. So it’s because of Drew.
Mark
I appreciate it. We all appreciate it. And yeah fuck Coldplay. I can’t tell you. I can’t tell you. So I’m doing my speaking tour. Auckland’s my last stop, and I can’t tell you how many New Zealanders have emailed me. And they’re like, “Well, I want to come, but Coldplay is playing the same night.” And I’m just like, God damn it.
Derek Sivers
It’s not even like it’s the Rolling Stones. Coldplay. Who cares about Coldplay? But apparently Auckland. In fact, I’m babysitting two rats all week because their owners are friends of mine in New Zealand. They’re having me babysit their rats this week.
Mark
To go see Coldplay?
Derek Sivers
Because they flew up to Auckland for the whole week to see Coldplay three times. We’re a little starved for entertainment here in the New Zealand, this little Pacific island.
Mark
We need to talk New Zealand. We need to have a heart to heart here. We need to get vulnerable here. You need bette heroes, better stars. Anything else? Is there anything else we haven’t touched on?
Derek Sivers
Let’s find out.
Mark
Oh, we’re almost done. All right. Anything. Anything else you would like to cover in our last few minutes here
Mark
In the last podcast.
Derek Sivers
I’m really glad that you are ceasing this podcast format. Even though it has been a proven success for you, it is objectively successful for you.
Derek Sivers
Yes it is.
Mark
It has been a hit. And I think we probably said it in the first episode, but the first one was really funny where it was like on a Wednesday you texted me saying, “I’m going to be starting this new podcast. Do you think in a couple of weeks you might want to come on it.” I said, “Well, in two days I’m leaving for Israel, so let’s do it. Tomorrow is my only free day.” And you know, by text he went, “Ha ha ha ha ha! Fuck it. Let’s do it. See you tomorrow.” And so we jumped in and did the very first one with one day’s notice. I think he even said, like, my producer is going to shit a brick, but fuck it, let’s do this. And then walking in today, you told me that you were going to not cease the podcast, but cease this format to do something that I think is way more creative, way more you, way more innovative and all that stuff we said earlier about like it’s just less done in the world. And I think it’s going to be more helpful to your audience because of that. I think it’s going to be more interesting, more educational, more helpful, more useful. And I’m really proud and glad that you had the balls to cease something that was successful.
Mark
Thank you, I appreciate that and I figured of all the people I know in my life, I figured you would understand immediately.
Derek Sivers
It’s the the music comparison, you know. That really hit me hard. This idea of Bob Dylan was such a huge success as the troubadour with the acoustic guitar man, and that’s what everybody loved about him. And then he went and headlined at the Newport Folk Festival full of other folkies, and that’s where he chose to go electric. And I love that. It was like there’s a recording of somebody out in the audience yelling, “Judas! How dare you betray us?” And that’s what you have to do artistically to keep yourself pushing forward, or maybe even just as a smart person to keep yourself interested and challenge yourself. So yeah audience, I hope you take this role model, take it as yet another, you know, David Bowie, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan and Mark Manson did it. You can do it.
Mark
Oh my God, that’s a lot to live up to.
Derek Sivers
I’m trying to get closing. We’re trying to come to an ending here. That’s what we’re doing.
Mark
You’re killing it. You’re killing it. No, you’re selling it much better than than I would. So I appreciate that. Derek, it’s been a pleasure, as always.
Derek Sivers
Thanks.
Mark
Perfect bookends to this period of my creative life. And to the audience, there will be a more formal announcement, probably in the next week or two, about what we’re doing. I’m extremely excited. It’s going to be very different. And I think you guys are actually going to like it a lot better as well. In the meantime, where can people find you?
Derek Sivers
Go to my website. By the way, this Useful Not True book we’ve been talking about. It’s not on Amazon, and I won’t put it on Amazon for a year. This is my little way of thinking about what would make me happy. I set up my own little store where I get to sell things for the price that I think is fair, not what Amazon tells me to sell them for. So Useful Not True is only at sivers.com. But the main thing that I always want to tell the audience is that the reason I do these podcasts is not to sell another fucking $10 book. Who cares? But I really love the people that I meet that find me because of a show like this. And unlike most people, unlike seemingly almost everybody, I really enjoy my email inbox. So I still have an open email inbox, and I spend about 60 to 90 minutes a day answering emails from strangers. And I really like it. Maybe because I’m here on this little Pacific island, you know, it’s like kind of cool to hear from people from Estonia and Kenya that heard your show and email me. So yeah, anybody listening to this, go to my website sive.rs and send me an email. Introduce yourself, say hello. Ask me anything.
Mark
Amazing. Thank you Derek. That’s it.