Interintellect
host: Anna Gát
Group salon about toxic positivity, rootedness, conflicting views, what's useful, distance.
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Transcript:
Anna Gát
Derek Sivers, welcome. Thanks for calling in from tomorrow from New Zealand. I’m privately really like relaxed by the fact that we’re still going tomorrow. It’s not something to be taken for granted these days. I’m holding in my hand your fifth book, Useful Not True. I kind of felt it was true, so we will talk about the paradox. Welcome to InterIntellect. How are you doing?
Derek Sivers
Thanks, good. I want to make it clear. I’m not here to promote a book. I just sent that to you as a little souvenir or something if you want to talk about it, but I’m not doing any kind of book promotion circuit. I have admired your work for a long time. By the way, anybody listening, Anna is one of the few people that I’ve reached out to to say hello the first time. Usually, I just answer incoming emails from people who reach out to me saying, “Hey, I heard you here. I read you there.” But Anna is one of the few that I contacted first.
Anna Gát
I thought he was a bot.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, so I read Anna’s writing. I read a couple of your Substacks and I went into some of your stuff and went, “Wow, you’re really interesting.” When I really admire an author, whether it’s a book or a blog or something, I take my time to go find the contact info and tell them, “Hey, I really like your writing. I really like what you’re doing.” But I only do that maybe six times a year. So I emailed Anna, I think it was one or two years ago saying, “Hey, I really like what you’re doing.” And you sent me a tiny little one-sentence reply, which I guess makes sense if you thought I was a bot. You just kind of said, “What did you find interesting?” That was all you said. And so I replied back.
Anna Gát
That’s my captcha. Prove you’re human. It worked.
Anna Gát
So it’s an honor to be talking to you today. Same for you. I had no idea that I was in such an exclusive club. There’s the SNL five-timers club, and the Derek Sivers reach out club. Kind of on par. I’m very flattered. Thank you so much. InterInsect has been a collective major fan of yours since forever. And I just love this journey that I kind of observed you go through, which is the start in technology. And a lot of people here, I’m sure... Hands up who’s an engineer. So a lot of people are still trying to manipulate code. And then you kind of went from building tech to helping people engineer their lives with the same kind of minimalism, with the very simple heuristics. And what I love about this book, and guys, don’t buy this book, okay? Derek is not here to promote this. Do not go on the internet right now and buy either electronic or this beautiful, super ugly physical form. Don’t read it.
Anna Gát
I read it. It’s great. But I’m a contrarian. I do what the opposite of what I preach. It’s basically koans, where you try to explain people what is true and why it doesn’t matter. In the series, do you want to maybe just talk about this a little bit? Just tell us how you ended up writing a book about truth and why it all feels true despite your misgivings about it.
Derek Sivers
Well, a couple things. I had many friends and people that I care about that seemed to be stuck in life because they had a strong sense that their story about their past is true. “I was wronged by this person. I’m unlucky. I’m bad at this.” Or sometimes even a positive self-story can get you stuck. Like, “I am brilliant. I’m great at this. I am at the top of my game.” Either one of those can get you kind of stuck. If you think that you’re already brilliant, well, then you think you have nothing more to learn and you end up being one of those too-successful people that only talks and never listens. Or if you really think that it’s just an absolute fact that you were wronged in the past and that you’re unlucky, well, then it just changes the way that you approach life if you think that everything’s crap and the world is stacked against you. By the way, if it’s not clear, I would argue that those stories are not necessarily true. It’s only one way of looking at your past or one way of looking at the situation to think you’re at the top of the game or to think that you were unlucky in the past.
Derek Sivers
But then more importantly, I often deliberately adopt a belief system that works for me. So for example, in my first book, I said, “Business is a place where you get to make a utopia. When you make a business, you make all the rules. Business is not about making money. It’s about generosity.” And every now and then somebody would push back on that saying, “Hey, that’s not necessarily true.” I’d say, “I never said it was true. I said that it’s useful for me to believe this because if I believe this, then I will act in such a way where I think from first principles or look for chances to be generous instead of look for chances to profit. Thinking this way improves my actions.” And then in my second book, I said something like, “I assume men and women are the same because I had a tendency to overvalue the differences between men and women when actually I think the differences among men and the differences among women are greater than the differences in general between men and women. So from now on, I’ve just decided to believe that men and women are the same.” And somebody would push back saying, “Hey, that’s not true. Men and women are different.” I’d say, “I didn’t say it was true. I’m saying I’m choosing to believe this because if I believe it, it adjusts my actions in the way that I want them to go.”
Derek Sivers
So finally, I realized there’s a common thread I keep having to explain here is that I choose my beliefs because they’re useful, not because they’re true. So hence the title in the book. And we could go more into that.
Anna Gát
I love it. And I often think about the utility of truth and also that the truth is so often in the consequences. When you’re wondering whether somebody is your friend or not, it’s not real, right? But those two timelines will be very different. So it will become clear. It will become true in the consequences.
Anna Gát
But I was really surprised. I mean, one of your most famous essays online is the one where you say that everything is your fault. We have psychotherapists here in the room. I’m sure they have a lot of thoughts on this where you kind of go against the traditional talk therapy, you know, “Good Will Hunting”: “It’s not your fault”. And you say, “No, it’s my fault. This person lied to me. That’s my fault. Why did I create a situation where they felt that they had to lie?” Et cetera, et cetera. But then in the new book in “Useful, Not True,” you actually reveal that that’s almost like a compensation belief because you have a natural tendency, maybe, to blame other people. So you can grab that instinct and just kind of flip it.
Anna Gát
Does it sound familiar, guys, here in the room? Is this something that you sometimes do? Do that counterbalance your kind of knee-jerk reaction with the exact opposite? Kaylee, you have your hand up.
Kaylee
Yeah. So I started taking philosophy classes to try to get to the bottom of this because I kept stumbling over it so much in my own life. And it’s the thing of almost everything can be true all the time. And so how do you decide what to sift out of the mix and keep as what’s true for you? And so that’s why I’m here today. I don’t have an answer. I’m just wrestling with it myself.
Derek Sivers
Cool. If you don’t mind me putting in one important clarification at the beginning here:
Derek Sivers
When I started writing this book (Useful Not True), I had the title first. And so of course, with a title like that, I think, “Oh, damn, I better define the word true since I’m going to be talking about it.” And I realized that anything, like you just said, many things can be true, right? Once you define something as true, it’s like a closed subject. It’s a fact, and that’s that. We don’t debate whether a square really has four sides or not. We don’t debate whether there’s a glass on this table right now. It’s just true. There’s just a glass on my table. A square has four sides. I’m not going to waste time re-thinking that. It’s just a fact, and that’s that. But everything else, if you say it’s not necessarily true, it opens it up to other options. And then it means that you can reconsider something. You can keep looking for another perspective. So at the first page of the book, I say, “Hey, from now on, I just want you to know, whenever I say the word true, what I mean is necessarily, absolutely, objectively, empirically true for everyone, everywhere, always. And only if it meets all those criteria, we can call it true.” And it’s closed, and that’s that. It’s just a fact. But everything else, like if somebody that you look up to says, “Here’s what you need to do with your life,” anything they say in that moment is not true. It’s just one way of looking at it. And anytime somebody says, “I believe,” whatever they say next is not true. Because if it was a fact, there would be no need to say, “I believe.” They could just point to the fact, and that’s that. There’s no need to share your insight, because your insight is a thing of the mind, which is not the only way to look at it. So sorry to get wonky at the beginning, but anytime you hear me say the word “true”, I just want to be clear that when we say not true, it doesn’t mean false. It just means that there could be another way of looking at it.
Anna Gát
When you mention emotions as well, which is kind of my pet peeve or pet theory that most emotions are not true. They are kind of expressing information in themselves, and if the information available was enough, we wouldn’t need emotions. In show business, there’s this rule, I grew up in show business, where the people who are in tabloid magazines are not successful, because actors who are busy making movies don’t have time to be like, “Here are my children and my carrots growing in my garden,” because they are filming somewhere. To me, that’s how emotions are. They are the tabloid media, when you’re not busy enough with your work, aka with reality. But at the same time, this is also not true, right? Because there are emotions that are true signals in the moment. There are emotions that stay with you for a very long time and kind of prove themselves to you, “We are real.” But probably something that is an illustrative emotion is not, strictly speaking, true. But you can’t really go up to a crying person and be like, “Hey, you’re wrong,” or at least that would not be very beneficial for your relationship with this person.
Anna Gát
How do you feel? Was there something about emotions that you realized while writing this book? Any surprising things about truth that you didn’t know until you started actually putting it down on paper?
Derek Sivers
Well, everything you just heard me say about truth two minutes ago, I didn’t know any of that in advance. That was a lot of reading and soul searching, to think of how I think of the word “true.” And I think the most important thing there is that when you call something true, in your mind, that’s a closed subject. No more questioning. It’s just true. But emotions, yeah, you realize that your emotions change, well, your emotions actually start with a thought. There’s some kind of belief that happens before the emotions.
Derek Sivers
I got in a really interesting slow motion debate in Shenzhen, China, with a guy that didn’t speak very good English. He had to recall every single word. So the conversation went at this speed. But at that speed, we handled one of the most interesting philosophical conversations I’ve ever had, sitting by the river, where we were arguing about whether the thought or the emotion comes first. And he said, “No, no, no, the emotion comes first and later we rationalize.” And I pushed back saying, “No, think about this for a second. Your emotions, say, for example, whether you think that somebody wronged you. First comes from a thought of what it means to be right and wrong. ”This person wronged me because they didn’t return my call.“ Well, first, that starts with a thought that if you call somebody, they’re supposed to call you back. That’s a belief system. You can imagine that there is a culture on earth somewhere where nobody’s expected to call anybody back.
Anna Gát
For example, with the salt in China, right? I don’t know if you’re in the UK, you have to be like, ”Oh, darling, please, could you help with the salt?“ But if you do that in China or where I’m from, your wife is like, ”Why do you talk to me like I’m a stranger? What did you do?“
Derek Sivers
Oh, wait, Anna, did you grow up with this too? With these kind of manners?
Anna Gát
Yeah, you know. In Budapest, if you meet a couple and they are like overly courteous to each other, everybody’s creeped-out so hard. They are like pervs. This is a pervy couple. Like, why are they so polite to each other? Which is weird because 100 years ago, they would address each other, a formal you in public, right? Like you would have a married couple and in public, even in the public spaces in their homes, they would use the equivalent of vu or z in German, usted. Like there’s a formal you in Hungarian, but today devolved into like we share our private selves much more openly. And in that private arena, whether shared publicly or not, you’re not supposed to talk to your kids like they are your butler. Like that’s not a good sign. Like that would mean something very, you know, unhealthy in the relationship. I mean, in America, it’s like that, right? Yeah. You maybe if you do a hand kiss to your grandmother on her hundredth birthday or something, but it’s not how you enter the home after, you know, I don’t know. It just would be weird.
Derek Sivers
Oh, I love this subject. Well, sorry, to close up the last tangent: What I was getting at is that you realize that just by changing your beliefs on something, you could just sit there lying down or staring out the window and try on different beliefs and feel that different beliefs will change your emotion about something. So the classic example that everybody has heard of is if somebody is being a real jerk in traffic and speeding and darting and cutting through, you could be angry at them, or you could think maybe they’ve got a sick child in the back and they’re rushing to the hospital. And just by trying on that thought, like you relax, you remember you are not the center of the universe. People have real problems that are worse than yours. Even if it’s not true, they probably don’t have a sick child in the back, but notice how just thinking that thought made you feel different, made you act different. It made you relax your muscles and exhale and calm down. But it can be the same thing with anything. There are certain thoughts in business that will give you an incredible advantage over others if you’re just looking at a situation a different way. There are certain thoughts in romantic relationships that will help you so much to connect better, to get along better, just by slightly adjusting your thinking.
Derek Sivers
You twist the dial, you try settings number one, two, three, four, you try number six and it goes, ”Ooh, that one feels better.“ So I do this with myself a lot whenever something’s bothering me. I just try on different ways of thinking about it. And usually, like brainstorming exercises, you have to push past the first one, the second one, the third one. And then later you find a different way of thinking about it that just clicks. It just feels right, whether it makes you feel at peace or whether it makes you jump into action in a way the other thoughts didn’t. There’s a different thought pattern that will change your emotions, which ultimately lead to real action.
Anna Gát
I love that. I think it’s a title of one of the chapters or one of the sections that your first thought is an obstacle and don’t hold on to it. It’s just like, it’s something to get rid of. And I find that framing much more helpful - the don’t trust your gut thing - because I think your gut is very useful. Like it has kept your species alive for a very long time. Always overwriting it is not necessarily the smartest thing to do.
Anna Gát
Colby, I will go to you because I know you have to leave early. And then I want to have one more question and then we will open the floor for the audience. Welcome Colby, so glad that you could make it.
Colby
Yeah, thanks. This is great, Derek. Big fan, love your books. I’m curious what you were just describing of trying on different ideas, trying on different thoughts. It reminds me a lot of your last book How to Live - which is like, ”Okay, everything is conflicting. You can trust anyone’s opinion on what you should do and you can try all these different ways to arrive at the same thing, but they all disagree with each other. How do you know which one is right?“ I’m curious, having not read your most recent book, but I’ve read the one before, what changed? What changed or what did you learn from the previous book that you wrote to this one? Or what insight is different between seeing those conflicting visions and like trying to live with all of them to this new approach of Useful Not True? Or did something change that kind of got you to where you are now?
Derek Sivers
I’m so glad you made that connection. So I already mentioned the reason I started writing Useful Not True is just because it was a common theme that kept coming up when people would challenge my deliberately chosen beliefs. They thought I was saying it because it was true. No, I’m saying it because I’m choosing to deliberately believe this. And so I sat down to write a book about it. It wasn’t until I was two thirds of the way through that I realized this is a prequel to How to Live.
Derek Sivers
My How to Live book, sorry, for anybody who hasn’t read it, it’s a weird little book that just I put out into the world with no explanation. It’s 27 chapters, each with a very opinionated view on this is how you should live, live entirely for the present moment. There’s no such thing as the past, no such thing as the future. All there is is right now, this is how you should live. This book is deliberately over the top opinionated. Every single chapter says, no, no, no, no, here’s how to live, live for the future. The whole point of life is to build a better future for yourself, for your kids, for your great grandkids to make the world a better place. Everything you should do is for the future. And the next chapter will say, no, no, no, no, here’s how to live, live for the past, relish those memories, keep the traditions alive, et cetera. So every chapter disagrees with every other chapter. And then that’s it. I just put it out into the world with no explanation and some people loved it. Some people were really confused by it.
Derek Sivers
So to answer your question, it wasn’t until I was two thirds of the way writing Useful Not True, that I realized that this actually explains the How to Live book more. Each one of those chapters was always just a thought experiment. Like I described, just laying on the couch or looking out the window like, hmm, what if the purpose of life is generosity? Then if that, then what? Then how would I live if the meaning of life was generosity? Here’s how it would affect my actions. Wait, what if the meaning of life is to just get rich? That’s it. Money is a neutral transfer of value. To chase money is to chase being valuable to the world, which is objectively a good thing. If that was the meaning of life, then how would that change my actions? Et cetera. And so you keep doing that as many times as you can. So that was always the point of the How to Live.
Anna Gát
It was like changing the musical key, right? Changing the musical, like switching its song.
Derek Sivers
Yes! A beautiful example. Okay, Anna, so think of the cinema example where you’ve got somebody walking out the front door. Sorry, I’m thinking of The Simpsons. I haven’t seen it in like 20 years, but I remember 20 years ago, somebody was making a movie of Homer Simpson walking out his front door eating a donut. And the first time we see it, it’s in real time with some goofy music. But then we see that somebody filming it was trying to make him the villain. So suddenly it was like, ”Dum, dum, dum.“ And it was like slow motion and zoomed in on his mouth going, ”Blah, blah,“ with a donut making him look disgusting. There was a time in my life where my boss at work was pissing me off so much that I hit my breaking point. All I did to deal with the situation is I changed the soundtrack. I made it so in my head, anytime he entered the room, the clown car music would come out. It was like, ”Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.“ And like the stupid oaf walked into the room. And somehow that gave me peace to see my boss as the circus clown.
Derek Sivers
I was just trying on different soundtracks or trying on different aspects in life. But none of them was ever trying to be the answer. It was just a way of looking at it. There’s no correct soundtrack to a movie. There are different soundtracks that would have changed the tone of the scene, but none of them is objectively right or wrong. You just choose the one that gives the impression you want to give. And for your life at any given moment, because it can change from hour to hour, you can have a certain way of looking at the world that helps you get out of bed in the morning and start your day. And then you can have a different way of looking at the world that helps you relax and let it all go and go to sleep at night without any worries. We already do this. We already have conflicting philosophies in our day. And so you can do this even in different aspects of your life. You have a certain present focused philosophy that you have when you’re with your family and a different future focused philosophy that you have when you’re at work or exercising. That’s very future focused. Almost nobody enjoys difficult weightlifting in the moment. You do it for the future. Yes, we adopt different philosophies through the day. There’s never a declaration that one is right and the others are wrong.
Derek Sivers
And so, the new book, Useful Not True, finally, to answer your question, was explaining How to Live, saying that each one of these approaches to life was just an idea that was worth considering, not the right answer.
Anna Gát
And you actually bring up the Stravinsky story where Stravinsky shows the orchestra. There’s no one good instrument. You have to play the music. And there are so many different ways of doing it. In contemporary life, maybe text messaging is a really good example of the interpretability of things. Like how many times you get a message and it could mean 17 different things based on what soundtrack you put underneath. People are looking at the dot dot dot that somebody is typing. These entire universes, Marvel universes opening, an entire franchise starts in your brain. And nothing even happened yet. But I think that’s why art is so important. Whether we think about metaphors like, oh, we’re all in our own movies, or you think about the movie soundtrack, you think about Stravinsky example. For me, it’s knowing drama and drama writing and how the curtain goes up and you’re watching, I don’t know, Hamlet or Uncle Vanya. And every single person on that stage has their own kind of moral universe about the whole story. And it’s completely different. If you did an exit poll after Uncle Vanya and you ask each of the characters, they would tell you a completely different story. There are even novels like Faulkner, Sound and the Fury, that try to explain the same story from all these different angles. They have nothing to do with each other. And you’re like, were we in the same situation? I’m trying to do this with my friends these days. I’m like, this is what happened in my movie. Let’s hear about you. And usually there’s nothing. Even with sensitive people, people who pride themselves on kind of to some degree understanding human nature, we know nothing. Our understanding of each other beyond the kind of instinctive level, I think is very low.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, I love that. Think about anything you hear people say about current events in the news today. Every opinion people spout, they say it as if it’s the truth. This is what happened. Look at the evil thing that somebody has done. It was bad. It was wrong. They say my truth. Right. Yeah, that’s one version. Okay, what’s another story? Like, oh, what’s another? ”Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead“. Wasn’t that like telling a Shakespeare story from the point of view of two bit characters in Hamlet? And I think there was a Chinese movie called ”Hero“, where the whole first third of the movie, the hero comes in and tells the story one way, and then they stop and they re-tell the story from a different point of view. And you realize the whole first third was a lie. And just when you think you’re done, then they come in with another third and tell the whole thing again, you realize the first two were all just a lie. And I love this idea for our own serenity and effectiveness in life to detach from your stories a bit and realize that it’s not the only perspective.
Anna Gát
And maybe if the whole loneliness epidemic idea is true, true or useful about the world, and we have maybe less insights into each other’s behaviors because we spend less time together, except in InterInterlect. Then reading fiction is all the more important, right? Because I don’t know you read War and Peace or even Game of Thrones, and you will be exposed to a lot of perspectives. Yeah. And the characters will, at least in the situation, will tell you their truth.
Anna Gát
I mean, before I open the floor fully and guys, if you have questions, you can also share it in the chat, or you can just raise your hand with the hand raise feature under reactions.
Anna Gát
There’s a story that really struck me in the book that we’re not here to promote, Useful Not True, to not buy this book. It’s great, but it’s up to you. Where you talk about an accident that you caused when you were very young and you lived with the belief that you had caused a very serious spine injury in a woman who then lost her mobility. You recount living with this enormous emotional and mental burden for 18 years, and when you’re 35, you can’t take it any longer and you look up this woman because you want to apologize. You want a kind of metanoia experience. You want to be redeemed, and you go there and this lady opens the door very well standing on her legs, and it’s like, oh, that’s not at all how it happened. And suddenly your entire movie is over because it turns out that, oh, no, no, these guys are so sad. We were wrong. We have been looking at it from the wrong angle the whole time. I mean, that’s a very serious misconception to live under for such a long time.
Anna Gát
We all have the same, right? I didn’t go home to Budapest for six and a half years, and I went home last year, and I was standing on Margaret Bridge, and I realized that in my city where I lived 30 years of my life, in the middle of it, there is a mountain. It is called Buda. It’s literally half of the city is a mountain. It’s called the Buda Mountains, plural, and I never noticed it for 30 years. And I was like, what else am I not seeing that’s just obvious? It’s just, oh, it’s where the tram goes up, but you don’t think, is this a mountain technically? And I just, I always think about these things. Sometimes the most obvious things, especially the places, the people you know the most, you never look with fresh eyes.
Anna Gát
So what, tell us more about this story. I really, I want more detail.
Derek Sivers
Wait, Anna, I gotta say, your mind is so fun. You have just, in this 30 minutes we’ve been on the phone, made four or five surprising lateral connections. We’re talking about a car crash and a woman opens the door and you say Kaiser Soze. You go to Buda, and then earlier I forget, you’ve been making so many fun lateral jumps that I totally get, but surprise me every time. It is so entertaining.
Anna Gát
You brought up The Simpsons very early on in this conversation on the nature of truth. So, you know, you’re in good company.
Derek Sivers
Oh, the car crash. Okay. I mean, look, I could tell the details of little moment, but you nailed the key points, which is, yeah, at the age of 18, I was in a car crash. I was not paying attention. I blew off a yield sign. I crashed into a woman and later the next day they told me that I broke her spine and she’ll never walk again. And for, yeah, like 17 years, I felt horrible about this. I went to go look her up 17 years later to apologize and she opened the door and it was all a misunderstanding. She could walk just fine that, yes, she had broken a vertebrae, but whoever communicated it to me misunderstood or told me wrong or I misunderstood, who knows? It was 17 years earlier, she’s been walking just fine. And then eventually she apologized for hitting me because she said, ”I was overeating at that point in my life. I was a compulsive eater. The car crash was good for me. It made me realize that eating too much was hurting my life. That’s why I hit you.“ I said, ”Wait, no, I hit you.“ She said, ”No, sweetie, I hit you.“ And then she starts crying going, ”Oh my God, all these years you thought that you hit me? No, it was my fault. I was eating and not paying attention.“
Derek Sivers
So the point is all of us have some story about our past that feels like it’s just a fact. This is what happened and that’s that. But you can open it up again and realize that that’s not necessarily true. And sometimes it’s based on just a straight up misunderstanding. You could think that somebody wronged you long ago and you could still harbor anger about it and still not be speaking with that person and find out the whole time they thought you wronged them. And they thought that you said this when you thought you said that. Oh, these things are based on so many misunderstandings.
Derek Sivers
Then it makes you realize that we do this in the present moment too, even just in the moment. You have a certain response or a reaction to something and it’s based on your interpretation of it. And you have to stop in the moment and say, wait, before I put this into the history books in this version, let me stop and question it.
Anna Gát
And we build our identities on these statements. I’m a survivor. The Germans bombed our city. Whatever level of complexity socially you are at. Or it was love at first sight for us 30 years ago, like whatever the cornerstone story is. You talk a little bit about responsibility, and how there is this discussion element to being responsible in society, which I often think about, and how important it is what statements we make towards each other. Saying to somebody, ”Oh, son, you’re bad at math.“ or ”You can’t sing,“ or ”You will never be a writer.“ They told Nureyev, you will never be a ballet dancer because you have short legs. And he was like, ”Okay, well, watch me!“ But not everybody says watch me. If it’s a child, if it’s somebody in a vulnerable moment. So for me, just imagining that somebody would say to a young man at age 17, 18, that you ruined somebody’s life through this life altering injury, and it was your fault. I mean, that feels incredibly irresponsible and makes me think like, you know, we all kind of do it in a in a smaller way. Like we make careless statements to each other. Yeah. Don’t do it, guys.
Anna Gát
But let’s do questions. Brian, Kelly, any more questions? Isabella, welcome. Peter is here. You have a lot of psychology talent here. So maybe they will have all sorts of PhD level questions about the nature of emotional truth. Kaylee, you have your hand up again. So good to see you, wonderful.
Kaylee
I didn’t expect to be crying on this salon, but here we are. My question for you, Derek is, how do you decide ... You’re kind of talking about how you can look at all the things that are true and decide what’s most useful. That’s at least what I’m understanding for the situation. How do you how do you keep in mind the idea of toxic positivity? Deluding yourself into believing things to the point of it being dangerous? I’m curious what your thoughts are on that.
Derek Sivers
Do you have an example? Have you done this in the past?
Kaylee
For sure. A quick example I could think of is, say your relationship is not working. And so you’re like, ”I’m going to take ownership over this. And it’s a me problem. And I’m going to fix it!“ To the point of not seeing the other person’s responsibility in the relationship dynamic as well.
Derek Sivers
You opened that can of worms.
Kaylee
It’s similar to your to the car crash story, but in a relationship context.
Derek Sivers
Yeah. Okay, toxic positivity. We don’t hear that much, do we?
Anna Gát
Um, not in Eastern Europe. This is not a problem. It’s a California problem.
Derek Sivers
I journal a lot. I write a daily diary. I wish I would have started earlier. I didn’t start till I was 42. I’m 55. Now I haven’t missed a day in 13 years. Every day I write down what I did today, how I was feeling today. I try to do it as close to the event as possible. So maybe even a couple times a day, I’ll open up my journal and write something that just happened. Or right before I go to bed. And if I have a crazy night, and I don’t write it, at least I’ll make it up the next day. The reason I’m saying this is because:
Derek Sivers
Just as we’re bad about seeing objects in the distance, we’re bad at seeing time in the distance. We’re bad at making projections from a year from now. If a friend says, ”Hey, a year from now, will you spend the weekend helping me move my house?“ And you go, ”Yeah, okay, sure.“ And then when it’s the day before you go, ”Oh, shit. Why did I say yes to this? I’m busy! I’m overwhelmed! What was I thinking a year ago when I said I’d have free time today? Of course I don’t!“ So it’s always hard to see in the distance forward. But similarly, it’s hard to see in the distance back. The farther away something is, the more likely it is to be fuzzy in our vision, our clarity. So I’ve found it so useful to keep this daily journal that I can refer to for exactly what you’re talking about, whether it’s toxic positivity or the other way. I go back to my journal to the days it was happening and say, ”Okay, well, how did I feel in the moment? I’m going to trust that more.“
Derek Sivers
So it did just recently happen to me two years ago that I was in a romantic relationship for two years. We were together for two years. We were living together for one year. And it was starting to feel really hard. And I remembered that this relationship had always been great, but right now it was just really hard. And then my friends started getting sick of hearing me complain. Not sick of, but started being really concerned like, ”Derek, this is being tough on you every day, isn’t it?“ I said, ”Yeah, it’s been really tough every day.“ And finally, things blew up to a head where I spent the whole day alone. And I went back to my journal starting at the day I met her. And I reread my journals from every single day, like 500 entries. It took me all day long to read them. And only then did I realize I had been unhappy the whole time. But my California rose-colored glasses had remembered the relationship positively. I remembered that it was a great relationship. It’s just hard right now. And once I looked at the diary and said, ”Oh God, no. It’s been hard the whole time.“ Even just weeks and months into meeting her, I wanted to break up because it was just too hard. And my fucking optimism kept me going. And so I broke up and it was one of the best things I did, but it was a really hard decision that was only enabled by having this evidence of reality in the moment.
Derek Sivers
But then of course, with anything, you can try on the pessimistic view, you can try on the cynical view, you can try on the optimist view and see which of these views creates the actions that you think are the right one to take.
Kaylee
I guess it ultimately boils down to how do you feel? You know when you hit the right emotion or pathway because it feels so different. It feels frictionless.
Derek Sivers
Anna brought up earlier that somewhere out there on my blog, I have an article saying everything is my fault. And I got to tell you, it took two years to come to that point. It was two years of me being angry at my old employees. I had a company for 10 years and it was kind of like a mutiny happened where all my employees made me walk the plank, which hurt my feelings a lot because it wasn’t even like shareholders. I had no investors. It was just me. I was 100% owner and they kind of ganged up on me and tried to get rid of me. And so for two years, I held onto this anger about those, ”Ugh, those blah, blah, blah.“ Fill in a bunch of curse words there. But for two years, I was angry at them. And then suddenly one day, I just decided or stumbled upon a different viewpoint. I said, ”What if all of that was my fault?“ And oh, the heavens opened up. The light came beaming down. I was like, Oh my God, what if it was all my fault? Then I’m not angry at them. I created the scenario that encouraged them to act like that. I created the system that made them act this way. It was an all inevitable because I fucked up and created this situation. I was like, ”Wow, now I’m not mad at them anymore.“ And now that’s a viewpoint I can do something about. When you blame somebody else, you can’t do anything about it but be mad except maybe get a stronger legal contract next time. But even that, sorry, actually that example I just said, ”Get a stronger legal contract next time,“ well, that’s still taking responsibility! That’s saying, ”There’s something I can do about this in the future. I should have had a stronger contract.“ Once you take responsibility, you can do something about it. That perspective felt - as you say, notice the feelings - it felt so much better for me and it seemed to guide smarter actions in the future, whereas just being bitter and resentful and blaming did not.
Derek Sivers
But after I put out that article saying everything’s my fault, some people in the comments said, ”Oh, Derek, no, no. I hate this. This is the worst thing I’ve ever heard. This is the worst thing you’ve ever written. You don’t know the guilt that I’ve suffered with. My parents dumped so much guilt on me that this thought that everything is my fault, it just makes me want to commit suicide.“ And I was like, ”Whoa, whoa, whoa, okay, hold on. Then this doesn’t work for you! I didn’t say it was true! It’s just one way of looking at it! If it doesn’t work for you, don’t adopt it. Don’t believe anything anyone says. Just try it on.“
Anna Gát
It sounds like he’s blaming his parents, but just his thoughts.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, right, right. But just try it on. Anytime you hear a thought, here in InterIntellect or in a book or on a podcast, anytime you hear an idea, just try it on. You don’t take it as the truth. It’s not the answer. It’s just something to test and see how it works for you.
Anna Gát
I really love this idea of blaming other people, to me, connects with another part in your book that is the distrust limitations idea. It’s basically using other people as imaginary limitations to make the world a little bit easier to understand. Because if I’m free, if I’m responsible, of course, within the general laws of relativity and other defining heuristics of the world, but this understanding that the world is a much freer place than we imagine is really scary to people. How many times you’re sitting in a restaurant and you hear somebody complaining about some family thing at the next table and you think that this is kind of meaningless? Like just tell your mother you don’t want to wear that dress. Like what’s the problem? But for this other person, this is like a two-year thing that will like redefine their relationship. And I don’t know because he or she, you know, is using the image and limitation in the other person as some kind of an anchor or something to like make the world take shape. And first of all, many times the other person doesn’t know or it’s just really unfair. Like did this person sign up to be this limitation for you? Have they signed their end of the contract? I find that very often they have not. But also to me this difference between like an extended feeling and why I hate journaling because when I read myself, I sound much better in my head than on the paper. Why did I write this down? This is so childish. But like understanding how you felt for a long time, even maybe during the hormonal craze of like an early relationship, that’s not the kind of feeling that we maybe sometimes think is false or misleading. It’s not a reaction feeling. It’s more that’s the musical theme of a relationship that you can only kind of piece together from these different movements.
Anna Gát
Anybody else here who’s journaling? I know there are some journaling fans in InterInspect. You can also raise your hand if it’s just something that you tell yourself you do, but you don’t actually do it. Charmaine, you have your hand up for a different reason. And you did it earlier. So thank you for your patience.
Charmaine
That’s okay. Thanks, Anna. And so my question is... So I’ve been listening, I listened to the interview that you did with Tim Ferriss. I did listen to it a couple of times. I was driving and so it was perfect to listen and to re-listen. And then since I didn’t read your latest book yet, I thought I’d look at your blog this morning while I was coming to work. And I saw that the top most one is with regards to your affinity towards Jews. And I said I could reply to it over there or I could actually have the conversation over here. And I’m trying to see if I’m joining some dots over here because I do know Mohammed Kazem, by the way, when he was deciding to move from his financial... We were sitting somewhere, I can’t remember where I met him. I know him very well. But I think we’re sitting on one of the pavements in Dubai. And there were four of us in the dark with some lamp and I do remember having this conversation, but I didn’t know that he was doing it because he was thinking of his family from 1800 years, right? Like from that point of view. And so coming to the question that you have, which is about truth, and then what is true, right? In a case, in a scenario like that, and beliefs, almost anything and everything cannot be true, right? And therefore it opens out incredible opportunities. And it can also open out a Pandora’s box because then everything can be questioned. So based on that, I’m coming to my question, but I need to join a few dots before that. So considering I’m going to draw a little tangent, which is for the longest time, I didn’t feel rooted because I grew up in all different places, traveled all around until I finally, and I wanted to feel like an oak tree, right? Like, or a sycamore, which was like, grounded and rooted and all those things. But I realized I was never going to be that because I grew up in Oman and then in India and then lived in Dubai and traveled all around. And so, but then I started seeing myself as a Lotus, which means that you’re still rooted, but you’re kind of meandering through a pond, right? And a small pond, big pond. And you know what that can look like. And so I’m wondering whether when you start, so what are the questions that I have right now are: When we decide to open ourselves up that nothing is true, right? Anything is possible. But as human beings, we need a sense of rootedness and groundedness. And I’m wondering whether maybe this is the connection I have made, but maybe it is: Is there a possibility the fact that you’ve opened yourself out to the fact that you do not want to live in one place, you want to be have the life where you’ve lived in several different places, right? Compared to being in the same house for 50 years. Is that by having friends who have a sense of groundedness, who know who their ancestors are for 2000 odd years, do those people help compliment you in feeling grounded, rooted, deeper in terms of conversations? And does that happen either with friends, with relationships, with and with who we are as people, even in terms of our belief systems, do we need to have like five core roots or truths and then everything can be played around with. But if we take out all the truths, then yeah, what does that look like?
Anna Gát
That’s a really good question by the way. And there was a chapter in the book that you should not read about religion. And I feel that it’s a little bit related, but I wonder what Derek is going to say.
Derek Sivers
Well, that was such a fun question. Sorry, quick question: Where are you living now?
Charmaine
I am now in West Virginia and Morgantown and I’m working at a university. Yeah. It just works out, right? I mean, it’s such a great trajectory, Dubai and Annapolis, Morgantown. I mean, it’s very direct.
Derek Sivers
And did you grow up in a Muslim family or Hindu family?
Charmaine
In a Christian, in a Roman Catholic family. And so I grew up in a monarchy and then lived in a democracy in India where my family is from and then lived in an aristocracy in Dubai.
Derek Sivers
Wow. Okay. So what a fun, big, deep question. And let me ask one more. What are you connecting? So everybody, if you didn’t get the reference that on my blog, one of the newest blog posts that I posted right before my boys’ school holiday that had me take a break from blogging for a bit, was how I just noticed that most of my friends are Jewish. And I thought it was just coincidence because I lived in New York City, but then years later, I’m just abroad in places like Argentina. And I just find myself exceptionally clicking with one person more than the rest and then later find out that he’s Jewish. And then again, I mentioned it to my Persian friend that she and I instantly clicked, but I know that she’s Baha’i. I know that she’s not Jewish, but I know that she’s religiously literate. And so I said, ”Why do you think that I get along with Jews so well? What do you think that is about me?“ And she goes, ”Well, maybe that’s why you and I clicked so well.“ And I said, ”No, you’re Baha’i.“ She goes, ”My mom’s Jewish.“ I went, ”Whoa, again? What the hell?“ So it was really more just like posed the question to the world going, ”How could this be? What is this blind test that I keep passing? Why is it—“
Anna Gát
I seem to be emailing people because of their Substack and coming to their salons, so well picked.
Derek Sivers
Wait, Anna, are you Jewish too?
Anna Gát
Yeah, I’m a convert to Catholicism, but I’m also Jewish. Who else would run a business where you sit around your whole day talking about things and then write a commentary about them? Like, you know what I’m saying? The Jewiest business in the world of business these days. So it’s not a secret.
Derek Sivers
So were you comparing the rootedness of like Muhammad Kazim with knowing his 1800-year family history? Were you comparing that to my friends that like have the Jewish family tree going back?
Charmaine
I’m trying to figure out, right? Because even friends that are who I have as Jews, who I either knew them from Israelis who had come to India at some point of time, because a lot of them after conscription tend to come to India for time off. And then Dubai, I used to work in the government, and so there’s been Jews coming in, right? And having—we had conversations. There’s the Abrahamic house that’s been built over there. And I’m wondering—and I was atheist for 15 years, and I’ve come back to faith in the recent past. And I’m wondering whether there is a link—you know, here I’m talking about Occidental religions. But I’m also wondering because I’m wondering whether that’s the case with the Rig Vedas. The Rig Vedas were written 5,000-odd years ago from India. And then if you’re looking at your Iranian friend, she possibly has a rootedness from Persian culture. And so I’m trying to figure out presently is we’re also living in a world where the word truth is very loaded today, right? And it’s almost a fight between the people who say the truth and the people who say my truth or a truth, right? And I’m journaling on those things.
Derek Sivers
Cool. So my thought about your question is it was interesting to me that you were saying, ”Do we need a sense of rootedness? Do we need a connection to the past?“ Earlier you had said, ”I want to be an oak tree. I want to be rooted.“ So I do think of it more personal like that, where you want to be more rooted. I don’t. I do not want any roots. I don’t even want to be the lotus. I want to be the dandelion seed. I want to have no roots at all. Something about that makes me really happy to feel absolutely equal with every part of the world. That’s kind of my dream that will probably never happen, but is my ideal that I’m working towards is that someday I could spin the physical globe and literally every single part of it would feel equally home to me. That would be my ideal. That’s what I’m pursuing. So I don’t want roots. And so no, I don’t think that my fascination with Muhammad Qasim, knowing his family history back 1,800 years, or my Jewish friends still upholding the holidays and traditions even though they’re atheist, I find that maybe fascinating because it’s so alien to me. I don’t even know who my great-great-grandparents are. I know who my great-grandparents are because my parents know who their grandparents are, but they actually don’t know beyond that. And so now neither do I. I don’t know my family history. So it’s fascinating to me to meet somebody that can tell me his family history back 1,800 years. But that wasn’t what I like about him.
Derek Sivers
By the way, anybody, if you want to know this reference, on my website, there’s my blog about the first time I went to Dubai and how much I love it. So it’s sive.rs/dxb, which are the letters for the Dubai airport. So sivers/dxb. You’ll see my blog post about the first time I went to Dubai and how it reversed my prejudice because I hated Dubai until I learned more about it. And the first time I went there, I met this guy named Muhammad Qasim that is just a fascinating dude and told me his family history back 1,800 years.
Derek Sivers
So finally, to get to your answer to your question, I’m sorry, it took us a while to get here. Imagine that there’s a little slider of a line where you draw the line at the truth wherever you want it to be. So for example, I said earlier, there is a glass on this table. That’s where I draw the line. I’m not going to debate that this glass is not real. But I do know some people that like to draw the line back even further where they say, ”Well, is there really a glass on this table? Maybe this whole thing is a virtual reality simulation.“ And I think, ”No, I’m not going there. That does nothing for me. I’m drawing the line here. This glass is on the table and that’s that. I’m not questioning that.“ But now there’s somebody else who will draw the line further and have a whole stack of beliefs, whether they’re religious or moral lessons that they were taught growing up and they’ll say, ”This is where I draw the line. These things are true. I’m not questioning anything beyond this point.“ And that’s great. That’s fascinating that that’s what works for them is to draw the line here. I like to draw it here. Some draw it here. Mine’s here. Yours might be here. So we have to test even on an item to item basis where you’d want to draw the line.
Derek Sivers
And by item to item, I mean, for example, I have a boy. He’s 13 now. And he and I are so close that you’ve heard my goal about wanting to be at home in the whole world. So some of my friends when he was born said, ”You don’t have to be there for him. You could go travel the world and as long as you just talk to him on the phone sometimes or see him a few times a year, you can still be a good dad without being there for him.“ I was like, ”Nope. I’m drawing that line here. I’m here for my boy. I will pause my dream of traveling the world for 18 years. This is where I draw the line. I want to be physically present with him every week.“ So that’s where I draw the line. I’m not questioning that. That value matters to me. I’m not questioning that one. That’s not open for negotiation. That to me is a hard and fast one. So you might have that with your diet, with your rituals, with your beliefs, but you just got to feel for yourself where you want to draw it and just understand that some people enjoy having that line in a different place.
Charmaine
Can I ask really quick? ....
Derek Sivers
You can always email me. As Anna will tell you, I have a very open inbox. Anybody, if we didn’t get to your question, go to my website and click email me. I answer every single email and I thoroughly enjoy it. So everybody email me, introduce yourself.
Anna Gát
I’m happy that Brian has his hand up because he knows more about this than myself, but I’m sure there is a Zen meditation practice somewhere where you just meditate on the different layers of belief about a glass on the table. And then you can go as deep as the cloud of atoms and that it’s not real or that somebody programmed this stimulation or in a Kantian way, your perception is not real to like all sorts of weird social layers, right? From this, we inherited this from my grandma who hid from the Soviets to that’s not the right glass for a cupboard in Sauvignon. You have no class. It’s a forest, don’t believe. So knowing how deep you are in that delusion, I think helps.
Anna Gát
Brian, thank you for your patience. And I will let Peter know, Peter Reinert who’s a wonderful, wonderful neuroscientist and psychologist in Canada had to leave. He had his hand up. He just shared something in the chat, but I will make sure that he emails you Derek.
Bryan Kam
Hi Derek, it’s Brian. Really great to see you. We haven’t spoken in a while and yeah, I really-
Derek Sivers
Oh my God, Brian. Hey. Good to see you again.
Bryan Kam
Yeah, I was curious to ask you about philosophy because I think when we were last speaking about some of the useful not true stuff, I was really excited about pragmatism and about Greek skepticism. And I do think there’s some overlap. I won’t go too deeply into it, but in Greek skepticism, there’s this idea that one of the big problems that makes us really unhappy is having a strong view that we know the truth. And if we’re like, there’s one truth and we know what it is, then that’s going to lead you into problems. And then there’s also the denial of truth. And if you say, there is no truth and we can never know, that will also lead you into unhappiness or suffering. And the skeptical approach says, we remain open to investigation. So basically you just never stop investigating. You never settle on a view. And some of that work excited me when I read it and it kind of reminded me of your work as well. Just this kind of investigation that is ongoing and you can pick up different views and try them on and see how they work. Because for me, that’s what’s really exciting about reading different philosophies is like, ooh, this is like a completely different lens on the world.
Bryan Kam
But I think I remember when you and I were speaking about it previously, I think you had a reaction against some of the isms, which I also have. So I completely understand that. But I guess I was wondering if in your investigation of useful not true, did you get much out of philosophy or was it kind of something that still turned you off in a way?
Derek Sivers
Well, same as you said, I love trying on different lenses. And so I love, like, please lay a new philosophy on me. I want to hear it. I want to try that on. It’s my favorite thing about traveling. I figured out a two word description that I think succinctly describes why I travel is I travel to inhabit philosophies. I want to go to a place and live according to the customs of this place. I want to inhabit this way of living, not just read about it. So that to me is the reason to spew a bunch of jet fuel into the world is to go to this place and inhabit a philosophy. But starting with just reading about a philosophy or trying to understand a philosophy, yes, I love it. My aversion to them is, and I’m going to make a nice lateral jump like you. Yoga, when I lived in Santa Monica, Los Angeles, California, all my friends did yoga. And they kept saying, ”Come on, Derek, you got to do yoga. You got to try it.“ And I finally went, ”Okay, I’ll try it.“ So I went to a yoga studio of which there’s one like every hundred meters. And I tried it a few times with an open mind. But my problem with it is that people weren’t just doing the yoga. They were buying into this entire package of what it means, like all of the like the namaste and this and then changing the decor of their home and the tone of their voice and all of these things in order to be a yoga person. And then you see somebody who’s, say, gets into cycling and they don’t just ride their bike. They put on all the same spandex with the company names and the stripes and logos and they all look the same wearing this template of what it means to be a cyclist. So they’re not just riding the bike. They’re buying into a whole persona. And so that’s my problem with isms is that it feels like you’re not just getting the iPhone. You’re getting the iPad, the Apple TV, the Mac. You’re buying into a whole ecosystem and declaring yourself to be this person now. Yeah, it seems to me to be a lack of critical thinking to just adopt the entire package, whereas I prefer to pick things piecemeal.
Derek Sivers
Although, notice that I deliberately then contrasted where I say I want to travel to inhabit a philosophy that yes, if I’m going to live in Oman, for example, I would want to live as a Muslim. I would want to follow the practices of the local culture and fully inhabit that. I would be buying into that whole way of life, but I would do it deliberately in order to go all in. So maybe people that say, ”I am into skepticism,“ or what’s the other one that was stoicism, or ”I’m into stoicism now.“ It’s like maybe they are just trying to like, ”Give me the whole outfit. Give me the hat, the boots, the belt, the everything. I want to dress like an ancient Greek, or I’m going to be a British gentleman now, or give me the full Chinese imperial robes.“ They just want to try on the whole thing. I don’t know. It makes me suspicious.
Anna Gát
A little bit like how if you read everybody from like Fright to Girard, all these people who try to unlock the secrets of human nature, there’s always some level of immigration being the other in their story. Because it’s the outsider who, I mean, when you travel and you temporarily adopt the local customs, you understand what a custom is. Whereas if you live in the same place your whole life, the kind of map and the territory are the same. But I always, you know, there is a dark side to it. Actually, what I wanted to kind of like go to in the last section of the salon, and Charmaine, you actually brought up some of it, is the dark sides of that. There is evidence that immigrants are far more likely to develop full-blown schizophrenia, for instance. Like you shake people in their sense of reality too much, and if they have a proclivity, they might not be able to handle it. If you grew up in a place like myself, where you didn’t even have to move around to live in a monarchy, communism, you know, wild west capitalism, illiberal Christian, like it’s just in one person’s life, they kind of pull these rugs and you’re not, it doesn’t come from the inside. It doesn’t come because you have realized something. It’s just history is like playing, you know, beach ball with you. And I often find when I read pieces on loosening beliefs, that how much can we loosen that? Is there a moment when in our quest for the good life, we might lose the virtue? If, I mean, one of the reasons why, say, a close-knit religious community or a military town, any kind of close-knit moral universe would have strong trust, is because I know what I believe, and I know that you believe the same thing. So we have super high levels of like common knowledge. We all know that everybody knows everything. If I negotiate my own beliefs myself and I, you know, let things in and trust my internal compass that I will only retain from this thing what is needed, I’m not going to become a yoga person, I’m not going to become, I can be stoical without being a capital S stoic, you know. But where is that line and how should we think about finding that? I mean, I think everybody wants to be a good person who is not a psychopath. So clearly you want to live authentically, but you don’t want to be a dick. At least I definitely try to avoid that, despite being Eastern European, you know, it’s a baggage. And I wonder like how, is there a heuristic for that that you found, whether that’s a just a feeling of how you feel in a situation or how to read other people’s reactions, or maybe it’s more kind of like engineering style as a solution.
Derek Sivers
One of the most interesting insights into life I’ve ever heard is somebody said the human condition is that we all have a need for certainty, and we all have a need for uncertainty. And we all have to balance these two needs in our life. So that’s the problem when say somebody is in a really stable marriage and they’ve been married for 12 years and it’s just solid. Well guess what? That’s a lot of certainty, but they have a need for uncertainty. So they go do something to fuck it up and they go cheat. And that’s coming from this weird perverse need to mix in the uncertainty. But on the other hand, if say you grew up moving around a lot and your parents moved you from so many different cultures, you might say, I want to be a rooted tree. I need deeper roots. I want more certainty. And it can feel like in the moment, this is a thing that we all need. We all need a sense of rootedness or we all need variety and we need to travel.
Derek Sivers
But when we say that, it’s usually just reflecting our current state. If you are in a situation where your life feels like it has too much uncertainty at a not enough certainty, you might declare a bunch of beliefs about this is the way the world should be. We need a strong sense of tradition and how things should be. But you’re just expressing your current state, which is ”I need more certainty. In fact, it helps me to think of this as not my mood, but a truth about the universe. We all need more certainty.“ But in fact, it might just be you. Somebody else might have grown up in a really boring suburb, in a boring culture with boring parents and boring friends. And they are just yearning for more uncertainty in their life. And great, go ahead and indulge your uncertainty. And at a certain point, you’ll probably get imbalanced and have a need for more certainty. And so I don’t think it’s universal. I think it’s personal.
Anna Gát
So in the negotiation between the two, we find kind of our virtue, right? Because they will come with all these decision moments and how else to test ourselves then in how we choose in those moments. I find that in InterIntellect, there are so many third culture kids. You know, it’s a little bit like running a company. I’m sure it’s the same with your blog. You’re basically like standing on this rooftop and you’re like, ”Hey, come.“ And some people hear the dolphin language and you only find out who you have been talking to after you get enough data of who’s coming. And that’s just amazing.
Derek Sivers
Yeah. I was just thinking about this yesterday. My six best friends in the world are in one each in India, China, Perth, New Zealand, and then two in New York City. They’re really spread around the world. But it’s because of this same process of, yeah, you said the dolphin call, that by just being out in the world and then traveling and then writing publicly, your kindreds, you find each other, whether it’s I reach out to somebody or somebody reached out to me, then we find each other. And these are my dearest friends right now are so spread around the world because of this. The kindreds are not necessarily where you grew up.
Anna Gát
And then the power of talking publicly about things, right? Yeah. But no, it shouldn’t be a secret. You shouldn’t be worried about exposing yourself. First of all, not many people will read you at first. So it’s not like you put something on Substack and immediately the world stops and the New York Times wants to put you on their cover. It’s a process. And I just love, I mean, InterIntellect, I’ve been running this company for six years and I see people kind of growing into their public voices. And it’s kind of insane, even in a community, because you have, I mean, in InterIntellect, we’ve had multiple books co-written, a lot of people quit their jobs, moved continents. We have five marriages. The third InterIntellect baby is on the way whose parents met in InterIntellect. One of them at my salon and I could see them hitting on each other and DMing. And I was like a teacher in high school, like, guys, I can see this. It was amazing. And now, you know, now they’re married. And that’s because, you know, at least on the salon level, you speak, you show yourself, your real self. And guess what? People are actually interested in the real stuff or whatever is real, you know, in your own way.
Anna Gát
Guys, we have 10 minutes left, so I’m just going to go and open the floor. Feel free to unmute yourself. Those of you who we haven’t heard from, Billy, Adam, Dylan, jump in. But there’s there’s no there’s no rule. So if you even just spoken already and you want to some more, the floor is all yours. And don’t read the book. You can guess from this conversation that it’s not not interested. Hi, Adam. Great comments in the chat. Like your contributions. Where are you calling in from? You’re in California, right?
Adam
No, I’m from Guam. All right. I mean, I don’t want to make the mistake of just speaking just to speak, but I did email Derek pretty recently and I just wanted to add some spice to the conversation. So basically what I emailed Derek was I was like, ”You know how you had a negative view of Dubai and then you totally 180 your perception of it through learning more about it?“ And then when I was watching him and Tim Ferriss’s recent podcast with him, I noticed that he had like a negative view on Elon.
Derek Sivers
Oh, that was you! I remember your email. Yes!
Adam
And then I was like, Hmm, you know, that seems kind of interesting. What if I just message him being like, ”What if that’s the same thing with Dubai?“ And he said, maybe with an exclamation. So now I want to learn more.
Derek Sivers
So I did think more about it after I got your question. That was a fun question. Nobody’s ever asked me that. I went, ”Huh...’ I actually thought about it for days after that, like just walking through the woods, going, you know, thinking about that dude that asked me about Elon Musk. So nice to put a face with the name. Yes. I’m weird like that. So, I mean, it’s the reason I like my open email inbox, right? I get thought provoking questions and meet interesting people.
Derek Sivers
So here’s my take on it. By my value system, no, I still, after much consideration and education, I still fucking hate Elon Musk, but here’s why. It’s because I think his public behavior is damaging for generations to come when a public successful person is deliberately cruel and inconsiderate and mean and petty on the public stage and yet gets rewarded for that behavior. I think it teaches future generations that this is how to be. If you go around being cruel and petty and demeaning to other people, you’ll get rich. And I think that it’s teaching a really bad lesson to future generations. So I dislike what he’s doing for that reason only. If he’s done smart business things, good for him. But I think the damage that he’s done with his public behavior has done more harm than good, in my opinion, by my value system.
Adam
That makes sense. I mean, that’s why they say like with great power comes great responsibility. So he might have a lot of power in one dimension and then everyone makes mistakes. So when he makes a mistake, it’s like it’s got drastic effects.
Derek Sivers
I thought you were going to quote, there is something funny I saw somebody said about him once, which is, “We all thought that dude was a genius till he opened his fucking mouth. He could have just kept his mouth shut. We’d still think he was a genius.” Anyway, that’s my bias.
Anna Gát
It’s unnecessary for the benefit of us all to know what these powerful people are thinking at any time of the day. Like, you know, there used to be a kind of press office to filter their bullshit and now they’re just like tweeting from the toilet. And I don’t know if that’s good. I also think, having lived in multiple countries and having seen different cultures, I don’t think that there’s such a thing as just culture. Right. I mean, you change that. That’s where the musical theme is defined. And if we’re in kind of the villain soundtrack, to go back to the earlier metaphor, then that’s how the people will decide. I often say that, you know, in screenwriting, there’s this one rule that every scene in a movie has to either move the plot forward or reveal character. Why? Because if you just have a, you know, a scene where you show the hero with his kids or something, you know about this person and you will accept how they decide later. And I often feel that the culture is a little bit like the character reveal scenes in a movie. So that’s where we kind of like cook up who we want to be as people morally. And it does matter. Like when in Hungary, people started just like completely disregarding, you know, basic norms of moral behavior and started saying these provocative, you know, pieces of nonsense in parliament. My favorite, the first one, I think that everybody kind of got shocked by was that, you know, the reason why there’s domestic violence is because women no longer have five children. If they have five children, their husbands would respect them and not beat them. Right. Like just like normal logical stuff, you know, supported by science. And, you know, they clearly did it to kind of confuse people and distract from other things that they were doing. But it opens this speech that I find very harmful. But in InterIntellect, we always try to kind of socially engineer things so that people get rewarded for good things. Like if you host a great salon, if you write a good post, if you, you know, have asked interesting questions like, you know, Adam, then, you know, people will remember you at the next salon and your status will go up. If you behave like an idiot, then you will be banned and you can’t come anymore. I feel like Elon is doing kind of the opposite, but he didn’t start it right. He just learned it very well and just and then paid a lot of money and bought the whole thing.
Anna Gát
Any thoughts on this aspect of culture? Because I feel like, you know, you can just do things. You can write an incredible blog like Derek, you can start a company, you can email people out of the blue and make them think about you for three days in the woods, you know, on a completely different continent. How do you guys feel about this? Do you have any like public projects right now on improving at least your immediate culture, whether that’s a WhatsApp group or your family or, you know, the yoga class that you’re teaching? I know Brian is hosting his philosophy salons in a pub.
Bryan Kam
Last time I saw Bryan... Bryan, I think last time I saw you was at Marylebone train station in London. I remember it vividly sitting in a pub restaurant there. And yeah, we’ve just been emailing for the five years since. But any other any last questions?
Anna Gát
Any last questions? I know Billy is doing his music and his drawings. I think everybody here kind of has your projects to contribute, right?
Beard Green Shirt
I did have one question. I know that you’re also a fan of “Sum” - David Eagleman’s book. Very curious if there’s a particular story that you keep coming back to.
Anna Gát
Oh, I love that as an outro.
Derek Sivers
No, I loved the format more than anything. I loved his little stories. I’ve marveled at it. I’m in awe of his writing of that book. But more than anything, it was the format that I loved this idea of every chapter disagreeing with the other chapters.
Anna Gát
That’s kind of how my thoughts are. I think I debate myself. I’m like, “No, you’re wrong!”
Derek Sivers
Yes. That’s why it still it may just be that that my book How to Live might just be my swan song masterpiece, whatever you want to call it. I think that that book is my soul. Like that’s how my brain works. That’s how I am. I have so many conflicting views inside me and kind of like the instruments of the orchestra, you know, choosing to play a trumpet versus a cello. It’s not that the trumpet is right and the cello is wrong. They all exist inside of you. You just bring them out at different times. You use them for different purposes. But there are all these clashing perspectives are inside of me. And I love that. It’s so exciting.
Anna Gát
It’s internal democracy, right? Like the brass are always a bit rude. The woodwinds are pushovers. But who’s the conductor? That’s my question always.
Derek Sivers
Ideally it would be you. But that’s a heavy question because we’re so influenced by our surroundings and we’re products of our culture, etc.
Anna Gát
Bryan is saying in the chat, I’m writing about the history of truth here. Head to https://www.bryankam.com/ We will share it in the tweet thread about this. Derek, any last words for us? Anything InterIntellect should take to heart that we don’t know yet that you believe in?
Derek Sivers
Honestly, anybody here that hasn’t emailed me yet, oh my god, you guys are my people. You guys are my... I mean, just anybody that comes to InterIntellect, you are just so my kind of people. So please, if you don’t mind sharing the chat, sive.rs. I’m not sure if you’re going to be able to do that. sive.rs/contact That’s linked with my email right there. Anybody here who hasn’t emailed me, please email me. I actually really love these provocative questions. I really, really love them. And I answer every email and I put aside like an hour or two a day to do it. And I really enjoy that hour or two a day. So please email me. That’s my final ask.
Anna Gát
I love it. And I’m going to copy paste it here because the autocorrect does not allow me to type it. It was just like, “Sive.rs is not a name. I can’t type that.” Derek Sivers, thank you so much. And for your generosity, this is incredible. I’m an even bigger fangirl than how I entered. One more reminder to not buy any of Derek’s books. We don’t take any, this is not advice. We don’t take any responsibility. Ask your physician about the side effects. But I hope that when the next book that we don’t promote will come out, you will come back to us and we will also not promote it together. Thanks Anna. It’s so nice to finally talk live. Amazing. I will definitely email you as well. Guys, let’s all go and email Derek. Derek, have a lovely rest of the day. In the future, you’re the best. Take care guys. Bye.