Between Views
host: Alec Kosky
Minimalism, De-othering, I'm not from here, Heroes, Protecting your inputs, writing as self-exploration, balancing consumption and creation, my life story in four nutshells.
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Transcript:
Alec Kosky
Welcome to Between Views. Today I'm chatting with Derek Sivers. He started CD Baby, helped thousands of indie musicians sell their music online, sold the company for a stack of cash, and then gave it all away. He's also written a whole heap of books like Anything You Want, How to Live, and Hell Yeah or No. And he's big on living simply, thinking differently, and doing things your own way, or at least the Derek Sivers way. As far as I know, he's living in New Zealand. And in recent times, they discovered he likes being a rat dad, enjoys coffee from the Emirates. And I got connected to Derek through my biggest idol of the last few years. His name is Gerry Garbulsky. He has his own podcast in Argentina. And he was the guy who was really interested originally and pointed me towards you. He said you'd be a great guest to have on the show. And our first question for today is from him as well. So Derek Sivers, welcome.
Derek Sivers
Thank you. That was a fun intro. I appreciate it.
Alec Kosky
So let's jump right in. Our first question for today is from Gerry Garbulsky. And I think he's actually listened to you and read your blog a fair bit by the sounds of it. And he likes you a lot. And his question for you, and he asked this on his show too, is:
Alec Kosky
What is it that you learned doing what you do?
Derek Sivers
If we say that doing what I do is writing, because that's what I've been doing for the last 14 years. Before that, I was doing other things. I was doing music for 10 years. I was doing a company for 10 years. But assuming that we're talking about writing, I've been thinking about this a lot lately. It's so much fun to learn while I'm doing. It's amazing to me that we often think of learning as taking in outside information and like adding facts and info into our brain. But you can learn just from sitting alone in a room and thinking. That is so cool. So writing is a way of exploring yourself. Some might say discovering yourself as if there's like a thing to be discovered or an answer to be revealed. But to me, it's more like exploring myself. So it's learning what I think about something or learning or exploring a new way I could think about something. And this all comes just from sitting alone with my thoughts and exploring. It is so much fun.
Alec Kosky
That's a really interesting way of looking at it because it's an input that comes from the input.
Derek Sivers
Yes, an input that comes from the input! I like that.
Alec Kosky
Yeah, it's unique how something can arrive in your mind and then from that, wherever that place is, you can turn that into a physical thing in the world.
Derek Sivers
You're right. I don't think of the physical book that much. I usually think of the idea just getting itself from my brain into yours. The physical books: one of my best friends named Saeah, who lives in North Carolina, USA, she takes care of all the physical books and she really nerds out about the binding and the paper quality. So she takes care of all that. I just focus on the words.
Alec Kosky
That's nice. That's one thing I've always kind of wished with the podcast as well is like, I love this part, but the editing part, I could really give to someone else who cares about it a lot more. Yeah. And I guess you do that with your books as well.
Derek Sivers
Well, only for the paper. I have in the past tried to hire editors. But imagine hiring an editor for what you tell your kid at night. Or hiring an editor to help you write a love letter to your partner. To me, it's just too personal. So my last two books had no editor at all. I tried hiring one two books ago and just didn't like it. I mean, they gave good suggestions and I just discarded them. I said, "Sorry, that's just, that's not what I intended." And I like the words I wrote. That's why I wrote them. So no editor for my last two books.
Alec Kosky
Oh, so you do it yourself?
Derek Sivers
I edit as I'm writing. So to me, the entire process starts with a rough draft that's a giant pile of words. And then I spend two years to edit it down like poetry into just the words I want. So at that point, there's kind of no room for an editor to do anything else.
Alec Kosky
Because that's one thing that I have come to admire about your writing is that you take a kind of minimal stance on it. You ask yourself, what is the smallest point that this could be? How could I make this point with the least words possible? I just heard that the other day when I was listening to your podcast with Tim. And I thought it was really nice because I like minimal values myself. And I think that a lot of the things that you do from what I've learned is based around those minimal values. Is that something that you've learned in life?
Derek Sivers
Yeah, it has two aspects. For the writing, I'm pessimistically assuming that most people don't like to read. And if they are reading, they want to get the maximum value in the least amount of time with the least amount of words. So I take it upon myself to compress my writing as succinct as it can be. Get rid of every word that doesn't need to be there. So that's one aspect. The other life minimalism is maybe related, but maybe not. It's more of a challenge to myself to see how little I can be happy with, thereby assuring my future happiness if I have trained myself to be happy on very little. It makes it easier to be happy in the future if I know it takes very little to make me happy.
Alec Kosky
The happiest man desires least.
Derek Sivers
Exactly. That's the pursuit I've been on for decades.
Alec Kosky
Nice. I came across your attempt at trying to translate some of your work. And I realized that that is kind of an interesting challenge for you because you kind of will lose it to the editors in a way. and you have a way of getting it out to the world to be translated the best. Did you want to talk about that for a second?
Derek Sivers
Not yet. Because ask me again in a year and I'll have a better answer for you. I'm still building the software. It's kind of like third priority under some other things I'm doing. So I have a software that I'm slowly developing called InchWord, which has every sentence stored in its own database entry, and then the translation stored separately. So I work with human translators sentence by sentence to try to make each sentence the best it could be, of course, in the context of the other sentences. But that's how my writing is stored anyway. Everything I write, I store each sentence separately in the database or this future purpose. And I haven't really made it happen well yet. Ask me again in a year.
Alec Kosky
It got me excited because I speak Spanish and I noticed you were talking about that kind of stuff recently. And I just thought to myself, wow, that's a cool kind of link I didn't know I had with Derek, but that could be a somewhat useful thing.
Derek Sivers
Yeah. It's, it's fascinating. Languages are so much fun to study because it makes you more aware of your own language and things that you just learned as a kid without questioning, and now you get to look at them with fresh eyes. You learn that the word for disappointment in another language is this, this. And then you think, oh, that's a strange word. But then it makes you look again at your own word. You go, well, disappointment. Wait, what is appointment? Why am I saying it's the dis- of appointment? You know, it's so much fun to make you re-question your own language and just pay more attention to language itself. So I'm not fluent in any other language besides English, but I'm learning Chinese because I think it's fascinating. It's so much fun to make these little games in my head to remember every character.
Alec Kosky
Yeah, me too, me too. I love when the characters look like what they look like. That's the easiest, you know, when it already looks like it. One thing I think you really love about Chinese, I don't know if you know it already, is it takes about half the time to say anything in Chinese. And I feel like that's very you. If you could like write all your books in Chinese, they'd be half as long.
Derek Sivers
I'll be making 30 page books instead of 80 page books.
Alec Kosky
I would love for our listeners to get to know you a bit. And I just came to realize after listening to, I listened to Hell Yeah or No, I listened to How to Live, and I listened to a few of the podcasts you featured on. I just realized I won't be able to tell your story as good as you can. So I really, I would love for you to tell it in a nutshell.
Derek Sivers
Okay. I will do four little nutshells.
Derek Sivers
#1: As a kid, I think a foundational thing for me is that we moved a lot. In particular, I was born in California, but then moved to England when I was five years old. And suddenly just the culture difference between this posh little English school and my hippie California background I had just come from instilled in me this feeling of "I'm not from here". As soon as I arrived in England, like I'm the American kid, I'm not from here. But then after only one year, we moved to Chicago and I had already picked up the English accent from a year in England. So everybody called me the English kid. I was like, well, I'm not from here either. And then I went to school in Boston. I'm not from here. I moved to New York city. I'm not from here. Everywhere I've lived, I felt like I'm not from here. Which the implication of that is that your norms don't apply to me because I know that they're not the only way. So I think this instilled a worldview in me that since I'm not from here your norms are not for me - I come from somewhere else where we do things a different way. OK so that's nutshell number one.
Derek Sivers
#2: At the age of 14 I got obsessed with music to the point where I said I'm going to be a full-time musician. This is my laser focus. I don't care about anything else. I did poorly in school because all I wanted was to be a successful musician. This was so good for me because the process of mastering anything helps you in every other aspect of life because now you have a reason to focus and you have something to apply everything else to. So in pursuit of being a successful musician, suddenly every book on psychology became interesting because I could apply it to what I was doing with music. Every book about business became interesting because I could apply it to my music business. Every book about communication was interesting now because I could apply that to how I'm trying to market myself or communicate with my audience, whether it's in lyric writing or promoting. So that was amazing to me. So 15 years from the age of 14 to 29, I was completely obsessed with being a successful musician. And that let me learn so much about the world because I wanted to apply it to something. Okay. That's nutshell number two.
Derek Sivers
#3: CD baby. So just by accident, I started this little online record store. I was just selling my own CD in 1997, and a friend said, "Hey, can you sell my CD too?" And I did it as a favor for a friend, and then it grew and grew. And then for 10 years, that became a music distribution company called CD Baby, where I had 85 employees and a quarter million musicians using my service. And it was super intense, but it was 10 years of being in service. I spent 16 hours a day, seven days a week, obsessed with being of service to the world. I was being of service to my musician clients. I was not doing the business for my own sake. Yes, it made money, but that was not the point. I was doing it to be like a public servant. That was 10 years of my life.
Derek Sivers
#4: Lastly, when I sold the company after 10 years in 2008, I didn't know what the fuck was next. I was lost. I didn't know what I'm doing. So I just started reading a lot and writing a lot and thinking a lot. And through doing that, realized that all of my heroes are authors. And that seemed to be the direction I was heading. So the last 17 years now, I've been more of a writer/ thinker/ speaker dude. So there's my four nutshells.
Alec Kosky
Wow. Each one of those brings up so many things for me. The first one is about how not being from somewhere, it reminds me of that whole idea that some people think you should contribute to the society you're in. But if you're not from there, some people would say, well, you're not from here. You're not going to be like us. Other people might say, if you're going to come here, you should really try and be like what we're doing here. How do you feel about that in general? When you move to the place, do you try and be like the Romans? Or do you kind of bring yourself along and be like, I'm doing it my way?
Derek Sivers
When in Iceland, do as the Romans do.
Derek Sivers
So first it helps to know that nothing anyone says on that subject is true. It's just an opinion. If somebody says you should contribute to the site society you're in, that's not true. That's just one person's way of looking at it. You can't let anybody shame you into adopting their value system. If it's not your own, you can hear them and you can, you can think, should I contribute to the society I'm living in? Does that work for me? Does that help me be who I want to be? Maybe, maybe that works for you. And so you do throw yourself into the society that you're in and try to contribute to it or try to be exactly like them. But if that doesn't work for you, that's not a physical law of nature that you absolutely positively must do this. It's just one way of looking at it. So first, you just can't let anybody moralize you and shame you. Just try it on and see if you like it.
Derek Sivers
For me, I find it's dependent on where I am. I moved to New Zealand 13 years ago just as a place to raise my kid. I had no particular interest in New Zealand itself. I just thought it would be a really great place to raise a baby in this nature paradise. So New Zealand culture has never particularly appealed to me. But the culture is just a circumstance of the last few hundred years. The fact that a bunch of British settlers came in in the 1840s and the Maori came in a few hundred years before that. It's just random. I feel extremely connected to the physical land of New Zealand. I feel no particular affinity for the culture. I think people are very nice, they're very friendly, but I'm not fascinated with the culture. So I feel no personal need to throw myself into New Zealand culture. On the other hand, there are places like China where I'm fascinated with the local culture and I want to throw myself into it. I want to try being a local. I want to learn the language. I want to live there - to try to live as a Chinese person would. Same thing somewhat with India. Definitely same thing with the Middle East.
Derek Sivers
I'm in Abu Dhabi today for a couple days, but just running an errand, and I'm actually going to the hospital tomorrow. There's a really good hospital here called Cleveland Clinic, and where I live in Wellington, New Zealand, is not doing very well. We don't have very many doctors. In fact, the last dermatologist in Wellington is leaving. So now, I think as of next week, Wellington, New Zealand has no dermatologists, none. So I haven't had a full medical checkup in a long time. So I came to Abu Dhabi for a medical. But anyway, sorry, that's beside the point.
Derek Sivers
There are places like United Arab Emirates, Singapore, and China, where I really like the local culture and I want to be a part of it. And there are other places that I don't.
Alec Kosky
The original question was kind of based around whether when you move to a place you should try and meld to the norms or not.
Derek Sivers
I just disagree with this idea of "should". You could try it on and see if it inspires you. I like it in some places, yes.
Alec Kosky
So from your perspective, it's pretty much personally, it's different for everyone. Go and figure it out and see how it fits and suits you.
Derek Sivers
It depends on who you want to be. There's people who, say, move to a place, and in fact maybe their rebellion against the place helps them be a better person. So imagine if you are a super achiever in some sense, whether it's fitness or intellectual pursuits, and you move to, say, a beach town in Portugal. And you get there and everybody's just smoking and drinking and lounging around and doing nothing but enjoying the beach. And you could use this as negative motivation, incredible anti-hero inspiration to do the opposite of the people around you, to use them as an example of what not to do. It could really work for you to not be like them. On the other hand, you could move to, say, Los Angeles if you wanted to be a writer, and you could realize that you're surrounded with thousands and thousands of people that every day wake up and throw themselves into their work to write the best stories they can because the stakes are so high. If you write a great screenplay, you can make millions in a Hollywood movie. If you write a great novel or a great comedy sketch, it can make or break your career. And so this could inspire you to be like the people around you. There's no right or wrong answer. You should happily ignore everybody who says you should. Then see if it works for you.
Alec Kosky
Just as a funny thought experiment, imagine if you went the other way where you didn't ignore everyone who said you should and you just did all the things that people said you should do. What would happen then? Where would you end up?
Derek Sivers
Dude, just look at the rest of the world. That's the answer to your question. Most people do what their peers and heroes in the media tell them or show them they should do. Especially more show than tell. They act like people act in their tv shows. They act like their friends reward them for acting.
Alec Kosky
That makes me want to ask you the question: Are you careful with your input?
Derek Sivers
Very!
Alec Kosky
Because I came across that - you know the whole "you are what you eat thing" - I was like, no hang on a minute you are what you consume! Every single input sensory input that goes into this body has the effect of potentially coming out and reproducing itself by mirroring itself through us. It got me thinking about like - whoa - you got to be really careful of what you let in. Otherwise you can kind of turn into whatever is being forced into your mind.
Derek Sivers
Which anyone listening to this, ask yourself, have you watched the news this year? And if so, why? Do you really want that shit in your head? Has it improved your actions and made you a better human being and really fulfilled your highest sense of self? Are you becoming more self-actualized through the shit you take in through the news every day? Probably not. So why the fuck are you letting it into your brain? Because most people do? That's not enough of a reason. Because people say you should? Or that you're living under a rock if you don't? That's just somebody trying to shame you and legitimize their own behavior. No, I don't think people should let any unhealthy shit into their brain.
Alec Kosky
Derek, what's the healthy shit that you should put in your brain?
Derek Sivers
Well, again, it's whatever you value.
Alec Kosky
What about for you? For you personally? Like what is the healthiest, like what's your general, your intake? What do you prefer to consume? I know books are a big thing for you.
Derek Sivers
Yeah. I really appreciate books more and more as other media forms get more infiltrated with advertising and persuasion. I appreciate books more and more for being the last media format that's advertising-free, and usually has better incentives. Of course, there are some crap books that are just shat out by somebody to promote their speaking gig, but I don't read those. Instead, I try to read actionable books that I can use to better become who I want to be.
Alec Kosky
What are your most actionable books ever?
Derek Sivers
#1 that's like a Bible for me is the book "Awaken the Giant Within" by Tony Robbins. And calling it a Bible is very apt because I read it at a formative age when I was 19 and again when I was 21 and again when I was 23. I just took in his message so much at this really formative age for me that it just became my worldview - in the same way that somebody who just grew up Hindu has this worldview or grew up Jewish has this worldview. They don't even question it. It just shapes the whole way they see the world. That book shaped the whole way I see the world to an extent I didn't even realize until I went back 20 years later and read it again just three years ago. I re-read it, amazed at how much its stories shaped my life ever since so that's my big one.
Alec Kosky
What's the key message from that book and how does it shape you?
Derek Sivers
You can help the way you feel. That's the the big counterintuitive one, if you make me pick one It's like a truism. People say, "You can't help the way you feel. I can't help the way I feel!" But you can! You can deliberately interrupt yourself, question your initial emotional reaction to something. Think of other ways that you could feel about this. Try them on for size, see what works better for you. Then stack up the reasons to adopt a different emotional reaction and then embrace the one you want. It's a very deliberate process that doesn't come naturally. Most of us aren't taught this way or raised this way, but it's very doable and it's so helpful. It makes your life something of your own design instead of just a shrug and impulse.
Alec Kosky
While you're talking about this, it's making me think a lot about, you kind of mentioned, it's not how we learn, not how we grow up. And I think that that's the case a lot of the time through school, you kind of get taught to be and act a certain way. And talking about books and coming across these books, you know, right after school, essentially, for you, it makes me realise that sometimes the books are the way we unlearn and relearn who and how we want to be in that moment as we get a little older.
Derek Sivers
Yeah. I did not read books until I was 21. I read this one book because somebody that I loved very much told me I should read it at 19. But other than that, I really didn't read much until my 20s.
Alec Kosky
But once you started, game changer?
Derek Sivers
Yeah. Like I said earlier, that nutshell about wanting to be a great musician. Once I realized that I could read books on negotiation and apply it to my music career, read books on networking and talking to strangers, and I could apply that to my music career, read books on marketing, even ones that are written about pharmaceutical companies and, I don't know, Mattel and retail placement. I would read these metaphorically to think how I could apply this to my music example. And because I wanted so badly to become a successful musician, it helps me devour every bit of self-improvement I could.
Alec Kosky
I think Gerry, who asked the original question, is really going to like the answer you just gave. He's huge on metaphors. And I feel like it kind of links well with, you know, those accesses of your life, which become really important. So much so that other information that seemingly is unrelated can suddenly be related. And I guess it's kind of cool how. Yeah, like you wouldn't think that you would enjoy those things, but then all of a sudden, just because of something that is seemingly unrelated, you can.
Derek Sivers
It really helps to learn how to learn metaphorically. I was just going to say read metaphorically, but honestly, with the success of YouTube, I should say the prevalence of YouTube - and even the way that people are using new large language model tools, books might have less importance, be just yet another media form where you might be able to learn just as much from a really well-made video course or really well-made video or just through back and forth interaction with an AI tool. The whole point is it's an amazing skill to be able to learn metaphorically so you can learn about, say, a triathlete and what they went through in their training, and you could apply it to your pursuit of being a great juggler, whatever. I should have picked a different skill that's not so physical. But you could apply anything to anything else in your own creative way so that you're not just looking for books or courses that are about the very specific thing that you're after, but you can glean lessons from everywhere else.
Alec Kosky
Yeah, you kind of take just a little bit of it. I called it, what did I call it once? I called it the croutons on the salad. You know, you don't really have to like the salad necessarily, but it doesn't mean you can't like croutons, because croutons are great. They're crispy, they're salty, they're oily. The salad might be terrible, but at least there's some croutons on there. And you can throw croutons on anything, literally.
Derek Sivers
Nice.
Alec Kosky
The final part of your nutshells there that really captured me was the CD Baby, the serving others. My girlfriend wanted me to ask you a question about CD Baby, but you already answered it. So I won't have to do it. But the serving others thing, is I guess you found that you needed or could make an offering that was going to help others. Whatever that offering is, that could be anything. And from what I can tell, it seems like your way is creating things. You create, be it something, an idea, a book. You create an availability of CDs for people so they can listen to music. It's not, I feel like people get stuck thinking that helping someone is volunteering and going into, you know, Africa to build a school or something. That's a great way to help people, I'm sure. But there's lots and lots of ways you can serve others, right?
Derek Sivers
And flying to Africa to put roofs on shacks is a very, very, very dumb way to help people. You should not do that if you really want to help people in Africa. The cost of your flight to get there itself could pay hundreds of people that already live there that are much better at putting roofs on buildings than you are. If you really cared and you weren't just fucking Instagramming to make yourself look like a helpful person, if you really want to be helpful, then flying to a place to hammer roofs is a very dumb way to do it. It'd be much smarter to just send some money to people that are already there so they can do it themselves. OK sorry that's a a ranty subject of mine.
Derek Sivers
Everybody has their own way. I think it's beautiful: people who volunteer their time at soup kitchens or homeless shelters. That's amazing. And those people do actual, helpful, immediately helpful work.
Derek Sivers
For me, I love building systems. I learned just enough about computer programming earlier on that I often look at a problem and think, how can I make a system that can solve this at scale? And I don't mean billions Facebook scale. I don't care about that. But even just helping dozens or hundreds of people, if I can build something that can help hundreds of people, that's a great joy for me because it gets the intellectual challenge of building something, the creative joy of making something that didn't exist and then the deeper fulfillment of knowing that it's helping people through its existence or its usage.
Alec Kosky
Yeah I know you you talked before about how you said you don't know any other languages but whenever I look at coding that is spoken as a language they relate to coding languages like Ruby and Python as languages and because I love languages so much it really got me curious to ask you about um is it like is there some relation between learning coding language and actually learning or well learning like a Chinese or something like that you know like. Do you feel like you know languages because you know coding?
Derek Sivers
No learning a programming language is a million times easier than learning a spoken language. It's really not that different than any program. Like if you've ever learned Photoshop or something, you learn that you have to go under that tools menu and get that little dropdown and then you have to highlight your mouse over this and then click R. It's just a typed out way of doing that. Instead of clicking that menu, clicking this option, dragging your mouse here, you learn that you have to type X equals that. You have to open the parentheses and type X equals that, then close the parentheses and type this word. But it's really no different than learning how to use some computer program.
Alec Kosky
I was trying to see if there was some relation between having learned a language already and then being able to transfer that into some part of my brain that accepts coding language as well. But I guess no.
Derek Sivers
I think not.
Alec Kosky
Okay. So that's good to know.
Alec Kosky
The last little part there of the nutshells, you wrote writer, thinker, speaker. That's your current nutshell. That's the one you're moving through life with at the moment. That's another way of serving people. You're giving out information, ideas. You're sharing reflections and your own personal knowledge and wisdom with people. And I think the thing that I really liked about what you said about that was how you wanted to be like your heroes. And that's the whole reason I started Between Views, that Gerry Garbulsky, I got to talk with him only very recently. He was my hero for a couple of years there. And I just, and still is. And I think that what he's doing is great. So I imitated him. I wanted to be like him. So I started Between Views. And I just think that's fascinating how we turn into the people we idolize or idealize. And I still don't really understand the whole mechanic, but it's like the mechanic is adoration equals positive change in your person.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, through emulation. We all emulate, right? I like the metaphor of noticing who you look up to tells you which direction you're facing. And then you tend to go in the direction you're facing. So noticing who you look up to tells you which way you're going. This mattered to me because I used to think of myself as an entrepreneur and a programmer. And that's how I would describe myself. For years, if you asked, "What do you do?" I'd say I'm an entrepreneur and a programmer. But yet, all of my heroes are the authors of these nonfiction books that I love so much. I did not have any entrepreneurs as heroes, yet I called myself an entrepreneur. So that's when I realized that I'm actually more of an author without it without realizing it at first because the way I'm actually facing the people I actually look up to are all authors.
Alec Kosky
It makes you wonder where that because everyone's different I always am fascinated by how uniquely different every single person's life is when you really get down to the dot points it's so different and so diverse and but everyone's still just doing life and still going along regardless of what it is and I feel like that's very you know a point you make often in your book that it's like everyone's doing it that's okay that's okay let's you know carry on live and let live kind of thing what suits you um but I just think like what makes you how why does everyone have different heroes you know like I mean a lot of people idolize and make heroes out of the same people because they're doing impressive things I guess or maybe they've just followed what they love to a T or something along those lines why do you think people find their heroes
Derek Sivers
I don't know I think it's social rewards like if somebody sees this pop star getting the uh getting all the girls and you think well I want to get the girls so I'm gonna be like that guy uh it can be as simple as that uh i think that's how it felt for me at first when i was 14 my girlfriend adored prince and so i found myself wanting to be more like prince so that i could get more of her attention which is funny because later he became a musical hero for me for almost unrelated reasons because i started getting into deeply into music and different of music and got really into funk and then i went and re-listened to prince who i thought of as just that guy that my girlfriend liked i'm like oh he's actually doing some fascinating music um but i'll admit looking back that yeah at first i was trying to be like prince because that's who my girlfriend liked and i imagine a lot of people in the world looking at say podcasters who have millions of views and saying, well, I want to be like that guy. He has millions of views. If I'm like him, I'll get those social rewards. Or looking at somebody who's really rich and saying, well, I want to be rich. And so if I act like that guy who's rich, then maybe I'll get rich. I guess it depends on what you want out of life, which usually comes from what you feel that you're lacking in.
Alec Kosky
I guess it's a good question to ask yourself, who's your idol? But also, what is it about them that you idolize because that might give you some good direction on what you actually really want and need. Like, for example, with Gerry, I thought about it a little bit and I came to the realization that it wasn't so much the fame and the big community and group and stuff like that. I liked more than anything that he could do and work as his own creative project and what he wanted to do. His job and his lifestyle became what he was creating and enjoyed creating. And I think that was my favourite part. And that's what I admire about the whole idea of being able to do it.
Derek Sivers
That's really cool to realise what it is that you admire about somebody. We should all do that. Take anybody that you really look up to and try to distill what it is that you admire about that person. See if you can actually make it into a recipe on how somebody could get the traits of this person and then see if you can use that recipe yourself.
Alec Kosky
Speaking of people who look up to people, you have become a father in recent times - a relatively recent time.
Derek Sivers
That's a transition! All right.
Alec Kosky
I'm working on segues. I'm still working on segues. Because, you know, if you're listening, please rate my segue. I won't be offended if it's a low rating.
Alec Kosky
You've become a father in a more recent part of your life. And from what I hear, becoming a parent changes a lot of the time the way that you move through the world because you have a whole new thing to focus on. So for you, how has becoming a father changed you? And what ideas do you stand by when it comes to parenting?
Derek Sivers
It didn't change me that much because I had just come out of 10 years of being in service to others. My 10 years of running CD Baby were quite selfless. I was going through every day just completely in service to helping others. So I think that is the main change for people that have gone through life very selfishly. And then they have a kid and suddenly they need to be selfless and spend their days doing whatever's best for their kid. "Never mind what's best for me. It's whatever's best for him." I was already in that mindset for 10 years. So I found that having a kid did not change me the way that people said it would change your life. And in hindsight, I'm guessing this is maybe the reason why. It's because I was already in that mindset.
Derek Sivers
Since you said before we hit record that the idea of having a kid scares you, I'll say that it should not, because I found that having a kid is really no different than being in love. Just like you're in love with your partner - you're head over heels - you're obsessed with her - you're so happy to be together - almost every minute with her is wonderful. Yes, you occasionally have to work through some misunderstandings or misalignments in needs, but those few times that you have to work through some of the bad stuff is totally worth it because the rest of the time is just so much bliss and joy. You're just so happy to be together. That's really what it is to have a kid. You're just in love, so wiping the poo out of a nappy is nothing. It's like as if the person you love most on Earth sneezed and you hold up a tissue to wipe her nose. It's no big deal. So I think it's definitely nothing to be scared of. It's just mostly bliss.
Derek Sivers
Unless you try to make your kid fit into your adult schedule. From my amateur observation, it seems that this is where all of the parenting problem and strife comes from, is trying to make a kid fit into your adult schedule. This idea of like, no, we need to go hurry up and get your shoes on. We have to go. And you're late and it's time to go and come over here and I don't have time for this. And I'm looking at my phone and you've just dropped something on the floor. It's that clash between kid time and adult time. They're circles versus squares. It's analog versus digital. They don't mix well. So instead, my suggestion for any new parent is to save your money as much as you can before your kid is born. After your kid is born, just find a way to turn off your adult schedule as much as possible. Whenever you're on duty, whether that's full-time or just half-time - maybe if you have another parent or a nanny or somebody that can help - but whenever you're on duty, completely power down your phone, shut it off, put it somewhere else and immerse yourself in your kid's life - your kid's schedule - so that they lead the way and you are just their sidekick and you're completely on their time. Whatever the clock says is moot. You just experience the world through your kids' eyes and then it's all easy.
Alec Kosky
Is that part of why you moved to New Zealand in the first place?
Derek Sivers
Not part - it is 100% of why. I was living in fascinating Singapore where I was super social and had hundreds of acquaintances that I would meet up with often. And that's where my boy was born. And after a few months, I saw this is a real problem. People are asking me to come to fascinating events and to speak and to meet up where my kid is sitting at home and also wants my attention. And to me, it's no contest. My kid deserves my full attention. So I moved not just to New Zealand, but to Nelson, New Zealand, where I knew nobody so that I could be completely undistracted and give my kid 100% of my attention. It's the reason I moved to New Zealand.
Alec Kosky
I often think about with kids, the whole idea without having one, I came to realize that the whole idea is giving them as much attention as humanly possible, especially during their first seven years of life while they're becoming the human they are. And because there was a few things that tipped me off about it was the where attention goes, energy flows. So literally in that you're looking at something and it grows. You know, I learned that through a weird reflection about advertising. and then the other part was how just kind of like a humorous noting of how whenever you're with kids parents it's always the parent's job it seems to redirect the attention to something about their kid and I don't mind that at all but I just kind of noticed that it's always like ages ago even when I was a kid it was kind of like a motherly competition or fatherly competition to direct the the the story towards what the kid had done and i realized that was kind of getting the attention towards the kid as well and i was like i wonder if that's like a mechanism a biological mechanism of parenting to like eyes on your kid kind of thing and it made me not feel so bad about the the parents who you know maybe do make their kids have these like crazy full-on attention star lives or maybe there's too much attention perhaps there's like a happy medium where you've got to like get it just right if there's too much something goes wrong if there's too little something goes wrong i don't know i'm just spitballing here
Derek Sivers
It's interesting I've never felt the desire for other people's eyes to be on my kid. But i have felt the desire where when I'm talking with friends, and I mean friends, not strangers, I mean friends where you have a safe space where you express yourself and they express themselves, and this is the essence of your friendship is getting to know each other or knowing each other and sharing your lives with each other. You spend so much time with your kid that it's almost a lie to not talk about it with others because it's such a huge part of your life. I spend, imagine this, 30 hours every week for the last 13 years. That's how much time I've spent one-on-one with my boy. His mom and I just set it up once he was born that she takes this amount of time, I take that amount of time, and the way it turns out is to be a steady 30 hours at least. And whenever I'm with him, my devices are powered down. I do nothing but give him my full attention. So, 30 hours a week for 13 years, that's a major chunk of my life. I've been mostly a full-time dad for the last 13 years and everything else you've seen me do is fit in between my time I give him.
Alec Kosky
What what's your favorite thing about being a full-time dad?
Derek Sivers
There's a meditative aspect to letting go of yourself and shutting down your own thoughts and plans and immersing completely into someone else's. It feels similar to meditation with I'm with him. He's fascinated with this thing and he's showing it to me or talking about it, and in my head I have other things that are on my mind. And like meditation, I just let them go.
Alec Kosky
Wow so it's kind of meditation through play in a way yeah that's awesome. It reminds me of sad guru. I don't know if you've ever come across him before. I don't know what his natural name is but he goes by Sadhguru online and he has that big thing with never he tells everyone he meets, "Teach my daughter nothing please." That's his first thing he says please don't teach her anything. Just play with her. Please just just play - do whatever game they're doing and yeah don't teach her something. I think he's getting it like don't install a rule in my daughter kind of thing
Derek Sivers
That said, my kid has actively appreciated the things that I have deliberately taught him.
Derek Sivers
He's told me years later that he really loves that I taught him this or taught him that.
Alec Kosky
There you go. You and Sadhguru can have a chat about that one. There's no right or wrong answer.
Derek Sivers
You know, as soon as you have a kid, everybody will tell you what's the right way to do things or the wrong way to do things.
Alec Kosky
I was just talking to my mum about that recently. And she's like, doesn't matter what you do, either way, someone will tell you you've done it wrong and right.
Derek Sivers
But that's in life, not just parenting. But same thing with business, same thing with health, same thing with anything you're doing in life. People are going to tell you you're wrong. That's why you really have to have a strong sense of self and knowing why you're doing what you're doing. So that when inevitably somebody says, "No, you're a fool for having a podcast. You're a fool for living in Australia. That's wrong. You should be living in India right now. You shouldn't have a podcast. You should be doing this other technology instead." You have to know why you're doing this, why it works for you, and be unflustered when somebody tells you that you're wrong. Or open your mind and consider it for a second. "Are they right? Am I perhaps wrong?" And every now and then, the answer might be yes.
Derek Sivers
I love those moments I've had in life where somebody tells me that I'm wrong and my first impulse is to bristle. "No, I'm not. No, I'm not wrong. How dare you?" And then I think about it later that night or the next week. And I go, "Actually, that's a really good point. I am not living congruently with my values. That person was right to call me out on that." And I update my behavior accordingly and then thank them. So it kind of comes to you a little later.
Alec Kosky
I guess in both of those situations, what would you say is the best way to know yourself? Because both of them are ways to know yourself.
Derek Sivers
Just reflecting, whether it's writing in a journal, speaking into an audio diary, having long in-depth talks with friends, but for me a journal works best every single day for the last 13 years and many years before that but unbreakable for the last 13 years I've kept a journal that's just really supplied my sanity
Alec Kosky
Do you put your journal down while you're playing or does that come along with you?
Derek Sivers
Oh it's not a physical thing. They're all text files in the computer. So if for example I'm out in the world and I have a thought I can record it into my phone, even if it's an airplane mode, I'll hit the voice recorder thing and i'll leave an audio note and then i'll later transcribe it and email it to myself so that it's back on my computer. Or if i'm out with no technology at I'll try to just remember that idea to record later. Sometimes by talking about it out loud, sometimes, you know, despite what I said earlier about letting all my thoughts go, sometimes when I'm with my kid, especially because he's 13 now and he's old enough to talk about anything, I can even have a complex, interesting thought. Like, I just had an interesting thought last week about de-othering. And even though he and I were just playing in a swimming pool somewhere, I said, hey, I just had a really interesting idea about de-othering. And I talked with him about it for 10 minutes. And he kind of went, okay, okay. He really had nothing to say back about it. But just the fact that I spoke it out loud to him helped me remember it eight hours later when I was back at the computer and he was asleep.
Alec Kosky
And what is de-othering?
Derek Sivers
All right, you're the first person I've talked to about this, so I wasn't sure if it's a known word. I heard the word othering and looked it up and it means, basically in short, it's when you say "Those people. Those people are crazy. Those people are lazy. Well, you know how those people are. Those people have a stick up their butt. Those people are weird." It's anytime you take a group of people and you define them as the other, "they are not like me". Usually in a negative sense. So it made me think, what is de-othering? The prefix de we use to mean to undo something. So to undo the thought process or the emotional impression you have of somebody being in an other group from you, how could I undo that? So de-othering, to undo the othering categories we put people into. I realized that that's actually the common thread behind what I've been doing for 20 years now. It's what made me want to leave America. I wanted to put myself out into the world and de-other all of these groups. So I could live in United Arab Emirates and feel at home, and feel kinship with my Arab neighbors, even though we grew up in different households, I feel no separation between them and I. We are one in the same. We are we are kindreds. To feel that in China, to feel that in India, to feel that in Brazil, maybe even Russia. That would be an amazing achievement to feel that connected to every type of person everywhere in the world.
Alec Kosky
It's built on the premise that we perhaps naturally other people or call them "they" you know if they're not asked it's them and i feel like that's a really common thing when you talk about stuff like oh they do this over there or they're a poor nation or they're always at war or something like that yeah from a few things that i've seen when you get down to actually even just reading about it but also going there traveling places it seems like you naturally kind of undo those stories through experience. I guess that's what you're trying to do first but it makes me think do we always have to other them in the first place like is there not a way to just kind of skip the process and not "other" them at all ideally
Derek Sivers
Maybe you are an enlightened individual that never from the beginning felt any separation between yourself and somebody in West Africa or Northern Siberia. Good for you. I unfortunately did think that way. I'm not just talking geographically. It would be de-othering for me to go to Burning Man without judgment. Right now I still have an othering of the fucking hedonists that want to just get high in the desert and dance to techno for days. I can't relate to that at all. To me they are more othered in my mind than my friends in China are at this point. Doesn't mean you have to go and do that. Perhaps it's a great film or book or conversation with somebody that does it. Maybe if I sat down and maybe I should start a podcast interviewing the others or something like that. And I could have in-depth conversations without ever leaving New Zealand could help me de-other people in many different walks of life.
Alec Kosky
It's an interesting concept and I really like that it doesn't even have to be people from other countries. That's national de-othering, but you've got like social de-othering and any other kind of description of that.
Derek Sivers
Right. Well, look at the political divides, right? I mean, America seems to have it the worst right now with this ridiculous right versus left, red versus blue tribalism. Everywhere has versions of this. Well, not everywhere. Most places have versions of this. Sorry, I brought up China like three times, but I've been there four times in the past year. But it's kind of interesting that, at least from what I've seen right now, China is a place that doesn't have this right versus left division in the culture, since it doesn't exist there. Anyway, that was part of the inspiration for this, is realizing how much people tribalize themselves politically.
Derek Sivers
Gender! Oh my god. One of my old best friends was a woman named Amber. And even though I was her best friend, she was my best friend, she's still at least every week, almost every day would have some version of like, "Well, you know how men are!" Or "You know what women are like, that women do this! Well, you know, men do that." And every time I'd have to say, "Amber, everybody does that. That's not just women. That's not just men." She's like, "Well, you know, men just don't like to change their mind." I'd say, "Amber, women also don't like to change their mind. Nobody likes to change their mind. Quit othering."
Derek Sivers
And it's something that I hate about politicians that make it their primary message. Is this othering of "Those people are the problem!" So I just realized that just last week, while in a swimming pool with my kid, So much de-othering matters to me.
Alec Kosky
It's tricky because it's obviously been a proven way to unite people is to give them a good enemy. We all know, we've heard of that before. It bonds people, unfortunately. So when that powerful way of bonding others comes along, I can see why people who are looking for power and want to just win would use that tactic if it works the best. On a percentage basis it kind of makes sense but it kind of sucks as well which is which is terrible. You made me think about - I often ask and the whole one of the whole reasons i got connected to you was through the question of who would be great for this show and what would you ask them the question i came up with to connect with people but that connects me with not the others really it connects me with people who would be great for this so i'm wondering if any of the shows i should ask who would be terrible for this show and what should i ask them you know to get the whole flip side of things it would be fascinating.
Derek Sivers
Not who would be terrible for the show because you might find somebody who's just a terrible communicator.
Derek Sivers
But somebody whose worldview you find incomprehensible. Somebody whose opinion you hate and you find complete revulsion towards, especially if they're an eloquent person that's good at explaining their point of view, it can be amazing. Okay, here's an example. Just last week, I read a book called Fossil Future about why fossil fuels are the way to go. They should be encouraged, not discouraged. Fossil fuels are the solution, not the problem. My jaw dropped when somebody said this is a good book. And I went, what? Never. And I was like, all right, I got to read this. And you know what, Alec? It's great. It's a great book! It's a great argument. By the time anybody hears this podcast, it will be up on my website. If you go to my book list sive.rs/book you will see the last 400+ books I've read since 2007 and all of my notes on them. If you click "newest" you will see Fossil Future near the top of the list, since I just finished it. I'll put all of my notes there. It's a fascinating argument. I can actually tell you in two sentences. He's just saying that as of now, fossil fuels are still the cheapest, most powerful source of energy. And literally billions of people on earth don't have enough electricity. And people die and babies die because there's not enough power to cool homes during heat waves or to supply electricity for incubators in Africa when babies are born and need incubators. And so babies die because they don't have enough power. And yet people in first world countries are trying to say we need to eliminate all fossil fuels. And what you're saying then is screw the poor. So he's saying the main message of the book was we should not discourage fossil fuels because most of the world still desperately needs them and needs more than they have already.
Alec Kosky
So it's his point is kind of like it's more of a transitional thing they shouldn't just be scrapped immediately they should be slowly phased out in a way?
Derek Sivers
It changed the focus to say let's focus on human flourishing, not this mystical pursuit of leaving the world untouched. That a lot of this nature argument, and look, I live in New Zealand. I get it. I want New Zealand to remain untouched. But his focus was on, ultimately, what matters is human flourishing. We already affect the environment wherever we go. Even if you build the greenest home, you're still tearing up the earth to build a home in a place that was a forest. So this is what we do. We tear up the earth to survive. We affect everywhere we inhabit. So quit acting like we don't, and killing people in the process.
Alec Kosky
When you look objectively at human nature it's kind of it's a lot darker than what we subjectively want to believe we are which is kind of kind of kind of a hectic thing and something worth I guess considering.
Alec Kosky
Speaking of untouched places and removing the earth to build things, you built a lovely rectangular prism in New Zealand to raise your son in. And actually, I think he got his own one was what I heard the other day as well. And I thought that was an amazing concept. But the reason I'm asking you the question is more related to wilderness and New Zealand. I have a friend who's gone on for years about his dream being to just live in New Zealand. He wants to live as isolated as he can. I'm fully thinking it's kind of like the Walden type experience of Thoreau that he's sort of looking for. He just wants to have, yeah, his own space in the woods in New Zealand. And I'm hoping that your experience could shed some light on what that's really like for him.
Derek Sivers
Anyone thinking about this must do it because it is pretty wonderful. But more importantly, you just need to know, if you've got this daydream in your head for years, well you just have to go act on it, just to see for yourself whether it works or not for you.
Derek Sivers
So the interesting question to ask yourself is once you do it, then what? Is the act of owning and living in a tiny home, is that the finish line for you? Or is it the starting line of something else? So then what? So every now and then I think about this. If I catch myself thinking, uh, I want to go do this thing or I want to own this thing. I ask myself, well, then what? Okay, there I've now, I'm now doing this thing. I now own this thing. Now what? What am I going to do with that? Is it really going to change my future actions? Is it going to make my life better? Or am I just enjoying the feeling as if it's like a finish line? Like just having that will be the answer? Or just being there will be the answer? It's a good question for your friend to ask himself. What will he do once he is there? There you've got your cabin in the middle of nowhere in the Wop Wops, as we say in New Zealand. There you are. Okay. Now what?
Alec Kosky
What was your "then what?"
Derek Sivers
My "then what?" has always been the same. No matter where I am, in a hotel room in the center of a city, in a little apartment on the 100th floor, or in a cabin in the middle of nowhere, I'm just writing, programming, thinking. It's always the same for me. I'm not, it doesn't make a massive change in my life. There have been some environments where I get out into nature much more often in a healthier way.
Derek Sivers
So once, years ago, I lived on the coast in a big, empty coast. I know you have some of these in Australia, like not the urban coast, but imagine the ones that are just out in the middle of nowhere. There's no city for 100 miles, but there's this long stretch of 100 kilometers beach. I lived on one of those spots once in a little town of the population of two. I had a cabin there. I went on three hour long runs on the beach every single day. That was really good for my soul. Now I'm living in Wellington, New Zealand, which has some really rich forests and it's extremely hilly. So that gets me sweating and walking on these little muddy trails through hilly forests for hours a week. That's been very good for my health.
Derek Sivers
But on the other hand, are you in Melbourne? Where are you at?
Alec Kosky
Sydney.
Derek Sivers
Oh, sorry. No offense.
Alec Kosky
Well, I still live two hours north of Sydney in Newcastle. I don't know if you have any friends in Newcastle yet, but you have one now.
Derek Sivers
I do. It's wonderful. Yeah, they say they love it there.
Derek Sivers
Okay, so, sorry, the point is, on my way here to this hotel in Abu Dhabi where I am today, I had a 12-hour layover in Melbourne. And I found an amazing health club, Virgin Active, in downtown Melbourne. And I went and spent seven hours there. It was amazing. I used all of the machines. I went through all of the circuits and then I went and sat in a spa and a hot tub and the cold plunge and back to the sauna and the hot tub. And then I went and got a little bite to eat and I came back and I did it all again. But this time I also did the free weights and the squats and the deadlifts and the overhead press. And then again, I did the sauna and the cold plunge. And then I did plenty of time on this, the skiing, the rowing, the treadmills and all that. I spent six or seven hours there that day. And it was amazing. I thought, man, we have no great gym like this in Wellington where I live. If we did, that might change my life too.
Derek Sivers
So sorry, this is all a big tangent on "then what?" So sometimes where you live can make all the difference in the world, but sometimes it doesn't. Or owning a thing, if you think that, you know, "If I just had a boat, then I'd be happy." You have to ask yourself if it would really change your life so much, like you might need to try renting something before buying it or just like your friend, maybe you just have to go try it for yourself. And even if you get there and find out like, "Oh, oops, nevermind. It's not what I wanted." Well, you had to do it to find out.
Alec Kosky
Right. Then at least you'll know, and you can figure out what, what then, or then.
Alec Kosky
So I noticed that those things aside, you sort of took with your writing, coding, reading. So those I often journal on, and I do this pretty much quarterly, if not more often. What are the most important things to me genuinely right now? And I feel like every single time it is literally the exact same things. And it keeps coming back. No matter what's changed in my life. It was the same stuff I love. And are those your things that you just love and you're like, yep, just kept taking these with me.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, it's the exploration of ideas. It's the expression of ideas, the self-exploration. Like I said at the beginning of the conversation, writing is exploring yourself. That's one of my favourite things to do is to explore ideas, to consider new perspectives. And then as a side effect and second priority is to try to communicate them to others. Maybe just as a way of being useful or helpful in the world, but perhaps it's also to be a beacon to find other weirdos like me.
Alec Kosky
That's a good way of looking at it.
Alec Kosky
Who's the most weirdo like you person you know just while we're on it
Derek Sivers
That i personally know? Erika Lemay. We met a few years ago. She is an aerial artist. Physical poetry, as she puts. She has the same approach to life that I have but I had never met anybody until her that also had the same approach to life. Which is just you know what you want and you're going for it, and you don't want to hang out, you don't want leisure or luxury, you just want to make your art. You just want to do your thing. She had that more than anybody else I've ever met. So as far as friends, so she's actually a bit of a role model because it's like, she's like me, but more so. So I want to be even more like her. She's a really good role model like that, especially because I know her so well.
Derek Sivers
And recently, I've been reading a lot of this philosophical economist named Bryan Kaplan. Bryan Kaplan is such an interesting thinker. But yet I also think he thinks like me or I think like him. We have a similar approach, but he takes it in a different way. So when I read his stuff, I feel this kindred-y feeling of like, "Ah yes, I agree. That's how I think about it. Yes, beautifully put." And yet he does it better than me. So I am really digging his writing lately and admire him.
Alec Kosky
And he's one of the people that you look up to, right?
Derek Sivers
Yeah.
Alec Kosky
Who are some of the other people you look up to?
Derek Sivers
It changes through time.
Derek Sivers
I told you Prince. After Prince was Brian Eno, because I love the way that he combined music with straight up intellectual exploration and counterfactual kind of thinking. "What about this? What about that? That's not the only way it goes. What if we reverse it? What if we remove the most important aspect of this music? Then what?" So Brian Eno.
Derek Sivers
Seth Godin was a hero, still is, for his clear empathetic thinking, defining marketing as a way of being helpful and generous. Most people don't think of marketing as generosity. So I think Seth Godin brilliantly showed that marketing can be generosity.
Derek Sivers
Tyler Cowen, in a way. Tyler Cowen is a fascinating thinker. He has a podcast called Conversations with Tyler and a blog called Marginal Revolutions and has written a bunch of books. And I really admire the way he thinks. Although I've found that because I admire the way he thinks, I found myself starting to emulate him a bit, but he considers himself an infovore. He loves just taking in lots of information. And I found that that was not working for me, that I started to emulate that aspect of him. I found that it was working against my interests. I was spending too much time consuming not enough time creating so now it's something I'm having to consciously limit wow so many things
Alec Kosky
So many things popped into my head from what you just said. I guess one of the main ones is about balancing your time between consuming and creating, because I noticed similar thing like I was just game and I was like you must learn you must read books you got to take it in information and I was just taking all this information in and then when it came down to talking about it because i just read and reading is not the best way to remember and i was just like oh i don't really remember any of that stuff that i spent all that time reading maybe like a few things you know the croutons that i took with me which is fine but like i was like how can i make this better and that made me think of how you blog and sort of share what you've learned from the books. And I was like, that's a great way to remember what you're learning, to actively engage with it and create a bit of a little sample of what you learned because that way you're creating what you learned and then sharing it, which is great.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, that's the reason I started doing my book notes on that URL I gave earlier: sive.rs/book
Derek Sivers
I also noticed that I didn't remember anything about a book I had read just a few years ago. I would look at the cover, I'd see it on my shelf and I'd go, oh, I did not remember that book at all. And I know I read it. Where the hell did those 13 hours go of my life? If I spent 13 hours reading that book and I don't remember it, oh my God, was that wasted time? That's awful. Life is short i don't want to waste 13 hours if i don't remember the book. So that was the day in 2007 that i started keeping book notes. Every time I read a non-fiction book - not fiction but only non-fiction - I underline my favorite ideas. Then when i'm done with the book, if it was a paper book i type it out, if it was a e-book i do some kind of export of the highlights clippings and put them in my own words a bit, edit them a bit to save the ideas so I never need to reread that book. And now I just go back to my notes from that book often. So I can just reread my notes from that book in 10 minutes and remember all the things that it taught me.
Alec Kosky
Two questions. Does it work? And second question is how often do you revisit your books?
Derek Sivers
Number one, it absolutely works, especially because every time you revisit it, you are a different person. You might have read that book in 2010. You revisit those notes in 2025. Whoa, totally different meaning. Even if you revisit them every year, it can be quite a different meaning.
Derek Sivers
So how often? Not as often as I would like because I still have a giant stack of books I still haven't read that I really want to read. So I often prioritize reading a new book over revisiting the old ones. But for specific purposes, because all of my notes are in text files, I can go search for a word like discipline and find all of the books that I've read in the last 18 years that talk about discipline. That's fascinating because it might even be in a book about painting or a book about economics will have the concept of discipline introduced. So if you find that there's a subject that you're interested in, you can find it across books instantly. It's so useful.
Alec Kosky
One thing I wanted to ask you about, and I understand that you try and be as non-reliant on technology as possible, or at least like subscription services, things like that, when you can do it yourself. Recently, I've come across a whole bunch of really useful things like Notebook LM, for example, stuff like that. And I was talking about this with Gerry too. He keeps journals of ideas he's had for the first time. He calls it, "today I thought it for the first time." And as soon as an idea that he's thought for the first time comes along, he writes it down or records it somewhere. And with those new services, I came to realize that you can put heaps of information into them and create kind of like a database with an AI that will not only talk about it to you or answer any questions and create things for you related to that information, but you can also get it to make a podcast that you can put your hand up with and interact with the podcast speakers about the information that you wrote about you. And I'm like, whoa, this is sick. Do you use anything like that at all? Have you experimented with, I guess, creating a clone of you and then talking to you about what you think about that?
Derek Sivers
I haven't. I'm not against it. And in fact, I'm preparing for it. Every interview I do, including this one, I get a transcript of the full thing. I have a computer do the first draft of the transcript. And then I go through pretty painstakingly and edit the transcript by hand to make sure it's a perfect representation of what we actually said, or even what I meant. Say if I stumbled earlier and had a broken sentence where I dropped an idea and picked it up later, I'll fix it in the transcript to be what I meant it to be so that the transcript becomes the definitive record of our conversation so that in the future, I could feed the whole transcript into a computer.
Derek Sivers
My only warning to someone thinking of doing this is to not forget that you will outlive these companies. That whatever notebook LLM or Claude or OpenAI service that's out there right now, you will almost certainly live longer than that company. So don't make any company own your data or be your only source of this information. Always have your own definitive source of anything that's important to you. And yes, you can also feed it into some company's service on the understanding that it could disappear at any time. This goes with tweets, photos, social media, like at some point, Instagram is going to go out of business. I hope that Instagram isn't the only source of all of your photos. At some point, Gmail is going to disappear. I hope that Gmail isn't your only source of a whole bunch of important things. Because at some point, your Gmail account will be gone. So it's important to make sure that you are saving this information yourself. There's my tech independence angle.
Alec Kosky
I see. That was like a light bulb moment for me that really explains why you've done it. That makes sense.
Derek Sivers
I'm not against using the tools, use the tools, but just remember they're ephemeral. They have different incentives than you. They're trying to make money. And if somebody comes along and buys them and decides to shut down that service, it's gone. It's misaligned incentives.
Alec Kosky
If listening to this and you're at home and you're thinking that, wow, tech independence, that sounds great. That's for me. There's a way that they can become tech independent, right, Derek? that you have available on your website?
Derek Sivers
Easy URL to share. sive.rs/ti as in tech independence. I wrote up my whole guide to how you can set up your own server. I give the exact step by steps. Just do this, follow these instructions, and you will have your own server at your own domain name, hosting your own email, your own contacts, your own calendars. So that even if Google shut down your account next month through some kind of misunderstanding, somebody said that you're a heroin dealer and your account gets shut down, you're not screwed because you've got your own copy of everything that matters to you.
Alec Kosky
Now, does that require some ongoing coding or maintenance? Or is it once you've got it set up, it's pretty much good to go?
Derek Sivers
It's pretty good to go. One minute a year, you type one command to have it update its software. And it just goes.
Alec Kosky
Oh, sweet. Okay, that's good to know. Maybe something that people could go down if they wanted to follow that route.
Alec Kosky
Derek, I have noticed, not just through our conversation, but just kind of exploring where you appeared online and looking at your blog and reading and listening to some of your books, I kind of noticed that one thing that we have in common, or I think it's something we have in common, is that our approach to certain things with information and what people think is like, I'm not really fully going to take a stance, and forgive me if I'm wrong, but I'm not really fully going to take a stance. I'd love to hear what you have to say. And most of the time, I'm going to agree with both of you and continue sitting on the fence and just enjoy the fact that both of those conversations are there and appreciate that there's difference in the world because that's beautiful. And I feel like that's kind of my philosophy, which is something I put aside a long time as a career path. I was like, ah, philosophy, I'm not going to do that. Like, you know, there's no career in that. But I came to realise that not just philosophy, but anthropology, like looking at people and how they do things and just being fascinated by that are two things that I'm like, man, I really like this. even though everyone says, you know, that's not going to work. They're not really, I mean, anthropology probably more than philosophy, but then I was like, hang on a minute. There's loads of people online being philosophers right now and absolutely crushing it. Yeah. You know, so like, what's your take on philosophy and I want to add anthropology. Cause I noticed you said that the other day, you're an amateur anthropologist and I don't really understand what that means for me yet, but I love that. I love that too. so what's your take on it in the modern era?
Derek Sivers
Well first I gotta say that it's tempting when you think of something you like doing or want to be good at you think "How can I do that for a job?" But don't forget that there are some skills that are better kept as amplifiers of your other skills.
Derek Sivers
So for example, being a great public speaker. If you are a scientist, an author, and anything, also being a great public speaker will be an amazing amplifier for you to be way more successful in whatever it is you're pursuing. If you're doing this thing you're doing, you're also a great public speaker. That's going to be a huge boon for you. But actually being a professional public speaker as a job? To go around to corporations giving speeches? Maybe not the best idea.
Derek Sivers
So similar one, being very good looking. If you're very good looking, it can amplify your success in anything else you're doing. There are actors that are just mediocre actors, but they're really damn good looking. And so they keep getting hired. Or there's the cliche of the mediocre doctor that's really good looking and so keeps getting promoted. Even executives, just in general, anybody who's really good looking, it gets amplified. But now being good looking for a career to be a professional model, eh, maybe not the best career.
Derek Sivers
So this is how I think of things like philosophy and anthropology is I think they are fascinating amplifiers that it, that can make you more interesting and maybe even more successful at other things you're doing. To be philosophical about your investing, to be philosophical about your marketing, can amplify your efforts in that realm. But being a professional philosopher? So I know that you said there are people being philosophers like on podcasts and crushing it, but I'd argue that they are really entertainers or providers of educational material in the form of podcasts that are making their offerings much more interesting and helpful because they're philosophical. Do you know what I mean? Whereas that's where also being a good public speaker, maybe also being very good looking or also uh uh having an okay and you said anthropology anthropology say the study of looking at different cultures and trying to understand different world views that can make you better at whatever else you're doing too but being a professional anthropologist.
Alec Kosky
Yours is kind of like you're like doing full-time practical anthropology by moving to countries.
Derek Sivers
That's what I'd like to do. I'm not doing it now really. I'm still a full-time dad now but give it four more years if my kid is off to uni and really doesn't need me anymore then I do plan to throw myself into it full-time. That's my current plan. I might change my plan in the next four years but as of now and actually as of like fucking 15 years what I've been wanting to do is to full-time just go live around the world immersing myself into one place at a time for three to 12 months and really getting to know this place - really feeling connected to the people there - understanding it - feeling at home - making friends there - feeling like a local - understanding the worldview and then going to another place and doing it again.
Alec Kosky
You think that three to 12 months is the right amount of time like what makes you feel that?
Derek Sivers
Well for one it's just practicality that three months is the usual tourist visa. You can extend it to six months if you ask, and you can probably go back again if you leave and come back they'll let you do it one last time. Staying over a year, you usually need to do a stack of paperwork and apply for a legal resident visa which is really hard. So just for practicality purposes.
Derek Sivers
Also I think with anything you do, you can crash course something. Say like if you were just passively living in a place for a year - you know let's say if you're passively living in a place let's say six months say - if you were passively living in a place for six months you're spending most of your time online you're doing the same shit you do anywhere else you're reading the same books you'd read anywhere else - you're doing your podcast - you're reading the same media sources as you would anywhere else - then you're probably not going to get that much of the local culture in six months. But instead if you said "All right I'm only here for six months I want to learn everything!" and you spent all of your time only say in the local language only out in the world constantly talking to 15 new people a day out in the streets. Not renting your own apartment but living in someone else's home, renting a room in someone else's home, and joining them for their meals two times a day. All of these other things can help you really crash course a culture and get years worth of understanding of that culture in six months.
Alec Kosky
I like what you said about maybe lining up with a host family or host home that you can live alongside because they would just being a local they would show you all of the cool local things you'd be instantly like have the information to go to the heart of you know where the good food comes from yeah and like you'd meet people through the family you probably even end up randomly at like family gatherings and stuff and like you'd get the family experience, you get the food experience, you get the locals knowledge and you'd probably make some really good connections with those people over the time you were there too and people to become a part of your kind of rolling family as you go around the world.
Derek Sivers
And at a quarter of the price to rent a room in someone's house versus to rent your own apartment.
Alec Kosky
Yeah and in certain situations there might be other people there doing the same be kind of cool as well yeah all right that's worth thinking about because i've sort of got something similar not as large in the works but something similar and it's given me a bit of perspective which is nice um where are we gosh we've gone through nearly everything just looking here at the transcript um we're pretty much come to the end because we got onto everything else all the way through. So that leads us to the final part of the podcast, which is there's a few little questions here, which we typically finish with. It's a way of connecting you with the past guests and then connecting you and I with the future guests, kind of a continuity piece right here at the end. And it's a way for, this is only a new thing in between views. It's a way for, because I'm at home this year and I'm choosing to stay home rather than go traveling, which I've done for the last sort of 10 years. And I was like, how can I, how can I travel at home? How can I still meet really cool, interesting people without going out in the world? How can I still have those conversations that blew me away while I was like out in the world? And I realized I was like, oh, the podcast, which I already have been doing is a great way to do that. So I would like to ask you, after your experience on the show, just having been here, sat here and sort of been like, oh, okay, that's what Between Views is about.
Alec Kosky
You recommended someone originally, but you've changed. You've changed tact since the time we started emailing. You originally recommended me and actually got very excited about it. So forgive me if you don't want to recommend them anymore. But there was a... Oh, Mohamed Kazim. Yes, the educator.
Derek Sivers
Yes, of course.
Alec Kosky
Is he from Abu Dhabi?
Derek Sivers
From Dubai.
Alec Kosky
Oh, from Dubai, from Dubai. And he is an educator and a shoemaker. And I checked out his site and I was like, whoa, this is sweet. I didn't even know I had any interest in this part of the world at all until I sort of got onto that. And I'm like, hmm, you know, that would be really cool. So I'd love if he's still included in the people that you recommend. If not, you also recommended two more.
Derek Sivers
Okay. So, you know, if you ask somebody, what's a song you like? They're most likely going to tell you the last song they liked which might have just been this morning. So yeah right before we hit record I thought about your question about who else would you recommend I ask on the show and I just read five books in a row by Bryan Caplan. So of course, I mean literally I just finished the newest one last night, so I've got Bryan Kaplan on my mind right now, and I think he would be a fascinating interview. Tyler Cowen too for the reasons I said earlier um but also because with your background in traveling I was just thinking about this last night before I went to sleep Tyler Cowen seems to travel in a different way than I know how to which is when he's going anywhere I think he's looking at different things than I look at and getting different insights than I get. So I would like to learn how he does that and what kind of questions he asks or what he looks at when he's traveling. So I selfishly would recommend him as a podcast guest so you could ask him those questions and I could glean the answers. So yeah, Mohammad Kazim in Dubai is such a fascinating dude. Also clearly very de-othering for me. I've never sat down with somebody with the full like Arab headdress with the white robe and the black ring on top and getting to know him. So interesting. He's such a wealth of knowledge about Arab traditions and how the traditional values can improve our life today. He would be such an interesting conversation for you and he's I think a dude that deserves more media coverage so I'll recommend all three Brian Kaplan, Tyler Cowen, Mohammad Kazim
Derek Sivers
There's actually one other person I find one of the most fascinating people but I asked her in advance and she said no I don't really want to do media but Angela Yu in London. We've never met face to face but she's a fascinating person that I discovered through her courses on programming. Took one of her courses and I loved it. Emailed her, we became friends. We talk often. She's one of the most interesting people I know. But when I asked if she'd have any interest in going on a podcast and just being herself, she said, "I don't really feel like being in the media spotlight." So I will not recommend Angela Yu as a podcast guest until she changes her mind on that.
Alec Kosky
I feel like I just became the Derek Sivers podcast surrogate.
Derek Sivers
I don't want to have a podcast. You do it for me. You've got one here. You talk to these people for me.
Alec Kosky
How good. And that's the cool thing as well. Like I used to just, I mean, I've had so many people and still do that I'm very interested in, but it's amazing to come across people that you're like, I hadn't really come across you in my life before. You know, except that I do feel like I've randomly come across some of your messages from your books before through others without having known directly that it was you. Like the hell yeah or hell no thing or hell yeah or no thing I definitely came across before, but not directly from the book, for example. Okay, cool. Well, if I get onto any of those guys, then I will let you know. So you now have a question from our last guest on the show. And this is kind of changes. Whenever I reach out to people, I can't give it to them straight away because the guests come on more frequently.
Alec Kosky
The last question is from a guy called Zach, and he comes from Hawaii. He's an amazing body surfer. He is a professor in poetry and Peruvian poetry and also philosophy in Hawaii.
Derek Sivers
Because that's where the big money is.
Alec Kosky
Well, if you listen to his episode, you'll realize that it is not where the big money is. But he loves it nonetheless, very much so living his dream, living his life, going after the things that are important to him at whatever cost. And his question to you was:
Alec Kosky
If you could create anything, what would it be?
Derek Sivers
I came up with two answers.
Derek Sivers
#1: A machine that would suck all of the trash and pollution out of our whole planet. Every little particle of microplastic sitting in the ocean, every bit of smog, every bit of discarded tin can. Take all of it, chuck it into the sun. That's number one. Get rid of all the pollution.
Derek Sivers
#2: A free pill that curbs your impulses so that you can always take a second and do the smart thing instead of the impulsive thing. And then I would make that pill free. I was going to say put it into the water, into the drinking water, but then that's involuntary. Instead, I would just make it free, maybe put it into the water by default, but you can opt out to not have it go into your tap water. But imagine what a better place the world would be if just by default, people stopped to think for a second before acting. There's my two things I would create.
Alec Kosky
I like both of them an awful lot. It makes me think though, like what would be the spatial impact of throwing all of the plastic of the planet to the sun? And it's also a fun image because plastic comes from like old ass dinosaurs. So you're like putting the dinosaur.
Derek Sivers
So after I wrote that down to say, cause you sent me the question in advance, I wrote it down.
Derek Sivers
And I was about to say, wait, actually, maybe I could repurpose it into something more useful?
Derek Sivers
Could I take all the trash in the world and then somehow repurpose its atoms into something useful? I don't know. Fuck it. Put it in the sun. Just get rid of it. Just throw it in the sun
Alec Kosky
The dinosaurs have been on a big adventure in the last millennia
Derek Sivers
Yeah in the ground, in the sun, yeah. They get to travel posthumously.
Alec Kosky
I guess the final part now and how we typically close is you're now leaving a question throwing it out to the to the ether um not to the sun this one will go to someone hopefully uh and:
Alec Kosky
What is the question that you are going to ask to our next guest?
Derek Sivers
What are you least likely to ever change your mind about? And what would happen if you did?
Alec Kosky
I like that one a lot and I hope that our next guest will too Derek that brings us to the end of our recording today a nice humble two hours in nearly and given that I want to say thank you so much for preparing a bit of time out of your life to sit and talk with me a random Australian man who reached out to you because a random Argentinian man asked you a question. And I like that. I like that a lot. And I'm grateful for your time because, man, we just don't get enough of that. And I know that it's special to you. So please take my gratitude for sharing it with me and also your information and ideas too. I hope that I can share them on with people so that more people can benefit from how you think and who you are and the way that you see the world because I think it's pretty cool. And in a fun way, I've realized that me and you have a whole decent amount in common, which is really nice to know.