#777: Derek Sivers, Philosopher-Entrepreneur — The Greatest Year of His Life

0:00:04 Well, hello boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of
0:00:10 The Tim Ferriss Show. Thanks so much for tuning in. This time around, we have my good friend Derek
0:00:16 Sivers back on the show. He’s one of my favorite humans. I call him often for advice. He is hilarious,
0:00:24 and he will do his own introduction because I am incredibly lazy, or I was feeling playful and lazy
0:00:30 in this conversation. He is a philosopher, programmer, musician, king of sorts. That’s how I
0:00:35 would describe him. It is a very fun conversation. I really enjoyed it. And you can find Derek’s books,
0:00:43 including his latest Useful Not True, which we discuss at his website, Sivers.com, or sive.rs,
0:00:48 which is probably just about as confusing to people as Tim.blog. If you enjoy this episode,
0:00:53 you should go back and listen to the 2015 conversation I did with Derek, the very first
0:01:01 one, you can find that at tim.blog/DerekSivers, and many longtime listeners out of the nearly 800
0:01:08 episodes I’ve done consider this their favorite or certainly one of their favorites. It is a
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0:07:21 while supplies last. For people who don’t know who Derek Sivers is,
0:07:33 what is the brief overview of Derek? Oh, I have to do it, right? I was a musician for many years,
0:07:40 and then I started selling my music online in 1997 when there was no PayPal and there was,
0:07:45 you know, Amazon was just a bookstore. So I started a little thing called CD Baby just to sell
0:07:49 my music, but then it grew and became the largest seller of independent music online. And I did
0:07:54 that for 10 years until I got sick of it and sold it. And then I was a TED speaker for a few years
0:07:59 and then kind of threw myself into that completely. And then Seth Godin asked me to write a book.
0:08:03 So I wrote a book and then people really liked it. So now I’ve written five.
0:08:10 Now I’m a dad in New Zealand thinking philosophically and living my life. How about that?
0:08:15 I thought you did a great job. Thank you for that. You know, when I can’t find a
0:08:19 virtual assistant to do work for me, I’ll ask my podcast guest to do my job.
0:08:26 I will also add number one people if you enjoy this conversation, which I’m sure you will not
0:08:30 to apply any pressure to Derek, but I always have so much fun. Go back and listen to the other
0:08:35 conversations also because you’ll notice a few things. Number one, Derek has one of the most
0:08:44 eclectic CVs imaginable. He’s worked in traveling circuses. He has played music at pig fairs. He
0:08:51 has been an entrepreneur. He has certainly been a philosopher coder and many other things, but also,
0:08:58 I would say, overarchingly crafted a life that is uniquely Derek’s and frequently
0:09:06 tests assumptions and to, I suppose, bucket one of what we’re going to discuss today,
0:09:14 changes his mind and finds himself zigging when he might have otherwise zagged or where other
0:09:22 people are zagging. That is part of why I enjoy spending time with Derek, aside from the dashing
0:09:29 good looks and wit and charm, of course. Let’s begin as we were brainstorming what we might chat
0:09:34 about because we were hoping to catch up. I suggested a few things. We batted a number of
0:09:41 things around, and we landed on things you’ve changed your mind about, things you’re fascinated by
0:09:47 people you’re studying, not necessarily in that order. Let’s start with things you’ve changed
0:09:54 your mind about or on. Where shall we begin? I’ve got five things for you. I’m starting small and
0:10:02 getting big. Coffee. I’ve never liked coffee. Every time I tried coffee, I went, “I don’t know
0:10:06 understand how you people like this.” And even when I’d be with somebody that knew I
0:10:11 didn’t like coffee and we were out somewhere and they would go, “Oh my god, this is the best
0:10:14 coffee I’ve ever had in my life here. I know you don’t like coffee, but if you’re ever going to
0:10:20 try coffee, this is the one. Try a sip.” And I’d say, “Okay.” I’d try to get myself into this mindset.
0:10:30 I’m going to like this. I just never liked it. So then I was in United Arab Emirates and I was
0:10:37 the guest of this Emirati man that we will get to later. And he said, “It is Emirati custom. You
0:10:41 must have the coffee.” And I went, “Oh, sorry. I don’t drink coffee. I just…” He said, “You must
0:10:45 have the coffee.” I said, “No, really. I’ve never liked coffee in my life.” He goes, “My friend,
0:10:51 you must have the… It is Emirati custom. You must have the coffee.” I went, “All right.”
0:10:59 I took a sip. I’m like, “Oh my god.” I’m like, “This is really good.” He goes, “That is Emirati
0:11:03 coffee.” I went, “No, you really… There’s something different about this.” He goes, “Yes,
0:11:07 it’s Emirati coffee.” And I said, “Is that the one where they make it in the sand?” He said,
0:11:12 “No, no, no. That’s Turkish.” He said, “This is Emirati coffee.” So knowing that we were talking
0:11:16 today and I was going to mention coffee, I texted him. I said, “Hey, what was that coffee you…”
0:11:21 Because he’d said, “There are only three places in Dubai that know how to make real Emirati coffee.”
0:11:28 So he told me one, “Bateel, B-A-T-E-E-L. If you’re in Dubai and you want to try real
0:11:34 Emirati coffee, apparently, according to this Emirati, try Bateel in Dubai for real Emirati
0:11:40 coffee, I’ve changed my mind on coffee. I now like at least Emirati coffee.” Here’s one.
0:11:47 Okay. Just for definition purposes. All right. You know, I’ll hold my follow-ups. There are going
0:11:51 to be a couple of follow-ups including, “How do you define Emirati? Is that basically a Brahmin,
0:11:55 the UAE?” Sorry, that’s what we call people from United Arab Emirates.
0:12:00 All right. Everybody. “If you are of the lineage, if you were a citizen
0:12:03 of United Arab Emirates, you’re referred to as Emirati.”
0:12:08 What is the special technique or special ingredient that makes Emirati coffee so miraculous for you?
0:12:13 “Hey listeners, if you find out what’s different about Emirati coffee, please let me know.”
0:12:17 “I went back six months later, same thing. I tried Emirati coffee and I like it.”
0:12:19 Severe social pressure.
0:12:25 Maybe that’s the magic ingredient. Severe social pressure.
0:12:28 It makes anything taste better.
0:12:33 “You must have it and it will be disastrous if you don’t like it.”
0:12:37 I don’t know what it is, but a surprise. Okay. Python. So I’m just going to include this because
0:12:42 23 years ago, I learned the Ruby programming language and I became fluent in Ruby.
0:12:49 And Ruby and Python are as similar as Portuguese and Spanish. But let’s say Ruby is
0:12:53 Portuguese where Spanish became more and more and more popular.
0:12:58 So when I first learned Ruby, it’s like Ruby and Python were kind of side by side.
0:13:02 Ruby was a little more popular at the time. But then over the years, Python just took off
0:13:06 and I refused to look at it. I was like, no, I chose Ruby. I speak Ruby.
0:13:10 I don’t want to learn Python. It’s too similar. If I’m going to learn another language,
0:13:12 it’s going to be Lisp or Haskell or something really different.
0:13:17 I’m not going to learn Python. No. And so for years and years, I’ve been
0:13:21 refusing and then just irrationally prejudiced against Python.
0:13:26 When I was choosing a new language for a new project, I considered everything but Python.
0:13:30 And then I realized I had left Python out because of my severe prejudice against it for no good
0:13:36 reason. So I finally looked at the Python programming language and I went, oh my god,
0:13:43 it’s beautiful. It’s great. Oh my god, it’s wonderful. So now I love Python.
0:13:47 And that just felt amazing in my heart to be like, wow, this thing that I was prejudiced
0:13:52 against for 20 years is actually wonderful. How cool. So coffee, Python, number two.
0:13:59 Should I go on? Number three, let’s go on. Rats. Okay. Rats. I brought a prop.
0:14:08 I want to make this a good show. For the first time ever, appearing are my little pet rats.
0:14:12 Okay, if you see on YouTube. Oh, look at that. All right. So we have two rats on video. They’re
0:14:19 sizable. Yeah. Yeah. Trunky monkeys. They are so cute and they’re so wonderful and they’re so
0:14:23 affectionate. You can’t maybe tell because I’m holding them up like they owe me money right now,
0:14:32 you know, but. So here’s the deal. Years ago, I used to kill rats. I hated rats so badly. I
0:14:37 lived in a basement apartment in Boston that had rats in and around the apartment that would
0:14:42 sometimes be blocking my entrance to my apartment as I would come home and I was tired. So I
0:14:48 killed many rats with great vengeance. I hated rats. And then just a few months ago,
0:14:53 my boy said, hey, dad, can we get a pet rat? I was like, and I just thought it was it was
0:14:58 kidding. And he said a week later, he said, you know, that really kind of made me sad that you
0:15:05 just shot down my idea of the pet rat. I said, wait, you were serious? He said, yeah. Oh, well,
0:15:11 why would you want a nasty awful rat as a pet? He said, no, they’re not nasty and awful. Look,
0:15:16 and he showed me some videos that rats are really sweet and they’re really wonderful. They’re smart.
0:15:20 They’re trainable. You can train them to do little tricks and like pick things out and like go to a
0:15:25 wallet and open it up and take money and bring it to you. And, you know, very useful in a crowd.
0:15:30 The thieves’ guild. This is gonna be interesting. The little art frilled dodgers. So it’s like
0:15:36 the difference between a wild rat and a pet rat is like the difference between a wild dog
0:15:40 and a poodle. The pet rats are really sweet. So no matter what you think of wild rats,
0:15:45 don’t discount or don’t hate on pet rats. They’re actually really wonderful and cuddly
0:15:49 and they’re even clean. They use a litter box. They can control their
0:15:54 bladder like a cat. They prefer to go in a litter box and so they’re really clean and wonderful.
0:16:01 So, oh, and wait, the lifespan. Their lifespan is two to three years, which as a parent is really
0:16:06 wonderful because when a kid says, I want a pet, you don’t always want like a 15-year commitment.
0:16:10 You know, the kid’s gonna be away at college and you still got the pet that your kid wanted when
0:16:15 they were eight, you know. So I like that the lifespan is two to three years, which is, you
0:16:21 know, so rats are good pets. And so I love my little rats. We’ve just got these two boys.
0:16:27 But even more than loving the rats, I love that I am now cuddling what I used to kill.
0:16:33 Like that I now love what I used to hate. It’s so sweet. Like I cuddle them, but it’s like,
0:16:38 God, I used to hate you. This is such a good feeling in my heart that I now love what I used
0:16:42 to hate. And you’ll see this is the theme of my five things today. Ready for the next?
0:16:46 What are the names of the two rats? Cricket and Clover. Cully Clover and
0:16:50 Crazy Cricket Climber. Do they eat crickets? What do they eat?
0:16:54 Actually, well, they do love Clover, but now they just kind of eat rat food from the store.
0:16:59 They eat anything. It’s like when you’re making food and you’ve got little leftovers,
0:17:03 you’ve got little bits and crusts or little things that you just give it to the rats and
0:17:05 they usually love it. It’s great. I keep them in the kitchen.
0:17:10 That’s perfect. That’s what some folks in South America do with
0:17:13 guinea pigs, although the difference is they fatten up the guinea pigs on the table scraps
0:17:18 and then they eat the guinea pigs. Probably not going to eat cricket and Clover, I imagine.
0:17:22 I would eat cricket and Clover, but I do like that kind of hang out near the kitchen and give
0:17:31 them the scraps. Okay. Number four, China. Number four, China. So in 2010, I went to Guilin, China,
0:17:39 and then I went to Taipei, Taiwan. And at the time, China was rough. I was walking over rubble.
0:17:45 The air was just choking me with its smoke and the sense of oil. And everything felt very third
0:17:51 world, very rough. And I just thought, okay, that’s what China is. China, you know, developing
0:17:57 economy. It’s just rough. And then you go to Taipei, Taiwan, and it just feels like
0:18:03 the most refined first world, beautiful version. It’s like Japan, but with Chinese culture.
0:18:09 And I thought, aha, someday I want to live in Taiwan because that’s the really nice part of
0:18:17 China. So here we are 2024, 14 years later, I go to bring my kid on a school holiday to
0:18:22 China for his first time. And I thought, well, we’ll start out rough by going to mainland China.
0:18:28 And then we’ll move on to like the best of the best with the refined culture of Taiwan and Taipei.
0:18:35 And it turned out to be the opposite. That China was wonderful. We went to Shanghai and it was like
0:18:43 first world, amazing, refined, silent, because all the vehicles are electric now. So that was
0:18:47 the very first thing I noticed as soon as I took the train from the airport. We got off in downtown
0:18:53 Shanghai, I’m surrounded by a hundred vehicles, and I hear nothing. It’s just, that’s so nice.
0:19:01 And I’m like, oh my God, what’s real, like 20 motorbikes went in front of my face, like right
0:19:05 there, like, you know, three meters away. And I heard none of them. There was just the silent
0:19:11 movement. I was like, oh, this is so nice. And the people were just so polite and cultured. And
0:19:16 it was none of this like hacking and spitting that I associated with it before, like the shouting
0:19:20 and the spitting, you know. Yeah, that’s good to hear. I remember the spitting from my visits.
0:19:26 A lot of spitting. Yeah. And even just transactionally, you have to get Alipay or WeChat on your phone
0:19:31 first before you go like attach it to your credit card. But then once you’re there, all transactions
0:19:37 are just, everything is so easy. And they’re beautiful, like rental bikes everywhere, laid out
0:19:42 in perfect color coded cues. You can just walk up to one and go and step on the bike and then
0:19:46 just go where you want to go. And you drop it off, you go beep. And everything is just
0:19:54 so civilized and wonderful. I was so it completely changed my mind about China. And then I don’t
0:20:00 want to sound like I’m trashing Taiwan, but it was just interesting that by comparison,
0:20:04 then I went to Taipei and I thought, whoa, if China is this nice, imagine how nice Taipei is
0:20:10 going to be. And I got there and it was kind of like stinky and trashy. And they don’t take credit
0:20:14 cards or they don’t have the apps. And so you have to pay cash everywhere. And I’m like,
0:20:21 money and paper and coins. And I was like, wow, interesting. And so I met with a Taiwanese woman
0:20:27 for lunch that I emailed with before. And she’s an investor that goes to mainland China often.
0:20:33 And I mentioned something about this cautiously as like, I don’t want to trash your home. I didn’t
0:20:38 say it like that. But I just cautiously said, hi, I noticed something. And she said, I’m glad you
0:20:44 noticed. She said, I noticed this too. She said, I go to mainland China’s cities every six to 12
0:20:50 months. And she said, I feel like Taiwan may be plateaued like 12 years ago, like we kind of hit
0:20:56 first world status and then stayed there almost like Japan, you know, it’s like Japan used to feel
0:21:01 futuristic. Now it feels kind of stuck in the 90s, you know, fax machines and stuff. And which is
0:21:06 kind of cute in a way like, again, not to knock it, it’s just it feels like it, it got to a certain
0:21:13 point. And then it said, okay, we’re happy here. And she said, every time I go to China, she said,
0:21:19 there’s visible, noticeable improvements like every six months, she said it blows my mind that
0:21:26 they just keep improving and keep pushing. So I read a book called China’s worldview by David
0:21:33 Daokui Li that changed my perception of China’s government too. It’s really impressive. He’s a
0:21:39 guy that in but not in China’s government. And so he kind of is trying to explain the mindset
0:21:44 of China’s government to outsiders. And it’s a beautiful book I highly recommend if somebody
0:21:50 wants to understand China better, China’s worldview. China’s worldview, just as a sidebar note,
0:21:57 your mention of Japan, I love Japan. And I’ve spent time in mainland China and in Taipei. It’s
0:22:01 time for me to get back to both of those. I’ve spent much more time in Japan. But when people
0:22:06 are going to Japan for the first time, they’re like, I can’t wait to experience this futuristic
0:22:14 view 30 years ahead. I typically say, look, especially if they’re going to stay there for a
0:22:25 longer period of time, I say, you’re going to love it. And it is 30 to 40% Blade Runner and 60 to 70%
0:22:33 DMV, just like feeling filling out paperwork and triplicates and fax machines. It’s going to drive
0:22:37 you nuts if you actually try to live there on some levels, right? There’s so many beautiful
0:22:42 things about it. But yes, it does have the feeling of having frozen in time, in a sense,
0:22:49 as opposed to continued to inflect the way that it was. Perhaps some time ago,
0:22:53 need to get back to the East, so to speak. It’s been a long time. All right, I think you have
0:22:59 actually, because of this newfound love, I’m actually going to Shenzhen and Chengdu in a few
0:23:05 weeks. Oh, wow. I just want to keep experiencing different Chinese cities. Are you going to do
0:23:11 any factory tours or see manufacturing there? I’m just meeting with people. That’s kind of how
0:23:15 I travel these days. I tend to go to a place and instead of just, instead of seeing the sites,
0:23:18 I want to meet the people. So I’m meeting with people that I’ve emailed with over the years and
0:23:23 just, I chose those two cities because I know a lot of people there. Great. Can I hear the
0:23:27 report? So I think, I’m no mathematician, but maybe you have one more.
0:23:41 Smartass. Okay, number five, Dubai. So this is my big one because when I lived in Singapore,
0:23:43 Dubai would often come up. People would compare the two and they would tell me
0:23:49 things about Dubai, about the shopping malls and the millionaire pandering and the Instagram
0:23:57 hashtaggy. You look at me kind of crap. And Dubai was in my top 10 places I never want
0:24:03 to go in my life. Fuck that place. It sounds awful. It sounds like everything I hate in one place,
0:24:09 you couldn’t pay me to go there. But then I have to notice that feeling in myself. And this is
0:24:13 going to be, we’ll get to like the theme when we’re done with this number five. But I had a
0:24:18 flight from New Zealand to Europe that it changed planes in Dubai and I looked at that and I went,
0:24:23 ugh, Dubai. And I was like, wait a second, what is this prejudice in me against Dubai?
0:24:28 It’s like saying, I hate artichokes, but I’ve never tried artichokes, right? Like I hate Dubai,
0:24:33 but I’ve never been to Dubai. Maybe I should go to Dubai. So instead of making it a three hour
0:24:38 layover, I made it like a three or four day layover. I went, wow, okay, I’m going to Dubai for a few
0:24:46 days. So I read a book called City of Gold, which was about the founding of Dubai and the
0:24:50 creation of Dubai. And dude, it was so good. It is such a great book. Anybody listening to this,
0:24:58 if you want a great read, read the book City of Gold about the history of Dubai. It is inspiring
0:25:05 the wisdom and the foresight and the boldness it took to make that place happen. It was really
0:25:09 just like a vision that saw its way through to the end against all odds, right? So super inspiring.
0:25:15 Then somebody said, oh, you need to read Arabian sands by this man named Fessager.
0:25:20 And that gets into like the Arab Bedou culture. It was written in the 1940s or 50s,
0:25:27 kind of like a Lawrence of Arabia kind of guy, like from England, but went through the desert
0:25:31 and kind of became one with the Bedou people and got to know the culture and wrote about it.
0:25:37 So that was really inspiring. And then the United Arab Emirates itself, as I learned more about,
0:25:42 so Dubai, you know, is a city and a region inside the United Arab Emirates. It’s one of the seven
0:25:48 states, the Emirates in that country. So Sheikh Zayed, the guy that was really like the father of
0:25:53 the nation, was a really great dude, kind of like when I moved to Singapore, and I learned more
0:25:57 about Lee Kuan Yew and started to really admire the decisions he made. He became a bit of a role
0:26:02 model, like learning about him like makes me want to be a better person. You know, I just noticed
0:26:07 that it actually subtly influences my actions. And so when I’m in Singapore, I feel like a little
0:26:13 bit infused with the role model, like I feel the presence of the role model of Lee Kuan Yew,
0:26:19 and when I’m in UAE, I feel a little bit inspired by Sheikh Zayed because he was just such a great
0:26:24 generous dude. And also, I think it’s interesting that Arab culture gets a really bad rap in the
0:26:30 media, like Hollywood portrayal is usually some like white actor with brown makeup being stupid
0:26:34 saying, you know, oh, I like this building, I’ll buy 10 of them, you know, I think I want a penguin
0:26:41 colony in the desert, you know, make it happen. And they’re kind of portrayed as fools that are too
0:26:46 rich. And so getting to know the culture felt like this is really interesting. I really had the
0:26:52 wrong idea about this culture. Okay, so as I read these books, City of Golden Arabian Sands,
0:26:57 I have a thing on my website where I always show what I’m reading, and I take notes from the books,
0:27:04 and I put notes on my website. And a friend of mine that lives in Muscat, Oman, saw my reading
0:27:08 list, and he said, what is your interest in this region? I’ve noticed you’re reading books about
0:27:12 Middle East. And I told him, I just really interested in Arab culture. And he said,
0:27:21 you must meet the man from Tamashii. I said, what? And he goes, go to tamashii.com, T-A-M-A-S-H-E-E.com.
0:27:28 And he said, you will see a shoe store. His name is Mohammed Kazan. He designs sandals,
0:27:34 but underneath the surface, he’s an educator of Arab culture. So the sandals are just like
0:27:38 the storefront. It’s like the pirate shop in San Francisco. Oh, I haven’t heard this.
0:27:44 There is a place in San Francisco, it’s on Valencia Street, and it is used for
0:27:51 now educating kids, writing workshops, things like that. But because they couldn’t get it zoned,
0:27:55 in San Francisco, they couldn’t get permission for what they actually wanted to do. They had to
0:28:03 create a storefront and then do the teaching in the back. And so they created a pirate attire store,
0:28:10 and all of the classrooms are in the back. So that was a bit of a digression, especially because I
0:28:18 can’t even recall the proper name of the sort of writing outlet that is associated with this.
0:28:26 But Tamashi, shoe store, sandal store on the front end, but it’s actually education in disguise.
0:28:30 Yeah, well, at first I thought there was no connection. Then I realized that his
0:28:38 sandal designs are actually kind of reflecting Arab traditions and culture through the design
0:28:42 of the sandals. But it’s like his true passion are these cultural trips he does. So if you go to
0:28:47 tamashi.com and you click on the menu, you can click cultural trips and then you’ll see. So
0:28:54 my friend introduced me to this guy. So I met with him on my trip to Dubai. We meet by the creek,
0:28:59 and he tells me that his grandfather built the first building in Dubai. That was his grandfather.
0:29:03 That’s how young that city is. And he’s just like, yeah, right, basically right over there. There
0:29:08 was a very first building in Dubai. My grandfather is the one that built it. So I said, can you explain
0:29:13 to me something about Arab culture? And he said, well, wait, first you got to understand the culture
0:29:19 of the people of the desert is very different than the people of the sea, the Arabian coast,
0:29:23 and which is very different than the people of the hills. And I said, okay, well,
0:29:26 where’s your family from? And he said, well, from the desert. But he said, but you know,
0:29:32 two uncles got in a fight. And so kind of half the family moved off to Iraq for a while. And there
0:29:38 was kind of like a split in the family. But then they kind of reunited in Abu Dhabi. And he said,
0:29:44 but then Islam came along. And I said, wait, hold on, Islam, that was like the year 600. I said,
0:29:49 have you been telling me your family history from 2000 years ago? And he goes, well, 1800 years
0:29:55 ago. Yeah, I said, wait, how the fuck do you know your family history back 1800 years? He said, well,
0:30:04 we keep good records. Whoa, imagine what that does to how you see your life. If you see yourself in
0:30:10 this long lineage of 1800 years of recorded family history, like how that affects your dating and
0:30:16 whatever choices on where to live. So Muhammad cousin, this guy is a badass. I love this guy.
0:30:21 He’s such a wealth of information. And he communicates it so well. It really helps by the way
0:30:25 that so he’s got a complete American accent. He went to college in Boston for six years,
0:30:30 like got into finance, came back, worked in finance in Abu Dhabi, and then just said, no, my real
0:30:36 passion is teaching the Arab cultural traditions that I think have gotten lost in our modern
0:30:41 skyscrapers. So that’s why he made it his passion project. He could have made way more money in
0:30:47 finance, but he has this tamashii.com sandal store and he teaches Arab culture. And I admire the
0:30:51 hell out of this guy. That’s a really cool Easter egg. All right, so we’ll link to that in the show
0:30:58 notes. And I also pulled up this word that was on the tip of my tongue McSweeney’s McSweeney’s.net.
0:31:04 People can check it out. There’s some hilarious writing. The one that I most recently shared
0:31:08 with someone after it was shared with me is Cormac McCarthy writes to the editor of the Santa
0:31:14 Fe New Mexican by John Keenan. It’s only going to be funny for people who have read some of Cormac
0:31:20 McCarthy like The Road or Blood Meridian. But there’s a lot of really good stuff. So that is
0:31:28 the outlet. Also wanted to mention, because you mentioned Iraq, Iraqi music, traditional music
0:31:34 is some of the most incredibly intricate music I’ve ever heard. Using a dulcimer or a hammer
0:31:40 dulcimer, there are different instruments involved. Absolutely spectacular. A lot of that has been
0:31:45 destroyed, unfortunately, culturally and various teachers and so on due to all of the
0:31:51 goings on in Iraq over the last while. But what is the overarching lesson that you take
0:31:58 from the five things you have changed your mind on? Are there kind of meta lessons that you take
0:32:04 from this? Yeah, you can see the theme, which is like, I love my rats. But even more, it’s like,
0:32:10 I love that I used to hate them. And now I don’t. And I could have gone on twice as long
0:32:15 about Dubai, by the way, the place is amazing. It is this cultural melting pot that just warms my
0:32:20 heart sitting on the second floor of the Dubai mall and watching the whole world go by just the
0:32:26 Nigerians and the Saudis and the Russians and the Chinese and the British just all walking in
0:32:32 through in the same place. And it’s so amazing. I just, I kind of want to live there. But as
0:32:38 happy as it makes me, I get this extra happiness of going, wow, I used to hate this place without
0:32:45 even knowing it. And I take a sip of this coffee and it’s like, wow, for my whole life, I’m 55,
0:32:50 I hated coffee, the Python programming. But the secret has been held back from you. So now you
0:32:58 have to go to Dubai to have the coffee that you’re like, right. The theme is that if you feel completely
0:33:05 averse to something, get to know it better, that whatever you feel yourself leaning away from,
0:33:12 try leaning into. If you hate opera, then go learn more about opera. And if you hate sports,
0:33:16 well, then go learn more about sports. It’s usually just learning about something
0:33:20 gives you an appreciation for this thing that you used to just dismiss.
0:33:26 At the end of the year last year, I just thought, God, this has been, I think, maybe the greatest
0:33:31 year of my life. I think this is the happiest I have ever been in my whole life. And I think the
0:33:38 reason why was because I had five major things in one year that I used to hate that now I love.
0:33:44 And God, this is the greatest joy. So major things. So the rats makes it into major things.
0:33:49 I like this. Sure. I mean, you know, they’re my they’re my I’m not minimizing rats. Yeah,
0:33:54 I’m not minimizing rats. But it’s, you know, even the coffee and even the Python,
0:33:58 I’m doing something Python going, wow, I can’t believe I hated this for 20 years.
0:34:05 Well, I suppose they’re major in the sense that to the degree you had a fixed position beforehand,
0:34:13 these were kind of strong, fixed positions of dislike. So that turnaround is very interesting.
0:34:21 Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors, and we’ll be right back to the show.
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0:35:30 performance stack. I’ll spell it out. It’s a long one live momentous.com/tim. Live momentous.com/tim
0:35:40 for 20% off. Let me ask you this. Since in the case of the rats that was catalyzed by your son
0:35:51 bringing up pet rats, Dubai, you had a layover that then prompted you to extend how long you
0:35:57 stayed there. Python, I’m not sure exactly how that about face came to be, but having experienced
0:36:02 the past year, you say to yourself, this is one of the greatest or maybe the greatest year of my life,
0:36:10 high levels of happiness. I think it’s because I had these changes of mind. Are you farming for
0:36:16 opportunities to change your mind proactively? Yeah. And if so, how are you doing that?
0:36:21 I don’t have a systematic thing I can share and not that I’m not sharing it. I just don’t have
0:36:29 it. But it just made me notice like now I just need to notice in myself when I’m
0:36:33 irrationally averse to something. It can’t even be a thought process. Sometimes, okay,
0:36:39 this is actually in my useful, not true book that just came out. This idea that was actually
0:36:46 a little bit sparked by you where somebody dismisses everything a person says. It dismisses
0:36:51 everything a public figure says because they don’t like something about that public figure,
0:36:56 right? Like, oh, I don’t like the way he acts on social media. So fuck him. I’m not going to
0:37:02 listen to a word he says. And that was inspired. I think I told you last time that the first time
0:37:06 I encountered that was years and years ago when I saw somebody holding four hour work week.
0:37:12 And I said, oh, wow, great book. And he goes, yeah, the guy’s full of himself. Here you want it.
0:37:18 He’s like, he didn’t want to read the book because he saw one thing in there that made
0:37:23 him think you were fully yourself. So that’s it. Fuck this whole thing. Fuck this 400 page book.
0:37:26 There’s nothing in it for me because there’s something I don’t like about this guy.
0:37:33 When I think about that, to me, that’s trying to think of people as either true or not true
0:37:40 instead of useful or not useful. That’s judging the box, not judging the contents inside.
0:37:44 And so I think there are many things in my life where I have judged the box like
0:37:53 Python, no, you know, China, rough Dubai, fuck that place. Rats, coffee. Sorry, I just had to
0:37:59 spit all five times. And all of those, I was judging the box. But if you learn a little bit
0:38:04 more about it, then you get into the contents and you go, oh, actually, the contents are wonderful.
0:38:09 It was just I was dismissing the package. He probably read the first edition where I had that
0:38:14 whole chapter on my cock size that ended up being a little over the top. So I took it out for
0:38:20 reprints. And then he put it into four hour body. It was a bit much. Yeah, then I ended up putting
0:38:27 that as an appendix in the four hour body. So fair play on his part. I would actually
0:38:37 build on that to say that I look to my close relationships, and I pause and question
0:38:44 how I’m thinking about friendships. If in every case, there isn’t something substantial,
0:38:49 I disagree with each of those friends on. Does that make sense? Yes. I love that.
0:38:56 I really want friends where the differences of opinion bring us closer and make our
0:39:02 friendships more valuable, not the other way around. Yes. If you and your friends agree on
0:39:09 pretty much everything, I view that as symptomatic of a problem. Okay, I’m so glad you brought this
0:39:19 up. Sometimes I wonder about your motivation for continuing these podcasts and how you keep up
0:39:24 the enthusiasm for doing this for so long. And then I thought, God, wait, you must
0:39:31 be immersing yourself in so many diverse world views that it made me think about the
0:39:37 comparison to investing. I was in a situation recently, you’ve probably had this many times,
0:39:42 and I think it’s maybe part of why you left California, where you catch yourself in a group
0:39:47 of people and everybody agrees with everybody else. It’s like this group think, even if they’re
0:39:52 all really smart, but damn it, they all basically agree. This sucks. And I thought about the benefits
0:39:59 of diversification when it comes to investing, right? So anybody who learns like investing one
0:40:07 to one learns about having a low correlation between your asset allocations. So your US stocks,
0:40:14 international stocks, real estate commodities, bonds, gold, cash, some things risky, some things
0:40:19 riskless. And the whole idea is they’re supposed to have a low correlation. So if one goes down,
0:40:26 they won’t all go down. And I thought about that in terms of the thought portfolio
0:40:33 in our head, any given person. So you say it with the friends you have around, but I assume,
0:40:40 aren’t you then by knowing your friends so well, when you’re in a certain situation and you’re
0:40:46 thinking about what to do, you don’t just have Tim’s thoughts, you also have this friend’s thoughts,
0:40:50 and that’s friends thoughts. And it’s like, how would this friend of mine approach this?
0:40:56 Do you do that actively? Oh, yeah, I definitely do. And I’ll give a real world example. And I don’t
0:41:03 know if we want to get into the thick of it. But I was reading some of your writing before we hopped
0:41:08 on the phone. And I was taking an ice bath also right before we got on the phone, which I know I
0:41:15 am fonder of than you are. But I was sitting in the tub freezing my balls off. And there were certain
0:41:23 statements and positions in the writing that got me all riled up. And I was sitting there getting
0:41:36 riled up and thinking about my counter positions. And then I thought to myself, well, that’s interesting
0:41:41 to observe these feelings coming up, these very strong feelings. Then I thought to myself,
0:41:49 this is really good. This is good because the feelings are coming up in a strong way. And
0:41:56 you’re not someone to shy away from a conversation about those things. And what a gift to be able to
0:42:06 have civil disagreement with friends like what a fucking treasure that is. Because we don’t have a
0:42:13 lot of models for civil disagreement, I would say, at least not in most media or online. It’s just
0:42:21 not what sells. And I very much want friends who are going to call me on my bullshit or at least
0:42:31 take counter positions and help me think through things. And I think that in your new book, for
0:42:36 instance, there’s a very good job of discussing perspectives and perspective taking and how you
0:42:44 can read many things differently from different viewpoints. And you want friends who can help you
0:42:49 do that so that you don’t get trapped in your own thought loops. And furthermore, just on a very
0:42:55 practical sense, you want to be able to speak truthfully to your friends and you want them to
0:43:01 be able to do the same. And if you do that and you talk about a really wide breadth of things,
0:43:07 if you never have conflict, one or both of you is probably being dishonest. And if you’re going to
0:43:11 have some friction in the system, which you probably will if you’re really being honest,
0:43:20 then you’re going to need to be good at conflict resolution or repair or talking about hard things.
0:43:31 So that’s a very long stream of consciousness that I just let out. But if I look for friends
0:43:39 who I can and will disagree with on things, then it becomes my dojo for life overall
0:43:48 with people I really care for and love. And good God, what an amazing gift and advantage that is.
0:43:55 So yes, I do that deliberately. And I invite people on the podcast who I suspect or know I
0:43:59 will disagree with on a few different levels. And that gives me a chance to interrogate their
0:44:05 thinking, but also interrogate my own thinking. Love it. I’ve noticed within myself that when I’m
0:44:13 around people that I know agree with me, my inherent curiosity level drops a bit.
0:44:19 And when I’m around people that I know don’t think like me, my curiosity peaks.
0:44:27 So when I meet somebody that is like a scientist that is also Hindu, I’m like, oh,
0:44:30 oh my God, I have so many questions for you. I was like, can you explain to me how this, okay,
0:44:37 I’m filled with curiosity to meet somebody that grew up Hindu and still actively has the Hindu
0:44:41 beliefs. I want to understand this better. I’ve read two books about Hinduism. I don’t get it
0:44:45 still. I have so many questions for you. But if I’m around somebody that’s like me and like,
0:44:52 how are you doing? What’s up? Yeah, me too. Cool. All right. So I think it’s a deliberate
0:44:59 over waiting if we’re going to kind of use a back to like quantitative and investment metaphor.
0:45:08 I have a whole lifetime of thinking my way. Now I want to overweight learning other ways of thinking.
0:45:12 And to me, it’s just pure curiosity. There’s no debate. There’s no like, let’s work this
0:45:17 out and get to the right answer. It’s just, no, please tell me this other way of looking at
0:45:21 things. Tell me this other way of looking at your family history, 1800 years. Tell me this
0:45:27 other way of looking at, I don’t know, spirituality, life after death, etc. Please. I’m so curious,
0:45:34 because it reminds me that my way of looking at it is not the only way. I love dislodging
0:45:42 my first impression. I think our first thought is an obstacle. And we have to get past it
0:45:47 to realize there are other ways to look at the situation. Once you realize that you can get
0:45:52 past your first way of looking at something, then you can do that like what do you call it systems
0:45:57 to thinking, right? Thinking fast and slow, you can go, Oh, right. Okay, hold on. That was my first
0:46:03 reaction. What are some other ways I could look at this? That’s what my whole useful not true book
0:46:10 is about. Yeah, I remember also, this is, I think this was on the podcast in one of our earlier
0:46:17 conversations. But I asked you, it was on the podcast, probably the first conversation. I asked
0:46:24 you who the first person was you thought of when I gave the word successful. And your answer was
0:46:29 along the lines of, Well, I think answer number one isn’t that interesting, because I might say
0:46:36 Richard Branson, but really memory or Elon Musk. But if Richard Branson wanted a life of peace and
0:46:43 tranquility and a slower pace, if that were his goal, then he’s utterly failing. So maybe that
0:46:50 isn’t success. But perhaps overarchingly, I’ve used that twice now as an adverb, that’s pretty
0:46:55 funny. I never use that word. But the question should be who’s the third person you think of
0:46:59 when you hear the word successful? I am so impressed that you remember that.
0:47:05 It’s a long time ago. Yeah. And that is an example of what you’re talking about,
0:47:09 is getting past the first thought. I think the operative word there is thought, right? Because
0:47:17 just to draw a distinction for me, I think paying attention to feeling, the first feeling can save
0:47:24 you from a lot of pain in the short and the long term. In other words, along the lines of the gift
0:47:30 of fear, Gavin DeBecca, etc. If your system says no, pay very close attention to that. But if you
0:47:38 have a inbuilt story, I hate Dubai because A, B, and C, which is very different from,
0:47:42 I don’t feel safe in this airport and I don’t know why. Those are two very different things.
0:47:47 Very, yeah. Questioning that first story can pay a lot of incredible dividends.
0:47:51 Dude, I love this subject so much. To me, it’s kind of like the key of life.
0:47:58 So often the difference between success and failure is the mindset that leads you to take
0:48:04 different actions. But if you just look at a situation and you say, that’s it, that’s what
0:48:09 the situation is, I’m not talking about physical things. I mean, declaring something to be a dead
0:48:16 end, declaring something to suck. These are all things of the mind. And nothing of the mind is
0:48:20 necessarily true. Everything that’s just in the mind is just one perspective. Like physical
0:48:26 things are true. Sure. There are some physical realities. The number of votes cast in an election
0:48:33 is a physical reality that an alien or a computer could observe and agree. But all of these things
0:48:38 of the mind were social creatures and we treat them like they are realities. Like, hey, that person
0:48:43 wronged me. And that’s just a fact. It’s like, hmm, that’s not just a fact. That’s one way of
0:48:48 looking at it. And you might be a lot happier and a lot more successful if you realize that that’s
0:48:54 just one way of looking at it. It’s not true. It’s just a perspective. It’s just a thought.
0:48:58 And there’s another way of seeing that. And that other way of seeing it might lead
0:49:01 to actions that would be much more effective for you.
0:49:08 Yeah, for sure. And I think your new book pairs well with Byron Heddy’s The Work,
0:49:14 which focuses on a lot of what we’re discussing. And I was going to say,
0:49:21 in addition to what we’ve already covered, that the content is different from the mindset. And
0:49:28 what I mean by that is you have crafted a very path of Derek life for yourself. And you’ve made
0:49:35 some very unorthodox decisions, some of which I think are frankly, sometimes cuckoo bananas.
0:49:40 But thank you. You’re welcome. If I don’t agree, even if I wouldn’t replicate the decision,
0:49:48 hearing you explain why you did it and how you navigated that, the lenses through which
0:49:54 you view this scenario has allowed me to learn things that I can apply to totally different
0:50:02 circumstances. And that’s really valuable. You might not make the same house as someone else,
0:50:06 but learning how to use the carpentry tools that they use to build that house
0:50:14 could actually really, really aid you in a lot of disparate scenarios. So that’s how I’ve also
0:50:22 thought about it. I so often try to get people to devalue the example, but value the theme,
0:50:26 the process, like you just said, that too many people focus on the example that you give them.
0:50:32 It’s like, try to forget the example and look for the process. So thanks for saying that. I do that
0:50:38 with everything. There’s a person that we could talk about here if you want later, but he’s a
0:50:43 computer programmer, but he gets up and gives a talk about computer programming that I see the
0:50:48 theme in what he’s talking about. I’m like, oh, okay, well, forget the code for a second. That’s a
0:50:55 brilliant theme. And it’s fun to be able to do that. So let’s pause. This might be a good segue.
0:51:04 Is that part of the next bucket of people you’re studying? Or things you’re fascinated by? Where
0:51:10 would you like to go next? Because this might be a good segue. Yeah, it’s funny. You actually jumped
0:51:16 to the last thing I was going to mention. You brought up this diversified portfolio of perspectives.
0:51:20 So that was one of the things I wanted to talk about today. And you didn’t even know that.
0:51:25 Oh, amazing. Look at that. I did not. That was great. Yeah, let’s talk. Okay, you asked me in
0:51:32 advance. People I’m studying. So let’s do them in reverse order since we already brought up
0:51:39 Rich Hickey. So R-I-C-H-H-I-C-K-E-Y. Wait a second before we switch to that. Have you ever met Brian
0:51:49 Eno, the record producer? I have not met Brian Eno, but I have his oblique strategies part set.
0:51:55 I was just reading about how he ended up coining the term ambient music in the hospital because he
0:52:00 couldn’t get up and change the volume and ended up he ended up listening to very, very low volume
0:52:05 music a friend had put on for him. So I’m fascinated by Brian Eno, but I’ve never met him.
0:52:14 Brian Eno is one of these guys that his thought process is fascinating. I don’t love his music.
0:52:18 I like his music. I don’t love it, but I love his thought process. By the way, if you go to the
0:52:24 website musicthoughts.com, that’s my love letter to Brian Eno and John Cage and some of these music
0:52:31 thinkers. I made that website in 1999 and it’s a collection of inspiring quotes from Brian Eno,
0:52:35 John Cage and a bunch of other musicians. Musicthoughts.com. Yep, musicthoughts.com. It’s
0:52:39 totally non-commercial. I’m not going to make it penny off of anybody looking at it, so I’m not
0:52:46 trying to pitch it, but I’m just saying it’s a collection of Brian Eno’s philosophies on music
0:52:51 and thoughts on music that I would read these quotes to inspire me as I was making music and
0:52:57 kind of knock my thinking kind of like the oblique strategies cards to shift my thinking
0:53:03 into something different. And so even just reading his interviews, one thing he said is his job as
0:53:10 a record producer is to have strong opinions in the studio so that if he’s in there producing a
0:53:16 record by you too and the guys are fighting about whether to have a guitar solo or not,
0:53:20 whether it should be a loud guitar solo or a quiet guitar solo, he said, “Well, my job then
0:53:25 would be to say, ‘Well, how about we have no guitar at all in this song?’ And the band members go,
0:53:30 ‘What? Are you crazy? No, this song needs a guitar.’ No, Brian, we absolutely need guitar.’
0:53:35 And he goes, “All right, happy I could help. By you disagreeing with me, I just helped you
0:53:40 solidify your position, so that’s my job here.” So on the other hand, if you would have said,
0:53:45 “Yeah, okay, no guitar, that’s a good idea. Great, glad I could help. I’m not saying my
0:53:52 opinions are right. I’m just trying to help you respond.” I love that.
0:53:58 You’re providing a foil. Yeah. Yeah, you’re providing a foil. That’s musicthoughts.com.
0:54:02 Quick question on, was it John Cage you mentioned? Yeah.
0:54:08 So I was first exposed to John Cage in a documentary, a friend of my name, Steve Jang,
0:54:15 was involved with Namjoon Paik, Moon is the Oldest TV, which is about Namjoon Paik,
0:54:21 this amazing pioneer in experimental art, performance art, many different media.
0:54:26 And he was inspired by John Cage. Now, I know very little about John Cage, but I did get to see
0:54:32 a segment of a performance that he did, which caused like 90% of the audience to leave.
0:54:38 He was just like the most agonizingly uncomfortable, I would say, noise to listen to.
0:54:44 That is my sole exposure to John Cage, but I’ve heard him invoked as this
0:54:50 figurehead of great influence. And I’m basing my impression of him only on that,
0:54:56 what I would just say is awful performance that I saw a part of in this documentary.
0:55:01 How would you sell John Cage or why is he interesting?
0:55:09 I’m no expert, but let’s just say he questioned things that hadn’t been questioned before.
0:55:18 A lot of modern art, the kind where people look at it and go, what, that’s it? It’s a seesaw over
0:55:23 the border between U.S. and Mexico. You call that art, I could do that. And it’s like, yeah,
0:55:27 but you didn’t. Somebody looked at that border between U.S. and Mexico and said,
0:55:31 I think we could put a seesaw over that. And in a way, that’s a beautiful statement.
0:55:35 It’s not about the brushstrokes on canvas. It’s about the statement.
0:55:42 So I think John Cage was doing that with music. He was questioning the core of what is this anyway.
0:55:46 And so that’s why I think his most famous piece is called Four Minutes in 33 Seconds,
0:55:51 which is just Four Minutes of 33 Seconds of Silence. The point was, hey, listen to the room
0:55:56 around you for four minutes and 33 seconds. There are sounds going on here already. I mean,
0:55:58 I think that was his point. Maybe he stayed mute on it. I don’t know.
0:56:05 Okay. So is it fair to say that he’s interesting to you for the same reason that Brian in the
0:56:11 producer capacity is interesting as a provocateur of sorts, like an instigator of new thinking?
0:56:19 Yeah. I want to emulate his thought process, even if I don’t love his end results. Well,
0:56:24 you said it first. That’s why I love that you beat me to this. It’s your friends. You may not
0:56:30 want to live my life here with my, whatever, three glasses and two rats, but you like some of my
0:56:38 thought process. People keep emailing me about that. Hey, I heard your podcast with Tim Ferriss.
0:56:44 So three glasses. So let me explain that for people who don’t have the content. You should get
0:56:48 a third rat just so you have the same number of rats that you have glasses. But when I visited
0:56:51 you in New Zealand, I was like, Hey, do you mind if I have glass water? No, no, knock yourself out.
0:56:56 We’re the glasses. Other in the cabinet. And I went and I saw three glasses, all of different,
0:57:02 dramatically different sizes. And I was like, what happens if you have more than three people over
0:57:06 here? Like, I’ll just buy some more glasses. I was like, well, actually, that kind of makes a certain
0:57:10 elegant sense. So those are the three glasses. All right, you know what? On that note, do you want to
0:57:15 hear? I am building my dream home right now. Can you imagine where this is going?
0:57:21 Just 20 minutes north of Wellington, I bought a piece of land or I’m building my dream home.
0:57:28 It is a four by eight meter rectangle with nothing inside. No toilet, no kitchen, no nothing. Because
0:57:36 I thought every house I’ve lived in came with its default shit. And I adapted myself to its
0:57:40 default shit. Like, well, that’s just where the bathroom is. That’s just the size of the living
0:57:44 room. That’s just what it is. And I’ve always had to adapt myself. So I’ve never experienced
0:57:54 the process of making the place adapt to me through practice, not in theory. So I thought,
0:57:59 if I just start with a four by eight meter well insulated rectangle, then over time we’ll see
0:58:07 what I need. Wait, did you say four by eight? Four by eight meters? Yeah. Is the whole house?
0:58:14 Sorry, it’s actually two. So it’s a four by 12? Okay, got it. No, four by 14 meter rectangle,
0:58:19 that’s the two bedroom place where I’ll sleep with my kid. And then next to it is a four by eight
0:58:24 where I spend all of my waking hours. Okay, so it’s the sleeping house and the waking house.
0:58:29 And my kid actually gets his own four by eight meter cube to experiment with. And the whole
0:58:36 idea is to see what you need. So I’m starting with no bathroom, no kitchen. I’m just going to put a
0:58:42 little induction hob outside and an outhouse. And then I’ll see if that’s okay with me. Or if I find
0:58:48 through experience that I really want a bathroom inside, okay, well now I know from experience,
0:58:53 not just because it’s the default setting. So I’m trying to start from scratch. And this is my
0:59:00 dream house because of the process that it will allow me to have. Okay, so this is a very mundane
0:59:04 question. But I’m curious, generally, if you’re going to have like a kitchen or a bathroom or
0:59:13 something, you would have the piping or the power and so on put in a certain place. So as it stands,
0:59:20 that is not the case. So you might have to do a fair amount of demo or deconstructing your house
0:59:29 to add any of these things internally. I got this tip from Stuart Brand wrote a brilliant
0:59:33 book that everyone should read. Anyone who’s smart that is called How Buildings Learned.
0:59:38 How Buildings Learned by Stuart Brand, you should try to get the paper book because it’s
0:59:43 just laid out in such a way that you kind of need the paper book. He goes through this analytical
0:59:49 thing about buildings. And he said, “This is a reason why you should never hide your wires and
0:59:54 pipes. Just keep the infrastructure on the outside so that it’s easier to change.” He has a beautiful
1:00:00 line in there. It’s almost the opening point. He says, “All buildings are predictions and all
1:00:09 predictions are wrong. So therefore, the less predictive you can make your building the better.”
1:00:14 That’s why I’m just getting this rectangle. All pipes and wires will just be exposed to nothing
1:00:18 buried so that I can quickly change them. I can always see where they are. I’m very much
1:00:25 following Stuart Brand’s philosophy. Stuart Brand is a smart, fascinating man. Just a quick
1:00:31 pitch for Stuart Brand. So I met Stuart through Kevin Kelly. Now, Kevin Kelly found an editor
1:00:37 of Wired Magazine. Fascinating, genius, bizarre guy. Has an Amish beard, but he’s a technology
1:00:43 futurist, built his own house by hand. Spends more time in China than probably anyone I know.
1:00:49 He’s just an eclectic combination of all sorts of things. The title of my podcast with him way
1:00:55 back in the day was “The Real World Most Interesting Man in the World” or something like that.
1:01:01 In the midst of the conversation with Kevin, or maybe speaking offline, he said, “If you really
1:01:05 want the person I consider to be the most interesting man in the world, it’s Stuart Brand.”
1:01:12 It’s so… I had Stuart on the podcast a number of years ago, and boy, oh boy, you want to talk
1:01:17 about a polymath. He’s something else. All right. So you’ve preserved the optionality
1:01:23 with the possibility of putting things on the outside rather than on the inside in terms of
1:01:31 support infrastructure. And how do you see yourself using a space with nothing inside?
1:01:35 I don’t know. See, that would be a prediction. I’m trying to not predict. I’m just…
1:01:39 I’m just going to show up. It’ll be ready in a few months, and then I’ll start living there,
1:01:43 and we’ll see what happens. That’s all I know. Okay. Is it going to be totally empty,
1:01:46 or are you going to have some desks at chair? I mean, are you going to have anything at all,
1:01:51 or are you just going to sit on the floor and be like, what do I require at this moment?
1:01:56 I’m bringing a mattress to start. And then over time, I’ll notice if I wish I had a desk here,
1:02:02 then I’ll get a desk there. So I’ll add things as I feel that I really, really need them.
1:02:07 Again, I highly recommend in How Buildings Learn, he kind of goes into this about, like,
1:02:13 the best spaces are just rectangles, and the best places are ones that are easy to alter,
1:02:16 so that if you suddenly decide, he talks about this MIT building,
1:02:20 where people were just allowed to bash a hole in a wall because it wasn’t some beautifully
1:02:24 architecturally designed masterpiece. It was something thrown together quickly in World War
1:02:28 II, and people love that building because if they do need to bash a hole in the wall or run
1:02:32 some wires through, they can just do it because it’s a trashy old building. And because of that,
1:02:37 it’s such a creative space. The places that are award-winning are often the ones that are the most
1:02:41 hated by their residents. They might win the award for the architect. That’s true. But because
1:02:46 they’re award-winning, they’re inflexible. They’re sacred. I mean, talk to people who live in a
1:02:53 Frank Lloyd Wright home now, and it’s like, you know, living in a masterpiece museum, and I can’t
1:02:57 change a single screw or anything because it’s the way he wanted it. So practical recommendation,
1:03:01 I would say if you’re going to be sitting on the floor a lot, if you’re not accustomed to doing
1:03:06 that, just so you don’t end up with all sorts of orthopedic issues, I would start doing Turkish
1:03:12 get-ups and getting accustomed to sitting on the floor and getting up a lot. I’ll probably get a
1:03:17 good chair almost right away, but I just want to make sure that I really… So your body’s ready for
1:03:23 the rectangle. All right, fascinating. Another example, I’ll let you be the first monkey shot
1:03:28 into space on this particular type of home design. I can’t wait to learn so many things.
1:03:33 You experiment with some things I don’t want to experiment with, and I’ll experiment
1:03:37 with things that you don’t want to experiment with. I’ll renounce my US citizenship and let you
1:03:43 know how it goes. I’ll build my dream home of a four by eight rectangle, let you know how it goes.
1:03:47 Yeah, you got to divvy it up. I mean, the redundancy and experimentation is kind of,
1:03:50 I don’t want to say pointless, but it’s more fun to have people doing different things.
1:03:57 Other people, you are studying. All right. Or things you’re fascinated by. We can hop around,
1:04:02 depends on where you want to go. I already started. Rich Hickey. Oh, that’s right. You mentioned him.
1:04:06 I wrote him down because that was left dangling, and I was like, who is this Rich Hickey?
1:04:12 So Rich Hickey is… He’s a programmer. He’s the inventor of a programming language called
1:04:17 Clojure, C-L-O-J-U-R-E. He’s actually one of my number one picks for somebody
1:04:21 that I would like to get on your show. Like, if we did a co-hosting kind of thing,
1:04:27 and I were to get somebody on, actually, I already emailed him. He didn’t reply, but maybe,
1:04:31 hey, if anybody knows Rich Hickey, and if he’s interested, nudge, nudge, nudge.
1:04:39 He did a brilliant talk. If you search YouTube for either Simple versus Easy, or I think the
1:04:45 name of the video on YouTube is called Simplicity Matters, here’s his point. And I actually jotted
1:04:49 down these notes so I could try to bang out his point quickly, and then we’ll talk about it.
1:04:54 And keep in mind, everything I’m about to say, he’s just talking about programming.
1:05:00 He’s speaking to a room of programmers. He said, we mistake Simple and Easy. We think that Simple
1:05:06 means Easy, and Easy means Simple. But he said there are two different things. The word complex,
1:05:10 if you look at the definition, it’s actually, it comes from the word complex,
1:05:16 which is to braid things together. So if something is complexed, it means it’s intertwined with other
1:05:22 things. And so the adjective complex means that something is bound to other things.
1:05:28 Whereas Simple comes from simplex, which means it is not bound to other things. It stands alone.
1:05:36 Easy, the root of that means that something is near at hand. It’s something you already know how to do.
1:05:44 It’s within your realm. So Easy and Hard are subjective, but Simple and Complex are very
1:05:48 objective things that we can look at. Something is Simple, it stands alone, it’s complex if it’s
1:05:55 bound to other things. And he said, here’s where it gets tricky, is that it can be very easy to make
1:06:03 something very complex. So he says, you could just type gem install hairball. And with typing
1:06:08 three words on a computer, you can install a massive framework, whether it’s Rubion Rails or
1:06:14 WordPress. And if you start using that, well, wow, you are now complexed with a huge complicated
1:06:20 system that you’re intertwined with. And so now everything I say after this, this is my take on
1:06:29 his analysis. But it’s really easy in life to say, okay, yeah, let’s get married, or to have
1:06:36 unprotected sex and get pregnant and have a baby. That’s easy. Adopt a dog, hiring people. You can
1:06:40 have a problem and think, all right, well, I’ve got some money and I’m overwhelmed. I’m going to
1:06:44 get a consultant to like hire 10 people. Okay, great. Now I’ve got 10 employees. Phew. That was
1:06:52 easy to take some work off my plate. But your life is now objectively complex. You are complexed
1:06:56 with these other people and their needs and their time schedules and their desires,
1:07:04 handing off parts of your business to say, this is hard. I’m just going to hand off my billing
1:07:10 or my something or my this or my scheduling to these apps or these subscription services.
1:07:17 That was easy to just hand it off. But now your business is very complexed with these other
1:07:28 services. So hence my rant on our last conversation over scotch at my house about tech independence.
1:07:35 His point is it can be really hard to make something simple. It can be much harder to do
1:07:41 something that is objectively simple, that stands alone, that isn’t dependent on other things. It
1:07:48 can be harder to make that, but it’s ultimately usually a better choice because it’s more maintainable.
1:07:54 It’s easier to change. It’s easier to stop and start. It’s simpler, even if it’s harder to make.
1:08:01 So the point is in his thinking is to beware of the objective measure of complexity or
1:08:06 beware of complexity, which can be objectively measured and aim for doing the simpler thing,
1:08:12 even if it’s harder. In my take, I think you can make simple things easier just by learning more,
1:08:18 say about the fundamentals of something instead of just adopting somebody else’s high-level solution.
1:08:24 You can spend a little time learning about the core underneath it, about the fundamentals.
1:08:29 Then you can forget norms. You could forget what others do, what others think.
1:08:33 And you can just get to the real essence of what you need. I’m not just talking
1:08:37 programming now, I’m just meaning in life. What would be an example of that?
1:08:44 Okay, my four by eight house. Really, I just need a shelter where it’s temperature controlled,
1:08:51 so it’s really well-insulated. I do need a mattress to sleep on, and I do need a place I can work.
1:08:56 But to me, those are the… Oh, and I do need a little food. To me, these are the core things of a
1:09:02 shelter. But even say with friendships, do I need to live in the same place with my friends? Well,
1:09:09 not necessarily. My dear friends, my best friends are often far, far away. I don’t need to move to
1:09:14 a place that has all my friends if I can reach them on the phone. I’m very often talking about
1:09:19 just the thought process. I very often find myself asking, like, well, what’s the real outcome I’m
1:09:24 after? What’s the real point of this? And once I figure that out, well, then what’s the most
1:09:29 direct route to that outcome? Never mind what other people do, what the norms are.
1:09:36 What do I think is the most direct route to that outcome? And then try to keep it simple along the
1:09:42 way and be very wary of dependencies and entangling myself with other things. That’s my take.
1:09:48 Could you give another example or two of how you implement that in your life?
1:09:48 Sure.
1:09:52 Or how you might? Because I know there are more examples.
1:09:57 The next two might be less relatable, because it’s…
1:10:00 It’s less relatable than the four by eight meter box.
1:10:01 Because I know everybody wants to live in it.
1:10:02 With nothing inside.
1:10:10 So, I mean, well, first, here’s a good question to strip away some things. Ask yourself,
1:10:17 would I still do this if nobody knew? There might be a lot of things in our actions that we do
1:10:22 because we like the way it would look to others, because it would be impressive to others.
1:10:27 That’s the first thing to just strip away when you’re beginning this thought process is like,
1:10:32 if I were to never tell anybody and nobody were to ever know, would I still do this thing?
1:10:34 Okay, well, then that might just be the decoration.
1:10:40 Okay, so two examples. Programming wise, I’m constantly asking this
1:10:47 when I’m building something. It’s just I need to get this calendar entry into this database
1:10:51 with this time. Do I need a whole bunch of JavaScript?
1:10:54 Do I need a bunch of CSS and things flying around?
1:10:55 Do I need fading graphics?
1:11:00 No, I just need this thing there.
1:11:04 What’s the most direct way to get that calendar entry into that database?
1:11:05 So that’s like a programming example.
1:11:11 Writing wise, my last two books, How to Live and Useful Not True,
1:11:16 I’m spending most of my time reducing.
1:11:20 My rough draft, I always spew out everything I have to say on the subject.
1:11:27 And then I spend 1000 hours every single word going, is that word necessary?
1:11:30 Wait a second, is that whole sentence necessary?
1:11:33 Wait, can the point still be communicated without that sentence?
1:11:37 If it can, okay, let me try to get rid of that sentence and see if the point still comes across.
1:11:40 Actually, does the point come across without this entire chapter?
1:11:41 Oh my God, it still does.
1:11:43 Therefore, I don’t need this chapter.
1:11:48 One of the most useful things that happened recently is a few months ago,
1:11:53 an organization in Australia paid me to come give a talk.
1:11:56 And I said, what do you want me to talk about?
1:11:56 They said anything.
1:11:59 I said, how about my next book called Useful Not True?
1:11:59 They said, sure.
1:12:04 So it was a room of very successful, very effective people.
1:12:08 And I had one hour on stage to communicate the whole idea of my next book.
1:12:12 And at the time, the book was still in process.
1:12:19 And that was so helpful because I noticed that there were a few things on stage,
1:12:22 even though I had it in my notes, I skipped over it.
1:12:24 And I thought, okay, well, actually, we don’t need to do that.
1:12:25 Okay, let’s get to the next point.
1:12:27 And so later when I was back home, I thought, wow,
1:12:29 I just skipped over that whole point on stage.
1:12:34 So why do I think it’s worth killing trees to print that point?
1:12:35 Apparently it’s not.
1:12:36 Cool.
1:12:38 This is now the shortest book I’ve ever written.
1:12:40 I’m very proud of that fact.
1:12:44 I compressed this 400 pages down to, I think it’s 102 pages or something.
1:12:48 So those are two examples where I’m constantly asking like,
1:12:51 what’s the most direct way to just get rid of what I really want?
1:12:56 Get the outcome, skipping the usual fanfare.
1:13:04 How do you think about burst order simplicity versus complexity versus second order,
1:13:07 third order, and planning?
1:13:16 And the reason I’m asking that is you strike me as someone who prizes freedom, independence,
1:13:20 simplicity, all very highly.
1:13:28 But I imagine there could be cases where looking at the first decision and the first order effects,
1:13:35 you might think, well, it’s much simpler for me to do X, to renounce my US citizenship,
1:13:41 to build a box, to do everything myself instead of taking on these cloud services
1:13:42 for accounting and so on.
1:13:50 But there are levels of second, third order complexities that ultimately make it kind of
1:13:55 net net more complex than doing the slightly more complex thing up front.
1:13:56 Does that make sense?
1:13:58 Almost.
1:14:07 I guess I’m wondering how practically people might think about simplifying but not oversimplifying
1:14:10 and then shooting yourself in the foot in the long term.
1:14:12 Give you an example.
1:14:19 I know people who have moved to Puerto Rico to trim taxes substantially.
1:14:25 But in the process, they viewed that as the most direct route to reducing taxes.
1:14:30 Therefore, they can do X, Y, and Z over time with more income or preserved capital gain,
1:14:30 whatever it might be.
1:14:38 However, in the process of doing that, they’ve created all of this lifestyle complexity and
1:14:41 applied a lot of constraints to what they can or cannot do.
1:14:50 The tax tail is wagging the dog and instead of money serving life, now life is serving money,
1:14:56 and they’ve kind of put themselves in a topsy-turvy upside down situation.
1:14:59 And if you were to look at it from first principles two years later, you’re like,
1:15:01 “Wow, that was really bungled.”
1:15:04 And that’s not true for everybody in Puerto Rico.
1:15:05 I’m not trying to make it sound like that.
1:15:10 But I have seen those types of examples where the thing that seemed simple and straightforward
1:15:16 at the outset ended up producing a lot of ripple effects that produced not just complexity,
1:15:18 but complexity that was hard to undo.
1:15:21 Yeah, great example.
1:15:25 So, yeah, how do you think about that kind of risk mitigation?
1:15:29 By the way, my two little examples of that.
1:15:32 A few years ago, Tony Robbins had a Money Master the Game book.
1:15:36 I was like, “Oh, wow, Tony hasn’t put out a book in like 20 years.
1:15:37 I wonder how this is going to be.”
1:15:43 And in it, he’s giving these prescriptions for extremely complex like insurance things
1:15:44 that you could set up.
1:15:48 I was like, “Ooh, wow, that’s objectively complex.”
1:15:53 And another example is in Neil Strauss’ book called Emergency.
1:15:55 I’ll never forget this point.
1:16:00 He said that he’s off at one of these nomad, sovereign individual,
1:16:03 “I’m beholden to no country” kind of events.
1:16:06 And he meets this guy that is bragging to him about his setup.
1:16:09 He’s like, “I got my income coming here, but then all expenses go here,
1:16:13 but then I’ve got a trust and this, but I’m the non-managing member of the trust,
1:16:14 which is held by this and that.”
1:16:18 And in the end, he’s going to save 30% taxes.
1:16:25 And Neil said, “Wouldn’t it just be a lot easier or make a lot more sense to just work
1:16:29 30% harder or like to just make 30% more money?”
1:16:31 He said, “That’s a ton of work just to save 30%.”
1:16:35 He said, “It’s not that much harder to just go make 30% more.”
1:16:39 And dude, when I read that, I love that thought process.
1:16:47 So I think that I know that your podcast and the Titans and all that is often about
1:16:54 how do we use the wisdom of others to avoid making these mistakes ourselves.
1:16:59 But some of these things maybe just have to…
1:17:00 I don’t know.
1:17:02 I think for some of these things, I’m willing to throw myself in and feel the pain
1:17:03 to see if I’ve done it wrong.
1:17:06 I know we’re improv-jazzing here, so let’s keep going.
1:17:13 This thought just occurred to me because when I hear you talk about code and programming,
1:17:20 I mean, there’s a poetry to it and there’s an economy to it that seems I’m not a programmer,
1:17:21 but I do write.
1:17:27 There seems to be something intrinsically rewarding to you about that presentation of elegance.
1:17:34 And I’m wondering in the case of following Stuart Brand’s principles in building this box
1:17:42 or doing certain things that seem to me optimized for freedom, independence,
1:17:50 is there… even if it ends up face-planting, is there something that you find beautiful
1:17:55 and redeeming just about taking the simple approach, even if the outcome is suboptimal?
1:17:57 It’s related.
1:18:01 It’s finding out, in fact, instead of just in theory.
1:18:06 We can sit at home and wonder what it might be like to do such and such,
1:18:09 but at some point you just got to throw yourself in and go try it.
1:18:14 And if you try moving to Puerto Rico and you hate it, well, now you know.
1:18:16 It was worth a try, maybe.
1:18:20 And now you know, in fact, that doesn’t work for you.
1:18:28 That’s maybe the how buildings learn idea is don’t predict that you will want to sink
1:18:34 in that spot, put yourself into that spot first, live without a sink for a while,
1:18:38 and eventually you’ll get a good feeling for where the sink needs to be, in fact, not in theory.
1:18:49 And so I think I do this with my life, is I’m willing to mess up happily because I will know
1:18:53 that then I found out, in fact, that that doesn’t work for me.
1:18:58 And maybe this is coming from the core of the fact that I’m a really happy person.
1:19:01 And so I feel that like my base level is up here.
1:19:06 I can take some big knocks and I think a lot of the crazy should have done.
1:19:10 I did marry somebody that I hardly knew after a few months because,
1:19:12 fuck it, let’s see what happens.
1:19:15 In fact, you and I have never talked about that directly.
1:19:18 But do you know what the mindset I was in at the time?
1:19:20 I had just sold my company.
1:19:26 I had a ton of money and I felt like I need to change my trajectory
1:19:31 because my first impulse after selling my company was literally the next day I set up
1:19:33 my next company.
1:19:34 And I thought, I’m going to move to Silicon Valley.
1:19:36 I’m going to do this thing.
1:19:37 I’m going to stay on the same trajectory.
1:19:44 And I did that for a few months, but then I caught myself going, wait, I want a full life.
1:19:45 I don’t want to stay on the same trajectory.
1:19:46 I want to shake shit up.
1:19:52 So I very deliberately did what we might call the George Costanza principle,
1:19:54 which is do the opposite.
1:19:57 Do the opposite of all of my impulses.
1:20:00 Every time I felt yes, everything in me said yes.
1:20:01 I would say no out loud.
1:20:04 And everything in me says no.
1:20:07 I say yes out loud as a way of deliberately shaking shit up.
1:20:13 And so I was dating this woman for a few months and we had no great connection.
1:20:18 And she said, oh, well, I can’t travel to California with you unless we get married.
1:20:22 And everything in me says, oh, hell no, don’t do that.
1:20:22 That’s stupid.
1:20:23 I don’t want to marry this person.
1:20:26 So I said, yes, let’s do that.
1:20:28 And so we got married.
1:20:32 And I kept doing that in every way.
1:20:38 I deliberately fucked up my life and made a bunch of crazy fucking decisions.
1:20:42 And some of them worked out great and some of them didn’t.
1:20:43 And I’m so happy that I did that.
1:20:47 Like in some ways I could say that that’s my biggest regret or biggest mistake.
1:20:50 But in other ways, it was wonderful.
1:20:53 It deliberately sent me on a different trajectory.
1:20:55 And I’m glad I did it.
1:20:56 That it definitely will.
1:21:01 So for people who don’t have any of the connective tissue here to figure out
1:21:06 how to orient themselves to this, people are going to want to know, right?
1:21:07 Cliffhanger.
1:21:09 So how did that turn out?
1:21:10 Everything in me says no.
1:21:12 So I said, yes, let’s get married.
1:21:12 Let’s do that.
1:21:14 The marriage is awful.
1:21:16 No, that was terrible.
1:21:19 And we knew it literally like days later.
1:21:21 Like, oops, we made a big mistake.
1:21:23 Yeah, that was instantly a big mistake.
1:21:24 And that’s fine.
1:21:31 Because we knew in fact then that it was a big mistake, not just in theory.
1:21:35 I could have walked away from that going, oh, God, remember that woman that wanted
1:21:36 me to marry her?
1:21:38 And I said, no, God, I wonder what would have happened.
1:21:40 Well, now I get to find out.
1:21:41 Like, I did it.
1:21:42 Now, hold on a second, though.
1:21:44 I’m going to push on this a little bit.
1:21:51 We could use this logic to be a reverse George Costanza for every decision we think is bad.
1:21:53 We could turn around and say yes to, right?
1:21:57 But as a life strategy, I don’t see you continuing that, right?
1:22:02 So you don’t know for a fact that the awful idea would have been awful.
1:22:06 But I mean, there has to be a point at which you think about self-preservation and
1:22:08 time as a finite currency.
1:22:11 So you’re like, well, when would you apply that versus when would you not apply it?
1:22:14 Because you could apply it everywhere, indefinitely.
1:22:19 But certain things are one-way doors and some are two-way doors, right?
1:22:28 I mean, for instance, getting a pet rat will lower cost, more reversible, let’s just say,
1:22:31 than maybe giving up your US citizenship, right?
1:22:34 That is a little harder to control Z.
1:22:36 Yeah, I cannot undo that.
1:22:38 Yeah.
1:22:43 So moving forward for you, having learned everything that you’ve learned, when do you
1:22:48 play the George Costanza strategy versus not, right?
1:22:53 Because there are lots of things we can’t know for a fact unless we make the right or
1:22:54 the wrong or the good or the bad decision.
1:22:56 But you can’t make all decisions.
1:22:57 So what do you do?
1:23:03 You know, long ago, when I said the hell yeah or no thing, and…
1:23:06 It’s going to be in your gravestone.
1:23:11 Hell yeah or here I am.
1:23:13 Here he lays.
1:23:20 So some people emailed me after that, after that was on your show and they said,
1:23:22 “Hey, man, I like this hell yeah or no thing.
1:23:23 I’m using it for everything.
1:23:24 You know, I just got out of college.
1:23:25 I’m getting a bunch of offers.
1:23:28 I’m like, I’m not feeling hell yeah about any of them.
1:23:31 You know, I’m dating and we’re just like, you know, I’m not hell yeah about any of you.”
1:23:32 And I go, “Wait, wait, wait, wait, hold on.
1:23:36 Everything does not become a nail because you’re holding this hammer.
1:23:36 You don’t…
1:23:41 This is a tool for a specific situation when you’re overwhelmed with options.
1:23:44 You have to have the wisdom to know when to use this tool.
1:23:46 You don’t use it on everything always.
1:23:49 It’s the same thing with this going against your instincts.
1:23:52 Of course, you don’t use it on everything always.
1:24:00 But that was a specific time in my life when I wanted to deliberately change my trajectory.
1:24:02 I wanted to go against my normal way of doing things
1:24:07 and deliberately introduce some randomness and variety into my life.
1:24:08 Right, it’s not your default.
1:24:12 Right, but let’s look at, you know, I mentioned Dubai earlier.
1:24:14 Everything in me said, “Fuck that place.”
1:24:17 And then I caught myself feeling that.
1:24:20 And I thought, “Okay, wait, hold on.
1:24:23 This is a good time to use this tool.
1:24:24 My impulse is saying no.
1:24:26 I’m going to try saying yes.
1:24:27 I’m going to go get to know this thing.”
1:24:32 Because that sounds to me like that would be a learning, growing experience to try it.
1:24:35 That’s a good example of integrating this into your life.
1:24:41 But then say, like if maybe you do hit a situation where it’s like nothing is working out.
1:24:43 You’ve been an idiot your whole life.
1:24:44 You just got fired.
1:24:47 You were just dumped by your romantic partner.
1:24:48 You’re at skid row.
1:24:53 Maybe it’s a really good time to go against all your natural impulses
1:24:57 since it’s pretty clear that your defaults were set wrong.
1:24:58 They’re not working.
1:25:00 Yeah, they’re not working very well.
1:25:03 Yeah, I like integrating it.
1:25:08 Maybe it’s the question is like, “Is this going to be a learning, growing experience for me?”
1:25:11 I like leaning into discomfort.
1:25:12 Whatever scares you, go do it.
1:25:16 All right, so I have quite a few follow-up questions.
1:25:18 We can take them in many different directions.
1:25:22 So we’ve covered Rich Hickey, Clojure, Knock Knock.
1:25:26 We’ll see if anyone lets him know he appeared on the show.
1:25:31 And I also want to ask you a question we can cut from the conversation if we need to.
1:25:33 But since Dubai has come up repeatedly.
1:25:34 That’s a great lead-in.
1:25:35 I love that.
1:25:38 This may be too risky for anybody’s ears, but here we go.
1:25:40 Do taxes fit into this at all?
1:25:44 Is this like people who move to Nashville or Austin,
1:25:46 and they’re like, “Oh, the barbecue and the music.”
1:25:51 And they will dance and dance and dance until you corner them with a broomstick.
1:25:52 And then they’re like, “Yeah, okay, fine.
1:25:54 Yeah, the taxes are all so it’s a thing.”
1:25:58 Is Dubai one of those or no?
1:25:59 Not at all.
1:26:01 I mean, I had to ask myself that.
1:26:04 That’s like one of those things.
1:26:09 Okay, when you ask yourself, would I still be doing this thing if nobody knew about it?
1:26:11 I got an email from Guy once.
1:26:14 It was just like, “Hey, man, I want to travel the whole world.
1:26:16 I’m going to visit every country in the world.
1:26:18 Do you have any suggestions for me?”
1:26:22 I said, “Yeah, don’t bring a camera and don’t tell anyone that you’re doing this.
1:26:24 Is it still appealing to you now?”
1:26:26 Yeah, probably not.
1:26:32 Okay, so anytime, say Dubai, for example, I was like, “Whoa, this place is fascinating.
1:26:34 Oh my God, I think I want to live here.”
1:26:38 I was like, “Would I still live here if the taxes were like 50%?”
1:26:41 I was like, “Yeah, that’s moot to me.
1:26:45 I mean, look, I’m living in New Zealand where my income tax right now is 45%.
1:26:49 I pay a ton of taxes, but it’s worth it to me.
1:26:50 I love it here.
1:26:51 I don’t care.”
1:26:57 So that thing I mentioned in Neil Strauss’ book, Emergency, that sentence hit me hard.
1:27:02 When I first sold CD Baby, that was 2008.
1:27:04 There were some things I was thinking at the time.
1:27:07 I was like, “Ooh, wow, I just got Mega Millions.
1:27:09 How can I pay less taxes?”
1:27:14 And it was literally like the month before or month after I sold CD Baby
1:27:17 that I read that book, Emergency.
1:27:19 And I saw that sentence and I went, “Whoa.”
1:27:22 -Good timing. -That is a great point.
1:27:25 Don’t jump through hoops to save taxes.
1:27:27 Jump through a hoop to go make more money.
1:27:29 That’s the growth choice anyway.
1:27:34 That’s the thought process that leads you to make growing decisions, not shrinking decisions.
1:27:39 So you’re about to sell or have just sold CD Baby.
1:27:42 You form a new company the next day.
1:27:47 You’re planning on moving to Silicon Valley and you see yourself moving on that track
1:27:52 and you decide to throw a Costanza curveball in and mix things up.
1:27:54 Why?
1:28:00 Like, what was the fear or the hazard you’re trying to avoid by following that path?
1:28:06 Was it doing something thoughtlessly and repeating what you’ve done before?
1:28:07 That it wasn’t intentional?
1:28:08 What was it?
1:28:10 I want to live a full life.
1:28:15 At the end of my life, I want to look back and go, “Wow, I did a bunch of different things.
1:28:17 I tried a bunch of different ways of living.
1:28:20 I followed this philosophy for a while.
1:28:21 I followed that one.
1:28:22 I tried this.
1:28:23 I tried that.
1:28:24 I lived here.
1:28:25 I lived there.”
1:28:28 That to me is my definition of a full life.
1:28:38 But my previous book called “How to Live” was 27 conflicting philosophies and one weird answer.
1:28:42 And the whole idea was that it’s 27 chapters.
1:28:46 Each one disagrees with the rest, but each one has a strong opinion of saying,
1:28:49 “Here’s how to live, live for the future.”
1:28:53 Then the next one’s like, “Here’s how to live, live only for the present.”
1:28:55 And the next one’s like, “Here’s how to live, leave a legacy.”
1:28:58 And these are all valid ways of living.
1:29:04 And my definition of a full life is I want to experience the different approaches to life.
1:29:10 I want to have the diversified portfolio of thought and of experiences.
1:29:11 So that was it.
1:29:15 I just felt like if I was to create a new company the next day and move to Silicon Valley,
1:29:17 I’d just be doing more of the same shit I’ve already done.
1:29:18 Yeah, makes sense.
1:29:20 Makes perfect sense.
1:29:22 Who else do you have on your list of people you’re studying?
1:29:24 All right.
1:29:30 Tyler Cowan, just a few days ago, in an article on Bloomberg.com called,
1:29:32 “Who was Bitcoin’s Satoshi?”
1:29:36 So we still don’t know who is Satoshi, the inventor of Bitcoin.
1:29:43 And there’s this law of headlines that if it ends in a question mark,
1:29:44 the answer’s usually no.
1:29:51 So when I first saw the headline, I thought that the answer was going to be,
1:29:52 “It doesn’t matter.
1:29:53 It doesn’t matter who Satoshi is.
1:29:54 Forget it.”
1:29:57 And oh my God, Tyler Cowan took it somewhere else.
1:29:59 Even if you would have asked me, by the way,
1:30:03 “Hey, Derek, I’m going to give you an hour alone in a room to think about one question.
1:30:07 Does it matter who is Satoshi, the inventor of Bitcoin?”
1:30:11 Even after an hour, I think my answer would have been, of course not.
1:30:15 And I would have just sat there for an hour just going, “No, no, no.”
1:30:18 Tyler Cowan took it the opposite way.
1:30:25 I jotted down his points, but it’s a masterpiece in this kind of if-then-knock-on thinking.
1:30:33 So he said, “Okay, if we find out that Satoshi is dead, that the inventor of Bitcoin is dead,
1:30:38 then that’s a good thing because it means Bitcoin will be more safe
1:30:41 because it won’t be open to future alteration.
1:30:44 The person can’t tarnish the reputation of it.”
1:30:48 You know, say like Elon Musk and Twitter, kind of like, you know,
1:30:52 by continuing to be there, can tarnish the reputation of something.
1:30:53 Sorry, I shouldn’t have gone there.
1:30:57 Satoshi can’t come back and change the rules for the worst.
1:31:02 And then he even said, “This is why all religions have dead founders,
1:31:07 is because the founder can’t stay in and tarnish the reputation of the religion.”
1:31:10 So I went, “Okay, good point.
1:31:13 If Satoshi is dead, that is good for Bitcoin.
1:31:15 It can stay as is and won’t get tarnished.
1:31:16 Won’t get changed.”
1:31:20 And he said, “So there’s a chance that Satoshi is an older guy
1:31:26 from this previous movement around e-gold that was generally seen as like a failed project,
1:31:29 that a bunch of people were into this idea of e-gold and it didn’t work out.
1:31:36 If Satoshi is somebody from that group, then that means that even projects that look like
1:31:39 they’ve failed can create great things.
1:31:46 So we should maybe think more highly or be less dismissive of projects that seem to be failing,
1:31:48 because who knows what they will lead to.
1:31:52 He said, “There’s a chance that Satoshi is this person,” and I forget their name,
1:31:58 but he said, “that would have been 21 years old and in grad school at the time of inventing Bitcoin.”
1:32:03 He said, “If that’s true, that means we should raise our perception of what young,
1:32:06 busy people can do, that they can do more than we realize.
1:32:09 This guy while in grad school also invented Bitcoin.”
1:32:15 And I said, “If Satoshi is still alive, that means,” oh, by the way,
1:32:18 we should say for you, I assume people know, but maybe not,
1:32:25 “that whoever is Satoshi has hundreds,” okay, let’s say at least tens of billions of dollars
1:32:32 in Bitcoin, that all he’d have to do, whoever Satoshi is, would have to just take it.
1:32:34 It’s already there in the account in the public record that we can see.
1:32:38 So Satoshi is one of the richest people on earth, whoever Satoshi is.
1:32:44 So he said, “If Satoshi is still living, that means that some people don’t want to be billionaires
1:32:46 or just have incredible self-restraint.”
1:32:51 Like maybe upon realizing what he created, he destroyed the key, destroyed the password,
1:32:54 so that he could not take those billions of dollars.
1:32:57 You know, to protect himself from that.
1:33:00 There’s a chance that Satoshi is a pseudonym for a group of people.
1:33:06 If that’s true, it means a group of people can keep secrets way better than we expected,
1:33:12 which means that conspiracy theories are more likely to be true.
1:33:14 About anything in general, about UFOs, about JFK or whatever.
1:33:20 If this group of people is Satoshi and they could have hundreds of billions of dollars
1:33:22 or tens of billions of dollars, but they are choosing not to
1:33:25 and they are all keeping the secret, that’s amazing.
1:33:29 And we should regard secrecy more higher than we can.
1:33:31 So that’s the end of the bullet points.
1:33:35 But I read this one little Bloomberg article and my jaw dropped.
1:33:39 I went, “Oh my God, this is the kind of thinking I aspire to.
1:33:42 That is some amazing lateral creative…”
1:33:43 I don’t know.
1:33:44 What kind of thinking do you call that?
1:33:45 But that’s what I want to do more of.
1:33:48 Love it.
1:33:49 Yeah, Tyler’s incredible.
1:33:51 I highly recommend people check him out.
1:33:53 That’s a really good Tyler example.
1:33:55 Cowan, C-O-W-E-N.
1:33:57 Definitely recommend people check him out.
1:33:59 Also, past podcast guest.
1:34:00 Yeah, that was a great one.
1:34:03 Previously to this, one of my favorite points of his
1:34:08 is he said that restaurants are better in places of high income inequality.
1:34:09 Why?
1:34:15 Because these are places that have both rich customers and low paid staff.
1:34:18 So somebody can afford to run a great restaurant
1:34:20 because there are enough people that will pay
1:34:21 because there are rich people around.
1:34:24 But there are enough low income people
1:34:26 that we can have a good amount of staff.
1:34:30 He said that’s why the best restaurants are in places of high income inequality.
1:34:32 Whoa, that’s again a brilliant connection.
1:34:33 That’s interesting.
1:34:37 I would also add to that that a lot of folks who want to dedicate themselves
1:34:43 to a craft or an art are, depending on the industry,
1:34:46 but frequently not going to be well paid for that.
1:34:54 And so, let’s just call it volitionally poorly paid in some cases.
1:34:59 And I’m thinking of, in this particular case, San Francisco and East Bay,
1:35:02 where a lot of restaurants in San Francisco,
1:35:03 a lot of restaurants in different places.
1:35:06 But as the price of living went up in San Francisco,
1:35:10 a lot of the best restaurateurs, meaning I should say chefs,
1:35:12 a lot of the best chefs, a lot of the best line cooks,
1:35:14 a lot of the best massage therapists,
1:35:17 a lot of these people could no longer afford to be there,
1:35:18 had to move to the East Bay.
1:35:23 And I would say that led to a decline in the quality
1:35:26 of all of the goods I just mentioned in services.
1:35:30 So that would also make sense if you want access to the artists,
1:35:34 they’re not going to be in the most expensive areas typically,
1:35:36 unless it’s like a Jeff Koons or someone.
1:35:37 I haven’t been to Pittsburgh lately,
1:35:39 but I heard that that happened with some of the,
1:35:43 a lot of the best chefs from New York City went to Pittsburgh.
1:35:46 And that now Pittsburgh is hotter than you’d expect.
1:35:49 I can see that. I can totally see it.
1:35:52 All right, Tyler, anybody else on the list
1:35:54 of people you’re learning from or people you’re studying?
1:35:57 Those of my two, that Tyler, it’s because they’re specific things.
1:35:58 I love it. All right.
1:36:00 So I think we have one more category.
1:36:05 We’ll see how many we get to, but I heard a sharp inhale.
1:36:06 Where should we go?
1:36:13 Okay, so inchword, inchword.com, I-N-C-H-W-O-R-D.com.
1:36:16 This is actually a bit of a call out.
1:36:21 I don’t usually do this, but I would like to hear from translators
1:36:25 that if you’re a translator, contact me,
1:36:26 because I’ve got a lot of paying work,
1:36:32 because I’m really interested in the subject of translations
1:36:34 that are always improving, well, not always,
1:36:36 at a certain point you call it, maybe you call it a release.
1:36:40 But you know, as a writer, the first time you write a sentence
1:36:41 is not always the best.
1:36:44 You improve it the second or third time,
1:36:48 and at any given sentence we see in your books,
1:36:52 that might be the fourth time you’ve improved that sentence,
1:36:53 maybe over the course of months.
1:36:55 There’s always room for improvement.
1:36:57 When somebody makes a translation of one of your books,
1:37:00 the incentives are a little off now,
1:37:03 because the translator’s incentive,
1:37:06 as long as they’re not translating the Bible or something,
1:37:10 their incentive is mostly just get it done, good enough, get paid.
1:37:12 The publisher’s incentive,
1:37:14 the publisher who publishes the translation,
1:37:18 their incentive is hire a translator
1:37:22 that will make a good enough translation for a low enough price
1:37:24 that we can get this out in the market now
1:37:26 and make a profit selling it.
1:37:31 But my incentive as the writer that sweated over these words
1:37:35 for years and really crafted it almost like song lyrics,
1:37:37 like I have a different incentive,
1:37:40 if I’m going to have a translation of this book out in the world,
1:37:44 I want it to be great and really, really great,
1:37:46 which means my incentive is to work closely with the translator
1:37:50 to make sure that what they’re doing is the best it can be
1:37:53 and that it’s communicating what I intended.
1:37:56 How do you do that in a language you don’t speak?
1:37:58 I don’t know, that’s my question.
1:38:00 So this is the, I don’t have the answer,
1:38:03 but I’m fascinated with the problem.
1:38:08 So so far, the best idea is what I’m putting at inchword.com,
1:38:10 which is this idea of incremental improvement.
1:38:11 Oh, so this is your website?
1:38:13 Yeah, I made it.
1:38:15 It’s my little passion.
1:38:19 So it’s this idea where once I call up something done,
1:38:21 whether it’s an article or a book,
1:38:24 I put every sentence into its own entry in the database
1:38:26 and then I pass it to a computer
1:38:29 that does the first round of a bad translation.
1:38:30 So now we have a starting point.
1:38:33 So now if you’re the first translator to come through
1:38:37 and translate the automatic translation into your language,
1:38:41 let’s say that’s a low bar, that’s low hanging fruit.
1:38:43 So let’s say that will pay 50 cents per sentence.
1:38:46 But now if you’ve done one round of improvements
1:38:48 over the computer translation,
1:38:50 and now somebody else comes through and says,
1:38:53 I can improve that further, that sentence,
1:38:54 not the whole thing,
1:38:56 that sentence I can improve that one.
1:38:59 Now that’ll pay like a dollar per sentence if it’s an improved.
1:39:03 And now say two different people have improved it twice.
1:39:05 And now a third person looks at that
1:39:07 and says, I know how to improve that better.
1:39:09 Okay, well now you can make say two dollars per sentence
1:39:11 to improve it better.
1:39:13 The stakes are getting higher for improving it.
1:39:18 There are incentives now to make it as good as can be.
1:39:20 How do you know if it’s been improved?
1:39:23 So yes, how do we know it’s a better translation?
1:39:26 So then we have readers who, reviewers,
1:39:26 readers, whatever you want to call them,
1:39:31 that are paid a little something to just read through and judge.
1:39:34 And at any given sentence where an improvement has been made,
1:39:37 both sentences are shown in random order
1:39:40 and they have to vote for which one they feel
1:39:43 is the better sentence in that case.
1:39:47 When a majority votes that sentence is better than it’s chosen,
1:39:48 and that’s when the translator gets paid.
1:39:52 So a translator can’t get money just for coming in and spewing crap.
1:39:53 They only get paid when the readers believe
1:39:55 that that was a better translation.
1:39:57 Anyway, I’m not saying this is the final answer,
1:39:58 but I think it’s a fascinating problem
1:40:02 that I’m willing to spend money on
1:40:04 because I’m incentivized to have the best translation
1:40:05 of my works out there.
1:40:07 That’s it.
1:40:08 If they are a good translator,
1:40:11 how do you incentivize them to go first,
1:40:13 knowing that someone might come along
1:40:16 and make substantially more money
1:40:18 by doing the fourth or fifth iteration?
1:40:21 Or is that not a problem?
1:40:22 I don’t know.
1:40:24 See, you just asked a great question.
1:40:25 Thank you.
1:40:29 You’re welcome.
1:40:31 That question is kind of the answer.
1:40:32 That’s a really good thing to ask.
1:40:32 I don’t know.
1:40:34 I mean, I know nothing about this.
1:40:36 I’m not fluent in any other language,
1:40:39 but you’ve probably seen this effect.
1:40:41 Whenever you start to learn another language,
1:40:45 doesn’t it make you look at your English more closely?
1:40:46 Oh, 100%.
1:40:47 That’s part of the fun.
1:40:47 Yes.
1:40:49 Makes you look at the whole world differently,
1:40:53 depending on how divergent the language is
1:40:54 from your native language.
1:40:56 In this case, English for us.
1:40:57 Oh, yeah.
1:40:59 So, so, so interesting.
1:41:00 I was just trying to help somebody
1:41:03 with their approach to Japanese yesterday.
1:41:04 And my first thought was,
1:41:07 if you have three or four weeks,
1:41:11 maybe you go to South Korea first
1:41:14 and try to pick up Korean
1:41:16 because the reading is so much easier.
1:41:20 So perhaps you could learn the basics of Korean,
1:41:23 which isn’t identical to Japanese,
1:41:26 but the grammar is very, very, very, very similar.
1:41:27 And then you go back to Japan
1:41:30 with your newfound knowledge of the grammar
1:41:32 without the handicap that slows you down
1:41:35 of having to learn three writing systems, right?
1:41:36 Kira ga na kata ga na nankan di.
1:41:37 Interesting.
1:41:40 And I don’t know if that’s a good approach,
1:41:41 but it was the first time it had occurred to me.
1:41:42 And I was like, huh,
1:41:47 wonder if that actually would be helpful
1:41:49 or kind of like Python and Ruby,
1:41:51 would it just be confusing as fuck?
1:41:52 Because now you’re like,
1:41:54 learn Portuguese and Spanish at the same time
1:41:55 and you just get scrambled.
1:41:57 It’s possible that it would be the latter.
1:41:59 Yeah, okay.
1:42:00 Do you remember Benny Lewis?
1:42:02 Fluent in three months, Benny Lewis?
1:42:03 Sure.
1:42:07 Yeah, the Irish polyglot, I think, was the nickname.
1:42:11 Yeah, Benny recommends Esperanto
1:42:12 for that same thing that you just said.
1:42:15 He said, because of objectively,
1:42:17 Esperanto is the easiest language to learn.
1:42:20 That’s why it was invented in 1888.
1:42:23 By Zamanoff to be easy to learn.
1:42:27 Therefore, if you’ve never spoken a second language before,
1:42:29 go learn some Esperanto first.
1:42:31 Get used to having a conversation
1:42:32 that’s not in your native tongue.
1:42:33 Interesting.
1:42:35 And then go learn your target language.
1:42:38 Wonder if that’s too much of a lift.
1:42:38 Have you done it?
1:42:40 Well, I will report.
1:42:41 I did it.
1:42:43 I became fluent in Esperanto about six years ago
1:42:46 on Benny’s advice and I regret it.
1:42:54 It’s less useful than Klingon,
1:42:56 at least in communicating with others, right?
1:43:01 Actually, I think Esperanto is hippy Klingon.
1:43:06 I went to the annual Esperanto conference in Seoul, Korea
1:43:11 and it was a bunch of 60-year-olds in tie-dyes
1:43:12 singing about world peace,
1:43:15 kind of like Woodstock 1969,
1:43:18 revisited and they’re all singing like,
1:43:19 “Oh, the world would have perfect harmony
1:43:22 if we all just followed the ways of Zamanoff
1:43:23 and had the one-world language.”
1:43:27 And even though I had spent six months learning this language,
1:43:28 I got to the event and I went,
1:43:31 “I don’t like you people.”
1:43:36 I stopped on that day.
1:43:38 I was like, “I don’t want to speak this language anymore.”
1:43:42 Okay, but so talk about the Ruby Python.
1:43:44 I never learned any Spanish my whole life,
1:43:45 even when I grew up in America.
1:43:48 I just thought, “No, Spanish is too similar to English.
1:43:50 If I’m going to learn another language,
1:43:53 I want it to be Chinese or Arabic or something very different.”
1:43:54 So I never learned any Spanish,
1:43:56 but just two months ago,
1:43:58 I went to South America for my first time
1:44:04 and so I spent like a month learning Pimsler Basic Spanish.
1:44:08 And Tim was like, “Oh my God, this is a great language.
1:44:09 This is amazing. This is fascinating.”
1:44:10 It is.
1:44:15 And also, it is so easy that I went, “Damn it, Benny.
1:44:18 I shouldn’t have learned Esperanto for six months.
1:44:20 I should have learned Spanish. It’s just as easy.”
1:44:23 And it would have been more useful.
1:44:25 Anyway, I like that you brought up the Korean thing.
1:44:29 I think it is proven to be a good technique
1:44:32 to do the easier language first to help you disconnect
1:44:34 or like you say, to help you understand the grammar
1:44:35 and then do the difficult one.
1:44:37 But it does help, I guess,
1:44:40 if it’s Korean or a language that people actually use.
1:44:41 Not Esperanto.
1:44:43 Yeah. Spanish is a great language.
1:44:49 For people who are curious about Korean
1:44:53 and just how brilliantly the writing system is designed,
1:44:54 it’s a point of national pride.
1:44:57 And it is not something that was out of the box.
1:45:01 It was something that was developed long after
1:45:06 Korea had first adopted Chinese writing,
1:45:08 much like the Japanese.
1:45:11 There is a cartoon online and it is something like
1:45:14 how to learn to read Korean in 15 minutes
1:45:16 or how to read Korean in 15 minutes.
1:45:18 And it’s a comic book. You can find it.
1:45:21 And literally, it might not be 15 minutes,
1:45:23 but within two or three hours,
1:45:24 you can learn Korean well enough
1:45:26 that you can read anything in Korean.
1:45:30 You will not understand a damn thing that you’re reading,
1:45:34 but you will be able to sound out phonetically roughly,
1:45:37 roughly what it is, which is great fun.
1:45:42 And well enough that if you’re, as I was a few weeks ago,
1:45:48 in an Uber and you see the Uber app is set to Korean,
1:45:50 you could say thank you or have a nice day
1:45:51 or how are you in Korean?
1:45:53 And below that in the back, how did you know?
1:45:54 And you’d be like, “Well, it’s Korean on the app.”
1:45:55 “Oh my God.”
1:45:57 If you want some cheap applause
1:46:00 that’ll make somebody’s day, that’s an easy way to go.
1:46:01 You know, it’s funny, it fits right in.
1:46:02 You remember your whole like,
1:46:05 “Hey, here’s how to learn how to spin a pen with your fingers?”
1:46:08 Like, here’s some things you can learn in 15 minutes,
1:46:13 like the old like Tim Ferriss 1.0 South by Southwest.
1:46:14 Yeah, exactly.
1:46:16 Speak Korean in 15 minutes.
1:46:18 Also, courtesy of Japan for sure.
1:46:21 This is what all the kids used to do in class,
1:46:24 and now I have something that will endlessly distract
1:46:28 and annoy everyone who sees it from an airplane or something.
1:46:30 Thanks, Japan.
1:46:31 Oh, all right.
1:46:32 What else do you have?
1:46:35 Derek, anything else in that top hat?
1:46:36 I’ll just say this quickly.
1:46:37 I love this little phrase.
1:46:40 I realized when I was like digging into my incentives
1:46:44 why I do things, I travel to inhabit philosophies.
1:46:47 You can hear about life in Brazil or life in Japan,
1:46:51 but it’s a different thing to be there in it.
1:46:53 But I think there’s some philosophies,
1:46:55 whether it’s stoicism or hedonism,
1:46:58 that we can just do from a chair
1:47:01 by just sitting and changing our thought process.
1:47:07 But, you know, Brazilianism, Japanism, Arabianism,
1:47:10 I don’t know, Parisianism, these are kind of like philosophies.
1:47:12 The way that people live in places
1:47:14 are kind of living philosophies.
1:47:18 But I want to experience what it’s like
1:47:20 because I want to think that way.
1:47:21 So I would really like to go there,
1:47:25 live as close as I can to being like a local,
1:47:29 learn the language, live that life according to that way
1:47:32 to inhabit, embody this way of living
1:47:37 in order to feel the actual physical results,
1:47:40 the actions of living that philosophy.
1:47:42 And I thought, this is actually the reason I travel.
1:47:45 It’s not to look at things or take pictures
1:47:47 or post them to impress people.
1:47:49 I travel to inhabit philosophies.
1:47:51 I love that.
1:47:54 What are you finding of the philosophy?
1:47:59 What is the philosophy of the UAE or Dubai?
1:48:00 Recognizing that the culture is very different,
1:48:04 depending if they’re by the hills or the water or the desert.
1:48:08 But how would you try to express that philosophy?
1:48:11 Easy. Generosity.
1:48:14 That’s the thing when I said that Sheikh Zayed, who founded it,
1:48:17 Bedouin culture underneath it,
1:48:21 and then say Emirati culture or Arabian Arab culture.
1:48:25 Generosity is by far the number one.
1:48:27 If you read this book, Arabian Sands,
1:48:30 by Thatcher, he has all these stories of
1:48:33 when he’d be out in the desert on the camels
1:48:35 with his little crew of six guys,
1:48:38 and they only have this much food left,
1:48:40 like nothing, and their tummies are grumbling
1:48:41 and they’re starving.
1:48:42 It’s funny that I just said tummies.
1:48:44 That was cute and dust.
1:48:46 I just noted that for myself.
1:48:49 Who wins my bedtime story, Dad?
1:48:52 And also my little rats here.
1:48:53 I love kissing your little tummies.
1:48:56 Anyway, okay, so, but then if somebody would approach them,
1:48:59 you know, like, oh, hello, my friend, whatever.
1:49:01 He said, as soon as somebody approaches,
1:49:03 that’s it, we’re not going to eat today,
1:49:04 because this is the way.
1:49:07 You give whatever you’ve got.
1:49:08 So anybody, a stranger approaches,
1:49:10 you say, hello, friend, come sit with us here.
1:49:11 No, have some soup.
1:49:12 Don’t worry, we’re not hungry.
1:49:14 We’ve eaten enough.
1:49:15 This is for you now.
1:49:16 Come sit with us.
1:49:19 When I went to Dubai that first time,
1:49:22 somebody I had met once from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
1:49:25 We met briefly in Oxford.
1:49:27 He was the only person I knew that lived in the region.
1:49:29 So I emailed him saying,
1:49:31 hey man, I’m going to Dubai for my first time.
1:49:32 Are you going to be around?
1:49:33 And he said, my friend.
1:49:35 He said, cancel your hotel reservation.
1:49:36 He said, you’re going to stay at my home
1:49:39 in the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world.
1:49:39 You’re going to stay.
1:49:41 I have an apartment in the Burj Khalifa.
1:49:42 Stay at my home.
1:49:43 You’re my guest.
1:49:44 I said, wow, that would be great.
1:49:46 I said, it’ll be so good to see you again.
1:49:48 And he said, no, no, I won’t be there.
1:49:48 He said, I live in Riyadh,
1:49:50 but my uncle will get you from the airport
1:49:51 and just give you the keys.
1:49:52 My home is your home, stay as long as you want.
1:49:56 So I did. I stayed in the Burj Khalifa a few days.
1:49:58 This generosity runs so deep.
1:50:00 It’s hospitality, it’s generosity.
1:50:04 And you understand why you’re in the harsh environment
1:50:05 of the desert.
1:50:07 Everybody’s living a harsh life.
1:50:09 When you meet somebody that’s traveling and passing,
1:50:11 it’s like, oh, come in, come in.
1:50:12 Here, have some.
1:50:13 Don’t even need to tell us your name
1:50:15 or who you are or your tribe or nothing.
1:50:17 Just come in, my guest.
1:50:18 Please have whatever you want.
1:50:19 My food.
1:50:20 Take a bed.
1:50:21 Stay as long as you want.
1:50:25 And that’s so deep in the culture
1:50:29 that yes, I would like to inhabit that philosophy.
1:50:33 Now that I’ve been on the receiving end of that hospitality,
1:50:38 part of me kind of wants to have a home near the Dubai airport
1:50:40 and make that my main home base.
1:50:43 And for whenever I’m not there and I’m traveling,
1:50:46 to just open it up for any of my friends in the world.
1:50:46 Like, please, you’re coming through.
1:50:48 Please stay at my home.
1:50:49 Like, I want to return that generosity.
1:50:50 Is it going to be a six by eight foot?
1:50:52 Thank you.
1:50:54 God, Touche, come.
1:50:56 Everything I have is yours.
1:50:59 Wait, Derek, quick text.
1:51:00 Where’s the bathroom?
1:51:01 Oh, no, there’s no bathroom.
1:51:02 Oh, no, my friend.
1:51:06 Question whether you truly need it or not.
1:51:09 You will find out.
1:51:12 Let me know where you think the sink should be.
1:51:14 I’ll be a bad Emirati.
1:51:15 I’ll be fired.
1:51:24 How is understanding that Dubai is an international city
1:51:27 for a lot of different reasons you could get by
1:51:29 on English almost certainly?
1:51:30 How is your Arabic coming?
1:51:32 Have you started tackling that?
1:51:34 I haven’t spent more time in Dubai yet.
1:51:36 I’m planning on going back very soon
1:51:37 and getting to know more people
1:51:38 and spending more time there.
1:51:40 And considering it as a place I really might want to live.
1:51:43 Because I’ve just noticed throughout my life,
1:51:44 like I grew up in a suburb of Chicago,
1:51:46 then I moved to downtown Boston,
1:51:48 then I moved to New York City in the middle of it.
1:51:52 And it was like, oh, yes, this multiculturalism,
1:51:55 like this feels more like representative
1:51:57 of the real world to me, right?
1:51:59 And then like when I went back to my hometown
1:52:02 in Hinsdale, Illinois, it’s like everybody’s white.
1:52:03 This is weird.
1:52:07 You know, it’s like I like places that are multicultural
1:52:09 because it feels like I’m more in the real world, right?
1:52:13 So I thought New York, like I’ve also lived in London.
1:52:14 I moved to Singapore.
1:52:15 I lived in Singapore for years.
1:52:17 I thought I had been in the most multicultural places
1:52:18 in the world.
1:52:22 No, I looked up statistically New York, London, Singapore.
1:52:26 They’re all about 35 or so, 30 to 35% foreign-born population.
1:52:32 Dubai is like 90 plus percent foreign-born population.
1:52:34 Everybody is from everywhere.
1:52:38 And so when I got there, it was like anthropology jackpot.
1:52:40 I was like, oh, this is amazing.
1:52:41 Everybody’s from everywhere.
1:52:43 I get into any taxi driver, you know, anybody.
1:52:46 You can just ask anybody you see where you from
1:52:48 and you’re going to get a different answer all the time.
1:52:49 I’m from Cameroon.
1:52:50 What are you doing here?
1:52:51 I love languages.
1:52:53 I said, okay, what does that mean?
1:52:55 He said, well, I love languages.
1:52:57 And I thought, where can I get paid to learn languages?
1:52:59 I said, I’ll move to Dubai.
1:53:02 I’ll drive a taxi and I can get paid to learn languages.
1:53:03 I said, did it work?
1:53:06 He said, my friend, I can speak eight languages now.
1:53:08 I’ve been here 18 months.
1:53:10 I can converse with people in eight languages.
1:53:12 He said, everybody that gets into my taxi,
1:53:14 I just talk with people all day long.
1:53:17 He said, I speak Urdu, Hindi, Arabic.
1:53:18 I think he grew up with French.
1:53:20 He said, I’m speaking to you in English.
1:53:22 He said, I couldn’t speak English 18 months ago.
1:53:23 Now look at me.
1:53:25 And he said, I’m getting paid to learn languages.
1:53:26 This is amazing.
1:53:27 And I turned to somebody else.
1:53:28 I’m like, where are you from?
1:53:30 She’s like, I’m from Nairobi.
1:53:31 She had the most beautiful accent
1:53:33 and we got into a long conversation about Nairobi.
1:53:35 And I just thought, this is what I want.
1:53:36 Like just by being in Dubai,
1:53:38 the whole world comes through there
1:53:40 and you meet so many people from all over the place.
1:53:42 I thought, oh, God, this is what a beautiful place.
1:53:45 Anyway, it’s like, there we are,
1:53:47 living in the cantina in Star Wars.
1:53:47 That’s fine.
1:53:49 Dude, you said it first.
1:53:50 That’s what I usually say.
1:53:53 It’s like, Dubai is the bar in Star Wars.
1:53:54 It’s the cantina.
1:53:57 Everybody comes from all over the world to this spot
1:53:59 to kind of do their shady dealings.
1:54:02 But oh my God, if you’re an amateur anthropologist
1:54:03 like me, it’s heaven.
1:54:05 Well, I’m excited that you’re excited, man.
1:54:06 It’s fun to see.
1:54:09 And I hope to break some bread in person
1:54:11 in the not too distant future.
1:54:12 What’s fun?
1:54:13 Always fun to hang out.
1:54:14 Always great fun.
1:54:18 Is there anything that you would like to say,
1:54:20 anything you’d like to point people to,
1:54:22 mention anything at all before we–
1:54:24 Bring out the little buddies again from here.
1:54:25 Hop off and land the plane.
1:54:28 These guys have been sleeping by my feet
1:54:29 the whole time we’ve been talking.
1:54:30 Adorable.
1:54:33 They’re really good little pets.
1:54:36 They’re really, if you don’t wash your hands
1:54:38 after you cook, then you just let them lick your fingers.
1:54:39 Oh, he’s licking me right now.
1:54:40 It’s really sweet the way they lick.
1:54:42 They never, ever, ever bite.
1:54:43 They’re very gentle.
1:54:46 Well, unlike my hamsters I had when I was a kid,
1:54:47 they were biters.
1:54:48 Yes, same.
1:54:48 I had gerbils.
1:54:49 They were nasty.
1:54:51 Anyway, I don’t know.
1:54:52 Well, you know my usual call out.
1:54:57 I really enjoy the people that I’ve met through your podcast.
1:54:59 So, hey, anybody listen to this all the way through,
1:55:02 I truly enjoy my email inbox.
1:55:04 I spend about 90 minutes a day just answering emails,
1:55:05 and I really like it.
1:55:06 So, send me an email.
1:55:07 Say hello.
1:55:09 Introduce yourself, especially if you’re a translator,
1:55:13 or if you live in Dubai, or you found anything here fascinating.
1:55:14 All right.
1:55:16 Do you want them to do the detective work
1:55:17 of finding the email address?
1:55:18 Is that the hurdle?
1:55:19 Oh, sorry.
1:55:19 Go to my website.
1:55:21 Just go to sive.rs.
1:55:23 There’s a big contact me here link.
1:55:25 It’s easy detective work.
1:55:27 Okay, sive.rs.
1:55:30 That’s pretty low hurdle.
1:55:33 If they can’t clear that, then they have other problems.
1:55:35 All right, man.
1:55:37 Well, thanks for taking the time.
1:55:38 As always, really appreciate it.
1:55:40 Sorry, I missed you in England.
1:55:42 Yeah, next time.
1:55:44 We’ll both get our knees repaired,
1:55:46 and then we’ll meet up for another walk and talk.
1:55:49 I might ask you some tips on meniscus stuff.
1:55:52 Boy, yeah, we’ll talk about the knee repair.
1:55:56 For everybody listening, go to tim.blog/podcast.
1:55:58 I’ll link to everything we talked about,
1:56:00 all the books, City of Gold, China’s worldview,
1:56:05 all of these various things, the figures and places,
1:56:06 musicians, and so on.
1:56:09 Oh, I should say that useful not true
1:56:10 is only through my website.
1:56:11 It’s not at fuck Amazon.
1:56:12 It’s not on Amazon.
1:56:14 I put it on my website only.
1:56:15 So don’t go to Amazon and look for it
1:56:17 and email me and ask why it’s not there,
1:56:18 because I don’t like them.
1:56:19 So go to sive.com.
1:56:25 All right, go to sive.com or sive.rs.
1:56:26 I guess let’s go to the same place.
1:56:30 And you can find all things about Derek.
1:56:33 And until next time, be a bit kinder than is necessary,
1:56:36 not just to others, but also to yourself.
1:56:37 And thanks for tuning in.
1:56:40 Hey, guys, this is Tim again.
1:56:42 Just one more thing before you take off,
1:56:44 and that is Five Bullet Friday.
1:56:46 Would you enjoy getting a short email from me
1:56:50 every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend?
1:56:51 Between one and a half and two million people
1:56:53 subscribe to my free newsletter,
1:56:56 my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday.
1:56:58 Easy to sign up, easy to cancel.
1:57:03 It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday
1:57:05 to share the coolest things I’ve found or discovered
1:57:07 or have started exploring over that week.
1:57:09 It’s kind of like my diary of cool things.
1:57:12 It often includes articles I’m reading, books I’m reading,
1:57:17 albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks
1:57:19 and so on that get sent to me by my friends,
1:57:21 including a lot of podcasts.
1:57:25 Guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field,
1:57:28 and then I test them, and then I share them with you.
1:57:31 So if that sounds fun, again, it’s very short,
1:57:34 a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off
1:57:36 for the weekend, something to think about.
1:57:37 If you’d like to try it out,
1:57:39 just go to tim.blog/friday,
1:57:43 type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday,
1:57:46 drop in your email, and you’ll get the very next one.
1:57:46 Thanks for listening.
1:57:50 Way back in the day, in 2010,
1:57:52 I published a book called The Four Hour Body,
1:57:55 which I probably started writing in 2008.
1:58:00 And in that book, I recommended many, many, many things.
1:58:02 First generation continuous glucose monitor.
1:58:07 And cold exposure, and all sorts of things
1:58:09 that have been tested by people from NASA
1:58:10 and all over the place.
1:58:14 And one thing in that book was athletic greens.
1:58:17 I did not get paid to include it, I was using it.
1:58:21 That’s how long I’ve been using what is now known as AG1.
1:58:24 AG1 is my all-in-one nutritional insurance,
1:58:25 and I just packed up, for instance,
1:58:27 to go off the grid for a while.
1:58:30 And the last thing I left out on my countertop
1:58:32 to remember to take, I’m not making this up,
1:58:34 I’m looking right in front of me,
1:58:37 is travel packets of AG1.
1:58:40 So rather than taking multiple pills or products
1:58:41 to cover your mental clarity,
1:58:43 gut health, immune, and out of energy, and so on,
1:58:47 you can sport these areas through one daily scoop of AG1,
1:58:49 which tastes great, even with water.
1:58:51 I always just have it with water.
1:58:52 I usually take it first thing in the morning,
1:58:54 and it takes me less than two minutes until,
1:58:56 honestly, it takes me less than a minute.
1:58:58 I just put in a shaker bottle, shake it up, and I’m done.
1:59:02 AG1 bolsters my digestion and nutrient absorption
1:59:04 by including ingredients optimized
1:59:07 to support a healthy gut in every scoop.
1:59:09 AG1 in a single-serve travel packs,
1:59:11 which I mentioned earlier,
1:59:13 also makes for the perfect travel opinion.
1:59:15 I’ll actually be going totally off the grid,
1:59:19 but these things are incredibly, incredibly space-efficient.
1:59:20 You could even put them in a book, frankly.
1:59:22 I mean, they’re kind of like bookmarks.
1:59:25 After consuming this product for more than a decade,
1:59:27 I chose to invest in AG1 in 2021
1:59:29 as I trust their no-compromise approach
1:59:31 to ingredients sourcing and appreciate their focus
1:59:34 on continuously improving one formula.
1:59:35 They go above and beyond
1:59:38 by testing for 950 or so contaminants
1:59:41 and impurities compared to the industry standard of 10.
1:59:43 AG1 is also tested for heavy metals
1:59:47 and 500 various pesticides and herbicides.
1:59:50 I’ve started paying a lot of attention to pesticides.
1:59:52 That’s a story for another time.
1:59:55 To make sure you’re consuming only the good stuff.
1:59:58 AG1 is also NSF-certified for sport.
1:59:59 That means if you’re an athlete, you can take it.
2:00:02 The certification process is exhaustive
2:00:04 and involves the testing and verification
2:00:07 of each ingredient and every finished batch of AG1.
2:00:09 So they take testing very seriously.
2:00:10 There’s no better time than today
2:00:13 to start a new healthy habit.
2:00:14 And this is an easy one.
2:00:15 All right, wake up.
2:00:16 Water in the shaker bottle.
2:00:18 AG1, boom.
2:00:20 And right now, every week of November,
2:00:23 AG1 will be running a special Black Friday offer
2:00:26 for a free gift with your first subscription,
2:00:28 which is in addition to the Welcome Kit
2:00:30 with five AG1 travel packs
2:00:32 and a bottle of vitamin B3 plus K2.
2:00:36 So make sure to check out drinkag1.com/tim
2:00:38 to see what gift you can get this week.
2:00:41 That’s drinkag1.com/tim
2:00:42 to start your holiday season off
2:00:45 on a healthier note while supplies last.
2:00:49 I have been fascinated by the microbiome
2:00:52 and probiotics as well as prebiotics for decades.
2:00:55 But products never quite live up to the hype.
2:01:00 I’ve tried so many dozens and there are a host of problems.
2:01:02 Now, things are starting to change
2:01:05 and that includes this episode’s sponsor,
2:01:08 Seeds DS01 Daily Symbiotic.
2:01:11 Now, it turns out that this product, Seeds DS01,
2:01:13 was recommended to me many months ago
2:01:15 by a PhD microbiologist.
2:01:18 So I started using it well before their team
2:01:20 ever reached out to me about sponsorship,
2:01:22 which is kind of ideal because I used it unbitten,
2:01:24 so to speak, came in fresh.
2:01:26 Since then, it has become a daily staple
2:01:28 and one of the few supplements I travel with.
2:01:31 I have it in a suitcase literally
2:01:34 about 10 feet from me right now.
2:01:35 It goes with me.
2:01:38 I’ve always been very skeptical of most probiotics
2:01:40 due to the lack of science behind them
2:01:42 and the fact that many do not survive digestion.
2:01:45 To begin with, many of them are shipped dead, DOA.
2:01:47 But after incorporating two capsules
2:01:50 of Seeds DS01 into my morning routine,
2:01:52 I have noticed improved digestion
2:01:54 and improved overall health.
2:01:56 Seeds seem to be a bunch of different cascading effects.
2:01:57 Based on some reports,
2:02:00 I’m hoping it will also have an effect on my lipid profile,
2:02:02 but that is definitely TBD.
2:02:04 So why is Seeds DS01 so effective?
2:02:06 What makes it different?
2:02:08 For one, it is a two-in-one probiotic
2:02:11 and prebiotic formulated with 24 clinically
2:02:12 and scientifically studied strains
2:02:16 that have systemic benefits in and beyond the gut.
2:02:16 That’s all well and good,
2:02:19 but if the probiotic strains don’t make it to the right place,
2:02:22 in other words, your colon, they’re not as effective.
2:02:26 So Seed developed a proprietary capsule and capsule delivery system
2:02:29 that survives digestion and delivers a precision release
2:02:32 of the live and viable probiotics to the colon,
2:02:35 which is exactly where you want them to go to do the work.
2:02:37 I’ve been impressed with Seeds’ dedication
2:02:38 to science-backed engineering
2:02:40 with completed gold standard trials
2:02:42 that have been subjected to peer review
2:02:44 and published in leading scientific journals,
2:02:47 a standard you very rarely see from companies
2:02:48 who develop supplements.
2:02:50 If you’ve ever thought about probiotics,
2:02:51 but haven’t known where to start,
2:02:53 this is my current vote for great gut health.
2:02:54 You can start here.
2:02:56 It costs less than $2 a day.
2:02:57 That is the DS01.
2:03:00 And now you can get 25% off your first month
2:03:02 with code 25TIM.
2:03:06 And that is 25% off of your first month of Seeds DS01
2:03:12 at seed.com/tim using code 25TIM all put together.
2:03:15 That’s seed.com/tim.
2:03:16 And if you forget it,
2:03:18 you will see the coupon code on that page.
2:03:24 One more time, seed.com/tim code 25TIM.
2:03:27 (upbeat music)
2:03:37 [BLANK_AUDIO]