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

Episode Date: November 13, 2024

Derek Sivers is an author of philosophy and entrepreneurship, known for his surprising, quotable insights and pithy, succinct writing style. Derek’s books (How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Your Music and People, Anything You Want) and newest projects are at his website: sive.rs. His new book is Useful Not True.Sponsors:Seed's DS-01® Daily Synbiotic broad spectrum 24-strain probiotic + prebiotic: https://Seed.com/Tim (Use code 25TIM for 25% off your first month's supply)Momentous high-quality supplements: https://livemomentous.com/tim (code TIM for 20% off)AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement: https://drinkag1.com/tim (1-year supply of Vitamin D (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase.)*For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsorsSign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissYouTube: youtube.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Maté, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Well, hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. Thanks so much for tuning in. This time around, we have my good friend, Derek Sivers, back on the show. He's one of my favorite humans. I call him often for advice. He is hilarious. And he will do his own introduction because I'm incredibly lazy or I was feeling playful and lazy in this conversation. He is a philosopher, programmer, musician, king of sorts. That's how I would describe him. It is a very fun conversation. I really enjoyed it. And you can find Derek's books, including his latest useful not true, which we discuss at his website, Sivers.com or S-I-V-E.R-S, which is probably just about as confusing to people as Tim dot blog. If you enjoy this episode, you should go back and listen to the 2015 conversation I did with Derek,

the very first one. You can find that at Tim dot blog slash Derek Sivers and many long time listeners out of the nearly 800 episodes I've done consider this their favorite or certainly one of their favorites. It is a barn burner of an episode. And now we're gonna get to it. First, just a quick word about the sponsors who make this podcast possible.

I have been fascinated by the microbiome and probiotics as well as prebiotics for decades, but products never quite live up to the hype. I've tried so many dozens and there are a host of problems. Now things are starting to change and that includes this episode's sponsor Seeds DS01 Daily Symbiotic. Now it turns out that this product Seeds DS01 was recommended to me many months ago by a PhD microbiologist, so I started using it well before their team ever reached out to me about sponsorship, which is kind of ideal because I used it unbitten, so to speak, came in fresh.

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who develop supplements. If you've ever thought about probiotics, but haven't known where to start, this is my current vote for great gut health. You can start here. It costs less than $2 a day. That is the DS01. And now you can get 25% off your first month with code 25TIMM. And that is 25% off of your first month of SEEDS DS01 at seed.com slash Tim using code 25TIMM all put together. That's seed.com slash Tim. And if you forget it, you will see the coupon code on that page. One more time, seed.com slash Tim code 25 Tim. Way back in the day in 2010, I published a book called The Four-Hour Body,

which I probably started writing in 2008. And in that book, I recommended many, many, many things. First generation continuous glucose monitor and cold exposure and all sorts of things that have been tested by people from NASA and all over the place. And one thing in that book was athletic greens. I did not get paid to include it. I was athletic greens. I did not get paid to include it. I was using it. That's how long I've been using what is now known as AG1. AG1 is my all-in-one

nutritional insurance and I just packed up, for instance, to go off the grid for a while and the last thing I left out on my countertop to remember to take, I'm not making this up, I'm looking right in front of me, is travel packets of AG1. Rather than taking multiple pills or products to cover your mental clarity, gut health, immune health, energy, and so on, you can support these areas through one daily scoop of AG1, which tastes great even with water. I usually take it first thing in the morning and it takes me less than two minutes in total. Honestly, it takes me less than a minute. I just put it in a shaker bottle, shake it up and I'm done. AG1 bolsters my digestion and nutrient absorption by including ingredients optimized to support a healthy gut

in every scoop. AG1 in single serve travel packs, which I mentioned earlier, also makes for the perfect travel companion. I'll actually be going totally off the grid, but these things are incredibly incredibly space efficient. You could even put them into a book, frankly. I mean, they're kind of like bookmarks. After consuming this product for more than a decade, I chose to invest in AG1 in 2021 as I trust their no compromise approach to ingredient sourcing and appreciate their focus on continuously improving one formula. They go above and beyond by testing for 950 or so contaminants and impurities compared to the industry standard of 10. AG1 is also tested for heavy metals and 500 various pesticides and herbicides

I've started paying a lot of attention to pesticides that's a story for another time to make sure you're consuming only the good stuff. AG1 is also NSF certified for sport. That means if you're an athlete you can take it. The certification process is exhaustive and involves the testing and verification of each ingredient and every finished batch of AG1. So they take testing very seriously. There's no better time than today to start a new healthy habit and this is an easy one. Right. Wake up, water in the shaker bottle, AG1, boom. And right now, every week of November, AG1 will be running a special Black Friday offer for a free gift with your first subscription, which is in addition to the welcome kit with five AG1 travel

packs and a bottle of vitamin D3 plus K2. So make sure to check out drinkag1.com slash Tim to see what gift you can get this week. That's drinkag1.com slash Tim to start your holiday season off on a healthier note while supplies last. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? No, what is it in a cooking time? What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living this year over a metal endoskeleton. Can I ask you a personal question? No, what is it?

I'm a cybernetic organism living this year over metal and discovered Me, Tim, Ferris, Joe For people who don't know who Derek Sivers is, what is the brief overview of Derek? Oh, I have to do it. Right. I was a musician for many years and then I started selling my music online in 1997 when there was no PayPal and there was, you know, Amazon was just a bookstore. So I started a little thing called Seedy Baby just to sell my music, but then it grew and became the largest seller of independent music online. And I did that for 10 years, till I got sick of it and sold it.

And then I was a TED speaker for a few years, and then kind of threw myself into that completely. And then Seth Godin asked me to write a book. So I wrote a book, and then people really liked it, so now I've written five. Now I'm a, I don I'm a dad in New Zealand, thinking philosophically and living my life. How about that? I thought you did a great job.

Thank you for that. You know, when, when I can't find a virtual assistant to do work for me, I'll ask my podcast guests to do my job. I will also add number one, people, if you enjoy this conversation, which I'm sure you will not to apply any pressure to Derek, but I always have so much fun. Go back and listen to the other conversations also because you will notice a few things. Number one, Derek has one of the most eclectic CVs imaginable. He's worked in traveling circuses.

He has played music at pig fairs. He has been an entrepreneur. He has certainly been a philosopher coder and many other things, but also I would say overarchingly crafted a life that is uniquely Derek's and frequently tests assumptions and to I suppose bucket one of what we're going to discuss today, changes his mind and finds himself zigging when he might have otherwise zagged or where other people are zagging. And that is part of why I enjoy spending time with Derek, aside from the dashing good looks and wit and charm, of course. So let's begin as we were brainstorming what we might chat about because we were hoping

to catch up. I suggested a few things, we batted a number of things around and we landed on things you've changed your mind about, things you're fascinated by, people you're studying, not necessarily in that order. So let's start with things you've changed your mind about or on. Where shall we begin? I've got five things for you. I'm starting small and getting big. Coffee.

I've never liked coffee. Every time I tried coffee, I went, I don't understand how you people like this. And even when I'd be with somebody that knew I didn't like coffee and we were out somewhere and they would go, oh my God, this is the best coffee I've ever had in my life here. I know you don't like coffee, but if you're ever gonna try coffee, this is the one.

Try a sip. And I'd say, okay. I'd like try to get myself into this mindset. I'm gonna like this. Pah, I just, never liked it. So then I was in United Arab Emirates and I was the guest of this Emirati man that we will get to later and he said it is Emirati custom you must have the coffee and I went oh sorry I don't drink coffee I just he said you must have the coffee I said no really I've never liked

coffee in my life because my friend you must have the coffee. I said, no, really, I've never liked coffee in my life. He goes, my friend, you must have the, it is Emirati custom. You must have the coffee. I went, all right. I took a sip. I'm like, oh my God. I'm like, this is really good. He goes, that is Emirati coffee. I went, no, you really, there's something different about this.

He goes, yes, it's, it's Emirati coffee. And I said, is that the one where they make it in the sand? He said, no, no, you really there's something different about this. He goes, yes, it's it's Emirati coffee. I said, is that the one where they make it in the sand? He said, no, no, no, that's Turkish. He said, this is Emirati coffee. So knowing that we were talking today and I was gonna mention coffee, I texted him. I said, hey, what was that coffee? Because he'd said, there are only three places in Dubai

that know how to make real Emirati coffee. So he told me one, Batil, B-A-T-E-E-L, if you're in Dubai and you wanna try real Emirati coffee. So he told me one, Batil, B-A-T-E-E-L, if you're in Dubai and you want to try real Emirati coffee, apparently, according to this Emirati, try Batil in Dubai for real Emirati coffee. I've changed my mind on coffee. I now like at least Emirati coffee. There's one. Okay. Just for definition purposes. All right. You know, I'll hold my follow ups. There are going to be a couple of follow ups, including how do you define Emirati? Is that basically a Brahmin, UAE?

Sorry. That's what we call people from United Arab Emirates. All right. Everybody. If you are of the lineage, if you were a citizen of United Arab Emirates, you're referred to as Emirati. What is the special technique, special ingredient that makes Emirati coffee so miraculous for you?

Hey, listeners, if you find out what's different about Emirati coffee, please let me know. I went back six months later, same thing. I tried Emirati coffee and I like it. Severe social pressure. Yeah. Maybe that's the magic ingredient. Yeah, that might be the magic ingredient.

Severe social pressure. Ah. It makes anything taste better. You must have it and it will be disastrous if you don't like it. I don't know what it is, but it's a surprise. Okay. Python. So I'm just going to include this because 23 years ago, I learned the Ruby programming language and I became fluent in Ruby. I learned the Ruby programming language and I became fluent in Ruby. And Ruby and Python are as similar as Portuguese and Spanish. But let's say Ruby is Portuguese, where Spanish became more and more and more popular. So when I first learned Ruby, it's like Ruby and Python were kind of side by side. Ruby was a little more popular at the time.

But then over the years, Python just took off and I refused to look at it. I was like, no, I chose Ruby. I speak Ruby, I don't want to learn Python, it's too similar. If I'm going to learn another language, it's going to be Lisp or Haskell or something really different. I'm not going to learn Python, no. And so for years and years, I've been refusing and then just irrationally prejudiced against Python. When I was choosing a new language for a new project, I considered everything but Python and then I realized I had left Python out

because of my severe prejudice against it for no good reason. So I finally looked at the Python programming language and I went, oh my god, it's beautiful, it's great, oh my god, it's wonderful. So now I love Python and that just felt amazing in my heart to be like, wow, this thing that I was prejudiced against for 20 years is actually wonderful. Cool. So coffee, Python number two. Mm hmm. Should I go on?

Number three. Let's go on. Rats. Okay. Rats. I brought a prop. I want to make this a good show. For the first time ever, appearing are my little pet rats okay if you see on YouTube look at that all right so we have two rats on video they're sizable yeah yeah chunky monkeys well they are so cute and they're so

wonderful and they're so affectionate you can't maybe tell cuz I'm holding them up like they owe me money right now, you know, but. So here's the deal. Years ago, I used to kill rats. I hated rats so badly. I lived in a basement apartment in Boston that had rats in and around the apartment that would sometimes be blocking my entrance to my apartment as I would come home when I was tired. So I killed many rats with great vengeance.

I hated tired. So I killed many rats with great vengeance. I hated rats. And then just a few months ago, my boy said, hey, dad, can we get a pet rat? I was like, ha ha ha. And I just thought it was kidding. And he said a week later, he said, you know, that really kind of made me sad that you just shot down my idea of the pet rat.

I said, wait, you were serious? He said, yeah. I went, oh, well, why would you want a nasty, awful rat as a pet? He said, no, they're not nasty and awful. Look. And he showed me some videos that rats are really sweet and they're really wonderful. They're smart. They're trainable.

You can train them to do little tricks and like pick things out and like go to a wallet and open it up and take money and bring it to you. And, you know, very useful in the crowd. The thieves guild. Yeah. This is gonna be interesting. The little art-filled dodgers. So it's like the difference between a wild rat and a pet rat is like the difference between

a wild dog and a poodle. The pet rats are really sweet. So no matter what you think of wild rats, don't discount or don't hate on pet rats. They're actually really wonderful and cuddly. And they're even clean. They use a litter box. They can control their bladder. Like a cat, they prefer to go in a litter box.

And so they're really clean and wonderful. So, oh, and wait, the lifespan. Their lifespan is two to three years, which as a parent is really wonderful because when a kid says, I want a pet, you don't always want like a 15-year commitment. You know, the kid's going to be away at college and you still got the pet that your kid wanted

when they were eight, you know? So I like that the lifespan is two to three years, which is, you know, so rats are good pets. And so I love my little rats. We've just got these two boys. But even more than loving the rats, I love that I am now cuddling what I used to kill. Like that I now love what I used to hate.

It's so sweet. Like I cuddle them, but it's like, God, I used to hate you. This is such a good feeling in my heart that I now love what I used to hate. And you'll see this is the theme of my five things today. Ready for the next? And what are the names of the two rats?

Cricket and Clover. Cully Clover and Crazy Cricket Climber. Do they eat crickets? What do they eat? Actually, well, they do love clover, but no, they just kind of eat rat food from the store. They eat anything. It's like when you're making food and you've got little leftovers, you've got little bits and crusts or little things that you just give it to the rats and they usually love it. It's great. I keep them in the kitchen. That's perfect. That's what some folks in South America do with guinea pigs. Although the difference is they fatten up the guinea pigs on the table scraps and then they eat the guinea pigs. Probably not going to eat cricket and clover, I imagine. Cricket and clover. But I do like that kind of hang out near the kitchen and give them the scraps.

like that kind of hang out near the kitchen and give them the scraps. Okay, number four, China. Number four, China. So in 2010, I went to Guilin, China, and then I went to Taipei, Taiwan. And at the time, China was rough. I was like, I was walking over rubble. The air was just choking me with its smoke and the sense of oil and Everything felt very third world, very rough. I just thought, okay, that's what China is. China developing economy, it's just rough. Then you go to Taipei, Taiwan, and it just feels like the most refined first world beautiful

version. It's like Japan, but with Chinese culture. I thought, ah, someday I want to live in Taiwan because that's the really nice part of China. So here we are 2024, 14 years later, I go to bring my kid on a school holiday to China for his first time. And I thought, well, we'll start out rough by going to mainland China. And then we'll move on to like the best of the best with the refined culture of Taiwan and Taipei. And it turned out to be the opposite, that

China was wonderful. We went to Shanghai and it was like first world amazing, refined, silent, because all the vehicles are electric now. So that was the very first thing I noticed as soon as like I took the train from the airport, we got off in downtown Shanghai, I'm surrounded by a hundred vehicles and I hear nothing. It's just, that's so nice. And I was like, oh my God, what? That sounds incredible. This is surreal.

Like 20 motorbikes went in front of my face, like right there, like, you know, three meters away. And I heard none of them. There was just the silent movement. I was like, this is so nice. And the people were just so polite and cultured. And it was none of this like hacking and spitting that I associated with it before like the shouting and the spitting, you know?

Yeah, that's good to hear. I remember the spitting from my visits, a lot of spitting. Yeah. And even just transactionally, you have to get Alipay or WeChat on your phone first before you go attach it to your credit card. But then once you're there, all transactions are just beep. Everything is so easy. And there are beautiful rental bikes everywhere laid out in perfect color-coded queues. You can just walk up to one and go beep and step on the bike and then just go where you want to go and you drop it off you go beep and everything is just so civilized and wonderful.

It completely changed my mind about China and then I don't want to sound like I'm trashing Taiwan, but it was just interesting that by comparison then I went to Taipei and I thought whoa if China's this nice imagine how nice Taipei is going to be. And I got there and it was kind of like stinky and trashy and they don't take credit cards or they don't have the apps. And so you have to pay cash everywhere and I'm like, money and paper and coins and I was like, wow, interesting. And so I met with a Taiwanese woman for lunch that I'd emailed with before. And she's an investor that goes to mainland China often. And I mentioned something about this cautiously.

I was like, I don't want to trash your home. I didn't say it like that, but I just cautiously said, hi, I noticed something. And she said, I'm glad you noticed. She said, I noticed this too. She said, I go to mainland China cities every six to 12 months. And she said, I feel like Taiwan may be plateaued like 12 years ago. Like we kind of hit first world status and then stayed there, almost like Japan. You know, it's like Japan used to feel futuristic.

Now it feels kind of stuck in the 90s, you know, fax machines and stuff. Which is kind of cute in a way. Like, again, not to knock it. It just feels like it got to a certain point and then it said, okay, we're happy here. Then it plateaued, yeah. And she said, every time I go to China, she said there's visible, noticeable improvements, like every six months. She said it blows my mind that they just keep improving and keep pushing. So I read a book called China's World View

by David Daokui Li that changed my perception of China's government too. It's really impressive. He's a guy that's in but not in China's government. And so he kind of is trying to explain the mindset of China's government to outsiders. And it's a beautiful book. I highly recommend if somebody wants to understand China better,

China's World View. China's World View, just as a sidebar note, your mention of Japan, I love Japan. And I've spent time in mainland China and in Taipei. It's time for me to get back to both of those. I've spent much more time in Japan, but when people are going to Japan for the first time, they're like, I can't wait to experience this futuristic view 30 years ahead. I typically say, look,

especially if they're going to stay there for a longer period of time, I say, you're going to love it. And it is 30 to 40% Blade Runner and 60 to 70% DMV. Just like feeling, filling out paperwork and triplicates and fax machines. It's going to drive you nuts if you actually try to live there on some levels, right? There's so many beautiful things about it, but yes, it does have the feeling of having frozen in time

in a sense, as opposed to continued to inflect the way that it was perhaps some time ago. Need to get back to the East, so to speak. It's been a long time. All right. I think you have- Actually, because of this newfound love, I'm actually going to Shenzhen and Chengdu in a few weeks. Oh, wow. And I just want to keep experiencing different Chinese cities. Are you going to do any factory tours or see manufacturing there? I'm just meeting with people. That's kind of how I travel these days.

I tend to go to a place and instead of just, instead of seeing the sites, I want to meet the people. So I'm meeting with people that I've emailed with over the years and just, I chose those two cities because I know a lot of people there. Great. Can't wait to hear the report. So I think I'm no mathematician, but maybe you have one more? Smartass.

Okay, number five. Dubai. So, this is my big one. Because when I lived in Singapore, Dubai would often come up. People would compare the two, and they would tell me things about Dubai, about the shopping malls and the millionaire pandering and the Instagram hashtaggy, you look at me kind of crap. And Dubai was in my top 10 places

I never want to go in my life. Fuck that place, it sounds awful. It sounds like everything I hate in one place, you couldn't pay me to go there. But then I have to notice that feeling in myself. And this is going to be, we'll get to like the theme when we're done with this number five. But I had a flight from New Zealand to Europe that it changed planes in Dubai.

And I looked at that and I went, Dubai. And I was like, wait a second, what is this prejudice in me against Dubai? It's like saying, I hate artichokes, but I've never tried artichokes, right? Like, I hate Dubai, but I've never been to Dubai. Maybe I should go to Dubai. So instead of making it a three hour layover, I made it like a three or four day layover. I went, wow, okay, I'm going to Dubai for a few days.

So I read a book called City of Gold, which was about the founding of Dubai and the creation of Dubai. And dude, it was so good. It is such a great book. Anybody listening to this, if you want a great read, read the book City of Gold about the history of Dubai. It is inspiring the wisdom and the foresight and the boldness it took to make that place happen.

It was really just like a vision that saw its way through to the end, against all odds, right? So super inspiring. Then somebody said, you need to read Arabian Sands by this man named Fessager. And that gets into the Arab-Beru culture. It was written in the 1940s or 50s, kind of like a Lawrence of Arabia kind of guy, from England but went through the desert and kind of like a Lawrence of Arabia kind of guy, like from England, but went through the desert and kind of became one with the Beirut people and got to know the culture

and wrote about it. So that was really inspiring. And then the United Arab Emirates itself, as I learned more about, so Dubai, you know, is a city and a region inside the United Arab Emirates. It's one of the seven states, the Emirates in that country. So Sheikh Zayed, the guy that was really like the father of the nation, was a really great dude. Kind of like when I moved to Singapore and I learned more about Lee Kuan Yew and

started to really admire the decisions he made, it became a bit of a role model. Like learning about him makes me wanna be a better person. I just noticed that it actually subtly influences my actions. And so when I'm in Singapore, I feel like a little bit infused with the role model. Like I feel the presence of the role model of Lee Kuan Yew. And when I'm in UAE, I feel a little bit inspired by Sheikh Zayed because he was just such a great, generous dude. And also I think it's interesting that Arab culture gets a really bad rap in the media. Like Hollywood portrayal is usually some white actor with brown makeup being stupid saying,

you know, oh, I like this building. I'll buy 10 of them. You know, I think I want a penguin colony in the desert. You know, make it happen. And they're kind of portrayed as fools that are too rich. And so getting to know the culture felt like, this is really interesting. I really had the wrong idea about this culture. Okay, so as I read these books,

City of Gold and Arabian Sands, I have a thing on my website where I always show what I'm reading and I take notes from the books and I put the notes on my website. And a friend of mine that lives in Muscat, Oman, saw my reading list and he said, what is your interest in this region?

I've noticed you're reading books about Middle East. And I told him I'm just really interested in Arab culture and he said, you must meet the man from Tamashi. I said, what? And he goes, go to tamashi.com, T-A-M-A-S-H-E-E.com. And he said, you will see a shoe store. His name is Mohammed Kazim. He designs sandals, but underneath the surface, he's an educator of Arab culture.

So the sandals are just like the storefront. It's like the pirate shop in San Francisco. Oh, I haven't heard this. There is a place in San Francisco, it's on Valencia Street, and it is used for now educating kids, writing workshops, things like that. But because they couldn't get it zoned in San Francisco, they couldn't get permission for what they actually wanted to do. They had to create a storefront and then do the teaching in the back. And so they created a pirate attire store and all of the classrooms are in the back. So that was a bit of a digression, especially because I can't even recall the proper name

of the sort of writing outlet that is associated with this. But Tamashi shoe store, sandal store on the front end, but it's actually education in disguise. Yeah. Well, at first I thought there was no connection. Then I realized that his sandal designs are actually kind of reflecting Arab traditions and culture through the design of the sandals. But it's like his true passion are these cultural trips he does. So if you go to tamashii.com and you click in the menu, you can click cultural trips and then you'll see. So my friend introduced me to this guy.

So I met with him on my trip to Dubai. We meet by the creek and he tells me that his grandfather built the first building in Dubai. That was his grandfather. That's how young that city is. And he's just like, yeah, right, basically right over there. That was the very first building in Dubai. My grandfather is the one that city is. And he's just like, yeah, right? Basically right over there, there was a very first building in Dubai. My grandfather is the one that built it.

So I said, can you explain to me something about Arab culture? And he said, well, wait, first you gotta understand that the culture of the people of the desert is very different than the people of the sea, the Arabian coast, which is very different than the people of the hills. I said, okay, well, where's your family from?

And he said, well, from the desert. But he said, but you know, two uncles got in a fight. And so kind of half the family moved off to Iraq for a while. And there was kind of like a split in the family. But then they kind of reunited in Abu Dhabi. And he said, but then Islam came along. And I said, wait, hold on, Islam, that was like the year 600. I said, have you been telling me your family history from 2000 years ago? And he goes, well, hold on, Islam, that was like the year 600. I said, have you been telling me your family history from 2000 years ago? And he goes, well, 1800 years ago, yeah. I said, wait, how the fuck do you know your family history back 1800 years? He said, well, we keep good records.

Whoa. Imagine what that does to how you see your life. If you see yourself in this long lineage of 1800 years of recorded family history. Like how that affects your dating and whatever choices on where to live. So Mohammed calls him, this guy is a badass. I love this guy.

He's such a wealth of information and he communicates it so well. It really helps by the way that so, he's got a complete American accent. He went to college in Boston for six years, like got into finance, came back, worked in finance in Abu Dhabi and then just said, no, my real passion is teaching the Arab cultural traditions that I think have gotten lost in our modern skyscrapers.

So that's why he made it his passion project. You know, he could have made way more money in finance, but he has this tamashii.com sandal store and he teaches Arab culture. And I admire the hell out of this guy. That's a really cool Easter egg. All right, so we'll link to that in the show notes. And I also pulled up this word that was on the tip of my tongue, McSweeney's.

McSweeney's.net people can check it out. There's some hilarious writing. The one that I most recently shared with someone after it was shared with me is Cormac McCarthy writes to the editor of the Santa Fe New Mexicans by John Keenan. It's only gonna be funny for people who have read some of Cormac McCarthy,

like The Road or Blood Meridian, but there's a lot of really good stuff. So that is the outlet. Also wanted to mention, because you mentioned Iraq, Iraqi music, traditional music, is some of the most incredibly intricate music I've ever heard using a dulcimer or hammered dulcimer. There are different instruments involved.

Absolutely spectacular. A lot of that has been destroyed, unfortunately, culturally and various teachers and so on, due to all of the goings on in Iraq over the last while. But what is the overarching lesson that you take from the five things you have changed your mind on? Are there kind of meta lessons that you take from this? Yeah, you can see the theme, which is like, I love my rats, but even more, it's like, I love that I used to hate them, and now I don't. And I could have gone on twice as long about Dubai, by

the way. The place is amazing. It is this cultural melting pot that just warms my heart. Sitting on the second floor of the Dubai mall and watching the whole world go by, just the Nigerians and the, I don't know, the Saudis and the Russians and the Chinese and the British just all walking through in the same place. It's so amazing. I kind of want to live there. But as happy as it makes me, I get this extra happiness of going, wow, I used to hate this place without even knowing it. I take a sip of this coffee and it's like, wow, for my whole life, I'm 55, I hated coffee. The Python programming like. But the secret has been held back from you. So now you have to go to Dubai

to have the coffee that you like. Right. The theme is that if you feel completely averse to something, get to know it better. That whatever you feel yourself leaning away from, try leaning into. If you hate opera, then go learn more about opera. And if you hate sports, well then go learn more about sports. It's usually just learning about something gives you an appreciation for this thing

that you used to just dismiss. At the end of the year last year, I just thought, God, this has been, I think, maybe the greatest year of my life. I think this is the happiest I have ever been in my whole life. And I think the reason why was because I had five major things in one year that I used to hate that now I love. And God, this is the greatest joy.

You said major things. So the rats makes it into major things. I like this. I like it. this. I mean, you know, they're my, they're my. I'm not minimizing rats. I'm not minimizing rats. But it's, you know, even the coffee and even the Python, I'm doing something Python going, wow, I can't believe I hated this for 20 years. Well, I suppose they're major in the sense that to the degree you had a fixed position beforehand, these were kind of strong fixed positions of dislike.

So that turnaround is very interesting. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. About three weeks ago, I found myself between 10 and 12,000 feet going over the continental divide carrying tons of weight and I needed all the help I could get. In those circumstances, I relied on Momentus products every single day and every single night. Now, regular listeners probably know I've been taking Momentus products consistently and testing them, the entire spectrum of their products for a long while now.

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So what's on the label is exactly what you're getting. Try it out for yourself and let me know what you think. Visit livemomentus.com slash tim and use tim at checkout for 20% off of my performance stack. I'll spell it out, it's a long one. Livmomentous.com slash Tim. So livmomentous.com slash Tim for 20% off. Let me ask you this. Since in the case of the rats, that was catalyzed by your son bringing up pet rats,

Dubai, you had a layover that then prompted you to extend how long you stayed there. Python, I'm not sure exactly how that about face came to be, but having experienced the past year, you say to yourself, this is one of the greatest or maybe the greatest year of my life, high levels of happiness, I think it's because I had these changes of mind. Are you farming for opportunities to change your mind proactively? Yeah. And if so, how are you doing that? I don't have a systematic thing I can share. And not that I'm not sharing it, I just don't have it. But it just made me notice. Now I just need to notice in myself when I'm irrationally averse to something. It can't even be a thought process.

Sometimes, okay, this is actually in my Useful Not True book that just came out. This idea that was actually a little bit sparked by you where somebody dismisses everything a person says. It dismisses everything a public figure says because they don't like something about that public figure. Right, like, oh, I don't like the way he acts on social media, so fuck him.

I'm not gonna listen to a word he says. And that was inspired, I think I told you last time that the first time I encountered that was years and years ago when I saw somebody holding for our work week and I said, oh wow great book and he goes yeah, the guy's full of himself here. You want it? It's like He didn't want to read the book because he saw one thing in there that made him think you were fully yourself Yeah, so that's it. Fuck this whole thing. Fuck this 400 page book. There's nothing in it for me because there's something I don't like about this guy

when I think about that to me that's Trying to think of people as either true or not true Instead of useful or not useful that's judging the box not judging the contents inside And so I think there are many things in my life where I have judged the box like Python. No, you know China rough Dubai fuck that place rats Coffee there. Sorry. Just had to spit all five times and all of those I was judging the box But if you learn a little bit more about it, then you get into the contents

And you go. Oh, actually the contents are wonderful. It was just, I was dismissing the package. He probably read the first edition where I had that whole chapter on my cock size that ended up being a little over the top. So I took it out for reprints. And then he put it into four hour body. It was a bit much. Yeah. Then I ended up putting that as an appendix in the four hour body. So fair play on his part. I would actually build on that to say that I look to my close relationships and I pause and question how I'm thinking about friendships. If in every case, there isn't something substantial, I disagree with each of those friends on.

Does that make sense? Ooh, yes. I love that. I really want friends where the differences of opinion bring us closer and make our friendships more valuable, not the other way around. Yes. If you and your friends agree on pretty much everything, I view that as symptomatic of a problem. Okay. I'm so glad you brought this up. Sometimes I wonder about your motivation for continuing these podcasts

and how you keep up the enthusiasm for doing this for so long. Then I thought, God, wait, you must be immersing yourself in so many diverse worldviews that it made me think about the comparison to investing. I was in a situation recently, you've probably had this many times, and I think it's maybe part of why you left California,

where you catch yourself in a group of people and everybody agrees with everybody else. It's like this group think, even if they're all really smart, but damn it, they all basically agree. This sucks. And I thought about the benefits of diversification when it comes to investing, right? So anybody who learns like investing 101 learns about having a low correlation between your asset allocations. So your US stocks, international stocks, real estate commodities, bonds, gold, cash. Some things risky, some things riskless, and the whole idea is they're supposed to have a low correlation. So if one goes down, they won't all go down.

And I thought about that in terms of the thought portfolio in our head, any given person. So you say it with the friends you have around, but I assume, aren't you then, by knowing your friends so well, when you're in a certain situation, you're thinking about what to do, you don't just have Tim's thoughts, you also have this friend's thoughts and that's friend's thoughts. And it's like, how would this friend of mine approach this? Do you do that actively? Oh yeah, I definitely do.

And I'll give a real world example. And I don't know if we wanna get into the thick of it, but I was reading some of your writing before we hopped on the phone and I was taking an ice bath also right before we got on the phone, which I know I am fonder of than you are, but I was sitting in the tub freezing my balls off and there were certain statements and positions in the writing that got me all riled up. And I was sitting there getting riled up and I was sitting there getting riled up and thinking about my counter

positions and then I thought to myself well that's interesting to observe these feelings coming up these very strong feelings then I thought to myself this is really good this is good because the feelings are coming up in a strong way and you're not someone to shy away from a conversation about those things. And what a gift to be able to have civil disagreement with friends. Like what a fucking treasure that is. Because we don't have a lot of models for civil disagreement, I would say, at least not in most media or online. It's just not what sells. And I very much want friends who are going to call me on my bullshit, or at least take counter positions and help me think through things.

Right. And I think that in your new book, for instance, does a very good job of discussing perspectives and perspective taking and how you can read many things differently from different viewpoints. And you want friends who can help you do that so that you don't get trapped in your own thought loops. And furthermore, just on a very practical sense, you want to be able to speak truthfully to your friends and you want them to be able to do the same. And if you do that and you talk about a really wide breadth of things, if you never have conflict, one or both of you is probably being dishonest.

Yeah. And if you're gonna have some friction in the system, which you probably will, if you're really being honest, then you're gonna need to be good at conflict resolution or repair or talking about hard things. So that's a very long stream of consciousness that I just let out. But if I look for friends who I can and will disagree with on things, then it becomes my dojo for life overall with people I really care for and love. And good God, what an amazing gift and advantage that is.

So yes, I do that deliberately and I invite people on the podcast who I suspect or know I will disagree with on a few different levels. And that gives me a chance to interrogate their thinking but also interrogate my own thinking. Love it. I've noticed within myself that when I'm around people

that I know agree with me, my inherent curiosity level drops a bit. And when I'm around people that I know don't think like me, my curiosity peaks. So when I meet somebody that is like a scientist that is also Hindu, I'm like, oh, oh my god, I have so many questions for you. I was like, can you explain to me how this, okay, dude, you know, like, I'm filled with

curiosity to meet somebody that grew up Hindu and still actively has the Hindu beliefs. I want to understand this better. I've read two books about Hinduism. I don't get it still. I have so many questions for you. But if I'm around somebody that's like me, I'm like, how you doing? What's up? Yeah, me too. Cool. All right. So I think it's a deliberate over-weighting if we're going to kind of use a back to like quantitative and investment metaphor. I have a whole lifetime of thinking my way. Now I wanna overweight learning other ways of thinking.

And to me, it's just pure curiosity. There's no debate. There's no like, let's work this out and get to the right answer. It's just, no, please tell me this other way of looking at things. Tell me this other way of looking at your family history, 1800 years.

Tell me this other way of looking at, I don't know, spirituality, life after death, etc. Please, I'm so curious. Because it reminds me that my way of looking at it is not the only way. I love dislodging my first impression. I think our first thought is an obstacle and we have to get past it to realize there are other ways to look at the situation. Once you realize that you can get past your to realize there are other ways to look at the situation Once you realize that you can get past your first way of looking at something Then you can do that like what they call it systems to thinking right thinking fast and slow you can go. Oh, right

Okay, hold on. That was my first reaction What are some other ways I could look at this? That's what my whole useful not true book is about. Yeah, I remember also this is I think this was on the podcast in one of our earlier conversations, but I asked you it was on the podcast, probably the first conversation. I asked you who the first person was you thought of when I gave the word successful and your answer was along the lines of, well, I think answer number one isn't that interesting because I might say Richard Branson, but really or Elon Musk. But if Richard Branson wanted a life of peace and tranquility and a slower pace,

if that were his goal, then he's utterly failing. So maybe that isn't success, If that were his goal, then he's utterly failing. So maybe that isn't success, but perhaps overarchingly, I might use that twice now as an adverb. That's pretty funny. I never use that word, but the question should be, who's the third person you think of when you hear the word successful? I am so impressed that you remember that.

It's a long time ago. Yeah. Yeah. And that is an example of what you're talking about is getting past the first thought. I think the operative word there is thought, right? Because just to draw a distinction for me, I think paying attention to feeling the first feeling can save you from a lot of pain in the short and the long term. In other words, along the lines of the gift of fear Gavin De Becker Etc if your system says no pay very close attention to that. But if you have a

inbuilt story, I hate Dubai because a B and C which is very different from I Don't feel safe in this airport. And I don't know why those are two very different things very yeah Questioning that first story can pay a lot of incredible dividends. Dude, I love this subject so much. To me, it's kind of like the key of life. So often the difference between success and failure is the mindset that leads you to take different actions. But if you just look at a situation and you say, that's it, that's what the situation is.

I'm not talking about physical things. I mean, declaring something to be a dead end, declaring something to suck. These are all things of the mind and nothing of the mind is necessarily true. Everything that's just in the mind is just one perspective. Like physical things are true. Sure. You know, there are some physical realities. The number of votes cast in an election is a physical reality that an alien or a computer could observe and agree. But all these things of the mind were social creatures and we treat them like they are realities. Like, hey, that person wronged me and that's just a fact.

It's like, mm, that's not just a fact. That's one way of looking at it. And you might be a lot happier and a lot more successful if you realize that that's just one way of looking at it. It's not true. It's just a perspective. It's just a thought. And there's another way of seeing that. And that other way of seeing it might lead to actions that would be much more effective for you. Yeah, for sure. And I think your new book pairs well with Byron Hittie's The Work, which focuses on a lot of what we're discussing. And I was going to

say, in addition to what we've already covered, that the content is different from the mindset. And what I mean by that is you've crafted a very path of Derek life for yourself and you've made some very unorthodox decisions, some of which I think are frankly, sometimes cuckoo bananas. But thank you. You're welcome. If I don't agree, even if I wouldn't replicate the decision, hearing you explain why you did it and how you navigated that, the lenses through which you viewed this scenario has allowed me to learn things that I can apply to totally different circumstances. And that's really valuable. You might not make the same house as someone else, but learning how to use the carpentry tools

that they use to build that house could actually really, really, really aid you in a lot of disparate scenarios. So that's how I've also thought about it. I so often try to get people to devalue the example, but value the theme, the process, like you just said, that too many people focus on the example that you give them. It's like, try to forget the example and look for the process.

So thanks for saying that. I do that with everything. There's a person that we could talk about here if you want later. But he's a computer programmer. But he gets up and gives a talk about computer programming that I see the theme in what he's talking about. I'm like, oh, okay, well, forget the code for a second. That's a brilliant theme.

And it's fun to be able to do that. So let's pause. This might be a good segue. Is that part of the next bucket of people you're studying? Yeah. Or things you're fascinated by? Where would you like to go next? Because this might be a good segue.

Yeah, it's funny. You actually jumped to the last thing I was going to mention. You brought up this diversified portfolio of perspectives. So that was one of the things I wanted to talk about today and you didn't even know that. Oh, amazing. Look at that. I did not.

That was great. Yeah, let's talk about, okay, you asked me in advance, people I'm studying. So let's do them in reverse order since we already brought up 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 Eno, the record producer? I have not met Brian Eno, but I have his oblique strategies. Yes, wow. Part set. I was just reading about how he ended up coining the term ambient music in the hospital

because he couldn't get up and change the volume and ended up, he ended up listening to very, very low volume music a friend had put on for him. So I'm fascinated by Brian Nino, but I've never met him. Brian Eno is one of these guys that his thought process is fascinating. I don't love his music. I like his music. I don't love it, but I love his thought process.

By the way, if you go to the website, musicthoughts.com, that's my love letter to Brian Eno and John Cage and some of these music thinkers. I made that website in 1999 and it's a collection of inspiring quotes from Brian Eno, John Cage and a bunch of other musicians. Musicthoughts.com? Yep, musicthoughts.com. It's totally non-commercial. I'm not going to make a penny off of anybody looking at it, so I'm not trying to pitch it, but I'm just saying it's a collection of Brian Eno's philosophies

on music and thoughts on music that I would read these quotes to inspire me as I was making music and kind of knock my thinking kind of like the Oblique Strategies cards to shift my thinking into something different. And so even just reading his interviews, one thing he said is his job as a record producer is to have strong opinions in the studio. So that if he's in there producing a record by U2 and the guys are fighting about whether to have a guitar solo or not, whether it should be a loud guitar solo or a quiet guitar solo, he said, well, my job then would be to say, well, how about we have no guitar at all in this song? And the band members go, what?

Are you crazy? No, this song needs guitar. No, we, Brian, we absolutely need guitar. And he goes, all right, happy I could help. By you disagreeing with me, I just helped you solidify your position. So that's my job here. So on the other hand, if you would have said, oh, yeah, okay, no guitar. That's a good idea.

Great. Glad I could help. I'm not saying my opinions are right. I'm just trying to help you respond. I love that. You're providing a foil. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're providing a foil. That's musicthoughts.com. Quick question on was it John Cage you mentioned? Yeah. So I was first exposed to John Cage in a documentary. A friend of mine named Steve Jang was involved with Namjoon Pike. Moon is the oldest TV, which is about Namjoon Pike, this amazing pioneer in experimental art, performance art, many different media. And he was inspired by John Cage.

Now I know very little about John Cage, but I did get to see a segment of a performance that he did, which caused like 90% of the audience to leave. It was just like the most agonizingly uncomfortable, I would say, noise to listen to. That is my sole exposure to John Cage, but I've heard him invoked as this figurehead of great influence. And I'm basing my impression of him only on that. What I would just say is awful performance that I saw part of in this documentary. How would you sell John Cage or why is he interesting? Ooh, I'm no expert, but let's just say he questioned things that hadn't been questioned before. A lot of modern art, the kind where people look at it

and go, what, that's it? It's a seesaw over the border between US and Mexico. You call that art, I could do that. And it's like, yeah, but you didn't. Somebody looked at that border between US and Mexico and said, I think we could put a seesaw over that. In a way, that's a beautiful statement. It's not about the brushstrokes on canvas.

It's about the statement. I think John Cage was doing that with music. He was questioning the core of what is this anyway. That's why I think his most famous piece is called Four Minutes and 33 Seconds, which is just four minutes of 33 seconds of silence. The point was, hey, listen to the room around you for four minutes and 33 seconds. There are sounds going on here already. I mean, I think that was his point.

Maybe he stayed mute on it, I don't know. Okay, so is it fair to say that he's interesting to you for the same reason that Brian, you know, in the producer capacity is interesting as a provocateur of sorts, like an instigator of new thinking. Yeah, I wanna emulate his thought process, even if I don't love his end results.

Well, you said it first, that's why I love that you beat me to this. It's your friends, you may not wanna live my life here with my, whatever, three glasses and two rats, but you like some of my thought process. Yeah. People keep emailing me about that. Hey, I heard your podcast with Tim Ferriss.

Three glasses, huh? So let me explain that for people who don't have the content. You should get a third rat just so you have the same number of rats that you have glasses. But when I visited you in New Zealand, I was like, Hey, do you mind if I have glass of water? No, no, no, knock yourself out. Wear the glasses. So they're in the cabinet. And when I saw three glasses, all of different dramatically different sizes. And I was like, what happens if you have more than three people over here? Like, Oh, just buy some more glasses. I was like, well, actually, that kind of makes a certain elegant sense.

So those are the three glasses. All right. You know what? On that note, do you want to hear? I am building my dream home right now. Can you imagine where this is going? Just 20 minutes north of Wellington, I bought a piece of land or I'm building my dream home. it is a four by eight meter rectangle with nothing inside. No toilet, no kitchen, no nothing. Because I thought every house I've lived in came with its default shit. And I adapted myself to its default shit.

Like, well, that's just where the bathroom is. That's just the size of the living room. That's just what it is. And I've always had to adapt myself. So I've never experienced the process of making the place adapt to me through practice, not in theory. So I thought, if I just start with a four by eight meter,

well insulated rectangle, then over time we'll see what I need. Wait, did you say four by eight? Four by eight meters is the whole house. Sorry, did you say four by eight? Four by eight meters? Yeah. Is the whole house? Sorry, it's actually two. One is so it's a four by 12. Okay, got it. No, four by 14 meter rectangle is that's the two bedroom place where I'll sleep with my kid. And then next to it is a four by eight where I spend all of my waking hours. Okay, so it's the sleeping house and the waking house. where I spend all of my waking hours. Okay, got it.

So it's the sleeping house and the waking house. And my kid actually gets his own four by eight meter cube to experiment with. And the whole idea is to see what you need. So I'm starting with no bathroom, no kitchen. I'm just gonna put a little induction hob outside and an outhouse. And then I'll see if that's okay with me.

Or if I find through experience that I really want a bathroom inside, okay, well now I know from experience, not just because it's the default setting. So I'm trying to start from scratch and this is my dream house because of the process that it will allow me to have. Okay, so this is a very mundane question,

but I'm curious. Generally, if you're gonna have like a kitchen or a bathroom or something, you would have the piping or the power and so on put in a certain place. So as it stands, that is not the case. So you might have to do a fair amount of demo or deconstructing your house

to add any of these things internally. I got this tip from Stuart Brand, wrote a brilliant book that everyone should read, anyone who's smart that is, called How Buildings Learn. How Buildings Learn by Stuart Brand, you should try to get the paper book because it's just laid out in such a way that you kind of need the paper book. He goes through this analytical thing about buildings. And he said, this is a reason why you should never hide your wires and pipes. Just keep the infrastructure on the outside

so that it's easier to change. He has a beautiful line in there. It's almost the opening point. He says, all buildings are predictions and all predictions are wrong. So therefore, the less predictive you can make your building, the better. That's why I'm just getting this rectangle.

All pipes and wires will just be exposed, nothing buried so that I can quickly change them. I can always see where they are. I'm very much following Stuart Brand's philosophy. Stuart Brand is a smart, fascinating man. Just a quick pitch for Stewart Brand. So I met Stewart through Kevin Kelly. Now Kevin Kelly founded the editor of Wired Magazine.

Fascinating, genius, bizarre guy. Has an Amish beard, but he's a technology futurist. Built his own house by hand. Spends more time in China than probably anyone I know. He's just an eclectic combination of all sorts of things. And the title of my podcast with him way back in the day was the real world most interesting man in the world, or something like that.

And in the midst of the conversation with Kevin, or maybe speaking offline, he said, if you really want the person I consider to be the most interesting man in the world, it's Stewart Brand. I had Stewart on the podcast a number of years ago and boy, oh boy, you want to talk about a polymath, he's something else. All right, so you've preserved the optionality with the possibility of putting things on the outside rather than on the inside in terms of support infrastructure. And how do you see yourself using a space with nothing inside? I don't know. See, that would be a prediction. I'm trying to not predict. I'm just going to

show up. It'll be ready in a few months and then I'll start living there and we'll see what happens. That's all I know. Okay. Is it going to be totally empty? Are you going to have some desks, a chair? I mean, are you going to have anything at all? Are you just going to sit on the floor and be like, what do I require at this moment? I'm bringing a mattress to start. And then over time, I'll notice if, if I wish I had a desk here, then I'll get a desk there, you know? So I'll add things as it I feel that I really, really need them. Again, I highly recommend in How Buildings Learn, he kind of goes into this about the best spaces are just rectangles and the best places are the ones that are easy to alter. So that if you suddenly decide, he talks about this MIT building where people were just allowed

to bash a hole in the wall because it wasn't some beautifully architecturally designed masterpiece. It was something thrown together quickly in World War II. People love that building because if they do need to bash a hole in the wall to run some wires through, they can just do it because it's a trashy old building. Because of that, it's such a creative space. The places that are award-winning are

often the ones that are the most hated by their residents. They might win the award for the architect. That's true. But because they're award-winning, they're inflexible, they're sacred. I mean, talk to people who live in a Frank Lloyd Wright home now. And it's like, ugh, you know, living in a masterpiece museum

can't change a single screw or anything because it's the way he wanted it. So practical recommendation, I would say, if you're going to be sitting on the floor a lot, if you're not accustomed to doing that, just so you don't end up with all sorts of orthopedic issues, I would start doing Turkish get ups and getting accustomed to sitting on the floor and getting up a lot.

I'll probably get a good chair almost right away, but I just want to make sure that your body's ready for the rectangle. All right. Fascinating. You had another example. I'll let you be the first monkey shot into space on this particular type of home design. I can't wait to learn so many things. You experiment with some things I don't want to experiment with and I'll experiment with things that you don't want to experiment with. I'll renounce my US citizenship and let you know how it goes. I'll build my dream home of a four

by eight rectangle, let you know how it goes. Yeah, you gotta divvy it up. I mean, the redundancy and experimentation is kind of, I don't wanna say pointless, but it's more fun to have people doing different things. Other people you are studying. All right. Or things you're fascinated by. We can hop around, depends on where you wanna go.

I already started Rich Hickey. Oh, that's right. You mentioned him at, I wrote him down because that was left dangling and I was like, who is this Rich Hickey? So Rich Hickey is Oh, that's right. You mentioned him. I wrote him down because I was left dangling and I was like, who is this Rich Hickey? So Rich Hickey is, he's a programmer. He's the inventor of a programming language called Clojure. C-L-O-J-U-R-E. He's actually one of my number one picks for somebody that I would like to get on your

show. Like if we did a co-hosting kind of thing and I were to get somebody on, actually I already emailed him. He didn't reply, but maybe, hey, if anybody knows Rich Hickey, and if he's interested, nudge, nudge, nudge. He did a brilliant talk. If you search YouTube for either simple versus easy,

or I think the name of the video on YouTube is called Simplicity Matters, here's his point. And I actually jotted down these notes so I could try to bang out his point quickly and then we'll talk about it. And keep in mind, everything I'm about to say, he's just talking about programming. He's speaking to a room of programmers. He said, we mistake simple and easy. We think that simple means easy and easy means simple.

But he said they're two different things. The word complex, if you look at the definition, it's actually, it comes from the word complex, which is to braid things together. So if something is complexed, it means it's intertwined with other things. And so the adjective complex means that something is bound to other things. Whereas simple comes from simplex, which means it is not bound to other things.

It stands alone. Easy, the root of that means that something is near at hand. It's something you already know how to do. It's within your realm. So easy and hard are subjective. But simple and complex are very objective things that we can look at. Something is simple, stands alone, is complex, fits bound to other things.

And he said, here's where it gets tricky, is that it can be very easy to make something very complex. So he says, you could just type gem install hairball, and with typing three words on a computer, you can install a massive framework, whether it's Ruby on Rails or WordPress. If you start using that, well, wow, you are now complected with a huge complicated system that you're intertwined with.

Now, everything I say after this, this is my take on his analysis. But it's really easy in life to say, okay, yeah, let's get married. Or to have unprotected sex and get pregnant and have a baby. That's easy. Adopt a dog. Hiring people. You can have a problem and think, all right, well, I've got some money and I'm overwhelmed. I'm going to get a consultant to like hire 10 people. Okay, great. Now I've got 10 employees. Phew, that was easy to take some work off my plate, but your life is now objectively complex

You are complected with these other people and their needs and their time schedules and their desires Handing off parts of your business to say this is hard I'm just gonna hand off my billing or my something or my this or my scheduling to these apps or these subscription services. That was easy to just hand it off. But now your business is very complexed with these other services. So hence my rant on our last conversation over scotch at my house about tech independence. His point is, it can be really hard to make something simple.

It can be much harder to do something that is objectively simple, that stands alone, that isn't dependent on other things. It can be harder to make that. But it's ultimately usually a better choice because it's more maintainable, it's easier to change, it's easier to stop and start, it's simpler, even if it's harder to make. So the point is, in his thinking, is to beware of the objective measure of complexity, or beware of complexity, which can be objectively measured, and aim for doing the simpler thing, even if it's harder.

In my take, I think you can make simple things easier just by learning more, say about the fundamentals of something instead of just adopting somebody else's high level solution. You can spend a little time learning about the core underneath it, about the fundamentals, then you can forget norms, you could forget what others do, what others think, and you can just get to the real essence of what you need. I'm not just talking programming now, I'm just being like in life. What would be an example of that?

Okay, my four by eight house. It's like, really, I just need a shelter where it's temperature controlled, so it's really well insulated. I do need a mattress to sleep on, and I do need a place I can work. But to me, those are the, oh, and I do need a little food. To me, these are the core things of a shelter. But even say with friendships, do I need to live in the same place with my friends? Well, not necessarily.

My dear friends, my best friends are often far, far away. I don't need to move to a place that has all my friends if I can reach them on the phone. I'm very often talk about just the thought process. I very often find myself asking like, well, what's the real outcome I'm after? What's the real point of this? And once I figure that out, well, then what's the most direct route to that outcome? Never mind what other people do, what the norms are. What do I think is the most direct route to that outcome? And then try to keep it simple along the way and be very wary of

dependencies and entangling myself with other things. That's my take. Could you give another example or two of how you implement that in your life? Sure. Or how you might? So I know there are more examples. The next two might be less relatable because it's less relatable than the four by eight meter box. I know everybody wants to live with nothing inside.

So, I mean, well, first, here's a good question to strip away some things. Ask yourself, would I still do this if nobody knew? There might be a lot of things in our actions that we do because we like the way it would look to others, because it would be impressive to others. That's the first thing to just strip away when you're beginning this thought process is like, if I were to never tell anybody and nobody were to ever know, would I still do this thing? Okay, well then that might just be the decoration.

Okay, so two examples. Programming wise, I'm constantly asking this when I'm building something. It's just, I need to get this calendar entry into this database with this time. Do I need a whole bunch of JavaScript? Do I need a bunch of CSS and things flying around? Do I need fading graphics? No, I just need this thing there. What's the most direct way to get that calendar entry into that database?

So that's like a programming example. Writing wise, my last two books, How to Live and Useful Not True, I'm spending most of my time reducing. My rough draft, I always spew out everything I have to say on the subject. And then I spend a thousand hours, every single word going, is that word necessary? Wait a second, is that whole sentence necessary? Wait, can the point still be communicated without that sentence? If it can, okay, let me try to get rid of that sentence and see if the point still comes

across. Actually, does the point come across without this entire chapter? Oh my God, it still does. Therefore I don't need this chapter. One of the most useful things that happened recently is a few months ago, an organization in Australia paid me to come give a talk. And I said, what you want me to talk about? They said anything. I said, how about my next book called Useful Not True? They said sure. So it was a room of very successful, very effective people. And I had one hour on stage to communicate the whole idea of my next book.

And at the time, the book was still in process. And that was so helpful because I noticed that there were a few things on stage, even though I had it in my notes, I skipped over it. And I thought, okay, well, actually, we don't need to do that. Okay, let's get to the next point. And so later when I over it. And I thought, okay, well actually, we don't need to do that. Okay, let's get to the next point. And so later when I was back home, I thought, wow, I just skipped over that whole point on stage. So why do I think it's worth killing trees to print that point?

Apparently it's not. Cool, this is now the shortest book I've ever written. I'm very proud of that fact. I compressed this 400 pages down to I think it's 102 pages or something. And so those are two examples where I'm constantly asking like, what's the most direct way to just get rid of what I really want, get the outcome, skipping the usual fanfare. How do you think about first order simplicity versus complexity versus second order, third order and planning. And the reason I'm asking that is you strike me as someone who prizes freedom, independence, simplicity,

all very highly. But I imagine there could be cases where looking at the first decision and the first order effects, you might think, well, it's much simpler for me to do X, to renounce my US citizenship, to build a box, to do everything myself instead of taking on these cloud services for accounting and so on. But there are levels of second, third order complexities that ultimately make it kind of net-net more complex than doing the slightly more complex thing upfront. Does that make sense? Almost. I guess I'm wondering how practically people might think about simplifying but not oversimplifying and then shooting yourself in the foot in the long term. I'll give you an example. I know people who have

moved to Puerto Rico to trim taxes substantially, right? But in the process, they viewed that as the most direct route to reducing taxes. Therefore, they can do X, Y, and Z over time with more income or preserved capital gain, whatever it might be. However, in the process of doing that, they've created all of this lifestyle complexity and applied a lot of constraints to what they can or cannot do. And the tax tales wagging the dog and instead of money serving life, now life is serving money. And they've kind of put themselves in a topsy-turvy upside down situation when if you were to look at it from first principles, two years later,

you're like, wow, that was really bungled. And that's not true for everybody in Puerto Rico. I'm not trying to make it sound like that, but I have seen those types of examples where like the thing that seemed simple and straightforward at the outset ended up producing a lot of ripple effects that produced not just complexity, but complexity that was hard to undo. Yeah. Great example. So yeah, how do you think about that kind of risk mitigation? By the way, my two little examples of that.

A few years ago, Tony Robbins had a Money Master the Game book. I was like, oh, wow, Tony hasn't put out a book in like 20 years. I wonder how this is going to be. And in it, he's giving these prescriptions for extremely complex, like insurance things that you could set. I was like, ooh, wow, that's objectively complex. And another example is in Neil Strauss' book called Emergency. I'll never forget this point.

He said that he's off at one of these nomad, sovereign individual, I'm beholden to no country kind of events. And he meets this guy that is bragging to him about his setup He's like I got my income coming here, but then all expenses go here But then I've got a trust and this but I'm the non managing member of the trust which is held by this that and in the end He's gonna save 30% taxes and

Neil said Wouldn't it just be a lot easier or make a lot more sense to just work 30% harder or like to just make 30% more money? Said, that's a ton of work just to save 30%. Said, it's not that much harder to just go make 30% more. And dude, when I read that, I love that thought process. So I think that I know that your podcast and the Titans and all that is often about how do we use the wisdom of others to avoid making these mistakes ourselves.

But some of these things maybe just have to, I don't know. I think for some of these things, I'm willing to throw myself in and feel the pain to see if I've done it wrong. I know we're improv jazzing here, so let's keep going. This thought just occurred to me because when I hear you talk about code and programming, I mean, there's a poetry to it and there's an economy to it that is seems I'm not a programmer, but I do write. There seems to be something intrinsically rewarding to you about that

presentation of elegance. And I'm wondering in the case of following Stewart Brand's principles and building this box, or doing certain things that seem to me optimized for freedom, independence, is there's even if it ends up face planting, is there something that you find beautiful and redeeming just about taking the simple approach, even if the outcome is suboptimal? It's related. It's finding out in fact, instead of just in theory, we can sit at home and wonder what it might be like to do such and such. But at some point, you just gotta throw yourself in and go try it. And if you try moving to Puerto Rico and you hate it, well, now you know. It was worth a try maybe.

And now you know in fact that doesn't work for you. That's maybe the how buildings learn idea is don't predict that you will want to sink in that spot. Put yourself into that spot first. Live without a sink for a while. And eventually you'll get a good feeling for where the sink needs to be. In fact, not in theory. And so I think I do this with my life, is I'm willing to mess up happily, because I will know that then I found out in fact, that that doesn't work for me. And maybe this is coming from the core of the fact

that like I'm a really happy person. And so I feel that like my base level is up here. I can take some big knocks. You can take a hit. And I think a lot of the crazy shit I've done, I did marry somebody that I hardly knew after a few months because fuck it, let's see what happens. In fact, you and I have never talked about that directly, but do you know the mindset I was in at the time?

I had just sold my company. I had a ton of money and I felt like I need to change my trajectory because my first impulse after selling my company was literally the next day I set up my next company. And I thought I'm going to move to Silicon Valley. I'm going to do this thing. I'm going to stay on the same trajectory. And I did that for a few months, but then I caught myself going, wait, I want a full life. I don't want to stay on the same trajectory.

I want to shake shit up. So I very deliberately did what we might call the George Costanza principle, which is do the opposite, do the opposite of all of my impulses. Every time I felt yes, everything in me said, yes, I would say no out loud. And everything in me says, no, I say yes out loud as a way of deliberately shaking shit up. And so I was dating this woman for a few months and we had no great connection. And she said, oh, well, I can't travel to California with you unless we get married. And everything in me says, oh, hell no, don't do that.

That's stupid. I don't want to marry this person. So I said, yes, let's do that. And so we got married. And I kept doing that in every way. I deliberately fucked up my life and made a bunch of crazy fucking decisions and some of them worked out great and some of them didn't. And I'm so happy that I did that.

Like in some ways I could say that that's my biggest regret or biggest mistake, but in other ways, it was wonderful. It deliberately sent me on a different trajectory and I'm glad I did it. That it definitely will. So for people that don't have any of the connective tissue here to figure out how to orient themselves to this. People are going to want to know, right? Cliffhanger. So how did that turn out? The everything in me says no. So I said, yes, let's get married. Let's do that. The marriage is awful. No, that was terrible. And we knew it like literally like days later, like, oops, we made a big mistake. Yeah, that was instantly a big mistake. And that's fine because we

knew in fact then that it was a big mistake, not just in theory. I could have walked away from that going, Oh God, remember that woman that wanted me to marry her? And I said, no, God, I wonder what would have happened. Well, now I get to find out. Like I did it. Now, hold on a second though. I'm going gonna push on this a little bit. We could use this logic to be a reverse George Costanza for every decision we think is bad we could turn around and say yes to right but as a life strategy I don't see you continuing that right. No. So you don't know for a fact that the awful idea would have been awful but I mean there has to be a point at which you think about self-pres preservation and time as a finite currency.

So you're like, well, when would you apply that versus when would you not apply it, right? Cause you could apply it everywhere, indefinitely. But certain things are one way doors and some are two way doors, right? I mean, like for instance, getting a pet rat, okay. Lower cost, more reversible, let's just say, than maybe giving up your US citizenship, right?

That is a little harder to control Z. Yeah, I cannot undo that. Yeah, so moving forward for you, having learned everything that you've learned, when do you play the George Costanza strategy versus not? Because there are lots of things we can't know for a fact unless we make the right or the wrong or the good or the bad decision,

but you can't make all decisions. So what do you do? Long ago when I said the hell yeah or no thing and- Uh-huh, it's gonna be in your gravestone. Hell yeah or here I am. Here he lays. So some people emailed me after that. After that was on your show and they said,

Hey man, I like this hell yeah or no thing. I'm using it for everything. I just got out of college. I'm getting a bunch of offers. I'm like, I'm not feeling hell. Yeah about any of them, you know I'm dating and just like, you know, I'm not hell. Yeah about any of you. I go wait, wait, wait, wait, hold on Everything does not become a nail because you're holding this hammer. You don't this is a tool for a specific situation When you're overwhelmed with options, you have to have the wisdom to know when to use this tool You don't use it on everything always it's the same thing with this going against your instincts And you're overwhelmed with options. You have to have the wisdom to know when to use this tool. You don't use it on everything always.

It's the same thing with this going against your instincts. Of course you don't use it on everything always. But that was a specific time in my life when I wanted to deliberately change my trajectory. I wanted to go against my normal way of doing things and deliberately introduce some randomness and variety into my life. Right. It's not your default. Right.

But let's look at, you know, I mentioned Dubai earlier. Everything in me said, fuck that place. And then I caught myself feeling that. And I thought, okay, wait, hold on. This is a good time to use this tool. My impulse is saying no. I'm going to try saying yes. I'm going to good time to use this tool. My impulse is saying no. I'm gonna try saying yes. I'm gonna go get to know this thing

because that sounds to me like that would be a learning growing experience to try it. That's a good example of integrating this into your life. But then say like if maybe you do hit a situation where it's like nothing is working out, you've been an idiot your whole life, you just got fired, you were just dumped by your romantic partner, you're at skid row, maybe it's a really good time to go against all your natural impulses since it's pretty clear that your defaults were

set wrong. They're not working. Yeah, they're not working very well. I like integrating it. Maybe it's the question is like, is this going to be a learning growing experience for me? I like leaning into discomfort. Whatever scares you, go do it. All right.

So I have quite a few follow up questions. We can take them in many different directions. So we we've covered Rich Hickey, Clojure, Knock Knock. We'll see if if anyone lets him know he appeared on the show. And I also want to ask you a question we can cut from the conversation if we need to. But since Dubai has come up- That's a great lead in. I love that. This may be too risky for anybody's ears, but here we go.

Do taxes fit into this at all? Is this like people who move to Nashville or Austin and they're like, oh, the barbecue and the music and they will dance and dance and dance until you corner them with a broomstick and then they're like, yeah, okay, fine. Yeah, the taxes is also it's a thing. Is Dubai one of those or no? Not at all. I mean, I had to ask myself that. That's like one of those things. Okay, when you ask yourself, would I still be doing this thing if nobody knew about it? I got an email from Guy once, it was just like,

hey man, I wanna travel the whole world. I'm gonna visit every country in the world. Do you have any suggestions for me? I said, yeah, don't bring a camera and don't tell anyone that you're doing this. Is it still appealing to you now? Yeah. Probably not. Okay.

So anytime, say Dubai, for example, I was like, whoa, this place is fascinating. Oh my God, I think I want to live here. I was like, would I still live here if the taxes were like 50%? I was like, yeah, like that has, that's moot to me. I mean, look, I'm living in New Zealand where, yeah, my income tax right now is 45%. I pay a ton of taxes, but it's moot to me. I mean, look, I'm living in New Zealand where, yeah, my income tax right now is 45%. I pay a ton of taxes, but it's worth it to me. I love it here. I don't care.

So that thing I mentioned in Neil Strauss's book, Emergency, that sentence hit me hard. When I first sold CD Baby, that was 2008. There were some things I was thinking at the time. I was like, oh, wow, I just got mega millions. How can I pay less taxes? And it was literally like the month before or month after I sold CD Baby that I read that book Emergency. And I saw that sentence and I went, whoa, good timing. That is a great point. Don't jump through hoops to save taxes. Jump through a hoop to go make more money. That is a great point. Don't jump through hoops to save taxes. Jump through a hoop to go make more money.

That's the growth choice anyway. That's the thought process that leads you to make growing decisions, not shrinking decisions. So you're about to sell or have just sold CD Baby. You form a new company the next day. You're planning on moving to Silicon Valley and you see yourself moving on that track and you decide to throw a Costanza curve ball in and mix things up. Why? Like what was the fear or the hazard you're trying to avoid by following that path? Was it doing something thoughtlessly and repeating what you've done before? That it wasn't intentional? What was it? I want to live a full life. At the end of my life, I want to

look back and go, wow, I did a bunch of different things. I tried a bunch of different ways of living. I followed this philosophy for a while. I followed that one. I tried this, I tried that, I lived here, I lived there. That to me is my definition of a full life. My previous book called How to Live was 27 Conflicting Philosophies and one weird answer. And the whole idea was that it's 27 chapters. Each one disagrees with the rest, but each one has a strong opinion of saying, here's how to live, now live for the future. Then the next one's like, here's how to live, live only for the present. And the next one's like, here's how to live,

leave a legacy. And these are all valid ways of living. And my definition of a full life is I want to experience the different approaches to life. I wanna have the diversified portfolio of thought and of experiences. So that was it. I just felt like if I was to create a new company the next day and move to Silicon Valley, I'd just be doing more of the same shit I've already done.

Yeah. Makes sense. Makes perfect sense. Who else do you have on your list of people you're studying? All right. Tyler Cowen, just a few days ago, in an article on Bloomberg.com called, Who was Bitcoin's Satoshi? So we still don't know who is Satoshi, the inventor of Bitcoin. And, you know, there's this law of headlines that if it ends in a question mark, the answer is usually no. You know, so when I first saw the headline, I thought that the answer was going to be, it doesn't matter. Doesn't matter who Satoshi is, forget it. And Oh my God, Tyler Cowen took it somewhere else. Like even if you would have asked me, by the way, Hey, Derek, I'm going to give

you an hour alone in a room to think about one question, does it matter who is Satoshi, the inventor of Bitcoin? Even after an hour, I think my answer would have been, of course not. I would have sat there for an hour just going, no, no, no. Tyler Cowan took it the opposite way. I jotted down his points, but it's a masterpiece in this kind of if-then knock-on thinking. So he said, okay, if we find out that Satoshi is dead, that the inventor of Bitcoin is dead, then that's a good thing because it means Bitcoin will be more safe because it won't be open to future alteration. The person can't tarnish the reputation of it. You know, say like

Elon Musk and Twitter, kind of like, you know, by continuing to be there can tarnish the reputation of something. Sorry, I shouldn't have gone there. Satoshi can't come back and change the rules for the worst. And then he even said, this is why all religions have dead founders is because the founder can't stay in and tarnish the reputation of the religion. So I went, okay, good point. If Satoshi's dead, that is good for Bitcoin. It can stay as is and won't get tarnished. Won't get changed. And he said, so there's a chance that Satoshi is an older guy from this previous movement around eGold that was generally seen as like a failed project, that a bunch of people were into this idea of eGold

and it didn't work out. If Satoshi is somebody from that group, then that means that even projects that look like they've failed can create great things. So we should maybe think more highly or we'll be less dismissive of projects that seem to be failing, because who knows what they will lead to. He said, there's a chance that Satoshi is this person, I don't know if I forget their

name, but he said that would have been 21 years old and in grad school at the time of inventing Bitcoin. He said, if that's true, that means we should raise our perception of what young, busy people can do, that they can do more than we realize. This guy, while in grad school, also invented Bitcoin. And he said, if Satoshi is still alive, that means, oh, by the way, we should say for your, I assume people know, but maybe not, that whoever is Satoshi has hundreds, okay, let's

say at least tens of billions of dollars in Bitcoin. That all he'd have to do, whoever Satoshi is, would have to just take it. It's already there in the account in the public record that we can see. So Satoshi is one of the richest people on Earth, whoever Satoshi is. So he said if Satoshi's still living, that means that some people don't want to be billionaires or just have incredible self-restraint, like maybe upon realizing what he created, he destroyed the key, destroyed the password so that he could not take those billions of dollars,

you know, to protect himself from that. There's a chance that Satoshi is a pseudonym for a group of people. If that's true, it means a group of people can keep secrets way better than we expected, which means that conspiracy theories are more likely to be true about anything in general about UFOs about JFK or whatever. If this group of people is Satoshi and they could have hundreds of billions of dollars or tens of billions of dollars, but they are choosing not to and they are all keeping the secret, that's amazing. And we should regard secrecy more higher than we can. So that's the end of the bullet points. But I read this one little Bloomberg article and

my jaw dropped. I went, Oh my God, this is the kind of thinking I aspire to. That is some amazing lateral creative, I don't know what kind of thinking do you call that? But that's what I want wanna do more of. Hmm, love it. Yeah, Tyler's incredible. I highly recommend people check him out. That's a really good Tyler example. Cowan, C-O-W-E-N.

Definitely recommend people check him out. Also, past podcast guest. Yeah, that was a great one. Previously to this, one of my favorite points of his is he said that restaurants are better in places of high income inequality. Why? Because these are places that have both rich customers and low paid staff. So somebody can afford to run a great restaurant because there are enough people that will pay because there are rich people

around, but there are enough low-income people that we can have a good amount of staff. They said that's why the best restaurants are in places of high-income inequality. Whoa, that's again, a brilliant connection. That's interesting. I would also add to that, that a lot of folks who want to dedicate themselves to a craft or an art are, depending on the industry, but frequently not going to be well paid for that. And so they're, let's just call it volitionally poorly paid in some cases. And I'm thinking of in this particular case, San Francisco and East Bay, where a lot of restaurants in San Francisco, a lot of restaurants in different places. But as the price of living went up in San Francisco, a lot of the best restaurateurs,

meaning I should say chefs, a lot of the best chefs, a lot of the best line cooks, a lot of the best massage therapists, a lot of these people could no longer afford to be there, had to move to the East Bay. And I would say that led to a decline in the quality of all of the goods I just mentioned and services. So that would also make sense if you want access to the artists, they're not going to be in the most expensive areas typically, unless it's like a Jeff Koons or someone. I haven't been to Pittsburgh lately, but I heard that that happened with some of the a lot of the best chefs from New York City went to Pittsburgh and that now Pittsburgh

is hotter than you'd expect. I can see that. I could totally see it. All right, Tyler, anybody else on the list of people you're learning from or people you're studying? Those are my two. That Tyler, it's because they're specific things. I love it. All right. So I think we have one more category. We'll see how many we get to, but I heard a sharp inhale. Where should we go? Okay. So inchward. Inchward.com. This is actually a bit of a call out. I don't usually do this, but I would like to hear from translators that if you're a translator, contact me, because I've got a lot of paying work,

because I'm really interested in the subject of translations that are always improving. Well, not always, at a certain point you call it, maybe you call it a release. But you know, as a writer, the first time you write a sentence is not always the best. You improve it the second or third time, and at any given sentence we see in your books, that might be the fourth time you've improved that sentence, maybe over the course of months.

There's always room for improvement. When somebody makes a translation of one of your books, the incentives are a little off now because the translator's incentive, as long as they're not translating the Bible or something, their incentive is mostly just get it done, good enough, get paid. The publisher's incentive, the publisher who publishes a translation, their incentive is hire a translator that will make a good enough translation for a low enough price that we can get this out on the market now and make a profit selling it. But my incentive as the writer that sweated over these words for

years and really crafted it almost like song lyrics. Like I have a different incentive if I'm gonna have a translation of this book out in the world, I want it to be great and really, really great. Which means my incentive is to work closely with the translator to make sure that what they're doing is the best it can be and that it's communicating what I intended. How do you do that in a language you don't speak? I don't know.

That's my question. So this is the, I don't have the answer, but I'm fascinated with the problem. So so far, the best idea is what I'm putting at inchword.com, which is this idea of incremental improvement. Oh, so this is your website? Yeah, I made it. It's my little passion. OK, all right.

So it's this idea where once I call up something done, whether it's an article or a book, I put every sentence into its own entry in the database. And then I pass it to a computer that does the first round of a bad translation. So now we have a starting point. So now, if you're the first translator to come through and translate the automatic translation into your language. Let's say that's a low bar, that's low hanging fruit.

So let's say that will pay 50 cents per sentence. But now, if you've done one round of improvements over the computer translation and now somebody else comes through and says hmm I can improve that further, that sentence, not the whole thing, that sentence I can improve that one. Now that'll pay like a dollar per sentence if it's an improved. And now say two different people have improved it twice and now a third person looks at that and says, hmm, I know how to improve that better. Okay, well now you can make, say, $2 per sentence to improve it better.

The stakes are getting higher for improving it. There are incentives now to make it as good as can be. How do you know if it's been improved? So yes, how do we know it's a better translation? So then we have readers who, reviewers, readers, whatever you want to call them, that are paid a little something to just read through and judge. And at any given sentence where an improvement has been made, both sentences are shown in random order and they have to vote for which one they feel is the better sentence in that

case. When the majority votes that that sentence is better then it's chosen and that's when the translator gets paid. So a translator can't get money just for coming in and spewing crap. They only get paid when the readers believe that that was a better translation. Anyway, I'm not saying this is the final answer

but I think it's a fascinating problem that I'm willing to spend money on because I'm incentivized to have the best translation of my works out there. That's it. If they are a good translator, how do you incentivize them to go first knowing that someone might come along and make substantially more money by doing the fourth or fifth iteration? Or is that not a problem? I don't know. So you just asked a great question. Thank you.

You're welcome. You're welcome. That question is kind of the answer. That's a really good thing to ask. I don't know. I mean, I know nothing about this. I'm not fluent in any other language, but you've probably seen this effect.

Whenever you start to learn another language, doesn't it make you look at your English more closely? Oh, a hundred percent. That's part of the fun. Yes. It makes you look at the whole world differently depending on how divergent the language is from your native language, in this case English for us. Oh yeah.

So, so, so interesting. It's just trying to help somebody with their approach to Japanese yesterday. And my first thought was, if you have like three or four weeks, maybe you go to South Korea first and try to pick up Korean because the reading is so much easier. So perhaps you could learn the basics of Korean, which isn't identical to Japanese, but the grammar is very, very, very, very similar. And then you go back to Japan with your newfound knowledge of the grammar without the handicap that slows you down of having to learn three writing systems, right? Hiragana, Katagana, and Kanji.

And I don't know if that's a good approach, but it was the first time it had occurred to me and I was like, huh, wonder if that actually would be helpful or kind of like Python and Ruby would just be confusing as fuck. Cause now you're like learn Portuguese and Spanish at the same time and you just get scrambled. It's possible that it would be the latter. Yeah. Okay. Do you remember Benny Lewis, fluent in three months, Benny Lewis? Sure. Yeah. the Irish polyglot, I think was the nickname. Yeah. Benny recommends Esperanto for that same thing that you just said.

He said, because of objectively Esperanto is the easiest language to learn. That's why it was invented in 1888 by Zamenhof to be easy to learn. Therefore, if you've never spoken a second language before, go learn some Esperanto first, get used to having a conversation that's not in your native tongue and then go learn your target language. I wonder if that's too much of a lift. Have you done it? Well, I will report.

I did it. I became fluent in Esperanto about six years ago on Benny's advice and I regret it. It's like less useful than Klingon, at least in communicating with others, right? Actually, I think Esperanto is hippie Klingon. I went to the annual Esperanto conference in Seoul, Korea, and it was a bunch of 60-year-olds in tie-dye singing about world peace, kind of like Woodstock 1969 revisited. They're all singing like, oh, the world would have perfect harmony if we all just followed the ways of Zamenhof and had the one world language. And even though I had spent six months learning this language, I got to the

event and I went, I don't like you people. I stopped on that day. I was like, I don't want to speak this language anymore. Okay. But so talk about like, you know, the Ruby Python, I never learned any Spanish my whole life, even though I grew up in America, I just thought, no, Spanish is too similar to English. If I'm gonna learn another language,

I want it to be Chinese or Arabic or something very different. So I never learned any Spanish, but just two months ago, I went to South America for my first time. And so I spent like a month learning Pimsleur basic Spanish. And Tim was like, oh my God, this is a great language. This is amazing. This is fascinating. It is. Also, it is so easy that I went,

damn it, Benny, shouldn't have learned Esperanto for six months. I should have learned Spanish. It's just as easy and it would have been more useful. Anyway, I like that you brought up the Korean thing. I think it is proven to be a good technique to do the easier language first to help you disconnect, or like you say, to help you understand the grammar and then do the difficult one.

But it does help, I guess, if it's Korean or a language that people actually use, not as a problem. Yeah, Spanish is a great language for people who are curious about Korean and just how brilliantly the writing system is designed as a point of national pride. And it is not something that was out of the box. It was something that was developed long after long after Korea had first adopted Chinese writing, much like the Japanese, there is a cartoon online and it is something like how to learn to read Korean in 15 minutes or how to read Korean in 15 minutes. And it's a comic book, you can find it. And literally, it might not be 15

minutes, but within two or three hours, you can learn Korean well enough that you can read anything in Korean. You will not understand a damn thing that you're reading, but you will be able to sound out phonetically, roughly, roughly what it is, which is great fun. And well enough that, you know, if you're as I was a few weeks ago in an Uber and you see the Uber app is set to Korean, you could say, you know, thank you or have a nice day or how are you in Korean and below that in the back. How did you know? And you'd be like, well, it's Korean on the app. Oh my God. If you want some cheap applause, that'll make somebody's day. That's that's an easy way to go.

You know, it's funny. It fits right in. You remember your whole like, hey, here's how to learn how to spin a pen with your fingers. Like here's some things you can learn in 15 minutes. Like the old like Tim Ferriss 1.0, South by Southwest. Yeah, exactly. Speak Korean in 15 minutes. Also courtesy of Japan for sure. This is what all the kids used to do in class. And now I have something that will endlessly distract and annoy everyone who

sees it from an airplane or something. Thanks, Japan. Oh, all right. What else do you have? Derek, anything else in that top hat? I'll just say this quickly. I love this little phrase. I realized when I was like digging into my incentives, why I do things. I travel to inhabit philosophies. You can hear about life in Brazil or life in Japan, but it's a different thing to be there in it. But I think there's some philosophies, whether it's Stoicism or Hedonism, that we can just do from a chair by just sitting and changing our thought process.

But Brazilianism, Japanism, Arabianism, I don't know, Parisianism, these are kind of like philosophies. The way that people live in places are kind of living philosophies that I want to experience what it's like because I want to think that way. So I would really like to go there, live as close as I can to being like a local, learn the language, live that life according to that way to inhabit, embody this way of living in order to feel the actual physical results, the actions of living that philosophy. And I thought, this is actually the reason I travel.

It's not to look at things or take pictures or post them to impress people. I travel to inhabit philosophies. I love that. What are you finding of the philosophy? What is the philosophy of the UAE or Dubai recognizing that the cultures are very different depending if they're by the hills or the water or the desert. But how would you try to express that philosophy? Easy generosity. That's the thing when I said that Sheikh Zayed who founded it, Bedouin culture underneath it and then say Emirati culture or Arabian Arab culture.

Generosity is by far the number one. If you read this book, Arabian Sands by Betjager, he has all these stories of when he'd be out in the desert on the camels with his little crew of six guys and they only have like this much food left, like nothing. And their tummies are grumbling and they're starving. It's funny that I said tummies. That was cute. I noted that for myself. When's my bedtime story, dad? And also my little rats here, I love kissing their little tummies. Anyway. Okay. So, but then if somebody would approach them, you know, like, oh, hello, my friend, whatever. He said, as soon as somebody approaches, that's it.

We're not going to eat today because this is the way. You give whatever you've got. So anybody a stranger approaches, you say, hello friend, come sit with us here. No, have some soup. Don't worry. We're not hungry. We've eaten enough. This is for you now.

Come sit with us. When I went to Dubai that first time, somebody I had met once from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, we met briefly in Oxford. He was the only person I knew that lived in the region. So I emailed him saying, Hey, man, I'm going to Dubai for my first time. Are you going to be around? And he said, my friend, he said, cancel your hotel reservation. He said, you're going to stay at my home in the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. You're going to stay. I have an apartment in the Burj Khalifa. Stay at my home. You're my guest. I said, wow, that would be great.

I said, it'll be so good to see you again. And he said, no, no, I won't be there. He said, I live in Riyadh, but my uncle will get you from the airport and just give you the keys. My home is your home, stay as long as you want. So I did, I stayed in the Burj Khalifa a few days. This generosity runs so deep.

It's hospitality, it's generosity. And you understand why, you're in the harsh environment of the desert. Everybody's living a harsh life when you meet somebody that's traveling and passing, it's like, come in, come in here, have some, don't even need to tell us your name or who you are, your tribe or nothing. Just come in, my guest, please have whatever you want, my food, take a bed, stay as long as you want.

And that's so deep in the culture that yes, I would like to inhabit that philosophy. Now that I've been on the receiving end of that hospitality, part of me kind of wants to have a home near the Dubai airport and make that my like my main home base. And for whenever I'm not there and I'm traveling to just open it up for any of my friends in the world. Like, please, you're coming through, please stay at my home. Like I want to return that. Is it going to be a six by eight foot tube? Touche. Come, my home.

Everything I have is yours. Wait, Derek, quick text. Where's the bathroom? Oh no, there's no bathroom. Oh no, my friend. Question whether you truly need it or not. You will find out. Let me know where you think the sink should be. I'll be a bad Emirati. I'll be fired. How is understanding that Dubai is an international city for a lot of different reasons. You could get by on English almost certainly. How is your Arabic coming?

Have you started tackling that? I haven't spent more time in Dubai yet. I'm planning on going back very soon and getting to know more people and spending more time there and considering it as a place I really might wanna live. Because I've just noticed throughout my life, like I grew up in a suburb of Chicago, then I moved to downtown Boston, then I moved to New York City in the middle of it,

and it was like, oh yes, this multiculturalism, like this feels more like representative of the real world to me, right? Then like when I went back to my hometown in Hinsdale, Illinois, it's like, ugh, everybody's white. This is weird. You know, it's like, I like places that are multicultural because it feels like I'm more in the real world, right? So I thought New York, like I've also lived in London, I moved to Singapore, I lived in Singapore for years. I thought I had been in the most multicultural places in the world, no.

I looked up statistically, New York, London, Singapore, they're all about 35 or so, 30 to 35% foreign-born population. Dubai is like 90 plus percent foreign-born population. Everybody is from everywhere. And so when I got there, it was like anthropology jackpot. I was like, ah, this is amazing. Everybody's from everywhere.

I could get into any taxi drive, you know, anybody. You can just ask anybody you see, where are you from? And you're going to get a different answer all the time. I'm from Cameroon. What are you doing here? I love languages. I say, okay, what does that mean? He said, well, I love languages. And I thought, where can I get paid to learn languages? I said, I'll move to Dubai. I'll drive a taxi. And I can get paid to learn languages. I said, did it work? He said, my friend, I can speak eight languages now.

I've been here 18 months. I can converse with people in eight languages. What? He said, everybody that gets into my taxi, I just talk with people all day long. He said, I speak Urdu, Hindi, Arabic. I think he grew up with French. He said, I'm speaking to you in English.

He said, I couldn't speak English 18 months ago. Now look at me. And he said, I'm getting paid to learn languages. This is amazing. And I turned to somebody else. I'm like, where are you from? She's like, I couldn't speak English 18 months ago. Now look at me. And he said, I'm getting paid to learn languages. This is amazing. And I turned to somebody else. I'm like, where are you from? She's like, I'm from Nairobi.

She had the most beautiful accent and we got into a long conversation about Nairobi. And I just thought, this is what I want. Like just by being in Dubai, the whole world comes through there and you meet so many people from all over the place. Oh God, this is what a beautiful place. Anyway, it's like, yeah, living in the Cantina and Star Wars. That's fine. You said it first. That's, that's what I usually say. It's like Dubai is the bar in Star Wars. It's the Cantina. Everybody comes from all over the world to this spot to kind of do their shady

dealings. But oh my God, if you're, if you're an amateur anthropologist like me, it's heaven. Well, I'm excited that you're excited, man. It's fun to see and I hope to break some bread in person in the not too distant future. What fun, always fun to hang out. Always great fun. Is there anything that you would like to say and think you'd like to point people to mention anything at all before we bring out the little buddies again pop off and land the plane these guys have been sleeping by my feet the whole time we've been talking adorable really good little

pets they're really if you don't wash your hands after you cook then you just let them lick your fingers oh he's licking me right now it's really sweet the way they lick they never ever ever bite very gentle unlike my hamsters I had when I was a kid, they were biters. Yes, same. I had gerbils. They were nasty. Anyway, I don't know. Well, you know my usual call out. I really enjoy the people that I've met through your podcast. So hey, anybody listen to this all the way through. I truly enjoy my email inbox. I spend about 90 minutes a day just answering emails and I really like it. So send me an email, say hello, introduce yourself,

especially if you're a translator or if you live in Dubai or you found anything here fascinating. All right, do you want them to do the detective work of finding the email address? Is that the hurdle? Oh, sorry, go to my website. Just go to sive.rs. There's a big contact me here link.

It's easy detective work. Okay, sive.rs. That's pretty low hurdle. If they can't clear that, then they have other problems. All right, man. Well, thanks for taking the time as always. Yeah. Really appreciate it.

Sorry I missed you in England. Yeah, next time. We'll both get our knees repaired and then we'll meet up for another walk and talk. I might ask you some tips on meniscus stuff. Oh boy. Yeah, we'll talk about the knee repair. For everybody listening, go to tim.blogs.com slash podcast. I'll link to everything we talked about, all the books, City of Gold, China's worldview, all of these various things the figures and places

Musicians and so on. Oh, I should say that useful not true is only through my website. It's not a fuck Amazon It's not on Amazon. I put it on my website only so don't go to Amazon and look for it and email me and ask Why it's not there because I don't like them. So go to Sivers.com Go to Sivers.com or Go to Sivers.com or S-I-V-E dot R-S, I guess this go to the same place and you can find all things about Derek and until next time be a bit kinder than is necessary not just to others but also to yourself and thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short that is Five Bullet Friday.

Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter, called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered

or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcasts, guests, and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blogslashfriday, type that into your browser, tim.blogslashfriday, drop in your email and you'll get the very

next one. Thanks for listening. Way back in the day, in 2010, I published a book called The Four Hour Body, which I probably started writing in 2008. And in that book, I recommended many, many, many things. First generation continuous glucose monitor and cold exposure and all sorts of things that have been tested by people from NASA and all over the place and one thing in that book was athletic greens. I did not get paid to include it, I was using it. That's how long I've been using what is

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