#67: Derek Sivers — Useful Not True

MP3s made a lot of people realize that there's no need for the record labels anymore. I can do this myself. And it was this huge uncorking of energy that suddenly everybody was so empowered to be like, right, I don't need to just sell my soul to the man. And honestly, it's been a little bit sad to me to see things are reverting back to the ass kissing, except now instead of kissing the ass of a man with a cigar and a suit, You're kissing the algorithm's ass. Let's blow up the internet from the basement to the higher net. Scrolling, tapping, man, we ain't done yet. Let's blow up the internet.

So I want to start off with a quote or belief that changed the way that I see the world. It's a Naval Ravikant quote. Understand that ethical wealth creation is possible. If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you. So this quote changed my life for sure. I think, you know, growing up, college kid, you know, you think that money is almost bad, right? You got to go work in corporate. You got to do whatever. And like reading this, realizing, oh, I could be happy, make money and make money ethically. Like there's nothing wrong with making money. And I really— this belief changed my life. And given your new book, Useful and Not True, is all about beliefs. I'm curious, what beliefs have you changed over the last few years and what led to the writing of the book?

That was a big two-part hello. So I think the Naval quote is a great example of how just changing the way you look at something can change your entire motivation, your entire strategy The whole way you approach something, the whole way that you choose what to do can be changed by one thought. And that is so badass. That is so fucking cool that you can change everything just by thinking of something in a different way. And honestly, it's just my favorite subject in the whole world because the coolest moments in my whole life have been moments like that. Like whenever you read that quote and you had this Whoa, whoa. Feeling. I love that feeling. That's the reason I keep reading so many books, is that constant search for that feeling, right? Or traveling to unusual places. I was in Oman, north of United Arab Emirates, sleeping overnight on a boat. And got in a conversation with an Arab man that was telling— I was saying something about the area we're in and asking him something about Arab culture. And he said, you've got to understand the culture of the desert people, the coastal people, and the mountain people are very different cultures. And I said, okay, well, I said, which are you? Which is your family? And he said, okay, well, my family was originally from the desert, but— or he said, no, my family's from the desert. But, you know, gradually it's like two uncles got into a fight or two brothers got into a fight and one went off to Iraq. And he said, but then the family eventually reunited. He said, but then Islam came around. And I said, wait, wait, wait, hold on. Islam came around in the year 640. I said, have you been telling me your family history from 2000 years ago? And he said, well, 1800 years ago. Yeah. I said, whoa, how the hell do you know your family history 1800 years ago? And he said, we keep good records. I said, whoa, okay, hold on. He said, yeah. He said, there's a downside to this. He said, I fell in love with a girl about 10 years ago. And he said, we were mutually in love. We wanted to get married. But her dad won't let us get married because there's an old 500-year-old feud between our families that was never resolved. He said there's pros and cons to knowing your family history that far back. So I just wanted to start with a non-businessy. Yeah, money example. I'm just like, that to me makes me go, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on. This is such a different way of looking at life. And I love those moments. I pursue those moments. And you can do it by traveling. You can do it by reading books, or most importantly, you can do it just by sitting and thinking about what's going on in your life and asking, well, what's another way to look at this? What's another way to think about this?

Yeah, I love the line from your book. The world is As negotiable as a flea market in America, only a fool doesn't haggle. And I love that. And growing up, you know, Jewish parents, the classic hagglers, right? I lived in Jerusalem and, you know, the shuk there is all haggling, right? And so it's— I don't know, I guess it's just built in me to haggle a little bit. Like, I want to negotiate. I find it fun. Yeah, I find the act of negotiating. People and negotiating with life, I find it joyous to like get what I want and almost like fight for it.

I don't know. Exactly. So I know it's with any of these subjects, right? We can talk about the mundane, tiny nitty-gritty, or you can use it as a great metaphor. So negotiating, you should check out— actually, no, you, Jason Levin personally, need to read a book called You Can Negotiate Anything by Herb Cohen. It is so good. On the surface, it's a book about negotiating price or terms, but you look at it one level deeper, as, as the author does, and he says, no, this is about life. Everything in life is negotiable. There is no stone tablet in the sky where everything is permanent and etched and done. Everything short of the laws of physics are negotiable. And that to me is the one of the biggest inspirations for a book like Useful Not True, which was to remind people that your entire outlook on life is negotiable. Yeah. The way that the job market, how you're going to make money, how you're going to or whether you're going to start a business. All of these things are— hold on, I've said negotiable too much. Let's see. They are just perspectives. But what's messed up is we live in a world where everybody tells us that their point of view is a fact, and that person is completely convinced that what they're telling you is a fact. They'll say, no, Jason Levin, here's the way it is. And they think that they're telling you the truth. And it can be good or bad. But regardless, you need to realize that it's just one point of view, that no matter what somebody tells you, you know, the only way to make it is this, or here's how you're going to get rich, or if you do this, it will be your biggest mistake. None of that is true. If we define true Or if we limit the word true to only the things that are absolutely, concretely, objectively true in life, because those are the only non-negotiables.

100%. I had so many people tell me there's no market for books about memes, right? I've had people tell me, you know, if you drop out, you'll never be able to get a job. You know, all these things. An English major can't work in startups, can't work in tech. Um, all these like things that are just opinions and like a younger me would be like, listen to them. Right. And because maybe my parents were saying these things, I would just listen. And then like, as I got older, trusting myself more with, more with it and realizing, oh, these are just opinions. And like, I might know better. Like maybe, maybe my opinion works. Uh, it's been super helpful, uh, for business, I feel like. Just in general, like if I believe in starting something, if I think there's a market, like, and I know it, if I think I know it best, I know it best, right? And I go for it. Right. It's been very powerful.

Well, wait, there are two ways, or let's say two stages of skepticism. So first, the kind of stuff we were just talking about, you can be skeptical or doubtful of the stuff that other people say. You can hear somebody say, well, Jason, this is the only way to make it. You can go, mm, I don't know about that. You can doubt that. That's step one. After you get good at doing that, the harder part is then doubting yourself so that if you say something like, this meeting is going to suck today, and to you it's just a fact, This is going to suck. And you have to catch yourself in those moments to go, whoa, hold on, wait. I'm declaring a point of view as fact, aren't I? Well, what's another way to look at it? How about this meeting is going to suck if I think it's going to suck? How about this meeting could be good if I go in with the right mindset, trying to extract value from a— like a cactus trying to get any little drop of water out of this dry situation here. I could do this. I could be a cactus. I can be a camel. Look, we're going for a Middle Eastern theme in our talk today. And you can walk into a room of people thinking that they're going to like you or thinking that they're not going to like you. And both of those beliefs are self-fulfilling. Anyway, the point is you got to catch yourself lying to yourself. That's harder. Much harder.

Yeah. And then choose the belief you want. You talk a lot about that, which I think most people don't really think is possible.

Yeah.

But could you explain a little bit more about that?

Yeah. So if you think of it like brainstorming, we've all heard the term brainstorming, which means don't just— definitely don't stop at the first idea. Don't stop at the second or third idea. Keep going. Even if like your fourth or fifth idea seems like a really good idea, You still keep going to try some others. And at some point you say, okay, that's— I've got 30 different ideas here. Now, which one will work best for me? And it's not asking yourself which one is right or which one is wrong or which one is true, but which one will put me into the right mindset that will create the actions that I need to take? Or shorthand, I call it useful. Which one of these is the most useful? So once you figure that out, then your job is to adopt this mindset, to get it into your bloodstream. And the way to do that is to— I, for me, I journal and I just, I talk to myself in my journal and I just stack up the reasons and I say, well, how can I believe? So if this were true, then this— what are the other implications of this? Okay, well, if this is If this is the— I say true, but you know what I mean. If this is the one I'm going to adopt, then this and therefore that. And I start stacking up the reasons why this belief is going to work for me and why I'm going to adopt this and what I'm choosing to believe now. And basically I psych myself out and pretty soon I've adopted it. I'm like, yeah, This is the approach I'm going to take. Years ago, I noticed that I was treating men and women very differently. And yet when I'd be talking with a man or talking with a woman, I, in my mind, I would think of them as very, very, very different types of people. And then I caught myself, well, that's not true. I think the differences among men and the differences among women are much greater than the general differences between men and women. So logically then, shouldn't I be treating men and women the same? So I just stacked up a whole bunch of reasons why I should be doing that. And I decided to just completely believe that men and women are exactly the same. But by doing so, I know that they aren't the same. But choosing to believe that and act that way is the counterbalance to the way I was being before. Right. So sometimes you have to choose a belief just to counterbalance the way that you've been the rest of your life, you know what I mean? So that was a concrete example where now I just choose to believe that men and women are exactly the same, even though I know it's not true, but it's useful to believe it.

Oh, I like that. Sometimes you got to you know, sort of fake it till you make it, right? Right.

Will put.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Sometimes it really works going up to talk to a girl. It's like, oh, she's into me. You know, just go for it. Who knows if that's true, but it's helpful. It's a lot more helpful than thinking she's not into you, right?

Yeah.

Or something that was big for me around marketing was, you know, growing up, you hear marketing, you think of it as like a dirty word, almost like, you know, scamming people or whatever. And then I think a, a boss probably earlier in my career was just like, marketing is just helping people find the solution to their problem. Yeah. And once I realized that, the idea of self-promotion, the idea of marketing became very cool and was like, oh, I'm just trying to get my solution to as many people as possible. And I do it in funny, clever ways, or I do it however I want. I could do paid ads, I could do organic. There's a ton of different ways. But if I have a real solution, that's all I'm doing is just helping people, right? And reframing that belief of marketing totally was just, poof, you know, totally blew my mind and shifted it and made me love what I do. So.

[Speaker:JASON_LEVIN] That's my first book. I never intended to write a book. I never wanted to write a book. People asked me for years to write a book. And I said, eh, I'm happy just doing my blog posts. And then Seth Godin called me and said, Derek, I'm starting a publishing company and I want you to write a book for me. Okay. Because Seth Godin, he's my hero. So my first book was called Anything You Want, and it was the story of how I started and grew and sold my company. And it's a very short little book, 88 pages, I think, 92 pages, something like that. And you can read it in an hour. But in it, I'm sharing my perspectives on business, and I realize that they're not necessarily true, but it's how I choose to look at it. So, for example, I say that the whole point of business is generosity. Business is a bandage for a problem. And for example, it should be the goal of the bandage to make the problem go away. And if a business dies, for example, that should be good news. That means the problem is gone. The wound has healed. You no longer need a bandage. So we should be happy if our business goes out of business and shuts down. You know, this should be good news. We're only here to solve a problem. We're just here to be helpful and generous. Anybody starting a business, we're like nurses. We're just here to help people with problems and help them heal their wounds. And if they don't need us someday, that's great. There's somebody else that needs a bandage.

Yeah, I think that belief would be very useful in the US right now. Is that belief— there's a very anti-capitalist trend going on right now, and it's, it's very tough to see when you have a completely opposite belief. Or— yeah.

Okay. So if you don't mind, you just said there's a very anti-capitalism mood in America right now. But I'd say the opposite is also true. I'd actually say that that's not— what you just said is not necessarily true. I think that there is kind of like, you know, the Game of Thrones and TikTok were rising in popularity at the same time that people could say, oh, nobody wants to watch long videos anymore. They're only watching these short little 6-second videos. It's like, well, that's not true. They spent, you know, 90 hours watching Game of Thrones. But if somebody could say, you know, nobody wants to watch 30-minute sitcoms anymore, they only want these really long shows. It's like, well, that's not true. You know, people are watching these really short little things on YouTube.

That's a great reframing. Yeah, you're 100% right. Like, I've heard so many people say, you don't need a podcast. There's enough podcasts. Why are you writing a book? There's enough books out there. And if you just change it, there's, there's not enough. Like I'm doing because there's not enough and I want my voice out there. I think the ideas can help people. Like, yeah, there's always— there's never enough. Yeah, I love that reframing. It's great.

One of my favorite perspectives on book reading is that these books are only like $12, right? If you get one good idea from a book, it was so worth the $12. If you can turn one— take one idea and turn it into something and take action on it, you've made made that $12 and 2 hours of your time very worth it. Um, a book doesn't need to be amazing through and through. It doesn't have to be a perfect book to be a good book. It just— if you can extract an idea out of it, it was worth it.

100%. One idea I'm really— I guess one belief I'm very fascinated with right now, uh, the, the movement starting— Brian Johnson, um, the Don't Die belief that he's trying to shift the meme around, shift the ideology around. I don't know if my brain's fully shifted it. And I think what's interesting is what you're saying is like he is sort of lying to himself. He says sometimes like, I think I might die. Like, I know I'm probably going to die, but it's useful to me to believe that I won't die and I'm going to act like I won't die and do the things that I would have to do to not die. And I think that's a really strong belief. And he seems to be living pretty good right now. I don't know. I don't know if he's happy, but he looks healthy. Yeah.

How old are you now?

26. All right.

I am twice your age. I'm 54. And I find it really useful to think that I'm going to die soon. I find it really, really motivating to think that I'm in the final quarter of my life now. Like, statistically, if you just look, because I was born in 1969. So if you look at people born, males born in America in 1969, the average lifespan, and if I calculate that out, then I'm definitely in the last third. And because I inherited a bad DNA from my dad and I've already had cancer like 4 4 times, 5 times. I'm probably going to be even less than that. So I'm just assuming I'm in the final quarter of my life right now. And that fucking motivates the hell out of me. I love that. There's no procrastination. You can't say, oh, someday, because I'm like, no, there is no someday. It's do it now or it won't happen. It is motivating as hell. I love assuming that I'm going to die soon.

I love that. Well, I appreciate you taking time to be here. Um, I, I think, uh, the idea of like using different philosophies as tools that you talk about in your book as well.

Yeah.

Um, like something I found, and you know, there is this meme around this is like philosophy majors tend to be like very miserable people. But if you, if you're just like a normal person and read philosophy, like you're pretty happy generally. Like I use Stoicism when I want to, but then maybe like I'm going out on the town and I use hedonism when I want to, you know?

Yes.

And, uh, like philosophies are just toolkits, you know, and the more you have in your tool belt and know about, the better.

I love that. Yeah, yeah, that's my, that's my take on it. I just yesterday learned a word, uh, anti-philosophy, which apparently is a term that I need to read a book about. Unfortunately, the only book about anti-philosophy is in a paper-only version. It's not on Kindle, so to get it here in New Zealand— I live in New Zealand, and, uh, It would take, you know, a couple of weeks to get the paper book to arrive here. But I'm looking forward to reading a book about anti-philosophy. If anybody's curious, just search the web for the term because I don't have anything to say about it yet. But it sounds really interesting. Yeah, it's about like basically ignore or kind of disregarding all the theoretical and focusing only on the practical aspects.

Yeah. Were there a lot of beliefs you had to change after you sold your company? I imagine there must have been so many in your life that just things changed, right?

Hmm. Yeah. I was trying to be of a useful tool. I was trying to be useful to people. But when you are useful, you are a tool. You're trying to make yourself into a good tool that people can use. And after I sold my company, I was kind of like a— it was almost like in Toy Story. I was like a discarded tool that was like under the bed nobody was using anymore. And I was like, nobody's using me. And so you can imagine I reframed that. I went, oh, wait a second, I'm nobody's tool anymore. I can just do things because I want to do them, not because they're useful to others. I think I had been in this service mindset like every waking minute for so many years, like 15 years. Every minute of my waking life, I was trying to be useful to people. And to let that go let me do things like travel. That's when I started traveling. I was like, I'm just going to go to India for a month and just read and hang around. And then I went to Iceland for a month and then I just went and popped around and just did whatever the fuck I wanted to without trying to be useful to people. And that was very liberating. And in the end, more— there was more self-care in that, you know, I was just doing what was interesting to me. And actually, I've been working so hard at this book And well, back to back, I've been working on books, books, books for many years now. This is my 5th book and I don't have a book idea that I'm— that's burning at me right now. So I might just like fuck off and go learn Chinese for a year or something like that, which is useful to nobody but me.

Yeah, I love that. I find it very hard to do things that aren't useful.

Yeah.

I didn't used to be like that. Um, but I think money and like once you're on that train, your brain gets used to it. Like I was talking about this with, uh, Nat Eliason, a friend of mine, um, on my podcast that just went out today. And, um, they're like, I haven't written fiction since college and I used to do that all the time. And it's because I'm so in this nonfiction. Writing blogs, writing on the internet, and then the muscle is like kind of gone. Where it's not gone, you know, but I just, yeah, I'm like, ah, you know, who's gonna read it? Like, I don't have that big of an audience to sell fiction or get a book deal. Like, who's it gonna be useful to? Like, should I write the screenplay? Even though I love writing screenplays, like, if it's not gonna go out there, is it even useful? And it's like, well, maybe, like, it's just useful to me. And like It's hard to— it's once like I'm having trouble getting that back and I just never want to lose that because it's such a joy to me. Yeah. So it's something that I'm like spending time on is trying to get back into that and, and writing just for me, not for the internet, just, just for me.

Right.

Like, yeah, it's fun.

You know, you just answered something that a lot of people ask. Which is how do you decide what's worth doing or what to do next? And honestly, most of my motivation comes from the kind of thing you just said, where you're feeling unbalanced in some way. Something's lacking. You've got an abundance here and a lack here. And so, well, usually what to do next is to head towards what's lacking and give it more attention. So if you've been, uh, if you've been ignoring your health for too long and you're feeling the effects of that, well then that's a good thing to prioritize now. And, uh, if you've been ignoring your fiction writing or writing just for yourself for too long and you're starting to feel the pain of that, well then that should bump it way up in priority on your list of what to do.

Yeah. Yeah, 100%. I'm, uh, I need to do that more. I love doing it. And so it feels good to be able to do that, uh, more. So I'm curious as well, you've been doing this for a long time, just like coding up your own apps for yourself. Like when we booked this podcast, I was like, I used your custom system to book it. Um, I believe, and, uh, I know reading some of your work that that's just like something you've done. Um, yeah, in the past it's just like code up stuff. And I think we're getting to a point where like most people aren't gonna be doing that, but like it's coming where, um, with some of these tools, like AI tools in general, Cursor, whatever. Um, do you think about that much? Are you still coding up new stuff, making new tools around that?

Oh yeah. I mean, yeah, all the time. Uh, in fact, it's my top priority right now. I'm rebuilding a translation tool I first built 4 or 5 years ago called InchWord, you know, like inchworm, but with inchword. So inchword.com is no AI. It's actually tools to assist human translators. So it's what I've used to translate my first 4 books. And now, as it came time to do the 5th book, I realized the tool could be improved. So I kind of— I've been in there coding like 18 hours a day for the past 12 days or so, just coding this tool. And it's what I'll do as soon as we get off the phone today. I'll go back to programming. So I just love it. I think it's— if you imagine the— anybody who's a real aficionado of a certain craft, right, like a carpenter, who's really like a master carpenter and cares so much about being a carpenter, can't just go pick up a sofa from IKEA. They care too much, you know, or a chair or a table. You can't just go get some cheap thing. You're just like, no, I care too much. I'm just— I'm going to make it myself. So I'm like that with software that so much of my life is spent on the computer using this tool to reach out to the whole world and manage all my stuff. So I care too much to just hand it to some big fucking company with some fucking cloud thing charging me $9.95 a month for the rest of my life. No way. I care too much. And maybe more importantly, you can't help but get kind of philosophical when you make your own software because you start asking, well, what is it really about? What am I really doing here? What is a meeting, really? You know, what is— or, you know, what is a translation really? I mean, ultimately, I mean, okay, well, check this out. The book that you— okay, you listen to the audiobook, but if somebody were to read one of my books, what you see there on the page is actually generated by my database where I write sentences that are in chapters, and then those chapters are in sections and the sections are in a book. But it's not quite a book, right? It's because if somebody translates it into French, is that a different book? Well, it is, but it isn't. So then I realized that I have a concept of the meta book, which is, say, useful, not true. The meta book is a thing up here that we don't really have a name for, that my English version is a book, of that meta-book and the French version will be a different book of that meta-book. So when— but this mattered in my store because if Jason buys my meta-book Useful Not True and you paid the $15 for it, well, then you should be able to read it in either English or Hebrew. If you read Hebrew, for example. How long did you live in Jerusalem, by the way?

Just 3 months. I— I'm so bad at Hebrew. I'm so bad.

Still confusing. Yeah, it's such an interesting place. I mean, you saw in my book.

Yeah, you heard it.

It's one of my favorite places. I want to live there someday. Yeah. So, so to me, you bought the Meta book from me. You didn't just buy the English version. You didn't just buy the paper version. Oh, that's a different thing. Like, to get the paper version, is the audiobook a different book? Is the ebook a different book? Well, someday, if there's like an AI book, will that be a different book? No, I think you already paid for that AI book when you bought the MetaBook. So what I'm selling on my sivers.com website are not editions. I'm selling the MetaBook. So when you spend the $15 on Useful Not True, you're buying every format, every translation. You've paid for all of the offshoots of this book. And so you see what I mean? It's like just by deciding to program this myself instead of just punting it off to Amazon, I get to get philosophical and ask myself, well, what is a book really? And that's very exciting. I'm sorry, I did— to wrap up the tangent where I started, the book that you'd read if you were to get my paper book is actually the database outputting each of my sentences. So I actually store every one of my sentences in the database in its own separate entry, and then the translators translate Each sentence has its own separate entry, and each translation then is kept separately. And this is all in my system.

And that's just to make it more accurate, or what's the reason for that?

More accurate. Also, for my own nerdy reasons, I get to learn more that way. So I, I speak a little French. I mean, any English speaker can look at those words and recognize that French and English are so similar. And so it's really interesting to me then to have instead of just a whole book full of French in front of me. Now I've got every one of my sentences mapped the English to the French, and I'm able to look at my English sentence, look at the French sentence, get the similarities, notice which word I don't understand in that sentence. Anyway, you could just tell that I just nerd out about this subject.

I love it.

I love it. And so the idea, the idea of handing it off to Amazon going, well, I wrote my book, okay, 'Take it, Amazon. Go, you know, pay me my little 30% of all of your sales, and you just keep all the customers.' And, well, hope it goes well. Fuck that. No way. I want to do this shit myself.

I love it. I love the nuanced perspective of it. I'm building software right now, and it's silly software, of course, but I'm building a meme editor from scratch. And so, you know, I built an MVP of it. Uh, it's called Meme Alerts and it delivers new viral meme templates to, you know, hundreds of paying subscribers now. Right. And it's like a very silly idea. Um, but it helps marketers like go viral and all like we had to do kind of just, you know, scrape the internet, find composability remixes of the memes, how often it's getting remixed. And now it's like, all right, how do I build The best meme editor, right? Like from scratch. And I love going from a writer to building software. It's like a whole new brain function that is unlocking that I'm having so much fun with. It's like going from a poem to writing like a book to writing now, like writing a world. And, um, I think like, you know, I'm, I'm using Bubble. I'm not doing anything fancy. I have a couple of engineers helping me. I'm playing around a little bit. But I think we're getting to that point where more and more people are gonna be experimenting, building their own software. And, uh, if you're listening to this and haven't tried it, like I encourage you to even just try with the no-code, try with whatever it might be. It's like new neurons are firing in different ways and I, I'm finding it just very fun. And like, like you said, first principles, totally like you take your philosophy and input it into the software. And then other people get to use it, which is like, yeah, that's a crazy feeling. That's—

yeah, talk about applied philosophy instead of just, you know, sitting inside of a university discussing the meaning of life and arguing about the meaning of life and trying to prove that you're right and others are wrong. I mean, you could just take your outlook on something and turn it into a tool that everybody uses.

Uh, yeah, I never liked philosophy classes. I always found it very nuanced and pointless to just argue about like the structures of— I don't know, I just hated it.

Yeah, but you know, I probably also wouldn't like a programming class. I, I'm only motivated to program my own stuff. I don't think I could get a job at a bank programming, you know, whatever, interest rates or whatever it may be.

Yeah. Have you always been like that, just very do it your own way, because I personally, I've been like that and I think it's— I don't think everybody's like that.

You can say, yeah, I have a hybrid. It's the stuff I care deeply about. Then I want to micromanage that and shape it in my own way to make it just the way I want it to be. If I don't care that much, then I'm happy to just go with whatever best practices, whatever people say is good. So, for example, right outside my door here, there's just a Nissan Leaf car that's just shitty with a big dent in back. And who cares? I don't care about my car. My car is— that's not in my circle of concern. I don't care that much about my car. So I just— I needed a car when I moved to New Zealand, I spent, I don't know, literally like 30 minutes online going, okay, I mean, obviously electric's the way to go. What's a good electric? What are the options? This is the expensive one. This is the mid-range one. Here's the cheap one. I'll do the cheap one because I don't care. So I get, it was like a 20-minute decision, called around, found a Nissan dealer, showed up, went, okay, there's the white one. I'll take it here. Done. So that was like, that's not something I micromanaged. Same thing with when it comes to fitness and diet. I'm not that interested, but of course I want to be healthy. So just tell me what to do. Tell me what I should be eating and should not be eating. Tell me what exercise I should be doing. You're the expert that has spent 1,000 hours on this. I trust you. I don't need to read a big book on it even. I don't care. Just tell me what to do and I'll do it. But now when it comes to software and it comes to books, writing, music, there are just a few things that I really care about. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, I don't believe any of you. Okay, if that's the way you like it, that's fine. I'm not just going to hand my stuff to Amazon. Even, dude, you'd notice I'm not even on any social media. I don't really like platforms. I was affected by the indie music revolution where for decades musicians had been selling their rights to record labels. You know, all these old Beatles records or whatever, they're not owned by the Beatles, they're owned by EMI. So EMI or whatever company gives them a big advance so that whatever music they write is now owned by EMI. They own the copyrights and they can do whatever they want with it. The Beatles can't. I mean, this is true with any musician. The musician signs a deal so that somebody else owns their rights. And that was true all the way up until like 1999, 2000, when MP3s made a lot of people realize that there's no need for the record labels anymore. I can do this myself. And it was this huge uncorking of energy that suddenly everybody was so empowered to be like, right, I don't need to just sell my soul to the man. I don't need to kiss that boss's ass to please him. I can go directly to the fans myself. And that was true. And so that uncorked all this energy, this great creative energy, musicians doing it themselves instead of signing a record deal. And honestly, it's been a little bit sad to me to see things are reverting back to the ass-kissing. Except now, instead of, instead of kissing some, instead of kissing the ass of a man with a cigar and a suit, you're kissing the algorithm's ass. You're, you're doing a whole bunch of open-mouth, oh, pictures on, on YouTube to please the algorithm. You're kissing the algorithm's ass and musicians are kissing Spotify's algorithm's ass to get on more playlists on Spotify, and authors are kissing Amazon's ass to get their book placed more. And I'm just like, no, I, I stopped ass-kissing a long time ago, so I have no interest in algorithms and platforms. I'd rather just— I'm happier to just not. I'm happier to sell it my own way, even if it means I reach a few less 12-year-olds this way. I'm okay with that.

I love it. I love it. Yeah, a lot of music I feel like is just getting created for viral TikToks at this point. You could feel it in some of the music. It's like, oh, this was just created to be a viral TikTok. It's kind of strange.

It's a, it's a little bit sad to me, this, this mindset of, um, whenever you see somebody being too desperate You know, love me, love me. Do you like me? Do you like this? If I say this, will you like it? If I do this, will you like it? If I do this, then now do you like me? It's like, oh God, you're being pathetic. Just relax. It's okay to be a little less popular and not be so desperate. In fact, that whole desperate for clicks thing is such a turnoff.

I agree. I think people can really sense if you're having fun on the internet. I think that's another thing is like, yeah. If you're just doing it for the money, people can sense that. You'll see like a lot of engagement bait. But if you're just having fun and you could tell that with music as well. I was thinking about this other day, like, and startups, right? So like musicians, let's say, you know, goofy, some, some goofy rapper, like one of my favorite rappers, Chance the Rapper, right? And his early mixtapes, right? He was having so much fun. And like, as he's gotten older, like, it's just ass kissing. And like no longer fun. And you see that with startups too, where like early stage startups, like my friend Tyler Dank, right? He runs Beehive and he is just having fun. Like you could just tell he is at his prime just having fun and it like, it's just so much fun to watch.

Yeah.

And I hope he carries that through with him. Right. And like, it looks like Zuck is having fun now. Speaking of like later stage founders, it looks like he wasn't for a while. Now he's having fun. The point I'm saying is like, there's something when you could see somebody who's having fun online, and I hope people get that. And it's pretty obvious that I'm having a good time. I got, you know, my Memelord69 jersey next to me. I'm having fun. Like, I think people could really tell, and, uh, an infectious energy, uh, when you're just doing it because you love doing it. Yeah, I'm definitely seeing that with software too, like just in general, like the, the design of software when, when somebody really loves the craft of it. That makes me so happy. Um, even if it's like, I hate Arc Browser. I hate it so much. I've tried using it. Ah, it is the most confusing, awful app ever, but it's beautiful. And like, I could tell that they really thought this through. I hate it, but I respect it. You know, I respect that they thought it through and the design is delightful. I'm not using it, but it's beautiful. I think people are hungry for that.

I think they really are. Yeah. The, I think like some, when you talk about the dissatisfaction with some piece of software you're using, what I always want to do is strip it down to only what I want. I usually don't want 95% of the features and I don't like that they slow it down or bloat it up or whatever. And I think, wouldn't it be nice if it just had the little 5% that I need? So that's often what I'm making. I used to, for my website, Sive.rs, I used to use WordPress at first. When I first sold my company, I was like, oh, maybe I'll start a personal website. You know, I still have more to say that I used to say on the company blog because it was my company. I thought, well, I guess I need to do a Sivers site. And so at first I just used WordPress, right? And But eventually I was like, oh God, this has so much crap I don't need. And so I used to just go into those HTML templates and strip away all that crap I didn't want. But then I still had the software itself, which had all this crap I didn't want just to create an HTML page. And I thought, but I know HTML. What is all this? In fact, I don't need 99.9% of this. I really just need the HTML with my words inside paragraph tags. That's it. And I stripped it down and just remade it as a static site. But even then I noticed that I was tracking hits, analytics, all that crap. I used to have a little Google Analytics crap in there and it took about a year for me to look at that again and go, wait a second, I don't even look at my stats. Or if I do, I kind of look at them, I go, Oh, well, all right, more people. But I wasn't acting upon it. So, hey, back to useful, not true. I realized that these analytics were not useful to me. So why am I pushing that crap down the wire to everybody that views my site on every device if I'm not even using it? It's just I'm polluting. So talk about a reframing. I think of every unnecessary line of code as pollution. The same way that every unnecessary item laying on a road is pollution. So it's digital pollution. And so I have stripped away all the digital pollution off my site. I don't even track anything anymore. I don't keep any logs or hits because I realized I wasn't acting upon it. So if you're not going to act upon it, why are you doing it? Yeah, I don't.

And I feel like you live the philosophy with books as well. Short books.

Oh yeah.

All the words that are pointless. Who needs them?

Every sentence I can get rid of, I get rid of. The only sentences that are left are the ones that had to be there because I don't want somebody to spend 7 hours reading a 400-page book. If I can say the same thing in 90 pages, then that's my job to not waste your time. It's my job to spend a few more months compressing that book down to only 90 pages so that you can read the whole thing in an hour. Yeah, if I sell 20,000 books, That's what my books have been selling usually. There's like, wait, sorry, 20,000 hardcovers. With the ebooks, it's like more like 50,000. So if I'm selling 50,000 books or 50,000 people get that book and read it, and if I reduce it down to 1 hour instead of 9 hours, I think of like how much time I've saved humanity by putting in that extra year of editing up front.

Oh, I wish so many authors had that mindset.

Yeah, me too.

Think about like, it's so sad how You grow up in high school and you're just like trying to shove as many words as possible. It's so dumb. And then the internet just retrains you the opposite. And yeah, there, I guess Naval had a good quote about it. It's like, nothing made me a better writer than Twitter. Right? Like Twitter has helped me personally a lot, like condense my words into as brief as possible. Untrain myself from the high school, shove as many words as I can, like fancy eloquent words. Like, I'm writing for people in India, you know, people in India, Hong Kong buy my books. English might not be their first language. Say it simple. Say it clear. You don't need to be fancy. Like, say it clear. Rethinking writing for the internet has been very powerful, uh, for me. Definitely rethinking the belief around that.

Um, same.

Yeah, yeah.

Paper books too, for what it's worth. When I made that decision 5 years ago that I was going to start making paper books, I went, well, I like trees. I don't want to— I want to kill as few trees as possible. I was like, all right, that actually made me a better writer because I started looking at every sentence like, all right, does that really need to be there? Is that really worth chopping down a tree for? It's like, nope, nope, nope, scratch, scratch. And I really honed these, especially when you think of physical hardcover books as something that might sit in somebody's house for 40 years. And be found 40 years later by a grandkid that's reading this book that was written way back in 2020, in the year 2060. You want to make sure that those sentences stand the test of time, that every single sentence in that book really should be the best fucking sentence it can be. If somebody is going to be reading that in 40 years, and if you chopped down trees to print that sentence in ink, it better be damn good. So that pressure on myself made me a better writer.

Yeah, I forget who said the quote. It's like, if I had the time, I would have written shorter essay, right?

Yeah.

So much easier to write longer. It's a lot harder to cut. Curious, have you been reading anything good lately?

No, I wish.

I don't know if you're a sci-fi fan. It's a long book, but The Unincorporated Man. I've been telling everybody about it. I think you'd love it. You'd probably love it.

Okay. I hadn't even heard of it. Unincorporated Man.

Yeah, it's a futuristic society where companies own equity in everyone and you have to fight your whole life to get equity back. And oh, it's so good. It's just so good. Like total hero's journey. Atlas Shrugged in like 700 years.

Wow. Yeah, I can relate.

Yeah, I think a lot of us can. Yeah. Fighting to get the equity back.

Unincorporated. I like that a lot.

Yeah. Yeah. I think what you were saying earlier was also interesting going back to it is like you can only be a guinea pig for so much, right? Like Tim Ferriss, right? He's the human guinea pig of health, right? But like, I personally, I can't do that. I don't care that much about my health. Just let me listen to Tim. Let me listen to Andrew Huberman. Huberman has a protocol on a blog. Let me just copy paste that to my life, right?

Yep.

Like for other things, like Marketing, I'm going to figure it out myself. I like doing it. I find it really fun. Like Photoshop, like I am obsessed. I've been doing it since I was 11 or 12. I'm going to always keep trying it, right? Some things like I just, I can't figure out. I still don't know how refrigerators work. Just give me the refrigerator. Like I'll just take it. Fuck it. Like, you know, like I don't know how my car works.

Like, right.

Like I don't need, I don't need to know. I don't really need to know. I mean, I guess maybe that's a bad thing, but.

No, because this is what you have to remember. Whatever you nerd out about, somebody else somewhere else doesn't care about that thing. And they'd rather say, Jason, just tell me what to do with my marketing. Jason, just help this thing go viral. I don't know. I don't care that much. Just can you help my auto repair shop? Yeah, viral. And it's like, all right, now you've got— they care deeply about cars and care nothing about memes. You care deeply about memes and care nothing about cars. It's a perfect match. And it's beautiful to remember that whatever you don't care about or whatever you don't want to do, somebody somewhere really wants to do that and really cares about it.

Yeah, 100%. I love that, dude.

Here's one more example. This, uh, this jacket I'm wearing right now was basically made I did. Why did I say basically? This jacket was made by a clothing nerd in London that really, really nerds out on lines and such, whatever. And I sat with him as he made this jacket for me. We did it during COVID lockdown. He just measured me and I just watched him fold and cut. And even just the choice of fabric he had, like, let me guess, he probably had like about 100 different fabrics to choose from. And even just choosing the exact fabric that he was going to make this jacket out of. He really nerds out about the lines on this. And it was really fun because I don't care. This is actually one of those examples like the health or car example, like just tell me what I should be wearing. And so I met this guy. It's Michael Browne. I should— might as well give him a plug. Browne with an E on the end. So Michael B-R-O-W-N-E. And I believe.eu is his website. He's based in London. and I was living in Oxford, England at the time, and it was during lockdown and met him and I was just dressed like crap and just the usual t-shirt that somebody had handed me at a conference, you know? And I said, yeah, you know, I don't want to wear these free t-shirts anymore. What should I be wearing? And somebody like Michael Brown says, oh, here's exactly what you should be wearing. You know, now let the, let the person who nerds out on clothing take care of it for you. So now I just— I only wear what Michael Brown tells me to wear.

That's why I let my wife dress me, because I do not care at all. She— so it's actually really funny. She works for Burberry in corporate.

And perfect.

So you think about like tech guys, most of us as like a stereotype really just don't care. The t-shirt, sweatshirt, whatever. Like it'd be so easy if they just like put Burberry on some of like the big tech podcasters. I just don't care. Like I'm the same way. Like I don't wear a watch. Like Why am I going to wear— I don't need a fancy watch personally. Like, I just look at my phone. Like, I don't know. But if I've got, you know, some big meeting, maybe I'll just get the fancy watch. Like, whatever. The point is, like, you can only choose so many things to care about, I guess, right?

Yeah.

So yeah, I choose—

That was a great ending. You get—

there's only—

you can choose so many things to care about. Yeah. Yeah. And actually, it does feel nice to adopt another one. If at some point in your life, not making yourself care about something, but if something starts to become interesting and maybe you enjoy riding a bicycle and you think you start to care about bicycles and you let yourself nerd out on the subject and learn a bit more about it, find what makes a good bicycle, the difference between aluminum and steel, the difference between steel and carbon, maybe between carbon and titanium. And you kind of nerd out for a while. It can be fun to expand your world of care a little bit, you know.

But that is true. I have, I have been finding that in some things actually, like specific notebook, like a nice, a nice notebook, like the little things that you start caring about.

Types of coffee.

I really want to like— yes, just get into types of coffee. Like, I don't want to just drink this crap cold brew that I drink. Like, I want to actually coffee Let's use that example for a second.

An old friend of mine, John Buckman, he in the '90s wrote a mailing list software called Liris, L-Y-R-I-S, which then he sold to one of those MailChimp-type companies that sold it to MailChimp and whoever. He took that money, was living in London for a while, and he loved espresso. He cared very much about finding a really good espresso, and he found it was really hard to find really good espresso. So at a certain point, he nerded out about this so much that he said, well, if I care so much about espresso and it bothers me so much, maybe this is something I should do something about. So he went and decided to start an espresso machine company that was going to be the best damn espresso machine company, like really turning all of his nerd energy into making not just the most commercially viable or trying to sell a lot of units, but making the best damn espresso unit. So he humbly called the company Decent Espresso, and he figured out where to make it the best was Hong Kong. So he moved to Hong Kong, threw himself completely into Decent Espresso. And if you go to YouTube, he basically has practically livestreamed the whole process. You can go back even, I don't know, 10, 15 years now to when he started it. And the whole way he is constantly making these videos showing you the difference of this and then showing the factory and then how made this and showing the failures and showing the experiments and showing what worked and, uh, just nerded out because he cared so much about the subject. And it's funny to see my old friend John care so much about espresso that he turned it into like this 15-year so far.

I love it. I love it. I mean, I didn't, I didn't care about memes like 3 or 4 years ago. I really did not care too much and then just fell down the rabbit hole of like all this different all these people who were running meme pages and wrote the book about it and interviewed all these people. It was like, oh my God, it's so smart. Like, they're so fast to make, they're so easy. It's like I did not care. And then just like, whoa, you just fall down a rabbit hole and yeah, it's fun. I love it. This has been an awesome conversation, Derek. I feel like just like super enjoyable. I really, really, really appreciate it. I've been a fan for a while and Very cool to talk to you about beliefs, and I just thank you a lot.

Thanks, man. Yeah, and anybody who listened all the way to the end of this thing, please go send me an email. Uh, as you heard, I'm not really on the socials, so my email inbox is my social network. I actually really like hearing from people around the world. I think it's fun. I take an hour or two a day to just answer every email.

Can you share your email?

For— Oh yeah. Yeah, we'll just go to my— go to sivers/contact. So it's sivers/contact. And there's my email address right there. And it's me. I answer every single email and I love it. That's how you and I met for the first time. Was it 2 years ago that you first emailed me?

Yeah, it was a while ago.

I think it was.

It was a while ago. And then, yeah, made it happen.

Made it funny.

I remember the first time I saw sivers. I was like, you could do that? Like, that was one of like the beliefs that I just— it's— you could just make your name a fucking domain? That's the most badass thing I've ever seen.

Well, it was so cool. You know what actually came from— for years and years and years, I had sivers.org because I was trying to show that this was my non-commercial blog. So I actually own sivers.com,.net,.org, and a bunch of others. Because, you know, there aren't that many Sivers out there, and I was nice and early. Dude, I've been online since 1994, right? So, um, so I did sivers.org for a long time, and then kind of like that minimalism thing I was saying, I looked at the.org, I was like, I'm not an organization. I was like, what is this.org at the end of every, at the end of my name all the time? I was like, that's not necessary, is it? Like, the Republic of Serbia is.rs, and I was like, That's the last— I don't need the.org anymore. I could just, you know, so I nerded out on like trying to not just scrape away every sentence that's not necessary in my books, but trying to scrape away every letter of my URLs that aren't necessary.

So I love it. I just bought JasonLevin.blog, so same thing. Yeah.

But, and you saw Naval has nav.al. That's a good one too.

Total 5 letters. That's pretty sick.

Yeah.

I, you know what?

I will, uh, a friend of mine years ago, uh, was trying to get, um, the Isle of Man is.im, and he was trying to get t.im as his domain name, and I wonder if it would have been a good one.

That's funny. I, I was looking for me.me for meme, and then memes.com, I was trying to get that. Available, but one day, one day, whoever's sitting on that, that's really—

I don't know what's crazy unless they don't sell it, then that's stupid.

Yeah, memes.com actually, like, they've had it since like 1996. It's pretty insane to think about. Yeah, I, I tried going through a GoDaddy domain broker and everything. Like, whoever has it is somebody who was early and like is just holding on to it for the long haul. They said they're not even negotiating, even thinking about it for memes.com. Like, no.

So they're not using it either.

I mean, it's like a crappy, like, website. Like, they're— they can't be making real money from it, but it comes up first if you search for memes. I offered, I was like, hey, $100K, like, just to throw it out there, see what happens. And like, they're just like, we're not even thinking about it, not even considering.

Huh. So it's interesting. I mean, I know a friend of mine owns Taxi.com, and it is a valid musician service that he's running. But I think he said— he told me like 18 years ago that people were offering multimillion dollars to buy the domain name taxi.com. And he said no. And he's holding out. But I always wonder then, are you holding out because you think the price is going to keep going up? Because it seems to me like now, like the importance of the domain is kind of falling. So they might, might have missed that window. I'm not sure.

I want to, I want to get it so bad. I also wanna steal Jason Calcanis's @Jason on Twitter. Like, if he gets hacked, just know it's me, man. I'm taking it. It's me. I'm coming for you, Jason Levin.

There's a great ending.

Yeah.

Coming for you, Jason.