The Art of Slow Thinking with Derek Sivers

It's a trade off that if you want to live simply and live free, you have to understand that you can do anything, but you can't do everything.

Anytime you negotiate with someone, if you say, but you said blah, blah, blah not too long ago, people will hold onto their identity and that congruence and consistency even when it doesn't serve them.

I think we all.

Probably have things in our identity that we could expire right now or that have expired and we should be letting go of, you know, the rotten food in the fridge, it's time to throw it out. That avocado is done.

Welcome to Capability Amplifier. This is Mike Koenigs. I'm here today with a very special guest, Derek Sivers, someone I have paid attention to for a long, long time. You may know him from CD Baby, you might know him from his TED talks, you might know him from the Tim Ferriss podcast. But one of the biggest takeaways I have here is I didn't know about or didn't remember this big trust that you set up. It's one of the things that's enabled you to have the freedom you have. But if you want a simple minimalist life that you love, Derek is just filled with great ideas. So, Derek, what's one big idea that you're walking away with from this episode?

It's a trade off that if you want to live simply and live free, you have to understand that you can do anything, but you can't do everything. You have to decide.

Well said. Well, this I guarantee will be an extraordinary and very different podcast than you're used to on this show. But you'll walk away with some big, big nuggets and Derek will make you think through a very, very different lens. So I first got introduced to you, Derek, through your company, CD Baby. I was an early client, one of the first, and then Bookbaby, of course, and really enjoyed. I think it was 2010, you did a TED talk called how to Start a Movement that I just checked today has over 10 million views, 1.6 million on YouTube, and then there's a variant of it that's got millions more. So one of the things that you talk about often is that you're besides being an author, a musician, a techie, a coder, diy, or you're a self described slow thinker. So I want to know what that is and were you born this way or is it something you developed?

I think the reason that is is because I've found that the top of mind answer is not usually the Best one, I think the things that come to mind first are often knee jerk reactions.

Or they are answers that we've memorized from our past. You know, long ago somebody says what's most important to you? And long ago you picked something, you said family, you know, and then you just start to identify with your past. We all have this need to be congruent with our past self. And so because you give an answer in the past, you remember that. And so next time somebody says what's important to you, you say family right away. But, you know, that might not be the real answer anymore. So I like to stop and think.

On any given subject. Even if we're just having a conversation with friends, I very often, hmm, I stop and think. Or that's why I'm terrible in any kind of debate situation, you know, because somebody brings up something interesting and in the moment all I have to say is, hmm. And then like the next day I know what I think about that because I like to look at things from different angles.

That's solid also at what I'm hearing, and I'll get to this a little bit later, is, you know, giving yourself time to rethink your identity because it's so easy to fall into that trap. And I know from anytime you negotiate with someone, if you say, but you said blah, blah, blah not too long ago, people will hold onto their identity and that congruence and consistency even when it doesn't serve them.

Yeah, yeah. I think we all.

Probably have things in our identity that we could expire right now or that have expired and we should be letting go of, you know, the rotten food in the fridge, it's time to throw it out. That avocado's done. Let it go. You know, there are things in our identity that are like that. I think about the cliche is somebody who is an athlete in high school.

Keeps thinking of himself as the quarterback, but, you know, hasn't been in 10 years in my case. I kept calling myself an entrepreneur just out of habit, but one day just realized, you know, I haven't started a business in a long time, so I really shouldn't be calling myself that anymore. So I think any of us listening to this show right now think about things in your identity that have actually probably expired and then you have a choice on what to do about it. So either you can stop defining yourself by that thing or realize that you need to kind of renew your membership in that identity. So I think that often goes with something like calling yourself a good friend. Have you you know, you think of yourself as a good friend with somebody, but have you really been a good friend lately? Maybe you need to renew that before you could define yourself as a good friend to that person.

Solid. I got it. All right, so here's another one.

You are so in your, one of your books. Hell yeah. Or no. Which I think is your third to the last. Or was it second to the last?

Either way. Yeah. Okay.

All right. So you, you talk about first principles and I love first principles and thinking. And the other thing I would, I would say I've noticed about the way you think is you're a great simplifier. You know, you cut through the garbage, you see fundamental truths.

So right now, when you think about who Derek is and how you think, what are your current non negotiable rules or value you currently live by? Ooh.

I mean, a value that to me just goes without questioning is I have a 10 year old boy and I'm very present for him. I'm in his life every week. And somebody asked me about travel recently and I said, well, I don't travel like I used to because I have a son. And that person said, well, you could, I mean, you could go away. And you know, it's like, no, that's out of the question. I want to be in my son's life every week. Maybe I could go, let's say at least every two weeks. You know, maybe I could go a week without, but not much longer. Okay, so that's unquestioned. I mean, that's a, that's solid.

Yeah.

Also, it's interesting noticing themes that run through your changing interests. So right now I'm working on.

A subject I find fascinating, called useful, not true. And my last book was called how to Live. But through it all is this fascination with, I think we call it pluralism, this idea of looking at things from many different points of view or not feeling that any one point of view is the right answer. It's interesting realizing that that's been a really dear and core subject to me. Like that's a core value that I've held for a long time and I don't think will be going away anytime soon. Did that answer your question? Is that.

Yeah, I think that's certainly. We'll call it 1 and 2.

So I'm going to give you a couple of mine that I've been living by. I suspect we share. But part of what I'm going, what I've been finding. So I think about this a lot.

So for example, one of my rules are no A holes. You know, I, I often say if you put, if you got one turd in the punch bowl, everyone gets sick. Just from an energetic point of view. And then another one is I, I have an aggravation filter I live by. So I, I ask myself, would this person, place or thing ever create more than 5% aggravation in my life? And that is a determining factor in a, in a, hell no. And another one would be if I feel antagonism, energetic antagonism. That's another one. I don't like to be antagonized.

And then another one I have lately has been no homework. I like to make an appointment to get it done. Now if you want something from me and it's important, let's do it together. I like improv. Okay. And I found that whatever your values are your non negotiables, they can become your company culture. They also become who you attract and how you live. And that the more conscious that is, the higher quality your life becomes where the hard nose enter. And that's why I asked, you know, so clearly time with your son, a 10 year old, being a great dad and being able to create those memories and experiences. But you know, when you look at your rule set now of, you know, like, so you said I'm not an entrepreneur. You haven't started something in a while. There's obviously some rules you live by I would expect beyond your son.

Okay, yeah, I've got some more good ones for you. So it's funny listening to the difference between yours and mine. It sounds like you've got a lot more people in your life than I do. I'm far away in New Zealand and I've made myself intentionally remote, especially from my kid's childhood. I just wanted to be very present for him. So I don't have a lot of people in my life except my email inbox, but that doesn't really count. So mine are more personal growth instead of yours. Sounded like a lot of interpersonal. So I always like doing the new thing, seeing the new perspective, going with the pluralism. Like I mentioned earlier, I'm fascinated with finding a new perspective to look at anything, whether it's a minutiae problem or a megatopic.

Like I read a lot of philosophy books and I'm fascinated when somebody presents a whole new way of looking at something that's been in my life for decades and now they're presenting a new way of looking at it. That's one of those, you know, mind blowing moments.

What's a recent one that you've been exposed to and you've adopted that's becoming a current mindset? For example, okay, it's half adopted.

But there is a fascinating little book I highly recommend to almost everybody called.

The Courage to Be Disliked. It was written in Japanese and then translated, so it's got an unusual format. It's a dialogue between a cranky student and a calm, wise sage.

But the sage the author is channeling a psychologist from Austria named Alfred Adler. I think Austria or Germany, who is a contemporary of Sigmund Freud's. Whereas Freud. Freud's reputation grew through time, Alfred Adler's reputation just kind of faded. So he's been pretty obscure. So the author of the book Courage to Be Dislike is channeling Alfred Adler, but putting his philosophy into the mouth of a wise sage meeting with a cranky student. So it's a dialogue between the two of them and. Okay, so that's the context to say the fascinating reframing was saying that.

Everybody'S life is their own task, that almost all interpersonal problems come from you trying to interject yourself into someone else's task or someone trying to get you to take care of their task. But even when he says the Courage to Be Disliked, the book, by the way, is not about that. Don't think that you're going to read a book about being disliked. That's just one of maybe 30 different subjects in there. And for some reason they made it the title.

But.

Yeah, he said that even what somebody thinks of you, that's their task to deal with in life. Somebody else's happiness is their task to deal with in life. Like things that they need, like that's their own task. And I forget why he calls it task, but I just found that fascinating to suddenly reframe the things that people were asking of me or expecting of me or wanting me to say. Even somebody expects me to say a certain thing. Somebody sneezes and expects me to say bless you, it gets upset if I don't. That's your task, to manage your expectations. That's not my fault that you were expecting me to say bless you after a sneeze. I didn't grow up in a family that does that. So that was just one example that comes to mind. Great book.

That's great. And it's. Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga are the authors. I just checked, looked them up. I put it in the show notes already. So I'm. I'm just like you in that regard. I Never say it. And anyone who I've. For a long time, my wife, actually look at me expecting it, like, I'm not going to do it. It's stupid, it doesn't make sense. And if you measure my love based upon whether or not I'm saying, God bless you, you've got something to work on that's not mine. So.

Yeah. Yeah.

And that could be. Yeah, go ahead.

One more for you. The. The. I find the philosophy of minimalism for me.

Runs in way more than just stuff in the house. I just find it so often with how I write. I just think it's so important to eliminate every word that doesn't need to be there. I do a lot of computer programming, and in my code, I try to eliminate every line of code that doesn't need to be there. If you look at my website and you do view source so you can see the HTML source code, you'll see I wrote it all by hand because I don't like the way that tools like WordPress spit out hundreds of thousands of lines that are unnecessary. That just bothers me in a visceral way. But.

Even emotionally, even when it comes to friends, even when it comes to identities, that's why I'm happy to let go of an identity like entrepreneur. And it's interesting hearing some people push back, going like, no, man, but you are an entrepreneur. That's what you've done. Or a musician. I used to be a musician. I'm not a musician anymore. Somebody says, no, come on. Well, once you're a musician, you're always a musician. I'm like, I don't. I don't think so. I'm not actively doing it. And so that can just be a difference in beliefs because to me, I actively want to let go of everything I don't need, including identities.

That is so powerful and that opens up so much evolutionary opportunity, especially with a partner, and it could become massively conflicted. Where.

You know, what I believe is the breakup of most relationships is when.

Your growth velocity is not matched. In other words, the direction and speed and rate. Right. So the focus areas.

And then I had one other observation. When you talk about minimalism, eliminating every word, we call it. We do a lot of copy, my team and I. We call it murdering words or word murdering. So we gave it of. Gave it an act and an action and a. And a. And, you know, an experience. So we turn. Turn that process into an experience.

Nice.

All right.

I think of it as cleaning. I just.

Yeah. Yes.

Yeah, it's cleaning. Getting rid of the garbage.

It's interesting, the harshness, if it motivates you or not.

Okay, another one. I've got a couple of these. I'm going to ask them in different order, which is, what do you. What is your next project or your next book right now? Because I've watched your evolution.

From, you know, musician to entrepreneur with CD Baby and then Book Baby, obviously fascinated with books. And then you have a very minimalist approach to even how you bind your books.

And so minimalism is definitely part of this whole thing. You have a background in coding, so you're. You're definitely a prototyper. You love to tweak and iterate.

Yes, precisely. And I, I didn't bring my copies out here, but I meant to do that. So I'm glad you have props. But what. And you know, part of it, it's like, hi, I would suspect you also have a minimalist lifestyle and you probably don't need a lot of money anymore. And even I remember when you gave up.

You know, your business. I don't know if it was the sale to give away or whatever. I know you've got a little interesting there, but how do you survive right now? How are you making a living? And what's. What's your book? Tell me a little bit about that part of your lifestyle.

Okay, cool. I gotta correct just one thing for the record in case somebody's reading or listening to this someday in the future. I know nothing about Bookbaby. Bookbaby wasn't mine after I left CD Baby in 2008.

Oh, they did that.

I heard that somebody made Bookbaby after I left, but I had nothing to do with that. That was long after I left.

I'm sorry, I don't know how I got it.

That's right. I just don't know anything about it. I don't think I've ever even typed bookbaby.com into a browser, but I know it's there. Somebody told me. So the.

Okay, so now let's go for the. Yeah. When I sold CD Baby in 2008.

For context, CD Baby was already profitable. I know it can be crass to mention exact numbers, but maybe it helps your audience. It was already making about 4 million a year net profit, and I was the sole owner. I had no investors, so I had already paid off all my debts. I already had a few million dollars in the bank. To me, that was enough because I live pretty simply. So when I agreed to sell the company for this agreed upon price of $22 million. My first thought was, wow. My second thought was, what the hell am I going to do with $22 million? I'd have to be an idiot to spend that much money. So my lawyer actually had a background in tax law and told me that there's something called a charitable remainder unitrust, which usually only old people do when they want to put all of their assets into a trust, but then it continues to pay them out a living wage until they die. So I wish I could have set the living wage down to 1%, but the minimum the US government lets you set it is 5%. So I put the transfer the ownership of the company into the charitable trust. Then the charitable trust sold the company to the buyer, which was pretty badass because that means where if I would have sold it personally, IRS would have taken $7 million taxes and that means 7 million less would have gone to charity. But because I transferred the company into the trust first and it was a charitable trust, by definition, the entire 22 million is going to go to charity. Right? So then, now my only source of income is twice a year I get 2.5% paid out semiannually from the charitable trust. That's my only income. So that's why everything you see me do since then, whether it's selling my books or whatever, I just give all the charity. I'm like, I don't even want it. That 2 1/2% semi annually is all I want. It's all I live off of. So that's where my money comes from as far as what I'm doing. You asked about my next project. How about that? I am stepping through your questions in reverse order. This is fun. So you asked about my next project. I am fascinated with the subject of useful not true meaning over and over and over again. For decades now, I found that I choose to believe things based on whether they're useful for me to believe, not whether they're true. And the simplest example of this is that if you are learning something new or even maybe getting better at something you know already, but you need to learn more, it behooves you to believe.

That you have a lot to learn, that you have a long way to go, that in fact you're just a beginner. The beginner's mindset is a good thing to believe when you're learning so that you will so that your cup is not full. But when it's time to get on stage and perform.

It is beneficial to believe that you got this, that you're awesome, that you're great, that the audience is going to love you. And then that confidence can be self reinforcing. So those are two opposite beliefs that you can hold just moments apart or days apart from each other. And somebody could rightfully point out, but that's not true. It's not true. You're not a total beginner or it's not true. You're not a total expert. You say no, but it doesn't matter if it's true or not. What matters is if it's useful for me to believe. So I just found this thread coming up again and again and again in so many aspects of life, including the opposite. When friends would tell me a sob story about their life, like, my mother abandoned me. And I'm like, wait, hold on. Abandoned is not an active verb. What actually happened? Well, when I was seven, she got remarried and so I lived at my grandmother's house. I was like, well, how far away is your grandmother from your mom's house? Five miles. I'm like, okay, so the fact what actually happened is your mother probably thought that you would have a better upbringing at your grandmother's house five miles away from where she was. Was she working two jobs? Yes, she was. Okay, so that's not abandoning. Like, sometimes we need to take these stories that we tell ourselves. Like, you know, I'm not attractive. I'm just, I've never been attractive. It's okay. Well, why are you saying that? Well, my ex told me I'm not attractive. Okay, maybe your ex was upset about something else that day.

You know, I think it's truth is something that we can use. We can either unravel it or just ignore it for certain beliefs that are useful for us and then it. Then all that matters is the good judgment on where you want to go in life. Because a common objection now is somebody said, we'll say. So you're saying somebody could just choose to believe that all people that don't look like them are subhuman and should be killed. Like, that's. That's clearly not the point. That's a different issue of where you want to go. That's like saying, you know, if you're teaching driving, you don't need to constantly address the fact that somebody might drive this car into a crowd of people. You can't. Like, that's a different issue if somebody's going to be a psychopath and outs to harm people. But yeah. So my next project, I believe is a book called Useful Not True, Whatever works for you.

Which is to me, it's you know, Mike, you mentioned, like, my other books. All my other books have been.

Sharing things I already thought or knew. This is my first one that's really like a discovery for me. Like, I felt like diving back into this subject that's fascinated me for years. So I'm learning as I go too. I'm reading a lot of old philosophy books and it turned out that this idea of useful not true is a school of philosophy called pragmatism. So right now I'm reading five books about pragmatism and learning what others have said about it already. And yeah, it's a fun process.

Hey, this is Mike Koenigs. Sorry to interrupt the podcast, but if you're an action taker and ready to transform and reinvent yourself and your business, go to connecttomike.com to learn more and book a conversation with me right now. All right, back to the episode. That's great. Well, that, that's a perfect segue into my next question, which I was going to ask you about inspiration. And my suspicion is.

Is creating versus consuming. How much of your time do you spend creating versus consuming? And you already mentioned what you're reading right now, but I'm curious, like, what you're reading, what podcast do you consume, what movies do you watch? And where's your consumption to creation ratio?

I think it changes. There have been times when I'm head down in writing a book where I just take in nothing new. I don't even read new books. I don't listen to anything. All I want to do is get this information that's inside of me out. And so I don't want any new information. But then there are times like right now where, yeah, I Woke up at 6am yesterday and I just got up to pee and then I got right back to bed and I sat there reading for six hours reading these books about the philosophy of pragmatism. And that's something that ordinarily I wouldn't do. But right now it's like I'm researching for my next project. So I'm taking in a lot, but I try to keep it high quality. You know, I think I, I go to Reddit like once a day for like three minutes to watch some funny cat videos or whatever. You know.

I, I'm really into the podcast called Econ Talk. I think it's Russ Roberts. I never would have expected Econ Talk. I thought it was about economics, but dude is talking about the meaning of life and talking with some really interesting thinkers on the subject of The Meaning of Meaning of Life. He's really, really fascinating. And the. I only know about it because he just wrote a great book called.

Wild Problems. I think it's called. It's at the top of my book list. If you go to Sive RS book. Well, then near the top is. It's definitely the word wild. I think it's wild problems. Yeah. This guy is fascinating. An American that just moved to Jerusalem, Israel, to be the president of college there. And it's just so thoughtful. And his podcasts are so good. He asks really interesting questions. So that's the only podcast I've been listening to lately is Econ Talk. Because I go on like a 90 minute walk in the forest most days, so I listen to it when I do that.

Oh, yeah, good idea, good idea. And how about.

What are the last three movies you watch that have been particularly.

Fascinating or motivating or got you thinking?

I don't know if I'm gonna have any. I think the only time I watch a movie is with my kid. So now that he's 10, I'm going to show him Kill Bill because he's fascinated with samurai swords. And I'm like, you know what? You're ready. So I know it's super violent, a lot of curse words, but I think he's ready for his first Tarantino inspiring all that. No, it's like, to me, I don't read novels, I don't read fiction so much in book form because I like to get my fiction in the kind of the. The full thing with the sound and the visuals and the cinematography and all that. I really kind of nerd out on cinematography and sound, so I don't think. I'm usually inspired by movies. They're usually a release and they're almost entirely just with my son. Okay, sorry, no, good answer for you there.

No, that's fine. More. More of a curiosity again. I'm. What I've been. My goal in interviewing you has been to understand how you think. Because when I look at your body of work, what you write about, how you write, I was like, okay, what. What made this guy this way? And because you are what I would consider a rare, rare bird.

You know, interesting and interested and fascinating at the same time.

You know, our mutual.

Acquaintance Tony Robbins was a massive, massive, massive influence on me. I just reread Awaken the Giant within for the first time since the 90s. And to me it's like reading the Bible. It's like. It blows me away. Sorry. By that I mean.

I'm amazed at how much of who I am and what I believe and how I see the world was shaped by reading Awaken the Giant within when I was 19 years old and again when I was 22 and again when I was 25. I read that book so many times and ingested a lot of Tony's like power talk and things like that back at a very formative age in my late teen years and early twenties. And it just. Then I just take it for granted. So that's what I mean by reading the Bible. So.

Right.

So I think if. So if you were raised Jewish or Muslim or Christian or whatever, there's a certain set of beliefs that, that you just take as given. You don't think of them even as opinions. You just think of them as Water is wet, gravity makes things fall to the earth.

Rereading Awaken the Giant within by Tony Robbins made me realize that. Oh, this is where I got those. This is why I think that way. That's right. It was because of this.

That's a huge part of who I am.

Okay, that, that makes that dude. All right. Yeah. You and me, probably around the same time. What, what year were you reading him at?

93. 92. 90. Yeah. 90. Okay.

Yeah, yeah. My, my big moment I think was around 95. I had a personal crisis and.

Business falling apart, divorce, etc, and I watched a friend of mine go through a huge transformation very, very quickly. And I'm like, what the hell happened to you? He, he wrote a book, he became a best selling author, started speaking and you know, he just completely changed. Quit eating meat, quit drinking alcohol, you know, the whole thing. Became a vegan. I'm like, what the hell happened to you, dude? So I was like, I need some of that because I was going through a horrible time and I would agree. And that's where it led to folks like Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer, that whole lineup, Neil Donald Walsh, that, that group of folks. So back to you, Bob.

Next one then. I'm curious right now from your daily routine, fitness beliefs, nutrition, what do you do with your body in your mind, meditation, etc, what's a typical routine for you?

I, I don't have a way of easily turning the camera to show you, but right next to me is my computer desk where I do all of my writing. And then right next to it, just, you know, one meter away, it's four feet away, is a squat rack with my barbell and all the plates. And I did that out of necessity because I had nowhere else to put it when I moved into this house. But I love it. I love that I'm right next to it. So usually, you know, if you do anything powerlifting, by which I mean not for bodybuilding sake, but just for being strong, the usual way to do it is you do five reps of a heavy weight and then you stop for three minutes or so, three to five minutes. You just sit around and wait and then you do five more reps, you put it down, you sit around and wait and you do that five times. So five reps of five. Then I read.

Pavel Tsozulin, I think is the way you pronounce his name. He's the kettlebell guy. He said, we'll. Well, studies have shown that ideally the ultimate ideal resting time is 15 minutes in between sets. But he immediately said, but that's just not viable for anybody. You're not going to sit at the gym for six hours. But I was like, wait a second, the gym is right next to my desk. We'd already heard that we should be getting up and moving our legs every 20 minutes or something, right? So it's like, how would I do this? I just set a timer. So as I'm sitting there doing emails and writing, just every 15 minutes, you know, a little thing chirps and I stand up and I go and I do 5 reps which only takes like 10 seconds. Put the bar back and go sit back down and get back to what I was doing. And it's so cool to like now I feel like I never have to put aside time to go to the gym. It's just 10 seconds every 15 minutes. That's my favorite recent hack. Other than that I live in gorgeous New Zealand, specifically in a not gorgeous city named Wellington. But it's a very, very hilly city and I live right at the base of this really steep, hilly range. So yeah, I go in this 90 minute walk through the forest which is very hilly. So I always come back from that walk like completely drenched. I have to just soak through a T shirt every day. But that's really good exercise to walk in the forest and yeah, lifting weights every 15 minutes, that's brilliant.

How about food? Diet, Nutrition, Alcohol, sugar?

I rarely ever drink. Not completely opposed. Sugar is the spice of life.

Food. I don't know.

Yeah, I'm no role model for that. But on the other hand it's like I just, whatever I, Tim Ferriss, I think, advised once to pick a healthy meal and stick with it. So every morning.

I take a can.

Of black beans, pour it into a huge bowl of Baby spinach. Sprinkle alfalfa sprouts on it and sometimes a little shredded cheese and sometimes a little peanut satay sauce. And that's my breakfast every morning and has been for, like, God, almost nine years since I moved to New Zealand. So I have this big bowl full of vegetables, sprouts, and spinach every morning. And then. Yeah, just like a. I don't know, like a lean chicken sandwich or something like that. I don't know. Whatever.

Yeah. Simple. Simple.

And.

Meditation? Any particular mental practice?

My. My life is very unheckedic as it is, so.

Meditation is not the. My top priority.

All right. Now, there was a while ago. I don't remember the exact answer. The why New Zealand and how long do you think you'll stay there? Do you have any other aspirations in terms of.

A location, your reason why? I suspect I know what the answer to part of it is, but I'm curious about how long.

There's a difference between.

The life we would like to live and the life we are living. Sometimes those things are constrained by other things, like family. So, yes, my kid's mom does not want to travel anymore. Before my son was born, that's the mission we were on. We were traveling the world together. And then she got pregnant and had a kid and said, I hate travel. I don't want to travel anymore. And so because of what I told you earlier, that means my plan to continue to live all around the world. I mean, I really wanted to live in Zanzibar and Korea and Ghana and Belgium and whatever. That plan has to wait eight more years until he's 18 or so, when he doesn't really need me in his life anymore. And then I might continue my nomadic ways. But for now, New Zealand is just where we happened to move when he was born. And so that's where we still are in 2018. We tried moving to England for a year. Well, sorry. We moved to England thinking that's where we were going to stay. It was like, one decision, like, all right, I will move once for you. Okay, Sorry. Those were her words to me. So we moved to England, going, okay, that's it. This is where our kid's going to grow up until he's 18. We live in Oxford, England. That's that. And then Covid hit, and it made us go, hmm, I really miss New Zealand. So we came back here. I'm a citizen. This is home.

Wow. Okay, that's legit.

And it's my fate, you know, I had to make that decision. I think a lot of us might have had to do something similar. When Covid hit, you had to ask yourself some questions. It was just like a big reshuffling moment for everybody, right? So my reshuffling at the time was saying, what if I could never travel ever again? Like, what if this is, like, worse than anybody expects and nobody's ever going to travel ever again? If I had to be trapped in just one country for the rest of my life, what country would I want to be? To me, it was like, well, New Zealand. No brainer. That's my place. That's where my friends are. That's where my emotional connection is. That's my true home. So, yeah, moved back here, I was living an international life. I used to have a home in Singapore and Portugal and all that. So I let all of that go. So Now I'm just 100% New Zealand.

Got it. Okay, I have one more question for you, and that is when I look at this, the story that I see of your life, which may or may not be accurate, what I see is, you know, you've explored, you've done what you've done. For you, it really looks that way in terms of how you created your businesses. You focused on your own creativity, whether it was 100% intentional or it happened that way. Being able to put your business into the trust so you don't have to think about money. It's not like you have anyone to serve except you. You know, and when you're working on your next books, it's because you're interested in them.

And what you choose to focus your time and attention on. It really does feel to me like you have.

An extraordinary amount of freedom.

And with that, I'm curious if you have advice for someone who's like, oh, man.

I really want to move in that direction. So for many people, it's how do you achieve financial freedom? How do you achieve passive income so you don't have to think about it anymore? And not everyone has an opportunity to build and sell a business at a young age and sell it for $22 million and shift it to over and also choose the discipline to live minimally.

So I. Inside of here, I'm not exactly sure what question to ask, except you've chosen an idyllic life that's very on purpose. And through your lens of saying, oh, man, it's I. I assume for you, it looks. And it's like, yeah, it's simple to get here. But for someone who wants to achieve a high degree of simplicity, independence, and freedom like you have, what advice do you have?

You gotta understand the trade off. You've got to cultivate the mentality of pomo, proud of missing out. You have to rock that swagger of knowing that, like that's right, I'm never going to do this thing, xyz, whatever it may be. And that's all right, you know, you, you have to call it whatever. Is your definition of the opposite of fomo. Fear of missing out. You really need to cultivate that to say yes to less. You need to say yes to almost nothing. You just say no to almost everything. To have that confidence that, well, the confidence, the.

The vividness of mission. To know that, to constantly remind yourself at every decision moment a hundred times a day that my mission is simplicity.

My mission is freedom. My mission is to be unbraided, unbound to other things when possible. So these can be tiny, tiny little decisions over and over again that you make. Even like how you organize your business, even if it's just three people or even if it's just you, it's how you choose what tasks are yours versus you set it up so that's somebody else's task, not my task.

And so in doing so, you have to let go of things, right? Like When I sold CD, Baby, it was 2008, I was freshly minted. People now saw me as a successful entrepreneur. I could have gone to San Francisco and done the whole Silicon Valley thing, be an angel investor. I would have been hobnobbing with the rich and famous. Also, I was living in Santa Monica, California at the time. I could have gone back to LA and been hobnobbing with the slightly less rich but slightly more famous people in la. And all of those things were a little bit tempting, but instead I thought, you know what? Those are all that sounds like a lot of complexity and a lot of being bound to a place that sounds like a lot of saying yes or at least a lot of maybes to live that kind of life. And so instead I thought of the alternative, which was to pack up and go far away across the world and just, you know, live out of a suitcase and live a simple life and just stay very, very, very intellectually stimulated, but without the in person obligations that living in LA or Silicon Valley would have had. So yeah, so I made that choice. But knowing what I've let go of. And so actually, I'll admit, for the first time publicly, I occasionally get a little envy of my friend Tim Ferriss. I've known him since before he was super famous.

And he Chose that path that I almost chose. Right. He chose the Silicon Valley investor meeting with every tech startup that was looking for an angel round. He stayed in there, and then he chose a TV show. Oh, my God. And then he chose his podcast, which is, you know, constantly churning out new content every week or two and really kind of being on the hook to do so.

He's gotten huge rewards from doing that, but also some huge downsides to being very bound to these things that he's agreed to. So, yeah, it's the trade off you have to make.

Yeah, well, you and I have him in common, too. He was. I created a product in the early, early 2000s, before four hour work week came out, called Everything you should know about publishing, publicity and building a platform with a pretty famous publicist named Ariel Forge. He represented Jack Canfield and Neil Donald Walsh and Don Miguel Ruiz from the four Agreements and on and on and on. She was it, Deepak's publicist, and she wanted to get out of the business.

For a lot of those same reasons. And we made this product and we got an order from Tim Ferriss, didn't know who he was, and he wrote to us asking for some help. And I didn't see it until after the book came out, and I'm like, oh, my God, this guy. So ended up connecting with him there. And I've watched his evolution, too, and, you know, we once, you know, I haven't talked to him in a long time, but he's. He is a very, very fascinating, interesting guy. He's had a hell of an interesting life, too. So I. I totally get that. So here's my last question for you, Derek, and that is, do you have a wish or an ask, aside from sending people to sive.rs.com to get your books? And, you know, I read all your stuff because it's just good and it's easy and it's simple and I'm inspired by it. I don't consume a lot of people's stuff these days. Yeah, yeah, but yours is one of the greats. But do you have an ask for our audience.

For.

Sorry, one tiny correction. There's no dot com at the end of my address.

Oh, I'm sorry.

I can't believe it.

Yeah, yeah, it's all right. I just wanted, you know, for the transcript, my mouth, honestly, my ask. And the reason I do podcasts like this is I really, really, really like meeting people from around the world. I think it's so fascinating when somebody emails me and says, hey, I heard you on Mike's podcast. And I'm a guitar builder in Slovenia or I'm a student in Korea or whatever. It's so cool to get these emails from people around the world. So that's really, like, one of my daily joys. I love my inbox. I feel so damn lucky that I love my inbox, because it's just people introducing themselves, and I get to know these people, have conversations, and then when I do travel, I meet up with these people. So I was just in Japan two weeks ago, and I met up with this guy in Tokyo because he had emailed me out of the blue. So, yes, my favorite thing is go to Sive RS and you'll see there's a link there to email me. Please email me and introduce yourself, because that's my favorite part.

Awesome. All right, well, thank you very much. This has been an absolute pleasure, and.

I've just enjoyed getting to know you, following you for the years, and I'm glad I reached out to you and asked you to be here today. So thanks a million.

Yeah, thanks, Mike. I so admire what you're doing to me. That was the, like.

Actually, you know what?

I swear, I'm not just saying this because I'm talking to you, but I get a lot of invitations to be on podcasts, and most of them are just like.

All right, I guess. And then when you asked me, I was like, oh, hell, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I'd love to talk with you. So, yeah, I just so admire what you're doing. So thank you.

Thanks a million. All right, well, thank you. I'll see you, everyone. And reach out to Derek, because he does actually answer his emails. That's another great thing about them. Bye, everyone.