#120: Sovereign Individual, Digital Age, Multi-incomes/citizenships with Doug Antin
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Kia ora, ni hao and hello. Welcome to the Chewy Journal podcast. I'm your host, Camille Liang. My guest today is Doug. He's the founder and author of TSI Global Media, a company covering the digital age and how the current digital transformation is creating a new class of people.

Doug is also writing the Sovereign Individual weekly newsletter, providing insights, analysis, and actionable advice helping you become a Sovereign Individual and make the most of the digital transformation. I hope you enjoy this episode.

Let's start with the definition of sovereign individual. Would you mind giving me your definition of this term? Yeah, I think it means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. You know, there's sort of like the interpretation from the book. The simplest way that I put it is it's a person that has the freedom to choose

and make choices in their life without intervention from outside people or organizations. And so what I mean by that is, I think in modern times, the two biggest outside influences are the government and your employer. So the government has laws, they have taxes, and different types of regulations that sort of influence the choices you can make in your life.

And your employer obviously has rules and policies that permit you to, you know, do different things within the organization. You know, you have to show up at work, you know, a certain time of day. You have to interact with your colleagues a certain way. For the most part, you still get paid on an hourly rate, even though, you know, salaries are huge. It's still a big deal.

And so for me, what I think of when I think of the sovereign individual, it's sort of like a spectrum where you can have more freedom of choice and you can have less freedom of choice. But there's many different types of people that fall within that bucket.

And so how does that, how does that shake out right now? Well, you have like digital nomads, where they're people that have opted to travel the world, see the world and live in different places, and their their jobs permit them to do that. And

You know, when they're in different locations, they have to sort of follow the rules and laws of that location. There's a new group of people, these remote workers that still work for companies like one company, but they have more flexibility over their life, whether or not they go into the office and what does that mean for them? And then you have solo capitalists, people that work for themselves, make investments in different things and are able to sort of pick and choose where they live throughout the world.

So at the end of the day, really the simple sort of reiterating what I said earlier, like the simple way of thinking about it is just the freedom to choose how you live your life according to the influences that you want impacting your choices. Yeah. So when did you realize you are a sovereign individual and what motivates you to get interested in this topic? Yeah. So,

It's a good question. I think like when I really started pursuing it was a little over a year ago when I read the book. Yes. But looking back, you know, there's like...

certain areas of my life that sort of set me down this path where when I got to the book, like the topic was like, it really resonated with me. So the first sort of real experience was getting fired from a job that I had, which, you know, it was unfortunate, but ultimately I'm glad it happened because it set me down this path. So I was working for a startup. It was based in Washington, D.C.,

And I was working crazy hours. You know, it was like close to 100 hours a week. Wasn't making a lot of money, but had equity in the company. And ultimately, because I was working so hard and so many hours, I kind of burned out and wasn't doing a great job by the end. The company was struggling a little bit. And so the founder just decided it was time to move on. And I remember thinking to myself, like, this is crazy. I have no control. I'm at the mercy of this job.

I only had one source of income. So it's like, what am I going to do now? And it was sort of like this crystallizing moment in my life where it felt like being an employee, you don't have as much control over your life as you think you do. Then fast forward,

Little later in life, I had worked a couple of jobs in between then and now. And that sort of idea of like wanting more control over the choices in my life sort of crystallized. And ultimately, COVID happened. And it's like, oh my gosh, the world's crazy right now. What's happening? I was doing a lot of writing about technology topics, about the digital transformation, how the world's changing.

And then I read The Sovereign Individual. I was like, yes, this is for me. This is what I want to do with my life. I want to take advantage of the digital transformation and the world we live in right now to live a life by my own choosing with as few outside influences on the choices I make as possible.

So, everything I've done since then has been trying to sort of add bits and pieces of sort of support for making the choices I want throughout my life. Thinking back to my sort of description of the sovereign individual as a spectrum, I would say I'm sort of like at the low intermediate end of it, where...

I can live life on my own terms right now for roughly a year and a half based on the assets I have. And I'm trying to build more income generating assets so I can continue to do that throughout life. I see. When I was working in corporate, I worked crazy hours like you. And I worked for one big company for two years. Then I quit because I also burned out. Then I moved to another corporate company.

Because I thought, oh, if I change companies, maybe I will feel better and I won't get burned out. But the same thing repeated again. That's how I come across, no, I need to get control of my life. I have an entrepreneurship spirit. So if I work for other people, because I can't pick up my colleagues I'm working with, although, yeah, I do feel for you. I think it's interesting you said you have the entrepreneurship spirit.

you know if you if you pursue that too long yes you become sort of unemployable because you get so accustomed to like making the rules yeah when i moved to the uk i was thinking oh i need to find a job i need to support myself but yeah as you said i'm unemployable now i can't work full time now yeah so you mentioned the sovereign individual book so for for my listeners who

never heard about this book, would you mind giving me an overview of what is this book about and what's the main concept from that? Yeah, so I would say the first part of the book, giving you historical context of how the world sort of was organized from huntering and gathering society to farming society to the gunpowder revolution that sort of brought

brought on the industrial revolution to now, which is sort of this information revolution. And the point the authors make is that at each stage of sort of the evolutionary process, technology was introduced in some way that reorganized how power was sort of distributed throughout society.

And in doing so, it sort of reshaped how we organized, how we interacted with one another, and ultimately the choices that we had within our life. And so the sort of main thesis of the book is, and this is sort of me putting in my own words, but like the internet has come.

And it's going to, again, reshape society and redistribute how power is organized throughout society, taking us from sort of mass production, mass organization, you know, big nation states to shifting more power to the individual. And you're going to see an emerging class of people that are able to leverage the digital transformation to gain more freedom over the choices they make in their life.

And ultimately, they're going to become customers of the nation state. Whereas before the nation could tell you sort of this is what it is and you got to deal with it. We're moving to a time where, you know, people that have remote incomes, remote assets and the ability to pick and choose where they live throughout the world are going to be able to basically dictate to governments. These are the policies we want. If you don't do them, we're going to move on to someone that will.

So what do you think, what kind of digital technology or digital trends that support the sovereign individual lifestyle?

Yeah, so I sort of think of it, the resource of the digital age. So like oil was one of the resources of like the industrial age. Our resources, information and the ability to share that information with a global network. So the sort of big ticket things that have changed the world, obviously the Internet.

The smartphone you're starting to see with SpaceX, you know, we're going to have satellite internet basically all over the world. Yeah. And so your ability to connect to the internet, make a living on the internet and do that anywhere allows you to basically...

pick and choose where you live. And if you don't like the government policies, you can just find somewhere else that has better policies for you. And I think those things are what's ultimately going to reshape the balance of power.

I say, yeah, I was born in China and grew up there. And my first job is a journalist. You know, the censorship in China. So being a journalist can be a very tough job. So that's why I moved to New Zealand, where I have more freedom of speech. Yeah, I do feel like in our generation, we have the freedom of choose which country we want to live and move around.

Well, so it's really interesting, you know, sort of taking that example and marrying it with my Starlink example is so for right now, like the Chinese government has firm control over what you can and can't say. But that's because they can exert influence on the sort of Internet operators. What happens when Starlink reaches scale and they can't exert the same control?

Over the people that, you know, host the internet. And you're seeing in countries like Russia, they're saying that they don't necessarily want Starlink to be permitted because they know that you'll lose control. So what does that mean in the long run? I don't know.

Because, you know, at the end of the day, the government could say, if we catch you with one of these satellite internet things. Yeah, we'll shoot you down. Exactly. So, you know, I try not to get like too crazy with that. But I think over the longer term, it starts to chip away at that influence. And 10, 15, 20 years down the road, the world will look very different as a result of those things. Yeah.

Yeah. So how do you deal with that information abundance? Because, you know, we have unlimited access to the information. How do we filter the information we receive? Yeah, it's something I struggle with right now myself. You know, writing a very specific newsletter around a specific topic, you have to sort of build those filters over time. Yeah. I think the way I think about it is,

Who are the people and communities that I want to interact with? And I allowed those to be my filters. So I know that I can't consume everything at all times. And what I do consume is going to influence the way I think about the world.

So I try and find people that I respect and admire and use them as primary sort of information filters. For me, I'm trying to broadcast information as well. And so I try and build sort of guardrails to like the things and points of view that I have. And I'm willing to be influenced by my audience. So whenever someone, you know, read something I write and they're like, I don't agree with this. I'm going to respond to Doug.

I take that into advisement because at the end of the day, there's a give and take to it. And so I think the short answer is I do so very carefully. I know that what I'm consuming influences me and I try and understand sort of the incentives of the people that are broadcasting it and make sure that they align with

Yeah, I think I come across your content from Balaji's 1929. Yeah, I was super excited that I subscribed to your newsletter and also approached you to make this interview happen. Yeah, so that's a great example, though, is like, if you're a biologist, you're going to be able to make a lot of money.

You respect and admire him. And you came across me from him. And so, you know, I think like that's an example of you using your personal filters to find the information that you're interested in and want to be influenced by. Yeah. So speaking of biology, he mentioned the network studies.

state. His mission is to build the network state, probably start with a cloud community first, then start up Citi. Do you have any examples of those concepts? I don't. And the truth is, I don't think it's happening yet. I think we're still so early in terms of

what it means to be able to connect with different people from all over the world and form like real ties. It's kind of, I call it,

I didn't and I didn't make up this word it's sort of bouncing around but it's neo medievalism, where in sort of feudal times you had loyalty to the local Lord, but you also had loyalty to sort of this like international organization which was the church, and those conflicting loyalties sometimes.

cause conflict where it's like if you cross the church if the local lord crossed the church like he was in trouble yeah that's kind of how i think of the evolution of the network state which is

you know, I'm an American, I live in America right now, but I may come across a community or I'm building this community of sovereign individuals where we all think alike. And it's like, maybe we want to come together and form our own sort of network state in the cloud. I could see that happening. But at the moment, I don't really feel like there's strong enough infrastructure to sort of facilitate like

taking it from the cloud into the real world. The one area that I think is sort of interesting and I'm trying to watch is decentralized autonomous organizations, DAOs. But at the moment, they sort of just seem like social clubs. I see, yeah. Change the avatar. Exactly, exactly. But I think that's sort of the beginning stage that you want to see. You know, it's not going to just happen all at once. It's going to start as a social club.

A lot of these social clubs are monetizing and it'll be interesting to see how they spend the money and how do they build consensus when it's sort of decentralized commune of people. And can they make huge, meaningful changes? And I think you see that with Bitcoin, you know, some of the forks that took place with no one person in control. That's really interesting. But at this point, like...

I don't know how it would work if, let's say, I form a DAO of sovereign individuals and we want to buy a city. Where would you go to do that? What government would be open to that? I don't know. Do you find there is some conflict between the sovereign individual and the network state? Because to me...

Because I'm a very solitude person and I like to be a sovereign individual because everybody sees the importance of community. But I don't know if I want to be a group again, even in the cloud. I don't know if I make sense because, you know, in the past time, a lot of violence or irrational decisions are made by the group.

Yeah, it's something I think I struggle with too because I tend to be a bit of a loner. But at the end of the day, I think what I keep coming back to is we're human beings and we're social creatures. And so we're always, you know, we're going to gravitate towards community. We may be willing to leave one community for another more frequently than others would.

but I don't think they conflict. I think you need different types of people to make up a vibrant community, and there will always be a place for people like you and I that are more willing to

leave and go off on her own to find a better opportunity. Yeah. Do you mean you have like several different community? For example, if you love football, you probably join that community during the weekend to discuss this topic. Yeah. So the way I think about it right now is so one of the things that I advocate for to make you more self-sovereign is pursuing citizenship in more than one country. Yeah. I don't think

for the most part, that has to mean you're picking one country over another. I think they can fit into this portfolio of sort of places I want to live for different reasons. And I think of that as a good parallel to like,

these network states where it's like, you can have two communities that you feel very passionate about and be a part of. Will there be times where loyalties conflict? Yeah. But I don't think that means you can't do both still. So what do you think, what stops people to be a sovereign individual? Because we can see so many advantages, but still people...

prefer to stay in one place and work for one job through their whole life. Yeah, I think at the end of the day, it takes a lot of personal responsibility and willingness to sort of chart the unknown to be a sovereign individual. And I think most people are afraid of the unknown and they want to follow sort of the well-beaten path.

They want to be told what to do for most things in life. Not all things, but certainly they want to go into work every day, know what to expect, work hard.

from 9am to 5pm and go home, you know, be with the family and all that. And there's nothing wrong with that. Yeah, I think that COVID has really shown that there's a willingness and desire to have a strong government tell you what to do and how to think. And that that's something that conflicting for me, because I'm like, that is not

how I operate, you know, the government's there, I think for the most part, at least in America, for the good of the people, but the good of the sort of the mass group doesn't always align with the individual. And so that's been an interesting experience for me to sort of see that and say, wow, like there's a lot of people in the world that really don't want to make decisions for themselves. They want to be told what to do.

And then there's the people that maybe would like to be a sovereign individual. They think it just means one thing where you have to be a high net worth individual. Yeah. You have to go out and buy citizenship in another country, you know? And I'm like, I think that's really the reason that I felt so passionate about starting this newsletter is, is I believe that there's a clear path for, for like middle-class everyday people to be,

gain a little more sovereignty in their life. And one of the things that's really started to resonate with my audience is like, we would do some of these things, but maybe not all of them. And so I think what's holding a lot of people back is not realizing like, there's no one size fits all. There's many different things you can do to gain a little more control over your life. And now it's a matter of educating those people on what those things are, because I believe

most people would want more freedom given the clear path.

Yeah, for sure. So how do you cultivate multiple income? Do you have any resources you could share? Yeah, so at the end of the day, we're going through a really interesting change in society right now, which is a lot of companies are allowing you to work remotely permanently. So to the people that maybe have a full-time job that's allowing them to work remotely permanently,

That gives you more time to focus on side projects that you can monetize. So that's like the easy low hanging fruit win is like if you can work from home on a full time basis, you should be using the time that you would otherwise be commuting to work, getting ready and all that to work on something else. For the people like me, I decided to quit my job and just go all in. The way I sort of approached it was I built myself an angel fund.

where I was starting Doug Incorporated. I am my own business and I needed a runway to be able to build income streams. So I used the opportunity with the cryptocurrency market being as crazy as it is to invest my income while I was working and build up a sizable portfolio that I could live off of while trying to build assets.

And so that's the way it sort of like protects me from, you know, having to work for someone else is like I have this pool of money that I can draw on. Conservatively saying like it's a six month fund. It's really a year and a half right now. But, you know, with crypto, it could go to zero tomorrow. You never know. So I've got this fund and I would say anyone can do that. You can you can think about it as a lifestyle investment strategy where you

I have this full-time job. I don't feel like I can work on side incomes right now. So let me save up my money so I can quit this job and focus on secondary incomes. I started the newsletter to share stuff on the sovereign individual with the world, but it's ultimately, it's going to be a secondary source of income. I'm going to monetize it.

I'm going to use that email list as an asset to sell other products. And so the way I think about it is it's sort of like a hub and spoke model where my email list is sort of the central hub. And I create side incomes from that moving forward. So it's a classic sort of like creator economy model. And I don't view it as like any one income stream is not going to be enough to live off of for the year.

But I want multiple incomes that allow me to live the lifestyle I want. And so my focus is building those multiple tiny incomes that allow me to do whatever I want, whenever I want. Yeah, that's great. I also read your tweet. You mentioned that in the future, people may work in different time zones and in different

what's the word for that asynchronous yeah asynchronous yeah way of working yeah because for me I have clients from China from New Zealand and from the UK so I work at three different time zones I find it's a very good because just keep me occupied and I can devote my energy into different clients

Well, that's one of the things I admire about you is, you know, when you reached out to me and you were telling me your story, I'm like, wow, you work all over. I'm a workaholic. Well, it's also what's really interesting is you work across many different cultures and the cultures you work with are very, very different. And so I think you have really great perspective on what it means to be a sovereign individual because you're getting your incomes from many different places and

you have the flexibility to sort of pick and choose where you live in the world.

Yeah. Back to your point when you mentioned the government may restrict your freedom. Like at the moment, I want to go back to New Zealand, but the border is shut and the government has a stupid quarantine rule. So they only have hundreds or thousands rooms available for people to go back to quarantine first. But if you can't get the spot, then you won't be able to come back. So there are

10,000

New Zealanders outside New Zealand, they want to go back, but they can't. Do you think for the foreseeable future, you're not even going to try and go back? I think, yeah, at least this year, I don't think I will be able to go back. That sucks. Judging from so many people waiting on the queue and the New Zealand government is still not decided whether they want to open the border or not. I found this a little bit frustrating. Yeah.

I've seen it's like that in Australia as well. Yeah, true. So you can see the different governments, their one decision can affect millions of people's lives. Yeah, I have some good friends I met in business school from India.

And they had work visas to work in the United States. And when I recently went on my vacation to Greece, they were supposed to come with us. But the U.S. government basically was like, you can go, but you're not going to get back in. And it was it was like really it was eye opening for me because, you know.

They're allowed to be here, except they're not. It, to me, was eye-opening that you really want to pursue citizenship where possible because you really do get significantly more flexibility from how a country will treat you in a time of crisis.

really chaos, I guess is the best way to put it. Yeah, exactly. Can I ask you probably a personal question? So if you can live and work anywhere in the world, where do you want to be? Yeah, so it's funny, it kind of changes on a frequent basis, depending on what's what's happening in the world. Yeah, I sort of I

I kind of have like a bucket list of places I've always wanted to live. And that's how I really look at it at the moment. So that's Berlin. That's Tel Aviv.

And it's Singapore. Yeah. So those would be like the places like very high on my list. There's definitely other places that I'm like interested in for different reasons. Yeah. You know, like tax reasons, freedom of speech and privacy. There's places where it's like, because I run an information business, it may make more sense to incorporate my business in a place where it's like, no one, no one's going to give them access to my like server. So yeah,

I think the things right now with where I'm at, where I'm pursuing my second passport is I'm looking for places I want to live, period. And then from there, I'll look for probably a third and it will be more about business opportunities. I see. So what other criteria would you...

be looking at when you pick up the location apart from tax probably health care I think that's very important element oh yeah yeah so it's it's interesting one of the things I'm hoping to do is start making a list of like the attributes of like a modern digital age state

And like, what are those? I think what we're seeing is like, as you said, like New Zealand and Australia, like I would have loved to have lived there a year ago. You know, their democracies, you know,

I thought they had freedom of speech and sort of these freedoms that I think what we're finding out is just because your country's a democracy doesn't mean you can do the things that you otherwise would have thought you could do. And so I think that's been eye-opening for me and sort of important to me is like freedom of speech really needs to be

huge in the country that I would live in. It needs to be protected. I need to be able to say what I want to say because if I don't have that being in an information business and talking about a sovereign individual, you know, it's not a recipe for success. I'll put it that way. The other thing I think, you know, you mentioned earlier being a journalist and like needing to like recognize

right and not be censored like i need to not be censored um and so there needs to be clear internet policies on you know what what digital platforms can and can't do and i think you're seeing that in america right now with twitter and facebook and their policies on misinformation it's starting to be where if you have an opinion or claim a fact that maybe is in dispute

you can be censored or kicked off the platform. And so those are the types of things that I'm on the lookout for when I pick places to live is like,

I need to be able to make money where I go and I make money through information. Yeah. I heard about if you are American citizen, if you move to other country, make money, you still need to pay tax to America. Is that right? Oh yeah. Okay. Yeah. So it's, America is like one of two countries where, um,

You basically, for the privilege of being an American, and it is a privilege, and there's no doubt about that, they will tax you. And there's, I'm not sure what the threshold is. Honestly, I need to look into it because it's going to be an issue for me. But yeah,

I know for the very least, you need to report your income. They may not tax it. From what I've read, it's something, it's an issue that a lot of American expats have is like it's expensive to find an accountant that can help you basically translate the country that you're in, their financial process to an American process. Do you think the blockchain technology...

will solve this issue in the future. Yes, but not anytime soon. The way I think of really Bitcoin and then we can sort of talk about some of the other stuff, but like Bitcoin is to me international money. It's like truly a one size fits all money for the entire global populace. And I think, yeah, you'll start to see more companies willing to

interact and pay their employees based on Bitcoin because it'll just become easier to do and easier to sort of account for across the employees that they have all over the world. I don't really know that all governments will interact with it the same way. I think ultimately they'll probably have to, but certainly for right now, it's like, we don't know how we want to treat this thing because it seems like the enemy of our money kind of a thing.

What's cool about Bitcoin is if you're in a country that's got oppressive monetary policy, maybe a country that's known to target opposition leaders and basically freeze their accounts. Yeah. I think it's really great to be able to have some of your money stored in Bitcoin where they can't do that. And that has some real interesting implications. Yeah.

But I try and advocate like being a sovereign individual doesn't mean you're breaking laws because you just don't need to to live the life you want to live. Like there's something like 195 countries in the world and between them, there's like you can get what you want from the world without breaking rules.

I do think that crypto, though, will, broadly speaking, force countries to adapt their policies to make them more amenable to people like you and me that want to go all over the world, earn income all over the world and not be double taxed. So what's the difference between sovereign individual and anarchist? Because some people may think, oh, you're just against the government. So I think going back to my example about it's a spectrum,

I do think some sovereign individuals probably are anarchists. I'm not. I do see the need for government in the world. I think governments in many different shapes and sizes are designed to address collective action issues, which otherwise, like,

a big group of people couldn't come together and solve. I think some governments are better at it than others. But I think that the real difference is when you look at a sovereign individual, if you look at it as only one type of person, it's not going to make a lot of sense. But if you look at it as a range of people, you'll see that there's something for everyone there. I think there's a lot of, especially like Bitcoin advocates that are anarchists,

I don't personally identify that way. I guess the best way to put me is a libertarian. I think less government is better, but I do see the need for government. I see. Do you mind sharing how many subscribers you have for this community at the moment? Right now, I have about 700. Let's see, I quit in May 2018.

And, uh, yeah. So like two months ago I quit my job and was like, this is what I'm going to do. And so it's, it started to really grow, um, since then. And what I'm really excited about is like, I feel like I've sort of done all the easy things.

up to this point and I'm starting to focus on the harder things. And so I'm going to be doing, I'm going to be launching my first like information product that, um, will hopefully bring in some revenue and help me grow. I'm going to use that money to start running ads. I'm doing these things more aggressively now that I have the time and I've devoted the time that I think will help me grow faster and

But also what I'm finding is like the people that I'm interacting with are like really passionate about the topic. And so the more I interact with them, the more I realize like I need to leave America to have like an international perspective. That's going to help me move the needle significantly. I see. Because you do the weekly newsletter, right? Yes. I find it super hard because I do the monthly one. I still find, oh my God.

I need to do so many researches and write it in a digestive way. So what's your process like? Yeah, I think if you just go into it thinking you're going to sit down every week and write it, you're going to have a bad time. And so I did build a process. I use Roam Research, which is kind of like Notion, but it's like a note-taking organization app that basically...

When I find links, different topics that I think are relevant to the newsletter, I'll store them in this app. And I'll spend the entire week just reading and reading and reading, finding the things that are relevant, storing them. And I'll write the newsletter over the course of a couple of days. By Wednesday, usually.

I know the general direction that each week is going to go. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, I'm writing the newsletter. Monday morning, I'll do a final edit and then it goes out.

Monday morning, East Coast US time. It's really interesting how it's changed from like the first one I sent to now. I think part of my process that has evolved over time is like using the data from each newsletter to sort of dictate, okay,

These are the things that my readers like. These are the things they clearly don't like. And how can I go and find more of what they like and less of what they don't like? So what kind of books and essays you'd like to recommend to people if they want to know more about this topic? I have three. Three books that I think are really important. And the first one I go back and forth with, like, it might be more important than The Sovereign Individual, honestly. Yeah.

It's called Future Shock. And it's basically, are you familiar with the term culture shock? Yes. I experienced a lot of culture shocks in my life. Yeah. So like, you know, that experience when it's like you go somewhere, somewhere new and you're like, oh my God, this is so different. I'm so tired. Like, what do I do to like, just to fit in? The book basically talks about this concept as it applies to

The fact that technology is coming out so fast and it's accelerating and it's accelerating the rate of change in society. So like everything we do, it's so different than it was 10 years ago before the smartphone came out. And it's just going to keep happening and happening and happening. And as that happens, we're going to experience like this culture shock, but a future shock where we're,

we freeze and we don't know how to adapt to the changes that are happening and it just opened my eyes to how crazy life is going to get if you only look to take your cues from the government or from other people and for me it reinforces a lot of the points of the sovereign individual which is you got to think for yourself and

You got to find your own sources of information and influence and make quick decisions because otherwise you're going to get left behind. Yeah. The other book I would recommend is called Predictably Irrational. It's about behavioral economics, which I think is becoming more and more important as where this

increasingly networked society. We interact with people as like, that's more and more what we do as, as like a productive society. And so understanding the cognitive biases that sort of force us to operate in weird ways. It's like, why will we do these things that we do on a daily basis? Well, it's because that's how we evolved.

And so understanding those sort of mental gymnastics tricks that our mind plays on us better helps us operate in society, especially as someone like me that produces a weekly newsletter. It's really important that I understand that.

you know, how to basically promote it in a way that people will be receptive to. Everything is changing, but people's behavior probably won't change that much. Right. Yeah. It's such a good point. I think if you think about evolution, society over the last hundred years has changed so much in such a short period of time, but like we haven't evolved in that time. Exactly. Yeah.

And for the first book you recommend, I do feel like my parents are facing the future shock. They have no idea what is Bitcoin. Yeah, the blockchain. It kind of motivates me to write something in a like

basic language to explain to their generation. I think it's natural, though. Younger generations pick up the new stuff, and it's harder for the old ones because change happens so quickly. Yeah. That's how I feel like maybe in 10 years' time, I will be left behind. So I'm a little bit anxious about that. I suspect you will be quite.

already thanks hopefully yeah keep learning yeah actually i think that's a good segue to the last book that i would recommend which is night as frontier it's about the willingness of people to look at the evening sort of night time as like an opportunity like an economic opportunity and for me i

what I liked about it was like the, you have to be willing to look at sort of fringe environments as opportunity, not as like, that's strange and bad. Like older people would where parallel, I think I draw is so this, this book talks about how like,

When we had electricity, we were able to basically control making nighttime like productive, like daytime, because we could just turn on lights. And so that really changed society. The ability to produce on a 24 hour basis, as opposed to just like when the sun was up. I think that the digital frontier is,

is going to operate the same way in that it's going to open our eyes to sort of new productive opportunities where yeah you can you can operate 24 hours a day if i'm if i've got a business in america but if i'm willing to sort of use talent all over the world

technically it's kind of more than 24 hours a day if you're manipulating time zones. So that's just one example. But like, I think treating the digital transformation as a frontier and sort of taking some of the lessons from this book, put it in a perspective that will allow you to embrace it in a more productive way.

Yeah, great. I'll put on to my reading list. Last question is a regular question for my guest. What got you most excited about the future? You know, it's hard. I think like a lot of people when they hear about the sovereign individual and like how it's going to like change society, they're like, oh, yeah.

That's so dystopian. Like that's the end of the world. And I like, I'm so excited for the future for so many reasons. I think the answer is I'm going to give you two, two things I'm excited about. The first is I think that like the internet and the productive opportunities it provides is really going to make so many people's lives better. And maybe not so much in the West, but,

But in developing countries where, you know, they didn't necessarily have access to great infrastructure and your sort of your job opportunities are what are available in your community. To be able to access job opportunities around the world through the Internet, I think is going to make a lot of people's lives better. And I think that's really exciting.

The other more personal thing that I'm excited about is I feel like we're living through a point in history that's going to be written about in like history books, like thousands of years from now, like the change that's happening. You know, it started with the smartphone with like on demand Ubers and things like that with social media and

And I think what's happening this decade, which is really exciting, is the space race. The ability to reuse rockets is really reducing the cost of getting to space. And most people think about when we talk about space, they're like, we don't need to be on Mars. I'm like, fine. But it's reducing the cost in a way that's going to make life on Earth better. So you're going to see space manufacturing increase.

You can do really interesting things in zero gravity as far as making organs and different kinds of silicon chips, which will drive down the cost eventually. I think ultimately...

the stuff that's happening now with space is going to have such significant impacts on our lives, on our everyday lives. In 10 years, we're going to look back and be like, oh my goodness, how did we operate before this stuff? So I couldn't be more excited. I think you and I will get to see just completely wild and wonderful changes to society that's going to make our lives better.

Exactly. I feel so lucky to be born in my generation because I got my first computer when I was in primary school. So I kind of experienced the before internet age because for the next generation, they probably won't have those like CD or DVD. But I find it very interesting to live in between. I mean, think about it this way, like

Like a younger person, like a Gen Z person, if you were to take their phone away for a week, you know what I mean? Like just one week, like what would happen? And that shows you how different the world is just from 10, 15 years ago.

Yeah, it's very interesting. Okay, thank you so much for your time, Doug. Thank you. Pleasure to talking to you. I enjoyed it as well. And it's, it's, you know, it's been fun. And when we first spoke, it was like, you go from from being like acquaintances on the web to friends. And it's so fun to put a face with a name. Yeah, definitely. We should do it again soon. Yeah, no problem.