Tony: This is the first ever, very exciting, and I'm very nervous, that we'll ever do an interview show and we have our first ever guest, Paul, the writer of Pathly Path on the show, which this book has been a tremendous influence for me this year. I've read the book a couple of times in English version and also in Chinese version. I'm very happy today we have Paul on the show.

To talk about Pathy Path. Welcome to the show, Paul. Can you introduce, maybe introduce a little bit of yourself and say hello to the audience?

Paul: Yeah, so thanks for inviting me to this. I appreciate you taking your first experiment doing a live interview with me. I'm Paul Millard. I, like you said, I wrote the pathless path. That is really a culmination of something I did at the age of 32, which was blowing up my life, walking away from sort of the, what I call the default path. And the default path isn't sort of, I...

specific kind of career or companies or anything like that. It's really the story in your head you grew up with about what you're supposed to be doing in life. Almost everyone from every country has some form of story in their head about what they're supposed to be doing. Everyone I've met in Taiwan has a story. It's similar but different than the one I grew up with in the U.S. And so I walked away from that path after job hopping, I had the appearance of success but underneath I was very discontent. I was not finding my way, my place in the world and I just needed to like run away from that world. Over the last eight and a half years I've been continuing to make sense of a new path. I like calling it the pathless path because it doesn't have a goal, it doesn't have an aim, it's just a continuous act of finding out, learning, reflecting, experimenting and adjusting as you go.

(02:03.312) For me, that was a relief, finding that phrase. It was the idea that I didn't have to have a plan. I didn't have to always be making more every year. I didn't have to be succeeding. And I could kind of reclaim those things and redefine them on my terms.

Tony: That's very exciting. think being able to encounter or, you know, kind of discover the pathless path and then come up with the phrase yourself and you talk about the default path. And I think in today's show, we want to start with the default path because it's a story that is really ingrained in every culture and specifically for Taiwanese audience, even for ourself, myself and Esther, the story of, hey, you have to get a good job. You have to

You have more salaries, you have to be a good employee in the company. And that's kind of the phrase you call it, the default path.

So in your words, how would you define the default path?

Paul: Yeah, like I was saying earlier, it's really the story of what you should be doing. When you ask people what they should be doing in their lives, almost everyone can recite a series of extrinsic milestones from zero to 30 years old.

graduate from school, go to university, graduate from university, get a job, maybe you get a master's, then you get married and have a kid. The problem with this is one, it doesn't account for any of the ups and downs that people inevitably face. Layoffs, confusion, not finding a good fit in the world. Second problem is it basically stops at age 30. And so,

for the rest of people's adult lives, it's just like dot, dot, dot, retirement. And so there's this huge swath of adult life, which we've sort of just said, well, you should just put your head down, not think about these things and grind forward because the only goal is retirement, right? And another one of those things is owning a home. Owning a home in Taiwan is probably even more intense of a pressure than owning in the US.

But I think if you grow up in Taipei, it's just extremely unreasonable. The price to rent ratios are some of the highest in the world. Personally, I can't afford a home in the US where I would like to own a home. So I've just sort of abandoned that dream. And I've said, OK, that's not something that's part of how I'm defining success or what I'm aiming at.

Mm-hmm.

Coming from you and then coining or coming up with the term default path, and to me or even to a lot of Taiwanese readers, it's kind of exciting or interesting is because we always thought from like East Asian perspective that the Western culture are more, there's a lot of freedom, there's all the things that you can try, but you still coming from that culture, you still was ingrained or kind of was in that default path mindset.

I think there's more openness in the US for entrepreneurship and taking risks and going after your dreams. But we have 350 million people. What you're seeing is the far end of the spectrum where we have extreme outliers. Exactly. I think on the average, most parents, most families are raised with the idea that you do the same thing.

(05:45.516) I think... The ideas I grew up with was you go to school, you try to get good grades, and then you get a good job at a big company and do that for 40 years. Maybe you jump to another job or something, but basically just like put your head down and work. Don't question these things. And then I think in the US, what's become even more supercharged over the past few decades is if you're making a lot of money, it doesn't matter what you're doing.

Mm-hmm.

Try to make a lot of money no matter what. One of the ideas I grew up with was, don't be a teacher, don't be a therapist, you're going to be poor. The worst fear in the US is like, what if you're poor? Right? And it's not to be rich, it's just to have like good money.

So we're moving to the next question. We share about your research on the modern work and the history of work and how people view them. Work from your book, Pathless Path, and it sparked a lot of feedback, mostly positive feedback. So from our audience, could you briefly elaborate the research you did on the modern work, like how people attach their meaning of life to their work?

Because I think the way you describe, you come up with the term default path is by one of the, I think one of the reason you come up with that is because you did an extensive research or you're understanding how the modern work or how the modern work life came to be. And then we're just sort of interested, like how did you do that? How did you find out, okay, the modern work was kind of like, it was created like a hundred years ago. It's not that long standing and that