"...I think it's fair to say he is officially King of The Tech Geeks."
Gawker, September 2013
"[one of the] Top 25 Best Bloggers"
Time Magazine, August 2013
Hi! I'm Tynan and I believe in making deliberate decisions and breaking away from the herd mentality. I like learning new things, building habits, exploring the world, connecting with awesome people, and creating good work. I also like good Japanese green tea. Below are some of the things I'm best known for.
SETT
This blog is hosted on a blogging platform called SETT, which I began building with my co-founder in 2011. We believe that blogs can be more than a one way monologue, and should engage readers to become a part of the community surrounding each blog.
I work seven days a week on SETT, usually for twelve hours or so. I love it and have given up pretty much everything else in my life to make it great. Some of my favorite blogs that are hosted on SETT right now are Daniel Odio (our first blog), Sebastian Marshall, and Dick Talens.
You can read more about SETT here.
Pick Up Artist
From embarrassingly humble beginnings, I rose to become one of the most famous pickup artists in the world.
I'm Herbal, one of the main characters in the New York Times Bestseller, The Game. Pickup helped me get over crippling introversion with girls and led me down a path of honest self-assessment and continuous pushing of my comfort zone. I'm not actively involved anymore, but it remains one of the best influences in my life.
When I was more active in pickup I wrote a book called Make Her Chase You, which has helped tens of thousands of guys become social, get girlfriends, and have a much better social life.
You can read about how I got involved in pickup, and read one of my defenses of it.
Life Nomadic
In 2008 I sold everything I owned and went on an extended world trip for the first time with my friend Todd. We each packed a 28L backpack and made no advance plans, arriving in Panama on the first day with nowhere to stay and knowing no one. Throughout the year we got lost in the jungles of Panama, experienced the Cherry Blossom Festival in Japan, rode cross country on the roof of the slowest train in the world in Cambodia, rode 4x4s in the sand dunes of Qatar, ran with the bulls in Pamplona, and explored the miles of catacombs beneath Paris.
I ended up writing for the leading travel blog Gadling, becoming a fervent minimalist, and writing a book on lightweight nomadic travel called Life Nomadic. Since that time my backpack has shrunk to 19 liters and less than 10 pounds, and I continue to travel for a few months each year.
Here's a highlight video from our first trip, as well as a recent adventure in Peru and one in China. My most popular post every year is my Gear Post.
RV
I haven't lived in an apartment or house since 2006, when I moved into my first RV. My second RV, a 1996 Winnebago Rialta, is my current home. Although I'm happy to be saving money, my primary reasons for living in an RV are that it forces me to be minimalist and focus on what matters, and it's a lot of fun. I've modified nearly every aspect of the interior of my RV, doing almost all of the work by hand. Some of the changes include:
Other cool things inside the RV include a 100 year old Persian rug, an original David Choe painting, and the Aeron chair that belonged to the CEO of Design Within Reach. As you might have guessed by now, I also wrote a book about living in a nice small RV, called The Tiniest Mansion.
Phoenix Island
In September 2013, nine friends and I bought an island in Nova Scotia. Right now it's undeveloped, but over the next few years we plan on turning it into a place we can enjoy nature, work, and build cool things together.
Random Facts
Some of my favorite posts
To get a feel for what I write about, here are some of the posts I'm most proud of.
I'm lying in bed in the RV right now. Yes, I still live here and love it, but that's another story. The only difference between tonight and a normal night is that my bed is flying down the highway at 60mph, headed for the east coast.
My esteem friends and colleagues, Jonah and Krystal, are accompanying me on my first actual road trip in the RV. We're going through the scary bits of America as quickly as possible (Arkansas, for example), and are trying to get to NYC before Krystal's flight on Monday.
I'm going to hopefully meet up with Ross Jeffries, the first "pickup artist" to ever teach seminars, in New York before he leaves. Online he sometimes comes off like a prick, but in real life he's one of the most warm and genuine guys in the community. I'm also going to stop by and say hi to my aunt, uncle, three cousins, and my grandparents who are visiting them.
I had an original thought about a year ago. It was wonderful.
Back then I was reading everything I could find on nomads. Something about that approach to life sounded right to me. One day on Wikipedia, I ran across the term "existential migration" (a term coined by Greg Madison, PhD), and my world instantly started making sense for the first time. I'm what you would call an "outsider". No matter what is going on in my life, I always feel like I don't/shouldn't belong. I have done my best to attempt to fit my square peg into regular round society, but it always felt uncomfortable. My urge is to go against the grain, do new and unexpected things. I want to experience all of the atypical in this world.
Now I find out about this entire group of people who share my point of view. It was a huge relief. Now I know that I belong and am not alone. This group consists of people who chose to be nomadic for no other reason than to not belong. They thrive by voluntarily leaving their homelands in order to become out-of-place in their environment. Madison's research found that "among this population, there is a marked preference for the strange and foreign over the familiar or conventional routines."
They leave in order to escape the ordinary. Great. I started to understand myself a little better now that I finally had a social mirror to look into. Later I would read this book called The Power Of A Habit, and an explosion occurred in my brain.
I'll get to that next time...
