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:

• Maple and marble floors
  
• Brazilian granite countertops
  
• Japanese-style tea room in the back complete with rush-reed tatami mats and mulberry shoji screened rear window.
  
• Golden tin ceiling
  
• Gold-leafed 10 foot curved section of the wall
  
• Home theater system with LED projector, 50" screen, and 12" subwoofer.
  
• A 240watt solar array on the roof
  
• Home automation to allow me to control the lights, locks, and stereo from my phone.
  
• Handmade zebrawood desk
  
• Controllable low-wattage LED lighting system with over 1000 bulbs
  

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.

Random Facts

• I've never tried cigarette or any drug. I've had only five sips of alcohol, and have swallowed no pills other than Vitamin D pills.
  
• Stan Lee (creator of Spiderman, The Hulk, etc.) gave me the superhero name: Quintessential Man.
  
• I once converted to Polyphasic sleep for several months, sleeping for fifteen minutes every four hours (2 hours total per day) instead of sleeping at night.
  
• I type on a Dvorak keyboard instead of QWERTY
  
• I can speak relatively poor Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese.
  
• I dropped out of college after 1.5 years with a final report card of F, A, X, and Q. The A was in scuba diving.
  
• Courtney Love was my roommate and lived in my bedroom for nine months.
  
• I was a professional gambler for seven years, and am a semi-professional Limit Hold'Em player. I played in the 2011 WSOP, but narrowly missed making it into the money.
  
• The first popular post on my blog was the one where I put a 3100 gallon swimming pool into my living room because I wanted to buy a penguin. Ah, youth.
  
• I only own one pair of pants and two shirts. And a white tuxedo, which is far less practical than I had hoped it would be.
  

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.

Love Work

Training Yourself

Stimulation and How I Learned to Love Dishwashing

Be The Twin

Extremes