Optimal mental this altitude I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking and oils you a personal question. I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton.
Books, I've Loved on the Tim Ferriss show is exclusively brought to you by audible there couldn't be a better sponsor for this series. My dear listeners and readers. I have used Audible for so many years as long as I can. Remember. I love it Audible has the largest selection of audio books on the planet. I listen when I'm taking walks. I'll listen while I'm cooking I listen whenever I can and if you're looking for a place to start I can recommend three of my favorites. The first is the Tao of Seneca by
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Hello boys and girls. Ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show where it is. Usually my job to sit down with world-class performers of all different types startup Founders investors chess Champions Olympic athletes, you name it to tease out that habits that you can apply in your own lives. This episode. However is an experiment and part of a short-form series that I'm doing simply called books. I've Loved I've invited some amazing past guests close friends and new faces to share their favorite book.
Describe their favorite books the books that have influenced them changed them transform them for the better and I hope you pick up one or two new mentors in the form of books from this new series and apply the lessons in your own life. I had a lot of fun putting this together inviting these people to participate and have learned so so much myself. I hope that is also the case for you, please enjoy.
Hi, this is Kevin Kelly. I'm Senor Maverick at Wired Magazine. And I'm an author of a couple books mostly about future technology. But in a previous life, I ran a magazine called the whole earth review and coevolution quarterly that reviewed books on a regular basis. And in that capacity. I have read through and evaluated. I don't know many many many thousands of books. I'm speaking right at this moment in a
Story library of my own that's filled with many many thousands of books that I own. I love books. I read books. I write books. And so I care about the kind of books that change people's minds and I want to talk about a few of those kind of books briefly. I want to tell you about four books that have changed my mind and maybe they'll change your mind.
I think the power of a book to change people's mind is an amazing superpower that we could hand something that little scribbles on it and it would change how you thought and maybe even looked at the world the kind of books. I'm going to recommend our non-fiction books, but fiction can certainly do that. There have been books of fiction that I've read have changed my view, but I'm going to talk about for non-fiction books that changed my mind and
I'm gonna start with the most recent one one that has just come out matter of weeks ago and it's called open borders and open borders is a graphic novel. That's what we call a comic book for adults and it's a graphic novel written by an economist Bryan Caplan and the graphic novels illustrated by an artist Zach weiner Smith and together. They have made this comic book for adults, which is about
out the science and ethics of immigration and it's probably one of the most radical books that I have read in years and it's radical because it has a radical idea in the radical idea is simply is that everybody in the world individually and every country in the world would benefit from having open borders meaning the ability or the right for anybody to live anywhere they want
If they obey will call loss. Now. There are going to be variations of that principle, but the basic premise is that you have open borders that you don't have borders that restrict where people can live and work in a certain kind of intellectual level. We could imagine some future Society on this planet where it becomes a universal human right to be able to migrate and live anywhere you want on the planet as long
As you obey local and that idea is seems very strange too. Many people right now. It seems unworkable or idealistic or in some ways simply a fantasy and Bryan Caplan in this book goes through this scientific economic reasons all researched and evaluated and makes a very clear fast fun case with comics about
Why are kind of intuition is may be wrong about this and why the fact is that it is the most and best economic thing. We could possibly do for ourselves and for others and there again, there are many objections about that. You may have many obvious ones and he goes through all of them offering reasons why those objections aren't true showing the data why it's not true. But at the end of the book he even goes a little bit further and says well even if you
Kind of don't accept all my arguments and you decide that maybe we meet some halfway measures he offers a bunch of different. He calls Keyhole solutions that are less than this perfect open borders, but is still Superior to what we have and I'm maybe not giving it credit because it sounds very dull and boring but in fact because it's a graphic novel it reads very fast if there's a kind of actually humor element in it.
And it's very very clear. It's very methodical and I believe it might even change your mind if you have some doubts about the premise. So that's open borders very new very current very radical very persuasive and fun to read the second book is one. That's a little bit older and is written by a friend of mine Stewart brand who used to be the editor and he was the founder of the whole Earth catwalks.
And he's read a lot of books too. But he wrote a book that I really found changed my mind about the spaces that I live in the structures that we work in the buildings that surround our lives and his books called how buildings learn by Stewart brand and it's an illustrated book with lots of pictures. But the main thesis of this book is that when you make building when you build something when you build a structure when you build a home or office building
Or even a factory you're making a prediction about what you think is going to be used for because because you're going to design it for certain uses in mind and like all predictions. Most of these buildings will be not use over the long term for what they were originally built for people build homes in they have additional kids and they need to remodel and then the begin to remodel or they were they won a home office and so commercial buildings are constantly being
Being renovated in four different kinds of stores or different from a store to a warehouse that warehouse to store and storts idea is that we should build buildings with the idea that they're going to be modified. So you want to make them sort of easy or ready to be modified by the current people who are using them and that the buildings that serve lasts. The longest are actually ones have been modified many times and therefore they are the ones that sort of are more able okay.
Capable of being modified and he calls that learning. So this is idea that when we want to make our surroundings or offices the places that we live in we should keep in mind that we're probably going to modify what they're being used for and therefore we're going to modify those spaces. And so we want to make adaptable structures adaptable spaces and it doesn't mean some high-tech thing that make me even me making something a square shell that's very easy to
Modify within it kind of depends but the point is is that buildings are adaptable and adapted in time. So you want to think of structures is having the element of time that changed my mind the third book. They won't talk about the change. My mind was a book called The innovators dilemma by Clay Christensen is kind of famous. Now, it may not be a hundred percent correct in all its details because it was based on some data that was preliminary but the basic
Is that when you are trying to do Innovation that there's a dilemma in The Innovation. There's a dilemma in the organization that's trying to make the Innovation and the Dilemma is simply that in the short term. It makes more sense to incrementally improve what you know how to do.
Rather than throwing it out and starting over and taking a chance on something new and maybe bigger that might not work and that in a business sense. It always makes more sense at the business bottom line in the short term to just incrementally improve what works and that to take a chance to do the risk of innovation, which is very likely to fail and that's almost the definition of innovation is that most of the time is going to fail
Um with the chance that you may have a hit a higher yield doesn't really make short-term economic sense. You have to take a longer view the calculus only works. If you are willing to take a longer View and so the Dilemma is how do you do that? How do you balance that risk of improving excellence in what, you know how to do versus
going with non Excellence going with failure in trying something new. So people think that is always obvious that you want to innovate but the point of this book is that it's actually not obvious that you actually have to kind of go beyond the obvious. You have to kind of push through the obvious because the obvious thing is to not innovate and so he gives case studies about why he believes
This is
true. And that aha to me really change my mind about thinking about how you be creative because to some people being creative seems natural and the obvious thing to do, but if you really are creative it's not going to always be so obvious and that is actually when you want to remember this book, which is that you have to take A longer-term View to kind of continue trying to innovate innovate.
It has dilemma clay Christensen. And the last one I want to talk about is another book to change my mind called finite and infinite games by James cars-- This is a little-known book. It's kind of hard to read was written by kind of a theologian a lot of it. I mean, he was kind of written in the language of religious orientation. A lot of is really maybe not so useful but read the first and last chapters and the basic premise that changed my mind was to
That in the world there were two kinds of games. There are finite games in which they were winners and losers we often call that a zero-sum if somebody wins someone else has to lose and then those kind of games the rules are fixed you have fairness if you someone is breaking the rules, it's unfair. You don't want to play and you play Until somebody wins and most of the games in the world. They're about winning and losing but there's another kind of game called the infinite game.
Game and they're there aren't winners or losers. The rules are not fixed your kind of constantly changing the rules just to extend the game and the purpose of the game is to keep the game going. The purpose of the game is to bring as many people into play the game purpose of the game is to kind of invent new games and that nonzero-sum or what we might want to call the positive sum is really the basis of most of the good things we have in life.
In a certain sense, you could say that a company that is working or successful isn't even a game because if it's really doing its job. Well, it's not taking from other competitors is actually enabling other people to do their own thing. It's actually creating jobs and creating money flow and creating new objects and services and goods that can be improved upon and used by others may be making ecosystem. It's in some ways in
charging the pie rather than just taking a slice of the pie and that idea of kind of the ever-expanding pi is the view that I now see the world and in helps me kind of look at things and even decide what to do by saying is this finite game and I don't want to play or is this an infinite game in which sign me up so finite infinite games James cars-- Those are four books that changed my mind and maybe
They will change yours. I hope they do. Thanks Tim for giving me a chance to rant about some favorite books by.
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