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Good afternoon. This is Edward Murrow, ladies and gentlemen, this is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show. Ladies and Gentlemen, I have one of my favorite people in front of me. Kevin Kelly, who's Kevin Kelly. Kevin Kelly helped launch and edit Wired Magazine. He has written for the New York Times And The Wall Street Journal among many other Publications. He is the author of the new book. Excellent advice for living wisdom. I wish I'd known earlier. I have a lot to say about this book. We will get into it other books by Kevin Kelly and
Out of control, the 1994 Classic book on decentralized, emergent systems the silver cord. A graphic novel about robots and Angels, what technology wants a robust theory of technology and Vanishing Asia, his 50-year project to photograph The Disappearing cultures of Asia. And the inevitable understanding the 12 technological forces, that will shape our future and New York Times, bestseller. Kevin is currently co-chair of long now Foundation, which is building a clock and a mountain that will tick for 10,000 years. Of course, he also has a daily blog.
Weekly podcast about Cool Tools and a Weekly Newsletter. Recommend, oh, a free one page list of six, very brief recommendations of cool stuff. You can find that at recommend oh.com that is re c, om, e, and D 0.com going to say, ret ome, and dough.com, you get the idea. So recommend a.com. Take a look. He's also Senor Maverick at wired and lives and Pacifica, California. You can find him on Twitter at Kevin to Kelly. Kevin the number two Kelly. And
All thanks, Kevin @kk dot-org, Kevin nice to see you again.
Kim is always a pleasure in just seeing you makes me happy life. So glad to be here.
Hey, I saw you walking. I was chatting with with Harley have shop by earlier today. And you walked in and I saw you across the room with your yellow baseball cap on. Doesn't hide the beard though. So I spotted you, and also just may be very happy to see us thinking about that and how
incredibly valuable that is what a gift it is. And I'm glad to be seen. And so I'm so glad to be able to share with you another time of exploring some ideas and to see where they go now, ideas, you're a man of ideas and I thought for comic relief, we might start with a list of possible topics to discuss with Kevin Collison. I just want to read these because people who
Our brass not long-term listeners. May not have heard our previous conversations, and I believe the title. I used, you did not choose this. I chose it for our first conversation was Kevin Kelly. The real life, most interesting man in the world. Something along those lines. Yes. And people may say, what hyperbole, what is this nonsense? But, wait, allow me to lift the possible topics and I ask every guest to send possible bullets for exploration.
So here we go. And then I will return to a few of these very the most popular thing I've ever written 1,000. True fans. 2008 why we built a clock that will take for 10,000 years? Inside a mountain. I've had a daily blog for 20 years for five years. A weekly podcast at wired, we invented the click on Advertising Banner for the web next. I spent 11 years creating a huge graphic novel about angels and robots released on Kickstarter the silver cord. We're going to come back to that my failed campaign to discover all the species of life on Earth in 2003. I made a long bet on the collapse of the global human population.
Shen by 2060 by Ted Talk on why we should be optimistic in 10 minutes. The most important article I've ever written. In my case against belief in an AI Singularity my most recent piece in wire extolling the glories of generative, AI engines of wow I co-founded the hackers conference in 1984. Still going my 50-year passion project and this ghost on, weighing 30 pounds about Vanishing Asia. I rode my bike Across America twice once west to east once north to south, I make a piece of art every day, my biggest audience and most of my fans
Are in China where I'm known simply as KK have a screen credit for working with Spielberg on the Syfy concept for Minority Report with a friend. I built a two-family house from scratch, cutting down the trees, it goes on and on and on right. The story of my religious conversion on This American Life in 1997 I made a music video in 1969. 12 years before MTV. So last people
think I'm exaggerating, it's now that you can just
ridiculous and thank God. I'm a specialist in the ridiculous. So I thought we would start with.
This bet. So in 2003, mmm long that the collapse of the global human population by 2060. So what is a long that and which direction did you bet where you better all on or against sure, Ed why?
So long box is a service that we set up at the long now Foundation, where, which I can explain a little bit more about that, which is meant to encourage long-term thinking. So we made a place where we could have a long bet, meaning more than two
Two years about some socials, the significant wager. And the idea would be that there would be a public that a need to be accountable for it and there'd be money involved in that wager. And the idea was to also require people to put the logic of why they were going in a certain direction and that over time, if you had enough of this, you could see which kinds of logic and what kinds of thinking would win more often and to get around the laws and betting it's a Time.
Which basically is illegal to make a bet.
That's been kind of slowly changing, but we engineered a kind of a hacker, which you could make a donation to you would use the money and the money would go to the foundation, the nonprofit of the person who won the bet. So my bet and by the way, there are a lot of people who bet on including Warren Buffett, I made a million dollar bet that basically index funds would beat any investment hedge fund if he won his charity one,
My bet about the population was that the population of the world, the global population of the World by 2060. I think it was only 16 would be the saying as it was at the time of the bat which is a think 2003. So the idea is that we are coming up to a peak of human population, that would then on the other side, go down. So you very commonly see the chart of the rise
In population. But it's interesting to me that you never see what happens on the other side. And what happens on the other side, as far as we can tell, is that it plummets. And that's because
resource scarcity. No, no education. Falling birth rates,
just falling birth rates because modern people on average are not having more than two kids per couple. And fertility is following all around the planet, including
I'll even in the US and everything that we've tried we being humans have tried collectively to counter, that has not worked. So, Japan is famously, losing the total number of people not just having a lower birth rate. They actually have a declining population but they're actually not the lowest birth rate, which is South Korea. And China is aging Mexico is aging faster than the US. So, all the people that have been coming from Mexico,
Co Mexico will want to have come back at some point. It's a really significant change. And again it's possible that we could use technology to change it, maybe have artificial wounds or who knows what the right now for the average person. They're not inclined to have a lot of children. In the people who do have children don't have enough to cover. For those who don't in terms of the world population, you can have immigration, which is what the US has been doing all along bitches.
Stealing people from other countries, but that doesn't help you globally. So here's where it's a problem formal of environmental is just as good news is, there's less people who are going to consume sources. But throughout history, we've always only had Rising living standards with Rising population. We have no experience.
Do you think those are causal or correlated? That's the
question. I think there's obviously some feedback.
Where the more people you have, the more ideas you have, the more wealth you have and that allows you to have more kids, but we don't know. And so all we can say is we have no experience in having living standards with
A smaller population, a smaller audience smaller Market every year. So what do you think of the implications of this is 2060 just after the Apex, will it have been declining for a period of time. When is the projected Apex, if you have a projection, right? So that's one of the evidences is that this peak is keeps moving closer because
Right? It's not
static well it's not static but it also means that there are sort of all the projections about the increase in population, that people were assuming and built into some of these demographic. Models are being revised, all the time, so that Peak keeps moving closer and the the height of the peak, the numbers of actually how high it is, is changing. And I think one of the things that's really important to understand for us in our society right now, is that if you ask any question at the global level, the answer is we have no idea.
I'm the one thing we have, we know most about is human population and I think our number accounting of that is probably off by 10 percent plus, or minus. And that's the thing that we know the most about globally. But if you ask like, how much fresh water is there, how much electricity is being generated globally? The answer is that we really don't know. We have a very poor view of us globally, partly, because there's areas of the world that are so undeveloped we don't have very good accounting
or view meaning. We just we just
Very incomplete. Yes, understand you don't
have a global census. We don't have a global way of viewing. We have now Sally's that can help us see but but they can't count everything. Yeah, and so I think what we're doing is a species is moving into this error will become a global, have a global economy. We've have a global view, a global machine all the internet's connected together and will act more globally and maybe increasingly some Global governance.
It's but we're not there yet. And so even something is Primal and essential as our population. I think we don't know.
Have you had any exposure to her interaction with the Santa Fe Institute? I have not. But I've recently had conversations with a number of people feel girly and others who are involved complex adaptive systems. And I just be curious to know what your exposure has been.
So my first book was written.
Out basically the Santa Fe Institute. So the out of control was based from the conference that was initiated by conference. I went to at Los Alamos and Santa Fe was hosting when the first conferences and I would go down there and talk to all the scientists. This is in the late 80s. That was the beginning of this sort of a complex adaptive system view of the world. And so that's what out of control is about is looking at that view and saying, you know, the way biology works in the way this complex
elegy works are very similar, they have very similar Dynamics because there are complex adaptive systems and what we want to make with like the internet, which is all its penetrations that you can kind of like think of spam as a conveying virus that you have to, you can't eliminate the, you have to treat it like an immune system, where you keep it at Bay, and so the adopting, some of these biological Dynamics and apply into machines and allow the work in trying to make robots and early AI or again, where
Modeling off of what was being learned and often reported or sponsored by the Santa Fe Institute and that kind of approach to complex adaptive systems. So, yes, I think it's incredibly important and for me it was a transformative. Framing of the complicated things was to think of them in these terms and my whole book was about the fact that the world of the made and the world of the born, basically, the same, the two faces of the same kind of dynamic.
Dynamic and so you can look at how Meadows work ecosystems and then you can look at the internet which was just beginning. And now, of course, it's in full bloom and you can see how social media they have similar
behaviors. Yeah. And you can find thing and wanted that you then find in the other and surprising ways life, imitating art, imitating life, and the sense that we think we have invented gears. And then, we were like, oh wait a s, actually there. Insects that use gears for
I've searched all thing right. How Wild is that
right? So there's biomimicry was the field which was kind of amusing. There's as models for ideas and Frameworks were trying to make mechanical things and the only takes you so far. I mean that was the kind of maybe the genius or the Breakthrough in the Wright brothers, which is like you didn't make Flying Machine by
strapping Wings to
people, but by flapping her wings it was like he's put a big Surfboard on a fly. There's limits to it and right now,
Now, with the way I suffer, there's lots of looking at the neurology and course we call them neural Nets. So there is huge amount of influence. But what I'm saying is even maybe a little stronger, which is that it isn't. As if these mechanical systems are imitating, biology I'm saying, they actually have the same.
Dynamics. The Dynamics that are powering. Biology are powering the technium in the technology. I think we are quite close on that. In the sense, that both paths end up in the same places and I would tend to agree Los Alamos. Is there any particular reason they chose was Alamos?
So post Alamos, there are a lot of physicists left over the Manhattan Project who kind of light living there and marry gum on was the prime mover. And so she liked it and I think he might have been instrumental in finding the finding for it he was on the chair for a very long time and they were space is to convene in people and so it was Santa Fe was close to Los Alamos and that was the reason why I was in Santa Fe got it.
I've been
revisiting some of Richard feynman's right now
and if he might been part of that whole thing too. I mean he well
he was there for sure. Me and in terms of do I see that that group that I don't know but certainly that is part of the reason I asked Los Alamos cell membrane, all right so let's take a hard left which is I think
going to be common in this conversation and we will probably come back. We almost certainly come back to AI but I don't open that can of worms just yet. Exactly. All right. You spent 11 years, creating huge, graphic novel, but angels and robots silver cord. I am you may or may not know this but deeply interested in comic books and collect it for a very long time. Spent all of my allowance, all of my work money, almost all of it on comics for very long from Taiwan to be penciler. Why did it take
11 years. And what did the process of translating your thinking and writing? Yeah, shoe that form look like or the steps
and then a friend who actually was actually comic book artist and had published in one to do another one. And I'd kind of always wanted to try my hand out because I thought this was a brilliant genre for communicating, lots of things. And particularly if you're interested in science fiction, it was sort of like, to me a little better than a novel because it had that kind
Of immersive visualization, which I love. I'm a very visual person but it wasn't as so detailed that you need to make a movie of it. But we thought we could do both and we thought that we maybe we could write something that would have some appeal to be making movies. So we would try to write it the script as if we were writing a movie. And so some of the other associates that we had worked for Pixar.
Some story writer pea-sized stands. It sounds like a law firm. What do you mean
my friend? And these other friends all went to the same church, okay? We
The same church and they were people who worked at Pixar and some people who worked at ilm. And so I had this idea of doing this book. It's a story, the premise of it was, I was imagining that there would be these interdimensional beings. We're calling them, Angels, they're made out of light because their intangible and that they would look down on humans and weep when they saw us because we were getting the ride that they crave that embodiment and we were squandering it. So that's the basic premise.
Is that there is this realm and there's these beings and there are waiting their turn to be embodied and they're looking at us what we're doing with is like, you, you have the ultimate ride and you're blowing it and it's like what would I do? It would smother my face with mango juice and I went to hear house, I can take a dive into the ocean and swim underwater at home, are you? And so that was the premise of it. And then the added part of it was that
some of these in jail, like beings would try to cheat by becoming embodied into robots. They wouldn't go through the traditional preparation that you require of moral guidance and whoever else it needs to be before you're allowed to be in the human, but they were going to cheat by coming into robots. Skipping a few steps and that these would be kind of unhinged your Rogue. So anyway, that's the premise. So you have these angels and robots and with graphic novel and we would tell stories and the issue was, I'd never written.
Fiction in my life though the Pixar people had they were in the from the story side and Ida couldn't draw to the level necessary. So we worked on it. And the reason why I took 11 years was we made it way too big. Instead of doing it. Like, little 20-page things, we started the whole thing.
300 of the Rings
in one. Gal, exactly. No, actually, we got a dance from Simon & Schuster to do it, and we were late and delivering in the guy.
Guy who bought it left, they wanted it back, slow blah blah
occupational. Hazard,
exactly, right. So it took us that long just to finish and we actually kick-started it to print it
when you were generating the story, were you doing it in effectively? Screenplay form?
Yes. It was written as a screenplay script
and what did you hope, what did you collectively? And maybe it was different person to person. Hope this story would do.
If anything,
that's a really good question. And that's the most important question you always want to be asking yourself when you're doing these, what effect you want to have on people. How do you want them to feel after they're done? Do you want them to change your behavior? And for me it was this idea of the Genesis of it which was to nudge people, a little bit more to take advantage of this special time that we have to interact with.
Each other. This is what you get by being embodied. Is that there's far more influence, we can influence things through the physical way that we can't wear intangible beings. And that was the issue that these other dimensional beings had is that they don't have as much, influence is really hard from the nervous because having a body means that you can influence think by interacting with them physically and that's very
powerful and experience things and
experience things, right? And so that's what it was. It was a node or a
nudge for people to maybe appreciate their own lives. Meaning literally their life much more than they do
and they get Kevin Kelly you're good at helping friends myself included to do that IRL in real life too. Right through experiences and we may come back to that but first the iconic 1,000 true fans, the most popular thing you've ever written, right?
Why do you think that is the case? And what would you double down on or revise? If you were to take another stab, right at it today. So the honest answer, the one of the reasons why it's very popular is actually through you. The fact that you included it in one of your books, that's sort of lifted it out of my little realm. The reason why maybe it kind of resonates with people is because
There is sort of a an assumption that the goal is to hit it big, the big tie bestseller, a hit and most people kind of dissociate that those numbers that kind of large-scale with success in the idea that success could look differently. That you could have a more modest size scale and that be successful, sometimes it's dismisses, lifestyle, businesses, or whatever. And I kind of
Realized that the technology would allow a different version of that little as possible. And that it would be good, it would be good for people. I think people can resonate with that because it's a viable, alternative option to things that was not spoken before I was not even really on the radar. And when I wrote it, when I first wrote it before you even saw it, there was no Kickstarter. There was no Patron and I was challenged with people like Geralyn nearer to say we know that
a nice Theory but there isn't any evidence that this is actually working and it was actually at that time I did a follow through and I tried to find evidence and there was evidence of established artists from publishing or music or Studios who had already audience and could move off of that to their own. But there wasn't any evidence of an indigenous
Organic growth from nothing. Now, there is everyday, people write to me, meet me. Say, yes, I have been able to do that inspired someone by hearing of that
possibility. Is there anything that you would modifying that piece or emphasize more?
So, I did a modification for you, which was where I talked about the fact that one benefit in one disadvantage. The one benefit, is that part of what we're doing?
Doing is if all you need is a thousand true fans, then even if your interests are one in a million given the population of the Earth of buildings, people, that means throws, a thousand people potentially on the planet, who will share your interests. So if your interests are only one in a million, people can identify with the, you still have enough. And then the second thing was that just emphasize to people that this is not for everybody that tending, the fans and
Jim with them is almost like a half-time job, at least, maybe even more and not everybody suited to do that. An artist might just want to paint. They don't want to deal with fans and we seeking for dealing with fans. What it means. It's not always pretty and it can burn your out. And so I just want to emphasize that this is an option and secondly you don't have to go all the way you can have your thousand true fans and then you can have lots of other casual fans and other fans, which would allow
You to have other people help you. So it's not just you and then secondly, for some people, your want to have intermediaries, just not something you want to spend your time doing and that's perfectly fine, but it's a really great place to be able to start from. So maybe you don't want to land there, but that's one of my pieces of advice is that where you start? It's not where you're going to land. So you, this is a good place to start,
that's exactly what I was going to say, which is even if you
Want to hypothetically build a huge company and change the world. Although I'm very skeptical people who lead with that. I think most businesses fundamentally our lifestyle businesses, if you really double click and look at it closely enough, even if someone aims to be Fortune, 500, CEO, in any case, the point I want to make is even if you have these very lofty large-scale goals. Beginning with the exercise of reading 1,000, true fans.
And at least considering what your approach would be to accomplish that burst is a great yo fundamental stuff, right?
And partly that is because you get 1,000 true fans by accumulating them one. By one. If you're focused on like today, I will get one more additional customer that is tremendously powerful customer by customer. Are they happy in my giving value to them? If you can focus on that that is
Incredibly a superpower.
Yeah, for sure. And if you can take those 1,000 true fans in right and some subset of them, become your PR / marketing forces, then things can multiply very quickly. I promise left turns are in take another left, turn, you failed campaign to discover all the species of life on Earth. I wanted to hit a highlight and maybe this is also a highlight but I would love for you to expand. Yeah, on this Lessons Learned what happened?
There was a conversation I was part of and I was sitting next to a billionaire who said, you know, it's actually hard to give away a billion dollars and for some reason I thought at that moment, well actually I know what I would do and that would be, I would hire all the local indigenous people and have them be barefoot taxonomists and go out and discover and catalog.
All the living species on this planet because we never done that. And by the way, if we found life on another planet, that's the first thing we would do, is a systematic survey of all the life on that planet. But we haven't done it on our own home planet and because you're paying the locals, you would distribute that money down really, really fast and a Stewart brand was sitting next to me and we kind of thought it was a cool idea and then I didn't think anything more of it because I have ideas, every I have a lot of ideas. I'm giving it away.
And then like a week later store said this, do that idea? And I said, what I did? I'd forgotten it about it. I've already said, you know, the idea at dinner about counting all the species and I said, yeah, you know, I don't know if like I'm not taxonomists I'm not a biologist and stores hunch, was that with new technology? This is my bias to, we might be able to do that.
Could you just briefly explain for people who don't know?
No Schuster
Bros. Yes. So Stewart brand is closer. And in the person who first hired me, he invented the whole earth catalog in the 1969. And the best way to describe the whole of Kellogg is it was kind of like your information Guide to the world before there was the internet and Steve Jobs famously called it the internet before there was an estate was internet printed on newsprint because it was reader generated. So, before YouTube before
Saying, if you wanted to find out how to build a house or repair your VW bug or start a
home school or
keep bees, where would you go? There was literally no place to find information. Libraries didn't have information. There was no internet to look it up, but the whole earth catalog started to accumulate those and they were readers of it would send in their versions. I do the best book on gold panning is this thing and then Stewart would run it. Run it. Run it right away. And there was no advertising was kind of.
Of leader supported. So that was Stewart brand. And he went on to do things, we started the well together, which was the first online access to the internet and other things. So he's my hero and he's kind of, just had a recent Buck a biography written by him by John Markoff, the New York Times, Tech writer. And so a, we Steward has been served at the center or at the Leading Edge of almost first, the beatniks and the hippies.
And then the natural things. Got a lot of tourists 25. Exactly. Right. He's a kind of always there and his background was biology. He was a biologist for a study with Paul Ehrlich who is the population bomb guy on the other side of this argument about population. So Stewart was sitting there it was a long now sir, guard of the wall now with me and Danny Hillis and Peter, Schwartz to encourage long-term, thinking to be a good ancestor. How do we be good? Ancestors.
And that that dinner later on. He said we should really try and do this. It would be kind of a great thing. So we actually started a foundation called all species. I named it all species, inventory. All species foundation and we were going to try and raise money not from the usual sources that funded taxonomy really want to take any money from. - it was really pitiful amount of money. But to find it from the Silicon Valley and get money for developing the technology that would be able to do that. And
It was just too early,
it's just too early, too early in what respects
right now on my phone I have Merlin which will identify a bird song I have I seek which will identify almost any plant or mushroom. That's what we needed. I say ecologically. Yes. And you needed it because even those those aren't going to identify a new one.
If you have an app that can identify the known ones, then you're only going to bother the taxonomists with one day. Isn't it, defy? Otherwise people are just sending the bio. This is a brand-new species locator signal, is not a new adult bother me with that one. So, that's what we needed. And we were just 25 years too early in terms of Technology, being available to be able to assist this. And so it became kind of a catalog of existing.
Species. And that was the thing that shocked us was okay. Well, first we need is we need a list of all the existing species. This is whatever. This is 2,000 feet or some. There isn't what it was like, what? Well, there's all these taxonomic, some Publications and they're all buried in these obscure publication to haven't been digitized yet. So it was like, oh my gosh, is as even further behind than we thought. So that is sort of what it became. It became kind of a program just to
Sighs the existing known species. And then the other thing is that as I started to do that, they realized that there was this huge duplication of species having more than one name, because they're being, you know, somebody in Germany and somebody in Japan and not even knowing that they're talking about the same thing. So it was failed in the sense that we still don't know all the species on this planet. We don't even know how many we don't know.
And we're still only beginning to have a central integrated comprehensive complete catalog of what we do know and install the Encyclopedia of life and he'll Wilson before he died, was involved in in that I legendary. Alright.
Stricken. Silly ants. Yes, Stewart brand. Let's spend a little more time on Stewart brand,
who, who's been a guest on your show, has been a
guest. He's spectacular, he is, you see what we say? His age is now he's
86.
Maybe something like that. Yeah. And I interviewed him not that long ago and he was doing CrossFit two or three times a week. Exactly. And also military background and just have to read it.
Bio to even begin to try to believe it. He would be also, maybe on your short list for real world, most interesting. Yeah. And exactly now. I recall chatting with Stuart, I believe about resurrection of species. So the potential of Jurassic Park style, resurrecting, say woolly, mammoths, and reintroducing. Some of these large
Terrestrial herbivores for any host of reasons. What do you think the future holds for those types of
plans? Yeah, it was Stuart Ryan feeling and I who did all species and Stewart and Ryan went on to do revive and restore is the name of their program and it is too. Originally the totem animal was the mammoth The Woolly Mammoth was to bring that back in? There are a lot of very interesting reasons why to do that. And the way they do is basically to
Take existing Asian elephants and winterizing them through breeding. I got an accelerated reading, so you can actually just going to like hatch out of a of a test tube brand-new woolly mammoth. There would be a sense in which you would kind of use the line that existing elephants to try and reverse kind of
engineer that take a mendelian right approach to,
but that's a little bit longer term and actually Stewart. And I went to enjoy each Church, went to Siberia
To go get samples of the namus that were being exposed by the thawing permafrost, to get the DNA from the trunk, a state park
17:1, right opening. Exactly.
So that was quite an experience, but there are other animals. They're gonna be a little bit easier to do.
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Well, alright, well optimism from your one of the most optimistic people. I know. Mmm. I think that that is a great influence on me and the world and sometimes push back. Yes. On some of
course, if we should
of what would be your doesn't have to be an elevator pitch, could just be a very long elevator run because we have infinite time. There's a horse. Yeah, exactly. That's right. Moving as slowly as you would like
What is the argument for why we should be optimistic?
So generally people see, optimism is kind of a temperament science, Sunny View. And I think there is some of that and I have a natural amount of it. But over time, I've actually become even more optimistic than my general tendency. Deliberately is kind of like a learned optimism. And I think the reason we should be, as optimistic as we can is because it is how we make really good things, good complicated things. It's very hard to make good complicated things work because generally there is
Ways things can fail, then they can succeed and it's very unlikely that we're going to make something really good this complicated inadvertently. They're hard to do. So we have to kind of see it and believe that it can be done and that is where the optimism comes in is envisioning something and then believing that you could make it real because when we look back on history and that's where a lot of my optimism comes, we realize that most of the things that we
have now have been made by people who are optimistic leave Ewing that there was possible to make them and believe that they were going to make him and could imagine them. So I think of it as a work of imagination where you could have imagined a good scenario which is harder to do than imagining a Sara, where fails or collapses. It is much easier to imagine how things break than it is to see how they work.
And that's why intrapreneurs and all the others are rightly lauded because the going against that grain, it is hard to imagine how we could have this thing. That seems like it is improbable. And most things that work are improbable. That's the definition from the Santa. Fe complexity theory is that things. Breaking down is the probable things, complicated things working or improbable by definition. And so you're against the improbable and that work of Imagining the improbability,
On having the improbable succeed, then believing hn is optimism, which means that the optimists are the ones who shape our future. So I like to give a little story of I could car. You need to have brakes on the car to steer the car with yourself are but the engine is actually the more important element. So there are people and are there are organizations in. There are methods that are going to be doing the breaking.
And I think they're essential, I went breaks in the car, but I just feel that the brake can overwhelm and tossed like nation in that. We also want to remember to focus on making the engine even stronger. So I emphasize the
engine. So I want to take a closer look at the engine today is two things, breaking down our the probable and there are many more ways things can go wrong than they can go, right, right.
if I'm hearing you correctly,
And maybe also bring in some of my own position. It would be that active optimism is probably more valuable than passive optimism in the sexiest, the belief that you can make things turn out, all right? As opposed to the belief that things will turn out. Alright and therefore
I can go about my day and not concern myself with worries about a b c. D, e, OE through Z and I'm curious if you suddenly have the Kevin Kelley Institute for active optimists, how you would cultivate this? Or
maybe encourage it in more people because I do see optimists who are
Not panicked, not necessarily paranoid, but they are very interested and excited and feel some moral obligation to focus on solving really high leverage problems. Were creating new technologies. I also see techno optimists are like, well, if a b and c gets bad enough, if the temperature of the earth gets to X, Y and Z, then we'll have these Technologies in all be fine, and if this happens then,
That'll all be fine and people thought all was going to run out by this year but they didn't factor in that. As the number of barrels per year, produced went down the price would go up and then all these other Technologies like fracking became viable and voila. No problem. I view those caps is somewhat different and I'm just wondering if you have any perspectives on
that. I love your distinction, between passive, optimism and active. I think this brilliant and right on the reality is, is that you can't be active about everything you have to kind of
t', tone shoes. And so, there is a sense in, which, okay, there is a greater than zero chance that the Earth could be impacted by an asteroid, and it would be really devastating. I'm on the most devastating things that could ever happen to this planet. Far beyond, even with climate change to do you. Delete Change Columbia. Exactly. And very fast. It's really good. That there is now a group of people who are thinking about that and there's the be 1612 Foundation which is just crack.
I think all the asteroids. What was it called? Be 1612 after The Little Prince, Right? Got it. It's a viable thing that they've been behind all the tracking of all the asteroids, kind of upping that. And then recently, we just actually sent something to hit the F2 Raven, deflected it. So the first Cosmic impact you really had on that, you know, in the cosmos
pretty wild to think but yeah, monkeys on a spinning rod, exactly, right. Figured out of deflect,
Caso De Soto it speeds up, there is a small group of people but we don't need to have that br
Concern for making National policy every year. That probability is so low, it should really be a factor in us making our decisions about. We're going to do this year so that's passive in that sense. I can be passive about because there is another group of people that
his act and you know that a group is active, right?
So what might help other people and think for me, one of the major things for me was the more I thought about the future, the more I became interested in history and the more I read history
The more the reality of progress became and I think just acknowledging the reality of progress would do a large huge step in helping our optimism.
I'm interrupting not to push back but just for definition of terms. What do you mean my progress? Because that word can be used to meet a lot of different things.
It's a very loaded word. I'm using it to mean, simply that
angels of our better nature type
stuff. Yes, it means that overall an average
This is a better place to live than any time in the past and this is the kind of Obama test. And if you heard about that, but it's like, if you were to be born randomly any time period could be male, female, poor Rich, you totally at random, on some average saying, what time do you want to live? In what time period? And like, there's no way you went to be anything before at least 50 years ago, and maybe not even within 50 years because we intuitively understand it. This is actually a
The best time to be alive, but there is a recognition of with the currents that made. That what has allowed that? What's operating is a still going? And from my view of history, and I had the chance to live in the past. And on time machine, we will talk about that in a minute. Yeah, she Cloud
didn't see that coming? Yes. Okay, time. I'm taking no time machine. I question
mark, and I've been in the time machine and it's very, very clear that we've been on.
The momentum and a trajectory of progress and it's possible that that could stop tomorrow. It's highly unlikely that it's going to stop tomorrow. So there is just all the conditions that make that suggests, that it will continue. And so heart of our optimism can come from that, okay?
Time machines coming up. Yeah, I won't be able to stick around right after this commercial break, French. Yeah, I'm not gonna take a commercial break, but I asked you here.
What to ask you given the bet?
On collapse of yeah, Global human population. Do you think that by 2060, if we've peaked out on top of the roller coaster? Do you think this progress is inextricably linked to population growth in population, density? And if that's the case, do you think we might be looking at regression?
There's a movement. The degrowth
movement,
I'm not
familiar. So these are people who basically the Troubles of the world and particularly climate, when coming from our addiction to growth. Growth is the kind of leads consumer. Capitalistic kind of idea that the grow grow grow grow. And they're saying it's finite, we can't continue to grow and we have to be growth stopped growing. There's a little bit of a confusion in English because it's too meaning of the word growth. There is growth to add on or more pounds to add more.
Or more stuff to get bigger, wider heavier to have more things to sell more refrigerators to sell more bottles of wine. But there's another meaning of the word growth which is probably closer to what you're interested in personal growth development, maturing knowledge
grow I guess in a sense it's the same as the first. But it's
no, it's increasing. This complexity is taking the same number of atoms and having a more complex Arrangement. It's going from a jellyfish to a chimpanzee or something.
And so that complex adaptive system where you have increasing levels of complexity and more extra Trophy and it that is a different kind of growth, what
is exotropia. Now I know that entropy is
the definition of entropy is increasing disorder and there's something called negative entropy which is what I'm talking about but that's a double negative. I don't like double negatives. So exit row P is basically an
In order. So actually trophy is this idea of this increasing order that comes at the cost of increasing entropy? So that's the thing. So you get your system like a living cell is actually increasing the generation of entropy as it increases this order, it's like a magnifying glass with the sound Rivers saying that there's a little bright spot in the middle of the lens from the Sun. But all around, it is a shadow because it's taken all the light and go around it and concentrate it in. So they generate a
shadow, right? So
They go together
so they go together. So what type of growth is an increase in complexity so you have an economy where instead of trying to sell more bottles of wine, you try to sell the same number of wines but better wine. Okay. That's different kind of growth. That's the kind of growth that we can shift into. We're just increasing the quality of things.
Do you think their incentives that will drive
that
Will the decreasing population.
How Are You Gonna Keep Her Revenue numbers? The say, Well, everybody's
leaving great, you have a smaller Market every year smaller audience. So one way is to make things better to make better stuff. Okay. And we have so refrigerators, you know, if you just count, how many refrigerators are being sold, you can have increasing numbers, but you could sell refrigerators and make them better every year, which is what we've been doing. And that's actually not often accounted for in economics, Judy.
Is how many refrigerators per unit are you making? But they are not saying, well, we actually these new refrigerators are better because they use less energy, they make ice as well as refrigerate. The, you know, they do all these other things, that's not really accounted for and so we can change how we account for things. We start to measure something different, just other than the expansion, the more the more stuff so we can need some new metrics. So yes, I am optimistic that we can change.
Our understanding and what we aim for. It's not inevitable though.
Well, time will tell and makes me want to be a better student of History. Also, as you point
out, so the time machine, I know you're going to unleash. I know you're going to ask about the highways their
machine.
I took it like a 20 dollar bus ride in Northern Afghanistan in 1975 somewhere.
And I arrived in a different Century literally in a different Century. I had no map, I'd not met anybody heard of anybody who ever went there. I mean there was obviously lots of tasks and but I mean no tourists, I had no idea if I could get there it was literally a name on a very poor
map, actually choose it.
It was so remote and I wanted to see what was at the end of the line and the heroes of town. I don't know how you maybe. There's a hundred thousand people in this town other than size.
Good-sized town.
There was no electricity.
in the town, they'd have street lights, they would have a guy at night go and like, kerosene, lamps the street lighter,
They would throw their shit into the straight. I mean out the window kind of stuff. It was like and of course, the futile. There's a feudal structure. I mean, they had basically slaves and child brides and the whole thing. It was just me the evil in every way very little metal. There's no signage on the town. There is no science, the meat science. So it was like, I mean a different century.
I'm in a different century and that experience of seeing what you get when you had development in technology. In course, you can see all the challenges and problems, but the main thing that I learned from that experience is the thing that we get is we get choices and options. That's ultimately, what we get from the technology. So the people growing up there, their occupations were faded through
If you're going to mail, you're gonna be a farmer. Maybe blacksmith sure, women you're going to be a wife and a mother and that was it. If you took the bus all the way into the City and went somewhere else, you'd be in a grimy gritty slum but you had a choice for the first time, what you could do and maybe not then, but now if you took the best ride, you might be a web designer or yoga teacher, mortgage, broker, whatever you have choices.
And that's what they do. Not have. They had very strong family, good identity, tremendous support may be organic food but no choices AI from the 15th century to today, even as I understand it, some
let's call them AI researchers, computer, scientists with familiarity with AI,
couldn't have even predicted.
Several years ago, I was having today, many choices may be some difficult choices. May be some difficult outcomes. I might go so far to say and I wanted to read something, this is from your wired piece, November 20, 22 and was after spending months, creating thousands of images using AI excellent piece. I think it Limitless, creativity and there's
One line that stuck out to me and I was like, man, that's a strong statement and he kind of wish Kevin had included this because I think it's going to be hard to defend and I would like to talk about it and this also pairs with an article. I only started recently reading for Marc Andreessen. And as I understand, the basic premise, is that a I will not cause an increase in unemployment, which is is a bit broader than the line that we have here. So let me read
I spent the last six months using a eyes to create thousands of striking images often losing a night's sleep in the unending quest to find just one more Beauty hidden in the code and after interviewing the Creator's power users and other early adopters, it's generators. I can make a very clear prediction generative. A I will alter how we designed just about everything. Period side note, I completely agree with this. Oh, and not a single human artist will lose their job because of this new technology. So maybe I should ask you to clarify this because I work with tons of
and tons and tons of contractors and there are artists right now. I've worked with who are going to be replaced, at least some of their functions will be replaced by AI. So I would predict they will lose that specific job not necessarily with me. But at some point the next few years, they will probably lose that job.
They have adapted to using the Technologies or carved a niche for themselves. They will find another job but they will lose his job. So, how would you expand on this statement?
There might be a little bit of semantics here, because I would say that we replaced many tasks but not their job. So, this is what they are, does, replace tasks or tasks that we do. Most jobs are complex of different tasks. A lot of these tasks will go to the AI but not necessarily the job. The job will shift into have different tasks part of our strength.
Is that I would actually maybe even expand this even broader and I welcome feedback on this, my claim would be that I don't think there's anybody in any feel this lost her job because of a, I so far there's tasks that have gone away but not jobs and a lot of the worry about this. AI is what I call. Third-person worry, they're saying my job hobby, I'm not going to be replaced, but I can imagine somebody else or maybe I can measure my friend losing it, but I'm still waiting for someone.
To say, I lost my job. Her real person with a real name who lost their job because of AI and so far, I haven't I though, maybe even offer like a 200 dollar Bounty. If you tell me the name, specific person who lost her job because of AI, and then he
sore. Yeah. Why take such a binary that I know you like, you that I would take the opposite side of that done, but please continue.
Well, you can take it by giving a name. I stopped fire.
Let's defend that I can take this to the
dollars, but you're up the a, I aiso saying because of a
I well I would have to replace them with AI and then blame it on
and you will be able to do that. Right
now, let's take an example. If I may yes, logo design. Yes, that is what somebody does day in day out, right? They design logo,
right? And I have gone to the sum of the logo designers. May I look with their our logo AI designers right now and they're amazing. But here's the position. This is my position is, and what we get from these, a is currently right now.
Now our Universal personal interns there in turn. They're doing the work as interns UPS up' is okay. And there are really amazing but you have to check their work. It's embarrassing to release their work without Improvement the intern work. So I've used these logo AI generators and I'll work with them over and over again and this is what the artist will be doing. The artist is going to be working with their interns.
Generating all these possibilities, tweaking them. They're kind of like a director or conductor, they're managing the interns, and they're not releasing the intern work, unless edited unpolished on curated, and that's what their new tasks become.
The artist.
I'm not totally convinced however I think that will happen but I do think some Rank and file. Well well well perhaps need to find new jobs at the very least. If someone has a eyes as the UPI I would imagine if you have a brand Design Studio that focuses on logos with 30 employees, some of which are junior, there might be some Shuffle,
there's going to be a lot of art generated from these entities, these a eyes and I always win
It's a plural. Always plural. There's not one AI, there's a eyes, all different species. But most of that work is being used for areas that are blank now, where there is no pictures where there isn't anything. So I have my assistant, actually has four years woke up in the night to write her dreams down, and now she feeds those dreams into the Ang illustrates them and they're just amazing. There were no illustrations before. Now, they're illustrations, I use them.
Generate images for my slides. There were no pictures before. Now, there are pictures though, it's not like I'm replacing somebody. I'm filling it in. So the major and by the way, there's about 30 million brand, new never seen before, images generated every day with these image generators,
30
million, and I would say about maybe 95% or maybe 98% of the, there's an audience of one.
One is for the Pure Pleasure, I've seen is just like you would take a walk out into the into nature and just see a beautiful saying it's like, I'm just enjoying this. This is why they're mostly being generated the predominant number of them just because they're beautiful. Okay? And so they weren't there before. You could not have your own private Museum of these really cool images. Maybe no one will ever see again, okay. And so that's what they're being mostly used for is.
In the blank spaces and that's also true. Again a lot of the other intern work then maybe writing things that nobody else but the boss
sees let's look at this a little more closely. So I will say just as a means of setting the table, I'm deeply deeply interested in these tools, which is y and the effects that they will have on the creative economies the economy period. Broadly speaking Society. Think they're very
Under estimated and I'd love to get your take on that in a bit.
I run a, i art competitions related to some of the fiction that I put out and have been absolutely blown away. I also sympathize with some artists A on Art station or deviantART who are part of the training set who are popularly mimicked. So prompt yada yada yada in the style of fill in the blank and I can understand why these artists would be
Upset feel threatened, maybe be financially impacted. I imagine their commissioned work might be. How do you think that'll shake out and I know based on some of the conversations that we've had that?
I believe your perspective is if people are relevant they're going to be copied anyway if they're not, it doesn't really matter if they're in the training case that something along those lines. So causes influence is going to be seeing all over the place no matter what. But how do you think this will shake out in the next handful of years? Because yes, I understand why people would have an aversion as
artists. I think there will be people companies who make training since they're all opt in some capacity.
City. Maybe most of it's sort of already out of copyright and they'll be sold as greenwash. This ethical, you know, training sets, whatever it is, their trade AI in our work. Exactly. And then they'll be, there would be a lot of them were people will use the will train the things on their own work and like, help me make more images in my style.
I am doing some experience with that, right?
Exactly. And then there's there's going to be this ability over time to require less of a training.
For right now we can only way we train. These has the more the billions, the better. But Schumann, Tyler can learn the difference between a cat and a dog just with 12 examples and when we start to have more targeted like that, I think people will start to clamor to be included in the
training set. What needs to happen for the a eyes to require far fewer examples in these these training data sets,
we don't know, that's the short answer.
Sir. But it may require right now. There's kind of the Brute Force these neural Nets, blue first, meaning that there are very flat and they didn't work in the beginning because they weren't big enough and the bigger we make them
They seem to overcome a lot of problems. But it's really clear to most people that we can't get all the way to, where we want to go, just with these flap because these models, basically, they do want to have things, they do pattern, recognition and pattern generation. That's all they don't do symbolic, logic, inductive reasoning, they're not secure ones are capable of that. Irony, tough irony and so it's just amazing that they have gone as far as they have and
Keep expecting that they can't go any further, but they keep surprising us, but we're pretty sure that they can't go all the way. And the example I would use is like, Wikipedia, Wikipedia is a flat. The idea was to fight it comes up from the bottom. At this bottom up with, like, how far can you make it reliable? And its like, the beauty of this from the bottom up? Well, a lot farther than you would initially thought. But we also know that Wikipedia has succeeded, because in recent years, have been more top-down control of the editors and you have to have
Have for ultimately what you want, a combination of mostly bottom up, that's somewhat regulated by some top-down control editorial, control all messed up and that's what we don't really have in a Irina. We have, just the bottom up. It's very, very bottom up. And there's just a suspicion looking at kind of the sign of say, work on complex adaptive systems that you will want to have some top-down governance to assist
This bottom-up to get where you want to
go. You've interviewed just about everybody, you can get to just about everybody. And I know you've spoken to the who's who of AI and any adjacent field that you want to investigate. You know, a lot of people and you know a lot of people who know a lot of people so you've spoken to so many and you have, I would say one of the more impressive Nostradamus like predictive track records, what would be your predictions speculations?
The next within the next 5 to 10 years could be a shorter timeframe of what you think, been AI. Yeah,
here's what I respect the thing I want to emphasize is that there's plural, there's a eyes. So this idea of the monolithic AI taking over. We're just there like machines and there. They follow the general engineering maximum, which is that you cannot optimize everything. There's always trade-offs. So, we're going to engineer these a eyes to be good.
For certain things but not as good as something else, another dimension and we already see that with say the image generators, some favor artist, some favor photography will be different personalities. The one that does painting. The best probably isn't going to be the best for writing. They'll be some kind of transformative, they're
all equally bad at hands
rightist. I say that the general stance. We're going to have is what I call dumps Martin through be really smart and
at a Pennsylvania Dutch.
Well, I don't know. It's kind of like that. It's Amish.
I'm smart. We're just going to be furious. It's like how could you be so dumb when you're so smart about these other things? This is going to be their typical reactions like you're insanely brilliant. But you're so dumb here. So sounds
like half of Silicon Valley if exactly
I should um she's Martin is going to be engineering will have multiple to be more and more difficult to kind of generalize what I'm saying is that there are going to be engineered for specific tasks primarily and there will be a general one but the general one would be kind of like
Like the Swiss army knife, you know, it's like good generally, but not really the best in any one tool, that's the engineering Maxim. So we should expect multiple varieties of these. And I think the other thing is that, for me the best stance is to think of them is artificial aliens, aliens being. They could be like Spock or Yoda very smart but they, they just doing things differently than we do. If they have a sense of humor, it'll be a little off, but that is actually their
It because they help us think different. And that's what we're going to be using them for. That's what people are already. Using the forest generate ideas like this popping idea that no Schumann would ever have come up with. And that helps me come up with a new idea. The third thing I would say about the a ice is that most of them will be unseen, they'll be behind the Office operating things, the plumbing, the infrastructure and that's actually a sign of their success.
Technology succeed when we don't see them anymore, we don't think about them. They become boring. The majority of the stuff won't even be outward-facing. That'll be just behind the scenes and then this idea of Consciousness. Consciousness is a liability, you don't want your car to be conscious. You want to drive, I don't want to be worrying about whether should major in finance. You want it to focus on the road so there will be advertising a eyes as conscious,
free Diamond obedient. Yes, exactly.
For $30 per
month, right? I think that I would say, a couple things one is, I think AI overall is underhyped, but the current version, we won't even call AI in 30 years. We'll look back. And that wasn't it. And so, it means that there's no AI experts right now. So, I think, but in the short time, we're probably overestimating this idea, like vast unemployment stuff, not in the next couple of years, for sure. So,
everything you've said, makes sense and tools will get special
Just they will become so embedded. They will cease to think about them, hopefully, right in the same way that you waved at the lights when we have all sorts of Lights in here, but it's not like we walk into any room with artificial lighting.
Good Lord, yeah.
What is this miracle of engineering, right. Right and human Ingenuity. I think most folks back. Okay. Okay, so why is it under hype? What should surprise people or what are people, not appreciating.
So I was
Involved with the internet. I was living online for at least 10 years before 1992 93 when wires started and in a certain sense was like we can get anybody to take it seriously. It was dismissed as teenage boys stuff and just kind of less what it was but I felt like no this is like this is really significant. This is really powerful and what changed? It was an interface change became visual for the first time in the web.
Was pictures and stuff and that's when everybody got it. Most of the AI happening today has been happening with all these chap has been happening for years. What's new is that we now have an interface you have. The conversational is the idea that a large language model, we have a conversational interface and that's suddenly with aha. The power that's been there for years and now suddenly accessible, like having the pictures on the web.
So we're suddenly thinking about is how the in people's faces in the same way that the internet was completely Fringe and then when the web came along in very rapidly became mainstream. I remember the first time I saw my gas station the pump, there was like a URLs like, oh my gosh! This is like it's here that have the same feeling right now happening with the chatbots in the image generator system. These capabilities have been around for at least a decade. But now what's new is we have a
language interface, a conversational interface with them and the powers to serve completely in our faces now. And so, where do we go from there? I think we are going to then start to apply this to everything, right? It's going to be as we speak every day. There's people in betting this and they're going to bet it with this interface. So I think we're going to move to this having a whole nother level of interfacing with this machine with language. And that's very, very powerful witch.
Just go through the whole things, like, take X and the language interface to it. That's really powerful.
What are you hoping to use a eyes for over the next six to 12 months?
First of all, I would generate posts a day. I picture every day and a half
been. When did you switch from manual to ilife June, almost a year ago, which tools? Dude, mostly is? I tend to go to mid-journey still mid-journey has a very
Various interface is a Discord Channel and at first I was completely Bamboozled and infuriated with that but I came to see it as
genius. Why is that?
Because everybody's working in the open it like the ultimate learning vehicle and I learn something. Every time I go
student in the surgery, theater
back. Exactly. You're seeing how other people do it. It's not behind closed doors. They're doing it in public and oh my gosh. Do you learn so much?
That way so fast. So, I must use and what's interesting, the year before that I did a piece of art every day on my iPad with procreate. And I spent almost as much time on the a eyes making an image, as I do, when I'm making myself because again, the accusation among the painters in the 1800s, when the photography came along was, oh, you guys, you just push the button,
And we realize the course down the photography is not just pushing the button. There's a lot more involved and making you really great photograph than just pushing the button used to be right. Positional is here stuff. The same thing with with the AI are it's all you're just clicking? No no it's like photography. I feel I have some of the same kind of a stance that I have when I'm photographing I'm kind of hunting and searching through it. I'm trying to find a good position, a good area where there's kind of promise and I'm moving around and I'm trying them whispering to the hey I am about this, I'm changing the word.
I'm actually interacting having a conversation with it over time. It may take a half hour or more to get an image that I'm happy with. And I'm at that point. Very comfortable and putting my name as a co-creator of it because I have mean the in turn have worked together to make this thing.
Okay? Say have the art application, any other
of the future, the next six months will, I'm actually using the chat Bots to help, right?
Chatbots check EBT touch your beauty you know being stuff in Google for me. I've always had problems making the first draft. This is to kill her.
Yeah and I know the feeling, you know, the feel
if I have find it helpful in making the first
draft, how do you prompt it? What would be an example
approach.
All different ways. I've been collecting these and here's the thing about going to spells. Yes, here's the thing about it, is it, this is important lesson about technology is that we have to use it to figure it out. There's something I called, think is MM, which is this Reliance on trying to solve problems by thinking about them, which is very appealing to people who like to thank. And you can only go so far with Fink is mmm because all the things we're discovering about this, none of the inventors of this had any idea that they could be used as
That's cool, right? And so we're discovering we collectively by using it or discovering his capabilities and eventually it's harms. But that's important because this is how we steer the things. And so the problem with trying to prohibit or turn it off or ban, it is that you don't get to steer van going back to that benefit. So right now, through use weren't covering all these things and I've been trying to track how people are actually using them like for Citizens chat, like there's a couple prompt. So, here's the thing, these
At models, basically what they generate or wisdom of the crowd, kind of knowledge, wisdom of the crowd was very famous counting, the jelly beans. Like if you average all the attempts by humans to count the number of jelly beans, in a bottle, the best guest, the most accurate was kind of the average of them. And that's what we're getting with the chat. It's taking everything is written the. Plus and minus is the Geniuses and the jerks, and it's averaging out, and that's what it's giving. You is kind of an average. So most of the time,
Ten generated by the chats is sort of broadly, correct? Very kind of average very kind of bland and a lot of what you're doing with the intern is kind of pressing them. So one of the tricks is that you can ask for it to be a little bit snarky ER or more professional. So let's say you're starting tabula rasa, right?
Idea popped into your head rush hour. I want to give a rough draft, a shot. What is the step number one? Step number two.
So it depends. Am I ask it to do a summary of what's known about this? Tell me everything that knows about it and then maybe write a first draft with bullets with the five bullet points.
Can you give a real example, or a example? You might
use? I'm trying to think of the last one. I
did Egyptian influenced, Roman architecture, I don't know making that up.
You could do that. Give me the five bullet points of stuff. And then you could say,
So, you can have questions about some parts you didn't understand or, like, expand this bullet, one party more sources, or give me an example of a day in the life of this or 10 more examples of how this might play out. You can kind of extend it that way. You can also shrink it in terms of like summarizing making bullet points or west, the key takeaway, or how about if I wanted to have like a teachable moment out of this and so you would have all these kinds of things flowing around. And then again it's the intern at work, it's like good but
You're not going to use it, you're probably a white at rewriting. It's maybe give me some ideas that didn't have, or maybe the structure of how it organized it was. That's pretty good for four of them and so it's a start and for
me it gets you past the breath hold of the empty,
right? For me, this is really big, it's just getting going and then you can also use it later on. I have a friend who writes scripts and they do show me all the week plot points in this
or can do give
Plane that you
put the script in and they'll say what are some of the contradictory
platforms or that's a great use
your right? It just, you know, kind of like we're is continuity broken or things like that. Also to hear something, I used my book which will get to my publisher asked for talking points. Talking about process, it make a list of nine talking points
for his machine. Number one for this book and
Woolly, Mammoth number 28 and made a good less. Again, I could really
We use the list but it was I could use it to make the list, it was a starting point and here's another thing. So I have a friend who has a Blog, a daily blog. They generate 40 posts a day.
Okay, probably guessing probably guess it is. What I was like, that's the whole. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sporty a day. So they use it to help bright headlights. They'll give a thing. I said, Gimme Five
headlights. Now I've actually not use CH IG PD for this. There is an upload function where you can upload your document and then use that as the basis for part of the basis for the prompt. Yeah.
Right some headlines it says is really really good with suggesting something that they hadn't thought of. Or is it also the on
Sometimes I'll has give the little posting. It said, give me a great punch line at the end.
That's cool.
And again it's the intern, you know, they're bad pretty good. It's going to give you something though. You give you something to start with.
I'll give you an example from my own life. Just on friend of mine, suggested this, because he sent me a text, he said, this is pretty interesting and he used chap. Gee Pete. He's been exploring all these tools that in great depth, and I've played with a lot of them, but not in the depth that he has. And he
Suggested podcast guest, John Verve, a key who is on not too long ago and he simply put in a prompt along the lines of what are questions? That Tim Ferriss might ask, John Verve, a key on his podcast in the style of Tim Ferriss and they weren't perfectly Polished, but they were not bad
and not bad is I think the title means that's we were talking about is so not bad in turn.
Okay, it's not bad interests, not that the universal, not bad personal in turn, they'll get better. And I think will also, again don't get specialized. So in 15 years, 15 years. So here's my reluctance about that. I Saw V R. So the first time, Jaron Lanier, in 1989, 87. I could see that in five years I could see, like,
I mean, it was so good, it was so
amazing. We'll be ready player one in 1992.
Exactly. So what's happened in the 30 years since then the state of the Oculus, whatever? It's about the same as what I saw was generally near but it's a million times cheaper.
But it really isn't a million times better. So
I don't know, I think this is the time for scenarios. I think I could have a bunch of different scenarios rather than making a prediction. Sure. And you know, one of the scenarios is that it doesn't get exponentially better but it just gets exponentially pervasive and she
would think would automatic not automatically. It's a strong word would make it better in terms of yeah, access to larger data sets.
And yeah, again, I think one of the things that might, we might have a much more tailored version of this. So, going back to the
Your tends to train it on your own stuff or to maybe have a more customized version of stuff that you want. So it's may be relatively the same level, but it's much more personalized and tailored and customized to what you do and how you do. It
also, tell urge my audience, I want to. And I've already seen a few people do this because my transcripts are available on the website. I want to train
Nai on my transcripts and also a lot of material that I produce. So that the most common questions I get right. Can be sourced from actual answers. I've given right so I have a doctor friend who runs a popular pediatrician so I asked the doctor of these questions and he has trained it on all his 20 years of answering questions to his patients, to do a chat.
And it works pretty good. And as I say better than no doctor and that's just on his is literally just trained on his replies. And I think more of that will be coming even better. So whether we get to the point where we can do the deductive reasoning of the transfer learning, I don't know, because we haven't really seen that much. So that's one scenario is we suddenly make another big innovation, leap. And we have another, besides this being able to synthesize
And stuff. We can actually do these other times of cognition, that would be huge, but there's no evidence that that's going on. So, another scenario is just that we have more of this on a larger scale, more pervasive, more tail erised kind of, like, in the way that probably been. No real advances in social media. In the 10 years, it's been
around. Excellent advice for them. Damn it. Kevin, I've been trying to get you to talk about this but keep pushing back. I was going to say whether this because you
Mentioned using AI to think differently as a catalyst for thinking differently, right? And it made me think of
advice that I've certainly read a viewers and you've probably we've had probably a conversations about it which related to Career advice for people say, in their 20s and exploring Avenues and creating for themselves or attempting to create for themselves jobs and activities that don't have clear labels.
And using that among other tools as a way to learn to think
differently.
But let's zoom out, I'm holding two copies of the book. One is very, very tiny. This is this is a prized possession. Now, I've read it, probably 12 times. I have many, many notes and there are all sorts of notes in here. Excellent advice for living the tiny version. I have says scenes for contemplation, which I also like and then there's the very beautiful
Cover this Galley that you had to me just before we start recording. Excellent advice for living wisdom. I wish I'd known earlier. How did this come to be? What is the Genesis story?
So, I would write down bits of advice to help me change my own behavior. I'd like to kind of reduce something that I could say to myself to repeat to myself, to remember something as a way of changing my behavior and that kind of encapsulation.
Shinto. A little tiny sentence for me was like a handle to grab, hold of it and bring it forth when they needed. An example would be, if I know I have something in my household and I can't find it, then when I finally do find it, I'd say to myself. When I'm getting ready to put it back, don't put it back where I found it, put it back where First Look for okay. So I have my flashlight. Put it back when you first look for it. So I reminded myself that and so I would start to write things down like another one would be if I'm invited to do a talk or go meet somebody or have coffee whatever it is.
I would say to myself, would I do this? If it was tomorrow morning as a stone of a filter to really make sure it past that hurdle because eventually they will be tomorrow morning captain for the think about it. And so, I would say I got this invite, well, that's kind of interesting. Good, what? What I do this tomorrow morning, so this kind of making it into some portable way that I could remind myself very easily and I start getting habit of writing these down and I realize a lot of that was sort of advice, I wish.
Wish I had known earlier, I have three kids and the way of our parenting was the opposite of helicopter parenting was very hands-off and I we do not give them much advice ever when I was growing up. I didn't really pay attention to what my parents said. I paid attention to what they did. Hmm. And I figure that's when our kids were doing too. So we try to Model Behavior rather than to say it. So neither my Wi-Fi or ever really gave much advice
But I thought that now that was writing it down that I should give them advice. So I began this idea of trying to extract out and put into a little handle, something encapsulated that I could give to my kids I did a bunch when I was 68 on my birthday. I kind of released it to my son. At that time, who was a young adult coming just becoming even dull and a lot of people loved it and it ricocheted around the internet. I did it for a couple more years and I realized that I had a lot to say
But it's kind of scattered around the internet and I thought we really handy to have it in a book. So I made a prototype myself, just made a little book. I made five copies and I said it around to see if it was kind of worked as a book and this book also has my little Doodles in it and it worked. And so I sent it to a publisher. They loved it. And said they didn't like the Doodles and so they didn't know art by you sent a portable form and actually I realized afterwards although it wasn't in my head at the time.
Time. But it's very tweetable. These are tweets. And so they work at the kind of attention span of a young person these days, they transmit. Well, so the version you have here has about another 100 that aren't even in this. I'll look at this.
Just when I thought Christmas
begin far away. I tried to make them as practical as possible actionable. Not conventional.
Positive. If at all possible and short, you can find no better medicine for your family than regular meals together without screens. Let me throw a few up just because I have so many notes in here, I'll mention a couple
And one that I may not get verbatim, but I thought quite a bit about because when I look back at all the places, I've spent time, it's totally true. It's something like, if an outdoor patio is less than 6 feet wide, no one will ever use it? No one. Yeah, never ever, ever. And I thought about his like that hundred percent maps to all of my experience Surya.
What you do in your bad days matters, more than what you do in your good days. You know. This is also overlaps, a lot of my thoughts on on ritual and routine versus relying on. Say discipline greatness is incompatible with optimizing the short term. Hmm. And it goes on and on. I'm just mentioning a few that I've highlighted for myself. You don't marry a person. You married
family. That's a big one. I decided you don't marry a family. You married country because my wife is so much different routes
and the you know, who knows maybe a hundred years from now you don't marry the person. You marry a
These. If you can't tell you desperately need it's probably sleep. Don't aim to have others like you aim to have them respect you which also helps in saying no to things. He won't want to do tomorrow morning. Are there any that come to mind for you? Here it is he a balcony or porch needs to be at least 6 feet deep or won't be used? Then there are some very very specific recommendations learn to tie a bowline knot practice in the dark and one hand for the rest of your life. Will use this and hot more times than you could ever believe true.
I only learned that not, I want to say in 2012, and I've used it a million times since what are some here?
That people have responded. Particularly well there are. There, are there. Any that pop out that come to mind. I'll buy you some time when you feel pressure to pick a choice. Don't forget the choice of not choosing any that's when I start for myself.
One thing that has surprised me is that there have been no overlap in people's favorites. No overlaps and people's favorites. I don't know what to make of that. But anyway, that's what it is. So I'll tell you some of my favorites. When you're in your 20s, you should spend a little bit of time.
Doing something that's sort of crazy. Insane. Unprofitable unorthodox orthogonal because that's going to be the, your Touchstone and the foundation of your success later on. Try and deliberately don't try for something successful or crude do something very, very strange and weird. It's kind of like to the other bit of advice of like the thing that made you weird as a kid can make you great as an adult, if you don't lose it.
Yeah.
I mean, this is like, it's true. It's really true. So one of my favorite bits of advice that can be expanded, which is don't aim to be the best. Be the only category. Why? Right before us, you are living that even know. If, you know, 10 years ago, I don't know when you started your podcast. If
almost 10 lb, 10 years next
year, you want to be doing something where it's hard to explain to your mother. What it is that you do, that's like, what is it? Well, it's not quite radio. It's not, you know, I don't know. It's like
Talking. And so that's where you want to be. You want to be the only you want to enough to very high bar because it requires a tremendous amount of self-knowledge and awareness to get to that point to really understand what it is that you do better than anybody else in the world. And for most of us, it takes Our Lives to figure that out. And we also, by the way, need family friends. Colleagues, customers clients, everyone around us to help us understand what it is that
Do Better Living Wells because we can't really get there by yourself. You can't do think is of you can't think your way there. You have to try and live it out and that's why most people's remarkable lives are full of detours and dead ends and right turns because it's a very high bar, but if you can get there, you don't need a resume. There's no competition and it's easy for you. You're doing it. You're not looking over your shoulder or your just right there, so don't aim to be the best. Be the only
Only
on the easy, front question that I've sometime asked my friends because the things that are right in front of us all the time or sometimes the hardest to see, there you go. Is what do you think? It's easy for me that it's harder for other people, right? Because sometimes you take I should say. So often times, take it for granted because it's just what you do. Yeah. And you don't even see right where you have something that falls into that.
I actually used that in a similar form of the question at dinner parties.
I'm sitting next to buddy. So one of my bits of advice is that I almost everybody knows a lot more about something than anybody else around them. So I'll sit down. It's like what do you know more about than most people? And it's like I feel like my job to kind of find out what that is and it's not obvious. It's not always obvious. You kind of have to work at it but it's always amazing. Yeah, totally if you can get there,
They know something, they just blow your mind, so that's my assignment. When I go to a party is like that person knows an amazing amount of something, but it's not going to be obvious, but they'll tell me,
I have a close cousin of that that I sometimes use myself, which is one, someone has shared or maybe it's already known what they do, professionally their primary gig. Let's just say it's financed right? In some capacity and I might just ask could be anything doesn't matter and I would just ask.
Asked if you had to give a TED Talk, 20 minutes long but it couldn't be on anything that people at this table, know you for including Finance, what would it be? And you get some of the most out of left field responses, and it opens the floodgates to really interesting conversation. We mentioned a couple more, all right. The enjoyment of travel is inversely proportional to the size of your luggage. This is 100% true of backpacking. It is liberating to realize how little you really need and if people are not familiar with our first conversation, they should listen to it. And they
All realize that you walk, the walk with that, you have certainly walked the walk with that and our minimalist in so many ways. I want to ask a follow-up question to one of these for the best results with your children. I start this one. Spend only half the money. You think you should be double the time with them? Yeah, one of the
Letters don't get a lot of physical letters, but one of the letters that I most look forward to every year, I think it's your year review or Christmas, perhaps, but you give a recap if you talk about the family and Adventures and so on, what have you found to be some of the best investments of time with your kids? Because abstractly, I bet most parents would nod their heads and say of course, that makes sense. Absolutely. But not all.
All ways of spending time with Greg rate are equal. I would imagine, right? What it for building intimacy and a relationship with your kids or maybe other things. What have you found to be really good use of
time? I don't know enough about this generally, basically tell you what we have done ourselves. And for me, it's what I'm asking. Yeah, well, I've seen is couple things. One is making things together, and I'm a maker. And so, I have to kind of work against my better instincts to be
Involved or take over too much but to really allow that kind of Cooperative joint making together and it's fun for the kid is fun for me. And you get to see frustrations, overcoming frustrations, making mistakes, or we're coming mistakes. There's a tremendous amount of going on, both of them learning, and me learning about them. And that togetherness is really
great. What kind of stuff have you made together?
We've made go-karts. We've made gingerbread hassles. We've made style robot. I don't know.
If you were in my office, I will have about with my son making it was was made from recycled styrofoam. It's with nine feet, tall just art projects helping in the garden doing chores together. I would say travel is undoubtedly one of the best learning experiences so much that I think as a nation we should subsidize travel but as a family if you can afford it and I do mean that's like going on vacation. The kind of travel I like is where you were learning. It's kind of like a lie.
Learning experiences experience. And oh, my gosh. Does that so powerful? And I would say one thing about it, they've learned doing it. And that is that I was a little concerned. When we were doing very intense travel with my kids, at a younger age, they kind of times
To tend to be paying attention. It seemed not to be aware of where they were kind of maybe wanting to stay in the hotel and play cards or things like that when there were, we went to bet, you know, whatever. But later on I found out the actually they were paying attention but they couldn't process it at the time. So the experience with there and they would reprocess it over time, it would become more and more valuable as they had more and more to kind of interpret it. And that trip which I've kind of thought was a failures of time.
Because they were sort of not really appreciating it or to actually grew in importance and so don't be dismayed if you take your kids on a great adventure and they're kind of like not impressed or they're not changed or whatever. No. No. They haven't yet. Been able to process it and they'll process it over time.
Any other tips for traveling with kids? Because I can imagine a family trip. Yeah, that is almost certainly, very different from chemical, a family trip. We're a
He's gone 25 countries, they stared at the Four Seasons. In each one, the kids have been on their phones the entire time and you can fill in the rest of the picture. So what would be perhaps some recommendations? And I'm not saying people should sleep on the sidewalks is sure you can, you can travel and not actually leave the comfort of your own.
Yeah, usual scaffolding. Yeah, knows one of the bits of advice is like, you know, like a vacation plus disastrous equals an adventure, he talks. So I went in times of rode, my bicycle across the u.s. was
From Vancouver down to Mexico on the coast and I wrote and I wrote with my son, who was a teenager and I had his nephew who was a teenager alone that was an incredible experience. And doing that together, kind of like an adventure together was tremendous for them because it took them out of the San Francisco bubble and can see the real world. And again, was a learning experience about overcoming doing things that seem hard but turn out to be things you just could do.
I would say yes. Try, try new things. Another thing that I think is really good for travel is almost goes somewhere, random. I mean, literally like this, it's what we are policy for. Our family was to follow our passions and interests rather than destinations. So every kid, we would say we're going to follow your passion for a vacation this year, whatever you're interested in, you know, if you're interested in and of Green Gables, okay. We're going to go to Nova Scotia and visit all the and of
Green Gables
sites. What is hand of Green Gables? I've got
major Gables is a popular children's or young adults, story ice, and a Green Gables, and there's a series of books and it was based in Nova Scotia, and there's kind of a big following about that. Got it. So our son was interested in dinosaurs were his very little, okay, we're going to go to all the dinosaur digs and dinosaur museums dinosaur excavations that we can find, and that was the theme and they were very engaged in.
Application. We were in a in an RV and we're going around visiting dinosaur because that's so the kid child got to pick
the follow-up question. I had after the bicycle story was, whether your kids have always been game for these Adventures or whether you've cultivated /. Jedi mind, trick them into being more game because I would have to imagine this is speculation by their parents listening. Or like I could never convince
My teenage son to go cycling for weeks at a time or months at a time. Whatever might be maybe that's just out of the
box. Yeah, I know. I need to go, I guess I would say it was not an issue that we had, they were up for a particular. Again, if you have something that's surrounding their own
passions and interests. I was imagining that if you hold them into the process of making these decisions from an early age, they relate to these things differently than exactly. Everything has been an assignment, right?
I think that's how you do it. We homeschooled our son for one year and part of their home, year of homeschooling we were at home. We were traveling. And again it was this idea of. Where would you like to go? You get to kind of set some of the things and that was total engagement. You want to make sure that it's devastated. Yeah, you're
invested. I'm going to grab a few more here. If an elementary school student is struggling first thing, check their eyesight. Yeah, great advice. Something I
Need to get checked it like, why should my family is quite a bit of glaucoma and intraocular pressure. She's going to have another check in a long time. So I'll get their purchase the most recent tourist guidebook to your home, town, or region, you'll learn a lot by playing the tourist ones here. This is something I did. I went out and I actually, I actually got the guy books and you do pick up a lot. Yeah, you pick up a lot. I did this in San Francisco to it's shocking. How much you miss? I remember.
Growing up in New York. I never made it to the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building until a German friend visited me like 10 years ago and was shocked that I had never been to either of these things as like, you know, maybe I should kill ya. We spend an afternoon and got some of these things and it was a
blast one Thanksgiving Day. We went into San Francisco and rode the cable cars which we had never been on ya and it was the perfect day because there was nobody else on them.
Thanksgiving day. It's a way of again, I favorite things to help you learn giving experience and treating your own. Neighborhood is a great way to do that.
So I'm giving some more example I keep going because there's so many good ones. I'll give an example of Highly tactical and specific right to Signal an emergency use the rule of three, three shots, Three Horn blasts are three whistles, all right. And then you have the more I would say still practical but conceptual when you were stuck, explain your problem.
Come to others, often simply laying out. A problem will present a solution make quote-unquote explaining. The problem part of your troubleshooting process and I
wish I knew that so much
earlier. I would not have been able to write the four hour work week he had. I not taken this advice. I was totally stuck on an entire section. I was Road blocked, could make any progress. I was really starting to panic and a writer friend of mine said just have
Someone interview you about why you're having trouble and record it. And I did that I had somebody who was a Ghostwriter. I didn't, I've never used a Ghostwriter but she knew had asked questions. We recorded the conversation, didn't even need the recording because it helped me walk right through it. And by the end, I knew what the solution was problem solved.
Yeah, well I have an assistant and when I get stuck, I'll start to explain to her why thing. And then
By the end. It's like, wait a minute. I get it. I was like I didn't need you but actually I didn't need you. Just to to walk. You through it? Yeah. Yeah. What would you
hope? I'll ask you. The same question. I asked about the as it does. So recorders or is the I just want to make sure I was, I was adding the article or not. So the silver cord. What would you hope this to do? I will be steak. What would be successfully or is it already successful? You're like us. Yeah, I've done it.
Generally. My books, have an audience of one, you know. I did this big Asia book.
Lb 3
volumes spectacularly, beautiful gorgeous. Gorgeous
gorgeous mother. You know, nine thousand images. There wasn't One Voice hook. Every, I took every image every caption. I did all the layout, every, there's a thousand pages. Each one has a different design and did the whole thing and there's nobody who enjoys that book more than me just going through. And, of course, I was there. But I made up one prototype book like this book, here is a prototype and all I wanted was one Buck. If
There was no other books made, I would have been happy but since I was making one is so easy to make others and so it's like if I can share with you send it to my friends, that makes me even happier. So the success for that was having the book. This one is not so much for me. It is if other people are also can gain and find ways to repeat these things and improve their lives that is success for me. So, I would hope that a young person like me.
Would hear some of this advice and be able to encapsulate it and repeat it to themselves and make their lives better. That would be success for me
and take a slight detour because that is my want. I'm going to take a slight detour because this is on my mind. Do you still recommend sabbaticals? Oh, gosh. How would you suggest maybe for people who have not heard our private conversations?
Think about sabbaticals the value of how to actually take a sabbatical, what does that bit
right? Right.
No, I'm a huge fan of sabbaticals and I think I had some advice in the book. I put it, I think we overemphasize our productivity and efficiency, but the best thing for your work ethic is to have a
rest and ask actually, that's what I've started something along the lines on the key to a great work ethic is have having a great
rest of thick. So this idea of I think goofing off
Wasting time sabbaticals Sabbath's taking a Sabbath or all essential to the creative life through this apps. It's almost like sleep. You just have to do it and it does it by rejuvenating you and shifting, your perspective by releasing you from. I mean, there's just so many things that it works on and most I think for me in my own experience of the best things I've done came after, you know, taking
And shifting, its kind of seems like the clutch when you're shifting want to put the clutch in, otherwise, you just kind of grind. So, I think it's really valuable. And and again, not just every seven years, which is a technical sabbatical, but like Sabbath's like vacations. But more importantly time off and goofing off. I find that the young people believe it or not, the ones that I am associated with, don't give off enough, they go right from college and their first job and the like
You know do I think were the first people at wired. They came right from college in nice to or seven years. There were still there. I was like I sit down like why are you here? You should not be here. I mean it's like when was the last time you goofed off for waste of time? So no I'm a big believer.
So fetch the rest of management must love
that. I wasn't hurt. As you know, I'm not the only manager
What might it look like for someone who lets personalize it like for me yeah. What might a sabbatical look like moving. You consider the sort of minimal viable duration and like what would what would make it a sabbatical versus me just being in a foreign Locale thinking about
The usual
stuff. So it's just because my wife's both of her company's she'd been at she was a genocide for 30 years and she's at 23andMe. Now, well, Jenna had a sabbatical program unofficial one, it was six weeks every six years which is basically a European Vacation. Yeah. Hey Bryce Daniel vacation I think six weeks is probably a trauma like the minimum for a sabbatical but man, it could be very effective in six weeks for me like I've done.
Like things like you're doing art is something I like, you know, in the old days professors would get sabbaticals and they would do their own project that they grind working on or go to school somewhere or have a visiting appointment. Travel is a very, very common one for you. I think, you know, your effort right now to work in animation and stuff.
I guess the general pattern is, you want something that's different in the structure and Rhythm from what you normally do. And so our Temptation, those of us who like to make things is to make something different. But that's not really the benefit of we're kind of in the same Rhythm. We're yeah. Learning and so it's sort of like you want to go in a different direction and I did a sabbatical in swear. I just read books and I was like literally it's all I'm going to do and we'll get good morning and went to read books.
And I'm not gonna do anything else. And that was really different from my normal behavior, but incredibly powerful. And by the end, I just had went to travel because I had it, you know, this is like Anyway, gasps exam to go but that sabbatical of like only reading books and reading books all day long and I could read them with like about an average of a book a day, because some books really sure and somewhere really long, we in the synapse associations that you get from reading a book,
After book after book, you begin to think that it's, they're all talking to each other and then the author's is like, they're talking about the same thing. They must have known about each other. It's impossible. But you have this sense of this all knitting together? Yeah. Sandra Asian. Yeah. So I think the recipe is to have a different rhythm in a different mode. Then you normally have
also used to making making making. Yeah, it could be interesting for me just to Shadow somebody for a period of time, right? Somebody who's really
Good in the world of say animation using that example and just watch, I'm not allowed actually there you go, to make. I like that. Anything for what, right? I just have to watch that would actually very
challenging that would be. It's right. Yeah. So like you have to watch somebody but, you know, like I do that at every evening on YouTube. Again, I could rant about YouTube forever because I think it's way under rated for an influencer of
society. Or hey, I'm not going to name names. Actually, I can name one name but I do want to mention
Kunal in amps. So mutual friend, Matt mullenweg. We were just saying time together and he said, you went out on a walk with one of his friends. Yeah. And the two of you just talked about YouTube, who hours straight, it's still. Why don't you let me expand a little
bit. What do you do on YouTube? I watch a white people. No, no, no, I'm sorry, I don't think
God's. You do. It has videos tab.
You know, I watch people work.
You watch people work. Yeah. I watch people
making things like what? Like people restoring, cars people making boats.
People making clay things, people make just watching people make things and because I'm a maker and because I learned so much by watching people work much more than you ever. Learn in the
book and are these just full capture videos or are they giving commentary as they go? They just a peek over the shoulder as they do
their Thal, all the above. All right, all the above sometimes, your time-lapse is them just in the shop. Sometimes you're giving lessons, sometimes you're showing a
Nique sometimes or walking through it, some record, their mistakes. Some don't, I mean, I subscribed to so many that it's hard to generalize, but the point is, is that why I think it's under appreciated, is that is an accelerant on the learning, the process of people, discovering something putting it up other makers. Watching it, seeing OSU. Good idea. Modifying it, putting their version up. And then two days later, someone else has improved it and brain surgeons are
Using this right now where a brain surgeon will have a operation, there will be a filming their operation to have a little bit of a technique Improvement that they'll watch other brain surgeons are watching whirring surgeries on YouTube on YouTube and within days they'll have an improvement and it's going this fast, unlike years and years of waiting to a paper being published in a paper, it's like how can you do it? So it's Justin right about accelerant and the problem that's a problem, but the thing about YouTube is all invisible, this like a bookstore where you see what's there? You have no idea.
Idea that this is this happening and it's like, it's tremendous source of
all being and the libraries of Alexandria with a blindfold on you and you're only allowed to take it off, once you grab something like a little Kylie peepholes. Well, there's some
books there about astronomy but no, there was like this huge world, so for me, that's but anyway, I liked your idea of watching people execute at work and not having to produce them, that would be a tremendous sabbatical or true
sabbatical. Hey, I do what all should be such a shit.
Maybe, because so much of what I do is virtual or on a screen that doing, it's a via YouTube would not be much of a behavioral shift, right? And doing it in person, right? I also travel, and move around so much being in, say, fixed locations for a would be a very different sectarian,
definitely, right. I was thinking the productivity, there's one little bit of advice. Actually, it was telling us to David L, and of all people, who was the get things done. Guy course, there is a tendency
The normal approach to like organizing your life is that you want to kind of like be productive. So you want to get through the things that you need done. The most productive way in the least time, as possible. But I find, it's better to kind of shift over to say, what are the kinds of things I want to do? They want to spend as much time as possible doing that to me is the focus is to shift from minimizing the amount of time on things but to maximize the amount of time to do things that you don't ever want to.
Doing where you want to maximize the time, right? That was one. I'm not going to go through all the pages to find it but that was actually one. I had my thumb on literally that I was going to bring out right because that is a piece of advice. Yeah, in the book I have to ask because I have never been able to figure it out probably because I haven't asked you specifically, why are you? You're like, the David Hasselhoff is to Germany where you are to trying to like, you're, you're huge in Shadow. What is the reason for that? Do you
think was it was an accident?
I wrote a book.
Out of control in the early nineties that was ignored in the u.s. who's way too early, it was just too early, it was talking about decentralized system that whole chapter on crypto in 1994 that actually, that I gave to Steven Levy and assigned him to follow up. And he later wrote the book on the crypto stuff. Crypto not being the money but mine was about digital money. It was just too early but it was translated into Chinese at the beginning.
Of the Arts. Sure and I know. 2006, maybe try, I don't remember exactly. It was actually crowdsource translating which was even more interesting
because there is so much Demand by know Jenny's.
There was just it was just some fans in China. Basically, that's a task. It was crowd-sourced. Yeah, so there was one guy, they also one guy, real true fan and he organized the crowdsourcing translation of it and it came out at the right and the moment that
Jack Ma and ponemah were beginning to build their do their here at things and it was hugely influential on them and they talk about the book. So every entrepreneur in China has to read the book because Jack ma
recommended it right, Steve Jobs and China, exact talking about it, right? And that's
primarily why did kind of 74 land and Iran and then and then all my other things were translated and I became the prophet of, you know, the internet or something because I was
Talking about these things here before there was the things and so kind of a profits to write. And so, in China, there is a little bit of more of a herd mentality where people read it, because other people have been reading, it need to read in. So, most of my fans are actually in China, you know, I still was going there on a regular basis, giving talks about the future of X, and Y and the major difference there, wasn't they?
Were actively listening and then executing and doing this stuff. There were so eager to build and to get ahead and thinking of we're talking about whatever it is. Blockchain, whatever. Okay, we're going to start doing blockchain whistle, like they were absorbing it and actually acting upon it rather than just kind of all. That's a nice idea. There were really looking for things to do, so it had a huge influence in that way.
Say said, you known as KK ya, do they write it in the English KK or is they, I'm sure they have a Chinese name for you, but
there isn't characters. This is mean that they can't leave the letters, smash. I don't know. But I mean this is Kay-Kay. I have a Chinese name. What is your child? Kylie? And Kylie,
there's a great. Um, you can be you can slightly change that and sell yourself as a KPop star in the u.s. If it's all the rage, you can do really well the frey girl cool older brother. Yeah that's you and I
I thought I think about you. Well is there any other advice you'd like to give her anything else you'd like to say
about
excellent advice for living wisdom? I wish I'd known earlier same or any other thoughts. You would like to share any closing comments, requests of my audience complaints, you'd like to Lodge
anything at all. There is one little piece of advice is very end which may be sums up.
The assignment which is kind of your goal in life is to be able to say on the day before you die that you fully become yourself. I'm really want to emphasize this idea of fully becoming yourself and the difficulty of the challenge that is to discover what that is and how powerful that is. And that's true, whether you're making starting a company or becoming a, an artist, or a teacher, whatever it is. And the reason
Why I'm very Pro on technology is, I think it enables us. Helps us generally to become more of ourselves that we all have mixtures of talents in us that actually need external tools to help
us express.
Thanks and so, I am interested in kind of increasing that pool of possible tools in the world, so that all of us would have some chance to really expressing our genius and fully become yourselves.
And that includes like having clean water and education and access to Transportation. Those are all the fundamental Tools in addition to the kind of high-tech stuff. But I really do believe that. That all of us have a unique genius, every evidence I've seen in the world and people around the world suggest that that's true. And so if I can at all, unleash people to attempt to fulfill their best self to be more of their selves to be fully then
Then that would be a success for me.
Kevin. So, nice to spend time with you. So much fun. Always
ask it always is Tim. I just
You make me happy. I just love your sincerity. Thank
you, you too man. Thanks so much. And I have read my little bootleg, copy of excellent advice for living probably 20 times. It really is something that you can refer to again and again and again. And each time you read it with a new pair of eyes, because you're in a different state, may be different place in your life. You also Glee
In different things. So I really can't recommend this book enough. It's so easy to read. Excellent advice for living wisdom. I wish I'd known earlier Kevin Kelly, go get it folks. You will not be sorry, you will thank me later and you can be found on Twitter, the tool of the Prophet Kevin to Kelly and on the website, certainly cake a.org where people can also find 1,000 true fans, which everyone should read and for those listening
We will have links to everything in the show notes as per usual, Tim da blog, / podcast. Until next time, be just a little Kinder than is necessary. To not just on the people, but yourself and strive to become fully. You are. So, and tools are part of that advice is certainly a part of that, and maybe the combination is part of the. So, until next time, thanks for tuning in.
Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off and that is five bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday? That provides a little fun before the weekend, between one and a half and two million people. Subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called five bullet Friday, easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things. I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week, kind of like my diary
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Blog / Friday, type that into your browser. Tim dot blog, / Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. Visit soda is brought to you by eight. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep and he is my personal Nemesis have suffered for decades tossing and turning throwing blankets off. Pulling the back on, putting one leg on top and repeating all that ad nauseam. But now, I am falling asleep in record time. Why? Because I'm using a device is recommended to be
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