Hello friends. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Kevin Kelley is the founder of Wired Magazine, a futurist author and a public speaker known for his insights on Technology's impact on society, working out how to live a good life is complex. However having rules from someone much older and wiser than you can make this a lot easier. Kevin has condensed a lifetime of insight into a few hundred sentences in his new book. And today we get to go through some of my favorites. Expect to learn why you should do everything you can to avoid
Becoming a billionaire, how to have a more optimistic outlook on life, whether you can trust websites with the word truth in the title, why you are more likely to be defeated by blisters than mountains, how to understand yourself better. The best way to turn bad days and good days. Why, what irritates you in other people is a lesson about you and much more.
Very, very cool stuff from Kevin here. Little aphorism me sort of Maxim's quote things, and we get to break them down, and I get to ask him questions and it is very, very cool. The guy is super, super smart and I love digging into the Insight. That someone has taken an entire life to accumulate a really, really hope that you enjoy this one. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Jim shark, their Apex t-shirt, which has Essence and anti-odor technology and heat map.
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But now, ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome Kevin Kelly, your new book. Feels like it was purpose written for me, massive fan of aphorisms, massive fan of pity short life.
Advice for the people that haven't read it. I notice a trend throughout the entire book, which is one of optimism and home. And at the moment I noticed on the internet, a current rhythm of serious, cynicism people believing that the world can't improve that the people who hope that it can are the ones that are genuinely the problem. What's the case for optimism? Why should people be optimistic at all?
I think there's three reasons why you should be optimistic as you possibly can understanding that. It's somewhat a temperament but actually I think it is a skill and the first reason is that if you read any history at all you soon and look at the evidence and the actual science you have to conclude that progress is real and that the conditions that generated that progress or still working at work in the world.
This will statistically probability continue for a while, that's one reason. The second reason is that
We know from the work of child psychologists, that people who are optimistic Thrive better that and that, and they understand, they, the psychologist, understand that. One of the ways you teach children is called learned optimism to be more optimistic is to have them. Come to understand that setbacks are only temporary.
They're not, they're inevitable, but they're only temporary. And then the third reason is that
it's the optimists actually are creating all the cool things that we need and that there is making our lives better. All The Optimist is someone who
envisions a world or something that they want to have and can believe believes that is possible. And that, that belief in that envisioning help, make it come about because the really good things that we want are so complicated. They're not going to happen. Accidentally inadvertently. You actually have to imagine them and have to believe that they're going to happen in that requires optimism. And that's why basically, it's The Optimist who are shaping our future. How much do you think that people can nudge the
One of the easiest ways is to change your time Horizon.
If you look out Beyond just next year of the year, after 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, it becomes much easier to be optimistic because that, that slow growth. That's flow compounding of progress. Can overwhelm even fairly serious setbacks and downturns and disasters. Even, and so, which are hard to kind of accept or even to to confront
with the short term. But if you take a longer-term view,
A long Horizon. Then you have the ability to kind of see that they can be overcome and that goes back then that the setbacks are just temporary
I suppose. This stops you from confusing noise for signal that you have little UPS little downs, but you're trending in a direction. Over a broad enough time Horizon, the trend is obvious, right? And it's also has to do with just the supreme power of compounding interest compounding things. So even if you are owning creasing or improving or creating,
A few percent more than you destroy, if you compound that over time, it becomes a very very large consistent force. And then I guess the fourth thing I would say is I am optimistic and I think others should be to not because of disregarding or dismissing our problems. We're have to be real. There are problems in there will be leaving new problems that are even more powerful.
I'm at the mystic not because the problems I think are smaller.
Then we're aware of but because our capacity to solve the problems is increasing even faster. So we're not being Pollyanna and dismissing the, the problems when you're optimistic, you're just saying, no, are we're trusting the future and their future generations, and our own skill for solving problems continues to increase.
That's an amazing case for it. I'm really trying to rail against this trend. This sort of a fashion
of cynicism on the internet at the moment and I really, really want. I've called it toxic positivity because I need to come up with something, I caught, radical optimism and yeah, radical optimism is my term for it formula. Actually, my friend Louis has militant optimism, which I thought it was even cooler. That is cool. Yeah. Right. Okay. First one don't be the best. Be the only. What's that mean?
This is sort of at the core of the book, you may be my own philosophy, it suggests that achieving the best is kind of what we're taught to do, is to be the best in things, but the best by definition is a very narrow, very narrow Niche. There can really only be one and you're kind of limiting the numbers in your chances of actually achieving that.
And also because it's basically it's someone else's definition of success. It also excludes most likely you and your own particular set of abilities and capabilities. And so if you head towards becoming the only that's a much wide-open area that is potentially full of a billion different only', all of them pursuing something different and in a
Certain sense. What you are getting to do is to invent a new definition for Success.
All right. Is a, there's a famous Nepal quote where he says become the best at what you do? Keep defining, redefining what you do until this is the
outcome. Exactly? Right. So you're you're kind of coming up with your own definition of success, and aiming at that. And and by the way, it most likely should not include a billion dollars great because
You actually don't want to billion dollars. I mean literally this is my other piece of advice not in a book. If whatever you do. Try your hardest not to have a billion dollars because ruined your life and a couple million fine but not a billion why? Oh my gosh it's imprisoning is a burden is terrible for your kids. It's it becomes overtakes your life, it becomes never present. You can't actually
Ali, spend it as fast as it will earn it money back and then you're the only thing you can do with it is, give it away. And that's now another whole nother job and for all its own complications and it because takes over your life. And so you're now kind of a slave to to the billion. I have a friend who owns a very big sportswear company. His net worth is three times Drake's net worth. So the one of the most famous rounds
Every network is
okay. It's like over to, I think it's, he's worth to tune a bit bill, right? Okay. I went to a place called Nando's in the UK with him which is a famous chicken chain. That exists. We sat down for dinner, on an evening time 5:00 and he was sat playing on his phone and his ETA and is EA's PA was sat a few tables across and they were working on their laptops. And I remember thinking is, I was sat with him, imagine the problems that Drake would have been
Countered, if he'd tried to come for dinner at Nando's with me, he wouldn't have been able to get within two miles of this location without being absolutely mobbed. And yet, the guy that sat opposite me is that there with no security? He's sat there. No one has telling him, no one really even paying attention to him. And what it got me thinking about was the price that people pay for the level of wealth that they have. And that there are differing prices that people can pay, maybe a billion. Regardless of
Your level of scrutiny is something that you shouldn't try and aim for. But there's within that, you think about Drake, it would be mobbed by by Paparazzi and press, and people will be coming up to him and he wouldn't be able to get any peace, need a million security guards, and you'd have to speak to the restaurant before hand and to be crowd control. And this guy that setups at me, gets to just play Sudoku on his phone or do whatever, he's doing beforehand. So the price that you pay for the wealthy Hub is something that I'd never considered
before. Whoa. Yeah. I mean, there's a little bit of conflation between
wealth and fame. So it's not Drake's wealth. It's his Fame. In famous, is something you definitely do not want to aim for it. All with some people are famous inadvertently like, you know, like Obama, you can't really help that, but aiming for it is, is crazy because it is imprisoning completely to be a bit debilitating for the very reasons, you say. So, so that's something that you think you might want, but you're really don't. And, and my advice on that.
It is read a book about any famous person, really famous person. You'll see what the consequences of that is. The only begins and where you're describing extends even further, but wealth is equally equally, but there's another kind of tax that you pay for it and that's maybe the best way to put it is that there's definitely a tax for that wealth and it will be paid out in other things. All is to say that when you're defining your success,
It should certainly include other things in money because that's the simply not the most important thing. And it's you know, your success and and having been around the people who have a billion dollars. It's really funny because the building they're asking the same questions that were all of us are asking, which is what do I do when I grow up, right? No matter how old your art and the billion dollars doesn't give him an answer to that.
Okay, it actually contributes to the problem because like, where do I go from here? And so that definition of success? And and that's for me, the joy of seeing people who are pursuing their own definition, and it might be that they they have total control their time, which I think it's a one of the highest forms of wealth. Rather than much of money is that the most abundant thing money is, is a bunny. But to scarce, this thing is our own time.
And having control, that is my definition of true wealth.
In your opinion, then should people take most of the opportunities that they can to trade well, for time?
Yes, absolutely. In fact, that's what really rich people try and do. Although not very successfully, but yes, and and it's much easier. You know, I say, you know what, I'm a bits of advice is that, you know, the rich have a lot of money. The wealthy have control over time and it's much easier to be.
Wealthy than rich.
Okay, so I like to boast when I'm with among my, my billionaire friends, that I'm the, wealthiest are because I have total control of my time. I don't have to worry about my Entourage, the EAS, the personal assistance, whatever it is. It's like, no. It's I have my time.
What you do on your bad days? Matt is more than what you do on your good days.
For sure. And that is going back to the kind of basic understanding we have now of habits. And that what you want to do is have something that will get you through the bad days because everybody will have them. And if they stop you or peed you that's something you want to overcome. You want to be able to just kind of like absorb them to to understand
That okay today was a bad day I think it much done or you know whatever I was working on failed or was rejected whatever it is but tomorrow I get to work try again and do I'm going to do again I'm going to make it, let me some more. I'm going to try another idea and so your how you deal with the bad days is really the secret to kind of moving forward.
Tim Ferriss once said he wanted to design his life to be able to crush the average Tuesday and I just thought it was such a lovely way to put it and I spoke to a friend. Rob, Dyrdek recently, and he said he wants his average cheese optimizing for the normal Tuesday. He just wants the normal Tuesday to be as enjoyable as
possible. That's okay. We think about that. That's that's an interesting way of right to the average. Tuesday is your best day.
Day, may I do for yourself, you say, optimized.
So he what he wants it to be that an average Tuesday has as much enjoyment in it as possible, right? Doesn't need to be spectacular, right? Just needs to be normal.
There's good as it gets. Is your average Tuesday? Yeah, that would be
Or or yeah I'm just you know you've got me now. Trying to think about how I make this
into the asterisk. The asterisk is coming out,
right? Yeah. So but the impulse I think is correct and that is, you know, your life. Basically is what you make on your average Tuesday in a certain
sense. That yes it's way more average choose days than there are Peak experiences, right. The I love the idea of a good bad day as well that you get out of bed and oh there's a been in some sort of
Nightmare at work or there's a flood that the toilets backed up and everything goes out the window. And yet when you look back at the end of the day you still consider it a success or you have fulfilled or you. Right. Right. Right, right. Yeah.
So there's some of yeah, making their your worst day. Still an okay day or there. You know something that you can feel good about. Yeah. You're sort of. That's interesting is your serve trying to elevate not your elevate your high estate but you want to elevate your worst day so that they're not so bad
correct bringing my dad.
It's safety net
up, right? That's interesting though. Yeah, I mean, there are disasters and things that can be your new worst day. You know, you having three kids and getting older been around there, you know, they're just unexpected days. Are Way Beyond your control? Yes, to become a bad day.
I suppose, what you're trying to optimize for, he's on average higher lows, rather than higher
highs. Exactly. You want your average bad to heed to be
Yeah. Okay. Okay. The thing that made you weird as a kid, make you successful as an adult, why
I have seen so many people like this? Oh, I think you forgot the last part, if you don't lose it.
so the idea is is that a lot of people are kind of weird as a kid and they kind of put that behind them but you want to keep that thing you want you on to to nourish in some way and cherish it and it's not just the childlikeness it's the fact that there's something in you that's inherently different than others and it's that difference that we're trying to
Accentuate and emphasized in grow and cultivate because the differences is what makes the wealth and The Innovation and all these other things possible. And the reason why we're not being duplicated by robots, the more, the more special and unique and weird, you are the less likely you're going to be replaced by AI.
So, so that kind of weirdness in them is often a suggestion, a reflection of your inherent makeup and dispositions and tendencies and abilities. And we tend to get them beat out of us as we go through school and looking for a job and trying to be the best in something. And so if you can retain some of that or return to it, I think you have a
Higher chance of being the only, rather than being the best.
I love the. I think it's a more pure view into your, a clearer view of your passions before they become molested or perverted by other incentives by money, by status, by Prestige, by sex. All those things. I remember reading this amazing story about one of the world's most successful color Pickers. So this lady would choose color wheels for the best fashion houses in the world. The best interior design companies in the world.
World knows an interview that was done with her and she was asked, how is it that you're so good. You've been the best in your field at this. What's your training being like talk me through your process. And she said, well to be honest, I'm not formally trained in this. But when I was nine years old, my parents bought me, the biggest Crayola, crayon set, that was available and I used every single one of them down to the nub. And I thought that is somebody who was weird in childhood and didn't lose it when they got to
adulthood exactly.
And there are tons and tons of stories. I'm counting people like that all the time. And, and, you know, a lot of people, I mean, basically you, you ideally, you'll have a business card and your occupation should be pretty unique to yourself and that is happening all the time right now. Today, that's the to me, the beauty of technology and why I'm a big booster of it, is that it gives us more options, it permits, more of our people to find their genes.
Us and share it in ways that you could not do before the invention of the, you know, the symphony or Cinema or laser, all these enable new ways of expressing. And somebody somewhere is born with that, right? Combination. If we can get them, matched
up. A great way to understand yourself is to seriously reflect on everything. You find are rotating in others.
Mmm.
Yeah, there's a little bit of a if you find it irritating.
It's a signal that this is resonating with you in a certain way and it doesn't mean that you are like that, it just means that you have something in you. That's particularly attuned to this and that you should investigate it to be sure that you are not like it. But even if you are not like it, that is indicating that something about yourself.
That you haven't really kind of explored yet. And and I think my basic premise, I know this from the Quantified Self movement, which we started is that we're opaque to ourselves.
We're kind of like the last to know about ourselves in many ways. What's collectively, as humans. We don't know how our brains work and why we do things. But even individually, we have were blocked in some ways from accessing, our true, understanding of ourselves, or even our memories or motivations. And we need a lot of discipline as well as outside help to understand ourselves and this
This is another tool, and that tool kit of trying to come to understanding about ourselves. There is a when you see somebody else that is being irritating,
It activates inside of you it triggered something inside of you which resonates with with a part of your own makeup, right? I am I totally totally agree. I think that it's so interesting to consider how subject self-deceptive we are. You know, even you should never lie, it makes total sense. If you don't need to kid, everybody else that you're not a complete freak that talks to themselves in the shower right now. Does all of the Myriad, weird idiosyncrasies stuff.
Throw the best way to convince them that you're not. Mental is to not believe that your mental yourself, which means that you are the easiest person to Fool by yourself in the last person to know.
And and also, there is also another evolutionary Advantage which is you really don't what the ego to be able to mess around too much in your fundamental operating system.
I'm so the base the base code should not be right
and so you don't really want
Have easy access to that because you'll be messing around with it. Otherwise and so there's a kind of a deliberate distancing that we do just to, to adopt keep operating
protect the vital systems. Exactly, I love ya. I'm at, well, I mean, imagine need to take it to an extreme. Imagine if you had to consciously think, every time you wanted to breathe or every time you want you to digest food, you know, it's just a difference of degree to roll that up toward your view of your own status or what you find attractive or etc,
etc. Yeah,
You can ignore any website with the would truth in its
URL. Yeah and then the email with with something similar with with a really good bargain. Yeah. It's most of my knowledge has been channeling, the Ancients in the stoics in the Bible. This is not one of them much more contemporary one based on my own experience and what I'm seeing the world. So,
I could be wrong about that but generally, that's a good heuristic in rule of thumb.
What do you think about the, you can ignore any science. That's got the word science in the title here Asta. I haven't heard that one, social science, a Christian Science. Yes, yes, social science. Yeah.
I don't, I wouldn't say you could ignore it, but yeah, that there is a parallel I had not thought about that. What it, what it means is that you need a lot more evidence. So like any kind of even whether the social science, but even in medicine, you can't really make policy based on just one or two studies we need. You need hundreds of studies and that's because the body and sociology is so complex that even unlike physics, where
Or two experiments can tell you a lot in these Arenas. You need hundreds of experiments
Maria
multivariate, right? Just over time. All kinds of variables eluded. And so by the way, this is why I'm very, very reluctant to make policy now based on social media because we haven't done the hundreds of experiments. There's one or two experiments about the consequences of social.
The and it's just like, it's like having one or two medical studies, you just should not be making policy based on just the handful that have been done mostly in the US and not even around the world. So so I'm a big advocate of more and more constant testing and knowledge and investigation and and and persistent doing it again. Unlike the FDA where they do it once and then they approve it and then they were tested again.
And that's also not really modern and so so right now we just Nai, I will be as a whole nother thing because we've done almost zero and it's like a year old who knows anything so trying to make policy based on whatever might come up is just completely ridiculous. We just don't know. Enough yet,
don't be afraid to ask a question that may sound stupid because 90% of the time. Everyone else is thinking of the same question and
And is too embarrassed to ask
it, right? So I was a kid.
Who sat in class up in the front row?
And I asked all the stupid questions and people would come up to me all the time saying, thank you for asking that question. I was too embarrassed to ask it so
And for some reason, I wasn't embarrassed to ask stupid
question. Why do you think that's the case? How can people become less embarrassed to be stupid?
I don't really know the answer to that one.
I've never lacked self-confidence and that's another question. People have is words to come from, or where do you get it? And I don't know. I think it may have something to do with a lack of empathy meaning that I kind of didn't care what other people thought.
Like what's up? Yes, it really does care is thinking about other people and I was not thinking about other people's. Like I wasn't asking the question for their sake. I genuinely had the stupid question. That was my question and so it wasn't as if I'm thinking oh I'm going to ask the question because for the benefit of others. No no it was like is an altruistic. This is going to be selfish. I was just a stupid guy who was naive enough to
I don't know what you're
talking. It, nailed it, so a good parallel to what I've done on the show. I asked, you know, thousands of questions a year to people on this podcast, the questions that get the most praised or thanks in the comments. Are when I'll say what's up, word mean, someone someone used the word bivalve the other day. And what's that? You know, it's like an oyster. Oh, thank you. Those
At this, the most super sci-fi. I thought that I didn't know what to buy, but I was the only one that wasn't by Valve pilled on this podcast. And it turns out, it turns out that other people are as well. So yeah, I, you know, it just goes all the way up. It's outside the school. It's outside of everything,
right. Right by the way, you know, I am a born editor rather than writer and I did magazines and wire. And this is something that I was doing that, I would do. When editing is, I am representing the reader at that point, but mostly again, it's for me and that it was
If I did not truly understand something, it was like, you got to explain it to me
because I do you mean by
that? What do you mean by that? Because I don't understand it and you and so. But there was also a balanced by the way, because there's also a tendency in journalism, particularly newspaper journalism to have to explain everything over and over again, aiming to the kind of eleven-year-old wear it for a while. In the 90s, if the use the word DNA,
Yeah, you had explained he had to say DNA that thing that, you know, whatever it's like. I know it DNA is. I don't need to hear
that. I suppose here's an interesting insight there. As new Fields, open up the conceptual, inertia hasn't propagated sufficiently quickly, which means that you end up with much more clunky articles for a short period of time until the whatever cultural Overton window has caught up and now, everyone's back in.
Right? So would be like, here's here's the kind of tests
Going to write an article about something like so you mentioned the word chat gbt, do you need to explain it or not?
It depends who you're writing for writing for your mum, right?
So so my advice to the people at wired writers. This is my standard device to the writers. You're not writing to your mom, you're not writing to the 11th grader, you're writing to me. I am your audience. I am bored. You have to amaze me. And so if it's something so you're trying to guess what is it? That I know, of course, right? So I know about chat gbt so that
Wired it would definitely would not be explaining it by now Transformer model large language models. Probably not, I don't know, but but this is a balancing act between, you know, bivalve would I have to explain that in an article for Wired?
I want to know what the article. Mm wide is. It's talking about oysters. Yeah. Yeah. It's a that's fascinating. You know, I think about it a lot on the show as well.
How much, how much brevity can I get away with? Yeah, how much is too much? How much color brings people along for the ride? How much patronizes them? It's a real, a real Balancing Act and some days you know you come in and you think this is the first time that we have ever spoken about the evolutionary basis for bullying. I had this guy called Tony balk on the show recently. Okay, I need to hear your definition. I need to hear why it's adaptive. I need to hear who does it. What whether it's heritable that the all the way down,
And then you, as you're learning goes on, but that's the perfect way that you said it, if you presume that you are somewhere close to the aggregate Avatar of the audience that you're speaking to, would you need it X when you learned it? Did you need to explain it to you, right? Did you need to go and do tons of research? If so you may need to pass that on. If not if you thought you have course. I know what that is. Maybe you know, if you become intimately familiar with bivalves, you're probably fine.
So what we were doing wired, we had the variants that we were starting wired and basically
Lie, there wasn't no audience and so we said we are making a magazine that we want to read and basically we're going to find other people who you know are like us.
That's what we're doing. We're writing an article. So we're going to attract the people who are like us, okay? So, so if you talk at my level, we're going to attract people that are interested in turned out to be a lot of people wanted to have that kind of a conversation at our level. So we found them or they found us because they would open up the thing and they would hear this conversation at our level and they were go, I
that's me. This is me.
This is my tribe.
Yep. You're talking at the right level that I'm at
yep. Prototype your life try stuff, instead of making Grand
plans. So this is really the subtitle of my book wisdom. I wish you'd known earlier, it just took me away way too long to kind of get there. There is a very what's the word I want? Literal, meaning of prototyping where you know I do I make a lot of stuff like can't show you but I make. I've been a maker all my life. I'm making things still and it took me a long time to get
To understand that you can only make a really great thing by prototyping it along the way. This, even this, I've now taken it to heart. And even this book, I prototype them a little versions of it bound books. These happen to have Doodles that the publisher rejected, but but excuse me. So I think that's the literal sense of actually, you know, meant when I'm making a writing a book, I'm going to literally
at a first draft all the way through to the end, that will kind of be thrown away.
The Builder people call build one to throw away, you and then that idea like making a chair all the way. And then just to kind of discard it to make the better one that was just. So that was just so hard for me to kind of accept as a efficient way to do it or is as because making one thing any way to the end with such a, such a challenge and so hard that you know, just doing it to throw away seem crazy. But that is
We would have discovered the only way you can make something really great. And so this idea the expands to Beyond just a project is to, if you're trying to start a business or something rather than quitting your job and getting a lot of money and making A Five-Year Plan, you prototype it by trying something for a three weeks or just see how far you can do with the with 10.
Sort n items that you're trying to sell or make or you you with the Airbnb guides did when they were prototyping. Airbnb is you know, they had some air mattresses and they were going door-to-door, taking pictures of people who are having the air mattress in their house and it was
A prototyping stage. So there, it's low commitment High, leverage, our learning experiment, where you're iterating your way to a greater success. And that's I think the approach that works in life as well. I can't tell you, the number of people that I've met, who went through school, did a graduate degree and want to become a lawyer, so they learn law school and then they graduate within five weeks of
Can your Law Firm that they realize they hate it?
They never once I did an internship or volunteer data, lawyer just to hang around to see what it was. You want to prototype. You just don't want to go that way. That's
stress test your
assumptions. Yes. The whole way your assumptions. Try out, something do a version of it. It's a mock-up when we did our kitchen remodel, I did a full scale model of the remodel in cardboard from
Or cardboard with duct tape and then you will learn incredible amount of seeing the real size things like, oh, this should be here. This should be over here. It should be a little bit higher and that's the best approach I think to both projects and life.
I've got one of my favorite ones. I came up with a number of years ago which was a note to myself, which is perfectionism is procrastination masquerading as quality
control. That's probably true for some people.
I think a lot of people optimized for perfecting rather than shipping at a pace required to work out, what works, right? Because they never have to face real world. Rejection failure by keeping everything behind the
scenes, right? And that's also something that I've learned again from blogging and being at wired, was this idea of sharing your work really early before? It's done in order to get feedback? Because once it's done, it's really hard to change. And so there's this
The idea of that I do now of writing out loud. I call writing out loud writing publicly in versus I'm again, I'm always impressed by the Fantastic musical. Hamilton the way that they work, shop that for a decade, just trying and trying and live, and getting the feedback and changing it. And so that is, that's when that's the best time to get feedback as before you're done.
Here's the other thing as well, involving somebody in the process of a creative work, gets them to be more bought in.
Then you can imagine. So I'm doing some live shows. So the live shows towards the end of this year, I'm going to do some work in progress shows between now and then I need to get in front of a room of 20 to 50 people before I stand it blessed us when detour on a Sunday night sold out in London and I'm going to have probably a laptop or an iPad attached to my hand. You know, it's going to be messy, the won't be music, it'll be blah blah. The money will go to charity for the people that come along, but I would wager that the people who get to say to their friends,
I went to go and see that in progress show, you know, and it was actually really interesting. So I got to observe it out loud, I'll blah, you know, we used to do this with with club nights too. So I run nightclubs for a very long time. Before we released the brand, what we would do is we would involve the most influential guys and girls that go out and party in town, in the process what, you know, the room to music upstairs. Do you want to go sort of more Tech house or do want to go more tropical house? We have care about their feedback. We wouldn't take their feedback.
Back on board, we knew what we wanted to do with regards to this event, but they would feel when the night was finally announced that they had almost a sense of ownership, they were emotionally invested. So yeah, I think asking people for feedback and you'll have seen, Jonathan haidt is basically writing his book on sub stack and you know this is the most direct example that I could think of to what you're saying.
I wrote my book on my blog and and so it's
Smart authors, realize the value of this. And here's the thing you get, you get all the all the mistakes and Corrections corrected very early because the internet is really good at correction, right? And so and then you get an extra ideas of what did you think about that? Did you know about that? No, I did. Thank you so much and it's much more embarrassing to get that later on and when it was published. So yes, that that aspect of writing out loud of creating you say,
They collectively creating with your audience, co-creating things. It's just super super under underappreciated. And the often the hesitancy for people is they're afraid someone's going to steal your idea and this goes back to don't be the best be the only when you're their only. That's not a problem. Okay, so I came to this kind of realization myself through my efforts at wired where I was trying to assign story because story
Diaz and we have here's a great story, find find writers to write these ideas. And I'd have an idea that I thought was really great and I just simply could not give it to anybody. I could not sell it to them for years. I tried again and again, try to kill off the idea. There's no good. Then we come back and I think it is good but I just can't get anybody to write it and then eventually I realized after years of, oh, I have to write it.
And while I was writing it, I didn't wasn't there wasn't any competition? There wasn't, I was I could take my time because I have been trying to give it away for so long. So this idea of like nine. Now when I'm working on something I talk about it to everybody hoping that someone will take it because if they take it, it means I don't have to do it. That wasn't for me, alright? And so you can be generous if you're really trying to do something, you can be generous in sharing your work early.
Because no one else is going to take and if they do good for them.
So you should over overcome that hesitancy about sharing things if you're really working on something that's only you
pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
Yeah.
We understand your humans, I think, animals feel pain. We don't think that they suffer very much.
In the way that we do. So it's sort of yeah we feel pain, that's inevitable but we can turn it into suffering by
What's the word by being victimized by it. And so if we decide that this is pain and we will try and deal with the pain, we don't have to suffer and I think the difference is
Here's what it is. I think pain is outside.
Suffering is internal pain is a is an external thing and suffering is more of an identity and you don't want that pain to become your identity.
You want it to be something that is a trait, something that you are.
Something that surrounds your rather than something that's integral to you. One of the ways you learn optimism and teach optimism to kids and optimism is a skill. You can learn is to understand that as a kid to have setbacks are only temporary, they're not your identity. You're not saying oh I am an unlucky person and suffering has a little bit of that sense of an acceptance of a fate.
Of an identity rather than the pain, which is external and can be overcome. You
can't reason someone out of a notion that they didn't reason themselves into.
So I have another another aphorism that I'm working on that. I haven't actually published it. And so, I don't have the words down but most arguments are not about the argument. They're usually, they're usually just usually about something else as an emotional level.
They all said and done daily level, something else that is subsurf subconscious level. And so, that's where a lot of our views come from most of the reviews are inherited their given to us. We kind of accumulate them without even being aware of it. And so, trying to get out of that, through a logical process, is just simply, usually not going to work, and that's why I say one of the best ways to change, someone's mind is to listen to them very carefully and try to
I understand.
Why they believe what their believing and you actually get more, you get further along and helping them change your mind that way then actually by arguing with them.
Yeah, it's it also probably saves you an awful lot of time, right? From trying to drowning yourself while trying to save somebody else. Who refuses to swim in, whatever argument they're doing but I have a friend. Who's got a good wind is theory of bespoke bullshit. Many don't have an opinion until they're
ask for it at which point they Cobble together, a Viewpoint for a whim and half-remembered hearsay before. Deciding that this two-minute old makeshift opinion will be, then you he'll to die on the
right. Well somewhere else. Give advice that. You have you can get more respect for your opinions. If you are able to be able to State the other side, as well as the other side could,
And that you really shouldn't be offering your opinions unless you are prepared to kind of be able to explain it to that to that level of understanding the other side. And so that's again, that's a very high bar and this should be a high bar for for pontificating, on say, controversial things is that you should be able to State the other side to the satisfaction of the other along. Now we ran a debate series
And that was one of the conditions of the debate was once I would State their premise or their idea. And the other side had to restate it to the satisfaction of the first one before you can move on. And that's by the way. That's a that's a pretty big hurdle for a lot of
people. Well, this is the thing about being convinced by anything. You don't really get to choose what you're convinced by there are degrees of self-deception that people can go through and sort of willful self-deception as well. I
I suppose, but if you were convinced by the thing that the other side is convinced by you would also be convinced by it, right? So it is very important and it's such a good tool. Steel mounting is such a good tool to turn down the volume of antagonism and adversary illness that occurs. I'm currently writing a book at the moment and everything that we're doing in it is to give theory of Mind from one group to another group. But like have you ever considered what it's like to be this person? Have you ever considered what
It's like to be the other person right here. It is soon as you do, you just realize. Oh God, yeah, maybe maybe it's not overblown, maybe maybe they genuinely do have a case here. Maybe they do genuinely suffer in ways that I couldn't
foresee. Yeah. Absolutely. And usually it's not a lack of information or information itself that that is changing people's minds. And so yeah. So you don't have to attend every argument that you're
You too
trust me there is no them. Yeah.
Once a little hard to explain, but that's born out of my own experience in working with my kids too.
There's no them because most people are not because of incompetency rather than anything else, right? I mean, they're just the them that you would imagine do requires a degree of Competency and collaboration and whatnot to work, and that's why power, you know, being paranoid is not really
Useful. Because
The universe isn't really conspiring, this is not capable of it. And so then them doesn't I want to be sure that to indicate that there is still, there are systems that have a Prejudice. There is systemic racism in the world. So there is a, there is a system that will
be biased, but they're still not of them there because you could the people involved in this system or not even willing and not necessarily collaborating, they're not being deliberate. So there are individual, the individuals are not the them. There can be, certainly A system that is biased but when you meet someone, it's not to them and there is no real. There's no real ability to conspire against you in the way you might imagine,
I've come upon the exact same thing. I've just
Given a different name. So I'm Drew Schultz. Comedian from New York, very funny guy. He taught me this lesson and I renamed it. Schultz is Razor, so it's not coordination. It's cowardice Schultz. Taught me a great lesson during our episode and this is him quote. A lot of the time we believe that there is a grand plan at work to try and push a narrative or hurt people from a particular group from the outside, it looked like a coordinated assault, collusion orchestrated by some malign Overlord conspiracy, but on the ground it doesn't look anything like that. It's just individuals.
Fight to save their own skin and not get fired. They've got an expensive house, they can barely pay the mortgage on and a wife. Who wants a new car and private school for the kids. It is much easier to just adhere to whatever ideology will keep them in their job, rather than go against it. Sure, it might mean that they push an unhinged story about children or band somebody for saying, something innocuous from platform, but this doesn't mean that they've been indoctrinated into some grand plan, the incentives encourage execs, influential actors, and the people in power to behave in particular aligned ways, but their coordination is not
Consciously conducted. It's just the path of least resistance for each person.
Yeah, I agree that that's a very good description of it, so all that's true. And then I would reduce it to, there's no them.
There's no that I should have just said, there's nothing. That would have been Cricket, 10 to the small things more. People are defeated by blisters than mountains. And by the way, there's again, to literal things of that, I do these walk-and-talk swear.
Invite people we walk and there are people who are very fit who are very healthy and they could climb a mountain. But there are just brought Low by a little tiny blister because they have bought new shoes. Don't ever buy new shoes for a long hike and so so yeah the Small Things metaphorically can bring down. So you you do want to make sure that you pay your taxes right? And you do want to make sure that
Your bank accounts or balanced and all that kind of stuff in order to do the really great things that you are called to do.
I often think about the very normal everyday things that the most excellent people have to do. Yeah. And this really sort of points the finger at it quite nicely. There's another one here and this I think might be the one that resonated with me the most despite the fact that it's the least applicable to me, you lead by letting others know what you expect of them which may exceed, what they expect of themselves provide.
Add them a reputation that they can step up to. I thought that was very, very interesting. Yeah I think I got a little bit from Steve Jobs in his attitude of leadership of really, and I had a I had a track coach. It was the same thing is like
He led by Leading me to believe and my capabilities beyond what I believed myself and he kind of pointed to this things and believe that I would get there and I did get there even though the I didn't see that. So he kind of led me into stepping up myself. And I see that in great leaders and people who work with them getting their
Best. And there was this belief in the person seemed unreasonable at the time, who demanded a certain level of excellence and performance that the employees, at the time, didn't really think was possible. But this person knew could see in them that they were capable and led them by expecting it from him, hmm. How can people become better?
Either is recipients or is broadcasters of finding that balance between tyranny and Desperation. It is. You're right it is a balance. Because by the way
Steve Jobs a really mean guy who certainly went overboard with this in his demands.
I think you.
I think you have to look at the people that you are guiding whether they remain healthy. If they are, they're truly. If their marriages are suffering, if their children are complaining about them. If other things in the Life are not working than you're probably pressing too hard. The if you're really that this works and enlarges the wholeness of a person and it's best if it's not doing that, then it's probably too much.
So I think this was the Amish, the story of the Amish who when are still deciding about new technology in which to accept and they will let the early adopter Amish. There are early adopter. Amish adopt new things but they were saying we're watching you and your family and how you treat people and what you're doing with your day as an evaluation of whether you should continue to use this stuff. And so that idea of, you know,
Jobs is weakness, was probably not in pay attention to that whole person just looking at their performance at work and forgetting the fact that this would have an impact on the rest of them. If they were paying attention to that he could see whether or not this was a positive for them or a
negative right now. No matter your age. These are your golden years. Yeah. Good stuff. Will yield Golden Memories and the bad stuff will yield golden lessons.
Yeah.
These are your golden years it's not when you're 70 is like right now, you are living in your golden years. This is it and
That is going back to your kind of like your best.
Bad day. These are your best bad years in a certain sense. It's like ya know you want you want to celebrate this year because this is as good as it's going to get which would be true for next year too. But this idea of kind of celebrating the present, as, as the best. And I have a friend who, well, his name is Hugh. Howey, he's now this week last week, his new story was
It onto Amazon Prime. The Silo stories
about one of my friends is told me that I need to watch. That looks like
it was written by Hugh and he started off writing is a bookstore Clerk and he started writing little chapters that were put on Amazon and he made it succeeded Beyond The Stream. But the thing was was optioned and taking through many many steps and it was like each time it was go through and then it would be fail and then that someone else would pick it up and
Then there would be, you know, casting and would collapse there. And there was this thing, and he was saying when he learned to do was that each time it moved, a step ahead, he would celebrate as if that's as far as it was going to go like it was option. Okay. We're gonna have a celebration. Is this probably not going to go any beyond that. And so every moment he's celebrating, the thing is, if that was the victory. Yeah. So you do this sense of these intermediate victories become
You accept them as I will may not go any further than that. So we're going to celebrate this. And I think you can, then do the same thing with your years. It's like you may not have additional year, so why not celebrate this? And it's the best year of your life. I think a lot of people presume that. If they give themselves an out in some regard, if they celebrate too much that it's going to kill that drive. But if you look at the relative balance between how much people over celebrate and how much people over whip themselves, flagellate themselves.
Because they're not, if the Puritan work ethic, it's way more on the other side. There's a related concept that I learned about called deferred happiness syndrome. The common feeling that your life has not begun that your present reality is a Prelude to some idiotic future where this, it'll is a mirage that will fade as you approach revealing that the Prelude you rushed through was in fact the one to your death.
Yeah, I think you're right. There's no Prelude, right? This is it and that's another piece of advice that I
I wrote recently this, not in the book, which is don't save the best China and the best wine for some date, that's never going to happen. You use them as much as possible. Now, because this is, this is the time to celebrate
scratch the Rolex. Yeah, I agree whenever you have a choice between being, right? Or being kind. Be kind. No exceptions, don't confuse kindness with weakness.
Yeah, yeah. So
You can't be too kind. That's, that's true. And that's
It's related to another piece of advice that have about attendings many funerals as you can. And listen to what people say my observation was having done. This recently is almost nobody talks about the achievements of The Departed. They talked about what they were like, how they made them feel, whether they were kind or funny or
Helpful. And so those are the qualities that we remember. And that means in certain sense.
They may become the most important qualities that we have and kindness is always at the Forefront and it's kind of empathy. And the kind of it's an acceptance of the general. I think it's being realistic about the actual state of humans, which is we tend to be at our heart, kind-hearted, helpful, and selfless, given all things being equal, and what we're taught in school that were
Selfish as a premise is wrong. And if you accept the fact that kindness is always according to people will be kind to you in return, which is really weird, but there is this weird Paradox, which is that the more you give the more you're get. And that's true for everybody and mathematically that does not add up, but that is the foundation of the universe. And when your kind is, the probably the most selfish thing you can do, correct.
We're going to treat you their best. And so weirdly paradoxically the selfish thing you can do is to be kind, what would be a scenario? Why you need to make a choice between being, right? Or being kind o all the time.
particular you like,
I don't know if there's a you told someone to try to help someone they didn't do what you suggested and it didn't work out being right. Would be reminding them about that. You were right being kind would be not to mention that that's just one kind of trivial example, but there is all the time.
I see this in marriages all the time where you can be like yeah I can be right this is this is the thing to do but the kindness was suggest you do it. So my wife and I have this thing where we can all rotating them always being right.
And so there's ideas like you're always right. I'm going to what is right and that's kindness and not rightness. We're not saying whether they're really right there saying we're treating you as if you're right. So that's that works, that it works. Very very powerfully because because basically it is in alignment with the general drift of the universe of humanness, which is that we are basically kind.
The other thing it does is it accounts for our rationality, you know, we're not utility optimizers, right? If we were, then you would always want the most right answer at all times. But you're not, you're emotional and you're going to take things not based on the facts but based on the way that you feel, so another really great quote that I love. That says karma is just you repeating your patterns virtues and Floors until you finally get what you
deserve. Well, c.s. Lewis,
Talked about his definition of Heaven and Hell.
You said heaven and hell are basically taking take you as you are right now and what you're becoming and just make it infinite.
Right? So wherever you are so if you're a kind of a person who's been cheating people and is just kind of out for themselves and it's like, okay you just keep extending it. Infinitely
That's hell if you're a person doing your better and going a little bit better. That's heaven. So it's your current trajectory just x
infinity.
Kevin Kelly, ladies and gentlemen, Kevin. I really appreciate you. I think this works. Fantastic. As like I say the fledgling a forest in me is really, really impressed by this. Excellent advice for living. Everybody should go and check that out. Is there anything else? Anywhere else that you want to direct people?
That really? I appreciate the attention. People can find me at my website, which is my initials Ka kada org among the socials as well. We're published my art every day. I do have a recommend o newsletter which we
We done for six years is free every Sunday and it's the recommended stuff is one page and you'll so people can sign up for that. But mostly take a look at the book. And by the way, the one thing I've learned about doing this recently, is that if you have kids generally, the kids won't pay any attention to the rights you give, but you can point them to a book, the other expert and they'll pay attention to that. So it really works great and that respect.
Kevin, thank you very much for today. Thank you. I really appreciate it was fun.
