Freakonomics Radio - 193. Someone Else’s Acid Trip

Episode Date: January 22, 2015

As Kevin Kelly tells it, the hippie revolution and the computer revolution are nearly one and the same.

It's time for another edition of our Frequently Asked Questions. That's when we run a set of fixed questions past some noteworthy guests. First time out, we talked to Boris Johnson, the mayor of London. I collect old cheese boxes. Today, we're putting the questions to Kevin Kelly, one of the founders of Wired magazine. He's also a technology writer. His books include What Technology Wants and New Rules for the New Economy. He'll tell us how he got started in publishing.

I think I was the first person in the world to be hired online in 1983. Why he's dying to travel into the future. I would give so much just to get a sense of the trajectory of the cosmos, because I think we're really blinded and short-sighted and particularly swayed by the last hundred years. And then there's this. When's the last time you dropped acid, Kevin? I tell you, there's nothing more boring than hearing someone's acid trip. From WNYC,

this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen D Dubner. Okay, so let's start. Tell us who you are and what you do. My name is Kevin Kelly. I'm senior maverick at Wired Magazine, a magazine that I

co-founded about 20 years ago. And what I do is write books about the consequences of technology, the impact of technology in our lives, which is really what Wired was about, the culture around technology rather than technology itself. And Kevin, tell me in 60 seconds or so what you actually do in a given day. I spend most of my day reading. I read magazines and books. And then I try and write a little about what I learned. Of course, I also write emails. Then I take a hike or a bike, and I also try to take one photograph a day. So I mostly spend my time reading. Now, Kevin, what would you say would be the best investment you've made,

any kind of investment, financial, emotional, education, whatever, that's got you to where you are today? I spent almost a decade traveling in Asia with very little money, and that transformed my life and it gave me insights into how things are actually done. And I also caught a really bad case of optimism there because I saw, with my own eyes, nations bootstrapping themselves from poverty into prosperity. This was after you went to college but did not graduate from college, correct? Right. I did one year of college and then dropped out. And instead, I awarded myself

a graduate degree in Asian studies by backpacking through Asia at a time when it was in transition. And what is your advice to people today who are thinking about not going to college or dropping out of college? backpacking through Asia at a time when it was in transition. And what is your advice to people today who are thinking about not going to college or dropping out of college? I think you don't need college if you have a project that you want to throw yourself into, if you have the gumption and the discipline, if you have a really good alternative. And I've told my kids, if you don't have that, then you've got to go to college. Your kids are how old? 26, 24, and 18. And what's their college status? They all went

because they didn't have something as an alternative. Kevin, who's been the biggest influence on your life for work and why? A man called Stuart Brand, who taught me how to think honestly. He was the first publisher and creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, which I read in high school. And the message of that kind of hippie Bible was you can invent your life to do whatever you want and that you don't need to ask permission. And you went on then to be an editor at the Whole Earth Catalog, yes? I did. The only job I ever wanted to have was to work for the Whole Earth Catalog because I felt that it was speaking to me directly. I was hired in a kind of a curious way. I was hired online. I think I was the first person in the world to be hired online in 1983. Wow. What was the portal that allowed you to do that?

It was an experimental online network called EIES, E-I-E-S, run by the New Jersey Institute of Technology. And I finagled my way into it by, I had become a travel writer at that time, and I was writing about this network nation as if it was a new territory. And I apparently had the right voice for online. And we recognize that voice these days as the voice of a blogger.

And that, I guess, directly or indirectly led to you belonging to a group of people who ended up starting Wired Magazine, yes? I mean, it's kind of a continuous thread. Yes, it was. But before that, I launched the first hackers conference with Stuart. We also launched The Well, which was the first public access to the Internet in 84 or 5. Given the modern face of cutting-edge technology, let's invite everybody out there to summon the image of a person who represents that, and it might be a Steve Jobs-like character,

it might be someone a generation or two generations younger than that, but you guys were a bunch of hippies that really kick-started what we now know as the digital revolution. I think most people don't think of the digital revolution today as being affiliated with hippiedom at all. They don't, and that is actually one of the untold stories. Actually, it was told by the New York Times technology writer John Markoff, who wrote a kind of overlooked book called What the Dormouse Said, which was telling the hippie origins of the personal computer and how basically from Doug Engelbert and Steve Jobs and Stuart Brand, they were all

dropping acid. They were trying to augment human cognition, not trying to make a new industry. And a lot of the earliest entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley in the computer world were former hippies who were living on communes and learned some small business skills, making candles or macrame or whatever it was, and transferred that into this ethic of the entrepreneur, which is now kind of all fancy and hip. And that is definitely a thread of Silicon Valley that's not widely appreciated. Yeah. When's the last time you dropped acid, Kevin? I have only dropped acid once in my life, and I was 50 years old on my birthday. Yeah, which was how long ago? You're how old? I'm 62. So I took no drugs at all, even though I was a hippie. I was

one of those weird ones that didn't do drugs. But I decided to make it a sacrament, and on my 50th birthday, I dropped three tabs of acid and saw God. What did God look like? What did she say? I tell you, there's nothing more boring than hearing someone's acid trip. I don't know. I've never done acid. Was it positive, at least? It was a positive experience. And I did a lot of research on trying to find out how you do this well. And it turns out that was actually kind of hard to find. But you do it with a guide in the right setting.

So I did it outdoors. I had a very experienced person who was sitting by me and taking care of me and leading me through. And I also had a source for the drug that was very pure. However, I have to say that I was given four tabs and I threw the last one into the ocean when I was done saying, you know, I don't need to do that again. What do you collect and why? You know, I don't have that collector gene. I have a couple little things that I collected on my travels in Asia, and one was Coke bottles. And I collected the Coke bottles because the different countries in Asia that had different scripts. Coke is bottled locally everywhere in the world, isn't it?

Right. And so that was the interest to me was this universal symbol that had these local variations. And I thought that was really cool. You know, the Chinese and the Japanese and Thai, they were all different. And yet they were all the same in some ways to the same shape. Kevin, what can you tell us about your strategy for creating and managing computer passwords? I use a mnemonic formula to generate passwords that are kind of specific to each site that I go to. So it's a formula that uses part of the site's name in the password. So yours is algorithm-ish that's adaptable to any site then, yes? Exactly.

So my assistant could generate it if needed, and we'd all agree on what it was, and yet it's unique to that site. What's your net worth compared to that of your parents when you were, let's say, 16? I didn't know what my parents' net worth was. I still don't know. We never talked about it. What did your folks do for a living? My father actually worked for Time Life. He was not an editorial site. He was in something that was called Operations Research at the time that we would now call IT. He was one of the

people who brought computers to the magazine world. And then later on, he was involved in this really kind of weird startup that you might have heard of called HBO. And so he was involved with the guys who were taking cable TV and trying to put it up onto a satellite. So did you grow up in New York then? I grew up in New Jersey, in Westfield, New Jersey. My dad worked in New York. And my parents never talked politics. They have no idea how they ever voted.

I don't even know what they were making. And so I don't have no idea how they ever voted. I don't even know what they were making. And so I don't have any idea. Okay, but how about your life and your family and consumption patterns and so on? Would you say you're financially better off or worse off than your parents? Well, I'm sure we're as well off and we might be better off, but it's all relative. For instance, when I grew up, I never ate out in a restaurant my entire life. Every meal my mom cooked, I don't know whether we couldn't afford it. It was just that we didn't do it. Now, that's not obviously true in my own life, but I don't know if that was

more about money or more just about the culture at the time. What was your favorite meal that your mom made? Tuna fish salad. And we were raised Catholic, so we had it on Friday. That's something I just always looked forward to. Is your mom still alive? Yes, she is. She's 86 or 87 and

sharp as ever. When you go home, does she still make you the tuna fish? Yes, she will. Can you make it now as well as her? Is there a recipe? No, I can't. I don't know. It's funny because I've never asked her for the recipe. Yeah, why not?

I mean, you're helping invent the Internet and you can't figure out the tune of it? Yeah, I guess I like the idea that she can do something that I can't. Coming up on Freakonomics Radio, why Kevin Kelly, who is sometimes mistaken for Amish, is not Amish. I'm Amish-ish in the sense that I am minimizing the number in my life, but the Amish are not interested in maximizing the number of options in the world, and I am. And his coolest book yet. It's called Cool Tools. And tool is in the broadest sense

of something that's useful to you. From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner. Kevin Kelly is a technology writer and a founder of Wired magazine. He lives and works in Northern California in a rambling house at the end of a road just a mile from the Pacific Ocean, as he puts it. Usually when we record an interview like this one, we either make someone go to a studio or we send an engineer to them with a portable recorder. But Kelly, being Kelly, offered to record himself. So what you're hearing today is me asking him questions from a radio studio in New York, and Kelly responding from his writing studio in California,

recording himself on a small digital recorder with two built-in microphones. It's called a Zoom H2 Handy. Later, he uploaded the file to Dropbox. We downloaded it. And to borrow Kelly's words, we zippered it into the half of the conversation that we recorded in New York. So that's what you're hearing as Kevin Kelly answers our frequently asked questions. Kevin, what do you worry about now when you go to sleep at night? I don't worry about anything when I go to sleep at night. I am kind of a machine that can

just be turned off and turned on. I've constructed my life to try and have very few regrets and no worries. And so while I may worry about like whether this is really recording or not, I'm not worrying about things at night. So you're an in-the-moment worrier. You're not a retrospective worrier. Right, exactly. What is one thing throughout your life maybe that you've spent too much on but do not regret? My library. I have a two-story library filled with lots of books. You know, I've read maybe two-thirds of them. So there's lots of books that I haven't read. They take up a lot of space,

but I just love it. I just would not give it up for anything. These days, do you typically buy a book on paper or an e-version? but I just love it. I just would not give it up for anything. These days, do you typically buy a book on paper or any version? I'm buying both. So I can have multiple versions of books and that's certainly an indulgence. When someone comes over to your house and they're in your library and they see a book that they are interested in, what do you do? Do you give it to them? little things that I print on Blurb or Lulu. So I'm a kind of recovering photographer, and they can range from photo books, or I have other little private books, a book on drawings that I've done over the years. So I have a little stash of private editions, and that's what I give away. So one of the books that you've made, but that's on a much bigger scale than the ones you're talking about here, is this amazingly interesting book, Cool Tools. Tell us about that a little bit.

So, Cool Tools is a book on paper, and it's only available on paper, that's a little bit oversized. It's a lot towel. And it is about 1,500 recommendations for cool tools. And tool is in the broadest sense of something that's useful to you. So it could be a hand tool, like a really good pair of pliers, or it could be the best glue gun in the world. Or it could be something like a piece of software or a software app. Or it could be something like a piece of software or a software app. Or it could be something even like a service like Elance, which is this global market for freelancers. And they're collected and arranged into this book that does something that your phone doesn't do or the web doesn't do, which is all these things arranged on a page and the design of them being adjacent to one another, there's something unconscious that provokes in your mind connections between them. So there's a

kind of a buzz and exhilaration you get because your brain is making associations between all these tools. You know, when I first got Cool Tools, I guess it came out in 2013. And I loved it. And I love looking through it. And my kids love looking through it. And we like to give it away as a present for high school graduation, or even bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs, because it's like, there's a world out there, and there's you here, and you are going into that world. And it's very easy to hear about the 10 things that everybody is talking about at the same time in media, social media, mass media, whatever. But then here's another thousand things that you may not know about and that are often least associate with Wired Magazine, has put out this book, which is on paper with everything from modern and cutting edge tools to a lot of things

about beekeeping and homesteading and keeping chickens and so on. So and I thought it was just the greatest contradiction that the Wired guy would also be the super hippie guy, even if he's the modern hippie guy. But now that we're talking, I see no contradiction whatsoever. And I guess what I'm saying is that I like that talking to you has made me, and I hope other people see the connection between going low, lo-fi and DIY and all that, with the highest of the high tech, that they really are connected, aren't they? Yes.

I think of myself as a minimalist in the sense that I'm looking for the minimum amount of technology that will maximize my options. So while I am in my role of wired and cheerleader for the benefits of technology, I'm trying to maximize the number of choices we have in the world. I'm trying to actually minimize the number of things in my own life at the same time. That's sort of why I'm not Amish. The Amish are minimites in the sense that they are really very selectively choosing. Although you look Amish with the beard.

I do. People mistake you for Amish. People say that I'm Amish, but I'm not Amish. You're Amish-ish. I'm Amish-ish in the sense that I am minimizing the number in my life, but the Amish are not interested in maximizing the number of options in the world, and I am. So, Cool Tools, I subtitle as a catalog of possibilities because I'm not encouraging people to buy all the tools in there. I mean, you kind of page through it and you say, oh, I want this, I want that. It's more important that you know that these exist rather than that you purchase them. Because a tool is really just an opportunity with a handle. It's just a way of

thinking about something differently that we make real. And so you can use this as a resource of getting ideas about what is possible to do. And that's why I think it's really great for young people is to say, look, you know, you've been through school, you've been through college, but here's a whole realm of things that are possible for an individual to do these things. You can rent a bulldozer if you want to. You can design your own home and build your own home if you want to. It's not that difficult. And so just knowing that can give you confidence to do other things that haven't been done yet. Let me ask you a series of favorite questions that are – honestly, these are the kind of questions that if you were asking me, I'd hate them.

So what's a favorite book or author? Favorite author is Andy Dillard. Oh, no kidding. Her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek was something that just made me want to write. And I can read that any time of day or night and just be filled with excitement. And I read anything by her and to me, she's just genius. Favorite music? Arabic pop.

Name some names. I don't even know what their names are. They're just compilations and they play and I don't even know who the artists are and they're probably not even well known. It's kind of like folk music. Let me ask you this. When it comes to regret, and you've already told us that you are pretty good at not hanging on to regret, at least at the end of the day. Do you tend to have stronger regrets for things you did that worked out poorly or things that you didn't do?

Probably for things I didn't do just because they're kind of opportunities lost. Do you have a list of those things that you had a chance at? No, I don't have very, very few of them. And one of the ones that had we done it a little differently, and we do have a regret is we didn't have a fourth child. Why? What would four do that the first three didn't? You know, our last son was a little bit younger than, was a little bit separated from the older two. So it would have been a little funner for him. And just, you know, as we went along, we realized how incredibly fantastic it was to have a household of kids around.

And so, but things in terms of timing and jobs and biology just didn't work out. Here's a big one. There are a few people I can think of that I'd rather ask this question of than you, Kevin Kelly. What's the best possible future discovery or invention? I think a nuclear fusion would be, not the best of all possible, but in terms of the near future

of something that we're close to, I think this is one of the most promising technologies that we have. If we can have economic synthetic solar, which is basically what it is, so you get a lot more energy out than you put in, that would be huge. So that would mean theoretically coal as an electricity source goes away. Hydro, if you can't build it, not a problem. Why is that such a game changer in your view? Well, as far as we know, it wouldn't contribute to global warming. And it would also take the same trends that we've had all along, which is we built civilization on the fact that we could find cheap energy. I mean, if this planet didn't have oil reserves or coal reserves, it's really hard

to imagine how we would have gotten this far. Yeah. How far do you think we would have gotten? That's a really interesting question. Like, if you imagine that we only had wood, how far along could we have gotten? Because we probably know enough now that we could maybe change the wood in some way, but whether we would have gotten as far as we had with wood only, I don't know. I haven't really kind of played it out. But that would be a wonderful counterfactual science fiction story if we replayed the Earth's history without the coal and oil reserves. Here's a hard one, Kevin. What do you think will eventually lead to humankind's demise if, in fact, there is such a thing? I don't believe there'll be a demise of any sort.

It'd be very, very difficult to eradicate all human life, even if you really wanted to. I mean, even asteroids would do a good job of killing most of the people, but not all the people. I think what will happen is we'll evolve until we're unrecognizable. That the way humanity disappears, basically, is we become something so different from what we are that we want to give it a different name. I also think that that's a plural. So I think our destiny is to be many species. And there will be people who will say under my dead body, will my genes or the genes of my offspring ever be changed? And then there are other people who would say, sign me up today.

What were you studying at college when you dropped out? Geology. Geology. All right. So let's imagine that instead of dropping out and traveling around Asia, then becoming this dude that you became, that you'd been a different kind of guy and you'd stayed in college and gotten your geology degree. What do you think

you'd be doing today had you not taken that alternate path? I might have made a good doctor, because I think I'm really good at diagnosing things. Medical diagnosis is so friggin hard, isn't it? Yes, it's hard. My wife actually runs a lab at Genentech. She's a biochemist, genetic engineer. So I hear how hard it is to unravel even the smallest bit of what's actually going on. And we still really, I mean, the brain, we don't know. The cell, you know, people's image of the cell, well, the cell is almost a solid. We think of it as kind of filled with water, but it's really, it's packed so much that there's almost no room for things to happen. And we don't even know how they happen, actually. It's humbling, too, isn't it?

Because you think as good as we humans have gotten at building systems, I mean, we can do air conditioning and even some nuclear power and this and that in terms of the most basic system which we all own we don't really know how it's put together and how it got that way and to make matters more complicated i think we are making our technology like the internet and robots and things like that almost as complex as biological systems and so my books have been about how we need to bring in biological thinking into our technology. We have to understand that they're related, that they're cousins, or if not brothers and sisters, and that our technology will become more biological as it progresses. And so this requires a different approach to what we make. Last question, Kevin, what was the question that I should have asked you, but failed to?

You didn't ask me if I was on a time machine, where I would go. Okay. Kevin, if you were on a time machine, where would you go? I would go into the future. And I would go about 200 years. I think further than that, I would just be lost. And what would you want to see 200 years out? I would give so much just to get a sense of the trajectory of the cosmos. Because I think we're really blinded and short-sighted and particularly swayed by the last hundred years. And so the question is, is there really a trajectory to our development and our progress? And I think 200 years would give me enough time for a second

data point. Would you make it a point to seek out your own great, great, great, great grandchildren, or would you avoid them? I'd probably went to that, but I would Google myself. See how well you held up. Because the honest truth is that even in 200 years, not one single one of us here is going to be remembered. All right. I'll make you this promise. If I somehow get frozen, boiled, whatever, and make it that long, I'm going to tell people about you. Okay. Well, thank you. Kevin, nice talking to you. Thank you very much.

It was great. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening. Thanks to Kevin Kelly for talking to us and for recording his end of the conversation. And thanks today and every day to our underwriters. Those are the people who buy the ads on this program that make it possible. Coming up on the next Freakonomics Radio, will robots eventually take all our jobs? It's not simply a matter of a machine does the job, therefore the worker doesn't do the job,

therefore there are fewer workers needed. But what's the chance a robot will take my job? Extremely slim. Oh, I would not be so sure about that. Jobs, technology, and creative destruction. That's next time on Freakonomics Radio. Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC and Dubner Productions. Our staff includes David Herman, Greg Rosalski, Caroline English, Susie Lechtenberg, and Chris Bannon, with help from Christopher Wirth.

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