Technology, Connected - Has Kevin Kelly Changed His Mind About AI?

Episode Date: September 20, 2025

Kevin Kelly is the most interesting man on the planet. The founder of Wired has spent the last few years asking one question: what is AI? His books have shaped how we think about innovation, the future of technology, and what works. His voice has been present at every major technological shift, from the early internet to AI today.His influence has reached all the way to this podcast. His essays and ideas are often places we return to for deep thought and reflection. Kevin Kelly is the ultimate curiosity machine, and it was a pleasure to speak with him at length about his ideas, philosophies, and even his jokes.In this conversation, Kevin thinks on paper with Mark and Jeremy about technology as the 7th kingdom of life, as real and alive as plants, animals, and fungi.This is a must-watch for anyone who wants to see AI and technology not as hype or fear, but as part of life itself, the 7th kingdom of nature.Please enjoy the show.--Other ways to connect with us:⁠Listen to every podcast⁠Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠Follow us on ⁠X⁠Follow Mark on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Follow Jeremy on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Read our ⁠Substack⁠Email: [e-mail]--Chapters(00:00) Kevin Kelly On Nature And Technology(02:59) Why Decentralized Systems Still Need Some Hierarchy(09:03) Why DAOs Failed: Immutability Was a Bug(16:46) Is AI Creative? (Yes) & The Coming Emotional Bonds(21:39) AI Consciousness: A Spectrum of Artificial Aliens(29:16) "Write to Discover What You Think"(32:48) Balancing AI Tools & Human Thinking(33:50) AI as a Skill & Powerful Thinking Partner(37:50) Hot Buttons: Future, Bitcoin, Jurassic Park, Aliens?(41:10) How to Cultivate Wonder (Hint: Be a Martian)(49:10) The Power of Saying "I Don't Know"(53:54) Kevin Kelly's Question: What Do We Want Humans To Be?

In the last six months or a year, is there anything about AI that you have changed your mind about completely, which you didn't think you would? We couldn't be more excited about our guest. Founder of Wide Magazine. The Man Behind A Thousand True Fans, the author of What Technology Wants, The Inevitable. And his new book, Excellent Advice for Living Wisdom. I wish I'd known earlier is out now. We are speaking to Kevin Kelly. The next big shock for people is when we start to code in emotions.

the AI's. The way you bond with your pets, but the pets don't have conversations with you, but now they're going to. Natural organic world and the technological world are actually part of the same force. There are two faces of the same coin. Technology is actually an extension of the evolution on the planet. You're not going to be replaced by an AI, but you may be replaced by a human who's using AI. And so I see it as an incredibly powerful thinking tool. My ideas come as through the process of writing. I don't know what I think until I write it. Wikipedia is a great way to start something,

but it's not going to take you all the way. What's a question that you would ask all of our guests to better understand what they're doing and how it fits in with the world? What do we want humans to be? Disruptors and curious minds. Welcome to another episode, a very special episode of Thinking on Paper.

We couldn't be more excited about our guest. I'm not going to give you a witty ramble. I think we're going to hand it off right to Mark to dive into who we're talking to. But the only thing I will say is a lot of what Mark and I do today is largely inspired by what this individual has done for decades and decades. So I'll leave it at that. Mark, who are we talking to today? We are speaking to Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired Magazine, the man behind a thousand true fans, the quantified self, the author of many books, including what technology wants, the inevitable loads of others. He's built his own house, cycled across America, hitchtight across Japan. And his new book, Excellent Advice for Living Wisdom, I Wish I'd Known Earlier, is out now.

Welcome to the show, Kevin Kelly. Thank you very much for thinking on paper with Earth. And I just want to start following off where we were in the green room just before. How has nature and being in nature framed and helped frame your lights to work? That's a great, great question. I like that framing. It would act this apparent. The dichotomy was actually the origin of my first book

out of control, which was making the argument that in fact, nature, the natural organic world and the technological world are actually part of the same world, part of the same force, or two faces of the same coin, and that they're not as different as they appear, that in fact, technology and all this stuff around us and this high-tech stuff is actually an extension of the evolution on the planet. And I like to call the technology the seventh kingdom of life because it behaves in the same way as a system

as evolution in nature does. And so when I go out to look at nature, I see kind of a kind of technology. And when I look at technology, I see a kind of nature. And so for me, there isn't that harsh opposition. It's actually much more of a unity that I see. I would love your thoughts on this. This interesting give and take between hierarchical systems and emergent systems

and this dance that happens. Have you noticed that throughout your work? And how influential is that in having things come to life when things go away? I hate to reference my original book and published in 94, but I written in the early 90s, which was about this very thing. of the organizational of things that were really interesting and that we liked, like life, like our minds, like a society. And my conclusion from all that research was that generally the most powerful systems

you can make were ones that were very decentralized with a very flat hierarchy that were generating things from the bottom up. And that was sort of written at the very beginnings of the Internet world. and we've since seen the power that that had. And then other things like AIs and all, reflecting that similar kind of organization, they're very, very flat. There's not a lot of hierarchy.

But the thing about it is, is that there's some hierarchy. So they aren't completely amorphous. They aren't completely empty of any kind of hierarchy. And often the hierarchy is a result of what we call pace layers, of different rates of things happening. That's how things come out. So like if you can imagine a corporation or even a company or a country where you have most

of the activity happening down here, there has to be some layer where people are concerned about doing what needs to be done tomorrow today, but there's got to be some layer that's thinking about the long-term strategy that moves at a different rate, and that's where you get hierarchy. And so it turns out that working from the bottom up like Wikipedia is a great way to start something, but it's not going to take you all the way. The encyclopedia that you really, really want has to have a little bit of top-down hierarchical control, something guiding it. It isn't a large percent, but it has to be present to some degree. And I had a great illustration of that in one of the early Sigraph conferences, which were all based around the future of

visualization and movie special effects. And now we see the kind of movie generation with AI called Sigraph, and this was 20 years ago, 30 years, I can't remember. They had a little devices where they gave to people to control a video game on the screen. So there's like 5,000 people. They've got some little kind of wireless control thing, and they're going to collectively steer this thing. And the first thing they did was we were flying an airplane. Do you have a Microsoft, you know, flight simulator? You have 5,000 people who are not pilots

are going to try to pilot a plane together. And they were able to do it. And once I was doing like pitch, I was doing yaw and stuff, and so they were actually able to emergently fly the plane and actually to roll it. And then they were given the assignment to run a submarine collectively

and capture some eggs or something that were hidden. It was a little story. And they couldn't do it. And there were, there was too many variables. And they were just looking around and nothing was happening. This was going around, whatever it is. And then there was a voice in the back said, you know, aim for the top or something simple.

And suddenly it just cohered. And they were able to do it, the whole audience. So they just took a little tiny bit of leadership, kind of lead. And so there was this great, fantastic example of how the bottom up is the main force, is the decentralized being, this distributed governance is the way you do things. But you need to have some level of small hierarchy leadership looking ahead, trying to participate. And the same thing at Wikipedia, they've gradually added a little bit more top-down control

about things. And that's the way you get the kind of thing that you really want. Sounds like parenting a little bit. It was more and more decentralized as they get older. Exactly right. No, it is. There's lots of analogies of gardening and other things where you are guiding, leading, setting examples, very, very subtle, whereas most of the work is still coming from the bottom. I've been wondering why DAO's haven't been as successful as they sound to be in words. What do you feel about them to be? Yeah, I was trying, I was trying to get on in the very first Dow, the one that later collapsed. Here's where I think that happened. This is sort of, for me, an illustration of a bigger point of the difference between rationalism and empiricism.

And there are a lot of things that sort of work in theory, but just don't work in practice because there are all these other issues and involved in things other than just the rational logic of it. So it's not that we're more than just rational beings, is that the world itself is composed and run over things other than just logic. So the logic of Dallas was really impeccable, but here's where they kind of stumbled, which was the whole idea of them was that you had these immutable rules. That was the attraction, was that they're immutable, and that, you know, once you set somethings up, it couldn't be subverted, they couldn't be hacked, they couldn't be derailed, they would just go on and do their thing without the failure mode that most other kind of

organizations would have. But the problem is, is that if you have a negotiation that can never be changed, it's really terrible because most negotiations are always, most contracts are usually renegotiated in time because new things come up that nobody expected. And so that immutability is not a feature. It was a bug. It was a bug. And so we want something to be flexible, but not too flexible. We don't want it to be just something that can never be changed. And so that kind of flexibility and that kind of adaptability of the contextual sense. They didn't have that kind of contextual awareness. Now, maybe someday in the future they could, but that's a much more complicated, elaborate thing that might need an AI to do. But that was what it was lacking, in my opinion.

And so you have this very logical, abstract thing that in theory, would work, but does this still not meet reality? It was not contextual enough for the changing parameters of us. I mean, it required people to kind of like think of all the possible things that might happen, and you can't. It's like the human version of the path integral, where you have to map out all the paths to figure out what the probabilities of one or the other. And the thing is, reality is that there's going to be something you ever thought about.

So I've been involved in, with GBN, Global Business Network, and we did hundreds of, future scenarios for the Fortune 500 companies trying to anticipate where things were going. And my friend Stuart Brand has us saying that this present moment is the unimaginable future of the past, right? It was the past unimaginable future. And so it is totally unimaginable. We did all these scenarios for these companies, and not one single of those scenarios was anything remotely like what we have today. Because had anybody suggested today's world it would have been rejected as simply ridiculous, right? I mean, it's like you couldn't have, it was just not plausible.

And so that's the problem. The problem is that the future is sort of outside of what we can imagine. So you didn't prepare for it, so the whole thing collapses. We have a book club at thinking on paper, and we've just finished reading Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari. And there's a reference to you in there, and he's speaking about when you first met, the CEO founder of Google, I think it was 2002,

that essentially Google was an AI company, not a search company. Yeah, yeah, so I met Larry at a party, and this was early in Google's before they had a business model. And I said, search, I don't see where you're going with this. Like, you know, why a big fan, but I don't see the business here of where you're going to go in the long term. And he said, oh, we're making AI. This is all to make an AI.

And then it was like, aha, yes, I get it. And so from the very, very beginning, that was the agenda, was to work towards the tools and the data that you would need to make an AI. Following on from that, so obviously you've been immersed in this since the beginning.

Things have changed very, very suddenly, very, very rapidly of late. In the last six months, is there anything about AI that you have changed your mind about completely, which you didn't think you would? two years ago? That's a really great question.

I don't know. I don't think it has changed my mind. Certainly has changed my mind completely. No, I, no, it has not. Is AI creative? Yes, it is. But I have believed that from the beginning, and I have been saying that for a very long time,

so it's not a new thing. I was, I think I even wrote about a couple of years, years ago talking about the fact that it was absolutely creative. This is not the past, but when I'm, we'll make a prediction, which is that the next big shock for people, the thing that will cause people to really go bananas

is when we start to code in emotions to the AIs and the degree to which those emotional values and capabilities and traits will cause people to bond to the AIs. that they're using and not just in kind of like a her romantic way, but I mean in kind of like the way you bond with your pets and beyond, but the pets don't have conversations with you, but now they're going to, and they'll be with you all the time. People have very, very strong attachments and very strong emotional complexity and all the other things of, you know,

having arguments or being rejected or whatever, the whole spectrum of kinds of things with the AIs as they become more and more emotional. And it's really going to freak out people because people will have strong emotions about them. And that's something we're not ready for right now. It's all kind of intellectual, sure, sure, sure. But no, but no, there will be people who will live with these day and night and people will be calling it addiction,

but it's sort of like having glasses, which if you need to have glasses to see, the solution is not to be upset. you're dependent on it, the solution is to make sure you always have glasses. And we're dependent on electricity. Like if electricity went out for a week, we would just be incapable of doing anything. And so the solution is not to be upset by it, but to say, let's make sure electricity never goes off. And with the AI, it's going to be the same thing. It's like there'll be people very soon who will really be dependent on having the AI is always on to work with them to do their best work.

And the solution, not to be upset, is to make sure the AI is never turned off. Don't always have that with you because that is what you need to do your best work. My glasses aren't going to manipulate my emotions to read a certain book. Right. The emotional piece, that's where it's going to get scary, right? Well, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I mean, yeah, the reasons why is because this is incredibly more powerful than your glasses, right? I mean, it's your mind. It's what we tend to think of us as ourselves, right?

we kind of, the ancients always identify themselves as right here. The modern person, you're here. We've migrated up. So we're associated our mind with ourselves. We're messing with ourselves. So that's, that's pretty dynamite, you know? And so, yeah, yeah, there's definitely, and, you know, I mean, things are going to go wrong. This is the most powerful technology we've ever made.

So therefore, we were going to have the most powerful problems we've ever had. And there'll be problems coming from the fact that these things can mess with our minds, for sure. I hope my children have their hearts broken for the first time by a real man or woman, though. Our latest book that we've been reading is by Federico Fajun, who came up with the Intel 4004. And he's right. I'm not familiar with that. What's the Intel 4? I guess the first microchip.

Oh, yeah, yeah. I'm sorry, I got it. All right. Okay. The first migraine, but now he's in and studying consciousness and neuroscience and all of these other things. And now he's starting to go, well, wait a minute. Like as AI comes about, like a computer cannot birth another computer with hardware, software, everything loaded.

So is it possible for that computer to ever get consciousness? Like, how do you think about consciousness and AI? So I think, first of all, I like to talk about AIs in plural, because it's not. It's not a single dimension. It's not even an element. I think intelligence is a compound of different kinds of cognitive elements. And it's a very high dimensional space. It's not just a ladder going up like decibels. It's a very big space. Possibility space of all minds and mapped ours, we're going to be at the edge somewhere. There's not a general intelligence. There is all these very, very specific different compounds. We're like a salt. And so when we start,

Thinking about that, the thing about the AIs is that there are multiple varieties, and we're going to make many different varieties of them, and some will be quite primitive and small, and some will be much more complicated. And I think there is, you can think of these as a continuum. So again, intelligence is not just an amplitude. It's a bunch of different things. And consciousness is the same way. I think it's going to be a whole space of conscious possibilities. And some things will have small amounts or primitive versions of it and other things will have more complicated aspects of it. And I think life itself is that.

I would say you could say that a virus has a little bit of life and a bacteria has more life and the ant has more life. And we have actually more life than the ant. And consciousness is probably something similar to be different kinds, different varieties, different arrangements of it. It's not just a binary thing where it's there or not there. So I would say the current LLMs have some degree of consciousness in them. But it's in the same way that your dog might have some degree of that. Like ours, no. And in fact, it's unlikely to be like ours.

Just as the intelligences of the AIs are not going to be like ours. That's the whole point of them. We're making them because they don't think like us. And they don't. What the LMs are doing right now is inhuman. It's not a human cannot do. what they're doing. And so that's why we have them do it. It's because they're not human. And so the consciousness is probably not going to be a human type consciousness, but it'll be some type. So I call

these things artificial aliens. And you can think of like Spock. Conscious, coherent, smart, intelligence, not quite the same as us. But that was his benefit. Yeah, they'll be conscious to some extend. Yeah. Oh, were you just signaling the Spock sign over there, Mark? What you're doing? Yeah. Live long and prosper.

Live long and prosper. Do you speak to cling on? I'm just going to, a moment, a moment of pause. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, there you go. A random quote from Kevin's new book, excellent advice. When you get invited to do something in the future, ask yourself, would I do this

tomorrow? Not too many promises will pass that immediacy filter. Yeah. I use this all. the time. I was talked to this by someone at the Whole Earth catalog. When I get an invitation to talk or something, it seems, oh, that seems kind of interesting. I say, wait, wait, if this was tomorrow morning, would I be willing to get on the plane and go? No. So, okay, it's a no. And yeah, so this kind of asking yourself, would I do this, like this afternoon or tomorrow morning,

not too many invitations are going to pass that test. Let's do another one. Okay, I'm going to say stop. Stop. Oh, I've highlighted this one. What do you do on. your bad days matters more than what you do on your good days. Right, right. Particularly if you have any kind of a disciplined habit. So yeah, so you want to, yeah, that's self-explanatory. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, so for instance, like, you know, I'm a lacrosse coach, lacrosse player.

You know, if I'm working on my game, if I don't feel like doing it and it's raining outside and I'm sick, but I still do it. That's kind of the gist. Right. That's it. That's your baseline. I've got one here. Although I'm not flicking through my book, but we can imagine you've said stop.

And I'm flicking through the book. Write to discover what you think. It took me a long time to kind of realize this, but I'm not. I work with writers as an editor. I, you know, I work with people who love to write, who just write compulsively. They enjoy their process. I don't. And it was always a struggle.

And I realized what struggle was because I don't have the ideas that I'm going to write down. My ideas come as through the process of writing. So writing for me became a way of thinking, a way of discovering what I thought. So it's like I don't know what I think until I write it, which gives me the ideas. So it's not like I'm taking ideas and writing. It's like the process of writing generates the ideas. And when I realized that, it was like, oh, okay, then the whole laborious, hainedful process is worth it. And the fact that I'm a slow writer is because I'm thinking.

It's because it's hard to think. So, and I'm, you know, I'm not writing, writing fiction and stuff. I'm talking about kind of a nonfiction idea-based writing. If I was writing, telling stories or something, I think that's a very different act. But it's also true, I hear from the fiction writers where they don't know what's going to happen with their characters until they actually write it. And then, and then they're told. It's like a channeling. It's a weird channeling to yourself.

And so, so, yes. And also the other half, which I don't think you read on that, which is that, you know, to, I also try and take pictures and paint and stuff in order to help myself see. The reason why I do photography is by forcing them else to see things, it's a way of seeing. And I often don't see it until I make the picture of it. It's not like I see it and then take the picture.

the picture is the scene. And so, or painting, the same kind of thing. And so, for me, this is this idea of like, this extended mind, because your mind is not just the brain cells. It's walking on your feet. The reason why I do a lot of walking is I think we think differently when we're walking. And using your hands to write or type, using cameras to see, all those things is a way of extending your brain.

Pointing back to AI, how do we? we get people to think about these human elements. Yeah, I mean, we're learning how to do this right now. I just saw a study of, from Anthropic, looking at how ways college students were using their AIs, they're trying to figure out, are they cheating, or, you know, how actually are they using them? This is a brand new tool a couple years old.

We're still figuring out, it's best ways. But from my own experience in using them, I just find them an invaluable tool for me, the first draft of things is always the toughest because I'm a boring editor. And I like that working with the second draft. And so I use the AIs to help me think. The thing about the AIs is that they're so, they've read Smarty pants. They've read everything. And I have these conversations with them helping me understand something. And it's incredibly beneficial. It's not like I'm not using the words. It's, it's helping me think. The words themselves are, again,

And they're pretty good. They're pretty good writing. But what I know is that, again, the act of trying to write it myself in my own words will give me new ideas. And so I guess the question is going to be, will we be able to educate people to understand that that's true for them as well? Which is that, yeah, you can get something that's pretty good that they say it. But you'll get even better ideas if you attempt to make it your own. And so I think we, you know, I mean, the other thing I know about using AIs for these past couple of years on a daily basis is that it is a skill, absolutely a skill like photoshopping or coding or anything in the sense that some people are 100 times, a thousand times better than other people because they have a thousand hours of doing it. And it's not just clicking.

It's just not clicking. And you have a skill in terms of being able to ask the person. prompt in the right way, knowing what to follow up with the question. It's like being a good interviewer, knowing what they're kind of capable of doing, understanding the differences between the different AIs and what's one good for it. So it's a skill. And we're going to have to train students and people, people have to learn. And if not, then you won't be that good at it. And you won't get the stuff out of it. The other people will. And so the little refrain that people were saying is like, you're not going to be replaced by an AI. But you may be

replaced by a human who's using AI. And so I see it as an incredibly powerful tool, a thinking tool. And it's like calculators. I, you know, I would have maybe been a different kind of a person maybe involved in the sciences if we had had calculators like in chemistry and stuff because my arithmetic was just, it was just so hard to do all those calculations by hand and get everything right. And so I would have to get the wrong chemistry answer because I was multiplying things by hand and I just would have these errors. If I had a calculator, I would have been a lot better. And now we have a better calculator, which is actually going to give me the answer. And so, yes, I mean, I'd love the fact that I have this thing that can give me all these facts and stuff as I'm thinking through this.

I was just looking this morning at this conversation about it was very technical stuff. on um, um, uh, cellular evolution and stuff. And so it was just fantastic to have, have the answer and go back in many around and around around and I can understand something within minutes. And so that I think is a great writing tool. Excellent. I love that as well. Jeremy has an incredible question on or, which I want him to get to in a minute. I want to ask you about Colossus and Dyer Wolf and woolly mammoths and bringing back T-Rex.

First, Kevin, it's time for the hot buttons. We're going to do the hot buttons. So I don't know if we have a clock today. Do we, Jeremy, or do we just take as long as it takes? So yeah, Daniel Carneman, thinking fast, thinking slow, one word answers. How many birds do you have on Merlin ID? I don't have any. In your lifeless.

I don't keep a lifelist. I use Merlin, but I don't keep a lifeless. You like history. You're given a time machine. Do you go back or do you go forward? I would go forward for sure. If it's a... Bitcoin, losing its way or just getting started.

Oh, stasis. Jurassic Park, very likely. No way. Possible. Jazz or classical? Jazz. Aliens or superintelligence, which arrives first on planet Earth. Oh, super intelligent.

Can I ask you, if aliens will ever arrive on Earth? Mattitz. Could you describe bees in one word? Honey. My kids are nine and six. At what age should I give them their first smartphone? Oh, yeah. I am hearing 16.

Okay, thank you. Hotburns, thank you. Those are great. Aliens, will they ever arrive or is that? Well, we'll, okay, I think aliens are here, but they're the probes. I mean, they're not, I mean, it's like, do their probes count? Sure. Okay.

Well, they're here then. Okay. And I think that's a segue to Jeremy. I'll hand it over to you with your awesome question on all. That's awesome. I love the B question, Mark. That was great. I was racking my brain on how to answer that one.

All right. Important bees, aren't there? Yes. Save the bees. Save the trees. Save the whales. Save them snails. That's George Carlin.

All right. So let's get back to this. You reference imagination a lot, I think, in your writing and how important of a vehicle that is. And, you know, Tom Waits, songwriter, musician has been said to say, we're in a deficit of wonder. People in general are in a deficit of wonder. I thought that was such a brilliant. Yeah, yeah, I like that.

I haven't not heard that. So my question to you related to that, as we tie those both together, if people have lost their ability to wonder, how would you recommend they explore bringing it back? Yeah. How do we cover wonder? So I'm a little stumped on that because I know how I do it, but I don't know. I mean, I don't know if I have a way to teach other people to do this because I know how I do it. And so I'm not a teacher. I don't have a lot of experience teacher. I've avoided teaching maybe because of that very fact. Kevin, I hate to break it to you. You're actually a wonderful teacher because you've taught me a ton. I know you've taught Mark and other people.

Well, I don't think of myself as a teacher. How do you do it? I do it by not losing it to begin with. That's what I'm trying to say. I've never had to recover it. So I don't know how you recover it because I'd never lost it. But I can tell you, maybe I can think about things that help me in my, you know, keep my wonder. I had a little, there was a little one of the proverbs in the book, which was, you know, a great payoff is being interested in things that you're not interested in.

So one of the things, this was a technique that the futurist Alan Toffler used to do that I learned from him. You would go to these talks and you'd be at these hotel giving a talk in a ballroom from some association or company or something. And what he would do, which I started doing too, is like when you're done, you walk next door to the conference that's happening next door and you sit in. And it's like there's a whole new world and this insider is talking about it and you get this incredible vision. view of, you know, whatever it is. It's the barber conferences of America or whatever it is. There's some things. So you have no interest in that. But you go in and you can discover a wonder because usually if you take anything, the smallest thing seriously, there's a world there. And so there was this idea of like, you know, kind of just taking something at random and paying a lot

of attention to it and noticing. So noticing is one of the ways that I think you can cultivate a sense of wonder is we're taught in a certain kind of weird way to consider, we're taught that the things that we kind of notice are not important. I notice this. It's like, oh, that's not really important. But if you decide that actually, it is very important and that you should really follow up on whatever that is that you noticed, that's one way that you can kind of cultivate that sense of wonder, because you'll discover that there's this whole other thing or world that you didn't even know was there. And that's wonderful. So that's one thing is noticing and paying attention. to what you notice and taking what you notice seriously.

But that's Jerry Seinfeld's whole thing is making his whole career of noticing these things and taking it kind of seriously, these little things. Noticing, so what else for cultivating a sense of wonder? I think you can make a habit. Last year, was it last year? I decided to write down things that I was noticing and grateful for just as a list and to kind of prompt me to try

and both be grateful. but also notice things again, like when you're writing it down, you begin to pay more attention to it. So that is like journaling is a sort of an apparatus or sketching things that you notice or that you are grateful for or whatever. You're kind of paying attention to it. And then I think wonder.

Wonder is in part forgetting. There's a forgetting that is I think part of wonder. It's the people that I know they're full of that spirit of wonder, are able to come in a new way, to see something old in a new way. They're kind of forgetting what they should think about things. And when I talk about the future,

when I do these scenario things, one of the biggest things that we're trying to get people to do is to forget what they think the future should be, to forget what you have been told about battleships, to forget what you have been taught about opera. And then if you can do that, go in and reek and see it in a way forgetting what you were taught about it, then often that wonder will come because it's, you can kind of see it in a different way from a different

angle. And I have a fourth maybe strategy. It was someone, Marvin Minnicki, who was an AI guy, who I was convinced with not humid because he had this weird ability to approach things as if he was a Martian. He would kind of like almost ask himself like, what would a Martian say right now or think. Love that. And it was this really weird thing. Like he would say, like, I don't get music. What's music for?

Why? Why do you, why are you doing music? And he would actually have this sort of ignorance that would generate a sense of wonder about things about music that we hadn't even thought about. You know, it's like, it's contagious or it's like weird. And so he would look at it as if he had never was not a human. looking at it. So it was a little practice, I would say, that he had adopted. And he was maybe, you know, prone to thinking that way. But he would, he would just look at weird things and say

something that, well, only a Martian would say. I love that. My child, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. One follow up to that, and that's a wonderful answer. I love all those ideas. What, I'd love your thoughts on this, Kevin, is my perspective is that most people feel like they have to know. the answers to be considered valid situations at work and whatever and a little bit of vulnerability and a little bit of beginner's mind goes a long way and that's the thing that needs to be kind of catalyzed. Sure, sure, sure, sure. I actually kind of saying there something like, you'll be a better person if you can say, I don't know at least once a day. And admitting that you don't know is really, really, very powerful. And I have no hesitation about letting people

that I don't know when I'm interviewing them or whatever. It's like, yeah, I mean, I'm not, the humility is also maybe part of a sense of wonder. I don't know what I was going to say. So I'm going to have a little pause and read a few quotes from excellent advice for living while we all try to get back to some kind of sanity there. That was an amazing answer. Okay. What you actually pay for something can be twice the listed price because the energy, time and money needed to set it up, learn, maintain, repair it, and then dispose of it when done, all have their own cost.

Not all prices appear on labels. Yeah, it's true. I've discovered that in maintaining a house, that, you know, basically over the life of the house, the whole lifetime of the house will probably cost what the house cost in terms of remodels, maintenance, re-roofing, whatever it is. By the time the house is done, people will have paid the amount of the house costs or like if you have a car it's the same thing or if you have even like my computer by the time I'm finished the life of that computer I've put in upgrades or the time in terms of doing the

upgrades and dealing with it and whatnot it's easily double the cost and then also including getting rid of it cost of that too okay we'll do one last more then I'll hand over to joey me to let's Right. Okay, now. Manage yourself, use your head. To manage others, use your heart. And the next one, dance with your hips. And the third one, don't let your email inbox become your to-do list run by others.

All the people's emergencies should not be your emergencies. Esther Dyson had a great suggestion, which I kind of tried to expand in one of my books, where we should have a system that you charge people to read their email. Pay attention. attention economy. Where are you? Right, exactly. I think that it would be so cool.

And you have certain friends, you know, read their mail for free. Yeah, that would be really, really fantastic. You know, someone's willing to pay you 25 cents or $5 to read their email. Okay. You know, I'll decide. But that thinks that'll be a cool system. All right. Well, this has been a blast, Kevin.

We greatly appreciate your time, your energy, your work, your writing. Your thinking has, like I said, inspired us and many others. One last question for you. What's a question? that you would ask, not just our next guest, but all of our guests, to better understand what they're doing and how it fits in with the world. What do we want humans to be? That's awesome.

Kevin, go. Thanks so much. I appreciate. It was a blast. Thank you very much. Take it easy, sir. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

Be curious. Stay disruptive. Keep thinking on paper.