The Pomp Podcast - #1196 Kevin Kelly On Bitcoin, AI, Future Optimism, & Excellent Advice For Living

Episode Date: May 8, 2023

Kevin Kelly is the Senior Maverick at Wired, and is the author of a number of different best-selling books on the future of technology. His latest book, "Excellent Advice For Living | Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier" is a powerful book. In this conversation, we talk about his optimism for the future, why he believes technology is mirroring the biology of humans, and how he sees the world revolving across things like bitcoin, blockchain, artificial intelligence, and many other areas. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 235,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/

What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. We have no advertisers on this podcast, so it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Kevin Kelly is the senior maverick at Wired, and he is the author of a number of different

bestselling books on the future of technology. His latest book, Excellent Advice for Living, Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier, is a very quick read, but it is powerful and I highly suggest you go get it. In this conversation, we talk about Kevin's optimism for the future, why he believes that technology is actually mirroring the biology of humans, and how he sees the world evolving across things like Bitcoin, blockchain, artificial intelligence, and many other areas. I really enjoyed talking to Kevin, and I hope that you guys enjoy this episode. Here is my conversation with Kevin Kelly.

This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales Using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments.

You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, everyone. I've got Kevin here with me. I'm super excited to talk with Kevin. I thought a great place to start this conversation was around optimism of the future.

We live in a time where communication and the speed of it is at the fastest pace we've ever seen. People love to complain. They love to fearmonger. They love to say how bad the world that we live in is. I tend to think we live in the safest, most prosperous time in human history. I know you are very optimistic about the future. Help us understand, what keeps you optimistic?

What are you optimistic about? So I'm optimistic in general about the long-term prospects of progress in our civilization. So I would say that on the average, globally, we have seen remarkable progress over time, particularly in the last couple hundred years. There are obviously parts of the world that have not enjoyed the same amount of progress. And there are pockets today that are undergoing pretty severe setbacks, like, you know, Ukraine. but in um in general we live longer we're safer we have more choices and possibilities which is to me the definition of progress and um i'm optimistic that will continue because of history because if you actually look at the data scientifically impartially you have to

acknowledge that progress has been real for people on average. And all the ingredients that produce that are still present. So statistically, it's going to continue. I mean, it's possible it could stop tomorrow. But just given the fact that all the components are still here and operating, we're going to continue to see progress. And I define it very loosely as our ability to create a few percent more than we destroy every year and that compounding is the secret because that few percent delta is not really visible it's why when we look around we don't necessarily are overwhelmed by a sense of progress just because it's buried in a small difference between all the crap that we make and all the good. And so, so for me, the source of it

is, is, is this understanding of the actual present, where we actually are, and where we've been, and the statistical likelihood that we will continue in that same direction. So when people think of you, if they've read your work, if they've paid attention over the last couple of decades, I think they would say you're an optimist, but also that you think very, very long-term. And a great example of this is the Long Now Foundation. For those that don't know, this is an organization that is trying to reinforce the ideas of long-term thinking. One of the projects that you all are doing there is the clock. Now, I did not know you were involved with this when I first came across the clock a couple of years ago, and I was fascinated.

But essentially, you all are building a clock in the side of a mountain with the goal of being able to tell precise, accurate time for the next 10,000 years. I believe Jeff Bezos has put a bunch of money into this. Just talk about the clock. What is going on with the clock in the side of the mountain? So we've made several clocks and several versions of the clock, and there may be other versions. The idea of the clock is to keep ticking for long term. And the idea there would be a tick every year and there'd be a tock every decade and every hundred years or centuries a little cuckoo would come out and every millennial there'd be fireworks

or whatever. And there was this idea of kind of like trying to force us to think about time at the long range. And it was to work as a mythic icon in the same way that the photograph of the whole earth. really catalyze the environmental movement. I mean, seeing the Earth from space as this little tiny blue ball,

you'd understand the idea that there was no garbage. You couldn't throw anything out. Everything never left. It was a very fragile, amazingly thin membrane of atmosphere. And all these other things came about from just seeing a photograph. And we wanted to do the same thing about time. Of forcing people to realize, oh, oh, this is we're in a very tiny period and we have a very narrow myopic view of the last five minutes, the next five minutes.

But actually. Even human civilization goes back 10,000 years and there'll be another 10,000 years in front of us, and we need to have that horizon, because when you do have the horizon, as you're suggesting, when you take the long view, then it is easier to become more optimistic because with compounding goodness. over time, they can overcome even a sizable setback, even a sizable drop in prices, even a sizable war can be overwhelmed by this compounding thing of a few percent over decades and centuries. And so that is part of the agenda is to help us become more optimistic because when we're we're more optimistic we're more likely to make the thing that we want in the future if we can imagine it but also it also enables us to to actually engage or start to work on things that may pay off only in future generations we are the benefit of work and projects and things that people have done that have taken hundreds of years to reach where we are we should be more

We're free to begin things that don't pay off for us, that only pay off for future generations. And taking the long view, again, helps us, enables us, kind of liberates us to some degree to be able to do that. Taking this idea of time and long-term thinking, you're not only thinking long-term about the future, I think you also think long-term about the past. And so the Manual for Civilization is this collection of all of the human knowledge and trying to document it so that future citizens and future kind of descendants are able to also understand what we know today and what we knew in the past. That is a Goliath undertaking to go and find all the information humans know and to document it. What's going on there and how is that going so far?

Yeah, so the clock, as Stuart Brand and Danny Hill first imagined it, was always going to be present with a 10,000-year library. And the clock kind of would wind down. The library is something that can build up. And I always imagined it as libraries, plural, that there would be a kind of a city or a collection of different 10,000-year libraries. And each of these would be a different view of what was important to save about human knowledge. And there would be a multiple set of different ideas of, like, taking the best of human knowledge. Like, if you were to have to do a backup or send, you know, a spaceship into space, what would that library look like? You know, or if you wanted to have something in case there was a dark age and you wanted to go through, what would be the essential vital knowledge?

And I think everybody would have a different answer, so that's why there would be a whole bunch of different 10,000-year libraries. But the point of the libraries is, one, there is some reason to have a backup and something, but it's mostly to help us. It's like self-reflection. It's like self-assessment. It's like making ourselves visible to us. We don't think very much about what is it that we actually do know right now. what is the most important things that we know there's the pedological reasons like if we were to teach us and to and to um you know uh train if we were to train an ai what do we want to train

the ai on okay i mean right now the ai is trained on reddit is that the is that the best thing to train an ai on to answer questions maybe we want to train on the manual civilization or the best of civilization what should that look like and so and by the way there's going to be different answers. We're going to have different AI chat bots that were trained and educated on different curricula, different courses. So that's another reason to think about what would a library of human knowledge look like. And that is another project that we're kind of working on. So on this idea of artificial intelligence and kind of what do you train it on, in 1994, you published a book called Out of Control. And for those that haven't read the book,

The general idea is artificial evolution is actually where kind of the world is going. So we won't necessarily create things from scratch. They will evolve. And in that book, you talk about we're already kind of doing that with software and drugs in the early 90s. Fast forward to the early 2020s, and now this is, you know, very top of mind for folks. How do you think about this idea of artificial evolution with the kind of new breakthroughs of artificial intelligence?

And do you still kind of believe that's the thesis and kind of how this is going to evolve? So, yeah, in the early 90s, I wrote a book called Out of Control. And there are several themes in it. One was trying to understand decentralized distributed systems, because that was kind of what the Internet was starting to do. And it's like, well, how do they work? And then how do we make them better? And part of the realization was that, oh, actually, there are a lot of biological systems or biological processes, like evolution, like metabolism, like the immune system, that could be imported into a very complicated technology. meaning that the the the gap between things that we make in the natural world or not is not as

large as we think we are actually making technology as complicated as biology the internet does in some senses have an immune system and it works like immune systems so if we knew more about those immune systems and more about how the internet works we might be able to learn something from each other because they're probably closer and evolution was another one of that where where And this is what's happening in AI right now, where you have something and you have inheritable changes and variation and survival and elimination, and then you can improve things. And that ability, which is in the biological world, has been imported into computers, into AIs. And that's one of the ways in which they get so good is they're actually internally, they're breeding answers and they have one AI that makes things better, another AI that kind of filters them, checks them, and they can learn how to play Go that way. They can learn how to play chess.

And so this was an example of using the principles of evolution and importing them into machines. And that continues to go on today. So there's lots of aspects of learning that are based on genetic algorithms, they called. And so my general thesis in the book was saying, look, there's a lot we can learn from biology to make our complicated technology work better and more suited for humans because we're biological. And that that's going to be the general trend of technology is towards the biological.

One of the most popular decentralized distributed computing systems in the world today happens to be open source. It's happened to try to serve as money, Bitcoin. What are your thoughts there? And are there similarities to what you saw in the early 90s with the Internet? Are there maybe risks or things that people should be aware of that you're not as kind of excited about that you were with the Internet? So, yeah, I mean, I think the underpinning course of Bitcoin is blockchain. I think blockchain is just a wonderfully elegant, brilliant idea.

I've often asked people like George Church and others who know about genomics whether there's any possibility that we would find a blockchain-like code inside the gene. Because it seems so, so elegant. There has not been found any. um my but currency based on blockchain of course that was the original um paper is is only one thing that blocking can do and i think that it's going to be very limited use i i think um blockchain-based um currency you know cryptocurrency i think has a very limited use and that is is because one of the costs of decentralization and distribution is that it's not very efficient.

That was, again, the beauty of evolutionary systems is that they're incredibly powerful, but they're slow and they're inefficient. Centralization, the reason why we do centralize is that they're faster and they're more efficient. And so we're always trading off the ability of the decentralized distributed system is they're very adaptable, they're very robust, they're egalitarian, they're great places to start, they're easy to get going, but they're incredibly inefficient and slow. And so in trying to make a currency or other things based on that, we have to make those tradeoffs. And for many things, the advantages of a decentralized distributed currency may not be enough for most consumers, for most of the time, for most transactions, to have at least something that's more centralized and faster and cheaper.

And so there might be hybrid versions of this, and that's what people were working on. But so what I'm saying is I don't think, in my view, that so far currency is really the real app for blockchain. I think there will be other ones where you can use authentication, verification, identity, all these other things, where we would tolerate the inefficiencies. We would be willing to pay that, the inefficiencies and the slowness. We don't need that kind of speed. And so my guess is that blockchain still has not found the right job, technological job. Are there other technologies that people are talking about that seem to be quite popular, maybe even overhyped, that you feel like haven't found the right job?

Do any of them stick out outside of blockchain technology for you? That's a really great question. Think about that. Yes. This may be a little hard to explain, but I actually think quantum computing is not going to be used for computing. It's very similar. It's a very, you know, you're kind of doing, it's a very dispersed, the whole point of quantum computing is that you can do like uh in parallel you can do like millions and millions of calculations all at once i think that quantum computing in the end is going to be used for something that we have

no idea right now no conception at all and not for computation in other words the whole quantum world is so strange and weird and not understood and deep that i suspect that the the kind of of work that we're doing and what we know so far about you know superposition and qubits and stuff in the end is not actually going to be used for computing but for doing something else in that kind of realm again for something that comes after computing so um when i when i hear you talk about whether it's quantum computing blockchain technology etc uh i feel like you are taking part journalist kind of investigation approach, right? You're trying to think through the various layers and the pros and cons and that. Part what I would consider futurist of like,

what is the impact of this going to be? But also part what I would almost consider to be a rationalist or a realist in the sense of what is it applicable to today? What is your process like when you come across a new idea or a new technology? Is there something that's repeatable where you kind of feel like, okay, you know, I usually go Google or I go and I read this book or how do you kind of work through these ideas when you first come across them? This episode is brought to you by Accenture.

When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result, less time spent on operations,

more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most learn more at accenture.com spotify yeah yeah it's a really great question and i think um i'm not maybe as methodical as i would like to be in terms of approaching all the problems the same going through a method um but i do ask you know a couple questions you know the the the the current what's the word i want best practices of trying to go back back to first principles um that requires maybe a level of i i try to go in that direction although to really go down to first principles requires a level of scientific uh knowledge and expertise that i probably don't have the full ability to but there is a sense of

trying to go to first principles and say like well if we didn't know anything if we were starting from the beginning if we just look at the physics how far can we go and um and so what does that look like the second thing that i pay a huge amount of attention to is um the earliest little bits of evidence of what actually we know and happens okay so so so i i like to have like an evidence-based speculation and so i'm like looking at you know uh bitcoin or quantum like, well, what actually happens? What do we actually know versus what we're thinking it can do? What can it do right now? And so it's kind of like the street use version of things. The same thing with AI right now. I pay a lot of attention to how people are actually using it

versus how we thought we were going to use it. That was the early internet was the same thing. People had all kinds of ideas about what they're going to use the internet for, which was going be like you know uh answering questions and doing banking and stuff versus like playing games you know what this is what they actually used it for so so it's this kind of street use of trying to head to wherever there's actually some use so we can see what that looks like and then i guess the third the third thing is is that one of the things we know about the future is it's probably going to to be unreasonable. The hardest thing of thinking about it is to let go of what we think it should be or what we've been told it would be. It's kind of forgetting what we expect. And that's really,

really hard because we bring these framings of things that we've been told for a very long time about whatever it is, AI or finance or currency. And it's that kind of unlearning or forgetting or being able to suspend what we rationally know about it and to engage the imagination of what could possibly be or the alternatives, and then to kind of rehearse those. So it's like what we used to call, Brian Engle and I used to call unthinkables, where we're taking something that seems unreasonable

and unthinkable and trying to inhabit it for a moment to see where it goes. And most of the time it doesn't go anywhere. Most of the times it's kind of ridiculous or preposterous or ridiculous, but we try to inhabit that to play with it, to see if there's something that might be there. And that work of imagination is also important in trying to think about things. And again, most of the time it doesn't work. Most of the time it's going to be silly. But occasionally, like anything else, you get something that actually works. You mentioned street use case, and it made me laugh a little bit because I think back in 1990, you created the Cyberthon, and you basically brought 400 people together and had all of the virtual reality demos, prototypes, et cetera, in one room and told those 400 people, try them all.

Like, see what you like, what you don't like. I was really, really irked that there were so many people who were pontificating about VR and what it was and the dangers or whatever, who had never tried it. It was like, okay, I'm going to make this. We'll make 24 hours. We'll take all the existing VR things. We'll bring them together. And you buy a ticket. And for 24 hours, you'll be able to try it.

And now you can talk about it. and so um uh yeah so so so i'm a big believer that the that the way we steer technology is through use and not by thinking about it there's thinkism which is it's good to think about things but we can only go so far thinking about it we actually and a lot of these new technologies the inventors don't know what they're good for the critics don't know what they're bad for we actually have to use them and get the actual data because they are so complicated that their use is going to hugely diverge from what our expectations was and so um uh you know and so so i i think i pay attention to the early adopters and seeing what's happening and and how they're

doing it and what the problems actually are versus what we could imagine that's the one of the kind things happening with AIs, a lot of people were imagining that people could lose jobs. So how many artists have actually lost their job to AI? As far as I can tell, zero. But we can imagine it, and yet we're trying to make policy based on what we imagine versus on the actual evidence. What are you most excited about when it comes to artificial intelligence right now? I would have to make a long list of probably about 1,500 things.

And I would start with the fact that, what's the word I want? You know, as far as we can so far to see, you know, minds are the most potent things in the universe. and um in terms of being able to create more possibilities more options more choices more freedoms more forms more ways of being more life all all these things and minds sort of accelerate that so so so all the things that we generally are in favor of minds can produce and so now we We're accelerating that production. We have other ways of accelerating those same things.

And so we have the possibilities to accelerate goodness and to accelerate the best things of the universe that we know about. And that's a power that we've never had before. And so that's exciting. And then the other thing is that one of the byproducts of this is that I think we're going to learn more about what we are and how we think and who we are from AIs, turn and make them, than we have ever learned for hundreds of years of neuroscience and psychology. These are going to be the way that we actually come to understand ourselves and how we work and who we are. So there's this kind of introspective, almost therapeutic enlightenment aspect to the AIs. And that's just the first two. Yeah. Well, what's fascinating to me is as you talk about artificial evolution and kind of this idea that maybe technology is actually mirroring the human body, there's an entire cohort of people who actually think the human body and technology will not be separate in the future, right? There will be some sort of melding of them together, whether it is the human computer interfaces or various other tools that, again, are imagined today. What are your thoughts on kind of that whole field of work? Yeah. So just speaking about the brain-computer interface, I thought a workable version of that was 100 years away.

But the stuff I've seen recently from Neuralink and beyond is really surprising because this feels like we could have something in 25 years or less. and then that would be something you put on your head that would enable you to telepathically so to speak control a computer or even communicate to other beings who are also connected and um that uh that's a very powerful and problematic um technology that seems a lot closer now from what i've seen so um i think yes in general with the advent of um prosthetics and all kinds of things there will be um the ability to have more cyborgian beings we can also modify our own genes and you know eliminating some diseases parkinson's or alzheimer's hereditary diseases taking them out of the gene line would be something that's possible but my suspicion is that

um we're not going to have consensus on this and therefore we will see divergence meaning that i think there will be um there will be this option that not everybody's going to uh accept or or you know take on meaning that there will be different kinds of of of humans where some are well the amish never going to modify their genes or their children's and then there's others who are immediately going to do that and that's um i think going to produce something that's we have have not experienced which is actual differences between humans because one of the the tenets of of our modern life is that you know between you and me there's almost an insignificant difference in genes but if we start to actually create real differences

that's that's something we have not encountered before what do you think the impact on society would be if we did that i'm i'm i haven't figured it out yet i i don't know it was um because you know right now the the the primary counter argument to racism is that there isn't any difference races are really superficial but what if there really was differences where there's us and them you who do this with your genes tend to do these kinds of things and we who have these things and so um so i don't know so so i think it's a um what's interesting is that right now this kind of 10 000 year section of of humanity maybe even the last 100 000 or less actually maybe 50 000 um we were the only sentient being but like before that time there were other there

were other sentient beings around us not not our species and subspecies we had encounters with neanderthals and others who were different from us um they didn't last long we don't know why but but civilization grew up where we were the only ones and now we're headed to make artificial aliens other other beings we may we may species ourselves and we may go back to that period where we're surrounded with other kinds of beings and um you know the past history was i don't know The Pasture Street may not have been a very good example because they're gone. We don't know whether our ancestors killed them off or whether they just were out-competed. So the prospect of heading to where we have multiple kinds of humans and other beings that are sentient, I don't know.

I don't know what our reaction is going to be. um that's that's something that i think again i think we have to learn our way into i think we could think about this a lot i'm not sure we're going to have any answers unless we actually try it what's interesting about what you're talking about here is you know take the computer right we basically had these huge mainframe computers we eventually shrunk them into our pockets so they kind of became closer to us uh now we actually wear computers on right i have an apple watch on the whole thing. And eventually people think that they will be embedded. And so you kind of continue to bring technology closer and closer and then eventually integrate it with kind of the

actual core of what it means to be human. What you're talking about with the idea of potentially in the future changing genetics or modifying genetics, what we're seeing now is a whole bunch of debate. And I frankly don't care about the culture war component of this, but with the rise of transgender and all of that, where people are changing, not necessarily from a gene standpoint, but they are changing their bodies. And so is that kind of in line with a similar type of trend where people are, again, they're bringing it closer and closer and closer to themselves. And you're saying, hey, the ultimate end of this journey is that people will actually change their genes. And that is what, you know, we don't yet understand how that

will impact society yes actually yeah the the the um so so the the larger again the larger story is is that for the past even million years um humanity our humanity is something we invented what do you mean by that deliberately moved in that direction of creating ourselves we when we domesticated uh at herding animals and started to milk them we quickly evolved human adult uh lactose tolerance in certain populations to to to we changed their genes by by inventing this idea of domesticated animals when we domesticated fire when we invented cooking into pots to digest food that we could not genetically digest we had this external stomach our jaws and teeth changed over time because we became dependent on fire and cooking okay and so

so we are inventing ourselves we are creating our humanity and we are at the genetic level too much faster than we thought a lot a lot of people the the kind of dogma was that oh evolutionary pressures were taken off by culture and that we continue to evolve culturally but not genetically but we're actually finding out that that's the truth genetically we've actually speeded up our genetic mutation in in evolution since since civilization so we are in the process of designing and creating humans we're much more malleable and we're not fixed human nature is actually not fixed it's actually something that is very slowly changing and so that path we're going to continue and we're going to accelerate that we're going to celebrate our own evolution

and the question of course is whether we continue to have a single evolution or whether we fork and speciate and um the the uh evidence all around us is a speciation is a much more likely future because that's what's present in everywhere else in biology um and in by the way in technology that's what i talk about what technology wants we technologies tend to speciate and become more specialize and diverge and so from that perspective that is sort of our likely thing if we to diverge if we were to somehow retain a consensus and a uniform single species as we as we changed ourselves that would be a really remarkable a remarkable um achievement i would say and and and i think maybe a question that we would have is like what is the chances of when we meet

ets on other planets what's the likelihood that there's a single species of them and what's the likelihood that there will be multiple species of whatever it is that they're about and i would bet that they're probably multiples rather than a single one just given you know our our own history so um so yeah so i think that is the long very very long term things that we are now beginning to do, which is to keep inventing ourselves. And this is why AI is part of that thing. It's because as we try to say, well, who do we want to become? We have all these other minds that we're making that are doing things that we thought only we could do. And now we understand we can make machines to do it. So we're kind of like, well, what do we want to do? What do we want the human

of the future to do and to be about what should we be not just kind of what are we going to be what what do we choose to be and that's a huge i mean this is like a huge things that you know we're going to have a kind of a collective conversation about that's that started right now these days which is um if we want to become better humans what does that look like is it just woke is it super woke is it post woke what what does a better human look like and we get to ask start to ask and answer that question right now what is fascinating to me about this is uh you've thought so deeply about some of these ideas but uh you started wired right you uh i think were either an advisor or helped inspire certain parts of the matrix uh and various other movies um how

important is media and the communication of these ideas to reinforcing or inspiring the people who actually go and build it i think it's very important um you know media is often beat up and and there are several things to say i think there's lots of uh different kind of me there's news where you're kind of trying to report on the latest thing and um you know that's no matter what kind it is, no matter what the publication, no matter the political bias, it doesn't matter the best, the worst. The bias in the news is that bad things happen fast, good things happen slow. So most news is going to be around bad news. And again, it doesn't matter what brand it is or where it's coming from. That's just the bias of news. It's going to be

mostly about bad things because good things take a long time however there's another part of media which is this kind of contextual trying to understand things and that's um a very important role because um the world of our knowledge is expanding so much that you know you you need you need other people to help explain and um digest and help you understand the world so you can't do it yourself and so this this intermediate of the media which is going around saying here's something that's happening that's important um and here and we'll try to explain to you and so you so we are dependent on media to kind of understand our own world there's no way we can read all the original papers ourselves it's it's just it's it's necessary it's a necessary

tool. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You recently published a book called Excellent Advice for Living, Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier. I don't know what number of book this is for you, but you've published a couple and they've been quite popular. And so I thought I would just pull out two or three different examples of what's in the book that I found just great advice. Prototype your life, try stuff instead of making grand plans. What do you mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And this literally is something that I wished I had known earlier. It just took me a long time to kind of arrive at this um there's several different things there is the kind of the immediate version of that if you're actually making physically making something like

making a chair or making a kitchen remodel or making writing a book or you're going to make a song you're going to do a startup all these things um they work better if you prototype them meaning that you iterate your way to it. So instead of like, I'm going to do a business for you, you write up a five-year business plan and you borrow a bunch of money and you do your first hire, that's more likely to not work. If you decide, okay, I'm going to, in my spare time,

make one little version of this and try it out on my friends, or to get one person that I'm aiming for as a potential customer to do this, and I'll see what happens. Or, and then, okay, that's really good. And then I have a couple other things. So for the next two months,

I'll run this a little bit longer and higher and see what happens. That way you are kind of managing the failure. You wanna have lots of small failures instead of having a cataclysmic failure Because the likelihood of most things that we do is that they don't work. That's entropy. That's the beauty of where we are is that we can only get to really great places by having failures along the way, by things that don't quite work as well.

So you want to manage those by having small ones. And so, you know, when we did a kitchen remodel, I did a prototype in cardboard, like refrigerator-level cardboard, where we made up the counters and everything at full scale in cardboard. We prototyped it, and we learned so much by actually having that, like, well, that needs to be a little higher. It needs to be moved over here. And so instead of building the cabinets and saying, oh, my gosh, I wish it was four inches to the side, you prototype it.

You do a design, you first make a little cardboard version of it in a little dial house size to see what it is. And then you make the full size prototype and you keep going that way. And that also now applies to a person's life where you are, again, maybe trying to change careers. I can't tell you the number of people that I've met, young people who decided they want to be a lawyer. they go through the whole law school and in the first summer after graduating and being doing actual law they realize i hate this okay and what they should have done is prototyped it like okay volunteer whatever it is at a lawyer's office for a summer and see what lawyering is actually about. Then if you really, really want to do it, then proceed. So this idea is that you

iterate your way and you kind of keep learning and you keep the failures along the way that you have to have in a manageable scale and that you kind of inch towards things rather than having a grand plan and then having to kind of make massive adjustments um later on that makes a lot of sense and i think um you can go through history and most of the great companies most of uh the great careers that's exactly how they were built another exactly and that's starting in the garage right absolutely another thing you say in the book is life gets better as you replace transactions with relationships yeah yeah yeah so there is absolutely you know a place for just keeping things in transactions but um you know you could get your coffee from a machine

um but there is something about having somebody that you know and see that knows you that um you have a relationship with it's like you know and so um those are expensive in a certain sense those are those are costly but if you can invest into them it's one of the ways we make life better and so um uh it doesn't mean that all our transactions have to be relationships it just means that the more we can shift things to having relationships which are costly the more we can forward that the richer our life will be. You also say, and this is the last one that I'll bring up because I think people should really go read this book. It's a very quick read, but quite powerful. You say, speak confidently as if you are right, but listen carefully as if

you are wrong, which to me just summarizes the idea of kind of being a lifelong learner. So you said, speak confidently as if you are right, but listen carefully as if you are wrong. What do you mean by that yeah um in the um i think it was mark andreessen's um az16 they um have this idea of in their kind of discussions of um strong opinions loosely held it's it's very very similar strong opinions loosely held so you you want to be able to inhabit an idea with confidence in order to communicate it in order to again rehearse the idea the possibility of it but you have to do it in a kind of a humble way with this idea that you have to be ready to throw it out you may be totally wrong so it's it's you know it's kind of weirdly a humble confidence

in in some ways it's it's it's a way of um of of stating something with enough clarity that you can do with confidence and yet being willing to to throw it away or to change your mind about it and that and it seems paradoxical but that's actually this kind of really beautiful um along the surfing along the edge that that you want to be one of the last questions i have for you is um what we're talking about right now is independent thinking the ability to question your own beliefs right kind of uh all of these uh concepts um how should people instill that in their children that's one of the questions i get all the time right is how do i make my child a good decision maker how do i teach them independent thinking how do i teach them how to uh synthesize

information what do you think is a good answer to that um it's a really great quest you know And there is something called learned optimism, and it's like child psychology, and this is that you actually can help your – you can actually teach children to be more optimistic. One of the qualities that they try to teach to breed optimism in children is to help them understand or learn or grasp that setbacks are only temporary. so if so so so and not their identity it's not that well i'm an unlucky person or this always happens to me or this is part of my identity um no that setbacks again it's kind of taking a longer view it's like elevating their view it's not about the next five minutes it's about the next coming years and in that sense whatever happens now whatever failure test you fail won't be important in the long term.

It's something you can overcome. And so independent thinking and that, you know, I'm not sure what it is, but here's what I think is one of the few skills that we should have kids graduate with. I think with ChatGPT, we can see the answers become free and cheap, and machines are going to be the best thing for answers. So I don't think we want necessarily to be teaching kids how to find answers or make answers or come up with answers. I think the major skill that schools should be teaching is how to learn, learning how to learn. And most importantly, each child should learn how to optimize their own way of learning.

They should be very aware and cognizant and capable of applying the best learning strategy for them for all these different domains, whether it be a physical skill a memory skill a understanding skill that each person graduate being very aware of what it takes for them to optimize their own learning part of that would be critical thinking and part of that would be you know innovative thinking that would be part of that skill set of of learning how to learn so i so this is a shift from teaching knowledge And even teaching domain specific skills to the uber skill of learning how to learn. And that would be a huge thing. And right now in my own survey, I have not found a single curriculum anywhere in the world that's actually doing that. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows.

Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales. Using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. And I found one little experimental school in Austin, Texas that might be working on that, but they're certainly headed in that direction. But that is, for me, the curriculum that should be in our schools in this century, which is teaching people how to optimize their own learning. Yeah. I'm an investor and a big fan of something called Synthesis School, which was taken out of Elon Musk's school at Astro, which was on the SpaceX campus.

He basically hired a team and said, hey, teach my kid. And what you're getting at is exactly what he wanted, right? It was like, teach my kids actually what is going to be valuable, not just to replicate and repeat, you know, two plus two equals four. Yes, they needed to know math, but there's more to it than that. And so there was a session in that school where basically they would give the students some tools or kind of sit them down at a table and say, start. But they wouldn't tell them the rules. They wouldn't tell them all the things, right? Like just kind of like literally got to figure it out, right? It's just kind of like life. No one sits you down and says, here's the rule book for life. Here's what you're allowed to do. Here's what you're not allowed to do. And so learning that is important. And they basically took that and tried to put it online with students at the school. And it's going very well, actually. And so it's fascinating to see so many people trying to answer this question because also it's not just can I learn inside of my classroom.

Now with access to the internet, these kids are on the global stage from day one, right? So it might be even more important. Right. So there are schools that can accelerate learning and how fast kids learn. but what i'm saying is actually a higher level it's the meta level is learning how you optimize your own kind of learning because in the future you're going to have to learn a whole another set of skills and so how do you optimize that learning of the new set of learning skills and and that's kind of a higher level thing and it requires i think huge amounts of teacher involvement and

stuff where you're being tested you're actually saying okay when doing memorization what's the optimal time of sleep in between the reps okay what's the you know am i more an audible learning or a kinetic learner you know or you know and you're being tested and you're working with and you're going through a program that is kind of like like a performance like an athlete you're you're actually being measured and learning how you best learn and then how to accelerate and increase that and then how to learn the brand new kinds of learning and that all wants to be very very um methodical and there isn't that right now yeah i completely agree um your new book excellent advice for living wisdom i wish i'd known earlier by kevin kelly if anyone has not read it i highly

suggest it i really like oh look you got one i got one perfect um people can buy it on amazon and everywhere else that you buy books uh kevin where can we send people to find some of your writing or some of the things that you're still working on today outside of the book yeah so um i have a website where i kind of post most things it's my initials kk.org very easy um we also have published a free newsletter every week for six years or so i call recommendo where i recommend um a couple things uh each week and it's very short it's one it's a one page stuff that stuff i find interesting so you can sign up for recommendo.com and get that um and then i'm the kevin two number two kelly kevin to kelly on the socials and these days i'm posting one piece

of art a day um again trying to use these generative ais in order to understand them i love it my last question before i let you go i heard that you have a two-story library yes uh what exactly oh are we gonna get a look at it oh my god amazing there's a glass uh catwalk for the uh underneath there's scaffolding right now because i just um built a model railway around the perimeter of it but um yeah so there it is what was your question reading habits how do you pick what books to read how many books do you think you read a week a month a year talk about reading so um unfortunately a lot of my reading has shifted away from books to online articles to papers to youtube so i so part of my library the lower half is a library of how-to information

how to do things i'm a maker and from the whole earth catalog and cool tools it was about enabling people to pick up new skills and making things that entire world has shifted away from books to youtube even a lot of the science stuff is now headed to youtube looking at talks that are recorded on youtube and long before they make it in papers and years before they're making into a book so um and then podcasts too uh so so so i don't read as many new books as as i used to or spending that much time um and that's that's because we were people of the book and now we're people of the screen um and and so more and more of the best information is actually not arriving it's not native to books it's actually books are

kind of like this very book itself which began online first and so um so sorry to say um i don't read as many books as i used to the most of the books i have these days are books where there's a visual component there's a reason to have that page and turn those pages in terms of physical books of course i'm kindle as well and and and and then most of always most of the fiction that i consumed was generally audible um i i i find it much easier to intake fiction when i'm being told when i hear hear the story yeah um so that's my reading habits i have a library which is um i think in the future going to be valuable because i think books are going to become more expensive over time i think we're at the peak book time this is the best time to make a library

because books are so cheap used books are just almost you can always have them for free and i think in the future um making books will be increasingly more expensive because they're to be in smaller volumes yeah that makes a ton of sense kevin i always appreciate uh just learning from you usually it is in a uh a very one-sided way you're putting information out into the world and i'm consuming uh but i appreciate you getting on this and talking about it uh as i mentioned anyone who hasn't gotten the book please go get that uh any last words you want to leave the audience with yeah as much as possible um try to spend your life working in an area where there's not a word or name for what it is you're doing don't aim to be the best of something and to be

the only um if you'd all can that's a lifelong that's a high bar that'll take most of your life to reach but you can keep moving in that direction of um trying to be the only and not necessarily the best so onward be the only i love it kevin thank you so much we'll definitely do it again in the future. Alrighty, great. Thank you. I really appreciate it. It was fun.