The School of Greatness - 97 Kevin Kelly: How to Master Technology to Create True Fans

Episode Date: October 7, 2014

"We are both the parents of technology and children of it at the same time." - Kevin Kelly Get the show notes and more at LewisHowes.com/97

This is episode number 97 with Kevin Kelly. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. What is up, everyone?

Thank you so much for joining me today. I'm very excited about this interview with Kevin Kelly. And if you don't know who Kevin Kelly is, he's the founding executive editor of Wired Magazine, former editor, publisher of The Whole Earth Review. He's also been a writer, photographer, and a student of Asian and digital culture. He's got a number of books out there as well that we talk about. And I first learned about Kevin through Tim Ferriss. And he recently had Kevin on his podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show, and did a three-part series with him,

and I thought it was fascinating. And in this interview, we dive into different questions. So if you've already listened to that series with Tim, awesome. This is going to be completely different. And if you haven't listened to it yet, then make sure to go subscribe to The Tim Ferriss Show and check that out as well. But I'm very excited to bring you Kevin today and in just a moment. But first, I want to ask you guys, if you're listening to this episode and if you listened to the show for a while, I want you to do me a favor. I want to do a little experiment. I want you to send this episode to one friend, just one friend who you think it could be

inspiring for or uplift them. And I want you to email them and CC me in the email. So my email address that you can send it to is lewis at lewishouse.com. So again, find one friend you want to send this to, email them this. The link will be lewishouse.com slash 97. That's where the show notes will be in the episode. CC me in the email. I would love to know why you're sending it to them, the message you want them to get from this interview. So again, CC me and one friend with lewishouse.com slash 97.

And my email is lewis at lewishouse.com. Very excited to see how this experiment plays out. Without further ado, let's go ahead and dive into this interview with Kevin Kelly. Welcome back, everyone, to the School of Greatness podcast. Very excited about today's interview with the one and only Kevin Kelly. How are you doing, Kevin? It's great to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Yeah. You know, I've heard your name for a number of years. I think back probably like in 2009, I started hearing about your name from Tim Ferriss. And he just put out a podcast recently. If the people listening have not listened to that three-part series yet, make sure to check it out because it's incredible. And I said, you know, you keep coming up in my mind. I want to bring you on and bring you in front of my audience. So I'm, you know, you keep coming up in my mind. I want to bring you on and bring you on in front of my audience. So I'm very excited to interview you. And you're really like one of the most interesting men in the world. You know, I was just reading and doing a lot of

research about you. And I was just like, I don't even know where to, where to start because there's so many interesting, inspiring things about you. So what I did want to start with is what I originally heard about you first, which is a thousand true fans. I remember Tim talking about this concept in this article you wrote called a thousand true fans. And my brother is a, the number one jazz violinist in the world. And when he started kind of going out on his own as a musician, he was trying to grow his business. He was trying to get fans to buy his CDs, his DVDs, come show up at live events. He had music that he was creating, all these different things.

And I told him to check out this article, and he said it was really helpful for him understanding what it means to be a performer and to make a full-time living. So can we talk briefly about this topic? I know you've talked a lot about it before, but a lot of people on my podcast are entrepreneurs or they're solo entrepreneurs. They're creative types and they're trying to build their business. They're trying to grow and make a living around what they love. So can you talk about that a little bit? The idea of TrueFans came out of the realization that while it's wonderful to have a million customers and audience in the six, seven digits, it's not absolutely necessary to have that with today's technology. So the idea is, is that if you are able to have a direct, unmediated relationship with your customers,

in other words, you, you had their emails or some way to communicate with them in a direct way, not through indirectly through like a label or a publishing house, but if you had direct relationships with those fans and that you were able to curate on an ongoing basis something that they were interested in, say, every year or more often, that you could use a plain arithmetic to actually support yourself. So the idea is that let's say you were able to sell $100 worth of something to 1,000 fans, 1,000 true fans.

That would be $100,000, and that's sort of a big number, and selling $100 per year is a big number, but I'm just trying to give you a sense. Of course, if you did half of that, then you'd need twice as many, but between 1,000 and 2,000, we can understand that. You don't need a million fans to have a livelihood. And I define a true fan as someone

who buys any version that you produce or will get the paperback the hardcover and the ebook who will drive 200 miles out of the way to see you sing who um wants not just the um the cd but wants the box set and wants you know people who are going to purchase and support you no matter what you do that's your true fan and of course outside of that circle true fans are kind of like just your fans and then there's kind of you know the occasional people so that's not your full audience but you can make the calculation that if you had a thousand of your true fans who really really supported you you could probably at least make a living you're probably not gonna make a fortune. You're probably not going to make a fortune.

And I think it was the shift of not aiming for a fortune, but just aiming for a living. And then secondly, using the technology of today to actually have that relationship with those true fans. Because when you're selling a book through a New York publisher or through a label, you actually don't know who those fans are. You don't have a relationship. They're being mediated by the studio or the publishing house or the art gallery or whatever. So it requires that you have a direct relationship, which, by the way, is not to every artist's or creator's liking. I mean, if you are basically tending your 1,000 true fans, that's almost another job. I

mean, that's certainly another skill set, but it is another role that you have to play. So the cost of 1,000 true fans is that you have a fan base that you're interacting with and you're engaging with, and it requires a kind of a skill set to do that. If you're willing to do that and you're engaging with and it requires a kind of a skill set to do that if you're willing to do that and you're willing to have a livelihood and not necessarily a fortune somewhere in the vicinity of a thousand two thousand five thousand whatever it is it's not a million you don't need a bazillion fans right to have success you can have a different kind of success with a more manageable numbers you might even be able to recognize a thousand names so so so it's in that kind of scale so what i'm trying to suggest is that there's another scale to then hit bestsellerdom

there is this other scale which is a little bit more approachable and maybe even achievable for most people. You know, one of the things that I hear about when I'm talking to different artists or musicians is that they only want to do the art. They don't want to do the business. They didn't want to do the marketing or kind of the fan engagement necessarily to push the business side of things.

So you're, you're saying that you really got to learn that skill as well or have someone on your team to do that with you right yeah i'm saying somebody has to do it right so you can either have a partner who do it and then maybe you just have to multiply everything by two because you need to be supported or you hire someone who's probably not going to do as effective you you, but they're going to do it pretty good. Or you employ – you split basically. You surrender that to professionals who are running labels and studios and broadcasters. But then that sort of increases the numbers that you need to have success.

So I'm not adverse to that, and I do it all different ways. I self-publish books, and I use publishers for books. Both are valid venues, but there's a cost and there's a benefit, and you have to kind of weigh that that and different projects might require different things. I think the message for your listeners out there is that this is a, if you want or if you choose this, this is a viable path. And it's also, I mean, it's actually a good path for beginning because there's no barriers. You can, nobody to tell you no. Maybe after you have some success, you might want to move away from that and have someone do the stuff you don't want, which is actually a very good idea.

You know, Tim and others talk about outsourcing stuff. And so that's what you're doing. And so it's not that everyone has to do this. I'm just saying this is an option that is available and it's very easy to start when you're starting at zero. Sure, sure. And have you used this yourself for a number of different books or things starting out?

Did you use this model or is this just something that you noticed and you saw that people could use? Originally, I conceived of the ideas in theory and then I went to hunt for examples of people who actually were able to do that. And I had been using, since I wrote it, I wrote it almost, I think, I don't know how long ago, at least seven years ago. Since then, I have been using that as well. We did a Kickstarter program, but I wasn't using it as an individual. I was using it as kind of like with some partners. But yeah, we did a Kickstarter campaign that was successful for a graphic novel and trying to employ these same kind of things. And then I have self-published another book recently, which was also successful.

So I think the amount of income coming in that way is what I'd say would still be – if I was relying only on that, I don't think that would be enough. But I have multiple different sources of income, which is a healthy thing to do these days. But it's significant, so it's not insignificant. So I think that I would say, yes, it's a success. I don't have only 1,000 true fans. And again, that's part of this concept, which is that you have your 1,000 true fans fans but it's not like those are your only fans sure nobody no artist no creator will ever turn away an audience yeah right i've got a thousand i don't need any more thanks exactly so you you want to have as many as you can but you can focus on those if you if you focus mind on it, you realize that you don't have to have a million of them.

And so I think it's when you're starting off, everybody often dreams of bestseller-dom and being a hit. And I think that can be toxic for people starting out because it seems so distant when you have a thousand or say you have your Twitter and you have 500 people. It's like, how am I ever going to get to a million? Well, you don't really want to be considered successful is a lot closer. And of course, if it goes beyond that, yes, you should welcome it and also harness that. But you can have success at a much more intimate scale than we might think at first. And I would say that even as a business owner, not an artist or a creative type, but as a business owner or a freelancer, that you really only need 10 to 100 true fans. I mean, if you're a business owner that you be, like, say, a restaurant or a dry cleaner or a florist or whatever at the local level. Because I suspected, in fact, that they were in the thousands, the total number of customers that they were serving, particularly, say, the regular customers. So it's probably between 1,000 and 10,000 total customers that might support a local business.

It's not millions again. Again, it's in the thousands. It's some thousands of them that you need. And that just, as you said, you don't have to be an artist. You can be a business trying to support a family or a small group of people. And you, again, don't need a lot. You can take your energy and really focus on developing those relationships of a much fewer number. And if they become your true fans, which is what you want.

So you basically want to turn customers into true fans. Right, right. Exactly. I like that. Now, have you seen the Dos Equis commercials, the most interesting man in the world? Have you seen those? I'm sorry, I haven't. I don't have TV.

There are these great commercials called the most interesting man in the world have you seen those i'm sorry i haven't i don't have tv so they're these great commercials called the most interesting man in the world and he's traveling the world he's got all these one-liners that are you know hilarious and um does you know does everything extraordinary the most interesting man in the world and basically what i'm trying to say is they should have casted you as that role because as I looked at your bio, I was just like, this literally is the most interesting man in the world. And you've just done so much. And so what I want to ask is what is your favorite, you know, people, when people say, so what do you do, Kevin? What's your favorite hat or title that you like to wear, I should say. And, or what do you like to talk about the most? Those are kind of probably two separate answers, but the most common description of, say, my

profession or my role is actually as editor. And I mention that because that is what I enjoy doing the most. I do write, but I hate writing. I don't like to. I mean, I don't. It's painful. I like having written. Isn't that what most writers like doing,

to say they have written? I have some friends who actually like that and are only happy when they're writing. But that's not me. I am only happy when I'm editing and packaging stuff and cutting stuff out and rearranging. And it's not just writing. It's like, that's what I love to do is, um, that process that we in the word Smith called, um, editing, but it's, it's really, um, packaging ideas, whether it's a PowerPoint, a brochure, a website, um, a book, that's what i'm happy in doing what is it about packaging that you

enjoy the most over everything else it's a good question um let me think about that i've never been asked that so um thank you tom i think it's the here's what it is one of the reasons why i do write is it's through writing that i learn what i think and the same process of editing by having by putting things together and packaging it requires me to actually have an opinion to have a point of view to have an idea there has to be there's structure this is all about struct. One of the huge lessons about magazine editing is that the entire success of an article is really in the structure of the article. How it comes about, what's the sequence,

what's the logic, what's the flow. Stuff that you're really not even aware of when you're reading it. In fact, if you are aware of it, it means it's probably not working because it's sticking up. And so you want this structure that's invisible and yet is propelling something along. And so they think, well, that's fantastic. And they don't even notice the editing, but it was through the editing that it actually made it work.

And to do that requires you to have a very sophisticated or a very sound mastery of the thing at hand. And so it kind of forces me to comprehend the material. It's a way of comprehension. So it's like the old dictum that you can't really teach something unless you understand it. Or by teaching it, you understand it. So it's a form of teaching. teach something unless you understand it or by teaching it you understand it so it's a form of teaching and it's a it's a means for me to try and understand something so that's what i get through the packaging it's a joy of understanding it interesting so there are a lot of things that

you actually edit that you don't know originally and then they and then you're able to dive into it and learn more about it as you're editing and researching it? Is that part of the process? Yeah. So let's say I'm doing, I don't know, I'm editing. I mean, I think this would be true. This is something I haven't done, but I'm going to make a guess. If you're editing some music, right? So the understanding, it's not like conceptual news,

but to edit music and produce what they call producing, to produce a song in the end with the hooks and the music and all the accompaniment to make it really good, you have to in some ways not only comprehend what the song is about, but you're offering a point of view about it. You're offering some opinion in shaping that melody into this song and editing it and saying, well, this doesn't belong here, this does. There's no right answer in that sense. It's kind of an expression, but you are coming away with something big and unifying it from all these parts. And so it requires that you have a stance. It requires that you have – so it's that stance that is brought out that was not there when I began.

So it often comes in the process of putting something together. When you go to any website, if you pick up something about that website instantly, you don't know what it is. There's an atmosphere, a feeling, a personality, something cool, whatever it is. If that's working and that's deliberate, that was put into there by the design. That was engineered to give you that, whatever that feeling was. that was engineered to give you that, whatever that feeling was. Well, often before that began, nobody really, I mean, that idea would only come about in some process of creating it.

That's sort of the beauty of creating it, is that it often takes the act of creating it for the idea to emerge. Often it's not there at the very beginning. You know, someone's writing a script for a Pixar movie movie it's not until the very end when everybody has signed off and everything has been done that everybody really understands what it's about right see it's like i mean i always joke about like a book it's like i i said i always wish that um i could have could write the book after i do the book tour because after the book tour then i realized what the book is about right that would be a good time to write it because when i'm writing it i didn't

know what it was about okay so so this process and it's that larger scale process of assembling all these pieces and creating it out of nothing and and more than just the words, but everything else, that process is the process that actually makes it alive and makes it worthwhile. And it's not just the moment of creation, but it's the moment of synthesizing it with all the other pieces that are necessary and then putting a stamp of uh that unifies it overall this that that is the higher level of editing so when i talk about editing i'm not talking about like correcting grammar that that is type it's called line editing i'm not talking about that i'm talking about this idea of um putting it into the flow yeah exactly putting in context

so so so what you're trying to do is you're trying to situate this new thing that you've made whether it's a photograph a film a song or a web app you're trying to situate it in the context of everything else that exists out there and show how it relates to the rest of things in people's lives and why it may offer them something, a different point of view that they didn't have before. Sure. Do you have a specific process that you follow for each thing that you edit or, you know,

let's say produce, is it, or is it different with writing an article or in a magazine or your website or a book or do you, how do you get in the zone and then the flow to create? Yeah, that's, you know,

that's a fair and useful question. I think I have some tricks, I recall, or heuristics that the programmers would use that word, kind of rules of thumb. One of the, and then I have a style, which is sort of independent of that. My style is a minimalist. I like a very minimal style

of trying to do the maximum with the least amount of intervention or guidance. And so in terms of even visual design, I would go like, how much of this can I take away and still have it work? And if something is there,

it has to absolutely be doing some useful work. That's not everybody's style. It's all people like decorative and they like to fill in things and actually i can enjoy that too but that when i create i'm on the minimalist style and that's and that's true for the number of words i'm using you know um you know how it's presented whatever whatever. But some of the tricks in trying to bring this to process is my role is I'm always trying to service the viewer, the reader, the watcher, the listener. So I'm trying to be empathetic with the receiver

and saying, will they get it? Do I get it? So if I'm editing something that's not my own, I'm representing the other and saying, will they get it, do I get it? So if I'm editing something that's not my own, I'm representing the other and saying, I don't understand this. And if I don't understand it, they won't. But when you're trying to do your own work, the heuristic I'm always asking myself is,

what am I trying to do here? What is this little piece trying to accomplish? And if it isn't doing something, then I remove it or alter it. And so every part should be working towards something. trying to do now what is this about does this move it forward in any way and that's sort of this recurring question that you're always asking it's not like what is it pretty no that doesn't matter is it it does it does it sound cool that doesn't matter it's always like is it moving the thing towards a goal and then what is the goal? So that, that alone is probably the main job that you're always asking. Right.

Now I want to ask you, have you ever thought about actually doing a book tour six months or a year before actually launching a book and doing what you just said? Were you talking about what you want to talk about, but then really discovering what the book is going to be about through the conversations of the book tour. Yes, and I have. Really? And how did it go? Well, here's what I did.

I gave talks about it. I made a – I started giving talks. I did that with the New Rules book. I was giving talks for almost a year or more before i even wrote an article and then i wrote an article as a way of kind of outlining the book and so yes that was the easiest in many ways because for almost a year beforehand i was i knew what exactly what it was about and i highly recommend that by the way is because when I first started giving the talk, I didn't know what it was,

but I got this constant feedback. Over time, I evolved it, so then when I came to write a book, it was like, yeah, I know. I mean, it's like I just sat down and wrote it. It was like the easiest compared to my other ones. I mean, again, I have difficulty writing fast, but for me, it was the easiest one for me to write.

Now, did you end up taking pre-orders during those speeches no this was in another era this was in the 90s okay it was a it was a new york publisher it was penguin and i tell you it's really hard to imagine how backwards i had to fight to get them to accept my manuscript as a digital manuscript and not re-keyboard it. Okay. I mean, can you imagine that? Right. So this was definitely a different time and there wasn't any thought of that. That now, of course, I would do things like pre-orders and things like that.

Sure. And how many books have you have you written and published and also self-published well i you know i don't know maybe uh 15 or so in total i have done a lot of self-publishing at a very small scale and i also do things where i do a lot of travel and on most journeys I actually produce a book after the journey, which goes to anybody who's on the journey with me. They're kind of private books. And some of those journeys, we've had 16 people and stuff. So I think some of the people come just because they want the book at the end.

Right. So I'm an abashed, obsessive bookmaker, making lots of books that aren't even available for sale. I have others that have self-published at the very small scale and sold on Amazon. I'm making more e-books now. And then I am publishing books on paper. So right as we speak, I'm finishing a huge, I mean, physically large, many pages. It's a 464-oversized-page graphic novel. Wow. What's that called?

It's called The Silver Chord. And it's about angels and robots. And it's about a half-angel, half-human girl who discovers that the robots who are going to be newly conscious with a quantum computer chip inside them, that their souls are going to come from dark angels. And so she has to save the world from them um yeah so we're getting kind of rehearsing the implications of what happens if robots have souls and um it's a coming of age story and it's a epic saga about the million different species of angels in the other world and And so it's anyways, it's a great, great thing. This was the Kickstarter campaign and that's going off to the press probably next week.

It'll be printed in Hong Kong. But in addition to the book going to the backers, the book is also going to go onto Amazon and bookstores. And so I'm serving as the publisher and we're having extra copies printed and it'll be a self-published book available to anybody out there who was listening, who wasn't part of the Kickstarter fund, you'll be able to buy it on Amazon or a bookstore. And that's again, something that would not have been even thinkable five or six years ago. First of all, Amazon makes it really easy,

and then InDesign and tools like that make designing these things really possible. A lot of the people who are working on the artists, we are hired through DeviantArt art which is a website on the internet that artists young artists comic book artists can put their portfolios up and that's how that's how we found the artists who we've never met deviantart.com deviant art yeah interesting and so we actually have been you know we hired on DeviantArt, and then the kind of globalization of printing it in Hong Kong, where we wanted to print in the U.S., but no U.S. printer could actually – they no longer can print at that art scale. Working with Hong Kong and working with China is really no big barrier anymore. Like Alibaba and places like that make it easier to have a one-person global corporation.

So that's one thing. And then the other thing that I'm proudest of is a book that I just finished before this called Cool Tools, which was entirely self-published. Again, another very, very large, oversized catalog of cool tools. What type of tools? From the best pair of pliers to the best glue gun to tools that you could rent like a bulldozer or a wet saw cut pile. People don't realize that you don't really have to buy these things. most any tools and some of them are pretty cool like uh you know auger or you know um huge auger for post hole digging or um something that will like a laser cutter sure and the other kind of tools are tools in the broader sense of being things that are useful like i i think that meetup the the web-based tool that allows you to coordinate and start physical meetups in your locality is is an incredible tool for anything you're trying to do with a group of people it's it just makes um self-scheduling people who are interested can

kind of self-schedule the the the gatherings it's itule the gatherings. It's just a really fantastic tool for communities. That's a tool. Sure. And then tools can range from how-to books, how-to videos, how to build a house, how to build a log cabin, how to sail around the world, live on a boat. Those are all tools. And so basically anything that's useful for self-education or useful in making things or making things happy is a tool. I like that.

So the book is coming out soon, but you also have a website for this as well? So the book is out. The book is out. It was based on a website that's as well? So the book is out. The book is out. It was based on a website that's still going. It's called Cool Tools. It's been going for 11 years or 12 years at this point. Every weekday we review one cool tool, and there's something about that.

One is that all the tools are written by users. Actual users are are not like a lot of these gadget blogs they're not using them they're just pointing they sound cool they point to it no one's ever used them ours are all tools that people have actually used and loved and at best they are comparing them to others and then secondly we only have positive reviews we only review things that are great. We don't bother negative reviews. If it doesn't work, we're not even going to mention it. It's like life is too short. Why not just deal with the best? So we have only recommendations

is basically the way to think about it. And so we took the best of those 10 years worth of recommendations and went back and re-evaluated them and put them into a book with – there's about 1,500 different things from the best foldable ladder to the best foldable bike to stuff that will help you study – but I don't know, how to disappear. Improve anything. Improve anything or how to grow edible mushrooms. Nice. Publish an e-book or maybe you want to heat your house with wood or maybe you want to design your own fabric. So here's a place that can print fabric in small runs.

You design it and it'll make a fabric. Or how to put on a house concert. Again, if you're a musician and you want to. One alternative these days to either playing in bars or even playing in stadiums is you play people. Your true fans, they'll set up a concert in their home for 20 people. They'll collect the money from all their friends, and they give the money to you, and you play a very intimate 20, 25 people in someone's home. And those are called house concerts, and you can set up a little tour. So anyway, you can learn how to do those kinds of things.

So it's tools for anything that people want to make or want to make happen and i think uh it'll greatly appeal to your readers it's available on amazon sure it's a huge oversized book it weighs five weighs five pounds it's in color and anybody who's of a certain age will recognize the style as the old whole earth catalogs if you're young that won't mean anything to you so just ignore it but this was this was a publication that i used to work for that was it was the first user generated content for the hippies and it was a catalog of tools that were very hard to find at that time, like to grind your own flour or to build your own log cabin in the woods. People would look at this catalog and it would give them the right information to do that.

Interesting. I like it. Sounds like a cool book to do that. Interesting. I like it. Sounds like a cool book. It is. Cool tools. Cool tools. I'll make sure to link that up on the show notes. Now, you just described yourself as a college dropout and a self-given PhD in Asian studies, right?

Yeah. So you left school and you went to Asia and traveled around with a camera and wandered for a bit and got your own PhD. So how did you know that, I guess, college wasn't for you and that this was your path to learn in a different way? Yeah. Well, again, the context is this is 1969 or so. 1969 or so um i went to uh i went to a school in the sub suburb of new york new jersey where people had moved to this town because the schools were good 98 of my classmates were going

to college it was not really even an option at that point not to go but i was interested in um i couldn't decide whether to go to art school or mit i was interested in art and science and um at that time there were it was kind of a binary choice you either went to college and you suffered through classroom work or you didn't there was no interning project oriented gap year any of this kind of stuff. Mentorships. Mentorship. Had all that existed, I probably would have stayed.

But at that time, it was grade 13. It was another year of sitting in a classroom. And at that age, I needed to make something or do something. And I think a lot of people coming out of high school can kind of resonate with that. You just want to make something happen. The idea of sitting in a classroom, again, for some more book work, it just wasn't working for me. And it wasn't as if I had – I didn't really even have an alternative other than I knew that I wanted to do something, wanted to make something. So I was interested in photography.

I dropped out and went to a photography commune. It was kind of a farm taken over by a bunch of photographers. We had our own dark rooms collectively. We cooked together, slept together basically. And what it was, was we were all doing photography at that time, which was black and white in the big format

where you develop your own film and prints and all that kind of stuff. And you critique each other very ruthlessly and constructively. But that was the kind of thing that I wanted to do. And so I just knew that I could not survive four years sitting in a classroom. four years sitting in a classroom. I only happened to go to Asia because I had a best friend who was studying Chinese in Taiwan. I wanted to be a National Geographic photographer.

He invited me to come over while he was there and I called up National Geographic. I called up one of the photo editors that found his name in the directory, whatever it was, and I called him National Geographic. I called up one of the photo editors. I found his name in the directory, whatever it was. And I called him up and said, I'm going to Taiwan. Do you need any pictures? And he said, well, that's not how we do it here. But when you come back, show me your stuff.

And so I set off. I had the minimal, cheapest, dumbest camera. I had a lot of film. And I started going and then i and and i when i was in taiwan i um met two swiss travelers they were not tourists they were travelers which is what they were called and they were saying they were they just come from the philippines and they just come from indonesia before that and then India and and I said well who invited you he said you don't need to be invited you just go you don't need to know

anybody you just show up and that was like that was a revelation to me I'd never been out of New England I'd never met anybody who traveled this is a very different world um at that time and um so i just you know i went to the philippines and i went to the you know i went to the next country there and i and i realized that you could just go and it wasn't that expensive at the time and i was photographing making this book in my head and um i discovered that there was this world in Asia where everything was done on the street. It was like turned inside out. Instead of everything kind of happening inside the back rooms or inside closed things, everything was open. They actually literally would make stuff in the street.

They were not like a garage. It was like a garage. It was like a place that would be open on one side. And they had no inhibitions about me just walking up and watching them work. And they were very glad. And so I could see how things were made. I could see not only the ways that had not changed in a thousand years, and then I could turn around and see

the future, which was, you know, they were erecting, you know, Asia was just becoming the future. It was becoming some of the fastest changing cities. There would be like a rice fields one year and then the next year there would be a city there just about. And Shenzhen is this huge city, bigger than New York City that did not exist 20 years ago. bigger than New York City that did not exist 20 years ago.

So that was the education that I got, which was both seeing how the old world worked, understanding how medieval minds in places like Afghanistan, which were literally living in the 15th century, to Japan and Tokyo, which was this postmodern place where they were ahead in many ways of their use of technology. And for me, that was better than any college degree I could have ever gotten. Better than sitting in a classroom for four years? Yeah, I'm afraid so.

Now, do you believe in higher education today for people coming out of high school? Yeah, so you're up near San Francisco, correct? So that's a question that I had to answer in a very direct way because I have three children. Yeah, so the thing I told them was, look, you're graduating from high school. Here's the deal. Here are some of your options. If you have a project that you want to do or if you want to make something or if you actually have a very detailed reason to travel, whatever it is, we'll support you for four years.

But you have to have a very concrete plan or a project to work on, something very, very specific. And if you don't have that, then you have to go to college oh so college was a second choice it was like okay um but you have to do you cannot just um hang around and sit around and play video games right and think about what you might want to do so if you have something you really want to do no matter what it is we'll support you but if you don't then you have to go to college interesting so what did your children end up doing yeah they all copped out and went to college no way yeah oh wow interesting yeah yeah so um you know i think um you know i they they unlike me

they didn't have a passion that they really wanted to pursue. They decided that they didn't know what they wanted to do, so they wanted to take some time to… Still in discovery. But now one of my daughters, the second daughter, has since graduated. She's doing what we call her gap life, which is that she's on her own. We're not supporting her, but she has been traveling around the world working as a web developer as she travels. So she's been supporting herself as she goes around from Greece, islands of Greece and Bulgaria to Cambodia, Vietnam, wherever, Japan. And she's working with her boyfriend

as web developers along the way. And that's, and that's amazing to me. So she, you know, instead of doing that, she did, she's doing that now, but she did go to four years. Sure. I would say that, you know, my college experience, it took me like six years to finish and I left for a while to go play professional football then came back just to graduate to please my mom and i would say that i didn't really learn anything from the classes but i learned a lot about people and relationships and just working hard that the experience was a great learning experience, but the information I learned in the classes was really irrelevant for me. That's true for – I mean, I would say that's a pretty typical response about – it was the friends and networks, the relationships, and the people skills that people learn. I mean, of course, that's in a world that changes as fast as ours is and where careers change as fast.

It's very unlikely in fact when i was at wired i was i did a lot of hiring as we were growing very fast and so i had a lot of um college graduates coming in and um looking for work and the kind of heuristics that we used which i think is now pretty common in Silicon Valley, which is that we hired for attitude, not for skills. Okay, it was sort of like whatever skills you had are probably not the skills that we need. Right. But what's your positive attitude? Attitude meaning like are you a fast learner?

How do you learn? Sure. And then, you know, are you easy to work with? Those are your character, those are the things that are much more important and they, they can be developed as you said in, in, in, in college and you have opportunities for that, but I don't think it's only in college that you could develop those. Right. So, so it's, um, and by the way, one of the things that I had, there was a couple of people who came to Wired, um, as interns were good enough that we hired them and we're still there when

I left. And I kept telling them, why are you here? I don't understand it. You're like 20, you know, whatever. And you're, you worked right out of college and you're still working, it's like when you're young, you should be wasting time somewhere. You should be wasting in the sense that you should just be pursuing something, not trying to make a living.

You should be exploring. You should be trying stuff that fail. This is the time to do that. You shouldn't be in a career with a down payment and a mortgage or whatever it is that you are you should really be trying crazy stuff right now and learning new skills yeah taking taking chances and not trying to optimize your strengths per se but you should be kind of exploring you should be exploring rather than to optimize and i think there's a tension there between everybody every

artist every creative person between optimizing what you know and exploring what you don't and i think some of the people i met that were kind of going through college on kind of like a schedule, graduating, getting their job, and proceeding up the ladder, that to me had more optimization in it than it did exploring. And so they needed to balance that with taking some more chances, doing stuff that had a lower success rate, and were crazier. And I think that's part of what you should be doing while you're young. Yeah, you mentioned how everything is changing so much faster now. And what you learn in school probably is going to be irrelevant in a few years later based on your environment and your changes that you're making. And you wrote an article, I believe it was called Amish hackers.

Correct me if I'm wrong. Um, but in this article about Amish, you talk about, uh, you describe the use of technology or the lack of, and the debate about in the Amish community. And you,

and you wrote, uh, you quoted an Amish man saying that the problem with phones, pagers, and PDAs was that you got messages rather than conversations. And what are your thoughts on modern technology or technology today? And do you think it has set us back in any way from connecting and having real conversations with humans? I have, I have, I think there's, I think I have the kind of same two minds about this flood of technology that most people have, which is there are some things about it that we want to embrace and we can't help but embrace.

And it's like, yeah, bring it on. And at the same time, we're really kind of cautious about not letting it take over. And I think that's baked into our inherent relationship of humans and technology that is going to be true for the next 10,000 years, which is that we are both the parents of technology and the children of it at the same time. We are both the masters and the slave at the same time. So both these relationships where we are making technology and it's also inevitable that that tension is inherent in the technology will always be there and we're always going to feel it.

So I would say that there's two things going on in our heads, which is, yeah, this is really cool. This is great. It makes me more productive. I can do things I can never do. And oh, my gosh, I've got to stop doing this. I can do things I can never do, and oh my gosh, I've got to stop doing this. And so I think there is no formula for – there's no escape from that paradox. And we just have to accept that it's going to be there, and we have to kind of manage those.

And here's what I know is that we're going to have different answers to this paradox at different times in our life, at different times of the week. And what I wrote about the Amish, what's interesting about the Amish, the untold story that most people don't know about them is that they are not lunatics. They have not rejected technology at all. They're just very selective in the stuff that they use, and they have a surprising mix of things and so it's not so they're not like saying no to everything yeah they are just saying

yes they're saying no no no yes no no no yes they're saying yes in a very deliberate way because they have a criteria for how they uh select and and they use. But the point is that they're not rejecting it. And so one thing about the technology is that anybody who's going to give this all up, there's nobody who does that. No one gives it all up. And there's very few who even give up substantial portions of it for very long. And I think that's actually okay. So one of the things that I promote is the idea of either vacations from technology or Sabbaths from technology or sabbaticals. So it's okay to stop using it for a while but understand that you're going to come back.

Have you done that before with technology? Yes. And what did you experience during those? How that before with technology yes and what did you experience during those how long were those periods for and what did you experience well so our kids and we still don't have tv at our house but we have and i was one of the first subscribers to netflix i mean when it first launched so no tv but but Netflix from the beginning. So we could enjoy some of the content. And it wasn't like we had anything against the content, but we could manage the format and the delivery. So it was on demand versus whenever they wanted to show it.

We could watch it on our demand. People understand that now, but we were doing that very early. And that transformed the context and so for a long time I didn't I didn't have a cell phone and that was because they didn't want to be on the leash people when I was you know at the call of anybody who wanted to call smartphones and the ability to kind of filter and do those kinds of things changed that for me. So now I do.

I didn't own a car for a long time. I had a bicycle only. And a lot of people in New York City still don't have cars. But they might later on. So it's not that they have anything against cars. It's just that cars weren't working for them at that time. Now with Uber and Zipcars and stuff. That's a viable option.

So there isn't – we have sabbaticals and Sabbaths. There's actually a growing trend to do a Sabbath, which is like one day a week you go offline. Either you darn online or you don't use a keyboard or you don't use a screen there's different ways people do it but it's very healthy to step away once a week because when you return you can return with greater enthusiasm and perspective and energy so it's not like you're stopping you're not using it once a week because it's horrible. You're stopping once a week because it's so good. And so that, anyone who's talking about, well, I'm going to do this because it's toxic or that it's addictive and all this kind of stuff, I think that's the wrong framing. What you want to talk about is stepping away because it's so good, because it's so powerful, because it's so sweet, because

it is so rich that that's why you want to step, not because it's so evil. I like that. Now, I'm curious about, you've done all these amazing, incredible things since after college or the one year of college. And you've, again, the most interesting man in the world. You've got so many different titles and books and a lot of different amazing things you've created. But what I want to know is what was the biggest fear that you overcame growing up, you know, in your childhood from five to 15? Did you have any major fears that you really took on and overcame?

And if so, what were those? Yeah, I had a really happy childhood i i kind of um had had very supportive parents though for a long time my father and i who was you know what were two straight arrow um we went through the 60s. That was a very turbulent time. He didn't get the hippie part of me at all. And I think the one obstacle that I had was probably my father, not that he didn't support me, but that it took him a long time to kind of come around to accept come around to accept my unorthodox approach. And so that took a long time to kind of overcome, but it did. And I also, I was one of five kids, and I was the oldest of five kids, I should say. And I didn't necessarily, wasn't advocating that my brothers and sisters all follow my unorthodox path either

so i had some concern about uh i mean i wasn't a preacher i wasn't trying to preach anything but i think i i was never really governed by fear very much i i think i i i had i had an um a hope of doing something that was significant or that people would appreciate. And I think when you're young and starting off, like myself, I was a nobody. I had no kind of a portfolio or anything. So I think maybe trying to be accepted or in some ways appreciated was the thing that I worked on the most. And that took, frankly, it took a long time. It took 20 years. a lot of people will relate to this because i was creating things and working on things for all that time without really much recognition and i think what i kind of started to do was

really making stuff because i wanted it to be made hoping that other people would appreciate it but really trying to in some sense you know make it for myself, and kind of accepting that, in fact, no one else may ever buy this or whatever, but I want to make something that I enjoyed making and I enjoyed having done and I was proud of, and not paying attention to the money very much because I didn't have money. I had more time than money, but I kind of was resigned to the fact that I'm not going to to the money very much because I didn't have money. I had more time than money. But I kind of was resigned to the fact that I'm not going to have any money. But I just really wanted to kind of do it right.

So the book of Asian photographs that I always wanted to do, it took me almost, I don't know, at least 20 more years until the technology came along where I could do it on my own because if I was you know the way photo books were done before you had to become a big famous photographer which I was not but I waited until the technology came along where I could do a book and make it myself and they didn't have to be famous right and I think that's why I'm so enthusiastic about the technology today because I think it can enable people like myself who are trying to create things. You don't have to get other people's permission to do this and to make copies of it.

You don't have to wait until someone says, yes, you can just go and do it. I like that. Well, I know you're writing another book right now, so I've only got two more questions for you. Okay. But I want to make sure everyone goes and checks out Cool Tools and go to kk.org. You've got a lot of the links that you've got there. I'll link it up on the show notes as well over on the podcast show notes.

But the final two questions, one is, what are you most grateful for recently? I love that because I think gratitude is what powers our humanity and our place in the cosmos. And we say a blessing at every meal, what we're grateful for. And there's so many things i have to say that i remain grateful that i'm still in good health um and i am grateful for the for my kids who um are not in jail and um you know basically they came out okay and um specifically, more specifically than that, I have an opportunity to travel, to still travel. And I go to China a lot where I have a lot of fans. And I am really grateful that I have the opportunity to do that because traveling is still my biggest teacher.

It's still the most intense uh mode of learning that i know about because i really you know i try to get out of the cities into the country and there's i mean it's just it's just one huge university there and so um i have the privilege of being able to do that on a frequent basis and i'm really grateful for that i like that and by the way i should let people know that there's two ways to travel you have a lot of money or a lot of time and now the two is better to have a lot of time you don't you don't need a lot of money to to travel to distant and exotic places you may think you do but there are many ways to do that without a lot of money and if you have a lot of time, it can always make up for money.

And so if you're willing to put some time, it will always reward whatever time you invest into it. Any resources on the best way to travel that you like? There's a couple of really good books. I like Potts, Ralph Potts, Its i think his vagabonding series yeah there's another book on um well i mean there's there's things like there's practical things like the um lonely planet thorn tree forums lonely planet books you know about the thorn tree forums are the kind of places where you know people who are on they are in Laos at the border are saying, yes, the border is open right here,

and it takes three hours to do it. This is how you do it. And so you get on-the-ground immediate currency. That's really good for – that's a great resource that I use a lot trying to find out what's – the guidebooks are a couple years out. This is like weeks old and there's also um there's a couple i'm trying to think of the name there's a couple websites i think it's called uh blue wing i'm thinking where you were the um mileage hackers

hang out sure yeah to get the free flights and all that type of thing. Yeah, right. There's all kinds of tricks and things. Some of them are more troublesome than others. But the idea there is that you can, it's kind of like travel hacking a little bit about how to rack up miles that you can then turn into flights. Because that is the biggest expense usually

for these kinds of remote places where it's very cheap. There's actually a book I recommend in Cool Tools called The Cheapest Destinations. So it's like his philosophy is if you're going to travel, why not go to the places where you get the best buck, best bang for your buck. And so he kind of did a little list of the places that have the best bargains for your dollar. And there's also a book called World Stompers, which is for the really low end travelers. And I define that as for the travelers who don't care where they sleep at all. I mean, it's like, you know, if you have to kind of camp out somewhere or couch surf or you're not that picky about where you sleep, then this is a book for you because it's like rock bottom, absolute cheapest way to go. That's not my style anymore.

Right. You like to have a nice bed. Well, you know, I had so much bed, but it's kind of something without bed bugs. I hear you. So that's another resource in the Cool Tools book or the website. Awesome. Okay, very cool. Thank you for those tips.

And the final question, which is the question I ask all my guests, is what is your definition of greatness? Good. First of all, I think greatness is overrated, okay? Greatness as we commonly define it or in a kind of celebrity way, every person I know who has a reputation for being great was a deeply flawed character. Sure.

Okay? And in a certain sense, greatness is another term for extreme, and they're extreme. So their characters are extreme which means that they often have very extreme they're unbalanced in a certain sense so they're not they're not rounded they're angular and i'm not saying uh we shouldn't seek out to be great but i'm just saying that in a certain sense it's not all that it's cracked up to be because it comes along with a lot of other there's a price to it and the price is that is

that you are extreme and so you know steve jobs is a great example a person that i have you know i can i was not his friend but i met him on numerous occasions and he was a brilliant jerk so he was brilliant he was a jerk right so those were linked in his case by the nature of his thing so so you know he really should not be anyone's really role model as a whole and i think what the way i would maybe define the kind of greatness I'm seeking is a specificity to my life so that you're in the class of one. And what a lot of people do is they're trying to make themselves, you know, whether they want to be a Michael Jordan or a Michael Jackson or… Tiger Woods. Tiger Woods or a Bill Gates or somebody like that. Basically, they're participating in someone else's movie.

And I think what you really want to do is you want to star in your own movie. And that's very, very, very difficult to do because we don't know what our movie is about. I mean, it'll take you basically all your life to figure out what our movie is about. I mean, it'll take you basically all your life to figure out what your movie is about. So it's constantly, it's an ongoing process. But to me, the way I would define, to answer your question, Grainis, is that it means that you are in a class of one.

And it's not so much whether you are the most brilliant or the most whatever, the superlative. It's the fact of whether you're being kind of really developing that blend that you have that nobody else has. And from afar, that may not seem great because maybe what you have is the ability to empathize with people or maybe you have an extreme sensitivity to poverty and others or something that may take you away from center stage. But in my book, you might not stand out in a certain sense in a crowd, but you would still be great because there would be no one else like you. And I think that being inimitable is probably closer to the idea of greatness in my mind, where it's like, yeah, he or she, they're the one and only. Nobody may know them out of their neighborhood, but no one will ever forget them either because they are just – they have sort of maximized who they were.

And who they were is this weird combination of stuff, but they have really kind of – they have managed to bring that to the front and star in their own movie. I love – that's a great definition. So thank you for sharing that. Well, thank you for asking such great questions and for being a great definition so thank you for sharing that well thank you for asking such great questions and for um being a great listener thanks to your podcast listeners for giving me attention and um I hope I said something that was useful to them that was great yeah I loved your wisdom and I appreciate it and we'll have everything leaked up in the show notes so thank you so much Kevin Kevin. There you have it guys. Thank you so much for

joining me today. And again, if this is your first time joining the school of greatness podcast, welcome to the podcast. Feel free to subscribe over on itunes.com slash school of greatness. feel free to subscribe over on iTunes.com slash School of Greatness. Leave me a review. Let me know what you think about the show and check out some other episodes as well. And again, if you are listening to this episode, share it with one friend

that you think could find some enlightenment or be inspired by this. Email it to that individual, that friend, and cc me, lewis at lewishouse.com. I'd love to see why you send it to them and what you want them to get out of this interview. So again, send it to one friend and cc me on the email, lewis at lewishouse.com. I am very grateful for all of you for listening, for subscribing. We're at episode number 97.

Can you believe it? It's almost 100 episodes, and I started this in the end of January 2013. believe it's almost 100 episodes and I started this in the end of January 2013. So make sure to check out this specific show over at lewishouse.com slash 97. We're gaining on 100 very soon. So I'm excited to share with you guys what is coming next. There's a lot of great things coming next. So thank you so much for joining me today. You know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great. Outro Music