The Tim Ferriss Show - #432: Books I've Loved — Kevin Kelly

Episode Date: May 13, 2020

#432: Books I've Loved — Kevin Kelly | Brought to you by Audible.Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to sit down with world-class performers of all different types—from startup founders and investors to chess champions to Olympic athletes. This episode, however, is an experiment and part of a shorter series I’m doing called “Books I’ve Loved.” I’ve invited some amazing past guests, close friends, and new faces to share their favorite books—the books that have influenced them, changed them, and transformed them for the better. I hope you pick up one or two new mentors—in the form of books—from this new series and apply the lessons in your own life.Kevin Kelly (@kevin2kelly) might be the real-life most interesting man in the world. Kevin is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He co-founded Wired in 1993, and served as its executive editor for its first seven years. His most recent book is The Inevitable, which is a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. His other books include the best-selling New Rules for the New Economy, the classic Out of Control, and his summary theory of technology in What Technology Wants. From 1984–1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. He co-founded the Hackers’ Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. He also founded the popular Cool Tools website in 2003.Recomendo is his free, weekly newsletter that gives you six brief personal recommendations of cool stuff.Note from the editor: This episode was recorded in late 2019.“Books I’ve Loved” on The Tim Ferriss Show is brought to you by Audible! I have used Audible for many years now. I love it. Audible has the largest selection of audiobooks on the planet. I listen when I’m taking walks, I listen while I’m cooking… I listen whenever I can. Audible is offering Tim Ferriss Show listeners a free audiobook with a 30-day trial membership. Just go to Audible.com/tim and browse the unmatched selection of audio programs. Then, download your free title and start listening! It’s that easy. Simply go to Audible.com/tim or text TIM to 500500 to get started today.***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests.For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Please fill out the form at tim.blog/sponsor.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seemed an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over a metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. Books I've Loved on The Tim Ferriss show is exclusively brought to you by audible there couldn't be a better sponsor for this series my dear listeners and readers i have used audible

for so many years as long as i can remember i love it audible has the largest selection of audiobooks on the planet i listen when i'm taking walks i I listen while I'm cooking. I listen whenever I can. And if you're looking for a place to start, I can recommend three of my favorites. The first is The Tao of Seneca by Seneca. If you want to hear my favorite letters of all time, touches on stoic philosophy, calmness under duress, etc. The next is The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, G-A-I-M-A-N, one of my favorites. Even if you're a nonfiction purist, this is the fiction book that you need to listen to. Neil also has

perhaps the most calming voice of all time. And third, Greg McKeown's Essentialism, subtitle, The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. This is one of my favorite books of the past few years. Combines very well with the 80-20 principle, but more on Audible. Every month, Audible members get one credit for any audiobook on the site, plus a choice of multiple Audible originals from a rotating selection. They also get access to daily news digests from the likes of the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, as well as guided meditation programs. And here are some other amazing audible features, and I use a bunch of these. You can download titles and listen offline, anytime, anywhere. I use this feature even when I could get access. I'll put my phone on, say, airplane mode,

because I don't want to get bothered with notifications when I'm taking a walk to clear my head, and you can listen to titles offline in a case like that, or on a plane or whatever. Obviously, I'm not flying much these days. The app is free and can be installed on all smartphones and tablets. You can listen across devices without losing your spot. And WhisperSync is another feature I use quite a lot. I love reading my Kindle in bed, for instance, then picking up at the same exact spot where I left off when I go walking and listening the love reading my Kindle in bed, for instance, then picking up at the same exact spot where I left off when I go walking and listening the next day. Kindle and audio versions can be synced up automatically. It's just amazing. And if you can't decide what to listen to,

don't sweat it. You don't have to rush. You can keep your credits for up to a year and use them, for instance, to binge on a whole series, if you like. Audible offers just about everything. Podcasts, guided wellness programs, theatrical performances, A, if you like. Audible offers just about everything. Podcasts, guided wellness programs, theatrical performances, A-list comedy, and Audible originals you won't find anywhere else. And right now, Audible is offering you guys, that's Tim Ferriss Show listeners, a free audiobook with a 30-day trial membership. And again, my list, if you want to check them out, The Tao of Seneca, The Graveyard Book, Essentialism. Those are just three.

There's so many good ones out there. Just go to audible.com slash Tim and browse the unmatched selection of audio programs. Then download your free title and start listening. It's that easy. So check it out. Go to audible.com slash Tim or text Tim, T-I-M, to 500-500 to get started today. Check it out,

audible.com slash Tim. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is usually my job to sit down with world-class performers of all different types, startup founders, investors, chess champions, Olympic athletes, you name it, to tease out the habits that you can apply in your own lives. This episode, however, is an experiment and part of a short form series that I'm doing simply called Books I've Loved. I've invited some amazing past guests, close friends, and new faces to share their favorite books, describe their favorite books, the books that have influenced them, changed them, transformed them for the better. And I hope you pick up one or two new mentors in the form of books from this new series and apply

the lessons in your own life. I had a lot of fun putting this together, inviting these people to participate and have learned so, so much myself. I hope that is also the case for you. Please enjoy. Hi, this is Kevin Kelly. I'm senior maverick at Wired Magazine, and I'm an author of a couple books, mostly about future technology. But in a previous life, I ran a magazine called The Whole Earth Review and Co-Evolution Quarterly that reviewed books on a regular basis. And in that capacity, I have read through and evaluated, I don't know, many, many, many thousands of books. I'm speaking right at this moment in a two-story library of my own that's filled with many, many thousands of books that I own. I love books.

I read books. I write books. And so I care about the kind of books that change people's minds. And I want to talk about a few of those kind of books briefly. I want to tell you about four books that have changed my mind, and maybe they'll change your mind. I think the power of a book to change people's mind is an amazing superpower, that we could hand something that little scribbles on it, and it would change how you thought and maybe even looked at the world. The kind of books I'm going to recommend are non-fiction books, but fiction can certainly do that. There have been books of fiction that I've read that have changed my view, but I'm going to talk about four non-fiction books that changed my mind. And I'm going to start with the most recent one, one that has just come out a matter of weeks ago, and it's called Open Borders.

And Open Borders is a graphic novel. That's what we call a comic book for adults. And it's a graphic novel written by an economist, Brian Kaplan. And the graphic novel is illustrated by an artist, Zach Wienersmith. And together they have made this comic book for adults, which is about the science and ethics of immigration. And it's probably one of the most radical idea simply is that everybody in the world, individually, in every country in the world, would benefit from having open borders, meaning the ability or the right for anybody to live anywhere they want if they obey local laws. Now, there are going to be variations of that principle, but the basic premise is that you have open borders, that you don't have borders that restrict where people can live and work.

And in a certain kind of intellectual level, we can imagine some future society on this planet where it becomes a universal human right to be able to migrate and live anywhere you want on the planet as long as you obey local. And that idea, it seems very strange to many people right now. It seems unworkable or idealistic or in some ways simply a fantasy. book goes through the scientific economic reasons all researched and evaluated and makes a very clear fast fun case with comics about why our kind of intuitions may be wrong about this and why the fact is is that it is the most and best economic thing we could possibly do for ourselves and for others. And there, again, there are many objections about that. You may have many obvious ones. And he goes through all of them, offering reasons why those objections aren't true, showing the data why it's not true. But at the end of the book, he even goes a little bit further and says,

well, even if you kind of don't accept all my arguments and you decide that maybe we need some halfway measures, he offers a bunch of different what he calls keyhole solutions that are less than this perfect open borders, but it's still superior to what we have. And I'm maybe not giving it credit because it sounds very dull and boring, but in fact, because it's a graphic novel, it reads very fast. There's a kind of actually humor element in it, and it's very, very clear. It's very methodical, and I believe it might even change your mind if you have some doubts about the premise. So that's Open Borders. Very new, very current, very radical, very persuasive, and fun to read. The second book is one that's a little bit older,

and it was written by a friend of mine, Stuart Brand, who used to be the editor and he was the founder of the Whole Earth Catalogs. And he's read a lot of books too. But he wrote a book that I really found changed my mind about the spaces that I live in, the structures that we work in, the buildings that surround our lives. And his book is called How Buildings Learn by Stuart Brand. And it's an illustrated book with lots of pictures. But the main thesis of this book is that when you make a building, when you build something, when you build a structure, when you build a home or office building or even a factory, you're making a prediction about what you think is going to be used for it.

Because you're going to design it for certain uses in mind. And like all predictions, most of these buildings will be not used over the long term for what they were originally built for. People build homes and they have additional kids and they need to remodel

and then they begin to remodel or they want a home office. And so commercial buildings are constantly being renovated for different kinds of stores or from a store to a warehouse, a warehouse to a store. And Stuart's idea is that we should build buildings with the idea that they're going to be modified. So you want to make them sort of easy or ready to be modified by the current people who are using them. And that the buildings that sort of last the longest are actually ones that have been modified many times.

And therefore, they are the ones that sort of are more able and capable of being modified. And he calls that learning. This is the idea that when we want to make our surroundings, our offices, the places that we live in, we should keep in mind that we're probably going to modify what they're being used for, and therefore, we're going to modify those spaces. And so we want to make adaptable structures, adaptable spaces. And it doesn't mean some high-tech thing. It might even mean making something, a square shell that's very easy to modify within. It kind of depends. But the point is that buildings are adaptable and adapted in time. So you want to think of the structures as having the element of time. That changed my mind. The third book that I want to talk about that changed my mind was a book called The Innovator's Dilemma by Clay the innovation. There's a dilemma in the organization

that's trying to make the innovation. And the dilemma is simply that in the short term, it makes more sense to incrementally improve what you know how to do, rather than throwing it out and starting over and taking a chance on something new and maybe bigger that might not work. And that in a business sense, it always makes more sense at the business bottom line in the short term to just incrementally improve what works. And that to take a chance to do the risk of innovation, which is very likely to fail, and that's almost the definition of innovation is that most of the time it's going to fail, with the chance that you may have a hit, a higher yield, doesn't really make short-term economic sense. You have to take a longer view. The calculus only works if you're willing to take a longer view.

And so the dilemma is how do you do that? How do you balance that risk of improving excellence in what you know how to do versus going with non-excellence, going with failure in trying something new. So people think that it's always obvious that you want to innovate. But the point of this book is that it's actually not obvious, that you actually have to kind of go beyond the obvious. You have to kind of push through the obvious because the obvious thing is to not innovate. And so he gives case studies about why he believes this is true. And that aha to me really changed my mind about thinking about how you be creative because to some people, being creative seems natural and the obvious thing to do. But if you really are creative, it's not going to always be so obvious. And that is actually

when you want to remember this book, which is that you have to take a longer-term view to kind of continue trying to innovate. Innovative Dilemma, Clay Christensen. And the last one I want to talk about is another book that changed my mind called Finite and Infinite Games by James Kars. This is a little known book. It's kind of hard to read. It's written by kind of a theologian. A lot of it, I mean, it was kind of written in the language of religious orientation. A lot of it is really maybe not so useful, but read the first and last chapters. And the basic premise that changed my mind was to understand that in the world, there were two kinds of games. There were finite games in which there were winners and losers. We often call that a zero sum. If somebody wins, someone else has to lose. And in those kinds of games, the rules are fixed.

You have fairness. If someone is breaking the rules, it's unfair. You don't want to play. And you play until somebody wins. And most of the games in the world, they're about winning and losing. But there's another kind of game called the infinite game. And there, there aren't winners or losers. The rules are not fixed.

You're kind of constantly changing the rules just to extend the game. And the purpose of the game is just to keep the game going. The purpose of the game is to bring as many people in to play the game. The purpose of the game is to kind of invent new games. And that non-zero sum, or what we might want to call the positive sum, is really the basis of most of the good things we have in life. In a certain sense, you could say that a company that is working or successful is an infinite game because if it's really doing its job well, it's not taking from other competitors. It's actually enabling other people to do their own thing. It's actually creating jobs and creating money flow and creating new objects and services and goods that can be improved upon and used by others and maybe making an ecosystem. It's in some ways enlarging the pie rather than

just taking a slice of the pie. And that idea of kind of the ever-expanding pie is the view that I now see the world in and helps me kind of look at things and even decide what to do by saying, is this a finite game that I don't want to play, or is this an infinite game in which sign me up? So, finite, infinite games, James Kars. Those are four books that changed my mind and maybe they will change yours. I hope they do. Thanks, Tim, for giving me

a chance to rant about some favorite books. Bye. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun for the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short.

It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.