The Tim Ferriss Show - #753: Derek Sivers and Kevin Kelly

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Starting point is 00:05:17 I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton. Me, Tim, Ferris, Joe. over metal and postcard. The Tim Ferriss Show. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to sit down with world-class performers from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, and so on, that you can apply and test in your own lives. This episode is a two-for-one, and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about, and passed 1 billion downloads. To celebrate,

Starting point is 00:05:58 I've curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes. And internally, we've been calling these the super combo episodes because my goal is to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household names, the super famous folks, but to also introduce you to lesser known people I consider stars. These are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can do the same for many of you. Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle. Perhaps you missed an episode. Just trust me on this one. We went to great pains to put these pairings together. And for the bios

Starting point is 00:06:38 of all guests, you can find that and more at Tim.blog slash combo. And now, without further ado, please enjoy, and thank you for listening. First up, Derek Sivers, former musician, programmer, TED speaker, and circus clown, who sold his first company, CD Baby, for $22 million and gave all the money to charity, and author of books on philosophy and entrepreneurship, including How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want, and Useful Not True. You can find Derek on Twitter, at Sivers. I was 18 years old,

Starting point is 00:07:23 and all I wanted in my whole life was to be a professional musician. I mean, ideally a rock star, yeah, but if I was just making my living doing music, that was the goal. So I'm 18 years old, I'm living in Boston, I'm going to Berklee College of Music, and I'm in this band where the bass player one day in rehearsal says, hey man, my agent just offered me a gig that's like $75 to play at a pig show in Vermont. He rolls his eyes and he's like, I'm not going to do it. Do you want the gig?

Starting point is 00:07:54 I'm like, fuck yeah, a paying gig? Oh my God, yes. So I took the gig to go up to Burlington, Vermont, and I think it was like a $58 round-trip bus ticket. And I get to this pig show in Vermont, I strap my acoustic guitar on, and I walk around a pig show playing music. And did that for like three hours,

Starting point is 00:08:15 got on the bus home, and the next day, the booking agent called me up and said, hey, so yeah, you did a really good job at the pig show. We got good reports there. Wondering if you can come play at an art opening in Western Massachusetts. I'll pay you 75 bucks again. Yeah, sure. So same thing. I took, you know, like a $60 bus out to Western Massachusetts, got 75 bucks for playing at an art opening. And the agent was there and he was impressed. And so

Starting point is 00:08:40 he said, hey, look, I've got this circus and the previous musician just quit. So we really need somebody new. And I really like what you're doing. So there's about three gigs a week. I can pay you 75 bucks a gig. They're usually Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Do you want the gig? I said, hell yeah. I'm a professional musician now. This is amazing. So I said yes to everything, which is going to come up later, you know, with the hell yeah or no thing. But I think it's really smart to switch strategies. But when you're earlier in your career, I think the best strategies, you just say yes to everything, every piddly little gig. You just never know what are the lottery tickets.

Starting point is 00:09:13 So this one ended up being a real lottery ticket for me because as soon as I joined the circus, again, I'm 18, I had no stage experience. And after a few gigs, they said, hey, so the previous musician used to go out and open the show with this big theme song and get everybody up and dancing. Could you do that? And I said, yeah, sure. And another gig or two later, they said, hey, the previous musician used to close the show also with that theme song. Could you do that? I said, yeah, sure. And then it was, the previous musician used to go out in between every act and like, get the audience to

Starting point is 00:09:46 applaud and thank them and introduce the next act. Do you think you could do that? I said, yeah, sure. And I was really bad at it at first, but I got good. Eventually I became like the ringleader MC of this whole circus and I was 18 years old. So if you were to go to the circus, it would have looked like my show. And I did that for 10 years from the age of 18 to 28. I did over a thousand shows. And eventually, by the way, got paid more than 75 bucks. Eventually, I was getting like 300 bucks a show and it became my full-time living. And I even bought a house with the money I made playing with the circus. And then that led to all kinds of other things. So just so many huge opportunities and 10 years of stage experience came from that one piddly little pig show that I said yes to this little thing. So yeah, the only reason I stopped doing the circus is when CD Baby started taking over my life and I had to start turning down circus gigs. But yeah, that was my life for 10 years. What did you learn that made you better?

Starting point is 00:10:45 What were the lessons learned that made the biggest difference in your performance as this MC? What were the biggest mistakes that you made early on that you corrected? Either one is fine. It's kind of the same answer is that at first I was too self-conscious because I thought it was about me. Like I was going up on stage thinking that the audience was somehow judging me, Derek Sivers, as if I mattered, you know? So I would get self-conscious of what they thought of me. And eventually, and I think it took maybe like 10 or 20 gigs. The circus was run by a husband and wife team and Tarleton was the name of the wife.

Starting point is 00:11:29 She was the one really kind of out on the gigs and leading the circus. The husband was more the booking agent. And she's the one that like single-handedly gave me my confidence that I have today. Like sometimes when people ask me, why am I so confident? It's like, that's because of Tarleton.

Starting point is 00:11:45 That's a longer story we get into. But anyway, Tarleton is the one that she just kept pushing me from backstage. Like, come on, you're up there acting like David Letterman. Like, don't do this whole kind of, ah, yeah, I'm so cool. All right, everybody, here's the next act. Like, I think I was trying to be cool

Starting point is 00:12:02 because I thought that people were judging me, right? And she said, these people came here for a show. Go give them what they came here for. And so one time I decided to go out there and just be over the top ridiculous. I went on stage and I said, ladies and gentlemen, what you're about to see is one of the most amazing things. We have an elephant that is going to be coming from backstage. And I did this whole like thing in the fast talking voice and real like pizzazz to it. And the audience loved it. And I from backstage and I did this whole like thing in the fast talking voice and real like pizzazz to it and the audience loved it and I came backstage and she said there you go that's what people come to the circus for so now that I've been on stage you know thousands of times this really sunk in that you get on stage to give the audience what they came there for

Starting point is 00:12:42 or even things like this this interview we're doing. This isn't necessarily for you or me. We could just hang up the phone and talk. We don't need to. But we're doing this for the listeners. So we're going to give them something that's useful to them. This isn't about me. This isn't about you.

Starting point is 00:12:58 This is about them. So that was the biggest lesson learned. Luckily, I learned that early on when I was 18, 19. And yeah. Seems like most of my friends who are what most people would consider successful in various respects can trace their confidence back to either or both end a specific woman and a specific coach or mentor of some type. It always comes down to one or both of those.

Starting point is 00:13:28 Oh, Tim, you know, I've never told you about Kimo Williams. It's a great name and I want to learn more. No, I don't know anything about. This is so up your alley. I can't believe I've never told you this. Okay. Thanks for prodding me. I mean, you prompted me with that because you're right. It was a gorgeous woman, Tarleton, and it was a music teacher, Kimo Williams. But see, he changed my life a year or two before I met her. Okay, so imagine this. I'm 17 years old now. I'm living in suburban Chicago, and I decide to go to Berklee College of Music

Starting point is 00:13:59 because I want to be a famous musician. And just like two or three months before I'm supposed to go, I see an ad in the local Chicago Tribune for music typesetting. And I'm wondering like how much sheet music I'm going to have to be writing. So I call up this classified ad in the paper and I say, can I ask you some questions about music typesetting? And he said, sure. Well, why do you want to know? And I said, because I'm about to go off to Berklee College of Music in a couple months. And he said, oh, really? He said, I used to teach at Berklee College of Music. I said, because I'm about to go off to Berklee College of Music in a couple months. And he said, oh, really? He said, I used to teach at Berklee College of Music.

Starting point is 00:14:28 I said, you did? Do you think you can give me some tips? He said, yeah. Here's my address. Come to my studio at 9 a.m. Thursday morning. See you then. And he lived like way downtown Chicago in an area I'd never been to. And I'm going to do a little foreshadowing of the story right now, because

Starting point is 00:14:47 when I got married years later to the woman I met when I was sitting in Times Square with you, he was one of only three people I invited to the wedding. It was Tarleton from the circus, Kimo Williams, my music teacher, and my first girlfriend, Camille. Those were my only three guests to my wedding. And Kimo Williams told the story to my family. He said, you know, I tell people all the time. I get all these kids that want to be famous. And I say, yep, show up at my studio at 9 a.m. And he said, nobody ever does.

Starting point is 00:15:17 Nobody has their shit together to show up when I tell them to. And he said, so I'd honestly forgotten that there was this kid that called from a classified ad. That was his way of saying no. No, it was just his hurdle. He was like, yeah, all right, kid. Sure. Here's a seven foot hurdle. Let's hear you do. Exactly. So he said, so, you know, my doorbell rings some Thursday morning at 8.59 a.m. And I opened the door and there's some long haired teenager sitting there. And so now flipping back to first person point of view is yeah, Kima Williams is this large black man from Hawaii that was a musician that attended Berkeley School of Music

Starting point is 00:15:54 and then stayed there to teach for a while. And so what he taught me in four lessons got me to graduate Berkeley College of Music in half the time it would take. And here was his thing. He said, the reason I wanted you to study with me for a bit. He said, I know you only have like eight weeks before you go to school. He said, I think you can graduate Berklee School of Music in two years instead of four.

Starting point is 00:16:18 He said, the standard pace is for chumps. I should get a t-shirt made. Yes, I know. This is like totally Tim Ferriss stuff, right? This is like, I can't believe we hadn't talked about this before. He's the one at the age of like 17, 18 got me into this mentality. He said, well, the standard pace is for chumps. The school has to organize its curricula around the lowest common denominator so that almost nobody is left out. So they have

Starting point is 00:16:47 to slow down so that everybody can catch up. But he said, you're smarter than that, or anybody can be smarter than that if they want to be. So you can go as fast as you want. And here's how. And so he sat me down at the piano. He said, okay, what do you know about music theory? I said, well, I don't know. Let's find out. And he, you know, he just asked me a few of these music questions, like, okay, what, how does the major scale go to da da da da, right? Okay. Show me the tritone. Do you know what a tritone is? Okay. Play me a tritone in the C major scale. I'm like, okay, B and F. He said, okay, how can you take that? And what other chord can you make from B and F? He said, okay, that's called the substitute chord. Now what is the resolution? We realized,

Starting point is 00:17:19 and he was just like, boom, boom, boom. At this kind of pace, he was doing all this music theory stuff with me. It was so intense. And I was like, I had all this adrenaline like a video game. I was like, this is amazing. Okay, keep going. I said, okay, do that and this. And that was like a two-hour lesson that went at that kind of pace. And then he dumped a bunch of homework on me. He said, okay, now go home tonight and take this big book of jazz standards.

Starting point is 00:17:40 Find me all the two five substitutions or two five closures. Now substitute chords for that and then come back next Thursday and we'll do this again. So we did that for like four Thursdays in a row. And sure enough, what he taught me in four two hour sessions was basically like two years of Berklee College of Music. He compressed it into four lessons. Wow. So that when I showed up to my first day of Berkeley, I tested out of the first few years just thanks to him. And then he even taught me a strategy. He offhand mentioned, he said, you know, I think they might still have a rule in place

Starting point is 00:18:16 where those other required courses, you know, that you have to take to graduate. He said, I think you could pretty much just buy the books for those and then contact the department head and just take the final exam to get credit. So I did that too. So when I got there, all those required classes like, you know, Bach counterpoint classes, I wasn't so interested in it. So I bought the book, did all the homework, approached the department head, said, can I take the final exam for this? And he said, looked at me weird and said, okay, took the final exam and got credit without ever having to attend the class. And yeah, that's how I graduated Berklee College of Music in two years. And on a related note, could you talk about, and we've talked about this a bit,

Starting point is 00:18:55 but I never tire of it, relaxing for the same result? Because I think this is such a huge observation that it's incredibly important for type A personalities, or at least for me, because I have a tendency to almost want to burn the candle at both ends to prove to myself that I'm putting forth the maximum effort. I'm leaving as little as possible to chance with certain things, you know, and, but tell everybody about the bike, about the bicycle experience. Yeah, this was kind of profound. Now, granted, I didn't learn this until later, but yeah, I'd been very, very, very type A my whole life. Even before I met Kimu Williams, you know, I mean, age of 14, it just, my friends called me the robot because they would never see

Starting point is 00:19:42 me sleep or eat or relax or hang out. I just was like so focused on being the best musician I could be that I would just practice every waking minute. If I'd begrudgingly go to a party, you know, I'd bring my guitar with me and I'd be sitting in the corner practicing my scales and arpeggios while everybody was hanging out, getting high, you know. So yeah, I've always been very type A. And so a friend of mine got me into cycling when I was living in LA. And I lived right on the beach in Santa Monica, where there's this great bike path in the sand that goes for down and push it as hard as I could. I would go all the way to one end of the bike path and back and then back home. And I'd set my little timer when doing this. Huffing and puffing, red face. Yeah, just red face huffing it, but like

Starting point is 00:20:34 just pushing it as hard as I can. Every single thrust of the leg just puff. Of course, you know, that made me quite fun if somebody was in my way on the bike path. Sure. That guy's got places to go. But I noticed it was always 43 minutes. I mean, you know, if you know Santa Monica, California, you know the weather is about exactly the same all year round. So unless it was a surprisingly windy day, it was always 43 minutes is what it took me to go as fast as I could on that bike path. But I noticed that over time, I was starting to feel less psyched about going out on the bike path. Because just mentally, when I would think of it, it would feel

Starting point is 00:21:13 like pain and hard work. It sounds like pain and hard work. Yeah, I mean, it was. But you know, I guess at first that was okay. And after a while, I just felt like, I don't know, riding a bike, why don't I just hang out? So then I said, you know, that's not cool for me to start to associate negative stuff with going on the bike ride. Why don't I just chill for once? Like, I'm just going to go on the same bike ride, but just, you know, I'm not going to be a complete snail, but I'll go at like half of my normal pace. So, yeah, I got on my bike and it was just pleasant. I just went on the same bike ride, but I was more like standing up. And I just noticed that I was looking around more.

Starting point is 00:21:51 And I looked out in the ocean. I noticed that day there were these dolphins jumping in the ocean. And I went down to Marina Del Rey to my turnaround point. And, oh no, actually it was when the breakers at Marina Del Rey, there was a penguin that was flying above me. I was like, no way. I looked up, I was like, hey, a penguin. And he shit in my mouth. Was it a penguin or a pelican? Oh, sorry, pelican.

Starting point is 00:22:18 Yes, a flying penguin above my head. That would be more amazing. I was like, what did you take before your ride? So you had a pelican shit in your mouth. That would be more amazing. I was like, what did you take before your ride? So you had a pelican shit in your mouth. That's incredible accuracy. Was that from how far away was it? Like 20 feet up. Wow.

Starting point is 00:22:34 I don't know if he was accurate or I was. I had such a nice time. It was just purely pleasant. There was no red face. There was no huffing and puffing. I was just cycling. It was nice. When I got back to my usual stopping place, I looked at my watch and it said 45 minutes. And I was like, no way. How the hell could that have been 45 minutes as compared to my usual 43? It's like, there's no way. But yeah, it was right. 45 minutes. And that was like a profound

Starting point is 00:23:07 lesson that I think changed the way I've approached my life ever since. It's because I realized that, I guess, you know, what percentage of that huffing and puffing then we could do the math at whatever, what a 93 point something percent of my huffing and puffing and all that red face and all that stress was only for an extra two minutes. It was basically for nothing. I mean, you know, of course, we're not talking about me competing in something where the huffing and puffing might have been worth it. But for life, I think of all of this optimization and getting the maximum dollar out of everything and the maximum out of every second to the maximum out of every minute. And I think I just take this approach now of going like, or you could just take the lesson,

Starting point is 00:23:54 take most of that lesson and apply it and be effective and be happy. But you don't need to stress about any of this stuff. And so honestly, that's been my approach ever since I do things, but I stop before anything gets stressful. One of the essays that you're best known for is Hell Yeah or No. And this has been extremely important for me to consistently reread or listen to. How did it come about and what is the gist of that? There was a music conference in Australia that I had told my friend I would go with her to. It wasn't even like the conference themselves were really expecting me.

Starting point is 00:24:33 It was my friend Arielle Hyatt is one of the best publicists I know. And she was speaking at that conference and asked if I would come with her as like a co-presenter in her mentor session or something. So I had said yes, like six months before. Yeah, sure, Australia. I'm living in New York City. I'm like, yeah, sure. And then once it came close and it was like time to book the ticket, I was like, I don't really want to go to Australia right now.

Starting point is 00:25:00 I'm busy with other stuff. And it was actually my friend, Amber Rhubarth, who's a brilliant musician. I was on the phone with her and kind of lamenting about this. And she's the one that pointed out, she said, it sounds like, you know, from where you're at, your decision is not between yes and no. You need to figure out whether you're feeling like, fuck, yeah, or no. And I said, yeah, that's really what it comes down to, right? Because the idea is, if you're feeling anything less than like, oh, hell yeah, I would love to do that. Oh my God, that would be amazing.

Starting point is 00:25:39 If you're feeling anything less than that, then just say no. Because most of us say yes to too much stuff. And then we let these little mediocre things fill our lives. And so the problem is, when that occasional big, oh my god, hell yeah thing comes along, you don't have enough time to give it the attention that you should. Because you've said yes to too much other little half-ass kind of stuff, right? So once I started applying this, my life just opened up because it just meant I just said no, no, no, no, no to almost everything. But then when the occasional thing came up that I was really like, you know what? That would be awesome. Then suddenly I had all the time in the world. And you know, people say this, I'm sure, you know,, that would be awesome. Then suddenly, I had all the time in the world.

Starting point is 00:26:25 And, you know, people say this, I'm sure, you know, every time people contact you, every time people contact me, they say, you know, look, I know you must be incredibly busy. And I always think like, no, I'm not. Because I'm in control of my time. I'm on top of it. Busy, to me, seems to imply like out of control. You know, like, oh my God, I'm so busy.

Starting point is 00:26:51 I don't have any time for this shit. To me, that sounds like a person who's got no control of their life. Yeah, no control and unclear priorities. Yes, exactly. So you asked how it's applying in my life that still just on the little tiny day-to-day level, even personal things, God, even people you meet, even, you know, as I'm dating, you have to do the hell yeah or no approach or people ask you to go to events or God, even, you know, even people asking to do a phone call or anything. I think, you know, am I really excited about that?

Starting point is 00:27:22 And, you know, almost every time the answer's no. So I say no to almost everything. And then yeah, occasionally something will come up. Even a little surprise will be dropped in my lap. Like this thing that happened just two months ago called the Now Now Now project, which we don't even really need to talk about. The details don't matter so much, but it was just something that popped up that seemed really interesting and people really wanted. And luckily, because I say no to almost everything, I had the time in my life to make it flourish. So for the last like six weeks, all I did full time, like 12 hours a day was suddenly work on this brand new thing that showed up because I could, you know, so that's to me the lovely result of

Starting point is 00:28:01 taking the hell yeah or no approach to life. So I am reading a section of this blog post that I wrote about you and your, the best email you ever wrote with the Japanese boxing specialist and so on. And one of the paragraphs that I put here for those people interested, it's just the most successful email I ever wrote, but it's everywhere online. And it reads, Stranger Still at its largest, Derek spent roughly four hours on CD Baby every six months. He had systematized everything to run without him. And feel free to correct that if it needs to be corrected. But assuming that's roughly true, what were some of the most important decisions or realizations that made that possible?

Starting point is 00:28:46 I love the timing for when I read 4-Hour Workweek because it was actually just after I had done this complete delegation of everything that it was feeling the pain from everything having to go through me. It was my business, right? 100%, no investors, no nothing. It was me. And so I hired people go through me. It was my business, right? 100%, no investors, no nothing. It was me. And so I hired people to help me. It was all me, me, me. So four years into it, it was growing. It was really taking off.

Starting point is 00:29:14 I had, I don't know, 20 employees, but still almost everything went through me. And it made my day kind of miserable because I'm a real like introverted, focused kind of person. I love to just sit down for 12 hours and do one thing without distraction. You're an INTJ Myers-Briggs. Yep. Are you? I'm a hundred percent INTJ. Yeah. So I hated going to the office and being distracted every five minutes with my employees asking me questions. So that's what I just felt such pain about this,

Starting point is 00:29:46 like, I hate this, that I really literally, man, I booked a flight to Kauai, I believe. And I was going to move to Kauai and not give my employees my phone number and literally move. I don't mean like take a vacation. I mean, like, I am now going to be running or I'm going to be the owner of CD Baby on a little island in Hawaii and you guys just figure out your own damn problems. Because I was just having so much psychic pain about this. But then luckily, with lovely coincidence,

Starting point is 00:30:15 that night that I booked the flight to Hawaii, I watched the movie Vanilla Sky. And in Vanilla Sky, Tom Cruise is like the owner of this big publishing company, but he gets all caught up with these crazy women and gets too overwhelmed with his life and focusing on his own happiness or unhappiness and all that. And pretty soon his company has just wrestled away from him. And I thought, oh, I don't want that to happen. Like, I don't want to just plug my ears, close my eyes, run away and have my company taken away from me. I need to deal with my problems instead of running from them. So I canceled the trip to Hawaii and went into work

Starting point is 00:30:58 the next day and decided to fix this thing. So then next time somebody asked me a question, I gathered everybody around. I said, okay, everybody, Tracy just asked me, you know, Derek, what do we do when a guy on the phone says he wants a refund? You know, I said, okay, everybody stop working. Everybody gather around. Okay. Tracy asked what we do if somebody wants a refund. Here's not only what we do, but here's why. Here's my philosophy. Whenever anybody wants a refund, well, we should always give it to them. And I would just explain not just the what to do, but here's why. Here's my philosophy. Whenever anybody wants a refund, we should always give it to them. And I would just explain not just the what to do, but the why. It was constantly communicating the philosophy to get to the core of it. And I think you mentioned this in back in four hour work week. There's almost nothing that really has to be you. Like you can almost get kind

Starting point is 00:31:41 of AI and figure out how your brain works, how your decision making process works, and just teach it to other people so that other people can do it. And yeah, that's what I did for every single thing that ever came my way. I would gather everybody around, explain the philosophy behind it, why we do things this way, why I'm about to say what I'm about to say. And now here's what I think we should do. Do you understand why? Now, please write it down. But it was also important that I taught it multiple people, not just one and had them write it down. And then the cool thing is,

Starting point is 00:32:11 I wasn't doing the hiring anymore at the company. I had taught other people how to do the hiring. So soon my employees were doing the hiring and then they were teaching new people how to do this thing from the book. And so that really started four years into the company. It was six months of difficult work to really make myself unnecessary. But then my girlfriend at the time decided to go to film school in LA, so decided to follow her down there. So I moved down to LA to be with her, which was a nice symbolic way to let the company

Starting point is 00:32:40 know like, you're on your own. I'm still the owner. And in fact, so there's one little caveat to the thing where you said that I was working on CD Baby for four hours a year or whatever you said. Yeah, four hours, six months. Is that that's how much time I spent doing this stuff I didn't want to be doing, right? The monotony, the bureaucracy stuff that I had reduced down to almost nothing, like a few minutes a week. But what I was doing from 7 a.m. to midnight every single day was programming like the future of CD Baby. And that's just the stuff that I loved doing.

Starting point is 00:33:13 So it was about making my life the way I wanted it to be, working on the stuff that I wanted to be working on and not doing the stuff I didn't. If you could have one billboard anywhere with anything on it, what would it say? My real answer, if I was taking that literally, is that I would

Starting point is 00:33:30 remove all the billboards in the world and ensure that they were never replaced. Have you ever driven through India? Yeah. It's so sad. Well, I haven't driven, but on my way to the Calcutta ER where I spent a week, I was briefly looking out the windows.

Starting point is 00:33:45 Even in these small towns in Kerala, there's almost no space that is left without advertising. So I really admire those places like I think Vermont and Sao Paulo, Brazil that ban billboards. But I know that that wasn't really what you were asking. So my better answer is, I think I would make a billboard that would say, it won't make you happy. And I would place it outside any big shopping mall or car dealer. So ideally, actually, I think, you know what would be a fun project? Is to buy and train thousands of parrots to say, it won't make you happy. It won't make you happy.

Starting point is 00:34:25 And then you let them loose in the shopping malls and super stores around the world. That's my life mission. Anybody with me? Let's do it. What advice would you give your 30 year old self and place us if you would for where you were at 30 and what you're doing? At 30? Well, let's see. I had just started CD Baby at 30. But I think the biggest advice I would give to my younger self, or more like knowledge learned, like, hey, younger self, you should know this now, is that women like sex. Did we know that until I was 40?

Starting point is 00:34:56 If I didn't get that, I think through, you know, like, teenage movies or whatever, we're kind of taught the opposite. That's like, you know, men always want sex and women don't. I don't know why the media portrays it like that. But later I found out that's not true. But I think the more interesting answer is that my advice to my 30-year-old self would be don't be a donkey. What does that mean?

Starting point is 00:35:19 Well, I meet a lot of 30-year-olds that are trying to pursue many different directions at once, but not making progress in any, right? And then, or they get frustrated that the world wants them to pick one thing because they want to do them all. And I get a lot of this frustration, like, but I want to do this and that and this and that. Why do I have to choose? I don't know what to choose. But the problem is, if you're thinking short-term,

Starting point is 00:35:43 then you're acting as if you don't do them all this week that they won't happen but i think the solution is to think long term to realize that you can do one of these things for a few years and then do another one for a few years and then another so what i mean about don't be a donkey is you've probably heard the fable about, I think it's Buridan's donkey? It's a fable about a donkey that is standing halfway in between a pile of hay and a bucket of water. And he just keeps looking left to the hay or right to the water, trying to decide, hay or water, hay or water. He's unable to decide, so he eventually falls over and dies of both hunger and thirst. So the point is that a donkey can't think of the future. If he did, he'd clearly

Starting point is 00:36:31 realize that he could just go first drink the water and then go eat the hay. So my advice to my 30-year-old self is don't be a donkey. You can do everything you want to do. You just need foresight and patience. Right? So say, like, for somebody listening, if you're 30 years old now, and say you have, like, five different things you want to pursue, well, then you can do each one of those for 10 years. And you'll have them all done by the time you're 80.

Starting point is 00:36:59 You're probably going to live to be 80. So it's ridiculous to, I mean, it sounds ridiculous to plan to the age of 80 when you're 30, right? But it's a fact that's probably coming. So you might as well take advantage of it. It's like, use the future. That way you can fully focus on one direction at a time without feeling conflicted or distracted because you know that you'll get to the others in the future. And I think you'd also, just to build on that, I agree. I think most people, and this is not something I've thought up on my own, but they overestimate what they can achieve in a day or a week.

Starting point is 00:37:33 So they have 20 items on their to-do list, but they underestimate what they could achieve in a year or even two years. And the way that, for instance, if you look at a lot of what I've done, much of which ended up being a result of accidental discoveries, but you had the book career, but then you had the angel investing start around 2007, 2008. And I treated that as a two year self-imposed MBA. And it was like, okay, I want to try this and really focus on it for two years. And I'm not going to expect to have any financial return, but just as an MBA, I'm going to sink this amount of cost into it, which was identical to Stanford Graduate School of Business at the time, and assume that the network and relationships and lessons I would learn would be worth that two years. And just viewing them as two-year experiments,

Starting point is 00:38:24 which I did with the TV also, which did not turn out as ideally as I would have liked, although I'm very proud of, you know, it's a very experiment podcast, same thing, right? It wasn't a three-year commitment, but it was also not a one day or one week commitment. It was like, okay, I'm going to do this for at least six episodes. Maybe it takes me six months and then I'll correct course at that point. But yeah, you do. I think a lot of 30 year olds feel pressured or younger or older for that matter to pursue many, many things in parallel when if you were just to tweak that slightly and make them serial, the results would be much better. Yeah. That's a really hard lesson to

Starting point is 00:39:04 learn. We can even say it right now. It's really tough. I even find that now. Yeah. Constant challenge. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront. There is a lot happening in the US and global economies right now. A lot. That's an understatement. Are we in a recession? Is it a bear market? What's going to happen with inflation? So many questions, so few answers. I can't tell the future. Nobody can. But I can tell you about a great place to earn more on your savings, and that's Wealthfront. Wealthfront is an app that helps you save and invest your money. And right now you can earn 5% APY, that's the annual percentage yield, with the Wealthfront

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Starting point is 00:40:30 former editor and publisher of The Whole Earth Review, and best-selling author of books on technology and culture, including Excellent Advice for Living, The Inevitable, What Technology Wants, living the inevitable what technology wants and vanishing asia his three-volume photo book set capturing west central and east asia you can find kevin on twitter and instagram at kevin the number two kelly and on his website kk.org kevin thank you so much for being on the show. It's my honor. And I am endlessly fascinated by all of the varied projects that you constantly have going on. But that leads me to the first question, which is when you meet someone who is not familiar with your background and they ask you the age old, what do you do question, how do you even begin to answer that? What is your stock answer to that? These days, my stock answer is that I package ideas into books and magazines and websites.

Starting point is 00:41:37 And I make ideas interesting and pretty. Well, I like the pretty. We'll come back to the aesthetic aspect. I think that's a really neglected piece of the entire puzzle. You do have, of course, a background. A lot of people are familiar with your background with Wired, but perhaps you could give folks a bit of background on yourself. And is it true that you dropped out of college after one year? Yeah, I'm a college dropout. And actually, my one regret in life is that one year that I came. Oh, no kidding no kidding i wish i had just even skipped that but i i do understand how college can be useful to people and i've but for me it was just not the right thing and i went to asia instead and i like to

Starting point is 00:42:18 tell myself that i gave my own self a phd in east asian studies by traveling around and photographing very remote parts of Asia at a time when it was in a transition from the ancient world to the modern world. And I did many other things as well. And for me, it was a very formative time because I did enough things that when I finally got my first real job at the age of 35. Wow. Which job was that? I worked for a nonprofit at $10 an hour, which was the whole worth catalog, which had been kind of a lifelong dream. If I said, if I'm going to have a job, that's the job I want. It took me a long time to kind of get it. But in between that,

Starting point is 00:43:03 I did many things, including starting businesses and selling businesses and doing other kinds of things, more adventures. And I highly recommend it. You know, I got involved in starting Wired and running Wired for a while, and I hired a lot of people who were coming right out of college. They were interns, and they would do the intern thing and then they were good and we would hire them, which meant that basically, you know, after 10 years, whatever it was,

Starting point is 00:43:29 they were, this was their first and only job. And I kept telling them, why are you here? What are you doing? You should be fooling around, wasting time, trying something crazy. Why are you working a real job? I don't understand it. And I just really, I really recommend Slack.

Starting point is 00:43:49 I'm a big believer in this thing of kind of doing something that's not productive. You know, productive is for your middle ages. When you're young, you want to be prolific and make and do things, but you don't want to measure them in terms of productivity. You want to measure them in terms of extreme performance. You want to measure them in kind of extreme satisfaction. It's a time to kind of try stuff. And I think- Explore the extremes.

Starting point is 00:44:21 Exactly. Explore the possibilities. And there are so many possibilities and there's more every day. And it's called premature optimization. You really want to use this time to continue to do things. And by the way, premature optimization is a problem of success too. It's not just the problem of the young. It's the problem of the successful more than even of the young.

Starting point is 00:44:40 But we'll get to that. That might turn into a therapy session for me at this precise moment in time, in fact. But when you are exploring that slack, I would imagine many people feel pressured, whether it's internal pressure or societal familial pressure to get a real job, to support themselves. And there, a lot of the decisions are made out of fear. They, they worry about being out on the streets or it's a nebulous terror or anxiety. How did you support yourself, for instance, while you were traveling through Asia when you left school? I totally understand this anxiety and fear and stuff. But here's the thing. I think one of the many kind of life skills that you want to actually learn at a fairly young age is the skill of being

Starting point is 00:45:22 like ultra thrifty, minimal, kind of this little wisp that is traveling through time in the sense of learning how little you actually need to live, not just in kind of survival mode, but it kind of, you know, in a contented mode. And I learned that pretty early by backpacking and doing other things. And especially in Asia was I could be very happy with very, very little. And go onto websites and stuff and look at sort of like the minimum amount of stuff, food, say, that you need to live, your basic protein and carbohydrates and vitamins, and how much actually, if you bought them in bulk, how much it would cost. I mean, you build your own

Starting point is 00:46:02 house, live in a shelter, a tiny house, you don't need very much. And I think trying that out, building your house on the pond like Thoreau, who's a hero of mine in high school, is not just a simple exercise, it's a profound exercise because it allows you to get over the anxiety. Even if you aren't living like that, you know that if the worst came to worst, you could keep going at a very low rate and be content. And so that gives you the sort of confidence to take a risk because you say, what's the worst that could happen? Well, the worst that could happen is that I'd have a backpack and a sleeping bag and I'd be eating oatmeal and whatever, you know, and I'd be fine. And I think if you do that once or twice, you don't necessarily have to live like that, but knowing that you can be content is tremendously empowering. That's basically what I did. It was, you know, living

Starting point is 00:46:56 in Asia where the people around me had less than I did and they were pretty content. You realize, oh my gosh, I don't really need very much to be happy. And did you save up money beforehand with odd jobs or did you do odd jobs while on the road, a bit of both? I did odd jobs before I left. I was traveling in Asia at a time when the price differential was so great that it actually made sense for me to fly back on a charter flight to the U.S. and work for four or five months. And I worked basically odd jobs. I worked from working in a warehouse, packaging athletic shoes, working in a kind of technical sense of a, it's really just hard to describe, but it was kind of a photography related job where we were reducing printed circuit boards down to little sizes to be shipped off to be printed. And driving cars to whatever else I could find. And that, at that time, made more money.

Starting point is 00:48:00 I could live off of, I could live off probably two years from those couple months of work. So I didn't really work while I was traveling until I got to Iran in the late 70s. And there, there was a very high paying job, which was teaching English to the Iranian pilots who worked for the Shah. But I had sworn there was never going to teach English. So I actually got a job in Bella hot helicopter who was teaching English to the pilots, but my job was running a little newsletter for the American community there. And I worked there until I was thrown out by the coup. That was another story. Why did that? Now, just a couple of comments. So number one, for those people listening who are saying to themselves, already perhaps creating reasons why they can't do what you did now

Starting point is 00:48:49 due to different economic climate or whatnot, it is entirely possible to replicate what you did. You just have to choose your locations wisely for that type of differential. Absolutely. And I should also just mention to people that part of the reason I'm so attracted to Stoic philosophy, whether that be Seneca or Marcus Aurelius, is exactly because of the practice of poverty. Not because you want to be poor, but so that you recognize not only that you can subsist, but then you can potentially be content or even in some cases be more content with a bare minimum. So for people who are more interested in that, I highly recommend a lot of the Stoic writings,

Starting point is 00:49:27 and you can search for those on my blog and elsewhere. Let me just add to that, there's actually a New Age version of that that was sort of popular a generation ago, and the search term there is volunteer simplicity. Volunteer simplicity. Right, and so the idea is poverty is terrible when it's mandatory, when you have no

Starting point is 00:49:45 choice, but voluntary version of that is very, very powerful. And I think attaching names sometimes to things, it makes it more legitimate, but imagine yourself practicing voluntary simplicity. And that I think is part of that Stoic philosophy, but there was a whole kind of a movement. A lot of the hippie dropouts were kind of practicing a similar thing. And there was a whole kind of a movement. A lot of the hippie dropouts were kind of practicing a similar thing. And there was, you know, a whole best practices that resolved around that. You can make up your own, but I think it's to me, an essential skill that life skill that people should acquire. And when you go backpacking and stuff like that, that's part of it. That's the beginnings of trying to understand what it is that you need to live as a, you know, as a being. And you can fill that out in any way

Starting point is 00:50:30 you want, but that's a good way to experiment. Now, you have become certainly a world-class packager of ideas, but also at synthesizing and expressing these ideas. I love your writing. I've consumed vast quantities of it. In fact, I'm here right now on Long Island where I grew up and I used to sneak into my parents' shed to read old editions of the Whole Earth Catalog for inspiration. It was the, I suppose, the equivalent of my internet at the time. And from that all the way to 1,000 True Fans, which of course, you know, I sort of shout from the rooftops for people to read. How did you develop that skill of writing and communicating? A lot of people associate that with schooling, but I don't recall myself having a lot of ideas. There were a lot of other people and kids in my high school

Starting point is 00:51:28 that I was very impressed with because they seemed to know what they thought and were very glib and articulate. And I wasn't. I was a little bit more visual in that sense. I was trying to decide whether to go to art school or to MIT because I was really interested in science. So I set off to Asia as a photographer.

Starting point is 00:51:47 So it was basically no words at all. It was just images. And as I was traveling and seeing these amazing things, I mean, again, I want to emphasize that this was sort of a, for me, I grew up in New Jersey. I never left New Jersey. We never took vacations. It's hard to describe how parochial New Jersey was back in the 1960s. I never ate Chinese food. I never had,

Starting point is 00:52:13 I mean, I never saw Chinese. It was like, it was a different world. And then I was thrown into Asia and it was like, oh my gosh, everything I knew was wrong. And so that education was extremely, extremely powerful. And I think that that gave me something to say. And I started writing letters home and I tried to describe what I was seeing. And so I had a reason to try to communicate. And that was the beginning of it. But even even then i don't think i really had much to say it wasn't really until the internet came along and i had a chance to go on to one of the first online communities in the early 80s and for some reason the early 80s that is that is definitely yeah it was early days yeah in 1981 and so these were

Starting point is 00:53:08 private it wasn't the kind of wide open internet these were a little experimental the fact it was new jersey institute of technology in ructors that had this experimental online community that i got invited on and we can talk about how that happened but that was it was just luck and a friend and i found that there was something about the direct attempt to just communicate with someone else in real time you know just just sending them a message or something that crystallized my thinking is how did it crystallize your thinking just not to interrupt but was it the immediate feedback loop it was the idea that they have since teachers have since done a lot of studies where they had kids write an essay on something, an assignment, and then they would also be instructed

Starting point is 00:53:51 to write some email to a friend or something. And then they would grade both of the compositions and they would find that inevitably the email that the kids were writing was much better writing. Because when you're trying to write a composition, there's all these, you know, we have all these attitudes or expectations or there's this kind of a writerly sense. There's all this other garbage and luggage and baggage on top of that.

Starting point is 00:54:19 But when we're just trying to send the email, we're directly trying to communicate something. We're not fooling around. We're not trying to make it... Literary're just, we're directly trying to communicate something. We're not fooling around. We're not trying to be, make it literary, literary, all that. We're just direct stuff. And so the writing there was always much more direct and concrete. Okay. That's the, that's the usual thing that happens when you're trying to write these, you're not concrete enough, but when your email is like all concrete. And so it was getting out of the whole kind of writerly stuff and just pure concrete communication that really made it for me.

Starting point is 00:54:45 And what I discovered, which is what many writers discover, is that I write in order to think. It was like, I think I have an idea. But when I begin to write it, I realize I have no idea. And I don't actually know what I think until I try to write it. So writing is a way for me to define out what I think. It's like, I don't have any ideas. That's true. But when I write, I get the ideas. And that was the revelation. And so by being forced to communicate online and there was none of this

Starting point is 00:55:18 expectation, it was just like, okay, just write an email. I can do that. I don't have to write an essay. I don't have to write something nice. I'm just going to write 140 characters. I can do that. I don't have to write an essay. I don't have to write something nice. I'm just going to write 140 characters. I can do that. But while I was doing that, I had an idea that I didn't have before. And so it was like, oh my gosh, this is a idea generation machine. It's by writing. It's not that I have these ideas and I'm going to write them down. No, no, I don't even have them until I write. I'm so glad you brought that up because I was just recently, a few things related to that. I was reading an interview with Kurt Vonnegut, who's one of my favorite authors. For people who aren't familiar, check out Cat's Cradle perhaps as a starting point. Hilarious guy. And he, at various points in his career, taught writing to make ends meet. And he would, number one, not look for good

Starting point is 00:56:00 writers. He would look for people who are passionate about specific things. So that's something I want to reiterate to people who don't feel writerly is that go out and have the experiences and find the subjects, the things that excite you. And as long as you're true to your voice, which is related to the email point, I threw out my first two drafts of, I'd say, a third of the four-hour workweek because they were either too pompous and Ivy League sounding, way, way, way too much. I mean, horrible. Or too slapstick because I felt like I had to go to the other extreme. And then I sat down and I wrote as if I were composing an email to a friend after two glasses of wine. And that's how I found my voice, so to speak. As a side note, why, and I think this might be related, but why did you promise yourself not to teach English? I'm so curious because that can be very lucrative. It's readily available. When you were traveling,ly if you want to support yourself because it is a very desirable skill, we call it for the moment.

Starting point is 00:57:09 I think the reason why was I felt that I didn't feel like I was a very good teacher. And I also felt that it was maybe a little easy. But I think the main reason was that I was having trouble imagining myself enjoying it. And I just felt that I would rather trouble imagining myself enjoying it, you know, and I just felt that I would rather try to find something else. Now, I think I did one time in Taiwan, which as you know, has a whole cram school system. I think a friend, I substituted for a friend once. And I think that maybe confirmed to me that idea that while it was, there was sort of like, you know, all I have to do is just talk. I mean, there's really not much

Starting point is 00:57:51 skill involved at all. It was fun, but I didn't feel like I was, I don't know. I didn't feel like I was maybe adding value or something. So I came away thinking, you know, I guess I could do this for money, but I'm not going to be happy. I think it was just the personality thing. I don't think of myself as a teacher. I don't do many workshops or classes. So I think a different person might thoroughly enjoy it. And I know they do, and they have a great time doing it. For me, it was just not for me. No big deal. I think this is an important thing is that, you know, it takes a long time to kind of figure out what you're good for. And part of where I'm at right now and where I got eventually was really trying to spend time on doing things that only I could do. And even when I could do something well, but someone else could do it. I would try and let that go. That's a discipline that I'm

Starting point is 00:58:45 still working on, which is not just things that I'm good at, but things that only I'm good at. So that was something I was sort of trying to start early on, which is like, you know, a lot of other people can do this and they're happy doing it. So I don't want to go somewhere where it requires more of me to do, and then I'll be happier and they'll be happier. abandon, what to say no to, to refine my focus so I can really focus on the intersection of my unique capability or capabilities, whatever that is, and a need of some type. How did you figure that out? And maybe we could approach it from a different direction. What do you feel is your skill set or your unique skill? And how did you figure that out? Well, let me tell you the story of how this

Starting point is 00:59:46 realization actually came to me in a kind of a very concrete way, which while I was editing Wired Magazine. And so part of what Wired Magazine is about is that we would come up with ideas and make assignments to writers. Now, some of the articles in Wired would come from the writers themselves. They would approach us and say, I have an idea. But a lot of the articles in Wired would come from the writers themselves. They would approach us and say, I have an idea. But a lot of the articles would be assigned from editors. We'd have editorial meetings where we'd kind of imagine this great article, and then we'd go and try and find someone to write it. And in that conversation of trying to persuade writers to write an idea that I had, they would go through kind of a very typical sequence

Starting point is 01:00:25 where, you know, I would have this great idea, oh, this is a great idea, and then I would try to persuade, like, one writer, two writers, three writers, and they would just, you know, they didn't think it was a very good idea. They didn't like it. They didn't want to do it, whatever it was.

Starting point is 01:00:37 And then I'd kind of forget about it, but then, like, you know, six months later, I would come back and say, you know, that was such a great idea. I really think we should do that. And I would go again for another round of trying to persuade people. And then I'd get no takers.

Starting point is 01:00:50 And then I'd go, oh, forget about that. It must have been a bad idea. But then like six months later or a year later, it might come back, you know, that's still a great idea. Nobody has done that. And then I would realize, oh my gosh, I need to do that. It's like, I'm the only one who can see this. I've tried to give it away.

Starting point is 01:01:07 I have tried really hard to give it away. I've tried to kill it. It just keeps on coming back. Coming back. And it's like, okay. And then I would do it and there'd be one of my best pieces. And so it was this idea of like, so, so I became really an important proponent of trying to give things away first. Tell everybody what you're doing.

Starting point is 01:01:30 Basically you try to give these ideas away and people are happy because they love great ideas and you can't do it it's a great idea you should do it and so um i try to give everything away first and then i try to kill everything it's like no that's a bad idea and then it's the ones that keep coming back that i can't kill and I can't give away that I think, hmm, maybe that's the one I'm supposed to do because no one else is going to do it. I mean, I've been actively trying to get, and then of course, if someone else is doing it, you should see someone else competing or trying to do it. It's like, oh yeah, you go ahead, do it. I'm not going to race against you.

Starting point is 01:02:00 That's crazy because there's two of us, you know, you do it. And so that generosity is actually part of this your vetting process exactly and so that's when i kind of realized it but that doesn't answer the question of well how do you find out what it is and all i can say is you know and i don't want to be flip but all i can say is it's going to take all your life to figure that out right that is fact here's what it Figuring out is what your life is about. I mean, that's what life is for. Life is to figure it out. And then, so every part of your life, every day is actually this attempt to figure this out. And you'll have different answers as you go

Starting point is 01:02:41 along. And sometimes there may be directions in that, but that's basically what it is. And you were very transparent about confessing this, but I have to tell you that even from hanging around a lot of very accomplished people, a lot of successful people that we would be on the covers of magazines, they also go through exactly the same questioning. I mean, no matter how big of a billion-dollar company they have,

Starting point is 01:03:06 they come up to the same thing. Well, you know, what's my role in all this? Why am I here? What am I useful? What am I doing that nobody else can? It's a continuous, in fact, as we'll come back to, being successful makes that even more difficult. Why is that? Because of what I call the creator's dilemma,

Starting point is 01:03:24 which is very much the same thing as the innovator's dilemma which is that it's a true dilemma in fact in the sense that there's no right answer but the question is is sort of is it better to optimize your strengths or to invest into the unknown into places places where you're weak. Or places you haven't explored. Yeah. Any accountant in any business will tell you that it absolutely makes more sense to take your dollar. You'll get a higher return by investing into what you're good at already, whatever it is.

Starting point is 01:04:02 This is the pursuit of excellence. This is Tom Peters and the whole entire movement, which is you move uphill, you keep optimizing what you know. And that by far is the sanest, the most reasonable, the smartest thing to do. But when you have a very fast changing landscape, like we live in right now,

Starting point is 01:04:23 you get stuck on a local optima. You get stuck. And the problem is that the only way you can get to a higher, more bit place is you actually have to go down. You actually have to head into a place where you are less optimal. You have no expertise. There's very low margins. There's low profits.

Starting point is 01:04:46 You look foolish. There have no expertise. There's very low margins. There's low profits. You look foolish. There'll be failures. And if you've been following a line of success, that is very, very difficult to do. It's very difficult for an organization. It's almost literally almost impossible for an organization who's been excellent and successful to do. It really is. So- Which presents a lot of opportunity for the... That's why the startups all start there. The reason why startups start is because they're operating in an environment that no sane big corporation would want to be in.

Starting point is 01:05:18 It's a market. It's low margins, low profitability, unproven, high failure. I mean, it's like, who wants to operate there? Nobody. The only reason why startups operate is they have no choice. Right.

Starting point is 01:05:30 Yeah, it's the gift of few options, right? Right, exactly. So in terms of success binding, I think you have to be unsuccessful. Who is successful wants to be unsuccessful. It's very, very hard to let go of that success. And so that's one of the things that works against someone really continuing on this life journey of finding out what they're really good at. Because here's the thing is that successful companies and successful people generally try to solve problems with money.

Starting point is 01:06:01 You buy solutions. And we all know that money is not the full answer for innovation. Basically, if you could purchase innovations, all the big companies would just purchase them. It's the fact that these innovations often have to be found out without money, through other means. Again, that's the advantage to the startup. And it's a disadvantage to the successful companies because they got money and they just want to buy solutions. But most of these solutions you can't buy. You have to kind of engineer in this very difficult environment of low margins, low success, low profits that no one really wants to be in, but the startups are forced to be in. That's also an advantage, I would think, for beginners or novices compared to experts they have less vested identity less

Starting point is 01:06:46 inertia to have to reverse and back to my suggestion the meeting of why slack and fooling around when you're young is so important because a lot of these innovations and things are found not by trying to solve a problem that can be monetized. It's in exploring this area without money. I mean, money is so overrated. It really- Could you elaborate on that? Because I feel like this is a sermon I need to receive on some level.

Starting point is 01:07:16 There's several things to say about it. One is, obviously, if you're struggling to pay bills and mortgages and stuff, there's a certain amount that's needed. But here's the thing is that accumulating enough money to do things is really a byproduct of other things. It's a kind of a lubricant in a certain sense rather than a goal. And great wealth or extreme wealth is definitely overrated. I've had meals with a dozen billionaires and they're no different i mean their lives lifestyles are no different you don't want to have a billion dollars let me put that way you really don't

Starting point is 01:07:50 there's nothing that you can really do with it that you can't do with a lot of less money let's set that aside but even just wealth itself in this world where there is more and more abundance even the money for, say, middle class is less significant in a certain sense in the sense that maybe there's status, which is really not needed, but the things that you want to do, the things that will make you content,

Starting point is 01:08:17 the things that will satisfy you, the things that will bring you meaning can usually got better than having money. I mean, if you have a lot of time or a lot of money having money i mean if you have a lot of time or a lot of money it's always better to have a lot of time to do something and so if you have a choice between having a lot of friends or a lot of money you definitely wouldn't have a lot of friends and so i think there's a way even in which technological progress that we're having is actually diminishing the role of money. And I want to be clear that I'm talking about money beyond the amount that you need to survive.

Starting point is 01:08:51 But even that reflects back what we were saying earlier, which is probably less than you think it is to survive. And so in a certain sense, most people see money as a means to get these other things, but there are other routes to these other things that are deeper and more constant and more durable and more powerful. So money is this sort of very small, one-dimensional thing that if you kind of focus on that you're trying to attain, you go to it more directly through other means, you'll probably wind up with a more powerful experience or whatever it is that you're after. And it'll be deeper, more renewable than coming at it with money. And so, you know, travel is one of the great examples, which is, you know, many, many people who are working very hard trying to save their money to retire someday to travel. Well, I decided to flip it around and travel when I was really young, when I had zero money. And I had experiences that basically even a billion dollars couldn't have bought. Right.

Starting point is 01:10:01 And it's not an uncommon sight, let me tell you, for young kind of travelers who have very little money to be hanging out doing something. And there will be some very wealthy people on their one week organized tour, looking at these young travelers, just saying, I wish I had more time. Yeah, you see it every, well, I see it almost every time I go traveling. And it reminds me of conversations I've had with Rolf Potts and also his book, Vagabonding, which I just absolutely love. And it was that book and Walden that I took with me traveling when I had my own two year or so walkabout. And he points out in the beginning of Vagabonding that many people subscribe to the belief along the lines of Charlie Sheens in the movie Wall Street

Starting point is 01:10:47 when he's asked what he's going to do when he makes his millions and he says, I'm going to get a motorcycle and ride across China. And Rolf, of course, points out that you could clean toilets in the US and save enough money to ride a motorcycle across China. Exactly. And let me ask you, this is maybe tangentially related, but you mentioned earlier that your middle age, your middle ages, middle ages maybe sounds odd, but in your middle age, that's when you optimize. And I find that horrifying on some level because I am so tired. I just turned 37 last week and I'm really tired

Starting point is 01:11:26 of certain types of optimizing and the incremental slogging of making trains run slightly more efficiently on time. Even though, like you said, from a strictly financial standpoint, the advice that I would receive from many people and have received when I've asked for advice is here are one or two core areas you should focus on to optimize for income. And on the flip side, I'm tempted to approach a kind of not scorched earth, but burned bridges approach where I somehow use creative destruction to force me into another direction to have these new experiences that I crave so much. And you, just for people who aren't aware, I want to give, I remember going to the first ever quantified self meetup. You're part of the Long Now Foundation. You've experimented in so

Starting point is 01:12:14 many different arenas and have looked so far into the future and thought on such grand a scale. I aspire to do more of that. What would be your advice to someone? And I know I have dozens of friends in the same position. They're say in their early or mid thirties in my particular peer group, and they want to explore, but they're feeling pressured to optimize this thing that they've suddenly found their footing with, whatever it is. Maybe they're a venture capitalist, maybe they're in a startup, they feel they should start a new startup, and they want to step out of that slipstream, what would be your advice to those people? First of all, I have to commend your honesty for this. And I will repeat that it is very, very difficult to do. I mean, I think that realization comes to people in middle age and they realize, oh my gosh,

Starting point is 01:13:01 there's a little bit of a routine here and I'm not really happy with that. I think that kind of scorched earth, they're kind of like, you know, just, we'll just set fire to it and we'll walk away. I actually have, I think we probably have a mutual friend. I won't use his name because I don't know how public this is, but, but one of his solutions was the most radical one I've ever heard to force himself was that he gave up US citizenship. Oh, wow. That'll do it. It was like, he was like saying, I just feel so, you know, and it was like, oh my gosh,

Starting point is 01:13:32 that is so radical. And he was telling me about what is involved in that. And it wasn't for tax purposes, because actually before you can do it, the U.S. actually requires that you square up on all taxes. It was like, but that was so radical. And I don't recommend that. He's doing fine, but I'm just saying that's unnecessary. But I think the advice is,

Starting point is 01:13:55 I'll be taking a page from yourself. I don't think it's necessary to, I think you can experiment your way through this. I mean, you can do this incrementally. You can take small steps and do something and then evaluate it test how it's going whether you're getting what you want out of it whether it's working and then you continue in that direction and that's sort of the pattern of people who kind of you have second careers or reinvent themselves you hear that a lot and you can do that in a disciplined,

Starting point is 01:14:29 Tim Ferriss way. I don't think that it requires you to kind of walk out and leave a burning pile behind. I think it's something that you're going to, I'm a big believer in doing things deliberately. And I think that you begin by looking at those areas that you get satisfaction out of and those areas where I often find that people kind of retreat back to kind of things that they did as kids and really, really miss, you know, whether it's art or other things. And the truth is that you're not really going to be able to escape all the other things you have going. And that's a good thing because that is part of you and part of what you do well. So you'll probably just bend in a certain direction. And I think the one bit of advice is that you can't, it's not going to happen overnight.

Starting point is 01:15:09 It's going to be, it took you 37 years to get where you are. It may take you another 30 years to get where you want to go. And I don't think you should feel impatient. Maybe that's the word I'm saying, is that I don't think you should imagine that you'll have another hat on with a new label next year. Just to maybe redirect that, and this may or may not be accurate, but in the process of researching for this conversation, which is sort of an odd exercise in and of itself,

Starting point is 01:15:39 given how much time we've spent together. But I came across in Wikipedia mention of your experience in Jerusalem and deciding to live as though you only had six months left. And I want to touch on that. But one of the questions that came to my mind when I turned 37 last week is if I knew I were going to die at age 40, what would I do to have the greatest impact on the greatest number of people? And so I find that constraint helpful. And I worry that if I aim at not being impatient in that way, that I won't, because I could get hit by a bus, that I won't do what I'm capable of doing. Maybe you could talk about, and I had no idea, I'm not sure if you would self-describe yourself as a devout Christian, but that's certainly written here. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that experience. Yeah, one thing I would, of course, warn people is that not everything on Wikipedia is correct.

Starting point is 01:16:37 No, that's why I'm bringing it up. But it's true that I got this assignment in Jerusalem, which, by the way, if you want to hear the full version of it, listen to one of the very first This American Lives, which I, on Ira Glass, and I told the story for the very first time. And it's a story about how I got this assignment to live as if I was going to die in six months, even though I was like perfectly healthy and I knew that it was very improbable. But I decided to take the assignment seriously and that's that's what I did and my answer kind of surprised me because I thought that I would kind of have this sort of mad high-risk fling you know do all these things but actually what I wanted to do was to visit my brothers and sisters go back to my parents help out but then my mom was not well at the time but that lasted for three months before I decided I needed to do something big. So I actually rode my bicycle across the U.S. from San Francisco to New York,

Starting point is 01:17:32 where I was going, and New Jersey, where I was going to basically die. And I kept a journal of that. And that question was something that I keep asking myself now. I actually have a countdown clock that Matt Groening at Futurama was inspired and they did a little episode on Futurama about. And what I did was I took the actuarial tables for the estimated age of my death

Starting point is 01:17:57 for someone born when I was born, and I worked back the number of days. And I have that showing on my computer, how many days. And I tell you, nothing concentrates your time like knowing how many days you have left. Now, of course, I'm likely, again, to live more than that. I'm in good health, et cetera. But nonetheless, there is something that really, you know, I have 6,000 something days. It's not very many days to do all the things I want to do.

Starting point is 01:18:30 And so I think your exercise is really fantastic and commendable. And there's two questions. What would you do if you had six months to live? And what would you do if you had a billion dollars? And interestingly, it's the convergence of those two questions. Because it turns out that you probably don't need a billion dollars to do whatever it is that you're going to do in six months. Right. And so I think you're asking the right question. And the way I answer it is you want to keep asking yourself that question every six months and really try to answer it.

Starting point is 01:19:00 And I try to do that on a kind of a day-by-day basis. I learned something from my friend Stuart Brand, who organized his remaining days around five-year increments. He says any great idea that's significant, that's worth doing for him, will last about five years from the time he thinks of it to the time he stopped thinking about it and if you think of it in terms of five year projects you can count those off on you know a couple hands for even if you're young and so the sense of mortality of understanding that it's not just old people who don't have very many you know you're 20 years old you don't have that many five-year projects to do and so i think it is that's maybe part of the the philosophy of thinking about our

Starting point is 01:19:47 time and whether, even if you believe in the extension of life, longevity, living to 120, you still have to think in these terms of what are you going to do if you, because you don't know if you'll live to be 120. What are you going to do if you have a year and what would you do with a billion dollars? And what's the intersection of those two? Does religion play a large part in your life right now? In a certain sense, not in a kind of ritualistic sense. I just wrote a book called What Technology Wants. Excellent book. I highly recommend it.

Starting point is 01:20:20 It was a theory of technology, and I was trying to put technology in the context of the cosmos. So I think what religion gives me is permission to think about cosmic questions. about angels and robots. And the intention there was to fictionalize the idea that robots would some days have souls, but these souls would be coming from angels. And so there was this intersection of these two kind of possible worlds of conscious robots who were ensouled by angels. And the reason why this was sort of interesting

Starting point is 01:21:01 was that the idea was that the angels that ensoul us have been trained. They've been given moral guidance. But if you don't give the spirit some kind of moral guidance, then they can wreak havoc. And so it was this idea that when we make robots, we're actually going to have to train them to be ethical. You just can't make a free being and not train it so it was a way to rehearse and think about some of the consequences of technology today so i think my religion gives me permission to ask those questions without embarrassment to say what is the general direction of the arc of evolution what is it pointed somewhere how does technology fit into the greater cosmos what

Starting point is 01:21:48 does it mean what drives it why is there more of it is this a good thing so i think having a kind of i consider this kind of an other view so i have a other view that i'm sympathetic to other world views i don't necessarily have to believe all the other world views but i get the I have a other view that I'm sympathetic to other worldviews. I don't necessarily have to believe all the other worldviews, but I get the idea that if you have another worldview, that can be very helpful in seeing other worldviews. So people have a worldview even though they don't know it, but I have a worldview and I know that I have a worldview.

Starting point is 01:22:24 I mean, really, everybody has a religious or a spiritual orientation. Even if they're atheists, they still have one. And so there are some assumptions that are at the basis of it. And I like to question assumptions,

Starting point is 01:22:39 including my own assumptions. Two things. I can't resist asking, and we can spend as much or as little time on this as you'd like, but recently grappling with a lot of these issues that I've been grappling with, some of which are existential, some of which are related to death, limited time on the planet, I've become deeply fascinated by indigenous use of plant medicine. And I've had some very transformative experiences that are difficult to put into words because they make you sound like a complete crazy person.

Starting point is 01:23:13 But yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a somethingness that is very difficult to communicate without sounding like you should be institutionalized. What do you think the role for people who aspire to do the greatest good in the world, what is the role of that type of direct experience? And is it possible to benefit from that type of, for lack of a better descriptor, spiritual experience without a religious framework around it? Yeah, yeah, no, it's a really good question. So my little personal story there, of course, is I was basically, I was basically a hippie. I worked for the hippie catalog, the Horace catalog, which was about hippies living in San Francisco. And all my friends

Starting point is 01:23:53 were drug-taking hippies, but I, for some reason, never did. I just had no appetite or inclination at all for ever taking any drugs or smoking pot or anything. And when I was 50 years old, I decided that I would like to take LSD sacramentally on my 50th birthday. And I did. And I arranged with, I had a guide and I had an appropriate setting and I had some acid that came from a source that was extremely reliable. And it was a sacrament and it was a very profound sacrament. And I think, yeah, you can use drugs and work racially and for entertainment.

Starting point is 01:24:35 And I think that can go somewhere, but I think there's another powerful use for it, which is kind of what you're talking about, which is to elevate one outside of yourself, to lose yourself, to be in contact with other things beyond your ego. And I think it can be done. And I think, unfortunately, because of the illegal status that we've had for a long time, the rituals and the practice around that have not had a chance to be developed or communicated. Actually trying to find this information was extremely hard.

Starting point is 01:25:05 There's one book that I did find eventually from a guy who was doing LSD experiments while they were still legal and was able to accumulate enough wisdom about it that that would be the one place I would point people to, but I think it is important that the context and expectations and the setting, they call it, that revolves around it is very important. And I do believe that these can be extremely profound and powerful experiences for good. They can remain long after, and most people who understand this and don't abuse it understand that, in fact, that experience was not in the pill. It was not in the chemical. It was a real experience. And so, unfortunately, there is so much other stuff circulating around the use of these drugs and the misuse of them that that kind of information is often very, very difficult to find. But I do think maybe we're seeing a moment now in the U.S.

Starting point is 01:26:08 where the second prohibition is being undone and at least pot will become legal and maybe we can return to revitalizing the traditions and the necessary settings around that and expectation that not just pot or LSD, but even other synthetic drugs can be extremely powerful in removing the ordinary guards that we have. I mean, we have an ego on purpose. We have all these things to keep us sane in a day-to-day functional standpoint. Right. And so if you remove it completely, you can become dysfunctional. keep us sane in a day-to-day functional standpoint.

Starting point is 01:26:45 Right. And so if you remove it completely, you can become dysfunctional. But if you remove it deliberately and with great care, you can be opened up. I think there's an expertise there. I think there's a lot of other things that if we have the freedom and the wisdom to not abuse it, I think it can be extremely powerful. Do you recall the title of the book or how people might search for it? Yes. So this is one of the many resources

Starting point is 01:27:09 that I recommend in my book, Cool Tools. And Cool Tools is a big catalog of possibilities. It has about 1,500 different items. A lot of them are kind of like hand tools, you know, pliers and the great cordless drill. But it's much broader than that. And I include things like, what if you wanted to have a psychedelic experience that was transformative? What do you do? And I would recommend this book or, or, I mean, there's lots of other things in it, but the, I don't

Starting point is 01:27:36 actually have the book right in front of me. I should, I think it's called, um, I don't remember. It's okay. In the show notes, we will list it as the right one. And there's also a little tiny book that came from England. It was a cartoon guide that gave kind of a street and unjudgmental view of all the different drugs there were

Starting point is 01:28:00 and what each one kind of did and didn't and what the plus and minuses are without recommending or forbidding them. It just saying this this is what it is that information also believe it or not is really in short supply it's like you know what do you do with this and how does it work and tell me the facts i don't need to hear a lecture either way like well this is great or this is terrible but just tell me what's going on as you know i mean that kind of information sometimes is extremely in short supply. It's very difficult to find information

Starting point is 01:28:27 that isn't politicized, inaccurate, or like you said, so shrouded in either fear or irrational optimism that it's almost intelligible and certainly generally useless. We'll put those books in the show notes for people. I want to come back to one thing you said far, far earlier, and that was related to the pieces that you tried to give away that eventually wouldn't die and came back. Were there any common threads, any patterns in those pieces that you can pick out as being sort of a uniquely Kevin Kelly theme,

Starting point is 01:29:04 if for lack of a better term. Yeah, yeah, yeah. One of the things that I discovered in my six months of trying to live as if I was going to die in six months, because as I was coming closer to that date, which happened to be Halloween, October 31st, it was, I kept cutting off my future.

Starting point is 01:29:21 I mean, I may be like you, I kind of tend to live in the future much more than the past. I'm always imagining, I'm saving like you, I kind of tend to live in the future much more than the past. I'm always imagining, I'm saving this for someday when I'm going to do this. I'm kind of looking forward, I'm going to do this here.

Starting point is 01:29:31 And so I was very much in the future. And then suddenly that future was being cut down day by day. And I was like, and I was thinking like, why am I taking pictures? I'm not taking photographs because I'm not going to be here

Starting point is 01:29:43 in another two months or something. So there was all these things that I'm kind of cutting out. And as I was cutting them out, I had this realization, which was the thing I took away from this thing, which was that I was becoming less human. That to be fully human, we have to have a future. We have to look forward to the future. That is part of us, is looking into the future. We have to look forward to the future. That is part of us, is looking into the future. And so after I came out of that, I kind of embraced that. I was saying, well, you know,

Starting point is 01:30:13 that future forward facing, that's what I do. That's what I want to do. That's what I write about. And in thinking about the future, one of the things that is very hard because the paradox about the future is that there are lots of impossible things that happen all the time. And if someone from the 100 years from now would come back and tell us things, there's a lot of stuff we're just not going to believe. It's just like, that's crazy. Just like if we went back 100 years and told them what was going on now, they would say, that's just not going to happen. I mean, we could even go back 20 years. I could go back 20 years and say, we're going to have like, you know, Google Street Views of all the cities of the world.

Starting point is 01:30:50 And we're going to have, you know, an encyclopedia that's for free that's edited by anybody. You know, it's like they would say, you know, there's no way. And I would tell them, you know, most of it's for free. They were saying, there is no economic model in the world that would allow for that. And there isn't. But here it is. So the dilemma is that any true forecast about the future is going to be dismissed. Any future that is believable now is going to be wrong.

Starting point is 01:31:17 And so you're stuck in this thing of if people believe it is wrong, if they don't believe it, where does it get you? You're dismissed. And so there was this very fine line between saying something that is right on the edge of plausibility and at the same time, right on the edge of having a chance of being true. And what I discovered that was helpful in trying to get away from the kind of assumptions that bind us to just kind of extrapolate was to think laterally, was to go sideways. One thing, just take whatever was everybody knew and say, well, what if that wasn't true? What would be a good example of that or an example?

Starting point is 01:32:00 Like everyone says, okay, Moore's law will continue. Well, what if Moore's law didn't continue? What would that mean? What would happen? And you can, maybe I could say for the audience, but I'll just, even to remind me, Moore's law is, what is it, every 18 months, the size and cost of technology will decrease by 50%, something along those lines.

Starting point is 01:32:19 Well, let's say even more simple. Or no, there's speed involved as well. Right, Moore's law does say that, but let's say something, right now we live in a's speed involved as well. Right. More or less, it does say that. But let's say something. Right now, we live in a world where every year the technology is better and cheaper. What if that wasn't true? Right. Got it.

Starting point is 01:32:32 What if every year, starting a couple of years from now, stuff was better, but more expensive? That's a completely different world. Right. I mean, everyone assumes that things are going to get better and cheaper. Well, what if that wasn't true? So you can take kind of an assumption, again, that's something that no one's really examining. Like, well, one of the things I write about is the fact that we're going to have a population implosion globally, that the global population will drastically reduce in 100 years from now. We'll have less population, far, far, far less than we have right now.

Starting point is 01:33:06 And so... All right, I have to bite at that. Because I've thought a lot about this and the, what do they call it, the Malthusian dilemmas. Is that going to be, do you think, pandemic-related, nuclear weapon-related, all of the above?

Starting point is 01:33:19 None of those. None of those? No. AI coming in the rise of the machines? No. Okay. It of those? No. AI coming in the rise of the machines? Nope. Okay. It's just pure demographics. So if you look at the current trends in fertility rates in all the developed countries, everywhere

Starting point is 01:33:34 except for the US, they're already either below replacement level. So replacement level means that you're just sustaining the population just replaces itself. If it's below, it means that there's getting less and less. So Japan, all these, you know, Europe, they're all below replacement. The U.S. is an exception because only because of immigration. Got it. Where people come in. Otherwise we would be there and this would not be any news to anybody.

Starting point is 01:34:02 But the real news is people would point to developing world, mexico is now aging faster than the u.s china is aging faster because of their one child policy of course japan is this completely they're way underwater completely so even the one exception is sub-sahara africa and there's really kind of debate right now about how fast or whether they're slowing down. But generally, around the world, South America, the rest of Asia, the rate and fertility continues to drop. And here's the thing, is that the demographic transition, that is happening everywhere where people become urban. So every forecast shows the urbanity, the acidification of the population continuing. And I can't think of any counterforce to stop this huge migration at the scale that we're seeing into the city.

Starting point is 01:34:55 And as that happens, the birth rates drop down. And even in places like Singapore or other places where they have taken very, very active countermeasures of cash for having kids. Wow. Daycare forever, bonuses, none of these work in terms of actually trying to raise fertility levels. So you have to understand that to go above replacement level, the average woman has to have 2.1 kids. Well, that means there have to be tons and tons of women who have three or four kids to make up for those.

Starting point is 01:35:31 How many people do you know with that many kids living in cities? And there's just not enough of them. So, and this is a projection. Some of these are UN projections. They have three, they have a low, high, and medium. And the low one is not good news because there's not a large cultural counterforce for women to have three, a lot, you know, a very high percentage of the population to have three or four kids in a modern world. And that's why the population continues to decrease every year. What type of, this is perhaps a tangent, but one of the big debates in my head right now is to marry or not to marry, to have kids or not to have kids.

Starting point is 01:36:15 I never thought those would even be questions in my mind and yet here I am and now they are. What are your thoughts on having children? What type of people, this is very broad, but should have children or shouldn't have children, whichever way of answering is easier, or how to even think about that question? I think people who are privileged, of which you are, should have children because you can bestow so many privileges and opportunities to your children. And if the world is to be populated, why not populate it with children

Starting point is 01:36:47 who have as many opportunities as possible? I also say from my own experience of growing up one of many kids and having, well, I have three kids. One of my other regrets in life is not having a fourth, but we were just, we started a little bit too late

Starting point is 01:37:00 and we were unable to have a fourth, but all my kids wished that we had a fourth too. And I would say that it's a gift to were unable to have a fourth, but all my kids wished that we had a fourth too. And I would say that it's a gift to your kids to have more than one. And I know that from hanging out in China where so many kids grew up owning children and this really, really missed that. There is a total gift of the siblings and brothers to each other that is really very profound and there is also i know from my friends who have had lots of kids that there is a tremendous amount of teaching from the the older to the younger and that's a lot of what they learn and that the

Starting point is 01:37:40 curve of the amount of energy that you have to expend actually after three it doesn't really matter right in terms of the parents got it i have one friend who has nine kids i have another friend who has seven wow and basically how do they do that well the older kids were helping to parent the younger kids that's the only way that really works but that's actually basically they have you know they have five parents instead of having two parents. Right. It's very traditional in a way. I mean, traditional meaning reaching back thousands or tens of thousands of years.

Starting point is 01:38:10 It is. Of course, in the old days, may have had 12 born, but they rarely had 12 kids survive. Right. It's like the 1800s kind of on and off. I hang out with the Amish a lot and they still have these very large families

Starting point is 01:38:24 and they all survive. So they have with the Amish a lot, and they still have these very large families, and they all survive. So they have kind of, in some senses, sort of an unnatural expansion. And one of my predictions, again, going back to kind of like the assumptions, one of my predictions is that, you know, in America, in 100 years from now,

Starting point is 01:38:39 whatever it is, it'll be, the complete countryside is run by the Amish. The Amish take over the entire countryside because they never sell land. They have like eight kids. And then there are all these people living in the cities and it's like, everybody's happy. You know, you drive out to the Amish lands and it's just fantastic. They're very happy, you know, doing their thing and running the farms. And so I've been predicting for years that the Amish would come and start buying upstate New York. And that's exactly what they're doing right now. Why do you spend so much time with the Amish? This is news to me, but very interesting.

Starting point is 01:39:06 And how long has that been going on? And does your beard have anything? Is there any relation to the Amish? I had the beard before my interest in the Amish. I can show you some pictures when I was 19 years old. So those who don't know, I have an Amish beard, which means I have a beard without a mustache. The reason why the Amish don't have mustaches

Starting point is 01:39:22 is it was at the time that they were kind of adopting their dress code, the mustache was all military men had mustaches. And so they were anti-military. They refused to serve in the armies. They don't even vote. So it was their kind of rejection

Starting point is 01:39:37 of the military by shaving off their mustache. I hang out with the Amish because their adoption of technology is like, seems to us totally crazy. Because first of all, they're not Luddites. They're complete hackers. They love hacking technology.

Starting point is 01:39:53 They have something called Amish electricity, which is basically pneumatics. A lot of these farms have a big diesel. They don't have electricity, but they have a big diesel generator in the barn that pumps up this compressor that sends high pressure air tubes down tubing into their barn, into the homes. And so they have converted like their sewing machine and washing machine and stuff to pneumatic. Okay. Seems like a bit of a sidestep of the word of God. Exactly. So they'll have like, they'll haveuggies and horse-drawn farm implements, and the horses will be pulling this diesel-generated combine.

Starting point is 01:40:29 And you're thinking, what are they doing? Okay, right? But in fact, if you look at our own lives, and I've done this many times, I can ask you, Tim, or you can ask me, there'll be some weird thing. Like, we don't have TV in our house, but I've got internet. It's like, well, what is that about? Right, right. So we all have these things but here's the difference is the Amish do it collectively they're very selective they're selecting their technology collectively as a

Starting point is 01:40:55 group and secondly they have to articulate because they're doing collectively you have to articulate what their criteria is a lot of us are adopting adopting, we try this, we try that. We don't have any kind of logic or reason or theory or framework for why we're doing stuff. It's just a parade of stuff. But the Amish have a very particular criteria, and their criteria is, there are two things that they're looking for.

Starting point is 01:41:21 The main thing they want to do, and the main reason why they have all these restrictions like horse and buggy and all this stuff is that they want looking for. The main thing they want to do, and the main reason why they have all these restrictions like horse and buggy and all this stuff is that they want to have these communities, very strong communities. And so they noticed that if you have a car that you'll drive out and shop somewhere out of the community or you go to church somewhere out of the community

Starting point is 01:41:38 or whatever it is. But if you have a horse and buggy, you can go only 15 miles. And so everything has to happen. Your entire life, you have to support the communitygy, you can go only 15 miles. And so everything has to happen. Your entire life, you have to support the community. You have a community within 15 miles. You have to visit the sick and you have to shop locally. So you're shopping with your neighbors.

Starting point is 01:41:54 So when a new technology comes along, they say, will this strengthen our local community or send us out? And then the second thing that they're looking at is with families. So the goal of the typical Amish man or woman is to have every single meal with their children for every meal of their lives until they leave home. They have breakfast, they have lunch, and they have dinner. So breakfast and lunch is that they go to one room schoolhouse and they pedal back for lunch. Their parents have with them. And that means that the business is ideally in their backyard they have a lot of like shops and stuff if they're

Starting point is 01:42:29 not a farmer they have a backyard shop which is actually has to be kind of cleanish because it is in their backyard right it's like not my well it is in their backyard so they really are you know they really want to make sure that they have metal working shops and stuff which they really try to keep non-toxic and work because it's in their backyard and so that means that they can come home for lunch they have breakfast lunch so they're they're on the premises and they have every single meal with their children until they leave and so they say well will this technology allow us to do that will it help us do that or will it work against that and then like right now they're they've been deciding whether to accept cell phones or not even though they don't have landline phones.

Starting point is 01:43:07 So basically, some of them are going to accept cell phones. And they do that by, there's always some Amish early adopter who's trying things. And they say, okay, Ivan Bishop says, you can try this. We're watching you. We're going to see what effect this has on your family, on your community. You have to be ready to give it up anytime we say that it's not working. And they do this on a kind of a Paris by Paris. It's very decentralized. And so they try out, always trying out their technologies and they're always looking to see, is this strengthening the families? Is this

Starting point is 01:43:40 strengthening the communities? If not, we don't want it and what have you i have two questions i guess the first is since you're normally as i understand it based on the west coast in northern california how do you get out to the amish or is there a separate community closer by and then secondly what have you incorporated into your own life or your your own family that originated from the amish yeah so i don't get to see them as often as I want, but actually when I go East, I have some contacts that I will exercise and I would try to get like to stay overnight and go to church in a buggy or something. And this is Pennsylvania? Well, actually Pennsylvania is the heart of it, but actually there are more communities

Starting point is 01:44:23 in Ohio where my brother lives. Oh, no kidding. Iowa. There's a lot more happening in New York. So the Pennsylvania are the kind of ground zero.

Starting point is 01:44:32 Ground zero. But in fact, there are bigger, more extensive communities outside of Pennsylvania. I didn't realize that. Yeah. The Amish diaspora.

Starting point is 01:44:40 It is. That's what I'm saying. They literally are just buying up farmland. They're expanding. They're constantly expanding. They have a very buying up farmland. They're expanding. They're constantly expanding. They have a very small attrition rate, very large families. They all are buying farms and stuff for their children, and they never sell.

Starting point is 01:44:54 And so they also don't even move into areas as a, they have a minimum number of families that need to move in at once. But what did I learn from then? Well, one of the things that we had, particularly when we had younger kids, was kind of technological sabbaticals, or Sabbaths, I should say. And I've now seen other families who aren't even religious adopt that same thing, which is once a week,

Starting point is 01:45:19 you take a break from either, you can define it however you want it, the screen or the keyboard or connectivity or something. And you step back and you do that not because it's like terrible or poison, but because it's so good. You know, there's lots of people who are kind of like, they're going to drop out from Twitter. They're kind of like, oh, this is like a toxin, like a detox or something. I think that's entirely wrong way to think about, is you want to take breaks from this, not because they're toxic, but because they're so good. It's like you want to step back so that you can reenter it

Starting point is 01:45:52 and with a renewed perspective, with a renewed appreciation, with having spent time looking at it in a different way. And I think that kind of rhythm of having Sabbaths and then yearly sabbatical vacations or whatever retreats, and then every seven years or whatever, as you take a true sabbatical, I think that kind of rhythmic disconnection or Sabbath, I think is very powerful, something that works very well and was something that we had in our family. I take Saturdays off, as it turns out, as my screenless day. I really try to make that a weekly occurrence.

Starting point is 01:46:29 And it's incredible, the effect that it has, the sort of galvanizing effect of just a mere 24 hours. Not even that, if you just consider the waking hours. Every seven years, a vacation or sabbatical of how long, in your case or your family's case? Yeah, probably because my wife actually is granted a sabbatical from the company she your case or your family's case yeah probably because my wife actually is granted a sabbatical from the company she works for which is genetech it was one of the companies that actually have a official sabbatical for older researchers at least and it's

Starting point is 01:46:57 very meager it's six weeks of course you know a six-week sabbatical is basically a European annual vacation. Right, right. But for an American. Right, it's three years. That's a big thing. So, yes. So, we're doing something different. So, this year we're taking one and we're going to camp in national parks for one month of it.

Starting point is 01:47:20 And then the other two weeks we'll go to Asia. But we haven't been to a lot of the national parks. I'm going to do a different kind of project that i haven't done before and we'll do some kind of car camping we haven't really done a big road trip like that so it's all new for us what is the longest in the last few years that you've gone without checking email oh probably two weeks and in china how How do you manage that? Well, it was very easy. It was like, I was unable to pick it up because

Starting point is 01:47:51 China was blocking Google. Makes it more challenging. And I was in some remote places and so even the connection was hard, but it was like they weren't letting me get it. I'm not a mobile person. My first smartphone was an iPhone 5 and I'm still not using it properly. I use it for phone calls.

Starting point is 01:48:12 Yeah, I don't use my iPhone as an input device either. It just drives me nuts. I can't type. When I travel, I like to leave everything. I spend a lot of my time sitting in front of a computer. I'm kind of like the Zen, you know, walk, walk, sit, sit. Don't wobble. So like I'm here, I'm like really online.

Starting point is 01:48:31 And then when I leave this studio, I don't want to be connected at all. And I won't be. And I'm not checking email. I'm not checking this other stuff. And I can go days. Typically, I'll go days without checking, even in the US if I'm traveling. And then if I'm overseas, I will go probably three or four days before I get email. That's pretty typical.

Starting point is 01:48:53 Let me shift gears just a little bit. I'm looking at longnow.org. I recommend everybody take a look at it, the Long Now Foundation. And humans are generally, I would say, pretty bad at thinking long-term. Certainly when it comes to habit change, very, very high failure rate with long-term incentives. You're going to get diabetes in 20 years, for instance, as opposed to you'll have more sex if you have a six-pack when it comes to diet. But the Long Now Foundation, I just want to read a few things on this website for people.

Starting point is 01:49:21 So the Long Now Foundation was established in 1996, written as 01996, to creatively foster long-term thinking and responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years. Then you have the 10,000-year clock, which is a monument-scale, multi-millennial, all-mechanical clock as an icon to long-term thinking. The Rosetta Project, building an archive of all documented human languages. Long Bets, featured betas here, Warren Buffett, protege partners LLC, a public arenaas here, Warren Buffett, protege partners, LLC, a public arena for enjoyable competitive predictions of interest to society with philanthropic money at stake, and then revive and restore, which is bringing extinct species

Starting point is 01:49:54 back to life. So there is a lot here. Can you explain to people, I've greatly enjoyed many of the seminars and speeches of the Long Now Foundation. I'm a supporter. I suppose I've even spoken there on stage and love the email synopses that Stuart sends out. What is the function of the Long Now Foundation and what is the value? The Long Now Foundation is kind of reactive. It's reacting to the very inherent short-term bias that our society, particularly this technological society, particularly say the Silicon Valley exhibits, which is often a focus on the next quarter, the next two quarters, the next year, results needing to be immediate, instant satisfaction. If something's not on Netflix streaming, we don't even wait for the DVD. It's this fairly kind of very fast-paced, short-term thinking, and also somewhat blinded by the fact that we don't have a lot of sense of history either, that we're kind of ignorant about what's happened in the past.

Starting point is 01:50:57 And so the term, the long now, came from Brian Eno, who noticed that we have a very short now, which is like the next five minutes, the last five minutes. And so the long now is an attempt to kind of expand that so that we as a society and as individuals would try to think about things at a generational or civilizational scale. So like, how about like working on something

Starting point is 01:51:22 that might take longer than your own lifetime to accomplish? So you start something now that maybe make it so that it might take like the cathedrals of old. And what if we were trying to make something that, you know, might need 25 years to accomplish? How can we do that? So we're trying to encourage people to think in that perspective, to take that perspective, and then to maybe move in that direction. We're not necessarily saying we have to have like the Asimov's foundation where we have to have like a master plan for the next hundred years and we're going to plan out the future. No, we're agnostic about what it is that people make or do. We're just saying that it would benefit thinking about the long term.

Starting point is 01:52:09 And I've often heard some people who advise to counseling to individuals about kind of thinking about the long term in their own life, even though you might want to act kind of locally and be spontaneous, but you do want to kind of keep in mind the fact that you'll be around for a while, whether it's putting some savings away or working on a skill that might take some time, more than six months or a year to acquire or whatever it is that you can have both perspectives. And so we're not attempting to get rid of the need for people to survive, the need for companies to have a profit this year. We're saying there can be additional perspectives in addition to that where we commit to like a program of science research where it's pure science and the results of this, say, in mathematics is one of the most profound things that we can invest in, even though most of the things in the beginning seem to be non-utilitarian, they don't have any purpose, but we know from our own history that in 20 years, they'll pay off in some way or other.

Starting point is 01:53:15 And so being able to kind of construct a society so that we can allow the rewards of long-term investment, long-term thinking, long-term thinking, long-term perspective, that would make us a better civilization. I'd love to perhaps jump into some rapid fire questions, and they don't have to even be rapid. But just some fire questions. Or just some fire questions. The questions will be rapid. The answers can be as short or as long as you'd like. What book or books do you gift or have gifted the most to other people outside of your own books?

Starting point is 01:53:53 There is a short graphic novel by Daniel Pink called Junko. And it's career counsel advice. It's aimed at young people. It's a graphic novel. It's a cartoon, basically. And it's aimed at young people as trying to teach them how to become indispensable.

Starting point is 01:54:13 And I've given that away to young people because it's, for me, the best summary of, again, it's not like how to become successful. It's how to become indispensable. That's right.

Starting point is 01:54:24 It's Adventures of Johnny Bunko or something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. That's right. I have that on my bookshelf back in San Francisco, in fact. Yeah. If you know a young person who is just starting out, hand them that book. It's very easy for them to read because it's a graphic novel.

Starting point is 01:54:39 It's non-threatening. It's fun. And it'll give them like five great principles for starting out and helping them kind of orient themselves as they start working in the working life. For someone who's facing a lot of the same questions, let's just say, so you have graduates asking the, what should I do? Why am I here? What am I good at? If we fast forward to say, for the sake of argument, mid thirties, right? People in middle age hitting that particular point. Are there any books that you would recommend they read?

Starting point is 01:55:10 Well, there is a book that I'm recommending by Cal Newport. It's called So Good They Can't Ignore You. This changed my mind because I'd kind of bought into the kind of new age California dogma of follow your bliss, you bliss, money will follow. And he makes a really good argument and convinced me that's actually not very good advice. That

Starting point is 01:55:33 what you really want to do is to master something and to use your mastering of something as a way to get to your passion. So if you start with just passion, it's sort of paralyzing because, and I know this from my own kids, they really don't know what they're passionate about. I mean, some people are lucky enough to know. And a lot of people aren't. So this is a book for people who don't kind of really know what they're really excellent at,

Starting point is 01:56:00 don't really know what they're passionate about. And his premise is that you master something, almost anything at all, just something you master, and you use that mastery to kind of move you into a place where you can begin to have passion, and that you kind of keep recycling, that the way you find your passion

Starting point is 01:56:18 is through mastery, rather than the other way around, which is people think that they're going to get their mastery through passion. And I kind of believe that former, you know, the passion would lead to mastery. But after thinking about it, looking at his examples and his argument, I'm pretty sure that for at least for most people, you can get to your passion through mastery. And that would also give you a currency or a lever to use in getting to that point. Excellent.

Starting point is 01:56:44 Do you have a favorite fiction book? Yes. Oh, fantastic. I usually don't get one answer. This is great. Yeah. Shantaram. Ah.

Starting point is 01:56:55 Shantaram, it might take me a while to explain this. It's an author who wrote one book because it's very autobiographical. The premise of the book and the author's life seems completely incredulous and kind of almost hollywoodish but what you get from it where it's set it's set in india it's in the slum of india and you get an incredibly vivid immersive deep and in some ways up uplifting view of India and the underworld in India and at that part of Asia. And the main protagonist is this very interesting Zen criminal.

Starting point is 01:57:35 He's sort of a coyote trickster blend of someone who is, you know, he does bad things, but at the same time, he's sorry about it. And he has a kind of a cosmic perspective. It's very, very unusual, but it's a long book. And I actually recommend that if people are going to try it, is that you actually get the audible version, listen to it. It runs like, you know, on and on, but it'd be one of those books that you wish will never end. And I'll just tell you the beginning of it, which is that, and know, on and on, but it'd be one of those books that you wish will never end.

Starting point is 01:58:05 And I'll just tell you the beginning of it, which is that, and this is the true part, which is that the guy, the author, became a bank robber in New Zealand. He was hooked on drugs, started robbing banks, was eventually caught and escaped from prison and made his way to the slums of India, where because he had a medical kit, he was treated as a doctor. Got involved and hooked on drugs in India. Got involved with the mafia. Was put in prison, tortured, left, abandoned. Nobody knew he was even in there. Started writing a book.

Starting point is 01:58:37 Wrote this book. They ripped it up, destroyed it. He was recruited, found a guru, an Afghan. He was recruited in the Mujahideen. Was fighting there. His entire company was wiped out. I Fisher, the book and the movie. World-class chess player, also a very deep, soulful guy. And this is one of his favorite books as well. Oh, awesome. Yeah, you would love Josh. Sometime I'll have to put you guys in touch. But any favorite documentaries?

Starting point is 01:59:19 Well, now you've asked the wrong question. I have a site called True Films where for the past 10 years, I have reviewed site called True Films where for the past 10 years I have reviewed the best documentaries and I actually have a book called True Films which is the 200 best documentaries that you should see before you die oh my god no kidding wow you have no idea how timely this is so it's truefilms.com

Starting point is 01:59:38 truefilms and so I there are a couple of films that I would say have sort of universal appreciation like you know they may have like a rating of like 100 on would say have sort of universal appreciation. Like, you know, they may have like a rating of like a hundred on rotten tomatoes or something. So the one documentary that I think everybody that I know have seen it

Starting point is 01:59:53 has loved it is a man on wire. Such a good movie. Right. So it's just, it's just transcendent. It's just a beautiful movie. It's based on the fact that this guy basically he's going to walk to twin towers.

Starting point is 02:00:04 I mean, he, the moment was, he was 14-year-old kid in France, he was at a dentist's office looking at a magazine and he saw that they had plans to build this Twin Tower in New York. And he saw those two Twin Towers and he said, I need to walk between them. He didn't know how to type walk.

Starting point is 02:00:20 The towers had not been built. He was already planning this thing. And he was filming himself the whole way. been built he was already planning this thing and he was filming himself the whole way yeah so amazing okay and so he does it and how he does is amazing so another great documentary that i love because it's very unusual among documentaries and that it films the villain side of the whole thing as well which is is King of Kong. I haven't, this has been recommended to me. I still have not seen this movie. King of Kong is about a guy who becomes the video game, arcade game, King of Kong.

Starting point is 02:00:54 He becomes the champion, but he is basically competing against this cabal of people who are trying to subvert him and are doing all kinds of really terrible things to stop him which was all on film yeah and so here's this really kind of midwest really lovable guy and you're rooting for him the whole time while these really sleazy guys are trying to take him down it's just fantastic i have to watch that so that's the second one the third one is one that's not so well known. It's called State of Mind. And it's about the spectacles in North Korea, which these two filmmakers had access to, and they followed several different young athletes

Starting point is 02:01:36 who were practicing for the spectacle. And in these spectacles, of course, what it is is people are pixels. They have these huge stadium-sized things, and they're like little robots. They're cogs in this machine, which is like perfect. So you can imagine like a picture that's made up of pixels, but every pixel is actually a little boy or girl

Starting point is 02:01:53 holding up a card, colored cards in sequence. So these things move, which means that, you know, there's not a pixel missing. So that means that nobody's sick. It's like, you know, you're not allowed to be sick. You can't make a mistake at all. it's getting inside of north korea which turns out to be a nationwide cult and i think that in 50 years when they're gone nobody will believe that that was even possible and this documentary will be here it's like no no no they really was

Starting point is 02:02:22 a nationwide cult and they really did believe this it really is amazing just to see what's going on there all right well i know what i'm doing for the next few days next few evenings i could go on unfortunately because i have a lot of them but go to the true films i only review ones that are great so i don't do awesome i just say these are fantastic oh man all right i've been looking this. I cannot believe that I'm only learning this now. I'm kind of embarrassed about that. When you think of the word or hear the word successful, who's the first person who comes to mind? Jesus.

Starting point is 02:02:54 All right. Why would you say that? Well, there aren't that many people who've left their mark on as many people in the world as he has. I think what he was up to, what he was doing is vastly been twisted, misunderstood, whatever word you want. But nonetheless, what's remarkable is, and here's a guy who didn't write anything. So I think success is also overrated. All right. I'd love for you to elaborate on that. Greatness is overrated. A lot of, you know, I mentioned big numbers, but it's more of the impact that you had on people's lives.

Starting point is 02:03:32 But I think we tend to have an image of success that's somewhat been skewed by, you know, our current media. It's like our sense of beauty. It's sort of like in terms of all possibilities it's in a very small narrow defined so kind of ritualistic in a certain sense and i think our idea of success is often today it means you know somebody who has a lot of money or who has a lot of fame or who has some of these other trappings which we assign but i think can be successful in by being true to and kind of being the most you that you could possibly be and i think that's what i think of as one of the things of jesus whether you take him as just a historical character or anything beyond was about he certainly

Starting point is 02:04:18 wasn't imitating anybody let me put it that way the great temptation that people have is they want to be someone else, which is basically they want to be in someone else's movie. They want to be the best rock star. And there's so many of those already that you can only wind up imitating somebody in that slot. And I think, to me, the success is like you make your own slot. You have a new slot that didn't exist before. And I think, that's of course what Jesus and many others were doing, but it was, they were kind of making a new slot and that's really hard to do. But I

Starting point is 02:04:51 think that's what I chalk up as success is you made a new slot. What is your new slot? You knew that was coming. Who says I'm successful? Well, I'm not. I'm trying to not make any assumptions here. Yeah. Or what would be your slot? My slot would be Kevin Kelly. I mean, that's the whole thing. It's not going to be like a career

Starting point is 02:05:13 or you would really ideally be something that you had no imitators. I mean, you would be who you are and that is success. Actually, in some senses, you didn't imitate anybody no one else imitated you afterwards right so you know in a certain sense you have if you become an adjective that's a good sign right so i think success is actually you kind of make your own path if they're

Starting point is 02:05:37 calling you a successful entrepreneur then to me that's not the best kind of success because you're being confined to that category right Right. You're in a category. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be? I could sing. Ah, you would like to sing. Yeah. I seem to be unable to carry a tune. I can't remember. I mean, my wife can hear something once and she can just sing it back. I could hear the same song. I have heard the same song and I couldn't tell you three notes of it. I'm sure because I'm a Tim Ferriss fan, I'm sure I could train myself to be that. I know I could, but I guess I haven't. And it would be something that I have to really work at and I haven't, but I have trouble carrying a tune, staying in tune,

Starting point is 02:06:20 remembering a tune. I love music and I appreciate it, but in terms of actually singing and I don't play an instrument, so maybe I would say if it was a little easier for me, that would be something nice. Have you taken lessons or attempted to take lessons? No. I got it. So just in the spirit of trade, I've recently started exploring hand drumming with djembes and different types of drums, if anyone out there can get me a pan art hang, I would really love to hear from you. Those of you that will mean nothing to most people who are hearing this. The research that has piqued my curiosity most recently, and of course you don't want

Starting point is 02:06:58 to run out and just start swallowing these things, but there's a common anti-epilepsy drug called Valproate, which apparently has some implications for opening a window for achieving perfect pitch in mature adults. Very fascinating stuff. So if I do any experiments with that, I will certainly report back. Well, now that you've talked about it, not the drug part, but I did, remember, I did take one class. You mentioned the drums i took a one class at an adult summer camp which i highly recommend if your kids go to camp you should go with them and there was a steel drum oh cool course and i love that so like you i think if i did take up an instrument it would be drums of some sort because that i seem to respond to it and i did pretty good for the intro course on steel drumming. I find percussion to be so primal.

Starting point is 02:07:47 It just satisfies some type of need that probably predates verbal communication even. Certainly written notes. It is your inner caveman just responding. Are there any particular, let's just say in the first two hours of your day, any particular morning rituals or habits you have that when performed consistently, you find produce better days for you. And I'm leaving better days undefined on purpose, but I love studying mornings and, or what people do when they wake up. What time do you wake up? Are there any particular habits or rituals that you

Starting point is 02:08:23 find contribute to better days? Yeah. Yeah. I'm a very good sleeper. I don't sleep a lot. These days I get up at 7.30 and I have some rituals, but I don't vary them enough maybe to know whether they are... I'm not a morning person, okay, to begin with. You're not a morning person. Well, I mean... Well, the fact that you don't vary them is perfect. Well, I know, but that means You're not a morning person. Well, I mean, well, the fact that you don't vary them is perfect. So I know, but that means they're not necessarily optimized in any way or I can't tell which is better, but for better or worse, one of the first things I do is I read the paper version of the New York times. It's a kind of like a, so what I call a guilty pleasure. I don't know whether that makes me better at anything else i do but um i don't drink coffee

Starting point is 02:09:07 or anything this is sort of it's a ritual and when i'm not here i don't read it so it's like i don't miss it it's kind of curious but like if i'm here it's like i gotta do it i don't know it's kind of weird is that immediately after waking you read the paper or is there anything just about just about i kind of in my pajamas i walk out to the front gate and i pick it up and i read it i mean and i don't read all of it i just kind of go through and i usually don't even read the news part i read the slower stuff i don't make sure why now that you're asking and that's it that's the entire ritual i don't have the same thing for breakfast or anything like that. It's just that morning hit.

Starting point is 02:09:47 Do you do anything throughout your day regularly? Maybe it's before bed or anything else that most other people probably don't do. That's a good question. No. Really? Okay. I have no special sauce. But you're very consistent.

Starting point is 02:10:04 Your days seem to be, don't vary very widely. So that in and of itself might be something that a lot of people don't do. Okay, let's pick up two different, while I'm here in this studio, I have a lot of control over my time. So what I do during the day is greatly varied. I do lots of things for short amounts of times

Starting point is 02:10:23 and go into my workshop. I'll read, actually read, books it down and read books during the middle of the day. I'll do a hike and bring my camera out almost every day. Maybe that is something that most people don't do is probably they probably aren't taking pictures with a camera every day. Or reading books in the middle of the day for that matter. Right, exactly. Well, maybe that's true, I guess. How do you choose your books?

Starting point is 02:10:45 Ah. That's a paradox of choice problem for a lot of people. It is. It's like, what are you going to listen to next in music? I think the music becomes free and everybody has all the music in the world, but deciding what you're going to listen to becomes the thing you'll pay for. This has been my prediction about Amazon, is that we're still going to have any book you want for free,

Starting point is 02:11:03 Amazon Prime, digital version of it. You can have it whenever you want. But you'll pay us for the recommendations. That's a great point. That's a great point. I have a network of friends, and I listen to lots of podcasts. So I get it from all over the place. And like probably you are at this point,

Starting point is 02:11:21 I long ago decided that in terms of the greater scheme of things, the cost of books were really cheap. And if I wanted a book, I would buy it. Right. And the result is I'm right now speaking in a two-story high library of books that I have. And I don't do the same with digital books because I finally figured out that, oh, if I purchase a digital book before I'm reading it, it's going anywhere it's just sitting there so i shouldn't really purchase a digital book until like five seconds before i'm going to read it i have exactly the opposite habit because right because it's like well it's there the whole point of kindle is that you don't

Starting point is 02:11:57 have to have it until like you need it so on the digital books i don't buy anything until like i'm seconds away from reading it then i'll get it but the paper books i I don't buy anything until I'm seconds away from reading it. Then I'll get it. But the paper books, I was near to the point of actually digitizing and getting rid of all my paper books. I was that close about five years ago. But then I had an epiphany. I went to the private library, and I realized that books were never as cheap as they are today, and never will be as cheap, and that there's some power about having these things in paper, always available, no batteries, never obsolete, and that if you made a library now,

Starting point is 02:12:37 you would never be able to make some of these libraries in 50 years. And so I decided to keep and to kind of cultivate this paper library as something that was going to be very powerful in the future. I like that. Or at least I can use it as a justification for keeping a lot of paper books around. Exactly. I get tips from books from podcasts, from blogs, from friends, from Amazon recommendations, anywhere. And whenever I hear someone recommend a book, I'll go and check it out. And then I'm fairly free in buying it,

Starting point is 02:13:08 which means that I read a lot of really mediocre books. But that's part of my job. Cool Tools, the book that we were just talking about, which is this catalog of possibilities that I self-published that has, oh, I don't know, 1,500. Maybe there's a couple hundred books that are recommended, but I probably read thousands and thousands and thousands of books in order to select those.

Starting point is 02:13:32 So I see part of my job reading through, and I read a lot of how-to books. Most of the books I'm reading is nonfiction, and a lot of it is even instructional stuff on how to build a stone wall, how to do origami, how to send a microsatellite into space. Whatever it is, it doesn't matter. I'll look at it, and I've seen tens of thousands, if not 50,000 how-to books over my lifetime. I can spot a really good one.

Starting point is 02:13:58 But still, I'll read through the other ones so that someone else doesn't have to, and I can recommend saying this is the best book on building a tiny house if you want to build a tiny house. Now, do you, when you read these books on origami or stonewall, do you follow through and attempt these projects or are you evaluating it purely based on your amassed experience of reading lots of these types of instructional books? No, actually. So maybe one of the other things that I don't do every day, but one of the things I do in general that maybe everyone else is not doing

Starting point is 02:14:29 is that I have like a thousand hobbies. I dabble in things. So I have built stone walls, more than one. I have done origami. I have made beer. I have made wine.

Starting point is 02:14:40 I have, you know, whatever it is, I've tried to do these things in my life and I continue to try and do them i have homeschooled my son i have and so as much as possible this is what my you know i was talking before about my day it's irregular in a sense that i'm here and i have things but i'm doing new things and i'm reading new things all the time so i'm in my

Starting point is 02:15:00 outside i'm you know i'll make a go-kart or we'll do something that I haven't done before. And that's the basis for helping decide about these books. I don't have to be an expert in them, but I can know enough to tell whether or not the information they're telling me is useful. What odd project over the last year has been the most fun? Let's start there for you. Yeah. Well, just the last couple of months, I finally built myself a real workshop.

Starting point is 02:15:31 I wish I could show it to you because one of the cool things I did was, if you go into Uline or somewhere, these container businesses, they have these racks of bins. So I filled an entire wall of hundreds and hundreds of bins so I can organize stuff. And I'm a big fan of Adam Savage. He has a principle for his workshops called first order access, which basically means that you don't want to store things behind anything.

Starting point is 02:15:58 Everything has to be at the first level so you can look and see it. It has to be within reach in a sense that you have to be able to see everything that you have and it's accessible. You don't want things hidden behind other things. Right. So that's part of what I was doing with this workshop is this kind of first order access. And it's tremendously powerful. I mean, I just, the few days or the weeks I've had working in it, it just transforms everything.

Starting point is 02:16:24 It's like I had the same problem with my books for many, many years. I had books like on multiple different bookshelves in the house. I had them in boxes. I had them this and that. And moving everything to one location, into a library where there was two stories

Starting point is 02:16:37 and I could see all my books, just transformed them and made it really useful because I could find them, just really go and reach for them and the same thing with i'm finally bringing it to my tools which is that you want to have things plugged in ready to go labeled organized first order access and it can make simple jobs really simple instead of like the you know the hours of looking for something right gathering all the tools getting all the tools and alsoing all the tools. It's like cooking.

Starting point is 02:17:05 It's just like cooking. Yeah, it's having like a manual random access memory, right? You have your mise en place right in front of you. Yeah, you have where you know the tools are, yeah. That's very cool. If there were one object, manual project, building something that you think every human should have the experience of doing, what would that be?

Starting point is 02:17:24 It's very easy. You need to build your own house. And it's not that hard to do, believe me. Actually, I built my own house. And your house is amazing. No, not this house. I mean, I actually built one from cutting down the logs, cutting down the trees in upstate New York.

Starting point is 02:17:40 Wow. And doing the stone hearths. I mean, unfortunately, I don't recommend this. We made like two by fours from trees. You don't want to do that because it's a pain. Because, you know, standard lumber is very good if things are off a little quarter of an inch as they are with rough sawn lumber.

Starting point is 02:17:56 It's just, it's a mess. But nonetheless, a large portion of the people in the world have made their own homes. Adobe, rammed earthmed earth bamboo whatever it is and like going back to what we originally started off with um even if you don't wind up living in it it's empowering to know that you can do it and if you do wind up living in it i have a friend lord khan who built this magnificent place in bolinas that he built with salvage material from scratch over the

Starting point is 02:18:25 many years. It gives you the power to alter it. So I believe that your house should be an extension of you, that really it's another projection. So another way of, and also going back to what we're talking about, it's another way to discover who you are and discover what you're good at. And because a well-designed house should really reflect you and and what i've discovered a lot of people design houses and they have this kind of imaginary fantasy idea about themselves and what they're going to do well you know whatever it is they're going to have a swimming pool well you know it's like they're never going to use a swimming pool whatever it is i mean very few people actually have a very good sense of who they are and what they're going to

Starting point is 02:19:02 use something for but if you really study yourself and really are honest and design something that space can help you become successful in the sense of making a slot for you making your own slot and it's another it's both a kind of byproduct of who you are and also can help you because it works both ways i like that right you're not just finding yourself you're creating yourself exactly and that so this is a larger philosophical question but this is something i talk about a lot in a very high dimensional space which means like space of many pending possibilities the act of finding and the act of creating are identical there is no difference between discovering

Starting point is 02:19:46 something and inventing something. We could say that philosophically, Benjamin Franklin invented electricity. We could say that Christopher Columbus invented America. We could say that discovery and invention are the same. So that discovering yourself and inventing yourself is really the same things will bring about that process. You have to do both at once. I really enjoy that. Last question. If you could give your,

Starting point is 02:20:16 let's say, you can pick the age, either 15 or 20 year old self, one or a few pieces of advice, what would they be? You don't have to do everything yourself. You can hire people to do stuff. I wish I had known that when I was younger.

Starting point is 02:20:34 I wish that I had, when I was 20, working for Whole Earth Catalog, I wish I'd known that I could have hired a programmer to do something. I could have hired someone. It took me a long time to understand that and then recently i've been really big on it hiring people through elance you know because i came from a little bit of kind of a do-it-yourself i mean i made a nature museum when i was 12 i had

Starting point is 02:20:58 a chemistry lab that i built myself you know building the stuff and i could buy in the glassware but i had a whole chemistry lab i had nature museums i did all this stuff and i did it myself and then of course and moving into the whole earth catalog which was a kind of a do-it-yourself thing i really was um you know i just talked about building my own house well now i will hire professionals to work and it just took me a long time to realize that there's something about being able to pay a professional to do what they do really well. It's not like a weakness. It's like it helps them. I'm happy. They're happy. We're all happy. And I can do a lot more. Now,

Starting point is 02:21:38 there's certainly a pleasure in doing things yourself and dabbling it. But there's also this other thing, which I didn't realize, which is there's this leverage that you get by hiring people who are really good, paying them fairly, working with them to amplify what it is that you want to do. And I wish I knew that when I was younger. That's a fantastic answer. And you have, if I remember correctly, an assistant and a researcher. Is that still true? Yeah, true yes one of the same person oh they are the same okay yeah so i thought that at one point you had believed that you needed those people to be two separate people but you're right here here's where what i was saying was that it's very unusual to find one person who can do both of those tasks both of those tasks are often not found the same person because there's you know

Starting point is 02:22:25 the hunting the researching the kind of there's a hunter aspect to research that is often found in a certain personality and then they're kind of the the admin is more nurturing kind of making sure things gardening a little bit so it's often rare to find someone who can do both, but it's possible. Was it luck that you happened upon this particular individual that you work with now, or did you have a method? I found that the place where I found, over the 14 years I've had two,

Starting point is 02:23:01 the place where I found that they were more likely than not to have a combination was librarians. I love it. That's fantastic. So we put out notices on the librarian mailing lists and stuff. That is fantastic. I said last question, this will be the last question. Is there any other thoughts or advice you'd like to leave with the listeners? And then where would you like people to find more from you, your writing, anywhere else? I would say congratulations to the people who are listening to the podcast. I think podcasts are this fantastic new medium. I'm spending a lot

Starting point is 02:23:35 of time there. I think it's just really great. We're in the early days of where this would go. I'm really impressed by the power of this medium to teach and to inform sometimes to entertain again i'm thankful to you tim for having me on and having a chance to gab here but the people who are listening i think keep going listen to more podcasts try to go wide i know tim mentions them here and there take a chance listen to some more and so that's one thing i would say and as far as finding out more about me, I lucked out with a very easy website. It's my initials, kkk.org. I have a very public email for the past 25 years. You can find it very easily on my website if you want to email directly. outsource that unlike other people that i know and my writings and books and whatnot are at www.kk.org cool tools is a book that i really believe that each of you out there should have it's on paper it's sort of the best of the website cool tools which has been going on for

Starting point is 02:24:41 11 years now where we review every day one great tool. They're only positive reviews. Why waste your time on anything but the best? And tools in the broadest sense of the word of things that are useful, whether it's Elance or a book on how to do psychedelics or a book on how to build a workshop or how to build a house or how to hitchhike around the world. I and others recommend the best here with some great context and it's printed on paper or available on Amazon. Not so easily found in bookstores because it's huge. I mean, it's like five pounds weighs, it's really, really big. And if you don't find like 500 things

Starting point is 02:25:23 in there that you didn't know about that you wish you knew about like last year, I'll give you your money back. So enjoy that. So that's that cool tools or cool tools in Amazon. Excellent. Well, Kevin, this has been a blast. It always is. Every time we chat, I feel like we should chat more. So hopefully we'll get a chance to spend some more time together soon back in NorCal or somewhere else. Or else in China. Or in China. It's been a long time. I could get back. I'm heading back to Japan again. And I know that you have lots of roots in Asia, but I go there to renew my sense of

Starting point is 02:25:57 the future because they are bulldozing the past as fast as they can and we're headed racing into the future. So I want to see what Asia has in store for us because mathematically we don't count anymore. You know, at one point, 3 billion Asians and 300 million Americans. What can you say?

Starting point is 02:26:16 That's right. Study up, folks. Specialization is for insects. I think that was a fine line. Enjoy your time on this planet and look broadly, like Kevin said. Kevin, thank you so much. I will talk to you soon and have a wonderful day. I will talk to you soon.

Starting point is 02:26:32 Thanks for having me, Tim. Okay. Bye-bye. Hey, guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or

Starting point is 02:27:01 discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash Friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep is a premium mattress brand that

Starting point is 02:27:49 provides tailored mattresses based on your sleep preferences. Their lineup includes 14 unique mattresses, including a collection of luxury models, a mattress for big and tall sleepers, that's not me, and even a mattress made specifically for kids. They have models with memory foam layers to provide optimal pressure relief if you sleep on your side, as I often do and did last night on one of their beds. Models with more responsive foam to cradle your body for essential support in stomach and back sleeping positions and on and on. They have you covered. So how will you know which Helix mattress works best for you and your body? Take the Helix sleep quiz at helixsleep.com slash Tim and find your perfect mattress in less than two minutes.

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Starting point is 02:29:41 of helix's mattresses and you my, my dear listeners, can get between 25% and 30% off plus two free pillows on all mattress orders. So go to helixsleep.com slash Tim to check it out. That's helixsleep.com slash Tim. With Helix, better sleep starts now. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I view AG1 as comprehensive nutritional insurance, and that is nothing new. I actually recommended AG1 in my 2010 bestseller more than a decade ago, The 4-Hour Body, and I did not get paid to do so. I simply loved the product and felt like it was the ultimate nutritionally dense supplement that you could use conveniently while on the run, which is,

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #753: Derek Sivers and Kevin Kelly

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