The Tim Ferriss Show - Ep 26: Kevin Kelly (Part 2) - WIRED Co-Founder, Polymath, Most Interesting Man In The World?

Episode Date: August 27, 2014

This is Part 2 of a 3-part interview with Kevin Kelly. Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine, which he co-founded in 1993. He also co-founded the All Species Foundation, a non-profit aimed at cataloging and identifying every living species on earth. And in all his spare times, he writes bestselling books, co-founded the Rosetta Project, which is Building an Archive of ALL Documented  Human Languages, and he serves on the board of the Long Now Foundation. As part of the latter, he's looking into how to revive and restore endangered or extinct species, including the Wooly Mammoth. ***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Visit tim.blog/sponsor and fill out the form.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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the number one, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out. Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Tim Ferriss Show. What you're about to hear is part two of a multi-part conversation with Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired Magazine and all around fascinating guy. If you didn't catch the first part, you might want to do that before venturing in. But we cover a lot of topics and it's a conversation. So if you don't mind your stories as more of a jigsaw puzzle, then by all means, keep on listening. So without further ado, please enjoy part two of the Tim Ferriss Show with Kevin Kelly.

All show notes, links, etc. can be found at 4hourworkweek.com forward slash podcast. And thank you for listening. question now what is the appropriate time what if i did the opposite i'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton does religion play a large part in your life right now in a certain sense not in a kind of a ritualistic sense i just wrote a book called What Technology Wants. Excellent book. I highly recommend it. 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. I'm right in the middle of finishing a Kickstarter-funded graphic novel that's 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 impossible worlds of conscious robots who were ensouled by angels. And the reason why this was sort of interesting 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, well, what is the general direction of the arc of evolution? Is it pointed somewhere? How does technology fit into the greater cosmos?

What does it mean? What drives it? Why is there more of it? Is this a good thing? And so I think having a kind of 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 idea that if you have an another world view 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. 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, 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. But 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 Horth catalog, which was about hippies living in San Francisco. And all my friends 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 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 recreationally and for entertainment. And I think that can go somewhere. And I think, yeah, you can use drugs and recreationally and for entertainment. 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. 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's 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. 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. Functional, exactly. Standpoint, yeah.

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. And 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? Okay, so this is... Or how people might search for it. Yes. So this is one of the many resources 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 i mean there's lots of other things in it but the i don't actually have the book right in front of me i should i think it's called um i don't remember it's okay i will uh 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 an unjudgmental view of all the different drugs there were and what each one kind of did and didn't and what the plus and minuses are without you know recommending or forbidding them you're just saying this this is what it is. That information also, believe it or not, is really in short supply. It's like, 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 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, 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. 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 this for someday when I'm going to do this. I'm kind of looking forward, I'm be 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. And so I was very much in the future. And then suddenly that future was being cut down day by day. And I was thinking, like, why am I taking pictures? I'm not taking photographs because I'm not going to be here 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. And so after I came out of that, and I kind of embraced that, I was saying, well, you know, 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.

That's crazy. Just like if we went back 100 years and told them what was going on now, they would say, you know, 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 and we're going to have you know 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 that's all and i would tell them you know most of it's for free and they were saying there's 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. And so you're stuck in this thing of like if people believe it is wrong, if they don't believe it, where does it get you? You're dismissed. So there is this very fine line between saying something that is right on the edge of plausibility and at the same time right on 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? 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? Let's say even more simple. Or no, there's speed involved as well. Right. More or less, I 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.

What if every year, starting a couple 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.

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? None of those. None of those? No.

AI coming in the rise of the machines? No. No. Okay. It's just pure demographics. So if you look at the current trends in fertility rates in all the developed countries, everywhere 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, Europe, they're all below replacement. The U.S. is an exception only because of immigration. Got it. Before people coming in. Otherwise, we would be there and this would not be any news to anybody. But the real news is people would point to the developing world. But Mexico is now aging faster than the US.

China is aging faster because of their one-child policy. Of course, Japan is just completely – they're way underwater completely. So even the one exception is sub-Saharan 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. drop down. And even in places like Singapore or other places where they have taken very, very active countermeasures of cash for having kids, 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. How many people do you know with that many kids living in cities? And there's just not enough of them. 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, 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. 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 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 and

we were unable to have a fourth, but all my kids wished that we had a fourth too but we started a little bit too late 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 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 uh curve of the amount of energy that you have to expend actually after three doesn't really matter 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 it really works. But that is actually basically 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. It is. Of course, in the old days, may have had 12 born, but they rarely had 12 kids survive. Right. So that actually is a very recent, I mean, it's like the 1800s kind of onward. I hang out with the Amish a lot, and they still have these very large families, and they all survive. So they have kind of in some sense 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 in America, in 100 years from now or 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. We all drive out to the Amish lands. It's just fantastic. And they're very happy doing their thing and running the farms.

And so I had 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, very interesting. And how long has that been going on? For a while. 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. I do have – 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 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 very anti-military. They refused to serve in the armies. They don't even vote. But so it was their kind of rejection of the military by shaving off their mustache.

I hang out with the Amish because their adoption of technologies seems to us totally crazy. Because first of all, they're not Luddites. They're complete hackers. They love hacking technology. 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 and tubing into their barn, into their homes. And so they have converted their sewing machine and washing machine and stuff to pneumatic. Seems like a bit of a sidestep of the word of God.

Exactly. So they'll have horse-drawn buggies and horse-drawn farm implements, and the horses will be pulling this diesel-generated combine. And you're thinking, what are they doing? Okay, right? diesel generated combine and you're thinking what are they doing okay right but 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 They're very selective. They're selecting their technology collectively as a group. And secondly, they have to articulate – because they're doing it collectively, they have to articulate what their criteria is. A lot of us are 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 one 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 the main thing they want to do and the main reason why they have all these restrictions like horse and buggy and all the stuff is that they want to have these communities very strong communities and so they notice 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 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 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. 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 and they have lunch and they have dinner. So breakfast and lunch is they go to one room schoolhouse and they pedal back for lunch that their parents have with them.

And that means that the business is ideally in their backyard. So they have a lot of like shops and stuff. If they're not a farmer, they have a backyard shop, which is actually has to be kind of clean-ish because it is in their backyard. Right. Well, it is in their backyard. So they really want to make sure that they're – they have metalworking 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 and lunch.

So 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've been deciding whether to accept cell phones or not, even though they don't have landline phones. So basically, they're going to – well, 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 he has to get permission he says you can try this but 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 in a kind of a Paris by Paris. It's very decentralized. And so they try out, always trying out new technologies. And they're always looking to see, is this strengthening the families? Is this 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 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 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 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. Ground zero. But in fact, there are bigger, more extensive communities outside of Pennsylvania. I didn't realize that.

Yeah. The Amish diaspora. 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 small attrition rate, very large families.

They all are buying, basically they're buying farms and stuff for their children, and they never sell. 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 them? 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,

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 terrible or poison but because it's so good. 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. I'm going to get detoxed or something. I think that's an entirely wrong way to think about it 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 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 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 it 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, 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, partly because my wife actually is granted a sabbatical from the company she works for, which is Genentech. It was one of the two companies that actually have an official sabbatical for all their researchers, at least. And it's very meager. It's six weeks. Of course, you know, a six-week sabbatical is basically a European annual vacation. Right, right. You know, but for an American. Right, it's three years. That's a big thing. So, yes. So, we'll do something different. So, this year, we're taking one and we're going to camp in national parks for one month of it. 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 in China. How do you manage that? Well, it was very easy. I was unable to pick it up because 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. 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 I'm here. I'm really online.

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 really online 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 U.S. if I'm traveling and then if I'm overseas I will go probably three or four days before I get the email. That's pretty typical. 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. 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. 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-Yeyear 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 arena for enjoyable, competitive predictions of interest to society

with philanthropic money at stake. And then revive and restore, which is bringing extinct species back to life. So there is a lot here. Can you explain to people, because 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? 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 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. 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 a way 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 that might take longer than your own lifetime to accomplish so you start something now then maybe make it so that it might take like the cathedrals of old what if we were trying to make something So you start something now, then maybe make it so that it might take like the cathedrals of old. What if we were trying to make something that 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 100 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 having um thinking about the long term and i've often heard some people who advise to counseling to individuals about kind of thinking about the long term in your own life even though you might want to act kind of locally and be spontaneous but you do want 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 say we commit to like a science program of science research where it's pure science and the results of the 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 rewards of long-term investment, long-term thinking, long-term perspective.

That would make us a better civilization. I love the Long Now Foundation. I encourage everybody to check it 4hourblog.com. F-O-U-R-H-O-U-R-B-L-O-G.com. Where you'll find an award-winning blog, tons of audio and video interview stories with people like Warren Buffett and Mike Shinoda from Linkin Park, the books, plus much, much more. Follow Tim on Twitter. It's twitter.com slash tferriss. That's T-F-E-R-R-I-S-S. Or on Facebook at facebook.com slash timferris.

Until next time, thanks for listening.