The Tim Ferriss Show - Ep 27: Kevin Kelly (Part 3) - WIRED Co-Founder, Polymath, Most Interesting Man In The World?

Episode Date: August 28, 2014

This is Part 3 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. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. What you're about to hear is part three of a three-part conversation with Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired Magazine, best-selling author, all-around fascinating human being. If you didn't catch the first two parts, you might want to do that before venturing in. But if not, no fear. We answer a lot of questions. It's a conversation. You can pretty much dip in and dip out as you like. 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 three,

the final part of the Tim Ferriss Show with Kevin Kelly. And thank you for listening. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seemed the perfect time. What if I did the opposite? hands start shaking can i ask you a personal question now what is it an appropriate time i'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton i'd love to perhaps jump into some rapid fire questions yeah and they don't have to even be rapid uh but uh just some fire questions or the just some fire questions the 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? 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. 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 to... That's right. It's Adventures of Johnny Bunko or something like that. 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. It's non-threatening. It's fun. And it'll give them five great principles for starting out and helping them 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-30s, right? People in middle age hitting that particular point. Are there any books that you would recommend they read? 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 know money will follow and he makes a really good argument and convinced me that's actually not very good advice that 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 have they're 18 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 this is a book for people who don't kind of really know what they're really excellent at, 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 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 passion would lead to mastery.

But after thinking about it, looking at his examples and his argument, I'm pretty sure that 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 exactly uh excellent do you have a favorite fiction book yes oh fantastic this i usually don't get one answer this is great yeah shantaram ah shantaram it might take me away to explain this, but it's an author who wrote one book because it's very autobiographical. The premise of the book and the author's lifelifting view of India and the underworld in India and that part of Asia. And the main protagonist is this very interesting zen criminal 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 people are going to try to is that you actually to get the audible version listen to it it runs like you know on and on but it'd be one of those books you that you wish will never end 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 he 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 involved with the mafia, was put in prison, tortured, left, abandoned. Nobody knew he was even in there, started writing a book. He wrote this book. They ripped it up, destroyed it. He was recruited, found a guru, an Afghani, was recruited in the Mujahideen, was fighting there. His entire company was wiped out. I mean, that's just the beginning. That's like the first day. It's really interesting that you would bring up Shantaram. For those people who haven't heard of Josh Waitzkin, I also had him on this podcast. Josh was the basis for Searching for Bobby 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. Yeah, you would love Josh. Sometime I'll have to put you guys in touch. But any favorite documentaries?

Well, now you've asked the wrong question. I have a site called True Films, where for the past 10 years, I have reviewed the best documentaries. I actually have a book called True Films, which is the 200 best documentaries that you should see before oh my god no kidding wow you have no idea how timely this is so it's two uh t-r-u-e films yeah true films okay 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 rotten tomatoes or something so the one documentary that I think everybody that I know who has seen it has loved it is Man on Wire. That's such a good movie.

Right? So 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. I mean, the moment was he was a 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. The towers had not been built. He was already planning this thing. And he was filming himself the whole way. Yeah, so amazing. OK, and so he does it. And how he does it so amazing. Okay, and so he does it. And how he does it is amazing.

So another great documentary that I love because it's very unusual among documentaries in that it films the villain side of the whole thing as well, which is King of Kong. Oh, 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 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 but 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 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 holding up a card, colored cards in sequence. So these things move, which means that there's not a pixel missing. So that means that nobody's sick. It's like you're not allowed to be sick. You can't make a mistake at all. And it's getting inside of North Koreaa 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 saying no no no they really was 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 can 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 for 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. 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 – I mentioned big jesus but it's more of the impact that you had on people's lives 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 i mean it's sort of like in terms of all possibilities it's in a, narrow, defined, kind of ritualistic in a certain sense.

I think our idea of success is often today it means 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 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 that Jesus, whether you take him as just a historical character or anything beyond, was about. He certainly wasn't imitating anybody, let me put it that way. I mean, I think that's 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 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 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 you know that's of course what j Jesus and many others were doing, but they were kind of making a new slot. And that's really hard to do. But I 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? Well, my slot would be Kevin Kelly. I mean, that's the whole thing. It's not going to be like a career 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 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 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. 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 years later. 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 ferris fan

i'm sure i could train myself to be better i know i could but i 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 remembering a tune i love love music and I appreciate it, but in terms of actually singing, 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 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 are hearing this. The research that has piqued my curiosity most recently, and of course you don't want 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. Wow. 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 one class at an adult summer camp, which I highly recommend. If your kids go to camp, you should go with them. And it was a steel drum 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 have responded to it. And I did pretty up an instrument, it would be drums of some sort, because that I seem to responded to. And I did pretty good for the for the intro course on steel drumming. I find percussion to be so primal, just satisfied some type of need that probably predates verbal communication, even certainly, certainly written notes. Right. 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 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 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 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 kind of like what I'd call a guilty pleasure. I don't know whether that makes me better at anything else I do, but I don't drink coffee or anything. This is sort of my, 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 if I'm here, it's like I've got to do it. I don't know. It's kind of weird. Is that immediately after waking you read the paper, or is there anything you do? 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'm not 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.

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. 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 things. While I'm here in this studio, i have a lot of control over my time and so what i do during the day is is greatly varied i'll you know i'll i do a lots of things for short amounts of times and go into my workshop i'll read actually read books it down and read books during the middle of the day i'll go i'll do a hike and bring my camera out almost every day maybe that is something that most people don't do. 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? 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 and i and i this has been my prediction about amazon is that we're soon going to have like any book you want for free amazon prime digital version of it you can have it whenever you want but you'll pay for us for the recommendations and um that's a great point that's a great point i have a network 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, 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 am 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 not 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 have to have it until you need it.

So on the digital books, 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 a 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, you know, never obsolete. And that if you made a library now, 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 a, you know, 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. So 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, which means that I read a lot of really mediocre books. 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 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. 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.

But still, I'll read through the other ones in order 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 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. 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 outside um 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 to 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. And I wish I could show it to you because one of the cool things I did, it was if you go into like 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 so i can organize stuff and

i'm a big fan of adam savage and he has he has a principle for his workshops called first order access which basically means that you don't want to store things behind anything everything has to be at the first level so you can look and see it it has to be within reach in the 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 just transforms everything. It's like I had the same problem with my books for many, many years.

I had books 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 and I could see all my books just transformed them. It made it really useful because I could find them, just really go and reach for them. It 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 the hours of looking for something. Right, gathering all the tools. Gathering all the tools. It's like cooking. It's just like cooking. Exactly. It's having a manual random access

memory, right? You have your mise en place right in front of you. Yeah, you know what the tools are. 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? It's very easy. You need to build your own house. project building something that you think every human should have the experience of doing what

would that be it's very easy you need to build your own house shelter and it's not that hard to do believe me i actually i built my own house and your house is amazing no not not this house i mean i actually built one from cutting down the logs cutting down the trees in upstate new york wow and doing the stone hearse and Unfortunately, I don't recommend this. We made two by fours from trees. You don't want to do that because it's a pain. Standard lumber is very good. If things are off a little quarter of an inch,

as they are with rough sawn lumber, it's a mess. But nonetheless, a large portion of the people in the world have made their own homes. Adobe, rammed earth, bamboo, whatever it is. And going back to what we originally started off with, 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, Lloyd Kahn, who built this magnificent place in Bolinas that he built with salvage material from scratch over the many years. It gives you the power to alter it. So I believe that your house should be an extension of you.

That really is 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. Because a well-designed house should really reflect you. 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.

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 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 a byproduct of who you are and also can help you become who you are. 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's no difference between discovering 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 that bring about that process. You have to do both at once. I really enjoy that. Last question, if you could give your, 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.

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. 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 a chemistry lab that I built myself, building the stuff.

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, moving into the 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, 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, it's one and the same person. Oh, they are the same. Okay. So I thought that at one point, you had believed that you needed those people to be two separate people. Here's 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 in the same person

because there's the hunting, the researching, there's a hunter aspect to research that is often found in a certain personality. And then the admin is more nurturing, making making sure things, gardening a little bit. And 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 for – was there a particular approach that bore fruit? I found that the place where I found that over the 14 years I've had two, 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 list 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 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 to the people who are listening, I think keep going. Listen to more podcasts. Try to go wide wide i know tim mentions them here and there take a chance listen to some more 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 very public email for the past 25 years you can find it very easily on my website if you want to email directly i have not outsourced 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 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 in there 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 on 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. NorCal's in China. Or in China. It's been a long time. I could get back i'm ready i'm heading back to japan again and i know that you have lots of roots in in asia but um i go there to renew my sense of the future because they are you know they're bulldozing the past as fast as they can and headed racing into the future so uh i want to see what asia has in store for us because mathematically we don't count anymore

you know what point three billion whatever three billion asians and you know 300 million americans count anymore. 3 billion Asians and 300 million Americans. What can you say? Study up, folks. Specialization is for insects. I think that was Heinlein. Enjoy your time on this planet and look broadly, like Kevin said.

Kevin, thank you so much. I will talk to you soon. Have a wonderful day. I will talk to you soon and have a wonderful day. I will talk to you soon. Thanks for having me, Tim. Okay. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. 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 at Twitter.com slash T Ferris. That's T-F-E-R-R-I-S-S. Or on Facebook at Facebook.com slash Tim Ferris. Until next time, thanks for listening.