We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC128: Evolving w/ the Technium w/ Kevin Kelly (Bitcoin Fundamentals)

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. Hey, everyone, welcome to this Wednesday's release of the Bitcoin Fundamentals podcast. So this week's show is a little different than most because I got an opportunity to interview one of the authors of one of my favorite books of all time, and that's Mr. Kevin Kelly. Kevin is the founding editor of the global brand Wired Magazine. When I read Kevin's book, What Technology Wants, for the first time, I immediately went back and reread the book two times in a row, which I don't know. normally do. The book was just that good. This was, and this book was written back in 2010. So Kevin has a

Starting point is 00:00:38 new book out. It's called Excellent Advice for Living. We talk about it. We talk about his old book. We talk about all sorts of things in this interview. This was really a lot of fun for me. And yeah, all these interesting ideas about technology, where it's going, especially right now with AI. We get into some of that. So here's my chat with the one and only Mr. Kevin Kelly. You're listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by the Investors Podcast Network. Now for your host, Preston Pish. Hey, everyone, welcome to the show. I am super pumped for today's interview.

Starting point is 00:01:27 Kevin Kelly, like I said in the introduction, is here with us. Kevin, welcome to the show. Hey, it's really great to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me. I really appreciate it. So, Kevin, you don't know this, but I'm a massive fan. Massive, massive fan. And I think the book that you wrote, What Technology Wants, was such a massive, massive book for me.

Starting point is 00:01:49 I find myself recommending this book to so many people because it's one of those books that you kind of walk away with just like looking at the world through a completely different lens than you looked at it before you read the book. Well, thank you. That's the highest compliment. And so it's a little surreal for me to be able to just sit here and talk to you today. There's a term that you use in this first book. And I know we're also going to be talking about your new book that's out, but we're going to get to that a little bit later in the conversation. I want to start off with a term that I think is really important for the listener to just hear

Starting point is 00:02:21 from you. And it's this term called technium. Describe this term technium to people. And for you personally, how did you come to even start thinking about this term technium? Because it's made my mind run wild for years ever since reading your book. So a very brief summary of the tech team would be we're all aware of technology in our lives. Although interesting, that is also a fairly recent word. It wasn't until 1859 or so that the word was used.

Starting point is 00:02:54 And so people didn't kind of recognize that there was such a thing as technology in their lives. But now it's very obvious that there's technology in our lives. And we have things like all the microphones in front of us and our lights around us as well as printing, things that are kind of older, and then all the new stuff. And the point about this is that it's not just a bunch of technologies together, it's the idea that these technologies form a system. It's like the difference between just looking at flowers and a tree and then understanding that there's an ecosystem, an ecology. So you can see that the tech team is sort of the ecology of technologies. It's all the technologies together working together. meaning you need a hammer to make a saw. You need the saw to make the handle for the hammer.

Starting point is 00:03:46 So they're kind of codependent on each other. Today we need plumbing to house of workers who make the machinery that the farmer uses. And so it's all tied together in a very complicated web of codependency and relationships. Some technologies require other technologies to work or consume, give them their byproducts. And so there is an ecosystem view of this world. And the larger point is that it's the system itself, the system, which I call the technium, which is the ecosystem of all the technologies. The system itself has certain biases and tendencies as a whole. And so the question I ask is, what are those tendencies and biases that the system itself will tend to go to, which are independent of our own human wishes and our own human actions inside it. So I would,

Starting point is 00:04:44 so I kind of summarize that as saying, what does the technium want? What does, what does technology, the system of technology, where does it tend to want to go just because it's a large system? So the technium is that larger. Almost like a homeostasis like you see in biology. You kind of have that happening. There is some of that. But there's also a dynamic. element too. So the thing about ecosystems, one of the myths about them is that they're kind of in harmony or they're in equilibrium. And they're actually the opposite. The thing about ecosystems is that they're forever in disequilibrium. They're forever changing and adapting to the climate, to the arrival of new species. And so there is a very active sense.

Starting point is 00:05:37 And actually, the only things that kind of, that only stops when it dies. So that kind of equilibrium is actually a sign of illness and death. The living force is, the dynamic zone is, is there's a disequilibrium. And so there is an inherent disequilibrium in the technium. That's the source of innovation. That's the source of constant change and flux, we call it. It's not just, we have some misconceptions about how even biology works, but what I suggest is that our technology, the world around us, is actually an extension and acceleration of the natural world and life and evolution. That this is sort of the same kind of dynamics that we see at work in ecology and ecosystems.

Starting point is 00:06:26 We see at work in the technological realm, what I call the technium. I would imagine that the amount of people asking you about AI on a daily basis is beyond annoying at this point. But we have to talk about it. You know, it's like it's unavoidable right now because it absolutely is the biggest thing going on. It's very central. There's a lot of hype, but there's also a lot of not enough hype in many other ways. Yeah. And the reason why we're all talking about it is a good reason.

Starting point is 00:06:58 And that is, it's because we have no idea what it is. We really don't know. We're all making projections, predictions, because we're trying to figure it out together. And this is going to be ongoing. And we're about to kind of revise our own ideas about who we are and about what thinking is and consciousness. And so it is worth talking about.

Starting point is 00:07:25 And it's unavoidable to talk about it because it's very, very much new territory. I can't stress how important it is because we have never been there before. I mean, this is a big thing. And the one thing I would say, it's a big thing so big that it's going to take a century to figure out. This is not something that we need to figure out like tomorrow, today, next year. We're not going to stop talking about it in two years now. We're going to be talking about it even more in two years.

Starting point is 00:07:57 to now. One of the things that you talk about a lot through your writings and through the years is how technology has this own evolutionary path separate from human influence. So when we look at AI or we look at any of these other just mind-blowing technologies that are coming out right now and you think about the steps in the order in which things have to happen, is there anything that you're seeing in the coming 10, 15 years that because these technologies now exist, like, like AI, what manifests itself out of that that maybe you're seeing on the horizon that isn't so evident to everybody else? Most people seem to be worried about unemployment, about losing jobs.

Starting point is 00:08:40 And then there's another subset who are concerned about equity, like making sure that it's evenly distributed. Those are valid concerns and those are things that we do want to pay attention to. But I don't think that's the, I think what we're not looking at is the unintended benefits of this. and the ways in which this is going to this, meaning the AI revolution in general, that this is going to reduce all kinds of new services, goods, opportunities for employment, things to do. And that right now it's much easier to see the ways in which is the problem and much harder actually to see the ways in which is the problem and much harder actually to see the ways in which these are. going to benefit. So the benefits are sort of hidden in a certain sense that we don't have enough

Starting point is 00:09:32 of imagination right now. It's hard for us to imagine the ways in which this will fall out in a good way. It's much easier for us to imagine the ways it's going to fall out in a bad way. But that's just the nature of the world that the good things are more improbable than the bad. bad is very probable. We know how things break. And so I think what we're not really prepared for are the upsides and taking advantage of those upsides. You know, it's like, it reminds me very much of the very beginning days of the web and

Starting point is 00:10:10 the internet in the late 80s and early 90s. And it's interesting, it's like, what would you, if you were coming back from the future going back to somebody in 1990s, say, you try. to explain to them what actually happened. First of all, they wouldn't believe you. Yeah. Probably. Secondly, they were just, you know, it's like, well, there's, everybody carries this little

Starting point is 00:10:36 magic stone in their pocket and it's a window into everything. Everything. Everything. It has a camera that's amazing. You know, it's got a GPS. You know, it's like, what? I didn't see that coming. So I think similar kinds of things are going to happen with.

Starting point is 00:10:53 with this technology where they're not obvious and they seem kind of impossible or improbable. And so I think on forgetting what we know and kind of suspending our disbelief a little bit is going to be one of the skills that we want to have as we encounter these new things so that we can actually take advantage of these new opportunities as they come along. How do you think about biology as far as like all the longevity stuff that's going on right now? Tony Robbins and some others, Peter Diamandis, they're really kind of talking about this a lot. And when I think about AI and I think about its ability to just conduct correlation analysis on like DNA and look at things from just a health standpoint, do you see our ability to extend human lifespan significantly because of what this technology might bring in and its ability to kind of see things that ordinary humans just can't do because of the sheer processing power that we have in, and essentially, single brain.

Starting point is 00:11:55 I think my answer may surprise you because the answer is I'm skeptical of that immediately. So I would say no. I think there's a there's a fallacy at work in the AI realm, which I call thinkism. And thinkism is the idea that the main thing that we lack is thinking, intelligence. And I think in that way, intelligence is often overrated for problem solving. So I think the answer is that we simply don't have not done enough experiments to know enough. So you could take the most genius super AI right now to read all the papers that have been done so far. And they're not going to figure out how to do longevity just by reading, just by thinking about it.

Starting point is 00:12:40 There's still a whole bunch of more experiments. In other words, we're just still too ignorant of that. And that just thinking faster, maybe doing simulations, is simply not going to be. enough to extend human lifespan significantly. Because of the complexity of biology? Because of the complexity of biology and are generally ignorance of it. So the answer is, we simply still don't know enough about how it works. And the thinking about it is not going to tell us that.

Starting point is 00:13:13 And so that's what I call thinkism, is this idea that, oh, well, if you just bring intelligence, you don't need data, you don't need experiments, you can just think about it. And that is not true. There is just research experiments needed to understand things. So we don't have enough data. You can, we have enough data to get in a fake and answer on chat, GBT, but we don't have enough data to extend longevity, which is a very different problem. I think in a long run, over a hundred years span, sure.

Starting point is 00:13:45 But if we're talking about near term, I don't think so. So you have a new book that came out. This book is very different than the one that we were just talking about. In fact, I was a little surprised when I opened it up. I was like, oh my gosh, this is so much different than what I was expecting, right? And I loved it. You start off the book with just kind of a note to the reader and you're talking about how you were going to write down 68 bits. Right, right.

Starting point is 00:14:12 I love the framing of this. Talk to us about this intro that you wrote and talk to us about the framing of using bits. Like, why did you describe it that way? Like, just give it a few of the tips. So the book is excellent advice for living. It's a little tiny book. There are these hundreds of little tiny, they're almost like tweets. There are bits, little bits of wisdom that I tried to take a whole book and compress it into a little sentence, a tweet, a phrase, a proverb. And I did that. I've been doing that for years myself because it's a way for me to remember these. remind myself, the reminders. A lot of the knowledge and wisdom is ancient, timeless, from the

Starting point is 00:14:55 Bible, the Stoics, Confucius. It's very much part of the same continuum, but I wanted to be able to compress it into an easy-to-remember way in the current vernacular, you know, and using my own words. And that was something that I was doing. And then I decided that my kids are grown, they're adults. We were not helicopter parents. We were the opposite. I never gave them. advice very much. But I decided that I really wished, I'd known this stuff earlier. It took me a long time. So I said, I'm going to give you a present and then I'll tell you things that I think you should know. And when my son did see the book, he said, yeah, you had, you never said those, but you'd try to live those. Yes. So you were saying it. You were just saying it in a different

Starting point is 00:15:40 language. We recognized it, but we just hadn't actually said it. And so that's what I was trying to do is make it in some kind of a compressible, transmittable, easily bits, little kind of digital things that could just be transmitted very easily sent over a tweet or email. And I started off with a few of them. And once I got going, I realized had more to say. And I started just over a couple of years trying to write them down when I thought of them. And then every birthday in April, I would share some more. And they went viral. So we decided to put them all together into a book that would be easy to hand to somebody young or as a graduation gift or Father's Day kind of a thing, where there was something that I think most people find at least 17 ones that they really, that will work for them. I mean, there's enough of them that there's going to be a couple in there that you want to keep.

Starting point is 00:16:35 Well, I've jotted a couple down. And this one specifically, I want to ask you about because it's different than what I think the consensus would think when they hear this. Fear is fueled by a lack of imagination. The antidote to fear is not bravery, which I think most people would think it is. It looks more like imagination. So do you have a story or like a life event that has driven this one right here? What I've encountered over time is that fear, particularly fears of new things, it's like fear of AI. We were just talking about or fears of immigrants or fears about transgender, whatever.

Starting point is 00:17:15 it is, there's fears. And the thing that's missing often is the imagining what those things might be or do beyond what they first appear to be or how they're cast. And so, like say, going back to fear of AI, what's missing, as I were saying, is imagining all the good things that it could do. It's really hard to see. It's very easy to see the downsides. It requires no imagination whatsoever. Or very little imagination. Yeah, yeah. Like, yeah, how things break.

Starting point is 00:17:52 Yeah, I can see how that, how it could go wrong. How can it go well unexpectedly? That's harder. That requires a work of imagination. But if you can see how it could go well, then the fear can dissipate because it's not as. So the fear is like a focus only on the easy to imagine things. It's focusing on the easiest to imagine. The easiest to imagine is that it doesn't work.

Starting point is 00:18:20 And by the way, that's based on experience because most things fail. Right? And we know in startup land, right? The probable destination is failure. And that's the easiest thing to imagine. Seeing how it works and becomes a success requires a lot of imagination. You have to imagine a very improbable path. Success is improbable.

Starting point is 00:18:44 And so by that definition, it's harder to imagine. If the easiest thing to imagine is that's going to fail, then you want to fear it, because it's fear, the fear of failure, the fear of that. We don't want that. It's not good. But overcoming that, it's not a matter of bravery of, like, stoism or some sort of, like, well, I'm not going to be afraid. No, the anecdote is to imagine it working, to imagine it being a good thing, to imagine the

Starting point is 00:19:12 good side, the unintended benefits from it. And so part of what I think being an optimist is about is actually a work of imagination. It's allowing your imagination to imagine a positive scenario. It may not happen, but you're more likely to make it happen because you can imagine it. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right. I want you guys to imagine spending three days in Oslo at the height of the summer. You've got long days of daylight, incredible food, floating saunas on the Oslo Fjord.

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Starting point is 00:23:33 That's Shopify.com slash WSB. All right. Back to the show. As an engineer, it's so hard to actually construct and build something that works. Call it a skyscraper or a building. But it's so easy to say, oh, yeah, I know how I could destroy a skyscraper or a building or whatever. It's just real simple. Right.

Starting point is 00:23:55 Well, that was the, that was the sort of, I don't know, not the genius, but taking down the Twin Towers was a lot easier than building them, destruction is easier. It's more probable. It requires less of an imagination. And again, whether you're starting a restaurant or a business or a new project, seeing how it fails or works or collapse or crashes or heart hurts somebody is much easier to do and requires very little imagination. But imagining how it could work and help everybody and be good requires a lot more imagination, and that is the anecdote to the fear of the harm. Correct me if you see this differently. When I think of going back to this term technium, and we look at how it evolves and moves over time, it almost seems like it's finding a more efficient way to process or move energy between

Starting point is 00:24:55 entities, and it's finding efficiency. So when we're building something or we're constructing a building, we're making something more efficient for those that are using it in the processing of energy. And when we're destroying it or fear-based, going back to this idea of fear, you're not making something more efficient. You're actually destroying efficiencies. If you had to define, am I making a connection here, or do you see it slightly differently in the way that I described that? Because at the core of this technium idea, I just continued to, literally for years, Kevin. For a year, I'm saying, what's at the essence of what's driving this evolution?

Starting point is 00:25:36 And I'm struggling to get there. Yeah. I don't think that biology, nature, evolution, or technology are necessarily trying to optimize efficiency as the central thing that you're trying to optimize. I think what's being optimized are some other things. I think efficiency might be, but if you think about evolution and biology, it's not efficient. It's not efficient to make a million frog eggs with the idea that three survive. That's not efficient. There is no optimization of efficiency there. It happened to be something

Starting point is 00:26:10 that worked. So evolution in biology is often incredibly very inefficient, although the tactic will work because it's not trying to optimize efficiency. Humans, when we make things, that is one of the concerns that we have, optimizing efficiencies for energy and stuff. But it's It's not the central one. I think the central one that we're optimizing are possibilities. We're increasing, and the system is increasing the possibilities by developing more ways to make a livelihood, more ways to survive as an entity, more different forms, more different livelihoods, more different ways, more different niches.

Starting point is 00:26:50 There's over time an increase in the ways in which you can arrange atoms, more different forms, right? Initially in the beginning of the universe, everything was very simple. There was helium and hydrogen in a few ways. There wasn't a very complicated arrangement of atoms into molecules, and over time, especially with life, you have a very, very elaborate system. So what is kind of moving towards and what it's optimizing are forms, possibilities, choices, in our terms, you might say freedoms, opportunities, it's different ways to make a living, different ways to interact. is this increase in complexity of the world. And that's the general thing that's trying to optimize is ways in which things can be arranged and made in new forms to be had, new services,

Starting point is 00:27:42 new products, new species, new mutualisms. I think the bigger arc over time, there are ways in which making things more efficient is one of the ways in which you can, And one of the strands, but it's not the only strand and not the major strand because there are times when, for instance, one of the things about crypto as a technology is it's incredibly inefficient. If you want to efficient, you centralize things. So any kind of distributed system has a penalty of being more inefficient. But that's oftentimes what we want because those decentralized systems are more adaptable. Yes. So you're trading off the inefficiency. for increased adaptability.

Starting point is 00:28:30 Okay, so that's a nice trade-off. So if you really want, so if you're going to have it really efficient, then you have to have centralized and there's cost to that. So that's what I'm saying is that efficiency is not the central optimization. It can be for certain uses. But at other times, we will pay the tax of the inefficiency in order to have a very adaptable system. I think of trees when you're describing this.

Starting point is 00:28:55 So you think of a tree and how robust that's root system is for what we see winds, you know, it's 30 knot winds is like the strongest winds I would see here, but its roots are structured for 100 knot winds or whatever, right? Right, right. Well, that's a really interesting observation. Right. So the tree is always trading off all kinds of things. It's in survival.

Starting point is 00:29:18 It needs to have enough surface area to capture the photons. But the more surface area has, the more water it loses. And so it's trading off, they're all a sole engineering tradeoffs, okay? And so it's got a tradeoff maximizing the amount of energy it gets with how much water it can afford to lose because of that surface area. And so the conifers have a different strategy. They have needles, which are low surface area. And so they may have to rejigger something else.

Starting point is 00:29:53 in order to get enough light from those needles, because even though they're not losing, the water so they can keep them all year. That's the reason why the leaves are dropped by the deciduous trees is because it's a drought during the winter. The frozen water doesn't move, so they have to lose their leaves. If you have needles, you don't have to lose it. So you have the gain there.

Starting point is 00:30:13 There's all these transactions and trade-offs and engineering terms that life is doing in order to survive, and there will be different strategies for, managing that efficiency versus inefficiency of different processes. And what we're doing in technology is very, very similar. We have technologies that we're social media, whatever it is. We'll have certain advantages and disadvantages for transmitting information, or transmitting emotions and all kinds of things.

Starting point is 00:30:42 And the issue that we're dealing with as the creators of these technologies is that it takes us at least the whole generation, human generation, to kind of figure out exactly what it's good and bad for. And so we're in the process right now of kind of social media is like, I don't know, 7,000 days old. It's still an infant. And we're still figuring out what is really good for, really what it's not good for. And we're trying to move it into the right job. That's what I see a lot of technologies is that they're invented.

Starting point is 00:31:17 And we're kind of trying to, it's like a little baby. And growing up through going through school. we're trying to find the right job, the right role for this technology. And sometimes they begin off in the wrong role, like we begin our nuclear power as bombs, but nuclear power really wants to be generating electricity, right? Okay. I mean, so that's a better job for that technology is a controlled explosion that makes energy for us. That process of discovering what the benefits and the harms are in a real way is,

Starting point is 00:31:51 takes time. We have to live with it. We have to use it. We can't just think about it. We can't just sit back and say, we're going to figure out all this, and then we can start to regulate it by thinking about what it could do.

Starting point is 00:32:04 We have to actually use things on a day-to-day basis to begin to see what they're good for. And that's been the thrill of AI is all the people are using it and discovering, oh, we can do this with it. We can do that with it. Or here, this happens.

Starting point is 00:32:19 The inventors had no idea. no idea what it was going to be used for or how best it was going to be used and what its harms were. And so that's the thrill right now as we see these things and we're every day discovering what they could be used for. It's pretty insane to think we've engineered something as a human race that we don't even really know how it can be used, which like when have we ever engineered something where that was the case? like it's kind of insane. Well, I mean, you know, the white paper, Totochi's white paper on crypto is a little similar to that was, you know, the first idea, well, we can use it for currency. I think that's not really what it's going to be used for blockchain.

Starting point is 00:33:04 So it'll probably have some other function other than currency. But the initial thought was currency. In the same way, well, you know, when Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, he spent to record sound, he spent a lot of time trying to think about what it would be used for. list. And his first thought that the major thing would be used for would be to record the words of those before they die. So you could hear about people after they were dead. And number 10, down at the very bottom of the list, you might be using for music. All right. So the idea that the phonograph would be for music was not the original conception. It was not even in, it was not

Starting point is 00:33:47 in the top 10 ideas about what you would use a funograph for. And now you can take people's voices and you can reconstruct as if they, you know, you can hear their voice forever. I mean, he was right. He just, it was way further out there on the timeline. You have another quote in the new book here. The expanding universe is overflowing with abundance. It is so full that improvement can often be gained only by subtracting.

Starting point is 00:34:17 Keep moving until you can't end with wanting more, not less. Keep removing. I might have jotted my note down wrong. Keep removing. Keep removing things. There you. There's another similar adage in the book called Art is in what you leave out. And this is the editor in me speaking.

Starting point is 00:34:40 I'm not a born writer. I'm a born editor. meaning that's my natural mode is editing. And I love removing things the way that it can elevate. Yes, enhance, yeah. Hands, elevate, concentrate. So a lot of what I was doing in this book was removing words, trying to remove as many words until just a few sparkling words were left.

Starting point is 00:35:08 It's like the elements of style. The element of style. And this is true for whether you're visually, a lot of the art in making a painting is knowing when to stop, knowing not what to put in. Any kind of screenwriter working in Hollywood would tell you the genius of writing dialogue

Starting point is 00:35:29 is in what you don't say, is all the stuff you don't say, all the stuff that's left unsaid, all the pauses. And then, you know, the famous, I think of Solonius Monk, I'm not really sure, or maybe it was one of the jazz guys talked about, the whole thing about music was the pauses, was the stuff in between the notes. That's where the emotion came in.

Starting point is 00:35:49 It wasn't the notes that you played. It was the nothingness, the silence in between that gave the music its power. And so this idea of removing and minimal and doing more with less is I think there was a period in our human development. where we didn't have enough. Scarcity was the norm.

Starting point is 00:36:13 Now when we have abundance, the skill, the trick, the job is to select, curate, to remove things in order to make them better. So, Kevin, you have a quote in the book, it says, and I think this is so important for the current generation and all the distractions we were just talking about less as more. And the quote says, show me your calendar. and I will tell you your priorities. Tell me who your friends are and I'll tell you where you're going.

Starting point is 00:36:47 Yeah. I love this. There's a couple others very similar where it's not what you say you believe is kind of like it's what you do that matters, this idea that actions are more powerful than words or wishes or anything else.

Starting point is 00:37:04 And so your life is how you spend your time. It's not what you're asking, aspirations are, it's not what you say you believe, it's not what your dogma is, or your belief system, your life comes down to how you actually spend your time, and how are you spending your time, and who do you spend your time with? And so it's kind of an action-oriented. It's an action-oriented perspective that we, one of the, what's the word I want, one of the treats, one of the privileges that we have being alive today, you and I, we're alive or in these meat bodies, we've got this which we are assigned and we have very little choice in the model number that we were given.

Starting point is 00:37:44 We were given these things. We were responsible for them, but we didn't have a choice about what we got. And so, and we have a limited amount of time, but it's, you know, the angels in heaven are looking down to us and weeping because we have this embodiment, which allows us to have impact, because we can take action, unlike some kind of light being that has no body and can do, have no impact. We can have impact on each other or people around us. This is the maximum ride.

Starting point is 00:38:12 This is a ride with the maximum impact where we can have this time to do stuff, to have action, interact with material world. And it's only through that action that we actually can get anything, have any kind of impact. We can say stuff that's important, but it's not enough. I think the bias in our lives should be through action. That's how we understand how technology works. It's through action, through use. It's how we show love. It's through action, not just words.

Starting point is 00:38:44 It's how we make things happen in the world. It's how we make new stuff. It's how we help people. It's through action. And so there's a bias in my advice book towards action. We have a lot of entrepreneurs, finance people that listen to our show. and you created an insanely successful business in your time. What kind of advice can you give to people that are startups or just wanting to start

Starting point is 00:39:14 their own business or kind of in the thick of it that you learned through the years, one or two nuggets that like when you look back at building this incredible thing with wired and whatnot, like what just kind of sticks out in your head as far as advice goes? So first of all, success is improbable. And therefore, it requires a great continuous imagination of trying to imagine how it works. And the thing that was my experience and absolutely the experience of every other entrepreneur that I know that has been successful is that that ride to success is kind of an ongoing string of near-death experiences. okay it's it's like if you're not having near-death experiences is probably not going to really have an impact in the world and and that is it's because it's improbable your success is going to be

Starting point is 00:40:07 improbable and and so I guess the thing to say is you should expect to have near-death experiences you should expect that that is not like a crisis or special or extraordinary that is the norm it's the norm where you're going to be coming to the edge and not knowing how you're going to make payroll the next month. I mean, can you write? That's almost standard. So you should expect that. I think the other thing is,

Starting point is 00:40:33 and that kind of makes a roller coaster because the month later you could be on top of the world and everything is going great and then three months later is back down there. And so that roller coaster ride, people aren't really prepared for it. They may be prepared for kind of like a slog, ongoing slog, but not,

Starting point is 00:40:49 but that roller coaster of coming to near death and going up again is stressful. It's stressful. So that's one thing. I would say the other thing about entrepreneurs is that if a lot of money was needed to make innovations, then all innovations would be coming from the billionaires and the big companies. But actually, a lot of money is actually a hurdle for innovation. And that's because if you have money that you attempt to buy the solutions.

Starting point is 00:41:22 But often the whole point of these solutions is that they can't be bought. They don't exist. They have to be created. And it requires grit, imagination, perseverance, luck, all kinds of things that a young, person with very little money can have an abundance. This is why most innovations and new things are going to be coming from the edges, from the startups, from people who maybe have little experience, from people who don't have very much money,

Starting point is 00:41:59 because they cannot afford to buy the solution so they have to invent it themselves. So I say the second thing is the fact that you may seem not to have a lot of resources and access to capital and other things is actually an advantage when you are really trying to do something new and novel because it forces you to go places, that a big company or a billionaire are not going to be able to get to

Starting point is 00:42:25 because they've got the money and they're going to try and buy the solutions. And so that would be the second thing I would say to them is your state, whatever it is, is actually a slight advantage in trying to make something the next breakthrough. Love that. Damon John wrote a book. I don't know if you're familiar with him, but he had a very similar piece of advice in his book to entrepreneurs about the money.

Starting point is 00:42:51 actually being maybe a disadvantage for them. I love this quote in your new book. You said, to transcend the influence of your heroes, copy them shamelessly like a student until you get them out of your system. That is the way of all masters. Where did this one come from? It came from actually my own, a little bit of myself, but also observing many, many other artists and people who worked with mentors, people that they admire.

Starting point is 00:43:20 and, you know, it's a very common kind of trope to tell writers to actually type out some passages of writing that you love, just literally copy it, or to try to write something in the style of one of your heroes or to paint in their style. And you learn so much by doing that. And then once you've done it, you move on. It's really kind of funny. If you don't do it, you're always kind of. kind of like imitating them in the background, but actually overtly imitating them somehow makes some kind of closure on it. You say, yeah, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to paint like Picasso for three months and I'm going to just try and make the most Picasso like things.

Starting point is 00:44:06 And then you've done that, you've incorporated it, you make it muscle memory and stuff. And now you can kind of put it behind and not, you'll still be influenced by them. It's not that the influence goes away. It's just that the copying goes away, the imitation goes away. And that's true, I think, even with, you know, business and other things, it's like, yeah, there's no shame, I think, and when you're beginning out to try and imitate something in order to learn from it. The shame is if you continue to do that. You want to, you want to, you want to just figure it out, do it, cooperate it, and then move on and leave it behind, and then go on to do your own thing. Make your own version of success.

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Starting point is 00:47:55 risks, charges, and expenses. This and other information can be found in the income fund's prospectus at fundrise.com slash income. This is a paid advertisement. All right, back to the show. So you just do so many neat and cool things through your life. Like when I look back at the stuff you were doing in the 80s over in Asia, like it's just, it's endless things we could talk about here. Right, right, right, right. But you're on a board and this is the 10,000 year clock. Why? What is this? Explain this to people. Then why? Why is this a passion of yours? So I was one of the co-founders of the Long Now Foundation, which was set up to try and encourage long-term thinking, to try and encourage us to consider future generations in what we do,

Starting point is 00:48:43 to, in other words, to be a good ancestor. And one of the projects, we've done a number of projects from trying to, I did a little website on trying to encourage people to take long-term bets as a way to sharpen our reasoning. that was called Long Betts, which was kind of a little small thing, to doing these big projects like building a 10,000-year clock. The clock, we've done a number of different variations. There's a prototype in the London Museum that we made the ring right at the beginning

Starting point is 00:49:16 of the year of the millennial 2000. So the idea of the clock is that there's once a year, it makes a tick every century, it makes a talk, and then every millennial little cucko comes out. this idea of kind of marking time in very long stretches in order to help us think generationally in the way that lots of the things that we enjoy today were built by people of previous generations and sometimes it took beyond their lifetime to complete the whole idea of cathedrals. We want to do things because most of the people who will live are in the future and we want to be a good ancestor in kind of doing things that may not pay off for us,

Starting point is 00:49:57 but we could pay off in the future, or things that they would thank us for, saying, well, thank you for planting that tree. We didn't know what that look like, so we made a foundation to try and encourage that. We have talks, and one of the things we did was build this clock to tick for 10,000 years, as a kind of like an icon, like the way that the picture of the whole earth from space could kind of trigger people thinking about ecology and ecosystems and environmentalism. We thought that a clock that's ticked for 10,000 years would remind people to think in a longer stretch of time, to be concerned not just with the next quarter, but the next decade

Starting point is 00:50:36 or the next hundred years, the next generation. And so the current clock, there's many clocks, But the current one is built in West Texas, it's underground in a mountain. It's 500 feet tall. It has chimes designed by Brian Eno that ring once a day and every day at noon. And every day it's a different melody for 10,000 years. So there's an algorithmically generated. But there's no electronics in the clock. The clock is actually a computer.

Starting point is 00:51:08 It's a computer that does digital bits that's run physically. there's no electricity. So instead of having gears, it has a mechanism that does calculation. So it's calculating the time with not electricity. It's being powered by the differences between night and day temperature at the top of the mountain. And there's a big face in the clock. And all this exists. Okay, so this already exists inside a mountain.

Starting point is 00:51:33 There's a spiral staircase that's been carved by a robot inside it. So the stairs are of the mountain itself that run up into this clock. from the base of the mountain. And the idea is that there's a big face for the clock. In order to see the current time, you have to have humans wind it. You have to wind the clock of the face to show the current time. It only shows the time that the last person asks, even though it's keeping the time in its own mechanism. It doesn't show the time until it's asked. So it requires kind of, it wants to have visitors. The clock wants to have visitors, people making the program is to the clock to honor the idea that this is a clock 10,000 year ticking, what else should

Starting point is 00:52:17 we be thinking about for the long term? It's the purpose of the clock is to remind us to be good ancestors. We're winding down on the time. I got one quick question for you with respect to this idea, protopia, and how it differs from utopia or dystopian visions of the future. You were talking about this idea of time preference, which I think is just a fascinating idea. So give us a little bit on this and then we'll wrap things up. In general, I think dystopians are cheap. Every single science fiction story, I would say not everything. I would say 99% of science fiction stories and movies about the future are dystopian. They're worlds that you don't want to live in. One of the exception is the Star Trek, which is not taking place on this planet. It's in space.

Starting point is 00:53:05 So that's kind of hard. But there's very, very, very, very few pictures of stories about a future where you want to live in it. And I think that's a real problem. They're actually harming us. And I think the vision of utopia is simply one that we no longer believe. And I think it's actually dangerous because it's a state where everything is, it's an end state where everything is perfect and problems. And I think that's completely unrealistic and may be harmful because the only one, way nothing, nothing ever changes. It's like, it doesn't make any sense. So I don't think we really

Starting point is 00:53:41 want utopia. And I think utopia visions are generally very, very flawed. And whenever someone tries to make utopia, they just collapse into some weirdness. So what we want is something in between. I think what we want is something what we have right now compared to where we were 100 years ago, which is what I call protopia. And protopia means that we have some something where there's progress. There is forward motion. It's not perfect, but it's better than last year or 10 years ago or 200 years ago. So it's incrementally moving towards betterment. Not perfect. We're making new problems. There'll be plenty of new things, new, powerful technologies will make powerful with new problems. But we'll solve those problems with

Starting point is 00:54:30 even more technology, which will make new problems. But what we get out of that kind of mix is we get increasing choices and possibilities, we get a little bit better. So if we can create 1% more than we destroy every year, just 1% that 1% compounded over time, the long-term view, is civilization. That's what civilization is. It's simply an accumulation of 1% a year. That 1% is almost invisible. One percent, who can see 1%? It's only visible when we look behind us and see, and that's why history is so important when we talk about the future, is we can see that progress is real. So protopia is this idea of progress. Pro progress. It's also like pro versus con. It's a positive. It's like prototyping, this idea of incremental improvement.

Starting point is 00:55:20 So that's what I meant by protopia. It's this idea that we want the, we can head in a direction where we can improve things by a tiny little bit better than last year. And that won't remove problems. Problems propel progress. Problems are needed and inevitable. And the reason why we're optimistic is not because we think our problems are fewer or smaller than they are, but because we believe our capacity to solve problems

Starting point is 00:55:53 is increasing faster than we thought. And so that's where the optimism comes. in Protopia. Kevin, I can't thank you enough for making time to come on. This was a real treat for me personally to have this conversation with you. Give people a handoff of the, I'm sure the books in Amazon, right? Yeah, yeah. It's there.

Starting point is 00:56:11 And, you know, I just want to close with one of my favorites. Let's hear it in one minute. And that is, don't aim to be the best, aim to be the only. I love it. I love it. Work on something where you are the only one doing it. And that might mean that you're working somewhere where there's not a name for what it is that you're doing. Maybe your startup's involved in something that's very hard to explain to your mother.

Starting point is 00:56:35 That's a good sign. That's the sign that you're actually on somewhere where you're not trying to be someone else's success. You're trying to have your own definition. So don't aim to be the best, aim to be the only. That's another bit of advice in the book. There's 450 of them. Thank you so much for inviting me to share. I really appreciate the opportunity.

Starting point is 00:56:55 D. Thank you so much for making time to come on the show. This has been a real pleasure. Likewise for me. If you guys enjoyed this conversation, be sure to follow the show on whatever podcast application you use. Just search for We Study Billionaires. The Bitcoin-specific shows come out every Wednesday, and I'd love to have you as a regular listener. If you enjoyed the show or you learned something new or you found it valuable, if you can leave a review, we would really appreciate that. and it's something that helps others find the interview in the search algorithm. So anything you can do to help out with a review, we would just greatly appreciate. And with that, thanks for listening,

Starting point is 00:57:32 and I'll catch you again next week. Thank you for listening to TIP. To access our show notes, courses, or forums, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decisions, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by the Investors Podcast Network. Written permissions must be granted before syndication or re-broadcasting.

We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC128: Evolving w/ the Technium w/ Kevin Kelly (Bitcoin Fundamentals)

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