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Episode: #753: Derek Sivers and Kevin Kelly

Author: Tim Ferriss: Bestselling Author, Human Guinea Pig
Duration: 02:32:53

Episode Shownotes

This episode is a two-for-one, and that’s because the podcast recently hit its 10-year anniversary and passed one billion downloads. To celebrate, I’ve curated some of the best of the best—some of my favorites—from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited.

The episode features segments from episode "Derek Sivers on Developing Confidence, Finding Happiness, and Saying No to Millions" and "Interview of Kevin Kelly, Co-Founder of WIRED, Polymath, Most Interesting Man In The World?"Please enjoy!Sponsors:Wealthfront high-yield cash account: https://Wealthfront.com/Tim (Start earning 5.00% APY on your short-term cash until you’re ready to invest. And when you open an account today, you can get an extra fifty-dollar bonus with a deposit of five hundred dollars or more.) Terms apply.Helix Sleep premium mattresses: https://HelixSleep.com/Tim (25–30% off all mattress orders and two free pillows)AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement: https://DrinkAG1.com/Tim (1-year supply of Vitamin D (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase.)Timestamps:[00:00] Start[05:47] Notes about this supercombo format.[06:50] Enter Derek Sivers.[07:20] From pig show busker to circus ringleader.[10:42] Derek's framework for developing confidence.[13:05] "The standard pace is for chumps."[18:51] Relaxing for the same result.[24:01] The origins of "HELL YEAH! or no."[26:25] "Busy" implies a life out of control.[28:03] What inspired the automation of CD Baby?[33:22] Derek's billboard.[34:32] Good advice at any age: "Don't be a donkey."[40:24] Enter Kevin Kelly.[41:02] Kevin's biggest regret.[43:13] Finding contentment in minimalism and "voluntary simplicity" without starving to death.[50:33] Kevin's epiphany when he embraced writing as a late bloomer.[56:40] Why Kevin promised himself he would never resort to teaching English while traveling abroad.[59:07] Finding purpose through resilience and the creator's dilemma.[1:06:50] Why the appeal of being a billionaire is overrated.[1:11:05] Middle-aged optimization.[1:15:28] Realizations following a "six months until death" challenge.[1:20:08] Kevin's Kickstarter-funded project linking angels and robots.[1:22:41] Why a self-proclaimed ex-hippie waited until his 50th birthday to try LSD for the first time.[1:28:43] Why a population implosion is probable in the next 100 years.[1:36:05] The greatest gift you can give to your child.[1:38:21] The criteria for Amish technology assimilation.[1:45:03] What technology-free sabbaticals can do for you.[1:48:53] Long Now Foundation's vision of a better civilization.[1:53:33] The graphic novel teaching young people how to become indispensable.[1:54:52] An antidote to misguided "follow your passion" advice.[1:56:44] Kevin's favorite fiction book.[1:59:15] The resource Kevin compiled for documentary lovers.[2:02:47] A name Kevin considers synonymous with "success" (and why success is overrated).[2:05:46] What Kevin would change about himself.[2:07:59] Daily rituals.[2:10:44] How Kevin accumulated enough books to fill a two-story library.[2:15:19] How Adam Savage from MythBusters transformed Kevin's method of organization.[2:17:14] The project everyone should undertake at least once in life.[2:19:30] Does discovery equal invention?[2:20:12] Kevin's advice to his younger self.[2:23:16] Parting thoughts.*For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsorsSign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissYouTube: youtube.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/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, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Maté, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, 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.

Full Transcript

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00:05:10 Speaker_02
before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now or the sooner the better time.

00:05:16 Speaker_00
What if I could be opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living this year over a metal endoskeleton.

00:05:23 Speaker_01
Meet Tim Ferriss.

00:05:30 Speaker_04
Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferriss.

00:05:33 Speaker_04
Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to sit down with world class performers from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives.

00:05:47 Speaker_04
This episode is a two for one, and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about, and passed 1 billion downloads.

00:05:56 Speaker_04
To celebrate, I've curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes.

00:06:08 Speaker_04
And internally, we've been calling these the super combo episodes because my goal is to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household names, the super famous folks, but to also introduce you to lesser known people I consider stars.

00:06:22 Speaker_04
These are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can do the same for many of you. Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle, perhaps you missed an episode.

00:06:32 Speaker_04
Just trust me on this one, we went to great pains to put these pairings together. And for the bios of all guests, You can find that and more at tim.blog slash combo. And now without further ado, please enjoy and thank you for listening.

00:06:50 Speaker_02
First up, Derek Sivers, former musician, programmer, TED speaker, and circus clown, who sold his first company, CD Baby, for $22 million and gave all the money to charity, and author of books on philosophy and entrepreneurship, including How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want, and Useful Not True.

00:07:16 Speaker_02
You can find Derek on Twitter, at Sivers.

00:07:20 Speaker_03
I was 18 years old and all I wanted in my whole life was to be a professional musician. I mean, ideally a rock star, yeah, but if I was just making my living doing music, that was the goal.

00:07:33 Speaker_03
So I'm 18 years old, I'm living in Boston, I'm going to Berklee College of Music, and I'm in this band where the bass player one day in rehearsal says, hey man, my agent just offered me a gig that's like $75 to play at a pig show in Vermont.

00:07:50 Speaker_03
He rolls his eyes and he's like, I'm not going to do it. Do you want the gig? I'm like, fuck yeah, a paying gig? Oh my god, yes. So I took the gig to go up to Burlington, Vermont. And I think it was like a $58 round trip bus ticket.

00:08:06 Speaker_03
And I get to this pig show in Vermont. I strap my acoustic guitar on, and I walk around a pig show playing music.

00:08:13 Speaker_03
And did that for like three hours, got on the bus home, and the next day the booking agent called me up and said, hey, so yeah, you did a really good job at the pig show. We got good reports there.

00:08:24 Speaker_03
Wondering if you can come play at an art opening in Western Massachusetts. I'll pay you 75 bucks again. So same thing, I took a $60 bus out to Western Massachusetts, got 75 bucks for playing at an art opening.

00:08:37 Speaker_03
And the agent was there and he was impressed, and so he said, hey look, I've got this circus, and the previous musician just quit, so we really need somebody new, and I really like what you're doing.

00:08:47 Speaker_03
So there's about three gigs a week, I can pay you 75 bucks a gig. They're usually Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Do you want the gig? Hell yeah, I'm a professional musician now, this is amazing.

00:08:58 Speaker_03
So I said yes to everything, which is going to come up later with the hell yeah or no thing. But I think it's really smart to switch strategies.

00:09:04 Speaker_03
But when you're earlier in your career, I think the best strategy is you just say yes to everything, every piddly little gig. You just never know what are the lottery tickets. So this one ended up being a real lottery ticket for me.

00:09:17 Speaker_03
Because as soon as I joined the circus, Again, I'm 18, I had no stage experience. And after a few gigs, they said, hey, so the previous musician used to go out and open the show with this big theme song and get everybody up and dancing.

00:09:31 Speaker_03
Could you do that? And I said, yeah, sure. And another gig or two later, they said, hey, the previous musician used to close the show also with that theme song. Could you do that? I said, yeah, sure.

00:09:39 Speaker_03
And then it was, the previous musician used to go out in between every act and get the audience to applaud and thank them and introduce the next act. Do you think you could do that? I said, yeah, sure.

00:09:51 Speaker_03
And I was really bad at it at first, but I got good eventually. I became like the ringleader MC of this whole circus. And I was 18 years old. So if you were to go to the circus, it would have looked like my show.

00:10:03 Speaker_03
And I did that for 10 years from the age of 18 to 28. I did over a thousand shows and eventually by the way got paid more than 75 bucks.

00:10:11 Speaker_03
Eventually I was getting like 300 bucks a show and it became my full-time living and I even bought a house with the money I made playing with the circus and then that led to all kinds of other things. So just so many huge opportunities in 10 years of

00:10:26 Speaker_03
stage experience came from that one piddly little pig show that I said yes to this little thing. So yeah, the only reason I stopped doing the circus is when Seedy Baby started taking over my life and I had to start turning down circus gigs.

00:10:40 Speaker_03
But yeah, that was my life for 10 years.

00:10:42 Speaker_04
What did you learn that made you better? What were the lessons learned that made the biggest difference in your performance as this MC? What are the biggest mistakes that you made early on that you corrected? Either one is fine.

00:10:57 Speaker_03
It's kind of the same answer is that at first I was too self-conscious because I thought it was about me. I was going up on stage thinking that the audience was somehow judging me, Derek Sivers, as if I mattered.

00:11:14 Speaker_03
So I would get self-conscious of what they thought of me. And eventually, and I think it took maybe like 10 or 20 gigs, the circus was run by a husband and wife team. And Tarleton was the name of the wife.

00:11:29 Speaker_03
She was the one really kind of out on the gigs and leading the circus. The husband was more the booking agent. And she's the one that like single handedly gave me my confidence that I have today. Like sometimes when People ask me, why am I so confident?

00:11:44 Speaker_03
It's because of Tarleton. That's a longer story we could get into. But anyway, Tarleton is the one that, she just kept pushing me from backstage, like, come on, you're up there acting like David Letterman. Don't do this whole kind of, yeah, I'm so cool.

00:11:57 Speaker_03
All right, everybody, here's the next act. I think I was trying to be cool because I thought that people were judging me, right? And she said, these people came here for a show. Go give them what they came here for.

00:12:10 Speaker_03
And so one time I decided to go out there and just be over the top ridiculous. I went on stage and I said, ladies and gentlemen, what you're about to see is one of the most amazing things. We have an elephant that is going to be coming from backstage.

00:12:20 Speaker_03
And I did this whole like thing in the fast talking voice and real like pizzazz to it. And the audience loved it. And I came backstage and she said, there you go. That's what people come to the circus for.

00:12:33 Speaker_03
So now that I've been on stage, you know, thousands of times, this really sunk in that you get on stage to give the audience what they came there for. Or even things like this, this interview we're doing. This isn't necessarily for you or me.

00:12:47 Speaker_03
We could just hang up the phone and talk. We don't need to. But we're doing this for the listeners. So we're going to give them something that's useful to them. This isn't about me. This isn't about you. This is about them.

00:13:00 Speaker_03
So that was the biggest lesson learned. Luckily, I learned that early on when I was 18, 19. Yeah.

00:13:05 Speaker_04
Seems like most of my friends who are what most people would consider successful in various respects can trace their confidence back to either or both end, a specific woman and a specific coach or mentor of some type.

00:13:24 Speaker_04
It always comes down to one or both of those.

00:13:28 Speaker_03
Oh, Tim, you know, I've never told you about Kimo Williams. It's a great name, and I want to learn more. No, I don't know anything about. This is so up your alley. I can't believe I've never told you this. OK, thanks for prodding me.

00:13:40 Speaker_03
I mean, you prompted me with that because you're right. It was a gorgeous woman, Tarleton, and it was a music teacher, Kimo Williams. But see, he changed my life a year or two before I met her. Okay, so imagine this. I'm 17 years old now.

00:13:55 Speaker_03
I'm living in suburban Chicago and I decide to go to Berklee College of Music because I want to be a famous musician. And just like two or three months before I'm supposed to go,

00:14:06 Speaker_03
I see an ad in the local Chicago Tribune for music typesetting, and I'm wondering how much sheet music I'm going to have to be writing. So I call up this classified ad in the paper, and I say, can I ask you some questions about music typesetting?

00:14:18 Speaker_03
And he said, sure, why do you want to know? And I said, because I'm about to go off to Berklee College of Music in a couple months. And he said, oh, really? He said, I used to teach at Berklee College of Music. I said, you did?

00:14:28 Speaker_03
Do you think you can give me some tips? He said, yeah. here's my address, come to my studio at 9 a.m. Thursday morning, see you then. So and he lived like way downtown Chicago in an area I'd never been to.

00:14:41 Speaker_03
And I'm gonna do a little foreshadowing of the story. Perfect. Right now, because when I got married years later to the woman I met when I was sitting in Times Square with you, he was one of only three people I invited to the wedding. It was

00:14:56 Speaker_03
Tarleton from the circus, Kimo Williams, my music teacher, and my first girlfriend, Camille. Those are my only three guests to my wedding. And Kimo Williams told the story to my family. He said, you know, I tell people all the time.

00:15:10 Speaker_03
I get all these kids that want, you know, want to be famous. And I say, yep, show up at my studio at 9 a.m. And he said, nobody ever does. Nobody has their shit together to show up when I tell them to.

00:15:20 Speaker_03
And he said, so I'd honestly forgotten that there was this kid that called from a classified ad.

00:15:25 Speaker_04
That was his way of saying no. It was just his hurdle.

00:15:29 Speaker_03
He was like, yeah, all right, kid. Sure. Here's a seven foot hurdle. Let's hear you do. Exactly. So he said, so, you know, my doorbell rings some Thursday morning at 8 59 a.m. and I opened the door and there's some. long-haired teenager sitting there.

00:15:43 Speaker_03
So now, flipping back to first-person point of view is, yeah, Kimo Williams is this large black man from Hawaii that was a musician that attended Berklee School of Music and then stayed there to teach for a while.

00:15:56 Speaker_03
So what he taught me in four lessons got me to graduate Berklee College of Music in half the time it would take. Here was his thing. He said, the reason I wanted you to study with me for a bit.

00:16:10 Speaker_03
He said, I know you only have like eight weeks before you go to school. He said, I think you can graduate Berklee School of Music in two years instead of four. He said, the standard pace is for chumps. I should get a t-shirt made.

00:16:24 Speaker_03
Totally Tim Ferriss stuff, right? Like I can't believe we hadn't talked about this before that he's the one at the age of like 17, 18 got me into this mentality. He said where the standard pace is for chumps.

00:16:37 Speaker_03
The school has to organize its curricula around the lowest common denominator so that almost nobody is left out. So they have to slow down so that everybody can catch up.

00:16:49 Speaker_03
But he said you're smarter than that or anybody can be smarter than that if they want to be. So you can go as fast as you want and here's how. And so he sat me down at the piano. He said, OK, what do you know about music theory?

00:16:59 Speaker_03
I said, well, I don't know. Let's find out. And he just asked me a few of these music questions, like, OK, how does a major scale go, da, da, da, da, da, right? OK, show me the tritone. Do you know what a tritone is?

00:17:08 Speaker_03
OK, play me a tritone in the C major scale. I'm like, uh, uh, uh, OK, B and F. He said, OK, how can you take that and? What other chord can you make from B and F? He said, OK, that's called the substitute chord. Now, what is the resolution?

00:17:19 Speaker_03
And he was just like, boom, boom, boom, at this kind of pace. He was doing all this music theory stuff with me. It was so intense. And I was like, I had all this adrenaline like a video game. I was like, this is amazing. OK, keep going.

00:17:28 Speaker_03
I said, OK, do that and this. And. That was like a two-hour lesson that went at that kind of pace. And then he dumped a bunch of homework on me. He said, OK, now go home tonight and take this big book of jazz standards.

00:17:40 Speaker_03
Find me all the 2-5 substitutions or 2-5 closures. Now substitute chords for that, and then come back next Thursday, and we'll do this again. So we did that for like four Thursdays in a row.

00:17:51 Speaker_03
And sure enough, what he taught me in four two-hour sessions was basically like two years of Berklee College of Music. He compressed it into four lessons. Wow. So that when I showed up to my first day of Berklee,

00:18:06 Speaker_03
I tested out of the first few years just thanks to him. And then he even taught me a strategy.

00:18:12 Speaker_03
He offhand mentioned, he said, you know, I think they might still have a rule in place where those other required courses, you know, that you have to take to graduate, he said, I think you could pretty much just buy the books for those and then contact the department head and just take the final exam to get credit.

00:18:29 Speaker_03
So I did that too. So when I got there, all those required classes like, you know, Bach counterpoint classes, I wasn't so interested in it.

00:18:37 Speaker_03
So I bought the book, did all the homework, approached the department head, said, can I take the final exam for this? And he said, looked at me weird and said, okay. Took the final exam and got credit without ever having to attend the class.

00:18:47 Speaker_03
And yeah, that's how I graduated Berkeley College of Music in two years.

00:18:51 Speaker_04
And on a related note, could you talk about, and we've talked about this a bit, but I never tire of it, relaxing for the same result? Because I think this is... such a huge observation that...

00:19:06 Speaker_04
It's incredibly important for type A personalities, or at least for me, because I have a tendency to almost want to burn the candle at both ends to prove to myself that I'm putting forth the maximum effort.

00:19:18 Speaker_04
I'm leaving as little as possible to chance with certain things, you know, and, but tell everybody about the bike, about the bicycle experience.

00:19:26 Speaker_03
Yeah, this was kind of profound. Now granted, I didn't learn this until later, but yeah, I'd been very, very, very type A my whole life, even before I met Kimo Williams.

00:19:37 Speaker_03
I mean, age of 14, it just, my friends called me the robot because they would never see me sleep or eat or relax or hang out. I just was so focused on being the best musician I could be that I would just practice every waking minute.

00:19:51 Speaker_03
If I'd begrudgingly go to a party, I'd bring my guitar with me and I'd be sitting in the corner practicing my scales and arpeggios while everybody was hanging out, getting high.

00:20:00 Speaker_03
So yeah, I've always been very type A. A friend of mine got me into cycling when I was living in L.A. and I lived right on the beach in Santa Monica where there's this great bike path in the sand that goes for, I think it's 25 miles.

00:20:14 Speaker_03
in the sand, something like that, the exact number doesn't matter. But what I would do is I would go onto the bike path and I would get like head down and push it as hard as I could.

00:20:25 Speaker_03
I would go all the way to one end of the bike path and back and then back home and I'd set my little timer when doing this. Huffing and puffing, red face.

00:20:32 Speaker_03
Yeah, just red face huffing, but like just pushing it as hard as I can, every single thrust of the leg just. Of course, you know, that made me quite fun if somebody was in my way on the bike path. Sure, that guy's got places to go.

00:20:46 Speaker_03
But I noticed it was always 43 minutes. I mean, you know, if you know Santa Monica, California, you know the weather is about exactly the same all year round.

00:20:53 Speaker_03
So unless it was a surprisingly windy day, it was always 43 minutes is what it took me to go as fast as I could on that bike path. But I noticed that over time, I was starting to feel less psyched about going out on the bike path.

00:21:10 Speaker_03
Because just mentally when I would think of it, it would feel like pain and hard work. That sounds like pain and hard work. Yeah, I mean, it was. But you know, I guess at first that was okay.

00:21:21 Speaker_03
And after a while, I just felt like, I don't know, riding a bike, why don't I just hang out? So then I think, you know, that's not cool for me to start to associate negative stuff with going on the bike ride. Why don't I just chill for once?

00:21:33 Speaker_03
Like, I'm just going to go on the same bike ride, but just, you know, I'm not going to be a complete snail, but I'll go at like half of my normal pace. So yeah, I got on my bike and it was just pleasant.

00:21:45 Speaker_03
I just went on the same bike ride, but I was more like standing up and I just noticed that I was looking around more. And I looked out in the ocean, I noticed that day there were these dolphins jumping in the ocean.

00:21:55 Speaker_03
And I went down to Marina Del Rey to my turnaround point. And, oh no, actually it was when the breakers at Marina Del Rey, there was a penguin that was flying above me. I was like, no way. I looked up, I was like, hey, a penguin.

00:22:09 Speaker_03
And he shit in my mouth. I was like, bleh, bleh. Was it a penguin or a pelican? Oh, sorry, pelican. Yes, a flying penguin above my head. That would be more amazing.

00:22:22 Speaker_04
I was like, what did you take before your ride? So you had a pelican shit in your mouth. That's incredible accuracy. Was that from, like, how far away was it?

00:22:32 Speaker_03
Like 20 feet up. Wow. I don't know if he was accurate or I was, you know. Anyway, I had such a nice time. It was just purely pleasant. There was no red face. There was no huffing and puffing. I was just cycling. It was nice.

00:22:45 Speaker_03
And when I got back to my usual stopping place, I looked at my watch and it said 45 minutes. And I was like, no way, how the hell could that have been 45 minutes as compared to my usual 43?

00:23:00 Speaker_03
It's like, there's no way, but yeah, it was right, 45 minutes. And that was like a profound lesson that I think changed the way I've approached my life ever since. It's because I realized that

00:23:15 Speaker_03
I guess, you know, what percentage of that huffing and puffing then, we could do the math, whatever, 93 point something percent of my huffing and puffing and all that red face and all that stress was only for an extra two minutes.

00:23:28 Speaker_03
It was basically for nothing. I mean, you know, of course, we're not talking about me competing in something where the huffing and puffing might have been worth it.

00:23:34 Speaker_03
But for life, I think of all of this optimization and getting the maximum dollar out of everything and the maximum out of every second and the maximum out of every minute.

00:23:45 Speaker_03
And I think I just take this approach now of going like, or you could just take the lesson, take most of that lesson and apply it and be effective and be happy. But you don't need to stress about any of this stuff.

00:23:55 Speaker_03
And so honestly, that's been my approach ever since I do things, but I stop before anything gets stressful.

00:24:02 Speaker_04
One of the essays that you're best known for is Hell Yeah or No. And this has been extremely important for me to consistently reread or listen to. How did it come about and what is the gist of that?

00:24:19 Speaker_03
There was a music conference in Australia that I had told my friend I would go with her too. It wasn't even like the conference themselves were really expecting me.

00:24:33 Speaker_03
It was my friend Arielle Hyatt is one of the best publicists I know and she was speaking at that conference and asked if I would come with her as like a co-presenter in her mentor session or something. So I had said yes like six months before.

00:24:49 Speaker_03
Yeah, sure, Australia. I'm living in New York City. I'm like, yeah, sure. And then once it came close and it was like time to book the ticket, I was like, I don't really want to go to Australia right now. I'm busy with other stuff.

00:25:02 Speaker_03
And it was actually my friend, Amber Rhubarth, who's a brilliant musician. I was on the phone with her and kind of lamenting about this. And she's the one that pointed out, she said, it sounds like

00:25:17 Speaker_03
You know, from where you're at, your decision is not between yes and no. You need to figure out whether you're feeling like, fuck yeah, or no. And I said, yeah, that's really what it comes down to, right?

00:25:27 Speaker_03
Because the idea is if you're feeling anything less than like, oh, hell yeah, I would love to do that. Oh, my God, that would be amazing. If you're feeling anything less than that, then just say no, because most of us say yes to too much stuff.

00:25:47 Speaker_03
And then we let these little mediocre things fill our lives. And so the problem is when that occasional

00:25:55 Speaker_03
big, oh my god, hell yeah, thing comes along, you don't have enough time to give it the attention that you should because you've said yes to too much other little half-ass kind of stuff, right?

00:26:06 Speaker_03
So once I started applying this, my life just opened up because it just meant I just said no, no, no, no, no, to almost everything. But then when the occasional thing came up, that I was really like, you know what, that would be awesome.

00:26:21 Speaker_03
Then suddenly, I had all the time in the world. And you know, people say this, I'm sure, you know, every time people contact you, every time people contact me, they say, you know, look, I know you must be incredibly busy.

00:26:34 Speaker_03
And I always think like, no, I'm not. Because I'm in control of my time. I'm on top of it. Busy to me seems to imply like out of control, you know, like, oh my God, I'm so busy. I don't have any time for this shit.

00:26:49 Speaker_03
To me, that sounds like a person who's got no control of their life.

00:26:52 Speaker_04
Yeah, no control and unclear priorities.

00:26:56 Speaker_03
Yes, exactly. So you asked how it's applying in my life that still just on the little tiny day-to-day level, even personal things, God, even people you meet, even, you know, as I'm dating.

00:27:09 Speaker_03
You have to do the hell yeah or no approach, or people ask you to go to events, or god, even, you know, even people asking to do a phone call or anything. I think, you know, am I really excited about that?

00:27:22 Speaker_03
And you know, almost every time the answer's no. So I say no to almost everything. And then, yeah, occasionally something will come up.

00:27:28 Speaker_03
Even a little surprise will be dropped in my lap, like this thing that happened just two months ago called the Now Now Now project, which we don't even really need to talk about.

00:27:37 Speaker_03
The details don't matter so much, but it was just something that popped up. that seemed really interesting and people really wanted. And luckily, because I say no to almost everything, I had the time in my life to make it flourish.

00:27:50 Speaker_03
So for the last six weeks, all I did full time, like 12 hours a day, was suddenly work on this brand new thing that showed up because I could. So that's to me the lovely result of taking the hell yeah or no approach to life.

00:28:03 Speaker_04
So I am reading a section of this blog post that I wrote about you and your, the best email you ever wrote with the Japanese boxing specialist and so on.

00:28:14 Speaker_04
And one of the paragraphs that I put here, for those people interested, it's just the most successful email I ever wrote, but it's everywhere online.

00:28:23 Speaker_04
And it reads, strangers still at its largest, Derek spent roughly four hours on CD Baby every six months. He had systematized everything to run without him. And feel free to correct that if it needs to be corrected.

00:28:38 Speaker_04
But assuming that's roughly true, what were some of the most important decisions or realizations that made that possible?

00:28:47 Speaker_03
I love the timing for when I read 4-Hour Workweek because it was actually just after I had done this like complete delegation of everything. that it was feeling the pain from everything having to go through me. It was my business, right?

00:29:06 Speaker_03
100% no investors, no nothing. It was me. And so I hired people to help me. It was all me, me, me. So four years into it, it was growing. It was really taking off. I had 20 employees, but still almost everything went through me.

00:29:19 Speaker_03
And it made my day kind of miserable because I'm a real like introverted, focused kind of person. I love to just sit down for 12 hours and do one thing without distraction. You're an INTJ, Myers-Briggs? Yep. Are you? I'm 100% INTJ. Yeah.

00:29:34 Speaker_03
So I hated going to the office and being distracted every five minutes with my employees asking me questions.

00:29:43 Speaker_03
So that's when I just felt such pain about this, like, I hate this, that I really, literally, man, I booked a flight to Kauai, I believe, and I was going to move to Kauai and not give my employees my phone number and literally move.

00:30:00 Speaker_03
I don't mean like take a vacation. I mean like I am now going to be running, or I'm going to be the owner of CD Baby on a little island in Hawaii, and you guys just figure out your own damn problems.

00:30:08 Speaker_03
Because I was just having so much psychic pain about this. But then luckily, with lovely coincidence, that night that I booked the flight to Hawaii, I watched the movie Vanilla Sky.

00:30:22 Speaker_03
And in Vanilla Sky, Tom Cruise is like the owner of this big publishing company. But he gets all caught up with these crazy women and gets too overwhelmed with his life and focusing on his own happiness or unhappiness and all that.

00:30:37 Speaker_03
And pretty soon his company is just wrestled away from him. And I thought, oh, I don't want that to happen. I don't want to just plug my ears, close my eyes, run away, and have my company taken away from me.

00:30:50 Speaker_03
I need to deal with my problems instead of running from them. So I canceled the trip to Hawaii and went into work the next day and decided to fix this thing. So then next time somebody asked me a question, I gathered everybody around.

00:31:06 Speaker_03
I said, okay, everybody, Tracy just asked me, you know, Derek, what do we do when a guy on the phone says he wants a refund? You know, I said, okay, everybody stop working. Everybody gather around. Okay. Tracy asked what we do if somebody wants a refund.

00:31:19 Speaker_03
Here's not only what we do, but here's why. Here's my philosophy. Whenever anybody wants a refund, we should always give it to them. And I would just explain not just the what to do, but the why. It was constantly communicating the philosophy.

00:31:31 Speaker_03
To get to the core of it, and I think you mentioned this back in 4-Hour Workweek, there's almost nothing that really has to be you. You can almost get kind of AI and

00:31:43 Speaker_03
figure out how your brain works, how your decision-making process works, and just teach it to other people so that other people can do it. And yeah, that's what I did for every single thing that ever came my way.

00:31:54 Speaker_03
I would gather everybody around, explain the philosophy behind it, why we do things this way, why I'm about to say what I'm about to say, and now here's what I think we should do. Do you understand why? Now please write it down.

00:32:05 Speaker_03
But it was also important that I taught it multiple people, not just one, and had them write it down. And then the cool thing is, I wasn't doing the hiring anymore at the company. I had taught other people how to do the hiring.

00:32:16 Speaker_03
So soon my employees were doing the hiring and then they were teaching new people how to do this thing from the book. So that really started four years into the company. It was six months of difficult work to really make myself unnecessary.

00:32:31 Speaker_03
But then my girlfriend at the time decided to go to film school in L.A., so decided to follow her down there. So I moved down to L.A. to be with her, which is a nice symbolic way to let the company know, like, you're on your own. I'm still the owner.

00:32:44 Speaker_03
And in fact, so there's one little caveat to the thing where you said that I was working on CD Baby for four hours a year or whatever you said. Yeah, four hours a year, six months.

00:32:53 Speaker_03
is that that's how much time I spent doing the stuff I didn't want to be doing, right? The monotony, the bureaucracy stuff, that I had reduced down to almost nothing, like a few minutes a week. But what I was doing from 7 a.m.

00:33:07 Speaker_03
to midnight every single day was programming, like the future of CD Baby, and that's just the stuff that I loved doing. So it was about making my life the way I wanted it to be, working on the stuff that I wanted to be working on,

00:33:19 Speaker_03
and not doing the stuff I didn't. If you could have one billboard anywhere with anything on it, what would it say?

00:33:26 Speaker_03
My real answer, if I was taking that literally, is that I would remove all the billboards in the world and ensure that they were never replaced, you know? Have you ever driven through India, you know? Yeah. It's so sad.

00:33:38 Speaker_04
Well, I haven't driven, but on my way to the Calcutta ER where I spent a week, I was, God, briefly looking out the windows.

00:33:46 Speaker_03
You know, even in these small towns in Kerala, there's almost no space that is left without advertising. So I really admire those places, like I think Vermont and Sao Paulo, Brazil, that ban billboards.

00:34:00 Speaker_03
But I know that that wasn't really what you were asking. So my better answer is, I think I would make a billboard that would say, it won't make you happy. And I would place it outside any big shopping mall or car dealer.

00:34:16 Speaker_03
So ideally, actually, I think, you know what would be a fun project? Is to buy and train thousands of parrots to say, it won't make you happy. It won't make you happy. And then you let them loose in the shopping malls and super stores around the world.

00:34:28 Speaker_03
That's my life mission. Anybody with me? Let's do it.

00:34:32 Speaker_04
What advice would you give your 30-year-old self? And place us, if you would, for where you were at 30 and what you were doing.

00:34:39 Speaker_03
At 30, well, let's see, I had just started CD Baby at 30, but I think the biggest advice I would give to my younger self, or more like knowledge learned, like, hey, younger self, you should know this now, is that women like sex.

00:34:54 Speaker_03
Didn't know that until I was 40. I didn't get that. I think through, you know, like teenage movies or whatever, we're kind of taught the opposite. That's like, you know, men always want sex and women don't.

00:35:05 Speaker_03
I don't know why the media portrays it like that. But later I found out that's not true. But I think the more interesting answer is that my advice to my 30 year old self would be don't be a donkey. What does that mean?

00:35:19 Speaker_03
Well, I meet a lot of 30 year olds that are trying to pursue many different directions at once. but not making progress in any, right? Or they get frustrated that the world wants them to pick one thing because they want to do them all.

00:35:32 Speaker_03
And I get a lot of this frustration, like, but I want to do this and that and this and that. Why do I have to choose? I don't know what to choose.

00:35:39 Speaker_03
But the problem is, if you're thinking short term, then you're acting as if you don't do them all this week, that they won't happen.

00:35:48 Speaker_03
But I think the solution is to think long-term, to realize that you can do one of these things for a few years, and then do another one for a few years, and then another.

00:35:59 Speaker_03
So what I mean about don't be a donkey is, you've probably heard the fable about, I think it's Buridan's donkey? It's a fable about a donkey that is standing halfway in between a pile of hay and a bucket of water.

00:36:13 Speaker_03
and he just keeps looking left to the hay or right to the water, trying to decide. Hay or water? Hay or water? He's unable to decide, so he eventually falls over and dies of both hunger and thirst.

00:36:26 Speaker_03
So the point is that a donkey can't think of the future. If he did, he'd clearly realize that he could just go first drink the water and then go eat the hay. So, my advice to my 30-year-old self is don't be a donkey.

00:36:40 Speaker_03
You can do everything you want to do. You just need foresight and patience.

00:36:46 Speaker_03
Right, so say, like, for somebody listening, if you're 30 years old now, and say you have, like, five different things you want to pursue, well then, you can do each one of those for ten years. And you'll have them all done by the time you're 80.

00:36:59 Speaker_03
You're probably going to live to be 80. It's ridiculous to, I mean, it sounds ridiculous to plan to the age of 80 when you're 30, right? But it's a fact that it's probably coming, so you might as well take advantage of it. It's like, use the future.

00:37:13 Speaker_03
That way you can fully focus on one direction at a time without feeling conflicted or distracted because you know that you'll get to the others in the future.

00:37:23 Speaker_04
And I think you'd also, just to build on that, I agree, I think most people, and this is not something I've, thought up on my own, but they overestimate what they can achieve in a day or a week.

00:37:33 Speaker_04
So they have 20 items on their to-do list, but they underestimate what they could achieve in a year or even two years. And the way that, for instance, if you look at a lot of what I've done, much of which ended up being

00:37:48 Speaker_04
the result of accidental discoveries, but you had the book career, but then you had the angel investing started around 2007-2008, and I treated that as a two-year self-imposed MBA.

00:37:58 Speaker_04
And it was like, okay, I want to try this and really focus on it for two years, and I'm not going to expect

00:38:05 Speaker_04
to have any financial return, but just as an MBA, I'm going to sink this amount of cost into it, which was identical to Stanford Graduate School of Business at the time, and assume that the network and relationships and lessons I would learn would be worth that two years.

00:38:20 Speaker_04
And just viewing them as two-year experiments, which I did with the TV also, which did not turn out as ideally as I would have liked, although I'm very proud of, you know, Tim Ferriss' experiment. Podcast, same thing, right?

00:38:33 Speaker_04
It wasn't a three-year commitment, but it was also not a one-day or one-week commitment. It was like, okay, I'm gonna do this for at least six episodes, maybe it takes me six months, and then I'll correct a course at that point.

00:38:45 Speaker_04
But, yeah, you do, I think a lot of 30-year-olds feel pressured, or younger, or older for that matter, to pursue many, many things in parallel when if you were just to tweak that slightly and make them serial, the results would be much better.

00:39:02 Speaker_03
Yeah. That's a really hard lesson to learn. We can even say it right now. It's really tough. I even find that now.

00:39:08 Speaker_04
Yeah. Constant challenge. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors, and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront. There is a lot happening in the US and global economies right now, a lot. That's an understatement.

00:39:24 Speaker_04
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00:40:24 Speaker_02
And now, Kevin Kelly, founding executive editor of Wired Magazine, former editor and publisher of The Whole Earth Review, and best-selling author of books on technology and culture, including Excellent Advice for Living, The Inevitable, What Technology Wants, and Vanishing Asia, his three-volume photo book set capturing West, Central, and East Asia.

00:40:51 Speaker_02
You can find Kevin on Twitter and Instagram at Kevin, the number two, Kelly, and on his website, kk.org.

00:41:02 Speaker_04
Kevin, thank you so much for being on the show.

00:41:04 Speaker_00
It's my honor.

00:41:05 Speaker_04
And I am endlessly fascinated by all of the varied projects that you constantly have going on.

00:41:11 Speaker_04
But that leads me to the first question, which is, when you meet someone who is not familiar with your background, and they ask you the age old, what do you do question, how do you even begin to answer that? What is your stock answer to that?

00:41:24 Speaker_00
These days, my stock answer is that I package ideas into books and magazines and websites, and I make ideas interesting and pretty.

00:41:37 Speaker_04
Well, I like the pretty. We'll come back to the aesthetic aspect. I think that's a really neglected piece of the entire puzzle. You do have, of course, a background. A lot of people are familiar with your background with Wired, but perhaps you could

00:41:51 Speaker_04
give folks a bit of background on yourself. And is it true that you dropped out of college after one year?

00:41:59 Speaker_00
Yeah, I'm a college dropout. And actually, my one regret in life is that one year that I came.

00:42:04 Speaker_04
Oh, no kidding.

00:42:05 Speaker_00
No kidding. Yeah, I wish I had just even skipped that. But I do understand how college can be useful to people. But for me, it was just not the right thing. And I went to Asia instead.

00:42:17 Speaker_00
And I like to tell myself that I gave my own self a PhD in East Asian studies. By traveling around and photographing very remote parts of Asia at a time when it was in a transition from the ancient world to the modern world,

00:42:35 Speaker_00
And I did many other things as well. And for me, it was a very formative time because I did enough things that when I finally got my first real job at the age of 35. Wow. Which job was that?

00:42:49 Speaker_00
I worked for a nonprofit at $10 an hour, which was the Whole Earth Catalog, which had been kind of a lifelong dream. If I said, if I'm going to have a job, that's the job I want.

00:42:59 Speaker_00
it took me a long time to kind of get it but in between that i did many things including starting businesses and selling businesses and doing other kinds of things more adventures and i highly recommend it you know i got involved in starting wired and running wired for a while and i hired a lot of people who were coming

00:43:20 Speaker_00
right out of college, they were internists and they would do the intern thing and then they were good and we would hire them, which meant that basically, you know, after 10 years, whatever it was, they were, this was their first and only job.

00:43:31 Speaker_00
And I kept telling them, why are you here? What are you doing? You should be fooling around, wasting time, trying something crazy. Why are you working a real job? I don't understand it. And I just really, I really recommend slack.

00:43:49 Speaker_00
I'm a believer in, in this thing of kind of. doing something that's not productive. Productive is for your middle ages. Only young want to be prolific and make and do things but you don't want to measure them in terms of productivity.

00:44:08 Speaker_00
You want to measure them in terms of extreme performance, do you want to measure them in kind of extreme satisfaction? It's a time to kind of try stuff. And I think... Explore the extremes. Exactly. Explore the possibilities.

00:44:23 Speaker_00
And there are so many possibilities and there's more every day. It's called premature optimization. You, you really want to use this time to continue to do things. And by the way, premature optimization is a problem of success too.

00:44:37 Speaker_00
It's not just the problem of the young. It's the problem of the successful more than even of the young, but we'll get to that.

00:44:41 Speaker_04
Yeah. That might turn into a therapy session for me at this precise moment in time, in fact.

00:44:47 Speaker_04
But when you are exploring that slack, I would imagine many people feel pressured, whether it's internal pressure or societal, familial pressure, to get a real job, to support themselves. And a lot of the decisions are made out of fear.

00:45:00 Speaker_04
They worry about being out on the streets or it's a nebulous. terror, anxiety. How did you support yourself, for instance, while you were traveling through Asia when you left school?

00:45:10 Speaker_00
I totally understand this anxiety and fear and stuff. But here's the thing.

00:45:15 Speaker_00
I think one of the many kind of life skills that you want to actually learn at a fairly young age is the skill of being like ultra thrifty, minimal, kind of this little wisp that is traveling through time in the sense of learning how little you actually need to

00:45:33 Speaker_00
not just in kind of survival mode, but kind of, you know, in a contented mode.

00:45:38 Speaker_00
And I learned that pretty early by backpacking and doing other things, and especially in Asia, was I could be very happy with very, very little, and go onto websites and stuff and look at sort of like the minimum amount of stuff, food, say, that you need to live, you know, your basic protein and carbohydrates and vitamins, and how much, actually, if you bought them in bulk, how much it would cost.

00:46:01 Speaker_00
I mean, you, build your own house, live in a shelter, a tiny house, you don't need very much.

00:46:07 Speaker_00
And I think trying that out, you know, building your house on the pond, like Thoreau, who was a hero of mine in high school, is not just a simple exercise, it's a profound exercise because it allows you to get over the anxiety.

00:46:20 Speaker_00
Even if you aren't living like that, you know, that if the worst came to worst, you could keep going at a very low rate and be content. And so that gives you the sort of confidence. to take a risk, because you say, what's the worst that could happen?

00:46:36 Speaker_00
Well, the worst that could happen is that I'd have a backpack and a sleeping bag, and I'd be eating oatmeal and whatever, and I'd be fine.

00:46:44 Speaker_00
And I think if you do that once or twice, you don't necessarily have to live like that, but knowing that you can be content is tremendously empowering. That's basically what I did.

00:46:55 Speaker_00
It was, you know, living in Asia where the people around me had less than I did and they were pretty content. You realize, oh my gosh, I don't really need very much to be happy.

00:47:07 Speaker_04
And did you save up money beforehand with odd jobs or did you do odd jobs while on the road, a bit of both?

00:47:14 Speaker_00
I did odd jobs before I left. I was traveling in Asia at a time when the price differential was so great that it actually made sense for me to fly back on a charter flight to the U.S. and work for four or five months. And I worked basically odd jobs.

00:47:33 Speaker_00
I worked from working in a warehouse, packaging athletic shoes, working in a kind of technical sense of a

00:47:42 Speaker_00
It's really just hard to describe, but it was, it was kind of a, in a photography related job where we were reducing printed circuit boards down to little sizes to be shipped off to be printed and driving cars to whatever else I could find.

00:47:57 Speaker_00
And that at that time made more money. I could live off of, I could live on probably two years from those couple of months of work. So I didn't really work while I was traveling until I got to Iran.

00:48:12 Speaker_00
in the late 70s and there there was a very high paying job which was teaching English to the Iranian pilots who worked for the Shah, but I had sworn I was never going to teach English so I actually got a job in Bellahat helicopter.

00:48:28 Speaker_00
who was teaching English to the pilots, but my job was running a little newsletter for the American community there. And I worked there until I was thrown out by the coup. That was another story.

00:48:39 Speaker_04
Why did that? Now, just a couple of comments. So, number one, for those people listening who are saying to themselves, already perhaps creating reasons why they can't do what you did now, due to different economic climate or whatnot.

00:48:52 Speaker_04
It is entirely possible to replicate what you did. You just have to choose your locations wisely for that type of differential.

00:48:59 Speaker_04
And I should also just mention to people that part of the reason I'm so attracted to Stoic philosophy, whether that be Seneca or Marcus Aurelius, is exactly because of the presence

00:49:11 Speaker_04
practice of poverty, not because you want to be poor, but so that you recognize not only that you can subsist, but then you can potentially be content or even in some cases be more content with a bare minimum.

00:49:24 Speaker_04
So for people who are more interested in that, I highly recommend a lot of the Stoic writings and you can search for those on my blog and elsewhere.

00:49:29 Speaker_00
But let me just add to that. There's actually a new age version of that that was sort of popular in a generation ago. And the search term there is volunteer simplicity.

00:49:39 Speaker_04
Volunteer simplicity.

00:49:41 Speaker_00
Right. And so the idea is poverty is terrible when it's mandatory, when you have no choice. But volunteer version of that is very, very powerful. And I think attaching names sometimes to things, it makes it more legitimate.

00:49:54 Speaker_00
But imagine yourself practicing voluntary simplicity. And that, I think, is part of that stoic philosophy. But there was a whole kind of a movement. A lot of the hippie dropouts were kind of practicing a similar thing.

00:50:06 Speaker_00
And there was a whole best practices that resolved around that. You can make up your own. But I think it's, to me, an essential skill, a life skill, that people should acquire. When you go backpacking and stuff like that, that's part of it.

00:50:22 Speaker_00
That's the beginnings of trying to understand what it is that you need to live as a, you know, as a being. And you can fill that out in any way you want, but that's a good way to experiment.

00:50:33 Speaker_04
Now, you have become certainly a world-class packager of ideas, but also at synthesizing and expressing these ideas. I love your writing. I've consumed vast quantities of it.

00:50:46 Speaker_04
In fact, I'm here right now on Long Island where I grew up, and I used to sneak into my parents' shed to read old editions of the Whole Earth Catalog for inspiration. It was the, I suppose, the equivalent of my internet at the time.

00:51:00 Speaker_04
And from that all the way to 1000 True Fans, which of course, you know, I sort of shout from the rooftops for people to read. How did you develop that skill of writing and communicating?

00:51:12 Speaker_04
A lot of people associate that with schooling, but it doesn't appear to be the source for you.

00:51:18 Speaker_00
Yeah. So in high school, I would call myself a very late bloomer. I don't recall myself having a lot of ideas.

00:51:26 Speaker_00
There were a lot of other people and kids in my high school that I was very impressed with because they seemed to know what they thought and were very glib and articulate. And I wasn't. I was a little bit more visual in that sense.

00:51:38 Speaker_00
I was trying to decide whether to go to art school or to MIT because I was really interested in science. So I set off to Asia as a photographer. So it was basically no words at all. It was just images.

00:51:51 Speaker_00
And as I was traveling and seeing these amazing things, I mean, again, I want to emphasize that this was sort of a, for me, I grew up in New Jersey. I'd never left New Jersey. We never took vacations.

00:52:05 Speaker_00
It's hard to describe how parochial New Jersey was back in the 1960s. I never ate Chinese food. I never had, I mean, I never saw Chinese. It was like, It was a different world.

00:52:17 Speaker_00
And then I was thrown into Asia and it was like, oh my gosh, everything I knew was wrong. And so that education was extremely, extremely powerful. And I think that that gave me something to say.

00:52:33 Speaker_00
And I started writing letters home and I tried to describe what I was seeing. And so I had a reason to try to communicate. And that was the beginning of it. But even then, I don't think I really had much to say.

00:52:46 Speaker_00
It wasn't really until the internet came along. And I had a chance to go on to one of the first online communities in the early 80s. And for some reason, The early 80s, that is, that is definitely early days. Yeah, it was, yeah, in 1981.

00:53:07 Speaker_00
And so these were private, it wasn't the kind of wide open internet. These were a little experimental. In fact, it was New Jersey Institute of Technology.

00:53:14 Speaker_00
in Ruckters that had this experimental online community that I got invited on, and we can talk about how that happened, but it was just luck and a friend.

00:53:24 Speaker_00
And I found that there was something about the direct attempt to just communicate with someone else in real time, just sending them a message or something, that crystallized my thinking. How did it crystallize your thinking?

00:53:38 Speaker_00
Just not to interrupt, but was it the immediate feedback loop?

00:53:41 Speaker_00
It was the idea that they have since, teachers have since done a lot of studies where they had kids write an essay on something, an assignment, and then they would also be instructed to write some email to a friend or something.

00:53:54 Speaker_00
And then they would grade both of the compositions And they would find that inevitably the email that the kids were writing was much better writing.

00:54:04 Speaker_00
Because when you're trying to write a composition, there's all these, you know, we have all these attitudes or expectations or there's, there's this kind of a writerly sense. There's all this other garbage and luggage and baggage on top of that.

00:54:19 Speaker_00
But when we're just trying to send an email, we're just, we're directly trying to communicate something and we're not fooling around. We're not trying to be it, make it, make Literary. Literary, all that, just direct stuff.

00:54:28 Speaker_00
And so the writing there was always much more direct and concrete, because that's the usual thing that happens when you're trying to write is you're not concrete enough. But when you're email, it's like all concrete.

00:54:37 Speaker_00
And so it was getting out of the whole kind of writerly stuff and just pure concrete communication that really made it for me. And what I discovered, which is what many writers discover, is that I write in order to think.

00:54:52 Speaker_00
It was like, I think I have an idea. When I begin to write it, I realize I have no idea. And I don't actually know what I think until I try to write it. So writing is a way for me to define out what I think. It's like, I don't have any ideas.

00:55:07 Speaker_00
That's true. But when I write, I get the ideas. And that was the revelation. And so by being forced to communicate online and there was none of this expectation, it was just like, okay, just write an email. I can do that. I don't have to write an essay.

00:55:21 Speaker_00
I don't have to write something nice. I'm just going to write, you know, 140 characters. I can do that. But while I was doing that, I had an idea that I didn't have before. And so it was like, oh my gosh, this is a idea generation machine.

00:55:35 Speaker_00
It's by writing. It's not that I have these ideas and I'm going to write them down. No, no. I don't even have them until I write.

00:55:40 Speaker_04
I'm so glad you brought that up because I was just recently a few things related to that. I was reading an interview with Kurt Vonnegut, who's one of my favorite authors.

00:55:49 Speaker_04
For people who aren't familiar, check out Cat's Cradle perhaps as a starting point. Hilarious guy, and he at various points in his career taught writing to make ends meet. And he would, number one,

00:56:00 Speaker_04
not look for good writers, he would look for people who are passionate about specific things.

00:56:04 Speaker_04
So that's something I want to reiterate to people who don't feel writerly, is that go out and have the experiences and find the subjects, the things that excite you.

00:56:13 Speaker_04
And as long as you're true to your voice, which is related to the email point, I threw out my first two drafts of, I'd say, a third of the four-hour workweek because they were either too pompous and Ivy League sounding, way, way, way too much.

00:56:27 Speaker_04
I mean, horrible. or to slapstick because I felt like I had to go to the other extreme and then I sat down and I wrote as if I were composing an email to a friend after two glasses of wine and that's how I found my voice, so to speak.

00:56:40 Speaker_04
As a side note, why, and I think this might be related, but why did you promise yourself not to teach English? I'm so curious because that can be very lucrative, it's readily available.

00:56:51 Speaker_04
When you were traveling, why did you commit to yourself not to teach English?

00:56:54 Speaker_00
Yeah, it's a good question because there's lots of opportunities all around the world.

00:56:58 Speaker_00
And by the way, I recommend it as a way for people to travel cheaply if you want to support yourself because it is a very desirable skill, we call it for the moment. I think the reason why was I felt that I didn't feel like I was a very good teacher.

00:57:15 Speaker_00
And I also felt that it was maybe a little easy. But I think the main reason was that I was having trouble imagining myself enjoying it, you know, and I just felt that I would rather try to find something else.

00:57:28 Speaker_00
Now, I think I did one time in Taiwan, which, as you know, has a whole cram school system. I think a friend, I substituted for a friend once, and I think that maybe confirmed to me my idea.

00:57:46 Speaker_00
That while it was, there was sort of like, you know, all I have to do is just talk. I mean, there's really not much skill involved at all.

00:57:53 Speaker_00
It was fun, but I didn't feel like I was, I don't know, I didn't feel like I was maybe adding value or something. So I came away thinking, you know. I guess I could do this for money, but I'm not gonna be happy. I think it's just the personality thing.

00:58:07 Speaker_00
I don't think of myself as a teacher. I don't do many workshops or classes. So I think a different person might thoroughly enjoy it, and I know they do, and they have a great time doing it. For me, it was just not for me. Got it. No big deal.

00:58:23 Speaker_00
I think this is an important thing, is that You know, it takes a long time to kind of figure out what you're good for. And part of where I'm at right now and where I got eventually was really trying to spend time on doing things that only I could do.

00:58:38 Speaker_00
And even when I could do something well, but someone else could do it. I would try and let that go that that's a discipline that I'm still working on, which is not just things that I'm good at, but things that only I'm good at.

00:58:51 Speaker_00
So that was something I was sort of trying to start early on, which is like, you know, a lot of other people can do this and they're happy doing it.

00:58:59 Speaker_00
So I want to go somewhere where it requires more of me to do it, and then I'll be happier, and they'll be happier.

00:59:07 Speaker_04
I am currently having, and I seem to have these periodically, a crisis of meaning phase. And I'm wrestling with this exact issue, trying to figure out what to abandon, what to say no to, to refine,

00:59:24 Speaker_04
my focus so I can really focus on the intersection of my unique capability or capabilities, whatever that is, and a need of some type. How did you figure that out? And maybe we could approach it from a different direction.

00:59:37 Speaker_04
What do you feel is your skill set or your unique skill? And how did you figure that out?

00:59:43 Speaker_00
Well, let me tell you the story of how this realization actually came to be in a kind of a very concrete way, which while I was editing Wired Magazine.

00:59:51 Speaker_00
And so part of what Wired Magazine is about is that we would come up with ideas and make assignments to writers. Now, some of the articles in Wired would come from the writers themselves. They would approach us and say, I have an idea.

01:00:05 Speaker_00
But a lot of the articles would be assigned from editors. We'd have editorial meetings where we kind of imagine this great article, and then we'd go and try and find someone to write it.

01:00:15 Speaker_00
And in that conversation of trying to persuade writers to write an idea that I had, they would go through a kind of a very typical sequence where, you know, I would have this great idea, this is a great idea, and then I would try to persuade, like, one writer, two writers, three writers, and they would just

01:00:34 Speaker_00
You know, they didn't think it was a very good idea. They didn't like it, they didn't want to do it, whatever it was.

01:00:37 Speaker_00
And then, I'd kind of forget about it, but then, like, you know, six months later, it would come back and say, you know, that was such a great idea. I really think we should do that. And I would go again for another round of trying to persuade people.

01:00:48 Speaker_00
And then I'd get no takers. And then I'd kind of, oh, forget about that. It must have been a bad idea. But then, like, six months later or a year later, it might come back, you know, that's still a great idea. Nobody has done that.

01:00:58 Speaker_00
And then I would realize, oh, my gosh, I need to do that. You know, it's like, I'm the only one who can see this. I've tried to give it away. I have tried really hard to give it away. I've tried to kill it. It just keeps coming back. Coming back.

01:01:12 Speaker_00
And it's like, okay. And then I would do it and there'll be one of my best pieces. And so it was this idea of like, so, so I became really. an important proponent, of trying to give things away first. Tell everybody what you're doing.

01:01:25 Speaker_00
Basically, you try to give these ideas away, and people are happy, because they love great ideas, and you go, yeah, do it, it's a great idea, you should do it. And so, I try to give everything away first, and then I try to kill everything.

01:01:38 Speaker_00
It's like, no, that's a bad idea. And then it's the ones that keep coming back that I can't kill, and I can't give away, I think, hmm, maybe that's the one I'm supposed to do. Because no one else is going to do it.

01:01:50 Speaker_00
I mean, I've been actively trying to get. And then, of course, if someone else is doing it, you should see someone else competing or trying to do it. It's like, oh, yeah, go ahead, do it. I'm not going to race against you. That's crazy because.

01:02:02 Speaker_00
There's two of us, you know, you do it. And so, that generosity is actually part of this thing. Your vetting process. Exactly. And so, that's when I kind of realized it, but that doesn't answer the question of, well, how do you find out what it is?

01:02:17 Speaker_00
And all I can say is, you know, and I don't wanna be flip, but all I can say is it's gonna take all your life to figure that out. That is fact. Here's what it is. Figuring out is what your life is about. I mean, that's what life is for.

01:02:31 Speaker_00
Life is to figure it out. And then so every part of your life, every day is actually this attempt to figure this out. And you'll have different answers as you go along. And sometimes there may be directions in that, but that's basically what it is.

01:02:46 Speaker_00
And you were very transparent about confessing this, but I have to tell you that

01:02:52 Speaker_00
even from hanging around a lot of very accomplished people, a lot of successful people that we would be on the covers of magazines, they also go through exactly the same questioning.

01:03:02 Speaker_00
I mean, no matter how big of a billion dollar company they have, they come up to the same thing. Well, you know, what's my role in all this? Why am I here? What am I useful? What am I doing that nobody else can?

01:03:13 Speaker_00
It's a continuous, in fact, as we'll come back to, being successful makes that even more difficult. Why is that?

01:03:21 Speaker_00
because of the, uh, what I call the creator's dilemma, which is very much the same thing as the innovator's dilemma, which is that it's a true dilemma.

01:03:31 Speaker_00
In fact, in the sense that there's no right answer, but the question is, is sort of, is it better to optimize your strengths or to invest into the unknown into places where you're weak and any or places you haven't explored? Yeah. Any accountant.

01:03:49 Speaker_00
And any business will tell you that it absolutely makes more sense to take your dollar. You'll get a higher return by investing into what you're good at. already, whatever it is, it is the pursuit of excellence.

01:04:02 Speaker_00
This is the Tom Peters and the whole entire movement, which is you move uphill, you, you keep optimizing what you know. And that by far is the sanest, the most reasonable, the smartest thing to do.

01:04:18 Speaker_00
But when you have a very fast changing landscape, like we live in right now, you get stuck on a local optima. You get stuck. And the problem is, is that the only way you can get to a higher, more fit place is you actually have to go down.

01:04:35 Speaker_00
You actually have to head into a place where you are less optimal. You have no expertise. There's very low margins. There's low profits. You look foolish. There'll be failures.

01:04:48 Speaker_00
And if you've been following a line of success, that is very, very difficult to do. It's very difficult for an organization. It's almost literally almost impossible for an organization who's been excellent and successful to do. It really is.

01:05:03 Speaker_04
So which presents a lot of opportunity for

01:05:07 Speaker_00
That's why the startups all start there. The reason why startups start is because they're operating in an environment that no sane big corporation would want to be in. It's a market. It's low margins, low profitability, unproven, high failure.

01:05:23 Speaker_00
I mean, it's like, who wants to operate there? Nobody. The only reason why startups operate is they have no choice.

01:05:28 Speaker_04
Right. Yeah, it's the gift of few options, right?

01:05:33 Speaker_00
Right, exactly. So in terms of success binding, I think you have to be unsuccessful. Who is successful wants to be unsuccessful? It's very, very hard to let go of that success. And so that's one of the things that works against

01:05:50 Speaker_00
someone really continuing on this life journey of finding out what they're really good at. Because here's the thing, is that successful companies and successful people generally try to solve problems with money. You buy solutions.

01:06:02 Speaker_00
And we all know that money is not the full answer for innovation. Basically, if you could purchase innovations, all the big companies would just purchase them.

01:06:12 Speaker_00
It's the fact that these innovations often have to be found out without money, through other means.

01:06:17 Speaker_00
Again, that's the advantage to the startup, and it's the disadvantage to the successful companies, because they got money, and they just want to buy solutions. But most of these solutions you can't buy.

01:06:27 Speaker_00
You have to kind of engineer in this very difficult environment of low margins, low success. low profits that no one really wants to be in, but the startups are forced to be.

01:06:38 Speaker_04
That's also an advantage, I would think, for beginners or novices compared to experts. They have less vested identity, less inertia to have to reverse.

01:06:51 Speaker_00
And back to my suggestion, the meeting of why slack and fooling around when you're young is so important because A lot of these innovations and things are found not by trying to solve a problem that can be monetized.

01:07:06 Speaker_00
It's in exploring this area without money. I mean, money is so overrated. It really... Could you elaborate on that?

01:07:12 Speaker_04
Because I feel like this is a sermon I need to receive on some level.

01:07:16 Speaker_00
There's several things to say about it. One is, you know, obviously if you're struggling to pay bills and mortgages and stuff, there's a certain amount that's needed.

01:07:24 Speaker_00
But here's the thing is that accumulating enough money to do things is really a byproduct of other things. It's a kind of a lubricant in a certain sense rather than, you know, a goal. And great wealth or extreme wealth is definitely overrated.

01:07:40 Speaker_00
I've had meals with a dozen billionaires and They're no different. I mean, their lives, lifestyles are no different. You don't want to have a billion dollars. Let me put it that way. You really don't.

01:07:50 Speaker_00
There's nothing that you can really do with it that you can't do with a lot of less money. We'll set that aside.

01:07:56 Speaker_00
But even just wealth itself in this world where there is more and more abundance, even the money for, say, middle class is less significant in a certain sense, in the sense that

01:08:11 Speaker_00
Maybe there's status, which is really not needed, but the things that you want to do, the things that will make you content, the things that will satisfy you, the things that will bring you meaning can usually got better than having money.

01:08:25 Speaker_00
I mean, if you have a lot of time or a lot of money, it's always better to have a lot of time to do something. And so if you have a choice between having a lot of friends or a lot of money, you definitely wouldn't have a lot of friends.

01:08:37 Speaker_00
And so I think there's a way in which technological progress that we're having is actually diminishing the role of money. And I want to be clear that I'm talking about money beyond the amount that you need to survive.

01:08:51 Speaker_00
But even that reflects back what we were saying earlier, which is probably less than you think it is. to survive.

01:08:57 Speaker_00
And so in a certain sense, most people see money as a means to get these other things, but there are other routes to these other things that are deeper and more constant and more durable and more powerful.

01:09:13 Speaker_00
So money is this sort of very small, one-dimensional thing that if you kind of focus on that, it kind of comes and goes.

01:09:20 Speaker_00
If you, whatever it is that you're trying to attain, you go to it more directly through other means, you'll probably wind up with a more powerful experience or whatever it is that you're after.

01:09:35 Speaker_00
And it'll be deeper, more renewable than coming at it with money.

01:09:39 Speaker_00
And so, you know, travel is, is one of the great examples is, which is, you know, many, many people who are working very hard, trying to save their money to retire someday to travel well.

01:09:50 Speaker_00
I decided to flip it around and travel when I was really young, when I had zero money. And I had experiences that basically even a billion dollars couldn't have bought.

01:10:01 Speaker_00
And it's not an uncommon sight, let me tell you, for young kind of travelers who have very little money to be hanging out doing something. And there will be some very wealthy people on their one week organized tour,

01:10:15 Speaker_00
looking at these young travelers just saying, I wish I had more time.

01:10:19 Speaker_04
Yeah, you see it every, well, I see it almost every time I go traveling. And it reminds me of conversations I've had with Rolf Potts and also his book, Vagabonding, which I just absolutely love. And it was that.

01:10:31 Speaker_04
book and Walden that I took with me traveling when I had my own two year or so walkabout.

01:10:37 Speaker_04
And he points out in the beginning of Vagabonding that many people subscribe to the belief along the lines of Charlie Sheen's in the movie Wall Street, when he's asked what he's going to do when he makes his millions, and he says, I'm going to get a motorcycle and ride across China.

01:10:55 Speaker_04
And Rolf, of course, points out that you could clean toilets in the US and save enough money to ride a motorcycle across China. Exactly.

01:11:05 Speaker_04
And let me ask you, this is maybe tangentially related, but you mentioned earlier that your middle age, your middle ages, middle ages maybe sounds odd, but in your middle age, that's when you optimize. And I find that

01:11:20 Speaker_04
horrifying on some level because I am so tired. I just turned 37 last week and I'm really tired of certain types of optimizing and the incremental slogging of making trains run slightly more efficiently on time.

01:11:36 Speaker_04
Even though, like you said, from a strictly financial standpoint, the advice that I would receive from many people and have received when I've asked for advice is here are one or two core areas you should focus on to optimize for income.

01:11:49 Speaker_04
And on the flip side, I'm tempted to approach a kind of not scorched earth, but burned bridges approach where I somehow use creative destruction to force me into another direction to have these new experiences that I crave so much.

01:12:05 Speaker_04
And you, just for people who aren't aware, I want to give, I remember going to the first ever quantified self meetup. You're part of the Long Now Foundation.

01:12:12 Speaker_04
You've experimented in so many different arenas and have looked so far into the future and thought on such grand a scale. You know, I aspire to do more of that. What would be your advice to someone?

01:12:23 Speaker_04
And I know I have dozens of friends in the same position, they're say in their early or mid 30s in my particular peer group and they want to explore but they're feeling pressured to optimize this thing that they've suddenly found their footing with, whatever it is.

01:12:39 Speaker_04
Maybe they're a venture capitalist, maybe they're in a startup, they feel they should start a new startup and they want to step out of that slipstream, what would be your advice to those people?

01:12:48 Speaker_00
First of all, I have to commend your honesty for this, and I will repeat that it is very, very difficult to do.

01:12:56 Speaker_00
I mean, I think that realization comes to people in middle age, and they realize, oh my gosh, you know, I'm kind of on a, there's a little bit of a routine here, and I'm not really happy with that. I think that kind of

01:13:08 Speaker_00
Scorcher to kind of like, you know, just we'll just set fire to it and we'll walk away. I actually have, I think we probably have a mutual friend.

01:13:14 Speaker_00
I won't use his name because I don't know how public this is, but, but one of his solutions was the most radical one I've ever heard. The force himself was that he gave up us citizenship.

01:13:25 Speaker_04
Oh, wow. That'll, that'll do it.

01:13:28 Speaker_00
It was like, he was like saying, I just feel so, you know, and it was like, oh my gosh, that is so radical. And he was telling me about what is involved in that.

01:13:36 Speaker_00
And it wasn't for tax purposes because actually before you can do it, the US actually requires that you square up on all taxes. It was like, but that was so radical. And I don't recommend that.

01:13:48 Speaker_00
I mean, he's doing fine, but I'm just saying that's, that's unnecessary. But I think the advice is, probably taking a page from yourself. I don't think it's necessary to, I think you can experiment your way through this.

01:14:02 Speaker_00
I mean, you can do this incrementally. You can take small steps and do something and then evaluate it, test how it's going, whether you're getting what you want out of it, whether it's working, and then you continue in that direction.

01:14:14 Speaker_00
And that's sort of the pattern of people who kind of, you have second careers or reinvent themselves, you hear that a lot. And you can do that in a disciplined, Tim Ferriss way.

01:14:26 Speaker_00
I don't think that it requires you to kind of walk out and leave a burning pile behind. I think it's something that you're going to, I'm a big believer in doing things deliberately, and I think that you begin by looking at

01:14:41 Speaker_00
those areas that you get satisfaction out of and those areas where I often find that people kind of retreat back to kind of things that they did as kids and really, really miss, you know, whether it's art or other things.

01:14:52 Speaker_00
And the truth is that you're not really going to be able to escape all the other things you have going. And that's a good thing because that is part of you and part of what you do well. So you'll probably just, you know, bend in a certain direction.

01:15:05 Speaker_00
And I think the one bit of advice is that you can't, you know, it's not going to happen overnight. It's going to be, It took you 37 years to get where you are. It may take you another 30 years to get where you want to go.

01:15:16 Speaker_00
And I don't think you should feel impatient. Maybe that's the word I'm saying, is that I don't think you should imagine that you'll have another hat on with a new label next year.

01:15:28 Speaker_04
just to maybe redirect that, and this may or may not be accurate, but in the process of researching for this conversation, which is sort of an odd exercise in and of itself given how much time we've spent together, but I came across in Wikipedia mention of your experience in Jerusalem

01:15:47 Speaker_04
and deciding to live as though you only had six months left.

01:15:52 Speaker_04
And I want to touch on that, but one of the questions that came to my mind when I turned 37 last week is, if I knew I were going to die at age 40, what would I do to have the greatest impact on the greatest number of people?

01:16:05 Speaker_04
And so I find that constraint helpful and I worry that if I aim at not being impatient in that way, that I won't, because I could get hit by a bus, that I won't do what I'm capable of doing.

01:16:19 Speaker_04
Maybe you could talk about, and I had no idea, I'm not sure if you would self-describe yourself as a devout Christian, but that's certainly written here. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that experience.

01:16:31 Speaker_00
Yeah, one thing I would, of course, warn people is that not everything on Wikipedia is correct.

01:16:37 Speaker_04
No, that's why I'm bringing it up.

01:16:39 Speaker_00
But it is true that I got this assignment in Jerusalem, which, by the way, if you want to hear the full version of it, listen to one of the very first This American Life's, which I and Ira Glass, and I told the story for the very first time.

01:16:53 Speaker_00
And it's a story about how I got this assignment to live as if I was going to die in six months, even though I was perfectly healthy and I knew that it was very improbable. But I decided to take the assignment seriously and that's what I did.

01:17:07 Speaker_00
My answer surprised me because I thought that I would have this mad high-risk fling, do all these things. But actually what I wanted to do was to visit my brothers and sisters, go back to my parents, help out. But then my mom was not well at the time.

01:17:24 Speaker_00
But that lasted for three months before I decided I need to do something big. So I actually rode my bicycle across the US from San Francisco to New York, where I was going to New Jersey, where I was going to basically die.

01:17:35 Speaker_00
And I kept a journal of that. And that question was something that I keep asking myself now. I actually have a countdown clock that Matt Groening at Futurama was inspired and they did a little episode of Futurama about.

01:17:52 Speaker_00
And what I did was I took the actuarial tables for the estimated age of my death for someone born when I was born. And I worked back the number of days. And I have that showing on my computer, how many days.

01:18:07 Speaker_00
And I tell you, nothing concentrates your time like knowing how many days you have left. Now, of course, I'm likely again to live more than that. I'm in good health, et cetera.

01:18:22 Speaker_00
But nonetheless, there is something that really, you know, I have 6,000 something days. It's not very many days to do all the things I want to do. And so I think your exercise is really fantastic and commendable. And there's two questions.

01:18:36 Speaker_00
What would you do if you had six months to live? And what would you do if you had a billion dollars? And interestingly,

01:18:42 Speaker_00
It's the convergence of those two questions, because it turns out that you probably don't need a billion dollars to do whatever it is you're going to do in six months. And so I think you're asking the right question.

01:18:53 Speaker_00
And the way I answer it is you want to keep asking yourself that question every six months and really try to answer it. And I try to do that on a kind of a day-by-day basis.

01:19:06 Speaker_00
I learned something from my friend Stuart Brand, who organized his remaining days around five-year increments.

01:19:14 Speaker_00
He says any great idea that's significant, that's worth doing for him, will last about five years from the time he thinks of it to the time he stops thinking about it.

01:19:23 Speaker_00
And if you think of it in terms of five-year projects, you can count those off on a couple of hands, even if you're young.

01:19:30 Speaker_00
And so the sense of mortality, of understanding that it's not just old people who don't have very many, you know, you're 20 years old, you don't have that many five-year projects to do.

01:19:42 Speaker_00
And so I think it is, that's maybe part of the philosophy of thinking about our time and whether, even if you believe in the extension of life, longevity, living to 120, you still have to think in these terms of what are you going to do if you, because you don't know if you'll live to be 120.

01:19:59 Speaker_00
What are you going to do if you have a year and what would you do with a billion dollars and what's the intersection of those two? Does religion play a large part in your life right now? In a certain sense, not in a kind of ritualistic sense.

01:20:16 Speaker_00
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

01:20:32 Speaker_00
cosmic questions. I'm right in the middle of finishing a Kickstarter-funded graphic novel that's about angels and robots.

01:20:42 Speaker_00
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 that there was this intersection of these two kind of possible worlds of conscious robots,

01:20:57 Speaker_00
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.

01:21:07 Speaker_00
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 gonna have to train them to be ethical. You just can't make a free being and not train it.

01:21:25 Speaker_00
So it was a way to rehearse and think about some of the consequences of technology today. So I think my religion gives me permission to ask those questions without embarrassment, to say, what is the general direction of the arc of evolution?

01:21:41 Speaker_00
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? So I think having a kind of, I consider this kind of an other view.

01:21:59 Speaker_00
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 another world view that can be very helpful in seeing other worldviews.

01:22:18 Speaker_00
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.

01:22:33 Speaker_00
And so there are some assumptions that are at the basis of it. And I like to question assumptions, including my own assumptions.

01:22:42 Speaker_04
two things. I can't resist asking and we can spend as much or as little time on this as you'd like.

01:22:46 Speaker_04
But recently grappling with a lot of these issues that I've been grappling with, some of which are existential, some of which are related to death, limited time on the planet. I've become deeply fascinated by indigenous use of plant medicine,

01:23:02 Speaker_04
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.

01:23:13 Speaker_04
But, yeah, there's a somethingness that is very difficult to communicate without sounding like you should be institutionalized. What do you think the role for people who aspire to do the greatest good in the world?

01:23:28 Speaker_04
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?

01:23:41 Speaker_00
Yeah, yeah, no, it's a really good question. So my little personal story there, of course, is I was basically, I was basically a hippie. I worked for the Hippie Catalog, the Horace Catalog, which was about hippies living in San Francisco.

01:23:52 Speaker_00
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.

01:24:06 Speaker_00
And when I was 50 years old, I decided that I would like to take LSD sacramentally on my 50th birthday. And I did.

01:24:15 Speaker_00
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.

01:24:31 Speaker_00
And I think, yeah, you can use drugs recreationally and for entertainment, and I think that can go somewhere.

01:24:37 Speaker_00
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.

01:24:52 Speaker_00
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.

01:25:05 Speaker_00
There is 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.

01:25:21 Speaker_00
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.

01:25:38 Speaker_00
They can remain long after and you know most people who understand this and don't abuse it understand that in fact The experience was not in the pill, it was not in the chemical. It was a real experience.

01:25:52 Speaker_00
And so, unfortunately, there is so much other stuff circulating around the use of these drugs and the misuse of them, that that kind of information is often very, very difficult to find. But I do think maybe we're seeing a moment now in the U.S.

01:26:09 Speaker_00
where the second prohibition is being undone and at least pot will become legal and maybe we can return to revitalizing, you know, 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

01:26:32 Speaker_00
Removing the ordinary that we have. I mean, we have an ego for our own purpose. We have all these things to keep us, you know, sane in a day-to-day... -"Functional." -...functional standpoint.

01:26:45 Speaker_00
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. You know, I think there's an expertise there.

01:26:55 Speaker_00
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.

01:27:02 Speaker_04
Do you recall the title of the book or how people might search for it?

01:27:05 Speaker_00
Yes. So this is a, 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 1500 different items.

01:27:18 Speaker_00
A lot of them are kind of like handles, 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?

01:27:31 Speaker_00
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 was called, um, I don't remember.

01:27:43 Speaker_01
It's okay.

01:27:45 Speaker_00
I will 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.

01:27:54 Speaker_00
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.

01:28:06 Speaker_00
It was just saying this is what it is. That information also, believe it or not, is really in short supply. It's like, you know, what do you do with this and how does it work? Tell me the facts.

01:28:16 Speaker_00
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.

01:28:25 Speaker_04
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.

01:28:41 Speaker_04
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.

01:28:53 Speaker_04
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?

01:29:05 Speaker_00
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.

01:29:21 Speaker_00
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 going to do this here.

01:29:31 Speaker_00
And so I was very much in the future. And then suddenly that future was being cut down day by day. And I was like, and I was thinking like, why am I taking pictures?

01:29:41 Speaker_00
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.

01:29:48 Speaker_00
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.

01:30:02 Speaker_00
That is part of us is looking into the future. And so after I came out of the, I kind of embraced that and I'm saying, well, you know, that future forward facing, that's what I do, that's what I wanna do, and that's what I write about.

01:30:19 Speaker_00
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.

01:30:28 Speaker_00
And if someone from the 100 years from now were to come back and tell us things, there's a lot of stuff we're just not gonna believe. It's just like that's crazy.

01:30:36 Speaker_00
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 gonna happen. I mean, we could even go back 20 years.

01:30:44 Speaker_00
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, encyclopedias for free that's edited by anybody.

01:30:55 Speaker_00
You know, it's like they would say, you know, there's no way. And I would tell them, you know, most of it's for free. They were saying, there is no economic model in the world that would allow for that. And there isn't, but here it is.

01:31:07 Speaker_00
So the dilemma is, is that any true forecast about the future is going to be dismissed. any future that is believable now is going to be wrong.

01:31:17 Speaker_00
And so you're stuck in this thing of if people believe it is wrong, if they don't believe it, you know, where does it get you? You're dismissed.

01:31:25 Speaker_00
And 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 edge of having a chance of being true. And what I discovered that was helpful in trying to

01:31:42 Speaker_00
get away from the kind of assumptions that bind us to just kind of extrapolate, was to think laterally, was to go sideways. One thing, just take whatever it was that everybody knew and say, well, what if that wasn't true?

01:31:57 Speaker_04
What would be a good example of that? Or an example?

01:32:00 Speaker_00
Like everyone says, okay, Moore's law will continue. Well, what if Moore's law didn't continue? What would that mean? What would happen?

01:32:06 Speaker_04
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, the size and cost of technology will decrease by 50%, something along those lines.

01:32:19 Speaker_00
Well, let's say even more simple.

01:32:21 Speaker_04
Or no, there's speed involved as well.

01:32:22 Speaker_00
Right. More or less it does say that, but let's say something right now we live in a world where every year the technology is better and cheaper. What if that wasn't true?

01:32:31 Speaker_04
Right. Got it.

01:32:32 Speaker_00
What if every year, uh, starting like, you know, a couple of years from now, stuff was better, bit more expensive. That's, that's a completely different world, right? I mean, everyone assumes that things are going to get better and cheaper.

01:32:44 Speaker_00
Well, what if that wasn't true? So you can take kind of assumption again, that's something that no one's really examining. Like, uh,

01:32:52 Speaker_00
Well, one of the things I'll 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, and we'll have less population, far, far less than we have right now.

01:33:07 Speaker_04
All right, I have to bite at that. What, because I've thought a lot about this and the what they call the Malthusian dilemmas. Is that going to be, do you think, pandemic related, nuclear weapon related, all of the above?

01:33:19 Speaker_00
None of those.

01:33:20 Speaker_04
None of those?

01:33:21 Speaker_00
No.

01:33:22 Speaker_04
AI coming in the rise of the machines? No.

01:33:24 Speaker_00
No, it's just pure demographics. So if you look at the current trends in fragility rates in all the developed countries, everywhere except for the US, they're already either below replacement level.

01:33:40 Speaker_00
So replacement level means that you're just sustaining the population just replaces itself. If it's below, it means that there's getting less and less. So Japan, All these, you know, Europe, they're all below replacement. The U.S.

01:33:53 Speaker_00
is an exception because, only because of immigration. Before people come in. Otherwise, we would be there and this would not be any news to anybody.

01:34:02 Speaker_00
But the real news, people would point to the developing world, but Mexico is now aging faster than the U.S. China is aging faster because of their one-child policy. Of course, Japan is completely, they're way under water, completely.

01:34:15 Speaker_00
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.

01:34:31 Speaker_00
And here's the thing, is that the demographic transition that is happening everywhere where people become urban. And so every forecast shows the urbanity, the cidification of the population continuing.

01:34:44 Speaker_00
And I can't think of any counterforce to stop this huge migration at the scale that we're seeing into the city. And as that happens, the birth rates drop down. And even in places like Singapore or other places where they have taken very, very active

01:35:06 Speaker_00
countermeasures of cash for having kids, daycare forever, bonuses, none of these work in terms of actually trying to raise fragility levels. So you have to understand that to go above replacement level, the average woman has to have 2.1 kids.

01:35:25 Speaker_00
Well, that means it has 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, there's not enough of them.

01:35:39 Speaker_00
So, and this is a projection, some of these are UN projections, they have three, they have a low, high, and a 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.

01:36:00 Speaker_00
And that's why the population continues to decrease every year.

01:36:05 Speaker_04
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.

01:36:21 Speaker_04
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.

01:36:33 Speaker_00
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.

01:36:43 Speaker_00
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.

01:36:56 Speaker_00
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 wish that we had a fourth too.

01:37:05 Speaker_00
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.

01:37:19 Speaker_00
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,

01:37:31 Speaker_00
that there is a tremendous amount of teaching from the older to the younger, and that's a lot of what they learn.

01:37:39 Speaker_00
And that the curve of the amount of energy that you have to expend, actually after three, it doesn't really matter in terms of the parents. I have one friend who has nine kids, I have another friend who has seven. And basically, how do they do that?

01:37:55 Speaker_00
the older kids were helping to parent the younger kids. That's the only way that really works. But that is actually, basically, they have, you know, they have five parents instead of having two parents.

01:38:04 Speaker_04
Right. It's very traditional in a way. I mean, traditional meaning reaching back thousands or tens of thousands of years.

01:38:10 Speaker_00
It is. Of course, in the old days, you may have had 12 born, but they rarely had 12 kids survive. Right. It's like the 1800s, kind of. I hang out with the Amish a lot, and they still have these very large families. And they all survive.

01:38:26 Speaker_00
So they have kind of, in some senses, sort of an unnatural expansion.

01:38:31 Speaker_00
And one of my predictions, again, going back to kind of like the assumptions, one of my predictions is that, you know, in America in a hundred years from now, whatever it is, it'll be, um, the complete countryside is run by the Amish.

01:38:42 Speaker_00
The Amish take over the entire census site because they never sell land. They have like eight kids.

01:38:46 Speaker_00
And then there are all these people living in the cities and it's like, everybody's happy, you know, we're all living, they drive out to the Amish lands. It's just fantastic. They're very happy, you know, doing their thing and running the farms.

01:38:56 Speaker_00
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.

01:39:02 Speaker_04
Why do you spend so much time with the Amish? This is news to me, but very interesting. And how long has that been going on? And does your beard have anything? Is there any relation to the Amish?

01:39:11 Speaker_00
I had the beard before my interest in the Amish. I could show you some pictures when I was 19 years old. So those who don't know, I have an Amish beard, which means I have a beard without a mustache.

01:39:21 Speaker_00
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 anti-military. They refused to serve in the armies.

01:39:34 Speaker_00
They don't even vote. 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 technology seems to us totally crazy. Because first of all, they're not Luddites.

01:39:49 Speaker_00
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

01:39:59 Speaker_00
They don't have electricity, but they have a big diesel generator in the barn that pumps up this compressor that sends high pressure air tubes down tubing into their barn, into the homes.

01:40:10 Speaker_00
And so they have converted like their sewing machine and washing machine and stuff to nomadic. Okay. Seems like a bit of a sidestep of the word of God. Exactly.

01:40:21 Speaker_00
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? OK, right?

01:40:34 Speaker_00
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?

01:40:46 Speaker_00
So we all have these things, but here's the difference is the Amish do it collectively. They're very selective. They're selecting their technology collectively as a group.

01:40:56 Speaker_00
And secondly, they have to articulate because they're doing collectively, you have to articulate what the criteria is. A lot of us are adopting, you try this, we try that. We don't have any kind of like logic or reason or.

01:41:09 Speaker_00
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.

01:41:21 Speaker_00
The main thing they want to do, the main reason why they have all these restrictions, like horse and buggy and all this stuff is that they want to have these communities, very strong communities. And so they noticed that if you have a car that you'll

01:41:34 Speaker_00
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.

01:41:45 Speaker_00
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.

01:41:54 Speaker_00
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.

01:42:04 Speaker_00
So the goal of the typical Amish man or woman is to have every single meal with their children, for every meal of their lives until they leave home. They have breakfast, they have lunch, and they have dinner.

01:42:16 Speaker_00
So breakfast and lunch is that they go to one room schoolhouse and they peddle back for lunch. Their parents have with them. And that means that the business is ideally in their backyard. They have a lot of shops and stuff.

01:42:28 Speaker_00
If they're not a farmer, they have a backyard shop, which actually has to be kind of clean-ish because it is in their backyard. Well, it is in their backyard.

01:42:37 Speaker_00
So they really want to make sure that they have metal working shops and stuff, which they really try to keep non-toxic and work because it's in their backyard. And so that means that they can come home for lunch. They have breakfast and lunch.

01:42:47 Speaker_00
So they're on the premises and they have every single meal with their children till 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?

01:43:00 Speaker_00
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 they're basically, they're going to, well, some of them are going to accept cell phones.

01:43:10 Speaker_00
And they do that by, there's always some Amish early adopter who's trying things, and they say, okay, Ivan Bishop says, you can try this, but we're watching you. We're gonna see what effect this has on your family, on your community.

01:43:24 Speaker_00
You have to be ready to give it up anytime we say that it's not working. And they do this on a kind of a Paris by Paris, so it's very decentralized.

01:43:32 Speaker_00
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.

01:43:43 Speaker_04
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 and Northern California, how do you get out to the Amish or is there a separate community closer by?

01:43:55 Speaker_04
And then secondly, what have you incorporated into your own life or your own family that originated from the Amish?

01:44:03 Speaker_00
Yeah. So I don't get to see them as often as I want, but actually when I go East, I have some contacts that I will exercise and I would try to get like to stay overnight and go to church in a buggy or something. And this is Pennsylvania?

01:44:18 Speaker_00
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.

01:44:32 Speaker_00
But in fact, there are bigger, more extensive communities outside of Pennsylvania.

01:44:37 Speaker_04
I didn't realize that.

01:44:38 Speaker_00
Yeah.

01:44:38 Speaker_04
The Amish diaspora.

01:44:40 Speaker_00
It is, that's what I'm saying. They literally are just buying up farmland. They're, they're expanding. They're constantly expanding. They have a very small attrition rate, very large families.

01:44:49 Speaker_00
They all are buying farms and stuff for their, 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?

01:45:03 Speaker_00
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,

01:45:18 Speaker_00
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 like terrible or poison, but because it's so good.

01:45:34 Speaker_00
You know, there's lots of people who are kind of like, they're going to drop out from Twitter. They're kind of like, oh, this is like a toxin. I'm going to get detoxed or something.

01:45:42 Speaker_00
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.

01:45:49 Speaker_00
It's like, you want to step back so that you can reenter it in with a renewed perspective, with a renewed appreciation, with having spent time looking at it in a different way.

01:46:00 Speaker_00
And I think that kind of rhythm of having Sabbaths and then yearly sabbatical, vacations or whatever, retreats, and then

01:46:07 Speaker_00
every seven years or whatever as you take a true sabbatical, I think that kind of rhythmic disconnection or Sabbath I think is very powerful, something that works very well and was something that we had in our family.

01:46:23 Speaker_04
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.

01:46:31 Speaker_04
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?

01:46:44 Speaker_00
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 a official sabbatical for older researchers, at least. And it's very meager.

01:46:58 Speaker_00
It's six weeks. Of course, you know, a six week sabbatical is basically a European annual vacation. Right, right. But for an American. Right, it's three years. That's a big thing. So yes, so we're doing something different.

01:47:15 Speaker_00
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.

01:47:25 Speaker_00
I'm going to do a different kind of project than 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.

01:47:34 Speaker_04
What is the longest in the last few years that you've gone without checking email?

01:47:38 Speaker_00
Oh, probably two weeks in China. How do you manage that? Well, it was pretty easy. I was unable to pick it up because China was blocking Google.

01:47:54 Speaker_04
Makes it more challenging.

01:47:57 Speaker_00
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.

01:48:13 Speaker_04
Yeah, I don't use my iPhone as an input device either. It just drives me nuts.

01:48:18 Speaker_00
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, walk, walk, sit, sit, don't wobble. So I'm here, I'm really online.

01:48:31 Speaker_00
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.

01:48:44 Speaker_00
even in the US, if I'm traveling, and then if I'm overseas, I will go probably three or four days before I get the email. That's pretty typical.

01:48:53 Speaker_04
Let me shift gears just a little bit. I'm looking at longnow.org. I recommend everybody take a look at it, the Long Now Foundation. And humans are generally, I would say, pretty bad at thinking long-term.

01:49:04 Speaker_04
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.

01:49:17 Speaker_04
But the Long Now Foundation, I just want to read a few things on this website for people.

01:49:21 Speaker_04
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.

01:49:31 Speaker_04
Then you have the 10,000-year clock, which is a monument-scale, multi-millennial, all-mechanical clock as an icon to long-term thinking. The Rosetta Project, building an archive of all documented human languages. Long bets.

01:49:43 Speaker_04
Featured bettors here are 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,

01:49:53 Speaker_04
which is bringing extinct species back to life. So there is a lot here. Can you explain to people? I've greatly enjoyed many of the seminars and speeches of the Long Now Foundation. I'm a supporter.

01:50:05 Speaker_04
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?

01:50:16 Speaker_00
The Long Enough Edition is kind of reactive.

01:50:19 Speaker_00
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.

01:50:39 Speaker_00
If something's not on Netflix streaming, we don't even wait for the DVD. It's this fairly kind of

01:50:45 Speaker_00
very fast-paced, short-term thinking, and also somewhat blinded by the fact that we don't have a lot of sense of history either, that we're kind of ignorant about what's happened in the past.

01:50:57 Speaker_00
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.

01:51:07 Speaker_00
And so the long now is a way to, 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

01:51:22 Speaker_00
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.

01:51:32 Speaker_00
And what if we were trying to make something that, you know, might need 25 years to accomplish? How can we do that? So we're trying to encourage people to think in that perspective, to take that perspective and then to maybe move in that direction.

01:51:49 Speaker_00
We're not necessarily saying we have to have like the Asimov's foundation where we have to have like a master plan for the next hundred years and we're going to plan out the future. No, we're agnostic about what it is that people make or do.

01:52:05 Speaker_00
We're just saying that it would benefit thinking about the long term.

01:52:09 Speaker_00
And I've often heard some people who advise to counseling to individuals about kind of thinking about the long term in their own life, even though you might want to act kind of locally and be spontaneous.

01:52:22 Speaker_00
But you do want to kind of keep in mind the fact that, you know, you'll be around for a while, whether it's

01:52:27 Speaker_00
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.

01:52:39 Speaker_00
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.

01:52:47 Speaker_00
We're saying there can be additional perspectives in addition to that where we commit to like a program of science research where

01:52:56 Speaker_00
It's pure science and the results of the same mathematics is one of the most profound things that we can invest in, even though most of the things in the beginning seem to be non-utilitarian, they don't have any purpose, but we know from our own history that in 20 years,

01:53:13 Speaker_00
they'll pay off in some way or other. And so being able to kind of construct a society so that we can allow the rewards of long-term investment, long-term thinking, long-term perspective, that would make us a better civilization.

01:53:34 Speaker_04
I'd love to perhaps jump into some rapid-fire questions. And they don't have to even be rapid. But just some fire questions. Just some fire questions. The questions will be rapid. The answers can be as short or as long as you'd like.

01:53:47 Speaker_04
What book or books do you gift or have gifted the most to other people outside of your own books?

01:53:53 Speaker_00
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.

01:54:13 Speaker_00
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

01:54:23 Speaker_04
That's right. It's Adventures of Johnny Bunko or something like that.

01:54:27 Speaker_00
Yeah.

01:54:28 Speaker_04
That's right. That's right. I have that on my bookshelf back in San Francisco, in fact.

01:54:32 Speaker_00
Yeah. If you know a young person who is just starting out, hand them that book. It's very easy for them to read. It's a graphic novel. It's non-threatening. It's fun.

01:54:41 Speaker_00
And it'll give them like five great principles for starting out and helping them kind of orient themselves as they start working in the working life.

01:54:52 Speaker_04
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?

01:55:03 Speaker_04
People in middle age hitting that particular point. Are there any books that you would recommend they read?

01:55:10 Speaker_00
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 had kind of bought into the kind of new age California dogma of follow your bliss, you know, money will follow.

01:55:27 Speaker_00
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.

01:55:42 Speaker_00
So if you start with just passion, it's sort of paralyzing because, and I know this from my own kids, they're a team, 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.

01:55:56 Speaker_00
So 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.

01:56:02 Speaker_00
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

01:56:13 Speaker_00
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.

01:56:23 Speaker_00
And I kind of believe that former, you know, the passion would lead to mastery. But after thinking about it, looking at his examples and his argument, I'm pretty sure that for at least for most people, you can get to your passion through mastery.

01:56:39 Speaker_04
And that would also give you a currency or a lever to use in getting to that point. Excellent. Do you have a favorite fiction book? Yes. Oh, fantastic. I usually don't get one answer.

01:56:50 Speaker_00
This is great. Yeah. Shantaram. Ah. Shantaram, it might take me a way to explain this. It's the author who wrote one book because it's very autobiographical.

01:57:01 Speaker_00
The premise of the book and the author's life seems completely incredulous and kind of almost Hollywood-ish.

01:57:08 Speaker_00
But what you get from it, where it's set, it's set in India, it sits in the slum of India, and you get an incredibly vivid, immersive, deep, and in some ways uplifting view of India and the underworld in India and at that part of Asia.

01:57:31 Speaker_00
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.

01:57:50 Speaker_00
It's very, very unusual, but it's a long book. And I actually recommend that if people are going to try to, is that you actually to get the audible version, listen to it.

01:58:00 Speaker_00
It runs like, you know, on and on, but it'd be one of those books that you wish will never end. And I'll just tell you the beginning of it, which is that, and this is the true part, which is that the guy, the author,

01:58:12 Speaker_00
became a bank robber in New Zealand. He was hooked on drugs, started robbing banks, was eventually caught and escaped from prison and made his way to the slums of India where, because he had a medical kit, he was treated as a doctor.

01:58:26 Speaker_00
got involved and hooked on drugs in India, got involved with the mafia, was put in prison, tortured, left, abandoned, nobody knew he was even in there, started writing a book, wrote this book, they ripped it up, destroyed it, he was recruited, found a guru, an Afghan, he was recruited in the Mujahideen, was fighting there, his entire company was wiped out.

01:58:49 Speaker_00
I mean, that's just the beginning, that's like the first day.

01:58:53 Speaker_04
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 Fischer, the book and the movie.

01:59:05 Speaker_04
World-class chess player, also a very deep, soulful guy, and this is one of his favorite books as well.

01:59:11 Speaker_01
Oh, awesome.

01:59:11 Speaker_04
Yeah, you would love Josh sometime. I'll have to put you guys in touch. But any favorite documentaries?

01:59:17 Speaker_00
Well, now you've asked the wrong question, because I have a site called True Films, where for the past 10 years, I have reviewed the best documentaries.

01:59:27 Speaker_00
I actually have a book called True Films, which is the 200 best documentaries that you should see before you die.

01:59:32 Speaker_04
Oh my god, no kidding. Wow, you have no idea how timely this is. So it's T-R-U-E, films.com?

01:59:37 Speaker_00
Yeah, True Films. And so 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.

01:59:48 Speaker_00
So the one documentary that I think everybody that I know have seen it has loved it is Man on Wire. Such a good movie. Right? So it's just, it's just transcendent. It's just a beautiful movie.

02:00:00 Speaker_00
It's based on the fact that this guy basically, he's going to walk to Twin Towers. I mean, he, the moment was, he was like

02:00:06 Speaker_00
14 year old kid in France was at a dentist 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.

02:00:21 Speaker_00
The towers had not been built. He was already planning. this thing. And he was filming himself the whole way.

02:00:27 Speaker_04
Yeah. So amazing.

02:00:28 Speaker_00
Okay. And so he, he does it and how he does it is amazing. So another great documentary that I love because it's very unusual among documentaries and that it films the villain side of the whole thing as well, which is King of Kong.

02:00:43 Speaker_00
I haven't, this has been recommended to me that I still have not seen this movie. King of Kong is about a guy who

02:00:50 Speaker_00
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 is all on film.

02:01:08 Speaker_00
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.

02:01:19 Speaker_04
I have to watch that.

02:01:20 Speaker_00
So that's the second one. The third one is one that's not so well known. It's called State of Mind.

02:01:26 Speaker_00
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.

02:01:41 Speaker_00
You know, they have these like huge stadium size things and they're like a little robot. So there are cogs in this machine, which is like perfect.

02:01:49 Speaker_00
So you can imagine like a picture that's made up of pixels, but every pixel is actually is a little boy or girl holding up a card, colored cards in sequence. So these things move, which means that, you know, there's not a pixel missing.

02:02:01 Speaker_00
So that means that nobody's sick. It's like, you know, you're not allowed to be sick. can't make a mistake at all. And it's getting inside of North Korea, which turns out to be a nationwide cult.

02:02:14 Speaker_00
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.

02:02:26 Speaker_00
It really is amazing just to see what's going on there.

02:02:28 Speaker_04
All right. Well, I know what I'm doing for the next few days. Next few evenings.

02:02:33 Speaker_00
I could go on, unfortunately, because I have a lot of them. But go to the... True films. I only review ones that are great. So I don't do... Awesome. I just say, these are fantastic.

02:02:42 Speaker_04
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?

02:02:53 Speaker_00
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.

02:03:03 Speaker_00
I think what he was up to, what he was doing is, you know, vastly been twisted, misunderstood, whatever word you want. But nonetheless, what's remarkable is, and here's the guy who didn't write anything. So I think success is also overrated.

02:03:23 Speaker_04
All right, I'd love for you to elaborate on that.

02:03:25 Speaker_00
Greatness is overrated. A lot of, you know, I mentioned big numbers, which is, 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.

02:03:41 Speaker_00
It's like our sense of beauty. I mean, it's sort of like in terms of all possibilities, it's in a very small narrow, defined, kind of ritualistic in a certain sense.

02:03:50 Speaker_00
And 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.

02:04:09 Speaker_00
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.

02:04:21 Speaker_00
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. You know, they want to be the best rock star.

02:04:30 Speaker_00
And there's so many of those already that you can only wind up imitating somebody in that slot. And I think to me, the success is like you make your own slot. You have a new slot that didn't exist before.

02:04:42 Speaker_00
And I think, you know, that's of course what 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.

02:04:55 Speaker_04
What is your new slot? You knew that was coming.

02:04:59 Speaker_00
Who says I'm successful?

02:05:00 Speaker_04
Well, I'm not. I'm trying to not make any assumptions here.

02:05:05 Speaker_00
Yeah. Or what would be your slot? My slot would be Kevin Kelly. I mean, that's the whole thing. It's not going to be like a career or you would really ideally be something that would, you had no, no imitators.

02:05:18 Speaker_00
I mean, you would be who you are and that's, that is success actually in some senses is you didn't imitate anybody. No one else imitated you afterwards. Right.

02:05:28 Speaker_00
So, you know, in a certain sense, you have, if you become an adjective, that's a good sign, right? So I think success is actually you kind of make your own path.

02:05:36 Speaker_00
If they're calling you a successful entrepreneur, then to me, that's not the best kind of success.

02:05:42 Speaker_04
Because you're being confined to that category.

02:05:44 Speaker_00
Right. You're in a category.

02:05:47 Speaker_04
If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

02:05:50 Speaker_00
I could sing.

02:05:52 Speaker_04
Ah, you would like to sing.

02:05:53 Speaker_00
Yeah, I seem to be unable to carry a tune. I can't remember. I mean, my wife can hear something once and she can just sing it back. I could hear the same song. I have heard the same song and I couldn't tell you three notes of it.

02:06:07 Speaker_00
I'm sure, because I'm a Tim Ferriss fan, I'm sure I could train myself to read that.

02:06:12 Speaker_00
I know I could, but I guess I haven't, and it would be something that I have to really work at, and I haven't, but I have trouble carrying a tune, staying in tune, remembering a tune.

02:06:22 Speaker_00
I 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.

02:06:33 Speaker_04
Have you taken lessons or attempted to take lessons? No, I got it. So just in the spirit of trade, I've recently started exploring hand drumming with djembes and different types of drums.

02:06:45 Speaker_04
If anyone out there can get me a pan art hang, I would really love to hear from you. That will mean nothing to most people who are hearing this.

02:06:53 Speaker_04
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.

02:07:13 Speaker_04
Very fascinating stuff. So if I do any experiments with that, I will certainly report back.

02:07:18 Speaker_00
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.

02:07:31 Speaker_00
And there was a steel drum.

02:07:33 Speaker_04
Oh, cool.

02:07:34 Speaker_00
Course. And I love that. So like you, I think if I did take up an instrument, it would be drums of some sort, because that I seem to respond to. And I did pretty good for the intro course on steel drumming.

02:07:45 Speaker_04
I find percussion to be so primal, it just satisfies some type of need that probably predates verbal communication even, certainly written notes. It is your inner caveman just responding.

02:07:59 Speaker_04
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.

02:08:12 Speaker_04
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.

02:08:27 Speaker_00
I'm a very good sleeper, I don't sleep a lot. These days, I get up at 7.30, and I have some rituals, but I don't vary them enough maybe to know whether they are... I'm not a morning person, okay, to begin with. You're not a morning person.

02:08:41 Speaker_04
Well, I mean... Well, the fact that you don't vary them is perfect.

02:08:44 Speaker_00
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.

02:08:57 Speaker_00
It's a kind of like a, so what I call a guilty pleasure. I don't know whether that makes me better at anything else I do, but I don't drink coffee or anything. This is sort of, it's a ritual. And when I'm not here, I don't read it.

02:09:12 Speaker_00
So it's like, I don't miss it. It's kind of curious. But like, if I'm here, it's like I got to do it. I don't know. It's kind of weird.

02:09:19 Speaker_04
Is that immediately after waking you read the paper or is there anything you do?

02:09:22 Speaker_00
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.

02:09:37 Speaker_00
I don't make sure why, now that you're asking. And that's it, that's the entire ritual. I don't have the same thing for breakfast or anything like that. It's just that morning hit.

02:09:47 Speaker_04
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.

02:10:04 Speaker_04
You don't, 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.

02:10:11 Speaker_00
Okay. Let's pick up two different, while I'm here in this studio, I have a lot of control over my time. So what I do during the day is greatly varied. I'll, I do a lots of things for short amounts of times.

02:10:24 Speaker_00
and go into my workshop, I'll read, actually read, book sit down and read bookstore in the middle of the day. I'll do a hike and bring my camera out almost every day.

02:10:33 Speaker_00
Maybe that is something that most people don't do is probably they probably aren't taking pictures with a camera every day. Or reading books in the middle of the day for that matter. Right, exactly. Well, maybe that's true, I guess.

02:10:44 Speaker_04
How do you choose your books? That's a paradox of choice problem for a lot of people.

02:10:49 Speaker_00
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.

02:10:58 Speaker_00
This has been my prediction about Amazon is that we're still going to have 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.

02:11:11 Speaker_04
That's a great point, that's a great point.

02:11:13 Speaker_00
I have a network of friends, and I listen to lots of podcasts, so I get it from all over the place.

02:11:18 Speaker_00
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.

02:11:29 Speaker_00
And the result is that I'm right now speaking in a two-story high library of books that I have.

02:11:37 Speaker_00
And don't do the same with digital books, because I finally figured out that, oh, you know, if I purchase a digital book before I'm reading it, it's not going anywhere, it's just sitting there.

02:11:45 Speaker_00
So I shouldn't really purchase a digital book until like five seconds before I'm gonna read it. I have exactly the opposite habit. Because it's there, the whole point of Kindle is that you don't have to have it until you need it.

02:11:59 Speaker_00
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.

02:12:15 Speaker_00
But then I had an epiphany, I went to the private library, and I realized that books were never as cheap as they are today, and never will be as cheap.

02:12:25 Speaker_00
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.

02:12:39 Speaker_00
And so I decided to keep and to kind of cultivate this paper library as something that was going to be very powerful in the future.

02:12:47 Speaker_04
I like that. Or at least I can use it as a justification for keeping a lot of paper books around.

02:12:52 Speaker_00
Exactly. I get tips from books from podcasts, from blogs, from friends, from Amazon recommendations, anywhere. And whenever I hear someone recommend a book, I'll go and check it out.

02:13:06 Speaker_00
And then I'm fairly free in buying it, which means that I read a lot of really mediocre books. But that's part of my job.

02:13:16 Speaker_00
Cool Tools, the book that we were just talking about, which is this catalog of possibilities that I self-published that has, oh, I don't know, 1,500, maybe there's a couple hundred books that are recommended, but I probably read thousands and thousands and thousands of books.

02:13:31 Speaker_00
in order to select those. So I see part of my job reading through, and I read a lot of how-to books.

02:13:37 Speaker_00
Most of the books I'm reading is non-fiction, and a lot of it is even instructional stuff on how to build a stone wall, how to do origami, how to send a satellite, a micro-satellite into space, whatever it is, it doesn't matter.

02:13:49 Speaker_00
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.

02:13:58 Speaker_00
But still, I'll read through the other ones so that someone else doesn't have to, and I can recommend saying, this is the best book on building a tiny house if you want to build a tiny house.

02:14:07 Speaker_04
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?

02:14:21 Speaker_00
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.

02:14:36 Speaker_00
I have done origami. I have made beer. I have made wine. I have, you know, whatever it is, I 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.

02:14:48 Speaker_00
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,

02:15:02 Speaker_00
Outside, you know, I'll make a go card or we'll do something that I haven't done before. And that's the basis for helping decide about these books.

02:15:13 Speaker_00
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.

02:15:19 Speaker_04
What odd project over the last year has been the most fun? Let's start there for you.

02:15:25 Speaker_00
Yeah. Well, just the last couple of months, I finally built myself a real workshop.

02:15:32 Speaker_00
I wish I could show it to you because one of the cool things I did, it was, you know, if you go onto like Uline or somewhere, this container businesses, they have these racks of bins. So I filled an entire

02:15:44 Speaker_00
wall of hundreds and hundreds of bins so I can organize stuff. And I'm a big fan of Adam Savage. He has a principle for his workshops called first-order access, which basically means that you don't want to store things behind anything.

02:15:58 Speaker_00
Everything has to be at the first level so you can look and see it. It has to be within reach and sense. You have to be able to see everything that you have and it's accessible. You don't want things hidden behind other things. So that's part of what

02:16:11 Speaker_00
I was doing with this workshop is this kind of first order access. And it's tremendously powerful. I mean, I just, the few days or the weeks I've had working in it, it just transforms everything.

02:16:24 Speaker_00
It's like, I had the same problem with my books for many, many years. I had books like on multiple different bookshelves in the house. I had them in boxes. I had them this and that.

02:16:33 Speaker_00
And moving everything to one location into a library where there was two stories, I could see all my books, just transformed them and made it really useful because I could find them, just really go and reach for them.

02:16:45 Speaker_00
And the same thing with, I'm finally bringing that to my tools, which is that you want to have things plugged in, ready to go.

02:16:53 Speaker_00
labeled, organized, first order access, and it can make simple jobs really simple instead of like the, you know, the hours of looking for something. Right.

02:17:02 Speaker_04
Gathering all the tools.

02:17:03 Speaker_00
Gathering all the tools. It's like cooking. It's just like cooking. Exactly.

02:17:06 Speaker_04
Yeah. It's having like a manual random access memory, right? You have your me some plus right in front of you.

02:17:11 Speaker_00
Yeah. You have, you know, the tools are. Yeah.

02:17:14 Speaker_04
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?

02:17:24 Speaker_00
It's very easy. You need to build your own house. And it's not that hard to do, believe me. Actually, I built my own house.

02:17:32 Speaker_04
And your house is amazing.

02:17:33 Speaker_00
No, 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 hearths and, you know, I mean, unfortunately, I don't recommend this. We made like two by fours from trees.

02:17:47 Speaker_00
You don't want to do that because It's a pain because, you know, standard, standard lumber is very, it's very good. If things are off a little quarter of an inch as they are with rough, um, saw and lumber, it's just, it's a mess.

02:17:58 Speaker_00
But nonetheless, a large portion of the people in the world have made their own homes, Adobe, rammed earth, bamboo, whatever it is.

02:18:05 Speaker_00
And like going back to what we originally started off with, um, even if you don't wind up living in it, it's empowering. to know that you can do it.

02:18:15 Speaker_00
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.

02:18:28 Speaker_00
So I believe that your house should be an extension of you, that really it's another projection. So another way of, and also going back to what we're talking about, it's another way to discover who you are and discover what you're good at.

02:18:41 Speaker_00
And 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.

02:18:52 Speaker_00
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.

02:18:58 Speaker_00
I mean, very few people actually have a very good sense of who they are and what they're going to use something for.

02:19:03 Speaker_00
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

02:19:19 Speaker_00
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.

02:19:28 Speaker_00
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.

02:19:43 Speaker_00
There is no difference between discovering something and inventing something. We could say that philosophically, you know, Benjamin Franklin invented electricity. We could say that Christopher Columbus invented America.

02:19:57 Speaker_00
We could say that discovery and invention are the same. So that discovering yourself and inventing yourself is really the same things will bring about that process. You have to do both at once. I really enjoy that.

02:20:12 Speaker_04
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?

02:20:25 Speaker_00
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.

02:20:34 Speaker_00
I wish that I had, when I was 20 working for all of the 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.

02:20:46 Speaker_00
And then recently I've been really big on it, hiring people through Elance. You know, because I came from a little bit of kind of a do-it-yourself, I mean, I made a nature museum when I was 12.

02:20:57 Speaker_00
I had a chemistry lab that I built myself, you know, 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.

02:21:09 Speaker_00
And then, of course, moving into the Whole Earth Catalog, which was a kind of a do-it-yourself thing. I really was, you know, I just talked about building my own house. Well, now I will hire... professionals to work.

02:21:21 Speaker_00
And it just took me a long time to realize that there's something about being able to pay a professional to do what they do really well. It's not like a weakness. It's like it helps them. I'm happy. They're happy. We're all happy. And I can do a lot more.

02:21:38 Speaker_00
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

02:21:48 Speaker_00
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.

02:21:59 Speaker_04
That's a fantastic answer. And you have, if I remember correctly, an assistant and a researcher. Is that still true?

02:22:06 Speaker_00
Yes, one and the same person.

02:22:07 Speaker_04
Oh, they are the same. OK. So I thought that at one point you had believed that you needed those people to be two separate people, but you weren't.

02:22:15 Speaker_00
Here's what I was saying was that It's very unusual to find one person who can do both of those tasks.

02:22:20 Speaker_00
Both of those tasks are often not found in the same person because there's, you know, the hunting, the researching, the kind of, there's a hunter aspect to research that is often found in a certain personality.

02:22:35 Speaker_00
And then they're kind of the, the admin is more nurturing, kind of making sure things, gardening a little bit. So it's often rare to find someone who can do both, but it's possible.

02:22:48 Speaker_04
Was it luck that you happened upon this particular individual that you work with now, or did you have a method?

02:22:54 Speaker_00
I found that the place where I found, 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.

02:23:09 Speaker_00
So we put out notices on the librarian mailing lists and stuff.

02:23:14 Speaker_04
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?

02:23:28 Speaker_00
I would say congratulations people listen 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.

02:23:41 Speaker_00
I'm really impressed by the power of this medium to teach and to inform, sometimes to entertain.

02:23:47 Speaker_00
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. I know Tim mentions them here and there.

02:23:58 Speaker_00
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, I have a very public email for the past 25 years.

02:24:15 Speaker_00
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.

02:24:30 Speaker_00
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.

02:24:48 Speaker_00
They're only positive reviews. Why waste your time on anything but the best?

02:24:52 Speaker_00
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.

02:25:06 Speaker_00
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.

02:25:21 Speaker_00
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. Enjoy that. So that's that cool tools or cool tools in Amazon.

02:25:31 Speaker_04
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.

02:25:43 Speaker_00
Or else in China.

02:25:44 Speaker_04
Or in China. It's been a long time. I could get back.

02:25:48 Speaker_00
I'm ready. I'm heading back to Japan again. And I know that you have lots of roots in Asia, but I go there to renew my sense of the future, because they are bulldozing the past as fast as they can and headed racing into the future.

02:26:02 Speaker_00
So I want to see what Asia has in store for us, because mathematically, we don't count anymore. You know, 1.3 billion, whatever, 3 billion Asians and, you know, 300 million Americans. What can you say?

02:26:16 Speaker_04
Yeah, that's right. Study up, folks. Specialization is for insects, so I think that was Heinlein. So enjoy your time on this planet, and look broadly, like Kevin said. Kevin, thank you so much. I will talk to you soon, and have a wonderful day.

02:26:31 Speaker_04
I will talk to you soon.

02:26:32 Speaker_00
Thanks for having me, Tim.

02:26:33 Speaker_04
Okay, bye-bye. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend?

02:26:47 Speaker_04
Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel.

02:26:55 Speaker_04
It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered. or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things.

02:27:06 Speaker_04
It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests.

02:27:18 Speaker_04
And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So, if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about.

02:27:32 Speaker_04
If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog slash friday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep.

02:27:47 Speaker_04
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02:31:35 Speaker_04
That is the basic, basic, basic, basic requirement, right? That is why things are called supplements. Of course, that's what I focus on, but it is not always possible. It is not always easy. So part of my routine is using AG1 daily.

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