Kevin Kelly - The Inevitable

Full transcript: Kevin Kelly on London Real

3:36 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Kevin Kelly the founding executive editor of Wired magazine. You are a writer, photographer, conservationist and student of Asian and digital culture. Your latest book The Inevitable understanding the 12 technological forces that will shape our future is out. The praise for the book has been incredible with venture capitalist Mark Andreessen saying it’s an automatic must read. Kevin welcome to London Real.

4:57 It’s really great to be here. Thanks for having me. It’s our pleasure. I’m curious before we jump in London as a town have you had a relationship with it over the years or when you’re in Asia or in California and you think about London or the Brits what comes to mind? Oh my gosh I think the my memory of London is actually a scene that I saw this afternoon walking here which is Friday afternoon in front of every pub outside are throngs of people hanging out drinking beer. That’s my image of London.

5:34 Yeah that’s a funny image because in the summer here the pubs just kind of overflow. Overflow and there’s glasses everywhere and they’re drinking. And they’re drinking. Yeah it’s so funny because when I was 15 years old I took a train here on like the Eurostar pass back in the day. And I remember I saw someone drinking a beer in the middle of the day at a train station and for me that was such a strange piece. And so I don’t know what it says about Britain but I think it’s it’s quite a good time. This is the summer it comes out and a lot happens in the pub here. Yeah it used to be a public house where people would just go and talk and it’s kind of got a warm space. So there is a sort of camaraderie that is on exhibit here of a kind of a very tight social knitting. I think that is reflected on the outside of the pub. The other thing that I get from London is you know I was a photographer.

6:24 I liked to look at things and photography for me is an excuse to force me to look. And as I walk around the city the thing that I’m kind of amazed by or I don’t know enthused by is the thousand details architectural artistic environmental that are they’ve been made over thousands of years of city life where you build up this very large dense network of little things that make life good. And so you walk down the street and there’s things put there standing there that have been there for a long time and it’s sort of like an ongoing art piece it’s like a masterpiece work. The city itself if its infrastructure has accumulated the best of so things that don’t work are kind of forgotten things that do work people give care to and they are maintained. So you have this you have this kind of like I was imagining it if this was a VR world the amount of hours that you would have to spend to recreate it and here it is this incredible VR experience you get to walk through and they have all these amazing details that somebody has spent their lifetime kind of making work the iron work the tiles on the floor the you know eaves of a roof with gargoyles all this stuff is amazing I’m just thinking like this is a video game it would be very expensive that’s what I get to walk through this for free. Yeah it’s almost like we’re almost the hoarders of history exactly we’ve kept all this stuff and it’s just in the attic and everything has a story

8:02 And you’ll see a lamp that used to be a gas lamp right no longer is but that’s why it’s shaped that way right and I know you just came from speaking at an institution right around here you would walk by the old walled city of London exactly and you would have seen all these different incarnations of this wall that now doesn’t mean anything but it does mean something right right and it’s and it’s and it’s like I mean there’s this little thing it’s a doorknob uh the the the kind of etched glass in the window of a pub there are all these little tiny details that have a lot of care a lot of love a lot of time a lot of expense to put there and yet there is this sort of they’re they’re being shared it’s the commonwealth and so the city is itself is an experience that rewards you just to walk through and the great cities of the world have that that aspect the attribute where every everywhere you look you’re you’re seeing something that has been refined in some way and then the other thing London that surprised me is this this is as crowded with people as Hong Kong it’s especially in the summertime is this is incredibly dense with life and people doing everything going around a lot of my tourists but a lot of natives and there’s just this vibrancy that makes this experience of of going through it really really enjoyable yeah and that population density I think it’s where great ideas are created and great

9:25 Companies are created and we have a technology show here as well called silicon real and I’ve interviewed say 90 of the top founders and ceos in London tech and they all it all happened they got ideas for their company when they were all in the same room sometimes sharing a beverage and it didn’t happen over skype it happened when all these people and I think you get them in this physical proximity and that’s where things happen right right and that’s why there’s this mass migration around the world of people moving into cities this urbanization is because cities are our technology cities are the biggest most complex technology that we humans have made and their function is to allow this serendipical contact this this association’s discovery of having high density sufficient density to actually have these ideas spring and communicate and also to have the market the audience for the things that you’re doing and we’re headed in the world to even more dense larger cities while basically the villages are emptying and that’s true not just in china and india but even in england where a lot of the villages are sort of more museums than they are thriving places because the people particularly the young those are the most industrious have moved to the cities and the cities are have the lowest actually environmental footprint of anything per capita so environmentally it’s actually what we want we actually want to have these very dense vibrant

10:57 Cities and then we want to have a very green rest of the world out there including wilderness and that’s the vision of a city which are these nodes of innovation nodes of wealth nodes of community that are just optimized for this thing that we really enjoy and derive our progress from that’s fascinating and why is that accelerating is it because those young people either do they crave those new ideas or for them they see their most upside intellectually just to go to those places what cities provide more than anything else is choices opportunities you know i mean okay so you have people buying one-way tickets from a beautiful village with beautiful wooden houses in china or on some greek island and they’re moving to the city because while they’re leaving behind very strong families organic food a beautiful architecture that’s suited to the geography strong family ties a real sense of who they are they’re moving to the city because they have more choices than they do in a village they have more options they can be ballerina they could study mathematics they could eat a hamburger if they wanted to and so people are moving to the cities because what cities deliver are choices and opportunities and the internet of humanity it is you can go to whatever cycle exactly it’s the it’s the internet of things we call that a city right that’s fascinating i want to jump into everything in asia as well we were briefly chatting about content and i figured we should

12:36 Talk about wired very quickly here and how you said you know when when wired started it really was a lot about this this long-form content where people would kind of open up ideas can you take me back to you know you founding that and what was going on at the time and uh yeah and so i i i been before wired i was publishing and editing first and then publishing a magazine that we would now look back on and say oh it was user generated content and it was uh completely user supported there were no ads it was all subscribed subscriptions and we were published it really fast on newsprint which was as fast as we could could do it so it was really cheap and we would distribute it by mail and so um what it was was the internet on newsprint okay it was the web on newsprint and if you go back and read those issues they still have that same flavor and they’re still evergreen they still they still make sense they’re not of they’re not fashionable they’re kind of they’re kind of perennial in that sense like printed blogs exactly they feel and smell like a blog they have that same enthusiastic passionate voice that we would recognize on the on the blog sphere and that’s in the 80s this is in the 70s and 80s i came in the 80s to to run it and at the same moment was the very beginning of the online world and um whole earth was involved the editors were involved in experimental online community when the very first ran out of the by the new jersey institute of technology

14:15 And i got invited on there because i was starting to write about travel i was a traveler and i viewed the well we didn’t call it the internet i viewed the online world as as if it was a separate new country and i was reporting on i was a travel writer and i was going to report on this new country that was emerging online we crawled in through the little plug the telephone plug and there was this alison wonderland of this this new place and um i get invited onto this other experimental one as part of that uh research and my mind was blown it was like this vision of technology is a different vision than what us old hippies had been afraid of of the steamrolling the chemical plants the smote stacks the you know the big supercomputers that controlled your life and there was there was this was a very different organic feel to it it felt more human skills that more biological being connected with people connecting with other people and so we kind of decided to try and do that we being hallworth ourselves so we got involved in starting a own online service you had to dial up with your phone it was a local call it was a long distance call if you weren’t local and that was the very beginning but we quickly tried to mesh onto this emerging internet and eventually we became the first public access to the internet that anybody could get onto before that time you had to be and this would be in like 1984 you had to be in a company or a university right to get to be able to get on the internet

16:02 We decided no anybody could come on if they paid us eight dollars a month which was considered that time a really good deal to have to get onto the internet whatever that was we didn’t know what it was nobody knew what it was and so that’s what we were involved in and that was when i first started becoming really interested in technology was um in 1985 or so i also organized the first hackers conference and hacker in the good sense of people who were making these networks okay they were called war games came out in the 84 right and they kind of gave hacker the bad name which is the people who were kind of trying to bring down the thing there’s another version from mit the mit model railway club who use hacker in the positive sense of trying to find out how something works and maybe tweak it a little bit okay so you took that version we took that version of hackers and we invited three generations of these guys mostly guys to come to california and they would meet each other for the first time they had never met this was pre-internet basically and so um i became much more interested in kind of the human side and the biological likeness of technology that was shown to me by the online world and uh eventually we brought that to wired because it seemed to me that that was going to it was that was a big enough or a potent enough force it was going to affect many aspects of our life and that was came from five years of living online okay so my years of

17:46 Living online taught me many many things and so by the time that 1990 came around i was convinced that this was going to stick and it was really going to affect things what i had seen of living online for five years seeing how people behave seeing what they did seeing how it changed things what it facilitated i was really we were i was convinced that this was really the best most powerful thing since you know writing or the printing press and the other founders of wired believed the same thing and so we wanted to make a magazine that would kind of report on that in a certain sense because 1990 nobody was paying attention to this i mean there was computer magazines right that talked about what computer to buy but i mean if you saw them now you’d laugh because they were so talking about hardware focused right bits and bogs and not culture not at all okay and so and that’s what wired was all about wired was about the culture of technology rather than the technology itself right that’s fascinating and that was based in san francisco so based on the west coast can you give me a perspective of the west coast of silicon valley of why it happened there you know in london in the tech space which is right around here you’re actually in the middle of tech because it started off as kind of a low rent district and now it’s next to the banks and fintech is big but everyone compares themselves to the valley i was curious if you could give me

19:14 Your take on why the valley happened in the valley and california and that whole area sure sure yeah i mean it’s a really good question because by all rights silicon valley should have happened around boston okay there was route 128 which surrounded boston and it was all where all the early computer companies were right there was you know deck yeah deck was there you know sparry ran i mean they were just they were from the institutions they were mostly coming out of you know the colleges right boston being a big huge university nexus i mean there’s dozens and dozens of high caliber universities that had really smart people who were working on computer science and and all this stuff and um they had an early lead there was around route 28 this kind of ring road around boston cambridge where were they were settled it was kind of like that silicon valley and so the question was why but why didn’t why didn’t happen there why did it happen in silicon valley there was actually a book written about this that tried to explain the competitive advantage that each had and as far as i can tell there were many reasons but a couple of the central reasons was that um silicon valley which was around stanford was uh so far away from the axis of funding by the u.s government that it wasn’t getting any right okay so a lot of the funding for this kind of computer stuff was coming from directly or indirectly from from the government but cal but stanford was just like too far away it was too new

20:55 It was not getting that and so they started to rely on private funding they developed the vc invention they invented vc’s basically this kind of really fast uh private investment out of necessity out of necessity so so one one of the ways we say is is that the one of the best inventions of silicon valley is actually silicon valley investment all right that was the most powerful meta invention so that’s one reason and the other the other reason is is because i think this was a residue a little bit of the history of california which in 1949 there was a 49 i mean in 1849 there was the 49ers who came out and so what they were doing was was there was like i don’t know thousands hundreds of thousands of young men coming out and in the united states was very unique in the sense that its gold fields were not claimed by the government everywhere else in the world the gold was claimed by the ruling government the united states said anybody could claim this so you had people rushing in was that a tactic to get california populated or did they just miss the boat i think it was yes it was a tactic to get it populated but what the effect of was that you had all these people coming in who had no adult supervision no one to say no to just like silicon valley exactly and that’s so you had them then you had the uh the bohemians afterwards and then you had the beatniks and then you had the hippies and this was all just the same continuation of this sort of

22:24 No adult supervision no permission being asked and you had this culture of people was we were saying asking for forgiveness later not asking for permission to start with and so i think um that was also the essential ingredient was a continuation of basically the california gold rush mentality of people who didn’t want to work for a boss people who wanted to do their own things people who wanted to start something and then last forgiveness if they had to later on right an entrepreneurial spirit exactly it’s funny because i was just telling you i graduated MIT in 93 but there was no business spin put on anything when i was there there was even no talk of it really now i got lucky and i took some classes at this loan school which is a great business school but we were never talked about business and i get the feeling that if i’d gotten that same degree at stanford i would have been inundated either in the class or outside the class or been surrounded by people starting businesses and it’s it it’s it’s almost boggles my mind because i the number of startups coming from stanford versus mit i mean i don’t know but it must be ten to one which is well actually these days you’re having kids are having trouble graduating because people are usually snatched up before they even graduate and it’s you know really infuriating to the professors because they don’t get to claim any graduates but you know i have three kids that are kind of millennials and what’s interesting to me about them is that they’re

23:51 All basically involved in startups and all their friends are involved in startups i mean it’s like that is the preferred mode for a young person today and i have to remind them that was really very different when i was growing up if someone told you that they were involved in a startup that was code for they were unemployed this was like this was like the lowest ranking you could get to was you were involved in a startup was like he doesn’t have a job he’s you know and everybody wanted to work for the big companies and and this was sort of like you were desperate if you were doing your own uh startup that had no dignity there was no status whatsoever and that has completely flipped now now it’s just like oh this is this is the thing and if you’re kind of like desperate you’re going to work for google or ibm or somebody like that yeah it’s basically it’s fascinating how that’s changed and even the culture i would say in the 70s you know if if you were really going after it you would go to the oil and in the 80s you might go to wall street you know and and then now that nowadays like you said not only would you go into technology but you’d go into the startup right not into the corporation right right yeah um you’ve said before that you have no interest in being a billionaire and yet in the valley and in san francisco i would argue that most of these millennials do aspire to that yeah um tell me a

25:09 Little bit about that culture um kind of even the media culture of the startup of the billionaire you know it’s this very strange story of a very few that that pervades the media yeah yeah so um i’m not saying that’s silly i mean uh i might not be interested because i’ve seen enough billionaires and hung around enough for them to understand what a burden that is to actually have a billion dollars um and uh i also think that there’s uh a huge difference in making a living versus making a fortune and um making a living is is actually maybe not as epic um as making a fortune but um is a lot more reasonable for most people to even shoot for but oftentimes in the vc world they call lifestyle businesses are completely looked down upon which is basically basically means you can make a living but you have to make a fortune what the vcs want is they want scaling they want something that was a scale scale scale but this is like um this is really unnecessary for most people and it’s very unlikely for most of them and i think the idea of always trying to shoot for it is is really misguided it’s goes back to my thesis of a hundred excuse me a thousand true fans right which is you don’t need a million fans to actually make a living you can get by with a much much smaller many orders of magnitude smaller number of supporters of an audience or fans or customers whatever you want and so um so i’m arguing that that there’s a

26:46 One thing that i don’t like about silenco valley is this misplaced attention to this huge scaling which does work can be amazing but it isn’t necessary there’s many other options and i think there’s a little distracting for those young people who are always shooting for that whereas that they would do much better to try and make something that’s of value that they can really sell that works now and then they can grow it organically and make it a little bigger but i um i don’t know you know other it’s really hard to counsel someone young and to tell them you know lower your sights uh you know try something a little bit more reasonable but i and i think part of it might be role models right so you have the bill gates and the steve jobs and all these people who were successful right at that scale and i think what i would like to see is more people who have what we call lifestyle businesses but who are have fortunes i mean you have livelihoods rather than fortunes that are um former role model for for young people and say yeah that’s what i would like to try and do something like that when you say the burden of a billion dollars yes can you explain that because you probably met more billionaires than most people right what does that mean well here’s what happens when you have a billion dollars i mean that’s just one billion and that’s not even to mention 10 billion or 20 billion which some of these folks have is is that um you have uh it begins to take over your life in the sense

28:21 You have to do something with that either you have to manage it to make more billions and or you have to give it away and giving it away is actually difficult to give it away responsibly is incredibly difficult this is why warren buffett basically punted and decided oh bill gates is going to give away my billions because i can’t do it he outsourced it because it’s a really difficult problem and it takes over your life in many ways because if you have a billion dollars you can’t spend it all as a normal human being and there’s i mean if you meet a billionaire they’re going to be wearing basically the same clothes as a millionaire right they’re going to be driving the same car as a millionaire they’re going to have basically the same house as a millionaire or a multi-millionaire they’re not they don’t have a thousand times more house they don’t have a thousand times better clothes okay so so spending it is actually difficult and so what happens is you have to kind of like you start to have to spend an or an immense amount of time to do something with it and you have to build an organization to give it away you just can’t give it away you have to have people involved and soon that that organization is consuming a lot of what you’re trying to give away and so you have to balance this around it becomes a job in every case it becomes a job and so that to do well at it because who wants not to do well

29:44 Shifts a lot of their life and their attention to that thing okay dealing with that thing and it’s the burden in a sense that you have a responsibility they feel they all of them feel some responsibility to do something with it something good and it’s so large that it consumes a lot of their attention okay is it also true sometimes and i don’t want to generalize that if you’ve gotten that billion or two dollars that you’re probably maybe a very competitive you’re maybe have a lot of issues you maybe you’re personally dealing with to try to you know that forces you to kind of get bigger and go bigger because many people would have cooled off at 10 100 million so do you think personality type sometimes these billionaires are still constantly looking for the next thing um actually not always i mean some some of the billionaires i’ve met have been very um have not been uh extreme in that sense but but i will say one thing is is that i think greatness is overrated greatness is is basically an you have to be extreme in some fashion to be called great really great world class great by the rest of your society and and um so so there is there is something that you’re giving up for that but not all the billionaires that i know are actually sort of super competitive in that sense they’re competitive enough believe me but they’re not um you know i call abnormal or you know pathological in that sense um some are you know keep going because um these they see some they want you

31:34 Know they want to use this well for some good they have some objective or they’re trying to do something or they or their own company which they fervent will believe in is serving people and look at jeff pesos truly truly believes that he is serving community by having really low prices on anything you can buy he says you know that’s to him is like good yeah that’s good for the world is why not have affordable things for everybody and so he’s sort of driven by really trying to genuinely serve people that way yeah and his obsession with that you could argue does you know a lot of good things right and jeff bezos an email you always have something thoughts about jeff and his email box well yeah i tell the story that um uh in fact i think i i heard him say recently repeated the same thing which is that um i’m always really interested in how people manage their email particularly as they become either famous or or sought after in some ways and um his method i guess you would say is is that he has a fairly public address and if you write to him he will see it but he will very rarely respond to it because he has more than one assistant who’s also getting all his mail and that person will act on that piece of mail if it needs any action or if just jeff has directed it and so um the worst case is that jeff will also independently act on it so a person may get two responses if they get any response and he says no one’s ever complained about getting two

33:22 Responses from him from him and his assistant so he he just basically lets the assistants take care of it and he’s reading everything but only responding to those that he wants to respond to so nothing is left fallen into the cracks and sometimes he gets to respond directly okay so that’s a good way to kind of go if you get it seems to work for him right seems for him um the thousand true fans article yeah uh pretty amazing piece of work i’ve quoted it so many times there’s so many people on this show it’s not even funny um when did you write that and did you have any idea how it was gonna you know reverberate around the world it’s a good question it’s not a long piece no it’s not and so actually i had been um talking about it for a couple of years before that i was just sort of playing out the math the arithmetic which is mostly all it is it’s just kind of a exploration of of the math and um i mean i was i would when i would meet people from the music industry i would kind of inquire to them about some of the independent artists trying to see if there’s any evidence for this idea and so after a couple of years i decided that um i didn’t have enough answers or evidence and so i would just write it up basically asking people if they had any ideas and this and part of this was also trying to suggest ways in which those would be funded because this was long before kickstarter and i was trying to also research to

34:58 See whether there was um you know economic or funding models that would work for somebody and so i finally kind of just decided i was going to do is i put out saying basically does anybody know anybody who’s actually doing this and how are they doing it um and that was the impetus to write it down and then i did a couple follow-ups because i heard back from people who knew people who were doing or trying it and and people who were trying to start these funding sites to make that happen um so it was several years in gestation and no i had no no clue that that it was going to you know work that that’s true for anybody who does anything kind of like on a long-term basis like a radio show or music it’s like you can never really guess which one of your creations will hit it just makes no you know you can’t artists have the same thing they write song after song and then suddenly one is like oh my gosh your genius it’s like i’ve been writing songs for 20 years where have you been you know whatever and and and even even movies are the same thing i mean i would say if there was a person who had this unique magical genie like ability to actually point to the ones that were going to succeed you’d be a billionaire because hollywood they don’t know which ones are going to work book publishers don’t know which books are going to right so keep creating you have to just kind of keep doing it again and again and again and again and for people that haven’t read the article if you had to summarize

36:32 It and like in three quick points what would you say is the thousands your fans and then also do you have anything to add to it in the last five years so so the basic thing is a very simple premise which is that technology allows us to have someone who’s a creator and that could be a writer a filmmaker music musician a sculptor photographer anybody who’s creating something that allows the technology allows us to actually interact with our customers directly in the past you needed you know you’d sell a book and the book sell there’d be a publisher and a book seller and someone would buy your book but you’d have no connection as the author with that person but now you can sell a book even if you don’t sell them directly you can have a they can have an email they can contact you on an ongoing basis and so the premise is simply that if you have that kind of ability to connect with your audience directly and you don’t have all these other people involved with publishers and and uh music studios and everybody if you’re actually creating and dealing directly within that the numbers that you need to actually get a living are very small and um i call those people um that they’re going to be most valuable to you true fans because the true fans are fans that will purchase anything that you produce in any on all the varieties all the different editions all the different venues whatever it is anything you do they’re going to support you in it if you have a you don’t need very many of those

38:01 Kinds of people and by my calculation for a single creator you need about a thousand if they if you can produce a hundred dollars worth of goods a year then a hundred times a thousand is a hundred thousand dollars that’s a living okay and so um that’s the basic idea now you have to adjust that by lots of different things because you have expenses you have to subtract if you have more than one person as a duo you have to multiply by two and the important thing though is that that number is actually not critical it’s just the order of magnitude it says you don’t need a million fans to make a living if you have direct contact with them you don’t need even a hundred thousand you need it in the thousands and the second thing about that that i would say is is that that’s not for everybody because there’s a lot of work involved in dealing with your fans there’s a lot of work in connecting with them and servicing directly and not everybody wants that some authors or artists they don’t want to become a social media guy or a person or a girl they want they want to paint in their studio and so for them they need to have somebody involved so you have to add a layer and you have to adjust those numbers in some capacity so it’s not for everybody but it’s a possibility and even if you have help you’re still in that order of magnitude what have i learned since then um i i think there are still is still a it’s a viable goal it’s still a tough it’s a tough

39:47 Way to i mean it still it still takes a lot of work to get there without the help of people from outside you’re kind of a good example of somebody who’s doing that most of the people who started doing it came from the hollywood studios or the music labels or book publishers and then decided to take their kind of existing audience and let go of that and go to it directly there’s fewer people who rise from the bottom but there are enough now that i know for certain if this works you know hugh howie who’s a science fiction author started with amazon kindle and he became a best-selling author and he still has he has people publishing his book but he’s still basically a true fan thousand true fan uh person from from the beginning he still starts by selling his stuff to the customers directly first and so there there are people who who can enough examples in all the different media that we know this is possible right and i think what we need is more role models people to to kind of become known as well they they’re doing it this way and i think one of the biggest points that article is that by focusing on those 1000 true fans you’ll find that message that resonates as opposed to trying to please a million people exactly and then if you can resonate with those thousand then that will scale right right right and uh yeah it’s something we think about around here all the time uh you know we have in it funny enough an academy that’s at around a thousand right now and so you know we

41:17 Just constantly service those people and yes it’s very difficult you have to deal with people you have to keep them happy but it also keeps you on that cutting edge of knowing yeah you’re absolutely right that that direct contact makes you honest and makes you really focus on delivering value versus just kind of going through the motions yeah i just want to wrap up with with wired when you look back on that wired experience do you how do you remember it and do you remember of you know we did x and then like what was that biggest challenge when you were there or even today with with the magazine well you know um like a lot of things that became successful they look extremely obvious in retrospect but you can talk to anybody every single person who became successful and it was not obvious to anybody going in and so it was against all odds it was i mean wired had probably at least three or four complete near-death experiences where we were like inches from just going under and that’s again very typical for a lot a lot of successes that seem again inevitable from the from the hindsight and so um it’s the 90s probably yeah so i remember i remember the fact that that it was very unlikely to succeed we had a lot of doubters constantly were rejected all the time and there was we’re kind of always kind of pushing that trying to show that this was going to work i mean the the basic the basic thing that wire did

42:48 Was to show to your i should say to move technology from the margins into the center say this is the main event this is the main story this is what’s going to be driving the next decades and we kind of took the nerds and made them heroes okay so that’s the main thing we did was was it was to talk to there’s a lifestyle around this this is no longer fringe bedroom teenager pimply guys talking to each other on the bulletin boards no this is bigger than that so i think the main thing we did was to convince people that this was the main event okay when did you leave that and so do you miss it um the saga is is that um wired was uh the founders who owned most of the stock we lost control of the company during the height of the dot com boom and bust when the vcs wanted to sell at the peak and we wanted to go for long term and we had an ipo that was being shepherded by golden sacks that failed because of the drop or around there okay so one and it was happening and okay well actually it was before that it was it was 2000 and um uh we were always we were we had a profitable magazine and we had a naturally an unprofitable uh digital side but we invented we invented the click through ad banner we we we had the first digital magazine that had advertising wow we had a search engine wow we would have done what google did which was to do the the ad auction that’s where we were headed to but um so the the the the digital side was valued at this crazy

44:53 Internet valuation and the and the revenue producing magazine was dismissed entirely so they divided it when when the ipo fell we we missed some benchmarks the vcs took over the board seats they they decided to sell the company against our our wishes they divided the company they sold the magazine to condi nast and they sold the digital side which was worth all the money to lycos okay who completely squandered it and there was a prohibition so the magazine couldn’t have uh wired dot com okay okay so it all ended you know okay so anyway so i was like so side new house condi nast bought the magazine and i have to say that of all the places that wired could have been sold to it was the best thing for the magazine because they just gave it money left it where it was but i had no interest in working for a billionaire so i left shortly after that um and because it was really fun when we were making our own magazines doing crazy stuff taking risks because we had one thing which was we made the magazine for ourselves for we were making the magazine we wanted to read and one of the the the injunctions i gave to the writers who were writing for me you know like if you work for a newspaper they have these kind of guidelines that okay you’re writing for the 11th grader or you’re writing for your mom or something and so i had one piece of advice for all the writers who wrote i said here’s who you’re writing for you’re writing for me and only me and i have read everything and i am totally bored

46:30 You have to amaze me tell me something that i don’t know and i i and i know a lot don’t explain dna again because i know what dna is talk up to me tell me and so that was so that’s what we were getting we were making a magazine for me for us that we wanted to read and that was really different than anything else about technology where people were still explaining what bits were and it’s like oh my gosh i have to hear that one more time i’m crazy yeah it had this specialness to it it’s funny because you know there’s so many magazines and there’s so many this but you had this ethos so you knew when you got a copy of Wired it was going to be i don’t i always remember it is like i’m going to get something special i’m going to get this pop of dopamine in my head that made me go wow wow and i feel like i’m on the inside exactly right and yet i don’t feel like it’s esoteric right right and the other thing we did was lewis rosetos the the the the the founder who um when he told me this this is what brought me on board when he convinced me to come on he said i want to make a magazine that feels like it got mailed back from the future i said okay i am on board for that that is what i want to do i want to mail it back from the future you see there’s no explaining it’s just like you’re you’re just it’s something there’s a message from the future and they’re talking about it as if the stuff was already happened okay that’s that’s what i want to do that’s powerful that is that’s very

48:02 Powerful that’s even today that’s still powerful wow that’s good and so and so today the brand continues the magazine continues and it still has it still has well there there’s a thing is we started off as the pirate ship and now it’s become the flagship that’s there’s a big difference in culture there i’m not so sure that if i was still there i could do that flagship thing i’m much better doing the pirate version because because i’m you know i’d like to kind of break the rules and disrupt the stuff and um try things that can fail and when you’re the flagship you don’t have that same kind of leeway right right thank you for that explanation that’s that’s invaluable let’s talk about your latest book because i’m guessing you’re doing a little bit of pirate ship stuff here right um and uh and pushing the envelope it’s called the inevitable understanding the 12 technological forces that will shape our future you talk about a lot of things in here can you can you tell me about the genesis of this book in your brain you know i’m always curious with writers how it starts out um you were on the tim ferris show multiple times right right spoken to malcolm gladwell recently and they both talk about how you know that idea for the book sometimes can take years in your brain yeah and you’re actually writing it inside your head when did this start right right so i actually wrote most of this book at the same time i was writing my other book but this was a different thing this was

49:31 The other book was basically in a a theory of technology it was called what technology wants and this was much more this other stuff that came into this book was much more concerned about what’s going to happen near term and for me 20 years was near term because i was talking about kind of the cosmic thing of the technology so 20 to 30 years was near term and although it’s actually long term for anybody else talking about it and so i so i um i started writing for wired some of these pieces and for the near times magazine and there was trying to explain my take on the digital arena looking at what i thought was the perennial the things that would you could still read about in 20 years that would make sense i was looking for those those generalities that seem to govern a whole bunch of different things happening at the same time whether it be in in music or in hollywood there’s something in common about the kind of changes that we were seeing and i was trying to abstract that what’s that general thing that connects them and what’s the thing that will still be connecting them in you know five or ten years what has connected them in the past and so my attempt was to to to look at these things in as high level as i could but still being grounded in reporting on what was actually happening so they began as um kind of one by one of um me trying to explain to myself what was happening and so for i think you know a journalist is sort of the ultimate

51:09 Job because you’re being paid to learn things so i would set out like what’s what about vr what about um ai what about like uh what’s happening with a digitalization of hollywood and and um special effects what that seems important what about so okay i’ll get a magazine assignment and they’re gonna pay me to find out and i’ll write my report and i’ll give it to them and they’ll give me money for for that and i was like that’s that’s a great deal now the process of writing it is how i learn i don’t have i don’t go in with a preconceived idea i’m just like i’m gonna find it and then then i have to write it down and that’s when i find out what i think okay so so it’s also writing it down give your brain space to now think about new ideas that’s a good yeah i think you’re right because then i can forget about it yeah because you know it’s safe right right exactly i think i think you’re right um i hadn’t thought about that um yeah maybe i have to stop thinking about that for a while i could think about something else but i but i do have a little bit of that magpie kind of a sense of um wanting to go on to the new thing okay and um that’s i learned that from stewart brand who i would say is kind of my mentor from whole earth who would start things like the you know uh get something going and then abandon it move on to the next thing and let people kind of he wasn’t a maintainer and i’m not either so the quantified self something i began

52:42 With gary wolf and i let i’m happy to have gary continue that the hacker conference someone else is still running the thing but well someone else’s so i i preferred the startup moment the pirate ship trying to get it going see if it works i’m not very good at maintaining that and so i want to move on i get bored easily and so um you’re right i kind of like putting it down into paper into a book is is one way to kind of move on from it and um i didn’t thought about that but i think you’re right and so for the next 20 years what is going to be happening with things like ai and vr you know you mentioned before that you had drove with uh elon muskin one of the very first tesla’s he’s got some ideas about what ai is bringing to us it’s in the conversation a lot these days but what’s your your take on it there’s a very big subject sort of like um sitting down with gutenburg you’re asking about this printing thing what do you think hey guten what do you think is gonna happen with this with this printing stuff is like well i mean first of all even if he knew where would you where would he begin because i think um you know yeah let me tell protestant revolution and it’ll you know it’ll unleash a thousand libraries i mean you know there’s there’s i think i think ai is is as fundamental as invention of printing easily maybe even the more as fundamental as the industrial revolution i really think it’s really profound and i think there’s lots of

54:14 Misconceptions and the first thing about it is that the artificial intelligence we might better think of it as artificial smartness because it’s not human-like it’s kind of like an industrial commodity and most of it’s going to be back facing that we won’t even see it’ll be invisible behind the scenes doing it’s like netflix recommendations or amazon recommendations it’s just they’re doing his stuff it’s getting better and better there’ll be some conversational bots that we’ll have we’ll have these digital virtual assistants which will be the front facing and i think that’s going to be the way that we’re going to interact with them have you seen it would be her like her did you like that movie i did i thought it was pretty good and uh there are some inconsistencies about i mean the problem with hollywood making the future is that you always make it in one dimension but they forget everything else is kind of the same um and so uh i i think this idea of kind of like the amazon echo alexia where you’re talking to it and it understands you is rapidly going to become one of the major interfaces that we have with the ai and the in the consumer face of it but most of that is going to be industrial like like it’s like factories or you know it’s like having motors we have some in our home but most of them are invisible motors most of the effect is on the the back end the factories and the tractors on farms

55:43 And so that’s where ai is going to be living for most of the time and it’ll be a utility like electricity that you just purchase as much as ai as you want you’re not going to generate you’re just going to buy it and the real advance the real frontier the real opportunity for entrepreneurs right now this minute is to take something and add ai to it and make something new so take taxis add ai that’s uber okay take something add ai to it and you’ll have a new business and like the early days of the internet where people took x and brought it online you know took a store bookstore and put it online or you take something so we’re going to have the same kind of mad rush right now and there’ll be lots of opportunities to do something with ai that you don’t even need to make you’re just going to buy it’s a utility commodity that you get on the cloud interesting very interesting all right vr what’s happening with it and are we seeing any of that play out today or is there so much more that’s yet to come yeah so we’re at the first generation of vr actually was the second generation the first generation was in the 80s i was there i thought it was really going to happen it didn’t it was just way too expensive now vr is using the same technology and the smartphones for tracking and video processing so now it’s cheap and that’s the big news is now it’s hundreds of dollars instead of a million dollars to do and so that hundreds of

57:21 Dollars is this the first generation it’s missing lots of pieces and i think the first version of it is going to be mostly for gamers vr and then there’s a maybe but the second generation will be the mr the mixed reality where you wear spectacles and you have the you have the virtual stuff inserted into the room that you’re in or the office you’re in and i think the enterprise the office the where you have virtual offices virtual screens virtual telepresence that’s the second i think the second use that we’re going to see after the games is in this kind of office space for education for training for telepresence for having virtual screens and that’s still even that’s probably still five years away so um i think this is a long term i think it’s a 15 20 25 year it’s immense i think in the beginning it’s going to be specialized uses you know ultra gamers experimental offices training for military um in schools like uh doctors learning to do surgery that kind of stuff and what is vr not going to give us that we think maybe it would i mean people have talked about vr sex and things like that um yeah it seems a little dubious to me but what do you think we’re not going that maybe we think we are that’s a good question but let me just actually say where i think we are moving with this which is that what you get in vr is is very hard to explain because we have an internet of of information and knowledge

58:58 Wikipedia’s you can look things up even your you can look at pictures you can learn things it’s it’s very cerebral in some senses what vr gives you actually are experiences that you feel it’s very hard to explain but you’re in this other world and you feel like you’re in another place you have this virtual thing in front of you and you feel it the the standard trick for a vr world is you you put your goggles on you’re in a room and they drop the floor away and you’re suddenly on a cliff like it’s a mile deep and your brain knows that you’re just standing in the same room that you were a minute ago but the rest of your body your deep reptilian brain is telling you need to step back because you’re going to die and your legs are shaking and you just have to get back and it operates that that sense of being real of being present is operating in a different part of our brain and it’s much more primitive and much more connected to our emotions to our empathy and so what we’re making is we’re making internet of experiences so the the currency in the vr world and economy will be experiences rather than knowledge or information and so it’s going to be a very social it’s going to be more social of all the social media because we’re going to be sharing experiences downloading experiences giving each other experiences and so that’s what it’s going to be about i don’t think it’s going to be about high-minded things i mean it’s

1:00:36 So i mean i think there probably will be a lot of porn so it’s it’s i did the survey in 1990 early issues of wire the money 394 about what people expected the internet to be what they were going to do on it and so they had like oh i’m going to vote electronic voting and there would be i’m using it for encyclopedia and you know education and i mean there was all these finding a job there was all these very high-minded things and at the bottom was kind of you know like gaming porn um you know gossiping whatever it was and so what actually happened was complete inversion and i think the same thing about vr i mean i think we’ll be we’re high-minded about what we’re going to be using for it but i think it’s going to be pretty base in that sense pretty pretty common needs and desires are going to be are going to fuel it okay it’s interesting because i think as humans in this day and age we pay for experiences you know think about travel we think about the live show that we go to exactly and yet the movie we download is worth about what we pay for it which is nothing and so if you can really deal in human experience then that’s that’s fast that’s yeah exactly i think this is the shift is is that we’re moving from ones we’re copies of things and or just commodities to the things that we can’t copy which are human experiences they’re the only thing that’s increasing in prices yeah everything else in the world is on this long-term curve down towards the free anything

1:02:08 We make or manufacture is becoming cheaper and cheaper the one things that aren’t are experiences like you know ticket concerts uh chef attention at high price babysitting all these nursing care all these things that are based around human relationships and and experiences right that we use all of our senses right for and that’s actually where some of our jobs are going to go to by the way as well see robots all the jobs are going to the bots are jobs that can be defined in terms of efficiency or productivity if you if efficiency is all critical to this task that’s the task that goes to the bots if productivity is all something that’s concerned about with this task it goes to the bots so productivity is for robots what humans are going to be about are these other things where inefficiency is a large component so like science science is inherently fundamentally inefficient innovation is fundamentally terribly inefficient because you’re making mistakes you’re trying stuff that doesn’t work you’re exploring you’re going down a dead end inherently that is the nature of it art is inherently not efficient human relationships are inherently terribly inefficient okay and so that’s that kind of inefficiency is actually what we’re good at and that’s where we’re going to drift as we take anything that is efficient and give them to the bots so we shouldn’t worry about robots replacing all of our jobs no they were replaced certain of our tasks okay our job jobs are made up a bunch

1:03:44 Of different tasks and so a lot of the tasks that we have are going to go there we’re going to actually work with the ais because they think differently than humans they have a different mixture of intelligences your calculator is smarter than you are in arithmetic your gps is smarter than you are in gps navigation google is smarter than you are in recall so we have the very very unhuman like things the driverless car is going to be the reason why we’re going to have the ais drive the car is because they don’t think like humans they don’t drive like humans they’re engineered to be non-conscious to not be worried about whether they left to stow on or whether they should have majored in finance they’re just driving and so that is something we’re going to complement we’re going to work with them you know the the the you know ai beat the best chess champion and bait the best go champion but pretty jeopardy but the best chess player in the world today is not an ai it’s not a human chess master it’s a team called a centaur of the two of them working together the best medical diagnitician is not watson the supercomputer it’s not a doctor it’s watson plus the supercomputer the ai so we’re going to be you’re going to be paid in the future by how well you work with ai because they are going to be complementary type of intelligence that will be there’ll be ai whisperers there’ll be there’ll be people who kind of really know that they’ll be highly paid for being able to work with

1:05:16 Ais i’m curious if maybe in the future i’m going to get more in touch with my human emotions because when i was being instructed at mit it was like you better be scientific and in a weird way when you’re training to be a scientist or an engineer you’re actually training out your human side because you make decisions based on anecdotal evidence you make quick conclusions right so in a weird way they almost you know dehumanize you in a nice way in a nice way and you know the thing about it is is is that we’re now having to teach our ai’s ethics there’s there’s a there’s a whole group at google and stanford another university they’re trying to actually extract out whatever ethics are so we can teach them to the robots because when they’re driving these cars they have to make these decisions these you know the trolley problem decisions about who should they favor in an accident should they favor the safety of the passenger or of the pedestrians we don’t think about that as humans we just do whatever and then we say oh i wouldn’t have time to think but the ai has time to think so you have to pre-program it and it turns out that you can do that but to do that you have to be very clear about what your ethics are you have to go deep and logical and we don’t know what we’re terribly inconsistent we’re not very deep and so the point is is that by teaching them to be ethical we’re going to become better ethically ourselves they’re going to help us become better humans so you have an

1:06:42 Optimistic view i have a very optimistic view and it’s been well received it’s been shared by a lot of people as as kind of welcoming these ideas is this kind of a counter to a lot of the you know the prophecies we hear about you know skynet and ai is this is this why you wrote that to kind of put a lot of those things straight well a little bit i i i i think optimists decide the future i think optimists are the ones who actually form our future and i think can you explain that i’ve never heard that before so well if you look back in history all the things that we have now we’re all done by optimists right because they dared to do it and i think you behave better when you’re optimistic you are you’re thinking about the future you assume the future is going to be friendly you’re actually you’re doing things for the future if you’re really pessimistic you’re not going to to take those chances and those risks too i mean it’s a very it’s a very risky thing to make something for the long term future if you know if you’re not optimistic you’re not going to engage in anything that that would take more than a generation to make but some of the best things we have look around the city were things that took a long time to make so you have to be optimistic because those are the things they’re going to endure and so i’m a little concerned right now that at least in hollywood and some science a lot of science fiction that the

1:08:08 Future is always a place you don’t want to go to and so i did write the book in part to try and make a vision of the future that i thought i wouldn’t mind living i would like to live in and i think if we can imagine it then we can kind of make it and if you talk to a lot of people today working in technology they were very influenced by some of those earlier visions of the future we’re going through the list of star trek you know the communicator the tricorder the holodeck we’re basically not just me i mean people in the industry were inspired by that to work on it so i think is we do want to have a picture of where we want to go because it will inspire us to to make it to work towards that and part of what i did in the book was i had these scenarios where i kind of imagine what would a world look like where it wasn’t so important to own things where maybe you didn’t own anything you were just accessing everything what would that be there would be kind of cool that’s almost like being the the hunter gatherer going through the forest not owning anything they just pick up something they need at the time they use it and they leave it behind it’s kind of kind of returning to a little bit of that kind of tribal person who is free of of possessions well we can almost imagine that in the future where you didn’t really have to own very much you actually just had access to it it’s not that you didn’t have

1:09:28 These things or you weren’t using but the own idea of ownership is a curious kind of an industrial age idea that wasn’t present in early tribes and maybe we don’t need it again yeah it’s funny we had um we had an author in here who’s been to Papua New Guinea a lot of times if you go if you go to the elders there um they’ll ask what happens when they they have like a windfall and they get all lots of money and yeah all of their relatives come in and move in with them and so it’s actually considered a burden for them because they have to then provide for everyone else right right so what’s been the biggest surprise to you with the reception to this book was there one of the topics where you thought and this might fly into the radar and then people were like wait a second or just the reception in general so so the surprise for me is that the book has made it to the new york times bestseller list congratulations in the wall street journal i was not expecting that at all and i had never been i’ve never gotten that far with the book before so it’s a first for me um there are there are some some aspects of the book or a chapter of the book that is controversial and actually it surprised me in a sense that i didn’t really want to get there but that’s where i landed and that is as i came as i did my research to really believe that it was inevitable that there would be our lives would be totally tracked and

1:10:46 Surveilled as i looked harder and harder at the very dynamics of of what that technology is how it works where we’re going there was no counter force to the realization that you know in 50 years from now 100 years from now every aspect of our lives is going to be recorded or captured in some fashion so the question is if that’s inevitable then what’s not inevitable what we have a choice about is what kind of tracking how is it done is it symmetrical is it done mutually who owns it i mean all these other questions which we have a lot of choice about and that or which will be very important for us and so i was suggesting one version of what i call co-valence meaning that we are mutually surveilling each other that we watch who watches us yes the cops should film everything but we should film the cops and we should have access to what they film and they have access to us so this kind of mutual transparency is really the way to deal with the fact that we’re going to have universal tracking we’re tracking ourselves our peers our friends are tracking us when they take a picture of us and facebook and tag it everywhere the companies are tracking is the government everybody’s tracking it but the way to make this civilized is to make it more symmetrical so that we are tracking each other all the time rather than they are tracking us we don’t know who would what they know we have no accountability and we don’t

1:12:22 Have any benefits how is that received humans don’t like the idea of being tracked they don’t and so there are still a lot of people who firmly believe that they can stop tracking and i think that’s as misguided as thinking you can stop copying you have to acknowledge that the world the internet is the world’s largest copy machine anything that can be copied if it touches the internet will be copied you can’t stop copying the music industry has tried for three decades to stop it you can’t stop it you have to work with the copying you have to kind of go along with that flow and understand that you have to work on top of it you kind of have to like it’s like kayaking down a whitewater you have to be going faster than the thing itself and so um i think tracking is the same thing and so that’s not a lot of people who really object to the idea that we should accept that and um i changed my mind i mean i don’t you know it’s like total surveillance no it doesn’t seem like a good idea but i think there’s ways that we could learn used we’re going to use technology to civilize it to make it work i think you’re right and 10 years ago in london they developed software and all the camera surveillance where they can track a license plate going through the city of london which at the time was pretty impressive i mean you know google search was just coming around um now the technology is even more and uh so it is going that way you don’t want to hear it

1:13:46 It’s no longer a license base it’s a face yeah they’ll be able to track your face as you go this is one of the most surveilled city in the city of the world that i believe it started because of terror terrorism issues with ira right and so that the society here allowed it to happen and now it’s just something we just kind of accept um and i think maybe maybe that’s okay because it’s going to happen anyways right but i think sooner than later 25 years or maybe 10 or five it’s going to happen and so now we have a fun have to find a way of managing that information and the way i would use it is not is is civilizing it making it making it civilized making it beneficial to us making it mutual um so um i think we can figure out ways to make it work that’s that we get direct benefits from right talking about asia uh i want to know about your experiences with asia your fascination with asia really quickly i visited uh tokyo and then a city south of tokyo named oduwara when i was about 11 years old 12 years old and so um i believe it was 1983 i was there i stayed with the family for a month i went back the year after that saved for a month and it was quite a culture shock i took the bullet train i lived with a family but it was fascinating and it really shaped me in a big way we went to hong kong after that um and i remember getting a culture shock because i was bargaining with the electronic traders in hong kong

1:15:09 After my mama son was taking care of me in japan and at one point i was being unreasonable about the price in hong kong the guy yelled at me and that’s not done in japanese culture and so i quickly my brain realized that these are different cultures um and so uh that was my initial experience and i spent a lot of that some time going back to asia but tell me about yours uh you spend you spent time there um what’s been your asia experience oh my gosh um well we need another show for that yeah exactly i the short answer is i went to asia instead of going to college okay i’m in college dropout went one year and then i just um i needed to do a project or something that was not an option at that time or should have done a gap year which was not an option at the time so eventually it made my way to asia because i had a friend who was studying chinese and taiwan and i’d never been out of new england and i and it’s very hard to kind of understand how cloistered and parochial the us was at that at this time this would be 1970 71 i’d never eaten in a chinese restaurant i didn’t there weren’t chinese people around i mean it was so i landed in taiwan and talking about cultural shock it was just unbelievably different in every respect and um but for some reason i just fell in love with it in terms of what it was one aspect of it that was most riveting to me was that everything happened on the street it was you know they had houses and shops were kind of like garage doors and they just opened

1:16:44 Them up and then they moved and so they would make stuff on the street they would cook on the street there was no sense of privacy i could walk into people’s homes and unfortunately i often did just to photograph and there’s like oh yeah hi you know you look strange uh you know and and and so and so there was this complete it’s like i got to see how the world worked i got to see how everything was made i got to see everything and that was the thing that really drew me was this this visible the visible world was and and i could see it and of course at that moment china was making everything in the world in some senses and so uh there was this it was like getting x-ray vision a superpower where you could see what was happening and how and how everything worked and that was the thing that at first attracted me and but then i was photographing i wanted to be a photographer and i started photographing and i saw myself gravitating to photographing the things that were old that were disappearing really fast and so i kind of within maybe about a year got made myself an assignment to kind of like record these things that were disappearing because right before my eyes i saw them transforming so that’s where i also got a really bad case of optimism because i saw i would come there would be a rice field and i come back six months later and there’d be a factory there and there were people who in other parts of the world were poor and then the next year they had a motorcycle

1:18:16 And then i mean i i saw visibly people rising out of abject poverty to becoming some of the richest people in the world today and so i spent a lot of time i i i had the advantage of getting in a time machine and traveling back three centuries and that was afghanistan and napalm and berma in 1975 or so i was in a time machine i landed in this place and it was living in the absolute medieval state unchanged for three centuries everything about it no metal no i mean it was they were throwing garbage out the windows there were no toilets i mean it was it was the the the women were cloistered it was exactly everything about it there were the street lamps were the guy walking down with kerosene lamps lighting each lamp uh you know that was that was nighttime i mean it was it was an amazing time travel experience and so i lived without technology i i saw the world what it would be like to not have it and so coming back to a big city i could see oh this is this is why we do this this is this is amazing this is this is smart this is good progress is good you don’t die so young you you have more choices the women are are real people i mean it’s i i i felt that progress and so i know the progress is real i i came to believe in progress by my travels in asia and it was real and good and so that made me believe history made me become an optimist seeing the fact that we’ve had all this every year we’ve gotten better which suggests that we’re going to keep doing that

1:20:07 Because for 500 years that’s what we have been doing so it’s possible everything could just fall off a cliff but the evidence so far as every year has gotten better and asia was that time machine the agent was that vehicle that that scream that scope that allowed me to see that wow do you still spend time there i do i spend an incredible amount of time and i’m still recording the things that are disappearing and that’s and i use that mostly as an excuse to get out of the big cities to go to where these things are falling away the the i was just in carola india photographing the temple elephant processions where they have 50 elephants and they you know it’s just spectacles and stuff very soon actually they’re very attempts right now to to stop them because some people feel the elephants are being mistreated and so that’ll go away and so i’m i’m kind of recording this i don’t have nostalgia for it i mean i’m not saying well they need to be preserved i understand i just you know i understand why living in these bamboo homes they’re beautiful they’re they’re just gorgeous but they’re drafty and they leak and they’re they’re always falling apart and if i was there i would want to live in the concrete apartment with running water and it was airtight so i know why they’re leaving him but i want to document this before they go and so i go to asia to see what the future is because they’re ahead of us in many ways they and they’re going to be deciding what our future is

1:21:50 The the arithmetic stacks up was at 1.3 billion chinese 1.4 billion asians and there’s like 300 million americans you know it’s like no we’re not going to count they’re going to decide our future so i’m going there to kind of hear what they have in mind for our future at the same time i’m trying to record as much of what’s disappearing as possible that’s fascinating insight i really appreciate that on this show a lot of times we’ve spoken in the past about different psychedelics we’ve tried ayahuasca we’ve spoken with dennis mckenna which is the brother of terence mckenna and talked about i know i know and new terence you know terence you knew terence oh yeah we did stuff together yeah really in berkeley okay he he was in berkeley but we yeah we did a couple of talks okay in probably esalen or something in california actually one was in spain but nonetheless okay what was terence like that you remember he was a little bit like another guy i know bruce sterling he had a remarkable or jason silva i don’t know if you’ve yeah okay it’s this sort of this ability to channel uh rhetoric that is is sort of like um it makes perfect sense at one level that doesn’t make much sense otherwise and um this is but be able to kind of emit it fully formed grammatically correct it’s a rhetorical style that’s just unbelievable so you can record things actually to kind of understand it because it’s coming out so fast and um but i

1:23:25 I’m and he was interested in things that i’m maybe not so interested in but nonetheless i have to listen to him because he’s just saying these kind of uh he’s arranging these these words in a way that this can compel you to listen yeah it’s like this verbal improvisation yeah yeah which on one level means nothing on another level can mean amazing things exactly right right right and his brother dennis used to say like terence this doesn’t mean anything but that you know the people believe it does and so yeah so so anyway but um so so psychedelics yeah so psychedelics is it true that you weren’t you waited until you were 50 years old before you tried ellis yeah yeah so i was one i was a very rare hippie who never did any drugs at all even though i was completely surrounded by people who were doing them all the time i just i’ve never smoked cigarettes i’ve never been drunk i just none of that ever appealed to me and i don’t know why but but when i was 50 i decided that i felt that psychedelics from every report and everybody i’ve ever had or read about was a very important experience it was it was a sort of it was an experience and i decided that i would i was mature enough to have that experience and so i set it up i did a lot of research on what the best setting would be and how to do it and actually turned out to be very little information about that but i found some good stuff and jim faidman was one of the guys who later on wrote the book i wish i had read that

1:24:49 Book at the time was not written but that was the kind of information that i was going for and i i would did make it sacramental as the way i would describe it i want to make a sacrament a rite of passage a spiritual investigation and it was very effective but i also decided that i didn’t need to do it again i may change my mind about that but right now i’m still kind of i don’t feel a need for that maybe i’ll try another psychedelic and do the same thing just as a as a as a sacrament um and so it’s it worked i i i 100 percent think that our drug policy is completely upside down i mean that’s another that’s another rant but i mean i i definitely think that that we should be doing much more research on this stuff that’s very it’s very therapeutic it’s very powerful lsd in particular is not addictive and so we should really unleash that to to set to science yeah they’re doing some amazing studies here in britain uh on lsd now previously on psilocybin doing fMRI studies in the brain and we’ve had a lot of people on here like professor david nudd of imperial college and amanda fielding who does a lot of the funding for that research so always looking into that stuff and seeing what we can realize but that’s interesting story and interesting that you decided at 50 to do it because you could have not i could have not yeah what do you think we can pass on to our children i mean both of us aren’t getting any

1:26:20 Younger and if we think about like what you want to pass on i mean obviously you’re writing books yeah yeah and things like that but what do you think we should yeah that’s a great question and no one’s ever answered so um well i’m you know i’m involved with the charter founding board member of the long now foundation which we started with danny hillis which is to promote long-term thinking so we’re building this clock that will tick for 10,000 years this could be in a mountain west texas for 10,000 years this clock ticks whether people are around or not and it every day makes a unique melody for 10,000 years will be a different melody whether anybody hears it or not at noon and it’s being powered by the changes of temperature and day and night on the mountain and to see the time you’ll make there’s a pilgrim as you walk up inside the spiral vertical tunnel where the thing hangs it’s about 500 feet deep and you to see the the clock knows the time but it doesn’t display it unless you move it to the unless you wind it to the current position and then it shows the current time so it knows the time but doesn’t display the time unless humans ask it to display the time and so um that the purpose of the clock is to remind us to provoke us to suggest us think in terms of multi-generational projects or what we could do over the long term so i do think about this and i and i think one thing that i want to pass on to my kids is that perspective is to say

1:28:01 It’s worth working on things that may not be completed in your lifetime contribute to the commonwealth so like this clock itself it’s not going to be done in my lifetime um that we can start things that may take generations to complete and that that’s what civilization in some respects is that you leave behind you you create more than you destroy and so um i think that’s passing on those kind of values to my kids in such a way that they can pass them on to theirs is the challenge and i think what i would like to do um and i think uh the other thing i like to give them is um a you know the parental gifts of opportunities that maybe you didn’t have that’s just a natural thing so i’m the believer in increasing the number of options and opportunities in the world so i’m a minimalist myself i’m trying to keep the things i use to a minimum but i’m a maximalist and trying to open up as many possibilities for others to choose from so i have much more to choose from than my father my grandfather and i want to continue that by increasing the options for people to choose from even though i might choose the minimum of those right so consume consume less but have more options right and this long-term perspective it’s almost in it’s it’s a less of an egoic perspective because when you’re thinking many terms ahead you’re not you by definition aren’t thinking about yourself your own accomplishments even your own sustenance you really have to

1:29:46 Think about the human the human mission yeah yeah the commonwealth the the fact that we’re in is that that we you and i and everybody listened has benefited from the work of previous people inventing that um invention or building those roads and leaving behind something that will endure that we that we are using you know the obama said well you know you didn’t build this and and he was derided by a lot of misguided people because what he because what he said was true is is that we’re we’re all surfing on and taking advantage we’re subsidized by the past who have made this stuff for us that we can then build on and take it further hopefully but but i’m just really aware of how deep the roots to our current prosperity are they’re they’re they’re they’re rely on so much you know particularly walking around a city like london you can just see that there’s been people working on this for centuries literally centuries to make this and here it is and and and we benefit from that and and so i think i like to contribute to that in some ways and it’s not just concrete there are intellectual there’s you know intangible stuff as well um you know the calendar is intangible but that’s an huge invention and so um i’m not sure what i fit in in terms of writing but maybe there’s something maybe my theory of technology will help somebody in the future and so that’s what i like to leave behind let me ask you a question you

1:31:25 Just took a stroll from st paul’s cathedral over to us in shortage yeah 100 years from now 2016 you make that same stroll and even i’ll take you on till tonight you go to your hotel room you check in there and the next morning what could that experience look like right so so so i’m maybe i’ll surprise you by saying that i think in a hundred from years now there’ll be some differences but not very many and that’s because i think the industrial revolution which is probably there is most of what we’re going to see there although there was a few little churches and stuff it was built since the industrial revolution that that was a work where we arranged the material world that was the atomic revolution so to speak where we are just doing this mass industrial scale of rearrangement of physical stuff i think that’s mostly over as we move in to the second industrial revolution and beyond we’re dealing much more with the intangible things much more about who we are and who we think we are and what we think our work is and i think for the most part that that the cities will look very similar then we’ll have some new things maybe they’re self-driving cars which changed the roads a little bit but by and large i think that arrangement has already happened what will change what will be different as i walk down those streets is that i’ll have a view of what’s i’ll have the informational view on top i’ll have an overlay of what’s happening how things are connected how how the information has been

1:33:03 Embedded into these physical things so it’s not that they’re two separate worlds but we’re actually going to we were embedding in we’ll put smart stuff in ai’s into these things we’ll put communication technology into these physical things as they exist right now and i’ll have a view of that i’ll be able to see where they are maybe i can see the pipes underneath if i wanted to i could imagine an app that would allow me to have the price of anything i wanted to look at i could see i’ll have face recognition software that would identify the people who want to be identified publicly they’ll be this embedded of on top of it but i think so my view of it will look different but i think the actual structure the physicalness won’t be that different from what we have today and i think i’ll have a different idea of who we are because i think that’s what technology particularly artificial intelligence is creating is we’re redefining what humans are what we are what our role is what we mean to be i mean look at today’s vote of england deciding that they’re no longer going to see themselves as being european basically they’re going to be english so so these are the kinds of things that i think are going to be the big changes of or changing our changing identity of who we are where we think we are how we relate who we identify ourselves with what we think humans are about what we think we’re we’re here for and what we’re doing because i guess we’ll have perhaps more time to think about

1:34:32 That role and less time to do robotic work right exactly we’ll be liberated to do that but we’ll also be forced to because every time a robot does something that we thought humans do we have to change our mind about it genetic engineering which we haven’t talked about we’ll also continually to change us and we’ll have this question of what do we want humans to be and if if you alter yourself are you still a human or are there two different kinds of humans i mean these are the kind of questions that we’re going to be grappling with these are the central the central things that are going to preoccupy us so the ideas and conversations might be radically absolutely different yes seriously i’m thinking back a hundred years ago and what you know what the place looked like in 1916 and you know there are still black cabs but they might have been horse you know horse driven there was still the tube funny enough there was mail there was mass media in the form of newspaper there was a lot of the same things happening in the streets and so in one way i feel like i want to agree with you that on the outside there’ll be nuanced differences and lots of electronic information but yet we’re still people yeah we but we’re changing our humanity was our invention we invented humanity it came out of our heads okay and we’re the first animals that we domesticated okay and we we have physically changed ourselves with our inventions so when we invented cooking which is external stomach

1:36:07 To process all this stuff that we couldn’t process the nutrition of potential nutrition that we couldn’t process ourselves if we cooked it we suddenly had all this additional nutritional goodness which changed very quickly evolutionarily our jaws and our teeth and our gut once we domesticated hurting animals start to milk them we evolved very rapidly uh lactose tolerance in adults so genetically very rapidly we have altered our by our inventions and we’re still doing that we have to turn that we’re actually still we’re actually evolving genetically faster than we ever had before which was a surprise to people recently because there was some idea that once you had cultural evolution the biological evolution stopped no no no we’re still we’re actually evolving faster now so we are remaking ourselves we’re inventing our own humanity all the things that we associate with the good humanity laws ethics these are all things we invented so we are going to continue to remake ourselves and the question is what do we want humans to be what should we be what can we be this is a big this is a big job this is this is exciting but that’s what we’re going to be doing is we realize that no no we’re we’re in the process of of choosing what we want humans to be because we don’t have and being forced to because we realize that we are not who we thought we are we thought we were the the the the thing that thought but now we have these things that were thinking hmm well maybe we’re the things that

1:37:43 Dream well we’re going to make things a dream well maybe we’re the you know and so we’re going to go through this constant thing well why are we here who are we for what’s this all about and and i think that’s probably one of the biggest questions we could ever ask and that’s what we’re going to be working on the next century wow you know they say that the cerebral cortex kind of formed in a big way so we understand social structures of the monkeys right now if you can outsource that to facebook exactly do we what does that do now right well it makes us bigger monkeys it makes us huge and yes and we’re and by the way we’re we’ve long past the point where we become wholly dependent on technology people worry about well we’re going to the future that happened millennial go so here’s here’s here’s here’s a thought experiment something happens some magic genie occurs and tomorrow we wake up and every bit of technology is gone from the planet everything every knife every sewing needle everything how long would we last like maybe a month the wolves would come without artificial claws which we call a knife i mean we have no contest we would we would if we couldn’t make new technology if we had nothing we’re we’re gone we don’t last a year we’re all completely dead no agriculture i mean we’re gone so so we’re already wholly dependent on our inventions and technologies and we’re just going to become more tied to them so google doesn’t make us stupid google makes us smarter as long as we

1:39:24 Have google and so we’re going to make sure that we always are on all the time because we’re smarter when we do that we’re smarter when we’re talking to our ais all the time and so we’re just going to it’s like can you i mean if i took away reading and writing from your life you’d feel really i mean you’d notice that that’s that’s an important part of your own identity you’re you’re we’re dependent on reading and writing but we don’t get freaked out about that we’re going to become dependent on ais that’s just going to be the way it is it’s a great observation um can i ask you a few questions about your personal success secrets some of the habits is is there anything you formed over the years that you found that when i wake up in the morning and do x that my life is significantly better or different physical or thought or diet practices that just allow you to do what you need to do every day these success secrets are only available on the London Real academy become a member and get access to live shows exclusive courses my webinars bonus content meetups live events an amazing community and much much more now back to the rest of the show when what is something you believe that others think are crazy so i think it’s a peter tealism but i’m going to use it actually i’ve been asking the same question long before peter but i don’t think he got it for me was independently um the way i use you say is what do you believe

1:40:59 Differently that that all your friends think the people that you respect mostly find heretical um but what do i think differently that other people believe um i believe god exists that’s not in fashion um what else um what what what is god yeah so if you i mean so we have this we have this thing that we’re in you know you look at the telescope and you see this universe it’s pretty big it’s kind of it’s mind-boggling big right i mean if you there’s a little the hobble deep sky view is it’s about the size of your little pinky and there is like a million galaxies in that one little image and then there’s a million of those it’s just like that’s just insane okay and um so anyway so it was made somehow or other or else you’re also assimilation but if it’s assimilation it was made too so there’s no getting out of the fact that there’s a bunch of big stuff that’s been made and we’re in the middle of it so what’s the source of that well there’s only i mean either it always was the thing made itself or you have the being that always was that made it both of those are completely unacceptable there’s like none of neither of those answers are at all comforting and um i’m i’m just going along with uh one that there is a self-made creator who made so you have something that made itself and then made everything else that’s so to me it’s the self-made origin of everything that we see and that i that has a connection with everything that it made

1:43:01 And that in some way our innate sense of making new things of creating these new options of creating is in some ways derived from the first creation okay we’re mimicking in some way yeah we’re reflecting okay we’re in some ways a continuation of that or the way to say it is is that um the god thing could have made everything but decided to be more fun to have his creation complete that cycle that’s kind of like cooler like if if you’re two gods there’s one god made everything all by itself another one is so i’m gonna like make something that makes itself that’s kind of cooler right right and that’s that’s the god i want to be on okay right that’s a bigger god besides that what’s something else that you think you believe that others think is crazy yeah uh i haven’t really talked about this very much but and this is a really half i don’t really i don’t have a strong belief about this this is more of a suspicion but i think actually there’s something called the fermi paradox because we’re talking about all these uh uh galaxies that we see you know the fermi paradox is well statistically there has to be all these other civilizations in the group but but how can we haven’t been how can we don’t see them so it’s a real paradox so my my explanation is in fact that they are here but they don’t want to be seen so um i don’t think very many people believe that but anyway that’s my suspicion is that in fact um they’re here in some ways but

1:45:03 They you know it’s kind of like the star trek prime direct uh what’s that called uh prime direct not to interfere right right so civilizations that it’s like they’re here but but they’re they don’t want to be seen so they don’t they aren’t seen um and you know do i have any proof no but that’s just my suspicion interesting okay well that’s that’s something i haven’t heard before so you might be a little mad um what uh what’s your biggest challenge right now you’ve got the book it’s been very very successful um like the next 12 months what challenges you um i’m working on another project and one of the things i’ve been telling people to try to hold myself accountable is that i think this may be on my last native book native book means something that is first written in book form and then there’s maybe other derivatives like you know video or whatever i’m i’m really um i really become convinced that nobody’s reading books my kids don’t read books their friends don’t read books my kids don’t we grew up without tv my still don’t have tv my kids don’t have tv they don’t go to movies that much their center of their culture is youtube videos for everything tutorials to look something up to it’s like that is the that is the medium so i’m telling myself i shouldn’t be writing books if i want to connect with this generation i have to be doing video jason silva type videos exactly i talked to jason about

1:46:39 This and so i’ve been saying that for almost two years now this book was not supposed to happen this book was was an accident um but i’m i’m i’m really challenged by how to do that because i wanted i have big ideas and though they’re harder to convey and so i’ve been looking at the kinds of videos that that can do that you know japanese history in nine minutes it’s just yeah i haven’t seen it but i hear great things it’s just like that’s that’s we can be done and i’m not sure even that the current form of video is a linear thing it’s necessarily where we’re going maybe it’s vr maybe it’s when we get into something that’s sort of a tablet that you can stop and you know so there may be there are new genres are coming that i really want to pay attention to and that’s one of my interests in vr is i want to want to use this for non-fiction for factual okay informational transfer i think i can do something that’s better than a book for many ideas i don’t know what it is and i do know two things one is that every in the past every attempt i’ve seen if someone to try and both curate the new medium and good content for it fail you kind of have to do one or the other i don’t want to have to invent the new form i’d rather just i’m waiting for i like to have someone tell me here it is and we’re ready to go and everybody’s using it but if it’s not going to come i’ll try to use the old form but i don’t really want to try and make the new but maybe you should be so well versed in

1:48:09 This form that when the next one comes you’re right exactly right exactly because it is a learning curve um doing that as you know i mean as you’re very well i’m telling somebody you don’t know i mean i’m not telling you something you don’t know and so um so that’s the the challenge for me is to to start to figure out how i could take some of these sort of pretty abstract ideas and have that work in a form i’m not i just don’t want talking heads it has to be it has to be a lot more constructed and and so the the example i’ve been telling my friends is look you know more people have seen my ted videos than whatever read my books i spent all of four hours thinking about getting ready for that ted this was when ricky’s worman was doing it now is a lot more rigorous but i didn’t do anything and yet that has reached and so what if i flip that around and i spent a year working on some videos and then i spent four hours so i’ll just will transcribe it into a book i think i’d be much happier and i think in terms of the reach and i think it’d be more powerful to do it that way i love that idea and i think you should start immediately with video uh you know your good friends with jason silva who’s done amazing things he signed on with test tube i believe is the youtube channel and the people who works in san francisco they’ve done some great things with him but you know he started off doing this as a just a thing

1:49:36 To do with friends right he started off actually almost makenna style where he would just group together with friends and just talk about ideas and then he put him on video and then he became jason silva which does these things so and we’ve got about five years of experience of video and and you know we’ve always gone the long form route and i sincerely know and truly believe that people do want to engage in a deeper experience on video it’s just not really offered to them right now and there’s a few examples like the nine minute japanese history and and uh other examples sometimes what we do but there’s somewhere in the middle where you can go between a two hour and a 20 second video where it’s extremely didactic sure sure well actually i’m not even suggesting that i want to go with nine and a half minutes i have how about like the two hour japanese history at that level of of of of engagement yeah so so i’m with you really on the long form as as a vehicle that i want to explore because i like to process things i like to i like to go long when everybody else is going short i like to be a little contrarian in that way yeah and it’s it’s so it’s so funny with my ted talk that 16 minutes of video trumped 250 hours of video on on youtube and so that was the one piece but it was so concentrated in that form and it struck so many emotional chords of people that when they meet me that’s what they talk about

1:50:56 They don’t talk about our other video that had a million views that was two hours long it just had that spike and they remembered a few big points in their brain right right so it’s definitely something to think about and concentrate on yeah i’m actually working right now because next week a week next wednesday i have to do a ted talk in my book in 14 minutes it’s like i’m actually practicing that one because it’s 14 minutes oh my gosh this goes so fast as you know yeah when you’re in the middle of it it’s like it’s over in a blink but if you get it right right it’s amazing what you do and then so many people will see that and then maybe come to the book or to the two-hour piece that you’re going to make right um just finishing up on those final pieces when you think of the word successful who comes to mind you’re surrounded by billionaires in the valley you know probably great writers you’ve met terence mckenna who comes to mind so um my definition of success has changed over time and um um the person though that that probably that i most respect that i that i continue to actually be more impressed with every single day even more than it was before is stewart brand who is the founder of the whole earth catalog who hired me to my basically my first job and we’ve done lots of projects together from the hackers conference to the well to all species to the long now foundation um and um i i think of him as success because

1:52:40 Um he’s probably there’s probably no person who has bent american culture more than he has um yeah he’s not he’s relatively unknown because he’s um actually a really good human being so he’s not great in that sense he’s not he’s not kind of bent out of shape as a human he’s actually pretty well rounded and um he’s done he has a couple remarkable things like he’s been able to do this without generating any fierce enemies he has a remarkable stated thing to make allies with everybody which is really hard to do when you are making something new and bending the culture at large um i’m still not sure exactly how he does it but it’s by his personality and um there are many other things about him that i would consider that i would like to imitate and also um i think he’s successful in the sense that he’s sort of like a forest gump that he’s been involved with almost every major uh trend in in american uh society since the 60s environmentalism the hippieism um you know the organic movement um uh silicon valley um startups you know entrepreneurs uh just he’s he’s there he’s there having influence and that’s what i would say is success it’s great you’re so close to someone like that where you can watch the character right and as i said like a lot of when you get really close to people and you see them day to day i find often that my respect is tempered right yeah but the stewart actually has increased every single interaction i have and i see him very very regularly i mean almost daily i my

1:54:42 Admiration actually increases i think people sense energy from other people and maybe the new humans in a hundred years will even better and then if you sense that there is some type of you know goodness or maybe people sense from stewart that he is thinking for the next hundred years and so they believe that everything he’s doing isn’t about him it’s about where we’re going to go and then the great ideas we need to be having yeah maybe that’s well i mean what’s actually curious because i see him in action all the time is that he has a remarkable highly evolved sense of empathy and that’s very very useful when you’re trying to make something get something done because what he can do is he has i mean i’ve seen this hundreds not thousands of times is that he will talk to somebody and convince them to do something he wants done by convincing them that it’s entirely for their benefit to do it and he does that because he can get into their mind and knows what it is that they need to hear and actually he knows what it is that they need to do that and so he can persuade them that if they do this if they come talk to him or if they’re involved with this that it’s and he’ll present it he’ll convince them it’s for their own good which he generally believes and which usually is true and so that persuasion is because of his empathy and able to get inside and represent and have him be in their position which is really remarkable powerful powerful Kevin i always ask everyone

1:56:25 Here one question at the end i’m going to ask you okay if you could make a phone call to the 20 year old Kevin yeah um i guess he might be in Taipei at this point yeah perhaps um if you could like literally pick up the phone to him and give that young man a bit of advice what would you tell him yeah i have one answer which i have said and i’m trying to think if i want to repeat it because one thing the stewart is really good at and taught me was how not to repeat himself and so um i think um i would say uh become master of something i was really it changed my mind after reading cowl’s book about so good they don’t they can’t ignore you so i kind of had this idea that you should follow your passions and i decided that that’s actually not the best device the best device is to master something and use that to and your passion will follow that most people don’t know what they’re passionate about and i think i don’t i didn’t either when i was 20 and that can be kind of stifling a little bit so when you’re 20 i wish someone had said you know just do this 10,000 hours of deliberate practice just take anything and become the world best at it and through that that mastery you’ll you’ll be able to locate you’ll move in the direction of your passion naturally as you are mastering it and as you get better you naturally guide that towards things that you’re most passionate about and you’ll end up at your passion through your

1:58:33 Mastery because it builds character by builds character because it builds competence because it gives you a position to move from because you then have a livelihood that that is that propels you and you have a reason to keep going which is just to master it in the beginning if you’re looking for your passion and you don’t know what you’re passionate about that’s paralyzing you can’t go anywhere because i can’t i can’t give my hundred percent because i don’t know what i’m passionate about i can’t i can’t if i only find what it is then i would give it 110 but i don’t know what it is so you’re paralyzed and so if you just say well i’m going to choose anything anything at all a bricklayer whatever it is i’m just going to master that then as you become a bricklayer you define it well actually i kind of i found a little bit more interest in in in you know in in the architectural aspect of it you know making fancy stuff and then you’ll gradually and you maybe end up as a graphic designer but you came it through mastering something and that moving it towards where your passions lay and all and so you get there versus being paralyzed for life great advice um second part of that question is best advice you’ve ever received oh could be about anything writing yeah yeah um um best advice ever received well um i i learned to write online and i had i struggled with the writing when i was in high school i mean i wasn’t very good and it was really hard and i and i think the problem was

2:00:18 Was that um i am editing myself as i write all the time that was the problem so the best advice i got was to divorce those two functions when you’re writing don’t edit just write and if you get stuck you say something like i’m stuck i can’t think of anything to say i’m i’m i’m really i hate writing you just start to you just write write write write even if it’s nonsense or anything you just refuse to let the editor see what you’re writing and then you go back and you have the editorial thing which is like this is garbage this is garbage this one sentence should be saved and then you start to write again around that one sentence and you don’t let the editor around that works for me that that that that that is sort of what i needed to hear which and that’s useful for lots of things if you’re making anything you wanted to you wanted to divorce that the other voice the critic voice which is entirely essential but you want to separate those two modes so when you’re making no criticism it’s just and and and and and keep going keep going don’t don’t judge it whatsoever and then you go back and you have that this is total crap this is total crap here’s that one little thing we’re going to work with that that was that was big that is big last part to the 20 year old that’s listening to us somewhere around the world watching us on youtube yeah um what advice do you give to them they’re going to be living in a new reality

2:01:58 They’re going to see a lot of this reality when they’re our age um what advice do you give to them that that maybe would be different than the advice you gave to your son or or to you know a hundred years ago the 20 year old yeah um yeah so i do get a lot of these emails because at one point my because my email is public for almost 30 years what is it kk at kk.org nice um and by the way i read all of it and by the way if it’s a genuine uh message i reply i mean if it’s sincere and it’s not too long and i may i may say not say very much but i reply to everyone you’re in touch with here thousand or now right i think every true right right so um uh and i don’t have much advice to give as you can tell because i’m really struggling so so if you’re asking for advice you’re not going to get very much um and and what i say and that is is that um i i think um i have several things to say one is that in general this is sort of one of the themes in my book is that um this is the best time ever in the history of humankind to make something to start something to do something the tools that we have to accomplish things are just everywhere they’re cheap they’re available to distribute them to find an audience all these things are just easier now than ever ever before and there’s really no reason for you not to take advantage of them you can borrow them you could find them you could steal them if you have to you can get them and and and and you should be making things and it’s through making

2:03:55 And trying that i think um we you know you’ll do anything at all so so so there’s really no excuse not to do things um and so one thing is make stuff make stuff happen do stuff i have a book called cool tools which will give you a thousand different tools that are available for doing things yourself or in a small group these these are tools from these these catalog of possibilities things that you didn’t have any idea were available there you may not even know about but you can you know you can build a satellite to go into space you can build your own home you can uh travel around the world for very little you there’s there are tools for all these things and they’re available now so um make stuff is one thing and then the other bit of advice i guess is that um uh something i took a long time to learn which is that um there’s almost nothing more powerful as a way of leveraging what you do than collaborating with other people i was very slow in that and i and i maybe have some regrets about that and that is is that um if you work with or even hire people who are really really good maybe even better than you are in many things um you don’t have to do everything yourself you can actually work with people who are better than yourself and you can really amplify what you’re doing and you can get better yourself that way and um i was a little bit of a too much of a solo do-it-yourselfer and it took me a long time to come come around and now i have

2:05:49 People that i work with and people who work for me and i am like a zillion times more productive a zillion times better a zillion times more creative because of that so collaboration is incredibly also made it easier through these new tools and technologies and even if but even if you’re just face to face or you’re just a buddy or somebody and just down the street it’s still an incredibly powerful way and and and um do it early start early with that share your ideas collaborate and it’ll scale everything so much more you’ll learn more you’ll do more together right it’s a great message um Kevin Kelly it’s been an honor having you here um i can’t remember how many times i’ve quoted your thousand true fan article uh we teach people in uh we have a business accelerator course and i’m constantly honing this idea into their heads and it’s amazing how it just uplifts people because and i always tell them to go read it it’s a short article but it gives a lot of people hope because sometimes they look at into the abyss yes and they think they need a million people yeah and again and then they also then they concentrate on the customer experience and again if you really think you make that fan that will that will drive two hours to see before it will buy the the e-book and all the other goodies bags right right it’s a great way to think about being a creative yeah and not to mention everything else you’ve created for us in

2:07:16 Books in magazines etc um and thanks for the perspectives today on london as well it’s something that i forget that’s why i love this city right because it has all of these tiny nuances that sometimes as a as an immigrant here i see that other people might take for granted and there’s so much that’s that’s you can’t even quantify yeah it is you know even the mannerisms the culture i started to dress british just because i’ve been here and i don’t know if it’s because of the city or what it feels like from the hundred years or the industrial revolution that hit it and caused wealth and new money and then caused people to dress up to show that they were part of the class and now it has a carry-on effect to me just because some guy made a steam engine 200 years ago it’s fascinating right yeah and uh and i’m very curious about what happens in the future and i like this idea of optimism because i yeah i think that’s how we make great things and i hope you do embrace the video format um you’ve got great friends that are doing great things in video including jason and now us so uh if we can be of any help uh please let me know well thank you for the encouragement and really thank you for your great questions one of the things i didn’t say in my book is that there’s a movement away from answers to questions so if you want an answer you ask a machine these days if you want a question this is what humans are really good at