[00:02:56] Kevin Kelly: But now it’s very obvious that there’s technology in our lives and we have things like all the microphones in front of us and there are lights around us as well as printing things that are kind of older, and then all the new stuff. And the the point about this is that it’s not just a bunch of technologies together.

[00:03:15] Kevin Kelly: It’s the idea that these technologies form a system. It’s like the difference between just looking at flowers and a tree and then understanding that there’s an ecosystem, an ecology. So you can see that the tech team has sort of the ecology of technologies. It’s all the technologies together, working together.

[00:03:35] Kevin Kelly: Meaning you need a hammer to make a saw. You need the saw to make the handle for the hammer, so they’re kind of co-dependent on each other. Today, we need plumbing to house the workers who make the machinery that a farmer uses, and so it’s all tied together in a very complicated web of co-dependency and relationships.

[00:04:00] Kevin Kelly: Some technologies require other technologies to work or consume. Give them their byproducts. And so there is an ecosystem view of this world, and the larger point is that it’s the system itself. The system, which I call the technium, does this, which is the ecosystem of all the technologies. The system itself has certain biases and tendencies as a whole.

[00:04:26] Kevin Kelly: And so the question I ask is, what are those tendencies and biases that the system itself will tend to go to, which are independent of our own human wishes and our own human actions inside it? So I would, so I, I kind of summarize that as saying what does the technium want? What does, what does technology, the system of technology, Where does it tend to want to go?

[00:04:52] Kevin Kelly: Just because it’s a large system. So the technium is that larger…

[00:04:57] Preston Pysh: almost like a homeostasis, like you see in biology, you kind of have that happen.

[00:05:01] Kevin Kelly: There is, there is some of that, but there’s also a dynamic element too. So the, the thing about ecosystems, one of the myths about them is that they’re kind of in harmony or they’re in equilibrium and, and they’re actually, it’s the opposite.

[00:05:17] Kevin Kelly: The thing about ecosystems is that they’re forever in disequilibrium. They’re forever changing and adapting to the climate, to the rival of new species. And so there is a very active sense and actually the only things that kind of, that only stops when it dies. So that kind of equilibrium is actually a sign of illness and death.

[00:05:45] Kevin Kelly: The living force is the, the dynamic fund is, is there’s a disequilibrium and so there is, there is inherent disequilibrium in the tectum. That’s the source of innovation. That’s the source of constant change and flux we call it. It’s not just we have some misconceptions about how even biology works, but what I suggest is that our technology, the world around us is actually an extension and acceleration.

[00:06:14] Kevin Kelly: Of the natural world and life and evolution, that this is sort of the same kind of dynamics that we see at work in ecology, in ecosystems we see at work in the technological realm, what I call the technium.

[00:06:28] Preston Pysh: I would imagine that the amount of people asking you about AI on a daily basis.

[00:06:33] Kevin Kelly: Yes.

[00:06:33] Preston Pysh: Beyond annoying at this point.

[00:06:36] Kevin Kelly: AI. Well, we have to talk about, you know, it’s, it’s like. It’s unavoidable right now because it absolutely is the biggest thing going on. It’s very central. There’s a lot of hype, but there’s also a lot of not enough hype in many other ways. Yeah, and the reason why we’re all talking about it is a good reason, and that is, is because we have no idea what it is.

[00:06:57] Kevin Kelly: We really don’t know. We’re all making projections predictions because, We’re trying to figure it out together, and this is going to be ongoing, and we’re about to kind of revise our own ideas about who we are and about what thinking is and consciousness, and so it is worth talking about, and it’s unavoidable to talk about it because it’s very, very much new territory.

[00:07:26] Kevin Kelly: I can’t stress how, how important it is. Because we have never been there before. I mean, this, this, this is a big thing. And the one thing I would say it’s a big thing, so big that it’s going to take a century to figure out, this is not something that we need to figure out. Like tomorrow, today, next year, we’re not going to stop talking about it.

[00:07:48] Kevin Kelly: In two years from now, we’re going to be talking about it even more in two years from now.

[00:07:53] Preston Pysh: One of the things that you talk about a lot through your writings and through the years is how technology has this own evolutionary path separate from human influence. So when we look at AI or we look at any of these other just mind blowing technologies that are coming out right now, and you think about the steps in the order in which things have to happen.

[00:08:14] Preston Pysh: Is there anything that you’re seeing in the coming 10, 15 years that because these technologies now exist, like AI, what manifests itself out of that, that, that maybe you’re seeing on the horizon that isn’t so evident to everybody else?

[00:08:30] Kevin Kelly: Most people seem to be worried about unemployment, about losing jobs, and then there’s another subset who are concerned about equitably, like making sure that it’s evenly distributed.

[00:08:42] Kevin Kelly: Those are valid concerns and those are things that we do want to pay attention to, but I don’t think that’s the, I think what we’re not looking at is the unintended benefits of this and the ways in which this is going to, this meaning the AI revolution in general, that this is going to reduce all kinds of new services, goods, opportunities for employment, things to do.

[00:09:08] Kevin Kelly: And that right now it’s much easier to see the ways in which it’s a problem and much harder actually to see the ways in which these are going to benefit. So the benefits are sort of hidden in a certain sense that we don’t have enough of imagination right now. It’s, it’s hard for us to imagine the ways in which this will fall out in a good way.

[00:09:36] Kevin Kelly: It’s much easier for us to imagine the ways it’s going to fall out in a bad way, but that’s just the nature of, of the world, that the good things are more improbable than the bad. Bad is very probable. We know how things break, and so I think what we’re not really prepared for are the upsides and taking advantage of those upsides.

[00:09:59] Kevin Kelly: You know, it’s, it’s like, reminds me very much of the very beginning days of the web and the internet in the late eighties and early nineties. And it’s interesting. It’s like, what would you, if, if you were coming back from the future, going back to somebody in 1990s, say you tried to explain to them what actually happened.

[00:10:20] Kevin Kelly: First of all, they wouldn’t believe you. Yeah, probably. And secondly, there, there were just, you know, it’s like, well, There’s everybody carries this little magic stone in their pod, and it’s a window into everything. Everything, everything, everything. It does, it has a camera. That’s amazing. You know, it’s got a gps, you know, it’s like, what?

[00:10:43] Kevin Kelly: I didn’t see that coming. So, so I think similar kinds of things are going to happen with, with this technology where they’re non-obvious and they seem kind of impossible or improbable. And so I think un forgetting what we know and kind of suspending our disbelief a little bit is going to be one of the skills that we want to have as we encounter these new things so that we can actually take advantage of these new opportunities as they come along.

[00:11:12] Preston Pysh: How do you think about biology as far as like all the longevity stuff that’s going on right now? I know Tony Robbins and some others. They’re really kind of talking about this a lot. And when I think about AI and I think about its ability to just conduct correlation analysis on like DNA and look at things from just a health standpoint, do you see our ability to extend human lifespan significantly because of what this technology might bring in?

[00:11:39] Preston Pysh: And, and its ability to kind of see things that ordinary humans just can’t do because of the sheer processing power that we have in, in a single brain.

[00:11:48] Kevin Kelly: I think my answer may surprise you because because the answer is I’m skeptical of that immediately. So, so I would say no. I Why is that? I think there’s a, there’s a fallacy at work in the AI realm, which I call thinkk and think is idea that the, that the main thing that we lack is thinking intelligence.

[00:12:08] Kevin Kelly: And I think in that way intelligence is often overrated for, for problem solving. So I, I think the, the answer is that we simply don’t ha have not done enough experiments to know enough. So, so you could take the most genius super AI right now to read all the papers that have been done so far. And, and they’re not going to figure out how to do longevity.

[00:12:30] Kevin Kelly: Just by reading, just by thinking about it, there’s still a whole bunch of more experiments in the words, words are still too ignorant. Of that and that just thinking faster, maybe doing simulations is simply not going to be enough to extend human lifespan significantly.

[00:12:50] Preston Pysh: Because of the complexity of biology?

[00:12:52] Kevin Kelly: Cause the complexity of, of biology and our generally ignorance of it.

[00:12:56] Kevin Kelly: So we, so, so the an answer is, is like we simply still don’t know enough about how it works, and the thinking about it is not going to tell us that. And so that’s what I call think is this idea that, oh, well if you just bring intelligence, you don’t need data, you don’t need experiments, you can just think about it.

[00:13:12] Kevin Kelly: And that just is not true. There is just research experiments needed to understand things. So we don’t have enough data. You can, we have enough data that kinda fake an answer on ChatGPT, but we don’t have enough data to extend longevity, which is a very different problem I think in the long run, over a hundred year span.

[00:13:36] Kevin Kelly: Sure. But if we’re talking about near term, I don’t think so.

[00:13:42] Preston Pysh: So you have a new book that came out. This book is very different than the one that we were just talking about. In fact, I was a little surprised when I opened it up. I was like, oh my gosh, this is so much different than what I was expecting.

[00:13:54] Preston Pysh: Right? And I loved it. You start off the book with just kind of a note to the reader and you’re talking about how you were going to write down 68 bits. Right?

[00:14:04] Kevin Kelly: Right. I love the framing of this.

[00:14:06] Preston Pysh: Talk to us about this intro that you wrote and talk to us about the framing of using bits. Like why did you describe it that way?

[00:14:13] Kevin Kelly: Like just give us, yeah. Yeah. So the book is Excellent Advice for Living. It’s a little tiny book. There are these hundreds of little tiny, they’re almost like tweets. There are bits, little bits of wisdom that I tried to take a whole book and compress it into a little sentence, a tweet, a phrase, a proverb, and I did that.

[00:14:36] Kevin Kelly: I, I’ve been doing that for years myself, because it’s a way for me to remember these, to remind myself. So reminders. A lot of the knowledge and wisdom is ancient, timeless from the Bible, the stoics, Confucius, it’s very much part of the same continuum. But I wanted to be able to compress it into a, a, an easy to remember way in the current vernacular, you know?

[00:14:58] Kevin Kelly: Using my own words, and that was something that I was doing. And then I, I decided that I, my kids are grown, they’re adults. We were not helicopter parents were the opposite. We, I never gave them advice very much, but I decided that I really wished I’d known this stuff earlier. It took me a long time.

[00:15:16] Kevin Kelly: So I said, I’m going to give you a present and then I’ll tell you things that I think you should know. And when my son did see the book, he said, yeah, I You had, you never said those, but you tried to live those.

[00:15:28] Preston Pysh: Yes. So you were saying it, you were just saying it in a different language.

[00:15:32] Kevin Kelly: Yeah. Were saying, right, right.

[00:15:33] Kevin Kelly: You recognized it, but we just hadn’t actually said it. And so that’s what I was trying to do is make it in some kind of a compressible, transmittable, easily bits, little kind of. Digital things that could just be transmitted very easily. Sent over a tweet or email. And I started off with a few of them and once I got going, I realized I had more to say.

[00:15:54] Kevin Kelly: I, and I started this over a couple of years trying to write them down when I thought of them. And then every birthday in April I would share some more and, and they went viral. So we decided to put them all together into a book that would be easy to hand to somebody young, or as a graduation gift or Father’s Day kind of a thing.

[00:16:14] Kevin Kelly: Where there was something that I think most people find, at least 17 ones that they really, that will work for them. I mean, there’s enough of them that there’s going to be a couple in there that, that you’re go, that you’ll want to keep.

[00:16:27] Preston Pysh: Well, I’ve jotted a couple down, and this one specifically I want to ask you about because it’s different than what I think the consensus would think when they hear this.

[00:16:37] Preston Pysh: Fear is fueled by a lack of imagination. The antidote to fear is not bravery, which I think most people would think it is. Yeah, yeah. It looks more like imagination. Yeah. So do you have a story or like a life event that has driven this? Yeah, this one right here.

[00:16:54] Kevin Kelly: So what I’ve encountered over time is that fears, particularly fears of new things.

[00:16:58] Kevin Kelly: It’s like fear of AI we were just talking about, or fears of, of immigrants or fears about transgender, whatever it is, there’s fears. And the thing that’s missing often is the imagining what those things might be or do beyond what they first appear to be or, or how they’re, they’re cast. And so like say, going back to fear of AI, what’s missing, as I were saying, is imagining all the good things that it could do.

[00:17:30] Kevin Kelly: It’s really hard to see. It’s very easy to see the downsides. It requires no imagination whatsoever. Or very little imagination. Yeah. Yeah. Like, yeah. How things break. Yeah. I, I can see how that, how it could go wrong. How can it go well, unexpectedly. That’s harder. That requires an work of imagination.

[00:17:53] Kevin Kelly: But if you can see how it could go well, then the fear can dissipate because it’s, it’s not as, so the fear is like a focus only on the easy to imagine things. It’s a focusing on the easiest to imagine. Yeah. The easiest to imagine is that it doesn’t work. And by the way, that’s based on experience because most things fail, right?

[00:18:17] Kevin Kelly: Yeah. And we know in startup land, right, that the probable destination is failure. And that’s the easiest thing to imagine. Seeing how it works and becomes a success requires a lot of imagination. You have to imagine a very improbable path. Success is improbable. And so by that definition is harder to imagine.

[00:18:38] Kevin Kelly: If the easiest thing to imagine is that’s going to fail, then do you want to fear it? Because it’s fear, the fear of failure, the fear of that you’re, it’s, we don’t want this, it’s going to, it’s not good, but overcoming that, it’s not a matter of bravery of like doism or some sort of like well, I’m not going to be afraid.

[00:18:55] Kevin Kelly: No. The, the anecdote is to imagine. It working to imagine it being a good thing to imagine the good side, the unintended benefits from it. And so part of what I think being an optimist is about is actually, it’s the work of imagination. It’s being allow, it’s allowing your imagination to imagine a positive scenario.

[00:19:16] Kevin Kelly: It may not happen, but you are more likely to make it happen because you can imagine it.

[00:19:21] Preston Pysh: As an engineer, it’s so hard to actually construct and build something that works. Call it a skyscraper, a building, but it’s so easy to say, oh yeah, I know how I could destroy a skyscraper or a, or whatever. It’s just real simple.

[00:19:35] Kevin Kelly: Right. Well that was the, that was the, the sort of, I don’t know, not the genius, but, you know, taking down the twin towers was a lot easier than building them. Destruction is easier. It’s more probable. It’s, it requires less of an imagination and again, Whether you starting a, a restaurant or a business or a new project, seeing how it fails or works or collapse or crashes or heart hurts somebody is much easier to do and requires very little imagination.

[00:20:07] Kevin Kelly: But imagining how it could work and help everybody and be good requires a lot more imagination. And, and that is the anecdote to the fear of, of the harm.

[00:20:19] Preston Pysh: Correct me if you see this differently. When I think of going back to this term, technium and we look at how it evolves and moves over time, it’s, it almost seems like it’s finding a more efficient way to process or move energy between entities and it’s finding efficiency.

[00:20:38] Preston Pysh: So when we’re building something or we’re constructing a building, we’re making something more efficient for those that are using it in the processing of energy. And when we’re destroying it or, or fear-based. Going back to this idea of, of fear, you’re not making something more efficient. You’re actually destroying efficiencies.

[00:20:58] Preston Pysh: If you had to define, am I making a connection here or do you see it slightly differently in, in the way that I described that, because at the core of, of this Technium idea, I just continued to. Literally for years Kevin for a year. I’m saying what’s at the essence of what’s driving this evolution?

[00:21:16] Preston Pysh: Yeah, yeah. And I, and I’m struggling to get there.

[00:21:19] Kevin Kelly: Yeah. I don’t think that biology, nature, evolution, or technology are necessarily trying to optimize efficiency as the central thing that they’re trying to optimize. I think what’s being optimized are some other things. I think efficiency might be, but if you think about evolution and biology, It’s not very efficient.

[00:21:39] Kevin Kelly: It’s not efficient to make a million frog eggs With the idea that three survived, that’s not efficient. There was no optimization of efficiency there. It was, it happened to be something that worked. So evolution in biology is often incredibly, very inefficient. Although the, the tactic will work because it’s not trying to optimize efficiency.

[00:22:00] Kevin Kelly: Humans when we make things, that is one of the concerns that we have. Optimizing efficiencies for energy and stuff, but it’s not the, the central one. I think the central one that we’re optimizing are possibilities. We’re increasing and the system is increasing the possibilities by developing more ways to make a livelihood, more ways to survive as a, as an entity.

[00:22:24] Kevin Kelly: More different forms, more different livelihoods, more different ways, more different niches. There, there’s over time and an increase. In the ways in which you can arrange atoms more different forms, right? Initially, in the beginning of the universe, everything was very simple. There was, you know, helium and hydrogen a few ways.

[00:22:45] Kevin Kelly: There wasn’t very complicated arrangement of atoms into molecules. And over time, and especially with life, you have a very, very elaborate system. So what is kind of moving towards and what is optimizing are forms, possibilities, choices in our terms, you might say freedoms. Opportunities. It’s different ways to make a living, different ways to interact.

[00:23:07] Kevin Kelly: There is this increase in complexity of the world, and that’s the general thing that’s trying to optimize is, is, is ways in which things can be arranged and made and new forms to be had. New services, new products, new species, new mutualisms. I think the, the bigger arc over time. There are ways in which making things more efficient is one of the ways in which you can, one of the strands, but it’s not the, it’s not the only strand and not the major strand because there are times when for instance, one of the things about crypto that’s a technology is it’s incredibly inefficient.

[00:23:50] Kevin Kelly: If you want to efficient, you centralize things. So any kind of distributed system has a penalty of it being more inefficient. But that’s oftentimes what we want because those decentralized systems are more adaptable. Yes. So you’re trading off the inefficiency for increased adaptability. Okay. So, so that’s a nice trade off.

[00:24:12] Kevin Kelly: So if you really want, so, so if you’re going to have really efficient, then you have to have centralized and there’s cost to that. So that’s what I’m saying is that efficiency is not the central optimization it can be for certain uses, but at other times we, we, we’ll pay the tax. Inefficiency in order to have a very adaptable system.

[00:24:32] Preston Pysh: I think of trees. When you’re describing this, so you think of a tree and how robust its root system is. For sure. What we see winds, you know, it’s 30 knot winds is like the strongest winds I would see here, but it’s, it’s roots are structured for a hundred knot winds or whatever, whatever. Right.

[00:24:48] Kevin Kelly: That’s right. Right.

[00:24:49] Preston Pysh: Oh, that’s a really interesting observation.

[00:24:52] Kevin Kelly: Right. So the tree has, is always trading off all kinds of things. Of it’s in survival. It needs to have enough surface area to capture the photons, but it, the more surface area has, the more water it loses and so it’s trading off. It’s, they’re all so engineering trade-offs, okay. It’s got a trade off maximizing the amount of energy it gets with how much water it can afford to lose.

[00:25:20] Kevin Kelly: Because of that surface area. And so you, you know, the conifers have a different strategy. They have needles which are low surface area, and so they may have to rejigger something else in order to get enough light from those needles. because even though they’re not, they’re not losing the water so they can keep them all year.

[00:25:38] Kevin Kelly: Right. That’s the reason why the leaves are dropped by the desiduous trees is because it, it’s a drought during the winter. The frozen water doesn’t move, so they have to lose their leaves. If you have needles, you don’t have to lose it. So you have some, you have the gain there. There’s all these transactions and trade-offs and engineering terms that life is doing in order to survive.

[00:25:58] Kevin Kelly: And there’ll be different strategies for managing the efficiency versus inefficiency of different processes. And, and what we’re doing in technology is very, very similar. We, we have. Technologies that were social media, whatever it is, we’ll have certain advantages and disadvantages for transmitting information, for transmitting emotions and all kinds of things.

[00:26:21] Kevin Kelly: And the issue that we’re dealing with as the creators of these technologies is that it takes us at least a whole generation, human generation to kind of figure out exactly what it’s good and bad for. And so we’re in the process right now of kind of social media is like, I don’t know, 7,000 days old.

[00:26:41] Kevin Kelly: It’s, it’s still an infant and we’re still figuring out what it’s really good for, really what it’s not good for, and we’re trying to move it into the right job. That’s what I see a lot of technologies is that they’re invented and we’re kind of finding, trying. It looks like a little baby. Growing up through going through school, we’re trying to find the right job, the right role for this technology.

[00:27:03] Kevin Kelly: And sometimes it begin often the wrong role. Like we begin our nuclear power as bombs, but nuclear power really wants to be generating electricity. Right. Okay. I mean, so that’s the, that’s a better job for that technology is, you know, a controlled explosion that makes energy for us. That process of discovering what the benefits and the harms are in a, in a real way is takes time.

[00:27:31] Kevin Kelly: We have to live with it. We have to use it. Again, we can’t just think about it. We can’t just sit back and say, we’re going to figure out all this, and then we can start to regulate it by thinking about what it could do. We have to actually use things on a day-to-day basis. To begin to see what they’re good for.

[00:27:48] Kevin Kelly: And that’s been the, the thrill of AI is only people using it and discovering, oh, we can do this with it, or we can do that with it. Or here this is happens. The a inventors had no idea, no idea what it was going to be used for or how best it was going to be used and what his harms were. And so that’s the thrill right now as we see these things and we’re every day discovering what they could be used for.

[00:28:15] Preston Pysh: It’s pretty insane to think we’ve engineered something as a human race that we don’t even really know how it can be used. Which like , when have we ever engineered something where that was the case?

[00:28:28] Kevin Kelly: Like it’s kind of insane. Well, the white paper, Satoshi’s white paper on crypto was a little similar to that was.

[00:28:35] Kevin Kelly: You know, the first idea, well, well, we can use it for currency. I think that’s not really what it’s going to be used for, blockchain, so it’ll probably have some other function other than currency. But the initial thought was currency in the same way. Well, you know, when Thomas Edison invented the phonograph he spent to record sound, he spent a lot of time trying to think about what it would be used for.

[00:28:57] Kevin Kelly: He made a list and his first. Thoughts that the major thing would be used for would be to record the words in this of those before they die. So you could hear about people after they were dead. And number 10 down at the very bottom of the list was might, you might use it for music. All right. So the idea that, that, that phonograph would be for music was not the original conception.

[00:29:22] Kevin Kelly: It was not even in, it was not in the top 10 ideas about what you would use a phonograph for.

[00:29:30] Preston Pysh: And now you can take people’s voices and you can reconstruct as if they, you know, you can hear Sure, sure. Exactly. Their voice forever. I mean, it’s, he was right. He just, it was way further out there on the timeline.

[00:29:42] Preston Pysh: Yeah. You have another quote in the, in the new book here. The Expanding universe is overflowing with abundance. It is so full that improvement can often be gained only by subtracting. Keep moving until you can’t end with wanting more, not less.

[00:29:59] Kevin Kelly: Keep removing.

[00:30:01] Preston Pysh: I might have jotted my note down wrong.

[00:30:04] Kevin Kelly: Keep removing, keep removing things.

[00:30:06] Kevin Kelly: Keep there you go. Till, yeah. There’s a, another similar adage in the book called Art is In What You Leave Out, and this is the editor and me speaking. I’m not a born writer, I’m a born editor, meaning I, that’s my natural. Mode is editing is, and I love removing things the way that it can elevate. Yes.

[00:30:30] Kevin Kelly: Whatever it can. Yeah. Can’t elevate concentrate. So a lot of what I was doing in this book was removing words. Trying to re remove as many words until just a few sparkling words were left. It’s like the elements of style. The element of style. Yes. The el, and this is true for whether you’re visually, A lot of the art in making a painting is knowing when to stop knowing not what to put in Any kind of screenwriter working in Hollywood would tell you the genius of writing dialogue is in what you don’t say is all the stuff you don’t say.

[00:31:09] Kevin Kelly: All the stuff is left unsaid. All the pauses. And then, you know, the famous, I think a Celonis monk, I’m not, I’m not really sure. Maybe it was one of the jazz guys talked about the only thing about music was the pauses, was the, the stuff in between the notes. That’s where the emotion came in. It wasn’t the notes that you played.

[00:31:28] Kevin Kelly: It was the nothingness, the sile in between that gave the, that gave the, the music its power. And so this idea of removing and, and, and minimal and doing more with less I is, is I think our, I think there was a period in our human development where we didn’t have enough. Scarcity was the norm. Now, when we have abundance, the skill, the trick, the job is to select, curate, to remove things in order to make them better.

[00:32:04] Preston Pysh: So Kevin, you have a quote in the book. It says, and I think this is so important for the current generation and all the distractions we were just talking about less is more. And the quote says, show me your calendar and I will tell you your priorities. Tell me who your friends are, and I’ll tell you where you’re going.

[00:32:23] Preston Pysh: Yeah, I love this.

[00:32:25] Kevin Kelly: Yeah, there’s a couple others very similar where, you know, it’s not, it’s not what you say. You believe is kind of like it’s what you do that matters. This idea that actions are more powerful than than words or wishes or anything else. And so your life is how you spend your time.

[00:32:45] Kevin Kelly: It’s not what your aspirations are. It’s not what you say you believe is not what your dogma is or your belief system. Your life comes down to how you actually spend your time and how are you spending your time. Who do you spend your time with? And so it’s kind of, I’m action oriented. It’s an action oriented perspective that we, one of the, what’s the word I want?

[00:33:09] Kevin Kelly: One of the treats, one of the privileges that we have being alive today. You and I we’re alive in these meat bodies. We’ve got this, which we, which we are assigned, and we have very little choice in the model number that we were given. We were, you know, we were given these things, we were responsible for them, but we didn’t have any choice about what we got.

[00:33:27] Kevin Kelly: And so, And we have a limited amount of time, but it’s, you know, the angels in heaven are walking down us and weeping because we have this embodiment, which allows us to have impact because we can take action. Unlike some kind of light being that has no body and can do have no impact, we can have impact on each other, our people around us.

[00:33:46] Kevin Kelly: This is the maximum ride. This is a ride with a maximum impact where we can have this time to do stuff, to have action. Interact with the material world, and it’s only through that action that we actually can get anything, have any kind of impact. We can say stuff that’s important, but it’s not enough. I think the bias in our lives should be through action.

[00:34:13] Kevin Kelly: That’s how we understand how technology works, is through action, through use. Is how we show love. It’s through action, not just words. It’s how we make things happen in the world. It’s how we make new stuff. It’s how we help people. It’s through action. And so there’s a bias in my advice book towards action.

[00:34:33] Preston Pysh: We have a lot of entrepreneurs finance people that listen to our show. And you created an insanely successful business in your time. What kind of advice can you give to people that are startups or just wanting to start their own business or kind of in the thick of it Yeah. That you learned through the years.

[00:34:55] Preston Pysh: One or two nuggets that, like when you look back at building this incredible thing with Wired and whatnot, like what just kind of sticks out in your head as, as far as advice goes.

[00:35:06] Kevin Kelly: So, first of all, success is improbable. And therefore it requires a great continuous imagination of trying to imagine how it works.

[00:35:16] Kevin Kelly: And the thing that’s was my experience and absolutely an experience of every other entrepreneur that I know that has been successful is that that ride to success is kind of an ongoing string of near death experiences. Okay. It’s, it’s like if you’re not having near death experiences, it’s probably not going to really have an impact in the world.

[00:35:39] Kevin Kelly: And, and, and that is, is because it’s improbable. Your success is going to be improbable. And, and so I guess the thing to to say is you should expect to have near death experiences. You should expect that this, that is not like a crisis or special. Or extraordinary. That is the norm. It’s the norm where you’re going to go be coming to the edge and not knowing how you’re going to make payroll the next month.

[00:36:02] Kevin Kelly: Right. Okay. Right. That’s, that’s almost standard. So, so you should expect that. I think the other thing is, and, and that kind of makes a rollercoaster because then month later you could be on top of the world and everything is going great, and then three months later it’s back down there and so that rollercoaster ride, people aren’t really prepared for it.

[00:36:21] Kevin Kelly: They may be prepared for kind of like a slog, ongoing slog, but not, but that rollercoaster of coming to near death and going up again is stressful. It’s stressful. So that’s one thing I would say the other, the other thing about entrepreneurs is that if a lot of money was needed to make innovations, then all the innovations would be coming from the billionaires and the big companies.

[00:36:47] Kevin Kelly: But actually a lot of money is, is actually a, a hurdle for innovation. And that’s because if you have money that you would attempt to buy the solutions. But often the whole point of these solutions is that they can’t be bought, they don’t exist. They have to be created, and it requires grit, imagination, perseverance, luck.

[00:37:14] Kevin Kelly: All kinds of things that a young, young person with very little money can have an abundance. This is why most innovations and new things are going to be coming from the edges, from the, the startups, from people who maybe have little experience from people who don’t have very much money because they cannot afford to buy the solution, so they have to invent it themselves.

[00:37:40] Kevin Kelly: So I say the second thing is, is the fact that you may seem not to have a lot of resources and access to capital and other things is actually an advantage when you are really trying to do something new and novel because it forces you to go places that a big company or a billionaire are not going to be able to get to.

[00:38:01] Kevin Kelly: Cause they, they’ve got the money and they’re going to try and buy the solutions. And so, So that would be the second thing I would say to them is, is your state, whatever it is, is actually a slight advantage in trying to make something the next breakthrough.

[00:38:16] Preston Pysh: Love that. Damon John wrote a book, I don’t know if you’re familiar with him, but he had a very similar piece of advice in his book to entrepreneurs about the, you know, the money actually being maybe a disadvantage for them.

[00:38:29] Preston Pysh: I love this quote in your new book you said to transcend the influence of your heroes, copy them shamelessly like a student until you get them out of your system. That is the way of all masters. Where, where did this one come from?

[00:38:44] Kevin Kelly: It came from actually my, my own a little bit myself, but also observing many, many other artists and people who worked with mentors.

[00:38:54] Kevin Kelly: People that they admire. And you know, it’s a very, it’s a very common kind of trope to tell writers to actually type out some passages of writing that you love. Just, just literally copy it. Or to try to write something in the style of one of your heroes or to paint in their style. And you learn so much by doing that.

[00:39:19] Kevin Kelly: And then once you’ve done it, you move on. It’s really kind of funny if you don’t do it, you’re always kind of like imitating them in the background but actually overtly imitating them. Somehow make some kind of closure on it. You say, yeah, I’m going to you know, I’m going to paint like Picasso for three months and I’m going to just try and make the most Picasso like things.

[00:39:41] Kevin Kelly: And then you’ve done that, you’ve incorporated, you make a muscle memory and stuff, and now you can kind of put it behind and not, you’ll still be influenced by them. It’s not that the influence goes away, it’s just that the copying goes away, the imitation goes away. And that’s true. I think even with, you know, business and other things, it’s like, yeah, you, there’s no shame, I think, and, and when you’re beginning out to try and imitate something in order to learn from it, the shame is if you continue to do that, you want to, you want to, you want to just figure it out, do it, incorporate it, and then move on and leave it behind, and then go on to do your own thing.

[00:40:17] Kevin Kelly: Make your own version of success.

[00:40:19] Preston Pysh: So you just do so many neat and cool things through your life. Like when I look back at the stuff you were doing in the eighties over in Asia, like it’s just, it’s endless things we could talk about here. Right?

[00:40:29] Kevin Kelly: Right, right, right.

[00:40:30] Preston Pysh: But you’re on a board and this is the 10,000 year clock.

[00:40:36] Preston Pysh: Why, what is this, what is, explain this to people then. Why, why is this a passion of yours?

[00:40:42] Kevin Kelly: So I was one of the co-founders of the Long Now Foundation, which was set up to try and encourage long-term thinking, to try and encourage us to consider future generations in what we do to, in other words, to be a good ancestor.

[00:40:58] Kevin Kelly: And one of the projects we’ve done a number of projects from trying to, I did a little website on trying to encourage people to take long-term bets as a way to sharpen our reasoning. That was called long bets. To that, which was kind of this little small thing to, to doing these big projects like building a 10,000 year clock.

[00:41:18] Kevin Kelly: The clock. We’ve done a number of different variations. There’s a prototype in the London Museum that we made to ring right at the beginning of the year of the millennial 2000. So the idea of the clock is that there’s once a year it makes a tick. Every century makes a talk and then every millennial, a little coco comes out.

[00:41:39] Kevin Kelly: The idea of kind of marking time in very long stretches in order to help us think generationally in the, in the way that lots of the things that we enjoy today were built by people of previous generations, and sometimes it took beyond their lifetime to complete. And that’s the whole idea of cathedrals.

[00:41:57] Kevin Kelly: We want to do things because most of the people who will live are in the future. And we want to be a good ancestor in kind of doing things that may not pay off for us, but who could pay off in the future, or things that they would thank us for saying, well, thank you for planting that tree. We didn’t know what that looked like, so we made a foundation to try and encourage that.

[00:42:19] Kevin Kelly: We have talks, and one of the things we did was build this clock to tick for 10,000 years as a kind of like an icon, like a. The way that the picture of the whole earth from space could kind of trigger people thinking about ecology and ecosystems and environmentalism. We thought that a clock that’s ticked for 10,000 years would remind people to think in the longer stretch of time to be concerned, not just with the next quarter, but the next decade or the next hundred years, the next generation.

[00:42:53] Kevin Kelly: And so the current clock, there’s many clocks, but the current one, Is built in West Texas. It’s underground in a mountain. It’s 500 feet tall. It has chimes designed by Brian Eno that ring once a day and every day at noon and every day. It’s a different melody for 10,000 years. So it’s an algorithmically generated, but there’s no electronics in the clock.

[00:43:18] Kevin Kelly: The clock is actually a computer. It’s a computer that does digital bits, that is run physically. There’s no electricity, so it, instead of having gears, it has a mechanism that does calculation. So it’s calculating the time with, with not, not electricity. It’s being powered by the differences between night and day temperature at the top of the mountain, and there’s a big face in the clock.

[00:43:41] Kevin Kelly: And all this exists. Okay, so, so this already exists inside a mountain, there’s a spiral staircase that’s been carved by a robot inside it inside. So the stairs are of the mountain itself that run up into this clock from the base of the mountain. And the idea is, is that there’s a big face for the clock.

[00:44:00] Kevin Kelly: In order to see the current time, you have to have humans winded. You have to wind the clock of the face to show the current time. It only shows the time that the last person asks, even though it’s keeping the time in its own mechanism, it doesn’t show the time until it’s asked, so it requires kind of, it wants to have visitors, the clock wants to have visitors, people making the pilgrimage to the clock to honor the idea that this is a clock, 10,000 year ticking.

[00:44:28] Kevin Kelly: What else should we be thinking about or for the long term? It’s the purpose of the clock is to remind us to be good ancestors.

[00:44:37] Preston Pysh: We’re we’re winding down on the time. I got one quick question for you.

[00:44:40] Kevin Kelly: Sure.

[00:44:40] Preston Pysh: With respect to this idea Protopia and how it differs from utopia or dystopian visions of the future, you were talking about this idea of time preference, which I think is just a fascinating idea.

[00:44:54] Kevin Kelly: So give us a little bit on this and then we’ll wrap things up. In general, I think Dystopians are cheap. Every single science fiction story, I would say not every single, I would say 99% of the science fiction stories and movies about the future are dystopian. They’re worlds that you don’t want to live in.

[00:45:13] Kevin Kelly: One of the exceptions to Star Trek, which is not taking place on this planet, is in space. So that’s kind of hard, but there’s very, very, very, very few pictures or stories about a future where you want to live in it. And I think that’s a real, that’s a real problem. They’re actually harming us. And I think the vision of utopia is simply one that we no longer believe, and I think is actually dangerous because it’s a state where everything is, is an end state where everything is perfect and problems.

[00:45:43] Kevin Kelly: And I think this completely unrealistic and maybe harmful because the only way, nothing, nothing ever changes. It’s like, it doesn’t make any sense. So, so I don’t think we really want a utopia. And I think utopia visions are generally very, very flawed. And whenever someone tries to make utopia, they just collapse into some weirdness.

[00:46:05] Kevin Kelly: So what we want is something in between. I think what we want is something what we, we have right now compared to where we were a hundred years ago, which is what I call protopia. And Protopia means that we have something where there’s progress. There is forward motion. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than last year or 10 years ago, or 200 years ago.

[00:46:27] Kevin Kelly: So it’s incrementally moving towards betterment, not perfect. We’re making new problems. There’ll be plenty of new things. New, new powerful technologies. We’ll make powerful and new problems, but we’ll solve those problems with even more technology, which will make new problems. But what we get out of that kind of mix is we get increasing choices and possibilities.

[00:46:49] Kevin Kelly: We get a little bit better. So, so if we can create 1% more than we destroy every year, just 1%, that 1% compounded over time’s a long-term view is civilization. That’s what civilization is. It’s simply accumulation of 1% a year. That 1% is almost invisible. 1% who can see 1%. It’s only visible when we look behind us and see, and that’s why history is so important when we talk about the future, is we can see that progress is real.

[00:47:20] Kevin Kelly: So Protopia is this idea of progress, pro progress. It’s also like pro versus con. It’s the positive. It’s like prototyping. It’s this idea of incremental improvement. So that’s what I meant by Protopia. It’s, it’s this idea that we want the, we can head in a direction where we can improve things by a tiny little bit better than last year.

[00:47:46] Kevin Kelly: And that won’t remove problems. Problems propel progress. Problems are needed, inevitable. And the reason why we’re optimistic is not because we think our problems are fewer or smaller. Than they are, but because we believe our capacity to solve problems is increasing faster than we thought. And so that’s where the optimism comes in in protopia.

[00:48:12] Preston Pysh: Kevin, I can’t thank you enough for making time to come on. This was a real treat for me personally, to have this conversation with you. Give people a handoff. I’m sure the books are in Amazon, right? Yeah.

[00:48:22] Kevin Kelly: Yeah. It’s, it’s there. And You know, I just want to close with one of my favorites. Let’s hear it just in one minute.

[00:48:28] Kevin Kelly: And that is this. Don’t aim to be the best. Aim, to be the only.

[00:48:34] Preston Pysh: I love it. I love it.

[00:48:35] Kevin Kelly: Work on something where you are the only one doing it, and that might mean that you’re working somewhere where there’s not a name for what it is that you’re doing. Maybe your startup is involved in something that’s very hard to explain to your mother.

[00:48:47] Kevin Kelly: That’s a good sign. That’s the sign that you’re actually on somewhere. Where you’re not trying to be someone else’s success. You’re trying to have your own definition. So don’t aim to be the best, aim to be the only. That’s another bit of advice in the book. There’s four 50 of them. Thank you so much. Thank you for inviting me to share.

[00:49:05] Kevin Kelly: I really appreciate the opportunity.

[00:49:07] Preston Pysh: Thank you so much for making time to come on the show. This has been a real pleasure and likewise for me. If you guys enjoyed this conversation, be sure to follow the show on whatever podcast application you use. Just search for, We Study Billionaires. The Bitcoin specific shows come out every Wednesday, and I’d love to have you as a regular listener if you enjoyed the show or you learned something new or you found it valuable.

[00:49:26] Preston Pysh: If you can leave a review, we would really appreciate that. And it’s something that helps others find the interview in the search algorithm. So anything you can do to help out with a review, we would just greatly appreciate. And with that, thanks for listening and I’ll catch you again next week.

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