AI transcript
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0:05:34 start shaking. Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another
0:05:38 episode of the Tim Ferriss Show where it is my job to sit down with world-class performers
0:05:43 from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, and so on that
0:05:49 you can apply and test in your own lives. This episode is a two for one and that’s because the
0:05:55 podcast recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about, and past 1 billion
0:06:01 downloads. To celebrate, I’ve curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites
0:06:07 from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited to give you these super
0:06:13 combo episodes and internally we’ve been calling these the super combo episodes because my goal
0:06:18 is to encourage you to yes, enjoy the household names, the super famous folks, but to also introduce
0:06:24 you to lesser known people I consider stars. These are people who have transformed my life
0:06:30 and I feel like they can do the same for many of you. Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle,
0:06:35 perhaps you missed an episode. Just trust me on this one, we went to great pains to put these
0:06:44 pairings together. And for the bios of all guests, you can find that and more at tim.log/combo.
0:06:48 And now, without further ado, please enjoy and thank you for listening.
0:06:57 First up, Derek Sivers, former musician, programmer, Ted Speaker, and Circus Clown,
0:07:04 who sold his first company, CD Baby, for $22 million and gave all the money to charity,
0:07:09 and author of books on philosophy and entrepreneurship, including How to Live,
0:07:19 Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want, and Useful Not True. You can find Derek on Twitter @Sivers.
0:07:27 I was 18 years old and all I wanted in my whole life was to be a professional musician. I mean,
0:07:32 ideally a rock star, yeah, but if I was just making my living doing music, that was the goal.
0:07:37 So I’m 18 years old, I’m living in Boston, I’m going to Berkeley College of Music,
0:07:44 and I’m in this band where the bass player one day in rehearsal says, “Hey man, my agent just
0:07:52 offered me a gig that’s like $75 to play at a pig show in Vermont.” He rolls his eyes and he’s like,
0:07:59 “I’m not gonna do it, do you want the gig?” I’m like, “Fuck yeah, a paying gig? Oh my god, yes.”
0:08:06 So I took the gig to go up to Burlington, Vermont, and I think it was like a $58 round trip
0:08:10 bus ticket. And I get to this pig show in Vermont, I strap my acoustic guitar on,
0:08:16 and I walk around a pig show playing music, and did that for like three hours, got on the bus home,
0:08:22 and the next day the booking agent called me up and said, “Hey, so yeah, you did a really good
0:08:26 job at the pig show, we got good reports there. Wondering if you can come play at an art opening
0:08:31 in Western Massachusetts. I’ll pay you $75 again.” “Yeah, sure, so same thing.” I took, you know,
0:08:36 like a $60 bus out to Western Massachusetts, got $75 bucks for playing at an art opening,
0:08:42 and the agent was there and he was impressed, and so he said, “Hey look, I’ve got this circus,
0:08:46 and the previous musician just quit, so we really need somebody new, and I really like what you’re
0:08:52 doing, so there’s about three gigs a week I can pay you $75 a gig. They’re usually Friday, Saturday,
0:08:58 Sunday. Do you want the gig?” I said, “Hell yeah, I’m a professional musician now, this is amazing.”
0:09:02 So I said yes to everything, which is going to come up later, you know, with the hell yeah or no
0:09:06 thing, but I think it’s really smart to switch strategies. But when you’re earlier in your career,
0:09:11 I think the best strategy is you just say yes to everything, every piddly little gig. You just
0:09:17 never know what are the lottery tickets, so this one ended up being a real lottery ticket for me,
0:09:22 because as soon as I joined the circus, again I’m 18, I had no stage experience,
0:09:29 and after a few gigs they said, “Hey, so the previous musician used to go out and open the show
0:09:32 with this big theme song and get everybody up and dancing. Could you do that?” And I said, “Yeah,
0:09:37 sure.” And another gig or two later they said, “Hey, the previous musician used to close the show
0:09:40 also with that theme song. Could you do that?” I said, “Yeah, sure.” And then it was,
0:09:46 “The previous musician used to go out in between every act and like get the audience to applaud and
0:09:51 thank them and introduce the next act. Do you think you could do that?” I said, “Yeah, sure.”
0:09:56 And I was really bad at it at first, but I got good eventually. I became like the ringleader
0:10:00 emcee of this whole circus, and I was 18 years old, so if you were to go to the circus,
0:10:07 it would have looked like my show. And I did that for 10 years from the age of 18 to 28.
0:10:12 I did over a thousand shows, and eventually, by the way, got paid more than 75 bucks. Eventually,
0:10:17 I was getting like 300 bucks a show, and it became my full-time living, and I even bought a house
0:10:21 with the money I made playing with the circus. And then that led to all kinds of other things.
0:10:29 And so just so many huge opportunities and 10 years of stage experience came from that one
0:10:34 piddly little pig show that I said yes to this little thing. So, yeah, the only reason I stopped
0:10:39 doing the circus is when CD Baby started taking over my life, and I had to start turning down
0:10:45 circus gigs. But yeah, that was my life for 10 years. What did you learn that made you better?
0:10:53 What were the lessons learned that made the biggest difference in your performance as this emcee?
0:10:57 What were the biggest mistakes that you made early on that you corrected? Either one’s fine.
0:11:00 Yeah, it’s kind of the same answer is that at first, I was too
0:11:08 self-conscious because I thought it was about me. Like, I was going up on stage thinking that the
0:11:15 audience was somehow judging me, Derek Sivers, as if I mattered, you know? So, I would get self-conscious
0:11:24 what they thought of me. And eventually, and I think it took maybe like 10 or 20 gigs. The
0:11:29 circus was run by a husband and wife team, and Tarleton was the name of the wife. She was the one
0:11:34 really kind of out on the gigs and leading the circus. The husband was more the booking agent.
0:11:41 And she’s the one that like single-handedly gave me my confidence that I have today. Like,
0:11:45 sometimes when people ask me why am I so confident, it’s like that’s because of Tarleton.
0:11:50 That’s a longer story we get into. But anyway, Tarleton is the one that she just kept pushing
0:11:54 me from backstage. It’s like, come on, you’re up there acting like David Letterman. Like,
0:11:59 don’t do this whole kind of, ah, yeah, I’m so cool. All right, everybody, here’s the next
0:12:04 act. Like, I think I was trying to be cool because I thought that people were judging me,
0:12:09 right? And she said, these people came here for a show. Go give them what they came here for.
0:12:15 And so one time I decided to go out there and just be over the top ridiculous. I went on stage
0:12:18 and I said, ladies and gentlemen, what you’re about to see is one of the most amazing things,
0:12:21 you know, we have an elephant that is going to be coming from backstage. And I did this whole like
0:12:27 thing in the fast talking voice and real like pizzazz to it. And the audience loved it. And I
0:12:33 came backstage and she said, there you go. That’s what people come to the circus for. So
0:12:39 now that I’ve been on stage, you know, thousands of times, this really sunk in that you get on
0:12:44 stage to give the audience what they came there for. Or even things like this, this interview
0:12:49 we’re doing, this isn’t necessarily for you or me, we could just hang up the phone and talk,
0:12:54 we don’t need to, is, but we’re doing this for the listeners. So we’re going to give them
0:12:59 something that’s useful to them. This isn’t about me. This isn’t about you. This is about them.
0:13:05 So that was the biggest lesson learned. Luckily, I learned that early on when I was 18, 19 and yeah.
0:13:12 Seems like most of my friends who are what most people would consider successful in various
0:13:22 respects can trace their confidence back to either or both end a specific woman and a specific coach
0:13:28 or mentor of some type. It always comes down to one or both of those.
0:13:32 Oh, Tim, you know, I’ve never told you about Kimo Williams.
0:13:35 It’s a great name and I want to learn more. No, I don’t know anything about.
0:13:39 This is so up your alley. I can’t believe I’ve never told you this. Okay.
0:13:43 Thanks for prodding me. I mean, he prompted me with that because you’re right.
0:13:50 It was a gorgeous woman, Tarleton, and it was a music teacher, Kimo Williams, that he, but see,
0:13:55 he changed my life a year or two before I met her. Okay, so imagine this. I’m 17 years old now.
0:14:00 I’m living in suburban Chicago and I decided to go to Berkeley College of Music because I want to
0:14:07 be a famous musician. And just like two or three months before I’m supposed to go, I see an ad in
0:14:12 the local Chicago Tribune for music type setting. And I’m wondering like how much sheet music I’m
0:14:16 going to have to be writing. So I call up this classified ad in the paper and I say,
0:14:19 “Can I ask you some questions about music type setting?” And he said, “Sure, well, why do you
0:14:23 want to know?” And I said, “Because I’m about to go off to Berkeley College of Music in a couple
0:14:28 months.” And he said, “Oh, really?” He said, “I used to teach at Berkeley College of Music.” I said,
0:14:34 “You did? Do you think you can give me some tips?” He said, “Yeah, here’s my address. Come to my studio
0:14:39 at 9 a.m. Thursday morning. See you then.” So, and he lived like way downtown Chicago in an area
0:14:47 I’ve never been to. And I’m going to do a little foreshadowing of the story right now because
0:14:52 when I got married years later to the woman I met when I was sitting in Times Square with you,
0:14:58 he was one of only three people I invited to the wedding. It was Tarleton from the circus,
0:15:02 Kimo Williams, my music teacher, and my first girlfriend Camille. Those were my only three
0:15:09 guests to my wedding. And Kimo Williams told the story to my family. He said, “You know, I tell people
0:15:14 all the time. I get all these kids that want to be famous.” And I said, “Yep, show up at my studio
0:15:19 at 9 a.m.” And he said, “Nobody ever does. Nobody has their shit together to show up when I tell them
0:15:24 to.” And he said, “So, I’d honestly forgotten that there was this kid that called from a classified
0:15:30 ad.” That was his way of saying no. No, it was just his fertile. He was like, “Yeah, all right,
0:15:36 kid. Sure. Here’s a seven-foot hurdle. Let’s hear you do.” Exactly. So, he said, “So, you know,
0:15:40 my doorbell rings some Thursday morning at 8.59 a.m. and I open the door and there’s some
0:15:47 long-haired teenager sitting there.” And so now flipping back to first person point of view is,
0:15:54 yeah, Kimo Williams is this large black man from Hawaii that was a musician that attended Berkeley
0:16:00 School of Music and then stayed there to teach for a while. And so what he taught me in four lessons
0:16:06 got me to graduate Berkeley College of Music in half the time it would take. And here was his
0:16:11 thing. He said, “The reason I wanted you to study with me for a bit,” he said, “I know you only
0:16:16 have like eight weeks before you go to school.” He said, “I think you can graduate Berkeley School
0:16:21 of Music in two years instead of four.” He said, “The standard pace is for chumps.”
0:16:24 I shouldn’t get a t-shirt made.
0:16:29 This is like totally Tim Ferriss stuff, right? This is like, I can’t believe we hadn’t talked
0:16:34 about this before, that he’s the one at the age of like 17, 18, got me into this mentality.
0:16:41 He said, “We’re the standard paces for chumps.” That’s, the school has to organize its curricula
0:16:48 around the lowest common denominator so that almost nobody is left out. So they have to slow
0:16:51 down so that everybody can catch up. But he said, “You’re smarter than that,” or anybody can be
0:16:57 smarter than that if they want to be. So you can go as fast as you want. And here’s how. And so he sat
0:17:00 me down at the piano. He said, “Okay, what do you know about music theory?” I said, “Well, I don’t know.
0:17:04 Let’s find out.” And he, you know, he just asked me a few of these music questions like, “Okay,
0:17:08 what, how does a major scale go?” Right? Okay, show me the tritone. Do you know what a tritone is?
0:17:11 “Okay, play me a tritone in the C major scale.” I’m like, “Uh, uh, uh, okay, B and F.” He said,
0:17:16 “Okay, how can you take that? And what other chord can you make from B and F?” He said, “Okay,
0:17:19 that’s called the substitute chord. Now what is a resolution?” We were like, and he was just like,
0:17:23 boom, boom, boom, at this kind of pace. He was doing all this music theory stuff with me. It was
0:17:27 so intense. And I was like, I had all this adrenaline, like a video game. I was like, “This is amazing.
0:17:33 Okay, keep going.” I said, “Okay, do that. And this.” And that was like a two hour lesson that went at
0:17:37 that kind of pace. And then he dumped a bunch of homework on me. He said, “Okay, now go home tonight
0:17:43 and take this big book of jazz standards. Find me all the two five substitutions or two five
0:17:47 closures and I’ll substitute chords for that and then come back next Thursday and we’ll do this again.”
0:17:53 So we did that for like four Thursdays in a row. And sure enough, what he taught me in four
0:18:00 two hour sessions was basically like two years of Berkeley College of Music. He compressed it
0:18:07 into four lessons. Wow. So that when I showed up to my first day of Berkeley, I tested out of the
0:18:14 first few years just thanks to him. And then he even taught me a strategy. He offhand mentioned,
0:18:19 he said, you know, I think they might still have a rule in place where those other required courses,
0:18:23 you know, that you have to take to graduate. He said, “I think you could pretty much just buy
0:18:28 the books for those and then contact the department head and just take the final exam to get credit.”
0:18:33 So I did that too. So I, when I got there, all those required classes like, you know,
0:18:38 Bach counterpoint classes, I wasn’t so interested in it. So I bought the book,
0:18:42 did all the homework, approached the department head said, “Can I take the final exam for this?”
0:18:46 And he said, looked at me weird and said, “Okay, took the final exam and got credit without ever
0:18:50 having to attend the class.” And yeah, that’s how I graduated Berkeley College of Music in two years.
0:18:56 And on a related note, could you talk about, and we’ve talked about this a bit, but I never tire
0:19:05 of it, relaxing for the same result. Because I think this is such a huge observation that
0:19:11 it’s incredibly important for type A personalities or at least for me, because I have a tendency
0:19:16 to almost want to burn the candle at both ends to prove to myself that I’m putting forth
0:19:21 the maximum effort I’m leaving as little as possible to chance with certain things, you know,
0:19:26 and, but tell everybody about the bike, about the bicycle experience.
0:19:30 Yeah, this was kind of profound. Now, granted, I didn’t learn this until
0:19:36 later, but yeah, I’d been very, very, very type A my whole life. Even before I met Kemal Williams,
0:19:42 you know, I mean, age of 14, it just, my friends called me the robot because they would never see
0:19:48 me sleep or eat or relax or hang out. I just was like so focused on being the best musician I could
0:19:53 be that I would just practice every waking minute. If I’d begrudgingly go to a party, you know,
0:19:57 I’d bring my guitar with me and I’d be sitting in the corner practicing my scales and arpeggios
0:20:01 while everybody was hanging out, getting high, you know. So yeah, I’ve always been very type A,
0:20:06 and so a friend of mine got me into cycling when I was living in LA and I lived right on the beach
0:20:13 in Santa Monica where there’s this great bike path in the sand that goes for, I think it’s 25 miles
0:20:20 in the sand, something like that. The exact number doesn’t matter, but what I would do is I would go
0:20:25 on to the bike path and I would get like head down and push it as hard as I could. I would go
0:20:30 all the way to one end of the bike path and back and then back home and I’d set my little
0:20:34 timer when doing this. Huffing and puffing, red faced. Yeah, just red face huffing it, but like
0:20:40 just pushing it as hard as I can. Every single thrust of the leg just, of course, you know,
0:20:45 that made me quite fun if somebody was in my way on the bike path. Sure, that guy’s got places to
0:20:50 go. But I noticed it was always 43 minutes. I mean, you know, if you know Santa Monica, California,
0:20:55 you know, the weather is about exactly the same all year round. So unless it was a surprisingly
0:21:01 windy day, it was always 43 minutes is what it took me to go as fast as I could on that bike path.
0:21:10 But I noticed that over time, I was starting to feel less psyched about going out on the bike path
0:21:15 because just mentally, when I would think of it, it would feel like pain and hard work.
0:21:21 It sounds like pain and hard work. Yeah, I mean, it was, but you know, I guess at first that was
0:21:25 okay. And after a while, I just felt like, I don’t know, running a bike, why don’t I just hang out.
0:21:31 So then I say, you know, that’s not cool for me to start to associate negative stuff with going
0:21:35 on the bike ride. Why don’t I just chill for once? Like, I’m just going to go on the same bike ride.
0:21:41 But just, you know, I’m not going to be a complete snail, but I’ll go at like half of my normal pace.
0:21:46 So yeah, I got on my bike and it was just pleasant. I just went on the same bike ride.
0:21:52 I was more like standing up. And I just noticed that I was, I was looking around more and I looked
0:21:56 out in the ocean. I noticed that day there were these dolphins jumping in the ocean. And I went
0:22:02 down to Marina Del Rey to my turnaround point. And oh no, actually it was when the the breakers at
0:22:08 Marina Del Rey, there was a penguin that was flying above me. I was like, no way. I looked up,
0:22:17 I was like, hey, a penguin. And he’s shit in my mouth. Was it a penguin or a pelican? Oh, sorry,
0:22:23 pelican. Flying penguin above my head. That would be more amazing. I was like, what did you take
0:22:28 before your ride? So you get to see it a pelican pelican shit in your mouth. That’s incredible
0:22:35 accuracy. Was that from like, how far away was it? 20 feet up. Wow. Because I don’t know if he was
0:22:41 accurate or I was, you know, I had such a nice time. It was just purely pleasant. There was no red
0:22:47 face. There was no huffing and puffing. I was just cycling. It was nice. And when I got back to my
0:22:57 usual stopping place, I looked at my watch and it said 45 minutes. And I was like, no way. How the
0:23:02 hell could that have been 45 minutes as compared to my usual 43? It’s like, there’s no way. But yeah,
0:23:10 it was right 45 minutes. And that was like a profound lesson that I think changed the way I’ve
0:23:17 approached my life ever since is because I realized that I guess, you know, what percentage of that
0:23:21 huffing and puffing then we could do the math or whatever would a 93 point something present of
0:23:28 my huffing and puffing and all that red face and all that stress was only for an extra two minutes.
0:23:31 It was basically for nothing. I mean, you know, of course, we’re not talking about me competing
0:23:36 in something where the huffing and puffing might have been worth it. But for life, I think of all
0:23:42 of this optimization and getting the maximum dollar out of everything and the maximum out of every
0:23:47 second to the maximum amount of every minute. And I think I just take this approach now of going
0:23:52 like, or you could just take the lesson, take most of that lesson and apply it and be effective
0:23:57 and be happy. You don’t need to stress about any of this stuff. And so honestly, that’s been
0:24:02 my approach ever since I do things, but I stop before anything gets stressful.
0:24:09 One of the essays that you’re best known for is hell yeah or no. And this has been extremely
0:24:18 important for me to consistently reread or listen to. How did it come about? And what is the gist
0:24:27 of that? There was a music conference in Australia that I had told my friend I would
0:24:33 go with her to. It wasn’t even like the conference themselves were really expecting me. It was my
0:24:39 friend Arielle Hyatt is one of the best publicists I know. And she was speaking at that conference
0:24:46 and asked if I would come with her as like a co-presenter in her mentor session or something.
0:24:51 So I had said yes like six months before. Yeah, sure. Australia. I’m living in New York City.
0:24:56 I’m like, yeah, sure. And then once it came close, and it was like time to book the ticket, I was like,
0:25:01 I don’t really want to go to Australia right now. I’m busy with other stuff.
0:25:10 And it was actually my friend Amber Rubarth, who’s a brilliant musician. I was on the phone with her
0:25:15 and kind of lamenting about this. And she’s the one that pointed out. She said, it sounds like,
0:25:21 you know, from where you’re at, your decision is not between yes and no. You need to figure out
0:25:27 whether you’re feeling like, fuck yeah, or no. And I said, yeah, that’s really what it comes down
0:25:35 to, right? Because the idea is, if you’re feeling anything less than like, oh, hell yeah, I would
0:25:41 love to do that. Oh my God, that would be amazing. If you’re feeling anything less than that, then
0:25:49 just say no. Because most of us say yes to too much stuff. And then we let these little mediocre
0:25:58 things fill our lives. And so the problem is, when that occasional big, oh my God, hell yeah,
0:26:02 thing comes along, you don’t have enough time to give it the attention that you should because
0:26:08 you’ve said yes to too much other little half ass kind of stuff, right? So once I started applying
0:26:14 this, my life just opened up because it just meant I just said no, no, no, no, no, to almost
0:26:20 everything. But then when the occasional thing came up, that I was really like, you know what,
0:26:26 that would be awesome. Then suddenly, I had all the time in the world. And you know, people say
0:26:30 this, I’m sure, you know, every time people contact you, every time people contact me,
0:26:35 they say, you know, look, I know you must be incredibly busy. And I always think like, no,
0:26:42 I’m not because because I’m in control of my time, I’m on top of it. Busy to me seems to imply
0:26:48 like out of control. You know, like, oh my God, I’m so busy. I don’t have any time for this yet.
0:26:52 To me, that sounds like a person who’s got no control of their life.
0:27:00 Yeah, no, no control and unclear priorities. Yes. So you asked how it’s applying in my life that
0:27:06 still just on the little tiny day to day level, even personal things, God, even people you meet,
0:27:13 even, you know, as I’m dating, you have to do the hell yeah, or no approach, or people ask you
0:27:19 to go to events, or God, even, you know, even people asking to do a phone call or anything,
0:27:23 I think, you know, am I really excited about that? And, you know, almost every time the
0:27:28 answers no. So I say no to almost everything. And then, yeah, occasionally, something will come up,
0:27:34 even a little surprise will be dropped in my lab, like this thing that happened just two months ago
0:27:38 called the the now now now project, which we don’t even really need to talk about the details don’t
0:27:43 matter so much. But it was just something that popped up that seemed really interesting and
0:27:49 people really wanted. And luckily, because I say no to almost everything, I had the time in my life
0:27:54 to make it flourish. So for the last like six weeks, all I did full time, like 12 hours a day,
0:27:58 was suddenly work on this brand new thing that showed up because I could, you know, so that’s to
0:28:06 me the the lovely result of taking the hell yeah or no approach to life. So I am reading a section
0:28:13 of this blog post that I wrote about you and your the best email you ever wrote with the Japanese
0:28:18 boxing specialist and so on. And one of the paragraphs that I put here for those people
0:28:23 interested, it’s just the most successful email I ever wrote, but it’s everywhere online. And
0:28:30 it reads stranger still at its largest Derek spent roughly four hours on CD baby every six months,
0:28:37 he had systematized everything to run without him. And feel free to correct that if it needs to be
0:28:44 corrected, but assuming that’s roughly true. What were some of the most important decisions or
0:28:51 realizations that made that possible? I love the timing for when I read four hour workweek because
0:28:59 it was actually just after I had done this like complete delegation of everything that it was
0:29:06 feeling the pain from everything having to go through me. It was my business right 100% no
0:29:11 investors no nothing it was me and so I hired people to help me it was all me me me. So four years
0:29:18 into it, it was growing it was really taking off I had 20 employees but still almost everything
0:29:23 went through me. And it made my day kind of miserable because I’m a real like introverted
0:29:28 focused kind of person I love to just sit down for 12 hours and do one thing without distraction.
0:29:38 You’re an INTJ Myers-Briggs. Yeah, I’m 100% INTJ. Yeah. So I hated going to the office and being
0:29:45 distracted every five minutes with my employees asking me questions. So that’s what I just felt
0:29:51 such pain about this like I hate this that I really literally meant I booked a flight to
0:29:58 Kauai I believe and I was going to move to Kauai and not give my employees my phone number
0:30:03 and literally move I don’t mean like take a vacation I mean like I am now going to be running
0:30:07 I’m going to be the owner of CD Baby on a little island in Hawaii and you guys just figure out your
0:30:13 own damn problems because I was just I was just having so much psychic pain about this but then
0:30:20 luckily with lovely coincidence that night that I booked the flight to Hawaii I watched the movie
0:30:27 Vanilla Sky and in Vanilla Sky Tom Cruise is like the owner of this big publishing company
0:30:33 but he gets all caught up with these crazy women and gets too overwhelmed with his life and focusing
0:30:39 on his own happiness and or unhappiness and all that and pretty soon his company is just
0:30:45 wrestled away from him and I thought oh I don’t want that to happen like I don’t want to just
0:30:51 plug my ears close my eyes run away and have my company taken away from me I need to deal with
0:30:58 my problems instead of running from them so I canceled the trip to Hawaii and went into work
0:31:04 the next day and decided to fix this thing so then next time somebody asked me a question
0:31:10 I gathered everybody around I said okay everybody Tracy just asked me you know Derek what do we
0:31:14 do when a guy on the phone says he wants a refund you know I said okay everybody stop working everybody
0:31:20 gather around okay Tracy asked what we do if somebody wants a refund here’s not only what we
0:31:24 do but here’s why here’s my philosophy whenever anybody wants a refund we should always give it
0:31:30 to them and I would just explain not just the what to do but the why it was constantly communicating
0:31:34 the philosophy to get to the core of it and I think you mentioned this in back in four hour
0:31:41 work week there’s almost nothing that really has to be you like you can almost get kind of AI
0:31:48 and figure out how your brain works how your decision making process works and just teach it
0:31:53 to other people so that other people can do it and yeah that’s what I did for every single thing
0:31:58 that ever came my way I would gather everybody around explain the philosophy behind it why
0:32:02 we do things this way why I’m about to say what I’m about to say and now here’s what I think we
0:32:07 should do do you understand why now please write it down but it was also important that I taught it
0:32:13 multiple people not just one and had them write it down and then the cool thing is I wasn’t doing
0:32:18 the hiring anymore the company I had taught other people how to do the hiring so soon my employees
0:32:22 were doing the hiring and then they were teaching new people how to do this thing from the the book
0:32:28 and so that really started four years into the company it was six months of difficult work to
0:32:34 really make myself unnecessary but then my girlfriend at the time decided to go to film school
0:32:39 in LA so decided to follow her down there so I moved down to LA to be with her which was a
0:32:44 nice symbolic way to let the company know like you’re on your own I’m still the owner and in fact
0:32:50 so there’s one little caveat to the thing we said that I was working on CD baby for four hours a year
0:32:57 or whatever you said yeah four or six months is that that’s how much time I spent doing this stuff
0:33:03 I didn’t want to be doing right the monotony the bureaucracy stuff that I had reduced down to almost
0:33:09 nothing like a few minutes a week but what I was doing from 7 a.m. to midnight every single day was
0:33:14 programming like the future of CD baby and that’s just the stuff that I loved doing so it was about
0:33:18 making my life the way I wanted it to be working on the stuff that I wanted to be working on
0:33:25 and not doing the stuff I didn’t if you could have one billboard anywhere with anything on it
0:33:30 what would it say my real answer if I was taking that literally is that I would remove all the
0:33:35 billboards in the world and ensure that they were never replaced you know if you ever driven through
0:33:41 India you know yeah it’s so sad well I haven’t driven but oh right on my way to the Calcutta ER
0:33:48 where I spent a week I was god briefly looking at the windows you know even in these small towns
0:33:54 in Kerala like there’s almost no space that is left without advertising so I really admire those
0:34:01 places like I think Vermont and uh South Paulo Brazil that ban billboards but I know that that
0:34:06 wasn’t really what you’re asking so so my better answer is I think I would make a billboard that
0:34:14 would say it won’t make you happy and I would place it outside any big shopping mall or car dealer
0:34:20 so ideally actually I think you know what would be a fun project is to buy and train thousands of
0:34:26 parrots to say it won’t make you happy it won’t make you happy and then you let them loose in
0:34:31 the shopping malls and super stores around the world that’s my life mission anybody with me let’s
0:34:37 do it what advice would you give your 30 year old self and place us if you would for where you were
0:34:44 at 30 and what you’re doing at 30 well let’s see I had just started CD baby at 30 but I think
0:34:49 the biggest advice I would give to my younger self or more like knowledge learned like hey
0:34:56 younger self you should know this now is that women like sex do you know that until I was 40
0:35:00 hopefully if I didn’t get that I think through you know like teenage movies or whatever we’re
0:35:05 kind of taught the opposite that’s like you know men always want sex and women don’t I don’t know
0:35:09 why the the media portrays it like that but later I found out that’s not true but I think the the
0:35:16 more interesting answer is that my advice to my 30 year old self would be don’t be a donkey
0:35:22 and what does that mean well I meet a lot of 30 year olds that are trying to pursue
0:35:29 many different directions at once but not making progress in any right and then or or they get
0:35:33 frustrated that the world wants them to pick one thing because they want to do them all and I get
0:35:37 a lot of this frustration like but I want to do this and that and this and that why do I have to
0:35:44 choose I don’t know what to choose but the problem is if you’re thinking short term then you’re acting
0:35:50 as if you don’t do them all this week that they won’t happen but I think the solution is to think
0:35:57 long term to realize that you can do one of these things for a few years and then do another one
0:36:02 for a few years and then another so what I mean about don’t be a donkey is you’ve probably heard
0:36:09 the fable about I think it’s Buridan’s donkey it’s a a fable about a donkey that is standing halfway
0:36:15 in between a pile of hay and a bucket of water and he just keeps looking left to the hay
0:36:23 or right to the water trying to decide hay or water hay or water he’s unable to decide
0:36:28 so he eventually falls over and dies of both hunger and thirst so the point is that a donkey can’t
0:36:33 think of the future if he did he’d clearly realize that he could just go first drink the water and
0:36:41 then go eat the hay so my advice to my 30 year old self is don’t be a donkey you can do everything
0:36:48 you want to do you just need foresight and patience right so say like for somebody listening if
0:36:54 you’re 30 years old now and say you have like five different things you want to pursue well then
0:36:58 you can do each one of those for 10 years and you’ll have them all done by the time you’re 80
0:37:04 you’re probably going to live to be 80 so it’s ridiculous to I mean it sounds ridiculous to
0:37:09 plan to the age of 80 when you’re 30 right but it’s a fact that’s probably coming so you might
0:37:15 as well take advantage of it it’s like use the future that way you can fully focus on one direction
0:37:21 at a time without feeling conflicted or distracted because you know that you’ll get to the others
0:37:27 in the future and I think you’d also just to build on that I agree I think most people and this is
0:37:33 not something I’ve thought up on my own but they overestimate what they can achieve in a day or a
0:37:37 week so they have 20 items on their to-do list but they underestimate what they could achieve
0:37:45 in a year or even two years and yeah but you’re the way that for instance if you look at a lot of
0:37:50 what I’ve done much of which ended up being the result of accidental discoveries but you had the
0:37:56 book career but then you had the angel investing start around 2007 2008 and I treated that as a
0:38:01 two-year self-imposed MBA and it was like okay I want to try this and really focus on it for two
0:38:07 years and I’m not going to expect to have any financial return but just as an MBA I’m going to
0:38:13 sink this amount of cost into it which was identical to Stanford graduate school business at the time
0:38:19 and assume that the network and relationships and lessons I would learn would be worth that two years
0:38:27 and just viewing them as two-year experiments which I did with the TV also which did not
0:38:31 turn out as ideally as I would have liked although I’m very proud of you know that’s inference
0:38:37 experiment podcast same thing right it wasn’t a three-year commitment but it was also not a
0:38:42 one-day or one-week commitment it was like okay I’m gonna do this for at least six episodes maybe
0:38:48 it takes me six months and then I’ll correct course at that point but yeah you do I think a lot
0:38:55 of 30 year olds feel pressured or younger or older for that matter to pursue many many things
0:39:01 in parallel when if you were just to tweak that slightly and make them serial the results would
0:39:06 be much better yeah that’s a really hard lesson to learn we can even say it right now it’s really
0:39:14 tough I even find that now yeah cost and challenge just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and
0:39:20 we’ll be right back to the show this episode is brought to you by Wealthfront there is a lot
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0:40:32 and now Kevin Kelly founding executive editor of Wired Magazine former editor and publisher of
0:40:38 the whole earth review and best-selling author of books on technology and culture including
0:40:46 excellent advice for living the inevitable what technology wants and vanishing asia his three
0:40:54 volume photo book set capturing west central and east asia you can find kevin on twitter and instagram
0:41:04 at kevin the number two kelly and on his website kk.org Kevin thank you so much for being on the show
0:41:10 that’s my honor and i am endlessly fascinated by all of the varied projects that you constantly have
0:41:16 going on but that leads me to the first question which is when you meet someone who is not familiar
0:41:21 with your background and they ask you the age old what do you do question how do you even begin to
0:41:28 answer that what is your stock answer to that these days my stock answer is is that i package ideas
0:41:38 into books and magazines and websites and i make ideas interesting and pretty well i like the
0:41:43 pretty that’s well well we’ll come back to the aesthetic aspect i think that’s a really neglected
0:41:48 piece of the entire puzzle you do have of course a background a lot of people are familiar with
0:41:55 your background with wired but perhaps you could give folks a bit of background on yourself and
0:42:00 is it true that you dropped out of of college after one year yeah i’m a college dropout and
0:42:06 actually my one regret in life is that one year oh no kidding no kidding yeah i wish i had just
0:42:12 even skipped that but i do understand how college can be useful to people and i’ve
0:42:18 but for me it was just not the right thing and i went to asia instead and i like to tell myself
0:42:27 that i gave my own self a phd in east asian studies by traveling around and photographing
0:42:33 very remote remote parts of asia at a time when it was in the transition from the ancient world
0:42:40 to the modern world and i did many other things as well and for me it was a very formative time
0:42:46 because i did enough things that when i finally got my first real job at the age of 35
0:42:53 wow which which job was that i worked for a non-profit at ten dollars an hour which was the
0:42:57 whole earth catalog which would have been like kind of a lifelong dream if i said if i’m going to
0:43:03 have a job that’s the job i want it took me a long time to kind of get it but in between that i did
0:43:09 many things including starting businesses and selling businesses and doing other kinds of things
0:43:16 more adventures and i highly recommend it you know i got involved in starting wired and
0:43:21 running wired for a while and i hired a lot of people who were coming right out of college
0:43:25 they were internets and they would do the intern thing and then they were good and we would hire
0:43:30 them which meant that basically you know after 10 years whatever it was they were this was their
0:43:38 first and only job and i kept telling them why are you here what are you doing you should be
0:43:44 slowing around wasting time trying something crazy why are you working a real job i don’t
0:43:53 understand it and i just really i really recommend slack i’m a believer in in this thing of kind of
0:43:59 doing something that’s not productive you know productivist or your middle ages
0:44:06 when you’re young you want to be prolific and make and do things but you don’t want to measure them
0:44:12 in terms of productivity you want to measure them in terms of extreme performance you want
0:44:19 to measure them in kind of extreme satisfaction it’s it’s a time to kind of try stuff and and i
0:44:25 think explore the extremes exactly explore the possibilities and there are so many possibilities
0:44:31 and there’s more every day and it’s called premature organization you you really want to use this time
0:44:37 to continue to do things and by the way premature optimization is a problem of success too it’s
0:44:40 not just the problem of the young it’s the problem of the successful more than even of the young but
0:44:45 we’ll get to that yeah that might turn into a therapy session for me at this precise moment
0:44:51 in time in fact but when you are exploring that slack i would imagine many people feel pressured
0:44:57 whether it’s internal pressure or societal familial pressure to get a real job to support
0:45:01 themselves and a lot of the decisions are made out of fear they they worry about being out on
0:45:08 the streets or it’s a nebulous terror or anxiety how did you support yourself for instance while you
0:45:13 were traveling through asia when you left school i totally understand this anxiety and fear and
0:45:19 stuff but here’s the thing i think one of the many kind of life skills that you want to actually
0:45:26 learn at a fairly young age is the skill of being like ultra thrifty minimal kind of this little
0:45:33 wisp at this traveling through time in the sense of learning how little you actually need to live
0:45:39 not just in kind of um survival mode but kind of you know in a contented mode and i learned that
0:45:45 pretty early by backpacking and doing other things and especially in asia was i could be very happy
0:45:50 with very very little and go onto websites and stuff and look at sort of like the minimum amount of
0:45:56 stuff the food say that you need to to live you know your basic protein and carbohydrates and
0:46:01 and vitamins and and how much actually if you were bought them in bulk how much it would cost i mean
0:46:08 you build your own house live in a shelter a tiny house you don’t need very much and i think
0:46:12 trying that out you know building your house on the pond like the row there’s a hero of mine in
0:46:19 high school is not just a simple exercise it’s a profound exercise because it allows you to get
0:46:25 over the anxiety even if you aren’t living like that you know that if the worst came to worse
0:46:32 you could keep going at a very low rate and be content and so that gives you the sort of confidence
0:46:38 to take a risk because you say what’s the worst that could happen well the worst that happened is
0:46:43 that i’d have a backpack and a sleeping bag and i’d be eating oatmeal and whatever you know and
0:46:48 that’d be fine and i think if you do that once or twice you don’t necessarily have to live like
0:46:55 that but but knowing that you can be content is tremendously empowering that’s basically what
0:47:00 i did it was you know living in asia where the people around me had less than i did and they
0:47:06 were pretty content you realize oh my gosh i don’t really need very much to be happy
0:47:12 and did you save up money beforehand with odd jobs or did you do odd jobs while on the road
0:47:18 a bit of both i did odd jobs before i left i was traveling in asia at a time when the
0:47:27 price differential was so great that it actually made sense for me to fly back on a charter flight
0:47:34 to the us and work for four or five months and i worked basically odd jobs i worked from working
0:47:42 in a warehouse packaging athletic shoes working in a kind of technical sense of a that’s a really
0:47:48 just hard to describe but it was kind of a in a photography related job where we were reducing
0:47:54 printed circuit boards down to little sizes to be shipped off to be printed and driving cars to
0:48:02 whatever else i could find and that at that time made more money i could live off of i could live
0:48:09 probably two years from those couple months of work so i didn’t really work while i was traveling
0:48:17 until i got to iran in the late 70s and there there was a very high paying job which was teaching
0:48:24 english to the iranian pilots who worked for the shah but i had sworn they were never going to teach
0:48:30 english so i actually got a job in bella hot helicopter who was teaching english is to the
0:48:35 pilots but my job was running a little newsletter for the american community there and i worked
0:48:41 there until i was thrown out by the coup that was another story why did that now just a couple
0:48:46 of comments so number one for those people listening who are saying to themselves already
0:48:51 perhaps creating reasons why they can’t do what you did now due to different economic climate
0:48:56 or whatnot it is entirely possible to replicate what you did you just have to choose your locations
0:49:02 wisely yeah for that type of differential absolutely and i should also just mention to people that
0:49:07 part of the reason i’m so attracted to stoic philosophy whether that be senica or marcus
0:49:14 aurelius is exactly because of the practice of poverty not because you want to be poor but so
0:49:20 that you recognize not only that you can subsist but then you can potentially be content or or
0:49:25 even in some cases be more content with a bare minimum so for people who are more interested
0:49:28 in that i highly recommend a lot of the stoic writings and you can search for those on my
0:49:33 blog and elsewhere but let me just add to that there’s actually a new age version of that that
0:49:38 was sort of popular and a generation ago and the search term there is volunteer simplicity
0:49:45 volunteer simplicity right and so the idea is poverty is is terrible when it’s mandatory when
0:49:51 you have no choice but volunteer version of that is very very powerful and i think attaching names
0:49:57 sometimes to things it makes it more legitimate but but imagine yourself practicing voluntary
0:50:02 simplicity and that i think is part of that stoic philosophy but there’s a whole kind of a movement
0:50:07 a lot of the hippie dropouts were kind of practicing a similar thing and there was you know the whole
0:50:15 best practices that resolved around that you can make up your own but i think it’s to me an essential
0:50:21 skill that life skill that people should acquire and when you go backpacking and stuff like that
0:50:27 that’s part of it that’s the beginnings of trying to understand what it is that you need to live as a
0:50:32 you know as a being and you can fill that out in any way you want but that’s a good way to experiment
0:50:36 now you have become certainly a world-class
0:50:43 packager of ideas but also at synthesizing and expressing these ideas i love your writing if
0:50:49 i’ve consumed vast quantities of it in fact i’m here right now on on long island where i grew up
0:50:55 and i used to sneak into my parents shed to read old editions of the whole earth catalog
0:51:02 for inspiration it was the i suppose the equivalent of my internet at the time and from that all the
0:51:07 way to 1000 true fans which of course you know i sort of shout from the rooftops for people to read
0:51:13 how did you develop that skill of writing and communicating a lot of people associate that
0:51:20 with schooling but it doesn’t appear to be the source for you yeah so in high school i i would
0:51:26 call myself a very late bloomer i i don’t recall myself having a lot of ideas there were a lot of
0:51:30 other people and kids in my high school that i was very impressed with because they seem to
0:51:37 know what they thought and were very glib and particulate and i wasn’t i was a little bit more
0:51:43 visual on that sense i i um tried to decide whether to go to art school or to mit because i was really
0:51:49 interested in science so i set off to asia as a photographer so it was you know basically no words
0:51:57 at all it was just images and as i was traveling and seeing these amazing things i mean again i want
0:52:03 to emphasize that this was sort of a for me i grew up in new jersey i’d never left new jersey we never
0:52:11 took vacations it’s hard to describe how parochial new jersey was back in you know the 1960s i never
0:52:17 had eight chinese food and never had i mean i never saw chinese it was like it was a different world
0:52:22 and then i was thrown into asia and it was like oh my gosh everything i knew was wrong
0:52:33 and so that education was extremely extremely powerful and i think that that gave me something
0:52:39 to say and i started writing letters home and i trying to describe what i was seeing and so
0:52:45 i had a reason to try to communicate and that was the beginning of it but even then i don’t think
0:52:54 i really had much to say it wasn’t really until the internet came along and i had a chance to go
0:53:01 on to one of the first online communities in the early 80s and for some reason the early 80s that
0:53:09 is that is definitely yeah it was early days yeah in 1981 and so these were private it wasn’t the
0:53:12 kind of wide open internet these were a little experimental the fact it was a new jersey institute
0:53:20 of technology in ructors that had this experimental online community that i got invited on and we
0:53:25 can talk about how that happened but that was it was just like a friend and i found that there was
0:53:31 something about the direct attempt to just communicate with someone else in real time you
0:53:37 know just just sending them a message or something that crystallized my thinking is how did it
0:53:41 crystallize your thinking just not interrupt but was it the immediate feedback loop it was the idea
0:53:48 that they have since teachers have since done a lot of studies where they had kids write an essay
0:53:53 on something an assignment and then they would also be instructed to write some email to a friend
0:53:59 or something and then they would grade both of the compositions and they would find that inevitably
0:54:05 the email that the kids were writing was much better writing because when you’re trying to
0:54:11 write a composition there’s all these you know we have all these attitudes or expectations or there’s
0:54:16 there’s this kind of a writerly sense there’s there’s there’s all this other garbage and luggage
0:54:21 and baggage on top of that but when we’re just trying to send an email we’re just we’re directly
0:54:26 trying to communicate something we’re not fooling around we’re not trying to be it make it literary
0:54:30 literary and all that we’re just direct stuff and so the writing there was always much more
0:54:34 directed concrete because that’s the that’s the usual thing that happens when you’re trying to
0:54:38 write is you’re not concrete enough but when you’re emails like all concrete and so it was
0:54:45 getting out of the whole kind of writerly stuff and just pure concrete communication that really
0:54:50 made it for me and what I discovered which is what many writers discover is that I write in
0:54:57 order to think yeah it was like I think I have an idea but when I began to write it I realized I
0:55:03 have no idea and I don’t actually know what I think until I try to write it so writing is a
0:55:09 way for me to define out what I think it’s like I don’t have any ideas that’s true but when I write
0:55:17 I get the ideas and that was the revelation and so by being forced to communicate online and there
0:55:21 was none of this expectation it was just like okay this is random email I can do that I don’t
0:55:25 have to write necessarily I don’t have to write something nice I’m just gonna write you know 140
0:55:30 characters I can do that but while I was doing that I had an idea that I didn’t have before
0:55:36 and so it was like oh my gosh this is a idea generation machine it’s by writing it’s not
0:55:39 that I have these ideas I’m gonna write them down oh no I don’t even have them until I write
0:55:44 I’m so glad you brought that up because I was just recently a few things related to that I was
0:55:49 reading an interview with Kurt Vonnegut who’s one of my favorite authors for people who aren’t
0:55:55 familiar check out Cats Cradle perhaps as a starting point hilarious guy and he at various
0:56:00 points in his career taught writing to make ends meet and he would number one not look for good
0:56:05 writers he would look for people who are passionate about specific things so that’s that’s something
0:56:10 I want to reiterate to people who don’t feel right early is that go out and have the experiences
0:56:15 and find the subjects the things that excite you and as long as you’re true to your voice which
0:56:20 is related to the email point I threw out my first two drafts of I’d say a third of the four hour
0:56:28 work week because they were either two pompous and Ivy League sounding way way way too much I mean
0:56:32 horrible or two slapstick because I felt like I had to go to the other extreme and then I sat down
0:56:38 and I wrote as if I were composing an email to a friend after two glasses of wine and that’s how I
0:56:44 found my voice so to speak as a side note why and I think this might be related but why did you
0:56:49 promise yourself not to teach English I’m so curious because that’s a that that can be very
0:56:53 lucrative it’s readily available when you are traveling why did you commit to yourself not to
0:56:58 teach English yeah it’s a good question because there’s lots of opportunities all around the world
0:57:04 and by the way I recommend it as a way for people to travel cheaply if you want to support yourself
0:57:12 because it is a very desirable skill we call it for the moment I think the reason why was I felt
0:57:18 that I do feel like I was a very good teacher and I also felt that it was maybe a little easy
0:57:24 but I think the main reason was that I was having trouble imagining myself enjoying it you know
0:57:32 and I just felt that I would rather try to find something else now I think I did one time in
0:57:40 Taiwan which as you know has a whole cram school system I think a friend I substituted for a friend
0:57:48 once and I think that maybe confirmed to me like my idea that while it was there was sort of like
0:57:53 you know all I have to do is just talk I mean there’s really not much skill involved at all
0:57:58 it was fun but I didn’t feel like I was I don’t know I didn’t feel like I was maybe adding value
0:58:04 or something so I came away thinking you know I guess I could do this for money but I’m not gonna
0:58:09 be happy I think it’s just the personality thing I don’t think of myself as a teacher I don’t do
0:58:16 many workshops or classes so I think a different person might thoroughly enjoy it and I know they
0:58:23 do and they have a great time doing it for me it was just not for me got it no big deal I think
0:58:29 this is an important thing is is that you know it takes a long time to kind of figure out what
0:58:35 you’re good for and part of where I’m at right now and where I got eventually was really trying to
0:58:40 spend time on doing things that only I could do and even when I could do something well but
0:58:46 someone else could do it I would try and let that go that that’s a discipline that I’m still working
0:58:51 on which is not just things that I’m good at but things that only I’m good at so that was something
0:58:56 I was sort of trying to start early on which is like you know a lot of other people can do this
0:59:04 and they’re happy doing it so I don’t want to go somewhere where it requires more of me
0:59:09 to do and then I’ll be happier and they’ll be happier I am currently having and I seem to have
0:59:18 these periodically a crisis of meaning phase and I’m wrestling with this exact issue trying to
0:59:26 figure out what to abandon what to say no to to refine my focus so I can really focus on the
0:59:32 intersection of my unique capability or capabilities whatever that is and a need of some type how did
0:59:38 you figure that out and maybe we could approach it from a different direction what do you feel
0:59:44 is your skill set or your your unique skill and how did you figure that out well let me tell
0:59:49 you the story of how this realization actually came to me in a kind of a very concrete way which
0:59:57 while I was editing Wired Magazine and so part of what Wired Magazine is about is is that we would
1:00:02 come up with ideas and make assignments to writers now some of the articles in Wired would come from
1:00:07 the writers themselves they would protest to say I have an idea but a lot of the the articles would
1:00:12 be assigned from editors we’d have editorial meetings where we kind of imagine this great
1:00:18 article and then we’d go and try and find someone to to write it and in that conversation of trying
1:00:24 to persuade writers to write an idea that I had they would go through a kind of a very typical
1:00:30 sequence where you know I would have this great idea this is a great idea and and then I would
1:00:34 try to persuade like one writer two writer three writers and they just you know they didn’t think
1:00:38 it was a very good idea they didn’t like it they didn’t want to do whatever it was and then I’d
1:00:42 kind of forget about it but then like you know six months later we’d come back and say oh that was
1:00:47 such a great idea I really think we should do that and then I would go again for another round of
1:00:51 trying to persuade people and then again no takers and then I kind of forget about that must have been
1:00:56 a bad idea but then like six months later a year later it might come back you know that’s still a
1:01:04 great idea nobody has done that and then I would realize oh my gosh I need to do that you know it’s
1:01:08 like I’m the only one who can see this I’ve tried to give it away I have tried really hard to give
1:01:13 it away I’ve tried to kill it it just keeps like coming back coming back and it’s like okay and then
1:01:19 I would do it and there’ll be one of my best pieces and so it was this idea of like so so I became
1:01:24 really an important proponent of trying to give things away first tell everybody what you’re doing
1:01:30 basically you try to give these ideas away and people are happy because they love great ideas
1:01:36 and you do it it’s a great idea you should do it and so I try to give everything away first
1:01:41 and then I try to kill everything it’s like no that’s a bad idea and then it’s the ones that
1:01:47 keep coming back that I can’t kill and they can’t give away that think hmm maybe that’s the one I’m
1:01:51 supposed to do yeah interesting because no one else is going to do it I mean I’ve been actively
1:01:55 trying to get and then of course there’s someone else is doing it you should see someone else
1:02:00 competing or trying to do it it’s like oh yeah you go ahead do it I’m not going to race against you
1:02:07 yeah that’s crazy because there’s two of us you know you do it and so that generosity is actually
1:02:13 part of this your vetting process exactly and so that’s when I kind of realized it but that
1:02:19 doesn’t answer the question of well how do you find out what it is and all I can say is you know
1:02:22 and I don’t want to be flipped but all I can say is it’s going to take all your life to figure that
1:02:28 out right that is fact here’s what it is figuring out is what your life is about
1:02:33 I mean that’s what life is for right life is to figure it out and then so every
1:02:40 part of your life every day is actually this attempt to figure this out and you’ll have
1:02:45 different answers as you go along and sometimes there may be directions in that but that’s basically
1:02:51 what it is and you are very transparent about confessing this but I have to tell you that
1:02:56 even from hanging around a lot of very accomplished people a lot of successful people that we would
1:03:03 be on the covers of magazines they also go through exactly the same questioning I mean no matter
1:03:08 how big of a billion dollar company they have they they come up to the same thing well you know
1:03:12 what’s my role in all this why am I here what am I useful what am I doing that nobody else can
1:03:18 it’s a continuous in fact as we’ll come back to being successful makes that even more difficult
1:03:25 why is that because of the what I call the creator’s dilemma which is very much the same
1:03:32 thing as the innovator’s dilemma which is that it’s a true dilemma in fact in the sense that
1:03:38 there’s no right answer but the question is is sort of is it better to optimize your strengths
1:03:46 or to invest into the unknown into places that where you’re weak and any or places you have
1:03:52 an explored yeah any accountant in any business will tell you that it did it absolutely makes more
1:03:58 sense to take your dollar you’ll get a higher return by investing into what you’re good at
1:04:04 already whatever it is and this is the pursuit of excellence this is the Tom Peters and the whole
1:04:11 entire movement which is you move uphill you you keep optimizing what you know and that
1:04:20 by far is the sanest the most reasonable the the smartest thing to do but when you have a very
1:04:27 fast changing landscape like we live in right now you get stuck on a local optima you get you get
1:04:35 stuck and the problem is that the only way you can get to a higher more bit place is you actually
1:04:41 have to go down you actually have to head into a place where you are less optimal you have no
1:04:47 expertise there’s very low margins there’s low profits you look foolish there’ll be failures
1:04:56 and if you’ve been following the line of success that is very very difficult to do
1:05:00 it’s very difficult for an organization it’s almost literally almost impossible for an organization
1:05:06 who’s been excellent and successful to do it really is so which presents a lot of opportunity
1:05:14 for the startups the reason why startups start is because they’re operating in an environment
1:05:20 that no sane big corporation would want to be in it’s it’s a market it’s low margins low
1:05:26 profitability unproven high failure I mean it’s like who wants to operate there nobody
1:05:32 their only reason why startups operate is they have no choice right yeah it’s the the gift
1:05:39 of few options right right exactly so so in terms of success binding I think you have to be unsuccessful
1:05:47 who is successful wants to be unsuccessful it’s very very hard to to let go of that success
1:05:52 and so that’s one of the things that works against someone really continuing on this
1:05:56 life journey of finding out what they’re really good at because because here’s the thing is that
1:06:01 successful companies and successful people generally try to solve problems with money
1:06:07 you buy solutions and we all know that money doesn’t it’s not the full answer for innovation
1:06:10 you know basically if you could purchase innovations all the big companies would just
1:06:15 purchase them okay it’s it’s the fact that that these innovations often have to be found out
1:06:20 without money through other means again that’s the advantage to the startup and it’s a disadvantage
1:06:25 to the successful companies because they got money and they just want to buy solutions but
1:06:31 most of these solutions you can’t buy you have to kind of engineer in this very difficult environment
1:06:37 of low margins low success low profits that no one really wants to be in but the startups are
1:06:43 forced to be in that’s also an advantage I would think for beginners or novices compared to experts
1:06:52 they have less vested identity less inertia to have to reverse and that’s back to my suggestion
1:06:56 the meaning of why slack and fooling around when you’re young is so important because
1:07:04 a lot of these innovations and things are found not by trying to solve a problem that
1:07:10 can be monetized yeah it’s in exploring this area without money I mean money is so overrated
1:07:15 it really could you elaborate on that because I feel like this is a sermon I need to receive
1:07:18 on some level there’s several things to say about it one is you know obviously if you’re
1:07:24 struggling to pay bills and mortgages and stuff that there’s a certain amount that’s needed but
1:07:30 but here’s the thing is that accumulating enough money to do things is really a byproduct of other
1:07:37 things it’s a kind of a a lubricant in a certain sense rather than you know a goal and great wealth
1:07:43 or extreme wealth is definitely overrated I’ve had meals with a dozen billionaires and
1:07:48 they’re no different I mean their lives lifestyles are no different you don’t want to have a
1:07:52 billion dollars me put that way you really don’t there’s nothing that you can really
1:07:57 do with it that you can’t do with a lot of less money it was set then aside but even just wealth
1:08:07 itself in this world where there is more and more abundance even the money for say middle class is
1:08:13 less significant in a certain sense in the sense that maybe there’s status which is really not needed
1:08:18 but the things that you want to do the things that will make you content the things that
1:08:25 will satisfy you the things that will bring you meaning can usually got better than having money
1:08:30 I mean if you have a lot of time or a lot of money it’s always better to have a lot of time to do
1:08:34 something and so if you have a choice between having a lot of friends or a lot of money you
1:08:41 definitely wouldn’t have a lot of friends and so I think there’s a way even which technological
1:08:46 progress that we’re having is actually diminishing the role of money and I want to be
1:08:52 clear that I’m talking about money beyond the amount that you need to survive but even that
1:08:56 reflects back what we were saying earlier which is probably less than you think it is
1:09:02 to survive and so in a certain sense most people see money as a means to get these other things
1:09:10 but there are other routes to these other things right that are deeper and more constant and more
1:09:17 durable and more powerful so money is this sort of very small one-dimensional thing that if you
1:09:23 kind of focus on that it kind of comes and goes and if you whatever it is that you’re trying to
1:09:30 attain you go to it more directly through other means you will probably wind up with a more
1:09:37 powerful experience or whatever it is that you’re after and it’ll be deeper more renewable
1:09:44 than coming at it with money and so travel is one of the great examples which is many many
1:09:50 people who are working very hard trying to save their money to retire someday to travel well
1:09:57 I decided to flip it around and travel when I was really young when I had zero money and I had
1:10:04 experiences that basically even a billion dollars couldn’t have bought and it’s not an uncommon site
1:10:09 let me tell you for young kind of travelers who have very little money to be hanging out
1:10:14 doing something and then there will be some very wealthy people on their one-week organized tour
1:10:20 looking at these young travelers just saying I wish I had more time yeah you see it you see it
1:10:25 every well I see it almost every time I go traveling and it reminds me of conversations
1:10:30 I’ve had with Rolf Potts and also his book Vagabonding which I just absolutely love and it was
1:10:36 it was that book and Walden that I took with me traveling when I had my own two year or so walk
1:10:43 about and he points out in the beginning of Vagabonding that many people subscribe to the belief
1:10:49 along the lines of Charlie Sheen’s in the movie Wall Street and he’s asked what he’s going to
1:10:54 do when he makes his millions and he says I’m going to get a motorcycle and ride across China
1:11:01 and Rolf of course points out that you could you could clean toilets in the US and save enough money
1:11:08 to ride a motorcycle across China exactly and let me ask you this is this is maybe tangentially
1:11:14 related but you mentioned earlier that you know your your middle age your middle ages middle ages
1:11:20 maybe sounds odd but in your middle age that’s when you optimize and I find that horrifying on
1:11:28 some level because I am so tired I just turned 37 last week and I’m really tired of certain types
1:11:35 of optimizing and the incremental slogging of making trains run slightly more efficiently on time
1:11:40 even though like you said from a strictly financial standpoint the advice that I would
1:11:45 receive from many people and have received when I’ve asked for advice is here are one or two
1:11:52 core areas you should focus on to optimize for income and on the flip side I’m tempted to approach
1:11:59 a kind of not scorched earth but burned bridges approach where I somehow use creative destruction
1:12:05 to force me into another direction to have these new experiences that I crave so much
1:12:09 and you just for people who aren’t aware I want to give I remember going to the first ever quantified
1:12:16 self-meetup you’re part of the long now foundation you’ve experimented in so many different arenas
1:12:21 and have looked so far into the future and thought on such grand a scale you know I aspire to do more
1:12:26 of that what would be your advice to someone and I know I have dozens of friends in the same position
1:12:32 they’re say in their earlier mid-30s in my particular peer group and they want to explore but
1:12:38 they’re feeling pressured to optimize this thing that they’ve suddenly found their footing with
1:12:41 whatever it is that maybe they’re a venture capitalist maybe they’re in a startup they feel
1:12:47 they should start a new startup and they want to step out of that slipstream what would be
1:12:53 your advice to those people first of all I have to commend your honesty for this and I will repeat
1:13:00 that that it is very very difficult to do I mean they’re I think that realization comes to people
1:13:04 middle-aged and they realize oh my gosh you know I’m kind of on a there’s a little bit of a routine
1:13:08 here and I’m not really happy with that I think that kind of scorched earth they’re kind of like
1:13:13 you know just we’ll just set fire to it and we’ll walk away I actually have I think we probably
1:13:18 have a mutual friend I won’t use his name because I don’t know how public this is but but one of his
1:13:24 solutions was the most radical one I’ve ever heard the force himself was that he gave up
1:13:30 you a citizenship oh wow that’ll do it it was like he was like saying I just feel so you know
1:13:35 and and it was like oh my gosh that is so radical and he was telling me about what is involved in
1:13:39 that and it wasn’t for tax purposes because actually before you can do it the US actually
1:13:47 requires that you square up on all taxes right it was like but that was so radical and I don’t
1:13:53 recommend that he’s going fine but I’m just saying that’s that’s unnecessary but I think
1:14:00 the advice is I’m probably taking a page from yourself I don’t think it’s necessary to I think
1:14:04 you can experiment your way through this I mean you can do this incrementally you can take small
1:14:10 steps and do something and then evaluate it test how it’s going whether you’re getting what you want
1:14:16 out of it whether it’s working and then you continue that direction and that’s sort of the
1:14:21 pattern of people who kind of you have second careers or reinvent themselves you hear that a
1:14:28 lot and you can do that in a disciplined Tim Ferriss way I don’t think that it requires you
1:14:34 to kind of walk out and leave a burning pile behind I think it’s something that you’re going to
1:14:41 I’m a big believer in doing things deliberately and I think that you begin by looking at those
1:14:47 areas that you get satisfaction out of and those areas where I often find that people kind of retreat
1:14:51 back to kind of the things that they did as kids and really really miss you know whether it’s art
1:14:56 or other things and the truth is that you’re not really going to be able to escape all the other
1:15:00 things you have going and that’s a good thing because that is part of you and part of what you
1:15:06 do well so you’ll probably just you know bend in a certain direction and I think the one bit of
1:15:11 advice is that you can’t you know it’s not going to happen overnight it’s going to be it took you
1:15:16 37 years to get where you are it may take you another 30 years to get where you want to go
1:15:22 and I don’t think you should feel impatient maybe that’s the word I’m saying is that I don’t think
1:15:27 you should imagine that you’ll have another hat on with a new label you know next year
1:15:34 just to maybe redirect that and this may or may not be accurate but in the process of researching
1:15:39 for this conversation which is sort of an odd exercise isn’t in and of itself given how much
1:15:46 time we’ve spent together but I came across in Wikipedia mention of your experience in Jerusalem
1:15:54 and deciding to live as though you only had six months left and I want to touch on that but
1:15:59 one of the questions that came to my mind when I turned 37 last week is if I knew I were going to
1:16:05 die at age 40 what would I do to have the greatest impact on the greatest number of people and so
1:16:12 that I find that constraint helpful and I worry that if I aim at not being impatient in that way
1:16:19 that I won’t because I could get hit by a bus that I won’t do what I’m capable of doing maybe you
1:16:25 could talk about and I had no idea I’m not sure if you would self describe yourself as a devout
1:16:30 Christian but that’s that’s certainly written here maybe you could talk a little bit about that
1:16:36 experience yeah one thing I would of course warn people is that not everything on wikipedia is
1:16:41 correct no that’s why I’m bringing it up right but but it is but it is it’s true that I got this
1:16:45 assignment in Jerusalem which by the way if you want to hear the full version of it listen to
1:16:51 one of the very first this American lives which I on ira glass and I told the story for the very
1:16:58 first time and it’s a story about how I got this assignment to live as if I was going to die in six
1:17:03 months even though I was like perfectly healthy and I knew that it was a very improbable but I
1:17:08 decided to take the assignment seriously and that’s that’s what I did and my answer kind of surprised
1:17:15 me because I thought that I would kind of have this sort of mad high-risk fling you know do all
1:17:20 these things but actually what I wanted to do was to visit my brothers and sisters go back
1:17:25 to my parents help out but then my mom was not well at the time but that lasted for three months
1:17:30 before I decided I need to do something big so I actually rode my bicycle across the US from
1:17:36 San Francisco to New York where I was going to New Jersey where I was going to basically die and I
1:17:44 kept a journal of that and that question was something that I keep asking myself now I actually
1:17:50 have a countdown clock that Matt Groening at Futurama was inspired and they did a little
1:17:57 episode of Futurama about and what it did was I took the actual old tables for the estimated age
1:18:03 of my death for someone born when I was born and I worked back the number of days and I have I have
1:18:13 that showing on my computer how many days and I tell you nothing concentrates your time like knowing
1:18:20 how many days you have left now of course I’m likely again to live more than that I mean good
1:18:27 health etc but nonetheless there is something that really you know I have six thousand something
1:18:33 days it’s not very many days to do all the things I want to do and so I think your exercise is really
1:18:37 fantastic and commendable and there’s two questions what would you do if you had six months to live
1:18:43 and what would you do if you had a billion dollars and interestingly it’s the conversions of those
1:18:48 two questions because it turns out that you probably don’t need a billion dollars to do
1:18:52 whatever it is you have you’re going to do in six months right and so I think you’re asking
1:18:58 the right question and and the way I answer it is you want to keep asking yourself that question
1:19:04 every every six months and really try to answer it and I try to you know do that on a kind of a
1:19:11 day by day basis I learned something from my friend Stuart Brand who organized his
1:19:16 remaining days around five-year increments he says any great idea that’s significant that’s
1:19:21 worth doing for him will last about five years from the time he thinks of it to the time he stopped
1:19:27 thinking about it and if you think of it in terms of five-year projects you can count those off on
1:19:33 you know a couple of hands for even if you’re young and so the sense of mortality of understanding
1:19:39 that it’s not just old people who don’t have her many you know you’re 20 years old you don’t have
1:19:46 that many five-year projects to do and so I think it is that’s maybe part of the the philosophy of
1:19:52 thinking about our time and whether even if you believe in the extension of life longevity living
1:19:58 to 120 you still have to think in these terms of what are you gonna do if you because you don’t
1:20:03 know if you’ll live to be 120 what are you gonna do if you have a year and what would you do with
1:20:11 a billion dollars and what’s the intersection of those two does religion play a large part in your
1:20:17 life right now in a certain sense not in a kind of a ritualistic sense I just wrote a book called
1:20:23 what technology wants excellent book I highly recommend it there was it was a theory of technology
1:20:29 and I was trying to put technology in the context of the cosmos so I think what religion gives me
1:20:37 is permission to think about cosmic questions I’m right in the middle of finishing a Kickstarter
1:20:45 funded graphic novel that’s about angels and robots and the intention there was to fictionalize the
1:20:51 idea that robots would some days have souls but these souls would be coming from angels and so
1:20:56 that there was this intersection of these two kind of impossible worlds of conscious robots
1:21:02 who were ensouled by angels and and the reason why this was sort of interesting was that the idea
1:21:08 was that the angels that ensoul us have been trained they’ve been given moral guidance but if you
1:21:15 don’t give the spirit some kind of moral guidance then they can work havoc and so was this idea that
1:21:22 when we make robots we’re actually going to have to train them to be ethical we just can’t make a
1:21:29 free being and not train it so it was a way to rehearse and think about some of the consequences
1:21:36 of technology today so I think my religion gives me permission to ask those questions without
1:21:41 embarrassment to say what is the general direction of the arc of evolution what is it
1:21:48 pointed somewhere how does technology fit into the greater cosmos what does it mean
1:21:58 what drives it why is there more of it is this a good thing so I think having a kind of I consider
1:22:06 this kind of an other view so I have a other view that I’m sympathetic to other world views
1:22:10 I don’t necessarily have to believe all the other world views but I get the idea that
1:22:17 if you have another world view that can be very helpful in seeing other world views
1:22:21 so people have a world view even though they don’t know it but I have a world view and I know
1:22:30 that I have a world view I mean really everybody has a religious or a spiritual orientation even
1:22:36 if they’re atheists they still have one and so there are some assumptions that are at the basis
1:22:44 of it and I like to question assumptions including my own assumptions two things I can’t resist asking
1:22:48 and we can spend as much or as little time on this as you’d like but recently grappling with a lot of
1:22:53 these issues that I’ve been grappling with some of which are existential some which are related to
1:23:01 death limited time on the planet I’ve become deeply fascinated by indigenous use of plant medicine
1:23:09 and I’ve had some very transformative experiences that are difficult to put into words because
1:23:18 they make you sound like a complete crazy person but yeah yeah yeah there’s a somethingness that is
1:23:23 very difficult to communicate without sounding like you should be institutionalized what do you
1:23:29 think the role for people who aspire to do the greatest good in the world what is the role of
1:23:36 that type of direct experience and is it possible to benefit from that type of for lack of a better
1:23:41 descriptor spiritual experience without a religious framework around it yeah yeah no it’s a really
1:23:47 good question so my little personal story there of course as I was basically I was basically
1:23:51 hippie I worked for the hippie catalog and the Horth catalog which was about hippies living
1:23:58 in San Francisco and all my friends were drug taking hippies but I for some reason never did I
1:24:05 just had no appetite or inclination at all for ever taking any drugs or smoking pot or anything
1:24:13 and when I was 50 years old I decided that I would like to take LSD sacramentally on my 50th
1:24:21 birthday and I did and I arranged with I had a guide and I had appropriate setting and I had some
1:24:29 acid that came from a source that was extremely reliable and it was a sacrament and it was a
1:24:36 very profound sacrament and I think yeah you can use drugs or racially and for entertainment and I
1:24:40 think that can go somewhere but I think there’s another powerful use for it which is kind of what
1:24:48 you’re talking about it which is to elevate one outside of yourself to lose yourself to be in
1:24:54 contact with other things beyond your ego and I think it can be done and I think unfortunately
1:25:00 because of the illegal status that we’ve had for a long time the rituals and the practice around
1:25:04 that have not had chance to be developed or communicated actually trying to find this information
1:25:11 was extremely hard. There’s one book that I did find eventually from a guy who was doing LSD
1:25:18 experiments while they were still legal and was able to accumulate enough wisdom about it
1:25:24 that that would be the one place I would point people to but I think it is important that the
1:25:31 context and expectations and the the setting they call it that revolves around it is very important
1:25:38 and I do believe that these can be extremely profound and powerful experiences for good
1:25:44 they can remain long after and you know most people who understand this and don’t abuse it
1:25:51 understand that in fact the experience was not in the pill it was not in the chemical it was a real
1:25:57 experience and so unfortunately there is so much other stuff circulating around the use of these
1:26:03 drugs and the misuse of them that that kind of information is often very very difficult to find
1:26:11 but I do think maybe we’re seeing a moment now in the US where the second prohibition is being
1:26:20 undone and at least POT will become legal and maybe we can return to revitalizing you know the
1:26:27 traditions and the necessary settings around that and expectation that not just POT or LSD but
1:26:36 even other synthetic drugs can be extremely powerful in removing the ordinary guards that we
1:26:41 have and we have an ego for on purpose we have all these things to keep us you know sane in a
1:26:47 day-to-day functional functional exactly standpoint yeah right so if you remove it completely you
1:26:53 can become dysfunctional but if you remove it deliberately and with great care you can be
1:26:57 opened up you know I think there’s an expertise there I think there’s a lot of other things that
1:27:02 if we have the freedom and the wisdom to not abuse it I think it can be extremely powerful
1:27:07 do you recall the title of the book or how people might search for it yes so this is a one of the
1:27:15 many resources that I recommend in my book cool tools and cool tools is a big catalog of possibilities
1:27:21 it has about 1500 different items a lot of them are kind of like hand tools you know pliers and
1:27:27 the great cordless drill but it’s much better than that and I include things like what if you
1:27:32 wanted to have psychedelic experience it was transformative what do you do and I would recommend
1:27:37 this book or I mean there’s lots of other things in it but the I don’t actually have the book right
1:27:46 in front of me I should I think it’s called I don’t remember it’s okay I will uh I show notes
1:27:52 we will list it as the right one and there’s also a little tiny book that came from England
1:27:58 it was a cartoon guide that gave kind of a street an unjudgmental view of all the different
1:28:04 drugs there were and what each one kind of did and didn’t in what the plus and minuses are without
1:28:09 you know recommending or forbidding them they’re just saying this this is what it is that information
1:28:13 also believe it or not is really in short supply it’s like you know what do you do with this and
1:28:18 how does it work and tell me the facts I don’t need to hear a lecture either way like well this
1:28:22 is great or this is terrible but just tell me what’s going on as you know I mean that kind
1:28:27 of information sometimes is extremely in short supply it’s very difficult to find information
1:28:36 that isn’t politicized yeah inaccurate or like you said so shrouded in either fear or irrational
1:28:42 optimism that it’s almost intelligible and certainly generally useless we’ll put those
1:28:46 books in the show notes for people I want to come back to one thing you said far far earlier and that
1:28:52 was related to the pieces that you tried to give away that eventually wouldn’t die and came back
1:29:01 were there any common threads any patterns in those pieces that you can pick out as being sort of a
1:29:09 uniquely Kevin Kelly theme if for like yeah yeah one of the things that I discovered in my six months
1:29:14 of trying to live as if I was going to die in six months because as I was coming closer to that
1:29:22 day which happened to be Halloween October 31st it was I kept cutting off my future I mean I may
1:29:26 be like you I kind of tend to live in the future much more than the past I’m always imagining I’m
1:29:30 saving this for someday when I’m going to do this I’m kind of looking forward I’m going to do this
1:29:36 here and so I was very much in the future and then something that future was being cut down day by
1:29:42 day I was like and I was thinking like why am I taking pictures I’m enough to take in photographs
1:29:46 because if I’m not going to be here in another two months or something so so there was all these
1:29:52 things that I’m kind of cutting out and as I was cutting them out I had this realization which was
1:29:58 the thing I took away from this thing which was that I was becoming less human that to be fully
1:30:05 human we have to have a future we have to look forward to the future that is part of us is
1:30:12 looking into the future and so after I came out of the and I kind of embraced that and I’m saying
1:30:18 well you know that future forward facing that’s what I do that’s what that’s what I want to do
1:30:23 and that’s what I write about and in thinking about the future one of the things that is very hard
1:30:27 because the paradox about the future is that there are lots of impossible things that happen all the
1:30:33 time and if someone from the 100 years from now would come back and tell us things there’s a lot
1:30:36 of stuff we’re just not going to believe this is like that’s just that’s crazy just like if we
1:30:41 went back 100 years and told them what was going on now they would say you know that’s just not
1:30:46 going to happen I mean we could even go back 20 years I could go back 20 years and say we’re
1:30:51 going to have like you know google street views of all the cities of the world and we’re going to have
1:30:56 you know encyclopedias for free this edited by anybody you know it’s like they would say you
1:31:01 know there’s no way and I would tell them you know most of us for free they were saying there’s no
1:31:08 economic model in the world they would allow for that and there isn’t but here it is so the dilemma
1:31:15 is is that any true forecast about the future is going to be dismissed any future that is believable
1:31:22 now is going to be wrong and so you’re stuck in this thing of if people believe it is wrong if they
1:31:26 don’t believe it you know where does it get you you’re dismissed and so there is this very fine
1:31:34 line between saying something that is right on the edge of plausibility and at the same time right
1:31:41 on the edge of having a chance of being true and what I discovered that was helpful in trying to
1:31:49 get away from the kind of assumptions that binos to just kind of extrapolate was to think
1:31:56 laterally was to go sideways one thing just take whatever was everybody new and say well
1:32:01 what if that wasn’t true what would be a good example of that or an example like everyone says
1:32:05 okay morse law will continue well what if morse law didn’t continue what would that mean what would
1:32:12 happen and you can maybe I could say for the audience but I’ll just even to remind me morse law is
1:32:19 what is it every 18 months the the size and cost of technology will decrease by 50 something along
1:32:23 those lines let’s say even worse or no there’s speed involved as well right morse law does say
1:32:29 that but let’s say something right now we live in a world where every year the technology is
1:32:34 better and cheaper what if that wasn’t true right got it what if every year starting like you know
1:32:39 a couple years from now stuff was better bit more expensive that’s that’s a completely different world
1:32:45 right I mean everyone assumes right things are going to get better and cheaper well what if
1:32:50 that wasn’t true so you can take kind of assumption again that’s something that no one’s really
1:32:55 examining like well one of the things I’ll write about is the fact that we’re going to have a
1:33:03 population implosion globally that the global population will drastically reduce in 100 years
1:33:08 now we’ll have less population far far far less than we have right now and so all right I have to
1:33:13 bite at that what because I’ve thought a lot about this and the what they call the malthusian
1:33:18 dilemmas is that going to be do you think pandemic related nuclear weapon related all of the above
1:33:26 none of those none of those no ai coming in the the rise of the machines no okay it’s just pure
1:33:32 demographics so if you look at the current trends in fertility rates in all the developed countries
1:33:40 everywhere except for the us they’re already either below replacement level so replacement
1:33:46 level means that you’re just sustaining the population population just replaces itself
1:33:49 if it’s below it means that there’s getting less and less so japan
1:33:54 all these you know europe they’re all below replacement the us is an exception because
1:34:00 only because of immigration got it where people come in otherwise we would be there and this would
1:34:05 not be any news to anybody but the real news if people would point to the developing world but
1:34:11 mexico is now aging faster than the us china is aging faster because of their one child policy
1:34:17 of course japan is this completely they’re way underwater completely so even the one exception
1:34:23 is sub-saharan africa and there’s really kind of debate right now about how fast or whether
1:34:29 they’re slowing down but generally around the world south america the rest of asia the rate and
1:34:36 fertility continues to drop and here’s the thing is that a demographic transition that is happening
1:34:42 everywhere where people become urban and so every forecast shows the urbanity the
1:34:48 certification of the population continuing and i can’t think of any counter-force
1:34:56 to stop this huge migration at the scale that we’re seeing into the city and as that happens
1:35:03 the birth rates drop down and even in places like singapore or other places where they have
1:35:13 taken very very active countermeasures of cash for having kids and wow daycare forever bonuses
1:35:19 none of these work in terms of actually trying to raise fertility levels so you have to understand
1:35:26 that to go above replacement level the average woman has to have 2.1 kids well that means
1:35:31 there have to be tons and tons of women who have three or four kids right to make up for those
1:35:37 how many people do you know with that many kids you know living in cities and they’re just
1:35:43 very not there’s not enough of them so and this is a projection some of these are un productions
1:35:48 they have three three they have a low high and and a medium and the low one is not good news
1:35:55 because there’s not a large cultural counter-force for women to have three a lot you know a very
1:36:01 high percentage of the population to have three or four kids in a modern world and that’s why
1:36:08 the the population continues to decrease every year what type of this is perhaps a tangent but
1:36:14 one of the big debates in my head right now is to marry or not to marry to have kids or not to
1:36:20 have kids i never thought those would even be questions in my mind and yet here i am and and
1:36:26 now they are what are your thoughts on having children what type of people this is very broad
1:36:30 but should have children or shouldn’t have children whichever way of answering is easier
1:36:35 or how to even think about that question i think people who are privileged of which you are should
1:36:43 have children because you can bestow so many privileges and opportunities to your children
1:36:48 and if the world is to be populated why not populate it with children who have as many
1:36:53 opportunities as possible i also say from my own experience of growing up one of many kids and
1:36:58 having well i have three kids one of my other regrets in life is not having a fourth but we
1:37:03 were just we started a little bit too late and we were unable to have a fourth but all my kids
1:37:09 wished we had a fourth two and i would say that it’s a gift to your kids to have more than one
1:37:17 and i know that from hanging out in china where so many kids grew up only children and this really
1:37:24 really missed that there is a total gift of the siblings and brothers to each other that is
1:37:30 really very profound and there is also i know from my friends who have had lots of kids
1:37:38 that there is a certain amount of teaching from the the older to the younger and that’s a lot of
1:37:43 what they learn and that the curve of the amount of energy that you have to expend actually after
1:37:50 three doesn’t really matter in terms of the parents got it i have one friend who has nine kids they
1:37:57 have another friend who has seven wow and basically how do they do that well the older kids were
1:38:01 helping to parent the younger kids that’s the only way that really works but that is actually
1:38:05 basically they have you know they have five parents instead of having two parents right it’s very
1:38:09 traditional in a way i mean traditional meaning reaching back thousands or tens of thousands of
1:38:17 years it is of course in the old days may have 12th born but they rarely had 12 kids survive
1:38:23 right it’s like the 1800s kind of unheard i hang out with the amish a lot and they still
1:38:28 have these very large families and they all survive so they have kind of in some sense is
1:38:34 sort of an unnatural expansion and one of my predictions again going back to kind of like
1:38:38 the assumptions one of my predictions is that you know in america in a hundred years from now
1:38:43 whatever it is it’ll be um the complete countryside is run by the amish the amish take over the entire
1:38:47 census slide because they never sell land they have like eight kids and then there are all
1:38:50 these people living in the cities and it’s like everybody’s happy you know you’re really they
1:38:55 drive out to the amish lands this is fantastic they’re very happy you know doing their thing
1:38:59 and running the farms and so i’ve been predicting for years that the amish would come and start
1:39:03 buying upstate new york and that’s exactly what they’re doing right now why do you spend so much
1:39:07 time with the amish this is news to me but very interesting and how long has that been going on
1:39:12 and does your beard have anything is there any relation to the amish i had the beard before my
1:39:18 interest in the amish i can show you some pictures when i was 19 years old so those who don’t know i
1:39:22 have an amish beard which means i have a beard without a mustache the reason why the amish don’t
1:39:27 have mustaches is that it was at the time that they were kind of adopting their dress code the
1:39:33 mustache was all military men had mustaches and so they were anti-military they refused to serve
1:39:39 in the armies they don’t even vote so is their kind of rejection of the military by sharing
1:39:44 off their mustache i hang out with the amish because their adoption of technologies is like
1:39:50 seemed to us totally crazy because first of all they’re not luddites they’re complete hackers
1:39:55 they love hacking technology they have something called amish electricity which is basically
1:40:00 pneumatics a lot of these farms have a big diesel they don’t have electricity but they have a big
1:40:08 diesel generator in the barn that pumps up this compressor that sends high pressure air tubes
1:40:12 down tubing into their barn into the homes and so they have converted like their sewing machine
1:40:19 washing machine and stuff to pneumatic okay seems like a bit of a side step of the word of god
1:40:25 exactly so they’ll have like they’ll have horse drawn buggies and horse drawns farm
1:40:30 improvements and the horses will be pulling this diesel-generated combine and you’re thinking
1:40:37 what are they doing okay right but but in fact if you look at our own lives and i’ve done this
1:40:41 many times i can ask you tim or you can ask me there’ll be some weird thing like we don’t have
1:40:46 tv in our house but i’ve got internet it’s like well what is that about right right so we all
1:40:52 have these things but here’s the difference is the amish do it collectively they’re very selective
1:40:58 they’re selecting their technology collectively as a group and secondly they have to articulate
1:41:02 because they’re doing collectively you have to articulate what their criteria is a lot of us
1:41:10 are adopting we try this we try that we don’t have any kind of like logic or reason or theory or
1:41:16 framework for why we’re doing stuff it’s just one parade of stuff but the amish have a very
1:41:21 particular criteria and their criteria is there are two things that they’re looking for the main
1:41:25 thing they want to do and the main reason why they have all these restrictions like horse and buggy
1:41:31 and all the stuff is that they want to have these communities very strong communities and so they
1:41:37 notice that if you have a car that you’ll drive out and shop somewhere out of the community or you
1:41:41 go to church somewhere out of the community or whatever it is but if you have a horse and buggy
1:41:46 you can go only 15 miles and so everything has to happen your entire life you have to support the
1:41:51 community you have a community within 15 miles you have to visit the sick and you have to shop
1:41:57 locally so you’re shopping with your neighbors so when a new technology comes along they say
1:42:02 will this strengthen our local community or send us out and then the second thing that they’re
1:42:09 looking at is with families so the goal of the typical amish man or woman is to have every
1:42:15 single meal with their children for every meal their lives until they leave home they have breakfast
1:42:20 they have lunch and they have dinner so breakfast and lunch is they go to the one-room schoolhouse
1:42:25 and they peddle back for lunch their parents have with them and that means that the business
1:42:29 is ideally in their backyard they have a lot of like shops and stuff if they’re not a farmer
1:42:33 and they have a backyard shop which is actually has to be kind of clean-ish because it is in their
1:42:38 backyard right it’s like not might well it is in their backyard so they really are you know they
1:42:41 really want to make sure that they’re they have metal working shops and stuff which they really
1:42:46 try to keep non-toxic and work because it’s in their backyard and so that means that they can come
1:42:50 home for lunch they have breakfast lunch so they’re on the premises and they have every single meal
1:42:57 with their children until they leave and so they say well will this technology allow us to do that
1:43:02 will it help us do that or will it work against that and then like right now they’re they’ve been
1:43:06 deciding whether to accept cell phones or not even though they don’t have landline phones
1:43:10 so they’re basically they’re going to well some of them are going to accept cell phones
1:43:16 and they do that by there’s always some amish early adopter who’s trying things and they say okay Ivan
1:43:22 Bishop says you can try this we’re watching you we’re going to see what effect this has on your
1:43:27 family on your community you have to be ready to give it up anytime we say that it’s not working
1:43:34 and they do this in a kind of a paris by paris so it’s very decentralized and so they try out
1:43:38 always trying out their technologies and they’re always looking to see
1:43:42 does this strengthen the families is just strengthening the communities if not we don’t
1:43:48 want it and what if you i have two questions i guess the first is since you’re normally as i
1:43:53 understand it based on the west coast and northern california how do you get out to the amish or is
1:43:58 there a separate community closer by and then secondly what if you incorporated into your own
1:44:06 life or your your own family that originated from the amish yeah so i don’t get to see them as often
1:44:14 as i want but actually is when i go east i have some contacts that i will exercise and i would try
1:44:18 to get like to stay overnight and go to church in a buggy or something and this is pennsylvania
1:44:24 but well actually pennsylvania is the heart of it but actually there are more communities in Ohio
1:44:30 where my brother lives oh look at iowa there’s a lot more happening in new york so the pennsylvania
1:44:35 are the kind of ground zero ground zero but in fact there are bigger more extensive communities
1:44:41 outside of pennsylvania i didn’t realize that yeah the amish and diaspora it is so i’m saying
1:44:45 they literally are just buying up the farmland they’re they’re expanding they’re constantly
1:44:50 expanding they have a very small attrition rate very large families they all are buying farms
1:44:56 and stuff for their for their children and they never sell and so they also don’t even move into
1:45:02 areas as a they have a minimum number of families that we need to move in at once but what did i
1:45:08 learn from then well one of the things that we had particularly when we had younger kids was kind
1:45:14 of technological sabbaticals or Sabbaths i should say and i’ve now seen other families who aren’t
1:45:24 even religious adopt that same thing which is once a week you take a break from either you can
1:45:28 define it however you want it to screen or the keyboard or connectivity or something
1:45:34 and you step back and you do that not because it’s like terrible or poison but because it’s
1:45:38 so good you know there’s lots of people who are kind of like they’re going to drop out from twitter
1:45:42 they’re kind of like oh this is like a toxin like any detox or something i think that’s
1:45:47 entirely the wrong way to think about it is you want to take breaks and it’s not because they’re
1:45:52 toxic but because they’re so good it’s like you want to step back so that you can re-enter it
1:45:59 and with a renewed perspective with a renewed appreciation with having spent time looking
1:46:05 in a different way and i think that kind of rhythm of having sabbaths and then yearly sabbaticals
1:46:11 vacations or whatever retreats and then every seven years or whatever as you take a true sabbatical
1:46:18 i think that kind of rhythmic disconnection or Sabbath i think is very powerful something
1:46:25 that works very well and what’s something that we had in our family i take Saturdays off as it
1:46:30 turns out is my screenless day i really try to make that a weekly occurrence and it’s incredible
1:46:36 the effect that has this sort of galvanizing effect of just a mere 24 hours not even that
1:46:42 if you just consider the waking hours every seven years a vacation or sabbatical of how long
1:46:47 in your case or your family’s case yeah partly because my wife actually is granted a sabbatical
1:46:51 from the company she works for which is Genetech which is one of the two companies that actually
1:46:59 have a official sabbatical for older researchers at least and it’s very meager it’s six weeks
1:47:05 of course you know a six-week sabbatical is basically a european annual vacation
1:47:13 right right left for an american right it’s three years it’s that’s a big thing so yes
1:47:18 so we’re do something different so this year we’re taking one and we’re going to camp in
1:47:23 national parks for one month of it and then the other two weeks will go to asia but we haven’t
1:47:27 been to a lot of the national parks i’m going to do a different kind of project than i haven’t
1:47:32 done before and we’ll do some kind of car camping we haven’t really done a big road trip like that
1:47:37 so it’s all new for us what is the longest in the last few years that you’ve gone without checking
1:47:47 email oh probably two weeks and in china how do you manage that well but it was very easy it was
1:47:54 like i just i was unable to pick it up because china was blocking google that makes it makes it
1:48:00 makes it more challenging and i was in some remote places and so even the connection was hard but
1:48:05 it was like they weren’t playing while letting me get it i’m not a mobile person my first smartphone
1:48:14 was the iphone 5 and i still not using it properly i use it for phone calls yeah i don’t i don’t use
1:48:20 my iphone as an input device either i just trust trust me nuts but i can’t i can’t type when i travel
1:48:25 i like to leave everything i’m i spent a lot of my time sitting in front of a computer i’m kind of
1:48:31 like the zen you know walk walk sit sit don’t wobble so like i’m here i’m like really online
1:48:38 and then when i leave this studio i don’t want to be connected at all and i won’t be and i’m not
1:48:43 checking email i’m not checking this other stuff and i can go days typically i’ll go days without
1:48:50 checking even in the us if i’m traveling and then if i’m overseas i will go probably three or four
1:48:55 days before i get email that’s pretty typical let me shift gears just a little bit i’m looking at
1:49:01 longnow.org i recommend everybody take a look at it the long now foundation and humans are
1:49:06 generally i would say pretty bad at thinking long term certainly when it comes to habit change
1:49:11 very very high failure rate with long term incentives you’re going to get diabetes in 20
1:49:17 years for instance as opposed to you’ll have more sex if you have a six pack when it comes to diet
1:49:21 but the long now foundation i just want to read a few things on this website for people so the
1:49:27 long now foundation was established in 1996 written as zero one nine nine six to creatively
1:49:31 foster long term thinking and responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years then you
1:49:35 have the 10,000 year clock which is a monument scale multi-millennial all mechanical clock is an
1:49:40 icon to long term thinking the rosetta project building an archive of all documented human
1:49:46 languages long bets featured bet is here warren buffet protege partners lc a public arena for
1:49:51 enjoyable competitive predictions of interest to society with philanthropic money at stake and then
1:49:56 revive and restore which is bringing extinct species back to life so there is a lot here
1:50:03 can you explain to people i’ve greatly enjoyed many of the seminars and speeches of the long
1:50:09 now foundation i’m a supporter i suppose i’ve even spoken there on stage and love the email
1:50:15 synopsis that steward sends out what is the function of the long now foundation when what
1:50:23 is the value the long now foundation is kind of reactive it’s it’s reacting to the very inherent
1:50:28 short term bias that our society particularly this technological society particularly say the
1:50:34 silicon valley exhibits which is often a focus on the next quarter the next two quarters the next
1:50:40 year results needing to be immediate you know instant satisfaction if something’s not on
1:50:47 Netflix streaming we don’t even wait for the dvd it’s just fairly kind of very fast paced short
1:50:52 term thinking and also somewhat blinded by the fact that we don’t have a lot of sense of history
1:50:59 either that we’re kind of ignorant about what’s happened in the past and so the term the long
1:51:04 now came from brian you know who noticed that we have a very short now which is like the next
1:51:10 five minutes the last five minutes and so the long now is a way to is an attempt to kind of expand
1:51:17 that so that we as a society and as individuals would try to think about things at a generational
1:51:23 or civilizational scale so like how about like working on something that might take
1:51:29 longer than your own lifetime to accomplish so you start something now that maybe make it so that
1:51:34 it might take like the cathedrals of old and what if we were trying to make something that you know
1:51:43 might need 25 years to accomplish how can we do that so we’re trying to encourage people to think
1:51:50 in that perspective to take that perspective and then to maybe move in that direction we’re not
1:51:55 necessarily saying we have to have like the asimov’s foundation where we have to have like a
1:52:01 master plan for the next 100 years and we’re going to plan out the future no we’re agnostic about what
1:52:08 it is that people make or do we’re just saying that it would benefit thinking about the long
1:52:15 term and i’ve often heard some people who advise to counseling to individuals about kind of thinking
1:52:20 about the long term in their own life even though you might want to act kind of locally and be
1:52:26 spontaneous but you do want to kind of keep in mind the fact that you know you’ll be around for a while
1:52:33 whether it’s putting some savings away or working on a skill that might take some time more than
1:52:39 six months or a year to acquire or you know whatever it is that you can have both perspectives
1:52:44 and so we’re not attempting to get rid of the need for people to survive the need for companies to
1:52:52 have a profit this year we’re saying there can be additional perspectives in addition to that
1:52:58 where we commit to like a program of science research where it’s pure science and the results
1:53:03 of the say in mathematics is one of the most profound things that we can invest in even though
1:53:09 most of the things in the beginning seem to be non-utilitarian they don’t have any purpose but
1:53:15 we know from our own history that you know in 20 years they’ll pay off in some way or other
1:53:24 and so being able to kind of construct a society so that we can allow the rewards of long-term
1:53:31 investment long-term thinking long-term perspective that would make us a better civilization
1:53:39 a month to perhaps jump into some rapid fire questions and they don’t have to even be rapid
1:53:45 or the question just some fire questions the questions will be rapid the answers can be as
1:53:51 shorter as long as you’d like what book or books do you gift or have gifted the most to other people
1:54:01 outside of your own books there is a short graphic novel by daniel pink called junco
1:54:08 and it’s career counsel advice it’s aimed at young people it’s a graphic novel it’s a cartoon
1:54:12 basically and it’s aimed at young people as trying to teach them how to be become indispensable
1:54:20 and i’ve given that away to young people because it’s for me the best summary of again it’s not like
1:54:25 how to become successful it’s how to become indispensable to that’s right it’s uh adventures
1:54:30 of johnny bunko or something like that yeah yeah that’s right that’s right i have that on my bookshelf
1:54:35 back in san francisco in fact yeah if you know a young person who is just starting out hand them
1:54:40 that book it’s very easy for them to read again it’s a graphic novel it’s non-threatening it’s fun
1:54:48 and it’ll give us like five great principles for starting out and helping them kind of orient
1:54:54 themselves as they start working in in the working life for someone who’s facing a lot
1:54:59 of the same questions let’s just say so you have graduates asking the what should i do why am i here
1:55:05 what am i good at if we fast forward to say for the sake of argument mid 30s right people in middle
1:55:10 age hitting that particular point are there any books that you would recommend they read well
1:55:16 there is a book that i’m recommending by cowell newport it’s called so good that can’t ignore you
1:55:24 this changed my mind because i’d kind of bought into the kind of new age california dogma follow
1:55:29 your bliss you know money will follow and he makes a really good argument and convinced me that’s
1:55:38 actually not very good advice that what you really want to do is to master something and to use your
1:55:44 mastering of something as a way to get to your passion so if you start with just passion it’s
1:55:50 sort of paralyzing because and i know this from my own kids they’re 15 they really don’t know
1:55:56 what they’re passionate about i mean some people are lucky enough to know a lot of people aren’t
1:56:00 so this is a book for people who don’t kind of really know what they’re really excellent at
1:56:06 don’t really know what they’re passionate about and his premise is that you master something
1:56:12 almost anything at all just something you master and you use that mastery to kind of move you into
1:56:17 a place where you can begin to have passion and that you kind of keep recycling that the way you
1:56:21 find your passion is through mastery rather than the other way around which is people think that
1:56:26 they’re going to get their mastery through passion and i kind of believe that former you know the
1:56:31 passion would lead to mastery but after thinking about it looking at his examples and his argument
1:56:38 i’m pretty sure that for at least for most people you can get to your passion through mastery
1:56:44 and that would also give you a currency or a lever to use in getting to that point
1:56:49 excellent do you have a favorite fiction book yes i don’t know fantastic this i usually don’t
1:56:57 get one answer this is great yeah shantaram ah shantaram it might take me a way to explain this
1:57:02 as author of one book because it’s very autobiographical the premise of the book and the
1:57:08 author’s life seems so completely incredulous and kind of almost hollywoodish but what
1:57:14 you get from it where it’s set it’s set in india it’s in the slum of india and you get a
1:57:28 incredibly vivid immersive deep and in some ways uplifting view of india and the underworld in
1:57:35 india and at that part of asia and the the main protagonist is this very interesting zen criminal
1:57:43 he’s sort of a coyote trickster blend of someone who is you know he does bad things but at the same
1:57:52 time he’s sorry about it and he has a kind of a cosmic perspective it’s very very unusual but
1:57:57 it’s a long book and i actually recommend if people are going to try it is that you actually
1:58:03 to get the audible version listen to it it runs like you know on and on but to be one of those
1:58:07 books you the you wish will never end and i’ll just tell you the beginning of it which is that
1:58:14 and this is the true part which is that the guy the author became a bank robber in new zealand
1:58:20 he was hooked on drugs started robbing banks was eventually caught and escaped from prison
1:58:24 and made his way to the slums of india where because he had a medical kit he was treated as
1:58:32 a doctor got involved and hooked on drugs in india got involved with the mafia was put in prison
1:58:38 tortured left abandoned nobody knew was even in there started writing a book wrote this book
1:58:44 they ripped it up destroyed it he was recruited found a guru in afghan he was recruited in the
1:58:50 mobile gene was fighting there his entire company was wiped out i mean that’s just the beginning
1:58:56 that’s like the first day it’s really interesting that you would bring up shantram for those people
1:59:03 who haven’t heard of josh waytskin i also had him on this podcast josh was the basis for searching
1:59:09 for bobby fischer the book in the movie world-class chess player also a very deep soulful guy and this
1:59:13 is one of his favorite books as well oh yeah you would you would love josh sometime i’ll have to
1:59:19 put you guys in touch but any favorite documentaries well now you’re you’ve asked the wrong question
1:59:26 because i have a site called true films where for the past 10 years i have reviewed the best
1:59:31 documentaries i actually have a book called true films which is the 200 best documentaries that you
1:59:37 should see before oh my god no kidding wow you have no idea how timely this is so it’s two uh t r u e
1:59:44 films yeah true films okay and so i there are a couple films that i would say have sort of universal
1:59:47 appreciation like you know they may have like a rating of like a hundred on rotten tomatoes or
1:59:53 something so the one documentary that i think everybody that i know have seen it has loved it
1:59:59 is uh man on wire such a good movie right so it’s just it’s just transcendent it’s just a beautiful
2:00:05 movie it’s based on fact that this guy basically he’s going to walk to twin towers i mean he the
2:00:10 moment was he was like 14 year old kid in france was at a dentist’s office looking at the magazine
2:00:15 and saw that they were had plans to build this twin tower in new york and he saw those two twin
2:00:22 towers and he said i need to walk between them he didn’t know how to type walk the towers had not
2:00:28 been built he was already planning this thing and he was filming himself the whole way yeah so amazing
2:00:35 okay and so he doesn’t and how he does is amazing so another great documentary that i love because
2:00:41 it’s very unusual among documentaries and that it films the villain side of the whole thing as well
2:00:46 which is king of kong i haven’t this has been recommended to me that i still have not seen
2:00:54 this movie king of kong is about a guy who becomes the video game arcade game king of kong he becomes
2:01:01 the champion but he is basically competing against this cabal of people who are trying to
2:01:07 subvert him and are doing all kinds of really terrible things to stop which was all on film
2:01:12 yeah and so here’s this really kind of midwest really lovable guy and you’re rooting for him
2:01:18 the whole time while these really sleazy guys are trying to take him down it’s just fantastic
2:01:24 i have to watch that so that’s the second one the third one is one that’s not so well known
2:01:33 it’s called state of mind and it’s about the spectacles in north korea which these two filmmakers
2:01:37 had access to and they followed several different young athletes who were practicing for this
2:01:42 spectacle and in these spectacles of course what it is is people are pixels you know they have these
2:01:47 like huge stadium size things and they’re like a little robot so they’re cogs in this machine
2:01:52 which is like perfect so you can imagine like a picture that’s made up of pixels but every
2:01:56 pixel is actually there’s a little boy or girl holding up a card colored cards in sequence
2:02:02 so these things move which means that you know there’s not a pixel missing so i mean that nobody’s
2:02:06 sick is like you know this you’re not allowed to be sick you can’t make a mistake at all
2:02:16 and it’s getting inside of north korea which turns out to be a nationwide cult and i think that in
2:02:20 50 years when they’re gone nobody will believe that that was even possible and this documentary
2:02:25 will be here it’s like no no no they really was a nationwide cult and they really did believe this
2:02:30 it really is amazing just to see what’s going on there all right well i know what i’m doing for
2:02:35 the next few days next few evenings i could go on unfortunately because i have a lot of them but go
2:02:42 to the truth i only review ones that are great so i don’t do awesome i just say these are fantastic
2:02:46 oh man all right i’ve been looking for this i cannot believe that i’m only learning this now
2:02:51 i’m kind of embarrassed about that when you think of the word or hear the word successful who’s the
2:02:58 first person who comes to mind jesus all right why would you say that well there aren’t that many
2:03:05 people who’ve left their mark on as many people in the world as he has i think what he was up to
2:03:15 what he was doing is you know vastly been twisted misunderstood whatever word you want but nonetheless
2:03:21 what’s remarkable is and here’s the guy who didn’t write anything so i think success is
2:03:27 also overrated all right i’d love for you to elaborate on that greatness is overrated a lot
2:03:32 of you know i mentioned big numbers which is but it’s more of the impact that you had on people’s
2:03:40 lives but i think we tend to have an image of success that’s somewhat been skewed by you know our
2:03:45 current media it’s like our sense of beauty women it’s sort of like in terms of all possibilities
2:03:50 it’s in a very small narrow defined it’s all kind of ritualistic in a certain sense and i think our
2:03:57 idea of success is often today it means you know somebody who has a lot of money or who has a lot
2:04:03 of fame or who has some of these other trappings which we have assigned but i think can be successful
2:04:10 in by being true to and kind of being the most you that you could possibly be and i think that’s
2:04:16 what i think of as one of the things that jesus whether you take him as just a historical character
2:04:22 or anything beyond was about he certainly wasn’t imitating anybody me put that way the great
2:04:27 temptation that people have is they want to be someone else which is basically they want to be
2:04:31 in someone else’s movie you know they want to be the best rock star and there’s so many of those
2:04:37 already that you can only one up imitating somebody in that in that slot and i think to me the success
2:04:44 is like you make your own slot you have a new slot that didn’t exist before and i think you know
2:04:47 that’s of course what jesus and many others were doing but it was they were kind of making a new
2:04:54 slot and that’s really hard to do but i think that’s what i chalk up as success is you made
2:05:00 a new slot what is your new slot yeah you knew you knew that was coming who says i’m successful
2:05:08 well i’m not i’m trying to not make any assumptions here yeah or what would be your slot my slot would
2:05:15 be kevin kelly i mean that’s the whole thing it’s not going to be like a career or you would really
2:05:20 ideally be something that was you had no no imitators i mean you would be who you are and
2:05:26 that’s that is success actually in some senses is you didn’t imitate anybody no one else imitated
2:05:31 you afterwards right so you know in a certain sense you have if you become an adjective that’s
2:05:37 a good sign right so i think success is actually you kind of make your own path if they’re calling
2:05:42 you a successful entrepreneur then to me that’s not the best kind of success because you’re being
2:05:48 confined to the category right right you’re in a category if you could change one thing about
2:05:56 yourself what would it be i could sing ah you would like to sing yeah i seemed to be unable to
2:06:02 carry a tune i can’t remember i mean my wife can hear something once and she can just sing it back
2:06:07 i could hear the same song i have heard the same song and i couldn’t tell you three notes of it i’m
2:06:13 sure because i’m a tim ferris fan i’m sure i could train myself to eat that i know i could but i i
2:06:18 guess i haven’t and it would be something that i have to really work at and i haven’t but i have
2:06:25 trouble carrying a tune staying in tune remembering a tune i love music and i appreciate it but in
2:06:31 terms of actually singing and i don’t play an instrument so maybe i would say it feels a little
2:06:35 easier for me there would be something nice have you taken lessons or attempted to take lessons
2:06:42 no i got it what’s this so just in the spirit of trade i’ve recently started exploring hand drumming
2:06:49 with gembeys and different types of drums if anyone out there can get me a pan art hang i would
2:06:53 really love to hear from you those of you that will mean nothing to most people are hearing this
2:06:59 the research that has piqued my curiosity most recently and of course you don’t want to run out
2:07:05 and just start swallowing these things but there’s a common anti epilepsy drug called valproate
2:07:13 which apparently has some implications for opening a window for achieving perfect pitch in mature
2:07:17 adults very fascinating stuff so if i do any experiments with that i will i will certainly
2:07:22 report back well and now that you’ve talked about it not the drug part but i did remember i did take
2:07:27 one class you mentioned the drums it took a one class at an adult summer camp which i highly
2:07:33 recommend if your kids go to camp you should go with them and there was a steel drum oh cool
2:07:38 course and i love that so like you i think if i did take up an instrument it would be drums of
2:07:43 some sort because that i seem to respond to and that did pretty good for the intro course on
2:07:51 steel drumming i find percussion to be so primal it just satisfies some type of need that probably
2:07:57 predates yes verbal communication even yeah certainly written notes right is your inner cave
2:08:02 man just responding are there any particular let’s just say in the first two hours of your day any
2:08:10 particular morning rituals or habits you have that when performed consistently you find produce
2:08:17 better days for you and i’m leaving better days undefined on purpose but i love studying mornings
2:08:22 and or what people do when they wake up what time do you wake up are there any particular
2:08:28 habits or rituals that you find contribute to better days yeah yeah i’m a very good sleeper i
2:08:35 don’t sleep a lot these days i get up at seven thirty and i have some rituals but i i don’t
2:08:40 vary them enough maybe to to know whether they are i’m not a morning person okay to begin with
2:08:44 you’re not a morning person well i mean well the fact that you don’t vary them is perfect so
2:08:49 well i know but that means an artist is only optimized in any way or i can’t tell which is
2:08:55 better but for better or worse one of the first things i do is i read the paper version of the
2:09:02 new york times it’s a kind of like a i sort of what i call a guilty pleasure i don’t know whether
2:09:08 that makes me better at anything else i do but um i don’t drink coffee or anything this is sort of
2:09:14 it’s a ritual and when i’m not here i don’t read it so i was like i don’t miss it it’s kind of
2:09:19 right curious but like if i’m here it’s like i gotta do it i don’t know it’s kind of weird
2:09:23 is that immediately after waking you read the paper or is there anything just about just about
2:09:29 i kind of in my pajamas i walk out to the front gate and i pick it up and i read it i mean and
2:09:36 i don’t read all of it i just kind of go through and i usually don’t even read the news part i read
2:09:42 the slower stuff i don’t make sure why now that you’re asking and that’s it that’s the entire
2:09:47 ritual i don’t have the same thing for breakfast or anything like that it’s just that morning hit
2:09:53 do you do anything throughout your day regularly maybe it’s before bed or anything else that most
2:10:01 other people probably don’t do that’s a good question no really okay i have no special sauce
2:10:08 but you’re very consistent you don’t your days seem to be yeah they don’t vary very wildly so
2:10:12 that in and of itself might be something that a lot of people don’t okay let’s pick up two different
2:10:19 while i’m here in this studio i have a lot of control over my time so what i do during the day
2:10:25 is is greatly varied i’ll i do a lots of things for short amounts of times and you know go into my
2:10:30 workshop i’ll read actually read books it down and read books during the middle of the day i’ll go
2:10:35 i’ll do a hike and bring my camera out almost every day maybe that is something that most people
2:10:40 don’t do is probably they probably aren’t taking pictures with a camera every day more reading books
2:10:44 in the middle of the day for that matter right exactly well maybe that’s true i guess how do you
2:10:49 choose your books ah that’s a paradox of choice problem for a lot of for a lot of people it is
2:10:53 just like what are you gonna listen to next in music i think the music becomes free and everybody
2:10:57 has all the music in the world but deciding where you’re going to listen to becomes the thing you’ll
2:11:01 pay for this has been my prediction about amazon is that we’re soon going to have like any book
2:11:08 you want for free amazon prime digital version of it you can have it whenever you want but you’ll
2:11:13 pay for us for the recommendations and um that’s a good point that’s a great point i have a network
2:11:19 of friends and i listen to lots of podcasts so i get it from all over the place and like probably
2:11:25 you are at this point i long ago decided that in terms of the greater scheme of things the cost of
2:11:31 books really cheap and if i wanted a book i would buy it right and the result is i am right now
2:11:40 speaking in a two-story high library of books that i have and i don’t do the same with digital books
2:11:44 because i finally figured out that oh you know if i purchase a digital book before i’m reading it
2:11:48 it’s not going anywhere it’s just sitting there so i shouldn’t really purchase a digital book until
2:11:53 like five seconds before i’m going to read it i have exactly the opposite habit because right
2:11:58 because it’s like what is this there the whole point of kindle is that you don’t have to have it
2:12:03 until like you need it so on the digital books i don’t buy anything until like i’m seconds away
2:12:10 from reading it then i’ll get it but the paper books i was near to the point of actually digitizing
2:12:17 and getting rid of all my paper books i was that close about five years ago but then i had an epiphany
2:12:23 i went to the private library and i realized that books were never as cheap as they are today
2:12:28 and they never will be as cheap and that there’s some power about having these things in paper
2:12:37 always available no batteries you know never obsolete and that if you made a library now
2:12:40 you would never be able to make some of these libraries in 50 years and so i decided to
2:12:47 keep and to kind of cultivate this paper library that’s something that was going to be very powerful
2:12:52 in the future i like that or at least i can use it as a justification for keeping a lot of paper
2:13:00 books around exactly i get tips from books from podcasts from blogs from friends from amazon
2:13:05 recommendations anywhere and whenever i hear someone recommend a book i’ll go and check
2:13:11 it out and then i’m fairly free in buying it but which means that i read a lot of really mediocre
2:13:18 books what but that’s part of my job right that’s in cool tools the book that we were just talking
2:13:24 about which is this catalog of possibilities that i self-published that has oh i don’t know 1500 you
2:13:28 know maybe there’s a couple hundred books that i recommended but i probably read thousands and
2:13:34 thousands and thousands of books in order to select those so i see part of my job reading
2:13:40 through and i read a lot of how-to books most of the books i’m reading is nonfiction and a lot of it
2:13:46 is even instructional stuff on you know how to build a stone wall how to do origami how to send
2:13:51 a satellite a micro satellite into space whatever it is it doesn’t matter i’ll look at it and i’ve
2:13:57 seen tens of thousands if not fifty thousand how-to books over my lifetime i can spot a really good
2:14:02 one but still i’ll read through the other ones so that someone else doesn’t have to and i can
2:14:07 recommend saying this is the best book on building a tiny house if you want to build a tiny house
2:14:11 now do you when you read these books on origami or stone vault you follow through
2:14:16 and attempt these projects or are you evaluating it purely based on your
2:14:22 amassed experience of reading lots of these types of instructional books no actually so
2:14:26 maybe one of the other things that i don’t do every day but one of the things i do in general
2:14:32 that maybe everyone else is not doing is that i have like a thousand hobbies i dabble in things
2:14:40 so i have built stone walls more than one i have done origami i have made beer i have made wine i have
2:14:46 you know whatever it is i i’ve tried to do these things in my life and i continued to try and do
2:14:51 them i have homeschooled ways so i have and so as much as possible this is what my you know i was
2:14:57 talking before about my day it’s irregular in a sense that i’m here and i have things but i’m
2:15:03 doing new things and i’m reading new things all the time so i’m in my outside i’m you know i’ll
2:15:12 make a go card or we’ll do something that i haven’t done before and that’s the basis for helping
2:15:16 decide about these books i don’t have to be an expert in them but i can know enough to tell
2:15:22 whether or not the information they’re telling me is useful what odd project over the last year
2:15:28 has been the most fun let’s start there for you yeah well just the last couple of months i finally
2:15:35 built myself a real workshop i wish i could show it to you because the cool things i did it was you
2:15:42 know if you go into like u-line or somewhere this container businesses they have these racks of bins
2:15:49 so i have filled an entire wall of hundreds and hundreds of bins so i can organize stuff and i’m
2:15:54 a big fan of adam savage he has a principle for his workshops called first order access which
2:15:59 basically means that you don’t want to store things behind anything everything has to be at
2:16:03 the first level so you can look and see it it has to be within reach and sense you have to be able
2:16:08 to see everything that you have and it’s accessible you don’t want things hidden behind other things
2:16:15 right so that’s part of what i was doing with this workshop is this kind of first order access
2:16:21 and it’s tremendously powerful i mean i just the few days or the weeks i’ve had working in it it’s
2:16:27 just transforms everything it’s like i had the same problem with my books for many many years i had
2:16:32 books like multiple different bookshelves in the house i had them in boxes i had them this and that
2:16:38 and moving everything to one location into a library where there was two stories i could
2:16:44 see all my books just transformed them and made it really useful because i could find them just
2:16:49 really go and reach for them and the same thing with i’m finding bringing it to my tools which
2:16:57 is that you want to have things plugged in ready to go labeled organized first order access and it
2:17:01 can make simple jobs really simple instead of like the you know the hours of looking for something
2:17:06 right gathering all the tools getting all the tools like cooking it’s just like cooking exactly
2:17:11 yeah it’s having like a manual random access memory right you have your me some plus right in
2:17:16 front of you yeah you have or you know the tools are yeah that’s very cool if there were one object
2:17:23 manual project building something that you think every human should have the experience of doing
2:17:29 what would that be it’s very easy you need to build your own house much older and it’s not that hard
2:17:34 to do believe me i actually i built my own house and your house is amazing i know not not this house
2:17:39 i mean i actually built one from cutting down the logs cutting down the trees in upstate new york
2:17:44 wow and doing the stone herds and you know i mean unfortunately i don’t recommend this we
2:17:50 made like two by fours from trees you don’t want to do that because it’s a pain because you know
2:17:54 standard standard lumber is very it’s very good if your things are off a little quarter of an inch
2:18:00 as they are with rough um sawing lumber it’s just it’s a mess but nonetheless a large portion of
2:18:06 the people in the world have made their own homes adobe rammed earth bamboo whatever it is and like
2:18:10 going back to what we originally started off with um even if you don’t wind up living in it
2:18:18 it’s empowering to know that you can do it and if you do wind up living in it i have a friend lord
2:18:24 conne who built this magnificent place in belinus that he built with salvage material from scratch
2:18:30 over the many years it gives you the power to alter it so i believe that that your house should
2:18:35 be an extension of you that that really definitely it’s another projection it’s another way of and
2:18:40 also going back to what we’re talking about it’s another way to discover who you are and discover
2:18:46 what you’re good at and because a well-designed house should really reflect you and and what i’ve
2:18:50 discovered a lot of people design houses and they have this kind of imaginary fantasy idea about
2:18:55 themselves and what they’re going to do well you know whatever it is they’re going to have a swimming
2:18:59 pool well you know it’s like they’re never going to use a swimming pool whatever it is i mean very
2:19:03 few people actually have a very good sense of who they are and what they’re going to use something
2:19:11 for but if you really study yourself and really are honest and design something that space can help
2:19:17 you become successful in the sense of making a slot for you making your own slot and it’s another
2:19:24 it’s both a kind of byproduct of who you are and also can help you because you are it works both
2:19:29 ways i like that right you’re not just finding yourself you’re creating yourself exactly and
2:19:34 that so this is a larger philosophical question but this is something i talk about a lot in a very
2:19:40 high dimensional space which means like space of many pending possibilities the act of finding and
2:19:46 the act of creating are identical there is no difference between discovering something and
2:19:53 inventing something we could say that philosophically you know benjamin franklin invented electricity
2:20:01 we could say that christopher columbus invented america we could say that discovery and invention
2:20:07 are the same so that discovering yourself and inventing yourself is really the same things
2:20:13 will bring about that process you have to do both at once i really enjoy that last question
2:20:22 if you could give your let’s say you can pick the age either 15 or 20 year old self one or a few
2:20:28 pieces of advice what would they be you don’t have to do everything yourself you can hire people
2:20:37 to do stuff i wish i had known that when i was younger i wish that i had when i was 20 working
2:20:42 for hall of catalog i wish i’d known that i could have hired a programmer to do something i could
2:20:48 have hired someone it took me a long time to understand that and then recently i’ve been really
2:20:54 big on it hiring people through elance you know because i came from a little bit of kind of a
2:21:00 do-it-yourself i mean i made a nature museum when i was 12 at a chemistry lab they built myself
2:21:05 you know building the stuff and i could buy in the glassware but i had a whole chemistry lab i had
2:21:10 nature museums i did all the stuff and i did it myself and then of course and moving into the
2:21:15 whole earth catalog which was a kind of a do-it-yourself thing i really was um you know i just talked
2:21:22 about building my own house well now i will hire professionals to work and it just took me a long
2:21:28 time to realize that there’s something about being able to pay a professional to do what they do
2:21:35 really well it’s not like a weakness it’s like it helps them i’m happy they’re happy we’re all happy
2:21:40 and i can do a lot more now there’s certainly a pleasure in doing things yourself and dabbling
2:21:44 in but there’s also this other thing which i didn’t realize which is there’s there’s this
2:21:54 a leverage that you get by hiring people who are really good paying them fairly working with them
2:21:59 to amplify what it is that you want to do and i wish i knew that when i was younger
2:22:04 that’s a fantastic answer and you have if i remember correctly an assistant and a researcher
2:22:10 is that is that still true yes one and the same person oh they are the same okay yeah so i thought
2:22:14 that at one point you had believed that you needed those people to be two separate people but you
2:22:19 right here’s what i was saying was that it’s very unusual to find one person who can do both of
2:22:25 those tasks both of those tasks are often not found the same person because there’s you know the
2:22:34 hunting the researching the kind of there’s a hunter aspect to research that is often found in a
2:22:40 certain personality and then they’re kind of the the admin is more nurturing kind of making sure
2:22:47 of things gardening a little bit so it’s often rare to find someone who can do both but it’s
2:22:53 possible was it luck that you happened upon this particular individual that you work with now or
2:23:00 did you have a method i found that the place where i found that over the 14 years i’ve had two
2:23:07 the place where i found that they’re more likely than not to have a combination was librarians
2:23:14 i love it that’s fantastic so we put out notices on the librarian mailing lists and stuff that is
2:23:19 fantastic i said last question this will be the last question is there any other thoughts or advice
2:23:25 you’d like to leave with the listeners and then where would you like people to find more from you
2:23:31 your writing anywhere else i would say congratulations to the people who are listening to the podcast i
2:23:37 think podcasts are this fantastic new medium i’m spending a lot of time there i think it’s just
2:23:43 really great we’re in the early days of where this would go i’m really impressed by the power
2:23:49 of this medium to teach and to inform sometimes to entertain again i’m thankful to you tim for
2:23:53 having me on and having a chance to gab here but the people who are listening i think keep going
2:23:58 listen to more podcasts try to go wide i know tim mentions them here and there take a chance
2:24:04 listen to some more so that’s one thing i would say and as far as finding out more about me
2:24:12 i lucked out with a very easy mail and website it’s my initials kkk.org i have a very public
2:24:18 email for the past 25 years you can find it very easily on my website if you want to email directly
2:24:26 i have not outsourced that unlike other people that i know and my writings and books and whatnot
2:24:35 are at www.kk.org cooltools is a book that i really believe that each of you out there should have
2:24:43 it’s on paper it’s sort of the best of the website cooltools which has been going on for 11 years now
2:24:50 where we review every day one great tool there are only positive reviews wide waste of time on
2:24:56 anything but the best and tools in the broadest sense of the word of things that are useful
2:25:03 whether it’s elance or a book on how to do psychedelics or a book on how to build a workshop
2:25:08 or how to build a house or how to hitchhike around the world i and others recommend the best here
2:25:15 with some great context and it’s printed on paper or available on amazon not so easily found in
2:25:20 bookstores because it’s because it’s huge i mean it’s like it’s like five pounds waste it’s really
2:25:24 really big and if you don’t fly like 500 things in there you didn’t know about that you wish you knew
2:25:30 about like last year i’ll give you your money back so enjoy that so that’s that cool tools or cool
2:25:35 tools in amazon excellent well kevin this has been a blast it always is every time we chat i feel
2:25:40 like we should chat more so hopefully we’ll get a chance to spend some more time together soon
2:25:47 back in norcal or somewhere else in china or in china it’s been a long time i could get back
2:25:53 i’m ready i’m heading back to japan again and i know that you have lots of roots in in asia but um
2:26:00 i go there to renew my sense of the future because they are bulldozing the past as fast as it can
2:26:05 and we’re headed racing into the future and so i want to see what asia has in store for us because
2:26:13 mathematically we don’t count anymore you know what three billion three billion asians and you
2:26:20 know 300 million americans what can you say yes it’s right so study up folks yep specialization
2:26:25 is for insects i think that was a timeline so i like enjoy your time on this planet and look
2:26:31 broadly like kevin said kevin thank you so much i will talk to you soon and uh have a wonderful
2:26:37 day i will talk to you soon thanks for having me too okay bye bye hey guys this is tim again just
2:26:42 one more thing before you take off and that is five bullet friday would you enjoy getting a
2:26:47 short email from me every friday that provides a little fun before the weekend between one and a
2:26:52 half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter my super short newsletter called five
2:26:59 bullet friday easy to sign up easy to cancel it is basically a half page that i send out every
2:27:04 friday to share the coolest things i found or discovered or have started exploring over that
2:27:09 week it’s kind of like my diary of cool things it often includes articles i’m reading books i’m reading
2:27:16 albums perhaps gadgets gizmos all sorts of tech tricks and so on they get sent to me by my friends
2:27:22 including a lot of podcast guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field
2:27:28 and then i test them and then i share them with you so if that sounds fun again it’s very short
2:27:33 a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend something to think about
2:27:40 if you’d like to try it out just go to tim.blog/friday type that into your browser tim.blog/friday
2:27:45 drop in your email and you’ll get the very next one thanks for listening this episode is brought
2:27:50 to you by helix sleep helix sleep is a premium mattress brand that provides tailored mattresses
2:27:55 based on your sleep preferences their lineup includes 14 unique mattresses including a collection
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2:30:06 better sleep starts now this episode is brought to you by ag1 the daily foundational nutritional
2:30:12 supplement that supports whole body health i view ag1 as comprehensive nutritional insurance and that
2:30:19 is nothing new i actually recommended ag1 in my 2010 best seller more than a decade ago the four
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2:30:32 nutritionally dense supplement that you could use conveniently while on the run which is for me a lot
2:30:37 of the time i have been using it a very very long time indeed and i do get asked a lot what i would
2:30:43 take if i could only take one supplement and the true answer is invariably ag1 it simply covers a
2:30:48 ton of bases i usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me
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2:31:19 how many ingredients 75 and you would be hard-pressed to find a more nutrient dense formula on the
2:31:25 market it has multivitamin multi-mineral superfood complex probiotics and prebiotics for gut health
2:31:31 and antioxidant immune support formula digestive enzymes and adaptogens to help manage stress
2:31:39 now i do my best always to eat nutrient dense meals that is the basic basic basic basic requirement
2:31:43 right that is why things are called supplements of course that’s what i focus on but it is not
2:31:50 always possible it is not always easy so part of my routine is using ag1 daily if i’m on the road
2:31:56 on the run it just makes it easy to get a lot of nutrients at once and to sleep easy knowing
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2:33:00 [BLANK_AUDIO]
0:00:11 whole body health. I view AG1 as comprehensive nutritional insurance and that is nothing new.
0:00:18 I actually recommended AG1 in my 2010 best seller more than a decade ago, the 4-hour body,
0:00:24 and I did not get paid to do so. I simply loved the product and felt like it was the ultimate
0:00:29 nutritionally dense supplement that you could use conveniently while on the run, which is,
0:00:34 for me, a lot of the time. I have been using it a very, very long time indeed, and I do get asked
0:00:40 a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement, and the true answer is invariably AG1.
0:00:45 It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel
0:00:52 packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? What is this stuff? AG1 is a science-driven formulation
0:00:57 of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food-sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you
0:01:04 support for the brain, gut, and immune system. Since 2010, they have improved the formula 52 times
0:01:09 in pursuit of making the best foundational nutrition supplement possible using rigorous
0:01:15 standards and high-quality ingredients. How many ingredients? 75. And you would be hard-pressed
0:01:20 to find a more nutrient-dense formula on the market. It has a multivitamin, multi-mineral
0:01:26 superfood complex, probiotics and prebiotics for gut health, and antioxidant immune support formula
0:01:32 digestive enzymes and adaptogens to help manage stress. Now, I do my best, always, to eat nutrient
0:01:39 dense meals. That is the basic, basic, basic requirement. That is why things are called supplements.
0:01:44 Of course, that’s what I focus on, but it is not always possible. It is not always easy,
0:01:51 so part of my routine is using AG1 daily. If I’m on the road, on the run, it just makes it easy to
0:01:56 get a lot of nutrients at once and to sleep easy knowing that I am checking a lot of important
0:02:02 boxes. So, each morning, AG1. That’s just like brushing my teeth, part of the routine. It’s also
0:02:08 NSF-certified for sports, so professional athletes trust it to be safe. And each pouch of AG1 contains
0:02:14 exactly what is on the label, does not contain harmful levels of microbes or heavy metals,
0:02:20 and is free of 280-band substances. It’s the ultimate nutritional supplement in one easy scoop.
0:02:25 So, take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of
0:02:31 vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So, learn more,
0:02:41 check it out. Go to drinkag1.com/tim. That’s drinkag1, the number one. Drinkag1.com/tim.
0:02:46 Last time, drinkag1.com/tim. Check it out.
0:02:54 This episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep is a premium mattress brand that
0:02:59 provides tailored mattresses based on your sleep preferences. Their lineup includes 14 unique mattresses,
0:03:03 including a collection of luxury models, a mattress for big and tall sleepers. That’s not me.
0:03:08 And even a mattress made specifically for kids. They have models with memory foam layers to provide
0:03:13 optimal pressure relief if you sleep on your side, as I often do and did last night on one of their
0:03:18 beds. Models with more responsive foam to cradle your body for essential support in stomach and
0:03:22 back sleeping positions and on and on. They have you covered. So, how will you know which
0:03:28 Helix mattress works best for you and your body? Take the Helix Sleep Quiz at helixsleep.com/tim
0:03:33 and find your perfect mattress in less than two minutes. Personally, for the last few years,
0:03:38 I’ve been sleeping on a Helix Midnight Luxe mattress. I also have one of those in the guest
0:03:44 bedroom. And feedback from friends has always been fantastic. They frequently say it’s the best
0:03:48 night of sleep they’ve had in ages. It’s something they comment on without any prompting from me
0:03:53 whatsoever. Helix mattresses are American made and come with a 10 or 15 year warranty,
0:03:57 depending on the model. Your mattress will be shipped straight to your door free of charge.
0:04:01 And there’s no better way to test out a new mattress than by sleeping on it in your own home.
0:04:05 That’s why they offer a 100 night risk free trial. If you decide it’s not the best fit,
0:04:10 you’re welcome to return it for a full refund. Helix has been awarded number one mattress by both
0:04:16 GQ and Wired magazines. And now Helix has harnessed years of extensive mattress expertise to bring
0:04:22 you a truly elevated sleep experience. Their newest collection of mattresses called Helix Elite
0:04:27 includes six different mattress models, each tailored for specific sleep positions
0:04:32 and firmness preferences. So you can get exactly what your body needs. Each Helix Elite mattress
0:04:37 comes with an extra layer of foam for pressure relief and thousands of extra microcoils for
0:04:42 best in class support and durability. Every Helix Elite mattress also comes with a 15 year
0:04:48 manufacturers warranty and the same 100 night trial as the rest of Helix’s mattresses. And
0:04:55 you, my dear listeners, can get between 25 and 30% off plus two free pillows on all mattress orders.
0:05:03 So go to helixsleep.com/tim to check it out. That’s helixsleep.com/tim. With Helix,
0:05:10 better sleep starts now. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands
0:05:34 start shaking. Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another
0:05:38 episode of the Tim Ferriss Show where it is my job to sit down with world-class performers
0:05:43 from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, and so on that
0:05:49 you can apply and test in your own lives. This episode is a two for one and that’s because the
0:05:55 podcast recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about, and past 1 billion
0:06:01 downloads. To celebrate, I’ve curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites
0:06:07 from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited to give you these super
0:06:13 combo episodes and internally we’ve been calling these the super combo episodes because my goal
0:06:18 is to encourage you to yes, enjoy the household names, the super famous folks, but to also introduce
0:06:24 you to lesser known people I consider stars. These are people who have transformed my life
0:06:30 and I feel like they can do the same for many of you. Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle,
0:06:35 perhaps you missed an episode. Just trust me on this one, we went to great pains to put these
0:06:44 pairings together. And for the bios of all guests, you can find that and more at tim.log/combo.
0:06:48 And now, without further ado, please enjoy and thank you for listening.
0:06:57 First up, Derek Sivers, former musician, programmer, Ted Speaker, and Circus Clown,
0:07:04 who sold his first company, CD Baby, for $22 million and gave all the money to charity,
0:07:09 and author of books on philosophy and entrepreneurship, including How to Live,
0:07:19 Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want, and Useful Not True. You can find Derek on Twitter @Sivers.
0:07:27 I was 18 years old and all I wanted in my whole life was to be a professional musician. I mean,
0:07:32 ideally a rock star, yeah, but if I was just making my living doing music, that was the goal.
0:07:37 So I’m 18 years old, I’m living in Boston, I’m going to Berkeley College of Music,
0:07:44 and I’m in this band where the bass player one day in rehearsal says, “Hey man, my agent just
0:07:52 offered me a gig that’s like $75 to play at a pig show in Vermont.” He rolls his eyes and he’s like,
0:07:59 “I’m not gonna do it, do you want the gig?” I’m like, “Fuck yeah, a paying gig? Oh my god, yes.”
0:08:06 So I took the gig to go up to Burlington, Vermont, and I think it was like a $58 round trip
0:08:10 bus ticket. And I get to this pig show in Vermont, I strap my acoustic guitar on,
0:08:16 and I walk around a pig show playing music, and did that for like three hours, got on the bus home,
0:08:22 and the next day the booking agent called me up and said, “Hey, so yeah, you did a really good
0:08:26 job at the pig show, we got good reports there. Wondering if you can come play at an art opening
0:08:31 in Western Massachusetts. I’ll pay you $75 again.” “Yeah, sure, so same thing.” I took, you know,
0:08:36 like a $60 bus out to Western Massachusetts, got $75 bucks for playing at an art opening,
0:08:42 and the agent was there and he was impressed, and so he said, “Hey look, I’ve got this circus,
0:08:46 and the previous musician just quit, so we really need somebody new, and I really like what you’re
0:08:52 doing, so there’s about three gigs a week I can pay you $75 a gig. They’re usually Friday, Saturday,
0:08:58 Sunday. Do you want the gig?” I said, “Hell yeah, I’m a professional musician now, this is amazing.”
0:09:02 So I said yes to everything, which is going to come up later, you know, with the hell yeah or no
0:09:06 thing, but I think it’s really smart to switch strategies. But when you’re earlier in your career,
0:09:11 I think the best strategy is you just say yes to everything, every piddly little gig. You just
0:09:17 never know what are the lottery tickets, so this one ended up being a real lottery ticket for me,
0:09:22 because as soon as I joined the circus, again I’m 18, I had no stage experience,
0:09:29 and after a few gigs they said, “Hey, so the previous musician used to go out and open the show
0:09:32 with this big theme song and get everybody up and dancing. Could you do that?” And I said, “Yeah,
0:09:37 sure.” And another gig or two later they said, “Hey, the previous musician used to close the show
0:09:40 also with that theme song. Could you do that?” I said, “Yeah, sure.” And then it was,
0:09:46 “The previous musician used to go out in between every act and like get the audience to applaud and
0:09:51 thank them and introduce the next act. Do you think you could do that?” I said, “Yeah, sure.”
0:09:56 And I was really bad at it at first, but I got good eventually. I became like the ringleader
0:10:00 emcee of this whole circus, and I was 18 years old, so if you were to go to the circus,
0:10:07 it would have looked like my show. And I did that for 10 years from the age of 18 to 28.
0:10:12 I did over a thousand shows, and eventually, by the way, got paid more than 75 bucks. Eventually,
0:10:17 I was getting like 300 bucks a show, and it became my full-time living, and I even bought a house
0:10:21 with the money I made playing with the circus. And then that led to all kinds of other things.
0:10:29 And so just so many huge opportunities and 10 years of stage experience came from that one
0:10:34 piddly little pig show that I said yes to this little thing. So, yeah, the only reason I stopped
0:10:39 doing the circus is when CD Baby started taking over my life, and I had to start turning down
0:10:45 circus gigs. But yeah, that was my life for 10 years. What did you learn that made you better?
0:10:53 What were the lessons learned that made the biggest difference in your performance as this emcee?
0:10:57 What were the biggest mistakes that you made early on that you corrected? Either one’s fine.
0:11:00 Yeah, it’s kind of the same answer is that at first, I was too
0:11:08 self-conscious because I thought it was about me. Like, I was going up on stage thinking that the
0:11:15 audience was somehow judging me, Derek Sivers, as if I mattered, you know? So, I would get self-conscious
0:11:24 what they thought of me. And eventually, and I think it took maybe like 10 or 20 gigs. The
0:11:29 circus was run by a husband and wife team, and Tarleton was the name of the wife. She was the one
0:11:34 really kind of out on the gigs and leading the circus. The husband was more the booking agent.
0:11:41 And she’s the one that like single-handedly gave me my confidence that I have today. Like,
0:11:45 sometimes when people ask me why am I so confident, it’s like that’s because of Tarleton.
0:11:50 That’s a longer story we get into. But anyway, Tarleton is the one that she just kept pushing
0:11:54 me from backstage. It’s like, come on, you’re up there acting like David Letterman. Like,
0:11:59 don’t do this whole kind of, ah, yeah, I’m so cool. All right, everybody, here’s the next
0:12:04 act. Like, I think I was trying to be cool because I thought that people were judging me,
0:12:09 right? And she said, these people came here for a show. Go give them what they came here for.
0:12:15 And so one time I decided to go out there and just be over the top ridiculous. I went on stage
0:12:18 and I said, ladies and gentlemen, what you’re about to see is one of the most amazing things,
0:12:21 you know, we have an elephant that is going to be coming from backstage. And I did this whole like
0:12:27 thing in the fast talking voice and real like pizzazz to it. And the audience loved it. And I
0:12:33 came backstage and she said, there you go. That’s what people come to the circus for. So
0:12:39 now that I’ve been on stage, you know, thousands of times, this really sunk in that you get on
0:12:44 stage to give the audience what they came there for. Or even things like this, this interview
0:12:49 we’re doing, this isn’t necessarily for you or me, we could just hang up the phone and talk,
0:12:54 we don’t need to, is, but we’re doing this for the listeners. So we’re going to give them
0:12:59 something that’s useful to them. This isn’t about me. This isn’t about you. This is about them.
0:13:05 So that was the biggest lesson learned. Luckily, I learned that early on when I was 18, 19 and yeah.
0:13:12 Seems like most of my friends who are what most people would consider successful in various
0:13:22 respects can trace their confidence back to either or both end a specific woman and a specific coach
0:13:28 or mentor of some type. It always comes down to one or both of those.
0:13:32 Oh, Tim, you know, I’ve never told you about Kimo Williams.
0:13:35 It’s a great name and I want to learn more. No, I don’t know anything about.
0:13:39 This is so up your alley. I can’t believe I’ve never told you this. Okay.
0:13:43 Thanks for prodding me. I mean, he prompted me with that because you’re right.
0:13:50 It was a gorgeous woman, Tarleton, and it was a music teacher, Kimo Williams, that he, but see,
0:13:55 he changed my life a year or two before I met her. Okay, so imagine this. I’m 17 years old now.
0:14:00 I’m living in suburban Chicago and I decided to go to Berkeley College of Music because I want to
0:14:07 be a famous musician. And just like two or three months before I’m supposed to go, I see an ad in
0:14:12 the local Chicago Tribune for music type setting. And I’m wondering like how much sheet music I’m
0:14:16 going to have to be writing. So I call up this classified ad in the paper and I say,
0:14:19 “Can I ask you some questions about music type setting?” And he said, “Sure, well, why do you
0:14:23 want to know?” And I said, “Because I’m about to go off to Berkeley College of Music in a couple
0:14:28 months.” And he said, “Oh, really?” He said, “I used to teach at Berkeley College of Music.” I said,
0:14:34 “You did? Do you think you can give me some tips?” He said, “Yeah, here’s my address. Come to my studio
0:14:39 at 9 a.m. Thursday morning. See you then.” So, and he lived like way downtown Chicago in an area
0:14:47 I’ve never been to. And I’m going to do a little foreshadowing of the story right now because
0:14:52 when I got married years later to the woman I met when I was sitting in Times Square with you,
0:14:58 he was one of only three people I invited to the wedding. It was Tarleton from the circus,
0:15:02 Kimo Williams, my music teacher, and my first girlfriend Camille. Those were my only three
0:15:09 guests to my wedding. And Kimo Williams told the story to my family. He said, “You know, I tell people
0:15:14 all the time. I get all these kids that want to be famous.” And I said, “Yep, show up at my studio
0:15:19 at 9 a.m.” And he said, “Nobody ever does. Nobody has their shit together to show up when I tell them
0:15:24 to.” And he said, “So, I’d honestly forgotten that there was this kid that called from a classified
0:15:30 ad.” That was his way of saying no. No, it was just his fertile. He was like, “Yeah, all right,
0:15:36 kid. Sure. Here’s a seven-foot hurdle. Let’s hear you do.” Exactly. So, he said, “So, you know,
0:15:40 my doorbell rings some Thursday morning at 8.59 a.m. and I open the door and there’s some
0:15:47 long-haired teenager sitting there.” And so now flipping back to first person point of view is,
0:15:54 yeah, Kimo Williams is this large black man from Hawaii that was a musician that attended Berkeley
0:16:00 School of Music and then stayed there to teach for a while. And so what he taught me in four lessons
0:16:06 got me to graduate Berkeley College of Music in half the time it would take. And here was his
0:16:11 thing. He said, “The reason I wanted you to study with me for a bit,” he said, “I know you only
0:16:16 have like eight weeks before you go to school.” He said, “I think you can graduate Berkeley School
0:16:21 of Music in two years instead of four.” He said, “The standard pace is for chumps.”
0:16:24 I shouldn’t get a t-shirt made.
0:16:29 This is like totally Tim Ferriss stuff, right? This is like, I can’t believe we hadn’t talked
0:16:34 about this before, that he’s the one at the age of like 17, 18, got me into this mentality.
0:16:41 He said, “We’re the standard paces for chumps.” That’s, the school has to organize its curricula
0:16:48 around the lowest common denominator so that almost nobody is left out. So they have to slow
0:16:51 down so that everybody can catch up. But he said, “You’re smarter than that,” or anybody can be
0:16:57 smarter than that if they want to be. So you can go as fast as you want. And here’s how. And so he sat
0:17:00 me down at the piano. He said, “Okay, what do you know about music theory?” I said, “Well, I don’t know.
0:17:04 Let’s find out.” And he, you know, he just asked me a few of these music questions like, “Okay,
0:17:08 what, how does a major scale go?” Right? Okay, show me the tritone. Do you know what a tritone is?
0:17:11 “Okay, play me a tritone in the C major scale.” I’m like, “Uh, uh, uh, okay, B and F.” He said,
0:17:16 “Okay, how can you take that? And what other chord can you make from B and F?” He said, “Okay,
0:17:19 that’s called the substitute chord. Now what is a resolution?” We were like, and he was just like,
0:17:23 boom, boom, boom, at this kind of pace. He was doing all this music theory stuff with me. It was
0:17:27 so intense. And I was like, I had all this adrenaline, like a video game. I was like, “This is amazing.
0:17:33 Okay, keep going.” I said, “Okay, do that. And this.” And that was like a two hour lesson that went at
0:17:37 that kind of pace. And then he dumped a bunch of homework on me. He said, “Okay, now go home tonight
0:17:43 and take this big book of jazz standards. Find me all the two five substitutions or two five
0:17:47 closures and I’ll substitute chords for that and then come back next Thursday and we’ll do this again.”
0:17:53 So we did that for like four Thursdays in a row. And sure enough, what he taught me in four
0:18:00 two hour sessions was basically like two years of Berkeley College of Music. He compressed it
0:18:07 into four lessons. Wow. So that when I showed up to my first day of Berkeley, I tested out of the
0:18:14 first few years just thanks to him. And then he even taught me a strategy. He offhand mentioned,
0:18:19 he said, you know, I think they might still have a rule in place where those other required courses,
0:18:23 you know, that you have to take to graduate. He said, “I think you could pretty much just buy
0:18:28 the books for those and then contact the department head and just take the final exam to get credit.”
0:18:33 So I did that too. So I, when I got there, all those required classes like, you know,
0:18:38 Bach counterpoint classes, I wasn’t so interested in it. So I bought the book,
0:18:42 did all the homework, approached the department head said, “Can I take the final exam for this?”
0:18:46 And he said, looked at me weird and said, “Okay, took the final exam and got credit without ever
0:18:50 having to attend the class.” And yeah, that’s how I graduated Berkeley College of Music in two years.
0:18:56 And on a related note, could you talk about, and we’ve talked about this a bit, but I never tire
0:19:05 of it, relaxing for the same result. Because I think this is such a huge observation that
0:19:11 it’s incredibly important for type A personalities or at least for me, because I have a tendency
0:19:16 to almost want to burn the candle at both ends to prove to myself that I’m putting forth
0:19:21 the maximum effort I’m leaving as little as possible to chance with certain things, you know,
0:19:26 and, but tell everybody about the bike, about the bicycle experience.
0:19:30 Yeah, this was kind of profound. Now, granted, I didn’t learn this until
0:19:36 later, but yeah, I’d been very, very, very type A my whole life. Even before I met Kemal Williams,
0:19:42 you know, I mean, age of 14, it just, my friends called me the robot because they would never see
0:19:48 me sleep or eat or relax or hang out. I just was like so focused on being the best musician I could
0:19:53 be that I would just practice every waking minute. If I’d begrudgingly go to a party, you know,
0:19:57 I’d bring my guitar with me and I’d be sitting in the corner practicing my scales and arpeggios
0:20:01 while everybody was hanging out, getting high, you know. So yeah, I’ve always been very type A,
0:20:06 and so a friend of mine got me into cycling when I was living in LA and I lived right on the beach
0:20:13 in Santa Monica where there’s this great bike path in the sand that goes for, I think it’s 25 miles
0:20:20 in the sand, something like that. The exact number doesn’t matter, but what I would do is I would go
0:20:25 on to the bike path and I would get like head down and push it as hard as I could. I would go
0:20:30 all the way to one end of the bike path and back and then back home and I’d set my little
0:20:34 timer when doing this. Huffing and puffing, red faced. Yeah, just red face huffing it, but like
0:20:40 just pushing it as hard as I can. Every single thrust of the leg just, of course, you know,
0:20:45 that made me quite fun if somebody was in my way on the bike path. Sure, that guy’s got places to
0:20:50 go. But I noticed it was always 43 minutes. I mean, you know, if you know Santa Monica, California,
0:20:55 you know, the weather is about exactly the same all year round. So unless it was a surprisingly
0:21:01 windy day, it was always 43 minutes is what it took me to go as fast as I could on that bike path.
0:21:10 But I noticed that over time, I was starting to feel less psyched about going out on the bike path
0:21:15 because just mentally, when I would think of it, it would feel like pain and hard work.
0:21:21 It sounds like pain and hard work. Yeah, I mean, it was, but you know, I guess at first that was
0:21:25 okay. And after a while, I just felt like, I don’t know, running a bike, why don’t I just hang out.
0:21:31 So then I say, you know, that’s not cool for me to start to associate negative stuff with going
0:21:35 on the bike ride. Why don’t I just chill for once? Like, I’m just going to go on the same bike ride.
0:21:41 But just, you know, I’m not going to be a complete snail, but I’ll go at like half of my normal pace.
0:21:46 So yeah, I got on my bike and it was just pleasant. I just went on the same bike ride.
0:21:52 I was more like standing up. And I just noticed that I was, I was looking around more and I looked
0:21:56 out in the ocean. I noticed that day there were these dolphins jumping in the ocean. And I went
0:22:02 down to Marina Del Rey to my turnaround point. And oh no, actually it was when the the breakers at
0:22:08 Marina Del Rey, there was a penguin that was flying above me. I was like, no way. I looked up,
0:22:17 I was like, hey, a penguin. And he’s shit in my mouth. Was it a penguin or a pelican? Oh, sorry,
0:22:23 pelican. Flying penguin above my head. That would be more amazing. I was like, what did you take
0:22:28 before your ride? So you get to see it a pelican pelican shit in your mouth. That’s incredible
0:22:35 accuracy. Was that from like, how far away was it? 20 feet up. Wow. Because I don’t know if he was
0:22:41 accurate or I was, you know, I had such a nice time. It was just purely pleasant. There was no red
0:22:47 face. There was no huffing and puffing. I was just cycling. It was nice. And when I got back to my
0:22:57 usual stopping place, I looked at my watch and it said 45 minutes. And I was like, no way. How the
0:23:02 hell could that have been 45 minutes as compared to my usual 43? It’s like, there’s no way. But yeah,
0:23:10 it was right 45 minutes. And that was like a profound lesson that I think changed the way I’ve
0:23:17 approached my life ever since is because I realized that I guess, you know, what percentage of that
0:23:21 huffing and puffing then we could do the math or whatever would a 93 point something present of
0:23:28 my huffing and puffing and all that red face and all that stress was only for an extra two minutes.
0:23:31 It was basically for nothing. I mean, you know, of course, we’re not talking about me competing
0:23:36 in something where the huffing and puffing might have been worth it. But for life, I think of all
0:23:42 of this optimization and getting the maximum dollar out of everything and the maximum out of every
0:23:47 second to the maximum amount of every minute. And I think I just take this approach now of going
0:23:52 like, or you could just take the lesson, take most of that lesson and apply it and be effective
0:23:57 and be happy. You don’t need to stress about any of this stuff. And so honestly, that’s been
0:24:02 my approach ever since I do things, but I stop before anything gets stressful.
0:24:09 One of the essays that you’re best known for is hell yeah or no. And this has been extremely
0:24:18 important for me to consistently reread or listen to. How did it come about? And what is the gist
0:24:27 of that? There was a music conference in Australia that I had told my friend I would
0:24:33 go with her to. It wasn’t even like the conference themselves were really expecting me. It was my
0:24:39 friend Arielle Hyatt is one of the best publicists I know. And she was speaking at that conference
0:24:46 and asked if I would come with her as like a co-presenter in her mentor session or something.
0:24:51 So I had said yes like six months before. Yeah, sure. Australia. I’m living in New York City.
0:24:56 I’m like, yeah, sure. And then once it came close, and it was like time to book the ticket, I was like,
0:25:01 I don’t really want to go to Australia right now. I’m busy with other stuff.
0:25:10 And it was actually my friend Amber Rubarth, who’s a brilliant musician. I was on the phone with her
0:25:15 and kind of lamenting about this. And she’s the one that pointed out. She said, it sounds like,
0:25:21 you know, from where you’re at, your decision is not between yes and no. You need to figure out
0:25:27 whether you’re feeling like, fuck yeah, or no. And I said, yeah, that’s really what it comes down
0:25:35 to, right? Because the idea is, if you’re feeling anything less than like, oh, hell yeah, I would
0:25:41 love to do that. Oh my God, that would be amazing. If you’re feeling anything less than that, then
0:25:49 just say no. Because most of us say yes to too much stuff. And then we let these little mediocre
0:25:58 things fill our lives. And so the problem is, when that occasional big, oh my God, hell yeah,
0:26:02 thing comes along, you don’t have enough time to give it the attention that you should because
0:26:08 you’ve said yes to too much other little half ass kind of stuff, right? So once I started applying
0:26:14 this, my life just opened up because it just meant I just said no, no, no, no, no, to almost
0:26:20 everything. But then when the occasional thing came up, that I was really like, you know what,
0:26:26 that would be awesome. Then suddenly, I had all the time in the world. And you know, people say
0:26:30 this, I’m sure, you know, every time people contact you, every time people contact me,
0:26:35 they say, you know, look, I know you must be incredibly busy. And I always think like, no,
0:26:42 I’m not because because I’m in control of my time, I’m on top of it. Busy to me seems to imply
0:26:48 like out of control. You know, like, oh my God, I’m so busy. I don’t have any time for this yet.
0:26:52 To me, that sounds like a person who’s got no control of their life.
0:27:00 Yeah, no, no control and unclear priorities. Yes. So you asked how it’s applying in my life that
0:27:06 still just on the little tiny day to day level, even personal things, God, even people you meet,
0:27:13 even, you know, as I’m dating, you have to do the hell yeah, or no approach, or people ask you
0:27:19 to go to events, or God, even, you know, even people asking to do a phone call or anything,
0:27:23 I think, you know, am I really excited about that? And, you know, almost every time the
0:27:28 answers no. So I say no to almost everything. And then, yeah, occasionally, something will come up,
0:27:34 even a little surprise will be dropped in my lab, like this thing that happened just two months ago
0:27:38 called the the now now now project, which we don’t even really need to talk about the details don’t
0:27:43 matter so much. But it was just something that popped up that seemed really interesting and
0:27:49 people really wanted. And luckily, because I say no to almost everything, I had the time in my life
0:27:54 to make it flourish. So for the last like six weeks, all I did full time, like 12 hours a day,
0:27:58 was suddenly work on this brand new thing that showed up because I could, you know, so that’s to
0:28:06 me the the lovely result of taking the hell yeah or no approach to life. So I am reading a section
0:28:13 of this blog post that I wrote about you and your the best email you ever wrote with the Japanese
0:28:18 boxing specialist and so on. And one of the paragraphs that I put here for those people
0:28:23 interested, it’s just the most successful email I ever wrote, but it’s everywhere online. And
0:28:30 it reads stranger still at its largest Derek spent roughly four hours on CD baby every six months,
0:28:37 he had systematized everything to run without him. And feel free to correct that if it needs to be
0:28:44 corrected, but assuming that’s roughly true. What were some of the most important decisions or
0:28:51 realizations that made that possible? I love the timing for when I read four hour workweek because
0:28:59 it was actually just after I had done this like complete delegation of everything that it was
0:29:06 feeling the pain from everything having to go through me. It was my business right 100% no
0:29:11 investors no nothing it was me and so I hired people to help me it was all me me me. So four years
0:29:18 into it, it was growing it was really taking off I had 20 employees but still almost everything
0:29:23 went through me. And it made my day kind of miserable because I’m a real like introverted
0:29:28 focused kind of person I love to just sit down for 12 hours and do one thing without distraction.
0:29:38 You’re an INTJ Myers-Briggs. Yeah, I’m 100% INTJ. Yeah. So I hated going to the office and being
0:29:45 distracted every five minutes with my employees asking me questions. So that’s what I just felt
0:29:51 such pain about this like I hate this that I really literally meant I booked a flight to
0:29:58 Kauai I believe and I was going to move to Kauai and not give my employees my phone number
0:30:03 and literally move I don’t mean like take a vacation I mean like I am now going to be running
0:30:07 I’m going to be the owner of CD Baby on a little island in Hawaii and you guys just figure out your
0:30:13 own damn problems because I was just I was just having so much psychic pain about this but then
0:30:20 luckily with lovely coincidence that night that I booked the flight to Hawaii I watched the movie
0:30:27 Vanilla Sky and in Vanilla Sky Tom Cruise is like the owner of this big publishing company
0:30:33 but he gets all caught up with these crazy women and gets too overwhelmed with his life and focusing
0:30:39 on his own happiness and or unhappiness and all that and pretty soon his company is just
0:30:45 wrestled away from him and I thought oh I don’t want that to happen like I don’t want to just
0:30:51 plug my ears close my eyes run away and have my company taken away from me I need to deal with
0:30:58 my problems instead of running from them so I canceled the trip to Hawaii and went into work
0:31:04 the next day and decided to fix this thing so then next time somebody asked me a question
0:31:10 I gathered everybody around I said okay everybody Tracy just asked me you know Derek what do we
0:31:14 do when a guy on the phone says he wants a refund you know I said okay everybody stop working everybody
0:31:20 gather around okay Tracy asked what we do if somebody wants a refund here’s not only what we
0:31:24 do but here’s why here’s my philosophy whenever anybody wants a refund we should always give it
0:31:30 to them and I would just explain not just the what to do but the why it was constantly communicating
0:31:34 the philosophy to get to the core of it and I think you mentioned this in back in four hour
0:31:41 work week there’s almost nothing that really has to be you like you can almost get kind of AI
0:31:48 and figure out how your brain works how your decision making process works and just teach it
0:31:53 to other people so that other people can do it and yeah that’s what I did for every single thing
0:31:58 that ever came my way I would gather everybody around explain the philosophy behind it why
0:32:02 we do things this way why I’m about to say what I’m about to say and now here’s what I think we
0:32:07 should do do you understand why now please write it down but it was also important that I taught it
0:32:13 multiple people not just one and had them write it down and then the cool thing is I wasn’t doing
0:32:18 the hiring anymore the company I had taught other people how to do the hiring so soon my employees
0:32:22 were doing the hiring and then they were teaching new people how to do this thing from the the book
0:32:28 and so that really started four years into the company it was six months of difficult work to
0:32:34 really make myself unnecessary but then my girlfriend at the time decided to go to film school
0:32:39 in LA so decided to follow her down there so I moved down to LA to be with her which was a
0:32:44 nice symbolic way to let the company know like you’re on your own I’m still the owner and in fact
0:32:50 so there’s one little caveat to the thing we said that I was working on CD baby for four hours a year
0:32:57 or whatever you said yeah four or six months is that that’s how much time I spent doing this stuff
0:33:03 I didn’t want to be doing right the monotony the bureaucracy stuff that I had reduced down to almost
0:33:09 nothing like a few minutes a week but what I was doing from 7 a.m. to midnight every single day was
0:33:14 programming like the future of CD baby and that’s just the stuff that I loved doing so it was about
0:33:18 making my life the way I wanted it to be working on the stuff that I wanted to be working on
0:33:25 and not doing the stuff I didn’t if you could have one billboard anywhere with anything on it
0:33:30 what would it say my real answer if I was taking that literally is that I would remove all the
0:33:35 billboards in the world and ensure that they were never replaced you know if you ever driven through
0:33:41 India you know yeah it’s so sad well I haven’t driven but oh right on my way to the Calcutta ER
0:33:48 where I spent a week I was god briefly looking at the windows you know even in these small towns
0:33:54 in Kerala like there’s almost no space that is left without advertising so I really admire those
0:34:01 places like I think Vermont and uh South Paulo Brazil that ban billboards but I know that that
0:34:06 wasn’t really what you’re asking so so my better answer is I think I would make a billboard that
0:34:14 would say it won’t make you happy and I would place it outside any big shopping mall or car dealer
0:34:20 so ideally actually I think you know what would be a fun project is to buy and train thousands of
0:34:26 parrots to say it won’t make you happy it won’t make you happy and then you let them loose in
0:34:31 the shopping malls and super stores around the world that’s my life mission anybody with me let’s
0:34:37 do it what advice would you give your 30 year old self and place us if you would for where you were
0:34:44 at 30 and what you’re doing at 30 well let’s see I had just started CD baby at 30 but I think
0:34:49 the biggest advice I would give to my younger self or more like knowledge learned like hey
0:34:56 younger self you should know this now is that women like sex do you know that until I was 40
0:35:00 hopefully if I didn’t get that I think through you know like teenage movies or whatever we’re
0:35:05 kind of taught the opposite that’s like you know men always want sex and women don’t I don’t know
0:35:09 why the the media portrays it like that but later I found out that’s not true but I think the the
0:35:16 more interesting answer is that my advice to my 30 year old self would be don’t be a donkey
0:35:22 and what does that mean well I meet a lot of 30 year olds that are trying to pursue
0:35:29 many different directions at once but not making progress in any right and then or or they get
0:35:33 frustrated that the world wants them to pick one thing because they want to do them all and I get
0:35:37 a lot of this frustration like but I want to do this and that and this and that why do I have to
0:35:44 choose I don’t know what to choose but the problem is if you’re thinking short term then you’re acting
0:35:50 as if you don’t do them all this week that they won’t happen but I think the solution is to think
0:35:57 long term to realize that you can do one of these things for a few years and then do another one
0:36:02 for a few years and then another so what I mean about don’t be a donkey is you’ve probably heard
0:36:09 the fable about I think it’s Buridan’s donkey it’s a a fable about a donkey that is standing halfway
0:36:15 in between a pile of hay and a bucket of water and he just keeps looking left to the hay
0:36:23 or right to the water trying to decide hay or water hay or water he’s unable to decide
0:36:28 so he eventually falls over and dies of both hunger and thirst so the point is that a donkey can’t
0:36:33 think of the future if he did he’d clearly realize that he could just go first drink the water and
0:36:41 then go eat the hay so my advice to my 30 year old self is don’t be a donkey you can do everything
0:36:48 you want to do you just need foresight and patience right so say like for somebody listening if
0:36:54 you’re 30 years old now and say you have like five different things you want to pursue well then
0:36:58 you can do each one of those for 10 years and you’ll have them all done by the time you’re 80
0:37:04 you’re probably going to live to be 80 so it’s ridiculous to I mean it sounds ridiculous to
0:37:09 plan to the age of 80 when you’re 30 right but it’s a fact that’s probably coming so you might
0:37:15 as well take advantage of it it’s like use the future that way you can fully focus on one direction
0:37:21 at a time without feeling conflicted or distracted because you know that you’ll get to the others
0:37:27 in the future and I think you’d also just to build on that I agree I think most people and this is
0:37:33 not something I’ve thought up on my own but they overestimate what they can achieve in a day or a
0:37:37 week so they have 20 items on their to-do list but they underestimate what they could achieve
0:37:45 in a year or even two years and yeah but you’re the way that for instance if you look at a lot of
0:37:50 what I’ve done much of which ended up being the result of accidental discoveries but you had the
0:37:56 book career but then you had the angel investing start around 2007 2008 and I treated that as a
0:38:01 two-year self-imposed MBA and it was like okay I want to try this and really focus on it for two
0:38:07 years and I’m not going to expect to have any financial return but just as an MBA I’m going to
0:38:13 sink this amount of cost into it which was identical to Stanford graduate school business at the time
0:38:19 and assume that the network and relationships and lessons I would learn would be worth that two years
0:38:27 and just viewing them as two-year experiments which I did with the TV also which did not
0:38:31 turn out as ideally as I would have liked although I’m very proud of you know that’s inference
0:38:37 experiment podcast same thing right it wasn’t a three-year commitment but it was also not a
0:38:42 one-day or one-week commitment it was like okay I’m gonna do this for at least six episodes maybe
0:38:48 it takes me six months and then I’ll correct course at that point but yeah you do I think a lot
0:38:55 of 30 year olds feel pressured or younger or older for that matter to pursue many many things
0:39:01 in parallel when if you were just to tweak that slightly and make them serial the results would
0:39:06 be much better yeah that’s a really hard lesson to learn we can even say it right now it’s really
0:39:14 tough I even find that now yeah cost and challenge just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and
0:39:20 we’ll be right back to the show this episode is brought to you by Wealthfront there is a lot
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0:40:32 and now Kevin Kelly founding executive editor of Wired Magazine former editor and publisher of
0:40:38 the whole earth review and best-selling author of books on technology and culture including
0:40:46 excellent advice for living the inevitable what technology wants and vanishing asia his three
0:40:54 volume photo book set capturing west central and east asia you can find kevin on twitter and instagram
0:41:04 at kevin the number two kelly and on his website kk.org Kevin thank you so much for being on the show
0:41:10 that’s my honor and i am endlessly fascinated by all of the varied projects that you constantly have
0:41:16 going on but that leads me to the first question which is when you meet someone who is not familiar
0:41:21 with your background and they ask you the age old what do you do question how do you even begin to
0:41:28 answer that what is your stock answer to that these days my stock answer is is that i package ideas
0:41:38 into books and magazines and websites and i make ideas interesting and pretty well i like the
0:41:43 pretty that’s well well we’ll come back to the aesthetic aspect i think that’s a really neglected
0:41:48 piece of the entire puzzle you do have of course a background a lot of people are familiar with
0:41:55 your background with wired but perhaps you could give folks a bit of background on yourself and
0:42:00 is it true that you dropped out of of college after one year yeah i’m a college dropout and
0:42:06 actually my one regret in life is that one year oh no kidding no kidding yeah i wish i had just
0:42:12 even skipped that but i do understand how college can be useful to people and i’ve
0:42:18 but for me it was just not the right thing and i went to asia instead and i like to tell myself
0:42:27 that i gave my own self a phd in east asian studies by traveling around and photographing
0:42:33 very remote remote parts of asia at a time when it was in the transition from the ancient world
0:42:40 to the modern world and i did many other things as well and for me it was a very formative time
0:42:46 because i did enough things that when i finally got my first real job at the age of 35
0:42:53 wow which which job was that i worked for a non-profit at ten dollars an hour which was the
0:42:57 whole earth catalog which would have been like kind of a lifelong dream if i said if i’m going to
0:43:03 have a job that’s the job i want it took me a long time to kind of get it but in between that i did
0:43:09 many things including starting businesses and selling businesses and doing other kinds of things
0:43:16 more adventures and i highly recommend it you know i got involved in starting wired and
0:43:21 running wired for a while and i hired a lot of people who were coming right out of college
0:43:25 they were internets and they would do the intern thing and then they were good and we would hire
0:43:30 them which meant that basically you know after 10 years whatever it was they were this was their
0:43:38 first and only job and i kept telling them why are you here what are you doing you should be
0:43:44 slowing around wasting time trying something crazy why are you working a real job i don’t
0:43:53 understand it and i just really i really recommend slack i’m a believer in in this thing of kind of
0:43:59 doing something that’s not productive you know productivist or your middle ages
0:44:06 when you’re young you want to be prolific and make and do things but you don’t want to measure them
0:44:12 in terms of productivity you want to measure them in terms of extreme performance you want
0:44:19 to measure them in kind of extreme satisfaction it’s it’s a time to kind of try stuff and and i
0:44:25 think explore the extremes exactly explore the possibilities and there are so many possibilities
0:44:31 and there’s more every day and it’s called premature organization you you really want to use this time
0:44:37 to continue to do things and by the way premature optimization is a problem of success too it’s
0:44:40 not just the problem of the young it’s the problem of the successful more than even of the young but
0:44:45 we’ll get to that yeah that might turn into a therapy session for me at this precise moment
0:44:51 in time in fact but when you are exploring that slack i would imagine many people feel pressured
0:44:57 whether it’s internal pressure or societal familial pressure to get a real job to support
0:45:01 themselves and a lot of the decisions are made out of fear they they worry about being out on
0:45:08 the streets or it’s a nebulous terror or anxiety how did you support yourself for instance while you
0:45:13 were traveling through asia when you left school i totally understand this anxiety and fear and
0:45:19 stuff but here’s the thing i think one of the many kind of life skills that you want to actually
0:45:26 learn at a fairly young age is the skill of being like ultra thrifty minimal kind of this little
0:45:33 wisp at this traveling through time in the sense of learning how little you actually need to live
0:45:39 not just in kind of um survival mode but kind of you know in a contented mode and i learned that
0:45:45 pretty early by backpacking and doing other things and especially in asia was i could be very happy
0:45:50 with very very little and go onto websites and stuff and look at sort of like the minimum amount of
0:45:56 stuff the food say that you need to to live you know your basic protein and carbohydrates and
0:46:01 and vitamins and and how much actually if you were bought them in bulk how much it would cost i mean
0:46:08 you build your own house live in a shelter a tiny house you don’t need very much and i think
0:46:12 trying that out you know building your house on the pond like the row there’s a hero of mine in
0:46:19 high school is not just a simple exercise it’s a profound exercise because it allows you to get
0:46:25 over the anxiety even if you aren’t living like that you know that if the worst came to worse
0:46:32 you could keep going at a very low rate and be content and so that gives you the sort of confidence
0:46:38 to take a risk because you say what’s the worst that could happen well the worst that happened is
0:46:43 that i’d have a backpack and a sleeping bag and i’d be eating oatmeal and whatever you know and
0:46:48 that’d be fine and i think if you do that once or twice you don’t necessarily have to live like
0:46:55 that but but knowing that you can be content is tremendously empowering that’s basically what
0:47:00 i did it was you know living in asia where the people around me had less than i did and they
0:47:06 were pretty content you realize oh my gosh i don’t really need very much to be happy
0:47:12 and did you save up money beforehand with odd jobs or did you do odd jobs while on the road
0:47:18 a bit of both i did odd jobs before i left i was traveling in asia at a time when the
0:47:27 price differential was so great that it actually made sense for me to fly back on a charter flight
0:47:34 to the us and work for four or five months and i worked basically odd jobs i worked from working
0:47:42 in a warehouse packaging athletic shoes working in a kind of technical sense of a that’s a really
0:47:48 just hard to describe but it was kind of a in a photography related job where we were reducing
0:47:54 printed circuit boards down to little sizes to be shipped off to be printed and driving cars to
0:48:02 whatever else i could find and that at that time made more money i could live off of i could live
0:48:09 probably two years from those couple months of work so i didn’t really work while i was traveling
0:48:17 until i got to iran in the late 70s and there there was a very high paying job which was teaching
0:48:24 english to the iranian pilots who worked for the shah but i had sworn they were never going to teach
0:48:30 english so i actually got a job in bella hot helicopter who was teaching english is to the
0:48:35 pilots but my job was running a little newsletter for the american community there and i worked
0:48:41 there until i was thrown out by the coup that was another story why did that now just a couple
0:48:46 of comments so number one for those people listening who are saying to themselves already
0:48:51 perhaps creating reasons why they can’t do what you did now due to different economic climate
0:48:56 or whatnot it is entirely possible to replicate what you did you just have to choose your locations
0:49:02 wisely yeah for that type of differential absolutely and i should also just mention to people that
0:49:07 part of the reason i’m so attracted to stoic philosophy whether that be senica or marcus
0:49:14 aurelius is exactly because of the practice of poverty not because you want to be poor but so
0:49:20 that you recognize not only that you can subsist but then you can potentially be content or or
0:49:25 even in some cases be more content with a bare minimum so for people who are more interested
0:49:28 in that i highly recommend a lot of the stoic writings and you can search for those on my
0:49:33 blog and elsewhere but let me just add to that there’s actually a new age version of that that
0:49:38 was sort of popular and a generation ago and the search term there is volunteer simplicity
0:49:45 volunteer simplicity right and so the idea is poverty is is terrible when it’s mandatory when
0:49:51 you have no choice but volunteer version of that is very very powerful and i think attaching names
0:49:57 sometimes to things it makes it more legitimate but but imagine yourself practicing voluntary
0:50:02 simplicity and that i think is part of that stoic philosophy but there’s a whole kind of a movement
0:50:07 a lot of the hippie dropouts were kind of practicing a similar thing and there was you know the whole
0:50:15 best practices that resolved around that you can make up your own but i think it’s to me an essential
0:50:21 skill that life skill that people should acquire and when you go backpacking and stuff like that
0:50:27 that’s part of it that’s the beginnings of trying to understand what it is that you need to live as a
0:50:32 you know as a being and you can fill that out in any way you want but that’s a good way to experiment
0:50:36 now you have become certainly a world-class
0:50:43 packager of ideas but also at synthesizing and expressing these ideas i love your writing if
0:50:49 i’ve consumed vast quantities of it in fact i’m here right now on on long island where i grew up
0:50:55 and i used to sneak into my parents shed to read old editions of the whole earth catalog
0:51:02 for inspiration it was the i suppose the equivalent of my internet at the time and from that all the
0:51:07 way to 1000 true fans which of course you know i sort of shout from the rooftops for people to read
0:51:13 how did you develop that skill of writing and communicating a lot of people associate that
0:51:20 with schooling but it doesn’t appear to be the source for you yeah so in high school i i would
0:51:26 call myself a very late bloomer i i don’t recall myself having a lot of ideas there were a lot of
0:51:30 other people and kids in my high school that i was very impressed with because they seem to
0:51:37 know what they thought and were very glib and particulate and i wasn’t i was a little bit more
0:51:43 visual on that sense i i um tried to decide whether to go to art school or to mit because i was really
0:51:49 interested in science so i set off to asia as a photographer so it was you know basically no words
0:51:57 at all it was just images and as i was traveling and seeing these amazing things i mean again i want
0:52:03 to emphasize that this was sort of a for me i grew up in new jersey i’d never left new jersey we never
0:52:11 took vacations it’s hard to describe how parochial new jersey was back in you know the 1960s i never
0:52:17 had eight chinese food and never had i mean i never saw chinese it was like it was a different world
0:52:22 and then i was thrown into asia and it was like oh my gosh everything i knew was wrong
0:52:33 and so that education was extremely extremely powerful and i think that that gave me something
0:52:39 to say and i started writing letters home and i trying to describe what i was seeing and so
0:52:45 i had a reason to try to communicate and that was the beginning of it but even then i don’t think
0:52:54 i really had much to say it wasn’t really until the internet came along and i had a chance to go
0:53:01 on to one of the first online communities in the early 80s and for some reason the early 80s that
0:53:09 is that is definitely yeah it was early days yeah in 1981 and so these were private it wasn’t the
0:53:12 kind of wide open internet these were a little experimental the fact it was a new jersey institute
0:53:20 of technology in ructors that had this experimental online community that i got invited on and we
0:53:25 can talk about how that happened but that was it was just like a friend and i found that there was
0:53:31 something about the direct attempt to just communicate with someone else in real time you
0:53:37 know just just sending them a message or something that crystallized my thinking is how did it
0:53:41 crystallize your thinking just not interrupt but was it the immediate feedback loop it was the idea
0:53:48 that they have since teachers have since done a lot of studies where they had kids write an essay
0:53:53 on something an assignment and then they would also be instructed to write some email to a friend
0:53:59 or something and then they would grade both of the compositions and they would find that inevitably
0:54:05 the email that the kids were writing was much better writing because when you’re trying to
0:54:11 write a composition there’s all these you know we have all these attitudes or expectations or there’s
0:54:16 there’s this kind of a writerly sense there’s there’s there’s all this other garbage and luggage
0:54:21 and baggage on top of that but when we’re just trying to send an email we’re just we’re directly
0:54:26 trying to communicate something we’re not fooling around we’re not trying to be it make it literary
0:54:30 literary and all that we’re just direct stuff and so the writing there was always much more
0:54:34 directed concrete because that’s the that’s the usual thing that happens when you’re trying to
0:54:38 write is you’re not concrete enough but when you’re emails like all concrete and so it was
0:54:45 getting out of the whole kind of writerly stuff and just pure concrete communication that really
0:54:50 made it for me and what I discovered which is what many writers discover is that I write in
0:54:57 order to think yeah it was like I think I have an idea but when I began to write it I realized I
0:55:03 have no idea and I don’t actually know what I think until I try to write it so writing is a
0:55:09 way for me to define out what I think it’s like I don’t have any ideas that’s true but when I write
0:55:17 I get the ideas and that was the revelation and so by being forced to communicate online and there
0:55:21 was none of this expectation it was just like okay this is random email I can do that I don’t
0:55:25 have to write necessarily I don’t have to write something nice I’m just gonna write you know 140
0:55:30 characters I can do that but while I was doing that I had an idea that I didn’t have before
0:55:36 and so it was like oh my gosh this is a idea generation machine it’s by writing it’s not
0:55:39 that I have these ideas I’m gonna write them down oh no I don’t even have them until I write
0:55:44 I’m so glad you brought that up because I was just recently a few things related to that I was
0:55:49 reading an interview with Kurt Vonnegut who’s one of my favorite authors for people who aren’t
0:55:55 familiar check out Cats Cradle perhaps as a starting point hilarious guy and he at various
0:56:00 points in his career taught writing to make ends meet and he would number one not look for good
0:56:05 writers he would look for people who are passionate about specific things so that’s that’s something
0:56:10 I want to reiterate to people who don’t feel right early is that go out and have the experiences
0:56:15 and find the subjects the things that excite you and as long as you’re true to your voice which
0:56:20 is related to the email point I threw out my first two drafts of I’d say a third of the four hour
0:56:28 work week because they were either two pompous and Ivy League sounding way way way too much I mean
0:56:32 horrible or two slapstick because I felt like I had to go to the other extreme and then I sat down
0:56:38 and I wrote as if I were composing an email to a friend after two glasses of wine and that’s how I
0:56:44 found my voice so to speak as a side note why and I think this might be related but why did you
0:56:49 promise yourself not to teach English I’m so curious because that’s a that that can be very
0:56:53 lucrative it’s readily available when you are traveling why did you commit to yourself not to
0:56:58 teach English yeah it’s a good question because there’s lots of opportunities all around the world
0:57:04 and by the way I recommend it as a way for people to travel cheaply if you want to support yourself
0:57:12 because it is a very desirable skill we call it for the moment I think the reason why was I felt
0:57:18 that I do feel like I was a very good teacher and I also felt that it was maybe a little easy
0:57:24 but I think the main reason was that I was having trouble imagining myself enjoying it you know
0:57:32 and I just felt that I would rather try to find something else now I think I did one time in
0:57:40 Taiwan which as you know has a whole cram school system I think a friend I substituted for a friend
0:57:48 once and I think that maybe confirmed to me like my idea that while it was there was sort of like
0:57:53 you know all I have to do is just talk I mean there’s really not much skill involved at all
0:57:58 it was fun but I didn’t feel like I was I don’t know I didn’t feel like I was maybe adding value
0:58:04 or something so I came away thinking you know I guess I could do this for money but I’m not gonna
0:58:09 be happy I think it’s just the personality thing I don’t think of myself as a teacher I don’t do
0:58:16 many workshops or classes so I think a different person might thoroughly enjoy it and I know they
0:58:23 do and they have a great time doing it for me it was just not for me got it no big deal I think
0:58:29 this is an important thing is is that you know it takes a long time to kind of figure out what
0:58:35 you’re good for and part of where I’m at right now and where I got eventually was really trying to
0:58:40 spend time on doing things that only I could do and even when I could do something well but
0:58:46 someone else could do it I would try and let that go that that’s a discipline that I’m still working
0:58:51 on which is not just things that I’m good at but things that only I’m good at so that was something
0:58:56 I was sort of trying to start early on which is like you know a lot of other people can do this
0:59:04 and they’re happy doing it so I don’t want to go somewhere where it requires more of me
0:59:09 to do and then I’ll be happier and they’ll be happier I am currently having and I seem to have
0:59:18 these periodically a crisis of meaning phase and I’m wrestling with this exact issue trying to
0:59:26 figure out what to abandon what to say no to to refine my focus so I can really focus on the
0:59:32 intersection of my unique capability or capabilities whatever that is and a need of some type how did
0:59:38 you figure that out and maybe we could approach it from a different direction what do you feel
0:59:44 is your skill set or your your unique skill and how did you figure that out well let me tell
0:59:49 you the story of how this realization actually came to me in a kind of a very concrete way which
0:59:57 while I was editing Wired Magazine and so part of what Wired Magazine is about is is that we would
1:00:02 come up with ideas and make assignments to writers now some of the articles in Wired would come from
1:00:07 the writers themselves they would protest to say I have an idea but a lot of the the articles would
1:00:12 be assigned from editors we’d have editorial meetings where we kind of imagine this great
1:00:18 article and then we’d go and try and find someone to to write it and in that conversation of trying
1:00:24 to persuade writers to write an idea that I had they would go through a kind of a very typical
1:00:30 sequence where you know I would have this great idea this is a great idea and and then I would
1:00:34 try to persuade like one writer two writer three writers and they just you know they didn’t think
1:00:38 it was a very good idea they didn’t like it they didn’t want to do whatever it was and then I’d
1:00:42 kind of forget about it but then like you know six months later we’d come back and say oh that was
1:00:47 such a great idea I really think we should do that and then I would go again for another round of
1:00:51 trying to persuade people and then again no takers and then I kind of forget about that must have been
1:00:56 a bad idea but then like six months later a year later it might come back you know that’s still a
1:01:04 great idea nobody has done that and then I would realize oh my gosh I need to do that you know it’s
1:01:08 like I’m the only one who can see this I’ve tried to give it away I have tried really hard to give
1:01:13 it away I’ve tried to kill it it just keeps like coming back coming back and it’s like okay and then
1:01:19 I would do it and there’ll be one of my best pieces and so it was this idea of like so so I became
1:01:24 really an important proponent of trying to give things away first tell everybody what you’re doing
1:01:30 basically you try to give these ideas away and people are happy because they love great ideas
1:01:36 and you do it it’s a great idea you should do it and so I try to give everything away first
1:01:41 and then I try to kill everything it’s like no that’s a bad idea and then it’s the ones that
1:01:47 keep coming back that I can’t kill and they can’t give away that think hmm maybe that’s the one I’m
1:01:51 supposed to do yeah interesting because no one else is going to do it I mean I’ve been actively
1:01:55 trying to get and then of course there’s someone else is doing it you should see someone else
1:02:00 competing or trying to do it it’s like oh yeah you go ahead do it I’m not going to race against you
1:02:07 yeah that’s crazy because there’s two of us you know you do it and so that generosity is actually
1:02:13 part of this your vetting process exactly and so that’s when I kind of realized it but that
1:02:19 doesn’t answer the question of well how do you find out what it is and all I can say is you know
1:02:22 and I don’t want to be flipped but all I can say is it’s going to take all your life to figure that
1:02:28 out right that is fact here’s what it is figuring out is what your life is about
1:02:33 I mean that’s what life is for right life is to figure it out and then so every
1:02:40 part of your life every day is actually this attempt to figure this out and you’ll have
1:02:45 different answers as you go along and sometimes there may be directions in that but that’s basically
1:02:51 what it is and you are very transparent about confessing this but I have to tell you that
1:02:56 even from hanging around a lot of very accomplished people a lot of successful people that we would
1:03:03 be on the covers of magazines they also go through exactly the same questioning I mean no matter
1:03:08 how big of a billion dollar company they have they they come up to the same thing well you know
1:03:12 what’s my role in all this why am I here what am I useful what am I doing that nobody else can
1:03:18 it’s a continuous in fact as we’ll come back to being successful makes that even more difficult
1:03:25 why is that because of the what I call the creator’s dilemma which is very much the same
1:03:32 thing as the innovator’s dilemma which is that it’s a true dilemma in fact in the sense that
1:03:38 there’s no right answer but the question is is sort of is it better to optimize your strengths
1:03:46 or to invest into the unknown into places that where you’re weak and any or places you have
1:03:52 an explored yeah any accountant in any business will tell you that it did it absolutely makes more
1:03:58 sense to take your dollar you’ll get a higher return by investing into what you’re good at
1:04:04 already whatever it is and this is the pursuit of excellence this is the Tom Peters and the whole
1:04:11 entire movement which is you move uphill you you keep optimizing what you know and that
1:04:20 by far is the sanest the most reasonable the the smartest thing to do but when you have a very
1:04:27 fast changing landscape like we live in right now you get stuck on a local optima you get you get
1:04:35 stuck and the problem is that the only way you can get to a higher more bit place is you actually
1:04:41 have to go down you actually have to head into a place where you are less optimal you have no
1:04:47 expertise there’s very low margins there’s low profits you look foolish there’ll be failures
1:04:56 and if you’ve been following the line of success that is very very difficult to do
1:05:00 it’s very difficult for an organization it’s almost literally almost impossible for an organization
1:05:06 who’s been excellent and successful to do it really is so which presents a lot of opportunity
1:05:14 for the startups the reason why startups start is because they’re operating in an environment
1:05:20 that no sane big corporation would want to be in it’s it’s a market it’s low margins low
1:05:26 profitability unproven high failure I mean it’s like who wants to operate there nobody
1:05:32 their only reason why startups operate is they have no choice right yeah it’s the the gift
1:05:39 of few options right right exactly so so in terms of success binding I think you have to be unsuccessful
1:05:47 who is successful wants to be unsuccessful it’s very very hard to to let go of that success
1:05:52 and so that’s one of the things that works against someone really continuing on this
1:05:56 life journey of finding out what they’re really good at because because here’s the thing is that
1:06:01 successful companies and successful people generally try to solve problems with money
1:06:07 you buy solutions and we all know that money doesn’t it’s not the full answer for innovation
1:06:10 you know basically if you could purchase innovations all the big companies would just
1:06:15 purchase them okay it’s it’s the fact that that these innovations often have to be found out
1:06:20 without money through other means again that’s the advantage to the startup and it’s a disadvantage
1:06:25 to the successful companies because they got money and they just want to buy solutions but
1:06:31 most of these solutions you can’t buy you have to kind of engineer in this very difficult environment
1:06:37 of low margins low success low profits that no one really wants to be in but the startups are
1:06:43 forced to be in that’s also an advantage I would think for beginners or novices compared to experts
1:06:52 they have less vested identity less inertia to have to reverse and that’s back to my suggestion
1:06:56 the meaning of why slack and fooling around when you’re young is so important because
1:07:04 a lot of these innovations and things are found not by trying to solve a problem that
1:07:10 can be monetized yeah it’s in exploring this area without money I mean money is so overrated
1:07:15 it really could you elaborate on that because I feel like this is a sermon I need to receive
1:07:18 on some level there’s several things to say about it one is you know obviously if you’re
1:07:24 struggling to pay bills and mortgages and stuff that there’s a certain amount that’s needed but
1:07:30 but here’s the thing is that accumulating enough money to do things is really a byproduct of other
1:07:37 things it’s a kind of a a lubricant in a certain sense rather than you know a goal and great wealth
1:07:43 or extreme wealth is definitely overrated I’ve had meals with a dozen billionaires and
1:07:48 they’re no different I mean their lives lifestyles are no different you don’t want to have a
1:07:52 billion dollars me put that way you really don’t there’s nothing that you can really
1:07:57 do with it that you can’t do with a lot of less money it was set then aside but even just wealth
1:08:07 itself in this world where there is more and more abundance even the money for say middle class is
1:08:13 less significant in a certain sense in the sense that maybe there’s status which is really not needed
1:08:18 but the things that you want to do the things that will make you content the things that
1:08:25 will satisfy you the things that will bring you meaning can usually got better than having money
1:08:30 I mean if you have a lot of time or a lot of money it’s always better to have a lot of time to do
1:08:34 something and so if you have a choice between having a lot of friends or a lot of money you
1:08:41 definitely wouldn’t have a lot of friends and so I think there’s a way even which technological
1:08:46 progress that we’re having is actually diminishing the role of money and I want to be
1:08:52 clear that I’m talking about money beyond the amount that you need to survive but even that
1:08:56 reflects back what we were saying earlier which is probably less than you think it is
1:09:02 to survive and so in a certain sense most people see money as a means to get these other things
1:09:10 but there are other routes to these other things right that are deeper and more constant and more
1:09:17 durable and more powerful so money is this sort of very small one-dimensional thing that if you
1:09:23 kind of focus on that it kind of comes and goes and if you whatever it is that you’re trying to
1:09:30 attain you go to it more directly through other means you will probably wind up with a more
1:09:37 powerful experience or whatever it is that you’re after and it’ll be deeper more renewable
1:09:44 than coming at it with money and so travel is one of the great examples which is many many
1:09:50 people who are working very hard trying to save their money to retire someday to travel well
1:09:57 I decided to flip it around and travel when I was really young when I had zero money and I had
1:10:04 experiences that basically even a billion dollars couldn’t have bought and it’s not an uncommon site
1:10:09 let me tell you for young kind of travelers who have very little money to be hanging out
1:10:14 doing something and then there will be some very wealthy people on their one-week organized tour
1:10:20 looking at these young travelers just saying I wish I had more time yeah you see it you see it
1:10:25 every well I see it almost every time I go traveling and it reminds me of conversations
1:10:30 I’ve had with Rolf Potts and also his book Vagabonding which I just absolutely love and it was
1:10:36 it was that book and Walden that I took with me traveling when I had my own two year or so walk
1:10:43 about and he points out in the beginning of Vagabonding that many people subscribe to the belief
1:10:49 along the lines of Charlie Sheen’s in the movie Wall Street and he’s asked what he’s going to
1:10:54 do when he makes his millions and he says I’m going to get a motorcycle and ride across China
1:11:01 and Rolf of course points out that you could you could clean toilets in the US and save enough money
1:11:08 to ride a motorcycle across China exactly and let me ask you this is this is maybe tangentially
1:11:14 related but you mentioned earlier that you know your your middle age your middle ages middle ages
1:11:20 maybe sounds odd but in your middle age that’s when you optimize and I find that horrifying on
1:11:28 some level because I am so tired I just turned 37 last week and I’m really tired of certain types
1:11:35 of optimizing and the incremental slogging of making trains run slightly more efficiently on time
1:11:40 even though like you said from a strictly financial standpoint the advice that I would
1:11:45 receive from many people and have received when I’ve asked for advice is here are one or two
1:11:52 core areas you should focus on to optimize for income and on the flip side I’m tempted to approach
1:11:59 a kind of not scorched earth but burned bridges approach where I somehow use creative destruction
1:12:05 to force me into another direction to have these new experiences that I crave so much
1:12:09 and you just for people who aren’t aware I want to give I remember going to the first ever quantified
1:12:16 self-meetup you’re part of the long now foundation you’ve experimented in so many different arenas
1:12:21 and have looked so far into the future and thought on such grand a scale you know I aspire to do more
1:12:26 of that what would be your advice to someone and I know I have dozens of friends in the same position
1:12:32 they’re say in their earlier mid-30s in my particular peer group and they want to explore but
1:12:38 they’re feeling pressured to optimize this thing that they’ve suddenly found their footing with
1:12:41 whatever it is that maybe they’re a venture capitalist maybe they’re in a startup they feel
1:12:47 they should start a new startup and they want to step out of that slipstream what would be
1:12:53 your advice to those people first of all I have to commend your honesty for this and I will repeat
1:13:00 that that it is very very difficult to do I mean they’re I think that realization comes to people
1:13:04 middle-aged and they realize oh my gosh you know I’m kind of on a there’s a little bit of a routine
1:13:08 here and I’m not really happy with that I think that kind of scorched earth they’re kind of like
1:13:13 you know just we’ll just set fire to it and we’ll walk away I actually have I think we probably
1:13:18 have a mutual friend I won’t use his name because I don’t know how public this is but but one of his
1:13:24 solutions was the most radical one I’ve ever heard the force himself was that he gave up
1:13:30 you a citizenship oh wow that’ll do it it was like he was like saying I just feel so you know
1:13:35 and and it was like oh my gosh that is so radical and he was telling me about what is involved in
1:13:39 that and it wasn’t for tax purposes because actually before you can do it the US actually
1:13:47 requires that you square up on all taxes right it was like but that was so radical and I don’t
1:13:53 recommend that he’s going fine but I’m just saying that’s that’s unnecessary but I think
1:14:00 the advice is I’m probably taking a page from yourself I don’t think it’s necessary to I think
1:14:04 you can experiment your way through this I mean you can do this incrementally you can take small
1:14:10 steps and do something and then evaluate it test how it’s going whether you’re getting what you want
1:14:16 out of it whether it’s working and then you continue that direction and that’s sort of the
1:14:21 pattern of people who kind of you have second careers or reinvent themselves you hear that a
1:14:28 lot and you can do that in a disciplined Tim Ferriss way I don’t think that it requires you
1:14:34 to kind of walk out and leave a burning pile behind I think it’s something that you’re going to
1:14:41 I’m a big believer in doing things deliberately and I think that you begin by looking at those
1:14:47 areas that you get satisfaction out of and those areas where I often find that people kind of retreat
1:14:51 back to kind of the things that they did as kids and really really miss you know whether it’s art
1:14:56 or other things and the truth is that you’re not really going to be able to escape all the other
1:15:00 things you have going and that’s a good thing because that is part of you and part of what you
1:15:06 do well so you’ll probably just you know bend in a certain direction and I think the one bit of
1:15:11 advice is that you can’t you know it’s not going to happen overnight it’s going to be it took you
1:15:16 37 years to get where you are it may take you another 30 years to get where you want to go
1:15:22 and I don’t think you should feel impatient maybe that’s the word I’m saying is that I don’t think
1:15:27 you should imagine that you’ll have another hat on with a new label you know next year
1:15:34 just to maybe redirect that and this may or may not be accurate but in the process of researching
1:15:39 for this conversation which is sort of an odd exercise isn’t in and of itself given how much
1:15:46 time we’ve spent together but I came across in Wikipedia mention of your experience in Jerusalem
1:15:54 and deciding to live as though you only had six months left and I want to touch on that but
1:15:59 one of the questions that came to my mind when I turned 37 last week is if I knew I were going to
1:16:05 die at age 40 what would I do to have the greatest impact on the greatest number of people and so
1:16:12 that I find that constraint helpful and I worry that if I aim at not being impatient in that way
1:16:19 that I won’t because I could get hit by a bus that I won’t do what I’m capable of doing maybe you
1:16:25 could talk about and I had no idea I’m not sure if you would self describe yourself as a devout
1:16:30 Christian but that’s that’s certainly written here maybe you could talk a little bit about that
1:16:36 experience yeah one thing I would of course warn people is that not everything on wikipedia is
1:16:41 correct no that’s why I’m bringing it up right but but it is but it is it’s true that I got this
1:16:45 assignment in Jerusalem which by the way if you want to hear the full version of it listen to
1:16:51 one of the very first this American lives which I on ira glass and I told the story for the very
1:16:58 first time and it’s a story about how I got this assignment to live as if I was going to die in six
1:17:03 months even though I was like perfectly healthy and I knew that it was a very improbable but I
1:17:08 decided to take the assignment seriously and that’s that’s what I did and my answer kind of surprised
1:17:15 me because I thought that I would kind of have this sort of mad high-risk fling you know do all
1:17:20 these things but actually what I wanted to do was to visit my brothers and sisters go back
1:17:25 to my parents help out but then my mom was not well at the time but that lasted for three months
1:17:30 before I decided I need to do something big so I actually rode my bicycle across the US from
1:17:36 San Francisco to New York where I was going to New Jersey where I was going to basically die and I
1:17:44 kept a journal of that and that question was something that I keep asking myself now I actually
1:17:50 have a countdown clock that Matt Groening at Futurama was inspired and they did a little
1:17:57 episode of Futurama about and what it did was I took the actual old tables for the estimated age
1:18:03 of my death for someone born when I was born and I worked back the number of days and I have I have
1:18:13 that showing on my computer how many days and I tell you nothing concentrates your time like knowing
1:18:20 how many days you have left now of course I’m likely again to live more than that I mean good
1:18:27 health etc but nonetheless there is something that really you know I have six thousand something
1:18:33 days it’s not very many days to do all the things I want to do and so I think your exercise is really
1:18:37 fantastic and commendable and there’s two questions what would you do if you had six months to live
1:18:43 and what would you do if you had a billion dollars and interestingly it’s the conversions of those
1:18:48 two questions because it turns out that you probably don’t need a billion dollars to do
1:18:52 whatever it is you have you’re going to do in six months right and so I think you’re asking
1:18:58 the right question and and the way I answer it is you want to keep asking yourself that question
1:19:04 every every six months and really try to answer it and I try to you know do that on a kind of a
1:19:11 day by day basis I learned something from my friend Stuart Brand who organized his
1:19:16 remaining days around five-year increments he says any great idea that’s significant that’s
1:19:21 worth doing for him will last about five years from the time he thinks of it to the time he stopped
1:19:27 thinking about it and if you think of it in terms of five-year projects you can count those off on
1:19:33 you know a couple of hands for even if you’re young and so the sense of mortality of understanding
1:19:39 that it’s not just old people who don’t have her many you know you’re 20 years old you don’t have
1:19:46 that many five-year projects to do and so I think it is that’s maybe part of the the philosophy of
1:19:52 thinking about our time and whether even if you believe in the extension of life longevity living
1:19:58 to 120 you still have to think in these terms of what are you gonna do if you because you don’t
1:20:03 know if you’ll live to be 120 what are you gonna do if you have a year and what would you do with
1:20:11 a billion dollars and what’s the intersection of those two does religion play a large part in your
1:20:17 life right now in a certain sense not in a kind of a ritualistic sense I just wrote a book called
1:20:23 what technology wants excellent book I highly recommend it there was it was a theory of technology
1:20:29 and I was trying to put technology in the context of the cosmos so I think what religion gives me
1:20:37 is permission to think about cosmic questions I’m right in the middle of finishing a Kickstarter
1:20:45 funded graphic novel that’s about angels and robots and the intention there was to fictionalize the
1:20:51 idea that robots would some days have souls but these souls would be coming from angels and so
1:20:56 that there was this intersection of these two kind of impossible worlds of conscious robots
1:21:02 who were ensouled by angels and and the reason why this was sort of interesting was that the idea
1:21:08 was that the angels that ensoul us have been trained they’ve been given moral guidance but if you
1:21:15 don’t give the spirit some kind of moral guidance then they can work havoc and so was this idea that
1:21:22 when we make robots we’re actually going to have to train them to be ethical we just can’t make a
1:21:29 free being and not train it so it was a way to rehearse and think about some of the consequences
1:21:36 of technology today so I think my religion gives me permission to ask those questions without
1:21:41 embarrassment to say what is the general direction of the arc of evolution what is it
1:21:48 pointed somewhere how does technology fit into the greater cosmos what does it mean
1:21:58 what drives it why is there more of it is this a good thing so I think having a kind of I consider
1:22:06 this kind of an other view so I have a other view that I’m sympathetic to other world views
1:22:10 I don’t necessarily have to believe all the other world views but I get the idea that
1:22:17 if you have another world view that can be very helpful in seeing other world views
1:22:21 so people have a world view even though they don’t know it but I have a world view and I know
1:22:30 that I have a world view I mean really everybody has a religious or a spiritual orientation even
1:22:36 if they’re atheists they still have one and so there are some assumptions that are at the basis
1:22:44 of it and I like to question assumptions including my own assumptions two things I can’t resist asking
1:22:48 and we can spend as much or as little time on this as you’d like but recently grappling with a lot of
1:22:53 these issues that I’ve been grappling with some of which are existential some which are related to
1:23:01 death limited time on the planet I’ve become deeply fascinated by indigenous use of plant medicine
1:23:09 and I’ve had some very transformative experiences that are difficult to put into words because
1:23:18 they make you sound like a complete crazy person but yeah yeah yeah there’s a somethingness that is
1:23:23 very difficult to communicate without sounding like you should be institutionalized what do you
1:23:29 think the role for people who aspire to do the greatest good in the world what is the role of
1:23:36 that type of direct experience and is it possible to benefit from that type of for lack of a better
1:23:41 descriptor spiritual experience without a religious framework around it yeah yeah no it’s a really
1:23:47 good question so my little personal story there of course as I was basically I was basically
1:23:51 hippie I worked for the hippie catalog and the Horth catalog which was about hippies living
1:23:58 in San Francisco and all my friends were drug taking hippies but I for some reason never did I
1:24:05 just had no appetite or inclination at all for ever taking any drugs or smoking pot or anything
1:24:13 and when I was 50 years old I decided that I would like to take LSD sacramentally on my 50th
1:24:21 birthday and I did and I arranged with I had a guide and I had appropriate setting and I had some
1:24:29 acid that came from a source that was extremely reliable and it was a sacrament and it was a
1:24:36 very profound sacrament and I think yeah you can use drugs or racially and for entertainment and I
1:24:40 think that can go somewhere but I think there’s another powerful use for it which is kind of what
1:24:48 you’re talking about it which is to elevate one outside of yourself to lose yourself to be in
1:24:54 contact with other things beyond your ego and I think it can be done and I think unfortunately
1:25:00 because of the illegal status that we’ve had for a long time the rituals and the practice around
1:25:04 that have not had chance to be developed or communicated actually trying to find this information
1:25:11 was extremely hard. There’s one book that I did find eventually from a guy who was doing LSD
1:25:18 experiments while they were still legal and was able to accumulate enough wisdom about it
1:25:24 that that would be the one place I would point people to but I think it is important that the
1:25:31 context and expectations and the the setting they call it that revolves around it is very important
1:25:38 and I do believe that these can be extremely profound and powerful experiences for good
1:25:44 they can remain long after and you know most people who understand this and don’t abuse it
1:25:51 understand that in fact the experience was not in the pill it was not in the chemical it was a real
1:25:57 experience and so unfortunately there is so much other stuff circulating around the use of these
1:26:03 drugs and the misuse of them that that kind of information is often very very difficult to find
1:26:11 but I do think maybe we’re seeing a moment now in the US where the second prohibition is being
1:26:20 undone and at least POT will become legal and maybe we can return to revitalizing you know the
1:26:27 traditions and the necessary settings around that and expectation that not just POT or LSD but
1:26:36 even other synthetic drugs can be extremely powerful in removing the ordinary guards that we
1:26:41 have and we have an ego for on purpose we have all these things to keep us you know sane in a
1:26:47 day-to-day functional functional exactly standpoint yeah right so if you remove it completely you
1:26:53 can become dysfunctional but if you remove it deliberately and with great care you can be
1:26:57 opened up you know I think there’s an expertise there I think there’s a lot of other things that
1:27:02 if we have the freedom and the wisdom to not abuse it I think it can be extremely powerful
1:27:07 do you recall the title of the book or how people might search for it yes so this is a one of the
1:27:15 many resources that I recommend in my book cool tools and cool tools is a big catalog of possibilities
1:27:21 it has about 1500 different items a lot of them are kind of like hand tools you know pliers and
1:27:27 the great cordless drill but it’s much better than that and I include things like what if you
1:27:32 wanted to have psychedelic experience it was transformative what do you do and I would recommend
1:27:37 this book or I mean there’s lots of other things in it but the I don’t actually have the book right
1:27:46 in front of me I should I think it’s called I don’t remember it’s okay I will uh I show notes
1:27:52 we will list it as the right one and there’s also a little tiny book that came from England
1:27:58 it was a cartoon guide that gave kind of a street an unjudgmental view of all the different
1:28:04 drugs there were and what each one kind of did and didn’t in what the plus and minuses are without
1:28:09 you know recommending or forbidding them they’re just saying this this is what it is that information
1:28:13 also believe it or not is really in short supply it’s like you know what do you do with this and
1:28:18 how does it work and tell me the facts I don’t need to hear a lecture either way like well this
1:28:22 is great or this is terrible but just tell me what’s going on as you know I mean that kind
1:28:27 of information sometimes is extremely in short supply it’s very difficult to find information
1:28:36 that isn’t politicized yeah inaccurate or like you said so shrouded in either fear or irrational
1:28:42 optimism that it’s almost intelligible and certainly generally useless we’ll put those
1:28:46 books in the show notes for people I want to come back to one thing you said far far earlier and that
1:28:52 was related to the pieces that you tried to give away that eventually wouldn’t die and came back
1:29:01 were there any common threads any patterns in those pieces that you can pick out as being sort of a
1:29:09 uniquely Kevin Kelly theme if for like yeah yeah one of the things that I discovered in my six months
1:29:14 of trying to live as if I was going to die in six months because as I was coming closer to that
1:29:22 day which happened to be Halloween October 31st it was I kept cutting off my future I mean I may
1:29:26 be like you I kind of tend to live in the future much more than the past I’m always imagining I’m
1:29:30 saving this for someday when I’m going to do this I’m kind of looking forward I’m going to do this
1:29:36 here and so I was very much in the future and then something that future was being cut down day by
1:29:42 day I was like and I was thinking like why am I taking pictures I’m enough to take in photographs
1:29:46 because if I’m not going to be here in another two months or something so so there was all these
1:29:52 things that I’m kind of cutting out and as I was cutting them out I had this realization which was
1:29:58 the thing I took away from this thing which was that I was becoming less human that to be fully
1:30:05 human we have to have a future we have to look forward to the future that is part of us is
1:30:12 looking into the future and so after I came out of the and I kind of embraced that and I’m saying
1:30:18 well you know that future forward facing that’s what I do that’s what that’s what I want to do
1:30:23 and that’s what I write about and in thinking about the future one of the things that is very hard
1:30:27 because the paradox about the future is that there are lots of impossible things that happen all the
1:30:33 time and if someone from the 100 years from now would come back and tell us things there’s a lot
1:30:36 of stuff we’re just not going to believe this is like that’s just that’s crazy just like if we
1:30:41 went back 100 years and told them what was going on now they would say you know that’s just not
1:30:46 going to happen I mean we could even go back 20 years I could go back 20 years and say we’re
1:30:51 going to have like you know google street views of all the cities of the world and we’re going to have
1:30:56 you know encyclopedias for free this edited by anybody you know it’s like they would say you
1:31:01 know there’s no way and I would tell them you know most of us for free they were saying there’s no
1:31:08 economic model in the world they would allow for that and there isn’t but here it is so the dilemma
1:31:15 is is that any true forecast about the future is going to be dismissed any future that is believable
1:31:22 now is going to be wrong and so you’re stuck in this thing of if people believe it is wrong if they
1:31:26 don’t believe it you know where does it get you you’re dismissed and so there is this very fine
1:31:34 line between saying something that is right on the edge of plausibility and at the same time right
1:31:41 on the edge of having a chance of being true and what I discovered that was helpful in trying to
1:31:49 get away from the kind of assumptions that binos to just kind of extrapolate was to think
1:31:56 laterally was to go sideways one thing just take whatever was everybody new and say well
1:32:01 what if that wasn’t true what would be a good example of that or an example like everyone says
1:32:05 okay morse law will continue well what if morse law didn’t continue what would that mean what would
1:32:12 happen and you can maybe I could say for the audience but I’ll just even to remind me morse law is
1:32:19 what is it every 18 months the the size and cost of technology will decrease by 50 something along
1:32:23 those lines let’s say even worse or no there’s speed involved as well right morse law does say
1:32:29 that but let’s say something right now we live in a world where every year the technology is
1:32:34 better and cheaper what if that wasn’t true right got it what if every year starting like you know
1:32:39 a couple years from now stuff was better bit more expensive that’s that’s a completely different world
1:32:45 right I mean everyone assumes right things are going to get better and cheaper well what if
1:32:50 that wasn’t true so you can take kind of assumption again that’s something that no one’s really
1:32:55 examining like well one of the things I’ll write about is the fact that we’re going to have a
1:33:03 population implosion globally that the global population will drastically reduce in 100 years
1:33:08 now we’ll have less population far far far less than we have right now and so all right I have to
1:33:13 bite at that what because I’ve thought a lot about this and the what they call the malthusian
1:33:18 dilemmas is that going to be do you think pandemic related nuclear weapon related all of the above
1:33:26 none of those none of those no ai coming in the the rise of the machines no okay it’s just pure
1:33:32 demographics so if you look at the current trends in fertility rates in all the developed countries
1:33:40 everywhere except for the us they’re already either below replacement level so replacement
1:33:46 level means that you’re just sustaining the population population just replaces itself
1:33:49 if it’s below it means that there’s getting less and less so japan
1:33:54 all these you know europe they’re all below replacement the us is an exception because
1:34:00 only because of immigration got it where people come in otherwise we would be there and this would
1:34:05 not be any news to anybody but the real news if people would point to the developing world but
1:34:11 mexico is now aging faster than the us china is aging faster because of their one child policy
1:34:17 of course japan is this completely they’re way underwater completely so even the one exception
1:34:23 is sub-saharan africa and there’s really kind of debate right now about how fast or whether
1:34:29 they’re slowing down but generally around the world south america the rest of asia the rate and
1:34:36 fertility continues to drop and here’s the thing is that a demographic transition that is happening
1:34:42 everywhere where people become urban and so every forecast shows the urbanity the
1:34:48 certification of the population continuing and i can’t think of any counter-force
1:34:56 to stop this huge migration at the scale that we’re seeing into the city and as that happens
1:35:03 the birth rates drop down and even in places like singapore or other places where they have
1:35:13 taken very very active countermeasures of cash for having kids and wow daycare forever bonuses
1:35:19 none of these work in terms of actually trying to raise fertility levels so you have to understand
1:35:26 that to go above replacement level the average woman has to have 2.1 kids well that means
1:35:31 there have to be tons and tons of women who have three or four kids right to make up for those
1:35:37 how many people do you know with that many kids you know living in cities and they’re just
1:35:43 very not there’s not enough of them so and this is a projection some of these are un productions
1:35:48 they have three three they have a low high and and a medium and the low one is not good news
1:35:55 because there’s not a large cultural counter-force for women to have three a lot you know a very
1:36:01 high percentage of the population to have three or four kids in a modern world and that’s why
1:36:08 the the population continues to decrease every year what type of this is perhaps a tangent but
1:36:14 one of the big debates in my head right now is to marry or not to marry to have kids or not to
1:36:20 have kids i never thought those would even be questions in my mind and yet here i am and and
1:36:26 now they are what are your thoughts on having children what type of people this is very broad
1:36:30 but should have children or shouldn’t have children whichever way of answering is easier
1:36:35 or how to even think about that question i think people who are privileged of which you are should
1:36:43 have children because you can bestow so many privileges and opportunities to your children
1:36:48 and if the world is to be populated why not populate it with children who have as many
1:36:53 opportunities as possible i also say from my own experience of growing up one of many kids and
1:36:58 having well i have three kids one of my other regrets in life is not having a fourth but we
1:37:03 were just we started a little bit too late and we were unable to have a fourth but all my kids
1:37:09 wished we had a fourth two and i would say that it’s a gift to your kids to have more than one
1:37:17 and i know that from hanging out in china where so many kids grew up only children and this really
1:37:24 really missed that there is a total gift of the siblings and brothers to each other that is
1:37:30 really very profound and there is also i know from my friends who have had lots of kids
1:37:38 that there is a certain amount of teaching from the the older to the younger and that’s a lot of
1:37:43 what they learn and that the curve of the amount of energy that you have to expend actually after
1:37:50 three doesn’t really matter in terms of the parents got it i have one friend who has nine kids they
1:37:57 have another friend who has seven wow and basically how do they do that well the older kids were
1:38:01 helping to parent the younger kids that’s the only way that really works but that is actually
1:38:05 basically they have you know they have five parents instead of having two parents right it’s very
1:38:09 traditional in a way i mean traditional meaning reaching back thousands or tens of thousands of
1:38:17 years it is of course in the old days may have 12th born but they rarely had 12 kids survive
1:38:23 right it’s like the 1800s kind of unheard i hang out with the amish a lot and they still
1:38:28 have these very large families and they all survive so they have kind of in some sense is
1:38:34 sort of an unnatural expansion and one of my predictions again going back to kind of like
1:38:38 the assumptions one of my predictions is that you know in america in a hundred years from now
1:38:43 whatever it is it’ll be um the complete countryside is run by the amish the amish take over the entire
1:38:47 census slide because they never sell land they have like eight kids and then there are all
1:38:50 these people living in the cities and it’s like everybody’s happy you know you’re really they
1:38:55 drive out to the amish lands this is fantastic they’re very happy you know doing their thing
1:38:59 and running the farms and so i’ve been predicting for years that the amish would come and start
1:39:03 buying upstate new york and that’s exactly what they’re doing right now why do you spend so much
1:39:07 time with the amish this is news to me but very interesting and how long has that been going on
1:39:12 and does your beard have anything is there any relation to the amish i had the beard before my
1:39:18 interest in the amish i can show you some pictures when i was 19 years old so those who don’t know i
1:39:22 have an amish beard which means i have a beard without a mustache the reason why the amish don’t
1:39:27 have mustaches is that it was at the time that they were kind of adopting their dress code the
1:39:33 mustache was all military men had mustaches and so they were anti-military they refused to serve
1:39:39 in the armies they don’t even vote so is their kind of rejection of the military by sharing
1:39:44 off their mustache i hang out with the amish because their adoption of technologies is like
1:39:50 seemed to us totally crazy because first of all they’re not luddites they’re complete hackers
1:39:55 they love hacking technology they have something called amish electricity which is basically
1:40:00 pneumatics a lot of these farms have a big diesel they don’t have electricity but they have a big
1:40:08 diesel generator in the barn that pumps up this compressor that sends high pressure air tubes
1:40:12 down tubing into their barn into the homes and so they have converted like their sewing machine
1:40:19 washing machine and stuff to pneumatic okay seems like a bit of a side step of the word of god
1:40:25 exactly so they’ll have like they’ll have horse drawn buggies and horse drawns farm
1:40:30 improvements and the horses will be pulling this diesel-generated combine and you’re thinking
1:40:37 what are they doing okay right but but in fact if you look at our own lives and i’ve done this
1:40:41 many times i can ask you tim or you can ask me there’ll be some weird thing like we don’t have
1:40:46 tv in our house but i’ve got internet it’s like well what is that about right right so we all
1:40:52 have these things but here’s the difference is the amish do it collectively they’re very selective
1:40:58 they’re selecting their technology collectively as a group and secondly they have to articulate
1:41:02 because they’re doing collectively you have to articulate what their criteria is a lot of us
1:41:10 are adopting we try this we try that we don’t have any kind of like logic or reason or theory or
1:41:16 framework for why we’re doing stuff it’s just one parade of stuff but the amish have a very
1:41:21 particular criteria and their criteria is there are two things that they’re looking for the main
1:41:25 thing they want to do and the main reason why they have all these restrictions like horse and buggy
1:41:31 and all the stuff is that they want to have these communities very strong communities and so they
1:41:37 notice that if you have a car that you’ll drive out and shop somewhere out of the community or you
1:41:41 go to church somewhere out of the community or whatever it is but if you have a horse and buggy
1:41:46 you can go only 15 miles and so everything has to happen your entire life you have to support the
1:41:51 community you have a community within 15 miles you have to visit the sick and you have to shop
1:41:57 locally so you’re shopping with your neighbors so when a new technology comes along they say
1:42:02 will this strengthen our local community or send us out and then the second thing that they’re
1:42:09 looking at is with families so the goal of the typical amish man or woman is to have every
1:42:15 single meal with their children for every meal their lives until they leave home they have breakfast
1:42:20 they have lunch and they have dinner so breakfast and lunch is they go to the one-room schoolhouse
1:42:25 and they peddle back for lunch their parents have with them and that means that the business
1:42:29 is ideally in their backyard they have a lot of like shops and stuff if they’re not a farmer
1:42:33 and they have a backyard shop which is actually has to be kind of clean-ish because it is in their
1:42:38 backyard right it’s like not might well it is in their backyard so they really are you know they
1:42:41 really want to make sure that they’re they have metal working shops and stuff which they really
1:42:46 try to keep non-toxic and work because it’s in their backyard and so that means that they can come
1:42:50 home for lunch they have breakfast lunch so they’re on the premises and they have every single meal
1:42:57 with their children until they leave and so they say well will this technology allow us to do that
1:43:02 will it help us do that or will it work against that and then like right now they’re they’ve been
1:43:06 deciding whether to accept cell phones or not even though they don’t have landline phones
1:43:10 so they’re basically they’re going to well some of them are going to accept cell phones
1:43:16 and they do that by there’s always some amish early adopter who’s trying things and they say okay Ivan
1:43:22 Bishop says you can try this we’re watching you we’re going to see what effect this has on your
1:43:27 family on your community you have to be ready to give it up anytime we say that it’s not working
1:43:34 and they do this in a kind of a paris by paris so it’s very decentralized and so they try out
1:43:38 always trying out their technologies and they’re always looking to see
1:43:42 does this strengthen the families is just strengthening the communities if not we don’t
1:43:48 want it and what if you i have two questions i guess the first is since you’re normally as i
1:43:53 understand it based on the west coast and northern california how do you get out to the amish or is
1:43:58 there a separate community closer by and then secondly what if you incorporated into your own
1:44:06 life or your your own family that originated from the amish yeah so i don’t get to see them as often
1:44:14 as i want but actually is when i go east i have some contacts that i will exercise and i would try
1:44:18 to get like to stay overnight and go to church in a buggy or something and this is pennsylvania
1:44:24 but well actually pennsylvania is the heart of it but actually there are more communities in Ohio
1:44:30 where my brother lives oh look at iowa there’s a lot more happening in new york so the pennsylvania
1:44:35 are the kind of ground zero ground zero but in fact there are bigger more extensive communities
1:44:41 outside of pennsylvania i didn’t realize that yeah the amish and diaspora it is so i’m saying
1:44:45 they literally are just buying up the farmland they’re they’re expanding they’re constantly
1:44:50 expanding they have a very small attrition rate very large families they all are buying farms
1:44:56 and stuff for their for their children and they never sell and so they also don’t even move into
1:45:02 areas as a they have a minimum number of families that we need to move in at once but what did i
1:45:08 learn from then well one of the things that we had particularly when we had younger kids was kind
1:45:14 of technological sabbaticals or Sabbaths i should say and i’ve now seen other families who aren’t
1:45:24 even religious adopt that same thing which is once a week you take a break from either you can
1:45:28 define it however you want it to screen or the keyboard or connectivity or something
1:45:34 and you step back and you do that not because it’s like terrible or poison but because it’s
1:45:38 so good you know there’s lots of people who are kind of like they’re going to drop out from twitter
1:45:42 they’re kind of like oh this is like a toxin like any detox or something i think that’s
1:45:47 entirely the wrong way to think about it is you want to take breaks and it’s not because they’re
1:45:52 toxic but because they’re so good it’s like you want to step back so that you can re-enter it
1:45:59 and with a renewed perspective with a renewed appreciation with having spent time looking
1:46:05 in a different way and i think that kind of rhythm of having sabbaths and then yearly sabbaticals
1:46:11 vacations or whatever retreats and then every seven years or whatever as you take a true sabbatical
1:46:18 i think that kind of rhythmic disconnection or Sabbath i think is very powerful something
1:46:25 that works very well and what’s something that we had in our family i take Saturdays off as it
1:46:30 turns out is my screenless day i really try to make that a weekly occurrence and it’s incredible
1:46:36 the effect that has this sort of galvanizing effect of just a mere 24 hours not even that
1:46:42 if you just consider the waking hours every seven years a vacation or sabbatical of how long
1:46:47 in your case or your family’s case yeah partly because my wife actually is granted a sabbatical
1:46:51 from the company she works for which is Genetech which is one of the two companies that actually
1:46:59 have a official sabbatical for older researchers at least and it’s very meager it’s six weeks
1:47:05 of course you know a six-week sabbatical is basically a european annual vacation
1:47:13 right right left for an american right it’s three years it’s that’s a big thing so yes
1:47:18 so we’re do something different so this year we’re taking one and we’re going to camp in
1:47:23 national parks for one month of it and then the other two weeks will go to asia but we haven’t
1:47:27 been to a lot of the national parks i’m going to do a different kind of project than i haven’t
1:47:32 done before and we’ll do some kind of car camping we haven’t really done a big road trip like that
1:47:37 so it’s all new for us what is the longest in the last few years that you’ve gone without checking
1:47:47 email oh probably two weeks and in china how do you manage that well but it was very easy it was
1:47:54 like i just i was unable to pick it up because china was blocking google that makes it makes it
1:48:00 makes it more challenging and i was in some remote places and so even the connection was hard but
1:48:05 it was like they weren’t playing while letting me get it i’m not a mobile person my first smartphone
1:48:14 was the iphone 5 and i still not using it properly i use it for phone calls yeah i don’t i don’t use
1:48:20 my iphone as an input device either i just trust trust me nuts but i can’t i can’t type when i travel
1:48:25 i like to leave everything i’m i spent a lot of my time sitting in front of a computer i’m kind of
1:48:31 like the zen you know walk walk sit sit don’t wobble so like i’m here i’m like really online
1:48:38 and then when i leave this studio i don’t want to be connected at all and i won’t be and i’m not
1:48:43 checking email i’m not checking this other stuff and i can go days typically i’ll go days without
1:48:50 checking even in the us if i’m traveling and then if i’m overseas i will go probably three or four
1:48:55 days before i get email that’s pretty typical let me shift gears just a little bit i’m looking at
1:49:01 longnow.org i recommend everybody take a look at it the long now foundation and humans are
1:49:06 generally i would say pretty bad at thinking long term certainly when it comes to habit change
1:49:11 very very high failure rate with long term incentives you’re going to get diabetes in 20
1:49:17 years for instance as opposed to you’ll have more sex if you have a six pack when it comes to diet
1:49:21 but the long now foundation i just want to read a few things on this website for people so the
1:49:27 long now foundation was established in 1996 written as zero one nine nine six to creatively
1:49:31 foster long term thinking and responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years then you
1:49:35 have the 10,000 year clock which is a monument scale multi-millennial all mechanical clock is an
1:49:40 icon to long term thinking the rosetta project building an archive of all documented human
1:49:46 languages long bets featured bet is here warren buffet protege partners lc a public arena for
1:49:51 enjoyable competitive predictions of interest to society with philanthropic money at stake and then
1:49:56 revive and restore which is bringing extinct species back to life so there is a lot here
1:50:03 can you explain to people i’ve greatly enjoyed many of the seminars and speeches of the long
1:50:09 now foundation i’m a supporter i suppose i’ve even spoken there on stage and love the email
1:50:15 synopsis that steward sends out what is the function of the long now foundation when what
1:50:23 is the value the long now foundation is kind of reactive it’s it’s reacting to the very inherent
1:50:28 short term bias that our society particularly this technological society particularly say the
1:50:34 silicon valley exhibits which is often a focus on the next quarter the next two quarters the next
1:50:40 year results needing to be immediate you know instant satisfaction if something’s not on
1:50:47 Netflix streaming we don’t even wait for the dvd it’s just fairly kind of very fast paced short
1:50:52 term thinking and also somewhat blinded by the fact that we don’t have a lot of sense of history
1:50:59 either that we’re kind of ignorant about what’s happened in the past and so the term the long
1:51:04 now came from brian you know who noticed that we have a very short now which is like the next
1:51:10 five minutes the last five minutes and so the long now is a way to is an attempt to kind of expand
1:51:17 that so that we as a society and as individuals would try to think about things at a generational
1:51:23 or civilizational scale so like how about like working on something that might take
1:51:29 longer than your own lifetime to accomplish so you start something now that maybe make it so that
1:51:34 it might take like the cathedrals of old and what if we were trying to make something that you know
1:51:43 might need 25 years to accomplish how can we do that so we’re trying to encourage people to think
1:51:50 in that perspective to take that perspective and then to maybe move in that direction we’re not
1:51:55 necessarily saying we have to have like the asimov’s foundation where we have to have like a
1:52:01 master plan for the next 100 years and we’re going to plan out the future no we’re agnostic about what
1:52:08 it is that people make or do we’re just saying that it would benefit thinking about the long
1:52:15 term and i’ve often heard some people who advise to counseling to individuals about kind of thinking
1:52:20 about the long term in their own life even though you might want to act kind of locally and be
1:52:26 spontaneous but you do want to kind of keep in mind the fact that you know you’ll be around for a while
1:52:33 whether it’s putting some savings away or working on a skill that might take some time more than
1:52:39 six months or a year to acquire or you know whatever it is that you can have both perspectives
1:52:44 and so we’re not attempting to get rid of the need for people to survive the need for companies to
1:52:52 have a profit this year we’re saying there can be additional perspectives in addition to that
1:52:58 where we commit to like a program of science research where it’s pure science and the results
1:53:03 of the say in mathematics is one of the most profound things that we can invest in even though
1:53:09 most of the things in the beginning seem to be non-utilitarian they don’t have any purpose but
1:53:15 we know from our own history that you know in 20 years they’ll pay off in some way or other
1:53:24 and so being able to kind of construct a society so that we can allow the rewards of long-term
1:53:31 investment long-term thinking long-term perspective that would make us a better civilization
1:53:39 a month to perhaps jump into some rapid fire questions and they don’t have to even be rapid
1:53:45 or the question just some fire questions the questions will be rapid the answers can be as
1:53:51 shorter as long as you’d like what book or books do you gift or have gifted the most to other people
1:54:01 outside of your own books there is a short graphic novel by daniel pink called junco
1:54:08 and it’s career counsel advice it’s aimed at young people it’s a graphic novel it’s a cartoon
1:54:12 basically and it’s aimed at young people as trying to teach them how to be become indispensable
1:54:20 and i’ve given that away to young people because it’s for me the best summary of again it’s not like
1:54:25 how to become successful it’s how to become indispensable to that’s right it’s uh adventures
1:54:30 of johnny bunko or something like that yeah yeah that’s right that’s right i have that on my bookshelf
1:54:35 back in san francisco in fact yeah if you know a young person who is just starting out hand them
1:54:40 that book it’s very easy for them to read again it’s a graphic novel it’s non-threatening it’s fun
1:54:48 and it’ll give us like five great principles for starting out and helping them kind of orient
1:54:54 themselves as they start working in in the working life for someone who’s facing a lot
1:54:59 of the same questions let’s just say so you have graduates asking the what should i do why am i here
1:55:05 what am i good at if we fast forward to say for the sake of argument mid 30s right people in middle
1:55:10 age hitting that particular point are there any books that you would recommend they read well
1:55:16 there is a book that i’m recommending by cowell newport it’s called so good that can’t ignore you
1:55:24 this changed my mind because i’d kind of bought into the kind of new age california dogma follow
1:55:29 your bliss you know money will follow and he makes a really good argument and convinced me that’s
1:55:38 actually not very good advice that what you really want to do is to master something and to use your
1:55:44 mastering of something as a way to get to your passion so if you start with just passion it’s
1:55:50 sort of paralyzing because and i know this from my own kids they’re 15 they really don’t know
1:55:56 what they’re passionate about i mean some people are lucky enough to know a lot of people aren’t
1:56:00 so this is a book for people who don’t kind of really know what they’re really excellent at
1:56:06 don’t really know what they’re passionate about and his premise is that you master something
1:56:12 almost anything at all just something you master and you use that mastery to kind of move you into
1:56:17 a place where you can begin to have passion and that you kind of keep recycling that the way you
1:56:21 find your passion is through mastery rather than the other way around which is people think that
1:56:26 they’re going to get their mastery through passion and i kind of believe that former you know the
1:56:31 passion would lead to mastery but after thinking about it looking at his examples and his argument
1:56:38 i’m pretty sure that for at least for most people you can get to your passion through mastery
1:56:44 and that would also give you a currency or a lever to use in getting to that point
1:56:49 excellent do you have a favorite fiction book yes i don’t know fantastic this i usually don’t
1:56:57 get one answer this is great yeah shantaram ah shantaram it might take me a way to explain this
1:57:02 as author of one book because it’s very autobiographical the premise of the book and the
1:57:08 author’s life seems so completely incredulous and kind of almost hollywoodish but what
1:57:14 you get from it where it’s set it’s set in india it’s in the slum of india and you get a
1:57:28 incredibly vivid immersive deep and in some ways uplifting view of india and the underworld in
1:57:35 india and at that part of asia and the the main protagonist is this very interesting zen criminal
1:57:43 he’s sort of a coyote trickster blend of someone who is you know he does bad things but at the same
1:57:52 time he’s sorry about it and he has a kind of a cosmic perspective it’s very very unusual but
1:57:57 it’s a long book and i actually recommend if people are going to try it is that you actually
1:58:03 to get the audible version listen to it it runs like you know on and on but to be one of those
1:58:07 books you the you wish will never end and i’ll just tell you the beginning of it which is that
1:58:14 and this is the true part which is that the guy the author became a bank robber in new zealand
1:58:20 he was hooked on drugs started robbing banks was eventually caught and escaped from prison
1:58:24 and made his way to the slums of india where because he had a medical kit he was treated as
1:58:32 a doctor got involved and hooked on drugs in india got involved with the mafia was put in prison
1:58:38 tortured left abandoned nobody knew was even in there started writing a book wrote this book
1:58:44 they ripped it up destroyed it he was recruited found a guru in afghan he was recruited in the
1:58:50 mobile gene was fighting there his entire company was wiped out i mean that’s just the beginning
1:58:56 that’s like the first day it’s really interesting that you would bring up shantram for those people
1:59:03 who haven’t heard of josh waytskin i also had him on this podcast josh was the basis for searching
1:59:09 for bobby fischer the book in the movie world-class chess player also a very deep soulful guy and this
1:59:13 is one of his favorite books as well oh yeah you would you would love josh sometime i’ll have to
1:59:19 put you guys in touch but any favorite documentaries well now you’re you’ve asked the wrong question
1:59:26 because i have a site called true films where for the past 10 years i have reviewed the best
1:59:31 documentaries i actually have a book called true films which is the 200 best documentaries that you
1:59:37 should see before oh my god no kidding wow you have no idea how timely this is so it’s two uh t r u e
1:59:44 films yeah true films okay and so i there are a couple films that i would say have sort of universal
1:59:47 appreciation like you know they may have like a rating of like a hundred on rotten tomatoes or
1:59:53 something so the one documentary that i think everybody that i know have seen it has loved it
1:59:59 is uh man on wire such a good movie right so it’s just it’s just transcendent it’s just a beautiful
2:00:05 movie it’s based on fact that this guy basically he’s going to walk to twin towers i mean he the
2:00:10 moment was he was like 14 year old kid in france was at a dentist’s office looking at the magazine
2:00:15 and saw that they were had plans to build this twin tower in new york and he saw those two twin
2:00:22 towers and he said i need to walk between them he didn’t know how to type walk the towers had not
2:00:28 been built he was already planning this thing and he was filming himself the whole way yeah so amazing
2:00:35 okay and so he doesn’t and how he does is amazing so another great documentary that i love because
2:00:41 it’s very unusual among documentaries and that it films the villain side of the whole thing as well
2:00:46 which is king of kong i haven’t this has been recommended to me that i still have not seen
2:00:54 this movie king of kong is about a guy who becomes the video game arcade game king of kong he becomes
2:01:01 the champion but he is basically competing against this cabal of people who are trying to
2:01:07 subvert him and are doing all kinds of really terrible things to stop which was all on film
2:01:12 yeah and so here’s this really kind of midwest really lovable guy and you’re rooting for him
2:01:18 the whole time while these really sleazy guys are trying to take him down it’s just fantastic
2:01:24 i have to watch that so that’s the second one the third one is one that’s not so well known
2:01:33 it’s called state of mind and it’s about the spectacles in north korea which these two filmmakers
2:01:37 had access to and they followed several different young athletes who were practicing for this
2:01:42 spectacle and in these spectacles of course what it is is people are pixels you know they have these
2:01:47 like huge stadium size things and they’re like a little robot so they’re cogs in this machine
2:01:52 which is like perfect so you can imagine like a picture that’s made up of pixels but every
2:01:56 pixel is actually there’s a little boy or girl holding up a card colored cards in sequence
2:02:02 so these things move which means that you know there’s not a pixel missing so i mean that nobody’s
2:02:06 sick is like you know this you’re not allowed to be sick you can’t make a mistake at all
2:02:16 and it’s getting inside of north korea which turns out to be a nationwide cult and i think that in
2:02:20 50 years when they’re gone nobody will believe that that was even possible and this documentary
2:02:25 will be here it’s like no no no they really was a nationwide cult and they really did believe this
2:02:30 it really is amazing just to see what’s going on there all right well i know what i’m doing for
2:02:35 the next few days next few evenings i could go on unfortunately because i have a lot of them but go
2:02:42 to the truth i only review ones that are great so i don’t do awesome i just say these are fantastic
2:02:46 oh man all right i’ve been looking for this i cannot believe that i’m only learning this now
2:02:51 i’m kind of embarrassed about that when you think of the word or hear the word successful who’s the
2:02:58 first person who comes to mind jesus all right why would you say that well there aren’t that many
2:03:05 people who’ve left their mark on as many people in the world as he has i think what he was up to
2:03:15 what he was doing is you know vastly been twisted misunderstood whatever word you want but nonetheless
2:03:21 what’s remarkable is and here’s the guy who didn’t write anything so i think success is
2:03:27 also overrated all right i’d love for you to elaborate on that greatness is overrated a lot
2:03:32 of you know i mentioned big numbers which is but it’s more of the impact that you had on people’s
2:03:40 lives but i think we tend to have an image of success that’s somewhat been skewed by you know our
2:03:45 current media it’s like our sense of beauty women it’s sort of like in terms of all possibilities
2:03:50 it’s in a very small narrow defined it’s all kind of ritualistic in a certain sense and i think our
2:03:57 idea of success is often today it means you know somebody who has a lot of money or who has a lot
2:04:03 of fame or who has some of these other trappings which we have assigned but i think can be successful
2:04:10 in by being true to and kind of being the most you that you could possibly be and i think that’s
2:04:16 what i think of as one of the things that jesus whether you take him as just a historical character
2:04:22 or anything beyond was about he certainly wasn’t imitating anybody me put that way the great
2:04:27 temptation that people have is they want to be someone else which is basically they want to be
2:04:31 in someone else’s movie you know they want to be the best rock star and there’s so many of those
2:04:37 already that you can only one up imitating somebody in that in that slot and i think to me the success
2:04:44 is like you make your own slot you have a new slot that didn’t exist before and i think you know
2:04:47 that’s of course what jesus and many others were doing but it was they were kind of making a new
2:04:54 slot and that’s really hard to do but i think that’s what i chalk up as success is you made
2:05:00 a new slot what is your new slot yeah you knew you knew that was coming who says i’m successful
2:05:08 well i’m not i’m trying to not make any assumptions here yeah or what would be your slot my slot would
2:05:15 be kevin kelly i mean that’s the whole thing it’s not going to be like a career or you would really
2:05:20 ideally be something that was you had no no imitators i mean you would be who you are and
2:05:26 that’s that is success actually in some senses is you didn’t imitate anybody no one else imitated
2:05:31 you afterwards right so you know in a certain sense you have if you become an adjective that’s
2:05:37 a good sign right so i think success is actually you kind of make your own path if they’re calling
2:05:42 you a successful entrepreneur then to me that’s not the best kind of success because you’re being
2:05:48 confined to the category right right you’re in a category if you could change one thing about
2:05:56 yourself what would it be i could sing ah you would like to sing yeah i seemed to be unable to
2:06:02 carry a tune i can’t remember i mean my wife can hear something once and she can just sing it back
2:06:07 i could hear the same song i have heard the same song and i couldn’t tell you three notes of it i’m
2:06:13 sure because i’m a tim ferris fan i’m sure i could train myself to eat that i know i could but i i
2:06:18 guess i haven’t and it would be something that i have to really work at and i haven’t but i have
2:06:25 trouble carrying a tune staying in tune remembering a tune i love music and i appreciate it but in
2:06:31 terms of actually singing and i don’t play an instrument so maybe i would say it feels a little
2:06:35 easier for me there would be something nice have you taken lessons or attempted to take lessons
2:06:42 no i got it what’s this so just in the spirit of trade i’ve recently started exploring hand drumming
2:06:49 with gembeys and different types of drums if anyone out there can get me a pan art hang i would
2:06:53 really love to hear from you those of you that will mean nothing to most people are hearing this
2:06:59 the research that has piqued my curiosity most recently and of course you don’t want to run out
2:07:05 and just start swallowing these things but there’s a common anti epilepsy drug called valproate
2:07:13 which apparently has some implications for opening a window for achieving perfect pitch in mature
2:07:17 adults very fascinating stuff so if i do any experiments with that i will i will certainly
2:07:22 report back well and now that you’ve talked about it not the drug part but i did remember i did take
2:07:27 one class you mentioned the drums it took a one class at an adult summer camp which i highly
2:07:33 recommend if your kids go to camp you should go with them and there was a steel drum oh cool
2:07:38 course and i love that so like you i think if i did take up an instrument it would be drums of
2:07:43 some sort because that i seem to respond to and that did pretty good for the intro course on
2:07:51 steel drumming i find percussion to be so primal it just satisfies some type of need that probably
2:07:57 predates yes verbal communication even yeah certainly written notes right is your inner cave
2:08:02 man just responding are there any particular let’s just say in the first two hours of your day any
2:08:10 particular morning rituals or habits you have that when performed consistently you find produce
2:08:17 better days for you and i’m leaving better days undefined on purpose but i love studying mornings
2:08:22 and or what people do when they wake up what time do you wake up are there any particular
2:08:28 habits or rituals that you find contribute to better days yeah yeah i’m a very good sleeper i
2:08:35 don’t sleep a lot these days i get up at seven thirty and i have some rituals but i i don’t
2:08:40 vary them enough maybe to to know whether they are i’m not a morning person okay to begin with
2:08:44 you’re not a morning person well i mean well the fact that you don’t vary them is perfect so
2:08:49 well i know but that means an artist is only optimized in any way or i can’t tell which is
2:08:55 better but for better or worse one of the first things i do is i read the paper version of the
2:09:02 new york times it’s a kind of like a i sort of what i call a guilty pleasure i don’t know whether
2:09:08 that makes me better at anything else i do but um i don’t drink coffee or anything this is sort of
2:09:14 it’s a ritual and when i’m not here i don’t read it so i was like i don’t miss it it’s kind of
2:09:19 right curious but like if i’m here it’s like i gotta do it i don’t know it’s kind of weird
2:09:23 is that immediately after waking you read the paper or is there anything just about just about
2:09:29 i kind of in my pajamas i walk out to the front gate and i pick it up and i read it i mean and
2:09:36 i don’t read all of it i just kind of go through and i usually don’t even read the news part i read
2:09:42 the slower stuff i don’t make sure why now that you’re asking and that’s it that’s the entire
2:09:47 ritual i don’t have the same thing for breakfast or anything like that it’s just that morning hit
2:09:53 do you do anything throughout your day regularly maybe it’s before bed or anything else that most
2:10:01 other people probably don’t do that’s a good question no really okay i have no special sauce
2:10:08 but you’re very consistent you don’t your days seem to be yeah they don’t vary very wildly so
2:10:12 that in and of itself might be something that a lot of people don’t okay let’s pick up two different
2:10:19 while i’m here in this studio i have a lot of control over my time so what i do during the day
2:10:25 is is greatly varied i’ll i do a lots of things for short amounts of times and you know go into my
2:10:30 workshop i’ll read actually read books it down and read books during the middle of the day i’ll go
2:10:35 i’ll do a hike and bring my camera out almost every day maybe that is something that most people
2:10:40 don’t do is probably they probably aren’t taking pictures with a camera every day more reading books
2:10:44 in the middle of the day for that matter right exactly well maybe that’s true i guess how do you
2:10:49 choose your books ah that’s a paradox of choice problem for a lot of for a lot of people it is
2:10:53 just like what are you gonna listen to next in music i think the music becomes free and everybody
2:10:57 has all the music in the world but deciding where you’re going to listen to becomes the thing you’ll
2:11:01 pay for this has been my prediction about amazon is that we’re soon going to have like any book
2:11:08 you want for free amazon prime digital version of it you can have it whenever you want but you’ll
2:11:13 pay for us for the recommendations and um that’s a good point that’s a great point i have a network
2:11:19 of friends and i listen to lots of podcasts so i get it from all over the place and like probably
2:11:25 you are at this point i long ago decided that in terms of the greater scheme of things the cost of
2:11:31 books really cheap and if i wanted a book i would buy it right and the result is i am right now
2:11:40 speaking in a two-story high library of books that i have and i don’t do the same with digital books
2:11:44 because i finally figured out that oh you know if i purchase a digital book before i’m reading it
2:11:48 it’s not going anywhere it’s just sitting there so i shouldn’t really purchase a digital book until
2:11:53 like five seconds before i’m going to read it i have exactly the opposite habit because right
2:11:58 because it’s like what is this there the whole point of kindle is that you don’t have to have it
2:12:03 until like you need it so on the digital books i don’t buy anything until like i’m seconds away
2:12:10 from reading it then i’ll get it but the paper books i was near to the point of actually digitizing
2:12:17 and getting rid of all my paper books i was that close about five years ago but then i had an epiphany
2:12:23 i went to the private library and i realized that books were never as cheap as they are today
2:12:28 and they never will be as cheap and that there’s some power about having these things in paper
2:12:37 always available no batteries you know never obsolete and that if you made a library now
2:12:40 you would never be able to make some of these libraries in 50 years and so i decided to
2:12:47 keep and to kind of cultivate this paper library that’s something that was going to be very powerful
2:12:52 in the future i like that or at least i can use it as a justification for keeping a lot of paper
2:13:00 books around exactly i get tips from books from podcasts from blogs from friends from amazon
2:13:05 recommendations anywhere and whenever i hear someone recommend a book i’ll go and check
2:13:11 it out and then i’m fairly free in buying it but which means that i read a lot of really mediocre
2:13:18 books what but that’s part of my job right that’s in cool tools the book that we were just talking
2:13:24 about which is this catalog of possibilities that i self-published that has oh i don’t know 1500 you
2:13:28 know maybe there’s a couple hundred books that i recommended but i probably read thousands and
2:13:34 thousands and thousands of books in order to select those so i see part of my job reading
2:13:40 through and i read a lot of how-to books most of the books i’m reading is nonfiction and a lot of it
2:13:46 is even instructional stuff on you know how to build a stone wall how to do origami how to send
2:13:51 a satellite a micro satellite into space whatever it is it doesn’t matter i’ll look at it and i’ve
2:13:57 seen tens of thousands if not fifty thousand how-to books over my lifetime i can spot a really good
2:14:02 one but still i’ll read through the other ones so that someone else doesn’t have to and i can
2:14:07 recommend saying this is the best book on building a tiny house if you want to build a tiny house
2:14:11 now do you when you read these books on origami or stone vault you follow through
2:14:16 and attempt these projects or are you evaluating it purely based on your
2:14:22 amassed experience of reading lots of these types of instructional books no actually so
2:14:26 maybe one of the other things that i don’t do every day but one of the things i do in general
2:14:32 that maybe everyone else is not doing is that i have like a thousand hobbies i dabble in things
2:14:40 so i have built stone walls more than one i have done origami i have made beer i have made wine i have
2:14:46 you know whatever it is i i’ve tried to do these things in my life and i continued to try and do
2:14:51 them i have homeschooled ways so i have and so as much as possible this is what my you know i was
2:14:57 talking before about my day it’s irregular in a sense that i’m here and i have things but i’m
2:15:03 doing new things and i’m reading new things all the time so i’m in my outside i’m you know i’ll
2:15:12 make a go card or we’ll do something that i haven’t done before and that’s the basis for helping
2:15:16 decide about these books i don’t have to be an expert in them but i can know enough to tell
2:15:22 whether or not the information they’re telling me is useful what odd project over the last year
2:15:28 has been the most fun let’s start there for you yeah well just the last couple of months i finally
2:15:35 built myself a real workshop i wish i could show it to you because the cool things i did it was you
2:15:42 know if you go into like u-line or somewhere this container businesses they have these racks of bins
2:15:49 so i have filled an entire wall of hundreds and hundreds of bins so i can organize stuff and i’m
2:15:54 a big fan of adam savage he has a principle for his workshops called first order access which
2:15:59 basically means that you don’t want to store things behind anything everything has to be at
2:16:03 the first level so you can look and see it it has to be within reach and sense you have to be able
2:16:08 to see everything that you have and it’s accessible you don’t want things hidden behind other things
2:16:15 right so that’s part of what i was doing with this workshop is this kind of first order access
2:16:21 and it’s tremendously powerful i mean i just the few days or the weeks i’ve had working in it it’s
2:16:27 just transforms everything it’s like i had the same problem with my books for many many years i had
2:16:32 books like multiple different bookshelves in the house i had them in boxes i had them this and that
2:16:38 and moving everything to one location into a library where there was two stories i could
2:16:44 see all my books just transformed them and made it really useful because i could find them just
2:16:49 really go and reach for them and the same thing with i’m finding bringing it to my tools which
2:16:57 is that you want to have things plugged in ready to go labeled organized first order access and it
2:17:01 can make simple jobs really simple instead of like the you know the hours of looking for something
2:17:06 right gathering all the tools getting all the tools like cooking it’s just like cooking exactly
2:17:11 yeah it’s having like a manual random access memory right you have your me some plus right in
2:17:16 front of you yeah you have or you know the tools are yeah that’s very cool if there were one object
2:17:23 manual project building something that you think every human should have the experience of doing
2:17:29 what would that be it’s very easy you need to build your own house much older and it’s not that hard
2:17:34 to do believe me i actually i built my own house and your house is amazing i know not not this house
2:17:39 i mean i actually built one from cutting down the logs cutting down the trees in upstate new york
2:17:44 wow and doing the stone herds and you know i mean unfortunately i don’t recommend this we
2:17:50 made like two by fours from trees you don’t want to do that because it’s a pain because you know
2:17:54 standard standard lumber is very it’s very good if your things are off a little quarter of an inch
2:18:00 as they are with rough um sawing lumber it’s just it’s a mess but nonetheless a large portion of
2:18:06 the people in the world have made their own homes adobe rammed earth bamboo whatever it is and like
2:18:10 going back to what we originally started off with um even if you don’t wind up living in it
2:18:18 it’s empowering to know that you can do it and if you do wind up living in it i have a friend lord
2:18:24 conne who built this magnificent place in belinus that he built with salvage material from scratch
2:18:30 over the many years it gives you the power to alter it so i believe that that your house should
2:18:35 be an extension of you that that really definitely it’s another projection it’s another way of and
2:18:40 also going back to what we’re talking about it’s another way to discover who you are and discover
2:18:46 what you’re good at and because a well-designed house should really reflect you and and what i’ve
2:18:50 discovered a lot of people design houses and they have this kind of imaginary fantasy idea about
2:18:55 themselves and what they’re going to do well you know whatever it is they’re going to have a swimming
2:18:59 pool well you know it’s like they’re never going to use a swimming pool whatever it is i mean very
2:19:03 few people actually have a very good sense of who they are and what they’re going to use something
2:19:11 for but if you really study yourself and really are honest and design something that space can help
2:19:17 you become successful in the sense of making a slot for you making your own slot and it’s another
2:19:24 it’s both a kind of byproduct of who you are and also can help you because you are it works both
2:19:29 ways i like that right you’re not just finding yourself you’re creating yourself exactly and
2:19:34 that so this is a larger philosophical question but this is something i talk about a lot in a very
2:19:40 high dimensional space which means like space of many pending possibilities the act of finding and
2:19:46 the act of creating are identical there is no difference between discovering something and
2:19:53 inventing something we could say that philosophically you know benjamin franklin invented electricity
2:20:01 we could say that christopher columbus invented america we could say that discovery and invention
2:20:07 are the same so that discovering yourself and inventing yourself is really the same things
2:20:13 will bring about that process you have to do both at once i really enjoy that last question
2:20:22 if you could give your let’s say you can pick the age either 15 or 20 year old self one or a few
2:20:28 pieces of advice what would they be you don’t have to do everything yourself you can hire people
2:20:37 to do stuff i wish i had known that when i was younger i wish that i had when i was 20 working
2:20:42 for hall of catalog i wish i’d known that i could have hired a programmer to do something i could
2:20:48 have hired someone it took me a long time to understand that and then recently i’ve been really
2:20:54 big on it hiring people through elance you know because i came from a little bit of kind of a
2:21:00 do-it-yourself i mean i made a nature museum when i was 12 at a chemistry lab they built myself
2:21:05 you know building the stuff and i could buy in the glassware but i had a whole chemistry lab i had
2:21:10 nature museums i did all the stuff and i did it myself and then of course and moving into the
2:21:15 whole earth catalog which was a kind of a do-it-yourself thing i really was um you know i just talked
2:21:22 about building my own house well now i will hire professionals to work and it just took me a long
2:21:28 time to realize that there’s something about being able to pay a professional to do what they do
2:21:35 really well it’s not like a weakness it’s like it helps them i’m happy they’re happy we’re all happy
2:21:40 and i can do a lot more now there’s certainly a pleasure in doing things yourself and dabbling
2:21:44 in but there’s also this other thing which i didn’t realize which is there’s there’s this
2:21:54 a leverage that you get by hiring people who are really good paying them fairly working with them
2:21:59 to amplify what it is that you want to do and i wish i knew that when i was younger
2:22:04 that’s a fantastic answer and you have if i remember correctly an assistant and a researcher
2:22:10 is that is that still true yes one and the same person oh they are the same okay yeah so i thought
2:22:14 that at one point you had believed that you needed those people to be two separate people but you
2:22:19 right here’s what i was saying was that it’s very unusual to find one person who can do both of
2:22:25 those tasks both of those tasks are often not found the same person because there’s you know the
2:22:34 hunting the researching the kind of there’s a hunter aspect to research that is often found in a
2:22:40 certain personality and then they’re kind of the the admin is more nurturing kind of making sure
2:22:47 of things gardening a little bit so it’s often rare to find someone who can do both but it’s
2:22:53 possible was it luck that you happened upon this particular individual that you work with now or
2:23:00 did you have a method i found that the place where i found that over the 14 years i’ve had two
2:23:07 the place where i found that they’re more likely than not to have a combination was librarians
2:23:14 i love it that’s fantastic so we put out notices on the librarian mailing lists and stuff that is
2:23:19 fantastic i said last question this will be the last question is there any other thoughts or advice
2:23:25 you’d like to leave with the listeners and then where would you like people to find more from you
2:23:31 your writing anywhere else i would say congratulations to the people who are listening to the podcast i
2:23:37 think podcasts are this fantastic new medium i’m spending a lot of time there i think it’s just
2:23:43 really great we’re in the early days of where this would go i’m really impressed by the power
2:23:49 of this medium to teach and to inform sometimes to entertain again i’m thankful to you tim for
2:23:53 having me on and having a chance to gab here but the people who are listening i think keep going
2:23:58 listen to more podcasts try to go wide i know tim mentions them here and there take a chance
2:24:04 listen to some more so that’s one thing i would say and as far as finding out more about me
2:24:12 i lucked out with a very easy mail and website it’s my initials kkk.org i have a very public
2:24:18 email for the past 25 years you can find it very easily on my website if you want to email directly
2:24:26 i have not outsourced that unlike other people that i know and my writings and books and whatnot
2:24:35 are at www.kk.org cooltools is a book that i really believe that each of you out there should have
2:24:43 it’s on paper it’s sort of the best of the website cooltools which has been going on for 11 years now
2:24:50 where we review every day one great tool there are only positive reviews wide waste of time on
2:24:56 anything but the best and tools in the broadest sense of the word of things that are useful
2:25:03 whether it’s elance or a book on how to do psychedelics or a book on how to build a workshop
2:25:08 or how to build a house or how to hitchhike around the world i and others recommend the best here
2:25:15 with some great context and it’s printed on paper or available on amazon not so easily found in
2:25:20 bookstores because it’s because it’s huge i mean it’s like it’s like five pounds waste it’s really
2:25:24 really big and if you don’t fly like 500 things in there you didn’t know about that you wish you knew
2:25:30 about like last year i’ll give you your money back so enjoy that so that’s that cool tools or cool
2:25:35 tools in amazon excellent well kevin this has been a blast it always is every time we chat i feel
2:25:40 like we should chat more so hopefully we’ll get a chance to spend some more time together soon
2:25:47 back in norcal or somewhere else in china or in china it’s been a long time i could get back
2:25:53 i’m ready i’m heading back to japan again and i know that you have lots of roots in in asia but um
2:26:00 i go there to renew my sense of the future because they are bulldozing the past as fast as it can
2:26:05 and we’re headed racing into the future and so i want to see what asia has in store for us because
2:26:13 mathematically we don’t count anymore you know what three billion three billion asians and you
2:26:20 know 300 million americans what can you say yes it’s right so study up folks yep specialization
2:26:25 is for insects i think that was a timeline so i like enjoy your time on this planet and look
2:26:31 broadly like kevin said kevin thank you so much i will talk to you soon and uh have a wonderful
2:26:37 day i will talk to you soon thanks for having me too okay bye bye hey guys this is tim again just
2:26:42 one more thing before you take off and that is five bullet friday would you enjoy getting a
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2:26:59 bullet friday easy to sign up easy to cancel it is basically a half page that i send out every
2:27:04 friday to share the coolest things i found or discovered or have started exploring over that
2:27:09 week it’s kind of like my diary of cool things it often includes articles i’m reading books i’m reading
2:27:16 albums perhaps gadgets gizmos all sorts of tech tricks and so on they get sent to me by my friends
2:27:22 including a lot of podcast guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field
2:27:28 and then i test them and then i share them with you so if that sounds fun again it’s very short
2:27:33 a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend something to think about
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2:27:45 drop in your email and you’ll get the very next one thanks for listening this episode is brought
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2:31:39 now i do my best always to eat nutrient dense meals that is the basic basic basic basic requirement
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2:33:00 [BLANK_AUDIO]
This episode is a two-for-one, and that’s because the podcast recently hit its 10-year anniversary and passed one billion downloads. To celebrate, I’ve curated some of the best of the best—some of my favorites—from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited. The episode features segments from episode “Derek Sivers on Developing Confidence, Finding Happiness, and Saying No to Millions“ and “Interview of Kevin Kelly, Co-Founder of WIRED, Polymath, Most Interesting Man In The World?“
Please enjoy!
Sponsors:
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Timestamps:
[00:00] Start
[05:47] Notes about this supercombo format.
[06:50] Enter Derek Sivers.
[07:20] From pig show busker to circus ringleader.
[10:42] Derek’s framework for developing confidence.
[13:05] “The standard pace is for chumps.”
[18:51] Relaxing for the same result.
[24:01] The origins of “HELL YEAH! or no.”
[26:25] “Busy” implies a life out of control.
[28:03] What inspired the automation of CD Baby?
[33:22] Derek’s billboard.
[34:32] Good advice at any age: “Don’t be a donkey.”
[40:24] Enter Kevin Kelly.
[41:02] Kevin’s biggest regret.
[43:13] Finding contentment in minimalism and “voluntary simplicity” without starving to death.
[50:33] Kevin’s epiphany when he embraced writing as a late bloomer.
[56:40] Why Kevin promised himself he would never resort to teaching English while traveling abroad.
[59:07] Finding purpose through resilience and the creator’s dilemma.
[1:06:50] Why the appeal of being a billionaire is overrated.
[1:11:05] Middle-aged optimization.
[1:15:28] Realizations following a “six months until death” challenge.
[1:20:08] Kevin’s Kickstarter-funded project linking angels and robots.
[1:22:41] Why a self-proclaimed ex-hippie waited until his 50th birthday to try LSD for the first time.
[1:28:43] Why a population implosion is probable in the next 100 years.
[1:36:05] The greatest gift you can give to your child.
[1:38:21] The criteria for Amish technology assimilation.
[1:45:03] What technology-free sabbaticals can do for you.
[1:48:53] Long Now Foundation’s vision of a better civilization.
[1:53:33] The graphic novel teaching young people how to become indispensable.
[1:54:52] An antidote to misguided “follow your passion” advice.
[1:56:44] Kevin’s favorite fiction book.
[1:59:15] The resource Kevin compiled for documentary lovers.
[2:02:47] A name Kevin considers synonymous with “success” (and why success is overrated).
[2:05:46] What Kevin would change about himself.
[2:07:59] Daily rituals.
[2:10:44] How Kevin accumulated enough books to fill a two-story library.
[2:15:19] How Adam Savage from MythBusters transformed Kevin’s method of organization.
[2:17:14] The project everyone should undertake at least once in life.
[2:19:30] Does discovery equal invention?
[2:20:12] Kevin’s advice to his younger self.
[2:23:16] Parting thoughts.
*
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Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Maté, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and many more.
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