Kevin Kelly

[00:03:35] Sean: Kevin, welcome to What Got You There. How are you doing today?

[00:03:38] Kevin: I’m doing fantastic. I’m so glad that you’ve invited me and I’m looking forward to our conversation.

Invention of the Scientific Method

[00:03:44] Sean: So am I. So you’re sitting in front of a lot of books, I know you’ve read thousands and thousands. I’m wondering for you though, is there a book that doesn’t sit on your shelf because it doesn’t exist yet? What books should be written?

[00:03:56] Kevin: Yes. There is not a book about the history of the scientific method of all the inventions that we’ve invented. The most important invention is the invention of the scientific method. And there’s not a book about that invention. In fact, all the prosperity that we have witnessed in the last two or 300 years, including our longevity that we have, this special miracle that we’re kind of, that I’m alive basically at my age is all due to the scientific method. And there’s really not a good biography about that.

[00:04:43] Sean: I mean, you are a really curious person. Why do you think that is?

[00:04:48] Kevin: I think that people have not really appreciated one dimension or two, the fact that it took 300 years to invent that it’s not a single invention. It’s a series of inventions that accumulate over time. To just give you one example, when the average informed educated person thinks about the size of your method, they might think about the double-blind experiment, which is this idea that particularly in health, that when you’re doing an experiment, not only should the subject not know which pill is the pill being tested, but the experimenter should also not know because that biases your interpretation of the results.

So that’s the key. So neither the patient, nor the doctor knows what is in the pills, that’s called a double-blind experiment. That was only invented in the 1950s. We think of it as sort of standard practice, but it’s actually a very recent invention. And so I think people don’t really appreciate how much of a work in progress the sign of your method is that we’re still basically inventing it. One of the recent inventions is this idea that you need to publish your negative results, that when something doesn’t work, you should also publish that because that’s valuable. 

It also increases honesty, and someone else doesn’t have to repeat the experiment that you did. And so in the past, that was very difficult to do, publish all the things that didn’t work. But now with the internet where publishing is easier, that’s now becoming more standard where they’re requiring that you post your experiment before you do it, and you post the results of whatever happens.

Kevin’s Learning Process

[00:07:04] Sean: You mentioned that being a work in progress one of the things I think is so important is the ability to learn. You’re someone who’s learned so much. I’m wondering what that process of learning new skills, new ideas, what does that look like for you? Is that a constant work in progress or is that something you’ve figured out? 

[00:07:08] Kevin: No, it is a work in progress and you were starting about what we don’t know or where it hasn’t been written. One of the other things that has not been written is a really good approach about how to learn, how you, me, individually learn. So, what I would like to know is how to optimize my own learning for all the different ways there are to learn or things to learn language or a skill, manual skill, or an intellectual skill. And you would think that that’s what we would teach kids in school, that when you graduated from high school, that you would know how to optimize your own learning. 

But that’s not what we do. I don’t even know how I learn best. Even after 70 years of learning, I don’t know that. I have never gone through that rigorous process of being tested and training to figure out how I learn best. I’m still stumbling around trying to figure out, well, what’s the best way for me to learn this new skill or this new approach or this new fact. And boy, I wish I knew that when I was 17. And so that’s something else that I would like to see, would hope to see someday is someone saying, well, here’s what you have to do.

Here’s the course, here’s the program. You go through that program. And the thing that you’ll come out with is, you’ll know exactly how you need to learn. You need to know how much sleep you need in between the reps. You need to here’s how much that spacing is for the refreshing course or whatever it is. Here’s what it is. And so, okay, great. Good. Because now I can do it more methodically when I learn something, when I’m trying to learn something new.

Kevin’s Vital Mindset

[00:09:22] Sean: You mentioned you wish you had known that when you were 17. I think some of our operating mindsets are so crucial. One of your mindsets, I would love to know if you could pass that on to any young person starting out. Is there a mindset that you just think is so vital to your overall life you’d love passing?

[00:09:42] Kevin: Yeah, it’s become a little bit of a cliche. It wasn’t when I was growing up, but it is now, which is that you fail forward. Don’t seek failure, but that you embrace failing, things not working as a way of moving forward. And I think that’s a very instrumental thing to learn is that you want to try things and that there is a correlation between quantity and quality when it comes to innovation and making new things and getting better that you literally have to do enough. So again, the now cliche, the 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. And the thing about deliberate practice, this is not 10,000 hours of practice.

It’s 10,000 hours of deliberate practice and deliberate practice is where you practice to the point of failure. Okay. So, you are a kayaker and you’re learning “kayaking”, and you’re going to the point where you actually fail, you make a mistake, you trip and that deliberate practice where you’re kind of going to the edge of failure is the way forward. And so that’s something that transfers into whatever domain you are, whether it’s music or sports or inventing things. You’re gonna try things with the idea that they probably aren’t going to work out in the beginning and that the failures that you have are opportunities to kind of get better.

It’s always going to be a balance because if you just completely fail all the time, it’s no fun. And it may be a sign that you should try something different. It’s an art of having enough successes with your failures to keep going. And so the formula is not really kind of a formula that you can kind of walk into and just do blindly. It still requires part of the art of living, of deciding, is there enough success to suggest that I should keep going forward? 

Handling Failure

[00:12:25] Sean: So many of us always want those black and white answers, right? Like the perfectly defined answer, but life is operating and working in gray, and getting comfortable with that gray element. So important. Kevin, you were mentioning that your learning process is still a work in progress. And so I’m wondering when you experience a failure, are there things that you do even just to be able to analyze and learn from so that you can use those insights into that next experiment and next trial?

[00:12:51] Kevin: Yeah, I think one of the things that failure presses on you is this question of why am I doing this? And part, I think of trying to be successful and having a successful life is, that you’re always coming back to your inner core and your inner motivations about why you’re doing this. What are you looking for? What does success look like? I find myself constantly asking, well, why am I doing this? And trying to examine the motivations and what I’m hoping to get out of things. 

And it’s very clear from the studies that the more inner directed, the more those motivations are something that you’re doing for yourself, the more likely that you are to succeed in a certain broad sense, than if you’re trying to please others in some ways. If you’re looking for approval, some part of that is just a natural human state. We want approval from others. We need a certain amount of it, but the bulk of what you’re going for has to be coming from your own drive. And so, when things fail I’m asking, okay, well why am I bothering with this? What am I trying to do? What do I find valuable? Is it something that’s practical?

Is it something that is much more spiritual in that sense? Is it something that maybe isn’t so pretty in terms of just, I want approval from others? And so examining when things don’t work and I am looking at the prospect of trying to do it again, I am reduced to thinking about my motivations and why am I doing things? And I think that the more aware we are of ourselves, the better. And, so that process as a self-examined life of really kind of being honest with yourself and why you are doing things I think that’s a very powerful place to be and a skill to have basically. 

“Finding Me is my Measure of Success”

[00:15:23] Sean: Interesting. I think about that inner drive as kind of that pull versus push, right? Are you being pushed by others or do you have that internal drive, that pull? I’d occasionally jump on a call, with a listener of the show, this happened the other day. And just talking about questions they have and a large theme that comes up again, and again, is breaking free of the shackles essentially of their parents, other people, and just living their own life. And this is something I really admire you doing and going against the grain. You have this great line, you were mentioning success a minute ago and your line is “finding me is my measure of success.” I would love for you to impact this because I think this is just such a liberating line.

[00:16:02] Kevin: Yeah. One of the things that took me a long time to kind of realize is that the course of our life over time is never a straight line. And you could take the most successful person and read their biography, and you’ll see that, that path to where they are is just full of detours, backtracks, side ventures and everything. It’s always the opposite of some direct path. And very few of them, particularly the sort of the greater success they have or the greater the reputation they have ever kind of imagined that the path of where they want to get. Occasionally someone will come up and say, yeah, I have wanted to be a world chess champion from the day I was 12 and they just went that way. 

But that is very, very, very rare. Again, the great ones, meaning the greats, the reason why they are great is because there was nobody else like them. Okay. So, I’ve really kind of honed this phrase, “don’t be the best, be the only”. You want to be the only one doing something. And so the people that we most sort of have the highest reputations are those that sort of like, there is nobody else like that. There’s nothing even remotely like them and they’re not. And so they’re in their own movie and a lot of people set out trying to be in someone else’s movie, they want to be LeBron James.

They want to be Steve jobs. They want to be Albert Einstein, whatever it is. They’re trying to form or conform to this image’s role. And in that way, lies failure. What you want to kind of figure out is you, about yourself. What is that unique set of talents that you have? And because when you’re there, it’s easier to be successful because you’re not competing against anybody. It’s like everyone else is doing their thing, and so you don’t have to compete anymore. If you can really find that, but finding that is so hard, first of all, because all the images of success we have are of other people. So what does my success look like?

And this is where this can come back to knowing yourself, finding out what it is that you can do better, or even only for most people will require all your life to figure out. In fact, that’s the purpose of your life. The purpose of your life is to figure out what the purpose of your life is. And so that will take all your life to kind of figure it out. And that’s why the great artists are kind of constantly reinventing themselves because they’re still figuring out what it is that they’re about. And so it’s a never ending process. 

But trying to get away from your ideas, your initial ideas of success and what your parents or your friends or the movies want to tell you what success looks like, that’s a very difficult lifelong project of trying to figure out. Well, what is it that I can do that’s natural for me? Natural in the sense that it rests on the things that I actually am naturally made up to do. And then how can I get those experiences that will bring and enhance and develop those skills until I get to a point where I am basically my own thing, I have my own title. I’ve invented my own niche, my own occupation, my own thing. Some people are more blessed and they can get to that earlier. Other people will take a longer time, but I think if you’re on that path you will always be better than if you aren’t. 

And so that’s sort of what the assignment is, and that’s why you have to try a lot of stuff, and have failures. Because what you’re trying to see is, well, is there anything in me that’s inclined, or that shows that I can do this. And this is a long answer, but let me say one other part of this is that…  I’ve just lost my train of thought, but I’ll get back to it. So, this thing of trying to find where you are is a project that I think will take most of your lives to figure out, and when you get there the advantage is that you don’t have to really compete with other people. You were the only, and it’s a natural state.

And one of the things I do to help me get there and to kind of be sure is I like to share when I’m doing my ideas as much as possible. A lot of people will find it very difficult because they’re afraid they’re going to give their ideas away. Someone’s going to steal it and do what they’re going to do. And when you’re young, yeah, I understand that, but in fact, you should be trying to give away your ideas because if you have an idea that someone else can steal, that means that you’re not the only, so you will kind of want to do something where nobody else can steal. 

It’s just like a very good place to be particularly when you’re young is to be working somewhere where there’s not even a name for what it is that you do. There’s just no title. There’s no occupation. It takes a long time to kind of explain to someone what you’re even upto. That for me is a really good place. If you tell somebody I’m doing crypto, it’s like, no, no, but if you’re doing something that’s like, well, what I’m doing is really hard to explain.  I don’t know. It’s like this weird thing where maybe I’m using blockchain, but it’s kind of like making an art out of it, whatever it is. And so that is a sign that you’re kind of on the right path. If you are headed for a place where there’s not even a name for what it is that you are doing.

Self-Knowledge

[00:23:33] Sean: I love this. You talk there around trying multiple things. It makes me think of this research paper. I’m pretty sure it was just published in Nature and it’s about hot streaks in different domains, both science, arts. And what they found out obviously is that the people who experienced these breakout successes, these hot streaks, were dabbling around a lot and actually took them longer to find their thing that they were going to have this breakout success in. I’m wondering for you, you mentioned when you finally find that thing that makes you so unique, for you is that more of a defined clarity breakthrough? Like the light comes out moment or is it more just fluid where like you’re comfortable in that element and it continues to evolve?

[00:24:11] Kevin: Yeah, there’s not really an epiphany aha moment. For me it’s been a very slow, incremental idea. And again, I did not even become aware of this idea of trying to be the only until later in my life. And I wish I had kind of been aware of it earlier. I was doing it without even knowing that I was doing it, but I think it’s helpful if you know that you’re doing it. And again, I’m not done. And that’s what I’m saying, I’m still trying to figure out what I’m going to do when I grow up. Where do I go from here? What is that thing that I should be doing? And I think the answer is, as I should be doing something that nobody else is doing. 

And then you say, well, what is it that one, I’m able to do? And two, that I would enjoy doing, and three, that is meaningful to others in terms of value and that nobody else can do. And so again, that’s recordings of a lot of self knowledge there. There’s a lot that you have to kind of figure out about yourself. And so this business of knowing yourself and being honest with yourself and as Richard Feynman, the great scientist says, is that we’re easy to fool, and that the easiest person to fool is ourselves. And so this is what the first principle is, a method to kind of not fool ourselves and that’s good in some domains, but it’s very hard in the others. 

This other thing that we’re talking about is to not fool ourselves, to really be aware of ourselves. So I think whatever mechanisms we have from therapy to friends, to paying attention, to feedback, all those things are part of this process of trying to figure out who we are, what we do, why we’re here. And so it’s the entire bundle. It’s not just a program. Again, it goes to when you complete something, what is the feedback? Are you really listening? Are you receptive? Are you open to what the universe is trying to tell you about that? And so that’s a large part of how we get better and how we learn and how we find meaning.

Psychedelics

[00:27:05] Sean: It’s funny when you open your ears and your eyes, the universe will tell you a lot, if you’re willing to listen to it. You mentioned self knowledge, it’s a constant thing. For you have there been foundational moments, experiences, things that really have fundamentally changed your ability to understand yourself?

[00:27:25] Kevin: Yes. And then I would say one of them is psychedelics which I recommend. And I think we’re as a culture, having a kind of little finally coming to a pivot in the culture at large about its approach to psychedelics. I didn’t do any recreational psychedelics at all as a young person, except I had psychedelic experiences at the dentist’s office with nitric oxide, and had out of the body experiences. But later on when I was 50, I took my first LSD and I think there is tremendous value in the general what we might call I’m sure there’s a term for it. 

But this idea of seeker experiences, where you are being provoked either through fasting, through prayer, through psychedelics, through other methods of taking yourselves out of your ego in some capacity, for me, that was something that was very revelatory and very, very strong. And near-death experiences and others where I was able to take a different view of myself and understand the kind of treat, blessing, how fortunate we are to have this bodily experience and to be here now. And so in short, for me, that kind of a spiritual experience was very, very important. 

Now that we’re collectively allowed to experiment again and do actual scientific experiments with psychedelics, which is where we are right now. We can finally research these legally. We’ll accumulate the next couple of decades, a lot more information about how to do this well. How to basically go on a trip the best way. There are different chemicals and different procedures and different guidelines, et cetera, that all required that will yield an experience that I think is for most people going to be a good way to get in, to kickstart some self knowledge.

[00:30:21] Sean: I know you tend to be at the forefront of unusual technologies, but these types of things, concepts, I’m wondering for you, where is your spidey sense going off, just thinking about what that could look like in the future.

[00:30:32] Kevin: You mean the psychedelics? 

[00:30:34] Sean: Correct. Yep. 

[00:30:35] Kevin: Yeah. Well it’s a really good question, which I haven’t really spent much time thinking about, but I think first of all what we’ll have is we’ll have a little bit more of a map of the landscape. And one of the things that’s already kind of emerging is that there must be a sequence or maybe not even a linear sequence, but that there is a spectrum, a palette of experiences with different chemicals, producing different kinds of things. And once there’s a kind of a map of that, then what we’ll be able to do is kind of evaluate someone and begin to craft an experience for them based on their own chemistry and their own experiences. 

What they might need is a kind of doctor going to evaluate your health and saying, well, from what I know, and here you should do this. Or if you’re going to a personal trainer. And so they’ll have personal trainers in this realm that will kind of evaluate you and say, well, here’s what I think you should try this year. And then we’ll go here and whatever depending on what happens. And so there’ll be a program saying here’s what we do with this technology. And they’ll be a little bit more trying to capture some of the results scientifically, so that would benefit others. Over time, it becomes like other kinds of coaching and performance. Like say, training, personal trainer.

And so I think that model will arise. Already the people doing it have guides and people who are almost like therapists, or almost like coaches who go through you and debrief and talk about it and kind of figure out what’s next. And those that are best, and what we’re seeing is not just like one single molecule. This is still a Simon guy. No, no, no. It’s somebody who’s is familiar with all these drugs, all these technologies, and can craft something for you in a sense, like a personal trainer or a really good one would be familiar with all the different kinds of exercise programs and regimes, and would say for you, this is what we’re going to kind of craft.

Kevin’s View of Money

[00:33:20] Sean: It’s very interesting. I feel like one of the recurring themes you just mentioned having the maps for this, we need to make sure that our maps don’t throw us off. And you even mentioned the ego earlier in breaking away from the grain. I think about this from the legendary Lao-Tzu, “to obtain knowledge, learn something everyday. To obtain wisdom, remove something every day.” I’m wondering for you, what have you removed throughout the years where you say… 

[00:33:50] Kevin: Remove? Okay. That’s a good question. Remove. Well, I have to be careful how I say this, but fairly early on in my journey, I removed the concern about money before I had any real money. It’s kind of a weird thing, but I kind of pretended I was a billionaire when I had no money. And so, the meaning that I wasn’t interested in accumulating money. And I had discovered that money would come, sufficient money would come to do the things I needed to do. The other thing was when you go through the list of things that you want to do and what it actually is preventing you from doing. 

People will often say that money is there, but it turns out that that’s not usually the case. We know for a fact that most breakthrough ideas and stuff always come, where there is very little money. That money will often prevent things from happening, meaning that all the great ideas have come about because the person, the group doing it, didn’t have resources. So they had to invent ways to do things. Because if you could invent things simply with money, then all the rich corporations would just own all the new ideas.

But their success actually imprisons them because they would attempt to buy solutions. One of the things I learned early on was that to kind of ignore in a certain sense, to ignore the money question, to behave as if money was not an issue and when obviously money matters, but you can kind of remove it from the equation. And if you do remove it, it’s easier to kind of get to that place. I may be wagging my hands a lot, but that’s what I would say, removing the issue of money was something that I learned to do. And that’s been hugely beneficial. 

[00:36:48] Sean: That’s a great piece of advice. I love finding paradoxes in life. I think they’re so important to study and understand, and you bring up a great one, right? Like the success of these companies, the reason they got successful, they’re handcuffed by now. And that’s the reason these young startup companies can even exist in this world and create these breakthroughs.

Rest Ethics

One of the things that I know you’ve talked about, and I just would love to explore it a bit further with you currently is around exploring your curiosities, but then also allowing slack in your system. Because some of these things can’t come out, unless you have some slack. I’m just wondering about your current day thinking, around developing slack in everyone’s own system to allow time to explore curiosity.

[00:37:27] Kevin: Yeah. I’ve been a verbal advocate for slack, that slack is necessary for creativity. People talk about your kind of work ethic, but I think your rest ethic is actually just as important. So we need to have sabbaticals and sabbaths and vacations and goof off time and time where we play, serious play, and wasting time. I think there’s an overemphasis in certain areas on efficiency and productivity. So there’s the other productivity groves, which is good to a certain extent, but I think you can be misdirected in your approach for efficiency and productivity. If you ignore the fact that we need a significant amount of time where we are not trying to be productive, where we are in a different mode. 

And so that creative mode requires wastage and requires inefficiency. The inefficiency of permitting yourself to have to redo things over, permitting yourself to make a mistake. Most of the things that we are really enamored of and make the most important in our culture like science and art are inherently inefficient. I mean, if you’re a hundred percent efficient scientist, you’re learning nothing, you’re not making any mistakes. And so we have to honor this part of our process where it’s inefficient and unproductive in that sense, because it’s aiming for something different. For me, there’s two general modes in creating and making things.

Like in writing where you are writing, you don’t want the efficiency expert over your shoulder when you first start writing. You don’t want the editor. You want to separate the editor and the writer and you need both of them. I’m a born editor. I think editors are always right, but you don’t need them around when you’re first making that first draft. You want to be completely inefficient in that process. You’re going to write stuff that you’re going to throw away. You’re going to write stupid stuff. It’s going to be crap. You don’t care in the beginning and the same thing with innovation or art or science you have to expect that you’re gonna just have to be redoing stuff.

Or even when you’re making things, I’ve discovered this thing now where I make versions of prototype things that I just know that I’m not going to use. That seems inefficient, but it’s actually the best thing to do. And so this thing of like doing nothing, horsing around wasting time with a video game, I think are essential. I think that’s a large part and needs to be protected often at times. Where you decide that for a day you will not be productive. You’ll do other things that you just simply either enjoy, or maybe you don’t even know why you do them. And so I think it’s important among some people who have a tendency to kind of want to be efficient and productive all the day, all the hours of their life. I think that they would be better protecting some part of that day for something that’s inefficient.

[00:41:55] Sean: Kevin, what do you think about when you’re dabbling with things, what’s going to capture and sustain your attention more? Like when you’re working on some of these longer and bigger projects, what is that internal? I don’t know. Just spidey sense, you feel where you decide to take those on.

[00:42:11] Kevin: I think I know what you’re asking. Sometimes longer projects don’t start off that way. Intentionally they start off as something small that it’s continued because it was pleasurable or seemed to be successful to others. Other ones kind of require envisioning them in their finished state before you start. And so they are kind of much more of a sense intentional long-term project. There’ve been intentional long-term projects that didn’t turn out to be very long that were abandoned. So, I think that for me, it’s been a mixture of different kinds of things. Some, as I said, were envisioned from the beginning and others emerged over time. That’s just been my experience. 

[00:43:22] Sean: That makes me think of a legendary Claude Shannon line, “we know the past, but cannot control it. We control the future, but cannot know it.” And so maybe I’m looking for one of those black and white answers here, and you’re like, no, Sean, that’s not how this works.

[00:43:34] Kevin: I’m not saying that. I’m just saying this is how it works for me. I am not a guru. And I haven’t done the science of studying how this works in other people’s lives. That’s another thing that doesn’t exist in this emerging field of the study of creativity and innovation. I think even with the kind of state of science we have right now, there’s still so much more that we could be doing in terms of being able to advise people or extract what happens to people in general. But I think your podcast is sort of an evidence that we kind of recognize now that this is something that we should know more about.

Increasing Standards Vs Decreasing Population

[00:44:29] Sean: Speaking of things we should know more about, one of the things for the past few months, I’ve been really intrigued by. I know this is something that we face, you’re really intrigued by as well. That’s our increasing standards and decreasing population. And I’m just wondering how you’re thinking about that and what are some of the second, third order consequences you’re expecting us to experience because of that. I mean our overall decline in population, but our standards continue to increase and we continue to spend for those like a population increasing when it’s not.

[00:44:59] Kevin: Yeah. Just to set the scene, worldwide, there is a drop in fertility rate. Meaning the number of kids that women have on average has been declining in every country and some countries faster than others. And surprisingly, some of the fastest dropping countries are countries like Mexico and in the developing world, in China, among them in India too. And some of those countries have already gone below replacement level, meaning that on average women aren’t having enough children to even replace the current population. And some of those places are famously Japan, but also Italy and Europe. 

Most of the countries are headed in terms of year by year drop to under replacement level very, very quickly because of the general way of demographic transitions that takes 25 years or whatever on average for a person born today to reproduce or not. There is a huge amount of inertia in this. And so it will take almost a generation or two of these processes to actually reduce the absolute numbers of people on the planet. So even though the replacement level can be reached or the under replacement level, it can be reached. Soon the actual numbers of people on the planet will, there’s a delay. 

And so, everything we know, because it takes a lot of time. We can look at the trends right now and say, and forecast that we’re headed to a world where on average, the global population does not reproduce. And so every year there’s fewer people on the planet that will happen, maybe around 2070 or something. But before then there will be countries that will reach this earlier. And so those countries have a loose population like Japan, which right now has fewer people in the country every year.

And so a lot of the issues we have with immigration right now are going to go away because countries, including the US, will be looking for people to come to their country to work because that is the easiest route to prosperity that we have known. So, throughout history, every period of rising living standards has been driven by rising population. We tend to think of rising populations as problematic, but in some ways it is and for the environment, but it also has been the engine of our prosperity in cities. As cities grow and as they grow, they get more prosperous.

Can we make a civilization? Can we make cities that will continue to grow in betterment? They get better with fewer people each year. I think we might be able to do it, but we don’t know how to do it. We don’t have those policies in place. It may require things like UBI, like having a minimum amount of income to pay everybody. I mean, there might be other means of taxation and wealth distribution. There are probably all kinds of things we need to figure out with our economy to figure out how we can raise living standards while there’s fewer people. And a lot of it will have to do with what we end up doing with AI and robots.

And so it’s an unknown, it’s a huge unknown. I think that we can figure it out, but I think we’re at the beginning of that right now, we’re just sort of starting to dip our toes into some of the ramifications we have of automation in AI and people not having jobs. So what do they do? And so it’s a very, very unclear area. I would say if you’re young and ambitious and interested in economics, this is where I would look to the future . Thinking about how you have increasing prosperity with a decreasing population is going to be an active area of research in the coming decades.

[00:50:15] Sean: Is there any point in history? And this could just be a small portion of the globe that actually that’s the case for. And we can look through history to help understand the future a bit better.

[00:50:25] Kevin: There was a period in the black plague where there was a decreasing population. We’ve had several examples of decreasing population and there are different versions of that. People are still trying to figure that out. There are some who claim that in fact, there was rising wealth after the plague. There were labor shortages suddenly, so the poor and middle class suddenly revolted forward. Some of the people who were most wiped out were the landowners, then suddenly there were no peasants to work. So they were kind of under water in that sense. 

They actually were doing really poorly and they actually had high levels of death in them because most of the medical practices at the time were to kill people rather than heal them. So, there was a moment during the plague years when there might have been for certain areas, an increase in prosperity for some of the people. I don’t think that’s a model that we want to adopt, but to answer your question, that’s one thing, but in general, no, in more modern history, we don’t have examples of that. We have city states like Singapore, which are very limited. But even there there’s been a growth in population. We don’t have very good modern standards.

Artificial Intelligence

[00:52:10] Sean: Kevin, I wish we had 10 hours, that we could just go back and forth and explore this all together. I know you’re optimistic about it. I have to link up (Kevin Kelly The Case for Optimism). You had a recent piece. I think you released it in August around what, why the case for optimism right now, which I loved. I just thought that was exceptional and should be read by people. One of the things that you’ve brought up again and again, is just the number of things that capture your attention. We need this curiosity. I’m wondering for you, what has been capturing your attention most recently, and has been the thing you’ve been putting your time into?

[00:52:42] Kevin: I probably have mentioned it several times, but I’m very interested in AI. Artificial intelligence is as I would say, plural. I’m trying to figure out, trying to place that, trying to see where this thing wants to be in the future because I think it is on the par of fire writing language, let alone electricity in terms of its impact on our lives. And it’s good. It’s going to play out for centuries. And I think we’ll play out the way Hollywood thinks is going to play out in terms of the Terminator coming, killing us in our sleep.

That’s a possibility it’s greater than zero, but it’s highly unlikely. So we need to have other scenarios about what this world of ubiquitous AI looks like. And so I’m spending time trying to live with the AIs, trying to do stuff co-creating with them. Trying to understand exactly how they’re going to fit into our lives. I’m not going to be able to figure out in terms of there’s no ultimate figuring out. It’s going to take several centuries for us to invent them while we reinvent ourselves. One of the things that I have learned is that there’s a disease called thinksism, which is this idea that we can solve problems simply by thinking about them. 

It’s very appealing to middle-aged guys like myself. I like to spend time thinking, but even if we had a super AI junior guy, like AI, who could think a million times better than we could think that thing could not figure out how to cure cancer by thinking about it. We just need to do experiments. We don’t even know enough. It might be able to work with us, and do experiments to figure out something. But, the world is too complex to be able to figure out something just from the data that we have. So we have to interact with the world in order to think about it. We can’t just think remotely, we have to actually do experiments.

We actually have to live it. We actually have to try things. We have these very complex systems. That’s one of the things that took away from it, complex systems theory is that often the shortest route is running the program. You can’t. You can simulate certain things while assimilations leave out things that’s why they run faster. If you include everything that you care about, then the fastest simulation of it is the thing itself has to run out. And so there is a sense in which there’s a lot of things that we want to know about that we can only figure out by doing and trying. So, this is my thing about embracing technology.

We want to embrace it because the only way that we can steer something is by engaging with it. We want to think about it as much as we can, and we want to anticipate stuff, but those are going to be very, very limited. We actually have to steer things by engaging with them, by using them, by interacting with them. And in that process, then we can kind of figure out what we think about it. So I think our long term future is not something that we can fully imagine right now, but it’s something that we can only arrive at by engaging within a hundred percent engagement. So that’s why I like to embrace new technologies because that’s how we get to steer them. 

[00:57:13] Sean: The conversation comes full circle there. I know we’ve got to wrap this up here in a minute. Just a few quick hits. And then we’re gonna link the listeners up with everything that you’re doing. I’m wondering for you, has there been a moment over the past few years where you’ve just been raptured in all of something?

[00:57:29] Kevin: Yeah, going back to the AIs, I was completely tickled and delighted and astounded by the GPT-3 who was generating the human faces that did not exist. So, if you haven’t seen this, Google these faces don’t exist. And what you’ll see is mile after mile of photographs taken in all different kinds of settings of people who do not exist, the detail, the specific character, everything about it looks like they just took a snapshot somewhere.

It was completely invented wholly out of nothing. I mean, it was like, there was nothing, that’s all derivative about it. By this AI, it’s basically making up human faces that are photographs and it’s like, wow, that is unbelievable. That is amazing. That is, there’s something powerful going on here. And that to me is this was kind of a sign of what we’re dealing with. 

True Game Changer

[00:58:53] Sean: Yeah. We’ll make sure we have that linked up. You mentioned some of these legendary people, some of these all-time greats, I’m wondering for you, who are you most admirable of everyone throughout history and it’s just like, wow, this person was a true game changer.

[00:59:07] Kevin: Jesus. Oh, who else? I have fans that a person that I admire who’s living that I know is Stewart Brand, who I’ve learned a lot from. And the more I know him, the more I admire him. And that’s sort of my recipe is, there are a lot of people I admire that the more I find out, the less I admire them, but he’s someone who I admire more and more. And so he’s been a huge influence on my life.

[00:59:46] Sean: One of those two people would be the answer to, if you could sit down and have a long form conversation like this with anyone dead or alive, would it be Jesus’, Steward Brand, or do you have a third you wanna throw in there?

[00:59:55] Kevin: A third? I find Newton a very curious person because not only was he served one of the adventures of science, but he was like an occultist. He had these other really weird beliefs that are strange. And that, by the way, is often a pattern that if you look at some of the great scientists, they’re often absolutely right about many things and absolutely wrong about other things. And anyway, Newton was interesting enough to me that I thought that’d be a great conversation.

Where To Stay In Touch

[01:00:44] Sean: Well, you’re one of those very interesting people to me. Unfortunately, an hour just doesn’t even begin to crack the surface on what I would love to dive deep on with you. I know you have a lot of interesting projects that you work on. What, and where can we link the listeners up with you just to make sure that they can stay in touch with you and capture anything that you’re putting out?

[01:01:02] Kevin: I have a website, which is my initials KK.org, where you can find almost anything I’m interested in these days. I do have a newsletter. A weekly newsletter that goes out. It’s called a Recomendo and every week my two partners give six very, very real brief recommendations of good stuff, which could be almost anything that we find good from apps to destinations, to people, to follow the stuff, tools to get. So that’s Recomendo and which is a free newsletter sign up. And beyond that this year I decided to make art every day. 

I’m making a daily art piece, which I’ve been posting on different platforms. So that’s been amusing to me and the key for me was to publish it, share it no matter whether it’s good or bad. That’s part of the thing about making stuff is that you want to keep doing it even if it’s not good and you don’t want to judge in the creation, you can go on later on and you can then make it better and evaluate it. But in the creative process, you want to just even make bad art. That’s kind of actually trying to make bad art because in a bad art, you can get to the good art. So it takes a lot of bad art to make some good art. And so I’m making a lot of bad art.

[01:02:37] Sean: That’s fantastic. Well, Kevin, as we close this out, I just have to say thank you. For the curiosity that you’ve sparked in me, the new ways of viewing the world and the things that you’ve shared, that I’ve become interested in. So Kevin Kelly, I can’t thank you enough for joining us on What Got You There and sparking curiosity.

[01:02:55] Kevin: This has been fun. I enjoyed the ride. Thanks for having me.

[01:02:58] Sean: You guys made it to the end of another episode of what got you there. I hope you guys enjoyed it. I really do appreciate you taking the time to listen all the way through. If you “found” value in this, the best way you can support the show is giving us a review, rating it, sharing it with your friends and also sharing on “social”. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it. Looking forward to you guys, listening to another episode.

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