#1196 Kevin Kelly On Bitcoin, AI, Future Optimism, & Excellent Advice For Living

Kevin Kelly is the Senior Maverick at Wired, and is the author of a number of different best-selling books on the future of technology. His latest book, "Excellent Advice For Living | Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier" is a powerful book. In this conversation, we talk about his optimism for the future, why he believes technology is mirroring the biology of humans, and how he sees the world revolving across things like bitcoin, blockchain, artificial intelligence, and many other areas. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 235,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone. This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. We have no advertisers on this podcast, so it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Kevin Kelly is the senior maverick at Wired and he is the author of a number of different bestselling books on the future of technology. His latest book, Excellent Advice for a Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier, is a very quick read, but it is powerful and I highly

• 0:46Anthony Pompliano?

  suggest you go get it. In this conversation, we talk about Kevin's optimism for the future, why he believes that technology is actually mirroring the biology of humans, and how he sees the world evolving across things like Bitcoin, blockchain, artificial intelligence, and many other areas. I really enjoyed talking to Kevin and I hope that you guys enjoy this episode. Here is my conversation with Kevin Kelly.

• 1:12Speaker 01

  The action's on the court, and as the official beer sponsor of the NBA, Michelob Ultra is getting fans closer to the game with a chance to win courtside seats, merch, and more. Visit michelobultra.com/courtside to enter. Michelob Ultra Courtside, 26 to 27. No purchase necessary. Open to U.S. residents 21+. Begins on October 1st, 2026 and ends on June 30th, 2027. Multiple entry periods. See official rules at michelobultra.com/courtside for free entry, entry deadlines, prizes, and details.

• 1:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, everyone. I've got Kevin here with me. I'm super excited to talk with Kevin. I thought a great place to start this conversation was around optimism of the future. We live in a time where communication and the speed of it is at the fastest pace we've ever seen. People love to complain. They love to fear monger. They love to say how bad the world that we live in is.

• 2:23Anthony Pompliano?

  I tend to think we live in the safest, most prosperous time in human history. I know you are very optimistic about the future. Help us understand what keeps you optimistic? What are you optimistic about?

• 2:33Speaker 02

  So I'm optimistic in general about the long-term prospects of progress in our civilization. So I would say that on the average globally, we have seen remarkable progress over time, particularly in the last couple hundred years. There are obviously parts of the world that have not enjoyed the same amount of progress. And there are pockets today that are undergoing pretty severe setbacks, like, you know, the Ukraine. But in, in general, we live longer, we're safer, we have more choices and possibilities, which is to me, the definition of progress. And I'm optimistic that it will continue because of history.

• 3:19Speaker 02

  Because if you actually look at the data scientifically and partially, you have to acknowledge that progress has been real for people on average. And all the ingredients that produce that are still present. So statistically, it's going to continue. I mean, it's possible it could stop tomorrow, but just given the fact that all the components are still here and operating, we're going to continue to see progress. And I define it very loosely as our ability to create a few percent more than we destroy every year.

• 3:59Speaker 02

  And that compounding is the secret because that few percent delta is not really visible. It's why when we look around, we don't necessarily are overwhelmed by a sense of progress just because it's buried in a small difference between all the crap that we make and all the good. And so, so for me, the source of it is, is, is this understanding of the actual present, where we actually are and where we've been. And the statistical likelihood that we will continue in that same direction.

• 4:38Anthony Pompliano?

  So when people think of you, if they've read your work, if they've paid attention over the last couple of decades, I think they would say you're an optimist, but also that you think very, very long term. And a great example of this is the Long Now Foundation. For those that don't know, this is an organization that is trying to reinforce the ideas of long-term thinking. One of the projects that you all are doing there is the clock. Now, I did not know you were involved with this when I first came across the clock a couple of years ago, and I was fascinated. But essentially, you all are building a clock in the side of a mountain with the goal of being able to tell precise, accurate time for the next 10,000 years. I believe Jeff Bezos has put a bunch of money into this. Just talk about the clock. What is going on with the clock in the side of the mountain?

• 5:21Speaker 02

  So we've made several clocks and several versions of the clock, and there may be other versions. The idea of the clock is to keep ticking for long term. And the idea there'd be a tick every, every year, and there'd be a talk every decade, and every hundred years or centuries, a little cuckoo will come out, and every millennial, there'd be fireworks or whatever. And there was this idea of kind of like, trying to force us to think about time at the long range. And it was to work as a, as a mythic icon in the same way that the photograph of the whole Earth really

• 6:05Speaker 02

  catalyzed the environmental movement. I mean, seeing the Earth from space as this little tiny blue ball, you'd understand the idea that there was no garbage. You couldn't throw anything out, everything never left. It was a very fragile, amazingly thin membrane of atmosphere and all these other things came about from just seeing a photograph. And we wanted to do the same thing about time of forcing people to realize, oh, oh, this is, we're in a very tiny period, and we have a very narrow myopic view of the last five minutes, the next five minutes, but actually...

• 6:47Speaker 02

  Even the human civilization goes back 10,000 years and there'll be another 10,000 years in front of us and we need to have that horizon because when you do have that horizon, as you're suggesting, when you take the long view, then it is easier to become more optimistic because with compounding goodness over time, they can overcome even a sizable setback, even a sizable drop in prices, even a sizable war can be overwhelmed by this compounding thing of a few percent over decades and centuries. And so, so that

• 7:27Speaker 02

  is part of the agenda is to help us become more optimistic because when we're more optimistic, we're more likely to make the thing that we want in the future if we can imagine it. But also, it also enables us to actually engage or start to work on things that may pay off only in future generations. We are the benefit of work and projects and things that people have done that have taken hundreds of years to reach where we are. We should be more free to begin things that don't pay off for us, that only pay off for future

• 8:08Speaker 02

  generations. And taking the long view again, helps us, enables us, kind of liberates us to some degree, to be able to do that.

• 8:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Taking this idea of time and long-term thinking, you're not only thinking long-term about the future, I think you also think long-term about the past. And so, the manual for civilization is this collection of all of the human knowledge and trying to document it so that future citizens and future kind of descendants are able to also understand what we know today and what we knew in the past. That is a Goliath undertaking to go and find all the information humans know and to document it. What's going on there and how is that going so far?

• 8:54Speaker 02

  The clock, as Stuart Brand and Danny Hillis first imagined it, was always going to be present with a 10,000-year library. And the clock kind of would wind down, the library is something that can build up. And I always imagined it as libraries, plural, that there would be a kind of a city or a collection of different 10,000-year libraries. And each of these would be a different view of what was important to save about human knowledge. And there would be a multiple set of different ideas of like taking the best of human knowledge. Like if you were to have to do a backup or send, you know, a spaceship into space, what would that library look like, you know?

• 9:39Speaker 02

  Or if you wanted to have something in case there was a dark age and you wanted to go through, what would be the essential vital knowledge? And I think everybody would have a different answer. So that's why there would be a whole bunch of different 10,000-year libraries. But the point of the libraries is, one, there is some reason to have a backup and something, but it's mostly to help us. It's like self-reflection. It's like self-assessment. It's like making ourselves visible to us. We don't think very much about what is it that we actually do know right now? What is the most important things that we know? There's the pedological reasons, like if you were to teach us and to, you know, train,

• 10:24Speaker 02

  if we were to train an AI, what do we want to train the AI on? Okay. I mean, right now, the AI is trained on Reddit. Is that the, is that the best thing to train an AI on to answer questions? Maybe we want to train it on the manual civilization or the best of civilization. What should that look like? And so, and by the way, there's going to be different answers. We're going to have different AI. Chatbots that were trained and educated on different, you know, curriculum, different courses. So, so, so that's another reason to, to think about what would a library of human knowledge look like? And that is another project that we're kind of working on.

• 11:04Anthony Pompliano?

  So on this idea of artificial intelligence and kind of what do you train it on? In 1994, you published a book called Out of Control. And for those that haven't read the book, the general idea is artificial evolution is actually where kind of the world is going. So we won't necessarily create things from scratch. They will evolve. And in that book, you talk about, we're already kind of doing that with software and drugs in the early 90s. Fast forward to the early 2020s, and now this is, you know, very top of mind for folks. How do you think about this idea of artificial evolution with the kind of new breakthroughs of artificial intelligence? And do you still kind of believe that's the thesis and kind of how this is going to evolve?

• 11:44Speaker 02

  So yeah, in, in the early 90s, I wrote a book called Out of Control. And there were several themes. And one was this trying to understand decentralized distributed systems, because that was kind of what the internet was starting to do. And it's like, well, how do they work? And then the, how do we make them better? And part of the, the realization was that, oh, actually, there are a lot of biological systems or biological processes like evolution, like metabolism, like the immune system, that could be imported into our very complicated technology, meaning that the, the, the gap between things that

• 12:29Speaker 02

  we make in the natural world are not, is not as large as we think. We are actually making technology as complicated as biology. The internet does, in some senses, have an immune system, and it works like immune system. So if we knew more about those immune systems and more about how the internet works, we might be able to learn something from each other because they're probably closer. And evolution was another one of that where, where,

• 12:55Speaker 02

  And this is what's happening in AI right now, where you have something and you have inheritable changes and variation and and survival and elimination and then you can improve things and and and that that ability, which is in the biological world, has been imported into computers, into AIs. And that's one of the ways in which they get so good is they're actually internally, they're breeding answers and they have one AI that makes things better, another AI that kind of filters them, checks them, and they can learn how to play Go that way, they can learn how to play chess. And so this was an example of of of using

• 13:39Speaker 02

  the principles of evolution and importing them into machines. And that continues to go on today. So there's lots of aspects of of learning that are based on genetic algorithms, they call. And so, um, so so my, my general thesis in the book was was saying, look, there's a lot we can learn from biology to make our complicated technology work better and more at more suited for humans because we're biological. And that that's going to be the general trend of technology is towards the biological.

• 14:23Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the most popular decentralized distributed computing systems in the world today happens to be open source. It's happened to try to serve as money, Bitcoin. What are your thoughts there? And are there similarities to what you saw in the early 90s with the Internet? Are there maybe risks or things that people should be aware of that that you're not as kind of excited about that you were with the Internet?

• 14:44Speaker 02

  So, um, yeah, I mean, I, I, I think the underpinning course Bitcoin is is blockchain. I think blockchain is just, is just a wonderfully elegant, brilliant idea. I've often asked people like George Church and others who know about genomics, whether there's any possibility that we would find a blockchain like code inside the gene.

• 15:07Speaker 02

  Because it seems so elegant. There has not been found any.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  My, but currency based on blockchain, of course, that was the original paper, is only one thing that blockchain can do. And I think that it's going to be very limited use. I think blockchain-based currency, cryptocurrency, I think, has a very limited use. And that is because one of the, one of the costs of decentralization and distribution is that it's not very efficient. That's the, that was again, the beauty of evolutionary systems is that they're incredibly powerful, but they're slow and they're inefficient.

• 15:58Speaker 02

  Centralization, the reason why we do centralize is that they're faster and they're more efficient. And so we're always trading off. The ability of the decentralized distributed system is they're very adaptable. They're very robust. They're egalitarian. They're incredibly, they're great places to start. They're easy to get going, but they're incredibly inefficient and slow. And so in trying to make a currencies or other things based on that, we have to make those trade-offs. And for, for many things, the advantages of a decentralized distributed currency

• 16:43Speaker 02

  may not be enough to, for most consumers, for most of the time, for most transactions,

• 16:50Speaker 02

  to have at least something that's more centralized and faster and cheaper. And so there might be hybrid versions of this, and that's what people were working on.

• 16:59Speaker 02

  But, but so what I'm saying is, I don't think, in my view, that so far currency is really the, the really, the real app for blockchain. I think there will be other ones where you can use authentication, verification, identity, all these other things where we would tolerate the inefficiencies. We would be willing to pay that, the inefficiencies and the slowness. We don't need that kind of speed. And so.

• 17:26Speaker 02

  My guess is that blockchain still has not found the right job.

• 17:33Speaker 02

  Technological job.

• 17:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Are there other technologies that people are talking about that seem to be quite popular, maybe even overhyped that you feel like haven't found the right job? But do any of them stick out outside of blockchain technology for you?

• 17:45Speaker 02

  That's a really great question.

• 17:49Speaker 02

  Think about that.

• 17:53Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 17:56Speaker 02

  This may be a little hard to explain, but I actually think

• 18:01Speaker 02

  quantum computing

• 18:04Speaker 02

  is not going to be used for computing. It's very similar. It's a very, you know, you're kind of doing, it's a very dispersed. The whole point of quantum computing is that you can do like in parallel, you can do like millions and millions of calculations all at once.

• 18:23Speaker 02

  I think that quantum computing in the end is going to be used for something that we have no idea right now, no conception at all, and not for computation. There was the whole quantum world is so strange and weird and misunderstood and deep that I suspect that the, the kind of work that we're doing and what we know so far about, you know, superposition and qubits and stuff in the end is not actually going to be used for computing, but for doing something else in that kind of realm. Again, for something that comes after computing. So.

• 19:05Anthony Pompliano?

  When I, when I hear you talk about whether it's quantum computing, blockchain technology, et cetera, I feel like you are taking part journalist, kind of investigation approach, right? You're trying to think through the various layers and the pros and cons and that. Part what I would consider futurist of like, what is the impact of this going to be? But also part what I would almost consider to be a rationalist or a realist in the sense of what is it applicable to today? What is your process like when you come across a new idea or a new technology? Is there something that's repeatable where you kind of feel like, okay, you know, I usually go Google or I go and I read this book or how do you kind of work through these ideas when you first come across them?

• 19:50Speaker 01

  The action's on the court and as the official beer sponsor of the NBA, Michelob Ultra is getting fans closer to the game with a chance to win courtside seats, merch and more. Visit michelobultra.com/courtside to enter. Michelob Ultra Courtside 26 to 27. No purchase necessary. Open to US residents 21+ Begins on October 1st, 2026 and ends on June 30th, 2027. Multiple entry periods. See official rules at michelobultra.com/courtside for free entry, entry deadlines, prizes and details.

• 20:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, it's a really great question and I think I'm not maybe as methodical as I would like to be in terms of approaching all the problems the same going through a method. But I do ask, you know, a couple of questions, you know, the, the, the, the current, what's the word I want, best practices of trying to go back to first principles? That requires maybe a level of, I, I, I try to go in that direction, though to really go down to first principles requires a level of scientific, uh, knowledge and expertise that I probably don't have the full ability to, but there is a sense of trying to go to first principles and say like, well, if we didn't know anything, if we were starting

• 20:59Speaker 02

  from the beginning, if we just looked at the physics, how far can we go? And, um, and so what does that look like? The second thing that I pay a huge amount of attention to is, um, the earliest little bits of evidence of what actually we know and happens. Okay? So, so, so I, I like to have like an evidence-based speculation. And so I'm like looking at, you know, uh, Bitcoin or quantum missiles, like, well, what actually happens? What, what do we actually know versus what we're thinking it can do? What can it do right now? And, um, so, so it's kind of like the street use version of things. The same thing with AI

• 21:43Speaker 02

  right now. I pay a lot of attention to people, how people are actually using it versus how we thought we were going to use it. That was the early internet was the same thing. People had all kinds of ideas about what they're going to use the internet for, which was going to be like, you know, answering questions and doing banking stuff versus like playing games. What this is what they actually use it for. So, so it's this kind of street use of trying to head to wherever there's actually some use. So we can see what that looks like. And then I guess the third, the third thing is, is that one of the things we know about the future is it's probably going to be unreasonable. The hardest thing of thinking about is to let go of what we think it should be,

• 22:27Speaker 02

  or what we've been told it would be is kind of forgetting what we expect. And that's really, really hard because we have these, we bring these framings of things that we've been told for a very long time about, well, whatever it is, AI or finance or currency and we, and this is a kind of unlearning or forgetting of being able to suspend what we rationally know about it and to engage the imagination of what could possibly be or the alternatives, and then to kind of rehearse those. So, so, so it's like what we used to call, Brian Eno and I used to call unthinkable's,

• 23:06Speaker 02

  where we're taking something that seems unreasonable and unthinkable and trying to inhabit it for a moment to see where it goes. And most of the time it doesn't go anywhere. Most of the times it's kind of ridiculous or, or, or preposterous, ridiculous, but we try to inhabit that to play with it, to see if there's something that might be there. And that work of imagination is also important in trying to think about things. And again, most of the time it doesn't work. Most of the times it's, it's going to be silly. But occasionally, like anything else, you get something that actually works.

• 23:47Anthony Pompliano?

  You mentioned street use case and it made me laugh a little bit because I think back in 1990, you created the Cyberthon and you basically brought 400 people together and had all of the virtual reality demos, prototypes, et cetera, in one room and told those 400 people, try them all. Like, see what you like, what you don't like.

• 24:06Speaker 02

  Right. I was really, really, really urged that there are so many people who were pontificating about VR and what it was and the dangers or whatever, who had never tried it. It was like,

• 24:21Speaker 02

  "Okay, I'm gonna make this. We'll make 24 hours. We'll take all the existing VR things. We'll bring them together and you buy a ticket and for 24 hours, you'll be able to try it. And then you, now you can talk about it." Okay? And so, um, uh, yeah, so, so, so I'm a big believer that the, that the way we steer technology is through use and not by thinking about it. There's thinkism, which is, it's good to think about things, but we can only go so far thinking about it. We actually, and a lot of these new technologies, the inventors don't know what they're good for. The critics don't know what they're bad for. We actually have to use them and get the actual data because they

• 25:02Speaker 02

  are so complicated that their use is going to hugely diverge from what our expectations was. And so, um, uh, you know, and so, so I, I, I think I pay attention to the early adopters and seeing what's happening and how they're doing it and what the problems actually are versus what we could imagine. And that's the, one of the kinds of things happening with AI is a lot of people are imagining that people could lose jobs. But, well, so how many artists have actually lost their job to AI? As far as I can tell, zero.

• 25:40Speaker 02

  But we can imagine it and yet we're trying to make policy based on what we imagine versus on the actual evidence.

• 25:47Anthony Pompliano?

  What are you most excited about when it comes to artificial intelligence right now?

• 25:52Speaker 02

  I would have to make a long list of probably about 1,500 things. And, um, I would start with the fact that, um,

• 26:03Speaker 02

  What's the word I want? Um, you know, as far as we can so far to see, you know, minds are the most potent things in the, in the universe. And um, in terms of being able to create more possibilities, more options, more choices, more freedoms, more forms, more ways of being, more life, all, all these things. And, and minds sort of accelerate that. So, so, so all the things that we generally are in favor of, minds can produce. And so now we had, we're accelerating that production.

• 26:47Speaker 02

  We have other ways of accelerating those same things. And um,

• 26:53Speaker 02

  so, so we have the possibilities to accelerate goodness and to accelerate the best things of the universe that we know about. And that's, that's a power that we've never had before. Um, and so that's, that's exciting. And then, then, you know, and then the other thing is, is that um, one of the byproducts of, of, of this is that I think we're going to learn more about how, what we are and how we think and who we are from AIs, trying to make them than we have ever learned for hundreds of years of neuroscience and psychology. These are going to be the way that we actually come to understand ourselves and how we work and what we, who we are. So there's sort of this kind of introspective,

• 27:39Speaker 02

  almost therapeutic

• 27:43Speaker 02

  enlightenment aspect to, to the AIs. Um, and that's just, those, this is the first two.

• 27:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, well, what's fascinating to me is as you talk about artificial evolution and kind of this idea that maybe technology is actually mirroring the human body. Uh, there's an entire cohort of people who actually think the human body and technology will not be separate in the future. Right? There will be some sort of melding of them together, whether it is the human computer interfaces or various other tools that again are imagined today. What are your thoughts on the, on kind of that whole field of work?

• 28:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, so, so, um, just, you know, just speaking about the brain computer interface. Um, I thought a workable version of that was a hundred years away. But the stuff I've seen recently from Neuralink and beyond is really surprising because this feels like we could have something in 25 years or less. And then that would be something you put on your head that would enable you to telepathically, so to speak, control a computer or even communicate to other beings that were also connected.

• 28:51Speaker 02

  And that's a very powerful and problematic technology that seems a lot closer now from what I've seen. So I think, yes, in general, with the advent of prosthetics and all kinds of things, there will be the ability to have more cyborgian beings. We can also modify our own genes and eliminating some diseases, Parkinson's or Alzheimer's, hereditary diseases, taking them out of the gene line would be something that's possible. But my suspicion is that we're not going to have consensus on this

• 29:36Speaker 02

  and therefore we will see divergence. Meaning that I think there will be, there will be this option that not everybody's going to accept or take on. Meaning that there will be different kinds of humans where some are, well, the Amish, never going to modify their genes or their children's. And then there's others who are immediately going to do that. And that's, I think, going to produce something that we have not experienced, which is actual differences between humans. Because one of the tenets of our modern life is that,

• 30:19Speaker 02

  you know, between you and me, there's almost an insignificant difference in genes. But if we start to actually create real differences.

• 30:28Speaker 02

  That's, that's something we have not encountered before.

• 30:32Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you think the impact on society would be if we did that?

• 30:36Speaker 02

  I'm, I'm, I'm, I haven't figured it out yet. I, I, I don't know. It was, um, because you know, right now, the, the, the, the primary counter argument to racism is that there isn't any difference. Races are really superficial. But what if there really was differences where there's us and them, you who do this with your genes tend to do these kinds of things. And we who have these things. And so, um, so I don't know. So, so, so I think it's a, um, what's interesting is that right now this kind of 10,000 year section of, of, of humanity, maybe even the last hundred thousand or less, actually maybe 50,000.

• 31:21Speaker 02

  We were the only sentient being, but like before that time, there were other, there were other sentient beings around us, not, not our species and subspecies. We had encounters with Neanderthals and others who were different from us.

• 31:39Speaker 02

  They didn't last long. We don't know why, but, but civilization grew up where we were the only ones. And now we're headed to make artificial aliens, other, other beings. We may, we may species ourselves and we may go back to that period where we're surrounded with other kinds of beings. And, um, you know, the past history was, I don't know, the past history may not have been a very good, may have a good example because they're gone. We don't know whether our ancestors killed them off or whether they just out were outcompeted. So the prospect of headed into where we have multiple kinds of humans and other beings that are sentient.

• 32:22Speaker 02

  I don't know. I don't know what our reaction is going to be.

• 32:29Speaker 02

  That's, that's something that I think, again, I think we have to learn our way into. I think we could think about this a lot. I'm not sure we're going to have any answers unless we actually try it.

• 32:42Anthony Pompliano?

  What's interesting about what you're talking about here is, you know, take the computer, right? We basically had these huge mainframe computers. We eventually shrunk them into our pockets. So they kind of became closer to us. Now we actually wear computers on, right? I have an Apple watch on, the whole thing. And eventually people think that they will be embedded. And so you kind of continue to bring technology closer and closer and then eventually integrate it with kind of the, the actual core of what it means to be human. What you're talking about with the idea of potentially in the future, changing genetics or modifying genetics. What we're seeing now is a whole bunch of debate and I frankly don't care about the culture war component of this, but with the rise of transgender and all of that, where people are changing, not necessarily from a gene standpoint, but they are changing their bodies.

• 33:27Anthony Pompliano?

  And so is that kind of in line with a similar type of trend where people are, again, they're bringing it closer and closer and closer to themselves. And you're saying, hey, the ultimate end of this journey is that people will actually change their genes. And that is what, you know, we don't yet understand how that will impact society.

• 33:42Speaker 02

  Yes, actually, yeah, the, the, the, um.

• 33:46Speaker 02

  So, so the larger, again, the larger story is, is that for the past even million years, humanity, our humanity is something that we invented.

• 33:58Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you mean by that?

• 33:59Speaker 02

  Deliberately moved in that direction of creating ourselves. We, when we domesticated hurting animals and started to milk them, we quickly evolved human adult lactose tolerance in certain populations to, to, to, we changed their genes by, by inventing this idea of domesticated animals. When we domesticated fire, when we invented cooking into pots to digest food that we could not genetically digest. We had this external stomach. Our jaws and teeth changed over time because we became dependent on fire and cooking.

• 34:42Speaker 02

  Okay, and so, so we are inventing ourselves. We are creating our humanity. And we are, at the genetic level, too. Much faster than we thought. A lot, a lot of people, the kind of dogma was that, oh, evolutionary pressures were taken off by culture, and that we continued to evolve culturally, but not genetically. But we're actually finding out that that's not true. Genetically, we've actually speeded up our genetic mutation and evolution since civilization. So, we are in the process of designing and creating humans. We're much more malleable. And we're not fixed. Human nature is actually not fixed.

• 35:25Speaker 02

  It's actually something that is very slowly changing. And so, that path, we're going to continue, and we're going to accelerate that. We're going to accelerate our own evolution. And the question, of course, is whether we continue to have a single evolution, or whether we fork and speciate. And the, the evidence all around us is that speciation is a much more likely future, because that's what's present in everywhere else in biology. And, and by the way, in technology. That's what I talk about, what technology was. We, technologies tend to speciate and become more specialized

• 36:10Speaker 02

  and diverge. And so, from that perspective, that is sort of our likely thing. If we, to diverge, if we were to somehow retain a consensus and a uniform, single species as we, as we changed ourselves, that would be a really remarkable, remarkable achievement, I would say. And, and, and I think maybe a question that we would have is like, what is the chances of when we meet ETs on other planets, what's the likelihood that there's a single species of them? And what's the likelihood that there will be multiple species of whatever it is that they're about? And I would bet...

• 36:53Speaker 02

  That they're probably multiples rather than a single one, just given, you know, our, our own history. So, um, so yeah, so I think that is the long, very, very long term thing that we are now beginning to do, which is to, um, keep inventing ourselves. And this is why AI is part of that thing is because, as we try to say, well, who do we want to become? We have all these other minds that we're making, they're doing things that we thought only we could do. And now we understand we can make machines to do it. So we're kind of like, well, what do we want to do? What do we want the, the human in the future to do and to be about?

• 37:35Speaker 02

  What should we be? Not just kind of what are we going to be? What, what, what do we choose to be? And that's a huge, I mean, this is like a huge things that, you know, we're going to have a kind of a collective conversation about that's, that started right now, these days, which is, um, if we want to become better humans, what does that look like? Is it just woke? Is it super woke? Is it post woke? What, what does a better human look like? And we get to ask, start to ask and answer that question right now.

• 38:10Anthony Pompliano?

  What is fascinating to me about this is, uh, you've thought so deeply about some of these ideas, but, uh, you started Wired, right? You, uh, I think were either an advisor or helped inspire certain parts of The Matrix, uh, and various other movies. How important is media and the communication of these ideas to reinforcing or inspiring the people who actually go and build it?

• 38:36Speaker 02

  I think it's very important. Um,

• 38:40Speaker 02

  you know, media is often beat up and, and, and there are several things to say. And I think there's lots of, different kind of media. There's news where you're kind of trying to report on the latest thing. And, um, you know, that's, No matter what kind it is, no matter what the publication, no matter the political bias, it doesn't matter the best, the worst, the bias in the news is that bad things happen fast, good things happen slow. So, most news is going to be around bad news. And again, it doesn't matter what brand it is or where it's coming from. That's just the bias of news. It's going to be mostly about bad things because good things take a long time. However,

• 39:22Speaker 02

  there's another part of media, which is this kind of contextual, trying to understand things. And that's a very important role because the world of our knowledge is expanding so much that, you know, you need, you need other people to help explain and digest and help you understand the world. So you can't do it yourself. And so this intermediate of the media, which is going around saying, here's something that's happening, that's important, and here, and we'll try to explain to you. And so we are dependent on media

• 40:05Speaker 02

  to kind of understand our own world. There's no way we can read all the original papers ourselves. It's necessary. It's a necessary tool.

• 40:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You recently published a book called Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier. I don't know what number of book this is for you, but you've published a couple and they've been quite popular. And so I thought I would just pull out two or three different examples of what's in the book that I found just great advice. Prototype your life. Try stuff instead of making grand plans. What do you mean by that?

• 40:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And this literally is something that I wished I had known earlier. It just took me a long time to kind of arrive at this. There's several different things. There is the kind of the immediate. Version of that if you're actually making physically making something like making a chair or making a kitchen remodel or making, writing a book, or you're gonna make a song, you're gonna do a startup, all these things, they work better if you prototype them, meaning that you iterate your way to it. So instead of like, I'm gonna do a business, okay, you, you write up a five-year business plan and you, you borrow a bunch of money and you do your first hire.

• 41:23Speaker 02

  That's more likely to not work. If you decide, okay, I'm going to, in my spare time, make one little version of this and try it out on my friends, or to get one person that I'm aiming for as a potential customer to do this and I'll see what happens. Or, and then, okay, that's really good, and then I have a couple of other things. So for the next two months, I'll run this a little bit longer and higher and see what happens. That way you are kind of managing the failure. You wanna have lots of small failures instead of having a cataclysmic failure because the,

• 42:09Speaker 02

  the, the likelihood of most things that we do is that they don't work. That's entropy. That's, that's the beauty of where we are is that, is that we can only get to really great places by having failures along the way, by things that don't quite work as well. So you wanna manage those by having small ones. And so, um, um, you know, when we did a kitchen remodel, I did a prototype in cardboard, like refrigerator level carpets where we made up the counters and everything at full scale in cardboard. We prototyped and we learned so much by actually having that, like, well, that's, needs to be a little higher, it needs to be moved over here. And so instead of building the cabinets and saying, oh my gosh, I wish it was.

• 42:54Speaker 02

  Four inches to the side, you prototype it. You do a design, you first make a little cardboard version of it in a little dollhouse size to see what it is. And then you nick the full-size prototype and you keep going that way. And that also now applies to a person's life where you are, again, maybe trying to change careers. I can't tell you the number of people that I've met, young people, who decided they want to be a lawyer. They go through the whole law school and in the first summer after graduating and being, doing actual law, they realize, I hate this. Okay, and what they should have done is prototyped it like, okay,

• 43:35Speaker 02

  volunteer, whatever it is, at a lawyer's office for a summer and see what lawyering is actually about. Then if you really, really want to do it, then proceed. So, um, so this idea is, is, is that you iterate your way and you kind of keep learning and you keep the, and you keep the, the, the, the failures along the way that you have to have in a manageable scale and that you kind of inch towards things rather than having a grand plan and then having to, to kind of make massive adjustments later on.

• 44:17Anthony Pompliano?

  That makes a lot of sense. And I think you can go through history and most of the great companies, most of the great careers. That's exactly how they were built.

• 44:24Speaker 02

  Exactly. They're starting in the garage, right?

• 44:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. Another thing you say in the book is life gets better as you replace transactions with relationships.

• 44:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there is absolutely, you know, a, a, a place for just keeping things in transactions, but,

• 44:44Speaker 02

  you know, you could get your coffee from a machine.

• 44:51Speaker 02

  But there is something about having somebody that you know and see that knows you, that you have a relationship with. It's like, you know, and so,

• 45:05Speaker 02

  Those are expensive in a certain sense. Those are costly. But if you can invest into them, it's one of the ways we make life better. And so it doesn't mean that all our transactions have to be relationships. It just means that the more we can shift things to having relationships which are costly, the more we can afford that, the richer our life will be.

• 45:31Anthony Pompliano?

  You also say, and this is the last one that I'll bring up because I think people should really go read this book. It's a very quick read, but quite powerful. You say, "Speak confidently as if you are right, but listen carefully as if you are wrong." Which to me just summarizes the idea of kind of being a lifelong learner. So you said, "Speak confidently as if you are right, but listen carefully as if you are wrong." What did you mean by that?

• 45:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. In the, I think it was Mark Andreessen's AZ16, they have this idea of in their discussions of strong opinions loosely held.

• 46:07Speaker 02

  It's very, very similar, strong opinions loosely held. So you want to be able to inhabit an idea with confidence

• 46:17Speaker 02

  in order to communicate it, in order to, again, rehearse the idea, the possibility of it.

• 46:26Speaker 02

  But you have to do it in a kind of a humble way with this idea that you have to be ready to throw it out. You may be totally wrong. So it's, I know, it's kind of weirdly a humble confidence in some ways. It's a way of stating something with enough clarity that you can do with confidence and yet being willing to throw it away or to change your mind about it. And that, and it seems paradoxical, but that's actually this kind of really beautiful along the, surfing along the edge that you want to be.

• 47:05Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the last questions I have for you is what we're talking about right now is independent thinking, the ability to question your own beliefs, right? Kind of all of these concepts.

• 47:16Anthony Pompliano?

  How should people instill that in their children? That's one of the questions I get all the time, right? Is how do I make my child a good decision maker? How do I teach them independent thinking? How do I teach them how to synthesize information? What do you think is a good answer to that?

• 47:31Speaker 02

  It's a really great quest, you know, and there is something called learned optimism. And it's like child psychology, and this is that you actually can help your, you can actually teach children to be more optimistic. One of the qualities that they try to teach to breed optimism in children is to help them understand or learn or grasp that setbacks are only temporary. So, and not their identity. It's not that, well, I'm an unlucky person, or this always happens to me, or this is part of my identity.

• 48:14Speaker 02

  No, that setbacks, again, it's kind of taking a longer view. It's like elevating their view. It's not about the next five minutes. It's about the next coming years. And in that sense, whatever happens now, whatever failure test you fail, won't be important in the long term. It's something you can overcome. And so

• 48:35Speaker 02

  independent thinking and that.

• 48:41Speaker 02

  You know,

• 48:44Speaker 02

  I'm not sure what it is, but here's what I think is one of the few skills that we should have kids graduate with. I think with ChatGPT, we can see the answer has become free and cheap, and machines are going to be the best thing for answers. So I don't think we want necessarily to be teaching kids how to find answers or make answers or come up with answers. I think the major skill that school should be teaching is how to learn, learning how to learn. And most importantly, each child should learn how to optimize their own way of learning. They should be very aware

• 49:28Speaker 02

  and conscientious and capable of applying the best learning strategy that for them for all these different domains, whether it be a physical skill, a memory skill, a understanding skill, that each person graduate being very aware of what it takes for them to optimize their own learning. Part of that would be critical thinking and part of that would be, you know, innovative thinking. That would be part of that skill set of, of, of learning how to learn. So I, so this is a shift from teaching knowledge and even teaching domain-specific

• 50:12Speaker 02

  skills to the uber skill of learning how to learn. And that would be a huge thing. And right now, in my own survey, I have not found a single curriculum anywhere in the world that's actually doing that.

• 50:30Speaker 01

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• 50:58Speaker 02

  I've found one little experimental school in Austin, Texas, that might be working on that, but they're certainly headed in that direction. But that is, for me, the curriculum that should be in our schools in the, in this century, which is teaching people how to optimize their own learning.

• 51:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. I'm a investor and a big fan of something called Synthesis School, which was taken out of Elon Musk's school at Ashra, which was on the SpaceX campus. He basically hired a team and said, hey, teach my kid. And what you're getting at is exactly what he wanted, right? It was like, teach my kids actually what is going to be valuable, not just to replicate and repeat, you know, two plus two equals four. Yes, they needed no math, but there's more to it than that. And so there was a, a session in that school where basically they would give the students some tools or, or kind of sit them down at a table and say, start. But they wouldn't tell them the rules. They wouldn't tell them all the things, right? Like, just kind of like, literally, you got to figure it out, right? It's just kind of like life. No one sits you down and says, here's the rulebook for life. Here's what you're allowed to do. Here's what you're not allowed to do. And

• 51:59Anthony Pompliano?

  so learning that is important. And they basically took that and tried to put it online with Synthesis School, and it's going very well, actually. And so it's fascinating to see so many people trying to answer this question, because also, it's not just, can I learn inside of my classroom? Now, with access to the internet, these kids are, they're on the global stage from day one, right? And so it might be even more important.

• 52:18Speaker 02

  Right, so there are schools that can accelerate learning and how fast kids learn. But what I'm saying is actually a higher level, it's the meta level, is learning how you optimize your own kind of learning.

• 52:33Speaker 02

  Because in the future, you're going to have to learn a whole nother set of skills. And so how do you optimize that learning of a new set of learning skills? And that's kind of a higher level thing, and it requires, I think, huge amounts of teacher involvement and stuff where you're being tested. You're actually saying, okay, when doing memorization, what's the optimal time of sleep in between the reps? Okay, what's the, you know, am I more an audible learner or a kinetic learner? You know, and you're being tested and you're working with and you're going through a program that is kind of like a performance, like an athlete. You're actually being measured and learning how you best learn and then how to accelerate and increase that.

• 53:16Speaker 02

  And then how to learn the brand new kinds of learning. And that all wants to be very, very methodical, and there isn't that right now.

• 53:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I completely agree. Your new book, Excellent Advice for Living Wisdom, I'd wish I'd known earlier, by Kevin Kelly. If anyone has not read it, I highly suggest it. I really like, oh, look, you got one, I got one, perfect. People can buy it on Amazon and everywhere else that you buy books. Kevin, where can we send people to find some of your writing? Or some of the things that you're still working on today outside of the book?

• 53:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I have a website where I kind of post most things. It's my initials, KK dot org, very easy. We also have published a free newsletter every week for six years or so called Recomendo, where I recommend a couple of things each week. And it's very short, it's one, it's a one-page stuff, the stuff that I find interesting. So you can sign up for recomendo.com and get that. And then I'm the Kevin two, number two Kelly, Kevin two Kelly on the socials. And these days I'm posting one piece of art a day.

• 54:30Speaker 02

  Again, trying to use these generative AIs in order to understand them.

• 54:36Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. My last question before I let you go. I heard that you have a two-story library.

• 54:42Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 54:43Anthony Pompliano?

  What exactly? Oh, are we gonna get a look at it? Oh, my God. Amazing.

• 54:48Speaker 02

  There's a glass catwalk for the underneath. There's scaffolding right now because I just built a model railway around the perimeter of it. But yeah, so there it is. What was your question?

• 55:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Reading habits. How do you pick what books to read? How many books do you think you read a week, a month, a year? Talk about reading.

• 55:09Speaker 02

  So unfortunately, a lot of my reading has shifted away from books to online articles, to papers, to YouTube. So I so part of my library, the lower half is a library of how-to information. How to do things. I'm a maker.

• 55:33Speaker 02

  And from the Whole Earth Catalog and Cool Tools, it was about enabling people to pick up new skills and making things. That entire world has shifted away from books to YouTube. Even a lot of the science stuff is now headed to YouTube, looking at talks that are recorded on YouTube and long before they make it in papers and years before they're making to a book. So and then podcasts too. So so so I don't read as many new books as as I used to or spending as much time.

• 56:12Speaker 02

  And that's that's because we were people of the book and now we're people of the screen. And so more and more of the best information is actually not arriving. It's not native to books. It's actually books are kind of the like this very book itself, which began online first. And so

• 56:40Speaker 02

  So sorry to say, I don't read as many books as I used to. The most of the books I have these days are books where there's a visual component. There's a reason to have that page and turn those pages in terms of physical books. Of course, I'm Kindle as well, and then most of always, most of the fiction that I consumed was generally audible.

• 57:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Hmm.

• 57:06Speaker 02

  I find it much easier to intake fiction when I'm being told, when I hear the story.

• 57:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 57:16Speaker 02

  So that's my reading habits. I have a library, which is, I think in the future is going to be valuable, because I think books are going to become more expensive over time. I think we're at the peak book time. This is the best time to make a library because books are so cheap. Used books are just almost, you can always have them for free. And I think in the future, making books will be increasingly more expensive because they're going to be in smaller volumes.

• 57:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Kevin, I always appreciate just learning from you. Usually it is in a very one-sided way. You're putting information out into the world and I'm consuming. But I appreciate you getting on this and talking about it. As I mentioned, anyone who hasn't gotten the book, please go get that. Any last words you want to leave the audience with?

• 58:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, as much as possible. Try to spend your life working in an area where there's not a word or a name for what it is you're doing. Don't aim to be the best of something and to be the only. If you'd all can, that's a lifelong, that's a high bar that'll take most of your life to reach, but you can keep moving in that direction of trying to be the only and not necessarily the best. So onward, be the only.

• 58:35Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. Kevin, thank you so much. We'll definitely do it again in the future.

• 58:38Speaker 02

  All right. Great. Thank you. I really appreciate it. It was fun.