Pod Insights The Tim Ferriss Show Ep 26: Kevin Kelly (Part 2) - WIRED Co-Founder, Polymath, Most Interesting Man In The World? About this episode This is Part 2 of a 3-part interview with Kevin Kelly.
Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine, which he co-founded in 1993. He also co-founded the All Species Foundation, a non-profit aimed at cataloging and identifying every living species on earth. And in all his spare times, he writes bestselling books, co-founded the Rosetta Project, which is Building an Archive of ALL Documented
Human Languages, and he serves on the board of the Long Now Foundation. As part of the latter, he's looking into how to revive and restore endangered or extinct species, including the Wooly Mammoth.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Tim Ferriss? Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to The Tim Ferriss Show. What you're about to hear is part two of a multi-part conversation with Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired Magazine and all-around fascinating guy. If you didn't catch the first part, you might want to do that before venturing in, but we cover a lot of topics and it's a conversation. So if you don't mind your stories as more of a jigsaw puzzle, then by all means, keep on listening. So without further ado, please enjoy part two of The Tim Ferriss Show with Kevin Kelly. All show notes, links, etc. can be found at fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. And thank you for listening.
0:35 Kevin Kelly? At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.
0:41 Speaker 02 Can I ask you a personal question?
0:43 Kevin Kelly? Now would be an appropriate time.
0:46 Speaker 03 I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.
0:57 Tim Ferriss? Does religion play a large part in your life right now?
1:01 Kevin Kelly? In a certain sense, not in a kind of ritualistic sense. I just wrote a book called What Technology Wants.
1:07 Tim Ferriss? Excellent book. I highly recommend it.
1:09 Kevin Kelly? It was a theory of technology and I was trying to put technology in the context of the cosmos. So I think what religion gives me is permission to think about cosmic questions. I'm right in the middle of finishing a Kickstarter-funded graphic novel that's about angels and robots. And the intention there was to fictionalize the idea that robots would some days have souls, but these souls would be coming from angels. And so that there was this intersection of these two kind of possible worlds of conscious robots who were ensouled by angels. And the reason why this was sort of interesting was that
1:51 Kevin Kelly? the idea was that the angels that ensoul us have been trained. They had been given moral guidance. But if you don't give the spirit some kind of moral guidance, then they can wreak havoc. And so it was this idea that when we make robots, we're also going to have to train them to be ethical. We just can't make a free being and not train it. So it was a way to rehearse and think about some of the consequences of technology today. So I think my religion gives me permission to Ask those questions without embarrassment to say, well, um, what is the general direction
2:30 Kevin Kelly? of the arc of evolution? What is it pointed somewhere? How does technology fit into the greater cosmos? What does it mean? What drives it? Why is there more of it? Is this a good thing? And so I think having a kind of, I consider this kind of an other view. So I have a other view that I'm sympathetic to other worldviews. I don't necessarily have to believe all the other worldviews, but I get the idea that if you have another worldview, that can be very helpful in seeing other worldviews.
3:09 Tim Ferriss? Mm hmm.
3:10 Kevin Kelly? So people have a worldview, even though they don't know it, but I have a worldview and I know that I have a worldview. I mean, really, everybody has a religious or a spiritual orientation, even if they're atheists, they still have one. And so there are some assumptions that are at the basis of it. And I like to question assumptions, including my own assumptions.
3:32 Tim Ferriss? Mm hmm. Two things. I can't resist asking, and we can spend as much or as little time on this as you'd like, but recently grappling with a lot of these issues that I've been grappling with, some of which are existential, some of which are related to death, limited time on the planet, I've become deeply fascinated by indigenous use of plant medicine. And I've had some very transformative experiences that are difficult to put into words because they make you sound like a complete crazy person.
4:03 Kevin Kelly? Otherness, yes.
4:06 Tim Ferriss? But, yeah, yeah, there's a somethingness that is very difficult to communicate without sounding like you should be institutionalized. What do you think the role for people who aspire to do the greatest good in the world? What is the role of that type of direct experience? And is it possible to benefit from that type of, for lack of a better descriptor, spiritual experience without a religious framework around it?
4:32 Kevin Kelly? Yeah, yeah, no, it's a really good question. So my little personal story there, of course, as I was basically I was basically hippie. I worked for the hippie catalog, the Horace catalog, which was about hippies living in San Francisco. And all my friends were drug-taking hippies, but I, for some reason, never did. I just had no appetite or inclination at all for ever taking any drugs or smoking pot or anything. And when I was 50 years old, I decided that I would like to take LSD sacramentally on my 50th birthday. And I did. And I arranged with, I had a guide, and I had appropriate setting,
5:13 Kevin Kelly? and I had some acid that came from a source that was extremely reliable. And it was a sacrament, and it was a very profound sacrament. And I think, yeah, you can use drugs recreationally and for entertainment, and I think that can go somewhere. But I think there's another powerful use for it, which is kind of what you're talking about, which is to elevate one outside of yourself, to lose yourself, to be in contact with other things beyond your ego. And I think it can be done. And I think unfortunately, because of the illegal status that we've had for a long time, the rituals and the practice around that have not had a chance to be developed or communicated.
5:56 Kevin Kelly? Actually, trying to find this information was extremely hard. There is one book that I did find eventually from a guy who was doing LSD experiments while they were still legal, and was able to accumulate enough wisdom about it, that that would be the one place I would point people to. But I think it is important that the context and expectations and the the setting, they call it, that revolves around it, is very important. And I do believe that these can be extremely profound and powerful experiences for good. They can remain long after. And, you know, most people who understand this and don't abuse it, understand that, in fact,
6:39 Kevin Kelly? that experience was not in the pill, it was not in the chemical. It was a real experience. And so unfortunately, there's so much other stuff circulating around the use of these drugs and the misuse of them, that that kind of information is often very, very difficult to find. But I do think maybe we're seeing a moment now in the US where the second prohibition is being undone and at least pot will become legal and maybe we can return to revitalizing, you know, the traditions and the necessary settings around that and expectation that
7:18 Kevin Kelly? not just pot or LSD, but even other synthetic drugs can be extremely powerful in removing the ordinary guards that we have. I mean, we have an ego for on purpose. We have all these things to keep us, you know, sane in a day to day.
7:37 Tim Ferriss? Functional.
7:37 Kevin Kelly? Functional, exactly.
7:38 Tim Ferriss? Standpoint, yeah.
7:39 Kevin Kelly? Right. And so if you remove it completely, you can become dysfunctional. But if you remove it deliberately and with great care, you can be opened up. And I think it's that, you know, I think there's an expertise there. I think there's a lot of other things that if we have the freedom and the wisdom to not abuse it, I think it can be extremely powerful.
8:00 Tim Ferriss? Do you recall the title of the book?
8:02 Kevin Kelly? Okay, so this is-
8:04 Tim Ferriss? Or how people might search for it?
8:05 Kevin Kelly? Yes. So this is one of the many resources that I recommend in my book, Cool Tools. And Cool Tools is a big catalog of possibilities. It has about 1,500 different items. A lot of them are kind of like hand tools, you know, pliers and the great cordless drill. But it's much broader than that. And I include things like, what if you wanted to have a psychedelic experience that was transformative? What do you do? And I would recommend this book. Or, I mean, there's lots of other things in it. But the, I don't actually have the book right in front of me. I should. I think it's called, I don't remember.
8:43 Tim Ferriss? It's okay. I will-
8:45 Kevin Kelly? In the show notes, we will list it as the right one. And there's also a little tiny book that came from England. It was a cartoon guide. That gave kind of a street, an unjudgmental view of all the different drugs there were and what each one kind of did and didn't and what the plus and minuses are without, you know, recommending or forbidding them. They're just saying this is what it is. That information also, believe it or not, is really in short supply. It's like, you know, what do you do with this and how does it work? And tell me the facts. I don't need to hear a lecture either way, like, well, this is great or this is terrible, but just tell me what's going on.
9:22 Tim Ferriss? Right.
9:23 Kevin Kelly? As you know, I mean, that kind of information sometimes is extremely in short supply.
9:26 Tim Ferriss? It's very difficult to find information that isn't politicized.
9:29 Kevin Kelly? Yeah.
9:30 Tim Ferriss? Inaccurate, or, like you said, so shrouded in either fear or irrational optimism that it's almost intelligible and certainly generally useless. We'll put those books in the show notes for people. I want to come back to one thing you said far, far earlier, and that was related to the pieces that you tried to give away that eventually wouldn't die and came back. Were there any common threads, any patterns in those pieces that you can pick out as being sort of a uniquely Kevin Kelly theme, if for lack of a better term?
10:08 Kevin Kelly? Yeah. One of the things that I discovered in my six months of trying to live as if I was going to die in six months, because as I was coming closer to that date, which happened to be Halloween, October 31st, it was, I kept cutting off my future. I mean, I may be like you, I kind of tend to live in the future much more than the past. I'm always imagining, I'm saving this for someday when I'm gonna do this. I'm kind of looking forward, I'm gonna do this here. And so I was very much in the future. And then something that future was being cut down day by day. And it was like, and I was thinking like, why am I taking pictures? I'm not taking photographs because I'm not gonna be here in another two months or something. So, so there was all these things that I'm kind
10:49 Kevin Kelly? of cutting out. And as I was cutting them out, I had this realization, which was the thing I took away from this thing, which was that I was becoming less human.
10:58 Speaker 04 Hmm.
10:59 Kevin Kelly? That to be fully human, we have to have a future. We have to look forward to the future. That is part of us is looking into the future. And so after I came out of the, and I kind of embraced that and saying, well, you know, that future forward facing, that's what I do. That's what, that's what I want to do. That's what I write about. And in thinking about the future, one of the things that is very hard, because the paradox about the future is that there are lots of impossible things that happen all the time. And if someone from the a hundred years from now would come back and tell us things, there's a lot of stuff we're just not going to believe. It's just like, that's just, that's crazy. Just like if we went back a hundred years and told them what was going on now, they would say, you know, that's just not going to happen.
11:44 Kevin Kelly? I mean, we could even go back 20 years. I could go back 20 years and say, we're going to have like, you know, Google street views of all the cities of the world and we're going to have, you know, encyclopedia this for free, this edited by anybody, you know, and it's like, they would say, you know, there's no way. And I'd say, oh, and I would tell them, you know, most of it's for free. And they were saying, there is no economic model in the world that would allow for that. And there isn't.
12:07 Speaker 04 Mm hmm.
12:08 Kevin Kelly? But here it is. So the dilemma is, is that any true forecast about the future is going to be dismissed.
12:14 Speaker 04 Mm hmm.
12:15 Kevin Kelly? Any future that is believable now is going to be wrong.
12:18 Speaker 04 Mm hmm.
12:19 Kevin Kelly? And so you're stuck in this thing of like, if people believe it is wrong, if they don't believe it, you know, where does it get you? You're dismissed. And so there is this very fine line between saying something that is right on the edge of plausibility and at the same time, right on the edge of having a chance of being true. And what I discovered that was helpful in trying to get away from the kind of assumptions that bind us to just kind of extrapolate was to think laterally, was to go sideways. One thing, just take whatever was everybody knew and say, well, what if that wasn't true?
13:00 Tim Ferriss? What would be a good example of that or an example?
13:03 Kevin Kelly? Like, everyone says, okay, Moore's Law will continue. Well, what if Moore's Law didn't continue? What would that mean? What would happen?
13:09 Tim Ferriss? And you can maybe I could say for the audience, but I'll just even to remind me, Moore's Law is, what is it? Every 18 months, the the size and cost of technology will decrease by 50%, something along those lines?
13:22 Kevin Kelly? Well, let's say even more simple.
13:24 Tim Ferriss? Oh, no, there's speed involved as well.
13:25 Kevin Kelly? Right. Moore's Law does say that, but but let's say something. Right now, we live in a world where every year the technology is better and cheaper. What if that wasn't true?
13:34 Tim Ferriss? Right, got it.
13:35 Kevin Kelly? What if every year, starting like, you know, a couple of years from now, stuff was better, but more expensive? That's a that's a completely different world.
13:42 Tim Ferriss? Right.
13:43 Kevin Kelly? I mean, everyone assumes that things are going to get better and cheaper. Well, what if that wasn't true? So you can take kind of assumption, again, that's something that no one's really examining like, well, one of the things I write about is the fact that we're going to have a population implosion globally, that the global population will drastically reduce in 100 years from now, we'll have less population, far, far, far less than we have right now. And so.
14:10 Tim Ferriss? All right, I have to bite at that. What? Because I've thought a lot about this and the, what do they call them? Malthusian dilemmas. Is that going to be, do you think pandemic related, nuclear weapon related, all of the above?
14:23 Kevin Kelly? None of those.
14:23 Tim Ferriss? None of those?
14:24 Kevin Kelly? No.
14:25 Tim Ferriss? AI coming into the the rise of the machines? No.
14:28 Kevin Kelly? Nope. It's just pure demographics. So if you look at the current trends in fertility rates in all the developed countries, everywhere except for the US, they're already either below replacement level. So replacement level means that you're just sustaining the
14:47 Tim Ferriss? Population.
14:47 Kevin Kelly? The population just replaces itself. If it's below, it means that there's getting, there's getting less and less. So Japan, all these, you know, Europe are all below replacement. The US is an exception because of only because of immigration.
15:02 Tim Ferriss? Got it.
15:03 Kevin Kelly? More people coming in. Otherwise, we would be there and this would not be any news to anybody. But the real news, people would point to developing world, but you know, Mexico is now aging faster than the US. China is aging faster because of their one child policy. Of course, Japan is completely, they're way underwater completely. So even the one exception is Sub-Saharan Africa. And there's really kind of debate right now about how fast or whether they're slowing down. But generally around the world, South America, the rest of Asia. The rate in fertility continues to drop and here's the thing is that the demographic transition. That is happening everywhere where people become urban.
15:43 Kevin Kelly? And so every forecast shows the urbanity, the citification of the population continuing. And I can't think of any counterforce to stop this huge migration at the scale that we're seeing into the city. And as that happens, the birth rates drop down. And even in places like Singapore or other places where they have taken very, very active countermeasures of cash for having kids. Wow. Daycare forever bonuses, none of these work. In terms of actually trying to raise fertility levels.
16:23 Kevin Kelly? So you have to understand that to go above replacement level, the average woman has to have 2.1 kids. Well, that means there has to be tons and tons of women who have three or four kids to make up for those. How many people do you know with that many kids, you know, living in cities? And there's just, there's not, there's not enough of them. So, and this is a projection, some of these are UN projections. They have three, three, they have a low, high and, and a medium. And the low one is not good news. Because there's not a large cultural counterforce for women to have three, a lot, you know, a very high percentage of the population to have three or four kids in a modern world.
17:05 Kevin Kelly? And that's why the, the population continues to decrease every year.
17:10 Tim Ferriss? What type of, this is perhaps a tangent, but one of the big debates in my head right now is to marry or not to marry to have kids or not to have kids. I never thought those would even be questions in my mind. And yet, here I am, and now they are. What are your thoughts on having children? What type of people, this is very broad, but should have children or shouldn't have children, whichever way of answering is easier? Or how to even think about that question?
17:37 Kevin Kelly? I think people who are privileged, of which you are, should have children because you can bestow so many privileges and opportunities to your children. And if the world is to be populated, why not populate it with children who have as many opportunities as possible? I also say from my own experience of growing up, one of many kids and having, well, I have three kids. One of my other regrets in life is not having a fourth. But we were just, we started a little bit too late and we were unable to have a fourth. But all my kids wished we had a fourth too. And I would say that it's a gift to your kids to have more than one. And I know that from hanging out in China, where so many kids grew up, only
18:21 Kevin Kelly? children, and this really, really miss that. There is a total gift of the siblings and brothers to each other that is really very profound. And there is also, I know from my friends who have had lots of kids, that there is a tremendous amount of teaching from the older to the younger. And that's a lot of what they learn. And that the curve of the amount of energy that you have to expend, actually after three, it doesn't really matter in terms of the parents.
18:52 Tim Ferriss? Got it.
18:53 Kevin Kelly? I have one friend who has nine kids. I have another friend who has seven.
18:56 Tim Ferriss? Wow.
18:57 Kevin Kelly? And basically, how do they do that? Well, the older kids were helping to parent the younger kids. That's the only way that really works. But that is actually, basically, they have, you know, they have five parents instead of having two parents.
19:09 Tim Ferriss? Right. It's very traditional in a way. I mean, traditional meaning reaching back thousands or tens of thousands of years.
19:14 Kevin Kelly? It is. Of course, in the old days, may have had 12 born, but they rarely had 12 kids survive.
19:22 Tim Ferriss? Right.
19:23 Kevin Kelly? So that actually is a very recent, I mean, sort of like, it's like the 1800s kind of onward. I hang out with the Amish a lot and they still have these very large families. And they all survive. So they have kind of in some senses sort of an unnatural expansion. And one of my predictions, again, going back to kind of like the assumptions. One of my predictions is that, you know, in America, in a hundred years from now, whatever it is, it'll be um the complete countryside is run by the Amish. The Amish take over the entire countryside because they never sell land. They have like eight kids. And then there are all these people living in the cities and it's like everybody's happy, you know. We're all living, they drive out to the Amish lands. It's just fantastic. And uh they're very happy, you know, doing their thing and running the farms. And so
20:05 Kevin Kelly? I had been predicting for years that the Amish would come and start buying upstate New York and that's exactly what they're doing right now.
20:11 Tim Ferriss? Why do you spend so much time with the Amish? This is news to me, but very, very interesting. And how long has that been going on?
20:17 Kevin Kelly? For a while. And by the way-
20:19 Tim Ferriss? And does your beard have anything? Is there any relation to the Amish?
20:22 Kevin Kelly? I had the beard before my interest in the Amish. I can show you some pictures when I was uh nineteen years old. I do have, so those who don't know, I have an Amish beard, which means I have a beard without a mustache. The reason why the Amish don't have mustaches is it was at the time that they were kind of adopting their dress code. The mustache was all military men had mustaches. And so they were very anti-military. They refused to serve in armies. They don't even vote. But so is their kind of rejection of the military by shaving off their mustache. I hang out with the Amish because their adoption of of technologies is like, seems to us totally crazy. Because first of all, they're not Luddites. They're complete hackers.
21:04 Kevin Kelly? They love hacking technology. They have something called Amish electricity, which is basically pneumatics. A lot of these farms have a big diesel. They don't have electricity, but they have a big diesel generator in the barn that pumps up this compressor that sends high-pressure air tubes and tubing into their barn, into their homes. And so they have converted like their sewing machine, washing machine and stuff to pneumatic.
21:30 Kevin Kelly? Okay.
21:31 Tim Ferriss? Seems like a bit of a sidestep of the word of God.
21:34 Kevin Kelly? Exactly. So they'll have like, you'll have horse drawn buggies and horse drawn's farm implements. And the horses will be pulling this diesel generated combine. And you're thinking, what are they doing? Okay, right? But, but in fact, if you look at our own lives, and I've done this many times, I can ask you, Tim, or you can ask me, there'll be some weird thing, like, we don't have TV in our house, but I got internet. It's like, well, what is that about?
21:59 Tim Ferriss? Right, right.
22:01 Kevin Kelly? So we all have these things, but here's the difference is the Amish do it collectively. They're very selective. They're selecting their technology collectively as a group. And secondly, they have to articulate, because they're doing collectively, you have to articulate what their criteria is. A lot of us are adopting, we try this, we try that. We don't have any kind of like logic or reason or theory or framework for why we're doing stuff. It's this, it's this one parade of stuff. But the Amish have a very particular criteria and their criteria is there are two things that they're looking for. The main thing they want to do, and the main reason why they have all these restrictions like horse and buggy and all this stuff is that they want to have these
22:43 Kevin Kelly? communities, very strong communities. And so they noticed that if you have a car that you'll drive out and shop somewhere out of the community, or you go to church somewhere out of the community, or whatever it is. But if you have a horse and buggy, you can go only 15 miles. And so everything has to happen. Your entire life, you have to support the community. You have a community within 15 miles. You have to visit the sick and you have to shop locally. So you're shopping with your neighbors. So when a new technology comes along, they say, will this strengthen our local community or send us out? And then the second thing that they're looking at is with families. So the goal of the typical Amish man or woman is to have every single meal with their children
23:27 Kevin Kelly? for every meal of their lives until they leave home. They have breakfast, and they have lunch, and they have dinner. So breakfast and lunch is that they go to one room schoolhouse and they pedal back for lunch that their parents have with them. And that means that the business is ideally in their backyard. So they have, they have a lot of like shops and stuff. If they're not a farmer, they have a backyard shop, which is actually has to be kind of clean-ish because it is in their backyard.
23:52 Tim Ferriss? Right.
23:52 Kevin Kelly? It's like not my, well, it is in their backyard. So they really are, you know, they really want to make sure that they're, they have metal working shops and stuff, which they really try to keep non-toxic and work because it's in their backyard. And so that means that they can come home for lunch, they have breakfast and lunch. So they're, they're on the premises and they have every single meal with their children till they leave. And so they say, well, will this technology allow us to do that? Will it help us do that? Or will it work against that? And then like right now, they're, they've been deciding whether to accept cell phones or not, even though they don't have landline phones. So they're basically, they're going to, well, some of them are going to accept cell phones. And they do that by,
24:29 Kevin Kelly? there's always some Amish early adopter who's trying things. And they say, okay, Ivan, Bishop says you can, he has to get permission. He says, you can try this, but we're watching you. We're going to see what effect this has on your family, on your community. You have to be ready to give it up anytime we say that it's not working. And they do this on a kind of a Paris by Paris. So it's very decentralized. And so they try out, always trying out their technologies and they're always looking to see, is this strengthening the families? Is this strengthening the communities? If not, we don't want it.
25:02 Tim Ferriss? And what have you, I have two questions, I guess. The first is, since you're normally, as I understand it, based on the West Coast in Northern California, how do you get out to the Amish? Or is there a separate community closer by? And then secondly, what have you incorporated into your own life or your, your own family that originated from the Amish?
25:22 Kevin Kelly? Yeah. So I don't get to see them as often as I want, but actually when I go east, I have some contacts that I will exercise and I would try to get like to stay overnight and go to church in a buggy or something.
25:37 Tim Ferriss? And this is Pennsylvania?
25:38 Kevin Kelly? Well, actually Pennsylvania is the heart of it, but actually there are more communities in Ohio where my brother lives.
25:45 Tim Ferriss? Oh, no kidding.
25:46 Kevin Kelly? Iowa, there's a lot more happening in New York. So Pennsylvania are the kind of ground zero.
25:52 Tim Ferriss? Ground zero.
25:53 Kevin Kelly? But in fact, there are bigger, more extensive communities outside of Pennsylvania.
25:58 Tim Ferriss? I didn't realize that.
25:59 Kevin Kelly? Yeah.
25:59 Tim Ferriss? The Amish diaspora.
26:01 Kevin Kelly? It is. So I'm saying they literally are just buying up farmland. They're expanding. They're constantly expanding. They have a very small attrition rate, very large families. They all are buying, basically they're buying farms and stuff for their, for their children. And they never sell. And so they also don't even move into areas as a, they have a minimum number of families that we need to move in at once. But what did I learn from that? Well, one of the things that we had, particularly when we had younger kids, was kind of technological sabbaticals.
26:32 Tim Ferriss? Mm hmm.
26:33 Kevin Kelly? Or Sabbath, I should say.
26:34 Tim Ferriss? Mm hmm.
26:35 Kevin Kelly? And I've now seen other families who aren't even, you know, aren't even religious adopt that same thing, which is once a week, you take a break from either, you can define it however you want it, the screen or the keyboard or, or connectivity or something, and you step back and you do that, not because it's like terrible or poison, but because it's so good. You know, there's lots of people who are kind of like, they're going to drop out from Twitter. They're kind of like, oh, this is like a toxin, like going to get detoxed or something. I think that's entirely wrong way to think about it is you want to take breaks from this, not because they're toxic, but because they're so good.
27:15 Kevin Kelly? It's like, you want to step back so that you can re-enter it and with a renewed perspective, with a renewed appreciation, with having spent time looking at it in a different way. And I think that kind of rhythm of having Sabbaths and then yearly vacations or whatever, retreats, and then every seven years or whatever, as you take a true sabbatical. I think that kind of rhythmic disconnection or Sabbath, I think is very powerful, something that, that works very well. And was something that we had in our family.
27:49 Tim Ferriss? I take Saturdays off, as it turns out, as my screenless day. I really, I really try to make that a weekly occurrence and it's incredible. The, the effect that, that it has, the sort of galvanizing effect of just a mere 24 hours, not even that, if you just consider the waking hours. Every seven years, a vacation or sabbatical of how long? In your case or your family's case?
28:10 Kevin Kelly? Yeah, partly because my wife actually is granted a sabbatical from the company she works for, which is Genetek. It was one of the few companies that actually have a official sabbatical for all their researchers, at least. And it's very meager. It's six weeks. Of course, you know, a six week sabbatical is basically a European annual vacation.
28:33 Tim Ferriss? Right, right.
28:34 Kevin Kelly? You know, but for an American.
28:36 Tim Ferriss? Right, it's three years.
28:38 Kevin Kelly? It's, that's a big thing. So, yes, so we're, we're do something, do something different. So this year, we're taking one and we're going to camp in national parks for one month of it and then the other two weeks will go to Asia. But we haven't been to a lot of the national parks. I'm going to do a different kind of project that I haven't done before and we'll do some kind of car camping. We haven't really done a big road trip like that, so it's all new for us.
29:03 Tim Ferriss? What is the longest in the last few years that you've gone without checking email?
29:07 Kevin Kelly? Oh, probably two weeks. And in China.
29:13 Tim Ferriss? How do you manage that?
29:14 Kevin Kelly? Well, it was very easy. It was like, I just, I was unable to pick it up because China was blocking Google.
29:22 Tim Ferriss? Makes it more challenging.
29:26 Kevin Kelly? And I was in, I was in some remote places and so even the connection was hard, but it was like they, they weren't, they weren't letting me get it. I'm not a mobile person. My first smartphone was an iPhone 5 and I still not using it properly. I use it for phone calls.
29:45 Tim Ferriss? Yeah, I don't, I don't use my iPhone as an input device either. I just drives me nuts.
29:50 Kevin Kelly? But I can't, I can't type. When I travel, I like to leave everything. You know, I'm, I spent a lot of my time sitting in front of a computer. I'm kind of like the Zen, you know, walk, walk, sit, sit, don't wobble. So like, I'm here, I'm like really online. And then when I leave this studio, I don't want to be connected at all, and I won't be. And I'm not checking email, I'm not checking this other stuff. And I can go days, typically I'll go days without checking, even in the US, if I'm traveling. And then if I'm overseas, I will go probably three or four days before I get the email. That's pretty typical.
30:26 Tim Ferriss? Do you, um, let me shift gears just a little bit. I'm looking at, uh, looking at longnow.org. I recommend everybody take a look at it, the Long Now Foundation. And humans are generally, I would say, pretty bad at thinking long-term. Certainly when it comes to habit change, very, very high failure rate with long-term incentives. You're going to get diabetes in 20 years, for instance, as opposed to you'll have more sex if you have a six-pack, when it comes to diet. Uh, but the Long Now Foundation, I just want to read a few things on this website for people. So the Long Now Foundation was established in 1996, written as 01996, to creatively foster long-term thinking and responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years. Then you
31:07 Tim Ferriss? have the 10,000-year clock, which is a monument-scale, multimillennial, all-mechanical clock, is an icon to long-term thinking. The Rosetta Project, building an archive of all documented human languages. Long bets, featured bet is here, Warren Buffett, protege partners LLC, a public arena for enjoyable, competitive predictions of interest to society with philanthropic money at stake. And then revive and restore, which is bringing extinct species back to life. So there is a lot here. Can you explain to people, because I've, I've greatly enjoyed many of the seminars and speeches of the Long Now Foundation, I'm a supporter, I suppose I've even spoken there on stage, and love the email synopses that Stuart sends out. What is the function of the
31:51 Tim Ferriss? Long Now Foundation? And what is the value?
31:53 Kevin Kelly? The long now foundation is kind of reactive. It's reacting to the very inherent short-term bias that our society, particularly this technological society, particularly say the Silicon Valley exhibits, which is often a focus on the next quarter, the next two quarters, the next year. Results needing to be immediate, you know, instant satisfaction. If something's not on Netflix streaming, we don't even wait for the DVD. It's this fairly kind of very fast-paced, short-term thinking. And also somewhat blinded by the fact that we don't have a lot of sense of history either, that we're kind of ignorant about what's happened in the past.
32:34 Kevin Kelly? And so the term, the long now, came from Brian Eno, who noticed that we have a very short now, which is like the next five minutes and the last five minutes. And so the long now is a way, is an attempt to kind of expand that so that we, as a society and as individuals, would try to think about things at a generational or civilizational scale. So like, how about like working on something that might take longer than your own lifetime to accomplish? So you start something now, then maybe make it so that it might take, like the cathedrals of old, what if we were trying to make something that, you know, might need 25 years to accomplish? How can we do that?
33:17 Kevin Kelly? So we're trying to encourage people to think in that perspective, to take that perspective, and then to maybe move in that direction. We're not necessarily saying we have to have like the Ozymov's Foundation, where we have to have like a master plan for the next hundred years and we're going to plan out the future. No, we're agnostic about what it is that people make or do. We're just saying that it would benefit having, thinking about the long term. And I've often heard some people who advise to counseling to individuals about kind of thinking about the long term in your own life, even though you might want to act kind of
34:00 Kevin Kelly? locally and be spontaneous, but you do want, you do want to kind of keep in mind the fact that, you know, you'll be around for a while, whether it's putting some savings away or... Working on a skill that may take some time, more than six months or a year to acquire, or you know, whatever it is that you can have both perspectives. And so, we're not attempting to get rid of the need for people to survive, the need for companies to have a profit this year. We're saying there can be additional perspectives in addition to that where we say we commit to like a program of science research where it's pure science and the results of the say
34:42 Kevin Kelly? mathematics is one of the most profound things that we can invest in, even though most of the things in the beginning seem to be non-utilitarian, they don't have any purpose, but we know from our own history that you know, in 20 years, they'll pay off in some way or other. And so, being able to kind of construct a society so that we can allow the rewards of long-term investment, long-term thinking, long-term perspective, that would make us a better civilization.
35:15 Tim Ferriss? I love the Long Now Foundation. I encourage everybody to check it out, longnow.org.
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