Ep 27: Kevin Kelly (Part 3) - WIRED Co-Founder, Polymath, Most Interesting Man In The World?

This is Part 3 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.

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

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, ladies and gentlemen. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. What you're about to hear is part three of a three-part conversation with Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired Magazine, bestselling author, all-around fascinating human being. If you didn't catch the first two parts, you might want to do that before venturing in. But if not, no fear. We answer a lot of questions. It's a conversation. You can pretty much dip in and dip out as you like. 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 three, the final part, of The Tim Ferriss Show with Kevin Kelly. And thank you for listening.

• 0:39Speaker 01

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? No, I would assume that would be time.

• 0:48Speaker 02

  What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:53Speaker 01

  The Tim Ferriss Show.

• 1:00Tim Ferriss?

  I'd love to perhaps jump into some rapid-fire questions.

• 1:03Kevin Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:03Tim Ferriss?

  And they don't have to even be rapid. But...

• 1:07Kevin Kelly?

  Just some fire questions.

• 1:09Tim Ferriss?

  Or just some fire questions. The questions will be rapid. The answers can be as short or as long as you'd like. What book or books have you, do you gift or have gifted the most to other people outside of your own books?

• 1:21Kevin Kelly?

  There is a short graphic novel by Daniel Pink called Junko.

• 1:30Tim Ferriss?

  Uh-huh.

• 1:31Kevin Kelly?

  And it's career counsel advice. It's aimed at young people. It's a graphic novel. It's a cartoon, basically. And it's aimed at young people as trying to teach them how to be, become indispensable.

• 1:41Tim Ferriss?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:42Kevin Kelly?

  And I've given that away to young people because it's, for me, the best summary of, again, it's not like how to become successful. It's how to become indispensable to...

• 1:52Tim Ferriss?

  That's right. It's Adventures of Johnny Bunko or something like that.

• 1:56Kevin Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. That's right. That's right. I have that on my bookshelf back in San Francisco, in fact.

• 2:00Kevin Kelly?

  Yeah. If you know a young person who is just starting out, hand them that book. It's very easy for them to read because it's a graphic novel. It's non-threatening. It's fun. And it'll give us like five great principles for starting out and helping them kind of orient themselves as they start working in the working life.

• 2:22Tim Ferriss?

  For someone who's facing a lot of the same questions, let's just say, so you have graduates asking the, what should I do? Why am I here? What am I good at? If we fast forward to say, for the sake of argument, mid 30s, right? People in middle age hitting that particular point. Are there any books that you would recommend they read?

• 2:39Kevin Kelly?

  Well, there is a book that I'm recommending by Cal Newport. It's called So Good They Can't Ignore You. This changed my mind because I'd kind of bought into the kind of new age California dogma of follow your bliss, you know, money will follow. And he makes a really good argument and convinced me that's actually not very good advice. That what you really want to do is to master something and to use your mastering of something as a way to get to your passion. So if you start with just passion, it's sort of paralyzing because, and I know this from my own kids, they have, they're 18, they really don't know what they're passionate about.

• 3:22Kevin Kelly?

  I mean, some people are lucky enough to know and a lot of people aren't. So this is, this is a book for people who don't kind of really know what they're really excellent at, don't really know what they're passionate about. And his premise is that you master something, almost anything at all, just something you master, and you use that mastery to kind of move you into a place where you can begin to have passion and that you kind of keep recycling, that the way you find your passion is through mastery rather than the other way around, which is people think that they're going to get their mastery through passion. And I kind of believe that former, you know, that the passion would lead to mastery. But after thinking about it, looking at his examples and his argument, I'm pretty sure

• 4:04Kevin Kelly?

  that for at least for most people, you can get to your passion through mastery.

• 4:09Tim Ferriss?

  And that would also give you a currency or a lever to use in getting to that point.

• 4:14Kevin Kelly?

  Exactly.

• 4:16Tim Ferriss?

  Excellent. Do you have a favorite fiction book?

• 4:18Kevin Kelly?

  Yes.

• 4:19Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, fantastic. I usually don't get one answer. This is great.

• 4:22Kevin Kelly?

  Yeah. Chantaram.

• 4:25Tim Ferriss?

  Ah.

• 4:26Kevin Kelly?

  Chantaram, it might take me a way to explain this, but it's, it's a one, it's the author who wrote one book because it's very autobiographical. The premise of the book and the author's life seems completely incredulous and kind of almost Hollywood-ish. But what you get from it and where it's set, it's set in India, it's in the slum of India. And you get an incredibly vivid, immersive, deep, and in some ways uplifting view of India and the underworld in India and that part of Asia. And the main protagonist is this very interesting Zen criminal.

• 5:09Kevin Kelly?

  He's sort of a coyote trickster blend of someone who is, you know, he does bad things, but at the same time, he's sorry about it. And he has a kind of a cosmic perspective. It's very, very unusual, but it's a long book. And I actually recommend that if people are gonna try to, is that you actually to get the audible version, listen to it. It runs like, you know, on and on, but it'd be one of those books you that you wish will never end. And I'll just tell you the beginning of it, which is that, and this is the true part, which is that the guy, the author, became a bank robber in New Zealand.

• 5:48Kevin Kelly?

  He was hooked on drugs, started robbing banks, was eventually caught and escaped from prison. And he made his way to the slums of India where because he had a medical kit, he was treated as a doctor, got involved and hooked on drugs in India, got involved with the mafia, was put in prison, tortured, left, abandoned, nobody knew he was even in there, started writing a book. He wrote this book, they ripped it up, destroyed it. He was recruited, found a guru, an Afghani was recruited in the Muajin, was fighting there, his entire company was wiped out. I mean, that's just the beginning. That's like the first day.

• 6:28Tim Ferriss?

  It's really interesting that you would bring up Shantaram. For those people who haven't heard of Josh Waitzkin, I also had him on this podcast. Josh was the basis for Searching for Bobby Fischer, the book and the movie. World-class chess player, also a very deep, soulful guy, and this is one of his favorite books as well.

• 6:45Kevin Kelly?

  Oh, oh, I see.

• 6:46Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you would, you would love Josh sometime. I'll have to put you guys in touch, but any favorite documentaries?

• 6:52Kevin Kelly?

  Well, now you've asked the wrong question because I have a site called True Films. Where for the past ten years, I have reviewed the best documentaries and actually have a book called True Films, which is the 200 best documentaries that you should see before you die.

• 7:08Tim Ferriss?

  Oh my god, no kidding. Wow, you have no idea how timely this is. So it's two, uh, T R U E films?

• 7:13Kevin Kelly?

  Yeah, True Films. And so I, there are a couple of films that I would say have sort of universal appreciation. Like, you know, they may have like a rating of like a hundred on Rotten Tomatoes or something. So the one documentary that I think everybody that I know have seen it has loved is Man on Wire.

• 7:30Tim Ferriss?

  Such a good movie.

• 7:32Kevin Kelly?

  Right? So it's just, it's just transcendent. It's just a beautiful movie. It's based the fact that this guy, basically, he's gonna walk the Twin Towers. I mean, he, the moment was, he was like fourteen year old kid in France, was at a dentist's office, looking at a magazine and he saw that they were, had plans to build this twin tower in New York. And he saw those two twin towers and he said, "I need to walk between them." He didn't know how to type walk. The towers had not been built. He was already planning this thing. And he was filming himself the whole way.

• 8:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, so amazing.

• 8:04Kevin Kelly?

  Okay, and so he, he does it. And how he does it is amazing. So another great documentary that I love because it's very unusual among documentaries in that it films the villain side of the whole thing as well, which is King of Kong.

• 8:19Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I haven't, this has been recommended to me. I still have not seen this movie.

• 8:23Kevin Kelly?

  King of Kong is about a guy who becomes the video game, arcade game, King of Kong. He becomes the champion. But he is basically competing against this cabal of people who are trying to subvert him and are doing all kinds of really terrible things to stop him, which was all on film.

• 8:43Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 8:44Kevin Kelly?

  And so here's this really kind of Midwest, really lovable guy and you're rooting for him the whole time while these really sleazy guys are trying to take him down. It's just fantastic.

• 8:55Tim Ferriss?

  I have to watch that.

• 8:56Kevin Kelly?

  So that's the second one. The third one is one that's not so well known, but it's called State of Mind. And it's about the spectacles in North Korea.

• 9:08Kevin Kelly?

  Which these two filmmakers had access to and they followed several different young athletes who were practicing for the spectacle and in these spectacles, of course, what it is is people are pixels. You know, they have these like huge stadium sized things and they're like a little robots or they're cogs in this machine, which is like perfect. So you can imagine like, you know, like a picture that's made up of pixels, but every pixel is actually is a little boy or girl holding up a card, colored cards in sequence. So these things move, which means that, you know, there's not a pixel missing. So that means that nobody's sick. It's like, you know, this, you're not allowed to be sick. You can't make a mistake at all. And it's getting inside of North Korea, which turns out to be a nationwide cult.

• 9:51Kevin Kelly?

  And I think that in 50 years, when they're gone, nobody will believe that that was even possible. And this documentary will be there saying, no, no, no, they really was a nationwide cult and they really did believe this. It really is amazing just to see what's going on there.

• 10:06Tim Ferriss?

  All right. Well, I know what I'm doing for the next few days, next few evenings.

• 10:10Kevin Kelly?

  I could go on unfortunately, because I have a lot of them, but go to the

• 10:13Tim Ferriss?

  True films.

• 10:15Kevin Kelly?

  I only review ones that are great. So I don't do

• 10:17Tim Ferriss?

  Awesome.

• 10:18Kevin Kelly?

  I just say these are fantastic.

• 10:20Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, man. All right. I've been looking for this. I cannot believe that I'm only learning this now. I'm kind of embarrassed about that. When you think of the word or hear the word successful, who's the first person who comes to mind?

• 10:31Kevin Kelly?

  Jesus.

• 10:32Tim Ferriss?

  All right. Why would you say that?

• 10:34Kevin Kelly?

  Well, there aren't that many people who've left their mark on as many people in the world as he has. I think what he was up to, what he was doing is, you know, vastly been twisted, misunderstood, whatever word you want. But nonetheless, what's remarkable is, and here's a guy who didn't write anything. So I think success is also overrated.

• 11:01Tim Ferriss?

  All right. I'd love for you to elaborate on that.

• 11:03Kevin Kelly?

  Uh, greatness is overrated. A lot of, you know, I mentioned big numbers, but it's more of the impact that you had on people's lives. But I think we tend to have an image of success. That's somewhat been skewed by, you know, our current media. It's like our sense of beauty in women. It's sort of like in terms of all possibilities, it's in a very small, narrow defined, it's kind of ritualistic in a certain sense. And I think our idea of success is often today, it means, you know, somebody who has a lot of money, or who has a lot of fame, or who has some of these other trappings which we assign, but I think can be successful in by being true to and kind of being the most you that you could possibly be. And

• 11:48Kevin Kelly?

  I think that's what I think of as one of the things that Jesus, whether you take him as just a historical character or anything beyond, was about. He certainly wasn't imitating anybody. Let me put it that way.

• 12:00Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm.

• 12:00Kevin Kelly?

  I mean, I think that's the, the great temptation that people have is they want to be someone else, which is basically they want to be in someone else's movie. You know, they want to be the best rock star. And there's so many of those already that you can only end up imitating somebody in that, in that slot. And I think to me, the success is like you make your own slot. You have a new slot that didn't exist before. And I think, you know, that's of course what Jesus and many others were doing, but it was, they were kind of making, making a new slot. And that's really hard to do. But I think that's what I chalk up as success is you've made a new slot.

• 12:36Tim Ferriss?

  What is your new slot? You knew, you knew that was coming.

• 12:40Kevin Kelly?

  Who says I'm successful?

• 12:41Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I'm not. I'm trying to not make any assumptions here.

• 12:46Kevin Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 12:47Tim Ferriss?

  Or what would be your slot?

• 12:48Kevin Kelly?

  Well, my slot would be Kevin Kelly. I mean, I mean, that's the whole thing. It's not going to be like a career, or you would really ideally be something that was, you had no, no imitators. I mean, you would be who you are. And that's, that is success. Actually, in some senses is you didn't imitate anybody. No one else imitated you afterwards.

• 13:11Kevin Kelly?

  So, you know, in a certain sense, you have, if you become an adjective, that's a good sign, right? So I think success is actually you kind of make your own path. If they're calling you a successful entrepreneur, then to me, that's not the best kind of success.

• 13:24Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm. Because you're being confined to that category.

• 13:28Kevin Kelly?

  Right, you're in a category.

• 13:30Tim Ferriss?

  If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

• 13:33Kevin Kelly?

  I could sing.

• 13:34Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, you would like to sing?

• 13:37Kevin Kelly?

  Yeah, I seem to be unable to carry a tune. I can't remember, I mean, my wife can hear something once and she can just sing it back a year later. I, I could hear the same song, I have heard the same song and I couldn't tell you three notes of it. I'm sure, because I'm a Tim Ferriss fan, I'm sure I could train myself to be dead. I know I could, but I, I guess I haven't and it would be something that I have to really work at and I haven't, but I have trouble carrying a tune, staying in tune, remembering a tune. I love music and, and I appreciate it, but in terms of actually singing and, or I don't play an instrument. So maybe I would say if it was a little easier for me, that would be something nice.

• 14:17Tim Ferriss?

  Have you taken lessons or attempted to take lessons?

• 14:20Kevin Kelly?

  No.

• 14:20Tim Ferriss?

  I got it. So just in the spirit of trade, I've recently started exploring hand drumming with gem, gembees and different types of drums. If anyone out there can get me a pan art hang, I would really love to hear from you. Those of you that, that will mean nothing to most people who are hearing this. The research that has piqued my curiosity most recently, and of course you don't want to run out and just start swallowing these things, but there's a common anti-epilepsy drug called Valproate, which apparently has some implications for opening a window for achieving perfect pitch in mature adults. Very fascinating stuff.

• 15:00Kevin Kelly?

  Wow.

• 15:01Tim Ferriss?

  So if I, if I do, if I do any experiments with that, I will, I will certainly report back.

• 15:05Kevin Kelly?

  Well, now that you've talked about it, not the drug part, but I did, remember I did take one class, you mentioned the drums, I took a one class at an adult summer camp. Which I highly recommend. If your kids go to camp, you should go with them. And it was a steel drum.

• 15:19Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, cool.

• 15:20Kevin Kelly?

  Course, and I love that. So like you, I think if I did take up an instrument, it would be drums of some sort. Because that I seem to responded to, and I did pretty good for the, for the intro course on steel drumming.

• 15:32Tim Ferriss?

  I, I find percussion to be so primal, it just satisfies some type of need that probably predates.

• 15:39Kevin Kelly?

  Yes.

• 15:39Tim Ferriss?

  Verbal communication even.

• 15:41Kevin Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 15:41Tim Ferriss?

  Certainly, certainly written notes.

• 15:43Kevin Kelly?

  Right. It is your inner caveman just responding.

• 15:47Tim Ferriss?

  Are there any particular, let's just say in the first two hours of your day, any particular morning rituals or habits you have? That when performed consistently, you find produce better days for you? And I'm leaving better days undefined on purpose, but I love studying mornings and, or what people do when they wake up. What time do you wake up? Are there any particular habits or rituals that you find contribute to better days?

• 16:13Kevin Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah. I'm a very good sleeper. I don't sleep a lot. These days I get up at 7:30. And I have some rituals, but I, I don't vary them enough maybe to, to know whether they are, I'm not a morning person, okay? To begin with.

• 16:28Tim Ferriss?

  You're not a morning person?

• 16:29Kevin Kelly?

  Well, I mean.

• 16:29Tim Ferriss?

  Well, the fact that you don't vary them is perfect. So.

• 16:32Kevin Kelly?

  Well, I know, but that means they're not necessarily optimized in any way, or I can't tell which is better. But for better or worse, one of the first things I do is I read the paper version of the New York Times. It's a kind of like a, so what I'd call a guilty pleasure. I don't know whether that makes me better at anything else I do, but I don't drink coffee or anything. This is sort of my, it's a ritual. And when I'm not here, I don't read it. So it's like, I don't miss it. It's kind of curious. But like if I'm here, it's like I gotta do it. I don't know. It's kind of weird.

• 17:07Tim Ferriss?

  Is that immediately after waking, you read the paper? Or is there anything?

• 17:10Kevin Kelly?

  Just about, just about. I kind of, in my pajamas, I walk out to the front gate and I pick it up and I read it. I mean, and I don't read all of it. I just kind of go through and. I usually don't even read the news part. I read the slower stuff.

• 17:26Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm.

• 17:27Kevin Kelly?

  I don't make sure why I, now that you're asking, and that's it. That's the entire ritual. I don't have the same thing for breakfast or anything like that. It's just that morning hit.

• 17:37Tim Ferriss?

  Do you do anything throughout your day regularly? Maybe it's before bed or anything else that, that most other people probably don't do?

• 17:46Kevin Kelly?

  That's a good question. Um, no.

• 17:50Tim Ferriss?

  Really? Okay.

• 17:51Kevin Kelly?

  I have no special sauce.

• 17:55Tim Ferriss?

  But you're very consistent. You don't, your days seem to be.

• 17:57Kevin Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 17:58Tim Ferriss?

  Don't vary very wildly. So that in and of itself might be something that a lot of people don't do.

• 18:02Kevin Kelly?

  Okay, let's pick up two different sections. While I'm here in this studio, I have a lot of control over my time. And so what I do during the day is greatly varied. I'll, you know, I'll, I do lots of things for short amounts of times. And you go into my workshop, I'll read, actually read, books it down and read books during the middle of the day. I'll go out, I'll do a hike and bring my camera out almost every day. Maybe that is something that most people don't do is probably, they probably aren't taking pictures with a camera every day.

• 18:33Tim Ferriss?

  Or reading books in the middle of the day for that matter.

• 18:35Kevin Kelly?

  Right, exactly. Well, maybe that's true, I guess.

• 18:37Tim Ferriss?

  How do you choose your books?

• 18:39Kevin Kelly?

  Ah.

• 18:40Tim Ferriss?

  That's, that's a paradox of choice problem for a lot of, for a lot of people.

• 18:43Kevin Kelly?

  It is. It's like, what are you gonna listen to next in music? I think the music becomes free and everybody has all the music in the world. But deciding what you're going to listen to becomes the thing you pay for. And I, and I, this has been my prediction about Amazon is that we're soon going to have like any book you want for free, Amazon Prime, digital version of it, you can have it whenever you want, but you'll pay us for the recommendations.

• 19:05Tim Ferriss?

  That's a great point. That's a great point.

• 19:07Kevin Kelly?

  I have a network of friends and I listen to lots of podcasts. So I get it from all over the place. And like probably you are at this point, I long ago decided that in terms of the greater scheme of things, the cost of books are really cheap. And if I wanted a book, I would buy it.

• 19:23Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 19:24Kevin Kelly?

  And the result is I am right now speaking in a two-story high library of books that I have. And I don't do the same with digital books because I finally figured out that, oh, you know, if I purchase a digital book before I'm reading it, it's not going anywhere. It's just sitting there. So I shouldn't really purchase a digital book until like five seconds before I'm going to read it.

• 19:46Tim Ferriss?

  I have exactly the opposite habit.

• 19:49Kevin Kelly?

  Because right, because it's like, well, it's it's there. The whole point of Kindle is that you don't have to have it until like you need it. So on the digital books, I don't buy anything until like I'm seconds away from reading it. Then I'll get it. But the paper books, I was near to the point of actually digitizing and getting rid of all my paper books. I was that close about five years ago. But then I had an epiphany. I went to a private library and I realized that books were never as cheap as they are today and they never will be as cheap. And that there's some power about having these things in paper, always available, no batteries, you know, never obsolete.

• 20:31Kevin Kelly?

  And that if you made a library now, you would never be able to make some of these libraries in 50 years. And so I decided to keep and to kind of cultivate this paper library as a, you know, as something that was going to be very powerful in the future.

• 20:46Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm, I like that. Or at least I can use it as a justification for keeping a lot of paper books around.

• 20:50Kevin Kelly?

  Exactly. So, so, so I, I get tips from books, from podcasts, from blogs, from friends, from Amazon recommendations, anywhere. And whenever I hear someone recommend a book, I'll go and check it out. And then I'm fairly free in buying it, but which means that I read a lot of really mediocre books. But that's part of my job.

• 21:14Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 21:15Kevin Kelly?

  Cool Tools, the book that we were just talking about, which is this catalog of possibilities that I self-published that has, oh, I know 1,500, you know, maybe there's a couple hundred books that are recommended, but I probably read thousands and thousands and thousands of books in order to select those. So I see part of my job, reading through, and I read a lot of how-to books. Most of the books I'm reading is nonfiction and a lot of it is even instructional stuff on, you know, how to build a stone wall, how to do origami, how to send a satellite, a micro satellite into space, whatever it is, it doesn't matter. I'll look at it and I've seen. Tens of thousands, if not 50,000 how-to books over my lifetime, I can spot a really

• 21:56Kevin Kelly?

  good one, but still I'll read through the other ones in order so that someone else doesn't have to and I can recommend saying this is the best book on building a tiny house if you want to build a tiny house.

• 22:07Tim Ferriss?

  Now, do you, when you read these books on origami or stone wall, do you follow through and attempt these projects or are you evaluating it purely based on your amassed experience of reading lots of these types of instructional books?

• 22:21Kevin Kelly?

  No, actually, so maybe one of the other things that I don't do every day, but one of the things I do in general that maybe everyone else is not doing is that I have like a thousand hobbies, I dabble in things. So I have built stone walls, more than one. I have done origami, I have made beer, I have made wine, I have, you know, whatever it is, I've tried to do these things in my life and I continue to try and do them. I have homeschooled my son, I have, and so as much as possible, this is what my, you know, I was talking before about my day, it's irregular in a sense that I'm here and I have things, but I'm doing new things and I'm reading new things all the time.

• 23:00Kevin Kelly?

  So I'm in my outside, you know, I'll make a go kart or we'll do something that I haven't done before and that's the basis for helping to decide about these books. I don't have to be an expert in them, but I can know enough to tell whether or not the information they're telling me is useful.

• 23:20Tim Ferriss?

  What odd project over the last year has been the most fun? Let's start there for you.

• 23:25Kevin Kelly?

  Yeah, well, just the last couple of months, I finally built myself a real workshop. I wish I could show it to you because one of the cool things I did was, you know, if you go onto like Uline or somewhere, these container businesses, they have these racks of bins. So I filled an entire wall of hundreds and hundreds of bins. So. So I can organize stuff and I'm a big fan of Adam Savage. And he has, he has a principle for his workshops called first order access, which basically means that you don't want to store things behind anything. Everything has to be at the first level so you can look and see it. It has to be within reach in a sense. You have to be able to see everything that you have and it's accessible.

• 24:10Kevin Kelly?

  You don't want things hidden behind other things.

• 24:12Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 24:12Kevin Kelly?

  So that's part of what I was doing with this workshop is this kind of first order access. And it's tremendously powerful. I mean, I just, the few days or the weeks I've had working in it is just transforms everything. It's like, I had the same problem with my books for many, many years. I had books like on multiple different bookshelves in the house. I had them in boxes. I had them this and that. And moving everything to one location into a library where there was two stories and I could see all my books just transformed them. It made it really useful because I could find them, just really go and reach for them. And the same thing with, I'm finally bringing it to my tools, which is that you want to have things plugged in, ready to go,

• 24:56Kevin Kelly?

  labeled, organized, first order access. And it can make simple jobs really simple instead of like the, you know, the hours of looking for something.

• 25:06Tim Ferriss?

  Right, gathering all the tools.

• 25:07Kevin Kelly?

  Gathering all the tools and also.

• 25:08Tim Ferriss?

  It's like cooking. It's just like cooking.

• 25:10Kevin Kelly?

  Exactly.

• 25:10Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's having like a manual random access memory, right? You have your MISO Plus right in front of you.

• 25:16Kevin Kelly?

  Yeah, you have, you know, the tools are, yeah.

• 25:17Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, that's very cool. If there were one object, manual project, building something that you think every human should have the experience of doing, what would that be?

• 25:28Kevin Kelly?

  It's very easy. You need to build your own house. Shelter and it's not that hard to do, believe me. I actually, I built my own house.

• 25:36Tim Ferriss?

  And your house is amazing.

• 25:37Kevin Kelly?

  No, not, not this house. I mean, I actually built one from cutting down the logs, cutting down the trees in upstate New York.

• 25:44Tim Ferriss?

  Wow.

• 25:44Kevin Kelly?

  And doing the stone hirs and you know, I mean, unfortunately I don't recommend this. We made like two by fours from trees. You don't want to do that because it's a pain because you know, standard lumber is very, it's very good if there's things are off a little quarter of an inch as they are with rough sawn lumber. It's just, it's a mess. But nonetheless, a large portion of the people in the world have made their own homes. Adobe, rammed earth, bamboo, whatever it is. And like going back to what we originally started off with, even if you don't wind up living in it, it's empowering. To know that you can do it.

• 26:20Tim Ferriss?

  For sure.

• 26:20Kevin Kelly?

  If you do wind up living in it, I have a friend Lloyd Kahn, who built this magnificent place in Berlinis that he built with salvage material from, from scratch over the many years. It gives you the power to alter it. So I believe that, that your house should be an extension of you, that, that really

• 26:37Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely.

• 26:38Kevin Kelly?

  It's another projection. So another way of, and also going back to what we're talking about, it's another way to discover who you are and discover what you're good at. And because a well-designed house should really reflect you. And, and what I've discovered, a lot of people design houses and they have this kind of imaginary fantasy idea about themselves and what they're going to do.

• 26:57Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm.

• 26:57Kevin Kelly?

  Well, you know, whatever it is, they're gonna have a swimming pool. Well, you know, it's like, they're never gonna use a swimming pool, whatever it is. I mean, very few people actually have a very good sense of who they are and what they're gonna use something for. But if you really study yourself and really are honest and design something, that space can help you become successful in the sense of making a slot for you.

• 27:20Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 27:21Kevin Kelly?

  Making your own slot. And it's another, it's both a kind of a byproduct of who you are and also can help you become

• 27:27Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 27:28Kevin Kelly?

  who you are. It works both ways.

• 27:30Tim Ferriss?

  I like that. Right. You're not just finding yourself, you're creating yourself.

• 27:33Kevin Kelly?

  Exactly. And that, so this is a larger philosophical question, but this is something I talk about a lot. In a very high dimensional space, which means like space of many pending possibilities, the act of finding and the act of creating are identical.

• 27:48Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 27:48Kevin Kelly?

  There's no difference between discovering something and inventing something. You could, we, we could say that philosophically, you know, Benjamin Franklin invented electricity. We could say that Christopher Columbus invented America. We could say that discovery and invention are the same. So that discovering yourself and inventing yourself is really the same things we bring about that process. You have to do both at once.

• 28:17Tim Ferriss?

  I really enjoy that. Last question, if you could give your, hmm, let's say, you can pick the age, either 15 or 20-year-old self, one or a few pieces of advice, what would they be?

• 28:31Kevin Kelly?

  You don't have to do everything yourself. You can hire people to do stuff.

• 28:35Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 28:36Kevin Kelly?

  I wished I had known that when I was younger. I wish that I had, when I was twenty, working for Whole Earth Catalog. I wish I'd known that I could have hired a programmer to do something. I could have hired someone. It took me a long time to understand that. And then recently, I've been really big on it, hiring people through Elance.

• 28:57Tim Ferriss?

  Mm-hmm.

• 28:58Kevin Kelly?

  You know, because I came from a little bit of kind of a do-it-yourself, I mean, I made a nature museum when I was twelve. I had a chemistry lab that I built myself, you know, building the stuff. I could buy in the glass here, but I had a whole chemistry lab. I had nature museums. I did all this stuff and I did it myself. And then, of course, I'm moving into the Whole Earth Catalog, which was a kind of a do-it-yourself thing. I really was, um, you know, I just talked about building my own house. Well, now I will hire professionals to work. And it just took me a long time to realize that there's something about being able to pay a professional to do what they do really well, it's not like a weakness. It's like it helps them. I'm happy, they're happy, we're all happy, and I can do a lot more.

• 29:44Kevin Kelly?

  Now, there's certainly a pleasure in doing things yourself and dabbling it. But there's also this other thing, which I didn't realize, which is there's this leverage that you get by hiring people who are really good, paying them fairly, working with them to amplify what it is that you want to do. And I wish I knew that when I was younger.

• 30:05Tim Ferriss?

  That's a fantastic answer. And you, you have, if I remember correctly, an assistant and a researcher. Is that, is that still true?

• 30:12Kevin Kelly?

  Yeah, it's one and the same person.

• 30:14Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, they are the same. Okay.

• 30:15Kevin Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 30:15Tim Ferriss?

  So I thought that at one point you had believed that you needed those people to be two separate people, but you're right.

• 30:21Kevin Kelly?

  Here's what I was saying was that it's very unusual to find one person who can do both of those tasks. Both of those tasks are often. Not found the same person because there's, you know, the hunting, the researching, the kind of, there's a hunter aspect to research that is often found in a certain personality. And then they're kind of the, the admin is more of, um, you know, nurturing, kind of, making sure things, gardening a little bit. And so it's often rare to find someone who can do both, but it's possible.

• 30:57Tim Ferriss?

  Was it luck that you happened upon this particular individual that you work with now? Or did you have a, a method for, was there a particular approach that?

• 31:06Kevin Kelly?

  Well, I've, I've, I've found that the place where I've found that over the 14 years, I've had two, the place where I've found that they're more likely than not to have a combination was librarians.

• 31:19Tim Ferriss?

  I love it. That's fantastic.

• 31:21Kevin Kelly?

  So we put out notices on the librarian mailing list and stuff.

• 31:26Tim Ferriss?

  That is fantastic. I said, last question, this will be the last question. Is there, is there any other thoughts or advice you'd like to leave with the listeners? And then where would you like people to find more from you, your writing anywhere else?

• 31:41Kevin Kelly?

  I would say congratulations to the people who are listening to the podcast. I think podcasts are this fantastic new medium. I'm spending a lot of time there. I think it's just really great. We're in the early days of where this would go. I'm really impressed by the power of this medium to teach and to inform, sometimes to entertain. Again, I'm thankful to you, Tim, for having me on and having a chance to gab here. But to the people who are listening, I think, keep going. Listen to more podcasts, uh, try to go wide. I know Tim mentions them here and there. Take a chance, listen to some more. So that's one thing I would say. And as far as finding out more about me, I lucked out with a very

• 32:19Kevin Kelly?

  easy email and website. It's my initials KK, KK.org. I have a very public email for past 25 years. You can find it very easily on my website if you want to email directly. I have not outsourced that. Unlike other people that I know and my writings and books and whatnot are at www.kk.org. Cool Tools is a book that I really believe that each of you out there should have. It's on paper. It's sort of the best of the website Cool Tools, which has been going on for 11 years now, where we review every day, one great tool. They're only positive reviews.

• 33:03Kevin Kelly?

  Why waste your time on anything but the best? And tools in the broadest sense of the word of things that are useful, whether it's Elance, or a book on how to do psychedelics, or a book on how to build a workshop, or how to build a house, or how to hitchhike around the world. I and others recommend the best here with some great context. And it's printed on paper or available on Amazon. Not so easily found in bookstores because it's because it's huge. I mean, it's like, it's like five pounds weighs. It's really, really big. And if you don't find like 500 things that you didn't know about that you wish you knew about like last year, I'll give your money back. So enjoy that. So that's at Cool Tools or Cool Tools on Amazon.

• 33:47Tim Ferriss?

  Excellent. Well, Kevin, this has been a blast. It always is. Every time we chat, I feel like we should chat more. So hopefully, we'll get a chance to spend some more time together soon back in NorCal or somewhere else.

• 33:58Kevin Kelly?

  Or else in China.

• 33:59Tim Ferriss?

  Or in China. It's been a long time. I could get back.

• 34:03Kevin Kelly?

  I'm ready. I'm heading back to Japan again. And I know that you have lots of roots in Asia. But I go there to renew my sense of the future, because they are, you know, they're bulldozing the past as fast as it can and headed racing into the future. So I want to see what Asia has in store for us, because mathematically, we don't count anymore.

• 34:26Kevin Kelly?

  1.3 billion, whatever, 3 billion Asians and, you know, 300 million Americans. What can you say?

• 34:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that's right. So, study up, folks. Specialization is for insects. I think that was a hind line. So enjoy your time on this planet and look broadly, like Kevin said. Kevin, thank you so much. I will talk to you soon and have a wonderful day. I will talk to you soon.

• 34:48Kevin Kelly?

  Thanks for having me too.

• 34:49Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. Bye bye.

• 34:56Speaker 04

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• 35:01Speaker 05

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• 35:05Speaker 04

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• 35:17Speaker 05

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• 35:20Speaker 04

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