(2014-08-29) Tim Ferriss Interviews Kevin Kelly

Tim Ferriss Interviews Kevin Kelly

These days, my stock answer is that I package ideas into books and magazines and websites, and I make ideas interesting and pretty.

*Is it true that you dropped out of college after one year?

Kevin Kelly:           Yeah, I’m a college drop-out. Actually, my one regret in life is that one year that I came.*

I finally got my first real job at the age of 35

in between that, I did many things, including starting businesses and selling businesses, and doing other kinds of things, more adventures. And I highly recommend it.

I just really recommend slack. I’m a big believer in this thing of kind of doing something that’s not productive. Productive is for your middle ages. When you’re young, you want to be prolific and make and do things, but you don’t want to measure them in terms of productivity. You want to measure them in terms of extreme performance, you want to measure them in extreme satisfaction

learning how little you actually need to live, not just in a survival mode, but in a contented mode

Well, the worst that can happen is that I’d have a backpack and a sleeping bag, and I’d be eating oatmeal.

How did you support yourself, for instance, while you were traveling through Asia when you left school?

I did odd jobs before I left. I was traveling in Asia at a time when the price differential was so great, that it actually made sense for me to fly back on a charter flight to the US, and work for four or five months. I worked, basically, odd jobs.

I could live probably two years from those couple months of work

I didn’t really work while I was traveling until I got to Iran in the late ’70s, and there was a very high-paying job which was teaching English to the Iranian pilots who worked for the Shah

You just have to choose your locations wisely

imagine yourself practicing voluntary simplicity

part of the reason I’m so attracted to Stoic philosophy, whether that be Seneca or Marcus Aurelius, is exactly because of the practice of poverty

How did you develop that skill of writing and communicating?

I set off to Asia as a photographer, so it was basically no words at all, it was just images

I want to emphasize that this was sort of a … for me, I grew up in New Jersey, I had never left New Jersey, we never took vacations. It’s hard to describe how parochial New Jersey was back in the 1960s. I never ate Chinese food, I never had … I mean, I never saw Chinese. It was a different world. And then I was thrown into Asia and it was like, “Oh my gosh,” everything I knew was wrong. So that education was extremely, extremely powerful. I think that that gave me something to say, and I started writing letters home, trying to describe what I was seeing. I had a reason to try to communicate. That was the beginning of it

It wasn’t really until the internet came along, and I had a chance to go onto one of the first online communities (Virtual Community) in the early ’80s

And I found that there was something about the direct attempt to just communicate with someone else in real time, just sending them a message or something, that crystallized my thinking.

teachers have since done a lot of studies where they had kids write an essay on something, an assignment, and then they would also be instructed to write some e-mail to a friend or something. Then they would grade both of the compositions, and they would find that, inevitably, the e-mail that the kids were Writing was much better writing.

the writing there was always much more direct and concrete. That’s the usual thing that happens when you’re trying to write, is you’re not concrete enough. But when you e-mail, it’s all concrete.

What I discovered, which is what many writers discover, is that I write in order to think (SenseMaking). It was like, “I think I have an idea,” but when I begin to write it, I realize, “I have no idea,” and I don’t actually know what I think until I try and write it. Writing is a way for me to find out what I think

So by being forced to communicate online, there was none of this expectation. It was just like, “OK, just write an e-mail. I can do that. I don’t have to write an essay, I don’t have to write something nice.

this is an idea-generation machine, it’s by writing. It’s not that I have these ideas and I’m going to write them down. No, no. I don’t even have them until I write them

why did you promise yourself not to teach English? I’m so curious. Because that can be very lucrative, it’s readily available

I recommend it as a way for people to travel cheaply

I think the reason why was I felt that … I didn’t feel like I was a very good teacher, and I also felt that it was maybe a little easy? But I think the main reason was that I was having trouble imagining myself enjoying it. I just felt that I would rather try to find something else

it takes a long time to figure out what you’re good for. Part of where I’m at right now and where I got eventually, was really trying to spend time on doing things that only I can do.

Tim Ferriss: I am currently having - and I seem to have these periodically - a crisis-of-meaning phase.

What do you feel is your skill set or your unique skill, and how did you figure that out?

Well, let me tell you the story of how this realization actually came to me in a very concrete way, was while I was editing Wired Magazine

We’d have editorial meetings where we’d imagine this great article, and then we’d go and try and find someone to write it. And in that conversation of trying to persuade writers to write an idea that I had … it would go through a very typical sequence, where I would have this great idea, and then I would try to persuade, like, one writer, two writers, three writers, and they just didn’t think it was a very good idea

But then, like, six months later or a year later, it might come back, “You know, that’s still a great idea. Nobody has done that.” Then I would realize, “Oh my gosh, I need to do that!”

And then I would do it and it would be one of my best pieces.

basically you try to give these ideas away, and people are happy because they love great ideas. You can- “Hey, do it, it’s a great idea. You should do it.” I’d try to give everything away first, and then I’d try to kill everything, like, “No, that’s a bad idea,” and then it’s the ones that keep coming back that I can’t kill and I can’t give away, that I think, “Hmm, maybe that’s the one I’m supposed to do.” Because no one else is going to do it.

but all I can say is, it’s going to take all your life to figure that out. That is fact. Here’s what it is - figuring out is what your life is about. (laughter) I mean, that’s what life is for.

is it better to optimize your strengths or to invest into the unknown, into places where you’re weak?

But when you have a very fast-changing landscape like we live in right now, you get stuck on a local optima, you get stuck. The problem is, is that the only way you can get to a higher, more fit place, is you actually have to go down

And if you’ve been following a line of success, that is very, very difficult to do.

And that’s back to my suggestion in the beginning, of why slack and fooling around when you’re young is so important. Because a lot of these innovations and things are found not by trying to solve a problem that can be monetized. It’s in exploring this area without money.

I think there’s a way even in which the technological progress that we’re having is actually diminishing the role of money. And I want to be clear that I’m talking about money beyond the amount that you need to survive

So in a certain sense, most people see money as a means to get these other things, but there are other routes to these other things that are deeper and more constant and more durable and more powerful

Travel is one of the great examples.

I decided to flip it around and travel when I was really young, when I had zero money. And I had experiences that basically even a billion dollars couldn’t have bought

It reminds me of conversations I’ve had with Rolf Potts and also his book, Vagabonding

I just turned 37 last week, and I’m really tired of certain types of optimizing, and the incremental slogging

I’m tempted to approach a kind of … not “scorched earth” but “burned bridges” approach, where I somehow use creative destruction to force me into another direction, to have these new experiences that I crave so much.

I think you can experiment your way through this, you can do this incrementally

It took you 37 years to get where you are, it may take you another 30 years to get where you want to go. I don’t think you should feel impatient

if you want to hear the full version of it, listen to one of the very first “This American Life”, which Ira Glass and I told the story for the very first time. It’s a story about how I got this assignment to live as if I was going to die in six months, even though I was perfect healthy and I knew that it was very improbable

My answer kind of surprised me, because I thought that I would have this sort of mad, high-risk fling, do all these things, but actually what I wanted to do was to visit my brothers and sisters, go back to my parents, help out. My mom was not well at the time. But that lasted for three months before I decided I needed to do something big. So I actually road my bicycle across the US, from San Francisco to New Jersey, where I was going to basically die. I kept a journal of that.

I actually have a countdown clock that Matt Groening at Futurama was inspired and they did a little episode of Futurama about. What I did was, I took the actuarial tables for the estimated age of my death, for someone born when I was born, and I worked back the number of days. I have that showing on my computer, how many days. I tell you, nothing concentrates your time like knowing how many days you have left.

there’s two questions - what would you do if you had six months to live, and what would you do if you had a billion dollars? And interestingly (laughs), it’s the convergence of those two questions

I learned something from my friend, Stewart Brand, who organized his remaining days around five-year increments. He says any great idea that’s significant, that’s worth doing, for him, will last about five years, from the time he thinks of it, to the time he stops thinking about it. And if you think of it in terms of five-year projects, you can count those off on a couple hands, even if you’re young

All my friends were drug-taking hippies, but I for some reason never did.

When I was 50-years-old I decided that I would like to take LSD sacramentally on of my 50th birthday and I did.  I arranged with, I had a guide and I had an appropriate setting and I had some acid that came from a source that was extremely reliable and it was a sacrament.  It was a very profound sacrament

I was going to die in six months because as I was coming close to that date, which happened to be Halloween, October 31st, it was I kept cutting off my future

“Why am I taking pictures?  I’m not taking photographs because I’m not going to be here in another two months.”

I was becoming less human.  That to be fully human we have to have a future

After I came out of the, I embraced that.  I’m saying, “Well, that future forward facing that’s what I do.  That’s what I want to do and that’s what I write about it.”

The dilemma is, is that any true forecast about the future is going to be dismissed.  Any future that is believable now is going to be wrong

What I discovered that was helpful in trying to get away from the kind of assumptions that bind us to just extrapolate was to think laterally, was to go sideways.  One thing just take whatever it was that everybody knew and say, “Well, what if that wasn’t true?”

What if Moore’s law didn’t continue?

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 population, far, far less than we have right now... just pure demographics.  If you look at the current trends in fertility rates

One of my predictions, again going back to the assumptions, one of my predictions is that in America in 100 years from now there will be … The complete countryside is run by the Amish...The Amish take over the entire countryside because they never sell land

They’re not Lettites.  They’re complete hackers.  They love hacking technology.  They have something called “Amish electricity,” which is basically pneumatics

They are selecting their technology collectively as a group and secondly, because they’re doing it collectively they have to articulate what the criteria is.

the main reason why they have all these restrictions like horse and buggy and all of this stuff is that they want to have these communities, very strong communities.  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, but if you have a horse and buggy you can go only 15 miles

When a new technology comes along they say, “Will this strengthen our local community or send us out?”  The second thing that they’re looking at is with families.  The goal of the typical Amish man or woman is to have every single meal with their children for every meal of their lives until they leave home.

Basically, some of them are going to accept cell phones and they do that by there’s always some early Amish adopter who’s trying things and they say, “OK 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.

What book or books do you gift or have gifted the most to other people outside of your own books?

short Graphic Novel by Dan Pink called Johnny Bunko, 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 become indispensable.

If we fast forward to say, for the sake of argument, mid-30s, people in middle age hitting that particular point, are there any books that you would recommend they read?

There is a book that I’m recommending by Cal Newport. It’s called So Good They Can’t Ignore You.

This is a book for people who don’t really know what they’re really excellent at, don’t really know what they’re passionate about.

I have thousand hobbies. I dabble in things. I have built stonewalls, more than one. I have done origami. I have made beer. I have made wine.

If there were one object, manual project, building something, do you think every human should have the experience of doing, what would that be?

That’s very easy. You need to build your own house, your own shelter

What I’ve discovered, lot of people designed houses, and they have this imaginary fantasy idea about themselves and what they’re going to do.

In a very high dimensional space, which means space of many pending possibilities, the act of finding and the act of creating are identical. There’s no difference between discovering something and inventing something. We could say that philosophically, 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 that bring about that process. You have to do both at once.