Kevin Kelly - Be Generous and Unique - [Invest Like the Best, EP.334]

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/cbc3ebda8fd044f1

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Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and this is Invest Like the Best.
This show is an open ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money.
Invest Like the Best is part of the Colossus family of podcasts, and you can access all our podcasts, including edited transcripts, show notes, and other resources to keep learning at joincolossis.com.
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO and founding partner of Positive Sum and the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management.
All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum or O'Shaughnessy Asset Management.
This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of Positive Sum or O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.
My guest today is Kevin Kelly.
Kevin co-founded Wired magazine and has published a number of seminal books and essays on technology over the past three decades.
I have devoured everything Kevin has put out into the world, and many of his ideas shape the way I live today.
Our conversation explores media, family, money, his concept of the technium, AI, and more, but the central theme of this episode is that we should be as generous and as unique as possible.
You will hear us refer to his latest book, Excellent Advice for Living, throughout, and I highly recommend reading it if you haven't already. Please enjoy this great conversation with Kevin Kelly.
Kevin, I joke before we hit record here that I've been preparing for this conversation for years, having read, I think, probably all your books and loved your thinking on technology. Maybe we'll talk about technology today as it relates to your new book, but I just have so enjoyed the pithy
simple, beautiful ideas in your latest book. And I wanted to start with
One in particular, which maybe you could spend the whole hour on.
'Cause it's kind of my favorite idea, which is your goal is to be able to say on your deathbed that you have become fully yourself.
I have thought about this idea through the Joseph Campbell lens, through a million lenses.
Almost on a daily basis for fifteen years.
And I want to take this idea extremely seriously with you.
And hear your take on this beautiful idea to open our conversation.
You're right. There's just a whole lot to unpack in this. And it does sum up
A lot of what I'm trying to do.
So
The first thing is I don't think I've met anybody who has achieved this.
I've met a lot of people.
Oh
Or
Absolutely in that direction.
And are absolutely
approaching that. It's like an asymptote curve.
Were you
Never actually get there.
There's always some way to get a little bit closer.
But
From a distance you might say, Well, you've arrived.
And
For most of us, this is a very, very high bar.
Truly becoming yourself is an incredibly high bar.
Because we were
Opaque to ourselves.
We are just
built in a way that we don't have
immediate access, even with language, to what it is that we do and how we do it and
our own motivations and
It's kind of like we're deliberately kept out of it so we don't mess it up too much.
This is a lifelong project for most people.
is coming to understand what it is that's authentic about you, what it is that you do better than other people, what it is that you're about, what your purpose in life is. This is a lifelong project.
And
The best we can do is to say that we are getting closer.
When did you awake to the idea yourself? What was the first time that you thought
Oh, this is a quest that I could be on for myself.
And now I'm curious about
who I am and how I might become that fully.
I think it was actually fairly recently.
You mentioned Joseph Campbell and and the others of following your bliss and stuff, and those have been around, but
The idea that
There was something about realizing the essence of yourself.
I think that's not something that I began with.
Or even had an early epiphany on it's actually more recent is to kind of reflect on things like even writing this book where you have to articulate what it is.
So I think I've been doing it, but not
Articulating it?
Not aware that I was doing it.
And would have been easier if I had this goes back to the subtitle of my book, Wisdom I Wish Had Known Earlier. I wish I'd known this earlier, that that's sort of the framing of a good life.
is to
Think about
What it is that you're trying to optimize in your life.
Trying to articulate the purpose in your life.
And to come to some understanding of what it is that
makes you unique and different among all the other eight billion people
On the planet at this moment, let alone
We've gone
before us and who may come after us. And so I think
You could be on this journey and not even aware that you're on your journey.
And I think a lot of us may do it.
Unconsciously we were just trying to figure out
What we can do well, what we can do that's valuable.
What we can do that other people can't do.
And
We could be doing that every day and not even have this articulation of
Trying to
Come to some essence of ourself.
But I think it's helpful if we can articulate it that way.
If you had
found and taken this idea really seriously, like really internalized it when you were thirty. What would you have done
Differently, do you think? If anything, like how would your behavior have changed?
It's a great question. I haven't done that.
Exercise
But let me think if I take a minute now to try and do that.
This is something I learned at Wired Magazine.
And then there is a piece of advice in the book that's a little bit like this.
It was has to do with there's a value in articulating what you're doing because
Instead of relying on other people to describe it.
And so
This is kind of part of like branding exercise in marketing, which is that you actually want to control the message rather than have people interpret it. And so we learned this at Wire that because we actually had to tell people again and again what it was that we're doing.
Because we couldn't deserve
Relying on them kind of figuring out from reading the magazines. And so we started to do these little tags on the cover each time saying, We're optimistic.
You know, this is an optimistic view. This is what we're doing.
And so
I think
If I was thirty and I knew what it was, I would have been spent a little bit more time
And accelerating where I was going.
by actually
going back to the Tom Peterson, the brand of you, I was like, what is my brand?
That's not kind of a selfish
It's actually
Useful to other people as well. This is what I learned with Wired is that
You kind of want to be able to tell people what it is that you're about.
To help you
Become better at it.
And I think when I was thirty, I had no idea. I didn't even think in those terms. Maybe I w would have thought of presumptuous or vain, but
In fact
It would have been better all around for everyone if I had really kind of worked on where am I aiming at or what do I think I'm about in that.
Sir, if I'd never really
done it very seriously, and I think that would have accelerated
the clarity ahead of the choices they were gonna make beyond that. So
That's what I would urge to people is to think about
yourself if you have to encapsulate what it is that you're about.
For other people to help other people understand it and therefore to help you
Realize yourself.
What your authentic self is.
I have sort of a wild follow up question. So I'm an investor.
And my focus is on investing in people that are doing what we call their life's work.
And our definition is very simple. It's a lifelong quest to build something for others that expresses who you are.
And we were wondering like what are the natural limits of this?
Steve Jobs, clearly who's doing his life's work and look at the impact that it's had.
What is the highest form of self expression?
And I wondered if it was like
Jesus and Buddha, the people's whose ideas or work has reverberated most through history. And you said you had never seen anyone that actually got to this definition. Do you think maybe the only ones that have are like the world's religious historical figures or something?
It's possible that of all the candidates, the Jesus was one who the day before he died was most authentically himself.
I think you're right.
That would be a good definition or a good role model.
In terms of what are the limits, your question was with the ideal
person look like that was doing that. And I could be wrong, but for me, I think what we will find is that they will be
Themselves
Unlike other people.
Not like a Jesus, not like a Buddha.
Because those again.
Those are niches that are occupied by them.
And the whole point of being authentic is you're gonna be slightly
Different and weird.
And the way I say is you want to invent
A new definition of success.
That's what your life should be. Your life should be inventing a new definition of success.
Bad.
Success should have its own metrics that are gonna be different from than Steve Jobs.
Metrics.
If they aren't different, then they haven't really achieved
That thing of being
Authentically unique.
Or what I would be looking for.
is looking for people who really
had a completely different definition of success.
What I tell people is that there are a lot of
People
Whose definition is that they're very different.
than what we normally associate with success, and we don't know about them, and that's part of their definition of success. They may be
A huge success and maybe people outside of the family don't even know
Who they are, but they're just incredibly successful.
In their own lives.
Because fame was not part of that definition. And so this doesn't mean that everybody has to become famous, and quite the contrary.
We think about often
the goal here of becoming full yourself as being so obviously true.
But the reality that like you said, almost nobody does it.
by definition means that the impediments are enormous. The counter forces are enormous. So what in your experience are those things that most commonly stop people from
Getting down this path.
I think that the number one thing
Is
Following
Other people's definition of success is being
Sway.
By other people's definition of success.
And
That's so hard to let go of.
It's so hard to surrender the idea
Unless you have a million dollars by the time you're thirty, whatever it is.
That you're not successful. That's a very narrow
Well trodden.
Yeah.
And
Is likely holding you back.
From
Your true greatness.
And your true
benefiting your true authentic self.
And your best self.
And because it's probably gonna look very different. And so we have these role models like a Steve Jobs. So a lot of people want to be Steve Jobs.
Wrong?
No.
First of all.
He was a jerk.
Having met him?
Couple times. He was a jerk. He was a brilliant jerk. A genius jerk.
You don't want to be him.
And I think
Just
Trying to
Let go of
And overcome the cliches the assumed
cultural biases that we have of what it is. That to me, in my opinion, has been what I see as the largest impediment to people achieving this.
Because
A lot of really
Authentic.
Success.
May not look like that to us, to everybody else around you. You don't own a car. You're walking everywhere. Whatever it is.
And you're saying.
I don't
think that's successful. And part of it is
You're educating people about that, other people, so that you have
the kind of support that you need, or else ignoring it, but it's a very, very difficult thing to let go of and to surrender the
Assumptions and the prejudices that we have of what that looks like.
Do you think that surrender is a powerful word. Do you think that surrender
Is a big part of this. The the key step is accepting
The things that you want may not be the things that other people want and that's hard.
Yeah. And I have a little bit of wisdom in the book saying, you know, the thing that made you weird as a kid
They make you great as an adult.
If you don't lose it.
And the problem is that most of the time you're losing. It gets beat out of you. You're weird. Who wants to be weird, right? I think surrendering is one aspect of it, but I would say something else. And this is the paradox that
You cannot
truly become yourself by yourself.
You can only become unique with the help of everybody else. That is the paradox, all right?
It's like it's not like you're gonna
Become unique on your own? No, it never happens.
It takes
Everybody.
To make you unique. You can't do it by yourself. And that is again
Because we are opaque.
To our own selves.
And we need the friends, family.
Clients, colleagues, customers.
To
Show us what we are becoming to
Show us who we are.
We can't see it by ourselves. We can't get there by ourselves. We need this So that is again the paradox. The paradox is the only way you can become somebody
Unique.
And different from everybody else is by relying on everybody else to help you do it.
And so
This is not a matter of okay, you're just gonna ignore everybody that anything says and you're on your own.
You're not gonna get there.
Why do you suggest that people prototype their life versus
Drawing up grand plans.
There's a bunch of reasons, but the primary one is that
Plans are ideal and perfect.
And to be real, it means you're imperfect.
And you want to take an ideal, a perfect thing, and make it as real as fast as possible.
And that making it real means that you want to do a prototype. You want to make it real and that will expose
All the imperfections.
But that's good.
Because reality is gonna be imperfect. And so you wanna take it from the
Perfect abstract realm.
And start to making it real.
As quickly as you can.
And that will inform and improve it because
You can't improve abstract.
Perfection.
You can't improve abstract things very well. You can only kind of improve things that are real. And so
That's the one of the reasons, one of the many reasons to prototype. And the second one is that
Very complicated things, whether
Artificial things like a robot or an AI or technology.
And ourselves and our lives.
The shortest
way to arrive at
Seeing what they are.
that's reliable is actually to run it. There's this like a
Computational compression that
Very very complicated.
Things.
can only be seen and only be understood by having them run all the way out. You can't like simulate them. If you simulate them, you make a toy model, you abstract them.
You're losing too much of it of what actually happens. And so it's very hard to predict
With any kind of accuracy.
What will happen.
Most of the inventors of these great technologies have no idea how they're actually going to be used.
And not until people start using them do we see what their strength and weaknesses are. You can think about this all you want, but it's just not going to match what happens when people actually use it.
And the same thing with your kind of life, you can kind of have a plan.
But the only really way to
get there is to go step by step. And so you want to start that as soon as possible.
Is that another cut at this your advice to sort of rather than like follow your bliss, quote unquote, just master anything, like when you're young, just like master something. Is that the actionable way of doing what you just said?
very close because follow your bliss for most people they don't know what the bliss is and it's kind of it's paralyzing.
But you master something in that platform of mastery of getting something done.
gives you that positioning
that ladder to stand on to start to move.
in other directions, but you have to have something to start with. So yes, you're right. That is another form of prototyping.
Will you start anywhere.
You master anything.
that ability to get things done.
is the mechanism that you start to creep towards
A more authentic place.
You can't do it again by thinking about it.
Which is what people wanna do when they're thinking about their follow my blessings, they're trying to figure out and trying to think their way out. I call that thinkism. And thinkism is just this
Very distracting idea that
Thinking is the most important thing in the world and it's
Necessary but not sufficient to get things done.
What in your life do you think you most mastered?
Yeah, that's a good question.
There's some
Small things.
I am a really, really good
A ninja
Travel photographer.
And I did fifty years of traveling in Asia and these book
And I have a nose.
A really great nose.
For arriving on a place and being able to find
Something was happening. Land in a city and I could tell.
Over here, there's gonna be something interesting happening.
Of like the old Polynesian navigators to see the waves intersecting. I could see waves of people moving in certain directions. I could just pick up little
Posters. Let's like those geogesser guys that can identify the location of any random photograph, they've tell you where it is, all these clues. I have some
Mastery.
In being able to
Photograph cultural things in Asia.
It's that's a pretty obscure mastery, but from that photography
Visual storytelling.
That can lead to other things.
It's a very rarefied mastery. But I think more generally I have mastered
It wired and whole earth.
And with the newsletters I'm mastering a sense of trends.
I would just say a sensibility of the future.
A feature sensibility. My mentors like Stuart Brand was very good at this and
My partner at Cool Tools, Mark Frenfelder, are very good at kind of saying
Something really important is happening right here.
These things are interesting.
And different, but they're not as
Important is this thing.
happening right here.
And I think
I've done that long enough that I think I also have a mastery in that as well.
It doesn't have a real name right now. It's not.
Predictions it's not
Forecasting
It's in that general vicinity, but it's much more like a spidey sense.
Yeah, I wrote about
E money and
My first book, Nineteen
Ninety four, I had a whole chapter on
Digital money.
I gave that chapter to Stephen Levy.
And the first issue of Wired and he went on to write the crypto stuff and so
That was like oh this is
I think this is really important. Here's these weird guys who are working on it. And I think
That
Is one of the things I've mastered over
These forty or fifty years is that sense of
There's something crucial happening right here.
You had to describe the energy signature of
Those things when you spot them or feel them.
How would you encapsulate that in words?
One of the energy signatures is a depth to it.
There's a sense in which you encounter it and then
There are these practitioners. There are people who are plumbing it. They're kind of going there. They're mining it.
And when you have conversations or observing them or reading them, you realize, oh, this little mind could go pretty deep in many different directions.
There's a depth and a breadth to them saying there's lots of things that this could intersect with.
I would say that's one energy signature is a depth and breadth to the possibility space.
That it suggests.
And
Secondly
I think there is some
Detection.
Of how
Fast.
Things are being uncovered like a rate.
Of
Discovery in that area.
If you encounter some subculture or some little niche or some new technology or some research
Area. There's maybe one person working on it, and every year or so, maybe they discover something. It's like okay, it's not enough.
But if there's a bunch of people and every week they're coming with another something.
That says that there's certain momentum.
Or acceleration?
that's involved. There's a sense of well, there's stuff being discovered that we could kind of imagine this scaling up.
Into something bigger.
And so you're looking at
The recent past to see
What's the rate?
Of
New things and then
Another metric that I use
Is how
Much new language and words are needed.
Or what's happening.
You want true
Very like this.
Well
be ahead of language and having to create
New terms, new words, new things.
You can't describe it well or easily.
Right, and so that's another sign
That
It's worth paying attention to.
I love those ideas are beautiful. The other cut at this that I love, maybe my second favorite thing in the book after that opening quote that we explored.
Is this notion that the reward for good work is more work.
When I read that people
or annoyed at me now for not shutting up about this idea.
How did that manifest for you? Like where did you come upon that idea? What does it mean to you? Like how did it play out in your own life? Absolutely love that idea.
So it's related to another piece of advice in the book, which is I actually talked with this with David Allen, the Get Things Done guy.
Which is that
There is a kind of a mis
appreciation or misunderstanding about productivity.
Which is that a lot of people who are productivity focused will be trying to
minimize the amount of time they spend on working on something. But actually what you really want to be doing is you want to be finding
Things.
That you want to spend as much time as possible working on.
That's this idea of like the reward for work is more work is you want to be doing something where the goal is to spend more time doing it.
Yes, Sprint TV is fine, but
What you're trying to do is actually
Move your time.
So that you are trying to spend as much time doing it.
And trying to find those kinds of tasks and those kinds of assignments and those kinds of jobs.
Where you would almost pay to do it.
And so in English we conflate lots of things in the word work.
Sounds bad.
Yeah, there's often very negative, but then you have the great masterworks and great work and so
We have both meanings.
We're sometimes conflated.
Maybe we need some new words about what that other state is where you are working
Doing, making, creating.
And you want to spend as much time as possible. And the more you do it, the more you can do it.
How do you think about
Money.
having thought so much about work and
self expression and all these things and not
Following others' definition of success.
You already said money is like the number one definition of success, maybe that we've all accepted because it's common unit. Say everything you can about money, the concept, the thing, how you relate to it.
In generally I'm very bored by money. I find very, very bored.
One of my things about crypto, my son and my son in law
We're kind of into crypto for a while and I would say, look, okay
I'm willing to have a conversation about crypto, but here's one caveat.
You can't mention the word money.
Can't talk about making money, saving money, whatever it is.
Let's talk about crypto without
Talk about money.
Those are very short conversations.
Okay, and that's the problem with crypto is that it was
Only about money, which is only a single dimension. And so I find it just boring in that way. That wasn't true of the internet. We could talk about all kinds of things in the internet. You didn't have to talk about money. And AI is the same kind of thing.
So
Generally
It's a tool. Money's a tool. I like
Tim O'Reilly's little definition of what money is. It's like
Gasoline for your car.
And the
purpose of the gas line for the car is to drive around, but you're not driving around the gas stations to see how much gas you can get.
It's a means to do things and for me that's what it is. And
I have had the privilege of hanging around billionaires.
Multi billionaires.
And what I've observed is that
In most cases having money at that level was
completely imprisoning.
And a burden.
Basically it's a burden.
Because it ends up owning them, or for some other reason?
Yeah, yeah, basically I would say right now, one of my pieces of advice to your listeners is that they should try as hard as they possibly can to never have a billion dollars. I have a couple hundred million.
Just don't have a billion.
What's the difference between those two?
Well, a lot of zeros and the more zeros you have, the more weight it is. First of all, it's distorting for your kids and your families. It's just incredible burden for children.
And secondly
The weight of it.
Just
becomes something you always have to attend to.
If you're a responsible person, you're going to
Take it seriously.
And it just becomes something that you
Can never escape.
'Cause you can't spend it now.
It's almost impossible to give away by yourself.
So you're suddenly running an organization, it's a whole nother job and
It may not be one of the most authentic thing for you.
Right.
billionaires I know, if you get them to be honest, it's a lot of luck.
Is it good luck or bad luck?
I like to ask young people, my kids friends, do the exercise of okay
I have my magic wand, I'm gonna give you a billion dollars. Which is what your wish is, right? And so what are you gonna do with a billion dollars? Tell me, just make the list. And so they well, you know, maybe I'll travel around the world or I'm gonna
buy a boat or something, okay, a house or whatever. Okay. You haven't spent any of that money yet.
Tomorrow it's all gonna come back.
You give a billion dollars, you cannot spend it. So now what are you gonna do with your billion dollars?
And it turns out that their dream, whatever it is
Can be accomplished for so little compared to a billion dollars.
That in most cases money is simply not
The gating factor for what most people want to do.
There's a great scene in I think it was Wall Street.
With this guy going to Wall Street and his whole goal just a couple more years, gonna make my fortune, and then I'm gonna quit so I can buy the motorcycle and ride across China.
And all of us travelers just laugh hilariously.
Because you could work at McDonald's for six months.
Save enough money.
To buy a motorcycle.
To ride across China. Don't need to go on to Wall Street.
to make your billions to do that. And so
I find that the focus certainly need to have enough.
To do the things
That you want to
But for most people's dreams.
It's a misplace.
Colonel.
Imagine that they're not enough money because in fact what we know about
Innovation.
Is that all the real breakthroughs come.
But the places.
Where there's not enough money.
Startups. The reason why a startup can succeed is because the big company wants to buy their solutions. They've got money, they're going to buy their solutions.
But the solutions can't be bought, they have to be invented.
They have too much money to do the hard work of being ingenious and frugal and thrifty and all the other
Stubborn and persevering.
That a startup can do. So a startup doesn't have any money, so they're forced
to invent the things.
In a way.
That if you had money you'd never get to.
And that's why all the breakthroughs happen at the edges and they happen in startups.
That
Lacking of the resources is actually
The feature is actually the benefit.
That's why when young people are starting off
Who have very little resources.
They don't understand. They actually have.
An advantage.
Over the established companies.
That lack of resource isn't a damage to them.
I'd love to talk about
The relationship between creation and imagination.
I wonder if in your experience
people are sort of naturally endowed with like a level of imagination, or if it's way more
changeable that I can do things to expand my imagination because
It seems so much like
The people that I
admire the most are creative and creators. Like they're manifesting something. Maybe that's their form of self-expression, like we talked about earlier.
But that requires tremendous imagination. Where do you think that comes from? Can you cultivate it?
Yes, I have
Slowly concluded, and maybe this is a changing of the mind.
That
Almost
Any virtue or
Why your talent.
can be improved. They're certainly unequally distributed and everybody has
higher or lower degree of the natural
Amount to begin with, but this is the beauty of it. No matter where we start, we can always get better at it. And I think imagination is a skill.
That
can be taught and can be learned and can be improved, even though there are certainly people who have are more naturally inclined in that direction than others.
And the same with optimism. I think optimism is something that you can learn and become more optimistic in. It's like a habit.
And that's true for playing music and everything else. And so
Lot of the work almost going back to what I was saying before about imagination is mostly
Forgetting.
What?
Is the expected
Answer.
I know this from doing lots of workshops.
With
corporations and groups of people from all walks of life and they were trying to get them to again imagine futures.
And it was so so hard.
To have them let go.
What
they've seen in Hollywood or what they've seen in the movie or what they have been told is
Possible.
And that ability what Brandino and I call the unthinkables to inhabit
those kind of improbable
Worlds.
is a skill that has to be learned. Has to be
regained. I mean, I think we have it in childhood.
But we
are rewarded
In other ways for
Paying attention to reality and understanding what it is that everybody accepts.
But the consensus is that a variable skill.
And that kind of overwhelms our ability to imagine crazy weird stuff.
Because we're not usually rewarded for that.
So imagination cultivating it is like an exercise in subtraction, not addition. Like it's not a blank canvas. That's what I would have said. It's like a painter at a blank canvas. No, it's like a sculptor. It's like removing stuff.
It's mostly about removing stuff these days. I would say that's the first step. You remove it and then you want to fill it up in a different direction. And by the way, the little side step, I think this is one of the ways that AI will help us. And that is because
AI is capable
Of
These orthogonal weird
directions that it's very difficult for humans to let go of. They're much easier. So working with them.
To help us.
inhabit the possibility space in a different way than
we find it hard on our own because of our education and biases and
inabilities. So that's what I see is one of the roles of
Some of the AIs is assisting us in our imagination.
I'd love a case study in imagination. When you think of the most imaginative person you've ever encountered, who comes most immediately to mind? What was their story?
I know some writers some fiction writers.
Who naturally
Can just
go off and
Imagine crazy things. And that's
Partly their ability to fill in details.
And then I have
Other people that I know
who are what I would call lateral thinkers and they have an imagination
Very much in this direction of
Overcoming the orthodoxy, overcoming the conventional wisdom.
And
They'll take something ordinary and just come at it.
A slightly.
Skewed.
direction like laterally
On a very very regular basis. And it was like oh
We've never thought of that. They are, I believe
have trained themselves to do that. Like Marvin Miskey, who is a very imaginative
Guy who used to pretend that he was a Martian.
Or a robot. He would just approach everything as if
He's from another planet and he would be examining music. Okay, well what is it about music? Why are you people so affected by music? Doesn't make sense to me.
And he would kind of investigate things.
looking at them from this lateral position.
Just as a habit.
So that's a kind of imagination.
I used to love the Nintendo idea. I think they had it something like lateral thinking with withered technologies or something, like new use cases for very old things or something like that.
Yeah. So there are various
forms of imagination. But the point is that
The possibility space for ideas is very, very, very, very large. It's probably the largest possibility space that we
Can imagine. And
We tend as humans and living in our lives to kind of retread the same ones and so
Anything you can do to get out of those ruts.
is very powerful.
But not always useful. I mean you can go too far. All we all know from startups and innovation and invention is that you wanna be one or two steps away. If you're five or ten steps away, it doesn't help anybody. There's nobody there. If you have some crazy idea but can't put it into words or pictures or communicate it, then
It's lost. If it's an idea is so far ahead of his time.
It could be right.
But
If you can't get to it.
In a couple of steps.
From today, then it's not really useful. So
Like other things, there's an art to the imagination.
to being actually valuable to people.
is constrained by how many steps away you are that will take someone
to get there. So if only you can arrive at that place.
It's not worth
Anything.
You have to get other people there.
Either
To see it and have it with you like in the story, to actually be able to replicate it in terms of
Making something whatever it is.
There's an R to this imagination because you can't be too far away.
Because then
It's not useful to anybody.
You have to have this adjacent possible that people talk about. You want it to be
Adjacent.
But not
So distant.
That
Well, it may be true someday, or it may
Because I appreciate it a hundred years from now.
It'd be a lot more useful.
If you could do something that was more adjacent.
When you study history and you think about the parts of life that have pulled some of these characteristics out of people that
We've talked about so far, you come across rites of passage a lot.
And it seems like the modern world is as low on different kinds of rights of passage
as at any point in history, and that that is very strange and troubling and hopefully like a historical anomaly when we look back on it a thousand years from now. Why do you think that's the case and what would be your prescription for changing it?
If three
Kids now grown young adults and
One of the things I know about kids what I learned
was that they crave when they're young, especially they crave
Reliability.
Stability.
On having
Something stable.
As they invent themselves. They're in the process from the moment they're born
to conventing themselves.
In a very literal sense of
developing their personalities.
And
That is
Very uncertain process. It's very scary.
They don't know.
What it means to be human. They don't know what it means to be a kid. They don't know what's
Ordinary, extraordinary. They have to accept everything is normal.
En so
The safer they can feel.
The more anchored they can be in a family, the easier it is for them to develop
Their owners
Identity and Thrive.
And so
Rituals and rites of passages are things that help
That anchoring.
And something that they can return to even when things get scary or uncertain or confusing, they can
Come back into and say
Well, at least my family's always there. My family always does this. My family is about this.
And these rites of passage and rituals
Bring them.
an ability to say this is what we do. This is something I can rely on. This is
A foundation to help me
Craft.
My identity, my personality, my contribution.
And so
Writes a passage.
And rituals.
Or something that
have been embedded in religion and when we throw out and get rid of religion
We're often
Undoing and
Surrendering and
Removing
Those
Things which
need to be replaced in some ways. And so
The thing about rituals is that they don't actually have to be about anything.
Burning means this ritual and the joke was always we burn it so that we can burn it next year, right? I mean it's like it's a ritual.
that doesn't have any meaning other than in itself.
But it's very powerful.
Because it's a ritual.
If you burn the man, the same man every time, okay? And so
what we discovered in our family and other families is that you if you have rituals even though as simple as having pancakes
On Sunday morning.
Or pizza on Friday night. Or birthdays, you always do this. Or
Three times a year, our family always does this thing at the beginning of the seasons. We change the sheets or whatever it is.
Something that you can count on.
And if you do it three times in a row, it becomes a ritual. And that ability of anticipating the thing, of looking forward to it, of relying on it.

be there and that is the foundation of a stable development.
In their own personality.
And so
Rights of passage is another aspect of that.
I think
We found that just you have to invent them.
You can use religious, which are fine, but we don't even have very many of those in America. So we just invented our own
Coming into adulthood.
Right of passage.
that we did as a family. We had a bunch of rituals that we would do.
And
They became again another anchoring thing in our kids' understanding of themselves.
If you had other exercises you would recommend
families engage in in addition to like, okay, we need to design rituals, we need to design rites of passage for our kids, let's say parent for the kids.
Any other
Exercises
For the family that you would recommend?
Well, one thing we do, our family, and I highly recommend it is having meals together with no screens.
And
The I'm a shoe, I pay attention to
Their definition of success, their definition of successful life, though the people they most respect are those that are able to have every single meal with their children until the children leave.
So they have breakfast and they have lunch.
And they have dinner together as a family.
Lunch is the real ringer for most people because
Their kids are in school and they come back.
To the house for lunch.
So that's
Something that is very, very profound is having
Family dinners we
Say Grace.
Before meals.
We have
Thanksgiving rituals for do gratitude rounds and things. There's a lot. There's actually a good book.
The secrets of happy families by Bruce
Fileer.
That's really good on this. Looking at the
research that's been done on understanding the
Family identity.
So one of the things I say is that you want to be able to
Have your kids be able to say our family does this or doesn't do this.
This idea of a family identity.
is something else that you cultivate.
Of like saying.
Our family does this or our family doesn't do this. This is what our family does.
That's fine with them. There's all kinds of things.
We didn't have TV.
If their kids growing up.
In the house at all.
Our family doesn't do TV.
You're free to watch TV at your friend's house as much as you want.
Yeah.
We
Our family doesn't do TV.
And it's like okay, that's fine.
That's good. I understand that. That's part of my identity. So you can do that.
What about in a marriage specifically? So setting aside the parent child relationship. Well, obviously that's critical.
But just purely at the level of
Spouses.
In the same general vein, exercises, rituals, whatever. Anything that you have done or would recommend people think about.
Yeah, I'm not very good. I think you need to talk to Esther Perrell, who's
In this
Couple's therapy. There's actually there was one thing in the book that I think came from Esther, which is the rule of three in conversation.
And that's particularly valuable in a marriage, which is that when someone that you love or intimate with is
Telling you something.
In a very
Intense way.
You wanna be listening and then when they're
Done, wait until they're done, then you say, Is there more?
And there's usually more.
And then they go a wreck.
Second round you listen all the way through and this is active listening, meaning that you are
Engaged, you were not just
A recording machine you're probing, you're encouraging.
And then
You wait until there's a third round.
Of Is there more.
And what's interesting about that is that because it's active listening
Is that
The other person
Needs
the listener to help them up.
Say it.
They almost can't say it without that active listening. And so you are able to arrive at understandings and truths
And honesty that neither one could get to by themselves.
And that ability to take the rule three and say is or more, is or more, is or more
It's very, very powerful.
And
Oftentimes that explanation and going through that process to the third level
It's hugely benefit to the person
Talking because they needed that.
person to get it out of them and often is enough to
Actualise.
Change.
Speaking of three, my third most powerful takeaway from the book was this notion of the three gates, this idea of
asking yourself three questions before you say something. Can you give us that incredibly cool and useful idea?
I think I said it was a white person who said it. It was actually roomy.
The Afghan
Poet Roomie.
Which is that before you say something about someone else particularly is you want to ask yourself, is it true? Is it
Necessary, I think.
I'm not going to do it.
Yeah.
True, necessary and kind, right.
Right. So if it's of those three, then you can say it. And there's a lot in the book about the virtues of kindness.
The kindness
is not a weakness, but a sign of strength.
And
You can't really be too kind.
Do you have a choice between being
Right or kind, you be kind.
And
I have another bit of advice for people which I
I've had the experience lately, which is to attend as many funerals as you can.
Particularly when you're young.
And listen to what they say about the departed, and the shock to me was that n nobody was talking about the achievements.
How many patents they had?
How many companies they started.
How much money they had. None of that.
They're talking about
What kind of person they were.
How they make people feel.
Whether they were kind.
It's like wow, that's really
Powerful.
That's what matters.
You think that humans are naturally kind?
I do.
There's a great book called Humankind.
That changed my mind.
That
Brought the evidence.
Showing that our
Received wisdom, the thing we're taught.
The school, so to speak.
that humans are naturally selfish.
And
That's
When
All things being equal, particularly if it gets tough.
People will retreat to being completely selfish and self interested.
And mean and I think
The evidence is the the opposite, and my own experience is the opposite.
that people generally are kind, you can generally trust strangers that
All things being equal.
People want to help each other.
And
That bias
Runs through my book, which is that
The universe is generally abundant.
That's the bias of the universe?
Th there's this other weird paradox.
At the foundation of the universe of the human condition anyway, which is that the more
You give the more you get.
That the most selfish thing you can do is to be generous.
The more you give the more you get. If that's true for everybody, then where does it come from, right? I mean like if you give away and you're getting more
And everybody does that.
The arithmetic doesn't add up, and that's the paradox.
So the paradox is that the most selfish thing you can do is to be generous.
And so much flows from that that by giving away
you're increasing your own happiness. And that's
The other little bit of advice giving away ten percent of what you take in
May seem like you've just reduced
You're purchasing power by ten percent.
But every person who does this will tell you that the happiness and the satisfaction and your life's
Well being
Will increase by
Tenfold.
The ten percent you don't even notice. So yeah, so I think
People are naturally
want to be kind given all things. And what we want to do is to make that as easy as possible.
I have a background in philosophy and so I can't help myself but focus on your advice that's very big and grandiose and about life and work, but the book is also full of very tiny bits of advice and very
tactical bits of advice.
Are there any few that stand out to you as like your favorites that make you chuckle or make you happy?
There are some very, very practical ones.
that I was very happy to include because again I was writing this for my kids originally.
Which is that if you
lose track of something in your household.
your workshop or your garage and you finally find it, don't put it back where you found it.
Put it back where you first look for it.
I repeat that to myself all the time when I'm putting things back, okay?
Put it back where I first look for it.
That's a bus piece of advice. Another one was I picked up from an editor thirty years ago at Whole Earth.
She told me this, and it's been true, which is that if you get invited to do something six months from now
Ask yourself if you would do it if it was tomorrow morning.
And very few
Events will pass that muster.
And so
I use that to say no.
I just imagining okay, would I get tomorrow morning to fly whatever it is or to go into the or meet whatever it is. And if it isn't uh resounding
Yeah.
Then
It's a no.
I love your rule of seven in research too, that if you just keep pushing for seven levels, you will ultimately hit bedrock. Like it's hard to go deeper than seven levels.
Part of the trick is you're trying to research something and they don't know and so you say
Well, who might know, or can you tell me who might know? You kind of use the last round to help you
develop the next round. Who do you think might know or where do you think it might go? So
You can kind of cascade down.
to seven levels, but if you're willing to do that to seven levels
You generally get a reliable answer.
Did collecting all of this advice change your mind or change you in any material ways?
I don't know about other people.
But I find that
actually don't know why I do things and I don't know
Exactly.
How I would describe what I'm doing or whatever and that
This process.
required me to articulate things and it brought more understanding of what
My path isn't where I'm going.
And so it didn't really change it.
As much as it illuminated it.
And that illumination
is valuable.
And so
I have a better idea.
About what it is I'm doing.
Then before I started.
I'd love to spend a minute or two just
having the benefit of having you on the call to ask about
your conception of technology.
before reading this book, like I said, I've been preparing this for a long time'cause I read all your other books about
Technology, your notion of the technium has been very influential on me and how I think about how I spend my time and how I invest and everything else.
How do you think about the history of technology and the stock of technology called the technique, the stock of technology that exists in the world and why that's such a natural extension of human beings?
In brief the main insight.
About
The technium, which is my term.
or the systems of all the technologies in the world.
Is the understanding that they don't stand alone.
The Dural Web that you
Can't make a hammer without a saw.
The saw cuts the handle and the hammer is needed to make the saw. And so they're all code dependent. And we use computers to make everything and
Me plumbing.
And the farmers to make the computers. And so there's this web
This ecosystem.
of technologies all codependent on each other and that the bigger this ecosystem gets
The more it adopts
the same things that any system of that complexity has, which it has its own internal
Biases and tendencies.
All systems.
Whether it's living systems or even mechanical systems.
That are complex enough.
Well exhibit.
recurring tendencies independent of all the parts.
So
This technium that we have, this this ecosystem, all the technologies in the world, has certain behaviors.
That are independent of us humans, the creators.
And independent of the parts. And so the question is, what are those general tendencies?
what are those wants in the sense of the tendency of a plant is to lean towards the light.
Call it a wants. And so that was my question was well, with the system, what does it want? What are those tendencies?
Part of what I concluded was that
The tendencies were basically an extension of the same tendencies in evolution.
of biological systems. In a certain sense
This
Technum was the seventh kingdom of life. It's an extension and acceleration of the same forces.
Yeah.
made life.
They've evolved.
life on the planet and that made self organized systems of stars and
Planets and elements I see the origins of
Technology
Doctor the big bang.
It's not human ingenuity. We are just
The vehicles. We are just the
sexual organs over just helping it replicate. When a beaver makes a dam and birds make nests, those are technologies in a certain sense. They're outputs of the mind. And so I see the cosmic
Ark.
of the story of technology which begins with the big bang and self organizing systems and elements and stars.
And planets that have the sufficient
Just the right amount of gravity and water and other things that
this most remarkable molecule DNA can evolve out of and then
DNA.
And self replicate.
Until we have minds. And there are many minds, and now the minds
Come other possible forms.
That can't be done
With just water based
Tissue.
And so
I'm imagining that there's technology and other planets throughout the galaxy.
Somewhere.
And that they're all kind of following this thing of
making more and more possibilities. And I think that's what
The big story in the end about what technology brings.
To the universe.
Which is increasing possible ways of being, increasing possible forms, increasing possible
Ways of living. Each one of those are improbable.
So that's the point of it.
The most universe is going towards heat death is the probable outcome.
Flat, uniform, gray.
He death.
Or these strands of the improbable.
Which are
Galaxies and stars and elements and planets and minds and technology.
And it's all improbable and
self maintaining. It keeps making things more and more improbable as long as it
keeps going and that's the infinite game that we're involved in is trying to keep the game going.
Making as many possibilities as possible. And for us humans, for me to equip every person born.
With the tools, water and health care and they would need
To realize
The unique
Improbable.
Gifts to the world.
The more improbable you are
The more likely you're authentic.
to what it is that you can do.
So in a certain sense what we're aiming for
Or
Improvable lives.
Wonderful idea. Do you think that if you're to draw the timeline of technology
It seems like we've harnessed information with the printing press. We've sort of harnessed energy.
with oil and fossil fuels and that maybe we're about to harness intelligence with AI. Is that a clean progression and is it fair to put AI on the same
scale as
Those other two.
Yeah, I mean I think ultimately you'll be even bigger than those other two.
Intelligence is not
The only thing necessary to get things done.
But in fact evolution itself is a kind of learning if you abstract it out.
The topography of
Things that learn.
Uh
Similar to the things that evolve. Evolution is learning.
Our brains are doing
similar kinds of mathematically, abstractly, there are very, very related learning and evolution.
Are very, very
Analogous. So
A mind is an accelerated version.
Of evolution.
It's learning much, much faster than evolution it can itself. So we're accelerating evolution with the mind.
And so
That's very, very powerful when you can accelerate evolution. So all the things that we see, all the good things that we've seen evolved.
On this planet, we're accelerating those processes.
No, and making things that are dry.
And silicon or other materials. And so that's very exciting. That's a huge, huge
Powerful force.
That we're unleashing
For the first time on the planet. Okay. And so I think it's way beyond
Fire and even our own
Invention of language.
In the long term.
We're just at the very, very beginning. We haven't really done very much comparatively to what we'll be doing.
But
It is Momentous.
moment where for the first time we're figuring out what it is and
As humans, this is big because
We evolved with other satian beings.
There are a lot of other
Neanderthals and beyond.
When we were evolving.
But at least for the past fifty thousand years, we've been the sole city being on the planet.
The hegemon.
We're now gonna go back.
to having other Setian beings and we don't know today why we're the only ones. Was it
Deliberate?
Or was it
Accidental, we don't know.
But we're gonna
Have to share.
the world with other Stient beings in some ways, and we don't even know what that looks like or feels like, but that's another momentous
Thresh in our planet.
But again, that's
Sort of long term. In the short term
We have AI of uh
Very, very narrow sense of pattern recognition and pattern generation.
We've synthesized one type of cognition, which is pattern recognition, pattern generation.
And all the things we're seeing today only because we synthesized that one single kind of cognition. We haven't been able to synthesize deduction symbolic reasoning.
All the other kinds of things that we do in our own brain we haven't been able to synthesize yet.
So we're still at the very
beginnings of this. I think one of the things that it
affects us in the long term, say the next century, is that
We're gonna be undergoing a
century long identity crisis as a species.
Going back to the individual.
Of like what is it you want to be, why you're here.
What do you do?
That nobody else can do.
Now we're gonna ask that at the species level.
What are humans for?
Why are we here?
What are we good for? What can we do that others can't?
And then we have genetic engineering, where we can actually change
our own bodies. And so what is it that we want to become?
And one of the things that AIs
are gonna force us to answer is because we make these AIs, we train them on humans.
And humans are
On average, sexist and ageist and racist and mean
And so the AIs are
Like average humans, but we say no no no no.
You have to be better than us.
So
What does it look like? What does a better human look like? We don't have a good model for that. We don't have a consensus on that.
And yet we're gonna demand
That our AIs be better than us.
So that's gonna force us.
In some ways to become better humans ourselves.
Is there anything else?
that you think is over or underestimated about what's happening in
This technological change.
Yeah, I mean the idea of existential threat is completely overrated. It's a fantasy
Intelligence itself is overrated.
It's overrated by
guys who like to think, who think that thinking is the most important thing in the universe. To get things done, so it's not necessarily the most important. But take Einstein and a tiger and put them in a cage. Who wins?
Not the smartest guy.
Why is that? Because it takes other things besides intelligence to get things done in the world.
It's not the company with the smartest people that will dominate. It's not the smartest person in the room that necessarily
knows what to do.
Intelligence is necessary but not sufficient.
to get things done in the world.
And
The people who imagine the smart genius AI thing.
Or what I
guilty of thinkism in the sense that they think
The thinking trumps everything else and it doesn't.
There're so many other things that you need to accomplish something to have effect.
on actually making things happen.
Including empathy. Including
Perseverance, all kinds of things. And so
A lot of the fears of the existential threat of the AI is taking over and killing us all are based on the idea that if you have
AI genius level thing that it will
overwhelm anything else in the world.
But what we know
Is that the
Will to survive will always overwhelm the will to predate.
I mean this is why only one out of ten
Yeah.
Work.
Because
The world to survive.
It's much more powerful.
than the will to kill.
And so
It'd be really tough.
Intelligence alone is not enough.
What do you think explains
The best.
I guess I'll just call it content media. What do you think unites the very best things that you've created?
And that you've appreciated that others have created.
One of things I learned about magazines was that the best magazines at the best times'cause magazines
And outlive individuals like the New Yorkers, say.
Is it they work best when they're an expression of the personality of the editor.
The more
Idiosyncratic creations are the
To me, that's one of the commonalities. If you unleash
The creators.
To really give them
That room
To create
Unencumbered.
And constrained by
The lawyers by the bureaucracy.
By
committees by the thought police, whatever it is.
The more that that can actually be an expression of idiosyncratic
Creativity to me the stronger that is.
We have that with novels because it's the sole person usually if they have any kind of clout they can
Demand certain things.
It's much harder to do with other media like a movie because there's just so many people involved. And that's one of the reasons why I think AI is gonna be hugely transformative because we'll be able to have
A ninety minute movie made by a single person.
auto generating all these other characters and stuff at their
command, their direction, the director.
That'll be true for games. True now in newsletters. The newsletters I follow.
Or by
People with very strong personalities.
And
We own books that you like. There's some
With a very strong point of view.
That we don't see that as much the of the screen that's now the center of our lives.
And I think we missed that.
And I think
A I will help.
us regain that by actually enabling
individuals are very, very small.
Partner teams.
To create
works in this medium of the screen.
When you were
running wired and wired obviously was like the expression of your taste and personality.
What practices or what did you do to protect that?
that seems incredibly desirable in any publication that it's like the taste of the person magnified or something.
Yeah, we projected by owning more than fifty percent of which we lost.
All right.
Terrible, terrible story. We lost control and that's why we had to sell and that's when we all left.
Okay we left.
Not because it wasn't funny anymore, but because we lost control over it.
We weren't having to report to anybody. We were just trying to make the magazine that we wanted to read.
And it was totally fun because
We could say anything.
That was
One of the ways I would say is you have to retain control, ownership of it.
And
This goes back to well, I was talking about articulating for me that was something that we were very slow
To see it wire, but
I did learn that there's a bit of advice in my book about what we learn from
The advertising people, which is to get your message across, you have to simplify, simplify, simplify, and then exaggerate. There was a sense of like us.
coming to understand what it was that we're doing in our role and being able to
Again.
Articulate that to the people. So this idea of the optimistic view was not something we was so
Evident at the very beginning, but it became evident that that was our role.
But that was what we were doing in part. Th that was sort of what
We were about
And that
Help. Tremendously in terms of
deciding whether this is a wired story or not. There's tons and tons of directions to go and so
Being able to
brand it in that sense.
Вас
Uh being
partly enabled by us articulating it ourselves and being
Able to do that.
Do you think then like it's so interesting thinking across our conversation how
maybe the meta piece of advice is your don't be the best, be the only. It seems like in business, in creating
in family, in career, in spirituality.
This is the advice to end all advice. Do you think that's right?
I think that's right. Again, that came from my time at Wired. We'd have story meetings.
Every month.
And we were trying to make assignments.
to story ideas that we had.
There's
Three editors. And
I'd have these ideas like uh this is a really great story.
We gotta find a really great author.
writer for this. This is a really great story. And then
Nobody else in the room thought it was a good idea. It's like uh, I don't know, drug
Or nah.
What?
No.
Yeah.
And so I would kill that idea.
And go on to the next idea. They got more ideas, okay? So we do more ideas.
But then maybe a year later, you know, that was a really good idea. I really think we should do this. This is still valid. This is really important. I think this would be a great piece.
In this case it was like nope.
I don't get it. What's the point? If you came back a third time
After me trying to kill it.
If it came back a third time I would say, Hm, let me try this one more time.
And if it got killed
The third time.
Then I would say, Oh, I get it now.
This is a piece that I have to do.
I have to write this one.
'Cause I can't give it away.
I think it's really important.
I'm the only one who kinds of
Appreciates it.
And so
Those are always my best pieces.
It was like oh
And then when I'm writing it, it's like there's no competition.
But I've been trying to give it away.
Three years.
There's no competition, so I can just do this.
And it's easy'cause it's me.
And so there was a sense of like okay, I'm the only and so when I go on from that
What I learned was to always ask myself, yes.
This would be fun to do.
Yes, I'm really good at this.
Yes, I could get paid to do it.
But is there anybody else who could do it?
And that's true in business as well.
'Cause if there's someone else doing it, then I don't want to do it. I want to go on immediately.
To the thing.
The
no one else is doing the only
'Cause in the best it's highly competitive. Only one number one.
And we could easily be displaced and become number two instantly. And so
You wanna be in this direction where you are working
Doing things that you find easy that other people find hard.
The only U appreciate and so
That's true for companies too.
You really want to be doing something
Not trying to become another OS, another social media app. Come on.
Those are occupied. Those who are occupied by
players with network effects. You're not gonna work there. You wanna go in a direction that's the only
And
Asking yourself, if you have competitors
They can be good establishing a field and bringing credentials and
believability to it and a market, but
The advantage that we had it wired was that we didn't have any other we were so only at the time.
There was nothing else like it.
And it was hard.
Because
Trying to sell advertising was impossible in the beginning and there was no category.
Why didn't it fit into any category? It was like an incredibly difficult sell. News stands didn't want to carry up because there was no category. Where do we put this magazine?
Computer. No, it's like
Computer magazine. It's
Technology lifestyle magazine. Wait, what's that? There's no category for there.
So it's hard, it's really hard to be the only.
In that sense.
But
If you can, the rewards are very, very high.
And I think
That's where you want to aim.
Your life.
Your family.
Your company
Country.
I think it's amazing that the advice in the book is somehow both counterintuitive and obvious. And just like to sum up what I take from this, is the smartest strategy, even if you're trying to be selfish, is to be generous and unique. And almost everyone does the opposite of those two things.
Which is totally bizarre. It's also a wonderful excuse to ask you the same question now I've asked, I guess.
Approaching five hundred times now. I've asked every single guest I've ever talked to. What is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you?
When I think of kindness, I think of a moment.
Many, many, many, many, many years ago when I was traveling in the Philippines, when the Philippines was an incredibly
Or developing country, there was not even a good map.
To the country there was no
Guidebook.
literally nothing. And I was traveling exploring their
And I arrive somewhere
And I no idea where it was going. I don't even remember why I arrived there, but
What happened was
Some family
Living in a grass hut waved me in.
And I remember that
They
You wanna give me dinner?
And they sent a kid out, which I saw
To buy
S
Can
Food somewhere because they didn't have food.
Themselves.
And they took some very, very precious cash.
I can just see.
To buy food.
For me.
Well for me.
Unbelievably
Kind of it was like I don't know like
Some random person walks by your house.
And you're gonna
Empty your life savings.
To give to them.
So obviously I had far more than they had and I could have
Bought my own
Though there wasn't really
Much for sale.
It was like a little tiny canned fish, but it was incredibly
Precious. And this is what they're giving me is they're giving me like canned tuna fish.
With a fork.
They're feeding me.
Unbelievably kind.
I just still remember that because they were giving not out of their surplus
But out of their basic needs. So it was not a luxury. It's really, really powerful.
And they had no reason to do it.
It was just hospitality. It was really incredibly kind.
Well, I'm so thankful for the conversation today. I'm so thankful for all that you've written and put into the world. Please know it affects people like me all over the place and makes us think for the better and hopefully act for the better too. So Kevin, wonderful to meet you and thank you so much for your time.
It's been a pleasure. I really enjoy this. You ask great questions. I love your spirit. Thank you for having me.
Um
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