#166 Kevin Kelly: Excellent Advice for Living
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I've had the privilege of knowing a lot of accomplished people, successful people, famous people, super rich people. And man, the outsides not represent their insides. And we tend to want to compare ourselves to their outsides, to their own ideas of what success is. I'm better and I do better when I am not trying to imitate someone else's success.

I mean, in a certain way, what you want to do is you want to kind of grow your own metric for what would be successful for you. You want to have a different metric. Welcome to The Knowledge Project, a podcast about mastering the best of what other people have already figured out so you can apply their insights to your life. I'm your host, Shane Parrish.

If you're listening to this, you're missing out. If you'd like access to the podcast before public release, special episodes that don't appear anywhere else, hand-edited transcripts, or you just want to support the show that you love, you can join at fs.blog.com. Check out the show notes for a link. Today, my guest is the legendary Kevin Kelly, who might just be the most interesting man in the world.

He co-founded Wired Magazine, which along with 2600 was a regular on my nightstand growing up. He also co-founded the All Species Foundation, a nonprofit aimed at cataloging every living species on Earth, written a host of books on technology and life, and serves on the board of the Long Now Foundation. This episode covers a lot of ground.

We start with a dive into some of Kevin's wisdom from his new book, Excellent Advice for Living, Wisdom I Wish I Had Known Earlier. And this started on his 68th birthday when Kevin began to write down for all of his young adult children some of the things he had learned about life and that he wished he had known earlier.

adding to this advice over the years compiling a sort of like a life's wisdom that I eagerly seek out and read every year when he publishes his bits of advice around his birthday.

Kevin's timeless advice covers an astonishing range from right living to setting ambitious goals to optimizing generosity and cultivating compassion. We're going to go deeper on some of my favorite passages from the book on learning, deadlines, perfection, forgiveness, living a meaningful life, reasoning, what to do when you're stuck, and so much more. Of course, I couldn't have him on the show without talking about artificial intelligence,

And we sort of explore this through two lenses, what he's excited about and what scares him. It's time to listen and learn.

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Where I want to start today is on your 68th birthday, you wrote down 68 bits of advice for your adult children about what you wish you had known. I read all of your advice across 68, 69, 70. I want to dive into some of this advice and go to the stories behind them that created this sort of pithy

wisdom that you expose. And so let's start with learn how to learn from those you disagree with or even offend you. See if you can find the truth in what they believe. So just to back up the general thing of what I was doing was in a curious way, I was writing these bits of advice for myself. I

found that I could make a habit out of something by reducing the idea of it to a little capsule and give it a handle so I can repeat it to myself. I could remind myself of it. And so I wanted some way to take a lot of big, weighty, large advice and reduce it into a proverb that I could repeat. So that's sort of the origins. I was kind of doing that in my head.

I would hear something and I would repeat it to me to remind myself of it. And so these things have their origin in a sense of like, did they work for me? Do they work for me first? And then I can pass this idea of I should pass it on. So the second element of this was I have three kids. They're all kind of adult now. And we were not a family that gave a lot of advice or

my wife and I were not preachy. I don't, I very rarely ever would give my kids advice. I was of the old school that said the kids don't listen to what they, what you say. They just watch what you do. So we try to model the behavior that we wanted, but

As I got older, I also realized that some of these little things that I was working on, I wished I had known earlier. It took me kind of 70 years to kind of arrive at them. It's like if I'd had this little thing that I kind of have in my own head now earlier, it would be so much better. So I decided to try and write them down for that and give them as a present to my kids. And so when I'm doing that, when I'm trying to write down, I'm –

Thinking of a way to kind of encapsulate a lot of information and advice and wisdom into a little tiny device that I can hold on to.

And the other thing, just to pause here, because I think this is an important distinction that I get a lot of times online. You probably get too. This isn't about precision. This is about utility. Right, exactly. This is practicality. So I have several filters I think through this. One is like, you know, do I really believe this? This is something that I think really works. And then secondly, is it practical? Does it work?

Is it actionable? Would it change how I do my day? And thirdly was, I'm trying to, following my own advice, uplift and be positive as much as possible. So yes, so...

Giving advice is a really tough assignment because it's obvious that it just varies tremendously on the context of who it is and what the situation is. And so trying to give general advice is definitely not about precision. It's about a general, what

what I call direction. It's about moving in the right direction. So back to this particular one, trying to learn from others that you disagree with and maybe even find offensive is, I guess I've been surprised in my own life to find that people that I really fundamentally disagree with could say something that I found was, well, yeah, that's true.

Like, I remember myself coming around to agree with Dick Cheney about something. And what Dick Cheney said was the climate change and environmentalism was not about personal virtue that had to be changed at the systems level. I was like, yep, that's right.

Here I am, I'm agreeing with Dick Cheney because he had something to say that was true. And so I've sort of learned to try and...

to spend some time to listen to people and not to cancel them, basically. And that is, it's tough because we have a natural, a natural evolution. And also there's personality types. I mean, we're not obligated to like everybody. I feel no duty to have to like everybody, but I feel that there is some duty to kind of respect people in a certain sense. And this, this idea of kind of respecting someone that you don't,

don't like and disagree with, it's difficult. But for me, it pays off, I guess what I'm saying. There's a practical benefit for doing so. Do you feel a need to be liked by other people? I think everybody has some element where they need to be liked. And so, yes, I would like to be liked by everybody. Emotionally, yes. Intellectually, I understand that that's not going to happen.

One of the curious things, and this is, I don't think I wrote this down, but this is something I've learned over time, is that with enough numbers, if an audience of enough numbers, no matter what it is you do, somebody will not like it. And vice versa, like let's take, I have this book of advice. There's 450. When you ask people their favorite one, the best ones, there's no agreement on the best ones.

everybody's list of the favorite ones is there's no overlap. And so I think part of what I've learned is that there's going to be people who, some people who don't like what you do all the time, but they're not going to be the same people. And when I was running a magazine called Co-Evolution and Whole Earth Review, I was the editor and we kind of ran a little, maybe provocative kind of articles. And my goal was to piss off people

one fifth of the audience, but keep rotating it, make sure it wasn't the same. You know, just, just like everybody gets your turn to be, to be riled. And so, and so that's the kind of idea is, is that I'm not going to be liked by everybody, but I don't want to kind of be a predictable person.

I'm liking, you know. I like that. With your reach, it's like you're the mayor of New York, right? Like not everybody is going to be happy all the time with what you're doing. I like the idea of rotating the unhappiness, sharing it equally. Exactly. Equal opportunity disruptor. So, you know, by the way, this is one of my bits of advice. If your views on other things can be predicted from your views on one thing,

you need to be very careful that you're not in the grip of an ideologue because that's what it is. It means that your opinions are too highly correlated with each other. And that's suspicious because most people are much more complicated if you're really genuine. You're going to be much more complicated than that. And also, by the way, this is a new piece of advice. If you're unpredictable in that way, you're much less likely to be...

taken over by an AI. You want to live your life in a way that the AI cannot predict what you're going to do. They cannot kind of fake you or cannot imitate you. Go deeper on that a little bit in terms of AI and disruption about how you think. Yeah. So there's a lot of concern about artists and even writers about training an AI to produce

to generate work, to creative work. And the concern is, well, my material that I've worked really hard for has been used to train this AI and people can use it to imitate me. And sometimes those imitations are quite amazing. Really, what you want to be able to do is to have a style, so to speak, to have something that's unpredictable, that's imitable, that you can't be imitated.

And this, again, goes back to my other piece of advice about don't aim to be the best, aim to be the only. So if you are in this category that it's hard to imitate you, that's a

That's a really good place to be in the human world and also a really good place to be in the AI world because AIs will have difficulty in imitating you. I think I'm in trouble. My kids went in to chat GPT the other day and they drafted this email and they should get more video game time, but they did it in the style of Shane Parrish. Yeah. So they basically like it was an email from myself to me. Yeah.

And I was like, this sounds awfully familiar. I was like, what was your query here? And they were like...

draft an email to dad about in the style of Shane Parrish I was like oh my god this is I'm in trouble yes yes so so yeah so you you you if you were if that was hard to do then you have an advantage because your your job is not going to be taken by an AI and so the idea is is to not be so predictable in the sense particularly again if you have if you

your views on the environment can be

deduced from your views on religion or something, that's going to be, that means that you're kind of not really that much of an independent thinker. And that's going to become more valuable because AI, at least at first, is going to give away standard thinking for free. So it'll raise the bar for some people, but it'll be so conventional for independent and original thinkers. Right, exactly. Right now, the best way to think of these AI is the term

training, the LLMs, is that they're the epitome of wisdom of the crowd. Okay, they're wisdom of the crowd thinking. That's what it is. It's the collective, all the average people in the world and all their average foibles and all the average genius. And it's going to get a very kind of average thing that is often very correct.

But oftentimes not because it's the average. And so it's the wisdom of the crowd AI, which is really good if that's where you want to be. I've been trying to figure out the practical use of these things and how people are actually using them. I have a friend who runs a very, very popular blog site, and he uses them to help them write headlines, to write a punchline at the end.

And he said it's often very generic and he has to kind of push them to be snarky. He'll say, no, no, no, make it more snarky or pretend you're a snarky editor or pretend that you're a conspirator. You have to kind of push them to not be that standard average. Deliberately say, no, you need to be a little bit on a little fringier. You've got to be a little bit angrier. You've got to be something. And then the role play.

If you don't do that, you won't get the kind of, as you said, the standard average. I want to come back to AI a little later because I think we'll have a broader conversation on it. I want to go to the next piece of advice that sort of stood out as I was reading these, which is always demand a deadline because it weeds out the extraneous and the ordinary. A deadline prevents you from trying to make it perfect. So you have to make it different. Different is better. It is, right? Different is better. So deadlines...

this again took me a long time to kind of figure out that i needed deadlines and deadlines were the difference between you know a dream and a something that you complete and um what happens with deadlines for me anyways you've got a ship you're you're you have to abandon the project and it's not perfect oh my gosh it's not perfect but because it's not perfect you kind of have to be ingenious about

making it a little different. And I find that deadlines force me to make decisions that you don't have enough time, you never have enough time. And so you think of something to, I wouldn't say it's a shortcut, you think of a way to finish it. And those little decisions are what make it a little different. One of the shocks to me about working at Wired on a monthly magazine was

Every single issue after years and years and years was a miracle that it got done on time. It was like you would think it would come down to some formula and you'd be done on Friday afternoon. But no, it was this last second getting it out the door every single time. And part of that was because we kind of kept upping the...

the goal, the quality. We're trying to make it better than last time. And so you come down to the same thing where you are being driven by the deadline to try to excel, but not making it perfect by doing something a little differently than you did before. Because without a deadline, you can convince yourself that you can always make it a little bit better, but then you never ship. Right. How do you find that balance between...

In a world of leverage, right, like where an internet article can go viral and reach 100 million people or it can reach 10 people, how do you find that point at which I've done enough, I'm comfortable with this versus the trade-off of do I raise the bar, do I make this better?

What is the advantage to doing that? So there's a couple of things, a couple of bits of advice buried in a book about that. One is this rule, which was actually based on some research in various different fields of life, that when you're trying to optimize something versus trying to explore, where you have something that works and you just want to make it kind of better and go and optimize it versus...

doing the inefficient thing of going out to try and try something new. And it comes down to something like when you go out to eat at a restaurant, do you get your favorite thing that you know works or do you try something that is a new dish that may not work? And so the ratio is actually one to three, two to three, one to three. So you actually want to spend two thirds of your time trying to optimize things that you

want to go deeper and better, and then a third trying new things. And that's been shown in many, many ways to be roughly true. So that's one answer is yes, lots of times you're going to just try and make it really, really better or not thing. But on third of the time, you want to be taking a chance. The second thing is this idea that I learned from doing art. There was actually a book called Writer's Time about how to write a book.

And it said that basically, look, the amount of work to write a book is infinite. It just could go on and on. And that's true of almost any project in terms of perfecting. It's bottomless. So really, the only thing you control is your time. You say, I have this much time to give to it. I'm going to do the very, very best in this amount of time.

And that's sort of what a deadline is about. It's saying like, yeah, I mean, it could go on forever, but I have a deadline. So I'm going to do the best. I'm going to write the best book I can in a year or a year and a half, whatever it is, or I'm going to do the best podcast I can make in a week. And so that is a deadline. And what it's doing is it's giving you some way to control because you can't control the amount of work, which is infinite because you always can find some way to perfect it.

So this is the idea that you control things by controlling the time. I wonder if part of us is hiding behind fear too. We don't want the deadline because we actually don't want to put the work out there. We can convince ourself that hiding, you know, making it better, hiding behind this perfection is in and of itself work and that we're accomplishing something. Yeah.

We don't have to put it out in the world and get feedback. Right, right, right, right, right. Yeah, yeah, that's true because it's not good enough yet. One of the things I have become a really big proponent of, which is doing things on a regular basis.

So the advantage of someone like you doing a podcast on a regular basis, like if this one is a complete flop, that's okay. Tomorrow you have another one. We'll try again. And you just do it over and over again and you put out whatever it is that you do. You know, you're trying your very best, but you know that there's more from where that's come from. And that gives you some kind of freedom to

fail in a certain sense because I'm going to do it again. And that's true of making art, which I do every day. I make a piece of art every day. So I'm going to put it out no matter what. And if it isn't up to the best standards, it's okay because tomorrow I'm going to do it again. And that's true about writing or anything else is this idea that you

want to do things on a regular basis because that is the source of great stuff, but also gives you that confidence and liberty to

To put out something that's not quite the best and not get really hung up on it because we're going to do it again. You get another up out. You get another crack at it. Right. The next piece of advice I want to talk about is when you forgive others, they may not notice, but you will heal. Forgiveness is not something we do for others. It's a gift to ourselves. Right.

That one's profound. Talk to me about that. It's something I've seen in my life. And I found that the easier I was to forgive, the better I felt. A lot of the golden rules are this weird, weird thing that don't make any logical sense at all. But the universe somehow seems to be constructed this way. The most selfish thing you can do is to forgive other people. The most selfish thing you can do is to give money away.

The most selfish thing you can do is to help other people and you'll be, you know, you'll get. It's like, that's weird. But that seems to be how the universe is set up. There's this kind of paradox at its core. And that's all these principles are somewhat based on the same weird logic of the universe, which is, yes, the most selfish thing you could do is to be selfless. This is kind of weird.

It goes almost to our biological instinct towards group survival, if you will, right? Where you're supposed to sacrifice for the good of your species. Yes. I think there are probably evolutionary reasons why that works, but it's so reliable that I'm just guessing that there's some other larger reason that

Because you can count on it. Are there times when you've learned not to forgive and it's best to move on without forgiveness? I haven't seen that. Forgiveness is sort of a way of, there's another piece of advice of kind of

accepting the apology you're never going to get, right? You're not going to get the apology. You just sort of, in your mind, you accept it. And it's like, I think there has to be some kind of closure. Because often we're waiting for that, right? We're waiting for the apology. We're waiting for the other person to go first. We're waiting for the world to give us sort of what we want, and yet we're incapable of going first. Right. So that's what forgiveness is, is you accept the apology you're not going to get.

The next bit of advice that I love, which is don't measure your life with someone else's ruler. Tell me the backstory to this one. I've had the privilege of knowing a lot of maybe I would say accomplished people, successful people, famous people, super rich people. And man, the outsides not represent their insides. And we tend to want to compare ourselves to their outsides.

to their own ideas of what success is. This goes back to don't aim to be the best, aim to be the only. I think we're, I'm better and I do better when I am not trying to imitate someone else's success state and how they define success. I mean, in a certain way, what you want to do is you want to kind of grow your own metric for what you do.

what would be successful for you. And that is hard to do because we're kind of bombarded with images and suggestions about what would make a successful person. But if you talk to people who seem to have success, you realize that you want to have a different metric. I spent some time with the Amish, a lot of time with the Amish. It was really interesting because they had a very different

measure of success. For the Amish, one of the ways that they decide which technology they're going to use or not use is they have a very clear idea of success. And so their goal is to have a lot of kids and to have every meal with their kids until they leave home. They want to have breakfast, lunch, and dinner with them every day.

And if they can arrange their lives to do that, there's a couple other things, but if they can arrange their lives to do that, that's success. And so they spend a lot of time and a lot of routines and rigmarole and crazy stuff with their hacking to try and do that. But that's for them, it's like, oh, that's interesting. For them, that's a successful person. It's

They were able to do that and everybody in the community really kind of honors that. Wow, that's really good. So it was like, all right, that's interesting. That's a different measure. We all have sort of like our own measure of what success is and what we think it is. And in a world of Instagram, what we're seeing is the best successes from everybody else and that we're feeling less about our own self and

in part because maybe that ruler that we're using is sort of malleable in a way. It's like, well, I want Kevin Kelly's brain and I want this person's body and I want this person's vacations and I want this person's cars. But this is what you're exposed to every day. You're exposed to the best of everybody else in a way that you never were before. Yeah. Actually, that's an interesting statement because I think it goes even further.

And I think we have really absorbed this. And here's the furtherness. And it's beyond TikTok into YouTube. We see the superlative of everything. We see the best human achievement of like, you know, the people who can use count cups or the Rubik's Cube speed serves or people jumping off of snowboard down houses. Just the weirdest stuff of human achievement. We're seeing it.

And so we're being exposed to the superlative world. We're seeing lightning striking people. It's like things that we would never see. It's not ordinary, but we're seeing this extreme superlative version of the world, which does several things. One is it kind of can inspire us to say, well, I didn't know that was possible for humans to do.

I want to do something that level. That's great. But of course, at the same time, there's this other thing of like, well, my life is nothing like that. I must not be worth very much. So there's two sides to it. But I think there is a positive side to that, which is to see and appreciate kind of the full range of human potential for the first time.

And that can be inspiring as well. The extraordinary has become ordinary in some ways. Yeah, exactly. Right. And it's like we're seeing it all day long. We're seeing the extraordinary all day long. It's like that must affect us in some way that we don't really appreciate where I can see the best that's ever happened again and again and again. And the weirdness is kind of like,

I mean, I actually subscribe to a channel that just shows these weird accidents, coincidences, just strange stuff every day that people get on their phones and security cameras. And you kind of realize, you know, there's like 100,000 airplane flights every day. And almost every day there's some accident.

airline mishap that we wouldn't normally even think about. But if you see that, you think, oh, this is actually not that rare. I mean, it's rare, but you, this idea of the extraordinary becoming the ordinary is, I think, a very profound thing that we haven't really absorbed yet. So with your thinking of success, I have to ask, what is success for you individually? Yeah.

Great question. I would say I ask that in a slightly different way in my own vocabulary, which I ask other people is what am I trying to optimize? And what I'm trying to optimize is learning for myself and increasing other people learning and the collective learning of the world. And I'm also...

to my own advice, I'm aiming so that on the day before I die, I can say I fully become myself. And I want to help that for everybody else is that I want as many people in the world to be able to say on the day before they die, I have fully become myself. And in my mind, that requires tools and stuff around us to allow. So the story that I like to tell

is just to do the thought experiment of imagining Mozart being born 2,000 years before he was born, before they had invented pianos or symphonies, and the way that his genius would have been lost. We would not have, maybe he could play some drums or whatever was around, but we would not have had his genius exposed that way and illuminated and fulfilled.

So we needed to invent those technologies of pianos and stuff. And so Van Gogh, before there was oil paint, what a loss that would have been. Or George Lucas, before we invented cinematography, what a loss that would have been. So that means that there is a Shakespeare today alive in the world, and she's waiting for us.

to invent the tools that she needs to best express her genius. And so I think we have a moral obligation to kind of make stuff so that everybody born and unborn would be able to express their genius. And that stuff includes things like clean water and education and stuff. It's not just technology, it's cultural stuff. But we have it and I want to unleash that in myself

And others. And that's sort of what I'm trying to optimize. I love that. It's beautiful. I love the word unleash, too. There's unleashing human potential by creating equal opportunity and creating better tools so that people's potential can shine through. Yeah. Yeah. We're all a different mix. Each one of us has a different face. We have a different personality face. We have a different talent face.

And we each have our own genius. I truly believe that. And so what we want to do is arrange things so that you can arrive somewhere where you can actually express it. And I have to say that this is a very, very difficult thing. It's taken me most of my life to kind of figure out what I'm really good at. And I think most people, it just takes almost their entire life to kind of figure out

where their genius is. There are some occasionally prodigies, people who have a very clear idea when they're very young exactly what it is. But for most people, we need our lives to kind of figure out what our lives are really about. And the other important

Part of that is we absolutely need everybody around us. We need parents. We need friends. We need colleagues. We need customers. We need clients to help us see who we're becoming, who we should be, because it is really, really almost impossible to do that introspectively by ourselves. Yeah, it's hard to understand a system that you're a part of. You need those outside people pointing at your blind spots in a way that

You need to listen to them when they're right and ignore them when they're wrong. That's another piece of advice is that, yeah, you want to be able to never quit. Quit when it's right. Right, right. But quit when it's necessary. And you need your friends and family and everyone else to help you decide between those two. That's why we've been put here with other people around us is that we really do need others to help us become who we should be.

I love that. Beautiful. Again, it's about the group. I like that. There's a common theme here. Well, one of your other pieces of advice was you can't reason someone out of a notion that they didn't reason themselves into. Yeah. Trying to argue. I mean, this is something I have learned to not do is, is, is argue with people. Even though I like to argue, you have to, you know, you have to find someone who's arguably authentically you'll want you to learn just, and it,

For lots of people, that's not really the case. And so often we have things that we believe that we inherit or that we don't know why we believe or we certainly haven't arrived through logic. And so therefore, logic is not going to work. Another piece of advice I have about changing people's minds is I have found by far the best way to have any hope of changing someone's mind is to try and listen and understand people.

truly understand why they think what they're thinking, how they got there. And that conversation will often give you the position to say something honest that might help them move.

Otherwise, it's not going to work because you're kind of operating at that point and more emotionally at the emotional level of having a conversation rather than intellectual reasoning option. Nobody's rational from the way that they see the world. It's all about how do they see the world? What would the world have to look like for me to exhibit that behavior or that belief?

And that goes a long way to helping you understand how other people see it because nobody's intentionally acting irrationally. Right. And everybody believes, and also, by the way, they also believe that they're good and doing good things. And that's another piece of advice is that in my view, and this, again, took me a long time to kind of realize this, but in my view, the worst crimes against humanity have all been done in trying to eliminate evil.

And so the lesson to me is if you are in the business of trying to eliminate evil, you've got to be really careful because that's where most of the harm happens, where people are trying to eliminate evil. Politics is full of that. Yeah, exactly right. So I'm really wary of anybody, left or right, who's trying to eliminate evil in the world or the bad things or whatever. So because...

most of the really bad things are done in that name. The next piece of advice I want to talk about is a great way to understand yourself is to seriously reflect on everything you find irritating in others. Yeah. What's the story behind that one? I think we're kind of, we're really sensitized. It's kind of like a self-criticism. We're really sensitized to the things. I'm not sure what the mechanism is. I don't have a deep

understanding of that but it's just my observation is that there's something fundamental about things that really tick us off and it's because it's like the resonant frequency it's because we're sort of operating on a very similar frequency and so we become sensitized to that and we find it annoying but it's actually because it's something that we are revolving around in some ways I'm not saying that you know

If you find someone lying, it means that you're a liar. It just means that there's some fundamental thing about telling the truth or whatever that is really core to you and you need to look at it to be sure about your own behavior in that department. Yeah, I think that there's a lot of, there's a signal in our body when other people are doing something that irritates us that's a part of ourself that we don't,

We don't like. And that's where we're getting that signal from. The next I only want to do a couple more of these and then we'll switch to sort of broader topics. But the next one is whenever you have a choice between being right or being kind, be kind with no exceptions and don't confuse kindness with weakness. Yeah. There's got to be a story behind this one.

Yeah, and by the way, the sub-theme of the book throughout the whole book is about kindness, compassion, gratitude, these kind of elemental, timeless, ancient virtues. So kindness is a kind of compassion. And it goes back to, again, for me, this kind of the weird paradox of the universe that –

Kindness is not weakness because, in fact, it's a strength. It's power. It's weak people. Small people are unkind. You can be generous when you are kind.

confident and true and honest and so cultivating kindness is is you're cultivating a superpower and so it's it's this kind of this again this really weird thing that reaching out helping others is the most selfish thing you can do in the long term so it's a little bit of long-termism and that's another thing that goes through is this idea that yeah for immediate payback

Be angry, be snarky, whatever it is. But if you are patient, if you take the long view of your own life and what we're doing, it's very clear that you'll gain more in that way. So you can afford to be kind, give away something, give away your time, be humble, give away your own status, whatever it is, because what I've seen is

among myself and other people is that you'll be rewarded more. So it's kind of like there's a reason to do it just on the base of it, of being human. But I'm saying, no, no, it's the most practical, selfish thing you could possibly do.

Totally. I love the idea of the long view because it's a frame that changes everything, right? So if you take a long view to life, you eliminate a lot of negative behavior. But if you even remind yourself before you talk to somebody at work or a colleague and you just think, I'm going to have a relationship with this person for 20 years, it changes the conversation you're about to have with them, especially if you're upset with them. Because now you're like, oh, I'm going to approach this almost like I would my partner in

instead of a colleague that is disposable or transactional or I'm going to approach this as we're going to be working together for a long time. Here's this thing that's bothering me. How do we get this out of the way so we can keep going forward versus like, stop doing this. This is, you know, it just changes the notion of the conversation and that allows for compounding. So if we look at sort of like one of the major, major forces in the world that people don't take advantage of, it's compounding.

But how does a relationship compound? Well, it compounds over time.

But you need to stay on the timeline. So anything that you do that negates being in a long-term relationship takes you off compounding to begin with. So if you think long-term and you know from compounding that all the advantages come at the end, not at the beginning, they're very slow to accrue, but then they're too large to ignore. It's like, how do I be in a relationship with this person for 20 years? And that compounding gives you, again, the freedom. It unleashes you because it will overcome...

all kind of temporary setbacks, right? I mean, the thing we know about investing is, yeah, if you're there for a long time, then things can go up. There could be recessions coming and going and you're not bothered by them because you're taking the longer view. So because those gains in the end will overwhelm

even fairly large setbacks. And so if you say, okay, yeah, we have an argument or whatever it is, but in the long view, it's okay because the gains from that are going to overwhelm whatever losses we had along the way or mistakes too. I mean, that's the other thing is you can make mistakes, even fairly large mistakes,

But if you have a long view, the total gains outweigh them. So it's – and we're talking about personal relationships, but it's also true about civilizations and societies.

And this is, of course, my involvement with the Long Now Foundation, trying to promote this idea of doing generational things because, one, we have ourselves benefited from what previous generations have made, but it also allows us to do things that are maybe even riskier now because we will make mistakes, but the long-term games of taking a longer view and arising our

our horizon will give us greater gains if we do that. Okay, last piece of advice before we move on, which is before you are old, attend as many funerals as you can bear and listen. Nobody talks about the departed's achievements. The only thing people will remember is what kind of person you were while you were achieving. So that came from my attending funerals. It was just 100% funerals.

direct observation of the data where I was going to funerals and I was noticing this weird thing. And, you know, then you kind of play forward. It's like, what are people going to say at my funeral? It was really sobering to reflect on that. And there was, you know, a couple of people who were prominent and I was just

kind of maybe shocked or amazed that that's what people wanted to talk about was what they were like and what they did and their sense of humor and all these other things and it wasn't about the trophies that they had at all or what they had even accomplished and so that was for me like a wake-up call okay I understand that it's going to be about the quality of my character so um

So that means that I should focus a little bit more on my character development, growth of my character, rather than another certificate and another thing to brag about. I think that's so important. If you sort of close your eyes and do a thought experiment and imagine yourself at 100 lying in a hospital bed with a few hours to live and you look back on your life and

You're not going to think about, you know, how many Twitter followers you had, how much money is in your bank account. You're going to think about, was I there for the people I cared for? Yeah.

How was I as a person? Right. All the moments where you, where you chose to be unkind and you could have been kind. Those are the things you're going to think about. Was I there for my kids? Did I skip the meals? Did I work extra to get that promotion that I now realize suddenly it doesn't matter. Right. What matters is time with my kids and my family. And yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So they're all, they're all, all these advices are all kind of,

woven together. I know you said that this was the last one, but you know, one of my pieces of advice is, you know, spend half as much money on your kids as you think you need to, and twice as much time, because that's what they're going to, they're going to value. And, um,

Again, that's another technique people call self-distancing that's really good about this, which is imagining yourself, a future self looking back or imagining yourself old and looking back and seeing what you would do now to change things. And I think...

you might rearrange your priorities, which is sort of what I did over time. Again, I wish I had known this earlier, so I'm putting it all together in this little book. Hope you enjoy it. I love that. I think you're just trying to get a different perspective on your own life. You don't have to... We look back at... I look back anyway at what I did when I was 16. I was like, "Oh, that was profoundly stupid." My 16-year-old self did not think that was stupid.

But we can use this sort of time shifting to give ourselves a different perspective into our own lives. Exactly right. Yeah. So, yeah, this kind of zooming around with time is a very important tool that, again, I use and I would encourage others to play with. I want to come back to something we started talking about a little bit earlier, which is artificial intelligence.

Why are you so excited about AI and what do you fear about AI? I'm very excited by AI, incredibly excited. There are books to be written about what's happening right now. And I really, in some ways, I think we're still under-hyping it for the long term, that the consequences of this are so profound. This is by far our

biggest invention after the scientific method and um we humans are incredibly opaque to ourselves we don't know how we work we don't know how our brains work we don't know what consciousness is we don't know what intelligence is we don't know what humans are and the major the way that we're going to find out about who we are is through ai robots

as we tend to try to make them like us and not like us, and how do we have other kinds of thinking, and all these things are going to come back. And then in addition to that, making other and trying to replicate ourselves is that...

We're also going to use them to become better humans. So it's like one of the things going on right now is you have these language models and chat bots that are trained on all human writing and behavior. And we're kind of, we're shocked that they're racist and ageist and sexist when that's kind of like the average human. But here's the thing is we don't accept that. We're saying, no, they need to be better than us.

This thing they were making cannot be racist, cannot be sexist. It has to be better than we are, which we can code in because that's just code. Ethics and morality is code. We can put it in. But the problem is that we don't have any idea.

or consensus on what it means to be better than us. We don't know what a better human looks like. We don't have that in our head. We don't know what our own ethics as humans are very shallow and inconsistent and terribly vague, but we want robots to be better than us, but we don't have a picture in our head of how to do that. So we are now going to be using these AIs and robots to imagine, articulate, and

help us become better humans. So that's why I'm excited, is that it's going to help us become better humans. What does that mean? We don't know. That's the conversation we're having right now. Every day we're coming up with these things. What does better than us look like? That is an incredibly profound question.

How does our own brains work? We don't know, but we're going to be finding out because we're trying to make them think and be conscious. So this is a huge centuries-long identity crisis, centuries-long journey for us of understanding us and then trying to change ourselves. And that's why it's so exciting. So

We can talk more about that. And then to your question, what am I afraid of? Well, the more powerful the technology, the more powerfully it can be abused. This is the most powerful technology we've ever made. It will be abused. I'm sorry to say it will probably be used, will be weaponized. And those are always something to worry about. So, yeah.

I'm not worried about the kind of commercialization and stuff. I go along with Ted Chiang's idea that most of our worries about technology are really worries about capitalism. I am worried about the weaponization of these things. And I have a second worry, which is a little harder to explain, which is I'm worried about whether we will take on the –

the relationship with some of these of master slave treat them like slaves if we treat them like slaves that's incredibly corrosive to our own humanity okay just just just that stance just the stance of these are these are going to do our bidding they're just machines they um

Help me understand that because that's a different relationship than I feel like we have with computers right now. Well, it is. And one of the things that we're trying to figure out is what is that relationship? And so one of the things I will say about the chats is that they are the universal intern relationship.

That's what we're making. We're making these universal interns that do all the work of interns. You have to check their work, but they're kind of like doing first drafts and they're helping the research. And so that's a relationship that we can understand. And that's a, you know, it's, there's still a power thing, but it's okay. It's a, it's not degenerative. Like I think a master slave relationship would be. So we, we,

I don't see any evidence that we're going down that way, but that's a worry that we would. And to some people, they're just machines. And I'm saying, no, no, just that stance itself. It doesn't matter that they're machines. If we have that kind of... You'll do my bidding no matter what. I'm not going to... You're not human, so therefore I can have you do whatever I want you to do. So that's a worry that we would...

Although I don't see any evidence that we're doing that so far. What would be the signs that AI has been being weaponized? How would we know?

Oh, oh, oh. Well, there's all different levels of it. There's, in a curious way, because this may seem contradictory, in a curious way, you know, there's this idea that take humans out of the kill decision. So you have robots, soldiers, and drones that make, that autonomously decide whether to fire the gun or not. I actually am okay with that in a weird way because one is,

I think it's possible that we could make them better than us and so they don't do war crimes. So we have the rules of war, which is a weird concept, but it's better than not having rules of war. And that we kind of say, okay, these are going to follow it. And so they do follow it. My hope is that that process of doing that, we realize how absurd it is.

To have war. Because right now we're saying, no, no, we don't want robots killing people. We only want humans to kill other people. It's like, that's not... No, no, we don't want humans to kill people either. And so I think by having to write the laws of war for the robot soldiers, it will illuminate how...

screwed up the idea of of accepting war as as a legitimate um process so so so that's so that's that's part of it i want to explore that a little more because in my mind where i go with this is like uh

Not every country would agree to encode that into all of their devices. The country that defects would gain an advantage, but the AIs would also learn that not everybody's following the rules of war, and then it would autonomously adapt to not following them because... Am I thinking about this wrong? Well, the one thing I feel is...

I have a huge disagreement with the singularitons because I don't believe AI is ever going to be out of our control in the sense of, yes, I mean, there may be occasions when it does something, but we're going to be quick to...

correct it and say no no so so if there's if there's people or countries that don't that are having soldiers that fight the other way it'd be like having war crimes it was like yeah do does the rest of the world accept that are we going to are they going to be punished so so um the thing about the world that we're headed into is is that for better or worse we're heading into

to a global world and this idea that we're going to stop globalism or stop the globalists, it's like we're not going to become Amish. We're not going backwards. We are making an integrated world and the more of the complex technology we make, like the internet and what's ever coming next, is very, very complex. It requires thousands and thousands of people to cooperate, to make it work. And

Even the AI running, it's not, it's very, the fantasy, the Hollywood fantasy of the lone villain on the mountaintop who has all this technology that works. There's no IT support. It just works the first time.

And they can gain control of these very complicated – that's just like dragons. It's just a fantasy. The technologies that we're making today, the more powerful ones, just require so many people to buy into the vision to make it work and keep it going that there's a natural resistance there.

now. To get something accepted, you have to have millions of people. Millions of people buy into the vision. There are things we bought into without knowing it. There's all kinds of things that we're collectively supporting without having articulated them. The important thing is that it takes huge buy-in to make things happen today. That's

a conservative force in the classical sense of it. And so that's one of the reasons why I don't worry too much about these rogue ideas of things. Yes, there may be an occasional thing, but it's not really a force at work in the world. Do you think we're at the hockey stick inflection point of AI finally? I mean, we've been talking about AI for 20 years. No, I don't. I think we're still...

at day one. And so here's the thing about artificial intelligence is that most people think of intelligence, including a lot of researchers as a single dimension, like a decibels IQ. It's multidimensional. There's multi-vector, it's all gradient. None of it's binary. There's probably hundreds of different dimensions and different types of cognition in our own minds.

And so far, we've synthesized basically two varieties, pattern recognition and a little bit of kind of generative ability. There's this logical deduction, you know, symbolic reason. None of these things have we come close to synthesizing. What's shocking to us is how far we can go with just these two things. And they're very flat and kind of bottom up.

into this connectionist idea, which is like, yeah. And what I've learned from that is that that bottom up will take you much further than you thought you could go, but will never take you all the way to where you want to go. So Wikipedia, this classic bottom up thing, over time, there's a more and more top down editorial control. And eventually over time, there'll be even more to get where we want to get that kind of encyclopedia that's totally reliable and

It does what we want to do. There's going to be some more top-down control given to that bottom-up power, but you can't get all the way just from the bottom-up. And that's sort of what the neural nets are. They're very flat bottom-up. And they're going to take us much further than we ever thought, but they're not going to take us to where we want to get to. One of my fears, I think, with AI that we'll have to deal with at some point is that

The news isn't the news anymore. The news is tailored to me. And by tailored to me, I mean you and I can look at the same article, which is generated in real time based on our political preference, based on how much coffee we had in the morning. It's going to have enough information to tailor the article towards us in a way that –

can manipulate or mislead or engage or drive clicks or do whatever. And we'll have no way of telling what the actual news is because we'll all have an individual view into the news. Yeah. So, so I think this epistemological front that we've entered into is a very significant and very potent frontier, which is, um,

How do we know things? What do we need to be convinced something is true? Again, we have kind of like in our own past sort of waved our hands and thought, oh, I know, I know. But what this is coming up to illuminate is, in fact, we don't know. We don't really have a very scientific measurement for that or process. And so what this is illuminating is,

It's like, okay, Chachi P is making things up. Well, what would we need to believe that? Is it the source? Well, can we believe the source? How many levels? Do we need to go down three levels of footnotes or does it need seven levels? Or do they have to be verified by...

something, some other AI. So this issue, I think, is a really fundamental thing. It's not a trivial thing of like disinformation for the election. No, no, it goes way beyond that. This is a really core thing at the level of what is truth. It's a consensus of some sort. How do we come to that consensus? And what are the different categories? Maybe there's different categories of things.

you know there's maybe levels or varieties i don't know and that's very exciting because we're going to have to head into that to kind of decide um and it's not a matter of something facebook is going to figure out this is big big challenge is how do we know things which was begun by the scientific method the scientific method began to change how we decided we knew things but that's

So I did a study of the scientific method. I did the first study of the scientific method. And what I realized is a lot of the things that we consider essential to the scientific method were very recent. The double-blind study was like in the 1950s. Placebos were not invented until within my lifetime. And so the scientific method itself is changing very, very rapidly. And so I'm trying to imagine what's the scientific method going to look like in another 50 years?

And I think part of what's happening is it's going to have an AI component and all these other things. But how we know things has been changing. And we're in this process right now of kind of being now illuminated the fact that we're in this thing. We're changing how we decide we know things. And that's very, very exciting and scary.

Yeah, I mean, it's going to be fascinating to watch all this play out. I want to switch gears just a little bit because I wanted to hit on this before we end. We talked a little bit earlier about religion. I'm curious what role you see religion playing in society today and how that might evolve in the future. That's a really good question. I am myself. I have a religious belief.

I think that if we look at the evidence right now, it's pretty clear that organized religions are on the wing. They're just disappearing around the world. The U.S. is almost exceptional in the sense of it's a very modern, has a high living standard and a high religiosity, which is very, very unique. One of the things I can say about Christianity is that

All the countries that have gone atheist were Christians first. So Christianity is the closest thing to atheism. It's really strange. So I think – so I would say standing back, there are several things you can say about religion. One is there's going to be less of the current organized versions of them. And secondly –

The other pattern we see is the schism where even the organized ones become more finely divided in different little local niches. So it's kind of like mass notification that we see in other parts of the culture. I am going to, I would not be surprised to see some new religions based on AI come up. Religions have always been about, throughout history,

People have converted and gravitated to religions that they felt made them more powerful and more successful. I mean, look at Korea. Korea went from a kind of a semi-Buddhist to a Christian state because it was being driven by the people that they saw who were Christian who were successful and like, I want to be like them.

Or your gods are more powerful than my gods. That was a very common thing in the ancient world, was whose god was more powerful? And people who were successful believing these gods...

It's like, yeah, I want that. So I'm going to worship that God because I want to be like them. And that's been one of the major causes. I mean, we think there's some intellectual thing, oh, the theology sounds better, but generally it has not operated that way. It's been much more, I want to be like that person. What do they believe?

There's a lot of encoded ancient wisdom in religion, though, that is beneficial to create success. Exactly right. Right. So in a modern world, yeah, if you don't drink and don't womanize around and stuff and you are a family man, you're probably going to be more successful than somebody else. And so, yeah, I want to be that. I want to be the Islamic guy.

because they were more successful because of their beliefs. Again, some of the things in my book about kindness and compassion and gratitude are ancient wisdom of the religions. And in my observation, people who believe that do better. So yes. So there is a lot of encoded wisdom in the religions. But the other stuff about them is not working as well. And I think...

there could be some new powers from people who kind of dive into AI. Maybe AI helps them understand who they are better. Maybe they can become more themselves by using AI. And that therefore there could be something, not Scientology, but that's one hint at that kind of a thing. Imagine if Scientology really worked, right? I mean, you know, the gizmo stuff. Well, that would be

A lot of people could move into that. And so I think, so it would not surprise me to see some new religions based around AI emerging in the kind of vacuum of the waning of the established religions. And let me say one last thing. And I would expect to see these first in China and maybe Russia because they have a total vacuum of this.

So here's the thing about China, which I spent a lot of time in. There's nothing to believe in. They don't have a religion to believe in. They don't have a scripture. They don't have a constitution that they believe in. There's only about making money and that's not enough. And so there is this hunger for something to believe in. And if there was something like an AI religion that could sweep the country because of the vacuum

of something greater than themselves to believe in. I think we miss the fact that as humans, we have this instinct to be a part of something larger than ourselves. And when that instinct is not fulfilled, it leads to all sorts of unpredictable behavior. Right, right, right. Exactly. Exactly.

So in absence of that, so nationalism is something bigger than yourself to believe in. And so that's why there's going to be a rise in China of nationalism. That's sort of almost inevitable because that's bigger than yourself and you can believe in that. It's your team, China. So, but there could be even bigger, bigger things. And that's, yeah, you want to believe in your purpose in life should suit you, but your meaning in life.

Your passion should suit you, but your purpose and meaning should exceed you, should be bigger than you. And we crave that individually. And so therefore, you know, we want to sign up. We want to be part of a big story, an arc going through it. For me, that big story is technology and life. I see technology as an extension of the same process of life.

in the mind. And so for me, the big arc is this sort of what I call exotropic growth of planets forming and life forming and then minds forming and then technology forming. It's all one long arc through the universe. And so that's what I'm aligned or that's what I'm trying to align myself with is a bigger story of bringing choices and possibilities to everybody so that everybody has a chance to, um,

fulfill their, be the most full of themselves as possible. That's a beautiful place to end this conversation. Thank you so much, Kevin. It was my pleasure. Thanks for the great questions and for your insight. I really appreciate it. I'm a fan and, you know, I really did enjoy this. I had a lot of fun. Thank you. Thanks for listening and learning with us. For a complete list of episodes, show notes, transcripts, and more,

go to fs.blog slash podcast, or just Google The Knowledge Project. Until next time.