Don't Be a Billionaire! Insights from Kevin Kelly, Co-Founder of Wired Magazine | MindHack Ep. 043

Kevin: Right? And actually, it makes it harder to answer that question. And, and if I have any advice that's not in the book for your listeners, it would be [00:00:00] okay.
Listeners out there, try as hard as you can. Never to have a billion dollars. All right. Don't have a billion dollars. You don't want a billion dollars. This is the total, total burden and warp, a hundred million fine, but don't have a billion. 
Cody: Our distinguished guest today is Kevin Kelly, a renowned technology enthusiast and visionary, co-founder of Wired Magazine, where he served as its executive editor for the formative first seven years. Kevin, known as the Senior Maverick at Wired, is also a successful author with his works frequently featured on the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling lists.
His books, such as New Rules for the New Economy and Out of Control delve into the depths of decentralized, emergent systems and technology theories. While his graphic novel, the silver Chord explores the [00:01:00] intricate intersection between robots and angels. One of his most recent work was a book called The Inevitable, and it is already cementing his reputation as a leading voice in technology discourse beyond books and magazines.
Kevin's expertise shines through as the founding editor and co-publisher of Cool Tools, a popular website that has been diligently reviewing tools since 2003. From 1984 to 1990, he held the helm as the publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, bringing unconventional technical news to the public's attention.
A true pioneer in digital connectivity. Kevin co-founded the Annual Hackers Conference and played a pivotal role in launching, well, one of the earliest online services back in 1985. Join us as we delve into Kevin's fascinating journey through the technology landscape, [00:02:00] and explore his insightful views on the future of this ever-evolving domain.
Thank you for being on the podcast, Kevin.
Kevin: It's my pleasure, my privilege. I'm honored and I appreciate the time to chat with you.
Cody: So Kevin, can you share with us the inspiration behind co-founding Wired magazine and what was your vision for it at the time?
Kevin: We wanted, first of all, to be very clear that I, was one of the co-founders. There were a number of people involved in this, and we wanted to make a magazine that we wanted to read. There was no source, there was no publication covering. The news that we wanted to hear. Keep in mind, of course, this is before the web, so it had to be on paper that was in mail to you, basically.
And, um, so there were a bunch of us who were, in our forties and we were otherwise unemployable in the sense that we did not have traditional careers. And , we were sort of slightly contrarian , in many respects. And we came together to make a magazine that we [00:03:00] thought we'd like to read. And I had kind of tried to make a magazine like this from the basis of the magazine.
 I was editing at that time, which was this unorthodox technical news. I had something called Signal. I had a magazine called Signal that I was trying to start up. It was unlikely to have maybe gone very far. Because while the ideas were correct, it was missing the ingredient. And that ingredient came with Louis Roseto, who was the primary co-founder of Wired.
And his idea was to take these kind of large ideas, conceptual ideas that I was working with, and , wrap it around people, and wrap people around it. Make this, make the magazine about the culture and the people around the technology and the ideas to make heroes out of the nerds. And, he said something else to me that convinced me that this would work.
He says, I wanna make a magazine that feels like it's been mailed back from the future. [00:04:00] I thought, oh yeah, okay. That's, that's, I'm, I'm on board. That's, that's what we want to do. And that's what we were trying to do. We were trying to make it feel like it was being mailed back from the future. And so we were making this magazine that we wanted and, the business proposition was the difficult part because, there was nothing else like wired.
There was no category news stands, didn't know where to put it. The advertising sales didn't know who to sell ads to. And we said, now we wanna make a technology lifestyle magazine. People would say, what? That doesn't make any sense. There's computer magazines, you're gonna have computer ads, but what's a technology lifestyle mag?
What's the technology lifestyle? So it was an uphill battle, but we were imagining, and the business proposition that we made to the advertisers was, look, there were all these technology people who were very involved in it and nobody's talking to them, but we can reach them because we're [00:05:00] gonna make a magazine that they want to read.
And that's what happened. So it was. We are full of near death experiences. I mean, the, the number of times when we were this close to failure in bankruptcy was again and again. And so it looks kind of inevitable if I'm looking at the past, of course. But it was not at all, not at all clear at the time that this was actually going to work.
But we believed that it could, and we were making a magazine for ourselves is the short answer.
Cody: Can you describe what some of the biggest challenges you faced during those early years at Wired?
Kevin: Well, getting advertisers, because
Cody: Hmm.
Kevin: Getting subscribers. The main business of, of magazines, the main customer is not the readers, is actually the advertisers. Okay. So we could find readers. We were pretty sure and, and we did, [00:06:00] but finding advertisers was a big hurdle because, there's branding issues. , companies with money are very concerned about who they become associated with in the magazine. So if they're, if they put an ad in some kind of crummy, you know, rotten Magazine or whatever it is, it hurts the brand. So they're very reluctant to try anything new. And then there was this other thing, what's the category?
So like, if you're selling computer, sure. You're go into a computer magazine who's gonna advertise and wired. We said we, we want clothing, advertisements. We want the high end stuff. And they're saying in a computer magazine and we're saying, well, it's not really a computer magazine.
Don't, it's something different. Uh, it's, it's like a lifestyle magazine. And so, um, So it was a very hard sale, just convincing people cause they hadn't seen it. But even when they had seen it, it was like, when is this? What is this stuff? I don't, I don't get it. Who can read this? What's this about? And so there [00:07:00] was a long, very long process of people kind of coming to understand that the, the nerds, the technical people were the center.
Was the center of the, um, of the culture. There was a tendency , to think that this was marginal. This was kind of like teenage boy stuff. We're saying, no, no, no. This is, this is gonna be the center of the culture. This is, we, we want to make the nerds cool and, and this will be cool and you want to advertise with us because it's cool.
It was not cool when we began. They were the AV guys. , they were the geeks and the nerds and they were not cool. And so that was part of the uphill battle.
Cody: I will say, I mean, as a kid, if, if I was looking at a range of magazines and I saw Wired, I picked up Wired every single time. It was my absolutely my favorite magazine growing up,
Kevin: right, right. But you were, were you a nerd?
Cody: kind of, I guess a little bit.[00:08:00] 
Kevin: Well, anyway, yeah. But, and so, , so now everybody says, it's kind of obvious. We see what it is, where it does have competition now, , it's, it's very obvious that it's, this is the technological, it's the center in some ways of the culture. The screen is no longer, it's no longer books and printed material.
It's the screen. All that now seems, very, very cliche and commonplace. But it was definitely not the, the, the process before.
Cody: So when you were with Wired, you were, you held the executive editor for seven years, if I recall. And, , I'm curious even now, how has your understanding of technology and say its relationship to our society, how has it changed, in your view, like,
Kevin: Well,
Cody: headed towards a, apocalypse, uh, 
Kevin: no, no. no. Wired. Wired has always been the most optimistic and I've become even more optimistic than I was before. I'm now radically [00:09:00] optimistic. And even when we start, optimism was not in fashion. There was kind of a, it was, it was a, there was a recession at the time and, now the stay of the world.
What, what's happened, what's changed over the, the 30 years Wired started 30 years ago. It was amazing. What's changed over 30 years is now whenever something new comes along, the very first question that people have is, um, How's this gonna bite? How's this gonna hurt? What's wrong? What's wrong with that?
That's the, everybody knows that there's a downside to technology. And now it's the first thing we, we, we say. It's not like, oh, that's cool. No. It's like, oh, how's that gonna hurt? And
so, That kind of bias is, is now kind of the resident stance for most things. We don't go, Ooh, ah, we go, Hmm, I'm not [00:10:00] sure.
And so, , so we have to overcome some of that, which is to say every, you know, I mean, there's a whole rant about why we should be optimistic. And so that's part of my job now is to, continue the optimism. I think Wired is less optimistic than it was. In part it's kind of, you know, It's older, it's kind of more mature.
It's run by different people who aren't as optimistic as we were. And by the way, when we were running it, we were total owners and, and it was fun because we could do whatever we wanted to, and we wanted to always push things to the edge. Now it's owned by Conde Nast and the editors for hire, and they have to be a little concerned about the, you know, the bottom line where we were like, push it to the floor and just let it go.
And so, um, so I understand, I understand that. , but I, my job is to help people become more optimistic than they might ordinarily, because I think it's only the, [00:11:00] the, the, if we look at all the great things we have today, they were built by some crazy optimist in the past who believe that that thing was not only possible. But that it could be real, and that is the kind of optimism that we need to make great things.
Cody: Right. I think you have in your book that we should be optimistic because optimistic people solve problems, but it seems like our society's engulfed in in a culture war, and we're not focusing on solving problems. The problems seem to be neglected, at least in the media sense. So how do we orient ourselves to remain optimistic when we see so much conflict?
Kevin: um, yeah, when, the short answer is that I'm optimistic not because I think. The problems of the world aren't real or big or serious. They are, I acknowledge all those problems, but I believe that our ability to solve the problems is even greater than, than, than we think, and [00:12:00] greater than the growing, they're increasingly even faster than our problems. so, also, I think there are plenty of people who are focused on our problems, which is good. And I'm glad that they're there and that's necessary. And they're doing that job really well. There are just not enough people who are focused on our opportunities and our, our strengths and, uh, who believe that we can do impossible, seemingly impossible things and want to make them happen.
And so some of those things are big things and we've kind of stopped making really big things. We're kind of almost allergic to building big things. People are totally suspicious. Of anything big. Uh, lots of people say they're anti-capitalist, but I think they're kind of anti-big
and they just big things of any sort, just give them the highs.
And so, we're now at the scale. We have a planetary economy. We have planetary problems. [00:13:00] We have to do planetary solutions, that they're gonna be big. And, we have a, we have an allergy to bigness right now, which I think is preventing us from being optimistic because we have to make some big things. And so, I believe that if we can become more optimistic and believe that we can increase our ability to solve problems faster than the problems, then I think we can then imagine some big things and then believe that they could be made and then that will help make them come true.
Cody: Yeah, I think today we have, I, I don't know if we would, Characterize it as an epidemic, but a lot of the people who become entrepreneurs, they're building apps. Maybe they're selling online courses, but the default for an entrepreneur today has drastically changed or the definition, at least from where it was 30 years ago.
Kevin: Yes. And even 30 years [00:14:00] ago was, was quite a change from, you know, say 30 years before that. So when I was growing up, I, I remember this very succinctly in the sixties, um, my father had a friend who was doing a startup. And at that time, in the fifties and sixties, if you were doing a start, if you had a business that you were gonna start, you were gonna start a business, it wasn't called startup, you're gonna start a business that was often code for that you're unemployed or that you were fired or whatever.
It was not. Something cool. It was like totally crazy talk for someone to imagine that they're gonna start a business. It was just so, so unusual. People were not, I mean, everybody was trying to work for a Fortune 500 company. That was the cool thing. Going off and starting your own business was like, I wouldn't say it was for losers, but it was almost [00:15:00] like that.
It was like poor guy. And so that's kind of switched around with the rise of Silicon Valley, where starting your own business and being cool and working for a startup became the thing that everybody wanted to do. That's, this is new. This is a very new thing. And, that's, you know, still changing right now, even as we speak in terms of , what people expect and what it means and, what's entailed and also. right now, you know, there's startups, but you know, with the DAO and other kind of stuff, crypto, there's this idea that you can actually have other kinds of organizations to do work. So it may be that maybe in 20 years from now, the cool thing is to be part of a co-op, you know, working with some kind of a Dow, Dow driven, you know, planetary level co-op, whatever it is.
So, so things will change.
Cody: I think your, your take on optimism and society and trying to help others be [00:16:00] more optimist, I commend you for that because it's way easier to be pessimistic about the future. And in your TED Talk from 2021, you gave an account that, that we should be optimist about the future because it has always been the optimist who created the solution to the problems that has improved people's lives.
So, I have to admit, I'm, I've always been a little bit on the pessimistic side and I still feel pessimistic about the future. in your talk, you didn't really give any specific insights, , or questions perhaps. If somebody is a pessimist and they want to become more of an optimist, especially about the future, what advice would you give them?
Kevin: I think the easiest and the primary advice is to take a longer view. To take the long view, both in the past, in the future. So if you'd take a long view in the past and actually look at the scientific evidence, the impartial accounts of what has happened in the [00:17:00] last couple hundred years, or even the last a hundred years, you have to acknowledge that progress has been real.
That it's much better to be alive if you have a, if you have a time machine that could send you to any year, but you were gonna be born as a random person. Maybe slave, maybe king, maybe other, and may with gender all randomly what year do you wanna be sent to? There is no way any sane person would go back into the past and choose a path, because you're likely have a pretty, pretty rough life because progress has been real.
So the conditions of that progress are still with us. So it's very statistically likely that it'll continue. So that's the first thing, have a long view of the past. And the other one is have a long view of the future so we can be optimistic, because if we can just create a few percent, just a few percent more than we [00:18:00] make every year, then we can be optimistic.
If you take a long view, if you take a long view of, uh, 10 or 20 years, then it's incredible what we can accomplish in that. And any kind of, like, even major downturns and setbacks don't really register. They're easily overcome. If you take a longer view, if you just take the fur view, then you're kind of stymied by these volatility and, and the ups and downs and the wars, temporary wars here and there.
But if you take a longer view, you can say, oh yeah, we're gonna be a lot better in 20 years. This is really, this is going in a good direction. So that's what I would say take a longer view.
Cody: Well, not to beat a dead horse, but I had some thoughts come up that could be, , this alternative, version where we look at. Say our government today, it's kind of become almost like a puppet government. Like nothing gets done in Congress and it seems that , you have all the lobbying companies who get them to sign bills that aren't [00:19:00] really in the best interest of the people.
And we have diminishing of power at the president. Uh, and so it seems like things are certainly a little turbulent, even perhaps more turbulent in terms of American society than they were 20, 30 years ago. We no longer have nationalism because we have nationalism within nationalism because if there's so many different tribes and pax that all kind of seem to separate each other.
So it's creating more hostility towards other groups. And I can't help but wonder how are we going to solve that? Is it just look back at historically things have gotten better. So I'm, I'm curious if you have any thoughts.
Kevin: Yeah. Well like, okay, first of all, there's two things. One is I was saying, you know, a longer view will help your optimism. The second thing will be a more global view. So you were mentioning US politics, US stuff. Increasingly, the US doesn't matter as much. So, China plus [00:20:00] India together has 10 times the population of the US 10 times, and they're increasingly gonna become very modern and, and play a tremendous role in the world as we can see right now with China alone, let alone India.
So, it's very parochial to think about the world in terms of just the us. The US is weird in many ways. It's a very weird country in terms of, and mean, literally exceptional in terms of a lots of things including, like, say guns, right? I mean, it's just way off the charts. So, so it, I think, I think you're, it's very parco to just talk about US politics in terms of the future because it is increasingly not as important as it was.
And secondly, Talking about the weirdness and the dysfunction of say, um, the, um, the US politics is, man, all I can say is you obviously have not read enough of US history read about the US history even a [00:21:00] hundred years ago. And you'll see like they were totally bonkers. I mean, it's just crazy, crazy vice presidents shooting, you know, political rivals.
It's, it's the depth of, of what was going on is, is isn't really appreciated. We romanticized the past because the politics of the past were even worse than they are today in terms of what was, how you got things done and what was the deals that were being made and the, the craziness. And so, that's what I meant by taking a longer view.
If you really read what was going on, even say like 30, 40 years ago, It was not pretty. It was, there was no, there was no sense in which that was a golden pass for politics. Come on. It was pretty ruthless. So, so I, I think, that's what I would say is, is elevate the horizon and then widen the view to a planetary view, because that is the future.
We're having a [00:22:00] planetary future. We're no longer, we can't even, there isn't even national economies. There's only global economies at this point. We're all meshed in together and we're kind of stuck with China no matter what. And it's like, well, what do we want to have that relationship? It's like, you know, uh, we're gonna have some kind of relationship with them.
We just cannot decouple entirely.
Cody: I assume you're a Elon fan.
Kevin: I'm, I was an Elon fan of the. Uh, the Pryor Elon,
Cody: Hmm. 
Kevin: the current Elon, don't know. He's, he's, um, there's, uh, what, what's the word I want? Um, yes, I, I'll stop right there. I, I was, I was a fan of the former Elon.
Cody: Hmm. Okay. Kind of switching gears, I wanted to mention about [00:23:00] you being the co-founder of The Hackers Conference, and I think hacking is a very misunderstood part of society. Can you tell me about what led you to Co-found this Hackers Conference?
Kevin: Yeah. So hacking was a term that came out MIT and it was applied to the, originally the railroad engineer guys who were kind of making large systems and they were. Um, they were exploring and they called that hacking and they were makeup weird stuff. And they called that hacking. And it was a very, um, it was complimentary.
It was not a derogatory term. It was, a positive sense of hacking like a hijacked in the eighties and especially in the nineties, to talk about the nefarious and, kind of the, the bad version of hacking where you're hacking into something, you steal things. [00:24:00] We made the hackers conference right at the cusp when we were trying to maintain the positive use of hacker and try to actually nudge the culture into accepting hackers as a positive term.
It was based somewhat on the book by Stephen Levy called Hackers, so that hackers conference. As we originally envisioned, was to bring together the three generations of, of existing hackers who were programmers primarily, , and kind of part of the people that made the Silicon Valley culture. , and so it was an attempt both to bring them together and to really seed this culture and also to work a little bit in trying to nudge the association with the word hackers.
I think we failed. It didn't work. Um, people talk about hackathons and hacking.
So in that sense, hacking is retained. Its positive term, but hackers is still the negative.
Cody: Even like white hat hacker.[00:25:00] 
Kevin: yeah, even white hackers are kind of like, yeah, they're still hackers. They're still people that you, you may not want to trust, right?
They're un, they're untrustworthy. And so, um, So, but it, but you know, the original idea of the conference was in the, the white hat version of it where these were people who were, were thinking about systems and that's sort of what the hacking was, was they were looking at the telephone system, the early internet.
They were in some cases the, the designers of them, but they were also the explorers of trying to figure out how it worked, how it broke, , where it was going. And so, the conference still runs today, but I have nothing to do with it. We left that long ago. It's independently run. It's mostly gray beards who attend.
 There are other conferences that have come up that have kind of replaced the Hackers Conference as an area where those Alpha geeks got to meet and come together. Food Camp is one example of that. So it's not what it was, but at the [00:26:00] time, it was part of this kind of white hat bringing together, celebrating this idea of hacking of.
Exploring, trying stuff. Doing as a way of thinking, making stuff was kind of like the earliest maker. The maker fair and the maker movement kind of came a little bit from this idea of the hacking and the hackathons.
Cody: Hmm. I would like to think that today hacker isn't as stigmatized as it was in the past. I mean, you have. Fortune 500 companies, they all have bug bounty programs. There is software written for you to submit bugs and get a bounty on that. And they should, they make their whole living based on that.
Kevin: ,
Yeah. I hope, I mean, I, I, I hope I'm wrong. I hope the hacker maintains some of that sense, but I think for most people, when they hear the word hacker, [00:27:00] they don't associate
with that. They associate with getting hacked.
Cody: Well, on another note, you were involved in the launch of, well, a pioneering online service. Could you share a bit about that experience and, and how you like to see the evolution of online community sense?
Kevin: Yeah, so kind of the internet's been around, but it was a very, very small, tiny experimental, network run by, um, academics, primarily in universities. And during that period of time, there was the popular bulletin bores, which were basically little servers we would call 'em today, that, that ran people's bedrooms and you had to use a phone modem, literally landline. To, to, to get in. And they, they could accommodate one or two people at a time the most. So you left, you had a conversation by people coming in, [00:28:00] logging in, leaving their comments, exiting. The next person would come in, leave their comments, and that was called the bulletin. It was like posting up on the bulletin board and you could go read the comments and come back.
But there were virtual, you know, SK online and that was the online world. And then, , we started something called the Well, which was a jacked up version of that. It was really big. I mean, like, we could have, I forget how many, maybe 30 people on it. Once we had 30 modems, and each modem could have maybe one or two people.
I, I don't remember coming in by the phone line. So, so there was a way to kind of have like a bigger scaled up bulletin board with the same idea. People would log on, you leave your comments in a thread, and then you would log off. Leaving room for another person to log on. That was called the well. And it was, there were other kind of evolutions where you could have threaded conversations, you could start more than one thread.
So [00:29:00] it was, it was better and approved in the bulletin board in that way. And, eventually it kind of grew and grew in the number of people that we could, , get on. And, at that time it was still something where you had to call in to that number and the internet was this idea that you could get on the internet and then go anywhere.
And we wanted to put the well onto the internet. And that was a really, really big project because even AOL and Comper, all these other ones were snot on the internet. They were all separate. You could only send mail to within that. So in the beginning, you could only send mail to anybody on the well, but nobody outside the, well, because it wasn't on the internet.
And so we wanted to put the well onto the internet. And it took a very, very long time because at that time the NSF National Science Foundation ran the internet and they prohibited commercial [00:30:00] use. They said only you had needed a, a, you needed a, a university or non-commercial address. And, uh, they were afraid that it would be used for commercial use.
And we said, well, you know, it's crazy cuz that's, that's where it's going. But anyway, we eventually made an agreement where people would have to sign a waiver saying they're not gonna use it for commercial use in order to get onto the well. But at that point, when we did, we actually had the first public access to the internet.
So if you paid $8 a month, To the, well for this bulletin board, you could have an address that would allow you to send email anywhere else on the internet. There was no other way to do it unless you worked for a university or a big corporation. So that's what the Well was, was basically the first online public, first public online ramp to [00:31:00] the internet.
Cody: , and whatever ended up happening with it.
Kevin: So the problem with it was you needed kind of command line coding. It was, it was sk just, just green screen. And, um, what was coming was the, , graphical user interface. , the well was a nonprofit and I never figured out a way to get. The necessary investment that needed to grow in a nonprofit. There are ways to do that today.
Open AI just did the whole thing where they raised billions of dollars even though they were a nonprofit. So I, we should have been more creative in figuring out a way to get investment into this nonprofit. And so, um, so, so we couldn't scale up. We never went to a graphical user interface. AOL came along and everything else just, just ran past it.
However, I [00:32:00] would say that the well continues, it's still working today. They're still some of the same people on who liked that old scale retro feel. They did eventually did make a, a graphical user interface. The web, they did the web version of it, so it is accessible. , so for people who want a bit of history, they can go to the well and get an account and you can have your conversations.
In an old school way, but it never, it was very influential. Stephen, Steve Case and other people who did AOL and went crazy and took over the world. They were paying attention. They were on the well, looking at what we were learning, but we didn't have the foresight to actually scale up and remain, , a contender.
So that was, I would say, a failure. And probably on my part,
Cody: At the time, so you still had a job at Wired, and so was this just the side project that you were trying to launch into something, but it started as a nonprofit, so you weren't really attempting to necessarily make [00:33:00] money, you were just doing it for the sake of doing it because you saw this new technology and you saw how you could put it together in a way that could benefit others.
Kevin: this was long before Wired. This was at, when I was at Whole Earth.
This is in 85. 84, 85 when we started. So I was working for Howorth, which was a nonprofit. Oh, I was running Howorth, which was a nonprofit. And um, so that's seven years before Wired.
Cody: Hmm
Kevin: So when Wired came along, you know, wired was this at the, of the web.
And the year after, or even later in the year that the wire began, the web began. And we were very involved in developing the web and inventing the web as it is. And so, that was the project. And once the web, once the web started the, well, it seemed less important because now he could do lots of the things that the well was trying to do.
The web was, was doing even better.
Cody: And so you've been [00:34:00] around since the beginning of the internet. I'm wondering if you have any thoughts, whether it's on AI or predictions about the next major shift in technology. Like where do you think we're headed?
Kevin: Yeah. So I think over the long term, and not in the next year, not in two years, maybe not in five years, but over the next decade, I think where we're going to is, , what I would call the spatial web, um, 3D web, sometimes called the mirror world, what I call, and sometimes some people call it the metaverse.
So that's very confusing, which is this idea that you have, , spatial. So we would be doing this, but when three dimensions, like a VR or augmented reality, we'd have smart glasses and goggles and other things, but that we would be interfacing in three dimensions and that there would be a three-dimensional web on top of the actual physical world.
And so they, it's called the [00:35:00] special web. , and AI's gonna help that because a lot of the content they might need, You can't really be generated unless you have AI kind of in the back. It's not something you would feel or see, but be working in the background to do the rendering, to do the modeling, to do all the kinds of navigation and sensing that you need, the mapping that you'd need to have a spatial web.
So I think that's where we're going. But as I said, I think it's like driverless cars. We can kind of see it. And we mistake often that for being a clear vision, we mistake for being close. I think completely self-driving cars as a mainstream thing is still decades away.
And I think even though we can see this spatial web, I think it's many decades away.
Cody: And, and so when you say the metaverse, are you referring to Mark Zuckerberg's Metaverse, or a Metaverse in general? This layer between [00:36:00] physical reality and reality.
Kevin: So lots of people are using it in different terms. The, including, you know, Neil Stevens, who, who invented the term, , I use it in the term of, , what I call the mirror world, meaning that it's a, um, it's not a, well when you're wearing the, the glasses or the viewers for that world, they're see through. So you see the real world and you have an overlay on top of that.
That is what I would call the metaverse or the mirror world. And, , rather than the virtual reality where you have opaque glasses and you see owning an alternative world, okay? You don't see the real world. You see an alternative imaginary world. that's what you get with vr. That's what the Oasis was.
But the mirror world or the [00:37:00] metaverse, depending what you want to call it, it's the real world with the virtual laid on top of it, and you can kind of see both switch back and forth. They're merged together, so it's a bigger, it's a really big thing that will most occurred to most people. They'll see it first at work. Lots of people who don't have desks will be using this, you know, warehouses and training and doing physical things. Even making virtual screens. I just saw this the other day. they have a new version of this where you can get 12 screens, as many screens as you want, as big as you want. And they're the same resolution as looking at this screen here, but they're all just from your, virtual.
Um, so you see the room, it's like your room, but there's actual screens there that are virtual, and you can use them in the same way that I would use them in the same resolution, but they're just virtual screens. So that's the kind of way that we're [00:38:00] gonna see it at first.
Cody: Okay. I want to switch to the meat and potatoes, uh, which is your book. Excellent Advice for Living Wisdom. I wish I'd known earlier by Kevin Kelly. So my first question, it's a little long,
Kevin: Yeah.
Cody: Kevin. On your 68th birthday, you embarked on a beautiful project of writing down life lessons and wisdoms for your young adult children.
Lessons you wish you had known earlier. As time went on, this compilation expanded, covering a wide range of topics from ethical living to setting ambitious goals, to generosity, compassion and practical advice on career relationships, parenting, finances, travel, and troubleshooting. Can you share with us what inspired you to start this endeavor and how it involved over the years into a compilation of valuable advice?
Kevin: Yeah. I've always collected little compact sayings and quotes and proverbs. [00:39:00] I like them. I like their, their form factor. I liked having them reduced their, whatever, their knowledge and wisdom into a little, a little kind of like a zip file and, who you can unzip a whole book of advice just from that one little sentence.
And I, I started to, write my own versions of it. For advice, thinking of my kids where whom we did not give a lot of, uh, specific advice to. We kind of try to model our, our lives rather than telling them, cuz I think kids don't really listen to their parents, but they tend to watch what their parents do. And so, um, I began writing these down and then at a certain point I realized I had enough to gift them to my adult kids. And, they went very well. They, they, they shared them, I shared them. They went kind of viral and I realized that there was a lot there. So I kept [00:40:00] doing it, a year after year after year, adding more.
And what I was trying to do was literally remind myself of things that I knew maybe the ancients had been passed on and people have talked about forever, kind of like. Maybe information that's not new, but I was trying to put into my own words, plus new things that just were things that I just picked up in living for 70 years that I thought, I really do wish I had known this earlier.
Someone had told me earlier. And so I try to put those into a book, um, format over time, because even though they were on the internet, it's kind of hard to collect and it would be, it's really handy to have them into something that you could gift to somebody. So that, that was the origin. It was in some ways written for myself to remind myself, to change my behavior.
So I, I think of these as four 50 reminders,
Cody: Hmm.
Kevin: things that maybe you didn't know, or things that you just [00:41:00] learned that you should be reminded of every now and then.
Cody: And, and so it's funny that you say that because I'm actually, uh, we're just weeks away from launching an app. It's called Mental Reminders, and I found that there was no other a app out there that does this. It's not a task app. It, what it does is it is, you can insert knowledge, little sayings, idioms tidbits.
You watch a TV show or a conversation, you insert it into the app. You can categorize it with like a label awareness or stress, and then you can set it up so that it will randomly choose from your entries, say every morning. It will randomly choose an item that you have previously entered into this database to send you as a push notification on your phone.
So every day you'll get three push notifications in the morning. Afternoon and evening, and it will remind you of these things that you want to remember, but most people don't have the discipline of having what you would call a commonplace book and actually going through that on a regular [00:42:00] basis.
So I'm trying to, to make up for that by kind of putting it into an app. So a lot of the things in your book I think would be fantastic. For the app, I'm certainly gonna add it to mine.
Kevin: Sure. Sounds great. Uh, yeah, I think that's what it is. It's, um, reminders and that's the origin of it. And I, and I use the book, it's myself. I mean, I, I put this into this kind of a form of little sayings to enable me to remind myself because, you know, it's like I'm, I'm, you know if a goal does not have a schedule, it's just a dream.
So you want to give a schedule, you want to have deadlines. I remind myself all the time, give myself a deadline. Deadlines are good to help you ship. And so, , that's the kinds of, advice that the book is filled with.
Cody: I'd like to go over some of the advice that that stood out to me , from the book. Let's see. So you had a quote. Being able to listen well is a superpower [00:43:00] while listening to somebody you love and keep asking until there is no more. 
Kevin: Okay. Yeah. So the idea is you, you ask them what it is that they feel or thinking, and you 'em three times until there's no more. You say, is there more? And then is there more? And that third time they're gonna be saying something close to the truth because they've said the kind of obvious and easy things to say, and they, and that kind of, the rule of three is really good.
And it's used in, in therapy all the time, particularly couples therapy where they're trying to, to get to the bottom of something important. It the, the, the sayer almost needs the listener to help them draw it out of them, because they're probably incapable. Uh, oftentimes you're incapable of saying it cuz you don't even, you don't even know what it is.
And it's that act of being asked to go deeper and deeper that actually kind of reveals it [00:44:00] and allows that person to say it. And so the two, you're, when you're listening, you're actually doing a service to the speaker by deliberately receiving what it is and enabling them together to go down to that third level to say something important.
Cody: Hmm. Where did this come from? This particular
Kevin: So this particular one came from a very famous, I mean the practice came from a very famous therapist, Esther Perel , who's a very famous, marriage counselor. And it's a technique that she uses in her therapy.
Cody: Hmm.
Kevin: So there's another rule of three. In the book, and this is the, the rule three for, for danger or survival, which is the, um, the universal appeal for help is three of something. Three whistle calls, three [00:45:00] blasts, three drums, three screams, three yells. So you do something 1, 2, 3. And that is the signal of help.
Needed help, wanted of assistance. SOS three. know, if you, all you have is a stick that you're going to whack a tree. You do it three times. You take a whistle, you do three whistles, and you just repeat that. And that's the universal call for help.
Cody: Another one is that no is an acceptable answer without a 
Kevin: Yeah. 
Cody: How can we become more comfortable with this?
Kevin: Yeah, I've, I've, that took me a long time to learn. I learned it a little bit from my mentor Stuart brand who, who did another version of the, the, it is you, the idea is you don't have to give an excuse when you say no. You need to do it politely and gently, and you can [00:46:00] also do it in a way that makes it seem a favor to the other person that you said no. And that's actually the best way. So, , where like, you know, you don't, uh, it's like, I, I can't give you the kind of attention and care that this needs, so therefore I have to say no. So saying no firmly and gently is a great skill to have.
Cody: It reminded me of a book I, I read a while back called, when I Say No, I Feel Guilty by Manuel Smith. And I think this is the premier book that is helpful. If you're somebody who always feels like you're some, you're, you can't say no to, to certain people or, or requests because eventually you can give and give and give until you have nothing left.
And so, so just like the saying of put on your mask first is an important concept that I think a lot of people just out of the good of [00:47:00] the heart aren't able to say no.
Kevin: Mm-hmm. Yep.
Cody: So another one you have here is perhaps the most counterintuitive truth of the universe is the more you give, the more you get. Can you explain this?
Kevin: It's so weird. There's a paradox that the most selfish thing you can do, the most selfish thing you can do is to be generous. The most selfish thing you can do is give stuff away. It's like really weird. And it's because the more you give them, more you get, and that mathematics doesn't work. If everybody was giving away more than they were getting, where is it?
Where's it coming from? But it's true. And so there's, there, there's this weird necessary paradox at the center. And, it's true for time. It's true for kindness. It's true for so many things that, um, that's one thing I've changed my mind about over time is that I now see that the, I now understand that the default human behavior is [00:48:00] selflessness, not selfishness.
That people will generally trust a stranger. Be kind to you, giving your best. Be selfless if you give him at all the chance to do so. And yes, if you do that, if you trust strangers, if you are, if you assume everybody is nice, if you assume that everybody is selfless, then every once in a while you are gonna be cheated or robbed. if you count up all the blessings you've had, you'll realize that that's just a small tax that you should be willing to pay gladly in order for the huge gains that you've gotten from people giving you the best because you've treated them the best.
Cody: Have you read the book Give and Take by Adam Grant?
Kevin: I have not.
Cody: No. That is the premier book on. Why Helping others [00:49:00] drives our own success.
Kevin: I'll add it to my list.
Cody: Very, very well written book and informative. That expands a lot on, on top of that, that really solid piece of advice. Let's see, another one. So keep showing up. 99% of success is just showing up. Most success is just persistence.
Kevin: Yep. And, we can accomplish so much in 10 years. Miraculous amounts in 10 years that don't seem even possible to do in six months. And so, if you're persistent over the long period of time, you can be unstoppable. Okay. And so, that relentless showing up is both, basically that's the definition of professionalism and mean professionals or like you show up.
You don't feel like it, but you're gonna write [00:50:00] again this morning because you're a professional and you're showing up. And so that, that's, so important where you, you're kind of, you're gonna do the work, even if you don't feel like if you're not inspired, whatever it is, it doesn't matter. You're gonna make crappy work today, that's fine.
You need to make a lot of crap to get the good stuff. So you're just fulfilling your, your duties of showing up. And, you do have to ask yourself every now and then. If you should keep doing what you're doing, that's fine. You can question that. But if you do decide that that's what you should do, you need to keep showing up. I, I, you know, it's just, it's just really remarkable how powerful that is.
Cody: Yeah, I, I started my first business at 14, and I had probably seven or eight different businesses, even in my, my twenties. Uh, a lot of them failed, but I didn't, I kept going, so that, that's something that I think a lot of my peers couldn't, couldn't meet. I mean, [00:51:00] I, I was in a very special circumstance because my parents died, so I, I only saw one path forward and it's like the Spanish conquistador who burned all of his ships when there was no retreat, you only see one way forward and I gritted it out and did what I needed to do.
Kevin: Yep. Yeah. And, and, and that goes to another, you know, advice about failing and failing forward and failing fast and failing better, which is that, um, you just need to do lots of things, most of which will fail most of 90% of it, which is not gonna be very good in order to get to the great stuff. There's just.
I have seen no other way, any, anybody that I know who's been remarkable, even my own life, in terms of accomplishments. You have to generate a lot of stuff that is just gonna be tossed or forgotten in order to make the great stuff you can make good stuff [00:52:00] kind of all right. And that's one of the problems with lots of corporate things is that they can't afford to make really bad things, but they also aren't capable of making good things because they don't make the bad things.
So you have to want to be able to it to be kind of free to generate a lot of crap. And that's the best way to do that, is just to do it on a regular basis. Keep showing up and you'll be kind of, you'll, you'll inadvertently generate a lot of crap. But that's okay because it's, it's that, it's that exercise of filling it out and knowing that you have more, where it came from and just kind of producing it in a generous way.
Um, and saying, yeah, okay, that wasn't good, but I got more there. I'll do it again. And so, that generosity, so to speak, is actually a key to really arriving at the great stuff.
Cody: Hmm. I know we're short on time. Do you have a few more for just a few more points?
Kevin: I have a few more. Yes.
Cody: Okay, great. [00:53:00] Y you have another one here. It's be more generous than necessary. There's no point in being the richest person in the cemetery.
Kevin: Yes, that's true. That is true. Um, it's, it's sort of, um, you know, you won't really regret being generous again because the weird thing is, is that, um, like if you, if you say tithe or give away, Even up, even up to 10% of what it is that you get in a year. You might, you might miss that 10% of purchasing power, but it will pale in comparison to the other blessings that you'll get from, from giving it away, from sharing it.
It's just, it's just remarkable how, how that works. So, yeah. Take the long view.[00:54:00] 
Cody: And that reminded me of another book I haven't finished re. Reading it yet, but it's called Die With Zero
Kevin: Yes, it's a great book. It's fabulous. There's actually a previous book, not really acknowledged that I like to call Die Broke, and both of 'em are talking about, Well, di with zero is a little bit more enlarged, but the dye broke one was really talking about, being able to, if you are gonna pass something on to the next generation, you should do it while you're alive because it's more fun.
You have much more control. It's healthier to the recipients. And, you know, I've seen it with my own eyes. Inheriting a lot of money is a real burden. I mean, if we're talking about a lot of money, it's a real burden for people not at all a blessing as you might think. And so, you know, you wanna be very careful about doing that.
And that's one way to be careful about doing it, is doing it while you're [00:55:00] alive.
Cody: Hmm. Yeah, I've worked my entire life to get to a point where I can, I can be independent and I've become, I've achieved a level of certain of financial success that I think most people can only dream of. But also having sold my company is, I've felt completely lost, like, not sure what to do next.
There's a great book called Second Mountain by David Books that helped to paint the picture, so to speak. Whereas most of us spend our first lives trying to get to the first mountain, which is fame, which is glory success. But then you realize that the destination was the journey. And then we spend the rest of our lives trying to get to the second mountain, which is, is social connection, it tribes, community social impact.
And so that's kind of where I'm at, is that I've gotta, I've made, I've made the money, but I also feel kind of miserable because I don't have a driving force and I'm not sure what what's next.
Kevin: Right. Yeah. This is what I've said. You know, it's like we're all kind of on [00:56:00] this journey to understand the meaning of our life. And the weird, again, the other paradox of the universe is that the purpose of your life is to figure out the purpose of your life. Okay? That's, that, that sounds completely ridiculous, but that's kind of what it's about.
And, the weird, again, the unusual, unexpected thing is, is that, becoming famous and having a billion dollars does not answer that question.
Cody: Hmm.
Kevin: Right? And actually, it makes it harder to answer that question. And, and if I have any advice that's not in the book for your listeners, it would be okay.
Listeners out there, try as hard as you can. Never to have a billion dollars. All right. Don't have a billion dollars. You don't want a billion dollars. This is the total, total burden and warp, a hundred million fine, but don't have a billion. And so, it's terrible for your kids as well. And so the, this journey of finding meaning in your life is, [00:57:00] is a journey that, uh, will take most of your, your life to, to figure out.
And it's never not a destination. There all the remarkable people that I know the most accomplished are still asking that question is, what do I wanna do when I grow up? Okay. And as I said, having fame and other things is, is in the way now. And so you wanna be setting off a course where if, if at all possible, you wanted to invent a new way of being successful.
Cody: Hmm. And I think as a, as a last quote from your book, something that that struck with me is you say before you are old, attend as many funerals as you can bear. And listen, nobody talks about the departed achievements. Only thing people will remember is the kind of person you were achieving.
Kevin: yeah, yeah. Don't work to acquire work to become, but pay a lot of attention who it is that you're becoming. And by the way, it will [00:58:00] take everybody around you to help you become yourself. So you cannot be, you cannot truly become yourself by yourself. You need everyone else to help you become unique.
It's kind of weird. You need everyone else to help you become unique. You can't truly become yourself by yourself. And so, so you're on this journey of trying to figure out who we are and what we're, and what we're meaning, and, and, and that. The more you can find the meaning, the easier it's gonna be to make a living.
It's it's work. It's, again, it doesn't kind of make sense, but it does work out that way. The more that you are your only, the more that you are unique, less you can be imitated by ai. By the way, you know, the, the, the more, the more conventional you are, the more you'll be AI replaceable. The more improbable you are and less predictable, the less likely you are gonna be replaced by ai.[00:59:00] 
So you want to be on a journey where you're kind of doing this improbable thing. The thing that made you weird as a kid can make you great as an adult if you don't lose it. So you want to keep that weirdness. You want, , you wanna, um, you want to. Professionalize your weirdness in some ways.
And, head for that area where, very few people are going, maybe they don't know of any names or what it is, and you're kind of headed in this direction that is more likely to be somewhere that's more you, where you can blossom your own unique talents and whatever. And so it's a hard thing that's not easy.
It's not as easy as like, I wanna become accountant or the best golf player in the world being the best golf player. It's a known thing that's a movie that many people are occupied by. But you want to invent a new version of success, a new definition, and I think that's where you want to go. So I. Really appreciate this time to chat with you.
I hope [01:00:00] some of this advice works on for your listeners, there's more, a lot more 450 little tiny sentences in a, in this book. There's no stories. It's the Bible without stories someone said. Yeah, that's right. There's no stories. It's all about these little proverbs and um, I hope that they work for your fans and followers.
Cody: Yep. We'll include a link to the, to his book and the show notes. And that's a wrap.
Kevin: Alright, well thank you. It was a pleasure and fun. Wish you success and, um, making a life that has meaning and so, um, I'm glad you enjoyed the book.
Cody: Yeah, I did. Thank you again.
Kevin: Yep. Bye-bye.
Cody: Appreciate it. Bye.
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