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My guest today is Kevin Kelly, the author of 14 books, a public speaker who has delivered TED talks with tens of millions of views, and a technology expert. In 1983, Kevin was hired by Whole Earth founder Stewart Brand to edit several later editions of the Whole Earth Catalog, the Whole Earth Review, and Signal. He later on served as the founding executive editor of the magazine Wired. In our conversation, Kevin and I talk about the scaling laws behind all technologies, but also how these laws intersect with biology, society, and policy. We explore themes from What Technology Wants, we focus on the 'Triad of Evolution' and the concept of convergence, and connect these ideas to antitrust and innovation policy. I also touch on his earlier work, including New Rules for the New Economy, where we discuss the dynamics of trust in network economies and its implications for technology adoption. Finally, we delve into the inevitability of technological evolution, its accelerating diffusion, and what happens when technology becomes ubiquitous in society. These questions feel increasingly urgent as we approach 2025, a pivotal moment for revisiting these ideas in light of modern developments. I hope you enjoy our discussion. Find me on X (@ProfSchrepel) and BlueSky (@profschrepel.bsky.social). References Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (2010) Kevin Kelly, New Rules for the New Economy (1998) Rishi Bommasani et al., Considerations for Governing Open Foundation Models (2023) https://hai.stanford.edu/issue-brief-considerations-governing-open-foundation-models
Danny Hillis is an inventor, scientist, author, and engineer. While completing his doctorate at MIT, he pioneered the parallel computers that are the basis for the processors used for AI and most high-performance computer chips. He is now a founding partner with Applied Invention, working on new ideas in cybersecurity, medicine, and agriculture.Kevin Kelly is the founding executive editor of WIRED magazine, the former editor and publisher of the Whole Earth Review, and a bestselling author of books on technology and culture, including Excellent Advice for Living. Subscribe to Kevin's newsletter, Recomendo, at recomendo.com. Sponsors:Momentous high-quality supplements: https://livemomentous.com/tim (code TIM for 20% off)Eight Sleep's Pod 4 Ultra sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating: https://eightsleep.com/tim (save between $400 and $600 on the Pod 4 Ultra)AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement: https://DrinkAG1.com/Tim (1-year supply of Vitamin D (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase.)*For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsorsSign up for Tim's email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim's books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissYouTube: youtube.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Maté, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
This short comes from a conversation that co-host Jean Gomes had with Kevin Kelly back in September 2021 (S3 Ep2). LISTEN TO THE ENTIRE CONVERSATION: The Next 15 Years with Kevin KellyIn this episode our guest is Senior Maverick at Wired Magazine, Kevin Kelly. Kevin co-founded Wired in 1993 and served as its executive editor until 1999. He is also editor and publisher of the Cool Tools website and is the former editor/publisher of the Whole Earth Review. Kevin Kelly has written several bestselling books including ‘New Rules for the New Economy', ‘What Technology Wants' and his most recent book ‘The Inevitable'.Send a message to The Evolving Leader team
WIRED founder Kevin Kelly explains why progress often looks like dystopia to the untrained eye. Imagine that tomorrow, the world magically got 1% better. Nobody would notice. But if the world got 1% better every year, the "compounding" effect would be very noticeable — in the same way that compounding grows a bank account. When technology solves a problem, it creates new problems. The solution is not less technology but better technology. Kevin Kelly of WIRED magazine calls this incremental progress toward a better world "protopia." Protopia is a direction, not a destiny. ------------------------------------------------------------------- This video is part of The Progress Issue, a Big Think and Freethink special collaboration. In this inaugural special issue we set out to explore progress — how it happens, how we nurture it and how we stifle it, and what changes are required in how we approach our most serious problems to ensure greater and more equitable progress for all. It's time for a return to optimism. ----------------------------------------------------------------- About Kevin Kelly Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at WIRED magazine. He co-founded WIRED in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor for its first seven years. His newest book is The Inevitable, a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. He is founder of the popular Cool Tools website, which has been reviewing tools daily for 20 years. From 1984-1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a subscriber-supported journal of unorthodox conceptual news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers' Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. Other books by Kelly include 1) Out of Control, the 1994 classic book on decentralized emergent systems, 2) The Silver Cord, a graphic novel about robots and angels, 3) What Technology Wants, a robust theory of technology, and 4) Vanishing Asia, his 50-year project to photograph the disappearing cultures of Asia. He is currently co-chair of The Long Now Foundation, which is building a clock in a mountain that will tick for 10,000 years. ----------------------------------------------------------------- About Big Think | Smarter Faster™ ► Big Think The leading source of expert-driven, educational content. With thousands of videos, featuring experts ranging from Bill Clinton to Bill Nye, Big Think helps you get smarter, faster by exploring the big ideas and core skills that define knowledge in the 21st century. Go Deeper with Big Think: ►Become a Big Think Member Get exclusive access to full interviews, early access to new releases, Big Think merch and more ►Get Big Think+ for Business Guide, inspire and accelerate leaders at all levels of your company with the biggest minds in business Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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THE SHOW Kevin Kelly is a modern creative pioneer. He was a polymath before it was cool. His career as a writer, founder, photographer, and editor extends across industries and continents. A world traveler and lifelong learner, Kevin's ideas such as 1000 True Fans have inspired a generation of builders and artists to exercise full agency over their creative pursuits. Kevin was on a short list of dream guests I've long held for Behind the Brilliance, and our conversation did not disappoint. He was candid and thoughtful as we covered a wide range of topics including career and life design, religion, decision making, unpopular opinions, and much more. This is an excellent listen for the dreamers, doers, and builders who want to hear the embodiment of integrating passion, purpose, and profit with thoughtful optimism. Behind His Brilliance: Luck + Not caring what others think Say hi to Kevin on X (Twitter): @kevin2kelly THE GUEST KEVIN KELLY | AUTHOR + CO-FOUNDER, WIRED Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He co-founded Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor for its first seven years. His newest book is Excellent Advice for Living, a book of 450 modern proverbs for good living. He is co-chair of The Long Now Foundation, a membership organization that champions long-term thinking and acting as a good ancestor to future generations. And he is founder of the popular Cool Tools website, which has been reviewing tools daily for 20 years. From 1984-1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a subscriber-supported journal of unorthodox conceptual news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers' Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. Other books by Kelly include 1) The Inevitable, a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, 2) Out of Control, his 1994 classic book on decentralized emergent systems, 3) The Silver Cord, a graphic novel about robots and angels, 4) What Technology Wants, a robust theory of technology, and 5) Vanishing Asia, his 50-year project to photograph the disappearing cultures of Asia. He is best known for his radical optimism about the future. TOPICS COVERED -the decision making framework Kevin developed over 5 decades of his career -the inception and growth of WIRED -why pursuing a range of interests can be more valuable than specializations (with important caveats) -Kevin's religious conversion and how it changed his life -important reflections on leveraging and time management -how a trip to Asia changed Kevin's life And much more!
Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He co-founded Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor for its first seven years. His newest book is Excellent Advice for Living, a book of 450 modern proverbs for good living. He is co-chair of The Long Now Foundation, a membership organization that champions long-term thinking and acting as a good ancestor to future generations. And he is founder of the popular Cool Tools website, which has been reviewing tools daily for 20 years. From 1984-1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a subscriber-supported journal of unorthodox conceptual news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers' Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. Other books by Kelly include 1) The Inevitable, a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, 2) Out of Control, his 1994 classic book on decentralized emergent systems, 3) The Silver Cord, a graphic novel about robots and angels, 4) What Technology Wants, a robust theory of technology, and 5) Vanishing Asia, his 50-year project to photograph the disappearing cultures of Asia. He is best known for his radical optimism about the future.
Welcome to episode #889 of Six Pixels of Separation - The ThinkersOne Podcast. Here it is: Six Pixels of Separation - The ThinkersOne Podcast - Episode #889. Let's delve into the kaleidoscopic journey of Kevin Kelly, a titan of technology and innovation, who launched Wired magazine in 1993 (and happens to be one of my favorite writers and Thinkers about "what's next?"). After seven years as Executive Editor, he still holds the fort as Senior Maverick. Twice during his reign, Wired clinched the National Magazine Awards for General Excellence - the magazine industry's equivalent to Oscars. Flashback to 1984-1990, Kevin wore the hats of both publisher and editor of Whole Earth Review, a journal serving unconventional conceptual news. With Kevin at the helm, it earned the distinction of being the first consumer magazine to cover virtual reality, ecological restoration, and Internet culture, among other trend-setting topics. His 1988 creation, Signal, evaluated emerging digital technologies, effectively setting the stage for Wired magazine. Later, in 2003, he crafted the Cool Tools website to feature daily tool reviews, culminating in a bestseller book, and eventually, the weekly recommendation list, Recomendo, boasting over 60,000 subscribers (of which I am one... and never miss an issue). Kevin's early digital footprint can be traced back to 1985 when he helped lay the foundation for The WELL, one of the pioneers in forming online communities. His tech experiments didn't stop there - he launched Cyberthon in 1990, the first-ever 24-hour virtual reality event, and co-founded the annual Hackers' Conference. Kevin's pen dances across a variety of subjects, from machines turning biological (Out of Control, 1994) to digital economy rules (New Rules for the New Economy, 1998) and the inevitable technological trends of the future (The Inevitable, 2016). His works echo in pieces like 1000 True Fans, and his latest book, Excellent Advice For Living. With a knack for photography, Kevin's snapshots have found home in Life and other national magazines. His nomadic photography journeys culminated in a 3-volume magnum opus, Vanishing Asia, preserving the fading cultures of Asia through 9,000 pictures. As a founding board member of The Long Now Foundation, Kevin promotes long-term thinking, epitomized by their 10,000-year clock and library project. Kevin Kelly's journey illustrates a passion for innovation and an unyielding curiosity about the future. I couldn't be more excited to talk with him. Enjoy the conversation... Running time: 1:01:49. Hello from beautiful Montreal. Subscribe over at Apple Podcasts. Please visit and leave comments on the blog - Six Pixels of Separation. Feel free to connect to me directly on Facebook here: Mitch Joel on Facebook. Check out ThinkersOne. or you can connect on LinkedIn. ...or on Twitter. Here is my conversation with Kevin Kelly. Excellent Advice For Living. 1000 True Fans. Recomendo. Cool Tools. Out of Control. New Rules for the New Economy. The Inevitable. Vanishing Asia. Wired. This week's music: David Usher 'St. Lawrence River'.
For the Summer of 2023, a dozen futurists talk about what life will be like for humans in 30 to 50 years. Each guest is asked to paint a picture of the changes that we will experience between now and 2053 or 2073. Then they are asked what mistakes we are making today that the people of 2073 will look back at in disbelief. The goal of these episodes is to spark the imagination of listeners about the future we have the ability to create. In this episode, futurist Kevin Kelly paints a picture of what life might look like in 2053. He discusses the implications to the world if Moore's Law slows down, how AI will become a fundamental utility to how we work and live similar to how transformative electricity has been for humans, and what would happen if “crypto wins” and the internet, finance, and other elements of our economy become decentralized. Kevin believes generative AI tools like Chat GPT will function as “interns” that each of us will get to train and use as tools to help with work and manage our lives. Kevin wraps up the interview by talking about how some of our current behaviors – like eating the flesh of animals, having parents choose the names of their children at birth, and our ideas around intelligence and how the brain works - will be looked at in 50 years with a sense of disbelief.Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He co-founded Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor for its first seven years. His newest book is Excellent Advice for Living, a book of 450 modern proverbs for good living. He is co-chair of The Long Now Foundation, a membership organization that champions long-term thinking and acting as a good ancestor to future generations. And he is founder of the popular Cool Tools website, which has been reviewing tools daily for 20 years. From 1984-1990 Kevin was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a subscriber-supported journal of unorthodox conceptual news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers' Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. Other books by Kevin include 1) The Inevitable, a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, 2) Out of Control, his 1994 classic book on decentralized emergent systems, 3) The Silver Cord, a graphic novel about robots and angels, 4) What Technology Wants, a robust theory of technology, and 5) Vanishing Asia, his 50-year project to photograph the disappearing cultures of Asia. He is best known for his radical optimism about the future.
Description: In this episode I am speaking with Kevin Kelly who is the author of Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier. On his 68th birthday, Kevin Kelly began to write down for his young adult children some things he had learned about life that he wished he had known earlier. To his surprise, Kelly had more to say than he thought and kept adding to the advice over the years, compiling a life's wisdom into these pages. When I read this book, I was smiling the entire time. Here is the short version of Kevin's incredible biography: Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He co-founded Wired in 1993 and served as its Executive Editor for its first seven years. His newest book is Excellent Advice for Living, a book of 450 modern proverbs for good living. He is co-chair of The Long Now Foundation, a membership organization that champions long-term thinking and acts as a good ancestor to future generations. And he is the founder of the popular Cool Tools website, which has been reviewing tools daily for 20 years. From 1984-1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a subscriber-supported journal of unorthodox conceptual news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers' Conference and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. Other books by Kelly include 1) The Inevitable, a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, 2) Out of Control, his 1994 classic book on decentralized emergent systems, 3) The Silver Cord, a graphic novel about robots and angels, 4) What Technology Wants, a robust theory of technology, and 5) Vanishing Asia, his 50-year project to photograph the disappearing cultures of Asia. He is best known for his radical optimism about the future. This episode is sponsored by Career Pivot. Check out the Career Pivot Community, and pick up my latest book, Repurpose Your Career: A Practical Guide for the 2nd Half of Life Third Edition. For the full show notes and resources mentioned in the episode click here.
New York Times bestselling author Kevin Kelly has led a fascinating and remarkable life and has been ahead of the curve on practically everything he has done. He is the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, and a former editor/publisher of Whole Earth Review, as well as having been a writer, photographer, conservationist, and student of Asian and digital culture. His latest book, EXCELLENT ADVICE FOR LIVING: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier, is his most personal book yet. On his 68th birthday, Kelly started to write down for his young adult children advice he had learned about life from experience and his travels that he wished he had known earlier. It's a collection of his life's wisdom gathered over the years since, from setting ambitious goals to optimizing generosity to cultivating compassion. Kelly shares compact but profound tips for career, relationships, parenting, and finances, and gives guidance for practical matters from travel to troubleshooting— and much more. To learn more you can visit: https://kk.org or follow along on instagram @kevin2kelly If you would like to work with us and receive a free health coaching consultation-- get in touch at courageouswellness.net or email aly@courageouswellness.net or erica@courageouswellness.net Don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review Courageous Wellness! We release new episodes each #WellnessWednesday You can also follow us on instagram @CourageousWellness and visit our website: www.courageouswellness.net to get in touch. This episode is brought to you by Odyssey Mushroom Elixir. Redeem your FREE can of Odyssey by visiting http://iwantodyssey.com This episode is brought to you by Milk+Honey. To receive 20% off your purchase visit www.milkandhoney.com and use code: CWPODCAST (all one word) at checkout! Milk+Honey is a line of non-toxic, effective, and safe bath, body, and skincare products made in small batches in Austin, Texas. You can also save 20% on all spa treatments at Milk+Honey Spa locations in Los Angeles, Chicago, Texas, Miami and get a special rate on a curated Courageous Wellness Retreat Spa Package that includes a 60 minute massage and dry brushing. Book over the phone or online and visit: milkandhoneyspa.com Shop Vintners Daughter + Get 2-Day Free Shipping Meet NED: You can receive 15% off our favorite Ned CBD products, including the Hormone Balance Blend and the Full Spectrum Hemp Oil, go to www.helloned.com and enter the code CWPODCAST at checkout We are so excited to partner with Seed! You can save 15% on Seed Synbiotic by using code: courageous15 at checkout. Head to www.seed.com to learn more. Save 20% on Sakara clean boutique and meal delivery with code: xocourageous at checkout! Are you interested in becoming a health coach or furthering your nutrition education? We loved our program at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition and are happy to offer our listeners a discount on tuition! To receive up to $2000 off tuition (for payments in full and $1000 off tuition for payment plans) you can use our name Aly French or Erica Stein when you enroll. To learn more you can also take a Sample Class, check out the Curriculum Guide, or visit the application page to enroll.
Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He co-founded Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor for its first seven years. He is also founding editor and co-publisher of the popular Cool Tools website, which has been reviewing tools daily since 2003. From 1984-1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers' Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. His books include the best-selling New Rules for the New Economy, the classic book on decentralized emergent systems, Out of Control, a graphic novel about robots and angels, The Silver Cord, an oversize catalog of the best of Cool Tools, and his summary theory of technology in What Technology Wants (2010). His new book for Viking/Penguin is The Inevitable, which is a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller.
Episode 347 features Kevin Kelly, a well-known American writer, technologist, and futurist.His new book, "Excellent Advice For Living" - https://www.amazon.com/Excellent-Advice-Living-Wisdom-Earlier/dp/0593654528Find Kevin Online:Website: https://kk.org/About Kevin:Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He co-founded Wired in 1993 and served as its Executive Editor for its first seven years. He is also the founding editor and co-publisher of the popular Cool Tools website, which has been reviewing tools daily since 2003.From 1984-1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers' Conference and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. His books include the best-selling New Rules for the New Economy, the classic book on decentralized emergent systems, Out of Control, a graphic novel about robots and angels, The Silver Cord, an oversize catalog of the best of Cool Tools, and his summary theory of technology in What Technology Wants (2010).His new book out is called "Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wished I'd Known Earlier"********This episode is brought to you by LMNT, the delicious, sugar-free electrolyte drink mix. As someone who is active with CrossFit and other activities, I take LMNT 1–2 times per day. LMNT is formulated to help anyone with their electrolyte needs as electrolytes are vital to helping relieve hunger, cramps, headaches, tiredness, and dizziness.For a limited time, listeners of the Just Get Started Podcast can get a free LMNT Sample Pack with any purchase. This special offer is available here: DrinkLMNT.com/justgetstarted********Find Brian:Website: https://brianondrako.com/Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@brianondrakoTwitter: https://twitter.com/brianondrakoInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/brianondrako/Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianondrako/Substack: https://brianondrako.substack.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
At a dinner party Substack hosted in San Francisco last week, I found myself sitting next to Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of Wired magazine and former publisher of the Whole Earth Review. We were talking about the capital of the world. It no longer felt that New York was it, I was telling him, though it had not been replaced by another physical city either. Rather, the world now had only one, digital, capital. If you made it there, you'd make it anywhere.He agreed, with one amendment. “Silicon Valley is the place least resistant to new ideas today,” he said, which was the original point of the world capital as a destination. I had recently interviewed Nadia Bolz-Weber for this podcast, and her words were still fresh in my mind. I imagined her response to this would be, “The problem is, it is also the place most resistant to old ideas.” Nadia embodies the old and the new. She is a striking figure: tall and lean, with a thick mane of salt-and-pepper hair and a penetrating blue gaze. She is covered in colorful tattoos of Christian mythology and exudes the warmth of wisdom. She practices one of the oldest traditions, that of the preacher. The texts she “wrestles with,” as she puts it, are centuries-old. Her task is to bring them to the here and now, to the self. They become personal to her because, in order to interpret them, she must first study herself anew. Nadia has been an alcoholic, a standup comic, and a sinner. She has been a pastor, a prison preacher, and a saint. She talked about what these qualifiers mean to her, how she understands the concept of faith, the relationship between poetry and prayer, and the danger of innovating without consideration for tradition. One of her observations echoed what Suleika Jaouad and Diego Perez emphasized during their own exchange a couple of weeks ago, when they spoke about the significance of honesty in writing. Nadia reinforced that message when she said:“Some people make a living off of being sort of influencers, who say things that might kind of be true, but they never feel honest. They feel like they're ignoring a darker side of our hearts. I always want somebody to really acknowledge the sort of more shadowy contours of my human heart, and then talk about where some grace or hope or forgiveness is. Because I feel like when those things are ignored, it just fills me a little bit with despair, even though they're telling me something really chipper. I like it when writers or preachers are willing to be honest about their own struggles in a real way.” This also brought to mind the conversation that Mike Solana and Ted Gioia had here on the Active Voice. As Ted put it, “There's been an enormous crisis of trust, and certain voices are emerging and succeeding because they've been able to parlay that trust.”What connects all of them is their allegiance to honesty, and the obligation they feel to deliver it to their audience. https://thecorners.substack.com/ Show notesSubscribe to The Corners by Nadia Bolz-Weber on SubstackFind Nadia on Twitter and InstagramNadia's booksFrancis Spufford's book Unapologetic“Introduction to Poetry” by Billy Collins[02:00] The House for All Sinners and Saints[06:18] The church after the pandemic[10:18] The process of preaching to oneself[12:54] Finding the Good News[15:29] Nadia's regrets[21:00] On resurrection[25:00] When we call out to God[29:40] Being clear-eyed about being humanThe Active Voice is a podcast hosted by Hamish McKenzie, featuring weekly conversations with writers about how the internet is affecting the way they live and write. It is produced by Hamish McKenzie, with audio engineering by Seven Morris, and content production by Hannah Ray. All artwork is by Joro Chen, and music is by Phelps & Munro. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit read.substack.com
Kevin is the Founding Executive Editor of Wired magazine, where he still serves as Senior Maverick. He was previously publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review. Kevin is a co-chair of The Long Now Foundation, creator of Cool Tools, and author of multiple best-selling books, including his most recent, Excellent Advice for Living. Follow Kevin on Twitter @kevin2kelly. [0:00] - Kevin's story and his lifelong interest in learning and disseminating knowledge [5:08] - Key inflection points in information-related technologies [14:49] - How to focus in a world of distraction [20:58] - Pursuing the unknown and creating uniquely [29:24] - Inventing your own definition of success [36:27] - Spending time on things you love [45:29] - Why innovation often comes from those who focus on their interests more than money homeofjake.com
In this episode, Dr. Nader sits down with Kevin Kelly, founding executive editor of Wired magazine, to discuss optimism, happiness and pearls of wisdom with tips for living a successful and fulfilling life. Kevin Kelly is a writer, photographer, conservationist, and student of Asian and digital culture. In addition to his work as Wired's editor, he was an editor and publisher of the Whole Earth Review and has also published multiple books of his own. Including his most recent book, “Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier”. He is also co-chair of The Long Now Foundation, a membership organization that champions long-term thinking. Kevin Kelly | Website https://kk.org Kevin Kelly | Twitter https://twitter.com/kevin2kelly Kevin Kelly | YouTube https://www.youtube.com/KevinKelly Dr Tony Nader | Website https://www.drtonynader.com Dr Tony Nader | Instagram http://instagram.com/drtonynader Dr Tony Nader | Twitter http://twitter.com/drtonynader Dr Tony Nader | YouTube https://www.youtube.com/DrTonyNader
In this episode of Foresight's Existential Hope Podcast, our special guest is Kevin Kelly, an influential figure in technology, culture, and optimism for the future. As the founding executive editor of Wired and former editor of Whole Earth Review, Kelly's ideas and perspectives have shaped generations of thinkers and technologists.Join our hosts Allison Duettmann and Beatrice Erkers as they delve into Kelly's philosophies and experiences, from witnessing technological shifts over the decades to fostering optimism about the future. Kelly shares details about his latest book, a collection of optimistic advice in tweet form, and talks about his current project envisioning a desirable hi-tech future 100 years from now.He also discusses the transformative power of the internet as an accelerant for learning, the underestimated long-term effects of being online, and the culture-changing potential of platforms like YouTube. If you're interested in the intersection of technology, optimism, and the future, this podcast episode is a must-listen.Full transcript, list of resources, and art piece here.Existential Hope was created to collect positive and possible scenarios for the future, so that we can have more people commit to the creation of a brighter future, and to start mapping out the main developments and challenges that need to be navigated to reach it. Find all previous podcast episodes here, always featuring a full transcript, artwork inspired by the episode, and a list of recommended resources from the podcast. Existential Hope is a Foresight Institute project. The Foresight Institute is a research organization and non-profit that supports the beneficial development of high-impact technologies. Since our founding in 1987 on a vision of guiding powerful technologies, we have continued to evolve into a many-armed organization that focuses on several fields of science and technology that are too ambitious for legacy institutions to support.Allison Duettmann is the president and CEO of Foresight Institute. She directs the Intelligent Cooperation, Molecular Machines, Biotech & Health Extension, Neurotech, and Space Programs, Fellowships, Prizes, and Tech Trees, and shares this work with the public. Beatrice Erkers is COO at Foresight Institute, and program manager of the Existential Hope group. Her special interest in the integration of technology and society has led her to work for Foresight Institute.Visit our website for more content, or join us here:TwitterFacebookLinkedInEvery word ever spoken on this podcast is now AI-searchable using Fathom.fm, a search engine for podcasts. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Ryan speaks with Kevin Kelly about his new book Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier, how his remarkable life and career is shaped by his quest to do things his own way, understanding that life is fluid and mistakes are important to development, the best lessons that we can pass onto our children, and more.Kevin Kelly is a writer, photographer, painter, lecturer, conservationist, student of Asian and digital culture, and the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, and editor/publisher of the Whole Earth Review. His work focuses on digital trends, futurism, the exploration of the natural world, and the convergence of nature and technology. While he is most known for his hugely influential essay 1000 True Fans, Kevin has written five books and published three volumes of art and photography, including Asia Grace, a collection of over 600 photographs that Kevin took throughout 30 years of exploring rural Asia. His work can be found on his website kk.org, and on Twitter @kevin2kelly.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail
Kevin Kelly, author of Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I'd Wish I'd Known Earlier joins Joe to discuss his latest book and share the lessons he's learned from over seven decades on this planet. Kevin and Joe cover everything from finding lost car keys to goal-setting to the importance of writing our thoughts down to understand what we think. Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He co-founded Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor for its first seven years. His newest book is Excellent Advice for Living, a book of 450 modern proverbs for good living. He is co-chair of The Long Now Foundation, a membership organization that champions long-term thinking and acting as a good ancestor to future generations. And he is founder of the popular Cool Tools website, which has been reviewing tools daily for 20 years. From 1984-1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a subscriber-supported journal of unorthodox conceptual news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers' Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. Other books by Kelly include 1) The Inevitable, a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, 2) Out of Control, his 1994 classic book on decentralized emergent systems, 3) The Silver Cord, a graphic novel about robots and angels, 4) What Technology Wants, a robust theory of technology, and 5) Vanishing Asia, his 50-year project to photograph the disappearing cultures of Asia. He is best known for his radical optimism about the future. (Bio Courtesy of Kevin's Website)
When seeking advice, it's best to go to someone with a lot of experience. Today's guest has certainly earned his wisdom, and has compiled it into a new book of advice for anyone wanting to live a more meaningful life. Kevin Kelly is a renowned writer, futurist, and technology enthusiast. His career in technology and futurism began in the early 1980s when he became an editor at Whole Earth Review, a counterculture magazine focused on technology, ecology, and personal empowerment.In 1993, he co-founded Wired Magazine, a publication that explores the intersection of technology, culture, and politics. He's authored several books, including The Inevitable and What Technology Wants.Today he returns to the show to discuss his latest book Excellent Advice For Living.Mentioned in this episode:Please Support Our Sponsors:Indeed: Indeed is an unbelievably powerful hiring platform. Join more than 3 million businesses worldwide that use Indeed to hire great talent fast. Visit indeed.com/creative to get started today. Shopify: Shopify is the commerce platform revolutionizing millions of businesses worldwide. Now it's your turn to get serious about selling and try Shopify today. Sign up for a $1 per month trial at shopify.com/accidentalcreative.
EPISODE 1462: In this KEEN ON show, Andrew talks to the author of EXCELLENT ADVICE FOR LIVING, Kevin Kelly, about the limits of AI, the value of walking and why he remains optimistic about the future Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He co-founded Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor for its first seven years. He is founder of the popular Cool Tools website, which has been reviewing tools daily for 20 years. From 1984-1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a subscriber-supported journal of unorthodox conceptual news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers' Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. Other books by Kelly include 1) Out of Control, the 1994 classic book on decentralized emergent systems, 2) The Silver Cord, a graphic novel about robots and angels, 3) What Technology Wants, a robust theory of technology, and 4) Vanishing Asia, his 50-year project to photograph the disappearing cultures of Asia. He is currently co-chair of The Long Now Foundation, which is building a clock in a mountain that will tick for 10,000 years. His latest book is Excellent Advice for Living (2023) Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Kevin Kelly is a writer, futurist, and Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He co-founded Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor for its first seven years. His books include The Inevitable, about future trends, and What Technology Wants, a theory of technology. He is founder of the popular Cool Tools website, which has been reviewing tools daily for 20 years. From 1984-1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a subscriber-supported journal of unorthodox conceptual news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers' Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985.
This episode with Wired Founding Editor Kevin Kelly is one of my favourite episodes!His joie de vivre is infectious and I learned so much from his inspiring story and his fantastic new book Excellent Advice For Living which we talk about in this episode from which I know you will get a lot from too.But stepping back in time, Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review from 1984-1990 before he joined Wired in 1993 as its Founding Executive Editor alongside Louis Rossetto who we mention in this episode and Jane Metcalfe who I interviewed in Series 5, episode 40 (listen here). Kevin has also written some incredibly popular books including the New York times bestseller The Inevitable, Out of Control, which he wrote in 1992 and immediately became required reading on set of The Matrix film The Silver Cord, a graphic novel about robots and angels, What Technology Wants, a robust theory of technology, and Vanishing Asia, his 50-year project to photograph the disappearing cultures of Asia. Kevin is also co-chair of The Long Now Foundation with Stewart Brand.Kevin is a living legend and the 400+ pieces of advice from his latest book have already become part of my son's bedtime routine – that's how good they are.So without further ado, you're listening Danielle Newnham Podcast where I interview tech founders and innovators to learn the inspiring, human story behind their work and this is my interview with Kevin Kelly. Kevin on Twitter / Website / The Long Now Foundation Pre-order Kevin's latest book, Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier, here.Danielle Twitter / Instagram / NewsletterFrom this episode, Kevin's interview on This American Life here.Episode image credit: Christopher Michel
Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He co-founded Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor for its first seven years. His newest book is The Inevitable, a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. He is founder of the popular Cool Tools website, which has been reviewing tools daily for 20 years. From 1984-1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a subscriber-supported journal of unorthodox conceptual news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers' Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. Other books by Kelly include 1) Out of Control, the 1994 classic book on decentralized emergent systems, 2) The Silver Cord, a graphic novel about robots and angels, 3) What Technology Wants, a robust theory of technology, and 4) Vanishing Asia, his 50-year project to photograph the disappearing cultures of Asia. He is currently co-chair of The Long Now Foundation, which is building a clock in a mountain that will tick for 10,000 years. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/thewrongadvicepod/support
Kevin Kelly is one of the co-founders of Wired magazine and a former editor/publisher of the Whole Earth Review. He has also been a writer, speaker, photographer, conservationist, and student of Asian and digital culture. In this episode, we talk about "What the Future Holds for all of us", "Can AI replace Humans", "Can Humans live on Mars", "Why should we bet on Technology", and many more. Interview Breakdown: 1.13 min - Why you should listen to Kevin? 2.56 min - Can AI replace humans? 5.31 min - Which jobs can disappear in the next 10-15 years if AI takes over? 8.07 min - Is AI dangerous like how some leaders in the industry believe? 9.28 min - Can we ever live on Mars? 11.54 min - How can you prepare for the Future? 15.03 min - Advice to Indians? 19.15 min - How do you become the master of your life by becoming self-aware? 23.17 min - Why and How did Kevin start The Wired Magazine which is such a hit today? 24.29 min - This one major trait makes people successful. 26.31 min - Two Life-Changing pieces of Advice which Kevin would give his Kids and everyone listening to the podcast. Follow us to find daily updates and success hacks on The Growth Mindset Page below: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/silawathirshad/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/silawath_irshad/ Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/silawathirshad/ Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheGrowthMindsetwithSilawathIrshad You can find Kevin Kelly here: Website: https://kk.org/ Wired Magazine: https://www.wired.com/author/kevin-kelly/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/kevin2kelly/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Kevin2Kelly/ Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/KevinKelly Amazon Book Link: https://www.amazon.com/Excellent-Advice-Living-Wisdom-Earlier/dp/0593654528
Technology has been around long before we were born. Today, we welcome Kevin Kelly back to the show. Kevin Kelly, a modern futurist, is the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, and a former editor/publisher of the Whole Earth Review. In addition, Kevin is also a writer, photographer, and conservationist. In the episode, Kevin speaks to listeners about technological revolutions and offers his knowledge on the future of AI. With inspiration from Amish traditions, Kevin explains that the technological advancements that are bound to happen in the future are inevitable and are driven by technological trends that have already been in motion. Tune in to learn why understanding what is occurring today is the most powerful starting point for the future. As a CIO and Business IT Leader here are some wins you will get by listening: Kevin [1:54] When we talk about technology, we should be talking about the 95% of it that's been around long before we were born. Kevin [2:27] There is more technology being made than we individually can use ourselves. Kevin [2:49] The primary difference between the Amish and us is that they decide collectively on what to choose, whereas we decide individually. Kevin [6:14] Identifying the qualities you want in a technology can help you choose which new technology to use. Kevin [7:16] Be a minimalist in terms of the technologies you use daily but be a maximalist in terms of encouraging the abundance of technological choices. Kevin [8:20]: Technology leads to choices. Kevin [9:14] Technology is about doing things now that we could not before, even though the old forms of technology stick around. Kevin [13:16] What will be important tomorrow began two or three decades ago. Kevin [18:25] The goal of AI is not to replicate humans, but to encourage the benefit of having a technology that thinks differently from us. Kevin [21:16] AI is not superhuman intelligence that grows smarter, AI is about making a planet-sized machine of all connected devices to create a world brain. Kevin [23:14] Global planetary awareness is critical when it comes to technology and securing technology. Kevin [24:29] The way that information flows around the world is a non-linear system. Kevin [25:34] The idea of ownership, intellectual property, and copyright have been mistaken. It's not possible for people to own ideas or data because of inter-relationships. Kevin [25:59] New ideas are a recombination of existing things. Kevin [26:20] New innovations have the same attributes as an ecosystem. Kevin [34:00] Will the AR world be economically and culturally bigger than the VR world? Kevin [38:50] Facial recognition is an example of the conundrum with the idea of ownership. Who owns your face? When we have VR and AR worlds, people will be claiming ownership which is the wrong model. Kevin [41:30] NFT's gives you zero copyright claims, unless it's part of the contract. Kevin [46:36] The best ideas are the ones that nobody likes or wants to pursue. Bill [49:23] Instead of trying to figure out who's going to buy something, focus on your own internal enthusiasm for a subject. Let your enthusiasm be the GPS and people will follow. Key Resources: Cool Tools Book Recomendo Institute for the Future Out of Control Better Than Free Essay Vanishing Asia Wired
Howard Rheingold is author of Tools For Thought, The Virtual Community, and Smart Mobs, Net Smart; editor of Whole Earth Review, and Millennium Whole Earth Catalog; Lecturer, Social Media Literacies, Stanford. You can find Howard on Twitter @hrheingold and Patreon @howardrheingold. For show notes and transcript visit: https://kk.org/cooltools/howard-rheingold-author-of-tools-for-thought/ If you're enjoying the Cool Tools podcast, check out our paperback book Four Favorite Tools: Fantastic tools by 150 notable creators, available in both Color or B&W on Amazon: https://geni.us/fourfavoritetools
Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He co-founded Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor for its first seven years. He is also founding editor and co-publisher of the popular Cool Tools website, which has been reviewing tools daily since 2003. From 1984-1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers' Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. His books include the best-selling New Rules for the New Economy, the classic book on decentralized emergent systems, Out of Control, a graphic novel about robots and angels, The Silver Cord, an oversize catalog of the best of Cool Tools, and his summary theory of technology in What Technology Wants (2010). His new book for Viking/Penguin is The Inevitable, which is a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. He is currently raising funds for his new book Vanishing Asia. The book is a huge, oversized, 1,000-page celebration of old Asia. The campaign runs until May 4, 2021. During this time I am offering discounts for pre-sales purchases. Head over to my Kickstarter site for more details. IN THIS EPISODE: 1:40 Kevin sees art in everything 2:00 Vanishing Asia and it's evolution 3:30 The center of the culture has moved from books to... 9:51 Didn't we meet in Iran...? 10:29 The beginning of his journey to Asia 11:28 Leaves of Grass and Kevin's call to the editor of National Geographic 13:04 "You don't need to know anybody - just go" 14:28 The exception - Iran 18:50 Kevin's ginger story 20:14 Dar's 'mango' story 25:39 Kevin's idea for the lockdown - *Brilliant* 29:10 Kevin, Woodstock, The Whole Earth Catalog, and Wired Magazine 35:40 Kevin publishes an article in New Age - "The Network Nation" in 1984 42:01 The idea behind Wired Magazine 45:51 His belief system that drives him 47:45 "Do I really believe that - or am I parroting something I heard?" 51:38 The 'secret' to his success 58:38 THE MOST beautiful sign-off, ever kk.org Order Vanishing Asia at a discount here
In this episode our guest is Senior Maverick at Wired Magazine, Kevin Kelly. Kevin co-founded Wired in 1993 and served as its executive editor until 1999. He is also editor and publisher of the Cool Tools website and is the former editor/publisher of the Whole Earth Review. Kevin Kelly has written several bestselling books including ‘New Rules for the New Economy', ‘What Technology Wants' and his most recent book ‘The Inevitable'.1'07 - What's on your mind right now?4'24 – 24 years ago when you wrote ‘New Rules for the New Economy', you had a very clear idea as to how the digital revolution would unfold. How do you think the development of technology has played out since then? 8'53 – You have an incredible track record when it comes to predicting how technology is going to play out. What's your process?13'56 – What does social media want, and how is it evolving?19'37 – Since writing ‘The 12 technological forces shaping our future' a decade ago, how have those 12 forces evolved?22'53 – What do you think the biggest challenges are for the leaders who are driving the world's largest companies (such as Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, Tencent, Alibaba etc), and if you could be a mentor to those individuals, what would you say to them?28'51 – Can you tell us why you set up the ‘Long Now Foundation' which promotes slower, better thinking and what impact do you think it's had in the last 25 years?34'06 – Which things are you most excited about when it comes to solving the biggest problems such as climate, education, health etc.40'28 – How has Covid impacted your work? Did the pandemic spark something new in you?43'24 – What advice would you give to young people today?46'20 – If you were going to take a single central idea that you would be proud for future generations to take from your thinking, what would it be?49.57 – What's next on your horizon?56'43 – You advised Steven Spielberg on Minority Report. What do you think 2050 is going to look like? Social: Instagram @evolvingleader LinkedIn The Evolving Leader Podcast Twitter @Evolving_LeaderThe Evolving Leader is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside production.
The Danny Miranda Podcast Podcast Notes Key Takeaways “When we are connected to each other 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, every day of the year, it becomes more difficult to have different ideas” Kevin KellyVanishing cultures can be an inspiration to help us think differentlyKevin is a huge believer in taking time off, playing, and being inefficientThose are the times we can be most creativeInnovation and creativity are fundamentally inefficientThey contain so much failure and dead-endsDoing a thing only for the pure joy of it is one of the paths to new ideasYour unconscious is one of the most powerful tools you haveIt whispers to you and you want to be able to listen to itYou have to do something to actively connect to it, otherwise, you won’t be able toFor some people, it’s in the shower, others while walking, drawing, or journalingThe best way to teach something to children is through example, not through what you sayRead the full notes @ podcastnotes.orgKevin Kelly is a writer, photographer, conservationist, and student of Asian and digital culture. He is the founding executive editor of Wired Magazine and a former editor/publisher of the Whole Earth Review. When he was about 20 years old he dropped out of college to go to Asia. He arrived in Taiwan in 1972 and was blown away. He is known for his concept of 1,000 true fans, and his wisdom continually gets proven correct.
Kevin Kelly is a writer, photographer, conservationist, and student of Asian and digital culture. He is the founding executive editor of Wired Magazine and a former editor/publisher of the Whole Earth Review. When he was about 20 years old he dropped out of college to go to Asia. He arrived in Taiwan in 1972 and was blown away. He is known for his concept of 1,000 true fans, and his wisdom continually gets proven correct.
“Don't try to be the best; try to be the only. If at all possible, you want to be doing something that you have trouble describing because there's not a name for it. That's a sign that you are working in the territory of the only." – Kevin Kelly In this episode of Outliers, I’m talking with Kevin Kelly (@kevin2kelly) of WIRED magazine about his newest project on Kickstarter, Vanishing Asia. A 1,000-page collection of photographs, the set of three over-sized books document his 49 years of travel across the continent. Kevin Kelly was the Founding Executive Editor of WIRED magazine and the Editor of Whole Earth Review. He’s also the author of several best-selling books, including Out of Control and What Technology Wants. His perspective on science and technology has been featured in writings for The New York Times, The Economist, and Time magazine, and he served as a futurist advisor for Steven Spielberg’s film, Minority Report. Kevin continues to produce content for his newsletter, Recomendo, his YouTube channel, and his weekly podcast, Cool Tools. Show notes with links, quotes, and a transcript of the episode: https://www.danielscrivner.com/notes/kevin-kelly2-outliers-show-notes Chapters in this interview: 00:01:44 – The full-time job of managing a Kickstarter campaign 00:08:29 – The “1,000 true fans” concept 00:22:39 – Art by the pound and writing out loud 00:26:14 – The process of creating, compiling and culling photographs for Vanishing Asia 00:38:27 – The photos in Vanishing Asia that resonate the most with Kevin 00:44:45 – Kevin’s travel in Asia, and how he viewed its changes over time 00:51:59 – Kevin’s thoughts on how to embrace the future while retaining cultural values and beauty 00:58:49 – How Kevin's travel in Asia has affected his life 01:06:41 – Understanding the nuances of Asia and the power it will hold in the future Sign up here for Outliers Weekly, our Sunday newsletter that highlights the latest episode, expands on important business and investing concepts, and contains the best of what we read each week. Follow Outliers on Twitter: https://twitter.com/heyoutliers. If you loved this episode, please share a quick review on Apple Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Whole Earth ‘lectronic Link, or WELL, was started by Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant in 1985, and is still available at well.com. We did an episode on Stewart Brand: Godfather of the Interwebs and he was a larger than life presence amongst many of the 1980s former hippies that were shaping our digital age. From his assistance producing The Mother Of All Demos to the Whole Earth Catalog inspiring Steve Jobs and many others to his work with Ted Nelson, there's probably only a few degrees separating him from anyone else in computing. Larry Brilliant is another counter-culture hero. He did work as a medical professional for the World Health Organization to eradicate smallpox and came home to teach at the University of Michigan. The University of Michigan had been working on networked conferencing since the 70s when Bob Parnes wrote CONFER, which would be used at Wayne State where Brilliant got his MD. But CONFER was a bit of a resource hog. PicoSpan was written by Marcus Watts in 1983. Pico is a small text editor in many a UNIX variant and network is network. Why small, well, modems that dialed into bulletin boards were pretty slow back then. Marcus worked at NETI, who then bought the rights for PicoSpan to take to market. So Brilliant was the chairman of NETI at the time and approached Brand about starting up a bulletin-board system (BBS). Brilliant proposed NETI would supply the gear and software and that Brand would use his, uh, brand - and Whole Earth following, to fill the ranks. Brand's non-profit The Point Foundation would own half and NETI would own the other half. It became an early online community outside of academia, and an important part of the rise of the splinter-nets and a holdout to the Internet. For a time, at least. PicoSpan gave users conferences. These were similar to PLATO Notes files, where a user could create a conversation thread and people could respond. These were (and still are) linear and threaded conversations. Rather than call them Notes like PLATO did, PicSpan referred to them as “conferences” as “online conferencing” was a common term used to describe meeting online for discussions at the time. EIES had been around going back to the 1970s, so Brand had some ideas abut what an online community could be - having used it. Given the sharp drop in the cost of storage there was something new PicoSpan could give people: the posts could last forever. Keep in mind, the Mac still didn't ship with a hard drive in 1984. But they were on the rise. And those bits that were preserved were manifested in words. Brand brought a simple mantra: You Own Your Own Words. This kept the hands of the organization clean and devoid of liability for what was said on The WELL - but also harkened back to an almost libertarian bent that many in technology had at the time. Part of me feels like libertarianism meant something different in that era. But that's a digression. Whole Earth Review editor Art Kleiner flew up to Michigan to get the specifics drawn up. NETI's investment had about a quarter million dollar cash value. Brand stayed home and came up with a name. The Whole Earth ‘lectronic Link, or WELL. The WELL was not the best technology, even at the time. The VAX was woefully underpowered for as many users as The WELL would grow to, and other services to dial into and have discussions were springing up. But it was one of the most influential of the time. And not because they recreated the extremely influential Whole Earth catalog in digital form like Brilliant wanted, which would have been similar to what Amazon reviews are like now probably. But instead, the draw was the people. The community was fostered first by Matthew McClure, the initial director who was a former typesetter for the Whole Earth Catalog. He'd spent 12 years on a commune called The Farm and was just getting back to society. They worked out that they needed to charge $8 a month and another couple bucks an hour to make minimal a profit. So McClure worked with NETI to get the Fax up and they created the first conference, General. Kevin Kelly from the Whole Earth Review and Brand would start discussions and Brand mentioned The WELL in some of his writings. A few people joined, and then a few more. Others from The Farm would join him. Cliff Figallo, known as Cliff, was user 19 and John Coate, who went by Tex, came in to run marketing. In those first few years they started to build up a base of users. It started with hackers and journalists, who got free accounts. And from there great thinkers joined up. People like Tom Mandel from Stanford Research Institute, or SRI. He would go on to become the editor of Time Online. His partner Nana. Howard Rheingold, who would go on to write a book called The Virtual Community. And they attracted more. Especially Dead Heads, who helped spread the word across the country during the heyday of the Grateful Dead. Plenty of UNIX hackers also joined. After all, the community was finding a nexus in the Bay Area at the time. They added email in 1987 and it was one of those places you could get on at least one part of this whole new internet thing. And need help with your modem? There's a conference for that. Need to talk about calling your birth mom who you've never met because you were adopted? There's a conference for that as well. Want to talk sexuality with a minister? Yup, there's a community for that. It was one of the first times that anyone could just reach out and talk to people. And the community that was forming also met in person from time to time at office parties, furthering the cohesion. We take Facebook groups, Slack channels, and message boards for granted today. We can be us or make up a whole new version of us. We can be anonymous and just there to stir up conflict like on 4Chan or we can network with people in our industry like on LinkedIn. We can chat real time, which is similar to the Send option on The WELL. Or we can post threaded responses to other comments. But the social norms and trends were proving as true then as now. Communities grow, they fragment, people create problems, people come, people go. And sometimes, as we grow, we inspire. Those early adopters of The WELL inspired Craig Newmark of Craigslist to the growing power of the Internet. And future developers of Apple. Hippies versus nerds but not really versus, but coming to terms with going from “computers are part of the military industrial complex keeping us down” philosophy to more of a free libertarian information superhighway that persisted for decades. The thought that the computer would set us free and connect the world into a new nation, as John Perry Barlow would sum up perfectly in “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”. By 1990 people like Barlow could make a post on The WELL from Wyoming and have Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus, makers of Lotus 1-2-3 show up at his house after reading the post - and they could join forces with the 5th employee of Sun Microsystems and GNU Debugging Cypherpunk John Gilmore to found the Electronic Foundation. And as a sign of the times that's the same year The WELL got fully connected to the Internet. By 1991 they had grown to 5,000 subscribers. That was the year Bruce Katz bought NETI's half of the well for $175,000. Katz had pioneered the casual shoe market, changing the name of his families shoe business to Rockport and selling it to Reebok for over $118 million. The WELL had posted a profit a couple of times but by and large was growing slower than competitors. Although I'm not sure any o the members cared about that. It was a smaller community than many others but they could meet in person and they seemed to congeal in ways that other communities didn't. But they would keep increasing in size over the next few years. In that time Fig replaced himself with Maurice Weitman, or Mo - who had been the first person to sign up for the service. And Tex soon left as well. Tex would go to become an early webmaster of The Gate, the community from the San Francisco Chronicle. Fig joined AOL's GNN and then became director of community at Salon. But AOL. You see, AOL was founded in the same year. And by 1994 AOL was up to 1.25 million subscribers with over a million logging in every day. CompuServe, Prodigy, Genie, Dephi were on the rise as well. And The WELL had thousands of posts a day by then but was losing money and not growing like the others. But I think the users of the service were just fine with that. The WELL was still growing slowly and yet for many, it was too big. Some of those left. Some stayed. Other communities, like The River, fragmented off. By then, The Point Foundation wanted out so sold their half of The WELL to Katz for $750,000 - leaving Katz as the first full owner of The WELL. I mean, they were an influential community because of some of the members, sure, but more because the quality of the discussions. Academics, drugs, and deeply personal information. And they had always complained about figtex or whomever was in charge - you know, the counter-culture is always mad at “The Management.” But Katz was not one of them. He honestly seems to have tried to improve things - but it seems like everything he tried blew up in his face. So Katz further alienated the members and fired Mo and brought on Maria Wilhelm, but they still weren't hitting that hyper-growth, with membership getting up to around 10,000 - but by then AOL was jumping from 5,000,000 to 10,000,000. But again, I've not found anyone who felt like The WELL should have been going down that same path. The subscribers at The WELL were looking for an experience of a completely different sort. By 1995 Gail Williams allowed users to create their own topics and the unruly bunch just kinda' ruled themselves in a way. There was staff and drama and emotions and hurt feelings and outrage and love and kindness and, well, community. By the late 90s, the buzz word at many a company were all about building communities, and there were indeed plenty of communities growing. But none like The WELL. And given that some of the founders of Salon had been users of The WELL, Salon bought The WELL in 1999 and just kinda' let it fly under the radar. The influence continued with various journalists as members. The web came. And the members of The WELL continued their community. Award winning but a snapshot in time in a way. Living in an increasingly secluded corner of cyberspace, a term that first began life in a present tense on The WELL, if you got it, you got it. In 2012, after trying to sell The WELL to another company, Salon finally sold The WELL to a group of members who had put together enough money to buy it. And The WELL moved into the current, more modern form of existence. To quote the site: Welcome to a gathering that's like no other. The WELL, launched back in 1985 as the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, continues to provide a cherished watering hole for articulate and playful thinkers from all walks of life. For more about why conversation is so treasured on The WELL, and why members of the community banded together to buy the site in 2012, check out the story of The WELL. If you like what you see, join us! It sounds pretty inviting. And it's member supported. Like National Public Radio kinda'. In what seems like an antiquated business model, it's $15 per month to access the community. And make no mistake, it's a community. You Own Your Own Words. If you pay to access a community, you don't sign the ownership of your words away in a EULA. You don't sign away rights to sell your data to advertisers along with having ads shown to you in increasing numbers in a hunt for ever more revenue. You own more than your words, you own your experience. You are sovereign. This episode doesn't really have a lot of depth to it. Just as most online forums lack the kind of depth that could be found on the WELL. I am a child of a different generation, I suppose. Through researching each episode of the podcast, I often read books, conduct interviews (a special thanks to Help A Reporter Out), lurk in conferences, and try to think about the connections, the evolution, and what the most important aspects of each are. There is a great little book from Katie Hafner called The Well: A Story Of Love, Death, & Real Life. I recommend it. There's also Howard Rheingold's The Virtual Community and John Seabrook's Deeper: Adventures on the Net. Oh, and From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, And the Rise of Digital Utopianism from Fred Turner and Siberia by Douglas Rushkoff. At a minimum, I recommend reading Katie Hafner's wired article and then her most excellent book! Oh, and to hear about other ways the 60s Counterculture helped to shape the burgeoning technology industry, check out What the Dormouse Said by John Markoff. And The WELL comes up in nearly every book as one of the early commercial digital communities. It's been written about in Wired, in The Atlantic, makes appearances in books like Broad Band by Claire Evans, and The Internet A Historical Encyclopedia. The business models out there to build and run and grow a company have seemingly been reduced to a select few. Practically every online community has become free with advertising and data being the currency we parlay in exchange for a sense of engagement with others. As network effects set in and billionaires are created, others own our words. They think the lifestyle business is quaint - that if you aren't outgrowing a market segment that you are shrinking. And a subscription site that charges a monthly access fee to cgi code with a user experience that predates the UX field on the outside might affirm that philosophy -especially since anyone can see your real name. But if we look deeper we see a far greater truth: that these barriers keep a small corner of cyberspace special - free from Russian troll farms and election stealing and spam bots. And without those distractions we find true engagement. We find real connections that go past the surface. We find depth. It's not lost after all. Thank you for being part of this little community. We are so lucky to have you. Have a great day.
Biel Casals is a Data Science student at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. His interests range from everything technology-related to economics, biohacking, and philosophy. He is also a fitness freak and DJ in his spare time. Timestamps/Chapters 0:00 - Introduction & the utility of podcasts 06:04 - Biel's story 12:25 - Identity, self-improvement and the pursuit of an ideal 19:05 - Systems thinking & marginal gains 26:02 - The interconnection between future technology & self-improvement 31:36 - Economic efficiency & the struggle to find balance 37:12 - How can we reach the 'Truth'? Thoughts from a data-science student 56:34 - How concepts and language affect our reality 1:05:37 - Bio-hacking, nootropics and the limitations of the human condition 1:19:06 - The future of the human experience & consciousness 1:29:18 - Thoughts on Utopia & the future 1:49:47 - Final thoughts Books/People Mentioned 1. 'Utopia' by Thomas Moore 2. Lex Fridman (https://www.youtube.com/user/lexfridman) - is an AI researcher working on autonomous vehicles, human-robot interaction, and machine learning at MIT and beyond. Teaching: deeplearning.mit.edu. 3. Richard Dawkins - "Memes" 4. 'Atomic Habits' by James Clear 5. Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian-born political philosopher and cultural critic. He was described by British literary theorist, Terry Eagleton, as the “most formidably brilliant” recent theorist to have emerged from Continental Europe. 6. Slavoj Žižek - "What is nature"? ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIGeDAZ6-q4) 7. Terence Mckenna was an American ethnobotanist and mystic who advocated for the responsible use of naturally occurring psychedelic plants. 8. Kevin Kelly is the founding executive editor of Wired Magazine and a former editor/publisher of the Whole Earth Review. He has also been a writer, photographer, conservationist, and student of Asian and digital culture 9. Kevin Kelly's "Technium" (https://palladiummag.com/2020/12/10/kevin-kelly-on-why-technology-has-a-will/) 10. Andy Clark and David Chalmers - "The Extended Mind" (https://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/concepts/clark.html) 11. Nick Bostrom is a Swedish-born philosopher at the University of Oxford known for his work on existential risk, the anthropic principle, human enhancement ethics, superintelligence risks, and the reversal test 12. Joscha Bach is a cognitive scientist focusing on cognitive architectures, models of mental representation, emotion, motivation, and sociality --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/utopia-is-now/message
Richard Kadrey has been a successful novelist, written for comic books, scripts, and journalistic articles about art, culture, and technology. He creates music under the name Seven Blood-Stained Orchids. We caught up with him to find out the latest gossip on his Sandman Slim series, as there’s rumors of a movie in the offing. … Continue...Episode 84 – Interview with Richard Kadrey
On his recent 68th birthday, acclaimed futurist, best-selling author, and global tech authority Kevin Kelly took a moment to reflect back on his nearly seven decades of life. The result—sixty-eights bits of unsolicited advice. In this episode, Nelda sits down to discuss these "bytes" of wisdom. Acclaimed futurist Kevin Kelly has always had his finger on the pulse of what he calls the Technium or ecosystem of technologies. He authored the best-selling New Rules for the New Economy and the classic book on decentralized emergent systems, Out of Control. As co-founder of Wired, the preeminent source for how technology affects culture, economy, and politics, and former editor of Whole Earth Review which covers unorthodox technical news, Kelly is an advocate for taking the long view—the really long view. From his celebrated books and publications to his online footprint, Kelly is investing time and energy into processes and research that will benefit humankind for tens of thousands of years. Kelly's efforts include The Long Now Foundation, a cultural institution whose mission is to promote long-term thinking and reframe the notion of time. Projects include a self-sustaining clock embedded in a west Texas mountain built to run for ten thousand years. As a symbol of time, the clock is an iconic reminder to invest in things for the distant future. Says Kelly, “The point is to explore whatever may be helpful for thinking, understanding, and acting responsibly for tens of thousands of years.” Kelly's philosophy is that just knowing that things like the clock are possible can suggest even greater ideas. Ideas are Kelly's stock-in-trade. With his daily blog Cool Tools and weekly newsletter Recomendo, he shares thoughts and recommendations on anything that could be considered a “tool”—defined broadly as anything useful. Recently, Kelly even offered up 68 bits of unsolicited advice to mark his 68th birthday. With another season passing, Kelly reflects, “the only real gift that we have on our short life here is our time and how we use that time is really far more important than what we say or what we intend or what we actually preach.” There is no question, this future thinker is using his time wisely.
A nationally known speaker and consultant on leadership and mastery, he has spent more than three decades researching, developing, and teaching the practical application of Somatics (the unity of language, action, and meaning) to business leaders and executive managers. Richard is the author of seven books, including In Search of the Warrior Spirit, The Anatomy of Change, Holding the Center, and Aikido and the New Warrior. His articles have appeared in Esquire, East West Journal, The Whole Earth Review, and numerous other publications. In October 2000, a Wall Street Journal cover story featured the ground-breaking leadership program developed by Richard for the United States Marine Corps. He also has been featured in Fast Company and U.S. News & World Report. His PhD dissertation in Psychology was made into the book The Mind/Body Interface. A sixth degree black belt in the martial art of Aikido, he holds ranks in Judo, Jujitsu, and Capoeira. Richard has taught at the University of Chicago, Harvard University, Sonoma State University, Esalen Institute, Lone Mountain College, Naropa Institute, and the University of Munich. Additionally, he has been named one of the top 50 coaches. Having worked with tens of thousands of people over the last 30 years including corporate executives, Olympic and professional athletes, managers, political leaders, and inner-city gangs, Richard's client list includes U.S. Marines, U.S. Army Green Berets, U.S. Navy SEALS, AT&T, DMV, Microsoft, Sportsmind, Capital One, Barnes & Noble, and Hewlett-Packard
Kevin Kelly is an author, philosopher, and public intellectual. He is the founding executive editor of Wired Magazine and a former editor and publisher of The Whole Earth Review. He is the best selling author of Out of Control and What Technology Wants. I love this man’s mind. Please enjoy and welcome Kevin Kelly.Recorded and Produced by OwlCove ProductionsProducer: Lewis RobertsonAudio Engineer: Cody HamiltonTechnical Director: Scott SchwerdtfegerProduction Assistant: Alex Miller
What is our relationship with AI technology as it grows? What will happen to us? We will continue to make these machines and as we make them, we will keep improving as humans. - Kevin Kelly What can technology teach us about self-love, society, and the divine? Get 15% off your CURED Nutrition order with the code WELLNESSFORCE ---> Get The Morning 21 System: A simple and powerful 21 minute system designed to give you more energy to let go of old weight and live life well. JOIN THE FACEBOOK GROUP | *REVIEW THE PODCAST* Wellness Force Radio Episode 312 Co-Founder and CEO of WIRED magazine, Co-Host of the Cool Tools podcast, and Author of his latest book, The Inevitable, Kevin Kelly, shares what technology can teach us about ourselves, explores how technology expresses its conscious self through The Technium and discusses the differences being healing and destructive technology. Discover why we shouldn't automatically dismiss technology but continue to seek ways to improve it. Organifi Get 20% off your purchase today with code: WELLNESSFORCE Are you getting the quality nutrition your body needs? It's what provides us with energy every day. And when we don’t give our body the nutrition it needs, we feel it. It’s in the way we lack motivation. It’s in the way we get stuck in ruts, dragging ourselves to work, to lunch, back to work, and back home... You don’t need to hire a nutritionist, though. You don’t need to live at the gym, either. In fact, all you really need is about 3 minutes a day… and Organifi will do the rest. Morning, Noon, And Night… Organifi Superfoods Have Your Nutritional Needs Covered. ORGANIFI GREEN JUICE Start the day with a refreshing glass of 11 perfect detoxing superfoods. Moringa, chlorella, ashwagandha, wheatgrass, coconut water, and a whole lot more to get energy levels up, cortisol levels down, and your day started off right. ORGANIFI RED JUICE Boost metabolism and energy with a delicious ruby-red fruit punch. All the best berries and super-fruits for a youthful glow, and real hardcore adaptogenic herbs, roots, and mushrooms for that extra kick of power. Great for those afternoon slumps! ORGANIFI GOLD What better way to end the day, than with a delicious mug of something sweet, nostalgic, and relaxing? Our Gold tea is made with turmeric, ginger, lemon balm, reishi, and more. Calming… soothing… for a great night’s sleep. Wake up feeling refreshed and ready to go! The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly Click here to get your copy of The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly A New York Times Bestseller from one of our leading technology thinkers and writers, a guide through the twelve technological imperatives that will shape the next thirty years and transform our lives. Much of what will happen in the next thirty years is inevitable, driven by technological trends that are already in motion. In this fascinating, provocative new book, Kevin Kelly provides an optimistic road map for the future, showing how the coming changes in our lives—from virtual reality in the home to an on-demand economy to artificial intelligence embedded in everything we manufacture—can be understood as the result of a few long-term, accelerating forces. Kelly both describes these deep trends—interacting, cognifying, flowing, screening, accessing, sharing, filtering, remixing, tracking, and questioning—and demonstrates how they overlap and are codependent on one another. The 12 Technological Forces These larger forces will completely revolutionize the way we buy, work, learn, and communicate with each other. By understanding and embracing them, says Kelly, it will be easier for us to remain on top of the coming wave of changes and to arrange our day-to-day relationships with technology in ways that bring forth maximum benefits. Kelly’s bright, hopeful book will be indispensable to anyone who seeks guidance on where their business, industry, or life is heading—what to invent, where to work, in what to invest, how to better reach customers, and what to begin to put into place—as this new world emerges. Listen To Episode 312 As Kevin Kelly Uncovers: 1:30 The Future Of Humanity And AI WIRED magazine Cool Tools podcast The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly Cool Tools website Kevin Kelly The Technium M21 Organifi Kevin's background before he launched WIRED and what inspires his work today. (6:30) How technology can be so liberating and is leading the way to improve our world. (10:40) Our role in this world and why we will become better humans as AI technology grows. 12:00 Ethics Lessons From Technology How artificial intelligence is teaching us to have better values and make greater ethical decisions. Why our own ethics are very inconsistent and we excuse each other's mistakes compared to not giving a pass to technology. How to go deeper and understand why we act and treat ourselves and others the way we do. (15:00) 275 Paul Chek 16:00 What Nature Can Teach Us About AI His book, The Inevitable, and the 12 larger, technological forces that will completely revolutionize the way we buy, work, learn, and communicate with each other. Why inventors like Thomas Edison didn't even know what use their inventions would be for us and their impact on society. The fact that it can take as long as up to a generation for us to fully decide what use a piece of technology is to the world. Why the only way to understand the impact of technology and whether it will be good or bad is through the embrace and use of it. How to properly decide if the cons of a piece of technology outweigh the pros. (21:00) Why he goes to nature and human biology to look for answers on how we can better construct our artificial systems. (24:00) The impact of traveling to give us a new perspective on the world we've created today. 28:15 The Impact Of The Technium On Our World What The Technium is and how it allows technology to express its consciousness. How The Technium helps create order in our world as an extension of both life and accelerated evolution. (31:30) Why inventors have a moral obligation to keep inventing in order to let others such as Beethoven share their incredible gifts with the world. (33:00) How we are both the Creators and The Created in our relationship with technology. 35:00 Human Connection Through Technology How to challenge our relationship with technology as a society. Why technology is such a blessing for us vs. the fear people might have about it. The fact that some people are better at connecting in person rather than through communication tools. Alan Watts The Elder Concept in Native American Culture: our ability to gather, apply, and embody lessons and knowledge. Kevin's All Species Foundation non-profit organization to categorize all living things on Earth and why we launched it. 40:00 Technology As A Reflection Of The Divine His personal beliefs on creation and how technology comes into place. Why technology is actually a reflection of the divine. The old technology we still use as a vital part of our society from concrete and paving to plumbing. His out-of-body experiences during a dentist visit and later with taking LSD as a sacrament on his 50th birthday. (44:20) What he learned from taking LSD including that we are all connected and supported. 46:00 The Ying-Yang of Technology The fact that most of our future problems are with technology are going to come from the technology of today. Why we should aim to improve and revamp technology as soon as we find a problem instead of completely dismissing it and seeing it as something bad. His belief that we cannot make a world in the future until we visualize it and all its technological improvements first now in the present. The power of solving old problems with new technology in order to move forward. (48:00) Power Quotes From The Show Our Small Contribution To The Universe "The difference between living systems and artificial systems are very small. When we're inventing new technology, even if they're consumables that will be thrown away, we are participating in a very long arc through the universe of these increasing choices and possibilities; the same thing that evolution and life are doing. So, we're part of something bigger when we make and invent things. Technology is a big thing; it has a spiritual dimension." - Kevin Kelly When To Embrace Or Let Go Of Technology "The only way to understand how technology is used for the greater good and find out what its bad parts are is through the use of it. That's why I preach this embrace of technology but we should also be quick to let it go or change it as we see fit. This stance of initial embracing technology and then reworking, adjusting, and revamping it is the pattern we're going to have forever. Instead of immediately rejecting technology, let's bring it on and see what it's actually good for in the world." - Kevin Kelly We Are The Creators & The Created "There is a fundamental contradiction and tension between the fact that we individual humans are both The Masters of what we create and The Created at the same time. So, as we make the tools, the tools make us. We are both the parent and the child of technology. Even in a thousand years, we will still be struggling with the fact that we are two-faced; we are both the master and slave to technology." - Kevin Kelly Links From Today's Show The Technium M21 Organifi 275 Paul Chek Wired Interviews Bill Gates 1996 The Origins of Cool Tools: Kevin Kelly in Conversation with Stewart Brand The Technium And The 7Th Kingdom Of Life 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape The Future Cool Tools podcast WIRED magazine Cool Tools website The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly Kevin Kelly Facebook Twitter YouTube About Kevin Kelly Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He co-founded Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor for its first seven years. His new book for Viking/Penguin is called The Inevitable, which is a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. He is also founding editor and co-publisher of the popular Cool Tools website, which has been reviewing tools daily since 2003. From 1984-1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers’ Conference and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. Other Works From Kevin Other books by Kelly include 1) best-selling New Rules for the New Economy, an early book outlining the digital economy, 2) Out of Control, the classic book on decentralized emergent systems, 3) The Silver Cord, a graphic novel about robots and angels, 4) Cool Tools, an oversize catalog of the best tools in the universe, and 5) What Technology Wants, a robust theory of technology. Join The #WellnessWarrior VIP Club **Click on the photo above to get exclusive discounts on new wellness tools, be first in line for new podcasts, get access to invite-only events, and so much more.** More Top Episodes 226 Paul Chek: The Revolution Is Coming (3 Part Series) 131 Drew Manning: Emotional Fitness 129 Gretchen Rubin: The Four Tendencies 183 Dr. Kyra Bobinet: Brain Science 196 Aubrey Marcus: Own The Day 103 Robb Wolf: Wired To Eat Best of The Best: The Top 10 Guests From over 200 Shows Get More Wellness In Your Life Join the #WellnessWarrior Community on Facebook Tweet us on Twitter: Send us a tweet Comment on the Facebook page
“Thinking different is the engine of creation, innovation and wealth. And if we are all connected together 24 hours a day with our devices, it's very hard to have a different idea.” — Kevin Kelly Kevin Kelly is co-founder and former Executive Editor of WIRED magazine. Prior to starting WIRED, Kevin was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news that featured tech-related trends and is known for being the first consumer magazine to report on virtual reality, ecological restoration, Internet culture, and artificial life. On today’s episode, Kevin shares his vision for the future of technologies such as A.I., driverless cars, and augmented reality. Kevin predicts it will take more than a decade for driverless cars to become the norm on our roadways. He attributes this largely to the fact that there needs to be a significant amount of infrastructure built before autonomous cars hit the road — things such as smart traffic lights and other technology that can interface directly with your vehicle. “You need a smart environment as well as a smart car,” says Kevin. What about artificial intelligence? Kevin believes it is the “most fundamental technological change coming that will touch every aspect of our lives.” However, his vision for A.I. is different from the pop culture narrative. Instead, he predicts that A.I. will be very intelligent, just not intelligent in the same ways that humans are. “If we want the answer to a question, we will ask a machine but if we want a good question, we hire a human,” Kevin says. Much of our time as humans will be spent managing A.I. systems and setting the values that determine their behavior. In the end, though, Kevin believes that it is very possible that A.I. will make the human race better, pushing us to identify and define our ethics. — We have a new partnership with b8ta! B8ta.com gives you access to some of the most innovative and cutting edge consumer tech products. This week, we will be giving away a Withings Body+ Wi-Fi Smart Scale. Enter the giveaway for a chance to win here or use discount code "MissionDaily20" to receive 20% off online at Withings.com! — Mission Daily and all of our podcasts are created with love by our team at Mission.org. We own and operate a network of podcasts, and brand story studio designed to accelerate learning. Our clients include companies like Salesforce, Twilio, and Katerra who work with us because we produce results. To learn more and get our case studies, check out Mission.org/Studios. If you’re tired of media and news that promotes fear, uncertainty, and doubt and want an antidote, you’ll want to subscribe to our daily newsletter at Mission.org. When you do, you’ll receive a mission-driven newsletter every morning that will help you start your day off right!
John Brockman's newly released book Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI is the springboard for this Seminar on Artificial Intelligence. Brockman will interview several of the contributors to the book, Rodney Brooks, Alison Gopnik and Stuart Russell on stage. Following the interviews, Kevin Kelly will host the Q&A and discussion with the group. John Brockman is founder and publisher of the online salon Edge.org, a website devoted to discussions of cutting-edge science by many of the world's foremost thinkers, the leaders of what he has termed "the third culture." Rodney Brooks is a computer scientist and roboticist, former Director (1997-2007) of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and founder of Rethink Robotics and iRobot Corp. Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. Her areas of expertise are in cognitive and language development, with specialties in the effect of language on thought, the development of a theory of mind, and causal learning. Stuart Russell is a computer scientist focused on artificial intelligence and computational physiology. He is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley and Adjunct Professor of Neurological Surgery at the University of California, San Francisco.Kevin Kelly is a Long Now Board member, founding executive editor of Wired magazine, and a former editor/publisher of the Whole Earth Review. He is a writer, photographer, conservationist, and editor and publisher of the Cool Tools website.
This is the second part of our interview with Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired magazine, former publisher of the Whole Earth Review, and author of many books, including his latest one called "The Inevitable" (https://goo.gl/78orqo), which forecasts the twelve technological forces that will shape the next thirty years. In this part, we look at how artificial intelligence and artificial consciousness will shape the future of work and life, what will make humans uniquely useful in this scenario, and reasons to be optimistic for the future. In This Episode of Future Thinkers: What technology wants: the biases of technium, or technology viewed as a whole system Deep engagement with technology as the only way to become aware of its wants Inevitable vs. unpredictable developments of technology New sharing economy and the transition of value from owning to the benefit of access Smart environment - the idea of superabundance or fulfilling all life needs on demand Flattening of hierarchical structures and the cost of decentralization at scale Why the idea of a global government meets resistance on both left and right side of political spectrum Mobility as a universal human right and why next generation cities and states will compete for humans How we can work together with different varieties of conscious AIs in the future Asking good questions — a uniquely human trait that cannot be replicated by AIs Possible future professions related to AI industry like AI curator or AI whisperer Implications of AI safety movement and the inconsistent ethics of humans Decentralizing manifestations of AR — mixed reality world Censorship concerns in a post-ownership society Why studying history can make us optimistic about the future Show notes: http://www.futurethinkers.org/85 Join the Future Thinkers Community on Discord: https://www.futurethinkers.org/discord This episode is sponsored by: http://www.futurethinkers.org/qualia Recommend a sponsor for Future Thinkers: http://www.futurethinkers.org/recommend Support us on Patreon: http://www.futurethinkers.org/support
Today our guest is Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired magazine, former publisher of the Whole Earth Review, and author of many books, including his latest one called "The Inevitable", which forecasts the twelve technological forces that will shape the next thirty years. This episode airs in two parts. In the first, we talk about what technology wants, the new sharing economy, and creating a smart environment. In This Episode of Future Thinkers: What technology wants: the biases of technium, or technology viewed as a whole system Deep engagement with technology as the only way to become aware of its wants Inevitable vs. unpredictable developments of technology New sharing economy and the transition of value from owning to the benefit of access Smart environment - the idea of superabundance or fulfilling all life needs on demand Flattening of hierarchical structures and the cost of decentralization at scale Why the idea of a global government meets resistance on both left and right side of political spectrum Mobility as a universal human right and why next generation cities and states will compete for humans How we can work together with different varieties of conscious AIs in the future Asking good questions — a uniquely human trait that cannot be replicated by AIs Possible future professions related to AI industry like AI curator or AI whisperer Implications of AI safety movement and the inconsistent ethics of humans Decentralizing manifestations of AR — mixed reality world Censorship concerns in a post-ownership society Why studying history can make us optimistic about the future Show notes: http://www.futurethinkers.org/84 Join the Future Thinkers Community on Discord: https://www.futurethinkers.org/discord This episode is sponsored by: http://www.futurethinkers.org/qualia Recommend a sponsor for Future Thinkers: http://www.futurethinkers.org/recommend Support us on Patreon: http://www.futurethinkers.org/support
Everything You Like Is Garbage: You know the creepy feeling of walking into a dark room and finding your kid hunched over the iPad with their eyes glazed over? So do we. On this week’s episode, Paul and Rich talk about addiction and obsession — words that are used interchangeably but that speak to different experiences. What kind of parenting decisions need to be made when kids are addicted to screens? What are Silicon Valley parents doing for their kids in response to the tech they push into the world? We discuss how kids are adaptable and curious — Rich, for example, grew up in a bookless home on a steady diet of Tom and Jerry cartoons, and he turned out fine! We also let you in on our own obsessions, chocolate, watches and old book collections. Links littleBits Interactive Electronic Toys Silicon Valley Nannies are Phone Police for Kids A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley Elsagate Transcript Rich Ziade It is something! There is— it’s about two-thirds of the way into eating the chocolate. It’s kind of odd and then— Paul Ford You can’t chew. RZ You can’t— no, you won’t get it. You won’t get that buzz. PF It lives under your mouth. It’s— it’s like— it’s like a drug. RZ It is and it starts to hit like brain centers. PF Yeah— RZ And it gets weird. PF It’s like Klonopin for rich people. RZ [Laughing] So melting Klonopin. PF Yeah [music fades in, plays alone for 18 seconds, ramps down]. We should talk about the things that we’re obsessed about that aren’t technology. Just to frame it a little bit. RZ Ok. PF You like chocolate. RZ I really, really good chocolate. PF It’s pretty exhausting. I gotta be honest, to— to be your friend but, at the same time, once I finally gave in and was like, “Alright, let em have it.” Cuz your— you’ll come up with what looks like a— like an overpriced candy bar and you’ll be like, “If you chew this I’ll punch you in the face, ok?” And the first few times I’m like, “This is just annoying.” I’m just waiting for something to get squishy. But then the reality is that with some of them you give em a minute— RZ It’s kind of incredible. PF And they start telling you a little story. RZ Yeah. PF They’re like, “Oh I was once a bean in the mountains [yeah] of Vietnam [yeah] and then someone picked me and then I’m— nothing really too much happened to me after that because I’m a single source [sings] chocolate bar!” [Both laugh] What are some of the brands? RZ Uh there’s a— a brand called Amadi. By the way— PF Yeah that’s the one. [1:39] RZ— Godiva. Godiva is like— PF Booo! RZ— is like— PF No, that’s the thing: lemme just tell everyone: everything— every chocolate you’ve ever liked, unless you’re in this world, is garbage and you’re an animal for eating it. RZ Ok. So. Godiva is like the Banana Republic of chocolate. PF Right. RZ It’s kind of pitched as higher end [Paul laughs] — PF It’s khaki pants of chocolate. RZ [Laughing] But it’s actually if you really go shop at Barney’s [yeah] and the fancier shops, Banana Republic isn’t really higher end. Tell me— tell me one of your obsessions, Paul. PF [Sighs] I have a lot of nerd obsessions like I, you know— RZ We all do. PF Yeah. Non-nerd: I really do like getting on eBay and looking at old books, like— and especially lots of books like— like eBay lots, like thousands of books or— RZ Like you’ll get three boxes. PF Yeah, not three! Sometimes 2,000. Sometimes it’s like the whole library is— is the personal library is getting unloaded or the— the used bookstore is going out of business. And I think there’s a lot of intertwining fantasies there which is like I love books. Still do [yeah]. I mostly don’t buy them anymore because they take up a lot of space; I live in an apartment, and— [sighs] — RZ And you read on your phone. [2:45] PF I read on my phone and I have enough stuff. RZ Yeah, yeah, yeah. PF But there’s a part of me that just really appreciates books. The— I still have thousands at home and I like to through them, I like to look at them. And I have associations with all the spines and— and sort of what they all mean [yeah sure] and I love old reference books, things like that. So I really like older stuff. There’s— it’s funny because I— I love, you know, there’s a part of me that really feels I should be interested in like rare volumes from the 1600s, like that’s the true bibliophile [hmm] but it’s not. What I like is the old encyclopedia from like 1890 about manners or about etiquette [hmm] or just like random stuff [yeah]. So they’re very soothing, these obsessions. RZ And I get it. And— and— first off: you make me sound like an eight-year-old. We talked about chocolate for a minute and then— PF No— RZ— we got into your wonderful obsession with books. PF [Chuckles] Not really because uh we— we should share with the YouTube video— or we should share the YouTube video of people eating the Almandi chocolate and sniffing to the sound of Steely Dan. That— they put up— RZ That’s Joe Cocker. [Paul laughs] It’s bad. It’s not good. It’s not good. PF And this is not— this is not for kids is what that says. RZ No. No. This is for sophisticated adults. PF You need to really enjoy the fine stylings of Joe Cocker. RZ While you eat chocolate. Are obsessions good? PF I think that— well it really depends. There’s some really bad obsessions that people can get. RZ Addiction. PF There’s addiction and then there’s also like I— I don’t know [sighs] it’s a real— it’s a really tricky one. The Kardashians is a good example. Some people have a really fun, silly relationship with that show and they think it’s [mm hmm] really interesting and they get a kick out of it and it tells them something about their own lives and they really like. Other people are— are just hating themselves cuz they can’t have a 4,000 dollar handbag. [4:32] RZ Right they’re not gonna be happy. PF Yeah. RZ It’s— it’s an— an unreachable quality of life, status, that just people dream about and obsess over. That’s a bad obsession. That’s a bad obsession. PF The chocolate is ultimately like a relatively medium-sized indulgence. You know, it’s just— RZ It’s— it’s also— PF It’s literally the— RZ It’s ephemeral. I’m not gonna put it in a shel— on a shelf. PF No, it’s the cache you have in your— I don’t really want the books when I’m looking at them. RZ I don’t— I mean I wanna eat the chocolates and that’s that. [Stammers] — PF I pulled a few triggers. I got— I wanted um old copies of The Whole Earth Review which is kind of an unusual magazine that came out in the eighties. And— nerdy, but I wanted copies of Omni Magazine which was like an early— RZ I remember Omni. PF I wanted the originals. I wanted to see the ads. I wanted to remember [yeah] sort of how it felt [yeah]. So I bought those. It cost a couple hundred bucks. So I mean it’s— it’s— there’s— and then they took up— they take up a lot of shelf space though and then I’m like— RZ It’s the feeling of this thing that I think about a lot, that I possibly can’t have, and when I do have it, I find some joy. I mean you— [I think there’s—]. You’re not well if you’re sitting there rubbing the book for days on end. PF That’s right. RZ Like that’s not what it’s a— I— I like watches. It’s another [that’s right]. I don’t know if I’d call it an obsession. [5:42] PF I don’t— it’s not an obsession. It seems to be that there’s almost a therapeutic function, right? Where you’re like, “I’m kinda stressed or stuff is going on or I just like— I need something to do for a half hour to settle my brain down.” And that’s when I see you creep over to your RSS feed of watch blogs. RZ Awristocrat! PF That might be— RZ That’s spelled W-R-I-S-T. I don’t wanna collect em. I like having them. I tend to get tired of them— PF I can vouch for this. RZ I don’t really want a room like a closet full of watches lined up. PF Well and also not to get into the numbers but we know some people that have done really, insanely well for themselves. Your collection is very nice and very special and very lovely but it’s not earth shattering. RZ No. No. PF You— you have— it’s not museum quality. RZ Not only that, I don’t want them long term [yeah]. I mean there are a couple that I’ve tied to events in my life that I’ll probably hold onto but the other’s are like, oh— ok. That was fun. PF Yeah— RZ That’s the thing. PF I got my pleasure out of this— RZ It’s not a material possession thing. Or an asset. Some people are like, “If I hold onto this for 20 years it’ll be worth three times as much.” PF It really is about the emotional reaction. RZ Yes. PF I think once you get into the asset that’s a whole different set of emotions, right? RZ Yeah. [6:47] PF Like for me I have limited— I don’t wanna move— I have limited shelf space [yeah] and so there’s a sort of like, what’s the most meaningful things I could put on that shelf? And then— RZ Question. Let me ask you a question: is it— do you love the physical object when you talk about your books or are you talking about just purely the content— [Paul sighs] cuz if it’s the content you could probably find it online or wherever. PF Oh the content’s everywhere. Yeah that’s not my worry. RZ Is it the physical thing? PF It’s the physical thing. It’s the space it takes up. Like how am I gonna apportion that space? What’s valuable? RZ No, no, but your love for it to begin with? PF I really do love it and the one of the things— RZ The physical thing. PF If— if I had more time, I would spend more of that time like with books and a notebook. That would be really satisfying. RZ Ok. PF I actually have a process, I really like reading. Occasionally I see something interesting, I would take a picture of it and tweet it [yeah]. Like that would be pure happiness for me [yeah]. I just don’t— especially with having little kids like, you know, they go to bed around 8:30 and I— I just am not gonna sit at a table and read for two hours. RZ Yes. PF I’m gonna goof off and watch some TV and answer emails. RZ Alright so let’s pivot into something that’s kind of, sort of sits as a juxtaposition when people talk about experiences today. Now, even if you weighed into our industry— PF Well I can— I can bridge this for you. There was just a big Apple event, it was held at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. [8:03] RZ That’s a beautiful space, by the way. PF It is. It is. RZ I live near it. PF Somebody was worried that— that Apple had bought it. RZ Dude, there were Apple flags [Paul laughs] all around the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and, by the way, there’s an Apple Store across the street from the Brooklyn Academy of Music [Listen—] that is absolutely striking and it looked like it was over. PF Yeah. RZ [Laughs] The dictator had arrived— PF Like there’s a big floating— RZ— the flags had been planted. PF There’s a giant Tim Cook head just sorta hovering. RZ [Laughs] Yeah and it’s like— yeah. And— and— PF “Strength through iOS.” RZ And you better start singing their song. If you don’t start singing their song, they’re gonna put you on the trucks and off you go. PF I think a third of America would probably pledge to Apple if it said, “We are the new government.” RZ I think so! So it looked weird, you know why? Because it was— it was nondescript. Apple being Apple there wasn’t a single word about what was happening. PF Right, so it’s just like, “Our presence is here.” RZ It was just apples with swirls of colors modify— modifying the logo. That’s the experience and look [stammers] — [8:59] PF Well and Apple’s— people have been obsessed with the Apple brand since the seventies. RZ Yes. Because it tried to humanize something that was— that felt very difficult to touch and to come near. PF And then, I mean, even before Steve Jobs, there were pictures— people shaving the Apple logo in their heads. And then— RZ It was a big deal. PF— as Jobs sort of made it more and more kind of this cult of quality, it got more and more intense, and I think that didn’t exactly scale. RZ No but— PF The brand works harder than any other brand. RZ It really does and— and they’re— I mean you can’t deny the craft that is— that is just— PF Well this is supreme, I mean I have— RZ— touching every aspect of the product. PF It’s almost inconceivable how— what these things are. Like every little piece represents thousands and thousands of person hours [yes] of unbelievable labor going back 40, 50 years. I mean they— they just are kinda— they just encapsulate all human culture [yes] into this tiny little box. RZ Well, I mean, we’ve really reached a threshold where I think we’re— people are starting to get scared. We talked a few minutes ago about obsession being get. Like your love of books is just a wonderful thing to talk through and talk about. I love watches but I’m not consumed by them. You wouldn’t call it an addiction. And what you’re hearing more and more of lately is the— the words obsession and addiction being used kind of interchangeably. PF That’s right and we’re very worried about children and phones. RZ Children and phones [yeah] and there was some articles— PF And iPads and— RZ Yeah. There were some articles recently where The New York Times said that in silicon valley, where they conjured up all this shit, they’re obsessed with their kids not using their phones. PF That’s right. I have an answer: just get your kids Chromebooks [music fades in] because they wanna throw those in the garbage. It’s wonderful. RZ Hard. PF Oh I love it. RZ It’s hard [music plays alone for six seconds, ramps down]. PF Rich, let’s interrupt our marketing podcast [music fades out] to do some marketing. RZ Despite what all these inventions do to your brain, Postlight’s really good at building them. PF We are [Rich laughing]. No matter what. No matter how many children’s brains are ruined by small devices [Rich laughs], um we are the device children ruiner— no, we’re not. We make really great software— RZ We channel a very different set of obsessions around great design, great engineering to build really great apps, really great platforms. PF We’re ethically concerned, too, we’re not going for addition. We’re not that kinda shop. RZ No, no. PF You call us because you have a business model and you want— now we love when people engage and are connected to stuff. RZ Yes. PF You know, we want people to really— RZ No, engagement’s part of success for us, for sure. PF We love people to use our stuff but we’re not— we’re not trying to figure out how to keep you on that phone for eight hours a day. Uh but we can help people— you know, when they open up a Postlight app, they think, “Wow, this looks, behaves, and operates exactly like the other really good apps that I’m used to.” We are— we’re at a very high level of quality, we take it very seriously. It’s— we’re not the cheapest for that reason but we’re pretty good. RZ Very reasonable. [11:59] PF We are overall when people work with us over time they come back again and again and again. We love that. RZ Visit postlight.com and you will see a bunch of work [music fades in]. PF That is true. Take a look at our work and send an email to hello@postlight.com [music plays alone for six seconds]. First of all: most of what children like to do with a screen is consume media. RZ Sure. PF When we grew up, we had, you know, Commodores and Amigas and Macs and whatever and you had to do computer things with computers because they wouldn’t play videos. Not really. Not until the nineties, and even then it was like little crappy videos [yup]. The current state is, you know, which of a hundred billion hours of video can I watch before somebody realizes that— you know, like when my parents are sleeping in, I wanna— like my kids will just sort of negotiate for computer time and the computer time that they want is Netflix and YouTube. RZ Understandably. PF Yup. RZ I mean it’s kind of magical. You’re holding this thing that’s a pound. PF It’s not just that though. They— if I remind them or if I say, “No, you can’t have that but you can have,” and then the number two thing that they like to do— and there’s lots of games on there, cuz it’ll play Android games, I will say like, you know, it’s just like Barbie— RZ Shopping Barbie. PF Yeah, Shopping Barbie or weird like princess games and so on and [yeah] there’s a profile of my children in Russia that’s probably about 700 pages long at this point [Rich laughs] but the um if I say, “You know what? Take some time on Google Maps and go look around Staten Island,” they love it. RZ I mean that’s wonderful. It’s exploration. PF They get to see the whole world. They get to see it. RZ Sure. Sure. [13:34] PF It’s like— like you’d imagine with kids, they wanna see their house [yeah] and then they wanna see their school and then they’re like, “I’ve been there,” and it’ll be relatively close by, it’s Grand Army Plaza [of course]. So they love that and then Google knows everywhere my children are looking and that’s cool. RZ And they’re in your house. Yeah. [Paul laughs]. So ok so. Let’s bring this into the whole— PF Well see Netflix— RZ “Ok. Let’s avoid kid addiction blah blah blah.” PF I mean let’s look at how the different companies react to this, right? Like Netflix just goes online, “You’re gonna binge watch this garbage and we’re gonna continue to shovel it down your baby bird mouths and you’re gonna give us money every month. You’re gonna forget how much you’re paying and you’re just gonna suck it up through your nose like cocaine.” RZ Worth noting: there is no setting, in Netflix, to not make another show start when one ends. PF Oh yeah! RZ It probably would take an engineer and a QA staff [no] a day to put this switch in. PF Netflix is the product equivalent of dumping a like a bag of candy hearts on the floor and saying, “Go, pig.” [Rich laughs] You’re— and you’re like, “I don’t even like candy hearts!” [Makes gross chomping sounds]. RZ “But ok!” [Laughs] PF That’s— that’s my experience of Netflix. RZ So. Alright. Let me— let me rant for a second here. It is scary I mean a kid— they do have a glazed look in their eyes if you leave em too long holding an iPad or a Chromebook. PF Oh, you know what’s bad? I got my kids sound cancelling headphones cuz I’ve got twins, right? [Oh god!] And they can’t— and I have this issue where every now and then the light’ll cut out in the room where it’s kind of my office space where they have their computers so I can watch them. So if I’ll like walk away, I tend to be kinda— I try to be close unless I’m asleep when they’re using the machines and they don’t get a lot of time with them but when you walk in and the room is dark and the screen is on their face and they’re wearing headphones, I’m like, “I am breeding monsters.” RZ Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [15:24] PF This is— like it needs to feel public and they need to be connected and near other humans when they’re using this stuff. I don’t— it’s pretty bad when they just lock in. RZ It’s scary. It’s scary. Right. So this is the fear and this fear is actually even more pronounced than Silicon Valley where they, frankly, invented a lot of this stuff which is, you know, New York Times wrote it up as almost this kind of irony. PF I’m so tired of all the drama though. “Oh! Oh! Oh!” Cuz here’s what— Silicon Valley’s so proud of itself for destroying the world. RZ It’s— PF They love to fantasize about all the incredible cultural power they have. They can’t build a skyscraper. RZ It’s this [both laugh] — PF [Laughing] That thing— they built one good skyscraper— RZ They can’t. After five stories, they’re fuckin’ confused. PF Everything is sinking! RZ They are confused. PF You know they’re like, “Oh hey, we dug a hole four blocks away and we destroyed this skyscraper.” I’m like— what did we— New York City [yeah], we sure as hell can’t build Google. RZ No. PF But, you know, we’ve been doing that since 1910 [Rich laughs], you know, maybe you could’ve sent somebody over. RZ It takes like three weeks. PF Seriously. RZ “Holy shit! When did that come up?!?” [16:24] PF Why don’t you just bring your— bring one of your iPhones out and take some pictures of the Woolworth building which went up [Rich laughs] in like 1915 and then take that back to San Francisco— what the hell, even email it over wireless. We have that in the parks. And uh and then maybe, you know, what you do is when you get the architectural renderings, I don’t know if they’ve ever seen this, you get the blueprints and you just write the words, “Don’t sink.” [Yeah] And that’s actually how the people in construction know but anyway San Franc— RZ They love to signal out that they’re seeing things that other people aren’t seeing. PF That’s right. RZ They love to say, “Oh my god—” PF They— oh yeah [whistles]. RZ “We are about three years ahead of this, guys, let’s talk this through.” PF The phone emergency. RZ All of it, right? PF Yeah, they’re really into like— this is the thing: they’re kinda missing climate— we’re not gonna get to really, really strong AI taking over the world before climate change destroys all the computers. Like we’ve, you know, [Rich laughs] like [stammers] like I know Moore’s Law. RZ We’re losing that race. PF I know Moore’s Law! We’re gonna get— it’ll just be like Seamless’ll be really fast and then one day there’ll be four feet of water in front of your door. Like you’re not gonna get a really great, intelligent assistant. RZ True. So wait! I mean is it legitimate? PF It’s a lot of consum— RZ We have to watch with these kids staring at their phones like passively? [17:32] PF Of course, of course you do. But you know what? God. Uh. As a parent, first of all: kids need to wind down like anyone else. It’s what you put in the brain. RZ Ok. PF Like uh maybe I’m lucky. I have good readers. I have very active, healthy kids. They’re healthier than I ever was. And they’re engaged and they have friends. They have all the regular problems that kids have, but it’s not cuz they’re watching an extra hour of Netflix every week. This is not really what we’re talking about. Now if my daughter was playing Candy Crush obsessively, you know, at age eight or nine, she’s seven now, then that’s an issue because that is like— that is a growing brain that has given itself entirely to Candy Crush. RZ Yeah. You have to diversify the experiences. PF And I have— my son likes YouTube cuz he loves to watch other people play video games and people are very paranoid about it— RZ Well that’s a big thing, right? PF I watch it really carefully. Everybody’s worried about strange alleys but, I don’t know, I keep a pretty close eye, I kinda know what’s in his cue and— RZ I’m not sure if that’s that much different from watching other people play sports. PF It’s like anything, I see— I have a little boy who loves to run and play soccer. RZ Again: same parallels, right? PF Yeah. RZ Uh I mean that kid needs to run and play soccer, otherwise they go bonkers, and like my boy but— PF If he tries to convince— RZ— frankly, watching sports isn’t [yeah] destroying anybody. Uh people have been doing it for many years. At first they couldn’t watch it, they’d have to listen to it. PF There’s so many other things to panic about. [18:58] RZ I’m gonna rant for a minute here. PF Rant! RZ My parents weren’t reading a lot of books. First off: there were no websites about how— we fled a war and we were immigrants in the country. I watched probably eight to twelve thousand hours of a mo— of a cat trying to eat a mouse. PF [Laughs] And What’s Happening!! RZ And [laughs] — PF There was a cluster of after school reruns on when we were kids. RZ Dude, it was— I— if you— we just— we just took a shit on Netflix. If you put on Netflix and wanna teach your kid the value of green vegetables [yeah] there is a cartoon for the value [oh yeah] like understanding and appreciating the value of green vegetables. PF Have you seen the show Hilda? RZ No. They’re all spectacular, dude. PF Oh it’s a charming narrative of a little girl with trolls. Oh, it’s wonderful. RZ Everybody’s learning manners! They’re learning how to eat [uh huh]; they’re learning about the world. There’s this show called Super Wings. PF That’s right. And when they’re ready for Hitler, there’s 40 or 50 thousand shows to watch. RZ Just a channel away [laughs]. PF Yeah! And then you switch to Amazon Prime and you got a hundred thousand. RZ [Laughs boisterously] So, look, man, I’m not saying I came out great. That’s questionable [Paul laughs] but shit! PF That’s a lot of podcast right there. RZ I watched a lot— a lot— my mom was a smoker and she was going through a lot of stuff [uh huh] and it was hard, it was a new country, and I am just eating up Tom and Jerry. It’s a cartoon where a cat is trying to eat a mouse [sure] and it’s the dumbest thing you ever saw and I thought it was really funny [mm hmm] and I’ve watched the same episodes of that cartoon probably hundreds of times and I’m ok. I think— [20:43] PF When did you— when did you actually start reading? Was it law school? Was it undergrad? Like not learning to read but like there’s a point where you started to read a lot of books and a lot of stuff. RZ It was probably undergrad. PF Yeah. RZ Yeah. PF That’s the big difference, right? Like I think the only thing that would’ve been different in your life is if you’d started earlier. RZ I think that’s right. I also was very fortunate you could pop open the back of an Apple 2 when I was 15. PF Yeah. See but you had to read and learn about how that worked too. RZ I did. I did. PF And, you know, you’re reading the catalogue, you’re reading the computer magazine. Like you wanted access to that world. RZ True. That’s true. PF Yeah so that— This is the thing that people miss about technology and I think this actually does get— it kinda takes us all the way back around. When you’re young, the world inside of that computer is a whole world and that was true whether it’s an Apple 2 or the phone, and it is actually— people are worried about Google and they’re worried about Apple. See I don’t— when you’re a kid and when you’re a teenager you know that there are forces outside of your control that are much bigger than you and you can’t tell which ones are good or bad and you don’t really trust any of them. RZ True. PF What kids are doing right now is they’re looking at their phones and sometimes they’re mindlessly consuming content. As they get older, most kids get real suspicious and they start to take it apart, and they start to wonder what’s going on. [21:55] RZ And I think that’s really cool and, you know, you’re seeing a lot of products out there like little bits and— and where you can actually take apart the toy and make a different toy out of the parts because there are no screws on that iPad. That thing is sealed tight [that’s right]. It’s just a magic box to them [mm hmm]. They have no idea. They don’t even call it a computer. It’s just this thing that just has an endless supply of stuff. PF Yeah and this is uh— RZ I want them to be able to interact which, by the way, there are some wonderful things out there on an iPad or on a Chromebook, where they interact and they explore [dude] and they learn and they build. I had none of that. PF Listen to me: we got you and me saying, “Oh it’s wonderful to explore.” And you’ve got the people in Silicon Valley saying, “Keep it away from them cuz it will destroy them.” You know what’s really gonna happen? Human beings have their own will and they’re pretty mischievous and they like to tear things apart like primates. RZ True. PF Teenagers will ruin everything. This current generation will come up and they will see Facebook and they will see Twitter and they will Google and they’ll be like, “What is this trash? It’s just been around forever.” RZ That’s very true. PF And you’re gonna go work at Google, it’s gonna be like going to work for the phone system when we were kids [yeah]. I mean it’s just like— this world will collapse into itself and that doesn’t mean that billionaires won’t remain billionaires or giant organizations won’t exist, it just means that tech moves fast, people can create what they want in order to communicate, and nobody maintains a lock in. So I’m just sort of like— we’re talking and we’re worrying about children because they don’t seem to have a lot of power but they have a lot of will, and they will start tearing all this stuff down to shreds. RZ I think that’s exactly right. PF And if you won’t let it and you lock em down, then they’ll go do something else. RZ And— and I think the best thing we can do is to encourage that. I do think there’s a crossing point that if you let that kid— I do have— I’ve had friends over and they’re ten or 12 and— [23:41] PF Oh and the kid just stares. RZ He’s— he’s just not— they’re it’s their babysitter, right? PF Yeah, see— RZ And the iPad is in their hands and their heads are down and they don’t— they don’t even say hello. PF My kids— my kids wanted an iPad at four and I was like, “Eh.” [No] Cuz it’s too much like candy. Just little rectangles of delicious candy. RZ It’s the passcode for us. We have an iPad, they don’t know it. And if we tell them, “You’re gonna get 15 minutes,” you’ll get 15 minutes. PF Yeah. What is your— let’s close out on this: what is your um we said non-nerd obsessions earlier [mm hmm]. What’s your nerd obsession? RZ Emulation. PF Oh really?!? RZ I love emulation. PF It’s funny cuz we don’t talk about this that much but I’m pretty obsessed with it too. RZ I know. It’s so cool. It just makes me happy. PF Tell the people what emulation is. RZ Emulation is when a machine transforms itself to behave entirely like another machine. So if you own— PF Usually an older machine. Not always. But usually. RZ Usually an older machine. I remember when they tried to press the gas and like the N64 emulator came out around when the N64 was out. PF Yeah, it was like Mario could hop once a minute. [24:42] RZ [Laughs] But you know I mean credit to them for trying it’s like, “Wait a minute, it’s the same CPU, we can do this.” PF This is— this is the super nerd like power play is to be an emulator writer cuz— RZ Ah! It’s so badass! PF— what you’re doing, you’re simulating another piece of hardware in software. RZ Yeah. It’s so cool. PF So that people can like play their games or run their software. RZ And when the archive put out like, “Yeah. Here’s 11,000 arcade games you can play in your browser.” It’s over. PF Internet Archive, yeah. That’s good. That’s the work of our friend, Jason Scott. RZ And I was like, “Well, that’s that!” PF And thousands of other people over time. RZ Uh it’s just really cool. It’s cool cuz I like to see the glitchy startup. I like— [yeah] I like to see it boot up cuz it’s truly emulating. It’s not a port. PF No and it’s rough around the edges, you know, you’re just like, “Oh this is where we came from.” RZ What about you? PF I like to research things actually. So lately I’ve been researching storage a lot. Like there’s just— I wanna know like what would it take to get a petabyte of information. This is actually inspired by Alan Kay who was a really uh important thinker in early technology and sort of big at Xerox PARC who at one point wrote an article about how what they were building was sort of the ten, 15 year later computer. You know they’re— they built these computers at Xerox that cost like 120,000 dollars in the seventies so like as much as a house. RZ Yeah. PF And— but they were trying to be desktop computers and I’m just sort of thinking to myself like what would the equivalent machine be for 15 years from now? And it’s gonna something like that— it’s gonna be, you know, what we think of now as almost infinite storage and [yeah] the processors can’t get too much faster but there were gonna be a lot more of them and there’ll be lots of little— so I just sort of— I like to continually come back to that mental exercise because the moment that we’re in now where five companies control the world and— and everything is sort of online and works in a certain way is going to change. And I just— I need to keep that in my head so that I feel like I’m adapting and ready for the future. [26:36] RZ Right. Growing up, Paul, I loved Legos. PF Sure! RZ And what I loved about them is obviously that they allowed you to be creative [mm hmm]. You could build stuff. I used to build houses and if you looked in the window of the house there was a little living room [mm hmm] cuz I’d make a couch and put it in the house [oh yeah] and a little table and a little TV. And my— my son gets Lego box gifts all the time. PF Oh god yeah. No. Infinite supply. RZ And they suck. PF Yeah. RZ Because it’s a little bat mobile. PF Yeah. RZ And the pieces are extremely specific to building just that batmobile and the instruction manual is 22 pages of how to make the batmobile and nothing else. And they— they have taken all the oxygen out of the room and there is no room for creativity and he can’t do anything else with those pieces. And this is more fundamentally my fear with where technology’s gone in that the controls that have been imposed— PF “Follow these instructions to get this great outcome.” RZ And you can’t come outside those guardrails, right? Like you can’t leap em. PF Well cuz that used to be you were exploring your world and kind of figuring out— humans, you know, we’re primates. We wanna know where’s the— where are the boundaries? What’s the territory we can get to? [Exactly] What kind of power can we have? And you had a power where you were like, “I can make a house.” RZ Yes. [27:54] PF “I am a house maker. I wasn’t that before and now I am.” RZ Exactly. Exactly. PF I will say it is fun to see, you know, I’ve got seven year old twins and now they get those and they follow the instructions together and they make them and then they tear them apart and they go into the mulch supply of the regular Legos which they still play with. So it’s working— it’s working at that age but [yeah] it— it actually— when they were younger which your son’s about a year younger, when they would get the toy, they would really feel obligated towards the toy. RZ “I want the thing on the box” PF That’s right. RZ And that was it. And that was it. And beyond that and when you broke apart, which is did, it’s Legos. PF Of course. RZ They viewed it as broken. PF No, it— as they grow that becomes a more ephemeral experience except for the people who get obsessed with Legos and want everything to be perfect. RZ Right. PF So, obsessions! Good or bad? RZ Who knows?!? [Music fades in.] PF Alright, Rich, let’s get out of here. RZ Yeah, I wanna go use my phone. PF I’m gonna have some chocolate. You getting chocolate? RZ And I’m gonna stare at my watch while I eat chocolate. I have chocolate. I will give you chocolate. We will have a couple of chocolate links next to the podcast. PF You know if you ever wanna work with us, there’s a very good chance you will have a piece of chocolate given to you in that first meeting. RZ Excellent chance. PF You just have to bring it up. We don’t like to showcase this too much cuz— RZ No. No, no. PF— people are like, “What?!” RZ “What wrong . . . with this person?” PF Yeah but if you want that piece of chocolate and even if you just want a little conversation: hello@postlight.com. That email goes straight to me and Rich and uh we like to talk. RZ Have a great week. PF Bye, everybody [music ramps up, plays alone for five seconds, fades out to end].
Kevin Kelly is cofounder of Wired Magazine and former editor of The Whole Earth Review. He is considered a futurist and has written a number of books identifying technological trends and innovations, including his most recent book The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future. Check out the episode at www.economicrockstar.com/kevinkelly or watch it over on the Economic Rockstar YouTube channel. Support the podcast at www.patreon.com/economicrockstar for as little as $1 a month
Kevin Kelly has been writing on the Internet since 1982 and Tim Ferris calls him the Most Interesting Man in the World. He has spent the past 40+ years living project to project, accomplishing some truly impressive feats in the process without ever attending college or university. From 1984 to 1990, Kevin Kelly was the publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review. In 1993 he co-founded Wired magazine and served as its Executive Editor for the first seven years. He is now Senior Maverick for Wired. He is a co-founder and editor of the popular Cool Tools website. Kevin Kelly is also a world-renowned bestselling author of countless books, with his latest called The Inevitable. He is also the author of the viral Internet piece called 1,000 True Fans. Now, let’s hack… Kevin Kelly In this 46-minute episode Kevin Kelly and I discuss: The importance of asking the dumb questions and critiquing your own thoughts in writing Recognizing knowledge and information as a commodity Establishing your voice on the Internet and finding a niche audience Honoring the middle-ground between brick & mortar and Amazon.com Saying yes to the right ideas and learning to say no to the others The catch-22 of being successful and embracing failure The Show Notes KK.org 1,000 True Fans Books by Kevin Kelly Kevin on Twitter Jon on Twitter Dig this episode? Wait until you hear these... How The Pitch Podcast was Acquired by Gimlet Media | Josh Muccio Working Between Your Comfort and Panic Zones | Chris Altchek | Mic [Going Deep] on Scaling a Media Company | Nathan Chan | Foundr
Kevin Kelly is the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, and a former editor/publisher of the Whole Earth Review. He has also been a writer, photographer, conservationist, and student of Asian and digital culture. We start off with getting to know Kevin’s background, then proceed to having him tell us about Wired. Doc chimes in and asks Kevin what he thinks is his greatest prediction about the internet then proceeds to talk about AI’s. Doc is pretty big and enthusiastic about AI’s, so he gets to asking about the implications for the future of employment, talk about the possibility of having a technological revolution, as well as the possible effects of such an occurrence on the religions of the world. Finally, they discuss about AR and VR and the pros and cons of the future with AI’s. Technology is amazing, so it was great to hear from someone who really has their head in that area of the world! Kevin was an amazing guest and we’re sure there’s plenty of key points you can take away from this one. Enjoy the show, guys! Quarsh Creative is an Elwood-based freelance design firm that helps solve business challenges in the digital world with a touch of creativity.Whether it be a website, logo, or marketing strategy, Quarsh Creative is here to help your business become stronger and create a better overall experience for your customers.As a special offer from ADVF Radio and Quarsh Creative, we're offering a free, basic SEO report on your website, and/or constructive feedback for your existing brand. Start the conversation via email at: hello@quarshcreative.com This podcast is supported by Audible. Audible is home to the widest selection of digital audiobooks, including best-sellers, new releases, exclusives and much more. Listen anytime, anywhere on your tablet, mobile or desktop with our free app. Audible is offering listeners of AdventureFit Radio a free audiobook download with a free 30-day trial to give you the opportunity to check out their service. To download your free audiobook today go to audibletrial.com/advfradio. This podcast is proudly supported by AdventureFit Travel. AdventureFit Travel is an adventure travel company for the fitness community. Head over to www.adventurefittravel.com to check out all our trips, all our blogs from our blogging team, special offers and more. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Jonathan White discusses his book, Tides: The Science and Spirit of the Ocean. After nearly losing his 65’ wooden schooner in a large Alaskan tide, writer, sailor, and surfer Jonathan White vowed to understand the tide. He knew the moon had something to do with it, but what exactly? He read a book, then two. Ten years later, he had read three hundred books and criss-crossed the seven seas to see the largest, fastest, scariest, and most amazing tides in the world. With photographs, stories, and short readings, Jonathan takes his audiences on an enthralling journey into the surprising and poetic workings of the tide. Jonathan White is an accomplished writer, conservationist, sailor, and educator. His first book, Talking on the Water: Conversations about Nature and Creativity, features interviews with Gretel Ehrlich, David Brower, Ursula K. Le Guin, Gary Snyder, Peter Matthiessen, and others. His writing has appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, The Sun, Sierra, the Whole Earth Review, and Fine Homebuilding. Jonathan White holds an MFA in creative nonfiction, and lives with his wife and son on a small island in Washington State.
Kevin Kelly has had a lot of accomplishments in his life and it certainly is not able to be summed up in this short intro. But to give you an overview, Kevin is Senior Maverick and the founding executive editor of Wired magazine as well as a former editor/publisher of the Whole Earth Review. His newest book, The Inevitable, is a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. He co-founded Hackers’ Conference and was involved in the launch of the WELL, an online service started in 1985 considered to be a pioneer in developing online communities and social networks. He has been published in the New York Times, The Economist, Time, Harpers, Science, GQ, Wall Street journal, and Esquire. Prior to pursuing technology, Kevin was a photojournalist, once riding his bike 5,000 miles across America and for most of the 1970’s was a photographer in remote parts of Asia and had his photographs published in national magazines.
This week's episode is brought to you by Visionary Magnets, the refrigerator poetry magnets that turn your boring old kitchen appliances into the substrate for woke invocations, tantric pillow talk, and other occult goofery. Support their Kickstarter and "enlighten your fridge" today! Or tomorrow. Subscribe to Future Fossils on iTunes Subscribe to Future Fossils on Stitcher Join the Future Fossils Facebook Group This week is part one of a special double-length episode with Jon Lebkowsky, founder of EFF-Austin – one of the unsung heroes of Internet culture, whose tale stretches through the earliest web communities and reads like a list of landmark moments in the history of digital rights and culture. http://weblogsky.com/ https://twitter.com/jonl https://www.facebook.com/polycot/ https://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/495/Bruce-Sterling-and-Jon-Lebkowsky-page01.html We talk about the early days of hacking in the Wild West of the 1990s, how the World Wide Web has changed since then, and the promises and perils of the Internet in the 21st Century. It’s a winding tale of pseudonymous keyboard-slingers and federal raids, roleplaying game empires and sci-fi visionaries, centered on the unsuspecting hippie cowboy outpost of Austin, Texas, Once Upon A Time. Enjoy this special conversation on the history of the Internet we know today, and a snapshot of the hopes and fears of life online in the dawn of our digital era… TOPICS: - The threat of Internet-empowered fascism and “participation mystique” (or maybe worse, a corporate plutocracy) eroding rational civil discourse and the dignity of the individual - The problems with “Net Neutrality” and how it makes more sense to focus on “The Freedom to Connect” - Connectivity vs. Interdependence (OR) Networks vs. Buddhism - Does the Noosphere already exist, and we’re just excavating it? - The History of Electronic Frontier Foundation-Austin and how it was connected to the secret service’s raid of legendary role-playing game designer Steve Jackson (GURPS) - The hilarious, troubled Dawn Age of e-commerce before secure web browsing - Jon’s work with a Gurdjieff group and his encounters with esoterica as an editor of the Consciousness subdomain for the last issue of the Whole Earth Review - Cybergrace, TechGnosis, and Millennial concerns about the mind/body split in the first Internet and our need to humanize technology with whole-body interfaces and MOVEMENT - Embodied Virtual Reality & Other Full-Sensory Immersive Media - Cory Doctorow’s new novel Walkaway as a banner book for the maker movement and a new form of cyber-social-liberation. - The movement of political agency back into city-states in a digital era - “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.” - Shaping the future of wireless infrastructure in the early 00s of Austin - Getting our values right before we imprint the wrong ones into superhuman AI - Putting together diverse conversation groups to solve “wicked problems” - New forms of participatory open-source politics suited for an internet age SOME OF THE PEOPLE & STUFF WE MENTIONED: Whole Earth Provisions, Whole Earth Review, The WELL, Whole Foods, William Gibson, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Hakim Bey, William Irwin Thompson, Alien Covenant, Terminator, John Perry Barlow, Mitch Kapor, Mike Godwin, Bruce Sterling, Clay Shirkey, WIRED Magazine, Fringeware, RoboFest, Heather Barfield, Neal Stephenson, Terence McKenna, Church of the Subgenius, Mondo 2000, Erik Davis, GI Gurdjieff, The National Science Fiction Convention, Rudy Rucker, Greg Bear, Jon Shirley, Jennifer Cobb, Robert Scoville, Greg Egan, Ernest Cline, Octopus Project, The Tingler, Honey I Shrunk The Kids (Ride), Charles Stross, Glass House, Rapture of the Nerds, Cory Doctorow, Alan Moore, Project Hieroglyph, Arizona State University, Jake Dunagan, Plutopia Productions, The Digital Convergence Initiative, Chris Boyd, South By Southwest, Boing Boing, Make Magazine, Dave Demaris, Maggie Duval, Bon Davis, DJ Spooky, Forest Mars, OS Con, RU Sirius, Shin Gojira, Open-Source Party, JON LEBKOWSKY QUOTES: “The Noosphere can certainly have pathologies…” “The Internet was originally a peer-to-peer system, and so you had a network of networks, and they were all cooperating and carrying each other’s traffic, and so forth. And that was a fairly powerful idea, but the Internet is not that anymore. The Internet has, because of the way it’s evolved, because it’s become so powerful and so important and so critical, there are systems that are more dominant – backbone systems – and those are operated by large companies that understand how to operate big networks. That’s really a different system than the system that was originally built.” “SO FAR we’ve managed to keep the Internet fairly open…the absolute idea of net neutrality might not be completely practical.” “Science fiction is a literature of ideas, but a lot of those ideas do not manifest in exactly the way that they did in the book.” “I don’t have a real high level of confidence that anybody understands exactly what the fuck is going on.” “You couldn’t get a consumer account to get access to the Internet at that time. And in fact I think the first companies to do that were here in Austin.” “At the time, we were the only game in town for internet stuff…” “One thing I learned was, if you’re at the very cutting edge, it’s hard to make money.” “There are a lot of people who aren’t in touch with themselves internally. Because it’s hard. It’s hard to do that.” “I know that that’s sort of the goal in VR development: to give you a fully immersive experience where you’re really in a completely other reality, like in the Holodeck. But, you know. I’m still dealing with THIS reality. I don’t want another one.” “In an online community, people are always itching for ways to get into real human proximity with one another. They’re always looking for ways to meet.” “That’s my idea of what works now: is to have events that are experiences, you know, versus people just like, going to movies, or watching television, or going to a concert and watching a band play.” “I keep thinking that we won’t be able to solve our problems with bureaucracy or the kind of governance structures that we’ve been living with, but I look around me and see people who are doing just fine, and doing great work, and living their lives…and I’m sort of feeling hopeful and a little bit confident that those people will step up and do what they need to do to make things work, even if our so-called elected officials aren’t doing it.” See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Future Squared with Steve Glaveski - Helping You Navigate a Brave New World
Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He co-founded Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor for its first seven years. He is also founding editor and co-publisher of the popular Cool Tools website, which has been reviewing tools daily since 2003. From 1984-1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers’ Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. His books include the best-selling New Rules for the New Economy, the classic book on decentralized emergent systems, Out of Control, a graphic novel about robots and angels, The Silver Cord, an oversize catalog of the best of Cool Tools, and his summary theory of technology in What Technology Wants (2010). His new book is The Inevitable - Understanding the 12 Technological Forces that will Shape Our Future, which is a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. This was a fascinating conversation with one of the most influential names in technology, entrepreneurship, digital media and future thinking. Expect to learn a number of things throughout the podcast but specifically Kevin and I cover: Whether humanity will find new things to do or simply live an unfulfilling existence once most of today’s jobs are automated or made redundant What large companies can do to prepare for what Kevin Kelly refers to as The Inevitable What we should do to combat online recommendation systems that serve to harden our minds to particular tastes or beliefs All topics discussed: Kevin’s travels to Uzbekistan and his views on the national dish How Kevin landed on 12 technological forces that will shape our inevitable future Why there’s never been a better time to start a business Why we all be endless newbies going forward, regardless of age or experience The number one skill people need to learn to succeed in the future Will humanity find new things to do once we automate most of what we already do? Why trying to ban the inevitable (and companies like UBER or Airbnb) backfires Will we have jobs in the future? Show notes: Kevin Kelly’s blog: www.kk.org Cool Tools: www.kk.org/cooltools Book: https://amzn.to/2p85Fan Twitter: @kevin2kelly --- Join the conversation on Facebook: www.facebook.com/groups/futuresquared/where you can discuss episodes, request guests, propose questions for forthcoming guests and access exclusive content and special offers! Listen on iTunes @ goo.gl/sMnEa0 Listen on Spotify @ spoti.fi/2G2QsxV Listen on Stitcher @ www.stitcher.com/podcast/future Listen on Google Play @ bit.ly/FSGoog If you've got any questions on this podcast feel free to send an email to steve@collectivecamp.us or tweet me on Twitter @steveglaveski or @future_squared Follow me on Instagram: @thesteveglaveski Like us? It'd make our day if you took 1 minute to show some love on iTunes, Stitcher or Soundcloud by subscribing, sharing and giving us a 5 star rating. To sign up to our mailing list head to www.futuresquared.xyz For more information on Collective Campus, our innovation hub, school and consultancy based in Australia and Singapore check out www.collectivecampus.io
Who is on the show today: Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He co-founded Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor for its first seven years. His new book for Viking/Penguin is called The Inevitable, which is a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. He is also founding editor and co-publisher of the popular Cool Tools website, which has been reviewing tools daily since 2003. From 1984-1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers' Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. His books include the best-selling New Rules for the New Economy, the classic book on decentralized emergent systems, Out of Control, a graphic novel about robots and angels, The Silver Cord, an oversize catalog of the best of Cool Tools, and his summary theory of technology in What Technology Wants (2010). Why is he on the show: In his latest book "The Inevitable", he talks about 12 trends that will shape the way our society will evolve. This is already a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. What do we talk about: In this free-wheeling conversation, we talk about: His interest and curating non-fiction films. He has a curated list of some of the wonderful documentaries on his site here. The 12 trends that are directions that technology is going to move towards, that seem to be inevitable. He lists them as verbs (Becoming, Cognifying, Flowing, Screening, Accessing, Sharing, Filtering, Remixing, Interacting, Tracking, Questioning , Beginning) [bctt tweet=""Trends are inevitable, the form and function is not"" username="rmukeshgupta"] Technology vs Societal view points of view to look at the future.. How Technology has its own agenda.. Have these trends have been behaving since the time the book was written.. How Moore's law would have served you really well if you believed in it.. Artificial intelligence and how this is going to play out.. How can entrepreneurs make use of these trends and place themselves at the fore-runners when these trends play out and become mainstream How can we stay relevant in the future where these trends are becoming mainstream? What do these technologies and trends mean for us as a society and culture? How do we prepare for the future that is coming? Access vs ownership Products vs services Tangible vs intangible A 1000 true fans and how this coupled with the trends that we are talking about provides a great opportunity for entrepreneurs to profit from. What are some of the most important skills that we need to learn in order to stay relevant: To learn how to learn (Meta skill or the super skill). Figure out how we learn best or our own kind of learning. Learn how to ask questions. Techno-literacy and critical thinking How he learns and stays up-to-date with what he sees happening around him? What he thinks is obvious but no one sees it yet (A very surprising answer).. Documentary he recommends - Becoming Warren Buffet. You can watch the documentary below: How can you connect with him: You can find his blog here. You can subscribe to his weekly newsletter here.
Credits: Opening music credit goes to Riju Mukhopadhyay & Pavan Cherukumilli Who is on the show today: Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He co-founded Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor for its first seven years. His new book for Viking/Penguin is called The Inevitable, which is a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. He is also founding editor and co-publisher of the popular Cool Tools website, which has been reviewing tools daily since 2003. From 1984-1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers’ […]
Biodynamics Now! Investigative Farming and Restorative Nutrition Podcast
Welcome to episode 25 of the Biodynamics Now! Podcast. Our guest today is Toby Hemenway, one of the leading practitioners and teachers of permaculture design in America. Toby Hemenway is the author of Gaia’s Garden the first major North American book on permaculture, which was published by Chelsea Green in 2009. His most recent book is The Permaculture City, is also published by Chelsea Green. The Permaculture City provides a new way of thinking about urban living, with practical examples for creating abundant food, energy security, close-knit communities, local and meaningful livelihoods, and sustainable policies in our cities and towns. The same nature-based approach that a good permaculturist uses so beautifully for growing food—connecting the pieces of the landscape together in harmonious ways—applies perfectly to many of our other needs. Toby illuminates a new way forward through examples of edge-pushing innovations, along with a deeply holistic conceptual framework for our cities, towns, and suburbs. The show notes for today's conversation are at bdnow.org If you appreciate hearing important programs like this one please take the time to leave us a positive review on iTunes, there's a link at the show notes. Toby Hemenway After obtaining a degree in biology from Tufts University, Toby worked for many years as a researcher in genetics and immunology, first in academic laboratories at Harvard and the University of Washington in Seattle, and then at Immunex, a major medical biotech company. At about the time he was growing dissatisfied with the direction biotechnology was taking, he discovered permaculture, a design approach based on ecological principles that creates sustainable landscapes, homes, and workplaces. A career change followed, and Toby and his wife spent ten years creating a rural permaculture site in southern Oregon. He was associate editor of Permaculture Activist, a journal of ecological design and sustainable culture, from 1999 to 2004. He teaches permaculture and consults and lectures on ecological design throughout the country. His writing has appeared in magazines such as Whole Earth Review, Natural Home, and Kitchen Gardener. He is available for workshops, lectures, and consulting in ecological design. Visit his web site at www.patternliteracy.com
Kevin Kelly, I think, may be the smartest person in the world...and I am only half-joking. I have been deeply interested in his work, and his thinking has influenced mine. His 2010 book What Technology Wants changed my perspective on Information Technology in 2010; his book Cool Tools is a compendium of the best tools cultivated from his years of research. Among other resources I like is his blog post 1000 True Fans; his latest book just released this summer titled The Inevitable; and his podcast interviews on London Real, Tim Ferriss, Lewis Howes, and Chase Jarvis. I asked him to come onto the show to get into topics that I had not heard him dive into from the perspective that I was curious about... I know you will be too. Major take aways from this episode are: 1. If you were the leader of a 1000 person company, what would you ask your direct 5 reports to do? 2. What skills are needed to teach kids to handle this new future in regards to learning and failure? 3. How Kevin Kelly would handle ethics and governance as we program Artificial Intelligence. 4. How humans will become more ethical and moral training AI. 5. Kevin's AI philosophy is very unique and will help you understand the role of AI working with other AIs. 6. His opinion on the difference between AI, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning. 7. The importance of being a newbie and an attitude of being a lifelong learner. 8. The difference between learning, how to learn versus finding how you learn that is unique to you. 9 . The skills enterprise leaders need to have in regards to how to fail. 10. The important skill of looking at the edges. 11. "In a world of abundance the only scarcity will be our attention," Herbert Simon. I have linked up all the show notes on redzonetech.net/podcast when you can get access to Kevin Kelly's books and publications. About Kevin Kelly: Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He co-founded Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor for its first seven years. He is also founding editor and co-publisher of the popular Cool Tools website, which has been reviewing tools daily since 2003. From 1984-1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers' Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. His books include the best-selling New Rules for the New Economy, the classic book on decentralized emergent systems, Out of Control, a graphic novel about robots and angels, The Silver Cord, an oversize catalog of the best of Cool Tools, and his summary theory of technology in What Technology Wants (2010). His new book for Viking/Penguin is called The Inevitable. Read full transcript here. How to get in touch with Kevin Kelly: Twitter Flickr YouTube Google Website Contact Page Website: kk.org Podcast: Cool Tools Podcast Blog: Cool Tools Blog Books: The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future What Technology Wants Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities Full List of Published Books by Kevin Kelly Key Resources: Blog post 1000 True Fans TEDxTalk 12 Inevitable Forces That Will Shape Our Future Interview for London Real Interview with Tim Ferriss Interview with Lewis Howes Interview with Chase Jarvis This episode is sponsored by the CIO Scoreboard, a powerful tool that helps you communicate the status of your IT Security program visually in just a few minutes. Credits: * Outro music provided by Ben’s Sound Other Ways To Listen to the Podcast iTunes | Libsyn | Soundcloud | RSS | LinkedIn Leave a Review If you enjoyed this episode, then please consider leaving an iTunes review here Click here for instructions on how to leave an iTunes review if you're doing this for the first time. About Bill Murphy Bill Murphy is a world renowned IT Security Expert dedicated to your success as an IT business leader. Follow Bill on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Welcome to episode #526 of Six Pixels Of Separation - The Mirum Podcast. I could not be more excited. When anyone uses the term "Futurist," there is only one name that comes to mind: Kevin Kelly. If you have not read his latest book, The Inevitable - Understanding The 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our World, you are truly missing out on the opportunity to read and understand what new businesses are going to thrive (and which ones are going to die). Kevin is the Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He co-founded the magazine in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor for its first seven years. He is also founding editor of the Cool Tools website, which has been reviewing tools daily since 2003. From 1984-1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers' Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. His books include the best-selling New Rules for the New Economy, Out of Control (a graphic novel about robots and angels), The Silver Cord (an oversize catalog of the best of Cool Tools), and a personal favorite, What Technology Wants (from 2010). He here is, pontificating about technology and the future. Enjoy the conversation... Here it is: Six Pixels Of Separation - The Mirum Podcast - Episode #526 - Host: Mitch Joel. Running time: 48:55. Hello from beautiful Montreal. Subscribe over at iTunes. Please visit and leave comments on the blog - Six Pixels of Separation. Feel free to connect to me directly on Facebook here: Mitch Joel on Facebook. or you can connect on LinkedIn. ...or on twitter. Six Pixels of Separation the book is now available. CTRL ALT Delete is now available too! Here is my conversation with Kevin Kelly. The Inveitable. What Technology Wants. The Silver Cord. Out of Control. New Rules for the New Economy. Cool Tools. Wired. Follow Kevin on Twitter. This week's music: David Usher 'St. Lawrence River'. Get David's song for free here: Artists For Amnesty. Download the Podcast here: Six Pixels Of Separation - The Mirum Podcast - Episode #526 - Host: Mitch Joel. Tags: advertising podcast audio blog blogging brand business blog business book business podcast cool tools david usher digital marketing digital marketing agency digital marketing blog facebook google hackers conference itunes j walter thompson jwt kevin kelly leadership podcast management podcast marketing marketing blog marketing podcast mirum mirum agency mirum agency blog mirum blog new rules for the new economy out of control social media technology the inevitable the silver chord twitter well what technology wants wired wired magazine wpp
The Writer Files: Writing, Productivity, Creativity, and Neuroscience
New York Times bestselling author and co-founder of Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly, stopped by the show to chat with me about his journey from travel journalist to famed futurist. Mr. Kelly’s storied and winding career has taken him around the world in search of visions of the new digital frontier. Kevin is a renowned TED speaker and author of multiple bestsellers including his latest, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future, a title that offers an optimistic roadmap of how new technologies will shape humanity. Dubbed “the Most Interesting Man in the World” by Tim Ferris, Mr. Kelly began writing on the internet near its inception and never looked back. He has taken gigs including Editor for the Whole Earth Review, and presently Senior Maverick at Wired magazine, a magazine he co-founded in 1993, and where he served as Executive Editor until 1999. Join us for this two-part interview, and if you’re a fan of the show, please click “subscribe” to automatically see new interviews, and help other writers find us. If you missed the first half you can find it right here. In Part Two of the file Kevin Kelly and I discuss: Why the Author Can’t Write on the Road The Importance of Delegation as a Writer The Cool Tools Kevin Kelly Uses to Get Words on the Page A Futurist’s Expansive Definition of Creativity How Lateral Thinking Can Improve Your Writing Why Steven Spielberg Asked Mr. Kelly to Predict the Future Listen to The Writer Files: Writing, Productivity, Creativity, and Neuroscience below ... Download MP3 Subscribe by RSS Subscribe in iTunes The Show Notes Kevin Kelly’s Personal Website The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future – Kevin Kelly 1,000 True Fans The Act of Creation – Arthur Koestler Oblique Strategies Writer Emergency Pack – John August Kevin Kelly on Google+ Kevin Kelly on Twitter Kelton Reid on Twitter The Transcript How Wired Magazine’s Senior Maverick Kevin Kelly Writes: Part Two Jerod Morris: Hey, Jerod Morris here. If you know anything about Rainmaker Digital and Copyblogger, you may know that we produce incredible live events. Some would say that we produce incredible live events as an excuse to throw great parties, but that’s another story. We’ve got another one coming up this October in Denver. It’s called Digital Commerce Summit and it is entirely focused on giving you the smartest ways to create and sell digital products and services. You can find out more at Rainmaker.FM/summit. That’s Rainmaker.FM/summit. We’ll be talking about Digital Commerce Summit in more detail as it gets closer, but for now I’d like to let a few attendees from our past events speak for us. Attendee 1: For me, it’s just hearing from the experts. This is my first industry event, so it’s awesome to learn new stuff and also get confirmation that we’re not doing it completely wrong where I work. Attendee 2: The best part of the conference, for me, is being able to mingle with people and realize that you have connections with everyone here. It feels like LinkedIn live. I also love the parties after each day, being able to talk to the speakers, talk to other people who are here for the first time, people who have been here before. Attendee 3: I think the best part of the conference, for me, is understanding how I can service my customers a little more easily. Seeing all the different facets and components of various enterprises then helps me pick the best tools. Jerod Morris: Hey, we agree. One of the biggest reasons we host the conference every year is so that we can learn how to service our customers — people like you — more easily. Here are just a few more words from folks who have come to our past live events. Attendee 4: It’s really fun. I think it’s a great mix of beginner information and advanced information. I’m really learning a lot and having a lot of fun. Attendee 5: The conference is great, especially because it’s a single-track conference where you don’t get distracted by “Which session should I go to?” And, “Am I missing something?” Attendee 6: The training and everything — the speakers have been awesome — but I think the coolest aspect for me has been connecting with those people who are putting it on and the other attendees. Jerod Morris: That’s it for now. There’s a lot more to come on Digital Commerce Summit. I really hope to see you there in October. Again, to get all the details and the very best deal on tickets, head over to Rainmaker.FM/summit. That’s Rainmaker.FM/summit. Kelton Reid: These are The Writer Files, a tour of the habits, habitats, and brains of working writers from online content creators to fictionists, journalists, entrepreneurs, then beyond. I’m your host, Kelton Reid, writer, podcaster, and mediaphile. Each week we’ll discover how great writers keep the ink flowing, the cursor moving, and avoid writer’s block. New York Times best-selling author and co-founder of Wired Magazine, Kevin Kelly, stopped by the show this week and chatted with me about his journey from travel journalist to famed futurist. Mr. Kelly’s storied and winding career has taken him around the world in search of visions of the new digital frontier. He’s a renowned TED speaker and author of multiple best-sellers, including his latest, at The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future, a title that offers an optimistic roadmap of how new technologies will shape humanity. Dubbed, “The Most Interesting Man in The World” by Tim Ferriss, Mr. Kelly began writing on the Internet near its inception and never looked back, taking gigs including editor for The Whole Earth Review and, presently, Senior Maverick at Wired Magazine, a magazine he co-founded in 1993 where he served as executive editor until 1999. Join us for this two-part interview. If you are a fan of the show, please click “subscribe” to automatically see new interviews with your favorite authors and help other writers to find us. If you missed the first half of this show, you can find it at Writerfiles.FM in the show notes. In part two of the file, Kevin and I discuss why the author can’t write on the road, the importance of delegation as a writer, the Cool Tools Kevin Kelly uses to get words onto the page, a futurist’s expansive definition of creativity, how lateral thinking can improve your writing, and the day Steven Spielberg asked Mr. Kelly to predict the future. Why the Author Can’t Write on the Road Kelton Reid: Do you have an office? Once you’ve traveled the world and gotten all the stuff you need — researched all the stuff — do you go back to the office then, or do you feel like you can write on the road? Kevin Kelly: I cannot write on the road at all. I can’t even write on planes. I can’t even write in hotel rooms. I do all my writing here. I have this magnificent studio. I call it a studio, it’s two stories. It’s in California. It’s all white. It’s got a huge ceiling. There are two stories of books. I have all my toys — my Lego wall here. I have a Styro Bot. I built it for me and my way of working. Camille’s just right over there. I have another assistant too, who does the website stuff. I have my big, huge whiteboard. I’ve got everything. I have a standing — and a ball, so I can move from standing to sitting within seconds. I need to be here to get my writing done, and I have the privilege of being able to control my time that way. I don’t know if I need to, but that’s how I choose to. That works for me. You’re right about the travel. When I’m traveling there’s two kinds — there’s the traveling for doing talks … My livelihood is basically giving talks in China. Most of my fans are in China. I have 20 times the number of fans in China than I do in the U.S., so I go to China to do talks. Because I have this obsession with Asia, I usually will piggyback other trips either in China or elsewhere around Asia when I go because I’m photographing the disappearing Asia. When I’m in photograph mode I can do nothing else. It’s really weird, but I become totally a camera. I’m just a camera. I’m a walking camera. I started off in the 1970s doing that. That’s what my first thing was. Instead of going to college, I went to Asia as a photographer and I was photographing the stuff. I was a camera. I worked from the beginning of daylight to the end of daylight as a camera. Still when I go to Asia — the same thing, I am just there. Then, when I’m in the hotel, I’m downloading, backing up all my stuff. Doing the minimum amount of e-mail that I need to do. Then I’m in bed. Then the next day, I’m just a camera. I find it really hard to — I’m happy if I can do my e-mail. I can’t write then. When I come back, then I can shift. I’ll leave the camera off to the side and then I can try and write. Kelton Reid: That sounds cool. It sounds like you’ve got these processes in place that help you to process, crunch all the information you see and then you get back to the designated writing space to get into the flow. The Importance of Delegation as a Writer Kevin Kelly: The other thing that I learned to do at Wired, working through the magazine, was delegate and hire. For 10 years I did Cool Tools myself. Five days a week, I was editing. I wasn’t writing all those reviews, but I was soliciting, getting them in, editing everybody, sending it back, going rounds of approval, posting it and finding the pictures, and doing the access information. At some point — it made money from the very beginning. “Okay, so I’m going to hire editors to do this.” I was overseeing a publisher, but they were doing the work. That’s the other thing that I have learned to do, is to hire out. That’s the one thing I wish I’d learned earlier in life, to hire people better than yourself as a way of extending your reach. Cool Tools — Marcus is running that, basically. Silver Cord — my partner in that is running that. I don’t have a partner yet in True Films, but Claudia — who is here — is helping me now. That’s the idea. The way that I found to leverage my ideas and perspective is to hire whenever I can. The Cool Tools Kevin Kelly Uses to Get Words on the Page Kelton Reid: That’s cool. For scaling and probably peace of mind too. To harness your skills and your creativity. Speaking of Cool Tools, let’s talk a little bit about the Cool Tools that you use to actually get words onto the page, if you don’t mind. I’d love to know. I know you’ve got some organizational hacks in place, it sounds like, but are you a Mac guy or are you a PC guy? When you’re actually sitting down to get words onto the page, what are you using there? Kevin Kelly: There’s a joke. I’ll actually just show you a picture of my — I have a beige, boring minivan, but the back window is covered with little white apples, like a million of them. I have been an Apple user from the Apple 2e. We did a famous Wired cover about praying for Apple because there was a brief spell before Jobs came back that I thought I was going to have to actually make the big switch to Windows. I was within two months of doing that, but he came back in time and saved the day. Yeah, I’m a total Mac — we’re a Mac household. I have an iPhone. I work on a Mac — they call it a Mac Tower. It’s a behemoth machine that sits below me. I have two cinema screens: one at sitting height and one at standing height. I can just toggle between them. I have a little, tiny, 11-inch Mac Air that I take with me when I travel. It’s big enough just to do e-mail and primitive web. I have my PowerPoint speeches mounted, and that’s it. I’m not a very mobile person, the first smart phone I had was Apple 6. I’m old-school in that sense. E-mail’s the best way to reach me. I work on a desktop. I’m not mobile. When I take pictures I have to process them. I use Lightroom, which I think is fantastic. I don’t even need Photoshop. I just use Lightroom for managing my gazillion … By the way, I have them all backed up to not only Google, but I’m a insane, radical, extreme backer-upper. My photos are backed up on three clouds and three different hard disks beyond the cards that I have. I also have them backed up in three different places while I travel. Needless to say, I have never lost an image. Kelton Reid: Is that known as RAID? Kevin Kelly: Yeah, exactly. I have my own version of RAID. Right, exactly. The tools I use for writing — eventually I get into Microsoft Word. I don’t always start there. Believe it or not, I sometimes start writing in my e-mail because it’s so simple and I’m not going to lose it. I can keep it up. I used to mail it to myself as a backup. That was long before I had Time Machine. Sometimes the first notes will be in all kinds of things. Sometimes it’ll be in Google Docs. Sometimes it’ll be in my e-mail. Sometimes it’ll be in Notes. Eventually it gets to Microsoft. When I’m writing a bigger piece I actually will move things, at some point, into Scrivener. Scrivener is this really cool software that’s used by people doing long-form writing, whether it be fiction or nonfiction, or sometimes screenplays. It’s a card-based organizing metaphor, so things have cards and you can move these cards around. The cards can have an indefinite amount of text in them, and you can put them in hierarchies or you can keep them flat, but the idea is that you can move all this stuff around. It takes the place of the old way where we actually did cut and paste. Had things in piles and moved piles around on the floor, or index cards on your desktop. It does that. And it’s really good for organizing lots of things in lots of parts. I’ve used that for the last two books, and I would definitely use it again for any other book I did. I think that’s on both Mac and Windows. I’m using Scrivener, but at some point it’ll make its way into a Word doc in the final form. That’s just because, in my experience working with magazines and book publishers, this is the universal format. It just has to reach there at some point. Kelton Reid: The track changes and traditional publishing. Kevin Kelly: Yeah, exactly. Kelton Reid: I skipped over a big one, but here is one for you. You probably are rubbing elbows with writers — and you have been for much of your career — do you believe in writer’s block? Kevin Kelly: I don’t. If you mean do I experience writer blocks, that’s all I can say. I’ve never really talked to the other writers about writer’s block, so I can’t say whether they have it or not. I have never had them volunteer conversation about it. I was just hanging out last week with all these science fiction authors — very published successes — and this never came up. I have not experienced it myself. In talking to them about their work habits and stuff, some of them have pretty regular, “write every day” kind of things where they’ll write about something every day. Maybe it’s not about what their book is, but they’ll do something. It has not been an issue in my experience. Kelton Reid: Cool. That’s good. Knock on wood. Kevin Kelly: Yeah. A Futurist’s Expansive Definition of Creativity Kelton Reid: All right. Let’s get into creativity a little bit. I know we’ve got a few more minutes here. I think creativity is probably inherent to a lot of what you do, but it might not be labeled as creativity when you’re getting into technology and looking to the future. Do you think that you could define creativity for us? Kevin Kelly: My image of creativity is a diagram in a book called The Act of Creation by Koestler. It’s an old book. It was his attempt to try and figure out what creativity is. His diagram was very simple: take two index cards that are inserted into each other so they form — from the end — a profile of a cross. So there are two planes that are intersecting, you have a flat plane and a vertical plane. You have two planes that are intersecting. His idea was that all creativity is basically taking two unrelated planes and making them intersect. That’s the visual image that I have of creativity, which is you are making a connection, an intersection between things that have not intersected before. Jokes are kind of like that. A joke is when you take two things that don’t seem to be related and you bring them together in some way that’s plausible and it’s funny. New ideas, new innovations are the same kind of thing where you recombine existing mechanisms in a way that haven’t been combined before. Brian Arthur’s and Paul Romer — two separate guys with two separate theories, but they’re both the same, which is that the fountain of all innovation is just a recombination. In fact, the origin of all wealth is actually recombination. You’re just recombining things. This idea of intersecting things that had not intersected before is my definition of creativity. There are, of course, rules. You can’t just take any random thing, the new intersection has to work in some way. It has to be plausible, interesting, whatever — but fundamentally, that’s the act. When I see something creative, it’s usually because someone has — we talked about the other metaphor of a leap somewhere. They have stepped off something and they’re stepping somewhere else, but there are actually two legs. They actually have a leg in the departure point and a leg in the arrival point. Those two things have not been bridged before. That’s my image of an intersection of two unrelated ideas. Kelton Reid: I like it. I like it a lot. I think that we’re getting close here. I have a couple of other questions for you, but — Kevin Kelly: Let me just say one thing about the creativity. Kelton Reid: Oh, I’m sorry. How Lateral Thinking Can Improve Your Writing Kevin Kelly: No, because I’ve gotten to work with many of what I would consider some of the most creative people working today, alive today. People who are technically geniuses like Danny Hillis, artistically genius like Brian Eno, and cultural genius like Stewart Brand. It’s really been interesting to watch them operate. I think they have trained their minds to do this. They’re doing the thing I’m saying with these unrelated planes intersecting, but they do them in different ways. Brian Eno, he’s the most lateral thinker I know. Lateral meaning that he’s associating ideas coming from off to the side. We have a tendency to proceed in a linear way, or a way in which there’s the obvious things in front of you that you may want to combine. He has an ability to reach off to the side into something that is unexpected, trying to make that association that will work. He’s particularly good at reaching behind his back or off to the side — that’s what I meant by laterally — to bring something in. That ability to, in some senses, dismiss or ignore the obvious ones and to reach for the unobvious but yet still works, is something that I think actually they train. Brian Eno has a famous set of cards called Oblique Strategies that he and a partner use to make music. These were prompts that they would pick up at random to force themselves to do this lateral thinking. They were prompts like, “Take the most obvious thing and ignore it,” or “What about the middle? Emphasize the middle.” They were almost random things. Often, that action would not be the thing that worked, but that would lead them to this other unobvious next step that would work. That’s one way. Those cards are actually very valuable and useful for anything. I have a deck right here. I have my own internal ones of when you’re in a situation — say when you’re stuck, you use these things as prompts, exercises to force yourself to think about these other approaches. It’s very handy. I think, internally, that’s what Brian and other are doing, is actually have a set of little things that they’re running through, sometimes unconsciously, as they try and prompt themselves to take this lateral approach. Then there are others like Marvin Minsky and Danny Hillis who are very technical. I think they do something very similar, particularly Marvin, which is pretend that they’re not human. They try to approach this as if they were seeing it for the first time, as if they were coming from another planet, as if they were pretending they were, often, a robot. “How would a robot do this?” To try and do the same thing of looking at it with fresh eyes, looking at it in a way that no ordinary human would look at it, not as a way an ordinary human would look at it. Then Stuart Brand, who also has this ability, I think his little heuristic that he also trained himself to do was to force himself — each time he approached something he would force himself to try and find a different perspective on it, including using the words that he used to describe something. He would never, ever repeat himself. If he was talking about something he knew, he would require that he use different words when talking about it this time to this person, even though he’d been talking about it for a thousand times before. That constraint would require him — because of the new words — to see it differently. Then he would have an insight just because he forced himself to use different words. Those are some of the ways that I’ve seen some of the most creative people I know use this on a daily basis. They have trained themselves to be better at this on an ongoing basis — not just when they’re sitting down, but as a habit. Kelton Reid: For sure. Yeah, I know screenwriter John August has a similar set of prompts like the Oblique Strategies that he uses for screenwriters which has proven to be very helpful. I think writers can use that in whatever way they think to kick-start their writing for sure. Side note, I love Brian Eno’s Music for Airports. I actually listen to it while I’m writing. I find that it helps because it’s kind of meandering and ambient, of course. I’ve got to slip this one in here. I know that in The Inevitable and Understanding the Technological Forces That Will Shape Our World, you’ve talked about VR quite a bit. I heard you say you were reading Ready Player One, which is Ernie Cline’s journey into VR. What is it? The OASIS? Kevin Kelly: Correct. Kelton Reid: Interesting intersection there. I think you’ve worked with Steven Spielberg in the past, and he is adapting that book into a movie. Have you heard anything about that? Kevin Kelly: I have not heard — either from Ernie or elsewhere — about what state the Spielberg Ready Player One is in. I’ve heard different rumors about whether it’s actually going to be in VR or not. I think there is likely to be some VR component, probably a VR game version. But no, I don’t know anything more about it other than what has been published. I think that it’s an ideal Spielberg movie for many reasons, not the least of all the references to the seventies and eighties that I’m sure he’d be very good at. Kelton Reid: Right. I thought it was interesting that it takes place in 2044 and he actually tapped you to help him predict 2054 in Minority Report. Why Steven Spielberg Asked Mr. Kelly to Predict the Future Kevin Kelly: Right, yeah. Kelton Reid: I thought maybe he had tapped you again. Kevin Kelly: No. It was just not me, it was a group of us, and as far as I know he hasn’t reached out in that sense to do that — which was a very amazing experience. There was a set of people, including the people I just mentioned, except I don’t think Brian was there. Doug Copeland and some other — Jaron Lanier — were present, and our job was to make this world comprehensive. It was really interesting because we did a lot of arm waving about these things. Spielberg is sitting in the room and he’s there with his little pencil and pad. He says, “Okay, what are people sleeping on? What do the beds look like? How about for breakfast, what are people having for breakfast?” That requirement to be that specific was very galvanizing because you couldn’t just talk about general things. He wanted to know what the beds looked like. So you began to think, “What do they look like? Are they any different? The same? Are they waterbeds?” That was so profound for me, because that really changed how I try to think about the future now. Kelton Reid: How cool. I really appreciate you taking time out to chat with us about your process. The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our World, a very optimistic roadmap of the future. Really cool stuff. It’s out now and we can find it out there. You link to it at kk.org and it’s on Amazon. I’ll link to your Google Plus Page as well and your Twitter handle. Is there any other sign-offs for writers you want to drop on us before you go to the next interview? Kevin Kelly: No, other than I do suggest that you look at the Cool Tools book that I did, which was self published. It’s this huge, oversized, thick, heavy, five pound, massive catalog of possibilities. There are some good writer tools besides Scrivener. There are some other resources for people making things and being creative — tools not just like the wrenches and pipes, but things like Elance, or what they would call Upwork these days. How to hire someone for help. Where to get a logo or book cover done. Check out that, that’s available on Amazon as well. Kelton Reid: Mr. Kelly, thank you so much. We really appreciate it. Best of luck with all of your press rounds, and hopefully you’ll come back and talk to us again another time. Kevin Kelly: Sure thing. Thanks for the attention. Appreciate it. Kelton Reid: Thank you. Thanks so much for joining me for this half of A Tour Through The Writer’s Process. If you enjoy The Writer Files Podcast, please subscribe to the show and leave us a rating or a review on iTunes to help other writers find us. For more episodes or to just leave a comment or a question, drop by WriterFiles.FM. You can always chat with me on Twitter @KeltonReid. Cheers. Talk to you next week.
Do we shape tech or does it shape us? Turns out it is both. And that is just 1 of the 12 big ideas Kevin Kelly explores in his latest bestseller, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future. The Inevitable is a playbook to guide us through the seismic changes in life and work, caused by technologies becoming exponentially faster and smarter. Kelly, Co-founder, former Executive Editor, and now Senior Maverick at Wired Magazine, takes us on a futuristic -- and highly believable ride -- from start to finish. Former publisher and editor of Whole Earth Review and Cool Tools, he is the author of other thought-provoking and visionary books, like New Rules for the New Economy, Out of Control, The Silver Cord, and What Technology Wants. Kelly embodies what it means to be curious! In this interview, we talk about: Why continual tech upgrades will make us perpetual newbies Why Kevin favors protopia, instead of utopia or dystopia What it means to cognify Why artificial intelligence is a feature, not a bug Why we want and need the different kinds of intelligence that comes with AI How we will work with robots to solve big problems How robots will free us up to be artists, scientists, inventors, and creatives How many of our jobs will be to invent jobs for the robots around us How our technology places us in streams and flows that are dynamic, interactive, and chronological Why personalization and immediacy will be better than free How filters may negotiate on our behalf and sharpen our understanding of who we are Why virtual reality is about presence and, more importantly, interactivity Why one day anything that is not interactive will be considered broken How interactivity will one day extend beyond our bodies to our emotions, facial expressions, voices, and more Why if it matters, we will be able to tell whether it is human or nonhuman Why tracking is inevitable and transparency around our data is a must What Kevin means by covalence when it comes to our data How we will come to a deeper, more nuanced understanding of privacy Two things Kevin worries about As AIs become more capable and integrated into our lives, how will we treat them? As cyber conflicts and cyber wars continue, what rules will we establish? How will our technology change us? The importance of thinking much longer term than a generation or a corporate quarter What a global government might look like and how we might get there Selected Links to Topics Mentioned @kevin2kelly http://kk.org/ Wired Whole Earth Review Protopia Game of Thrones The Third Wave by Steve Case The Quantified Self The Fitbit Blockchain Bitcoin Boston Dynamics Quadrupeds Star Trek If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening! Thank you to Emmy-award-winning Creative Director Vanida Vae for designing the Curious Minds logo, and thank you to Rob Mancabelli for all of his production expertise! www.gayleallen.net LinkedIn @GAllenTC
The Writer Files: Writing, Productivity, Creativity, and Neuroscience
New York Times bestselling author and co-founder of Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly, stopped by the show to chat with me about his journey from travel journalist to famed futurist. Mr. Kelly’s storied and winding career has taken him around the world in search of visions of the new digital frontier. Kevin is a renowned TED speaker and author of multiple bestsellers including his latest, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future, a title that offers an optimistic roadmap of how new technologies will shape humanity. Dubbed “the Most Interesting Man in the World” by Tim Ferris, Mr. Kelly began writing on the internet near its inception and never looked back. He has taken gigs including Editor for the Whole Earth Review, and presently Senior Maverick at Wired magazine, a magazine he co-founded in 1993, and where he served as Executive Editor until 1999. Join us for this two-part interview, and if you’re a fan of the show, please click “subscribe” to automatically see new interviews, and help other writers find us. In Part One of the file Kevin Kelly and I discuss: How an Amateur Photographer Became a Bestselling Author and Digital Visionary The Future of Artificial Intelligence How a Technologist Keeps His Finger on the Pulse of the Future Why You Should Write to Understand Your Ideas The Importance of the Incubation Phase for Writers Listen to The Writer Files: Writing, Productivity, Creativity, and Neuroscience below ... Download MP3 Subscribe by RSS Subscribe in iTunes The Show Notes How Wired Magazine s Senior Maverick Kevin Kelly Writes: Part Two Kevin Kelly’s Personal Website The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future – Kevin Kelly 1,000 True Fans Cool Tools Website Kevin Kelly on Google+ Kevin Kelly on Twitter Kelton Reid on Twitter The Transcript How Wired Magazine’s Senior Maverick Kevin Kelly Writes: Part One Jerod Morris: Hey, Jerod Morris here. If you know anything about Rainmaker Digital and Copyblogger, you may know that we produce incredible live events. Some would say that we produce incredible live events as an excuse to throw great parties, but that’s another story. We’ve got another one coming up this October in Denver, it’s called Digital Commerce Summit. It is entirely focused on giving you the smartest ways to create and sell digital products and services. You can find out more and get a killer early bird price on your tickets at Rainmaker.FM/summit. That’s Rainmaker.FM/summit. We’ll be talking about Digital Commerce Summit in more detail as it gets closer, but for now I’d like to let a few attendees from our past events speak for us. Attendee 1: For me, it’s just hearing from the experts. This is my first industry event, so it’s awesome to learn new stuff and also get confirmation that we’re not doing it completely wrong where I work. Attendee 2: The best part of the conference, for me, is being able to mingle with people and realize that you have connections with everyone here. It feels like LinkedIn live. I also love the parties after each day, being able to talk to the speakers, talk to other people who are here for the first time, people who’ve been here before. Attendee 3: I think the best part of the conference, for me, is understanding how I can service my customers a little more easily. Seeing all the different facets and components of various enterprises then helps me pick the best tools. Jerod Morris: Hey, we agree. One of the biggest reasons we host the conference every year is so that we can learn how to service our customers — people like you — more easily. Here are just a few more words from folks who have come to our past live events. Attendee 4: It’s really fun. I think it’s a great mix of beginner information and advanced information. I’m really learning a lot and having a lot of fun. Attendee 5: The conference is great, especially because it’s a single-track conference where you don’t get distracted by “Which session should I go to?” And, “Am I missing something?” Attendee 6: The training and everything — the speakers have been awesome — but I think the coolest aspect for me has been connecting with both people who are putting it on and then the other attendees. Jerod Morris: That’s it for now. There’s a lot more to come on Digital Commerce Summit. I really hope to see you there in October. Again, to get all the details and the very best deal on tickets, head over to Rainmaker.FM/summit. That’s Rainmaker.FM/summit. Kelton Reid: These are the Writer Files, a tour of the habits, habitats, and brains of working writers from online content creators to fictionists, journalists, entrepreneurs, then beyond. I’m your host, Kelton Reid. Writer, podcaster, and mediaphile. Each week we’ll discover how great writers keep the ink flowing, the cursor moving, and avoid writer’s block. New York Times best-selling author and co-founder of Wired Magazine, Kevin Kelly, stopped by the show to chat with me this week about his journey from travel journalist to famed futurist. Mr. Kelly’s storied and winding career has taken him around the world in search of visions of the new digital frontier. Kevin’s a renowned TED speaker and author of multiple bestsellers, including his latest, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future. It’s a title that offers an optimistic roadmap of how new technologies will shape humanity. Dubbed “The Most Interesting Man of the World” by Tim Ferriss, Mr. Kelly began writing on the Internet near its inception and never looked back, taking gigs including editor for the Whole Earth Review, and presently senior maverick at Wired Magazine, a magazine that he co-founded in 1993 and where he served as its executive editor until 1999. Join us for this two-part interview. If you’re a fan of the show, please click subscribe to automatically see new interviews and to help other writers find us. In part one of this file, Kevin and I discuss how an amateur photographer became a best-selling author and digital visionary, the future of artificial intelligence, how a technologist keeps his finger on the pulse of the future, why you should write to understand your ideas, and the importance of the incubation phase for writers. All right. We are rolling with a very special guest on the podcast today, Mr. Kevin Kelly. Thank you so much for dropping by to talk to us about your process as a writer. Kevin Kelly: It’s my pleasure and privilege. Thanks for having me. Kelton Reid: I understand you’re doing the rounds. You’re just out there and talking about this fantastic new book, The Inevitable. Kevin Kelly: Actually, I’m more like the sun in the center, because the way we’re doing podcasts is I’m here sitting at my studio and everyone’s coming to me. Kelton Reid: Yeah, it’s got to be nice to not have to travel — at least for this part of the journey. Kevin Kelly: Yeah. It’s the future, man. Kelton Reid: Let’s talk a little bit about that. I want to just mention that you are having quite a bit of success so far with the new one. It is titled The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our World. It’s good stuff. It’s heady, but it’s already hitting New York Times and Wall Street Journal best-sellers lists. How an Amateur Photographer Became a Bestselling Author and Digital Visionary Kelton Reid: You’ve written a lot of other stuff — you’re an author — many, many books. You’ve been a travel journalist, I understand. An editor of a handful of important publications including The Whole Earth Review way back and Co-Founder and now Senior Maverick of Wired Magazine. That’s pretty cool. Lots of other stuff in between. I want to talk a little bit about your origins and how you went from those early days of maybe not knowing you were going to be a writer, to today being a best-selling author. Kevin Kelly: Yeah, I definitely did not identify or even dream of being a writer. That was not something that I was aiming for. I actually started off as a photographer. I still think very visually in those terms. I came to writing, actually, online. I’d learned to write online on the very early bulletin boards in the early ’80s. I discovered that I had a telegraphic style that was very suited for online discourse. I was not attempting to write. I was just attempting to communicate — just email or postings. We would now think of them as comments, blog postings, that kind of stuff. That’s where I started. I wasn’t even thinking of it as writing then. It was just communicating. My natural instincts are not actually in writing, but more in editing. Not the line editing and copyediting, but more editing in terms of packaging ideas. Particularly packaging ideas that had a visual component — a diagram, picture, charts — graphic design of the whole thing. That led me to magazines where I am now. I was magazine junkie growing up as a kid, in part because my dad actually worked for Time Life company. Kelton Reid: Cool. Kevin Kelly: Every week he brought home — every Monday he brought home this stack of magazines. I have been reading Time and Fortune Magazine since I was the age of 10. All the others at that time — the suite included Sports Illustrated, Money Magazine, Life Magazine — I read them all. I loved them. I thought in those terms, and later started working on magazines. Not so much in the writing department, but more in the editing or what we might call these days curation. I was curating articles. I wrote out of desperation, basically. The short answer is I would try and make assignments. Try to get other people to write. Have ideas and have other people try to write them. I would go through and ideas that I tried to get other people to write for years and then kept coming back as something that no one wanted to do. I would try to kill off the idea in my own mind, but it’d come back. I couldn’t get someone to write it. Those are the ideas that I couldn’t give away that I would eventually end up writing myself. There are two lessons in that. One was I realized that I could write if I had to. Secondly, the pieces that I did write that way were the best ones because no one else could write them. There was this discovery that what I really want to do was to do things that only I could do. Part of that process — which I still adhere to today — is to talk about what I’m thinking about doing. To talk about what I am doing in the hopes of someone else either stealing the idea and doing it before me or else tell me that they’re already working on it or that it has already been done, which is always a great relief. I don’t really want to have to do it. I only want to do stuff that no one else can do. Kelton Reid: Cool, yeah. I like that a lot. You just had this very interesting circuitous route to where you are today. You’re a world traveler and a TED speaker and a digital visionary, I guess would be one term to use. Where can listeners find the bulk of your writing out there? I know there’s a lot. Kevin Kelly: Yeah, I have a website and a early domain name. It’s my initials, kk.org. I post most of the stuff there. For instance, a lot of this book and a lot of my previous book was first written as blog posts and then rewritten for the book. There’s a lot of stuff there on the website that has not been published elsewhere, like “1,000 True Fans,” which people still enjoy. There’s that. There’s a link to the other site that I’m still active with with Mark Frauenfelder, the founder of Boing Boing, who has actually worked with me at Wired. We run Cool Tools, which is a site that recommends and reviews one cool tool — in the broader sense of something handy — every weekday for the past 13, no 16 years, something crazy. Kelton Reid: Yeah, I love that site. Kevin Kelly: There’s other stuff there. I did a graphic novel with a bunch of people from Pixar and ILN. We spent 11 years on it. It’s this massive, immense 500-page, oversize book that’s about angels and robots and trying to say what would happen if robots had souls. I have a site that reviews the best documentaries. I have my photography site, which is probably closest to my heart because it’s a total compulsion. There’s no reason why I should be spending so much time still, today, in Asia photographing the disappearing traditions. I do it because I have to. All those kinds of things are there. Books, my translations of the various editions are also available, probably other stuff I’m forgetting about right now. Oh yes, Street Use was another blog I ran. I haven’t updated it forever. I was collecting the ways in which people would make homegrown adaptations or modifications to technology, like weird vehicles in China — just odd things. How they made technology in prison. There was really cool stuff that I just neglected because of doing other stuff. That’s actually pertinent to this book, The Inevitable. Part of what I look at in trying to see where our technology is going, is looking at where it is evolving unsupervised. If you want to see the true behavior of something, look at it where they’re not being supervised. You can see what’s really happening. Technology being misused, abused, or unsupervised — like with outlaws, or the kids, or the street — is one way that I use to see where it wants to go to. Where it’s tending to go to beyond what the inventors think it should do. The street use, the street technology — as Bill Gibson says, “The street has its own use.” I think that’s, to me, a very valuable place to look to see what technology wants. Kelton Reid: Yeah, I’ve heard you talk about slang as being a marker for that as well. I think you’re kind of a word nerd as well. I know in the opening of What Technology Wants you talk about the origins of the word, technology, which I thought was cool — dating back to Aristotle’s rhetoric. Kevin Kelly: It actually was a word, by the way, that was not really used and re-made in the 1820’s, or something. It had been neglected for all that time. It took us a long time to even recognize technology in our lives, which seems strange to us now. That’s how things happen. The Future of Artificial Intelligence Kevin Kelly: I know that, to me, one of the big things coming — I mean big on the level like the invention of printing, industrial revolution big — is the artificial intelligence stuff that’s coming. We’re going to look back and realize that we were so ignorant about intelligence. Intelligence is not a single thing. We’ll realize that there’s all these different varieties, nodes, styles, species of thinking. Right now we use one word when we talk about intelligence. We’re actually meaning probably 5, or 6, or 10, or 1,000 different things. We lack the conceptual tools, the data, the vocabulary to talk about it in any other level of precision right now. I would expect in 20 years from now that we’ll be much better informed. We’ll have a whole new lingo for talking about the varieties of smartness. Kelton Reid: Yeah. You get into that in your book. You talk about cognifying. In layman’s terms, that’s the AI piece. Is that right? Kevin Kelly: Correct. It’s my coinage. Cognifying is making things smarter. It’s because we don’t have other good English words for that. We don’t call it smartifying, or smarting, or something. I use cognifying to make smarter. Kelton Reid: I wish we did use smartifying. Kevin Kelly: Yeah, exactly. Kelton Reid: I think that would be a good domain. Someone needs to pick that up now. What are you working on now? Are you working on a book about AI — it sounds like that’s where most of your interest lies at the moment — or are you working on something different? Kevin Kelly: I’m not on AI. That’s a full-time beat for somebody. There are increasing numbers of people … I’ll answer the question, but there is a nice aside — I make the analogy in the book of the way that artificial energy was distributed on a grid of electricity to everybody, all their homes, factories, farmsteads. Anybody could purchase electricity, artificial power, and you’d have this industrial revolution where you take X and add electricity and you’d have an electric pump. So you’d take a manual pump and make electric. You’d have a electric pump. You’d multiply that by thousands of times. You’d have the industrial revolution. Now we’re going to we’re going to do the same thing with AI, artificial smartness, which will be sold over a grid called a cloud. Anybody who wanted to buy AI will buy it like they would buy electricity off of the grid as a commodity utility. You would apply the AI that you buy to anything, any X. You would take the electric pump and then you would cognify it. Everything that we electrified, we would cognify. What was interesting — it was hundreds of years ago when electricity was coming onto the grid. It was so complicated and dangerous and mysterious, that they had Vice Presidents of Electricity in companies, the person in charge of electrifying things. I think we’re going to have VPs of AI, VPs of machine learning, whatever it is, for the foreseeable future until it becomes boring and standard and then we’ll drop it. There will this period where there’ll be specialists in bringing AI to it, just like we had VPs of electricity. Now I’ve forgotten what your question was. Kelton Reid: What’s your most recent project? Kevin Kelly: The next thing I’m working on with my assistant researcher, Camille, we are putting together, collecting — she’s mostly doing the collecting of all the existing long-term forecasts in all the different domains, from energy, transportation, food, sports, furnishings, whatever it is. We’re looking at anybody who’s producing a long-term forecast. My intention is to integrate those into cohesive, plausible future for, say, 2050 or something about then. To build a world based on these official forecasts, which are generally always wrong. The idea is that, like a lot of complex systems, you can take a lot of unreliable parts and you make something reliable. The magic of complex systems is that you can make things more reliable than the parts. Literally, the old saw about the sum being greater that the parts is actually true. Neurons and brains are that way. They’re much more, as a whole, reliable than the individual parts are. Bee hives and other kinds of things exhibit the same kind of a phenomena. The idea is if we took these forecasts — which independently are not very reliable — but can somehow integrate them into a system so that they’re informing each other, that there might be a way to make it more reliable and useful. The idea is to try to make a comprehensive scenario of the future that might prove useful to people in some capacity. It’s an experiment. It could fail. That’s the beauty of it. That’s what we’re working on right now. How a Technologist Keeps His Finger on the Pulse of the Future Kelton Reid: Sounds really cool. It sounds like a lot data. You have a researcher it sounds like. I would like to dig into your productivity a little bit and the writing process itself. It sounds like you revealed that you’re getting a lot of the number crunching and the research done. You have someone helping you do that. There’s still probably quite a bit that you have to crunch down yourself, or turn over in your mind and remix, etc. Are you spending a certain amount of time just reading every day? Kevin Kelly: I try to. As I said, I’m a magazine junkie. My tendency is to read magazines, and journals, and some papers. I would like to read more books. I’m surrounded by a two-story library right now. I would like to dedicate more of my time to reading books. What happens is that there’s so many magazine articles to read. They seem to be a little bit more current and faster paced so they tend to push out my book reading time. I listen to a lot of books on tape, but most of that — or at least half of that — is fiction. That’s how I get my fiction done. That even has been somewhat eroded by my interest in podcasts. A lot of the audible book time is now going to podcasts, which I also am a big fan of. I do spend a lot of time reading. That’s one of my privileges and blessings, that I do have the ability to make time for that. That’s an extremely important part of my day. The input is reading papers and articles. The other thing is trying to talk to people on the phone, which is, to me, the second most important way I get what I get, which is actually in conversation. People just tell you things. It’s a very high signal to noise ratio of input. It’s high quality. Generally, people can be more direct in what they tell you. The conversation can guide to the kind of information I’m looking for very fast. It’s a very effective way to learn something. Kelton Reid: Yeah, that’s cool. It sounds like you’ve got a system down that’s helping you keep your finger on the pulse. Before you launch into a bigger project, do you have to psych yourself up to sit down to write? Are you going through periods of where you’re just putting input and then you spit out a big chunk of a book? How do you crack your knuckles and get going then? Why You Should Write to Understand Your Ideas Kevin Kelly: I have had different phases. As I said, I don’t think of myself as a writer. I don’t feel like I have to write every day, on a normal day I do the email thing. I write to figure out what I’m thinking. When I have that problem of trying to do that, then I will start writing and I’ll commit to a writing period until I’m done. Then, I’m writing a lot. I try to do whatever it is — 500 words or something — just to get stuff down. For me, the killer thing is that first draft. That’s the hardest thing for me to do. When I was doing the last two books, I basically was trying to write and post something every day as a incentive. I didn’t always make it, but I did a lot in that period. Both of the last two books came from that writing — the early parts of it. When I’m doing a big piece for Wired — which I do about one a year — there it’s a lot of research and a lot of interviews. A lot of reading, calling, trying to talk to people. I’m making notes and I’m writing up notes, which I will then go through to extract out stuff. That’s the several-step process where I’m heavily, intensively doing the research. Camille’s doing other research. I’m like, “Find me this. What about that? There must be some paper on this. How about this question?” That’s all coming together and I’m trying to process it. I’m writing there — mostly notes, things I don’t want to forget. The hard part of trying to have an idea generally comes out where I try to write down stuff in order to have an idea. I don’t have an idea and then try and write it. I write it to have an idea. The Importance of the Incubation Phase for Writers Kevin Kelly: That means writing stuff that’s not going to be used, but I have to go through that process. That’s painful. I call it painful because when I’m writing it usually isn’t very good. I know that I’m not saying anything new. It’s painful in the sense that it feels like I’m inadequate. It feels like I’m not doing anything. It’s the usual kinds of fears that artists have, which is, “I’m not very good at this.” It takes persevering through that where you begin to — for me anyway — pick out the stuff that does work. You isolate it and try to recombine it. You’re going through. That’s just to make an article. If you’re making another book, you have to go through that whole thing again at a different level. You have to have bigger ideas to connect all those little ideas together. It takes several cycles. During that period of writing — I’m a slow writer and I’m a slow typer — I won’t get very far. But I will spend a lot of time just staring at the screen, staring out the window. For me, it’s a type of thinking. Or I’ll pace, where I’m trying to think, “What do I think? I don’t know.” It’s a type of thinking. It’s not literary in that sense. I work with people who are real writers, like Neal Stephenson. He writes every day. He loves to write. He lives to write. He just writes like you would speak. It just comes out of him. That’s not me. I write out of desperation as a way of thinking. It’s very slow. I don’t generate very many words. I do it reluctantly. Kelton Reid: That’s funny that you say that. I know that a lot of writers and best-selling authors say the same thing. They don’t like to write. They would rather be reading. Yet they have these storied publishing pasts. You get the words down there. What you’re talking about is that classic creative process where you’re doing the research, getting all this stuff together. You need that incubation phase to get that “Ah-ha” moment of an idea. Thanks so much for joining me for this half of a tour through the writer’s process. If you enjoy The Writer Files podcast, please subscribe to the show. Leave us a rating, or a review on iTunes to help other writers find us. For more episodes, or to just leave a comment or a question, you can drop by WriterFiles.FM. You can always chat with me on Twitter @KeltonReid. Cheers. Talk to you next week.
Kevin Kelly is the founding executive editor of Wired magazine and a former editor/publisher of the Whole Earth Review. He has also been a writer, photographer, conservationist, and student of Asian and digital culture. Kelly stepped down as executive editor of Wired in 1999; his current job title is Senior Maverick. Partially due to his reputation as Wired's editor, he is noted as a participant in and an observer of cyberculture. His books include; Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World What Technology Wants The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future Kevin’s Challenge; Take $100 and invest it into someone that cannot pay you back directly. Learn to be full of gratitude. Try Kiva. Acknowledgements John Craig Mike Dariano Kiva Connect with Kevin Twitter Facebook Website If you liked this interview, check out episode 109 where I rant about the current state of the internet.
Kevin Kelly is the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, and a former editor/publisher of the Whole Earth Review. He has also been a writer, photographer, conservationist, and student of Asian and digital culture. WATCH FOR FREE: https://londonrealacademy.com/episodes/kevin-kelly-the-inevitable/
Kevin Kelly - The Inevitable. Kevin Kelly is the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, and a former editor/publisher of the Whole Earth Review. He has also been a writer, photographer, conservationist, and student of Asian and digital culture.
Episode 132: Kevin Kelly - How To See The Future... Much of what will happen in the next thirty years is inevitable, driven by technological trends that are already in motion. In this fascinating, provocative new book, Kevin Kelly provides an optimistic road map for the future, showing how the coming changes in our lives—from virtual reality in the home to an on-demand economy to artificial intelligence embedded in everything we manufacture—can be understood as the result of a few long-term, accelerating forces. Kelly both describes these deep trends—interacting, cognifying, flowing, screening, accessing, sharing, filtering, remixing, tracking, and questioning—and demonstrates how they overlap and are codependent on one another. These larger forces will completely revolutionize the way we buy, work, learn, and communicate with each other. By understanding and embracing them, says Kelly, it will be easier for us to remain on top of the coming wave of changes and to arrange our day-to-day relationships with technology in ways that bring forth maximum benefits. Kelly’s bright, hopeful book will be indispensable to anyone who seeks guidance on where their business, industry, or life is heading—what to invent, where to work, in what to invest, how to better reach customers, and what to begin to put into place—as this new world emerges. (Per Amazon.com) Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He co-founded Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor for its first seven years. His new book for Viking/Penguin is called The Inevitable, with a publication date of June 6, 2016. He is also founding editor and co-publisher of the popular Cool Tools website, which has been reviewing tools daily since 2003. From 1984-1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers’ Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. His books include the best-selling New Rules for the New Economy, the classic book on decentralized emergent systems, Out of Control, a graphic novel about robots and angels, The Silver Cord, an oversize catalog of the best of Cool Tools, and his summary theory of technology in What Technology Wants (2010). Episode 132 Kevin Kelly – How To See The Future... Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher Radio The Learning Leader Show “Their success can prevent future success. It’s difficult to move off that peak. It’s important to know nothing at times.” In This Episode, You Will Learn: Those who cultivate, create, make, and have an ability to see the world a little differently sustain excellence With technology advancements, it’s difficult to sustain a different view Why we should think of ways to optimize our lives The art of making allies instead of enemies “I write in order to tell myself what I think” The power of sharing your journal with the world Why humans will own less and will pay for access to more things Why do we need to sleep? Can we optimize it? Why hasn’t the speed of commercials airlines increased in 30 years? “You are not late – Go do something now” “What are you trying to optimize in your life?” Continue Learning: Follow Kevin on Twitter: @kevin2kelly Read: 1,000 True Fans Read: The Inevitable: Understanding The 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape You To Follow Me on Twitter: @RyanHawk12 You may also like these episodes: Episode 130: Ryan Holiday – Ego Is The Enemy Episode 078: Kat Cole – From Hooters Waitress To President of Cinnabon Episode 082: Dan Pink – The Science of Motivation, Legendary Writer & Ted Talk Episode 086: Seth Godin – How To Become Indispensable & Build Your Tribe Did you enjoy the podcast? If you enjoyed hearing Kevin Kelly on the show, please don’t hesitate to send me a note on Twitter or email me. Episode edited by the great J Scott Donnell Bio From KK.org Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He co-founded Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor for its first seven years. His new book for Viking/Penguin is called The Inevitable, with a publication date of June 6, 2016. He is also founding editor and co-publisher of the popular Cool Tools website, which has been reviewing tools daily since 2003. From 1984-1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers’ Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. His books include the best-selling New Rules for the New Economy, the classic book on decentralized emergent systems, Out of Control, a graphic novel about robots and angels, The Silver Cord, an oversize catalog of the best of Cool Tools, and his summary theory of technology in What Technology Wants (2010).
In the 11th episode of NEOHUMAN, Agah is chatting with Kevin Kelly. Kevin is the founding executive editor of Wired magazine and a former editor/publisher of the Whole Earth Review. They talk about wide range... The post 11: Kevin Kelly appeared first on LIVE IN LIMBO.
Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He co-founded Wired in 1993, and served as its executive editor from its inception until 1999. He is also editor and publisher of the Cool Tools website, which gets half a million unique visitors per month. From 1984-1990, Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers' Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. He authored the best-selling New Rules for the New Economy and the classic book on decentralized emergent systems, Out of Control. Kevin dropped out of college to pursue his real interests, and they are varied. James and Kevin talk about Kevin's idea that "if you have 1000 True Fans then you have a business." This is a wide-ranging conversation about the past, the present, and the future. Kevin's extremely bullish on the future of artificial intelligence, yet he says there is no extinct technology... none. And they talk about a few of his books, Cool Tools and The Silver Cord. Listen here if you want to see into the future. ------------What do YOU think of the show? Head to JamesAltucherShow.com/listeners and fill out a short survey that will help us better tailor the podcast to our audience!Are you interested in getting direct answers from James about your question on a podcast? Go to JamesAltucherShow.com/AskAltucher and send in your questions to be answered on the air!------------Visit Notepd.com to read our idea lists & sign up to create your own!My new book, Skip the Line, is out! Make sure you get a copy wherever books are sold!Join the You Should Run for President 2.0 Facebook Group, where we discuss why you should run for President.I write about all my podcasts! Check out the full post and learn what I learned at jamesaltuchershow.com------------Thank you so much for listening! If you like this episode, please rate, review, and subscribe to "The James Altucher Show" wherever you get your podcasts: Apple PodcastsiHeart RadioSpotifyFollow me on social media:YouTubeTwitterFacebookLinkedIn
Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He co-founded Wired in 1993, and served as its executive editor from its inception until 1999. He is also editor and publisher of the Cool Tools website, which gets half a million unique visitors per month. From 1984-1990, Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers' Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. He authored the best-selling New Rules for the New Economy and the classic book on decentralized emergent systems, Out of Control. Kevin dropped out of college to pursue his real interests, and they are varied. James and Kevin talk about Kevin's idea that "if you have 1000 True Fans then you have a business." This is a wide-ranging conversation about the past, the present, and the future. Kevin's extremely bullish on the future of artificial intelligence, yet he says there is no extinct technology... none. And they talk about a few of his books, Cool Tools and The Silver Cord. Listen here if you want to see into the future. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He co-founded Wired in 1993, and served as its executive editor from its inception until 1999. He is also editor and publisher of the website, which gets half a million unique visitors per month. From 1984-1990, Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers' Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. He authored the best-selling and the classic book on decentralized emergent systems, . Kevin dropped out of college to pursue his real interests, and they are varied. James and Kevin talk about Kevin's idea that "if you have 1000 True Fans then you have a business." This is a wide-ranging conversation about the past, the present, and the future. Kevin's extremely bullish on the future of artificial intelligence, yet he says there is no extinct technology... none. And they talk about a few of his books, and . Listen here if you want to see into the future.
Few people have had a better perspective on the rise of the "technology revolution" than our guest this week, Kevin Kelly. As a young hippie backpacking his way around the world, Kevin aspired to make art and to learn about the world. By his own admission, he disliked most technologies, especially the computer - which was a large, clunky, useless machine. However, when he snuck his way into one of the earliest groups to try out the internet, he realized that the world was about to change in a big way and he wanted a front row ticket. Soon after, in 1993 Kevin co-founded Wired Magazine and they have been predicting the future ever since. Kevin is the author of the new book, Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities. Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He co-founded Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor from its inception until 1999. He has just completed a book for Viking/Penguin publishers called "What Technology Wants," due out in the Fall 2010. He is also editor and publisher of the Cool Tools website, which gets half a million unique visitors per month. From 1984-1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers' Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. He authored the best-selling New Rules for the New Economy and the classic book on decentralized emergent systems, Out of Control. "I remember saying to myself that I'll just pretend that I'm a millionaire. I'll just pretend that I have the money that I need and I'll act as if money is not the constraint, but other things are." - Kevin Kelly Quotes from Kevin: What we learn in this episode: How to live like a creative. How did Wired magazine get started? How does mastery play a role in passion? What does the future of information look like? Resources: Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities www.kk.org Twitter: @kevin2kelly -- This episode is brought to you by: SmartThings: Go to http://www.smartthings.com/smartpeople to get 10% off a Home Security Kit or Solution Kit with promo code: SMARTPEOPLE Lynda.com: Do something good for yourself in 2015 and sign up for a FREE 10-day trial to Lynda.com by visiting Lynda.com/smartpeople.
For 3.8 billion years, life has lived in a bath of solar radiance. The Sun’s illumination outlines which objects are appealing, bland, or repellant. Its powers of desiccation, blistering, bleaching, and revelation govern a balance between beauty and danger. Its flood of photons shapes light-harvesters (“eyes”), pigments, and surfaces---stretching planetary aesthetics to include "invisible light" (ultraviolet, infrared, and polarized). From euglena to Matisse, all creatures dwell in a variety of luminance locales---dramas of biospheric brightness, color mixes, and rebellions against darkness (such as fireflies and luminescent fish). The most recent rebellion has been human-devised lamps that impact everything from the artistic-military complex (camouflage and mimicry) to the materials, techniques, and display of paintings, electronic imaging, and growing plants. This 55-minute journey travels from unicells to octopi to op-art, with a dose of PR for “planetary color webs” and their influence on awareness, desire, self-direction, memory, contemplation, and curiosity. Armed with a PhD in Biological Anthropology from Harvard, Peter Warshall has shaped watershed theory and practices, conservation biology, relations with Indian tribes in the Southwest, and refugee activities in Africa. For a decade he was the editor of the Whole Earth Review.
Nina Wise is a well-known performer who has devoted her career to investigating the relationship between art and spirit. Artistic Director of Motion, she is the recipient of multiple fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Marin Arts Council and has received seven Bay Area Critics Circle Awards. She is the author of "A Big New Free Happy Unusual Life: Self-Expression and Spiritual Practice for Those Who Have Time for Neither." Her stories and articles have appeared in The Sun, Yoga Journal, Tricycle, Inquiring Mind and Whole Earth Review. Support the show______________ To participate live and be notified of upcoming speakers in advance, please Like us on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/gaybuddhistfellowship) or visit https://gaybuddhist.org/calendar/ To support our efforts to share these talks with LGBTQIA audiences worldwide, please visit www.GayBuddhist.org.There you can: Donate Learn how to participate live Find our schedule of upcoming speakers Join our mailing list or discussion forum Enjoy many hundreds of these recorded talks dating back to 1996 CREDITSAudio Engineer: George HubbardProducer: Tom BrueinMusic/Logo/Artwork: Derek Lassiter
Today's guest is bestselling author Kevin Kelly, whose new book is titled What Technology WantsWhat Technology Wants, by Kevin KellyKelly's new book introduces a provocative view of technology, comparing it to a living, evolving organism that has its own unconscious needs and tendencies - even a drive towards sentience.In his attempts to discover "what it wants," Kelly uses examples from the past and then forecasts into the near future to project where technology is headed.The book is an optimistic look at how humanity and technology join together to produce increasing opportunities.We're excited to have been one of the first interviews Kevin has granted regarding his new book.Pre-order What Technology Wants hereKevin is also author of the best-selling New Rules for the New Economy and the classic book on decentralized emergent systems Out of Control.His writing has appeared in the NY Times, the Economist, Time, Harpers, Science, GQ, and Esquire.Kevin is Senior Maverick and Editor-at-Large for Wired magazine. He helped launch Wired in 1993, and was its Executive Editor until January 1999.He is editor and publisher of the Cool Tools website, which gets 1 million unique visitors per month.From 1984-1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, and oversaw the publication of 4 versions of the Whole Earth Catalogs.
Today's guest is bestselling author Kevin Kelly, whose new book is titled What Technology WantsWhat Technology Wants, by Kevin KellyKelly's new book introduces a provocative view of technology, comparing it to a living, evolving organism that has its own unconscious needs and tendencies - even a drive towards sentience.In his attempts to discover "what it wants," Kelly uses examples from the past and then forecasts into the near future to project where technology is headed.The book is an optimistic look at how humanity and technology join together to produce increasing opportunities.We're excited to have been one of the first interviews Kevin has granted regarding his new book.Pre-order What Technology Wants hereKevin is also author of the best-selling New Rules for the New Economy and the classic book on decentralized emergent systems Out of Control.His writing has appeared in the NY Times, the Economist, Time, Harpers, Science, GQ, and Esquire.Kevin is Senior Maverick and Editor-at-Large for Wired magazine. He helped launch Wired in 1993, and was its Executive Editor until January 1999.He is editor and publisher of the Cool Tools website, which gets 1 million unique visitors per month.From 1984-1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, and oversaw the publication of 4 versions of the Whole Earth Catalogs.
Peter Warshall The Spiritual Labor of Earth Healing Join Michael Lerner in conversation with ecologist, activist, and essayist Peter Warshall, editor of Whole Earth Review, and teacher at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa Institute. Peter Warshall Peter was an ecologist, activist, and essayist whose work centered on conservation and conservation-based development. After receiving his A.B. in Biology from Harvard in 1964, he went on to study cultural anthropology at l’École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris with Claude Lévi-Strauss, as a Fulbright Scholar. He then returned to Harvard where he earned his Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology. Warshall’s research interests included natural history, natural resource management, and conservation biology. He worked as a consultant for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees in Ethiopia; for USAID and other organizations in ten other African nations; and he worked with the Tohono O’odham and Apache people of Arizona. Warshall was an editor of one of the later editions of the Whole Earth Catalog series, and served as an editor of its spin-off magazine, Whole Earth Review. He taught at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa Institute. Warshall died in 2013. Find out more about The New School at tns.commonweal.org.