Advice for Living From Author Kevin Kelly

Not all advice is excellent, and not all futurists are right. But Kevin Kelly, founder and senior maverick of Wired magazine, is the exception on both fronts. Today he returns to the Rule Breaker Investing podcast to share his optimistic take on the generous nature of the universe and our place in it.

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This video was recorded on May 03, 2023.

David Gardner: Excellent advice for living. Who wouldn't want that? Of course, the question then comes, but is it excellent though? Well, you will be the judge, but I'm confident you will walk away, smarter, happier, and richer. Because the source of that excellent advice for living is the co-founder of Wired author and futurist all-round, great human being Kevin Kelly, who this week rejoins me on Rule Breaker Investing. Kevin first appeared in February 2018 on this podcast talking about his book, The Inevitable, reviewing some of the technological forces he viewed as inevitable for our future. This time though, he's down to something more practical. His new books title are the four words with which I lead off this week's podcast excellent advice for living. Plus, we'll also later look back at his predictions in his book, The Inevitable. Grade him a little bit for his work and update his viewpoints for the year 2023, chatbots and all. Get ready for a wide-ranging cerebral, speculative, compelling and I hope you'll agree, excellent podcast this week only on Rule Breaker Investing.

Welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing. Well, I closed last week's podcast by reading one of my favorite quotes from Kevin Kelly, my guest, this week on Rule Breaker Investing. I hope you'll enjoy this conversation. This by the way, since we recorded it just a few days ago, is a long podcast. This is one of our longer podcasts in Rule Breaker Investing history. But if you're like me and you might not be. But if you're like me, you wanted this to go longer. This is a very special, wide ranging conversation. Probably worth listening to more than once and you can probably listen in the future back to this time and appreciate it then too. I really appreciate the time that Kevin Kelly gave us and I bet you will too. Kevin Kelly needs little to no introduction most places, but maybe particularly here on Rule Breaker Investing, having recently crested the age of 70, Kevin may now fairly be said to be an [inaudible] in the world of technology, cultural pattern recognition, futurism, optimism, life, living. Living now to indeed his new book, just hitting bookstores this week is your next must read, and it's entitled, Excellent Advice for Living. Back in 1985, Kevin was involved with the launch of The Well, the pioneering online community. Then later Kevin helped launch Wired in 1993. He was executive editor for its first seven years. His most recent book before this week at least in English, and the subject of our Valentine's Day 2018 podcast was The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future. Long-time technology journalist David Pogue had this to say about Kevin and I know you love this line, Kevin. I wish he'd said this about me. This is such a great line. "Anyone can claim to be a profit, fortune teller, or a futurist and plenty of people do. What makes Kevin Kelly different is that he's right." So much fun.

Kevin Kelly: Thank you. That's a great intro. I really appreciate that. I'll take that flattering compliment even if it's not true, but thank you.

David Gardner: You do remain the official Senior Maverick at Wired and I remain the official Chief Rule Breaker at the Motley Fool. We get to have a senior Maverick and achieved rule-breaker, hang out together for a little while. I wanted to start just with your new book because it's your new book and it's not something that comes out every year. At least, I think of 2016 as having been your most recent big new book. But Kevin, off the air ahead of time, you were mentioning that some of your stuff is just going straight to China these days or Japan; hasn't even appeared in English. Did you say that you have more fans in China than in US right now?

Kevin Kelly: Yeah. I have many more fans and I am a bigger person there than I am here. That was a matter of luck because my first early books were translated late into Chinese. But just at the right moment when the Internet was beginning. Jack Ma and Pony Ma and all those guys read my book in Chinese. They found it very helpful for them starting new businesses and they recommended it to everybody. Naturally, every entrepreneur in China has to read Out of Control and [inaudible] . It became required reading and the Alvin Toffler of China. 

David Gardner: Universally recognized really. I think it's this. If I read it right, this quarter in Earth history, there will be more Indians on this planet than Chinese for the first time. Although it's very close, and you've already got the U.S. pretty well covered. I would say a lot of the western world. You've now got China. Do you have designs on India?

Kevin Kelly: I do. I spent an awful lot of time in India and I make the claim, which I'm still hoping that hopefully to be disproved, which is either seen more places in India than any Indian than I've met.

David Gardner: Wow, love it.

Kevin Kelly: Because I spent years traveling in India in my former life; that it was a different India than it is today. But yes, I do think that I'm simpatico with India and will resonate there. I would be looking forward to that if that does happen. But you're right. We've got superpowers are rising and that's, you know, that may be part of the mix is that the role of the US is shifting and that's part of what's happening right now.

David Gardner: Well, we're going to talk about what's happening right now. It's fun to do that on any given week, but especially fun with Kevin Kelly. Of course, a lot of our focus will be on the future. In fact, I'm going to backload this podcast, Kevin, let's retrogressively go back to some of what you wrote in The Inevitable, and let's update ourselves for 2023 going forward from here. I am really looking forward to that, but in the meantime, I got the proof for your new book ahead of time. Thank you for sending me the PDF. I've read it. It's very different from your other books, For those who don't already know this, I would describe it as Ben Franklin. I would describe it as [laughs] aphorisms. That's really what we have here from Page 5 to Page 208, per page 1 to 3 quotes, very thoughtful. Could you briefly tell the story? Your introduction is the longest part of the book and it itself is two pages are. What's the backstory, this superhero origin story for this book?

Kevin Kelly: It began in some ways by the realization that I had lots of pieces of advice I'd been writing down for myself to help me memorize them and be reminded. Yet, I had not given it to our adult kids and we were the opposite of helicopter parents. I have three kids who are adults now and I was not in the habit of giving them much advice. We prefer to try to act out our advice by deeds rather than words. But I felt that there were some things that as I was writing them down that I really genuinely wish that I had known when I was younger, that somebody had told me. I thought, well, I should really continue to write these down and then give them to my children, which I did the first batch when I was 60 at my birthday. I did it kind of a Irish hobbit version of a birthday where you give presence instead of get them.

David Gardner: Lovely.

Kevin Kelly: That seemed to work and they really enjoyed them. Later on, when my son saw the book, he said, yeah, you never said this, but you definitely taught us this. I thought, OK, I'll take that as a sign of success.

David Gardner: That's wonderful.

Kevin Kelly: But there were things that he appreciated having written down. The reason to write them down for me was to encapsulate a whole bunch of knowledge and wisdom into this little tiny telegraphic capsule that would make it easy for me to repeat to myself and remember, some of it is grand and cosmic and universal and timeless, but others are very, very specific practical things, such as if you lose track of something in your house, you know you have but can't find it and you finally do find it, here's the thing I repeat myself. Don't put it back where I find it, put it back where I first looked for it, put it back where I first looked for it. I repeat that to myself or another piece of advice that's very practical that I got while working at Whole Earth was, if you get invited to do something six months from now, ask yourself, "Would I wanna do this if it was tomorrow morning?" That immediacy really filters out things because there's lots of things that I would say yes to it six months, but if it was tomorrow morning I'm going to say no to so I say no. Those are the things that I repeat to myself. If there's an argument with two sides, find the third side. That's always something I repeat to myself because there's two sides. Dichotomy, back-and-forth, black and white. It's like, well, what's the third side?

Kevin Kelly: Those are the kinds of things. I attempted to reduce these little books of wisdom into something that could almost be treatable, and where most of my work was taking away words until just the essence left. They were something that could be easily brought to mind.

David Gardner: Very well said, and that is indeed what you have done throughout. Excellent advice for living. You have captured the essence of the wisdom that you've encountered, that you've said to yourself, spoken, actually acted out in front of others, as it turns out, not always spoken to them, but now spoken for us. I asked you ahead of time if you would consent to me randomizing different pages of your book and then just picking my favorite quote off that page and doing the interview that way. You said you would allow us to go where our whimsy in this case my dice take us. That's where we're going to start, Kevin. I've lined up about eight quotes here, and this was randomly chosen. In fact, the order will be talking through these was itself randomly chosen. I guess a less lazy interviewer would have actually sculpted everything, but this is how I roll and I think you're really good with that too. Let's start with the first quote. For each of these, I'm just going to spot you up. There might be a story or an anecdote that you have in mind, or simply additional thoughts you have for each. I love that the first one I randomized was from Page 85. This is what you write on Page 85. ''All the greatest prizes in life, in wealth, relationships, or knowledge come from the magic of compounding interest by amplifying small, steady gains. All you need for abundance is to keep adding 1 percent more than you subtract on a regular basis.'' Now I literally randomized that first but that couldn't be a better Motley Fool setup. I don't think. [laughs]

Kevin Kelly: Sure that you weren't cheating there? Because that seems also familiar to me. Yes, it's true. My point is that it's not only true for money, for those little magic coins, but it's actually true for relationships, is actually true for skills. It's true for civilization as a whole. If we as a civilized society can create 1 percent more than we destroy, then we can make civilization that way. In fact, that's all civilization is. There's plenty of destruction and problems, but we create a few percent more than we destroy and that compounded over time gives us our society today. It is absolutely true for finance, but it's also true for other things like relationships. If you can love a few percent more than you are when you're being nasty or mean, you can actually compound that over time and accumulate something good. There is this magic force, as Einstein says, this marvelous fortunate universe. But it does apply even beyond the little stacks of bills.

David Gardner: Of course, we do spend a fair amount of time at The Motley Fool thinking about the compounding effect of money and interest as you say. Certainly, that is in some ways an easy read because it's numbers. It's numerical. You can actually play it out forward in a spreadsheet. You can quantify it, enumerate it. Whereas when you start saying well, relationships, that takes us off into a right-brain qualitative assessment. I really appreciate that in your mind and I think mine too, I find this persuasive. Everything's compounding. Everything has compounded up to this moment for better and for ill that you and I could share in this discussion. Everything is compounding. What we do as parents compounds. I love that you described earlier your approach to parenting where it sounds like you really didn't offer much guidance. You just tried to do it through action and that it sometimes compounds in ways we don't appreciate or know for better, or for ill. I also have adult children who sometimes say dad, you said this when I was this age and I was like I did? [laughs] Again for better or for worse. Everything is compounding, but certainly from a Motley Fool standpoint, I just love that I hit this one first and this won't be the only one because, Kevin, there are other aspects of thinking about finances and life which is not the focus of this interview, but it's clearly part of your focus in life and part of your knowledge basin and your interest. Presumably, you've been a saver through your life. I hope you own some stock, or you own shares of the things that you created.

Kevin Kelly: Absolutely. Another piece of advice. I don't know if you get to, but was again, it was very practical. I don't even know if it was in the book, but it was something I have a granddaughter now, and I was saying to the granddaughter. It was kind of a funny joke. But as I was saying, Forget crypt kiddo. You'll invest in index stocks, mutual funds. But yeah, I've been a buy-and-hold guy and through everything thick and thin, and I remember back in the '80s, I guess, it must have been in the '80s. There was a curmudgeony guy at Haworth catalog and there was the first time in my recollection where the stocks were going down and it was like a, I'm not sure what the event was.

David Gardner: Maybe it was Black Monday, 1987. Who knows that the stocks [inaudible].

Kevin Kelly: Maybe it was '87, and he was saying, oh, sell, whatever it was. I say no, buy. If I had cash I'd be buying right now. [laughs] We have been very fortunate in that way. Again, in index funds is primarily what I do. I don't have time to do the research that you need to be good at this. I'm lazy investor and I've been served well by hanging. Yeah, it worked.

David Gardner: Compounding works, and certainly I prefer investing directly in individual stocks as I'm sure you've already love here at the Fool. But right there with our first book, The Motley Fool Investment Guide, we started by saying everybody could or should just index, and for most people that's what makes the most sense. At that time anyway, there was so much marketing of managed mutual funds that index funds looked even better because they were just so much cheaper, and the way to really compound was to not be paying so much in fees. Anyway, let's move on to random quote Number 2. We're skating backwards, 35 pages to Page 50. This one is very practical and very short. It implies maybe that you're a builder in a physical architectural way that I'm certainly not. Here it is, Kevin. A balcony or porch needs to be at least six feet, two meters deep, or it won't be used.

Kevin Kelly: Yeah, this is absolutely true. They're borne out of my observation of many travels around the world and staying in many places in rooms and hotels and homes. But it's also came originally, the insight came from Christopher Alexander in Pattern Language. He was the one who pointed out to me this phenomenon. I have had architect friends tell me the same thing that when they're designing things, is that people tend to want to have like a token balcony, but it's just simply never used. You have to have enough depth in there to actually go out and make it more than just a design flourish. If I had the privilege of making a house from scratch, from cutting down the trees to building the lumber, moving rocks. I've worked on this house many times and I've designed some houses for my kids. Yes, I do have some experience in the making part of it. But this is true for anybody who has an opportunity to make a space. Just keep that in mind.

David Gardner: I was wondering as I read this one, whether you intend it just to be what it says or whether you're being abstract and inspirational like a Chauncey Gardiner from the movie Being There, that great Peter Sellers character, if you remember who would just speak, very open-ended aphorisms. But are you just talking here literally about balconies and six feet, or is there something more you're saying?

Kevin Kelly: I think to be honest, I was talking about balconies, [laughs] but I'm sure we could expand that to cosmos.

David Gardner: Well, as an English major, I learned that if you can BS your way, you get better grades [laughs] that you see more connections than might've been intended, that can be rewarding sometimes. I'm not intended to be cynical about my education. I love that I was an English major. Well, let's move on to Number 3, but I'm really glad, again randomly that I started with those two because I think listeners and future readers will see there's a lot of range here. It's not just all self-actualization, or the future of technology, Kevin. You're taking us all over the place in excellent advice for living. Quote Number 3, this one four pages later. Page 54, as I've been saying this by the way, you've been pulling out your book. This is of course, just an audio podcast so people can't see checking. Not at all actually as somebody who's an author myself in the past, I know it's very helpful to have your own book, especially with the book tour, because often you've written it a year before and you can't quite remember what you said. But yeah, excellent advice for living, Page 54 and I quote ''Over the long term, the future is decided by optimists. To be an optimist, you don't have to ignore the multitude of problems we create, you just have to imagine how much our ability to solve problems improves.''

Kevin Kelly: Yes, I have become deliberately more optimistic as I get older. I think the kind of optimism I'm talking about is a choice and less of a sunny disposition. It's an active imagination primarily. To imagine things working out good and well, things improving over time. Because to imagine things getting worse is easy, it's cheap. It's very cheap to imagine how things go wrong. Because that is the probable destination, that's the S entropy. The entropy is most things are going to fail, most things are going to break. It's easy to imagine them breaking. It's much harder to imagine how things work well and we have this problem right now with AI. It's far easier to imagine all the ways that it doesn't work and harder to imagine how it works. But if we can, then we are rewarded by becoming more likely that it will happen. More likely that the good version will happen. So overall, it isn't that we are ignoring the problems, it's just that we're imagining and seeing how in fact, our ability to get better and how future generations can improve things so that we are actually more successful at solving problems. We will no doubt make new problems beyond what we have right now. The only reason why we don't despair is because we will also continue to make solutions and the ability to solve those problems even faster and that's that 1 percent difference. That difference may only be 1 percent, by the way. Remember what I'm saying is that there may only be a 1 percent difference in our ability to solve the problem versus having the problems. But that 1 percent is all we need. That's my protopian vision. 

David Gardner: Yes, I was going to rock that because I remember you and I talked about that and certainly you wrote about it in the inevitable, we're not living in a utopia. I think we can all agree [Laughs] on that. Pretty sure we're not living in a dystopia, I think things would be a lot worse. But what you have said for many years now and you just alluded to it again, is we're living in what you call a protopia, which by my layman's definition is basically things are getting infinitesimally better each day, like maybe less than 1 percent, but every day, and maybe some days, they get a little bit worse that day, but invisibly so. 

Kevin Kelly: That's on a global average because there's obviously parts of the world.

David Gardner: Absolutely.

Kevin Kelly: That are going backwards. But as a global average on average is an inferential amount with local disruptions and local setbacks.

David Gardner: That's right.

Kevin Kelly: Just as you might have your own, anybody would have an illness. There was a doctor that I worked with an author, he said, if you do a really honest appraisal of your body every day, every day you're going to find some little injury, some little cut, some little boil, something. There's not a single day when your body is perfect, and that is just the cost of living, so to speak and it's the same thing with our global civilization, that there are going to be always illnesses and cuts and injuries, but that we overcome them over time, and that by the way, is another bit of advice. I believe that optimism can be learned and we know from studies that this is true and one of the differences or one of the main skills if I would have to say it's optimism is a skill. One of the skills of optimism is that you understand that setbacks are temporary, they're not your identity. The pessimists believe that setbacks is their identity, that it's inevitable, that there are fated to it. We can't escape it. But an optimist views setback as temporary, something that can be overcome.

David Gardner: That's a great definition and you've already said optimism is a choice. That's what you said initially. Optimism is a skill. It can be learned. It reminds me of a friend of mine who's a world-class executive coach, Heath Dieckert. Heath often with his clients will say, hey, what's the best you can see for yourself? 

Kevin Kelly: Great question.

David Gardner: This summer or coming out of your book tour or the rest of your life and that knee-jerk question forces people to articulate in their minds what might be the best and guess what, you're much more likely to get near there if you've thought about it than just locking your way into the best. I hear a very similar thought. There's one other friend of mine I want to mention Madison Parry who when ChatGPT started to make its big pop culture splash starting late last year, Madison who tweets out sometimes on Twitter, said something to the effect of, what does it say about us? This is my question for you. This is not merely rhetorical, Kevin, I'll ask you directly, what does it say about us humans that so many people are just trying to break ChatGPT and mess with it and make it say stupid stuff our show, its shortcomings and I don't think he's necessarily being cynical. This is a positive inquiry. What does that say about humans?

Kevin Kelly: Actually, I'm not bothered by that because that to me is much more a tradition of what the origins of the word hacking came from. This is what the hackers were doing.

David Gardner: Love it.

Kevin Kelly: Back in the old days, MIT, they were hacking systems. They were trying to jailbreak it, they were trying to see what would work and not work as a means of exploring and that's what a lot of people who are hacking the ChatGPT are doing trying to jailbreak it. Is there probing the limits of it, which I think is a very natural fun thing to do. I don't think it's that malicious where they actually are trying to, there was some guy who was asking ChatGPT about how to eliminate humans on Earth and it wasn't a serious intention to try and do that. It was more saying what would it say? I think at this level that we're talking about right now, it's a form of hacking. It's an exploration. It's testing the limits, it's like quality control in some senses that the consumers are doing the quality control. Like where does this break? Which is what software people do all the time. There are people who are hired and that's their job is to see if they can break it and that's what was happening here.

David Gardner: That's really well said. I appreciate that. I just finished a good book you may have come across Jordan Ellenberg in his book, How Not to Be Wrong, The Power of Mathematical Thinking. But in his book, he highlights Charles Darwin as being distinctive in his era for as soon as he started having a hunch about evolution, he was his harshest critic. He spent a lot of time just attacking his own ideas. Whereas most of us are looking for confirmation bias. We want things that show that we're right and Darwin was the opposite and it's that hacker mentality with a capital H and a positive connotation for many. I know hacking or hackers sounds negative, but I love that point. Let's move on to random quote number 4. Again, this is my own order. Kevin has no responsibility other than he wrote each of these things. [laughs] But the next one I have for you is on Page 134. This one is quite concise. The entire book is concise. Every page has one to three quotes, each of which is about a sentence long. This is one of them. "You can be whatever you want to be, so be the person who ends meetings early". 

Kevin Kelly: Yeah.

Kevin Kelly: Part of writing this was a joy in these little poems. The way they're structured is you're winding up for a big reveal and the reveal is a very pragmatic request [laughs] to end meetings early, which I have to say I know a couple of people who try and do that and they are heroes in my eyes because you're stopping when it's really done when there's nothing more to say. I have another bit of advice elsewhere in the book. I don't know if you got to it. But another way to actually contain and trim and reduce meetings is to have a requirement, particularly as the meeting is near the ending that person is only allowed to speak if you are going to say something that nobody in the group knows. It has to be like, is this new information that we all need to know? Then you can say something. If it's not, the meeting's over. You can see I have a definite bias against meetings.

David Gardner: I just love it. I'm going to say it one more time. You can be whatever you want to be. [laughs] Be the person who ends meetings early. Let's go to the fifth quote, this one from Page 58 and I quote, "Superman and Mother Teresa never made art. Only imperfect beings can make art because art begins in what is broken."

Kevin Kelly: Yes, Saints and superheroes don't make art. That is because there is a sense in which the art that we create is in some ways, coming from our flaws. Coming from what is not working, the yearnings that we have. I've been talking about really the good expressive art, not just the mechanics of putting paint on paper or whatever, but the actual expression is coming from our flawed nature rather than our perfected nature. This is an encouragement to people to make art. It's not like you have to arrive at some level of enlightenment or pure being or some spiritual plateau. It's actually the reverse. You want to start when you are hurting. You want to start where you are. You want to start with your imperfection and lack of skills. All those things is the place from which the great art is coming. It's this idea that is coming out of imperfection rather than perfection.

David Gardner: Really appreciate that and art like leadership, it almost means nothing because so many people have defined it's so many different ways that it becomes unclear what it is. I do appreciate people like Les McEwen who have very practical, pragmatic, simple definitions for leadership. I appreciate what you've just done there, Kevin. I was thinking about this isn't exactly art, but it's about not trying to be perfect and not trying to be 100 percent acknowledging we're broken. I think of the software world I had a fun chat a weekend or two ago with my friend Zach, who used to work at Activision Blizzard. At Activision Blizzard, they would ship what was it, 90 percent and I'm sure you're familiar with this concept in Silicon Valley because if you try to get your piece of software or your game done at 100 percent, you'll never actually finish. That concept of shipping something that's broken in one sense is really the only way we can muddle through and succeed.

Kevin Kelly: Exactly. I've been making a piece of art today for several years and I have a couple of other things to say about art in the Vice book, and one of them is a definition that I picked up from somewhere that art is whatever you can get away with [laughs] which is my favorite example. I tell my son who wanted to be an artist I told him the same thing. It's like whatever you can get away with. Hanging around some professional artists, people who make their living artists, this is 100 percent true. Where basically they convince you that what they're working on is art and therefore it becomes art. It's important to realize that art is something that we can do every day and doesn't require superpowers to do it if you can convince someone else that it's there. Another piece of advice that I had about art was, art is what you leave out.

David Gardner: Well said.

Kevin Kelly: A lot of the great art is knowing when to stop, what to take away, what not to say. Screenwriters in Hollywood know that it's in what is left unsaid. It's not the words that are there it's all the things that you skip over that you don't say that really make a piece of dialogue work. In music, of course, is all about going over to spaces between the notes, it's not about the notes and so that idea of art is what you leave out is another important, I think, piece of advice.

David Gardner: I wanted to ask you about art and making art because Kevin, I do follow you on Twitter where you are at kevin2kelly, I don't see a blue checkmark there. You won't see one on mine either I don't know, or maybe I've missed one, or maybe are you opting into the Elon's blue checkmark or not.

Kevin Kelly: No. I was bestowed a blue checkmark long ago. I didn't ask for it and then suddenly appeared last week or this week it disappeared.

David Gardner: It hasn't really changed your world?

Kevin Kelly: So far, I have no objection to paying for things. For instance, right now, I pay for search. I moved from Google three years ago to Neeva and what I wanted was a ad-free version of search. I would happily pay Google for an ad-free version of search. I would love to. I've been actually emailing these guys saying, I pay for YouTube premium, which has changed my life. Literally, I've watched so much YouTube and just not having to see any commercials is worth more than $100 a year to me. I don't want to see those ads sponsored links in my search. I'd be willing to pay. I pay Neeva for ad-free search, which was started by some other guys from Google and so I have no adverse to paying for a social media. It's just that so far. How about an ad-free version of Twitter? Let's go in that direction and then I'd be willing.

David Gardner: That's really interesting. Well, on Twitter, you're at kevin2kelly. Did you insert the two with intention or was there some other dude named Kevin Kelly who showed up first?

Kevin Kelly: Exactly. The problem is Kevin Kelly actually is a very common name. I went to high school with Kevin Kelly. There was a Kevin Kelly at wire, there's another one at home worth. I'm surrounded by Kevin Kelly's and less than their early. I don't get the name.

David Gardner: [LAUGHTER] But you were on Twitter pretty early.

Kevin Kelly: But haven't gave up even trying to. Now I'm just Kevin2Kelly as a way to have my own Google unique name.

David Gardner: Well, you were certainly on Twitter pretty early March 2007, but I guess that wasn't quite early enough, but I did want to ask you, following you on Twitter each day I see a piece of visual art that is uploaded, it seems to me by you to your account and it's always tagged #AI_ART #DailyAI #ImadeAIart. Are you texts prompting something or you sculpting these Photoshop images? They're quite alluring and interesting and creative. What is going on there?

Kevin Kelly: Yeah. For one year I made art myself with my iPad and very fabulous app called Procreate that costs all of $10; it's just fabulous. I was making a new piece of art every day and posting it. Then this year I decided to switch over to having AI help me co-create the art. I'm using a bunch of different engines. The one I use most often is Midjourney, which was the original one. But I sometimes you Stable Diffusion or DALL-E. What I'm doing is yes, I am giving it prompts, but what you have to understand is to get anything really good from these requires a long conversation. I would spend hours and hours going back and forth and round and round, nudging it, and backtracking and deciding that I'm not really getting what I want and starting over again and sometimes these days we can actually upload images to help it along. There is a lot of work. There is a whole new art called prompting that is required to get something really good. You can get something instantly by clicking it. But if you want to get something that's not just average and mediocre, you have to work at it. That's why I am perfectly content and proud of signing it as a co-creation because I have put in my hours.

David Gardner:  Yeah, that is really interesting and I thank you for telling that story because I do follow you. I'm interested in the art that we're creating. I suspected your tag is AI, so we might get into that a little bit later. But some people are of course objecting to this.

Kevin Kelly: Sure, there's a whole discussion about that.

David Gardner: Your property has been stolen, etc. We may get there or not, but I want to go back to your book because we're having so much fun there and we just talked about Superman and Mother Teresa. Superheroes and saints don't make art, coming from a broken place. Let's just do a few more and then we'll shift to The Inevitable. Number 6 comes from page 132, number 6 in our interview, this is the sixth that Kevin and I are doing of his stuff. We tend to overestimate what we can do in a day and underestimate what we can achieve in a decade. Miraculous things can be accomplished if you'd give it ten years, a long game will compound small gains that will be able to overcome even big mistakes. I'll put an end quote right there, but I want to add first of all, this is a second one that speaks again to compounding and small things growing and I'm a sucker for these themes. But what I like about this one is you're also pointing out one of the things I've tried to point out about stock market investing in my own experience, both acting on my own advice and what I've provided to others. That is, losers are overrated. We make too fearful losing in life. The most you can ever lose and I've done this only once to twice is 100 percent unless you're doing some crazy silly thing. But the most you can make is infinite. If you do the math, losing is so overrated and not worthy of the fear people accorded. To quote you again, a long game will compound small gains that we'll be able to overcome even, and I would even say "big". But you mean seriously, mistakes or losses exactly.

Kevin Kelly: Yeah, again, there's a direct financial vector in this, but this also same advice applies to other things. Again, if you are list is for instance, one of the values of doing art, say on a regular basis is that you can make some bombs, you can make stuff that's not good. You could be in a streak where nothing is very good, but if you do it every day, you're compounding your skills and that will overcome even the most horrific mistake that you might make or failure and so this idea of doing things on a regular basis in a small things on a regular base is part of what the advice is about that could apply to exercise, that could apply to like, if you're doing exercise every day and then you get hurt. It's much easier to overcome that because you have built-in this compounding ability to return to the gym or whatever it is.

David Gardner: Yeah. Being stronger. Yes.

Kevin Kelly: Yeah.

David Gardner: Well, really appreciate that. Have you ever read or maybe met James Clear or his book Atomic Habits?

Kevin Kelly: I'm very aware of the book and a big fan of it. I have not actually met James. But I applaud his basic thesis isn't ideas about making things as easy as possible, as habitual as possible. I think there hasn't been an influence on my own habit-making. Chris there's good habits and bad habits too. But going back to the investment thing, yes, that's very much true. I think that advice is really good for entrepreneurs and people who are trying to do something new and difficult. That is the same thing that if you could construct your progress in a way that it's incrementally compounding where you do things and you're not waiting for a big payoff. You're not hoping for the thing to come in on what? The average fast, but you're getting rich slowly. Who wants to get rich slowly? Everybody should be because that's really the only way you're going to get there [laughs]. If you do this compounding, then again, when you have the disaster strikes when the lights go out, whatever it is. When you had your near-death experience, which we will have if you're entrepreneur, then you can overcome it much easier because you have built-in these compounding slogans you've been gaining all along. You go back 10 feet, but you've been incrementally gaining for each day.

David Gardner: Resilience. Obviously the word great in recent years has been to describe this and the reason it's popular is because it's important and accounts. Well, two more. Number 7, page 202. This one, you won't even find fast enough because it's so short I'll be done before you get there, Kevin, but go with the option that opens up yet more options.

Kevin Kelly: Yes. This is actually maybe a more of a theme of the book in general. There's a couple of themes in the book. One is about the generous nature of the universe and the second one is this idea of opening up options, which part of our optimism is about. But the idea is that in my view when I think about technology which were taught here near about, I think most of the problems that we have today in our lives and in the world have been created by a technologies of the past and most of the technologies of tomorrow will be caused by our technologies we're making today and the most critics of technology would probably agree with it. But where I diverge from the critics is I believe that the solutions to those problems is not less technology, but more and better technology. Those new and better technologies themselves are not immune because they will produce new and better problems. You might wonder, well, what's gained by all this running around where technology making new problem solving, new problems making new problems. There's one fundamental thing, which is that we get options out of a good choices. We get possibilities. That's the difference between living in a city and living in a beautiful village in the Himalayas, where they eat organic food and stuff is that you take the one-way bus into the grimy, greedy city and you have choices to about what you can do. You don't have to be a farmer. You don't have to be a farmer's wife. That's what technology gives us and that's what civilizations giving us is increased choices. What we want in our individual lives and society-wise is that when we make choices, we went to favor those choices that will unleash more options. We don't want to close down options. We always want to make choices where we're increasing our options over time.

David Gardner: Love it.

Kevin Kelly: Each time we can make a choice, we are going to close off options. There is inherently a closing off of options, but we wanted to be opening up more than we close off. When I look at decisions I have to make evaluating it on what does the option scape look like? Does going this way does it increase my choices and possibilities even though it might close off others? Or is it going in the direction where I'm restricting the number of options that I have? Thinking in terms of the option scape is a skill that we're going to increasingly come to rely on as we have more and more choices and possibilities before us.

David Gardner: I love your point about the problems of today are better problems in some ways, they're also more complex problems and therefore we need better technology to solve them. Some of the undeniable human progress. The yes things really were worse back then and yes things really are better today and only we can't see it day to day in a protopia but when we look a century backward, we see that many of the top causes of death of our fellow humans a century ago are diseases that have been eradicated. It's truly remarkable. We take for granted too often, probably every day how much has been gained, how much safer this world is, even though we're all aware of problems with guns and other threats in our society today. But wow. Some of the problems today truly are better problems in the sense that they're not as sad and tragic what we're actually having to encounter as something like smallpox.

Kevin Kelly: Yeah. To me, there's nothing that makes me more optimistic than reading history. During COVID, we read up and watched many lectures on what actually happened during the Black Death, during the plague. Oh my gosh. This horrific in so many ways. It was very rapid, the entire family is being wiped out except for one person. It was really phenomenal because they didn't even have the highest level of living standards to begin with but this was just really plunged them to the depth. If you read anything about how slavery was endemic for most cultures around the world, it was really bad. I always liked the Obama challenge, which is, you're going to be born somewhere in the world with no control over what rank you are, what gender you are. It's what year do you want to be born in. It's like you do not want to be born in the past. You do not want to be born in the past where you're randomly going to be born somewhere in the world and most people had it really tough and particularly the women. You can see progress in that way more than just longevity, just control of your time, pain, all things.

David Gardner: Before we go to our final quote, I just want to underline one quick investment point about your go with the option that opens up yet more options. One of the words that I've used regularly over the years for my own signature style of investing is optionality. I know you know that means.  I think a lot of people do too. But I don't think enough of the world understands the power of companies and Alphabet is a great example and Amazon is a great example and many, ironically perhaps of the best stocks of our time, the stocks that you want to have had in your portfolio are companies that exhibit extreme optionality. It does seem with as they go with their option, whatever their initial business model is, it opens up more options to your point, Kevin. I want to make sure there's a real clear parallel in my fellow Fools' minds here that what Kevin is saying about go the option that opens up yet more options is awesome advice for entrepreneurs and for investors buying into certain stocks over certain others. I am a huge optionality buff.

Kevin Kelly: I haven't heard your definition. Could you summarize that to me in just one sentence. You hinted at it, but optionality, meaning that companies that are increasing the options in which they can do business?

David Gardner: Companies who's very nature is such that they have increasing numbers of options with their widget or platform, or cultural or innovative idea. It was once pointed out to me by Andy Cross, our Chief Investment Officer here at the Fool. He said, David, the difference between you and Buffett, well, they're actually a lot of differences between me and Buffett that don't actually make me look very good. But he said, the difference between you is that you are looking for companies with infinite possible futures and Buffett is looking for companies with one definite future, you think about See's Candies or GEICO insurance. I loved AOL back in the day, my first 100-bagger stock because I saw it could be so much more or Amazon started. You remember this, Kevin? Earth's biggest book seller, of course you do.

Kevin Kelly: I was one of the very first customers because Jeff knew the Haworth catalog and we were book reviewers so he invited Stewart and me, and I actually have a history of my first purchase in 1995.

Kevin Kelly: But I have to say, I did not see the optionality that Jeff saw because I was imagining it as bookselling and anybody who saw beyond that had a bigger vision than I had.

David Gardner: If I may say I don't even think Jeff saw what Jeff would see because that's part of the nature of this is that as you take more steps toward the lighthouse, you still don't exactly know where it is, but you know, that's a little brighter than where I just stepped from. As you get closer, these are the words of Shirzad Chamine, the author of Positive Intelligence. I've always loved this metaphor he uses. You'll never actually get to the lighthouse, but there's more and more light. I do think that Jeff Bezos did not know Amazon web services in 1995. 

Kevin Kelly: No, he did not.

David Gardner: But he was positioned culturally.

Kevin Kelly: Yeah.

David Gardner: With the ideas to actually take us there and get us there and where will these entrepreneurs and these visionaries take us next? You're one of them, Kevin.

Kevin Kelly: Yeah.

David Gardner: That's why I'm glad to be hanging out with you.

Kevin Kelly: I like the term and I would expand it beyond even investment and even a personal optionality and say that what we want to have as a civilization is optionality.

David Gardner: Love that.

Kevin Kelly: We want to increase the optionality so that we as a civilization are opening up options all the time, taking choices where we increase options rather than decrease them. There may be something to keep in mind headed into the current situation with China and Russia is to try and keep our options expanding.

David Gardner: If you do come out with a sequel or a second edition, and this line shows up, I want partial credit.  Just a footnote and it's this one because I'm basically just magnifying what you and I just said.

Kevin Kelly: Yeah.

David Gardner: Go with the civilization that opens up yet more civilizations. [laughs].

Kevin Kelly: Yes, exactly. One of the things that I think in not the near future, but the far future say 50 years. This is not that far, but say 50 years, horizons. We're going to see a global population implosion and countries are going to be competing for people to come in, and city's particular. I think this is a Paul Romer idea that you have cities competing against each other's with all kinds of tax and employment and lifestyle things. But there's going to be a sense of cities saying come join us. You'll say you want to live in a place where there's expanding options, you want to live in a place or city where they've decided to try to expand the options over time. I think that we might come to something like that where we're thinking of this at a higher level. I'm trying to have expanding optionality as an attraction to have labors. Companies are in some ways trying to hire, are doing that in a limited way, but that's this for employment. But I'm saying no. Just for being an entrepreneur, for being creative, for investing, for working, for just living. You want to join a place where they are investing into increased optionality.

David Gardner: That is so persuasive and I'm really glad we got there. I love people who think 50 years ahead and I don't think I'm going to be around. You might be around though, Kevin. I just feel like you've got the future figured out better than the rest of us and I hope you're still around in 50 years. But I did a podcast a couple of years ago called the day the market crashed. It was done from the year 2052. The market crashed, it was down substantially. But the joke is, of course, it wasn't a joke. We were trying to take this seriously, but the joke is the things that compounded so much from this day to that day that what sounded like a really bad drop magnitude of points today that would scare us was really not very meaningful that particular day. But we literally tried to do the conversation from the year 2052. We were talking about how we can now talk with animals. They've started reaching consciousness. They have a lot to say to us and it's fascinating and nobody ever thought we'd get there. Of course, we're totally speculating and having fun. We also talked about the power of Greenland clearly back in 2022, they didn't realize that Greenland in a warming world was going to be an incredibly valuable place to be. We're having some fun and that was half-serious. The parts that were maybe not as serious, but might still be true. Self-driving cars still maybe going to get there. [laughs]

Kevin Kelly: Yeah, I think self-driving cars are inevitable, but here's the thing. This is a pointed out to me by Rodney Brooks and I totally believe him, he was one of the first guys to make commercial robots. He made the Roomba.

David Gardner: You bet i-robot, one of my stock picks.

Kevin Kelly: I robot and he's been at the forefront of robotics. What he says is that the challenge with self-driving cars, the reason why they're so slow and will be slow and coming is because you can't just swap out the self-driving car for driven car just like we didn't swap out a horses carriage car into the same infrastructure that the horse-drawn carriages were. We had to build an entire highway system, on-ramps, gas stations, and the whole thing. We're going to have the same kind of large-scale restructuring necessary to have self-driving cars is going to take a lot of investment over time to accommodate them. We're not just swapping those cars out and expecting it to work. That's one of the reasons why this inevitable thing is going to take a while is that there's more involved and just replacing the cars, we have to actually replace the entire transportation system.

David Gardner: That's great. I think we also mentioned near the end of that episode that the iPhone maybe 48 was coming out and was going to have a slightly better camera. Let me spot you up with one more quote from your book. Then we're going to just close our discussion with three quotes from the Inevitable, your 2016 book and ask you how you're feeling where we are today and you've been so generous with your time. I'm definitely running this week's podcast long because it's not nearly as long as I'd even want it to be. But regular listeners know that when we go long, it's usually because I'm so enthusiastic as I am today. Kevin, here's my eighth and closing randomized quote from your book. This is from page 78. A fun one to close on. Writing down one thing you are grateful for each day is the cheapest possible therapy ever.

Kevin Kelly: Yeah, gratitude. Gratitude is my only prayer. I think it really is very therapeutic to be aware of gratitude. I don't know how it works. It's mysterious to me. But that act of being gratitude settles you, calms you, renews you, and that's just talking about you. The effect on the world when you're grateful to others around you it spreads and ripples out. It's contagious.

Kelvin Kelly: I think my general view as I said, I've decided to become more optimistic and as I become more optimistic, I see the world slightly differently than I did before and in the sense that I see how much it revolves around trust. I have a different idea or basic nature, which has been backed up by some recent studies, which is that our natural human inclination is not selfishness, but actually selflessness. That's why we have exceeded, because we trust as strangers that we collaborated scale, that we are able to meet someone that we've never seen before and trust them as a default. That trust is occasionally betrayed with cheating but the little bit of advice to say, is getting cheated every now and then is a small tax to pay for getting the best out of other people all the time. They're going to give you the best when you trust them, when you're grateful, when you're generous and occasionally, yeah, you'll be taken advantage of. But going back, what we're saying before that compounding abilities of that generosity, that's a small tax to pay. I don't like to be cheated, but I will gladly pay that tax for the benefits of trusting others first. For taking advantage of this really weird thing about the universe that makes no sense whatsoever. But it's absolutely true which is that the more you give the more you get. Mathematically that does not add up. The arithmetic is all wrong. But there is something fundamental about it that the more we give out, the more we get back. How that works I don't know, but that is the fact that I've seen in my 70 years of being everywhere in the world that seems to be some law of the universe, at least among human relationships, of course, is obviously not talking about physics. I'm talking about human relationships. In that world, the more you give, the more you get. That's the act of being grateful for that and understanding that most of what success is is an awful lot of it is luck. Something that unearned in a certain sense. That is the foundational view or the foundational bias of the world. I think I've become less patient with people who are convinced that people will always, if you don't.

David Gardner: Protect your back.

Kelvin Kelly: Protect your back, they're going to stab you. That's the natural inclination for everybody is to steal and this is another piece of advice, is that the easiest way to see the thief among you is the one who sees the things that everybody steals. No, everybody doesn't steal. Most people are honest most of the time. That is the fact. We know that, people will help each other in a disaster given all things being equal. That's something I've changed my mind about. I have to say in recent years is accepting the fact that the basic nature of humans as of today is to be generous and collaborative given everything equal.

David Gardner: I really appreciate that. I know. Occasionally you've mentioned publicly you're Christian faith. I think I share it. We all come at things from different angles. A lot of us are taught not just in the Christian tradition, but others that absolute power corrupts absolutely and we're all bad and we're all faulty, that's for sure but I really appreciate a fresh angle toward selflessness and recognizing that. I think that opens eyes and hearts and I appreciate you putting that out there. Let me shift to The Inevitable now. I've been talking about three quotes. Your book is so wonderful from 2016 and absolutely worthy of a rereading. I didn't do a full one I just pulled a few of my favorite pull-up quotes to share with you. Before I do, I am going to throw a bonus quote out from your [inaudible] because it reminds me of what you've just done for us. Page 164 you wrote. To be interesting, just tell your own story with uncommon honesty and I believe that you have been interesting and that's exactly what you're doing this week for us on Rule Breaker Investing. Thank you, Kevin Kelly. The Inevitable. You and I did a podcast on this. You have written an amazing book. You've talked about it. In many ways, it brought your thinking together from years of observation, but you weren't looking backward. It was all about what's going to happen next and what are the inevitable forces that we're going to see in our future. As I've often pointed out talking about this book with friends, it's not genomics, Chapter 4 genomics. Sure, genomics are probably inevitable and important, but it's things like filtering and sharing. If they're all [inaudible] it's disarming initially for readers who thought they're going to learn what the 12 hot technologies are they need to pay attention to, including with their portfolios. I really appreciate the orientation of the entire book. The first quote I wanted to ask you about was about artificial intelligence because of course, ChatGPT, etc. We've already talked about this some; you make art daily. I wanted to get into this a little bit with you. What you wrote in 2016, among other things, "To demand that artificial intelligence be human-like is the same flawed logic as demanding that artificial flying be bird-like with flapping wings, robots too will think different."

Kelvin Kelly: Yeah, I would say further, it's the fact that they think differently than human. That's not a bug, that's a feature. That is the most important thing about them, is that they don't think like us. We have the first inclination to that with ChatGPT and making my art. They make art that is a little bit alien. My framing is that the best way for us to think about these coming AIs. We talk about them in plural. There's been a variety of them. That we think of them as artificial aliens. Who knows when aliens will land on here but we're going to make artificial aliens on this planet and they may, at some point be conscious and they may have some intelligences, the super intelligences. But what's for sure is that they're not going to be human-like. That again, is the advantage of them, is that they think a little differently than we do and that's I think important because we have problems, say scientific problems. What does quantum gravity look like, that we may not be able to figure out with our own minds. We may have to do, and it's two-step process where we make other minds like other Spocks or Yodas and we together work with them, with these artificial brains to figure out some of these problems so that one mind is not sufficient we need other kinds of don't think like us. By the way, we're connected 24-hours basically, we have eight billion people connected 24 hours a day all the time. Group-think is a problem and so being able to think differently is the engine of creation and innovation entrepreneur and it gets harder and harder to think differently for connected all the time having AIs on hand-engineered to think differently than we do is going to be a huge asset in helping us to think differently.

David Gardner: What's interesting about that for me is that, and I love your point about alien and I also enjoy your art again, follow Kevin on Twitter at Kevin2Kelly.

Kelvin Kelly: On Instagram.

David Gardner: On Instagram. See, I'm not there so I don't think of that.

Kelvin Kelly: Well, it's the same one Kevin2kelly on Instagram.

David Gardner: On Instagram as well wonderful. Few days ago you posted your daily art was what looked like this amazingly fun bicycle or motorcycle. It's red and gold. It looks like what every seven-year-old boy wants to unwrap Christmas. The problem is there no pedals that I could see, even looked completely uncomfortable. It's like a crotch rocket that no one would actually want to ride. It's really cool looking, but it's alien ultimately. That's what you're pointing out but to bring it back to ChatGPT and irony perhaps Kevin, is that alien intelligence, which as you say underlies AIs like ChatGPT in the guys have chatbots, are understandably trying to be as relatable, as human, as pedestrian and friendly as possible. It started perhaps, if you like, with Siri or Alexa. I hope I didn't trigger that for anybody's machine as they're listening to us. But now it's increasingly, I think, trying to be human and relatable. How do you view that juxtaposition?

Kevin Kelly: It's very deliberate. A lot of what the current crop of AIs and generative AIs are doing is actually not new. They've been able and capable of doing it for years now. What's new? Where the big bang is that we've noticed is the fact that they have suddenly a conversational interface. The interface is a conversation and we are naturally conversational beings. Siri couldn't understand language, but it couldn't have a conversation. That's what this is. Now we have this conversational interface that we can bring to all things. Phone, your shoes, whatever it is, you can have a conversational interface to it. That's the Big Bang is having a conversational interface. The AI part of it is slowly improving, very slowly. What's really been magical has been this interface to it. That deliberate engineering about what happens if you'd give a large language model, this language interface to it? What can we do that we didn't know we could do before? It turned out that really having the conversational way to get into the AI produced all things that we didn't expect. It gave us a sense of intimacy. What I call these things what we have now is we have universal personal interns. Everybody has a personal intern. We got the personal navigator with GPS. We've got the personal librarian with Google Search. Now we have the personal interns that could do all things, but you'll have to check their work. I have a personal intern working with me on the AI, but I can't release what they're doing. It's embarrassing just to give the first thing they do. You go back and forth, you got to nudge him alone. Do you really mean that? You can do better than that. How about this? These interns are interns. They're working with us and you have to work with them. That's what we're getting out of this. The next step, which is really people are going to be very shocked by this, is to start to program in emotions.

More of this effect of humanness, again, to make them easier to work with. Right now, there's this question, like, are you polite to Siri and Alexa? Do you say thank you or please? The engineers are going to begin to program this in because we have a natural affinity of working with, it's the human scale is to be conversational and polite and to have some emotional tag, an emotional layer. That's going to be surprising because people for many years or decades believe that emotions sort of came after intelligence. But actually, emotion comes way before. It's like dogs and cats, we can bond with them and they're obviously not as intelligent as us. We can put in that emotional nuance and an emotional wavelength and emotional frequency into these things and that's going to happen to make them easier to use. There'll be even more confusing for us as a whole, because here are these things that are decidedly not human, but they're like a dog or cat, which are not human, and yet they can tug at our hearts and we can have bonds with them. We're going to have to overcome that and understand that that dimension is not reserved just to humans, but it's going to be open for things like animals and beyond animals.

David Gardner: Let me ask you one more thing about AI then we'll go to our second quote.

Kevin Kelly: Sure.

David Gardner: My son, Gabe, who's a very avid and I think interesting observer of technology. Somebody who went to Cal-Berkeley and programs and thinks a lot about not just video games, which we play a lot in our family, but what is it all doing to us and what does this all mean? It's certainly not an insight unique to him, but this is a conversation I was having with him the other day just about how so much of AI, the AIs are using human creation and curating that; the sharing, that is one of your inevitable technological forces we're sharing. Ironically perhaps and pessimistic, if you like, I don't because I'm an optimist too, but I tried to be real about these things. Arguably starting to discourage us as humans from thinking and sharing if we start relying so much and thinking, I don't even need to type into Wikipedia anymore because, hey, it's all just being done for me. The danger might be that the base of human creation that actually enables all of these AIs or many of them, could itself become disconnected, disaffected, or just less productive. Your thought?

Kevin Kelly: Yeah, I think it's an interesting concern. One of my missions is to help us make our decisions about technology based on evidence rather than just what we could imagine. As you said, yes, we can begin to imagine some of these things happen. My question would be, is it happening? Do we have any evidence that's where we're going? Do we have any evidence so far that because of generative AI and whatnot, people are making, say less art? Well, one of the things we saw about chess when chess came along and it was very clear that the AI chess could beat any human chess was actually chess has expanded because more humans playing chess than ever before. That's a counterfactual. That's saying, actually so far what we've seen. In generative AI there, by my own calculations, talking to the different AI generative companies, there's about 30 million images generated every day. Thirty million images that have never existed before and they will never be seen again. That's the weird thing about it is that these images, you can't find these again, you can't get to them. But here's the thing because I've been doing this for a year. This is a recent realization that I don't think I've talked about. The realization is that right now these AI image generators they cannot actually produce a lot of the art that humans are making and that's because they are being driven by language prompts. A lot of the art that's really great is beyond language. There's no language to describe them. You can't get there by putting in language. I've been trying to do that, I've been trying to make these art and it is like I don't have the language to get there. So far, the evidence is that I think the human artists will begin to dwell in the places that the AIs can't get to. This goes back to artificial aliens and we need them together.

Kevin Kelly: Together, me and the AI can get to a place that the AI can't get to by itself and I can't get to by myself. They are being trained on human-made content. The question is whether they'll be trained on the human and AI-made content. That's one fear and that's a legitimate concern. But I don't know if that's bad by itself, but the other question that your son asked or concern, are humans going to be making less, generating less, writing less, making less music if the AIs can make it? So far, I have not seen that happening. It's possible. If it is, we should reckon with that. But I can imagine it, but I haven't actually seen the evidence for that in my own life. I'm making the art that I can't get to with the AI. I think it's worth paying attention to this space. It's a concern we should have, but let's look at the evidence rather than just imagine what can happen.

David Gardner: I think he would be the first to agree. He's very much an optimist himself.

Kevin Kelly: Sure.

David Gardner: It's probably more speculative concern at this point. I do really appreciate your point. From The Inevitable we got briefly there to the if-able, because that's [laughs] really what you say can't enter art without things that can't be expressed as language.

Kevin Kelly: Right now, anyway. There are some AI generators, they're taking visual inputs. It may be that you could begin to work visually and get there. I'm just talking about what we have right now. There are other concerns about the AIs and the fact that they're based on human content for training. What I expect to see, by the way, is that they're trained on like Reddit. They're trained on the great works, but everything else. Basically, right now these AI personal interns make mediocre. They generate the average human response, which is biased, and racist, and sexist, and all kinds of other things, because it's the average human. Here's the thing is that we are not going to accept that. We're not going to accept it. We're going to say, no, we demand that our AIs be better than us. Not as racist, not as sexist, not as mean, whatever is as we are. We want them to be better than us, but the problem is, we don't know what that looks like. We don't have no agreement on it. We have no consensus on what that means. Is it wokeism? Is it post-woke? Well, what does that even look like? How do we have the consensus about it? I actually don't think we're going to have a consensus. I think we're going to make a bunch of different AIs that are curated in different training. It's like educating your kids. Like this will say, no, only read the great works of literature, this other one is, no, read everything so you know how the reality is. I want to expose my AI to everything about the human thing, and then we'll make values based on that. The other one's, no, you can only read these things here, only read the best, only read the optimistic elevated ones. I think we're going to have a choice about which one you want to ask a question to. That's good. Let's have multiple versions.

David Gardner: I saw you asking that on social media. What are the books, if any, that you do not think we should be feeding into an AI? Should we feed an AI Mein Kampf, yes or no? The answer is  yes and no, because your point, Kevin, is that we're going to have a lot of different AIs. Somebody might want to just interact with this one versus that one. I'm sure some could be self-destructive or just dumb. Others could be absolutely amazing or so amazing we can't even understand what's happening, but if we could, we'd be so much brighter and better off perhaps. Well, listen, you've been so generous with your time. I did want to go deep on AI. I do before going to my last two, which I'm almost going to combine, because I just want to credit you with at least one great call on this book. There are many, but one that is very small and personal, but I like. I'm going to do that in a sec. But before I do, the phrase social media has come in for a lot of criticism. Jonathan Haidt and others saying this is a real problem. I'm just curious. Again, I'm talking to a rational optimist in Kevin Kelly and I identify similarly. We'll just say 60 seconds or less right now. What's your take these days on the healthfulness or lack thereof of social media use?

Kevin Kelly: I think it's still too early to tell. I don't fully trust the research done so far. I think it's biased to the US. Primarily, that's the only place they can find data. I think US has some weird things that don't represent the entire world. I think it's like health. It's really dangerous to rely on making policy based on one medical or two, or even 10 studies on the subject. You need hundreds. You need hundreds to really figure out what's going on, because complexity of the medical and biological world. I think we're at the same level of complexity that even one, two or five studies is insufficient to tell us what's really going on. I know from my own experiments in trying to say go through social media like the YouTube recommendations is I don't get radicalized. It finds that, goes in the other directions for me. It becomes more and more bland. I think there's still a lot more research to do. I really promote this idea of evidenced-based policy rather than just imagining what could go wrong. The same thing about unemployment. It's like, it's always a third person. Well, I don't believe my job is at risk, but my friend of a friend, they could lose their job. There's no evidence there. There's no evidence that really anybody has lost her job to AI so far. Social media, I know this is more than 60 seconds, but I think it's too early to tell.

David Gardner: I really appreciate that. Steven Pinker, one of the great moments in his book, Enlightenment Now, was speaking to how when you ask the average American, I realize this is just America, and I take your point that Americans can be weird and not necessarily representative globally. But if you take the average American today and ask them, are you happy? About 77 percent of us, at least in recent years have said, yeah, I'm happy. Then you ask, are Americans happy? Are your fellow Americans happy? The answer is, no, they're not happy. In fact, only something like 32 percent of us think our fellow Americans are happy, but we say 77 percent strong, I'm happy. This is a great argument for evidence-based approaches. Well, my last two quotes from The Inevitable, I'm going to read them back-to-back. The first one said this, "Today we can highlight a passage. Tomorrow, we will be able to link pages. We can add a link from a phrase in the book we're reading to a contrasting phrase in another book we've read from a word in a passage to an obscure dictionary from a scene in a book to a similar scene in a movie." That's one I want to talk about in a sec. The other one totally different topic, also interesting, we won't have time for it this time, but, "But there is one way in which "socialism" itself is the wrong word for what is happening. It is not an ideology, not an "ism", it demands no rigid creed. Rather, it's a spectrum of attitudes, techniques, and tools that promote collaboration, sharing, aggregation, coordination, adhocracy, and a host of other newly enabled types of social cooperation." Just in the interest of time, I smashed those two together. They're different topics, but I wanted to know with the first one to say, you called it, at least you did for me because I have really enjoyed using Readwise over the last year. This is a brilliant app where you upload all your highlights from all your e-books that you've read and it starts flashing them back to you in a very helpful way. I did highlight passages. That's all I thought I could do for 10 or 15 years with e-books. But now, you said tomorrow in 2016, now, I'm regularly linking one passage in one book to another. Haven't quite got there yet, of course, for scenes in movies, although I realize I'm sure it's already happening because the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed, but I want to say I think you called it, Kevin, and do you use Readwise or anything like that?

Kevin Kelly: I do. I use Readwise and it is amazing and it is exactly the thing I was trying to suggest by the passage. To go back to the video part of it, actually, we need to go to AI, because this is, I think, the real frontier. These image generators that we talk about making a little painting or photograph artificially. We're at peak 2D. It doesn't really matter if they can make them artificially. The real frontier is being able to, one, generate video in 3D worlds, like a game world, which is beyond the capacity of a single individual. You or I as single individuals could sit down and we could write a novel, A Full World, and it could be a best seller and it could change people's lives and it would be an amazing story. But you or I alone cannot make a feature length movie with a churn technology today. But with the AIs, we could. We could actually direct them, these interns and artists and stuff, and to make all the details, to fill up the room, to do the whole thing, to make the virtual characters. In the far future, somebody in their bedroom will be able to make an hour-long video, movie that comes completely from their mind, like a novel would be. But that's not really related to the passage you're relating to. There's another thing that's happening with AI and video, and that has to do with like YouTube. Right now, if you were to Google Search for something and you wanted to search into YouTube, the most you could do is maybe search the title of something.

Kevin Kelly: But you can't search any further then. You can't go into the actual content of a scene or whatever it is, like the way you can go into a book. Google Search, you can actually search inside the book to a sentence in the book, but you maybe go into the transcript, but you can't go into the scene because it doesn't know it. But right now the AIs are at the point where they're going to Google will then set the AIs upon their YouTube universe and digest, semantically understand every scene. To the chat, you could say, give me every video scene where there's magician pulling rabbit out of a hat with a spotlight, in the black behind them and a beautiful assistant next to it, whatever it is. Then it'll go through all the videos in the world and give you, and you could then link to that because it would semantically understand the videos in a way that isn't possible right now and you can begin to use it in the same way of understanding and linking into that universe, which is the expanding universe. That's where all the content is expanding and people who are making it, it's not writing Wikipedia articles, is making YouTube, postings in TikTok. That's the real frontier where all these new goods and services are going to be made. If they're entrepreneurs listening, this is the frontier that's going to happen is when you have access in a searchable access and you can manipulate them, and unbundle them and repackage and remix them. This content, which is in video form and right now is hidden from us in a certain sense because we can't search it. When that becomes searchable, accessible, and manipulable, that's a huge thing, that's going to be coming next.

David Gardner: When I say this phrase, what do you think, Web3? 

Kevin Kelly: That's Web3. Web3 is I think what I call the mirror world. I know the Web3 technically means like decentralized version of crypto. I think it means a spatial web. The web that has three-dimensions, maybe four dimensions with time. That's what I mean by Web3.

David Gardner: Then the last topic, briefly, socialism. This is a phrase for a lot of us in America, especially those who like to invest and like to think that I as an entrepreneur can create something that I didn't have to run through the government. I didn't need to be owned by the government. I actually had the freedom of the pursuit of happiness and a lot of us associate that with capitalism, I traditionally have, I love conscious capitalism. Any listener of this podcast knows that I'm on the National Board, etc., these things. Socialism has never sounded like a good word to me until I read The Inevitable, Kevin, where you talk some about how it's not always such an "ism" and it takes different forms and in a lot of ways that represents collective collaboration. Boy, if the worldwide web isn't a demonstration of that over the last 30 years or so and going forward. I'm curious if you want to update your thoughts on socialism.

Kevin Kelly: I'm not too wedded to the term, I was just saying in the English language is probably the correct word to use. Although I understand fully why it's been shanghaied or corrupted by its association with the politics. But it actually is technically the correct word we should be using for what's going on. But maybe we want to rebrand, maybe it's like a social capitalism or socialistic capitalist, or maybe it's conscious socialism, I don't know [laughs]. But there may be other words that could used, but the point is that in a certain sense, there is a huge socialistic aspect of capitalism. It's a cooperative enterprise, even though there's self-interest going is cooperative in that sense. When I see the general drift of technology in our civilization headed toward, is more collaboration at a higher scale. The exciting part, is that we are moving from doing things with groups of eight to 10 to a hundred to a thousand, and maybe even moving to doing things with a million people and whatever you want to call that, those tools that are needed, those co-operations, those institutions that are required to take a million people and have them work on a problem over time, we'll give a name for it. Socialism is a technically a good term, but it's probably not going to be used. But the more important thing is to understand that this is a social thing, and that it's high order social interaction and that it is the group that is benefiting as well as individuals and that's been my refrain about the Internet. That was wonderful about the Internet is one of the few technologies that rewarded, enhanced both the individual power and the power of the group at the same time.

David Gardner: Well said, and it's fun to hear your updated thoughts. Indeed, I could easily go another hour and a half. [laughs] I wouldn't want to do that to you, though. Our listeners, I know wish this could keep going, but this shall end for now. Kevin Kelly, thank you very much for your life's work because it's so giving, it's so sharing. You have demonstrated an ability to look ahead around the corner in way that few humans that I know have but you've always shared that. You're also optimistic about what you see. You pointed out as you did earlier in this interview, that that's a choice and usually, most studies around health and happiness suggests that's the right choice to make, not just for our own constitution, but of course for those around us, our families, friends, and the world at large, you are a living exemplar of that and you are now a two-time guest of Rule Breaker Investing podcasts. I know it's not going to end here. Going to have to touch base with you much more often than every five years or so, Kevin, if you'll consent to come back, I know you're busy this week with the book tour. Congratulations on Excellent Advice for Living. It has my five Foolcap stamp of approval, and thank you so much for being with us.

Kevin Kelly: It's really a pleasure, David. I'm so honored to be included in you and your generous spirit. I really appreciate your generosity in sharing your own platform and in dispensing your own wisdom in a very subtle way, I appreciate that as well. More power to you guys doing what you're doing in the world and I'm really delighted to be part of it. Thank you for asking me to join.

David Gardner: Thank you, Fool on.