hello everyone and welcome back to conversations with Tyler today I'm chatting with Kevin Kelly in the best of all possible ways Kevin is extremely difficult to describe or introduce I pulled a little bit from Wikipedia it says Kevin Kelly is the founding executive editor of Wired Magazine a former editor publisher of the whole earth review he's also been a writer photographer conservationist and student
of Asian and digital culture yet it still feels that barely scratches the surface most recently Kevin has a new book out which I recommend excellent advice for living wisdom I wish I'd known earlier Kevin welcome it's real pleasure to be here thank you for having me I'm really looking forward to this let's start with some questions about your new book which is the piece of advice you were afraid to give and did not give
I'm afraid to give very much um marriage counseling kind of um things the way to run your marriage I gave one piece about every now and then rotate in letting your partner be always right a piece of advice that I would be hesitant to talk about is um like here's one I think um if you should have as many kids as you possibly can that's the piece of advice I did not include in the book
if advice is of positive expected value why be afraid to give marital advice because um I don't have enough experience in in standing up to it so so I only put pieces of advice that I felt I could really stand by and there were times when I doubted my own um my own certainty about it what do you feel has been the worst piece of advice you ever gave uh let's see um something that I changed my mind about maybe um I think uh
I might even I think I would advise someone when I was at wired to um to to to to accept to do some things that they were not inclined to do and I said you kind of kind of you know do one for the team kind of a thing and I felt in retrospect that that was maybe dishonest and sense that I would not have done that myself and so I was sort of advising something to do something that I would not have done maybe it was
good for them but I wasn't certain about that so I would say that was a bad piece of advice here's a piece of advice tell me if it's good or bad quote minimize deathbed regret I think that's good advice why is it good won't it lead you to do too many things just so you don't regret having missed out but in fact a lot of it just amounts to nothing um not necessarily um I I think minimizing your regrets is is
um a good thing and most most regrets people have are from things that they not from things that they did but from things that they didn't do and so I I I'm trying to think of somebody who who really regretted having done too much in their lives um I think I've I've not met anybody who's ever told me that I've met people who told me that they were good at not doing things so I think minimizing regret's still a good idea why is the ex
post perspective better than the exante if so many people at the end feel they haven't done enough at the time they probably had pretty good reasons not to do it right if it's such a common phenomenon and at the end of your life it seems like it would have been easy to have done it because you're no longer faced with all the costs yeah I I think I think that would be true but I think most people wind up not
doing very much not because they had good reasons to but because um it was easier or or or that it was inconvenient at the time and I think sometimes the best things that we do are not necessarily convenient so I I think um if there was legitimate reason for not getting things done then then people probably wouldn't have agreed about it I think the reason they do have regrets is that they understood that their reasons
for not doing it were really not really valid if someone asks you for advice on how do I get better at following advice what do you tell them um advice so I think a good way to use advice is to try to use it as a reminder most of the advice here's here's a piece of advice is that everything um everything good has already been said but we just need to say it again people weren't listening so a lot of advice is
really kind of reminders of things that we kind of already know and so I think a good way to to pay attention to advice is to encapsulate in some way that you can remember and to remind yourself so there really should be called maybe reminders what should institutions do to in essence subsidize advice or encourage it oh that's a good question I think um is there anything institutions can do well institutions like an educational
institution I think um it would it would help them in terms of Education to um work on life skills and um learning how to to you know cultivate good habits versus bad habits um uh trying to um guide people with with heuristics that when they confront things that are unclear that they have a kind of a general heuristic to help them get through it that's kind of advice so I think the educational system could
incorporate the idea of advice into its curriculum as a way of helping young people develop these these principles in their own lives that they could be reminded of how many people asking for advice actually want advice and to the extent they don't what is it they're looking for people write me for advice every day and at least half the time I feel maybe they want the feeling of having asked me
rather than the advice now I'm happy to supply them with that feeling but maybe it's just it's process they're maximizing I think you're right I think that um sometimes people are looking for confirmation about things that they've already decided sometimes they're actually looking for justification for something they've already decided um and I think sometimes they are actually looking for attention but I I
think there's a sense of maybe um confirmation there um I'm not sure how much people are actually looking for information from from this the kind of advice that I get from people um writing are usually young people who are trying to decide about you know where to go where to study and they're kind of wanting to hear from an adult some sense of whether something is valuable or not and they don't know and
so that kind of advice I'm very reluctant to give and I must never answer because I don't feel I know that person well enough I can give them a platitude like my book is filled with saying here's my piece of advice for a young person who is studying out and I would say my piece of advice to them somebody I don't know is try to work on an area where there's no words for what it is that you do and I would say that's my advice
you said that to Noah Smith in that interview but if I'm a young person and then I say well how do I operationalize that what do I do in the morning do I put that on my LinkedIn profile how do they make that concrete yeah so so so so basically it's sort of what you're not doing it's like um um and and it's not going to be instant but but it's a journey and that's a really important thing is that the
general drift of of one's life is is going to be a direction rather than a destination and I think um you you say well like accounting account things that I know about are things that are um probably not where I should be headed even though I may start there that's not where I really want to go and and I make another piece of advice which is it doesn't really matter where you really begin because that's not where you're
going to end up so so the idea is well I might study accounting but I intend not to to to dwell there for very long because I want to head out into the frontier where there's something so I would say it's a ongoing process where you're asking yourself um is this someone else's idea of success what's buried in me that I can do that may be a little bit different than others now when you were in your 20s you hitchhiked to work I understand
do you advise the same to your grandkids or forthcoming grandkids um I it was all I could do to get them to ride a bicycle to work so so um my I actually accompanied my son a couple times it was a pretty long haul I have to say that but um I um really was urging them to be independent in that sense of even getting to work and um uh I thought a bicycle was more appropriate for where they had to go I'm
not sure that they could have hitchhiked to work these days but I I the idea of trying to be as independent as possible when you were young now my favorite creation of yours probably is this three volume set it's called Vanishing Asia if I understand correctly it was a 50-year project based around roughly 200 000 photos it's three volumes it's one of the greatest picture books ever produced possibly the greatest and
that in turn makes it one of the greatest books ever produced so just a few simple questions about that two hundred thousand photos where in Asia do people most like being photographed and where do they like it the least and why um so first of all the kind of photography I do is is sometimes called street photography it's um it's candid um there are some portraits but most of the time people are often not even aware
that I'm photographing them um other times when I kind of ask permission although I would often shoot first and ask questions later um and I would say um places uh actually in some ways China was very easy to photograph people without much resistance or hesitation they were they seem to be potential even if they weren't that familiar with cameras um I think there's something about the sense of privacy being expanded uh in a
larger range there or their sense of privacy being smaller in that sense I think the hardest place to photograph people certainly were in some of the Islamic countries um where women were off limits basically for most of Photography um and even where um um men were were were shy or there was some kind of a civil unrest and so there was suspicion there and I'm thinking of like Eastern Turkey
um and some other places in Northern Pakistan at one point where there was a suspicion of anybody with a camera 2023 where's the best place to see Vanishing Asia now um so my book kind of Records the places in the world that um there's still remnants of traditional culture where people are are wearing the the ideal place they're still wearing costumes because that's the first to go you know adopting machine made western
dress which is the cheapest kind of clothing you can buy is the first kind of traditional indigenous culture to to disappear and so where are they still wearing native costumes in that way um one is in Miramar where there's a lot of very traditional cultures the one that least developed and kind of isolated up in the mountains so that's one place you could go to see kind of Vanishing Asia um
and even places in Afghanistan despite the troubles in the wars it is so poor that there are still areas that have not been developed and there's still a lot of very traditional culture and costume there and of course I don't recommend going there but it's possible and why are costumes the first thing to vanish you know because here's what it is the amount of effort required to make clothing by hand is so enormous
I mean the traditional way you make clothing is you make fibers you know from wool you you spin the threads then they have to make into a loom it is an enormous amount of energy to make clothing by hand and so it's much cheaper to to to buy cloth that's one of the first things that people do when they have the ability to have money is that they buy clothing rather than make it themselves and if they're not making
um if you're not taking the homemade cloth and making it to the your native costume um and you're buying a shirt it's just it's just easier to put on a shirt t-shirt cotton t-shirt which you can almost get for free um and so it just it the the costumes just disappear because they're not making the entire cloth and fabric by hand and other than a camera what is it that you need to pack and what can you do without that would
surprise us yes um I take very very very little um the in addition to a change of clothes which is that's basically all I have some soap powder I'd have my camera equipment I these days I carry a little portable Pharmacy a medical kit because that's often in short supply and it's not even just for me it's for those around me things basic things like you know ibuprofen aspirin those kinds of stuff
antibiotics so so um things that might need an emergency so the medical kit is one thing um other I I had a few little duct tape tools that are essential to keeping things going um some super glue and uh you know these days once photography turned digital a lot of what I carry is power packs extension cords you know backup drives and that kind of stuff beyond that oh yes there is one thing I'm sorry one
vital thing that I carry with me everywhere even today and that is mosquito netting I have a little portable mosquito netting in my luggage at all time because I'm very allergic to mosquitoes it's not even necessarily the disease aspect but I I'm allergic to them I wake up if I'm bit so I put up my mosquito netting and carry it with me everywhere and even when people say there's no mosquitoes here they're wrong
I'll still put it up what do you do for books I have um a Kindle and that's mostly what I use for books when I'm traveling before that time I usually had a paperback um and um I often believe it or not read books on my phone do you ever feel that if you don't photograph a place you haven't really been there does it hold a different status like you haven't organized the information it's just out on Pluto somewhere
yes I did I when I was younger I had a religious conversion and I decided to ride my bicycle across the U.S and part of that problem part of the thing was I was on my way to die and I decided to leave my camera behind for for This Magnificent journey of a bicycle across in the US and it was the most difficult thing I ever did because I was just imagining all the Magnificent pictures that I could take that I weren't that I
wasn't going to take I I took a Sketchbook instead and that kind of a piece some of my desire to capture things visually but you're absolutely right it was in kind of a little bit of an addiction where the framing of a photograph was how I solved the world still images and I was basically in my head clicking I was clicking the shutter at the right moments when something would happen um and that I think
was not necessarily healthy to be so dependent on that framing to to to enjoy the world and and I've learned to wean myself off from that necessity to to so now I can travel with just a phone um for the you know the Selfies that you might want to take but maybe the earlier habit was better but I sometimes think your fundamental contribution if I try to tie together all the different things you've done including your very long
list of reviews of documentaries your work for the all-species foundation uh wired your writings on Tech your blogging basically every day for 20 years is your true Innovation some new way of organizing information and you're just applying it to all these different areas Vanishing Asia right two hundred thousand photos of ideas in a very visual way and that was the the fun of wire it is it was it
was actually experimenting with what could you do with cheap color printing um and uh the web moving on to digital and the web and things like that is an extension of that kind of a packaging of ideas I I I'm reluctant to assign any kind of large General thesis to all the things I'm interested in because um I think it's just a pure reflection of my own idiosyncratic interests in the world and I'm not sure that there's a bigger thing
connecting them all together but it's the bigger thing some insight about how packaging helps you frame the content and you're trying to teach people that in a lot of different ways it might be um and maybe I'm not self-aware enough to to just to see that but um I I for me there is a joy in in that marriage of text and images and these days moving images you know I I do one bit of art a
day for for the past year I was making it myself this year I'm using co-generating with AI posting one New Image a day and there is for me um a a supreme joy in in packaging ideas my own or other people in an Artful way to you know I'm I'm a book lover I'm a magazine lover I'm I'm a website lover so um so maybe they do maybe that is the the fundamental impetus is um presenting things that are conceptual in a visual
way are you happier when you travel or do you travel for other reasons um I'm very happy when I've traveled I'm very content um I think I was a little frantic people didn't like to travel with me often because I really literally was working from morning to night I wasn't relaxing hanging around the pool and even when I was visiting things I was on the hunt for these images I have since learned to
take a different mode but I am very very happy because I I like to kind of travel that's not for relaxation and not so much for Rejuvenation but for Learning and so I'm happiest when I am encountering things I've never seen before making me question and change my mind and try to understand things and that makes me supremely happy and content so I can just keep going and going and particularly in situations
where I'm learning the entire time we're very similar in this way but I sometimes think most people don't actually enjoy their so-called vacations more they don't enjoy it when they try travel they may do it for social bonding or they feel they're supposed to or they don't know what else to do with themselves but it's a funny thing to spend so much money on something that makes you less happy and that's what I observe yeah
that's true and and there are there are there is kind of travel where people are going to be rejuvenated and restored where they may have to relax or be pampered or in some ways enjoy a level of living that they don't normally get to but that's not I mean I can particulate but that's not the reason why I go out I head out to confront the other the otherness in the world and to have that kind of um come back with
a new sense of who I am a new sense of what's possible what's the biggest travel mistake you make repeatedly um try to trying to do too much I I I I've learned a little bit better but I but but I am very ambitious in in that and it's particularly if I'm with other people like my family um so I have to I repeatedly try to accomplish too much and I know and I've learned not to kind of travel around I'm
I'm I'm when I go somewhere I'm very content to kind of not travel within a country but to travel around where I am in that to kind of exploit that but still I I want to keep going I'm a little you know and so I I for the sake of others of my own sake I've tried to slow down a little bit um but I keep making mistake of trying to do too much it doesn't yet sound like a mistake to me I have to say it right well
um your armistics may not be the same um so uh yeah because there's a value here's what it is is it and that is something related to what I say is is that um there's a tendency to always one to keep moving but often what I'm looking for is right next to me and so um and so and so I can sometimes miss that ability to kind of go deeper because I'm still still traveling I'm still in that motion mode
I sometimes think my biggest mistake is going too many times to the same places because a city like London or New York you'll get a lot of good invitations right and it's hard to say no to them and you you love those cities but you could just head off to say Caribbean coast of Honduras or something rather than going there yeah I I I'm not making that mistake so so um that hasn't been a mistake but but yes I can see that um
if you're not making that mistake what's your algorithm for deciding where to travel next that's a great question um what one of them is is looking for these little pockets of the world where there is more otherness than others I I'm really interested in going places that are very different tempered with the ease of travel so there are places in the world that are very different that require kind of girding up you know Sudan Chad whatever
it is and um where it's not going to be necessarily an easy entry an easy time so I'm trying to balance the ease of getting somewhere with the surprise and value of being someone very very different and I'm looking for those kind of places where there's the right combination of those here's another systematic mistake I make when I imagine places like that in advance I think they're much more difficult than they
usually turn out to be yeah so I went to gonder Ethiopia at first I was thinking oh that's so nearly impossible will I even get there and in fact it was all super easy and relaxing yeah um so so so I think that is a mistake maybe that I make is um believing things were more difficult than they actually are if you actually get there I have a friend who keeps convincing me I should go back to Afghanistan and so it's
really it's really you know perfectly well I don't know I'm not really sure if I'm ready for that paper maps or GPS which is better um GPS is better um I I don't I have a drawer for fabulous maps that I don't even take with me anymore paper maps don't you like the feeling that you figured out where everything is when you use a paper map you don't get that from GPS yeah I I don't get it but I don't miss I
mean it's not it's not as important as actually knowing where I am and having a track of it what are the best books to read while you're traveling I tend to really read about the place I'm in as much as I can and it's really weird because I find that often I'm not really interested or willing to read about it unless I'm there but once I am there I have an insatiable appetite for finding out about the history whatever
was going on other people's view of it that kind of is not present when I'm not there so I tend almost exclusively to read about where I am I tend to read about where I'm going in advance a lot but once I'm there I read for offset so I'll pick some classic book that has nothing to do with the place where I'm at yeah um I have I haven't been able to do that that's not how my brain works for some reason
I also find after I've been to a place when I then process subsequent news stories about that place I just remember them much better so one reason I go places is to be able to read news about those places and have it make some kind of sense absolutely absolutely I mean it's like right now if and and I also feel that um I have a better image of its relationship with all the stuff around it which has a huge influence and so
that kind of cartographic intelligence um is really really Supreme so if you've been to some places and you kind of have an idea of how far away the other related places are that gives you an intuitive sense of of that news and um it's absolutely true that that is um a way and there's an interest too because I've been there and so I'm kind of curious about um you know it's like having met someone
you're now interested in you're vested into their story and if visiting a country deeply you're now vested into their story which is your favorite part of India one way to answer that is where have I returned to the most and that would be Roger Stone that was because it was the most colorful photogenic um in some ways intact uh of the places my second favorite is Kerala um for a similar reason those two areas
have I've returned to the most often because um there was photographically for me um this a little bit of a kind of the vanishing Asia of the intact Traditions culture the ceremonies uh the festivals the everyday dress um was Supreme and I'm sorry to say I'd probably go back again there before other places in India traveling with kids what's the secret I know you've done it many people are afraid what's your advice if I may put
it that way um the device is simply do it uh um for us it was there were far less issues or troubles than than we imagined I know one concern people have is about health and so um um that frankly you've never had any kind of disaster but I can see why that might be very stressful if if there were um I I don't I don't see the difficulty in it it was been very very easy to do it and we had our kids
in very very remote places I would say one thing that when they were younger they were often overwhelmed by the stuff like I took my young girls by myself to parts of Tibet when it was very very rough and tumble and they were a little intimidated by the huge Tibetans and the strangeness of it and I felt in some ways it was kind of a failure because they were they would rather play cards on the train than look out the window
and it's like you're missing this you're like this is this is the Himalayas whatever and so um but what what I found out was was they later on they didn't have enough to process what it was and it was later on that that trip those trips became more and more important to them as they were able to kind of digest and process it so even though no they did maybe didn't appreciate it at the time or seemed to
be paying attention they were actually reprocessing it later as they grew up and those trips became more important to them than they were at the time so I would say one thing one piece of advice is if your kids don't seem to appreciate it it doesn't matter they'll probably appreciate it later on and as you reprocess your own travel experiences are you more impressed or struck by the unity of mankind or the diversity
yeah that's a good question I had Epiphany recently about that and that was um at the at the at the you know Maslow's hierarchy of of needs which he never really made into a pyramid but we all imagine as a pyramid at the base of the kind of satisfying our need for shelter and clothing and basic uh water and food at that lower level the entire world is converging on uniform basic needs so so everybody in the world
wants to live in an airtight air-conditioned concrete box that has Wi-Fi and it's looking very similar but I believe that at the higher levels of actualization and what it all means I'm seeing a diversity in the world and so I think there's a commonality that we all share fundamentally um more than than ever at the at the at the base level of our genetic bodies and and basic human needs but that there's
weirdly A diversity of differences in kind of what it means to us and how we make value and the kinds of things that we find important or not and and so and so yes there's two things going on there's this huge commonality and then there was this difference that we find important I think travel has helped me to see just how much virtually all squabbles are Petty squabbles because you go to other places and you hear them talk about what
they're squabbling about like oh you know what kind of music should you play in the church ceremony and you think of it well that's the petty squabble and you're right but your own squabbles are not less Petty and that's the unity I Come Away thinking more about after a lot of trips yeah and I think for me the overwhelming lesson about those kinds of travel for me has been how um uh what's the word I want
um you know basically most people in the world are fairly racist sexist um suspicion suspicious of strangers and stuff and so relative to to the rest of the world the US is doing pretty good that's one of the things I come back is is that this is the the general thing that we're trying to move from was the norm for most of the world for most of history and so um the the the kind of elevated society that we want is is is
compared to the rest of the world a pretty good deal some tech questions what attacks should we be paying more attention to um Tech in general I I think um let me put this way there was a technology that I thought was 100 years off that I'm now convinced is much closer than I thought and that is the brain computer interface you know Elon musk's neural link and others there's a whole field of people
who are doing and having gone to visit to see their work I've been really shocked that they're much further along in being able to bypass our fingers in order to actually communicate via computer and I thought again that that was going to be way off but it looks like that could be within 25 years which was a shock to me so I I would say that's one place you might be looking for were things that could
happen in that kind of suddenly even though it's been going on for you know the research has been going on for decades and then and that would really kind of shake things up if if that was to happen and how would that change people's lives say your grandkids what what how will it matter for them so I think at first of course it's going to be mostly and that's what they're aiming at is is you know in in disabled
you know oh sure but for not non-disabled individuals right exactly right how will it matter I think what it matters is um a way of um auxiliary I don't think it's going to necessarily replace typing but I think it'll be um another way of interfacing with the the technology that we want to do so so one of the dreams that Jared Lanier and others have had with virtual reality is being able to create paint
things as fast as we could think of them so there could be a way in which we are generating content faster and more easily than the laborious way we have right now of having to put things into language into so there may be some way to kind of like post symbolically skip some of the language framing that we do to to make say an image so so this is something I've learned recently about making daily AI art which
is that theoretically these machines can make any possible image and they can back engine the real shock that we've had right now is we've now suddenly have the conversational user interface we now have an ability to use conversation as an interface to the AI capabilities but here's what happens is we're using a conversational interface to try to make art but there's a lot of art that humans create that can't be reduced to language you
can't get there by using language so there's art that I've been trying to make and I realize I'm never going to be able to make it with an AI because I need language to get there and there's lots of things that we can't get to with language and so that's one way in which this kind of human computer interface could could make a new Frontier is enabling us to do things where we can kind of bypass language and
and work with maybe emotions or other kind of intuitions or things that we don't even have in language for because we're actually tapping into the brain directly but do you ever find that say you need to write a piece to figure out what you think about something or maybe it's the act of painting that is giving you the idea of the image and there's no way to reverse engineer that absolutely I I write in order to think
that's how I think I think by writing I don't have the ideas and then sit down and try to write them I I use writing to get the ideas and I think painting certainly may be part of that or or or rendering and making visual but that's the point is that that may be something that we can do without having to go through language or our fingers to get there and so um for the grandchildren this ability
you know for maybe playing games or maybe creating things or maybe walking through this virtual mediverse space this may be an interface to it that's very different from the interfaces that we have right now how will recent developments in AI alter our understanding of God and religion oh yes yeah I think um the moment that one of our creative beings says I have a soul um they've said it already right I don't
believe them but they already say it if you ask right exactly right I have a soul you have to believe me and here's why I believe it and they want to be baptized so um I I I think that is um um really really important in fact I've been working on this project called a catechism for robots and it's sort of a it's half ingest but it's uh 80 serious about trying to have answers theological Cosmic answers
for the beings that we create when they want to know why we created them and um to what purpose and um so I think the role of AI first of all I think it's instrumental in in US deciding who we are and who we want to be and I think that will impact our ideas of of God in our understandings that because we are going to be Gods ourselves I mean that that's the major thing is that our Act of creating these
beings we will be Godlike and that's going to illuminate to us our Notions of what being god-like is like so Christianity in particular how will it change the idea of a demiurge will become more important you know I I I I I don't know how Christianity itself will will change I think that um you know the Christian Creed is that humans are made in the image of God and therefore since God is a Creator and made other beings like us that this
could reinforce the idea of um of demigods and that we are god-like we're fulfilling the the Commandment to be like God by creating other beings and so we might have to have you know um some what's the word I want guidance some principles about well here's how to be a good god based on biblical principles that's that's a possibility I think one of the things we see in the trends in Christianity is increasing
number of sects and divisions and schisms and so it's possible that there could be a sect derived around Ai and the ability of making and guiding and creating other beings what would be a technology that you refuse to use and why which well if there was the weaponization of of of of of Technologies is something that I um shy from so uh if there was you know uh I I personally am not going to use um
technologies that we're like a gun like a better gun oh sure in more ordinary life say I I won't use a microwave I feel it makes people lazy in their cooking oh let's see what's your analog I also won't you know kill someone with an atom bomb but may I can tell you something right now is I don't have social media on my phone but you use it but I use it I use it on my desktop but I don't use it on my phone
um so is there a technology that I would not use um so so okay I don't want to be the first to to use the brain computer interface I'm not going to be the first to be jacked in I might use it if many if my friends all used and they live I think um I'd be very hesitant to use certain kind of genetic a germline um uh alterations I I'm not sure I would say no but I would certainly be very very very hesitant about that I think we have to
be very cautious so there are things that I'm cautious about and I would say well uh let me see how this is the Amish this is the Amish take on how they don't let me see how other people are doing it and how it affects their lives before I decide to to do it and if there was generally positive results in their own lives and around them as Society then it might adopt it so um uh I can't think of something that I
absolutely would not do at all what's the most surprising fact you know about the Amish um they are adopting cell phones so let me let me let me you know uh carry out that the Amish decide to use technology by Parish by Parish so it's very decentralized way and there's many different varieties of many different sects and the more generally the most liberal ones are the more at the core of where Lancaster County and where the
Amish began the some of the most rigid and ones that are more are fashioned are actually further away like in Upstate New York or other places and so um um but generally they have um uh have decided kind of that the cell phones are appropriate technology and they are often are flip phones they're not even smartphones and that is appropriate for them because um they find that it keeps their families
together and what they're doing is they're spreading around the country buying up cheap farmland and they have a cell a certain number of families they need to have as a minimum and to keep in contact with their families further back away from where they have left they finding that the cell phones help strengthen their families so that's a surprising fact that most people don't know as you know non-amish birth rates are
both low and falling yeah so what is the mechanism that caps the percentage of Amish in say the American population or is it just asymptotically approach one my my one of the scenarios for the future of the U.S is that basically the Amish takeover all the farmland and um because right now the Amish are continually to spend their attrition rate is still very electrician meaning the number of kids that they have that
don't um go back don't stay with the church um it's still only a few percent um so Amish Always by land they've never sold land they're they're they're still expanding and it's possible to imagine them taking over the rural areas over time so I don't see any much of a cap right now in the current birth rates that they have given the birth rates of the rest of the US I think it's a very
viable scenario is that most of the rural farmlands is being run by the Amish and you don't think there's a scaling problem so if someone says oh America it could have 60 million Amish you think that's an equilibrium at least potentially or it is being Amish somehow Fray when the numbers are so large such a diverse group they have so much contact with the outside world yeah well there may be limits because they can
make the big cash crop for most Amish is actually Dairy and there's a limit on the amount of dairy that we're going to consume um but they're um they're really good at the kind of um small Holdings animal raising combined with raising the food for the animals so I would say maybe as long as they're actually consumption of meat and animal products um the Amish but there might be some limit to the amount that that
we as a society are consuming it perhaps if there was really good animal cell based meat prevalent and animal cell based milk prevalent baby then the Amish are kept how would Society most change if we simply could double or triple our amount of long-term thinking so I'm involved as this group called the lonel foundation where we're trying to promote long-term thinking I think the way it would change is that um
there would be a couple of um things one is I think we would we would collectively maybe mostly through government um have more long-term research involved and the benefits of that would be spilling over to everything so most science experiments today last as long as a PhD which is like four years and um there's very little really long-range research being done and then secondly um there's very little projects that may
take 25 years or more to do whether infrastructural or otherwise um and and more of those garnered by the number of people who understand that there may be that there's a benefit to having payoffs come not just for the current generation but future Generations would allow longer term maybe even bigger kind of projects to become more normal and conventional than they are right now and then thirdly I think I'm thinking in
terms of generations rather than just the immediate next quarter or next year I think that also would enable us to um manage the planet in in a better way because loss of the kind of planetary things that we're interested in and and paying attention to have a longer range Dynamic than just the immediate year or two the the short now we call it so so I think individually for for individuals I
think that that's not maybe necessarily going to change their own lives but I think it changes our lives at the civilizational level of all the people you have known who is it that has handled power the best [Laughter] people that I have known um I know Jerry Brown a little bit and I've been very I was very impressed with with him he was in the leadership in California and was doing well um I hear somebody I um
I know Jeff Bezos and I actually been very impressed with Jeff Bezos and the more I know him the more him the more I admire him and I think he's very fast to own up to mistakes and to take um responsibility um I think he is uh very aware and and sensible and I think in my own observation I think he's working very hard to um deal with the responsibility that great power comes from and so I would say Jeff Bezos
what film has most expanded your conception of what reality is um um most expanded my conception of reality boy I'm not sure that I've seen a film that's changed my idea about reality um there are actually after all they're just fictional I mean you know I I would say uh um you know seeing 2001 by Kubrick expanded my idea of what's possible and maybe that's maybe that's a an aspect of reality is believing what's possible so
I I found I found that that sort of that Vision was exhilarating at the time of and this is you know kind of pre-star Wars but I have to say Star Wars itself the idea of kind of the worn and old future that that shifted my idea and expanded my possibilities my idea of what was possible as well so so I think maybe the idea of a future that was worn and used and not just kind of streamlined I think
that that did shift my idea of of reality which is the most underrated documentary um um there was a there was a documentary called King of Kong which was about the champion um King Kong um video game and what was underrated about it and was fabulous about this movie was that there was a villain there's not that many documentaries that have villains and here was a villain and they were they were filming the villain
basically gave them access because to their his whole side of it and even though he was incredibly villainous and scheming and just underhanded he didn't think he was but it was very obvious to everybody else he was and so that made it really fabulous documentary because you've got a villain in there and you're seeing the villain the whole time so I think that's underrated I love that
movie by the way I also quite like Farina herzogs the German language version of little Dieter needs to fly do you know that I always feel the English version um why is the German version better just deeper more authentic and more morally ambiguous feels more here so again so that would be a favorite of mine what is something unusual that you measure about yourself so I I and my partner um Gary Wolf we began the Quantified
Self movement of this idea of using technology to measure ourselves to quantify Our Lives to do things and I was very much doing that in the beginning and I don't measure almost anything about myself these days and uh the reason why I shifted in that was it turned out to be very easy to generate the data the metrics the information the measurements but it became really really hard to make sense out of it to
to get meaning out of it and what if what it needed is what we're about to have which is the needed AIS to digest the huge ocean of data that was generating to really make sense of the patterns and things that that are not obvious that we can't see that aren't intuitive and so at the certain level there's a what I discovered like say counting my steps is actually counted it long enough and measured it
long enough that I can actually to moan within 100 steps tell you how many steps it took today because I was correlating all those measurements with with my own experience and so to go beyond that um it just it it just needs uh cheap ubiquitous AI to kind of monitor these this stream of data and to try and help extract out some meaning from that that has not yet happened and because it hasn't I haven't been measuring very
much at all about my life way back when why is it you dropped out of University of Rhode Island yes this is a 1970 one um had there been at that time a gap year or internships I would have done that and that's what I needed and I would have gone back I I suspect but there wasn't such a thing and it felt like grade 13 it was sitting in the same desks with the same routine and what I needed was to do a project I
I I needed to to just get out of my seat and do stuff and um there wasn't any option at that time to do that so I I dropped out and in retrospect I regret having even spent that one year there what was the job you took after dropping out my job was to go to Asia and to photograph and I didn't know what I was gonna do there what I was going to photograph but I wanted to be a photographer I actually actually called it up National
Geographic I was like you know a 19 year old whatever I caught up in the National Geographic and I said I'm going to go to Taiwan in Japan do you need any photographs I found I found a photo editor from the in the phone book and he graciously said you know it doesn't work that way but when you come back show me your photographs and we'll we'll we'll take it from there and he was good to his word and I did
so I was I was I I decided to to to photograph um and become a photographer that was what my my dream was I hesitate to use such a general phrase but the world of tech what was your first entry point into that yeah so I had a I had a kind of a hippie-ish attitude um you know and when I was dropping out I was very influenced by the whole earth catalog I believed when it said that you should kind of invent your own life and
that all these things were possible and so um I had a very armed length I owned nothing I was very suspicious of computers which my dad worked with and um uh not interested you know it's kind of the smallest beautiful take I was thorough was my hero in high school you know building your own house living in a little simple life that was my that was that I believe was my destination that changed when I came back and I
um from traveling I graduated I say I graduated from travel I had decided to to um to try to make a living somehow or other and I decided I did a mail order catalog of travel books I had I discovered all these really interesting books when I was traveling that were not available in the U.S there was this um guy named Rick Steves who was self-publishing a book about Europe Europe the back door and
there was um Tony and Maureen wheeler who had a little stapled book called Lonely Planet shoestring guy to the southeast Asia and I was importing them my little catalog and so um I got I worked in a I worked at the University of Georgia in the science lab and there was an apple 2E there that was used in the lab for data stuff and I got a modem for it and I started to send information from my the little catalog I was making
to a local newspaper to have a typeset but I discovered that there was this bulletin board World on the inner on the modem there was this online thing happening so I used the computer to telephone the modem into these bulletin boards where there was this conversations happening and for the first time I felt that there was this organic kind of Technology there was something very community
Amish barn raising like about it and that was my entry was was that was that was when I began to rethink about technology because for the first time it didn't seem like smoke stacks and Big congrum Rich industrial scale technology he was something that was very intimate and I started paying attention to that and I started to explore that as if it was a new country so I got a my first when the first
magazine articles ever wrote was exploring this online world as a new country and I was trying to do a Couture guide to it um I was taking the kind of my travel metaphor and it was called Network nation and so um that was the thing that kind of flipped my idea about technology and seeing a different face to it how has it affected your World Views having been born into Westfield New Jersey where I've been many times I mean the it
being the technology no anything you're from Westfield New Jersey how does that matter yeah well so so so I tried to convey to my kids how parochial Westfield New Jersey was during the 50s and 60s where I could kind of arrived at the graduating high school never having eaten Chinese food ever having picked up Chopsticks never being around um very people from other cultures um the the paucity in the local
bookstore of finding out information of how things worked it was incredibly parochial at that time and even the kind of Cuisine the stuff that we ate you know macaroni and cheese meatloaf it was unbelievably hard when I came back to Major the first time I decided I want to try to cook something Chinese I went to hunt for fresh ginger it took me I had to go basically travel into like Newark New Jersey like a big city to find an
Italian groceries to find fresh ginger which of course now is available everywhere so there was this sense of it of of the parochial little secular isolated sense of a suburb that um is most strong in my mind right now um and and so I feel as if um I knew nothing and there was very little contact with things that were different or other it was not Cosmopolitan in the least and um that's of course a change over time
but that was that's the journey that I've been on is leaving that behind I used to think of Westfield as the bigger town so imagine my upbringing where did you grow up well I was born in Kearney New Jersey right next to Newark but mostly grew up in Hillsdale which was a sleepy town of 20 000 people and the chess club we would go play Westfield they were like the big strong chess club from the big
place and we were afraid of them because they were from Westfield yes yeah well um yeah you know it's all relative right for me I thought this was a small town and and some of the small towned uh parochial sense of it was was for me and the reason why I left basically right after high school and and only recently went back after 50 years from my 50 year high school reunion and I went back and
the main thing I wanted to see was uh when I was 17 I planted an acorn in our backyard A Little Seedling from Acorn and I said I want I'm hoping that this tree would grow to be a huge tree in 50 years and I went back and the tree was there in the same yard and it was a magnificent huge oak tree and I just felt very proud that I was um being a good ancestor long-termism right exactly last two questions first what's the last
thing you've changed your mind about so um yeah the the the the the last thing and I have to say this kind of very very cautiously but I have been this been deciding that I think um I I think the Civil War was a mistake that we should have we the union should have left this the South to succeed if if the majority of people who were voting had voted for it and and that the um and that the you know the right of the Union to enforce that
Union I think was a mistake um and all the on the number of people's died the division they're caused and everything else was um uh wrong and that that it would have been better to have left the South to succeed and I think that's I mean that's the kind of recently came to that conclusion but wouldn't slavery just have gone on for a very long time I don't think so you think it would have ended for not
being profitable enough or right just slave owners would have given up all that wealth I think I think and for the same reason it ended all the other places in the in the world and I think so I I think maybe would not have ended as fast but I think it would have proven to to have not withstand industrialization I'll mention yearbook again before the final question excellent advice for living wisdom I wish I'd known earlier
last question now that your book is out or coming out what will you do next I'm working on a project called The 100 Year desirable future I think it's really important to try and visualize where it is that we want to go with all this technology because I think it's hard enough to get there deliberately and it's almost impossible to get there inadvertently and so I think having a a vision a destination of wherever it is
that we want to go is helpful and and that's actually it's difficult it's much easy to imagine how things don't work because that's more probable failure is is the norm and so seeing how high all this AI could work is really hard to see how is there a world in which we have ubiquitous AI ubiquitous genetic engineering constant surveillance where is that how is that a world that we want to live in I'm trying
to imagine what that is with a set of scenarios that would say here's a possible future of this high tech that could work and I call it the 100 Year desirable future or protopia Kevin Kelly a real pleasure thank you very much Tyler you always ask the very best questions I just love it each one of them made me really think hard which is a real Joy when you're doing these kind of interviews so thank you very much