Kevin Kelly Interview: Part 2 (Full Episode) | The Tim Ferriss Show (Podcast)

Tim Ferriss 0:00 Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to The Tim Ferriss Show. What you're about to hear is part two of a multi-part conversation with Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired magazine and all-around fascinating guy. If you didn't catch the first part, you might wanna do that before venturing in, but we cover a lot of topics, and it's a conversation. So if you don't mind your stories as more of a jigsaw puzzle, then by all means, keep on listening. So without further ado, please enjoy part two of The Tim Ferriss Show with Kevin Kelly. All show notes, links, et cetera, can be found at fourhourworkweek.com/podcast, and thank you for listening.

0:35 Optimal minimal. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would seem a perfect time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show.

0:57 Does religion play a large part in your life right now?

Kevin Kelly 1:02 In a certain sense, not in a kind of a ritualistic sense. I just wrote a book called What Technology Wants.

Tim Ferriss 1:07 Excellent book. I highly recommend it. This is, is, um-

Kevin Kelly 1:10 It was, it was a theory of, of technology, and I was trying to put technology in the context of the cosmos. So I think what religion gives me is permission to think about cosmic questions. I'm right in the middle of finishing a Kickstarter-funded graphic novel that's about angels and robots, and the intention there was to fictionalize the idea that robots would some day have souls, but these souls would be coming from angels, and so that there was this intersection of these two-

Tim Ferriss 1:42 Mm-hmm

Kevin Kelly 1:42 ... kind of possible worlds of conscious robots who were ensouled by angels. And, and the, and the reason why this was sort of interesting was that the idea was that, um, the angels that ensoul us have been trained. They had been given moral guidance, but if you don't give the spirit some kind of moral guidance, then they can, um, wreak havoc. And so it was this idea that when we make robots, we're also gonna have to train them to be ethical.

Tim Ferriss 2:10 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Kelly 2:10 Um, we, you just can't make a free being and not train it. So it was a way to rehearse and think about some of the consequences of technology today. So I think my religion gives me permission to ask those questions without embarrassment.

Tim Ferriss 2:27 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Kelly 2:27 To say, "Well, um, what is the general direction of the arc of evolution? What... Is it pointed somewhere? How does technology fit into the greater cosmos? What does it mean? What drives it? Why is there more of it? Is this a good thing?" And so I think having a kind of... I consider this kind of an other view. So I have a other view that I, I'm sympathetic to other worldviews. I don't necessarily have to believe all the other worldviews, but I get the idea that if you have an- another worldview, that can be very helpful in seeing other worldviews.

Tim Ferriss 3:09 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Kelly 3:10 So people have a worldview even though they don't know it, but I have a worldview, and I know that I have a worldview. [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 3:15 [laughs]

Kevin Kelly 3:16 I mean, really, everybody has a religious or a spiritual orientation. Even if they're atheists, they still have one, and so there are some assumptions that, that are at the basis of it, and I like to question assumptions, including my own assumptions.

Tim Ferriss 3:32 Mm-hmm. Two things. I can't resist asking, and we can spend as much or as little time on this as you'd like, but recently grappling with a lot of these issues that I've been grappling with, some of which are existential, some of which are related to death, limited time on the planet, I've become deeply fascinated by indigenous use of plant medicine.

Kevin Kelly 3:54 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 3:54 And I've had some very transformative experiences that are difficult to put into words because they make you sound like a complete crazy person. [laughs]

Kevin Kelly 4:04 [laughs] Otherness, yes.

Tim Ferriss 4:05 But-

Kevin Kelly 4:05 Otherness, yeah

Tim Ferriss 4:06 ... yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a somethingness that-

Kevin Kelly 4:09 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 4:10 ... is, uh, very difficult to communicate without sounding like you should be institutionalized. What do you think the role for people who aspire to do the greatest good in the world, what is the role of that type of direct experience? And is it possible to benefit from that type of, for lack of a better descriptor, spiritual experience without a religious framework around it?

Kevin Kelly 4:33 Yeah, yeah, no, it's, it's a really good question. So my little personal story there, of course, is I was basically, I was basically a hippie. I worked for the hippie catalog, you know, the Whole Earth Catalog, which was about hippies living in San Francisco. And, um, all my friends were drug-taking hippies, but I for some reason never did. I just had no appetite or inclination at all for ever taking any drugs or smoking pot or anything. And when I was 50 years old, I decided that I would like to take LSD sacramentally on my-

Tim Ferriss 5:05 Mm-hmm

Kevin Kelly 5:05 ... 50th birthday.

Tim Ferriss 5:07 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Kelly 5:07 And, and I did, and I arranged with, uh... I had a guide, and I had appropriate setting, and I had some acid that, like, came from a source that was extremely reliable.

Tim Ferriss 5:19 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Kelly 5:20 And it was a sacrament, and it was a very profound sacrament. And I think, yeah, you can use drugs recreationally and for enter- entertainment, and I think that can go somewhere, but I think there's another powerful use for it, which is kind of what you're talking about.

Tim Ferriss 5:34 Right.

Kevin Kelly 5:34 And which is to elevate one outside of yourself, to, uh, lose yourself, to be in contact with other things beyond your ego, and I think it can be done. And, and I think unfortunately, because of the illegal status that we've had for a long time, the rituals and the practice around that have not had a chance to be developed or communicated. Actually trying to find this information was extremely hard.

Tim Ferriss 5:59 Right.

Kevin Kelly 5:59 There was one book that I did find eventually from a guy who was doing LSD experiments while they were still legal-

Tim Ferriss 6:06 Mm-hmm

Kevin Kelly 6:07 And was able to accumulate enough wisdom about it that that would be the one place I would point people to. But I think that it is important that the context and expectations and the, the setting they call it, that that revolves around it, is very important. And I do believe that these can be extremely profound and powerful experiences for good. They can remain long after, and, you know, most people who understand this and don't abuse it understand that in fact, that experience was not in the pill, it was not in the chemical. It was a real experience. And so unfortunately, there's so much other stuff circulating around the use of these drugs and the misuse of them, that that kind of information is often very, very difficult to find. But I do think maybe we're seeing a moment now in the US where the second prohibition is being undone, and at least pot will become legal, and maybe we can return to revitalizing-

Tim Ferriss 7:13 Mm-hmm

Kevin Kelly 7:13 ... you know, the traditions and the necessary, uh, settings ar- around that, and expectation that, um, not just pot or LSD, but even other synthetic drugs-

Tim Ferriss 7:22 Mm-hmm

Kevin Kelly 7:23 ... can be extremely powerful in removing the, um, ordinary guards that we have. I mean, we have an ego for, on purpose. We have all these things to keep us, you know, sane in a day-to-day, um-

Tim Ferriss 7:37 Functional [laughs]

Kevin Kelly 7:37 ... functional, exactly.

Tim Ferriss 7:39 Standpoint, yeah.

Kevin Kelly 7:40 Right. And so if you remove it completely, you can become, um, dysfunctional. But if you remove it deliberately and with great care, you can be opened up. And I think it's that, you know, I think there's an expertise there. I think there's a lot of other things that, that, that, um, if we have the freedom and the wisdom to not abuse it, I think it can be extremely powerful.

Tim Ferriss 8:00 Do you recall the title of the book?

Kevin Kelly 8:03 Okay. So this is-

Tim Ferriss 8:04 Or how people might search for it?

Kevin Kelly 8:05 Yes. So this is, uh, one of the many resources that I recommend in my book, Cool Tools.

Tim Ferriss 8:12 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Kelly 8:12 And Cool Tools is a big catalog of possibilities. It has about 1,500 different items. A lot of them are kinda like hand tools, you know, pliers, and the great cordless drill. But it's much broader than that, and I include things like what if you wanted to have a psychedelic experience that was transformative, what do you do? And I would recommend this book or, I mean, and there's lots of other things in it. But the, I don't actually have the book [laughs] right in front of me. I should. I think it was called, um, I don't remember.

Tim Ferriss 8:43 [laughs] It's okay. I will, uh, I-

Kevin Kelly 8:45 But in the show notes, we will list it as the right one. And there's also a little tiny book that came from England. It was a cartoon guide that gave kind of a street, an unjudgmental view of all the different s- uh, drugs there were, and what each one kinda did and didn't, and what the plus and minuses are without, you know, recommending or forbidding them.

Tim Ferriss 9:06 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Kelly 9:06 It was just saying this, this is what it is. That information also, believe it or not, is really in short supply. It's like, you know, what do you do with this? And how does it work? And, and tell me the facts. I don't need to hear a lecture either way, like whether this is great or this is terrible, but just tell me what, what's going on.

Tim Ferriss 9:22 Right.

Kevin Kelly 9:22 As, as you know, I mean, that kind of information sometimes is extremely in short supply.

Tim Ferriss 9:26 It's very difficult to find information that isn't politicized-

Kevin Kelly 9:29 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 9:29 ... inaccurate, or like you said, so shrouded in either fear or irrational optimism that it's-

Kevin Kelly 9:38 Mm

Tim Ferriss 9:38 ... almost intelligible and certainly generally useless. We'll put, uh, those books in the show notes for people. I wanna come back to one thing you said far, far earlier, and that was related to the pieces that you tried to give away-

Kevin Kelly 9:51 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 9:51 ... that eventually wouldn't die and came back. Were there any common threads, any patterns in those pieces that, that you can pick out as being sort of a, a uniquely Kevin Kelly theme, if for lack of a better term?

Kevin Kelly 10:07 Yeah, yeah, yeah. One of the things that I discovered in my six months of trying to live as if I was going to die in six months, because as I was coming closer to that date, which happened to be Halloween, October 31st, it was, I kept cutting off my future. I mean, I may be like you. I, I kind of tend to live in the future much more than the past.

Tim Ferriss 10:27 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Kelly 10:27 I'm always imagining, "I'm saving this for someday when I'm gonna do this. I'm, I'm kinda looking forward. I'm gonna do this here." And so I was very much in the future, and then suddenly that future was being cut down day by day. And I was like-

Tim Ferriss 10:39 Mm-hmm

Kevin Kelly 10:39 ... and I was thinking like, "Why am I taking pictures? Uh, I'm not gonna end up taking any photographs because, [laughs] you know, I'm not gonna be here in another two months or something." So, so there was all these things that I'm kind of cutting out. And as I was cutting them out, I had this realization, which was the thing I took away from this thing, which was that I was becoming less human.

Tim Ferriss 10:59 Hmm.

Kevin Kelly 10:59 That to be fully human, we have to have a future.

Tim Ferriss 11:02 Hmm.

Kevin Kelly 11:02 We have to look forward to the future. That is part of us, is looking into the future. And so after I came out of the... And I kind of embraced that, and saying, "Well, you know, that future forward facing, that's what I do. That's what, that's what I wanna do, and that's what I write about." And in thinking about the future, one of the things that is very hard, because the paradox about the future is that, um, there are lots of impossible things that happen all the time.

Tim Ferriss 11:30 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Kelly 11:30 And if someone from the [laughs] 100 years from now were to come back and tell us things, there's a lot of stuff we're just not gonna believe. It's just like, that's just, that's crazy. Just like if we went back 100 years and told them what was going on now, they would say, you know, "That's just not gonna happen."

Tim Ferriss 11:43 [laughs]

Kevin Kelly 11:44 I mean, we could even go back 20 years. I could go back 20 years and say, "We're gonna have like, you know, Google Street Views of all the cities of the world, and we're gonna have, you know, an encyclopedia that's for free that's edited by anybody." You know, it's like they would say, you know, "There's no way." And I'd say, "Oh, it's all..." And I would tell them, you know, "Most of it's for free."

Tim Ferriss 12:02 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Kelly 12:02 And they were saying, "There is no economic model in the world-

Tim Ferriss 12:05 [laughs]

Kevin Kelly 12:05 ... that would allow for that." And there isn't.

Tim Ferriss 12:07 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Kelly 12:08 But here it is. So the dilemma is, is that any true forecast about the future is going to be dismissed.

Tim Ferriss 12:15 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Kelly 12:15 Any future that is believable now is going to be wrong.

Tim Ferriss 12:18 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Kelly 12:19 [laughs] And so you're stuck in this thing-

Tim Ferriss 12:21 [laughs]

Kevin Kelly 12:22 ... of, like, if people believe it, it's wrong. If they don't believe it, you know, where does it get you? You're dismissed. And so there is this very fine line-

Tim Ferriss 12:30 [laughs]

Kevin Kelly 12:30 ... between saying something that is right on the edge of plausibility and at the same time right on the edge of having a chance of being true. And what I discovered that was helpful in trying to get away from the kind of assumptions that bind us to just kind of extrapolate-

Tim Ferriss 12:50 Mm-hmm

Kevin Kelly 12:51 ... was to think laterally, was to go sideways. One thing, just take whatever it was that everybody knew and say, "Well, what if that wasn't true?"

Tim Ferriss 13:00 Mm-hmm. What would be an, a good example of that, or an example?

Kevin Kelly 13:03 Like, like everyone says, "Okay, Moore's Law will continue."

Tim Ferriss 13:05 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Kelly 13:06 Well, what if Moore's Law didn't continue? What would that mean? What would happen?

Tim Ferriss 13:09 And you can ... Maybe, uh, I could say for the audience, but I'll just [laughs] even to remind me, Moore's Law is ... What is it? Every 18 months-

Kevin Kelly 13:17 Yes

Tim Ferriss 13:17 ... the, the size and cost of technology will decrease by 50%, something along those lines.

Kevin Kelly 13:23 Well, let's say even more simply-

Tim Ferriss 13:24 Or no, there's speed involved as well.

Kevin Kelly 13:26 Right. Moore's Law does say that, but, but let's say something. Right now we live in a world where every year the technology is better and cheaper. What if that wasn't true?

Tim Ferriss 13:34 Right. Got it.

Kevin Kelly 13:35 What if every year, uh, starting, like, you know, a couple years from now, stuff was better but more expensive? That's a, that's a completely different world.

Tim Ferriss 13:43 Right.

Kevin Kelly 13:43 I mean, everyone assumes-

Tim Ferriss 13:45 Right

Kevin Kelly 13:45 ... that things are gonna get better and cheaper.

Tim Ferriss 13:47 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Kelly 13:47 Well, what if that wasn't true?

Tim Ferriss 13:49 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Kelly 13:49 So you can take a kind of assumption, again, that's something that no one's really examining. Like, uh, well, one of the things I write about is the fact that we're going to have a population implosion-

Tim Ferriss 13:59 Mm-hmm

Kevin Kelly 14:00 ... globally, that the global population will drastically reduce. In 100 years from now we'll have less population, far, far, far less than we have right now. And so-

Tim Ferriss 14:10 All right, I have to bite at that. What ... Because I've thought a lot about this and the, uh, what do they call it? The Mal- Malthusian-

Kevin Kelly 14:17 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 14:17 ... dilemmas. Is that going to be, do you think, pandemic related, nuclear weapon related, all of the above?

Kevin Kelly 14:23 None of those.

Tim Ferriss 14:24 None of those?

Kevin Kelly 14:25 No.

Tim Ferriss 14:25 AI coming in the-

Kevin Kelly 14:26 No

Tim Ferriss 14:26 ... the, the-

Kevin Kelly 14:27 No. No

Tim Ferriss 14:27 ... the rise of the machines. No.

Kevin Kelly 14:28 Nope.

Tim Ferriss 14:28 Okay.

Kevin Kelly 14:29 It's just pure demographics. So if you look at the current trends in fertility rates in all the developed countries, everywhere except for the US-

Tim Ferriss 14:39 Mm-hmm

Kevin Kelly 14:39 ... they're already either below replacement level.

Tim Ferriss 14:42 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Kelly 14:43 So replacement level means that you're just sustaining the, the-

Tim Ferriss 14:47 Population size

Kevin Kelly 14:47 ... population just replaces itself.

Tim Ferriss 14:49 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Kelly 14:49 If it's below, it means that there's getting, there's getting less and less.

Tim Ferriss 14:53 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Kelly 14:53 So Japan, all these, you know, Europe, they're all below replacement. The US is an exception because of, only because of immigration.

Tim Ferriss 15:01 Mm-hmm. Ah, got it.

Kevin Kelly 15:03 More people coming in. Otherwise we would be there and this would not be any news to anybody. But the real news, if people would point to the developing world, but, you know, Mexico is now aging faster than the US. China is aging faster because of their one-child policy. Of course, Japan is just completely ... They're way underwater completely.

Tim Ferriss 15:19 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Kelly 15:20 So even the one exception is sub-Sahara Africa, and there's really a kind of debate right now about how fast or whether they're slowing down. But generally around the world, South America, the rest of Asia, the rate in fertility continues to drop, and here's the thing, is that the demographic transition, that is happening everywhere where people become urban. And so every forecast shows the urbanity, the citification of the population continuing, and I can't think of any counterforce-

Tim Ferriss 15:53 Mm-hmm

Kevin Kelly 15:54 ... to stop this huge migration-

Tim Ferriss 15:57 Hmm

Kevin Kelly 15:58 ... at the scale that we're seeing into the city. And as that happens, the birth rates drop down. And even in places like Singapore or other places where they have taken very, very active countermeasures of cash for having kids-

Tim Ferriss 16:15 Wow

Kevin Kelly 16:15 ... daycare forever, bonuses, none of these work in terms of actually trying to raise fertility levels. So you have to understand that to go above replacement level, the average woman has to have 2.1 kids. Well, that means there has to be tons and tons of women who have three or four kids-

Tim Ferriss 16:35 Right

Kevin Kelly 16:35 ... to make up for those. How many people do you know with that many kids, you know, living in cities? And there's just-

Tim Ferriss 16:42 Very few. Yeah

Kevin Kelly 16:42 ... there's not, there's not enough of them. So, and this is a projection. Some of these are UN projections. They have three, three, they have a low, high and, and, uh, medium. And the low one is not good news because there's not a large cultural counterforce for women to have three, a lot, you know, a very high percentage of the population to have three or four kids in a modern world, and that's why the, the population continues to decrease every year.

Tim Ferriss 17:11 What type of ... This is perhaps a tangent, but one of the, uh, big debates in my head right now is to marry or not to marry, to have kids or not to have kids.

Kevin Kelly 17:20 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 17:20 I never thought those would even be questions in my mind.

Kevin Kelly 17:23 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 17:24 And yet here I am and, and now they are.

Kevin Kelly 17:26 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 17:26 What are your thoughts on having children? What type of people, this is very broad, but should have children or shouldn't have children, whichever way of answering is easier, or how to even think about that question?

Kevin Kelly 17:38 I think people who are privileged, of which you are, should have children because you can bestow so many privileges and opportunities to your children.

Tim Ferriss 17:48 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Kelly 17:49 And if the world is to be populated, why not populate it with children who have as many opportunities as possible?

Tim Ferriss 17:54 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Kelly 17:55 I also say from my own experience of growing up one of many kids and having ... Well, I have three kids. Uh, one of my other regrets in life is not having a fourth, but we were just ... We started a little bit too late and we were unable to have a fourth. But all my kids Wish that we had a fourth too, and I would say that it's a gift to your kids to have more than one.

Tim Ferriss 18:15 Mm.

Kevin Kelly 18:15 And I know that from hanging out in China, where so many kids grew up only children, and this really, really miss that. There is a total gift of the siblings and brothers to each other that is, uh, really very profound.

Tim Ferriss 18:31 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Kelly 18:31 And there is also, I know from my friends who have l- had lots of kids, that there is a tremendous amount of teaching from the, the older to the younger, and that's a lot of what they learn. And that the, uh, curve of the amount of energy that you have to expend, actually after three, it doesn't really matter-

Tim Ferriss 18:51 Right

Kevin Kelly 18:51 ... in terms of the parents.

Tim Ferriss 18:53 Got it.

Kevin Kelly 18:54 I have one friend who has nine kids, and I have another friend who has seven.

Tim Ferriss 18:57 Wow.

Kevin Kelly 18:58 And basically, how do they do that? Well, the older kids were helping to parent the younger kids. That's the only way that it really works. But that is actually basically they have, you know, they have five parents instead of having two parents. [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 19:10 Right. It's very traditional in a way. I mean-

Kevin Kelly 19:12 It is

Tim Ferriss 19:12 ... traditional meaning reaching back thousands or tens of thousands of years.

Kevin Kelly 19:15 It, it, it is. Of course, in the old days, may have had 12 born, but they rarely had 12 kids survive.

Tim Ferriss 19:21 Survive, right.

Kevin Kelly 19:23 So that actually is a very recent, r- I mean, as far as like, it's like the 1800s kind of onward.

Tim Ferriss 19:29 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Kelly 19:29 I hang out with the Amish a lot, and they still have these very large families, and they all survive. So they have kind of in some senses s- sort of an unnatural-

Tim Ferriss 19:38 Mm-hmm

Kevin Kelly 19:38 ... expansion. And one of my predictions, again, going back to kind of like the assumptions, one of my predictions is that, you know, in America, in 100 years from now or whatever it is, it'll be, um, the complete countryside is run by the Amish.

Tim Ferriss 19:49 [laughs]

Kevin Kelly 19:50 The Amish take over the entire countryside because they never sell land. They have, like, eight kids, and then there are all these people living in the cities, and it's like everybody's happy, you know? We're all living. They drive out to the Amish lands, and it's just fantastic. And, uh, they're very happy, you know, doing their thing and running the farms. And so I had been predicting for years that the Amish would come and start buying upstate New York, and that's exactly what they're doing right now.

Tim Ferriss 20:11 Why do you spend so much time with the Amish? This is news to me, but very, uh, very interesting. And how long has that been going on?

Kevin Kelly 20:17 For a while. And by the way, Tim-

Tim Ferriss 20:19 And does, and does your beard have anything, is there any relation to the Amish?

Kevin Kelly 20:22 It's, it's... I had the beard before my interest in the Amish.

Tim Ferriss 20:25 Okay. [laughs]

Kevin Kelly 20:25 I could show you some pictures when I was, uh, 19 years old. I do have... So those who don't know, I have an Amish beard, which means that I have a beard without a mustache. The reason why the Amish don't have mustaches is, is it was at the time that they were kind of adopting their dress code, the mustache was, all military men had mustaches.

Tim Ferriss 20:42 Ah.

Kevin Kelly 20:42 And so they were very anti-military. They refused to serve in the armies. They don't even vote. But so it was their kind of rejection of the military by shaving off their mustache. I hang out with the Amish because their adoption of, of technologies is, like, seems to us totally crazy.

Tim Ferriss 21:00 [laughs]

Kevin Kelly 21:00 Because first of all, they're not Luddites. They're complete hackers. They love hacking technology. They have something called Amish electricity, which is basically pneumatics. They, a lot of these farms have a big diesel. They don't have electricity, but they have a big diesel generator in the barn that pumps up this compressor that sends high-pressure air tubes down tubing into their barn, into their homes. And so they have converted, like, their sewing machine and washing machine and stuff to pneumatic.

Tim Ferriss 21:29 [laughs]

Kevin Kelly 21:30 Okay?

Tim Ferriss 21:31 Seems like a bit of a, a sidestep of the Word of God. [laughs]

Kevin Kelly 21:35 Exactly. So they'll have, like, they'll have horse-drawn buggies and horse-drawn farm implements, and the horses will be pulling this diesel-generated combine.

Tim Ferriss 21:44 [laughs]

Kevin Kelly 21:45 And you're thinking, "What are they doing?" Okay? Right? But, but in fact, if you look at our own lives, and I've done this many times. I can ask you, Tim, or you can ask me. There'll be some weird thing, like we don't have TV in our house.

Tim Ferriss 21:57 Right.

Kevin Kelly 21:57 But I've got internet. It's like, well, what is that about?

Tim Ferriss 22:00 Right, right. [laughs]

Kevin Kelly 22:01 Or some kind... So we all have these things, but here's the difference is the Amish do it collectively.

Tim Ferriss 22:06 Mm.

Kevin Kelly 22:06 They're very selective. They're selecting their technology collectively as a group. And secondly, they have to articul- because they're doing it collectively, they have to articulate what their criteria is. A lot of us are adopting, we try this, we try that. We don't have any kind of, like, logic or reason or theory or framework for why we're doing stuff.

Tim Ferriss 22:28 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Kelly 22:28 It's just, it's just one, a parade of stuff. But the Amish have a very particular criteria, and their criteria is there are two things that they're looking for. The main thing they want to do, and the main reason why they have all these restrictions like horse and buggy and all this stuff, is that they want to have these communities, very strong communities. And so they notice that if you have a car, that you'll drive out and shop somewhere out of the community, or you go to church somewhere out of the community or whatever it is. But if you have a horse and buggy, you can go only 15 miles, and so everything has to happen your entire life. H- you have to support the community.

Tim Ferriss 23:02 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Kelly 23:02 You have a community within 15 miles. You have to visit the sick, and you have to shop locally. So you're shopping with your neighbors. So when a new technology comes along, they say, "Will this strengthen our local community or send us out?" And then the second thing that they're looking at is with families. So the goal of the typical Amish man or woman is to have every single meal with their children for every meal of their lives until they leave home. So they have breakfast, and they have lunch, and they have dinner. So breakfast and, and lunch is they go to one-room schoolhouse, and they, they pedal back for lunch that their parents have with them, and that means that the business is ideally in their backyard. So they have, they have a lot of, like, shops and stuff. If they're not a farmer, they have a backyard shop, which is actually has to be kind of clean-ish because it is in their backyard.

Tim Ferriss 23:52 Right.

Kevin Kelly 23:52 It's like, not my... Well, it is in their backyard, so they really are, you know, they really want to ensure that they're... They have metalworking shops and stuff, which they really try to keep non-toxic and work because it's in their backyard. And so that means that they can come home for lunch. They have breakfast and lunch, so they're, they're on the premises, and they have every single meal with their children till they leave. And so they say, "Well, will this technology allow us- To do that. Will it help us do that, or will it work against that? And then, like right now they're, they've been deciding whether to accept cell phones or not, even though they don't have landline phones. So they're basically, they're going to ac- well, some of them are going to accept cell phones, and they do that by, there's always some Amish early adopter who's trying things, and they say, "Okay, Ivan." The bishop says, "You can..." He has to get permission. He says, "You can try this, but we're watching you. We're gonna see what effect this has on your family, on your community. You have to be ready to give it up any time we say that it's not working." And they do this on a kind of a parish by parish, so it's very decentralized.

Tim Ferriss 24:51 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Kelly 24:51 And so they try out, always trying out new technologies, and they're always looking to see, is this strengthening the families? Is this strengthening the communities? If not, we don't want it.

Tim Ferriss 25:03 And what have you... I have two questions, I guess. The first is, since you're normally, as I understand it, based on the West Coast in northern California, how do you get out to the Amish-

Kevin Kelly 25:13 Mm

Tim Ferriss 25:13 ... or is there a separate community closer by?

Kevin Kelly 25:15 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 25:15 And then secondly, what have you incorporated into your own life or your-

Kevin Kelly 25:19 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 25:19 ... your own family that-

Kevin Kelly 25:21 Mm

Tim Ferriss 25:21 ... originated from the Amish?

Kevin Kelly 25:23 Yeah. So I don't get to see them as often as I want, but actually, just when I go east, I have some contacts that I will exercise, and, um, I would try to get, like, to stay overnight and go to church in a buggy or something.

Tim Ferriss 25:37 And this is Pennsylvania?

Kevin Kelly 25:38 Well, actually, Pennsylvania is the, um, heart of it, but actually there are more communities in Ohio where my brother lives.

Tim Ferriss 25:45 Oh, no kidding.

Kevin Kelly 25:47 Iowa. There's a lot more happening in New York. So, so the, the Pennsylvania are the kind of ground zero.

Tim Ferriss 25:53 Ground zero.

Kevin Kelly 25:53 But in fact, there are bigger, more extensive communities outside of, of Pennsylvania.

Tim Ferriss 25:58 I didn't realize that.

Kevin Kelly 25:59 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 25:59 The, the Amish diaspora.

Kevin Kelly 26:01 It is. That's what I'm saying. They literally are just buying up, um, farmland. They're, they're expanding. They're constantly expanding. They have a very small attrition rate, very large families. They all are buying, uh, basically they're buying farms and stuff for their, for their children, uh, and they never sell.

Tim Ferriss 26:17 Hmm.

Kevin Kelly 26:17 And so they also don't even move into areas as a... They have a minimum number of families that we- need to move in at once.

Tim Ferriss 26:23 Hmm.

Kevin Kelly 26:24 But what did I learn from them? Well, one of the things that we had, particularly when we had younger kids, was kind of technological sabbaticals.

Tim Ferriss 26:33 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Kelly 26:33 Or Sabbaths, I should say.

Tim Ferriss 26:35 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Kelly 26:35 And I've now seen other families who aren't even, um, you know, aren't even religious adopt that same thing, which is once a week-

Tim Ferriss 26:44 Mm-hmm

Kevin Kelly 26:44 ... you take a break from either, you can define it however you want it, the screen or the keyboard or, or, or connectivity or something, and you step back, and you do that not because it's, like, terrible or poison, but because it's so good. You know, there's lots of people who are kind of like they're gonna drop out from Twitter. They're kind of like, "Oh, this is like a toxin. I gotta get detoxed or something." I think that's an entirely wrong way to think about it, is you want to take breaks from this, not because they're toxic, but because they're so good. [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 27:15 Yeah.

Kevin Kelly 27:15 It's like you want to step back so that you can reenter it and with a renewed perspective, with a renewed appreciation-

Tim Ferriss 27:22 Mm-hmm

Kevin Kelly 27:22 ... with having spent time looking at it in a different way. And I think that kind of rhythm of having Sabbaths and then yearly sabbat- uh, vacations or whatever, retreats, and then every seven years or whatever is you take a, um, a true sabbatical. I think that kind of rhythmic disconnection or Sabbath, I think is very powerful, something that, that works very well, and it was something that we had in our family.

Tim Ferriss 27:49 I take Saturdays off, as it turns out, as my screenless day.

Kevin Kelly 27:52 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 27:53 I really, I really try to make that a weekly occurrence, and it's incredible. I mean, the-

Kevin Kelly 27:57 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 27:57 ... the effect that, that it has, the sort of galvanizing effect of just a, a mere 24 hours. Not even that if you just consider the waking hours. Every seven years, a vacation or sabbatical of how long, in your case or your family's case?

Kevin Kelly 28:10 Yeah. Partly because my wife actually is granted a sabbatical from the company she works for, which is Genentech.

Tim Ferriss 28:16 Hmm.

Kevin Kelly 28:16 It's one of the few companies that actually have a official sabbatical for all their researchers, at least. And it's very meager. It's six weeks.

Tim Ferriss 28:26 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Kelly 28:27 Of course, you know, s- a six-week sabbatical is basically a European annual vacation. [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 28:33 [laughs] Right. Right.

Kevin Kelly 28:35 You know, but for an American, [laughs] it's-

Tim Ferriss 28:37 Right, it's three years

Kevin Kelly 28:38 ... it's, that's a big thing. So yeah, so we're, we're do something, do something different. So this year we're taking one and we're going to camp in national parks for one month of it, and then the other two weeks we'll go to Asia. But we haven't been to a lot of the national parks. I'm gonna do a different kind of project that I haven't done before, and we'll do some kind of car camping. We haven't really done a big road trip like that, so it's all new for us.

Tim Ferriss 29:03 What is the longest in the last few years that you've gone without checking email?

Kevin Kelly 29:07 Oh, probably two weeks.

Tim Ferriss 29:11 Got it.

Kevin Kelly 29:11 And in China.

Tim Ferriss 29:13 How do you manage that when, uh, knock on wood?

Kevin Kelly 29:15 Well, it was very easy. It was like I just, I was unable to pick it up because China was blocking Google.

Tim Ferriss 29:21 [laughs] It make- makes it, makes it more challenging. [laughs]

Kevin Kelly 29:26 And I was in, um, I was in some remote places, and so even the connection was hard, but it was like they, they weren't, uh-

Tim Ferriss 29:33 Playing ball

Kevin Kelly 29:33 ... they weren't letting me get it.

Tim Ferriss 29:34 [laughs]

Kevin Kelly 29:35 Um, I'm not a mobile person. My first smartphone was an iPhone 5, and, um, I still not using it properly. I use it for phone calls. [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 29:45 [laughs] Yeah. I don't, I don't use my iPhone as an input device either. I just-

Kevin Kelly 29:49 Yeah, yeah

Tim Ferriss 29:49 ... it drives, drives me nuts, but, uh-

Kevin Kelly 29:50 I can't, I can't type. When I travel, I like to, to leave everything... I, you know, I'm s- I, I spend a lot of my time sitting in front of a computer. I'm kind of like the, the Zen, you know, walk, walk, sit, sit.

Tim Ferriss 30:00 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Kelly 30:00 Don't wobble. So, like, I'm here, I'm, like, really online, and then when I leave this studio, I don't want to be connected at all, and I won't be.

Tim Ferriss 30:10 Hmm.

Kevin Kelly 30:10 And I'm not checking email, and I'm not checking this other stuff, and I can go days. Typically, I'll go days without checking. Even in the US if I'm traveling, and then, um, if I'm overseas, I will go probably, yeah, three or four days before I get the email. That's pretty typical.

Tim Ferriss 30:27 Do you, um... Let me shift gears just a little bit. I'm looking at, uh [laughs] looking at longnow.org. I recommend everybody take a look at it, the Long Now Foundation, and humans are generally, I would say, pretty bad at thinking long term. Uh, certainly when it comes to habit change, very, very high failure rate with long-term incentives. You're gonna get diabetes in 20 years, for instance, as opposed to you'll have more sex if you have a six-pack [laughs] when it comes to diet. Uh, but the L- the Long Now Foundation, I just wanna read a few things on this website for people. So the Long Now Foundation was established in 1996, written as 01996, to creatively foster long-term thinking and responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years. Then you have the 10,000 Year Clock, which is a monument-scale, multi-millennial, all-mechanical clock as an icon to long-term thinking. The Rosetta Project, building an archive of all documented human languages. Long bets. Featured bet is here, Warren Buffett, Protege Partners LLC, a public arena for enjoyable competitive predictions of interest to society with philanthropic money at stake, and then Revive & Restore, which is bringing extinct species back to life. So there is a lot here.

Kevin Kelly 31:33 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 31:33 Can you explain to people, 'cause I've, I've greatly enjoyed many of the seminars-

Kevin Kelly 31:38 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 31:38 ... and speeches of the Long Now Foundation. I'm a supporter. I suppose I've even spoken there on stage, and love the email synopses, uh, that Stewart sends out.

Kevin Kelly 31:49 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 31:49 What is the function of the Long Now Foundation, and what is the value?

Kevin Kelly 31:53 The Long Now Foundation is kind of reactive. It's, it's reacting to the very inherent short-term bias that our society, particularly this technological society, particularly, say, the Silicon Valley, exhibits, which is, um, often a focus on the next quarter, the next two quarters, the next year, results needing to be immediate, you know, instant satisfaction. If something's not on Netflix streaming, we don't even wait for the DVD. It's this fairly kind of very fast-paced, short-term thinking, and also somewhat blinded by the fact that we don't have a lot of sense of history either, that, um, we're kind of ignorant about what's happened in the past. And so the term the Long Now came from Brian Eno, who noticed that we have a very short now, which is like the next five minutes and the last five minutes.

Tim Ferriss 32:44 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Kelly 32:44 And so the Long Now is a way to... is an attempt to kind of expand that so that we as a society and as individuals would try to think about things at a generational or civilizational scale. So, like, how about, like, working on something that might take longer than your own lifetime to accomplish?

Tim Ferriss 33:04 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Kelly 33:04 So you start something now, then maybe make it so that it might take, like the cathedrals of old, what if we were trying to make something that, you know, might need 25 years to accomplish? How can we do that? So we're trying to encourage people to think in that perspective, to take that perspective, and then to maybe move in that direction. We're not necessarily saying we have to have, like, the Asimov's Foundation where we have to have, like, a master plan for the next 100 years and we're going to plan out the future.

Tim Ferriss 33:37 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Kelly 33:38 No, we're agnostic about what it is that people make or do. We're just saying that it would benefit having, um, thinking about the long term. And I've often heard, uh, some people, uh, who advise do counseling to individuals about kind of thinking about the long term in your own life, even though you might want to act kind of locally and be spontaneous. But you do want, you do want to kind of keep in mind the fact that, you know, you'll be around for a while, whether it's putting some savings away or, uh, working on a skill that might take some time, more than the six months or a year to acquire or, you know, whatever it is that you can have both perspectives. And so we're not attempting to get rid of the need for people to survive, the need for companies to have a profit this year. We're saying there can be additional perspectives in addition to that where we say we commit to, like, a sci- a program of science research where it's pure science and the results of the, say, mathematics is one of the most profound things that we can invest in, even though most of the things in the beginning seem to be non-utilitarian. They don't have any purpose, but we know from our own history that, you know, in 20 years they'll pay off in some way or other. And so being able to kind of construct a society so that we can allow the rewards of long-term investment, long-term thinking, long-term perspective, that would make us a better civilization.

Tim Ferriss 35:15 Hmm. I love the Long Now Foundation. I encourage everybody to check it out, longnow.org. [upbeat music] If you want more of The Tim Ferriss Show, you can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or go to fourhourblog.com-

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35:35 ... where you'll find an award-winning blog, tons of audio and video interview stories with people like Warren Buffett and Mike Shinoda from Linkin Park, the books, plus much, much more. Follow Tim on Twitter at twitter.com/tferriss. That's-

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