Kevin Kelly - Be Generous and Unique - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS]

26:22I like to ask young people, my kids' friends, do the exercise of, okay, I have my magic wand. I'm going to give you a billion dollars, which is what your wish is, right? And so what are you going to do with a billion dollars? Tell me, just make the list. And so they, well, you know, maybe I'll travel around the world or I'm going to buy a boat or something, okay, or a house or whatever. Okay, you haven't spent any of that money yet. Tomorrow, it's all going to come back. You give a billion dollars, you cannot spend it. So now what are you going to do with your billion dollars? And it turns out that their dream, whatever it is, can be accomplished for so little compared to a billion dollars that in most cases, money is simply not the gating factor for what most people want to do.

27:01There was a great scene in, I think it was Wall Street, where this guy going to Wall Street and his whole goal just a couple more years, going to make my fortune, and then I'm going to quit so I can buy the motorcycle and ride across China. And all of us travelers just laugh hilariously, because you could work at McDonald's for six months, save enough money to buy a motorcycle to ride across China. You don't need to go into Wall Street to make your billions to do that. And so I find that the focus, you certainly need to have enough to do the things that you want. But for most people's dreams, it's a misplaced hurdle.

27:40Imagine they're not enough money because, in fact, what we know about innovation is that all the real breakthroughs come from the places where there's not enough money. Startups. The reason why a startup can succeed is because the big company wants to buy their solutions. They've got money. They're going to buy their solutions. But the solutions can't be bought. They have to be invented. They have too much money to do the hard work of being ingenious and frugal and thrifty and all the other stubborn and persevering that a startup can do. So a startup doesn't have any money. So they're forced to invent the things in a way that if you had money, you'd never get to.

28:16And that's why all the breakthroughs happen at the edges and they happen in startups. That lacking of the resources is actually the feature. It's actually the benefit. And that's why when young people are starting off who have very little resources, they don't understand they actually have an advantage over the established companies. That lack of resource is an advantage to them. I'd love to talk about the relationship between creation and imagination. I wonder if in your experience, people are sort of naturally endowed with like a level of imagination or if it's way more changeable that I can do things to expand my imagination because it seems so much like the people that I admire the most are creative and creators.

29:00Like they're manifesting something. Maybe that's their form of self-expression like we talked about earlier. But that requires tremendous imagination. Where do you think that comes from? Can you cultivate it? Yes, I have slowly concluded, and maybe this is a changing of the mind, that almost any virtue or quality or talent can be improved. They're certainly unequally distributed, and everybody has a higher or lower degree of the natural amount to begin with, but this is the beauty of it. no matter where we start, we can always get better at it. And I think imagination is a skill that can be taught and can be learned and can be improved, even though there are certainly people who are more naturally inclined in that direction than others.

29:39And the same with optimism. I think optimism is something that you can learn and become more optimistic. And it's like a habit. And that's true for playing music and everything else. And so a lot of the work, almost going back to what I was saying before about imagination is mostly forgetting what is the expected answer. I know this from doing lots of workshops with corporations and groups of people from all walks of life, and they were trying to get them to imagine futures. And it was so, so hard to have them let go of what they've seen in Hollywood or what they've seen in the movie or what they have been told is possible.

30:17And that ability, what Brian Nino and I call the unthinkables, to inhabit those kind of improbable worlds is a skill that has to be learned. It has to be regained. I mean, I think we have it in childhood, but we are rewarded in other ways for paying attention to reality and understanding what it is everybody accepts, what the consensus is. That's a variable skill. And that kind of overwhelms our ability to imagine crazy, weird stuff because we're not really rewarded for that. So imagination, cultivating it is like an exercise in subtraction, not addition. Like it's not a blank canvas. That's what I would have said.

30:57It's like a painter at a blank canvas. No, it's like a sculptor. It's like removing stuff. It's mostly about removing stuff these days. I would say that's the first step. You remove it and then you want to fill it up in a different direction. And by the way, the little side step, I think this is one of the ways that AI will help us. And that is just because AI is capable of these orthogonal, weird directions that is very difficult for humans to let go of. They're much easier. So working with them to help us inhabit the possibility space in a different way, then we find it hard on our own because of our education and biases and inabilities.

31:35So that's what I see as one of the roles of some of the AIs is assisting us in our imagination. I'd love a case study in imagination. When you think of the most imaginative person you've ever encountered, who comes most immediately to mind? What was their story? I know some writers, some fiction writers, who naturally can just go off and imagine crazy things. And that's partly their ability to fill in details. and then I have other people that I know who are what I would call lateral thinkers, and they have an imagination very much in this direction of overcoming the orthodoxy, overcoming the conventional wisdom.

32:15And they'll take something ordinary and just come at it in a slightly skewed direction, like laterally, on a very regular basis. And it's like, oh, we've never thought of that. They are, I believe, have trained themselves to do that. Like Marvin Minsky, who was a very imaginative guy who used to pretend that he was a Martian or a robot. He would just approach everything as if he was from another planet and he would be examining music. Okay, well, what is it about music? Why are you people so affected by music? It doesn't make sense to me. And he would kind of investigate things, looking at them from this lateral position, just as a habit.

32:53So that's a kind of imagination. I used to love the Nintendo idea. I think they had something like lateral thinking with withered technologies or something like new use cases for very old things or something like that. Yeah. So there are various forms of imagination. But the point is that the possibility space for ideas is very, very, very, very large. It's probably the largest possibility space that we can imagine. And we tend as humans and living in our lives to kind of retread the same ones. And so anything you can do to get out of those ruts is very powerful, but not always useful. I mean, you can go too far.

33:31All we all know from startups and innovation and inventions, you want to be one or two steps away. If you're five or 10 steps away, it doesn't help anybody. There's nobody there. If you have some crazy idea, but can't put it into words or pictures or communicate it, then it's lost. If it's an idea so far ahead of its time, it could be right. But if you can't get to it in a couple steps from today, then it's not really useful. So like other things, there's an art to the imagination to being actually valuable to people. It's constrained by how many steps away you are that will take someone to get there.

34:06So if only you can arrive at that place, it's not worth anything. You have to get other people there, either to see it and inhabit it with you, like in the story, to actually be able to replicate it in terms of making something, whatever it is, there's an art to this imagination because you can't be too far away because then it's not useful to anybody. You have to have this adjacent possible that people talk about. You want it to be adjacent but not so distant that, well, it may be true someday or it may be appreciated 100 years from now. It'd be a lot more useful if you could do something that was more adjacent.

34:44When you study history and you think about the parts of life that have pulled some of these characteristics out of people that we've talked about so far, you come across rites of passage a lot. And it seems like the modern world is as low on different kinds of rites of passage as at any point in history, and that that is very strange and troubling and hopefully like a historical anomaly when we look back on it a thousand years from now. Why do you think that's the case and what would be your prescription for changing it? I think traditional cultures are full of rites of passage. I have three kids now grown young adults.

35:19And one of the things I know about kids, what I learned was that they crave, when they're young, especially they crave reliability, stability. they rely on having something stable as they invent themselves. They're in the process from the moment they're born to inventing themselves in a very literal sense of developing their personalities. And that is a very uncertain process. It's very scary. They don't know what it means to be human. They don't know what it means to be a kid. They don't know what's ordinary or extraordinary. They have to accept everything as normal. And so the safer they can feel, the more anchored they can be in a family, the easier it is for them to develop their own identity and thrive.

36:07And so rituals and rites of passages are things that help that anchoring and something that they can return to even when things get scary or uncertain or confusing. They can come back into and say, well, at least my family is always there. My family always does this. My family is about this. And these rites of passage and rituals bring them an ability to say, this is what we do. This is something I can rely on. This is a foundation to help me craft my identity, my personality, my contribution. And so rites of passage and rituals are something that have been embedded in religion. And when we throw out and get rid of religion, we're often undoing and surrendering and removing those.

36:55things which need to be replaced in some ways. And so the thing about rituals is that they don't actually have to be about anything. There's the beauty of Burning Man. Burning Man is this ritual and the joke was always, we burn it so that we can burn it next year, right? I mean, it's like, it's a ritual that doesn't have any meaning other than in itself, but it's very powerful because it's a ritual. And you burn the man, it's the same man every time, okay? And so what we discovered in our family and other families is that if you have rituals, even though they're as simple as having pancakes on Sunday morning or pizza on a Friday night or birthdays, you always do this or three times a year, our family always does this thing at the beginning of the seasons.

37:34We change the sheets or whatever it is, something that you can count on. And if you do it three times in a row, it becomes a ritual. And that ability of anticipating the thing, of looking forward to it, of relying on it, of having it be there. And that is the foundation of a stable developmental development in their own personality. And so rites of passage is another aspect of that. I think we found that just you have to invent them. You can use religious ones, which are fine, but we don't even have very many of those in America. So we just invented our own coming into adulthood, rite of passage that we did as a family.

38:11We had a bunch of rituals that we would do, and they became, again, another anchoring thing in our kids' understanding of themselves. If you had other exercises you would recommend families engage in, in addition to like, okay, we need to design rituals, we need to design rites of passage for our kids, let's say parents for the kids. Any other exercises for the family that you would recommend? Well, one thing we do, our family, and I highly recommend it, is having meals together with no screens. And the Amish, who I pay attention to, their definition of success, their definition of successful life, though the people they most respect are those that are able to have every single meal with their children until the children leave.

38:52So they have breakfast and they have lunch and they have dinner together as a family. Lunch is the real ringer for most people because their kids are in school and they come back to the house for lunch. So that's something that is very, very profound is having family dinners. We say grace before meals. We have Thanksgiving, rituals where we do gratitude rounds and things. There's a lot. There's actually a good book called The Secrets of Happy Families by Bruce Weiler that's really good on this, looking at the research that's been done on understanding the family identity. So one of the things I say is that you want to be able to have your kids be able to say, our family does this or doesn't do this.

39:38This idea of a family identity is something else that you cultivate of like saying, our family does this or our family doesn't do this. This is what our family does. That's fine with them. There's all kinds of things. We didn't have TV for our kids growing up in the house at all. Our family doesn't do TV. You're free to watch TV at your friend's house as much as you want, but we, our family doesn't do TV. And it's like, okay, that's fine. That's good. I understand that. That's part of my identity. And so you can do that. What about in a marriage specifically? So setting aside the parent-child relationship, Well, obviously that's critical, but just purely at the level of spouses in the same general vein, exercises, rituals, whatever, anything that you have done or would recommend people think about?

40:21Yeah, I'm not very good. I think you need to talk to Esther Perel, who's ace in this couple's therapy. Actually, there was one thing in the book that I think came from Esther, which is the rule of three in conversation. And that's particularly valuable in a marriage, which is that when someone that you love or intimate with is telling you something in a very intense way, you want to be listening. And then when they're done, wait until they're done, you say, is there more? And there's usually more. and then they go a wreck, second round, you listen all the way through. And this is active listening, meaning that you are engaged.

40:56You are not just a recording machine. You're probing, you're encouraging. And then you wait until there's a third round of is there more. And what's interesting about that is that because it's active listening is that the other person needs the listener to help them say it. They almost can't say it without that active listening. And so you are able to arrive at understandings and truths and honesty that neither one could get to by themselves. And that ability to take the rule three and say, is there more, is there more, is there more, is very, very powerful. And oftentimes that explanation and going through that process to the third level is hugely benefit to the person talking because they needed that person to get it out of them and often is enough to actualize change.

41:48Speaking of three, my third most powerful takeaway from the book was this notion of the three gates, this idea of asking yourself three questions before you say something. Can you give us that incredibly cool and useful idea? I think I said it was the white person who said it. It was actually Rumi, the Afghan poet Rumi, which is that before you say something about someone else particularly, is you want to ask yourself, is it true? Is it... Necessary, I think. Kind. Yeah. True, necessary, and kind, right. Right. So if it's of those three, then you can say it. And there's a lot in the book about the virtues of kindness, that kindness is not a weakness, but a sign of strength.

42:28And you can't really be too kind. If you have a choice between being right or kind, you be kind. And I have another bit of advice for people, which I have had the experience lately, which is to attend as many funerals as you can, particularly when you're young, and listen to what they say about the departed. And the shock to me was that nobody was talking about the achievements, how many patents they had, how many companies they started, how much money they had, none of that. They were talking about what kind of person they were, how they made people feel, whether they were kind. It's like, wow, that's really powerful.

43:05That's what matters. You think that humans are naturally kind? I do. There's a great book called Humankind that changed my mind that brought the evidence showing that our received wisdom, the thing we're taught in school, so to speak, that humans are naturally selfish and that when all things being equal, particularly if it gets tough, people will retreat to being completely selfish and self-interested and mean. And I think the evidence is the opposite, and my own experience is opposite, that people generally are kind. You can generally trust strangers that all things being equal, people want to help each other.

43:45And that bias runs through my book, which is that the universe is generally abundant. That's the bias of the universe, that there's this other weird paradox at the foundation of the universe, of the human condition anyway, which is that the more you give, the more you get, that the most selfish thing you can do is to be generous. The more you give, the more you get. If that's true for everybody, then where does it come from, right? I mean, it's like if you give away and you're getting more and everybody does that, the arithmetic doesn't add up, and that's the paradox. So the paradox is that the most selfish thing you can do is to be generous, and so much flows from that, that by giving away, you're increasing your own happiness.

44:27And that's the other little bit of advice. Giving away 10 % of what you take in may seem like you've just reduced your purchasing power by 10%, but every person who does this will tell you that the happiness and the satisfaction and your life's well-being will increase by tenfold. That 10 % you don't even notice. So yeah, so I think people are naturally want to be kind given all things. And what we want to do is to make that as easy as possible. I have a background in philosophy, and so I can't help myself but focus on your advice that's very big and grandiose and about life and work. But the book is also full of very tiny bits of advice and very tactical bits of advice.

45:10Are there any few that stand out to you as like your favorites that make you chuckle or make you happy? There are some very, very practical ones that I was very happy to include because, again, I was writing this for my kids originally, which is that if you lose track of something in your household, in your workshop, in your garage, and you finally find it, don't put it back where you found it. Put it back where you first look for it. I repeat that to myself all the time when I'm putting things back. Okay, put it back where I first look for it. That's a bit of advice. Another one was I picked up from an editor 30 years ago at Whole Earth.

45:46She told me this, and it's been true, which is that if you get invited to do something six months from now, ask yourself if you would do it if it was tomorrow morning. And very few events will pass that muster. And so I use that to say no. I'm just imagining, okay, would I get tomorrow morning to fly whatever it is or to go into or meet whatever it is? And if it isn't a resounding yeah, then it's a no. I love your rule of seven in research too, that if you just keep pushing for seven levels, you will ultimately hit bedrock. Like it's hard to go deeper than seven levels. Part of the trick is you're trying to research something and they don't know.

46:27And so you say, well, who might know? Or can you tell me who might know? You kind of use the last round to help you develop the next round. Who do you think might know? Or where do you think it might go? So you can kind of cascade down to several levels. But if you're willing to do that to several levels, you would generally get a reliable answer. Did collecting all of this advice change your mind or change you in any material ways? Articulating this, again, I don't know about other people, but I find that I actually don't know why I do things. And I don't know exactly how I would describe what I'm doing or whatever.

47:05and that this process required me to articulate things and it brought more understanding of what my path is and where I'm going. And so it didn't really change it as much as it illuminated it. And that illumination is valuable. And so I have a better idea about what it is I'm doing than before I started. I'd love to spend a minute or two just having the benefit of having you on the call to ask about your conception of technology. Before reading this book, like I said, I've been preparing this for a long time because I read all your other books about technology. Your notion of the technium has been very influential on me and how I think about how I spend my time and how I invest and everything else.

47:47How do you think about the history of technology and the stock of, you call it the technium, the stock of technology that exists in the world and why that's such a natural extension of human beings? In brief, the main insight about the Technium, which is my term for the systems of all the technologies in the world, is the understanding that they don't stand alone. That they're a web, that you can't make a hammer without a saw. The saw cuts the handle and the hammer is needed to make the saw. And so they're all codependent. And we use computers to make everything and we need plumbing and the farmers to make the computers.

48:24And so there is this web, this ecosystem of technologies all codependent on each other. And the bigger this ecosystem gets, the more it adopts the same things that any system of that complexity has, which has its own internal biases and tendencies. All systems, whether it's living systems or even mechanical systems that are complex enough, will exhibit recurring tendencies independent of all the parts. So this technium that we have, this ecosystem, all the technologies in the world has certain behaviors that are independent of us humans, the creators, and independent of the parts. And so the question is, what are those general tendencies?

49:07What are those wants in the sense of the tendency of a plant is to lean towards a light and call it a want? And so that was my question was, well, with this system, what does it want? What are its tendencies? Part of what I concluded was that the tendencies were basically an extension of the same tendencies in evolution of biological systems. In a certain sense, this technium was the seventh kingdom of life. It's an extension and acceleration of the same forces that made life, that evolved life on the planet, and that made self-organized systems of stars and planets and elements. I see the origins of technology back in the Big Bang.

49:50It's not human ingenuity. We are just the vehicles. We are just the sexual organs of it. We're just helping it replicate. When a beaver makes a dam and birds make nests, those are technologies in a certain sense. They're outputs of the mind. And so I see the cosmic arc of the story of technology, which begins with the Big Bang and self-organizing systems and elements and stars and planets that have sufficient just right amount of gravity and water and other things that this most remarkable molecule of DNA can evolve out of and then DNA can self-replicate until we have minds. And there are many minds, and out of the minds come other possible forms that can't be done with just water-based tissue.

50:38And so I'm imagining that there's technology in other planets throughout the galaxy somewhere, and that they're all kind of following this thing of making more and more possibilities. And I think that's what the big story in the end about what technology brings to the universe, which is increasing possible ways of being, increasing possible forms, increasing possible ways of living. Each one of those are improbable. So that's the point of it. Most universe is going towards heat death is the probable outcome, flat, uniform, gray heat death. These strands of the improbable, which are galaxies and stars and elements and planets and minds and technology, and it's all improbable and self-maintaining.

51:28It keeps making things more and more improbable as long as it keeps going, and that's the infinite game that we're involved in, is trying to keep the game going, making as many possibilities as possible. And for us humans, for me to equip every person born with the tools, water and healthcare, they would need to realize their unique improbable gifts to the world. And the more improbable you are, the more likely you're authentic to what it is that you can do. So in a certain sense, what we're aiming for are improbable lives. Wonderful idea. Do you think that you're to draw the timeline of technology.

52:08It seems like we've harnessed information with the printing press. We've sort of harnessed energy with oil and fossil fuels, and that maybe we're about to harness intelligence with AI. Is that a clean progression? And is it fair to put AI on the same scale as those other two? Yeah. I mean, I think ultimately, you'll be even bigger than those other two. Intelligence is not the only thing necessary to get things done. But in fact, evolution itself is a kind of learning. If you abstract it out, the topography of things that learn are similar to the things that evolve. Evolution is learning. Our brains are doing similar kinds of mathematically, abstractly.

52:48They're very, very related. Learning and evolution are very, very analogous. So a mind is an accelerated version of evolution. It's learning much, much faster than evolution. It can itself. So we're accelerating evolution with the mind. And so that's very, very powerful when you can accelerate evolution. So all the things that we see, all the good things that we've seen evolved on this planet, we're accelerating those processes now and making things that are dry and silicon or other materials. And so that's very exciting. That's a huge, huge, powerful force that we're unleashing for the first time on the planet, okay?

53:26And so I think it's way beyond fire and even our own invention of language in the long term. We're just at the very, very beginning. We haven't really done very much comparatively to what we'll be doing, but it is momentous moment where for the first time, we're figuring out what it is. And as humans, this is big because we evolved with other Setian beings. There were a lot of other Neanderthals and beyond when we were evolving, but at least for the past 50 ,000 years, we've been the sole Setyan being on the planet. The hegemon. We're now going to go back to having other Setyan beings. And we don't know today why we're the only ones.

54:07Was it deliberate or was it accidental? We don't know. But we're going to have to share the world with other Setyan beings in some ways. And we don't even know what that looks like or feels like. But that's another momentous threshold in our planet. But again, And that's sort of long-term. In the short term, we have AI of a very, very narrow sense of pattern recognition and pattern generation. We synthesize one type of cognition, which is pattern recognition, pattern generation. And all the things we're seeing today, only because we synthesize that one single kind of cognition. We haven't been able to synthesize deduction, symbolic reasoning, all the other kinds of things that we do in our own brain, we haven't been able to synthesize yet.

54:49So we're still at the very beginnings of this. I think one of the things that affects us in the long term, say the next century, is that we're going to be undergoing a century-long identity crisis as a species. Going back to the individual of like, what is it you want to be? Why you're here? What do you do that nobody else can do? Now we're going to ask that at the species level. What are humans for? Why are we here? What are we good for? What can we do that others can? And then we have genetic engineering where we can actually change our own bodies. And so what is it that we want to become? And one of the things that AIs are going to force us to answer is because we make these AIs, we train them on humans.

55:32And humans are on average sexist and ageist and racist and mean. And so the AIs are like average humans, but we say, no, no, no, no, you have to be better than us. So what does that look like? What does a better human look like? We don't have a good model for that. We don't have a consensus on that. And yet we're going to demand that our AIs be better than us. So that's going to force us in some ways to become better humans ourselves. Is there anything else that you think is over or underestimated about what's happening in this technological change? Yeah. I mean, the idea of existential threat is completely overrated.

56:09It's a fantasy. I'll tell you what's overrated. Intelligence itself is overrated. It's overrated by guys who like to think. We think that thinking is the most important thing in the universe. To get things done is not necessarily the most important. But take Einstein and a tiger and put them in a cage. Who wins? It's not the smartest guy. Why is that? Because it takes other things besides intelligence to get things done in the world. It's not the company with the smartest people that will dominate. It's not the smartest person in the room that necessarily knows what to do. Intelligence is necessary but not sufficient to get things done in the world.

56:42And the people who imagine the smart, genius AI I think are what I'm guilty of thinkism in the sense that they think that thinking trumps everything else, and it doesn't. There are so many other things that you need to accomplish something to have effect on actually making things happen, including empathy, including perseverance, all kinds of things. And so a lot of the fears of the existential threat of the AI is taking over and killing us all are based on the idea that if you have AI genius level thing, that it will overwhelm anything else in the world. But what we know is that the will to survive will always overwhelm the will to predate.

57:24I mean, this is why only one out of 10 predations work, because the will to survive is much more powerful than the will to kill. And so it'd be really tough. Intelligence alone is not enough. So anyway, so that's overrated. I think general intelligence is overrated. One of the things that I remember distinctly from my teenage years was my two favorite magazines, which were probably Maxim and Wired, my two burgeoning interests as a teenager. And you've also created so many interesting other forms of content, whether that's photography, whether that's books. What do you think explains the best, I guess I'll just call it content media.

58:03What do you think unites the very best things that you've created and that you've appreciated that others have created? One of the things I learned about magazines was that the best magazines at their best times, because magazines can outlive individuals like the New Yorker say, is that they work best when they're an expression of the personality of the editor. The more idiosyncratic creations are, to me, that's one of the commonalities. If you unleash the creators to really give them that room to create unencumbered and constrained by the lawyers, by the bureaucracy, by committees, by the thought police, whatever it is.

58:45The more that that can actually be an expression of idiosyncratic creativity, to me, the stronger that is. We have that with novels because it's a sole person. Usually, if they have any kind of clout, they can demand certain things. It's much harder to do with other media like a movie because there's just so many people involved. And that's one of the reasons why I think AI is going to be hugely transformative because we'll be able to have a 90-minute movie made by a single person, auto-generating all these other characters and stuff at their command, at their direction, the director. That'll be true for games.

59:19It's true now in newsletters. The newsletters I follow are by people with very strong personalities. And we own books that you like. There's somebody with a very strong point of view that we don't see that as much of the screen that's now the center of our lives. And I think we miss that. And I think AI will help us regain that by actually enabling individuals or very, very small partner teams to create works in this medium of the screen. When you were running Wired, and Wired obviously was like the expression of your taste and personality, what practices, what did you do to protect that? That seems incredibly desirable in any publication, that it's like the taste of the person magnified or something.

1:00:07Yeah, we projected it by owning more than 50 % of which we lost. Very terrible, terrible story. We lost control, and that's why we had to sell it. That's when we all left. Okay, we left, not because it wasn't funny anymore, but because we lost control of it. We weren't having to report to anybody. We were just trying to make the magazine that we wanted to read. And it was totally fun because we could say anything. That was one of the ways I would say is you have to retain control, ownership of it. And this goes back to what I was talking about articulating. For me, that was something that we were very slow to see at Wired, but I did learn that.

1:00:45There's a bit of advice in my book about what we learned from the advertising people, which is to get your message across, you have to simplify, simplify, simplify, and then exaggerate. There was a sense of like us coming to understand what it was that we're doing in our role and being able to, again, articulate that to the people. So this idea of the optimistic view was not something that was so evident at the very beginning, but it became evident that that was our role, that that was what we were doing in part, that that was sort of what we were about. And that helped tremendously in terms of deciding whether this is a wired story or not.

1:01:25There's tons and tons of directions to go. And so being able to brand it in that sense was us being partly enabled by articulating it ourselves and being able to do that. Do you think then, like, it's so interesting thinking across our conversation, how maybe the meta piece of advice is your don't be the best, be the only. It seems like in business, in creating, in family, in career, in spirituality, this is the advice to end all advice. Do you think that's right? I think that's right. Again, that came from my time at Wired. We'd have story meetings every month, and we were trying to make assignments to story ideas that we had.

1:02:05There was three editors. And I'd have these ideas like, this is a really great story. We've got to find a really great author, writer for this. This is a really great story. And then nobody else in the room thought it was a good idea. It's like, eh, I don't know. It's a drug or nah or that's, nope, get that. And so I would kill that idea and go on to the next idea. They got more ideas, okay? So we do more ideas. But then maybe a year later, you know, that was a really good idea. I really think we should do this. It's still valid. This is really important. I think this would be a great piece. In this case, it was like, nope, I don't get it.

1:02:40What's the point? If it came back a third time, after me trying to kill it, if it came back a third time, I would say, let me try this one more time. And if it got killed the third time, then I would say, oh, I get it now. This is the piece that I have to do. I have to write this one because I can't give it away. I think it's really important. I'm the only one who kind of appreciates it. And so those were always my best pieces. It was like, oh, and then when I'm writing it, it's like, there's no competition. I've been trying to give it away for years. There's no competition, so I can just do this.

1:03:12And it's easy because it's me. And so there was a sense of like, okay, I'm the only. And so when I go on from that, what I learned was to always ask myself, yes, this would be fun to do. Yes, I'm really good at this. Yes, I could get paid to do it. But is there anybody else who could do it? And that's true in business as well. Because if there's someone else doing it, then I don't want to do it. I want to go on immediately to the thing that no one else is doing, the only. Because in the best, it's highly competitive, only one number one. And you can easily be displaced and become number two instantly.

1:03:47And so you want to be in this direction where you are working, doing things that you find easy, that other people find hard, that only you appreciate. And so that's true for companies too. You really want to be doing something, not trying to become another OS, another social media app. Come on. Those are occupied. Those are occupied by players with network effects. You're not going to work there. You want to go in a direction that's the only. And asking yourself, if you have competitors, they can be good establishing a field and bringing credentials and believability to it and a market. but the advantage that we had at Wired was that we didn't have any other.

1:04:32We were so only at the time. There was nothing else like it. And it was hard because trying to sell advertising was impossible in the beginning. That's the business. It's not subscription, but advertisers. And there was no category. Wired didn't fit into any category. It was like an incredibly difficult sell. Newsstands didn't want to carry it because there was no category. Where do we put this magazine? Computer? No, no, it's not computer magazine. It's technology lifestyle magazine. What's that? There's no category for there. So it's hard. It's really hard to be the only in that sense. But if you can, the rewards are very, very high.

1:05:06And I think that's where you want to aim your life, your family, your company, country. I think it's amazing that the advice in the book is somehow both counterintuitive and obvious. And just to sum up what I take from this, the smartest strategy, even if you're trying to be selfish, is to be generous and unique. And almost everyone does the opposite of those two things, which is totally bizarre. It's also a wonderful excuse to ask you the same question now I've asked, I guess, approaching 500 times now, I've asked every single guest I've ever talked to. What is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you?

1:05:40When I think of kindness, I think of a moment many, many, many, many, many years ago when I was traveling in the Philippines, when the Philippines was an incredibly poor developing country. There was not even a good map to the country. There was no guidebook, literally nothing. And I was traveling, exploring there. And I arrived somewhere at night. No idea where I was going. I don't even remember why I arrived there. But what happened was some family living in a grass hut waved me in. And I remember that they were going to give me dinner. And they sent a kid out, which I saw, to buy some canned food somewhere.

1:06:23Because they didn't have food themselves. and they took some very, very precious cash, I could just see, to buy food for me. It was for me to eat unbelievably kind. It was like, I don't know, like some random person walks by your house and you're going to empty your life savings to give to them. So obviously I had far more than they had and I could have bought my own food, though there wasn't really much for sale. It was like a little tiny canned fish, but it was incredibly precious. And this is what they're giving me is they're giving me like canned tuna fish with a fork. They're feeding me unbelievably kind.

1:07:02I just don't remember that because they were giving not out of their surplus, but out of their basic needs. So it was not a luxury. It was really, really powerful. And they had no reason to do it. It was just hospitality. It was really incredibly kind. Well, I'm so thankful for the conversation today. I'm so thankful for all that you've written and put into the world. Please know it affects people like me all over the place and makes us think for the better and hopefully act for the better too. So Kevin, wonderful to meet you and thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure. I really enjoyed this.

1:07:31You ask great questions. I love your spirit. Thank you for having me. If you enjoyed this episode, visit joincolossus.com where you'll find every episode of this podcast complete with hand edited transcripts. You can also subscribe to Colossus Review, our quarterly print, digital, and private audio publication featuring in-depth profiles of the founders, investors, and companies that we admire most. Learn more at joincolossus.com slash subscribe.