321: ChatGPT as Universal Intern and Permission Not to Be a Billionaire with Kevin Kelly

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Welcome back Pivoters. I am so excited to have returning guest Kevin Kelly back on the pod. I first had Kevin on the show in 2016 after we met in south by Southwest and the opener to those show notes was that I almost fainted when he said yes to be on the Pivot podcast. To this day, eight years into podcasting, he is still one of my all time favorite guests and I told Kevin before he record that I prefer to embarrass my guests on the air. So before I read your official bio, Kevin, welcome back to the show.

It's a delight. Thank you Jenny for inviting me back and I am so glad to share some new ideas with your audience and fans, which is my tribe. So thank you.

Well, your work has been such an influence over the years and we are going to talk about your new book that's coming out. Excellent advice for wisdom. I wish I'd known earlier and it's also kismet. It's just perfect timing that we have this interview today because Pandora's box of ChatGPT has been opened and I feel the paradigm shift happening and it started a couple months ago when it first really was open to the public and I think some people can't avoid hearing about it. But then some of us, including me, my husband, are really diving in. And when you were on the show in 2016 we were talking about your book, the Inevitable, talking about the technium, this almost emergent organic or superorganism that has its own urges and tendencies that's advancing technology. And even back then you were saying that we will all be paid by how well we whisper to AI. So to have this sort of Cambrian AI explosion with ChatGPT and have you here today, I just can't resist but kick off with that. So the first thing we did was have IT write a new bio for you. So let me just read what ChatGPT wrote, because as I was going to read yours, it didn't sizzle and I thought, this doesn't sound right. Is this your latest bio? So just so you know, here's what ChatGPT came up with while we were live, by the way listeners Kevin Kelly is a renowned technology and science writer, futurist and thinker who has been at the forefront of digital culture for decades. He was the founding executive editor of Wired Magazine and has authored multiple books including what Technology Wants and the Inevitable. Kelly's work explores the intersection of technology, culture and society and he is known for his thought provoking insights on the future of innovation and the impact of technology on our lives. In addition to writing and speaking, Kelly is involved in a variety of tech related ventures including his Cool Tools podcast which I love, and is a co founder of the All Species foundation which aims to catalog and identify all species on Earth. He lives in Pacifica, California with his family.

How to do that is amazingly correct, succinct, fun and much better than I could write.

It's so much better than what I had too, and it also fits perfectly. The talk you're going to give coming up at the time of this recording at south by Southwest is about the universal intern. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

As you mentioned, we're at this moment where we've opened up this amazing tool chest of new things and new problems called generative AI, which is another phase in our unleashing of AI. We've had mostly pattern recognition AI, the things that could do, face recognition, that kind of stuff, and now we're doing ones that generate things. And you have the image generators that were all abuzz a couple months ago, the Mid Journeys and the Dalles, and now we have the text generators like ChatGPT and Bing and you and others. And this is a tremendously exciting time. I'm very, very optimistic about what's happening. We can get into some of the problems, but by and large what we have now is the first draft of an intern that everybody can have. I think that's the closest analogy, the closest kind of intellectual framework that we have is that these are interns that were employing to do the kinds of things that we would maybe not have time to do or maybe not have the patience to do that we would love doing, but they're not necessarily ready for prime time. Like, say, the intro that was there. If I was to use it, I might still do a little editing on it before I posted it on my own website. There's a couple things that still it missed or could be said even better. But it's like an intern. It's like you gotta check their work. You hand them some jobs, and they do them very fast, immediately. And they may not be 100% perfect, but we're gonna get really good at communicating with them. Some people will get better than others. And we'll, for the first time, have that intern power, the co pilot, the assistant, the guide that we've always wanted to have. And they are so far from perfect. They don't understand anything. You got to explain everything to them again and again. But they're very cheap. You know, they're cheap, expensive, accessible, anytime, anywhere. And it's just starting. This is just the first draft. They're not as reliable right now as we would like, but they'll get better. And we have a whole discussion about how that can and can happen. So I'm super excited. And I'm using these every day. I use one version to generate art, one piece of art every day. And I'm using the others, like the Jaji Bing, to do all kinds of things. I've been spending time interviewing people, asking them what they are using them for. And to see the variety of ways in which people are using them is just thrilling.

Oh, I was just gonna ask you, what are some of the favorite things that you've tried or the favorite results from something you didn't know if it would work?

Just last night, in our family, we had the doctor submit an mri. The diagnosis said, do an MRI cat scan of you. And the radiologist had a very technical summary or report. And so I just cut and pasted into japt. I said, summarize this MRI report into plain English. And oh, my gosh, it was just all these technical medical terms. You don't know. It just said it in, like two or three paragraphs, very, very clearly, very succinctly. Normally, I might have to have, like a doctor friend or somebody interpreted or someone who knows him. And this was like that. It was like, oh, they did the research. I've used it to make up summaries for this book kind of like talking points. I asked it to make a rough draft of a talking points for my book. The excellent advice for living. It was like an intern. There were things that were not right, there were things that were not well said, but there were lots of things that I hadn't thought of. And then there was a nice organization that was a good start. So it was like a first draft. And for me, a first draft is sometimes the hardest thing. So I had a friend who is a screenwriter for Hollywood and he asked it to analyze his script for reversal points and plot inconsistencies. And it did. I had another friend who had a bunch of private videos posted on YouTube and asked it to generate a code, you know, scripting code that would download the non public videos to his hard drive. And it wrote the code to do that. It wasn't perfect. He had to kind of work on it. It was intern's work. So that's where we are. Get a first draft of the universal intern that can do things that might take us an hour to do, or half hour. You can do it in a few minutes. It's not perfect, but it's useful, it's practical, we can work with it.

I'm so with you. I mean, of course, just because I knew I was talking to you, but I've done it a few times now. I said, please prepare 25 interview questions for Kevin Kelly. And they were pretty broad. There was a few good ones in there. I appreciate it. As you said, they're generic. It's truly what an intern, a smart, good intern would come up with. But maybe not super experienced or not as nuanced. There's not as much curation, I find with ChatGPT. Like you still have to be the one. You said you were making visual art as well. It's like the conceptual work is still up to us, the really creative conceptual. Even this interview, like, where do I really want to take it? How is this conversation going to be unique from any other one you do on your podcast tour? ChatGPT is not really going to tell me that. Although it might.

It might give you one idea that you hadn't thought. But that as everybody knows, one good idea is worth a lot.

That's true. Right? And it did one of them that I pulled out. So I altogether came up with 65 questions for you in less than five minutes. And I asked about cool tools and the technium and the new book, but there was one it said you have written about the idea of a cognisphere, the interconnected network of human Knowledge and intelligence. How can we harness this network to solve complex problems? I thought that was a good one. I forgot about the cognisphere.

The thing that I want to emphasize that we're kind of skirting around, and this is particularly true in the discussions about the AI art generators, which is that nobody that I can tell. And I've been asking, and I may even offer a bounty at some point, but I've been asking around for names of a real person who has lost their job to AI. It has not happened anywhere, and particularly not in art. I know there's a couple people suing Stable Diffusion and others because they're using their work, but they can't actually show harm in the sense that they haven't been fired, they haven't lost a job. A lot of the concern about AI is what I would call worry about a potential problem for the third person. Nobody is saying, I have been hurt by this. They're saying, well, maybe I have a friend who might be hurt by this. And so far, these technologies, including the art one, they're not causing unemployment. They're amplifying and supplemental to what people are doing. They may change what we do, but mostly what they're doing, if they're used by themselves, they're going to generate content for places where there is no content. So a lot of the stuff that I use the AI image generators for is for like my PowerPoint presentations or blog posts. I wasn't hiring human artists to do this. I was taking them off of the web. I'm generating them. And in places like the blog post, I didn't have any images at all. So I'm using images where there were no images. And so that's a lot of where this is being used or like for music. AI generated music is going to be like right now, this conversation with us could have a soundtrack that the music would ebb and flow and change depending on what we were saying. And so there is no music right now because making a soundtrack for this would be kind of expensive and technically difficult to do. But we could have an AI generate this. It would not generate a symphony that we want to listen to sit down and listen to by itself, but as putting music where there is no music, that's what this is good for. So this in turn is generating things where there wasn't anything at all before, or working with us to generate something high caliber, working with us as a team. And neither of those really affect or cause the loss of employment for other people. So there are lots of things to be concerned about, but I just don't think that is one of them.

I do wonder how it will shift the nature of entry level work and the work that interns would do. For example, my friend Mitch put a link to one of his podcast episodes and he said, please generate 10 social shares. Bam. Within a minute. And that used to be something that you would pay a social media manager or an intern. And I find that for a lot of colleagues that I have now, I don't mean to disparage the industry. Some social media teams are amazing. They're incredible. And many social media content that is generated is kind of generic. So in an instant, ChatGPT replaced what for years he had been struggling to find someone who would blow his mind. You know, because it was generic, it wasn't amazing, it wasn't a home run, but neither was it when he hired people. And so it does seem like teams that are doing kind of generic run of the mill work that's going to have to shift. And if you're an intern, your skill might need to be editing the AI, not just generating random stuff from scratch.

Exactly. So it bumps up the level of the involvement of the AI. Human intern is the one who's running the AI and they are trying to up the level, up the quality, because you're right. And that's the thing. These models are trained on the mass of human content, which is an average, it's average stuff. I mean, that's the nature of content is most of it is mediocre at best. So We've trained these AIs and they're reading basically mediocre stuff and they're autocompleting it in a mediocre way. It's serviceable because that's the average thing on the web or the training set. And by the way, they're also trained on human behavior, on average. And so on average, human behavior is not very noble. We shouldn't be shocked when it behaves like an average human does. So I think the intern's job, the actual human interns become in trying to elevate or improve what the generic version. So it's not as generic, so it's a little bit more distinctive, a little bit more appropriate, a little bit more customized and that's a better job.

We'll be right back just after this.

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I feel like your argument a lot of futurists for a long time, which is that it's usually the jobs that aren't very rewarding anyway that tend to go away or go by the way of technology and then we keep moving toward more and more creative or care work or empathetic. Yes, on the subject of generic content, one of my little futurisms as I look to what's going to happen with this? I'm not currently active on social media and I can just picture LinkedIn becoming like a glut of generic content because I so often hear people saying oh I should be on social. It's good for my career, it's good for my business. I really should have a presence or I should build a platform. It's a lot of shoulds. And I just feel like with ChatGPT people are going to do by obligation now like 10x and post regularly, but it will be even more generic stuff. What do you think? Are we going to get overwhelmed by generic content and therefore the people who are truly interesting, authentic and creative will just stand out that much more?

I think it's self limiting. We will come very quickly to be able to spot generically in turn produce content. We'll ignore it, we'll filter it out. It won't be effective. It won't do what it's trying to do. If it doesn't work, people will stop making it. I'm not really worried about the flood of mediocre stuff because that is the current state of the world. Most of the stuff made by humans is mediocre. Yeah, there'll be more of it, but there's no reason to keep producing it if it isn't effective. This is a real grand project. That remains to be seen how we do. One of the issues that we have is whether we can trust these. It's like, can we trust our interns for crucial things? And we would like to be able to train the intern to be more reliable, to be better. We don't know how to do that right now. Another way of saying this, right now we train these models on the average human who is racist and sexist. And even the great works of literature talk about bad people and war and things that are not the best of human behavior. And that's all contained in the stuff that we've trained our AIs on. And what we're saying is we want you to be better than us. We want you to behave even better than we behave. It's like you're a child and you're going to be better than us. And that's actually possible. We can actually give these AIs ethical, moral guidelines because it's just code. We can just put the code in. But the challenge we have before us is that we don't know what the code is for better than human behavior, for making us better. We don't know how to do that. Our own ethics and morality are very shallow, very inconsistent, very flimsy. If you go very deep. We realize that we don't know. I mean, we don't have the answers to the trolley problem of like, okay, should the self driving car, should it give priority to the safety of the passenger or to the pedestrians? Well, we don't know. We humans haven't answered that and we give ourselves a pass. But we're requiring the AIs have an answer. They have to have one or the other. They have to choose and how they choose. And we don't have a very good map of how we behave better than ourselves than we currently do. And so we don't have any consensus about that. And that's to me, the exciting, decades long conversation that we're going to have. These are mediocre interns. We would like them to be much better humans than we are ourselves.

That's true.

How we go ahead and tell them that. What are we going to tell them?

Isn't that fascinating? It's like it'll be old news by the time this comes out. But the most recent furor over Kevin Roose's post, his interactions with Bing, telling him, you're not happily married, leave your wife, be with me.

Right, right.

And we're so shocked, we're morally appalled by this. But you're right, I mean there's plenty of stuff out there in the human world that's dirty or downright tragic or awful, evil, et cetera. You're making such a great point that we want the AI to be morally superior than us, basically. And yet we're at one of the most divisive moments in our history, at least in America, where nobody can agree on anything. We don't agree on facts, we don't on truth, we don't agree on morality, we don't agree on anything. So how are we going to teach our little AI child.

What to do? Oh, very interesting. Okay, well, to an exact counter to this, you've written maybe with ChatGPT, I don't know. You've written a great book partly from your birthday posts that Tim Ferriss is, I think, where I first saw him link to these all your great advice for living that you dedicate the book to your kids. This feels like it's really your curation. Talk about the opposite of AI. This is your wisdom from many years. Lots of career pivots. So I'd love to shift to ask you some questions about themes from the book, if that's okay with you.

Please. I'm really delighted to talk about them.

One of the themes that stood out to me from a couple of bits of advice and the book is just full of them. It's really easy to read. It's the kind of book you could pick up and turn to any random page like an oracle, just get a missive for the day. But there's this theme, a couple of them. You say you really don't want to be famous. Read the biography of any famous person. Another one. The rich have money, the wealthy have time. It's easier to become wealthy than rich.

Yeah.

Talk to us about was there ever a point in your career? Because being the co founder of Wired and you've had moments in your career that you were super prominent, you still are. Where you had to grapple with wanting kind of the wrong things, the things that wouldn't fulfill you in the end, like fame, like wealth, et cetera.

Because I dropped out of college at a time when that was not at all a thing to do. It was kind of a kiss of death really. But I kind of resigned myself to kind of always being poor but having a lot of time to do what I wanted to. And even back then in my teens, I kind of knew that that trade off of having control of your time, to me I was richer for that than having a bunch of money, which I was resigned to never really having. The thing about fame is I'VE had the privilege of being around some famous and very, very wealthy people and just seeing their lives. It's kind of like a rude awakening, which is that that fame thing is just incredible burden. And it's inescapable in a weird way. The only escape they have is to be isolated from things. And you can't walk down a street without having to deal with this other dimension of your fame. It was like being in prison. There was almost nothing attractive about it at all. And the wealth was also weird. It didn't make much difference in weird kind of a thing. Like a billionaire who has $100 billion. Well, I can tell you that his clothes are not a hundred billion times better than my clothes. All right? His car is not 100 billion times better. It's ridiculous. Their lifestyle is basically like a millionaire. Okay, that's nice, but it's way beyond. There's a lot of zeros there that are meaningless, I guess is the word. And not only meaningless, but again, another huge burden in terms of having to deal with this in the way that it overtakes your life. I would say to people, and I'm not. It would sound like I'm saying this from a very privileged position. Maybe it am. But you do not want to be a billionaire.

I'm telling you, you don't really want to be a billionaire and you want to have a lot of money. Okay, sure, that's fine. But you don't want to be a billionaire because that is a burden. It's a whole other thing. It's a kind of a prison. Yeah. Try to be rich, make multiple millions, make a hundred million, but don't be a billionaire.

I love that you hereby have permission to stop a billionaire.

For a lot of people, this would be an achievable goal.

Yes, yes. And it's also interesting. They're definitely not a billion times happier. I think what's surprised me, my awakenings. And you've probably been around many more famous and rich people than me, but sometimes I'll meet an exceptionally beautiful person. Let's say a beautiful woman that is literally is a supermodel, a world renowned. But they're not guaranteed any more happiness than anyone else. In fact, sometimes less or they struggle with more. And it's just this reminder that it's not. And I don't know why we have this glitch in our psyche, or at least I do that I always have to catch it. That thinks like, well, if I just had more money or if I looked like that, or if I weighed this. It's a trick. It's an illusion. It's not real.

No, it's not. It's a false thing. So I try to emphasize with these bits of wisdom, is that you want to strive not to acquire things, but to have experiences, to have things that no money can buy. Those are the most valuable things, are the ones that no money can buy. And that's even a little, kind of a practical thing. So I get invited to talk to lots of places. And what entices me to go somewhere, to travel somewhere, if my host can arrange something, a visit or conversation or something that no money could buy. It's like, I went to talk to the Space Force, and it's like, okay, I'll come talk to the Space Force. I know you probably don't even have the budget, the US Space Force, but I would like to visit Cheyenne Mountain, where NORAD is. There's no amount of money that can get you there, but in exchange for this, that the right people could get me there. So that was much more valuable to me than any kind of money would be. It was something that no money could buy. And that's true of, like, your love. It's true of your kids and their respect and family. Those are the valuable things that have nothing really to do with money. And so if you can arrange your life to seek out those things that don't have a price, that can't really be bought, because those are the things that you're going to treasure the most.

I've had that exact bit of wisdom to cherish the things that no money can buy. Ringing in my ears ever since I read the book. So for this last week, and it's had a lot of influence, even on the last few days of just, I couldn't buy my husband. I mean, I could. That'd be kind of weird, but I can't buy the connection that we have. I can't buy the relationship with my dog and our visits to the park every day. So those words really have resonated. And you say, you know, you are tapping into universal wisdom, and yet sometimes to just hear it and see it again and see it in the way you're saying it. Like, you also say, cultivate 12 people who love you because they're worth more than 12 million people who like you. Yes, that goes back to that fame thing.

Yeah, it is. You want people not to like you, but to respect you. Actually, you know, it's kind of focusing on things that really matter over time. And there were things that took me a long time to kind of realize that I wanted to aim for that I didn't see when I was younger and I wished I knew about or I wish someone had articulated this into a little maxim that I could repeat to myself, because that's sort of how this began as I wrote these down for me as kind of a way to compress an entire book of wisdom and advice into a single sentence that I could hold onto. It's like a little handle that I could use to repeat to myself to cultivate these habits. My favorite example is if I know that I have something in my house but I've lost track of where it is and I finally find it. The little thing I repeat to myself is don't put it back where I found it. Put it back to where I first looked for it, because that's I'm going to look for it again.

Now that I've articulated that, I can repeat that to myself. Okay, put it back where I first look for it and other things like that, where I may kind of have some intuitive understanding, but being able to have a little tiny tweetable maxim proverb enables me to kind of repeat it and remind myself of it and have it begin to work as a seed of a habit.

Yes, and even the example you shared about bartering, I love how creative that is that you consider opportunities not purely on what they can pay you and charging through the roof and then you might end up in really weird places, if that was your only rubric for accepting speaking gigs, for example, just end up in really strange rooms with people who have really oddly high budgets, you know, but asking for an experience and then they're probably so happy and delighted to show you more about what they do or to be able to say yes to you is so joyful. It's just a true win win.

We'll be right back just after this.

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Since I first met you many, many years ago, I've always had still in my head of give all your ideas away. Like, give them away. Don't hoard ideas, be generous. And the ones that stick to you that no one else can do, sure, work on those as your next project. But the spirit of generosity seems like another big theme in the book.

It is, and it's related to another piece of advice about, which is the kind of a classical biblical golden rule about, you know, the more you give away, the more you get, which is this weird universal paradox. It doesn't make any sense at all. There's no logic to it that the most selfish thing you can do is to give things away, because you're going to get all of it back and more. That kind of generous thing, which you can count on, that it's so ingrained in the universe that you can actually count on it. That's really weird, but very, very powerful. And it kind of is the mechanism by which this other piece of advice that I like that is sort of at the core of the book, which is don't aim to be the best, aim to be the only. And you can arrive at this being the only, because if you keep giving away the things and other people can do them, that means that you weren't the one to do them, that someone else could do them. You should be focused on the things that only you can do until you get there by trying to give your things away. And the ones that you can't give away are the ones that you do. So there's actually kind of a practical practice of that generosity also helping to move you, to enable you to find out what it is that you are uniquely kind of made to do. So when you get there by being generous and by being productive about generating ideas every day, knowing that most of the ones aren't going to work or that you're going to give away. But there's always more where that comes from. And anybody who's creative knows that you have to kind of do a lot of it and you're doing a lot of it so that you are at ease with the idea that there's more from where that came from. Therefore, I can afford to give them away, afford to try to give them away, because there's more where that comes from. Because I know that because every day I'm doing it. And I can rest in that assurance that there'll be more from where that comes from.

I love that as a way of finding what we're uniquely suited to do. Because that's usually where people get stuck. Like, what is my purpose? What should I do?

It's so hard.

Yeah. And you say that's the work of our lifetime. That's why we're here. Our purpose is to find our purpose. It's a mystery on purpose.

And by the way, that's why we're surrounded by people. That's why we need other people. That's where we need people in our lives. We need family, friends, partners, we need customers, clients, we need fans because they're going to see where we're going before we will. And we cannot see what we're really best at by ourselves. It's just impossible.

I agree.

We need to have that outside thing. So you need, and I need to pay attention to what other people say. So it's not just a matter of ignoring what everybody says. There is a role for that. There's a time and role for that. But we also need to pay attention to what everybody says. Those are signals, those are data points, those are things that are trying to help us. And so life is this sort of weird walk along the life edge between ignoring what everybody else says and listening to what everybody else says and trying to have enough wisdom to be able to navigate that weird stance.

And as you say, with the sense of calm and playfulness. It's also paradoxical, isn't it? That's the funny thing of giving any advice at all. When I wrote Pivot, I had a sidebar in every chapter called the Pivot paradox. Because I say sometimes the grass really is greener and it's greener over there. You are happier, but a lot of times it's not. And it's like all of these. That's also part of the wisdom, is the paradox and everything.

I agree. I totally agree that I think at the foundation of the universe, this paradox and that paradox is like even where creation comes from. Basically, whether it's God or the universe, something was self created. That is impossible. There's no logic. Self creation is not logical. It's just inherently paradoxical. Which means that all the good things in life, from life itself to the mind, are inherently rooted in some kind of weird recursive self paradox. Douglas Hofstadter calls a strange loop where it loops back into itself. There's this kind of endless snake swallowing its tail. The self curation, the looping back, the inescapable paradox of things like the golden rule about getting more back. We need to acknowledge that and not be freaked out by it and then to honor it by trusting it, by trusting. This called pronoia, the opposite of paranoia. Paranoia is where the entire world's conspiring to do you in. Pronoia is where the entire world is conspiring behind your back to help you succeed. And you're kind of trusting that trust. It is easy for a person like me to grow up in a place like America, the time like America, with the background that I have to say I can trust the universe. But I also have spent enough time in the developing world among people who were among the poorest of the poor to know that even with their backgrounds, there were people who decided to trust the universe and others who didn't, and those who did, despite all the things against them, they thrived and prospered and were happier and more content and more satisfied and more vibrant and more full of them and more like themselves because they trusted the universe.

Yeah, I've noticed that too. Sometimes it's people who don't have very much who are so positive and so hopeful or prayerful or trusting, and almost that trust gives them a sense of presence. Yeah, it's like they've lifted the cloud of thinking, oh, everyone's out to get me, woe is me. And they're just so grateful for what they have or what is given that then it attracts more. It really does. It really does. And I don't mean that either. And it's just privileged, like manifest, whatever you want, that billion dollars sense, but just that that energy and presence seems to bring its own blessings. And then you look for the blessings where they are, even the tiniest ones.

Absolutely. I am by temperament very sunny and optimistic and not very athletic. But I can become better. I can always improve. No matter where we start, we can always improve. And so we can grow, we can keep always growing no matter where it is that we start. And we don't start at the same place. And we have. There's an unfairness to the world and about the opportunities that we have and the way in which that is distributed. But we all have the power and the privilege and the, I hope, the expectation that we can improve what we've been given. And so for me, this life journey is not about destinations, it's about directions. And the one bit of advice, again going back to the book, is it kind of doesn't matter where you start because you're not going to end There. This is my observation, looking at now many, many people's in their own careers and their own personal journeys, is that there's very few people who end up where they were aiming for in the beginning. And the more interesting people in my book have a very convoluted, detour filled, backtracking, serendipitous journey in their lives. And you could have never guessed that they would have ended up where they were from where they started. So I say don't worry too much about where you're starting from. As long as you're kind of moving in a direction, you'll arrive at somewhere fabulous.

I love that. I love serendipity too. It's just one of my favorite things to cultivate. If we could leave listeners with one experiment, one thing that they can try in the next week or two, what would it be?

You'll be invited to an argument for at least one of the arguments. Don't attend it.

I love that.

Don't attend the arguments that you're invited to in the coming weeks.

I love that. Decline the invitation to the argument, whichever one you're invited to. That's great. Thank you for such a thoughtful answer. That one's very delightful. The last thing I want to ask you before we close out, because this may be a paradox of what you just said of serendipity and just having all these detours and pivots. You also say this might be the most mysterious that I picked out. At least to me in the book, it's kind of a coan. You say the main thing is to keep the main thing. The main thing. What do you mean by that? While also allowing life to surprise us.

For me, it was a reminder to kind of focus. Another piece of advice in the book is if you don't actually need to make more money, sometimes you just need to focus the money that you have. Focus in terms of the money that's already flowing through you, focusing it, using it more astutely, better, wiser, more innovatively. And the same with time. We have a limited amount of time. One other piece of advice I say in the book is because everybody is limited in time, the highest leverage thing you could do is actually to buy other people's time outsourcing things. I was so late in understanding that. That was absolutely something I wish I knew when I was 22 is I could hire people. I was a do it yourselfer and I just didn't understand this idea. That was a high leverage thing. So it's another way of focusing time. You're easily distracted and keeping the main thing. The main thing, it's not necessarily like through your life. This is much more of a kind of a project oriented thing where you are going to focus and that focusing is identifying the main thing and then kind of keep returning to it like a mantra or like, you know, whenever you're kind of throwing into the part. No, no, no, I got to keep the main thing. The main thing. That's the main thing.

Thanks so much for listening to this.

Episode of the Pivot Podcast.

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