Kevin Kelly Explores 'In the Year 2525,' Tech, and Longevity

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Will we still be alive in the year 2525? Hi everyone, I'm business coach Steve Sandusky for Barron's Advisor, The Way Forward Podcast. If you're of a certain age, or perhaps a fan of music from the 1960s, you may remember a song called In the Year 2525 by the band Zager and Evans. They were a true one-hit wonder, and their song was very prescient in terms of causing us to think about the pace of technology, the future, and the meaning of life. In today's episode, I talked to Kevin Kelly, and we use that song as a framework to dive into our conversation about technology, longevity, retirement, and life's big questions. And we wrap up with a few key pieces of advice from his new book, Excellent Advice for Living. Kevin is the co-founder and senior maverick at Wired Magazine. He's authored numerous books, including The Inevitable, What Technology Wants, and his newest book, Excellent Advice for Living. He's a former editor publisher of The Whole Earth Review, and he's a photographer and student of Asian and digital culture. With that, let's get started with Kevin Kelly. We're going to start out in the year 1969, and my wife has always accused me of being someone who speaks in song lyrics. So we are going to start with a song here. Called In the Year 2525 by a band called Zager and Evans. And now they were a one-hit wonder.

One-hit wonder, right?

One-hit wonder. This was their only hit. In fact, they are the only group that had a number one song in the US, a number one song in the UK, and never had another song that hit the charts at all. So they are truly the epitome of a one-hit wonder. But I think this is really going to be a good launching pad because you talk so much about technology, you talk about the future, you talk about longevity. And so this song, I think, interesting because written in 1969, you were a teenager, I think, back then. I was alive back then, but not super conscious of everything that was happening that year. I was sort of oblivious to everything, I guess you could say. But I'm gonna read the lyrics and we're gonna stop at each part, and I want you to give some commentary on where we're at relative to what they were predicting. So the song starts by saying, in the year 2525, If man is still alive, if woman can survive, they may find. So we start off in the year 2525, and these writers are even projecting, are we even going to be around then? So first question, is humanity on the trajectory we're on? Are we going to be here in 2525?

We will be around, but my guess is that in 500 years we will have speciated. So the we will be problematic in the sense of what do we mean by the we, we might literally have more than one variety of us by then. Meaning with genetic engineering, there will be people, I think like my friends, the Amish who would say under no circumstances shall I or any of our descendants ever get our genes modified. And there's other people who are like, yes, tomorrow, take out that Parkinson's gene in our family line. And that's where it starts. So I think there will be a we, but that we may not be who we are right now.

Okay. So then the song basically goes in 1,000-year increments and talks about what might happen each next 1,000 years.

So now I have forgotten this completely.

Oh yeah, this will be fun. Okay. So now we go. In the year 3535, ain't gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lie. Everything you think, do, and say is in the pill you took today.

Oh, wow. Yes. I mean, I see where that's coming from. 1969.

Exactly. Yeah, we had all the drug culture back then.

People were tripping out. That the future was a better pill. We will still be taking pills in, you know, 35, 35, but I'm not sure. We might know more about ourselves by that time to be able to experience what they're hoping that you experience with a pill, with something besides a pill or outside of a pill or, you know, in other technologies. So I think they're saying, well, imagine what we have now. Imagine the pills that we could have in 1,000 years or whatever. And so I think, yeah, we'll have some amazing pills, but I'm not sure that that is necessarily gonna be the technology that will deliver what they're thinking it will deliver.

And then the next two stanzas here go another couple thousand years, and they're basically talking about we're getting rid of our, our bodies essentially. And they say, in the year 4545, you ain't gonna need your teeth, won't need your eyes. You won't find a, a thing to chew. Nobody's gonna look at you. In the year 5555, your arms hanging limp at your sides, your legs got nothing to do. Some machine's doing that for you. So when are we going to not need our bodies anymore? When do we become— you may be a Star Trek fan. I was a fan of the original Star Trek, and there was an episode where a certain species had become so evolved that it was just— it was all pure intelligence and there was no form, no shape to it, but it was just intelligence.

I think it's gonna go in a different direction myself. We could imagine us surrendering, or that some versions of us or some species of us surrendering, wanting to download themselves into a better body that's in a robot. But if we're talking about the, you know, 55, 55, we'll have plenty of robots doing stuff for us, but that liberates us to really have a hedonistic, if we wanted to, life of really kind of saturating our sensibilities and maybe even having more senses than we have right now. There's a guy working, David Eagleman, who's actually trying to add the number of senses that we have using our skin, other ways to absorb data. Like they teach blind people to wear a vest or to wear a wrist thing so they can see. With cameras and they can actually feel it and they can learn to see it using other organs besides their eyes, which don't work. And so we could actually enhance ourselves so we could enhance our own embodiment, becoming even more embodied than we are. I don't mean by having like extra hands, but I mean in the sense of doing things that maximize our embodiment rather than kind of relieving us from embodiment. Because we'd have the technology to do that. Yeah, there might be an option for some versions of us to want to be in a robot, though why anybody would want that, I don't have any idea. But we could have versions of us or bodies that are actually more embodied than we are right now. Maybe we have, we have an ability to see another spectrum. We can see ultraviolet or things like that. That I could see us trying to do. So you have people who are, you know, the hedonists, we'll call them, who are pursuing this thing of maximum embodiment. They're going to like have as many senses as possible added to them, and they're going to really invest into this ride that we have of being in a body and, you know, maximizing the body and maybe, you know, becoming extremely healthy, maybe living longer, which is another kind of embodiment. So in short, my vision of technology is that we have increasing options. There will still be the Amish in 2000 years. There'll still be these people who are committed to like not changing and just living on the farm, whatever. That's really good because they're gonna be doing all the farming for us with the robots and they're probably have robots too. But it's choices. It's about having as many different options as possible, including the option to be left alone.

Yeah, choice. And it almost seems like what's old is new again. If we go back to the '60s, so much of that was about hedonism, about experiences of the body and trying to live that kind of lifestyle. And of course, that didn't exactly end in utopia. We go way back to the Bible, and that talks about trying to have everything in life and then realizing, well, what is the meaning if I've got everything? And so on. I think we'll probably maybe get a little into that as we get later into the song here. So now we go to the year '65, '64, '85. You won't need no husband, won't need no wife. You'll pick your son, pick your daughter too, from the bottom of a long glass tube. Now this one came to fruition just a few years later. We do have test tube babies. So tell me any thoughts on we won't need a husband, won't need a wife. We'll just, you know, pick our kids.

That will be true. It's already kind of true. Yeah. As you said, it's already, they're surrogate mothering and we'll have artificial wombs very, very shortly.. And we're having those mostly starting with having preemies to have babies survive without their mother for various medical reasons. And then of course, once it works as an emergency procedure, then we're going to use it for choice. So that's already on the table. The thing about it, of course, is that it's, there's one, there's the biological manufacturing of a body of a person, and then there's the upbringing of it. And there, It's pretty clear so far that you want to have kids raised with other people around, other humans around. We're very sensitive to that, particularly children growing up. And so we could have things where the machines, the robots are raising babies. That is technically possible in 2000 years. I would be surprised if that is preferred by anybody, that the kinds of people that it would raise would be ones that other people want. But, you know, I'm sure that experiment will happen and we can look at the evidence of that. So yes, I think that's definitely, we're on our way with that.

Yeah. And as technology continues to do more and more and more, I think we run into this question that we've had since eternity, which is, What's the meaning of life here? If we've got machines and technology that are doing all of this, if, if we don't have the magic of what our children look like when they're born, if we don't raise children, if we don't have community and family, it's like, well, what's the purpose of anything? Right. If we don't have that.

Right. And so one of the ways, one of the tools I use to try to think about the future is the rule of thumb that what the rich will do with their wealth later on everybody will do. And so one of the things to look at is like, okay, if you have a billion dollars, I mean just $1 billion, everything in life is already free. I mean, if you have like a hundred billion dollars, it's like, okay. But the point is, is that even with a billion dollars, literally everything is free because you can't spend a billion dollars. You literally can't spend it fast enough on normal things because it's, the interest is just replacing it. Yeah, you buy a yacht and then a couple months later that money is back. And so everything is free. And so in a certain sense, billionaires are kind of living one version of our future where you have this world of abundance and anything you want is free. You can just get it. And so you quickly see that there are other limitations to having this world of abundance where robots can make everything. Your shortage is your own attention span. You can buy everything, but buying it, it's like you're possessing it. It doesn't, it is meaningless. It literally becomes meaningless. Your possessions become meaningless because yeah, it's like I own everything, but what does that even mean? How does that give me any value? I want to use something and my time is limited. So the billionaire has only 24 hours like everybody else. And so that wealth they have is actually meaningless in many ways. And that same kind of future where we go forth into the world where robots make everything and everything's available, the limitations no longer the resources, what's available, limitations is your own attention. What are you going to spend your time on? And you can have literally anything you want call before you, what do you do? And so this question of, What do you do with your life? What's meaningful? How are you going to spend your time? It's separated from this idea of like the materials and everything around it because those become meaningless. And we see that happening right now with the super wealthy.

And I love that idea. So what are you seeing the super wealthy, the billionaires, what do you see they're doing today when everything quote is free? How are they spending their time? How are they finding meaning in life?

So one of the questions I've been asking, how many kids are they having? Because as you know, there is a worldwide population implosion on its way, and some countries can kind of dodge that for a little bit by stealing people from other places. Like this is what immigration is basically. And so the US has been shielded from that because we've had a very somewhat open immigration policy with a net flow of immigrants. But globally, this is going to be taking place where the total number of people on the planet shrinks every year. And some people think, well, Well, it's, you know, there's a resource thing that they're too expensive to have. And so we don't know, we don't actually what it takes to counter that, to actually raise the average birth rate. We have no idea. Nothing has worked so far. And a lot of people felt that it was a matter of money. And so I've been looking at the billionaires to see if everything was free. I mean, they have like all the nannies you wanted. I was just visiting one guy and he had 7 kids and probably like 7 nannies. I mean, literally, like they were just everywhere. So yeah, I think there is a little bit of a sense in which we might be able to stabilize our population if everything was free and you could have as many nannies as you wanted. That's one thing I would say that they probably will have a little bit larger families. Another thing is they move around a lot. They have multiple places to stay. They take the whole troupe, everything with them. There's an entourage, you know, in kind of a curious way, they resemble extended families because they're kind of never alone. It's really weird. A lot of those, you know, they have protection, you know, bodyguards, but they actually have this support crew, personal trainers, and, and they travel together. So it's like an extended family. They're kind of recreating it. They don't really have nuclear families in that sense where, I mean, there are always other people around in their lives all the time. I mean, it's not their biological families, but that is, they have an extended family, which is, I think is really healthy for, for kids growing up, just to have a lot of other people around them. But otherwise, the clothes they wear are not a billion times better than your clothes. The car they're driving is not a billion times better than your car. They may have a chauffeur. And so you have chauffeur, I mean, take Ubers around. Okay. So you can do that right now. So in some sense, they're not that far ahead of us in terms of what that would give you. And by the way, this is a little piece of advice from my book. We'll get into that, but it's a burden that, that wealth for most time is a burden for them and a hassle and a weight on their children. That's really, really very, very substantial. And so my first piece of advice is if at all possible to your listeners, out there do not earn a billion dollars, do not accumulate a billion dollars if at all possible. Okay? Because it's like fame, you really don't want it. $100 million, okay, but not a billion.

So let's say through technology, through all of these advances that we have, all of us end up being in a position like the billionaires are today. Are we going to be able to find happiness? You say it's a burden for billionaires today, but if everyone in the future through all these advances, are in the same position, is this going to be like a massive existential crisis for everybody?

Yeah, it can be. Of course, in the future you'll have all that without having a billion dollars, which is the point. But yes, I think it does come back down to people asking themselves in the morning, why am I here? What am I doing? What am I good for? What can I do to matter? And I think this is a very difficult thing for anybody to ask or to answer. And having a billion dollars does not answer it. Okay. And so I talk about, you know, my advice for young people is, is don't aim to be the best, aim to be the only. Try and go somewhere where you, your particular mix of genius is going to make a difference where you can become and do things that only you can do. And that is a very high bar. That's a very hard thing to to arrive at. And for most of us like myself, it's taking most of our lives to kind of get in that direction to realize any of that. And there may be a freakish few who are born early and know that from the get-go what they're really good at and no one else is what they see as play that others find as work. That is for most of us is going to take a lot of trial and error trying things, detours, backtracking, left turns, you know, setbacks. And so our lives and the lives of most remarkable people look like a meandering crooked path. And I think that's what's in store for anyone heading that direction. There's an ongoing direction rather than a destination, and it's all your life journey. And it's difficult because we are opaque to ourselves. We just don't see ourselves very well. We require people around us, family, friends, clients, customers, the public to help us see who we are and where we're going. It's a paradox that to become the only you, the most individualistic that you could be requires tons of people around you. You can't do it by yourself. You cannot become the only by yourself. It's kind of weird. So that process is long. And I think I have my hope that everybody in the world will have a chance to try and do that. The technology will keep increasing the amount of choices that we have and spreading it so that everybody has clean water, literacy, you know, healthcare, all the other tools and technology that you need to be able to blossom as a person and to try and follow your path of doing only what you can do, that is a leap forward for civilization to be able to do that at scale. But I think that is, if you have any choice in where you're going, that's where you should be headed.

As you know, one of the common ideas in business is this idea of best practices. And to your point, if everyone is copying best practices, then what we're gonna end up with is you're gonna be a second-rate version of someone else instead of a first-rate version of you. You know, exactly to your point about don't necessarily be the best, be different, be who you are. And that takes a lot of self-awareness. It takes a lot of work to make that happen. So I love that point there.

Right. And it's absolutely true that it does apply both to companies and to countries for that matter. And so it works at all levels. And if you are involved in any kind of business, this is exactly like if you wanna be the best search engine in the world, that, that's a really hard job because it's well occupied. That niche is very well occupied and you have to displace, you have a lot of competition. But if you're going to be, you know, the best AI-enabled spreadsheet database thing, that's brand new. There's no one else doing that right now, although there will be. And the way I say it is, is in, you know, in your 20s, spend some time, you know, working at a place in an area where it's very hard to explain what it is that you're doing to other people, where it takes a half hour to explain to your mother what it is that you do. That's a good sign. You want to be headed out to this area where there isn't a language where you're ahead of the language, you're even ahead of the slang. And that is a really good place to be. Yeah.

I remember back in the '70s we had the cola wars, which are still going on today, Pepsi and Coke. So what does 7-Up do? They're the un-cola. So, you know, they're not going to compete against Pepsi and Coke. It's like, we're going to create a new space here called the, you know, lemon lime, the un-cola.

I like the idea of, you know, being the, well, okay, there'll be a whole bunch of people, the un-AI, right?

Yeah. They'll be the Amish. They'll be the Amish of AI.

Well, yeah, the Amish AI. There is a company doing Amish computers. They're disconnected from the internet. All they do is just like word processing. But yes. You're absolutely the un, the unversion of things is, well, Tim O'Reilly did a conference called the Unconference, which was this bottom-up, no agenda, self-organizing thing. So yes, the unversion is a good heuristic to think about where you might want to head in terms of your own direction.

So let's head to the year 7510 and the next two stanzas here Get God into the picture. Okay. In the year 7510, if God's a-comin', he ought to make it by then. Maybe he'll look around himself and say, guess it's time for the Judgment Day. In the year 8510, God is going to shake his mighty head. He'll either say, I'm pleased where man has been, or tear it down and start again.

Wow. The revelations. Yeah, it's a very biblical echoing. You know, the singularitarians have this idea that they're gonna make, we're gonna make our God by making an AI robot that's so smart it can make one smarter than itself. And that one will be making one smarter than itself. And each time it does that, it's going faster. And then all of a sudden we have this super genius infinitely intelligent being that will solve all our problems or eliminate us. And I think that's a fiction. I think it's a myth. I mean, I think it's a religious idea very close to the rapture. So in this song, expecting judgment of one way or the other, that we get too big for our breeches and God intervenes in some capacity. That's not my God. That feels to me to be like a little god. I'm interested in believing the biggest God possible. So my God would not do that. I don't buy the, the superorganism, superintelligence. I think that is a, a myth, very similar to a religious idea. And who knows what religion would look like in 2,000, 3,000 years. That is something that I don't think we've spent much time thinking about. Theologians are sort of allergic to it. There is a book, a Christian theologian book about ET, about the stance to extraterrestrials and other civilizations in the galaxy. And one of my claims is that we're gonna make artificial ETs, that that's what AIs are, that they're basically artificial aliens, that who knows whether we'll ever contact, but that we'll create on this planet artificial aliens that will be sentient and have consciousness in some cases. And the issue about what they believe might inform what we believe.

So we're gonna finish the song lyrics here, and this one's kind of interesting. In the year 9595, I'm kind of wondering if man is going to be alive. He's taken everything this old Earth can give and he ain't put back nothing. Now it's been 10,000 years, man has cried a billion tears for what he never knew. Now man's reign is through. Through eternal night, through the twinkling of starlight, so very far away, maybe it's only yesterday. So two things going on there. One is, and we see this today, we've got an environmental issue. We've got a climate situation going on. We're wondering if we've taken everything from this earth, we ain't given nothing back, is it going to survive? So that's part one.

We're going to answer that long before 10,000 years.

Right. And hopefully we'll solve it long before 10,000 years.

Exactly. Right. So, so, so like we solve it in the next 100 years or we don't, you know, we don't solve it. So it's not like it's going to be in 10,000 years from now where we suddenly realize and wake up, oh my gosh. So I'm much more optimistic about this story and I believe that we will solve this in the next 100 years and that, you know, the long-term 10,000 years is so hard to to fathom. You know, I don't think meat belongs in space. I think we'll have some, you know, within our solar system, maybe some research stations where we have humans, but most of our space is going to be with robots and machines. Flesh just does not do well in space, particularly for long term. And there's really no reason, there's no economic model for us to, we're gonna do some near-Earth asteroid mining. And the vision of a lot of the people who are building space right now is this idea of moving industry pollution and energy generation off the planet as a solution. And that is, to me, that kind of plausible. I can see that. So we have industry and stuff, mining stuff, and then sending it down into Earth, which is much, much easier than sending things up. Out of the gravity well. And so including energy generation, the solar, basically focusing solar down onto the planet where it's needed. So near Earth, I see. But, but I'm just saying, I think the idea of kind of long-range human migration into the cosmos, unless we have some weird faster-than-light discovery, something in physics that we can actually travel faster than light or wormholes, whatever it is. I don't see that as part of our, of our story. I do see us coming to understand the miracle of this planet and the ability of what we can do. The question is like, how many people would be living on the planet in 10,000 years? Do we have a trillion on the planet? Is that even possible? I don't know. I don't know what that, what that math looks like. Do we come to kind of accept a stable number as being sort of the natural number for a planet this size? Maybe that's what we arrive at. And we have this kind of steady state where, well, there's, you know, 4 billion people and that's sort of what we can handle and we kind of manage that. That's a plausible scenario in my eyes. But I think we're gonna have billions of other artificial alien robots and AIs. We'll have other minds on the planet. And I think we need those other minds to solve some of the problems. It may be that we have invent AIs, not that they're gonna take over, but they're gonna work with us to solve some of our problems. Like, you know, what is quantum gravity? Or can you go faster than light? And maybe there are AI minds that we need in order to figure that out. So I think we'll have, many, many minds on the planet, but they may not be human minds.

This last part here, maybe Zager and Evans are essentially winking at us when they say it's been 10,000 years, maybe man's reign is through, but maybe it's only yesterday.

Yes.

So we've got people talking about, well, we're living in a simulation. Maybe all of this has happened a billion times before and we're just, you know, replaying a loop here or something. Any thoughts about how to think about that?

Well, there's the whole, there's a whole theory called the Silurian Hypothesis, which is that in fact that the life came up and was intelligent within like a couple billion years and then it completely disappeared from the geological record. It's very implausible. It's very, very, very, very unlikely. But you could imagine, you could imagine things like that happening because, because, you know, there was what's remarkable. According to the current understanding of science, is that we had this bacterial level life for so long and nothing happened, right? I mean, that's the current story is like for 3 billion years or something, life never got any more than just a little cell. That's incredible. And so the hypothesis of life itself having replicated is a little different than multiverse and it's a little different than the simulation. So I think all those things are possible, but the question is, would they make any difference? I'm not sure what difference it would make to us right now, even if we knew that.

So that's sort of a big setup to talking about longevity. So for the last 100 years or so, we've had this idea of a three-stage life where essentially we're born, we spend the first 20 years or so learning, then we spend the next 40 years or so working, and then we spend, if we're lucky, the next 30 years in retirement. And it's like 3 sort of fixed stages. Well, now as we start living longer— and I know in the past couple years in the U.S., life expectancy has dropped, and there's been some reasons for that that hopefully are just temporary— but if we do indeed continue to live longer, if we have these medical advances, if we have artificial intelligence that helps us come up with new drugs and so on. If life routinely goes to 100 or 110 or 120, what do you think about longevity? Are we gonna be living to 100, 110, 120 anytime soon?

So there are all different kinds of longevity. You mentioned one type, which is that you have many more people living to around the limits of what we've already seen., you know, in the hundreds early, you know, 110, whatever. There's another version, a dream, which is that, you know, you just keep extending the longest live, the extremes, and that you, you live to be 150 and then 200. And then there's the other issue of the kind of the wellness, you know, living well and, and what that quality of that life is, not just the age. And you want that kind of, I don't know what you wanna call it, but kind of we'll call wellness living also extending into the old age, maybe right up to death. So those are 3 different things. And to me, I think the evidence so far suggests the idea of extending the longest part is way, way beyond. We're not anywhere near doing that. Whether we can do that eventually, I wouldn't bet against it, but I don't see any evidence right now that we can see a way of extending the longest beyond what the longest live right now live. So I don't know what you call that. There's probably some technical term, but that, that outer limit, I don't see that happening in the near future. The idea of moving more people to the, what I would call the current limits, that does seem to be happening. And, and that's a much more reasonable thing. And I think, but though I would say that it's probably not gonna move at internet speed. It moves at sort of biological research speed, which is a lot slower. And even with kind of findings, whether it's CRISPR or something else, there isn't that same kind of jumping that we see, like say with AI where you can all of a sudden have a thing that's disseminated. Biological improvements just seem to work at a much different pace. And then the, the other one of like moving the, the wellness range into that old age is something that is probably of the three of the easiest to do is gonna be one where there's maybe the most progress is gonna be just making sure people kind of stay healthier as they age.

Let's segue to your new book here. Just gimme the quick rundown on how you came about to write the book, and then I want to go through a few of the quotes that you have in there and just riff on those for a moment.

Yeah, actually began for me trying to convey to, to my kids some advice that we had not given them growing up, cuz we did not give very much advice. We were, I feel the kids don't really pay attention to what you say as much as what you do. So we try to model our behavior and not lecture them or give them too much spoken advice. I showed the books to my, my son And he said, oh yeah, you never said any of that, but you were definitely trying to teach us that. So, so that was the purpose of it. Originally, it was writing it down to help me remember and be reminded of things as a way to change my behavior. So I encapsulate some little bit of a whole book of, of wisdom to put it down into something that I could remind myself to change my behavior. And I found it useful for the kids to, to hear. And, and it really is stuff that I wished I'd heard earlier because I do remember these and repeat to them and they do change my behavior. And I, and I wished I'd known about some of this stuff earlier in my life. It would've been better. So that's the purpose to share with the young and young at heart something, a little reminder, a proverb that they can repeat and improve their lives that way. Yeah.

And the book is called Excellent Advice for Living. So I've got two here that I want to say at the same time. They sort of get a point across. I want to get your take on it. So the two here are: when you get invited to do something in the future, ask yourself, would I do this tomorrow? And then the second one is, if you repeated what you did today 364 more times, will you be where you want to be next year? So I love those two. What are your comments on that?

Yeah, the first one I picked up while working at Whole Earth. Catalog from one of the editors, it really changed my schedule. It really changed how I do things because if I think about doing it tomorrow, tomorrow morning, and I can't say yes to it, then I need to say no to the invitation right from the bat. So it's kind of future projecting. It's a self-distancing, the psychologist calls, where you put yourself further away from yourself and you can have a different view. And the view is, well, at some point it's gonna be tomorrow, so let me make that decision now. And it really does help. The one about, you know, examining your life to see what you're doing today and whether that's really gonna get you where you want to go is the same kind of thing, which is future projection. You know, you're imagining yourself reviewing what you've done this year and looking back on your work today and saying, Should I have been doing that? And that kind of projection, I think, is a good habit in general of evaluating your own decisions that you have to make is what would my future self think about this looking back? So that tact, that little exercise itself is always very, very helpful thinking about how you might review your own work.

In the future. Another one you have here is don't ever work for someone you don't want to become.

I love that one.

Yes. Life is too short.

Have you ever done that? Worked for someone I didn't want to become? Yeah. Not for very long. Okay. Life is too short. You really are influenced by the people around you. Tim Ferriss likes to say your behavior is the average of the 5 people closest to you. One is there, they can be a bad influence. And meaning that you will become like them. And secondly, I want to work with people that I admire, that I want to become more like and learn from them. And that's one of the benefits, by the way, of working with other people is the way in which you can learn from them and model them. And so you want to be around people that you look up to, that you wanna step into, that you want to become. And see how they do it. So look at a potential boss as someone's like, do I want to be around this person all the time? Do I want them influencing how I behave? And secondly, another bit of advice is don't take a job just because it pays the most money. There's so many other reasons to work and Someone who makes a lot of money is not necessarily— that's a useful but inadequate and not sufficient reason to do things. That's tough for many people who are struggling with money. But I've seen this around the world. It's not just about privilege. I've seen this in the poorest areas of the world and people trying to survive. It's still not just about money. It's about other stuff. You work for dignity, you work for satisfaction, you work for creativity, you work for your family, you work for friends, and you work for money.

But money's only part of it. This next one here is one that I wish I would've done a better job of earlier in my life. You wrote, your growth as a mature being is measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations you were willing to have.

Yeah. So that applies to people you work with, applies to your spouse, applies to your kids. It's tough. It's tough. It's kind of like medical treatment. You kind of want to do things sooner than later, and there's always better to deal with things now. And that means an uncomfortable conversation early is better than uncomfortable conversation later. You will grow and they will grow. Through those uncomfortable conversations. And it's hard to kind of embrace it, but, you know, try it.

And I want to end with this last one here. And I know the folks that are financial advisors listening to this will recoil at this one and they will say they aim to do the opposite of what you're suggesting here. So this should be a fun one. You wrote, aim to die broke. Give to your beneficiaries before you die. It's more fun and useful to them. Spend it all. Your last check should go to the funeral home and it should bounce. So of course, financial advisors are like, they want to help clients save enough money so the client never runs out of money. Yes, they help them give the money away for philanthropy. They do a lot of that. But the last thing they want is for the client to be concerned that they're going to run out of money.

I honor that. I think you don't want to run out of money, but believe me, most people are trying to do something else. They're trying to pass on money to their next generation, and that's good too. But you want to do that while you're alive because it's more fun and you have more control. What you don't want to do is end up with a bunch of money that someone's going to inherit that you have no control over and you don't even get to enjoy. You do want to have enough to make sure that you're not struggling at the end. Absolutely. Without a doubt. And you do want to help your children, but I think the way you don't want to have 'em is that to inherit a billion dollars and have that responsibility and that luggage and baggage with that, you want to give it to 'em in a way that is most productive for them, most helpful for them. And that requires in some senses paying attention and being there, which is why you want to do it while you're alive. And when you do it, you would have to do it kind of gracefully and smartly and sensitively rather than just dumping all you— like leaving your garage full of junk. It's like, no, that's just not what you want to do. You want to respect them. And that requires, I think, an active engagement with that process. So it's not contrary to the idea of leaving yourself enough to make sure that you're not struggling.

It's more nuanced.

Yep.

Well, terrific. Well, Kevin, thank you. Any final word and what's the best way for folks to connect with you if they wanna stay in touch with all your great work?

Yeah, so the book is Excellent Advice for Living. It's a small little book with little tiny tweetable things in it for the young and young at heart. You can find me at my websites, which are all around my initials, kk.org, kk.org. And I'm Kevin number 2 Kelly, Kevin 2 Kelly on the socials. Mostly these days posting art that I do. One piece of art a day used to be art I made by hand. Now it's art I make with my AI intern. And I have a Recomendo newsletter, like all kinds of good stuff for folks. And I continue to try and pay attention to where technology is going because I think that is the thing that's changing our lives the most. So don't be afraid. Don't do anything out of fear. Embrace the generosity of the universe. It's a pronoia world where we're all conspiring to help you if you'll let us.

All right, wonderful words to, to finish by and to live by.

So, Kevin, thank you. Thank you. I appreciate your great questions.

Thank you. All right, that's all for today. Make sure you like and share this podcast through your favorite social platforms, and for more great podcasts, visit us at barons.com/podcast.

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