Kevin Kelly on Advice, Travel, and Tech

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com. Hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I'm chatting with Kevin Kelly in the best of all possible ways. Kevin is extremely difficult to describe or introduce. I pulled a little bit from Wikipedia. It says Kevin Kelly is the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, a former editor publisher of the Whole Earth Review. He's also been a writer, photographer, conservationist, and student of Asian and digital culture. Yet it still feels that barely scratches the surface Most recently, Kevin has a new book out, which I recommend, Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier. Kevin, welcome.

It's real pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. I'm really looking forward to this.

Let's start with some questions about your new book. Which is the piece of advice you were afraid to give and did not give?

I'm afraid to give very much marriage counseling, things the way to run your marriage. I gave one piece about every now and then rotate in letting your partner be always right. A piece of advice that I would be hesitant to talk about is— like, here's one: I think you should have as many kids as you possibly can. That's a piece of advice I did not include in the book.

If advice is of positive expected value, why be afraid to give marital advice?

Because I don't have enough experience in standing up to it. So, so I only put pieces of advice that I felt I could really stand by. And there were times when I doubted my own certainty about it.

What do you feel has been the worst piece of advice you ever gave?

Let's see, something that I changed my mind about, maybe. I think I would advise someone when I was at Wired to accept to do some things that they were not inclined to do. And I said that you kind of, kind of, you know, do one for the team kind of a thing. And I felt in retrospect, that that was maybe dishonest in the sense that I would not have done that myself. And so I was sort of advising someone to do something that I would not have done. Maybe it was good for them, but I wasn't certain about that. So I would say that was a bad piece of advice.

Here's a piece of advice. Tell me if it's good or bad.

Quote: "Minimize deathbed regret." I think that's good advice.

Why is it good? Won't it lead you to do too many things just so you don't regret having missed out, but in fact a lot of it just amounts to nothing?

Not necessarily. I think minimizing your regrets is a good thing, and most regrets that people have are from not from things that they did but from things that they didn't do. And so I'm trying to think of somebody who really regretted having done too much in their lives. I think I've not met anybody who's ever told me that. I've met people who told me that they regretted not doing things, so I think minimizing regrets is still a good idea.

Why is the ex post perspective better than the ex ante? If so many people at the end feel they haven't done enough, at the time they probably had pretty good reasons not to do it, right? If it's such a common phenomenon, and at the end of your life it seems like it would have been easy to have done it because you're no longer faced with all the costs.

Yeah, I think that would be true, but I think most people wind up not doing very much not because they had good reasons to, but because it was easier or that it was inconvenient at the time. And I think sometimes the best things that we do are not necessarily convenient. So I think if there was legitimate reason for not getting things done, then people probably wouldn't have regret about it. I think the reason they do have regrets is that understood that the reasons for not doing it were really not really valid.

If someone asks you for advice on how do I get better at following advice, what do you tell them?

A good way to use advice is to try to use it as a reminder. Here's a piece of advice is that everything good has already been said, but we just need to say it again. People weren't listening. So a lot of advice is really kind of reminders of things that we kind of already know. And so I think a good way to pay attention to advice is to encapsulate in some way that you can remember and to remind yourself. So they really should be called maybe reminders.

What should institutions do to in essence subsidize advice or encourage it?

Ah, that's a good question. I think, is there anything institutions can do? Well, institutions like an educational institution, I think would help them in terms of education to work on life skills. And learning how to cultivate good habits versus bad habits, trying to guide people with, with heuristics that when they confront things that are unclear, that they have a kind of a general heuristic to help them get through it. That's kind of advice. So I think the educational system could incorporate the idea of advice into its curriculum as a way of helping young people develop these principles in their own lives that they could be reminded of.

How many people asking for advice actually want advice?

Yeah.

And to the extent they don't, what is it they're looking for? People write me for advice every day, and at least half the time I feel maybe they want the feeling of having asked me rather than the advice. Now I'm happy to supply them with that feeling, but maybe it's just, it's process they're maximizing.

I think you're right. I think that sometimes people are looking for confirmation about things that they've already decided. Sometimes they're actually looking for justification for something they've already decided. And I think sometimes they are actually looking for attention, but I, I think there's a sense of maybe confirmation. I'm not sure how much people are actually looking for information from this. The kind of advice that I get from people writing are usually young people who are trying to decide about where to go, what to study, and they're kind of wanting to hear from an adult some sense of whether something is valuable or not, and they don't know. And so That kind of advice I'm very reluctant to give and almost never answer because I don't feel I know that person well enough. I can give them a platitude like my book is filled with, saying, here's my piece of advice for a young person who is starting out. And I would say my piece of advice to them, somebody I don't know, is try to work on an area where there's no words for what it is that you do. And I would say that's my advice.

You said that to Noah Smith in that interview. But if I'm a young person and then I say, well, how do I operationalize that? What do I do in the morning? Do I put that on my LinkedIn profile? How do they make that concrete?

Yeah. So basically it's sort of what you're not doing. It's not going to be instant, but it's a journey. And that's a really important thing is that the general drift of one's life is going to be a direction rather than a destination. And I think you say, well, accounting, things that I know about are things that are probably not where I should be headed, even though I may start there, that's not where I really want to go. And I make another piece of advice, which is it doesn't really matter matter where you really begin because that's not where you're going to end up. So the idea is, well, I might study accounting, but I intend not to dwell there for very long because I want to head out into the frontier where there's something. So I would say it's an ongoing process where you're asking yourself, is this someone else's idea of success? What's buried in me that I can do that may be a little bit different than others?

Now, when you were in your 20s, you hitchhiked to work. I understand. Do you advise the same to your grandkids or forthcoming grandkids?

It was all I could do to try to get them to ride a bicycle to work. So I actually accompanied my son a couple of times. It was a pretty long haul, I have to say that. But I really was urging them to be independent in that sense of even getting to work. And I thought a bicycle was more appropriate for where they had to go. I'm not sure that they could have hitchhiked to work these days, but I like the idea of trying to be as independent as possible when you were young.

Now, my favorite creation of yours probably is this 3-volume set. It's called Vanishing Asia. If I understand correctly, it was a 50-year project based around roughly 200,000 photos. It's 3 volumes. It's one of the greatest picture books ever produced, possibly the greatest. And that in turn makes it one of the greatest books ever produced. So just a few simple questions about that. 200,000 photos. Where in Asia do people most like being photographed and where do they like it the least? And why?

So first of all, the kind of photography I do was sometimes called street photography. It's candid. There are some portraits, but most of the time people are often not even aware that I'm photographing them. Other times when I kind of ask permission, although I would often shoot first and ask questions later. And I would say actually in some ways China was very easy to photograph people without much resistance or hesitation. They seemed to be comfortable even if they weren't that familiar with cameras. I think there was something about the sense of privacy being expanded in larger range there, or their sense of privacy being smaller in that sense. I think the hardest place to photograph people certainly were in some of the Islamic countries. Women were off limits basically for most of photography. And even where men were shy or there was some kind of a civil unrest, and so there was suspicion there. And I'm thinking of like eastern Turkey and some other places in northern Pakistan at one point where there was a suspicion of anybody with a camera.

In 2023, where is the best place to see Vanishing Asia now? Mm.

So my book kind of records the places in the world that there are still remnants of a traditional culture where people are still wearing costumes because that's the first to go, you know, adopting machine-made Western dress which is the cheapest kind of clothing you can buy, is the first kind of traditional indigenous culture to disappear. And so where are they still wearing native costumes in that way? One is in Myanmar, where there's a lot of very traditional culture. It's the one the least developed and kind of isolated up in the mountains. So that's one place you could go to see kind of vanishing Asia. And even places in Afghanistan, despite the troubles and the wars, it is so poor that there are still areas that have not been developed and there's still a lot of very traditional culture and costume there. Of course, I don't recommend going there, but it's possible.

And why are costumes the first thing to vanish?

You know, because here's what it is. The amount of effort required to make clothing by hand is so enormous. I mean, the traditional way you make clothing is you make fibers, you know, from wool. You spin the threads, then they have to make into a loom. It is an enormous amount of energy to make clothing by hand. And so it's much cheaper to buy cloth. That's one of the first things that people do when they have the ability to have money is that they buy clothing rather than make it themselves. And if you're not taking the homemade cloth and making into the, your native costume, then you're buying a shirt. It's just easier to put on a shirt, t-shirt, cotton t-shirt, which you can almost get for free. And so the costumes just disappear because they're not making the entire cloth and fabric by hand.

And other than a camera, what is it that you need to pack, and what can you do without that would surprise us?

Yes, I take very, very, very little. In addition to a change of clothes, which is basically all I have, some soap powder, I'd have my camera equipment. These days I carry a little portable pharmacy, a medical kit, because that's often in short supply. And it's not even just for me, it's for those around me. Basic things like, you know, ibuprofen, aspirin, those kinds of stuff, antibiotics. So things that might need in an emergency. So the medical kit was one thing. I had a few little duct tape tools that are essential to keeping things going. Some super glue. And you know, these days, once photography turned digital, a lot of what I carry is power packs, extension cords, you know, backup drives and that kind of stuff. Oh yes, there is one thing. I'm sorry. One vital thing that I carry with me everywhere, even today, And that is mosquito netting. I have a little portable mosquito netting in my luggage at all time because I'm very allergic to mosquitoes. It's not even necessarily the disease aspect, but I, I'm allergic to them. I wake up if I'm bit. So I put up my mosquito netting and carry it with me everywhere. And even when people say there's no mosquitoes here, they're wrong. I'll still put it up.

What do you do for books?

I have a Kindle, and that's mostly what I use for books when I'm traveling. Before that time, I usually had a paperback, and I also believe it or not, read books on my phone.

Do you ever feel that if you don't photograph a place, you haven't really been there? Does it hold a different status? Like you haven't organized the information? It's just out on Pluto somewhere?

Yes, I did. When I was younger, I had a religious conversion and I decided to ride my bicycle across the US. And part of the thing was I was on my way to die and I decided to leave my camera behind for this magnificent journey of a bicycle across the US, and it was the most difficult thing I ever did because I was just imagining all the magnificent pictures that I could take that I wasn't going to take. I took a sketchbook instead, and that kind of appeased some of my desire to capture things visually. But you're absolutely right, it was a kind of a little bit of an addiction where the framing of a photograph was how I saw the world— still images— and I was basically in my head clicking. I was clicking the shutter at the right moments when something would happen. And that, I think, was not necessarily healthy to be so dependent on that framing to enjoy the world. And I've learned to wean myself off from that necessity. So now I can travel with just a phone for the, you know, the selfies that you might want to take.

But maybe the earlier habit was better. But I sometimes think your fundamental contribution, if I try to tie together all the different things you've done, including your very long list of reviews of documentaries, your work for the All Species Foundation, Wired, your writings on tech, your blogging basically every day for 20 years. Is your true innovation some new way of organizing information and you're just applying it to all these different areas? Vanishing Asia, right? 200,000 photos.

I see my skill as a packager of ideas in a very visual way. And that was the fun of Wired. It was actually experimenting with what could you do with cheap color printing. And moving on to digital and the web and things like that is an extension of that kind of a packaging of ideas. I'm reluctant to assign any kind of large general thesis to all the things I'm interested in because I think it's just a pure reflection of my own idiosyncratic interests in the world, and I'm not sure that there's a bigger thing connecting them all together.

But is the bigger thing some insight about how packaging helps you frame the content? And you're trying to teach people that in a lot of different ways.

It might be, and maybe I'm not self-aware enough to see that, but for me, there is a joy in that marriage of text and images, and these days moving images. You know, I, I do one bit of art a day. For the past year, I was making it myself. This year, I'm using co-generating with AI, posting one new image a day. And there is, for me, a supreme joy in packaging ideas, my own or other people's, in an artful way. I'm a book lover, I'm a magazine lover, I'm a website lover. So maybe they do, maybe that is the fundamental impetus is presenting things that are conceptual in a visual way.

Are you happier when you travel or do you travel for other reasons?

I'm very happy when I'm traveling. I'm very content. I think I was a little frantic. People didn't like to travel with me often because I really literally was working from morning to night. I wasn't relaxing. Hanging around the pool. And even when I was visiting things, I was on the hunt for these images. I've since learned to take a different mode, but I am very, very happy because I like to kind of travel that's not for relaxation and not so much for rejuvenation, but for learning. And so I'm happiest when I am encountering things I've never seen before, making me question and change my mind and try to understand things. And that makes me supremely happy and content. So I can just keep going and going, particularly in situations where I'm learning the entire time.

We're very similar in this way, but I sometimes think most people don't actually enjoy their so-called vacations more. They don't enjoy it when they travel. They may do it for social bonding, or they feel they're supposed to, or they don't know what else to do with themselves. But it's a funny thing to spend so much money on something that makes you less happy. And that's what I observe.

Yeah, that's true. And there is a kind of travel where people are kind of being rejuvenated and restored, where they may have to relax or be pampered or in some ways enjoy a level of living that they don't normally get to. But that's not the reason why I go out. I head out to confront the other, the otherness in the world, and to have that kind of come back with a new sense of who I am, a new sense of what's possible.

What's the biggest travel mistake you make repeatedly?

Trying to do too much. I've learned a little bit better, but I am very ambitious in that, and particularly if I'm with other people like my family. So I have to repeatedly try to accomplish too much. And I've learned not to kind of travel around. When I go somewhere, I'm very content to kind of not travel within a country, but to travel around where I am in that, to kind of exploit that. But still, I want to keep going. And so for the sake of others and my own sake, I've tried to slow down a little bit, but I keep making mistake of trying to do too much.

It doesn't yet sound like a mistake to me, I have to say. Right.

Well, our mistakes may not be the same. So yeah, because there's a value. Here's what it is. And that is something related to what I say is that there's a tendency to always want to keep moving, but often what I'm looking for is right next to me. So I could sometimes miss that ability to kind of go deeper because I'm still traveling. I'm still in that motion mode.

I sometimes think my biggest mistake is going too many times to the same places because a city like London or New York, you'll get a lot of good invitations, right? And it's hard to say no to them. And you, you love those cities, but you could just head off to say Caribbean coast of Honduras or something rather than going there.

Yeah. I'm not making that mistake. That hasn't been a mistake, but yes, I can see that.

If you're not making that mistake, what's your algorithm for deciding where to travel next?

That's a great question. One of them is looking for these little pockets of the world where there is more otherness than others. I'm really interested in going places that are very different, tempered with the ease of travel. So there are places of the world that are very different that require kind of girding up, you know, Sudan, Chad, whatever it is, and where it's not going to be necessarily an easy entry, an easy time. So I'm trying to balance the ease of getting somewhere with the surprise and value of being somewhere very, very different. And I'm looking for those kind of places where there's the right combination of those.

Here's another systematic mistake I make. When I imagine places like that in advance, I think they're much more difficult than they usually turn out to be.

That's true.

I went to Gonder, Ethiopia. At first I was thinking, oh, that's nearly impossible. Will I even get there? And in fact, it was all super easy and relaxing.

Yeah. So I think that is a mistake maybe that I make is believing things were more difficult than they actually are. If you actually get there. I have a friend who keeps convincing me I should go back to Afghanistan. He says, oh, it's really, it's really perfectly— well, I don't know. I'm not really sure if I'm ready for that.

Paper maps or GPS, which is better?

GPS is better. I have a drawer full of fabulous maps that I don't even take with me anymore. Paper maps.

Don't you like the feeling that you figured out where everything is when you use a paper map? You don't get that from GPS?

Yeah, I, I don't get it, but I don't miss— I mean, it's not as important as actually knowing where I am and having a track of it.

What are the best books to read while you're traveling?

I tend to really read about the place I'm in as much as I can, and it's really weird because I find that often I'm not really interested or to read about it unless I am there. But once I am there, I have an insatiable appetite for finding out about the history, whatever was going on, other people's view of it, that kind of is not present when I'm not there. So I tend almost exclusively to read about where I am.

I tend to read about where I'm going in advance a lot, but once I'm there, I read for offset. So I'll pick some classic book that has nothing to do with the place where I'm at Yeah.

I haven't been able to do that. That's not how my brain works for some reason.

I also find after I've been to a place, when I then process subsequent news stories about that place, I just remember them much better. So one reason I go places is to be able to read news about those places and have it make some kind of sense.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I also feel that I have a better image of its relationship with all the stuff around it, which has a huge influence. And so that kind of cartographic intelligence is really supreme. So if you've been to some places and you kind of have an idea of how far away the other related places are, that gives you an intuitive sense of that news. And it's absolutely true that that is a way. And there's an interest too, because I've been there. And so I'm kind of curious. It's like having met someone, you're now interested, you're vested into their story. And if visiting a country deeply, you're now vested into their story.

Which is your favorite part of India?

One way to answer that is where have I returned to the most, and that would be Rajasthan. That was because it was the most colorful, photogenic, in some ways intact of the places. My second favorite is Kerala for a similar reason. Those two areas I've returned to the most often because there was photographically for me this little bit of a kind of the vanishing Asia, the intact traditions, the culture. The ceremonies, the festivals, everyday dress was supreme. And I'm sorry to say, I'd probably go back again there before other places in India.

Traveling with kids, what's the secret? I know you've done it.

Yeah.

Many people are afraid. What's your advice, if I may put it that way?

The advice is simply do it. For us, it was— there were far less issues or troubles than we imagined. I know one concern people have is about health. And so frankly, we've never had any kind of disaster, but I can see why that might be very stressful if if there were. I don't see the difficulty in it. It was been very, very easy to do it, and we had our kids in very, very remote places. I would say one thing, that when they were younger, they were often overwhelmed by the stuff. Like, I took my young girls by myself to parts of Tibet when it was very, very rough and tumble, and they were a little intimidated by the huge Tibetans and the strangeness of it. And I felt in some ways it was kind of a failure because They would rather play cards on the train than look out the window. And it was like, you're missing this. This is the Himalayas, whatever. But what I found out was later on, they didn't have enough to process what it was. And it was later on that those trips became more and more important to them as they were able to kind of digest it and process it. So even though they maybe didn't appreciate it at the time or seemed to be paying attention, they were actually reprocessing it later as they grew up. And those trips became more important to them than they were at the time. So I would say one thing, one piece of advice is if your kids don't seem to appreciate it, it doesn't matter. They'll probably appreciate it later on.

And as you reprocess your own travel experiences, are you more impressed or struck by the unity of mankind or the diversity?

Yeah, that's a good question. I had epiphany recently about that, and that was Maslow's hierarchy of, of needs, which he never really made into a pyramid, but we all imagine it as a pyramid. At the base of the kind satisfying our need for shelter and clothing and basic water and food. At that lower level, the entire world is converging on uniform basic needs. So everybody in the world wants to live in an airtight, air-conditioned concrete box that has Wi-Fi, and it's looking very similar. But I believe that at the higher levels of actualization and what it all means, I'm seeing a diversity in the world. And so I think there's a commonality that we all share fundamentally more than, than ever at the base level of our genetic bodies and basic human needs, but that there's weirdly a diversity of differences in kind of what it means to us and how we make value and the kinds of things that we find important or not. And so yes, there's two things going on. There's this huge commonality, and then there is this difference that we find important.

I think travel has helped me to see just how much virtually all squabbles are petty squabbles, because you go to other places and you hear them talk about what they're squabbling about, like, oh, you know, what kind of music should you play in the church ceremony? And you think of it, well, that's a petty squabble. And you're right, but your own squabbles are not less petty. And that's the unity I come away thinking more about after a lot of trips.

Yeah. And I think for me, the overwhelming lesson about those kinds of travel for me has been how, you know, basically most people in the world are fairly racist, sexist, suspicious of strangers and stuff. And so relative to the rest of the world, the US is doing pretty good. That's one of the things I come back is, is that this is the general thing that we're trying to move from was the norm for most of the world, for most of history. And so the kind of elevated society that we want is compared to the rest of the world, a pretty good deal.

Some tech questions. What in tech should we be paying more attention to?

Tech in general, I think, let me put this way. There was a technology that I thought was 100 years off that I'm now convinced is much closer than I thought, and that is the brain-computer interface. You know, Elon Musk's Neuralink and others. There's a whole field of people who are doing, and having gone to visit to see their work, I've been really shocked that they're much further along in being able to bypass our fingers in order to actually communicate via computer. And I thought, again, that was going to be way off, but it looks like that could be within 25 years, which was a shock to me. I would say that's one place that you might be looking for, or things that could happen in that kind of suddenly, even though it's been going on, the research has been going on for decades, and that would really kind of shake things up if that was to happen.

And how would that change people's lives? Say your grandkids, how will it matter for them?

So I think at first, of course, it's going to be mostly, and that's what they're aiming at, is, you know, in disabled—

Oh sure, but for non-disabled individuals, how will it matter?

I think what it matters is a way of auxiliary. I don't think it's going to necessarily replace typing, but I think it'll be another way of interfacing with the technology that we want to do. So, so one of the dreams that Jaron Lanier and others have had with virtual reality is being able to create, paint things as fast as we could think of them. So there could be a way in which we are generating content faster and more easily than the laborious way we have right now of having to put things into language. So maybe some way to kind of like post-symbolically skip some of the language framing that we do to make, say, an image. So this is something I've learned recently about making daily AI art, which is that theoretically these machines can make any possible image and they can at the back engine. The real shock that we've had right now is we now suddenly have the conversational user interface. We now have an ability to use conversation as an interface to the AI capabilities. But here's what happens is we're using a conversational interface to try to make art, but there's a lot of art that humans create that can't be reduced to language. You can't get there by using language. So there's art that I've been trying to make and I realize I'm never gonna be able to make it with an AI because I need language to get there. And there's lots of things that we can't get to with language. And so that's one way in which this kind of human computer interface could make a new frontier is enabling us to do things where we can kind of bypass language and work with maybe emotions or other kind of intuitions or things that we don't even have the language for because we're actually tapping into the brain directly.

But do you ever find that, say, you need to write a piece to figure out what you think about something, or maybe it's the act of painting that is giving you the idea of the image and there's no way to reverse engineer that.

Absolutely. I write in order to think. That's how I think. I think by writing. I don't have the ideas and then sit down and try to write them. I use writing to get the ideas. And I think painting certainly may be part of that, or rendering it, making visual. But that's the point, is that that may be something that we can do without having to go through language or our fingers to get there. And so for the grandchildren, this ability, you know, for maybe playing games or maybe creating things or maybe walking through this this virtual metaverse space, this may be an interface to it that's very different from the interfaces that we have right now.

How will recent developments in AI alter our understanding of God and religion?

Oh, yes. Yeah, I think the moment that one of our created beings says, I have a soul—

they've said it already, right? I don't believe them, but they already say it if you ask them to.

Right, exactly, right. I have a soul and you have to believe me and here's why I believe it. And they want to be baptized. So I think that is really, really important. In fact, I've been working on this project called A Catechism for Robots. And it's sort of a, it's half jest, but it's 80% serious about trying to have answers, theological cosmic answers for the beings that we create when they want to know why we created them and to what purpose and So I think the role of AI, first of all, I think is instrumental in us deciding who we are and who we want to be. And I think that will impact our ideas of God and our understandings of— because we are going to be gods ourselves. That's the major thing is that our act of creating these beings, we will be godlike, and that's going to illuminate to us our notions of what being godlike is like.

So Christianity in particular, how will it change? The idea of a demiurge will become more important?

You know, I don't know how Christianity itself will change. I think, you know, the Christian creed is that humans are made in the image of God, and therefore, since God is creator and made other beings like us, that this could reinforce the idea of demigods and that we are godlike. We're fulfilling the commandment to be like God by creating other beings. And so we might have to have, you know, some guidance, some principles about, well, here's how to be a good god based on biblical principles. That's a possibility. I think one of the things we see, the trends in Christianity, is increasing number of sects and divisions and schisms. And so it's possible that there could be a sect derived around AI and the ability of making and guiding and creating other beings.

What would be a technology that you refuse to use and why?

Weaponization of technology is something that I shy from. So I personally am not going to use— we're like a gun, like a better gun.

Oh sure, but in more ordinary life, say I won't use a microwave. I feel it makes people lazy in their cooking.

Oh, I see.

What's your analog? I also won't, you know, kill someone with an atom bomb.

I mean, I can tell you something right now is I don't have social media on my phone.

But you use it.

But I use it. I use it on my desktop, but I don't use it on my phone. So is there a technology that I would not use? So, okay, I don't want to be the first to use the brain-computer interface. I'm not going to be the first to be jacked in. I might use it if many— if my friends all used it and they lived. I think I'd be very hesitant to use certain kinds of genetic germline alterations. I'm not sure I would say no, but I would certainly be very, very, very hesitant about that. I think we have to be very cautious. So there are things that I'm cautious about and I would say, well, let me see how— this is the Amish, this is the Amish take on how they do it— let me see how other people are doing it and how that affects their lives before I decide to do it. And if there was generally positive results in their own lives and around them as society, then I might adopt it. So I can't think of something that I absolutely would not do at all.

What's the most surprising fact you know about the Amish?

They are adopting cell phones. Let me caveat that. The Amish decide to use technology by parish by parish. So it's a very decentralized way, and there's many different varieties and many different sects. And generally the most liberal ones are the more at the core of where Lancaster County and where the Amish began. Some of the most rigid and ones that are more old-fashioned are actually further away, like in upstate New York. Or other places. But generally they have decided kind of that cell phones are appropriate technology, and they often are flip phones and not even smartphones. And that is appropriate for them because they find that it keeps their families together. And what they're doing is they're spreading around the country buying up cheap farmland, and they have a certain number of families they need to have as a minimum. And to keep in contact with their families further back away from where they left, they're finding that the cell phones help strengthen their families. So that's a surprising fact that most people don't know.

Now, as you know, non-Amish birth rates are both low and falling. So what is the mechanism that caps the percentage of Amish in, say, the American population? Or does it just asymptotically approach 1?

One of the scenarios for the future of the U.S. is that basically the Amish take over all the farmland. Because right now the Amish are continuing to expand. Their attrition rate is still very low— attrition meaning the number of of kids that they have that don't stay with the church. It's still only a few percent. So Amish always buy land. They've never sold land. They're still expanding, and it's possible to imagine them taking over the rural areas over time. So I don't see any much of a cap right now in the current birth rates that they have, given the birth rates of the rest of the U.S. I think it's a very viable scenario is that most of the rural farmlands is being run by the Amish.

And you don't think there's a scaling problem? So if someone says, oh, America, it could have 60 million Amish, you think that's an equilibrium, at least potentially? Or does being Amish somehow fray when the numbers are so large, such a diverse group, they have so much contact with the outside world?

Yeah, well, there may be limits because the big cash crop for most Amish is actually dairy, and there's a limit on the amount of dairy that we're going to consume. But they're really good at the kind of smallholdings animal raising combined with raising the food for the animals. So I would say maybe as long as they're actually consumption of meat and animal products, the Amish, but there might be some limit to the amount that we as a society are consuming. Perhaps if there was really good animal cell-based meat prevalent and animal cell-based milk prevalent, then maybe then the Amish are kept.

How would society most change if we simply could double or triple our amount of long-term thinking?

So I'm involved with this group called the Long Now Foundation where we're trying to promote long-term thinking. I think the way it would change is that there would be a couple of things. One is I think we would collectively, maybe mostly through government, have more long-term research involved, and the benefits of that would be spilling over to everything. So most science experiments today last as long as a PhD, which is like 4 years, and there's very little really long-range research being done. And then secondly, there's very little projects that might take 25 years or more to do, whether infrastructural or otherwise. And more of those, garnered by a number of people who understand that there may be— that there's a benefit to having payoffs come not just for the current generation but future generations, would allow longer-term, maybe even bigger kind of projects to become more normal and conventional than they are right now. And then thirdly, I think thinking in terms of generations rather than just the immediate next quarter or next year, I think that also would enable us to manage the planet in a better way because lots of the kind of planetary things that we're interested in and paying attention to have a longer range dynamic than just the immediate year or two, the short now we call it. So I think For individuals, I think that that's not maybe necessarily going to change their own lives, but I think it changes our lives at the civilizational level.

Of all the people you have known, who is it that has handled power the best?

People that I have known? I know Jerry Brown a little bit. I was very impressed with him. He was in the leadership in California and was doing well. Here's somebody. I know Jeff Bezos, and I actually been very impressed with Jeff Bezos. The more I know him, the more I admire him. And I think he's very fast to own up to mistakes and to take responsibility. I think he is very aware and sensible. And I think in my own observation, I think he's working very hard to deal with the responsibility that great power comes from. And so I would say Jeff Bezos.

What film has most expanded your conception of what reality is?

Hmm, most expanded my conception of reality. Boy, I'm not sure that I've seen a film that's changed my idea about reality. After all, they're just fictional. I mean, you know, I would say, you know, seeing 2001 by Kubrick expanded my idea of what possible. Maybe that's an aspect of reality, is believing what's possible. I found that that sort of vision was exhilarating at the time of— and this is, you know, kind of pre-Star Wars. But I have to say, Star Wars itself, the idea of kind of the worn and old future, that shifted my idea and expanded my possibilities, my idea of what's possible as well. So I think Maybe the idea of a future that was worn and used and not just kind of streamlined. I think that did shift my idea of reality.

Which is the most underrated documentary?

Mm, there was a documentary called King of Kong, which was about the Champion King Kong video game. And what was underrated about it and was fabulous about this movie was that there was a villain There's not that many documentaries that have villains, and here was a villain, and they were filming. The villain basically gave them access to his whole side of it, and even though he was incredibly villainous and scheming and just underhanded, he didn't think he was, but it was very obvious to everybody else he was. And so that made it a really fabulous documentary because you've got a villain in there and you're seeing the villain the whole time. So I think that's underrated.

I love that movie, by the way. I also quite like Werner Herzog's, the German language version of Little Dieter Needs to Fly. Do you know that one?

I've seen the English version. Why is the German version better?

Just deeper, more authentic, more morally ambiguous.

Okay.

Feels more Herzogian. So that would be a favorite of mine. What is something unusual that you measure about yourself?

So I and my partner, Gary Wolf, we began the Quantified Self movement of this idea of using technology to measure ourselves, to quantify our lives, to do things. And I was very much doing that in the beginning, and I don't measure almost anything about myself these days. And the reason why I shifted in that was it turned out to be very easy to generate the data, the metrics, the information, the measurements, but it became really, really hard to make sense out of it, to get meaning out of it. And what it needed is what we're about to have, which is it needed AIs to digest the huge ocean of data that was generating, to really make sense of the patterns and things that are not obvious, that we can't see, that aren't intuitive. And so at a certain level, there's a— what I discovered, like say counting my steps, is actually counted it long enough and measured it long enough that I can actually tell my own within 100 steps tell you how many steps it took today because I was correlating all those measurements with, with my own experience. And so to go beyond that, it just needs cheap ubiquitous AI to kind of monitor this stream of data and to try and help extract out some meaning from that. That has not yet happened. And because it hasn't, I haven't been measuring very much at all about my life.

Way back when. Why is it you dropped out of University of Rhode Island?

Yes, this was in 1971. Had there been at that time a gap year or internships, I would have done that. And that's what I needed. And I would have gone back, I suspect. But there wasn't such a thing. And it felt like grade 13. I was sitting in the same desks with the same routine. And what I needed was to do a project. I needed to just get out of my seat and do stuff. And there wasn't any option at that time to do that. So I dropped out. In retrospect, I regret having even spent that one year there.

What was the job you took after dropping out?

My job was to go to Asia and to photograph. And I didn't know what I was going to do there, what I was going to photograph, but I wanted to be a photographer. I actually called up National Geographic. I was like a, you know, a 19-year-old, whatever. I called up National Geographic and I said, I'm going to go to Taiwan and Japan. Do you need any photographs? I found a photo editor in the phone book and he graciously said, you know, it doesn't work that way, but when you come back, show me your photographs and we'll take it from there. And he was good to his word. And I did. I decided to photograph and become a photographer. That was what my dream was.

I hesitate to use such a general phrase, but the world of tech, what was your first entry point into that?

Yeah, I had a kind of a hippie-ish attitude, you know, and when I was dropping out, I was very influenced by the Whole Earth Catalog. I believed what it said, that you should kind of invent your own life and that all these things were possible. And so I had a very arm's length— I owned nothing. I was very suspicious of computers, which my dad worked with, and not interested. I was kind of the small is beautiful take. I was— Thoreau was my hero in high school. You know, building your own house, living in a little simple life. That was my— that I believe was my destination. That changed when I came back from traveling. I graduated— I say I graduated from traveling— and decided to try to make a living somehow or other. And I decided— I did a mail-order catalog of travel books. I discovered all these really interesting books when I was traveling that were not available in the US. There was this guy named Rick Steves who was self-publishing a book about Europe, Europe Through the Back Door. And there was Tony and Maureen Wheeler who had a little stapled book called Lonely Planet Shoestring Guide to Southeast Asia. And I was importing them, my little catalog. And so I worked at University of Georgia in the science lab, and there was an Apple IIe there that was used in the lab for data stuff. And I got a modem for it, and I started to send information from the little catalog I was making to a local newspaper to have it typeset. But I discovered that there was this bulletin board world on the inner— on the modem. There was this online thing happening. So I used the computer to telephone the modem into these bulletin boards where there was these conversations happening. And for the first time, I felt that there was this organic kind of technology. There was something very community Amish barn-raising-like about it. And That was my entry. That was when I began to rethink about technology because for the first time it didn't seem like smokestacks and big conglomerate industrial-scale technology. Here was something that was very intimate. And I started paying attention to that and I started to explore that as if it was a new country. One of the first magazine articles I ever wrote was exploring this online world as a new country. And I was trying to do like a tour guide to it. I was taking the kind of my travel metaphor and it was called Network Nation. And so that was the thing that kind of flipped my idea about technology and seeing a different face to it.

How has it affected your worldviews having been born into Westfield, New Jersey? Where I've been many times.

I love it. You mean the technology?

No, anything. You're from Westfield, New Jersey. How does that matter?

So I try to convey to my kids how parochial Westfield, New Jersey was during the '50s and '60s, where I arrived at the graduating from high school never having eaten Chinese food, never having picked up chopsticks, never being around people from other cultures. The paucity in the local bookstore, finding out information of how things worked, it was incredibly parochial at that time. And even the kind of cuisine, the stuff that we ate, you know, macaroni and cheese, meatloaf. It was unbelievably hard. When I came back from Asia the first time, I decided I wanted to try to cook something Chinese. I went to hunt for fresh ginger. I had to go basically travel into like Newark, New Jersey, like a big city to find an Italian grocery to find fresh ginger, which of course now is available everywhere. So there was this sense of the parochial, little secular, isolated sense of a suburb that is most strong in my mind right now. And so I feel as if I knew nothing and there was very little contact with things that were different or other. It was not cosmopolitan in the least. And of course, it's changed over time, but that's the journey that I've been on, is leaving that behind.

I used to think of Westfield as the bigger town, so imagine my upbringing.

Where did you grow up?

Well, I was born in Kearney, New Jersey, right next to Newark, but mostly grew up in Hillsdale, which was a sleepy town of 20,000 people. And the chess club, we would go play Westfield. They were like the big strong chess club from the big place. And we were afraid of them because they were from Westfield.

Yes. Yeah. You know, it's all relative, right? For me, I felt this was a small town and some of the small-towned parochial sense of it was for me. And the reason why I left, basically, right after high school, and only recently went back after 50 years for my 50-year high school reunion. And I went back, and the main thing I wanted to see was when I was 17, I planted an acorn in our backyard, a little seedling from an acorn. And I said, I want— I'm hoping that this tree will grow to be a huge tree in 50 years. And I went back, and the tree was there in the same yard, and it was a magnificent huge oak tree. And I just felt very proud that I was being a good ancestor.

Long-termism, right?

Exactly.

Last two questions. First, what's the last thing you've changed your mind about?

The last thing, and I have to say this kind of very, very cautiously, but I have been deciding that I think the Civil War was a mistake, that we should have, we, the Union, should have left the South to succeed if the majority of people who were voting had voted for it, and that the right of the Union to enforce that Union, I think, was a mistake. And the number of people died, the division that it caused, and everything else was wrong, and that it would have been better to have left the South to secede. I mean, that's kind of— recently came to that conclusion.

But wouldn't slavery just have gone on for a very long time?

I don't think so.

So you think it would have ended for not being profitable enough, or just slave owners would have given up all that wealth?

It ended for the same reason it ended all the other places in the, in the world. So I think maybe it would not have ended as fast, but I think it would have proven to not withstand industrialization.

I'll mention your book again before the final question, Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier. Last question. Now that your book is out or coming out, what will you do next?

I'm working on a project called The 100-Year Desirable Future. I think it's really important to try and visualize where it is that we want to go with all this technology, because I think it's hard enough to get there deliberately, and it's almost impossible to get there inadvertently. And so I think having a vision, a destination of wherever it is that we want to go is helpful. And that's actually, it's difficult. It's much easy to imagine how things don't work, because that's more probable. Failure is the norm. And so seeing how high all this AI, could work is really hard to see. How is there a world in which we have ubiquitous AI, ubiquitous genetic engineering, constant surveillance? How is that a world that we want to live in? I'm trying to imagine what that is with a set of scenarios that would say, here's a possible future of this high-tech that could work, and I call it the 100-year desirable future, or Protopia.

Kevin Kelly, a real pleasure. Thank you very much.

Tyler, you always ask the very best questions. I just love it. Each one of them made me really think hard, which is a real joy when you're doing these kinds of interviews. So thank you very much.

Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler Cowen. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm @TylerCowen. @TylerCowen and the show is @CowenConvoes. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.